Why is Lovecraft scary?

[golentan]

Just reread a story by him. Kind of pretty language. Characters who like learning things. World filled with interesting lore.

What part of this was meant to scare me?

The rundown from what I can figure out:
Spooky point 1:There are creatures that are older and know more than us.
Response: Yes. Some are in my family.

2:No, you don't understand. They're REALLY old and know lots!
R:Cool, can we steal their knowledge?

3:No, it will drive you mad!
R:Ooooh...kay? I'm already off my rocker. It can always get worse, but shouting "CRAZY" isn't going to deter me.

4: But it's all non-euclidean and junk!
R:I have a genius level IQ and have taken a test that indicates I can visualize things in a 6 dimensional curved space and how such things would project visually onto our space. Let me have a crack at their stuff, please. At least the basics.

5: Shut up. You're cosmically insignificant and these things can swat you like a bug. Stop asking.
R:Yeah. Which is why I'd like to take a crack at this. Sure, it might fail miserably, but if I can work something out maybe we can negotiate from a stronger position. I'd rather NOT wait to get swatted at leisure, and I have a feeling that if flies worked out how to build tanks (or suicide bombers) RAID sales would drop through the floor.

6:You're too optimistic. It's a big scary world. We're too insignificant for the major powers to even notice us, let alone care.
R:Yeah. Let's go kick it in the teeth before it figures out it should bite us. Believe me, I've been hanging around a *long* time and I haven't found anything nastier, grosser, meaner or more adaptable than humans. Give me the damn necronomicon! We're going to do start studying repeatability and testing variables.

7:
...
Are you an alien?
R:I'm going to plead the sixth amendment.

8:You plead the right not to quarter troops outside of a time of war?
R:Yes.

9:How does that follow?
R:It lets me avoid answering the question in point number 7, and I can refuse to explain why using the fifth amendment.

10:But... But...
R: Hey, see my responses to 3, 4, and 1 in that order. I can take it. Let me at least have a peek? Please?

11: No. Because EVERYTHING in this universe is equally horribly screwed.
R: All the more reason to start forming alliances with relatively similarly minded abominations and kicking ass.

12:They won't let you. The nasty ones. The ones with the most power.
R: I thought we were beneath their notice.

13: I hate you.
R: Right back at you.

Sorry, had to stretch it to 13 points. Seemed appropriate.

It just seems like Lovecraft tries to make it scary by showing it's pointless to try, when what he actually shows is people giving up without making even a token effort, rather than doing what I'd try to do: figure out consistencies, what's a reasonably safe avenue of assault, and then smash everything humanity has against hostile forces until one or the other gives way. He tells rather than shows, and the tale shrinks in the telling.

Would people really give up on learning they were the low man on the totem pole and the higher ups wanted to kill them? I don't think so, and if they did I would find it sad in more ways than could be counted on the infinite tentacles of Azathoth (there's a victory strategy right there. Since almost everything in the world is as scared of the next guy up, go stand near azathoth and threaten to break those sissy flute things unless the non-nihilists BACK THE **** OFF OUR PLANET!!! and help us take out the nihilistic ones).

I have a similar problem with the Warhammer 40k "Everything is bad forever" motif. But that's another story.

[toasty]

Doing a Semester Course on Sci-Fi lit this semester and one of the Themes we need to discover in the various Sci-Fi books we're reading is the following: Man is a degraded and indecent animal, doomed to failure against the utter evil of the cosmos.

I think this is perhaps what Lovecraft might be trying to get across.

NOTE: I've never read Lovecraft. I've actually read very little Sci-Fi (War of the Worlds, some Star Wars and some Warhammer 40k novels).

I think one thing you need to realize is that there are some things that are beyond the ken of mortals. We simply cannot understand certain things. We never will, we never can. Okay, maybe thats not the case in the real world (but I think it is) but it is indeed the case in the works of at least Lovecraft, if not other authors.

[Jan Mattys]

1- He wrote that stuff in the 1920 - 30s. Long before people got accustomed to Cloverfield, Jason, Nightmare and all the other "scary" stuff.

2- Lovecraft is FAR from being a decent writer, but his ideas are awesome. The world as we know it is safe because we don't know what lurks in the dark corners of earth. The existence as man evaluates it (believing in God, having ordinate, tranquil lives where everything goes more or less as planned) is nothing but a lie, and there are powers far beyond human comprehension that rate so high in the non-humanity scale that you can't simply explain them by using human terms.

Cthulhu (who is just a servant to those powers anyway) is nothing but a glimpse of the true viciousness that Universe has to offer.

Lovecraft works do not try to instill fear by using bug-like threats, or ETs, or Borgs. As a matter of fact, the presence of the Great Old ones or of the Outer Gods in Lovecraft's works is almost non-existant (if you make an exception for Nyarlatothep - most notably in the Quest Dream of Unknown Kadath).

Lovecraft's point is that ignorance is a blessing, because it lets people convince themselves that the world has rules they can understand, work with, and bend to their needs.

The more you know about what reality is truly about, the more you lose all faith in the stupid, childish concepts of life, death, good, evil, morals, control, planning and power you built your existence around.

You finally get to see Life as a game you don't really want to play any more because reality has teeth, and claws, and all of a sudden it scares the hell out of you because you feel a puppet at best, and a prey at worst.

[Kris Strife]

This was my feeling as well OP, I've got genius level IQ as well and, though I'm not sure if I can visualize 6th dimensional geometry, I'm able to understand what I've learned of quantum physics with no difficulty.

I realized humanity was nothing but an insignificant hair on the mole of the butt of a gnat (in universal terms at least) some time ago. This was actually a relief to me, cause lets face it, theres a lot of really, really stupid people. A high percentage of them are famous Role Models too. :smallsigh:

The only story of his I found really creepy was A Color Out of Space, but that had more to do with the whole 'it makes you go insane and rot from the inside out' (the latter of which is a phobia of mine) then anything else about the story.

[Belial_the_Leveler]

Lovecraftian horror tries to scare people with the idea of utter insignificance at the face of things we cannot even fathom.

That is not different at all to how the world works IRL. A star may spontaneously explode nearby, unleashing a gamma ray burst that kills all life on earth. A comet may happen to fall upon the world and kill us all. A war may one day start and we might nuke eachother into oblivion. A mugger may kill any one of us down a dark alley one night, a car may run us over and we can never know when, where and why. Hell, a brick might be corroded enough to fall off a building and on our head as we walk and kill us instantly.

Statistically speaking, even when eldritch abominations do exist, car accidents and domenstic violence will still kill, maim and turn insane far more people than said abominations ever will.
So why should the existence of said abominations bother us when we already know we can do nothing about a far more dangerous phenomenon?

[Jan Mattys]

1- First off, I don't think the average 1920's man had one hundred percent of your knowledge of the world, of space, of physics.

2- Although Kierkegaard and the highest point in nihilism's history was around 1850, I think it's undebatable that the modern man has become more skeptic and less prone to let his life be run by beliefs, faith and so on than his 1920 counterpart.

3- At the same, the modern man has seen things that can effectively be called magic from Lovecraft's point of view, and has now become so used to change that a lot of us don't even feel change anymore. When something arises that represents something really New, we adapt. We might be "impressed", but we're not in awe any more. We have lost the pleasure of discovering Wonders, we are not able to surprise ourselves in front of even the most gigantic leap of science...
I mean, tell a man of the 1920's we've gone to the Moon, or that something built by man is currently orbiting around Neptune...

So it's not a matter of being a genius, an atheist, and accept that Man is just a grain of dust in the void. It's about being accustomed to change and having lost the ability to found our lives on something that is not "physical".

That's why Lovecraft is not creepy any more, in my opinion. It subverts and shocks the man of his time. For the contemporary man it's just a writer with good, maybe even fascinating ideas, but it doesn't shock the fundamental blocks of our life any more.

[Tengu_temp]

In addition to what everyone said, it doesn't help that Lovecraft had very weird phobias, and expected his reader to share them. Fish, for example.

[Kris Strife]

In addition to what everyone said, it doesn't help that Lovecraft had very weird phobias, and expected his reader to share them. Fish, for example.

In all fairness, there are some pretty freaky looking fish out there. Personally, I'd have named penguins as one of his more bizarre phobias.

[jamroar]

In all fairness, there are some pretty freaky looking fish out there. Personally, I'd have named penguins as one of his more bizarre phobias.

Ah, yes. "...that nighted, penguin fringed abyss" was it?

[Kris Strife]

Ah, yes. "...that nighted, penguin fringed abyss" was it?

Yes, though I don't think I've read that particular story, might be wrong though.

[Fri]

The penguins are giant fodder for the city's guardian, in that particular story. But still great. where else we could see penguins and cosmic horrors in one sentence?

On Gnats, gnats and flies can't make tanks no matter how smart they are. Even the best, most genius, best of the best gnats can't understand human's mind. And gnats got a lot more similarity with humans compared to human and the cosmic horrors in lovecraft's stories.

[Winter_Wolf]

That story was "At the Mountains of Madness", and it was about 20 pages too long in the middle to be perfectly honest. I like Lovecraft's work, but that man could be really pointlessly wordy.

Also, as to scary, back in the day, people didn't have the same kind of desensitization and exposure to the horrors of the modern age. And yeah, HPL was a weird duck and wrote for himself rather than others, according to the biography of him (based on correspondence with others) in the back of my huge book of his collected works. Which might well explain why he never really made it big in his day, or maybe instead explains why he's still remembered and other pulp magazine writers just got forgotten.

[GallóglachMaxim]

Guy was terrified of sex, foreigners and seafood. Imagine what happened in his childhood to cause that. There's the scary.

[Cespenar]

Besides, nothing is supposed to scare you. Getting scared from fictions of any kind is tied solely to your intention. If you don't try to empathize with the author or the main character etc. and force yourself into the situation, you won't be scared and that's only natural.

Though, since empathy is also a natural instinct, a fiction's 'scariness' relies a lot on how easily a person can get into the atmosphere of the story. But then again, as I said, willpower, resolve, intention, call it what you wish, can act against instinct, so in the end, it all sums up to that.

[bosssmiley]

Guy was terrified of sex, foreigners and seafood. Imagine what happened in his childhood to cause that. There's the scary.

And the cold. He didn't like the cold either. :smallconfused:

Why is Lovecraft scary? Because the entirety of all human suffering and endeavour, indeed our entire sane universe, is naught but a soap bubble. We are ephemeral and inconsequential on a cosmic level and there's nothing we can do about it. We ain't even the ants on Cthulhu's lawn.

Where is your God now? Him? Oh, He's a mad, blind frothing toxic thing that bubbles, blasphemes and likes flute music.

[Eldan]

And the cold. He didn't like the cold either. :smallconfused:

Why is Lovecraft scary? Because the entirety of all human suffering and endeavour, indeed our entire sane universe, is naught but a soap bubble. We are ephemeral and inconsequential on a cosmic level and there's nothing we can do about it. We ain't even the ants on Cthulhu's lawn.

Where is your God now? Him? Oh, He's a mad, blind frothing toxic thing that bubbles, blasphemes and likes flute music.

The problem is, I've always seen the world like this, minus the cosmic horrors. Of course everything we do doesn't really matter in the cosmic sense. So what?

Perhaps it was scary in the 1920's.

[Jan Mattys]

The problem is, I've always seen the world like this, minus the cosmic horrors. Of course everything we do doesn't really matter in the cosmic sense. So what?

Perhaps it was scary in the 1920's.

I think there's a huge difference between saying "I've always seen the world like this" and actually knowing, seeing, touching it is like this (PLUS the cosmic horrors).

You would be pretty terrified if you knew you lived in a world where powerful entities could, at any moment, tear your flesh, consume your very being and expose your soul to the lidless eye (quite a crossover here :smallbiggrin:). And if you knew the Antichrist were lying at the bottom of the Pacific, ready to storm the world in a violent, blood driven rampage of madness, destruction and depravation as soon as the stars are right.

If you were a character of a Lovecraft novel, you would be on the brink of madness no matter how you think you have always seen the world.

Of course, this doesn't mean that reading a novel by Lovecraft should scare you or even disturb you in the slightest, but the ideas behind his horror stories are pretty solid I think.

[Erts]

Exactly. You are trying to apply 21st century literary standards to a different time.
People find (well, found) Lovecraft scary because of the limited amount of detail he revealed into the nature of these beings, and how he suggested maybe we are just all an insignificant speck.

Also, I think that if we really saw how the universe worked, you would go insane. That is what Lovecraft is also trying to suggest, that the universe is way to complex and strange for us to ever comprehend it.
Think about it: what if you saw every quark dancing, particles interacting, and understood all of the strange logic and paradoxes that go into quantum mechanics? You would definetely not be sane by humanity's definition.

[Cleb]

Hey all. Been dormant for a long spell, but was re-reading all the OOTS from the beginning (lot of down time in the office of late) and figured I'd peruse the boards a bit. Saw this thread and just couldn't resist.

I've been a big Lovecraft fan for a long time. Dagon was actually my introduction to his writing. I fell in love from there and couldn't stop. I'd been a Poe man for many, many years, but Lovecraft was something different. Now, don't get me wrong here, both are brilliant men. But Poe's horror felt a little more obvious typically. He just laid it out on the table for you nearly every time. Lovecraft though...he made you work for it more often than not.

Dagon, for those of you who are not familiar with the short, tells the tale of an American sailor during World War I whose ship is boarded and taken over by Germans. He escapes and finds himself adrift in the sea, on the brink of death from dehydration alone, and washes up on an "island" of sorts that has risen from the bottom of the ocean. The protagonist has no idea how it wound up there, but theorizes volcanic or seismic activity dislodged it and it rose to the top. I believe there are even references to the "land" itself smelling sulfuric.

The protagonist finds himself in the most dire of circumstances. Boarded during wartime, and barely managing to escape. Still, he has little-to-no chance of survival adrift at sea. The horror lies in the unflinching apathy of the universe towards his plight as his situation which seemingly could not get worse does. As he wanders this faux island in search of a path to safety, he encounters denizens of a world that he realizes exists within his own yet is alien. Creatures from below the sea with sentience and intellect similar to ours. Crude, ancient and somehow alien statues to gods and deities never consciously known by the world on the surface.

Lovecraft was playing with sanity in a way few had before him, you see. Our protagonist spends the rest of his life unable to leave that island. Though physically he manages to escape and miraculously find himself in San Francisco, his "heart and soul" never leave the island that is. We realize that what we are reading is a suicide note. One last desperate plea, by a man who knows the world will not believe him, to explain what he saw. I guess I can only empathize with him. Imagining myself in a situation where I've laid eyes on alien entities that were somehow native to my own world, managing to escape...I can almost hear the sounds of the scales dragging across the floor right now. The man lived the remainder of his life in fear. It never got better. Riddled with a morphine-addiction, he takes his own life incapable of continuing to worry incessantly about those creatures coming for him. Creatures that the sane reader will remember never saw him. Creatures that never came for him. Yet still tormented him to the very last of his days.

Sorry if that was a bit much...honestly...I have to fight myself from going back over all of that to make sure I'm not just ranting. I have this desire to make sure that I've edited and approached my arguments appropriately. Alas, I shall leave it be.

I suppose I'm just a fool though. Not a genius but a mere man. A mere man whose mind is tickled silly by the subtle genius that I believe belongs to men like Lovecraft. Genius that (as the other posters have kindly pointed out) seems to come with a supplemental serving of madness as well. I've been reading a bit of Robert Anton Wilson lately (another brilliant writer, from my perspective), so perhaps that's why I feel so defensive of Lovecraft at the moment.

(As a side note...isn't bragging about one's IQ and sixth-dimensional-viewing capabilities in a forum populated almost solely by "nerds" and fans of "nerddom" akin to public, mental masturbation? Maybe that's just me too that feels a bit sickened by it.)

Thanks for letting me rant about Lovecraft. Good to be back and posting with you folks.

[T-O-E]

Guy was terrified of sex, foreigners and seafood. Imagine what happened in his childhood to cause that. There's the scary.

I think I read somewhere that he was also scared of hills and old buildings.
And that he got the inspiration for many of his stories from his nightmares.
Yeah...

[Manicotti]

7:
...
Are you an alien?
R:I'm going to plead the sixth amendment.



Why are you asking for the right to a speedy trial? :P

[Mewtarthio]

(As a side note...isn't bragging about one's IQ and sixth-dimensional-viewing capabilities in a forum populated almost solely by "nerds" and fans of "nerddom" akin to public, mental masturbation? Maybe that's just me too that feels a bit sickened by it.)

No more than Kobe Bryant is masturbating publicly when he scores a touchdown with the bases loaded and wins the Stanley Cup in front of a bunch of soccer fans. [/silliness]

To the OP: I think the idea is that, no matter how smart you think you are, you're not smart enough to understand a Lovecraftian horror. Heck, look at "Morpheus": The guy there actually does try to research and understand the smallest subset of Lovecraftian madness, and he ends up way in over his head, to say the least.

To be fair, I'm not that big a fan of Lovecraft, either. He kind of overuses the whole "It's so scary you'd go insane if I described it, so I won't describe it, but trust me, it's really scary" element. Plus, you know, the weird fetishes and the racism. And, honestly, how did those ridiculously blatant murders in "Call of Cthulhu" get written off as "accidents"?

Fun fact: Firefox recognizes "Cuchulain" but not "Cthulhu."

[AstralFire]

Lovecraft just has problems holding water with some of us who got raised on the idea that the universe is unfathomably large... and that despite that, we need to keep moving. It's a common theme in both modern science and heroic fantasy.

[Belial_the_Leveler]

Lovecraft just has problems holding water with some of us who got raised on the idea that the universe is unfathomably large... and that despite that, we need to keep moving. It's a common theme in both modern science and heroic fantasy.

Exactly. The phrase "you will cease to exist and no-one will mourn your loss" has not been that frightening for some time now.

[Jan Mattys]

Exactly. The phrase "you will cease to exist and no-one will mourn your loss" has not been that frightening for some time now.

I still believe that many who think they're ok with this view of the Universe would be very disturbed in front of the actual evidence that it's really like this.

ps: I'd add that it's not just "you will cease to exist and no-one will mourn your loss". It's more "you will cease to exist and no-one will mourn your loss, and you better not exist, because if you exist you now know you live in the same reality as Beings whose desires and powers you cannot even understand, and yet could more or less inadvertently cause you so much physical and psychic suffering that you would be forced to review the very definition of Hell, even if you currently don't believe a Hell actually exists".

[AstralFire]

I still believe that many who think they're ok with this view of the Universe would be very disturbed in front of the actual evidence that it's really like this.

Quite a few of them, but it's not likely to come up and I'd argue they're more equipped to deal with it when it does. The whole point of that viewpoint is, rather than denying the universe is like that at all, 'vaccinate' yourself against it and then intentionally shift your focus.

When you combine this ideological vaccination with the fact that Lovecraft and his inheritors are by no means literary masters, it's not surprising a lot of people just find the idea of Cthulu kind of laughable.

[Jan Mattys]

When you combine this ideological vaccination with the fact that Lovecraft and his inheritors are by no means literary masters, it's not surprising a lot of people just find the idea of Cthulu kind of laughable.

I'm not arguing against this. Still I think the premises of Lovecraft's horrific Universe were pretty solid from a 1920 perspective, and are still quite good today. Of course, the ever-spreading cynical view of life we have today doesn't really help in creating Call of Cthulhu's kind of pathos, but well... that's not Lovecraft's fault after all... :smallwink:

[Telonius]

I think there's a huge difference between saying "I've always seen the world like this" and actually knowing, seeing, touching it is like this (PLUS the cosmic horrors).

You would be pretty terrified if you knew you lived in a world where powerful entities could, at any moment, tear your flesh, consume your very being and expose your soul to the lidless eye (quite a crossover here :smallbiggrin:). And if you knew the Antichrist were lying at the bottom of the Pacific, ready to storm the world in a violent, blood driven rampage of madness, destruction and depravation as soon as the stars are right.

If you were a character of a Lovecraft novel, you would be on the brink of madness no matter how you think you have always seen the world.

Of course, this doesn't mean that reading a novel by Lovecraft should scare you or even disturb you in the slightest, but the ideas behind his horror stories are pretty solid I think.

Lovecraft wrote before WW2 and the Cold War. At the time of his writing, the worst weapons we'd come up with (other than deliberate smallpox epidemics) were mustard gas and machine guns. People didn't know that at any moment, somebody guarding the nukes might sneeze, and the whole world would be glowing green for a thousand years afterwards. They might have heard rumors of Tamerlane's skull pyramids, but that sort of deliberate cruelty was supposed to be in the distant past and in far-off, "barbarous" lands. The world was supposed to be a sensible place, ruled by logic.

Back then, a lot of the ideas around science didn't focus on, "you're a miniscule portion of the universe." It was more like, "For the first time in the history of the universe, thinking beings are finally able to make some sort of sense of things; we are therefore the pinnacle of what the universe has to offer." All the world's problems would eventually be solved by Progress. But that sort of Progress really ignored the essentially animal portion of human nature, and it did provoke something of a backlash. You can see some of the elements of this backlash in other works of the time, such as Metropolis, Tarzan, Conan, and King Kong.

[ZeroNumerous]

You would be pretty terrified if you knew you lived in a world where powerful entities could, at any moment, tear your flesh, consume your very being and expose your soul to the lidless eye (quite a crossover here :smallbiggrin:). And if you knew the Antichrist were lying at the bottom of the Pacific, ready to storm the world in a violent, blood driven rampage of madness, destruction and depravation as soon as the stars are right.

Mankind--No, our entire species from the primordial ooze up to now is merely 300 billion years old. Give or take 200 billion. In several hundred billion years, our sun will go nova. In it's death throes it will expand to consume every planet between Mercury and Jupiter, light Jupiter on fire, blast the atmosphere off every planet left in the Solar System and then explode with more destructive force than the entirety of humanity has ever produced up to that point.

In that amount of time? We will have achieved nothing. Our entire solar system, every single species in it and everything associated with it, will have been a meaningless speck of dust on the windshield of the universe. Time will forget all that we have made and everything we have done will be gone with the death of our sun. Compared to that ultimate insignificance, what can your pathetic squid-god do?

[Kris Strife]

Actually, according to current theory, the planets from Earth outwards will be moved to wider orbits as the sun expands, meaning that even though it'll be irratiated and badly charred, the earth will still be recognizable as a planet.

The sun would have only expanded to the inner three, meaning Mars would have been safe, especially since the sun will cool as it expands, making me doubtful that Jupiter will actually 'burn'.

Furthermore, our Sun is too small and cool a star to explode in a nova or supernova. It will actually contract into a white dwarf after its Red Giant stage, eventually cooling into a brown dwarf star.

Estimated time till the star known as Sol goes red giant: approximately 6.4 Billion Years.

Personal estimate for humanity offing themselves: About 50 years.

[ZeroNumerous]

The sun would have only expanded to the inner three, meaning Mars would have been safe, especially since the sun will cool as it expands, making me doubtful that Jupiter will actually 'burn'.

Even if the Sun does cool enough not to ignite the significant amount of hydrogen in Jupiter's atmosphere it probably will significantly reduce the planet's size and mass as its atmosphere is blasted off. And it's been awhile, but I thought a supergiant would reach from the asteroid belt to the sun's current position with ease.


Furthermore, our Sun is too small and cool a star to explode in a nova or supernova. It will actually contract into a white dwarf after its Red Giant stage, eventually cooling into a brown dwarf star.

I thought our Sun was a yellow-white on the classification list which qualifies it as a possible nova. It's still ultimately irrelevant as the destruction of our entire planet is still a scale far and above Cthulhu's 'terror'.

[Kris Strife]

Even if the Sun does cool enough not to ignite the significant amount of hydrogen in Jupiter's atmosphere it probably will significantly reduce the planet's size and mass as its atmosphere is blasted off. And it's been awhile, but I thought a supergiant would reach from the asteroid belt to the sun's current position with ease.



I thought our Sun was a yellow-white on the classification list which qualifies it as a possible nova. It's still ultimately irrelevant as the destruction of our entire planet is still a scale far and above Cthulhu's 'terror'.

The distance from the earth to the sun is about 93 million miles. I believe Mars's orbit is about that far away from that of the earth.

I think the Sun is a medium sized yellow star. Its usually giant and supergiant stars of Blue and Blue white that form novas. Essentially, it lacks the mass to explode appropriately.

And its not Cthulu thats the worrying part. Cthulu is as far above humans (supposedly) as humans are above a gnat. Cthulu is only the priest of the things that will destroy humanity.

[ZeroNumerous]

And its not Cthulu thats the worrying part. Cthulu is as far above humans (supposedly) as humans are above a gnat. Cthulu is only the priest of the things that will destroy humanity.

That's exactly why it's not terrifying. Sure, humanity is gone because Eldritch Horror #12 ate us all. But if you wait around long enough, we'll be gone anyway. Does that mean Time is an eldritch horror? No. It just means we live the lives of mayflies. Whether we're killed by the death throes of our sun, our own stupidity or through the heat death of the Universe: We're killed entirely too easily anyway.

[AstralFire]

Not to mention, as Lovecraft himself was fond of pointing out, there is a limit to human comprehension - in this case, pain or negative emotion. The idea that Cthulu is only an appetizer on this 12 course meal of bizarre doesn't mean much if we can barely comprehend him to begin with. It tends to be the more real horrors that grip people.

[Dervag]

The really critical thing to understand to "get" Lovecraft's horror is the idea that whatever you thought you knew, whatever you thought even exists to be known, is a negligibly small fraction of the parameter space. It goes something like this:

You thought quantum mechanics was tough? You thought that explained the real nature of matter? You thought your clever little microchips and fusion bombs were impressive? Ha! You're like an ant awestruck by the idea of being able to carry water droplets into the nest to feed the queen. What a pathetic, blinkered excuse for a sentience!

And were you really so naive as to believe that you can get a complete picture of the age and structure of the universe in the electromagnetic spectrum?
__________

I'm a graduate student in physics; I do think quantum mechanics is tough, that you can get a passably complete picture of the age and structure of the universe from EM-spectrum detectors, that sort of thing. In short, that we can observe the universe and Cthulhu isn't anywhere in it, let alone any of the more exotic stuff in Lovecraft's mythos.

The counterfactual to all that is: What if the upper bounds on what my species could figure out how to do even in principle are a negliglbe fraction of what really is possible to higher-order minds? What if those higher-order minds are real, what if they're just not operating in this area for the moment, what if they come back? How strange and horrible would it be to have to deal with entities like that, for whom the stuff that my race's geniuses find difficult is infantile, who live in a mindspace I can't even access? How long could I survive doing so?

And that does manage to scare me rather effectively.
__________


Yes, though I don't think I've read that particular story, might be wrong though.Penguins don't actually figure prominently in At the Mountains of Madness compared to amorphous blob-monsters and long dead civilizations.

[Lord Seth]

The sun "blowing up" is so many years in the future that I find it extremely difficult to believe that one of the following wouldn't have happened:
1) Humans have developed to a point in which they have the technology to survive, be that somehow stopping the sun from doing that, supplying the necessary heating themselves somehow, or just heading to another planet we colonized. At any rate, we would've found some kind of solution to the problem.
2) Humanity would've wiped itself out somehow already anyway, so it won't matter to us when the sun blows up.

Long story short: I don't think humanity has anything to worry about from the sun blowing up a few billion years in the future. Either by then it won't matter because we're gone, or it won't matter because we'll know how to handle it by then.

[GoufCustom]

If mankind is equivalent in consideration to Cthulhu as gnats are to mankind, and Cthulhu is merely a priest of the eldritch horrors that will doom mankind... why would the eldritch horrors care to doom us?

Wouldn't that be like mankind going on a genocidal rampage against plankton?

I don't claim to be a genius. I'm pretty average in most respects, I would say. And I'll admit, I've never read any of Lovecraft's work myself. Maybe some day. But I also don't find the concept of mankind being small and insignificant frightening. I also kinda doubt I'd actually find the books scary, partly due to my almost complete lack of empathy.

[The Extinguisher]

I've always found that the scariest Lovecraft story was The Colour Out of Space.

Something about a colour that cannot exist driving everyone insane freaks me out.

[warty goblin]

If mankind is equivalent in consideration to Cthulhu as gnats are to mankind, and Cthulhu is merely a priest of the eldritch horrors that will doom mankind... why would the eldritch horrors care to doom us?

Wouldn't that be like mankind going on a genocidal rampage against plankton?

Given what we've done to some parts of the ocean, from a plankton's perspective that's not actually an unreasonable conclusion. Of course our destruction of plankton is incidental, a byproduct, to our real goals. Which is pretty much how the destruction of humanity by unfathomable horrors works in Lovecraft. They don't care whether we live or die, we simply die as a result of them doing what they do.

[Texas_Ben]

Welll I'm a genius too. In fact I can visualize objects in 27-dimensional space while getting a blowjob, talking on the phone, and driving. And I think lovecraft is pretty nifty.

[golentan]

Okay, some good responses, thank you. But I still feel that even if we can't directly envision what's happening we should still be able to model it. I certainly can't visualize quantum, but I can still model and predict it, and use some facets to my advantage. Or we deliberately improve ourselves and our children until we can. You don't give up hope just because something has only a slim chance, esp. when it's all you've got. And there's a reason why hope was in that box with everything else to begin with.

I'd like to emphasize I actually enjoy Lovecraft. I think he tends toward purple prose, and is mired in the times of his writing. But that's never bothered me about so many other authors, and I enjoy reading his books and his amazingly original ideas. Plus he's an endless source of memetic mutation. What bothers me is that so much of it is considered horror. When we get down to the nitty gritty of "single guy vs. monster of the week, cut off, alone, hunted, and going to be flayed alive in body and mind," that's horror. Because it's one guy vs. something he's unprepared for that will ruin him forever. But when it's the high concept stuff about the universe... Okay, so it's a mean universe. One where horror CAN and DOES happen. Why does that make it any different from our universe, and why is it time to stop kicking?

And why are physical features considered mind-breaking? If it hurts your eyes, stop looking at it. But the fact you can't visualize something doesn't make it evil or insanity inducing, it's just "Huh. Fancy that." With maybe a side dish of "Avert your eyes while shooting downrange."

Wow, I should have gone to sleep before posting my OP though. Rereading it through the eyes of rest and caffeine it has way more errors than I usually make.

edit: @Texas ben & similar posts: Oh for...

I wasn't trying to put on a big 'ol brag. I don't think "genius level IQ" is even a particularly good or useful or indicative trait. I don't think it correlates with True Genius, and in fact I have a list of geniuses with low IQs and idiots with high IQs. I was trying to indicate that "non-euclidean" isn't scary, to me or a large number of other people in the world, and that rationality can deal with such things.

On the other hand, if you're serious that's fairly awesome. Though I ask you not do it while driving, all those things are fairly distracting.

[hamishspence]

Agree with most of this.

I felt the Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath felt rather like a fantasy adventure- akin to D&D- which is what endeared it to me- and a lot less like horror.

It also avoided the "Alien=Evil" on occasions- the hero's allies are the ghouls, and the nightgaunts, while not exactly friendly, do help him- or at least- help defeat his enemies.

[Jan Mattys]

Let's put things into perspective:

(sorry if I'm using biblical reference, not trying to get into a religious discussion - which is against the rules - I swear).

I'm just trying to make a point (and probably messing up religious myths while at it, so PLEASE don't point my mistakes but just try and understand what I'm saying).

The Bible tells us that there's a huge serpent lying in the deepest abysses of the oceans, large enough to grasp the whole world in its spires, and evil enough to have our Doom as its ultimate goal.
One day, not so far in the future, it will awake and the world will be destroyed, our souls will be consumed by fire, hate, lust, corruption and the humanity itself will be wiped out in the ultimate cataclysm.
Let's also say, for the sake of argument, that no Archangel Michael is going to the rescue, to save us in the Judgement Day. Let's just say the Leviathan wins and we all get to enjoy our highest moment of suffering ever.

Now, let's imagine that one day, something happens that suddenly reveals that this is TRUE. That there's a Leviathan, that it's a twisted, obscene, corrupted thing, that it's damn huge, totally immortal, and totally comparable to a God from our point of view.

No matter if you're religious or not, atheist, agnostic, cynical or not, no matter if you think you're prepared to the worst, you get to undoubtedly find out that:
1- The old "myths" man has been telling himself were true
2- That you're going to die. Probably in the most horrific way imaginable, or even more, NOT imaginable.
3- That if THAT exists, you can't be sure in your serene faith that there's nothing past death. I mean, if Leviathan exists, wouldn't you start worrying about Heaven and Hell as VERY realistic problems for you?
4- If you're not going to die because you're old, your sons will. Which is possibly even worse.

Now... wouldn't you freak out??? I know I would.

The Call of Cthulhu basically works on the same premises: there's something so horrible, so weird, so wrong, that you really don't want to know. And if you know, you don't think "ah well, the sun is going to burn Earth anyway one day, so what's the problem if I die while being eaten by some unspeakable horror". You just freak out and cut your own throat before the thing can get you.

That's how I see it. But I've been known for letting myself be carried away by good ideas :smallbiggrin:

[GoufCustom]

Given what we've done to some parts of the ocean, from a plankton's perspective that's not actually an unreasonable conclusion. Of course our destruction of plankton is incidental, a byproduct, to our real goals. Which is pretty much how the destruction of humanity by unfathomable horrors works in Lovecraft. They don't care whether we live or die, we simply die as a result of them doing what they do.

However, plankton are unable to perceive or even concieve of humanity. As far as they would know (assuming for the purposes of the analogy that they are capable of knowing at all), random bad stuff happens that make some plankton die. Just as we are unable to perceive/conceive the eldritch horrors. And random things happen, and people die. And life, for the rest of the plankton/people, goes on much as it always has.

Maybe it helps that empathy is very hard to invoke in me, and that my standard viewpoint on most things is apathy.

[WalkingTarget]

Agree with most of this.

I felt the Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath felt rather like a fantasy adventure- akin to D&D- which is what endeared it to me- and a lot less like horror.

It also avoided the "Alien=Evil" on occasions- the hero's allies are the ghouls, and the nightgaunts, while not exactly friendly, do help him- or at least- help defeat his enemies.

That's largely a side-effect of his work going in stages. Dream Quest and a bunch of others aren't horror stories, they're fantasy inspired more by Lord Dunsany than anything (Lovecraft said as much). They incorporated some entities he used in other places, but he wasn't writing these things with any sort of cohesive structure in mind until fairly late in his career.

The whole "cosmic horror" thing didn't really get going as a major theme until later (The Call of Cthulhu is generally cited as the dividing line in his body of work).

[Mewtarthio]

The Bible tells us that there's a huge serpent lying in the deepest abysses of the oceans, large enough to grasp the whole world in its spires, and evil enough to have our Doom as its ultimate goal.
One day, not so far in the future, it will awake and the world will be destroyed, our souls will be consumed by fire, hate, lust, corruption and the humanity itself will be wiped out in the ultimate cataclysm.

...Er, what? What translation of the Bible are you using?

[golentan]

Can we please stay out of real theological debate to avoid having the thread locked? I ask this preemptively, having seen how fast such things can devolve.

[Solaris]

Can we please stay out of real theological debate to avoid having the thread locked? I ask this preemptively, having seen how fast such things can devolve.

The thread is already doomed. Madness and despair, madness and despair for the squamous bulk of the unknowable moderator approaches.

... Personally, I always thought of Lovecraft's stuff as kind of tongue-in-cheek given his over-the-top style.

[Jan Mattys]

Can we please stay out of real theological debate to avoid having the thread locked? I ask this preemptively, having seen how fast such things can devolve.

I already put at the top of my post a really clear disclaimer. That Mewtarthio promptly ignored. The point in my post (you know, the real one), got ignored as well.

Sorry if I tangentially touched religious material, but:
1- it was the first example that came to my mind for making my point.
2- I actually think that the presence / absence of God or another ultimately good and ultimately powerful entity in the Universe has a lot to do with the despair Lovecraft wanted to instill with his works.

[golentan]

Yep. I just wanted to preemptively strike before things devolved.

The thing is, in your example I'd learn as much as I could about prophecied events, try to extrapolate exploitable scenarios, and either try to kill the thing or prevent a situation that could wake it. Maybe I fail, maybe it triggers the scenario of doom, but maybe I succeed in either preventing doom or kicking it down the road with notes on how to continue doing so.

[The Big Dice]

The thing with asking why Lovecraft is scary is, you need a reasonable hypothesis on what makes for scary literature. And that's not a simple thing to give.

Personally, I think the reason Lovecraft's stories still work is, despite them being almost a century old and the cultural reference points he uses being almost completely irrelevant now, is that he lets the reader's imagination do most of the heavy lifting. His prose style can be very purple, but what he does well is establish an atmosphere of claustrophobia and impending doom. But he doesn't tend to describe his cosmic horrors and eldritch weirdness too explicitly.

And on some level, people respond to that. He encourages you to use your own imagination, which is what anybody writing horror needs to do.

[Swordlol]

I thought Lovecraft is considered Scary cause he was one of the first authors to employ such tactics as massive cults and evil from outside of this world.

As in the original dark-mind-set that our culture now uses in virtually every other horror movie.

[warty goblin]

Also scary is perhaps the wrong word for Lovecraft. The Lovecraft I've read hasn't kept me up at night unable to sleep, it's more a slow knawing feeling in the back of my mind, making me doubt my conclusions. It's horror, not terror. The horror of a universe that does not care, which is a paradigm shift from most cosmologies with which I'm familiar.

This goes beyond the athiest/agnostic uncaring universe though. Those worldviews hold that the universe is basically a bunch of inanimate stuff. It doesn't care because it is as capable of caring for the fate of humanity as a mud puddle. The Elder Things don't care, not because they can't, but because they have no reason to. It's the difference between breaking your leg in the middle of the forest and not recieving aid from the trees, and breaking your leg in the middle of a street, then getting run over repeatedly because nobody can be bothered to stop or turn aside.

[YesImSardonic]

To this thread I have only one thing to say:

You fool! Loveman is dead!

[Lord Seth]

...Er, what? What translation of the Bible are you using?He wasn't using any version, it was hypothetical, that is, if the Bible said that. However, there was no need to involve a real-life religious source; he could just say "a very old manuscript" and the point would've been completely unchanged.

I think one of the reasons Lovecraft isn't as scary now is that his works have been parodied so much they've lost their original fright factor (or at least Cthulu has).

[Myrmex]

I'd like to address the "Lovecraft was scary in the 30s."
No, he wasn't. No one read him in the 30s.

Lovecraft didn't achieve a wider readership until the 60s and 70s, and his themes didn't regularly start showing up in fiction until the 70s and 80s.

Lovecraft's themes of horror are modern; they're not reliques of a bygone era. The reason he doesn't seem scary or novel is because you've spent your entire life reading and watching Lovecraftian themes.


Doing a Semester Course on Sci-Fi lit this semester and one of the Themes we need to discover in the various Sci-Fi books we're reading is the following: Man is a degraded and indecent animal, doomed to failure against the utter evil of the cosmos.

I think this is perhaps what Lovecraft might be trying to get across.

It's not.
That's Derleth.

Lovecraft saw the cosmos as uncaring and incomprehensible. Good and Evil had absolutely nothing to do with it.


2- Although Kierkegaard and the highest point in nihilism's history was around 1850, I think it's undebatable that the modern man has become more skeptic and less prone to let his life be run by beliefs, faith and so on than his 1920 counterpart.

Uh?
How can you say that?
9 in 10 Americans consider themselves religious, for instance.


The problem is, I've always seen the world like this, minus the cosmic horrors. Of course everything we do doesn't really matter in the cosmic sense. So what?

Perhaps it was scary in the 1920's.

That's easy an easy thing to intellectualize, but wait until you're face-to-face with a monstrous, trans-dimensional entity. Then you'll truly grok it.
Or something like that.


But I still feel that even if we can't directly envision what's happening we should still be able to model it.

EVERYTHING is a model. Your brain is running a model of reality right now, and you filter out or fail to pick up an incredible amount of information.

Our view of the world is confined to our primitive headspace and trying to interpret everything in hilariously primitive, simian ways.

We lack the ability to see things as they are, and this is a good thing, because if we could, we would go mad, since we certainly don't have the capacity to handle knowing anything. A large part of living is denial and ignorance. Being able to filter out information keeps us sane.


What bothers me is that so much of it is considered horror. When we get down to the nitty gritty of "single guy vs. monster of the week, cut off, alone, hunted, and going to be flayed alive in body and mind," that's horror. Because it's one guy vs. something he's unprepared for that will ruin him forever. But when it's the high concept stuff about the universe... Okay, so it's a mean universe. One where horror CAN and DOES happen. Why does that make it any different from our universe, and why is it time to stop kicking?

The fear is that the horrors lurk EVERYWHERE. We're adrift on a soap bubble in a sea of monsters.


And why are physical features considered mind-breaking? If it hurts your eyes, stop looking at it. But the fact you can't visualize something doesn't make it evil or insanity inducing, it's just "Huh. Fancy that." With maybe a side dish of "Avert your eyes while shooting downrange."

Did you know if you flash lights in certain patterns they induce seizures?
Did you know the optimum growth ratio for an organism is phi, and because of this, things with that proportion of features are most attractive and natural looking? We like the golden ratio because it's natural.

Imagine if there was some mindbreaking, and yet undiscovered, ratio.


I already put at the top of my post a really clear disclaimer. That Mewtarthio promptly ignored. The point in my post (you know, the real one), got ignored as well.

Sorry if I tangentially touched religious material, but:
1- it was the first example that came to my mind for making my point.
2- I actually think that the presence / absence of God or another ultimately good and ultimately powerful entity in the Universe has a lot to do with the despair Lovecraft wanted to instill with his works.

That's Derleth.

[Seraph]

4: But it's all non-euclidean and junk!
R:I have a genius level IQ and have taken a test that indicates I can visualize things in a 6 dimensional curved space and how such things would project visually onto our space. Let me have a crack at their stuff, please. At least the basics.


but do you understand why kids love cinnamon toast crunch?

[golentan]

EVERYTHING is a model. Your brain is running a model of reality right now, and you filter out or fail to pick up an incredible amount of information.

Our view of the world is confined to our primitive headspace and trying to interpret everything in hilariously primitive, simian ways.

And I can model things that I can't visualize well enough to predict and use them, even though I can't always run the model internally without using abstractions and numeric processes externally to process it. I know this. Don't see it as relevant.


We lack the ability to see things as they are, and this is a good thing, because if we could, we would go mad, since we certainly don't have the capacity to handle knowing anything. A large part of living is denial and ignorance. Being able to filter out information keeps us sane.

Disagree. It's trading one form of insanity for another. As long as I am moderately functional, I shall fear no madness. And when I'm not, lock me in a rubber room and say "we found a breaking point. Jot that... whatever down as dangerous." Or heck, shoot me if I'm a danger to others.


The fear is that the horrors lurk EVERYWHERE. We're adrift on a soap bubble in a sea of monsters.

Which means we've got a lot of work to do. Propagate far enough, and it becomes ridiculously hard to take us all out. Take out the monsters, and we have the sea to ourselves and anyone who plays nice with us.


Did you know if you flash lights in certain patterns they induce seizures?

I am painfully aware of that, as my grandpa suffers seizures and seizure analogs. Chalking this down as "Avert your eyes while shooting downrange." Anything that DOES have a pattern that is a hypnosis or seizure glitch exploit means that you don't let yourself see it. We will win such wars the way wars were meant to be won. By bombing the **** out of them from a safe, distant position.


Did you know the optimum growth ratio for an organism is phi, and because of this, things with that proportion of features are most attractive and natural looking? We like the golden ratio because it's natural.

Imagine if there was some mindbreaking, and yet undiscovered, ratio.

If it is a ratio, it is rational. Someone would almost certainly have discovered it. And as you said, humans have an amazing ability to filter. I'd half expect that such a ratio would fall under an optical illusion category and people would ignore it without a specific reference frame. And if it is just "unnatural" looking, suck it up. You may not like spending time with it, but deal with it, and we'll get you counseling when you get back home.

If there truly is some horrible, mind breaking, blue screen of death inducing angle, see the seizure response. Work out some meds that keep it from ticking over.

Also, just in general keep on hand some final option items that can't be triggered by someone just going crazy. If one of these things were to eat me, I'd like to try taking it with me. Poison, explosives, radiation, antimatter or whatever.

[warty goblin]

And I can model things that I can't visualize well enough to predict and use them, even though I can't always run the model internally without using abstractions and numeric processes externally to process it. I know this. Don't see it as relevant.



Disagree. It's trading one form of insanity for another. As long as I am moderately functional, I shall fear no madness. And when I'm not, lock me in a rubber room and say "we found a breaking point. Jot that... whatever down as dangerous." Or heck, shoot me if I'm a danger to others.



Which means we've got a lot of work to do. Propagate far enough, and it becomes ridiculously hard to take us all out. Take out the monsters, and we have the sea to ourselves and anyone who plays nice with us.



I am painfully aware of that, as my grandpa suffers seizures and seizure analogs. Chalking this down as "Avert your eyes while shooting downrange." Anything that DOES have a pattern that is a hypnosis or seizure glitch exploit means that you don't let yourself see it. We will win such wars the way wars were meant to be won. By bombing the **** out of them from a safe, distant position.



If it is a ratio, it is rational. Someone would almost certainly have discovered it. And as you said, humans have an amazing ability to filter. I'd half expect that such a ratio would fall under an optical illusion category and people would ignore it without a specific reference frame. And if it is just "unnatural" looking, suck it up. You may not like spending time with it, but deal with it, and we'll get you counseling when you get back home.

If there truly is some horrible, mind breaking, blue screen of death inducing angle, see the seizure response. Work out some meds that keep it from ticking over.

Also, just in general keep on hand some final option items that can't be triggered by someone just going crazy. If one of these things were to eat me, I'd like to try taking it with me. Poison, explosives, radiation, antimatter or whatever.
Screamed the dust speck.

[Myrmex]

And I can model things that I can't visualize well enough to predict and use them, even though I can't always run the model internally without using abstractions and numeric processes externally to process it. I know this. Don't see it as relevant.

You say "we should be able to envision it", and I'm telling you we can't "envision" anything, because our entire experience is virtual & filtered.


Disagree. It's trading one form of insanity for another. As long as I am moderately functional, I shall fear no madness. And when I'm not, lock me in a rubber room and say "we found a breaking point. Jot that... whatever down as dangerous." Or heck, shoot me if I'm a danger to others.

Ok. So you're a villain. Got it.


Which means we've got a lot of work to do. Propagate far enough, and it becomes ridiculously hard to take us all out. Take out the monsters, and we have the sea to ourselves and anyone who plays nice with us.

The monsters aren't just "monsters", some of them are more like universal constants or laws that manifest. It'd be like declaring war on electrons. Also, we're stuck on earth. In the Lovecraft mythos, earth has been colonized like 3 times from starspawn.


I am painfully aware of that, as my grandpa suffers seizures and seizure analogs. Chalking this down as "Avert your eyes while shooting downrange." Anything that DOES have a pattern that is a hypnosis or seizure glitch exploit means that you don't let yourself see it. We will win such wars the way wars were meant to be won. By bombing the **** out of them from a safe, distant position.

If it's purely a visual thing, sure. But noises, emanations, just the existence of a preternatual entity could screw us up. Bombs may or may not work, depending on the thing. For the truly horrid, planet wiping entities, nothing will save you.


If it is a ratio, it is rational.

phi is the ratio of two arbitrarily large numbers in the Fibonacci Sequence, and is not rational.


Someone would almost certainly have discovered it.

Not if its a ratio of things that don't exist.


And as you said, humans have an amazing ability to filter. I'd half expect that such a ratio would fall under an optical illusion category and people would ignore it without a specific reference frame.

But then you see it and it doesn't get filtered and you fail your sanity roll and wake up eating corpses.


And if it is just "unnatural" looking, suck it up. You may not like spending time with it, but deal with it, and we'll get you counseling when you get back home.

It's relatively easy for a human to break another's mind.

If there truly is some horrible, mind breaking, blue screen of death inducing angle, see the seizure response. Work out some meds that keep it from ticking over.

Also, just in general keep on hand some final option items that can't be triggered by someone just going crazy. If one of these things were to eat me, I'd like to try taking it with me. Poison, explosives, radiation, antimatter or whatever.

Most of these things are whatever, though some of them are explosives, radiation, poison and/or antimatter.

For the low ranking horrors, the things that are just monstrous, these are valid tactics. Against the truly cosmic horrors, you can't do much but flee and hope to forget. Solutions are temporary.

What happens when the great race of Yith puts your brain in a jar and you travel through time and space for 10,000 years?

[Solaris]

Screamed the dust speck.

And warty goblin wins the thread.

[AstralFire]

Wrong definition of rational, Myrmex.

I'm pretty much siding with golentan here, though, I haven't seen a point yet to disagree with.

[ZeroNumerous]

The horror of a universe that does not care, which is a paradigm shift from most cosmologies with which I'm familiar.

You need to read up on manlier cosmologies then. Norse and Egyptian come to mind in particular. Selfish gods who care nothing for mankind is a common cosmology in the harsher parts of our little world.

As for conclusion doubting: That's fairly irrelevant. Let us assume then, that our entire basis of how the universe works is fundamentally flawed. The question then becomes: Can we live with this flaw? If yes, then anything else is irrelevant. If no, then anything else is irrelevant. Why? Because if we can indeed continue our meager advancements with this flaw in mind or unknown then the flaw changes nothing. We live as we always lived with a random amount of people dying to an eldritch horror. If we cannot continue our advancements with this flaw in mind or unknown then we'll kill one another long before some eldritch horror accidentally steps on us.

Sure, if you like to be right then it'd be a hard blow to your ego and assessment of your own abilities. But if you like living over being right: Then nothing changes for you. Even if everything you know about the universe is absolute ****e then it doesn't matter if you didn't understand quantum physics to begin with anyway. If Cthulhu woke from his dead slumber in the depths of Ry'loth then the only people actually driven insane would be the people trying to understand him.

[Nerd-o-rama]

Screamed the dust speck.For perhaps the first time ever, I agree with a warty goblin post 100%.

As an example of a "truly cosmic" horror, I'd like to mention Azathoth, who's more or less the point source of energy in the Universe. Basically he's there so writers can say, "if he twitches in his sleep, Earth may be randomly obliterated". He's less a monster than he is simply a personification of the sheer uncaringness of the cosmos. Which is perfectly valid in real life. Earth could be smashed by an asteroid or fried with a gamma ray burst at any second, and we have no real way of dealing with it. We just have to ignore it and get on with our lives.

Well, or colonize other planets. We'll get to that eventually, in which case it will merely take a larger disaster to eradicate us.

[SurlySeraph]

Lovecraft is less about fear than despair. Everything you or any other human has ever attempted was completely futile, and may as well have never happened. We are completely incapable of understanding the true nature of the universe, or anything else that really matters. And nothing will ever change any of this, no matter how much progress we think we've made. That's the message Lovecraft wants to get across.

[golentan]

Like I said. Maybe I fail. Maybe everything we can attempt DOES fail, or at best kicks things down the road. But then maybe we can keep delaying the inevitable just that one day. And if you stop *before* you lose, you never know if maybe you could have won the game for someone else. You just lost the game...

I'm not going down without kicking, and I'm not letting humanity do that to itself. If morality doesn't matter, then anything we can live with afterwards is fair game. Saving lives is great, but when someone has a choice between saving lives and saving humanity they almost always pick the latter. Do you want the full list of people who have gone knowingly to horrific deaths in the hopes that it might make a difference for someone else? I'm not saying senseless slaughter and bloodshed, I mean to approach any problem as seems best in that specific case.

And declaring war on cosmic forces has been done before, and will be done again. We're 0 for whatever right now depending on who you believe, but we've been trying for less than a handful of centuries.

And you're right, Goblin. A speck of dust is harmless, and can't hope to change anything.

Unless it rides with a sandstorm.

Edit: Nerd-o-rama: I specifically mentioned threatening to wake azathoth to hold the others in the universe hostage to our wills. His uncaring, predictable, idiot nature just means he's exploitable, as far as I'm concerned.

[tyckspoon]

You need to read up on manlier cosmologies then. Norse and Egyptian come to mind in particular. Selfish gods who care nothing for mankind is a common cosmology in the harsher parts of our little world.


Most of those pantheons aren't actually uncaring. They're just not especially concerend about the state of humanity as a whole as long as they get their appropriate respect. The gods of the Greeks, Norse, and Egyptians may generally come across as nigh-omnipotent jerks, but they're still fairly fundamentally human. Lovecraft's beings just honestly don't care, and they're completely non-human. It's a pretty big difference- in a Norse worldview, you can pray and sacrifice to Thor to guide you while you carry out some act of valor, and if you did it right he will. In a Lovecraft world, you perform your ritual to Cthulu and he destroys your mind in passing without noticing you tried to get him to do anything..

[Nerd-o-rama]

Edit: Nerd-o-rama: I specifically mentioned threatening to wake azathoth to hold the others in the universe hostage to our wills. His uncaring, predictable, idiot nature just means he's exploitable, as far as I'm concerned.

Okay, so when they ignore you thinking "not even us things without minds are that insane!", you destroy the Universe (or at least chunks of it at random?) Congratulations. Now what?

I'm curious which Lovecraft story you actually read (your OP implies it was just one and you seem to be running off a summary of the Mythos's modern internet representation for your arguments).

You know what you might enjoy, though? Cthulhutech (http://www.cthulhutech.com/). It's a mix of the Cthulhu Mythos and anime-inspired giant robot/power armor war shows where humanity is attacked by and takes on a variety of horrors like the Mi-Go, minions of Nyarlathotep and He Who Shall Not Be Named, and a submarine army of Deep Ones, and succeeds in a limited extent. Largely by exploiting the incomprehensible nature of the Universe, the collective sanity of our scientists be damned, like you're suggesting.

[Jade_Tarem]

I mostly subscribe to the "Give me the strength to change what I can, the patience to accept what I cannot, and the wisdom to know the difference" school of thought.

I've never been all that worried about Gamma Ray Bursts (Stephen Hawking says it's significantly less likely than asteroid impact [a problem that is *not* unsolvable] and every conceivable scenario in which the human race wipes *itself* out) or the Sun going Red Dwarf. For one thing, a number of "oops, everyone's dead" scenarios can be permanently prevented, eventually, though certainly long after I'm gone.

The heat death of the universe is more of a bummer - as we understand it, the entire universe will, eventually, simply run out of energy, and entropy is impossible to reverse. But then, once upon a time, the pinnacle of human science and understanding held that witchcraft was responsible for the hiccups and that the human body was composed of exactly four substances, none of which turned out to be actual substances.

Someone pointed out that they have a problem with being horrified by Lovecraftian terrors due to scale - a point I agree with 100%. It's pretty much statistically proven that the human ability to sympathize with tragedy is directly and inversely proportional to the size of that tragedy. More infamously, we have Stalin's line, "One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." I have a hard time being afraid of something that you keep telling me I can't think about.

If Azlazphargablargleblargblarg twitches and blows us the heck up, I won't spend much time worrying about it, will I? We're supposed to fear the yawning gulf of the unknown and unknowable, but the best of us, I think, see that as a challenge and a reason to get up in the morning. And if it's physically impossible for us to comprehend this stuff now, well, we have potentially trillions of years of evolving left to do.

As for insignificance? That's another problem cured with time. Sound of Thunder, despite being Scary Science Fiction, is actually a bright point of optimisim as well - events become magnified as time continues and consequences pile up. With that knowledge, the only thing to do is to live life as fully and well as you can. It might not seem like it, but someday (assuming humanity manages to not wipe itself out, and that something like gamma ray bursts don't kill us) your life, even as a realitively non-epic one, may be relevant on a cosmic scale. No one will see it that way, but it will be no less real.

So yes, humans might vanish from the universe at any moment. The only thing I can see to do about it is to prevent those doomsday scenarios that can be prevented, and hope for the best. What's life without risk, after all?

Alea iacta est, punks!

[ZeroNumerous]

It's a pretty big difference- in a Norse worldview, you can pray and sacrifice to Thor to guide you while you carry out some act of valor, and if you did it right he will. In a Lovecraft world, you perform your ritual to Cthulu and he destroys your mind in passing without noticing you tried to get him to do anything..

A) You can try. You have to hope Thor isn't busy doing something else, that you haven't upset him by praying during the wrong month or day or that he actually cares about your little excursion. Which, frankly, he won't if you aren't a soldier.

B) Hastur. Nyratholep(I know I spelled that wrong). There are eldritch horrors which listen to people and react to them. I see no difference between them or praying to Loki and getting your home burned because you're a moron who worships an insane evil god.

Granted, they're still fundamentally human-shaped. But the Aesir are far from human in their actions. Each and every single one of them knows their destruction comes at Ragnarok, that they cannot change this and that their people will be entirely eradicated. And yet they charge straight into death rather than flee from it like any human would. And they do this for no discernable nor understandable reason. The only thing humans gain or lose from the gods is the wisdom of runes and the knowledge that the world is larger than themselves. Isn't it interesting how cultists in the Lovecraftian mythos often gain magic or some other mystical mutation and the knowledge that the universe is far greater than themselves?

Conversely, Egyptian mythology is by-and-large removed from the concerns of humans. Two gods interact with humanity on any 'perceived' scale and they are Anuket and Ra. The first because she was the Nile and the second because he is the Sun. Sure, they sacrificed things to their war goddess and to the lord of the dead but neither of those gods granted boons to the Egyptian people. A large quantity of Egyptian gods are unknowable alien beings who concern themselves with something beyond the scope of mortal understanding. Sound like somebody we know?

[Catch]

Mankind--No, our entire species from the primordial ooze up to now is merely 300 billion years old. Give or take 200 billion. In several hundred billion years, our sun will go nova. In it's death throes it will expand to consume every planet between Mercury and Jupiter, light Jupiter on fire, blast the atmosphere off every planet left in the Solar System and then explode with more destructive force than the entirety of humanity has ever produced up to that point.

It's far bleaker than that. The universe cooled down about 13-14 billion years ago, Earth is only 4.5 billion years old, eukaryotes have been around for less than half of that time. Mammals are about 200 million years old, and humans as we know them emerged 200,000 years ago. Civilization has existed for between 5,000 and 10,000 years.

Now, our sun is slightly older than the Earth, which means it's at the midpoint of its life cycle. It's continuing to get warmer, which is why life on land developed a billion years ago, but also why in another billion years, Earth's surface will be too hot to sustain liquid water. We'll die of drought far before the sun incinerates us. And, considering how our population is exponentially bearing down on Earth's carrying capacity, we'll eat each other before anything celestial kills us. We're looking at a population of 7 billion in the next two years, and 8 billion in another sixteen. That means Earth's population will have doubled in just over 50 years.

Cthulu might eat you, but you better watch out for the rest of humanity.

[Renegade Paladin]

7:
...
Are you an alien?
R:I'm going to plead the sixth amendment.

8:You plead the right not to quarter troops outside of a time of war?
R:Yes.
Actually no; that's the Third Amendment, Mr. Genius. :smalltongue:

[Jade_Tarem]

Cthulu might eat you, but you better watch out for the rest of humanity.

I'm pretty sure a Larry Niven style reproduction lottery would be instituted before cannibalism becomes the mainstay of the human diet.

Then again, maybe we'll go the Soylent Green route after all. You never know.

[Solaris]

I'm pretty sure a Larry Niven style reproduction lottery would be instituted before cannibalism becomes the mainstay of the human diet.

Then again, maybe we'll go the Soylent Green route after all. You never know.

I know I'd rather go the Soylent Green route. Maybe I'll finally get my dream of eating long pork.

[ZeroNumerous]

I'm pretty sure a Larry Niven style reproduction lottery would be instituted before cannibalism becomes the mainstay of the human diet.

I vote for mass enforced sterilization. Let keep the sex but lose the results. :smallwink:

[Mystic Muse]

I think the point of the weird sea serpent analogy is there's nothing you can do.. no not even then. You will die. You will die, slowly, painfully and you will scream and there's nothing you can do about it. You are going to be squashed, eaten tortured and whatever else comes to the being's mind.

[chiasaur11]

Fun fact:

Soylent Green is...

SOY AND LENTILS! In the book, at least.


(Also: Population boom predictions have been dire for the entirety of the last century, as far as I can find, but every deadline has come and gone without disaster. As it turns out, more comfortably well off societies tend to reproduce less, [see: most of Europe] making a nice counterbalance to the whole expanding population bit)

[The Vorpal Tribble]

Actually, most of livable space is still unused on earth. We just tend to stupidly congregate in certain areas.

Thing is, even that is going down. Statistics show more babies are being born... but less families are having babies. We'll hit the peak... and then it'll start to plummet.

At current rate of births the population will begin to sharply decline around 2020 if i recall.

[golentan]

Lovecraft I've read: The Forgotten City (which is the one I just reread), Call of Cthulhu, The Color out of Space, and some other story I don't remember the name of. It involved deep ones, I think it might have been Shadow over Innsmouth?

My plan with Azathoth is "Hey, leave us alone and we WON'T have him blow up random bits of the universe. And you can go on with any plans that don't involve our death, have a generally good time, and muck about with cosmic forces beyond our understanding. Try to kill us and we'll at least have a go at taking the rest of this place with us when we go. Do you feel lucky? Well, do ya, Pun-kazyroths?

I was considering picking up Cthulhutech.

Edit: Rant Removed.

[Jade_Tarem]

No longer related to the discussion:
From now on, all mockery shall be done... in limerick:

There once was a thread 'bout Cthulhu,
which caused a great big hullabaloo.
So some new points were made,
some IQ scores displayed,
Then Cthulhu began posting too!

[RandomNPC]

To answer the origonal question of why lovecraft is scary.

Have you read rats in the walls? It's about a guy who is the only one in his house who can hear the rats (the cats hear it, but they can't tell anyone) at the end he finds out he's a decendant of some messed up people (not telling why) and when his mind snaps he does some pretty horrible things, blaming it all on the rats.

This is not scary, you see the end coming about five pages before it shows up. The scary part is every noise you hear when you're up at night makes you think about it for a second. Sure you'll dismiss the idea quickly, but for a week all you'll think about when your house makes noise is those rats and the things that guy did because of them.

[SurlySeraph]

Like I said. Maybe I fail. Maybe everything we can attempt DOES fail, or at best kicks things down the road. But then maybe we can keep delaying the inevitable just that one day. And if you stop *before* you lose, you never know if maybe you could have won the game for someone else.
(etc.)

Yeah, there's the thing. H.P. Lovecraft really wasn't a "Believe in the you who believes in yourself!" kind of guy, much less a "Kick reason to the curb and go beyond the impossible!" kind of guy.

He was more of a "Curl up in a corner of the basement in the fetal position, whimpering softly about how scared and helpless he feels" kind of guy. And you clearly can't identify with that attitude much.

[warty goblin]

He was more of a "Curl up in a corner of the basement in the fetal position, whimpering softly about how scared and helpless he feels" kind of guy. And you clearly can't identify with that attitude much.

This is more or less how I react to the GREs, which come to think of it are strong contenders for inhuman, incomprehensible horrors capable of destroying your mind should you seek to understand them.

[Primal Fury]

I think the whole point of Lovecraft wasn't so much "Big bad thing gonna squash you by accident", as much as "You don't mean anything". It's all from a naturalistic perspective. Kinda like The Open Boat. Mankind stands up to Mother Nature herself and screams "I matter! I'm important! And I can beat you!!" That's a lie. There really isn't anything you can do. If we don't kill ourselves (and it's very likely that we will), and we all become one big happy species... then what? We spread? We propagate? Okay, then what? We unravel the mysteries of the cosmos? Yay. Then what? I'm too tired to think of anything else right now, so lets say thats it. We still don't mean anything, not in the cosmic sense. We're still just another organism, only we've given ourselves the illusion of importance.

And that whole taking Azathoth hostage thing is just plain silly. In the Mythos-verse, it won't matter how much you think you can accomplish, it won't matter that you'll hope that you can do it. That's because there is no slim chance when dealing with these sorts of things. There is no "Well, at least I tried" mentality, because in the end, you'll wish you didn't. You just lose, and that's it.

And some might say that, in relation to the Pandora's Box reference earlier, hope was the worst curse of all. The final "Middle Finger" at the end of a long line of pain and misery. That hope makes us think we stand a chance, when in reality, we never did.

I feel it's worth pointing out that I am a very cheerful and optimistic person by nature. :smallsmile:

[Mewtarthio]

This is more or less how I react to the GREs, which come to think of it are strong contenders for inhuman, incomprehensible horrors capable of destroying your mind should you seek to understand them.

*looks up GRE*

Ah, yes. Uh, curse that accursed Glycopeptide-Resistant Enterococci! What with all those, uh, nosocomial infections it causes, and, uh... Hey, did you know it resists glycopeptide? I mean, you could see some enterococci coming at you and go all, "Bam! I've got glycopeptides! Bring it, punk!" and it'd be all like, "Pshaw. I eat glycopeptides for breakfast," and then it'd just punch right through it and infect you in a nosocomial manner. That's just plain wrong. :smalleek:

[GoufCustom]

I'm glad I'm not the only one who started thinking about Gurren Lagann in this thread.

*goes off to ponder Team Dai-Gurren fighting Cthulhu*

[chiasaur11]

I'm glad I'm not the only one who started thinking about Gurren Lagann in this thread.

*goes off to ponder Team Dai-Gurren fighting Cthulhu*

My money's on them pulling it off.

I mean, X-Com did it, and they don't have giant robots.

[Nerd-o-rama]

Cthulhu, they could definitely do.

Although they never did take on a "real" cosmic force, only the super-technological Anti-Spiral who had powers similar to, but of a far different tenor than the Outer Gods, at least in their home universe. In fact, it's arguable that the Spiral races were the cosmic horror of the setting, threatening to destroy the Universe unwittingly with their power. Thankfully, unlike say Azathoth, the Spirals can think, reason, and have morals.

[Caewil]

Most of these things are whatever, though some of them are explosives, radiation, poison and/or antimatter.

For the low ranking horrors, the things that are just monstrous, these are valid tactics. Against the truly cosmic horrors, you can't do much but flee and hope to forget. Solutions are temporary.

What happens when the great race of Yith puts your brain in a jar and you travel through time and space for 10,000 years?
Meh. Some random sailor delayed Cthulhu a good while just by crashing a ship into his head. A temporary solution, but every solution is anyway. Someone whose cancer is cured through chemotherapy is still going to die eventually. Doesn't mean the temporary solution was worthless. If we dropped a H-bomb on Cthulhu, it probably wouldn't be able to regenerate for a few million years.

As for the brain in a jar... Er? Take the opportunity to see the sights? I always thought that story was more cool than scary.

I honestly find his stories more weird and pathetic than scary. Take "The Shadow Over Innsmouth". Now personally, I found the fact that the author turns into an immortal fish-thing more awesome than horrible.

[Lord Seth]

I've been holding off on it, but I really have to say it now...

"It's like something out of H.P. Lovecraft! Only gay!" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bpG0P1Ks_8)

[Rutskarn]

3:No, it will drive you mad!
R:Ooooh...kay? I'm already off my rocker. It can always get worse, but shouting "CRAZY" isn't going to deter me.

This isn't "eccentric uncle" crazy. This is frothing-at-the-mouth, mind-completely-shattered, unable-to-function crazy. This is the kind of crazy where your entire purpose and sense of self is broken.


4: But it's all non-euclidean and junk!
R:I have a genius level IQ and have taken a test that indicates I can visualize things in a 6 dimensional curved space and how such things would project visually onto our space. Let me have a crack at their stuff, please. At least the basics.

It's exactly this kind of hubris that Lovecraft's work is based upon. Yeah, you're hot stuff for a human. You can visualize 6-dimensional curved space? Yeah, that's great. This isn't that stuff. This isn't stuff flesh-puppet brains can hadle.


5: Shut up. You're cosmically insignificant and these things can swat you like a bug. Stop asking.
R:Yeah. Which is why I'd like to take a crack at this. Sure, it might fail miserably, but if I can work something out maybe we can negotiate from a stronger position. I'd rather NOT wait to get swatted at leisure, and I have a feeling that if flies worked out how to build tanks (or suicide bombers) RAID sales would drop through the floor.

Again, there's no point. I mean there really isn't. People do try in Lovecraft, at least in most interpretations, and they fail and fail hard. When I say this stuff is above humans, I mean it really is above humans. Which brings me too...


6:You're too optimistic. It's a big scary world. We're too insignificant for the major powers to even notice us, let alone care.
R:Yeah. Let's go kick it in the teeth before it figures out it should bite us. Believe me, I've been hanging around a *long* time and I haven't found anything nastier, grosser, meaner or more adaptable than humans. Give me the damn necronomicon! We're going to do start studying repeatability and testing variables.

Okay, see, this is your problem, right here. This is an okay position to take...for a given setting. But in Lovecraft, this stuff is just patently not friggin' true. It's like if I said, "Elves are more agile than humans," and you replied, "Oh, likely story! I've seen some really agile people." You're not accepting the central conceit of the setting, and that's why it's not making sense to you.



12:They won't let you. The nasty ones. The ones with the most power.
R: I thought we were beneath their notice.

You're not beneath their notice. You're just beneath their contempt.



It just seems like Lovecraft tries to make it scary by showing it's pointless to try, when what he actually shows is people giving up without making even a token effort, rather than doing what I'd try to do: figure out consistencies, what's a reasonably safe avenue of assault, and then smash everything humanity has against hostile forces until one or the other gives way. He tells rather than shows, and the tale shrinks in the telling.

Would people really give up on learning they were the low man on the totem pole and the higher ups wanted to kill them? I don't think so, and if they did I would find it sad in more ways than could be counted on the infinite tentacles of Azathoth (there's a victory strategy right there. Since almost everything in the world is as scared of the next guy up, go stand near azathoth and threaten to break those sissy flute things unless the non-nihilists BACK THE **** OFF OUR PLANET!!! and help us take out the nihilistic ones).

What I'm saying is, this isn't a bad idea for a setting, but it's simply not applicable to Lovecraft. The entire Lovecraftian setting is based around everything you've said being very, very wrong, just like Warhammer 40K is based off of...


I have a similar problem with the Warhammer 40k "Everything is bad forever" motif. But that's another story.

Okay, I'm going to say this once.*

Warhammer 40K is a Gothic, Romantic setting. It's not supposed to be 100% realistic. This is entirely to its credit. Saying 40K is bad because the setting doesn't make sense is like saying Superman is bad because the physics don't make sense--it's not supposed to be real god dammit.

TO SUMMARIZE:

Lovecraft's setting is that we're screwed and we're screwed forever. Every element of the setting logically leads to this conclusion. You don't have to like the fact that the setting is constructed in this way. You don't have to like Lovecraft. But it's pointless to say that the tenets of the setting are false just because it seems like they should be false to you.

[The Tygre]

I'm backing Rutskarn on this. Being able to visualize six dimensions doesn't reallys stack up to a creature that has a -brain- made out of six dimensions. Maybe your mind can handle it, but it's also entirely possible that a given entity literally emits waves of organ-destroying hallucinogenic energy.

Truth be told, I was never scared by Lovecraft. Put in suspense? Excited? The cockles of my heart warmed as he utterly abused the dictionary? Definitely. Scared... No. Well, maybe once or twice. But I always considered it Cosmic -Entertainment- before Cosmic -Horror-.

[AstralFire]

I don't think golen is arguing that the tenets are false for everyone. He is questioning why more people don't find them false, given the culture we grow up.

[Solaris]

I don't think golen is arguing that the tenets are false for everyone. He is questioning why more people don't find them false, given the culture we grow up.

In the real world? I'd argue that yes, yes they are false.
In Lovecraft's world? They are the reality.

[AstralFire]

In the real world? I'd argue that yes, yes they are false.
In Lovecraft's world? They are the reality.

That's a hard distinction to make since Lovecraft's world is ostensibly our own.

[toasty]

That's a hard distinction to make since Lovecraft's world is ostensibly our own.

But he's a fiction author, yes? So while his world may ostensibly be our own a smart reader should be able to separate what is true (humans eat food) from what is false (Cthulu will destroy us all!)

[Jerthanis]

Lovecraft turned out to be right, mostly, so they started teaching him in elementary school.

He really isn't scary anymore.

[kpenguin]

Alright, I get how this noncomprehensibility we-are-dust-motes thing is pretty damn terrifying. However, what I'm not getting is how the Chtulhu mythos gets this point across.

I mean, these things have names. Heck, these things are things. We understand things to be things. If they were truly incomprehensible to man, then why the hell are they things?

Or, like, how Cthulhu is waiting for the stars to align. What the hell? Stars? Alignment? Those are things we understand. Waiting is something we understand.

And R'lyeh, a city? You're telling me that a being so unfathomable as a cosmic horror has something as human as a city? That's sunken beneath the sea? That seems oh so comprehensible and mundane.

[Rutskarn]

In retrospect, I should have kicked off with this.



R:Yeah. Let's go kick it in the teeth before it figures out it should bite us. Believe me, I've been hanging around a *long* time and I haven't found anything nastier, grosser, meaner or more adaptable than humans. Give me the damn necronomicon! We're going to do start studying repeatability and testing variables.


http://lolthulhu.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/internet-o_rlyeh.jpg

[kpenguin]

Eh. Shopping could have gone a bit better.

[The Tygre]

Alright, I get how this noncomprehensibility we-are-dust-motes thing is pretty damn terrifying. However, what I'm not getting is how the Chtulhu mythos gets this point across.

I mean, these things have names. Heck, these things are things. We understand things to be things. If they were truly incomprehensible to man, then why the hell are they things?

Or, like, how Cthulhu is waiting for the stars to align. What the hell? Stars? Alignment? Those are things we understand. Waiting is something we understand.

And R'lyeh, a city? You're telling me that a being so unfathomable as a cosmic horror has something as human as a city? That's sunken beneath the sea? That seems oh so comprehensible and mundane.

I can see your point. But it was always my assumption that humans applied those traits, projected them onto those beings and creatures. The reality remains somewhat debatable, in-Mythos wise.

[Dervag]

If mankind is equivalent in consideration to Cthulhu as gnats are to mankind, and Cthulhu is merely a priest of the eldritch horrors that will doom mankind... why would the eldritch horrors care to doom us?

Wouldn't that be like mankind going on a genocidal rampage against plankton?It doesn't happen because they care; it happens because they can't be bothered. Think of us as the exotic species of plankton native to a single pond... that someone decided to use as a cooling pond for a nuclear power plant. The plankton are still screwed even if they honestly don't realize we're even there, let alone care. And good luck trying to explain to them why their species has to go extinct.


However, plankton are unable to perceive or even concieve of humanity. As far as they would know (assuming for the purposes of the analogy that they are capable of knowing at all), random bad stuff happens that make some plankton die. Just as we are unable to perceive/conceive the eldritch horrors. And random things happen, and people die. And life, for the rest of the plankton/people, goes on much as it always has.In the analogy above, the plankton have this brief moment of "Holy crap! The water temperature is rising to unnatural levels!" while slowly being dissolved from the inside out by industrial waste products they have no frame of reference for. I'm sure you can imagine having something like that happen to you sucking mightily, and that's what people are getting at here.

The point is that the random things that make people die that we know are what happens when the eldritch abominations are away. We can't even exist when they're actively operating; they crush us without even realizing they've done it. And the process of being crushed is far nastier than the 'normal' things that make people die, and it's a much more urgent prospect than, say, the sun blowing up.
________


But when it's the high concept stuff about the universe... Okay, so it's a mean universe. One where horror CAN and DOES happen. Why does that make it any different from our universe, and why is it time to stop kicking?I think you're reading a little too much into it, and then objecting to the result of the over-reading. You don't have to walk away from Lovecraft thinking "he's saying we should all give up" or even "in his setting we should all give up." But that doesn't change the key point of Lovecraft, which is that the universe really isn't something comprehensible, and even if your descendants could hypothetically figure it out... that's a sign that they aren't recognizably human anymore.


And why are physical features considered mind-breaking? If it hurts your eyes, stop looking at it. But the fact you can't visualize something doesn't make it evil or insanity inducing, it's just "Huh. Fancy that." With maybe a side dish of "Avert your eyes while shooting downrange."In your experience, yes... which completely misses the point of a story which introduces stuff that wrecks your mind by its sheer weirdness precisely because it is categorically outside your experience.

Also, keep in mind that empirically people often are driven insane by hideous sights and experiences; it's not at all improbable that someone who has a horrible experience with non-Eucliden knuckle-monsters will spend the rest of their days rocking in a corner and muttering "the horrible knuckles" under their breath.
________


Yep. I just wanted to preemptively strike before things devolved.

The thing is, in your example I'd learn as much as I could about prophecied events, try to extrapolate exploitable scenarios, and either try to kill the thing or prevent a situation that could wake it. Maybe I fail, maybe it triggers the scenario of doom, but maybe I succeed in either preventing doom or kicking it down the road with notes on how to continue doing so.Golentan, I have to ask... have you ever had to deal with a really serious crisis in your life? Not just stuff like "if this happens there is a 5% chance I will be kicked out of college" or something, but a terrible problem with immediate, visceral impact and irreversible consequences? Something horrible happening to someone close to you, a major disaster striking your family home, something along those lines? Do you have direct experience of your own ability to function in the face of a crisis that causes a lot of people to just shut down and fail to cope for extended periods of time?

Because you're making a statement about your own sheer mental implacability and immunity to trauma that simply is not true of most of humanity.
_________


It's not.
That's Derleth.

Lovecraft saw the cosmos as uncaring and incomprehensible. Good and Evil had absolutely nothing to do with it.In human terms, the Lovecraft-cosmos is evil... because it can and will obliterate us without caring that it has done so. It may not be evil on its own terms, but it's quite reasonable for us to call it evil.
_________


This is more or less how I react to the GREs, which come to think of it are strong contenders for inhuman, incomprehensible horrors capable of destroying your mind should you seek to understand them.The physics one really isn't so bad if you can intuit physics...

[golentan]

No, what I'm really arguing is the tenets just aren't that scary. Okay, there are a million ways to destroy a person, each more horrific than the last. But in the end, you wind up with a person who's destroyed, and who therefore... Doesn't care. Until you get to that point... you care, so you keep trying to postpone hitting that point until you are destroyed or safe. We live, and die, in the manner of our choosing. All the more so because these ideas only have meaning in our minds. It doesn't matter whether we win or lose, whether we're killed or driven insane or just die when we go. Whether our lives had meaning, or anything else in our lives. What matters is that we choose to keep living them and kicking the universe back every time it kicks us. That we don't let go of our ideals until they are bodily ripped from us, because anything else is suicide. Because if we just sit around waiting to be killed, we're deader than if we had never lived.

In the meantime, life goes on. Because here's the thing: I'm a pessimist. I believe that the universe is big and cold and uncaring. I believe that apart from the eldritch abominations, Lovecraft is right. Even then, I believe there are things far greater than me, in mind and body, that wouldn't care a whit for my existence, but I don't think they're incomprehensible; just distant. And I believe that nothing I do will have cosmic significance, or be remembered a hundred years after I'm gone. Which means that right here, and right now, I have to live the best I can. I have to meet all my ideals, and live a life I want to live, and that I want my friends to envy and emulate. Because if I give in, I've lost far more than if I am defeated. I have no real future, so I will never surrender my present. And I want to safeguard the presents of as many others as I can, even if it costs me.

And I don't find that scary, I don't find it intimidating. I find that a challenge. I find the thought that I can forge my own destiny and choose my path and decide whether I succeeded right up until the moment I stop being me; until I stop *being* exhilarating. My world is my world, it is what happens in my little meatpuppet skull while I live. Everything after that is meaningless, because I'm not there to consider it. I spout optimistic rhetoric and leading the charge rallies because that's the world I want to live in, and if I never give up on it I do. I don't ignore the bad things, I face them head on secure in the knowledge that I can learn and accept them if they turn out to be good things, I can destroy them, or I can go out fighting them in a manner of my choice.

And that's the disconnect. I like Lovecraft. I like the stories. I don't like how the people who are still standing at the end have become hollow though. People who can still reason and plan and fear and love have just... given up. Not because their minds were damaged to some degree (though that played a part on occasion) but because they had simply decided not to forge onwards in the face of the knowledge it would eventually break them entirely unless they gave up on who they were and submitted to the world of another. And the devil of it is they still know that they will break, but later, having chosen not to keep living in the interim. That's not scary, that's pathetic.

[golentan]

Golentan, I have to ask... have you ever had to deal with a really serious crisis in your life? Not just stuff like "if this happens there is a 5% chance I will be kicked out of college" or something, but a terrible problem with immediate, visceral impact and irreversible consequences? Something horrible happening to someone close to you, a major disaster striking your family home, something along those lines? Do you have direct experience of your own ability to function in the face of a crisis that causes a lot of people to just shut down and fail to cope for extended periods of time?

Because you're making a statement about your own sheer mental implacability and immunity to trauma that simply is not true of most of humanity.
Hope this isn't a double post.

Yes. Do you want the laundry list? Sexual abuse, Assault, critical mental illness, kicked from college, life threatening illness, death of friends. Edit: Oh, and a tornado wrecked our house, but that was when I was really little and I'm not sure I should count that one.

Some of the time, this stuff hits me hard enough that I stay down for a good... Call it 2 months on the outside. I think that's the record, before I started fighting back again (which knocked me back on my backside, but I got up in about 2 weeks the next time).

I'm not perfect, but I have dealt with crises. And I'm getting better at dealing with them.

[kpenguin]

I can see your point. But it was always my assumption that humans applied those traits, projected them onto those beings and creatures. The reality remains somewhat debatable, in-Mythos wise.

But all we have to go on is the words of an author. A human author.

The fact that we know of their existence, that we can comprehend them as individual things, as consciousnesses, lowers that horror part for me.

[Rutskarn]

And that's the disconnect. I like Lovecraft. I like the stories. I don't like how the people who are still standing at the end have become hollow though. People who can still reason and plan and fear and love have just... given up. Not because their minds were damaged to some degree (though that played a part on occasion) but because they had simply decided not to forge onwards in the face of the knowledge it would eventually break them entirely unless they gave up on who they were and submitted to the world of another. And the devil of it is they still know that they will break, but later, having chosen not to keep living in the interim. That's not scary, that's pathetic.

Okay, that I can understand. But not all characters give up immediately--some Lovecraftian characters pursue the horrors to their limit. They just, you know, fail anyway.

@penguin: Not my shoop, just to clarify.

[kpenguin]

Ah. That makes sense. I've come to expect higher quality art from the Choclate Hammer brand, so your use of that image confused me.

[Rutskarn]

Yeah, that was a lazy-joke-I'm-sure-someone's-done-this-before-grab-summat-off-the-nets sort of dealie-o.

[JonestheSpy]

To answer the origonal question of why lovecraft is scary.

Have you read rats in the walls? It's about a guy who is the only one in his house who can hear the rats (the cats hear it, but they can't tell anyone) at the end he finds out he's a decendant of some messed up people (not telling why) and when his mind snaps he does some pretty horrible things, blaming it all on the rats.

This is not scary, you see the end coming about five pages before it shows up. The scary part is every noise you hear when you're up at night makes you think about it for a second. Sure you'll dismiss the idea quickly, but for a week all you'll think about when your house makes noise is those rats and the things that guy did because of them.

Actually, I think the story itself is one of Lovecraft's most scary and disturbing.

Seriously, anyone saying Lovecraft isn't scary has to read "Rats in the Walls" and get back to us.

[Galileo]

I'm glad I'm not the only one who started thinking about Gurren Lagann in this thread.

*goes off to ponder Team Dai-Gurren fighting Cthulhu*

Coincidentally, I was listening to Sky Blue Days as I read this thread. I've also bet on that greatness!

And I'm glad Cthulhutech has been mentioned. I love the idea that humanity's taken the ridiculously optimistic approach to unknowable horrors, and is fighting them with everything they have, including a whole lot of impossible tech. If I were a mech pilot in Cthulhutech, I'd have my mech constantly broadcasting Gattai Nante Kuso Kurae. I don't care if the Migou don't have ears!

[Matar]

And that's the disconnect. I like Lovecraft. I like the stories. I don't like how the people who are still standing at the end have become hollow though. People who can still reason and plan and fear and love have just... given up. Not because their minds were damaged to some degree (though that played a part on occasion) but because they had simply decided not to forge onwards in the face of the knowledge it would eventually break them entirely unless they gave up on who they were and submitted to the world of another. And the devil of it is they still know that they will break, but later, having chosen not to keep living in the interim. That's not scary, that's pathetic.

I just want to say this: I freaking love hot-bloodedness and kicking reason to the curve. In fact, I've been thinking of trying to make a M&M game of something like this.

But, if we are in a lovecraft setting... well, what you're saying just won't work. Why?

Well.


Response: Yes. Some are in my family.

I don't think you get it. In a Lovecraft setting, humanity knows nothing. Everything is a lie. Do you think you know the dark secrets of the universe? You're wrong. Simple as that. So! Do you want to figure out how things really work in the universe? Do you want to travle to the Darkest Corners of the Earth and learn the truth?

Baaaad idea.


Ooooh...kay? I'm already off my rocker. It can always get worse, but shouting "CRAZY" isn't going to deter me.

What's the worst thing you could possibly do? Kick a dog? Harm a loved one? Rape? Eating meat?

You will do it all.


The secret priests would take great Cthulhu from his tomb to revive His subjects and resume his rule of earth....Then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.


I have a genius level IQ and have taken a test that indicates I can visualize things in a 6 dimensional curved space and how such things would project visually onto our space. Let me have a crack at their stuff, please. At least the basics.

Well, in a Lovecraft setting? You wouldn't. Not really, anyways. Everything you think you know is just a lie. Can you attempt to learn these forbidden secrets? Of course! But you will fail. And the things you will do in service of the Great Old Ones will be unspeakable.

Hell, I would think that having a harsh life would make this even more terrifying. Because in a Lovecraft setting? Well, read the above quote. You would do everything we deem horrible and simply not care.


Hey, see my responses to 3, 4, and 1 in that order. I can take it. Let me at least have a peek? Please?

Go right ahead.


All the more reason to start forming alliances with relatively similarly minded abominations and kicking ass.

Two things:

One: It won't do any good. Sure, you can try. But you will fail. See, in a Lovecraft setting there is no chance. You will fail, and you will die/become insane.

Two: Let's just say you DO somehow manage to fight back. Guess what? You have creatures that defy the laws of time and space treating you like a game. No, not seriously. You'll never be big enough to be treated seriously. But they will take notice to you, and mess you up big time.


I have a similar problem with the Warhammer 40k "Everything is bad forever" motif. But that's another story.

I hate that to, honestly.


I have to meet all my ideals, and live a life I want to live, and that I want my friends to envy and emulate. Because if I give in, I've lost far more than if I am defeated. I have no real future, so I will never surrender my present. And I want to safeguard the presents of as many others as I can, even if it costs me.

Which is nice. Except it won't work. In fact, in the end, you won't even care.

[Avilan the Grey]

I agree with (whoever it was, upthread) who said that for a lot of us, the idea of a wast empty uncaring universe etc etc is not scary anymore.

If you think it's depressing to remember that you are living on a small speck circling a rather small star in one of the further ends of one of the arms of a galaxy, just listen to what Monty Python sings about it. :smallbiggrin:

We live in a cosmos where time and light are slaves to gravity. Where black holes bend the very fabric of cosmos around them.

We live on a speck that can be destroyed or rendered uninhabitable by a million things, from environmental disasters via meteor strikes up to our galaxy colliding with another galaxy...

Now, I am not saying that a Cosmic Horror might be scary. What I am saying is that what caused Lovecraft to write his stories to begin with, his concept of fear and what to be feared, is not scary to us anymore.

[Caewil]

I don't think you get it. In a Lovecraft setting, humanity knows nothing. Everything is a lie. Do you think you know the dark secrets of the universe? You're wrong. Simple as that. So! Do you want to figure out how things really work in the universe? Do you want to travle to the Darkest Corners of the Earth and learn the truth?

Baaaad idea.
And the reason why this makes lovecraft scary? It doesn't, primarily because we've pretty much given up on "the truth" nowadays. We have a model of how things work which allows us to make predictions about reality. If those predictions turn out to be false, time for a new model. It's only scary if you believe that you can actually know things for certain or can't deal with emotional trauma or somehow haven't been desensitized by television.

As long as the central tenets of his universe aren't believable or convincing, he's not going to be scary. He can tell us how horrible the understanding is, but we really, really wouldn't care.

[Kris Strife]

And some might say that, in relation to the Pandora's Box reference earlier, hope was the worst curse of all. The final "Middle Finger" at the end of a long line of pain and misery. That hope makes us think we stand a chance, when in reality, we never did.

Um... Hope was the one good thing that was in the box. Had Pandora not closed the box before it escaped, the evils would have turned upon it and destroyed it utterly, leaving mankind no hope, no reason to keep living.

I suppose it'd be closer to there being one cosmic force that is actually concerned about the lesser beings, but if it were to act directly, it would be destroyed, and instead works to distract us from these horrible beings and discourages us from trying to look where we shouldn't.

Just saying.

[Primal Fury]

Um... Hope was the one good thing that was in the box. Had Pandora not closed the box before it escaped, the evils would have turned upon it and destroyed it utterly, leaving mankind no hope, no reason to keep living.
You have absolutely no way of knowing that. :smalltongue: And that also begs the question: Why didn't the horrors destroy Hope while they were still in the box to prevent all that in the first place? Because they saw the lie that hope gave humans. If you were an evil overlord, and you were torturing some people and were just about to kill them, and they escaped, but were subsequently recaptured, would you take more pleasure in simply killing them? Or would you enjoy the perverse satisfaction of knowing that they tried with all their might, but still failed miserably?

[Myshlaevsky]

I never got the Pandora's box thing, really. The evils are locked in the box, and when it's opened they all escape out into the world. So, by locking hope back in the box, it always seemed to me that Pandora should have denied hope to humanity, not kept it for them.

[Nerd-o-rama]

Coincidentally, I was listening to Sky Blue Days as I read this thread. I've also bet on that greatness!

And I'm glad Cthulhutech has been mentioned. I love the idea that humanity's taken the ridiculously optimistic approach to unknowable horrors, and is fighting them with everything they have, including a whole lot of impossible tech. If I were a mech pilot in Cthulhutech, I'd have my mech constantly broadcasting Gattai Nante Kuso Kurae. I don't care if the Migou don't have ears!Real men spam "Do You Remember Love?"

Or "Trombe! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ot-0-KyPd0Y)"

[warty goblin]

I never got the Pandora's box thing, really. The evils are locked in the box, and when it's opened they all escape out into the world. So, by locking hope back in the box, it always seemed to me that Pandora should have denied hope to humanity, not kept it for them.

I'd guess because misery hunts you down and makes you suffer, but hope is an illusive little sneak who will slip away unless you keep it nailed down.

[Dervag]

No, what I'm really arguing is the tenets just aren't that scary. Okay, there are a million ways to destroy a person, each more horrific than the last. But in the end, you wind up with a person who's destroyed, and who therefore... Doesn't care.You hope. This is not a foregone conclusion if you're going to accept Lovecraft tenets for the sake of "getting" the horror of it.


And that's the disconnect. I like Lovecraft. I like the stories. I don't like how the people who are still standing at the end have become hollow though. People who can still reason and plan and fear and love have just... given up. Not because their minds were damaged to some degree (though that played a part on occasion) but because they had simply decided not to forge onwards in the face of the knowledge it would eventually break them entirely unless they gave up on who they were and submitted to the world of another. And the devil of it is they still know that they will break, but later, having chosen not to keep living in the interim. That's not scary, that's pathetic.Again, it is also human. Some people who just plain give up when confronted with deep trauma. Especially deep trauma that destroys the frame of reference you would normally use to recover your mental balance.
__________


Yes...
Some of the time, this stuff hits me hard enough that I stay down for a good... Call it 2 months on the outside. I think that's the record, before I started fighting back again (which knocked me back on my backside, but I got up in about 2 weeks the next time).

I'm not perfect, but I have dealt with crises. And I'm getting better at dealing with them.All right. But I'm honestly a bit surprised that you would be unable to comprehend the idea of someone getting knocked so flat that they don't bounce back up, in that case.

I'm sorry if I offended you, but you really were claiming a very high level of psychic invincibility* there, and I couldn't be sure whether it reflected your life experiences or whether it was standard Internet Tough Guy rhetoric.

*Literal definition of invincibility, not video game definition; note that invincible != invulnerable.


I agree with (whoever it was, upthread) who said that for a lot of us, the idea of a wast empty uncaring universe etc etc is not scary anymore.

If you think it's depressing to remember that you are living on a small speck circling a rather small star in one of the further ends of one of the arms of a galaxy, just listen to what Monty Python sings about it. :smallbiggrin:

We live in a cosmos where time and light are slaves to gravity. Where black holes bend the very fabric of cosmos around them.

We live on a speck that can be destroyed or rendered uninhabitable by a million things, from environmental disasters via meteor strikes up to our galaxy colliding with another galaxy...

Now, I am not saying that a Cosmic Horror might be scary. What I am saying is that what caused Lovecraft to write his stories to begin with, his concept of fear and what to be feared, is not scary to us anymore.Thing is... in Lovecraft, it is worse than that. All we have to worry about in real life is inanimate matter, not living beings who can casually destroy us (individually or collectively) for reasons we don't have the processing power to comprehend.

[multilis]

Lovecraft wrote before WW2 and the Cold War. At the time of his writing, the worst weapons we'd come up with (other than deliberate smallpox epidemics) were mustard gas and machine guns. ...
"Brave New World" SF book had anthrax bombs as part of the nasty world wrecking war that triggered the New Order.

[Avilan the Grey]

Thing is... in Lovecraft, it is worse than that. All we have to worry about in real life is inanimate matter, not living beings who can casually destroy us (individually or collectively) for reasons we don't have the processing power to comprehend.

Two things:
1. One point I was trying to made was that the monsters might be scary to some, but the idea, the reason Lovecraft wrote about this, is not scary anymore.
2. Why is that worse?

[Jade_Tarem]

I am kind of curious about why the world destroying entities being sentient and uncaring is worse than the world destroying entities we know about that are nonsentient and just as uncaring.

Is there some level of annihilation beyond dead that they can inflict on us? Can Cthulhu make someone "extra dead?" I'm curious.

[warty goblin]

I am kind of curious about why the world destroying entities being sentient and uncaring is worse than the world destroying entities we know about that are nonsentient and just as uncaring.

Is there some level of annihilation beyond dead that they can inflict on us? Can Cthulhu make someone "extra dead?" I'm curious.

Ask yourself the following, which would be more disturbing:

1) While walking in the wilderness alone, a rock falls on your leg, breaking it. Nobody hears your screaming, because nobody is there to do so.

2) While walking in a city filled with other intelligent beings, you are struck by a car, which breaks your leg. Very few people even notice the shinbone sticking out of your shattered limb, or your screams of pain. Those who do notice just keep walking, without seeming to care.

The difference is between a universe that is incapable of caring, and a universe that doesn't consider you worth caring about. The first is incapable of judgement, the second, if it even notices you, doesn't care.

I don't know about you, but I'd rather live in the first than the second.

[Jade_Tarem]

I don't know about you, but I'd rather live in the first than the second.

Today is not your lucky day, then, because we happen to live in a universe that bears a close resemblance to the second. It's called the bystander effect - the more people there are to observe a disaster or emergency, the less a given person is likely to do about it - and it's a proven psychological phenomenon.

Honestly, I'd find the concept of hugely powerful beings that cared deeply about what happened on Earth a lot scarier than ones that can't be bothered. If their massive 60th dimensional intellect doesn't give two farts about us, then whatever happens to us will be the byproduct of whatever they were going to do anyway, and that's exactly the same at our end as a natural disaster.

The old expression "those who don't read are no better off than those who can't" applies - if Agglebroth J'boingo, Cosmic Horror doesn't use his powers with malice, then for all intents and purposes he's a force of nature.

Put another way, if I accidentally step on an ant, the ant will be just as dead as if a meteor had landed there and vaporized it. The fact that its death has come as the byproduct of the plans of an intelligent, uncaring entitiy that it is completely incapable of comprehending the true complexity of as opposed to, say, an act of nature, is something that the ant is not going to be aware of and doesn't care about due to the difference in scale.

But as far as ants go, a given ant has a much greater chance of survival if I don't care. If I want to eliminate an ant colony in my back yard, I can do it. I can do it by accident as well, but it's a lot less likely than if I use my unbeatable powers (technology) and higher-order thought processes and incomprehensible logic (to an ant) to wipe them out deliberately.

[Nerd-o-rama]

But humans aren't ants. In HP Lovecraft, we try to comprehend the universe and, in seeing the metaphorical tennis shoe about to squash us, generally snap from the realization that we really are no more than ants, despite our delusions to the contrary.

[Yora]

I am kind of curious about why the world destroying entities being sentient and uncaring is worse than the world destroying entities we know about that are nonsentient and just as uncaring.

Is there some level of annihilation beyond dead that they can inflict on us? Can Cthulhu make someone "extra dead?" I'm curious.
One is a disaster. The other is plain and utter lack of compassion for other beings.
The one is tragic, but the other is what you could regard as pure evil.

[Johel]

Just to say that I agree with the OP :
The concept of cosmic horror itself isn't scary exactly because we can't fight it or escape it.
Fear comes from the egoist hope that you, as individual, can survive a situation by following a certain course of actions and from the fact that you can't possibly know this course of action will work... but there's a hope.
If a situation is just hopeless, well you don't have to restrain or care for your own self preservation : whatever you do, you'll end up dead. So try at least to screw first whatever comes to kill you.

Think of any childhood monster and the logic behind it :
It doesn't just scry-and-die at you. It *can* be fought but not by you because you are still a weak little thing that ONE DAY will be strong but for that, you must survive. If you keep it quiet, it won't notice you. Or if you switch the light on. But to switch the light means you're not being quiet, which means taking the risk to be noticed. But again, maybe the monster has already noticed you and is just being cruel by letting you *think* you are safe and unnoticed but will eventually jump at you once you fall asleep. So you must stay awake, if only to run at the light in one last mad run.
The cold logical step will eventually be :
"-Screw that, I'm going for the light. Better die awake fighting than waking up with my belly ripped open !!"
But our instinct prevents us to go straight to this because there's the hope that IF we keep quiet, we might survive without taking risks.

With cosmical horror, it's basically :
If it wants to get you, it can. And you won't be able to oppose it. In any way available to mankind. Also, the ones that notice you aren't even cruel or evil, since the very concepts of good and evil are alien for them. They might or might not enjoy your suffering but whatever you do, it won't change anything. No hope of even a slightly less painful death. So, better fight them than growing angsty.

With WH40K
The galaxy is a mess and you WILL die horribly. However, there's hope. Not for Humanity as a whole, it's eventually doomed. But hope for you, as individual, to live one more day. You can fight or you can flee. Death awaits you but you can still dodge it for a moment.
So, we got the fear of death, suffering, slavery, ect... but also the hope to escape that, if only for a time.

[The Tygre]

A factor that I just now remembered to bring up. We humans, in comparison to the Elder Gods, are indeed no more than ants and gnats. This of course does pose the immediate question of why the Elder Gods even notice us then. The answer is perhaps the whole premise of the Mythos. It has always been my general theory that the Elder Gods are something like wild animals in their disposition; leave them alone, and they'll leave you alone for the most part. However, we humans keep metaphorically poking the bear. It's hard not to rise the ire of any pseudonatural being when you keep summoning its offspring, siphoning its power for magic, or invoke its name with the Necronomicon. In short, we humans are indeed beneath the notice of the Elder Gods, but we're just too stupid to stay that way.

Now -how- we get the ability to pester Outer Deities, that's the rub, as our planet seems to be an endless succession of extraterrestrial wars, experiments, explorations, colonizations, strandings, and imprisonments. Not to mention there's Nyarly, who, for reasons that have never and may never be explained, just seems to hate us. That actually strikes me as a big plot-hole for one of the only entities that you can call a true 'villain' in the Mythos. Why does the Crawling Chaos hate humans? Why is he -obsessed- with us? I suppose the alternative isn't too great; sit next to Azathoth for all time, listen to him bubble and gurgle for eternity like a brain-damaged sloth. Still, though...

[Texas_Ben]

With WH40K
The galaxy is a mess and you WILL die horribly. However, there's hope. Not for Humanity as a whole, it's eventually doomed. But hope for you, as individual, to live one more day. You can fight or you can flee. Death awaits you but you can still dodge it for a moment.
So, we got the fear of death, suffering, slavery, ect... but also the hope to escape that, if only for a time.

Heh, I look at it in precisely the opposite way: The life of the average individual in 40k is at best tolerable, but usually short, miserable, and violent. But it's that way for a reason: So that humanity (and the Imperium) lives on. And, all things considered, they're doing pretty okay on that count.

[Johel]

Heh, I look at it in precisely the opposite way: The life of the average individual in 40k is at best tolerable, but usually short, miserable, and violent. But it's that way for a reason: So that humanity (and the Imperium) lives on. And, all things considered, they're doing pretty okay on that count.

Well... Yes, Humanity survives. Just that. It stagnates and has done so for millenniums, with short local improvements that were quickly canceled by xenos invasions or by the Imperium itself.
Most individuals live and die without mattering much, even on the local scale, while billions of others (still a minority) die horribly trying to preserve the status-quo.
Since it stagnates while all xenos (except the eldars) are THRIVING, Humanity is eventually doomed.

That's my feeling too but that's really difficult to explain, since we talk about a galaxy-wide empire with hundred of thousands of worlds, probably at least that many cultures, constant shifting borders, and a completely inapt administration.
Ignorance, in that world, IS truly a blessing, since you'll then only worry about your little life, in that relatively safe part of the hive, and accomplish something good. Of course, it won't matter for Humanity or even for your planet but it will have mattered for you.

In fact, maybe that's what Lovecraft tried to tell us : don't think too much about the universe as a whole, it will make you sad and angsty. You'll waste time and energy for things that won't change the universe and won't really matter, since nobody will even notice your deeds. Focus on your daily life, be happy with your petty pleasures and die after a short but well-led life, without regrets. You're a mere human, act like it.

And so 50 years later, Games Workshop understood the message and created 40K :smallbiggrin:

[Jade_Tarem]

But humans aren't ants. In HP Lovecraft, we try to comprehend the universe and, in seeing the metaphorical tennis shoe about to squash us, generally snap from the realization that we really are no more than ants, despite our delusions to the contrary.

I'd be more terrified if the whole thing didn't resemble an egregiously bad railroading by a hack DM. I suppose what's failing to trip my sense of horror is the completely arbitrary amount of power and awareness the humans in the stories seem to have.

We're complex enough, smart enough, and sensitive enough to detect these cosmic horrors and observe them, even if observing them is a bad idea, but for some reason are completely unable to learn from the experience, no matter how long we have and how far our culture or even our species evolves - understand that the humans of a trillion years from now may not have that much in common with us, especially if the process is aided artificially. I realize the whole point of cosmic horrors is that they don't make sense, but really, it's pretty wierd (and mighty convenient) how we're just powerful enough to see how powerful these beings are, but not strong enough to ever be able to do anything about it.

Never mind that we weren't able to detect them before. There was theoretically a time when humanity wasn't aware of the cosmic horrors. Then progress or evolution, or perhaps simple discovery, happened. But not anymore! Despite the fact that humans passed the very real benchmark of being able to notice cosmic horrors, all further advancements and achievements end here for no reason.

Ok, so the response I'm likely going to get is "No dude, you still don't get it, all further advancements and achievements will still happen, but they won't mean anything."

Look, we've been over this. For all further advancements and achievements to have no meaning, the Old Ones, or whatever it is that's supposed to inspire terror (or horror), have to have infinite power. Not power and physical and mental structure beyond current human comprehension, infinite power. Any sum of power less than infinity won't do, since that would mean that there was a target point at which something humanity could do would have an effect.

So if that's the case, then the underlying message (and the only thing that could be considered scary) is pretty simple:

There is a God, and he doesn't care.

Which, while a scary thought, requires an alteration in one's Faith (no matter what religion you do or don't believe in) to be effective one way or another, and I'm afraid that if one has to change their religion (or their stance of atheism) to be afraid of this writing, then the horror message is lost. I'd go into it further, but that's taboo on these boards.

The argument for why I'm supposed to be afraid of the cosmic horrors keeps shifting. One minute, it's because they're totally powerful like whoa and we can never, ever do anything about them and they don't care about us. The next moment its because the cosmic horrors don't care that I should despair, because all my life I've apparently been laboring under the delusion that abominations from the bottom of the ocean had my best interests at heart, and I should be crushed to find out that great Cthulhu doesn't care about me.

A number of people have pointed out that we are, as a whole, already aware that humanity is insignificant on a cosmic scale. The response is always something to the effect of "No, you don't get it, it's totally different in Lovecraft books, really!" Why? Because there are giant evil squid men stomping around? Because there are insanity inducing phenomena in the universe, suddenly my ego becomes fragile enough that the "revelation" that my actions have nothing to do with the price of tea on Neptune will drive me mad? What's the big deal?

[Drakyn]

Maybe the big deal was that when Lovecraft was writing the books the idea of humans being absolutely insignificant in the universe was slightly more worrying to the public at large.

EDIT: Also, I fail to find how the idea of "there is a god, and he doesn't care" requires that you arrange your faith around it to find it scary. I don't believe in werewolves and I'm pretty sure a good werewolf story would unsettle me.

[Nerd-o-rama]

The Wall of Text impales me for 28 damage. Since in Call of Cthulhu you get like 15 tops, I'm afraid I'm quite done in this thread.

I mean, I don't even like Lovecraft's writing.

[chiasaur11]

The argument for why I'm supposed to be afraid of the cosmic horrors keeps shifting. One minute, it's because they're totally powerful like whoa and we can never, ever do anything about them and they don't care about us. The next moment its because the cosmic horrors don't care that I should despair, because all my life I've apparently been laboring under the delusion that abominations from the bottom of the ocean had my best interests at heart, and I should be crushed to find out that great Cthulhu doesn't care about me.


But I sent him a card!

[Samb]

This was my feeling as well OP, I've got genius level IQ as well and, though I'm not sure if I can visualize 6th dimensional geometry, I'm able to understand what I've learned of quantum physics with no difficulty.


Why hasn't anyone pointed out how incredibly arrogant this statement is..... like you were joking right.

I mean I've only won the Nobel prize 4 times in a row, and currently researching how to fold space to achieve faster than light travel but I'm not sure I can engage in a social interactions without pointing out what a genius I am......

It was a joke right?

[warty goblin]

We're complex enough, smart enough, and sensitive enough to detect these cosmic horrors and observe them, even if observing them is a bad idea, but for some reason are completely unable to learn from the experience, no matter how long we have and how far our culture or even our species evolves - understand that the humans of a trillion years from now may not have that much in common with us, especially if the process is aided artificially. I realize the whole point of cosmic horrors is that they don't make sense, but really, it's pretty wierd (and mighty convenient) how we're just powerful enough to see how powerful these beings are, but not strong enough to ever be able to do anything about it.


Never mind that we weren't able to detect them before. There was theoretically a time when humanity wasn't aware of the cosmic horrors. Then progress or evolution, or perhaps simple discovery, happened. But not anymore! Despite the fact that humans passed the very real benchmark of being able to notice cosmic horrors, all further advancements and achievements end here for no reason.

I find your inductive hypothesis...disturbing.
Just because something passes one benchmark in no way implies that it can pass any benchmark.


Look, we've been over this. For all further advancements and achievements to have no meaning, the Old Ones, or whatever it is that's supposed to inspire terror (or horror), have to have infinite power. Not power and physical and mental structure beyond current human comprehension, infinite power. Any sum of power less than infinity won't do, since that would mean that there was a target point at which something humanity could do would have an effect.
This displays a very, very poor understanding of limits.

You claim that because human progress, power, understanding and ability is always increasing, it is unbounded- that is, given sufficient time it will exceed any finite measure. Even if one grants your hypothesis, the conclusion in no way follows. There are a lot of things that are always increasing and yet bounded. The sum of the reciprocal squares of the natural numbers is one example- it's always increasing but it converges to a real number. Two, if I recall correctly.

So if that's the case, then the underlying message (and the only thing that could be considered scary) is pretty simple:

Just because humans have progressed, and will continue to progress cannot be used as proof, or even a particularly good argument, that we will obtain infinite power or understanding, or even be able to understand any particular phenomina.

[Stormthorn]

Just reread a story by him. Kind of pretty language. Characters who like learning things. World filled with interesting lore.

What part of this was meant to scare me?

The rundown from what I can figure out:
Spooky point 1:There are creatures that are older and know more than us.
Response: Yes. Some are in my family.

2:No, you don't understand. They're REALLY old and know lots!
R:Cool, can we steal their knowledge?

3:No, it will drive you mad!
R:Ooooh...kay? I'm already off my rocker. It can always get worse, but shouting "CRAZY" isn't going to deter me.

4: But it's all non-euclidean and junk!
R:I have a genius level IQ and have taken a test that indicates I can visualize things in a 6 dimensional curved space and how such things would project visually onto our space. Let me have a crack at their stuff, please. At least the basics.

5: Shut up. You're cosmically insignificant and these things can swat you like a bug. Stop asking.
R:Yeah. Which is why I'd like to take a crack at this. Sure, it might fail miserably, but if I can work something out maybe we can negotiate from a stronger position. I'd rather NOT wait to get swatted at leisure, and I have a feeling that if flies worked out how to build tanks (or suicide bombers) RAID sales would drop through the floor.

6:You're too optimistic. It's a big scary world. We're too insignificant for the major powers to even notice us, let alone care.
R:Yeah. Let's go kick it in the teeth before it figures out it should bite us. Believe me, I've been hanging around a *long* time and I haven't found anything nastier, grosser, meaner or more adaptable than humans. Give me the damn necronomicon! We're going to do start studying repeatability and testing variables.

7:
...
Are you an alien?
R:I'm going to plead the sixth amendment.

8:You plead the right not to quarter troops outside of a time of war?
R:Yes.

9:How does that follow?
R:It lets me avoid answering the question in point number 7, and I can refuse to explain why using the fifth amendment.

10:But... But...
R: Hey, see my responses to 3, 4, and 1 in that order. I can take it. Let me at least have a peek? Please?

11: No. Because EVERYTHING in this universe is equally horribly screwed.
R: All the more reason to start forming alliances with relatively similarly minded abominations and kicking ass.

12:They won't let you. The nasty ones. The ones with the most power.
R: I thought we were beneath their notice.

13: I hate you.
R: Right back at you.

Sorry, had to stretch it to 13 points. Seemed appropriate.

It just seems like Lovecraft tries to make it scary by showing it's pointless to try, when what he actually shows is people giving up without making even a token effort, rather than doing what I'd try to do: figure out consistencies, what's a reasonably safe avenue of assault, and then smash everything humanity has against hostile forces until one or the other gives way. He tells rather than shows, and the tale shrinks in the telling.

Would people really give up on learning they were the low man on the totem pole and the higher ups wanted to kill them? I don't think so, and if they did I would find it sad in more ways than could be counted on the infinite tentacles of Azathoth (there's a victory strategy right there. Since almost everything in the world is as scared of the next guy up, go stand near azathoth and threaten to break those sissy flute things unless the non-nihilists BACK THE **** OFF OUR PLANET!!! and help us take out the nihilistic ones).

I have a similar problem with the Warhammer 40k "Everything is bad forever" motif. But that's another story.

You think very very highly of yourself dont you.

I mean, i guess you have a right to since i cna only visualize things in 4 special dimensions, but damn.
Your an egomaniac. You dont find lovecrafts stories scary becuase you think your smarter and tougher then his fictional entities to which normal humans are like ants?


A factor that I just now remembered to bring up. We humans, in comparison to the Elder Gods, are indeed no more than ants and gnats. This of course does pose the immediate question of why the Elder Gods even notice us then.
Humans notice ants dont they?
Some humans keep ants in farms.
Some like to burn them for the heck of it.
Some dont mind them.
Some kill them when they come in your house and try to take your cracker crumbs.

[Johel]

I find your inductive hypothesis...disturbing.
Just because something passes one benchmark in no way implies that it can pass any benchmark.


This displays a very, very poor understanding of limits.

You claim that because human progress, power, understanding and ability is always increasing, it is unbounded- that is, given sufficient time it will exceed any finite measure. Even if one grants your hypothesis, the conclusion in no way follows. There are a lot of things that are always increasing and yet bounded. The sum of the reciprocal squares of the natural numbers is one example- it's always increasing but it converges to a real number. Two, if I recall correctly.

So if that's the case, then the underlying message (and the only thing that could be considered scary) is pretty simple:

Just because humans have progressed, and will continue to progress cannot be used as proof, or even a particularly good argument, that we will obtain infinite power or understanding, or even be able to understand any particular phenomina.

Much more simple theory :
Humanity's understanding will progress and we will eventually get noticed by [Insert Cosmic Horror's true name]. The speed at which we accomplish said progress is up to us.

The moment you get noticed by [Insert Cosmic Horror's true name], it stomps you the way we do with flies on windows : they never did anything to us but their presence is disturbing + it comforts our idea that we are all-mighty and unchallengeable by bugs. This basically means that, like a fly, you can't oppose [Insert Cosmic Horror's true name]. At most, you'll annoy it and it will annihilate you with a single thought.

Since understanding means risking to be notice by [Insert Cosmic Horror's true name] and since we will never survive long enough to reach a high enough understanding of [Insert Cosmic Horror's true name] to oppose it, we better not understand at all, as being ignorant means we aren't notice and increase slightly our chances of survival while a certain level of understanding means instant annihilation.

Flies, if we don't annihilate them before, will eventually learn to make fire. But the very moment they do, we'll crush them, as we don't like competition and the difficulty of the task isn't a real toll on our own resources. In the mean time, they are funny to splat and can be left flying around...

[Stormthorn]

Some of the time, this stuff hits me hard enough that I stay down for a good... Call it 2 months on the outside. I think that's the record, before I started fighting back again (which knocked me back on my backside, but I got up in about 2 weeks the next time).

Thats the problem right their. Your some sort of optomistic "im going to keep going" person.
You see the big horror and say "Its not SO big."

Lovecraft writes from a much more "nothing you do matters so you might as well just curl up and get eaten by cultists" sort of view.
I mean, he watched family members waste away and die of incurable disease and in fact writes about that sort of thing a lot seems to suggest it had an effect on him.

If he were a more can-do sorta person his stories would probably have space marines fighting the abominations and whatnot.

[Texas_Ben]

Why hasn't anyone pointed out how incredibly arrogant this statement is..... like you were joking right.

I mean I've only won the Nobel prize 4 times in a row, and currently researching how to fold space to achieve faster than light travel but I'm not sure I can engage in a social interactions without pointing out what a genius I am......

It was a joke right?
I know that I and at least 2 others have commented on it. I didn't want to make a thing of it though, because if I came in all derailing the thread over OP's e-peen waving, it would probably get locked.

[Johel]

If he were a more can-do sorta person his stories would probably have space marines fighting the abominations and whatnot.

Probably the reason why WH40K is much more popular among youth than Lovecraft stories : most of us are optimists or at least want to be.
We want to seek solutions even if the situation seems hopeless, since going down in a crowning moment of awesome is preferable than dying like a worm, the head full of angsty defeatism.

I mean... you end up dead both ways but at least, you had a bit of fun with option 1, even if you were scared as hell. And IF you succeed (big if...), then all the best !!
The emo kids that just went with option 2 are either proved wrong (and you gotta get laid with the chick...) or they were right but are dead and so are you so... you don't care. :smalltongue:

[Samb]

I know that I and at least 2 others have commented on it. I didn't want to make a thing of it though, because if I came in all derailing the thread over OP's e-peen waving, it would probably get locked.

So i'm not the only one that has found many posts here to be.... vapid and self-promoting?

That explains a lot of why they found Lovecraft to be boring.

I find Lovecraft's stories to be scary on an conscious basis, rather than a visceral level. I think Lovecraft did a good job describing the horror that his characters experienced.

[Stormthorn]

So i'm not the only one that has found many posts here to be.... vapid and self-promoting?

That explains a lot of why they found Lovecraft to be boring.

I find Lovecraft's stories to be scary on an conscious basis, rather than a visceral level. I think Lovecraft did a good job describing the horror that his characters experienced.

I agree. On all three points, which is rare. I tend to do more of the "argueing" thing and less of the "agreeing" thing.

[Moose Fisher]

There is more to Lovecraft than the Cthulhu Mythos, in fact, I consider them two separate things.

The Cthulhu Mythos is the loosely connected collection of cosmic horror stories. The universe is a large and old place, and human kind is small and young. We are safe in our ignorance, for delving into the dark secrets of the earth and cosmos exposes us to the dangers within it. Some things are indescribable because humanity has no proper words to describe it, it may even be functioning on universal laws we are unaware of. We may try to shine a light into the eye of the beast, but the consequences are likely to be dire.

Lovecraft may have started the Cthulhu Mythos, but I believe it is an extension of his work. Lovecraft's themes are that which matches his antiquarian quirks and fear of outside influences.

Lovecraft respects history and tradition, and it takes form in both positive and negative lights. Many of Lovecraft's characters have a career or hobby in historical fields, such as architecture or geology. Modernization and foreign influences are often portrayed as defilers of the older generation's works. Strangely, many of the horrors of Lovecraft's fiction come from the older times, existing in the background and subverting humanity. There are things that are best left not known, to be left to lie under the carpet, something Lovecraftian characters unfortunately uncover.

Xenophobia was common during Lovecraft's time, the intruding 'lesser people' degrading the great works of the native civilization. The incoming outsiders change the invade society, creating a horrifying cross that becomes a mockery of the original halves. Corruption is often inherited from an ancient and alien ancestor, and its discovery serves as the major shock to Lovecraftian characters.


There is more to Lovecraft than tentacles and horrors from outer space. There is a large section of Lovecraft's work that has little reference to Cthulhu and the other cosmic entities we've come to know him by. While there is intersection between the themes of Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos, the two are not one and the same.



Perhaps the OP should be asking, why is the Cthulhu Mythos scary?

[AstralFire]

So i'm not the only one that has found many posts here to be.... vapid and self-promoting?

That explains a lot of why they found Lovecraft to be boring.

I find Lovecraft's stories to be scary on an conscious basis, rather than a visceral level. I think Lovecraft did a good job describing the horror that his characters experienced.

The person you're charging with being 'vapid', the only person who's done any (joking) self-promotion, likes Lovecraft. He doesn't find it scary, though. Now, I've said that I wasn't interested in Lovecraft at all, but the most I've done is be snarky; I don't consider myself terribly intelligent in most regards, and I certainly cannot comprehend spatial dimensions beyond the familiar three.


Perhaps the OP should be asking, why is the Cthulhu Mythos scary?

This is what he's asking.

[Moose Fisher]

This is what he's asking.

Again, there is a difference. I find the examples of inbreeding/hybridization in stories like "The Lurking Fear" and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" to be a lot more disturbing.

[Primal Fury]

I really don't think talking about the OP's apparent arrogance is all that derailing. If all these eldritch horrors and and whatnot DID exist, don't you think there'd be those few people who'd go "Eldritch horrors beyond our understanding? Pbth. :smalltongue: Nothing is beyond my understanding. Just let me take a crack at this so-called hor- AAAAAAAGHAGHAGHAGAHGAAAAAAAAAAAGHAGHAGAHGAHAHGG!!! MAKE IT STOP!!!PLEASEMAKE ITSTOP!!!!" And there also would be much baby-eating thereafter.

[golentan]

Eh, ants kill people too, and weigh more than we do. If we're looking at total effect on the universe, humans are more successful. If on the other hand, we look at number of individuals, or biomass, or number of civilizations, or square miles of inhabited territory, or any of a number of factors ants are triumphant. The goal isn't to rule, it's to pose enough of a threat that we can claim our own territory as long as we stay out of the whatever's house. It's about building a human world where people have what they want and some security for keeping it.

And in the worst case, it's about not giving up. It's about at least making a point to your own satisfaction. If there's no cosmic significance, then we define our own victory conditions.

The tangential "IQ" conversation is, in my opinion, hurtful. I'm not going to restore my rant from a few pages back on this subject, as it was unnecessarily hostile. I have spoilered what I feel is a more reasonable response, which I hope will be read and put an end to some of the comments.

I don't have a high opinion of myself, I view myself as a two trick pony who fails to meet minimum requirements on a number of other categories. I know myself to have a demonstrable talent for these, and am willing to take at face value such claims from others in the absence of hideous contradictory evidence or clearly mocking claims. I don't conflate genius level IQ with true genius, which is why I specified it as such. I think that a demonstrable talent for rational thought (which is all that IQ means) and a knack for dimensional visualization is an applicable talent for bringing up in a discussion of Lovecraft. Which is why I mentioned roughly the level without attempting to brag, as an example of why I don't find the idea of bizarre angles terrifying and why I'd at least like to try applying rational principles to the basic material of the setting.

I do not believe IQ (including "Genius Level," which is a benchmark within a number of tests) correlates to true genius, and I don't believe it makes me or anyone else superior to those who scored lower on the tests. I was not attempting to brag, and did not view similar follow up posts as bragging. If you want supporting evidence that this is in fact my view of the world, please note I don't think that any humans are stronger or smarter than the other things in the books. I do think that we can raise ourselves to the point that en mass we can thrive in the world, and understand at least enough to gain practical benefits.

I find the number of comments on the subject implying egotism and elitism uncomfortable. But I am more upset by the number of angry, mocking comments, and am personally hurt by those who attempt to take mistakes and errors make the person who did the original post look foolish or stupid. My original rant on the subject a few pages back was too aggressive and similarly mocking and insulting because of the degree to which the small number of comments hurt me. If this is because people find the comments insulting in a similar way, I will go back and scrub the original comments from my post to prevent further hurtful comments or digressions from the topic at hand, which should be the works themselves and their emotional impact.

But I have a question. If someone had commented in another subject that they could bench around 225 lbs; how many people would have commented on the size of their egos? How many people would have mockingly suggested that they could shotput a blue whale?

[Samb]

The person you're charging with being 'vapid', the only person who's done any (joking) self-promotion, likes Lovecraft. He doesn't find it scary, though.



This is what he's asking.

Hey if I encountered a real eldritch cosmic horror I'd piss my pants too..... but I haven't. Pretty sure its like falling in love or becoming a parent; gotta experience it to really know what it like.

I don't think most people find Lovecraft scary however, myself included. I've read most of his works and enjoyed them immensely but I'd have to say his prose could use a bit of polish.

Poe on the other hand can still bring chills to my spine.

[Moose Fisher]

It's ok golentan, just ignore the IQ comments and work on the real meat of the issue.


The Cthulhu Mythos are certainly outdated to a degree. I wonder what the modern equivalent would be...

[Texas_Ben]

But I have a question. If someone had commented in another subject that they could bench around 225 lbs; how many people would have commented on the size of their egos? How many people would have mockingly suggested that they could shotput a blue whale?
You're getting ripped on (and rightfully so) because you went out of your way to emphasize your own superior intellect, when it would have been just as easy to make your point without a big 'look at me, I'm SMART ON THE INTERNET'. It would be just as easy for you to say "I'm a fairly intelligent individual, math and physics don't intimidate me, let me have a crack at it", but instead we get the hugely immodest, internet tough-guy "I am a genius and will surely outwit these eldritch abominations with my keen mind which is superior to that of the most of men".

See the disparity? And I have never seen anyone ever make a comment about how much they can bench on the internet without at least 3 people snarking on them heavily.

[AstralFire]

Texas, you'd have a stronger point if he'd raised this within the frame of the debate rather than using this to open the debate - it was obviously a (somewhat unsuccessful) attempt to establish credibility that he understands the closest thing the real world has to what Cthonic pop fiction has.

The argument has gone several pages without him really bringing that up in anywhere near as grand a manner; personally, bringing it up now just seems largely unproductive.

[Texas_Ben]

Texas, you'd have a stronger point if he'd raised this within the frame of the debate rather than using this to open the debate - it was obviously a (somewhat unsuccessful) attempt to establish credibility that he understands the closest thing the real world has to what Cthonic pop fiction has.
He asked why he's been getting negative comments from it, I answered.

[AstralFire]

He asked why he's been getting negative comments from it, I answered.

You also stated that it was 'rightful', and have indicated in several posts an urge to bring it up more and earlier. I don't think that's very helpful to anyone at this stage of this thread.

[Samb]

You also stated that it was 'rightful', and have indicated in several posts an urge to bring it up more and earlier. I don't think that's very helpful to anyone at this stage of this thread.

You know what's unproductive? Talking about how unproductive other people are!!!!

BOO YEAH!

[Nerd-o-rama]

This thread is meant to be helpful? Looks to me like it's just about a series of books not being to someone's taste (or at least a facet of those books meant to provoke a particular emotional response not doing so with him), and people on all sides of the argument getting super-defensive about it.

Like every thread in Media Discussion that isn't just opened with the premise of "say whatever you like about Show X".

[AstralFire]

Well, I do think we're past the point of gleaning anything else useful from this discussion, but we can at least pretend.

I liked my Dark Knight complaint thread. Aside from me getting a little snappy at you because I misread your intent, which I think we made up over, everyone had a nice pleasant talk out about it, and then the thread died at two pages once we'd exhausted all avenues of interesting discussion.

[Inhuman Bot]

Having read to page 3, I may have been beaten to this, but..

You know, the OPs ideas make me think of Gurren Lagaan.

Defeating the eldritch horrors of the universe with FIGHTING SPIRIT!

[Samb]

Anyone see that Call of Cthulu black and white movie? Just saw it over the weekend and I must say it was quite faithful. A must see for all Lovecraft lovers.

[Brewdude]

(As a side note...isn't bragging about one's IQ and sixth-dimensional-viewing capabilities in a forum populated almost solely by "nerds" and fans of "nerddom" akin to public, mental masturbation? Maybe that's just me too that feels a bit sickened by it.)

No, it's more like bragging about your boot camp exploits to a bunch of war vets.

[Worira]

You're getting ripped on (and rightfully so) because you went out of your way to emphasize your own superior intellect, when it would have been just as easy to make your point without a big 'look at me, I'm SMART ON THE INTERNET'. It would be just as easy for you to say "I'm a fairly intelligent individual, math and physics don't intimidate me, let me have a crack at it", but instead we get the hugely immodest, internet tough-guy "I am a genius and will surely outwit these eldritch abominations with my keen mind which is superior to that of the most of men".

See the disparity? And I have never seen anyone ever make a comment about how much they can bench on the internet without at least 3 people snarking on them heavily.

I do indeed see the disparity between these two statements that he did not make.

[Stormthorn]

But I have a question. If someone had commented in another subject that they could bench around 225 lbs; how many people would have commented on the size of their egos?

Me. Why do you even bother to find out your IQ or bench limit?

Now i wouldnt be too bothered unless he was using his bench press record as an excuse to say he could take Godzilla.

Which is essentialy what you were doing.
Points 1,2,3,4,5,6,11, and 13 have a very strong vibe of "My spartan-sized balls and massive intellect will save the day and thus I need not fear!"

I dont find Lovecraft very scary, with only a few exceptions. But your post was so self-promoting and overblown that I couldnt let it pass without comment.

This is the internet. If you try and put yourself on a pedestal be prepared for hundreds of people wearing Guy Fawkes maskes to try and push you off.
You could have just said "I dont find this very scary or bleak."

[AstralFire]

And to you I repeat, what point does this serve? We're all fairly intelligent people here, I think the last few people posting have sent the point that he came off less adroitly than he intended.

Let it drop. No one likes getting leapt on.

[Stormthorn]

And to you I repeat, what point does this serve? We're all fairly intelligent people here, I think the last few people posting have sent the point that he came off less adroitly than he intended.

Let it drop. No one likes getting leapt on.

Really depends upon who's leaping and why.

Once i was lept on by a girl wearing a cat collar....
It wasnt so bad.

The reason it cant be let drop is because so much of the initial post has this attidude, and it is now part of the thread.
His argument was "im awesome, this is why im not scared."
The common argument for why Lovecraft is scary is "We are worms compared to them."

It is a difficult thing to say "You are awesome so you are not scared, but we are all worms so we are."
Thus we must first deflate his ego ("Trust us, your really a worm too") to avoid taking damage to our more reasonable ego's and also avoid inflating his more.

[AstralFire]

No, his argument is more along the lines of, "I deal with trying to comprehend the incomprehensible all the time, and the culture that spawns this point of view is endemic to modern society. Why do people regard it as horror?"

It is not a matter of one group being better than the other, and I will smack anyone on either side who says so. It is a matter of a fundamental difference in basic paradigms, and both sides are talking at each other because they're trying to grasp why these people have such different paradigms.

[kopout]

As I understand it thats a part of the mythos right their incomprehensibility caused by alien mindsets. Thats not really so scary, not necessarily.

***disclaimer***
I have never read any Lovecraft, all my knowledge of it is hearsay.

[Stormthorn]

No, his argument is more along the lines of, "I deal with trying to comprehend the incomprehensible all the time, and the culture that spawns this point of view is endemic to modern society. Why do people regard it as horror?"

It is not a matter of one group being better than the other, and I will smack anyone on either side who says so. It is a matter of a fundamental difference in basic paradigms, and both sides are talking at each other because they're trying to grasp why these people have such different paradigms.

Your just defending him because you talk smart like he does. :smallannoyed:
I spend hours upon hours every week on a college campus and i hear more flowery language here than from my professors.
I dont even know what paradigm means. Is it something like a worldview or a schema?

If it is then i supose your comment makes some sense, but i also think at the very least the OP feels his worldview is superior.
Anyone who even takes an IQ test is either insecure or egotistical.

[AstralFire]

Your just defending him because you talk smart like he does. :smallannoyed:
I spend hours upon hours every week on a college campus and i hear more flowery language here than from my professors.
I dont even know what paradigm means. Is it something like a worldview or a schema?

...No, I'm defending him because I think he has a valid point that's somewhat obscured by his approach at times. I do that sort of thing regularly; recall on the other thread I just posted some defenses for the vegans and vegetarians. I was doing that while eating a hamburger.

Worldview would work here. It's not like paradigm's a harder word than schema or anything, though.


If it is then i supose your comment makes some sense, but i also think at the very least the OP feels his worldview is superior.
Anyone who even takes an IQ test is either insecure or egotistical.

There are various reasons to take IQ tests (not the least of which is simple curiosity), and on top of it, he's already denounced them. And even if someone took an IQ test to soothe their ego, it wouldn't mean they still have the same emotional issues sometime later. People do change.

I wouldn't be surprised if, at some level, he thought his worldview was superior. Most of us do. But he brought up his level of intelligence primarily to set the stage for an opening post, and not really used it much as a point of rebuttal. I don't think you're ascribing emotions to him fairly.

[Jade_Tarem]

Your just defending him because you talk smart like he does. :smallannoyed:
I spend hours upon hours every week on a college campus and i hear more flowery language here than from my professors.

Heaven forbid we stretch your vocabulary a bit. If people are using words you don't know, then this is a golden opportunity to learn!

And if these precocious people are assailing you with superfluously circumlocutious and invidious aspersions in a perniciously effervescent manner, you could just, you know, vector to the egress.



I find your inductive hypothesis...disturbing.
Just because something passes one benchmark in no way implies that it can pass any benchmark.

Indeed! But... that wasn't what I was after. All of my stuff you just quoted? It's not valid. That is to say, it's not necessarily true - I don't have to be right.

But everything I posted before is satisfiable - it can be true. The general consensus is, however, that it isn't and can't be true in Lovecraft's works. And that's where the problem is. It would appear that some of the limits placed upon mankind in these works are assumed to be true when they don't have to be.



This displays a very, very poor understanding of limits.

You claim that because human progress, power, understanding and ability is always increasing, it is unbounded- that is, given sufficient time it will exceed any finite measure. Even if one grants your hypothesis, the conclusion in no way follows. There are a lot of things that are always increasing and yet bounded. The sum of the reciprocal squares of the natural numbers is one example- it's always increasing but it converges to a real number. Two, if I recall correctly.

This (the crossed out part) displays a very, very poor understanding of synonyms.

Some people get irritated when you tell them that their argument falls into a formal logical fallacy, but you really are equivocating here. The limits that you use to "prove" me wrong are purely mathematical in nature and only distantly related to what I was talking about.

As for the rest, I never once made the claim that because humans make progress, such will always be the case. I make the claim that they can, but the setting explicitly requires you to believe that they can't, and that nothing matters.


Just because humans have progressed, and will continue to progress cannot be used as proof, or even a particularly good argument, that we will obtain infinite power or understanding, or even be able to understand any particular phenomina.

Which is once again not what I said. I didn't say humans would one day be omnipotent, but any quantity of power less than infinity is possible to understand, and hypothetically, to achieve. All this is really secondary, though, to my puzzlement over what the deal is with insignificance being terrifying.

I suppose what I'm getting at is that there's no room in the Cosmic Horror scare for horror. The constant emphasis on just how incredibly ridiculoulsy don't-even-bother powerful they are makes them a credible threat to my safety, I get that. I'm even willing to acknowledge that at any moment, Jigglypuff the Magnificent will fart and Earth will be no more, but what I don't get is why this is more terrifying than, say, any number of things we know can kill us (that we can't possibly do anything about) like the Heat Death of the Universe or a badass enough Ebola mutation. The common answer is "because it's eeeeeeevil even though these things are beyond good and evil but it's uncaring so it's evil and you should give up even though they're not really doing anything right now and probably won't for a thousand generations."


EDIT: Also, I fail to find how the idea of "there is a god, and he doesn't care" requires that you arrange your faith around it to find it scary. I don't believe in werewolves and I'm pretty sure a good werewolf story would unsettle me.

Ok. I'll buy that. I still don't find them mind-numbingly scary, though. See above.

[Stormthorn]

Heaven forbid we stretch your vocabulary a bit. If people are using words you don't know, then this is a golden opportunity to learn!

And if these precocious people are assailing you with superfluously circumlocutious and invidious aspersions in a perniciously effervescent manner, you could just, you know, vector to the egress.

Which is why i asked what the word i didnt know ment.

I also dont know what circumlocutious means, although i got all the others.


Worldview would work here. It's not like paradigm's a harder word than schema or anything, though.

Well, im a psych student. I hear "schema" used all the time. I heard "paradigm" once in a buisness class on how to identify and avoid overuse of buzzwords.


but what I don't get is why this is more terrifying than, say, any number of things we know can kill us (that we can't possibly do anything about) like the Heat Death of the Universe or a badass enough Ebola mutation.
I dont find it scarier than those. On the whole i find Lovecraft just as scary as the heat death of the universe. When im reading it im not scared. When im lying at night pondering my place in the cosmos, i am. By both of those.

Usualy. The Colour Out of Space and a few others invoke an irrational level of fear in me when compared to most his works.

[Jade_Tarem]

Which is why i asked what the word i didnt know ment.

I also dont know what circumlocutious means, although i got all the others.

Well, good for you, then. I mean that.

Circumlocutious means "roundabout and unnecessarily wordy," and happens to be a wonderful word to stick into a circumlocutious sentence.

That said, "You're defending him because you talk smart like he does" is probably one of the most ridiculous things on this thread. I honestly thought you were joking until I saw the :smallannoyed:.


Well, im a psych student. I hear "schema" used all the time. I heard "paradigm" once in a buisness class on how to identify and avoid overuse of buzzwords.

In this case, it's not a buzzword, although I guess you know that already.

[chiasaur11]

Well, good for you, then. I mean that.

Circumlocutious means "roundabout and unnecessarily wordy," and happens to be a wonderful word to stick into a circumlocutious sentence.


Great. Now I'm hearing those sentences in the voice of PBS children's series protagonist Word Girl.

I hope you're happy.

[Worira]

Me. Why do you even bother to find out your IQ or bench limit?

So that you don't break your ribs, but instead maximize your physical gains?

PS: I prefer "sesquipedalian loquaciousness".

[Caewil]

Because the rest of this page sucks,

OMG IT'S ASTRALFIRE!

Also strom, don't ask us if you don't know what a word means. Ask google. If your professor has an aversion to polysyllables, that's hardly our fault. If you personally dislike our manner of speech, vector to the egress.

Note for psych students here: the term "our" means that I am defining an in-group of loquacious people from which Strom is excluded. Other posters have done this before, I'm simply making it explicit. Unless he can find a way to associate with the in-group or gain their sympathy, the default attitude toward his posts will be aggression and/or distain as any argument against one member will likely be perceived as an attack upon the entire group. Thus arguing from his current position is an inefficient use of time and energy.

PS. I'm going to try using the phrase "vector to the egress" as often as possible in conversation from now on.

[golentan]

Okay, I think I'm done here. On the main topic there hasn't been new input for a couple pages, and I think I've got a grasp on the points made. Thanks for the input, I know I argued with a lot of it but that's a big part of how I process (I argued with my math teacher for a solid 2 hours without giving ground before I finally just said "Cool, I get it and it does seem a perfect proof."), and I really appreciate people taking the time to respond. I'm going to spend a couple days pondering, and maybe come around now. I know my paradigms :smallwink: aren't applicable in generality anyway, and always have to be tempered by circumstance. I mostly use the one I've got because it's the only one that hasn't tried to kill me yet. :smallbiggrin:

To what has evidently derailed the thread, I'm sorry that my peace offering didn't appeal to you. But I still would like to ask you in future cases (no matter who it involves) to consider whether mocking another person is an appropriate corrective measure.

Night all.

[Jan Mattys]

Probably the reason why WH40K is much more popular among youth than Lovecraft stories : most of us are optimists or at least want to be.
We want to seek solutions even if the situation seems hopeless, since going down in a crowning moment of awesome is preferable than dying like a worm, the head full of angsty defeatism.

That's two totally different takes on the problem.

The first is Lovecraftian horror.
The second is Lord of the Rings epic fantasy.

[Avilan the Grey]

That's two totally different takes on the problem.

The first is Lovecraftian horror.
The second is Lord of the Rings epic fantasy.

Well Lovecraft had a totally opposite view compared to Robert E Howard, for example, who's idea was "any guy with a will of steel and a broadsword can kill any kind of cosmic horror".

...Which to me is far better reading.

[Axolotl]

Wow. A lot of people in this thread don't understand Lovecraft at all.

Lovecraft isn't scary cause of the whole "insignificant mote of dust" idea (though that certainly has the potential of really scary horror). The scary part of Lovecraft is the monsters that jump out of the shadows and eat your face, which is the scary part of most horror. Most of his stories are about monsters living underground, evil artifacts tormenting people or demonic cults.

In short Lovecraft is scary for the same reason MR James is scary or Slasher films are scary, he portrays a world where a single moment of greed, curiosity or simple trust can get you horribly killed.

[Johel]

Since the thread is going down to personal troll anyway...


Because the rest of this page sucks,

OMG IT'S ASTRALFIRE!

Also strom, don't ask us if you don't know what a word means. Ask google. If your professor has an aversion to polysyllables, that's hardly our fault. If you personally dislike our manner of speech, vector to the egress.

Professor Wikipedia (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaADQTeZRCY)

[Jan Mattys]

Since the thread is going down to personal troll anyway...

You're not helping in keeping it in track. Just go away.

[Avilan the Grey]

Wow. A lot of people in this thread don't understand Lovecraft at all.

Lovecraft isn't scary cause of the whole "insignificant mote of dust" idea (though that certainly has the potential of really scary horror). The scary part of Lovecraft is the monsters that jump out of the shadows and eat your face, which is the scary part of most horror. Most of his stories are about monsters living underground, evil artifacts tormenting people or demonic cults.

In short Lovecraft is scary for the same reason MR James is scary or Slasher films are scary, he portrays a world where a single moment of greed, curiosity or simple trust can get you horribly killed.

I disagree with this. The only thing that makes Lovecraft unique is his ideas about the insignificant humanity etc. If you remove that it would just be B- or C-movie horror, if that. Just like slasher films (which you watch for the partial nudity and the humor (intended or otherwise)).

[Nerd-o-rama]

Well, I do think we're past the point of gleaning anything else useful from this discussion, but we can at least pretend.

I liked my Dark Knight complaint thread. Aside from me getting a little snappy at you because I misread your intent, which I think we made up over, everyone had a nice pleasant talk out about it, and then the thread died at two pages once we'd exhausted all avenues of interesting discussion.Yeah, that was okay.

And like golentan, I'm done here. I mean, I don't even like these damn books, I just like the concept.

One more thing though: monsters that jump out of the shadows and eat your face are not scary, ever. They're at best startling.

[Texas_Ben]

One more thing though: monsters that jump out of the shadows and eat your face are not scary, ever. They're at best startling.
I'm pretty sure monsters that jump out of the shadows and eat your face are terrifying if you're actually there. Since you said "ever", I think it's a valid point.

[Axolotl]

I disagree with this. The only thing that makes Lovecraft unique is his ideas about the insignificant humanity etc. If you remove that it would just be B- or C-movie horror, if that. Just like slasher films (which you watch for the partial nudity and the humor (intended or otherwise)).Yes that's what makes it unique, but it's not what makes it scary. They set the tone and feel but not the actual scary part itself. Like the slasher example, the nudity/humor is needed for the right tone but the scary part is the guy with the knives stabbing people.


One more thing though: monsters that jump out of the shadows and eat your face are not scary, ever. They're at best startling. Really? I disagree and I think that's a fairly minority opinion.

[Avilan the Grey]

Yes that's what makes it unique, but it's not what makes it scary. They set the tone and feel but not the actual scary part itself. Like the slasher example, the nudity/humor is needed for the right tone but the scary part is the guy with the knives stabbing people.

I don't get scared by that. I might get grossed out, but that is not the same emotion as fear (It is one of my nits I like to pick with Fear Factor too: eating rotten eggs is not scary, it's disgusting).


Really? I disagree and I think that's a fairly minority opinion.

I do get scared when this happens when I am playing a first person game sometimes, but that is a whole different level of immersion.

[Axolotl]

I don't get scared by that. I might get grossed out, but that is not the same emotion as fear (It is one of my nits I like to pick with Fear Factor too: eating rotten eggs is not scary, it's disgusting).So you wouldn't classify Slasher films as scary then? What do you consider scary?


I do get scared when this happens when I am playing a first person game sometimes, but that is a whole different level of immersion.
Yes but it's shown to work in films as well, take Alien for example widely considered a scary film, it's horror is mainly derived from a monster jumping out and killing people and it's far from the only example.

[Nerd-o-rama]

Really? I disagree and I think that's a fairly minority opinion.I know it is, otherwise the modern "horror", and I use that term very loosely, genre wouldn't exist. Nonetheless, it's the opinion I hold. There's only so much emotional investment I can put into someone jumping out at me and going "boo!"

Plus, that works better on film than in text anyway.

[Avilan the Grey]

So you wouldn't classify Slasher films as scary then? What do you consider scary?


When I was a kid I had nightmares about Where the Wild Things are and Not Now, Bernard.

It was a long time since I was really scared by a movie: Alien, the first time I saw that.
The Others was unsettling, though I guessed the twist before it came.
The Ginger Snaps trilogy was actually quite freaky.

[WalkingTarget]

Yes but it's shown to work in films as well, take Alien for example widely considered a scary film, it's horror is mainly derived from a monster jumping out and killing people and it's far from the only example.

For me, the horror is in the anticipation of the monster jumping out and killing people. The suspense is the fun part and is why Alien (and Lovecraft, frankly) works for me but a lot of recent "scary" movies don't. Cheap thrills from a Boo! perspective are boring; it's all in the mood that the author/director/whatever sets.

[The Big Dice]

For me, the horror is in the anticipation of the monster jumping out and killing people. The suspense is the fun part and is why Alien (and Lovecraft, frankly) works for me but a lot of recent "scary" movies don't. Cheap thrills from a Boo! perspective are boring; it's all in the mood that the author/director/whatever sets.

I have to agree here. Once you've seen a couple of slasher movies, they aren't scary anymore, they're actually pretty formulaic. Hence Scream making fun of the genre. Which is a very postmodern, filled with irony kind of thing, especially as Wes Craven helped create the genre in the first place.

But the knife wielding stalker of the slasher movie can be beaten. They can be killed, arrested, rehabilitated or whatever, but it almost always comes down to the college girl that didn't sleep with anyone during the movie gets out alive. And after a series of movies that rapidly diminish in quality, the psycho finally gets beaten once and for all.

But Cosmic Horror doesn't follow the same rules as stalk and slash gross outs.

Stephen King once wrote an essay in which he separates horror into three distinct sub categories. The most basic is the gross out, the second is the scare. These two are the cornerstone of the slasher pic. The third is terror. The build up of anticipation that something bad is going to happen. Or the sense that what you're facing simply can't be stopped or defeated. And Cosmic Horror gets a lot of mileage out of the last category.

Cosmic Horrors can't be beaten, they are too big, too powerful and too different. At best they can be driven back and kept out of our frame of reference or their worshippers can be stopped. And that's just the Great Old Ones, beings so ancient they were billions of years old when our planet formed out of cosmic debris. The Elder and Outer Gods are even weirder.

The fundamental assumption behind the Mythos, which goes way beyond Lovecraft, is that there are things out there that human beings are not equipped to deal with. Physically, psychologically and intellectually were are simply not capable of comprehending these entities. And when we are confronted by them, our fundamental conceptions of what is real and what can not exist aren't just challenged, they are smashed on the uncaring stones of what the person viewing the event now realises is the truth beyond their ingrained perceptions. A fundamental shift from what the character has been taught, has experienced in his life and is programmed by biology to accept as real takes place. And because of this unbearable moment, the character's mind snaps and for them, nothing is ever the same again.

But like any other form of fantasy media, you have to make the initial suspension of disbelief, willingly accept the conventions of the genre. Otherwise it's just B-movie monsters.

And really, are the conventions of the Cosmic Horror genre any harder to accpet than those of the Tolkien-derived fantasy that gave rise to D&D?

[GolemsVoice]

"Knowing what I know, and believing what I believe, I cannot be still any longer. The world may pour ridicule on my words, or simply ignore them, but I finally have to tell. When I first opened that old, musty tome containing the words of on Lovecraft, I felt a strange, necromantic whisper speak to me, from out of the depths of the 30s, untold aeons before my time, and I heard the murmur of strange gods, and beings that are greater than any man...."

I'm not sure how much good will come from what I am about to say, but I simply LOVE Lovecraft, and therefore, can hardly remain silent in such a heated, though somewhat cooled, debate.

I sometimes wonder how people can fail to discriminate between what they think, and what a setting offers. Take the OP's question: Is Lovecraft scary. First of all, that is a question that only he can answer to himself. If he doesn't find HPL scary, and seeing his worldview, I can see why he doesn't, that is totally alright. Lovecraft was surely no writer for everyone, indeed, he seldom expected his stories to be read by more than a few of his collegues and friends, and submitted them to various magazines only out of necessity. THus, his stories are almost 100% coloured by what he feared and believed, so anyone who does not fear the same could rightfully claim that he doesn't "get" Lovecraft. As I said, the man is very special in both character and writing.

BUT, and here comes the main point of my argument: all the points that the OP made are made from the position of one who lives in the real world, is intelligent and knowledgable about the ways of the world, and accustomed to the findings of modern science.
And therefore, he is abolutely NOT what Lovecraft's protagonists and world are. In his world (and yes, by writing ficitonal stories in "the real world", Lovecraft creates a parallel universe, where we need not be introduced, because it resembles our world in every detail, but is coloured by Lovecraft's perceptions of what the world looks like.) all the things that the OP claimed he would do, and most of them are quite sensible, even though the mocking tone you use doesn't lend itself well to a serious argument, in my view, as it makes the whole thing look like you just want to make a mockery out of Lovecraft, not discuss, WOULD NOT WORK, because Lovecraft writes it this way, and that is where his world differs from the real world, where his characters are not real humans, but just that, characters in a story. And that "makes" Lovecraft for me. If I read Lovecraft, I leave aside what I believe is true about man and the universe, and enter Lovecraft's world. In his world, mankind is doomed, there are horrors that just CAN'T, and I'm really emphasizing this, CAN'T be understood, there are gods that are truly alien, and monsters so strange that they operate on a totally different mindset. Humanity may kick and scream, but it won't help. Sure, they may sink Cthulhu for another year, or thousand years. Sure, they might drive the Deep Ones out of Innsmouth, but they will never manage to even get near the real threats. So maybe you don't become unstrung when you witness whatever goes on in quantum science, I seriously hope you don't, but, hey, you are not the right character for Lovecraft, and I wouldn't want to read a Lovecraft story with you as a protagonist. His writing style, and the way his characters work, or fail to work, all that what makes his "world" is what I have in the back of my mind when I read his fiction or DM Call of Cthulhu. I get into it for the duration of the game, or the novel, and try to imagine what it must feel like to have the whole truth fall down on you, and not be able to handle even a quarter of it. That doesn't mean I would be scared by something like this in real life. My players, very good one, I must say, understand that, and their characters act in a way they themselves might not really feel. But for the moment of reading, or playing, or DMing, I can pretend that this all is real, and just enjoy the horror thet this brilliant, but sad man has put to paper. I hope I ahve made myself clear, it's difficult to express, really.

[Johel]

I do get scared when this happens when I am playing a first person game sometimes, but that is a whole different level of immersion.

Got that friend who, while being quite massive himself, nearly ruined one of my keyboard playing Half life because of such thing.

The reason ? He had been attacked by a crab-like face-hugger.
The guy was fine with monsters that, if you had to face them IRL, would make you **** your pants. But against the jumping crawlers in the ventilation tunnels, he went berserk, screaming like a little girl, seizing the keyboard and nearly throwing it at the screen.

Fear isn't rationnal (well, not 100% rationnal). It comes from the hope that you can overcome an obstacle but risk to be stripe of something important (health, freedom, life, friends, reputation, wealth, sanity...) if you try to overcome it.

A jumping crab can scare the **** out of you, since you have good chances to get out of it alive and unharmed. But you have to think fast and you can't afford to make a mistake. The indecision, the perceived limited time, the numerous choices of action and the consequences of a bad decision... all this contribute to make you go "-OH MY GOD !! NOOOOOOOOOOOOO".

The large monster with laser beams who's looking at you right now ? You'll probably die anyway. Either you face it, screaming "Yippie Ya, motherf*****" and might live or you just die sobbing... So, less scary because there's nearly no hope and only one course of action to survive: to fight. No hope, no indecision, nearly no fear.

[Tyndmyr]

I'd agree...headcrabs in half life and facehuggers in aliens are two of the more scary monsters I can think of. Granted, they're less of an actual danger than...pretty much everything else in those settings, but they're unbelievably freaky.

[Avilan the Grey]

Got that friend who, while being quite massive himself, nearly ruined one of my keyboard playing Half life because of such thing.

The reason ? He had been attacked by a crab-like face-hugger.
The guy was fine with monsters that, if you had to face them IRL, would make you **** your pants. But against the jumping crawlers in the ventilation tunnels, he went berserk, screaming like a little girl, seizing the keyboard and nearly throwing it at the screen.

Fear isn't rationnal (well, not 100% rationnal).

Yes, the face crabs are the scariest things in the HL series, I think.
Personally right now it's the Ghouls in FO3 that really gets me. Even the weakest ones... Bethesda have really hit the nail with them, the sounds they make and the way they sound when they are running...

[Myrmex]

I think another element of Lovecraft that terrifies me, is that the Universe is incomprehensible and inscrutable. Humans just can't figure it out, and the closer we get to clarity, the further we descend into madness and death.

That's what's scary about Lovecraft.


Actually, I think the story itself is one of Lovecraft's most scary and disturbing.

Seriously, anyone saying Lovecraft isn't scary has to read "Rats in the Walls" and get back to us.

That one and Dreams in the Witch House were the two creepiest, IMO.

[Worira]

I think another element of Lovecraft that terrifies me, is that the Universe is incomprehensible and inscrutable. Humans just can't figure it out, and the closer we get to clarity, the further we descend into madness and death.

That's what's scary about Lovecraft.



That one and Dreams in the Witch House were the two creepiest, IMO.

Fortunately, thanks to the unified field theory, we know exactly how the universe works in the real world. Otherwise, we'd all go insane and die.

[Johel]

Fortunately, thanks to the unified field theory, we know exactly how the universe works in the real world. Otherwise, we'd all go insane and die.

This one ? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAGSeSTvwlc)
Wouldn't those who can formulate such theory become crazy from the sheer understanding about our universe ? I mean, it's something to say : "there are billions of stars" or "the Earth and Sun are distanced by 1 AU" but seriously, who can clearly understand what's that represent beyond numbers ?

I have problem to figure out exactly the distance that 10 km represent and numbers became abstract in my mind once we get past 100 units of something. So, to visualize distance and numbers in the millions and understand how all of that interact and influence each other... Sanity check because of too much Wisdom ?

[Nerd-o-rama]

Fortunately, thanks to the unified field theory, we know exactly how the universe works in the real world. Otherwise, we'd all go insane and die.So it kinda sucks that there isn't a Unified Field Theory that actually works and explains everything (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_field_theory).

Actually, a perfectly correct unified theory of everything would be downright depressing, because it would mean there's nothing more to learn. The Universe will always, or at least almost always, be a mystery, no matter how much of it we can explain, there's always more that we have to look at and reconsider. I find that amazing. Lovecraft (and many people) find it terrifying.

[warty goblin]

So it kinda sucks that there isn't a Unified Field Theory that actually works and explains everything (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_field_theory).

Actually, a perfectly correct unified theory of everything would be downright depressing, because it would mean there's nothing more to learn. The Universe will always, or at least almost always, be a mystery, no matter how much of it we can explain, there's always more that we have to look at and reconsider. I find that amazing. Lovecraft (and many people) find it terrifying.
Or put another way, seldom will you find a person as delighted to be proven wrong as a physicist.

[Myrmex]

So it kinda sucks that there isn't a Unified Field Theory that actually works and explains everything (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_field_theory).

Actually, a perfectly correct unified theory of everything would be downright depressing, because it would mean there's nothing more to learn. The Universe will always, or at least almost always, be a mystery, no matter how much of it we can explain, there's always more that we have to look at and reconsider. I find that amazing. Lovecraft (and many people) find it terrifying.

Lovecraft would tell you that you're wrong; the whole philosophy is of science is wrong. That's why he's scared.

[chiasaur11]

Lovecraft would tell you that you're wrong; the whole philosophy is of science is wrong. That's why he's scared.

And X-Com would tell you science and explosions can solve any Lovecraft style problem.

Admittedly, everyone involved dies, but SCIENCE still is victorious.

[Myrmex]

And X-Com would tell you science and explosions can solve any Lovecraft style problem.

Not if you ascribe to a Lovecraftian view of an inherently mysterious and unknowable cosmos. The mythos is, at its heart, mystical. Absolute faith in science also happens to be a bit mystic, though. Just a tad. :smallwink:

[Jade_Tarem]

Not if you ascribe to a Lovecraftian view of an inherently mysterious and unknowable cosmos. The mythos is, at its heart, mystical. Absolute faith in science also happens to be a bit mystic, though. Just a tad. :smallwink:

Or maybe a bit more. (http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20081205)

[Horatio@Bridge]

One element of Lovecraft's stories that I find scary, but which I don't think has really been addressed, is the issue of corruption. In many of the stories, such as The Rats in the Walls or the one about Innsmuth, the protaganist



becomes the monster he was fighting all along.



So one of the scary things about Lovecraft is that yes, you can fight, but if you do so you'll just be turning yourself into your own worst enemy. In the end, you'll just strengthen the bad guy instead of overcoming him. The very potential of mankind that the OP calls upon as our salvation is twisted against us. In fact, I think this is directly addressed by Lovecraft at one point when he gives us a glimpse of the future and we see that humanity eventually becomes one of the inhuman monsters.

It's kind of similar to the idea of zombie horror, or at least in the versions of zombies where they can infect you.

[Dervag]

Two things:
1. One point I was trying to made was that the monsters might be scary to some, but the idea, the reason Lovecraft wrote about this, is not scary anymore.
2. Why is that worse?Because inanimate matter is predictable, determinate, and in principle controllable. We can describe, analyze, and predict the behavior of inanimate matter, and that gives us defenses against it. Yes, for instance, an asteroid could flatten us... and yet we can actually DO something about asteroids, at least in theory. We could blow ourselves up with nuclear bombs... but we don't have to; it is not required, and if we're smart enough we won't do it.

Moreover, we are the only intelligence in the universe we know. And that places us in a special philosophical position, even if it doesn't guarantee that the universe will revolve around our whims.

But if you introduce Lovecraft-style superbeings that are transcendently more powerful and capable than we are... those reassuring factors vanish. We cannot engineer a way around them. And we are not in a special philosophical position; quite the opposite. To my way of thinking, that's worse than the status quo we have in real life.
_______


Now -how- we get the ability to pester Outer Deities, that's the rub, as our planet seems to be an endless succession of extraterrestrial wars, experiments, explorations, colonizations, strandings, and imprisonments.I think the implication is that the whole universe is like that; there's lots going on and constant interaction among the Mythos races; we just happen to see our little corner of it.


Not to mention there's Nyarly, who, for reasons that have never and may never be explained, just seems to hate us. That actually strikes me as a big plot-hole for one of the only entities that you can call a true 'villain' in the Mythos. Why does the Crawling Chaos hate humans? Why is he -obsessed- with us? I suppose the alternative isn't too great; sit next to Azathoth for all time, listen to him bubble and gurgle for eternity like a brain-damaged sloth. Still, though...Think about the meaning of "crawling chaos." There's an overtone of something that naturally tends to slowly overrun any existing order and dissolve it, like a creeping blanket of carnivorous insects.

It's not a question of malice. It's in Nyarlathotep's nature to kick over our orderly little corner, turning it into something that more closely befits the true nature of the blind idiot god that dominates the universe.
_______


We're complex enough, smart enough, and sensitive enough to detect these cosmic horrors and observe them, even if observing them is a bad idea, but for some reason are completely unable to learn from the experience, no matter how long we have and how far our culture or even our species evolves - understand that the humans of a trillion years from now may not have that much in common with us, especially if the process is aided artificially. I realize the whole point of cosmic horrors is that they don't make sense, but really, it's pretty wierd (and mighty convenient) how we're just powerful enough to see how powerful these beings are, but not strong enough to ever be able to do anything about it.If there was ever an us-descendant that could... it wouldn't be us anymore. It wouldn't see the universe in terms that make sense to us, it wouldn't care about what we think is important, and it probably wouldn't even function in terms we can now understand. It would be indistinguishable from all the other cosmic horrors, except for the little tag saying "Made on Terra" instead of "Made on Omricon Persei VIII."

I'm not sure the idea of having posthuman inhuman descendants that can play ball with cosmic horrors makes me feel better about the idea of cosmic horrors.
_________


Look, we've been over this. For all further advancements and achievements to have no meaning, the Old Ones, or whatever it is that's supposed to inspire terror (or horror), have to have infinite power. Not power and physical and mental structure beyond current human comprehension, infinite power. Any sum of power less than infinity won't do, since that would mean that there was a target point at which something humanity could do would have an effect.I don't think it's presented as that simple. I mean, take the Elder Things that built the civilization explored in At the Mountains of Madness. They are essentially just technologically advanced aliens; the disturbing bit is that they can make a credible case for being the rightful owners of our planet, with us being the squatters who built a shantytown on the ruins of their magnificent cities.

It is not inconceivable to me that in a Lovecraft setting we could develop that kind of technology- and Lovecraft himself classifies the Elder Things as "men" in the generic sense of intelligent human-like beings who can be broadly understood in human terms.

But even if we do, it's still a big universe, and sooner or later we end up running afoul of cosmic conditions or entities with power we can't match. The really important concept here is that the scale of power runs upward through so many orders of magnitude that mere mortals of any species are NOT at the top, and can't plausibly hope to get there.

People think and operate in the center of their own mental universe- it's the only way to live. The reason cosmic horrors are scary is that they have enough power to crack that necessary conceit, one that you intellectually admit is a conceit but use anyway. They can forcibly break this conceit and suck you into thinking of them as the center of your universe. Which is no way to live.
________


And X-Com would tell you science and explosions can solve any Lovecraft style problem.

Admittedly, everyone involved dies, but SCIENCE still is victorious.Now, now, if everyone involved dies you lose the battle! You need one or two of your squad members to stagger out of the wreckage after causing the final, decisive round of explosions!

[GolemsVoice]

What I also "like" about Lovecraft's works is that, sometimes, becoming the monster, becoming less, and more than human, is actually a merciful thing. The last part of Shadow over Innsmouth, where the protagonist joins the other Deep Ones to live forever beneath the sea is actually very beautiful, and has a sense of deep calm, at least to me. Only by ending their humanity can man find peace, either by becoming the monsters and, "shifting" perspective, by suicide, or by giving in to madness without higher reason or care. That thought is often frightening, but sometimes, as in Shadows over Innsmouth, a strange kind of reassuring.

[Jade_Tarem]

If there was ever an us-descendant that could... it wouldn't be us anymore. It wouldn't see the universe in terms that make sense to us, it wouldn't care about what we think is important, and it probably wouldn't even function in terms we can now understand. It would be indistinguishable from all the other cosmic horrors, except for the little tag saying "Made on Terra" instead of "Made on Omricon Persei VIII."

I'm not sure the idea of having posthuman inhuman descendants that can play ball with cosmic horrors makes me feel better about the idea of cosmic horrors.

I think you're interpreting the situation as more dire than it actually is. There's really nothing more natural than evolution. Do you think that we see the universe and function in terms that pre-homo sapiens man would understand? Of course not. However, we're not cosmic horrors, we're just far beyond what we were.


People think and operate in the center of their own mental universe- it's the only way to live. The reason cosmic horrors are scary is that they have enough power to crack that necessary conceit, one that you intellectually admit is a conceit but use anyway. They can forcibly break this conceit and suck you into thinking of them as the center of your universe. Which is no way to live.

Ok, see, this is the first thing I've read here that might make the cosmic horrors scary. But how likely is it?

[Mewtarthio]

Actually, a perfectly correct unified theory of everything would be downright depressing, because it would mean there's nothing more to learn. The Universe will always, or at least almost always, be a mystery, no matter how much of it we can explain, there's always more that we have to look at and reconsider. I find that amazing. Lovecraft (and many people) find it terrifying.

My understanding is that the Unified Field Theory would just be a theory that explained the four fundamental forces of the universe (Gravity, Strong Nuclear, Weak Nuclear, and Electromagnetism) as merely different manifestations of a single force. The universe wouldn't be any less interesting as a result of that any more than people stopped caring about electricity when it was discovered that the electromotive force and the magnetic force were really the same thing.

The theory that would explain everything is called, I believe, the Theory of Everything.

[Nerd-o-rama]

My understanding is that the Unified Field Theory would just be a theory that explained the four fundamental forces of the universe (Gravity, Strong Nuclear, Weak Nuclear, and Electromagnetism) as merely different manifestations of a single force. The universe wouldn't be any less interesting as a result of that any more than people stopped caring about electricity when it was discovered that the electromotive force and the magnetic force were really the same thing.

The theory that would explain everything is called, I believe, the Theory of Everything.True enough, but I just get sick of people who think that science has or will ever have a 100% correct answer for everything with no need to further research. The point of science is that you never stop asking questions and looking for new answers.

[GoC]

Just thought I'd mention the scariest cosmic horror I know of to see what you think of it: Strong AI

[chiasaur11]

Just thought I'd mention the scariest cosmic horror I know of to see what you think of it: Strong AI

Nah. Even they fear the W'rcacnter.

Strong AIs tend to need to play lip service to physics. Cosmic horrors tend to act without such restrictions.

[GoC]

Nah. Even they fear the W'rcacnter.

Strong AIs tend to need to play lip service to physics. Cosmic horrors tend to act without such restrictions.

Strong AIs are more incomprehensible and harder to predict than cosmic horrors. They also have the ability to be us. Literally be us. And they're smarter. We become meaningless... irrelevant... inferior in every possible way. That scares me. A LOT.

[Drakyn]

Artificially "grape" flavoured tylenol is more inexplicable than either. It claims to be grape...yet it isn't. There is no way that any sane being could eat a grape, then one of these...things...and claim that they are in any way, shape, or form related. And yet it sits there on drugstore shelves. Staring.

[Aotrs Commander]

Right, humans. Time to shed the cold, harsh light of facts, based on countless years of accumulated knowledge in the Army Of The Red Spear's massive databanks. Now, I'm going to have to try and explain this in very broad, simple terms because even the smarter ones of you (and I use "smart" in a loose sense, since you are, of course, all completely stupid in comparison to the dizzy intellectual heights of a epic-level Lich such as myself) will not be able to understand the complexities of the level of science and thaurmaturgy involved. After all, I'm speaking from the vantage point of one of the more advanced technological groups in reality (though far, sadly, from the highest); trying to explain the exact details to you would be like trying to explain advanced quantum physics to a Sumerian. It would take weeks to even attempt to explain the basic mechanics with which to explain the intermediate stages and so on. Heck, I have to admit, I have only a loose grasp of the technology myself. I can certainly use and even fiddle with our advanced tech, but I couldn't tell you how most of it works on the fundemental level, myself.

So:

1) Yes, there really are eldritch horrors that live outside normal space and time, and I don't just mean demons and such. They're just reasonably powerful entities that are eminantly killable if you have approriate weaponry. Meta-reality entities are much harder to deal with because they don't belong in our reality and come from places that literally do not have the laws of physics. The worst of these carry, for the sake of simplicity, let's say something akin to a bubble of their reality with them (the truth, like most things, is much more complicated).

The interactions of these 'bubbles' with our universe causes distortion in the underlying fabrics of the universe, which results in varying disrupting effects on a material, thaumatugerical and psionic level. Some of these effects, dependant on the type of entity, have a deleterious effect on the common mental...well, let's say frequency or bandwidth (which again, is a grosse oversimplification) of most sentient creature's minds.

As most sentient creatures share a very similar space of this 'bandwidth' - after all, sentient creatures all think and perceive the universe in broadly similar way - the effects are likewise broadly similar across species. These effects are usually heavily disruptive to the normal mental functions, and often result in mental problems, from simply insanity (often caused by the simultaneous effects of the mental and physical components of the extra-reality 'bubbles' working in cohesion) to literal mental extermination.

So, you actually go mad, not from despair or horror - unless the specific disruption effects tend to cause that - but from what amounts to a sort of psionic fit, possibly with neurological or thaumatugerical complications.

Strong willed or particulaly mentally or psionically resistant creatures (e.g. Liches) are much more tolerant of these effects.

So this, combined with the fact that they are extra-reality entities, and thus quite hard to damage with weapons and effects because they are only partly following the laws of our own universe, is what makes them so dangerous and rightly feared. (So Lovecraft kind of got the right effect, if he was wrong in his reasoning.) Not so much for the visual effects or the knowledge that they are out there, as the nearly-unavoidable side-effects they have on reality when in proximity. (And that, boy, those bastards are seriously ugly scums-of-Liches.)

2) There are entities out there, capable of killing you - and far, far worse than 'just' killing you and not caring, and worse, the entities that can do that and do care; worse because they'll come after you personally. (Heck, I'm one of 'em.) Despite my enormous arrogance, wherein I do not believe, but know, inherent to my being that I am the most perfect entity in all reality (save perhaps Lord Deth Despoil, head of the Army Of The Red Spear), there are still creatures out there I do not even want to know I exist. Because, despite all my power, I'm not (yet) the biggest fish in the sea and were they to do that they could come after me and do to me what I'd do to you and worse! And some - nay several - are very much corporeal, prime material and entirely comprehensible entities...

You should all be afraid on some level of that, as much as you should be afraid of arbitary sudden planetary destruction, as with a random solar flare striking the planet. Though unless one of these entities comes for you in person, really, there's not much you can do about it, so why worry?

3) At high enough levels of energy output, nothing is immune, not even creatures composed of pure thought of energy. Contrary to what your backwards, primative 21st science would tell you, you can destroy energy (though it's infinitely easier just to disrupt or disperse it). Put enough energy in one spot and it'll permeate through all the local planes and dimensions, disrupting and scattering anything that happens to be there. Sadly, Aotrs technology is not usually up to this level in many cases. Though the amount of energy one of our captial starship weapon releases is usually enough to cause even greater deites problems on a direct or sustained hit. Though again, this is somewhat inefficient; it's often better to hit the nigh-invulerable entity with a more direct and tailed strikes rather than trying to overpower it with raw force. But it can be done. So if Cthulu rose up, nuke him and he might well come back radioactive, but blow the planet up he's own (doable - over time - with the weapons available) or just hit him in the face with enough captial starship weapons and he'll kick the bucket; possibly even permenantly. That said, if the guy gets taken down by a steam boat, a 20m advanced-alloy slug travelling at several times the speed of light will probably do the job anyway!)



So, Lovecraft should be scary in the sense that, if you are weak-minded (like most sentients) and daft enough not to realise that objective fact humans are and have always have been and always will be inherently worthless scum, the dregs at the bottom of the chain of sentient beings, whose primary advantage is that least they aren't Vampires or Shi'Ar, that this knowledge being forced upon you is traumatising. This is, of course, not as common as it used to be, as most of the effect is from the shock of learning this, which is migitated by a relatively open mind. But that's basically culture shock more than fear, really. The Total Perspective Vortex of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy pretty much worked on similar principles, come to that...

The mystery of these entities is more scary; the unknown is awlways disturbing, I think, and the fact that normal unaugmented humans cannot hope to defeat them nor understand them in any fashion. (But let's face it aliens can be just as hard to beat and just as incomprehensible without translators or telepathy.) It's like the Judge from Buffy in a macrocosom. He was scary as long as you couldn't hurt him, but as soon as they found a way to fight him, he fell like cheese.



So, what was the point of all this?

Um...well, none really, except:

1) Needless self-aggrandisation

2) You are all inherently worthless

3) I'm stupidly powerful and you're not (see 1)

4) We've sort of moved off the topic anyway

and 5) if you thought golentan was a bit arrogant in taking about his abilities, you clearly need educating on what arrogance means. I'm by far so much more arrogant than any of you can ever hope to be! Six dimensions? Hah! I've BEEN to more dimensions than that, and I've got the ichor-splattered severed thingy-entrails to prove it. So, if you want to jump a guy for being smug, at least try it on someone who's a worthy target. And I'm more worthy, in any definition of the word than anyone else...



This post brought to you by the Army Of The Red Spear Public Service Department, "because we really ought make even hairless monkeys have some understanding of the universe, so they know how much they're really screwed".

[chiasaur11]

Right, humans. Time to shed the cold, harsh light of facts, based on countless years of accumulated knowledge in the Army Of The Red Spear's massive databanks. Now, I'm going to have to try and explain this in very broad, simple terms because even the smarter ones of you (and I use "smart" in a loose sense, since you are, of course, all completely stupid in comparison to the dizzy intellectual heights of a epic-level Lich such as myself) will not be able to understand the complexities of the level of science and thaurmaturgy involved. After all, I'm speaking from the vantage point of one of the more advanced technological groups in reality (though far, sadly, from the highest); trying to explain the exact details to you would be like trying to explain advanced quantum physics to a Sumerian. It would take weeks to even attempt to explain the basic mechanics with which to explain the intermediate stages and so on. Heck, I have to admit, I have only a loose grasp of the technology myself. I can certainly use and even fiddle with our advanced tech, but I couldn't tell you how most of it works on the fundemental level, myself.

So:

1) Yes, there really are eldritch horrors that live outside normal space and time, and I don't just mean demons and such. They're just reasonably powerful entities that are eminantly killable if you have approriate weaponry. Meta-reality entities are much harder to deal with because they don't belong in our reality and come from places that literally do not have the laws of physics. The worst of these carry, for the sake of simplicity, let's say something akin to a bubble of their reality with them (the truth, like most things, is much more complicated).

The interactions of these 'bubbles' with our universe causes distortion in the underlying fabrics of the universe, which results in varying disrupting effects on a material, thaumatugerical and psionic level. Some of these effects, dependant on the type of entity, have a deleterious effect on the common mental...well, let's say frequency or bandwidth (which again, is a grosse oversimplification) of most sentient creature's minds.

As most sentient creatures share a very similar space of this 'bandwidth' - after all, sentient creatures all think and perceive the universe in broadly similar way - the effects are likewise broadly similar across species. These effects are usually heavily disruptive to the normal mental functions, and often result in mental problems, from simply insanity (often caused by the simultaneous effects of the mental and physical components of the extra-reality 'bubbles' working in cohesion) to literal mental extermination.

So, you actually go mad, not from despair or horror - unless the specific disruption effects tend to cause that - but from what amounts to a sort of psionic fit, possibly with neurological or thaumatugerical complications.

Strong willed or particulaly mentally or psionically resistant creatures (e.g. Liches) are much more tolerant of these effects.

So this, combined with the fact that they are extra-reality entities, and thus quite hard to damage with weapons and effects because they are only partly following the laws of our own universe, is what makes them so dangerous and rightly feared. (So Lovecraft kind of got the right effect, if he was wrong in his reasoning.) Not so much for the visual effects or the knowledge that they are out there, as the nearly-unavoidable side-effects they have on reality when in proximity. (And that, boy, those bastards are seriously ugly scums-of-Liches.)

2) There are entities out there, capable of killing you - and far, far worse than 'just' killing you and not caring, and worse, the entities that can do that and do care; worse because they'll come after you personally. (Heck, I'm one of 'em.) Despite my enormous arrogance, wherein I do not believe, but know, inherent to my being that I am the most perfect entity in all reality (save perhaps Lord Deth Despoil, head of the Army Of The Red Spear), there are still creatures out there I do not even want to know I exist. Because, despite all my power, I'm not (yet) the biggest fish in the sea and were they to do that they could come after me and do to me what I'd do to you and worse! And some - nay several - are very much corporeal, prime material and entirely comprehensible entities...

You should all be afraid on some level of that, as much as you should be afraid of arbitary sudden planetary destruction, as with a random solar flare striking the planet. Though unless one of these entities comes for you in person, really, there's not much you can do about it, so why worry?

3) At high enough levels of energy output, nothing is immune, not even creatures composed of pure thought of energy. Contrary to what your backwards, primative 21st science would tell you, you can destroy energy (though it's infinitely easier just to disrupt or disperse it). Put enough energy in one spot and it'll permeate through all the local planes and dimensions, disrupting and scattering anything that happens to be there. Sadly, Aotrs technology is not usually up to this level in many cases. Though the amount of energy one of our captial starship weapon releases is usually enough to cause even greater deites problems on a direct or sustained hit. Though again, this is somewhat inefficient; it's often better to hit the nigh-invulerable entity with a more direct and tailed strikes rather than trying to overpower it with raw force. But it can be done. So if Cthulu rose up, nuke him and he might well come back radioactive, but blow the planet up he's own (doable - over time - with the weapons available) or just hit him in the face with enough captial starship weapons and he'll kick the bucket; possibly even permenantly. That said, if the guy gets taken down by a steam boat, a 20m advanced-alloy slug travelling at several times the speed of light will probably do the job anyway!)



So, Lovecraft should be scary in the sense that, if you are weak-minded (like most sentients) and daft enough not to realise that objective fact humans are and have always have been and always will be inherently worthless scum, the dregs at the bottom of the chain of sentient beings, whose primary advantage is that least they aren't Vampires or Shi'Ar, that this knowledge being forced upon you is traumatising. This is, of course, not as common as it used to be, as most of the effect is from the shock of learning this, which is migitated by a relatively open mind. But that's basically culture shock more than fear, really. The Total Perspective Vortex of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy pretty much worked on similar principles, come to that...

The mystery of these entities is more scary; the unknown is awlways disturbing, I think, and the fact that normal unaugmented humans cannot hope to defeat them nor understand them in any fashion. (But let's face it aliens can be just as hard to beat and just as incomprehensible without translators or telepathy.) It's like the Judge from Buffy in a macrocosom. He was scary as long as you couldn't hurt him, but as soon as they found a way to fight him, he fell like cheese.



So, what was the point of all this?

Um...well, none really, except:

1) Needless self-aggrandisation

2) You are all inherently worthless

3) I'm stupidly powerful and you're not (see 1)

4) We've sort of moved off the topic anyway

and 5) if you thought golentan was a bit arrogant in taking about his abilities, you clearly need educating on what arrogance means. I'm by far so much more arrogant than any of you can ever hope to be! Six dimensions? Hah! I've BEEN to more dimensions than that, and I've got the ichor-splattered severed thingy-entrails to prove it. So, if you want to jump a guy for being smug, at least try it on someone who's a worthy target. And I'm more worthy, in any definition of the word than anyone else...



This post brought to you by the Army Of The Red Spear Public Service Department, "because we really ought make even hairless monkeys have some understanding of the universe, so they know how much they're really screwed".

You're still scared of them?

I thought every halfway civilized chunk of rock had at least heard of Jjaro extradimensional energy converters. Keep those running right and you're in like Flynn.

Sure, it's a bit cargo cult to rely on the gear of beings long gone to keep the dark away, but I find that unseen Athenas are better than cowardice and reliance on personal power.

[lisiecki]

to the OP: Quite a few people DON'T find Lovecraft scary.

If your interested in the setting, and want to read story's about mere mortals kicking eldrich ass, check out Titus Crow

[Dervag]

I think you're interpreting the situation as more dire than it actually is. There's really nothing more natural than evolution. Do you think that we see the universe and function in terms that pre-homo sapiens man would understand? Of course not. However, we're not cosmic horrors, we're just far beyond what we were....At this point, we're quibbling over a definition. What is a cosmic horror? What assurance do we have that our hypothetical posthuman descendants won't qualify? How much application of nanotech utility fog would it take for them to whip up something indistinguishable from a Shoggoth? If they bioengineer themselves thoroughly enough to be able to deal with the Mi-Go on their own terms and behold Cthulhu without going mad, will they still resemble us closely enough that we would call them us, rather than another breed of the same powerful alien weirdness?


Ok, see, this is the first thing I've read here that might make the cosmic horrors scary. But how likely is it?For people who actually encounter them, it seems to happen with a probability approaching one. That's why they go insane on seeing the things. Seeing them strips you of the ability to secretly believe that you are the center of the universe.


Just thought I'd mention the scariest cosmic horror I know of to see what you think of it: Strong AIQuite scary, but less scary than Azathoth. At least a strong AI has something I consider a mind. At least I know that syllogisms and Bayesian rules are involved somewhere. I can flatter myself with the principle that all Turing machines are created equal on some level, and that I'm one too, even if I'm a joke compared to my new robot overlord.

Side note: are you familiar with the philosophy and work of Eliezer Yudkowsky?


You're still scared of them?

I thought every halfway civilized chunk of rock had at least heard of Jjaro extradimensional energy converters. Keep those running right and you're in like Flynn.

Sure, it's a bit cargo cult to rely on the gear of beings long gone to keep the dark away, but I find that unseen Athenas are better than cowardice and reliance on personal power.I like you, chiasaur. If I ever get around to writing that X-COM story that's kicking around in the back of my head, you will receive some sort of honorable homage.

[chiasaur11]

I like you, chiasaur. If I ever get around to writing that X-COM story that's kicking around in the back of my head, you will receive some sort of honorable homage.

Thanks. I'm honored.

[Executor]

My guess is because most of Lovecraft's terror is in the Unseen. And the Human Imagination will always make something you don't see scarier than what you do see.

[Aotrs Commander]

You're still scared of them?

I thought every halfway civilized chunk of rock had at least heard of Jjaro extradimensional energy converters. Keep those running right and you're in like Flynn.

Sure, it's a bit cargo cult to rely on the gear of beings long gone to keep the dark away, but I find that unseen Athenas are better than cowardice and reliance on personal power.

Scared? Not really. However, knowing that there are entities with technology out there at a higher level than anything that's gone before (including the likes of the Ancients, the Jjaro, the Protheans, the Iconians and the Sienaetic Harbingers) with the technology AND thaumatugy to literally kill greater deities in one-on-one combat without breaking a sweat makes one...cautious. In the same way I be cautious about jumping naked into a supernova. It's not really scary, but you still wouldn't want to do it.

Unfortunately, as the Aotrs is, while not a large power, still big enough that we don't have enough salveged ancient technology to go around, and I'm not on the priority list...

[GoC]

Side note: are you familiar with the philosophy and work of Eliezer Yudkowsky?
Yep.* I don't agree with a few things but I still learnt a HUGE amount from his articles on rationality.**

*He didn't influence my opinion of strong AI at all though. I'd already figured out just how damn scary they were while I was mentally making a The Incredibles fanfic (it's a long story). Amazing what happens when you add a few mental superpowers...

** Though most of what I learnt is methodology. Analysis of statements and beliefs.

[Avilan the Grey]

to the OP: Quite a few people DON'T find Lovecraft scary.

If your interested in the setting, and want to read story's about mere mortals kicking eldrich ass, check out Titus Crow

Or play the RPG. A good GM will make the setting far scarier than the books do.

[Moose Fisher]

Or play the RPG. A good GM will make the setting far scarier than the books do.

I use that system for both Mythos and non-Mythos related horror.:smallbiggrin:

A good GM for those games should always leave the monsters abstract to let the players's imaginations go wild. Giving them names or showing pictures lessens the scare. You can find pictures of Cthulhu on the internet and think, "that's what I'm supposed to be afraid of?", but removing all those visual images makes is much more frightening.

[EleventhHour]

You're not beneath their notice. You're just beneath their contempt.

"Hey, Cosmic Horror #3!"
"What's up?"
"You remember that little blue-and-green marble you left by that match in on the west side of the 'Milky Way' plate?"
"Oh yeah. What's up?"
"It got some mold growing on it."
"Ugh. Wash it off for me, would you?"

[Moose Fisher]

"Hey, Cosmic Horror #3!"
"What's up?"
"You remember that little blue-and-green marble you left by that match in on the west side of the 'Milky Way' plate?"
"Oh yeah. What's up?"
"It got some mold growing on it."
"Ugh. Wash it off for me, would you?"

-Generic Great Old One wakes up from its slumber-

"Oooh... I really let the backyard grow wild. Those little pests seem to have built over all of the old cities."

[Avilan the Grey]

I use that system for both Mythos and non-Mythos related horror.:smallbiggrin:

A good GM for those games should always leave the monsters abstract to let the players's imaginations go wild. Giving them names or showing pictures lessens the scare. You can find pictures of Cthulhu on the internet and think, "that's what I'm supposed to be afraid of?", but removing all those visual images makes is much more frightening.

Yes. Of course I also convinced that if you can't really put your mind where the character's mind is, you should not be playing Horror RPG anyway. Then it just becomes "Another Bug Hunt" :smallwink:

[Tiktakkat]

Lovecraft is scary for the same reason every other horror author is scary:
Because the reader (or watcher for movies) agrees to be scared.

If you want to be scared by what Lovecraft writes you will find the Mythos scary.
If you do not want to be scared by it, you will find it whatever you find it - viciously racist, tediously baroque, inanely obscure, whatever.

The same applies to every work of horror.
You may find Dracula, Frankenstein, and Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde to be obnoxiously moralistic.
You may find Freddie and Jason to be merely grotesque.
You may find Stephen King to be just pop culture drivel.

Ultimately all horror requires you to want to be scared by the work for whatever reason you choose.
If you choose not to be, then in the end all horror is nothing of the sort, as it is all just a story - static, set, avoidable, irrelevant. There is no monster attacking you, there was never any monster anywhere attacking the people in the story, there are no monsters.

[GolemsVoice]

Ye, I find that being scared by works of fiction is very much a thing of losing yourself in it. The less immersive the work is, the more you've got to do for yourself (for example, I think it's harder to be scared just reading something, probably in bed where it's warm and cozy, than wathcing it in the dark on TV, or even experiencing it "yourself" as you scout out some dark tunnels in some video game). Thus, if you go at a work thinking "ha, this Lovecraft sure is a fool", little will scare you, the work had to be of exceptional quality and of a kind of horror that easily gets to readers. And, much as I love Lovecraft, he isn't that good, and his subject matter isn't the kind of psychological horror that grabs you without you noticing it. So, a suggestion: try to let the horror in, try to set aside what you believe in real life, and be one of Lovecraft's ants, and ahve your cosmos shattered.

[Ecks Dee]

1- First off, I don't think the average 1920's man had one hundred percent of your knowledge of the world, of space, of physics.

2- Although Kierkegaard and the highest point in nihilism's history was around 1850, I think it's undebatable that the modern man has become more skeptic and less prone to let his life be run by beliefs, faith and so on than his 1920 counterpart.

3- At the same, the modern man has seen things that can effectively be called magic from Lovecraft's point of view, and has now become so used to change that a lot of us don't even feel change anymore. When something arises that represents something really New, we adapt. We might be "impressed", but we're not in awe any more. We have lost the pleasure of discovering Wonders, we are not able to surprise ourselves in front of even the most gigantic leap of science...
I mean, tell a man of the 1920's we've gone to the Moon, or that something built by man is currently orbiting around Neptune...

So it's not a matter of being a genius, an atheist, and accept that Man is just a grain of dust in the void. It's about being accustomed to change and having lost the ability to found our lives on something that is not "physical".

That's why Lovecraft is not creepy any more, in my opinion. It subverts and shocks the man of his time. For the contemporary man it's just a writer with good, maybe even fascinating ideas, but it doesn't shock the fundamental blocks of our life any more.

This has probably been addressed already, but -

'I must protect my sanity from the old ones' said humanity.

'No, humans,' the radio crackered. 'You are the old ones.'

And humans were spacemen.

[LurkerInPlayground]

Lovecraft was a man of very different sensibilities whose ideas happened to be very influential and archetypal. He wrote about what horror ought to be. His ideas are interesting, even if they don't instill sheer terror.

But that's a bit of an unrealistic expectation. Horror IS NOT a scare. It IS NOT terror. It's about feeling uneasy or being filled with dread. It's about being sucked into an atmosphere of tense anxiety.

It drives me crazy to no end when people tell me they aren't "scared" by horror. Of course not. That isn't the sole point. It's about the feeling of repugnance or antipathy. A scare is just an adrenaline spike. It's good for releasing tension, but it alone is not what makes good horror. Horror is supposed to be challenging and dramatic.

Good movies often spice up the story with horror. This is why Heath Ledger's Joker in The Dark Knight works. He isn't interested in killing people as much as he is interested in psychological torture. The killing just happens to be the byproduct.

If you've seen District Nine, what happens to Wikus is similarly horrifying. The oppressive injustice. The loss of identity. His degradation. We can empathize with Wikus's anxiety when he is presented over-and-over with sources of bodily mutilation or disfigurement. As a matter of point, District Nine's "Prawns" are analogous to Lovecraft's Deep Ones.

And yet neither of those movies are "horror" movies.

[Demented]

When you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back.


I thought every halfway civilized chunk of rock had at least heard of Jjaro extradimensional energy converters. Keep those running right and you're in like Flynn.

Sure, it's a bit cargo cult to rely on the gear of beings long gone to keep the dark away, but I find that unseen Athenas are better than cowardice and reliance on personal power.

And when your Shiva furnaces all shut down and hyperspace collapses, what then!?

Then you and your entire species get eaten.

[LurkerInPlayground]

And when your Shiva furnaces all shut down and hyperspace collapses, what then!?

Then you and your entire species get eaten.
Then Those From Beyond The Rim will eat/corrupt the indigenous cargo cults first.

This gives us ample time to navigate to another meta-shard.

Tedious, but the time we get out of it is nonetheless a good return on our investment.

[Argeus]

Answer: because psychological horror is the one to rule them all?

[pendell]

It seems to me that the pre-eminent theme in Lovecraft is not terror, not fear, but despair.

It seems like all of his protagonists are variants on Tolkien's Lord Denethor: "For a space of time, you may triumph on the field, for a day. But against the dark power rising in the east there is no victory." [So let's all commit suicide by burning ourselves alive. It'll hurt less than waiting for Sauron to get his clutches on us and tormenting us in the Houses of Lamentation]

It's obvious that Tolkien and other authors of his time encountered that attitude , and had very little appreciation for it. If you're Tolkien, you believe that the Eagles are going to come flying in the nick of time, and even if they don't , it's better to die resisting the dark then gibbering in fear.

Howard -- Conan's author -- seems to have had the same approach. Yes, there are dark things out there, and there's no one to help us. We'll fight them anyway, and although our victory (saving Aquilonia for a generation) is only temporary, it's still a fight worth having.

It seems to me that you can't really "get" the true horror of Lovecraft unless you're able to grasp the essential despair and hopelessness of the stories. That's precisely why they don't frighten me. Because the idea is simply too alien. And so the Great Big Tentacled Monstrosity just becomes another rubber-suited boss with a weak point that needs to be hit For Massive Damage. Granted, you have to hit it with a steamship, but that's just details.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Avilan the Grey]

It seems to me that the pre-eminent theme in Lovecraft is not terror, not fear, but despair.

(Snipping some insightful stuff)

It's obvious that Tolkien and other authors of his time encountered that attitude , and had very little appreciation for it. If you're Tolkien, you believe that the Eagles are going to come flying in the nick of time, and even if they don't , it's better to die resisting the dark then gibbering in fear.

Howard -- Conan's author -- seems to have had the same approach. Yes, there are dark things out there, and there's no one to help us. We'll fight them anyway, and although our victory (saving Aquilonia for a generation) is only temporary, it's still a fight worth having.

(Snipping some insightful stuff)


Agreed with this.
Howard went a little further than that though; at least with Conan: No matter how horrific, or ancient a Horror might be a man can theoretically, if he is strong-willed enough, fight it and if very lucky defeat it. Mental an physical strength will at the end always top ancient magic.

[YesImSardonic]

As a matter of point, District Nine's "Prawns" are analogous to Lovecraft's Deep Ones.

Absolutely not. The Deep Ones know their place and fully plan on restoring humanity to pet of choice. They are our predators, and we are their surrogates.

Prawns are basically insectoid humans from space. They can love us and could possibly mingle with human society. The Deep Ones are only concerned with us in the way we're concerned with cows or ants or spiders. We disgust them, and they drive us mad.

[LurkerInPlayground]

Absolutely not. The Deep Ones know their place and fully plan on restoring humanity to pet of choice. They are our predators, and we are their surrogates.

Prawns are basically insectoid humans from space. They can love us and could possibly mingle with human society. The Deep Ones are only concerned with us in the way we're concerned with cows or ants or spiders. We disgust them, and they drive us mad.
Absolutely yes.

They play on the same themes of "miscegenation" and they're a stand-in for a inbred low-class of hicks. A variant on the "red neck ramapge." You just dress them up in fishmen suits or whatever.

[FlyingWhale]

Fear of the unknown. That's a big point labeled on each cover of his works. Right about being a terrible author. No real skill for it, as far as all the ends and outs that editors and book folk have... But undoubtedly a fantastic guide into our fears. 6...Out of 5.

[SPLH]

Doing a bit of necromancy here, hope that is okay...

Although I agree with the basic premise that Lovecraftian horror can feel outdated on scientific grounds, I feel that my deep attraction to the works of Lovecraft runs on deeper grounds than just his worldview. I think the various phobias and personal fears of Lovecraft himself point the way : Cosmic horror is not just an apersonal materialistic worldview, it is a mask for depression-riden anxiety. If you have not feeled at some point in your life crushing despair oozing from the pores of reality, you will probably miss a connection (and may be all the better for it ! depression is not a fun ride, I can tell you that much). I remember reading In the mountains of madness for the first time, feeling the dread building up in my chest, and thinking "I have been there".

I suspect there is something similar going on with the works of Philip **** and paranoia. I enjoy them a lot at an intellectual level, and have felt emotionally very involved in A scanner darkly, but I imagine that going through an episode of paranoia (never been there, but saw a friend in the throes, a terrifying thing to see) would deepen that connection.

[averagejoe]

The Mod They Call Me: Thread necromancy.