sindri42:

daisenseiben:

trilllizard666:

analvelocity:

You shouldn’t give Lovecraft too much shit because most of his racism was because he was a kooky aristocratic shut in who took after his dad (the one who actually named the cat). Once his wife divorced him he actually left the house and he actually became a lot more well-adjusted and embracing of different cultures which is more than I can say of people on here

he was a crazy loopy shutin who was almost always broke and eating so little for most of his life some people think he might’ve actually been hallucinating lmao

then when he got some perspective later on in his life he was like

“wow, I was fucked up”

In his later works you can actually see the revelation hitting him.

One of the reasons I love Lovecraft’s books is that every single one of them is an unreliable narrator (the average protagonist doesn’t remember half the story and describes several key things as ‘undescribable’) layered under an unreliable author who openly admitted that his early works were seriously warped by his xenophobic upbringing and he wanted to go back and fix them later.

So you’re looking at this huge, weird, beautiful mythos. And you’re only seeing it through a tiny bendy porthole. What actually happened is almost left as an exercise for the reader to figure out, because other than the handful of solid data points, few and far between, you’re seeing the impressions and reactions of somebody who should never have been the primary source for these events but they’re who was on the scene at the time.

Which of these things are evil, and which are just gross? Which are hostile to humanity, and which are just unchristian? How many of the humans talking to these entities have gone mad, or been turned into servitors, and how many are just folks who had the decency to ask questions first and shoot later? How many of these mind-breaking secrets man was never meant to know are things a real scientist would love to learn about and rebuild their models of the universe accordingly, and how many are genuine cognitive hazards which destroy the psyche of anybody unfortunate enough to be exposed to the meme?

Reading one book will destroy you and everything you love, failing to read another book means nobody knows how to stop the next extinction event. One of these alien beasts means to torture you to death, one will save humanity, one just thinks you’re food, one will take you on marvelous adventures and teach you the wonders of the universe, one will put you in sensory deprivation for eternity, and the truly dangerous one will never even notice that you exist.

Your actions might be totally irrelevant or absolutely vital, and your only source of information to base your choice on is deranged ramblings which you know are largely false or misrepresentative, but without them you would be totally ignorant.

I won’t call it the best or favorite book series, not by a long shot, but the whole thing is fascinating.