F#@k H.P. Lovecraft

Not Sure wrote: So where are you moving to, Pete?

Superfly (may I call you Pete?) wrote and posted something that basically I wrote and then canceled yesterday and I support his view. Giving up a game theme linked to a racist source is easy for someone struggling to do what’s right. But when scrambling up the moral high ground there are many false peaks. You reach one only to see another one high - so high - above you. Like any normal person you count the cost and make a decision about how high you want to go. Pete is pointing out the mountainous high ground towering above us that reaches into heavens and where, we tell ourselves, only saints can breath.

Generally we all stay put at some point. The temptation is to start comparing the elevation of the ground we occupy to that of others and playing the game that by going a few feet more I can feel better about myself in comparison to those around me. Then someone shouts down at me from their perch and I climb a bit further to restore my view that I’m a good person. It’s fucking endless these days.

But.... what’s the real impact and have we simply become the Pharisees?

Is that what Michael is doing in publicly renouncing HPL? Taking a cheap stand to point out the speck of dust in our eyes? I read it carefully and did spot a “we” in there ... e.g. “we must move on” or something like that. It rankled me.

But I don’t think so. I’m going to guess that he has decided to add his voice to the chorus and influence the hobby in a positive direction. He may say he’s only stating a personal moment of enlightenment but it’s obvious he’s a paid influencer and knows the impact he can have. Sorry to use the third person Michael. I enjoyed your post and I enjoy this convo.

Michael Barnes wrote: If we cleanse misogynistic content and creators from the cultural canon...wow. Goodbye Led Zeppelin, NWA, any number of pre-20th century authors and painters, Tolkien, many composers, etc. etc. etc. I don't think anyone is willing to cut that deep, and we start to run into that issue where we _shouldn't_ be cutting that deep.

I have enjoyed reading through this conversation because I think that these issues are good to think about. I tend to think that we each have to decide what we are comfortable with (as others have said). I have not read Lovecraft at all, and I have played none of the games directly related to his stuff.

However, I feel compelled to jump in about Tolkien. I do not know Led Zeppelin or NWA enough to comment, but I do feel that I know Tolkien well enough.

If we are going to label Tolkien misogynist, we may as well just throw out the term. There are only two (very weak) attacks against him in that direction that I can see (though I am willing to be corrected).

The first is related to the number of female characters in his works. I think that just going by number of characters is a bit silly. Should all works of fiction have an exactly 50/50 male to female ratio? Certainly there should be room for works that shift away from that in either direction.

The other attack would be to state that the female characters in Tolkien follow old-fashioned gender stereotypes. This could be answered in a few ways, but I think that a closer look at the female characters that are in his work are powerful and independent. Most of them are married, but I think that Tolkien celebrated marriage (as the Catholic church and Christians in general do). Though married, Arwen, Luthien, and Galadriel are not hampered by it. Marriage is considered a good thing, and I think that a good marriage is a very good thing. There is nothing inherently misogynistic in celebrating marriage - I would think that it is something of the opposite.

When charges of racism, sexism, and the like get tossed around without a strong basis, it weakens those words. I tell my sons to be very, very careful and have very solid evidence before they employ the words "liar" and "cheater". Those are serious accusations to make.

The evidence for Lovecraft being a racist seems strong to me. The evidence for Tolkien being a misogynist is laughable (the above arguments in favor of Tolkien are not exhaustive or well articulated - they are brief and the best I can do at the moment).

Hearing the way you guys are talking, it’s almost as if I’m supposed to feel guilty for owning all this Nazi memorabilia.

Black Barney wrote: Hearing the way you guys are talking, it’s almost as if I’m supposed to feel guilty for owning all this Nazi memorabilia.

That depends...has it been sanitized yet? Fazi the Nazi Teddy?

Whoshim wrote: If we are going to label Tolkien misogynist, we may as well just throw out the term. There are only two (very weak) attacks against him in that direction that I can see (though I am willing to be corrected).

The first is related to the number of female characters in his works. I think that just going by number of characters is a bit silly. Should all works of fiction have an exactly 50/50 male to female ratio? Certainly there should be room for works that shift away from that in either direction.

The other attack would be to state that the female characters in Tolkien follow old-fashioned gender stereotypes. This could be answered in a few ways, but I think that a closer look at the female characters that are in his work are powerful and independent. Most of them are married, but I think that Tolkien celebrated marriage (as the Catholic church and Christians in general do). Though married, Arwen, Luthien, and Galadriel are not hampered by it. Marriage is considered a good thing, and I think that a good marriage is a very good thing. There is nothing inherently misogynistic in celebrating marriage - I would think that it is something of the opposite.

I had always thought that the beef against Tolkien was that he set up this archetype of the dwindling West vs. barbaric, crafty, and subhuman hordes. This was Morcock's argument from way, way back, and still rings true: www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/anti-tolkien

However, there are important distinctions to be made between Tolkien and Lovecraft. Tolkien had fought in WWI, which complicates his relationship to a dwindling West and European barbarism. He was a first-rate scholar, and a deep-diving collector of mythic archetypes. He was also a good writer, whom Auden praised upon first reading the Hobbit. Certainly, the omission of women is on a par with all sorts of other adventure fiction of the time, and it's important to remind ourselves that women went on "adventures" and witnessed the full brunt of European "barbarism," during Tolkien's war, and that's not been properly explored because women were not allowed to bear witness to their own experiences. (Women are still fighting that fight, especially in F and SF.) In short, there is a great deal of good to be taken with the bad in Tolkien. This isn't hypocrisy, and if it is, then there's no point in comparing one idea with another, or in shedding old ideas for new. It's just points we get for pointing it out from the comfort of our absolute inertia, points we can't spend on anything. "Find the hypocrisy" is a game that liberals on the right and left have been playing for years now, and it's a disaster.

By contrast, Lovecraft was purely representative of a strain of middle-class, middlebrow American ultrarightism which has gone unchanged for a hundred years. He was afraid of non-whites, female bodies, and the idea of biological evolution, learned just enough about these things to freak himself out even more, and so decided he would hide in his little apartment, in his little town, and write stories about miscegenated vagina monsters until he died. Lovecraft is useful in two, binary ways: 1) as an example of how psychoactively, hilariously strong the fear response is, particularly in the American conservative mindset and 2) as a cautionary example against same. There's literally nothing else redeemable about him.

jeb wrote: I am confronting something similar with my kids, who adore the collected works of Carl Barks. His Donald Duck comics and Uncle Scrooge comics are fucking stellar. They are also racist as fuuuuuuuuck. I mean, look at this shit:

This is actually a great example because it was handled very well by Don Rosa in The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck. Rather than ignoring what was an off-character depiction of Scrooge and a racist story he used it to show colonization, with Scrooge crossing the line into a robber baron and driving a tribe out of their lands. Here Zoola (the black character) is depicted without the racist features like big lips and exaggerated nose and explicitely calls out Scrooge, sarcastically calling him "white master" and making it clear that he is but an imperialist thief. He is also hostile and dangerous and not easily tricked, not an idiot. Also, while I cannot say, his speech seems to resemble a real language and probably is, instead of being stereotypical AAVE.

Hadik wrote: But I don’t think so. I’m going to guess that he has decided to add his voice to the chorus and influence the hobby in a positive direction. He may say he’s only stating a personal moment of enlightenment but it’s obvious he’s a paid influencer and knows the impact he can have. Sorry to use the third person Michael. I enjoyed your post and I enjoy this convo.

What's the point of having a platform if you aren't going to use it?

I mean, the counterargument that I've seen so far is "So what. There's always something worse." Michael's hardly got a platform to discuss Saudi-US relations (as one of the offered examples). It's a nerd culture site, and this is right in the lane.

For all that I vehemently disagree with GorillaGrody's take on HPL as "right-wing" rather than "blue-blood New England racist", I very strongly agree with his followup post that "fuck it, everything's worse, your shit doesn't matter, stop bumming me out" is a basically nihilist view. I can't get behind that.

If the article causes anyone to examine their views on HPL and Mythos-derived stuff and decide they don't want to be a consumer of it, that's okay. If they examine their views and decide they're cool with the Chaosium/FFG pulp iteration of things despite the sources, that's okay. If they come away thinking "man this HPL guy was really right on!" I'm going to be pretty disappointed, but at least they thought about it. A little introspection is a good thing, and that's how I read this article.

GorillaGrody wrote: By contrast, Lovecraft was purely representative of a strain of middle-class, middlebrow American ultrarightism which has gone unchanged for a hundred years. He was afraid of non-whites, female bodies, and the idea of biological evolution, learned just enough about these things to freak himself out even more, and so decided he would hide in his little apartment, in his little town, and write stories about miscegenated vagina monsters until he died.

Nothing about this was remotely right-wing, especially at the time. There were lots of full-fledged racists on all sides of economic theory (example: Wilson, as I stated). I'm about as lefty as you'll find on the site, but I really think continuing to paint HPL as "right-wing" is just baiting the right-leaning members of the site, and incorrect. We have a whole Trash Talk section for that. I stopped going there for my own mental health. The defection of Southern Democrats to the GOP after Johnson completely changed the left/right landscape with regard to race as political policy, and that was long after HPL was dead.

To reinforce Not Sure's last paragraph:

The thing I see is this: It's very good to discuss the moral implications of this kind of thing. It's healthy and positive. But this damned positioning and virtue signaling that these always turn into is ridiculous and lacks any meaningful result. Mike Tyson was a wifebeating rapist. He isn't anymore. At what point do we forgive people their trespasses, especially when THEY DIDN'T DO IT TO YOU?

Lovecraft was racist, no doubt. It's also worth considering that during his life, blacks weren't allowed to vote. The only truly damning thing I see with regard to his racism is that racial suffrage ended 3 years into his writing career - he literally was alive when blacks got the right to vote, and thus he had two choices - cling to the past's racism or move forward and progress. I've heard tale of his recanting his racism, but I've also heard that it was a weak renouncement. So, I am not educated enough to say if he did or not. So, I will assume that he lived a racist and died a racist. At the end of the day, he's long dead, and his writings aren't some sort of a propagation of racism and no Whitey Cracker KKK member to my knowledge ever used him as a beacon to support their views. "Blacks suck because HP Lovecraft said so" is not something I've ever heard, nor could I imagine that anyone would ever even think that.

So, the question regarding his racist view is whether his racist stuff has caused anyone else to become racist. I doubt that highly. I think, at best, it's his own personal hangup and some of the subtle stuff slipped into his writing, which didn't affect the whole of his writing's impact. He created Cthulhu, not KKK.

Do what y'all want, but for my own part, Lovecraft's racism is such a minor, minor portion of his overall writing that nobody remembers it directly. I mean, think of how many characters and places you can think of off of the top of your head, how many stories you can name, and then ask yourself how many times he said something racist and how impactful that comment was to the overall story. I think it's pretty clear that it's a minute part of his overall writing.

I'm still kind of aghast at the fact that anyone is seriously contemplating dismissing him as one of the greatest American writers of his age, perhaps in history, 90 years after his death or so, because he was a bit of a cunt 90 years ago. It's revisionist. He didn't call for the slaughter of blacks, he didn't actively go to rallies to stop black voting...as far as I know the extent of his racism was expressed in perhaps three paragraphs in total, if you stitched all of it together, amidst tens of thousands of pages of text.

Do what you want, and I don't slight you for it, but if you want to fight that battle, accept that the vast majority of rational people will view it as virtue signaling at best and insipidity at worst, when there's REAL battles to be won TODAY, RIGHT NOW. It's literally complaining about the splinter in your neighbor's eye, 90 years after his death, when there's logs in so many people's eyes RIGHT NOW.

Just my 2C. Go with God.

Don't read below. Trust me.

Not Sure wrote: I very strongly agree with his followup post that "fuck it, everything's worse, your shit doesn't matter, stop bumming me out" is a basically nihilist view. I can't get behind that.

I’m not sure about that, because I can’t make it out, but I have a feeling that you’ll hate what I actually said more.

What I actually said, reworded, is that the idea that all contradictory evidence deriving from a single source is mere hypocrisy, and dismissible at face, is contrary to any known process of developing and acting on information. Such an idea promotes inertia. It is the main mode of shit like South Park and Bill Maher, but it’s also replaced most of what counts as news online and on television. No one has anything nice to say about Trump but that he’s supposedly not a hypocrite. And that serves a very specific kind of nihilism which says that, as a white guy, I’m going to live as comfortably as I can until it all goes to shit, at which point I get to use m’guns.

To be clear, I am not a paid influencer. My current income from hobby games writing is $0.

Not Sure wrote:

GorillaGrody wrote: By contrast, Lovecraft was purely representative of a strain of middle-class, middlebrow American ultrarightism which has gone unchanged for a hundred years. He was afraid of non-whites, female bodies, and the idea of biological evolution, learned just enough about these things to freak himself out even more, and so decided he would hide in his little apartment, in his little town, and write stories about miscegenated vagina monsters until he died.

Nothing about this was remotely right-wing, especially at the time. There were lots of full-fledged racists on all sides of economic theory (example: Wilson, as I stated). I'm about as lefty as you'll find on the site, but I really think continuing to paint HPL as "right-wing" is just baiting the right-leaning members of the site, and incorrect. We have a whole Trash Talk section for that. I stopped going there for my own mental health. The defection of Southern Democrats to the GOP after Johnson completely changed the left/right landscape with regard to race as political policy, and that was long after HPL was dead.

Look, if what I’ve written gets this very interesting thread exiled into the things-the-right-thinks-are-political section, than I’ll truly regret it. Not Sure, I think you’re conflating Democrats with leftists. With a very few exceptions, I consider Democrats—from Southern Democrats to Clinton’s Crime and Welfare Bills—to be thoroughly, historically right wing. That is a New England problem as well as a Southern and Midwestern problem, and it’s one I think we share together.

EDIT: because I really don't want to get into an unproductive back and forth and clog up the topic, my final opinion on Lovecraft and how to handle him are as follows: There aren't these two, separate bad things, called "racism" in one corner, and "politics" in the other. The history of these things is the history of both. It is my further opinion, and the opinion of many others, that to attempt to artificially separate these things--to separate politics from all affairs where they may do good or ill--is a fundamentally right-wing concept. I truly believe that Lovecraft believed that what he did intersected not at all with politics, that he believed he was transcribing eternal truths transcribed in the bones. That's what makes him right wing. And people who defend him on the basis of separating Lovecraft from his politics repeat the error.

Michael Barnes wrote: To be clear, I am not a paid influencer. My current income from hobby games writing is $0.

You give away all of your games then?

The odd thing with the stance is that Lovecraft has pretty much already been weeded out of things "Lovecraftian". Practically all of the modern Lovecraft-tinged games and things are based on the Call of Cthulhu RPG, which is really the thing which defines "Lovecraftian" now.

Most of what is left now from Lovecraft is really just a bunch of god and creature names and a bit of sanitized descriptive flavor text.

Some pretty awful things have crept in from other Pulp genres, of course. When I look at Masks of Nyarlathotep (from the 80's), it is rife with Fu-Manchu Chinese villains, African and Egyptian cults, and the odd bit of fictional Nairobi divided into districts called "Blacktown", "Whitetown", and "Browntown". (The 2018 version as well as the exhaustive Companion systematically replace these bits. This kind of xenophobia is rife through all of 30's pulp, and isn't just Lovecraft.

Purging Lovecraft's writings is one thing, but there is still some very interesting stuff going on in the wake of Lovecraft. I'm inordinately fond of both The Laundry Files and Carter and Lovecraft. The first is a strange commentary on UK government under the guise of being MI5 meets Cthulhu. The second frequently moves the racism issues with Lovecraft front and center by featuring a black woman named Emily Lovecraft who is a distant relation of HP, and not really much of a fan. The second book drifts into a weird Man in the High Castle kind of mode as well.

Really, both of these are the modern form of pulp--written by people who definitely know that "yeah, that crap is wrong."

...and ditching a look at the latest Arkham Horror seems really almost criminal. This is Lovecraft filtered through Nikki Valens...there is no way any of that will filter through her--and after the masterwork of Legacy of Dragonholt, she is probably my favorite designer.