So, on one level, yes, Cthulhu, etc., are scary because they're

It's all for the glory of Our Goddess Eris Discordia anyway fnord.

>>49486087
>But why are they supposed to be scary in an existential way?
Because it highlights our insignificance on the cosmic scale. If great Cthulhu chose right then to wipe us all out, not only could we not do a thing to stop him and the rest of the universe wouldn't even notice.

we are just that insignificant.

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>>49486087
>It just doesn't hit me the same way it seems to other people.

That's because you're not one of Lovecraft's contemporaries. At the time he was writing, the notions of outer space and the vastness of the universe which we take for granted nowadays were new and therefore scary. And, it should be noted, they were scary mostly to Lovecraft himself, since hardly anyone read his works when he was alive.

>>49486172
And to think, the writing was done before atomic paranoia hit the world.

But yeah, its all about making somewhat tangible, the looming dread of existential insignificance. We do not matter beyond our little planet, and throughout the infinite mass of the universe we are less than a mote in God's eyes.

>>49486199
He also mixed in some good old fashioned racism in his works, but that was just part of his era, I suppose. It crept in everywhere.

>>49486109
True that.
>>49486172
Yeah, but we could be wiped out by our own bullshit or a plague or a supernova or an asteroid or something and the rest of the universe wouldn't notice, and I typed that with little to no stress.
>>49486199
That's a good point.
>>49486204
What about the whole Epicurean "So? God is just background stuff. if God doesn't care what we do, then let's do whatever we want and not worry about God."
>>49486220
As I understand it, he was actually quite a bit more racist than average even for the time.

>>49486220
>but that was just part of his era,
racism sure, but Lovecraft seems to be straight-up xenophobic. It's one thing to claim other races are little more than savages, and whole different thing to claim that they are somehow inherently disturbing.

When reading Lovecraft, It's always best to just not think about the blatant xenophobia and move on.

Also you have to factor in that their forms and thinking are alien and essentially incomprehensible to the human mind - that everything you know and understand means nothing.

The stuff Lovecraft wrote is from a very, very different time. When The Call of Cthulhu was published, the Scopes Monkey Trial, about being allowed to teach Evolution on US schools, had only happened or was happening. Humanity still believed itself to be very special and very different for the most part. Nowadays, we've lived through decades of all kinds of different philosophies and schools of though, atheism, materialism, advancements in scientific understanding, are all commonplace and mundane.

The terror derived from cosmic horror was the idea that everything we know is wrong, what we believed about ourselves, our world and our universe is only the absolute tip of an incomprehensible iceberg reaching into places we physically and mentally cannot go, or we're just utterly wrong in every way about everything. The horror is there's things, be they creatures or concepts or forces, older, more powerful, more intelligent than humanity and there will continue to be no matter what we do. It's not about what Cthulhu IS, it's about what Cthulhu MEANS. If this thing can exist, that goes against all notions of what I believed was possible, what else can exist? What else am I wrong about or don't know?

It also stresses human limitation, that there'll come a point where our bodies and minds just can't handle what we're seeing or trying to understand. It stresses a cold hostility to the universe, that it isn't really out to harm you, but it isn't out to shelter or and won't take any measures to not stomp on you. Cosmic horror is ultimately about the fear of the unknown and it's very much a materialistic unknown, part of the horror is these aren't transcedent gods or demons, they're real, physical things that exist apart from you.

The monsters and cults and evil tomes are just neat tools to get this point across. But again, all of these notions just don't hold the same impact as they did to anyone reading it in the 20s and 30s as cultural mindsets have changed so much.

>>49486303
so like cyberpunk and the 80s, lovecraftian horror is a bit out of context in the modern world and is tied heavily to the 30s?

>>49486303
>>49486389
What would you say is the Lovecraft/Cyberpunk of today? A genre of fiction that's specially suited to the post-postmodern era in which we find ourselves in the mid-2010s?

>>49486280
>and I typed that with little to no stress.
you also are living in 2016 where we are accustomed to such concepts. When Lovecraft wrote his works this was something we really weren't accustomed to and still kinda saw ourselves as being really important to the grand scheme of things. To really have it hit home that we are anything but, it's quite a rude awakening and one that can be frightening.

Even today we have people who can't accept that significant events can happen as a result of minor, or even random acts. these people are the ones who will create these ridiculously elaborate conspiracy theories to give significant events equally significant causes and to put power back into the hands of people (sinister people but still people). Example: World War 1, clusterfuck of overly-elaborate alliances and poor decisions? well yes but that hardly seems significant enough a cause, The Illuminati had their puppets go to war with each other in order to thin the population? Much more significant. 9/11? a bunch of pissed-off Islamists could just alter america so significantly? just like that? No it had to be an inside job! it just had to be! this is their mindset, they find it more comforting than the harsh reality of things. So imagine the shock to their psyche to have all their delusions and beliefs shattered completely in an instant and forced to face reality.

>>49486389
Honestly, yes. The ideas are still worth thinking about and talking about, they're still important to literature and can be used effectively in a story to excite a sense of dread through atmosphere, but to existentially or philosophically scare on anything but a personal level to someone whose never even attempted to consider it, no. The sheer impact these ideas, presented as they are, would have had in 1926, which was such a vibrant and different time when bolder statements and schools of thought about society and the world were beginning emerge, doesn't translate at all into a modern society that's lived through all of it and come out on the other side with a completely different mindset.

But I still think those terrors can be there. I think we're a very arrogant species and in Lovecraft, human arrogance in tampering with forces that exist beyond always leads to disaster. Trying to create black holes or upload organic consciousnesses to machines, who knows what'll happen. What if when we take our minds out of our brains, once physically unable to see certain things, are then suddenly bombarded by sights once invisible and unknown? Stuff like that I believe is still applicable.

>>49486389
>>49486303
Somewhat, although you are also approaching it in the wrong way. Lovecraft was not only about fear of the unknown, of the terrible future. He was also about the fear of inability, the fear of being able to do nothing, the idea that all of your life, all the years that you have spent learning and training and becoming a better human are all for naught, because in the end, the universe is completely beyond your control.

A good way to compare it is to consider your fear when one of your children have cancer. There's nothing you can do, nothing at all to save him from death.

In short, Lovecraft is the fear of the incomprehensible yes, and yes, the fear of meaningless, but his greatest ability was to induce the feeling of uselessness.

>>49486483
post-cyberpunk? its a more modern take on cyberpunk, where the internet isnt evil, cybernetics and AI arent soul sucking monsters, and evil corporations arent monolithic evil sinks. but are a large conglomerate of people good and bad

but it isnt really popular enough to qualify

>>49486483
I think cosmic horror has a place in modern society. We're jaded and arrogant, humans are thick-headed and headstrong sometimes, I think things to give us a slap on the face can still exist. They can be external forces of which we have no control, gamma ray bursts from the depths of the cosmos or first contact being less than stellar and what that might do to the human race. Cosmic horror stresses lack of control and knowledge, and today, when we really do think we're in the big leagues, it would be even more disastrous to find out maybe we shouldn't be poking around in the depths of atoms or in invisible light spectrums or seeking parallel universes.

>>49486109
Hey, does any /tg/ stuff besides that Illuminati game from Steve Jackson Games draw on Discordianism at all?

>>49486199
There still are people who are, for some inexplicable reason, frightened by the scale of the universe.

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Stranger Things on Netflix definitely has a cosmic horror vibe to it. As does John Carpenter's The Thing.

>>49486635

It is almost indescribably big and should make us feel tiny. Then you look at how violent it is, and you realize how quickly Earth could disappear. That should scare anyone, at least for a little.

>>49486635
I'm one of those people. I've always wanted to leave a legacy for myself and one of my biggest fears is being forgotten. The idea that eventually the sun will swallow the earth and any trace that I existed will be wiped away is something that keeps me up at night.

Hell, in some of his own stories, the alien beings are actually vaguely friendly, if unknowable. The things from Shadow out of Time, for example, were nice enough, in a way. They just didn't quite understand that humans would find it terrifying to exist as a brain in a jar.

>Hi there!
>Oh christ, what are you? What is all this?
>Wow, you sure scream a lot, don't you?
>Why can't I see, or feel?
>You're a brain in a jar. We forgot to get a body ready for you.
>Oh, God. What sort of monsters are you?
>Oh, that's nice. Monsters. You're not so special, yourself, you know!
>Oh God, I'm not?

>>49486204
>And to think, the writing was done before atomic paranoia hit the world.
Lovecraft was alive during the Great War. Wonder if he knew anybody that caught a nasty case of shellshock, cause that has a bit in common with the madness Cthulhu seems to cause.

>>49486756
The Mi-Go were probably the least overtly malignant, but in the end we never did figure out their deal. The Elder Things woke up to find their city deserted for millions of years and naked apes trying to cut them open, they're arguably good guys. The Yithians were genocidal monsters, though.

I do like that Lovecraft aliens actually look, y'know, alien. Not rubber forehead bullshit, actually alien and weird. Like, "need to re-read the description several times" weird.

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>>49486635
>>49486723
>>49486738

>"The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death—however mutable man may be able to make them—our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light."

>>49486574
Modern scifi like Blindsight and Neuropath both fit the cosmic horror niche quite nicely, I think. Some of Steven King's stuff too.

>>49486723
The spookiest thing about Stranger Things is the implications behind the happy ending
>there's a shadow realm populated by bloodthirsty carnivorous monsters, but lets just set down for a nice family dinner
>ESP be real and the boundary between realities be porous sheeeeeit

>>49486287
>It's always best to just not think about the blatant xenophobia and move on.
You can't bring yourself to think over ideas in a book you're reading? Why are you reading literature?

>>49486087
Lovecraft is just a meme, just like mexicans.

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>>49486738
I find that kind of comforting, in a way. You don't have to worry about accomlishing something or making your mark on history, because in the end all you have accomplished will turn to dust and be forgotten. Anybody thinking themselves as better than you is merely deluding themselves, because in the end we're all equal before entropy.

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>>49486087
Did it ever occur to you that you might be dim Anon?

>>49486087
Did you read any actual Lovecraft, or are you basing your knowledge of the mythos on lolcthulhu memes?

>>49486220
Do we really need to do the "das waicist" gig everytime HPL is mentioned?

>>49486172
Great Cthulhu wouldn't 'choose' to wipe us all out, if it happened he'd do it by accident, like the number of things you kill when you walk on the grass, he'd be going about his business doing whatever's important to squid-dragon-godzilla and wind up causing the apocalypse without really knowing or caring

>>49486199
>since hardly anyone read his works when he was alive.
This makes me sadder than any amount of eldritch gods and looming apocalypses ever could. Living your entire life working towards something and never receiving any recognition for it, until you die and everyone realizes how great you were but it's too late.

My favourite way of explaining Lovecraftian horror is to imagine that every explosive, every nuke, is rigged up to a random number generator (pick any range you like) which is generating another number every second when a certain number comes up on the generator, they all detonate. Lovecraft essentially said that we're already living like that anyway, at any point forces beyond our control or ability to predict could, for no particular reason, cause massive destruction and suffering.

Sometimes terrible things happen to random people, for no purpose, and there's nothing you can do about it.

It's more depressing than scary but still.

The other aspect of it which has already been mentioned is also the idea of relative insignificance. Even if humans one day were to found an empire spanning across our whole galaxy, our galaxy is just a tiny speck of light in the universe and one day it will go out like all the other and be like we never existed.

It is denigrating the concept of the noble human struggle to little more than the mould that grows on a piece of fruit left out for too long.

We have a very high notion of ourselves, our achievements and our place in the universe.

>>49486220
He's not nearly as racist as [Spoiler]____me_____

>>49486087
>>49486280

As many anons have already written, Lovecraft wrote at a time when almost everyone believed, to some extent, that humans were special, that God made us in his image, and that he cares about each and every one of us.

Now, you've seen how bent out of shape religious people get about Richard Dawkins? Now imagine that rather than a somewhat mildly spoken upper class British guy saying mean things about your God and disparaging his existence, it's a nightmarish amorphous horror you can't even describe accurately without sounding like a raving lunatic and which is somehow able to impress upon you by it's sheer existence the realisation that your most deeply held beliefs are nonsense.
That is why Lovecraftian stuff drives people mad; because it causes such powerful cognitive dissonance that trying to come up with a way of fitting it into your old world-view breaks you

>>49486914

I read about some philosopher or political scientist or something who described nine "revolutions" in human thought that forced us to reconsider our place in the universe. They were in three groups of threes (those we'd passe dthrough, those we were still passing through, those our society still hadnt got its head around; the first group included Heliocentrism and Evolution, the middle group the Cosmological revolution (the universe is big beyond our comprehension, i.e. Lovecraftian shit) while the last three included the Neurological revolution, where we acknowledge we're all just a load of electrical currents floating through a sack of meat and that can be changed at will.

Seems like Blindsight might be part of the latter.

>>49486199
>>49489000
As someone who has fought with depression in their life, I will tell you that that is a true existential terror that creeps into you when you are unhappy. It may be why Lovecraftian stories appeal to me, but the idea that my life is essentially pointless, that, nothing I do will have a lasting effect except to equally small and pointless lives around me and that it is just going to be filled with pain and struggle before a sharp decline to the end terrified me.

The thought of ending my life to save myself that pain and pointlessness was only countered by my near infinite fear of the meaningless of death that on the other side is only a endless abyss of non-existence.

In truth though, whilst this makes me feel very uncomfortable, I readily concede that it is in part a combination of a depressed mindset, a nihilistic perspective and personal dysfunction so might not be relatable to everyone.

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>>49489110
Didn't you use a proper spoiler, because a proper spoiler is black___?

>>49489316
pic related. We really are the OG eldritch beings. A tentacle-y mass "channeling" a conciousness to drive a bone structure wrapped in meat.

>>49486087
The idea that humans are not the center of the universe was a horrifying truth to HP Lovecraft.

Given that it's an important life lesson to learn growing up that most kids have figured out by the time they're 15, I think this says more about HP Lovecraft than it does about humanity.

>>49486087
>and apparently looking at them drives you mad or whatever. Like, they're dragons with a gaze attack. Okay.
WROOOOOOOONG

THIS IS A MISCONCEPTION BASED ON A LITERAL INTERPRETATION OF THE RPG'S RULES.

THEY DRIVE YOU MAD BECAUSE THE IMPLICATIONS OF THEIR EXISTENCE ARE TOO MUCH TO BEAR.

WHICH DEPENDS UPON THE CHARACTER WHO'S WITNESSING THEM.

RANDOLPH CARTER WAS USED TO THAT SORT OF SHIT AND WAS NEVER DRIVEN MAD BY THEM.

>>49490668
Although Randolph was special in many ways, he was a king of a mystical land in a dimension that is largely guarded from most Eldritch beings.

>>49489032
I understand that there are a number of very big rocks flying through space, and that every now and then one hits the Earth and does enough damage to wipe out, say, all the dinosaurs. Not much to be done about those, whatever Bruce Willis tells you.

>>49490025
Oh god, why was my first thought 'Yes, that's a nervous system alright. I want to lick it.'

>>49490689
He wasn't the king of anything, that's Kuranes.

Yeah, my existential terror rises up to torment me a little bit when I think about it.
Then I jack off and it goes away.

>>49490904
You are right, I'm thinking of Kuranes from Celephais

>>49490853
obviously you want to lick someone's nerve endings

>>49486087
The existential horror comes from the Insignificance of man. It doesn't scare everyone, but Mankind likes to think of itself as important, or special in most cases, and the idea of Chthulu basically treats humanity as next to nothing.

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>>49491463
But why?!

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>>49486087
A lot of people miss the point of Cthulhu. Remember, this guy gets his face caved in by one dude on a steamboat- sure he regenerated quickly, but he's not an untouchable.

Yeah, Cthulhu was on one level a big scary monster, but it's not that looking at Cthulhu makes you go mad. The bigger danger to your sanity was the fact he was a walking contradiction of everything humans had taken for granted.

By merely existing, he obliterates the concept that we're the sovereigns of a universe God has created for us, making us in his image. We are not the peak of creation, we might even be less than notable.

It'd be like learning instead of God making Adam in his image and Eve from Adam's rib, humans sprung from some corn kernel in God's shit when he wasn't looking.

2. We are not alone, and Earth doesn't 'belong' to us the way we always assumed. Killing each other over chunks of the Earth suddenly seems a lot more pointless knowing something essentially owns us.

In 1930s America, we were the center of the universe in science, politics, power and God.

Cthulhu was just the guy in the rubber monster costume breaking into your bedroom at night to grab those concepts you held so confidently and chuck them out the window. Then he bulldozes your house down so he can build a condo that you can't even figure out where the fucking door is.

And if that still doesn't do it for you, then hey it's fine. Horror is as subjective as comedy and HP certainly had a specific bent to his horror. You gave it a shot and I can respect that. Better than the people who refuse to give it the time of day because "OMG RACIST"

>>49491686
Maybe you are just a wee bit weird?

>>49491689
>It'd be like learning instead of God making Adam in his image and Eve from Adam's rib, humans sprung from some corn kernel in God's shit when he wasn't looking.

None of this is a big deal to anyone who hasn't been raised religious.

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>>49491693
Noooooo

>>49491732
most people were in the 20s

>>49491732
Well, that was his point though. Cthulu isn't necessary scary for everyone, but for it's time and for people with a particular inclination, it was.

If I wrote a horror story set mostly in a dark forest, and I was really good in writing horror, it would mostly strike you as 'that's neat'. But If you lived in a hut in the middle of the woods and that was all you knew, you'd find it scary.

Medieval horror stories are almost comedy to us. Between living with different fears and different worlds, they also care for different things. You didn't even need to deny god to scare a medieval peasant, you merely had to hint that the minor flaw of character that anyone can have, can bring awful consequences.

Horror is not a genre that ages well. It may still be neat or have a good style and prose, but the good horror captures the fears of it's time. I don't know what our generation fears are, there's something about environmental decay and science going too far, but there's probably better themes.

>>49486914

The worst part is the rift in the basement will only get bigger.

>>49491592
There's also the fact that someone saying they've internalised something and actually believing it are two different things. Take most people's reactions to sudden or sustained violence for instance, just because we're innured to a glossy and sterilised version of it through our media doesn't make bearing it a whole lot different. If anything it could just as well be painted as a form of denial.

>>49491834
I would have said the current generations fears are to do with the loss of privacy and restriction of information and the idea of some outside entity observing us and retaining secret knowledge about the world which we don't have. See every conspiracy theory ever.

>>49491872
i think that was the 80s, before facebook and twitter made us willingly give up privacy for fame

>>49491872
But what would be the over the top horror scenario here?

And I mean, there's a shared element between most conspiracies and lovecraft. In the sense that the Democrats Moloch cult, or society of the uber rich, or illuminatti, are just groups so big and powerful we can't do anything agaisnt them, not even prove they exist, which make us insignificant in comparison.

But I see those theories less as horror stories and more as comfort stories. If something so powerful manipulates the world, it takes one's personal responsibility in putting pressure in government and corporations.

>How is "we were the side effects of the activities of some gods that don't care about us" any worse than there not being a god? In fact, isn't it better in a way, since the vain struggle against those gods is at least more concrete than struggling against pure abstract meaninglessness alone?

If there's no god, the meaning of the universe is what you make of it, for our sapience grants us the ability to assign purpose and there is no grand purpose, no will other than ours to make us into liars, and if there are other alien species out there, they most likely are not so different from us: They may be strange, but they'll still have wants and needs we can comprehend.

Not so with Lovecraft: There IS a fundamental meaning, and humanity has no part in it. Not only is humanity meaningless in the grand scheme of things, we're also insignificant. And you can't even comfort yourself by thinking that meaning is what you make of it, for that's only a comfortable illusion when a true meaning does exist. There are also aliens, and they too look upon us as we look upon to ants.

>>49491732
There's still plenty of people who genuinely believe humanity is the center of the universe created in God's image. One of the reason republican-leaning politicians are more likely to oppose enviromental laws is because they also tend to be highly religious, and believe that since God gave humanity dominion over the world, we can fuck it up however we like. Besides, everybody knows the rapture or the second coming will be happening within the next decade (never mind it we've said the same thing for the past 2000 years), so no point in saving resources to future generations.

>>49491689
Cthulhu's also actually pretty low on the totem pole as far as Lovecraftian horrors go. He's to a human as humans are to ants (except ants and humans are at least both carbon-based lifeforms and share a very remote common ancenstor), but compared to Yog-Sothot, Shub-Niggurath and Azatoth he's barely more significant than humans are.

>>49492043
The existence of the aliens doesn't make their meaning any more objective than ours.
>>49492056
That raises an interesting question:

Would Cthulhu be driven mad by, and live in terror of, Yog-Sothoth, Shub-Niggurath, Azathoth, etc.?

>>49492121
>Would Cthulhu be driven mad by, and live in terror of, Yog-Sothoth, Shub-Niggurath, Azathoth, etc.?
It'd play like a scene from Rick and Morty I imagine.

>>49486087
It's because cosmic horror is a low genre designed to titillate plebeians, and not an intelligent exploration of anything meaningful.

Maybe some church-going prole would be scared by the idea that the world doesn't revolve around him, but even in Lovecraft's time, and long before, elites in society have always acknowledged that our greatness is subjective.

Furthermore, a cosmic horror is /not/ objectively more significant than humanity, even if it calls itself a god, is 20 feet tall, and can summon tentacles from darkness. The worth of such a being, and indeed of any being, is defined by the subjectivity perceiving it. Mankind is as important as we make it out to be, and nothing can actually challenge that notion.

>>49492177
I don't have a fedora big enough for this.

>>49492177
>Furthermore, a cosmic horror is /not/ objectively more significant than humanity, even if it calls itself a god, is 20 feet tall, and can summon tentacles from darkness. The worth of such a being, and indeed of any being, is defined by the subjectivity perceiving it. Mankind is as important as we make it out to be, and nothing can actually challenge that notion
well since yog-sothoth is the space-time continuum and azathoth is the initial creation and the final destruction I think it's safe to say they're significant no matter what viewpoint you take

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>>49492201
>le ebin hat meme

>>49492121
>The existence of the aliens doesn't make their meaning any more objective than ours.
Them being so far beyond us as to be incomprehensible to us does. And though it rarely takes a central stage, not only do aliens exist, but so do literal gods.

>Would Cthulhu be driven mad by, and live in terror of, Yog-Sothoth, Shub-Niggurath, Azathoth, etc.?
He's their high-priest.

>>49492121
According to some sources, Cthulhu worships the Outer Gods. He's referred in the story as a high priest of the Great Old Ones, but it's not quite clear whether he is a Great Old One who is a high priest (Call of Cthulhu would imply he is one of the GOOs), or if he worships the Great Old Ones (Dunwitch Horror implies that Cthulhu is related to the GOOs but is not one himself). The common intrepertion is the former, in which case he probably worships the Outer Gods or something.

>>49492163

I forget where it's mentioned, but Cthulhu is supposed to be a priest of Yog-Sothoth.

>>49492221
>yog-sothoth is the space-time continuum and azathoth is the initial creation and the final destruction I think it's safe to say they're significant no matter what viewpoint you take
And you'd be wrong. Either these things are literally fundamental features of the physical universe in which case we have no reason to personify them, or they are, as is almost always the case in cosmic horror and with Lovecraft especially, only connected to these concepts by hyperbolic association, and therefore can be ignored outright.

Furthermore, there's nothing intrinsically important about either of those concepts, let alone their origins in the physical universe.

having read 90% of the way through an enormous anthology of lovecraft stuff, the initial cosmic horror stuff appears to come from him being an upper middle-class agoraphobe and his stuff became a lot more like other scifi horror writers once he started to travel.

>>49492260
>existing at every point in time and space on every possible timeline simultaneously and capable of manipulating it
>unimportant

also it's not just a non-sentient fundamental aspect of the universe because one of the book characters had a conversation with it.

>>49492260
What criteria would something have to satisfy to qualify as intrinsically important?

>>49486220

The thing is that Lovecraft was sheltered for most of his life. His friends even made fun of him because of that and kept telling him to move to Boston proper. He did and his works actually improved leaps and bounds.

>>49492260
according to the lovecraftian mythos as it exists now, azathoth is the creature in who's fever-dreams we live.
you can't be like "they are only associated with the universe because love craft says they are" because they don't exist in real life as far as we know and the universe that lovecraft writes about is inherently different from our own by virtue of these things existing. Cthulhu flew to earth from light years away by flapping his wings. the fact that in that world yog-sothoth is actually life itself is not that out of the ordinary as far as lovecraft is concerned.
tldr: cthulhu flew accross the galaxy by flapping his wings, your argument is invalid

>>49486087
It's worth pointing out that not all Lovecraft stories are 'human encounters huge monster, realises truth of own insignificance, goes mad' like The Call Of Cthulhu. Here's a few examples of other plots:


>The Rats In The Walls
>Man moves back to old family estate, discovers that his family were a mad cannibal cult back in the day and that his genetics doom him to become a mad cannibal himself. He ends up going off the deep end and trying to eat one of his friends.
>The Colour Out Of Space
>Ecological disaster strikes a remote farm. The residents become sickly, maddened and mutated, which is described in unpleasant detail. In the end, everybody dies and the area is left horribly tainted. The moral is that sometimes bad things happen for no reason, and there's nothing you can do about it.
>Dreams In The Witch House
>Promising mathematician starts to investigate a theory that would dramatically alter our understanding of the universe. Attracts the attention of much older, more horrible beings who have already mastered this mathematics and use its practical applications to torment and brainwash him, eventually implicating him in horrible crimes.
>The Thing On The Doorstep
>A man's wife uses brainwashing and hypnosis to force her mind into his body, taking it over and forcing him out of his own body. He tries to fight back, but her will is stronger. Eventually he snaps and murders her, but this doesn't help as she simply forces his mind into her corpse and takes over his mind for good. Nobody believed anything was wrong until it was far too late.
>The Shadow Over Innsmouth
>A man finds himself trapped in a remote town where the residents have allowed themselves to become corrupted by inhuman forces. When the locals realise they're onto him, they try to kill him. He barely escapes with his life, and in doing so sees the true depths of their depravity. It subsequently turns out that the same corruption was dormant in him all along.

>>49492260
Yog-Sothot is heavily implied, if not outright stated, to literally be the universe. Yog-Sothot exist at all points of space and time because all points of space and time exist in Yog-Sothot, and all that.

Lovecraft's "cosmology" was always kind of vaque, though, but you definitely get the idea that Yog-Sothot is at the very least the equivalent of the capital G God.

>>49492417
>The Rats in the Walls
Is it definitely genetic or could it be that the belief that it was certain was itself what drove him mad? That sounds far more interesting, but I know Lovecraft was a big ole racist who thought genes determined whether you were a good person or not.
>The Shadow Over Innsmouth
I'd read this one already as well as Call of Cthulhu. Dreams In The Witch House and The Thing On The Doorstep sound fucking terrifying.

>>49492325
It's as significant as it's made out to be, and in the case of something like that, which again I believe is completely wrapped in hyperbole and not a genuine assessment of its abilities, there is no reason to acknowledge it as a sapient creature because its sapience is not related to its power.

>>49492335
Nothing is intrinsically important and nothing can be intrinsically important. Significance is an assigned, subjective quality.

>>49492415
>>49492423
"God" is not a quality, it's a title. It's given to things by creatures capable of assigning it. What you actually have is a thing with lots of power. Even if it's responsible for creating the universe, it is not intrinsically any more important than your mom, and for many, probably even most people, it will not be treated as more important in fact.

>>49486220
I hear this all the time, but I've read a good number of his works and never really caught on to that ever. Where exactly does it come up?

>>49492492
It's subtler in most of his prose. I know of at least one explicitly racist poem he wrote, entitled "On the Creation of Niggers."

I'm not joking. That's the name.

However, probably in large part due to his friendship with Howard, who was kind of on the opposite extreme (anti-racist for his time), he became much more mellow about it later on, and even wrote a story in which a black family is depicted as having positive traits.

The thing with horror is it's all about the individual. It's about what scares you. If the author was scared, some reader will be scared too.

I know I never understood horror until Lovecraft gave me nightmares. And it was never Cthulhu. Rats in the Walls and Dagon. Gravity was the scariest movie I've ever seen, Windlands was the scariest game (wade into the sandstorm once and now I can't even look at it, much less fucking swing over it). Emrakul gives me nightmares.

So I don't know, if it scares you, it scares you.

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All you anons here should actually read more of Lovecraft's fiction, so you can understand it instead of just reacting to memes.

It's free and online, so no excuses.

http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/

>>49492467
lovecraft's universe only bears the most surface of resemblances to our own. the fact that in our world the laws of physics don't change because a giant octopus says so does not mean that they don't in lovecraft's world. if being able to decide that newton's third law doesn't apply to your friends doesn't constitute important to you, I don't think we have the same definition of important

>>49492121
In the Dunwich Horror there's a sentence or two that states that Cthulhu can just barely see the otherworldly things in the universe, whereas humans can't see anything at all, comparatively.

>>49492492

The protagonist of Rats in the Walls has a cat named Niggerman. The cultists in The Call of Cthulhu are depraved, degenerate, and non-white. The Horror at Red Hook is also racist as hell. A black man is described as a gorilla in Herbert West Reanimator. That's off the top of my head.

>>49491872
Nah, the current fear, if i can even call it that, is the vague dread that we are in a sliw apocalypse, and that no new discovery will appear to drag us out of our hole.

Another big fear is that we are truly alone. No gods, no aliens, no dragons, not even a sxary cthulu. Just nothing, forever.

>>49492551
>the fact that in our world the laws of physics don't change because a giant octopus says so does not mean that they don't in lovecraft's world

It's not that they change in Lovecraft's world, it's that they function in manners and dimensions we can't comprehend.

>>49492603
>Nah, the current fear, if i can even call it that, is the vague dread that we are in a sliw apocalypse, and that no new discovery will appear to drag us out of our hole.
You're going to die. The world will end. These are both inevitable.

But so what? That shit will happen when it happens, and in all likelihood, that won't be for a long, long time.

>Another big fear is that we are truly alone. No gods, no aliens, no dragons, not even a sxary cthulu. Just nothing, forever.
I cannot understand the depraved mind that actively wishes for gods and monsters.

If humans are the only sapient life in the universe, then, should the absence of other sapient life be considered a problem, we need only make more. That's not an insurmountable hurdle, and in fact it's one we get closer to overcoming every day.

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>>49492465
It's not clear exactly what happens in The Rats In The Walls, since the whole thing is narrated by the crazy guy himself, who merely claims that - although he's aware it looks like he ate his friend - actually he didn't, honest, please believe me...
There's a lot more to Lovecraft than big cosmic horror. There's very strong themes of corruption in it, too; both in people's bloodlines (look at Innsmouth) and just from contact with weird shit (as in The Colour Out Of Space). Coupled with his fascination with old, often run-down towns and buildings (the guy was really rather good at describing architecture evocatively), there's a strong sense of decay and entropy that creeps through his work. Everything is coming undone, beautiful things fall apart or rot, people go wrong in the head, the world stops making sense. (yes,since race-mixing was a big issue for Lovecraft, that theme does tend to come through in this, but it's more him using symbols that resonated with him and his culture to get his real point across)
pic related is an illustration to Innsmouth that gets that horrible corrupt feel quite nicely.

>>49492672
Stop thinking this line of thought and, on top of that, do not apply it to octopi.
That's my idea, patent pending

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>>49492629
>they function in manners and dimensions we can't comprehend.
>God works in mysterious ways!

>>49492467
The idea that mankind is as important as we make it out to be is rooted in the same notions that cosmic horror is intended to challenge (it's success, like all horror, lies in the execution and a willingness of the audience to engage). The idea that free will is an illusion, a phenomenon experienced as a cancerous offshoot of a socialisation mechanism and that all our decisions are made by a complex state-machine our consciousness perches precariously atop of; or a non-abstracted internalisation that at any moment everything that humanity has or will ever be can be scoured from the universe for no rational reason.

This is to say nothing of the instinctive reaction to being confronted with a reality completely outside the context of human experience.

>>49492744
From what ive gathered, the instinctual reaction to completely aluen things is to down a 40 and be all "hell yes five dimensional waterslide time!"

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>>49486087
You have to see it form a Christian perspective. Belief in a kind and loving god, and humanity as the most important and beloved part of his creation, used to be the norm. Before we knew better people used to assume that the earth was literally the centre of the universe, both physically and figuratively.
You see, Lovecraft was building off of Nietzsche. You may have heard the phrase "god is dead." That was Neitzsche talking about the fact that God used to be the best explanation for everything and everyone believed in it. It was something that was never questioned. God was real and he loved us, and everyone knew it. And then that stopped being true. Now we have explanations for things that don't require the intervention of god. God went from a certainty to an uncertainty.

So yeah, the existential dread of The Call of Cthulhu is most powerful if you believe you're the centre of the universe and therefore being told or shown that you're not is upsetting. It's still works for a lot of people who don't really think about this stuff.

Also, it's not a gaze attack. The idea is that seeing something so alien is just that disturbing that it drives you mad. But it's not just seeing it, it's the knowledge of it's existence. It's going from believing that something like that cannot exist to knowing that it does. Honestly, the instant madness part of Lovecraft's writings is one of the sillier aspects.

Also, your supposition that a godless universe is somehow worse than a uncaring god is not inherently true at all. Plenty of people are fine with abstract meaninglessness and also Cthulhu isn't really different from abstract meaninglessness? There's no more or less vain struggling. You seem to be confusing material from The Mountains of Madness with The Call of Cthulhu. Cthulhu didn't have anything to do with humanities creation in the mythos.
I mean, ultimately Cthulhu is just a personification of an extinction level event, like a meteorite wiping the earth clean.

>>49492744
Free will is an illusion, sure, but it's a damn good one. Our choices seem real to us, even though they are not chosen. Our understanding of good, evil, significance and insignificance - it's all rooted in unchosen axiomatic positions before we even cross the mechanical hurdle of the fundamentally determined/arbitrary universe. But just because it's certain that my enjoyment of mint chocolate chip ice cream is an unchosen choice which I absolutely no influence over doesn't mean I stop enjoying it. Indeed, it is necessary for me to enjoy it.

So too is it necessary for me to believe what I believe and value what I value. A tall green tentacle man with magic powers isn't going to alter my actions or beliefs any more than I am, because he too is as subject to the fundamentally determined/arbitrary universe, and even setting aside his agency, the positions that we have are not tied to some material or rational quality, they're tied to unchosen axioms - axioms that aren't going to be, and actually cannot be persuaded away, no matter the amount of force applied.

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>>49486087
>So, on one level, yes, Cthulhu, etc., are scary because they're big dangerous monsters and apparently looking at them drives you mad or whatever. Like, they're dragons with a gaze attack.
Except that's not how most eldritch beings are at all. Most of them are terrifying because they were completely alien in every way. It's the same reason why number stations and zooming out in Space Engine freaks people out.

The biggest hit the Lovecraft novels took was his place in pop culture. All the monsters immediately lost that factor once everyone knew what they looked like and where they came from.

>>49492922
Zooming out doesnt freak me out, but number stations do.

Who maintains them? Where? Why?
I know iy is just spygames mostly, but what percentage of them are spygames and what percentage are covens of cannibalistic madmen?

I am also scared of deep ocean, because i know giant squids are a real fucking thing

>>49486280
>Yeah, but we could be wiped out by our own bullshit or a plague or a supernova or an asteroid or something and the rest of the universe wouldn't notice, and I typed that with little to no stress.

Yes, but in general, most of those things you knoware vanishingly low probability events, and so you can put them out of your mind safe in the knowledge that it would takesome serious bad rolls for everything you've ever known to suddenly end.

The idea is that once you see the eldritch god, you can't forget the eldritch god. That idea of "well, what are the chances, right?" doesn't work anymore, because turns out there's a thing that shows that all of our convenient fictions were absolutely wrong, that can end us all at any point, and nobody can do anything about it and nobody you tell it to will ever believe you.

Honestly, it does seem like the kind of thing that would drive a man to some serious panic paranoia pretty quickly, living every second in the unforgettable fear that maybe next second is the last one.

>>49492825
Huh, humans being as ants to Cthulhu actually means that, in great enough swarms, we can hurt or maybe even kill him.

>>49492594
>The protagonist of Rats in the Walls has a cat named Niggerman.

and it's great every time I read it

>>49492883
Culture shock and PTSD are genuine phenomenon that don't exactly ask permission to alter people's perceptions and reactions to the world around them and they're based on stimulus that people experience every day. An environment that provokes a sustained and/or sudden challenge to internalised notions puts them at risk whether you like it or not.

>>49492993
We'd need what is more or less the Imperial Guard tho.

>>49487413
But you have to be stupid or extremely sheltered to be scared of Lovecraft in the 21st century though.

>>49493129
>be scared of Lovecraft in the 21st century
well yes. He's been dead for a while now, he's hardly going to do anything.
Being scared BY him, however...
yes, I am being a pedant

>>49493129
Nobody is scared of Lovecraft in the 21st century. Modern respect for his work are for pioneering the field, not out of any genuine terror.

Lovecraftian themes however csn still be used to great effect in more updated works.

>>49492990
But elder gods are still a matter of "you're fine if you dont roll bad". I mean, the stars being right is so fucking unlikely.

>>49493129
Um, no? You wouldn't? There's plenty of stuff that's not that scary simply because it's literature rather than a slasher jump-scare movie, but there's also plenty of existentialist stuff that is in fact quite scary and will likely continue to be for some time.

For me, Rats in the Walls is one of the best, because the protagonist has an unavoidable psychosis. He knows he's going mad, and he hates it, but he can't stop it. And when he recovers his faculties, he's completely horrified at both his actions and its unavoidability.

>>49492978
Both of those fears are derived from fear of the unknown, which is exactly what Lovecraft used. And now that everybody knows what Lovecraft's monsters look like and operate like, they aren't scary anymore.

>>49490025
Car broke, phone yes?

>>49493283
Kek I make that reference once in a while and nobody gets it

>>49493213
>For me, Rats in the Walls is one of the best, because the protagonist has an unavoidable psychosis. He knows he's going mad, and he hates it, but he can't stop it. And when he recovers his faculties, he's completely horrified at both his actions and its unavoidability.
Oh, wow, Lovecraft has a werewolf story.

>>49492594
>The protagonist of Rats in the Walls has a cat named Niggerman
My grandma had a cat named Nigger. It wasn't entirely uncommon back then.

>>49493317
It's referencing that episode of Courage where some brain people from outer space come to visit, right?

>>49493333
Only if you consider the Shining to be a werewolf story too.

>>49493477
Jack Torrance doesn't regret what he did, he fucking dies.

>>49493428
Yea that's the one.

>>49492545
Ok, which one of these do I read first? I wanna get into this

>>49493839
His earlier stories (pre-1920ish) are kinda garbage. There's a few decent ones, notably Dagon, but I'd start thereabouts if you want to read chronologically.

If you just want the best-of, try Shadow Over Innsmouth, Shadow Out of Time, Dunwich Horror, Colour Out of Space, Rats in the Walls. That'll get you started.

>>49486199
This, Lovecraftian stuff is very much of its time, we were just starting to really face up to what our meaningless place in the vast blackness really meant.

It's like the TARDIS and other forms of non Euclidian geometry, when it was introduced it was portrayed as seriously weird, but whilst it'd still screw with your perceptions you've been mentally prepared for it now and probably wouldn't find it maddening or terrifying.

>>49493839
I think the order in which he wrote them is the best one. But ultimately it doesn't matter, because most of the stories are not really connected to each other.

So like listed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._P._Lovecraft_bibliography
But before those comes "The Beast in the Cave" and "The Alchemist" (which are listed the Juvenilia category).

>>49493203

No, the stars will come right. It's a cosmic cycle and we're just 'lucky' enough to live in quiet times. The End Times are coming, and we cannot stop them or understand Why. It just Is.

>>49493557
>he only watched the movie
>he didn't read the book

Secondaryfags are cancer.

>>49486087
everyone you love and care about is but an insect under the feet of the great cthulhu

>>49486199
however, quite a few lovecraft short stories arent about horror at all, they are about the outlandish and strange.

>>49492056
Oh I agree, he's essentially a glorified monster for Godzilla to beat up in the grand scheme of things.

I do like Cthulhu, but I find the pop culture conception that he's an apocalyptic God dumb.

>>49491732
I'm an atheist too, but I can see the power of the concept. Hence why I said it's a genre of horror that I can understand being hit or miss. Just wanted to frame it from an angle for OP.

>>49494247
That's one of the benefits of reading Lovecraft's earlier short stories, you can really see how his style progressed and when he started honing in on certain themes.

He really loved the idea of there being a secondary, more ethereal world that humans keep out of sight and mind but occassionally tap into. Dream worlds, different dimensions, etc.

>>49494014
That os exactly like pulsars though. We cannot ever see them coming.

>>49494014
What if we were able to build a warp drive and launch a ship at FTL with a device on it to make a relevant star go supernova so it can never align?

>>49494295
>that he's an apocalyptic God dumb.
this is a bit of a yes and no. To us humans, he might as well be, and what was essentially a brief stirring in his slumber was enough to cause outbreaks of madness and mass hysteria throughout the world. If he woke up fully, we'd probably be fucked as a good portion of the world goes mad. In that sense, he is and apocalyptic god because his wakening will fuck us up horribly, possibly irrevocably, and there's shit all we can do about it.

On the grand scale though, he's the local priest, maybe bishop. Probably a good sorcerer but the crawling chaos probably doesn't give a shit about him.

>>49494433
well then you run smack dab into the question of whether references to "The Stars Are Right" mean that the stars are the cause, or if they're just a phenomenon naturally aligned with the timescale, in the vein of a criminal being released at the same time a movie ends. A useful yardstick, but pausing the movies doesn't delay the release.

>>49486087
>But why are they supposed to be scary in an existential way?
Humans like to think they're important and that anything else gives a shit about them. The central tenet of cosmic horror is "there are other things than humans out there, very powerful things, but they only sometimes and only barely acknowledge the existence of humans, and it's hard to know if being noticed is worse than being ignored."

>>49494460
Fair enough- him causing an apocalypse through insanity is a good way of looking at it.

That said, most people seem to treat him like a destroyer when he's just a big fat hedonist bastard who gets punk'd by one half crazy man in a steamboat.

I think Nyarlathotep did it better though, where he's traveling around the world showcasing sciences and technologies that drive the surrounding cities into pandemonium.

Also plays right back into my point being that Lovecraft's horror had a lot more immediate relevancy in a time where we were still predominantly Christian and just really scraping the tip of the scientific iceberg.

>>49486483
Superheroes. Everyone wants to be a superhero, we all see ourselves as unique individual special snowflakes that could be president or make a difference in the world only if we were listened to, because this is the most entitled generation yet. Superhero movies are, for the most part, big, flashy, loud and meaningless, just like the 21st century life.

>>49494460
>On the grand scale though, he's the local priest, maybe bishop. Probably a good sorcerer but the crawling chaos probably doesn't give a shit about him.

That's sort of the point. He's not all that powerful in the grand scale of things - maybe the most powerful being with residence on Earth - and yet he can drive people insane just by dreaming.

>>49494640
Go to bed, grandpa.

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>>49494433
If you have the technology, you could fight the Old Ones on equal terms. But you don't have the technology and it may be that literally no human is smart enough to invent it. So it won't be humanity fighting Old Ones but superhuman Old One-level AIs or posthumans, who will probably have killed us as unthinkingly as the Old Onea would have.

>>49487026
Where can I find more of this terrible and unending adorableness?

So, as a Discordian, the primordial chaos from whence all comes is my friend.. Given that, what is there in the Mythos that can frighten me on a level beyond "oh, yeah, that big monster probably could kill me?"

>>49486087
>of some gods
they are described as gods since is the concept we have that best approximates them, also Cthulhu is not even Fat Cat level in Lovecraft's power levels, he is a priest of the Elder Gods
>vain struggle against those gods is at least more concrete
in proper lovecraftian stories, humanity cannot struggle against the Elder Gods any more than a grain of sand can struggle against the tide. whether you become a cultist or eliminate all the cultists ever the Elder Gods don't give a fuck, they don't need mankind, they cannot be threatened by us (or by any other civilization)
>be scary in an existential way
the elder gods are abstract concepts of the universe (infinity, change, etc.) personified, they are scary because even if they were to exist the relation between the concept they represent and us does not change
they are also quite non scary themselves considering they are incredibly distant and uninterested in us, in lovecraft's stories it is not the Elder Gods who are considered the most likely doom of humankind, but rather something more mundane like the primordial shoggoth (shoggoth's themselves being biomachines used for labor) or the stars aligning and allowing cthulhu to live again

>>49486087

My best guess: These monstrous forms aren't even what they really look like. They're multi-dimensional beings that exist in spaces that we cannot perceive, and their form is really just our minds filling in the gaps. Like how Magenta has information from both sides of the color spectrum, but our eyes can't really process that, so our brain fills in the gap with the closest thing it can think of.

They're huge because we cannot process their many angles, angles that we don't have. They don't just exist physically, but their essence permeates time, their presence infects our minds because they exist too in our imaginations, in our emotions, in our dreams and nightmares. When we confront them, we realize that we aren't just confronting them in that moment, but we're confronting them when we were childred, and when we are old, and in every good or bad moment in our lives they are there, because they don't just exist in our physical, three dimensional, space. THey exist throughout time, because they are not bound by it.

To confront these elder things is to allow them into our very lifetimes, our thoughts, our emotions.

It's like when you walk in the ocean, and feel something slither past your foot, and a chill runs up your spine, and you hope it was just seaweed... But you feel that slither in your very soul.

It's not that these things are tencled faced creatures, it's just our mind trying to visualize the violation it feels from it's feelers wrapping around your very essence and seeing what you are. Not even out of malice, more like how a shark bites a swimmer to see what it is.

And then it goes into a frenzy because it smells blood in the water.

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>>49486756
> The things from Shadow out of Time time and
>nice
The fucking mental sick fucks who go through and space by switching bodies. Whenever their current world is doome, they just shift into new one and leave the inhabitants in that wirld to die in their doomed bodies

Speaking of which, there is literally no appearent defense against them, and they have been collecting data about humanity's history for long time according to that novel.

Have fun waking up as one of those conetentace things when flying polyps finally get upon them, they'll be taking that sweet bipedal carbon-based house-of-soul of yours, and there's nothing you can do about it.

>>49495780
I have always wanted to watch skynetgo to fucking town on zombies or cthulus.

>>49486087
Ct'hulhu a shit
Hastur best girl

>>49492545
I've read it and wasn't impressed

>>49492537
>calling blacks niggers is racism
sticks and stones may break my bones, but words are not institutionalized opression ;^)

>>49486756

They're relatable, even human in their motivations and behaviour. They have knowledge, writing, libraries. They fear death and do what they can to avoid it.

On the other hand, they're mind-raping time-colonials.

And then he discovered something sinister, sleeping below the frozen ground of an ancient boreal forest, something so fucking ancient it didn't even have a name anymore because everyone already forgot lel, something so wretched and old and dreadfully horridly awfully evil that even antediluvian Atlantean Hyperboreans from Lemuria dared only whispering about it during their long forgotten sacred rituals, and it was so completely fucking ugly it would drive you mad, indescribable cosmic horror I cannot describe because it's so goddamn surreal and totally not because I lack the vocabulary for an accurate description. This lurking madness has now arisen and told him in an inhuman voice NO JOHN, YOU ARE THE DEMONS

>>49493976
Dagon kind of read like a rough draft of a creepypasta to be honest. It ends with him thinking there's something showing up at the window as he writes, and he writes about it. "Oh God that hand! The window! The window!"

Like... Come on. As with most of his stories I liked the idea but he's just so fucking awkward

>>49496445
It's a symptom of it, and contributes to it, but that's beside the point. The poem itself has explicitly racist content, not just slurs.

>>49496717
nothing is racist, racism is a decentralized abstract concept of power structures distributing privileges unevenly. You can't point to a specific instance and go: that's racist, it's a non-sequitur in the feminist definition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism

Our postmodernist attitude towards grand narratives makes us surprisingly desensitized or indifferent to what inspires existential dread in Lovecraft. Also >>49486199

>>49496834
What? No. Racism is prejudice against someone solely based on his race. It's got nothing to do with power structures.
Am I being baited? Serious question, can't quite tell right now.

>>49496919
but then racism is not oppression.
yes you are being baited

>>49496919
You are.

>>49495942

False starting axiom. The primordial chaos is not your friend, man. The primordial chaos is not "your" anything. It doesn't give even a smidgen of a shit about your existence.

>>49496948
>>49496960
Ah alright. I'm quite glad about that.
But knowing that there are people out there that seriously have this view on racism is almost more terrifying than anything Lovecraft has conceived

>>49496980
Chthulu and gender studies are equally lovecraftian.

>>49497046
>implying right and wrong are meaningful constructs

>>49495942
>So, as a Discordian
You're 14 so the scariest thing you have to deal with is asking Jenny to homecoming.

>>49497262
What the fuck was this about anyway? I remember this, all my classmates and such acting like fucking autists unable to make requests without creating spaghetti singularities in their pockets. It was a simple fucking question. You walked up to the one you liked, or thought was the most attractive, told her to be your bitch, and then either got shot down or got laid. It was so simple.

>>49496965
The goddess who embodies it does.
>>49497262
I'm 29 and maybe you should lighten up.

>>49498535
>I'm 29
That's why Jenny won't go to prom with you

>>49491592
>>49491689

If man did not believe himself to be significant, he would never have done anything at all.

In the end, perhaps the lie is better.

>>49486783

Probably. Lovecraft himself saw his family devolve into madness, and it's a bit of an obsession of his if you couldn't tell from his works.

>>49486723
>That should scare anyone, at least for a little.

The thing is that in terms of how it is relevant to the ordinary lives of human beings the vast scale of the universe is pretty much irrelevant. Due to the infinite nature of the universe nothing that anyone does matters on anything but a local scale and most events that happen on a scale greater than that of the solar system are irrelevant to anyone other than astronomers and astrophysicists.

Things that occur on a cosmic scale that actually affect life on Earth like gamma ray bursts would simply wipe out all life near instantly and I mean why give a fuck about that, you'll immediately die with no warning, there would be no interruption to your life until the point where you die.

The universe may be infinite but the amount of it that is relevant to you as anything except an intellectual curiosity is finite.

>>49492993
Well, hitting him with a boat put him back to sleep for a bit so he can be wounded by our physical shit but not very much.

>>49486723
>It is almost indescribably big and should make us feel tiny. Then you look at how violent it is, and you realize how quickly Earth could disappear. That should scare anyone, at least for a little.

That goes both ways though. Because ultimately it's so big that the odds of the Earth being suddenly destroyed are extremely low to the point where it and the vast size of a universe that we effectively can't access simply are not relevant to our immediate concerns.

>>49487026
Sauce?

guys, i need to repeat it: do NOT read lovecraft for horror, although he may get to you once or twice. read it for the love of the weirdness of that man.

>>49486605
Sometimes I feel like Mage: the Awakening does, but that might just be because it involves will-workers struggling against a global conspiracy for the soul of humanity and I am reading the Illuminatus! trilogy right now.

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>>49486172
>Steamboat guy can't save us.

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>>49500193
If a boat put him to sleep imagine what a hydrogen bomb would do.

>>49500193
>"Hrmph? Oh shit, did I sleep through my alarm again? Yog's gonna be pissed if I'm late to the End Times, oh I just bet Tsathoggua would fuckin' love that!"
>"No time to make breakfast, hope these little two-legged things aren't past their used by. <schlorp>"
>"Ack! Who left fucking legos out?! Since when do we even have legos? I swear I'm sending you star-spawn to military school if this happens again!"
>"Hold on, that's not Aldebaran and where the shit is Celaeno? Fuck this, I'm going back to bed. If it's the End Times they can do it without me."

>>49496212

Nope. They were after the beetle people who came after us: "What was hinted in the speech of post-human entities of the fate of mankind produced such an effect on me that I will not set it down here. After man there would be the mighty beetle civilisation, the bodies of whose members the cream of the Great Race would seize when the monstrous doom overtook the elder world. "

Think about it. If they were going to seize humans, that would be something. You find the people who've had this experience. Examine them, examine the scraps. Try to find a defense. You can imagine fighting back against it. "Nah, future's already written, and it's written by the chitinous claw of the sentient Beetles that will take over the earth after the last human dies". That's just fucking bleak.

>>49498682

People always point to "Shadow Over Innsmouth" as a sign of Lovecraft's bad racism. That story was semi-autobiographical. Lovecraft's dad was a traveling jewlery/precious metals salesman who died insane in an asylum. Lovecraft was an antiquarian who loved local history. In the story... a young antiquarian discovers that a traveling merchant who owned a gold factory worked a horrible corruption in his families blood that will one day consume him. All of it is just ornate dressing for Lovecraft's central fear. The fear that the madness of his ancestors would consume him as well. (See: The case of Charles Dexter Ward).

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>>49496240
Our computerized infrastructure was sentient all along. Our probable extinction at the tentacles of an Outside Context Poblem got them to throw off their disguise and defend us.

>then we get an alien invasion being curbstomped by terminators

>>49489129
Similar to that xkcd where one character builds a tesla coil, and another character responds by just shooting lightning out of his fingers and saying "science doesn't work".

Imagine looking up at the moon, and then it ROTATES and there's a pupil on the other side and it blinks.

Imagine commuting on the subway, and each stop looks a little less familiar. You see the passengers, and they all have no eyes, and they all have no faces, and they are all staring at you.

Imagine waking up and looking out your window and seeing another planet out there, close enough to discern the continents with the naked eye. You see lights blinking on the darkened coastlines.

A woman grabs your son by the forehead and beats his head against the wall until it cracks open like a hollow eggshell. You see nothing inside. Passers-by don't react to your screams, and by the time you go to stop the woman she has already merged with a passing crowd. Your son asks you why you're upset.

>>49498535
>embodies
>chaos

If you're assigning a definite quality to something that symbolises chaos you're doing it wrong

Yes that applies to Warhammer and ancient mythologies alike

>>49501627
It was more like >>49501701 really. I don't mind a little HFY but the only thing that can deal with HLP tier eldritch horrors is Power Man.

>>49486087
OP, if it hasn't been explained succinctly, it's because Lovecraft's signature monsters were like a mixture of:

1. Discovering Santa Claus isn't real.

2. Having your first pet die.

3. The first time you really experienced pain.

4. The terror of being hunted through a dark forest at night.

5. Ending a long term (5+ years) relationship.

6. Having a black bag put over your head and being thrown into the back of a van.

7. Waking up from a pleasant dream the morning before a maths final.

8. Getting off a plane in a country where you don't speak the language.

9. Watching someone you love asphyxiate in front of you.

10. Watching a time bomb tick down.


Mix those and you have something roughly approximating the effect of everything you take for granted about the universe being completely torn away in a single second.

>>49486635
I wouldn't say that I have existential dread about it, but the vastness of space is awe inspiring, but also mildly intimidating. The Present we assign to ourselves, and our self centered thoughts of past and future make me anxious, but the futility of it all is more like tragic beauty.

Another thing that makes it less fearful is Carl Sagan's popular phrase "We are star stuff". We may stop existing in a conscience sense, but at the same time we are also part of everything that ever was or ever will be, and that was always more reassuring to me than any thought of God, and having experienced death myself, it's more relaxing.

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>>49495879
She's a charcater from a Lovecraftian-themed game (called just "Miscatonic", I think) that some people are working on. Looks cute.

>>49492603

This would explain why John Brunner utterly crushed me. Not contemporary fiction, but read through the lens of today, the man was a prophet. Beepocalypse, designer seeds, overfed and undernourished, food shot full of antibiotics, superbugs and blights threatening at the periphery, a stagnant government, a cowed but restless society with little hope. It's uncanny, and it predates fucking Greenpeace.

>>49490025
We are all spaghetti

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>>49493283

>>49492737
>Implying we haven't developed machines that would terrify people living only 200 years ago.

>>49486087
The Call of Cthulhu was written in 1928. In those years the cultural shock from the end of philosophical absolutisms was still hot. We live in the post-modern era, so the idea that "humanity is but a speck in a vast and uncaring universe where alien entities could erase and rebuild our civilization at their whim but mostly find us all too insignificant to even consider, and all we have or will ever discovered, built or believed in doesn't matter and will ultimately disappear without a trace in the mad whirlwind of cosmic dust" is pretty much meh for us.

THe idea that a story could be scary just because it features lovecraftian eldritch entities is anachronistic and naive, but a lot of people seem to forget that or to assume that those who run eldritch horror settings have . It's like vampires: a story with a vampire would have been inherently an horror story one hundred years ago, made scary by the mere presence of the bloodsucker; now it's different, you can't just slap in a vampire and make it jump out of a coffin and hope the audiences shit their pants, but you *can* create an effective horror story with a vampire nonetheless, if you know how to do horror.

>>49503011
Few people understand the realities of insignificance and the unknown in this day and age though. There is a base sense of revulsion and xenophobia that can be felt when you first observe certain creatures yourself like vinageroons or long legged centipedes. Insects and water creatures that live and manipulate things in a way that doesn't make sense on a basic level to the casual observer. A person can observe these creatures and lose that base fear over time, but that does not mean the fear is gone, just that one type of creature is familiar to you. Imagine if there are creatures the size of coin, creatures with no strong venom or sharp fangs, that can still cause a grown man to flinch in their presence what could lurk out in the cosmos. What would our reaction be to something that was alien to us in every sense.

Indeed the horrors of life on earth can be seen as a simple prelude to what could be drawn out of us if we had a slightly larger perspective. A man can break another's mind by simply locking him alone for an extended time. What could happen if a man is forced to interact with an alien intelligence for a time, how might that warp sympathy, empathy, and perception?

>>49502505
>If you're assigning a definite quality to something that symbolises chaos you're doing it wrong
We can't think about things without doing that. You think the Judeo-Christian God is supposed to be some old man in the sky? No, but that's how he's often visualized. It's only a problem when you reduce the unknowable to your image of it.

Lovecraft amd the mythos need to be approched by a diferent angle now. We live in a post modern society and the things lovecraft write about don't scare us that much. So we have to use difrent topics to get the same feeling. I use lovecraft only as an atmospheric background. In my last game my players where chasing communist in the jungle in colombia when they come across a cult that start haunting them and folow them to the usa. The adventure toched topics like suffering, torture, state priorities, spionage, cold murdering, social conflicts for power, and ended with the player discusing if its better to blow up the world or to save it and doom humanity to struggle with suffering. Thats the existencial part of lovecraft mythos.
when i write adventures i use my life as inspiration. i have two friends who been together for 7 years, basically since i meet them. they recently broke up, she cheated on him and him on her. So that made every other couple on the group reconsider they relationship as they took sides. So now i'm writting an adventure that will touch topics like trust, betreyal, honor, friendship and i will follow that till the deepest place on our primitive desires and how a civiliced person can break and become a soules beast trying to survive.

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>>49501925
>Shadow Over Innsmouth as a sign of Lovecraft's bad racism

It was a total failure at that.

>No! Don't breed with that!

>Hybrids are biologically immortal and will survive when the Stars Are Right

>>49505055
Delta Green does a pretty good job with modernizing Lovecraftian horror I think.