[ SECRET POST #4025 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4025 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 20 secrets from Secret Submission Post #576.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I don't have time (at the moment) to go into too much detail, but I dont think the central aspect of Lovecraft's stories is just that there's no inherent meaning in the universe. Rather, I think it's that the cosmos is actively malign, that mankind does not belong in it, and in particular, that the exercise of human reason leads ultimately to madness and oblivion..

SA

[(Anonymous)]

also, I agree that Lovecraft's stories aren't necessarily great, but imo that's mostly because of the limitations of his prose

Re: SA

[cbrachyrhynchos]

And his thinly veiled racism is one of those things you can't stop unseeing once you start. "... and the mud-races are going to take over and erase all that you hold dear" is a big part of it.

Re: SA

[(Anonymous)]

He was obviously very racist, and I agree that it's a problem for his writing, but I think a lot of people want to reduce him to use racism and I'm really not sure how far I agree with that.

Re: SA

[(Anonymous)]

"reduce him to his racism" sorry, phoneposting

Re: SA

[soldatsasha]

Yeah ia. He's racist and xenophobic, sure, but not in a way that's unusual for a writer from that time period. And his work is a hell of a lot more than just that.

I think people reduce him to his racism because people generally only read a handful of his more famous works (Shadow over Innsmouth, Dunwich Horror, etc.) where the "creepy subhumans" racist/xenophobic themes are the focus.

But the vast majority of his work, I think it's really a stretch. Like, sorry, Shadow out of Time, the Color out of Space, At the Mountains of Madness, and so on of his longer works, and dozens of short stories... most of them aren't just some weird reflection of how super duper racist he was. A lot of his work has literally nothing to do with other humans at all, it's just straight up aliens that aren't meant to be stand-ins for people, or spooky scifi concepts like time travel or pocket dimensions or pollution/radiation or whatever.

(Not to mention, I've never been quite sure why Lovecraft gets so much flak for writing about creepy sub-human hill billies. It's not like any horror fan gets up in arms about The Hills Have Eyes or Texas Chainsaw Massacre being secretly racist.)

Re: SA

[(Anonymous)]

I agree with most of this but I do think that Lovecraft was above-average in racism even for the time he lived in. Certainly in terms of virulence. He was very, very, very racist.

Re: SA

[were_lemur]

This exactly. And I'm saying this as someone who does enjoy his writing.

Re: SA

[(Anonymous)]

"I agree with most of this but I do think that Lovecraft was above-average in racism even for the time he lived in. Certainly in terms of virulence. He was very, very, very racist."

No, he definitely was; like, many of his contemporaries were very aware how intensely racist he was. His wife, Sonia Greene, was outright disturbed by how intensely anti-Semitic he was (despite her being Jewish herself and reminding him of that constantly); Wilfred Branch Talman, a friend and colleague, noticed and commented on it in his works, though he thought it was just a reflection of the weird 18th-century-style prose he wrote in; there was a public essay published in 1915 by Charles D. Isaacson during a back-and-forth between the two about Birth of a Nation calling him out as a racist. People noticed how extreme his views were even at the time.

This wasn't just a "it was how people were" thing. He was a huge racist by the standards of 1920s America.

Re: SA

[(Anonymous)]

"It's not like any horror fan gets up in arms about The Hills Have Eyes or Texas Chainsaw Massacre being secretly racist."

"Racist" isn't precisely the right term, but if you think there aren't people who are upset that appalachian people and most southerners get treated as stupid at best and evil at worst in most media, but especially horror movies, you're wrong.

Re: SA

[cbrachyrhynchos]

Yeah, there's more to him than his racism, but it spoils so many of his better stories once you see it.

Re: SA

[(Anonymous)]

Sure.