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On the subject of unintentional self-owns by gross nerd icons, I can’t help but be reminded of everybody’s favourite cranky racist hack: H P Lovecraft – i.e., the guy who managed to found an entire genre of popular fiction based on unwittingly casting himself as the bad guy.
Okay, literary theory wank incoming: cosmic horror is often characterised as the horror of nihilism, but – at least in the early incarnation of the genre in which Lovecraft wrote – it’s not particularly nihilistic. If anything, it’s the opposite of nihilist, which is where the trouble comes in.
In a nutshell, early cosmic horror fiction proposes a universe in which both the presence of a God or gods and the existence of a grand plan or cosmic purpose can easily be demonstrated, both empirically and mathematically. The problem is that the grand plan in question has nothing to do with us. Early cosmic horror’s Big Idea™ is that everything we know and everything we believe is objectively wrong; the proof of this would be childishly simple, if only we understood a few basic things about how the universe works. Our very existence is a blasphemous aberration, and the only reason the Powers That Be haven’t wiped us out is that we haven’t yet proven ourselves worth the minuscule effort that would be required to do so. That’s where the old “reading the wrong books makes you go violently insane” cliché comes from – not because of some alien mind virus, but because a correct understanding of the nature of reality inevitably leads to the understanding that the only morally justifiable course of action is to destroy ourselves.
As horror premises go, that’s a real doozy, and on the face of it Lovecraft’s totally right: that would be horrifying if it were true. The killing irony is that Lovecraft’s particular brand of white supremacism, with its firm grounding in racial pseudoscience, is constantly telling us that all this is literally true. “Your existence is aberrant and if you were capable of basic moral reasoning you’d kill yourself immediately and save us all the inconvenience of doing it for you“ is early 20th Century scientific racism’s literal thesis for everybody who isn’t exactly the right shade of white.
(Which is not to suggest that this brand of thinking isn’t present in modern white supremacism in some capacity, of course; I’m just focusing on the stuff Lovecraft would have been aware of.)
Reading Lovecraft’s horror fiction in the context of his professed beliefs is basically a constant process of going “bro, do you not realise that in this allegory you’re constructing, you are Cthulhu?” And all evidence suggests that no, he honestly didn’t get it.
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