a subject that can last
(nb/prescript: here i am, of course, not touching upon the more direct and tangible horrors he writes. stuff like innsmouth is for another day.)

Nobody here yet? Well, then...what bugs me most about the Mythos is actually its popular depiction as sanity-blasting tentacle horrors just twitching with anticipation to wipe out mankind as soon as the stars are right. Lovecraft's actual stories paint a somewhat different picture to me: The universe at large, monsters and mindless gods and all, does not even care enough about us to specifically single us out for hostilities. It is, however, a weirder and scarier place than our 'civilized' sensibilities generally allow us to admit to ourselves, and Bad Things can happen if somebody clueless stumbles into the wrong place at the wrong time or a human villain decides to play with forces beyond the ken of his or her fellows.

see, this is the thing. when they're not being absolute idiots (point 2), tropers tend to be pretty alright. sometimes. at least, when it comes to the just bug me stuff, a lot of them do make good points.

and this is one of them. that's what's scary about the lovecraft mythos.

it's not actually that scary to think that somewhere below the ocean dread beings lie in death-sleep waiting to wake and take the earth for their own; it's no more scary than the thought that somewhere in the world there's someone who will one day murder me for a reason i'll never know. it's disconcerting, and in a way it's disquieting, but it's not scary. it's motive-based and centres on me as a person, in much the same way as the concept of great old ones who want the world to be theirs centres on earth and humans as the targets of their hostility. it's an ego-based fear that's reassuring in its own way because it relies on me/us being important enough.

it's like the stuff i posted a little while ago, about azathoth the nuclear chaos. azathoth isn't meant to be scary because one day he might think of earth and destroy us with his boundless power. azathoth is meant to be scary simply because he embodies the concept of the oblivious uncaring universe - but worse, he embodies a universe that doesn't make sense. he's chaos kept dormant by something we'll never understand.

as a fear, azathoth represents one of the most primal ones humans have: that things don't follow rules. as it is, our worldview is based on the idea that even if we're alone in the universe, even if there is no god, even if life is fleeting, shit makes sense. gravity works. the earth keeps turning. the sun keeps rising. we live in a world where everything is assumed to happen the next time because it's happened every single time before that, and there's nothing wrong with that, because it works. the universe does follow rules, and we can look at the past and make predictions about the future, and if they work then we're golden and if they don't then we know that all we have to do is look over the maths again.

the implication is that if azathoth wakes, that's it. you'll just get chaos. i think it's where a lot of the other writers who have written on the mythos have gone wrong - you get a lot more characterisation of azathoth as the supreme god, which plays on the fear, but also takes away from it. the idea of being ruled by chaos is bad, but at its heart, it's not something unknown. it confines chaos into an actual 'person' and not just a being. the epithet 'daemon sultan' doesn't really apply to what azathoth should be, because despite lovecraft having started writing of him as a caliph, that's not how he ended up. he ended up as the chaos at the centre of the universe, the threat that it could all just stop, the under-the-skin itch that the sun doesn't have to rise tomorrow. "the nuclear chaos" isn't an epithet, it's what he is.

at the same time, the great old ones, beings like cthulhu, are a more direct threat but have still been taken awkwardly. they don't so much represent chaos as history. one day, they will attack humans, and clear us off the face of the planet, but it's nothing to do with us - it's because the stars are right. the idea here is that once it was their time, and now it's ours, and then it's theirs again, and that's simply how it is. it's not that it was their time and then we took it over and they want it back; that distorts the threat into a human one of possession and revenge. where it sits now is that they're simply time. they directly affect us, but so does the weather. yes, they're more corporeal, and humans can fight against them (hello, ramming a boat into cthulhu), but they never go away, and when it's really time for them to rise, it's curtains.

that's what lovecraft's horror is for me. inevitability and irrelevance, the crushing depression of the realisation that this is how it will be and the mindnumbing thoughts that we simply do not matter - the use of gods as metaphors for a universe worse than anything we could think of on our own, and the infantile transparent comfort that it's fiction, so we can retreat to the world we know, one of laws and rules and a world where we matter.