Lovecraftian Horror

Entirely possible. That is what he named the cat inThe Rats in the Walls after all. And Lovecraft was never exactly subtle when it came to his racism either.

Best pagetopper ever

Edited by KnightofLsama on Nov 1st 2020 at 8:37:11 PM

And his own childhood cat, as well. The word was used way more casually back then, and bizarrely enough not always intended as a slur. Still obviously fueled by some very virulent racism.

Although, I am curious about what HPL might have become as a person if he had lived a decade or two longer, because it seems that towards the end of his life he was slowly toning down his xenophobic beliefs, even showing some measure of tolerance towards people of different backgrounds. He himself commented on that his friendship with a very varied bunch had made him more willing to look outside of his comfort zone, even with some regret over how he became more mature fairly late in life.

Edited by Mara999 on Nov 1st 2020 at 6:38:53 PM

I think it has more to do with his isolated upbringing than the time he lived, of course that's also a factor. I think had he grown up in a metropolitan environment and interacted more with people who weren't blood relatives he would've been more open minded.

On a related note, the Dambusters movie has a dog named after that slur as well.

Same what I've heard. His bigotry is often described as childish and unconcentrated, because he had very little direct exposure with other ethnicities prior to living in New York, so everybody different remained also abstract. He also viewed himself through such a narrow definition, so pretty much everybody from outside New England high-class society was a scary outsider. This becomes ironic because the Lovecraft-Phillips family was itself seen as a weird bunch to be avoided, even by those who Lovecraft saw as his peers. An interesting thing I've heard, is that the same friends who helped Lovecraft become gradually more open-minded also allowed him to discover more common everyday racism, because even the most open-minded people tend to be prejudiced against somebody.

I'm tired of tentacles as the default sign of the eldritch. I want a new weird appendage, like insect legs, or however starfish work.

Starfish have arms with hundreds of tiny feet under them.

If you're tired of tentacles, you could always go with the Flying Polyps. Their description in the story is deliberately vague, but given the name you could probably imagine them as hideous floating giant tumors. Tumors that somehow leave footprints everywhere despite flying and not having feet.

Or the Hounds of Tindalos, who are also not described in great detail. The only confirmed feature they have in the original story is a long blue tongue or proboscis that drains bodily fluids. I guess you could depict them as hideous giant mosquitoes or something.

Edited by M84 on Nov 25th 2020 at 11:59:05 PM

I think Eldritch Abomimnation works better if based off of horrible diseases and such.

Like cancers and necrosis and such.

And abyssal fish, which look freaky already.

Edited by HailMuffins on Nov 26th 2020 at 8:09:46 AM

Well, I did mention flying polyps...

With an effective Eldritch Abomination I'm mostly for features from Big Creepy-Crawlies, like segmented limbs and chitinous plates. I find it creepy when insectoid or crustacean features are added to a creature where they shouldn't really belong, like a human shape. Slimy deep-sea fish skin also revolts me, so a resemblance to a blobfish on land is another good way to gross me out.

I feel I should point out that a lot of what Lovecraft himself described were scaly. But beause most people don't know that squamaous is based on the latin word for scaled and it sounds, for lack of a better term, squishy, its often overlooked.

Yup, he wrote mostly fishy imagery as far as I recall. The tentacles have become a bit over-represented in Lovecraftian horror after his death, with squid-like imagery becoming the easiest way to make things seem weird. But weird is the key-word, with many of his creatures being described with loads of archaic adjectives, even though they are supposedly "undescribeable".

I've tried my hand at drawing some of the monsters, mostly to see if I can put on paper the mental images I get from Lovecraft's text. The Byakhee is a great example of a truly bizarre bundle of descriptions, that seem quite contradictory when you think closely about them.

https://www.deviantart.com/mara999/art/Byakhee-642635705

One issue is that quite a few of the Lovecraftian Horrors have deliberately vague descriptions. Helps sell the whole "beyond human comprehension" element.

The Flying Polyps and the Hounds of Tindalos I mentioned earlier both have incredibly vague descriptions in the actual stories - they in fact never actually appear for real and are described second hand in Apocalyptic Log.

Another good one is human-looking molars on things that shouldn't have molars.

Reminds me of the Grotesqueries of Drakengard.

It's amazing how much scarier a giant space baby is when you give it a full set of regular teeth.

Edited by M84 on Nov 27th 2020 at 11:53:48 PM

That deep-sea squid with a beak-plate that looks like human teeth is a really creepy example from real life. Beyond the Uncanny Valley there is something horrible about beings that look like predators, but have only flat grinding teeth.

I could have gone my whole life not knowing of that.

I always thought that was a photoshop.

They're really just folded lips that happen to resemble human teeth.

In that case, the South-American fish with molars is a much even better example of how bizarre flat teeth look on something you don't expect to have them.

Edited by Mara999 on Nov 30th 2020 at 8:22:45 PM

Then again, that fish explicitly eats plants, so flat teeth aren't all that unusual.

What could have been, if Lovecraft was an oceanographer as well as a writer. He'd be the anti-Jules Verne.

But he was afraid of the ocean. No way would he have gone into a career studying it in depth.

He was afraid of everything, dude never left the house.

That's why I never took his "These things are so scary you'll go insane just from looking at them" schtick seriously.

TBF, it's less the actual physical appearances that are supposed to be terrifying but rather the implications of the eldritch beings' existence. To Lovecraft, the idea that humans weren't the masters of everything but rather Puny Earthlings that the greater cosmos couldn't care less about was deeply unnerving.

He surprisingly subverted this when it came to the Elder Things from At the Mountains of Madness.

Edited by M84 on Dec 2nd 2020 at 10:15:48 PM