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Cingulate posted:How does it impact on his general cosmic-horror stories? I haven't read Lovecraft in a while, but I don't remember racism actually being especially present in a majority of his stories, considering they often don't feature any humans at all. Two of his most famous, The Call of Cthulhu and The Shadow Over Innsmouth, are all about dat racism. At The Mountains of Madness is a grey area, depending on how you interpret the relationship between the Elder Things and shoggoths, and The Colour Out of Space (his best work, IMO) is pretty much devoid of it. Lovecraft could write non-racist stuff sometimes - it's not quite as hard to untangle as, say, Robert Howard's stories.
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Nov 9, 2015 13:32
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I maintain that Howard was at least an equal opportunity racist since he seemed to mostly be obsessed with the "savage barbarian" archetype for every race and creed imaginable.
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Nov 9, 2015 13:57
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Cingulate posted:Well okay, but that doesn't license defending the author's character doesn't it? Like, would't the most time and energy-saving approach still be to simply knowledge your fave is racist? There really isn't a coherent argument behind "he was a racist so nothing he wrote is of value," no. But at least where I went to university it was a disappointingly common thing to hear, from both students and professors.
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Nov 9, 2015 14:05
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GIANT OUIJA BOARD posted:There really isn't a coherent argument behind "he was a racist so nothing he wrote is of value," no. But at least where I went to university it was a disappointingly common thing to hear, from both students and professors.
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Nov 9, 2015 14:07
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Cingulate posted:Hopefully not in subjects where analyzing art was actually the point? In the English department 
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Nov 9, 2015 14:35
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GIANT OUIJA BOARD posted:I think there's a pretty big gulf between this and having a blatant antisemitic caricature as one of the central figures of the novel widely regarded as your masterpiece (Wolsheim in The Great Gatsby). I don't remember the portrayal of Wolfsheim being particularly antisemitic. His Jewishness is mentioned once (mainly to make it obvious that he's based on Arnold Rothstein), and he's shown in a less harsh light than Tom (a racist, snobbish WASP). He's not even "one of the central figures of the novel"; he's a pretty minor character. Silver2195 has a new favorite as of 14:52 on Nov 9, 2015 |
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Nov 9, 2015 14:46
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Darth Walrus posted:Two of his most famous, The Call of Cthulhu and The Shadow Over Innsmouth, are all about dat racism. At The Mountains of Madness is a grey area, depending on how you interpret the relationship between the Elder Things and shoggoths, and The Colour Out of Space (his best work, IMO) is pretty much devoid of it. Lovecraft could write non-racist stuff sometimes - it's not quite as hard to untangle as, say, Robert Howard's stories. Yeah he really covered the spectrum from "neutral" to "this man sees the future and what he sees is a horrible hell-world full of slant-eyed yellow people dancing pagan rites"
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Nov 9, 2015 14:57
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I'm not intending to poke the bear or anything but how many Lovecraft stories actually have racist content? I remember the one about the gorilla in the cave but I don't really recall nearly as many parts in his stories as, say, solomon kaine.
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Nov 9, 2015 15:37
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coyo7e posted:I'm not intending to poke the bear or anything but how many Lovecraft stories actually have racist content? I remember the one about the gorilla in the cave but I don't really recall nearly as many parts in his stories as, say, solomon kaine. I think Shadow over innsmouth is meant to be a parable about race mixing. That, the infamous cat in "the rats in the wall", the fact that something up there with none elucidan geometries and terrible dragon octopi is that someones ancestor was partially black, the endless endless screeds written by Lovecraft during his lifetime etc. I can't really comment on the comparison with Solomon Kaine since I don't know that person, but yeah. Lovecraft was crazy racist.
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Nov 9, 2015 15:41
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In the Dunwich Horror one of the things that repels the townspeople from the kid is that he's swarthy
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Nov 9, 2015 15:47
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coyo7e posted:I remember the one about the gorilla in the cave but I don't really recall nearly as many parts in his stories as, say, solomon kaine. As for Lovecraft's racism, here is Lovecraft vs. Hitler. There was only one sentence I felt confident in answering, and that was the one where Lovecraft implies he assumes there are some strains of "Jewish blood" that are better than others.
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Nov 9, 2015 15:50
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coyo7e posted:I'm not intending to poke the bear or anything but how many Lovecraft stories actually have racist content? I remember the one about the gorilla in the cave but I don't really recall nearly as many parts in his stories as, say, solomon kaine. I don't know an absolute number but a while ago I went through and read all his stories, and a bunch of his lesser stories that people don't usually remember (generally because they were boring and repetitive) are really, really racist, like the one I mentioned above with the time traveler seeing the horror of yellow slant-eyed pagan degenerates overtaking New York City. I wouldn't say the majority were comically racist but certainly a large minority were, and probably a lot more than most people who only read the "good" ones (Colour Out of Space/Call of Cthulhu/Mountains of Madness/Shadow over Inssmouth) realize. And that's ignoring the whole "the reason he was so great at describing the raw horror of the unknown was probably because he was so xenophobic in the first place" angle that I personally subscribe to.
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Nov 9, 2015 15:50
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Test your ability to tell Lovecraft from Hitler.
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Nov 9, 2015 15:52
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Missed only one, it's generally easy to tell them apart because Lovecraft tends to be more flowery.
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Nov 9, 2015 15:55
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The fact that this quiz somehow ties back to gamergate is just surreal.
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Nov 9, 2015 16:05
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GIANT OUIJA BOARD posted:E: or how On The Road (an autobiographical novel) has a lot of characters based on actual queer people talking about how much they hate fags. In it's defense, I've known plenty of gay guys who've talked about how much they hate people who "act too gay." It wasn't just that they weren't attracted to them, they were basically saying that over the top gays were holding other gays back. Spoiler: They themselves weren't exactly models of masculinity. ikanreed posted:So... they were continuous masculinity instead? MizPiz has a new favorite as of 16:13 on Nov 9, 2015 |
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Nov 9, 2015 16:06
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MizPiz posted:In it's defense, I've known plenty of gay guys who've talked about how much they hate people who "act too gay." It wasn't just that they weren't attracted to them, they were basically saying that over the top gays were holding other gays back. So... they were continuous masculinity instead?
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Nov 9, 2015 16:07
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The giveaway is that if it's complaining about black people, it's Lovecraft, and if it's masturbating over struggle and war, it's Hitler. The ones about Jews could go either way.
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Nov 9, 2015 16:12
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Even when racism's not the focus of the story, it seeps in- in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, there's an offhand and pointless reference to a woman's ugliness being due to her having some "Negro blood". It's just completely ingrained in the guy's thinking.
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Nov 9, 2015 16:38
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Pope Guilty posted:Even when racism's not the focus of the story, it seeps in- in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, there's an offhand and pointless reference to a woman's ugliness being due to her having some "Negro blood". It's just completely ingrained in the guy's thinking.
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Nov 9, 2015 16:48
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On a happy note, the official HP Lovecraft Facebook page is banning for racism and vitriol in the comments on their post about the WFA change.
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Nov 9, 2015 17:00
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what it is with Reactionary nerds and anime avatars? https://twitter.com/Keldory20
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Nov 9, 2015 17:35
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Race Realists posted:what it is with Reactionary nerds and anime avatars? Is this a rhetorical question?
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Nov 9, 2015 17:38
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Josef bugman posted:I think Shadow over innsmouth is meant to be a parable about race mixing. That, the infamous cat in "the rats in the wall", the fact that something up there with none elucidan geometries and terrible dragon octopi is that someones ancestor was partially black, the endless endless screeds written by Lovecraft during his lifetime etc. Also, isn't the big reveal in the 'Rats in the Wall' supposed to be that the narrator's ancestors were supposed to be Celtic druids/Morlocks or something?
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Nov 9, 2015 17:48
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Race Realists posted:what it is with Reactionary nerds and anime avatars? You're not the first to ask this question.
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Nov 9, 2015 18:08
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That article has lot of build up to a disappointing conclusion "its because people who have anime avatars probably spend too much time on the internet"
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Nov 9, 2015 18:39
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article posted:What a time to be alive. 
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Nov 9, 2015 18:41
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massive spider posted:That article has lot of build up to a disappointing conclusion "its because people who have anime avatars probably spend too much time on the internet" That's like, the conclusion my dad would come to.
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Nov 9, 2015 18:53
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massive spider posted:That article has lot of build up to a disappointing conclusion "its because people who have anime avatars probably spend too much time on the internet" It's not wrong. Nerds like anime, and neo-fascist losers are nerds, therefore neofascists have anime avatars. Just like LF Maoists, as the article points out
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Nov 9, 2015 19:00
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For a little while there, society could accept nerds as cool people. I really think neomisogyny in particular, has completely eradicated that notion.
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Nov 9, 2015 19:16
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ikanreed posted:For a little while there, society could accept nerds as cool people. I really think neomisogyny in particular, has completely eradicated that notion. Society accepts otherwise-normal people who have nerdy hobbies like reading superhero comics or playing video games. There was never a point where pimply, awkward, socially-stunted recluses were "cool".
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Nov 9, 2015 19:25
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I understand why a lot of these jerks would have anime avatars, and not even just like - "ha ha, everyone else has a Random Anime Girl Face, I'll get some random anime girl face too" ones. My real question is how they reconcile this love of the aneems with all this pro-Western pro-white pro-Christianity stuff. Do they consider the Japanese to be honorary whites? Do they consider Japanese animism to be a font of masculine paganist virtue?
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Nov 9, 2015 19:39
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Nessus posted:I understand why a lot of these jerks would have anime avatars, and not even just like - "ha ha, everyone else has a Random Anime Girl Face, I'll get some random anime girl face too" ones. My real question is how they reconcile this love of the aneems with all this pro-Western pro-white pro-Christianity stuff. Do they consider the Japanese to be honorary whites? Do they consider Japanese animism to be a font of masculine paganist virtue? I'd say the modal view is that East Asians are a superior ( = high IQ) race that hasn't been corrupted by democratic and multicultural Cultural Marxism, but the church they tell everyone to go to is a broad one, so there are a lot of possible views you can have within the broad framework, from "yeah but the White Man has more creativity and bravery than the Asiatic" to "whites are too outbred to stand up for themselves and so doomed" to "whites are My People so that's where my loyalty lies regardless of their characteristics" and so on.
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Nov 9, 2015 19:46
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"They're great at making railroads and bouncy anime tittays and therefore we should keep them as a working class"
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Nov 9, 2015 19:50
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blastron posted:Society accepts otherwise-normal people who have nerdy hobbies like reading superhero comics or playing video games. There was never a point where pimply, awkward, socially-stunted recluses were "cool".  Parallel Paraplegic posted:"They're great at making railroads and bouncy anime tittays and therefore we should keep them as a working class" Oligopsony posted:I'd say the modal view is that East Asians are a superior ( = high IQ) race that hasn't been corrupted by democratic and multicultural Cultural Marxism, but the church they tell everyone to go to is a broad one, so there are a lot of possible views you can have within the broad framework, from "yeah but the White Man has more creativity and bravery than the Asiatic" to "whites are too outbred to stand up for themselves and so doomed" to "whites are My People so that's where my loyalty lies regardless of their characteristics" and so on. Just guessing here, I don't watch cartoons.
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Nov 9, 2015 19:59
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Cingulate posted:I personally have a lot more sympathy for people who have bad skin or suffer from social anxiety than people who have bad taste. Anime isn't really a unified genre so you can't really make sweeping statements about it. There's a ton of reactionary backwards attitudes about women in some shows (generally aimed at teen boys) but there's also good hard sci-fi that has none of that (Planetes) and a growing amount of not-lovely queer media that treats gays and transpeople as people instead of weird sexual stand-ins for women. I mean the majority is definitely terrible and reactionary but not all of it.
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Nov 9, 2015 20:04
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divabot posted:SHUT UP DAMMIT NOBODY WHO IS NOT YOU CARES THE THREAD HAS A TOPIC LET'S GET WITHIN A GODDAMN MILE OF IT Re: Land "taking the piss the whole time," this might be partly true, but it doesn't excuse the sadistic undercurrent that runs through basically everything he writes. He's probably too philosophically knowledgeable to believe in Roko's Basilisk, but I doubt that stops him from getting off on the idea of it.
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Nov 9, 2015 20:59
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Nessus posted:I understand why a lot of these jerks would have anime avatars, and not even just like - "ha ha, everyone else has a Random Anime Girl Face, I'll get some random anime girl face too" ones. My real question is how they reconcile this love of the aneems with all this pro-Western pro-white pro-Christianity stuff. Do they consider the Japanese to be honorary whites? Do they consider Japanese animism to be a font of masculine paganist virtue? People say this like it's a new thing for fascists to make common cause with the Japanese. You can't make an Axis with just one nation! Although you probably could have skipped Italy.
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Nov 9, 2015 21:06
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Actually common cause is probably the wrong word. I'm sure there are fascist Japanese nerds, but I don't know if they even know Moldbug exists for the most part.
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Nov 9, 2015 21:07
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The most reasonable hypothesis is simply crank magnetism. Weeaboos consider anime to be outside of the mainstream (as they define it), and that inclination towards non-mainstream art makes them more inclined to like other non-mainstream things, including politics. This covers not just reactionaries, but leftists as well—hence the much-mocked Tumblr trend of "anime communism". In fact, this can cover any subcultural identity. Some of them even take advantage of it—the early punk movement deliberately connected radicalism in art with radicalism in politics.
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Nov 9, 2015 21:34
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