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I think that a lot of it comes down to the way that the roleplaying hobby was created and developed mostly by white American men, and of those, mostly college-educated people living in the Midwestern US. If you could put all the authors of the material in Appendix N together, you'd have a more diverse array of perspectives and life experiences than if you did the same thing with the founders of TSR, GDW, FGU, Judges' Guild, Palladium, Chaosium, etc. To give a very specific example of what I'm talking about: Moorcock was very critical of Tolkien, but I doubt that either Moorcock or Tolkien would invoke Chivington's "nits make lice" defense of the Sand Creek massacre when talking about the nature of orcs.
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Oct 21, 2020 21:36
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Halloween Jack posted:I think that a lot of it comes down to the way that the roleplaying hobby was created and developed mostly by white American men, and of those, mostly college-educated people living in the Midwestern US. If you could put all the authors of the material in Appendix N together, you'd have a more diverse array of perspectives and life experiences than if you did the same thing with the founders of TSR, GDW, FGU, Judges' Guild, Palladium, Chaosium, etc. Honestly I feel like most of Gygax's creative output was a case of him aping a lot of the surface-level details of the media he consumed without having a deeper understanding of what those details meant and why they were the way they were. You can even see this in the...unique voice of his writing, which was very clearly influenced by the vocabulary of Jack Vance, but completely lacks any of the snappy, succinct prose that made Vance's writing work so well.
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Oct 21, 2020 21:56
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Meinberg posted:The more I read about Tolkien, the more I view him as “okay for his time.” In contrast to say... Gygax and those who followed after Gygax. It's worth noting that Tolkein and Lovecraft were contemporaries, which puts Tolkein at "pretty loving amazing for his time" IMO.
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Oct 21, 2020 22:11
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moths posted:It's worth noting that Tolkein and Lovecraft were contemporaries, which puts Tolkein at "pretty loving amazing for his time" IMO. To be fair: Lovecraft was a weird, racist twerp even by the standards of his own time. I've always found this Wikipedia article on Robert E Howard telling about just how Lovecraft compared to his peers: quote:Howard became less racist as he grew older, due to several influences: admiration of the boxer Jack Johnson, listening to black story-tellers, sympathy with the underdog in any situation, and greater travel throughout Texas. Later works include more sympathetic black characters, as well as other minority groups such as Jewish people. Howard's viewpoint was also affected and softened by his correspondence with H. P. Lovecraft — whose own beliefs about race were a lot stronger — and his relationship with Novalyne Price — who was more liberal and challenged him on his racial beliefs "Lovecraft was such a weird racist, it inspired Robert E Howard to try and be less racist for fear of ending up like Lovecraft"
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Oct 21, 2020 22:21
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In case anyone hasn't seen it somehow, here's Tolkien's famous response when a Nazi publisher wrote asking him about his ancestry:quote:Dear Sirs,
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Oct 21, 2020 22:30
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Nuns with Guns posted:Haha basically, yeah. And see that's maybe the biggest issue with Dragonlance as a setting. The groundwork of the original books treats the gods as comfortable engaging in some classic Old Testament wrath, but it's still a D&D setting so they also have to follow the kind of Classical Pagan Pantheon structure and have to be accessible to worshippers, have clearly defined personalities with motivations and interpersonal conflicts, and also uncomfortably squeeze into the restrictive limits of the nine alignment grid. It's a series of inherently contradictory objectives that just make all the deities look like petty assholes in a way most modern audiences would find distasteful. Another problem is that during the 4th Age/Age of Despair when the classic modules take place, the people of Krynn more or less behave like modern secularists in regards to the gods doing evil. There's a huge amount of religious people IRL who can justify theological examples of their gods acting selfish and wicked, or view suffering in this world as part of "a divine plan" yet would not extend the same generosity if said suffering came from a human hand. The "closeness" of gods in D&D very much means that people are more apt to treat them as they would a mortal head of state in a society with checks and balances on power or a Mandate of Heaven style of code. Someone who you can (and should) rebel against if they overstep their boundaries. So on one hand Dragonlance has people like the Seekers whose faith is shaken and very much justified when said divine heads of state willfully refuse to protect them; it makes sense that they'd find alternative religions. But then you have the favored good guys of the book like Goldmoon, Fizban, and others placing the blame entirely on mortals and more or less waving away the very valid trauma they suffered through the past 300 years. It reminds me a bit of how conservative Christians write liberal Christians and atheists who feel disgusted at the worst of the Old Testament. They cannot approach things from a "you know this would be hosed up if a human did it" angle and thus cannot adequately address said peoples' worries. They function in a "if the Bible says it, then it's right"* and thus become too afraid to more deeply examine the implications of their own theology. *while absentmindedly ignoring the parts of the Bible which conflict with right-wing politics and modern living. Edit: Honestly, the behavior of the gods in Dragonlance is the largest flaw of the setting. Things like color-coded wizard orders and dumb comic relief races are annoying tropes, but it pales in comparison to the divine rulers of Krynn pulling a genocide and then being welcomed back with open arms. Libertad! fucked around with this message at 23:04 on Oct 21, 2020 |
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Oct 21, 2020 22:43
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KingKalamari posted:Honestly I feel like most of Gygax's creative output was a case of him aping a lot of the surface-level details of the media he consumed without having a deeper understanding of what those details meant and why they were the way they were. You can even see this in the...unique voice of his writing, which was very clearly influenced by the vocabulary of Jack Vance, but completely lacks any of the snappy, succinct prose that made Vance's writing work so well.
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Oct 21, 2020 23:07
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Libertad! posted:It reminds me a bit of how conservative Christians write liberal Christians and atheists who feel disgusted at the worst of the Old Testament. They cannot approach things from a "you know this would be hosed up if a human did it" angle and thus cannot adequately address said peoples' worries. They function in a "if the Bible says it, then it's right"* and thus become too afraid to more deeply examine the implications of their own theology. Mormonism: Not Even Once
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Oct 22, 2020 00:11
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KingKalamari posted:To be fair: Lovecraft was a weird, racist twerp even by the standards of his own time. I've always found this Wikipedia article on Robert E Howard telling about just how Lovecraft compared to his peers: The fact that Lovecraft treated like Italian people the same way most racists today treat African Americans really sets a high bar for how racist a person could be. After all the only thing more viscerally terrifying than facing the fact that the universe has vast incomprehensible forces that are totally uncaring about humanity is a mixed race child. gently caress Lovecraft.
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Oct 22, 2020 00:35
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HopperUK posted:In case anyone hasn't seen it somehow, here's Tolkien's famous response when a Nazi publisher wrote asking him about his ancestry: quote:I must say the enclosed letter from Rütten and Loening is a bit stiff. Do I suffer this impertinence because of the possession of a German name, or do their lunatic laws require a certificate of 'arisch' origin from all persons of all countries?
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Oct 22, 2020 02:03
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KingKalamari posted:To be fair: Lovecraft was a weird, racist twerp even by the standards of his own time. I make this point every time it comes up, but Lovecraft's time was incredibly loving racist. Lovecraft is just a time capsule from a time in which he was acceptable.
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Oct 22, 2020 02:29
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moths posted:I make this point every time it comes up, but Lovecraft's time was incredibly loving racist. But that misses the fact that even his contemporaries (who were super racist) were like "Whoa there, Huckleberry, come on back to the stable you're being too racist." Lovecraft was so racist that racists thought he was too racist.
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Oct 22, 2020 02:42
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I just reread The Hobbit and there's the scene where they're in the tunnel to Smaug's lair and all the dwarves are urging Bilbo to hurry up and get on with the burglaring that has some highly questionable content. Bilbo isn't exactly enthusiastic about going face-to-face with a dragon and challenges the dwarves to enter first if they're so lustful for their precious gold. The line that made me feel uncomfortable and I think is something Tolkien tried to course correct with Gimli is: "There it is: dwarves are not heroes, but calculating folk with a great idea of the value of money; some are tricky and treacherous and pretty bad lots; some are not, but are decent enough people like Thorin and Company, if you don't expect too much."
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Oct 22, 2020 02:46
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While a handful of writers recognized that Lovecraft was pretty drat racist, the Tula race massacre also happened. People like to look back at Lovecraft or purged Disney cartoons as aberrations rather than an emblematic part of a greater pattern.
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Oct 22, 2020 02:51
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moths posted:While a handful of writers recognized that Lovecraft was pretty drat racist, the Tula race massacre also happened. He can be an aberration for his time while we also know his time was incredibly racist. That just makes him even more racist without excusing people he associated with ; he managed to be so racist that other racists during a really racist time thought he was racist.
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Oct 22, 2020 02:59
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What I'm saying is that the guy with bad opinions is perfectly consistent with his time: A time when white people were doing lynchings and armed massacres like it was NBD.
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Oct 22, 2020 03:25
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No one is disagreeing with you
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Oct 22, 2020 03:42
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Libertad! posted:So Tolkien's more socially progressive than Gygax on the Baby/Surrendering Orc Dilemma. Tolkien fought at the Battle of the Somme. Unlike Gygax, he had actual experience fighting a hated enemy who went back to being just people a few hundred miles away. Gygax was just a wargamer, and D&D's assumptions are built from board game assumptions where one side is in the right. moths posted:What I'm saying is that the guy with bad opinions is perfectly consistent with his time: A time when white people were doing lynchings and armed massacres like it was NBD. And what you're missing is that even for that time Lovecraft was viewed by his contemporaries as extremely, unsettlingly racist. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 03:54 on Oct 22, 2020 |
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Oct 22, 2020 03:48
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Alternately, what his contemporaries may have been uncomfortable with was that Lovecraft wasn't sticking to the latest racism zeitgeist. Having a crusty old anglo-exlusive racist around was embarrassing to all those forward looking white universalist racists who had just graciously allowed those Irish and mediterranean types into the club. Raised some awkward questions.
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Oct 22, 2020 10:47
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Lovecraft was also afraid of architecture. Dude was loving afraid of right angles
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Oct 22, 2020 13:04
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Liquid Communism posted:And what you're missing is that even for that time Lovecraft was viewed by his contemporaries as extremely, unsettlingly racist. Compared to the average liberal writer that he hung out with Lovecraft was noteably racist. Compared to the average WASP on the street he was just an average racist, and compared to the average KKK member he was less racist then average. You're comparing him to a small subset of the population and ignoring just got incredibly racist society as a whole was. To say Lovecraft wasn't a noteable racist isn't too diminish how racist he was, it's to keep in mind that America is a country that has race massacres on a regular basis. Edit: and Robert Howard was super racist his whole life too, just differtly racist then Lovecraft. Howard was super racist against Mexicans for instance. neaden fucked around with this message at 13:58 on Oct 22, 2020 |
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Oct 22, 2020 13:56
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neaden posted:Compared to the average liberal writer that he hung out with Lovecraft was noteably racist. Compared to the average WASP on the street he was just an average racist, and compared to the average KKK member he was less racist then average. You're comparing him to a small subset of the population and ignoring just got incredibly racist society as a whole was. To say Lovecraft wasn't a noteable racist isn't too diminish how racist he was, it's to keep in mind that America is a country that has race massacres on a regular basis. This is a hill I will die on because you are carrying water for a legitimately heinous human being who Nazi Germany would have thought a bit too eager. HP Lovecraft posted:When, long ago, the gods created Earth Redacted because there are things I won't willingly quote. He hated black people. He hated the Irish and didn't regard them as properly white. He hated the Italians. He was a fan of Hitler's. To quote him on Ireland, circa 1921: quote:“If the Irish had the ‘right’ to independence they would possess it, If they ever gain it, they will possess it – until they lose it again. England has the right to rule because she does … It is not chance, but racial superiority, which has made the Briton supreme.” On Hitler in 1933: quote:When I say I like Hitler I do not imply that he is a personally winning or temperately rational individual, but simply that he is an honest, ignorant man fighting bravely & blindly against the disintegrative forces which more educated & sophisticated people accept without adequate evidence as inevitable. His neurotic fanaticism, scientific addle-patedness, & crude gaucheries & extravagances are admitted & deplored — & of course it is quite possible that he actually may do more harm than good. One can scarcely prophesy the future. But the fact remains that he is the sole remaining rallying-point for German morale, & that virtually all of the best & most cultivated Germans accept him temporarily for what he is — a lesser evil at a special & exacting crisis of history. Objections to Hitler — that is, the violent & hysterical objections which one sees outside Germany — seem to be based largely on a soft idealism or “humanitarianism” which is out of place in an emergency. This sentimentalism may be a pleasing ornament in normal times, but it must be kept out of the way when the survival of a great nation hangs in the balance. The preservation of Germany as a coherent cultural & political fabric is of infinitely greater importance than the comfort of those who have been incommoded by Nazism — & of course the number of sufferers is negligible as compared with that of bolshevism’s victims. If what you say were true — that others could save Germany better than Hitler — then I’d be in favour of giving them a chance. But unfortunately the others had their chance & didn’t prove themselves equal to it. On Jews, Italians, and immigrants in general, also c. 1933: quote:
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Oct 22, 2020 15:10
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So, I couldn't sleep, so I started plotting out writing my own game system. think I need to get some one extremely goony to work out probabilities and such, but think I've come up with a fairly workable base system. (I decided on a Cyberpunk game because we all know what a mess Shadowrun has been, and while I'm eagerly anticipating Cyberpunk Red in a few weeks when it releases, there's some wonkiness I don't like about the system and some of the world conceits. Some of this is looking for feedback, some of this is for my own memory. Post non-nuclear World War III cyberpunk (basically post Twilight 2020 type thing, the well off in cities have recovered due to strict rationing and recovery, but Joe Average hasn't recovered much at all, many people work on sufferance from home thanks to the grid (at barely starvation wages), in some cities the well off portion is literally walled off with checkpoints, etcetera, while in other cities, they just patrol the well off areas much more then the slums, which hardly get any attention. So, pretty close to a Cyberpunk RED type setup, except the Net isn't a polluted wasteland (yet). In the race to recovery, many cities sold out to the corps, and the already-weakened governments could do little to stop it, so the places THAT do have in-house work can be hellholes, Union organizers get beaten (or shot, or disappeared). Psionics/Mentalism is a thing, (a poorly understood, misconstrued thing), but while it can work wonders, there are limits (force bolts yes, giant meteors now, encourage someone to heal faster, yes, regenerate no (although the corps are working on that) Current thought is a 1-10 attribute system Toughness Agility Physical Power (read: Strength) Resilience Magnetism (read: Raw Charisma/looks) Brains: Special Ability (only for those rare people with psionic/mentalistic abilities) Mental Power: Mental Control: Skill checks would be an Attribute+1d10 result (the character would roll 3d10, and take a result based off their skill level in the relevant skill) Untrained: You must take the lowest die (disregard the middle and higher die) Trained: You cannot take the highest die, you can take the middle die or the lower die Master: You can take any die you want Now, why wouldn't you take the highest die you're allowed to? Dice that you're eligible for can also be used for extra effects, for example, extra base damage may be a 6+ die for an unarmed combat style, or shooting someone to disarm them may require not only that you succeed, but have a die left over of 7 or more). Skill example: Bruiser A is fleeing a rent-a-cop squad in the slums of the ruined city. He has Physical Power of 7, and is trained in the skill of Unarmed Combat. He spots a locked door leading deeper into an area where the rent-a-goons would be hesitant to go (too many paths that he could take), and wants to make a skill check to break through the door. The GM allows it, sets a difficulty check of 12 (the locked door is sturdy, it would take some real power or knowledge of where to slam through it to break through), but warns the player that without an effects die of 5, he will bruise his shoulder slamming through, and take a -1 Physical Power penalty until he has time to rest and recover. Bruiser A rolls 3d10: 8 7 3 So, Bruiser A can take the middle or lower die because he is trained in the skill, but because he can't take the 8 (since he is not a master in the skill), he has two options. One is to take the 7 for the skill roll, and the 3 for the effects die. That means he would break through the door (7+7=14), and likely put some distance between him and his pursuers, but he's going to hurt until he can take some time to ice down his shoulder (or take a pain-patch to numb it). Or take the 3, he would fail the skill roll (7-3), but using the 7 as the effects die would mean that while the rent-a-goons would gain ground on him, he might have time to try again (or choose another option) I need to find the old thread I made on dice probability under such a system to work out the proper difficulty checks, etcetera. I figure the mental power/control ratings would work to power abilities, with the effects die either being used to resist strain/drain (aid recovery), or boost length of time. If you can't keep a die for whatever reason (penalties due to wounds knocking you back a step, whatever) your effects die is automatically a 1 (because you have to take the lowest of the 3d10 anyway if you're untrained) Also thinking about capping effects die at the underlying attribute rating (cybernetics could allow you to boost effects dice without boosting the base rating)
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Oct 22, 2020 15:10
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That seems interesting for a complicated dice game, but does that much complication in the resolution mechanic do anything positive for the narrative game you're trying to run with it? Your explanation makes me leery, because resolving a simple door entry takes two paragraphs and multiple references to weigh the benefits.
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Oct 22, 2020 15:18
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What I was thinking was the following: I didn't want the bucket of dice that Shadowrun requires, but still make skills and attributes powerful. Originally, I just had "Untrained takes lowest, Trained takes middle dice, Master takes highest dice", but I was thinking that the things that make a trained person, and especially a Master at the skill, better is not just raw ability to complete a task, but the add-ons, the special effect. Sure, any schmoe can shoot a gun, and someone who has taken a firearms course can point and be reasonably sure to hit what they're aiming at, but a master at gunplay could shoot someone holding a hostage without risking the hostage's life. So I came up with the effects die. It's not something I'm completely married to, but that it might add a good bit of flavor. edit: Also, I wanted something more than just "You pass/you fail". In the example I posted, for example, I wanted to add something more then "you break through the door with no problem", and "you fail to break through the door (and possibly injure yourself)." Risk/Reward, in a nutshell. By adding the complication of a bruised shoulder, it adds another factor to the roll. (for example, if I go more narrativist, our Bruiser could have: "Heavily Cybered" as an advantage, with the game ability "You ignore the first two minor physical penalties you take from combat or skill checks", or if I go more Game-ist, it'd be more "Cyber Arms: Get +2 to your effects die when a check involves your arms." SirFozzie fucked around with this message at 15:29 on Oct 22, 2020 |
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Oct 22, 2020 15:25
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Liquid Communism posted:This is a hill I will die on because you are carrying water for a legitimately heinous human being who Nazi Germany would have thought a bit too eager. Seriously what the gently caress? I honestly do not understand how you can read what other people are writing, or pay attention to history, and come to this viewpoint. I am not carrying water for Lovecraft, he was really really racist. He said and did abhorrent things. The fact though that you compare him to the Nazis as if he was more racist then the group who murdered 11 million people though, shows that you have a real problems with perspective. Yes, Lovecraft said really awful things, he hated black people. That was not weird at the time, white people lynched black people, they violently overthrew democratically elected governments that black people elected, they rioted it and burned and bombed black neighborhoods. We are not excusing Lovecrafts behaviors or views, they are terrible. But by trying to make Lovecraft some sort of aberration rather then typical of his time you are diminishing the racism of the United States then and now. Lovecraft was not an some exceptional racist. He was an ordinary, everyday racist who lived in a country full of racists. We cannot reckon with our past as a nation until we accept that. When you point to Lovecraft and act like he was some sort of unusual racist you are downplaying how pervasive racism was then and is today.
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Oct 22, 2020 15:41
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This is an incredibly stupid argument. The 1920s and 30s were an extremely racist period of American history. In addition, HP Lovecraft was a neurotic who thought that like Italians were so greasy that they would pollute a stretch of beachfront property. He described a black character as having "forelegs" instead of arms, which is a step beyond anything I've seen in Chandler, Hammett, or the Doc Savage and Shadow novels, and they were plenty racist. Trying to say he's more or less racist than someone who actually committed an act of racist violence is an apples-to-oranges comparison. He never had the means, motive, or opportunity to do that, as far as I know. But he had racist views that were bizarrely racist even in the racist context of the very racist 1920s and 30s. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 16:04 on Oct 22, 2020 |
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Oct 22, 2020 15:59
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SirFozzie posted:What I was thinking was the following: Think of it from a time standpoint. Your average 3-encounter game session with a 5 player group (for round numbers). Figure each encounter probably takes about 10 turns to resolve. So you're having to run this mechanic at minimum 150 times per session, assuming the antagonists don't run on it as well. neaden posted:Seriously what the gently caress? I honestly do not understand how you can read what other people are writing, or pay attention to history, and come to this viewpoint. I am not carrying water for Lovecraft, he was really really racist. He said and did abhorrent things. The fact though that you compare him to the Nazis as if he was more racist then the group who murdered 11 million people though, shows that you have a real problems with perspective. That is, sadly, where you are wrong. He was an exceptional racist. He was emotionally and viscerally terrified of the concept of miscegenation. To quote his wife, Sonia Green, "“Whenever we found ourselves in the racially mixed crowds which characterize New York, Howard would become livid with rage. He seemed almost to lose his mind.”" During that time in New York he wrote "He" and "The Horror At Red Hook", both of which are explicitly racist screeds as horror. As a sample bit of prose: Lovecraft, 'He' posted:The throngs of people that seethed through the flume-like streets were squat, swarthy strangers with hardened faces and narrow eyes, shrewd strangers without dreams and without kinship to the scenes about them, who could never mean aught to a blue-eyed man of the old folk, with the love of fair green lanes and white New England village steeples in his heart. Even in an exceptionally racist time in American history, Lovecraft was beyond the pale. Trying to pass him off as normal for the time downplays just how terrible he was.
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Oct 22, 2020 16:04
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SirFozzie posted:So, I couldn't sleep, so I started plotting out writing my own game system. think I need to get some one extremely goony to work out probabilities and such, but think I've come up with a fairly workable base system. A dice system is pretty uninteresting without a system to slot into, which you don't appear to have right now. Whether the system is interesting, fun, or good will be determined by how it interacts with the rest of the game Right now all you have is an example of someone trying to break down a door, and it's... well, the GM sets two difficulties and you roll against them? It's not terribly captivating. You should focus more on the systems the players will engage with, and less on the exact dice resolution system.
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Oct 22, 2020 16:05
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Please don't make me probate anyone or lock the thread over an argument about the precise moral equivalencies between awful people.
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Oct 22, 2020 16:29
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LatwPIAT posted:A dice system is pretty uninteresting without a system to slot into, which you don't appear to have right now. Whether the system is interesting, fun, or good will be determined by how it interacts with the rest of the game Right now all you have is an example of someone trying to break down a door, and it's... well, the GM sets two difficulties and you roll against them? It's not terribly captivating. You should focus more on the systems the players will engage with, and less on the exact dice resolution system. Yeah, OP will want to know in terms of tone and setting and player role which things should be reliable-but-gradiated-success, which should be swingy with a chance of massive failure, and how you want those things to change as characters develop. That'll tell them whether they have a good dice system that supports the play style of the game, and not just a complicated random number generator. (I like the math fiddling too, don't get me wrong, but letting it drive a system design seems like it will make it harder for the system to shine.)
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Oct 22, 2020 16:31
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Liquid Communism posted:Even in an exceptionally racist time in American history, Lovecraft was beyond the pale. Trying to pass him off as normal for the time downplays just how terrible he was. He was racist in thought in a time that was equally racist in deed. If the lynching and massacreing whites of the era had been equally prolific writers, (and those letters not been discarded by embarrassed descendants,) I'd be frankly shocked if their views were any less horrific.
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Oct 22, 2020 16:38
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The dice system seems fine to me. Asking a GM to set DCs sucks. Maybe I'm in the minority on hating that, but I do hate it. Mouse Guard showed a way to make DC setting objective but flexible. Apocalypse World showed you don't need it at all. Your dice are fixed at 3d10, so just fix some DCs, too. Throw in one single modifier for trying to do something in a particularly advantageous or disadvantageous way if you want.
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Oct 22, 2020 16:46
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IMO it is not necessary, and is reductive and myopic, to attempt to rank degrees of racism as if they were a character attribute in an RPG. Racism is complex and multifaceted, and it is more useful if you want to analyze the racism of a particular person such as Lovecraft to be descriptive - as has been done with detail and scholarly rigor by Liquid Communism. Meanwhile, one can also be descriptive and analytical about other influential author's racism, including Howard and Tolkein, without having to conclude with some kind of ranking about which one was more or less racist and by how much. Lovecraft was extremely racist. Many of his contemporaries were aghast at some of his hot takes. Saying this does not in some way excuse those contemporaries of their own racism, nor does it imply a minimization of the baseline racism of the places and time they each lived in, nor does it imply some kind of excuse or acceptance of them or those times or the society that sustained and promulgated racism. OK?
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Oct 22, 2020 18:51
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I went to go digging for some tweets that were transcribing purported letters from Lovecraft in his twilight years after he'd mostly given up writing where he was disgusted with what a racist twerp he'd been and talked about how capitalism sucks, but the twitter account those were on has been suspended. Did those end up being troll tweets or something?
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Oct 22, 2020 19:39
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Leperflesh posted:IMO it is not necessary, and is reductive and myopic, to attempt to rank degrees of racism as if they were a character attribute in an RPG. 
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Oct 22, 2020 19:40
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Nuns with Guns posted:I went to go digging for some tweets that were transcribing purported letters from Lovecraft in his twilight years after he'd mostly given up writing where he was disgusted with what a racist twerp he'd been and talked about how capitalism sucks, but the twitter account those were on has been suspended. I think this is the one you're talking about. Letter to Catherine L. Moore (7 February 1937), in Selected Letters V, 1934-1937 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 407-408 posted:I can better understand the inert blindness & defiant ignorance of the reactionaries from having been one of them. I know how smugly ignorant I was—wrapped up in the arts, the natural (not social) sciences, the externals of history & antiquarianism, the abstract academic phases of philosophy, & so on—all the one-sided standard lore to which, according to the traditions of the dying order, a liberal education was limited. God! the things that were left out—the inside facts of history, the rational interpretation of periodic social crises, the foundations of economics & sociology, the actual state of the world today … & above all, the habit of applying disinterested reason to problems hitherto approached only with traditional genuflections, flag-waving, & callous shoulder-shrugs! All this comes up with humiliating force through an incident of a few days ago—when young Conover, having established contact with Henneberger, the ex-owner of WT, obtained from the latter a long epistle which I wrote Edwin Baird on Feby. 3, 1924, in response to a request for biographical & personal data. Little Willis asked permission to publish the text in his combined SFC-Fantasy, & I began looking the thing over to see what it was like—for I had not the least recollection of ever having penned it. Well …. I managed to get through, after about 10 closely typed pages of egotistical reminiscences & showing-off & expressions of opinion about mankind & the universe. I did not faint—but I looked around for a 1924 photograph of myself to burn, spit on, or stick pins in! Holy Hades—was I that much of a dub at 33 … only 13 years ago? There was no getting out of it—I really had thrown all that haughty, complacent, snobbish, self-centred, intolerant bull, & at a mature age when anybody but a perfect damned fool would have known better! That earlier illness had kept me in seclusion, limited my knowledge of the world, & given me something of the fatuous effusiveness of a belated adolescent when I finally was able to get around more in 1920, is hardly much of an excuse. Well—there was nothing to be done … except to rush a note back to Conover & tell him I'd dismember him & run the fragments through a sausage-grinder if he ever thought of printing such a thing! The only consolation lay in the reflection that I had matured a bit since '24. It's hard to have done all one's growing up since 33—but that's a drat sight better than not growing up at all. Then there's Letter to Jennie K. Plaiser (8 July 1936), quoted in "H.P. Lovecraft, a Life" by S.T. Joshi, p. 564 posted:I used to be a hide-bound Tory simply for traditional and antiquarian reasons—and because I had never done any real thinking on civics and industry and the future. The depression—and its concomitant publicisation of industrial, financial, and governmental problems—jolted me out of my lethargy and led me to reëxamine the facts of history in the light of unsentimental scientific analysis; and it was not long before I realised what an rear end I had been. The liberals at whom I used to laugh were the ones who were right—for they were living in the present while I had been living in the past. They had been using science while I had been using romantic antiquarianism. At last I began to recognise something of the way in which capitalism works—always piling up concentrated wealth and impoverishing the bulk of the population until the strain becomes so intolerable as to force artificial reform. mellonbread fucked around with this message at 20:02 on Oct 22, 2020 |
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Oct 22, 2020 19:59
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neaden posted:Edit: and Robert Howard was super racist his whole life too, just differtly racist then Lovecraft. Howard was super racist against Mexicans for instance.
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Oct 22, 2020 20:31
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Man I'm glad that I find the vast majority of mythos stuff just boring and repetitive so I don't have to constantly rehash whether the racist that wrote it needs to be a daily factor in my enjoyment of media. Oh no some professors are scared of a big goop! Better condense the concept of mental health into a percentile table about it!
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Oct 22, 2020 22:09
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why did you scare the professors
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Oct 22, 2020 23:02
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