Michael Noire
(?)Community Member
Offline
- Report Post
- Posted: Thu, 20 Nov 2014 06:54:58 +0000
the Cthulhu stuff today is very pop. I was at a roleplaying game today with 12 people, 3 were playing Cthulhu warlocks, and it was totally unplanned. 12 classes, and like 3 or 4 subclasses, like no way in hell, right? but there they all were.
Now, here's the thing I wanted to point out. Lovecraft stuff to me is a bit like how Listening to Iron Maiden was forbidden back in the 80s and wearing their shirts. It was a special kind of taboo that most people didn't notice, but what It was, was always disturbing. I think the closest analogy would be the late 90s early 2000s Insane Clown Posse cult, basically, it was a sure fire way to never get a good career, to end up screwed up, and to have social difficulties for the rest of your life.
I'm sure there's someone out there today who went heavy into lovecraft (or maiden) and turned out perfectly normal. I just haven't seen it. Not one. No doctors or lawyers who are living middle and upper class lives in the suburbs. No mini, prius, or suburu drivers. It's always someone who's ******** up. Every time.
That should be enough to lend the materials some measure of gravitas, some kind of weight that tells you to beware, like what goes wrong with most normal christians when they start reading apocrypha and chat with their ministers. It's a pandora's box. Like playing with Oija boards. Sure, people fiddle with it. Then bad s**t happens to someone. Lots of synchronicity. Not a lot of reasonable explanations as to why these taboo subjects lead to shitty lives, suicides, traffic accidents, and so on. But they do. Repeatedly.
I had a friend read some lovecraft for a bit. He went bonkers for 2 weeks. Its been 10 years now, and he still randomly fills his dialog with expressions like "wormy brains" - like out of the blue. WTF. Clive Barker stuff was slightly less taboo, but i remember my parents let me watch hellraiser 1 but wouldn't let me watch hellraiser 2, and they let me watch everything normally, like really ******** up s**t from the splatter-gore and porn phase of 1970s film horror. Come to think of it, I know people who still get weirded out on the Hellraiser cube, or on Lord of Illusions.
There's basically these genres of fiction where morality disintegrates and you are left with things like folded dimensions like in sphere, but also twisted and wrong somehow, like in Event horizon, and for whatever reason, puzzle boxes and noneuclidean horror combined with some kind of space gods or old ones and human sacrifices, dark gods stuff... there's something to it. I don't know what that is, but its the kind of warning that basically works like this:
your brain contains info, and part of that info is your reasoning and ethical code. This s**t gnaws away at a lot of the core assumptions most people have that keep their reasoning functional, and then that gnaws away at the presumptions of their ethical codes. The net result is variations of sociopathy for people who never had a solid grounding in their baseline moral assumptions and how they are intended to interact in physical reality.
The fact that we live in a world that is especially shitty, and full of unfairness in repeated examples doesn't help. When you make a moral statement about life, and what is right or wrong, what is real and imagined, things like drugs, alcohol, sex, porn, or ******** - hentai, you get the point. There's a lot of already disturbing or mind altering experiences out there. If you aren't grounded well and solid in the way you think reality and morality should be, then when you step into these horror taboos, well, something goes wrong. That assumption you thought was solid is now like quick sand and your world starts sinking fast.
Now, here's the thing I wanted to point out. Lovecraft stuff to me is a bit like how Listening to Iron Maiden was forbidden back in the 80s and wearing their shirts. It was a special kind of taboo that most people didn't notice, but what It was, was always disturbing. I think the closest analogy would be the late 90s early 2000s Insane Clown Posse cult, basically, it was a sure fire way to never get a good career, to end up screwed up, and to have social difficulties for the rest of your life.
I'm sure there's someone out there today who went heavy into lovecraft (or maiden) and turned out perfectly normal. I just haven't seen it. Not one. No doctors or lawyers who are living middle and upper class lives in the suburbs. No mini, prius, or suburu drivers. It's always someone who's ******** up. Every time.
That should be enough to lend the materials some measure of gravitas, some kind of weight that tells you to beware, like what goes wrong with most normal christians when they start reading apocrypha and chat with their ministers. It's a pandora's box. Like playing with Oija boards. Sure, people fiddle with it. Then bad s**t happens to someone. Lots of synchronicity. Not a lot of reasonable explanations as to why these taboo subjects lead to shitty lives, suicides, traffic accidents, and so on. But they do. Repeatedly.
I had a friend read some lovecraft for a bit. He went bonkers for 2 weeks. Its been 10 years now, and he still randomly fills his dialog with expressions like "wormy brains" - like out of the blue. WTF. Clive Barker stuff was slightly less taboo, but i remember my parents let me watch hellraiser 1 but wouldn't let me watch hellraiser 2, and they let me watch everything normally, like really ******** up s**t from the splatter-gore and porn phase of 1970s film horror. Come to think of it, I know people who still get weirded out on the Hellraiser cube, or on Lord of Illusions.
There's basically these genres of fiction where morality disintegrates and you are left with things like folded dimensions like in sphere, but also twisted and wrong somehow, like in Event horizon, and for whatever reason, puzzle boxes and noneuclidean horror combined with some kind of space gods or old ones and human sacrifices, dark gods stuff... there's something to it. I don't know what that is, but its the kind of warning that basically works like this:
your brain contains info, and part of that info is your reasoning and ethical code. This s**t gnaws away at a lot of the core assumptions most people have that keep their reasoning functional, and then that gnaws away at the presumptions of their ethical codes. The net result is variations of sociopathy for people who never had a solid grounding in their baseline moral assumptions and how they are intended to interact in physical reality.
The fact that we live in a world that is especially shitty, and full of unfairness in repeated examples doesn't help. When you make a moral statement about life, and what is right or wrong, what is real and imagined, things like drugs, alcohol, sex, porn, or ******** - hentai, you get the point. There's a lot of already disturbing or mind altering experiences out there. If you aren't grounded well and solid in the way you think reality and morality should be, then when you step into these horror taboos, well, something goes wrong. That assumption you thought was solid is now like quick sand and your world starts sinking fast.
