Lovecraft Country - HBO's show about shoggoths and Jim Crow

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marco.xing said:
I'm not gonna get into the merits of racism on KF but I think it's pretty well-documented that HPL was about as top-tier racist as possible for his era.
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Ya know in an era when various forms of mass violence against niggos within america was loudly supported by state level elites and condoned either quietly or explicitly by national level elites either in anti communist paranoia or as wider blood guilt for whatever crimes individual niggos were accused of, and the whole schebang of using force to exploit non white countries in perpetuity that was the norm accross the civilised world, im reasonably sure that lovecraft's use of spicy literary devices in describing them does not qualify as "top tier racist as possible for the era".

Hell given the state of pulp fiction of the time from what little I have seen from the works of jack london and co, he may not have even been particularly noteworthy for racism by the standards of novelists in early 20th century america given how he was competing with straight up incitements to race war and mass genocide by assorted authors whose works never raised many eyebrows from society of that time
 
Shield Breaker said:
wish I had a time machine, and could get Lovecraft's reaction to the Japanese turning Nyarlethotep into a loli.
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I'd want to see his reaction to Japan's interpretation of Shub niggurath.
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BooneHelm said:
You got to love how a review of the book basically says "muh racism" is scarier than the Elder Gods:
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Most reviews center around how it's a tribute to Lovecraft but we got to show this Lovecraft guy a lesson! Sure, you really showed a guy who's been dead for 100 years a lesson.

Also pic of the book's author
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To be fair I read a book of his in 2012 called The Mirage, which was an alternate history take on 9/11 and the Iraq war where the roles are reversed, the Middle East is a first world USA esque super power and America is a third world shithole and terrorists from America destroy twin towers on 11/9.

It was really interesting with a lot of well done and clever world building, but of course it was very liberal, George W Bush in this universe is just a trailer trash nobody, but it also didn't totally white wash Muslim society like you'd probably see if it was published today, despite the alternate middle east being a first world country, homosexuality and alcohol is still illegal.

I'm surprised nobody ever attempted an adaption of The Mirage but I'm not surprised Lovecraft Country did.

In other words the guy definitely has talent, it's just filtered through a very liberal worldview.

Takayuki Yagami said:
Eternal Darkness does it pretty well too IMO. It does in regards to the protagonists’ fraying sanity anyway. Shame that’s never been remastered.
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Eternal Darkness is an absolutely brilliant take on Lovecraft style mythos.

Ruin said:
There was a Lovecraft inspired MMO, The Secret World. It was awesome and shut down.

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I played that briefly back in 2012, the only MMO I've ever played, but I was pretty terrible at it being new to the genre and unwilling to put in the grindy work needed to succeed.

But man, what a cool world with lots of cool lore, it seemed to me like it should have been a single player Skyrim esque game and not an MMO though.

Did it fully shut down though? I thought it was relaunched as a different version, is that still available to play?
 
Dom Cruise said:
America is a third world shithole and terrorists from America destroy twin towers on 11/9.
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Is that how people are describing Trump's election now?

Jokes aside, I do miss when fiction having liberal ideology didn't mean that there's a good chance the creator sacrificed quality to preach about how their ideology is One Good Belief.
 
Yeah, this has definite AHS seasonings. It feels like early cool fun AHS so far, but it could turn into shit AHS.

The soundtrack is also pretty excellent.
 
The newest episode feels like Indiana Jones, except that the side characters have actual personalities. Is it wrong that I really like this show?
 
Just watched episode 4. By the end, I just knew it'd provoke some SJW tears, and I was right.
The episode tried to play with adventure movie tropes while using them to push a "colonialism bad" narrative. Tic, Leti, and Montrose (who's apparently "queer" now) go hunting for Titus's missing papers, and this necessitates them breaking into his secret vault, which happens to be hidden in plain sight under his memorial wing in a natural history museum. Titus is revealed to have traveled the world in search of Natives capable of translating the Language of Adam, one of which he eventually finds, and the show makes it abundantly clear what a racist, imperialist piece of shit he was. Our protagonists find and rescue this Native, who has been magically imprisoned by Titus for over a century, and predictably, this poor person is an intersex Two-Spirit to boot. In a twist ending, Montrose kills this character off at the very end of the episode, leaving the viewer wondering what Montrose is hiding.

While I'm sure the creators patted themselves on the back for including a Native character and bashing colonialism, it came off as cheap, lazy pandering to me. Critics did not take kindly to the "trans" character (they'll never stop conflating intersex with trans) being killed off ten minutes after her introduction. The author of this hilarious review was upset that the fictional character never confirmed that her pronouns were "she/her" (even though there's no indication of "misgendering" in the show), and insisted on referring to the character as "they/them," while other even loonier commentators used "xe/xir." Ironically none of them seem to realize that the show's creators were clearly trying to be super woke with this story arc, and proceeded to cry and bitch that the show is just reinforcing "xenophobia and imperialism."
 
GhostButt said:
I'm surprised he ISN'T insta-greenlit on every project after his "we live in the pale mans world" twitterspergathon. Dude should play up his accent more.
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Best part of Del Toro going woke was him talking about how much he loves Mexico, when the last time he was in Mexico his father was kidnapped by cartels and he has never gone there again.

I havent watched LC, mainly because a Mulatto from a rich white family that raised him and sent him to an expensive school after his black father bailed on him lecturing me on the evils of whitey has zero appeal to me. But re discussions of Lovecrafts racism. A big part of SocJus/American Communism is communal TV/Film watching. Things like Marvel movies and shows like Steven Universe form a kind of social glue that hold bickering backstabbing dangerhairs together and reaffirm collective values like white people bad and sticking things up your butt.

The reason every single adaptation of Lovecraft has to give him the middle finger either overtly in the text or in interviews with the creators ect is because theres a fear that Lovecrafts work could provide the same kind of sense of community and social glue to reactionary elements who should be destroyed. This is also the reason for so much of the egregious forced diversity and woke shit in a lot of other things like the MCU Thor Asgardians being a multicultural rainbow and adaptations of ancient greek stories randomly making characters black. This is also why theres this weird inquisitor mindset that gives you articles like "the unbearable whiteness of HIKING" and going after the racism of Warhammer 40k figurine painting. It doesnt matter if these things are actually racist or not, the problem is that serve as de facto "white spaces" where evil whites bond and form communities which even if these communities arent Klan meetings makes it harder to deliver "racial justice" of the kind weve been seeing in major cities across America since Floyd died.

Thats why "go woke go broke" is such an inane observation. The goal isnt to make money the goal is to keep the people they hate socially atomized so they can more easily crush them.
 
Table Country said:
There was a Color Out of Space film that came out earlier this year. I hear it's good, but I hear that about a lot of things so who knows.
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It's a terrible movie, but it's probably benefiting from some goodwill for being the only Lovecraft adaptation that panders directly to Lovecraft fanboys (except for the retro-styled silent films). It quotes the original short story at length, namedrops locations like Innsmouth, and so on, and it's relatively close to a literal depiction of the events of the story, as Lovecraft adaptations go. Never fear: Lovecraft's narrator is played by a black man, so you're not a bad person if you like it. Very timely, this is the Lovecraft film that America needs.

Ironically, for being an apparently un-filmable story, Color out of Space is up to at least two-and-a-half adaptions: this, the 1960s "Die, Monster, Die!", and a segment in the anthology movie "Creepshow" that was admittedly plagiarized from it. The best Lovecraft adaptations are still Stuart Gordon's (Re-Animator etc) which aim low but squarely hit the mark.

Dom Cruise said:
The Lovecraftian motif does not at all have to be connected to his racism, that's why it's idiotic for people wanting to "cancel" him because "Lovecraftian" doesn't have to have anything to do with racism.

If you ask me what the root of "Lovecraftian" means I think it's simply fear of insignificance and fear of insanity.
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Well, your mistake here is thinking that anything anywhere isn't connected to white supremacy somehow. Cosmic horror, the fear that your way of life might not be the most important thing in the universe, is a direct product of white privilege. Black bodies have more concrete, physical threats to fear (from white people, naturally).

The irony is that Lovecraft was obscure in his own racist time, and might be totally forgotten if he hasn't been copied and popularized mostly by people who probably didn't agree with his racial views etc. at all. In the progressive version of history, this somehow adds up to Lovecraft being a dominant spirit of racism throughout the history of horror fiction that now must be confronted. Since everything is inherently political, deliberately infusing fiction with the correct, enlightened point of view is only a matter of turnabout being fair play, I suppose.

So yeah I'm skipping Lovecraft Country, although it does seem to fit some of his themes on a meta level, what with Jews and children of miscegenation ruining everything and dooming civilization to oblivion.

frozenrunner said:
As an aside, Niggerman is a great name for a cat :cunningpepe:
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Or a superhero.
 
Table Country said:
Really? I've heard nothing positive about Re-Animator.
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It was a breakout success, spawned a few sequels, plus a few more HPL adaptations, and a bunch of horror movie roles for Jeffrey Combs. It's also the only reason anybody remembers the original story or Herbert West, since HPL churned it out for easy money and didn't even like it himself, and it doesn't have much to do with his usual themes. Can't please everybody, but I'm concerned that you could be hanging out with a bad crowd.
 
Table Country said:
Really? I've heard nothing positive about Re-Animator.
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You can forget it's even a HPL movie since it doesn't have anything to do with his usual themes, but it's still an entertaining movie.

From Beyond though is a movie from the same director with some of the same actors that does tackle a story more in the typical Lovecraft vein and it's even better.
 
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