I’m homeless, and fighting drug addiction. I just scored a gig writing scripts for corporate instructional videos and they hired me full time. Things are looking up, comrades, and these videos have helped to soothe me many a restless night.
Basically everybody who goes insane in here Rhode Island ends up a bit like Lovecraft. I blame it on our tradition of finding eldritch sea creatures and deep fry them.
It’s definitely a thing. Too little and too late to change the material impact of his work, but he did intend to become less of a reactionary ghoul. He was slowly discovering that Black and Jewish people were actually, y’know, human instead of part ape or whatever. He’d been too scared to really talk to any of them and learn who they were.
This is typical, projecting your ideology on a wrong statement you didnt even check a bit just because you want it to be true... "and embraced socialism" 😅 yeah, right...
I would love to interact with HP. I've interacted with people who are racist (I'm not white) but on an individual level are interesting and perfectly enjoyable to interact with. He was an interesting shut in.
Yeh that’s the other thing about Lovecraft too, he was one of the quiet shut-in racists and not the hooah-kill everyone supremacist racists. Which is why he renounced a lot of the racial vitriol by the end of his life, as he like most every edgy poster at some point ends up realising how absolutely moronic they look.
@@topleybird2443Also just meeting people more later in life I think helped. I have a friend who was that, and he changed because he got to know an actual not white person. Saw we are just all people.
He was not a shut in by any measure of the word, he had vast correspondency with young authors and visited many across the east coast. He was actually pretty well traveled by the standards of the times. His only real period of isolation was during his high school years when he had a minor nervous breakdown and when he was dying of stomach cancer
Me too. His racism seems to stem precisely from the times that he lived in coupled with his lifestyle. Something I've learned in life is that people can have shitty opinions without being shitty, my parents for instance were vehemently homophobic until my brother came out at which point they rescinded their views. Most of these beliefs can only exist in isolation.
“I can’t believe they would call Lovecraft racist! Just because he wrote all those racist stories and said things like ‘sexism is bad because Asians do it’.”
As Anita Sarkessian said, you c an enjoy a problematic piece of work as long as you understand why it’s problematic. You can take out the bald faces racism and the stories remain amazingly written sci fi stories
As an artist, he's a big influence for me in a few ways, cosmic horror, madness, isolation, body horror, applying science to horror, the limits of human understanding; but he's only one out of many artists who used those elements in their art. Like many others who took influence from him over the years, I'm very glad we can take the good parts and discard the disgusting hate that warped his mind all his life, or at the least reengineer his subtext. I'm very glad I never met the guy
....there's that New Yorker article "The Complicated Friendship of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert Barlow, One of His Biggest Fans", and while I have no stakes in whether there was some gay shenanigans going on, you really can't convince me that that photo of Barlow isn't an example of the kind of very early, tender photographs that gay men took of each other. He's beautiful in that photo; it's not some kind of accidental snap of "just a man working on some lettering, shirtless, in the morning/afternoon-sun".
He pretty much was asexual, he wasn't all that interested in romance apparently. But also when he finally had his first time (with a Jewish girl, ironically) he apparently felt ashamed for not having been experienced and said that he was past his sexual prime. Obviously that didn't stop him from finally getting laid tho lol
@@mediocremodeler5174 it's called Cthulhurotica by Carrie Cuinn if you wanted to check it out It's on Amazon, I haven't read it yet but I'm looking forward to it's bizarre pages XP
My entire childhood and teenage years, my family had a succession of solid black cats. All were named Ni**er. My parents were lower working class in SW Virginia. My Dad read a lot of science fiction and may have been inspired by Lovecraft.
Rural deep south isn't the same as urban New England. I've met people from your neck of the woods, and while not everyone is racist, it's still prevalent.
Yeah, so after the 11:30 mark, this is shit piling on someone who was psychologically abused as a child a century ago, at a time when racism was overt, and who by no fault of his own never developed any kind of people skills. Of course he was warped and terrible. His life was a fucking tragic horror show.
@@CaymenLeP There's never been a time since his death when there wasn't a discussion going on about him, Lovecraft studies is now an actual academic field. This isn't a meaningful discussion, it's a bunch of literal trust fund kids doing cruel and unfunny comedy to a dead room.
They rag on him for being incel like on his views on sex, but as an asexual man myself he comes off like an aroace. The rest of their observations are spot on though.
@@jim7601 I dunno, I didn't laugh at the bombs and then neither did any of the other hosts.. which made me laugh, lol. Just not their best for whatever reason. Not a Lovecraft fan nor am I from RI. I feel like there's just a loss of flow when they're basically performing rather than just having a conversation.
Chapo Trap House: "Ha Ha Robert E. Howard killed himself over the grief of his mothers passing lets laugh about it and many other people who disagree with us politically dying or suffering" Also Chapo Trap House: "Don't you dare make fun of Matt Christmans stroke"
@@alexcypher4794 I just got to that part. They alsk said someone claimed he hardly touched her. But I do remember reading some quote from her describing him as "an adequately excellent lover" (or something like that).
I’m convinced that Lovecraft was Gay. And since homosexuality was frowned upon he probably married to save face. The DETAIL he described some of his male characters feels like a given for proof of this.
@@nullset560 jawline, handsome and refined affect, shit like that. Any time he describes a cool dude character from another dude perspective he basically sounds like Ben Shapiro. He either hates a guy or wants to fuck him. I'm pretty sure he was asexual though. He pretty much never describes female characters the way he pines over male characters tho so sus.
I think you're right about Lovecraft's racism being hideous even by the standards of his time, but it must be borne in mind that you can employ the "man of his time" defense much more effectively when discussing the racism in Robert E. Howard's work. He subscribed to all sorts of anthropological theories which would be considered discredited pseudoscience today, but which were intellectually acceptable back then. Out of Africa hadn't been established, continental drift wasn't understood, and medical genetics wasn't really explored until after WWII. To a person from that time, segregation and miscegenation laws would have seemed more justified. It wasn't even completely understood that all races were the same species.
No, it was pseudoscience even back then. They didn't know everything we known now but race as a construct was already a thing in the early 20th century--not to mention prior to American chattel slavery the idea of black = inhuman and inferior was a foreign concept for people in ancient and medieval history. W.E.B Dubois published the following in 1915: 'In fact it is generally recognized to-day that no scientific definition of race is possible. Differences, and striking differences, there are between men and groups of men, but they fade into each other so insensibly that we can only indicate the main divisions of men in broad outlines. As Von Luschan says, "The question of the number of human races has quite lost its raison d'être and has become a subject rather of philosophic speculation than of scientific research.'
How does saying 'he was a man of his time' wirk at all when people like John Brown existed? It's not like it never occurred to anyone this shit might be bad...
I enjoy the podcast, but the constant "he's the such-such of 100 years ago" or "if the internet existed 100 years, he would be this!" Is tiresome and hacky. It's not clever so why bring it up?
Lets be honest, the reason he blew up in the last 20 years is because all of his 'books' in his flimsy body of work are like 30 pages long. People too stoopid or ADHD ridden to read a real ass book latched on, Metal Gear Solid game manual -> Warhammer Codex -> HP Lovecraft 'novel' -> The Prince by Machiavelli, oh and throw in some comic books but nothing good like Tin Tin or Asterix, too much text in those.
This was pretty cringe, lots to bash Lovecraft on but I don't think the various physical and mental health issues that plagued human civilization are funny. I mean really are supposed to laugh at a guy who probably suffered terrible untreaded ptsd or suffered from physical health issues? I'll be sure to tell my sister that all the people who disassociated from her after coming out because it was against "god" to chill and her friends will eventually grow up. And honestly Lovecrafts views were not as out of the norm as they portrayed, this is a era when Atlantis Atlantis the Antediluvian world was one of the best selling books in the country. It's no surprise that when the Nazi's came up with a lot of their stuff it was the United States of America that they really looked towards.
As to your first question, unironically yes. Bullying works and violence is sometimes the answer. But yeah Lovecraft's views were not that far from the norm then or now. That's kind of the problem
@@stevem.o.1185 It is pretty ironic hearing it from the chapo people though, who aren't exactly ideal specimens of humanity. I think Lovecraft is way more talented than the Chapo people. Their comedy is maybe like 2 notches above the kind of stuff that I hear when I drink with my friends. Their politics is dumb too. I don' t think I've ever heard them make a salient point. I've never seen any indication that they have good evidence for their beliefs or even that they are statistically literate enough to evaluate evidence.
@@TheEternalHermit the fuck are you doing listening to Chapo as anything more than a friend simulator? If you get your politics from Chapo I can't help you. That said, I was thoroughly entertained by this episode.
@@gapsule2326 His problematic phase was most of his life though. I mean, if you wanna have a better legacy your gonna have to avoid spending most of your life being a weirdo.
So, you think I have issues because I've made fun of someone like _H¡tIer?_ Damn, Tube Guy. That's a fucked up stance. Why do you think mentally well people only discuss people who died like 80 years ago in positive terms?
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