H.P. Lovecraft - so long and thanks for all the fish

You can only be in a goth fishing club for so long before you intersect with Lovecraft-inspired media. You can really be goth only for so long before this happens, and it may even be what brought you to the goth subculture as a teenager. I say "Lovecraft-inspired media" because there is lots and lots of it, a whole world of fantasy and horror and films and games and sculptures and shirts. But Lovecraft himself has some seriously problematic elements. Like being a racist. And a homophobe. And a right-wing asshole. His racism is embedded as metaphor throughout his fiction. Will the people of your all-white New England village be forced to breed with a race of fish people? We see what's going on there.

I was trying to write an entirely different post that required a disclaimer that Lovecraft was a shithead. The explanation was getting as long as the rest of my post, and it deserves its own attention, so here it is. Actually, there are some good articles that do a better job of explaining it than I do, and they deserve your clicks. Lovecraftian Horror - and the racism at its core, explained by Aja Romano We Can't Ignore H.P.Lovecraft's White Supremacy by Wes House

From the second link:

"Knowing the primacy of existential dread within Lovecraft’s stories, is it then possible to separate his racism from his creative output? In the end, is Lovecraft’s nihilism ultimately colorblind, “All Lives Don’t Matter in the Vast Cosmos-at-Large”? Not quite. As Jed Mayer argues in The Age of Lovecraft, the “mingling of horror and recognition that accompanies the encounter with the nonhuman other is one that is vitally shaped by Lovecraft’s racism.” The admixture of his maniacal bigotry and hysterical racism ignite stories of nihilism often based on the master-race ideology. In the same anthology, China Miéville writes that “the anti-humanism one finds so bracing in him is an anti humanism predicated on murderous race hatred.” This provides all the more reason to place Lovecraft’s racism at the forefront of examinations of his oeuvre."

I have always liked horror that is fundamentally tied to the fear of becoming an animal. As a child, I fantasized about these things. I had complex daydreams about slowly, sometimes painfully, becoming a bird. I would be cast out of society but I would get the gift of flight. No wonder I turned out goth. I am always on the side of the monster. I like thinking about breeding with fish people. On a literal level. Maybe then we'd prioritize cleaning up the fucking ocean.

What can we do with this genre now? I don't really know. I'm pretty attached to my fantasies about an ancient unknowable evil waiting patiently at the bottom of the ocean, fish people that want me to become one of them, sacrificing something to the sea in exchange for fish and jewelry... The stories came to me even before my introduction to the author, and they came filtered through cultural references and remakes of movies based on stories that were fanfic of the originals which were themselves stealing all the interesting parts of their content from vague interpretations of Mesopotamian gods from 2500BC. I don't know if that makes it ok. I'm just going to keep moving forward with my own weird interpretation and constantly examine it under that lens. Lovecraft - thanks for letting us know we could take these 4000 year old stories and make them modern and creepy and interesting, now go fuck yourself.