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VNS: The Cute Cthulhu Debate.
I tried to only be a day late with this, but between a three hour drive, half of that on the accursed Mass Pike, followed by a late-night viewing of 1966's Incubus, starring a pre-Star Trek Wm Shatner and a bunch of people speaking a language non-fluently, my brain rebelled at doing such prosaic things as typing coherently.
I'm guilty of indulging in 'The Cult of Cute Cthulhu,' although with irregularities borne out of my discomfort with it. My reflexive complaint is that it's lazy. Making something that is supposed to be an unspeakable horror easy to access is offensive to me in the same way that, to use an out-dated analogy, AOL was offensive in the age of dial-up. It let people engage without any pretense of understanding either the underlying [infra]structure or cultural background that made it possible. Goetia for Dummies. Do-it-yourself suture removal. Flow-bees.
In contrast, when I was in college, I found out my senior year that one of the first-year writing classes was using the new-at-the-time Penguin Classics collection of Lovecraft's stories. That was a much better introduction, I hoped, than the failed Campus Crusade I'd started, the one that involved reading modern mythos fiction on picnics and a failed attempt at atmospheric roleplaying. Modern mythos fiction often skirts a line between capturing the intent of Lovecraft's world (the Otherness) and appropriating images, characters, or worlds, and placing them in modern, or at least different, settings.
I tried to only be a day late with this, but between a three hour drive, half of that on the accursed Mass Pike, followed by a late-night viewing of 1966's Incubus, starring a pre-Star Trek Wm Shatner and a bunch of people speaking a language non-fluently, my brain rebelled at doing such prosaic things as typing coherently.
I'm guilty of indulging in 'The Cult of Cute Cthulhu,' although with irregularities borne out of my discomfort with it. My reflexive complaint is that it's lazy. Making something that is supposed to be an unspeakable horror easy to access is offensive to me in the same way that, to use an out-dated analogy, AOL was offensive in the age of dial-up. It let people engage without any pretense of understanding either the underlying [infra]structure or cultural background that made it possible. Goetia for Dummies. Do-it-yourself suture removal. Flow-bees.
In contrast, when I was in college, I found out my senior year that one of the first-year writing classes was using the new-at-the-time Penguin Classics collection of Lovecraft's stories. That was a much better introduction, I hoped, than the failed Campus Crusade I'd started, the one that involved reading modern mythos fiction on picnics and a failed attempt at atmospheric roleplaying. Modern mythos fiction often skirts a line between capturing the intent of Lovecraft's world (the Otherness) and appropriating images, characters, or worlds, and placing them in modern, or at least different, settings.
