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Emulating Poe or Dunsany takes effort. Emulating - sorry, "emulating" - Lovecraft requires tentacles and for you to keep saying "non-Euclidean" for everything.
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Dec 15, 2013 06:51
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crowfeathers posted:I just don't get why everyone rips off Lovecraft and not Poe or Dunsany I think his style was more distinctive than that of Poe (whose writing was typical of the gothic literature that Lovecraft would later modify), while Dunsany never really caught on in mainstream America, his reputation mostly surviving in literary and fantasy circles. Lovecraft, for his part, was also sort of lucky, in that the nihilistic modernist fears he wrote about would later have a more everyday manifestation in the nuclear bomb. I think the kind of fear he captured resonated with a wider audience. When the idea is powerful, it influences more people. As for why he's popular with nerds, we're talking about a group who are largely social outcasts and are noted for opinions like "Big Bang Theory is nerd blackface" and "I'm glad Roger Ebert is dead, he didn't think video games were art." So, which do you think will appeal more? 1) Poe, a moderately successful writer who struggled with alcoholism and married his 13 year old niece (which might explain his popularity with  )2) Dunsany, a critically successful writer to whom financial success wasn't an issue. Also noted animal rights activist. 3) Lovecraft, whose love of racism and felines intersected in his cat friend of the family Man, an outsider whose works were bizarre by the standards of the day but against all odds became relatively famous after his death.
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Dec 15, 2013 07:10
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Byde posted:How does TvTropes feel about Legend of Galactic Heroes? TV Tropes posted:Accidental Innuendo: Well, this is the internet.
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Dec 15, 2013 07:19
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Alopex posted:
Once again, I remind myself how terrible I am for unironically using the term "trap". 
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Dec 15, 2013 07:45
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Penny Paper posted:Well, to a troper, they probably have never heard of Dunsany and they probably studied Poe in school by their (to use their "language") Sadist Teacher (who probably wasn't a sadist at all; tropers just like to exaggerate and think teachers are beneath them). If not, then they wrongly think Poe is for emos and Goths. That's probably it. They seem to automatically think that anything that they had to study in high school English is just crap and is just there to torture them.
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Dec 15, 2013 07:55
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Testekill posted:That's probably it. They seem to automatically think that anything that they had to study in high school English is just crap and is just there to torture them. Admittedly, having to read stuff that seems like you're having to read for the sake of reading it, like Ethan Frome and The Scarlet Letter, certainly could turn one off to HS-level lit. But then, with relatively modern works like Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, and In Cold Blood, it's like they're willfully trying to deafen themselves to something that's required of them that, gasp, just might actually be good despite not being an anime or game.
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Dec 15, 2013 08:06
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Regalingualius posted:Admittedly, having to read stuff that seems like you're having to read for the sake of reading it, like Ethan Frome and The Scarlet Letter, certainly could turn one off to HS-level lit. But then, with relatively modern works like Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, and In Cold Blood, it's like they're willfully trying to deafen themselves to something that's required of them that, gasp, just might actually be good despite not being an anime or game. The sequel was just poo poo, though.
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Dec 15, 2013 08:09
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Fuego Fish posted:Emulating Poe or Dunsany takes effort. Emulating - sorry, "emulating" - Lovecraft requires tentacles and for you to keep saying "non-Euclidean" for everything. Cyclopean.
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Dec 15, 2013 08:14
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So, sort of an Ender's Game kind of deal? Even if I thought Speaker for the Dead was fairly good for the most part. 
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Dec 15, 2013 08:16
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Regalingualius posted:So, sort of an Ender's Game kind of deal?  Seriously, though, everything beyond Xenocide was awful and crazy, though.
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Dec 15, 2013 08:22
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Regalingualius posted:Admittedly, having to read stuff that seems like you're having to read for the sake of reading it, like Ethan Frome and The Scarlet Letter, certainly could turn one off to HS-level lit. But then, with relatively modern works like Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, and In Cold Blood, it's like they're willfully trying to deafen themselves to something that's required of them that, gasp, just might actually be good despite not being an anime or game. Yeah, there are plenty of books or films that I would never have seen if not for English class. I certainly wouldn't have ever seen American History X if not for my Lit class and I probably wouldn't have read Great Gatsby either.
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Dec 15, 2013 08:43
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Testekill posted:Yeah, there are plenty of books or films that I would never have seen if not for English class. I certainly wouldn't have ever seen American History X if not for my Lit class and I probably wouldn't have read Great Gatsby either. There's a lot of politics involved in the decision of which books belong in a high school curriculum. In addition to regional politics, there's the problem of different publishers or public domain access, and the books that face challenges from religious or conservative parents who think the material doesn't belong in schools. Canadian schools try to teach Canadian authors, but Atwood is too controversial, so we read a novel that involves brothels, rape, and treason but is too boring for anyone to notice. Really, if The Wars wasn't so dull it would be perfect for the simple minds of tropers. Flamethrowers symbolize fire!
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Dec 15, 2013 08:53
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Anticheese posted:Cyclopean. Squamous. (Nobody on TvTropes know what it means.)
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Dec 15, 2013 14:00
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Fuego Fish posted:Squamous. I think you mean rugose.
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Dec 15, 2013 14:15
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Testekill posted:Well you see, even putting in minimal effort still requires them to put in effort. The Pro Wrestling section is one of the most ignored and least cleaned-up sections of the site. If you looked hard enough and sifted through the regular banal dreck, I'm pretty sure you could find some horrible, horrible gold in there.
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Dec 15, 2013 14:23
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Darth Walrus posted:The Pro Wrestling section is one of the most ignored and least cleaned-up sections of the site. If you looked hard enough and sifted through the regular banal dreck, I'm pretty sure you could find some horrible, horrible gold in there. The only real "holy gently caress, what the hell guys?" bit is the Anyone can Die entry. They could just say that it's an unfortunate fact that wrestlers are starting to die really young. That's all that would need to be said but then they have to elaborate. This is Truth in Television because immortality does not exist, so real life examples will be completely unnecessary. This is said on the trope page for Anyone can Die. These are real people that have passed away generally before their time (There's been a lot of deaths while the person is in their mid 40's to early 50's.) and they could treat it with a little respect instead of going "well this is how x person died" There's still going to be asinine bullshit like them having to list every wrestling B show but that's the real standout.
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Dec 15, 2013 14:59
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Testekill posted:That's probably it. They seem to automatically think that anything that they had to study in high school English is just crap and is just there to torture them. This is important and another thing I can sometimes glean from this thread is that Tropers that are a "fan" of a work/author/etc. are continuously trying to one up each other. The site is about how many tropes can we add to this work? How many tropes can I fit into my "story"? They are trying to find increasingly obscure material and ways to to find them or build them and say that they did it first. I think Portaxx and Istafan of the F Plus said it best in these quote: Istafan of the F Plus posted:A lot of the comedy behind this stuff is that people just turn off any sort of social filter regarding it. Your "duty" comment really made me arch an eyebrow, because that's exactly the sort of social-filter bypass that the Internet has collectively cursed us with. "Portaxx of the F Plus posted:My theory is that some fandoms just kind of snowball out of control. Some devoted fans create lots of fanworks, those fanworks catch others' attention, and it spreads. More people see how much this group is enjoying itself, and they look into the source material to see what the fuss is about.
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Dec 15, 2013 18:36
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I don't have the exact quote with me, but one post I remember was from a guy who got into pony stuff through Fallout Equestria and has never seen the show at all because it's for little girls. He was making fun of fans of the actual show because they like colorful happy cartoons instead of a "mature" rape-fest.
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Dec 15, 2013 21:33
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Nothing is more mature than horses raping one another in a post-apocalyptic nightmare world!
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Dec 15, 2013 21:46
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crowfeathers posted:I don't have the exact quote with me, but one post I remember was from a guy who got into pony stuff through Fallout Equestria and has never seen the show at all because it's for little girls. He was making fun of fans of the actual show because they like colorful happy cartoons instead of a "mature" rape-fest.  It's not that I'm not surprised, I just wished it was some hypothetical loser that couldn't actually exist.
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Dec 15, 2013 21:48
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RunningIntoWalls posted:This is important and another thing I can sometimes glean from this thread is that Tropers that are a "fan" of a work/author/etc. are continuously trying to one up each other. The site is about how many tropes can we add to this work? How many tropes can I fit into my "story"? They are trying to find increasingly obscure material and ways to to find them or build them and say that they did it first. I think Portaxx and Istafan of the F Plus said it best in these quote: That bit about Fluttershy explains so much about "nightmare fuel" and other pages. It doesn't help that "no such thing as notability" means there's no limit on what you can list. Although "no such thing as notability" links to this page: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Administrivia/TheContentPolicyAndThe5PCircuit Funny how they expect people to point stuff out to them, when it's not in any Troper's interest to do so. Then they'd have to remove all the "rape of high schoolers is so dark and edgy", anthropomorphic ponies or otherwise.
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Dec 17, 2013 00:03
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Darth Walrus posted:In other words, the key difference was that whilst they were both incredibly racist, Lovecraft could turn his racism off sometimes and write about other stuff. I disagree. Have you ever read some of his stories? The Horror at Red Hook? The Street? Call of Cthulhu? The man's stories were saturated with racism. He could not "turn his racism off". It's more just a matter of him gradually becoming less overtly racist later on in his career. By comparison, Robert E. Howard was actually capable of occasionally writing about black people as human beings, unlike Lovecraft who tended to just explode into a ball of rage, terror and negative adjectives at the thought of black people or mulattos or non-white foreigners existing. Read the Solomon Kane stories; while they are certainly deeply racist by modern standards, they are pretty benign for the era. And even REH's really racist works still weren't as racist as Lovecraft's. And Lovecraft didn't even have the excuse of being from early 20th-century rural Texas. As for why nerds and tropers love Lovecraft so much: besides the fact that he's the trendy flavor of the month, Lovecraft himself was pretty goony when you get down to it. A weird, nerdy, awkward, racist misanthrope who couldn't related to other people, had issues with women, was terrified of sex and minorities, and tended to write in the most needlessly verbose manner possible? He was practically a proto-Troper. Just, y'know, with actual writing talent, and with an England fetish instead of a Japan fetish. EDIT: Seriously, "I could not write about "ordinary people" because I am not in the least interested in them." Tell me you couldn't see that being posted in TVT Writer's Block subforum. EDIT 2: Yeah, sorry, I hadn't read those articles when I posted this. I'd also never read Kings of the Night or Bal-Sagoth, or Vale of Lsot Women, or apparently quite a few of his other stories, nor most of his letters. Seriously, I cannot loving believe he thought the Romans didn't understand shieldwalls. That's not just racist, that's loving inexcusably stupid (even more so than having vikings in a late-Roman-era story). Hammurabi fucked around with this message at 03:29 on Dec 20, 2013 |
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Dec 19, 2013 06:56
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Hammurabi posted:I disagree. Have you ever read some of his stories? The Horror at Red Hook? The Street? Call of Cthulhu? Also - another reason Howard's less imitated - he was an excellent stylist who really cared about things like rhythm and sound and whose bookshelves were groaning with Shakespeare and Classical literature and poetry as well as with pulp. He loved great literature; he just had a knack for writing something different. Lovecraft had a remarkable talent in his own way, but it lay in the stuff he could invent, creatures and cosmologies, and that's easier to pretend you can imitate. It's much harder to pretend you can imitate someone whose great talent lay in his ability to, you know, write. They probably all play 'Eye of Argon' a lot and know it's easy to look foolish trying to imitate Howard (though personally I'd give the Argon author at least some props for effort; he clearly had an honest love for Howard's work and was trying to be good rather than to look smart); trying to imitate Lovecraft, ironically, by now just makes you look bland.
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Dec 19, 2013 10:09
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Hammurabi posted:I disagree. Have you ever read some of his stories? The Horror at Red Hook? The Street? Call of Cthulhu? You're still misunderstanding me. Again, yes, Lovecraft was incredibly racist, but he could write a story that contained no mention of that racism, be it a haunted house tale or a 'weird unknowable alien force shows up' one. Everything Howard wrote was based around preaching his bizarre, heavily racialised savagery-barbarism-civilisation theory of history. The Kane books, for instance, were about how Africa was the last true refuge of both savagery and barbarism, with the virile, potent 'barbarians' being hard-bitten European colonists/more enlightened African tribes, whilst the 'savages' consisted of everyone else with dark skin, who were presented as animalistic monsters halfway into devolving into apedom. In them, Howard presented the case that Aftrica was a land of opportunity, a place to return mankind to its best and most natural state of barbarism, but for this to happen, the black savages had to be slaughtered en masse. Black barbarians do show up, but they're inevitably presented as The Good One who green-lights the books' genocidal worldview. A cover from the 1980s provides an accurate summary. To get a proper understanding of how monomaniacal Howard could get about his pet worldview, though, it's necessary to check out his stories set in Europe. No black people or Native Americans means no racism, right? Wrong. He carefully sorted the various ancient civilisations according to how 'Aryan' he considered them, with English Saxons being the best of all (curiously, despite his fetishisation of the 'Nordic', he doesn't seem to have had much patience for actual Vikings). This is most effectively summarised in one of his letters to Lovecraft: quote:"Don't think I’m fanatic in this matter of Rome. Its merely a figment of instinct, no more connected with my real every-day life than is my preference for the enemies of Rome. I can appreciate Roman deeds of valor and no one gets more thrill out of Horatius’s stand on the Roman bridge, than I do. I am with the Romans as long as their faces are turned east. While they are conquering Egyptians, Syrians, Jews and Arabs, I am all for them. In their wars with the Parthians and Persians, I am definitely Roman in sympathy. But when they turn west, I am their enemy, and stand or fall with the Gauls, the Teutons and the Picts! Fantastic, isn’t it?" This hair-splitting racism could often get very, very silly - my favourite is from the first Bran Mak Morn story, 'Kings of the Night', where the protagonist, a Pict, leads the barbarians of Britain (plus their shifty Viking allies) to a crushing victory against the invading Romans by using an ingenious Aryan strategy that the Romans' inferior, non-Aryan minds simply could not comprehend... a loving shield-wall. quote:This was the first time the Roman legions had met with that unbreakable formation - that oldest of all Aryan battle-lines - the ancestor of the Spartan regiment - the Theban phalanx - the Macedonian formation - the English square.  As for 'Lovecraft didn't even have the excuse of being from early 20th-century rural Texas', you forget that he was instead from early-twentieth-century Boston, one of the hotbeds of the eugenics movement and of scientific racism in general, which manifests heavily in his stories - indeed, early Lovecraft often gives the impression that he only knew anything about non-white people through the regurgitations of his racist buddies in academia. However, I'd argue that this and other product-of-their time arguments fail to excuse either of them, and your description of Howard as 'relatively benign' is seriously loving off. Yes, America around the start of the twentieth century was severely racist - the Jim Crow laws were more than ample evidence of that. However, that doesn't mean that every single American citizen, or even every single Western spec-fic writer of the time, had Lovecraft's screaming paranoia about people different from him or Howard's gigantic murderboner for exterminating non-Aryan 'savages'. In fact, they weren't even majority opinions. By 1932, when Howard published his first Conan stories, the Harlem Renaissance was in full swing, and Eleanor Roosevelt was leading a wave of civil-rights campaigners across the country. Even in the South, the Ku Klux Klan was crippled and dying, with its leadership shattered and local papers routinely lambasting it as 'un-American'. Sure, there were still powerful arguments for segregation, but anyone wanting to slaughter the black savages and bathe in their blood was still considered a bit weird. Even the US's biggest ongoing civil-rights disaster, the persecution of Native Americans, had started to make some tiny progress with the Indian Citizenship Act. Even within the stuffy, conservative, and often batshit crazy fantasy genre, Howard and Lovecraft were by no means moderates. Even Tolkein, generally considered a backward, sheltered old fuddy-duddy by his contemporaries, wrote about his Jew-equivalents, the dwarves, with far more affection than was shown in Howard's greasy, treacherous 'Shemites' (and criticised Hitler for persecuting them, unlike Lovecraft, who was a Hitler fan, and Howard, who had apparently decided Adolf wasn't Aryan enough for his tastes), and expressed extreme discomfort about his own use of evil, dark-skinned savage hordes that can be found nowhere in Howard's work or in Lovecraft's capering mulatto Cthulhu-worshippers. Darth Walrus fucked around with this message at 14:40 on Dec 19, 2013 |
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Dec 19, 2013 14:07
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Darth Walrus posted:Even within the stuffy, conservative, and often batshit crazy fantasy genre, Howard and Lovecraft were by no means moderates. Even Tolkein, generally considered a backward, sheltered old fuddy-duddy by his contemporaries, wrote about his Jew-equivalents, the dwarves, with far more affection than was shown in Howard's greasy, treacherous 'Shemites' (and criticised Hitler for persecuting them, unlike Lovecraft, who was a Hitler fan, and Howard, who had apparently decided Adolf wasn't Aryan enough for his tastes), and expressed extreme discomfort about his own use of evil, dark-skinned savage hordes that can be found nowhere in Howard's work or in Lovecraft's capering mulatto Cthulhu-worshippers. While we are nerding out on Fantasy authors I'm going to white knight Tolkien a bit as he is my homie. Tolkien seems to me to simply have been insensitive and ignorant of some of his ingrained views. As you said, he personally stepped back and was like "woah i made the bad guys all black." For him he just honestly went "well people from the southern parts of Earth tend to be darker, so the bad guys from the south should be darker" He directly called out South Africa for being horrific, and lamented that everyone always gets appalled by it at first and then forgets about it. On the dwarves Jew equivalents, the only negative stereotype presented there is their tendency towards greed, and while that is certainly a stereotype levied on Jews, its not unique to them by any means. The Dwarves are otherwise presented in as positive a light as anyone else in the story, considering both Elves and Men also have bad traits. He based their language off Semitic languages, and did directly compare them though, so again he seems just ignorant of how that can be interpreted. Tolkien more then criticized Hitler, he was straight up disgusted, appalled, horrified, etc at the Holocaust and Nazism in general. He completely refused to even let the Hobbit be published in German. Tolkien posted:Personally, I should be inclined to refuse to give any Bestätigung (although it happens that I can), and let a German translation go hang. In any case I should object strongly to any such declaration appearing in print. I do not regard the (probable) absence of all Jewish blood as necessarily honourable; and I have many Jewish friends, and should regret giving any colour to the notion that I subscribed to the wholly pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine...But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.
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Dec 19, 2013 15:59
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WoodrowSkillson posted:While we are nerding out on Fantasy authors I'm going to white knight Tolkien a bit as he is my homie. Tolkien seems to me to simply have been insensitive and ignorant of some of his ingrained views. As you said, he personally stepped back and was like "woah i made the bad guys all black." For him he just honestly went "well people from the southern parts of Earth tend to be darker, so the bad guys from the south should be darker" He directly called out South Africa for being horrific, and lamented that everyone always gets appalled by it at first and then forgets about it. Well, the introduction to dwarves in the Hobbit is a bit uncomfortably suggestive when we remember that they were intended to be 'clearly Semitic': quote:The most that can be said for the dwarves is this: they intended to pay Bilbo really handsomely for his services; they had brought him to do a nasty job for them, and they did not mind the poor little fellow doing it if he would; but they would all have done their best to get him out of trouble, if he got into it. . . . There it is: dwarves are not heroes, but calculating folk with a great idea of the value of money; some are tricky and treacherous and pretty bad lots; some are not, but are decent enough people like Thorin and Company, if you don’t expect too much. Still, that's really mild when compared to Howard or Lovecraft's attitudes towards Jews, who they see respectively as representatives of the decadent, corrupt excess of civilisation and as unknowable, alien, and monstrous pariahs. Funnily enough, the latter was actually married to a Jew for a while, and whilst they did end up separating, they apparently got on quite well before, during, and afterwards. Nobody's quite sure how that one happened.
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Dec 19, 2013 16:36
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Keep in mind the hobbits are also distrustful of the elves and men as well. Men are portrayed worse then the Dwarves really as they are the only ones that are actually on the bad guy's side. Hell one of the themes is how racism between the 3 actual races causes discord when they should be united against the bad guys. I think Tolkien is a perfect example of an relatively privileged dude who did not recognize that he was being a bit offensive while not harboring actual ill will.
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Dec 19, 2013 16:47
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Tolkien and CS Lewis both were really outstanding people who went above and beyond "fair for the time", even if they did have a few faults like that. Howard had, at worst, odd views on society and how the world works, but I don't think had any ill will towards people based solely off race, at least not intentionally.
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Dec 19, 2013 16:56
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WickedHate posted:Tolkien and CS Lewis both were really outstanding people who went above and beyond "fair for the time", even if they did have a few faults like that. Howard had, at worst, odd views on society and how the world works, but I don't think had any ill will towards people based solely off race, at least not intentionally. How did you come to that conclusion about Howard given the nicely put together effortpost not 4 posts up?
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Dec 19, 2013 16:59
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WoodrowSkillson posted:How did you come to that conclusion about Howard given the nicely put together effortpost not 4 posts up? Because I've read a lot of his stuff. There are plenty of virtuous characters of color(including Conan's most well known girlfriend) and white characters are presented just as badly depending on where the story takes place. He still wasn't purely not racist, but he was still better then most.
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Dec 19, 2013 17:03
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WickedHate posted:Because I've read a lot of his stuff. What's this, a goon who actually knows what they're talking about, instead of just regurgitating goonsay as gospel truth?
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Dec 19, 2013 17:07
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DStecks posted:What's this, a goon who actually knows what they're talking about, instead of just regurgitating goonsay as gospel truth? Cause the other guy clearly has not read it. Someone going "Well I totally red it guys, so there." is a fantastic rebuttal.
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Dec 19, 2013 17:11
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I don't know why people are arguing H.P. Lovecraft versus Robert Howard when you can just have Clark Ashton Smith. Get both without the unpleasant aftertaste.
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Dec 19, 2013 17:16
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WickedHate posted:Because I've read a lot of his stuff. There are plenty of virtuous characters of color(including Conan's most well known girlfriend) and white characters are presented just as badly depending on where the story takes place. You mean Valeria? The original cover art for Red Nails (link NSFW) doesn't seem to agree with you (yes, she is in the middle of being sacrificed by evil lesbian brown women - the editor of Weird Tales had some very specific tastes).
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Dec 19, 2013 17:39
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Darth Walrus posted:You mean Valeria? The original cover art for Red Nails (link NSFW) doesn't seem to agree with you (yes, she is in the middle of being sacrificed by evil lesbian brown women - the editor of Weird Tales had some very specific tastes). I meant Belit, actually, but I misremembered that anyway, so I was wrong on that point. Still, there was plenty of other non whites on Conan's side or who were good and sympathetic people(good and sympathetic does not necessarily align with "on Conan's side" either). I could have sworn she was black. WickedHate fucked around with this message at 00:04 on Jun 27, 2014 |
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Dec 19, 2013 17:45
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Darth Walrus posted:You mean Valeria? The original cover art for Red Nails (link NSFW) doesn't seem to agree with you (yes, she is in the middle of being sacrificed by evil lesbian brown women - the editor of Weird Tales had some very specific tastes). Because old-timey pulp and paperback covers were famed for exactly representing how the characters within the work were described.
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Dec 19, 2013 18:01
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WickedHate posted:I meant Belit, actually, but I misremembered that anyway, so I was wrong on that point. Still, there was plenty of other non whites on Conan's side or who were good and sympathetic people(good and sympathetic does not necessarily align with "on Conan's side" either). Any in particular you're thinking of? Bear in mind that due to Howard's stated beliefs, what he finds sympathetic and what we do may not necessarily gel - he was big on ruthlessness and willingness to shed blood as vitalising virtues that civilisation was in danger of draining from us, for instance. Belit, for the record, is a data-point in the opposite direction, a white woman worshipped as a goddess by her all-black crew. She is Shemite (Jewish), but is presented very differently from most Shemites in the story, with emphasis being placed on her whiteness (in contrast to the primitive, bestial black people surrounding her) and on the virtues that she gains from the barbarian lifestyle (Shemites are usually civilised and decadent, and we see some very unflattering depictions of them in the early parts of the story). Here's her introduction: quote:"Bend to it, dogs!" roared Tito with a passionate gesture of his brawny fist. The bearded rowers grunted, heaved at the oars, while their muscles coiled and knotted, and sweat started out on their hides. The timbers of the stout little galley creaked and groaned as the men fairly ripped her through the water. The wind had fallen; the sail hung limp. Nearer crept the inexorable raiders, and they were still a good mile from the surf when one of the steersmen fell gagging across a sweep, a long arrow through his neck. Tito sprang to take his place, and Conan, bracing his feet wide on the heaving poop- deck, lifted his bow. He could see the details of the pirate plainly now. The rowers were protected by a line of raised mantelets along the sides, but the warriors dancing on the narrow deck were in full view. These were painted and plumed, and mostly naked, brandishing spears and spotted shields. I think part of the thing is that whilst Howard was clearly very racist, his near-total lack of self-awareness (beyond that Lovecraft letter) meant that he was incredibly goddamned inconsistent about who he was being racist towards. Take, for instance, the Romans. When they're up against the decadent East, they're the noble, heroically ruthless defenders of all that is good and Aryan. When they're up against European barbarians, they're spineless, brainless, simpering Eyeties. I think we get some of that turnaround in 'Queen of the Black Coast'. When Conan the glorious Aryan is contrasted with the Shemites, they're every horrible exotified Jewish stereotype at once. When Belit the Shemite is placed against actual black people, she's this mighty white goddess by dint of being a little closer to the Aryan ideal, and she naturally submits to Conan, her more-Aryan-than-thou superior, as soon as she meets him. Darth Walrus fucked around with this message at 18:17 on Dec 19, 2013 |
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Dec 19, 2013 18:09
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Lovecraft still has a certain nerd-cred value because his stuff has stayed just outside the mainstream- there's never been a big movie based on his stuff (low budget films like Re-Animator and The Dunwich Horror are the closest we got), and Cthulhu & co. aren't really household names (even though he was in a goddamn South Park episode) so there's still a certain "You know Cthulhu? You're a nerd like us!" thing going. Whereas "Conan the Barbarian" is a more widely recognized cultural image, if only from the Schwarzenegger movies.
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Dec 19, 2013 18:12
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DStecks posted:Because old-timey pulp and paperback covers were famed for exactly representing how the characters within the work were described. It's accurate enough in this case - Valeria's 'unruly golden hair' and blue eyes are mentioned at the start of 'Red Nails', which would be slightly unusual for a POC.
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Dec 19, 2013 18:12
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Howard's take on race is really all over the place. In a story like "Vale of Lost Women" you've got the black characters as savage rapists of white women and all that crap, but in another story he'd write the same black culture as a bunch of noble warriors Conan gladly fights alongside.
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Dec 19, 2013 18:14
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