I liken it to a black hole with consciousness. It would be strange to call it evil in the sense of human morality, indeed, but it is inherently hostile to life. But I wasn’t talking about the view from the outside.
Lovecraftian horror figures are usually overhelming creatures. They transcend your imagination, defy your understanding of reality and challenge the laws of physics. They show you that you know nothing and are nothing. To them, your entire existence, desires, fears, dreams, morals, and society are meaningless; you are but a speck of dust that they crush as they pass.
Your mind is incapable of comprehending them; you cannot negotiate or fight them. You’re helpless. This concept instills existential fear in some people. I’m not sure why this is called ‘fear of the unknown’. Humans frequently associate the unknown with danger, and only enlightenment can alleviate this fear.
However, imagine shoehorning human morality or a tragic crybaby backstory on those beings, transforming them into misunderstood anti-heroes or sad villains (= grey morality). Doesn’t do much good, does it?
The void and the old gods are obviously not the “great old ones”. The generous inspiration of Lovecraft cannot be denied, but they are not the same. However, one should avoid cutting away at the appealing core they share.
i mean this is black-and-white morality in the first place. the great old ones of lovecraft are morally grey by virtue of existing outside of the paradigm. making the old gods just evil is a pretty boring read on lovecraft; you’re basically casting aside the substance of the horror and instead going ‘hrm yes eyeballs and tentacles and mouths are scary, we can use these for our generic bad guys.’
Danuser had nothing to do with Odyn, the only thing he worked on in Legion was the hunter lodge and story. Metzen is more to blame for it considering he was one of the main authors of Chronicle 1.
Sure. But this is specifically why (harkening back to the topic of this post) nerubians and kobolds are being “rehabilitated” in the lore. They’re not nice people by human standards, they look pretty monstrous, and even they’re afraid of the Old Gods/Void.
The nerubians find serving the void so distasteful that they rebelled against their own creators and made a godless society. The kobolds are so terrified of the void that they’ll fight anyone to ravenously keep their candles alight and keep the darkness at bay.
The Old Gods and Xal’atath are unknowable cosmic forces, they don’t need redemption. But it’d be nice if they had actual motivations beyond “consuming everything”, which, on the whole, isn’t very interesting. This topic is about the people born of/adjacent to/wielding those forces, I think.
That said, I don’t think WoW does “motives beyond our understanding” storylines very well. That’s was The Jailer’s entire shtick for several years. We were repeatedly told we “can’t comprehend” his machinations. What does he want? To destroy the universe or something. Oh. Right then.
And yet his works are still good. I can divorce the author from their works. A lot of novels I read came from awful people. Ender’s game being one of them.
Yeah, he used his racism and fear to make terrific monsters and stories. I know his stories and as a non-white person I can understand the controversy about his work. Do not care, still love them and they are great bases of human terror infecting ones mind and fear of the unknown.
People today have forgotten the old adage of Seperate the art from the artist. Lovecraft was a racist, doesn’t mean we can appreciate the classics that he wrote. Even if he himself was a horrible human being
