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#cthulhu #knight #lovecraft #octopus #samurai
Published: 2015-12-31 04:32:39 +0000 UTC; Views: 2693; Favourites: 32; Downloads: 0
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Once one particular question popped up in mind: Why H.P. Lovecraft not very popular in Japan.Hardship of fishermen communities' life is quite close to home for them...
But...
They probably couldn't take seriously sea creature as a monster.
It's like if someone will try to scare you with beef steak
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Comments: 19
Lovecraft was also a huge racist. Like, anything less than New England lily-white skin was immediately suspect. He often described people from Asia or Africa as "degenerate" or "savage", and they would usually be described with the most unflattering adjectives. I imagine he would have written Japanese people to be in league with the monstrosities of the mythos, or at least, how sickening it is that they feast on them.
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Racist indeed. 
Say, he already almost did it in "The Horror At Red Hook" and there were few words about so called "yellow peril" in some Lovecraft's documents.
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Herbert Wells offered final solution of asian problem years before Lovecraft. To bomb them into oblivion with biological WMD from huge superbomber armada. So, it was kind of mainstream of hard racial conflict sci-fi of the era.
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Lovecraftian racism worked more bunglingly. Whole "The Shadow over Innsmouth" is about "horrors of mixing blood"
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When, long ago, the gods created Earth
In Jove's fair image Man was shaped at birth.
The beasts for lesser parts were next designed;
Yet were they too remote from humankind.
To fill the gap, and join the rest to Man,
Th'Olympian host conceiv'd a clever plan.
A beast they wrought, in semi-human figure,
Filled it with vice, and called the thing a N***er.
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And this poem of his is a perfect example of that.
Sometimes I think maybe people mistook "crazy bigot" for "corky weirdo"
Yet I still like very much some of his stuff. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The Dunwich Horror and The Colour Out of Space.
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If Cthulu ever surfaced off of the coast of Japan, the big guy would be met not by the JSDF, but by every Sushi chef in Japan looking to make the ultimate sampler platter out of him.
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Exactly!
"End of the World canceled due to lunch break"
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Happy New Years my friend!
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You too
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Ооооо, какие люди и без охраны!
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Пауза на дА слегка затянулась
Кстати с наступающим
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Holy Jesus on a pogo stick! Dude, you still around and doing art!
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It's a Christmas miracle! ^_^
But seriously I've never stopped drawing all this time
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It doesn't help that Lovecraft was largely horrified by the creatures that came out of the ocean but was fascinated by the fishermen who were able to shrug as they dropped an octopus on the harbor before casually nudging it back into the water (if they didn't plan on selling it for calamari). He couldn't wrap his head around the mentality it took for crabbers and divers to go out into that inky black for terrifying bugs and gigantic fish all for the sake of some food or money.
And while Lovecraft's creatures may not show up very often in Japanese media, the ideas behind them certainly do. There is quite the element of Yog Sothoth in Alucard on Hellsing. Then there's the concept of raging against indescribable, gargantuan monstrosities that are not so much bent on the destruction of humanity, but more just trodding upon us on their quest to locate a lost companion in Neon Genesis. And there are any number of stories where characters are possessed by beings so far beyond our ken, they're utterly formless and barely even able to grasp human needs, often signified by shadows wafting from the enthralled human.
Then there's the fact that tentacle porn was already a thing in Japan by the time they heard of Lovecraft, so I'm sure their reaction was along the lines of "Oh. We've already got this..."
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I think huge monsters it's legacy of nuclear bombing (relatively fresh trope). I don't remember equivalent of European giants in Japanese folklore (Onis are smaller than Godzilla and other kaiju). Possession of higher being probably something from Shintoism.
True, Japanese creators love to work with references. Sometimes with very loose interpretation.
That's why I love them
God bless Hokusai and his "The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife" for inventing tentacle porn
Speaking of...
As fun fact: There is one hentai visual novel based on Lovecraft works - NECRONOMICON by FairyTale Hardcover (1994)
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That's absolutely true! I have a book that examines the tropes of Anime in a scholarly vein, and one of the big ones is the fascination of apocalyptic events and world-ending monsters - the real-life horror of nuclear destruction was something Lovecraft couldn't have anticipated.
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Who could predict such devastating thing and how it will change perception of the world?
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