this post was submitted on 23 May 2025
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This is why i call it separating the artisr from the finance, the art is just unavoidable collateral damage.
Perfect example. Hp Lovecraft is dead he gains no money, rallies no crowd, calls no lawmaker. JkR does still, she does gain money and spends it trying to make the world worse for people.
Lovecraft is also a different case. It should be obvious now that he was a clinical xenophobe and was afraid of most things. He wasn't really looking to put other people down to compensate for his own shortcomings. If Lovecraft was still alive, I wouldn't argue with people boycotting him, but he's not the same as JK.
Yeah and Lovecraft came to see his racism was wrong before the end of his short life. Rowling so far has only clamped down harder on her detrimental bullshit.
Is that true? I'm an HP Lovecraft head and had never heard that
In his later letters to, and I could be wrong about the recipient, Robert E Howard he lamented that he wasted so much time being afraid of other cultures, and recognised his xenophobia as ignorance.
Yeah, and you can see it in his fiction as well. While in earlier stories characters literally kill themselves or go insane because they are not racially pure, the narrator in "Shadow over Innsmouth" looks forward to his final transformation into a fish person:
Lovecraft is problematic for other reasons.
The problem is that what makes his work good is this pathological fear of the other, that he interlinks with xenophobia and notions of racial purity in his fiction.
You can't love the art and hate the author with Lovecraft, you have to accept they're both pretty fucked up.
Sure, but people can use Cthulhu in their own books/games/movies and Lovecraft still gains nothing from it.
All true. They are not the same Hp was about as xenophobic as you can get.
But ido disagree with that last part. I can read and love his stories but never learn anything about him. I can't unlearn about him.
Several of his stories are outright racist though.
How do you go about loving that without acknowledging there are issues?
Same reason i can love a villain as a character. Just because i love a of work of fiction or fictional characters does not mean i endorse the mesaage.
Have you read Herbert West: Reanimator? I think that one in particular had an especially problematic description of a black man. I had to put down the anthology for a bit when I got there.