Thread by @AlexandraErin

The Stuffed Bear of the Forest With A Hundred Acres

https://twitter.com/LoreKeating/status/1478563991060455434

The thing I like best about Lovecraft is how much he exposes the lie of "separate the art from the artist". His racism was his art.

What's scary to him? Stuff from other places. Your mind shattering against the rock of learning the universe doesn't exist for your benefit alone.

He wrote about the progeny of interracial relationships in the same horrified tones he wrote about the offspring of humans and unfathomable alien fish people because they were the same thing to him.

Back when the World Fantasy Award was still using a bust of Lovecraft as the model for their trophy, I said he was the worst possible mascot for fantasy as a genre because everything that is great about fantasy was a source of terror and disgust to him.

Like, imagining other worlds? How horrible! Bad enough that he has to imagine other countries, now you want him to imagine whole other worlds in which, by necessity, every country is an *other* country, relative to his? All the people are *other* people?

A universe, a multiverse, a cosmos so vast that we aren't a tenth of a percent of the living minds that make it up is the kind of thing that makes a fantasy writer go, "Think of the possibilities."

Lovecraft wants us to believe that it's a fatal insult to the frail human ego.

I know a lot of people mine Lovecraft (and the Derleth Cut of the Lovecraft Expanded Universe) and post-Lovecraft eldritch horror and I wouldn't take that away from anyone if I could, especially given how much it resonates with people who identify with rather than recoil from it.

Honestly, I hope that somehow, somewhere, he knows how many people are horny for the horrors he unleashed. It's what he deserves.