The fact is Lovecraft had horrendous opinions on race, and there's no 'standards of the time' Get Out Of Jail Free card for him, IMHO. But he was also a genuinely innovative writer of the Weird. Talented people can be monsters, we have to look this square in the face.
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It doesn't matter if he'd thinks my existence would be some kind of abomination.
He's dead. His thoughts on the matter don't matter anymore.
LIVING shit heads, however......
“Life is not a ledger. Your sins can’t be paid off through good deeds. Your good deeds are not cancelled by your sins. Your sins and your good deeds live alongside one another. They coexist in superposition.”
Maybe it's because his return to popularity was late enough his flavor of bigotry didn't really appeal to racists anymore?
Dude was that bad.
So buying his books doesn't fund someone doing active and ongoing harm.
Monster should be reserved for the genuine psychos who use their crap opinions to justify shit like murder and torture.
Lovecraft if I remember correctly was just vocally racist.
It seems like looking this square in the face is similar to looking into the face of one of Lovecraft’s own mind bending eldritch horrors. It does not square with how we think of reality.
He was just dumb.
I know it's cliché to say you projecting on the people you hate, but it's true.
It's EXTREMELY obvious Harry represents Rowling's repressed male side/identity.
But she suffered as a young woman so doesn't want her gender identity challenged.
He was a good writer though, both things can be true.
Lovecraft is a great example too, because you can see how his remarkable bigotry hindered his work and made him into a kind of hypocrite pessimist. The closer you look the more you can see how cosmic horror requires a deep sense of human equality.
While some certainly seems familiar as modern racism, other parts seem to be just fear of anything different
But still, the central point remains: great (or at least important) art can be done by shitty people.
His fish men are just fish men until you realise they were written by that monarchist simp who wrote for The Conservative and supported Hitler.
Or perhaps more interesting those who were pushing for progress in their own day, but would be awful now.
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/92824/prince-of-flames/chapter/1778389/chapter-i-a-kingdom-of-sand
(it's also OK to boycott it too!)
I never read Lovecraft, so recently picked up a collection of his works - I've been wading though that stuff attempting to figure out where the good stuff is!
I don’t want to separate the art and artist because there is a clear and direct relationship between his racism/xenophobia and the worlds he made.
It’s not a rational concern, per se, but it does weigh on me.
I’ve got to a point, however, where as talented as someone is I’m just fine not paying them and their work attention if they’re working hard to be among the dregs of humanity.
I simplify it to everyone is human, which in my mind means people in general can have all sorts of hot takes and questionable morals, but it doesn't mean their heart is so bereft of any beauty that there is nothing to appreciate.
We need to look past the bad, not ignore it, but learn from it and move on.
It can be hard, but I think we need to hold onto that to keep our own humanity.
His racism is of the crudest, most primitive and unreflective sort. It's obviously vile.
But the real danger in those days was urbane, pseudo-scientific "racialism".
Lovecraft's "cosmic horror" shows the bourgeois mind's recoiling at democratic society.
Joshua Hellfire Christ himself had a lot to say about this.