Cthulhu Mythos: Difference between revisions

''To destroy mankind, the bold ones

''Come at last the long foretold ones

 

''Yog-Sothoth or mankind's blunder

''P'raps we'll summon up a Shuggoth;

''Find our brains on distant Yuggoth!

 

An informal and, appropriately, chaotic [[Shared Universe]] that squarely defines the [[Darker and Edgier|darkest and edgiest]] of genres, [[Cosmic Horror Story|cosmic horror]]. It was started unintentionally by [[H.P. Lovecraft|HP Lovecraft]] and his circle of peers (informally called the 'Kalem Club') who belonged to the embryonic [[Fandom]], at that stage less about [[Speculative Fiction]] but more about writing short amateur "weird" stories for the 'pulp' magazines, at least for Lovecraft.

Due to the [[Shared Universe]]'s informal nature there have arisen several rather divisive conceptions of the Mythos, generally categorized as the Lovecraft purists' version; the version including the broad post-1930s expansions by later writers like August Derleth (who is a controversy unto himself) and Ramsey Campbell; and then there's the rigidly codified and de-mystified [[Tabletop RPG]] adaptations which crunch down [[Mind Screwdriver]]-style to produce orderly game rules from an inherently disorderly canon. Information from the latter has tended to proliferate across the Internet disproportionately, resulting in simple Google searches producing a majority of pages derived from the game and its various campaigns, which are not always labeled as such.

 

 

See also the [[Call of Cthulhu (tabletop game)|Call of Cthulhu RPG]]

* [[Kull]], [[Conan the Barbarian]], and [[Bran Mak Morn]]: [[Robert E. Howard]]'s works form a peripheral part of the Mythos - the stories tend to be human-centric. "[[The Tower of the Elephant]]", one of the best early Conan stories, features a Lovecraftian abomination.

 

* '''The "Lovecraft Circle"''' : The original writers who corresponded with each other and used the elements of the mythos in their writings.

** [[August Derleth]]. Co-founder of ''Arkham House'', and proponent of the Mythos. Also see [[The Trail of Cthulhu]].

* [[Thomas Ligotti]]: More influenced by Lovecraft's bleak philosophy than by the particulars of the Mythos, but has written a few explicit homages like "The Sect of the Idiot."

 

* [[Affectionate Parody]]: Several, including:

** [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|The aptly named]] [[Cthulhu Saves the World]] is a huge love letter to both 16 bit [[RPG|RPGs]] and to the Mythos as a whole.

** [[Pokethulhu]], crossing the mythos and Pokemon.

** [[Hello Cthulhu]]

* [[Alien Geometries]]: One of the most notable examples being on the island of R'lyeh, in "The Call of Cthulhu".

* [[Aliens Are Bastards]]: Just about everything not of this Earth is evil and/or horrifying. About the only exception are Elder Thing and the Great Race of Yith, who still do freaky things like body-swapping with humans so they can visit Earth, and politely mind-wiping the unfortunate human when they switch back.

** An unusual example is that Lovecraft himself became a figure in his own mythos and was written into several stories by other authors, either as an avatar or even more curiously as himself. In addition to this, the first Lovecraft short story collection ''The Outsider and Others'', put together posthumously, was inserted into the mythos as one of the arcane tomes frequently referenced in the stories of other authors.

** [[Robert Bloch]] killed off a character based on Lovecraft in "The Shambler from the Stars"; in response, Lovecraft killed off a character based on Bloch in "The Haunter of the Dark".

** Frank Belknap Long had another character based off Lovecraft in "The Space-Eaters".

** The main character of Fritz Leiber's "Terror from the Depths" shares many similarities to [[Clark Ashton Smith]].

* [[Blue and Orange Morality]]: An alternative take on the Mythos by some authors. Most of the beings in the Mythos are beyond good and evil, as we understand it. For example, Long presents the ''Hounds of Tindalos'' as "Foul" and "descended of angles". Humans are somewhat "Pure" and literally descended from curves. In "A Note on the Cthulhu Mythos", Derleth explains that the entities of the Mythos are "beyond mundane morality".

* [[Canon Welding]]: Very common.

* [[City with No Name]]: "The Nameless City".

* [[Covers Always Lie]]: Lovecraft anthologies (such as the ''Del Ray'' ones) tend to have weird, surreal imagery that often doesn't have anything to do with anything in the stories. Though, it does communicate the atmosphere of the books well enough.

* [[Cult|Cults]]: The Mythos is filled with Old One worshipers with [[Religion of Evil|horrible rituals]]. They range from the ''Arkham Witch Coven'', various madmen like the Whateleys, ''The Brotherhood of the Yellow Sign'', and the English ''Temphill Cult'' to name a few.

* [[Dark Fantasy]]: Really Dark.

* [[Death by Adaptation]]: {{spoiler|Inspector Legrasse}} in the 2005 silent film adaptation of ''[[Lovecraft on Film|The Call of Cthulhu (tabletop game)]]. {{spoiler|In the literature, he not only lives, but also stars in a series of short stories.}}''

** The same goes for a bunch of other characters in ''[[Lovecraft on Film|The Whisperer In Darkness]]'' as well. Most prominently, {{spoiler|Albert Wilmarth crashes a plane into a Mi-Go ritual site, after which the aliens [[Brain In a Jar|save his brain]]}}.

* [[Did You Just Romance Cthulhu?]]?:

** Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror". Yog-Sothoth mates with a human woman {{spoiler|and produces the offspring who will be known as Wilbur Whateley.}}

* [[Fish People]]: The Deep Ones and their [[Half Human Hybrids]], obviously.

* [[Genocide Backfire]]: ''The Doom that Came to Sarnath''.

* [[Half-Human Hybrid]]: And not the [[Body Horror|cute furry kind]], [[In the Blood|nor the sympathetic outcast kind]].

* [[He Knows Too Much]]: Whoever finds out too much about the Mythos (such as the Cthulhu Cult) [[Killed to Uphold the Masquerade|tend to be hunted down and killed]]. That is, if the person in question doesn't go insane first or get eaten.

* [[Masquerade]]: One of the defining aspects of the Mythos, living in ignorance of the true horrors of reality.

* [[Medium Awareness]]: Lovecraft encouraged the authors he corresponded with to use elements of his mythos in their stories, even if those stories were not part of the mythos itself. This emergence of common elements in seemingly unrelated works of literature created the impression that the mythos was actually real, thus leading to the fan theories that Lovecraft actually had encounters with eldritch entities. This culminated in a peculiar case when an infamous [[Moral Guardian]] by the name of Patricia Pulling included in a questionnaire submitted to police as a means of investigating people for possible occult affiliations, a question regarding whether or not the suspect had heard of and read the Necronomicon. This question, among various other things, led to her discrediting as a credible expert in the area of occult crime.

* [[Mushroom Man]]: The Fungi from Yuggoth.

* [[Names to Run Away From Really Fast]]: Pretty much all of them, unsurprisingly.

* [[Weaksauce Weakness]]:

** The Cthonians ''dissolve in water.'' Justified: Considering the Cthonians are able to survive intense heat and pressures, can borrow underground, and have telepathic powers capable of controlling people's minds, the fact that Earth is mostly water may be the only reason why they haven't wiped humanity out.

** Water isn't good for the Great Old Ones according to ''The Call of Cthulhu'', either - it blocks their telepathic powers completely, trapping them to their lairs both physically and mentally, until R'lyeh rises again.

** The Haunter in the Dark, one of Nyarlathotep's many forms, is extremely weak against light. Granted, it comes from a dimension where no visible light exists (and where it would presumably be invincible), and it can't be killed, only banished back to that dimension, but still, it's an [[Eldritch Abomination]] that can kept at bay with ''a flashlight''! But you'd better hope [[Ten-Second Flashlight|your batteries last]] until you find something else... the Haunter can wait, it only needs to catch you once.

*** In [[Robert Bloch]]'s story "The Shadow From the Steeple" (considered [[Fanon Discontinuity|out of canon by some]]) [[It Got Worse|it gets better]]: after a ''serious'' blunder by a university professor attempting to contain it, {{spoiler|it [[Grand Theft Me|takes over his body]], therefore becoming almost unaffected by light, changes the man's field of expertise to theoretical physics, then joins the Manhattan project so we'll succeed in creating a weapon that could actually annihilate us. It's also an avatar of the god Nyarlathotep, [[Names to Run Away From Really Fast|The Crawling Chaos]].}}

* [[Weird Tales]]: Many of Lovecraft and pals wrote for the magazine.

* [[When the Planets Align]]: The Great Old Ones will return when ''The Stars Are Right''.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Trope Overdosed]]

[[Category:The Verse]]

[[Category:Horror Literature]]

[[Category:Science Fiction Literature]]