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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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I've never tried reading any "sympathetic to the monsters" Lovecraft-inspired fiction, but I would argue that Lovecraft himself was good at writing them in a way that was both alien/horrifying and understandable/sympathetic (in the cases where it served the purpose of the story), despite him writing horror in which it was almost never a primary emphasis. So if someone came away from Lovecraft wanting to write a sympathetic treatment without appreciating how Lovecraft himself did it, I strongly suspect they would be worse at it than he was. Most likely by revising Lovecraft antagonists until they are less alien or threatening than even cultures/political-factions/eras other than the author's own, let alone other species. Meanwhile, based on that description for The Litany of Earth, it sounds like the author gave the alien culture of "the 1920s U.S. government" less understandable and sympathetic motives than Lovecraft gave to most of his actual aliens.

Most obviously the protagonist of At the Mountains of Madness comes to appreciate the alien culture and history of the Elder Things through the art and other remnants they left behind and is outright sympathetic to them (which serves the narrative purpose of contrasting with the greater horror), but this applies to antagonists as well. The Great Race of Yith are scholars seeking after science/knowledge and their own survival, the Mi-go are also scientifically inclined and have the more mundane goal of mining resources, and ghouls mostly just want to eat/survive and sometimes serve the role of allies or neutral figures. The reader (and sometimes the characters) can appreciate the wonders and achievements of their civilizations even if they don't share the morality of the early 20th-century United States. (Something much more difficult for SJW writers and readers who tend to have a totalizing view of SJW dictates and taboos, creating a necessity to insert them into fiction where they don't fit.) When beings have goals that aren't understandable, like the godlike beings tend to, he conveys the sense that they have their own reasons for acting as they do, even if they are not reasons that humans understand or appreciate.

The Deep Ones from The Shadow Over Innsmouth are some of his less sympathetic antagonists, in that activities like human sacrifice in service to alien gods seem irrational, but of course human sacrifice is a thing that even humans did, groups like the Aztecs are historical realities, so it is hardly cheating to impute it to a group of non-humans as well. Nor are such activities their only defining feature, just what brings them into conflict with humans. Instead attributing the conflict to "the United States’ motivation for destroying Innsmouth was a mixture of racism as well as hatred for the non-Christian religious practices of the townsfolk" is just flipping it around and having the U.S. government kill people in the name of religion instead, except that the 1920s U.S. government actually existed and not as the author depicts it. Naturally "The Innsmouth people are depicted as victims and the story ignores the Marsh family’s reign of terror over regular humans.", you can't give the "racists" understandable reasons for their actions, so conflicts must be cleanly divided between evil perpetrators and innocent victims. Meanwhile Lovecraft gave "monsters" glorious civilizations that the reader can appreciate even if the incidental consequences for humans produce horror. He was an enthusiast of science who often made his antagonists scientists, which makes sense with the instrumental utility it has for even deeply alien beings. (Compare to the above review for a book where 'non-binary gender identity", a highly specific and recent cultural concept, is immediately adopted by aliens once it is explained to them.) He was an atheist and intellectual who repeatedly wrote stories where the local superstitious traditions contain a kernel of truth that only intellectuals are arrogant enough to disregard (but without depicting science and modernity as having nothing to contribute). The roles of inhuman beings in his stories are shaped by the narrative requirements of primarily writing horror stories, but he could and did write them with complexity and compelling world-building anyway, and that was part of why his stories became so popular and influential to begin with.

I've never tried reading any "sympathetic to the monsters" Lovecraft-inspired fiction, but I would argue that Lovecraft himself was good at writing them in a way that was both alien/horrifying and understandable/sympathetic (in the cases where it served the purpose of the story), despite him writing horror in which it was almost never a primary emphasis.

I haven't read much Lovecraft-inspired fiction, and it's been a while since I've read Lovecraft himself, but I'd highly recommend the PS4 game Bloodborne for a great "sympathetic to the monsters" Lovecraft-inspired fiction. If you don't like games or don't have access to a PS4/PS5. I thought it did a great job of doing exactly what you're describing Lovecraft himself as doing, presenting these elder gods as both alien/horrifying and understandable/sympathetic. And it doesn't go for the obvious "humans are the real monsters" approach, presenting most human characters as parts horrifying and sympathetic, and the whole story just feels very tragic on all fronts for all characters, including the elder gods. This being a Fromsoft game, the story is cryptic and difficult to make out from a single playthrough, though there is no shortage of YouTube videos that dissect it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Fromsoft is a Japanese company with Japanese writers and developers, and their style of writing and game design tends not to be heavily influenced by Western/American norms, despite most of their famous games, including Bloodborne (set in heavily fictionalized Victorian London), being set in Western settings with Western characters.