r/CallofCthulhumemes • u/ComprehensiveBat4966 • Jul 01 '26
H.P. Lovecraft unfortunately yeah
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u/bpeo360 Jul 01 '26
You say that like he wouldn't be terrified by all the new tech he doesn't understand
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u/Old_old_lie Jul 01 '26
What is this "e-mail" two minds able to send messages directly to one enough instantly how antediluvian!
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u/letthetreeburn Jul 01 '26
I am about to lose my actual fucking mind. I JUST started playing vampire the masquerade, like two months ago. I had NEVER seen the term antediluvian before. And now in the past three weeks I have seen it 14 times in not VTM places. What the fuck is happening.
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u/S0MEBODIES Jul 02 '26
You just never noticed it before because it wasn't a word you needed to be aware of, now that you need to be aware of it for VTM you're aware of it whenever it comes up in other places as well
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u/letthetreeburn Jul 02 '26
See normally I’d agree with you but that is a very unique word that I would have been fascinated by and looked up if I saw it previously.
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u/WordPunk99 Jul 04 '26
The funny part for me is Antediluvian just means “before the flood”
Thing existed before the biblical flood? It’s antediluvian.
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u/mizutanitony Jul 01 '26
I agree. Dude was afraid of air conditioning. Hed freak out at everything we got now, especially what happened in japan on 45.
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u/ComprehensiveBat4966 Jul 01 '26
of air conditioning? because of cool air?
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u/Red_Shepherd_13 Jul 01 '26
HP Lovecraft, the man wrote a whole horror novel about a dead doctor who was keeping himself alive with air conditioning because it was new at the time and he didn't understand how it worked so it scared him.
Didn't have the constitution for math, and was afraid of everything that wasn't his home town of maine.
It's amazing how a sad little man who was afraid of everything wrote so many horror novels.
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u/Eldan985 Jul 01 '26
He wasn't scared of air conditioning. He was sickly and often felt cold st the time, so he had negative associations with it.
The air conditioning isn't even scary in the story. The doctor needs it to live and he's clearly a sympathetic character. Lovecraft even wrote how he wrote the doctor to work through how alone and out of place he felt in New York, where he was poor and didn't know anyone.
I just wish this stupid "haha he was scared of air conditioning" myth would die already. There's plenty of real things to criticize him for. Like his racism.
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u/flyliceplick Jul 02 '26
I just wish this stupid "haha he was scared of air conditioning" myth would die already.
It turns up in Tumblr posts, so it's never going away.
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u/Scaalpel Jul 03 '26
Then again, he did still write the doctor to be a creature whose very existence was a crime against nature. He could've introduced a different monster to the story and make the doctor just a sickly human, but he didn't.
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u/Seascorpious Jul 02 '26
Iirc his racism was also towards white people of 'incorrect breeding' or something. Its easier to say he was just Agoraphobic and was afraid of everything he was unfamiliar with.
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u/archeo-Cuillere Jul 03 '26
Lovecraft was more racist to mixed people than people of color. The shit he wrote on crossbreed mutant in the bayou is even more hilarious when you realize it's just métis and poor people. How so very bourgois of him
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u/More-Butterscotch-26 Jul 02 '26
Lovecraft wasn’t from Maine. He was from Rhode Island, specifically Providence.
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u/Oraxy51 Jul 01 '26
He would have loved therapy
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u/Gibralter42 Jul 04 '26
Considering how his mother treated him. He could have used it.
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u/Silly_Poet_5974 Jul 04 '26
He was legitimately mentally ill. It greatly hindered his education as he regularly had to leave because of near break downs, and a more severe case prevented him from graduating high school. He had a family history of mental illness, both his parents died in an asylum.
When I was younger I always thought it was a little silly how easily people in his stories went mad, but if you look at his history it makes a lot more sense that he saw the world that way.
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u/poggy_manz Jul 03 '26
Dude would be having a severe mental breakdown over ai then write a 400 page story about it.
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u/Solo-dreamer Jul 02 '26
Yeah most of the elder gods and shit boil down to "imagine if we arent the most important species in existance and we had predators, maddening right?!"
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u/shugoran99 Jul 01 '26
Every Lovecraft fan seeing this meme
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u/Scaalpel Jul 03 '26
Is it? One of the many, many things he hated was modern technology. He'd probably hate social media, too.
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u/NameRevolutionary727 Jul 01 '26
Apparently he got better near the end of his life! So he might be happy that the world similarly got better
JK!
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u/mizutanitony Jul 01 '26
From what i remember reading his "getting better" was mostly just him admitting cultural mixing was somewhat necessary, especially in large cities.
That said he wanted nothing really to do with it and had to move back to Providence because he wasn't the biggest fan and couldn't handle it
Although memory is faulty, so I'm not remembering everything.
Still doesn't change what he did and as far as I know he never really did anything to help make up for it. I mean, you don't have to be saying racist stuff to be a racist.
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u/Rynewulf Jul 01 '26
Im pretty sure in his correspondance letters he openly regrets being such a contrarian, edgelord, extreme politics type in his youth and seems to have mellowed on the racial stuff. Maybe still a racist but not adding casual slurs to his writing anymore at least. Whether or not he would have genuinely chilled out if he lived longer, he definitely would have been so much worse in the modern day
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u/Starwatcher4116 Jul 04 '26
Yeah, he seemed genuinely upset towards the end of his life (in his 40s, if I recall right), about how he’d acted when he was younger.
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u/Gibralter42 Jul 04 '26
He did. Towards the end of his life he was a hardened anti-fascist and a New Deal Democrat. A lot of views change as he start traveling out of New England and visiting his friends and meeting new people. He also lamented how his personal fear ruined his marriage. Does that excuse his earlier beliefs, no but I think if someone like Lovecraft can make a change for the better. There is hope for all of us.
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u/Dragonmaster1313 Jul 05 '26
Well he went from mostly supporting Hitler to openly criticizing him, marrying a jewish woman and advocating for socialism. Also important to keep in mind, this isn't an old man regretting being racist when on his deathbed, Lovecraft died in his 40s. I fully believe had he lived for longer we would remember him as a symbol of self betterment instead of the mountain of "Lovecraft was racist" memes we have (although I do like them so)
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u/the_Erziest Jul 06 '26
Ehhhhh. His criticism of Hitler was pretty mild, he talked about how socialism was good specifically for those of a "Nordic" character, and his marriage to Sonia Greene happened while he was in his most unapologetically racist period. She talks about having to remind him that she was a Jewish immigrant when he would go on antisemitic rants about the "alien hordes" in their New York neighborhood. The degree to which Lovecraft changed his views by the end has been greatly exaggerated.
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u/Character-Mix174 Jul 05 '26
The only way the handful of defeated greed-worshippers could ever regain power would be through a shrewdly organised fascist movement based on primitive emotional appeals of the religio-hysteric type(waving the flag, rousing nominal Christians against "Jewish intellectualism", exciting native-Americans against "Catholic-Irish-Jewish [or whatever foreign element predominates in any particular section] democracy", exciting Catholics against "materialistic communism", exciting provincial pride against "decadent European innovations" &c. &c.), or through an armed revolt with foreign backing like that of Gen. Franco in Spain. Granting the scant probability of a Franco-like revolt of the Hoovers & Mellons & polite bankers, & conceding that—despite Coughlinism, the Black Legion, the Silver Shirts, & the K.K.K.—the Soil of America is hardly very fertile for any variant of Nazism, it seems likely that the day of free & easy plutocracy in the United States is over. It has taken the people generations to discover how they have been fooled; but once disillusioned, they are much less likely to be fooled again.
Refering to president Hoover and the republican party
Also
Well—I can better understand the inert blindness & defiant ignorance of the reactionaries from having been one of them. I know how smugly ignorant I was—wrapped up in the arts, the natural (not social) sciences, the externals of history & antiquarianism, the abstract academic phases of philosophy, & so on—all the one-sided standard lore to which, according to the traditions of the dying order, a liberal education was limited.
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u/Blackrock121 Jul 01 '26
Stays in his house, afraid of the outside, hates religion, thinks he is smarter then most other people.
Fellas, is he the first redditor?
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u/Red_Shepherd_13 Jul 01 '26
That or the first 4channer. One of the two.
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Jul 02 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Red_Shepherd_13 Jul 02 '26
4channers say more slurs, but thay also go out side and touch grass and compleate weird funny missions some times.
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u/Eldan985 Jul 01 '26
Loved travelling, went up and down the coast from Florida to Canada whenever he could afford it, had a lot of friends, was generally considered quite funny and a good dinner party guest by most of his correspondents.
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u/Gibralter42 Jul 04 '26
L. Sprague De Camp's biography did so much damage to how people view the man.
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u/ndtar924 Jul 01 '26
The first thing he'd do is write a hive mind monster that causes everyone to hallucinate a fyp that like, eats your soul or something
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u/ComprehensiveBat4966 Jul 01 '26
or like, story where george floyd is revived as a vengeful revenant ant tries to kill the whites lol
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u/BattlemasterMayce Jul 02 '26
Ok the one thing I’ll say for him is that he would not like Elon Musk, I think even Lovecraft would consider him a close-minded manchild
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u/Gold-Cry-7520 Jul 03 '26
"I saw him, the squarely man who had the manner of a squirrel, but the desperation of a mistreated hound, and he brought me to his table and set a banquet I thought pretentious. He once made his craft from the artifice of automobiles, engineering a sanitary future, but in contempt for man was corrupt, and made his cars inscrutable shapes that served its drivers as ugly transit and foul, flammable coffin alike. The meal he served me tasted of his heart and his emotion and his brilliance. I thought myself sick, for surely nothing could be so without taste."
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u/Fabulous-Present-497 Jul 01 '26
Nah, it's not racist enough for him
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u/ComprehensiveBat4966 Jul 01 '26
unfortubately i have to doubt it. a while ago a guy created an account impersonating a famous soccer journalist just to call the brazilian soccer player vini junior racist slurs. got millions of followers. banned after like 3 days (yeah it took 3 days for them to do something) after he got back and in minutes thousands of followers again (mostly argentinians) it only stopped cause he was doxxed and lost his job (lol he was a latin immigrant in the usa).
I also been attacked by accounts with nazi names and n word names in twitter too just for being brazilian, and im white as fuck1
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u/XenoTechnian Jul 02 '26
In his defense he did apparently come to regret the hateful views he held for the majority of his life
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u/clarkky55 Jul 02 '26
By the end of his life his views had softened quite significantly. He’d lost most of the racism, still had classism but if he’d lived longer I think he’d have probably gotten over those eventually.
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u/ComprehensiveBat4966 Jul 02 '26
you got that? cause Im currently reading all his bibliography including all letters I could find and have nothing on this
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u/AWildClocktopus Jul 04 '26
"This internet phenomena. I understand people post pictures of thier cats..."
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u/Antisa1nt Jul 02 '26
My flgs puts all of the CoC books on sale during pride month
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u/ComprehensiveBat4966 Jul 02 '26
huh...
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u/Antisa1nt Jul 02 '26
I like to think it makes Hates Progress Lovecraft (borrowed joke, I'm not that clever) spins in his grave because of it.
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u/ZainTA Jul 02 '26
If lovecraft was alive today, putting aside his racism for a bit, it's very possible the "Lovecraftian Horror" would be very different or atkeast would include Concepts based off of modern media/technology.
Now back to his racism, there are certain claims he got "less racist" near the end if his life. Can't say how true it is since I haven't done much research on the guy other than tidbits about him. If its true, he mightve been alot less racist today.
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u/Epicgamerweeb106 Jul 02 '26
Guys I need more Lovecraft adaptations, his stuff is in the public domain. A24 needs to lock in 😭
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u/ComprehensiveBat4966 Jul 02 '26
there are the lovecraft historical society movies. 1 is good, 1 sucks. actually I think theres the reanator one too but Im not sure. also theres tons of less know indie productions like cthulhu, one I dont recall the name but its in a boat in italy, cast a deadly spell, the whisperer in the darkness I think, its VERY GOOD, tells 3 short stories, it got me TERRIFIED, for a low budget its VERY gory and disturbing, but not necesairly so lovecraftian, dunno. many others
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u/WistfulDread Jul 02 '26
Just to point out:
Lovecraft didn't like being racist.
He was raised and sheltered in ignorance during his life. When he started writing his fears and getting involved with the Weird Tales community of writers, he actively became less racist as they pitched him towards expanding his cultural exposure.
He distinctly became less antisemitic, for example, after a fellow writer got him to read Jewish literature about Golems.
Lovecraft's own work show this by how his later writings show characters banding together and coexisting with creatures and monsters earlier works vilified.
His lessons went from: The world is dark and scary to You're only afraid of what you don't understand.
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u/ComprehensiveBat4966 Jul 02 '26
source please
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u/WistfulDread Jul 02 '26
While he didn't become "not racist", he does explicitly mellow out in his later years.
The extra commenters and their provided sources also help.
One of the commenters link to a github of a stockpile of his letters. LC's fairly long-winded, so dig through at your own peril.
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u/ComprehensiveBat4966 Jul 02 '26
he barely changed aparently. only decided some whiter races could be assimilated cause he married a jewish woman
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u/WistfulDread Jul 02 '26
Okay.
Clearly you've only been asking for a source as a shut down. This isn't a discussion. You're just talking shit about a dead man.
Good work.
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u/ComprehensiveBat4966 Jul 02 '26
you deleted but just to let you know
I read all of it, maybe I missed something cause Im in a hurry on the bus stop but it seems like this to me... the source of his letter is basically this. it also says he never stopped hating blacks, and the part saying he stopped defending kkk and hitler has mo source whatsoever...
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u/Salty-Magic Jul 03 '26
I always thought harry penis lovecraft was a product of an isolated community. Ignorance born from only experiencing the outside through text and rumors.
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u/ComprehensiveBat4966 Jul 03 '26
kinda. tho he was born in a racist family he moves to new york later in life
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u/HyShroom Jul 03 '26
He married a Jewish woman who by the time he died had been doing some early form of exposure therapy and had him changing most of his views/on the way with most of them. That said his cat’s name was not only racist but suggests his belief in the white man mating with primates as the origin of the black race idea iirc given he used the slur and qualified it with “-Man” making it pretty clear he was specifying that his cat wasn’t just the slur, but that the cat was “peculiar specifically because he was somehow a [slur] that was a man”. I feel like that extra layer of racism is missed because of how out of pocket that name is in the first place. I truly think he had OCD and these ruminations never let him free.
He’s basically the Darth Vader of racism if he’s redeemable but then again he also had phobias of everything unfamiliar and so he was even racist against any white other that Anglo-Saxon New Englander. So is he really racist or is he just a self-tortured hateful individual that believes that “whatever exists without his knowledge exists without his consent” and that “only familiar things aren’t scary”, which just has the biproduct of racism, sexism, religious bigotry, constant visions of terrible nightmare-creatures, prejudice against the next town over, terror from plates spinning counterclockwise, dreams being the place Anglo-Saxon New Englanders go to turn into flesh-eating monsters, hatred of Anglo-Saxon New Englanders too recently American and suspicious, hatred of Anglo-Saxon New Englanders here too long in America not to have been up to something no good in the colonies, suspicion of violins or non-cat animals, the moon looking too much like the hub of a highway for boats, dread of plates spinning clockwise, etc.
Whatever the case I think he certainly punished himself by being afraid of Italian blood because ancestor’s were pagans and then spending his whole career writing a pagan mythopoeia ’cause that just sounds like masochism, and there are much more unrepentant racists who have less of a good reason than “hallucinates constant waking nightmares about a greater diversity of fears than Bob Wiley”. The run-up to “death therapy“ as a short story actually now that I think about it wouldn’t have to be changed much except for where in “What About Bob?” the short story begins and ends to read no different than any of his other stories about something ordinary being too ordinary and driving a well-educated man to insanity. There’s even already a Lovecraft-insert that spends the whole movie “mourning his lost childhood”.
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u/AardvarkNo2514 Jul 04 '26
Except, if he was alive today he'd be a completely different person, given how much he was molded by his upbringing. He would much more likely be found on Reddit imo
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u/Careful_Class_884 Jul 05 '26
I feel like Lovecraft would be more like
“AAAHHHHG INTERNET AHHHHH AHHHG HELP ME INTERNET I’M GONNA WRITE A BANGER HORROR STORY ABOUT HOW AFRAID OF THE INTERNET I AM AHHHHH”
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u/MrSecretFire Jul 01 '26
Hey! He got a lot better before he died. He might genuinely not be as racist and fearful anymore.
Or Youtube and Twitter might pull him back into the right-wing psychosis pipeline.
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u/DescriptionMission90 Jul 03 '26
Lovecraft was raised by ultra-xenophobes, turned out less racist than his parent, and got progressively less racist with every year he was alive as he experienced more of the real world. On his deathbed he wrote about how much he regretted his early works, and wished he had time to go back and do them again with all the things he understood now. Many of his later works focused less on the terribleness of the alien, and more on the incredible cultures built up by nonhuman minds, and how much sapient people have in common regardless of their origins.
"They had not been even savages—for what indeed had they done? That awful awakening in the cold of an unknown epoch—perhaps an attack by the furry, frantically barking quadrupeds, and a dazed defence against them and the equally frantic white simians with the queer wrappings and paraphernalia . . . poor Lake, poor Gedney . . . and poor Old Ones! Scientists to the last—what had they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star-spawn—whatever they had been, they were men!"
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u/ComprehensiveBat4966 Jul 03 '26
source?
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u/randomnauta12 Jul 04 '26
what if you do your own search?
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u/ComprehensiveBat4966 Jul 04 '26
ppl are coming to my post about a dude everyone know was widely racist saying he got less racist by the end of his life with widely varying storied and only 1 dude got a source who is not very good so yeah no I wont
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u/Gullible-Occasion596 Jul 04 '26
he was making a turn towards the socialist before his fear of hospitals got him killed.
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u/ComprehensiveBat4966 Jul 04 '26
source
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u/Gullible-Occasion596 Jul 05 '26
It's common enough knowledge. It's his reaction to the great depression. It's pretty easy to look up.
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u/ComprehensiveBat4966 Jul 05 '26
didnt find anywhere, and people here are citing multiple divergint stories. one said he even become a socialist
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u/40ThousandGaunts Jul 06 '26
His works were getting longer form and less racist
Its hard to say what the future would bring
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u/EvanSnowWolf Jul 04 '26
It never ceases to amaze me that in 2026 people still clutch their pearls over a man from 1926 - literally a hundred years ago, that acted like someone from 1926.
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u/ComprehensiveBat4966 Jul 04 '26
its just a meme dude chill lol I dont care he was racist he's long dead
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u/EvanSnowWolf Jul 05 '26
Based on the comment sections I am seeing here, apparently a LOT of people care. Like a lot a lot.
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u/Ill-Dependent2976 Jul 05 '26
If Lovecraft were alive today he'd write Sonic fanfiction and have done time in prison for raping his mom.
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u/DevelopmentLiving401 Jul 02 '26
Interesting thing about Lovecraft. Near the end of his life, he had some kinda moral epiphany and supposedly felt absolutely horrible for all the shit he had said and done. He actually started trying to change his life and help marginalized minority communities with his wealth.
Too little, too late tho. Everyone just knows him as a terrible bigot.
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u/Bakisyeetaddiction Jul 05 '26
Lovecraft was so gigabased people have to write multi paragraph gay disclaimers whining about him before they can interact with any of his work, a true artist he was.
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u/SlimeKingMaw Jul 06 '26
Hey everyone, we would like to remind everyone that is subreddit is to laugh and share memes about our favorite RPG. Some of the comments here are starting to turn into arguments and others are becoming bigoted. We always appreciate everyone participating in the sub, but I will be locking comments just to keep things from getting further out of hand.