#Lovecraft Mythos

[millenianthemums]

Felt like drawing my puppet King in Yellow design and then spent way too long on this. i wanna learn how to do more polished and atmospheric pieces

[i-am-trans-gwender]

You should read The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

In The Call of Cthulhu the titular character is defeated by a steamboat. The story is in the public domain.

The Steamboat Willie version of Mickey Mouse is also public domain.

Therefore it is legally possible and canon compliant for Mickey Mouse to defeat Cthulhu.

[witchmarsh]

We are always saying that.

🧙 Wishlist on Steam now 🧙

[saspitite]

ive been thinking about this question for a while so i wanted to make a poll and see other people’s opinions:

reblog for himb

do it for he ^

[lovelaceace]

Remake of The King's Dancers

[flamdoodles]

Iä, the King in Yellow comes!

Dedicated to @late-to-the-magnus-archives @sepiabandensis and @sparklyandheroic, for writing my favorite fanfiction of all times and helping me be freely creative again. I can never thank you enough <3

[soliusss]

uhhhhhhh she unknown on my dream quest until I kadath or whatever the fuck I painted this in one sitting late last night

[transman-badass]

My Lovecraftian horror novelette, THE DARKNESS IN OLD BELLBLACK, is out! The first in my Pharaoh Syndicate Investigation series is here!

Get it over on itchio!

[coffeexmythos]

You can look at the Yellow Sign and not see it.

You can see the Yellow Sign and not know it.

To see is to understand. To understand is to see.

You can read the Play and find it as scary as any good horror story. You can read but not understand. Not on a conscious level, at least. And that's fine, for Hastur is a patient tyrant. He can wait. Because to see is to understand that he was there all along. And to understand is to see him where he has been this whole time.

[blacknedsoul-blog]

I think the Deans are fucking Lovecraftian gods

If you're a regular reader of my nonsense, you may have noticed that on more than one occasion I've referred to the Deans as "Nyarlathotep Tumblrsexymen": no, I didn't have a stroke on the keyboard, this is a reference to an entity that appears in the stories of Howard Phillip Lovecraft. A writer who is widely known because there were even people who thought that the Necronomicon, a fictional text part of his work, actually existed (and because he was such a recalcitrant racist that it has become a meme about how extremely racist he was).

And since I'm still going through my pile of papers on Gothic fiction, let me take a moment to talk about Lovecraft's work, why I have reason to believe that the Deans have something in common with these creatures, and what that might mean for the development of Nevermore.

A Little About Lovecraft's Gods

To understand a little bit about the kind of creatures we are talking about, I have to stop at a brief (seriously brief) description of cosmic horror: This is a type of horror that takes elements from the scientific publications of the time (which makes it close to science fiction) to give it verisimilitude, it has at its core a deep nihilism, the breaking of scientific canons, the fragility of the human mind and societies contrasted with the vastness of the universe, an enormous fear of "the unknown" for the white man (fed by his racist paranoia), and seasoned with tentacles and creatures that remind us of sea creatures, because Lovecraft had an enormous fear of the sea.

The gods in these stories represent, on a symbolic level, the vastness of the universe, the terror of the unknown, and the fragility of the human mind: they are entities older than time itself, contact with them tends to shatter the mind, and humanity must be very, very grateful that most of them are locked away or incapacitated in some way. Also, the way to access them is through very specific rituals that have been lost over time, so thankfully they're not very easy to contact either.

Similarities with the Deans

Let's start with the most obvious: the Deans, like the Lovecraftian gods, seem to operate in their own plane of existence, beyond what humans understand as "life" and "death": Nevermore is a kind of limbo, but we know, thanks to the Raven, that these guys came from another place and had enough power to kick the crap out of psychopomps without any problem.

However, just like Lovecraft's gods, these enormous powers don't make them able to do whatever they want; as I said, these entities are usually locked up or incapacitated in some way and can only have contact with humans under certain circumstances (like being summoned in rituals), and getting out of their prisons usually requires vague events like astral alignments that are completely out of their control.

The Deans, like Lovecraft's gods, seem to be subject to rules that are above them, and while they can bend them a bit to achieve their goals, it's not like they can do much about it.

Another thing they have in common with Lovecraft's gods is the ability to create servants that function as extensions of them to fulfill their designs. There are many creatures that follow this line in the stories that speak of The Myths, but the best known are the Shoggoth that appear in the novel At the Mountains of Madness: artificial beings created by the Old Ones to rule the Earth, described as amphibious, amorphous masses similar to amoebas.

Although the Deans prefer their minions in the form of animated dolls. I suspect this decision is based on the story The Sandman by E.T.A. Hoffman. I have no proof, but no doubt.

Now for the joke that brings this essay to life: the creature in Lovecraft's universe that most resembles the Deans is a being called Nyarlathotep. This creature belongs to the category of "Other Gods" (not the old ones like Cthulhu) and gets very nice nicknames like "Crawling Chaos".

Nyarlathotep is a being who enjoys causing chaos, death and madness wherever they go. They can communicate with humans, which they use to psychologically torture them and make them lose their minds. Something they seem to enjoy quite a bit. In the same way that the Deans view this sadistic battle royale, they have set up a fun game.

Then there is the ability to manipulate and alter the human mind, which is called into question in stories like Nyarlathotep and The Rats in the Walls (where it is apparently Nyarlathotep who messes with the protagonist's mind so that he tries to kill his friend).

This is something we've seen manifest in Nevermore in two different ways: the ability to trigger or unlock memories.

And the ability to change them. While we can't know if what was shown to Annabel is 100% real, we do know that showing her the end of her life caused a permanent change in the way she retrieves her memories: from the end backwards. If this memory is somehow altered, we also know that the Deans are capable of photoshopping people's memories.

Finally, Nyarlathotep has the ability to shape-shift, which allows them to appear as humanoids in several stories, such as The Oniric Quest of the Unknown Kadath or Dreams in the Witch's House. His human form is considered "unnatural", "strange" and "disturbing" by those who see it (remember that Lovecraft was extremely racist, so he always presents himself as a black man). As a pharaoh in the Randolph Carter cycle and as a charcoal humanoid figure in the second story cited).

Here, the human form of whatever the Deans are is also quite atypical: not only are they ridiculously tall (7 feet), they have heterochromia with a white-colored eye (which I would venture to say may be a reference to the cataract eye mentioned in the story "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe), and their synchronized movements are amusing on paper, but possibly strange to look at for the characters.

Otherwise, there are two other entities in Lovecraft's universe whose descriptions can be loosely associated with the Deans: Yogg-Sothoth and Azathoth. Both are beings of dual nature.

The former is an entity associated with omniscience and appears in stories such as The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward and The Dunwich Horror. and is described as "the key and the door".

Azathoth represents omnipotence, is the center of the universe, and is described as "the beginning and the end" or "the alpha and the omega.

Implications for the comic

The fact that the Deans have elements in common with Nyarlathotep brings up an interesting point: although Nyarlathotep has far greater freedom than other beings, they is a servant of Azathoth. In other words, them powers are subservient to a more powerful being whose plans they must follow. They may amuse themselves in the process, but they is still essentially a butler.

On the other hand, the Azathoth connection might be vague, since this creature is a lobotomized god, so he can't do much. But if the reference is to Yogg-Sothoth, it gets a little more interesting, because that entity is the one who is supposed to release the original gods when the time is right.

And I don't know about you, but these references have me wondering if the Deans are working for something much more messed up than they are, or if they're using the souls of the students to bring back something much more sinister.

[70zcowboy]

[the-lesser-dog123]

Danny Phantom eldritch/lovecraft mythos AU

So I just had this idea randomly while laying there getting stabbed repeatedly (electrolysis) and tbh I haven't put much thought into it beyond that but hey i figured why not share it:

AU of Dany Phantom where instead of ghosts, it's more eldritch stuff inspired by the Lovecraft mythos and adjacent material

Maddie and Jack are the classic archetype of "investigators tormented by the eldritch knowledge they've learned"

But hey on the bright side that knowledge lets them figure out how to make things that would otherwise be impossible

Instead of trying to make a portal, they were trying to make a device to seal a portal/dimensional rift

Danny still gets caught in an unintentional activation of the device his parents were making, like in the original

But instead of becoming a half-ghost, he has eldritch energy stuff from the rift sorta stapled into him

He isn't technically human anymore, but he can shape himself into an approximately human body well enough that he's just a little unsettling to look at instead of visibly monstrous so he can still act like a normal(ish) person

Technically any other similarly intelligent eldritch entity probably could do the same pretending-to-be-human thing too, but Danny having been a human kid for his whole life before that means it's a lot easier for him

Instead of "going ghost" he just kinda... unfurls his eldritch-y-ness

He probably struggles a bit to "detransform" actually, since his human form is more like a disguise than a fully distinct form he can switch between

I guess the ghosts would be replaced by the more minor entities from the mythos? I'm not super familiar with a lot of the mythos stuff tbh

and maybe dealing with human cultists too

The story's version of Amity Park probably takes a bunch of inspiration from Innsmouth

Oh that just made me think "The Shadow Over Amity Park" could be a fun title for this maybe

[thefugitivesaint]

Michael Whelan, 'Lovecraft Mythos Diptych', 1980

While used for two different Lovecraft story collections, the painting to the left was also used by the Florida death metal band Obituary for the cover to their second album 'Cause of Death' from 1990 (which was originally intended to be the album cover for Sepultura's 'Beneath the Remains' but some shenanigans happened behind the scenes and that didn't happen). My go to song from COD is their cover of Celtic Frost's 'Circle of the Tyrants' (my second go to song is 'Turned Inside Out')

[luciiferous]

A mask of my own face, I'd wear that

[macabrecabra]

LOVECRAFTOBER: DAY TWENTY-THREE: HASTUR

The King in Yellow, The Unspeakable One

Affiliation: The Court of Yog-Sothoth

A fan favorite makes his debut! Hastur, the King in yellow is finally on the scene at last!

The design for Hastur was taken from the fact he is often shown manipulating artists or involved in the arts, so I felt he fashioned himself after classical Greek statues, wearing a mask to help give the appearance of one who is vain with appearances. Also, has arms for days and can manifest just as many.

The Golden sun of the Court of Yog-Sothoth, the most active and powerful spawn of Yog, Hastur takes immense pride in how he conducts his business and mortal followers, spreading his sign across the universe. Known to be a bit of a show-off, not taking things seriously at times, and obsessed with well...himself, sometimes he can come off as annoying to some of the older horrors out there. Very defensive of his kin though and does not hesitate to throw down with elder gods when he's in a full fury. Just don't mention a certain someone's name or he can get very depressed and upsetti very quick....

[lovelaceace]

Masquarade!