#for context lovecraft was racist af

[catgirl-catboy]

Technically, you can tag totally normal pictures of people of color and air conditioners as 'lovecraftian horror' and be objectively correct.

[clonerightsagenda]

Putting this in conversation with tags from @reaperlight:

#unfortunately that line comes right from the source material which is Lovecraft (i.e. racist af even for the 1930s...) #but Arthur I expected better of you... #challenge: be less racist than h.p.l. (the bar is on the floor) #when using Lovecraft as a source material creators should make themselves aware of racism/bigotry in his works so as not to perpetuate it #anyway that was a plot of a mythos story using that same eurocentric language the protag also believed nothing really old could exist in us #and those ruins they keep finding were clearly because aliens/beetle people who walked the earth before humans #couldn't POSSIBLY be the work of indigenous people oh no *smh*

I guess the question is whether Malevolent is just directly replicating these Lovecraft concepts or intends to grapple with them. I'm not sure yet. The Stanzyck family is presumably Polish, a group H P Lovecraft likely would have seen as inferior (don't recall if they had been assimilated into whiteness by the 1930s) and I'm not sure if they're affiliated with or just victims of the various cults. What really interests me when thinking about Malevolent/Lovecraft/anxieties around the often racialized Other is that Arthur's partner Parker Yang is presumably of Chinese descent, and this would've been during Chinese exclusion. Yet Arthur never comments on this and apparently - as a presumably white man in the 1930s - had no problems with being personally and professionally close to him. And then when an actual dangerous invader from parts unknown comes calling... the first thing he does is kill Parker. How am I supposed to read that in the context of all this? Is it supposed to mean anything? IDK if the podcast is interested in wrestling with any of this.

My hand hovering near the "this podcast is being weird about Native Americans" counter as Arthur once again comments on how there shouldn't be anything this old in America