#hmmmmmm not my most coherent take but it’s 11:11 where I live rn and I’m very tired

[sugarcoatednightshade]

@darkersoul’s reply….

Maybe that’s why HP Lovecraft was able to write such good cosmic horror, truly inventing the genera.

He was a scared bigot who was constantly surrounded by things he could not comprehend, or did not want to understand. But still he was unable to avoid learning new things about new peoples. I haven’t read all of his stories, but a surprising number of them center around relatively normal things. A mining operation in Colorado, northern Canada/Alaska(very funny), a ship crossing the ocean.

Maybe his greatest skill was in translating his fear into poetry. Because bigots live in constant fear. Reading his works, we can step inside the mind of a scared man who was in the habit at balking at what he did not understand.

People, especially games, get eldritch madness wrong a lot and it’s really such a shame.

An ant doesn’t start babbling when they see a circuit board. They find it strange, to them it is a landscape of strange angles and humming monoliths. They may be scared, but that is not madness.

Madness comes when the ant, for a moment, can see as a human does.

It understands those markings are words, symbols with meaning, like a pheromone but infinitely more complex. It can travel unimaginable distances, to lands unlike anything it has seen before. It knows of mirth, embarrassment, love, concepts unimaginable before this moment, and then…

It’s an ant again.

Echoes of things it cannot comprehend swirl around its mind. It cannot make use of this knowledge, but it still remembers. How is it supposed to return to its life? The more the ant saw the harder it is for it to forget. It needs to see it again, understand again. It will do anything to show others, to show itself, nothing else in this tiny world matters.

This is madness.