#sorry for the heavy topic but unfortunately you can't really talk about lovecraft without talking about his bigotry :pensive:

[vs-stardream]

I still constantly think about the tag you wrote about Kirby being anti-lovecraft, because instead of being scared of the elderich and unknown he seeks to befriend and understand it. That is truly worthy of an essay.

#kirby is dark but it isn’t lovecraftian #eldritch horror for sure but the whole thing about lovecraft is that he was a huge racist/xenophobe #who was afraid of literally everything he saw as different #kirby is the opposite of lovecraft. he doesn’t fear the unknown #even seemingly unknowable beings are capable of becoming your friend #for lovecraft the ultimate horror is finding out youre related somehow to the Unknowable Horror #for kirby… that just makes him care even more and want to save them

^ the tags in question, from this post

hehe thank you, i'm glad they were thought-provoking! it's been a while since i last engaged with lovecraft but i really should read more of his stories.

i think the key difference between kirby and lovecraft is less about the scariness/evilness of the eldritch horrors (they're pretty scary and evil in both!), and more about why they're scary/evil.

for lovecraft, it's all about the fact that they're an Other. because they’re an other, they’re inherently evil. plus, he is quite scared of the boundaries of self/other being muddled: in a couple of his stories, the big twist/horror is that some person or group of people has interbred with the Evil Unknowable Monsters and produced offspring that are half human and half monster. let me be very clear: this is because lovecraft was a white supremacist piece of shit and really hated mixed race people. so you have like, characters agonizing over the revelation that "oh noooo some ancestor of mine had kids with a monster... does that mean i have monster genes???" which is just this huge existential nightmare for lovecraft.

kirby is different. there’s no inherent evil. for example - gooey’s dark matter, but that doesn’t make him a bad guy! often, the villains start off as good or sympathetic people who fall into dark obsession when presented with too much power. queen sectonia is a great example, as is president haltmann. i think hyness might be the same but i can’t really remember if that’s canon or not. the point is, there is a corrupting agent. power is what twists people into creepy, eldritch, soulless versions of themselves... and that’s scary in its own way, because it could happen to anyone!

but the real classic eldritch horror of kirby is the dark matter. they’re pretty mysterious and powerful and unknowable. but that doesn’t mean that they’re evil just because they’re dark matter. again, gooey. again, dark matter swordsman, who attacks popstar because he’s lonely. you defeat zero with the love-love stick. there’s no love or friendship within the ranks of the dark matter, and that’s why they’re so horrific. it’s not about inherent nature or genes or whatever else. lovecraft fears bonds with creatures; kirby fears creatures without bonds.

and then void being so similar to kirby is a cause for hope, not despair. might kirby be related to dark matter? if he is, that doesn’t make him evil. kirby’s also kinda incomprehensible in a lot of ways, so the eldritch beings he’s fighting are not totally alien to him. but he’s different because he uses his powers for good :) more on that in this post, again

finally, there’s something to be said about capitalism as an eldritch force. after all, isn’t capitalism the big villain of robobot? and forgotten land vibes in that direction as well. in his book on “the weird and the eerie” (not the eldritch, but close), literary theorist mark fisher notes that:

...the eerie is fundamentally tied up with questions of agency. What kind of agent is acting here? Is there an agent at all? These questions can be posed in a psychoanalytic register - if we are not who we think we are, what are we? - but they also apply to the forces governing capitalist society. Capital is at every level an eerie entity: con­jured out of nothing, capital nevertheless exerts more influ­ence than any allegedly substantial entity.

that’s a tangent, but an interesting one. kirby is all about mysterious forces that shape and corrupt. the master crown makes magolor greedy. the mirror makes sectonia arrogant. star dream makes haltmann desperate, among other things. and then you’ve got throughlines of possession and mind control to deal with as well. what’s interesting is that these emotions and desires aren’t unknown or unknowable. they’re very human. and kirby isn’t there to crumple under the existential horror of whatever he’s fighting and how different it is from him - this isn’t a horror game. he’s here to lend a helping hand - either to the victims of a villain, or to the villain themself, who may not actually be as much of an Other as you might think.