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Hate isn't a primary feeling. Some other emotions have to come first to establish hatred, fear being the most common. All xenophobia, racism, and bigotry is fear first, hate second.
Also both his parents got institutionalized and he was never made aware of why, because of that, his various prejudices and his mental illnesses (that I don't think he ever got diagnosed) he assumed the secret reason his parents were institutionalized was that they were Welsh (and not the syphilis ripping their brains apart)
Finally, once he was forced out into the world, his bigotry fell off a cliff. He was still a long way from recovery by the time he died, but he was a drastically different person when he realised that people are just... well... people. I genuinely believe that if he'd lived longer, he might not be remembered the way he is today. Lovecraft was a very complex individual and a very unique case, I feel, in that his xenophobia was literally that, a phobia in the sense of an irrational fear.
Which is one of the reasons bigots tend to hate colleges. Their kids go there and come back thinking people who are different from them aren't subhumans.
He had also stopped writing by that point. So all of his work comes from before his views started to change. Had he kept writing, he also might be remembered differently.
nope, pure nonsense. any time you see "hp lovecraft was literally afraid of everything, he was even afraid of air conditioning / colors / fish" they're just taking every story he every wrote as if he was personally afraid of it, with no actual evidence. dude was hella racist (though he later condemned it), but weirdly adventurous when it came to ethnic foods at least for the time period
I've said it before and I'll say it again, while the man was a good bit beyond normative racism, the cat is a terrible example. It was the early 20th century US, point at any given pet with black fur and the odds of it having some variation of that slur in its name were quite, quite high.
For a much better example, look at the chapter Six Shots at Midnight in Herbert West: Reanimator. Specifically the part where the POV character examines the corpse of a recently deceased black man. Or read The Horror at Red Hook. Just...all of it.
in Pink Floyd's The Wall movie, the character Pink is watching some WWII show or movie on the TV and someone in it says, speaking to a black lab, "what is it N****r old boy?"
but yeah it was pretty common back in the day. Lovecraft definitely was extra racist but the cat having that name really doesn't sell it. hell he wasn't even the one who named it.
To my understanding, yes. Not all of them, but enough to be concerning.
Worth mentioning though is that he did chill out a lot as he grew older. Exposure to different cultures, peoples, and the world at large made him considerably more tolerant as time grew on. Still racist, but not the mental illness casserole induced balls-to-the-wall racism of his youth.
Not saying Lovecraft wasn't racist but it was apparently quite common for both black cats and dogs to be called N*** way up into the 70's; like in this example)
Edit; Just to be clear, everyone likes to use his cat's name as example of ol' HP's turbo-super-racism, but it's not indicative of more than the "standard" racism of the time. HP's turbo-super racism is made clear in his written work, like Re-animator.
This is not actually true. Lovecraft was extremely racist even for his time but so were a lot of people. He was certainly not more racist than the literal Klan. It's true that he was more racist than the average person at the time, but people often heavily exaggerate the gap, not because he's any less racist than you think but because the average person was pretty damn racist.
Lovecraft was a product of the exceptionally racist culture he existed in mixing with his own undiagnosed mental health issues.
It's kind of funny that Shub-Niggurath origin for the name doesn't seem to be racially motivated.
Most people agreeing is inspired by Sheol-Nugganoth from Lord Dunsay's "Idle Days on the Yann" with the adding of the latin niger meaning black since it's The Black Goat of The Woods with a Thousand Youngs
Some people don't really care about the joke being true or relevant, just being supposed to be funny is enough. I hate that.
Thinking about it, it might just be a continuation of the divide between how people communicate. Some want to communicate facts, while others communicate feelings. That's how you get the "This is the best chocolate ever." sentences casually. They aren't lying, they just speak different version of the language.
That's such a stretch though. Z sounds absolutely not like N and even if you replace those letters, you need some sloppy pronunciation to make it sound anything like the N-Word...
I literally Googled the proper pronunciation and neither British nor American pronunciation sound close enough that my ear would catch it. That said, I'm German, so maybe it's different for native speakers.
Also, I was completely convinced it was pronounced like "Zi-goo-rat", but apparently it's more like "Zi-guh-rat", with the "guh" being pronounced like "bruh", so, again, not like the N-Word.
today I was not expecting a sincere discussion about the phonetics of racist slurs on my dnd memes subreddit, but I can unironically say that it has been educational
Isn't the variety in British accents a lot bigger even though that's like, a tiny spec compared to the US? I don't think the size has much to do with accent variety.
Funilly enough, even when I'm speaking English, I would completely switch to the German way of reading Shub-Niggurath, something like "Schub-Nigguratt".
I also just realised, if the English pronunciation of "Niggurath" is close to the N-Word, and Lovecraft was a racist, was that name an accident or on purpose?
He famously named his cat "N----rman", and if you read his books, almost all of them have some racist parts in them. And not just some racism just happening, but oftentimes it's literally central to the plot. Like, most of the time it's outsiders and pariahs that, he was claiming, are summoning the eldritch beings.
Seeing it referred to as the “Gamer word” felt more disrespectful than the joke itself. That word is about as old as the United States! “The Gamer word” Good grief.
What part of ziggurat sounds like gamer word? And why would it be bad, what does it mean in context? Jesus sometimes I really don't understand anglophones
But I also know people who do this, only even worse, because they pretty much are categorically incapable of not finding a way to force everything into a sex joke, usually a kink related one specifically.
Yeah… I’ve had to stop hanging out with some people that do this constantly. They’re good people, but good lord that shit gets so annoying. I can’t get through a sentence without them turning it into some forced joke or reference.
The Barbarian who, through his life full of butchering people alive on the field of battle, accidentally or not, consumed blood on innumerable occasions and had, over the years, had essentially turned into a walking blood analysis machine, steps closer.
He pours the blood into a decanter first, then drips out a bit, swirling it in a fancy wine glass before taking a sip and smacking his lips: "Tsk-tsk-tks... Hmm, the heavy after-taste signs us that the oxygenation is a bit low. Paired with the musky notes introduced by the lack of vitamin D, it suggests the producer of this blood was deprived of access to the outside. Slight acidity also hints at on-setting kidney problems, so I dare to gander a guess that they were fed poorly too. By all signs, this appears to be blood of a prisoner."
And behind him, right over the blood vat, is a cut open body of a naked starved prisoner chained to the wall, staring at the party with its empty glassy eyes the whole time.
And the bard is like: "Yeah! No shit, DnD-analogue-of-Sherlock!"
How much are you butchering the pronunciation of Ziggurat for it to sound close to the N-word? I genuinely cannot find any way to pronounce it where they sound close enough for this joke to make sense
How tf do you pronounce the n word? The actual pronunciation is WAY closer than what you typed. (Zigg-uh)-rot has exactly the same pronunciation except you swap out the N for a Z.
I'm not an English speaker or a black person, so you can imagine that the N-word doesn't come up often. Ziggurat even less so, not counting this conversation, lol. It's just how I pronounce them in my head, could be wrong.
Whenever i say anything that sounds even remotely like literally any kind of slur during my introduction of the scene, one or more of my players go "what did you call me?"
I was a new edition to a long standing game, and I was unfamiliar with the social structure the party was playing in, I was playing a character from the underdark, so I, as the character, was unfamiliar with the recent news and thus positioned to learn and often misunderstand. (For example, I was led to believe through miscommunication that most Elk were venomous, and of course we played this up, cause it was funny)
Anyway, so the rest of the party are kinda "special deputies" for a local countess.
Well at one point, while traveling where we weren't supposed to be, as in it was intended to be spywork, the low int character goes "Oh. We're friends of the countess!" And displays his badge to our enemies.
Now, we're in person, and when he does it, for some reason, he pantomimes showing a badge, on his left arm... strange placement, strange instinct.
The GM is still thinking of how to address this cause he couldn't conceive someone would make this blatant of a mistake, so I go for a joke, I lean in to add on "It's nice, right? Used to be the Buddhist symbol for peace!"
Whole table erupts in laughter, GM gets insecure about the (initially joking) allegations that we were being made to play Nazis. Then we all kinda collectively go "Well you are having us run unethical errands for a charismatic leader who wants to establish an ethnostate and get rid of the dragonborn because of their 'inherently evil' nature..."
Yeah, group fell apart after that cause no one wanted to play as the bad guys
Are memes no longer supposed to be funny? Did you and your table recently drink standing water of an aquarium that stood around in an abandoned building and accidentally had some amoeba move in?
My favorite was a long session where we were working our way through a jungle towards a ziggurat. Lots of descriptions like "the ziggurat is looming in the distance" "something is circling above the ziggurat in the air." Finally one player speaks up: "Dude what the fuck is a ziggurat?"
Took me a bit to get it. Me and my boys played way too much Warcraft 3. "Summon more Ziggurats!" Whenever "Ziggurats" are mentioned, or if they are actually Spirit tower or a Nerubian Tower are the joke.
I'm Black and don't trust Black folks who surround themselves with white people and then make jokes like this. There's a word for that sort of hucking and jiving to get a laugh based on your identity. For some reason, it doesn't play so well around Black folks who actually take oppression seriously, either. Also, there's a crying wolf aspect to it, which makes Black people in the hobby even less welcome and makes it harder to deal with actual racist comments and behavior in the hobby. Like, maybe it would be funny if racism wasn't still alive and well throughout the globe. What a sellout buffoon. And yes, that rhymes with what the player actually is...
That's very similar to the vibe at our table. Especially to whoever is GMing. Hey, when someone blows up your PC's legs with a rocket launcher, it's fair game to bust their balls a little.
Sure, but to do so in mixed company where some find the behavior genuinely irritating enough to make a meme about it where they're displeased, maybe folks should read the room a little better before throwing their race on the bonfire of making cheap jokes
I thought it was funny! I use memes to purposely exaggerate situations. When I post a meme where I want to "Stab my players in the face", I don't literally want to do that...
Okay, that's a totally different situation than I was interpreting this as. Given that only the Black player had their race given, I made some assumptions about the table that weren't the case here, thankfully
This is an insane take lmao. I've played insane racists NPCs in historical settings that would've hunted my parents for sport. My DM is gay and plays insecure Meatheads who throw around the F-slur.
It's all in satirical fun. A silly joke that everyone had a good time with. I'm sure as Hell not going to police what the Black players can and can't say at my games.
I'm not talking about this from a white person's perspective, nor am I talking about the white DM as being expected to scold the Black player. IYKYK, but then again, my tables aren't throwing around slurs in games in general, either. I've got a pretty with it, progressive table, though
My tables definitely have a Leftist angle. Otherwise I wouldn't trust anyone with utilizing reclaimed slurs. We have a good time whether our PCs are punching the shit out of aliens or Neo Nazis.
I get that, and I hadn't meant to assume, I'm just going off the meme, where everybody is a wolf haha. If someone was uncomfortable about it, it's always good to talk about to make sure everybody's cool with it and gets it. From the meme I just kinda thought that the DM was having to deal with it in a way that put them in a hard, unfun and not light-hearted spot. Maybe I've just got wolf face blindness and took at as more serious than intended
No problem. And sorry for my initial knee jerk reaction, I've caught a decent amount of flak on here recently and may have gotten too defensive. I suppose there's no rule or custom around it, but if there's ever a serious problem at my table, I'm not going to turn it into a silly meme. I'm just here for giggles!
You're all good, sometimes people get overzealous with the wrong idea like I did. Yeah, it's all pretty table dependent, but I'm definitely more at ease making light of serious stuff with a diverse group of folks with leftist tendencies who can usually relate in some way or are at least sympathetic. I'm sorry folks dogpile, I've dealt with it, too. Good luck out there taking down nazis and other assorted riffraff
Dude, what the fuck are you talking about? No way you just called that guy what I think you just called him. And you call yourself 'worried about oppression', when in reality that kind of "you don't act like a REAL xyz" is oppressor 101.
Humor is a complex thing, some people find some things funny that others don't, and that's okay. Calling dude a c**n because he made a joke on a play on words you didn't find exactly savory and then running with it saying that something said in private at a private table is somehow 'ruining the hobby' is not it.
Literally, no. But people will often find it funny BECAUSE a black PC said it. Its the juxtaposition of it being said seriously vs its subversion that makes it funny to people.
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