7.5 KiB
Idea for a Lovecraft like fic.
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Author: u/mack2028 *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/2yx1kk/idea_for_a_lovecraft_like_fic/
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Score: 11
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Created: 2015-03-13T15:22:13
Post:
TLDR, rational person encounters the mythos and starts to try to figure it out and/or exploit it.
The basic idea would be that an ordinary but intelligent person falls into a depression and following common wisdom tries to find religion. What he finds is a cult operating out of his campus actively recruiting smart, sad, lonely outcasts. He joins them (as they don't seem particularly sinister) and comes to discover that they worship Yog Sothoth and that the entity puts them into some kind of trance and they come out with magic power. He realizes that the smarter the person is and the more time they commit to it the more they are rewarded.
The strange thing is that I think that realizing that there were powerful beings beyond human comprehension wouldn't really be that big a mental blow to a mostly rational character, surprising sure but not kill and eat your best friend disturbing like in Lovecraft.
I guess I'm just wondering what you guys think of the idea? I am neither the best writer nor a great rationalist but I figured I would drop the idea in and see if anyone has any thoughts.
Comments:
u/qznc [+8] Chaos Legion (3 hours later)
Do you know the Laundry Files by Charles Stross? Overtime and Equoid, for example.
Do you want to munchkin Lovecraft or write rational horror? Good end or bad end, respectively?
u/mack2028 [+1] (10 hours later)
I haven't read those, as for munchkining I was really more thinking that it would be interesting to see someone actually try to solve the problem for 5 minutes before giving up.
u/callmebrotherg [+6] now posting as /u/callmesalticidae (6 hours later)
Lovecraft's work is kind of flanderized as far as the insanity angle goes. In his stories, "insanity" is almost always either PTSD or the consequence of acting on information which other people don't have (or both).
u/None [+2] (a day later)
[deleted]
u/callmebrotherg [+1] now posting as /u/callmesalticidae (a day later)
That too. >:]
u/MugaSofer [+4] (7 hours later)
I'd really love to read a rational Cosmic Horror story, actually, but Cosmic Horror - as a genre - is incredibly hard to do right.
(Although, to be fair, a lot of the best stuff dealing with Superintelligence borders on cosmic horror itself.)
It's not about tentacles that deal 3d6 SAN damage for looking at them, it's about ... black swans, I guess. Big, terrible Outside Context Problems with little possible resolution, and trying to cope with them. It's about when cosmology itself is so bleak you can barely accept it, not just some minor torture-murders coming from an evil ghost or a werewolf.
I really like cosmic horror, is what I'm saying. Maybe I should write some cosmic horror.
u/mack2028 [+1] (10 hours later)
sure, and yea maybe you should. Though I read those stories and am always disappointed in the protagonists, they just give up right away. As soon as they find out it is real they shut down and stop fighting. So? There are monsters from beyond the start that eat human spines, fuck them they also brought magic with them.
u/forrestib [+6] Project Freelancer (43 minutes later)
Well, the concept of lovecraftian mythos is by its very nature somewhat lacking in conventional rationality. But that certainly doesn't mean that a rationalist character interacting with such a world wouldn't be entertaining. They might be perfectly fine at first when they think that they simply don't understand. Once they investigate further and start to realize that their puny causal 3D human brain CAN'T understand, then you get to play with the lovely thing that is their slow and steady descent into madness.
Or, you know, the cult could just be on LSD the whole time. Plot twist!
u/mack2028 [+1] (10 hours later)
I was thinking that people in those stories seem to give up on the problem as soon as black guys show up, by the time monsters get there they are already eating their own poop. Maybe you can't understand them with your normal 3d brain, but there are spells that change that, and frankly I have never believed that any way. It seems like they have pretty obvious motivations if you are willing to take human ego out of the equation. Cthulu is taking a nap, narylotep is working as a messenger and occasionally likes to fuck with humans, it is possible that the other gods think of him the same way we think of people who tourer animals. In the context of the story I was thinking Yogsototh was actually using people as computing substrate and the reason they get smarter and magic is that he is upgrading and reinforcing the parts that he has.
u/derefr [+2] (8 hours later)
I was pondering just writing a rational!Carlos-driven Welcome To Night Vale. Lovecraft's mythos in general is sort of anti-inductive—the more you try to solve it, the more it tries to kill you. The Night Vale spin on it strikes a nice balance, where the Lovecraftian stuff exists, but there seems to also be forces at work ("angels" et al) trying to protect people from it... by, oddly enough, using the powers of secrecy, privacy, cover-ups, delusions, etc.
It'd be fun to have a character who has to walk the line of trying to learn about the world, but knowing that broaching the masquerade would, in and of itself, be the Bad End. I imagine a lot of "I'm going to learn this thing in such a way so that I can do something useful with the information, and yet somehow forget the information I used to derive the conclusion"-like solutions to problems.
realizing that there were powerful beings beyond human comprehension wouldn't really be that big a mental blow to a mostly rational character, surprising sure but not kill and eat your best friend disturbing like in Lovecraft.
I always figured that the people who do these things in Lovecraft's stories aren't going insane, per se, but are effectively seeing this as the rational thing to do in this situation: effectively, the Outer Gods are basilisks, and the more you find out about them, the more you think you need to subjugate your utility function to theirs to protect yourself from them. "Praying to a utility monster", so to speak. It seems like this is a trap that would be more appealing to a rationalist, if they didn't already know specifically about this class of memetic hazards.
u/mack2028 [+2] (10 hours later)
I guess but frankly most of them go insane in a very "eating your friends" or "smashing your face against the wall until you die" kind of way, really that doesn't seem productive.
To me it never seemed anti-inductive because no one ever tries to figure it out once they see the monsters, the only person who ever even tries does a great job. The main character (not danforth) of "at The Mountains of Madness" realizes that the elder things are just aliens, people who are scientists like him.
u/AKhou [+1] (18 hours later)
I would think that the film Pi is what you should watch before doing this.
u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (a day later)
Pi struck me as pretentious dreck, am I not supposed to think that it's about the horrors of paranoid schizophrenia?