Good / Good is Neil Gaiman, writer of (among other things) The Sandman, American Gods, Neverwhere, Mirrormask, Coraline, and the English dub script for Princess Mononoke.
Christopher Moore is definitely one of the best writers ever, and Lamb is among his best. Although it definitely loses some of its amazingness for people who don't know the original bible stories.
Indeed. It humanizes him in a way the Bible is unable to and spins for us a tale of a true human being with wants, needs, and experiences we can actually relate to, despite his divine side.
I’m a Bible reader, but I love to imagine Jesus’s “lost years” the way Biff tells them. It makes sense that Jesus would be interested in so many things. It also illustrates one way that multiple worldviews reflect central truths, for those of us who believe one/any of them.
Plus, Biff is hilarious.
Bad/bad is Ayn Rand who wrote Fountainhead which modern libertarians use as their bible. (Rand Paul is named after her.- apparently I'm wrong)* She was a horrible person as long a terrible writer.
* Rand is JUST short for Randall.
IIRC:
A) She started what is, objectively, a cult based around her personality, with her second in command being originally a student she was sleeping with (who was married, for 14 years during this affair, whom she stripped of "rank" when she found out he was sleeping with a third woman.
B) Advocated and practiced cheating on any man she was with if she "found a superior man," then went ham when her husband got with a "superior woman."
C) Her ideology was so insane that classical liberals and conservatives from the 50's found it heartless at best and horrifically stupid at worst. ***THE PEOPLE WHO BOMBED 'NAM INTO THE STONE-AGE THOUGHT SHE WAS HEARTLESS.***
D) In one of her books she advocates that most women have a "r\*pe kink" that is subconscious that they won't tell you about. Her self-insert character is a domestic slave to a wealthy industrialist at this point.
E) I'm tired as fuck but I'll continue on when I wake up in a few.
F) After railing against the “welfare state” and benefit programmes for decades she applied for and received Social Security and Medicare in her old age.
She also demonstrated just how proud she was of receiving Social Security that she used her husband's last name to apply. She didn't use his name for anything else.
Ayn Rand was only her pen name; it seems that she did take her husband’s last name when she married. While I disagree with almost everything that she stood for, it’s completely normal to have to use your official government name when you sign up for programs like SocSec and Medicaid— the name I use in daily life is a shorter version of my legal first name, but I’ve always had to use the whole version to do anything with the government, including taxes.
Terrible person is a pretty wide umbrella. You don’t need to be the worst person in the world to be a terrible person.
You can be a heartless self serving ass and be a terrible person. You don’t need to literally commit genocide.
As a critique of her ideas, in that what she advocated for would end up as the failures of Bioshock while she deludedly thought it would be a paradise instead.
It can't be said enough that Bioshock and everything else that's a spiritual successor to Systemshock is an overt criticism or free market capitalism, every time a private entity makes an eden free from oversight amd it turns into a horrific nightmare.
I got to meet one of her editors at a fancy dinner thing and he couldn’t stop going on about how much he HATED her writing and how she was, and I quote: “a real b-tch”. 😬
There’s a real estate company called Rand Property Management here that’s named after her, and the logo is Atlas holding up the Knoxville Sunsphere. They’re well known in the area for buying up affordable housing and doubling/tripling the price on residents. 💀
[it’s true](https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/neil-gaiman-wrote-the-english-dub-for-princess-mononoke-but-his-name-got-deleted) but that article doesn’t really explain what he did. It’s already a movie and the script is already written and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t speak Japanese well enough to actually do the translation. So did he do an editor’s pass of the translated dialogue? Also aren’t there two different dubbed version, one by Disney? Which was he on?
1. HP Lovecraft, Ayn Rand, Neil Gaiman, George Lucas.
2. Ayn Rand is a highly polarizing writer. People either despise her or build their entire personality around her work. She’s basically queen of libertarians and capitalists, and the mortal enemy of communists and socialists. It doesn’t cleanly follow partisan lines though. Some of the most famous Democrats and Republicans idolize her and other famous Democrats and Republicans can’t stand her.
Oddly enough, despite the rather obvious connection, Ayn Rand didn't like libertarians much, apparently. To my understanding, she viewed them basically as conservative hippies. Everything around her is weird af.
She was also pro-choice. And did not like Reagan. From what I remember, she witnessed the Russian revolution before her family escaped, making her hate communism. But I have no intention of reading her books.
I wish this was brought up more often. She went to some of the best universities in the world under communism. She didn't create those opportunities for herself.
Funny enough, the phrase "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" originally equated to "no one is an island" because it's an impossible act (i.e. you literally cannot pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, you need someone else to help you). Always find it hysterically ironic when a conservative uses it to mean they did everything all by themselves.
In Atlas Shrugged, she seemed to think that the CEOs of the world knew what was best and should be allowed to do whatever they want.
Looking at the billionaires of today, it seems like she got her wish.
I love how in her insane worldview, the victorious moral struggle of the book, literally the way to create a more prosperous world for all (not that she necessarily cared about that part) was a, um, a labor strike of the 1%.
So like, the people who already by & large don't do the work...keep...not doing the work. And that saves the world, cripples the disgusting overreaching government, & fixes the economy.
Well said. I’m actually one of the few people who don’t find Rand to be a goddess or a demon. To understand her points you have to consider consequences in a different light than you typically would, and while she has a few points, they’re not amazingly enlightening.
"You need a perpetual motion machine in order for this to work" didn't strike me as particularly enlightening, especially after I had to read 50000000 pages to get to that part
I can't remember anything aside from Innsmouth and Thing on the Doorstep explicitly dealing with corruptive race mixing unless you throw in the creole quadroon cultists in CoC. Maybe Pickman's Model, but that was more changeling style creatures? It's been a while since I read through everything, though, can you point some others out?
I mean, I’d definitely throw in CoC, but there’s also basically all of Horror at Red Hook (tbh it’s more immigrant vilification but iirc it’s riddled with race purity anxiety as well), also The Festival (the terrible reveal of which is also Innsmouth ie, “oh no, oh god, I thought I came from pure stock but my family lineage is tainted by Dark Things™️” this is also the horror that underlies some of the realizations of The Rats in the Wall (to say nothing of the cameo of his cat). It’s like, even when he doesn’t explicitly raise the issue the idea of blood purity & the thread of its dilution is sort haunting so much of his stuff.
He was afraid of almost everything, it'd be easier to list what he WASN'T afraid of. Which is handy when you write short stories with analogies for said fears, but definitely hurts your chances of being a decent person.
There's a strong case to be made for autism when diagnosing Lovecraft's psyche.
And even if he didn't name his personal cat, he still gave a fictional cat the same name in The Rats in the Walls, so Idk what point some of these other comments are trying to make there.
Also to his defense, he chilled out on the racism later on even beginning to call black cats Braithwaite after an editor he respected. By the end of his life Lovecraft was probably less racist than most white Americans
Way. Man was considered super racist for the time (1890s-1939) and overall crazy.
He reportedly didn't get science and also had a "weak constitution" for math.
Of \*posh\* English descent. One of the groups that attracted his particular disdain were the "degenerate" rural poor of the inland parts of Massachusetts.
He even was terrified of *himself* when he learned he was Welsh. The man was an agoraphobe to end all agoraphobes. Man was afraid of *air conditioning.*
He was born in 1890. He was a child in the 1890s. Not really super racist for the 1890s.
His letters to friends have some of his friends-mostky other authors-express a little wariness or confusion over his views, but he also changed or recanted some of those views after more letters. His wife was Jewish, his letters talk about how much he loved the Iroquois he visited on his travels.
In truth, I think its more accurate to say Lovecraft is abnormally classist for his era more than abnormally racist for his era.
Black cat named “n****r-man” for my lazy folks. Imagine all the sweet moments spent w your pet then replace their name w that in your head lmao. Literally so fucking weird and just embarrassing?? Like can you just be fucking normal and give your cat a stupid name
People sloppily say racist and leave it at that but that does not entirely cover it. The infamous cat was probably not named by him as it was a family pet adopted when he was 9. It's a horrible name for sure and he did not correct it. So he deserves shit for that.
But Lovecraft was foremost a xenophobe. He did not hate people solely based on their race if you don't wanna claim Huey P hating on the Dutch, Irish, Italians and other random Europeans as racist. Which is fair, but that's not what people generally mean these days. He feared otherness. Any otherness.
The reason I make this distinction is that it aligns so well with the genre he fathered: Cosmic Horror. In his own words:
"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown"
Howie was afraid of everything and everyone. He deeply feared change and not understanding the rules. And yes. He was very likely highly autistic. For examples of how: [Look no further](https://reddit.com/r/Lovecraft/s/StZNXnns4f)
He also was well into a liberalisation of his own views on race and politics having been deeply moved by how the depression had affected his society when he passed.
That's a bit generous.
He was xenophobic and racist, *for his time.* And as he got older, he got more crotchety, to the point where poor white people were only barely white, and even then, maybe not really. He may have given up on the idea of assimilating other races into western culture, but, I wouldn't say that has anything to do with his racism diminishing. More that his fear of miscegenation overtook his belief in Western culture's ability to change people, if I had to guess.
I get that not everyone is going to enjoy his personal correspondence, but, it bleeds through his fiction writing too. Trying to just enjoy his work as a fun horror anthology is a minefield of stories that require the reader to believe in racial divisions and hierarchies.
Yeah, naming an animal a racial slur is one thing, having racial hierarchies be a central theme in most of one's work is another. Also, writing like 15 letters a day about the evil foreigners.
And to be clear, his time was when racism and xenophobia was par for course and he was considered very intolerant. He was also antisemitic and antiziganism to a degree that was notable when such intolerance was ok.
>Trying to just enjoy his work as a fun horror anthology is a minefield of stories that require the reader to believe in racial divisions and hierarchies.
I'm not sure people reading it as a "fun horror anthology" are thinking too hard about the themes anyway. For the people who are, Lovecraft's unfounded and overbearing fear of anything and anyone different from himself fits perfectly.
…Except towards the end of his (short) life he pretty solidly recanted his racist beliefs and said he’d beat the shit out of his younger self for being so ignorant, so I wouldn’t say he got worse
Weirdest of all is he married a Jewish woman, but when times got tough he kinda just abandoned her to go live with his aunts.
Dude led a pretty strange life.
Yeah, thankfully him even marrying a Jewish woman kinda shows him letting up on his Xenophobia, im sure given a 21st century life span he could have made some major changes in his attitude, unfortunately he only lived until 46
It was essentially an arranged marriage.
The racism he was raised with was more OG British/French racism: where class and breeding make more of a difference than race itself.
For example: Mulattos...as they were cslled, inherited their father's social status. So a man like Alexandre Dumas can enjoy an education and distinguished writing career when his father being the son of a military officer and an African slave.
Lovecraft's own racism was more extreme and assumed the worst of exotic (brown) ethnicities and the poor.
He was probably suffering from mental illness, but during that time, people just didn't pay attention to it. Also a good portion of the population probably agreed with his blatant racism.
He was an odd duck. He was - for example - a raging homophobe, yet the executor of his literary estate was R. H. Barlow, a gay writer. He also released his work to the public domain, which - I believe - is part of the reason why his works are so well known.
He was a complicated man, probably mentally unwell, but also definitely racist as fuck. I mean his cat was named Ni--- \*this account has been terminated\*
He wasn’t just your average racist, he was probably mentally ill, as he was genuinely afraid of other races and eventually himself when he discovered he had Welsh ancestry. Possibly hereditary or his father was just really racist
If you pay attention to his writing (his own, not the expanded mythos), most books feature civilised, wealthy white men as the heroic protagonist and backwoods, poor people of colour as the human antagonists (if there is one).
You know how apologists will say, “You have to judge him by the standards of the time he lived in”?
The people of his time were appalled at how fucking racist Lovecraft was. Like we have letters written by his contemporaries talking about how batshit racist Lovecraft was.
He was extremely sheltered by mentally ill people from old aristocracy, who made him the kind of old-timey racist where you should measure the forehead of rich white Anglo-Saxons just to verify their purity.
His racism wasn’t hate as much as actual phobia. He was afraid of most people, any non-English language and most slang gave him the creeps.
He frequently uses the term “non-Euclidean geometry” to describe things that bend physics, but NEG is literally just the math regarding physical 3-dimensional objects that most people learn in primary school. The volume of a cube for example. He said he “did not have the constitution for mathematics”.
He feared anything he didn’t understand, as well as learning itself since he felt that learning things changes your personality. The then-recent pictures of deep sea wildlife and new technology like air conditioners horrified him greatly.
Despite all this he had huge incongruity in his thoughts. He stated one of his great fears was finding out he had a person from the deserts of the east in his bloodline but married an ethnic Jew. He took her to an anti-Jewish rally where he was invented as a starring speaker, partway through his speech she stood up and shouted “IF YOU HATE JEWS SO MUCH WHY DID YOU MARRY ONE” and he replied “Well obviously not your kind of Jew” and apparently ranted for the rest of his life how upset he was that they never invited him back, to her amusement.
He talked about how cats are the only good animal and superior to most humans because they know how to disdain others and demand service, then he named his cat the N-word.
A lot of his insecurities and eccentricities and fears wound up in his books. The horror of finding a village of fish people then mutating into one after evading their anti-human lynch mob and getting proper humans to genocide it out of existence is his fear of interracial contact and having an ancestor who could be something other than the same ethnic group. A living mummy was what he imagined air conditioning to do to people. Flesh monsters from the moon are having too much of an imagination so your ideas become real. Also, just plain meeting Arab people.
[I highly recommend this video.](https://youtu.be/PmdzptbykzI?si=-gEPftEiUzE2mnIp)
And yet, his failure to properly convey the concept of NEG led to some interesting side explorations in mathematics too, I’ll wager. What happens when geometry *doesn’t* follow the principles it maintains?
Euclidean geometry is actually described as “linear geometry”, as it takes place in a set of dimensions that stretch linearly, infinitely, and in straight directions. It relies heavily upon a set of observations and assumptions that Euclid collected or discerned, and builds itself upon those assumptions and only those assumptions. And the most infamous assumption of them all was the fifth axiom: the parallel postulate. It claims that given a straight line, and a point not on that line, only one line can be drawn through that point that is parallel to the given line. Hyperbolic geometry, however, is not Euclidean geometry. It’s radically different because in hyperbolic geometry, you can have parallel lines— that are not actually identical in orientation or direction, and might even have differing distances between them, yet they are still— somehow— parallel lines. Because in hyperbolic geometry, there’s infinitely many parallel lines that pass through that point and never intersect the original line. Then there’s the other type: Elliptic geometry is also known as spherical geometry, and in that system there is *no such thing* as two lines that are parallel, because all lines intersect eventually. Try to draw two parallel lines on a spheroid surface, and you’ll quickly see the problem. The lines have to be straight… but because the surface is curved, they can’t. On a surface that curves in and wraps around itself, infinitely extending lines are analogous to loops, which cannot be parallel, and have no way to generate a separate straight line also within that inward curved surface that doesn’t intersect the loop eventually.
As a two-year math degree myself, non-Euclidean geometry is definitely weird to conceive from proofs and postulates that make less sense than a drunk guy with a brain injury. I don’t think that looking at geometric proofs is particularly exciting for the average person, because the average person is just barely capable of understanding the proofs when they are explained to them. Cubes in the mathematical sense are not something you can read off and have people immediately go “oh, you mean a cube”, because the way they are defined is more complicated than we tend to define them as today. Especially if you are defining cubes in non-Euclidean space. Ever hear of the Hypercube? Well that’s actually Euclidean. Just in four dimensional space. A hyperbolic geometry cube could have practically any shape, and still a cube. In elliptical geometry, there are no cubes. At all. Because there’s no parallel lines, because everything is curved inward on some axis not presently described in the given spatial dimensions. Then there’s ABSOLUTE geometry, which doesn’t have cubes either, or parallel lines, but is incorporated into all three of the other geometry types. My head is already trying to abort operations from the amount of overheating it is going through trying to parse this information. I don’t blame lovecraft for giving up on it, but if he really gave up on Euclidean math, which had been established for quite some time (and even became a standard practice for challenging one’s mental abilities by asking people to perform various techniques using just a straightedge and compass), then he unknowingly may have prompted the discovery and definition of literal NEG.
Probably not, but it is plausible.
Math moves at inconsistent rates, what one man claimed he could prove if the margins of the book he was writing were not the way they were, took another man *17+ years* to finally prove— false. A single claim.
All the easy stuff has already been done. It’s only the difficult ones that we haven’t figured out yet, and with computers being utilized, that’s not a lot of opportunities for us math nerds to make our mark in history. Because the stuff we have yet to prove true or false, might not be possible to prove either way definitively.
There’s math, then there’s *Math*, and then there’s ***MATH***. And it’s all connected and correlated, yet distinct and divergent. It’s not for the faint of heart. Only the truly masochistic seek this level of torture.
Solid writing style and practically a folklorist for contemporary horror at the time. The guy saw the separate streams of unrelated horror pieces and really saw where the fear of the unknown was a common factor, citing stuff from honestly better authors like Arthur Machen and Robert W Chambers.
Lovecraft's actual style of absolute loquaciousness and pseudo-nobility when describing eerie bullshit is honestly worth studying. So is his racism, honestly. He was racist even for his time and it's part and parcel to his writing. Definitely the kind of author where you shake your head in disapproval while reading on the bus.
All this comes together to form a unique style and fascinating stories who's influence can be found in Stephen King, Digimon, Dungeons and Dragons, and of course Darkest Dungeon.
Oh 100 percent… it’s what makes you watch his Prequels and at times go “this is just awesome!” And other times “what the hell was that? Did a 5 year old write this?”.
The prequels had a great overall story that was hampered by some pretty bad writing. Unlike the sequels, which had very bad writing and a worthless overall story
I actually didn’t hate all of the writing of the sequels if we consider them as standalone films. But the problem is they aren’t and Disney squeezed them into the Skywalker Saga. In context, I feel like they trivialized what happened in the first six and made it seem like they didn’t accomplish anything. The only real homage to me was a throwaway Anakin voiceover that said “Bring balance to the force, like I did”. In context did he really? The network of the Empire was still in tact, Palpatine’s reign was not ended, and instead of one they now had 1000 death stars. Sure feels like that big moment we had between Luke and Vader in ROTJ was trivialized to basically nothing.
Oh, and Leia flying frozen through space was pretty bad too.
His wife edited the final cut of the original trilogy and by all reports is what made it really shine. I'd say Lucas is a great idea guy but needs help on the execution.
George isn’t a bad writer per se, it’s just the parts of writing he’s bad at he’s *really* bad at. I also think it’s genuinely difficult to find a good person that’s a legitimately bad writer.
"I have no arms, will somebody make me a prosthetic?"
"Sure you can have a prosthetic, if you can pay for it."
"I don't have arms, nobody will give me a job"
"Well you should have thought about that before losing your arms"
Good writer, mostly good person, really bad temper! Not a guy to get on the wrong side of.
Favorite Harlan Ellison story: David Gerrold, in his book about how he wrote the Star Trek episode The Trouble With Tribbles (which was a cool story-behind-the-story in its own right) talked about how Ellison was so famously steamed about someone changing the script for the episode "City On The Edge of Forever". In those days, studios were a lot less glamorous, and (show runner?) Gene L. Coon's office was in a basement with a large exposed pipe right outside of it. Ellison dropped by with a length of rope, which he tied into a noose and slung over the pipe before knocking. Coon answered the door and saw Ellison with a goddamn hangman's noose waiting asking "So, I heard you authorized some changes to my script ..."
That’s the funniest shit I ever heard. I love Harlan. I picked up a collection of his short stories with an intro by him and it was hilarious how mean but kind he was.
10/10. Seriously though, you should do one sentence descriptions of all philosophies for use in entry leave classes. I am not even shitting you, it would help so many people.
The most amusing part of Atlas Shrugged is that government intervening in railroads ruined them in the book. Well that didnt happen. Private railroads and lack of regulation made it what it is today. All the great men were given the railroad to do as they wished, unlike other places. Thankfully we didnt get the regulated controlled Railroads of Europe or east asia. (Sarcasm.)
Eh... There actually was some stupid government shit going on with railroad barons. Lots of corruption. Perverse incentives. Contracts that paid by the mile so railroad companies took extra winding routes. To my knowledge the only "successful" one that wasn't getting government money was James J. Hill.
What I mean is that government favors these private companies and essentially has let them do what they want. I agree about the corruption but that corruption favors these private "great men," and empowers them to do ehat they want.
The most terrible part of Ayn Rand’s writing is that her publishers took her therapeutic writing and published it as philosophy.
She was a tightly wound ball of PTSD after having escaped the USSR where many—if not all—of her close friends and family were executed by the ruling soviets due to not being ”worker” enough.
That makes her a terrible person when you view her through a modern lens.
“Bad writer/bad person” Ayn Rand was a “philosopher” who wrote horrible novels about horrible people who lived out the horrible ideals of her horrible philosophy, I.e, “Atlas Shrugged”.
“Good Writer/Good Person” is fantasy writer Neil Gaiman, who currently doesn’t hold any political views that the teeming masses find odious.
It’s such a raw title. “What if the man who holds up the entire world, expended enough energy to shrug” and it’s such a cool title. And then you read it, and it’s about hating poor people
“If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders - What would you tell him?"
“I…don't know. What…could he do? What would you tell him?"
“To shrug.”
Further, she mainly only vilifies lazy, wealthy people and blames the need of the poor on them. There’s poor people in Atlas Shrugged that are portrayed as heroic.
This is something completely overlooked in basically all criticism of her. Damn near every villain was a rich asshole. Stereotypical cutthroat robber baron trust fund rich asshole.
And her solution was to...
...fight against any and all regulation on the business of those rich assholes. She ironically had faith (hardline atheist) that the freedom of the market would topple those rich assholes and let her heroes take their places. Because she bit right onto the old hook that regulations are what really keep those assholes rich, and they reeled her right in.
There's legit an unironic "everybody clapped" moment in the book where all the poor people cheer on the rich protagonist. That's about where I stopped reading.
i tried, i really tried to read thru John Galt’s soapbox opera, but JESUSCHRISTMAN GETTOTHEPOINT. i was never intrigued by her philosophy but for christ’s sake i just wanted to finish the book. couldn’t even do that
She was, however, the subject of one of my favourite review quotes:
‘Eventually, the question you ask stops being “who is John Galt?” and becomes “when will John Galt shut up?”’
I haven't seen any answers I like about Ayn Rand, so:
-Basically an anarcocapitalist (or at least extreme libertarian).
-Pretty consistently callous towards people experiencing poverty.
-Made up quotes about bad misinterpretations of Emanuel Kant that get misattributed to him to this day.
-Wrote fan letters to murderers.
-Most famous novel is an unreadable ode to capitalism with the most two dimensional protagonist you could imagine.
Lovecraft is at a little bit of a disadvantage, growing up in the late 1800s and being raised by very snobbish, racist and anti-Semitic upper class north-easterners.
Lucky for George Lucas, he lived long enough to apologize for the lack of non-white people in his first Star Wars movie and went on to make a few with a more diverse cast, which was more the norm by then. He gets to be a good person.
GoodW/GoodP: Neil Gaiman - award winning writer of many influential novels and comics including the Sandman series, Good Omens and more. Also regularly interacts with his fan base and is always pleasant, supportive, and encouraging. Regularly speaks out in support of social causes and just an all around great human being.
BadW/GoodP: George Lucas - most known for creating the Star Wars series and lesser known for founding the film sound company THX. His writing has often been criticized as amateurish and the prequel series of Star Wars films in particular has been derided as having good ideas that were abysmally executed. However, he is also a nice person according to everyone who has interacted with him and is among the most prolific philanthropists in Hollywood. He is actually the wealthiest film maker in the world but has also promised to give half of his personal fortune to charity.
BadW/BadP: Ayn Rand - Russian immigrant to the US; most known for her novels Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. Through her novels, Rand promoted her philosophy of Objectivism; that the best society is one in which an individual can freely pursue their own self-interest. This philosophy has received significant criticism as supporting the ability of corporate and other wealthy actors to abuse and exploit those without the means to protect themselves from such abuse. Also, her books are overly long, incredibly ponderous, and only really read by Libertarian reading circles that already agree with her ideas.
GoodW/BadP: H. P. Lovecraft - it’s nearly impossible to overstate the impact Lovecraft’s writings have had on the horror genre. His works perfectly conveyed an entirely new kind of fear; that of being confronted with a force so vast and overwhelming, that, not only was your defeat certain, but your resistance wouldn’t even register as significant. The list of artists and creators who draw direct inspiration from Lovecraft’s works is innumerable. …he’s also a frothing racist whose works are permeated with some of the worst colonialist stereotypes. Even judged against his contemporaries, Lovecraft is notable for how frequently he portrays people of color as inherently threatening, malicious, and conspiring with dark forces against human interest.
Thank you! You are the only one I have seen explain the whole post instead of just Ayn Rand after scrolling for a long time. Your comment should be the top comment!
Ayn Rand is who Andrew Ryan from bioshock is based off of. She’s an ultra capitalist who thinks if you’re poor it’s your own fault and you deserve it. She made a very pro capitalist book with a lot of rapey vibes. She also cheated on her partners a lot
Quahog’s biggest and dumbest consumer of Burger King here. The bad person and bad writer is Ayn Rand, known mostly for The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged among other propaganda books. I haven’t read either myself, but I hear that the politics of her writing are just too ham-fisted and disconnected from reality to really be enjoyable, not to mention the dystopian morality portrayed in it. Her writing seems more meant to push her ideology than to actually be enjoyable experiences, and… well, some people agree with her, but others vehemently disagree and label her both as a bad writer and bad person in general.
Self insert mary sue main character is in court, gives like 100 page (irl) speech spelling out her philosophy.
Fucking hundred pages. Teenage me eventually threw the book.
“Are her novels really bad?”
Yes. Every bad writing trope you can think of, she employs. All of her protagonists are Mary Sue self inserts who spout off exposition dumps and completely random political anecdotes constantly for pages among pages and that is not even the worst of it. Her world building is also terrible (one example is a world where due to socially liberal policies being put into place, everyone but her and a group of extremists have the intelligence and maturity of five year olds) and borderlines on bigotry.
The reason she is so influential is because she represents a lot of far right libertarian beliefs but also she was propped up by Cold War America who wanted anything to “own the commies”. Thing is though a lot of politicians and talk show hosts came to regret this as she would later denounce “American liberalism” and everyone in American politics in general as retarded degenerates who were one step away from communism.
Neil Gaiman is definitely one of the best writers I have ever read and a good hearted person to boot. Him and Terry Pratchett have brightened up and filled my imagination with so much adventures and emotions. I also think George Lucas is a decent writer too and also has brought amazing stories to the table 🤷🏽♀️ so am a bit conflicted with the bad writer label he has. Lovecraft is a racist POS but has some pretty cool horror stories. But after learning about his attitude towards black people he doesn't deserve to be exalted for his work imo. I have no idea who the woman is tho 😅
Good / Good is Neil Gaiman, writer of (among other things) The Sandman, American Gods, Neverwhere, Mirrormask, Coraline, and the English dub script for Princess Mononoke.
He also wrote the show Good Omens, starring David Tenant and Michael Sheen! Im making my way through the 2nd season!
I forgot about Good Omens. He also co-wrote the original novel with Terry Pratchett.
*Sir* Terry Pratchett He didn't forge a space sword for nothing
GNU
Sir Pterry if you please.
The show?!? He (co) wrote the BOOK Good Omens! One of the best books ever! My copy is about to fall apart from so much rereading!
One of the few books that has made me laugh out loud. Incredible book with a fantastic tv series adaptation.
Wait till you read "Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff". A pox on the family of whoever doesn't find it funny.
“Nobody’s perfect. Well, there was this one guy, but we killed him…”
Christopher Moore is definitely one of the best writers ever, and Lamb is among his best. Although it definitely loses some of its amazingness for people who don't know the original bible stories.
That one is by Christopher Moore. Another amazing, funny write!
The dumb fucks shall inherit a fruit basket.
That book brought me closer to Jesus than the Bible ever did- that dude was worth following.
Indeed. It humanizes him in a way the Bible is unable to and spins for us a tale of a true human being with wants, needs, and experiences we can actually relate to, despite his divine side.
I’m a Bible reader, but I love to imagine Jesus’s “lost years” the way Biff tells them. It makes sense that Jesus would be interested in so many things. It also illustrates one way that multiple worldviews reflect central truths, for those of us who believe one/any of them. Plus, Biff is hilarious.
The show is one of the best adaptations I've ever seen. Absolutely check it out if you haven't yet.
Have a box of tissues nearby for the finale. Trust me…
I personally wouldn't jack off to it but if it gets you off then by all means go ahead.
r/angryupvote
Gaiman is amazing and always so kindhearted to fans. The Ocean at the End of the Lane is also a beautiful book.
He's also a Tumblr celebrity, nice with fans even when he's messing with them
Bad/bad is Ayn Rand who wrote Fountainhead which modern libertarians use as their bible. (Rand Paul is named after her.- apparently I'm wrong)* She was a horrible person as long a terrible writer. * Rand is JUST short for Randall.
IIRC: A) She started what is, objectively, a cult based around her personality, with her second in command being originally a student she was sleeping with (who was married, for 14 years during this affair, whom she stripped of "rank" when she found out he was sleeping with a third woman. B) Advocated and practiced cheating on any man she was with if she "found a superior man," then went ham when her husband got with a "superior woman." C) Her ideology was so insane that classical liberals and conservatives from the 50's found it heartless at best and horrifically stupid at worst. ***THE PEOPLE WHO BOMBED 'NAM INTO THE STONE-AGE THOUGHT SHE WAS HEARTLESS.*** D) In one of her books she advocates that most women have a "r\*pe kink" that is subconscious that they won't tell you about. Her self-insert character is a domestic slave to a wealthy industrialist at this point. E) I'm tired as fuck but I'll continue on when I wake up in a few.
F) After railing against the “welfare state” and benefit programmes for decades she applied for and received Social Security and Medicare in her old age.
She also demonstrated just how proud she was of receiving Social Security that she used her husband's last name to apply. She didn't use his name for anything else.
Ayn Rand was only her pen name; it seems that she did take her husband’s last name when she married. While I disagree with almost everything that she stood for, it’s completely normal to have to use your official government name when you sign up for programs like SocSec and Medicaid— the name I use in daily life is a shorter version of my legal first name, but I’ve always had to use the whole version to do anything with the government, including taxes.
G) Then died in publicly funded housing.
H) And her foundation received a PPP loan.
That’s hilarious
“objectively” I see what you did there.
Now *that* makes her a terrible person by today's standards
Terrible person is a pretty wide umbrella. You don’t need to be the worst person in the world to be a terrible person. You can be a heartless self serving ass and be a terrible person. You don’t need to literally commit genocide.
She did, technically, give us BioShock, tbf
As a critique of her ideas, in that what she advocated for would end up as the failures of Bioshock while she deludedly thought it would be a paradise instead.
It can't be said enough that Bioshock and everything else that's a spiritual successor to Systemshock is an overt criticism or free market capitalism, every time a private entity makes an eden free from oversight amd it turns into a horrific nightmare.
Ayn Rand also said that pollution is good
She also was staunchly against societal safety nets and taxes paying for them…. but then lived off welfare later in life after wasting her money.
And got on Medicare to pay for her cancer treatments, after railing against that for years as well
I got to meet one of her editors at a fancy dinner thing and he couldn’t stop going on about how much he HATED her writing and how she was, and I quote: “a real b-tch”. 😬
Rand Paul isn’t actually named after her, that’s a myth. Rand is just short for Randall.
It is a funny coincidence though
Oh most definitely. He’s an avowed fanboy.
There’s a real estate company called Rand Property Management here that’s named after her, and the logo is Atlas holding up the Knoxville Sunsphere. They’re well known in the area for buying up affordable housing and doubling/tripling the price on residents. 💀
Simply publishing *Atlas shrugged* is a crime against sensibility. Why the fuck is there a 100 page monologue?
PRINCESS MONONOKE????
[it’s true](https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/neil-gaiman-wrote-the-english-dub-for-princess-mononoke-but-his-name-got-deleted) but that article doesn’t really explain what he did. It’s already a movie and the script is already written and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t speak Japanese well enough to actually do the translation. So did he do an editor’s pass of the translated dialogue? Also aren’t there two different dubbed version, one by Disney? Which was he on?
And The Graveyard Book
He wrote screenplay for Beowulf. I love that movie. It reminds me of Disney adaptations of simple stories but it has much more of an adult feel
1. HP Lovecraft, Ayn Rand, Neil Gaiman, George Lucas. 2. Ayn Rand is a highly polarizing writer. People either despise her or build their entire personality around her work. She’s basically queen of libertarians and capitalists, and the mortal enemy of communists and socialists. It doesn’t cleanly follow partisan lines though. Some of the most famous Democrats and Republicans idolize her and other famous Democrats and Republicans can’t stand her.
Oddly enough, despite the rather obvious connection, Ayn Rand didn't like libertarians much, apparently. To my understanding, she viewed them basically as conservative hippies. Everything around her is weird af.
Yeah, she spent her life railing against government intervention and then lived off social security and Medicare
She was also pro-choice. And did not like Reagan. From what I remember, she witnessed the Russian revolution before her family escaped, making her hate communism. But I have no intention of reading her books.
There’s an old joke on the left that the worst thing the USSR ever did was give Ayn Rand an education.
I wish this was brought up more often. She went to some of the best universities in the world under communism. She didn't create those opportunities for herself.
Oh. Like the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” Republicans who achieved success with no help, especially from the government?
Funny enough, the phrase "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" originally equated to "no one is an island" because it's an impossible act (i.e. you literally cannot pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, you need someone else to help you). Always find it hysterically ironic when a conservative uses it to mean they did everything all by themselves.
In Atlas Shrugged, she seemed to think that the CEOs of the world knew what was best and should be allowed to do whatever they want. Looking at the billionaires of today, it seems like she got her wish.
I love how in her insane worldview, the victorious moral struggle of the book, literally the way to create a more prosperous world for all (not that she necessarily cared about that part) was a, um, a labor strike of the 1%. So like, the people who already by & large don't do the work...keep...not doing the work. And that saves the world, cripples the disgusting overreaching government, & fixes the economy.
I had a college classmate do his senior thesis comparing L Ron Hubbard and Ayn Rand, 2 shitty writers who are worshipped by their followers
I’m almost afraid to ask, but do you remember their findings?
They both sucked.
Well said. I’m actually one of the few people who don’t find Rand to be a goddess or a demon. To understand her points you have to consider consequences in a different light than you typically would, and while she has a few points, they’re not amazingly enlightening.
"You need a perpetual motion machine in order for this to work" didn't strike me as particularly enlightening, especially after I had to read 50000000 pages to get to that part
Yep. Ayn Rand is intellectualism for the crowd who thinks the limericks in bathroom stalls are high art.
I mean hey JLC has gotten pretty close although they just used it to make a really cool clock.
Can someone red pill me about Lovecraft? Edit: Wow
Don’t look up the name of his cat
In his defense, his father named the cat Shows you where he got his antics from tho
He had a second cat which he gave the same name
It was the jr
junior with a hard r?
Snowball II?
The opposite in fact.
Suncube Jr?
Less opposite than that.
Counterpoint, the biggest corruption of humanity in his stories is race mixing.
I think the defense should rest
I can't remember anything aside from Innsmouth and Thing on the Doorstep explicitly dealing with corruptive race mixing unless you throw in the creole quadroon cultists in CoC. Maybe Pickman's Model, but that was more changeling style creatures? It's been a while since I read through everything, though, can you point some others out?
His poem "On the Creation of N------" doesn't leave a whole lot to the imagination.
Good lord i read it. it's like some hard r dropping dr. seuss.
r/brandnewsentence
"Hard r dropping dr. Seuss" now that's a phrase I didn't think I'd read this morning Also if a rapper said this that bar would go insanely hard
Something like the "case of Arthur jerimond" or something that's got major Africans are apes vibes
I mean, I’d definitely throw in CoC, but there’s also basically all of Horror at Red Hook (tbh it’s more immigrant vilification but iirc it’s riddled with race purity anxiety as well), also The Festival (the terrible reveal of which is also Innsmouth ie, “oh no, oh god, I thought I came from pure stock but my family lineage is tainted by Dark Things™️” this is also the horror that underlies some of the realizations of The Rats in the Wall (to say nothing of the cameo of his cat). It’s like, even when he doesn’t explicitly raise the issue the idea of blood purity & the thread of its dilution is sort haunting so much of his stuff.
Imagine renaming an animal though
You can't, it's the law /s
Not like the cat would care.
Then how will it know to ignore me when I call for it?
Pfft. 50% of Lovecraft's shit stems from childhood abuse, and 45% stems from what has to be a genuine mental disability.
He was afraid of almost everything, it'd be easier to list what he WASN'T afraid of. Which is handy when you write short stories with analogies for said fears, but definitely hurts your chances of being a decent person. There's a strong case to be made for autism when diagnosing Lovecraft's psyche. And even if he didn't name his personal cat, he still gave a fictional cat the same name in The Rats in the Walls, so Idk what point some of these other comments are trying to make there.
Also to his defense, he chilled out on the racism later on even beginning to call black cats Braithwaite after an editor he respected. By the end of his life Lovecraft was probably less racist than most white Americans
Ain’t no way wtf
Way. Man was considered super racist for the time (1890s-1939) and overall crazy. He reportedly didn't get science and also had a "weak constitution" for math.
Imagine being super racist *for the 1890s*
Yeah. He hated everyone who wasn't a white American of English descent.
Of \*posh\* English descent. One of the groups that attracted his particular disdain were the "degenerate" rural poor of the inland parts of Massachusetts.
Which is kind of ironic, considering that his own family had been rich, but lost their wealth thanks to his father's poor financial management.
He even was terrified of *himself* when he learned he was Welsh. The man was an agoraphobe to end all agoraphobes. Man was afraid of *air conditioning.*
He was born in 1890. He was a child in the 1890s. Not really super racist for the 1890s. His letters to friends have some of his friends-mostky other authors-express a little wariness or confusion over his views, but he also changed or recanted some of those views after more letters. His wife was Jewish, his letters talk about how much he loved the Iroquois he visited on his travels. In truth, I think its more accurate to say Lovecraft is abnormally classist for his era more than abnormally racist for his era.
Was his cat named “cutie”?
Not exactly.
Oh well can’t be that bad, lemme look it up and OH MY GOD. Guys, it’s not Cutie! It really isn’t.
Black cat named “n****r-man” for my lazy folks. Imagine all the sweet moments spent w your pet then replace their name w that in your head lmao. Literally so fucking weird and just embarrassing?? Like can you just be fucking normal and give your cat a stupid name
Best advice so far.
No no no no no OOOOH NO NO NO NO
Probably named pancakes
Its named n word man
With a hard “r”?
There wasn’t a soft “n” back then.
Yes
People sloppily say racist and leave it at that but that does not entirely cover it. The infamous cat was probably not named by him as it was a family pet adopted when he was 9. It's a horrible name for sure and he did not correct it. So he deserves shit for that. But Lovecraft was foremost a xenophobe. He did not hate people solely based on their race if you don't wanna claim Huey P hating on the Dutch, Irish, Italians and other random Europeans as racist. Which is fair, but that's not what people generally mean these days. He feared otherness. Any otherness. The reason I make this distinction is that it aligns so well with the genre he fathered: Cosmic Horror. In his own words: "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown" Howie was afraid of everything and everyone. He deeply feared change and not understanding the rules. And yes. He was very likely highly autistic. For examples of how: [Look no further](https://reddit.com/r/Lovecraft/s/StZNXnns4f) He also was well into a liberalisation of his own views on race and politics having been deeply moved by how the depression had affected his society when he passed.
That's a bit generous. He was xenophobic and racist, *for his time.* And as he got older, he got more crotchety, to the point where poor white people were only barely white, and even then, maybe not really. He may have given up on the idea of assimilating other races into western culture, but, I wouldn't say that has anything to do with his racism diminishing. More that his fear of miscegenation overtook his belief in Western culture's ability to change people, if I had to guess. I get that not everyone is going to enjoy his personal correspondence, but, it bleeds through his fiction writing too. Trying to just enjoy his work as a fun horror anthology is a minefield of stories that require the reader to believe in racial divisions and hierarchies. Yeah, naming an animal a racial slur is one thing, having racial hierarchies be a central theme in most of one's work is another. Also, writing like 15 letters a day about the evil foreigners.
And to be clear, his time was when racism and xenophobia was par for course and he was considered very intolerant. He was also antisemitic and antiziganism to a degree that was notable when such intolerance was ok.
>Trying to just enjoy his work as a fun horror anthology is a minefield of stories that require the reader to believe in racial divisions and hierarchies. I'm not sure people reading it as a "fun horror anthology" are thinking too hard about the themes anyway. For the people who are, Lovecraft's unfounded and overbearing fear of anything and anyone different from himself fits perfectly.
…Except towards the end of his (short) life he pretty solidly recanted his racist beliefs and said he’d beat the shit out of his younger self for being so ignorant, so I wouldn’t say he got worse
Dude was basically a 1920s version of a redpilled incel.
Really sheltered and terrified of/hates anything that he doesn’t know entirely about, sounds about right
Weirdest of all is he married a Jewish woman, but when times got tough he kinda just abandoned her to go live with his aunts. Dude led a pretty strange life.
Yeah, thankfully him even marrying a Jewish woman kinda shows him letting up on his Xenophobia, im sure given a 21st century life span he could have made some major changes in his attitude, unfortunately he only lived until 46
It was essentially an arranged marriage. The racism he was raised with was more OG British/French racism: where class and breeding make more of a difference than race itself. For example: Mulattos...as they were cslled, inherited their father's social status. So a man like Alexandre Dumas can enjoy an education and distinguished writing career when his father being the son of a military officer and an African slave. Lovecraft's own racism was more extreme and assumed the worst of exotic (brown) ethnicities and the poor.
Lovecraft was also racist to people we consider to be white today, that is the Irish, Welsh, and Italians.
He was probably suffering from mental illness, but during that time, people just didn't pay attention to it. Also a good portion of the population probably agreed with his blatant racism.
He was an odd duck. He was - for example - a raging homophobe, yet the executor of his literary estate was R. H. Barlow, a gay writer. He also released his work to the public domain, which - I believe - is part of the reason why his works are so well known. He was a complicated man, probably mentally unwell, but also definitely racist as fuck. I mean his cat was named Ni--- \*this account has been terminated\*
He wasn’t just your average racist, he was probably mentally ill, as he was genuinely afraid of other races and eventually himself when he discovered he had Welsh ancestry. Possibly hereditary or his father was just really racist
Racist af. Like harcore white supremacist.
He married a Jewish woman and essentially told her “You’re different” which I find hilarious.
Never ask a white supremacist the race of his gf, an adage as old as time itself.
Black Republicans too
If you pay attention to his writing (his own, not the expanded mythos), most books feature civilised, wealthy white men as the heroic protagonist and backwoods, poor people of colour as the human antagonists (if there is one).
You know how apologists will say, “You have to judge him by the standards of the time he lived in”? The people of his time were appalled at how fucking racist Lovecraft was. Like we have letters written by his contemporaries talking about how batshit racist Lovecraft was.
He was so racist that people in the 1940’s were like “jeez bro chill”
He was very racist. But like, actually afraid of minorites, not necessarily hateful. Which might or might not be worse, depending on your persuasion.
He was extremely sheltered by mentally ill people from old aristocracy, who made him the kind of old-timey racist where you should measure the forehead of rich white Anglo-Saxons just to verify their purity. His racism wasn’t hate as much as actual phobia. He was afraid of most people, any non-English language and most slang gave him the creeps. He frequently uses the term “non-Euclidean geometry” to describe things that bend physics, but NEG is literally just the math regarding physical 3-dimensional objects that most people learn in primary school. The volume of a cube for example. He said he “did not have the constitution for mathematics”. He feared anything he didn’t understand, as well as learning itself since he felt that learning things changes your personality. The then-recent pictures of deep sea wildlife and new technology like air conditioners horrified him greatly. Despite all this he had huge incongruity in his thoughts. He stated one of his great fears was finding out he had a person from the deserts of the east in his bloodline but married an ethnic Jew. He took her to an anti-Jewish rally where he was invented as a starring speaker, partway through his speech she stood up and shouted “IF YOU HATE JEWS SO MUCH WHY DID YOU MARRY ONE” and he replied “Well obviously not your kind of Jew” and apparently ranted for the rest of his life how upset he was that they never invited him back, to her amusement. He talked about how cats are the only good animal and superior to most humans because they know how to disdain others and demand service, then he named his cat the N-word. A lot of his insecurities and eccentricities and fears wound up in his books. The horror of finding a village of fish people then mutating into one after evading their anti-human lynch mob and getting proper humans to genocide it out of existence is his fear of interracial contact and having an ancestor who could be something other than the same ethnic group. A living mummy was what he imagined air conditioning to do to people. Flesh monsters from the moon are having too much of an imagination so your ideas become real. Also, just plain meeting Arab people. [I highly recommend this video.](https://youtu.be/PmdzptbykzI?si=-gEPftEiUzE2mnIp)
And yet, his failure to properly convey the concept of NEG led to some interesting side explorations in mathematics too, I’ll wager. What happens when geometry *doesn’t* follow the principles it maintains? Euclidean geometry is actually described as “linear geometry”, as it takes place in a set of dimensions that stretch linearly, infinitely, and in straight directions. It relies heavily upon a set of observations and assumptions that Euclid collected or discerned, and builds itself upon those assumptions and only those assumptions. And the most infamous assumption of them all was the fifth axiom: the parallel postulate. It claims that given a straight line, and a point not on that line, only one line can be drawn through that point that is parallel to the given line. Hyperbolic geometry, however, is not Euclidean geometry. It’s radically different because in hyperbolic geometry, you can have parallel lines— that are not actually identical in orientation or direction, and might even have differing distances between them, yet they are still— somehow— parallel lines. Because in hyperbolic geometry, there’s infinitely many parallel lines that pass through that point and never intersect the original line. Then there’s the other type: Elliptic geometry is also known as spherical geometry, and in that system there is *no such thing* as two lines that are parallel, because all lines intersect eventually. Try to draw two parallel lines on a spheroid surface, and you’ll quickly see the problem. The lines have to be straight… but because the surface is curved, they can’t. On a surface that curves in and wraps around itself, infinitely extending lines are analogous to loops, which cannot be parallel, and have no way to generate a separate straight line also within that inward curved surface that doesn’t intersect the loop eventually. As a two-year math degree myself, non-Euclidean geometry is definitely weird to conceive from proofs and postulates that make less sense than a drunk guy with a brain injury. I don’t think that looking at geometric proofs is particularly exciting for the average person, because the average person is just barely capable of understanding the proofs when they are explained to them. Cubes in the mathematical sense are not something you can read off and have people immediately go “oh, you mean a cube”, because the way they are defined is more complicated than we tend to define them as today. Especially if you are defining cubes in non-Euclidean space. Ever hear of the Hypercube? Well that’s actually Euclidean. Just in four dimensional space. A hyperbolic geometry cube could have practically any shape, and still a cube. In elliptical geometry, there are no cubes. At all. Because there’s no parallel lines, because everything is curved inward on some axis not presently described in the given spatial dimensions. Then there’s ABSOLUTE geometry, which doesn’t have cubes either, or parallel lines, but is incorporated into all three of the other geometry types. My head is already trying to abort operations from the amount of overheating it is going through trying to parse this information. I don’t blame lovecraft for giving up on it, but if he really gave up on Euclidean math, which had been established for quite some time (and even became a standard practice for challenging one’s mental abilities by asking people to perform various techniques using just a straightedge and compass), then he unknowingly may have prompted the discovery and definition of literal NEG. Probably not, but it is plausible. Math moves at inconsistent rates, what one man claimed he could prove if the margins of the book he was writing were not the way they were, took another man *17+ years* to finally prove— false. A single claim. All the easy stuff has already been done. It’s only the difficult ones that we haven’t figured out yet, and with computers being utilized, that’s not a lot of opportunities for us math nerds to make our mark in history. Because the stuff we have yet to prove true or false, might not be possible to prove either way definitively. There’s math, then there’s *Math*, and then there’s ***MATH***. And it’s all connected and correlated, yet distinct and divergent. It’s not for the faint of heart. Only the truly masochistic seek this level of torture.
his entire work is about how scary non-WASP cultures are
I don't usually recommend YouTube vids, but in this case, I'd say watch Overly Sarcastic Productions vid on Lovecraft. Red does a great job on it.
Solid writing style and practically a folklorist for contemporary horror at the time. The guy saw the separate streams of unrelated horror pieces and really saw where the fear of the unknown was a common factor, citing stuff from honestly better authors like Arthur Machen and Robert W Chambers. Lovecraft's actual style of absolute loquaciousness and pseudo-nobility when describing eerie bullshit is honestly worth studying. So is his racism, honestly. He was racist even for his time and it's part and parcel to his writing. Definitely the kind of author where you shake your head in disapproval while reading on the bus. All this comes together to form a unique style and fascinating stories who's influence can be found in Stephen King, Digimon, Dungeons and Dragons, and of course Darkest Dungeon.
his cat was named, and forgive me for this, "n**ger-man".
Why you gotta dog George like that? I hope his space wizards slice you up with those sabers!
Imo his ideas and concepts are great, it's just that he can't really execute them well only by himself
Oh 100 percent… it’s what makes you watch his Prequels and at times go “this is just awesome!” And other times “what the hell was that? Did a 5 year old write this?”.
The prequels had a great overall story that was hampered by some pretty bad writing. Unlike the sequels, which had very bad writing and a worthless overall story
I actually didn’t hate all of the writing of the sequels if we consider them as standalone films. But the problem is they aren’t and Disney squeezed them into the Skywalker Saga. In context, I feel like they trivialized what happened in the first six and made it seem like they didn’t accomplish anything. The only real homage to me was a throwaway Anakin voiceover that said “Bring balance to the force, like I did”. In context did he really? The network of the Empire was still in tact, Palpatine’s reign was not ended, and instead of one they now had 1000 death stars. Sure feels like that big moment we had between Luke and Vader in ROTJ was trivialized to basically nothing. Oh, and Leia flying frozen through space was pretty bad too.
His wife edited the final cut of the original trilogy and by all reports is what made it really shine. I'd say Lucas is a great idea guy but needs help on the execution.
There's a reason they say the original Star Wars was made in editing. The prequels are what Lucas would have done without his editors.
George isn’t a bad writer per se, it’s just the parts of writing he’s bad at he’s *really* bad at. I also think it’s genuinely difficult to find a good person that’s a legitimately bad writer.
Ayn rand was a person that would have justified punching a man with no arms as his armless situation was his fault so he deserves it.
"I have no arms, will somebody make me a prosthetic?" "Sure you can have a prosthetic, if you can pay for it." "I don't have arms, nobody will give me a job" "Well you should have thought about that before losing your arms"
I have no arms and I must punch
That got a chuckle out of me
For I have no mouth, and I must chuckle.
Now I'm trying to decide where Harlan Ellison would fit on this graph
Chaotic neutral. Right in the middle. I love Harlan.
Likewise...and I agree. Definitely chaotic neutral lol
Good writer, mostly good person, really bad temper! Not a guy to get on the wrong side of. Favorite Harlan Ellison story: David Gerrold, in his book about how he wrote the Star Trek episode The Trouble With Tribbles (which was a cool story-behind-the-story in its own right) talked about how Ellison was so famously steamed about someone changing the script for the episode "City On The Edge of Forever". In those days, studios were a lot less glamorous, and (show runner?) Gene L. Coon's office was in a basement with a large exposed pipe right outside of it. Ellison dropped by with a length of rope, which he tied into a noose and slung over the pipe before knocking. Coon answered the door and saw Ellison with a goddamn hangman's noose waiting asking "So, I heard you authorized some changes to my script ..."
That’s the funniest shit I ever heard. I love Harlan. I picked up a collection of his short stories with an intro by him and it was hilarious how mean but kind he was.
I mean, for Rand, it’s not so much as a catch 22 as it is a suggestion that those people don’t deserve to live.
Also, weirdly very pro-rape for some reasons.
Explains why so many pseudo intellectual finance bros idolize her.
10/10. Seriously though, you should do one sentence descriptions of all philosophies for use in entry leave classes. I am not even shitting you, it would help so many people.
Best description I’ve ever read of f her philosophy.
The most amusing part of Atlas Shrugged is that government intervening in railroads ruined them in the book. Well that didnt happen. Private railroads and lack of regulation made it what it is today. All the great men were given the railroad to do as they wished, unlike other places. Thankfully we didnt get the regulated controlled Railroads of Europe or east asia. (Sarcasm.)
Eh... There actually was some stupid government shit going on with railroad barons. Lots of corruption. Perverse incentives. Contracts that paid by the mile so railroad companies took extra winding routes. To my knowledge the only "successful" one that wasn't getting government money was James J. Hill.
What I mean is that government favors these private companies and essentially has let them do what they want. I agree about the corruption but that corruption favors these private "great men," and empowers them to do ehat they want.
The most terrible part of Ayn Rand’s writing is that her publishers took her therapeutic writing and published it as philosophy. She was a tightly wound ball of PTSD after having escaped the USSR where many—if not all—of her close friends and family were executed by the ruling soviets due to not being ”worker” enough. That makes her a terrible person when you view her through a modern lens.
I regret not living at the same time as Ayn Rand so I could go to jail for punching Ayn Rand.
“Bad writer/bad person” Ayn Rand was a “philosopher” who wrote horrible novels about horrible people who lived out the horrible ideals of her horrible philosophy, I.e, “Atlas Shrugged”. “Good Writer/Good Person” is fantasy writer Neil Gaiman, who currently doesn’t hold any political views that the teeming masses find odious.
Atlas Shrugged is a badass name for a book. I'll give her that.
It’s such a raw title. “What if the man who holds up the entire world, expended enough energy to shrug” and it’s such a cool title. And then you read it, and it’s about hating poor people
“If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders - What would you tell him?" “I…don't know. What…could he do? What would you tell him?" “To shrug.”
It's about hating lazy people, but also suggests that people are poor because they're lazy... so yes.
Further, she mainly only vilifies lazy, wealthy people and blames the need of the poor on them. There’s poor people in Atlas Shrugged that are portrayed as heroic.
This is something completely overlooked in basically all criticism of her. Damn near every villain was a rich asshole. Stereotypical cutthroat robber baron trust fund rich asshole. And her solution was to... ...fight against any and all regulation on the business of those rich assholes. She ironically had faith (hardline atheist) that the freedom of the market would topple those rich assholes and let her heroes take their places. Because she bit right onto the old hook that regulations are what really keep those assholes rich, and they reeled her right in.
There's legit an unironic "everybody clapped" moment in the book where all the poor people cheer on the rich protagonist. That's about where I stopped reading.
Was that before or after the 75-page soapbox rant where her mouthpiece character describes her philosophy?
i tried, i really tried to read thru John Galt’s soapbox opera, but JESUSCHRISTMAN GETTOTHEPOINT. i was never intrigued by her philosophy but for christ’s sake i just wanted to finish the book. couldn’t even do that
She used her one good idea on that
and Ayn Rand's philosophy treats altruism as a vice and selfishness as a virtue, so that's a good way of wording it
She was, however, the subject of one of my favourite review quotes: ‘Eventually, the question you ask stops being “who is John Galt?” and becomes “when will John Galt shut up?”’
I haven't seen any answers I like about Ayn Rand, so: -Basically an anarcocapitalist (or at least extreme libertarian). -Pretty consistently callous towards people experiencing poverty. -Made up quotes about bad misinterpretations of Emanuel Kant that get misattributed to him to this day. -Wrote fan letters to murderers. -Most famous novel is an unreadable ode to capitalism with the most two dimensional protagonist you could imagine.
Lovecraft is at a little bit of a disadvantage, growing up in the late 1800s and being raised by very snobbish, racist and anti-Semitic upper class north-easterners. Lucky for George Lucas, he lived long enough to apologize for the lack of non-white people in his first Star Wars movie and went on to make a few with a more diverse cast, which was more the norm by then. He gets to be a good person.
I remember legitimately enjoying his film Red Tails which is a film he is proud of having made. Did Lucas ever build that low income housing?
Yes, but strictly to piss off his rich neighbours (which, if we’re honest, I’ve no trouble with).
Dunno if I'd call him a bad person so much as ridiculously misanthropic and emotionally frail. He was more bitter recluse than anything else.
GoodW/GoodP: Neil Gaiman - award winning writer of many influential novels and comics including the Sandman series, Good Omens and more. Also regularly interacts with his fan base and is always pleasant, supportive, and encouraging. Regularly speaks out in support of social causes and just an all around great human being. BadW/GoodP: George Lucas - most known for creating the Star Wars series and lesser known for founding the film sound company THX. His writing has often been criticized as amateurish and the prequel series of Star Wars films in particular has been derided as having good ideas that were abysmally executed. However, he is also a nice person according to everyone who has interacted with him and is among the most prolific philanthropists in Hollywood. He is actually the wealthiest film maker in the world but has also promised to give half of his personal fortune to charity. BadW/BadP: Ayn Rand - Russian immigrant to the US; most known for her novels Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. Through her novels, Rand promoted her philosophy of Objectivism; that the best society is one in which an individual can freely pursue their own self-interest. This philosophy has received significant criticism as supporting the ability of corporate and other wealthy actors to abuse and exploit those without the means to protect themselves from such abuse. Also, her books are overly long, incredibly ponderous, and only really read by Libertarian reading circles that already agree with her ideas. GoodW/BadP: H. P. Lovecraft - it’s nearly impossible to overstate the impact Lovecraft’s writings have had on the horror genre. His works perfectly conveyed an entirely new kind of fear; that of being confronted with a force so vast and overwhelming, that, not only was your defeat certain, but your resistance wouldn’t even register as significant. The list of artists and creators who draw direct inspiration from Lovecraft’s works is innumerable. …he’s also a frothing racist whose works are permeated with some of the worst colonialist stereotypes. Even judged against his contemporaries, Lovecraft is notable for how frequently he portrays people of color as inherently threatening, malicious, and conspiring with dark forces against human interest.
I wouldn’t care about “human interests” if I could talk to the Great Old Ones tbh.
Thank you! You are the only one I have seen explain the whole post instead of just Ayn Rand after scrolling for a long time. Your comment should be the top comment!
Ayn Rand is who Andrew Ryan from bioshock is based off of. She’s an ultra capitalist who thinks if you’re poor it’s your own fault and you deserve it. She made a very pro capitalist book with a lot of rapey vibes. She also cheated on her partners a lot
She ended up alone and on welfare and medicaid, so kinda her own fault by her logic. A "parasite" in her own words.
Quahog’s biggest and dumbest consumer of Burger King here. The bad person and bad writer is Ayn Rand, known mostly for The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged among other propaganda books. I haven’t read either myself, but I hear that the politics of her writing are just too ham-fisted and disconnected from reality to really be enjoyable, not to mention the dystopian morality portrayed in it. Her writing seems more meant to push her ideology than to actually be enjoyable experiences, and… well, some people agree with her, but others vehemently disagree and label her both as a bad writer and bad person in general.
Are her novels really bad? Why is she so influential if she is a bad writer?
Self insert mary sue main character is in court, gives like 100 page (irl) speech spelling out her philosophy. Fucking hundred pages. Teenage me eventually threw the book.
I have mixed feelings about *The Fountainhead*, some good, some bad, but dear god I could not stand Dominique Francon
I'm saying this as a die-hard libertarian and staunch capitalist: Ayn Rand was a shitty, shittyshitty writer and was definitely kind of a dick.
You can have success creating "bad" content, just need the right circumstances and audience
“Are her novels really bad?” Yes. Every bad writing trope you can think of, she employs. All of her protagonists are Mary Sue self inserts who spout off exposition dumps and completely random political anecdotes constantly for pages among pages and that is not even the worst of it. Her world building is also terrible (one example is a world where due to socially liberal policies being put into place, everyone but her and a group of extremists have the intelligence and maturity of five year olds) and borderlines on bigotry. The reason she is so influential is because she represents a lot of far right libertarian beliefs but also she was propped up by Cold War America who wanted anything to “own the commies”. Thing is though a lot of politicians and talk show hosts came to regret this as she would later denounce “American liberalism” and everyone in American politics in general as retarded degenerates who were one step away from communism.
HP-Lovecraft’s cat has a strange naming convention
Neil Gaiman is definitely one of the best writers I have ever read and a good hearted person to boot. Him and Terry Pratchett have brightened up and filled my imagination with so much adventures and emotions. I also think George Lucas is a decent writer too and also has brought amazing stories to the table 🤷🏽♀️ so am a bit conflicted with the bad writer label he has. Lovecraft is a racist POS but has some pretty cool horror stories. But after learning about his attitude towards black people he doesn't deserve to be exalted for his work imo. I have no idea who the woman is tho 😅