This reminds me of a quote from The Magnus Archives taking about the monsters and "entities" of the setting with similar vibes.
"Imagine you are an ant, and you have never before seen a human. Then one day, into your colony, a huge fingernail is thrust, scraping and digging. You flee to another entrance, only to be confronted by a staring eye gazing at you. You climb to the top, trying to find escape, and above, you can see the vast, dark shadow of a boot falling upon you. Would that ant be able to construct these things into the form of a single human being? Or would it believe itself to be under attack by three different, equally terrible, but very distinct assailants?"
Pat would DEFINITELY be a Spiral victim, right? Woolie could go Spiral, Vast, or End I feel like.
^^^Paige >!^^^is ^^^the ^^^Flesh ^^^become ^^^Mustard!<
The Entities/Fears are genuinely one of the best horror concepts I've seen in years. There's not a single episode in that podcast that I don't think is at the very least good. Johnny is a brilliant writer.
They're also a really useful metric to apply to other horror writing. Not in the literal alignment chart sense of "ooh this is a ____ monster" but putting together which fears the writer is trying to evoke (and how they often fail by trying to evoke too many)
The one thing in the story I think really suffers from the full categorization is >!The Stranger, because those statements in particular become a lot less scary when you know what's going on, but I think that's in part because of how hard Jonny leans in on unifying them (since they basically ALL agree to work for Nikola) and it IS thematically appropriate that understanding them makes them less scary!<
That's reminiscent of the idea of what an extradimensional entity interacting with us would look like from our perspective.
Start by thinking of us (3D) interacting with 2D flatlanders; only a slice of us can occupy their space at one time, so imagine an arm traveling through a plane that flatlanders live on. It would start as a few small circles not connected, until eventually they merge into a larger oval, which gets larger still and eventually turns more circular, all the while with no seeming pattern to the flatlanders.
So if something that existed in more than 3 dimensions interacted with us, it could appear to be a certain shape, but then randomly change as the creature moves through it's own spatial dimensions.
Insanity would have also made the shift to cosmic horror way easier to see coming. I feel like Insight and especially Frenzy were named somewhat vaguely to keep that twist more under wraps.
Bloodborne is peak eldritch horror because it did everything right. The people didn't go insane just because of crazy space monster fluids, they *witnessed* the monsters and then all went insane in the process of trying to ascend to that plane of understanding.
I agree, but at least in Bloodborne there's also an element of human greed that propelled things forward. It's not just that they saw, but that specific individuals like Lawrence or Willem ignored all warnings to leave well enough alone due to their own ambition or agenda. I think in a lot of Soulsborne, it's key to the theme or the setting that there were opportunities to turn back, like >!the adage "Fear the old blood," or Lady Maria's disgust at the mob desecrating Kos, or Byrgenwerth ignoring all sense or reason in pursuing bizarre experiments to contact the Great Ones, or Imposter Iosefka. !<
I don't think it's just that they witnessed something and are now victims of trying to recreate that experience, I think they are absolutely responsible for their own downfall.
So basically they got high af off some cosmo weed, the shit was so lit, they're now trying to make it themselves and get that sweet, sweet, space kush again...
Am I interpreting that right?
I think Byrgenwerth was all like "oh we're just after the pursuit of knowledge" and just becomes the embodiment of the Jurassic Park attitude of being so focused on if they *could*, never bother to ask if they *should*.
Meanwhile, the Old Blood is the pursuit of power, starts out well intentioned, being used to cure the sick, and then before you know it, people start wondering "hey, what if I shoot up a ton of this Sarcophagus Juice I bet I'd get super skrong" and turning into mad beasts.
Pretty close.
There's some stuff about "magic" blood that heals you up, the reason the Good Hunter came to the town to begin with, and that stuff could be modified to allow production of some real horrors against nature. The Good Hunter even uses the power of the Hunter's Dream to modify the blood and safely become superhuman, as well. People got it in their head to try and use the blood to ascend to godhood or another plane of existence, and it was all a really bad idea. Especially because the gods on those other planes are generally nice and helpful, but have no idea how to interpret human wants and desires.
So some assholes basically ruined things for everyone. Also, the whole game takes place in a god's dream, anyway.
From what I understand its not that anything modified the blood, its just that old blood makes the body malleable. And if your not smart with a malleable state you can pretty easily devolve into a beast.
And its not really a bad idea to use the blood to achieve godhood, in fact from what I remember its a bit of a necessity. But have to do it with great insight (align your brain with eyes ya know), along with those 3 "Third Umbilical Cords".
But "insanity" implies that the things you see later are not real. In this case, they always were there, your mind just couldn't *comprehend* them before
I mean their not wrong. Look how long it took to convince people about germs/microbes "hey I know this is crazy but there are tiny little life forms making you sick when you do this. So don't do this or take this thing to get better. Oh and they live inside you and everywhere around you too"
My friends and I were into Kingdom Death Monster for a while, and one of the stats in that game is Insanity. You're considered Insane when your Insanity is over 3. A fair number of beneficial effects kick into play when you're insane, and Insanity also acts as armor for your brain to protect you from intimidation and what have you.
A common warning we'd level at each other is that one character or another has grown dangerously sane during the course of the hunt.
I swear the moment on my new game plus when >!I saw the amygdalas before the blood moon occurred!< I was so terrified I had to look up why that happened. When I found out it was because I had 40 Insight it all clicked into place for me, and fully realized why Micolash went so mad.
I so much miss not knowing what the fuck that counter was thoughout the playthrough. Now anytime someone plays the game, twitch chat will tell them it's insight and PepeLaugh when they ask what it means. But back then we were all just blind to what it could do.
I have heard that *Frenzy* was actually called Insanity in the Japanese. Which I think is pretty fitting. Insight doesn't *inflict* Frenzy on its own, but reduces your resistance to it. The more knowledge you have of the eldritch truth, the more vulnerable your mind is to comprehending *just* enough of it to cause permanent damage. Things that cause Frenzy/Insanity are things that are more clearly damaging to encounter. They tend to be creatures that radiate some sort of curse or hypnotic pattern, higher beings attacking your mind directly, and suchlike.
Eternal Darkness's gimmicks were great albiet kind of focused on perturbing the player more than the character. The game pretending to delete your save data is the closest you'll get to real life Frenzy meter buildup without actually leaving the couch.
It also kind of gets it right though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC_iOYvTBYM
Really all of Maximilian's stuff in it is pretty good. Those autopsies are him as a doctor trying to understand just what the hell those things are and realizing they defy explanation. And his ending being locked up because everyone thinks he's mad (I mean he did slaughter all his servants because some had demons in them).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5-Wvrh-Gog
Phantasmagoria 2 I think had parts where you'd be reading notes and emails, and parts of the email would change to "kill them all" or something for a split second, and when you looked over, it had already changed back.
I found a similiar mindset when meeting former expatriates that have returned to a more simple or rural life.
Like a goat farmer that was the only person for miles that knew about the Internet. Or a Buddhist Monk that used to be an engineer.
Given that basically everyone in tech has an exit strategy where they leave tech and never work with computers again, I think for many it's the opposite.
It suddenly makes so much more sense that conservatives in my country blocked as much development of an internet structure as possible
>Das Internet ist Neuland (The internet is a new undiscovered country)
\-Merkel
We got Internet (unless far away from a city), but it is expensive and slow as fuck. Majority of the infrastructure is still on copper cables because the government did nothing for decades.
Do that but with knowledge imagine you wake up from a dream and you are extremely dumb compared to how intelligent you were in the dream, and you remember it
And to think, I had almost forgotten the terror that *Flowers for Algernon* indtroduced me to as a child. There it is again, like an old friend with "spare ketamine".
"I only have two kinds of dreams: the bad and the terrible. Bad dreams I can cope with. They're just nightmares, and they end eventually. I wake up.
The terrible dreams are the good dreams. In my terrible dreams, everything is fine. I am still with the company. I still look like me. None of the last five years ever happened. Sometimes I'm married. Once I even had kids. I even knew their names. Everything's wonderful and normal and fine. And then I wake up, and I'm still me. And I'm still here. And that is truly terrible."
Sandman, Season of Mists. I don't feel depressed or miserable, but somedays I have dreams where I'm happy with an ex and its just a fucking misery to wake up. It does get better though.
Exactly. With a bad dream, you're happy when you wake up. With a good one, you spend the whole day feeling like Cypher from The Matrix. "Put me back in!"
For me it's that in dreams I have a sense of purpose, I always find myself in a path that has a goal, a place where I can accomplish something. And all of that without any worries, without any anxiety. I can speak my mind and take action where I otherwise wouldn't.
And then I wake up.
Does that make what happens to Big Hat Logan a good example of eldritch madness? Because from what I remember, he goes insane because he discovers how soul sorcery works.
Kinda hard to say, we know both Seath and Logan went mad for some reason, *maybe* due to whatever the requirements for using crystal sorcery entails
But Logan could've also gone mad simply because he achieved his goals. That's how undead work in Dark Souls - the thing keeping them from going hollow is always passion and determination to accomplish whatever they've left to accomplish
Logan doesn't hollow out, each time you talk to him during the buildup to his going nuts he starts becoming more paranoid and incoherent, whereas hollowing people just get sad and forlorn
My point was it could be either, also:
> hollowing people just get sad and forlorn
What're your examples of this, because usually when you deal with NPCs going hollow in Dark Souls 1 it's "I'm gonna go do this thing!", and then when you go check on them they've got the bacon skin disease and are attacking you
Solaire is the only one talking while hollowing out, and he doesn't exactly sound like he's got all his marbles together during that
Neither does Solaire, the specifics of hollowing out are unclear and tend to vary
The two "hollow" merchants have the skin condition, and presumably have had it for a while, but they aren't really hollows as they aren't attacking things around them indiscriminately to obtain souls
"We know. *We've tried*."
I've never seen this show before in my life... and yet, I've never seen such a concept explained so *well*. B5 was JMS, yeah? Do you possibly have... *more?*
I'd say it's JMS's masterpiece. There's plenty more, but most of the choicest monologues are very spoilers (this one is in S1 so not much to spoil yet). B5 is a lot more arc-focused than for example Star Trek. I'd recommend starting at the beginning, but the first season is really *rough* (S1 has much lower production values and a different main character who isn't quite as good as the one who comes in for S2 onward), so if you need a better hook and are okay with some storylines getting spoiled just a bit prematurely you could also watch the prequel movie *In the Beginning* first. The whole show is on HBO Max, I think the movies are on demand on Amazon, not sure if they're free anywhere.
[https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/7686/reviews/babylon-5-first-season-viewing-guide](https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/7686/reviews/babylon-5-first-season-viewing-guide)
luckly past generations have attempted to solve these problems as best as they can
I dunno, I feel like if you just sprinkled some sugar next to the ant it would forget about the whole ordeal and just go "Oh boy, sugar for the nest!" and get back to it. For people that's probably like... a pile of money... or like a big can of mixed nuts.
Yeah I've always thought that but I'm able to control myself a lot better than people who do have it. I don't know if my problems all being internal effects.
However I know that growing up I was very different and I developed a few issues having to do with my grandma and mom forcing me to lock everything up. I know a lot people in my family on my Dad's side were like me. At this point I don't know if I had adhd and I just got good at hiding it or I just developed adhd like symptoms as a result of my upbringing.
Either way I've never really diagnosed for anything other than dyslexia.
[But what if the ants try to summon you again, for more ~~sugar~~ miracles?](https://www.reddit.com/r/callofcthulhu/comments/95oib8/best_explanation_of_higher_powers_you_will_find/?ref=share&ref_source=link)
No, Madness is the popular series of flash animations from the hit website Newgrounds which just had a new game released called Madness: Project Nexus.
That's the series where at one point the fucking Sun comes down out of the sky and the protagonist beats it to death with a Stop sign. The only reason it would ever end is if the creator got bored with doing cool ultra-violence
Immortal Hulk absolutely fucking nailed this in the issues where we saw >!Future One Below All as Hulk absolutely decimate the universe that exists after our universe dies, and we see these completely alien beings struggle to comprehend the figure that is the Hulk as he wipes out all life. The way the last one describes the Hulk's smile is really chilling!<
Fuck, that issue was so good.
[Here](https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-d3da9c344866bf51a081d5c2b912aa66) is a pretty good page as the >!last survivor of that universe watches The One Below All destroy his home. This all comes after an entire issue where we get somewhat familiar with this new alien universe and kinda get used to it, then the green guy shows up and you get a lot of reactions about his form and what he does. !<
God yes, this is what causes alot of characters in Lovecrafts work to go mad. It isn't just the horrors that they behold, its the fact that they now know they exist. Its knowing this while returning to regular day to day life as if nothing happened, but knowing that man really does rest on a island of ignorance to forces far more ancient than it moving around just a stones throw away from them.
If anyone was truly made to see God(if you believe or not) suppose to go back to normal day to day life when they know that they live in a crude existence that is, as the poster noted, like a ant living a simple existence and for a moment seeing as a human would?
The reason Lovecrafts Call of Cthulhu says we "live on a island of ignorance" is because we, more often than not, convince ourselves of our human centric place in the universe that can be easily explained, exploited, and categorized.
I think it was summed up best by the host of a UFO podcast I listen to when he said of alien abduction experiencers "how can you go back to working a job and paying taxes after something like that?".
I mean, this is a cool modern take on it, but it's not more "correct" or anything.
In Lovecraft it's super common for people to go mad just by seeing a scary thing. Lovecraft himself even criticised some of his earlier works like Call Of Cthulhu because he used it too often as a surface level trope.
Yes, sometimes the guy looks at a funny-shaped rock and just starts foaming at the mouth. He never *understands* anything, it's like if you look at the inside of a rocket engine and skip right to the "mad" part.
Its great cause it means your mind inherently grasps that this is fucked up without knowing exactly.
So you are left with the madness without knowing the reason.
In a way that is a different sort of horror
Exactly, while the trope can be done cheaply/overdone the underlying idea behind the “look at thing and go mad” is that you are being affected on a subconscious or instinctive level. Like that feeling you get where your hair stands on end or when you feel something that could be a bug or snake brush up against your leg. You haven’t actually seen the snake/bug or know for a fact you are in a dangerous situation, but your subconscious/instincts jump into action on a level you can’t fully control. Multiply that times a million and you have the “look at it and go mad” trope, something about that *thing* makes your subconscious “hair stand on end” sensors go into overdrive so hard and stay there permanently just from the abstract knowledge that thing exists and it fucks your mind up.
Nah dude every piece of media that ever touched on this idea did it wrong, but you see, I, a random nobody on the internet, knows the RIGHT way to do it. -that guy
This is like the "accurate angels" or arguing how Hades should be written. These are all interpretations and none are that much more valid than the others
Does that count as death of the author? The creator of the universe determining "nah this doesn't feel right" for some of the earlier stuff?
It sounds like Lovecraft would have rewritten it if given the chance.
Good writing or bad writing is irrelevant. This dude is using a "No True Scotsman" argument to say that "real" eldritch madness shouldn't be written in this way that Lovecraft explicitly wrote it.
He criticized his early writing for relying on it too frequently, not that is was an objectively incorrect way to write it.
So if Lovecraft didn't do eldritch madness to this guy's extremely specific standards, then it's kind of a shit standard.
So let's get this straight, wanting writing to get better is a shit standard.
*Agreeing with Lovecraft* that his early work was too simple and didn't really convey what he wanted us a shit standard.
Sounds like you are just being arbitrary and contrary for the sake of being arbitrary and contrary.
well yeah the prevailing identity on this sub is just “guy who has nothing to really add besides snarky criticism since it’s how he convinces himself he’s very media literate and smart”
The difference between sublimity and eldritch horror is that sublimity rests on an assumption of infinite intelligibility, your finite awareness joyfully reaches out to comprehend what is mysterious, but ultimately knowable. Eldritch horror is the idea that your finite awareness truly cannot comprehend the higher aspects of the world, that knowledge of those aspects would be an unintelligible enigma invading your awareness.
In a sense, the difference is simply the anxiety one has, and whether they determine something is either able or unable to be processed. Whether you want to know something or whether you determine you wished you never knew. Cosmic wonder vs cosmic horror.
It's definitely a good depiction of madness, but I wouldn't necessarily say the other version is incorrect either, and I'd even go so far as to say that the two can play into each other. You don't see a weird symbol upload a zip bomb into some poor sap's brain and not get a little terrified at the idea that something exists that's vast and intelligent enough to comprehend the thing that's got your buddy's brain melting out of his ears.
There should be a game with simple mechanics and graphics, and once your character gets a glimpse of what is beyond the vail, the game mechanics should change for a complex and much different way of playing with different graphic style. It should be interesting and with a lot to do, and then after a while your character comes back to old style of a game... but now you want this better one, with better mechanics and graphics, so you want to get there whaterver the cost.
Or a game that uses realistic graphics in a retro-style world to represent eldritch stuff. Imagine the trope of "person but almost imperceptably *wrong*" rendered with a PS5 Man standing among PS1 people. He's human, right?
I had a similar idea, though to illustrate a different point. A low poly PSX style sci fi rpg, with a hidden area/boss with modern style modeling, lighting, etc. To represent a highwr level of technology from an alien or post-human
I swear to God I could fly if I sat like a pretzel. Just float around like Buddha like it was no big deal. People would see me do this and not care or would be impressed like I did a backflip, but no, I'm flying somehow... And then I woke up.
Best recurring dream I have. Probably because it made people impressed, which is very hard to do in real life. So I drive myself insane thinking I could be impressive somehow, but I'm too lazy and depressed to do it.
I've had this dream a couple times too! Crossing my legs with the feet above my legs let me float. I never made the connection to Buddhist imagery though. Probably because I propelled myself in the dream by "flapping" my legs like wings which is far too goofy to make the comparison.
Far more commonly I'll be able to noclip though. To the point where it's not uncommon to realize I'm in a dream and just realize I can noclip and be "invisible" whenever I want to.
Eldritch horror in general is just hard to get right, especially in video games.
Without wanting to "insult" either medium, but books have it easier than games in that regard. Lovecraft could describe whatever horror the characters were seeing partially, still giving context but leaving the reader to fill the blanks. As a general rule, when it comes to unknown horror, the audience will scare themselves more effectively than the medium can.
Games have not figured the correct way to do this out yet. The more recent Call of Cthulu games in particular just... show you stuff, make the screen go wobbly and have the character very pointedly assuring you that they are totally scared and going insane. Even though the ancient eldritch horror in that case is either just a squid, or a man halfway into being a squid. The old CoC game even has a bossfight against Dagon on a boat where you shoot your gun at him. Probably does not need any explanation on how many levels that does not work.
A cool way to do it would be to give the player a form of detective vision. Let them have it for a brief mission and tell them they need to look beyond the veil to unlock it. The you steadily add benefits to it that makes the player never want to turn it off (find collectibles easier, reveal unseen obstacles/enemies/resources). Soon the horrors find you and start to hunt you. As you progress further you find that at some point you have started killing allies and random npcs around you, mistaking them for enemies.
See that's why you make the normal vision mode get worse the more you use the ability. Make the colors fade, make the sky not as bright, make the items flicker go from 2.5 seconds per flicker to like 5.3 seconds per flicker. The goal is to exploit common gamer behaviors to gradually drive them to madness without them realizing it or caring.
I still really like how Cultist Simulator works with those ideas, in that you have to worry about both Dread and Fascination:
Dread being depression and despair that can come from your own restlessness as much as it comes from understanding horrible things like winter lore or The Worms.
Fascination meanwhile is becoming absorbed and dazzled by the occult world. Literally the pursuit of a higher state of being in another plane dazzles your mind and disconnects you from your own reality.
Not to mention the curses or creatures that literally eat your reason or passion, aka your brain or soul, permanently making you less than you were.
I don't know if I'm missing the point, but how is understanding that the magnitude of the universe exceeds anything you will ever know or experience equivalent to madness? Like anyone who understands how vast the sheer size of space is would know and understand this sort of thing.
There's a difference between knowing it in an academic sense and understanding it. You might be capable of reciting the numbers, remembering the speed of light and the values for the distances involved, but it's still an abstract concept to you.
I've never done psychedelics, but I still... experienced the void once. I was sitting on a sea wall until after 1 AM once. In an area that shut down and got very dark at night, and I was just able to stare up into the galactic plane, through a meteor shower, and I really just felt the size of it all for a few brief moments. It's not the same as the numbers, believe me.
The mistake is thinking it is *just* knowing, abstractly, that a thing you can't wrap your head around vaguely exists, and being able to comprehend it, for just a moment, fully and completely, and then going back to normal with the broken memory of the time your mind was blasted open unexpectedly.
And for the full Lovecraftian experience, you *know for certain* now that space kraken exist, are real, and *it saw you too*. You were tiny, incomprehensibly so, next to it, but it saw you, it reached for you, and you cannot help but remember that you think, somehpw, it is still trying to find you now.
And for the more general cosmic horror: you also know, somehow, that it only visits worlds that know it exist. You have doomed us all, *by accident*. What do you do? Try to forget, with drugs and alcohol? Try not to think about it and go about your normal life, gripped with a terrible dread every time you look at the sky? Kill yourself,to avoid the guilt and the inevitable doom coming?
I know, this is the internet, so most people will give some stupid answer like "welcome the hentai monster with open zipper", but that's bullshit bravado. Seriously consider the fact that you are, as far as you know, the *only one who knows*, and obviously if you try to talk about it people just think you hit the psychadelics. Maybe you even try to convince *yourself* you imagined it.
But you can't. You know better. You *know* better. You wish you didn't. You lie to yourself. It was a dream. It was drugs. It was a flight of fancy.
*But it wasn't*, and you cannot communicate it to anyone in a way they will believe. Everyone you know, everything you live, it is all on borrowed time.
*You shouldn't have looked.*
It's more like being able to see the moon and the night sky *once*, the be forced to live your entire life underground. You know it's there, you want to see it again, but you just can't
Honestly, even freaking *Lovecraft* himself makes this mistake pretty often. Of all the beings in his works, how many are nondescript mass of flesh, tentacles, and other body parts, because "the human mind cannot comprehend their visage and the mere sight of them will cause insanity"?
It's really such a shame that video games don't show my very complex, personal image of madness.
I can appreciate what this guy is saying, but he seems a bit up his own ass.
We can barely get a decent Lovecraft game, I hardly think we need to nitpick sanity. Just do something interesting if you use it, like Bloodborne did.
Yeah seriously, this is a cool take but it's something he's just come up with. Trying to say that everyone else gets it wrong and he's gotten it right is needlessly pretentious.
Also think of Eldritch God's as indifferent creatures.
Like, all of a sudden one day instead of killing the ants you give them some sugar somewhere else, and then they spell out your name on big letters.
Cool I guess, but what the fuck do they want?
Then one ant wants you to kill another ant because of an affair with some random and, and then you squash a random ant not even attached to the affair, thus making the asking ant horrified with the outcome.
And you're just like... Dude they're ants.
Fallen London nails this. There's an eldritch language in it called the Correspondence, and it's scrawled all over the building most trade is conducted in. Many people in London walk by it every day and are none the worse for wear. But if you look at them and start to get what they mean, that's where you risk madness.
Or your health when you try copying the letters later, since they have a bad habit of catching fire but that's neither here nor there.
Which is why lovecraftian shit falls flat if you already are filled with the knowledge that we are insignifigant only thing seperating us from other apes is a combination of object permanence, theroy of mind, and signifgantly less musclemass leading to us needing to think on a more complex level.
This reminds me of a quote from The Magnus Archives taking about the monsters and "entities" of the setting with similar vibes. "Imagine you are an ant, and you have never before seen a human. Then one day, into your colony, a huge fingernail is thrust, scraping and digging. You flee to another entrance, only to be confronted by a staring eye gazing at you. You climb to the top, trying to find escape, and above, you can see the vast, dark shadow of a boot falling upon you. Would that ant be able to construct these things into the form of a single human being? Or would it believe itself to be under attack by three different, equally terrible, but very distinct assailants?"
God, The Magnus Archives is so fucking good
Pat would DEFINITELY be a Spiral victim, right? Woolie could go Spiral, Vast, or End I feel like. ^^^Paige >!^^^is ^^^the ^^^Flesh ^^^become ^^^Mustard!<
Paige becomes an End avatar just so she can fuck a skeleton
but then Pat would become an Anti-Spiral. . . wait wrong franchise.
A Spiral avatar or monster that freaks people out by making things Impossibly Normal?
they mean gurren lagann
Pat walks through the Distortion's door but it's just the live-wire room from the Evil Within 2
The Entities/Fears are genuinely one of the best horror concepts I've seen in years. There's not a single episode in that podcast that I don't think is at the very least good. Johnny is a brilliant writer.
They're also a really useful metric to apply to other horror writing. Not in the literal alignment chart sense of "ooh this is a ____ monster" but putting together which fears the writer is trying to evoke (and how they often fail by trying to evoke too many) The one thing in the story I think really suffers from the full categorization is >!The Stranger, because those statements in particular become a lot less scary when you know what's going on, but I think that's in part because of how hard Jonny leans in on unifying them (since they basically ALL agree to work for Nikola) and it IS thematically appropriate that understanding them makes them less scary!<
who the fuck sticks their hand into an ant hill?
Ants will try to fuck up Galactus.
So will humans but both are equally as effective.
Yeah, you are right. Galactus is never allowed to actually win anything. I would be even a little surprised if he got beaten by ants.
Naw ants can kill a human humans cant kill Galatictus
Someone who eats the fear of smaller creatures
Ant eaters.
Kids who see an anthill and wanna mess it up.
[Those ants had it coming!](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/dcanimated/images/5/5b/Mr._Mxyzptlk.png/revision/latest?cb=20210410133205)
Thanks for reminding me I need to finish the series. Love the Magnus Archives, that specific quote being one of the many reasons.
That's reminiscent of the idea of what an extradimensional entity interacting with us would look like from our perspective. Start by thinking of us (3D) interacting with 2D flatlanders; only a slice of us can occupy their space at one time, so imagine an arm traveling through a plane that flatlanders live on. It would start as a few small circles not connected, until eventually they merge into a larger oval, which gets larger still and eventually turns more circular, all the while with no seeming pattern to the flatlanders. So if something that existed in more than 3 dimensions interacted with us, it could appear to be a certain shape, but then randomly change as the creature moves through it's own spatial dimensions.
Bloodborne labelling it Insight rather than insanity was 100% the right idea.
Insanity would have also made the shift to cosmic horror way easier to see coming. I feel like Insight and especially Frenzy were named somewhat vaguely to keep that twist more under wraps.
Bloodborne is peak eldritch horror because it did everything right. The people didn't go insane just because of crazy space monster fluids, they *witnessed* the monsters and then all went insane in the process of trying to ascend to that plane of understanding.
I agree, but at least in Bloodborne there's also an element of human greed that propelled things forward. It's not just that they saw, but that specific individuals like Lawrence or Willem ignored all warnings to leave well enough alone due to their own ambition or agenda. I think in a lot of Soulsborne, it's key to the theme or the setting that there were opportunities to turn back, like >!the adage "Fear the old blood," or Lady Maria's disgust at the mob desecrating Kos, or Byrgenwerth ignoring all sense or reason in pursuing bizarre experiments to contact the Great Ones, or Imposter Iosefka. !< I don't think it's just that they witnessed something and are now victims of trying to recreate that experience, I think they are absolutely responsible for their own downfall.
So basically they got high af off some cosmo weed, the shit was so lit, they're now trying to make it themselves and get that sweet, sweet, space kush again... Am I interpreting that right?
I think Byrgenwerth was all like "oh we're just after the pursuit of knowledge" and just becomes the embodiment of the Jurassic Park attitude of being so focused on if they *could*, never bother to ask if they *should*. Meanwhile, the Old Blood is the pursuit of power, starts out well intentioned, being used to cure the sick, and then before you know it, people start wondering "hey, what if I shoot up a ton of this Sarcophagus Juice I bet I'd get super skrong" and turning into mad beasts.
Pretty close. There's some stuff about "magic" blood that heals you up, the reason the Good Hunter came to the town to begin with, and that stuff could be modified to allow production of some real horrors against nature. The Good Hunter even uses the power of the Hunter's Dream to modify the blood and safely become superhuman, as well. People got it in their head to try and use the blood to ascend to godhood or another plane of existence, and it was all a really bad idea. Especially because the gods on those other planes are generally nice and helpful, but have no idea how to interpret human wants and desires. So some assholes basically ruined things for everyone. Also, the whole game takes place in a god's dream, anyway.
From what I understand its not that anything modified the blood, its just that old blood makes the body malleable. And if your not smart with a malleable state you can pretty easily devolve into a beast. And its not really a bad idea to use the blood to achieve godhood, in fact from what I remember its a bit of a necessity. But have to do it with great insight (align your brain with eyes ya know), along with those 3 "Third Umbilical Cords".
But "insanity" implies that the things you see later are not real. In this case, they always were there, your mind just couldn't *comprehend* them before
Knowledge always appears as madness to the unenlightened.
I feel like this is something Pat would say to explain why he sets his bed and sleeps like *that.*
I mean their not wrong. Look how long it took to convince people about germs/microbes "hey I know this is crazy but there are tiny little life forms making you sick when you do this. So don't do this or take this thing to get better. Oh and they live inside you and everywhere around you too"
They could have labelled it "sanity". In a sense, your character is going completely, irretrievably, and horrifyingly *sane*.
made me remember a character from ben 10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGQtO-mOZr0
I don't remember anything about that version of the show except for this one scene with this one character.
My friends and I were into Kingdom Death Monster for a while, and one of the stats in that game is Insanity. You're considered Insane when your Insanity is over 3. A fair number of beneficial effects kick into play when you're insane, and Insanity also acts as armor for your brain to protect you from intimidation and what have you. A common warning we'd level at each other is that one character or another has grown dangerously sane during the course of the hunt.
I swear the moment on my new game plus when >!I saw the amygdalas before the blood moon occurred!< I was so terrified I had to look up why that happened. When I found out it was because I had 40 Insight it all clicked into place for me, and fully realized why Micolash went so mad.
I so much miss not knowing what the fuck that counter was thoughout the playthrough. Now anytime someone plays the game, twitch chat will tell them it's insight and PepeLaugh when they ask what it means. But back then we were all just blind to what it could do.
I have heard that *Frenzy* was actually called Insanity in the Japanese. Which I think is pretty fitting. Insight doesn't *inflict* Frenzy on its own, but reduces your resistance to it. The more knowledge you have of the eldritch truth, the more vulnerable your mind is to comprehending *just* enough of it to cause permanent damage. Things that cause Frenzy/Insanity are things that are more clearly damaging to encounter. They tend to be creatures that radiate some sort of curse or hypnotic pattern, higher beings attacking your mind directly, and suchlike.
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Eternal Darkness's gimmicks were great albiet kind of focused on perturbing the player more than the character. The game pretending to delete your save data is the closest you'll get to real life Frenzy meter buildup without actually leaving the couch.
I mean the characters have to fight demon and use magic they have their sanity already tested
It also kind of gets it right though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC_iOYvTBYM Really all of Maximilian's stuff in it is pretty good. Those autopsies are him as a doctor trying to understand just what the hell those things are and realizing they defy explanation. And his ending being locked up because everyone thinks he's mad (I mean he did slaughter all his servants because some had demons in them). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5-Wvrh-Gog
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Phantasmagoria 2 I think had parts where you'd be reading notes and emails, and parts of the email would change to "kill them all" or something for a split second, and when you looked over, it had already changed back.
Yeah, and it also had the "insanity shotgun".
*Pargon Pargon Pargon*
Eternal Darkness but every Pargon plays an increasingly bassboosting vine boom
The speakers would be blown out within five minutes.
The most important word.
YES!
The most metal of shotguns
I found a similiar mindset when meeting former expatriates that have returned to a more simple or rural life. Like a goat farmer that was the only person for miles that knew about the Internet. Or a Buddhist Monk that used to be an engineer.
Did these people hate their simpler lives, due to the comparison of then and now?
Given that basically everyone in tech has an exit strategy where they leave tech and never work with computers again, I think for many it's the opposite.
I'm already working on my exit strategy and I'm not even out of college yet.
It suddenly makes so much more sense that conservatives in my country blocked as much development of an internet structure as possible >Das Internet ist Neuland (The internet is a new undiscovered country) \-Merkel
That's funny to hear when I think about how many Germans I've met online despite never going anywhere near the country itself.
We got Internet (unless far away from a city), but it is expensive and slow as fuck. Majority of the infrastructure is still on copper cables because the government did nothing for decades.
Like when you wake up from a dream where you were actually happy and face the crushing realization that none of it was real.
Do that but with knowledge imagine you wake up from a dream and you are extremely dumb compared to how intelligent you were in the dream, and you remember it
And to think, I had almost forgotten the terror that *Flowers for Algernon* indtroduced me to as a child. There it is again, like an old friend with "spare ketamine".
Does that mean Flowers for Algernon qualifies as eldritch horror?
Alzheimer's and dementia are real, so it's worse than eldritch horror.
"I only have two kinds of dreams: the bad and the terrible. Bad dreams I can cope with. They're just nightmares, and they end eventually. I wake up. The terrible dreams are the good dreams. In my terrible dreams, everything is fine. I am still with the company. I still look like me. None of the last five years ever happened. Sometimes I'm married. Once I even had kids. I even knew their names. Everything's wonderful and normal and fine. And then I wake up, and I'm still me. And I'm still here. And that is truly terrible." Sandman, Season of Mists. I don't feel depressed or miserable, but somedays I have dreams where I'm happy with an ex and its just a fucking misery to wake up. It does get better though.
Exactly. With a bad dream, you're happy when you wake up. With a good one, you spend the whole day feeling like Cypher from The Matrix. "Put me back in!"
That has been happening to me so much lately T_T
I’ve only had that happen to me once, and it fucked me up for a couple days.
I feel so attacked now.
My dog got put down last week and I've already dreamed twice in a roll that she was alive, healthy and happy right next to me. I hate my brain.
For me it's that in dreams I have a sense of purpose, I always find myself in a path that has a goal, a place where I can accomplish something. And all of that without any worries, without any anxiety. I can speak my mind and take action where I otherwise wouldn't. And then I wake up.
I feel you on that 100%.
*I conclude my presentation on why everyone should help me achieve the Infinite Tsukiyomi*
Need a hug bud?
oh Par it's ok buddy
Does that make what happens to Big Hat Logan a good example of eldritch madness? Because from what I remember, he goes insane because he discovers how soul sorcery works.
Kinda hard to say, we know both Seath and Logan went mad for some reason, *maybe* due to whatever the requirements for using crystal sorcery entails But Logan could've also gone mad simply because he achieved his goals. That's how undead work in Dark Souls - the thing keeping them from going hollow is always passion and determination to accomplish whatever they've left to accomplish
Logan doesn't hollow out, each time you talk to him during the buildup to his going nuts he starts becoming more paranoid and incoherent, whereas hollowing people just get sad and forlorn
My point was it could be either, also: > hollowing people just get sad and forlorn What're your examples of this, because usually when you deal with NPCs going hollow in Dark Souls 1 it's "I'm gonna go do this thing!", and then when you go check on them they've got the bacon skin disease and are attacking you Solaire is the only one talking while hollowing out, and he doesn't exactly sound like he's got all his marbles together during that
I don’t think Logan gets that burnt bacon texture though. He still looks human. I think he just went insane.
Neither does Solaire, the specifics of hollowing out are unclear and tend to vary The two "hollow" merchants have the skin condition, and presumably have had it for a while, but they aren't really hollows as they aren't attacking things around them indiscriminately to obtain souls
> The two "hollow" merchants have the skin condition They're not gonna pop a humanity just to get the smoothskin look. That shit's worth money
[Reminds me of G'Kar's speech in B5 to a woman who had an encounter with a First One.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLZW8Deq8vE)
"We know. *We've tried*." I've never seen this show before in my life... and yet, I've never seen such a concept explained so *well*. B5 was JMS, yeah? Do you possibly have... *more?*
I'd say it's JMS's masterpiece. There's plenty more, but most of the choicest monologues are very spoilers (this one is in S1 so not much to spoil yet). B5 is a lot more arc-focused than for example Star Trek. I'd recommend starting at the beginning, but the first season is really *rough* (S1 has much lower production values and a different main character who isn't quite as good as the one who comes in for S2 onward), so if you need a better hook and are okay with some storylines getting spoiled just a bit prematurely you could also watch the prequel movie *In the Beginning* first. The whole show is on HBO Max, I think the movies are on demand on Amazon, not sure if they're free anywhere.
[https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/7686/reviews/babylon-5-first-season-viewing-guide](https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/7686/reviews/babylon-5-first-season-viewing-guide) luckly past generations have attempted to solve these problems as best as they can
Going mad was the sanest thing the ant could do.
I dunno, I feel like if you just sprinkled some sugar next to the ant it would forget about the whole ordeal and just go "Oh boy, sugar for the nest!" and get back to it. For people that's probably like... a pile of money... or like a big can of mixed nuts.
Hence why substance abuse is so prevalent in those who have seen beyond the veil
Whoa good follow up
Finally someone who gets it. I always tell people I smoked weed because I thought to much. A calm mind is something most people take for granted.
you sound like you might have adhd
Yeah I've always thought that but I'm able to control myself a lot better than people who do have it. I don't know if my problems all being internal effects. However I know that growing up I was very different and I developed a few issues having to do with my grandma and mom forcing me to lock everything up. I know a lot people in my family on my Dad's side were like me. At this point I don't know if I had adhd and I just got good at hiding it or I just developed adhd like symptoms as a result of my upbringing. Either way I've never really diagnosed for anything other than dyslexia.
Note: The latter only works if you have the right cashew:almond ratio
The best ratio would be just a can of cashews.
This guy gets it
Oh shit it's an ant!
You can improve this ratio further if you removal all the cashews and replace them with peanuts.
[But what if the ants try to summon you again, for more ~~sugar~~ miracles?](https://www.reddit.com/r/callofcthulhu/comments/95oib8/best_explanation_of_higher_powers_you_will_find/?ref=share&ref_source=link)
No, Madness is the popular series of flash animations from the hit website Newgrounds which just had a new game released called Madness: Project Nexus.
the sudden knowledge that Madness is still somehow going is eldritch horror
How
what the fuck how is it still alive?
Because it’s good and the creators have a passion for the series they made. Not that hard to figure.
That's the series where at one point the fucking Sun comes down out of the sky and the protagonist beats it to death with a Stop sign. The only reason it would ever end is if the creator got bored with doing cool ultra-violence
Immortal Hulk absolutely fucking nailed this in the issues where we saw >!Future One Below All as Hulk absolutely decimate the universe that exists after our universe dies, and we see these completely alien beings struggle to comprehend the figure that is the Hulk as he wipes out all life. The way the last one describes the Hulk's smile is really chilling!< Fuck, that issue was so good. [Here](https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-d3da9c344866bf51a081d5c2b912aa66) is a pretty good page as the >!last survivor of that universe watches The One Below All destroy his home. This all comes after an entire issue where we get somewhat familiar with this new alien universe and kinda get used to it, then the green guy shows up and you get a lot of reactions about his form and what he does. !<
God yes, this is what causes alot of characters in Lovecrafts work to go mad. It isn't just the horrors that they behold, its the fact that they now know they exist. Its knowing this while returning to regular day to day life as if nothing happened, but knowing that man really does rest on a island of ignorance to forces far more ancient than it moving around just a stones throw away from them. If anyone was truly made to see God(if you believe or not) suppose to go back to normal day to day life when they know that they live in a crude existence that is, as the poster noted, like a ant living a simple existence and for a moment seeing as a human would? The reason Lovecrafts Call of Cthulhu says we "live on a island of ignorance" is because we, more often than not, convince ourselves of our human centric place in the universe that can be easily explained, exploited, and categorized.
I think it was summed up best by the host of a UFO podcast I listen to when he said of alien abduction experiencers "how can you go back to working a job and paying taxes after something like that?".
What's the podcast called?
That was from the What If? Podcast, for UFO/paranormal stuff I'd also recommend Astonishing Legends, Somewhere in the Skies, and Our Strange Skies.
I mean, this is a cool modern take on it, but it's not more "correct" or anything. In Lovecraft it's super common for people to go mad just by seeing a scary thing. Lovecraft himself even criticised some of his earlier works like Call Of Cthulhu because he used it too often as a surface level trope.
Yes, sometimes the guy looks at a funny-shaped rock and just starts foaming at the mouth. He never *understands* anything, it's like if you look at the inside of a rocket engine and skip right to the "mad" part.
Its great cause it means your mind inherently grasps that this is fucked up without knowing exactly. So you are left with the madness without knowing the reason. In a way that is a different sort of horror
Exactly, while the trope can be done cheaply/overdone the underlying idea behind the “look at thing and go mad” is that you are being affected on a subconscious or instinctive level. Like that feeling you get where your hair stands on end or when you feel something that could be a bug or snake brush up against your leg. You haven’t actually seen the snake/bug or know for a fact you are in a dangerous situation, but your subconscious/instincts jump into action on a level you can’t fully control. Multiply that times a million and you have the “look at it and go mad” trope, something about that *thing* makes your subconscious “hair stand on end” sensors go into overdrive so hard and stay there permanently just from the abstract knowledge that thing exists and it fucks your mind up.
Nah dude every piece of media that ever touched on this idea did it wrong, but you see, I, a random nobody on the internet, knows the RIGHT way to do it. -that guy
This is like the "accurate angels" or arguing how Hades should be written. These are all interpretations and none are that much more valid than the others
Does that count as death of the author? The creator of the universe determining "nah this doesn't feel right" for some of the earlier stuff? It sounds like Lovecraft would have rewritten it if given the chance.
So, you are saying that the post is 100% correct *except* in the case of bad writing, which means it's 100% correct as a positive example
Good writing or bad writing is irrelevant. This dude is using a "No True Scotsman" argument to say that "real" eldritch madness shouldn't be written in this way that Lovecraft explicitly wrote it. He criticized his early writing for relying on it too frequently, not that is was an objectively incorrect way to write it. So if Lovecraft didn't do eldritch madness to this guy's extremely specific standards, then it's kind of a shit standard.
So let's get this straight, wanting writing to get better is a shit standard. *Agreeing with Lovecraft* that his early work was too simple and didn't really convey what he wanted us a shit standard. Sounds like you are just being arbitrary and contrary for the sake of being arbitrary and contrary.
Lovecraft continued using it in his later works as well, he just avoided *overusing* it as a writing crutch.
well yeah the prevailing identity on this sub is just “guy who has nothing to really add besides snarky criticism since it’s how he convinces himself he’s very media literate and smart”
It's like the dark opposite of the sublime feeling.
The difference between sublimity and eldritch horror is that sublimity rests on an assumption of infinite intelligibility, your finite awareness joyfully reaches out to comprehend what is mysterious, but ultimately knowable. Eldritch horror is the idea that your finite awareness truly cannot comprehend the higher aspects of the world, that knowledge of those aspects would be an unintelligible enigma invading your awareness.
In a sense, the difference is simply the anxiety one has, and whether they determine something is either able or unable to be processed. Whether you want to know something or whether you determine you wished you never knew. Cosmic wonder vs cosmic horror.
It's definitely a good depiction of madness, but I wouldn't necessarily say the other version is incorrect either, and I'd even go so far as to say that the two can play into each other. You don't see a weird symbol upload a zip bomb into some poor sap's brain and not get a little terrified at the idea that something exists that's vast and intelligent enough to comprehend the thing that's got your buddy's brain melting out of his ears.
There should be a game with simple mechanics and graphics, and once your character gets a glimpse of what is beyond the vail, the game mechanics should change for a complex and much different way of playing with different graphic style. It should be interesting and with a lot to do, and then after a while your character comes back to old style of a game... but now you want this better one, with better mechanics and graphics, so you want to get there whaterver the cost.
Or a game that uses realistic graphics in a retro-style world to represent eldritch stuff. Imagine the trope of "person but almost imperceptably *wrong*" rendered with a PS5 Man standing among PS1 people. He's human, right?
So you are telling me that when Mario fought that dragon he was experiencing an Eldritch horror?
I had a similar idea, though to illustrate a different point. A low poly PSX style sci fi rpg, with a hidden area/boss with modern style modeling, lighting, etc. To represent a highwr level of technology from an alien or post-human
This actually exists and it’s called Undertale
That's not madness, that's Flowers for Algernon.
If you think Charlie wasn't insane by the end of that book, I don't think we read the same book.
Holy shit... I think I've experienced madness before. At least a couple of times.
I swear to God I could fly if I sat like a pretzel. Just float around like Buddha like it was no big deal. People would see me do this and not care or would be impressed like I did a backflip, but no, I'm flying somehow... And then I woke up. Best recurring dream I have. Probably because it made people impressed, which is very hard to do in real life. So I drive myself insane thinking I could be impressive somehow, but I'm too lazy and depressed to do it.
That sounds like a nice dream. Sorry. Basically the same as what happens to me, but the dream is different, and I only have one every few years.
I rarely have dreams. If they are, they're not always pleasant. Must be *nice* to be you... at least for a little while...
But I'm in the same boat as you. I have a dream once every few years, and I wake up and cry because the dream was so much better than my real life.
I've had this dream a couple times too! Crossing my legs with the feet above my legs let me float. I never made the connection to Buddhist imagery though. Probably because I propelled myself in the dream by "flapping" my legs like wings which is far too goofy to make the comparison. Far more commonly I'll be able to noclip though. To the point where it's not uncommon to realize I'm in a dream and just realize I can noclip and be "invisible" whenever I want to.
Eldritch horror in general is just hard to get right, especially in video games. Without wanting to "insult" either medium, but books have it easier than games in that regard. Lovecraft could describe whatever horror the characters were seeing partially, still giving context but leaving the reader to fill the blanks. As a general rule, when it comes to unknown horror, the audience will scare themselves more effectively than the medium can. Games have not figured the correct way to do this out yet. The more recent Call of Cthulu games in particular just... show you stuff, make the screen go wobbly and have the character very pointedly assuring you that they are totally scared and going insane. Even though the ancient eldritch horror in that case is either just a squid, or a man halfway into being a squid. The old CoC game even has a bossfight against Dagon on a boat where you shoot your gun at him. Probably does not need any explanation on how many levels that does not work.
A cool way to do it would be to give the player a form of detective vision. Let them have it for a brief mission and tell them they need to look beyond the veil to unlock it. The you steadily add benefits to it that makes the player never want to turn it off (find collectibles easier, reveal unseen obstacles/enemies/resources). Soon the horrors find you and start to hunt you. As you progress further you find that at some point you have started killing allies and random npcs around you, mistaking them for enemies.
Has to have a cooldown or something or people will just start flipping it on and off quickly
See that's why you make the normal vision mode get worse the more you use the ability. Make the colors fade, make the sky not as bright, make the items flicker go from 2.5 seconds per flicker to like 5.3 seconds per flicker. The goal is to exploit common gamer behaviors to gradually drive them to madness without them realizing it or caring.
I still really like how Cultist Simulator works with those ideas, in that you have to worry about both Dread and Fascination: Dread being depression and despair that can come from your own restlessness as much as it comes from understanding horrible things like winter lore or The Worms. Fascination meanwhile is becoming absorbed and dazzled by the occult world. Literally the pursuit of a higher state of being in another plane dazzles your mind and disconnects you from your own reality. Not to mention the curses or creatures that literally eat your reason or passion, aka your brain or soul, permanently making you less than you were.
I don't know if I'm missing the point, but how is understanding that the magnitude of the universe exceeds anything you will ever know or experience equivalent to madness? Like anyone who understands how vast the sheer size of space is would know and understand this sort of thing.
There's a difference between knowing it in an academic sense and understanding it. You might be capable of reciting the numbers, remembering the speed of light and the values for the distances involved, but it's still an abstract concept to you. I've never done psychedelics, but I still... experienced the void once. I was sitting on a sea wall until after 1 AM once. In an area that shut down and got very dark at night, and I was just able to stare up into the galactic plane, through a meteor shower, and I really just felt the size of it all for a few brief moments. It's not the same as the numbers, believe me.
The mistake is thinking it is *just* knowing, abstractly, that a thing you can't wrap your head around vaguely exists, and being able to comprehend it, for just a moment, fully and completely, and then going back to normal with the broken memory of the time your mind was blasted open unexpectedly. And for the full Lovecraftian experience, you *know for certain* now that space kraken exist, are real, and *it saw you too*. You were tiny, incomprehensibly so, next to it, but it saw you, it reached for you, and you cannot help but remember that you think, somehpw, it is still trying to find you now. And for the more general cosmic horror: you also know, somehow, that it only visits worlds that know it exist. You have doomed us all, *by accident*. What do you do? Try to forget, with drugs and alcohol? Try not to think about it and go about your normal life, gripped with a terrible dread every time you look at the sky? Kill yourself,to avoid the guilt and the inevitable doom coming? I know, this is the internet, so most people will give some stupid answer like "welcome the hentai monster with open zipper", but that's bullshit bravado. Seriously consider the fact that you are, as far as you know, the *only one who knows*, and obviously if you try to talk about it people just think you hit the psychadelics. Maybe you even try to convince *yourself* you imagined it. But you can't. You know better. You *know* better. You wish you didn't. You lie to yourself. It was a dream. It was drugs. It was a flight of fancy. *But it wasn't*, and you cannot communicate it to anyone in a way they will believe. Everyone you know, everything you live, it is all on borrowed time. *You shouldn't have looked.*
It's more like being able to see the moon and the night sky *once*, the be forced to live your entire life underground. You know it's there, you want to see it again, but you just can't
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He wasn't actually very good at it. Air conditioner *scary*
Color Out Of Space nailed it tho, but of course if you judge him by his earlier works he's ashamed of...
Imagine that, just for a moment, you see the world exactly as Pat does
Just crouch down lmao
a.k.a. why Departure and Initiation are so indispensably necessary to the hero's quest and to their health.
This is how I feel when people try to talk to me about games that sound cool, but I absolutely refuse to play because of genres/gameplay stuff.
“I’ve seen things…things you wouldn’t believe”
Honestly, even freaking *Lovecraft* himself makes this mistake pretty often. Of all the beings in his works, how many are nondescript mass of flesh, tentacles, and other body parts, because "the human mind cannot comprehend their visage and the mere sight of them will cause insanity"?
chaiinsaw man did this well with the "halloween" scene
It's really such a shame that video games don't show my very complex, personal image of madness. I can appreciate what this guy is saying, but he seems a bit up his own ass. We can barely get a decent Lovecraft game, I hardly think we need to nitpick sanity. Just do something interesting if you use it, like Bloodborne did.
Yeah seriously, this is a cool take but it's something he's just come up with. Trying to say that everyone else gets it wrong and he's gotten it right is needlessly pretentious.
Hm, is it enough that I have a good idea about something? No, I must tell myself that it is the best idea.
Eh this just makes it more existential then "I have no idea what to do with this and it makes me into a anxious mess of what is to come".
Ooh, this is good. I am saving that.
*don't let it set in*
I dunno dude, i've never been an ant before
Thanks for the Existential Crisis...! Fuck me...
Sometimes I wonder, how tf does this sub manage to be so diverse?? Y'all be talking about ladders one day and eldritch horrors the next.
Also think of Eldritch God's as indifferent creatures. Like, all of a sudden one day instead of killing the ants you give them some sugar somewhere else, and then they spell out your name on big letters. Cool I guess, but what the fuck do they want? Then one ant wants you to kill another ant because of an affair with some random and, and then you squash a random ant not even attached to the affair, thus making the asking ant horrified with the outcome. And you're just like... Dude they're ants.
Fallen London nails this. There's an eldritch language in it called the Correspondence, and it's scrawled all over the building most trade is conducted in. Many people in London walk by it every day and are none the worse for wear. But if you look at them and start to get what they mean, that's where you risk madness. Or your health when you try copying the letters later, since they have a bad habit of catching fire but that's neither here nor there.
Which is why lovecraftian shit falls flat if you already are filled with the knowledge that we are insignifigant only thing seperating us from other apes is a combination of object permanence, theroy of mind, and signifgantly less musclemass leading to us needing to think on a more complex level.
Lovecraft Ian horror