Figure 2 Alan Moore’s Visual Representation
To start with a work of Alan Moore, one must be very careful, because being bold is one key factor, though he seems to be milder in many ways of presenting the images of the
“unpresentable.” Moore adapts a realist way in presenting the characters under Lovecraft’s pen. There are the Providence series and the Neonomicon series, while the first one featuring a real story of Lovecraft’s life, and the other new structure under the original settings and design. If one surf the net, one can easily find pictures of each series. There is a new collection called Saga from the Swamp Thing, which one can easily see the influence from Lovecraft as well.
Some of the pictures are really disturbing to unprepared minds. Except from the
humanoid creatures, which bear much similarity with fish, and living beings remind you with dinosaur and human organs, usually green in color, they trigger a sense of uncanny by
speaking directly to human. Alan Moore presents “the Shadow over Innsmouth,” which has plenty of fish-men depictions and a fear of a hybrid clan mixing human and creatures like Shoggoth, who worship the great Cthulhu.
One of the most highly circulated pictures is such a creature raping a woman after bathing. The depiction itself is not erotic at all, not even exposing; one can only see the back of a fish-man and a women whose torso is covered by that back, with her limbs stretching out, and a column indicating that she is screaming for help. It is just challenging, more than
simply getting onto one’s nerves. One may be astonished by the bold expression of the crossbreeding issues hinted here. As any fan of Lovecraft may come to find, Lovecraft himself is highly rejected to hybridity. He is a man of controversy because of his misogyny and racism. Alan Moore’s work may even scare Lovecraft himself.
The story of Neonomicon is actually a chasing after truth story in Salem, Massachusetts, featuring agents from FBI. A series of murders following copycat actions have drawn the attention of investigation. The tracing leads to a cult which indulge themselves in sex with the
fish-men. The cult worshippers are followers of Dagon, and a rival who later reveals himself to be Nyarlathotep, one of the Great Old Ones. The raped woman mentioned in the previous paragraph then realizes she is pregnant by the strange creature’s tasting a drop of her urine.
She escapes through a secret tunnel to the ocean. The woman then discovers that Lovecraft’s novels are actually a foreseeing of the child she is giving birth, Cthulhu. This anti-mythology is parodying the birth of Jesus.
In the story, we can see the re-arrangement of the elements in Cthulhu Mythos. The writer Alan Moore is not going to abide by the original rules. This new collage of
Lovecraftian motifs is a new endeavor, and of course a postmodern measure. The implosion following the new arrangement is beyond estimation.
Figure 3 “The Very Hungry Cthulhupillar”
“The Very Hungry Cthulhupillar”
The Very Hungry Caterpillar is a world-famous children’s book by Eric Carle. The storybook teaches toddlers how to count and tell different week days and different colors by giving vivid, eye-catching drawings of fruit, flowers, and of course, the caterpillar, along with a three-dimensional design and little holes on the paper print indicating the biting trace of the growing little worm. Instead of presenting a bug’s life, The Very Hungry Cthulhupillar tells the story of how an awakened, hungry evil god is so eager to nibble all the way to the core of
the Earth, destroying everything by devouring things that come pass his way.
Figure 4 Part of “The Very Hungry Cthulhupillar”
The blending of the children’s book with the horrifying elements in Cthulhu Mythos is not meant to be for kids for sure. This is a capricious design for adults. Many of the present followers of Lovecraft may also come from a context which storybooks like The Very Hungry Caterpillar may be introduced when they’re in their childhood, this is also an accumulated culture capital. For many of the readers, this is not just a parody, but a fresh combination adding new thrilling effects to what seems daily, normal, serene, and eternally still; it is an active destruction of what seems safe and familiar. Maybe deep down in those readers’ mind, it’s a reminder of what is always crawling behind us. Those that may be too real to be faced with; those much more terrifying of the known than the unknown: When the real became too real. To face the reality directly is too cruel; people may as well choose another way of representing it.
So where does the real horror come from when people laugh with an identifying smile on their faces reading this pseudo-child work? (And similar to the parody of The Polar Express, Antarctic Express and also Where The Deep Ones Are featuring a structure
resonating Where The Wild Things Are) If we have to say that people today are losing their
keenness to danger, or their concerns for threats, I might well be saying that people today get numb with it; because of the wide circulation of media and information, people are getting used to new forms of menacing horror. It is so common in life that people learn how to ignore them so as not to influence their will to lead a seemingly normal life. What comes to us, a mortal, corporeal body when going to a concert may mean being killed by unexpected terrorist attack? What comes to such vulnerable being like us, when the iceberg in Antarctica is melting drastically and the globe is heating that the climate becomes unpredictable like lunatics? Instead of facing the truth, maybe more people are trying to entertain themselves to death, let alone other problems led by globalization like epidemics and commercial, political collapses. These are all problems too real for people today to face.
Figure 5 “Unspeakable Words”
“Unspeakable Words (Table Games)”
This famous table game has won 2007 table game of the year. It is a spelling game featuring number cards with an alphabet, each representing a character in the Cthulhu Mythos (for example, S is for Shoggoth). There is an arbitrarily distributed number on each of the card. Several purple-colored dolls with the shape of Cthulhu about 4-5 centimeters tall and an
Icosahedron dice are also in it. Each player in each round has to spell a word containing at least three alphabets (there cannot be repetition); once a word is out of the seven cards on the player’s hands, the total number on the casted-out cards is already there. Then the player should throw the Icosahedron dice to see if the number is bigger than the total of the card number. If not, then the player loses a Cthulhu doll (each player has 5 dolls each time). When all of the five dolls on a player’s hands is lost, then it means the player has “loses his/her mind,” surrendering to the madness of encountering the horror.
The eerie / interesting feelings generate when one thinks of why people come up with such games. There are so many designs of worldviews on Earth. Why choose one with such uncanny elements? If it is a spelling game designed for young teenagers, what does those strange adults want from the kids? Is it because Cthulhu Mythos has become so famous that the designers want to gain some benefits from it? Or is the adults are preparing the children for the world outside? Or, it’s simply a game designed for adults? No matter what the answer is, it is of no doubt that Lovecraft has sneaked his way into the pop culture more than ever.
There’s not only “concrete” game, but a virtual game. How Cthulhu’s empire will expand in the virtual reality is another story.
“Nyaruko”
Figure 6 “Nyaruko”24
24 這いよれ！ニャル子さん。
The Japanese have a very long history of “OTAKU” culture. The OTAKU culture is one of the dominant and “mainstream” branch of their subcultures, containing numerous forms of metamorphosis, adjustment and hybridity. To begin with, there’s this branch called the “Moe”
(萌), normally cute or triggering one’s desire and sensitivity for those which are vulnerable and transient in a way. One key factor in this branch is the element of “Mishojo,”25 which means young and pretty girls. These beautiful, “hyper-real” girls often are bestowed with
“traits,” each of which attracts its own aficionado. Despite the fact that Cthulhu Mythos has been passed to Japan in the late 1970s and has numerous transformations in local cultures.
For example, some comic producers have adapted Lovecraft’s stories and make them into a new horror fiction with Japanese rural background. Recently, the famous comic painter Ito Junji, who has also been introduced due to his devotion in the horror genre in Japan, has also claimed that he is going to release a production featuring one of Lovecraft’s most famous novels. This time he is abandoning his horror tradition, which normally contains twisted human bodies, bubonic contagious diseases and inside-out organs, along with a sense of extreme horror which even disgust his boldest readers.
The OTAKU culture has another factor, which is personification. Because of the
prospering of this branch, there are numerous kinds of personification in Japanese’s people’s daily life. There are even personification of countries26 in anime (Japanese cartoon, meaning
“animation”) and personification of desserts. Taiwanese people adapt similar measures in advertising the Kaohsiung metro: a cute girl wearing uniform with little ponytail, along with her happy partners like a girl with fiery-red hair and a girl with wheat-blonde braids. They become the living example through which the Kaohsiung City government, the metro company as well as the common people can interact. Similar examples are not hard to see in
25 “Mishojo” （美少女）
26 ヘタリアAxis Powers
Japanese counties. People in each county often select their favorite characters as the
representatives of their hometowns. One of the most famous is the Kumamon, representing Kumamoto County in North-Eastern Japan.
In the title of “Nyaruko: Crawling with Love.” The author is already playing with some elements in Cthulhu Mythos. The word “crawling” and the tentacles, which normally
wouldn’t appear on a high school teenage girl’s face is a hint. Featuring several main characters from the Cthulhu Mythos, the main “Mishojo” is actually
a formless Lovecraftian-deity of chaos (Nyarlathotep) which usually transforms herself as a silver-hair girl. Other girls which form the “harem” of the main male character, which is also a common pattern in male-oriented production in Japanese’s OTAKU subculture are also the
“Moe” version of the images in Cthulhu Mythos. The production features a common high school teen encountering an alien girl with numerous forms, saving him from being devoured by creatures with disoriented malice, developing a story of love (craft). This openly wink to the name of the founder is very unusual. The light fiction itself plays not only with Cthulhu Mythos but many other things include press news, western movies and even baseball games.
Strangely enough, the “horror” itself has faded in the narration of the story, let alone the anime production. One can hardly tell the difference between this work and other works featuring “Moe,” “Mishojo” characters and voice actors who sings and performs in a
“hyper-real” way, catering only to the needs and favors of the audience who would pay for all the souvenirs, CDs and DVDs made in the name of the work. There is an “implosion” of numerous factors, symbols and signs, mass amount of stimulants, an emphatically powerful kick on one’s nerves, resulting even in a sensory overload.
This is a new phenomenon of horror in our present days. The horror is not created by carefully arranged atmosphere and diction, but faded to blank and mass-produced farce. Like what Baudrillard had been saying, the simulations come before the real thing itself as the widespread of media. People get used to the simulacra rather than the real things itself. Few
of the audience of “Nyaruko” may really have read or even heard of the name of H. P.
Lovecraft. What they see is merely another anime, light fiction which triggers their desire.
This is the horror of mass-reproduction and blank representation. It’s not like what Frederick Nietzsche told you when you look at the abyss the abyss will look at you. It’s when you look inside the artificial human-made something else which looks very much like an abyss, what you see is nothing but something even more nihil than never, something reflecting the real nothingness inside a being itself.
Since the very dawn of the OTAKU culture, it has suffered the severe attacks of the so-called mainstream culture. In Japan, because of the connection with OTAKU culture with juvenile delinquency and atrocious crime out of pedophilia and delusional disorder, also because of the stereotyping of what it is to be an “OTAKU.” Even until recently, OTAKU is generally pictured as a fat, geeky pervert who adore “Mishojo” from the fictional world, usually a male, with low self-esteem and incapable of social interaction, alienated, disjointed with the society, even anti-social. In the Japanese society where conformity and harmony is highly reputed and the benefits of the group is always above the well-being of an individual, this kind of personality is to be removed and eradicated. Setting up a strawman as the target of attacking is simple, ironically, Japan cannot live without the value of output rising to billions of dollars each year. No one can be ignorant of the economic miracle in the time of recession, as well as the flexibility, variability and hybridity of cultures, even the introduction of Japanese culture to the international stage all share credits to the blossoming of OTAKU culture. What a critic should be looking, therefore, is not the superficial levels, but the underlying reasons why more and more people devote to the fictional, virtual world. The main issue here may be social problems of a grand scale. Unemployment, monopoly of multinational corporations, low-payment and marriage problems…when the real world is so depressing, why not embrace the harmless, the soothing, the thrilling, the dream fulfilling, the …? This is where Post-Lovecraftian sense of horror intrudes. When Pokémon Go was at a
feverish peek, the new reported the spectacular scene in Beitou, where people crowded to catch the legendary Pokémon. The horror comes not from the existence and the frightening characteristics of zombies, but the possibilities of people’s indifference, numb and being accustomed to zombies. At that very moment, “zombies” become not only a frightening factor or a prop in a video game, but a widespread trait of our modern world, where people cease to feel for the existence of zombies.
Conclusion
There are several conclusions for this project. First of all, Lovecraft as merely pulp or horror is over-simplification, for Lovecraft is philosophical, and goes beyond categorization and pinning-down, so as his works. Lovecraft’s worldview has found new dwellings in numerous philosophical approaches since its rise in the postmodern eras, and becomes a core figure in the definition of Posthumanity. Secondly, Lovecraftian cyborgs in the complexed and hybrid cultural output of our time, due to its widespread effects and affects, are lens to understand the present world we live in. Concerning the Lovecraftian Apocalypse, the evolvement of Lovecraft may also help us grasp the sense of horror of our time. In a time when the horror genre has become entertainment, sometimes even kitsch, the components to build up the sense of horror are somehow broken into fragments. Any form of production in the entertainment industry can dub itself as part of the horror genre even with the slightest connection to it. People live paradoxically with the desire to seek for thrills with spitting distance in any piece of work related to horror, but at the same time also with a subconscious fear of the collapse of our world. The values of Cthulhu Mythos serve both as the capital of lucrative, mass production, and as a shared mindset of present time, which is comparatively pessimistic and floating. Finally, as a figure successfully established its sense of existence in the postmodern era, “Lovecraft” becomes a new cult with supports of individual cases, each with its own contingency and articulation. Flat and empty they may be if put into the broader sense of historical narratives, these cases also reflect upon ourselves as a new posthuman species in becoming with technological evolvements, cultural and ethnic diversity as well as numerous other results of globalization. With the context in mind, the “flatness” and
“emptiness” as they seem may prove much more complicated than they show. The evolution of Lovecraft has in a way become an epitome of contemporary historical processing.
The rising of Lovecraft in the postmodern and posthuman age, and the era of booming
technologies and prospering discourses, heating tensions and conflicts between
heterogeneous groups as well as rising voices calling for attention and actions on various issues, is a case serves as an example with whose evolvement we come to the definitions of our own world. Given a philosophical meditation and an interwoven discussion out of cultural studies and even sociopolitical awareness, the project, which deals with the present conditions of human beings through the looking glass of Lovecraftian universe, might be forever ongoing and always point to more future directions. For those who believe in the Cthulhu Mythos as part of everyday life, the evolution of the it is not only a phenomenon in subcultural terrain, but a reflection of life, of history, and of human fates on the very long trek of time. Though this also reminds us that the time span is extremely teeny-weeny compared with the eons and light years of the timeline the Elder Ones, the Great Old Ones and those who could make you scream without a sound in the eternal length and void.
Post-Lovecraftian Apocalypse may not be so far away considering the devastations our own race has brought upon ourselves. Based upon the discussions of the previous chapters, from the early definition of the cosmic horror, to the posthuman horror, the meaning of horror has transformed. Due to the highly-divergent contexts of fields and interdisciplinary
endeavors, the horror today also has a thousand faces. In Lovecraft’s fiction, the only way to escape the horror is the surrendering to death. In the posthuman context, however, one can detest the horror of flatness, blankness through a philosophical approach, both ethically,
endeavors, the horror today also has a thousand faces. In Lovecraft’s fiction, the only way to escape the horror is the surrendering to death. In the posthuman context, however, one can detest the horror of flatness, blankness through a philosophical approach, both ethically,