P H Lee

So I want to talk about racism and HP Lovecraft fandom (I will use the term "Cthuliana" from this point forward.)

This is a limited circle; this is a draft essay; do not share this widely.

Alice, John, I'm pretty sure you don't read G+ anymore but if you are reading this you should probably just skip this and talk about it with me in person.

This is a work in progress. Please engage with it as such.

So a lot of the discussion around Cthuliana and racism turns into a referendum on HP Lovecraft's soul. Was he personally bigoted? Ok, yes, but wasn't that par for the course for the times? Ok, no, but can we separate an author from his work? Etc.

I don't care very much about this. I really don't. Lovecraft is dead. The past is his country now, and no amount of argumentation or passion or tears will change a single thing that he did or said or wrote or believed.

I'd like to talk about what people are doing right now, in the modern day. People who can still change their minds or make amends or even experience a moment of doubt or self-reflection.

A lot of the discussion around the actions of Cthuliana fans is about how they defend, deny and elide Lovecraft's racism. While this is definitely true, and common across a lot of fandoms of racist material, I feel like this is not the sum of the problem. Far from defending the status quo, Cthuliana actively modernizes and expands the existing racism of Lovecraft's writings, often leaving behind a canon that is far more racist that the already-racist original work.

Cthuliana is obviously a diverse fandom. People come to it for a lot of different reasons. But I think a significant portion of Cthuliana is made up of people for whom the racism is a major if not primary draw. Basically, if you're a fan of 1930s adventure writing, you can write off the racism because "that's just how things were*" which then means it is a socially acceptable form of racism to be a pulp** fan. This attracts bigots and aggressive racists, who are always drawn towards socially acceptable outlets for their racism.

Thus, while Lovecraft's racism may be background radiation, or at least within the overton window of his era, modern Cthuliana produces some extraordinarily more racist works, because they are written by and/or for aggressive bigots, rather than a general audience.

Let's talk about a case study. The Tcho-Tcho.

Mention "Tcho-Tcho" to any Cthuliana fan and they will get very sad or very mad or both. They're amazingly racist by any standard, and so the fandom is understandably touchy about them. They're pretty God-awful.

In the original material, the Tcho-Tcho are a fictional group of Burmese hill people. They murder all outsiders, worship Cthulu, and are implied to be cannibals***.

This is pretty grossly racist.

Here's a thing: when the story was written, there were in fact many Burmese hill peoples actively and successfully resisting colonization by murdering the fuck out of every missionary, soldier, or bureaucrat that came within eyesight of them. They were headhunters, not cannibals, but in the 1930s it was widely believed that they were cannibals. They do not worship dark gods (seriously who the fuck does outside of modern geeks ironically?) but the anecdote about them is told in the context of "every culture, everywhere has a cult of Cthulu" at least.

In short: Madly racist in perspective and framing, not totally divorced from reality, though. It is pretty possible to look at this and go "people defending their territory from incursion, okay."

Now let's look at a modern version of the Tcho Tcho. This is not fringe material: it's from Cthulu Now a widely popular RPG. I can't actually bring myself to type this out, so I'm going to copy-paste from wikipedia.

The campaign At Your Door, for the Cthulhu Now supplement of the Call of Cthulhu roleplay setting, claims that some Tcho-Tcho have actually integrated themselves into modern society, masquerading as just another harmless ethnic group. It also claims that a delicacy of their cannibalistic cuisine, which they secretly dole out to unsuspecting diners at their "ethnic restaurants", is a dish called bak bon dzhow. This dish is composed of human ganglia mashed into a thick paste and is usually served in accompaniment to other "white pork" (human flesh) based dishes. Bak bon dzhow means, literally, human ganglia paste in their native tongue, though inquisitive outsiders are always told that the translation is "White Pork Sauce". Non-Tcho-Tchos who partake of it dream of lustily partaking in a vile cannibal feast the next time they sleep.

OK so the Tcho-Tcho have gone from a hostile, evil, people defending their borders to... evil Chinese restaurant owners who feed human flesh to white people to make them crazy. I mean holy shit people. I want to try to detail all the ways in which this is more racist, but it's hard to hit it point by point.

The important thing isn't the details, though. It's also totally detached from reality. While the first version was a (racist) horror re-imagining of real activities (what if the violently anti-colonial hill people were devil worshippers?) The second is just completely vile fiction, perpetuating particular stereotypes about vulnerable people in our society that the authors know to be wrong. So we've gone from "racist view of the world" to "racist re-imagining of the world."

This is part of what I mean by "for some people, racism is a major draw to Cthuliana." Cthuliana provides a place where it is safe for them to reify their wholly modern racist bullshit, because "it's part of the original material" or "those were the times." But the racism displayed above is not 1930s racism. It's carries the distinct odor of the modern. The historicity and claims of genre and arguments about Lovecraft's soul are distractions at best, feints at worst.

I think that Cthuliana fans need to decide -- each for themselves, and also as a subculture -- whether Cthuliana will be a safe place to be a racist. Right now, for better or for worse, it is.

Obviously, I would like that to change, because I would like to live in a society where there is no safe place to express racism. But I also am not a Lovecraft fan. I can't make that decision for you.

I am leaving comments on as a measure of faith in you as my friends, but there may be shitty comments. I will try to swat down such comments: we'll see how it goes. If you're not me, please don't scream "FUCK YOU" at a commenter: just let me know and I will delete or engage as appropriate.

If your comment gets deleted, I don't think you're a bad person, I just don't want to have this conversation right now, right here. Catch me on chat or something.

* Ignoring non-racist writers like Harold Lamb in the process.
** Pulp as a genre does not exist except in retrospect, which I think is key to this, but a tangent to this particular essay.
* Also the name is made up gobbledegook.