History Headscratchers / CthulhuMythos

* Why do the cosmic beings in the Mythos take so many weird forms,like Y'golonac [[spoiler:"YOU FOOL! YOU'VE DOOMED US ALL!"]]:Takes the form of a obese male with no head and mouths on his hands.

* Something seems inconsistent about the power of the great old ones (like cthulhu). In ''Literature/TheCallOfCthulhu'' Cthulhu is knocked out when someone rams a yacht into his head, and in ''VideoGame/CallOfCthulhuDarkCornersOfTheEarth'' Hydra and Dagon are both killed by the player with conventional weaponry (well, Hydra was killed with a Yithian Engergy Gun), yet I've also heard that they are extremely powerful and could end humanity on a whim. So are they immortal badass gods or can they be killed?

** You english speakers are struggling for nothing. Some languages, like portuguese, actually have the "lh" sound, and for us pronouncing "Cthulhu" would be resonaly easy.

** The majority of the cosmic beings in the Cthulhu Mythos are beyond human. ''Way'' beyond. They do not share our ideas of what 'good looks' are, they hardly share our ideas of what 'up' is. [[YouCannotGraspTheTrueForm You cannot grasp the true form]], [[StarfishAliens starfish aliens]] and [[AlienGeometries alien geometries]] are in full effect here, as well as the occasional [[BrownNote brown note]].

** It's part of the chaotic nature of the shared and ever-expanding mythology. DependingOnTheWriter, the Great Old Ones and such are extremely alien SufficientlyAdvancedAliens, or actual demonic gods with actual supernatural powers. Sometimes they're barely aware of humanity's existence, other times we're critical to their long-term plans. It all depends on which "version" of the Mythos you buy into. Similar things can happen with actual mythology. Are the Greek gods paragons of good values and loving patrons of humanity, or are they flawed characters with as many faults as good points, or are they complete [[JerkassGod jerkasses]] who screw with people ForTheEvulz? Depends on your interpretation. Is Loki of Norse mythology just a trickster archetype who keeps the other Asgardian gods on their toes, or is he the Norse Pantheon's Satan-equivalent, always trying to bring about chaos, death, and destruction just because? For that matter, is Satan actually a force a pure evil, trying to overthrow God and bring about Hell On Earth, or is just an adversary for the righteous to overcome, and become better for facing down and defeating a challenge? If you buy into a version of the Mythos where the Great Old Ones are deeply invested in humanity for whatever reason, [[HeWhoMustNotBeNamed That Y Guy]] makes perfect sense. If you buy into a version where the universe at large barely notices humanity exists, and doesn't give a shit when it does, then yeah, he doesn't fit.

*** That wasn't Lovecraft. That was Lin Carter's ''The Hounds of Tindalos'', where the narrator continues to write his final words as he's being eaten alive by the titular creatures. Lovecraft's own prose doesn't have quite as egregious examples, and the few, like "{{Literature/Dagon}}" or ''The Haunter of the Dark'', clearly have the narrator [[ApocalypticLog frantically scribbling their final notes]], in hopes that they manage to get their last words down before the creature breaks in, and tend to cut off at a critical point. In ''The Colour from Space'' the narrator has no personal experience of the events at all, and the person he interviews survived after only glimpsing the Colour a couple of times.
*** ''The Hounds of Tindalos'' was by Frank Belknap Long, not Lin Carter.

*** Lin Carter made Xoth Cthulhu's origin, in "Out of the Ages".

** If Jesus is the physical manifestation of a deity, one immensely more powerful than the witch, and a cross was used to kill him for ~3 days then [[fridgebrilliance it makes perfect sense for a deity to fear the cross]]. So rather than the cross being a symbol of the divine in this context it's a symbol ''against'' the divine.

** Who knows? Ask [[{{God}}Yahweh]].

** The Dunwich Horror implies very strongly that Cthulhu belong to a different (and lesser) class of being than the true Old Ones (definitely including Yog-Sototh, possibly Shub-Niggurath too). In the Necronomicon quote in that story their relation is described as "Great Cthulhu is their cousin, yet can he spy Them only dimly" (capitalization of pronouns is from the story). Likewise, the goal of the Old Ones in Dunwich (The implication seems to be that Cthulhu is much more part of this dimension than Beings like Yog - hence why he would be more vulnerable,

*** That wasn't Lovecraft. That was Lin Carter's ''The Hounds of Tindalos'', where the narrator continues to write his final words as he's being eaten alive by the titular creatures. Lovecraft's own prose doesn't have quite as egregious examples, and the few, like "{{Literature/Dagon}}" or ''The Haunter of the Dark'', clearly have the narrator frantically scribbling their final notes, in hopes that they manage to get their last words down before the creature breaks in, and tend to cut off at a critical point. In ''The Colour from Space'' the narrator has no personal experience of the events at all, and the person he interviews survived after only glimpsing the Colour a couple of times.

* So a recurring analogy is that humans are as ants to the Great Old Ones and Outer Gods, us being so far beneath them that we don't matter to them at all, such that they wouldn't give two rat's asses about bulldozing over our entire colony just to build a parking lot, assuming they even realized we were there. Extending this analogy, the least of them, Nyarlathotep, is the bratty half-pint kid killing ants with a magnifying glass because ItAmusedMe... but following this train of thought, shouldn't there also be a benevolent antithesis to Nyarly as per a kid with an ant farm? Why is it that everything in this setting that's different from or more powerful than humans is by that very fact malevolent (or at the least [[InformedAttribute allegedly ambivalent]], since even the "ambivalent" ones usually end up killing people anyway)?

* So a recurring analogy is that humans are as ants to the Great Old Ones and Outer Gods, us being so far beneath them that we don't matter to them at all, such that they wouldn't give two carps about bulldozing over our entire colony just to build a parking lot, assuming they even realized we were there. Extending this analogy, the least of them, Nyarlathotep, is the bratty half-pint kid killing ants with a magnifying glass because ItAmusedMe... but following this train of thought, shouldn't there also be a benevolent antithesis to Nyarly as per a kid with an ant farm? Why is it that everything in this setting that's different from or more powerful than humans is by that very fact malevolent (or at the least [[InformedAttribute allegedly ambivalent]], since even the "ambivalent" ones usually end up killing people anyway)?

* Let's say I write a HeroicFantasy story that happens to include a LawfulGood blacksmith god named Valkix, said to have hammered the world into being. Now let's say that several decades later, a completely different writer reads my book, decides they like the sound of the name, and so uses it in a PlanetaryRomance work for their ChaoticNeutral sea god of tsunamis and typhoons, born from the Sky god's first ever toilet-trashing bout of diarrhea. Few people would see any logic in claiming that these two very different gods were the same being just because the NamesTheSame, so why is the general consensus in this fandom that Ambrose Bierce's good-natured god of shepards is the same entity as Lovecraft's and Dereleth's Evil* god of [[OddJobGods nihilism and decadence]]?

* Let's say I write a HeroicFantasy story that happens to include a LawfulGood blacksmith god named Valkix, said to have hammered the world into being. Now let's say that several decades later, a completely different writer reads my book, decides they like the sound of the name, and so uses it in a PlanetaryRomance work for their ChaoticNeutral sea god of tsunamis and typhoons, born from the Sky god's first ever toilet-trashing bout of diarrhea. Few people would see any logic in claiming that these two very different gods were the same being just because the NamesTheSame, so why is the general consensus in this fandom that Ambrose Bierce's good-natured god of shepards is the same entity as Lovecraft's and Dereleth's evil* god of [[OddJobGods nihilism and decadence]]?

* So a recurring analogy is that humans are as ants to the Great Old Ones and Outer Gods, us being so far beneath them that we don't matter to them at all, such that they wouldn't give two carps about bulldozing over our entire colony just to build a parking lot, assuming they even realized we were there. Extending this analogy, the least of them, Nyarlathotep, is the bratty half-pint kid killing ants with a magnifying glass because ItAmusedMe... but following this train of thought, shouldn't there also be a benevolent antithesis to Nyarly as per a kid with an ant farm? Why is it that everything in this setting that's different from or more powerful than humans is by that very fact malevolent (or at the least [[InformedAttribute allegedly ambivalent]], since even the "ambivalent" ones usually end up killing people anyway)?

* Can somebody spoonfeed me the ending to The Festival? It might be the antiquated speech but I didn't quite understand the twist of the final paragraphs.

* What the hell was it that got summoned by accident in TheCaseOfCharlesDexterWard? I mean, it's one of the few genuinely helpful supernatural entities in Lovecraft's works and there's absolutely no indication of who or what it was. I know that NothingIsScarier was his thing but sometimes a ''hint'' would be nice.

** Seeing deep sea creatures as aliens is pretty understandable, really.

* Since tentacly things seem to be a recurring thing with Lovecraft's monsters, has he ever explained his fear of octopi and sea life? If letters exist, I want to read them.

* If a Yithian swaps minds with a human and then a Mi-go stuffs that human's brain inside a cylinder before they swap back, whose mind is stuck in the brain in a cylinder? Is the human mind snapped back to their own brain, which is now in a cylinder? Or is the Yithian trapped inside the brain? Or does it depend on the writer?

*** Thing is, Lovecraft wasn't a great writer. At all. He had some cracking ideas and his Mythos was an amazing concept just because of the framework that these unimaginably alien and powerful beings couldn't care less about humanity but his prose was, in many cases, absolutely dire. There's one story in particular (I want to say the Colour Out of Space but I'm not 100% on that) where a character is writing his journal when something bursts through his window. The final line of the story is something along the lines of 'oh no, htey're outside now, they're coming through the window, arrrgh.' Because obviously when being attacked by an alien monstrosity you'd be sure to make sure your death-scream was recorded.

* If Earth and Humans (and perhaps even our own plane of existence) are so pitiful and insignificant, why are so gosh-darn many cosmic and other miscellaneous "higher" beings hanging out here? <<|ItJustBugsMe|>>