Line #3 Trivia/CthulhuMythos


1	!!General Trivia
2	* Arkham is loosely based on infamous witch-town Salem, Massachusetts, while Miskatonic University is based on Gordon College (Wenham, Massachusetts) and Arkham Sanitarium (no relation to [[{{Franchise/Batman}} Arkham Asylum]]) is based on Danvers State Hospital in Danvers, Massachusetts. Curiously enough, this means LovecraftCountry is also home to Haverhill, Massachusetts -- one of the inspirations for Archie Comics' Riverdale!
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4	!!General Tropes
5	* BasedOnADream: The Nightgaunts were from a recurring nightmare Lovecraft had as a child, so it's rather fitting they be living in the Dreamlands.
6	* {{Defictionalization}}: The Necronomicon listed in the Ohio University Library card catalog. Creator/LSpragueDeCamp, fantasy author and linguist, acted as Abdul Alhazred's "translator".
7	* RunningTheAsylum: An appropriate and positive example -- Lovecraft encouraged his fans to use his mythology, and expanded off the concepts within those tales. Also, he disliked typing so much that he sometimes didn't submit completed work to publishers because he'd have to type it -- and his friends volunteered to type it for him. Indeed, without Lovecraft's fan friends, his work would have drifted into obscurity.
8	* ScienceImitatesArt:
9	** ''Yogsothoth'' is a genus of protist named after the Outer God from the stories of Creator/HPLovecraft (due to forming spherical colonies with many round scales that bear a resemblance to the description of Yog-Sothoth resembling many floating orbs).
10	** ''Cthulhu'' is a genus of protist that dwells in the gut of termites that helps them digest wood, named due to its octopoid-like shape. It has a smaller close relative called ''Cthylla'', named after the daughter of Cthulhu.
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12	For works that reference the Mythos, see the [[ReferencedBy/CthulhuMythos Referenced By]] page.
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14	!!CommonCrossover
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16	Thanks to its popularity and its domain status, the Cthulhu Mythos has a large number of crossovers:
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18	* Several stories by Creator/StephenKing
19	* ''TabletopGame/CthulhuTech'' = (Cthulhu Mythos + {{Mecha}} + PostCyberPunk)
20	* ''VisualNovel/{{Demonbane}}'' (Cthulhu Mythos + HumongousMecha + {{Moe}}. And by humongous, we're talking about one can destroy the universe with sheer size.)
21	* The Literature/WhateleyUniverse (Cthulhu Mythos + SuperheroSchool).
22	* In ''TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons'' 3rd Edition, the sourcebook ''Lords of Madness'' states that the Outer Gods (or reasonable facsimiles thereof) are "worshiped" by the inhuman aboleths, while ''Magazine/{{Dragon}}'' #360 implies that Nyarlathotep may be the father of the demon prince Graz'zt.
23	** 4th Edition hasn't any direct crossovers yet, but it's made clear that the Far Realm referenced in the standard campaign setting is a realm of Lovecraftian horrors that require the combined power of the gods to repel, and is the source of all psionic powers.
24	** And in the TabletopGame/{{Pathfinder}} (AKA D&D 3.75) campaign setting, a local race of subterranean Abominations explicitly worships the Mythos and use Shoggoths as guards, while the module ''The Carrion Hill Horror'' is pretty much TabletopGame/CallOfCthulhu without the nasty sanity effects, and the ''Rise of the Runelords'' adventures involve the realms of Leng and Kadath; and while most of the planets in the Golarion system are representative of staples of PlanetaryRomance, the furthest one, Aucturn, is clearly analog to the Mythos version of Pluto AKA Yuggoth. In general, the creators have explicitly said that the non-Earth specific elements of the Mythos are fully compatible with the ''Pathfinder'' universe, and they run with it.
25	*** Taken to its climax in the 4th bestiary, which includes a Great Old One template and stats for three of them; Hastur (as the King in Yellow), Bokrug, and, of course, the infamous Cthulhu himself.
26	*** The late 1st edition adventure path ''Strange Aeons'' is all about this, as the adventure starts with the party as amnesiacs trying to escape an asylum corrupted by Mythos forces, and ending up embroiled in a terrible plot [[spoiler: to have the world swallowed up by the City of Carcosa to further Hastur's plans to evolve from Great Old One to full-fledged Outer God]]. The non-adventure sections also cover a variety of Mythos subjects and how they relate to the ''Pathfinder'' setting.
27	** Also in 5th edition, where one of the Warlock’s patrons can be a Great Old One, Cthulhu being one of the given examples.
28	* A couple of Franchise/DoctorWhoExpandedUniverse {{Tie In Novel}}s have incorporated the Old Ones into the Doctor's universe, to the extent of doing a {{Retcon}} labeling several of the Doctor's past adversaries as Mythos deities under different names. ''All-Consuming Fire'' by Andy Lane adds Franchise/SherlockHolmes.
29	** According to at least one story, The Nestene Consciousness, leader of the [[DemonicDummy Autons]], is actually one of Shub-Niggurath's oft-mentioned but seldom seen [[ExplosiveBreeder 1000 young]]. Creator/ClarkAshtonSmith would be proud. To be fair, he(?) really does look the part.
30	* Literature/SherlockHolmes canon, being [[PublicDomainCharacter in the public domain]], has also been bridged more than once, such as in ''Literature/AStudyInEmerald'', ''Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened'' or ''ComicBook/TheLeagueOfExtraordinaryGentlemen''. ''Shadows Over Baker Street'' is an anthology of short stories in which Sherlock Holmes investigates various Lovecraftian mysteries.
31	* {{Tokusatsu}} show ''Series/UltramanTiga'' drops subtle referrences throughout its run, but it becomes obvious in the two last episodes with a sunken city rising from the ocean and BigBad '''Ghatanothoa''' awakening from its deep slumber.
32	* ''WesternAnimation/TheRealGhostbusters'' unexpectedly battled Cthulhu in an episode that provides a detailed explanation of H.P. Lovecraft, Miskatonic University, Arkham, and the mythos in general.
33	* ''Literature/MerkabahRider'' consists of the adventures of a Hascidic Jew who battles demons. However, the overarching story is the invasion of the Outer Gods who are not part of the binary Heaven vs. Hell conflict. The first novel hints that these are Mythos creatures, and this becomes explicit in the second novel. Whether you consider this a crossover depends on whether you see the Rider as his own character, or whether you see it as a Mythos story from the very beginning.
34	* There's a Franchise/{{Batman}} Elseworlds story called ''[[ComicBook/BatmanTheDoomThatCameToGotham The Doom that Came to Gotham]]''.
35	** More humorously, ComicBook/{{Hitman}} had the protagonist battling the "Many-Angled Ones'' alongside parody superteam Section 8 thanks to a MadScientist using AlienGeometries in his teleportation experiments.
36	* Similiarly, Creator/MarvelComics' ComicBook/TheThanosImperative has "Many-Angled Ones", thinly-veiled copies of the Mythos' most popular gods, attacking the Franchise/MarvelUniverse and even defeating some of the Abstracts, who are among Marvel's most powerful beings.
37	** Even earlier, ComicBook/DoctorStrange and ComicBook/{{Dracula\|MarvelComics}} had each battled Mythos-like monsters like Shuma-Gorath and Y'Garon in the 1970s and 1980s, and the first issue of Strange's revived series in 1988 opened with a brief sequence showing him defeating an (unnamed) Cthulhu by causing R'lyeh to sink back beneath the waves.
38	** Creator/ChrisClaremont also got into the act; in the story where Magneto's HeelFaceTurn begins, Magneto's island base, which he raises from the ocean depths, is very heavily hinted as being R'Lyeh or someplace very similar.
39	* ''WesternAnimation/SouthPark'' had a trilogy of episodes where BP's drilling opened a hole into another dimension that many {{Eldritch Abomination}}s, including Cthulhu, came through to attack Earth. ''[[VideoGame/SouthParkTheFracturedButWhole The Fractured But Whole]]'' has a boss fight with Shub-Niggurath.
40	* Let's just say that at one point or another, every major franchise that is even slightly SpeculativeFiction must include a monster that would be right at home in the Mythos.
41	--> More than a literary icon, he's a cultural omnibus who shaped a style of horror that spoke to the terrors of modernism and looked ahead to what’s come to be called the postmodern. He’s the faux English gentleman who became a bit bohemian, the traditionalist who helped create a revolution in comic books and B movies. A self-declared provincial who never went west of the Mississippi river, he has helped shape a part of Hollywood Babylon that owes more than it sometimes seems to know to this terminally uncool man who at one point in his life believed it unseemly to leave his house without a hat. -- W. Scott Poole, ''In the Mountains of Madness: The Life & Extraordinary Afterlife of H.P. Lovecraft.''

Context Trivia / CthulhuMythos