Through The Eyes Of The Beast

So congrats, You Just Punched Out Cthulhu. The creature is disintegrating before your eyes and the world is at peace.

But did you ever stop to think how it felt?

I would like to explore this idea. Maybe not so far as to make a cosmic horror sympathetic, but at least take a look through its eyes. An abominable protagonist and a Magnificent Bastard human antagonist.

My Big Bad, the Eldritch Abomination god of madness. His motivation? He just wanted to go home.

edited 2nd Oct '10 7:09:10 PM by Carbonpillow

I've had this idea for a while now; a reconstruction of f=the fantasy genre, in which the hero becomes mad with power after saving the world, and becomes a tyrrant. A group of new heroes must stand up against him. One of these is the Eldritch Abomination from the backstory, who just wants revenge on he hero for attacking him without reason.

I'll make a thread for this story once I solidify the info.

I've been thinking of including an episode focusing on the Herald of the Outer Gods, the Big Bad of Forgotten Lore. The thing about the Herald is that he is at once a huge asshole with no redeeming qualities, and his backstory is still somewhat sympathic. He is the servitor of the Outer Gods, and exists only to carry out their will. He really hates his job and takes it out on mortals, as by manipulating and toying with lesser beings makes him feel like he's in charge for once. That's the reason why his plans to bring about the End of the World as We Know It are needlessly complicated and somewhat illogical. It's all a game for him, and it's not really the end result that matters. It's also implied that while he plays the role of a Card-Carrying Villain now, he has done many thing over the eternity, from causing mindless destruction to actually being a good guy.

My personal guess? I'd imagine a punched out Cthulhu would feel a mixture of — put into human emotions — shock, confusion, and hate. Especially hate: we're talking AM levels of pure, primal, and above all impotent fury. The shock and confusion would stem from it, as an immortal being, not having come to terms with the possibility of death as mortals inherently must. It might not truly understand what it means to "die": it would be aware that dying is a bad thing, a thing mortals will try very hard to avoid, but it probably would be dead before it understood that it was dying. So these would be its last thoughts: darkness and pain, pierced only by a blaze of hatred for the insignificant worm that caused these new feelings to intrude upon its existence. But even that last flame would gutter out and die, until reduced to a single ember of cold, pitiful, desperate fury, the last thoughts of the dying beast before its mind was snuffed out forever.

Ofcourse a real Lovecraftain being would be literally immortal. As the famous quote from the Necronimicon says, death may one day die, but they do not. Dying is something they literally cannot do. The problem with eldritch horrors in general is that in order to be true eldritch beings they have to be utterly incomprehensible to humans. Assigning them human emotions and thought patterns should be impossible, hence they make very poor viewpoint characters. Ofcourse there are exeptions, Lovecraft himself had Nyarlathotep (whom I've based the Herald on) who seems quite cabable of human-like feelings (he is stated to treat his masters with scorn, and often seems to mess with humans purely for his amusement), but even then his point of view would be very alien to humans (As with other Lovecraftian beings, humanity is less than insects to him. But while the others will step on us without noticing, Nyarlathotep is the kid with a magnefying glass).

I was tinkering with a setting overhaul for Exalted with a reduce number of nigh-omnipotent entities, with one being a Designated Villain with apparent desire to subvert stable reality and destabilize it because he's Chaotic Stupid.

But of course he has his own sympathizers and supporters. It's true that his own playground literally is Hell and it's filled with constant catastrophe and destruction. But why does he do that? He is, despite his cosmological stature, a sympathetic person — he invented Sympathy in the first place!

The true core motivation I set for the character was that he wanted to make a utopia without pain in the first place, but his comrades didn't let him — they wanted improvement via conflict. He lashed out at them and was beat down, being rendered a cripple. So he was put to a corner in reality and isolated. He spent thousands of years trying to create his own universe without pain, but with how they broke his mind and power, he can't — and they keep collapsing. This always breaks his heart... but he shan't feel it, if he feels pain his creations will, too. This only drives him further insane.

I really wish to use this setting for a game one day, but at that point I may have turned him into too much a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds at that point. :[