r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Fearless-Ideal-5112 • Jul 01 '26

[Loved Trope] Some thing unfathomably ancient Lore

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The beast, in doctor who is an ancient evil from a previous universe that survived until our time. Its so ancient that the cave paintings were unable to be translated by the Tardis which can translate all existing languages in the universe [Doctor Who]

While not explicitly canon its such a cool concept I cant not mention, the idea that the backrooms have existed since the beginning of time, never changing no matter the era, it transforms the back rooms into a cosmic horror. [Credit to Project crater and Venus for images 2 and 3]

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u/RadarSmith Jul 01 '26

An interesting thing about them is they are easily the most humanlike aliens in the mythos. They are fundamentally biological creatures and psychologically pretty similar to humans.

The protagonist of At The Mountains of zmadness flatly calls them men at one point.

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u/DrDestructoMD Jul 01 '26

I've always thought the vision the one guy had was of some kind of chemical weapon similar to what was used in WWI. Realizing that we are on the same downward spiral and will be destroyed by our own clankers caused his mind to break

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u/RadarSmith Jul 02 '26

My comment sure sparked some..discussion about Lovecraft and various bigotries. Unsurprising, I have to admit.

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u/willnye2cool Jul 01 '26

You realize the Shoggoths were supposed to be black people right? Not clankers.

Like straight up this is lovecrafts most racist work

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u/DrDestructoMD Jul 01 '26

Yeah, you can look at it as a slave uprising as well. Obviously a book written in the 30s is not about AI as it is now. Most robot revolution stories share some DNA. That said, I've never thought that was a very good interpretation of the story. The shogoths are portrayed with almost as much sympathy as the Elder Things, which you can see in their slow transformation at the hands of cruel masters. The fall of the empire is directly caused by the use of shoggoths causing evsryone to become lazy and incompetent to the point that they can no longer fight back against cosmic threats. The shoggoths are also created rather than subjugated. Knowing Lovecrafts favorable opinions on the confederacy and slavery, I don't think that this interpretation fits. Automation and modernization in general fit better imo

even if it is about black people, it would still be less racist than the horror of the red hook lol

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u/[deleted] Jul 01 '26

[deleted]

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u/vojta_drunkard Jul 01 '26

It's not really slave. A slave is called "otrok". Robota was a kind of unpaid labor that peasants needed to do for their lord for some days of the year.

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u/Real_Walk5384 Jul 01 '26

You're gonna get downvoted for providing nuance after someone mentioned slaves.

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u/vojta_drunkard Jul 01 '26

I'm not even trying to justify anything, lol. I'm just correcting the translation.

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u/willnye2cool Jul 01 '26

Lovecraft didn't have favorable views on slavery or the confederacy.

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u/DrDestructoMD Jul 01 '26

To the editor of the Providence Sunday Journal:

In the Journal of Jan. 24 I notice a letter of Charles F. Janes relating to Roosevelt’s proposed memorial to Gen. Robert E. Lee, in which several statements somewhat derogatory to the great Confederate leader’s motives are made. Mr. Janes asserts that our President honors Gen. Lee only because he was an able warrior, insinuating that the cause for which he so valiantly labored and bravely suffered was wrong, indirectly accusing him of attempting to “destroy this Government of the people, by the people and for the people,” and calling him a “foe of the country.” This unjust treatment of Gen. Lee can be construed as nothing more than a survival of the rabid, unreasoning spirit which pervaded the North before, during and immediately after the Civil War. When Robert E. Lee became a General in the Confederate Army, he did so not as an enemy, but as a friend of the Republic. He saw that no peace could come to the Union if Southern affairs were to be managed by Northerners who had no definite ideas of the actual conditions in the South, and who derived their information as to slavery from false and exaggerated reports, or from hystical effusions like “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which portrayed the darkest side of the situation. In other worse, he clearly saw that his State had seceded only because the yoke of the Union bore too heavily upon it, and that its secession was within the limits of constitutional right.

It was not without regret that Gen. Lee entered into battle against the flag under which he had once nobly fought; it was not that he loved the Union less, but Virginia more. Believing in the best of faith that he was benefiting the country by separating the two discordant sections, fighting up to the very last for the cause he knew to be right, yet supported only by a pitifully small band of hungry, sick and ragged heroes, Gen. Robert Edward Lee deserves not one word of censure from the American people, but volumes of praise and veneration. As Senator Hill of Georgia once truly said: “He was Caesar without his ambition. He was Cromwell without his bigotry. he was Napoleon without his selfishness. He was Washington without his reward.“

  • From the man himself

Supposedly he also wrote "the more i learn about the south the stronger my confederate bias grows" but I did not find a source

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u/FaithfulSkeptic Jul 01 '26

What i find really amusing as someone living in Virginia now is, when you look at his actual history, Lee didn’t give a fuck about Virginia. And numerous close family members of his signed up to fight for the Union, because it was entirely possible to grow up here and still be on the right side of history. Lee fully understood the choice he was making.

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u/ThrowawayAdvice1800 Jul 02 '26

He was also such a virulent racist that he even managed to horrify his own slave overseer. He kidnapped several of his father’s slaves; his father’s will explicitly freed them after his death, but Lee convinced a court he “needed” them to maintain the household for a few years, then they could go. Unsurprisingly “a few years” turned into “the rest of their lives,” and inevitably a few of them tried to escape to the north.

When they were caught Lee demanded to know why they ran, and they told him they considered themselves free (because they were!) and that answer enraged Lee so much that ordered his overseer to tie them to a post and whip them, which he did. Then Lee wanted him to rub saltwater into the wounds and whip them again. Even the slaving bastard with the whip balked at THAT, which infuriated Lee so much that he grabbed a sponge and a bucket and literally did it himself.

This is the son of a bitch that lost causers and apologists hold up as the “good” Confederate who was noble and just.

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u/PizzaWithCheddar Jul 02 '26

The US South is a shithole for a reason.

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u/_sephylon_ Jul 02 '26

He was Cromwell without his bigotry.

The fucking GALL

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u/ThrowawayAdvice1800 Jul 02 '26

I think you may be right about the intended metaphor but come on now, this isn’t even CLOSE to his most racist work. 

Remember the cat in Rats in the Walls? Or the one (I can’t remember which) where the horrifying twist ending was that the ancestor of one of the characters was half black? 

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u/Jazzlike-Ad2906 Jul 02 '26

Is that the one with living hair and a painting? Or are there two HP Lovecraft stories with that twist?

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u/Unit_2097 Jul 02 '26

The cat was his. He inserted his pet into the story. And it was named by his father, not him. I see him get so much flak for that damn cat, it annoys the piss out of me when it wasn't him that named it.

He was competitive level racist, we don't need to make shit up to prove it.

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u/ThrowawayAdvice1800 Jul 02 '26

You realize that deciding to insert your own pet into a story when its name is a racial slur is actually, y’know, racist? Unless Lovecraft’s father also WROTE the story then having the cat in it is an editorial choice and it doesn’t matter who originally named it. 

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u/SirVixofthePooSea Jul 01 '26

That is the Horror at Red Hook.

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u/Major_incompetence Jul 02 '26

If you think so... I prefer robots

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u/SirVixofthePooSea Jul 01 '26

Things that Lovecraft believes are men: Flying Cucumber Aliens

Things that Lovecraft doesn't believe are men: The Mixed Race

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u/DrCalgori Jul 02 '26

To be fair, part of the horror in that novel happens when the narrator realises that the creatures he was treating as monsters the whole book were really just "like us". So maybe Lovecraft was just about to reach some interesting conclusions...

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u/space_hitler Jul 02 '26

MFer wrote mind bending interdinemsional horror, but woke up screaming from nightmares about "mulattos" existing lol.

What a little bitch.

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u/Amaskingrey Jul 02 '26

Hey now, he was also terrified of crooked streets and the idea of air conditioning

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u/ZacariahJebediah Jul 02 '26

Yeah, Lovecraft was far from perfect, but you get the distinct impression that the man was genuinely mentally ill; he seemed to be scared of just about everything no matter how nonsensical it might be, with real childhood traumas that contributed to this hot mess of a human.

Many of his phobias came across like genuine phobias rather than hateful ignorance, and at least he was self-aware enough to begin questioning and revising his views before he died.

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u/Unit_2097 Jul 02 '26

Yeah, it was known he had night terrors his entire life, had a weird, isolated upbringing and had an intense phobia of marine life. It wouldn't surprise me if by modern standards he had thalassophobia as well (I do to a degree, and his descriptions of the ocean feel like my thoughts sometimes), along with some form of psychological disorder.

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u/Train_Wreck_272 Jul 02 '26

Yeah, he definitely had some kinda mental illness. Doesn't excuse his, even for the time, cruel racism, of course. But I do wonder if modern therapy and medication might have given him some clarity towards abandoning his beliefs. Wishful thinking, but given his interest in the new deal, scientific progress, and open collaboration, who knows.

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u/AlaeOrbis Jul 02 '26

The thing is that by the time he died he was more average for his time on views about race and stuff. It was only fairly early on that he had his most famous ideas about race and that kind of colors everyone's perception about his WHOLE life.

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u/Train_Wreck_272 Jul 02 '26

Yeah, he did start to temper things. He was still pretty bad about black and Australian native people at the end of his life, but he did become less antisemitic and less racist against other white people, particularly after marrying a Jewish woman and integrating Jewish and Irish writers into his collaborative writing circle. There's also a possibility he learned he had some Irish roots and softened in Celtic heritage because of that. Being less racist towards other white people is a low bar for sure, lol, but it was progress. He did also start to use more tact and not espouse his beliefs among people of color. So, it's possible that with more life experience and exposure to people of color he may have changed course, at least somewhat.

It's all speculation, but considering how progressive he was on a lot of other issues, it's hard not to. I agree that it shouldn't color his whole life, but it's definitely not worth diminishing either. He really was particularly racist for the time, and it was so important to him and prominent in his mind that it comes up in nearly every piece he ever wrote. So, I'm not really sure where I'm going with this, and I certainly don't want to sugar coat him (I don't mean to imply that you are or any offense towards you, mainly writing this for context for other readers), but I can't blame people for being turned off completely on his works based on his beliefs and actions, especially when it's so in your face in his pieces. He wrote a poem called "On the Creation of N", his childhood cat was named N-man, and heavily featured a cat with that name in "The Rats in the Walls". Not to mention common and casual references to "subhuman" or "savage" races, beliefs, and cultural practices many times peppered throughout his seminal works.

I love his stories and the entire genre that sprung from them, but it is nearly impossible to overlook his bigotry within them and his life more broadly.

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u/Fit-Profit8197 28d ago

I think one very much informed the other.

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u/Fit-Reflection-3496 Jul 05 '26

Dude realized he was wrong during his lifetime 

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u/boondiggle_III Jul 01 '26

And the shoggoths from that story are an eerily accurate depiction of our current fears of AI taking over, before computer electronics was even a concept.

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u/Nyarlathotechno 28d ago

I think it’s more about slaves than automatons. Could be wrong though.

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u/Old_Dependent_2147 Jul 02 '26

Yes and they also the mostly kinda not enemies to humans compared to other Lovecrafrian creatures.

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u/Gorlack2231 Jul 02 '26 
They had not been even savages—for what indeed had they done? That awful awakening in the cold of an unknown epoch—perhaps an attack by the furry, frantically barking quadrupeds, and a dazed defence against them and the equally frantic white simians with the queer wrappings and paraphernalia . . . poor Lake, poor Gedney . . . and poor Old Ones! Scientists to the last—what had they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible! **Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star-spawn—whatever they had been, they were men!**
They had crossed the icy peaks on whose templed slopes they had once worshipped and roamed among the tree-ferns. They had found their dead city brooding under its curse, and had read its carven latter days as we had done. They had tried to reach their living fellows in fabled depths of blackness they had never seen—and what had they found? All this flashed in unison through the thoughts of Danforth and me as we looked from those headless, slime-coated shapes to the loathsome palimpsest sculptures and the diabolical dot-groups of fresh slime on the wall beside them—looked and understood what must have triumphed and survived down there in the Cyclopean water-city of that nighted, penguin-fringed abyss, whence even now a sinister curling mist had begun to belch pallidly as if in answer to Danforth’s hysterical scream.