Inappropriate language
So, at risk of getting banned or whatever, bleep Lovecraft, and bleep his racism. I'm not saying you need to live with that. I'm actually saying no one dors. Lovecraft doesnt control his texts. We do.As a Shakespeare fan, I totally understand what you mean.
But, to put it in a personal context, I'm in a mixed marriage and my children are of mixed heritage. According to Lovecraft, I'm a race traitor and my children should have been strangled at birth. So, how exactly am I supposed to introduce Call of Cthulhu to my kids? "Oh, hey, honey, here's this really cool game with really cool monsters and horror elements. Let's play, but, you have to promise me that you won't read the source material for this game because then you'll realize that those fish people we met at Innsmouth are actually supposed to be you."
Basically, you're saying that because he had cool ideas, we're supposed to just ignore the context of those ideas. Ignore the fact that people still make considerable amounts of money from that context.
Or, as an alternative, we could let him fade into history like so many other genre authors of the time.
See, I'm not sure that "finding merit in their art" is really worth the price. There are all sorts of brilliant writers out there. There have been more original fantasy works printed since 2000 than in the previous century. I'm pretty sure we can find some pretty cool ideas there. Let the past go. Consign it to the dustbin of history along with the other trash and instead celebrate works by authors who weren't horrible people.
Is that really too much to ask? Is your pretend eldritch horror really that important?
Mod Edit: Foul language removed. ~Umbran
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