Disconnect Between Designer's Intent and Player Intepretation

[Bedrockgames]

I think you are giving HPL way too much credit here, but I guess there is no harm in that. Like you, I don't want to discount the role of the reader in the communication either, least of all in rejecting the writer's take even once and especially once you understand it.

Keep in mind, the two things I am saying he may be coming to terms with internally are the possibility that he has inherited mental illness from his mother and his father, and perhaps a growing realization that he isn't physically well. I don't know that a writer writing a story like this and using that as fuel to make the sort of ending this story has is giving him a lot of credit. That is pretty much how writers function in my view. I'm also not saying this is fully conscious. I think there are other things going on the story, which again I don't think we can really get into.

For me though your take is tying back into my problem with attempting to scare modern readers with horror, in as much that even forced transformation and loss of humanity and an alien conspiracy that amounts to a cuckoo breeding strategy makes you shrug and go, "Isn't it pretty! Look, he's coping with his mental illness by accepting his inner nature!"

Well, I can see what you are saying, but I don't think that moment of beauty at all undermines the horror for the reader because there is still something very uneasy about that too. When I first read it when I was in highschool the beauty of it was something I completely missed for example, and it wasn't until later that it became more clear that there was beauty there and a kind of religious language. But even then, that is still an odd thing to feel after all the horrors leading up to that. To me that is a very Clive Barker thing, and I think he is very good at making horror that is both beautiful, even morally a lot more cloudy and unclear, while still frightening me as a reader. I suppose everyone is going to have different tastes though in terms of what they find scary. There is a point where you can go too far with things like beauty, comedy, romance, in a horror story and it stops being scary (but there is also a sweet spot where those things can enhance the horror).

Also I am not saying one should take all alien horror and make it beautiful or misunderstood. I don't think that would add anything to the Xenomorphs for example (it might be an interesting political or social commentary but it wouldn't be especially scary I think). So I do take your point. Here though, this is more like a puzzling final passage in the story that makes me question everything I've read to that point.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think Stross actually has an interesting take on it: his Deep Ones are not intrinsically evil entities (nor his Cthonians), just long time dwellers who are not interested in dealing with crap from the newbie surface dwellers. His take is that Lovecraft and his cohort are filtering events through their own prejudices and problems. That said, the actual Lovecraftian gods are every bit as awful as ever--even C'thulhu which is a rather different sort of entity in Stross' work is just appalling, and Nyarlathotep is better only to the degree that he considers humanity fun toys and useful pets rather than something to be exterminated.

So there's room to say that Lovecraft had some understanding of the terror that was behind the facade of the world, but that he was generally bad at separating off the genuinely evil from the merely alien (the Great Race of Yith notwithstanding).

 

[Celebrim]

I think Stross actually has an interesting take on it...

I really enjoyed 'The Atrocity Archives' and his early takes on the laundry, but Stross has completely lost me as a reader as the series progressed because Stross came off more like he was saying, "Wouldn't it be fun to live in a Cthulhu universe? Think how much less boring things would be? We nerds could be cool wizards who get to kiss all the hot monster chicks and we could gain superpowers and be vampires and it would all be great and awesome!" Like there is this meme where fans are like, "I wish I could live in Narnia" or "I wish I could live in Middle Earth" or what not, and then at the end of the fandom there is like some fandom whose universe is pure dystopia and they are like, "Can't relate". Well, I would have thought that the world of Lovecraftian horror was one of those places no one wanted to live, but I guess not.

 

[Bedrockgames]

You ever seen the original B&W Dracula with Bela Lugosi? A real classic and worth watching, but it's impossible to watch as a modern viewer in the way it was originally received. Women were literally fainting with terror. The audience was screaming with horror. The original screening was so intense, that the actually edited the final release so that it never actually shows the vampires fangs because that was felt to be too graphic and horrifying. Now days, compared to the sort of stuff people take in and shrug at, it plays as a comedy.

I think we might have had this discussion before, but I'n probably the wrong person for this example, as I find older horror movies more scary than modern ones. I will say the original Dracula, as horror movies go, I don't think is particularly scary (though I don't think it is due to the feinting women). Nosferatu on the other hand, I still say is maybe the scariest horror movie of all time for me. And some things can lose their sting over time. Some movies stand the test of time and others don't. I think Dracula is just one of those films whose horror didn't make it across the decades. But I find a lot the techniques in modern horror movies people point to to say that older movies aren't as scary, not particularly impactful on me. Which isn't to say there aren't modern horror movies that I find scary: I found 28 Days Later very effective, and I found the Descent quite scary as well. I can get much more into the suspense of an old hammer movie for instance than I can into the newer movies I see popping up on my netflix page. And I don't think it is because those newer movies aren't as scary or bad, I just tend to engage older movies with more immersion than newer ones (which I think is fundamental to allowing a horror movie to impact you).

Also a lot of older horror movies weren't necessarily aiming for the kinds of scares you have in a movie like the Exorcist or Nosferatu. Bride of Frankenstein is a wonderful monster movie, and I love it, but it is also not particularly about the scares. So they sometimes need to be graded on factors like camp and who they were aimed at.

 

[Bohandas]

Planescape Torment would have made a great visual novel. I remember loving the characters, dialogue and the intrigue, hated the D&D mechanics constantly distracting me from them. And that was back when I was still in love with D&D!

It would have made an excellent visual novel. But instead it was an extremely bad RPG.

 

[Bohandas]

These are always worth a re-read as some of the things people repeat, like everyone going mad, doesn't need up being true. But madness was definitely a theme (pretty sure both his parents were institutionalized).

The ones that stand out to me as actually going mad are Herbert West's patients (as well as West himself who, in addition to gradually devolving into sociopathy, also seems to lose the thread of his own work; by the end he seems to just be messing around), and the family from The Color Out Of Space. And both of those groups went mad due to physical brain damage.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I really enjoyed 'The Atrocity Archives' and his early takes on the laundry, but Stross has completely lost me as a reader as the series progressed because Stross came off more like he was saying, "Wouldn't it be fun to live in a Cthulhu universe? Think how much less boring things would be? We nerds could be cool wizards who get to kiss all the hot monster chicks and we could gain superpowers and be vampires and it would all be great and awesome!" Like there is this meme where fans are like, "I wish I could live in Narnia" or "I wish I could live in Middle Earth" or what not, and then at the end of the fandom there is like some fandom whose universe is pure dystopia and they are like, "Can't relate". Well, I would have thought that the world of Lovecraftian horror was one of those places no one wanted to live, but I guess not.

I think any reading of the Laundry books that sees it presented as a positive place to be requires a pretty slanted view. In particular, it becomes progressively hard to see the later books that way.

 

[Celebrim]

I think any reading of the Laundry books that sees it presented as a positive place to be requires a pretty slanted view. In particular, it becomes progressively hard to see the later books that way.

I admit I haven't read past 'The Annihilation Score' but I think my take holds up to that point.

 

[ersatzphil]

As a recovering English literature graduate student, I could not possibly be more thrilled to see this discussion here. . But at the end of the day, aren't RPG manuals instruction manuals? If the authors fail to convey their meaning, then that is a failure on their part.

As someone who came up in the New Criticism, I’d be inclined to argue that RPGs are more like dances or songs - the work of art is the act played out at the table, not the sheet music or Players Handbook that supports the performance.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I admit I haven't read past 'The Annihilation Score' but I think my take holds up to that point.

I'm afraid I don't, really; even early on those books were clear about the sword of Damacles hanging over everyone and the fundamentally terrifying perspective being in the Laundry provided.