[momentoftop]

I'm the opposite. One of the things I love about Lovecraft is how oblique the mythology is in his writings. I don't know much about Azathoth, save that he's somehow "Lord of all Things", while being a "Blind Idiot God." That seeming contradiction is tantalising and the last thing I want is to see it fleshed out.

It's fear of the unknown, after all, not fear of the things that have detailed wiki pages.

[ndsipa_pomu]

I find the extra detail adds to the horror, though I'd generally agree. The scariest horror films are the ones that hint rather than depicting everything.

With Azathoth, I find it more disturbing to consider that our entire universe is just a fragment of a dream by Azathoth, and the pipers play a tune to keep him asleep, as what happens to a dream when the dreamer awakes?

[nextaccountic]

What I find most disturbing is that it makes more sense than most creation myths, at least from my modern point of view; and it paints humanity hanging by a thread, like 20th century fears of being hit by a supernova, or a meteor, etc (of course we had apocalyptic themes through all of history though)

Or rather, anyone that had a dream with a person that said "don't wake up, or I will die" can relate

[momentoftop]

I love the idea of hanging by a thread, of complete existential and cosmic precarity. To again quote the opening of Call of Cthulhu, science will reveal "our frightful position [in reality]". I like the fact that, for Lovecraft, the answer to such terrifying revelations is mostly to draw the curtains and ideally brick up the window and insist "nothing to see here." The opening quote offers that as one solution, but it's recurrent in his stories. It's what the protagonists end up doing in the Dunwich horror mentioned in the blogpost.

[nextaccountic]

Also this specific tidbit explains how he can be lord of all things (he created the universe anyway) but still be a blind idiot fool (he apparently doesn't even realizes what's happening)

[ndsipa_pomu]

I like the description "monstrous nuclear chaos beyond angled space" as it implies that Azathoth isn't a reasoning, thinking being, but something that is totally beyond human comprehension. As an atheist, one thing that annoys me about the depictions of various deities is when they have petty human reasoning and desires. I like to think the relationship is more akin to ants thinking about humans - the ants have no way to even grasp the nature of humans and humans have no interest (or at least most people don't) in what an ant believes or worships.

[nextaccountic]

> I like to think the relationship is more akin to ants thinking about humans - the ants have no way to even grasp the nature of humans and humans have no interest (or at least most people don't) in what an ant believes or worships.

That's, incidentally, why I don't kill ants, but instead blow them gently so they fly away if they are in my body; or why I don't trample their mounds and look carefully at the ground when I'm walking, etc. I like to think that if some powerful being looked at Earth like we looked at ants, they wouldn't "trample" us mindlessly (like in the Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy)

For me that's a deeply religious thought somehow (and from there, veganism is an obvious consequence)

[hotnfresh]

Agree. In Lovecraft’s hands, I regard it as maybe the most-honest and -accurate depiction of cosmic reality—of that horror-adjacent feeling one may experience trying to actually imagine the universe—in fiction, but the effect falls apart if you start filling in the gaps. Most of the broader “mythos” stuff since Lovecraft can still be fun in about the same way that Catholic mythology’s fertile ground for horror, but it’s not the same thing and it’s not as interesting.