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[Cthulhu]

I don't remember that either.  THe problem is there's a lot of other people who came afterward and couldn't leave well enough alone, specifying and cosmologizing and doing other things that killed the mystery.  August Derleth is the main offender there.

Azlan is thematically related to Cthulhu but that's it, it's silly to say that since Dagon is a servant of Cthulhu in lovecraft (if that's even true) that Dagon has to be a servant of Aslan.

[Neonivek]

Am I honestly the only one who remembers that Father Dagan and Mother Hydra work for Cthulhu?

Azlan is thematically related to Cthulhu but that's it

Ok that explains it. I always thought Azlan was a "Well, we aren't going to call him Cthulhu... but yeah he is totally Cthulhu"

--

Though I will say that Dagan being the herald of another sleeping old one does work within the rival framework and would make him completely unique compared to the other Rivals.

Since his ultimate goal is to awaken someone else.

[nenjin]

I recall it. I'm a little weary of Lovecraft fanservice or the desire for it, ya know? Like, everything doesn't need to be Lovecraft just because it has a squid for a face and likes reality domination. TBH though, much like zombies, I think I've personally hit Peak Mythos. I like bipedal things with squidface and bat wings just as much as the next guy. But I think it's getting pretty worn these days. Once, these things were an homage to Lovecraft. Now they're well-trodden tropes.

To be fair though, obligatory Lovecraft inspirations aside, I think KDG has come up with some really flavorful ideas for their Old Ones. Maybe not the most original but the execution and detailing is quality.

[ChairmanPoo]

All too often people intending to do Lovecraft homages think something around the lines "..he was big on squids and tentacles, right?", and forget that it's not about squids and tentacles at all, but about cosmic horror. Most things in Lovecraft's pantheon are formless and/or beyond description.


...TBH chapter three of the "Call of Cthulhu" short story is a bit anticlimatic, IMO, because it brings Cthulhu down from being a gibbering horror that even asleep and dreaming drives people mad and will bring forth doom if it ever awakens, to a mere squid-dragon-thing that can be rammed with a boat somewhat successfully.

[Cthulhu]

A little bit, but at hte same time it really hammers in the cosmic horror of it.

Think about how lucky they got to stop it, and what was at stake.  if they hadn't been right there at that time and had the thought to ram him (and of course that it worked) then that would be the end of mankind as we know it.

And for all that they just bought us time.  He'll come back again and it'll be on somebody else's shoulders to try to stop him.

That's what I love about the idea of endless mode in this game.  It really reinforces just how futile the struggle against you is.  Like, let's say you win as Belial and take over the world.  The chosen one is defeated and disappears, the world is in ruins, you slowly rebuild it in your name and mankind is enslaved to your project to absorb Limos.  Rebels in the fringes continue to harry you, stealing artifacts and destroying temples and funneling weapons and knowledge to the chosen one and finally they take the fight to you and in a climactic battle the chosen one who's now in his fifties sacrifices himself to put you back in your tomb and the world is saved.

And his kids grow up celebrating.

And their kids grow up remembering the stories.

Their kids grow up fearing that The Night Shepherd will come and get them if they're bad.

And on and on until the story's passed into myth and the names of the chosen one's great great grandchildren have been forgotten and a road now passes over where their tombs once stood in a city where sages delve into the sewers to explore the ruins of a city the ancients called "Aventura," though little is known about their culture.

And then Belial wakes up to do it all again.

[Neonivek]

Cthulhu sometimes referred to as the dreaming god. He was killed by the Migo (In a somewhat ridiculous way) and current resides in Ryleh at the bottom of the ocean.

He is a Great Old One, though not one of the Outer Gods and though he is one of the more popular lovecraftian gods he isn't the most powerful nor the most active.

Azlan takes direct inspiration from him. Hence why I didn't know if he was an expy or just renamed.

TBH chapter three of the "Call of Cthulhu" short story is a bit anticlimatic, IMO, because it brings Cthulhu down from being a gibbering horror that even asleep and dreaming drives people mad and will bring forth doom if it ever awakens, to a mere squid-dragon-thing that can be rammed with a boat somewhat successfully.

The way I always justified it is that Cthulhu had not truly awakened, he was essentially sleep walking and it took a huge ship ramming it at full speed to even stop it... and it still drove the captain uselessly insane at the end.

In other words even Cthulhu's corpse kicks butt.

Fully awakened the ship wouldn't have really done much.

[Cthulhu]

That's all your headcanon though, it doesn't mean anything.  I've also never heard of this mi-go thing, and I feel like I've heard you saying other weird things that aren't from Lovecraft's canon. 

Other authors have a really bad habit of explaining too much.  It's scary because you don't know, your imagination is way scarier than what the author will come up with.

[Darkmere]

Mi-go = Fungi from Yuggoth. I have no memory of them doing anything to Cthulhu, however. Cite source?

Also there's a bunch of hangers-on to HPL's stuff, mainly August Derleth, who tried to add a bunch of shit of their own with varying degrees of success. It's taken a while to sort out what was actually in the mythos and what was added later on by other jackholes wanting to cash in, or just high-profile fanfics.

[Neonivek]

That's all your headcanon though, it doesn't mean anything

It is the implication though.

There are not many things outright stated in the books... and most interpretations side with me on this one.

Mi-go = Fungi from Yuggoth. I have no memory of them doing anything to Cthulhu, however. Cite source?

Goodness I have only heard this once and for the life of me I have never found a source except that a VERY unpopular writer no one likes might have included it in his books (basically the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs killed him... which was a magically enchanted asteroid made of platinum)

[Cthulhu]

a VERY unpopular writer no one likes

See, exactly what I was saying.  It's stupid.  It says too much.  It fills in the blanks our imaginations were doing just fine at filling, and it fills them with stupid.

[Neonivek]

a VERY unpopular writer no one likes

See, exactly what I was saying.  It's stupid.  It says too much.  It fills in the blanks our imaginations were doing just fine at filling, and it fills them with stupid.

I liked the idea of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs to be involved... And even the Mi-go doing it is a nice detail. (Albeit COMPLETELY confusing given their allegiances)

It being a magically enchanted asteroid is overkill... and it being made of platinum is just ridiculous because it is an easily verifiable fact... and Lovecraft should always "Could be real".

[thegoatgod_pan]

I too agree with the Cthulhu sleepwalking notion: nothing in Call of Cthulhu indicated that the Stars Were Right: the dreams in part I were in response to the events in part III. All that happened was a boat landed on a sticking-out fragment of R'lyeh and the crew opened the door to Cthulhu's bedroom. He devoured most of the sailors bothering him, stumbled around, got hit by a boat, which didn't really hurt him as he reformed immediately after (narrator describes him reforming in the wake of the boat) and went back to sleep.

This is why the fish-frogs (whose eldest leaders are Dagon and Hydra) don't just pop the doors of R'lyeh open and bang pots together until Cthulhu wakes up: the stars have to be right, and when they are no mortal action is going to make a difference.

I wouldn't be surprised about the dinosaur thing either: dinosaurs killed by space comet meant to kill cthulhu, accidentally liberating humanity to take over the globe?  Sounds about right.

 Lovecraft is obsessed with geologic time and paleontology and evolution and race (especially race) in their most lurid 19th century misapprehensions. Somehow, he retained every major bit of 19th century dread around evolutionary theory, the age of the universe, the death of god, the existence of dinosaurs and the insignificance of humanity and carried it through into the 1930s, long after half of the theories he seems to rely on were disproven.

Take any 19th century scientific mistake, be it phrenology or crazy theories about dinosaurs and Lovecraft is way ahead of you. E.g. tell me the fish frog people with their racist geneology (the Marsh's are Anglo-saxons who married East Asians who married fish frogs: the Cthulhu cultists and their war on pure-blooded white people ) have nothing to do with racist evolutionary 18th-19th century science that gave us charts like this

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

http://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/essays/data/art8/images/apolloLavater.gif

Hell, most of Lovecraft's cosmic terror is around evolution vs. geologic time: related here because Darwin was a geologist and the whole scale of time that evolution suggested was mind-blowing.

Thus all the Lovecraft and Co stories about time: Shadow out of Time, Ashton Smith's Ubbo-Sathla, and strange passages like the long section of in the Mountains of Madness when the geologist narrator uses the age of rocks used for sculptures to discuss the cultures of the old ones in insane scales of inhuman time:  "in the Jurrasic era they had picnics, but then in the Creataceous era it was all about playing tag with shoggoth etc"

[Majestic7]

I think one of the most interesting allegations regarding Mi-Go is in Whisperer in the Dark, where it is mentioned that the servants of the Yellow Sign and the King in Yellow are their sworn enemies. It seems to me the Mi-Go are just an alien race trying to survive in the Lovecraftian universe. The fact they are harvesting brains from humans might even be seen as charity on their part, bestowing immortality upon stupid primitives.

Regarding Cthulhu, isn't it told that the Elder Race fought Cthulhu and his spawn with Science! and shoggoth as their weapons after Big C crashed the Elder Race picnic on Earth? I've always assumed it was some sort of MAD that wiped both out, releasing the shoggoth and killing the Elder Race while aligning reality so that Cthulhu had to take a nap.

[Darkmere]

The Great Race managed to imprison some Elder Beings, but in their brainswap time traveling they found periods in the future where the cages had been breached and the world was enthralled. Eventually they found out that far in the future, the elder things were just gone, so all of the Great Race just mind-swapped with spider-critters from the end of Earth's timeline.

[TempAcc]

Maybe unrelated, but I thought the whole ~meteor sent to earth to kill cthulhu and that killed the dinosaurs~ was actualy added by Derleth later, and so is not actualy part of Lovecraft's stories, instead being part of Derleth's derp dualistic/christianized works.

Cthulhu got to earth later and fucked up the elder things experiments, yes, but I don't think its ever expressively mentioned why he's currently asleep.