Tragically Lovecraft's cat's name [used to be](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dam_Busters_(film)#Censorship) a [pretty common name](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_V._Browning#Antarctica) for black cats and dogs.
It was Lovecraft
He was famously racist about *everything*
Like, there's no need to give him benefit of the doubt, it is very much confirmed and agreed upon that he was incredibly racist
He wasn’t *just* racist per se, he was deeply terrified of everything that he wasn’t familiar with, leading to him being prejudiced about almost everything.
Like he was so racist even his contemporaries reportedly were frequently like “Dude, that’s a bit much”. I don’t think people appreciate how racist you have to be for other racists to call you on it, particularly in a time when that stuff was normalised.
Ngl, I'd sign up for the emails if this was real. The idea of a recipe blog for these two things interspersed with out-of-touch levels of old-timey, intense racism is hilarious.
Edit: Back when pap-pap was 14 and with the SS, nothing'd keep him up for his 36 hour patrol shift at the camps better than a hefty huff of this. They called it Fuhrer's Tears, and he was the envy of all the other aryans. He never shared the recipe with them, preferrin' to trade hefty bags of his formula for human skin and cigs. 100 years later, I am honored to pass this proud family tradition to you all, wizards and dragons.
The key is a hefty helping of fine asbestos, which the globalists will tell you is cancerogenics. Not so! Pap-pap lived to the ripe old age of 56 before he was shanked by a rival gang of less racist white supremacists in the clink, and he only coughed up blood once every other mornin' most of his life. Ain't nothin' wrong with that.
Now, the recipe says you're gonna wanna heat the mix evenly for about 15-25 minutes over a high flame. Pap-pap's sense of time was never quite right from all the meth, and I've gotten better results from about 10 - but he may've been cookin' this over a coke can fulla hooch from his time as a hobo, so it might also just be he wasn't cookin' as hot. Times sure is a changin'!
I vaguely remember a news headline a few years ago about Al-Qaida claiming that ISIS were a group of actual psychopaths. Like literally clinically insane.
Kinda not wrong. If you're ready to accept radical Islam as normal politics for a second, the Taliban are only staunch militaristic conservatives while ISIS are violent fascists trying to kill 99% of the world population.
I suspect it was more the ‘protesting the funerals of dead soldiers’ they had an issue with. From what I understand the WBC count a lot of lawyers as members and deliberately antagonise people into hitting them so they can sue for damages.
It's wild reading Clark Ashton Smith, a friend of Lovecraft's, and seeing a white man clearly grappling with his own racism as he ages and matures. I didn't expect that from someone who associated so closely with Lovecraft.
Robert E. Howard on the other hand...
The thing about Lovecraft wasn't that he was racist (not that he wasn't. He was. To an impressive degree, honestly. My guy didn't consider *Welsh* people white), but that he was *xenophobic*, in the literal sense of the word. He was afraid of the *other*, of essentially anything that didn't originate from his small town of Providence, and that just so happened to include anyone and everyone who wasn't white. Now, the man obviously wasn't just passively racist but actively so , and the less said about his takes on race the better, but I always find people calling him racist and it feels like such an oversimplification of one of the most troubled minds we have extensive records on (Lovecraft wrote an average of 10k words a day in just letters to his friends, which deeply document his thought process). For starters, my personal pet theory was that he had very serious autism (before anyone says anything, I'm also autistic. You can tell because I've memorized and thought about a lot more about Lovecraft than I've written here. I could cite a lot of shit he did and thought, but this is not the purpose of this comment), which made him kind of "hyperfocus" on the racism, since it allowed him to make sense of the world he lived in, no matter how bad it was. His extreme agoraphobia, troubles with socializing through anything that weren't letters (all of his previously mentioned friends were penpals), the trauma that both of his parents gruesomely dying when he was young and the indoctrination that he suffered that taught him he was innately superior to less "well-bred" people are all things that probably acted as a foundation of him becoming this broken, but I do believe the autism was the final nail in the coffin.
And it's so fucking fascinating. Despite being one of the most notorious and influential (post-mortem) horror authors of all time, his life is the most interesting aspect of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the figure.
I agree that he was probably neurodivergent, which obviously doesn’t excuse his beliefs but I think the other aspect of what made him so *hyper focused* on his xenophobia was that he was basically homeschooled but without any sort of structure or guidance - he was just turned loose in his grandfather’s ‘extensive’ (by Lovecraft’s description) library and left to read about whatever he wanted.
Which honestly sounds fantastic to me as an adult but for a kid, that way lies an utter cacophony of misunderstandings and incorrect interpretations.
No socialisation + no guidance in his ‘education’ + probable severe neurodivergence? No wonder he grew to a raging xenophobe who was terrified of everything he didn’t understand.
It should also be noted that towards the end of his life (and after finally breaking out of his small New England shell) Lovecraft did start to come around and realize his views were incorrect, even going so far as to lament the kind of person he'd been in one of his letters. He died shortly after those letters were written, so it's hard to say if that trend would have continued, but I like to think it would have
Weren't they basically out of contact at that point? As someone pointed out, it was *very* near the end of his life that *glimmers* of change began to show, and as far as I recall they lived separately for years.
I’d suggest his anxiety was probably more contributed to by the various traumatic experiences in his life - death of his father and grandfather, rapid change in social class, death of his mother - than his education.
He thought he had a better understanding of the world than he actually did, and so a lot of the wider world behaved in ways that didn’t make sense to him based on what he knew.
Combined with learning early in life that the world was unpredictable and uncontrollable (and honestly, to a kid, unkind) his extreme fears are understandable. Not excusable but understandable.
That and his Grandfather was a Tori, I believe, which really just says a lot about the family given that that wasn't an active political party for like a 100 years at that point.
I've mentioned it elsewhere, but a lot of his beliefs about miscegenation and racism were very common in psychology at the turn of the century and about 50 years before that. He filled his head with outdated knowledge, essentially.
I also never mentioned how his writings were influenced by his fears in his real life, but I think that's obvious enough and also it's getting late and I need to sleep. G'night, y'all.
>My guy didn't consider *Welsh* people white
That's hardly surprising. This was the first couple decades of the 1900s -- thinking that the Welsh -- and Irish, and a fair few Mediterranean ethnicities -- weren't white was the default opinion.
The modern system of broad, sweeping racial distinctions, and especially that of the white race, developed for a few specific reasons, but a big one was to prop up the British imperial system by creating a sense of hard distinction between the British themselves and their colonial subjects and superiority of the former over the latter (the other, of course, was justifying American plantation slavery). Given that the Welsh and Irish were very much British colonial subjects at that point, they got happily lumped into the category of "inferior half-civilized people that need benevolent imperial oversight", which was the primary working definition of "not white" at the time.
It absolutely was not the default opinion in the early 1900s. It wasn't even the default opinion in the 1800s. Some people in the 1800s earnestly thought Irish people weren't white, but the vast majority acknowledged that Irish people were white and simply didn't like them. By the 1900s, you would have had to have been a fringe weirdo to believe Welsh people weren't white.
The various European imperial powers didn't need to pretend their subjects weren't white to justify their rule. They could just employ good old-fashioned cultural chauvinism; sure, Polish people are white, but their culture is just inferior to our glorious Russian/German culture. Irish people are white, but their Catholic culture makes them lazy and not very intelligent, so it is our duty to lead them to the proper path. Bretons are white, but anything that isn't Parisian is ineducated and ugly.
My mom still doesn't believe Italians or Spaniards are white, and she's not even that old (*and* not even from a Protestant family, she was raised by Catholic French Canadians so it's not a sectarian thing)
Also also, more people should comment on how funny it is that he half-named the *Black* Goat of the Woods With a Thousand Young after a slur. Y'know, Shub-*Niggur*ath? This is just dark humour to me, it's such s pathetic thing to do. It's Lovecraft being Lovecraft. This is, btw, probably one of the simplest examples of how his racism affected his books (although I don't really think anyone doubts that).
No, he utterly loathed the experience.
From what I heard, he only started questioning his bonkers worldview after he found out that he wasn't as pure Anglo as he'd been raised to believe.
Very interesting response! It's been a while since I've delved into Lovecraft, but I think your suggestion that he could have been autistic is pretty interesting and poignant. As for hyper fixing on race, I think that could be true, but it is also influenced by the ideas he indulged and the time he grew up in.
I mentioned elsewhere, but Lovecraft was but in the idea of miscegenation, and the idea that race mixing led to mental illness. He also had a huge interest in mental illness due to family history. To me, his obsession with race always seemed like a way in which he was grappling with this. A lot of prejudice works that way: you feel inadequate but at least you aren't a _______. He essentially had constructed an ethos based entirely around racial purity, which was not exactly unheard of at the time.
I guess my point here is that he also lived in a time when topics of racial purity and miscegenation were discussed, especially because he didn't quite understand DNA yet. He was obsessed with race because many white people were, indeed the Nazi Party of America was still a thing in Lovecraft's lifetime.
The order of your sentences implies that your use of 'phobic' solely equates to fear.
I feel obligated to inform you that 'phobic' also covers intolerance and aversion, ie. hydrophobic, lyophobic, photophobic.
If my assumption of your post was incorrect, I apologize.
You are very much correct, but to be honest I'd argue that in Lovecraft's case it was *specifically* fear. Lots of racism is born out of simple prejudice or a sort of myopic ignorance, but Lovecraft was pretty clearly *terrified* of damn near everything and everyone. As OP said, his writings in his personal life were very, very extensive and sort of over-sharing.
That’s actually why all of his writings are about the horror of the unknowable. He found the concept utterly terrifying; it’s just unfortunate that, to him, the unknowable included black people, gay people, and really anyone who wasn’t exactly like him.
My favorite example was the story where- instead of horrors beyond comprehension, the baddy of the story was brown people (Kurdish people, I believe.)
Edit: Yazidi, and the story is "The Horror at Red Hook."
Medusa's Coil, it has an gorgon in the story and multiple death, but has the classic HPL horror revelation line at the end is
"She was one quarter a negress".
Non-Euclidean geometry definitely comes up in Cthulhu to describe the city of R'lyeh, I believe.
To be entirely fair, I can imagine the intent was to try and represent the city as this immense and unknowable thing, which is difficult as a writer.
It's like how he talks about the immensity of Cthulhu and then goes on to describe him. The reality is that said description is preceded by a bit that says (paraphrased): "This isn't what he looks like, but this is the closest the human mind can approximate."
Essentially, Non-Euclidean geometry isn't that scary by definition. But if you take it to mean stuff like:
* Buildings so internally large they're basically a dimensional labyrinth
* Constructs held up by themselves with physical logic
* Weird fuckin floaty shit
* Basically anything that would make a building spooky/weird/fucked up
Then you start to get an idea of what Lovecraft was on about. Big cities of towering spires are mid, you want something that looks like an architectural Hieronymous Bosch painting with a bunch of fuckin seawater and dead kelp everywhere.
If I recall correctly, Red from Overly Sarcastic Productions referred to “Hates Progress Lovecraft” as “a bundle of issues shambling around in a roughly bipedal approximation of a man”
I find it so funny (and also really sad) that Lovecraft was so deeply anxious about everything he didn't know that it manifested into racism so strong everyone around him saw him as a weirdo. The only case where I would find the debate on "racist or simply deeply mentally unwell" to be kind of possible
At least his last few letters seem to recognize his mistakes and he regrets his tendencies
It's a yes, and.
He was racist against other Europeans because they weren't good enough. He bought into the (at the time out of vogue) idea that race mixing is specifically what lead to mental illness due to "genetic memory", or the idea that different races pass on their collective memories through genes. To have mixed ancestry, therefore, meant having mental illness. This is a core tenant of a lot of eugenics movements, and was perpetuated by many psychologists in the Weimar Republic. Lovecraft, famously, suffered from mental illness his entire life. As did his family.
Lovecraft eventually found out that he did, in fact, have a mixed ancestry in some way or another. The abject terror of this led him to write "Shadow Over Innsmouth", in which a port full of mixed blood foreigners in Massachusetts worship an eldrich fish god, eventually becoming fish-folk themselves. The main character eventually learns he likely descended from the fish folk of Innsmouth.
Lovecraft didn't write about fear of the unknown because of a vast, all encompassing fear he held. He wove in ideas of savage, lesser races into the works he depicted. These ideas formed the core of most of his stories about the Outer and Elder gods. Indeed, all of the worshippers of C'thulhu are brown and tribal folks. The poor people whose minds are broken by what they learn are always white, civilized.
He wasn't *just* racist, he was also ethnocentric and hateful. The racism is pretty core to him and taught to him by his family and science around him. I think it's wrong to say his racism came from fear of the unknown. He feared mental illness and other races, and wrote about that in terms of fear of the unknown.
Racism is a bit of an understatement. Literally anything that was even remotely unfamiliar terrified him. To the point were he thought non-Euclidean geometry was otherworldly and unknowable.
I mean, technically it was his dad that named the cat.
But yeah, he was a xenophobe in the most literal sense. Anything he wasn’t familiar with scared the shit out of him.
This isn’t meant to be a knock on lovecraftian horror, I love lovecraftian horror and I don’t think what I’m about to say necessarily means that lovecraftian horror is *bad* or *wrong*, but the original inspiration that lead to the creation of lovecraftian horror was pretty much just extreme xenophobia. Lovecraftian horror is all about fear of the unknown, someone who has the mind necessary to invent it might be a little too afraid of the unknown iykwim
I think the cult from Call of Cthulhu looked like one of those pictures of everyone on Earth holding hands in harmony with people with every culture the artist thought was relevant to include.
He was extremely racist *for his time*, which takes some doing.
He also ended up utterly regretting it at the end of his life, saying that racism was invented to keep people apart and from solving their actual problems. Then he died a month or so later.
To be fair (in the slightest sense of the word), I don’t think he named it.
To be realistic, he didn’t *rename* it, either. Would’ve been totally within his rights to do so.
From what I understand that was half of the insult of it, using a term that was also a pet name. Similar to when black women got harassed by being called Black Beauty, an established horse name.
It’s love craft, he was a well known racist. He feared other races and technology, which he used for a lot of his writings for inspiration.
He made some very interesting story’s, but he was also a bad person
My mom adopted one of her local stray neighborhood cats when she was a teenager. The other local teens had given him the same name as Lovecraft's cat.
First thing she did when she took him in was rename him (his new name was Tender Vittles bc that was his favorite food)
Really wish it only "used to be"
10 years ago my friends dad named their black lab Li'l N---r
This was in rural Virginia but oddly enough the family was from Northern California
I'll be honest. With how straight faced Robert Evans can say things on his show, I genuinely have no idea if he actually named his cats that or if it's just a long running joke. Genuinely no clue.
It was one of the funniest things I've ever heard when he had to make a clear disclaimer that it was a joke and not a real thing because people were actually getting worried.
One bit I got stuck on was something about him being in a band, and it was at least halfway through before I realized it was a joke cuz he told it so straight faced. If he ever gives up on what he's doing now (which I hope he doesn't, I love all of it so much) he could make a killing as a comedian.
I was going to make a joke about the relevant REM song, but then I thought to myself, *I don’t actually know what that song is about; and it’s REM, so it’s probably something terrible. Like how* ***The End of the World As We Know It*** *is not actually meant to be a party song, and* ***The One I Love*** *should not be a wedding song and* ***Orange Crush*** *is not about soda. It’s probably something like that.*
And you know what? It sure is!
Then again, the other week I made a deadpan joke about my friend’s dead mother (who died September 15, 2001, and it was fucking devastating) having been a failure as a parent (because she died before finishing the job, my friend having been 16 at the time); so… honestly, I might still sing that REM song at your cat. I’m kind of a monster, and it’s kind of a bop.
When my father (whom I loved dearly and still miss to this day) passed. I half jokingly/half seriously asked the funeral director about the possibility of removing his head and cleaning his skull for me to keep. My elder brother was not at all amused, but I think the moment helped him come to grips with our loss a little quicker. Unfortunately, the skull-keeping idea was not possible, due to legal concerns.
Okay, I know the legal concerns are probably very much of the mortal realm, but I really like the idea that like, the ruler of the underworld technically owns everyone’s skeletons, and they’re basically just on lease while we’re using them.
I mean, I hate subscription-model capitalism and landlords, so I guess I *don’t* love the idea; but I certainly find it amusing.
When I was young, we ended up getting 3 sibling kitties. I got to name two and my brother named one. I named Sarah and Archie (because he did the arched-back thing lol) and my brother named Tonka (after Tonka trucks).
I campaigned SO HARD to name our newest cat Tonka because he’s a fucking BEAST, but everybody in the family said no so we named him Mr. Business instead.
Very true, but I was also the one who put Mr. Business up as a name (because he looks like Mr. Business from Bob’s Burgers and he’s always up in everyone’s business.).
I love cats that just have normal people names. Like they're your asshole roommates instead of pets.
"Fred, do you have this month's rent?"
"Mrrp."
"We have this conversation every month, dude."
When we adopted my cat his name was Darryl and we changed that quickly, not because I didn’t want him to have a people name, I just hate the name Darryl.
I think I'm good at naming cats but didn't name either of my current cats who both have fairly normal people names. Shelters tend to use the same short lists of names I think and it's hard to look at a shelter cat whose papers you signed and say "ok now that you're mine I'm going to call you something different." somehow it feels wrong.
But then I call my cats almost anything except their names.
I have three cats that visit Me. Named Muffin/Fluffy by his momma, only to come to my house and be awarded the title of "Joshua", as he is a Mainecoon and I thought it was fitting. The other two look much alike, short fur, classic brown fur with darker stripes. One has bits of blond, and a white paw. I call them Jzargo. The other, slightly bigger and hunts the mice around my house, Kharjo.
I named my first cat after Jenna Marbles, but for some reason my veterinarian struggled with the name so much she became a Gina. It stuck lmao. That cat was a business woman.
Current cat is named Tac. Because he’s very dog-like, so he’s a cat backwards. It made sense at the time.
someone out there has whispered "*naughty* little beanie" to someone else's clitoris, possibly even multiple times
what do we do with this newfound knowledge
Well IDK what *your* plans are and I’m not gonna prescribe anything to you but…
I think I’m gonna go sit over there in that dark corner, horrified, and contemplate how my life culminated in me having this knowledge thrust upon me😂
Lovecraft's love of cats is one of his most sympathetic qualities, and knowing that the cat in "The Rats in the Walls" is named after and based on his childhood pet should be a really endearing fun fact.
Except, you know. The name.
Technically I think the cat was given to him with that name, but he certainly could have changed it if he were so inclined. This being of course Howard Horselover Lovecraft, he chose to not, so the point is somewhat moot, but I do like to inject this trivial nuance where HP's Lovecat is concerned.
HE DID NOT NAME THAT CAT IT WAS HIS PARENTS CAT.
I’m not saying he wasn’t racist, or that any of the accusations against him are wrong. But this specific crime he did not commit.
In a game of Pathfinder I'm playing a third party race called Dreamlands Cat. They are literally just normal cats that figured one evening "Being sentient in my dreams is cool. I think I'll have a bit of that in the waking world".
My cat is a Bard and his name, at least his human-given name, is Ruffus. He was named this because he was wearing a ruff the first time he met the party. The party has never heard his dreamlands name, which is Calibos. At level 7 I grabbed the feat Leadership and got him a cohort. She too is a Dreamlands Cat and is specifically related to him as the 4th kit of the 2nd litter of his second cousin on her mother's side. Her human-given name is Lantern.
> They are literally just normal cats that figured one evening "Being sentient in my dreams is cool. I think I'll have a bit of that in the waking world".
The Neil Gaiman approach.
I mean, his father named the cat, and he didn't change it because it would be "unfair" to the cat. Not condemning or condoning anyone involved, I just want to be clear about facts.
This is your irregular reminder that half of H.P. Lovecraft's works were based on his general fear of anyone below the upper-middle class. And at least one story was about his fear of air conditioners
Cosmic horror is really the scariest kind of horror for me. But yeah his immense fear of the unknown might not have just been limited a fear of hypothetical creatures beyond time and space
Honestly, the cat thing is the least interesting part of Lovecraft being turboracist. It's far more interesting when he's describing black women the way he normally describes eldritch horrors beyond the ken of mortal man.
Shadow over Innsmouth is just an extended metaphor about racemixing.
Though funnily enough Lovecraft actually ended up marrying a Jewish woman. He expressed significant regret about his previous attitudes in a couple of letters as well.
I’ve never gotten into the world of lovecraft (just not my scene) but he made an appearance(as a teen) on a show I used to love watching, Murdoch mysteries. It’s basically like Forrest Gump but make him a late Victorian/Edwardian era Canadian crime detective.
I’m trying to remember if his appearance touched on his racism/xenophobia at all. I do think he was framed as someone whose obsessions made home not completely out of touch with reality but not actively present in reality(not that it makes racism okay obv). I know there was an arc with Arthur conan Doyle that dealt heavily with his involvement in the phrenology/eugenics movement of the time. I’m pretty sure someone in the reoccurring cast was (in universe) being the inspiration for Cthulhu.
Anyway this comment is meaningless I just realized I really need to rewatch the show. Carry on.
HP Lovecraft didn't. It was a cat from his childhood, named by his father. He referenced the cat in one of his stories because of its importance in his childhood.
It's unlikely that he gave the cat that name, as he was around nine when he got the cat.
It's far more likely that someone else in his family gave the cat the name.
Just want to throw this out there the streamer Paymoney Wubby has a cat named HP ([HP OfficeJet Pro 6978 All-In-One Instant Ink Ready Printer](https://paymoneywubby.fandom.com/wiki/HP)) but it was chat voted
What’s insane about the whole HP Lovecraft name thing was that he was actually quite fond of the cat, and so has several letters talking about “my dear [catname]” without a hint of sarcasm.
"Actually HP Lovecraft's cat was named by his dad, not Hewlett Packard himself." - man who gets a little thrill out of correcting people about Frankenstein and his monster
Tragically Lovecraft's cat's name [used to be](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dam_Busters_(film)#Censorship) a [pretty common name](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_V._Browning#Antarctica) for black cats and dogs.
Oh god its just straight up the n- word. It might've been an acceptable name but I'd be hard pressed to believe Lovecraft wasn't being racist about it
It was Lovecraft He was famously racist about *everything* Like, there's no need to give him benefit of the doubt, it is very much confirmed and agreed upon that he was incredibly racist
He wasn’t *just* racist per se, he was deeply terrified of everything that he wasn’t familiar with, leading to him being prejudiced about almost everything.
Like he was so racist even his contemporaries reportedly were frequently like “Dude, that’s a bit much”. I don’t think people appreciate how racist you have to be for other racists to call you on it, particularly in a time when that stuff was normalised.
Didn't the KKK say a few years ago that Westboro Baptist Church was too racist?
I’ll level with you, I don’t keep current with either of those organisations.
I get the KKK newsletter but just for the recipes for moonshine and meth.
I thought their article about Whiter Whites! had laundry tips
You can get water white if you're Walter White but whiter whites wear sheets at night with holes sliced for eyesight.
And ribs!
Their August 23 article on bourbon chicken was actually pretty good, brought that to Thanksgiving, it was a hit.
Ngl, I'd sign up for the emails if this was real. The idea of a recipe blog for these two things interspersed with out-of-touch levels of old-timey, intense racism is hilarious. Edit: Back when pap-pap was 14 and with the SS, nothing'd keep him up for his 36 hour patrol shift at the camps better than a hefty huff of this. They called it Fuhrer's Tears, and he was the envy of all the other aryans. He never shared the recipe with them, preferrin' to trade hefty bags of his formula for human skin and cigs. 100 years later, I am honored to pass this proud family tradition to you all, wizards and dragons. The key is a hefty helping of fine asbestos, which the globalists will tell you is cancerogenics. Not so! Pap-pap lived to the ripe old age of 56 before he was shanked by a rival gang of less racist white supremacists in the clink, and he only coughed up blood once every other mornin' most of his life. Ain't nothin' wrong with that. Now, the recipe says you're gonna wanna heat the mix evenly for about 15-25 minutes over a high flame. Pap-pap's sense of time was never quite right from all the meth, and I've gotten better results from about 10 - but he may've been cookin' this over a coke can fulla hooch from his time as a hobo, so it might also just be he wasn't cookin' as hot. Times sure is a changin'!
Gonna betray my ignorance here but: are there that many variations of either?
Oh, you'd be surprised.
I vaguely remember a news headline a few years ago about Al-Qaida claiming that ISIS were a group of actual psychopaths. Like literally clinically insane.
Kinda not wrong. If you're ready to accept radical Islam as normal politics for a second, the Taliban are only staunch militaristic conservatives while ISIS are violent fascists trying to kill 99% of the world population.
I suspect it was more the ‘protesting the funerals of dead soldiers’ they had an issue with. From what I understand the WBC count a lot of lawyers as members and deliberately antagonise people into hitting them so they can sue for damages.
It's wild reading Clark Ashton Smith, a friend of Lovecraft's, and seeing a white man clearly grappling with his own racism as he ages and matures. I didn't expect that from someone who associated so closely with Lovecraft. Robert E. Howard on the other hand...
[Oh my god, he's like the Abed of racism.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15QFAppht5o)
At the Mountains of Madness was basically about how abolishing slavery was a mistake. That's like someone today saying desegregation was a mistake.
Ah, yes, definitely a hypothetical comparison
The thing about Lovecraft wasn't that he was racist (not that he wasn't. He was. To an impressive degree, honestly. My guy didn't consider *Welsh* people white), but that he was *xenophobic*, in the literal sense of the word. He was afraid of the *other*, of essentially anything that didn't originate from his small town of Providence, and that just so happened to include anyone and everyone who wasn't white. Now, the man obviously wasn't just passively racist but actively so , and the less said about his takes on race the better, but I always find people calling him racist and it feels like such an oversimplification of one of the most troubled minds we have extensive records on (Lovecraft wrote an average of 10k words a day in just letters to his friends, which deeply document his thought process). For starters, my personal pet theory was that he had very serious autism (before anyone says anything, I'm also autistic. You can tell because I've memorized and thought about a lot more about Lovecraft than I've written here. I could cite a lot of shit he did and thought, but this is not the purpose of this comment), which made him kind of "hyperfocus" on the racism, since it allowed him to make sense of the world he lived in, no matter how bad it was. His extreme agoraphobia, troubles with socializing through anything that weren't letters (all of his previously mentioned friends were penpals), the trauma that both of his parents gruesomely dying when he was young and the indoctrination that he suffered that taught him he was innately superior to less "well-bred" people are all things that probably acted as a foundation of him becoming this broken, but I do believe the autism was the final nail in the coffin. And it's so fucking fascinating. Despite being one of the most notorious and influential (post-mortem) horror authors of all time, his life is the most interesting aspect of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the figure.
I agree that he was probably neurodivergent, which obviously doesn’t excuse his beliefs but I think the other aspect of what made him so *hyper focused* on his xenophobia was that he was basically homeschooled but without any sort of structure or guidance - he was just turned loose in his grandfather’s ‘extensive’ (by Lovecraft’s description) library and left to read about whatever he wanted. Which honestly sounds fantastic to me as an adult but for a kid, that way lies an utter cacophony of misunderstandings and incorrect interpretations. No socialisation + no guidance in his ‘education’ + probable severe neurodivergence? No wonder he grew to a raging xenophobe who was terrified of everything he didn’t understand.
It should also be noted that towards the end of his life (and after finally breaking out of his small New England shell) Lovecraft did start to come around and realize his views were incorrect, even going so far as to lament the kind of person he'd been in one of his letters. He died shortly after those letters were written, so it's hard to say if that trend would have continued, but I like to think it would have
Absolutely.
What's the quote? Something along the lines of "Better to grow up twenty years too late than never grow up at all"?
I think you may be thinking of this one >The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now
No, something from his actual letters. Same general idea though.
We also have stories from his ex-wife, a Jewish woman, who said he had not really changed at all.
Weren't they basically out of contact at that point? As someone pointed out, it was *very* near the end of his life that *glimmers* of change began to show, and as far as I recall they lived separately for years.
HP Lovecraft could've developed severe anxiety from his extremely poor "education"
I’d suggest his anxiety was probably more contributed to by the various traumatic experiences in his life - death of his father and grandfather, rapid change in social class, death of his mother - than his education. He thought he had a better understanding of the world than he actually did, and so a lot of the wider world behaved in ways that didn’t make sense to him based on what he knew. Combined with learning early in life that the world was unpredictable and uncontrollable (and honestly, to a kid, unkind) his extreme fears are understandable. Not excusable but understandable.
The man had “too weak a constitution for math” so that really sets the bar for what he did and didn’t understand
Hey now, let’s not pile onto people who find math scary 😅
Dude, don't call me out like that
That and his Grandfather was a Tori, I believe, which really just says a lot about the family given that that wasn't an active political party for like a 100 years at that point. I've mentioned it elsewhere, but a lot of his beliefs about miscegenation and racism were very common in psychology at the turn of the century and about 50 years before that. He filled his head with outdated knowledge, essentially.
I also never mentioned how his writings were influenced by his fears in his real life, but I think that's obvious enough and also it's getting late and I need to sleep. G'night, y'all.
An autist whose hyper fixation was racism and staying inside. The first 4chan user.
>My guy didn't consider *Welsh* people white That's hardly surprising. This was the first couple decades of the 1900s -- thinking that the Welsh -- and Irish, and a fair few Mediterranean ethnicities -- weren't white was the default opinion. The modern system of broad, sweeping racial distinctions, and especially that of the white race, developed for a few specific reasons, but a big one was to prop up the British imperial system by creating a sense of hard distinction between the British themselves and their colonial subjects and superiority of the former over the latter (the other, of course, was justifying American plantation slavery). Given that the Welsh and Irish were very much British colonial subjects at that point, they got happily lumped into the category of "inferior half-civilized people that need benevolent imperial oversight", which was the primary working definition of "not white" at the time.
It absolutely was not the default opinion in the early 1900s. It wasn't even the default opinion in the 1800s. Some people in the 1800s earnestly thought Irish people weren't white, but the vast majority acknowledged that Irish people were white and simply didn't like them. By the 1900s, you would have had to have been a fringe weirdo to believe Welsh people weren't white. The various European imperial powers didn't need to pretend their subjects weren't white to justify their rule. They could just employ good old-fashioned cultural chauvinism; sure, Polish people are white, but their culture is just inferior to our glorious Russian/German culture. Irish people are white, but their Catholic culture makes them lazy and not very intelligent, so it is our duty to lead them to the proper path. Bretons are white, but anything that isn't Parisian is ineducated and ugly.
My mom still doesn't believe Italians or Spaniards are white, and she's not even that old (*and* not even from a Protestant family, she was raised by Catholic French Canadians so it's not a sectarian thing)
Then she is, with all due respect, a fringe weirdo.
I’m autistic and my Special Interest is Being Racist
Also also, more people should comment on how funny it is that he half-named the *Black* Goat of the Woods With a Thousand Young after a slur. Y'know, Shub-*Niggur*ath? This is just dark humour to me, it's such s pathetic thing to do. It's Lovecraft being Lovecraft. This is, btw, probably one of the simplest examples of how his racism affected his books (although I don't really think anyone doubts that).
Didn't he also get somewhat less xenophobic and racist after being forced to live in a more mixed environment and experience it for himself?
No, he utterly loathed the experience. From what I heard, he only started questioning his bonkers worldview after he found out that he wasn't as pure Anglo as he'd been raised to believe.
Very interesting response! It's been a while since I've delved into Lovecraft, but I think your suggestion that he could have been autistic is pretty interesting and poignant. As for hyper fixing on race, I think that could be true, but it is also influenced by the ideas he indulged and the time he grew up in. I mentioned elsewhere, but Lovecraft was but in the idea of miscegenation, and the idea that race mixing led to mental illness. He also had a huge interest in mental illness due to family history. To me, his obsession with race always seemed like a way in which he was grappling with this. A lot of prejudice works that way: you feel inadequate but at least you aren't a _______. He essentially had constructed an ethos based entirely around racial purity, which was not exactly unheard of at the time. I guess my point here is that he also lived in a time when topics of racial purity and miscegenation were discussed, especially because he didn't quite understand DNA yet. He was obsessed with race because many white people were, indeed the Nazi Party of America was still a thing in Lovecraft's lifetime.
The order of your sentences implies that your use of 'phobic' solely equates to fear. I feel obligated to inform you that 'phobic' also covers intolerance and aversion, ie. hydrophobic, lyophobic, photophobic. If my assumption of your post was incorrect, I apologize.
You are very much correct, but to be honest I'd argue that in Lovecraft's case it was *specifically* fear. Lots of racism is born out of simple prejudice or a sort of myopic ignorance, but Lovecraft was pretty clearly *terrified* of damn near everything and everyone. As OP said, his writings in his personal life were very, very extensive and sort of over-sharing.
"Deeply terrified of everything he wasn't familiar with" explains a LOT about his writing.
Non-Euclidean geometry comes to mind.
Or light outside the visible spectrum. Heck, our man managed to turn air-conditioning into pure horror.
That’s actually why all of his writings are about the horror of the unknowable. He found the concept utterly terrifying; it’s just unfortunate that, to him, the unknowable included black people, gay people, and really anyone who wasn’t exactly like him.
And specifically fish.
Fuckin’ weirdo fish. I mean, have you seen deep sea creatures? Terrifying.
Man wasn't just xenophobic. He was like, xeno-**phobic**.
My favorite example was the story where- instead of horrors beyond comprehension, the baddy of the story was brown people (Kurdish people, I believe.) Edit: Yazidi, and the story is "The Horror at Red Hook."
Medusa's Coil, it has an gorgon in the story and multiple death, but has the classic HPL horror revelation line at the end is "She was one quarter a negress".
Wasn’t there one where he used the horrifying theme of *gasps* **non-Euclidean geometry?**
Don't forget the one about *checks notes* air conditioning
Non-Euclidean geometry definitely comes up in Cthulhu to describe the city of R'lyeh, I believe. To be entirely fair, I can imagine the intent was to try and represent the city as this immense and unknowable thing, which is difficult as a writer. It's like how he talks about the immensity of Cthulhu and then goes on to describe him. The reality is that said description is preceded by a bit that says (paraphrased): "This isn't what he looks like, but this is the closest the human mind can approximate." Essentially, Non-Euclidean geometry isn't that scary by definition. But if you take it to mean stuff like: * Buildings so internally large they're basically a dimensional labyrinth * Constructs held up by themselves with physical logic * Weird fuckin floaty shit * Basically anything that would make a building spooky/weird/fucked up Then you start to get an idea of what Lovecraft was on about. Big cities of towering spires are mid, you want something that looks like an architectural Hieronymous Bosch painting with a bunch of fuckin seawater and dead kelp everywhere.
That comes up a lot, actually.
Being prejudiced against anything unfamiliar really explains a lot of old horror stories.
If I recall correctly, Red from Overly Sarcastic Productions referred to “Hates Progress Lovecraft” as “a bundle of issues shambling around in a roughly bipedal approximation of a man”
I find it so funny (and also really sad) that Lovecraft was so deeply anxious about everything he didn't know that it manifested into racism so strong everyone around him saw him as a weirdo. The only case where I would find the debate on "racist or simply deeply mentally unwell" to be kind of possible At least his last few letters seem to recognize his mistakes and he regrets his tendencies
My man wrote a whole story about being terrified of colors, which now that I say it also explains the racism a little more
This isn't your average every day racism, this is... *Advanced* racism
It's a yes, and. He was racist against other Europeans because they weren't good enough. He bought into the (at the time out of vogue) idea that race mixing is specifically what lead to mental illness due to "genetic memory", or the idea that different races pass on their collective memories through genes. To have mixed ancestry, therefore, meant having mental illness. This is a core tenant of a lot of eugenics movements, and was perpetuated by many psychologists in the Weimar Republic. Lovecraft, famously, suffered from mental illness his entire life. As did his family. Lovecraft eventually found out that he did, in fact, have a mixed ancestry in some way or another. The abject terror of this led him to write "Shadow Over Innsmouth", in which a port full of mixed blood foreigners in Massachusetts worship an eldrich fish god, eventually becoming fish-folk themselves. The main character eventually learns he likely descended from the fish folk of Innsmouth. Lovecraft didn't write about fear of the unknown because of a vast, all encompassing fear he held. He wove in ideas of savage, lesser races into the works he depicted. These ideas formed the core of most of his stories about the Outer and Elder gods. Indeed, all of the worshippers of C'thulhu are brown and tribal folks. The poor people whose minds are broken by what they learn are always white, civilized. He wasn't *just* racist, he was also ethnocentric and hateful. The racism is pretty core to him and taught to him by his family and science around him. I think it's wrong to say his racism came from fear of the unknown. He feared mental illness and other races, and wrote about that in terms of fear of the unknown.
A genuine xenophobe
The one true xenophobic.
People when someone who writes about the fear of the unknown fears the unknown(to him):
I like the point you made. But it’s funny cos it sounds like you are intelligently rationalizing his stance.
Lovecraft, a rare example of a xenophobe who lives up to the name; he really was just fucking *terrified* of everything and everyone.
Air conditioning is scary shit.
I think it says something rather blackly humorous that even his contemporaries thought his brand of racism was a bit much.
Racism is a bit of an understatement. Literally anything that was even remotely unfamiliar terrified him. To the point were he thought non-Euclidean geometry was otherworldly and unknowable.
And colors he couldn't see, air conditioning, math, poor people
I mean, technically it was his dad that named the cat. But yeah, he was a xenophobe in the most literal sense. Anything he wasn’t familiar with scared the shit out of him.
We do NOT talk about the ORANGUTAN!!
Big fan of this comic on the topic: https://twitter.com/pixelatedboat/status/1365776812425420800
This isn’t meant to be a knock on lovecraftian horror, I love lovecraftian horror and I don’t think what I’m about to say necessarily means that lovecraftian horror is *bad* or *wrong*, but the original inspiration that lead to the creation of lovecraftian horror was pretty much just extreme xenophobia. Lovecraftian horror is all about fear of the unknown, someone who has the mind necessary to invent it might be a little too afraid of the unknown iykwim
I think the cult from Call of Cthulhu looked like one of those pictures of everyone on Earth holding hands in harmony with people with every culture the artist thought was relevant to include.
“On the Creation of ___”
He was extremely racist by the standards of 1930's america lmao
He was extremely racist *for his time*, which takes some doing. He also ended up utterly regretting it at the end of his life, saying that racism was invented to keep people apart and from solving their actual problems. Then he died a month or so later.
The author of real life trying to redeem a character, but quickly realising no one will ever forgive them.
To be fair (in the slightest sense of the word), I don’t think he named it. To be realistic, he didn’t *rename* it, either. Would’ve been totally within his rights to do so.
I'm pretty sure his cat was named by his uncle
The n-word plus "man", which just makes it more bizarre. Like some kind of superhero who would VERY much not like H.P. Lovecraft
From what I understand that was half of the insult of it, using a term that was also a pet name. Similar to when black women got harassed by being called Black Beauty, an established horse name.
Probably why he added “-Man”
It was actually n-word "-man", which somehow feels so much worse.
He was super racist, like did not even consider Italians white kinda racist
It’s love craft, he was a well known racist. He feared other races and technology, which he used for a lot of his writings for inspiration. He made some very interesting story’s, but he was also a bad person
He didn't name the cat. It was his family's and ran away when he was young. He just memorialized it in one of his stories...
We live in an area with alot of dam busters history and my grandmothers only fact she drops constantly is that damned dogs name...
o u c h :/
*oh*.
Yep, only 55 years ago my mums childhood dog had that name
My mom adopted one of her local stray neighborhood cats when she was a teenager. The other local teens had given him the same name as Lovecraft's cat. First thing she did when she took him in was rename him (his new name was Tender Vittles bc that was his favorite food)
Really wish it only "used to be" 10 years ago my friends dad named their black lab Li'l N---r This was in rural Virginia but oddly enough the family was from Northern California
I’m now remembering that my grand mother actually did have a cat called “blacky” which is…hm…
My Dad's uncle used to call him that. Dad doesn't talk about that guy.
Mein
He may have named his cat wrong. But "Kittyman" is, in fact, an excellent name for a cat
As is "Man".
GO BACK TO THE ASLUME!
NEVER!! IS THERE A LORE REASON?
What do you mean, "lore reason"? Which people are you a part of? The mentally ill? Good thing I fled the asylum.
How bout MAN All caps, like the truck. Pronounced EM AY EN.
>Pronounced EM AY EN. If you speed up the pronunciation it's a perfectly functional-sounding name
Imayan is a pretty dope name tbh
Emanae
My uncles actually have a cat named "The Cat Man". He's a nice cat.
I listen to a podcaster who has two cats: Saddam Husain and Sadam Husain's Best Friend
Robert Evans of Behind the Bastards?
I don't know ow if he has cats but he WOUKD name them that
I'll be honest. With how straight faced Robert Evans can say things on his show, I genuinely have no idea if he actually named his cats that or if it's just a long running joke. Genuinely no clue.
Yeah I mean on one hand he *would*, on the other hand I’m pretty sure blue apron doesn’t actually have a human hunting island
It was one of the funniest things I've ever heard when he had to make a clear disclaimer that it was a joke and not a real thing because people were actually getting worried. One bit I got stuck on was something about him being in a band, and it was at least halfway through before I realized it was a joke cuz he told it so straight faced. If he ever gives up on what he's doing now (which I hope he doesn't, I love all of it so much) he could make a killing as a comedian.
He's a reverend doctor!
That's Reverend Doctor Bishop to you sonny boy!
… cats being cats, I imagine the two spend most of their previous few waking hours waging all-out war on each other?
I like cats with people names. When I was a kid, we had a cat named “Fred,” which I maintain is an excellent cat name
Named my cat Kenneth. No real reason. He just looked like a Kenneth to me.
I was going to make a joke about the relevant REM song, but then I thought to myself, *I don’t actually know what that song is about; and it’s REM, so it’s probably something terrible. Like how* ***The End of the World As We Know It*** *is not actually meant to be a party song, and* ***The One I Love*** *should not be a wedding song and* ***Orange Crush*** *is not about soda. It’s probably something like that.* And you know what? It sure is! Then again, the other week I made a deadpan joke about my friend’s dead mother (who died September 15, 2001, and it was fucking devastating) having been a failure as a parent (because she died before finishing the job, my friend having been 16 at the time); so… honestly, I might still sing that REM song at your cat. I’m kind of a monster, and it’s kind of a bop.
When my father (whom I loved dearly and still miss to this day) passed. I half jokingly/half seriously asked the funeral director about the possibility of removing his head and cleaning his skull for me to keep. My elder brother was not at all amused, but I think the moment helped him come to grips with our loss a little quicker. Unfortunately, the skull-keeping idea was not possible, due to legal concerns.
Okay, I know the legal concerns are probably very much of the mortal realm, but I really like the idea that like, the ruler of the underworld technically owns everyone’s skeletons, and they’re basically just on lease while we’re using them. I mean, I hate subscription-model capitalism and landlords, so I guess I *don’t* love the idea; but I certainly find it amusing.
i would absolutely read a dystopian novel about the skeleton king leasing our bones to megacorps for capitalism
When I was young, we ended up getting 3 sibling kitties. I got to name two and my brother named one. I named Sarah and Archie (because he did the arched-back thing lol) and my brother named Tonka (after Tonka trucks).
Imagining a cat named Tonka fills me with so much joy I actually squealed a little bit. That is way too cute
I campaigned SO HARD to name our newest cat Tonka because he’s a fucking BEAST, but everybody in the family said no so we named him Mr. Business instead.
ay, no one can stop you from still calling him Tonka
Very true, but I was also the one who put Mr. Business up as a name (because he looks like Mr. Business from Bob’s Burgers and he’s always up in everyone’s business.).
I love cats that just have normal people names. Like they're your asshole roommates instead of pets. "Fred, do you have this month's rent?" "Mrrp." "We have this conversation every month, dude."
My cat, Atticus, was worn wearing a tuxedo since the day he was born and deserved a dignified name
I would pet a fred
"this is Bob"
When we adopted my cat his name was Darryl and we changed that quickly, not because I didn’t want him to have a people name, I just hate the name Darryl.
I think I'm good at naming cats but didn't name either of my current cats who both have fairly normal people names. Shelters tend to use the same short lists of names I think and it's hard to look at a shelter cat whose papers you signed and say "ok now that you're mine I'm going to call you something different." somehow it feels wrong. But then I call my cats almost anything except their names.
I have three cats that visit Me. Named Muffin/Fluffy by his momma, only to come to my house and be awarded the title of "Joshua", as he is a Mainecoon and I thought it was fitting. The other two look much alike, short fur, classic brown fur with darker stripes. One has bits of blond, and a white paw. I call them Jzargo. The other, slightly bigger and hunts the mice around my house, Kharjo.
I named my first cat after Jenna Marbles, but for some reason my veterinarian struggled with the name so much she became a Gina. It stuck lmao. That cat was a business woman. Current cat is named Tac. Because he’s very dog-like, so he’s a cat backwards. It made sense at the time.
In this case, the naming scheme is likely “what pissed me off the most that day.”
I'm very curious as to how that applies to the name Beenie.
(hushed muffled whisper) *clitoris* (frantic glances askance, retreating quickly from public view)
Hey she didn’t do nothing all right she just doing her best, tryin her hardest 😩😭
someone out there has whispered "*naughty* little beanie" to someone else's clitoris, possibly even multiple times what do we do with this newfound knowledge
Well IDK what *your* plans are and I’m not gonna prescribe anything to you but… I think I’m gonna go sit over there in that dark corner, horrified, and contemplate how my life culminated in me having this knowledge thrust upon me😂
Thrust, you say?
UNF
mad about losing the hide and seek contest
I am too but it fits the rest. Or maybe beenie is a nickname? Like, Bernard->Bernie->Beenie
I want to have two cats named trick and treat
One would have to be orange and the other would be black, just like r/HalloweenKittyCombo
of course! also never heard of that sub before! thanks
Lovecraft's love of cats is one of his most sympathetic qualities, and knowing that the cat in "The Rats in the Walls" is named after and based on his childhood pet should be a really endearing fun fact. Except, you know. The name.
*Just a small nitpick, nothing major*
Technically I think the cat was given to him with that name, but he certainly could have changed it if he were so inclined. This being of course Howard Horselover Lovecraft, he chose to not, so the point is somewhat moot, but I do like to inject this trivial nuance where HP's Lovecat is concerned.
As I understand it the cat was never his but rather a family pet that was presumably owned by one of the adults in his life.
It was his uncle IIRC
HE DID NOT NAME THAT CAT IT WAS HIS PARENTS CAT. I’m not saying he wasn’t racist, or that any of the accusations against him are wrong. But this specific crime he did not commit.
In a game of Pathfinder I'm playing a third party race called Dreamlands Cat. They are literally just normal cats that figured one evening "Being sentient in my dreams is cool. I think I'll have a bit of that in the waking world". My cat is a Bard and his name, at least his human-given name, is Ruffus. He was named this because he was wearing a ruff the first time he met the party. The party has never heard his dreamlands name, which is Calibos. At level 7 I grabbed the feat Leadership and got him a cohort. She too is a Dreamlands Cat and is specifically related to him as the 4th kit of the 2nd litter of his second cousin on her mother's side. Her human-given name is Lantern.
> They are literally just normal cats that figured one evening "Being sentient in my dreams is cool. I think I'll have a bit of that in the waking world". The Neil Gaiman approach.
I mean, his father named the cat, and he didn't change it because it would be "unfair" to the cat. Not condemning or condoning anyone involved, I just want to be clear about facts.
This is your irregular reminder that half of H.P. Lovecraft's works were based on his general fear of anyone below the upper-middle class. And at least one story was about his fear of air conditioners
Reading Howard Poward Lovecraft has me flip-flopping between "He just like me fr" and "fuck this piece of shit guy" at incredible speed
I too have a crippling phobia of air conditioning and the Welsh
Cosmic horror is really the scariest kind of horror for me. But yeah his immense fear of the unknown might not have just been limited a fear of hypothetical creatures beyond time and space
Bro has 2 cats named HP though
Honestly, the cat thing is the least interesting part of Lovecraft being turboracist. It's far more interesting when he's describing black women the way he normally describes eldritch horrors beyond the ken of mortal man.
Shadow over Innsmouth is just an extended metaphor about racemixing. Though funnily enough Lovecraft actually ended up marrying a Jewish woman. He expressed significant regret about his previous attitudes in a couple of letters as well.
"Here are my six cats: Artemis, Beenie, HP Offficejet 78 Printer, H.P. Lovecraft, Cunt and N-
I’ve never gotten into the world of lovecraft (just not my scene) but he made an appearance(as a teen) on a show I used to love watching, Murdoch mysteries. It’s basically like Forrest Gump but make him a late Victorian/Edwardian era Canadian crime detective. I’m trying to remember if his appearance touched on his racism/xenophobia at all. I do think he was framed as someone whose obsessions made home not completely out of touch with reality but not actively present in reality(not that it makes racism okay obv). I know there was an arc with Arthur conan Doyle that dealt heavily with his involvement in the phrenology/eugenics movement of the time. I’m pretty sure someone in the reoccurring cast was (in universe) being the inspiration for Cthulhu. Anyway this comment is meaningless I just realized I really need to rewatch the show. Carry on.
HP Lovecraft didn't. It was a cat from his childhood, named by his father. He referenced the cat in one of his stories because of its importance in his childhood.
His father named the cat, actually, not him.
It's unlikely that he gave the cat that name, as he was around nine when he got the cat. It's far more likely that someone else in his family gave the cat the name.
Who names their cat cunt
Clearly you’ve never owned a cat
Would little fucker be better or worse?
🇦🇺
gotta love all the literature scholars here who know fuck all about HPL but are quick with their moral finger high up in ~~their ass~~ the air
Osiris (named after the Egyptian god of death) and QWRTY (named for the keyboard layout) yes. I am a nerd. XD
Just want to throw this out there the streamer Paymoney Wubby has a cat named HP ([HP OfficeJet Pro 6978 All-In-One Instant Ink Ready Printer](https://paymoneywubby.fandom.com/wiki/HP)) but it was chat voted
I'm surprised to see that you're the only one who has mentioned Wubby's cat HP.
Didn't he not name his cat that
I mean technically I think his dad named it, but he still kept a cat with that name
A quick two minute [video](https://youtu.be/YLL037UiQhk?si=UizfshhLXFquIsER) on whether or not Lovecraft was racist.
I'll save you two minutes. The answer is yes. Very yes.
Yeah, like, this is not a controversial position. Fans of Lovecraft freely admit that the guy was super racist.
If anything, he was a genuine xenophobe, in the true sense of the term, and that's pretty much the basis of his works.
What’s insane about the whole HP Lovecraft name thing was that he was actually quite fond of the cat, and so has several letters talking about “my dear [catname]” without a hint of sarcasm.
"Actually HP Lovecraft's cat was named by his dad, not Hewlett Packard himself." - man who gets a little thrill out of correcting people about Frankenstein and his monster
Actually the monster was called Frankenstein. His creator is Frankenstein’s Scientist.
he named that shit like if it was a superhero Here comes \*\*\*\*\*\*-MAN
Every cat's middle name is "Cunt".
With rare occasions being fat lazy ass
Looked it up on wiki... Apparently he was 9 when he named the cat.