User blog:Jake888/Why I think Cthulhu is so scary

Welp, I haven't done a blog in a long time. Hope I'm not too rusty. Here goes nothing. Im actually suprised I didnt see any blog on this here, so I hope Im not repeating what's already been posted. I hope not, at least.

Background on Cthulhu

Perhaps Lovecraft's most renound and successful tale, the Call of Cthulhu was sold to Wierd Tales magazine in 1926 for 165 dollars. Franswroth Wright, then the editor of Wierd Tales, had a habit of rejecting stories upon their submissionm as was the case with the Call of Cthulhu; here, two different sources conflict on a trifling detail. Lovecraft's documentary, The Fear of the Unkown, states that Lovecraft was aware of Wright's habit and shelved the story for a year and re-submited it a year later with some minor edits; the introduction of my books differs slightly on that point, argueing that Wright himself asked for the story back a year later and that Lovecraft was discouraged by the intial rejection and the frequency of his submissions dropped.

The plotline of the story is about as linear as a Tarantino film. It follows three disjointed events across three chapters, which, when correlated, open up "horrible vistas of reality, and our frightful position therein". Namely, an old man's papers and research, a policemen's account of a raid on a ritual rite, and a ship's expedition which stumbled upon Cthulhu himself, in his great city of R'lyeh. The nonlinear, disjointed structure of the story mirrors the pprotagonis's madness and lunacy as he descends into insanity by corrlating these events.

What is Cthulhu?

Lately, I've been wondering what makes Cthulhu such an abhorred and adored symbol of horror, and I came to the realization that Cthulhu isn't just some squalid squid with superpowers; but that he is a concept, an idea. Cthulhu is all around us, present in our greatest fears and questions. Cthulhu is that overwhelming awareness of our smallness in this universe. He's what keeps us awake at night wondering what we're doing here, what's the point of it all? Cthulhu represent forces beyond our control, forces which we can't even attempt to understand, he's something bigger than life, something bigger even than the idea of life; to look at Cthulhu is to go mad.

If someone asked me who I think is the best existential writer, I clould say Dostoevsky, or Nietzsche, or Jean-Paul Satre, or Camus; but despite the awesome grandeur of their writing, I would have to deviate from the norm, and say Lovecraft is my favorite existential writer. And all thanks to Cthulhu. Words shrink, words diminish concepts; that's why symbolism is such a powerful tool: it shows us, not tells us, it speaks to us subconsciously. And Cthulhu is a symbol, an icon of existentialism. Cthulhu is an insurmountable fear looming over our daily lives, the fear of us being inconsequential little organism on a spinning rock in a universe mercifully too vast and too secretive for our own understamding; he's the fear of our smallness, of our lack of control.

How To Do Cthulhu?

The point of Cthulhu is not that he is some monster to be defeated or to overcome, but that it is a thing which can never be defeated or overcome; the point of Cthulhu is not to present the reader with a glimpse at something which is unkown, but something which is wholly unkowable. What makes Cthulhu so horrifying is that his power cannot be relatively compared to anything our own mortal minds know; Cthulhu is scary beyond any human measure.

Much of Lovecraft's stories start with the narrator going mad, and frantically trying to make us believe his story. There, again, lies Lovecraft's genius. A big part of Cthulhu is isolation. Here is this humongous horror which you have discovered and which is threatening humanity and human sanity, and no one will listen to you; or at most, they'll call you mad. You're alone, stranded, alienated, isolated with your horrible knowledge. Cthulhu is all about disempowerment. Making you feel alone, inconsequential, faced with forces your mind is unable to understand or even properly process, it's utterly unkown and utterly terrible, and your stranded with it.