But [men calling the women they love goddesses] sure as hell isn't healthy. Or contributes to a stable, loving relationship.
I don't actually disagree about it not being the best thing for a long term relationship. It is the act of a man who is
smitten, who is carried away with passion... and I would argue that passion is neither good nor evil. It is simply passion. I prefer not to criticize, but I don't object if you do. As long as we can recognize that Crowning isn't doing anything that millions of other men haven't done before him- and done with less justification.
If that's what you think of when reading Cthulhu mythos, then you clearly haven't read Cthulhu mythos. Or at least not enough Cthulhu mythos to know what the entire genre encompasses.
[Rolls eyes]
Well yes,
of course there are an endless array of different supernatural entities in the works of Lovecraft (see also fan/devotees such as Derleth who are themselves published, having played in his setting after his death). But what makes the Cthulhu mythos
distinct, to the point where it is anything other than a misleading waste of time to say "Cthulhu mythos," is that its gods are alien and inhuman and at best indifferent to human life. The world of the Cthulhu mythos is ancient beyond comprehension, weird beyond comprehension, and the only reason we can even be vaguely comfortable with our place in it is that we
do not know the vast majority of what's going on in it.
OK, Lemme just stop you right there.
You're wrong.
You. Are. Wrong.
Sort of.
Things from fairies, to their eating habits, to their impossible weight, to summoning their rigging, are stuff the humans explicitly do not understand and should be impossible. They know it exists, but they don't understand how it works. This actually happens at times in physics and how things work at the smallest, most fundamental levels. You get a law you can't directly test for it but you can show through math that if it didn't exist, this other more observable and documented thing wouldn't. I'm explaining it horribly, but I think you get my point. Shipgirls are as much nonsensical shit as they are 'human'. Hell, that's the whole promise of Kant-O-Celle quest, something I know TheJMPer tunes into and has taken minor inspiration from.
You are not comprehending.
See, I get that shipgirls
violate the laws of physics. That is because I am not literally stupider than a pile of wet concrete. My point is that the ways in which they violate said laws of physics
make sense in a human way. We may not fully understand the rules of how or why it happens, but it makes poetic sense.
This "poetic sense" is critical if one is to be anything other than a humorless hypercritic when it comes to fiction. For example, the idea of angels- humans with feathery bird wings growing out of their backs- flying around makes poetic sense. Nobody with a gram of imagination actually has to stop and cope with discomfort, confusion, or cognitive dissonance at the concept.
To someone with no poetic sense, there is a problem. They immediately start asking questions like "hey, human musculature isn't set up to flap wings, the 'angels' would have to have nonhuman body proportions" or "bird wings are equivalent to human arms, they aren't physically separate limbs, so shouldn't angels have wings for arms instead of having normal arms
and wings growing from their back?"
And lots of people momentarily switch off their poetic sense for fun, to indulge in such critiques. This is common on the Internet. If one cannot
stop doing it, though, it is a sign of a cramped and damaged imagination.
Shipgirls make poetic sense. It makes poetic sense that their weight both is, and is not, equal to that of a huge steel ship. It makes poetic sense that they both are, and are not, extremely expensive to take care of. It makes poetic sense that that as ships have crews of humans, shipgirls have "crews" of faeries. We may not be able to explain every detail of how these things happen, or how they can happen when they seem to give rise to logical contradictions. But only a person with a cramped and damaged imagination actually has any trouble imagining all these things being true.
Shipgirls present at least as many logical contradictions as the concept of a square circle, but are much,
much easier for humans to imagine.
This is because squares and circles are constructs of geometric logic. They exist in our minds only as logical constructs, and when we try to imagine them breaking logical rules, we are unable to imagine them at all. Just having a good imagination isn't enough- there is no such thing as a square circle or circular square, and you can't change that by closing your eyes and visualizing harder.
Shipgirls are NOT constructs of pure logic, that much is obvious- but the symbolic logic and poetic logic they
do follow is logic which is quite familiar to our experience, aligned with our mythology, and which is easily comprehensible to any human being with a working imagination.
...
And for this very reason, it is
vanishingly unlikely that shipgirls are the creation of any force which is truly alien to humanity. Gods that were associated with humanity in the past are certainly a reasonable explanation- but the gods that would create a shipgirl are OUR gods. They are not the gods of creatures from beyond the stars. They are not vast, mindless, buzzing cosmic forces of elemental chaos and creation and destruction.
If shipgirls are the creations of gods, then those gods must be something like us. They are gods that themselves must be able to think and express their creative power in ways that may not make
logical sense to humans, but do at least make poetic and symbolic sense to us. They are gods who must think a lot like humans do.
[In reply to me saying "no creation of alien mentalities from beyond known reality would do X, Y, and Z...]
1. You need to watch more anime.
2. That's also a lot of stuff you actually disagree with on a subjective sense rather than, you know, anything concrete.
3. Watch more black-and-white B-movies. The girls in some of them be stacked.
[sighs]
Still missing the point.
Those animes and B-movies and so on are
NOT actual examples of inhuman creations of elder deities from beyond the stars.
They are themselves the products of human imagination. They act a lot like (wacky) humans because humans imagined them and imagined them acting a lot like humans.
When someone tries to
actually portray entities in human form, which are the creations of inhuman and nonhuman forces and mentalities, you get a story like this:
How to Talk to Girls at Parties
That level of strangeness- not just magic and illogic, but
strangeness-
That is what you would get, if entities out of the Cthulhu mythos were responsible for the creation of a race of beautiful female spirits that personify warships.
Shipgirls aren't like that.
And so, if we accept that shipgirls are a thing that
actually exists, and yet have more in common with humans than, say, squid do... It suggests that they are a product of something that in turn has more in common with humans than squid do. Sort of like how if you see articles of clothing created by an alien, and those clothes would fit a human, you know the alien is humanoid in shape. Inhuman-shaped aliens would not wear human-shaped clothes.
Whose to say I wasn't talking about the gods of humanity?
And to point out a big of a logical fallacy you're operating under: just what is 'human'? And what is 'alien'?
What is 'human' in the context of what I've been saying... is the realm of mindsets and attitudes that make symbolic, poetic sense to the great majority of human beings. This is not hard, this is not complicated.
Aliens might be like that. In many fictional settings (say, Star Wars, or Mass Effect) they are. But not in Lovecraft they wouldn't be. Aliens in Lovecraft are much weirder and, as a rule, grander than we are.
Shipgirls are not 'alien' in the sense that I am using the word 'human,' because they are not 'inhuman.'
FOR FUCK'S SAKE CROWNING! I know you idolize her, but literally worshiping her as a pagan god is a bit much.
