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Eldritch and Cosmic Horror

Vindictus said:
I mean, Bloodborne doesn't really do tentacles much, at least as far as I've gotten (Just beat Amygdala the other day, working my way through the city of stupid fucking respawning mobs) and I'd argue it's story at minimum verges into cosmic horror.
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I was gonna mention Bloodborne if no one else did. It does cosmic horror really well in my opinion, in that it keeps the unknown vague and indistinct. The "Eldritch Truth" is mentioned a lot throughout the game, but it's never clear what that truth is - no details on it are given, beyond that to comprehend it either sends you mad and/or permits some form of ascension. It also avoids a clear moral judgement of the Great Ones - Lovecraft's alien gods were cruel, capricious, and evil, but Bloodborne's Great Ones can't be judged so simply. Everything in Bloodborne relating to the Eldritch Truth is incredibly hard to categorise or firmly define, which helps sell the idea that there is something beyond our understanding; a truth that cannot be explained in our simplistic language.

It does the visual aesthetic well too - lots of creepy alien body horror! :D

Unilateral said:
My favorite modern example of eldritch horror, that I've personally read, is the There Is No Antimemetics Division series of short stories on the SCP wiki. (here). It really gets to the core of what I think is the meat of this genre: the unknowable. The things mankind cannot or was not meant to know. Basically, it boils down to ideas, knowledge, information. That which is outside our frame of reference, or cannot be known, will always be something to fear, since we can't do anything against it but pray. You don't need tentacles, or writhing masses of flesh, just the unknowable.

A good example of this in the real world is the set of real numbers: there are more real numbers between 1 and 2 than there are possible arrangements of atoms in the universe, or even finitely long descriptions, or definitions. Since every number that can be uniquely defined or described is paired with that definition or description, there are only finitely many numbers that can be uniquely defined. The infinitely vast majority of the real numbers between 1 and 2 will never be defined or written down, and indeed cannot be uniquely defined. And yet, it's trivially easy to describe them collectively, as a group. In fact, I did just that. They are but tiny fractions of the unknowable that lurks between the everyday, overlooked by everyone, because to peer closer is mathematically impossible. The set of real numbers was thought up by humans, and yet, within it we find numbers we cannot think. Where else do such unthinkable, unknowable ideas live within the knowable?

It probably sounds really retarded when I just say it like that, but I really do like it when writers use this abstractly eldritch horror, where the the thing that goes bump in the night isn't a tentacled monstrosity you can hit with a boat, or a writhing mass of flesh(that resembles mammalian flesh, might I add), but something more abstract, and less physical. Like an idea, or a number, or a memory. Those things are defined by our awareness of them, which is why having an idea that can't be remembered, or a number that can't be written down, is all the more unnatural, and therefore horrifying.
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GuesssWho said:
Trust me, I've seen some weird-ass coincidences in my life. At least if Lovecraft was right there would be an explanation for them.

I think you'd like SCP-1193. To quote the author: We are somehow wrong about the nature of everything that surrounds us. The world of conventional objects which the being with the arm describes is not subject to the conventional and comprehensible laws we believe it to be. Its dream-logic about ovens and cakes and casts and invulnerability is the way the world works, not a deluded fantasy by a buried giant. The Foundation's attempts to rigorously study it are futile, because reason itself is a bizarre delusion. This is the most horrible answer, and what I'm trying to get at.
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These two posts demonstrate a couple of facets of this genre that really fascinate me: That humanity's perception and understanding of reality is inherently flawed, and that beings may exist that are so far outside our conception of reality that we can only perceive them as concepts (as in the concept of those beings and those beings themselves are one and the same). The genre does rely on the fear of the unknown, and implying that everything you know is wrong is a good way to emphasise that.

Also the phrase "reason itself is a bizarre delusion" is just really good. Really succinct and punchy. I'd like your post twice for that, if I could. :p
 
I personally feel like it would be interesting to explore artificial intelligence as a cosmic horror. Instead of tentacle monsters you have immensely intelligent supercomputers.
 
Krall said:
Also the phrase "reason itself is a bizarre delusion" is just really good. Really succinct and punchy. I'd like your post twice for that, if I could. :p
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Not my line, but an opinion I'm rather fond of.

I believe that science doesn't teach anything truly worth knowing, only interesting trivia. Science cannot answer why, only more and more complicated whats. For all we know the laws of physics will rewrite themselves tomorrow. (For all we know they rewrote themselves yesterday and our memories, our very bodies, changed to fit.)
 
The aspect of the real world that I find most conceptually horrifying is entropy. I built an 'evil faction' in an RPG world based on entropy once. I'm not sure how I'd connect it to cosmic or supernatural stuff though. I mean, I could say that us poor humans were either stolen from a universe which did not have entropy and placed in this one that's toxic to us, or our universe didn't originally have entropy and invading elder things poisoned the universe. But that doesn't really lend itself to a plot.
 
GuesssWho said:
Not my line, but an opinion I'm rather fond of.

I believe that science doesn't teach anything truly worth knowing, only interesting trivia. Science cannot answer why, only more and more complicated whats. For all we know the laws of physics will rewrite themselves tomorrow. (For all we know they rewrote themselves yesterday and our memories, our very bodies, changed to fit.)
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Of course science can never answer the "why". It is not designed to. If you believe that it can, than you are in an awful lot of trouble, because all science can ever do is describe what is happening, and, eventually, how it happens. "Why" is dependent on an enormous number of factors that may or may not still apply, or even exist...or may never have existed, or may never have been able to exist. All anybody can know for certain is the "what", or, occasionally, the "how". This gap in science and human knowledge is where faith and religion enter the picture--by presenting a conceptual why, they are able to give us, as humans, an explanation of "why". Why the universe is built the way it is may never be answerable....but it is something that can be explained, to all intents and purposes.

The true horror behind beings like Cthulhu isn't that they are Unknowable. We already have the Unknowable as part of our everyday lives, and we celebrate great and vast holidays as part of our acceptance of the Unknowable. But what drives people who witness the sight of Cthulhu mad isn't the revelation of the Unknowable, but instead the realization that the Unknowable may be Knowable, and thus, could be deduced, described, explained, categorized, and, ultimately, ignored. If Cthulhu appears before you, with all of his inexplicable power and majesty, you are forced to confront the fact that you are limited, that you are insignificant, and that you truly will never be anything more than an ant. The argument could even be made that everything humans have achieved, we have accomplished because we are too stupid to realize it is impossible.


Or, to put it another way: so long as we have no use for, and no need to use, the infinite variety of real numbers between one and two, they don't matter. They are outside of our frame of reference, and are thus something that we have chosen not to know. But if we were confronted by those numbers...well, who is to say what might happen?
 
Another vide on Bloodborne I found, it's a sequel to the same guys work on connecting Dark Souls to the monomyth, except here connects Bloodborne to an anti-monomyth that itself loops back into cosmic horror.



For a TL;DR of one of the videos most important arguments. A lot of stories in human cultures reflect the human need to see themselves in god and god in themselves, and the monomyth represents the journey to that enlightenment. Which is a story that cosmic horror FUCKING OBVIOUSLY rejects outright.
 
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