Board and tabletop game developer Evil Hat have caused public outcry, after their Fate of Cthulu tabletop book described H.P. Lovecraft as a racist. We looked into it further to see if they were right.
On January 17th, the Evil Hat Twitter account tweeted “While developing Fate of Cthulhu, we were obligated to reflect on the problematic roots of the source material. We tackle that on page 6. The mythos is definitely worth exploring – it’s also worth re-examining.”
Page 6 explains how dungeon masters should ensure all players “give enthusiastic consent” before playing the game, as Lovecraftian horror can often deal with topics of “mental health, systemic abuses of power, and the deaths of huge portions of the human species.”
The page continues, explaining how they felt Lovecraft was a racist, with thinly veiled contempt:
Also- Howard Phillips Lovecraft was a racist and an anti-Semite. There. We said it.
We could give a litany of examples, but they are easy to find with a simple Internet search. Look up the name of his cat, for instance (HPL was over-the-top, even for his time). Go ahead, we’ll wait.
Now that we’ve gotten that issue out in the open, let us turn our attention to why we still find the Cthulu mythos, of which we planted the seed, a fruitful garden in which to find stories.
Lovecraft once said, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” He filled that void of knowledge with his imagination, creating Old Ones and forbidden knowledge, strange religions and fantastical superstitions, threats to society and suspicion of what science might unlock. We can acknowledge the fear behind his imagination while also re-examining what came out of it.”
The page finishes encouraging readers to read Lovecraft-inspired works by “many writers, including writers of color,” and hoping players will use them as inspiration “just as much as you use Lovecraft’s original works.”
This quickly caused outcry on Twitter, but praise from others. Some felt Evil Hat had been overly sensitive, self-righteous, or attempting to appeal to those with “progressive” beliefs, rather than fans of tabletop games or Lovecraft.
Other pages in Fate of Cthulu also discourage dungeon masters and players from portraying a character with mental illness or insanity if they are not comfortable, but also the “Corruption” effect of the Old Ones is distanced from it “by default.”
Evil Hat is also playtesting Thirsty Sword Lesbians, a game which offers “flirting, sword-fighting, and zingers in a PbtA-based system designed for both narrative drama and player safety.” [1]
In addition, it seems among the tabletop community handbooks and guides are already adapted by dungeon masters, based on the players at the table to ensure everyone enjoys themselves. This was seemingly born by older rulebooks for Dungeons and Dragons encouraging it.
Others felt Evil Hat had essentially confessed to despising Lovecraft, yet hypocritically seeking to profit from his works. Some claimed Lovecraft was no more racist that others in his era, and that decrying him as a racist by modern standards would discourage others from enjoying his work.
Whether Lovecraft was racist even for the United States during the 1920s to 1930s is still hotly debated. This is due to many conflicting reports and discussions about whether racist attitudes were openly stated, kept discreet, whether people did so as not to be ostracized, and so forth. We took a look at Lovecraft’s life for ourselves.
A Brief History of Lovecraft
Lovecraft’s history (via sources from Wikipedia) seems to indicate he came from a rich family in Providence, Rhode Island, having a Christian upbringing, and deep reverence for his English heritage.
After his father was committed and died five years later, his mother was “permanently stricken with grief.” The death of his grandmother also inflicted the family with “a gloom from which it never fully recovered.”
Lovecraft’s interest in astrology and science were also undermined by his poor health, as he “went in and out of elementary school repeatedly,” and struggled with math.
In the 1900s, his family began to spiral to financial ruin- a period of time where Lovecraft became suicidal. He would also be frequently absent from highschool due to what he deemed “near breakdowns.” While he did attend university, he never graduated.
When he became Chairman of the Department of Public Criticism of the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA) in 1914, he developed a new lease on life, stating:
“With the advent of United I obtained a renewed will to live; a renewed sense of existence as other than a superfluous weight; and found a sphere in which I could feel that my efforts were not wholly futile. For the first time I could imagine that my clumsy gropings after art were a little more than faint cries lost in the unlistening void.”
While in the UAPA, he advocated for “the superiority of English language usage that most writers already considered archaic.” He also claimed that immigrants had “bastardized” the “national language.”
He was later elected to the Vice-President, and then President of the UAPA, as reportedly “other board members that mostly shared his view on the supremacy of classical English over modern American English.”
Lovecraft’s mother had a nervous breakdown in 1919 and saw “weird and fantastic creatures that rushed out from behind buildings and from corners at dark.” She was later committed.
Despite finally finding confidence in his writings and self from 1919 to 1921 via amateur writer conventions and groups, his mother’s death in 1921 caused Lovecraft to become suicidal again.
He would later marry Sonia Greene, and moved into her apartment in Brooklyn, New York. Due to him detesting life in the area and being unable to find work, they would later move to Cleveland. Some suspect one of the reasons he hated life in Brooklyn was due to the high immigrant population.
As he struggled to find work and became increasingly poor, Lovecraft moved back to Brooklyn on his own. His home near the “working-class waterfront neighborhood” Red Hook was burgled, leaving him with “only the clothes he was wearing.” He would later write The Horror at Redhook, and the short story He.
In the latter, the narrator states “My coming to New York had been a mistake; for whereas I had looked for poignant wonder and inspiration […] I had found instead only a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to master, paralyze, and annihilate me.”
His works often struggled to find success, with the small amount published in pulp magazine Weird Tales being the few that gained notoriety at the time. Even then, most of his works were rejected by the publication, who favored “stock content and action” instead. Some works he did not even attempt to publish.
Towards the end of his life, Lovecraft wrote The Call of Cthulu. His finances continued to decline, sometimes going without food to afford to mail letters. He died of cancer of the small intestine in 1937.
Through Lovecraft’s life, we can make some assumptions. His life was full of frequent tragedy, and his desires and hopes were often unobtainable. He may have felt he was “letting down” his English heritage by not being more successful and intelligent, at a time when immigrants were coming to the US to find their own successes.
The few times of happiness in his life were at the UAPA, where he was surrounded by peers who re-affirmed his beliefs on immigrants ruining the English language. His later failures and sensitive nature could have led him to further seek another source to blame for his misfortunes.
Lovecraft’s work does often feature white protagonists (sometimes explicitly of English or Nordic decent), usually of good standing and intelligence. Though a white protagonist in a story from a predominantly white country was most likely the norm in 1920’s to 1930’s American fiction.
His writings usually depict white people of “poor breeding” or lower-class in a similar way to how he depicted most non-whites in his works; poor, depraved, and performing despicable acts in worship or under the influence of Great Old Ones.
Wikipedia also states via numerous sources that “From the start, Lovecraft did not hold all white people in uniform high regard, but rather esteemed the English people and those of English descent.”
As such, Lovecraft may have been an “English supremacist” as oppose to a white supremacist overall. He even argued in favor of the US getting involved in World War 1 to protect England from the Germans.
Lovecraft also produced a short poem in 1912 entitled On the Creation of N*ggers, wherein God creates man, “lesser parts” went to beasts, and Africans were created as “A beast they wrought, in semi-human figure, Filled it with vice.”
According to The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature (via Wikipedia), Lovecraft’s infamous cat (named N*gger Man) was likely named while Lovecraft was aged 9. Even after Lovecraft’s death, the word was continued to be used as a nickname, brand name, and pet name.
Most notably, this includes the dog belonging to Wing Commander Guy Gibson, who was involved in Operation Chastise (the “Dam Busters” raid) during World War 2 in 1943. The morse code to confirm that Möhne dam had been successfully breached was the dog’s name.
In short, it seems Lovecraft was certainly a racist by today’s standards, and did have a deep loathing of those he deemed “lesser,” whether due to their race or class, seemingly only holding “good breeding” from English decent in high-regard.
As aforementioned, it is hard to know whether that attitude was typical for the time or not- his colleagues at the UAPA not withstanding. The use of the n-word continued long after his death, and events such as the Civil Rights Act of 1968 occurred over 30 years after his death.
Nonetheless, some criticize denouncing his impact on literature due to his beliefs. On November 9th, 2015, the The World Fantasy Convention announced their World Fantasy Award for fantasy writing would no longer be in the shape of a bust of Lovecraft- due to outcry of his racist attitude.
Again, this was met with complaints, as some feared other great works of art and writing would be condemned and ignored due to the author’s beliefs. Others proposed that forgetting the origin’s of a person’s beliefs would make it harder to understand why people develop such beliefs in the future.
A mere three days after making their original post, Evil Hat tweeted condemnation for those who had condemned them.
Since the predictable edgelords and apologists have now shown up, a quick reminder: If you don’t like the politics included in our games, don’t buy them. We literally do not want your money. We are committed to diverse and inclusive gaming. We’re not perfect, but we’re trying.
Image: Kickstarter
