Two things about Trail of Cthulhu

[tablesaw]

I'm running a game for ojouchan, cramerica, amythyst, and maybe thefreak (who's will probably be working) and pbchris (who hasn't let us know whether he's coming glare). Ojou asked for Call of Cthulhu, which I've run before, but I decided to switch to Trail of Cthulhu, which looked awesome and is nicely streamlined. I'm finishing up writing my notes now, which is good, because I still keep moving things around as I do it. But two things have been bouncing through my mind.

(There are no spoilers for the game in this post.)

One, it's awesome that the places that I walk to when I want to clear my head are exactly the setting of the game I'm writing. I live just a few blocks away from the old Krotona Colony. Krotona was a colony for Theosophy, an esoteric religion that still exists today. (So does the colony; it moved to Ojai in 1926.)

A regular feature in my walks is this stairway, which served as the southern entrance to the colony. I knew that several of the buildings up there were from the colony, but I didn't realize how many. A review of the architecture of the area (available as a PDF) has this to say:

Nearly all of Krotona's major and many of its minor buildings still stand occupied, though all have been to some extent remodeled and most changed dramatically in function. Together they comprise what may well be the largest coherent group of architecturally significant, Theosophical structures in the western hemisphere.

And sure enough, looking through the pictures, I kept recognizing the less flamboyant buildings as ones I walked past.

Tomorrow's adventure begins at this house, though not with its then owners, the parents of Mary Astor.

Second, I've always wondered the extent to which Cthulhu roleplaying games are fundamentally racist. Not in the sense of mechanically dealing with 1920s American race relations in roleplay. More in the sense of whether Lovecraft's stories structurally racist, whether they contain or foster or support ideas of the primacy of whiteness. There's no doubt that Lovecraft was a serious racist, even for the 1920s. (If you doubt it, read this; you can get the gist by looking at the title in the URL.) But the last time I ran the game, Ojou drew up a character that was essentially her grandmother, and it threatened to break the game. Not because of min-maxing or anything, just in having a view of the world that was not the WASP academic worldview that Lovecraft relies upon. That worldview is necessary for the horror to work, and as a result it supports it in the reader. Add a character that doesn't fit into that worldview (like a rich black woman withconnections to other African-American practitioners of Vodoun), and the story completely changes.

The role-playing games are very good at breaking down the stories of Lovecraft (and other Mythos writers), and examining them can give a sense of what's there structurally. There's definitely a sense of extended Terra Nullius. The Mythos contains a whole host of gods, creatures, and alien races that populated earth long before "humanity." And yet, non-White humans (like the native Tongva of Southern California, or ancient or even contemporary Africans) seem to have regular contact with this mentally toxic existence.

Trail of Cthulhu takes Call of Cthulhu's legendary "Sanity" stat and breaks it into Sanity and Stability. Stability is what many people consider to be "sanity"; it's the ability to hold yourself together when terrible things happen, whether they're natural or supernatural. Sanity is specifically tied to knowledge of the "Cthulhu Mythos." From the ToC manual:

Sanity is the ability to believe in, fear for, or care about any aspect of the world or humanity as we know it: religion, science, family, natural beauty, human dignity, even "normal" immorality. The horrible truth of the Mythos is that Sanity measures your ability to believe a comforting lie . . . . It is perhaps best understood as a long-term measure of how close you are to fully realizing the bleak and awful reality of the cosmos.

Given all this (and some other things), I start to see Lovecraft's take on horror as one in which Whiteness and its privileges is equivalent with "humanity." Horror comes from the threat to Whiteness, the comfortable (and comforting) lie that is threatened by incursion from or exposure to the Other, who are alien and unhuman. It's an attitude and analogy that does permeate the structure of Lovecraftian horror, and I'm trying to find ways to neutralize it.

Comments

[cnoocy]

I think it's more generically part of the structure of horror that the horror comes from the incursion of the abnormal into a defined normal state. From the point of view of the native inhabitants, most of the colonial era could be seen as a horror story. In a Mage setting, you could do something with the clash of paradigms, but I'm not sure how that works in a Mythos setting. Are there unearthly beings in the catacombs of Paris? Does Western civilization have an overall loss of Stability due to the bleeding of all of Europe's formerly local horrors into a whole? Hm. That's an interesting thought, but it causes other problems. To see something as horrible to colonizers that's normal to the locals is all well and good until the game explicitly sides with the colonizer's perspective. There's more thinking to be done here.

[naraht]

From the point of view of the native inhabitants, most of the colonial era could be seen as a horror story.

And yet mysteriously--or perhaps not--this doesn't seem to be a popular topic for horror stories. I think you're downplaying the extent to which the topics chosen as "horrifying" are skewed by cultural context.

To see something as horrible to colonizers that's normal to the locals is all well and good until the game explicitly sides with the colonizer's perspective.

Surely the game is siding with colonizers by presenting the thing as horrible in the first place? Rather than focusing on colonialism as the evil?

[cnoocy]

I think you're downplaying the extent to which the topics chosen as "horrifying" are skewed by cultural context.

That's a good point. I'm thinking about what could be done to change this and still be in the horror genre. Is "horrifying" based on the context of the characters, of the reader, or of the author? Does it have to be?

Surely the game is siding with colonizers by presenting the thing as horrible in the first place? Rather than focusing on colonialism as the evil?

That's part of the point I was trying (and probably failing) to make. You could create an occult history of Western civilization where, by conquering other civilizations and melding the local occult aspects of each local culture in Europe, the entire civilization gradually loses stability until the atrocities of colonization begin to make rational sense within its context. But at the end of the day, the game is sending characters into the occult context of the local culture and presenting that as horrible. I don't think the Mythos is flexible enough to present the local Things as relatively evil.

[naraht]

Is "horrifying" based on the context of the characters, of the reader, or of the author? Does it have to be?

Personally I'm always fascinated by literature in which the reader is meant to see things a different way from the character. (Unreliable narrators, in other words.) Having said that, if the reader doesn't find the situation depicted actually horrifying, then the book has probably moved well out of the horror genre.

[cnoocy]

The sort of theoretical horror story we're discussing is almost the opposite of an unreliable narrator story in that the author has to get the reader to share the character's perceptions of "normal" and "horrifying". Doing so without devolving into farce or some other non-horror genre could definitely be a challenge. It's possible that M. Night Shyamalan is the most well-known current practitioner, but it would be even more challenging to do so without concealing important information about the setting.

[amythyst]

Note: amythyst :)

[yeloson]

As teenagers, we used to joke how in Lovecraft's stories, that knowledge and truth made white people crazy. I think the "horror" he portrays is this: "Whiteness is not the actual foundation of the universe! Scary OTHERS have lived before us, and will one day replace us! ZOMG!"

What I thought was always interesting is the specific roles which POC played in his stories- always magical to be sure, but in some cases trying to stop the crazy white folks from summoning up/unsealing the evil and in other cases actively worshiping the evil thing and yet, unable to really bring this about until there's a speshul snowflake to commit the final act or at least be witness to it.

Of course, maybe the reason all this stuff makes San loss happen, according to that definition, is that we're already talking about a society which casually -doesn't- care about humans, because they've chosen to define so many AS not human.

Maybe other people who haven't taken that route have more mental resistance, because they're not playing rationalizing games about why it's ok to (shoot these people, infect them for science, chop off hands for rubber, etc.)

Other tangent, slightly related- this also was something that came up when a friend of mine decided to play a half-black character in Dogs in the Vineyard (basically Mormon Gunslingers in the Wild West)...

The larger problem is we have a certain set of genre stories which all have monoracial casts- these stories don't deal with integration on any level, and the problematic part is that leaves a massive gap for many folks in how they choose to portray these groups as real people, in real situations.

[joshroby.livejournal.com]

Keeping in mind I read two short stories of Lovecraft before I tossed the collection aside, it sounds from your description as if he takes two Others — the inhuman and the non-white — and regularly associates the two of them. People Not Like You know stuff about Things Not Like You. I don't know how you translate that into a cosmopolitain mindset that values, rather than fears, the Other.