I think all of the wokeness has poisoned the well for these kinds of debates. This forum is so opposed to wokeness that it’s impossible to engage in good faith with anything judged woke or woke-adjacent.
One could argue that even "Blade Runner" is an example of it.
Blade Runner presents the replicants as victims and tragic villains, not irredeemable monsters that must be exterminated to protect the human race.
First strike for "I'll give an arbitrary interpretation to an element of the tale so to prove my woke point".
Leila Hahn goes out of her way to explain, rationalize, and defend Lovecraft’s behavior rather than dismiss him as a worthless bigot. She psychoanalyses his writing and biography in an attempt to understand him as much as it is possible with a dead person. That’s the last thing a truly woke person would do. Empathy is not a woke value.
She goes out of her way to analyze and speculate to a degree that any Lovecraft fan would hope to dream of being able to. She’s contributed plenty of interesting analyses of the aliens and monsters that I have never seen in any other fansite or forum or game. Biology, psychology, metaphysics, evolution, etc. A woke bigot who hated HPL would not be doing that. She clearly likes the material enough to write textbooks worth of anakysis and commentary. Effing textbooks worth!
Her analysis of the deepies doesn’t treat them as a persecuted minority and acknowledges their imperialistic behavior. She even takes into account that the deepies engage in propaganda and whitewashing of their own history. She explicitly compares them to white colonialists. A woke bigot, again, wouldn’t do that. Woke bigots want to fuck the fish people to satisfy their monster fetish, not psychoanalyze them and examine their culture from an anthropological standpoint.
Here you go dismissing all that as woke bigotry and personal attacks on Lovecraft. This is what I mean about poisoning the well. You’re so opposed to the woke that you absolutely refuse to tolerate any interpretation of HPL’s work that doesn’t take it purely at face value and lionizes Lovecraft.
The guy named his cat a racial slur and regularly dehumanized people in his stories on the basis of class, race, and culture.
This is the horrifying ending revelation of “Medusa’s Coils”:
It would be too hideous if they knew that the one-time heiress of Riverside, the accursed gorgon or lamia whose hateful crinkly coil of serpent-hair must even now be brooding and twining vampirically around an artist's skeleton in a lime-packed grave beneath a charred foundation, . . . for, though in deceitfully slight proportion, Marceline was a negress.
To treat “The Shadow over Innsmouth” purely as a horror story where “fish people bad” is the takeaway and every other critical analysis take not matter how well reasoned is bad and wrong (especially if it sounds “woke”)… that takes Death of the Author to the most ridiculous extremes.
Neither is that Lovecraft may have read of Puritan flash mobs and used them just as an inspiration for the scene without any political meaning.
Now you’re just insulting HPL’s intelligence. The bookworm was a precursor to Tolkien. He would write layers of symbolism and references into his stories that only the erudite would understand. You’re deliberately flattening all those layers of meaning simply to defend HPL’s character (which isn’t being attacked here anyway) while ironically devaluing him as a writer and an intellectual.
This is exactly the kind of anti-intellectual cherry-picking backlash that I expected the woke to have created in their insanity. The well is so poisoned. Do you believe that if you read this analysis ten or twenty years ago that you’d still dismiss it as woke bigotry?
Even S.T. Joshi acknowledges that Lovecraft’s work was full of both literal racism and racist allegories, and he’s one of the premier Lovecraft scholars. He even handed in his award when they took away HPL’s likeness. Acknowledging that Lovecraft was racist because of his upbringing and wrote racism and racist allegories into his work, as was standard at the time he lived in, is not a woke take. I read such analyses as mainstream long before the woke panic.
Maybe Hahn’s analyses aren’t perfect or extensive enough, but they’re hardly woke bigotry. She displays empathy for Lovecraft, which the woke do not do. I know because I have chatted with them about it and they can’t fucking shutup about how he’s the devil incarnate. Hahn is not attacking Lovecraft. She’s treating him like a human being, with all the baggage that entails.
Treating Lovecraft like an actual human being, warts and all, is something that already doesn’t happen enough on both sides of the political aisle.