I think it should be possible to write the fish people without falling into those extremes, those traps. What's frustrating is that people too often treat it as an either/or thing.
No, NO, NO! That isn't a trap! Your cosmopolitan, pampered, Western, relativistic worldview is the trap. Your insistence that nuance is necessary, or even obligatory, is the trap. HPL's monsters are the essence of other. They are not redeemable, nor are they sympathetic. They are alien, in the most extreme meaning of that word. They seek, as part of their very being, the destruction of humanity, not as a hostile act, but because humanity's survival is irrelevant to their aims. They are no more amenable to compromise with humanity than humans are amenable to compromise with cockroaches or termites. And that absolute enmity with human concerns is vital, central, impossible to remove without destroying what cosmic horror is intended to mean in those stories.
You rage against suggestions that you are blind to your own biases that prevent you from understanding these stories, and yet every word you write simply confirms that blindness. You cannot write Lovecraftian monsters with "nuance" and still have Lovecraftian horror. Only someone so steeped in modern bourgeoisie relativism that they can't even see outside their own mental constructs could miss this. By definition, a Lovecraftian horror is one that is impossible to understand, to bargain with, to defeat. The most you can ever to is to delay the inevitable. Cthulhu sleeps and waits, but he will awake, and all of our civilization will crumble. THAT is Lovecraftian horror. And it doesn't work if the Deep Ones are "reasonable" and "understandable" creatures.
The past four days have been extremely stressful for me in real life (e.g. I’ve been having nothing but diarrhea all that time), so I apologize if there’s any confusion as a result of my responses.
It’s not my desire to see the horror subtracted. It’s extremely difficult to explain this because we both seem to have completely different meanings when it comes to basic words, but I’ll try.
I feel that Innsmouth stories are typically extremely schlocky. They rely on violence, gore, graphic rape (of women, and only women), etc. The more subtle psychological horror in the original story is completely absent. The fish people are reduced to caricatures with more in common with dothraki or orcs than anything else. I feel these recurring elements betray the writers’ biases and hangups regarding horror and sexuality more than it says anything about cosmic horror.
The stories that don’t fall into that are typically SJW claptrap where the fish people are a persecuted minority with nothing but redeeming values. Any kind of horror is absent; at best you get dark fantasy.
It’s extremely difficult to find stories that actually emphasize the alien nature of the fish people without resorting to gory misogynistic b-schlock. The only decent effort I’ve found is
Call of the Sea, an adventure puzzle video game.
What I mean to say is: I think writer biases and hangups regarding violence, sexuality, more recently social justice, etc cloud our ability to explore cosmic horror. This goes in all political directions. This problem is particularly pronounced whenever stories broach any topics that relate even remotely to human social issues like race relations.
It’s easy to avoid complicating a story where an alien from another universe is trying to eat you or an ancient city is telepathically eroding your mind. It’s a lot more difficult when things like sex with fish people is involved.
I’m not trying to argue that we can make peace with the fish people and live in a peaceful multicultural society, unless the story is presenting that
as horrifying. And to be fair, going by Hahn’s xenology speculation, a multicultural society would result in fish people genetics dispersing through the human population and making everyone subject to Cthulhu’s dreams.
I think there’s tons of potentially interesting avenues that are being completely ignored here.
I’ve also been having similar problems trying to pitch omnivoracious hivemind bug stories elsewhere. I keep running into people who think the bugs should inevitably engage in diplomacy, when my entire argument has been that they’re so alien that they don’t interact in any way other than genocidal warfare. I’m pitching these bugs as intelligent and introspective, and reasonable in the literal sense: they’ve reasoned that the best way to interact with humans (and everything else) is to eat/assimilate them as part of their quest for borg-esque perfection. In fact, some bugs who give it any thought are actually surprised that other species would not want to join this quest and blame this resistance on pathological ignorance. The bugs are reasonable, yet impossible to reason with. They don’t bother to engage in communication with other species because it won’t convince them to surrender and let themselves be eaten. Etc.
I hope I explained that right because it’s really difficult to get it across to human readers, it seems.
Anyway, I’m tired now so I’ll sign off.