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Old 09-07-2020, 03:11 PM
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ferretchucker ferretchucker is offline
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Lovecraft Country

Crikey, this one has been causing some real debate on the Lovecraft Facebook pages. Lovecraft has been my favourite author for a while now - when I was 16 I wrote an essay on him and just went further down the rabbit hole from there.

That being said, I think it is willfully ignorant to completely out aside the fact of his awful (even for the time) racism. If he were still alive I think it would be much tougher, but as it stands, I do think for the most part you can separate him from his art. But that doesn't mean sweeping it under the rug. Something I've grown to accept more and more as I've got older is that there might just not be an answer in these situations. Sometimes you have to accept that you'll never fully be able to reconcile these things. The important thing is to keep is all in mind.

Anyway - Matt Ruff does a great job of that in his book (nearly finished it, bought it immediately after episode 1). The difficult conflict between Atticus' love of pulp stories and the uncomfortable knowledge that the people who made those stories would have wanted him nowhere near them (as in, in a character sense) is fab, not to mention the story itself DOES set him (and others) as new pulp protagonists. I love that it maintains those slightly silly elements of early 20th century sci-fi, with weirdly describe devices and slightly corny images. Letitia in particular is a wonderfully independent character.

I won't harp on too much about "who are the REAL monsters" because I think that while relevant and obviously well handled, it's already been discussed to death.

The show...is good. The first episode was great, the second one less so. The third was slightly better again. I don't know...every change from the book they've made has felt for the worse so far. Some of them make sense in terms of adaptation, some just seem odd. But I'm enjoying it and holding out hope it'll bring it back. Going to watch episode 4 tomorrow.
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