Full rights for demonic fish people

[dorchadas]

I read, or rather listened to, The Litany of Earth when it ran on The Drabblecast, and I thought it was a good story that I really didn't like. Turning the people of Innsmouth into a metaphor for cultural appropriation and oppression due to government policy, like Japanese internment, meant that it wasn't really deep ones in the story, just fish

Comments

[nelc]

It seems to me that Litany of Earth is a conscious inversion of the alienforeign-as-something-to-be-feared that Lovecraft seems to rely on in some of his work. The Innsmouthers (Innsmouthians? Innsmouthites?) similarities to regular humans are played up in order to underline humanity's bad habit of underplaying other humans' humanity. And that's a message that needs to be underlined in our world.

As a filthy athiest, I of course regard all religions as 'just another religion'; if the Innsmouthans' religion actually has a living god who can do stuff (when he's awake or at least stirring), then that's an interesting feature, but it's still just another religion for all that, with traditions and lines of authority and obligation. Not a lot different from modern cults, really, except the central figure in all this is potentially more powerful than a merely human sociopath using the material wealth his followers gather to support his hedonistic lifestyle.

[dorchadas]

I'm not sure I agree with the second paragraph. One of the primary characteristics of the One True Religion (as Bob Howard would put it) to my mind is that its practices and objects of veneration are innately injurious to human mental stability. I can understand taking that out to make a point about the way many humans tend to believe that already about religions different from the one they practice themselves--"underplaying other humans' humanity," as you say--but it takes out the most interesting part of cosmic horror to me. If the answer to "[Being X] cannot interact with humans without causing them injury, what do we do" is "We don't have to do anything, it's just human prejudice that led to that impression and it doesn't have any innate truth," it seems like a cop-out. Dealing with the problem by saying it doesn't exist at all and the problem is actually something completely different.

[nelc]

Sure, and LoE is doing that because it isn't about cosmic horror at all; it's about humanity's inhumanity masquerading as unsolvable and incomprehensible cosmic horror projected onto the Other. So much easier to deal with fellow sentients if we can pretend that they are alien aliens, and that we are not only justified in dropping depth charges on their reefs, but telling ourselves that they don't feel the pain of genocide like real true humans.

[dorchadas]

All of that is true! But that's why I said it was a good story that I didn't like.