![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Oct. 25th, 2020 08:38 amIt is Halloween week, so I am doing some revisiting of Spooky Stories I Have Loved and have been listening to some of my Dark Adventure Radio Theater Lovecraft things.
Lovecraft is one of those things that I cannot in honesty recommend to anyone for obvious reasons, but he's weirdly a comfort author for me. This is partially because I first read him as a child, before I knew enough to be uncomfortable with any but his most egregious awfulnesses. It's partially because I find a lot of cosmic horror in general to be obscurely comforting, for reasons that are difficult to put into words.
It's also, and I think I've really only articulated this to myself for the first time today, that he is one of the very few authors where the universe of his writing feels comfortable to me as an asexual person. With most authors, even queer authors, there is a fundamental assumption baked into their stories that some people, at least, are going to enter into romantic/sexual relationships and that this is, if not good, than at least natural and expected. That fundamental assumption is completely missing from Lovecraft's writing. And I'm not just talking about the fact that most of the sexual relationships we do see are explicitly monstrous (Asenath Waite and Edward Pickman Derby, Lavinia Whateley and her sons' father, Obed Marsh and his fishwife, etc). There's no expectation that any of his more "normal" characters would want or even consider a romantic partnership. Even when there you would absolutely expect that kind of thing, like with Charles Dexter Ward's whole situation. ("Can't you just find a girlfriend and get out of the house instead of staring at that creepy painting all day?" said absolutely no one to Charles Dexter Ward.)
It is so rare to find stories without that fundamental expectation that one is perhaps willing to look other flaws in order to live in that particular aspect of the world for a while.
ETA - Look at me, accidentally writing a post about the asexual horror fan experience on the first day of Ace Awareness week!
Lovecraft is one of those things that I cannot in honesty recommend to anyone for obvious reasons, but he's weirdly a comfort author for me. This is partially because I first read him as a child, before I knew enough to be uncomfortable with any but his most egregious awfulnesses. It's partially because I find a lot of cosmic horror in general to be obscurely comforting, for reasons that are difficult to put into words.
It's also, and I think I've really only articulated this to myself for the first time today, that he is one of the very few authors where the universe of his writing feels comfortable to me as an asexual person. With most authors, even queer authors, there is a fundamental assumption baked into their stories that some people, at least, are going to enter into romantic/sexual relationships and that this is, if not good, than at least natural and expected. That fundamental assumption is completely missing from Lovecraft's writing. And I'm not just talking about the fact that most of the sexual relationships we do see are explicitly monstrous (Asenath Waite and Edward Pickman Derby, Lavinia Whateley and her sons' father, Obed Marsh and his fishwife, etc). There's no expectation that any of his more "normal" characters would want or even consider a romantic partnership. Even when there you would absolutely expect that kind of thing, like with Charles Dexter Ward's whole situation. ("Can't you just find a girlfriend and get out of the house instead of staring at that creepy painting all day?" said absolutely no one to Charles Dexter Ward.)
It is so rare to find stories without that fundamental expectation that one is perhaps willing to look other flaws in order to live in that particular aspect of the world for a while.
ETA - Look at me, accidentally writing a post about the asexual horror fan experience on the first day of Ace Awareness week!
