Starfields is one of the biggest games of 2023 – but it’s joined other recent games like Baldurs Gate 3 in being boycotted by conservatives because of the way it interacts with gender.
Starfields is one of the biggest games of 2023 – but it’s joined other recent games like Baldurs Gate 3 in being boycotted by conservatives because of the way it interacts with gender.
I wasn’t even talking about his horror, to be honest. The man himself was a hot mess of being afraid of everyone different. As well as being oddly picky about who he applied it to - he was extremely antisemitic but married a Jewish woman. He hated gay people but one of his best friends was gay. It was like he hated the idea of Others but was ok with an very few individuals on a very personal level.
As for what you’ve brought up, that’s often, I think, why SF can be used to explore racism or themes of racism. By making a complete alien The Other, you can look at and explore ideas that would nowadays get folks screaming “WOKE!!!” if you tried to explore it with races of people.
Yes, his relationship with the idea of “Others” is strange… like a love/hate relationship. In fact, the cat which you mentioned (named after a racial slur, though it seems it was not him who named it) was deeply loved by him… he using his cat’s name in one of his works was more of a way to honor it rather than anything else, there’s letters from him claiming he was still mourning even though it was more than 20 years since it vanished.
A lot of people can hold low key prejudices against the abstract notion of a group of people but make exceptions for people that they actually know, it’s really weird but that’s humans for you…
Only Lovecraft wasn’t low-key at all. Dude was high-key, so much that people in his own time were saying he was racist. I mean, there’s a Hitler or Lovecraft quiz out there.
Lovecraft had very complex thinking about race, oddly enough. He was ok with his Jewish wife because she was “assimilated enough” because at the time he thought assimilation was best. Later, he went against that and thought non-whites should keep their own cultures (but those cultures were inferior) and praised groups trying to do so, and looked down on anyone not Anglo-Saxon. Dude was a paradox and how.
Hey cool that’s by Zoe Quinn!
Point taken though - didn’t do the whole thing but more then a few I thought were Hitler turned out to be Lovecraft. Never actually read any of his books. (Lovecraft’s that is. Well Hitler’s either thinking about it…)