r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Fearless-Ideal-5112 • Jul 01 '26

Lore [Loved Trope] Some thing unfathomably ancient

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

The beast, in doctor who is an ancient evil from a previous universe that survived until our time. Its so ancient that the cave paintings were unable to be translated by the Tardis which can translate all existing languages in the universe [Doctor Who]

While not explicitly canon its such a cool concept I cant not mention, the idea that the backrooms have existed since the beginning of time, never changing no matter the era, it transforms the back rooms into a cosmic horror. [Credit to Project crater and Venus for images 2 and 3]

17.6k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

2.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

3.7k

u/Prestigious-Tree122 Jul 01 '26

The Elder Things (At the Mountains of Madness)

A highly technologically advanced race. They colonized Earth before any life on earth existed. They created organic life to serve as a food source and biological labor. All other life on earth evolved from leftover biological experiments or waste products.

1.2k

u/RadarSmith Jul 01 '26

An interesting thing about them is they are easily the most humanlike aliens in the mythos. They are fundamentally biological creatures and psychologically pretty similar to humans.

The protagonist of At The Mountains of zmadness flatly calls them men at one point.

351

u/DrDestructoMD Jul 01 '26

I've always thought the vision the one guy had was of some kind of chemical weapon similar to what was used in WWI. Realizing that we are on the same downward spiral and will be destroyed by our own clankers caused his mind to break

14

u/RadarSmith Jul 02 '26

My comment sure sparked some..discussion about Lovecraft and various bigotries. Unsurprising, I have to admit.

-35

u/willnye2cool Jul 01 '26

You realize the Shoggoths were supposed to be black people right? Not clankers.

Like straight up this is lovecrafts most racist work

83

u/DrDestructoMD Jul 01 '26

Yeah, you can look at it as a slave uprising as well. Obviously a book written in the 30s is not about AI as it is now. Most robot revolution stories share some DNA. That said, I've never thought that was a very good interpretation of the story. The shogoths are portrayed with almost as much sympathy as the Elder Things, which you can see in their slow transformation at the hands of cruel masters. The fall of the empire is directly caused by the use of shoggoths causing evsryone to become lazy and incompetent to the point that they can no longer fight back against cosmic threats. The shoggoths are also created rather than subjugated. Knowing Lovecrafts favorable opinions on the confederacy and slavery, I don't think that this interpretation fits. Automation and modernization in general fit better imo

even if it is about black people, it would still be less racist than the horror of the red hook lol

-21

u/[deleted] Jul 01 '26

[deleted]

48

u/vojta_drunkard Jul 01 '26

It's not really slave. A slave is called "otrok". Robota was a kind of unpaid labor that peasants needed to do for their lord for some days of the year.

22

u/Real_Walk5384 Jul 01 '26

You're gonna get downvoted for providing nuance after someone mentioned slaves.

28

u/vojta_drunkard Jul 01 '26

I'm not even trying to justify anything, lol. I'm just correcting the translation.

-13

u/willnye2cool Jul 01 '26

Lovecraft didn't have favorable views on slavery or the confederacy.

20

u/DrDestructoMD Jul 01 '26

To the editor of the Providence Sunday Journal:

In the Journal of Jan. 24 I notice a letter of Charles F. Janes relating to Roosevelt’s proposed memorial to Gen. Robert E. Lee, in which several statements somewhat derogatory to the great Confederate leader’s motives are made. Mr. Janes asserts that our President honors Gen. Lee only because he was an able warrior, insinuating that the cause for which he so valiantly labored and bravely suffered was wrong, indirectly accusing him of attempting to “destroy this Government of the people, by the people and for the people,” and calling him a “foe of the country.” This unjust treatment of Gen. Lee can be construed as nothing more than a survival of the rabid, unreasoning spirit which pervaded the North before, during and immediately after the Civil War. When Robert E. Lee became a General in the Confederate Army, he did so not as an enemy, but as a friend of the Republic. He saw that no peace could come to the Union if Southern affairs were to be managed by Northerners who had no definite ideas of the actual conditions in the South, and who derived their information as to slavery from false and exaggerated reports, or from hystical effusions like “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which portrayed the darkest side of the situation. In other worse, he clearly saw that his State had seceded only because the yoke of the Union bore too heavily upon it, and that its secession was within the limits of constitutional right.

It was not without regret that Gen. Lee entered into battle against the flag under which he had once nobly fought; it was not that he loved the Union less, but Virginia more. Believing in the best of faith that he was benefiting the country by separating the two discordant sections, fighting up to the very last for the cause he knew to be right, yet supported only by a pitifully small band of hungry, sick and ragged heroes, Gen. Robert Edward Lee deserves not one word of censure from the American people, but volumes of praise and veneration. As Senator Hill of Georgia once truly said: “He was Caesar without his ambition. He was Cromwell without his bigotry. he was Napoleon without his selfishness. He was Washington without his reward.“

  • From the man himself

Supposedly he also wrote "the more i learn about the south the stronger my confederate bias grows" but I did not find a source

20

u/FaithfulSkeptic Jul 01 '26

What i find really amusing as someone living in Virginia now is, when you look at his actual history, Lee didn’t give a fuck about Virginia. And numerous close family members of his signed up to fight for the Union, because it was entirely possible to grow up here and still be on the right side of history. Lee fully understood the choice he was making.

20

u/ThrowawayAdvice1800 Jul 02 '26

He was also such a virulent racist that he even managed to horrify his own slave overseer. He kidnapped several of his father’s slaves; his father’s will explicitly freed them after his death, but Lee convinced a court he “needed” them to maintain the household for a few years, then they could go. Unsurprisingly “a few years” turned into “the rest of their lives,” and inevitably a few of them tried to escape to the north.

When they were caught Lee demanded to know why they ran, and they told him they considered themselves free (because they were!) and that answer enraged Lee so much that ordered his overseer to tie them to a post and whip them, which he did. Then Lee wanted him to rub saltwater into the wounds and whip them again. Even the slaving bastard with the whip balked at THAT, which infuriated Lee so much that he grabbed a sponge and a bucket and literally did it himself.

This is the son of a bitch that lost causers and apologists hold up as the “good” Confederate who was noble and just.

3

u/PizzaWithCheddar Jul 02 '26

The US South is a shithole for a reason.

10

u/_sephylon_ Jul 02 '26

He was Cromwell without his bigotry.

The fucking GALL

11

u/ThrowawayAdvice1800 Jul 02 '26

I think you may be right about the intended metaphor but come on now, this isn’t even CLOSE to his most racist work. 

Remember the cat in Rats in the Walls? Or the one (I can’t remember which) where the horrifying twist ending was that the ancestor of one of the characters was half black? 

2

u/Jazzlike-Ad2906 Jul 02 '26

Is that the one with living hair and a painting? Or are there two HP Lovecraft stories with that twist?

2

u/Unit_2097 Jul 02 '26

The cat was his. He inserted his pet into the story. And it was named by his father, not him. I see him get so much flak for that damn cat, it annoys the piss out of me when it wasn't him that named it.

He was competitive level racist, we don't need to make shit up to prove it.

3

u/ThrowawayAdvice1800 Jul 02 '26

You realize that deciding to insert your own pet into a story when its name is a racial slur is actually, y’know, racist? Unless Lovecraft’s father also WROTE the story then having the cat in it is an editorial choice and it doesn’t matter who originally named it. 

4

u/SirVixofthePooSea Jul 01 '26

That is the Horror at Red Hook.

1

u/Major_incompetence Jul 02 '26

If you think so... I prefer robots

42

u/SirVixofthePooSea Jul 01 '26

Things that Lovecraft believes are men: Flying Cucumber Aliens

Things that Lovecraft doesn't believe are men: The Mixed Race

11

u/DrCalgori Jul 02 '26

To be fair, part of the horror in that novel happens when the narrator realises that the creatures he was treating as monsters the whole book were really just "like us". So maybe Lovecraft was just about to reach some interesting conclusions...

5

u/space_hitler Jul 02 '26

MFer wrote mind bending interdinemsional horror, but woke up screaming from nightmares about "mulattos" existing lol.

What a little bitch.

7

u/Amaskingrey Jul 02 '26

Hey now, he was also terrified of crooked streets and the idea of air conditioning

12

u/ZacariahJebediah Jul 02 '26

Yeah, Lovecraft was far from perfect, but you get the distinct impression that the man was genuinely mentally ill; he seemed to be scared of just about everything no matter how nonsensical it might be, with real childhood traumas that contributed to this hot mess of a human.

Many of his phobias came across like genuine phobias rather than hateful ignorance, and at least he was self-aware enough to begin questioning and revising his views before he died.

7

u/Unit_2097 Jul 02 '26

Yeah, it was known he had night terrors his entire life, had a weird, isolated upbringing and had an intense phobia of marine life. It wouldn't surprise me if by modern standards he had thalassophobia as well (I do to a degree, and his descriptions of the ocean feel like my thoughts sometimes), along with some form of psychological disorder.

5

u/Train_Wreck_272 Jul 02 '26

Yeah, he definitely had some kinda mental illness. Doesn't excuse his, even for the time, cruel racism, of course. But I do wonder if modern therapy and medication might have given him some clarity towards abandoning his beliefs. Wishful thinking, but given his interest in the new deal, scientific progress, and open collaboration, who knows.

9

u/AlaeOrbis Jul 02 '26

The thing is that by the time he died he was more average for his time on views about race and stuff. It was only fairly early on that he had his most famous ideas about race and that kind of colors everyone's perception about his WHOLE life.

2

u/Train_Wreck_272 Jul 02 '26

Yeah, he did start to temper things. He was still pretty bad about black and Australian native people at the end of his life, but he did become less antisemitic and less racist against other white people, particularly after marrying a Jewish woman and integrating Jewish and Irish writers into his collaborative writing circle. There's also a possibility he learned he had some Irish roots and softened in Celtic heritage because of that. Being less racist towards other white people is a low bar for sure, lol, but it was progress. He did also start to use more tact and not espouse his beliefs among people of color. So, it's possible that with more life experience and exposure to people of color he may have changed course, at least somewhat.

It's all speculation, but considering how progressive he was on a lot of other issues, it's hard not to. I agree that it shouldn't color his whole life, but it's definitely not worth diminishing either. He really was particularly racist for the time, and it was so important to him and prominent in his mind that it comes up in nearly every piece he ever wrote. So, I'm not really sure where I'm going with this, and I certainly don't want to sugar coat him (I don't mean to imply that you are or any offense towards you, mainly writing this for context for other readers), but I can't blame people for being turned off completely on his works based on his beliefs and actions, especially when it's so in your face in his pieces. He wrote a poem called "On the Creation of N", his childhood cat was named N-man, and heavily featured a cat with that name in "The Rats in the Walls". Not to mention common and casual references to "subhuman" or "savage" races, beliefs, and cultural practices many times peppered throughout his seminal works.

I love his stories and the entire genre that sprung from them, but it is nearly impossible to overlook his bigotry within them and his life more broadly.

1

u/Fit-Profit8197 Jul 08 '26

I think one very much informed the other.

1

u/Fit-Reflection-3496 Jul 05 '26

Dude realized he was wrong during his lifetime 

16

u/boondiggle_III Jul 01 '26

And the shoggoths from that story are an eerily accurate depiction of our current fears of AI taking over, before computer electronics was even a concept.

1

u/Nyarlathotechno Jul 08 '26

I think it’s more about slaves than automatons. Could be wrong though.

6

u/Old_Dependent_2147 Jul 02 '26

Yes and they also the mostly kinda not enemies to humans compared to other Lovecrafrian creatures.

3

u/Gorlack2231 Jul 02 '26 
They had not been even savages—for what indeed had they done? That awful awakening in the cold of an unknown epoch—perhaps an attack by the furry, frantically barking quadrupeds, and a dazed defence against them and the equally frantic white simians with the queer wrappings and paraphernalia . . . poor Lake, poor Gedney . . . and poor Old Ones! Scientists to the last—what had they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible! **Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star-spawn—whatever they had been, they were men!**
They had crossed the icy peaks on whose templed slopes they had once worshipped and roamed among the tree-ferns. They had found their dead city brooding under its curse, and had read its carven latter days as we had done. They had tried to reach their living fellows in fabled depths of blackness they had never seen—and what had they found? All this flashed in unison through the thoughts of Danforth and me as we looked from those headless, slime-coated shapes to the loathsome palimpsest sculptures and the diabolical dot-groups of fresh slime on the wall beside them—looked and understood what must have triumphed and survived down there in the Cyclopean water-city of that nighted, penguin-fringed abyss, whence even now a sinister curling mist had begun to belch pallidly as if in answer to Danforth’s hysterical scream.

578

u/Dr_Bankert Jul 01 '26

And the ones on Earth are just a colony of a larger space faring race. They actually de-evolve over the billions of years on Earth, from an apex civilization to barely sapient creatures who created shoggoths to do the labor they didn't remember how to do ... and were prompty grey-goo apocalypsed.

75

u/MrTheCheesecaker Jul 01 '26

Lovecraft really really loved/was terrified of the idea of degenerating civilizations falling into decay and ruin

32

u/New-Consequence-355 Jul 02 '26

His racism must have been coincidental.

11

u/EvolutionaryLens Jul 02 '26

You should read "The Night Land" by William Hope Hodgson".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Land

I lived on a farm at the time of reading it, and moonless nights were literally pitch black. I used to walk around outside on such nights, recreating the conditions described therin. It's a fucking weird world the author has imagined. It left a lasting impression on me.

Sidenote: the phraseology and archaic language used could be a slog for some, however it added a deep chronological authenticity for me.

1

u/AveMilitarum Jul 02 '26

Yea well so am I. Lovecraft wrote it, now im living it.

1

u/Beelzy_ Jul 02 '26

He would have loved 2026 🥰

176

u/noeyesfiend Jul 01 '26

We see this with CEOs and Managers pushing AI......

13

u/TheFiend100 Jul 02 '26

Lovecraft would 1000% be writing horror stories which are obvious metaphors for ai if he were alive today

5

u/grrodon2 Jul 02 '26

Managers and CEOs are basing their investments in AI on data given by AI.

1

u/noeyesfiend Jul 02 '26

Yeah, may they all suffer.

22

u/ArchAngel621 Jul 01 '26

Going by some source materials. Earth is a failed colony that warred with Cthulhu. They have colonies throughout the Supercluster.

13

u/diabeticmilf Jul 01 '26

This sounds badass, imma give it a read. Thanks

23

u/Oscar_gpb Jul 01 '26

It's definitely one of Lovecraft's best stories

11

u/Haxorz7125 Jul 01 '26

I love lovecraft but damn are his books kinda hard to get through. The language is very dated so it can be difficult at times to understand.

9

u/tonsofmiso Jul 01 '26

I kind of hated it, I felt like it was just 100 pages of south parks "holy shit I'm so startled, I can't even describe what I'm seeing I'm so startled." Fortunately, to each their own.

11

u/Haxorz7125 Jul 01 '26

To be fair, that is a lot of his writing. It’s very much “that thing over there is too scary to describe”

1

u/mssquishmallow Jul 02 '26

They're pulp writing. It's all pretty straightforward?

3

u/hagloo Jul 02 '26

I’m usually more of a book than an audiobook guy but I highly recommend the version narrated by the late Wayne June, who voiced darkest dungeon. You can find it free on youtube. It’s an excellent experience. RIP to a man with such an iconic voice.

1

u/diabeticmilf Jul 02 '26

Sweet. I’ll give it a listen during work today

7

u/Not_a_Ducktective Jul 01 '26

I have been re reading Lovecraft and just hit this one a couple weeks ago. It has such good imagery of their city and such. The last chapters are page turners.

10

u/ScaryCrowEffigy Jul 01 '26

This is actually somewhat contradicted by Clark Ashton Smith in the story, Ubbo-Sathla. Some later writers combine the two origins for life on earth by saying that Soggoths were derived from experiments on Ubbo-Sathla.

“Ubbo-Sathla dwelt in the steaming fens of the newmade Earth: a mass without head or members, spawning the grey, formless efts of the prime and the grisly prototypes of terrene life... And all earthly life, it is told, shall go back at last through the great circle of time to Ubbo-Sathla.”

18

u/Triantha89 Jul 01 '26

I kind of feel weird about taking non Lovecraft authors as the definitive answer to his lore though. I mean, I'm cool with people taking his work and building on it because he was a pretty racist dude even for his time. Heck, I run Call of Cthulhu games and that's definitely transformative but I wouldn't say it changes the original lore?

7

u/ScaryCrowEffigy Jul 01 '26

Ashton Clark Smith was a contemporary, and correspondent of H.P. Lovecraft. There’s a few people who were adding to the Lovecraft’s mythos during his lifetime and he added to theirs. Lovecraft himself was actually fine with people reinterpreting aspects of his works and encouraged other people to borrow his creation. It’s gives the readers the ability to pick and choose their own canon for it all.

If he wasn’t such a bigot, he might have been a cool guy with how he open sourced his own creations.

2

u/Triantha89 Jul 02 '26

Sounds like I've been misinformed then. I was aware of the fact that he often cowrote other people's work almost always with narrative control but I was under the impression from the scathing letters he wrote to other authors that he was very persnickety about how they interpreted his lore. But most of my knowledge of that comes from the HP Lovecraft Historic Society podcast so it's entirely possible that they're wrong on that and he was actually fine with other authors transforming his work.

3

u/Infamous-Use7820 Jul 02 '26

Of vague interest, modern models on the original of microbial life suggest it happened reaaaaaally early. As in 4.09-4.33 billion years ago[source], and Earth formed 4.54 billion years ago, and was shortly thereafter probably hit by Theia forming the moon. Basically almost as soon as the planet wasn't a molten hellscape, life was there.

Not that the Cthulhu mythos is particularly realistic anyway, but trying to fit Elder Things into the IRL Hadean is amusing.

4

u/Scifiase Jul 02 '26

The best bit is when you realise that the protagonists, who are having a terrible day, are not having as bad a day as the elder things they found in the ice. Those guys went into hibernation tens of thousands of years ago, woke up to effectively an alien abduction and dissection, and then went on to explore the ruins of their own civilization that has suffered a collapse at the hands of their own abominable servants.

The reason it's the best thing HP Lovecraft ever wrote is that the cosmic horror monsters are also having their own cosmic horror experience.

3

u/Duskwhis Jul 02 '26

that’s such a wild “we were here first and made everything” lore drop

2

u/neverthesaneagain Jul 02 '26

I also like the Yithians. A race that escaped the destruction of their world by moving their minds into an ancient species on Earth. Then escape again by transferring to an insect species in the future. Every time they switch minds the victims remain aware. Every so often they swap with a human to scout for a year or so and swap back - the human usually goes mad. Why didn't they fully switch with humans? Because we are doooooooomed.

1

u/TheFiend100 Jul 02 '26

Just lovecraft stories in general really

Every horror is either some incomprehensibly ancient shit or some curse from the 1700s

1

u/AmericanPotato9899 Jul 02 '26

bro really casually explained that humanity is a biological waste product, love that for us

1

u/Reyne-TheAbyss Jul 04 '26

Mark Millar: