This is Cthulhu.
It's a film that came out in 2008. Not many people appear to have seen it.
As a teenager, I was obsessed with the works of Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
Lovecraft was a pioneer in pulp horror fiction, immediately gripping with his cavalcade of creative monsters, epic scope, terrible fates,
and a unique philosophy about the terror of the existence of gods greater than the human consciousness could allow.
The man's work was inspirational and moving to me. It made me think. It made me dream. It made me want to be a writer.
Also, seeing cool new words like "theosophists", or "non-euclidean",
or sentences like “the bloodroots grew insolent in their chromatic perversion” made me feel smart.
I liked thinking I was smart.
I was a big fan of the role-playing game, too.
I just really liked the way that it dealt with the mythos, and had you interact with it.
And the way it modeled sanity was really good, too. And—
Hang on, can we— can someone find out who did this, and why?
I've been confused by this for like a decade now.
As my interest grew and I ran out of stories by, inspired by, or about Lovecraft to read,
I started playing or watching any game or film even remotely based on his work.
I'd seen Re-Animator and its sequels, and From Beyond,
and I was even about to watch Hellraiser when I found an interview with Clive Barker
where he said he didn't like Lovecraft's writing very much,
and decided not to watch the film out of some misguided sense of spite.
That was how I did things back then...
apparently.
I'd heard that Guillermo del Toro was going to adapt At the Mountains of Madness, one of the best of Lovecraft's stories,
and I couldn't wait for that.
It turned out I shouldn't have waited, because it didn't happen;
it was in development hell for a very long time, and then it was never greenlit.
Then, as I was scraping the bottom of the barrel and watching fan films on YouTube,
I eventually found out about Cthulhu.
It was named after Lovecraft's most famous creation, and it had been made so recently
that it might have been able to take advantage of the kinds of effects and production techniques possible in modern filmmaking,
that something of truly epic scale might actually have been possible.
Cthulhu is not that film.
Cthulhu isn't in the film. It isn't even based on the short story The Call of Cthulhu.
It's actually a loose— very loose— interpretation of The Shadow Over Innsmouth.
In that story, the narrator investigates a New England fishing town where the people are strange and unwelcoming to outsiders.
He eventually discovers that the people of the town worship a godlike fish creature named Dagon and its monstrous children,
and have begun breeding with those creatures.
And their descendants eventually transform into monsters themselves,
to take to the water and live forever beneath the sea with Dagon.
After barely escaping with his life,
the narrator realizes that his family tree comes from Innsmouth, and he is slowly becoming one of them too...
and he's starting to like it, and relish the chance to worship Dagon for all time.
It's a really good story, and it's an excellent example of early 20th century American horror,
with the narrator's final change serving as a genuinely uncomfortable and fascinating twist.
It's really a true classic.
This film is about a gay college professor called Russell,
who learns that his mother has passed away and returns to his hometown for her funeral.
Russell's father is the leader of a strange religious cult,
and also deeply homophobic, along with many of the rest of the townspeople.
Russell realizes the cult has designs on him of some kind, and something strange is going on.
He reconnects with an old lover from his past and tries to learn the truth, as the people become increasingly hostile towards his search.
In lieu of looking at the tangible specifics of the horror, the beliefs of the cult, or portraying the monsters from the original story,
the film focuses on Russell's own emotional state; his experiences, and dreams, and relation to the people he encounters
as he tries to understand what is happening.
When monsters do briefly appear, there's not really much to see.
The story isn't really concerned with them.
When I first saw this film, I decided that I hated it more than any other film.
It had taken something I cared about and enjoyed, and removed the things I thought made it interesting and valuable.
It made an existential horror about godlike creatures that care not for human affairs
into a story where the god in question never turns up, or does anything, or is even really talked about in it.
And even the name's technically the wrong name of the god.
Oh, and if you put the disk in a PC,
the label doesn't even spell Cthulhu properly!
It's such an easy word to spell!
The whole film felt like a betrayal.
The camera sometimes sits very still,
trapping you with Russell in situations neither of you want to be in,
for conversations he doesn't want to be having, with people he doesn't want to see.
"So, how's the, uh, how's the church?"
"How's the gay life treating you, Russell?"
"It's my life."
"Is it satisfying? Are you fulfilled?"
"What do you want to know? You want to know what we do?
Just, please, stay— stay out of this."
I didn't want any of this. I wanted something big, something epic,
something focusing on the horror of the big monsters, the sheer scope of the cosmos beyond our reach,
and the nihilistic implications of being unimportant in the face of seemingly all-powerful things
that can decide our fate on a whim.
For so much of it, it was such an uncomfortable and personal and low-key horror,
a human horror I wasn't really prepared for and was sure I didn't want.
But as I got older and lived a decade of new experiences,
to put it simply, I grew up.
I just sort of realized one day that I was capable of being romantically attracted to men as well as women.
I realized I was different from how I'd even thought of myself.
I'd just sort of naturally seen myself as straight, and even if I didn't think I thought of it this way,
on some primal level, I'd thought of being straight as being "normal."
I didn't know why I thought like that.
It's probably a mix of not really thinking too hard about these things at the time,
combined with the vague notions and expectations our society tends to have towards people's sexuality.
But one day I looked in the mirror, and saw myself as not who I thought I was.
I saw myself as an outsider from me, from the identity I'd assumed for myself,
and then I had a few difficult conversations with troublesome people about those feelings.
I'd always experienced homophobia.
I was an effeminate boy growing up,
but I hadn't really cared, because at the time I'd not really accepted it as an insult,
or seen anything wrong with being called gay by losers in high school
who had just as much growing up to do as I did.
But, when I actually was one of those people and knew it,
all of a sudden, it was a real judgment of who I actually was.
To them, I'd actually become lesser.
Being told I was going to die of AIDS, and that my feelings were unnatural, and so on,
and having to deal with being actually expected to
try to convince people that I wasn't inferior to them,
suddenly made me think about that Cthulhu film I'd seen a few years before.
It was like it knew what I was going through.
It knew how it felt to sit in a room you just can't leave, and have a piece of your personhood interrogated.
It knew how it felt to be seen as an outsider,
and it knew how it felt to connect with someone who understands and accepts you.
Somehow, it knew me and how I'd felt, before I'd ever had a chance to.
Some of the scenes from this film just kept coming back up in my mind.
It hadn't been what I'd thought I'd wanted,
but what it *was* struck a chord with me anyway, on a level I didn't know was there.
It just took a while for me to hear the chiming.
It turns out that some of the greatest horrors, biggest sources of sadness in our lives,
don't come from scope or big questions, but from the tiniest things.
If you've ever lost a loved one and had to be involved with the arrangements of their funeral,
or if you've ever had to be around someone you've made an effort to cut out of your life because of something abusive they'd done to you,
or even something as simple as being reminded, gently,
that you're in a place where everyone regards you with suspicion, that you're an outsider to them—
You'll already know that the idea of a powerful cosmic monster out there somewhere beneath the sea
can actually be the least of a person's problems.
The film was, in retrospect, a meaningful and valuable work that paid respect to the source material's themes and emotions
in ways I hadn't grasped as a cynical kid who thought he knew he was straight, and thought he knew what made Lovecraft good.
And I just wasn't ready to appreciate the value of that kind of story at the time.
Here's a review from back in 2009 on the film's Amazon page by someone called Giles. Giles writes:
[READING REVIEW]
"I can't stress how bad this film is on every level. As for H.P. Lovecraft,
he must be spinning in his grave, 'cos this is definitely the worst film adaptation yet.
It is vaguely based on Shadow Over Innsmouth,
but the story— what there is of it— is so badly constructed
that you could easily miss the very few similarities."
Now, here's the thing about Giles from 2009.
*I* was Giles in 2009.
No, I'm fairly certain I didn't write this exact Amazon review, but I felt the same way as this person at around the same time.
It didn't make sense to the teenage me, whose main frame of reference on the world was the horror stories he'd read.
But then I grew up, and it started making a lot more sense without me even having to go back and see the film again.
This film and its delayed effect on me
got me thinking about what works about Lovecraft stories, what doesn't,
and what the best way might be to navigate these qualities in creating an adaptation.
And along the way, with a lot of encouragement, and if it's not too awkward,
we'll maybe talk about the fact that a writer who basically founded a sub-genre of fiction,
has been hugely influential, and made so many people want to become writers, including myself...
was really, massively racist.
♪♪
Anyway, let's start at the beginning, shall we?
Why do humans create and tell each other stories?
Yeah, I'm sure we can settle that real quick. We've only been asking that question for millennia.
I can solve that! I've got a plaque for surpassing over 100,000 YouTube subscribers.
Firstly, we should acknowledge that fiction isn't simply the opposite of truth.
It is, in some sense, a reflection *of* truth.
Let's look at horror stories. When a ghost story speaks of a place being "haunted" by the past,
it speaks to us about the ways that really does happen, the ways the world controls and decides things for us, and how the legacy,
the result of other people's decisions, are still here with us, even after the people who made them are gone.
The ghosts of the past really do haunt the present they built.
Vampires, similarly, tend to be impactful because they reflect some true aspect of the society that was writing about them at the time.
There's a reason Dracula was a count.
Vampires are aristocratic, upper-class beings
that live by parasitically consuming the essence of the poor workers
and exploiting people using their influence; either their literal riches, or their other, less tangible powers.
And in doing this, they literalise a very real but much more vague social antagonism.
The aristocracies, monarchies, and other rich and powerful figures over history rarely actually drink people's blood for sustenance—
although the way the current economy is going, who knows—
But the rich really are vampires, in a sense.
They really do profit and thrive from the work and sacrifice of those beneath them.
It's not unimaginable that consciousness of this kind of antagonism makes its way into folklore
as creatures that are only slightly more exaggerated forms of the actual power relationships between rich and poor people, or boss and worker.
Bram Stoker? More like...
"Gramsci" Stoker.
Uhhh...
Doesn't really work, does it?
Um, is there a better Marxist thinker who would work here as a pun?
Let me know in the comments, so I can feel like an idiot for missing it.
When you're reading Dracula,
you're not just reading a creative horror about a scary monster.
You're reading a story that most people, on some level, understand.
It's relevant to the world people live in, where a non-magical version of Dracula's immense influence
and theft of livelihood from ordinary people really does happen.
Notably, even Karl Marx repeatedly used vampirism as a way of describing the nature of capitalism in Das Kapital.
Look, my point here isn't that vampire stories are all secretly about how capitalism is bad or something.
That would be ridiculous.
And so many of them were written before the actual, proper invention of capitalism as we know it today.
My point is that...
it was a way of talking about issues that functioned so well,
that when the time came to actually talk about things like capitalism,
the guy who started talking about it used vampires as a way of talking about it,
which usually means that the stories were onto something that was kind of like, real, something that was there.
It's also notable that Fifty Shades of Grey, originally a fanfiction based on Twilight,
kinda does this too.
It takes out all the major supernatural aspects of Twilight,
and of course, the simplest way of bringing the dynamics
between a magical, immortal vampire and a young, innocent teenage girl into the real world
is to reimagine the vampire as a billionaire with immense influence and a very particular sexual taste.
Look, the rich are vampires, basically. I think I've made this point.
The slasher film also embodies this as well.
The killer in slasher stories is an urban, modern creature which expresses modern urban fears—
the fear of what's happening in the neighborhood behind everyone's closed doors,
where they could be getting up to just about anything;
the fear of the effects of modern living on people growing up in it.
Fellow YouTuber Nyx Fears did a really cool video going into the deeper aspects of this in Halloween,
which you can check out linked in the description. It's good, and long, and fun, and please go watch it.
The slasher films are silly and gross,
gory, and often just kind of bad,
but they got popular because they're dealing with something that's real and actually happening.
Okay, that's not actually happening...
in— in real life. Um...
But that's from, like, part eight of a franchise,
and you don't get seven sequels without at least originally having some
resonating cultural...
[EXASPERATED SIGH]
He punches his head into a bin!
You get a perspective shot of it!
It's like you— like, you're looking out of his head as it flies off!
The idea that fiction is not the opposite of facts,
but actually can be more truthful than facts on their own,
is key to what makes storytelling so important.
Art is all lies, all perceptions, always subjective,
always up for further interpretation, and always slanted by the perspectives of its creators,
but art is lies in service to truth.
Bringing all of this back, what of Lovecraft?
What makes his work in particular continue to be remembered alongside Dracula or Halloween,
and act as direct inspiration for yet more creative works?
What truth is hidden within his fiction?
Well, it might be the existential horror.
His works come together to relate a thoroughly nihilistic universe, wholly uncaring about our existence.
And there may well be a truth to that,
but it isn't whether or not human existence actually matters that's central to his work.
It's not quite the idea of that stuff actually being true,
but rather, the direct feeling of being unimportant in the grand scheme of things.
Lovecraft's writing and tropes function, in this regard, a lot like one of the writers who in turn inspired him—
Edgar Allan Poe.
Poe doesn't exactly make people feel good. Rather, he makes them feel sad in a productive way.
It can make people who are prone to those feelings feel less alone,
because they know others have them too.
The Call of Cthulhu doesn't begin by telling you how scary a big monster could be,
or giving you a description of what its tentacles would look like.
It opens with a profound fear of the future, and of what discoveries might lie there.
[READING ONSCREEN QUOTE]
So what mattered wasn't how creative or imaginative his stories got,
but how they related to people's own feelings of unimportance then and now in the actual world.
There's the old joke that a paranoid person, if they were ever to discover the room that the government spied on them from with all the notes on their lives—
they wouldn't actually be any more afraid because of this. They'd feel validated.
They weren't paranoid, they were right.
And through that lens, Lovecraft has a way of feeling completely assured that the world really is out to get you,
and maybe God doesn't care, or hates you, or wants you dead.
You can use special effects to design something scarier than the man himself could ever have imagined,
but that alone isn't actually the thing that's scary about the story.
What's scary is the way these smaller aspects build to create a sense that humans are tiny and powerless creatures,
that the greatest height we can aspire to is a deep and intimate understanding of just how little we understand.
Lovecraft rarely reused his creations between stories, and that's because the creatures he came up with didn't really matter.
They were interchangeable, and the ideas they existed to communicate, with their scope and alienness, was what mattered.
Unfortunately, however, this is where things get a bit hairy and complicated.
One of Lovecraft's most famous quotes goes:
[READING ONSCREEN QUOTE]
And you know what this guy didn't know much about?
People of other races.
Look, we've managed to brush past it, but we do have to talk about Lovecraft's racism,
sexism, anti-Semitism, and the homophobia.
It's happening now.
So, for the folks out there who don't think you can criticize an author's beliefs just because it was a different time
and it happened a hundred years ago,
thanks for watching. Don't forget to like and subscribe. I'll see you next time.
I promise I'll review a game and make some jokes or something in the next one.
Are they gone?
Okay, they're gone.
Right, so it's pop culturally quite well known that Lovecraft was a bit xenophobic,
and I do remember reading some pretty bad stuff.
- [BOOK RUSTLING]
- But it was a while ago that I read it, and I'm sure it can't be as bad as I rememb—
- ♪ ["Advent: One-Winged Angel"]
- What the fuck is "nautical-looking" supposed to mean, Howard?!
WHAT DOES IT EVEN MEA—
[SOUND BLACKS OUT]
In his biography of H.P. Lovecraft, fittingly entitled "Against the World, Against Life", Michel Houellebecq writes:
[READING ONSCREEN QUOTE]
[TAPE PAUSING NOISE]
Houellebecq kinda sucks, honestly, and idolizes some of Lovecraft's worst qualities in his biography,
but this quote is helpful in illustrating the specifics of Lovecraft's worldview,
so I'm gonna use it. A stopped clock is right twice a day, I suppose.
[TAPE UNPAUSING NOISE]
Lovecraft seemingly hated society itself,
but he had a deeper and specific dislike for black and Jewish people, along with immigrants.
It's so prevalent in his writing
that even citing multiple examples would kind of diminish how overwhelming and constant it is.
I can't even bring myself to say the name of Lovecraft's cat,
because it's a racial slur.
And despite this obviously completely full schedule
of racism and general hatred for humanity itself,
he also managed to find time to be a raging homophobe.
He claimed not to have even known homosexuality existed until he was in his 30s,
but then he goes on to immediately compare it to being a pederast.
You know, growing up, I always would immediately try to find ways to write off or handwave away the racism.
Y'know, I would say, "well, it was a product of his time."
I never really just sat down & gave myself the opportunity to just say,
God, what a piece of shit.
I mean, honestly, like...
his work meant something to me in a really, like, profound way that no other work has ever really done,
but I fucking think the guy's terrible.
As a side note, Lovecraft's views apparently softened a little bit over time.
In a letter he wrote a month before his death,
he claimed he understood the blindness and defiant ignorance of reactionaries, because he used to be one.
"I know how smugly ignorant I was," he wrote.
He supposedly became a socialist in the last year of his life and supported the New Deal,
and he was married to a Jewish woman for a while,
but it's debatable whether he really developed all that much, and the racism in his work is still unavoidably there.
And this leads us to a very weird and difficult question:
Why are there queer Lovecraft fans?
Why do I exist?
And why do so many people like me exist?
Why is this space a place for a lot of queer and marginalized people in the first place?
Why does his work resonate so well with people who the man himself
would have hated even more than he hated everyone else?
Now... I don't think I'm qualified to answer this question.
I don't actually think anyone really is.
There's probably a lot of different reasons, but...
from what I can gather,
it seems like the answer lies in the specifics of how Lovecraft saw the world, in the place that his approach actually came from.
When Lovecraft was three years old, his father had a breakdown and was committed to a mental hospital.
He died there five years later.
His mother also frequently suffered from similar problems, and later died in the same hospital.
Lovecraft suffered from periods of severe anxiety and depression.
He had to drop out of high school, and often isolated himself for long periods at a time.
He saw himself as a temporary visitor to a strange and unwelcoming world.
This is present even in one of Lovecraft's earliest stories, The Outsider.
The narrator escapes from being trapped within a decaying castle,
but his search for human contact is frustrated when the people he finds run away in horror.
He turns, and sees a detestable and ghoulish creature has entered the room.
To his shock, he realizes he's looking into a mirror.
All of his best works draw into close focus not some generic fear of outsiders,
but the anxieties and fears that come with being an outsider,
of being in a world that doesn't really understand you, and perhaps, of not being fully able to understand yourself.
So, there is a fairly decent reason here why someone might be drawn to these works, even if the author was deeply problematic.
And this appears to have been true to some degree at the time, in a strange way.
Lovecraft was pretty open about the problems he had with homosexuality.
However, several of his closest friends were gay,
including the poets Hart Crane and Samuel Loveman,
and Robert Hayward Barlow, who he worked closely with on numerous stories,
and who Lovecraft made the executor of his literary estate in the event of his death.
It's partially due to Barlow that so much of Lovecraft's writing has been preserved over the years,
given how he wasn't all that popular at the time.
The deeply bigoted belief in a link between homosexuality and pedophilia
is invoked, this time on purpose, in the film as well.
There's a scene in Cthulhu where Russell is arrested on manufactured charges of being a pedophile.
- "You're under arrest for murder, rape of a minor..."
- "Oh, come on... Wait, you ca—"
The event is positioned as an extension of his mistreatment by the rest of the town.
We're seeing the kind of alienation the original stories had to invent a foreign cult to get across,
but translated into actual things people do experience.
"Oh yeah, you like this?! Faggot goes off to jail?!"
The easiness and convenience with which having a different sexual preference is equated with criminality
is something that real people deal with, even today.
For some people, the intellectualized, existential problems Lovecraft had originally written to explore
cease to be theoretical and start to communicate familiar experiences,
the same way Edgar Allan Poe's writing can be to someone who's lost a loved one,
or the way Halloween explores the suburban fear of one's neighbors,
or Dracula puts words to a deeper understanding of the antagonism between different classes in our social hierarchy.
For those who've been treated like this in the name of a religion,
or simply by their surrounding society because of its horrific expectations,
have they not come the closest a person can in the real world
to the central Lovecraftian experience?
Have they not, in a sense, glimpsed the face of an uncaring universe?
VOICE OF GUILLERMO DEL TORO:
"He was a guy that definitely did not get laid much, you know?
And— and a guy that was...
an alien amongst us."
Del Toro still hasn't gotten to make the Mountains of Madness adaptation he wanted to make and I wanted to see,
but what's weird is, as I've grown older and become more interested in stories that are more compelling than Lovecraft's original works,
it seems that Del Toro has as well.
In a recent interview about The Shape of Water, he said:
[READING ONSCREEN QUOTE]
The Shape of Water doesn't have any elements
that would be regarded as traditionally Lovecraftian by purists like Giles or the teenager I used to be,
but its story gets at what I think makes Lovecraft actually work in the first place—
human stories about our alienation from each other and our lonelinesses,
our victimization by forces beyond our control that see us as outside the norm,
and how we can at least partially rectify this by
learning to see the beauty in something previously seen as alien.
In a sense, it's a story about the people of Innsmouth who happily chose to join with the deep ones,
quite literally embracing otherness,
raising children who literally learned to love to be different.
Now, the film's perspectives & plot & texture
make it not really invite much of a comparison with Lovecraft in a straightforward viewing,
but maybe that's proof of how good it is.
The Shape of Water has so successfully excavated all the garbage away from its spiritual predecessor that,
despite depicting something that directly happened in a story Del Toro has definitely read,
the comparison still feels strange, wrong almost.
This film captures the beautiful, human, mesmerizing center of Lovecraft's writing.
It's the kind of story he could, or perhaps should, have been writing all along.
For me, there's something personally wonderful about finally really coming to an understanding of a film
that touched me in ways I didn't realize and that never really got much recognition,
right as a film that understands this just as well gets released and actually gets major recognition, and even wins an Oscar.
[GUILLERMO DEL TORO SPEAKING ONSCREEN QUOTE]
[APPLAUSE]
While it's easy, and correct, to be dubious about the value of winning an Oscar,
I do think the success of a film like this is a really hopeful sign for the future of how people see that which is alien to them.
There's a philosopher named Julia Kristeva, whose work was pretty formative for me.
I discovered her through her being quoted in a series of critical essays on Lovecraft,
one by Gina Wisker, entitled "Spawn of the Pit".
The quote went:
[READING ONSCREEN QUOTE]
Why be alien to each other, when we are all alien to ourselves?
So, what have we learned about how to adapt Lovecraft?
Well, I think there's a point here about how we have to decide what really makes his work good in the first place,
what the core truths in his work are that ought to survive into a future they inspire.
An adaptation— to me, at least— only needs fidelity to what really matters about the text,
and neglecting to bring across other aspects, like the finer points of its philosophy,
or its particular linguistic flourishes, or certain characters, or even its racism or homophobia,
isn't a failure to be fully faithful to the original work.
It's demonstrating a successful understanding of why those stories were worth reading about in the first place, in spite of those flaws.
In focusing on a person's experiences and treatment for their sexuality,
or on a relationship with someone seen by others as an alien outsider,
these works explore the originals and their feelings of otherness better than Lovecraft did.
You don't have to go find a copy of this 10 year old obscure film if you don't want to.
It's not perfect by any means, and lots of the criticism the film's received is valid.
Even the director's commentary opens by admitting they aren't fully happy with the film.
VOICE OF "CTHULHU" DIRECTOR DANIEL GILDARK:
"There are 85 locations in this movie. Ridiculous."
It's certainly nowhere near as good as the best film ever—
Gremlins 2—
but it meant something to me and was very important to me in a formative period of my life,
and sometimes that's kind of more important than the writing or execution.
As I look out into the internet and find many other queer fans of Lovecraft's work,
and writers in some form inspired by these feelings themselves,
the wealth of literature exploring this side of his writing,
and films taking up radically humanizing perspectives even towards that which might literally be considered monstrous,
I can't help but feel that there's a side of Lovecraft's work the man himself died unable to fully comprehend.
And in a way, that's fitting, isn't it?
But there's one other great story inspired at least partially by elements of Lovecraft,
and I'm going to talk about it soon on my channel.
Join me in the future, when I reveal spectacularly why I filmed segments for this video at night in the woods.
Oh, I just kind of gave it away then, didn't I?
♪♪
Hey, thanks for watching, everybody. This one was quite hard to make, for reasons that are probably obvious.
I'm supported by all these lovely people over on Patreon.
Backers get videos a few days early, and also get to make suggestions on changes before the other version goes out,
and they get some bonus extra videos every now and then.
I still need to finish one about the making of the CTRL-ALT-DEL video,
but there's just so much footage to cut together; I'm basically making a little documentary about making this silly YouTube video.
Oh, and since I don't do readings of the credits outside of longer videos,
I'm trying a new thing where I stream myself to $10 backers doing editing, and take live suggestions and show off my, sort of, process.
Last night I did a three hour stream of me making changes to this video,
so thanks to Mallow, who was in the chat and gave me the idea of pointing out that Houellebecq sucks.
I wasn't sure if I should do it,
so it was nice getting the input that I probably ought to.
And thanks to everyone else, who singled out other changes and fixes to mistakes I can now pretend were never made at all.
I'd also like to say a special thank you
to the over 100 people who reached out to me when I asked on Twitter for LGBT fans of Lovecraft to get in touch a few months ago.
Your notes and contributions were really great, and helped me think a lot about this topic, and helped me...
ascertain that it wasn't all just me, that I wasn't imagining all of this, that other people felt this way.
You were all really helpful and lovely, and this video wouldn't exist without your kindness and support.
I hope everyone had a happy Pride Month, not that you have to stop being proud now, y'know?
By all means, please continue.
I'm going to, uh, go back into my hole
and feel sorry for myself for another 11 months,
but, uh... you do whatever makes you feel good.
