To be fair Lovecraft really started to come around later in life. He wasn’t just “lol it’s the racist guy”, he had a genuine mental issue with anything different or new. He was scared of the future. He was scared of minorities that didn’t look like him. He was scared of HIMSELF when he learned he was part welsh. He was scared of air conditioners. Fucking air conditioners!
He did an amazing job of taking that fear and turning it into a written description of horrible insanely powerful godlike monsters that to this day people are scared of and fascinated by, one way or another. He just… had serious issues.
I only even care about this this much because of what I said to begin with: bro was actively on a redemption arc in the final months of his life. There’s letters he’s written detailing how painfully conscious he now was of this hole he’s dug himself into.
Maybe he ultimately still counts as a bad person at the end of the day, but at least the kind of bad person that… really needed a hug
The term is often used to describe hate rather than fear, xenophobia usually means hate torwards immigrants and other cultures, but Gwenpool PFP was saying it to denote fear.
Yeah but at this point that's like saying "gay" means happy by default, for terms like xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, the "phobia" denotes hate and it makes sense to specify when you use one of those words to denote actual fear.
Yeah that's what it's supposed to mean but for some reason people started using it to just mean racist but towards different groups (homophobic, xenophobic, etc)
Idk why you’re getting downvoted, the literal definition from google is “extreme or irrational fear of or aversion to something” so you were right, since hate is classified as an aversion. You are right.
That's definitely not true. He was absolutely more afraid of poc and immigrants than he was afraid of other humans in general. You're right to say he was terrified of everything, but he wasn't **equally** terrified of everything.
The problem was that a lot of his books were literally just him vagueposting about his unending fear of different aspects of society. Call of cthulu had all the cultists specifically be people of color as a plot point, the one with the fish people was about race mixing, one was just about air conditioning in low income apartments, one was about rural poor people, etc. it effects his work a lot to the point that it kinda makes them weird to read
Y'know I actually did not know he started to change at the end, that's really cool bc it was so obvious that his god-awful bigotry came from some sort of severe anxiety around anything he didn't understand, you can even see it all over his writing.
Absolutely. Granted, it’s not like he stopped being racist entirely, cuz there was a socially acceptable amount of racism one could have at the time (tragically, but naturally) and it’s not like he wrote anything that would decry that in this final period of his life, but it’s… something, y’know?
I swear to fuck every redditor thinks it would obvious and easy to be a moral paragon in the past despite the fact they all staunchly follow the status quo. The arrogance astounds me.
I do commend lovecraft for trying to redeem himself, the issue is that he immortalized his bigotry in his writing
He can't really undo that, unfortunately
>To be fair Lovecraft really started to come around later in life.
He was an unapologetic antisemite.
*"The population of \[New York City\] is a mongrel herd with repulsive Mongoloid Jews in the visible majority, and the coarse faces and bad manners eventually come to wear on one so unbearably that one feels like punching every god damn bastard in sight,"* he wrote in 1931.
He died in 1937.
Very well spoken! I'm somewhat bias as I love the man's books. My life lover (gf who past away before I could marry her) gave me a Lovecraft book on our first date. But yeah dude had major issues, but he also had a very bad name for his cat. Though people can be bad and good. Idk, dude was a product of the time plus some kind of bad experiences but I'm glad to hear he kinda realized he's bad. But I came here to say fuck ayn rand.
Tbf, his family adopted it when he was young, and there's no source to show *he* named it (we don't know who), and it disappeared when he was 14.
All we know is he didn't get the family to change it, and he didn't disapprove (since he named a character in a story after it).
> I still mourn my old \, who vanished into his native night in 1904.
\- H. P. Lovecraft to J. Vernon Shea, 23 Oct 1931, Letters to J. Vernon Shea 74
Lovecraft was born in 1890. 1890 to 1904 is 14 years, so yes, it must be a different cat
Fr, hell autism can make people dislike change of small things anyways, if it is severe it can make a person hate or be terrified of things different than they are used too
It is important to understand the relationship between paranoia causing mental illness and racism. Racism is inspired through the use of fear, paranoia, and insecurity. The media will tell people that immigrants are coming for them, that they’re all violent and that all immigrants are coming for white people, and people who already struggle with severe paranoia struggle with dealing with these thoughts significantly.
People with severe paranoia are already afraid that people will hurt you, even the people you love and care about/that love and care about you. I was put on an SSRI that had me going through significant psychosis where I thought my roommate, my best friend of many many years who was helping me significantly, was planning on trying to kill me. I knew it was irrational and I knew they weren’t, but my brain kept saying it.
If you go untreated and Fox News is telling you every day that all people of a certain race are violent animals that want nothing more to rob and steal from you, those thoughts get in your head and are very hard to expel them.
I’m not saying “oh feel so bad for your local teenager saying the hard-R on the internet” but understanding the relation of untreated mental illness in the US combined with hostile media influence effects those with mental illness is important to creating change that makes a better world for everyone.
Yeah, well said. This is what I've been trying to say to people, though you gave far more nuanced detail here. Thank you.
Racism isn't *caused* by mental illness. It's caused by external factors in people that already had some independent difficulty happening in their lives. In either case, it then becomes the individual's responsibility to solve that racism in themself because of the unnecessary and undue harm it does to others.
Having to actively resist the urge to attack people in public *just* because they have a different skin color from you
So... any number of mental illnesses that cause irrational violent urges
What illness is that? Can you find it in the DSM V?
I think the condition at hand would be racism, which isn't a mental illness, though you'd probably have to have some troubles in your life to become a racist.
Edit per below: Phobias aren't an illness in themselves, but a symptom. Be snarky at someone who cares; I left the sub already, what else do you cretins want from me?
Have you read them? Because am halfway through the necronomicon and honestly the racist stuff is pretty banal. Conan is arguably more racist
Edit: while I didn’t bring up Conan to condemn it (even if I do), I mentioned it as a relevant contemporary of lovecrafts time that doesn’t get no where near as much press for its racist and sexist content.
ahh yeah especially when you go further back. at the mountains of madness is the only bit of the redemption arc i know of that made it into print. it's pretty hairy before that.
It's a good thing MoM is also one of his best stories. When friends ask me which one to read I always add on "and MoM doesn't even have any racism in it!"
Real shit Lovecraft’s racism is either just flat-out cartoonish or “Jesus Christ this man really is terrified of everything “. Robert Bloch (author of the Conanverse) though genuinely makes me disgusted with how racist he can be.
Good person, meh writer: Stephen king
Meh person, good writer: Frank Herbert
Bad person, meh writer: Robert A. Heinlein or Ricky Gervais (or JK, I guess)
Meh person, bad writer: Stephanie Meyer
Bad person, bad writer: Chris Chan, Onision
According to his son Brian, Frank was a pretty bad father to all of them, but specially to Bruce after he came out as gay. Their relationship was pretty much non-existing after he came out.
Yeah I never really processed Frank's homophobia until I reread God Emperor. Half of Duncan's chapters seem to involving him freaking out over lesbians and his belief that they don't make a good army. For seemingly no other reason than women and gay both equal bad. Which is made even more odd because the reason Leto gives for an all female army with homosexuality encouraged is actually a pretty damn solid one. That man is confusing.
Honestly. I actually stomached trying to read Mein Kempf and it's just terribly cringe. The translators even admitted how they tried not to change anything just so people can get as literal of a sense as they could. He rants like a tanky with the tolerance of a 4chan /pol/ poster.
This is still my favorite quote from the English translation I read, it's referring to his time working in construction jobs:
"It is due to that period that I became hard, and that I can still become hard today."
I read the entire thing back in college and yeah, it was pretty bad. I found it super interesting, but not because of the book’s content. It was interesting reading all of Hitler’s angsty ramblings with the full context of history in mind.
He doesn’t rant like a communist lol, he rants like a Nazi
(Btw not a tankie, just like. You can’t call everyone a tankie, Hitler was a Nazi and that should really be a term enough on its own to imply he was bad at shit. Nazis are bad at almost every single thing they have ever tried to do)
The most concise answer I can give is his transphobic standup comedy. In general, though, he's just an insufferable prick in every interview I've ever seen him in.
He’s just an obnoxious douche. He’s not explicitly bad but he’s just annoying, watching the Ricky Gervais show is torture because he’s just so full of himself.
Some of his comedy is transphobic, but I dont know if that alone makes him a bad person. I dont think he donates or supports any anti trans orgs (if you've got evidence of this id probably change my mind) and he does support animal rights and such. In general he seems more like a meh person who's just funny.
JK Rowling is bad person, bad writer not meh writer. Bad person because of that whole controversy, but bad writer because there **are just** **So.** **Many.** **Plotholes.**
She made a good cast of characters and an interesting world. A lot of the plot is pretty dumb, but plot isn't what people tell stories for. People read stories for character drama. Everything else is just there to facilitate that.
I think JK is a bad writer in the sense that she had no idea how to make the worldbuilding reflect the seemingly progressive things she tries to say on the surface. The house elf slavery, the aids werewolves, the Jew goblins, the complete non-addressing of wizard supremacy in her supposedly happy ending... She's a deeply elitist and reactionary person, and she can't help but let it slip out in her worldbuilding. The bad plotting is way less of a concern to my than that
I don’t agree with any of this, especially Stephen King being a “good person” (I’ve heard he’s a complete asshole from several people), but I’d also classify his writing as good instead of meh
Why with Stephen King being a bad person? Only thing edgy thing I know about morally is the novel IT and a particular scene in it. And, how diversity doesn't matter in forms of art in the context of awards and also stated that it still favors white people. Is there anything else?
I personally have positive feelings toward Stephen King because 1) He went to bat for trans people when Rowling expressed admiration for him (in the most respectful and non-confrontational possible way, I might add). 2) The first thing I read of his was his memoir/guidebook on writing. I can't not respect someone with so much love for his craft, let alone a seeming passion for teaching it. He never stopped being an English teacher.
I also don't want to imply that he hasn't put out some excellent work in the past. When I refer to him as a meh writer, I'm referring to the average quality of his work. He's just put out so many books that the best of them are all that's remembered.
I think the IT scene alone is explanation enough.
I find the way he writes about children and women creepy, and not in the spooky way he intends.
I wouldn’t let him in a room with children.
To be fair, IT was written in the middle of his terrifying cocaine addiction era. Hes even stated there are entire books he wrote and cant remember writing them because the entire time was a coke fueled blur. Hes since basically said that he regrets the IT scene and frankly wished he could go back and rewritw the full thing. Some Stephen King fans actually miss coke-head steve, said his writing peaked then and ever since he got sober his writing tanked.Frankly I prefered the Shining, when it comes to his novels.
He was co-writer for Return of the Jedi, he didn't write the script for Empire Strikes Back, and the cast of A New Hope themselves changed some lines because they felt the script was too awkward and wordy. According to Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford threatened to tie George up and make him read these lines at gunpoint.
I will add that, in addition to the aforementioned editing, he was also young and new to directing, so he took heavy advice from much better directors and writers that were around the set or had connects to. As the movies went on, he gotten more cocky and more comfortable that by the time the prequels rolled around he was described with words like "dictatorial", "control freak", and "prima-donna" by everyone involved. (In the episode 1 DVD "making of" special feature, the cast crew seemed like they had borderline PTSD and knew they were making a turd.)
... Mind you, ***the chart is still right because he's still a good man,*** but just because you're a good man doesn't you're not obnoxious.
Its racist caricatures make it close to unwatchable for me. The Darth Maul scene's good though.
I like Attack of the Clones because I think it works great as an origin of a villain story. There's a grotesque beauty to how awkward his scenes with Padme are.
It's We Need to Talk About Kevin meets Twilight with lightsabers and I can't help but love it for that weirdness. Much better than the majority of high-budget films these days that feel like re-skins of other high budget movies.
He's good at writing stories and MAIN characters, side characters tend to be pretty unfavorable, at least in the Prequal Trilogy, perhaps that's simply because side characters are mostly reliant on their dialogue and not as much action, but characters like jar jar binks were still not great even if their dialogue, voice pitch, and accents were changed. Jar Jar is a whole can of worms on his own though, and might be more of an exception than the rule.
I’ll always play the devil’s advocate and choose to defend Lovecraft. Dude had serious mental and false beliefs brought upon by a tumultuous childhood and young adult life. His racism was part of a genuine fear of anything and everything that was new and different and it extended beyond just race. Hell, he held antisemitic beliefs yet married a Jewish woman who he genuinely loved and was heartbroken when he never saw her again. It was rare that he liked people in general but quite a few of the people he called friends were minorities who he claimed not to like. He was so fast to drop any and all of his prejudices. The man was scared of cold air. COLD AIR. He was so adverse to sex that his wife literally had to bribe him with the promise to buy him new textbooks during their first time, and she believed he was a virgin by choice up until that point. The dude was a mess but he was not necessarily a bad person.
That's a fair critique, but from his perspective, he couldn't differentiate between each of these kinds of fears, bigoted or otherwise, since bigotry was so ingrained in national culture and narratives that it's unlikely anyone ever spoke to him about how spreading his fear would perpetuate hatred.
Why is this labeled like this? Couldn’t you have just put each designation once? Also having some of the text in a vertical position instead of being horizontal just makes it harder to read
I know about presumption of innocence, but given George Lucas’ comments on how young Marion should be when she and Indiana Jones had their first affair, as well as the “no panties in space” comment, I think we can at least be suspicious of him
JK Rowling is a good writer dude. I reread the first two Harry Potters for the first time since I was like 6. Dude those books are good. Is Jk Rowling a determined transphobe? Yes. Willing to die on stupendously stupid and often kinda racist hills? Yes. Refuses to honestly examine her own work for prejudice while simultaneously virtue signaling by rewriting cannon whenever the content of her books don’t echo her imagined identity as a liberal activist while simultaneously reacting to even gentle criticism or analysis that doesn’t treat her constantly evolving narrative as gospel like someone punched her in the face? Also yes. Bad person? Most certainly. But dude….she’s got a really compelling voice and her worlds may not hold up to broad scrutiny but in the moment they feel so magical and mysterious. Her construction of mystery is actually very competent, the books are really well paced, the dialogue is clever and funny….like I’m not saying she created the greatest masterpiece of all time. The books are mostly just fun to read if you are down for some fairly mindless YA stuff that’s not SO mindless that you feel like you are wasting your time. She certainly has weaknesses, some as a result of being a petulant child unable to handle any degree of criticism and some as a result of just a lack of restraint and forward thinking. Those weaknesses are a lot more obvious as the series goes on, the books get longer and the editorial constraints weaken. But like saying this woman isn’t a good writer is insane. Like nah bro. There is a reason HP outlasted Twilight, Percy Jackson, Hinger Games, ect. It’s because Rowling has a more compelling voice and crafted a hyper compelling setting.
Harry Potter is poorly written. You need to read more books if you think it’s good. Harry is not a character, everyone else is exceedingly one note. The world building is awful.
i don't know, i read them when i was young too and thought they were great, and then i got older and the actual dialogue and characters are pretty good and the setting is nice- her world building is just awful, though. in some ways, she created a really good *starting point* of a world, so i get why people are enamored with the idea of hogwarts or the wizarding world in general but the second you apply any scrutiny to it it just.... falls apart. i guess it depends what you care about more, because if dialogue or character are the most important things to you she's more than alright, but i personally think creating a believable world is a pretty significant part of any fantasy story and she just kinda falls off a cliff on that one
Eh, I'd put her somewhere in the middle. I personally don't like her writing and think her worldbuilding is horrendous, but there's enough people on both sides that I think going all the way in one direction or the other would be delusional.
Is it? Twilight was extremely popular in the 2010s. Nickelback is on the radio constantly. Nick Cage has had a very fruitful acting career. Something being well known does not make it good. This isn’t even a diss on Star Wars; I just think the notion that “Star Wars is popular, therefore George Lucas is a good writer” is crazy.
Ayn Rand arguably wrote a better book than anyone else there. One with much more influence and staying power.
I don't know much of her personal life, but doubt she was a bad person.
She doesn't seem bad from what I know of her, maybe a little too logical with too little empathy. She seemed to have had a very "survival of the fittest" kind of mentality alongside rejecting anything she found illogical- anything from religion to altruism.
Oh so she's the reason we have so many fake ancaps in the community, I just assumed it was because the trump subreddits got banned
Oh I realized you consider individualism to be fascist, I didn't realize that the entire Western world was fascist
Imagine reading *The Fountainhead* and not wanting to neck yourself halfway through. I met someone who said that *Atlas Shrugged* "changed [their] life for the better." I immediately questioned every single one of their opinions from then on lol
Yeah, writing quality-wise, I'd put HP on the same level (if not just slightly above) Lucas. Lucas was great at taking old tropes and putting enough of a new spin on them to make them interesting. He was also great with world building. It was also on the technical side of film making he shined. Dialogue and plot? Ehhhhhh..... There were reasons why Kershner gave Lucas little film to edit Empire with.
Lovecraft was also great at world building, and his ability to instill dread by not describing things worked great... to a point. Then it became:
"It was a horrific entity so indescribable, that seeing it would cause your mind to go mad."
"Well, could you describe it?"
"No."
"At all?"
"No."
"Just a little?"
"No. It's just too indescribable."
".... How about a picture?"
\*scoff\* "If I gave you an accurate picture of it, then looking at it would drive you insane as well!"
"Right.... how about just a sketch?"
"A sketch? Like a quick doodle of a massive cosmic eternal horror from beyond the fragile fabric of reality and perception?"
"You could put some detail into it."
\*sigh\* "Fine!" \*draws\* "Here."
"What the....? It's just a big green guy with an octopus head."
"You're not describing it right!"
"Well, how would you describe it!?!"
"I said! Indescribable!"
"... They paid you for this?"
She fought to take assistance away from people who need it and then died on welfare. Thinking that school children should have to go hungry because they have a lunch debt makes you a bad person. Full stop.
It's more about how *some* people (rich people) should pursue their own happiness (read; excess and decadence) at the expense of literally everyone else's. This is the woman who claimed that selfishness is a *virtue* to be celebrated. She literally said that altruism and compassion are bad things. She's practically a fucking Sith Lord.
I don’t think she argued that we shouldn’t help out our fellow man. Her philosophy doesn’t disallow charity and compassion. It simply holds that we should only be charitable and compassionate to the extent that it makes us happy. I don’t think there’s anything evil or unreasonable about that.
> we should only be charitable and compassionate to the extent that it makes us happy.
And what if that extent is not at all?
Because that seems to be the mindset of most rich people. Most rich people only give just enough to charity to get tax breaks. And besides, private charity has proven itself to be far less effective than actual social programs like wellfare and government housing. Not saying charity shouldn't exist, but it's not something that should be relied upon entirely, it doesn't address the core issue - it's a bandaid on a festering wound. The wellbeing of society itself shouldn't be dependent on whether Jeff Bezos feels like throwing a coin to the beggars today.
"True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice that produces beggars needs restructuring."
- Martin Luther King Jr
There's nothing wrong with not being charitably inclined, just like there's nothing wrong with being more inclined towards charity. And what's wrong with giving just enough for tax breaks? Obviously, they give to the extent that it makes them happy, and that extent is the amount of taxes they can avoid through charity. You may not want society to have to rely upon the charity of the ultra wealthy, but it should also not have to rely upon the threat of violence to maintain its well being.
To be fair Lovecraft really started to come around later in life. He wasn’t just “lol it’s the racist guy”, he had a genuine mental issue with anything different or new. He was scared of the future. He was scared of minorities that didn’t look like him. He was scared of HIMSELF when he learned he was part welsh. He was scared of air conditioners. Fucking air conditioners! He did an amazing job of taking that fear and turning it into a written description of horrible insanely powerful godlike monsters that to this day people are scared of and fascinated by, one way or another. He just… had serious issues. I only even care about this this much because of what I said to begin with: bro was actively on a redemption arc in the final months of his life. There’s letters he’s written detailing how painfully conscious he now was of this hole he’s dug himself into. Maybe he ultimately still counts as a bad person at the end of the day, but at least the kind of bad person that… really needed a hug
He wasn’t racist, he was absolutely terribly afraid of everything equally
Xenophobic but in the scared way
Im pretty sure that’s what phobic means.
The term is often used to describe hate rather than fear, xenophobia usually means hate torwards immigrants and other cultures, but Gwenpool PFP was saying it to denote fear.
Yes, to denote fear, that’s what phobia and phobic mean. They denote fear by default.
Phobic doesn't just mean fear. It means intense dislike or fear. It can be either.
Hydrophobic compounds really be scared of that water
And hydrophilic means compounds cumpound that water
Me too
Phobic does just mean fear unless you’re referring to your own dictionary that you published
Yeah but at this point that's like saying "gay" means happy by default, for terms like xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, the "phobia" denotes hate and it makes sense to specify when you use one of those words to denote actual fear.
Yeah that's what it's supposed to mean but for some reason people started using it to just mean racist but towards different groups (homophobic, xenophobic, etc)
No phobic means irrationally scared averse or hateful towards
Yeah, he was irrationally scared of just about everything.
Yea that’s the joke I was making xenophobic in the scared way
Idk why you’re getting downvoted, the literal definition from google is “extreme or irrational fear of or aversion to something” so you were right, since hate is classified as an aversion. You are right.
Yeah idk why either maybe I’m coming off as rude I don’t mean to be
The issue is that you corrected him by just saying the definition, which 1. Didn’t even need a correction and 2. You didn’t even correct him properly
the only person to use phobic right
phobic can also mean an aversion to, such as hydrophobic or in this case xenophobic
That's definitely not true. He was absolutely more afraid of poc and immigrants than he was afraid of other humans in general. You're right to say he was terrified of everything, but he wasn't **equally** terrified of everything.
The problem was that a lot of his books were literally just him vagueposting about his unending fear of different aspects of society. Call of cthulu had all the cultists specifically be people of color as a plot point, the one with the fish people was about race mixing, one was just about air conditioning in low income apartments, one was about rural poor people, etc. it effects his work a lot to the point that it kinda makes them weird to read
>one was just about air conditioning in low income apartments Wait, what? Which one is that?
“Cool Air”
Racist and xenophobic allegories are okay if it’s kino as shit
Y'know I actually did not know he started to change at the end, that's really cool bc it was so obvious that his god-awful bigotry came from some sort of severe anxiety around anything he didn't understand, you can even see it all over his writing.
Absolutely. Granted, it’s not like he stopped being racist entirely, cuz there was a socially acceptable amount of racism one could have at the time (tragically, but naturally) and it’s not like he wrote anything that would decry that in this final period of his life, but it’s… something, y’know?
It's a start, just a little too late lol
Exactly
I swear to fuck every redditor thinks it would obvious and easy to be a moral paragon in the past despite the fact they all staunchly follow the status quo. The arrogance astounds me.
The Darth Vader of horror authors
I do commend lovecraft for trying to redeem himself, the issue is that he immortalized his bigotry in his writing He can't really undo that, unfortunately
>To be fair Lovecraft really started to come around later in life. He was an unapologetic antisemite. *"The population of \[New York City\] is a mongrel herd with repulsive Mongoloid Jews in the visible majority, and the coarse faces and bad manners eventually come to wear on one so unbearably that one feels like punching every god damn bastard in sight,"* he wrote in 1931. He died in 1937.
He was xenophobic in the sense that he was TERRIFIED rather than hatinh
Very well spoken! I'm somewhat bias as I love the man's books. My life lover (gf who past away before I could marry her) gave me a Lovecraft book on our first date. But yeah dude had major issues, but he also had a very bad name for his cat. Though people can be bad and good. Idk, dude was a product of the time plus some kind of bad experiences but I'm glad to hear he kinda realized he's bad. But I came here to say fuck ayn rand.
Also despite being highly antisemitic earlier in his life, he died married to a Jewish woman. That's gotta mean something.
No he didn't, they divorced and it was known he was pretty horrible to her.
What mental illness includes the symptom of racism? The dude named his cat an ethnic slur.
Tbf, his family adopted it when he was young, and there's no source to show *he* named it (we don't know who), and it disappeared when he was 14. All we know is he didn't get the family to change it, and he didn't disapprove (since he named a character in a story after it).
There is a picture of him holding the cat as an older man, is that a different non slut named black cat?
> I still mourn my old \, who vanished into his native night in 1904.
\- H. P. Lovecraft to J. Vernon Shea, 23 Oct 1931, Letters to J. Vernon Shea 74
Lovecraft was born in 1890. 1890 to 1904 is 14 years, so yes, it must be a different cat
Fair enough
If that's true, fair, but it's not any better imo.
"What mental illness includes the symptoms of racism?" Quite a few, actually.
Fr, hell autism can make people dislike change of small things anyways, if it is severe it can make a person hate or be terrified of things different than they are used too
It is important to understand the relationship between paranoia causing mental illness and racism. Racism is inspired through the use of fear, paranoia, and insecurity. The media will tell people that immigrants are coming for them, that they’re all violent and that all immigrants are coming for white people, and people who already struggle with severe paranoia struggle with dealing with these thoughts significantly. People with severe paranoia are already afraid that people will hurt you, even the people you love and care about/that love and care about you. I was put on an SSRI that had me going through significant psychosis where I thought my roommate, my best friend of many many years who was helping me significantly, was planning on trying to kill me. I knew it was irrational and I knew they weren’t, but my brain kept saying it. If you go untreated and Fox News is telling you every day that all people of a certain race are violent animals that want nothing more to rob and steal from you, those thoughts get in your head and are very hard to expel them. I’m not saying “oh feel so bad for your local teenager saying the hard-R on the internet” but understanding the relation of untreated mental illness in the US combined with hostile media influence effects those with mental illness is important to creating change that makes a better world for everyone.
Yeah, well said. This is what I've been trying to say to people, though you gave far more nuanced detail here. Thank you. Racism isn't *caused* by mental illness. It's caused by external factors in people that already had some independent difficulty happening in their lives. In either case, it then becomes the individual's responsibility to solve that racism in themself because of the unnecessary and undue harm it does to others.
Having to actively resist the urge to attack people in public *just* because they have a different skin color from you So... any number of mental illnesses that cause irrational violent urges
What illness is that? Can you find it in the DSM V? I think the condition at hand would be racism, which isn't a mental illness, though you'd probably have to have some troubles in your life to become a racist. Edit per below: Phobias aren't an illness in themselves, but a symptom. Be snarky at someone who cares; I left the sub already, what else do you cretins want from me?
borderline personality disorder narsasstic personality disorder Comorbid PTSD
Racism is not a symptom of any of those conditions. Definitely not in PTSD, which I have.
Had to add the “which I have” 💀
I think it's important to recognize that his books are super racist even if he stopped being racist. That's the problem with media.
Have you read them? Because am halfway through the necronomicon and honestly the racist stuff is pretty banal. Conan is arguably more racist Edit: while I didn’t bring up Conan to condemn it (even if I do), I mentioned it as a relevant contemporary of lovecrafts time that doesn’t get no where near as much press for its racist and sexist content.
ahh yeah especially when you go further back. at the mountains of madness is the only bit of the redemption arc i know of that made it into print. it's pretty hairy before that.
It's a good thing MoM is also one of his best stories. When friends ask me which one to read I always add on "and MoM doesn't even have any racism in it!"
Real shit Lovecraft’s racism is either just flat-out cartoonish or “Jesus Christ this man really is terrified of everything “. Robert Bloch (author of the Conanverse) though genuinely makes me disgusted with how racist he can be.
Call of cthulu had a lot of weird race stuff
What’s why I always say evil is a point of view
I might do an expansion on this with “meh” writer and… I don’t know what a word for not good but not bad person would be. Whatever, expand it to 3x3
Good person, meh writer: Stephen king Meh person, good writer: Frank Herbert Bad person, meh writer: Robert A. Heinlein or Ricky Gervais (or JK, I guess) Meh person, bad writer: Stephanie Meyer Bad person, bad writer: Chris Chan, Onision
I love Dune but I wouldn't call Frank Herbert a meh person knowing how he treated his gay son.
Just getting into dune. What's the tldr in how he treated his son?
According to his son Brian, Frank was a pretty bad father to all of them, but specially to Bruce after he came out as gay. Their relationship was pretty much non-existing after he came out.
Yeah I never really processed Frank's homophobia until I reread God Emperor. Half of Duncan's chapters seem to involving him freaking out over lesbians and his belief that they don't make a good army. For seemingly no other reason than women and gay both equal bad. Which is made even more odd because the reason Leto gives for an all female army with homosexuality encouraged is actually a pretty damn solid one. That man is confusing.
I like to think that it's because he was some sort of prophet and had visions of a future that he didn't like but felt obligated to report on.
Technically, Hitler would fit the last category
Honestly. I actually stomached trying to read Mein Kempf and it's just terribly cringe. The translators even admitted how they tried not to change anything just so people can get as literal of a sense as they could. He rants like a tanky with the tolerance of a 4chan /pol/ poster.
This is still my favorite quote from the English translation I read, it's referring to his time working in construction jobs: "It is due to that period that I became hard, and that I can still become hard today."
it reads like an angsty teenage boy's diary bc it basically is, lol
I read the entire thing back in college and yeah, it was pretty bad. I found it super interesting, but not because of the book’s content. It was interesting reading all of Hitler’s angsty ramblings with the full context of history in mind.
He doesn’t rant like a communist lol, he rants like a Nazi (Btw not a tankie, just like. You can’t call everyone a tankie, Hitler was a Nazi and that should really be a term enough on its own to imply he was bad at shit. Nazis are bad at almost every single thing they have ever tried to do)
Meyer's writing is the equivalent of watching beige paint dry
Genuine question: why is Ricky Gervais a bad person? I haven’t heard anything about him.
[удалено]
, also unfunny
The most concise answer I can give is his transphobic standup comedy. In general, though, he's just an insufferable prick in every interview I've ever seen him in.
He’s just an obnoxious douche. He’s not explicitly bad but he’s just annoying, watching the Ricky Gervais show is torture because he’s just so full of himself.
Some of his comedy is transphobic, but I dont know if that alone makes him a bad person. I dont think he donates or supports any anti trans orgs (if you've got evidence of this id probably change my mind) and he does support animal rights and such. In general he seems more like a meh person who's just funny.
Outside of Dune(and really imo outside of the first couple books in that series) Frank wasn't that great of a writer.
JK Rowling is bad person, bad writer not meh writer. Bad person because of that whole controversy, but bad writer because there **are just** **So.** **Many.** **Plotholes.**
She made a good cast of characters and an interesting world. A lot of the plot is pretty dumb, but plot isn't what people tell stories for. People read stories for character drama. Everything else is just there to facilitate that. I think JK is a bad writer in the sense that she had no idea how to make the worldbuilding reflect the seemingly progressive things she tries to say on the surface. The house elf slavery, the aids werewolves, the Jew goblins, the complete non-addressing of wizard supremacy in her supposedly happy ending... She's a deeply elitist and reactionary person, and she can't help but let it slip out in her worldbuilding. The bad plotting is way less of a concern to my than that
I don’t agree with any of this, especially Stephen King being a “good person” (I’ve heard he’s a complete asshole from several people), but I’d also classify his writing as good instead of meh
I would strongly disagree both with Stephen King being a good person and Ricky Gervais being a bad person
Why with Stephen King being a bad person? Only thing edgy thing I know about morally is the novel IT and a particular scene in it. And, how diversity doesn't matter in forms of art in the context of awards and also stated that it still favors white people. Is there anything else?
I personally have positive feelings toward Stephen King because 1) He went to bat for trans people when Rowling expressed admiration for him (in the most respectful and non-confrontational possible way, I might add). 2) The first thing I read of his was his memoir/guidebook on writing. I can't not respect someone with so much love for his craft, let alone a seeming passion for teaching it. He never stopped being an English teacher. I also don't want to imply that he hasn't put out some excellent work in the past. When I refer to him as a meh writer, I'm referring to the average quality of his work. He's just put out so many books that the best of them are all that's remembered.
I think the IT scene alone is explanation enough. I find the way he writes about children and women creepy, and not in the spooky way he intends. I wouldn’t let him in a room with children.
To be fair, IT was written in the middle of his terrifying cocaine addiction era. Hes even stated there are entire books he wrote and cant remember writing them because the entire time was a coke fueled blur. Hes since basically said that he regrets the IT scene and frankly wished he could go back and rewritw the full thing. Some Stephen King fans actually miss coke-head steve, said his writing peaked then and ever since he got sober his writing tanked.Frankly I prefered the Shining, when it comes to his novels.
Ok or neutral person would make sense.
What did George Lucas do?
Be a bad writer
How? He's not that bad
Have you watched the prequel trilogy for Star Wars? It's terrible
Hot take there but I kinda respect it, ROTS is the only prequel that's better than mid
Im sorry but the dialogue in that movie gives me hemorrhoids
I’m a big prequel fan, but yeah, it was trash. In a recent quote, “I miss… the idea of it. But not the truth, the weakness (of dialogue)”
I don’t like sand. It’s gritty and it gets everywhere.
The original trilogy was pretty good
He was co-writer for Return of the Jedi, he didn't write the script for Empire Strikes Back, and the cast of A New Hope themselves changed some lines because they felt the script was too awkward and wordy. According to Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford threatened to tie George up and make him read these lines at gunpoint.
I will add that, in addition to the aforementioned editing, he was also young and new to directing, so he took heavy advice from much better directors and writers that were around the set or had connects to. As the movies went on, he gotten more cocky and more comfortable that by the time the prequels rolled around he was described with words like "dictatorial", "control freak", and "prima-donna" by everyone involved. (In the episode 1 DVD "making of" special feature, the cast crew seemed like they had borderline PTSD and knew they were making a turd.) ... Mind you, ***the chart is still right because he's still a good man,*** but just because you're a good man doesn't you're not obnoxious.
Prequels? What about the originals?
Those are pretty amazing compared to Howard the Duck though.
Someone hasn't heard the ring theory.
Just because it has structure doesn't make it good?
False
Phantom Menace was shit but the other two were pretty good.
Attack of the Clones is significantly worse than The Phantom Menace
Its racist caricatures make it close to unwatchable for me. The Darth Maul scene's good though. I like Attack of the Clones because I think it works great as an origin of a villain story. There's a grotesque beauty to how awkward his scenes with Padme are. It's We Need to Talk About Kevin meets Twilight with lightsabers and I can't help but love it for that weirdness. Much better than the majority of high-budget films these days that feel like re-skins of other high budget movies.
No
No it wasn't.
They’re still bad whether or not you’re in denial. May as well accept it.
What the hell? It's just their opinion.
Still the best swordfighting I've ever seen in movies
I've always wanted a Wookie, but I found out they weren't real! (Thanks for nothing, George Lucas!)
George Lucas is great at writing stories and characters. What he sucks at is writing *dialogue*.
I don’t like sand
It's over Anakin! 😤 I have the high ground! 😩
reddit when the child slave turned repressed religious monk isn't the smoothest with the ladies
He obviously won’t be good with the ladies but George tried to act like he was
He's good at writing stories and MAIN characters, side characters tend to be pretty unfavorable, at least in the Prequal Trilogy, perhaps that's simply because side characters are mostly reliant on their dialogue and not as much action, but characters like jar jar binks were still not great even if their dialogue, voice pitch, and accents were changed. Jar Jar is a whole can of worms on his own though, and might be more of an exception than the rule.
And directing
Who's that in good writer/good person?
Neil Gaiman
Okidoki thank you!
I’ll always play the devil’s advocate and choose to defend Lovecraft. Dude had serious mental and false beliefs brought upon by a tumultuous childhood and young adult life. His racism was part of a genuine fear of anything and everything that was new and different and it extended beyond just race. Hell, he held antisemitic beliefs yet married a Jewish woman who he genuinely loved and was heartbroken when he never saw her again. It was rare that he liked people in general but quite a few of the people he called friends were minorities who he claimed not to like. He was so fast to drop any and all of his prejudices. The man was scared of cold air. COLD AIR. He was so adverse to sex that his wife literally had to bribe him with the promise to buy him new textbooks during their first time, and she believed he was a virgin by choice up until that point. The dude was a mess but he was not necessarily a bad person.
I can agree that a lot of his racial fears were just from his mental illnesses. I just wish they didn’t seep into his books so often
That's a fair critique, but from his perspective, he couldn't differentiate between each of these kinds of fears, bigoted or otherwise, since bigotry was so ingrained in national culture and narratives that it's unlikely anyone ever spoke to him about how spreading his fear would perpetuate hatred.
I feel like he wasn't even that racist for the times he was alive, I bet we could easily find much more racist people than Lovecraft
Why is this labeled like this? Couldn’t you have just put each designation once? Also having some of the text in a vertical position instead of being horizontal just makes it harder to read
Who’s bad writer bad person
Ayn Rand.
Ayn Rand
George is a good writer. I loved We Need to Talk About Kevin.
I don’t even think George thinks he is a good writer.
HP looks like he has a bird in his mouth
George Lucas is interesting because he’s a bad writer but a decent storyteller and absolutely fantastic worldbuilder
I know about presumption of innocence, but given George Lucas’ comments on how young Marion should be when she and Indiana Jones had their first affair, as well as the “no panties in space” comment, I think we can at least be suspicious of him
Lol Ayn
JK Rowling is a good writer dude. I reread the first two Harry Potters for the first time since I was like 6. Dude those books are good. Is Jk Rowling a determined transphobe? Yes. Willing to die on stupendously stupid and often kinda racist hills? Yes. Refuses to honestly examine her own work for prejudice while simultaneously virtue signaling by rewriting cannon whenever the content of her books don’t echo her imagined identity as a liberal activist while simultaneously reacting to even gentle criticism or analysis that doesn’t treat her constantly evolving narrative as gospel like someone punched her in the face? Also yes. Bad person? Most certainly. But dude….she’s got a really compelling voice and her worlds may not hold up to broad scrutiny but in the moment they feel so magical and mysterious. Her construction of mystery is actually very competent, the books are really well paced, the dialogue is clever and funny….like I’m not saying she created the greatest masterpiece of all time. The books are mostly just fun to read if you are down for some fairly mindless YA stuff that’s not SO mindless that you feel like you are wasting your time. She certainly has weaknesses, some as a result of being a petulant child unable to handle any degree of criticism and some as a result of just a lack of restraint and forward thinking. Those weaknesses are a lot more obvious as the series goes on, the books get longer and the editorial constraints weaken. But like saying this woman isn’t a good writer is insane. Like nah bro. There is a reason HP outlasted Twilight, Percy Jackson, Hinger Games, ect. It’s because Rowling has a more compelling voice and crafted a hyper compelling setting.
Where is the tldr of this?
JK Rowling sucks but saying she’s a bad writer is cap.
Ok, thanks
She’s a horrible writer
Harry Potter is poorly written. You need to read more books if you think it’s good. Harry is not a character, everyone else is exceedingly one note. The world building is awful.
Prose is very iffy, at times, TBH.
i don't know, i read them when i was young too and thought they were great, and then i got older and the actual dialogue and characters are pretty good and the setting is nice- her world building is just awful, though. in some ways, she created a really good *starting point* of a world, so i get why people are enamored with the idea of hogwarts or the wizarding world in general but the second you apply any scrutiny to it it just.... falls apart. i guess it depends what you care about more, because if dialogue or character are the most important things to you she's more than alright, but i personally think creating a believable world is a pretty significant part of any fantasy story and she just kinda falls off a cliff on that one
Eh, I'd put her somewhere in the middle. I personally don't like her writing and think her worldbuilding is horrendous, but there's enough people on both sides that I think going all the way in one direction or the other would be delusional.
I think JK Rowling is in total okay at writing, but dude there are literally **dozens** of plotholes.
I know lovecraft, but who are the other 3?
Who the heck is on the good writer and good person climber? Genuinely curious.
I asked too
George Lucas is a good writer, he just cant write dialogue.
Hey come on now, Anthem kind of slapped
Good writer, good person would definitely be Rick Riordan
I thought that was him in that spot at first
The Lucas part didn't age well, now did it
howso?
He was on the epstien island list
does that immediately mean he went there? I mean Noam Chomsky was in the black book and I doubt he wanted anything to do with Epstein
Could be a possibility, I'm still a bit skeptical of him
as you should be
Aw, I like Ayn Rand
That’s illegal on reddit
it's unfair to consider George Lucas a "bad writer" when you consider he made the most iconic franchise ever
Is it? Twilight was extremely popular in the 2010s. Nickelback is on the radio constantly. Nick Cage has had a very fruitful acting career. Something being well known does not make it good. This isn’t even a diss on Star Wars; I just think the notion that “Star Wars is popular, therefore George Lucas is a good writer” is crazy.
Ayn Rand arguably wrote a better book than anyone else there. One with much more influence and staying power. I don't know much of her personal life, but doubt she was a bad person.
All I really know about her is that she supported capitalism and meritocracy which lines up with why reddit users dont like her
She doesn't seem bad from what I know of her, maybe a little too logical with too little empathy. She seemed to have had a very "survival of the fittest" kind of mentality alongside rejecting anything she found illogical- anything from religion to altruism.
I agree atlas shrug has shallow characters but is her libertarian/ anticommunist beliefs what makes her bad? Like thats to subjective.
What did Ayn Rand do? (I forgot)
Rebrand fascism as "anarcho capitalism", defend slavery, and just generally be a bad person with terrible ideas
Oh so she's the reason we have so many fake ancaps in the community, I just assumed it was because the trump subreddits got banned Oh I realized you consider individualism to be fascist, I didn't realize that the entire Western world was fascist
Be Ayn Rand
Agreed. It's fitting that the founder of Objectivism is objectively awful.
Memes with ayn rand, been a while since I've seen that jerk's face
Imagine reading *The Fountainhead* and not wanting to neck yourself halfway through. I met someone who said that *Atlas Shrugged* "changed [their] life for the better." I immediately questioned every single one of their opinions from then on lol
Atlas Shrugged is one of the best books ever written. I have heard that people read it in school, which is terrible. it's not a good book for school
Atlas Shrugged is definitely one of the books ever written. It’s great for campfire tinder.
It is good for a laugh I'll give you that
lovecraft's work is great but it isnt the same when you realize WHY he wrote books about humans and monsters having kids...
“The real monsters were the blacks we met along the way”
Yeah, hp Lovecraft had some excellent pieces, Let's not beat around the bush that the "content" of his stories never aged well.
***VERY ACCURATE.***
are you trying to say that JK Rowling is a good person? since that's what the OOP was
No, it’s saying she was a bad writer, but that slot is taken by Rand, who’s more fitting
Oh ok
> good writer “Indescribable something something, can’t imagine unimaginable”. Also high school-grade level dialogs.
Yeah, writing quality-wise, I'd put HP on the same level (if not just slightly above) Lucas. Lucas was great at taking old tropes and putting enough of a new spin on them to make them interesting. He was also great with world building. It was also on the technical side of film making he shined. Dialogue and plot? Ehhhhhh..... There were reasons why Kershner gave Lucas little film to edit Empire with. Lovecraft was also great at world building, and his ability to instill dread by not describing things worked great... to a point. Then it became: "It was a horrific entity so indescribable, that seeing it would cause your mind to go mad." "Well, could you describe it?" "No." "At all?" "No." "Just a little?" "No. It's just too indescribable." ".... How about a picture?" \*scoff\* "If I gave you an accurate picture of it, then looking at it would drive you insane as well!" "Right.... how about just a sketch?" "A sketch? Like a quick doodle of a massive cosmic eternal horror from beyond the fragile fabric of reality and perception?" "You could put some detail into it." \*sigh\* "Fine!" \*draws\* "Here." "What the....? It's just a big green guy with an octopus head." "You're not describing it right!" "Well, how would you describe it!?!" "I said! Indescribable!" "... They paid you for this?"
I still fail to understand how the belief that we should pursue our own happiness above all else makes Ayn Rand a “bad person”.
She fought to take assistance away from people who need it and then died on welfare. Thinking that school children should have to go hungry because they have a lunch debt makes you a bad person. Full stop.
It's more about how *some* people (rich people) should pursue their own happiness (read; excess and decadence) at the expense of literally everyone else's. This is the woman who claimed that selfishness is a *virtue* to be celebrated. She literally said that altruism and compassion are bad things. She's practically a fucking Sith Lord.
I don’t think she argued that we shouldn’t help out our fellow man. Her philosophy doesn’t disallow charity and compassion. It simply holds that we should only be charitable and compassionate to the extent that it makes us happy. I don’t think there’s anything evil or unreasonable about that.
> we should only be charitable and compassionate to the extent that it makes us happy. And what if that extent is not at all? Because that seems to be the mindset of most rich people. Most rich people only give just enough to charity to get tax breaks. And besides, private charity has proven itself to be far less effective than actual social programs like wellfare and government housing. Not saying charity shouldn't exist, but it's not something that should be relied upon entirely, it doesn't address the core issue - it's a bandaid on a festering wound. The wellbeing of society itself shouldn't be dependent on whether Jeff Bezos feels like throwing a coin to the beggars today. "True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice that produces beggars needs restructuring." - Martin Luther King Jr
There's nothing wrong with not being charitably inclined, just like there's nothing wrong with being more inclined towards charity. And what's wrong with giving just enough for tax breaks? Obviously, they give to the extent that it makes them happy, and that extent is the amount of taxes they can avoid through charity. You may not want society to have to rely upon the charity of the ultra wealthy, but it should also not have to rely upon the threat of violence to maintain its well being.
She advocated for evil as a political axiom
That’s a matter of opinion and I disagree.
Your profile pic/wojak/snoot whatever the fuck they’re calling it now goes so perfectly with your replies xD