The Cosmic and the Eldritch

Cosmic Horror is all about the fear of the unknown, the things that are, at best, indirectly portrayed. Often with a healthy dose of the utterly bizarre and the horrific to the point of madness for the characters unfortunate to behold them.

However, some differences have emerged between what people often consider Cosmic Horror and what Cosmic Horror is, and the eldritch beings that inhabit the best of the genre. People often believe, rather shallowly, that you can just throw some fleshy tentacles or have some mean gods and cults and call it a day.

These are the failures of media comprehension. There is an important ingredient to Cosmic Horror that makes something truly eldritch rather than just Cosmic Horror. It’s what separates the Lovecraft Countries from the Cthulhu of the world.

It’s the entity’s indifference to humanity.

Before I continue with these explanations, I want to establish a difference between cosmic and eldritch, as there is often a lot of overlap and interchanging between the two terms. But one rarely means the other most of the time.Cosmic Horror is all about the horror of the vastness of the cosmos, evil gods run amok, creatures impossible to behold lurk within the depths of space or the sea. Humanity cannot even place such powerful and evil creatures on the same congo line.

Eldritch is these, but with the added component of the fact that the monster or god doesn’t give a shit about you. It will step on you in the same way I would step on an ant. The Colour might not even be sentient. Cthulhu was merely struggling for the snooze button when we saw him.

They cannot give a damn about us. The eldritch element forces us to confront the horror of our own insignificance, that we are not special, we are not the centre of the universe, and our hubris will be our downfall.

I have been guilty of equating one with the other, much like many so-called Cosmic Horror games/books/movies where the god cares too much about humanity, often maliciously. Lovecraft Country tries to marry Cosmic Horror with the Jim Crow era of racial intolerance. But it fails to use Cosmic Horror well (along with abandoning it all together) because you can’t exactly make a good Cosmic Horror story when someone actively wants to kill you because of who you are.

I want to be better at understanding the difference and the importance of what makes Cosmic Horror scary. I had to understand that my Cosmic Horror gods (Judacrat, and He who Binds us Down) are not eldritch because they cannot be indifferent to humanity. They have to be actively involved in order to keep going.

This is in stark contrast towards my dream god: The Shape of Reality, who doesn’t need the worship of mortals. It doesn’t seek representation using Demigods and Servants, but merely exists. The Shape of Reality is a god who likes to watch and observe the creations it spawned rather than interact. It’s curious, but not exactly interested in mortal survivability.

It’s the same with Cthulhu or The Colour out of Space. We cannot hope for the representation of radiation to care. It just kills everything it touches. It doesn’t care about us, it just mutates and destroys. Cthulhu wakes up to do what he needs to do; we are just in the way. A minor inconvenience, at best.

A truly eldritch being doesn’t give a damn about you or me. It just exists to work whatever it needs to do, and if that results with us being wiped out, then so be it.

Better luck next time humanity.

But a god or creature that does care, in whatever capacity, might be cosmic, they could be some monster from the furthest stars but once they start giving a damn about us or are actively trying to be involved in our lives, they cease to be eldritch, but simply cosmic. The nightmare is still there but now it’s Thanos rather than The Colour out of Space.

I will let you decide which one is better for humanity.

You might be asking why I am even going on this tangent, what the point of this article even is supposed to be about.

But I am still learning what makes Cosmic Horror special, and how I have noticed creatives water down the truly horrific elements that make Lovecraft’s work (and his inheritors) truly special. It is about the unforgiving fact that you are insignificant. The surrounding forces are hostile in the disproportionate way we are towards ants. Eldritch is the mind breaking realisation that our importance is illusionary, resulting in madness and our self-destruction.

When Fate decided to have Yog-Sothoth become actively involved in perpetuating the Salem witch trials forever in order to get the bikini wearing Abigail Williams (who was twelve at the time and still is in the game) to open the gates to the outer realm, you have ceased to make a Cosmic Horror story. It kind of stopped caring about making Yog-Sothoth an eldritch entity, but an evil god bereft of anything that made him scary.

By giving an eldritch god too much motivation, the fear of the unknown is ruined, we know damn well what the motivations and actions are of this god. In Fate’s case, wanting to use a Loli of a real-life child to open gates to the outer realms.

Where is the fear of the unknown in that?

I am struggling with this problem myself when I try to write Cosmic Horror. I always want to provide a bit too much information. It is my desire to present my cool monster designs. I want people to see what I have made. I tend to go overboard with showing people the creature.For the future, I need to try to minimise this when exploring something truly eldritch, the complete unknowable of our vast uncaring universe. Cosmic Horror is truly fascinating but deceptively difficult to do well.

I hope with Fast Radio Bursts I can practice writing Cosmic Horror in some capacity. Maybe I use it as practice to improve myself for Parable of the Gods. I guess Our Broken World could also count as it as well in some capacity.

I would love to show you these when I get the chance to. It’s so fun to explore the horrors of our own hubris and insignificance.

I mean, maybe for me it is.

Thank you Lovecraft I guess.