How mainstream is Lovecraft these days?

[richardthinks]

Really damn mainstream, it seems.

Exhibit A, from 2010, when st_rev pointed it out: Scooby-doo: Mystery Incorporated. Which, by the way, has shaped up into a bona fide Laws-n-Tynes Over The Edge sorta eldritch mystery campaign, almost exactly like the ones I used to play in the 90s.

Exhibit B, 2012: some British sketch comedy show. Not very funny, but

Comments

[richardthinks]

I don't think RPG playing is - as play - self-aware enough to be properly pomo. In a very pomo way, it hovers on the brink of not being observable, or it might just fall apart if you try to do it with too much self-regard.

ISTR a bit of self-conscious protest in Sandy Petersen's original rules, so playing CoC straight might always have been something of an uphill endeavour... it's always been "known" that HPL was a terrible writer (I put known in quotes because he clearly was a very good writer... with a few notable lapses, and some growing pains along the way and Ken Hite's already written about all that); you have to embrace the conventions to make the genre work.

What seems new to me about these appropriations of HPL's work is the directness, like we all know this thing and so here's a joke around it, which I don't think you could've done in, say, the period of the X Files - if you put something directly Lovecraftian in that show you'd have to say something about it or it would be a knowing wink kinda thing. Popping Cthulhu in your Ben 10 or anime series doesn't require the level of audience familiarity that this requires.