DFo wrote:I never get sick of Lovecraft ripoffs.
This has been on my mind for a couple weeks now and I'll use DFo's comment from the Monsterpocalypse thread to jump right in ...
What constitutes
official Lovecraft? Who
owns Cthulhu and other Lovecraftian critters?
Several summers ago I took a deep breath and dove into all the Lovecraft I could find, in search of original Cthulhu, Nyarla, Dagon, Shaggoth, etc. What I found was intensely vague and generally multiplicious - for example, the many forms of Nyarla - and actually quite disappointing, I have to admit. I didn't find the grand descriptions standing monolith-like in Lovecraft's prose that I assumed would have to be behind all the monsters and madness in all that art spawned in the decades since H.P.
Which leads me to wonder at the apparently "bottom-up" nature of the Cthulhu Mythos, where so much of the creative work has been done by the many artists and writers (and directors :S) inspired by Lovecraft's sketches. My own concept of Nyarla (my preferred Elder God) is directly influenced by the work of
Nightserpent, not the obtuse commentary on the Crawling Chaos that Lovecraft gives us. Big C himself has become fairly solidifed in appearance at this point, though tentacles, slimey crawling and/or winged beasts and tentacles have become almost instantly evocative of the Mythos in general (see the recent movie
The Mist, described as "Lovecraftian" in several reviews I read).
But bringing it back to models. Reaper has an
"Eldritch Demon", are they just being obtuse or vaguely-almost-creative in the naming, or should they be worried about covering their ass from Cthulhu IP infringement? Is the Cthulhu Mythos under the same IP constraints that forces Copplestone to name these rather predacious aliens
"Hunter Aliens"? There's a pretty impressive
Cthulhu for Horrorclix, who did WizKids shell out the big bucks to to be able to make that model, as the Horrorclix line has loads of clearly mass-market characters in it?
And now
PP has "The Lords of Cthul" in their new monster fighting game (which
IMO are pretty cool takes on the Mythos). Even in name the tentacular critters are vaguely concealed at best ... Which brings me back to DFo's quote and my questions. I see the development of the Mythos as at it's base disconnected from the same marketing entities that give us Godzilla or King Kong or any number of Hollywood-spawned monsters that now prowl our collective imaginations (though there is a sort of recursive system of the media picking up Lovecraftian elements, repackaging and giving them back to the consumer for a tidy profit - say, the Hellboy movies for example). So ...
Who owns the Cthulhu Mythos? Who dictates what official Lovecraft monsters should look like?
- Salvage
*Note that I am no expert in any way on Cthulhu and the rest of the eldritch spookiness that makes up the Mythos. To the experts out there, please feel free to correct and elaborate, I really am interested in knowing more.