Why is the Arctic so well-suited for the telling of Lovecraftian tales?

One's at the north, one's at the south.

Artic is north, there's no land there, just an ocean covered in ice. Depending on the time of year the ice sheet overlaps with Greenland, Northern Canada, and Siberia, making it possible to travel to the north pole entirely by foot.

Antartic is south, it's an actual continent isolated by southern seas year round. Conditions are more extreme - even though it's perpuetually icy it's also technically a high-altitude desert because there's no precipitation and the ice cap is thousands of feet thick.

Arctic is at the North pole. It has no landmass and is purely an ice sheet. There's polar bears.

Antarctic is at the South pole. It is a continent that is merely covered in glaciers. There's penguins, ancient ice core drilling, and a research station by the pole.

youtube.com/watch?v=fch483sIoMA

Which one does The Thing live at?

Who Goes There?, The Thing From Another World, or The Thing / the other Thing?

It's bleak, foreboding and isolated -- and yet beautiful, breathtaking. It hides threats, anything might be the thing that kills you. Its a sheer, immense void that wordlessly communicates how small you are, and is incredibly lethal without having to DO anything other than "be itself".

And shit might be buried there forever. There's a TV show called Fortitude, which is about a murder in the titular mining town, the northernmost human settlement on Earth, and that shit reeks of Lovecraft because it's all set into motion by a horrible discovery under the ice which begins spreading a queer, bloody madness through the townsfolk.

The good one.

I'd imagine for a couple of reasons:

>It's big and empty. There's really nothing out there, so finding anything "abnormal" only heightens its abnormality.
>It's relatively untouched by humans. Very little is known of the area aside from satellite mapping tech, but those maps rarely tell the whole story or notice "minor" hazards that will still kill you dead.
>It's dangerous and punishing. The extreme cold causes all sorts of problems that humans are not used to adapting to, and causes even hardy machinery to break down. If you run out of food, you get hurt, or your vehicle breaks down, you pretty much just die.
>It's icy. Ice is a preservative, so you can have all sorts of things trapped within it that are still in relatively good condition.
>You're both incredibly exposed and extremely well hidden at the same time. Animals that are adapted to the icy conditions can be virtually invisible, to the point of you literally stepping on them. This means that other threats may be as equally hidden.

It's really easy to die and never be found.

The 1938 novella is set in the Antarctic.

The 1951 film moves the action to the Arctic. The team departs from Anchorage towards a North pole base.

In the 1972 Horror Express it plays out on a train from Shanghai to Moscow.

Carpenter returns it to the Antarctic in 2011 and again in 1982.

...

The ice. The arctic is a shifting landscape, constantly in motion. It is a world that re-invents itself every season.

The antarctic is a vast, high-elevation, static desert that we can imagine having looked the same for millions of years.

If you're doing either correctly, there should be a vast difference between the two. The ocean, wind and ice are your enemies in the Arctic. In the Antarctic it's the bleakness and the cold.

Our education system, everyone!

Antarctic is home to Elder Things and The Thing, Arctic is home to Wendigo. Two different kinds of horror you can go for.

Why do people put research stations in isolated regions?

Same reason people still go on trips to Antarctic, just from the opposite side.

>Horror Express

my man

And the Ocean, wind and ice. And shoggoths

Can die and never be found. Snow and ice cover things and can keep things hidden/imprisoned. Harsh environment and the fake people won't assume stuff. If you hear noises in the night you'd think "oh it's just the wind" Not some gribbly from beyond the veil

I'm guessing fake was suposed to be "it makes" but it's early.

The isolation (it's about as far as you can be from rest of the humanity, with no settlements on the entire continent aside from a few research stations), the bleak surroundings, the extremely hazardous conditions, and the fact that we still no very little of what's actually in there under the ice (only recently through satellite imaging we have discovered that there's entire subglacial mountain ranges and a canyon that rivals the Grand Canyon in size, and then there's all those subglacial lakes that have been sealed from the world for thousands, if not millions, of years). It's a place where it's very easy to imagine something utterly alien and unknown to humans dwelling.

shoggoths are creations of the elder things, which were in the antartic.
dumbass

>in 2011 and again in 1982
Yog-sothoth is getting all up in here.

Lovecraft's stories tended to be on the scientific and exploratory frontier at the time - which was the antarctic and the deep sea (which is where all the Dagon stuff comes in).

Nowadays the frontier is the moon and Mars and the outer planets which is why a lot more (relatively) modern horror and sci-fi-horror takes place there, like Alien.

And if you die out there arn't found, your frozen corpse will preserve your last terrifying, pain wracked scream for millenia.

>you could sled to
With the right car, you could drive to, even

On the other hand, has a good point about things under the ice, though the antarctic has much thicker ice shelves over ocean as well as land - in the Arctic you're looking at maybe 3 meters of ice covering 4000 of water (recall the subs breaching the pole) where as the Antarctic can have hundreds of meters of ice, but with a fair bit less water underneath

>With the right car, you could drive to, even
The right ute, specifically.

>ute
No aussie, you stay in your own hemisphere and go to Antarctica.

Also, aren't utes generally not 4WD?

>aren't utes generally not 4WD?
Nah, utes can be 4wd.

We own most of the Antarctic

So it's Utes, Brah

...

Less than half, you've just got the biggest slice.
That's "the most of", not "most of", you convict.

Though people have driven to both poles, just the north pole was first (and it had already been flown and sailed to long before)

I believe it is one nation.

Nobody should aim to split Poland into north Poles and south Poles.

I'm assuming they managed to get the person (or at least the camera) out okay since we are watching the video now, but damn those last few seconds when he falls in completely were scary. Just imagine the ground suddenly opening up under your feet, you just manage to stop yourself falling in completely, but you can feel the snow crumbling around you; staring down into the abyss you are suddenly frozen with fear that the slightest movement will throw you from your precarious position, praying that your friends will notice and come back for you in time before the inevitable. And as the snow finally gives, you plummet down praying that the crevasse doesn't close up afterward leaving you trapped forever in the ice to be found hundred of years later when the pollution finally melts the ice caps...

>That's "the most of", not "most of", you convict.
English: doesn't make any sense since 11th century

...

Alaska.

While I'm sure that vehicle in your pic was an actual thing, it strangely looks photo-shopped in, like it's not really supposed to be there at all. Mostly due to the front right tread appearing clearer than the rest of the vehicle itself, but now I just want to look into the various stuff they make just to explore the arctic with. Has to be very specialized gear to begin with.

It's the snow and barren landscape, it makes anything man-made look out of place.

Just because you didn't know a rule doesn't mean it didn't exist. Every language is retarded in a special way, like France with numbers, or Welsh with comprehensibility, or Welsh with letters, or Welsh with words

Everyone knows that Antarctica is owned by the Nazi remnant forces with bases deep under the ice.

>Welsh with comprehensibility, or Welsh with letters, or Welsh with words

Is....is that a bus stop? A sign for the next town? How are you supposed to read that while driving?

I know a guy who went out on the ice for a few months in Antarctica as part of ANSMET. He said the most difficult thing to get used to was the sound of the ice moving underneath him. It crackles and groans 24/7 and can split apart at any moment.

It's a platform at a small train station

Yeah the full video is on youtube.

He was down there for a long time though.

Because there's more to life.

In fiction: Antarctic
Shooting Locations: Alaska and Alberta (Canada) logging sites during the winter.

I'm late to the party, but I would recommend Fortitude to anyone wanting to play this style of game

I don't understand. How is a human being supposed to pronounce that? Are the Welsh themselves Lovecraftian creatures?

Pretty sure those settlements were only temporary.

they were staging areas for the exodus to the moon base. Lunar is the glorious 4th Reich. That's the real reason no nation is allowed to own land on the moon, It's already owned

Like this.

youtube.com/watch?v=fHxO0UdpoxM

It's not well explored.
It's incredibly hostile to human life already.
It's got a day/night cycle totally alien to most of humanity
'it's been frozen for aeons beneath half a mile of ice' is a really good and simple excuse for why an unstoppable horror from beyond with the ability to destroy the world hasn't already done so.

Yog-Sothoth isn't that bad as Elder Gods go, I mean, he's not a bro or anything, but he just sort of IS without any sort of malevolent intent.

Getting mad at Yog is like getting mad at 2+2 for making 4. He's just a eldritch function. Nyarlo or Cthluhu though? Those guys are monsters.

It's like someone hit the rewind button on him mid sentence as he's pronouncing that gibberish name of a town. I can't stop chuckling at it.

>Right on the coast
>Strange alien name
Yep, there's no doubt about it, that is DEFINITELY a city founded by Cthulhu worshipers.

>Are the Welsh themselves Lovecraftian creatures?

No, just their pseudo-country. It's why their suicide rate is the highest in all of Europe. It's also why at Euro 2016 you'd see all those Welsh fans crying whenever their team won, thankful that they could go for another week without having to return home.

Reminder that every double-L isn;t pronounced like and L, but more like a cross betwen an L and a CH.
An English "ch" mind you, the Welsh "CH" is an entirely different letter.

>Doesn't know about Beteigeuze

At least they're not the English!
I'm still a wee bit salty the sheepshaggers put us out of the euros

The football competition or the political/trading bloc?

Actually, freezing to death tends to coincide with numbness and eventually apathy. You don't so much scream your last breath out in pain but more just go numb and lay down and die.

Want to explain yog to me? Sounds neat.

That assumes that freezing to death is what killed you and not the bored Migo youths.

Isolation and the general hostility of the nature add up.

It's kind of difficult without going insane. Basically, he's the key and the gate to magic processes that work in mathematically predictable ways.
He is also the guardian of the gate, which is, admittedly, where things get weird.

Essentially you use rituals involving him and essential salts of an individual to raise people from the dead.
Whether you make your historical ressurectees fight each other like pokemon because you're bored is up to you.

Just don't try and use him to summon up anything you can't control.

Lovecraft was always pretty vaque when it came to any cosmology, but Yog-Sothot is repeatedly mentioned to be "the key and the gate", and it is alos said that "past, present and future are one in Yog-Sothot" and that "he alone knows where the Great Old Ones walked Earth's fields and where they shall walk again". He's also very high up in the "divinity gradient" of the Mythos, being only two steps removed from Azatoth, the source of all things.

The common intrepertion of Yog-Sothot is that he is essentially the personification of space and time. Or more accurately, he IS space and time. Our universe, and all other possible universes, are part of Yog-Sothot, and he exists in every point in space and time because every point in space and time exists in him.

The competition, though come to think of it the EU as well. Norn Iron voted majority stay, Wales and England, majority leave.

>Why do people put research stations in isolated regions?

Because there's all sorts of interesting shit to research out there.

I find it somewhat interesting that out of all UK countries, right down to the Orkneys and Gibraltar, ONLY Wales voted for the Brexit along with England.

Based Wales

I was expecting "lurk moar" thanks for elaborating that to an uninitiated

Some experts say that was probably largely due to the Welsh feeling they've been repeatedly shat or or ignored byt the English goverment. So the one time you give them a chanse to change the status quo and give a middle finger to the goverment, of course they're going to do it. At least that way things might get better rather than remaining shitty forever.

Well if you think about it, it's the only country that feasibly could have voted leave
Scotland has a pro-EU SNP majority
Northern Ireland had fears over the border
Gibralter had border fears to the max
Fucked if I know what's going on up in Orkney, some sort of Great Old One cult I'd wager

The town is just called "Llanfair", meaning "Saint Mary's". Everything else is an addition. It means "Saint Mary's church in the hollow of the white hazel near to the rapid whirlpool Llantysilio of the red cave"

It's a geographic description attached so the hamlet remains on the map as a tourist spot

source: a welsh guy who posted before about this and wikipedia

>Just don't try and use him to summon up anything you can't control.
My Lovecraft is weak, but this sounds like an allusion to Charles Dexter Ward. Does he ever touch again on the subject of just who or what the doctor accidentally summons up?
>Mercy of Heaven, what is that shape behind the parting smoke?
>“That beard . . . those eyes. . . . God, who are you?”

My favorite part is how the penguin stops and turns to look back when the narrator says "But why?"

youtube.com/watch?v=OvjUUgJgxJ4

How horrifying

Orkney was just in with the rest of Scotland I think.

Those islands have been inhabited for a long-ass time, incidentally, there's a fair few ancient tombs and henges and shit - including one passage grave aligned to be illuminated on the winter solstice

Well at least we now know exactly which tomb They shall arise from.

Now we just need to think of what to do about it.

I suggest getting and staying really drunk.

...

Those sorts of tombs are all over the place in celtic countries, but the ones I've heard of are aligned with the summer solstice
This is... worrying to say the least

Funny enough there's this indie Irish horror-comedy flick about a remote Irish island that's attacked by tentacle monsters
The twist: Alcohol makes them explode. Naturally the protagonists get the entire town drunk so the monsters ignore them.
They even kill the mama monster by dumping poitin in it's mouth

>Why is the Arctic so well-suited for the telling of Lovecraftian tales?
Let's see
>isolated and far from civilization
>isolted from most common life
>cold, barren and hostile weather
>dark night most of the time
>uncharted and mailable terrain

All classic horror elements are in place.

Forgot pic

For some dumb reason I'm reminded of Minecraft.

kek

Newgrange in Ireland is very similar, having a winter solstice alignment.
They're both older than the Pyramids or Stonehenge.

At least at Maeshowe we don't have to worry about being the ones that disturbed something's slumber or anything, the Norse already did that in the 9th Century or so.

Ahem, ANTarctic.

Isn't this from some vaugely mythos comic? Dagon or whoever traps a super-titanic in a another dimension until its builder gives up his soul or something. I wish I could find it. It was badass.

Did he break his leg or something as well when he fell? It's hard to tell.