How is it that Cthulhu, or for that matter any of the Old Ones, drives a man mad by just looking at him...

No it's a matter of shitty game mechanics that make CoC players assume that lovecraftian monsters are literally so ugly they make you crazy from seeing them.

When in fact most of them are just ugly.

There's the case of Nyarlathotep who boasts about his true forms being so horrible none may witness them and retain his sanity, but we don't know if it's true.

Imagine that you are a deaf ant. Now imagine there is some kind of creature so wierd that does not have an exoskeleton, with hard-to-percieve size.
Now, said creature communicate not by exchanging pheromons, but by making the air vibrate. It is uterly alien to you, and your brain can hardly process all this informations, and what it implie. Your queen ant is'nt the center of the world, you are but a small part of a larger being, the planet. Witch is part of an even larger being, the Universe.

That is what Cthulhu is for us.

Sadly, no.
I live in bumfucksville, and no libraries near me have any Lovecraft, or H.G. Wells either, which kinda shocked me.
Lovecraft's not too well-known, I suppose, but Wells? Motherfucker's one of the founding fathers of sci fi as a whole.

Lovecraft also wrote stories like "The Unnamable" in which he intentionally creates a monster that cannot be discerned by five conventional senses, only intuited through (contradictory) impressions and the markings it leaves behind.

In "The Statement of Randolph Carter" the narrator witnesses no monster, merely hears reports from his friend over the phone as the man delves deep into a crypt. The man suddenly begs Carter to flee the cemetery. When Carter begs his friend to come out, an inhuman voice asserts Warren is dead and hangs up the phone. Here the horror comes from Warren (a stony and implacable man) suddenly being gripped by terror and thus it is left for the reader to imagine what he might have encountered down there.

In "Imprisoned With the Pharoahs", the narrator glimpses a mere fragment, a paw, of something far larger and greater and more bizarre in aspect than he can rightly put into words, and in doing so he realises the that this was the same problem encountered by the ancients when they attempted to represent it in a sphinx; it was like a man, like a lion, like an eagle, and yet none of those things in truth. It was merely how they could process its parts and attempt to render them visually. But these visions he witnesses may be due to the psychological stresses of being kidnapped and imprisoned by his guide.

So, yeah, the whole "see a tentacle, go flibble" thing is a bit of a misrepresentation brought about by later representations of Lovecraft's ideas.

>is it a proximity deal
No.

It's purely a matter of psychic sensitivity.
Wilcox went mad despite being in America when Cthulhu awakened. But the Norwegians who directly met him were just scared shitless.

It means a blind man would be less likely to be scared.

Read the fucking story

maggiemcneill.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/the-complete-works-of-h-p-lovecraft.pdf
Get reading

If you want, you can get both Wells and Lovecraft off of Project Gutenberg online for free. I recommend you give it a look, it's a great public domain resource.

I'd reach through the screen and jerk you off if I could m8.

>No libraries near me have any Lovecraft
Motherfucker, public domain is your friend. Google is your friend. There is no shortage of free versions of the text, or audio productions thereof, out there.

My interpretation is that when a human witnesses Cthulhu their mind "breaks".

Often times when we see things our mind doesn't understand we brush it off as a mistake or try to rationalize it in our minds. We do this because throughout our life we have "parameters of reality" that create the foundation of our life. We know that if we drop an apple it will fall to the ground. We know that we can only see when there is light. We know if we are stabbed in the heart we will die, etc

The visage of Cthulhu is such an aberration that it invokes such a strong fragmentation of our parameters of reality that our mind can't help but try to disbelief. But his imposing and undeniable presence refuses to let your mind cope in it's normal ways. As with anything that is bent too much, it breaks.

Look up the BBC's audio recording of The Shadow Over Innsmouth. It's great.

It doesn't make sense to you because it doesn't make sense. In real life, when you see something you don't understand, you just gloss over it or perceive it in the limited way you are able. Ants don't die from looking at their surroundings and all that.

Someone made this point in /ysg/ a while ago. I have a headache, so I'll paraphrase.

It's not so much just "seeing an old one" that makes people insane. Most of HPL's protagonists are learned men: doctors, archaeologists, other men with a deep-seeded ideas of a consistent reality. The stories are almost always about a slow descent into madness, often through a combination of scientific curiosity and eventual obsession. By the time any of HPL's protags actually /see/ anything horrific, they're fearful and broken men, already. A common theme in the books is that knowledge is inherently dangerous.

The fisherman who stumbled upon Cthulhu had been attacked by vicious cultists before landing in a nightmare corpse city, all before actually seeing the old one. Really, seeing the monsters is just the icing on the cake that confirms, without a doubt, that everything they know is wrong.

Well your interpretation is an interpretation of the Sanity rules in the Call of Cthulhu RPG when applied to Cthulhu's rules in the Call of Cthulhu RPG.

It's not an interpretation of the short story The Call of Cthulhu cause there's nothing in it to substantiate your ideas.

>Derlethian is a literally who for me
August Derleth is basically the reason people know who Lovecraft is in the modern era; he took control of Lovecraft's writings after HPL died, set up a publishing house to keep HPL's work in print - the problem is that he was also basically writing HPL fanfiction and publishing it. He brought a lot of ideas to the Mythos that really went against some of the core philosophy, such as assigning classical elemental alignments to certain Great Old Ones, or introducing the idea of "good" mythos powers opposed to the evil ones...

It's because actually seeing his impossible shape is final, total, absolute PROOF that the humans are less than nothing and that everything you thought you knew was wrong.

Ah, so a guy who on the one hand helped, but also hindere, Lovecraft's work.

You done any diving? Go see a giant animal in the water, with nothing but low-visibility between you. It moving gracefully as you lose your sense of equilibrium and panic, having difficulty figuring out which way is up and which is down even though, trying to imagine that situation when calm it seems completely insane (how can you not know where up is when it's the direction your body is trying to float)?

Like that. But the size of a skyscraper. Oh and it's not a whale--it's literally a god. Your perspective on what being a human animal is will never compare to the perspective of a person who hasn't seen it, ever again.

Except existentialism believes that anyway. Besides, on their own, a human may be nothing, but humanity is a group, a whole, and honestly as one whole, I think we're equal to one or two old ones, especially with nuclear weapons.
Cthulhu may have been big, but a nuke still would've hurt.

yes, but a lot of the blame lies with the RPG, because it not only based itself heavily on Derleth's works, it also introduced the Sanity rules that propagated the misconception you detailed in the OP.

As said above, merely witnessing Cthulhu doesn't make you go mad, so the point is moot.

And actually a boat is enough to temporarily incapacitate him. But since he's immortal he can regenerate automatically from anything.

The first thing a newbie CoC player says when Cthulhu is described to him is "why don't people just nuke it?" because obviously, if Cthulhu is a monster then they've gotta kill it, right?
The answer is: if you nuke Cthulhu, he comes back two months later, but pissed off and radioactive.

Does that mean a quantum physicist, or someone who understands reality may not be what it seems, would handle an old one better?
Or, along the line of thought, would a baby raised around horrific things and old ones have no psychological effects upon being eposed to one?

Even so, we can take a god out for two months.
That's not the actions of a nothing, and while we can't kill him, two months is still alot. And, if during those two months, we could find an adequate way to trap him, then we'd be set.
Hell, if a boat can kill him, why not just rig up an artillery cannon to shoot him in the face everytime he wakes up? Or just put him in acid? Sure he's big, but just enough to keep melting a vital part would be enough, right?
Honestly, beating Cthulhu sounds like a matter of thinking outside the box.

People who are raised around mythos monsters just become fucked-up cultists. They don't suffer emotionally from it, but since their idea of normality is completely alien to us, they might as well be crazy.

And quantum physicists being confronted with an actually empirical manifestation of what they believe on a purely theoretical level would still be pretty upset. But yeah they'd probably handle it better,in fact in Dreams in the Witch-House there's a mathematician who figures out how to do magic by making maths and he's really weirded out and becomes a bit paranoid but he doesn't go bonkers.

I'd like to think they'd handle it worse.

You spend your whole life studying and researching the "If's, Maybe's, and the Theoreticals."

Then you find out all of the things you studied were real.

Oh God.

However, your second point is actually brought up in Pickman's Model, iirc, which is one of my favorite stories. Otis Jiry does a great reading of it.

In the second case, it depends on what you mean by psychological effects. Would they function? Sure. Would they grow up to do things that everyone else sees as abhorrent and unnatural because that's what the rubbery mold creatures down the street do? Oh yeah. It would be perfectly natural to them, of course.

>someone who understands reality may not be what it seems, would handle an old one better?
a strong possibility
> would a baby raised around horrific things and old ones have no psychological effects upon being eposed to one

a definite yes.

>of thinking outside the box
precisely
you're thinking outside of the limits of the LITERARY GENRE OF COSMIC HORRORS and into the limits of the INTERNET WANKERY GENRE OF POWERLEVEL ARGUMENTS.

Which basically makes the issue of "would witnessing this thing make me insane?" completely irrelevant.

Well, the stories were also written when people had a much smaller idea of the universe. The protagonists almost always require some sort of convincing, along with a little proof. An excerpt from the Necronomicon that stuck with them for years, a small fetish that had no definable origin, things like that. They follow these shreds of evidence, but by the time they ever actually see an Old One, they are already 100% convinced of their existence and power. A quantum physicist, specifically, might be a little more open to the original breaking point of "oh man there are actually fucking monsters walking around somewhere holy shit", but I dont' think they'd fare any better.

>would a baby raised around horrific things and old ones have no psychological effects upon being eposed to one?
He would almost certainly be a cultist. It was explicitly stated that (dead) Cthulhu has a low psychic wave (or something) that makes sensitive people have dream-visions of R'lyeh

>Hey guys, from the safety of my own home with electric lighting, I can safely say that reality-bending monsters are neither terrifying nor psychologically damaging!

People lose their minds from spending thirty minutes around other people in high stress situations. What makes you think spending thirty minutes around fish-men in high stress situations would be less likely to leave someone with psychological damage?

Right, but what if raised with both? A sort of bridge person, inbetween batshit crazy, and normal.

So there is logic to Loveraft's universe, it's just not understood by humanity? Then it is conceivably possible for a human to come to understand it, although the journey might change them, without going insane?
So in the end, the best policy is to have weak convictions, because then they weren't really there to block understanding anyway.
I meant more that because Cthulhu is batshit insane, you need a batshit insane idea.
You need to think outside the box.
Outside of your own convictions, and understandings, and come up with a solution that, well, ony an idiot on the internet would have.
Well, yeah, I suppose they still might struggle with the fear.

Insensitive baby? Bridge Baby? And why do people choose to worship their dream visions?

>The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

That's literally the beginning of "The Call of Cthulhu." In Mythos works, understanding is often more dangerous than ignorance. Quantum physicists and their ilk are generally the people who are closest to the shattering revelations implied to be inherent in the existence of Mythos entities, so they're often the first to go, in a sense.

On the other hand, in various stories it's the learned who are able to resist Lovecraftian forces the best. You really want some scholars on your side if you're trying to defeat (well, slightly postpone the inevitable victory of) some kind of Mythos-related threat. It just takes an awful toll on them, as they have to live with the horrible knowledge they've acquired.

See mate, you've got it wrong. What everyone forgets is that the boat didn't harm him, it's that it went through him because he wasn't finished materialising because the stars only aligned for not even half of a minute. Dead Cthulhu sleeps in R'lyeh until the stars are aligned. Once they are, and he fully wakes, nothing shall stop him from. Nothing could stop him. If you're driven insane by him sleeping, then what if he's alive and awake?

>If a boat can kill him
It can't, though. The ending of Call makes it clear that, at best, all the ramming charge did was delay him just long enough that the stars to stop "being right" and he slouches back to Rlyeh for a nap. He just puts his exploded head back together and goes home. If the stars come right for longer than the few moments they had in the 1920's, it's going to take a hell of a lot more to even do harm, never mind delay him.

>Just put him in acid
He's not made of matter we understand, so good luck figuring out what acid to use.

>Honestly, beating Cthulu sounds like a matter of thinking outside the box

More like thinking outside the genre is what you're doing. It's like saying "all it takes to beat Cthulhu is a good cutemeet where he bumps into a nerdy girl at the college library and they fall in love because this is a romcom right?" No, it's not. You're operating in the wrong schema.

Har-die-har-har
Yes, I am a civilian, with a civilians ability to handle crazy shit.
But what if some hard motherfucker, who also happens to have a quantum physics degree because fuck you, and- Wait, I got it.
Gordan Freeman.
How would Gordan Freeman handle a gotdamn Lovecraftian horror?
But what makes the awful knowledge worse than any other awful knowledge, such as oblivion, mortality, the universe's death, and the fact that the human soul may not exist?

What you meant doesn't matter, I'm explaining you that Cthulhu, as a literary device, is something you should not be able to actually win against, and whose presence should humble you beyond the capacity to come up with an effective counter-attack plan.
if you really win against Cthulhu you're writing a bad story or playing CoC wrong.

In fact the more I read your posts the more you come off as a guy who wants to "win CoC" by killing Cthulhu.

Which is to say a DnD munchkin who lost his way.

Like 90% of people don't just "go crazy" from seeing eldritch horrors, they develop very reasonable psychological conditions not properly treatable by 19th century alienists, and then get thrown into an asylum.
Guy sees horrible monsters, suffers massive stress and fear that impacts his daily routine, can't explain why without sounding like a madman, and all it takes is someone deciding he needs to be fixed, and then it's off to gay baby jail.

It doesn't. Mythos stuff doesn't care about you or influence you in any way.

What drives you insane, much later, is the understanding that the universe is filled with things such powerful and incomprehensible that everything humanity, and you, personally, will ever achieve, or become, doesn't matter at all. This causes people to be overcome with deep depression and ennui, and THAT eventually drives you insane.

At least, that was the case before Derleth came with his psychic shit.

Ah, so he's got, for lack of a better word, plot armor? And no, I don't want to win by "kiling cthulhu", just was looking for a song about him, which led me to his wikipedia out of curiosity, when I noticed that it said that seeing him drove you nuts, while also saying that there were descriptions of him.
So essentially PTSD then?
That actually makes a decent chunk of sense.
You go through fucked up shit, and come out fucked up.

Fuck off with your powerlevel bullshit.

The Mythos isn't a fucking fighting game roster for you to pit against other characters.

The Mythos is a set of literary elements for you to create cosmic horror stories.

If you use them outside of this context they lose their value. And here you're clearly trying to turn Cthulhu into a pro-wrestling jobber for your babyface to win against.

The descriptions of Ktulu come from the dreams of fevered minds, as none have seen him and lived, or were mentally stable enough to be of any use. (In-universe, that is.)

I agree with this. I do like the idea of being able to confront the Great Old Ones and win, but that's definitely not classic Lovecraft in the slightest at all and understand that the horror part comes from the inevitability and unbeatable part of these characters.

Beating the Cthulu through ingenuity, determination, the social links you got by hanging out with that dude who wants to fuck his teacher; these are Lovecraft Lite things that have a much more optimistic bent than your CoC proper. There are definitely tabletops you can find to grab some of that feel, though I can't come up with any off the top of my head aside from DnD and WoD.

>So there is logic to Loveraft's universe, it's just not understood by humanity?
Not really. Whatever logic exists is, at best, dreamed up by Azathoth. But since all the stories are from a human perspective, it tends to emphasize the "random, chaotic, horrible universe" angle.

Eat an eighth of mushrooms and you'll understand why the concept of a non-euclidean city is pretty fucking spooky.

>He's got plot armour.

Still thinking in the wrong terms.

It's not that he's too big.

You're too small.

Cthulhu is a big thing, right?

In Mythos, Cthulhu is a small fry compared to the Big Things.

The universe itself is one of them.

"plot armor" is meaningless outside of fight-centered stories where the plot should be resolved by fighting.

"plot armor" has no meaning against a character you aren't supposed to fight.

The Norwegian captain incapacitates Cthulhu in the story but it's immediately made clear that it doesn't fucking matter and resolved nothing.

So no, Cthulhu doesn't have plot armor because he's not a supervillain for superheroes to beat up.

Well, SOME victories are possible in "purist" Lovecraft, but human endeavour rapidly becomes meaningless at a certain scale. In the Dunwich Horror, the Whateley boys are horrors that can be brought down in semi-mundane fashion. But those are essentially weird mutants caused by close contact with a deity, who doesn't care if your shotgun is really cool.

Yeah and let's not forget that CTHULHU ISN'T EVEN THE BIGGEST THREAT IN HIS OWN STORY.
Cthulhu is just the front desk receptionist of the Old Ones and R'lyeh is full of them.
He's the tip of the iceberg, and THAT'S what really scares the author-narrator of the story.

look at
Gordan Freeman has dealt with horrors akin to Lovecraftian ones on a regular basis.
He was the best example I could think of for the best individual to "deal" with a lovecraftian horror. And I mean "deal" in the sense of not go batshit whenever he sees sushi from that encounter afterwards.
But in the end, Azathoth must have his own version of logic.
Granted, fucking insane by human standards, but logic nontheless.
Except they said his whole point as an entity in the plot, is that he's unbeatable, uncomprehendable, and mostly indifferent to humanity.
In the end, it's a fiction, beholden to fiction's rules.
Now, a real life lovecraftian horror, yeah, it's not got plot armor.
He's just a massive fucker.
Massive in more than size too.
Massive in power, and influence.
Massive in the amount of fuck's ungiven torwards humanity.
They are not Benevolent.
They are not Malevolent.
They, from our view, just are.

But what makes the awful knowledge worse than any other awful knowledge, such as oblivion, mortality, the universe's death, and the fact that the human soul may not exist?

Irrefutable proof that the human soul DOES exist, and it gets raped for eternity. Basically, the ending to every HPL story.

This.The entire town of Dunwich saw some real shit, but they are pretty content to just not talk about it and keep fucking each other.

OP, play some Bloodborne if you have a PS4. It's Victorian werewolf hunters meets lovecraftian cosmic horror. Also, Spotify has many HPL stories read aloud for free. You seem interested enough, take a look.

>And I mean "deal" in the sense of not go batshit whenever he sees sushi from that encounter afterwards.
Oh, then sure I guess he could, as a matter of fact a fair amount of Lovecraft' characters do that.
But they've lost all hope because they know beyond any doubt that the world is fucked.

See that's what I'm getting at with Cthulhu and the whole cosmic horror thing.

Lovecraft's stories aren't just meant to induce horror or fear, they're meant to induce despair. And Cthulhu works in that context, with the rest of the story he appears in.

Why do you give a shit about "real life"?

This is fiction. You're on a board dedicated primarily to fiction.

No mate. Cthulhu is just a priest.

Think of it like that. He's not important.

At least, to them.

>But in the end, Azathoth must have his own version of logic.
He shits physics and then eats them and does it over again. And he likes the sound of pipes so he's got two formless dudes play pipes while he eats his own poo because he's "the blind idiot god".
That's literally all he does.

How's that for "logic"?

OP, I want you to imagine a colour that fell from outer space. A colour that consumes people, for lack of a better description.

THAT'S your average Lovecraftian entity; abstract, immaterial and intrinsically adverse to the very underpinnings of ''logic'' and ''reason'', which are but trivial concepts that we humans have conceptualized to enforce order upon an inherently apathetic universe.

By the sheer fact that our insignificant sensory organs are simply not adequately equipped to fully comprehend these entities without driving us mad in the process, the pictures you see of Cthulhu are bit vague pseudo-representations of what could-be -- the glimpses of fragmentary reality, amassed in such a way to give you a mind's eye into the void of infinity.

Now I just have this image of the others looking at Cthulhu's strange hate for humans and being like "Why are obsessed with bacteria, you feckin weirdo."
I'm laughing at an eldritch horror.
take that, cosmos
Because you guys started applying real life rules.
Fiction's have different rules, from reality.

>But in the end, Azathoth must have his own version of logic.
In the mythos, the entire universe and all of it's contents are the dream of some massive dead god (Azathoth). Literal time, space, life, death, EVERYTHING is just some abstract dream of something so alien in concept that we don't really have the capacity to describe it wholly.

Can you imagine what this being must conceive when it's awake? Sure, you could attach a mundane label on it like 'logic', but at that point anything described as logic would be entirely different than the narrow definition you'd be using.

The funny thing is that your assertions are basically the same thing that every protag goes through

>I mean, there's no way something like that could exist, right?
Wrong
>It's big, but...it's not THAT big
Nope
>C-can't we nuke it?
Nuh-uh
>W...what if-
Nah

Cthulhu doesn't have a hatred of humans. He doesn't care. We are as ants to Them.

Besides fiction only has different rules wen it is allowed to.

>take that, cosmos
wow you're such a badass measuring your intellect to fictional beings that don't exist and were made up by other people like you.

You sure are a lot smarter and braver than Lovecraft.

Oh boy.

>Because you guys started applying real life rules.
when?

Again, you're just assuming this interaction is taking place in a different sort of story than a Lovecraft story.

Like I said earlier, if you want to write a story using Cthulhu and use a different genre with a different mood and different tropes and expectations for what is feasible, then sure, write your story where Optimus Prime fights Cthulhu. But that's not cosmic horror.

Cosmic horror is, as a genre, about human insignificance, irrelevance and meaninglessness in the face of things so much larger than us. Disempowerment is key, and I understand that it's a difficult pill to swallow when you come at Lovecraft from sci fi or fantasy which is often about how cool it is to have power and be able to do cool things. But Lovecraft was writing cosmic horror. Saying "what if it's not though?" is like asking why the leads in a romantic comedy don't stab each other in the face and scream about how much they hate each other and go on gore-splattered murder sprees; because that's not what the genre is.

Azathoth isn't dead he's just stupid and blind.

Lovecraftian entities are more akin to forces of nature. Does the wind have ''plot armor'', how about ''temperature'', or ''radiation''?

Yog-Sothoth the Gate and Key is LITERALLY the space-time continuum. Not a representation, not an ''avatar'', no. He's literally the very concept of space and time and the dimensions.
Try him on for size.

Cthulhu doesn't give a shit about humans he's just waiting for the stars to be right so he can summon the Great Old Ones on earth, and from there all over space.

>then sure, write your story where Optimus Prime fights Cthulhu. But that's not cosmic horror.
I mean, Cthulhutech was literally built for this kind of shit.

I don't like CT because I feel like it's too against the grain from HPL's themes, but OP might like it.

Yeah.
Cthulhutech sounds like it was written by people like OP.

Cthulhu isn't even that big of a deal, cosmic-horror wise. He's simply the Old One's vanguard to reclaim Earth.

Yeah, but don't give him too hard of a time. I mean, if you're not already a fan of the works, it's only reasonable to ask these kids of questions. I mean most of them are addressed by the protagonists.

He likes eating physics, so he makes some and eats it.
Seems logical to me.
We like bacon, so we make it and eat it.
Same with the sound of pipes.
Nice description, and it makes sense.
u don did a good
Yeah, but he's still got a logic.
Logic just means a mind process, a way of perceiving things. Either he has one, or he's not sentient, even if it is so fucking weird calling it weird is like calling the center of a fusion explosion "A little warm"
And as for those assertions, I guess that would seem funny.
Still, they are gods.
Who could hope to kill a god, but a god.
We drove steamboat into him an delayed him.
If we're ants, we're fire ants, and he's probably miffed at us.
It was a sarcastic "take that cosmos" you sperg.
Figured lack of punctuation and capitalization would make that clearer.

When you claimed plot-armor was irrelevant when discussing a fictional character who is required to be immortal by the plot.
If the wind was a fictional entity with features tacked on to help fulfill the plot?
Sure.
And we made him wait for next time.
Imagine you were waiting in line for something, and an ant bites you.
You step to the side, pull the ant out with tweezers, but now you've lost your place and must wait another 5 minutes.
You curse the ant, while the other people look on in confuson as to why you'd be so mad over an ant.
This is how I think Cthulhu sees us.

"Color out of Space" is actually one of HPL's stories, and the "creature" did "devour" things. The quotation marks are paraphrases, because those two words are about two or three pages of description in the book, I want you to understand.

Fire ants is probably a good way of looking at it.

>If the wind was a fictional entity with features tacked on to help fulfill the plot? Sure
I didn't ask you a question though, so thanks for that lackluster reaction, cunt.

Putting your smug mockery aside, these things are - objectively - beyond your comprehension. You cannot envision what it would be like to be swallowed whole by the space-time continuum. (or the wind, for that matter).

Stop trying to deconstruct Lovecraft (which you haven't even read). It's not working, and all you're doing is arguing semantics like a pedantic faggot.

>When you claimed plot-armor was irrelevant when discussing a fictional character who is required to be immortal by the plot.
what the fuck does that have to do with "applying real-life rules"?

And it sounds to me like you have textbook Asperger's syndrome: an obsession with organizing everything into a coherent system.
Incompatibilities between things (such as cosmic horror and military strategy) upset you so you shoehorn things into each other.

Like Deviantart people who make Sonic OCs of everyone they know cause they can't handle Sonic being its own thing.

But we did not delay him, he merely went back to death-sleep as the stars went out of perfect alignment. Should they ever perfectly align, he will rise, and the earth shall sleep in his wake.

And nothing can stop it.

this

Because, things like "plot-armor" will always be relevant in a story.
Fiction is beholden to rules.
The story was supposed to be about the oppressive horror of indifferent, massive, dangerous unknown.
So it was required that the manifestation of that in the story be worth fearing.
His immortality is merely plot armor used to make him more imposing.
It's a story.
With a story's rules.
He has plot armor.
Except, they aren't
Sure, some things are, for the sake of the story, but in the end I know about him.
I know he's immortal, because him being immortal improves the story.
Call of Cthulhu would be a very different tale if he died from the steamboat.

Grip a billiard ball, feel your fingers wrap around it, and you will understand. Now imagine a creature that existed in only two of those three dimensions, in a universe that described a simple plane through our own. To that creature, the billiard ball would appear to be a simple circle, growing and shrinking as it passes through the plane of the creature's universe. Imagine how our hand would look - strange fleshy circles filled with pulsing fluids, shards of os, glistening meat. The creature could never understand what it was really seeing, as it could no more conceive of a hand than it could imagine a creature like us, moving freely in three dimensions and gripping billiard balls on a whim.

This is what I mean with incomprehensible -- and your insistence to the contrary by saying ''no nu'' won't prove otherwise.

To imply that something can ''die'' assumes that it ''lives'' in the first place. Tell me, can a colour die? Is it alive to begin with?

>it's a "fundamental misunderstanding because I've never read the source material" episode

>I know about something
>I comprehend it
You *know* what a triangle is, and you *know* what angles are -- but can you 'comprehend' the notion of an extra-dimensional triangle with twelve angles? If so, then please draw one for me with a timestamp :^)

I think you're both arguing something that is, at this point, semantics. But I did want to say this,
>Fiction is beholden to rules.
The mythos is very purposely NOT beholden to any rules. If you wish, any rules that are within the scope of human reasoning.

Considering the fact that human reasoning is all that you or I could ever hope to achieve, you're supposed to take these sort of things with a grain of salt. Sit back and enjoy the horror at face value, because attempting to deconstruct it is redundant and futile.

It's more along the lines of an insane man who claims and truly believes he was abducted by aliens and you can see the fear in his eyes when he speaks of them. Optical illusions don't drive anyone insane because the brain can process them and eventually through time rationalize them as being tricks or flukes; possibly even replicating them. And with the insane alien abductee you can convince yourself he's lying for a variety of human reasons, or suffering from a mental disorder. But through his eyes he saw something that defied everything he previously knew and changed him forever in one singular experience and reduced him to a terrified mess. Not a single day would ever pass where he didn't think about it and that thinking and reasoning would push him to question the nature of reality and existence itself until to an outsider: he is absolutely a lunatic. And that's just from little grey men that shouldn't exist on our planet with some technology that also shouldn't exist in our timeline, imagine that scaled to the nth degree in the case of something like Cthulhu.

There's no skepticism after an experience like that, you will never be able to brush it off as a trick of the mind or blame it on something in the corner of your eye or weather balloons ever again.

>How is it that Cthugha, or for that matter any of the Hot Ones, drives my mad by just looking at her? Is it a puberty thing? Is it the desire of her? Or is it just because a man can't ever be inside what he's looking at, and wants to bust a nut?

Here you go.
Eh, in the words of Mark Twain
"Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't."
Fiction has the fault of being made by humans, with human logic.
Reality has no such limitations, and therefore an eldritch horror in fiction is inherently different from a real one.

Sorry, but that's wrong. Geometry is objectively measured. Do you even know anything about mathematics? Kek

Speaking of Cthulhu, what's the best version of the RPG?

All triangles occupy the same infinite space across all realities rendering a 12 angled one an impossibility within the supreme reality. Should one enter ours it would be reduced to three.

The point was that showing an extra-dimensional object on only 2 is like trying to see a sphere in only 1 or less dimensions.
I cn know it, and I can even sort of feel a comprehension, though in the same sense I comprehend that the screen I'm looking at is a bunch of radiation bombarding holes in my face.
I comprehend it, but not really.

>doesn't get that his drawing is still 2D and that the exercise was physically impossible.
Guess you feel pretty stupid now for obliging him

And, not to mention, a twelve angled version of an object that is defined as having 3 angles (and 3 sides) is like saying "Show me tiger but it's a fish instead."

Exactly, and yet you still don't understand how the conceptualization of something that we inherently understand to be impossible, is not the very definition of incomprehensible?

Just how dense are you?

Okay Mr. Autism

But that's like saying "Hah, you don't understand how a circle can also be a square?
That's because a circle can't be a square, because then it wouldn't be a circle anymore haha gotcha good didn't I?"
A "definition" is a product of the human mind, and is beholden to the human minds rules.
Trying to compare an eldritch horror and an incorrect definition is just inaccurate.
So act smug all you want, but your point is invalid.