…unless he’s your own.
The more you study [HP Lovecraft’s] Mythos, the closer you come to losing your marbles.
And so it has come to pass… Lovecraft is one of those rare writers to have achieved immortality not only as an author but as a genre originator. Thousands of authors, filmmakers, comic book writers and game designers have adapted and elaborated his narrative tropes, atmospheric imagery, and monster lore into an intertextual web that, like all realized genres, congeals into an archetypal reality more powerful than any specific instantiations of the material….
And still the dread conundrum: why and how did Cthulhu become cute? How did his eons-old awfulness become awwwwww….?
Erik Davis on the cuddlification of the Great Old Ones. Over at HiLoBrow