Remember my Woke Sci-Fi Article? It’s back in video form!
Indeed, Conan is even capable of seeing a non-human as, if you’ll pardon the expression, a man worthy of respect:
“Black, hairy, abhorrent, the monster lay, grotesque in the tatters of the scarlet robe; yet more human than bestial, even so, and possessed somehow of a vague and terrible pathos…Even the Cimmerian sensed this, for he panted: “I have slain a man tonight, not a beast. I will count him among the chiefs whose souls I’ve sent into the dark, and my women will sing of him.”—Rogues in the House
He also portrayed women very positively, something he held in common with Tolkien.
…Arguably the most overtly racist of the writers I’ll be discussing here, Lovecraft’s detractors are not entirely wrong. Many of his stories are overtly racist, showing its tragic heroes dying due to a past of miscegenation or other inherited failings. With that being said HP Lovecraft is still more than just the snarling WASP caricature that he’s often mocked as. For example, while he does portray some non-whites (in particular black people) as an animalistic other, let it not be forgotten that he portrays poor white people as equally, if not MORE degenerate, and shitting on poor white people is, of course, right in sync with what we’re supposed to believe in now.
It is also worth pointing out that for SOME non-white races Lovecraft shows a great deal of respect for them (while also portraying them as distinctly OTHER than white cultures). Indeed, Lovecraft’s writing does on occasion portray noble and heroic (or at least sympathetic) POC. And much like his good friend Robert Howard, he was capable of portraying non-humans as men worthy of respect:
“They were the men of another age and another order of being. Nature had played a hellish jest on them — as it will on any others that human madness, callousness, or cruelty may hereafter dig up in that hideously dead or sleeping polar waste — and this was their tragic homecoming… Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn — whatever they had been, they were men!” —At the Mountains Of Madness
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