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[Loud Whispers]

I regret asking the question, forget it.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Let's have a serious talk

Before I begin: I am about to use some very strong, offensive, and harsh language. I will be speaking very frankly about topics of rape, abuse, suicide, and violence. I will be using sexist and racist slurs openly. This is not meant to imply that I, in any way, condone racism, rape, abuse, or violence. The opinions here are strictly my own and do not in any way reflect those of the SCP Foundation leadership or the wiki.

To begin with, the following Tumblr post is in response to this post by a fan of ours:

    oh

    Abe’s article reached 200+ upvotes

    image of grinning smug doodle

    Aanyways not very happy with all the sudden censorship talk going on

    As one wise tumblr user said - if horror offends you then you need to stay the heck away from horror

    I mean, let’s look at horror movies (a genre I don’t explore much ‘cause I’m a…

So the big thing being discussed in SCP Foundation’s leadership these days can kinda boil down to “censorship.” Should we ban slurs? Should we restrict writing on certain topics? Should we edit older articles that rely on “triggering” aspects? That sort of thing.

I wish there was an easy answer. “Of course we should ban racial slurs!” right? But where do we draw the line?

Some lines are easy to draw: someone calls a man a nigger to his face and you’re not a pair of black rap artists playfully using racial slurs to each other? Shut that shit down. Uses “Jew” as a synonym for “miserly?” shut that shit down. Says “Man, I hope that bitch gets raped,” because an outspoken female on the internet has an opinion you don’t like? Shut that shit down. Tells a kid expressing depression and suicidal thoughts to, “Do it, faggot, don’t be a wuss?” Fucking shut that shit down.

… then you get to the fuzzy edges. Someone says, “I bet gay people would have gotten further if they didn’t annoy people with their silly pride parades.” Maybe they’re trying to have a discussion on whether “pride parades” might alienate the very voters that the LGBT population is trying to appeal to in civil rights legislation. Maybe they’re trying to have a discussion on whether increasing the visibility of the “camp” side of the culture is playing into the fear-mongering of the anti-LGBT lobby.

At this point, you turn on your moderator hat and watch the discussion. Maybe the discussion turns out civil. Maybe the tone of the chat is conducive to the free exchange of ideas. Maybe the poster is willing to listen to others and discuss gender politics. Maybe the end result is an interesting and edifying discussion of a complicated issue, and everyone comes away feeling a little more educated, with a lot of thought-provoking ideas to think over.

Or maybe it explodes into angry accusations back and forth and no one is really listening to anyone else, just digging trenches and firing artillery. Then you cut that shit out.

You cut all this shit out because SCP Foundation’s purpose isn’t social justice or political commentary… it’s horror writing. You stop angry political debates because it might drown out the voices of new writers trying to get feedback on their ideas. You push the discussion on rape culture and gender roles somewhere else because it might stop someone from trying to discuss their favorite stories. You push these things out not because they are not good and important subjects that should be discussed, but because the feedback and writing areas of a horror-writing website are not the places to have them.

… but there are places where Social Justice and moderating a horror-writing website interact. Not because Social Justice is a good thing and because you want to promote understanding and goodwill among all peoples: this is a noble goal, but it’s outside the scope of a horror-writing site on the internet. You promote understanding site for the betterment of the site itself.

Initially, SCP Foundation was very male-skewed. That ratio has been changing, and we’ve been getting more and more female fans and authors. This is good: a single viewpoint is a stagnant one. You get a wider variety of fears and horrors when your authors come from very many different viewpoints (one of my great regrets is that no real efforts have been made to adapt the SCP articles written by our foreign language sites to English).

But what this has meant for me personally is that I’ve had to take a look at some of my own writing which has relied heavily on sexual themes as a means of promoting horror.

Let’s be honest: sex itself is an inherently frightening act, despite its rewards. Intimacy is a moment of vulnerability. Orgasm is a moment of helplessness. Culturally, the removal of clothing and expression of sexuality has a strong taboo in the culture I come from: Just take a look at the kerfluffles that arise whenever someone at an awards show wears something odd or unusual. (And note the tone of critique for female celebrities vs. male, too.) There is a strong tradition of sexual imagery in horror, ranging from Bram Stoker through H.R. Giger through Lovecraft.

When I did this, I meant no message other than this: “Sex is an inherently scary act, and by adding elements of sex to my horror, I am trying to illustrate and evoke feelings of helplessness, vulnerability, and violation.”

But I was lazy. In the past, my audience was largely made up of people who came from a certain set of cultural baggage and experiences, and so I was able to use sexualized imagery to heighten the sense of emotion in my readers. But they still felt safe doing it, for the same reason that people can feel safe sitting at home watching “Alien.” The movie might be frightening, but I’ve never been chased through a spaceship by an alien monster that wants to plant eggs in my chest. When it gets too intense, I can step back and remind myself that this is only a movie.

… but the site’s audience has changed. New people with different backgrounds have been joining up. And this new audience, these new writers and artists and fans with new perspectives… they read some of my old work, and they see me touch on a subject that they may personally have had experience with… and this is what they see.

“This author thinks that a traumatizing experience (that I or someone I love personally experienced) is trivial enough to be included as a side element of horror, not important enough to be the ‘real’ scary thing here.”

And that is something I NEVER intended to do or say.

As an example: I recently wrote a story where a GOC assessment team goes through a mass mind-rape scenario, come very close to being sexually assaulted by a mindbender, and have to deal with the trauma that results. The story was intended as a setup to a second story with the team dealing with the impact of the incident.

Despite the fact that it was still positively rated, I spiked the story after I got some very angry and concerned feedback… not from people who disliked the sexual elements… but from people who pointed out that, in my attempt to illustrate that the team had become callous to strange situations due to long experience with supernatural horror, I was also being callous to real-world victims of sexual violence.

I had no intention of doing so. I was horrified to realize I’d done so. I spiked the story and immediately went into rewrite mode.

It didn’t work. I got angry. How dare they object to the story when I had warned them of the sexual themes! I got frustrated. How the hell could I rewrite this story that I’d put so much time and effort into now? I was going to have to redo the entire thing!

And then someone said something that reminded me of something: “You’re a horror writer writing about monsters and ghosts. These are real people who have suffered actual trauma. Deal with it, you wuss.”

So I rewrote the damn story. I’d poisoned the well to using sexual trauma as the triggering mechanism, so I switched it to something else that doesn’t have as huge a stigma of being trivialized in my culture: wartime PTSD. I went even darker and harsher than I think I ever did with the original rape imagery.

And you know what? I think it’s a much better story now. Not because it doesn’t have rape in it any more… but because, in being forced out of my lazy rut of “rape=horror,” I was forced to really buckle down and get horrifying.

I do not want to automatically exclude “triggering elements” such as rape, child abuse, suicide, and personal trauma from being included in SCP Foundation’s writings, or my writings in particular. I feel that, if handled carefully, with compassion and sympathy towards the actual real-world victims of these traumas, these elements can be used effectively. But lazily relying on such tropes to provide a cheap burst of emotional weight sends a bad message.

As much as I want to believe that I am simply a guy writing silly horror fiction on the internet, the truth is that art, by the very nature of existing, sends a message. And as a responsible artist, it is my personal responsibility to make sure that I do not inadvertently send a message that I find personally reprehensible through laziness of craft.

I am currently in the process of looking through my older articles and re-evaluating them with this new perspective and the weight of a few more years of experience. One of them I’ve had to send to someone else for a rewrite: SCP-166, the teenage succubus, is just… it’s just BAD. And despite my prior efforts to defend it… I can no longer justify its existence in its current form. I think its themes, role in the universe, and a few elements can still be salvaged, but I don’t think that I have the right mindset to do so.

Other articles… I’m less sure of. SCP-231 is the big one: It’s one giant ball of pregnancy and rape horror imagery of the worst kind being thrown against the an even bigger element of world-ending terror… but given that I’m pretty sure that no one comes away from that one thinking, “It’s okay to rape little kids in real life,” I may hold my ground on it and let it stand.

I’m a little more worried about SCP-835, the underwater tumor. I’m worried that the exploration log reduces what should be a competent female figure to an object to be attacked sexually… that’s certainly not my intention, I intended to pull a “Samus is a Girl” switch and illustrate strength and resolve in the face of horror. I’m a little weirded out by people who think the bitter, angry, and defeatist tone of the last line is “romantic,” though.

This has gone on for too long, so I’ll end here. I’m interested to see what Tumblr has to think about this. The site has a reputation for being filled with “Social Justice Warriors” who make mountains out of molehills, but sometimes those damn molehills are a sign that you’ve got fucking moles digging around under your fields and you need to do something about what’s lurking underground.

The original anons from /x/ started sailing off to greener pastures. It was inevitable imo, that the ephermal anon would go to shitpost beyond, but they had in their ephemeral ways sought to leave behind dank spookiness in an archive which would outlast their fleeting nature. This archive was pretty good, but began to decline in overall quality because it started getting shitty animus or too many edgy Spongebob murder copies, that some basic regulation had to be put in place. This archive was in turn inherited by administration which decided that the regulation must be expanded to make sure the site was left-leaning, as to be apolitical would be to harm inclusivity, and so harm the site's growth. In order to maintain this, censorship was happily employed, the quality control of the site was left to a community which had been pruned of mature writers, leaving behind people who were interested in making anime storyboards, avoiding topics, phrases, themes and words which would cause horror, for fear of causing hurt. This marked a transition from the SCP site being an archive of horror stories made by anonymous contributors, to a site being a community whose focus is on the personalities of the community members. This is very stupid politics

Profile: The genre-savvy and enigmatic "Dr. Alto Clef" maintains that its true name is that of an A major chord played on a ukelele, which it carries around with it at all times should other entities wish to address it by name. It has recieved its current nickname due to its habit of signing reports with a hand-drawn Alto Clef symbol. Although apparently competent at its job, its acerbic attitude and habit of annoying its coworkers by walking around minimal security areas with unfurled cinnamon rolls stuck in its nose has gained it the enmity of several of its coworkers.

It used to be dark, dark times for SCP lmao. It can still be enjoyable, just make sure to have a reading guide so you don't waste hours on duds. Some people still haven't grapsed that 5 pages of containment protocols alone is not enough to make an unnameable thing an object of interest; it's just a description of a job function. I suppose if you love lore SCP will never fail to please, it's got lore for days, and enough vagueness to allow for endless speculation and theorizing.

[SeriousConcentrate]

This marked a transition from the SCP site being an archive of horror stories made by anonymous contributors, to a site being a community whose focus is on the personalities of the community members.

That's why I stopped occasionally glancing at it, yeah. It was hard to take any of the writing seriously. (Also I'm not an 'anon', for the record.)

[Darkmere]

SCP had a real nadir there a couple years ago, but after the Canon Hub got started I feel the site took on some new life. Once the Antimemetic Series was posted I was pretty much back with it.

There was a point where the wizards and catgirls showed up that I just quit reading, but it seems like in the time since there's been some great work done. Antimemetics and Counterconceptual division are both great.

Aleph-Null is a personal favorite, but it hasn't updated in a while.

Nothing... it doesn't exist but we're killing ourselves.

Mobile Task Force Tau-5, let's make soldier homunculi out of chunks from a dead god.

-snip-

Thanks for expounding... and you're not wrong. I joined the site, tried to critique and submit, even tried the analysis subreddit. Every community outlet surrounding the actual site is a festering pile of trash in some way or another. That's what drove me to post here, more or less...

All that said, I do think somehow they manage to turn out a good story now and again, regardless of the attendant drama and other issues I'm sure as hell not touching on.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Any of you who haven't had a read through The Rat's Nest, and in particular Old Kansas Sector, should do so immediately. It's one of the greatest SCP plots out there, even weighed against the classics.

TL;DR: The Foundation finally starts losing the long war, and anomalies slowly consume everything.

There's also Kalinin's SCP-001, which I think is the best of the bunch and as some nice difficult to understand mindfuckery to it near the end.

The original anons from /x/ started sailing off to greener pastures. It was inevitable imo, that the ephermal anon would go to shitpost beyond, but they had in their ephemeral ways sought to leave behind dank spookiness in an archive which would outlast their fleeting nature. This archive was pretty good, but began to decline in overall quality because it started getting shitty animus or too many edgy Spongebob murder copies, that some basic regulation had to be put in place.

Let's not be too conciliatory towards ebin hackers known as 4chan here. I'm a salty dog by the history of the creepypasta world, and I remember the Asylum Series, which was your standard quality of writing from golden age /x/ and rarely exceeded. They get some credit for accidentally starting SCP's style by never deviating from "do all this weird unmemorizable shit when you meet the aslyum object or you'll have barbed wire pulled through your urethra until the sun burns out" that in time would evolve into Special Containment Procedures, but I say again, that credit was for them utterly lacking in creativity in everything but thinking up various methods of physically impossible torture.

The brooding vampire boyfriend SCPs and Attitude Era moderation staff were a bridge too far in trying to squeeze water from that stone, but it didn't come out of nowhere. It was a necessary growing pain, looking back on it now.

[Loud Whispers]

There was a point where the wizards and catgirls showed up that I just quit reading, but it seems like in the time since there's been some great work done. Antimemetics and Counterconceptual division are both great.
Thanks for expounding... and you're not wrong. I joined the site, tried to critique and submit, even tried the analysis subreddit. Every community outlet surrounding the actual site is a festering pile of trash in some way or another. That's what drove me to post here, more or less...
All that said, I do think somehow they manage to turn out a good story now and again, regardless of the attendant drama and other issues I'm sure as hell not touching on.

Pretty much, it can still produce some gems; a bog need not be without flowers. That's why it's good to get a reading guide and keep arm's length from the drama, though there are better platforms and mediums to write spooky horror funs

Let's not be too conciliatory towards ebin hackers known as 4chan here. I'm a salty dog by the history of the creepypasta world, and I remember the Asylum Series, which was your standard quality of writing from golden age /x/ and rarely exceeded. They get some credit for accidentally starting SCP's style by never deviating from "do all this weird unmemorizable shit when you meet the aslyum object or you'll have barbed wire pulled through your urethra until the sun burns out" that in time would evolve into Special Containment Procedures, but I say again, that credit was for them utterly lacking in creativity in everything but thinking up various methods of physically impossible torture.

The brooding vampire boyfriend SCPs and Attitude Era moderation staff were a bridge too far in trying to squeeze water from that stone, but it didn't come out of nowhere. It was a necessary growing pain, looking back on it now.

To me 2014 was the dead cat bounce of /x/. The Golden age was before then, before even when the /x/ anons were cast out and sought refuge in /tg/. Then the /x/ anons were cast out from /tg/ into the rest of the internet, much as the Greek scholars evicted from Constantinople sparked the renaissance, sowing the seeds of their own destruction by making their works self-archiving. Now that the deluge of redditors has successfully decomposed the creepypasta, new spicy meatballs are what I seek. One of the greatest things about the golden age of /x/ was that it was true to its ephemeral format, if it was not worthy of being remembered, it was forgotten. Once 2014 comes around, all the urethra barbed wire shit nipple crap that would have been forgotten, is not forgotten, instead taken up by all the eager baby birds lapping at the creepyvomit. It's like the nutcases murdering for slenderman in 2014, the effortless immortalisation of /x/'s works was not a golden age, it was a curse, enshrining their mistakes as canon for the wider internet to consume. The very notion that you should even care about who gets credit for making a creepypasta is sentiment to how far the autistic vision of the true artiste has been lost - it's laughable that the thing an anonymous poster would want, is to claim credit to their non-existent character. It's a copypasta, a thing shared from person to person, the digital oral epic of contemporary Homers and Homersexuals, now reduced to the basest, commercial and easily consumable products for individuals with real personalities. The death of nirvana, brought to you by 9gag ecksdeeeXDDDDD

[Urist McScoopbeard]

Ah, so what did you guys think of Annihilation if you've seen it? It's very elegantly done--and adapted from quality novels to boot--but the source material itself has some issues with... well, understanding what it wants to say, and the filmmakers--for all the brilliant work they've done--kind of slapped a thin veneer of esoteric and vague, hand-wave-y themes concerning xenophobia and acceptance on top of what appears to be an already nebulous story/plot/reason-to-read/watch.

[Loud Whispers]

Ah, so what did you guys think of Annihilation if you've seen it? It's very elegantly done--and adapted from quality novels to boot--but the source material itself has some issues with... well, understanding what it wants to say, and the filmmakers--for all the brilliant work they've done--kind of slapped a thin veneer of esoteric and vague, hand-wave-y themes concerning xenophobia and acceptance on top of what appears to be an already nebulous story/plot/reason-to-read/watch.

Worth watching? The trailer didn't really grab my attention

More horror:

According to the story, at some point in or around June 1947 (Gaddis and others list the approximate date as early February 1948), two American vessels navigating the Strait of Malacca, City of Baltimore and Silver Star, among others, picked up distress messages from Dutch merchant ship Ourang Medan. A radio operator aboard the troubled vessel sent the following Morse code message: "S.O.S. from Ourang Medan * * * we float. All officers including the Captain, dead in chartroom and on the bridge. Probably whole of crew dead * * *." A few confused dots and dashes later two words came through clearly. They were "I die." Then, nothing more. When Silver Star crew located and boarded the apparently undamaged Ourang Medan in a rescue attempt, the ship was found littered with corpses (including the carcass of a dog) "[s]prawled on their backs, the frozen faces upturned to the sun with mouths gaping open and eyes staring, the dead bodies resembled horrible caricatures", with no survivors and no visible signs of injuries on the dead bodies. A fire then broke out in the ship's No. 4 cargo hold, forcing the boarding parties to evacuate the Dutch freighter, thus preventing any further investigation. Soon after, Ourang Medan was observed to explode and sink.

The sea is horror

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Annihilation isn't quite as good as Arrival or The Martian, but it's very nearly in that category and it tells a story without strong Hollywoodisms. I'd recommend it, especially to spite the studio for once again making a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure for an interesting film while sucking down a cigar and demanding more blue lasers shooting into the sky.

I didn't watch the trailer but I heard from several people that the trailer was cut to seem generic while the film is anything but. I'm not sure if I'd fully classify it as a horror film. It gives equal time to horror and to sci-fi, mixing the two more as the story evolves.

[Kagus]

So, it's been ages since I watched it, but I remember being genuinely disturbed by 8mm. I also recall at least one scene that was done rather poorly, but the overall effect did leave me mulling over the themes explored.

I'm also apparently somewhat of an oddball, in that I actually quite liked Signs (maybe I'm just terrified of Joaquin Phoenix? Food for thought). Or, more specifically, I'm in love with a specific scene from said... the closet TV scene. Here we have something that flies in the face of standard horror cinema by building up and hyping up an event, something you know is going to happen (both intuitively and explicitly), and then after all that build-up it actually gives it to you... And it still freaks you (well, me) the fuck out. For that scene alone, I can look past the film's other shortcomings. Damn thing had tween me checking corners for a month.

Lately, when the ladyperson is out of the house for a night, I'll tune out and have a little fun browsing the schlocky horror picture show side of Netflix. Cheesier the better.

Through this, I've seen some interesting titles... including the surprisingly-good-for-a-B-movie Below, good-start-but-fell-flat Cabin in the Woods (hyperlinking on a phone is an exercise in patience and obsession that I don't have), the not-actually-horror-(except-for-the-philosophical-implications) He Never Died, and whatever Babadook was (aside from a reminder that I don't want kids).

Most recent one was The Ritual, which had a lot of good things in it. Overall it's not a particularly good movie, as it suffers terribly from an inability to make us care about the characters properly outside of the protagonist, and it gets confused about how it wants to deal with the protag's inner demons. Worth looking out for are the really cool creature design (naturally only really visible during the final 15 minutes) and a rather clever scene where the creature is actually partially shown in the middle of the shot, but you don't notice until it moves to conceal itself.

All in all, just a bit disappointing because they deal with a lot of troubling and scary aspects with huge potential, but it all just kinda falls flat in a muddle. It might have been better to take a more clichéd approach and just not dealt with or shown the creature directly, but they had some actually really cool monster design and surprisingly decent CGI for an indie flick... So it's a toss up.

RE: Junji Ito. Uzumaki is a great example of "whoa dude, shit's creepy". The story has some neat aspects, it gets really campy and silly towards the middle, and the end pissed me right the fuck off. Great illustrations though.

I don't recall what it's called, but the short one with the endless dreamers was really unsettling, right up until it went balls-out blargalargl and violently expelled all subtlety in a slurry of half-digested ooze at the end.

Worth a read.

[ChairmanPoo]

The novel is better.  Overall I really like Adam Nevill as an author. He has this tendency for the endings to lose momentum, though.  Eg:  Last Days was positively terrifying through 75% of the book, but the ending was "meh"

[Urist McScoopbeard]

Sorry, missed all this. Annhilation is worth the watch. The first 2/3rds of the film are a GREAT movie. It just details a group of women's descent into madness. The third act is pretty fucking bad though.

A Quiet Place was great too... IMO, up there with Alien for me.

[Max™]

I appreciate the explanation of what happened with SCP.

Haven't had as much taste for it since we started our travels down the wrong trouser leg of time.

Implausible horror is less interesting when you're living a banal impausibility.

[ChairmanPoo]

There was a point where the wizards and catgirls showed up that I just quit reading, but it seems like in the time since there's been some great work done. Antimemetics and Counterconceptual division are both great.
Thanks for expounding... and you're not wrong. I joined the site, tried to critique and submit, even tried the analysis subreddit. Every community outlet surrounding the actual site is a festering pile of trash in some way or another. That's what drove me to post here, more or less...
All that said, I do think somehow they manage to turn out a good story now and again, regardless of the attendant drama and other issues I'm sure as hell not touching on.

Pretty much, it can still produce some gems; a bog need not be without flowers. That's why it's good to get a reading guide and keep arm's length from the drama, though there are better platforms and mediums to write spooky horror funs

Let's not be too conciliatory towards ebin hackers known as 4chan here. I'm a salty dog by the history of the creepypasta world, and I remember the Asylum Series, which was your standard quality of writing from golden age /x/ and rarely exceeded. They get some credit for accidentally starting SCP's style by never deviating from "do all this weird unmemorizable shit when you meet the aslyum object or you'll have barbed wire pulled through your urethra until the sun burns out" that in time would evolve into Special Containment Procedures, but I say again, that credit was for them utterly lacking in creativity in everything but thinking up various methods of physically impossible torture.

The brooding vampire boyfriend SCPs and Attitude Era moderation staff were a bridge too far in trying to squeeze water from that stone, but it didn't come out of nowhere. It was a necessary growing pain, looking back on it now.

To me 2014 was the dead cat bounce of /x/. The Golden age was before then, before even when the /x/ anons were cast out and sought refuge in /tg/. Then the /x/ anons were cast out from /tg/ into the rest of the internet, much as the Greek scholars evicted from Constantinople sparked the renaissance, sowing the seeds of their own destruction by making their works self-archiving. Now that the deluge of redditors has successfully decomposed the creepypasta, new spicy meatballs are what I seek. One of the greatest things about the golden age of /x/ was that it was true to its ephemeral format, if it was not worthy of being remembered, it was forgotten. Once 2014 comes around, all the urethra barbed wire shit nipple crap that would have been forgotten, is not forgotten, instead taken up by all the eager baby birds lapping at the creepyvomit. It's like the nutcases murdering for slenderman in 2014, the effortless immortalisation of /x/'s works was not a golden age, it was a curse, enshrining their mistakes as canon for the wider internet to consume. The very notion that you should even care about who gets credit for making a creepypasta is sentiment to how far the autistic vision of the true artiste has been lost - it's laughable that the thing an anonymous poster would want, is to claim credit to their non-existent character. It's a copypasta, a thing shared from person to person, the digital oral epic of contemporary Homers and Homersexuals, now reduced to the basest, commercial and easily consumable products for individuals with real personalities. The death of nirvana, brought to you by 9gag ecksdeeeXDDDDD

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Mein Gott...

[Loud Whispers]

Pretty much this.  But by his standards, we could have the old ones walking down the street and we would be OK with it these days. (Most of his "madness" was the realization that Victorian standards of behavior, culture, status, etc were all hollow vanities, and the psychic implosion of people that based their worldview on these things.  Considering how far removed our culture currently is from that kind of silliness, he would view our culture as quite corrupt indeed.  I suspect he would liken us to the culture he described in The Mound.)

Personally, I would be very intrigued by the prospect of a candid conversation with one of his Elder Things, rather than repulsed.

Reading At the Mountains of Madness, the Scientists are completely chill when they are analysing the elder things, even when the elder things slaughter his camp the protagonist remarks that they were merely acting like men of science. I wouldn't call it Victorian standards of behaviour or culture, since Lovecraft's attachments to culture went back to a past far before the Victorian era, but definitely one regarding scientific innovation unsettling all. Consider in this time period for example, Einstein's relativity, Darwin's speciation & breakthroughs in archaeology fucks everyone up, and we know from his letters that Lovecraft was reading of all of them. With relativity mankind finds that their intuitive understanding of time and space is only accurate to their immediate locality in the vast expanse of existence, hence all the non-euclidean geometries and extra-dimensional fuckery the characters attempt to comprehend. With speciation the concept that mankind is distinct from other species in a great chain of evolution or a racialist hierarchy is untenable; around this time scientific racialism is reeling from the notion that humanity, the white race included, is a type of great ape distinguished only by degree of evolution from a gorilla, hence the stories of white men finding out they descend from gorillas / fishmen e.t.c.. With new findings in archaeology exposing just how many ancient civilisations are dead & really just how young even the oldest one was, it puts human existence into context, especially the context of ruin - as in Memory, we are a moment in time.

Sounds like alt-left to me.
(You also have to include the evil practices of human kind if you intend a fair comparison. )
If you actually read the story that features them, they try to integrate the protagonist. One even fancies him, and goes with his escape plan.  For a race with such baggage, they only presented that face when confronted with the threat of being wholly discovered by the human race.

The Ky'nan are a colonial remnant enclave of a dead master race that once spanned the stars, the Elder Things are empirical men of science who were overthrown by the imitated plastic of their slave race. Where the stories of the human protagonists 'getting along' (or at least being ok with their existence) of their eldritch counterparts are concerned, it's usually because there's a similarity between them and the degenerated white race; as with at the mountains of madness, the scientists are completely ok with the elder things butchering and dissecting all of their companions, because that's what they tried to do to the elder things - they were both just being men of science. It is the shoggoth, the dumb plastic amoeba, which disturbs the scientist. Because the shoggoth, already the superior of its master in terms of brute force, adopts its master's language and educates itself, beginning to surpass its master in intellectual and physical prowess, a parallel to world-wide white rule beginning to deteriorate under the increasing education of the rest of the world; former colonial subjects becoming equals with their nominal overlords. It's a motif which Lovecraft probably got from Poe, that the masters have grown weak while the slave races are advancing - linguistically and biologically, coupled with degeneration theory from the likes of Lombroso & Nordau.

I believe the derivative works of Lovecraft have somewhat exaggerated the perception that Lovecraft's works are about individuals seeing that-which-should-not-be and having their brains implode, when in most of the stories the characters remain sane all the way unless their family possesses some latent hereditary mental illness, something which has little to do with what they've seen. Indeed, much of the empirical-minded protagonists DO see the proverbial old ones walking down the street and are completely fine. Instead of shying away from looking at the "monsters," they try to observe and describe them down to the smallest detail and the finest digit. Where they go mad it's usually hereditary mental illness or heroin addiction, which is another one of Lovecraft's recurring themes, which seem especially tied to his own self-perception as a mental invalid, unfit even to die in the Great War. Generally the more superstitious a Lovecraft character is, the more likely they are to go mad when they see the odd shit - but Lovecraft never at any point validates their madness as true. Those cultists who worship Cthulhu as a god are worshiping a strange entity, but it is no god. Lovecraft's got plenty of these sort, of scientists who find that time and matter are illusionary, that the accepted evolutionary model or anthropological model is obsolete, that really weird fucky shit is happening - and at most they are unsettled, or in some cases find accepting the truth particularly easy, only to be regarded as mad by others. Read the Temple for peak 'empirical man of iron disregards Lovecraftian shit,' though there is another story where a scientist encounters an actual god and disregards them as a fraud, though I forgot the name. Anyways in the Temple the Prussian submarine Captain is an empirical scientific racialist who views all the gradations of germans within his submarine as inferior to his type of german, and when all the Lovecraftian shit starts happening, he endeavours to make his men fear him more than they fear the other-worldly beings.
He is largely successful, and never once goes mad

[Kagus]

For a brief moment, I thought this might have been someone reviving the thread in order to talk about Overlord.

(which looks pretty darn stupid to me, if I'm being perfectly honest)