I really want someone to do a thorough analysis on the psychology behind modern fantasy monster design
This, but moreso. Like, a breakdown on modern monster conceptualisation as compared to those of historical cultures. At some point, we all apparently began riding the dragons into battle and sleeping with the vampires or something? I wonder what gives.
I think the vampire thing had to do with Romanticism and the shift from the vampire as a symbol of death in the day-to-day nasty sense to representing its more poetic accoutrements.
this could be me talking out my ass, but modern monsterism is more biological and less plotty to me
like, sleeping with vampires is okay now since they're aliens but also look and act more or less like people. in ye old days sleeping with a vampire barely even made sense as a concept since you only knew of them in the context of stories starting "Miss Smith disappeared one night"
the cornucopia of weaknesses is, as far as i know, fairly modern. it's not like an old source would write out encyclopediacally "you need to stake the fucker", you would just have a story in which maybe some weapons didn't work and then a stake did
That's true of mainstream horror, but the more literary strain—yes, pretentious, I know, but for lack of a better word, here we are—seems to be more interested in invoking the mythic qualities of the monstrous without establishing more than the simplest and most dream-like of rules, which generally work in the supernatural's favour. But I think that's because horror for a mass audience tends to rely on the idea that we want to slay the proverbial dragon, but horror for people who are serious diehard horror people is about resonating with their own weird personal terrors and scaring the bejeezus out of them.
ok yeah maybe i should ahve said "the strain of modern monsterism you refer to"
now that i think about it... in mountains of madness, the elder things are described in great detail (in the form of a scientific report, lol) while the shoggoths, who are more "bad guys", are left pretty vague
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I really want someone to do a thorough analysis on the psychology behind modern fantasy monster design
like, sleeping with vampires is okay now since they're aliens but also look and act more or less like people. in ye old days sleeping with a vampire barely even made sense as a concept since you only knew of them in the context of stories starting "Miss Smith disappeared one night"
the cornucopia of weaknesses is, as far as i know, fairly modern. it's not like an old source would write out encyclopediacally "you need to stake the fucker", you would just have a story in which maybe some weapons didn't work and then a stake did
now that i think about it... in mountains of madness, the elder things are described in great detail (in the form of a scientific report, lol) while the shoggoths, who are more "bad guys", are left pretty vague