His focus on the specialness of Cthulhu was that "Cthulhu represents our fear of the possibility of our own human smallness.. Cthuhlu presents us with the revelation of forces that are so much larger than us that they're beyond our control... The fear in Cthulhu is not that it's powerful, it's that it's powerful on a scale that we can't even comprehend."
-mouser
[^] that is *not* they key element from my perspective.
The key element as I understood it was the idea of something so horrific and alien and scary that your mind could not process it, and it drove you mad with fear.
-mouser
Leaving out the going mad aspect, it seems to me that the two above could be reduced to the same underlying ideas: fear of the unknown, and of our inability to control it.
as a result of his (many times dangerous and/or foolhardy) investigations, discovers forces beyond his control or comprehension that brutally exposes his own smallness in the face of the vastness of what he observes. This, in turn, drives him stark raving mad and/or drives him to pen an entry in a letter or diary warning the rest of us not to tread the path he forged.
You've actually got a pretty good grasp of the argument, as madness IS the inevitable end, and I think you'd agree with the author's opinion that any game based on the Cthulhu mythos would be better served by NOT making defeatable bosses out of unnameable horrors. I mean really...
-Edvard
Yes,
"making defeatable bosses out of unnameable horrors" sounds like a fail, but reassuring us about the unnameable horrors seems like an okay idea to me (if maybe impossible in a game). FWIW, I guess I'm saying the idea that madness is the inevetibale end is Lovecraft's belief - and doesnt have to be our's, or the game makers'.
Going back to the fear of the unknown: it's interesting that in most fairy tales, the unknown is mostly presented very casually - and the main protaganist gets help left, right, and centre on their journey into it (the unknown). The evil characters usually represent some behaviour known, or something vaguely known (for the listener), like the wolf in little red riding hood (who represents getting sexual at too young an age).
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- this was Edvard's response:
vaguely
hi Stephen!