But what if: several thousand words considering whether Mieville is right that the Weird is actually radically different from...
But what if: several thousand words considering whether Mieville is right that the Weird is actually radically different from tentacle hentai
LIKE LISTEN I totally get his point re: the tentacle “representing” the phallus and therefore not being the radically antisemiotic Weird BUT IF I WAS THE KIND OF PERSON WHO LOOKED AT MONSTER PORN I’d question whether the genre actually is as unambiguous as Mieville implies
also, looking at the historical justification of the tentacle-as-phallus-substitute as a workaround designed for old Japanese obscenity laws, it makes sense even on a surface level—it’s a way of articulating what is socially unspeakable, and if you’re not making a huge distinction between what is unspeakable in Lovecraft terms and what is unspeakable in terms of what is verboten (something I think definitely applies even when we’re just talking about Lovecraft as-is), then I don’t think we have to dig that deeply to justify tentacle hentai as a genuine manifestation of the abcanny.
I want to comment on this but I’m honestly just too stunned at the moment by the fact that my goofy nonsense got a response this interesting (and that anyone knew what the heck I was talking about)
The thing is… the unspeakable thing the tentacle represents in tentacle hentai, and in older Japanese tentacle ‘porn’, is, one assumes, pretty-much specifically and exclusively the penis… or perhaps, more broadly, the act of penetration itself. Well, that’s really far too specific to be Weird in the true sense. The Weird certainly represents specific things at certain times. For instance, for Lovecraft it is often pretty specifically miscegenation. But the affect is one of incomprehension, of blank screaming horror at something beyond understanding, something rearing up from the previously-unglimpsed depths of a place we never knew was even there to do unknowable things for incomprehensible reasons. The affect relies upon a scrambling effect in the manner of the delivery. It relies upon a tactically deployed incoherence. This is very characteristic of the tendency/affect/mode that irrupted from within the Fantastic genres in Western culture (i.e. Euro-American capitalism) in the age of industrial imperialism. Because it happened as a result of the imminent failure of that culture to live up to its own ideological dream of itself as heading towards a telos of rational enlightenment. The Weird in the true sense (the haute Weird) is quite historically and culturally specific. Now, if you want to argue that tentacle hentai is one of its hybrid children… okay, it has a lot of those. It interbred like fuck. Which is where I have some arguments with Mieville. I think the ‘dialectical superpositioning’ between the Weird and the Gothic was never quite as absolute as he seems to imply, and that it certainly decayed after a certain point.
Surely his point (or at least the point I ended up using him to support) is that the superpositioning decayed instantaneously. The entire point of the exercise is that the gothically repressed and the external pure Other do not actually form a stable distinction.
but the supersession by nakadashi and the NTR turn, what’s that about, ya dweebs?