{"version": "1.0", "type": "rich", "title": "But what if: several thousand words considering whether Mieville is right that the Weird is actually radically different from...", "author_name": "kontextmaschine", "author_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "provider_name": "kontextmaschine", "provider_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "url": "https://kontextmaschine.com/post/160113846148/", "html": "

philsandifer:

\n\n
\n

shabogangraffiti:

\n
\n

sam-keeper:

\n
\n

o-hybridity:

\n
\n

sam-keeper:

\n
\n

sam-keeper:

\n

But what if: several thousand words considering whether Mieville is right that the Weird is actually radically different from tentacle hentai

\n

LIKE LISTEN I totally get his point re: the tentacle \u201crepresenting\u201d the phallus and therefore not being the radically antisemiotic Weird BUT IF I WAS THE KIND OF PERSON WHO LOOKED AT MONSTER PORN I\u2019d question whether the genre actually is as unambiguous as Mieville implies

\n
\n

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\u2014it\u2019s a way of articulating what is socially unspeakable, and if you\u2019re 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\u2019re just talking about Lovecraft as-is), then I don\u2019t think we have to dig that deeply to justify tentacle hentai as a genuine manifestation of the abcanny.

\n
\n

I want to comment on this but I\u2019m 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)

\n
\n

The thing is\u2026 the unspeakable thing the tentacle represents in tentacle hentai, and in older Japanese tentacle\u00a0\u2018porn\u2019, is, one assumes, pretty-much specifically and exclusively the penis\u2026 or perhaps, more broadly, the act of penetration itself.\u00a0 Well, that\u2019s really far too specific to be Weird in the true sense.\u00a0 The Weird certainly represents specific things at certain times.\u00a0 For instance, for Lovecraft it is often pretty specifically miscegenation.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The affect relies upon a scrambling effect in the manner of the delivery.\u00a0 It relies upon a tactically deployed incoherence.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The Weird in the true sense (the haute Weird) is quite historically and culturally specific.\u00a0 Now, if you want to argue that tentacle hentai is one of its hybrid children\u2026 okay, it has a lot of those.\u00a0 It interbred like fuck.\u00a0 Which is where I have some arguments with Mieville.\u00a0 I think the \u2018dialectical superpositioning\u2019 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.

\n
\n

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.

\n
\n\n

but the supersession by nakadashi and the NTR turn, what’s that about, ya dweebs?

"}