Cthulhu Mythos/YMMV

These things about are subjective - not everyone will agree with all of them.


 * Continuity Porn: Common from virtually the moment of Lovecraft's death onwards, though hardly mandatory.
 * If you consider many of the stories are narrated in first person and one of the bases of the Mythos is that humans actually know really little about the cosmos then we can conclude that the own character narrators doesn't know enough or have wrong information due to the vague nature of their sources about the Mythos, which of course is a nice excuse to keep creating new stuff.
 * Complete Monster: Nyarlathotep is the only entity in the mythos that is truly malevolent and enjoys causing suffering for the sake of it, as opposed to the others who are either completely mindless or have Blue and Orange Morality.
 * And Y'golonac is just as bad, if not worse, even though he operates on a more Squicky level while Nyarly operates on a more outright vicious level.
 * Designated Hero: The Great Race of Yith are the closest thing to a good-guy race the original Lovecraft stories contained.
 * Ensemble Darkhorse: Cthulhu has so little role in Lovecraft's work, yet is the most famous now.
 * Despite showing up in about two Mythos stories, Cthylla is pretty well known.
 * Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory: Interpreting the end of The Dunwich Horror to be a parody of the Crucifixion.
 * Until you reread it, and realize that it undoubtedly IS a parody of the Crucifixion...
 * Fan Dumb: Plenty to go around, but perhaps the most irritating and clueless would be the various armed groups that gang up and fight each other and innocent bystanders over the "correct" way to pronounce the names of things in the Mythos like the Elder God's names in spite of the fact that Lovecraft made it clear that many names- and especially those of the Elder Gods- were not their real names but the rough translations into the human language of "words"- if they can be called that- which are beyond our ability to comprehend properly, much less understand.
 * Magnificent Bastard: A lot of portrayals on Nyarlathotep.
 * Thsathoggua as well.
 * Memetic Mutation: CTHULHU FHTAGN!
 * IA! IA!
 * Older Than They Think: Hastur originally came from Ambrose Bierce's Haita the Shepherd. Chambers used the name in The King in Yellow, which is where H.P. Lovecraft got it.
 * Moment of Awesome: Johansen hitting Great Cthulhu's head using the ship. It dosen't kill Cthulhu, but still awesomely badass, and eats up enough time for Cthulhu to be forced back into his slumber.
 * Running the Asylum
 * Unfortunate Implications: Knowing Lovecraft's views on race and religion can cast some of his works into a rather negative light. Other authors tend to avert this.
 * The Deep Ones are likely a demonization of miscegenation.
 * Also overlaps with Misaimed Fandom when Non-American, Non-Western authors, or even foreign titles, parodies or not, plays with the Mythos just because it looks cool without knowning the cultural backdrop of those stories. Of course, with so many Cthulhu-clone in western media - mostly being there for Rule of Cool as well, you can't blame them.