The Culture: Turns Out More Than SF & F Is Fake

Night Danger makes a bold, but correct, claim.

Video going up later on Lovecraft, "Cosmic Horror" isnt a real departure from Gothic, and why contemporary artists fail to capture what Lovecraft was doing

— Night Danger (@WithNightDanger) June 14, 2025

Here's the video.

Death Cultists will not react well to this. Then again they don't react well when they are confronted by reality.

Night Danger gets it. It's the matter of the Sublime that makes the difference, and it is this quality--a non-materialist quality--that is what makes fantastic literature its power. It is what makes horroric tales scary, yet satifying. It is what makes heroic tales thrilling, yet safe. It is what makes tales something more than the ordinary, and thus it is what separates a lot of slop media from the pinnacle they immitate like a Cargo Cult.

The same is true for those in Tabletop trying to use this hobby to chase a high they had with some source material, not realizing that they're using the wrong tool for the job and then getting mad when nothing they do "fixes" what they see as "broken". Why? Because when you're playing Tabletop, you are--for all intents and purposes--not separated from the danger or awesome incident at issue. You are in First Person mode, so it many respects when your man kills the dragon it is real to you and it's also why recreating what Lovecraft (et. al.) did in literature does not work; there is nothing keeping you from it- whatever it is.

Virtual experiences, so far as your brainmeats are concerned, are as real any literal ones. Trainers know this; that why they do it.

You can't do the Sublime without destroying the power of the Tabletop medium.

That's why, in addition to Gothic Horror being fake, Tabletop-as-Narrative-Medium is also fake. Virtual Experiences can only had in First Person mode; this is why Videogames are better at Muh Narrative faggotry than Tabletop because you can do that.