By Jack Mulvey, Staff Writer

June 3, 2021

In the past few years, a prevailing culture has begun to infect not only the internet but mainstream media as well. This new wave is referred to as "cancel culture" and the mission it seems is to dig up and expose the old sins of public figures so that the world can punish them. 

Now there is a difference between someone benefiting from these past actions and someone who has grown and moved past these things and is still being punished for them.  But a big issue for me as an inspiring writer is someone’s work being glued to their misdeeds and a pale being cast over everything they have done. 

A great example of this is H.P. Lovecraft, a cosmic horror writer from Rhode Island who was one of the pioneers behind the popularization of cosmic horror in modern media.

Cosmic horror for those uninitiated is horror that showcases humanity’s insignificance in the vast darkness of the universe. Lovecraft is still the biggest name in this genre and yet that same name is being dragged through the mud. 

Now the reasons are valid. Lovecraft was a problematic human being. He was a racist and he did have some of these ideas in his work. However, if we look at what survived as opposed to what did not carry over into the modern-day you see the real truth of things. H.P Lovecraft’s themes and mainly antagonists have stayed in the genre since he created them and are still as terrifying as they were back then. While his more racist and xenophobic rhetoric has fallen to the wayside. 

This is a classic case of “ignore the artist, Love the work” and that ideal has also fallen to the wayside. Day after day, artists and creators are getting “cancelled” for things that happened many years ago. The accusations may not even be true.

This culture is toxic but more importantly, the work of these artists, bad people or no, is getting dragged down with them. 

And Lovecraft is just one example of this culture dragging great works through the mud when they don’t deserve it. The long and short of it is that people are fallible, even malicious in a lot of ways, but the things we create should live on despite our mistakes, in the end, works such as "The Shadow over Innsmouth," "At the Mountains of Madness," and "Call of Cthulu," will and have lived on far past their author’s expiration date and we as a society should not speed up the death of these authors works. Instead, we should laud them and praise the works and art of the flawed man behind them.