does “alien monster that lets out a deadly psychic scream when it dies” have its origins in lovecraft or was hussie pulling a watchmen with gl'bgolyb
okay lots of good chat going on in the replies but I think my point is getting kind of lost lol. I’m aware Hussie makes references to Lovecraft through several layers of irony and pop cultural permutation, and just about says as much in his book commentary:
The goofy alt-universe Lovecraft mythos had its roots in Problem Sleuth […] The creatures are known as Horrorterrors, and their presence in the story was always meant to be a silly one […] with HS you may reap the spoils of these pilfered concepts without soldiering through an actual Lovecraft novel, which I think even Lovecraft’s ghost doesn’t recommend.
Homestuck: Book 1, p. 217
which is what makes me think Hussie probably hasn’t read much Lovecraft himself (I was trying to get at this in my tags, but my wording may have been poor).
I’m also aware the way Andrew uses cosmic horror in Homestuck tends toward being generic deconstruction of Lovecraftian horror; the monsters have generic “Lovecraftian” names like Oglogoth and Fluthlu and Nrub'Yiglith, and they have generically “horrifying” psychic powers like causing one’s bones to explode or forcing all the children in a galaxy to frown for a thousand years. So obviously the fact that Gl'bgolyb is a giant mollusc with a psychic scream on its own does not seem like a reference to anything in particular; it’s just What You Do when you’re making a generic cosmic monster.
but Watchmen, being a deconstruction of comic book tropes from the mid-80s, seems like an example of post-Lovecraft writing that Hussie very feasibly would have read. and I’m not just flagging up that Gl'bgolyb has a psychic power; it’s that Gl'bgolyb’s psychic power, which is to unleash a scream that kills the surrounding population when it dies, is the same specific psychic power that Ozymandias’ artificial organism has.
not only this, but Scratch and Ozymandias’ monsters share in the fact that they are Horrorterrors with a purpose. their deadly screams were engineered specifically to influence society in a particular way using the threat of armageddon. it’s true that while Ozymandias’ monster was designed to unite the human race across the East-West divide, Gl'bgolyb was used to sew conflict; but it might also be remembered that Gl'bgolyb gives Feferi the promise that she will one day “UNITE THE TWO RACES”, and it is the emissary’s psychic holocaust that ultimately allows this to happen.
(actually the fact that the Condesce was able to use Gl'bgolyb’s threat of annihilation to pull the land dwellers into line, effectively consolidating the two races into one chain of command, could also be seen as an act of uniting the two races… wonder if that was something of a sick little joke coming from Gl'bgolyb after all!)
the presence of a bald, nuclear-powered omnipotent looking over everything also feels particularly Moore-esque to me, but Scratch has been analysed down into a fine paste by now so I’m much more interested in using this as a lens into the more mysterious Gl'bgolyb for the time being