Okay so like I’ve been pondering this for a while but I can’t come up with any examples, please help me hive mind.
What is media that attempts to make the person viewing/listening/playing it feel like a Lovecraft style elder god?
I ask because I’ve been listening to a podcast called The Magnus Archives for the last month or so, and one of the conceits is that there are a bunch of evil entities from outside the universe that peek in and feed on people’s fear in very specific ways. For example, The Buried will, uh, bury people and then get all horny for their claustrophobia. It’s better than I’m making it sounds.
Anyway, the person who is narrating the podcast is an archivist at the Magnus Institute, which is actually an organization dedicated to serving the Beholder, an entity that feeds on knowledge and stories. It’s very, very clear that the way it does this is by convincing people to recite their stories onto magnetic tapes. In other words, the patrons of the Beholder feed it by reading stories aloud or telling their stories.
So, the Beholder is basically a listener feeding on these terrible stories…in much the same way that I am entertained by these fictional characters’ suffering.
Like, I dunno if it’s tremendously clever and the whole thing is sort of ham-fisted but I like the idea!! And I literally cannot think of anything else that really approaches this side of things.
I guess Undertale is close, since you’re essentially an omnipotent time-shifting being controlling the fates of unwitting creatures but like…I don’t get the same sense of totally impossible to understand intentions. Like, to someone in the magnus universe, my role is totally ineffable. What do I gain from listening to these stories? But in Undertale it’s clear that what I get is to be close to these characters in one form or another, and the whole friggin theme is friendship among those who are not really supposed to be friends, you know?
Anyway
Can anyone give me examples of this kind of thing?