Godzilla, Cthulhu, and You

Anti-Hegelian Monster Psychology

Godzilla vs. Cthulhu color by aquilianranger on DeviantArt

Lost Project: Godzilla vs. Cthulhu

Staff working in the planning department of Toho Pictures were tasked with submitting a story that could be used as the base for the next Godzilla movie. One of these submissions was Godzilla vs. Cthulhu, which would have pit the king of the monsters against one of writer H. P. Lovecraft's most well known mythical characters, Cthulhu. Unsurprisingly, this unusual proposal would have been heavily inspired by the fictional Cthulhu Mythos.

Sometimes people speculate about Godzilla vs. Cthulhu, which usually ends up with some fedora neckbeard saying “Cthulhu isn’t a kaiju!” Godzilla vs. Cthulhu was actually planned once upon a time by the people who made Godzilla, but never got made, so I think they would disagree. I would love to see Godzilla vs. Cthulhu, even if we just get a comic book or something and not a movie yet, even if we all know it’d be a complete curb-stomp… for Godzilla. Cthulhu is overrated, and saying this will get you hated by all the fedora neckbeards on TVTropes, but screw them.

In the Cthulhu Mythos of H. P. Lovecraft, despite it being widely called the “Cthulhu Mythos,” Cthulhu is really not all that powerful of an entity. As is widely-memed, Cthulhu literally got crushed by a steamboat. Sure, maybe the stars weren’t fully aligned or whatever, but even if they were fully aligned, Godzilla would still find it trivially easy to vaporize Cthulhu over and over. Even if we assume this can’t kill Cthulhu because Cthulhu’s body is partially in a different dimension and it just sends Cthulhu back where it came from, the fact is, it’s such a slow process for Cthulhu to come from the dimension it lives in back to Earth. One of the things the Cthulhu Mythos inspired was the sword and sorcery of Michael Moorcock such as the Elric Saga, and the Elric Saga lent the idea of planes to Dungeons and Dragons. In Dungeons and Dragons, if you kill a low-level imp, it just goes back to the plane of Hell where it can hypothetically come back to the material plane, but no one says that low-level imps are infinitely more powerful than adventurers because of that. That’s basically what Cthulhu is compared to Godzilla. Additionally, there’s actually a comic where Cthulhu defeats Satan and God (which, even though I haven’t read it, I can’t assume is just blasphemous since that was Jacob’s whole thing in the Bible) and escapes Hell to come back to Earth, so Godzilla is arguably the same way, but with Earth instead of the R’lyeh dimension, which makes Godzilla infinitely better-poised to win fights on Earth than Cthulhu.

Additionally, Cthulhu’s abilities are completely overrated. People seem to think Cthulhu has a bunch of psionic type abilities like telepathy, the ability to warp reality with its mere presence, and that it can eat entire stars and planets like Galactus, but absolutely none of that is portrayed anywhere in Lovecraft. Cthulhu does have telepathic connections with the cultists, but that’s not an ability of Cthulhu, that’s an ability of the dream-realm of Kadath, even though Kadath wasn’t named in the story “The Call of Cthulhu.” Kadath is H. P. Lovecraft’s idea of a realm where everything where people dream is externally real, so people and various nonhuman entities which are dreaming can meet in Kadath and communicate that way. This is the only telepathy that is ever portrayed between Cthulhu and its followers. Cthulhu can’t dominate people or read minds, and, horror of horrors, Cthulhu even has to talk to communicate. People seem to like to conflate Cthulhu with the ilithids (mind flayers) from D&D as well as any other creature from later media that has a tentacle beard, but that’s not accurate. Cthulhu has a lot of power in Kadath since it’s a big, powerful entity, but Cthulhu also gets defeated by Nodens in the story “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.” Nodens is essentially the Lovecraft version of Poseidon, which is another deity Godzilla was portrayed as defeating.

Cthulhu cannot warp reality instantaneously with its mere presence. Cthulhu is implied to warp reality by casting a spell. You know, like an incantation with words and gestures, even if Cthulhu is supposed to have a different shape of vocal tract that’s adapted to underwater so humans can’t cast the same spells it can, and a different shape of hands as well. Cthulhu can warp reality, but it’s such a slow process for Cthulhu that Godzilla would be able to breathe radiation on it and interrupt it immediately before Cthulhu would be even close to finishing. Cthulhu is basically casting D&D spells and can get interrupted like someone casting D&D spells, so Cthulhu’s abilities would just get it curb-stomped by Godzilla.

Furthermore, Cthulhu does not eat stars and planets like Galactus. Cthulhu is literally describe as being 60-70 meters tall. This is also why a steamboat to the face can defeat Cthulhu, even if Cthulhu wasn’t at full power then because the stars weren’t aligned. Godzilla on the other hand is 300 meters tall. All these pictures of Godzilla vs. Cthulhu showing them as roughly the same size are completely inaccurate. Cthulhu is about 1/5 the height of Godzilla. Cthulhu is like the size of a literal baby compared to Godzilla. This is almost certainly another reason we don’t have a Godzilla vs. Cthulhu movie, because even the few comics, games, and works of fanart and fanfiction have to take a lot of creative license to make Cthulhu anything even close to as imposing as Godzilla. Yes, the stars flickered when Cthulhu was waking back up from being dead for billions of years, but that’s the stars controlling Cthulhu and the necromancy that allows him to wake up from aeons of death, not Cthulhu controlling the stars.

It also doesn’t take much analysis to say that in some Cthulhu Mythos stories written after Lovecraft, R’lyeh was nuked back underwater when it started to rise from the sea, and Godzilla, being inspired by Japan’s experience with the nuclear bomb, essentially breathes out multiple nuclear blasts per second with his breath ray.

To make matters even worse for Cthulhu, Cthulhu can easily be beaten by humans in his own universe, not only Nodens. Conan the Barbarian and Cthulhu exist in the same universe, and Conan literally killed several gods who are on the level of Nodens or higher such as Knull, and Nodens easily vanquished Cthulhu in Kadath.

H. P. Lovecraft himself generally portrayed all of Cthulhu’s cultists as people who were already insane and for that reason they were impressed by Cthulhu. People like Conan who were in the same universe just killing high-level gods all the time were not impressed by Cthulhu. Gary Gygax even imported Conan into D&D with actual psionics because of the things he could do that normal humans couldn’t.

The fact is Cthulhu is really a lot like a slightly scaled up underwater alien version of the sorcerers Conan beat up early on in his career. Cthulhu uses sorcery, he lives in a concrete jungle city with no nature, he’s portrayed as a priest of organized religion, and besides being 60-70 meters tall and regenerating on a different plane of existence when you crush him, his only abilities are basically to use technology that’s so advanced humans don’t understand it, and to call upon beings who actually have more innated abilities than himself, both of which are subsumed together under sorcery.

Cthulhu is a humanoid proponent of organized religion and technology who lives in a city and is completely disconnected from nature. There’s nothing wrong with organized religion, technology, or cities, and I certainly wouldn’t dream that we should all go back to the Hyborean Age, much less devolve all the way into giant lizards who only care about eating radiation and not getting killed no matter who you have to kill to do it because you have a lizard brain, but when these artificial things take over to the exclusion of nature, that’s really madness and no one wants it. The idea of techno-optimism or techno-utopianism is basically self-contradictory, because you just end up in R’lyeh, but with an AI instead of Cthulhu, and like Cthulhu, only crazy people who are probably inbred and live in the backwater like many Lovecraft characters will think it’s so smart and awesome and worship it, and everyone else will laugh at the fact it gets hit by a boat and dies.

It’s not very powerful either and it gets owned easily by people and giant monsters who are portrayed as being supernaturally close to nature, or as forces of nature. People, especially TVTropes fedora neckbeards, think of Cthulhu as being basically the most anti-human thing ever because it’s supposed to kill humanity, but Cthulhu basically ends up killing humanity by exemplifying all of humanity’s vices but more extreme. It seems to not be the case so much that Cthulhu drives everyone crazy, but that only crazy people are impressed enough by Cthulhu to worship it, since people like Conan didn’t care and just killed things like it and stronger than it all the time. The fact that that’s true, yet we live in a society where a lot of people basically worship Cthulhu through their attitudes to it doesn’t bode well for them.

To me, Cthulhu is really the epitome of Hegel’s mindset. Hegel thought everything would be subsumed by Geist, usually translated Spirit, which was Hegel’s idea of God, but Hegel mostly saw his idea of Spirit as being essentially the mechanisms of society: organized religion, technology, etc. Hegel importantly thought that God at the point in history he was living in was literally just the German state because God showed up through the dialectics, so he worshipped the state. This is not any kind of conventional religious notion of God, or even a very common unconventional one, and probably the root of modern totalitarianism compared to ancient god-kings like Pharoah and Caesar. Cthulhu is basically that kind of mentality exemplified, so when humanity gets closer to that, it just gets eaten by Cthulhu, who does that better than humanity ever can, even though Cthulhu is kind of pathetically weak on a cosmic scale.

The important connection between Cthulhu and Hegel is that people get in the trap of thinking Hegel is all this conventional religious and positive ideas about life, but it’s actually about death, and how individuals need to all die to advance Geist, because the ultimate dialectic is self-negation and self-negation is just the same as death. The ultimate expression of Hegel’s Geist is actually for civilization to destroy itself by taking itself to the extremes Hegel seems to admire, and then there won’t be any individuals left. That’s basically what Cthulhu is to the extreme, even more so than all the idyllic Greek gods and things people normally consider in the context of Hegel. Goethe also notably called Hegel a crazy person and told him to touch grass. Hegel did create “death of God” theology because Hegel worshipped death and thought God Himself must be dead, and Cthulhu is also a dead god, and has a book, the Necronomicon, which refers to this idea.

Death - if we wish so to name that unreality - is the most terrible thing there is and to uphold the work of death is the task which demands the greatest strength. Impotent beauty hates this awareness, because understanding makes this demand of beauty, a requirement which beauty cannot fulfil. Now, the life of Spirit is not that life which is frightened of death, and spares itself destruction, but that life which assumes death and lives with it. Spirit attains its truth only by finding itself in absolute dismemberment. It is not that (prodigious) power by being the Positive that turns away from the Negative, as when we say of something: this is nothing or (this is) false and, having (thus) disposed of it, pass from there to something else; no, Spirit is that power only to the degree in which it contemplates the Negative face to face (and) dwells with it. This prolonged sojourn is the magical force which transposes the negative into given-Being.

Despite the fact I think people who want to worship Cthulhu in real life are pathetic and crazy, I do think Lovecraft was a talented author, because I think Lovecraft himself was keenly aware that Cthulhu cultists are crazy, and it speaks to Lovecraft’s competence as an author that real-life Cthulhu cultists don’t see anything crazy about themselves, they just genuinely think Cthulhu is the ultimate power in the Universe when even Lovecraft himself, well, infamously portrayed him losing to a boat. Lots of people like the idea that Cthulhu is super inhuman and weird, and though that’s true of other creatures from Lovecraft like “The Color Out of Space,” Cthulhu doesn’t seem that super weird. “The Color Out of Space” was also republished in Best American Short Stories, so even the literary authorities liked Lovecraft, despite the fact that nowadays they mostly complain about similar authors like Stephen King. Lovecraft’s writing and world was absolutely pretty interesting, but a lot of what makes it interesting is psychology that flies over the heads of the average TVTropes type of person, including many self-described serious academic philosophers, who just mindlessly consumes pop culture to become a “nerd” or “geek.”

For those of us who aren’t insane Cthulhu cultists, Godzilla will keep Cthulhu safely far away.

These people also knew Godzilla would easily own Cthulhu.