Thread:Mesektet/@comment-27729149-20160128170019/@comment-3581997-20160610202552

I related FLCL to Evangallion because for all it's bluster it is still about giant robots fueled by tween angst. FLCL just takes that it's it's logical conclusion, celebrating and making fun of the idea itself. What one takes hundreds of episodes to do the other does in six and manages to stay true to while acknowledging how stupid it all is. And no, a creepy looking alien attacking is not cosmic horror. If it were, Power Rangers would be cosmic horror, and how stupid would that be? Cosmic horror is about the horrific existence of the other and how alien and terrible it would be weighed against our perceptions, not just Freeza shows up and says he is going to blow up the planet. In call of Cthulhu, Cthulhu shows up just for a brief moment woken from his slumber and drawn into the waking world, the existential horror of the revelation he brings threatens to shatter reality as it is conceived by the narrator, and when he blinks away things are still not right. The world exists but the full scope of what the world is has forever changed. It is a lose of innocence on the universal stage story. Not, tentacle god shows up and starts wrecking things.

In Shadow Hearts the big revelation that God, is and always was an eldritch horror and that the the kind, loving, wise Big Good we as a life-form assigned him was just our tiny intellects struggling to make sense of what was just barely imprinted on our genetic memory. Though in Shadow Hearts's case it is more of a subversion of this trope, the Punch Cthulhu trope at it's finest. But the horror isn't that a big scary showed up. It is that the big scary is the closest thing we ever had to God. That our world has constructed itself a lie and that lie will not hold up to certain death so it must be come to terms with and not merely accepted. Even after Meta-God leaves, without killing a single person the world constructed around him no longer holds up, so a new one must be accounted for. Now compare that to "Next time Power Rangers next tiiiimmme!".