[Lovecraft] What would life be like for the average deep one, if Cthulhu were to awaken?

"The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom." - The Call of Cthulhu

This quote is relevant because this is the world for which the Deep Ones are preparing: a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom, where the Old Ones hold sway. The Pacific Islanders with whom they had interacted noted that "they cud wipe aout the hull brood o’ humans ef they was willin’ to bother—that is, any as didn’t hev sarten signs sech as was used onct by the lost Old Ones, whoever they was. But not wantin’ to bother, they’d lay low when anybody visited the island." They bide their time despite immense power. Doing what?

There's something to the argument that Lovecraft's monsters are simply human traits (biological or cultural) taken to such a degree that they seem horrible, and our actual practices pale next to monstrous yet more effective forms.

The Deep Ones "never died excep’ they was kilt violent" ("The Shadow over Innsmouth") so they've conquered natural death. They have no distaste for slaughter, if expedient. They demand sacrifices, and produce offspring, "mixed bloods." Obviously, to Lovecraft this carried some of his racist fear of interracial relationships. However, this mating is coercive. Even with the offer of treasure, the Kanakys "balked", and the Kanakys are the source of the idea that the Deep Ones could have easily wiped out their island and those around them. Lovecraft (despite his ex-wife testifying to his being an adequate lover) seems always disgusted by or disinterested in mating. There is a perceived imbalance of roles (social and physical) in sex that makes the fear of the appearance of coercion common as we move toward more progressive cultural values (and perhaps makes our pornography and erotica more prone to staged violence or manipulation, as we seek to bury our more bestial impulses yet still finds way to explore them). In Lovecraft's time, however, he was responding perhaps to Victorian British and Puritan American prudishness suspicious of bestial instincts, and the Classical elevation of the penetrator over the penetrated (an embrace of the idea of a quasi-violent subjugation of another in a sexual act). The Deep Ones have embraced the ugliness and violence that procreation seems to imply. Lovecraft feared miscegenation and its change of the course of a human society (necessarily an unwise change to him; most of us thankfully hold otherwise), but the Deep Ones embrace it to the point of interspecies mating. Lovecraft saw a society increasingly open to racial and cultural mixing, and so he took it to its logical extreme via the Deep Ones, and the "Innsmouth Look" that reveals the hidden abnormalities over time.

Yet isn't there something glorious in at the end of "The Shadow over Innsmouth" that makes one wonder if life as a Deep One isn't superior, its benefits forever inaccessible or beyond understanding to homimes sapientes? Even more so, their very existence embraces the ultimate origin of humanity in the sea, an idea much more exotic in Lovecraft's day than even today, with our textbook battles: "Seems that human folks has got a kind o’ relation to sech water-beasts—that everything alive come aout o’ the water onct, an’ only needs a little change to go back agin." The Deep Ones seem to be nature "red in tooth and claw," with culture merely a survival construct, slowly gaining back ground lost to civilization and its sublimation of instinct.

If Cthulhu rises, all constraints of civilization go with him. The Deep Ones, alienated from human values of civilization, would weather this holocaust by continuing to be violent survivors, or embrace the orgy of destruction. The narrator of "The Shadow over Innsmouth" was responsible for the government raid and torpedo attack that devastated the Deep Ones -- yet his grandmother visits him in a dream near the end and speaks nothing of vengeance. She seemingly has forgiven him purely because he is one of them and is destined for their company. The violent death of their peers doesn't bother them -- if Cthulhu or revelling humans kill more, what does it matter? Does anything but destiny matter? If physics demonstrates determinism, isn't a sentient species that embraces this meaningless of individual actions more reasonable than one that preserves illusionary ideas of meaning, justice, vengeance, etc.?

The Deep Ones are smarter than we are, and more bestial than we are. They've embraced both sides of their nature. They would embrace Cthulhu in the most true-to-reality way, whatever that might be. It's we who would go mad.

Likewise, the Elder Things of At the Mountains of Madness are scientists far beyond us -- destroyed by their own wonders yet curious to the last. Ghouls have embraced the horrors of death and decay so much they live among it, and drive a great artist to appreciate their beauty ("Pickman's Model"). In The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, they are helpful to the protagonist, and have built a functional society into which Pickman has integrated: a human, embracing an environment where the ravages of death are celebrated and utilized, not sanitized, has found peace. The Great Race has defeated the boundaries of space and time, not truncating them in harmony as we have done with transportation, but becoming masters of chronology. Understanding history is to them a matter of survival, not merely a laboratory for predicting sentient actions in the face of change. Human historians interpret the world, but the Great Race changes it (to nod to Marx). Cats are cruel and beautiful -- they live the human dream of constant luxury by zealously guarding their place as parasites on human society ("The Cats of Ulthar", The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath).

And so forth. Lovecraft's monsters, gods, and aliens are generally sentient: they have will, they have conscious interactions, they have industry, etc.

All of them embrace the ultimate power of the Old Ones (even the industrious Mi-Go practice rites and maintain knowledge relevant to the Necronomicon).

I doubt Deep Ones would care that Cthulhu was marching across the world. But I also think that Lovecraft's stories were not meant to be settings, but vibrant presentations of his cosmicist philosophy.

To shorten it: the Deep Ones already live in light of the implications of the Old Ones, so life wouldn't change much for them when the stars are right.

/r/AskScienceFiction Thread