Suffering is enjoying stories and their worlds plenty but always having an underlying anxiety about it eventually adding cosmic horror elements it was completely fine without.
On one layer, I think it’s overdone and undercooked. That is, everyone tries to do it and it’s seldom good. It rings as the least interesting part of something often and yet it’s inherently something big in scale, so it’s harder to ignore and just by itself it implies a lot of things apropos of the worldbuilding. It feels like it usually is a result of stakes creep. “Damn, how do we make an even bigger villain and/or more dangerous scenario?”
On another layer, I don’t find it interesting, yes. I know I lose interest when cosmic horror is introduced. It can be done right, but that’s rare as far as my tastes go.
the bit with the world building is pretty interesting because I tend to get annoyed at haphazard inclusions of cosmic horror because it doesn't really get addressed in satisfying ways, it's just there as if it's obligatory to include it.
In that vein yea careless stake and world building scope creep are the main perps I feel, it's just seen as a way to escalate the world into something bigger and more unfathomable instead of using it as basis for why the here and now is important, for why meaning is important even in the grand indifference of the universe.
Another big thing in my personal opinion is that the average media including cosmic horror has not touched either the king in yellow or any Lovecraft story, and instead just grabs the recycled tropes inspired by inspirations with no interesting message behind what the author wants to convey by using cosmic horror.
Sorry if my reply seems a bit all over, I like cosmic horror and my thoughts jump a bit all over the place when it comes to expressing my discontent at inclusions of it when it wasn't done from the ground up.
“It doesn’t get addressed in satisfying ways” different words but it’s what I was trying to convey as well when I said “it’s inherently big thus harder to ignore”: The author introduced these incredible beings to the setting. This has massive implications that I will now think about. It will likely be a surface brush and now I am disatisfied with the outcome.
That’s not to mention what you pointed out about the predecessors to the genre: You know it’s going to suck when a character goes le insane because they looked at le ugly tentacles. Extremely superficial understanding on the whole “it fries your brains because it’s incomprehensible” thing. There’s a post that put it best: Imagine you’re an ant given human cognition and understanding, you read on how circuitry works, how digital systems and television works, then suddenly you lose human cognition and understanding and go back to being a regular ant, but you still retained all of that knowledge, knowledge you cannot comprehend anymore because you are an ant, and now you have to wrestle with this. Which is a hell of a lot more nuanced than going bananas because the thing had tentacles and eyes.
