✰King in Yellow Minecraft ARG: A Character Analysis ✰
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So, I’m a fan of HP lovecrafts work. NOT THE RACISM, just to clarify, but the cosmic horror part of what he writes. I play a lot of board games based off his work and am currently in the process of reading a collection of his works.
All this is to say that I LOVE the idea of ‘searching for a world that doesn’t exist’, or sfawtde (wow that acronym is still really long), or ‘at the crossroads don’t turn left’ or ‘king in yellow Minecraft arg’ or whatever it’s called. While the king in yellow was not originally a Lovecraft novel, the fact that the cosmic horror genre of that nature getting attention because of sfawtde is amazing!!!
Also, I haven’t seen anybody talk about this with outsider knowledge. I wanted to give my input as somebody who has read Lovecrafts work (yes, I know, just said it wasn’t originally his, but the Lovecraft-verse has basically adopted the king in a yellow as one of theirs). I’m about to go on a long speech, just stick with it…
Most of Lovecrafts works are written is first person. This person goes on some insane tale, sometimes ten pages long, sometimes fifty. Additionally, most of the works are retrospective, meaning the person survived the ordeal and is now recounting it. They warn ominously that the devils they saw could not be described, and that there are things unknowable to humans in the cosmos.
Some of lovecrafts work is not from first person, for example there is an omnipresent narrator in the Dunwich Horror, although you could argue the main character is Henry Armitage.
Despite this, whether first person or not, the critical part is that the main characters have backgrounds in academia and are intellectual. Now, was this Lovecraft viewing white educated men as “better” then other races or less educated people? MOST DEFINITELY!!! But not long now, I’m about to tie this all back to sfawtde.
Avery, to put it nicely, is not the sharpest tool in the shed. Derlorde, in contrast, is like the most insanely intelligent person ever. He solved those cyphers in like 20 mins with a pen and paper. And didn’t the creator say on the discord he could speak like 7 languages? And the king in yellow, well, he’s the king in yellow with all knowledge of everything.
“Ok that’s fire but how do those things exactly relate?”
I think that Derlorde was the main character of this own story, and the extremely likely outcome is that he has gone fully insane after seeing the king in yellow- who’s name I’m going to shorten to Hastur now, since that’s his true name. The metaphor isn’t fully accurate, since lovecrafts first person takes are retrospective, but do you see what I mean? Somebody who knew there was more about the world dug too deep and paid the price with his sanity.
For Avery we need to extrapolate a bit more. If I tried to make a one-to-one Lovecraft comparison, then Aubrey would live in poverty in outback Vermont and speak is such such a heavily phonetically transcribed way that it’s almost unreadable.
I think Avery represents the common person. Since he has no idea what this weird new thing that has been bought into his world, it’s like the normal person discovering there is so much more out there. While for the he is played up a bit to be silly and naive, I think that is representative of humanity’s stupidity and ignorance to the ancient ones.
What does this mean for the rest of the story? If we want to follow lovecrafts story structure closely, then Derlorde has not gone fully insane. Or, at least, he will be sane enough to reappear back in the story. Although, realistically I doubt that. Gonna be honest, not tooooo sure what’s gonna happen with Avery. If my metaphor holds true, then for him to find out about Hastur would mean the wide world had found out about the wider cosmic horror. Ehhh, that doesn’t make much sense, but it wouldn’t make a very good story if Avery was in the dark the whole time.
At the end of the day, I really hope the creator of sfawtde takes cues from lovecrafts stories. Not necessarily because I want to be right- although I love being right- but because to have this media gain mass attention would just warm my heart. And also it would make a fire Minecraft arg
Let me know if you agree with my interpretation!!
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Edit after posting: I THOUGHT AVERYS NAME WAS AUBREY THIS WHOLE TIME OOOOSPPSS