Thread #97625513
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It's late 1800s Europe. What are good monsters for a hunter to fight besides vampires, dhampirs, nosferatu, werewolves, invisible men, headless horsemen, Doctor Jekylls and Mr. Hydes, fishguys, evil dolls, Frankenstein's Monsters, Kings in Yellow, swampmen, opera phantoms, spring-heeled jacks, sorcerers, slashers, Dorian Grays, mad scientists, and men in the iron mask?And what's a better name for the generic version of whatever Dorian Gray is?
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>>97625513
Depends what you're going for. If you're in the 19th century, the most obvious tropes are:
Gothic horror
Lost world
Steampunk
So you could just as easily be doing dinosaurs and cavemen and saber tooth lions and lizard people.
Or robots and fascist police and pollution-mutants.
Or really whatever the flying fuck you want. Goblins and dragons invade. Do your thing.
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>>97625513
Hellhounds, if you have a monster hunter in the East Anglia region of England you can have him be on a quest to hunt down Black Shuck. Theres a ton of black hellhound esque dogs in the British Isles now that I think about it.
Some of the other black dogs are Gytrash, Padfoot, Church Grim, Black Tyke and Moddey Dhoo
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>>97625513
>Dorian Grays
I mean in practice the guy was essentially something like an accidental Lich, one that had a bad interaction with his phylactery. I don't think that's a fitting term for it though. I'd be more accurate to say the guy had some deal with the Devil, and the manifestation of that deal can vary wildly.
Also, mummies, absolutely mummies shipped to Europe with their fucking egyptian curses.
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>>97625513
So many classics, how did you miss Mummy?
Golem
Banshee, they're not intangible
Rusalka and leshy, Slavic nature spirits
Nachzehrer and other revenants
Ghoul, ghast, wight, all intelligent
Alp, look that one up, it doesn't mean a mountain range
Homonculi, tiny little perfect humanoids
Doppelgänger
Time-traveller or time-displaced villain or a regular person who only causes havoc because confused.
Legendary hero who either causes trouble by being heroic in modern era or isn't as heroic as legends claim
Time-displaced, alternate-reality beast, maybe just hungry or looking for a home or nest
Possessed person
-spirit from a spiritualist seance
-cursed item from Asia, New World, Africa
Imp, demon, devil
Tulpa, a physical entity thought into existence, meant to be created by a skilled lama but this time it's a layman who can't control or reabsorb it
Hound of the Baskervilles
Nuckelavee, like a skinless horse with a skinless rider only it's all one monster
Kelpie and other related water creatures
Artefacts imported by museum or collector could come to life (I only thought of Night in the Museum while writing the first one)
- amixsak, a walrus not given water when killed, its skin is left on the ice without being cut up, the animate skin attacks and sinks boats
-stikini, an actual live owl the bird collector doesn't know is a shapeshifted woman, yes it is werewolf like
-chichipischekwan, syllables are chi-chi-pi-sche-kwan I think, a man eating rolling head that arises from the grave of a murder victim
Zombie, the kind controlled by a priest, not the humans got a virus kind
Something Hellenic like a chimera or sphinx, or old-fashioned like a cockatrice or basilisk
Serpent or wyrm aka dragon, only the needle firing French or well-dwelling Lambeth worm kind
Giant spiders, classic
>Dorian Gray
The Reflected
name because metaphorically they seem nice but are bad, less metaphorically damage they would suffer is reflected in the object's state
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>>97625513
Beasts of Gevaudan
>>97626100
A "tangible ghost" is just a revenant
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The tortured spirit of Edgar Allan Poe who seeks to recreate in life some of the machinations or the despairing conditions about which he wrote.
Torturing people in the pit, hypnotising them at the point of death or maybe taking inspiration from 80s horror and seeing what the other side is like, taking the form of a raven that foretells only doom, murdering people in seemingly impossible ways, burying people alive, living in a house that seems alive
Elves or faeries from the Unseely Court
Gods taking a trip to Middle Earth
-the Wild Hunt
-competing for worshippers or trying to re-establish their worship
-one last hoorah before heading off to retirement or greener pastures
Krampus, Santa Claus
A flood of shoemaker or other skilled elves and brownies emigrating out of their traditional homelands and putting humans out of business
Goblins and trolls, good old fashioned pre-Tolkien goblins and trolls
-have them take over a town at Christmastime because they want presents, not because they got fed after midnight
The Green Man, trying to put an end to industrialism
A hill figure like the Uffington White Horse or the Cerne Abbas Giant animating, hopefully the giant doesn't want a wife
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>>97625513
Capitalists.
More seriously, as in >>97626292 make the colonies fight back, at least if you go in the tragic monster route.
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>>97625513
mesmerists
voodoo zombies and witch doctors
all manner of devils and devil worshippers
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>>97625513
>late 1800s
The cult of the "New Motive Power" would be a good baddie for that era. They were basically a Victorian version of the Adeptus Mechanicus who claimed to have received the designs for a mechanical god from the ghost of Benjamin Franklin. It was actually constructed and various accounts of it supernatural qualities are attested, but ultimately it was destroyed during a schism within the movement.
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>>97625513
Djinns from an imported antique lamp. If you want to import exotic monsters and spirits, you can also look through folk tales in India, China, and Indonesia. Japan has some neat stuff but it wasn’t really colonised so the theme is much weaker. Bigfoot and other modern cryptids are often as old as that or older, too, but you have to import them.
Living haunted houses.
>>97626292
>Legendary hero who either causes trouble by being heroic in modern era or isn't as heroic as legends claim
In England, there is King Arthur, in Germany, there is Barbarossa; look up ‘king under the mountain’ for a long list of fairy tales. Bonus points for him being a herald of the darkest period in history the country will ever face.
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>>97625624
Gothic Fiction is Medieval
Why don't people who talk about gothic fiction read it?
90% of the original stories written in the gothic age of golden literature, 1760 to 1820 were set in the middle ages.
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>>97626597
I am so fucking tired of you /pol/fags making everything about modern politics, goddamn.
>b-b-but I hate /pol/
You are perpetually obsessed with politics and shove your culture war where it doesn't belong. You ARE /pol/, deal with it.
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>>97627966
>Gothic Fiction is Medieval
When your needle gets unstuck from you'll realise that not only was that not true in the golden age you keep on going on about but it's moved on in the last 200 years.
If 90% of it is set in the medieval, and I'm not conceding that it is because I really don't believe it, that does nothing to change the fact that a curated list of the top 100 stories and novels from the golden ago would have a spread close to 50 to 60% Early Modern to nearly-contemporary with the date of composition, 30 to 40% medieval and 10 to 20% then-contemporary. Even if the majority were set in the medieval, the majority of the good stuff was set post-medieval and why would we focus on the bad ones when it's the good ones that we enjoy and want to emulate. Radcliffe, whom people did want to emulate, wrote six novels, one was medieval. Now you probably know who she was but for everyone else reading this, she was one of the most popular gothic writers of her day. She was acclaimed then and is today by critics and fans of the genre. She didn't concentrate on the medieval.
>Why don't people who talk about gothic fiction read it?
They do. A lot of people have read Frankenstein. It's gothic. It's not medieval. Published 1819 so it's in that golden age. You fixate on limited and wrongly identified aspects of the genre.
>gothic age of golden literature
I also let that go by uncommented but it was just too amusing to read.
>1760 to 1820
There can be no golden age of gothic fiction in 1760 when the first gothic story dates from 1764. You've even got a pic featuring the first one.
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>>97628532
>When your needle gets unstuck from you'll realise that not only was that not true in the golden age you keep on going on about but it's moved on in the last 200 years.
When you actually start reading Gothic Literature instead of of browsing wikipedia articles you'll understand how wrong you are.
>If 90% of it is set in the medieval, and I'm not conceding that it is because I really don't believe it, that does nothing to change the fact that a curated list of the top 100 stories and novels from the golden ago would have a spread close to 50 to 60% Early Modern to nearly-contemporary with the date of composition, 30 to 40% medieval and 10 to 20% then-contemporary. Even if the majority were set in the medieval, the majority of the good stuff was set post-medieval and why would we focus on the bad ones when it's the good ones that we enjoy and want to emulate. Radcliffe, whom people did want to emulate, wrote six novels, one was medieval. Now you probably know who she was but for everyone else reading this, she was one of the most popular gothic writers of her day. She was acclaimed then and is today by critics and fans of the genre. She didn't concentrate on the medieval.
By Medieval I refer to what the people of the time referred to as the "Gothic ages" meaning from the fall of rome to the early to mid 1600s.
Spenser, despite not being medieval, was referred to as a "Gothic Poet", for example. As was Herrick.
And you saying how the "majority of the good stuff" is post medieval shows your ignorance.
>Frankenstein
Frankenstein is not a work of gothic literature. It has gothic elements but is not purely gothic.
>I also let that go by uncommented but it was just too amusing to read.
Autistic nerd pointing out typos.
>There can be no golden age of gothic fiction in 1760 when the first gothic story dates from 1764.
Gothic literature had its antecedents with works like Thomas Leland's Longsword, published pre otranto, ESL.
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>>97628532
>>97628552
So when we actually look at the Gothic Golden Age's core works we can see that they are nearly all set in the Gothic Ages.
And before our ESL starts sperging out Gothic, in the time of the 18th and early 19th century, meant pre enlightenment, medieval and renaissance. Gothic Literature did not mean spooky. The term was used by Horace Walpole to describe his book being set in the middle ages.
Castle of Otranto takes place in the time of the crusades.
The old english baron also takes place in the time of the crusades.
All but two of Anne Radcliffe's books takes place in the gothic ages, and the two that don't have enough Gothic Machinery such as ruined castles and abbeys to make it so they're considered part of the Gothic Genre.
The Monk is set in 16th century spain.
Melmoth the wanderer mostly takes place in the 17th century.
And this isn't accounting for all the other gothic books and short stories that take place in the middle ages and renaissance that you have no doubt never heard of because they don't have a wikipedia article because your knowledge of gothic literature is surface level
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>It was left for Walpole to launch ‘ Gothic’ on its way as a critical term in prose fiction. ‘* This literary impulse, if anything, can be called the true starting-point of the Gothic Revival.” His archaeological studies fostered his medieval interests. “It is impossible to peruse either the letters or the romances of this remarkable man without being struck by the unmistakable evidence which they contain of his Mediaeval predilections. His Castle of Otranto was perhaps the first modern work of fiction which depended for its interest on the incidents of a chivalrous age, and it thus became the prototype of that class of novel which was afterwards imitated by Mrs. Ratcliffe (sic) and perfected by Sir Walter Scott. The feudal tyrant, the venerable ecclesiastic, the forlorn but virtuous damsel, the castle itself, with its moats and drawbridge, its gloomy dungeons and solemn corridors, are all derived from a mine of interest which has since been worked more efficiently and to better profit. But to Walpole must be awarded the credit of its discovery and first employment,” says Eastlake. The thought of ‘ Gothic’ brought to his mind not only “‘ the dark ages” of superstition and church domination, but also the days of chivalry and the Crusades. And he transplanted these ideas in The Castle of Otranto. “The castle was gothic; terror and superstition were gothic—chivalry and the Middle Ages were gothic ; ...and at the head of everything Gothic, with his ghost story, and the house at Strawberry, stood Horace Walpole.”
Why don't ESL's read Gothic Literature instead of spouting shit?
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>>97627966
>Gothic Fiction is Medieval
No, no it really isn't.
I've read every single thing Ann Radcliff ever wrote. It's vaguely anachronistic and specifically early modern which, like the rest of the Romantic movement, it's a fucking response to. What, did you google a wikipedia article, you fucking illiterate?
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>>97637179
The Castle of Otranto is set in the crusades you retard.
Two of her books are set in the middle ages. Others are set in the renaissance/early modern era which were defined as the "gothic" ages by 18th century people.
Do you even bother reading you absolute cretin? Stop browsing the internet trying to pretend what Gothic fiction is when you could read an actual book, spastic.
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>>97625513
Weird oversized bug-creatures deep in the uncharted jungles of Africa/Asia that are aggressive and deadly in equal measure but also produce an element that can be used as fuel for the burgeoning industrial powers of Europe and beyond.
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https://archive.org/details/occultlaboratory00hunt_0/page/79
81
https://archive.org/details/descriptionofwes0000mart/page/178
https://archive.org/details/bim_early-english-books-1641-1700_pandmoni um-or-the-devi_bovet-richard_1684/p age/172
https://newvariorumshakespeare.org/edition/mnd/#tln_0456-row
http://www.vsnrweb-publications.org.uk/Text%20Series/Folk-stories.pdf# page=85
https://books.google.com/books?id=VZIdDQAAQBAJ&pg=PA13
https://books.google.com/books?id=V3pLAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA321
https://archive.org/details/longerscottishpo0000unse_r7o3/page/282
https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/8759/1/Supernatural%20Ballad s%20changes%20accepted%20FIXED.pdf# page=147
https://cst.dk/dighumlab/duds/DFK/Dorthe/html/BILL63.htm
https://books.google.com/books?id=jtZKAQAAIAAJ
>celly vichtys
https://archive.org/details/englishconquesto00girauoft/page/17
https://archive.org/details/joanofarclapucel00unse/page/203
https://archive.org/details/ProcesDeCondamnationV1/page/187
https://archive.org/details/fasciculusmorumf0000unse/page/579
https://sussexfolktalecentre.org/wp-content/uploads/Gwyn-ap-Nudd.pdf#p age=11
https://www.flickr.com/photos/balliolarchivist/8575316090/in/album-721 57633033706125
https://archive.org/details/holygreyhoundgui0000schm/page/6
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b90671845/f294.zoom
https://www.ulster.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0009/939852/0317.pdf
https://archive.org/details/bloomsbury-2024-classical-antiquity-mediev al-ireland/page/337
https://www.isos.dias.ie/RIA/RIA_MS_23_P_2.html#555