I'm Huge!

Let the enormity of our new choice of font enthrall you this Halloween!

If that doesn't work, perhaps my thoughts about C'thulhu's place in the world will.

There's little question that Cthulhu's a bit overdone, at least in the subcultures I dwell in. He's the default punchline of eldritch horror coming right at you, he's appeared in every webcomic, and you can now choose from a hundred different visages of C'thulhuy goodness to adorn the bookshelf where your toys now live. (Mine is in the terrifying form of a Beanie Baby.) Every four years, he begins his doomed run for the presidency with complementary t-shirts and bumper stickers. He's not quite recognized by the mainstream, but he also doesn't feel out of place there.

Meanwhile, the character of Nyarlathotep can crack jokes, wear the nice outfits, and passive-aggressively fuck with the other characters to no end. He's the too-cool sidekick that steals all the scenes, and he can still provide non-euclidian horror in one of a thousand forms. In any other series, this would end up as the character the audience identifies with, while the masters he slaves for are only vaguely recalled. Instead, oh, he's about the same, but to a much smaller extent than Cthulhu is. He's got only the one stuffed animal, almost no t-shirts, and I've never turned on a random cartoon to find him in a guest-starring role.

I don't know quite why this is. Perhaps it's because Call Of C'thulhu has been dubbed the quintessential Lovecraft story. Or perhaps it's because of the character design, which is one part squid, one part demon, and one part flabby guy. Then again, it's probably just that Nyarlathotep almost exclusively appeared in the stories in those The Rest Of Lovecraft volumes that are bought, read once, and quietly regretted.

Or it could all come down to the name. I had to copy Nyarlathotep's spelling from Wikipedia, and just hit the paste key whenever it came up in this post. When spelling C'thulhu, my only worry is whether to throw in a random apostrophe for flavor. There's a very low limit on how much gibberish a monster's name can contain and still be cool.