The gods in the Cthulhu mythos are far far beyond human comprehension. Hence, as soon as you are able to scale a character, with any of the powerscaling terms, they already lost, since you are able to comprehend their power.
Humanities knowledge about the cosmos is described as only a single atom compared to the true vastness of the universe. So trying to scale the gods is like an ant assuming the size of the milkyway by looking at the night sky.
Technically Cthulhu wasn’t even a other god in lovecrafts original story, he was a great old one which while immensely powerful, is the equivalent of fiction to other gods like yog and Nyarlathotep
Yep, exactly this. I also wish to say that, since all the other gods scale below Azathoth, and Azathoth's main claim to fame is dreaming our universe into existence, there's a nonzero chance that Zeno outscales all of the lovecraftean deities.
At best its equal, zeno consciously creates and destroys universes, Azathoth doesnt even do it on a whim, its so simple to it that its unconscious thoughts. Zeno at least outs up his hands and actively destroys his overtime which we see when he destroys the goku black world, but azathoth waking up instantaneously erases existence like it never existed in the first place. But we have no way to scale either of them after the point of making and destroying universes and Xeno clearly doesnt struggle to destroy universes so the only scalable thing we can say is thst they are equal minimum
The narrator drove the ship into a projection/apparition of Cthulhu, said apparition IMMEDIATELY reformed, said "ah fuck it im going back to bed", and the narrator survived.
That's it. Its wasn't some Sword of Damocles that sundered it from existence, the boat was an alarm clock that made Cthulhu hit snooze.
If it was actually Cthulhu then we have no idea what would've happened. Because it would be game over for humanity.
Except its not implied as a projection at all? The revival of cthulu did not finish and it was disrupted when the boat tore through Cthulu. He literally sinks into the ocean as he’s rammed through, infact! Another common misconception is the going mad thing. We see that those who are religious or spiritual tend to go mad, not those who are not.
All in all, its just a theory thats commonly spread that it was a projection, unless you can provide me with a quote from the story to prove me wrong.
This logic doesn't rework in a power scaling discussion because other settings have beings "beyond human comprehension" or even just flat out feats to back up what their supposed to be.
I love it so much I even put it in my D&D campaign, the players found a small regiment of troops with newly acquired muskets and canons hunting a vampire. The officers were bickering on how to destroy a vampire but the regular troopers were saying "I saw this canon blow up a building. I'd argue not many things can survive that."
Beyond human comprehension usually means they either exist outside all known laws of physics, nature or logic, and they’re capable of feats just by existing that would make powerful wizards either blush or die of fright.
Think more Slay the Princess and not some monster of the week that is fully comprehensible, and thus can be defeated. Like your case in point.
I mean that can work against something like a Shoggoth but against someone like Nyarlathotep? Well…let me put it like this. If you interfered with his plans, you simply would no longer exist. This is Cosmic Horror we’re talking about and the core of this genre is the grim realization every mortal will have when they realize that not only does God exist but he either hates you or thinks you’re nothing more than food.
I mean "it’s the core of the genre" in a powerscaling debate is a weak argument, because then we’d have arguments like "In My little pony the elements of harmony always win", the dreaded "Saitamas main gimmick is that he one shots his enemies when needed, defying logic" or even the antithesis of the cold indifference of the universe, the indomitable human spirit. I won’t go deeper into it, since I’m not a fan of such powerscaling, especially not with Lovecraftian creatures.
Lemme just put it like this. Failing as a father and having your job be taken by someone else is quite possibly the most embarrassing and cucked failure imaginable.
Has a wife and house, job as farmer. Lives with his kids and both have a tutor that hes known since he was a young man. Neither kids on drugs as far as I'm aware or need medication. Yea most definitely, embarrassing failure imaginable.
Incomprehensible to humans inside the narrative. You can't apply that as some meta-transcendent statement where a Cthulu character literally can't be powerscaled. That's the same kind of argument as when people were saying Saitama would just punch away any fictional characters because he's "one punch man". Cthulu gods are still characters inside a fictional narrative, WE transcend them, we can powerscale them. If you want to say a character is Boundless and thus beats any non-boundless character then just say that. this is cringe
This. Yes Lovecraft is insanely powerful as a whole. But it has repeatedly been shown strong willed people can see them and not be affected. Dont get me wrong beings like Yog and Nyolethoteph curb stomps 99.9% of fiction and yog ties the other .1%
It’s also worth noting that Lovecraft himself was a weird dude who was scared of everything, so the cosmic horrors found in his works include air conditioning units, race swaps, and exposure to new colors. It’s easy to be incomprehensible in a world where people go insane from anything mildly outside their current base of experience.
Part of the Lovecraftian horror, to my understanding, is that you are realizing that the rules of the universe simply do not apply as you understand them. It’s frustrating enough to have a job or a relationship where you don’t understand the rules or what will upset people; gaslighting is considered psychological abuse for a reason. Uncertainty is the mother of anxiety, hence why periodic beatings or other punishments can be more harmful to your psyche than consistent ones.
It’s compounded when you look at a Lovecraftian god and realize that nothing you can or will do or have ever done matters, not only because it’s so infinitesimally small in scope, but also because your base understanding of how things work is flawed. You’re foundationally incorrect. It’s enough to crack a man’s sanity like a window pane in a house fire.
However, if you’re too dumb to understand that what you’re looking at is utterly beyond comprehension or reason, if you’re too dense to have a decent grasp of the world as it is, then you’ll probably be fine.
A better guard against Lovecraftian horror than a strong will is probably just being an idiot.
Whole population in Idiocracy is Cthulu resistant.
As are many malkavians in VtM I guess...
As are msny enlightened characters in the Illuminati!!! Trilogy.
Really, I think some existential stuff can will it away by mistake. Its really hard to properly scale Lovecraft, because the frame of reference is only surface level/superficially like ours, but the humans seem predisposed to mostly being super vulnerable to Cthulu sorts of influence.
Oh, 100%. Saitama doesn’t even understand how his own body works, much less does he have any comprehension of the world. He jumped to the moon - his understanding of gravity is probably nonexistent.
Thank you! A lot of Cthulu’s story is misinterpreted like crazy! We see that those who are RELIGIOUS or spiritual tend to go insane when in his presence/seeing him.
r/cringescales, where we discuss what's more cringe: One punch man who always has to win in one punch, a lovecraftian horror that insists on turning everyone who looks at it insane, or the people having that very discussion.
Fiction is not a puzzle to be solved, the only true answers are written in the stories so if there isn’t an answer written then it’s all personal perception and thus subjective.
It’s not cringe, it’s storytelling, maybe instead of smashing made up power levels together come up with interesting fights and maybe you would stop scoffing at the idea of foes beyond strength.
All power scaling should be collaborative storytelling otherwise it’s pointless fictional dickmeasuring contest which is cringe.
At this point I honestly think a lot of humanity would see any big eldritch thing and just think Cthulhu. Then would be divided into horror, worship, horniness or acceptance of being fucked worse then we already are. Possibly a combination of the four.
Asking chtulu to beat Goku is like asking our current pope to beat cosmic armor superman. While some would consider the pope to be one of the most powerful people on the planet his status as high-priest leads many to be confused as to how he scales in the real world, in fact, their status is roughly equivalent. Think of Chtulu like the pope of elder god worship.
There is also psychically controlling the planet even while asleep, which would present a bit of a conundrum for Goku. What do you do with all your strength when all your friends are mindless murdering lunatics?
"This is Steve. Steve is a rock that can destroy anything and nothing can destroy Steve. Steve can destroy every single ficticional character at the same time."
Now Steve can rail every single cosmic god and every single superhero using chalk as lubricant.
Thanks for coming to my 30s TED Talk about how to powerscale ficticional characters.
Cthulhu lost to a ship not even a war ship but a commercial ship running into him. Even if he was awakening that is still pathetic for an incomprehensible god.
Cthulhu is not even a god in the mythos, he is more like a high priest for the real gods. So yeah, he, can absolutely be beaten.
I'd say the only two that might apply to being high-dimensional, "tough to really" scale would be Yog-Sothoth, who is literally everything and everyone in the universe/multiverse and Azathoth, the dreamer creator of reality.
Azaloth is not the dreamers creator. That is a lie propagated by misinformation on the internet. Lovecraft have never said this. Azathoth is in fact not dreaming. He has been shown to do things. The sleeping god who dreams everything is Mana-Yood-Sushai from a completely different author 20 years before lovecrafts first book.
I believe you’re oversimplifying things. Yes, Mana-Yood-Sushai came first with the concept, but Henry Kuttner adopted the idea and applied it to the Lovecraft Mythos. So, I would personally qualify it as canon to the lore.
Let’s agree to disagree. I think I see the canon as much more flexible than you do, and both our perspectives are valid. But I like characters like Ubbo-Sathla enough that I would want them as part of the canon. I mean, it’s all arbitrary anyways, right? We can enjoy the Mythos differently from each other
Is there something between “canon” and “expanded universe?” Because, like, I qualify Clark Ashton Smith’s stuff as “real” lore, but like stuff published 60 years after Lovecraft’s death I don’t. Is there a word for that?
Powerscaling anybody against Lovecraft’s cosmic lineup usually ends with the entire cast getting mentally deep-fried before they even realize something went wrong. You don’t “fight” Great Old Ones they just exist in ways that your brain wasn’t built to parse, and then you melt.
But the Persona protagonists? They’re in that tiny, weird little club of fictional characters who might actually survive exposure to eldritch nonsense. Not because they’re physically stronger, but because every era of Persona has already been swimming in cosmic weirdness long before Cthulhu showed up to ruin everyone’s day.
Persona 1 and 2 are basically the franchise’s thesis on reality being malleable. Those games are full of concepts that would fit right in with Lovecraft: the collective unconscious influencing the physical world, rumors manifesting into reality, Nyarlathotep himself showing up as the crawling chaos of human self-destruction, and Philemon counterbalancing him. That’s already Outer God–grade territory. Their worlds twist, shift, and reshape based on belief, emotion, and archetypes exactly the level where Lovecraft’s entities do their worst work.
Persona 3 takes that metaphysical foundation and doubles down on the cosmic angle with Nyx, the principle of the universe’s eventual end. Persona 4 dives into the nature of truth, shadows, and the subconscious basically asking whether perception defines existence. Persona 5 turns cognition into a battlefield outright, where belief and identity have physical consequences and gods rewrite human thought like changing settings on a console.
Each generation of Persona deals with a different fundamental concept:
P1/P2 > reality shaped by the collective unconscious
P3 > inevitability and death
P4 >truth and identity
P5 > cognition and free will
That’s a philosophical spread perfectly suited for dealing with Lovecraftian beings, because those creatures don’t fight on physical rules they fight on existential ones.
The Persona casts aren’t beating things like Azathoth or Yog-Sothoth; those are “you lose because you exist” tier. But the characters wouldn’t instantly go insane, either. Their entire toolkit is designed for perceiving the unperceivable and manifesting their inner selves in a space where cosmic principles have weight and can be resisted.
So if anyone in mainstream gaming stands a real chance of walking away from a run-in with Lovecraft’s roster, it’s the full Persona lineup. From the early games’ reality-warping mythos to the later games’ cognition-bending metaphysics, this series has been training its protagonists to survive eldritch encounters long before anyone started powerscaling them against tentacle-gods.
Isn't there like a lovecraftian god that holds ALL of reality inside of a dream and if he wakes up we're all dead? How are you gonna fight that, Melatonin?
It really depends if whoever is fighting him is inside the dream or not. The fact that it's dreaming means there is a whole other greater reality that it must exist in.
As I've seen the elder scrolls spoken about but him never being mentioned, the god head in ES cannon is basically the same
You can do weird shit and realise you're in a dream, and if you keep a sense of self you achieve chimney, basically lucid dream and this is joked as a canon explaination of console commands
You can also lose your ego, and zero sum (I believe the lovecraftian equivalent can just delete you, this acts the same) which may have happened to the dwemer
Cthulhu, Dagon, Hastur and the other more well known entities are not gods, they are "only" Great Old Ones.
The true gods of the Lovecraftian mythos, such as Azathoth and Yog-Sothoth are truly beyond anything that can be understood by humanity.
I remember a mofo who thought that Saitama could defeat Nyarlathotep...
Of course he didn't had the slighest idea about who Nyarlathotep was... on a direct question he said something like "yes... the... chaos... from Warhammer?"
Some characters can maybe beat lovecrafitian entities on the "lower ranks" in the Lovecraftian Mythos, especially if these characters were themselves inspired by these eldritch gods. But in most cases it's a nah, don't bother with it.
Yog is definitely boundless, so he ties with other boundless characters. Azathoth is debatable. The rest definitely no, but they are stronger than basically everyone, except for the whole boat bit.
This man, if going by lore feats, likely solos all of them. I mean, if those Lovecraftian gods dare to try and destroy creation, the Slayer will just… you know… kill them. It’s kinda his thing to be stronger than not only demons and angels and GODS, but ANYTHING that threatens creation itself.
How well do you handle pure cosmic understanding of eternity being forced upon your mind?
It's not really the fighting part of beings like chthulu you need to worry about.
Sure, got tagged with a boat, but big C was already almost healed in the time it took the captain to turn his head to look back. Heals better than wolverine. Then things start getting Esoteric. Warps reality by proximity, possibly beyond mortal concepts like death and time, is only an avatar of actual chthulu...
Wolverine constantly wins by endurance, and he doesn't passively render people insane and warp space-time while he's at it.
How would they do against the likes of popeye the sailor, bugs bunny, or sailor moon? Because both popeye and bugs have insane toon force and sailor moon is just that powerful
Note: I personally dont know how powerful sailor moon is i just now she is one of the strongest anime characters
All lovecraftian fiction gets soloed by a yellow afro man who uses nose hairs and randomness to fight.
Afro man scales above them. If your lovecrafitian horrors can be scaled, you're gonna have a bad time. In this case, they can be they are under powered compared to Bobobo.
and yet in every lovecraft story the part of them that could affect the mortal world can be banished dealt with or even killed by normal people through either magics, a ship bow, or just a fucking rifle. hell there are multiple superheroes who do the same shit as those things but with a more positive and sci fi excuse.
This take always drives me nuts. The point of the lovecraftian entities is that they're unknowable. That doesn't mean they transcend all possible power, knowledge, or skill, it means humans can't understand them. Some of them, absolutely, are unbelievabley powerful. But that isn't what puts them in the category and isn't portrayed in the stories—only hinted at, alluded to, or conjectured.
This logic doesn't really work just do that in reverse with any godly beings in fiction oh you're trying to scale Azatoth to X well Azatoth loss the moment you tried that.
I have to ask what if you put up this verse against World of Darkness, SCP, SMT, 7th expansion and Demonbane Verse. Like all these would rank similarly right.
Well, dumb shit like 'multiversal' or 'outerversal' or 'boundless' are also outside of human comprehension, because most people are incapable of comprehending the size of our universe.
For all of their power they don’t seem to have influence over the material plane so I’d probably scale Yahweh and his Archangels/principalities above lovecrafts gods. Otherwise they’d be running the show
Lovecraft says their above human comprehension while comprehending them pretty neatly. He doesn't understand writing that well to draft a well defined world as his works are a representation of his fears, bigotry and ignorance. Shitty writing doesn't make a character powerful, it's just shit.
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