Why is this and Asenath Waite tagged as both Weird Tales and "Lovecraft Circle" Myth Cycles?[]
Shouldn't it be Lovecraft Myth Cycle? And if it was written by Lovecraft himself, why does The H.P. Lovecraft Wiki:Canon also list it as "Weird Tales" since "This category contains the handful of stories from his friends that were "acquired" by Lovecraft for his Myth Cycle."? Metapone (talk) 07.35, 29 July 2021 (UTC)
- Okay, here goes. The Canon page was written several years ago, and does not accurately reflect the way we categorise articles now. A complete category overhaul was undertaken in the second half of 2021, and as part of that it was decided to break pages down by their author's relation to Lovecraft, while giving each author their own "works" category. A number of people have been "lumped in" with categories which some would disagree with: for example, author Sonia H. Greene is not considered by scholars to have been a part of Lovecraft's circle, but it would be absurd not to include her there, as they were married. The Weird Tales category is there more as a nod to how important that publication was to spreading the weird fiction genre than anything else.
- Something to remember about the "canon" of H. P. Lovecraft is that, as Lovecraft himself never wrote anything which might tell us which pieces belong in a shared universe and which don’t, it is entirely headcanon: what you believe about the Mythos is true, so long as it doesn’t contradict what Lovecraft wrote (due to the nature of the reality-bending, sanity destroying entities of the Mythos, one could take the same stance as Games Workshop do with their timelines: everything is canon, but not all of it is necessarily true). Many scholars have different opinions on what constitutes the Mythos (Carter, Joshi, Price, etc), and your own opinion on this is no less valid than theirs: after all, none of these people met Lovecraft nor know what he was thinking before his death either.