The Drabblecast

Cindy prances onto the stage to the music of Madonna. Cindy is blonde, wears a red sequined outfit and hot red lipstick. Doing her act it quickly becomes clear that she's the crowd favorite. Cindy exhibits a practiced professionalism that's extraordinary for a four year old.

Shub-Niggurath has tears in her thousand eyes as she accepts the blue ribbon. Training Cindy for the past year she'd come to love the little girl, but she'd known this day would come. Young humans are so cute, but a rancher knows that the slaughterhouse always pays a premium for the 4H club's winner.

I'm not enough of a Lovecraft afficionado to get it. Was Yog-Sothott in the pageant too? Did the winner get to eat the other contestants as the prize?

I've played Yog-Sothoth (now Shub-Niggurath) a little differently than Lovecraft did. I just thought that mixing together child beauty pageants, Lovecraft's elder gods and a popular 4H club activity has a lot of potential in terms of being a strange story. Ultimately though this is the often heard story of the raising of a prize animal for a 4H club contest and then that animal being sent to the meat packing plant but from a somewhat different perspective.

Actually, I've always found beauty pageants repulsive for this very reason. We parade some pigs on stage and judge the best pig. Then the sheep come on and we judge the best sheep. When evening rolls around, the women come out and we judge the best woman.

Am I the only one who sees the irony here?

Ahem. Editorializing aside, I think this would work better if you took out the Lovecraft reference and just implied that the (human) audience is going to eat Cindy. That would make it both less obscure and more horrible. It could also easily lend itself to a little soapboxing, if you wanted to soapbox.

What he said

Mr. Tweedy wrote: Editorializing aside, I think this would work better if you took out the Lovecraft reference and just implied that the (human) audience is going to eat Cindy. That would make it both less obscure and more horrible. It could also easily lend itself to a little soapboxing, if you wanted to soapbox.

I understand what you are saying about the obscurity of the Yog-Sothoth (which I changed to Shub-Niggurath) reference. I thought that the idea of one of Lovecraft's elder gods having tears in a thousand eyes because of a little blonde girl is kind of a fun way to turn that mythos on it's head, but I understand that a lot of people won't make that connection. I did make a minor change to spell out the 4H club element a bit better, but I imagine that many, especially out of the USA, don't know what the 4H club is.

BTW, I think that these beauty pageants for tiny girls are particularly creepy, not to mention being a rich source of fodder for fiction.

The other thing I was trying to get across is the idea of humans being just another ranch animal, which I think is pretty creepy. If it is humans raising and eating other humans that's a going to be a little harder to pull off than if non-humans are doing it. How do you make the distinction between the ranchers and the ranchees, unless one set of humans are zombafied? I'll have to mull it over. It might be worth tweaking this one and then doing an entirely new one about a human audience eating the little girl.

I went back and tweaked this one. I think it works better now.

You used to hear a lot more about Cannibalistic Tribal cultures. Neanderthals are reported to have practiced cannibalism as well (so easy, even a caveman can do it).
One might imagine that a different fork in the evolutionary road might have resulted in farm-raised human livestock. As it is, we view it as barbaric, except when its equivalent occurs in an antiseptic, medical environment.

I like Lovecraftean themes, but if you want this to be human cannibalism you could change

Shub-Niggurath has tears in her thousand eyes as she accepts the blue ribbon.

with

Sarah Palin (or Nancy Peloski if you are Republican) has tears in her eyes as she accepts the blue ribbon.

and "Young humans" with "Little girls"

eric_marsh wrote:Sarah Palin (or Nancy Peloski if you are Republican) has tears in her eyes as she accepts the blue ribbon.

and "Young humans" with "Little girls"

Bipartisan contempt for politicians... +100 kudos