Grimdark in Fiction

[Blueysicle]

I was originally going to write this as a response to Celestial 's post in the Mini-Comments thread, but I thought that -with this being a writing forum and all- there could be a good discussion over this.

I talked a bit about this in the Steven Universe thread several months ago, but it's still relevant now: Though it's not necessarily a new phenomenon, there's this increasing trend in media -be it literature, TV shows, movies, video games, etc- where works that have an overall dark tone -that is, when the narrative puts the focus on the nastier and unpleasant parts of life- are held up on a pedestal.

The logic seems to go:

Dark = Realistic = Better

So in Trope-speak, True Art is Angsty.

Now, angst and darkness in fiction isn't a bad thing in of itself. With the issues that surround today's world, many of them need a spotlight shone on them as a way of acknowledging and addressing these problems, which -eventually and hopefully- will inspire the people consuming the work into putting in the effort towards fixing them in real-life.

What I think is the problem is that fiction lately is becoming over-saturated with darkness. Or "grimdark" as I'll call it.

In the absolute bleakest of pieces, the world is a horrible place and there's nothing anyone or anything can do about it. Endings are bittersweet at best and downright depressing at worst. "Heroes" often have very little heroic about them. Characters that try to instill hope meet grim ends. Even in more "comedic" pieces, the story still often consists of jerks being jerks to one another and everything is mean-spirited just for the sake of it.

So these are the questions I'd like to pose to the forum:

Does darkness make for a better narrative? At what point does something cross from merely having dark themes to being "grimdark?"

My personal thoughts:

To sum it up simply, if I really wanted to be depressed at the state of the world, I'd turn on the news.

It's not that I can't handle darker themes here and there. As I stated above, sometimes you need to show the darker parts of life in fiction, and that trying to be Rainbows and Sunshine 24/7 feels far too much like sticking your head in the sand.

But at the same time, I feel like there needs to be something hopeful about the story. There needs to be some reason to root for the characters in it. If the story is just going to be one long parade of Terrible Things, what's the point in continuing on with it if it's made clear nothing is going to improve? If the characters are nigh unlikable or unrelatable, even despite attempts by the writer to make me see them as "the good guys," what reason would I have to care about what happens to them? To summon TV Tropes again, we call this Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy.

I'm not going to sit here and pretend that I've never indulged in grimdark before, both in consuming it and putting it into my own writing. But as I grow older, I'm starting to grow tired of the practice. More and more, darkness without any purpose other than for the creator to say, "Isn't the world awful?" is coming across to me as a cheap tactic to make weak fiction stronger. And the notion Shock Value™ is an acceptable substitute for plot, character development, and even comedy is becoming quite pretentious in my eyes.

All in all, I think there needs to be a balance. To present an example, Avatar: The Last Airbender dealt with themes such as genocide, war and its consequences, child abuse, sexism, racism, ableism, just to scratch the surface. When it wanted to be, it could be a very dark show. While all of the main cast was three-dimensional and likeable, they made mistakes sometimes; sometimes very serious mistakes. There were setbacks, there were losses, and there were unwinnable situations. But there was always a ray of hope. There was always the notion that the struggles of the heroes weren't all for nought. And ultimately, it did all pay off. Though as the sequel series, The Legend of Korra, showed, not all of the problems faced by ATLA's heroes were solved neatly and permanently, since reality is a lot more complicated than that. But they still ended up in a better place than they were at the start of the story, and their accomplishments succeeded in having a positive impact.

So the way I see it is that darker themes in moderation can enhance the story, but there needs to be a payoff to it all. If the struggles of the characters and the world they live in accomplish nothing, then it just comes across as the creator/s showing off how "edgy" they can be.

[Reiqua]

Fascinating topic Blueysicle, and I pretty much agree with everything you said. Excellently expressed too.

I feel like I'm not really qualified to comment comprehensively on this, since I personally tend to avoid the really dark works, but I did want to make one simple observation:
Most people, of most world views, believe that there is both good and bad in the world. Whether or not they're in equal parts is another question, but most people agree that both parts are there.

To write a story with all bad, nothing good is... not great in my opinion.
If I may, I'll draw an analogy to writing a story where nothing bad happens - where there is no complication or tension that needs resolving.
You could argue that an excessively dark story with no form of resolution is as unrealistic and pointless as a story with no complication.

I know this doesn't really address your main question, but I felt it was relevant and wanted to contribute (:

[Shinko]

For me, it depends on the work in question. Not all stories will, or should, end on a postitive note. That is why the genre of tragedy exists. Because sometimes in this world, there are going to be gutwrenchingly heartbreaking endings to a conflict. The big thing for me is that the bittersweet or tragic ending has to be earned- tragic twists for TEH SHOCK VALUE or that are tacked on sloppily do nothing for me- and there needs to be a point to it. If I'm going to watch a show or movie that indulges in dark content, I want it to make me think. To feel intelligent. Not to be gratuitous for the sake of gratuity.

To use an example, I'm gonna talk a bit about an anime called Now and Then, Here and There. (spoilered for, well, spoilers)

SPOILER: Click to show

The story is about as dark and ugly as you can get- addressing themes of war, death, child soldiers, environmental destruction, and much, much more (some of the themes I am not comfortable discussing on the forum, if you go looking for the show just keep in mind I've barely scratched the surface). It is no exaggeration to say that the show addresses all of the ugliest aspects of human nature in its thirteen episode run time. Yes, just thirteen episodes.

That said, the show is viewed through the lenses of a main character who basically takes the TVtropes concepts of Wide Eyed Idealist, Incorruptable Pure Pureness, and The Determinator, and congeals them into a little kid named Shu who thinks he's going to take on all of that horror with a smile, a little wooden kendo stick, and a sense of optimism so stubborn one often has to wonder if he's just not very smart. Shu is at times a bit exasperating, and can say and do things that are Unfotunate Implications city in his fixation on making the best of things, but he is the moral compass of the story. He gives an otherwise hopeless world hope by his sheer dogged refusal to give up, and inspires the people around him to better themselves as best they can given the circumstances.

The story does not have a happy ending. Honestly I think that's for the best. A happy ending would feel downright irreverent to the content that came before. Very forced, and very dishonest. But the thing is, Now and Then, Here and There is a cautionary story about the dangers of letting our own excesses get out of control, of becoming to numb to horror and tragedy- and a cautiously optimistic story that posits that the goodness in people can overcome the bad, if only we are willing to fight on even against seemingly impossible odds and despite all voices trying to convince us to give up.

So... in short, do dark themes and tragedy make something better? No, but neither do light ones. For everything there is a season. You can have good stories on both sides of the spectrum, provided the story is well written and there is a point to whatever themes the author chooses to address.

Are dark themes perhaps rather over saturated in our media? Sure, but that's somewhat of a different question than the one you're posing. XD

[Twillie]

First of all, when you mention how fiction today is full of bleak worlds and unlikeable characters, my immediate thought is to ask for specific examples. I'm not one to really read or watch everything new that comes out (I don't watch tv shows at all, really), so perhaps I'm just not seeing enough to have a real say. But honestly, I've felt like this whole "everyone has angst in a dystopian world" trope has become more and more of a fad.

Like, if a movie were to step into a theater today and all of the characters were brooding under an unsaturated camera lens, audiences would not fall for that like they did maybe five or so years ago. Some examples that come to mind are some recent DC films like Man of Steel or Batman v Superman; the former was better received, but it is still at best polarizing among viewers. A big reason for this is that many people did not like how downtrodden Superman had become and how little color was in that world. Similar in the latter in that Batman and Superman were essentially made the same brooding person. It can be argued that a lot of this audience was comic book fans that just didn't get the Superman or Batman they wanted, but I think even taking away the adaptation element from the films, that would still be a legitimate criticism (heck, I think those movies would have done much worse sales wise had they not been adaptations of already popular media).

So, I guess before I can say anything, I'm going to ask for some specific examples on what is over saturating the media with unnecessary darkness, as that's something I've thought was slowly dying away rather than picking up.

[Moni]

Neither darkness or lightness has any intrinsic artistic value over the other, insofar as the average happiness/sadness of a story is.

I do say average happiness and sadness because with a few exceptions, a piece ought to exhibit the full range of human emotion--at least to some extent. Characters should feel happy, sad, angry, disgusted, whatever, or, if the characters don't feel them, then the piece should at least acknowledge them, at any rate. The frequency the piece acknowledges these discrete emotional states and the main message of the piece determines whether or not is is "dark" or "light."

The problem that's associated with darkness is the jejune way in which it is addressed. Darkness isn't more "realistic" than lightness in. The real world has a lot of light, dark, and it's not all "realistic" or nihilistic. Society is made of of both the "real," empirical world and the ideas that permeate through it. Ideals reflect people's actions, people's actions reflect ideals. You can never separate the two.

Batman v. Superman (and the second and third Nolan Batman movies) is "dark," but its darkness is just... childish. It's an adolescent film because it never puts all its darkness to good use. It's that teen that dons black lipstick and buys a black leather jacket from Hot Topic, filling their diary with words like "pain" and "suffering" and "dark" without any substance. Batman v. Superman dons the grimdark style, but its message is still: the hero takes what he wants, he will fix everything for you, he'll do what's right, it's okay, it's justified in the end--with no self-awareness.

The Song of Ice and Fire series often wears the grimdark label as well, but it's directed. Now, full disclosure, I reallllly do not like the series (I HATE GRRM's lethargic writing style), but it has its darkness for a reason. From the first two books at least, the reason all the characters are nobles and all the characters are jerks; a running theme is that hey, this story is about these miserable nobles, but in their pursuit of POWER! these nobles do horrendous things, and the power they have quickly changes them and spirals out of their control. The nobles are obsessed with the iron throne, and that's what the books are about, but the first two books do not hesitate to tell you that this stuff doesn't really matter--the average person could not give two hoots about who sits on the iron throne, they just see the violence.

This theme is compelling--but it's the sort of thing that once you realize that what the main point of the book is--and it's not really hidden--you don't need to read it anymore, and this theme is hackeneyed when the deplorable noble drama IS the primary engagement of the entire Game of Thrones franchise. Which puts it in an... interesting situation that functions to its detriment. Most of its readers are wrapped up in the opprobrious noble drama that the initial books rebuke--they miss the point--and the franchise builds its popularity around BA moments, the fans relish in the surface edginess, and that's where ASoIaF misses the mark completely and suffers for its darkness.

Grimdark is what happens when darkness is taken as a matter of fashion--when an immature story decides to wear black because it thinks it'll look cooler with its friends.

That said, characters do not have to be likable per say and stories do not have to be hopeful to create good art--the average mood for the story can tilt toward very dark and suffer nothing for it. If you insist on having something to root for, you're missing out on some genuinely good stuff. Not all fiction has to appeal to the reader, and not all fiction needs a payoff. It just has to have purpose.

[Shinko]

Jan 20, 2017 15:25:53 GMT -5 Moni said:

That said, characters do not have to be likable per say and stories do not have to be hopeful to create good art--the average mood for the story can tilt toward very dark and suffer nothing for it. If you insist on having something to root for, you're missing out on some genuinely good stuff. Not all fiction has to appeal to the reader, and not all fiction needs a payoff. It just has to have purpose.

Here I have to disagree with you, although I was behind all of your other points. If all of the characters in a work are so deplorable that there are no qualities in them I can relate to, or if their negative qualities are never "punished" in-story and treated as negative qualities, it is a massive turn-off for me. I just do not enjoy stories about jerk characters being jerks with no consequences. I do agree that stories don't have to have a hopeful tone, but there does need to be some positive elements. If there aren't, the reader/viewer gets fatigued by all the negativity. Fiction is by and large escapism (the term "escapist fiction" exists for a reason) and that escapism is ruined if our fiction only serves to depress and/or aggravate us.

[Celestial]

Oh boy, do I have stuff to say on this topic. I think you made excellent points in your intial post, Blueysicle, and I don't disagree wiht any of them but I also have opinions.

I think the problem with a lot of "grimdark" is that their creators think that throwing in heavy subjects like murder, war, slavery etc. makes the work automatically mature, realistic and deep with an important message. Either that or they simply mishandle the topics without really exploring all of the implications, instead using those topics for either shock value, overusing them to the point where it doesn't mean anything anymore and the audience is jaded to them. Or the author holds a deeply misanthropic worldview which some people might agree with but I personally cannot.

Cynicism is seen as the most "mature" way of looking at the world and the belief that humans are inherently awful creaturs with no redeeming qualities is seen as "the way things are". Certainly, watching the news, one might see that as being the case. In contrast, idealism and the belief in goodness is seen as "naive", "foolish" or "childish". Some writers and content creators, wanting to be seen as "real" and "smart", or genuinely believing the world is that awful, load their works with all this cynicism and misanthrophy that their works become "grimdark". They might be perfectly decent, even excellent works but they are the ones that churn my stomach the most.

Let me bring up the clearest example in my head: A Song of Ice and Fire. I tried to get into this series as it is the sort of thing right up my alley: medieval fantasy with complex politics, factions and lore. But I just...could not. I turned my stomach to the point where I couldn't make it through the first book. (Funnily enough, I had no problems with the TV show but I watched it and then read the books three years apart. My tastes most likely changed.) I had no problems with the writing, the characters, the overall plot or anything. What repulsed me beyond all hope is how the world of Westeros is portrayed as a sick, disgusting place with no hope for redemption and salvation, and GRRM loves going into lurid, explicit detail about how awful everything is. I have heard this series defended as "this is what real history is like" which is...no. I do not buy that.

See, the problem is not that the grimdark in that series exists. The problem is that it utterly fails to find any kind of balance and instead revels in how dark and horrible it is, and loves shoving that into the reader's face. It also uses random atrocities as footnotes, something which is a pet peeve of mine due to my high empathy. I always wonder when I read "and then peasant was [insert horrible way of dying here]" whether they had a family, what their pain was like, what they thought of as they died. It is very painful for me when a series just...glosses over the death as if it was nothing, as if saying "well, what do you expect?" Real history is nothing like that. Everyone who died in real life had people who loved them, suffered really. They were not a throwaway line done for shock value. And in real history, all actions have consequences.

Plus, real history is not one monolithic "everything is awful and humans are terrible". Even ignoring all the schools of thought and the thousands of ways of writing different events, even in the worst human conflicts on the planet, there are always amazing stories of hope, of human kindness. Humanity is a scale ranging from atrocious to saintly good, and to only present one of those things as the absolute gospel truth is childish beyond all hope. If we take World War Two, one of the brutalest, most awful conflicts in human history and dissect it, we can find plenty of light. Look up the rescue of the Danish Jews, or the Grand Mosque of Paris, or the White Rose Movement, or heck, this. I cannot think of any comparable large scale acts of kindness in ASOIAF. It's not history; history is the movement of a million independent cogs, all capable of as much good or evil as the next one. ASOIAF is the workings of one mind who can shape the world to his will. He chooses to shape it into a cynical mirror of the world and he rolls in it like a pig in mud. The girmdarkness is not a thing to be overcome: it is a feature. If it is a feature, why should I care? If everyone is going to be horrible, why does it matter?

(For the record, if you enjoy A Song of Ice and Fire, great. I am sorry I seem to be ragging on about it so much but it is a perfect example, to me at least, of the problem of darkness being the "absolute truth of the world.")

My point is, "grimdark" is not a real reflection of the world. To do that, one needs balance. One needs to give the weight to the heavy topics that they deserve, including exploring the consequences they have on real people and giving them the proper treatment instead of using them for shock value. In short, to properly explore a heavy topic, one must put in the work. They need to earn it. If it isn't earned, or if the setting is too dark to ever hope things will change, why should the reader care?

Let us also not forget that fiction has a very important element in it: catharsis. A reader needs to feel like they have achieved something with the protagonist, because a good piece of media will hook you and make the struggles of the protagonist or the characters in general the reader's struggle too. If the characters don't accomplish anything and there is no point to anything they do, what's the point of reading? One might argue it is to give the reader a sense of hopelessness but frankly, the reader probably has enough of that going on in their lives, and if not, they have better things to do with their time than waste it.

Personally, what makes me very sad is when the "grimdark" elements of a story detract from something that is otherwise amazing. I feel like I could have enjoyed ASOIAF if it did not revel so much in its darkness and present such a hopeless picture of the world. The original inspiration for my mini-comment was the discovery of a fantastic and richly built world with sprawling setting and even themes which intrigued me a lot, and could have been good if handled well. Except what I discovered was the thing which the term "grimdark" is derived from: Warhammer 40k. So I probably won't be straying outside my Youtube webseries which manages the water down the grimdarkness with comedy, heartwarming and catharsis ("If the Emeperor Had a Text-To-Speech device". Good series, excellent primer on the lore, funny and heartwarming with a good plot, highly recommended, will not go further.") Though in 40k's case, it's so dark I can't even take it seriously, connect with it or enjoy it. It doesn't frustrate me like ASOIAF, it just...gets no reaction from me because I find myself not caring about it beyond the lore (and the aforementioned Youtube series because it manages to be likeable and funny and light enough to get its hooks in me.)

Some people like that sort of thing and to each their own. Me, personally? I like my fiction to mean things, and if they are going to be dark, I want them to either say something about the darkness, empathise a bit with the people that awful things happen to or just...maybe not paint the darkness as all there is. ^^ The world is much richer and more complex and far less awful than everyone thinks. The darkness might be predominant but it is not absolute. The sooner we get out of the idea that cynicism is "adult", the better.

[PFA]

I mostly agree with what other people have been saying, in that I think darkness in stories has its time and place. But for me, the darker it is, the more it has to be justified really well. Like, if you want to have something awful to happen to your characters, why does it happen? Does it contribute to the plot? Is it given the weight and attention it deserves, or is it just there to make it "more realistic and gritty!"? You can only get away with doing awful stuff for the dark factor so much before it starts to feel like you're doing it just for the sake of being awful, which is a turn-off for me.

I also agree that it helps when the darkness is balanced out with hope. Even if your story is mostly awful, throw the characters a bone once in a while, y'know? Give them small victories, some reason for them to keep on trying, even when the world around them is falling apart. I find that a lot more impactful than stories where nothing good ever happens at all, personally.

[Moni]

Jan 20, 2017 15:42:38 GMT -5 Shinko said:

Jan 20, 2017 15:25:53 GMT -5 Moni said:

That said, characters do not have to be likable per say and stories do not have to be hopeful to create good art--the average mood for the story can tilt toward very dark and suffer nothing for it. If you insist on having something to root for, you're missing out on some genuinely good stuff. Not all fiction has to appeal to the reader, and not all fiction needs a payoff. It just has to have purpose.

Here I have to disagree with you, although I was behind all of your other points. If all of the characters in a work are so deplorable that there are no qualities in them I can relate to, or if their negative qualities are never "punished" in-story and treated as negative qualities, it is a massive turn-off for me. I just do not enjoy stories about jerk characters being jerks with no consequences. I do agree that stories don't have to have a hopeful tone, but there does need to be some positive elements. If there aren't, the reader/viewer gets fatigued by all the negativity. Fiction is by and large escapism (the term "escapist fiction" exists for a reason) and that escapism is ruined if our fiction only serves to depress and/or aggravate us.

I am talking about artistic merit, not the reader's enjoyment, which are quite different. In the proper context, art can feel free to aggravate or depress or to bore or to disgust or whatever, as long as it has a point. Fiction can be escapist for you, and that's fine, but it does not have to be escapist, and claiming it can only be escapist restricts what can be done with it.

Characters can still be interesting and a book can still be good and have a message even if it is filled with characters you can't root for (this doesn't translate to "no redeeming quality" or "no joy whatsoever") and there doesn't have to be in-story payback. There's more to a work than the strict events of a narrative--you can guess something is wrong by how something is phrased/shot/acted whatever.

Given my criticism of Game of Thrones, if I were GRRM writing it in the 90s (and also had a modicum of talent, which I do not), I would have decided that my book might have benefited from taking out the "characters who are likable and you can root for" part and instead replaced it with characters who might have seemed affable at first, but you couldn't really root for any of them--which would been more in line with the point of the series without having it be the bloated Titanic that it is.

One book that a) no real characters you "root for" and b) no hopeful ending within the events of the narrative is The Stranger. It's not a dark narrative despite those two qualities, and the fact that there's no character you emphasize with and that the book captures ennui in print is the whole point--it's to explore the concept of absurdity and the nature of social mores, not to give readers a riveting story and it does not indulge in escapism. It manages to be an interesting read and it's just one use of fiction outside of escapism.

Indeed, I would argue that relegating fiction to escapism is potentially dangerous and ignores how it plays a part in society, reinforces ideals or deconstructs them, etc. The term "escapist fiction" exists as a matter of exclusivity--if all fiction is supposed to be escapist, then you would just say "fiction," and it is just implied. But the term exists because there is definitely fiction that is not escapist.

[Shinko]

Moni

I suppose in theory if we're going to use the justification that "artistic = can do whatever you want" then yeah, that is true. However I personally don't and never have bought into that train of thought. It's the mentality that forced me to read novels I loathed in high school because they were viewed as "artistic."

I'm not arguing that all fiction has to be escapist. But it does need to engage with the audience, or it be as artistic as Shakespeare and can have all the point it wants and that point will fail to make an impact because the audience won't actually care. If the characters don't seem human, don't have understandable motivations that at least make sense according to their own internal sense of logic (even if not by the logic of the reader) then the characters make no impact because it's far too easy to distance them from our own lives. They don't feel "real" and so what they do and what happens to them doesn't feel "real." So it is very easy to shrug off.

You seem to assume that by "punish" I mean the morally bankrupt characters need to lose or get some sort of cosmic justice for their actions, but that's too narrow a train of thought. I'm going to echo Celes here to explain what I mean- if dark themes and characters are going to be present in a work, the work needs to explore the consequences and implications of these themes. If you murder the king, you may get away with it and never stand trial for your crime, but that's going to cause serious social and political upheaval as the kingdom tries to cope with the loss of the monarch. It's going to make people seriously afraid of you and what you are capable of. It's going to alienate some people who trusted you prior. That is what I mean by the story punishing deviant behavior. When people do things that go against societal concepts of "good" or "lawful" then society punishes them. Maybe not outright through some criminal justice system, but inherently and subconsciously as an automatic response to what they've done. Actions -> consequences. If a person is consistently morally reprehensible, takes awful actions, says rude things, or commits heinous crimes, and others in the story don't ever react to these actions negatively, then the whole work falls flat because the world feels fake. Contrived, to let this bad character get away with whatever the author wants them to get away with to make their point.

Which in turn makes the story feel forced, unrelatable to our world, and thus any point to the work goes ignored as "well that wouldn't happen to us because we are smarter than that."

[Joker]

Jan 20, 2017 15:42:38 GMT -5 Shinko said:

If all of the characters in a work are so deplorable that there are no qualities in them I can relate to, or if their negative qualities are never "punished" in-story and treated as negative qualities, it is a massive turn-off for me. I just do not enjoy stories about jerk characters being jerks with no consequences.

Uh-oh...don't ever read Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton!

I'm surprised to see all the Game of Thrones hate - not just because I'm a big fan of the books, but because I've never considered them to be especially dark. Brutal and violent, sure. But truly dark and depressing, not at all. Medieval times were pretty harsh by current standards - I'm not sure you can really get into that kind of setting without a certain amount of nastiness. To me, ASOIAF is actually a good example of how it should be done: some happy/triumphant moments, some sad/shocking ones. Some pretty irredeemable characters, some pretty nice ones, most somewhere in the middle. I don't get a particularly grim or dark feeling from reading it.

In general, I think my favorite fiction is the kind that basically captures (a perhaps slightly more exciting version of) life. But I'm one of those people who doesn't really need a story to have a "point" or a "message" or a "moral." And I don't mind seeing the bad guy get away with it once in a while. (Although there is a certain kind of darkness/pointlessness that I really despise - I'm looking at you, Faulkner!)

[Shinko]

Jan 20, 2017 23:13:11 GMT -5 Joker said:

Jan 20, 2017 15:42:38 GMT -5 Shinko said:

If all of the characters in a work are so deplorable that there are no qualities in them I can relate to, or if their negative qualities are never "punished" in-story and treated as negative qualities, it is a massive turn-off for me. I just do not enjoy stories about jerk characters being jerks with no consequences.

Uh-oh...don't ever read Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton!

XD Please see my above clarification because folks seem to be misinterpreting what I meant by that statement.

[Breakingchains]

TEXTWALLLLLL

So like Twillie said, if anything, what I have found recently is that people are starting to move away from Grimdark. It was really in vogue for a while there, but I've seen more and more content creators avoiding it and more and more fans laughing up their sleeves at it when it does pop up. Which is... yeah, that's another point I'll get to in a minute.

For the question as to whether dark is better, I kinda agree with what seems to be the thread status quo. Quality is more of a craftsmanship thing than a subject matter thing. Want to watch a cartoon about ponies where everything is persistently cheerful and stakes are generally low? That covers some children's media that is surprisingly watchable, and some that is historically godawful. (You're welcome.) Want a tragic, adult-oriented story about the heavy topics of infidelity and suicide? Could be either Othello or The Room. I don't think competent storytelling necessarily leans one way or the other.

For the second question, if there is a clear line between dark and grimdark, I would put it probably around the point where the whole intent becomes to just... roll in it. Now to be crystal clear, I don't believe this hinges on how much hope the story conveys, or on the choice of subject matter. The core idea here is why the writer chose to write that thing.

Most of us hit middle school and decide we're too old for "baby stories", and we start veering as far in the opposite direction as possible. And that's actually completely healthy and normal as long as it evens out; this is where you get kids writing, like, these elaborate lengthy angstfics about Hamtaro and Minions. The problem is, some people get stuck there. You get grown adult content creators whose whole drive to create this thing is to make people go "Whooaaa sick bro, your mind is like TWISTED" as they merrily spackle the script with blood and guts. They have no respect for their subject matter, and hoo-weee GOLLY does it show. The attitude is juvenile and the work will be juvenile and most of the fans will likely be juvenile. And I think Shinko 's point about having to earn your tragedy is a good one--you have to dedicate yourself to it, dedicate the space and time and discomfort it deserves. You cannot just throw it in.

...However.

There's also been a backlash coming out of the woodwork in recent years that I think goes too far. I haven't really seen it on this forum, but there are some folks out there who have decided to ridicule anything that threatens to make them feel bad, as if the only reason to end a story on anything but pretty fireworks is if you are Edgy the Edgelord, Lord of Edge. And I find that itself to be pretty shallow. So here's the part where I write some wacky impassioned ten-paragraph manifesto defending teh grimdark.

Granted, it's easy to think that a story that is completely hopeless is just... vapid, empty of content. And for some stories that's definitely true. But the more I think about it, the more I think that even utterly bleak stories do have their place, for a number of reasons.

For one thing... sometimes real life has pointless tragedy in it, and often art is just making an earnest attempt to reflect that. If I wrote a fictional war that was anything like WWI, it would be the most disheartening thing ever--inhumanity to man on an unprecedented scale, atrocities committed for no good reason and to no good end, far worse things hinted to come, and an unsatisfying conclusion where nobody learns anything. Some things don't have a purpose, some things just happen. If an author looks out at the world and this is what they see, I don't think it constitutes being grimdark or juvenile or Edgy(tm) to just... show us what they see.

But even aside from the abstract idea that art has a right to tackle this part of the human condition, I have more personal reasons I think bleak fiction needs to exist. A while back I shared this comic by B. Patrick, which I still think is a pretty good breakdown of why stories that seem downright ghastly or incomprehensibly depressing can be incredibly important. In a nutshell: sometimes you are just in too bad of a place for messages of happiness to reach you. Sometimes all you are even capable of hearing is, "Yes, life is meaningless. You are correct. Now let's keep going anyway."

Heck, this here...

Jan 20, 2017 2:00:10 GMT -5 Blueysicle said:

In the absolute bleakest of pieces, the world is a horrible place and there's nothing anyone or anything can do about it. Endings are bittersweet at best and downright depressing at worst. "Heroes" often have very little heroic about them. Characters that try to instill hope meet grim ends.

...if you need an example, that aptly describes Dark Souls. (And listen, I know I can't shut up about this game recently, but indulge me here because I think it fits the discussion. Very mild spoilers?) For those unfamiliar, this is a game... starring a zombie... who is doomed to eventual insanity... dealing with what is perhaps best described as a magical version of the heat-death of the universe. Even the gods are scrambling for a solution and they sure as heck don't mind if it means throwing you under the bus. In fact, everyone is either evil, or adorable but in danger of dying horribly, or manipulating you. Oh, and you're not even the only one they've tried it with--everyone is calling you "Chosen" but you're, like, Chosen #4829, you ain't special. Little is resolved, even less is explained, and whatever you choose, you're never quite given an honest clear 'attaboy saying you did the right thing.

So one wouldn't guess on the surface that this game has this weird habit: pulling its players out of suicidal depression. Seriously, I didn't have that kind of earth-shattering experience with it, but it's a strangely widespread phenomena that I stumbled across by accident while wiki-walking and such. People apparently routinely find themselves spoken to by this seemingly malicious little video game when nothing else was even cracking the shell.

And it's because there is so little hope. It's because it doesn't blind the player with pretty sparkles and try to tell them things aren't so bad. It meets the player where it knows that many obsessive gamers are (sadly) actually at, and it shows them a wall to beat their heads against, and it says "Now, let's beat our heads against this wall until it falls down." It acknowledges just how bad things are, willingly flirts with the sickening possibility that maybe there isn't even a point, and then rather than trying to artificially reassure you, it teaches you in baby steps to derive your own point from the pointlessness you see. That's a very rare thing for popular media to attempt, and if it was set in a hopeful universe, it wouldn't even begin to work.

So, tl;dr of my take:

• Extreme "darkness" is completely valid if treated responsibly and respectfully.
• If art is meant to represent all aspects of the human condition, then some art is going to be incredibly bleak because sometimes life is incredibly bleak.
• If art is meant to speak to people, you still have to speak to them in their language. Sometimes that language isn't mutually intelligible with cheerier themes.

[M is for Morphine]

I'm going to dump a lot of historical context for 'grimdark', since I think it 1. it might be helpful and 2. it's interesting.

(I know you poked at this Celestial but I want to chase that thread a little further)

So the first thing is the phrase itself, 'grimdark', which is from a (cannon) quote describing the Warhammer 40k universe: "In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war" Now, Warhammer 40k might be the most perfect example of grimdark ever made, but it also slots neatly into the pop culture wave that started this all in the first place- The British Invasion (comics edition). See, WH40k was written as a cheeky sort of satire of organized religion and zealotry, and took a lot of influence from 2000AD comics, in particular Judge Dredd. It was meant to be over the top, but people looked at it and thought it was cool. And since they liked it a lot and invested time in it, they took it very seriously. So for the past however many years people have been taking these terrible, silly space fascists as serious as a heart attack.

So, 2000AD and Judge Dredd (and WH40K) were a direct reaction to Thatcher-ism. It was an extremely conservative period in an already fairly grim postwar environment, with a fair amount of moral panic against media (leading to the Video Nasties and the banning of many horror movies), a rising Nationalistic current, among other things, and a lot of artists felt it was very serious and had a lot to say about it. They described a bleak world and a dark future because that is what they felt and feared. The work of a number of British comic writers for 2000AD caught the attention of American comic companies and came to America. There was an absolute ton of awesome and (at the time abnormally) thoughtful comics being written, American fans hadn't seen anything like it. One of the 2000AD writers was Alan Moore.

Moore's V for Vendetta perfectly encapsulates the Nationalistic, authoritarian government these artists feared and I think it's a must read to understand the creative environment of the time (for the record I did not like the movie). But what really must be talked about, as it changed the face of comics and by extension many other forms of media forever, is Watchmen.

Now Watchmen was a revelation, it hit the scene like a bomb. It had a ton to say: If such people as superheroes existed, what would the psychological toll be on these people? How damaged would you have to be to want such a life in the first place? Alan Moore also came from a place of strong dislike for vigilantes, the character Rorschach's dialogue was sometimes taken almost word for word from Son of Sam and serial killer Carl Panzram.

So the major take away from all this for many subsequent comic writers appears to have been 'Rorschach is so cool, and sex and violence means this is for adults' (for the record I HATED the movie). So an absolute boatload of grim & gritty copycats with a notable lack of finesse sprang up and we started to get a lot of super hero teams with 'blood' in the name.

I think so much of it was people enjoying the work, but not really understanding the finer points of why it worked. It was really good, and it was dark and violent, so it must be really cool because it was dark and violent. And we've been working in this landscape since, as the people who grew up at this time are old enough to be making the movies.

Don't get me wrong. grimdark stuff is a small part of comics. Especially now, there is so much good stuff out now and so much of it is positive. I think the problem is that it was very visible for so long, and it's still very easy to look at a more serious work and assume it's some more Frank Miller nonsense (oooh I went there).

I guess what I'm saying is- grimdark is the style, and it's nothing without substance under it.

That leads me to Marshal Law. First off look at this and tell me it's not the ugliest comic you've ever seen. It's ugly in other ways as well, the epitome of drugs, sex, violence, sexual violence, and just nothing but the most irredeemable bits of scum you can imagine.

But... It's really good! I mean really, really good! It's got real substance, and it's packaged in the best possible way to reach the people who need to hear it. At least the first arc does, I haven't read the sequel. It's actually about- and I'm not reaching here, this is text not subtext- toxic masculinity. It's about how the pop culture masculine ideal is a creature of power and brutality, removing all the things that make a man good and kind, and tell little boys that to nurture and be gentle is weak and unseemly when it's a crucial part of being human. It's unpleasant in a lot of ways and as dark as it comes, but I felt like I really gained something from experiencing it.

Uh, let me wrap this up I guess. The human experience encompasses all sorts of things so all sorts of things should be required from our media. There's a place for all of it, but due to Sturgeon's law most of it is not going to be done very well.

[Celestial]

Jan 20, 2017 23:13:11 GMT -5 Joker said:

I'm surprised to see all the Game of Thrones hate - not just because I'm a big fan of the books, but because I've never considered them to be especially dark. Brutal and violent, sure. But truly dark and depressing, not at all. Medieval times were pretty harsh by current standards - I'm not sure you can really get into that kind of setting without a certain amount of nastiness. To me, ASOIAF is actually a good example of how it should be done: some happy/triumphant moments, some sad/shocking ones. Some pretty irredeemable characters, some pretty nice ones, most somewhere in the middle. I don't get a particularly grim or dark feeling from reading it.

This is kind of what I was trying to make a point against. I will not argue that medieval times were brutal and violent, sure. I have read enough history books to know that (Time Traveller's Guide to 14th Century England is highly recommended). However, the problem I had with ASOIAF is not that it was brutal and violent but how much emphasis there was on the violence. GRRM seemed to take a perverse delight in the violence. I do not think it is a good representation of medieval times. It was, in essense, too misanthrophic and nihlistic, and really gave me more of an impression that the author hated everything and saw the world in very dark tones instead of trying to represent history as it really was. However, that's just what I got out of it. Maybe others, including yourself, were different.

I suppose, as Twillie said, some authors only see that nihlistic view of the world and that reflects in their stories. That is fine (although if it goes too far, I would suggest they get psychological help because that is a symptom of depression). What I hate is when authors downplay the optimistic elements of real life (they do exist, honestly) so that they can be taken more seriously as a "realist" author. That is wrong and frankly a disgusting attitude to perpetuate. The world is not a horrible, grimdark place, even if it feels that way.

Breakingchains, that's actually really interesting to read about Dark Souls. I never knew that. However, I would actually say that it's what makes the game hopeful: that you can fight the darkness and overcome it. That might be a good use of the grimdark style, and I would argue gives it some substance. But as M is for Morphine mentioned, it needs that substance to make it any good. At the same time, however, people just get so carried away with the superficial stuff that they miss the deeper meanings, but that's just people again associating "blood, sex and violence" with maturity.