When fantasy is just too dark

[Toby Frost]

I think modern fantasy is much more proud of being dark than earlier books where it was just part and parcel of the story. I find it irritating when authors confuse "dark" with "deep". It actually seems quite adolescent to feel the need to make things artificially dark because life's tough, man.

A sort of fake maturity can creep in - if we were talking about cinema, I suppose the term would be war-porn - where every general is a callous incompetent, every soldier is either a cannon-fodder conscript or a robotic stormtrooper, all the princesses are obnoxious cows and if the good guys win they then catch plague. This doesn't have to go very far before it becomes just as silly as some cheesy old swashbuckling, and will be much less fun to read. Cheap cynicism always seems very insincere. (It's also unrealistic. If the above was true, we would be living in Oceania and I wouldn't be writing this). Personally, I would far rather read or watch something sincerely silly like Captain America than something that thinks it's dark and is just dumb, like 300.

I think everyone over the age of four knows that medieval life was utterly squalid and unpleasant. If the story doesn't require that, then there shouldn't be a need to put it in. A book can be very grim and realistic - The Cruel Sea for instance - or gloomy and slightly morbid, like Gormenghast, but still brilliant. It's the lack of wit, in terms of either deft cleverness or humour, that's really depressing.

[j. d. worthington]

Glad you mentioned Gormenghast, as that is a prime example of classic fantasy which has plenty of darkness and grim realization of the tragedy of life to it. It also has some completely slapstick elements as well; the two don't necessarily work against each other, either. Sometimes they actually strengthen by contrast.

But yes, I think you're right, Toby, that there is a tendency these days to think that everything that went before was all "sweetness and light" and to be overly proud of being "gritty" and "realistic" when often it is done in a juvenile fashion; and at best is no more true to the darker elements of the human experience than the bulk of literature, period. (Jude the Obscure, anyone? The Cherry Orchard? The Sheep Look Up? A Case of Conscience? Flowers for Algernon? A Canticle for Leibowitz? Heck, The Deep Blue Goodbye? The list is darn near endless....)

It's the pretentiousness of it I think, which sets it apart. Those who take the tragic road because it best suits the story being told, the (genuinely philosophical) point being made, don't tend to emphasize this as something new, startling, innovative, fresh, or against tradition, because it is none of those things. The masks of Comedy and Tragedy have been with us for a looong time, and you can't get much more bitingly grim than some of Twain's writings....

[Anne Lyle]

I also think you can show the squalidness of life back then without grinding the reader's face in the stinking, plague-ridden mud, so to speak. As with any element in fiction, less is often more - a telling detail here and there primes the reader's imagination, so that they fill in the rest.

[Connavar]

Originally Posted by Toby Frost

I think modern fantasy is much more proud of being dark than earlier books where it was just part and parcel of the story. I find it irritating when authors confuse "dark" with "deep". It actually seems quite adolescent to feel the need to make things artificially dark because life's tough, man.

A sort of fake maturity can creep in - if we were talking about cinema, I suppose the term would be war-porn - where every general is a callous incompetent, every soldier is either a cannon-fodder conscript or a robotic stormtrooper, all the princesses are obnoxious cows and if the good guys win they then catch plague. This doesn't have to go very far before it becomes just as silly as some cheesy old swashbuckling, and will be much less fun to read. Cheap cynicism always seems very insincere. (It's also unrealistic. If the above was true, we would be living in Oceania and I wouldn't be writing this). Personally, I would far rather read or watch something sincerely silly like Captain America than something that thinks it's dark and is just dumb, like 300.

I think everyone over the age of four knows that medieval life was utterly squalid and unpleasant. If the story doesn't require that, then there shouldn't be a need to put it in. A book can be very grim and realistic - The Cruel Sea for instance - or gloomy and slightly morbid, like Gormenghast, but still brilliant. It's the lack of wit, in terms of either deft cleverness or humour, that's really depressing.

Thats why i tend to avoid the popular kind of modern fantasy that thinks dark is deep. I tend to read more classic older fantasy. Or fun fantasy that doesnt think dark is everything.

Fake medieval suffering i dislike lika a plague in fantasy. Give me modern fantasy like a Tanith Lee or Powers or a Gemmell or a Paul Kearney over fake dark epics.....

[hitmouse]

TBH even superficially humorous fantasy like Terry Pratchett can be pretty dark, and those that are are (the Vimes books) probably his best.

[Anne Lyle]

Agreed - my favourite is Night Watch - probably his darkest and most satirical.

[thaddeus6th]

I do like gritty and dark fantasy, but sometimes it can feel overdone. I've been reading slightly lighter stuff recently. The Riyria books have a nice mix of self-serving and good characters, for example.

When writing, it can be hard to decide when something harsh happening is justified.

[Grunkins]

"The city wasa, wasa, wasa wossname. Thing. Woman."

Not dark, but that line in Guards Guards! made me laugh for about five minutes.

Pratchett can be dark. Like in Mort when they are in the cellar reading the "butler's" history as it's being written and he's coming down the isles toward them. Well, maybe that's not dark, but it was scary.

[Randy M.]

Originally Posted by j. d. worthington

On today's fantasy being darker or bleaker than earlier periods... I think I would seriously question that. If you look at the history of the field, you'll find a lot of grim and tragic tales as well, whether it be Howard, Wagner, Anderson, even Tolkien; not to mention many of the older writers. (You can't get much darker than Machen's The Three Impostors or several of Smith's tales of Zothique, for instance.)

And then there are always the fantasies of such as Harlan Ellison, in which darkness predominates....

Coming to this late, but I agree with J.D. Machen, Blackwood, Lovecraft, C. A. Smith, Howard, Peake, even Lord Dunsany among others all wrote about varying degrees of darkness. And for me a primary emotional response to LOTR was a sort of tuning fork sympathy for the almost overwhelming melancholy sounded throughout the quest. From early on you start to understand this is a world that can be saved but never repaired. Even victory will cost the victors the social, cultural riches of the past, and the new age will be the end of the old magic.

Randy M.

[dlsevern]

There is no such thing as too dark. That is real, bad guys win a lot in the real world because they don't care about the consequences of their actions. Anyone who thinks otherwise is naive.

[TedKeller]

I think fantasy today which is 'too dark' is just going overboard with two compensatory mechanisms: 'social realism', and 'soap opera character development'.

With the 'social realism' they add fake depth through people's backs hurting, their food being icky, the doctors being incompetent, the horse having worms..

With soap opera character development (curse you, Jordan and Feist! And Brooks and Eddings!) they add another layer of fake depth which imitates psychological portrayal through the sleight of hand of people having a past and nonlinear emotions.

Now, I call it 'fake depth' merely because I don't like it, I have no epistemological proof that it's 'fake', I just have the instinctive feeling that the depth is real in the books of Tolstoy, Mann, Balzac, or in the spec plane - Samuel Delany, Frank Herbert, Le Guin, Dick, Strugatski, Lem, Straub -and not real in most thick installments of post 70's fantasy serials.

Wagner and Moorecock are as a rule of thumb the most 'contemporary' authors I can handle, almost everyone after them sends me into a drooling coma of boredom.

And I have to agree with some of the others in this thread, that the authentic bygone sword and sorcery would be classified as 'nihilistic splatter punk' today, and certainly not be seen as natural YA reading material, as it was in its day. And which I think it really is.

4 paragraphs from Howard's Pool of The Black One
(1933)

She saw a Zingaran sailor, blinded by a great flap of scalp torn loose and hanging over his eyes, brace his straddling legs and drive his sword to the hilt in a black belly. She distinctly heard the buccaneer grunt as he struck, and saw the victim's tawny eyes roll up in sudden agony; blood and entrails gushed out over the driven blade.

The dying black caught the blade with his naked hands, and the sailor tugged blindly and stupidly; then a black arm hooked about the Zingaran's head, a black knee was planted with cruel force in the middle of his back. His head was jerked back at a terrible angle, and something cracked above the noise of the fray, like the breaking of a thick branch.

The conqueror dashed his victim's body to the earth--and as he did, something like a beam of blue light flashed across his shoulders from behind, from right to left. He staggered, his head toppled forward on his breast, and thence, hideously, to the earth.

Sancha turned sick. She gagged and wished to vomit. She made abortive efforts to turn and flee from the spectacle, but her legs would not work. Nor could she close her eyes. In fact, she opened them wider. Revolted, repelled, nauseated, yet she felt the awful fascination she had always experienced at sight of blood

[Anne Lyle]

Originally Posted by TedKeller

With the 'social realism' they add fake depth through people's backs hurting, their food being icky, the doctors being incompetent, the horse having worms..

I agree that too much negative without any positives is tiresome - but so is the reverse unless you're writing heroic high fantasy a la Lord Dunsany.

Originally Posted by TedKeller

With soap opera character development (curse you, Jordan and Feist! And Brooks and Eddings!) they add another layer of fake depth which imitates psychological portrayal through the sleight of hand of people having a past and nonlinear emotions.

So you think it's unrealistic for characters to have a past? And what do you mean by nonlinear emotions?

[TedKeller]

I think fantasy today which is 'too dark' is just going overboard with two compensatory mechanisms: 'social realism', and 'soap opera character development'.

With the 'social realism' they add fake depth through people's backs hurting, their food being icky, the doctors being incompetent, the horse having worms..

With soap opera character development (curse you, Jordan and Feist! And Brooks and Eddings!) they add another layer of fake depth which imitates psychological portrayal through the sleight of hand of people having a past and nonlinear emotions.

Now, I call it 'fake depth' merely because I don't like it, I have no epistemological proof that it's 'fake', I just have the instinctive feeling that the depth is real in the books of Tolstoy, Mann, Balzac, or in the spec plane - Samuel Delany, Frank Herbert, Le Guin, Dick, Strugatski, Lem, Straub -and not real in most thick installments of post 70's fantasy serials.

Wagner and Moorecock are as a rule of thumb the most 'contemporary' authors I can handle, almost everyone after them sends me into a drooling coma of boredom.

And I have to agree with some of the others in this thread, that the authentic bygone sword and sorcery would be classified as 'nihilistic splatter punk' today, and certainly not be seen as natural YA reading material, as it was in its day. And which I think it really is.

4 paragraphs from Howard's Pool of The Black One
(1933)

She saw a Zingaran sailor, blinded by a great flap of scalp torn loose and hanging over his eyes, brace his straddling legs and drive his sword to the hilt in a black belly. She distinctly heard the buccaneer grunt as he struck, and saw the victim's tawny eyes roll up in sudden agony; blood and entrails gushed out over the driven blade.

The dying black caught the blade with his naked hands, and the sailor tugged blindly and stupidly; then a black arm hooked about the Zingaran's head, a black knee was planted with cruel force in the middle of his back. His head was jerked back at a terrible angle, and something cracked above the noise of the fray, like the breaking of a thick branch.

The conqueror dashed his victim's body to the earth--and as he did, something like a beam of blue light flashed across his shoulders from behind, from right to left. He staggered, his head toppled forward on his breast, and thence, hideously, to the earth.

Sancha turned sick. She gagged and wished to vomit. She made abortive efforts to turn and flee from the spectacle, but her legs would not work. Nor could she close her eyes. In fact, she opened them wider. Revolted, repelled, nauseated, yet she felt the awful fascination she had always experienced at sight of blood

[Anne Lyle]

Are you going to engage in debate or just repost exactly the same text as before?

[TedKeller]

I am going to keep posting the same posts until the end of time.

...or, perhaps it is technical issue, perhaps my connection can be iffy at times and an attempt at editing the post produced a duplicate, and maybe I only see your post now... Who can tell...

...and maybe an 'edit' button isn't even visible this time around on my older posts and I can't yet get rid of the doppelganger.

Anyway, 'non-linear' emotions meant in this context a more diverse range than the classic pulp one - anger/fear/lust/smugness grafted to a basically unchanging basis - a 'linear' approach.

The past - I meant the use of the past as dramatic amplification and 'explanation' of current personality traits, instead of of the past just being an emotionally flat line (in the sense of having little emotional value for the current existence of the character) of events leading up to 'now'.

...that wasn't really 'engaging in debate' was it? More like 'clarification of concepts' for now.