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naraburns  nihil supernum  3yr ago (text post)   33471 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 7, 2022

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I love the Black Company. If you enjoyed it check out Malazan book of the fallen by Steven Erickson. He was directly inspired by Cook.

As for your post, the Black Company is pretty transparently about subverting expectations in fantasy around good/evil. A lot of folks argue it’s responsible for the massive wave of anti-hero/grimdark works in recent years.

A more interesting question to me is why gritty, darker, and honestly kinda fucked up stories have become so much more popular and mainstream. As @fivehourmarathon mentioned in another thread, ‘adult’ shows and novels now seem to refer to pointlessly gross violence or sex or both instead of actual adult themes with regards to philosophy or complicated moral decisions.

Warning Re: Malazan, it's 10 enormous books so you're committing a significant fraction of your life to reading it if you have a job or life outside reading.

A more interesting question to me is why gritty, darker, and honestly kinda fucked up stories have become so much more popular and mainstream.

Compared to other societies, physical violence is largely de-normalized and banished/confined to the outer fringes of society (i.e. ethnic ghettos, trailer parks, rust belt areas etc) in the West. Large segments of society are basically sterile in that regard, so to speak. For example, I'm sure there are millions and millions of Western men who have never thrown or taken a punch in their lives. And if something fundamentally innate and essential in human existence, like violence and the threat thereof, largely becomes exotic and taboo, I think it's only evident that it becomes an ever larger subject of human fantasy on one hand, and that its social expressions become deformed and extreme (like spree shootings committed in elementary schools etc). It's no wonder that the main consumers of true crime literature and TV, as far as I know, are middle-class White suburban women, i.e. society's most pampered group.

Agreed! And personally while I find true crime distasteful because it glorifies evil fuckers, I think darker tones and themes in fiction is a good thing. Too many modern people, especially pampered white women, don't understand how bad things were for our ancestors, or how bad things can get. It's telling that white women tend to be the most privileged class and also the most willing to tear down the institutions that have brought us such peace and plenty.

I think the "grimdark" label is often misapplied; remember, the setting that gave the trope its name is Warhammer 40K. It's not just a general "do bad things happen onscreen" measure; it's an evaluation of specific story elements.

"Grim" is a measure of the characters, in terms of moral motivations. The protagonist is an anti-hero, and the conflicts are gray vs. grey or gray vs. black. There are no classic altruistic heroes here; a grim story is cynical about people and how they work.

"Dark" is a measure of the moral center of the setting itself. No good deed goes unpunished; virtue is for fools. If there's a higher power, he's at best completely disinterested in justice, but he might just be Tzeentch straight up. Dark stories are cynical about ultimate justice and whether good deeds have meaning.

Sanderson is a good example of an author who is not grimdark, and he explicitly rejects the concept. Yes, the Elantris and Mistborn settings are deeply broken, but the protagonists are trying to fix things, and their efforts are rewarded. The brokenness of the settings isn't a grimdark immutable constant; it's the result of previous bad choices and calamities that can be addressed.

I think "dark and gritty" stuff could also be called "grimdumb." (See also)

There’s also

“Grimderp" has in many parts of the Net become popular as a term for Grimdark that goes so far that it becomes Narm.

(Tvtropes)

See also the subtle differences that make something /r/grimdank.

When I use the term Grimdark, I think it is etymologically tied to its role in 40k, by function. The 40k setting is grimdark because that makes gameplay work well. Everybody sucks and there are no good guys, so whichever faction you pick its all the same you're trying to kill the other guy. One guy isn't forced to pick being the bad guy, both sides are bad guys, all the damn sides are bad guys. You can be part of the slaughter xenos and execute anyone who thinks bad guys, the fight for the sake of fighting bad guys, the kill everyone and stack their skulls bad guys, the hivemind eat everything swarm bad guys. The fun is in picking your bad guy and leaning into it, not in trying to argue that the IoM are actually the good guys, or that Tzeentch is actually the good guy, or whatever.

Something like Succession is a very different example of well done grimdark, everybody sucks and no one is the good guy, so all the maneuvering and fucking each other over is just good fun. I don't give a shit about Roman or Shiv or Kendall, and for God's sake you can't really like Logan; so every twist of the knife is great no matter who its stuck in.

They're great when they understand that their grimdarkery is window dressing to make gameplay work. Where they fall apart is when they get up their own asses about "this is how things really are, maaaan." ASOIAF is great fun, but when GRRM or GoT fans get uppity about realism I lose interest.

I like everyone except Roman though, he's a disgusting sexual degenerate who kills tons of people through negligence.

I think Roman is actually my prohibitive favorite of the four kids? I sympathize with Tom and Greg to an unfortunate degree, but they're all pretty morally reprehensible in their own ways. Still don't like any of them really, any sympathy I have towards a character is sort of an internal cringe "Oh God am I like that..."

Yeah, I'm not sure how well-accepted that taxonomy or this taxonomy is (or how applicable it is to settings as a whole: even WH40K has bright spots like Ciaphas Cain), but it does seem more useful as a way to talk about adult themes in philosophy or complicated moral decisions, as opposed to the gritty, darker, and honestly fucked up side.

The Illiad (or so I am told) starts with an argument about status symbol sex slaves, but contemporaries didn't consider sex slaves "grimdark", they considered it normal part of life and reality of warfare; the narrative is much more interested in how angry Achilles is when Agamemnon takes his sex slave. Achilles, his anger and everything else that unfolds are the exceptional thing worth telling a story about. "Grimdark" parts are environmental background noise to the signal.

So back to modern storytelling. Are the "grimdark" themes of gross violence or sex or both something we consider normal in our the society? Not really, I hope. And the uninspiring "adult" stories do not insert it as a background noise, but it is often supposed to be the centerpiece of drama.

I don’t know that I’d make the case that the anti-grimdark ‘trend’ is a nostalgic yearning for what was a sum product of Victorian (‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’) prudishness and scandal and 20th century American muh wholesomeness but sometimes it can seem this way.

I absolutely don't think that grimdark is too much or too gritty for a historical analysis. Rather I would argue that many modern fantasy authors have a sort of 'performative grimdark' aspect in their writings. Whereas for instance in a Sanderson novel it'll be bog-standard wholesome heroic journey, then there will be a jarring torture or rape seen thrown in to make it 'dark and gritty.'

In my opinion the best of these series have been the Black Company by Cook, Malazan by Erickson, A Song of Ice and Fire by GRRM, and The Second Apocalypse by Bakker. They all weave darkness and evil and moral ambiguity directly into the world - it's important, it's fundamental to the struggles of the characters. Again I'm not knee-jerking saying that 'oh man rape and violence that's bad!' I'm more arguing that if an author just throws in a rape scene or brutal, gorey torture scene out of nowhere in a world that has not been all that dark or rough to begin with is a bad trend.

From that reframing am I making more sense?

You're making sense and The Blade Itself from Abercrombie is also a good grimdark world and trilogy.

Whereas for instance in a Sanderson novel it'll be bog-standard wholesome heroic journey, then there will be a jarring torture or rape seen thrown in to make it 'dark and gritty.'

That's very unfair to Sanderson. Spoilers for his first two book series, Mistborn and Elantris, below.

Elantris is set in a universe where the magical gifted people can't heal. So they just slowly experience more and more pain until they turn into madmen and/or mute lumps of flesh wracked by constant torment. The setting itself is practically as "grimdark" as it can be, offset by Sanderson's goofy prose and characterization. Mistborn is set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where the Bad Guy is in charge, ash is constantly falling from the sky, and most people are slaves. Kelsier has a gritty backstory involving a dead wife, Elend was forced by his dad into raping a girl, Sazed is a eunuch because his people aren't allowed to have kids, and so on. What part of this screams "bog-standard heroic journey" to you? Any torture or rape scenes put into either setting would seem fairly fitting.

The Stormlight Archive setting is less terrible, but then again I don't remember any rape or torture scenes thrown into that series.

I think you're mistaking prose for content. The world of ASOIAF is much less "grimdark" than either of the Sanderson settings, but the prose is darker and characters die all the time. Plus I think the characters act a bit more mature, in some ways at least, and the plot and character development are less straightforward. All of this I think means that in some ways, GRRM has more of a license to be grimdark. That may have been what made you think that Sanderson's worlds "[have] not been all that dark or rough to begin with" when it seems clear to me that his worlds are more grimdark if anything; it's his stories that are less dark despite the world they're set in.

That sounds right to me; it's been a while since I read the books. His dad is just the worst.

I hadn't read Elantris and mis-remembered Mistborn here. I was basing this off the first couple books of the Stormlight Archives.

All that said I love Sanderson's work, he just jumped out as an easy example. If I do more research I'm sure I could find better examples.

Fair. I wouldn't characterize the SA as "trying to be grimdark" but there's definitely something to that. I think that often, in just about any story, you can inject a feeling of depth and importance by making something really bad happen. Whether it actually works or falls flat seems to depend more on your skill as an author than on the setting itself.

I think the difference between The Witcher and GoT here is that with GoT you get the sense of GRRM revelling in how grimdark and, like, REAL, his world is as a whole, maaaan, while with The Witcher it's more like that Geralt's profession (and, later, the plot) just happens to take him to the more crapsack parts and situations of his world.

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