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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30931 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.

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.

Also

Wasn't the villain in the second mistborn book the product of rape and Elend's father goes into some detail about this and how he needs to rape more to get a second mistborn son

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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