Should "Elpis" have the Dark tag? · 12:34am Aug 11th, 2014
I removed the Dark tag from Elpis. It has a hopeful ending, and it has the "gore" tag to warn people there is a little bit of gore. I call a story "dark" if it makes me feel hopeless or pessimistic. You wouldn't, I think, call Lord of the Rings or Star Wars dark, though they have all manners of dark, grim, and gruesome people and places, and loppings and choppings of limbs and other things. (Think about it: How many scenes of torture, dismemberment, murder, slavery, or war are there in the Star Wars trilogy? Maybe a hundred?)
Similarly, I think Fallout:Equestria isn't dark, nor is V for Vendetta. Leaving Las Vegas, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and the works of HP Lovecraft are dark, though none of them have any gore.
(Please don't argue that Fallout: Equestria is dark unless you've read the whole thing.)
Proposition: The "dark" tag should tell you how a story ends, not where it goes along the way. The "gore" tag should be used for gore and violence., not the "dark" tag.
Vote: Agree / Disagree
I think dark is more of a theme. I think a dark story can still have a happy ending. And Fallout: Equestria is ABSOLUTELY Dark, very much so. If you spend most of the story where things are very grim, you should add a dark tag, even if it all turns out well in the end.
I disagree completely. The 'Dark' tag references the over all atmosphere of the story. 'Tragedy' tells you how it ends.
How is the voting supposed to work? Just commenting on the linked-to spot?
Anyway, I do disagree; dark isn't about how something ends, it is about how something is. I think of dark as a tone rather than how it ends. Something like Saving Private Ryan is dark, even though it ends with them ultimately... well, saving Private Ryan. Black comedy is dark by its very nature, but it doesn't necessarily mean it is horrible. "We must hang together, or we will most assuredly hang separately" is funny.
I would consider Fallout: Equestria to be dark because of the overarching tones of darkness it has in much of the story.
I mean, what are we talking about when we say something is darker than something else? I think that's the fundmental question. Something can end hopefully even if it is dark in tone.
2359574 "Tragedy" doesn't cover dark endings. It only covers endings where a virtuous character makes a mistake and suffers a downfall as a result. That's pretty specific.
2359569 So is Lord of the Rings dark? I don't think it spends any less time in dark places than Fallout: Equestria does, nor has any less blood. How about Star Wars? It has tyranny, gore, torture, dismemberment, and genocide. And the prequels have Jar-Jar Binx.
2359579 Saving Private Ryan is dark because of how it ends: The mission succeeded, but it was a stupid mission and a waste of life. Similarly, Apocalypse Now is dark, because of how it ends.
2359599 The second of the two Lord of the Rings books are somewhat dark, yes, and Fallout: Equestria spends WAY more time in dark places than LotR. Fallout: Equestria is a fantastic novel, but in a lot of ways the feelings of hopelessness and overwhelming odds in that book are like if all of LotR was just Sam, Frodo and Gollum in Mordor, a sequence which was definitely dark. There are the occasional bright spots, but 90-95% of that novel is dark. Well written adventure, but dark adventure. It's a post-apocalyptic dystopia, dark is pretty much required for the setting.
... No, V for Vendetta is a bit dark. It's a world where the only reason the psychotic main character is the hero is because the bad guys are worse. There's a chance for a better future, but it's also got the 'hero' brainwashing and torturing someone into being his successor. It's a bit borderline, though, the mood's certainly less grim than Watchmen. And you'll note note of what I raised involved gore. It's not about gore, it's about mood. And the mood of the piece in general counts just as much as the mood at the finale. More, really as the majority of the piece is much longer than the end is.
Actually, yes, Elpis is dark. I can see that the ending is hopeful, but you have to go through the rest of the fic to get there. It's not what I'd call 'grim dark' nor is it a tragedy but it's dark, certainly. The sheer amount of loving detail put into the suffering of the protagonist definitely calls for that tag. If Lord of the Rings had more scenes of hobbits being tortured than adventure, it would also well deserve a dark tag.
2359599
The mere presence or absence of blood or death doesn't darkness make or deny, I think. It has more to do with the sort of world they live in; the world of the Lord of the Rings is a lot less cynical than the world of Fallout: Equestria. In LotR, the elves, the hobbits, the ents, Tom Bombadil, Gandalf, and even the dwarves ultimately are all points of light, and while bad things happen, the good guys are, ultimately, good, and those who fall to evil are corrupted by the darkness, rather than being intrinsically bad people who just happened to be on the side of good. Fallout: Equestria is much more full of shadows and grayness, and it is a lot more bleak in many places than LotR ever gets.
I also don't really remember the orcs possessing the same sort of sadistic savagery as the bandits do in Fallout: Equestria.
2359599
I agree with 2359569. Never having read Fallout: Equestria, I can't comment on that except to suggest that it might be Dark when compared to the canon material.
The only fic I've written as bookplayer that has the dark tag is To Tell the Truth. There's no violence or gore, but it's about childhood sexual abuse. (It was inspired by Charles De Lint's Jilly Coppercorn stories.) In that case, I felt like the Dark tag should be there to warn readers that, even if the ending wasn't intended to be dark, the story was going to much darker places than even a normal mature rated story.
Fanfic tagging is weird, I usually end up complaining about that with every story, being a mixture of genre indication, content warning, and advertising. I don't know that there's any good answer for what should or shouldn't be tagged one way or another, I suspect it's a matter of trying to serve your audience (by warning for tones or plot points they might want to avoid) and advertising things that people might be looking for.
So, if you want people who like Dark stories to read your fic, or you don't think that people looking for "normal" pony fic would like the story, mark it Dark.
I, too, disagree. It's more the mood than final message that would have me calling a story dark. For the most part.
I mean, Fallout: Equestria has very dark tones and spends lots of time in dark places, but in the end has a very positive message. It is dark and some ways, but also uplifting and others. I would personally tag it dark because darkness is there, but I get what you're saying.
But even the ending is depressing in its way, and the epilogue isn't 100% sunshine and rainbows either.
2359599
You can have a violent comedy that is not dark (Saun of the Dead, Zombie Land) or a violent comedy that is dark (Evil Dead 2). You can also have a dark comedy that isn't violent at all (Portal). Dark is all about tone and theme, not violence.
I think you covered your butt with the gore tag. Whether it really classifies as dark or not, not giving your readers any sort of warning would have been a problem, as you saw people during the writeoff complain a bit. Gore by its nature is typically dark, so I think you convey the necessary information to the reader. If someone sees the gore tag and gets through it and then complains there wasn't a dark tag, I'd be surprised.
Disagree, dark describes the overall feel of a piece. If I write a vividly described story about a kidnapping and rape that ends with the rapist being shot by the police or something, even though the ending is somewhat happy, the story itself is still dark and sad.
I think, as 2359665 pointed out, the real question is: if someone searches for dark stories, and finds it, would they feel it was out of place on the list of dark-tagged stories?
I agree that the ending can ultimately give a story its tag (I voted agree, though I suppose I should hit disagree as well), but getting through the dark nature of a story that ends well still brings the reader through that experience. You aren't just left with the ending to think on as the reader, but the experience as a whole.
I can see why you'd make the choice to remove the tag, though: You're the author, and you knew where the story was going, what you wanted it to say, that it was a message of strength and hope. But we as readers still had to experience the story as new, to watch Celestia suffer and wonder why until the very end. It is a dark, hopeful story.
I disagree. "Tragedy" is a tag that tells you how it ends (which doesn't require a mistake to trigger character's downfall). "Sad" is a tag that tells you you're gonna get some feels. "Dark" tells you that the feel is going to be more grim than the show.
LoTR was definitely dark. There were evil forces, a personified ultimate evil, torture, murder, betrayal, and ghosts.
All those things were also in Ghostbusters. Ghostbusters was not "dark" themed, even if it was a "dark comedy" which I don't think necessarily feels dark.
Characters can go through dark times and still have a happy ending. Otherwise, every suicide hotline should just tell folks to just go ahead and do it, because they have no hope.
I'm not as familiar with the community's standards as you are, but I would say that if it falls on the borderline, and you believe the tag would cost you readers, then go ahead and remove it--this is an honor system after all. Though with that in mind you may want to mention that it had the tag once but that you removed it upon consideration. I think you have enough cred for people to accept your call on the play.
No to part A, yes to B except for the bit where you claim it is the same as A. I think you are mixing up the path, the scenery, and the destination.
Gore is the dead dog you drive past on the road. It is harsh, ugly details used to drive home some point of the setting.
Dark is the tone of the work. Do the characters suffer horribly? Does the world? Is there room for hope? You can certainly have darkness without gore. Some clever writers may even manage gore without darkness (though I'm not sure how. Absurdist body horror, perhaps?)
And, as several others have pointed out, tragedy already encompasses unhappy endings in a way "dark" doesn't.
2359638
I've got exciting news for you! There's a third book now!
Bad Horse, why are you asking for people's opinions here? Do you expect to discuss this as if what you think matters? The story tags aren't for you, they're for the readers. Story tag standardization is a vital part of our system. You must conform to the system. The system is for us, the system is for you. Fimfiction tolerates free thought, but any expression of free thought that threatens the system is prohibited.
Are you wearing the tag again? Good. Remember to wear it at all times, my little pony.
2359829 There is? Man, and I skipped the third movie because I thought Andrew Jackson was just making up some random crap on his own. Well this is wonderful, the only thing that would make it better is if there was some sort of prequel to LotR that was a little less dark and explained how Bilbo had that wacky ring in the first place. Ah well, a man can dream.
I like to think of it this way: If a reader sees the tags, doesn't see the dark tag and reads the book, but stops halfway through because it is darker than they were expecting, what does it matter if the ending is uplifting? So I guess that puts me in the camp that believes the tags are for the work as a whole. If someone reads the first half or two-thirds and it feels dark, it should have the dark tag. Basically, the tags aren't precise description, they are warning labels.
I think your question can't be answered in a useful manner without answering certain other ones first, the chief among which is: what's tagging for?
Because if it is for someone to find a story with, then the question isn't what should be tagged [dark] but what people expect. And a vote here might actually be the best way to determine that. For the record, no, I don't expect a [dark] tag on your story.
If it is a question of accurate categorization of stories, then we are in more shaky territory. I don't see how your [dark] definition holds up. I think I understand your main thrust: Every story has some darkness for the light to show up against, but as long as they end well it's just a seasoning, not the point of the story.
My counter-argument is twofold: First, trivially, if [dark] meant "Doesn't end well." it would rather spoil any story it was applied to. Second, I don't think everything rests on the ending. Sure, the ending helps--a story that ends bleakly is a much better candidate for [dark] than one that doesn't, but it isn't quite so clear-cut. I think [dark] should mean that the atmosphere within is dark and oppressive above and beyond a certain expected amount.
Let's say you write a story about a war between ponies and griffins, pace Von Clawsewitz. If you write a story where, of course, people die and there is destruction and strife it is a bit dark, but if it ends with a equitable peace and some sort of catharsis then you can say it is, say, and [adventure] story, even if one of the protagonists dies. But take the same story and add atrocities and torture and even if it ends the same, and the total tally of survivors is identical it now requires a [dark] tag. It discusses a darker subject, or, rather, discusses a maximally dark subject in a darker way than is common.
So does your story fit this criterion? I don't think so. It doesn't deal with a grim subject matter, not really. I mean, yes, the world came to an end, but it isn't described in painful detail and worlds do end. Ours included. I guess Celestia's dissolution is visceral, and the story is well-served by its gore content warning, but it isn't dark, as such. It's too mythological for darkness, especially tinged as it is with supreme self-sacrifice and hope as it is.
Now this is all fuzzy, granted, but tagging is inherently imprecise. My own heuristic when it comes to this is that [dark] is for horror and stories which touch on subject that may evoke a real-life horror in certain readers (this covers child abuse, torture, semi-realistic depictions of war, &c).
Ideally, of course, we'd have two [dark] tags. One for "darker than the show" and another for "grimdark." This might provide better granularity.
2359712
I don't even think that's questionable. This isn't near the sort of gross mis-tagging that should provoke protest or censure.
2359665
I think you are right: it should be simply a way to communicate with readers ("You like dark stuff? Well! You might like..."), but I'm afraid too many people think it represents some sort of potted judgement on the fic. Hence disagreements.
2359881
Of course. But as I said I really don't know the community's standards all that well, being newer than most people here, so I wanted to give cautious advice.
I remember Kkat also wrote a little regarding how "dark" Fallout: Equestria is. In a sense, Fo:E is a lot like Elpis in that it's a story about hope and light in the darkness. I think you make a convincing point that the story isn't dark in its opinion of the nature of life, humanity, etc.
However, I don't think that's what people on Fimfiction use the dark tag for. It's definitely seen more as a warning sign--beware (abandon hope isn't quite appropriate in this case) all ye who enter--rather than a description of the story's themes. It might not be what should be the case, but the majority of the site claims otherwise. Thus, I would still give Elpis the dark tag.
I don't think the dark tag should be about the ending so much as the theme of the story. You can still have "happy" endings that leave one pessimistic, such as your example Saving Private Ryan. I don't think it's the ending that merits the dark tag, I think it's the feeling of pointlessness and the losses that are accrued as the plot progresses that give the movie its dark feeling.
Sorry if I'm being incoherent. It's kind of late.
2359599 I think that you shouldn't apply definitions from the classical literature here, because fanfinction has different conventions. According to the FAQ, "In a Tragedy, the heroine fights through amazing odds to achieve her objective, and just as she's about to get there, she fails through her own folly, or perhaps because she cannot fight fate in the end after all. Ultimately the hero fails; their friend dies; the world ends... our hero dies. Any outcome, as long as it involves the hero's failure in their struggle and the bitter result of it is what makes a Tragedy... a Tragedy." So Tragedy is about how the story ends.
You know, it's funny you mention Lord of the Rings, because the ending to that book reliably leaves me depressed. They won, but the world broke in the conflict. There will be a few scant centuries, a last gasping surge of renewed glory, and then the elves will finish passing into the west, the dwarves will dwindle, the hobbits will fade away, and the blood of Numenor will finally spend itself.
Like others, I do believe the [Dark] tag is about the tone of the story as a whole, rather than the ending. Thus, I do think it can be applied to your story.
On the other hand, I see your story as a borderline case. I don't think the [Dark] tag would be out of place for it, but at the same time I don't think it requires the tag.
Last year, during the drama storm surrounding Biblical Monsters, you said:
This whole thing may be just a question of semantics. People seem to use the term "grimdark" to describe a story with a completely hopeless scenario. This is contrasted with regular "dark", in which the situation only appears hopeless.
So, Lord of the Rings would actually be dark, but Black Robe and Nineteen Eighty-Four are grimdark.
Well I'm posting in a Bad Horse blogpost that's over 6 hours old, which means the question has already been answered thoroughly by people much more eloquent than myself, but nevertheless I'm going to try to regurgitate some of the answers in an attempt to sound mildly intelligent.
In the current system, Gore and Sex are tags. Everything else, currently, is a category. Dark is a category. Freakin Anthro is a category. Seriously, that would be like walking down to your brick-and-mortar store and asking where the Albino section is. And then when they rightly say that there is not a dedicated section to stories featuring albinos, you chastise them loudly over how much better the Internet is, while they sadly shake their heads at you. Such is Fimfiction.
Brick and mortar stores are set up as they are, because a general system is needed, and because you can't dynamically reindex the store on a whim. (i.e. I can't push a button and suddenly the store is reshelved alphabetically by title). So most bookstores are broken down into the most basic of literary frameworks (drama, tragedy, comedy, mystery). Beyond that, it's just alphabetical by author, so refining your search either means asking the staff for recommendations, or reading book jackets. Often, the store also breaks down common tropes as well (fantasy, sci-fi) even though those are orthagonal to the first category. There are fantasy dramas and fantasy comedies, for instance. In fact, just saying "fantasy" by itself is somewhat meaningless. The default assumption would be "fantasy adventure", but "fantasy" in-and-of-itself tells us little aside from the general atmosphere. On this site, "dark" runs into the same issue (dark tragedy? dark comedy?) while also being entirely subjective, as you point out.
The tags on this site—both actual tags like sex, and category-that-should-be-tag like dark—serve two purposes. First, it is meant to provide the prospective reader with information about the story they're considering reading. They look at the cover art, then the title, then the like/dislike bar, then the characters/tags, then the short description, probably in that order. Yes, you could argue that the short description ought to make the tags and cover art redundant. You could even be like my one friend, who feels entitled to lie in this metadata, because "how dare you judge my story without actually reading it. If I decieve you into reading it, but you end up thoroughly enjoying it, the only one to blame is you for being so closed-minded in the beginning." But the reality of the situation is that we live in a reader's market. They have way more fanfiction than they can ever hope to read. The snap judgments, while harsh, are necessary to weed through all the fanfiction and find the stories that the reader suspects will actively interest them.
This ties in strongly to the second point: filters. Some people want to actively avoid clop; some people actively seek it. Some people find Sad fics to be cheap, forced feels, whereas other times that's just what I'm in the mood for. This is way in which the Internet surpasses the layout of the brick and mortar store, because if I want to read some Scootabuse, I can (or rather, ought to be) able to search "Scootaloo, Dark, Scootabuse, Gore, NOT Mature, NOT Twist" and get precisely what I'm looking for. Again, then, the tags are a service to the reader, and should accurately align with their expectations.
I've often thought what Fimfic would be like if it supported user-generated tagging, akin to Derpibooru. If I, as a reader, could add whatever string I wanted onto a story to tag it (obviously, pending official mods and community-driven policing). Sure, you'd get a few obnoxious / informal tags like Derpibooru has, and you're removing the author agency to tag the story exactly as they'd prefer. But look at the advantages:
* Improved search results. The community at-large decides "why doesn't Story X show up when I search for Y" or consequently "what idiot keeps tagging Story X as Y?"
* Refined searching. Per my above example, just tag Scootabuse stories as "Scootabuse" and search for them directly. If my story is "Romance" and has main characters AJ, RD, and FS, I can directly tag the story as "Flutterdash" without needing to put it a big neon sign in the short description, and without disappointing anyone expecting Appledash.
* Saved Filters. With one click, I no longer have to see any foalcon stories, ever again. And yes, some people will object "but my closemindedness may cause me to miss a good story!" Well, I thought that once, and tried a story that was supposed to objectively be good, and I nearly threw up as a result. So, no. As a reader, my tastes and interests are more important than some author trying to break conventions.
Circling back home, since I rambled extensively, I think the cheap answer is to let the free market decide. You asked in this blog not just about your own fic, but about LotR and other stories, and people have offered their own opinions. Systems like wikis and boorus have developed their own systems for resolving disputes of this manner, and reaching a general consensus for the good of the user, and that concept is sorta appealing to me, in a death-of-the-author sort of way.
2360519 But on the other hand, according to the FAQ, "In a Tragedy, the heroine fights through amazing odds to achieve her objective, and just as she's about to get there, she fails through her own folly, or perhaps because she cannot fight fate in the end after all. Ultimately the hero fails; their friend dies; the world ends... our hero dies. Any outcome, as long as it involves the hero's failure in their struggle and the bitter result of it is what makes a Tragedy... a Tragedy." So Tragedy is about a hero's failure, not just about how the story ends.
2359579
But it's dark because it has a dark theme. Which means it /does/ end somewhere dark. It has a dark conclusion.
2360373
Theme is the argument a story makes, and a dark theme means the entire story is set up to draw a dark conclusion, as in Saving Private Ryan. So dark is about where you end up.
2764580
You're right. Hm. "Theme" doesn't really sound consistent with what I was trying to say. I think that I meant something more like mood or tone or atmosphere.
My initial argument was that a Dark tag should give readers an idea of what to expect. I believe this is still the case, but I'm no longer really sure about what readers expect when they see a dark tag.
I think that when I wrote that post, my opinion was that a dark tag indicates dark content. Now, however, I'm not sure if people also expect that a dark tag indicates a dark progression - that is, the story ends on a darker note than it began.
Now that the gore tag has the same size as the other tags (at least, I don't think it was 25 weeks ago), I believe the need for a dark tag to indicate dark content is no longer as necessary.
As before, I still believe that best use of the dark tag is to inform readers of what to expect. Removing the dark tag may mislead readers into believing there isn't dark content (not quite as big an issue with the gore tag), but keeping the dark tag may mislead readers into thinking the story becomes more bleak and dark (especially with the gore tag).
I think the second manner of misleading potential readers is the safer option if you wish to cover your bases, since for the most part it only disuades potential readers, while the opposite may result in something like when Biblical Monsters added a Tragedy tag after the story was published and many readers were already hooked. On the other hand, now I am of the opinion that removing the dark tag is a more accurate representation of the story.
The key factors for me are:
a) The change to the gore tag. It used to be more like a footnote, and didn't have the same effect as it does now.
b) What impression a story has when it contains both a gore tag and a dark tag. Together, they generally indicate a story that is grimmer than a story with either of the two tags occurring separately.