Darkness done right · 7:21am Sep 19th, 2019
Hey, do you think I'm a wellspring of good advice? Do you think I have a clue about anything I talk about? Well time to burst that bubble and tell you all I am either talking out my ass half the time or repeating shit I learned from someone else.
So, dark stories.
I love them, but its a little hard to explain how to do them well. So I would like to show you a game 'series' I use to help me with gaging how dark something is; Soul Sacrifice. You know Sony's latest hand-held that died a terrible death? Yeah, it had some bomb ass games, two of which had stories that rival the emotion of some of even the best stories here, and all in around a thousand words each. If you have the time, read the lore for the monsters and, if you can find the youtube videos, watch the stories for the characters. You see, one of the major things about dark stories, at least how I look at them, is that they hold a mirror up to the less savory aspects of the human condition, and these games explore the concept better than anything I have seen. Let me give you come of the prime examples of what I am talking about.
Canatux: What if we took robin hood and made him a total ass hat but at the end make you see him as the bestest of dudes.
Radux: life is suffering, mom knows best.
Monstrux: Repent through pain.
So, how can you use this information in your writing? well, what these do is what I like to call the 'candle in the dark' stories. This is where the world is dark but there is still one bit of good there. When you approach a dark story, to do it right, at least from my viewpoint, you NEED to remember to make the characters of you world suffer, and not just by John Wicking their dog (though that is really dark when you look into the implications), but by making them miserable and not stopping. What I see that I usually think of as the best dark stories are when the characters are forced to make a terrible choice that has the outcomes of pain or different pain, with the cost being more pain. Now, dont go to far overboard and just write torture porn, that's a different genre, think about what and how you want to convey a theme or idea and figure out how to properly dick them over. When you want to do dark, if you want the audience to feel like the world is out to get people, think about the shortcomings of humanity and think about how those shortcomings can cause them or the people around them to suffer.
Honestly, a lot of my advice boils down to just saying rambling nonsense until I accidentally say something that sounds smart.
Darkness without a purpose is just angst, and darkness with nothing else to contrast is just edginess. Darkness is a tool, and it needs to be used for some message above itself to be truly effective.
5123549
This is actually an interesting aspect of darkness as, while this is good starting advice, once you hit a certain level or type of story, the advice breaks down. Dark without purpose, for me at least, gets difficult to define as things like Warhammer 40K are grim-dark, or dark taken to the logical extream. There really isn't a point to the darkness other than to establish a world where everything sucks and you would likely die in two seconds from mesothelioma because you dared to breathe while in a hive city if you were magiced to that universe (or in other words, it is being dark just to be dark). I think a better way to phrase it might be 'make it so the dark concepts you are using are the best way to convey the concept or idea that you are trying to get across'. As for needing contrast, this is probably a little more firm as a rule. Most every dark story that is well made does this as without contrast the dark starts losing meaning. BUT, you can make an all dark story work, it's just LUDICRUSLY difficult. Games like Bloodborne, Hellblade (depending on how you want to interpret the ending), and This War of Mine show that you can just turn on the dark faucet and just let it keep running and the resulting stories are just incredible. The issue is, to get your 'all dark all the time' story to work, it looks to me like the story itself needs to be itself masterfully crafted; or in other words, if just the story you are trying to tell isn't a 9 or a 10, making it all dark is going to instantly knock it down several points.
Also, do you think you can look at my chapters for a Timberwolf for Forester next week? I haven't been working on it much as of late but I want to finish up the chapters that are still in the shoot and was planning to finish off the revisions this weekend
5123612
Well, I'd argue that Warhammer 40k does use darkness with a purpose. It's building a sci-fi dystopia with an emphasis on the inevitability of conflict. Without the darkness it would be closer to something like Paranoia (which for the record, is my favorite RPG of all time), where the dystopia is treated as lighthearted fun rather than the more overt seriousness of Warhammer's universe. The darkness is used to build the universe instead of the universe itself being made of darkness, if that makes sense.
I'd also like to point out that I never said that angst or edge were inherently bad things. They get overused in a lot of bad stories, but that doesn't mean you can't build a good story with them if you know what you're doing.
5123620
Fair enough.
Reading this, I believe the 'Monstrux' trope is what fits closest to 'A Nightmare in Eidolon', the story I've been writing
5127283
Did you watch the video for it? When I get around to reviewing your story I'll see if I can make a good suggestion for something that was close to it.
5127353
I didn't see the links. It was late at night when I wrote this and didn't notice. I'll go watch them
5127353
Oh, okay. Well, what I MEANT by that were the attributes of 'The Man Who is Nearly a Monster' and the 'Repentance Through Pain' aspects. Those two are rather significant to that story.
5127353
Actually, I'm kinda curious what your next review is gonna be about? I saw 5 stories on your reading list, and I'm interested in what will be talked about next