Why I’ve had it with grimdark

In common with most headlines and titles you come across these days, mine was clickbait. You probably knew that already and then clicked anyway. Thanks.

So, no, I haven’t entirely had it with grimdark. I still love to read a well-crafted fantasy story even if I suspect all the characters will suffer horribly and almost all of them will die pointless deaths. However, a few years ago, I realised that this is not the kind of story that got me interested in fantasy in the first place. I started questioning why I enjoy this genre so much, and it finally came to me that I love fantasy precisely because it is fantastical. When you read grimdark, you tend to see authors struggling with the tension between a fantastical world where anything could happen and the constraints of seeming realistic. You can almost see the wheels turning in their brain as they go “But if I put my characters in this situation, most of them will end up chopped into fine slices and cooked for dinner.” At the same time, you notice some of them playing with this kind of thing for shock value, deliberately killing off people you think couldn’t possibly be killed off without the story also dying on its feet.

As I said, I actually enjoy a good grimdark story as much as anybody. But…

I remembered fantasy gripping me in the first place because it gave me that sense of wonder that I used to get from myths, legends, fairy tales and so on. And although the main characters often go through terrible hardships or even die in those kinds of stories, the emphasis is usually on something else, something altogether brighter. By and large, the emphasis is on positivity of some kind. Yes, we get evil queens who try to poison people with apples, or witches who get annoyed by long hair, trolls who eat people just because they crossed their bridges, and all sorts of other horrors unrelated to fruit or coiffure. But we read these stories or listen to them knowing that there is always hope for something positive, something uplifting, and that the bad guys will get their comeuppance in the end. Maybe the wolf can huff and puff and blow down some of those houses, but the rhetorical structure of the story promises us that eventually it will all work out for the best.

The trouble with a lot of fantasy (and let me stress this is a matter of my own personal taste – it is not a problem per se) is that there is an underlying sense of futility. We begin reading and get invested in a character. By the time we get a quarter of the way through the book, that character has been revealed to be a complete failure as a hero and is probably dead by now. So we try to invest our interest in another character: oops, also dead now. Should we instead try rooting for the bad guy to get that well-deserved comeuppance? Well, maybe, but good luck working out exactly who is the bad guy in this book full of blurred lines and grey hats.

For my money, this kind of plotting and characterisation makes it difficult to keep caring about what happens or who wins. If nobody is really on the side of good, and the author hedges about pinning down what is truly evil, the whole idea of stakes tends to become nebulous. Even if somebody seems on balance to be the least evil character in the book, there is often an overriding sense that nothing that person does will ever really make much difference.

Of course, all of this futility plotting and grey characterisation has come about because people grew bored of the predictability of good winning out over evil and because they wanted to inject more nuance and subtlety into their characters, to make them seem more like people.

The antidote to grimdark is noblebright. What noblebright fantasy tries to do is to remind us that the characters in stories are not people: they’re characters, maybe even archetypes. They can have believability and weaknesses and layers and changeability, but they are nevertheless there to carry a story and deliver a message. That doesn’t mean that we should expect unbreakable character shields. People can still die. But, I would argue, the stakes are even higher when they do, because this type of story isn’t out to shock us with how no one in the book is ever safe.

Think of the difference between The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. I believe Tolkien never successfully completed a novel based on any of the stories in The Silmarillion partly because of the difficulty he would experience with the futility plots that form most of the individual tales (which is part of what makes them so appealing as background mythology). And yet The Lord of the Rings puts it characters through plenty of hardship and challenges, and not all of them walk away at the end: even among those who do, all of them are irrevocably changed by the experience. But the key point is that their suffering and sacrifice makes a difference to the world they live in. They are heroes. Not necessarily because they are all born with heroic qualities. In fact, far from it. Most of them are reluctant heroes. But they step up to the challenge when their world needs them. This is fantasy. Fantasy, for me, is about the inner hero; it's about what we should seek, rather than what we must accept.

In our modern world, we have a lot of stresses and worries. Fantasy fiction can help us process these things in a safe and nurturing way. At the same time, it can help us escape from reality for a little while and enjoy experiencing that sense of wonder and delight we once got from our fairy tales. This is why I favour noblebright most of all: I love discovering the magic over and over again.

The books set in the world of Meklir have dark moments. Characters suffer. some of them even die. There are dangerous, seedy and unappealing elements in the world. After all, conflict and tension must come from somewhere, mustn't they? But the characters strive for better. That is the driving force behind their unique individual driving forces.

Take Malivene Grode as an example. Malivene is not some strapping warrior or some adventuring mage. She is a baker, who just happens to discover she has a set of unusual abilities. When she gets the chance to help the people around her, she makes the right decision. Or Talgar of Sen. Talgar seems the archetypal hero. He has trained all his life under the philosophers of the Academe, learning his detective skills, fighting, alchemy and all the rest. He has enhanced strength, speed, stamina and resilience thanks to his magical artefacts. But when you learn more about Talgar, you realise he always saw himself as the least likely hero out of his contemporaries. For the rest of his days, he strives to live up to the trust placed in him. Or we could take the ensemble cast of the Spell Books of Meklir. They each have their issues, and sometimes we probably want to punch them right on the nose, but they fight for what they believe is good and right in the world: and they all show up for each other when they really need to.

I think I spent too long reading a gritty style of fantasy and being impressed by the credibility of the grittiness. It took me a while to realise that I come away from so many of these books with an overwhelming sense of 'so what?' This is nothing to do with the quality of the writing or of the stories themselves. It's more to do with an underlying thematic hopelessness. Nowadays, I want my fantasy to have hope and direction and the promise of a better future.