How do I avoid grimdark in my writing?

I just finished The First Law trilogy recently. (The Blade Itself, Before They Are Hanged, The Last Argument of Kings)

This series is considered to be on the edge of "grimdark", and I think I know why. While it has dark themes, bloody battles, murderous intrigue, torture, deep complex characters who suffer from their past, dark supernatural beings, and the like, its not just those elements that make it grimdark. Those things can be found in quite a lot of fantasy and fiction.

What makes the series "grimdark" is a sense of nihilism. When I finished the series, I was satisfied with having read it, but I was not satisfied with the story arc itself, because the closure was one of "these things shall continue", nobody gets what they want, everyones greater aspirations are decimated, and the world is really worse off from the characters having done what they did. Characters you wished would find their stars are left in terrible condition.The brutality that occurs starts necessary enough, but eventually becomes for its own sake. Everything is for nothing; simply for the petty power of few individuals. And the book promises that the hope, "epicness", and yearning for redemption you gained from the beginning was a lie.

(Plus, the torture scenes, while provided in a "dark comedy" sort of light at times, are graphic. Some battles are too "heavy metal / moments of Gary Stu". Women are NOT represented in the book, say for one or two characters, and usually in some subservient way. It's a male-brutality playground at times.)

What I learned:

Dark fantasy gives you a light at the end of the tunnel, despite the dark things around the characters, and the things they do.
Grimdark gives you a light at the end of the tunnel, just to take it away and laugh. Hope is a lie.


The difference is,... how do you leave the reader by the end of the book?
Does hope have any place in the story? Is there a promise that something with get sorted in the end, even if its going to happen in a latter book?

 

Exaaaactly! ...

One of my current struggles is that I discovered that there is a follow-up trilogy to this series "First Law World", that explores other parts of the map, with other prominent characters, while the overall story of the world continues forward. While I've moved on from the previous characters, and these other characters seem interesting to me, I did a quick readup on reviews, and it sounds like... while new and interesting things happen, the arc is much of the same. ... Nihilism. Hope is a lie. Etc.

Making me doubt that I want to start the next few books.



(EDIT: With that said, I'd highly recommend "The First Law" trilogy! ... It's a perfect example of the kind of things to expect in that genre, while seeing precisely how... if the book went a different way, it would leave the genre.)

 

I don’t think nihilism or hopelessness makes something grimdark. In fact, I think attaching a philosophy to it prevents it from being grimdark.
Grimdark is shallow and meaningless. It’s misery for the sake of misery. That’s why it’s often used as a pejorative. The critique of the term isn’t that it’s grim or dark. It’s that it’s nothing but.

 

Reading a lot of the types of books that you'd like to write may help.

 

What kind of story lines do you write normally? Try telling a different tale. Not just in different feeling, but in different kind of story lines, character arcs, maybe even genre and so on. For instance, if you always write about big fantasy conflicts, with epic wars and so on then write a SF story with a smaller scale and different kind of conflict.

 

I think this is where we would disagree. I don’t see grimdark as a subgenre. I see it as a critique on bad examples of dark fantasy.

 

My mistake. I was thinking of when the term first started being used as an in-joke among Warhammer fans. After doing some quick research, it seems that this in-joke has become a full fledged genre and I just hadn’t noticed.

Turns-out, I’m not as on-the-ball with fantasy trends as I thought.

 

As far as I can tell based on my limited research, the term being used as a genre started happening between 2016 and 2018 but the term goes back to around 2008. So I’m only 2-4 years out of the loop.

 

But you can have good settings even without hope - or you can actually combine hope with helplessness. Lord of the Rings is good example of the latter: evil will never be destroyed, and the world itself will gradually wither away. Notice how all wonder, all magic, all that is good and beautiful is gradually lost, to be replaced with modern technological world where even humanity gradually vanishes. In purely physical terms, there is no hope at the end of the tunnel there - but as Gandalf says, "It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.". You cannot win, not permanently, but that does not mean you shouldn't fight - and in the end, final victory cannot be material anyway, for the struggle itself is actually transcendental. So you have helplessness and hope both.

 

What stories, or movies do you like that are not either grim, nor dark? What attracts you to them? I wonder if just giving yourself a bit of time to ingest some of the kind of stories you like that have a different tone may inspire you in a different direction.