[ SECRET POST #5497 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #5497 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 33 secrets from Secret Submission Post #787.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[meadowphoenix]

Your examples intrigued me, but I don't think Avatar is grimdark in any sense, and I don't think Star Wars was intended to be grimdark at all (there is more reason to call it grimdark in the prequels than the original, imo). I can't speak to Halo.

So I think we have a fundamental disagreement about what grimdark is. It is something more than simply dark or dysfunctional, imo. I would probably go so far as to describe it as having a specific and universal cynical understanding of power/ethics/morals (which is vague but I do think to a certain extent this is about philosophical atmosphere more than anything else). So OG Star Wars has a moral system too clearly defined to the audience for grimdark. The prequels otoh, don't seem nearly as defined and all of the people including heroes and enemies, are operating on the same understanding of power, which is both very cynical, and which is reflected in their actions. That's way more grimdark.

War is not grimdark inherently, imo. But the type of war that seems entrenched into an understanding of human operations is. That's why I would put OG Avatar outside grimdark (though to that point....if all we had was Ba Sing Se...I might think differently about it). I think there's much more of the grim in Korra, but even that doesn't reach the level of grimdark.

What about those examples make them grimdark to you rather than simply dark?

[ladykyou]

In Halo, the alien hegemony destroys human settlements planet by planet. In the lore, it's common to show just how woefully unmatched human ships are against alien ones, to the point hearing the news of colonies being glassed by the Covenant is as common as hearing of a terrorist attack, a shooting, or an execution someplace else. It becomes even darker when a parasitic hivemind is discovered (that turns out to be Lovecraft!God), as well as a super-advanced vanished empire that built the titular Halos to destroy it. Hell, in one of the books, the creator of the Master Chief loses all hope that humanity will be saved, until he saves them from all three menaces anyway. Halo 4's NPC dialogue shows how deeply the war scarred both military personnel and scientists.

As for Star Wars, to me it is grimdark because it put the Galatic Empire in the hands of a tyrannical, cruel despot that wishes to torture everything alive. And after Darth Vader's birth and the Jedi purge, he has all but won, and the people see it by the enslavement of multiple species, how cheap soldier and pilot lives become, how hopelessly outmatched the Rebellion is, and by the creation of the Death Star. Hell, it's shown that when the Death Star was revealed, the Rebellion would've dissolved then and there had they not found out about the weakness.

Avatar, I will concede I exaggerated. That said, it is a setting that still deals with dark subjects, and again, the setting comes WAY too close to falling to the Fire Nation at multiple points. The fact that element benders are methodically hunted down and purged by the Fire Nation is a terrifying form of ethnic cleansing by itself.

On another example that just came to me, the (indefinitely paused) series If the Emperor Had a Text To Speech Device, which is a comedic parody of Warhammer 40k. However, while the official setting itself is grimdark, the series itself is hopeful in the sense that it portrays the Emperor's efforts to un-fuck the Imperium, as well as improve as a person after the series shows how he was also responsible for its downfall in the first place.

I admit I disagree on war not being inherently grimdark. It's a messy, ugly affair that consumes whole societies, and it is the cause of a lot of grief and horrors. A war can be portrayed as full of action, heroic, and even comedic (in the way Red vs. Blue does, for instance), but it still takes its toll on people. When war exists on a setting, people often suffer for it. That said, some settings only give a surface-level narrative on war merely to move the plot, so I can agree to disagree.

[meadowphoenix]

So I guess I'm confused at how you distinguish merely dark, or with dark elements, and grimdark. Autocratic rule, war are all dark, but not inherently grimdark, though you could certainly write them so.