Case (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
case) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomsecrets2014-02-12 06:40 pm
case) wrote in fandomsecrets2014-02-12 06:40 pm
[ SECRET POST #2598 ]
⌈ Secret Post #2598 ⌋
Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.
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Notes:
Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 031 secrets from Secret Submission Post #371.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 1 - 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.
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It varies from interesting to laughable. :P
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(Anonymous) 2014-02-13 07:03 am (UTC)(link)A lot of kids stories use workarounds to avoid talking about heavy issues, and sometimes these workarounds look really dark when seen from an adult mind. Things like mind control, magic, and even the very rules of the universe are meant to be innocent and fun, but they walk a razor thin line, where a bump up in the rating would make these same cute things look really horrifying.
To use MLP specifically, Nightmare Moon bringing eternal night is a way to set up a threatening villain while giving them a simple understandable motive that kids can wrap their heads around. That goal looks a lot darker to the adult mind, because an adult will realize that eternal night would cause an agonizing death to everything on the planet as one side of the planet slowly froze to death, while the other side starves as everything turns into a barren desert from the eternal sun.
Along the same line, Discord mind controls the main characters because using physical violence and threats generally won't fly in a Y rated program, to kids it's just the villain using tricks to make the main characters fight each other. To an adult, the concept of having your entire personality and memories rewritten at the whims of another person is a horrifyingly dark concept. In children's stories, mind control is usually treated very lightly and is often a workaround in lieu of physical violence, in adult fiction mind control is seen as irredeemably evil, and often leaves scars that linger, and is sometimes used as an allegory for rape or other horrible acts.
I think that's where a lot of the grimdark comes from, when we look back on cartoons we watched as children we sometimes realize that the things we saw as whimsical and magical would be terrifying when applied to a more realistic setting. Some people want to explore that realization by taking things like eternal night, shapeshifters that replace your loved ones, and casual mind control and explore what something like that would mean in a world that didn't run on good guys always winning in the end and nobody ever suffering permanent harm.
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