Is it possible that the trend of "dark and gritty" fantasy will fade away?

>there's plenty of positive, optimistic sci-fi.

Could you give a few examples?

Honestly this. People on Veeky Forums jerk on and on about how "shades of grey" and "dark fantasy" ate trends which are killing the genre and we're on the precipice for some Renaissance of boring, moralist stories about pure and noble knights fighting dragons and smooching chaste princesses. That's never been the norm and never will be. Grit will never go away.

I'm convinced people who hold to this opinion don't actually consume media outside of iseki anime and it's all just anti-GoT contrarian memery.

Stark Trek.

Star Trek TNG, Mass Effect (broadly), Halo arguably, Star Wars (inb4 "that's not a sci fi!", I know, it's a space opera, but you get the point, it's a thing in space)

*Star Trek
I'm currently half-asleep.

literally everu trend before it has

>"Shades of grey" is killing the genre
I never even understood the thought process behind this. God forbid, people are acting like people were everyone believes their own actions are morally justified, and moral complexity has been added!
I love me some straight up cackling evil bad guys as much as the next person, but those two things can exist side by side, you can have your morally grey antagonist and not-so-squeaky clean heroes alongside your true monsters and your genuinely well meaning and moral paragons.

>, and for that matter didn't spend five chapters raping her.
now where can i find that fanfic?

Nobody wants "boring, moralist" stories. They just want hope that isn't there to bait you into thinking the characters might not be idiots or assholes this time.

Game of Thrones isn't good writing, in my opinion, but on its own it's not even a problem. The wave of clones it inspired is the real cancer. Good writing with grit and realism would be fine, but now we're swimming in crappy ASoIaF ripoffs made by people who think all you need to do to make it as a writer is write some brainless misery porn.

Though I'm sure it's easy to blame the problems on a strawman like "weeaboos" and "contrarians." What's next, are "soyboys" behind this non-problem as well?

>Halo

Just because Chief wins doesn't mean it's completely optimistic. The universe is quite grim.

Legolas by Laura.

See, the problem isn't shades of gray. The problem is that "shades of gray" is used as a rallying cry by people who don't want anything lighter than charcoal. That's not moral complexity, that's just making everyone an asshole and claiming it's realistic. If your standard GoT-clone was realistic, there would eventually be someone who wasn't an utter monster, and was also not introduced solely to be humiliated and proved wrong.

Then shouldn't people be pissed about "Black on black morality"? The idea that everyone is the bad guy, because in such a scenario if even your protags are assholes you're just not going to be rooting for anyone?

Yeah, no, it's gonna be a while. The problem is that it's part of a natural desire for something different caused by the over-marketed Heroic Fantasy of Forgotten Realms, and the general lack of deadliness in 5e.

>GoT clone

I don't know what this means, and would like some examples. And by that I don't just mean "this book". I want you to pull actual citations from that book and prove to me it's a rape-fest filled with irredeemable jerks and good guys who are never allowed to win. I'm skeptical they have as big of an influence on the genre than you guys think.

Again, grit is absolutely nothing new, and we've never lived in a time where it was rare.

Rolled 11 (1d12)

Things go in cycles. It'll be popular, then silly stuff will be popular.

Again, it's not the narrative convention itself that's the problem. It's the misinterpretation of it that gets touted by bad writers trying to sound smart.

*cough* George Martin *cough cough*

A good story with varying shades of grey and a bad story with just one very dark shade of grey get lumped in together because they're both marketed with taglines about "ooh muh shades of grey."

>I don't have to respond to this, you have to write me a graduate thesis on it.
>There, now I win!

>they're both marketed with taglines about "ooh muh shades of grey."

Literally the only people I ever see saying this are brain-dead Channers complaining about it. People who actually read don't describe books in this manner.

GoT is heroic fantasy with a bit of edge. Just like how the Expanse is space opera with a little edge. And Indiana Jones is adventure serials with a little edge.

>Makes vague claims
>Asked for actual evidence
>"Lol dude don't ask for that just admit I'm right"

What was the last thing you read that wasn't a backwards comic book about awkward virgins and the big-tiddied yanderes who love them?

The first law and The Broken Empire (Where the protagnist rapes two girls right at the beginning) comes to mind.

Especially annoying in the case of the first law. The third book was literally ... forced?... dark.

>The First Law
Written in 2006
>The Broken Empire
2011, you have me there. Even I put that down after the first chapter because of how the protagonist spouts Coldsteel-tier oneliners.

I still stand by my point though gritty books are 1) nothing new and 2) nowhere near as oversaturated in gore and fatalism as people here think.

>Grit will never go away.
It doesn't have to completely go away, I even prefer gray villians to "always evil" ones. But boring nihilist stories are just as bad as boring moralist stories.
I'd much rather hear about a pure and noble knight striving desperately to endure temptation and keep struggling to do the right thing even though it hurts and sometimes it doesn't seem worth the effort, instead of:
>The loose-cannon cop woke up in a dirty hotel room with a killer headache after his drug-addled whore-orgy.
>He lights a cigarette and stares out the window
>He should probably feel guilty for cheating on his wife and missing his daughters recital, but he brutally murdered a couple of drug dealers yesterday, so it all balances out.
>Its not like anybody cares about integrity anyway, why should the libertine elites have all the fun?
>Sometimes he doesn't even know why he bothers fighting crime when his superiors are just as guilty.
>He leaves the hotel to begin another day of shooting gangbangers and drowning his existential thoughts with copious amounts of alcohol.
Even in dark anime like elfen lied, and jigoku shoujo its made very clear that these people are not heroes or role-models and its much better to keep your nose clean and strive to live a life of sincerity and compassion even if its difficult.

A premise like that would infuriate me because it's close to being something genuinely entertaining: it's nearly Punisher (in concept).
Punisher is the character who did fall, who did decide it wasn't worth it, that a permanent solution was better and that the bad guys deserved it. He can be an asshole at times, he can be very cold, but he's not a terrible person. He's juxtaposed with the ones who haven't fallen yet, and succeeds in being a fantasy for the part of your brain that does see where his mindset is coming from when he's done right; until he shows up in someone else's line and you're reminded that you're not supposed to think like he does, or that he'll tell someone else not to give up hope and not start to become what he is, even if he does still have a moral compass in there somewhere that stops him being a bad guy.

This is the gayest sentiment I've seen in years. You need to be strung up by your toes until you repent your horrible words and deeds. Holy shit.

I'm replying to my own post which is bad form, but I just realized something awful: Somebody allows this person around children.

Of course, with a bad writer you get the other side of the coin: A story where Punisher is immune to Ghost Rider's powers because he "has no remorse" and proceeds to shit all over a hero for not being as grimdark as he is.

So again, it comes back to stupid writers more than medium or specific tropes.

>Stark Trek

Too late.

>Again, grit is absolutely nothing new, and we've never lived in a time where it was rare.
That sounds like a much harder claim to substantiate, actually. What’s a good gritty work from, say, the sixteenth century? Would it have been considered gritty by its contemporaries, or are we talking about the modern idea of grittiness?

I mean, you could claim that Macbeth is gritty because it involves ambition and betrayal, or that the Iliad is gritty because it’s fairly gory and a lot of people die, but neither one of those things seems to fit. “Tragedy” doesn’t mean “gritty”; you need some criterion beyond “bad stuff happens and there are unethical dudes.”

That seems more like it's touching on the question of "What IS grit?" for both today and back when. What is the criteria for something being considered gritty, exactly?

Its is just as possible that noblebright will fade away

Even major mainstream popcorn movies like the Avengers aren’t allowed to tell jokes without nerds going batshit crazy, do you think that something this niche will be allowed to be fun again?

But dark humor is fun

It may simply be that "grit" only exists in contrast to the bowdlerization which has afflicted fiction at various points in recent history.

If you don't find something fun, that doesn't mean other people don't.

I would say that:

1) The characters are jerks. They may be jerks because they’ve been traumatized, they may be jerks because the world they live in snuffs out kindness, they may be jerks that are, on balance, somewhat more good than evil, but they’re jerks.

“Jerk” is distinct from “villain.” Villains do terrible things, but the stories they’re in usually condemn these terrible things. Gritty stories, on the other hand, condone or even exalt jerkdom. It’s not about giving in to temptation, even; gritty characters are jerks because they know that decency is for suckers.

2) The setting implies that everyone is, to one degree or another, a jerk. Humanity is, above all, petty and selfish, and it shows in the “gritty” aspects of the setting. A gritty story can condemn this fact, so long as it accepts jerkdom on the part of the main characters themselves.

“Bowdlerization” is a value judgment, in this context. Remove it, and you’re left with something like “‘grit’ only exists in contrast with less gritty stories,” which is tautological.

I’m not convinced that there’s any sort of cycle or equilibrium at work here, either. Fiction has changed a lot over the last two centuries, particularly with the advent of radio, film, and television, and the rise of a middle-class audience.

>Dark and gritty ending
Can't wait to get those lawful retarded Paladins, clerics who always just ended up healboting and sucking off Pelor, rogues who only steal from bad people and assassins who killed the same way, mercenaries who only took good-guy quests and mages who never had to account for their magic in any way back. Super missed those.

>The characters are jerks.
>gritty characters are jerks because they know that decency is for suckers.

I feel like this is somewhat simplistic. For example, let's take a relatively recent film: Django. I think most people would class Django as pretty fucking gritty.

Are King and Django himself jerks, though? Do they think decency is for suckers? It seems quite the opposite, really.

...what?

Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Chronicles of Narnia

Overwatch, Ghost in the Shell Standalone Complex, possibly the Marvel or DC universes depending on how strict your definition of sci-fi is.

I hated Civilization Beyond Earth as a game, but they got the optimism down really well in the cinematics. Makes me wish they'd done a better job fleshing out the setting of the game.
youtube.com/watch?v=qtYWqE55s24
youtube.com/watch?v=yEl9kI2Aluw

I'm sure that after Game of Thrones wraps and none of the imitators catch fire it will stop being pushed.
Fantasy and science fiction have always had plenty of grim themes though. I think you're reacting to a marketing chimera more than a problem with the genre itself.

I can't say much about 343's take on the setting, but in Bungie's games, "heroic sacrifice to save a brighter future that will definitely be realized" was the order of the day.

>but he's not a terrible person.
He's very much a terrible person.

God I'm still mad about Civ:BE. What a waste of a great concept/possible spiritual successor to Alpha Centauri.

>all the redshirts have power armor which usually malfunctions because it hasn't been properly tested yet

...

What was bad about it?

It was a Civ V mod with a very bad diplomacy system and some good ideas that were never thoroughly realized. It was the definition of 'ok" but was trying to follow on smac, a tremendously beloved game with a great deal of depth and philosophy underpinning it

It was basically a Hollywood reboot, like the nu Robocop

I feel as though people like "dark fantasy" because they can relate to it, as it tends to be more grounded and relies less on pure fantasy tropes and signals known more to Grogs. It's normiecore, Essentially.

Yes. This shit is always cyclic. It's not just fantasy, it's every genre.

Everyone is a bag of dicks is part of the zeitgeist. Fiction isn't going to change until people stop generally believing that people are mostly inherently bad.

I think the reason people think people are inherently bad is their inability to zoom out and look at humanity from a macro scale, where when supplied with accurate information you realize we aren't that bad and the dick bags are statistical anomaly

Accurate information is the other problem since we've been portraying our political, military, and social enemies as "the fucking devil" since Ug first convince his tribe that Og tribe anger sky horse by having all that food and shelter because sky horse wanted Ug tribe to have

Not really. It may fall from prominence as Game of Thrones fades from pop culture prominence, but dark and light have always been two flipsides of fantasy tone, and are too broad to be extirpated from the genre ever. At most, the line we draw for what's dark will change.

>inb4 "that's not a sci fi!", I know, it's a space opera
It's Science Fantasy. Space opera is like Mass Effect or Outlaw Star.

>the general lack of deadliness in 5e
>implying 5e isn't itself part of a reaction to the high noblebright settings of 3.x and 4e

Beyond Earth was an exercise in wasted potential. They had a lot of cool ideas but almost none of them were executed well (in fact, a lot of them were handled better in Civ 5, the game it was based on). It featured a tech web which, instead of being vast and interesting, was small and dense, giving you the feeling like you were never really making progress. The social engineering system was boring and uninspired, feeling like a dumbed-down, less interesting version of Civ 5's. Wars were WW1-esque slogs which almost never amounted to anything other than a waste of time and resources with nothing gained. On top of all that, the game feels utterly devoid of personality (which is weird, considering that the cinematics felt quite the opposite). Technology and wonder quotes are either confusing, boring, or unoriginal. The factions don't really have clear agendas, and diplomacy with the leaders is really boring (they rarely say anything, just occasionally making hand gestures).

I try not to compare it to Alpha Centauri, since the devs were pretty upfront about not trying to make a sequel, buuuuuuuuuut it's a civ game featuring colonists on another planet, so comparisons are kind of inevitable. If they'd done a good job fleshing out the people, factions, and setting of the game or handled the mechanics better they might have faired better. The problem is, whenever I played Beyond Earth, it just made me want to play Alpha Centauri. I heard the expansion fixed a lot of the game's issues, but I just didn't care enough at that point to look into it.

>What IS grit?
People have meaningful injuries when injured and die when they are killed. And both those things happen fairly often.

Gothic Fantasy has been a thing since before anyone on this board was born, it's not going anywhere, all these faggots who think it's a trend, including you, don't know shit about history of literature.

Speaking from a side of someone who looked into the coding - Civ: BE was pretty much the groundwork for Civ VI's coding base, it's pretty much a transitional stage for the series, and it's incredibly interesting in how the coding tackles many of the things that had been done (Civ V's bizarre interactions have to led to the development of mods for modders that directly alter the backend of the game, while Civ VI has much more flexible tables but some of the most godawful scriptcoding in the series). Unfortunately, it suffers from a case of some of mediocre fluff and the customization didn't really allow for the Civs to feel vivid. It's got plenty of good ideas and is the groundwork for Civ VI, but it suffers massively from some unintended side effects to their designs, and the lessons were learned when it came to the design.

It's not an actively bad game, it's just one that has a few critical failures that just cause it to fall flat. It's not extremely bad, it's got plenty of good ideas, it's just incredibly mediocre.

It will fade when our world stops ignoring the bad shit going on

How the fuck is something from 2006 not relatively new?

Its over a decade ago, that is not relatively new at all.

Django is certainly a massive jerk. Just because he's a jerk to people who has been previously de-humanized (in this case slavers and racists) doesn't make him less of a fucking jerk. Punching nazis and goring nazis isn't the same.

Fucking teenagers

>noblebright settings
>4e
Whoa there.

Eberron and Faerun got 4e books. It wasn't all Dark Sun.

Fucking this.

To each his own, but for me You can royally fuck off with heroic fantasy forever.

And what you're talking about istny even grimdark. GoT is nobledark with edge at best.

Isn't *

personally I like both. Give me the gambit of hopeless situations and noble people doing the right thing for no other reason than its the right thing to do. For every Hitler, give me a Jesus.

Hopefully not. The bright colorful 70s/80s style was unbearbable.

>The bright colorful 70s/80s style was unbearbable.

Have you ever actually watched a fantasy film from the 70s or 80s?

In fairness, while Excalibur is nothing like that Excalibur was horrendously unpopular at the time it was released.

Don't forget Dragonslayer, Hawk the Slayer, Conan the Barbarian, Clash of the Titans, Deathstalker, Return to Oz.

Even more family-friendly films like Legend or Neverending Story were far from some noblebright heyday.

Don't forget me now.

The Iliad is, to my mind, absolutely gritty.
Almost all the main characters are dick-bags, and the ones who aren't generally get killed off.

Achilles is a sulky man-child who decides to sit out the war for a while because Agamemnon took a slave girl he fancied, and then when his best-friend/bum-chum Patroclus is killed while pretending to be him, has another tantrum and desecrates Hector's body.

Agamemnon is also a dick - sacrifices his daughter, and pisses people off left right and centre by being an arrogant douche (see the Achilles incident above)

Paris is a wife-stealing pretty-boy who becomes a cowardly douche as the war goes on

Ajax gets in a strop after losing out to Odysseus for the prize of Achilles' armour, and plots to kill the other greek kings, but instead slaughters a flock of sheep thanks to Athena's intervention, then kills himself out of dishonour

Odysseus strands Philoctetes alone on an island, murders, or frames, Palamedes, plots to kill Diomedes, steals various things from the Trojans

this, so much this

Considering that table top is and always has been a thing primarily marketed to teens, and teens since the 80's have become convinced that optimism and positivity are lies while pessimism and negativity are the only authentic things because of pseud misinterpretations of postmodern thought that worked it's way into consumer media, you need teens who are starting to view the world as something larger than school and home to learn how to recognize that their rejectionist attitudes about life are fundamentally flawed even more so than their assumptions about how the world is actually totally bad and fucked up.

So, probably not for a while. New Sincerity isn't really taking off at the same speed that postmodernism did, and the generation after the millennials are too busy crying to shitty soundcloud emo rap or over-dosing on xanax and opiods. Hopefully they figure that shit out soon, since their parents are obviously not involved in the equation.

150 more years of dark gritty fantasy? That's optimistic

it will with time

not that theres anything inherently bad with it

I dunno, the only people he kills are people actively standing in the way of him and his wife's freedom, or outlaws and brigands. And the only ones he's particularly cruel to are ones that have been truly terrible toward him - and even then, his cruelty is eclipsed by theirs by several magnitudes.

I wouldn't call him a jerk.

>Achilles is a sulky man-child who decides to sit out the war for a while because Agamemnon took a slave girl he fancied

It's a little more complicated than that. Achilles was kinda within his rights to stick it to Agamemnon there, partially because Agamemnon's predicament was a result of him defying the gods, and partially due to the way Achilles and Briseis were portrayed (i.e. their relationship is more similar to man and wife than man and slave).

Where Achilles does true wrong by the Iliad's standards is desecrating Hector's body.

The thing about the Iliad, and I think what divides it from what most people think of as 'gritty' fiction, is that it's not meaninglessly gritty. Awful things happen, but they happens because the Iliad has something to say about Greek warrior culture. The story constantly questions the martial virtues, demonstrating how often they lead to individual shame and sorrow. It's about trying to reconcile the post aristea shame of having done something despicable with the values and duties a man is expected to uphold, and asking if they can be reconciled. The truly iconic scene of the Iliad is the meeting between Priam and Achilles, where they drink together and commiserate, and share in an understanding that they both have done wrong and they both cannot change what has happened.

Oedipus was the one that always got me.
Greek tragedy is supposed to be about bad things happening to Protag and there is nothing they can do to stop or change it. But Oedipus could have easily avoided his fate by not killing a man for bumping into him on the road. I mean who does that? Dick-bags?

youtube.com/watch?v=cy4CJ4F-epA
>THERE
>IS
>ONLY
>WAR

The general public is sick of any medieval fantasy, whether it's gritty or not. I remember when GoT first came out and normies weren't really into it because it was fantasy, but then people would say "there's no elves or shit, it's just really brutal and complex" and people would watch it. The worst part was I'd just finished the first two books of my own fantasy series, and it got barely a nibble. They still don't, really.

However, people (especially young adults) absolutely love urban fantasy and sci-fi now. I've got two series going in both those genres, and they get the most sales out of all of my work (excluding the trash erotica I put out under a different pen-name). It doesn't matter if it's light or dark, comfy or gritty, as long as it's not the average "fantasy" story it's in demand.

I can only hope this lasts for another couple of decades, or I'm up the proverbial creek of faeces.

I feel like fantasy is due for a bit of a renaissance, to be honest. They're still in this ghetto where people think of medieval fantasy as being for fat pasty nerds, but then, that's how they used to think about comic book superheroes and now look at them.

Historical fiction is getting more popular. Shit like The Crown would've been very obscure a decade ago. Shit like Vikings, which isn't even that good, manages to be commercially successful and decently popular. I think it's not a big jump from historical fiction to historical fantasy.

Can you get a living from writing?

Peter Dinklage turned down the role of Tyrion Lannister because he'd been told Tyrion was a dwarf and he was really afraid of being typecast and only able to land LotR type roles. He only showed up to casting when someone told him that Tyrion was a dwarf in the sense of "person with dwarfism," rather than beards and axes and beer dwarf.

Doubtful. Considering the roots of fantasy as a genre go back to an epic detailing a brutal war led by a cuckolded king, starring a godlike killer.

Even its lighter sequel, the Aeneid, still features a woman killing herself in an act of desperation as the man she fell in love with left, and then ends with a vicious and pointless war, ultimately ending on an uncertain and incomplete note.

After he already played the Dwarf Trumpkin in Prince Caspian... kek

Quite possible, to be honest. Though even superheroes seem to have had their day. It certainly feels to me that Infinity Wars is the beginning of the end for cape films, but we'll see.

Barely. You have to write almost all the time, mostly stuff you don't even enjoy writing either but it's just to keep up with the fluctuating demands of readers, and it gets harder and harder every day since thousands of books are getting thrown out daily.

Exactly. It's that sort of fantasy that people are tired of. Take out what they see as the "nerdy" stuff, make it more realistic, and people will connect.