![]() It’s about the brief flickers of humanity you find in characters that would usually be classed as villains, and it’s about how those flickers actually burn brighter for all the layers of dirt and grit and shit that they’re buried in. But grimdark is about the light you find within that darkness. Yes, the world you’ll find in a grimdark story is usually a horrible one and the people that inhabit it are undoubtedly products of that environment. Personally, I believe grimdark to be about hope and contrast. Some people seem to think it’s about the gore and ultra-violence, others say it’s about the realism, and others still that it’s about the gritty world and morally grey people that live in it. Grimdark is still a term that no one seems to agree on its definition. In other words, it’s like trying to ground fantasy in reality by limiting the divergence from the real world to deliberately speculative elements. People curse with real profanity, the violence is usually graphic, there’s actual sex, romances often fail, and “heroes” aren’t always that heroic. It’s not so easy to be a grizzled old grouch when you’re backed by a chorus of singing elves. low levels of magic, few wizards, monsters are considered rare etc.) because it’s a more appropriate setting for our down and dirty characters. What this generally means is that Grimdark writers end up writing low-fantasy (e.g. And in fantasy, it usually means you have a dark fantasy setting (more on that later, but we’ll call this necessary but not sufficient) where the rose-colored paint has been scraped off your glasses. For the purposes of this article, I’m speaking specifically of grimdark fantasy, though the term sometimes gets applied to sci-fi, superheroes, or whatever else. By claiming their own work as grimdark, they striped the term of its ability to be an insult.Īs to what it refers, this tends to be kind of subjective, so different people will claim a particular book is or isn’t grimdark. The term grimdark was originally a pejorative derived from the description of Warhammer 40k description (“In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.”)Īnd then the writers of this subgenre took the “insult” and made it their own. Because of this, dark fantasy can blend with gritty fantasy to create grimdark. The more real the rest of the world, the more real the horror seems. After all, in a more “realistic” setting, we are more apt to be scared by the supernatural. In fact, dark fantasy naturally tends to go hand-in-hand with low or historical fantasy. And these days, the fantasy I love the best is dark fantasy and historical fantasy. The term can be used broadly to refer to fantastical works that have a dark, gloomy atmosphere or a sense of horror and dread. ![]() It also often combines fantasy with elements of horror. I have almost no memories of a time before having read those books.Ī subgenre of fantasy which can refer to literary, artistic, and cinematic works that incorporates darker and frightening themes of fantasy. Young enough, Mom claims that, when they transferred me to my big boy bed, I was crying “it burns, it freezes,” like Gollum. ![]() I was really little when my dad read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to me.
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