The Issues With Grimdark
From the perspective of a grimdark author.
You know, one thing about me is I love grimdark.
Director Edward Elias Merhige’s Begotten and Martyrs 2008 are two of my most beloved films, and I would unironically live in Yharnam—beast plague and all. In fact, I love grimdark so fiercely that it became the genre in which I write my own novels.
Nevertheless,
Grimdark would not be an entertainment media genre without ideological issues.
The night brims with defiled scum.
So let’s take a stroll across the Great Bridge.
But First, You’ll Need a Contract…
Given as I will be a published author of grimdark in May, there exist certain boundaries which may be advisable for me to maintain. As such, I will abstain from naming specific works here. I will, however, strongly allude to them wherever topical, doing essentially everything short of naming names and thus granting myself plausible deniability.
While I cannot be certain whether I’ll always uphold this, especially given an article I plan to publish in the future, I will for at least this publication. If you’re vehemently certain of what I’m talking about at any given moment, pretend you aren’t.
Disclaimers done and dusted, we have a long night ahead.
//CW: discussions of sexual violence, misogyny, mental illness, racism
Firstly, grimdark is chiefly defined as a subgenre of speculative fiction with a distinctly dystopian, nihilistic, brutal edge, often employing gothic, splatterpunk, and horror elements.
It is a candid genre with few boundaries and much to say.
Occasionally, however, it’s bad at talking.
Misogyny
The nature of the grimdark genre is in the name.
Grim.
Dark.
As such, often-extremely-graphic violence abounds, and dark content seems unending. And that’s the point, right? You can argue about some inherent issue present in that, but this is a genre which explicitly advertises what it is. Unlike certain instances of romance or fantasy, grimdark has never lied about its stripe. The trigger warning list for my own debut is very extensive, even more so for the second in the duology.
This tendency, however, can make authors, particularly male authors, flippant about the implementation of one specific type of violence against women, female-presenting and queer people.
Sexual violence.
Grimdark is a very male-dominated genre. As such, non-men are very often marginalised and exploited within these narratives. Female exploitation in particular comes with the objectification of rape and sexual assault into a plot device or character developing tool of the generally-male lead. We see a very similar pattern in genres like extreme horror, and indeed much of horror (which I say as a huge horror fan, just look at my Letterboxd). The usually-woman victims of SA are de-centred; tossed in for tragedy, for plot, for backstory, to highlight the darkness of the world without offering up compassion or commentary. In so much of fiction, not just grimdark, violence against women is used as a springboard for male heroism, something for the man to be tortured over if the crime is committed against his love interest, his sibling, his parent, when it is not his story.
Alternatively, in an oft-fruitless attempt at some sort of a feminist spin, scenes like sexual harassment written by men are done so to underscore how “strong” the female character is. How she fought back and broke her attacker’s nose and stuck him with a witty snipe before walking off with her cigarette and her fetishised lesbian girlfriend. This “girlbossification”, if you please, of assault survivorship is insidious because it downplays the reality of what these encounters do to a person.
SA is one of the darkest crimes which can be committed, and it can—and in fact should—be discussed in fiction. But an issue arises when the inherent darkness of the crime is interpreted by authors, usually male (but not necessarily) as a device. Authors believe that just because they feature SA in their work, it makes it darker, and therefore somehow automatically deeper, more impactful, when it does not. The depth is achieved via exploration of a dark subject, not the mere existence of it. And the prescriptive darkness of a genre doesn’t just hand out a free pass to have at anything.
The rule of thumb should be: the darker a given topic is, the more commentary it should receive. Grimdark is a speculative fiction subgenre—it is ripe for discourse, and this misogynistic, queerphobic, victim-ignoring narrative and caricature is not only misplaced in a space like ours, but is reductive and a disservice to the very essence of speculation.
Ableism
Among sloppily-handled dark content within the grimdark genre is the subject of disability. Particularly, what I want to focus on most is mental illness.
Mental health in general remains a taboo subject notwithstanding the efforts of the medical, and broader, community to normalise its discussion, not least so being the particularly stigmatised conditions such as dissociative identity disorder (DID), psychosis, self-injury, eating disorders (ED), OCD, schizophrenia, and others.
Grimdark as a genre has the inclination towards attempting to tackle mental illness within its narratives. While this is certainly a noble cause when done in earnest, and a great number of fictional works have succeeded, it is tricky territory and many, many productions fall short, misstep, and on occasion seem to intentionally misrepresent.
Take DID, for instance. Not only are some of these authors out here marketing their books with it, calling it “split personality disorder” which, speaking as a medical scientist by profession, has been a defunct term for decades now, but in-narrative they are portraying DID sufferers as violent, dangerous people, as some sort of dark-sided sexual thrill. As individuals who have a “malevolent” personality, and then a meek, benevolent “core personality” that’s usurped by this evil intruder. DID is essentially treated like demon possession, similarly to schizophrenia or even to things that aren’t mental illnesses at all like autism. Not only is this un-scientific and medically incorrect, it falsely perpetuates stigma and shame, and prevents people from gaining acceptance. Gaining safety.
It is already incredibly charged to assign a “darkness” to mental illness, as is at times observable in grimdark fiction. To allude to some sort of corruption, or evil within mental health disorders which are as real as any other illness. In fact, you could philosophically postulate that it is more real than a somatic illness because it affects your brain, the only thing which is truly You.
People are already repulsed by individuals struggling with these stigmatised illnesses like ED and DID and OCD, but not just that. Depression, anxiety, substance abuse disorders remain denigrated as not just shameful psychological conditions, but as evidences of laziness and weakness. It’s just sadness and worry and over-indulgence in the eyes of neurotypical people(!) Once again, I’d like to remind the senate floor what genre grimdark is a subgenre of.
These negative characterisations of psychological disorders cause direct harm. These very real, very serious topics, just like sexual violence, are usually thrown in not to be discussed, but to elicit disgust. Especially when creators—and I do mostly speak as an author and poet here, though also an aspiring filmmaker—fail to provide trigger warnings whilst featuring behaviours or traumatic causes in their works: things which can be active triggers for people struggling.
And let me make it very clear:
If your story can be spoiled by a list of trigger warnings, you did not write a good story. And in fact, it likely indicates that those triggers are the very nucleus of your story, which does not make for a compelling narrative. It is just gratuitous torture porn at that point, which entirely negates so many of these authors’ perceptions of self-grandeur and the supposed “depth” of their work. Writing dark fiction of any type does not exempt you from providing trigger warnings to your audience, and I think as explorers of such subject matters, we grimdark authors and screenwriters and what have you should be setting an example.
This trigger warning assignment must extend equally to all of the aforediscussed—misogyny, queerphobia, sexual violence. It is fine to feature it in context. But remember that the darker the conversation, the more commentary it should go along with. You dismantle it. You do not perpetuate it. An overtone of nihilistic hopelessness does not negate an opportunity for honest discourse. Au contraire, it lays fertile ground for it.
This trigger warning assignment too, must extend to the forthcoming:
Racism
Grimdark fiction, particularly of the fantasy variety which I’m more familiar with (I don’t like sci-fi; please don’t talk to me about it) takes much of its aesthetic inspiration from gothic. Spired, talon-like roofs, flying buttresses, thick velvet, dark blood, steel blades, gargoyles, fuscous stone, all black everything.
Another thing grimdark takes from gothic, is racism.
It is a prevailing concept within some goth circles that non-white people are just… “not really goth”, for the sole fact of their non-whiteness. All this despite there existing an “ethnogoth” subgenre which is mostly white goths wearing bastardised bellydancing attire and ghagra cholis and “African jewellery” ✨for the vibes✨. They simply want our things but without us. This isn’t an inherently evil subgenre or anything—one could argue my own style, what I call “dark folk”, is a type of ethnogoth. The difference being I actually use elements of my ethnic cultures as opposed to appropriating those I don’t belong to and which are more marginalised. Then again, these goth circles would consider me “not really goth” anyway so what are ya gonna do?
Grimdark suffers from these issues too. When it’s not villainisation of non-white characters, it’s tokenism, it’s mystification, it’s stereotyping. Beyond that, grimdark also heavily favours northwest European settings, especially Victorian England. Granted, you may at times see settings inspired by China or Japan, which themselves can come with Sinocentrism and Japanese imperialism respectively. More often than not, however, given entertainment, especially outside of videogames, is overwhelmingly white Western (i.e. of the Anglo colonies and maybe northwest Europe) the depictions of East Asia are usually just Orientalist, meaning racist.
And really, this is all a symptom of the white supremacy ingrained into entertainment. As I brought up, media is overwhelmingly white, book publishing, namely trad, being one of the worst offenders.
And again, as said, these subjects should absolutely be tackled in fiction, but it how it’s executed and by whom that really makes or breaks the outcome.
When you don’t have the diversity behind the scenes, you won’t have it on-scene.
Seek paleblood to transcend the hunt.
And perhaps you believe the call is coming from inside the house. If you read my books now or in the future, you may decide that I too was flippant with my display of self-injury and mental health struggles. That I didn’t portray brothels or sex work the way you wanted (I was portraying sex trafficking, not sex work), that I wrote a culture I’m not a part of (ethnically I do have some ties but this is correct inasmuch as culture isn’t automatically equatable to ethnicity, see: Pontians). That’s all entirely your prerogative and review spaces are not for me as the author unless it is something I’m directly contacted regarding. I cannot know everything regardless of how hard I have worked or how diverse my space and indeed my own background is.
But what’s important is my acute awareness of what goes down in my genre and the very serious shortcomings of it.
All authors should critique their genres, most of all those of you writing within historically problematic ones like romance, extreme horror, spiritual fiction, high fantasy, and indeed my own grimdark. It’s not so much the genres, but the tendencies within their orbits that’re problematic, mind.
I do my part and you do yours and we call out inappropriate behaviour or content of fellow authors where needed and we keep our lawns healthy. Civility politics never did anyone any good, and I certainly don’t want to sit quietly in a genre which has issues I could help illuminate and begin to drive out.
~Sfar~Ⓐ🧿֎⨳