Enter Grimdark

There is a kind of fantasy out there called grimdark, gritty realism and base motives, mostly. Is this a better representation of a fantasy world than, say, LOTR or GOT? Well, yes—and no.

The yes part is that the characters are driven by base motives and their actions tend towards indifference if not outright cruelty.

The no is that people aren’t like that.

But isn’t that the real issue? In a fantasy setting we have the capability of creating a very different world. But there is a problem with that. Namely, readers won’t relate to such characters. And to my view, this is the great weakness of the grimdark genre to some extent. Lack of human redeeming charactersitics, however deeply suppressed, isn’t going to engage readers.

That is not to say, a gritty fantasy story isn’t going to engage. In this context I class the Broken Empire trilogy by Mark Lawrence that I greatly enjoyed. There were times when I wondered… But over the course of the trilogy, the grimness lessened and the ending fitted this humanising development. Actually, you can easily see in retrospect the arching of the MC towards their ultimate fate, if that is the right word.

Of course, any genre depends on good writing skills and the ability of the author to manipulate the various elements that go into a good story, whatever the setting. My own personal ethos in this is that character trumps all other aspects of a story, bad plotting and poorly conceived theme. But that is a personal preference and my “likes” in terms of stories are probably very different to those of other readers. But that is what allows a whole world of creative writers to thrive.