The Failure of 'Dark' Fantasy

[InfinityX]

Its hard to explain, but Personally, I find Dark souls and Berserk a "dark" setting, but I don't find DA:O or Witcher 2 "dark".

Dark souls has the atmosphere and theme of a dark setting. Theres not much diologue or backstory, but the environment itself instead tells the story. I find it well done and not intrusive or having themes shoved down your throat.

Berserk is a anime that has a good story about the downfall of a man that wanted too much power, and how the main character deals with it. the setting itself isn't "dark" per say, but the themes and symbolism (plus most characters don't die for the sake of death)

and those are really my opinions,

BUT (and I don't think many people will agree with me)

Dragon Age Origins and Witcher 2 feel like they are trying too hard to make a dark scene.

DA:O does a bit better job in the "dark" theme. The world was a good fit, as was the main story, but I didn't find the characters really fit the scene. I think the Dwarven area was the best in terms of story and a "dark" setting. Also as someone pointed out, there was an excessive amount of blood from...anything. Try fighting a emeny (not even killing) and your character is bathed in blood after a few swings.

With the Witcher 2, I felt like it was trying so hard, that it just hurts to watch it. People cursing everywhere, hangings and death like no tomorrow, spirits and evil monsters everywhere, It felt forced. like the Devs were saying "Look here! elf hangings! thats bad! now lets make the whole town swear every 2nd or 3rd word!

Ok, maybe a bit exaggerating there, but the point is that I don't find cursing and random deaths everywhere (yes I know why there was so much death, but it still too much) very "dark". If you put someone dying or dead around every corner, it kinda loses it's meaning.

The story in Witcher 2 was good though, just the setting was forcing "dark" and "dark for the sake of dark"

 

[Mr Companion]

I am more with Yahtzee on this one and say that DA:O is not "Dark" fantasy its just fantasy. I played it through entirely and I can't see why it has this reputation as being "Dark". Its certainly doesn't have a more realistic narrative structure. You are a powerful hero selected to be part of a prestigious army of monster hunters because you are awesome.

The main villain is basically orcs led by Dragonsatan who is also a demon and an elder god all at the same time. Can you be the one person in the world awesome enough to kill the bigbad? Probably yes! Its certainly no darker than Lord of the Rings which is of course the baseline for fantasy worlds so if its no darker than LOTR then how is it "Dark" fantasy? Isn't fantasy usually a little dark?

In fact even Dragons Dogma is darker than Dragon Age. Not at first obviously but the overall message of the story and the denial of a power fantasy is kinda disheartening. More so than Dragon Age which really is straight up power fantasy cliche. Dark Soul's and Demon's Souls are of course, truly "Dark" fantasy in the sense that everything is f**king horrible and anybody who was a hero either died or worse. Dwarf Fortress is fantasy so dark I hesitate to talk about things that happened in that game in polite company... so much horror O.O

But Dragon Age? Please. Basic power fantasy.

 

[InfinityX]

Your suspicions about the Witcher are basically the same as what I thought after playing it for a couple of hours. I kept hearing how mature it was only to see the game trying so hard to be "adult" that it was actually quite funny (and disappointing, considering what I was expecting.) It's clearly aimed at a teen market. Nothing wrong with that, but certainly not what I expected. Games like Skyrim seem far more mature to me than Witcher did. When darker things happen in Skyrim, it's just a part of the world instead of feeling incredibly forced.

As I just posted, I agree. Too much random sex, death, and hate, all trying to scream "look at me! Im a mature game!" Also, I feel like Witcher 2 would not be as a popular game (game mechanics are shallow, Questing is annoying, Map and pathing is buggy) if it wasn't for the sex scenes, which is really disappointing since now other developers are going to think "sex scenes are better then gameplay".

Only thing I will disagree with though, is that Skyrim's "dark" scenes are not forced per say, but scripted. Its definitely more mature in the sense that the world is put together better.

 

[Fox12]

I suppose dark fantasy's main idea is to embrace 'realism,' but one interesting point is that the more qualified and educated a person is concerning Medieval culture, society, and literature, the less inclined they are to write "dark" fantasy. Tolkien was a professor of Medieval studies and literature and even fluently read and translated Medieval texts. Montey Python -Jerry Jones in particular- is tremendously well-versed in the subject. Jones even co-wrote a book detailing and offering theories on the death of Geoffry Chaucer. George R.R. Martin, on the other hand, has his degree in Journalism. So, much like modern military shooters, we see a trend towards "realism" from people that know very little about the reality of their subject.

I... I think I love you.

I find it interesting that Tolkien, a war veteran and professor of medieval history and linguistics, is being panned as unrealistic, while Martin, who is neither, is being praised for his realism, mostly by the ignorant. Honestly, I didn't even hate Game of Thrones at first, I just found it mediocre, but now it makes me physically ill just to think about it.

To be fair, there is good "dark fantasy" out there. Berserk is excellent, for instance. It draws from Greek tragedy, Carl Jung, Hieronymus Bosch, Abrahamic faiths, the philosophies of fatalism and causality, and a lot, lot more. It's dark fantasy, yes, but it's also incredibly intelligent and intricate, and has a lot to say, unlike Martins works, which are juvenile at best. A work isn't good, bad, or realistic just because its dark. All that matters is the quality of the story telling. Tolkien, for all his fantasy, is more realistic than Martin ever was.

 

[Isra]

But Dragon Age? Please. Basic power fantasy.

Quoted for truth.
There's absolutely no reason Dragon Age should be labeled dark fantasy, or to attribute any supposed failing of Dragon Age to the dark fantasy subgenre. It has no roots whatsoever in horror. It's regular straight up high fantasy, through and through.

I mean you can get subjective about subject material, but calling Dragon Age dark fantasy is like calling Blade Runner post apocalyptic. It just clearly doesn't fit the definition, which is not subjective. Not taking place after the apocalypse? Not post apocalyptic. Not a horror? Not dark fantasy.

It seems if it so much as rains in a fantasy game people slap the dark fantasy label on it.
It's a name that's misappropriated at every turn as though it has no real definition when actually it does.

 

[Trueflame]

Dark fantasy is a trend, yes, but it's one I like. It isn't about historical accuracy, necessarily (though you will find precedent for events like Martin's Red Wedding in history), but about being realistic in terms of human nature, which such authors believe to be dark, violent, often self-destructive, and maybe even fundamentally flawed. Views that I espouse myself, and being both a pessimistic and a cynic, dark fantasy floats my boat.

But many of the things you are describing and are unhappy about, like the blood splatter in DA:Origins, has nothing to do with dark fantasy. It's like a kid cursing a lot in order to sound "adult." He's using adult language, sure, but that doesn't make him mature. And so having lots of blood, gore, sex, and even death doesn't necessarily make something a dark fantasy. DA:Origins is firmly in the epic/high fantasy genre anyway, if even follows all the basic tropes, with a hero rising up from essentially nothing, going on a quest to unite people and assemble his forces, and then fighting the big bad evil - which even looks like a generic orc horde. DA:O isn't dark fantasy, it's just fantasy. That said, I liked the game a lot, and the blood didn't bother me, it was just a source of amusement and nothing more.

The Witcher games are guilty of using sex to up their "maturity," and to a certain extent language too. But despite that, they are dark fantasy because of the things that happen in the plot. Especially in Witcher 2, things get genuinely dark, and at every turn you are presented with choices where there is simply no good solution. You're just choosing between various pros and cons, but there's no definite righteous path, or definite evil path. Those shades of gray, and the view that when things change it is generally for the worse, is what constitutes dark fantasy.

 

[lautalocos]

The Witcher 2 is much better in terms of it's "Dark Fantasy", compared to Dragon Age Origins. That being said, TW2 also has some 'dark for the sake of dark' in there. Luckily it's pretty sparse though. The only thing I had a problem with were some of the sex scenes.

Like when you have to find a flower to make a special potion out of it to resist the poison from the kraken-like beast. (Forgot the name) You just happen to fall into an old chamber from the ruins you're on top of. Then you have to fight another witcher guy. And then, out of the blue, instead of deciding to get on with your mission, Gerald decides to have sex with Trish. I mean...what? After the mission, sure. But right there in the ruin, while skinny dipping in a pool? That's just a sex scene for the sake of a sex scene, to make it more 'mature'.

i read only until the half of the 3 book of the witcher, but as far as i remember, he did, and pardon my french, fuck things all the time

still, i read it years ago so i might be wrong

 

[Qvar]

Cynicism that passes for "realism" is nothing new. It offers ignorant people who believe they are sophisticated by "knowing how the world really works" the pleasure of consuming media (Game of Thrones, Deadwood, Breaking Bad classic examples) that "know how the world really works". Meanwhile, the actual world works very differently.

ignorant people who believe

Meanwhile, the actual world

Your hypocrisy just left me breathless.

 

[Mylinkay Asdara]

Okay I'm going to chime in here and say that "Dark" is usually something tacked on to the word "Fantasy" to indicate to consumers (and their parents, much more specifically) that a game that looks like just another "Fantasy" game is going to deal in some way with issues that - to use the movie and television industry tag line "may not be appropriate for some audiences."

That's about it guys, really. It's a term of convenience - not something they are trying to build into an actual genre or sub-genre at this point - they're leaving it as a simple "category" type label so they don't get slapped with negative feed back from places like Fox News and Mother's for Safe Games and the like for leading children astray or some other such nonsense.

Dragon Age deals with sexual liaisons between party members, death - often violent death - and a whole slew of things that some people - again, specifically I would say parents - don't expect out of the traditional "fantasy" game and so they throw "dark" in front of it to fend outrage off preemptively.

Some of us, who are more serious about games than the general population, would like to see such development into an actual genre and have "dark" mean something more, but we tend to forget we are in the minority, being all cloistered together like we are on this site.

Similarly the use of the word "mature" in relation to this is not probably, "we're going to go deep into concepts that are mature themes" but rather "we prefer our players be able to buy liquor on their own and drive a car and not be mommy and daddy's problem anymore."

 

[michael87cn]

Anything can be good if its done in an entertaining way.

Setting and theme don't really matter.

Unless.... well, you close yourself off to things just because you want to.

 

[someonehairy-ish]

Fantasy needs to step away from the medieval setting all together.

And go where?

You could always go to older folklore for fantasy inspiration. The fable series has a wee bit of this, what with various hobbe and fae type creatures kidnapping children and turning them into changelings. There are entire worlds of potential fantasy creatures and peoples in the folklore of any particular country.

Or you could make fantasy directly inspired by defunct religions. Fantasy taking greek myth as reality, for example. Or, if you wanted to be especially ballsy, you could make fantasy that treats modern myths and religions in the same way.

It's fantasy, you can do what you want with it.

 

[Ryan Hughes]

I... I think I love you.

I find it interesting that Tolkien, a war veteran and professor of medieval history and linguistics, is being panned as unrealistic, while Martin, who is neither, is being praised for his realism, mostly by the ignorant. Honestly, I didn't even hate Game of Thrones at first, I just found it mediocre, but now it makes me physically ill just to think about it.

To be fair, there is good "dark fantasy" out there. Berserk is excellent, for instance. It draws from Greek tragedy, Carl Jung, Hieronymus Bosch, Abrahamic faiths, the philosophies of fatalism and causality, and a lot, lot more. It's dark fantasy, yes, but it's also incredibly intelligent and intricate, and has a lot to say, unlike Martins works, which are juvenile at best. A work isn't good, bad, or realistic just because its dark. All that matters is the quality of the story telling. Tolkien, for all his fantasy, is more realistic than Martin ever was.

Aw shucks, thanks. I by no means hate G R R Martin, though his prose really dropped off about halfway through the third book, it is just confounding as to why some see him as the best writer out there right now.

One of the points I was trying to make in that paragraph you quoted is that what we often call "Dark Fantasy" is really baased on a skewed perspective of what the middle ages were actually like. In short, the Victorians revered the middle ages, because they saw it as a time of pre-industiral social innocence, and as the beginnings of the British Empire. They saw King Arthur as righteous -even though in the pre-Mallory works he is often portrayed as weak and corrupt. They did this because they needed a discourse to justify the rampant racism and oppression of their colonial policies, and the middle ages served as a nice fantasy for them.

Of course, now we have come to terms with colonialism and the fact that it was pretty bad, this -in turn- again warps our perspective of the middle ages, forcing it into something like a double-distortion. Since the Enlightenment and Victorian- eras lauded the middle ages, we must then condemn the middle ages by extension.

People like Tolkien -who know that the common view of the middle ages is wrong- reject this type of storytelling and societal self-hatred. Since "dark fantasy" is bourne of our misconceptions of medieval times, then those that are actually qualified medievalists tend to shy away from "dark fantasy."

 

[Theminimanx]

This, so much this. It's almost become engraved in modern people's minds that fantasy is a medieval only setting. They can comprehend that there could easily be modern fantasy. Shadowrun has modern fantasy and it is awesome combining magic powers with guns.

I might have to play that now. What's the gameplay like?

Picture Counter Strike with Trolls, Dwarfs, Elves, and Humans. Each race has different abilities, I can't remember any since it has been a long time sine I played it.

Here is a gameplay vid, sorry about the quality. It was all I could find.


It's also only available on PC and 360 and it came out in 2007. The servers may be dead.

Meh, doesn't look like it has much of a story focus. Shame.
Besides, there's not much point if the servers are dead.

i don't think that's the one he's talking about.

heres the one he was talking about

Ah, that looks a lot better. Going to have to leave it for a while though, I have enough CRPG's to play through as it is.

This, so much this. It's almost become engraved in modern people's minds that fantasy is a medieval only setting. They can comprehend that there could easily be modern fantasy. Shadowrun has modern fantasy and it is awesome combining magic powers with guns.

I might have to play that now. What's the gameplay like?

Edit for extra value:
I don't have a lot of experience with dark fantasy, mainly because I don't watch things that don't have an end in sight. I took a brief look at the witcher 1 & 2, and my immediate thought was: Why should I care about any of these people (especially the "Oh noes! Someone got killed. Now you must care." characters, such as the king). And if I don't care, why don't I just leave this hellhole of a country?

Anyway, my main problem with fantasy in general is that it limits itself to elves and dwarves in a medieval setting. Why can't we have a story set in, say the ottoman empire. Or a story in which fallen london is now in a cavern the size of europe, and populated with devils, mummies, octopus man and things that sound like the come from a Lovecraft novel. Oh wait, we do.
Why can't we have more of this?

or a story set in Roman Times or during the bronze age's.
also the link you posted is broken. just fyi.

Weird, I used the right command. Maybe you can't properly add links while editing. Oh well, an alternative is now available.

 

[The Doughboy]

"Of course, now we have come to terms with colonialism and the fact that it was pretty bad, this -in turn- again warps our perspective of the middle ages, forcing it into something like a double-distortion. Since the Enlightenment and Victorian- eras lauded the middle ages, we must then condemn the middle ages by extension."

It's interesting that you think that. I'm graduating from a Christian college where we discuss in great detail the middle ages and what they were (and weren't) like. It's on the rosy side definitely, but I for one have always been OK with that because I'm sick of people blaming the "Church" for all the ills of the time.

It was confusing and scary. Like most periods in history.

Good topic, I'm greatly enjoying reading it and giving my two cents on Tolkien and "dark fantasy".

 

[RandV80]

I for one am weary of the way that fantasy -once a vibrant genre- is being treated lately in games and other mediums like literature. But, what are your thoughts?

You're starting at DA:O and the Witcher and talking about it as a modern trend, but CRPG's have been built that way since pretty much forever. Bioware for example started with Balders Gate, the genre started to get away from that with quicker action RPG's after Diablo's success but Dragon Age (the first one at least) was a return to those roots.

I don't think there's really a clear definition for what 'dark' fantasy is. If you look at it in terms of Tolkien vs vs Martin, I see it as a matter of on one side you had the good guys from often humble origins who go on a quest to defeat the big bad evil, and in the end the good guys always. Dark or light, realistic or not, it got tiresome to some (not me in particular) because the books always worked like this. At the start of a series: meet Rand Al'Thor, humble farm boy from the quaint & peaceful Two Rivers. At the end of series: here is Rand Al'Thor again, a little worse for wear but vanquishor of the Dark One and saviour of the world, hooray!

(note: my username has nothing to do with the Wheel of Time series, rather it's purely coincidental)

Now the main thing Martin did that stood out, he took his 'hero' Ned Stark and chopped his head off before the first book was even done. It created a sense that nobody was safe and anyone can die, a more 'realistic' take on things which is more appealing to adults than youth who tend to prefer unbeatable badass types that fantasy hero's usually become. Forget all the sex & rape & gore, from my perspective that's the 'realism' that draws rave reviews from some.

Personally my current favourite fantasy author, since GRRM takes so long these days though I'm not one of the people who criticize him for it, is Brandon Sanderson. I find he's able to find a nice balance between the 'Tolkien' and 'Dark' fantasy genre's, with Mistborn Trilogy being exhibit A.

 

[Savo]

It's been too long since I played DA:O to launch into an extremely deep discussion of its handling of morality and dark fantasy, but it's probably one of the better fantasy games I've played as far as story goes. There's a lot of grey areas and the fact that it doesn't use a morality meter was an extremely nice touch. It's not nearly as dark as something like Game of Thrones, but it's not as light as a lot of JRPGs, which was perfect for me. I remember it handling the darker elements well, but it's been years since I last played it, so who knows.

I haven't played much of the second Witcher, but I can comment on the first game's use of darkness, and it is absolutely laughable. Although often used interchangeably, there is a difference between adult and mature. The Witcher has lots of adult themes but handles them poorly and rarely feels remotely mature. It reminds me of the first season of Torchwood, when the writers started cramming in sex scenes and lots of profanity and violence in a desperate attempt to convince the audience that they were watching a hip and adult show. If you thought Dragon Age's handling of darkness was bad, you had better mentally prepare yourself before starting the Witcher.

Maybe it improves in the second game. I started it up, but quit after half an hour of stilted dialogue and stiff voice acting, so I'll probably never know.

 

[daibakuha]

Now the main thing Martin did that stood out, he took his 'hero' Ned Stark and chopped his head off before the first book was even done. It created a sense that nobody was safe and anyone can die, a more 'realistic' take on things which is more appealing to adults than youth who tend to prefer unbeatable badass types that fantasy hero's usually become. Forget all the sex & rape & gore, from my perspective that's the 'realism' that draws rave reviews from some.

Martin does a little more than that. He subverts a lot of the common conceptions of modern fantasy storytelling almost to the point of being a deconstruction of the genre. Instead of playing into audience expectations, he subverts them and defies them. His use of atypical heroes and morally ambiguous characters makes for fun reading. I think Cersei Lannister might be one of the most complexly written characters I've seen in a long, long time.

Not to say the books don't have their stumbles though. A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons spent way too many pages on just getting characters where they needed to be, so nothing really happens. He also spends way too much time describing food (sometimes it's a good thing, but spending too much time is tiresome).

 

[ThatQuietGuy]

It's kinda just pendulum swinging isn't it? I mean look at the dc movies lately, they can't put a hero on the screen unless it's gritty and 'dark'. I'm sure in a few years the backlash to all the grittiness will push us somewhere else, maybe abstraction or something weird

 

[sXeth]

Based on comics, we'll look back at the grim/dark era of storytelling 15-20 years from now and find it quite giggleworthy.

There's a balance to be had between Nursery Rhymes, and (to borrow a term) "misery porn", and presumably, it'll swing back around in the not too distant future, or at least out of the current trend. Various critics and analytical types will often denote these phases in media as a reflection of social circumstance in real life, with people's choices reflecting their current worldviews.

TVTropes has a fairly broad listing for the sort of things mentioned in the OP. The most applicable of which is probably "Darkness Induced Audience Apathy". Summarized as "Everything is so worthless and grim in the world that the audience no longer has nay hope or care for the character's actions".

The other factor is that for most people, villains are far harder to identify with as an audience, or as a writer. This tends to make villains/villain protagonists/anti-villains/darker anti-heroes all a tough morsel to write well, and even if managed, will only resonate with a subset of the wider audience.

 

[thefascistpig]

Both the Dragon Age and Witcher series fall under the same broad category of "mature" fantasy, but the Witcher series (at least Witcher 2. Witcher 1's gameplay was too boring for me to get far into the story) does a much better job of it. The issue with Dragon Age isn't that it attempts to be mature fantasy; it's that it's a mediocrely-written attempt at mature fantasy (decent by video game standards, but fares poorly when compared to almost any other medium). Dragon Age (from what I remember) has lots of stuff involving racism and betrayal and what not....unfortunately, its world-building is not of sufficient quality to make all that bad stuff seem natural; as a result, the motives of the bad people often seem one-dimensional and forced. Furthermore, the hero is almost always given the option to ride in and save the day for everyone, which undermines the "mature" theme and makes the game closer to wish fulfillment.

In the Witcher 2, on the other hand, a lot more work went into the micro-level world building. Dragon Age puts a lot of work in the grand plot, but if you run into some minor supporting character, he'll probably be a poorly written, one-dimensional frothing racist or something like that. So when the one-dimensional frothing racist kicks an elf, you'll roll your eyes and think "clearly they wrote that guy in simply to kick that elf." And then you'll sweep in and save the elf. The Witcher 2 puts a great deal more work into the actual characters, their environments, and what drives them. It's hard to explain in words, but you'll find the motives of almost everyone in the game to be a lot more relatable, even if you disagree with them. Whereas Dragon Age just drops random assholes onto your path, in Witcher 2 when you run into an asshole you'll think "well, you suck, but having spent the last few hours in the town in which you spent your whole life, I can see how you developed into someone like that." Additionally, while your character is powerful and can shape events to a certain degree, he cannot simply save the day; playing the game, you get the feeling that you're merely one influential person trying to throw your weight behind a goal and hope that it's enough in the face of a whole world of influential people trying to do different things.

Regarding the "trend" you identified from a sample size of three people:
I'm not really sure why you took that cheap shot at RR Martin; imo he's merely decent, but ASOIAF clearly is NOT attempting to accurately recreate a medieval world. Rather, it's just a "deadly politics" story and set it in a generic medieval environment.

Oh by the way, Tolkien's work can be very tragic. Sure, the Hobbit and LoTR are generally light-hearted, but much the Silmarillion is quite the opposite. You may have noticed that while LoTR is more or less a typical hero's adventure, it hints at many tragic events before the events of the story; those are written in detail in the Silmarillion. IMO some of Tolkien's work is much darker than any of RR Martin's stuff, in which the general theme is more "hey, I wonder if that guy will--- oh, look, he died" than a legitimate tragedy involving characters that you actually care about.

PS: I agree that Dragon Age is full of cheap shocks that don't really create much of a response to the player ("yes, yes, more faceless victims that I'm supposed to feel bad for. Moving on..."). However, the Witcher 2 does a much better job at tugging at your emotions when it tries to. It had one scene that legitimately infuriated me, an emotional I had until then never felt in a game.

Which scene was it cuase I know plenty of scenes in witcher 2 that pissed me off