(no subject)

[feotakahari]

For a while I read this story called Nowhere Stars that’s so grimdark it’s ridiculous. Every new aspect of the setting makes it more miserable and soul-crushing than before. But some of the books I’ve tried to read lately, just normal fantasy stuff, feel more depressing to me than NS, and I just figured out why.

It feels like the NS protagonist has the capacity to do things that have meaning on some level. The monsters in this setting really need to die, and she does something good by killing them. I read other fantasy stories where the protag does a lot of killing, but they tend to establish that killing is meaningless and won’t fix anything.