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.

A while back, I made a post about noblebright. L.B. Lee was confused by the concept. If one person alone can’t make a difference, but many people together can, is that noblebright, or is it grimdark?

Based on an interaction between Balioc and Moonlit-Tulip, I have an answer now. There exists a kind of person who thinks many people working together are still people. There also exists a kind of person who thinks many people working together are an “inhuman machine” that does things no individual human wants. Which kind of person you are determines whether you think the real, actual world is noblebright or grimdark, as well as determining your views on fiction.

1d4chan defines “noble” settings as ones where a brave individual can change things, and “grim” settings as ones where individuals are powerless to change anything. I’ve been thinking, is this affected by the number of major characters? In a story with two major characters, each can have 50% impact on how the story ends. With twenty major characters, the average impact is at best 5%. Maybe some have more impact, but that means others are just dragged along by the flow of events.

Unless you’re a Russian novelist, you can’t write a story with billions of major characters. This means that real life is the grimmest setting ever.

(Alternatively, the world’s grimmest story is Johnny Got His Gun, and honestly, that fits.)

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