As in, how to handle darker elements in your narrative works, and how difficult that can be. These are, as always, just the opinions of one person, and inevitably more than a little subjective.
Darker elements certainly have a place, a vital place, in storytelling. The villain to defeat, the conflict to work through, the obstacles to overcome, and texture and contrast to help give your worlds greater life. For me, though, they have to be treated carefully, for they can all too easily create an imbalance in the narrative, or the tone, and negatively affect the story experience as a result.
A crude but hopefully illustrative example: a group of kids investigate some odd goings-on in their neighbourhood. It’s a little spooky, there’s mild scares, and mild threat, dangerous situations gotten into and out of. Then, one of the kids is captured and beaten to death. Even if you play it really carefully, just allude to it happening off-screen, with no actual detail, it’s a big shift in tone, and the narrative cannot be the same afterwards. The moment has an impact, a heavy one, potentially a jarring one given it’s so much darker than anything before it, and that’s what can derail things, and why I believe great care is needed.
Thomas K Dye’s Newshounds was a webcomic I loved, and still have a lot of affection for, to the point it was a major inspiration in creating my Cinnamon series of stories. Smart, thoughtful, extremely funny, and keeping the darker elements subtle, it worked wonderfully; Alistair, Nigel, their relationship, & the former’s middle-of-the-street epiphany about the latter, and what they really mean to him, are elements and moments I hold especial fondness for. The follow-up, a graphic novel, increases the darkness, dramatically, and that’s where things, for me, go wrong.
It goes too dark, up to and including repeated threats of sexual assault, a shift from the original webcomic so pronounced I found it off-putting. It might not have been so bad if it had all been toward a satisfying narrative end, but it wasn’t. If anything, it all got hand-waved away. Arguably the hardest part of telling a story is the ending, sticking the landing, drawing all the elements together for a resolution that feels right, hits the proper notes of emotional release. Narrative is an emotional journey, and without a release, a catharsis of some kind at the climax, it ends up feeling hollow, and in my opinion, the darker you go, the harder it becomes to get that catharsis. Balance is needed, and for me, it wasn’t to be found here.
It’s also not to be found in Dye’s current webcomic project, Projection Edge. That’s partly because, at this point, character seems to matter markedly less to him than densely complicated plotting, Big Ideas and heavy drama, so the characters are getting lost amongst all the rest, you never really have a chance to get to know them, connect with them, care about them. It’s also partly because, again, he’s gone too dark. I speak mostly of a sequence in which a main character relates, with accompanying flashback images, a harrowing moment from his childhood, in which his misguided actions cause an already unbalanced religious zealot to snap, and results in the latter burning the main character’s two brothers alive in a pair of pottery kilns.
Now, that’s, at least to me, extremely dark, really, really heavy. Yes, the tone of the comic was already on the darker side, but two children being killed in horrifying fashion is still a massive tonal shift, even if nothing graphic is shown. It needs to be justified, to carry all its due weight, and I’m not convinced Dye is willing or able to do that. Even in the reveal he wasn’t, the character’s reactions muted, because they themselves are muted, leaving it feeling like a shock-value plot device.
Let me put it another way. The narrative point of that moment is clear, as it explains the main character’s difficulties, and puts him squarely at odds with the apparent villains, with their heavy religious overtones, but was it truly necessary to go to such an extreme to achieve those ends? I don’t believe it was, it could have been achieved without the killing, just it almost happening, or even the threat of it happening, but Dye chose to go that far, and now he has the imposing, and quite possibly insoluble, problem of how to deliver a catharsis to match. If the Newshounds graphic novel is any guide, he probably won’t even try.
To push things further, to an example of a moment of darkness that was utterly mishandled in every way, and one I likely made mention of in a prior blog, we turn to Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD. One of the characters is introduced behind a wall of desks and cabinets, a literal and not very subtle – but then, AoS never is – barrier between her and the world. She doesn’t want to go back into the field, but after she’s convinced to, has no problem dropping bodies left and right, often in brutal fashion – the show practically revels in blood and guts – which prompts a question: what happened that was so bad even an arguable sociopath like her couldn’t deal with it?
The answer came pretty quickly to me, because it seemed the only possible one: she killed a child. Early in season two, a flashback episode confirms this, with the character out to stop a series of deaths centred around a mother and daughter. She assumes it’s the mother, not least because the mother wants her to, and shoots them dead. In front of the child. When said child then turns out, in the most hokily b-grade horror movie way, to be the actual killer, she shoots them, too. Then has a meltdown.
Not a single aspect of this works, not character, not narrative, not tone, not anything. It’s a complete mess, and I cannot fathom what the writers were trying to achieve. It put me off so much that was the last episode I watched. A friend watched more, and reported a classic “what if” scenario, in which they show what would have happened if the character hadn’t killed the girl: she’d have been taken to a secure facility, and pretty quickly massacred everyone there. I mean, I think I can see what they’re going for, another twist on the increasingly wearying trope of “the ends justifies the means”, but it’s so ham-fisted it fails utterly. That the little girl was a horror cliche, and not in any way a meaningful character, suggests even they knew it was a bad idea, but they went with it anyway, because visceral reaction is more important than character and narrative coherence.
Speaking of visceral, it’s important to note that I am very sensitive, reacting to things more, and more strongly, than most people generally would. That ratchets up considerably where violence toward children is concerned, meaning a game like Limbo or a film like Clown is something I couldn’t even begin to handle. This is undoubtedly colouring my thoughts and feelings, which I why I stress again, all the points and views here are subjective.
It’s also important I note examples of darkness handled well. Neil Gaiman is a master of the art, as seen in Neverwhere, a dark fantasy that’s not afraid to embrace the light and is beautifully restrained with the darkness – horrible things happen, but they’re not dwelt upon, and they all matter – and the resultant depth and contrast helps create a world so vivid it leaps off the page, grabs you, and drags you in. Roald Dahl is one of my greatest creative heroes largely because of his phenomenal ability to be exactly dark, and grisly, and gruesome enough to make his point, but not one iota more, not least through his use of heightened worlds and tones and characters. The miniseries adaptation of Stephen King’s It is a fantastic example of how violence toward children can be handled, its tone perfectly set and maintained, King’s excess of gore exchanged for adroit restraint that really lets the emotional weight of it all register, not least in how Georgie’s death affected, continues to affect, and will always affect Bill. It can be done.
Just as important is to demonstrate how I handle darker elements in my work, for which I’ll focus on my big, ongoing fantasy project Moonglade. A mild example is a scene between a trio who barely escaped a situation gone badly wrong, and an older, matriarchal character who is forever haunted by the bloody results of a situation that went even more wrong, and that she blames herself for. That guilt drives her to chastise one of the three, her son, harshly for the mistakes he made, and he becomes greatly distressed as a result. I am currently revising the work, checking everything, and it occured to me she was too harsh, giving an impression of her I didn’t want, so I toned it down, had her realise what she was doing, stop, and apologise, and her son not react as strongly, and it not only achieves the original intent, but a little more besides, in illustrating their relationship.
A second, heavier example also involves the son character, dealing not only with his sister suffering a grievous injury, losing a limb, but that even with all the magic at their disposal said limb can’t be reattached. He loses it, to the degree he drops an f-bomb, the only one in the whole story, and hits a girl he thinks of as a daughter, and who looks at him as a father. Again, going over it, it’s too much, more than is needed, damaging him like the prior scene damaged his mother, so I’m going to remove the f-bomb and have him stop himself just before hitting the girl, echoing what happened with his mother, and enabling a better segue into the following part of their narrative.
A last example revolves around a character riding out to a meeting in another village, taking a longer route via a third because the shorter road was blocked by storm damage. In that third village, she encounters a group of thugs, and a brutal vigilante type intent on taking them out, with no regard for anyone else who happens to be in the way. This is vividly demonstrated in a sequence of him on horseback, firing arrows at the heavies in the middle of a street, killing several, and a bystander one tries to use as a living shield, until the protagonist of the chapter stops him. Afterwards, she lingers at an isolated beach to try and compose herself, and then tries to find ways to distract herself, stop herself dwelling. It affected her, continues to affect her, and will keep affecting her in future, not disappear and reappear to suit the plot. The one tweak I might make is the bystander killing; is an actual death required, or is the strong implication of the vigilante’s disregard for collateral damage, say the bystander is only injured, enough?
The lesson Gaiman and Dahl taught me, of only having as much darkness as is truly necessary, and not one iota more, maintaining a balance for the good of the story, and more importantly the characters, is one I intend to keep following, and I heartily recommend others do, too.
Foxy Musings 