A Brief Look at Grimdark

I told you that last story so I could tell you this one.

This happens a lot. An idea gets stuck in my head and I work backwards. Eventually I want to talk about the idea, but I have to then start at the end and work my way to the beginning of my thoughts. Brains are strange things.

So, let’s talk about a specific genre: Grimdark.

What is grimdark?

I’ll be honest. A lot of this whole mini-series of posts is a result of me watching this video. I’ve used the term grimdark before, always with a fairly clear idea of what the term meant, and this video got me thinking about it more than I had before, and not only because they use a different definition than I do.

Now, I could do the internet-critique thing and comment on how Good’Nuff Gaming has a very muddy definition of the word grimdark, changing definitions as they need to make their point, but I want to be a Better Socrates, so I’m going to steelman their opinion: While they don’t explicitly spell it out, they view grimdark as possessing a few key pieces:¹ It’s a setting embroiled in constant and unstoppable war, a sense of hopelessness, a dark and gothic aesthetic, and a lack of easily definable “good-guys.” If we look at genre as a spectrum, the more a setting utilizes these quals, the more “grimdark” it is.

While Good’Nuff Gaming doesn’t put these qualities in a hierarchy, they do say that the One Rage Rules system of Grimdark Future isn’t grimdark because there isn’t constant war. They highlight a portion of the setting book that explains how part of the sector even has a tourism industry. There are people whose lives are not defined by violence, and so the setting isn’t grimdark.

I’m not sure I agree with this delineation: it implies that grimdark can’t be real.

Is there poetry in the Warhammer 40k universe? How about television? Any celebrated weather-reporters? Does the Imperium of Man have plumbers? How about cooks? The game of Warhammer 40k doesn’t have any of this, sure; but the setting itself? It’s hard to imagine, isn’t it? It feels silly. It’s easy, with the gothic atmosphere, to picture cold and dystopian industrial factories were people live out their lives doing nothing but manual labor, listening to the tinny propaganda and re-reading the holy work-catechism every night. There are no cooks, only slaves who grind up bio-matter and turn it into soylent green. There’s no need for weather reports, the report is the same every day: industrial smog covering the entire planet.

What if we were to look at some other media and genres and see what we can learn from them? There are certainly Grimdark TTRPGs: White Wolf made their name with the grim and hopeless World of Darkness, while newer titles such as SINS or Shattered also aim for the designation. Blades in the Dark and Apocalypse World lean pretty heavily into grimdark settings, and almost any game can be made grimdark if the table wants it, but while violence can pervade all of them, none of them are necessarily wrapped in an unending conflict.

What about genres like Cosmic Horror? The entire focus of the Lovecraftian style of story is that the underpinnings of the universe are dark, terrible, maddening, and anathema to human worldviews. There is nothing like “romance” or “comedy” in Cosmic Horror. There are no heroes, only victims. There is no hope save denial and ignorance, no peace save the peace of the grave — and sometimes not even that.

What about video games: Is Quake grimdark? It has some markers — a grim and gothic inspired design and brutal violence — but you can win the game and kill the evil villain. Hardly unending war, is it?

How about the Dark Souls series? Surely, there is a sense of unending cycle, hopelessness, and nihilism burned into the core of the series; and the different endings of the games give you a choice: continue the grim and painful cycle or allow it to rot and stagnate?

What do we think about Total Annihilation? This is a game all about two sides of a conflict that will never cease their efforts to commit genocide on the other, but it has a slick metallic aesthetic, not gothic or grim. You could certainly argue one side is more “in the right” than the other, but the war has gone so far beyond ideology that it’s hard to say whether ‘which side is right’ even matters.

Darkseed? Its H.R. Gieger aesthetic is certainly grim and gothic, and a horrific conflict between dimensions is definitely part of the story, but it’s not about violent war, exactly, and there is certainly a victory.²

How about Myth? One of the more non-standard-fantasy settings ever, with a brilliant exploration of the inescapable cycles of tyranny and liberation, eternal war, and hope beyond the desire for peace, and all done with cut-scenes more fitting for Saturday morning cartoons.

But let’s go one step further. As has been mentioned before, both in these pages and others, All Art is Interactive. If that’s true, can we look at Grimdark less as a collection of aesthetic or archetypal choices, and more as audience reaction? What if what makes something grimdark is that it makes the audience feel grimdark?

What does grimdark make people feel?

Looking at Trench Crusade, we get the feeling of hopelessness, of dread fear and gnawing doubt. There is no place for hope, there is only pain and suffering. Even death might not see the end of it for you. Everything is blood, rust, death, and darkness. Joy is not even fleeting, it’s absent. It is a shadow nihilism, bent towards decay and foulness. The imagery is designed to be off-putting, at once repelling you while having a kind of horrific beauty.

Warhammer 40k is all about rage. Violence, death, and destruction are the aesthetic, while stoic brooding and blind anger are the only acceptable emotions. The only species in the entire game one can consider “happy” is the Orks, who “luvva good krumpin’.” For anyone else, laughter is merely a sign of madness and the taint of heresy. There is no grief, only shame. There is no fear, only determination. At worst, despair is allowed but only as a seasoning; it’s there to make final stands and hopeless charges poignant and to highlight the virtues of dying for a cause, as opposed to living for one.

Grimdark Future is filled with uncertainty. The setting is all about upheaval, with even the most simplistic factions given multiple complex layers. The Chaos gods³ don’t want to feast on human blood, they just want to survive. The Robot Legion isn’t reclaiming their lost empire by burning away the messy infestation of organic life that spread during their slumber, they’re a slave rebellion struggling to get galactic recognition and protect themselves. The Battle Brothers aren’t a theocratic blood-cult devoted to burning away heretics, aliens, and immigrants; they’re homeless refugees who are struggling to survive in a dangerous corner of a galaxy they have no connection to. The Jackels have just developed space travel and are trying to establish a foothold. The Saurians have just woken up and are trying to protect their ancient race’s culture and reclaim stolen territory. The Alien Hives — locusts who devour resources to swell their numbers — are reeling from the discovery that there are other sentient beings in the Sirius sector. Even the Infected Colonies, the space-zombies who litter Sci-Fi Horror settings like confetti, are arguing among themselves whether they have the right to infect and kill other sentient beings to survive.

Let me dwell on that for a moment. Can you imagine The Walking Dead if the zombies were having philosophical discussions about survival? How could that be anything but a comedy? The trope of Zombies is such a powerful one that it’s hard to defy it without spoofing it…and Grimdark Future is trying to be serious about giving the entire space-zombie species an existential crisis.

I don’t think there is any clearer mission-statement: in Grimdark Future, anyone can have sympathetic motives or ideals. Anyone could be a “good guy.” That doesn’t mean no one does awful things, or there is no “evil,” but that with the right perspective anyone could seem good.

In this setting, whichever side loses we have to shed a tear. There could be peace, shared resources, community, and diplomacy…but the past is too fraught, the present too fragile, the future too uncertain for war to ever truly be seen as a last resort. Survival is required, and even the brief moments of peace are little more than pauses. We could in fact call Grimdark Future a pre-grimdark setting; if it’s not there yet, we can easily see how it’s heading there…and each misstep along the way is one step closer.

In the grim darkness of Grimdark Future, all is upheaval.

Now, there’s more to be said about this, but the post has gotten too long already. I’ve split the post into two, so next time you’ll get my concluding thoughts.