Essay

Titles are an interested etymological study.

Consider that we use the word “human” to describe our species as a whole, “woman” to describe the female of the species, and “man” to describe the male. Wouldn’t it make more sense to say “man” is our whole species, while “woman” is female and “human” is male?

That was how it was done in Old English: “man” was separated into the words “wereman” and “wifman.” (Note that I’m being general, here. This is not a detailed explanation, nor is it meant to be precise. If you want a longer and more detailed/accurate explanation of old english words, please go to a primary source, or a work dedicated to the subject.) to designate male and female. Wifman became the word “wife,” and wereman became…well, at some point we dropped the idea that males needed to be defined seperately from the species. “Man” became both non-gendered and gendered, depending on context.

Think about what this does. It implies that “male” is the default, that “man-kind” is the baseline expectation, and that being a “wo-man” is to be different from a “normal-man,” or a man. This encourages viewing females as an “other,” a being that requires special treatment of some kind, leading the way to thinking women shouldn’t read or study, be given the right to vote for how the world is run, or be allowed to speak their mind with benefit of the doubt.

I’ve had an…interesting relationship with fan-fiction over the years.

I will admit, I was quite dismissive of the genre at first. Not the effort or the results, but the desire to tell a story in another person’s playground. Every fan-fiction story out there could be re-written with minimal changes in a new universe; why copy someone else’s? It was a kind of plagiarism in my eyes; a kind of laziness.

A lot of this, I think, came from my social issues. The idea of inserting yourself was — well, still is — frightening. You aren’t the original “official” writer of Star Trek; if you wrote a story about the crew of the Enterprise, you might get it wrong.

Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s a silly mindset when you think about how many times the official IP has “gotten it wrong,” and that’s even before you question the whole idea of a story “being wrong” in the first place. I was young and stupid.

Please read my last post before reading this one, I’m kinda jumping in the middle of a train of thought.

A train of thought that began: in Grimdark Future, you can make the argument that anyone can be a “good guy,” depending on your perspective. Good’Nuff Gaming mentions this as a pretty key point for grimdark, as you aren’t supposed to have good guys in grimdark.

Now, in Warhammer 40k you could make the argument that the Space Marines are the “good guys,” or are at least not nearly as “bad guys” as everyone else. Sure, they’ll burn heretics, but the Tyranids, Necrons, and Orks want to genocide humanity. The Chaos Gods have plans that are even worse than genocide, so being alive in an Imperial dystopia is better than death and/or eternal torment, right?

In a pure Grimdark setting, that would be an open question. The peace of the grave might be preferable to the unending machine of the Imperium, and the torment of the Chaos Gods little different than the dead Emperor’s oppressive fist. Either way, the universe will look pretty much the same no matter who “wins.” In a weird way, the ideal in the universe of Warhammer is this constant war; the instant someone wins the dystopian universe will get even worse.

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.

What is genre?

I’ve talked about it before, I’ve brushed past it before, I’ve even ignored it before. Is now the time to have a long-form discussion about genre?

Nah.

I can talk a little bit about it, sure, but other people have covered genre in much better ways than I ever could. My go-to example is the marvelous Ian Danskin over at Innuendo Studios, who talks about genre in this third video in his [[Who Shot Guybrush Threepwood series.

Did you watch the video? Good, because I want to jump off of a question he begged.[^fn:1] Specifically, the question: “do Video Games tend to have descriptive genre titles?”

Do you know the Robert Frost poem, The Road Not Taken?

Of course you do. It’s one of his most famous. Everyone knows at least the last three lines:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

I have heard multiple stories about the writing of this poem. Generally it is agreed that it was written as a bit of a joke, poking fun at an indecisive friend. The entire poem, in defiance of the last three lines, is actually a bit of irony; specifically about how his friend would always regret taking the one path and not the other.

Words are powerful things. One of the greatest lies in modern discourse is the suggestion that words are somehow less significant or “real” than physical action. “Sticks and Stones,” after all. A politician who says all the right things is branded an empty suit if their actions are not measured in kind. But words control us in marked and unavoidable ways. There are words that we feel bad for saying, or uncomfortable even thinking.