![]() Darker And Edgier just adds "dark" elements to try and get the same effect. This does not have to be dark (see for instance Deconstructive Parody) and it does not prevent things from turning out well. A Deconstruction plays out the genre's conventions to their logical conclusions in order to criticize the initial genre conventions. Note that this is not the same as a Deconstruction. note If the standard metaphor is a franchise trying to "grow up," one may compare this to a young adult getting a first taste of freedom, and then gradually learning self-restraint. This will of course attract some audience members and repel others, but eventually both the viewers and the writers will likely want to scale things back to some level between the original squeaky-clean version and the later R-rated version. When the writers had previously been scarcely allowed to depict any violence, swearing, or innuendo at all, but are then finally given permission, you can fully expect them to go wildly overboard with it for a while. This is a common result of an ongoing work suddenly becoming subject to less censorship than it had been previously (as was the case with the Comics Code fading away). Which also gets applied to fanfic writers who produce exclusively Grimdark (or especially Grimderp) works.Īs with Lighter and Softer, this practice tends to go better if the change was planned in advance to keep the tone from shifting too abruptly. When a specific character rather than the work as a whole is perceived as having become excessively Darker And Edgier, a popular term is "Edgelord". "Grimderp" has in many parts of the Net become popular as a term for Grimdark that goes so far that it becomes Narm. Overly Sarcastic Productions has a video on this subject as well. The United Federation of Charles wrote an essay called, What is Grimdark? which explains some of the history of the subject. If a pre-existing show undergoes a Retool under the guise of making things Darker And Edgier, expect Jumping the Shark, especially if there was Executive Meddling involved. ("In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.") Sometimes justified with the phrase " Silly Rabbit, Idealism Is for Kids!". The excessive version is often known as "Grimdark" (one word), derived from the tagline of Warhammer 40,000. This trope became extremely popular in Comic Books as a rebellion against the Silver Age but also led to more than a decade of a lot of clumsy attempts by many writers to show that comics are " not kid stuff anymore." See the Bronze Age, the Dark Age, and '90s Anti-Hero for more details about how this worked. It can also be a result of child fans growing up as its creators and continuing to think of the setting as something aimed at themselves and their peers instead of the original target age group. But unlike its opposite, a Darker And Edgier shift is often intended not to reach a new audience, but rather to keep an existing audience as it grows up. Just as a Lighter and Softer tone is typically part of an attempt to bring a fictional world to children or to younger children, a "darker" tone is often intended to make a setting appeal to older children or adults. In fact this is often the purpose of a Darker and Edgier turn. This doesn't make it a bad trope though- when this is used subtly such as in the Harry Potter series, it can create the effect of a series growing up with its audience. However, this all works IF it's done right.Īs one could predict, this is fairly easy to screw up and poor use of these tropes may just result in Too Bleak, Stopped Caring if the setting gets too hopeless, or Narm if the edginess becomes just silly. When a show uses this trope as a tagline, you can expect a mixture of: awful things happening to the characters, twisted backstories giving them a reason to angst, good and bad becoming less obvious, and the setting becoming much bleaker. ![]() When done right, Darker and Edgier works are a case of Tropes Are Tools. This is not to be confused with Tough Love. ![]() ![]() In practice, however, writers can be too lazy to realize all that potential and end up randomly "spicing up" a work with gratuitous gore, cursing, and sex to make it more "adult" - often overdoing it in the process. In theory, this means that archetypes which we are accustomed to see acting in a more noble setting will have to act in one where they must think and act grimly in order to make progress, thus forcing re-examination of the tropes involved, or the use of new tropes and expansion of the setting, utilizing different sorts of characters and stories. The Riddler, Secret Origins, " When Is a Door"Ī Tone Shift that seeks to make a work of fiction more serious, cynical or gritty. ![]()
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