Literary Kitty Litter

As an opening note, I will be at the Tucson Festival of Books this upcoming weekend (not this one right now, otherwise you’d have missed it already and I’d be quite cross with you for not having come).

You might be reading the title of this blog post and thinking that I’m starting up my amateur porn company again.  Well, sadly, until I can either liberate my actors from North Korea or Nebraska changes its filming and tax laws, Upon Thy Lady’s Face is still in pre-production.

No, instead, this blog post is about the totally original, never-been-discussed-before, completely-not-beaten-to-death topic of grittiness in fantasy.  Or nihilism in fantasy.  Or grimdark darkgrim fantasy.  Whatever.  We’re talking about fantasy that uses bad language and slaps bare bottoms just like the big kids do.

It’s a trend (note, I’m not saying “disturbing” or anything else like that) that’s become more and more prevalent that could be attributed to a number of things: George R.R. Martin’s success, the general maturity of the fantasy crowd growing, a tiredness with traditional fantasy, whatever.  Regardless, we’re seeing a lot of books that are portrayed in stark, gritty settings with cruel, selfish bastards and vicious, gory violence for a number of reasons.  Some of them good.  Some of them not so much.

Whether they succeed or not and for what reasons they do succeed isn’t important.  What is important is that I’m seeing a lot of it and I’m bored and because the whole world revolves around me and my big important opinions, that’s a bad thing.

For a while, I sat around thinking how I could phrase this objectively.  I was wondering what I could really offer up to prove, once and for all, that the whole grimdark fantasy was harmful to the genre, to define just what it was about this trend that could apply to everyone else and that no one could contradict.  I wasn’t going to sit around and say it was morally harmful, since I’ve made my notions on moral objectivity pretty clear, I think.  Nor was I going to make some lame-ass Appeal to Tolkien, since my views on traditionalism aren’t much more advanced.  I took a lot of time sitting carefully and thinking even more carefullylier about how to phrase this objectively.

And I realized I couldn’t.  I’m just bored with it.  Here’s why.

1. It’s everywhere.

It’s not entirely surprising that, once the fantasy genre becomes saturated with grim and gritty fantasy, the same thing happens to a fantasy genre that’s saturated with morally black and white fantasy.  The stories become echoes of one another and the setting and tone begin to forego the story.  When we read the story and realize that this is a grim, gritty story, we can usually begin to draw conclusions based on it: the heroes will probably not be heroic, not all of them will make it probably, someone will probably find a creative use for the word “fuck.”  And at that point, we likely have reason to believe we know how the story will end: the bigger bastard will probably die, the person who is least unlikable will probably survive and we’ll all wonder what the point is.

This is the problem with oversaturation, beyond the obvious: it conditions people.  You might write a fantasy with a grim and gritty setting.  It might not end like the other guy who writes grim and gritty.  It might be amazing.  And it might be totally passed over because people will read it and draw the same conclusions.  Worse, they’ll become enraged because it’s not like the other guy’s grim and gritty fantasy.  Either way, you’re not doing too well.

2. It doesn’t know when to stop.

I’ve mentioned it in a few posts, podcasts and conversations with hobos, but I’ve recently become enamored with the notion of restraint.  The idea that you can hold back your most vivid descriptions, your most wild gore, your most violent emotional explosions and unleash them at a key point to guarantee maximum emotional investment and subsequent shock from the audience.  It’s a problem that beginning writers face that they feel the need to unleash this constantly and I think it’s a problem for this particular style of fantasy, as well.  Along the same lines of conditioning, desensitizing can also be a problem.

A man who swears once is shocking, a man who swears constantly is tiresome.  A guy who blows up in a rage rarely is terrifying, a man who gets into fights at the drop of a hat is a joke.  There’s absolutely no point in putting your finger in someone’s butt if you’re just going to do it every time they bend over.  They’ll come to expect it.  It loses its impact and because this is a grim, gritty fantasy, people seem to think they can’t defy expectations by not putting their fingers in peoples’ butts.  Which leads me to my biggest grievance with this trend…

3. It’s disingenuous.

I think the whole idea of flawed heroes who weren’t ultimately selfless, conflicts that didn’t always end cleanly, villains who weren’t necessarily the completely irredeemable world-ending horrors of Tolkien’s day started as a response to the fantasy that personified just that: a parade of supermen who always bowed when ladies entered the room and always played fair to justifiably murder the villain who was always a bastard.  Beyond the very obviously troubling moral quandaries of this set-up, the mind eventually rejected it because people just don’t work that way.  Good guys don’t always do the best thing, bad guys don’t always do the worst thing.

And it works both ways.  People sometimes do selfless things like spare their enemies and fall in love.  People sometimes do just get along.  People sometimes do good, even if it doesn’t always work out.  And it’s that last part that interests us as readers: what happens when it doesn’t work out, what happens when it does.  We need to not only wonder what happens if the good guys lose, but what happens if they win?  What does society lose by the death of the villain is as important as what it gains?  When the answer is foregone, be it “the bastards win” or “the not-bastards win,” the conflict is simplified.  It’s too easy.  The mind will reject it, eventually.

And this is the culmination of it all, the conditioning and the desensitization: the reader will know what the conflict is and how it will end, so the reader will lose hope.  The reader can’t lose hope.  Not for any shitty moral duty we have as writers to uphold the paragons of society, nor for any shitty reason to wank off the reader/ourselves, but for the reason that it’s shitty storytelling and it’s not true.

Like any good argumentative jerk, I have left the possibility of addressing my own hypocrisy for the very last moment and will do so in an amazingly snide and superior way.

But Sam, you might say, nitpicky little troll you are, you yourself have been hailed as splatterfest gory and emotionally diabetic.  Isn’t it a little silly to condemn others?  

I try my damnedest never to label myself as one thing or another, be it swords and sorcery over epic fantasy or grim and gritty over morally ambiguous.  Mostly because I hate it when people can hold me accountable to my own words, but also because one definition rarely remains applicable over a writer’s career because the story will always be changing.

It’s true, I do go nuts with violence and emotional meltdowns.  I like doing those.  Sometimes I do them, sometimes I don’t.  I’ll likely do them in the future and in some instances, I won’t.  I’d tell you that this is for reasons that I can recognize when to pace myself and when to deny myself, but anyone who has seen me at an Indian buffet/petting zoo will tell you I lack self-control in many things.  What makes it different is that I (try to) do those things when I want to and when it suits the story, not the atmosphere.  Sometimes I fail.  It’s a subtle difference.

That sounds like a total bullshit reasoning.

I SAID IT WAS SUBTLE.

Whatever.  Anyway, why are you even bringing this up?

Because we were discussing it briefly over on twitter and my friend James Long brought up this in response.

Completely agree. I think a gradual shift back towards what is now considered ‘traditional’ fantasy is on the cards…

And this is roughly the point I started screaming.  Because there was a bee in my room.  After I shooed it out, I sat down and began to type a reasonable response to why this is, overall, a bad idea.

We can’t just keep trading saturations.  We can’t keep swinging between hopelessly and unrealistically grim and hopelessly and unrealistically cheery.  There doesn’t necessarily need to be a balance, but there does need to be a reason to keep reading.  And that reason is the story itself: the conflict and its price, the characters and their struggle, how high the small stakes are and how trivial the big stakes are.

We don’t read to be told the world is a bottomless shithole and that people will always stab you in the back, we read to see what happens to two people who fall in love in a shithole.  We don’t read to be told that good will always prevail and that evil will always be punished, we read to see what happens to the people who happened to be on the wrong side when “evil” fell.

And this is what I think a lot of people fail to grasp when they try to emulate the success of someone like George R.R. Martin.  “Shades of gray” is a thing that’s said, it’s not a mathematical formula in which you combine 6 parts white and 12 parts black.  The story doesn’t come from the desire to be a huge bastard.  The huge bastard happens to be a part of the story.

Serve the story.  Not the mood.