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Darker And Edgier
The success of books like Spawn lead publishers to believe that kids wanted dark anti-heroes. This lead to the creation of some of the worst comic book characters in the history of the world. Not only that but existing characters where retooled to be darker and more mysterious. For God's sake they gave Super Man a black suit and I think for a few years Captain America's shield drank human blood.
- Penny Arcade

Inspector: Allow me to introduce myself. I am Inspector Leopard of Scotland Yard, Special Fraud Film Director Squad.
Court: Leopard of the Yard!
Inspector: The same. Only... more violent! (he demonstrates this by kneeing the copper in the balls)
- Monty Pythons Flying Circus, episode 29

A process that seeks to make a work of fiction "more adult". All too often, this really means it'll be less mature about its production.

Beware any press release that promises a new character or show which will be Darker And Edgier than the competition. In theory, it means that a show will shift towards cynicism on the Sliding Scale Of Idealism Versus Cynicism. But in practice, it far overshoots the mark, ending up spiced up with gratuitous gore, cursing, and sex, none of which makes the story any better and which wouldn't impress anybody but Beavis And Butthead. The show will also demonstrate that it's a harder universe now by having lots of unpleasant things happen to the characters or giving the characters a particular issue they can spent all their time angsting about; as with the sex and violence, this will usually be done in a ham-handed and immature manner and will come off as being annoying, if not actually laughable.

Things are even worse if there is a Retool to make a pre-existing show Darker And Edgier. This is usually a sign of Jumping The Shark.

The most obvious example is in comic books. As a rebellion against the Silver Age led to more than a decade of clumsy attempts to show that comics are Darker And Edgier, and thus "not kid stuff anymore." What this actually showed was that comics were often kid stuff with gore, cursing, and sex. See Dark Age and Nineties Anti Hero.

Occasionally, it actually works. The trick is, naturally, to add good, adult writing to go with your adult themes.

Darker And Edgier is rapidly joining Hilarity Ensues as one of the most beaten-to-death marketing slogans.

Also mocked as Grim Dark, derived from the tagline of Warhammer 40000. Often goes hand-in-hand with Hotter And Sexier. The inverse of this trope is Lighter And Softer. Sometimes paired with World Half Empty.
Examples:

Live Action TV
  • The Doctor Who spinoff Torchwood was billed as "Darker and Edgier" than its family-aimed parent, and was shown late at night. Unfortunately, with the show keeping the visual feel of Doctor Who, the swearing, sex and "adult themes" grated even further. It was mentioned in SFX magazine that the episodes which worked best were either the ones which didn't go Darker And Edgier, or the ones that didn't tie into the Whoniverse.
    • Conversely, the Children's BBC series The Sarah Jane Adventures is "Lighter and Softer" than the original series.
    • The 1990s series of New Adventures novels, billed as "Stories too deep and too wide for the small screen", often fell into Darker And Edgier territory, as did the later BBC Books series.
      • This may have been an influence on the series revival, particularly the concept of Gallifrey and the Time Lords being destroyed, but the show has nothing on the books. (This troper confesses she didn't enjoy the books all that much because of this - she found the plot rundowns at fansites depressing enough.)
  • The revival of Battlestar Galactica.
  • The 2007 revival of Bionic Woman
  • Slightly related is the "younger and edgier" spoof version of the SG-1 team in the 200th episode of Stargate SG-1.
  • During the US broadcast of Seasons Four and Five of Degrassi The Next Generation on The-N, all commercials for the show emphasized that each episode would be more "intense" than the last, because "Degrassi -- It Goes There." The show had always been melodramatic, but the commercials now went out of their way to show that every character was to suffer (venereal disease, teen pregnancy, getting cyber-stalked, etc.) Some fans loved this, but others sneered that The-N was hardly "intense" when it refused to show an episode about abortion. Eventually it got so over-the-top that The-N stopped the Darker And Edgier commercials, and switched to self-parodying commercials instead.
  • Season 3 of Star Trek Enterprise tended towards this, with somewhat... mixed results. Star Trek Deep Space Nine was another rare example of Darker And Edgier actually working.
  • Kaamelott is a very popular short-format French TV show, a parody of the Arthurian Legends. Straight comedy in its first seasons, it became more story-oriented later, and also much more darker in its latest season (culminating with Arthur’s attempted suicide). This is not the result of executive melding, though, but the very intent of the original creator of the show.
  • Stargate Atlantis was announced to be Darker And Edgier than Stargate SG 1. It dealed with an all around darker atmosphere, Moral Dissonance and Anyone Can Die. Unfortunately, they forgot to keep them dead...

Anime
  • Often blamed for the critical failure of Digimon Tamers, although not only did the tone actually work for this season, it wasn't even played up in the ads at all.
  • On the flip side, Yu-Gi-Oh The Five Ds went the way of Akira in order to achieve Darker And Edgier. In fact, popular consensus among the show's fans is that the sheer spike in Darker And Edgier material in it was a deliberate act to keep Four Kids Entertainment from Macekreing it...not like it won't stop them from trying.
  • Every adaption of Read Or Die seems to do this. The manga is fairly light-hearted (and the Read or Dream manga entirely so). The OVA has a bit of camp to it, but gets fairly dark, with a Bittersweet Ending. The TV series, R.O.D the TV, manages to get more depressing nearly every episode. Strangely, they keep improving.

Comic Books
  • In comics, this move is most famous for Batman. After the end of the Batman TV series, it became apparent the campy tone had burnt out, and DC realized a change was needed quickly. With Denny O'Neil's writing and predominately Neal Adams' gothic and realistic art, Batman was made a darkly fearsome night stalker much like he was in the original stories before he was softened for kids. Later, in the mid-80s, Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns overclocked this to dangerous levels.
    • Don't forget All-Star Batman and Robin.
    • Also note that the pattern repeated itself with the movies. After the increasingly silly Batman Forever and Batman and Robin movies failed, DC started again from the beginning with the more serious Batman Begins.
    • The shift also carried over to Batman's Rogues Gallery, most notably the Joker (who had been written as a comical "Clown Prince of Crime", but now returned to his psychotic murderous roots.
    • In the 90s the Batgirl mantle was passed from Barbara Gordon to Cassandra Cain, a character who came complete with a much darker origin (she's a mute trained from birth to be an assassin) and a costume that wouldn't look out of place at a BDSM club. Fortunately, she's written well enough to not come off as completely ridiculous.
  • Indeed, the Dark Age was an instance of this for the entire American Comic Book medium.
  • The Transformers Generation 2 comic books, finally free from having to grant almost everyone Contractual Immortality in a story about a devastating war, promptly started massacring the cast. Issue #1 title: "This is Not Your Father's Autobot." #2 title: "Fort Max Gets the Ax." #3: "Killing Frenzy."
  • Here's one way to kill the party: Turn cheerful, bouncy Robbie Baldwin from the playfully heroic Speedball into an apparent murderer with a guilt complex worthy of Angel. Now he calls himself Penance, and wears a suit with 612 built-in points of pain, one for each person killed that day. His new powers can only manifest when he is in pain.Way to go, Marvel.
    • However, Marvel mitigates this (in this troper's eyes, anyways) by having the newly-christened Penance make an appearance in Squirrel Girl, in which Penance shouts at the titular character about how she "DOESN'T UNDERSTAND" and that "his pain is.. too DEEP for [her]," all the while banging his helmeted head angstily against a wall.
    • Recently in Thunderbolts, however, Penance has come to terms with the Stamford incident not being his fault.
      • And in his Crowning Momentof Awesome, he reveals to Nitro the real reason for the suit. The suit wasn't for Robbie, although his survivor's guilt led him to wear it as a form of cutting, it was for Nitro. Robbie captured Nitro in Latveria to punish him for the Stamford incident, put him in the suit and proceeded to beat the CRAP out of him, after which he removes the last spike from his own chest to symbolize that he's freed himself of guilt.
  • Much of Marvel's Ultimate Universe runs in this vein. A stunning amount of the process of its "updating" traditional Marvel characters for the modern era has involved inflating the sex and violence content, as well as gratuitous Squick (e.g. the Hulk isn't merely violent or even murderous but cannibalistic; Tony Stark is a genius as expected — due to a painful cancer-like affliction which has spread brain matter throughout his body).
    • Not to mention that "updating" personalities means turning pretty much everyone into a complete and utter Jerkass. Spider-Man largely escaped, but the "Avengers" and X-Men were all turned into such vile bastards that... well... they wouldn't exactly look out of place on the new Battlestar Galactica.
      • Oddly enough, Iron Man is actually LESS of a dick in the Ultimate universe.

Film
  • The Revival Movie of Miami Vice divided audiences by going this direction.
    • Actually, the original was fairly dark itself. It just had more trappings of the 80s.
  • The rebooted James Bond series, starting with Casino Royale, is an example of this trope done right. The excessive special effects, cheesy one-liners, and flashy gadgets that characterized previous Bond movies were thrown away in favor of a more mature and realistic plot, a flawed main character, and short, brutal fight scenes. In short, the writers focused more on substance than style while applying this trope, which is more than you can say for many other examples mentioned here.
    • Oh, and swapping baccarat for poker. It's more sofistercated.
  • While many versions of The Phantom Of The Opera go in the opposite direction, the 1989 film turned the story into a bloody slasher flick, with Robert "Freddy Krueger" Englund in the title role. Really.
    • This Troper actually thought that version, disregarding the time-travelling, was closer to the book than the only-half-scarred softie in the movie of the musical
  • Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom took this direction what with its plot about an evil cult using dark magic to pull people's hearts out and enslave cute children. This was apparently George Lucas' brilliant idea, based either on how well going darker had worked with the second installment of the original Star Wars trilogy (this ignores the fact that Doom is actually a prequel) or just because Lucas was going through a divorce at the time. Either way, Doom was later counterbalanced by the Lighter And Softer Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Literature
  • R.A. Salvatore's Drizzt has, in recent iterations especially, sailed headlong into this territory. Attempting (and failing) to dodge the icebergs of Wangst, and the turbid seas of an author who seems to have started resenting his own creation. All of this jives strangely with the original portrayal of the character, (who wasn't actually intended to be the hero) who was more cheerful, though admittedly still quite un-talkative when around strangers, and a mix of a devil-may-care style swordsman/rogue, and a mentor for Wulfgar when he wasn't.
  • Diana Gabaldon's Lord John Grey series, historical mysteries concerning a secondary character from her main set of historicals, come across as an attempt to be both Darker And Edgier and Hotter And Sexier, using the seedy aspects of the protaganist's forbidden love affairs, him being gay and the setting being the 18th century, for all the shock they're worth. They may or amy not have managed it. (Her main books are themselves essentially Darker and Edgier versions of the 'roguish Scots in kilts' type of historical romance, though significantly better written- there's still smouldering glances, kilts, time travels and duels, but the male love interest's the one who suffers all the traumatic villain-initiated rape scenes and Gabadon doesn't hold back on the gore or inequality much.)
  • Tolkien's novelization of a bedtime story he told his children about a short, funny little man that went on adventures in a fantastical world with the aid of a magical ring that could make him invisible was so popular with the 8-12 year crowd that his publishers asked for a sequel. He elected to write a sequel that would give the 8-12 year crowd night terrors about eyes made of fire. Nevertheless, it worked out pretty well.

Western Animation
  • Warner Brothers attempted to make the classic Looney Tunes characters Darker And Edgier in the 2005 series Loonatics Unleashed, only to result in massive outcry against the idea, and an overhaul resulting in a strangely-drawn cartoon that wasn't very much in the way of new or interesting. A Re Tool for the second season attempted to add more references to the original Looney Tunes, with mixed results.
  • The Legion Of Super Heroes' Animated Adaptation started out fairly light in tone, but the second season features a future laid waste by an evil warlord, the replacement of the young Clark Kent version of Superman with a rather disagreeable clone called Superman X, an utterly destroyed New Metropolis, and the death of one of Triplicate Girl's selves. Dark and edgy enough? No? How about, Superman X says Brainiac 5's going to do something original-Brainiac-level nasty at some point in the future. Ultimately, it ends up a lot better than you'd think: Brainiac takes over Brainiac 5, kills Imperiex, but 5 takes back over, and Superman X can go home right and the restoration of the time-stream bring the third Triplicate Girl back.
    • V4 LSH in the comic book version, as well as being an example of Running The Asylum, was notorious for this. It was even parodied in the Amalgam Comics Marvel/DC crossover.
  • Ben 10: Alien Force, the newer, more dramatic sequel to its predecessor appears to being going in this direction, as allotted by Ben, Gwen, and Kevin being aged up into their adolescence. Aside from the age difference, one drastic change is that Ben now retains wounds inflicted while in alien form even after he's reverted back human.

Video Games
  • The shift in style between the game Jak And Daxter and its successor, Jak II took place during the opening cinematic. In the original, the tone was light, the hero was a Heroic Mime, his rodential sidekick joked all the time, and the combat was minimal and hand-to-hand. At the beginning of Jak II the heroes traveled forward in time, released an extra-dimensional evil onto the world in the process, then skipped over two years of Jak being tortured under lab settings. After that, Jak got a voice, a sardonic attitude, a gun and became a card-carrying Phlebotinum Rebel; Daxter got some dirtier jokes, and was dropped from the title. This Time Travel based change was a plausible way to change the world of the game drastically in one scene, and it arguably worked.
  • Less successful was Double Dragon II: The Revenge. Marion becomes a Disposable Woman. The "Williams" character is more muscled. The "Loper" character now resembles Chuck Norris with an eyepatch. "Linda" now sports a mohawk and is a bit more butch. "Jeff" (a miniboss that resembled your characters but with a Palette Swap) now has red glowing eyes. The bosses make Giant Mook Abobo look like a midget. But it didn't add up to being truly dark or edgy. While the game was mildly successful, it never matched up with its predecessor.
  • A much less successful video game example was Bomberman: Act Zero for the XBox 360. That's right, Hudson tried to make Bomberman◊ Darker And Edgier.
    • To be fair, the original concept of Bomberman was rather dark (robot-like beings trapped in an underground arena and forced to kill each other with bombs) and the lighter feel of the original game was actually a compromise. However, none of the other games in the series make any references to Act Zero in any way, choosing to stick with the Hello Kitty-esque Bombermen everyone knows and loves (or at least has learned to tolerate).
  • And lest we forget Shadow The Hedgehog, where Sonic's Evil Twin Shadow (introduced in Sonic Adventure 2) was given the chance to drive cars, shoot guns, and brood over his purpose in life. Occasional cursing was added to the US version for kicks.
  • The teaser trailer in Kingdom Hearts suggested that Kingdom Hearts 2 would be Darker And Edgier and involve people in black raincoats fighting in a dark city. They did appear, but the overall game ended up being less grim than the original, if anything.
  • Advance Wars: Days of Ruin is clearly Darker And Edgier than the other three Advance Wars games, which sometimes bordered on silly. According to the rumor mill, the writers were good enough to do this the right way, rather than the stupid, more typical way.
    • Then again, this is a Nintendo franchise game. Even though they don't control third parties with their Censorship Bureau, they still internally abide by it within, if abit relaxed.
    • It managed to stay away from spicing the dialogue up with swearing, at least... even the US version.
      • Well, in the JP version the little bubble for being ambushed was "SHIT!" instead of "NOOO!". I can't tell whether changing that for the US was censorship or Narm-prevention.
      • It helped that characters died, a bio-weapon runs amok, and the main villains are rather reminiscent of Aribert Heim and Stalin.
  • The original Rayman was packed to the brim with cheery, bright colours, silly characters and all sorts of silly things that make its sequel, Rayman 2: The Great Escape, look extremely grim in comparison. Fortunately, the latter also added an additional sense of mystery and wonder, not to mention consistency, to Rayman's world, so it all works out.
  • Painkiller could be said to be the dark cousin to Serious Sam. Both are FPSes recreating the old-skool style of gunning down massed Mooks in War Sequences, but where Serious Sam's levels are bright and colourful with fantastic and cartoonish monsters, those of Painkiller are grim and subdued with hellish dark fantasy-style beasts. It is worth noting, though, that the two titles are done by different companies of different nationality (Croatian Croteam for Serious Sam and Polish People Can Fly for Painkiller), though, so this comparison may be the fault of a mind that thinks too much.
    • Moreover, when Serious Sam was released, some reviewers thought that the game was a bit too bright, light-hearted and silly, which didn't exactly keep up with the game's old-school Doom and Quake influence, or in one reviewer's words, "too Braindead and not Aliens enough". With its signifigantly meaner attitude, it looks like Painkiller was the game these reviewers wanted Serious Sam to be.
  • Pokémon Mystery Dungeon 2 Explorers of Time/Darkness. The original Pokemon MD was cute, child friendly, odd, and moral but had enough difficulty, action, and well thought of story line to plese most. Pokemon MD 2 however was darker and edgier. They either thought the original was too soft or wanted to scare little kids. First they put some of the most dispicable crimes in and made the quirky boss squad more sinister. They added a pinch of traumatizing images and scary concepts, other worldly storyline, more then a dozen ghost pokemon are turned into demons, torture, a trip to hell, subjective scenes, Primal Dialga whoes a Dialga that became the Pokemon Satan, and suicidal advice. They thought making your leader a childish Wigglytuff as comic relief could make it okay but it doesn't. Definity not a kid's game but it got an E-rating somehow. You may never heal after a certain sequence.
    • On the main Pokemon series--the series as a whole has gotten darker as time went on. The first set of games was antagonized by a poaching mafia; as the series progressed this went to genetic experimentation via radiation, to either flooding or drying up the planet, to creating a new universe in the villain's image. To say nothing of the Legendary Pokemon themselves, which went from powerful (and one case of a screwed-up cloning venture), to spectacularly powerful, to primordial forces of nature, to gods of time, space, and consciousness.
      • Of course, the main games still keep the Lighter and Softer parts intact as well, especially with the introduction of contests.
  • Actually done well for the nightmarish Twisted Metal: Black.
  • Rather than an adorable, Astro Boy android, the blue bomber of Mega Man X is a morally conflicted hero. Similarly, the comical Dr. Wiley was replaced with Sigma, a ruthless (and seemingly indestructible) robot bent on the total annihilation of the human race. It was still done rather well, Sequel Stagnation aside. Still, apparently Capcom knew when enough was enough, as a later series in the franchise, Mega Man Legends, significantly dials down the angst with less hard-edged artwork, a more reasonable difficulty level, and a comical cast of characters.
    • X's other sequel series Mega Man Zero goes even darker, with Zero as reploids' only hope of survival in a fascist world, with Copy-X as its supreme ruler. The games got less dark with each installment, as Zero and the resistance slowly succeed in bringing about better conditions.
      • Well, until the fourth game, where Zero dies trying to prevent a Kill Sat being Colony Droped after the second firing of its Wave Motion Gun is cancelled. The first destroying the only city in the world, leaving only the escapees and the ones that La Resistance could save in time alive.
      • The manga turns the whole thing into a comedy at times. In fact, it loses all seriousness by the time the second series comes around. It is absolutely hilarious, in this troper's opinion - especially the cowardly helmet-less Zero, and the Guardians bickering amongst themselves.
    • ZX was lighter... Except for the backstories of the four protaganists, the general atrocities caused by the antagonists, and Giro falling victim to Zero's death curse. It was still done well.
    • Mega Man Star Force was definitely darker than its predecessor, Battle Network... Somewhat. Appearances can be deceiving. Geo Stelar starts out being understandably depressed about his dad to the point where he won't go to school... But his depression quickly lifts the longer the Power Of Friendship thing hangs around (Then it hits a roadblock when Pat betrays him and Geo goes into a short-lived fit of Wangst). As far as this troper knows, Star Force actually lightens up quite a bit after this point. The anime and manga were more comedic in nature (The latter a lot more so, like the Zero manga).
  • In Prince Of Persia: Warrior Within, the likeable prince of the previous game had apparently given up both shaving and civility after years of being chased by the Dahaka. The game also became more combat-heavy, and threw out the atmospheric Middle-Eastern soundtrack of the previous game for generic, mediocre heavy metal. (Oh, and for "Even More Mature Gaming!", the lesser antagonists are women in Stripperiffic outfits, one of whom is introduced with an extreme close-up aimed directly at her thong-clad ass.)
  • Not even an obscure series like Snowboard Kids can escape this trope, with the DS installment gutting nearly everything that gave the earlier games their quirky charm for the sake of appealing to teenagers. Neither the critics nor the small but dedicated fanbase were amused, which possibly spells doom for the franchise.
  • Though Halo started off fairly grim in the first place, as the series progressed it went ever deeper down the tunnel. By Halo 3 there's some serious nastiness going on, especially regarding the Flood and the Nightmare Fuel inherent to some of Cortana's messages.
  • Devil May Cry 2 was clearly made under the assumption that the overblown camp of the first game was a bad thing, and decided to play the B-movie setting straight, as evidenced by inexplicably changing the stylish wise-cracking, cowboy-esque, demon hunter Dante to a generic, stoic badass who barely gets any lines. It might also have to do with the fact it was rushed into production without informing or involving the original creators. To say the least, it didn't turn out well. Capcom made up for it with a return to the appeal of the original with Devil May Cry 3.
  • Done extremely well in Grand Theft Auto 4, replacing the cheesy crime dramas with a rousing immigrant story wrapped in a crime drama, while retaining the extremely-funny humor. Complaining about this one is a good way to mark you as the dumbest of the Fan Dumb.
  • Arguably The Thousand Year Door is darker and edgier than the first Paper Mario, the first example, of many, that this game will be darker than the last is probably the rougeport gallows. I, as a preteen at the time, was going through my own darker and edgier phase, and when I saw it, I instantly thought "wow, this game is going to kick ass!", and I was right.
  • Conkers Bad Fur Day was originally going to be a kid-friendly platformer starring a cute little squirrel in a blue hoodie. Early screenshots of the game met a chilly reception from the gaming community, saying it looked suspiciously like a weak Banjo Kazooie knockoff (a fair criticism--the collection platformer was a genre which had plagued Rare around the turn of the century, resulting in the decent but largely unpopular Donkey Kong 64 and Star Fox Adventures). In response, Rare kept the cute squirrel and the platforming, but changed just about everything else, adding enough sex, gore, and profanity to make it perhaps the most perverse title ever released for the N64.

Professional Wrestling
  • The WWF's Attitude era gained so much attention because it was so much Darker And Edgier than the days of Super Hero-like wrestlers like Hulk Hogan, the fact that much of the new flavor was imported directly from ECW aside.

Web Comics

Tabletop Games
  • Warhammer 40000 takes this trope to insane levels. In fact, some groups of fans of the game have taken the phrase "Grim and Dark" (taken from the catch phrase of the game) to describe when this trope is used to an extreme, usually implying that it is done in a way that's So Bad Its Good. Something might be Dark and Edgy, but its nothing compared to the GrimDarkness of the Grim Dark future of Grim Dark.
    • Despite this fact, the background of the 5th edition of the game looks to this troper like a Darker and Edgier version of 40K. The fact that the Imperium is crumbling is shoved down a reader's throat even more than in previous editions, and there are hints that the Emperor's life-support device is failing (which would completely destroy all human civilisation, since FTL travel is only possible using the Warp- and only the Emperor can create the necessary navigation beacon).
      • Nevermind that, this troper, who has taken everything grim and dark in the universe in stride, whose Space Marine army is themed after WWII Panzer Divisions, who wrote an epic fanfic about Cadian Whiteshirts (who are basically child soldiers), felt deeply disturbed by the description of life in the Imperium in the 5th Ed Rulebook. I guess I draw the line at feral children fighting with one another over the flesh of the dead.
      • In fact, the 40K universe is probably the first franchise in history to reach the limit to which it can be further darkened and edged. The only way things could possibly be worse in the universe is for one of the more evil races to win. Unfortunately, turning the galaxy into a chaotic nightmare, leaving every planet in the galaxy as a lifeless ball of rock, or destroying all life in the galaxy except the sentient beings farmed as food for gods would mean that it isn't actually a game any more.
  • Dungeons And Dragons 4th edition has gone this route. Wacky Gnomes and Proud Warrior Race Guy half-orc are replaced with Dragon Men and Demon People. The default setting has changed from "Knights and Kingdomes" to "points of light in a sea of darkness". Sales figures over older editons are still pending....
    • Actually, Half-Orcs were never Proud Warrior Race Guy, that's what Dragonborn are. For the most part though, Dragonborn and Halforcs fill the same niches. The gnome and tiefling switch is better apples and oranges. Replace the angst-free fun loving inhently magical race with... demon people. Seriously, 'nuff said. On the other hand, the "Points of light in a sea of darkness" is not a darker setting. It's more of a 'golden age of exploration'. Settlements are relatively isolated in the wilderness, and most of the world is unmapped. Cue adventurers.
    • One must remember that Forgotten Realms wasn't the only campaign setting, just the most popular. Other settings are noticably darker, such as Greyhawk, Ravenloft and Dark Sun.
    • Not to mention that they did include a new kind of elves that are shinier, happier, more mystical and just all-around ''better'', like an entire race made of Galadriel.
    • This troper, for one, welcomes the lack of gnomes as a basic PC race. Goddamned gnomes.
  • Bliss Stage is essentially "Bokurano: The Roleplaying Game."

Music
  • Sonata Arctica's music has been progressing from the standard cheesy excesses endemic to power metal to more grim lyrics and darker sounds. It seems to be working, though one wonders how far they can stretch it...
    • Their music has always been a bit dark thematically, though, even if they did used to sound like an explosion in a Skittles factory.
  • The cover of Imagine by A Perfect Circle is darker, edgier, and down right creepy, according to some friends who know the original John Lennon version.
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