On Digital, later ITV Digital, was an early attempt to bring digital TV to British viewers. It was advertised by Johnny Vegas and a cute little Deadpan Snarker sock puppet monkey sidekick as in this advert. It wasn't a resounding success and ITV Digital died a quite public death with a lot of recrimination and lawsuits and all that fun stuff. But the Vegas/Monkey team were so loved that they ended up becoming the mascots of a completely different product, namely PG Tips. How do you reintroduce a pair of endearing and loved characters? Like this, apparently.
A literal example: Restoration Hardware, an upscale home furnishing chain, went from white walls, brightly lit stores, and a retro-industrial-Thirties/Forties/Fifties aesthetic to dark gray walls, very dim lights, and items with a modern/rough-edged look at some point after 2008.
On the flip side, Yu-Gi-Oh 5Ds 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 4Kids Entertainment from Macekreing it... not like it hasn't stopped them from trying.
Speaking of Yu-Gi-Oh!, Yu-Gi-Oh! GX went from the brainwashing cult of season 2 to the way darker tone of season 3. It started out with new main characters as usual and a seemingly tame (at least compared to season 2) villain until he gets defeated relatively quickly and then the series gets much darker including the characters dying when they lose a duel, at least that's what they are told, the main character getting tricked into releasing his Superpowered Evil Side and killing some of his remaining friends, and the The Man Behind the Man/Stalker with a crush/Hidden Agenda Villain possessing the main character's best friend. Although 4Kids Entertainment ruined season 3's dark tone in the dub, watching the Japanese version makes the dark tone obvious.
Little known fact: AKIRA was conceived as a Darker and Edgier retelling of Gigantor.
The actual Tetsujin remakes also have a touch of this. While the 1980s version wasn't particularly dark, the look of the series was redesigned to make it less cartoony and whimsical and more like the modern, high-tech Super Robot Genre shows of the day. This ultimately resulted in a rather bland show and it's very telling that when a sequel series, Tetsujin 28-FX came out in the 90s, despite the new robots being even more complex, overbuilt and gimmicky, with transformation and combination gimmicks and such, the original Tetsujin was drawn in the classic style, googly eyes and all. The second remake in the 00s, from the people who brought you Giant Robo, took it in a whole new direction, keeping the cartoonish 1950s visual style and wrapping it around a grim story about war and political intrigue... and a boy detective with a giant cartoony robot.
Every adaptation 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, but eventually rewards its long-suffering cast with a happy ending. Strangely, they keep improving.
Tekkaman Blade is a Darker and Edgier version of an earlier series called Tekkaman the Space Knight.
Pokémon Special, a manga spinoff of Pokémon's video game series, has fights to the death for everyone, humans included.
Pokémon RéBURST appears to be a much darker variant of the Pokémon manga aimed at an older demographic.
Pokémon Diamond and Pearl Adventure! is this too. Not in terms of violence, though it has been described as "Dragon Ball meets Pokémon" and is hefty on the fighting, but more-so in the plot. Especially with Mitsumi and her past is involved.
As far as the Pokémon anime goes, Diamond/Pearl and Best Wishes are both noticeably darker and more serious at times than much of what came before it, though the original Kanto season had it's fair share of dark moments as well.
Urasawa's Pluto does this to Tezuka's Astro Boy, showing the grittier side of life in the twenty-first century. This being Urasawa, it works tremendously well as the writing and themes are thoughtful and touching as well as dark and edgy.
Arguably a subversion. Urasawa doesn't change the basic plot very much at all, resulting in most of the same major robots dying as did in the original. ie all of them. What made the story darker was the fact that each robot was actually developed, rather than simply being a collection of powers to be destroyed by Pluto.
GaoGaiGar FINAL was much darker than the television show for two main reasons: first, it was an OAV so they could get away with things that wouldn't fly on broadcast television, like explicitly sexual Fanservice. And secondly, it was aimed at a seinen audience rather than at children.
Arguably happened to the anime installments of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha. The series starts out as an archetypal, formulaic Magical Girl series, but then the first season turns it into more of a serious action series with magical girls. The second season, meanwhile, goes from having no real villains to uncovering a SealedCosmic Horror (who ends up being an Anti-Villain anyway). The third season then becomes a straight military series with a little bit of magical girls.
The fandom tends to do this. It seems everyone wants it to be Darker And Edgier. Then, there's the popular BetrayerS doujinshi, which literally cranks the darkness and edgy-ness up to 11. Hayate and Nanoha being Lawful Evil. You can get it here.
Record of the Magical War Nanoha Force is said to be Darker and Edgier by the writer. And he wasn't kidding. In the 3rd Chapter, we were introduced to Card-Carrying Villain Veyron who introduces himself by killing everyone in a chapel that Touma had visited earlier. We won't see Nanoha fall to the dark side but definitely we will see more people being offed by Belkan weaponry then usual and maybe a few kills with Midchildan weapons. Then, a few chapters later, there's a brutal fight between Signum and the Dark Action Girl Cypha, which involves the latter being partly dismembered and the former, landing in a pool of her own blood with a sword in her gut.
And how Touma's device is relies on The Corruption to work, and Lily is a source of death and ruin as she accidentally causes people to degrade to Body Horror like meat blobs
Meanwhile, ViviD defies the trend, going Lighter and Softer than even the original series was (So far?).
The OVA of Magical Play is a much darker affair than the slapstick comedy of most of the original series—up to and including characters dying horrible deaths in big puddles of blood.
Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni utilizes this about every 5 or 6 episodes. Each arc begins with a few gruesome shots of one of the character's deaths, and then proceeds to be lighter and happier for a while, while steadily approaching the doom shown at the beginning of the arc, getting darker as it goes on.
Umineko No Naku Koro Ni not only follows a similar formula, but also has this trope by actually BEING darker and edgier than Higurashi. At least Higurashi was limited to depicting things that are relatively down to earth. Umineko gives us witches who pretty much do whatever they want, often to brutally graphic extents. One even delights in killing her victims in brutally creative ways, only to revive them and do it all over again. And when they're done with the killing they'll start with Mind Rape that makes Higurashi look like Casey And Friends.
In One Piece, the 6th movie, Baron Omatsuri and the Secret Island, the Straw Hats start to separate from each other, due to conflicts the antagonist is creating. The plot also contains some of the biggest High Octane Nightmare Fuel, as Luffy's comrades are eaten by a Man-Eating Plant called "Lily", the Big Bad's backstory is also different, showing that his crew died, and he found Lily, allowing him to create Replacement Goldfish, so long as he feeds Lily, the movie's plot is also slightly more complex.
Naruto Shippuden/Part II has been increasingly darker than the original series. The main character, Narutoloses the closest thing he has to a father, Jiraiya, his entire village is literally nuked, his mother figure Tsunade is knocked into a coma, he is actually put into a Hannibal Lecture by Pain which he couldn't retort to...even though he managed to get Pain to bring everyone back to life that he killed that day, the Village is still a crater, Tsunade is still in a coma, and Danzo became Hokage. THEN we get his largest player punches in regards to Sasuke, his former rival and best friend who had joined Akatsuki and attacked Killer Bee, and then attacked the Kage Summit. Learning how far his best friend had fallen caused him to actually have a Heroic BSOD and fall into an Angst Coma. And not to mention that Shippuden/II has more death, destruction, Accidental Nightmare Fuel, High Octane Nightmare Fuel, and Orochimaru-and later Madara creepiness to show it's much darker and edgier than Part I.
Digimon Tamers is an example of this trope done very well.
Digimon Savers is also a good example,thanks to emulating the above show
In-universe example in Ouran High School Host Club: Renge's first appearance has her making a video where the normally-cheery members of the club become darker personae, e.g. the Keet becoming a callous bully. It sells well enough to take the club out of debt.
Karakuridouji Ultimo seems to follow a zig-zag pattern with this trope and Lighter and Softer. The series started fairly light hearted, and comical, up until the chapter where Ultimo, the embodiment of good, beats up an evil doji into a rather nighmarish pulp while smiling. Then they threw in the main character's best friend turning into a Yandere, the world blowing up, and the entire good cast being killed quite brutally. Once everyone got better in Part 2 of the series, it went back to its original state, but then implied to have killed off most of the original Good Doji Masters. Then Part 3 got even worse, by having the earlier mentioned Yandere nearly rape the main character in a rather dark manner.
Once in The Seventies, there was a short shonen manga by Kazumasa Hirai and Hisashi Sakaguchi. Its name was Wolf Guy, and it was about the adventures of young werewolf Akira Inugami and his Hot Teacher Akiko Aoshika. Decades later, Yoshiaki Tabata and Yugo Yuuki (the authors of Akumetsu) took the basic concept of this manga and re-made it into a seinen story named Wolf Guy - Wolfen Crest - which is full of Gorn, Fan Disservice, etc. Inugami gets almost killed several times, Aoshika-sensei is almost completely broken in all senses, and Big Bad Haguro Dou goes from a mere Yakuza heir to one of the most despicable Complete Monsters in manga.
AD Police, the spin-off of Bubblegum Crisis, is darker, more violent and adds some psychological spins to the original series concept. The TV spin-off they produced to this spin-off a decade later surprisingly was closer in tone to the original Bubblegum Crisis.
Osamu Tezuka's Black Jack is a rather dark series to begin with, safe for some comedic touches usually provided by Pinoko. Osamu Dezaki's video adaptation in the 90's however takes the darkness to extremes and (for the most part) deletes all hints of humour in the story, opting for high-tension, highly stylized drama instead.
Gundam SEED, to frankly put, was pretty dark for an Alternate Universe Gundam series. You got yourself brutal atrocities committed by both sides which becomes a Guilt Free Extermination War with very little in the way of clear comic relief. Gundam 00 took this much further, increasing the death toll and toning down the comic relief, making it the darkest alternate universe Gundam...
That is, until Gundam Age unveiled its true colors from episode 14 onwards. Don't let the series' kiddy art designs fool you. While initially masquerading as a children's Gundam series for the first 13 episodes, the Love Interest gets brutally killed in episode 14 and The Hero consequentially takes the dark descent into becoming a genocidal Knight TemplarWho Fights Monsters. Oh, and the UE are Human All Along. Add the almost-complete absence of comic relief and the series being set in a Crapsack World that would feel right at home in the Universal Century, and you got a series that somehow manages to surpass SEED and 00 as the darkest AU series yet.
Where the Gundam series is concerned, it's sometimes darker and edgier in their side stories, regardless of the calendar. Comic relief aside, the overall progression of arcs, foreknowledge, the ending and themes show that the likes of Mobile Suit Gundam 0080 War In The Pocket and C.E. 73 Stargazer to be less sunshiny than their respective calendars' main series.
To a point Gundam franchise in general was darker and edgier in comparison to the other mecha anime around, with the themes, the (generally) Grey and Gray Morality, the various War tropes present and not to forget the fact that the franchise was started by a man known as "Kill 'Em All".
The Fooly Cooly manga is much darker and more bizarre than the anime its rather loosely based on. An example of this would be Naota killing his dad with a baseball bat.
Amazing Agent Luna is becoming this as of Year 2. Not only does Luna undergo TWO Plot Mandated Friendship Failures in the course of Volume 7, but it's hinted from the brief description of Volume 8 at the end of Volume 7 that she may pull a Face Heel Turn in Volume 8. In fact, a Face Heel Turnmay be her only option if she wants to win Francesca back, though that's just because she rejoined Elizabeth when she thinks Timothy had dumped her because of Luna.
The first Fullmetal Alchemist anime was this compared to the original manga. A lot of characters die who lived in the manga, there are fewer comedic Mood Whiplash moments, people suffer from Angst a whole lot more, the way Homunculi are created is a much darker theme; they were human transmutations that Came Back Wrong, instead of just created from red stones, the overall theme is considerably more cynical, the ending is far more bittersweet (though still optimistic). The people of Lior get hit the hardest by it, especially Rose. Two words: rape baby.
Ironically the Manga has a lot of dark elements, Ishbalan War in the anime is was a short Curb-Stomp Battle, while in the manga its full on War Is Hell and a number of chapters are devoted showing how horrible it was.
Front Mission is known for being a war drama, but Dog Life and Dog Style takes it Up to Eleven as it incorporates the grittiness of Red Eyes in a completely uncensored and brutal manner (Which relates the journalist who brings out the uncensored truth). In the first two issues of the manga it starts off showing gruesome death, rape/sex and ultra violence.
In Sailor Moon, the villain Queen Nehelenia appeared in two seasons, and the contrast between which is huge. Season 4 was mostly rather light-hearted: there was a pegasus, the villains were campy circus people who were commanded around by a weird old lady, and it focused mostly on Chibiusa; only at the very end there was a real difference. The first part of season 5, however, was entirely different, even breaking with the usual format. There were no monsters of the week, only Nehelenia's nearly indestructible mirror minions. In the course of the arc, Mamoru was brain-washed once again, resulting in Chibiusa almost fading, and the senshi were taken out one by one, sometimes in very painful manners (like Makoto being electrified almost to death by Nehelenia herself). This arc also brought back the outer senshi, who have a much more cynical approach to these matters... and they also get taken out. Usagi barely manages to win, but before that she has to go through a full-blown Break the Cutie process that almost throws her to the Despair Event Horizon.
Even more so, the last part of Stars. Where after a long search, the Sailor Starlights are reunited with their Princess... only for her to be killed. Then the Inner Seishi get killed. And we find out Mamoru has beenDead All Along for a while already. AND Haruka an Michiru kill Setsuna and Hotaru as a part of a Fake Defector plan, but fail and die at Galaxia's hands. And we're not done...
The Movie installments of Doraemon can easily feels like this, even if Nobita and friends remain good people. One movie deal with the horrid effect Black Magic (in a magical world), which comes from devils (who are aliens). Another deal with the revenge of the Reptilian people evolved from dinosaurs, who want to alter time so humans never exist. Yet another deal with the horrors of war as High Octane Nightmare Fuel aliens (who are humans in hazmat suit) invade a utopian planet inhabited by cute humanoid animals. The last one has a particular scene that can't be anything else but traumatic to its supposed audience.
THE iDOLM@STER - While the first half of the series was very lighthearted, the second half progressively began to take on darker tones, culminating in 765 Pro's rivalry with 961, Chihaya's dead little brother plot, and the Producer getting into a life threatening accident.
He is constantly abused by his wife, which is played for laughs in the original strip. In a rather dramatic Art Shift, the parody beginslike this and ends like this: showing Jiggs in a pool of his own blood as his vicious wife looms in the doorway, rolling pin in hand. This ran in Mad #17, 1954.
Maggs: You WORM! My dog is dead and it's all your fault!
Jiggs: Nobody getting beatings like me can survive... in this serious atmosphere!
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 predominantly 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. Also note that the pattern repeated itself with the movies. After the increasingly silly Batman Forever and Batman & 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 was written well enough in her own series to not come off as completely ridiculous.
Bat-Azrael was a darker, edgier, more brutish version of Batman, created to show what makes the true Batman not a vigilante. However, DC was totally ready to keep Azrael as Batman, if it sold well enough.
Jason Todd as Batman is similar to Azrael: a thuggish, heavily armored Batman who guns criminals down with his pair of pistols. Fans have taken to calling him "Gunbats".
Even the firsttwo Batman movies with Michael Keaton were intended to be darker-and-edgier versions of the Dark Knight than the campy Adam WestBatman most people had grown up with, partly in an attempt to cash in on the popularity of The Dark Knight Returns comic.
The Transformers Generation 2 comic books, loosed from even the moderate Contractual Immortality restrictions they had been operating under before, promptly started massacring the cast. Issue #1 cover copy: "This is Not Your Father's Autobot." #2: "Fort Max Gets the Ax." #3: "Killing Frenzy." The characters would also kill without hesitation and use guns that weren't their signature weapons.
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.
In Thunderbolts, however, Penance has come to terms with the Stamford incident not being his fault. 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 (e.g. the Hulk isn't merely violent or even murderous but cannibalistic; Quicksilver isn't just very protective of his sister the Scarlet Witch but in a sexual relationship with her; Tony Stark is a genius as expected — due to a painful cancer-like affliction which has spread brain matter throughout his body and will soon kill him). "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.
The biggest example of this in the Ultimate Universe is Captain America, who in the mainline universe is the embodiment of American ideals and values, including but not limited to equality, openness to political discourse, and dedication to international harmony. Ultimate Cap is a racist, sexist, hardliner who calls the French cowards, despite the fact that he fought alongside the Resistance in WWII. His characterization is more of a Deconstruction of the original idea: a man who's been frozen in ice since the 1940s and yet has to be the quintessential American hero for today, despite being the hero of (and thus holding ideals from) yesterday.
Said Ultimate Universe spread to the 616-universe, as far as evil Iron Man and Reed Richards and Cyclops expelling Xavier from the X-Men (even though Cyclops utterly bombed as Top Guy at the school as far as Xavier saving the X-Men's asses during the Messiah Complex X-Over) and starting his own murder squad, a move even Wolverine found distasteful and only agreed to lead to try and keep Scott from turning Wolfsbane, X-23, and Warpath into soulless murderers). Not to mention the whole "Spider-Man selling his soul" crap.
The whole "Professor X is no better than Magneto" creep from the Ultimate to the main universe that was exemplified by Deadly Genesis where it was revealed that Professor X led a team of X-Men to their deaths rescuing his original team from Krakoa and just mind-wiped everyone into forgetting that it happened and trying again with another new team. And that Professor X later realized that the Danger Room was becoming sentient but ignoring it leading to Danger being created years later.
A 2004 ThunderCats mini, Thundercats: The Return. Lion-O gets trapped in the Book of Omens for five years, and when he gets out he finds the Thundercats beaten and enslaved by Mumm-Ra. Of particular note are Wilykit and Wilykat. Let's just say that puberty has been good to them, and that Mumm-Ra has the same tailor for his slaves as Jabba the Hutt. There is also implied rape of Cheetara by the Mutants.
Marvel as much as said at the time that the thinking behind USAgent, War Machine, and Thunderstrike was to have Darker And Edgier versions of Captain America, Iron Man, and The Mighty Thor, without losing the originals. There's even a famous Avengers cover of the two versions facing off. Though created prior to the decade, they would see their heyday as Nineties Anti Heroes.
The DCU's Post Crisis universe was so grim it supposedly drove the Silver Age-inspired Superboy-Prime crazy — causing him to become a mass-murdering fanatic and perhaps the darkest and edgiest DC character of all time.
One of the flashpoint events leading to this was Wonder Woman's killing of Big Bad Maxwell Lord.
The Superboy-Prime saga, which climaxed in Infinite Crisis, was followed an even darker and edger storyline called 52, and also saw the relaunching of numerous series with a generally darker tone. A prime example is Checkmate; issue 1 featured a team of superpowered spies infiltrating a Kobra base and leaving no survivors (with the Bad Ass heroine of the series, Sasha Bordeaux, shooting the Kobra Big Bad dead, execution style). The series muted its violence considerably after the first half-dozen issues.
While not generally darker and edgier as a whole, the TheNewFiftyTwo DCnU titles are divided into groups, such as "Batman", "Superman", "Justice League", etc. Two of the groups are known as "The Dark" (supernatural titles) and "The Edge" (titles about anti-heroes).
To put it in perspective: the original X-Force itself was a Darker and Edgier version of New Mutants and X-Men for that matter. To make a team that saw its heyday during The Dark Age seem Lighter and Softer in comparison is... something.
Dare, a 1991 take on Frank Hampson's iconic British 1950s space explorer Dan Dare. The 1991 version was written for Toxic magazine by Grant Morrison, and illustrated by Rian Hughes. Dare awakes in the 1990s to find that Britain has become a capitalist society, and that a thinly-disguised parody of Margaret Thatcher has sold Britain to the evil Mekon. During the course of the story all of the main characters are killed - Digby even has his arm blown off - and the final edition ends with Dare blowing up London with a nuclear bomb.
Parodied extensively in the Belgian comic Kiekeboe, where in one issue, The Simstones, a character from the comic buys the publishing rights to the comic (very meta) and introduces a darker and edgier style.
Marvel Year In Review 1993 parodied this in their own titles, by taking characters that this had been done for, and then making new characters that turned it Up to Eleven:
Spider-Man — Venom — Carnage — Bile (Cannibalistic madman with the proportionate strength of a spider)
Captain America — U.S. Agent — The Patriot Missile ("Blow all them foreigners to hell and let God sort 'em out!")
Thor — Thunderstrike — Godhead (Convinced he is God. Holed up in his compound, waiting for Ragnarok)
New X-Men: Academy X. After House of M, the title was hit by Darker and Edgier hard, but the change was especially marked in contrast with the first half of the series. Under Weir and De Filippis, the book was fairly light-hearted fluff that focused on relationship drama. When Kyle and Yost took over, dozens of students were immediately blown up, and everyone else was left traumatized by their failed rescue attempts. Then a main character was shot in the head and killed. And another main character betrayed the team, was mutilated, and died. They were replaced by a former assassin Tyke Bomb. Succeeding plotlines saw the entire team sent to HELL, one of them tortured and spending a lot of time crying herself to sleep, and so forth and so forth. In fact, most of Kyle and Yost's work falls under this trope. See also: X-Force, mentioned above.
Now they're going to do it to Superman. The announced reboot of Superman in the 'Earth One' title is listed as being darker, sexier, and moodier.
Not really, the reboot, is only going to change smaller details in the Superman's universe. Like Lois and Clark not being married anymore. They aren't going to make the blue boy scout, too dark, as the descriptions for the reboot, were only to get people talking about it.
DC's Vertigo imprint revolves around material intended for mature audiences. After the success of Swamp Thing, Doom Patrol, Hellblazer, Shade, the Changing Man, and Animal Man, all of which starred fairly obscure characters from established DC canon, there were a few misfires - up to an including a brooding, psychological take on Brother Power, the Geek. For the uninitiated, Brother Power is a human-sized hippie rag doll given life and super strength by magic sunshine who once ran for a US congressional seat and was last seen orbiting the Earth. Someone tried to make that serious.
Similarly, Grant Morrison himself tried to revive Kid Eternity in a darker and edgier fashion. Kid Eternity was a demi-angel who could summon the spirits of dead famous people. All told, it actually worked out surprisingly well; the miniseries sparked a (short-lived, but still) ongoing by Ann Nocenti, if that's any indication.
Parodied in issue #10 of the old Chip N Dale Rescue Rangers comic book. In it, the Rangers are brought to the set of a movie featuring a dark-and-gritty version of, of all things, a superhero squirrel puppet who originally appeared in a Sid And Marty Krofft-type children's show. The character's creator is shown working as the movie's creative consultant and is not at all happy with the way the movie portrays his creation.
Let's not forget My Immortal, in which most of the characters have converted to Satanism "STANISM", Harry's scar is now a pentegram, and all the characters seem to do is Wangst around, cut their wrists, go to My Chemical Romance concerts, have sex, and proclaim how gothic "goffik" they are. The irony being that, for all its posturing, it's not nearly as dark as the actual later books of the series, for which see Literature below.
Challenge of the Super Friends: The End, where the Legion of Doom travel to a horrific Lovecraftian universe and end up like victims in the Event Horizon and Hellraiser films, while the Superfriends become fascistic and attempt to make their world a utopia in the villains' absence.
Aeon Natum Engel takes Neon Genesis Evangelion and makes it darker by removing most of the elements that made the original dark, giving everyone mandatory psychological counseling, making the characters competent... and introducing the Cthulhu Mythos.
Angel Island Zone. A retelling of the events of Sonic 3 from Knuckles' end of things. More blood, more tears, more drama, and more character development. And surprisingly, it manages to pull it off quite well.
You're Ready and You're Willin' by Hector Rashburn is in the same vein. Yes, there are two fanfics based on a t-shirt. Never underestimate the power of fandom.
Tiberium Wars manages to make the Command & Conquer Tiberium universe even darker than it already is, by virtue of introducing War Is Hell to show just how horrific the battles and weaponry in the setting really are.
Latias Journey is an awesome, hilarious but hellish Pokémon fan fic.
Take Axis Powers Hetalia- a cute, comedic series about anthropomorphised countries- twist history a bit, add a good dosage of mind screwing and a bizarre love quadrangle, and you get All He Ever Wanted, a series of fanfics set in a world where England is on the Axis Powers' side, America is Communist, Prussia is a batshit Nazi and rape machine, Austria is suddenly Jewish, Hungary and Liechtenstein are raped, and everyone's suffering for it. The fandom's opinion on it... well, it's very mixed.
Note that the AHEW crew are not the first nor the last to give this particular series this makeover. The Hetalia fandom as a whole is greatly enamored with the trope. The results... well, are varied.
The Oneiroi Series is notorious with fans for this. While The Order of the Stick is notLight And Fluffy, the series is darker with frequent (VERY frequent) sex-related violence (usually rape) and a potential Downer Ending, as well as the fact it has very dark themes involving the relationship between children and their parents (or parental substitutes) and generally the role of adults and family in raising a kid. It's very specific.
Falling Stars takes the characters of Lucky Star and places them into the Capital Wasteland. Needless to say, it's not nearly as cheery as the original source material.
Special mention should go to the "Rotten Dirty Bastard" fics. The special was Black Comedy dedicated to going to extreme lengths describing how much The Nostalgia Critic makes everyone's lives suck. The fics will either point out the flaws in these "happier lives" (like Iron Liz never meeting Linkara as one example) or have this heartbreaking sense of loss that makes you want to cry.
The constant and unrelenting use of this trope in Pokémon fanfic spawned this parody, which also doubles as a parody of grimdark movie reboots in general.
The Pokémon anime has taken on a darker edge with Cornova's Poké Wars. It is much more violent, cynical, grittier and much less idealistic than the anime it was based on.
For a show as innocuous as My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic, there is quite a substantial amount of fan media with this in mind. One of the most notable examples is Cupcakes, a fan fiction that has gained memetic status within the Brony community for its rather High Octane Nightmare Fuel portrayal of Pinkie Pie and her cupcake recipe. Another example would be Fallout Equestria, a MLP and Fallout crossover featuring a post-apocalyptic Equestria.
Winter War takes the darkest elements of Bleach and runs with them. Bleach can get pretty violent, but it's usually contained in one-on-one duels, the only people who die are villains, and no matter how badly a good guy is hurt, they're unlikely to suffer any lasting consequences to it. Winter War throws that all out the window. Heroes die. Heroes will fight dishonorably or gang up on opponents if they have to. There are limits to what healers can do, and lingering injuries complicate daily life and battle alike. Aizen's Hollowfication experiments are shown as horrific and dehumanizing rather than being used as a source of power-ups. And the authors don't pull punches about the likely states of mind of people who've been on the front lines- or taken captive, or waiting back home for loved ones who are probably dead- for months.
Team Fortress 2 is normally quite a violent game, but always in a light-hearted and comedic way. Respawn Of The Dead, on the other hand, is brutal and disturbing in its violence and very, very dark. Cat Bountry takes the personal quirks of the characters and expands them into full-blown psychosis. The result is actually quite good.
Considering the time gap in between each movie's theatrical release, this seems somewhat appropriate. It's almost as if Pixar directed the film at an older audience who grew up on the older films. This Troper was fairly young when he first saw Toy Story. They way Toy Story 3 ended it felt like Pixar wanted to give the now Teen/Young Adult audience of the first movie some closure on the series they came to love when they were kids.
And the entire series, along with Pixar itself, was almost shut down completely due to not being satisfied with the "edgy" Toy Story cut; naturally, they pulled off a miracle and created the classic trilogy we know and love today.
Clarifying edit: The team wasn't satisfied with the "edgy" Toy Story cut, and we're talking about the original one; the bigwigs demanded the movie be "edgy" so that the cynical children of the nineties would give it the time of day. The original cut was dark on a level you might shy away from in most adult movies. How dark? Try "Woody was a manipulative psychopath who used terror to rule the other toys with an iron fist, and the conflict of the movie was basically that Buzz didn't catch on." There's concept art of Slinky Dog licking Woody's boot in terror.
"Really, really little kids should not see this movie. They should wait till they get older. We're getting some reactions from people who were disappointed that their four-year-old was a little freaked out by it. Well, I don't want to compromise the intensity in order to please a four-year-old."
Even in comparison to the first movie, the sequel is perhaps even darker. Its Villain Song is considered much more intense than that of the first, subjects like child abuse and war are dealt with much more bluntly, and the violence is both heavier and more frequent.
The 2009 made-for-DVD animated film Wonder Woman takes this approach. Wonder Woman is shown killing on numerous occasions, including cold-bloodedly killing several guards (including two who have their throats cut by her tiara). The film also ramps up the sexual innuendo.
The G.I. Joe animated film G.I. Joe: Resolute predated the live-action G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra in depicting the Joes as actually hitting and killing enemy soldiers, something that was rather glossed over in the classic TV series.
Kung Fu Panda 2 is significantly darker than the first film. Multiple characters are Killed Off for Real on screen, (though we don't see their bodies) and the Never Say "Die" rule is broke a LOT, to where it seems like "death", "dead", and "kill" are used every other sentence. The villain wants to take over all of China with giant cannons that are seemingly unstoppable and really are used to kill.
Let's not forget the repressed memories of Po's traumatizing childhood.
How much darker it is than the first film is debatable. It's still quite kid-friendly, and while there is more action, it's justified due to the villain having an army with him, and at least most of it is just as mild as anything in the first one. On top of that, "kill" and "dead" were already used relatively normally in the first one, and Tai Lung was considered pretty scary, even to some of the adults. If there's anything darker about this installment, it's some of the underlying themes and the status of the villain. Other than that, there's still quite a bit of comedy mixed in with the action, and most of the deaths that are in it are offscreen.
Babe 2: Pig in the City is very much this trope compared to the original. The original was about a little pig on a farm who was taken in by the female sheepdog and was mostly lighthearted. Tear Jerker here and there, but the darkest element was when Babe's parents are herded to the slaughterhouse. In Babe 2, there's a hotel with illegal pets, animal control, a vicious bulldog that nearly hangs him trying to kill Babe, and one of those little wheelchair dogs who almost dies. Accidental Nightmare Fuel for some kids.
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. This movie is much more in keeping with the original novel's tone as far as the titular character's obsession with Christine goes, to the point of his being quite willing to kill for her, but even then it's still a gentler version of the story compared to the original novelization.
Richard Kelly wrote a screenplay for Louis Sachar's lighthearted Black Comedy, Holes, that went in this direction. Instead of searching for buried treasure at a juvenile delinquent summer camp, the movie would have had the boys searching for nuclear weapons in a post-apocalyptic Texas. One scene has Stanley visiting a prostitute. The studio instead used the screenplay written by Sachar himself.
A common trend in films about King Arthur, which is a pretty downbeat legend to begin with.
Excalibur combines magical realism with gritty, bloody violence, reaching a peak of dark edginess in an early scene in which a knight in blood-stained armour tricks the wife of his nemesis into having sex with him. There are plenty of impalings and crow-pecked corpses to go around as well.
Robert Bresson's Lancelot du Lac. What it lacks in gore and Dung Ages ambiance, it makes up for by being extremely dour, mechanical and joyless, Bresson films are wont to be.
The "historical" film King Arthur from 2004 has the Knights of the Round Table turn out to be just a pack of Roman mercenaries fighting evil Saxons in a cold, windswept wasteland of an England.
While all of the James Bond films have been action movies, with varying levels of drama & humor, Licence to Kill was by far the darkest of the original series. It starts with Colombian drug lord Franz Sanchez feeding Bond's longtime friend & ally to a shark (after killing his new bride), followed by Bond resigning from MI 6, going rogue, and killing every member of Sanchez' organization in increasingly graphic ways. How graphic? The Dragon gets dispatched by being put through a giant cocaine grinder.
Also the newer films seem to be a darker and edgier reboot of the series, what with all the murder, torture, and the lack of fun gadgets that had been so prevalent in the former movies.
The second Home Alone film is much less lighthearted than the first, taking place in New York rather than a Chicago suburb, and with Kevin using much more dangerous traps against the Bandits. Also, when they catch him, Harry fully intends to murder Kevin.
Even the classic E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was not immune to this trope. When E.T. first became a hit in theaters, Steven Spielberg and E.T. screenwriter Melissa Mathison came up with a treatment for a sequel: E.T. II:Nocturnal Fears, in which Elliot and his friends are kidnapped by evil albino offshoots of E.T.'s species. Fortunately, E.T. returns to Earth and rescues them, but not until after the kids have all been tortured. Needless to say, they thought better of it.
TRON: Legacy is much more grim than the 1982 original. When you got programs violently shattering into data, genocide, a brutal dictator, and brainwashing programs to invade the real world, you got more than just the suits and the environment that's darker than the first Tron.
Even the 1982 Original was a D&E risk on Disney's part, their second attempt after The Black Hole. Recall that five years earlier, they released Pete's Dragon, which was one of their most saccharine entries. The classic had a few nasty deaths (including an Involuntary Battle to the Death), Cold-Blooded Torture, and some heavy-duty religious themes. Then, there's the infamous Deleted Scene that's just shy of a full-blown sexual encounter...
The Godzilla franchise jumps back for with this and Lighter and Softer. No film has ever topped the original but some try pretty hard. 'Mothra vs. Godzilla' was bleaker than the goofy King Kong vs. Godzilla, Godzilla vs. Hedorah had people melting and one of the biggest body counts of all the franchise after the kid-centered Godzilla's RevengeThe Godzilla movie Terror of Mechagodzilla was Darker and Edgier than "Godzilla vs. Mecha-Godzilla which featured violence but it had a very pulpy story, Terror, even deals with the issue of suicide.Godzilla 1985 dealt with a possible world war III and was politically heavy, Biollante was just a tad bit lighter but very dark still. Godzilla vs. Destroayh dealt with Godzilla dying, Jr. dying, and possibly a nuclear meltdown. GMK was even bleaker with a Complete Monster Godzilla terrorizing Japan than Megaguirius.
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra had EVERYONE wearing black and a knives and bullets always finding their way into enemy eye sockets. Then we have the Baroness display her cleavage and the buxom Scarlett wearing a sports bra while on a treadmill.
The Transformers series in general. Robots are getting ripped apart, blown up, or their faces bifurcated. The added sex (and not much else) is supplied by Megan Fox.
Although amputation, decapitation and on at least one occasion, crucifixion, were all features of the 80s transformers comics.
And the third film cranks it Up to Eleven, with humans being assassinated, as well as having Sentinel Prime launch a full scale Decepticon assault on Earth, complete with scenes of carnage.
Rob Zombie's remakes of the first two Halloween films fits this trope. While the originals were fairly dark in their own right, Zombie amps it Up to Eleven by creating a darker, gritter world filled with rapistorderlies, necrophiliacs, Abusive Parents (namely Michael Myers'), and a barrage of characters who swear like sailors. Even Michael himself kills in a more violent, brutal manner. Needless to say, not everybody was fond of these changes.
Literature
The Berenstain Bears books normally come in the form of small short books that deal with small family issues like being afraid of the dark at night and way too much junk food. But they also had mini-chapter books that dealt with slightly darker themes like shoplifting, friendships going sour, political controversy, and the destruction of natural habitats.
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 protagonist's forbidden love affairs, him being gay and the setting being the 18th century, for all the shock they're worth. They may or may 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 smoldering glances, kilts, time travels and duels, but the male love interest's the one who suffers all the traumatic villain-initiated rape scenes and Gabaldon doesn't hold back on the gore or inequality much.)
Wicked and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is a fluffy, heartwarming story of a few friends in a magical country. Wicked, the novel, doesn't go more than a few pages without some swear word or mention of sex, or just sex. Gregory Maguire had a pretty dirty mind... there is a lot of weird romance in it, like Elphaba's father and mother were both in love with the same man, Elphaba's roommate was in love with her (but married a older rich guy, who all Gelphie shippers insist is an abusive ass), Elphaba's guy friend and his friend may have had a hint of romance... it never ends.
And yet this isn't the actual thrust of the plot. The Wizard is a tyrant, using a secret police and assassination to suppress dissension and many ethnic groups. Conscious, sapient Animals are sent to farms and stripped of their rights, resulting in many Animals going into hiding. Elphaba herself is willing to commit murder to help her cause, and works for what can only be called a terrorist group at one point. Her mentor, Doctor Dillamond, is brutally murdered for coming close to proving the minor point that Animals (the sapient kind) and animals (the normal kind) and humans are made from the same stuff. Religious tensions between Tick-tokism (straw-man science), Lurline (straw man paganism), and the Unionists worshiping the Unnamed God tears apart society. The Wizard's projects come at severe cost in life, such as the destruction of the Quadlings' country for ruby mines. Racism between humans - especially towards Winkies and Quadlings, is common (though Munchkinlanders of means always "marry into height)." The land is caught in a terrible drought. The Yellow Brick Road and Emerald City are both wasteful boondoggles. Witch sex is hardly the 'darker and edgier' in Wicked.
And the original Wizard Of Oz book isn't as "fluffy and heartwarming" as many might think from seeing the 1939 musical film. In the book, for instance, the Tin Woodsman is made of tin because when he was a normal human, the witch enchanted his axe to repeatedly cut off various parts of his body which he kept replacing with tin. Also, the witch enslaves Dorothy and her friends at one point.
Neil Gaiman gave Snow White a similar treatment in his short story "Snow, Glass, Apples."
The Harry Potter books tended to get Darker And Edgier as they went along. Which was no accident. Rowling set out to write a series that would grow up with its audience, and it was published over a decade — so the same 10-year-olds expected to read Philosopher's Stone were expected to be about 20 when they read Deathly Hallows, and ready for more mature fare. Naturally, this was entirely lost on most Concerned Parents, leading to oodles of Fan Dumb and What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?. This started with a noticeable difference between Goblet of Fire and Prisoner of Azkaban
Many of the poems in Songs of Experience are darker counterparts to poems in Songs of Innocence, for example "THE Chimney Sweeper" to "The Chimney Sweeper", "Infant Sorrow" to "Infant Joy", and both "The Human Abstract" and the cut poem "A DIVINE IMAGE" to "The Divine Image".
After the success of her second novel Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen wrote to her sister Cassandra that she felt it was "too light, and bright, and sparkling" and planned to write something different next time. The result was her most realistic and controversial novel, Mansfield Park.
Wicked Lovely was, on its own, dark, due to being an Urban Fantasy novel about The Fair Folk. Ink Exchange was much, much, much more so. Then came fragile eternity, the Lightest and Softest of the series. Then came Radiant Shadows, which was similar in tone to Ink Exchange, with the additions of Tish being Killed Off for Real, and Irial being wounded to the extent that he'll die within a fortnight. So, it's pretty much Darker and Edgier And Deader.
Many of the original Brothers Grimm fairytales were this before Disneyfication.
The Dresden Files, while never sparkles, rainbows, and kittens, is getting darker. Genocide being the most recent inclusion...
And that's the protagonist's doing. The villains have gotten considerably larger-scale as well, but the constant character development justifies all of this. The turning point seems to be post-Grave Peril (book three), then changes again post-Dead Beat (book 7), and seems to be headed that way post-Changes (book twelve).
The Dresden Files, already far from a fluffy saccharine series, got a fair bit darker with Ghost Story. Murphy's withdrawn and hostile, Molly is a few fries short of a happy meal, and the Fomor are a lot like the Red Court without the love and sense of fair play.
Weirdly enough, the Cambridge Latin Course textbooks. The first book were mostly just fairly light-hearted stories about Caecilius and his family, all of whom come across as genuinely nice people... until the last chapter, when Vesuvius erupts, killing almost the entire cast (even the dog!) The next book moves to Roman Britain, where a new main character, Salvius, is introduced. In his very first story, he executes one of his slaves for the heinous crime of being too sick to work, and things mostly go downhill from there. The final book ends with Salvius being taken to court for fraud and attempting to commit suicide to keep his honour intact.
Caecilius was a real person, and he did probably die in either the eruption of Vesuvius or an earlier earthquake. They had to stay true to history if they wanted to use someone who had actually lived...
The Star Shards Chronicles trilogy starts out with some fairly dark horror themes, but stays PG-13. The final book, however, turns up the sex-and-profanity dial quite a bit.
A series of original novels based upon the Tomb Raider games was published in the mid-2000s. While the games themselves had become darker and edgier over time, the novels fully recast Lara as a killer more than an explorer and archeologist. One novel, The Man of Bronze, is particularly violent, with Lara describing in first person how she mercilessly kills a group of thugs (in the process recalling how she once killed a man while kissing him). Later, she attempts to kill a man in cold blood for apparently no other reason than he was painting a sexy portrait of her (she is unsuccessful).
Stuck starts off fair enough, though in its final episode the themes get darker and there's a bit more violence and black humor. Not surprising, considering that the main characters become fugitives.
The Cinderella adaptation Sunny Ella casts Cinderella as a deluded murderer and Rapunzel as a soulless half-vampire.
The Nancy Drew Files and Hardy Boys Casefiles spin-offs weren't really an attempt to go Darker and Edgier, but a switch to a new publisher removed most of their previous roadblocks, namely Never Say "Die", No Hugging, No Kissing, and the like. In doing so, they also got better written as a side effect, and fans of both series consider them some of the better books in their respective franchises.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the essence of this trope. The TV series is a considerable case of "Darker and Edgier" than the movie, which was a high-camp spoof of horror movies. Almost all viewers agree that the tone of the TV series was a marked improvement.
A Darker and Edgier remake of the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie is currently under development. In season 1 of the TV series, some of the events of the movie were referenced, but a movie with a different script (an early draft), so a large number of fans have been keen for a remake which fits into the Buffy canon. In spite of this, the news has not been well received, mainly due to the absence of Joss Whedon and the more understandable absence of Sarah Michelle Gellar*
The TV series was Dawson Casting in the first place, but some people still want to see the older cast reprising even younger roles
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In addition, Angel was a Darker and Edgier spin-off of Buffy, dealing with more mature issues, having a higher cast turnover, and including a higher mortality rate.
With its much smaller quantities of humor and less likeable Protagonists, Dollhouse is quite a bit darker than Whedon's other work.
The Doctor Who spinoff Torchwood was billed as "Darker and Edgier" than its family-aimed parent, which amounted to quite a bit of sex and violence. While not as overt, series 2 still had far more sensitive material than could ever be shown at 7pm, and the miniseries Children of Earth upped the depression and utter hopelessness of the show to eleven.
Doctor Who has the mid-1980s period where Eric Saward went to town with his "gritty realism" ideals, and many of the adult-fan-aimed parts of the Doctor Who Expanded Universe.
Parodied on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (of all places) in the episode, "A Space Oddity", where the Darker and Edgier and Bloodier and Gorier revival of a Star Trek-like show, "Astro Quest," was revealed to SF convention goers by the murder-victim-to be/new show's producer. This Battlestar-esque Edgier version was so bad that one of the con-goers leaps up and screams to the producer, "You suck!" The yeller was Ron D. Moore, creator and Exec Producer of the new Battlestar series, in a real-life Stealth Parody (embedded within a Parody Retcon) of what happened to HIMSELF when he introduced the "re-imagined" BSG, back in 2002. The episode, incidentally, was written by David Weddle and Bradley Thompson, writers of many Battlestar episodes—who got to throw away their BSG Series Bible and use any and all Technobabble that came to mind. During this scene, actress Grace Park (the Cylon Sharon and now-star of Yet Another Edgier and Darker remake, Hawaii Five-O) was in the audience, looking equally appalled, to complete the inside joke. Between the many Battlestar references and Star Trek homages, this was certainly one of Television's Crowning Moment of Funny. Fortunately for the CSI 'verse the creator of the D&E&B&G version is also the episode's Asshole Victim.
Speaking of CSI, CSI: New York was supposed to be the Darker and Edgier counterpart to the Brighter and Shinier CSI: Miami: Mac Taylor lost his wife in 9/11; the lab was in a dingy 100-year old stone building; the area where the deceased were identified by their loved ones was a cramped, dark room where the corpses were lifted into the light by a hydraulic "elevator"; and, of course, liberal abuse of Unnaturally Blue Lighting (lampshaded in the pilot when Mac and H are lit by their respective filters: H is bathed in a warm orange glow while Mac is in cold blue shadow), though it only lasted one season.
The 2007 revival of Bionic Woman. Did we mention that it was produced by David Eick, the co-Exec Producer of the Edgier & Darker Battlestar Galactica? Oh, yeah...in the show's short lifetime, BSG stars Katee Sackhoff and Aaron Douglas came in to help add that extra touch of dark.
Seasons 3-5 of Miami Vice are a marked departure from the first two seasons. This was largely caused by Law & Order writer Dick Wolf taking up head writer duties on the show. The Daytona was destroyed and replaced with the Testarossa, the pastel colours disappeared, the plots got much more serious (see Zito's death), and the overall tone was much more grim.
Stargate Atlantis was announced to be Darker And Edgier than Stargate SG-1. It dealt with an all around darker atmosphere, Anyone Can Die, along with an arc enemy intended to be even more frightening than the Body Horror of the Goa'uld and Scary Dogmatic Aliens of the Ori. Unfortunately, they forgot to keep them dead, and the enemy's only advantages were soon nullified, until all they had was numbers.
To be fair, early on Stargate Atlantis did a good job of killing or bussing well-liked supporting characters and a main character was even Put on a Bus mid-season 2. They did start to shift away from this as the series progressed, though.
Stargate Universe in turn is a Darker and Edgier version of the previous two Stargate series. What makes this one significant is that the creators stated that it will be a Darker and Edgier Stargate from the get-go. And then... They never really shut up about it and all they were ever talking about was how much darker, edgier and grittier Universe will be.
Tin Man has DG (Dorothy Gale) going to the Outer Zone (yup, the O.Z.) where she befriends a man who has lost part of his brain to evil experimenters, and a tortured empathic beast who seems to be a human/lion crossbreed, and the "Tin Man" of the title, a cop who wears a tin star.
He was also locked in a metal life support box that kept him alive but awake and unable to move or talk, furthering the Darker And Edgier parallels. The whole thing is pretty much a combination of the movies, the book, and a bunch of Darker and Edgier twists and story details.
Ultraman has had various installments like this. First there was Leo in 1974, which dealt with slavery and had a Kill 'Em All style ending before Tomino even had his own series.
Ultraman Nexus, which was supposed to be a Darker and Edgier reboot of the franchise aimed at a shonen/seinen audience, but got Screwed by the Network and placed in a Saturday Morning Kids Slot.
Power Rangers In Space seemed to have a more mature theme compared to the previous seasons at the time. It was the first season to carry the Luke, I Am Your Father trope. It was also the first season where the bad guys actually used their forces to take over all of Earth, not just aim for a single city. It was also a tragic fair well to a mentor who started it all, Zordon, who commits a Heroic Sacrifice, the first death of a good guy in the series.
Power Rangers RPM is much, much, much darker than either the whole Power Rangers franchise or its source material Engine Sentai Go-Onger, going so far as to kill off a large percentage of humanity in the nuclear bombardment of a Robot War, and deal with serious psychological repercussions of traumatic events and childhoods at times. Power Rangers in general, by contrast, is generally the poster child for Never Say "Die", and Go-Onger was very much a silly Lighter and SofterSuper Sentai series, complete with monster song-and-dance numbers.
In the original version of Survivors, the third season goes in this direction; at the very least, the characters appear to be taking a lot fewer baths.
In the 70's, not long after the series was created, MAD Magazine gave us Sesame Street with random gang violence, drugs, evictions, prostitutes, pimps and gangsters called Reality Street (the writer was a pessimist). Even the intro was changed - Smoggy days, feeling my lungs decay. It's a street of depression, Corruption, oppression! It's a sadist's dream come true! And masochists, too! Can you tell me how to get, get away from Reality Street?
This trope happened to The West Wing in an odd way since the original show had almost no on-screen violence involving the main cast, it couldn't be ramped-up: the last three seasons saw the artificial retconning of character personalities from the idealistic to the cynical end of the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism, deleting a lot of the morality from the characters' choices to make them "grayer", a shift to Ripped from the Headlines crises instead of political ones, a lot more military-oriented storylines, more disasters and suspense, a lot of verbal fighting and drama to make up for the fact that there was no regular violence, making the rare instances of violence more frequent, and casting a much darker political climate over the previously sensible in-universe Washington. Needless to say, the fans saw through this ploy right away and disapproved of its artificiality, especially as seasons 3 and 4 had already done a very different, organic take on the darker and edgier convention. Oddly enough however, the show did avoid MOST (emphasis on "most") easy opportunities for inserting more sex into the show.
The American remake of Shameless: William H. Macy decided to play the main character as a "realistic" unsympathetic drunk, which pretty much sapped the humor out of the show. It should be noted that the original already takes place in a Crap Sack World filled with Dirty Cops and other degenerates.
And among the Heisei era of Kamen Rider, the darkest series to date was not Kamen Rider Kuuga but Kamen Rider Ryuki as even in Kuuga most of the protagonists were definitely good and the main character is a by the book Showa type hero who doesn't get put down for being a Wide-Eyed Idealist. Ryuki however puts the Riders as bad as their monsters they fight and it is seemingly impossible to escape this vicious loop.
Some believed that Kamen Rider Faiz was the darkest of the Heisei era, you got swearing and blood everywhere, massive Accidental Nightmare Fuel, characters dying on a regular basis by dissolving to ash, and the even darker novel. Regardly, both Ryuki and Faiz are commonly accepted as being the darkest Heisei rider series.
In a similar tone to the Japanese Kamen Rider series, Kamen Rider Dragon Knight is this for North American tokusatsu. Unlike its counterpart, Power Rangers, KRDK regularly dealt with betrayal, distrust, questionable motives and underlying truths in initially good-looking characters. It also did away with the formulaic Monster of the Week in lieu of a more naturally-flowing, arc-based narrative. KRDK was also much more serious and dramatic than Power Rangers, with very little in the way of comic relief outside of the occasional moment from Lacey and Trent, both of whom faded out of the show around episode 20. While still considerably lighter than the above-mentioned, grim-and-serious Kamen Rider Ryuki, KRDK deserves mention for making itself a name in tokusatsu circles as an attempt to make a US Kamen Rider without tampering with what makes a Kamen Rider a Kamen Rider by toning it down to a Power Rangers rip-off/copy.
Then Garo kicked in, reducing Kamen Rider into a three-storey building under its ten-storey height. To be short, it is full of kaijins which are far, far scarier than any kaijins ever made to the point of High Octane Nightmare Fuel.
The 2011 pilot for a new version of Wonder Woman, although not picked up by NBC, was examined by a number of reviewers who almost unanimously indicated that Diana was depicted as darker and edgier than her comic book counterpart, using torture and deadly force without hesitation.
The French series Kaamelott is also a good example since it started out as only a parody and then evolved into something more epic and tragic (going as far as portraying suicide).
A December 2011 report in The Hollywood Reporter on a planned TV series remake of The Munsters by Bryan Singer refers to this trope by name, indicating plans to give the 1960s monster sitcom "an edgier and slightly darker take".
The 1994-1995 Gerry Anderson sci-fi series Space Precinct is a darker, more serious reworking of a primarily comedic pilot called Space Police that Anderson made a decade earlier.
The Hardy Boys Nancy Drew Mysteries: The first two seasons had a very light-hearted, humorous tone. Season Three, though...dear God. It not only dropped Nancy Drew completely, but started off by killing Joe's fiance in a car wreck (complete with Joe weeping over her body) and having Joe go on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge in response (Last Kiss of Summer). The rest of Season Three ditched almost all the light-hearted humor of the show, showed actual dead bodies, and more dangerous situations. The turn confused the show's teen audience, and lost viewers.
Music
Green Day's Insomniac is lyrically darker than Dookie (or, for that matter, 1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours and Kerplunk!), and the music has sometimes been perceived as heavier and more abrasive.
Done famously and successfully by Pantera in the late 80's. After spending most of The Eighties as an unknown glam metal band, Pantera became recognized for the darker and edgier Cowboys from Hell after hiring Phil Anselmo to replace Terry Glaze and trashing their glammy image in favor of a more "street wise" one. They would attempt to make each subsequent album even more darker and edgier throughout The Nineties.
Judas Priest went here by releasing Painkiller, an album full of hard-hitting power and speed metal, with none of the happy-go-lucky synthesizers and lyrics of their previous album Turbo (they did keep the synths, but only to evoke dark atmospheres). Subsequent albums (the Ripper Owens period especially) continued the trend, although most fans dismiss these albums (which seems to happen with more Ripper-sung albums; see Iced Earth's albums The Glorious Burden and, less often, Framing Armageddon.)
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 downright depressing. With a simple shift to a minor chord, the song switches from hopeful and uplifting to cynical and depressing. "Imagine all the people sharing all the world! ...yeah, like that'll ever happen..." The change has been likened to going from a friendly, smiling hippie offering you peace and love and flowers, to a grim suicide bomber outlining his manifesto to a huddled, frightened crowd.
Any cover by Marilyn Manson. Impressive when he picks already-dark or creepy songs.
Dope's cover of Dead Or Alive's "You Spin Me Round (Like A Record)".
As well as Ten Masked Men's cover of the same song, and others.
Progressive metal band Dream Theater has done a little in this direction lyrically and vocally, the only curse words in the band's 16+ year history were in its past three albums (still very few overall), but this change has been mostly for the better, as their softer songs don't really portray the technical brilliance of the instrumentalists, and vocals such as "The smile of dawn/Arrived early May/She carried a gift from her home/The night shed a tear/To tell her of fear and of sorrow and pain, she'll never outgrow" in a track from their 1992 album Images And Words stand in stark contrast to the guitar riffs and drumming, which wouldn't be out of place in a Metallica song. Your Mileage May Vary.
Arguably, they were already doing this on Awake. See "The Mirror" and "Voices", as well as "Scarred".
Neil Young's Rust Never Sleeps album is an example, as Young responded to the death of Elvis, the rise of Punk Rock, and his own fears of becoming culturally irrelevant by turning his soft-ish folk rock into nihilist hard rock with heavy distorted guitars, in a postmodern stage show with giant amps, roadies dressed like Jawas, and decaying film footage from Woodstock. It worked - the album received widespread popular and critical acclaim, and has been cited as one of the earliest examples of what would become Grunge music.
Much, though not all, of John Lennon's songwriting took this direction in the late sixties due to a combination of drug use (especially heroin), the influence of Yoko Ono, and a growing disillusionment with his role as a Beatle. This culminated in his 1970 solo album Plastic Ono Band in which, under the influence of primal scream therapy, he expressed his childhood traumas and adult pain starkly and directly in a way that he couldn't do with the Beatles. While Lennon continued to write hard-edged songs afterward, most of his subsequent work was more pleasant and hopeful in tone.
The Beatles as a group went Darker and Edgier gradually, from Rubber Soul up to the White Album, but seemed to be going in the opposite direction at the time of the breakup.
Compare the album "The Cheerful Insanity of Giles, Giles and Fripp" to anything that King Crimson's done, ever. The first King Crimson lineup was Giles, Giles and Fripp, plus Greg Lake.
Similarly, compare the album "From Genesis to Revelation" by Genesis to the track "The Knife", which was from the very next album.
Also compare "The Aerosol Grey Machine" with any of Van der Graaf Generator's subsequent output.
This is a common theme with progressive bands that have their roots in the flower power 60's psychedelia days, as prog as a whole is generally much more serious- The Pink Floyd being the Ur Example.
The entire musical genre of Doom Metal is one big exercise in how grim and depressing music can get.
Porcupine Tree have been doing this since 2003 or so. While they never made the most upbeat or happy music out there, there's a definite change between psychedelic, Pink Floyd-influenced rock like The Sky Moves Sideways, and the metal Fear of a Blank Planet, which has ends with "Sleep Together", about the album's 'narrator' trying to convince another teenager to commit suicide with him.
Van Halen's fourth album, Fair Warning. Most of the band's, silly hard-partying atmosphere (which made them famous) from the previous albums disappears and a heavier, more serious sound is heard. This is mostly attributed to the tensions between lead guitarist Eddie Van Halen and lead singer David Lee Roth at the time. The album features "Mean Street" and a foggy synthesized instrumental "Sunday Afternoon in the Park" that is full of Accidental Nightmare Fuel.
It would get even darker with 1995's Balance, musically and lyrically.
Counting Crows' first album, August and Everything After, was a sweetly melodic, very subdued folk album. Their second, Recovering the Satellites, added distortion guitar, angry lyrics, and several swear words. Eventually they found a middle ground which worked quite well.
Eminem's entire discography has basically been a sine-wave of Lighter and Softer and Darker and Edgier. His 1996 debut Infinite was basically the former, though a series of life events caused him to take the darker contentto the nth degree with both The Slim Shady LP and The Marshall Mathers LP, both of which were critical and commercial successes. His subsequent two albums were somewhat Lighter and Softer, though the cycle has begun again with the recently-released Relapse, which serves in and out of this trope. It should, of course, be noted that each album always has a parodying track somewhere in it.
Massive Attack. While Blue Lines and Protection weren't entirely sunny, Mezzanine had a sonic background so dark, it absorbed light.
Trip-Hop as a whole has moved in this direction. It originated as a soothing, acid jazz-inspired blend of hip-hop and dub; in mid 90's, the post-punk influences turned into angry distorted riffs, the trippiness became heavy psychedelia, and the Retraux atmosphere traded nostalgia for old horror movie creepiness.
Jazz musicians will occasionally take songs from seemingly light repertoire and turn the intensity up. Sonny Rollins took the corniest of show tunes (such as "There's No Business Like Show Business") and turned them into positively hip (for the time) jazz tunes. John Coltrane famously turned the light-hearted, optimistic My Favorite Things into what one critic described as a "hypnotic eastern devish dance", one that lasted an impressive 13 minutes.
Trane himself is a truly a great example of this trope. Starting with light-hearted simplistic albums like Blue Train before becoming gradually more complex with Giant Steps and My Favorite Things and culminating in the madness of Ascension and Meditations.
Blue Train is many things, but it is in no way simplistic. Look at the chord progression to "Moment's Notice," for example, and you'll see that it's an early iteration of Coltrane changes - the substitutions that would eventually result in Giant Steps. Although Coltrane hadn't yet gotten to what would later be called his infamous "sheets of sound," Blue Train is still a seminal album in the history of jazz.
Happened naturally to Michael Jackson in the mid-Nineties. His 1991 album Dangerous was, like his previous albums, a mix of standard pop and uplifting songs. His next album, HIStory (1995), came out following his 1993 child molestation allegations and it shows. The album is filled with dark songs that exude paranoia and anger, dealing with topics like betrayal, media scrutiny, loneliness, and even a song entirely about a child dying from neglect. It also has more swearing than any other Michael Jackson album, including the only instance of the word "fuck." Even the sole love song on the album, the R. Kelly-penned "You Are Not Alone", is a little bit of a downer because it is about separated lovers. Jackson's 2001 album Invincible would retain some of the darker influences from this period though it would also be a bit of a return to form, with more upbeat, love/life-affirming songs compared to HIStory.
Hanson, in a sense, though more with their image than the actual music. I think they've used swear words in a few interviews or stuff they had, and the lead singer had sex before he got married. As for their music, they're not as light and innocent as they were as children, but still a very upbeat group. It's more that they've switched their style.
And she's combined this with Hotter and Sexier in her overall career choices, likewise debated.
Downplayed in that most of the songs on Can't Be Tamed are about empowerment, or about Miley missing her boyfriend on the road. But the media's focus on the mild Three Minutes of Writhing and (relatively) saltier language (she uses "hell"in a song) and revealing clothing in her music videos has overshadowed the enpowerment themes.
Disturbed's discography, over time: the first album was mainly about anger and the world being a horrible, horrible place, all inspired by lead singer David Draiman's past experiences (which later evolved into retrospective navel gazing then to themes of empowerment and victory). Then he started getting some new experiences to work off of, creating Indestructible, then Asylum after that (that band's darkest, most serious records yet). Time will tell if the lyrics ever get back to the "a bit of humor through pain" theme.
Blue Öyster Cult was called a satanic band for good reasons. These include suicide pacts, possession, the dead rising, people dying in the dessert, and the last person on earth.
A lot of Dubstep remixes tend to go down this path while still using the same lyrics as the original song. This is easily accomplished with the thunderous basslines associated with the genre. For comparison: Example - Kickstarts versus the Bar 9 remix, the former sounding much more hopeful and cheery than the latter, made even more evident with the corresponding official videos.
David Bowie albums, or stretches of such, tend to alternate between this and Lighter and Softer (owing to his penchant for the New Sound Album trope), but an even clearer example of this can be seen with his stage personas in The Seventies. After the flamboyant tragic rock messiah of Ziggy Stardust and the variants of Aladdin Sane, et.al., with 1976's Station to Station came The Thin White Duke — a heartless Fascist. This persona owed a lot to a Creator Breakdown and his heavy drug abuse at the time (including cocaine addiction), and Bowie's decision to pull himself up from it all was accompanied by a choice to not only dump the persona, but to only be himself on stage from that point on.
Lady Gaga: In 2008, after performing as indie blues rock artist Stefani, she released The Fame, her first label-sponsored LP. The album had a very upbeat, joyful theme, centered mainly around party life, along with love, along with the idealist's view of fame. Her follow-up EP, The Fame Monster, is its "hangover". The cover, monochrome with the Queen Monster veiled up to the nose by a cape; combined with music centered around love evoking a bad, sexy romance novel; romantic anxiety ("Dance in the Dark"); and sex; the music took a more outré, avant-garde and edgy sound.
Many hold that if you compare her to other teen pop stars shes dark and edgy. Other contend that, in comparison to many other genres and groups, she's not that much different from any other popstar despite a different packaging.
Gorillaz pulls a not-so subtle variation in their story canon, which started out as a zany and darkly humorous setup but got noticeably darker in the second and third phases. Party animal Murdoc shifted sharply into a violent psychopath with the Plastic Beach arc, (though this may be justified as an already twisted man being driven to desperate measures by greed.) In accordance, his relationship with 2D has changed in portrayal from comedic bullying to pretty damn abusive, though it could always have come off this way if you thought about it.
And ironically, their musical style has become brighter and more polished, though certainly no softer in theme.
Weezer's release after their self titled debut, Pinkerton, contained a more abrasive and darker sound that their previous album
But can you blame them? Rivers was pretty beat up after having multiple surgeries to correct a minor bone deformity that he wrote the entire album with a bitter disposition. The entire album is themed around breaking up, it's hard to write upbeat songs about breakups.
The first album by Skid Row was a pretty typical Hair Metal album, containing popular rock anthems such as "18 And Life" and "Youth Gone Wild" as well as the Power Ballad "I Remember You". The band's second album, Slave To The Grind, was darker, edgier, and less mainstream than the first with many songs adopting a Thrash Metal sound and lyrics about drugs, politics, and criticism of religion.
All of the Strapping Young Lad albums are this to Devin Townsend's solo work. Although some of Devin's solo albums can be considered dark based on their lyrical content and heaviness. Physicist and Deconstruction are heavier compared to others and their lyrics are darker. Ocean Machine's lyrical themes revolve around Life, Death, Isolation, etc. Ki for it's moody atmosphere. And Ghost 2 will appear to have more in common with Ki in terms of atmosphere rather than the original Ghost, which was Devin's attempt at Lighter and Softer.
Within Temptation is fairly dark itself, but eventually parodied the trend in "Gothic Christmas" — complete with The Evil Reindeer Overlord, because everything should be Grim and Nordic.
Mythology
Contrary to what popular belief holds, this is exactly what modern adaptations do to ancient Greek myths, which despite all the gruesome acts and events they tell, were surprisingly lighthearted. The grotesque demons and horrid monstrosities, the hellish underworld and evil gods (Hades in particular but many others get this treatment) we see in modern movies and videogames inspired by Greek mythology are the product of blending the ancient myths with the nightmarish medievaleuropean folklore.
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.
The "steel cage" used in Steel Cage Matches transformed over time from something that kids would probably enjoy climbing at Chuck E. Cheese to, well, an actual steel cage.
When Gregory Helms brought his "superhero" The Hurricane to WWE, it was essentially a silly character and a parody of comic books. When he revived the character years later just before his departure from WWE, he attempted somewhat to reimagine Hurricane as a grim, silent, Dark is Not Evil avenger.
Interestingly, while the WWE's PG era was initially exactly that, with relatively clean violence and little profanity, it's now gotten more than a bit edgier, the violence is more brutal, the language is dirtier and more frequent, and Anti Heroes like CM Punk and Randy Orton are starting to become the norm again for faces. Add to that the returns of wrestlers from the Attitude Era like Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Rock, and it could very well be only a matter of time before WWE goes back to TV-14. Funnily enough, the WWE initially started out as PG before transitioning to the Attitude Era, and then back to PG before starting to get edgier again.
ECW was considered a more darker and edgier professional wrestling organization when compared to other organizations like WWE or WCW back in the day as ECW's storylines take a more mature approach over the cartoony storylines wrestling organizations used to take.
Radio
When Dragnet premiered in 1949, it used subject matter previous crime dramas wouldn't have touched with a ten foot pole, like rape and child murder.
Tabletop Games
Warhammer 40,000 is this trope to War Hammer Fantasy, though not by the margins of some other works on this page as the source material was already parodying "Darker and Edgier" works by playing this trope to the extreme.
Thrid Edition the Grim Darkest of all of 40k edition is proof there is a limit, it was so grim dark it became pure narm.
Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition has gone both this route and the opposite (Lighter and Softer) simultaneously. The wacky gnomes and lust-for-life half-orcs are replaced as player races with dragon-men and demon-children. For the most part, dragonborn and half-orcs fill the same niches; they aren't any more given to brooding than half-orcs, the race most likely to be spawned by rape, already would be. The gnome and tiefling switch is better apples and oranges. Replace the angst-free fun loving inherently magical race with... demon children, who all but gain dark powers by slashing their wrists. Not to mention that they did include a new kind of elves that are shinier, happier, and more mystical, like an entire race made of Galadriel.
Of course, this is somewhat rendered moot by the fact that the Half Orcs and Gnomes were put back in Players Handbook 2. And they actually made the Half Orcs Lighter and Softer via removing the implications of rape from their backstory, implying that they more appeared due to orcs and humans teaming up and eventually intertbreeding after the fall of the empire of Nerath.
Forgotten Realms definitely went darker, with glorious cathedrals crumbling and different gods and longtime power characters being slain or depowered left and right. Though one must remember that Forgotten Realms wasn't the only campaign setting, just the most popular; other settings, particularly Ravenloft and Dark Sun, were noticeably darker than FR was anyway — this more brought FR "down" to Greyhawk's level. Players still have Eberron, with its pulp-adventure-y feel, for less depressing fare.
On the third hand, the system is much Lighter and Softer, in that every adverse condition that happens to the players can be removed almost instantly. Several of the nastier conditions from earlier editions (e.g. attribute drain) simply don't exist anymore, and all of the others either automatically wear off in five minutes, or can be removed by a low-level spell. Hungry? Oh, here are some infinite rations. Room is dark? Plenty of infinite light sources around. The world may be dark and edgy, but harsh, long-lasting hardship for the player characters is non-existent.
The Pathfinder Adventure Paths and campaign setting have also gotten noticeably Darker and Edgier. The half-orcs' origins as the product are made more explicit, ogres are reimagined as inbred monsters right out of Deliverance, and most monsters explicitly like to eat people. Even the gnomes get in on the act. In Pathfinder, they are fey creatures who have been separated from their original world. If they do not constantly seek out new and ever more sensational experiences, their features begin to 'bleach', the banality of existence aging them to death.
The World of Darkness initially marketed itself along these lines, as an "adult role-playing game" for "mature gamers". Apparently feeling that their attempts had failed, White Wolf demolished that line and rebooted it as WoD 2.0, a Darker and Edgier version of the first.
The setting itself is described as being Modern Day Earth... only, you guessed it, darker and edgier.
The sixth edition of Gamma World used the d20 Modern ruleset and was the grimmest, darkest edition of the game, period. While the first edition of Gamma World had basically been a parody of post-nuclear apocalypse, a Black Comedy rich game of wackiness, where one could see things like a laser rifle-toting yeti/cockroach hybrid, Gamma World D20 took everything seriously, making the backstory realistic (genetic engineering and nanotech vs. nuclear war) and portraying all of the horror inherent in such a ruined, freakish world. Gamma World 1e would point out the hilarious side of fighting a garbage grinding robot whose programming had gone mad: Gamma World 6e would emphatically point out what it would like to be on the wrong end of those grinding, snapping, mashing jaws and relentless, implacable hunger...
Dog Sees God is a play featuring thinly disguised versions of the Peanuts cast in high school. Snoopy was put down after getting rabies and killing Woodstock. Lucy is in an asylum for lighting the little redheaded girl's hair on fire and that's the tip of the iceberg.
Cirque du Soleil's Quidam was intentionally conceived by its creators as a show that would be darker, less whimsical, and more realistic than what the company had produced up to that point. They accomplished this by...telling a story about the commonality of loneliness and alienation through the eyes of a jaded preteen girl who learns to reconnect with others via a trip to a sometimes-melancholy Magical Land.
Richard Strauss's opera Elektra, based on the Sophocles play but turn the bloodlust and neurotism up to the eleven, and adds a sister-to-sister Les Yay moment.
King Lear, believe it or not, wasn't a tragedy until Shakespeare got his hands on the story. In the story his audience knew, the story ends with Lear coming to his senses, forgiving Cordelia, retaking his throne and ruling until he finally dies of old age. Poor audience.
Toys
BIONICLE, when compared to other LEGO lines. The first LEGO line to feature brutal, on-screen deaths and carry shades of Cosmic Horror Story.
Within Bionicle, the story noticeably turned a shade darker from '04 to '05, and with the advent of the online serials in '07, it also became Bloodier and Gorier. So much, in fact, it made the initial years look like a kindergarten play in comparison. A good deal of this stuff LEGO would never have allowed the writer to publish when the theme first started.
Ninjago, is starting to become darker then the other Lego lines,sense it has a plot and the characters are seen using weapon's like swords and arrows.
Swords and even muskets have appeared in many LEGO ranges. The Pirate theme had its own comic and Ladybird Books (from Woolworth's), which featured duels and possible deaths (who knows if the soldiers being defeated constantly die or not?).
Video Games
Id Software did this. Their earlier publication, Commander Keen, was a lighter hearted game that was quite intended for children and maybe relatively more innocent hearted adults. Id Software is famous for popularising the first person shooter in the form of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom.
Strangely enough the characters of all these games appear to be related, as discussed here
Bioware games as a whole have been going through this. Their first few games (Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, etc) were fairly idealistic High Fantasy games. Their later ones, though? The game worlds are grim, bloody and crapsack, Black and Grey Morality runs rampant, and almost every major quest (and quite a few sidequests) end in a Sadistic Choice where even the seemingly best option has disastrous consequences. Oh, and about 99.9% of the available party members have severely traumatic pasts.
Mass Effect was rather serious and even bleak to begin with. Mass Effect 2 didn't neccessarily get that much darker, but where the first game only made hints, the second goes all the way. The very first scene is an absolute Curb-Stomp Battle, in which a voiceless and faceless enemy appears from nowhere and completely rips your ship from the first game apart, with you still inside it. Then you join forces with a ruthless survivalist organization whose agents you killed by the dozens in the first game, because there are much more pressing matters at hand. The Black and White Morality of the first game is pretty much abandoned and nobody blinks an eye when you murder a mechanic with his own power tool because you have to slow down the repairs on the vehicle he is working on. And in pretty much every space port you'll find a couple of people talking about sex, or have your team scientists give you advice for sex with aliens and mentioning something about zoophilia on the ship.
This seems to be the course of action EA is taking with its SSX franchise. At first, it was a lighthearted, goofy snowboarding game set to a funky soundtrack. Now? Joystiq reports that the latest game is something akin to a survival horror game in the sports world.
When the first Metal Gear came out, people saw it as a little fun and cheesy action game with a twist on stealth elements. Then starting with the second game and the Solid series, It Got Worse. By the time of Metal Gear Solid 4, you could expect the world to blow up at any moment and can't do a thing about it. It's actually surprising that at the end of the series, that about 80% of all named characters died. For most of the time, it feels like there would be a lot fewer people to make it to the end alive.
The idealistic Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar was followed up with Ultima V, which involved resisting an oppressive tyrant using twisted versions of the very virtues the previous game was founded on to keep power. THAT was followed up by Ultima VI: The False Prophet]], which STARTS OUT with the hero narrowly avoiding being sacrificed as part of a terrible and brutal interspecies war.
And that trilogy was the Age of Enlightenment. Let's not get started on the Age of Armageddon...
The shift in style between the game Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy 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.
The original Double Dragon was already a gritty game to begin with, but the arcade version of Double Dragon II: The Revenge attempted to up the ante by killing off the girl from the first game, changing the objective from rescuing her to avenging her death. All the returning enemy characters were redesigned to look more punkish (Linda the female mook for example, was given a mohawk and a chain whip) and the new bosses includes a masked wrestler who leaves behind his mask when he dies and an André the Giant-lookalike with Terminator-esque sunglasses whose stature dwarfs Abobo from the original game.
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 familiar Hello Kitty-esque Bombermen.
Sonic the Hedgehog is overall somewhere between Mario and Zelda in terms of creepiness, but its tone is darker nowadays than it was when starting out.
Sonic the Hedgehog Spinball features a much darker aesthetic than the main series games. One of the bosses actually shows the animal robotization process in horrid detail.
The Sonic Adventure Series goes beyond Sonic games prior to it in intensity; the first deals with large-scale destruction dealt to modern cities by creatures reacting to atrocities committed by ancient civilizations led by tyrannical, abusive fathers, and the second surpasses THAT by dealing with use of "weapons of mass destruction" (and yes, they are actually called that in the game) to threaten whole countries, a military conspiracy involving the deaths of numerous innocents in a space colony, and threats to the survival of the entire world from anguished people with a vendetta against it. A case can be made for this game's 'Final Story' being the grimmest part of any game in the Sonic series. Gerald's diary is pure High Octane Nightmare Fuel, containing such lovely lines as "I lost everything, I had nothing more to live for, I WENT INSANE!" (this part is helped by the fact that Gerald's voice actor was actually really good).
Sonic The Hedgehog 2006 attempts to toss Sonic into a hyper-realistic world, where he protects a princess who is the container of Iblis, one half of Solaris, a time god from Eggman. Along the way, he, Shadow, and Silver deal with a conspiracy where it is revealed in the final storyline Sonic dies to upset Elise to release Iblis ancient monster from her body, allowing that and the other villain, Mephiles, to merge to form Solaris, slaughtering the entire space-time continuum in the process. And then Elise kisses Sonic,reviving him with the power of the Chaos Emeralds, and restoring the space-time continuum from the damage dealt by Solaris, in the process.
In Sonic Unleashed, Sonic gets a Superpowered Evil Side that is the Werehog. However, the Werehog can also be considered a partial subversion of this trope, seeing as he has many comical-looking moves, not to mention his stretchy arms — also, Sonic himself takes the whole thing in stride rather admirably.
And then, the game explicitly tells you that the only reason why Sonic isn't massacring everyone is because he's got a will of titanium laced with diamonds, and that's what's keeping his Werehog side from going on a total rampage. The Werehog is very much not harmless at all, it's only Sonic's willpower keeping it on a leash that manages to somehow defuse its threat factor.
While on the subject of Disney related games, Epic Mickey for the Wii had concept art of creepy steampunk cyborg versions of both Mickey Mouse and Goofy. The artwork really speaks for itself◊. For a Disney game, that is pretty damn dark.
Epic Mickey has a different kind of dark to it. Rather than dealing with Body Horror robotic chimeras of our favorite Disney characters like first expected, it's about the consequences of Mickey's irrationality and how he must make up for it.
In the 90's, the space sim genre dominated by X-Wing and Wing Commander wasn't exactly sunshine and rainbows to begin with. But then FreeSpace appeared with a much more serious tone, but it also got far surpassed by FreeSpace 2, which was even darker and edgier and comparable in mood to Halo: Reach, if anything.
Advance Wars: Days of Ruin is clearly Darker And Edgier than the other three Advance Wars games, which sometimes bordered on silly. It pulls it off just fine, thanks in part that it's a brand new continuity, plus the fact that it recognizes that adult themes don't necessarily mean throwing out all humor. It works because the setting is After the End but the survivors are trying to make the best of things. The doctor exemplifies this, saying that it's times like this you need to laugh. The last mission is called Sunrise.
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.
Afterwards, the slide is balanced in Rayman 3 and pushed beyond the cheeriness in the Rabbids series.
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 significantly meaner attitude, it looks like Painkiller was the game these reviewers wanted Serious Sam to be.
Considering Serious Sam not only recreated but also parodied the "gunning down masses of Mook" gameplay (and gleefully lampshades its parodies), it seems said reviewers completely missed the point.
Pokémon Mystery Dungeon 2Explorers of Time/Darkness. While the first game's offered a character that simply tried to ruin your protagonists' lives and was a cosmic Jerk Ass, the sequel goes further by sending your protagonist duo to the literal End of Days, having to face down a legendary Pokémon that has become an evilly subverted primal force of nature, and a Big Bad who not only traps children in unending nightmares, but also poses as an "ally" who suggests that it's all your fault and the best way to fix things is to kill yourself.
Black and White definitely qualify, too - the game does not in fact end with the Champion as in the previous four generations, the villainous team takes a much heavier role in the plot than before, the plot itself is much less of an Excuse Plot, and on top of all that we also have the single most despicable villain in the series.
Just look at the title screens. The first gen features the protagonist Red with the first stage of the version mascot. The second gen shows the version legendary flying above the clouds/swimming in the ocean while heroic music is playing. The third gen's theme tune is already a lot more eerie, with the title screen showing the version legendary in a volcano/the bottom of the ocean, with only its silhouette and glowing lines clearly visible (the actual games weren't too dark aside from the stuff involving said legendaries, though.) Then the fourth and fifth gens comes along and you get a creepy piano and ominous remix of the main theme (respectively), with the version legendary standing in a glowing void, and a Scare Chord playing upon hitting start, or in Platinum and Gen V's case, the version legendary screaming at you.
Orre, by the way, is officially based off the American Southwest, Arizona in particular. Thinking of Arizona as a Mad Max wasteland is amusing.
Done well for the nightmarish Twisted Metal: Black. To put this in perspective, Twisted Metal began as a series about a burn victim inheriting genie like powers, and putting on a no holds barred kill or be killed destruction derby in densely populated areas between maniacs with heavily armed vehicles. They went darker from there.
Rather than an adorable Astro Boy-esque android, the Blue Bomber of Mega Man X is a morally conflicted hero. Similarly, the comical Dr. Wily was succeeded by Sigma, a ruthless (and seemingly indestructible) robot bent on the total annihilation of the human race. It was still done rather well, Capcom 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.
Mega Man Zero was hands down the darkest in the series, what with the hero being on the losing side of the war (at first), giving the players the "pleasure" to see countless allies die. Not to mention the horrible backstory (bridging this series with X), which later gets incorporated into the main plot, and a truly OmnicidalComplete Monster as the main Big Bad...
ZX was lighter than Zero...except for the backstories of the four protagonists, 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). 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).
However, the sequel contains one of the darkest plotlines in the entire series. The Apollo Flames "second quest" involves an alternate universe After the End scenario where every human has been killed off thanks to the Precursor To Ruin.
The third game has some decidedly un-cheery plot elements, such as two war orphans trying to use an Eldritch Abomination to destroy the world's technology, a corrupting, quasi-Hate Plague, and one character being killed before Geo's eyes (Luckily they turn out to be Only Mostly Dead).
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 fist-pumping heavy metal. Oh, and 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. Though the third game scaled back on the GRIMDARK while keeping the improved combat system.
Meanwhile the Two Thrones is darker in the sense of storytelling, pitting the Prince against the darker and edgier persona of himself
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 Accidental Nightmare Fuel inherent to some of Cortana's messages.
The story goes that the original script for Halo 3's ending had a much lighter tone, with all the main characters returning to Earth to a hero's welcome. Marty O'Donnel, Bungie's musical director, thought that this ending was too light and soft and didn't portray the grim consequences of being a "hero" in a 30-year war. Subsequently the script was re-written to have a much Darker And Edgier ending in which several main characters die and Master Chief is stranded in deep space with Cortana, presumed dead by the rest of humanity.
Halo: Reach is suppose to be the darkest depressing game thus far since you already know everyone what will happen to you, your comrades and the planet itself . It's about the heroism and sacrifice of those people on a doomed planet watching their friends and everything they love fall. Hell even look at the medals when you perform a feet (Double Kill/Triple Kill), in Halo 3 they were bright and brightly colored, in Reach they are darker, and look metallic, yes even these meta-game symbols are darker AND edgier.
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 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.
Dante in Devil May Cry 4 grew up and apart from bishounen self in previous installments, sporting five-o-clock shade and somewhat cynical and wisened behaviour.
This appears to be what Ninja Theory is going for with DmC.
Done in Grand Theft Auto IV, replacing the cheesy crime dramas with a immigrant story wrapped in a crime drama, while retaining the humor.
If anything, people complain because Niko wasn't dark enough.
The current generation of Grand Theft Auto IV plays to a cynical darker tune. The Lost And Damned DLC turns the Grim DarkUp to Eleven, with the protagonist Johnny partaking in a series of events which leads to the death of his best friend Jim at the hands of Niko, being betrayed by childhood friend turned Big Bad Billy Grey who tries to have Johnny and Jim killed during a drug deal and later attempts to sellout everyone to save his own ass after said drug deal gets him arrested, and said arrest leading to a civil war that wipes out more than half of the Lost. Once everything is over with Billy dead, Johnny and the survivors of the whole ordeal (One of whom happens to be a paraplegic crippled in an accident caused by Billy's carelessness) decide to just burn down the clubhouse to put it out of its misery after it and the club have been ruined over the course of the game. This leaves the player with a single, run down safehouse that is in one of the most run down areas of the city and used to belong to one of the Lost members Johnny had to kill in the civil war.Damn.
Subverting the first two main stories of the IV generation, the last IV DLC The Ballad Of Gay Tony went in the Lighter and Softer direction, with the return of some over the top elements of games frm the III era, and an overall happy ending that doesn't end in the deaths of any major characters close to the protagonist Luis or anything being left in ruins.
The original Super Mario Bros was fairly light and soft, with a generic "save the princess" story, fairly comical villains, and overall cartoony style. Super Mario Bros. 2 had more of a "seeing upon waking what you saw in a dream" story, and introduced a variety of spookier enemies, like the Sparks, the Albatosses, (no, that's not a typo) the mousers, the tryclydes, the fryguys, and let's not forget the ESPECIALLY intimidating Phantos. Even the hawkmouths eventually become enemies. It's also the first Mario game to involve the use of bombs. Of course, many of the introductions are due to it being a Dolled-Up Installment of another game.
Paper Mario 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 gallows in Rogueport's town square. This is also a game in which Mario does jobs for the Mafia. Nonetheless, the whole thing is fairly cheery and innocuous.
Super Paper Mario is even darker, what with Mario and company saving the multiverse from an Omnicidal Maniac and his dysfunctional flunkies.
Mario and Luigi went the same kind of way with the second game (Partners in Time), with the second game being based around an alien invasion of the past Mushroom Kingdom and having places like Toad Town and Princess Peach's Castle turned to ruins by the Shroobs, and some rather creepy things as background detail and music. It actually introduces a Christmas-themed village solely to destroy it less then five minutes after your arrival.
Mario Strikers Charged did this in a tongue-in-cheek, over-the-top way.
Mario Party 4 can be seen as Darker and Edgier than the Nintendo 64 installments - with its psychedelic music, and its somewhat more serious tone - in fact, while the rest of the world gave it the same age rating as the earlier games, it got a G8+ rating in Australia. Strangely, the next three installments took on a more childish tone than the N64 installments.
The original Super Smash Bros was a cartoony fighting game with cute Nintendo characters and cartoony sound effects, and the artwork was done in a comic book style. The sequel, Melee, was not as cartoony, had more realistic sound effects, the characters had more realistic appearances, some of the playable characters were villains, and there was no true artwork, barring the game's character models. The second sequel, Brawl, went as far as to portray the characters as more aggressive (even the happy-go-lucky ones like Yoshi and Mario), an adventure mode where each character once again acts, to some extent, out-of-character (though you wouldn't know it from the lack of dialogue), and two of the newcomers have stuff that is inappropriate for a Nintendo game: Wario has a flatulence attack, and Solid Snake not only comes from a game series known for its violence, making him look unprofessional amongst all those cute Nintendo characters, but as a secret, he makes, along with his contacts, witty comments about every character. Also, as far as artwork goes, each character has just the one pose for everything: their character portrait, their life icon, their trophy, their instruction booklet picture, everything; while the previous two games used a different pose for each of those situations. Let's not get started on what they'll do in SSB 4...
Conkers Bad Fur Day was originally going to be a kid-friendly platformer starring a cute little squirrel in a blue hoodie. Indeed, the predecessor Pocket Tales had that tone. 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.
Ironically enough, the port for the Xbox was less offensive due to enforced censorship on swear words. That idiots blamed on Nintendo. (Never mind that Nintendo in fact did not censor the n64 version.)
Not to pile on DC Comics again... but they did agree to make a crossover game called Mortal Kombat Vs DC Universe. Mortal Kombat itself is the Darker and Edgier version of every other fighting game (ironically, the crossover was Lighter and Softer for the Kombat side. Or at least, its trademark violence).
The series itself seems to get darker every other installment.
The unreleased game Thrill Kill is the Darker and Edgier form of Mortal Kombat. Yes, that is possible.
As the Command & Conquer Tiberium series has progressed, it gradually went from being a fairly dark modern world-war with Green Rocks mixed in to a brutal struggle to simply survive a planet that's dying under alien terraforming.
Example: in the first game, the worst thing to happen was one faction slaughtering a village and blaming it on the other; Tiberium was a minor nuisance when it was growing in the wrong place. In the third, Tiberium growth had reached catastrophic levels, over half of the world is in a state of anarchy, another world war breaks out and all that is topped by an alien invasion. How's that for Darker and Edgier? Though Word Of God said that the fourth game is even worse with an Enemy Mine going on and YET ANOTHER visit from the Scrin on the horizon.
Thankfully the Tiberium growth was stopped in the 4th series, but by no means the war is over. All this means is that Tiberium will no longer threaten the world as now anti-Kane Seperatists have their own agenda. And the Scrin remains to be a problem... or rather, they would if EA hadn't forgotten about them.
On the other hand, the Red Alert series has headed in the opposite direction as that series progressed.
Actually, it's Darker and Softer. If not for the fact that the series got weirder and weirder with each game, it would be quite disturbing.
Super Robot Wars recently had a slightly Darker And Edgier tone with Z being that a famous hero of an original franchise is given an evil spinoff. You can't save both psycho girls from Gundam and the bad ending route is possible again. Mind you this is as far as they go.
It only gets really Darker And Edgier if you pick Setsuko's route. Rand's route has several Camp elements and mostly considered light hearted. But Setsuko's route is just throwing you lots and lots of Break the Cutie moments to the poor heroine, and in the end... she doesn't get completely better...
It is darker compared to past games. There are personality issues and infighting with nearly all the members or your team for most of the game, you are duped and betrayed several times throughout the game. All the original villains are more or less Complete Monsters, with the guy who does the worst things arguably the kindest since he isn't a psychotic bastard in it for the evil. Also your team at one point literally splits into factions and tries to kill each other with no Brainwashing involved. And the ending is bittersweet as some people are lost. It's pretty dark.
You actually can save both crazy Gundam girls if you plan carefully. Compare it to SRW A, where you are forced to choose between Master Asia and Gai Daigoji and can't save both no matter how hard you try. The storyline of Z is still dark as far as SRW games go, though.
Final Fight: Streetwise is a good example why you don't make it so damn Grim Dark. And they forgot our favorite transsexual Poison? For shame, for shame.
The Tekken games have both been an example and subversion of this trope. While the games have become more story based and darker (What with Jin's Wangst and all) they've at the same time introduced increasingly ridiculous elements like kickboxing kangaroos, endings where people are launched into space or blown up with bow ties and training dummies that communicate through nonsensical clicking noises.
The Call of Duty series has the weird example of becoming darker and edgier three separate times throughout the series. Call of Duty 1, 2, and 3 were all T-rated World War II shooters which while showing the intensity and violence of war, weren't really that brutal or dark, all of them had happy endings for their protagonists. Call of Duty 2 and 3 were slightly darker and edgier versions of Call of Duty 1, but not by much only with minor cursing and intense hand-to-hand combat respectively. Modern Warfare amps it up with an M rated, major cursing, more violence, and a significantly darker story in which almost every major character dies, including one of the main characters by nuclear explosion and a lot more pessimistic view of things. And then World At War comes out which amplifies Modern Warfare by two, with a curse word being in every second sentence, dismemberments and charred corpses being standard fare, the opening mission which has one of your squadmates brutally tortured and his throat slit by a Japanese officer, and enough war crimes to fill an encyclopedia, especially by the more sadistic Soviets who are also supposed to be the good guys.
Modern Warfare 2 tops that off with you getting to witness your character being burned alive FROM FIRST PERSON.
Call of Duty: Black Ops goes even further, with the gore being amped to 11, in addition to the entire plot revolving around your teammates torturing you, not to mention the scene were Weaver gets his eye dismembered and that Reznov, your main ally in the game is a hallucination. However, none of those top the fact that that you are the assassin of John F. Kennedy.
Elevator Action featured an agent named Otto and was more spy themed, shooting down agents. Elevator Action Returns, however...did that.
Ratchet's new outfit hides his tail (and head throughout most gameplay) and makes him look suspiciously like Samus or Master Chief. (Likely intended to be the latter, considering the era it was released in.)
Clank, although still having a major role, had his name removed from the western titles, likely to make the game seem less friendship-themed.
The humour is less reliant on slapstick situations compared to the first two entries.
The weapons are often considered more "realistic" than those in the rest of the series, although that does not say much (even by sci-fi standards).
The subtitle is not an obvious innuendo like the previous two games, although the innuendo subtitles tend to get replaced outside of America.
Star WarsRepublic Commando is dark to the point where some people complained it wasn't very Star Wars-like. For starters, no Opening Crawl is present, and there is blood and gore in heavy levels for a T-rated game. It's a first-person shooter in which you play as a clone trooper, and the scale, far from epic, is outright tiny. Not actually a bad game, but definitely darker. The Star Wars Expanded Universe is veering towards this fast these days.
Massive, massive change in mood between R:1 and R:2 in .hack//. The good AI are dead or apathetic, and players have gone from dealing well with depression to psychosis. It's possible that the third "season" R:X is trying to regain the innocence.
Team Fortress 2 parodies this somewhat; in contrast with the increasing violence and realism seen in many current online FPSes, all the characters look like they're from a Pixar movie. It's gory, yes, but a game where the standard infantry character was rejected from the army during WWII and got on a plane to Poland, going on a Nazi killing spree (in 1949) and awarding himself medals that he made for himself can't be anything but outlandish and silly.
There is some of this between Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion where major plot points are concerned. Not only does the player character in Oblivion spend the main quest helping the Empire's last heir sacrifice himself in order to provide a stopgap against demon invasion while simultaneously eliminating any possibility of such protection in the future, Oblivion also has the Dark Brotherhood series of quests wherein the player character can actually become an assassin with all that this entails. Further, many of Oblivion's NPC dialogues discuss events in Morrowind and involve events that overturn previous cheerful endings, such as Vivec disappearing and Ald'Ruhn being burned down. At the same time though it also censors a few in game books, and makes the gameplay much softer (the only way to fail most quests is your death or bugs).
Rather, Morrowind is lighter on the surface. Daggerfall featured nudity, graphic texts in books, insane dungeons, disease is instant death if not cured in time, etc..
If you include the spinoffs, The Elder Scrolls constantly went through two phases of going Darker and Edgier. Arena was pretty light, Daggerfall was darker, Battlespire pushed the darkness as far as it could go. Then Redguard went back to square one, followed by Morrowind and Oblivion being progressively darker.Skyrim meanwhile goes...in a bit of a zigzag. The world in Morrowind was pretty Crapsack, but you make it better. Oblivion is in a Crap-saccharine world. Skyrim goes right back to a crapsack world...even worse than the world in the previous games! Yet the story ends on a pretty idealistic side.
Donkey Kong Country 2 was subtly darker than the previous, and a bit better.
They now exclusively make Golden Tee games, learning their lessons from following the leader too closely.
While the first Killzone wasn't sunshine and roses, it didn't have the feel or atmosphere of a dark game. Killzone 2 plunged right through that and made everything dark and gritty, with dark and oppressive vistas of muted colors, increased character death rate, blood everywhere and a general feel of hopelessness in the fight. Quite like with Jak and Daxter, going dark and edgy was a good choice here.
Ditto for Resistance series which is completely bleak from the get go and only gets worse with sequel for humanity.
Contra: Shattered Soldier went a long way to undo the optimistic ending of Contra III: The Alien Wars. Bill Rizer, the hero of the original games, is now a wrongly accused war criminal convicted for causing the destruction of 80% of the world's population, while his former partner Lance Bean is now a a terrorist leader seeking to overthrow the Triumvirate, who were responsible for provoking the alien invasions in the previous games.
Neo Contra inverts this by essentially being a self parody of the series.
Ironically just played with in the end, as only the designs and settings are truly Darker and Edgier - now that the game has dialogue (and in English, at that!) the story and characterizations are every bit as nutty as its mainstream counterpart.
The sequel however plays this much straighter.
Spyro the Dragon, When you remember that the original games have a cute dragon fighting hilarious freaks who mostly ran away from him, and you regained health by collecting BUTTERFLIES, it's difficult to see how it progressed to the level of grimdark it is today. And damn, Spyro got ugly.
Inverted with Backyard Sports. The executives wanted to make the series darker and edgier by making the kids older and giving them new designs, but it became Lighter and Softer, and its audience's age went down.
Square Enix has announced that Final Fantasy Versus XIII will be the darkest entry to the Final Fantasy series yet. The trailers and plot information released so far paints it as fairly bloody and bleak, so this is probably true.
Proven correct as it's cousin Final Fantasy Type Zero is also dark, bloody and depressing as well.
The entire FF series went this direction after (or, one could say, starting with) Six, though Seven and Tactics went the furthest.
Dragon Quest games are often pretty idealistic, but as shown by Dragon Quest V they aren't afraid to make the heroes work hard for their happy endings. However, Dragon Quest VII is easily the darkest Dragon Quest game yet, with the heroes almost always finding a part of the world that suffered (or is about to suffer) some kind of unspeakable tragedy that would wipe out everything. Normally they put a stop to this and manage to save the town (and that part of the world) but there have been instances where they were too late or there wasn't anything they could do.
Radical Dreamers and subsequently Chrono Cross shifted dramatically in tone from the relatively lighthearted adventurous spirit of Chrono Trigger. The fact that the idealistic heroes from the previous game are strongly implied to have been unceremoniously offed is a pretty good indicator of the general tone of the games.
The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask is pretty dark for a Zelda game, especially in comparison to the previous title. Although not to the same extent, Twilight Princess is also pretty dark, suggesting that the "realistic" games are permanently taking a turn for the dark and edgy.
If one would branch the 3D Zelda games into two categories, Toon-style and Real-style, the "darkest" entry in the generally more cheerfully Toon-style category would be Spirit Tracks, which is one of the only two Zelda games to not receive a regular E rating (Spirit Tracks was rated E10+ ; Twilight Princess was rated T). It even features one of the shortest, but creepiest plot points of Twilight Princess as framework for a huge junk of the story: Princess Zelda's empty body being possessed by a male Sealed Evil in a Can.
One could argue that Wild ARMs 3 is the darkest entry in the Wild ARMs series due to having the most sinister villains, Filgaia (normally A World Half Full) being a flatout Death World, and arguably having the bleakest ending in the franchise.
While not to the extent as other examples in this page, Tales of Rebirth is probably the darkest entry of the Tales Series. Overall, the game has a more grim atmosphere and serious story than its predecessors and successors (doesn't mean that the game doesn't have humor, mind you, it's just in smaller amounts). The game isn't universally considered the best of the franchise, but it's pretty high up there; so, an example of the trope working.
{Video Game/{Tales of The Abyss}} qualifies as well. It followed the much Lighter and SofterTales Of Legendia and more idealistic 'Video Game/'Tales of Symphonia series. (Including Phantasia, which received a Game Boy Advance release months before Abyss was.) The game's Wham Episode involves Luke being tricked into causing a mining town full of people suffering from Miasma-poisoning into the Qliphoth. Those who didn't die in the initial fall then sank into the mud and died. Nothing quite like that happens (unless you include the mass-Suicide of the Replicas) later, but almost all the characters wind up losing someone important to them or going through hell to earn their happy ending. And even then...they got a Gainax Ending. Not to mention the characters themselves. Jade'' is the only one who doesn't go through some kind of traumatic event. And given that Jade kind of created a Humanoid Abomination and nearly killed himself when he was younger...yeah.
Homeworld Cataclysm. Although we don't witness it directly, the Beast easily trumps the Taiidan in terms of brutality; at least the Taiidan stopped at annihilating a planet, the Beast only cares about making more of itself in a gruesome and (by the sound of it), REALLY F***ING PAINFUL way.
Army of Two - The 40th Day was a much darker compared to Army of Two, Morality decisions that is in the Black and Grey Morality section. A much darker plot and quite the number of people killed off.
The upcoming Max Payne 3, as if the series wasn't already dark enough. There may be Creator Breakdown involved.
Tales of Monkey Island. For starters, the sex jokes and double entendres are more frequent and overt. The comedic, silly deaths from previous games are mostly replaced by gruesome, occasionally-tragic deaths. LeChuck tones down his Large Ham persona. There's almost no fourth wall breaks. Oh, and Guybrush DIES...he gets better later on, but still.
Zork: Nemesis was a black sheep in the series, largely eschewing the light-hearted, satirical nature of the rest of the series for a dark, grim story set in an abandoned and ruined temple, where the only characters to interact with are four self-aware corpses and the Eldritch Abomination who killed them, and that's just the first area.
For a while the third sequel to Kid Icarus seemed to be heading this way, looking more like Nintendo's answer to God of War. [1] Apparently, Pit was a adult and was "cursed for thousands of years for a crime and becomes a 'Fallen Angel" and had a tattoo on his arm bearing the inscription of said crime. Most of the fans did not like it. Fortunately for them, they went with the Brawl redesign and appear to have scraped the old ideas.
"Me and my poor befuddled brain, trying to fathom a Sierra where... the most recent King's Quest involves killing things? Whatever happened to saving the cute little bee queen? HAS THE WORLD GONE MAD?"[2]
The Mother series falls under this somewhat. Mother 1 and 2 were relatively cheerful and funny, then comes Mother 3 where Your mother dies (in the first 30 minutes of the game, no less), your brother goes missing after trying to avenge your mother's death (although its implied the main character thinks he's dead), your father dedicates his life to finding him, your brother is used by the big bad to pull the seven needles which if he gets more than half the WORLD ENDS, the big bad is an insane person who is thousands of years old and has the mind and body of a kid, and in the end your brother kills himself. Amazingly it does retain the humor of the previous games though.
EarthBound seemed slightly darker than Mother, as well. Especially when considering thefinalboss...
No More Heroes 2 is a slightly darker version of the first game. While it still retains the quirky, paradoxal, fourth wall-breaking, Tarantino-esque qualities of the first game, it continues the series theme of revenge that was only brought up at the end of the first game, a noticeably angrier Travis, and the brutal murder of Travis' friend Bishop, with his severed head in a paper bag being thrown through Travis' window at the beginning of the game. Interestingly, the second game also features some actual Character Development, with Travis starting to get sick of mindless killing and eventually deciding to quit the UAA because it disgusts him, as opposed to the first game, where he was just a violent, foul-mouthed Blood Knight.
Sengoku Basara is a game series that's known for being ridiculously over-the-top with all its character designs, Engrish, attacks, plotlines, ham, silly humour, cheese and the tendency to ignore actual history. Basically, everything was turned Up to Eleven, and it was awesome in its own way. Kind of. Then along came Sengoku Basara 3, kicking the previous poster boys out of the way and taking over with new serious plotline. Capcom also decided to be more history-accurate, making them NPC/killing off important characters along the way. Result? Previously "LET'S PARTY!" -characters overrun with angst.
If you count it, the unreleased Star Fox 2 is dark by the fact that interplanetary ballistic missiles are used to destroy Corneria. To top it off, the entire game is on a time limit of sorts. Don't take out the missiles, and Corneria is hopelessly destroyed.
Syphon Filter was already rather dark to begin with, but Logan's Shadow especially turns upthe angst factor, with the IPCA shut down, Logan sent on a botched mission by corrupt bureaucrat Robert Cordell, Lian accused of treason by Cordell, and Logan's and Teresa's possible death at the end. Ironically, it has a T rating, as opposed to the M rating of previous games.
Patapon 3 is a rather mild example. The art style is much darker in this one and music has lots of heavy guitar riffs in it.
The sequel is notably darker, instead of leading an army of Patapon, the Patapon are left to 4 survivors who are tossed into a dimension filled with dark demons and must fight them off with masks that can corrupt them.
EA has announced a new game, plays like Diablo in a dark and gritty sci-fi universe. It's called Darkspore. Yes, thatSpore.
Just like Spore, The Sims Medieval is darker than the older sim games as it breaks the three rules of Simology which is no religion, no murder (You can kill people in swordfights and executing them) and no alcoholism. It also introduces some things such as breastfeeding for instance.
The "Wonderful Life" subseries of Harvest Moon are extremely dark compared to the other games. For one, unlike the other HM games, once you've chosen who to marry, the game clearly spells out to you that the lives of the other potential brides are now completely, irrevocably ruined.
For the second, characters age in real time, which means the end of A Wonderful Life is a wonderful death.
Arc The Lad 2: the game takes every trope and cliche found in Japanese RPGs, then apply with bullheaded consistency Murphy's Law, turning the sequel of a generic RPG into one of the most sadistic game on the first Playstation.
The general direction of Dwarf Fortress updates is that each is darker and edgier than the last, if it's more than bug fixes, to bring more Fun. Highlights include:
The recent .17 version of DF2010 came with the introduction of bogeymen that kill anyone who wanders alone at night, the Night Creatures who abduct innocent people to transform and breed with, and the spirits of improperly memorialized dwarves haunting, and sometimes murdering, the living.
Telltale's Sam And Max Freelance Police games went from being a collection of lighthearted (but satirical) stand-alones in the first two seasons, to the much more serious and epic Season 3, The Devil's Playhouse, which (while still a total comedy) had a strong overarching plot, was less satirical, and deconstructed the Dead Baby Comedy stuff into more serious and emotionally-affecting Black Comedy. It went down really well with the fanbase, though.
Hard Truck series started out as a trucking simulation game. Then Hard Truck Apocalypse spinoff was released where events take place in post-apocalyptic Europe.
Would you believe LittleBigPlanet 2? It's still a fairly light, silly game, but... well, the previous titles were about traveling an imaginary world, helping people. This one is about stopping an Eldritch Abomination from destroying an imaginary world, complete with some genuinely creepy levels and enemies.
Batman: Arkham Asylum itself was essentially a MUCH darker version of the animated series. In fact, it was so dark and filled with so much Nightmare Fuel, that many people who play are shocked that it didn't get rated M. One wonders how the hell they'll get away with a Teen Rating for Batman: Arkham City.
Tomb Raider went this direction. The first game had Lara Croft simply hunting for artifacts and getting into shootouts for self-defence. As the games progressed the character became darker and more violent, with the player being unable to avoid killing in order to proceed with a level in some cases. One game's cutscene has Lara cold-bloodedly allowing a man to fall to his death, while a mission in Tomb Raider Anniversary chronicles Lara's first killing of another human being. (See the Literature section for how Lara got even more darker and edgier.)
Especially with a new reboot of the series recently announced, this E3 trailer definitely contains a much darker and emotional-scarring experience for our young heroine. Can't shake the feeling of Survival Horror on this one.
If you didn't feel anythingatall watching the goddamn trailer, you are a horrible, horrible person.
Tenchu isn't exactly a family friendly game but its prequel, Birth of the Stealth Assassins, got rid of the supernatural elements and the soothing music and elaborated on Rikimaru and Ayame's tragic back story.
Golden Sun: Dark Dawn is darker and edgier than its predecessors. Weyard in the two previous games was largely at peace, and the only characters who tended to kick the bucket were the villains. Now Angara, and very likely the other continents of Weyard, is full of budding countries who frequently war with each other, and once the the Grave Eclipse is activated, townspeople start dropping like flies in the face of an overwhelming monster horde, with even a few named characters both good and bad getting Killed Off for Real.
Portal 2, while still being as hilarious as the first game, has a noticeably darker and more serious plot.
While Mabinogiisn't exactly one of the cheeriest games around, its prequel game Vindictus, focusing on humanity's war against the Fomors to reach The Promised Land (Mabinogi's original setting Erinn) is as violent as all get-out and has a lot more serious themes. In the third major episode, a young cadet that you spent the first few episodes getting to know is viciously murdered, and as the game goes on, we learn it's only the beginning of how worse things are getting.
It doesn't help that the cutscene where he's killed is right before the boss fight in a mission. And it's unskippable. Given the luck-factor in finishing quests, it's not uncommon to see him murdered over and over and over again.
Rocket Knight Adventures was a cute game about a silly opossum who wears knight armor and a jet pack, and fights an army of pigs, who, when defeated, run around in their underwear after their armor is knocked off. There were two sequels released shortly after, both named Sparkster, one for the SNES and one for the Genesis. The music is no longer as upbeat, the enemies are replaced with wolves or lizards (depending on which sequel), the humor and silliness are gone, Rocket Knight (now Sparkster) himself is no longer chubby and happy looking but instead slim and grim, and a lot of the original charm is gone.
Final Fantasy also has its fare share of Darker and Edgier moments. A particularly notable example is Final Fantasy VI: There are hints at unethical experimentation towards a sentient race by The Empire, the amnesiac main character, when knocked out, experiences a particularly horrifying recollection about her being outfitted with a slave crown in a manner that is implied to be unwilling on her part, then being forced to torch fifty of the imperial troops alive, and the war speech made by the Emperor. In addition, the main villain, a psychotic jester named Kefka Palazzo manages to gleefully poison an entire civilization's water supply and was implied to have wiped out said civilization in what is essentially an act of Genocide, with the Empire also suffering losses from the same poison as well, and then proceeds to stab the Emperor in the back and cause the world to be significantly ruined, remaining this way throughout the second act, and it is implied that the world's condition is slowly getting worse, with the main bad guy (now a god) murdering various people with his Light of Judgement, even orphaning various people, and then trying to destroy the entire planet.
League of Legends' newer skins as of August 9th, all of them felt a lot darker and grittier.
Hyperdimension Neptunia was a fun light-hearted Console Wars game filled with a fun cast and a happy game overall. The sequel starts off with the four goddesses on the receiving end of a curb stomp, piracy monsters are rampant, and in one of the endings murdering fellow goddesses to power up the sword, only to find out that Nepgear was being controlled by the Big Bad.
However Fallout 3 was a much more grim game compared to New Vegas and had very little humour.
Compared to the rest of the series, Hitman: Contracts is probably the darkest. All of the missions take place at night and it's usually raining. The game also has really haunting background music, and at least 4 of the missions have already dead bodies, one who was horribly butchered.
Darwinia, released by Introversion Software, centers around saving a race of small, green machine-intelligence entities known as Darwinians from a virus that has infected their computer system. However, in the process, the player introduces the Darwinians to a previously unknown concept: organized conflict. The result can be best seen in the slogan for the sequel, Multiwinia:
Multiwinia ~ Darwin is dead. Prepare for war.
NHL '99, where the menus had a grittier feel to them. However, this didn't change the content of the game.
Although Metroid is already a darker and edgier Nintendo franchise, it reached a new level with Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. In addition to including a Dark World, its backstory tells about much more tragic events, including the rise, decline and near-extinction of the Luminoth, the death of the Galactic Federation soldiers, and the Space Pirates being frightened before the presence of anEvil Counterpart of Samus Aran. The next game, Corruption, didn't have a Dark World, but Samus does witness the death of several fellow hunters, several (not just one anymore) planets being affected by Phazon, the renmants of a merciless attack towards a GF ship, and she being gradually corrupted herself by Phazon.
Web Animation
The There she is!! series of videos at http://www.sambakza.net/ feature Doki and Nabi, a rabbit who falls in love with a cat. The first two videos are cute and funny, showing Doki chasing Nabi despite his arguing that they are different species, then him getting her a birthday cake. The third and fourth videos show how society is REALLY against this pairing, with the two of them getting injured, property destroyed, pet dying, etc. Not so fun anymore, huh?
Jib Jab, originally, light in tone, went from gently mocking Bush and Kerry in 2004 to mocking McCain and Obama straight up in 2008, along with the broken promises made by presidents in election day that never come to light when they are actually in office. The "Year in Reviews" went from hoping it'll get better to, most recently, the 2008 Year in Review summing up everything that's bad, and even adding "wars and famine" to the end.
Super Smash, the gritty reimagining of Super Mario Bros makes itself to be a rather awesome flash.
Singer: There's new demographics when nobody asked for it!
The third season of Gotham Girls is much darker and realistic than the last 2. In fact, many DCAU fans consider this to be the ONLY canon season.
Webcomics
Sailor Moon CS compared to the anime it's primarily based on
The superhero parody webcomic Emokid and Chemokid was initially dark comedy, but eventually became a suspensefully story with deep backgrounds and character development while still maintaining the odd sense of humour that only the writer of Headtrip can provide.
In a May 2008 Dominic Deegan strip, the title characters learns, to his horror, that his favorite comic is about to become Darker And Edgier... by retconning the hero into a demon. It's like making Superman Darker And Edgier by giving him a German heritage, a small mustache, and a great personal hatred of Jews.
It was foreshadowed at the end of the Storm of Souls arc. One of the cosmic consequences of breaking the storm was that many of the souls normally bound for Heaven or Hell ended up in the wrong place.
Occurred in A Modest Destiny, around the third story arc. Up to that point it was a lighthearted and humorous fantasy spoof. Then came "The War of Fate" arc, which was much more darker and serious, such as the female lead considering getting an abortion.
Ctrl+Alt+Del. Let's not forget the shift from "two game nerds on a couch" to "personal responsibility and miscarriage tragedy".
Wapsi Square has certainly gotten much darker and edgier since it shifted from a slice-of-life comedy, to a supernatural drama; dragging in themes of suicide, human sacrifice, manifesting personal demons, and a looming quasi-apocalypse.
Breakfast Of The Gods is a Darker and Edgier and Bloodier and Gorier use of breakfast cereal mascots, of all things. Tightly-written and exquisitely drawn, it's D&E&B&G at its finest. Frankenberry is a sadistic thug, Sonny the Cuckoo is batshit insane, The Trix Rabbit is a private investigator, Toucan Sam runs a bar and acts a lot like Rick. It's now completed.
Hijinks Ensue's (dark) MacGyver parody can be found here.
DMFA started out as a very light-hearted comic that basically followed the everyday antics of Dan, Mab, and their friends and family. Later on, things like Dan discovering that he is an incubus, Mab being involved in...something that she claims will kill at least two of her friends, a flashback revealing that on Dan's first adventure one of his friends was brutally killed by Dark Pegasus, and all of Abel's Story made it clear that DMFA is definitely a more mature comic than when it started. Though this to be expected, as the comic was started when the author was in high school, and so it's probably matured along with her.
Formerly Lawful Stupid Cale, from Looking for Group has certainly come a long way since the comic started. Due to the influence of undead warlockRichard, cynical companions Pella, Benny, and Krunch Bloodrage, and the fact that his new Kingdom was Powered by a Forsaken Child, Cale has become far more flexible with regards to his morals, and even smiles when he sees an old foe intimidated by Richard's undead townsfolk.
tentacleTherapist (Rose): I'm not actually trying to caricaturize a grim sorcerer. TT: There's still a perfectly intact piece of my mind which realizes how ridiculous it is to be flying across rainbow oceans with a couple of magic wands and a salamander in a little cowl. [a bit later] ectoBiologist (John): maybe later, i will drop by your planet again and rescue you, thus breaking the spooky spell put on you by your nefarious, shadowy masters. EB: that way you will stop being sogrimdark and ominous, and basically completely off the deep end in every way, as is now painfully obvious to anyone with a brain. TT:Swoon!
Well, dying and resurrecting as a God Tier put an end to that. And with the end of Act 5, it seems like things are going to get a bit less dark.
Sam and Fuzzy parodies the trope here. And then again here. And then manage to further parody the second parody here. Sam Logan does not seem to like this trope.
Web Originals
The Insane Cafe RP trilogy has elements of this. The first was a nonsensical, hilarious and downright Narmy. The second was more plot driven and a terrorist attack on a remote laboratory was a key plot point. The 3rd installment features several assassination attempts, a few sex scenes and an impending war. Oh yeah, profanities are uttered the second and third installments.
The blog Chocolate Hammer mocked this trend with the game Darker and Edgier, in which familiar franchises were warped beyond recognition and readers had to guess what they originally were. The posts in question can be found here and here.
While most of the campaigns in the Global Guardians PBEM Universe were standard Bronze Age fare, the Night Life In The Big Easy campaign, which featured a solo 1980s-style vigilante facing off against a voodoo-themed criminal empire that had been built on drugs, prostitution, and white slavery, was straight out of the Dark Age.
Suburban Knights compared to Kickassia. While both are hilarious and Kickassia indeed showed off Critic's lack of sanity well, SK had a really dark villain that made the mood drop in whatever scene he was in, innocents getting blown up, a Bittersweet Ending where Critic hopes to find the Necronomicon in order to revive Ma-Ti, death not being at all cheap and actual, honest-to-God Tear Jerkers.
In a more meta sense, The Nostalgia Critic both in-character and out-of-character openly hates this trope when done poorly and, as he puts it, is "dark for the sake of being dark" instead of being dark to convey some message or have some purpose. It comes up in a good amount of reviews.
When compared to the movies, The Gungan Council is definitely more mature across the board. However, whether or not it beats out Star Wars Legacy depends on the writer and character.
The flash series Super Mario Bros was actually much darker than the original games, as the very beginning had Mario trying to escape from something before it proceeds to a flashback: Luigi ended up killed during an ambush on Bowser's forces, Bowser successfully kidnaps Princess Peach because Mario was busy mourning for Luigi (and it is heavily implied that several of the Toads ended up killed in the assault). Bowser's plans with Peach involve using her to create mushrooms so he could effectively be immortal. After a final stand against Bowser, and successfully dethroning him, he ends up failing to save Princess Peach (resulting in her death by magma alongside Bowser), and the direct result was an eruption, getting to where the series started. Mario then faces the magma flow and essentially dies.
"Zest Online Riddle" is a game similar to Not Pron, and it's... weird. It also has dark, oppressive music and, overall, it's... creepy. Thing is, unlike most online riddles, this actually has some kind of a story to it, and from what this troper knows, it appears to be darkening the hell out of "The Wizard of OZ", among other things.
Actually not too far from the truth, there seemed to be a new Inspector Gadget series, where the humor was announced to be darker, the characters more animesque, among other things. The only thing stupid-sounding about the show is that Gadget was going to fight ghosts, for Pete's sake.
So...in a sense, it was going to be Danny Phantom with more cyborgs?
Speaking of Danny Phantom, while being perhaps one of the edgiest of Nicktoons, the tv movie, "The Ultimate Enemy", was the perhaps the darkest episode in the entire series, as well as one of the darkest moments in Nickelodeon history.
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.
Legion of Super-HeroesAnimated 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 brings 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.
ReBoot pulled this off rather well in season 3 by showing two young characters suddenly grown up, adapting to the change in writing style, introducing new locations, and expanding the scope of the series.
This was the culmination of a transitional phase of the story begun during the Web World Wars when Bob was thrown into the Web and the previously one-shot virus attacks became a full-on assault. When Enzo was required to take the role of Guardian and lost in battle... that was when the Darker and Edgier tone was cemented.
Transformers Animated did similar, starting with the season three opener "Transwarped". Instead of the usual light-hearted action/humor, it explored the ethical implications of building a sentient but simple-minded superweapon, dealt with Ratchet's troubled past, involved far more visceral violence (albeit to robots) and brought several main character close to death. Not to mention that as of "Where Is Thy Sting" one Autobot character's been killed off grotesquely and the leader of the Autobots is beaten into a coma with his own hammer. We never do see him wake up, by the way.
Word Of God says that had the series continued, he would have been revealed as having been killed.
Beast Wars, although frequently serious in tone, was also often humourous and silly. Beast Machines, the sequel, begins with planetary genocide and things just degenerate from there.
Beast Wars itself saw this after the end of season 1, which featured the death of Optimus Primal. The first, episodic, often very campy season stands in contrast to the more mature, more serious later seasons.
Speaking of Beast Wars, Transformers Animated has a habit of borrowing characters, ideas, or scenery from the earlier Transformers shows and modifying them for its own purposes. In Beast Wars Waspinator was the lovable hapless Butt Monkey who blew up many times but always pieced himself together without any obvious lasting effects. In Animated he's a gigantic, half-crazed techno-organic bent on bloody revenge upon Bumblebee for (accidentally) having him sent to the stockades under accusations of treachery. When he blows up, he's also seen piecing himself back together, but the effect is intensely creepier.
Transformers Prime is the darkest and edgiest Transformers cartoon thus far. Deaths are common (and the Autobots are actually shown killing Decepticons), there's far less comic relief, and disease, brutality, and the undead are common thematic elements.
Transformers: The Movie compared to most of the rest of the series, the original series occasionally took a darker turn but everything usually turned out fine in the end, but in the movie the vast majority of the original Autobots are killed within the first 20 minutes in increasingly gruesome manners Optimus Prime included, later the surviving Autobots (mostly newer characters) band together to save the world from Unicron, a planet eating Transformer, while having to avoid Galvatron, the rebuilt Megatron.
The Powerpuff Girls underwent this slightly for the movie. It was edgier and more serious than the majority of the series — not that that's hard to accomplish.
An episode had them sell the formula to an unscrupulous man who started cranking out "EXTREME" Powerpuff Girls. He used more Chemical X and less of the other ingredients resulting in malformed girls, later when he won't give up the Chemical X he drinks it and turns into a monster and nearly sucks the life out of the girls leaving them a sickly green and covered in spots, the professor and their clones are just barely able to save them.
What about the "Speed Demon" episode where the girls travel to a grim future where Ms. Bellum has turned into a Mayor-hat obsessed wretch because the Mayor had been killed, the teacher is so traumatized that she keeps repeating a Madness Mantra about the girls leaving, and the professor is shallow shell of his former self, not even going into the list of people who blame them, having suffered possibly even worse things. And it's all caused by Him who has reduced the town to an apocalyptic wasteland and becoming a literal Satan himself.
In the episode Super Zeros, where the girls try to act like their favourite heroes, they poke fun at this trope. Buttercup at one point complains, "And we're not all dark and tormented!"
In 2003, John Kricfalusi made a revival of his cartoon Ren and Stimpy, called Ren and Stimpy Adult Party Cartoon, to allow him more freedom on what he couldn't do previously on the show. It was darker, much more violent, the characters used stronger curse words, and it had a lot more blatant sex jokes, including a few episodes where the duo are portrayed as gay lovers.
To promote the movie, a PG-13 version of G.I. Joe called G.I. Joe: Resolute has been launched for [adult swim]. The first episode has the Joe's battleship base attacked, Bazooka killed, and Cobra Commander wiping Moscow off the face of the map. Then again, what do you expect when Warren Ellis is doing the writing?
The Scooby-Doo films of the late 90's were much darker than the previous shows and movies. They were very violent, people actually died, the villains were threatening, most of the monsters were real, and a few adult jokes were put in. By the time What's New, Scooby-Doo? premiered, they became Lighter and Softer.
However, the new series Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated has become Darker and Edgier, again. And becomes more and more Darker and Edgier so as the series goes on....
The final episode of Tales from the Crypt (the only one animated) was a bloody and gory retelling of The Three Little Pigs, featuring the wolf messily eating the pigs (and presented as a rapist in one scene) and making two of the pigs a smoker and an alcoholic who sponge of their brother. Plus, The Bad Guy Wins.
Lampshaded in the animated, Direct-to-DVD feature Turtles Forever, where the Edgier 2003 Turtles disdain their 1987 counterparts, but are in turn scorned by the yet edgier original comic Turtles when they meet.
The "Red Sky" seasons in the 1987 series is this compared to the light-hearted show before.
Avatar The Last Airbender features this after Season 1. While the first episodes did detail how an entire nation was destroyed and explains Zuko's scar, it's not until the second season when the plot really starts to hammer in the sheer destruction of war, touching on such cheery implications as genocide, concentration camps for water benders, and a general feeling of helplessness. Even the personal stories get deeper and darker, with Zuko struggling with moral issues, Katara seeking vengeance for her mother's death with a technique called "blood-blending", and Azula going absolutely psychotic. Done well, because the descent into darkness is gradual and doesn't just put a gun in a character's hand. Rather, the focus is on fleshing out characters and exploring the implications of their situation.
The show is an excellent example of how a series can be dark, with mature themes, without having to resort to graphic content (something it shares with a number of other series, including Harry Potter).
The creators have even stated outright that Korra is darker and more mature in comparison to Airbender - which is extremely impressive for a Nickelodeon cartoon, given how mature the original series was already.
Sonic SatAm to Adventures Of Sonic The Hedgehog: The latter show was a light hearted comedic show without any of the characters being in any real danger while in SatAM, Dr. Robotnik has become a power hungry dictator who has taken over the city of Mobotropolis, captured the king and thrown him into another universe, and has turned most of the inhabitants into robots to do his bidding. He is also much more menacing and capable than his other interpretations, which are generally bumbling idiots. Also, Sonic, Tails and a band of surviving friends known as the Freedom Fighters try to stop him from completely taking over the world- he already owns most of it -and must avoid being captured and roboticized in the process.
Although it is MUCH lighter than the comic.
Until you actually get to episode 2, when Cat dies. Then it's permanently DARKER than the comic.
Parodied in The Stinger for the Ed, Edd n' Eddy movie. Having been beaten up by the cul-de-sac kids over a misunderstanding (he attacked the Eds, not knowing that everyone had made up), Johnny, as his superhero persona Captain Melonhead, reimages himself as The Gourd and swears revenge on the neighborhood...only for Plank to tell him the movie was over.
What movie?
The movie itself was a more darker and edgier version of the series, and not in the fun way: The Eds' scheme seriously wounded the other kids for once, which cause them to seek retribution, meaning ganging up on the Eds so they could beat them up senseless. The Eds themselves ends up in several hardships trying to escape them, which takes its tolls on both Edd and Eddy. They ends up in a rather ugly fight because of Eddy's lack of seriousness and empathy unleashed all of Edd's repressed anger, and later it turned out that Eddy has his reasonsforhisbehavior. The climax itself was a horrificdeconstruction of Amusing Injuries and what consequences they actually have.
The "Coon and Friends" episode trilogy of South Park takes Darker and Edgier and runs with it. Kenny turns out to have experiences every single death consciously, waking up in his bed the next morning unharmed, and having to live with the fact that no one who witnessed his death has any memory of it. When he realizes he has a legitimate super power, he develops a secret super hero identity as "Mysterion". At first, he only uses the secret identity to thwart Cartman's plans and to scare his crack-addicted parents into actually taking care of him. ... and then he gets sucked into R'Lyeh, realizes it looks all too familiar, and kills himself to be transported back to his bed the next morning so he can save his friends who are stuck in a Lovecraftian nightmare. And then it's revealed that he's the spawn of Cthulhu, used as an infact in Lovecraftian cult rituals, as depicted in the Necronomicon.
South Park in general, thanks in part to its evolving animation style and in greater part to loosening content restrictions imposed by the network, has gotten a fair bit darker (if not more serious) over its run, with more and more graphic content included on a regular basis. It's gotten to the point that reruns of old episodes, which were once rated TV-MA, are now rated TV-14 since they appear downright tame compared to what's been allowed on the show (and other basic cable programming) in recent years.
Spider-Man: The New Animated Series is perhaps the darkest telling of Spiderman. The pilot alone portrays the origin of villain Electro as a tormented university student who smashes a sign after everyone laughs at a cruel prank played on him, is electrocuted, then murders the chief antagonist. Spiderman tries to stop him from killing more people, Electro seeing everyone as the people who hurt him, but can only do so by killing him. Too bad, as the graphic nature made the series Too Good to Last.
The Rugrats Movie: Not too many fans (want to) remember the show containing murderous animals, child endangerment, and tension between the babies thick enough that it can be cut by katana
It's also a bad sign when the adults are being more competent than usual.
Teen Titans got darker with each season, starting out mainly as an action-comedy cartoon with only the Robin-centric episodes being serious, but after the first season it all went downhill from there, and you got episodes like Robin going temporarily insane, Terra "dying" and then later maybe possibly coming back to life?, and then there was the apocalypse with everyone turning to stone...
J. Torres: [The show] started out skewed a lot younger... but along the way, I think the producers discovered it was reaching a wider audience. ... [the show] got into some darker story lines, and they introduced a lot more characters, so they expanded on it, and they let the show evolve with the audience.
Immediately afterward, the battle with the Ewoks looks a whole lot darker, with stormtroopers bleeding and screaming as they're hit with arrows and rocks, and Ewoks eating each other. Also, "Holy shit! That blast came from the Death Star!"
The regular series itself became darker in recent seasons. Bertram crosses the Moral Event Horizon by doing something not so comedic. He kills Leonardo da Vinci. Then Peter seems to cross Complete Monsterdom by throwing an unconscious Stewie under Lois' car wheel, and promptly has her run him over, and there was Evil Stewie, who committed one homicide, cut of Brian's tail, tries to choke Stewie with it, and later tries to strangle said dog with his collar. Seems like Family Guy is getting more seriously menacing antagonists, aren't they?
On the topic of more recent episodes being darker, the episode "Screams of Silence" actually has very few laughs in it due to the plot being about Quagmire trying to help hissister overcome domestic abuse she is in severe denial over; due to the serious nature of the topic, the series instead throws itself to the right on the comedy-horror scale by including several instances of domestic violence, suffocation via autoerotic asphyxiation, attempted murder (by strangulation), graphic murder (by crushing) and very, very few gags. And those gags weren't all that funny.
The difference can also be seen in the Christmas Specials, evident to anyone who watched both "A Very Special Family Guy Freakin' Christmas" and "Road to the North Pole".
The Boondocks TV series in comparison to the comic strip its based on. Though justified in that being on television obviously allows it to get away with a lot more than what a daily newspaper comic strip would.
Weapon Brown is Peanuts (and other cartoon characters) made ludicrously grimdark.
There was also the student film "Bring Me The Head Of Charlie Brown" by future Simpsons writer Jim Reardon, which involves the Great Pumpkin hiring the kids as hitmen to kill Charlie Brown in gruesome ways, eventually he snaps and goes on a killing spree.
When Batman: The Animated Series started in 1992, it was basically this compared to every other kids show out there. In a good way though, with mature storylines and complex characters and themes. The movies were even darker.
My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic's second season starts on a light note with the new villain brutally Mind Raping most of the mane cast and consuming the world in chaos. Then we get to the third episode which has Fluttershy snapping a bear's neck and Twilight going insane.
Given Discord, and the Deconstruction of the aesop formula in 'Lesson Zero' it's not hard to imagine there'll be an episode parodying the 'Darker and Edgier second season' at some point.
An in-universe example in King of the Hill: Multiple episodes show Luann running a Bible-themed puppet show called "The Manger Babies". In a later episode, John Redcorn runs a business of selling children's educational DVDs and has Luann make some. When her popularity wanes, she tries to gain back her fanbase by making a Darker and Edgier show with "edgier" storylines and characters, including a Bratz doll Expy.
"Pigmalion".
The first Halloween special for The Simpsons was a series of moderately creepy stories connected by a non-frightening Framing Device which kept reminding viewers that the tales were fictional. Starting with the second special, however, the stories began to get more violent and scary while the Framing Device got less and less reassuring. Eventually it was dropped altogether, and the stories quickly became downright horrific.
Some episodes that have darker and serious undertones include "The Crepes Of Wrath", "The Boys Of Bummer", and "500 Keys".
The first was the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode The Best of Both Worlds, during which happened the battle at Wolf 359, which is in some circles referred to as "The 9/11 of Star Trek", which is especially relevant in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. After this point, stories started focusing more on the imperfections of the Federation, which had until that point been portrayed as a Utopia.
Notably, Star Trek did not go Darker and Edgier by adding a load of sex, violence, and profanity, but it did (particularly in DS9) turn away from the Black and White Morality utopia Federation and introduced some grey into the Federation and their allies and enemies,
The second was the 2009 Star Trek film, which destroyed Vulcan and killed Kirk's father, years before Star Trek: The Original Series is set. As a result, the Federation in future Treks is likely to more closely resemble the post-Wolf 359 and post-Dominion War Federation seen in DS9 instead of the happy-go-lucky world of TOS and early TNG.
