deconstructing dark fantasy

The marauding rapists lurking 'round every corner? The families of the victims hunt them down and murderize them. The cartoonishly corrupt religious leadership? Get ousted and replaced by genuine believers who are fed up with their venality and inspire widespread popular support with their piety. The depraved and oppressive lords? Get picked off by the many, many enemies they make. The Badass Antihero? His worldview leads to him getting his teeth kicked in by life. He learns from his mistakes, and stops being a nihilistic prat.

Do some research into the actual Middle Ages, since a lot of Dark Fantasy tropes draw from the caricature of the time cooked up during the Enlightenment. Get some ideas from that.

That's true. We often forget that the Middle Ages was also the time of Aquinas, Dante Alleghiari, and Chaucer, and there were attempts by many people to find some way of limiting the internecine warfare. While it certainly wasn't perfect my any measure of the word, it certainly wasn't a constant warfare.

If you think about it, any attempt to juggle a 'dark fantasy' from becoming even -more- dark, or to 're-fix' it back into something lighter, is going to sound an awful lot like regular, non-deconstructed dark fantasy. Unless your writer is either being pointlessly gloomy on purpose, or just plain sucks, then these are going to be the motivations of quite a lot of characters already.

Dark fantasy only ever maintains itself as such by giving these characters, and by extension the audience, a clear-cut message that the reason it doesn't get better is "it just don't work that way, hon". Things aren't that simple, or maybe they -are- that simple, they're just that bad. One way or another, the world is rigged to suck, and its residents receive the message loud-and-clear.

And any attempt to subvert this principle, by showing that positive things happen when someone simply doesn't listen to this message... well, that's just regular old heroic fantasy.

That being said, if you think about the usual role of magic in the setting, and if I correctly understand the concept of 'deconstruction' — I admit I have never quite understood why the term even exists — then dark fantasy can be easily and brutally 'deconstructed' by slowly but decidedly -answering- the question of MaybeMagicMaybeMundane in favour of the latter.

Magic does not exist. Magic appears to exist, not because of lost or 'alien technology', but because of the systemic ignorance of the general populace, isolation of the upper classes, impotence of the former to even control their own lives and haughty shamelessness with which the latter think of themselves as gods. All of these things combine to place the population in such a state of scientific ignorance, social hopelessness, and literal dirtiness that the few among them who -would- bother to distinguish 'witchraft' from illness and poison, priesthood and politics from prophecy, nobility and monarchy from godhood, have no real incentive to do so.

The deconstruction, of course, lying in the fact that this makes 'dark fantasy' ontologically indistinct from -historical fiction-.

Now that I'm thinking about this again with fresh eyes, I'd have to agree that it's impossible to "deconstruct" Dark Fantasy. Instead, you have maybe two options:

1, parody the hell out of the genre, removing any credibility from the Grimdark-ness.

2, Give it a Decon-Recon Switch. Start out with the Grimdark Dung Ages Fantasy world, but then let the characters slowly make it better.

edited 2nd Mar '15 6:45:26 AM by AwSamWeston

I don't think that it is impossible to decontruct dark fantasy.

I do think that at this point, with the proliferation of writers such as Brent Weeks, George R. R. Martin, and R. Scott Bakker, dark fantasy has become a genre of it's own.

I think that it has moved beyond simple "deconstruction" because the authors choose to emphasize certain themes and ideas in their world-building. For instance, such authors place a strong emphasis on the brutality of violence (over the perceived romanticization of violence), the domination of men by women, violence initiated by supernaturalist religious institutions, as well as a magic system that is inherently dangerous if not downright immoral. Dark fantasy explicitly examines and emphasizes the less attractive aspects of the standard fantasy setting that was never (at least in the authors eyes) explored in works like the Chronicles of Narnia, Conan the Barbarian, or the Lord of hte Rings.

The thing is, Dark Fantasy is a genre that was born out of a deconstruction. It's already a "realistic" interpretation of High Fantasy (or at least one realistic interpretation). So how do you deconstruct a deconstruction?

Well, you kinda don't.

I mean sure, there might be a few things to inject realism into. Maybe people wise up and realize that violence isn't always the answer, and instead one kingdom fights a war by blocking trade into another. Maybe some women demand respect from the men in a kind of medieval feminism. Maybe a wizard realizes that magic is just an extension of physics and uses it for good purposes while getting around all the common drawbacks.

But those are just tiny changes. And once you go there, you start to reach Low Fantasy territory.

Which is why (like I said before) the best alternatives to a Dark Fantasy deconstruction are parody and reconstruction.

Still say the best way to deconstruct Dark Fantasy is by making it more realistic... and thus, less dark.

Deconstruct dark fantasy by making it more realistic. I like it.

The important thing is to deconstruct the darkness, not the fantasy.