Can darker stories be unrealistic?

Exactly. And while one or two examples are acceptable, too many moments like that can, and sometimes will, cause a story to collapse.

So ther neeeds to be balance or else it just becomes plain dark without any substance huh?

More like, things need to make basic sense regardless of whether they're light or dark or whatever. It's entirely possible that dark stuff runs afoul of this rule in addition to light stuff.

It's the basic "don't let them catch you writing/acting" rule. The internal logic of the story has to withstand inspection without anyone saying "the reason for this is the creator said so".

Sort of. Many a dark world of a story are places so hopeless that there comes a point where you realise that with a place this bad they shouldn't ... no, couldn't have gotten to the point they are at; that, no matter how much they struggle, at this time they should already be extinct if the situation was this crappy in the past too.

It's kind of a specific "show, don't tell" case (that many people might not even count as such) in that no matter how much the author insists that the world makes sense and that it's not quite this bad, it won't work unless it gets shown in the story that yes, it truly isn't. And if you show that no, it really is, at every opportunity just to make the story darker ... well, there goes that, and it gets unrealistic due to being too crappy.

A fine comparison would be if you compared the world gone too dark but somehow existing to a student who never does anything at all—turns in empty test sheets, doesn't even try to do the homework or even copy it off of anyone, sleeps in class all the time, doesn't attend supplementary lessons if any of the teachers even bothers with those—but passes with decent grades. Because with the kind of effort the student extends they should have flunked a long time ago, the fact that it hadn't already happened makes no sense; and the same is about a world gone too dark, in those cases.

So pretty much what Night said, only I used different words.

There's also the reverse scenario where the setting fails to be dark enough to justify all the horrible stuff that has happened to the characters. At which point it becomes clear that it is you, rather than the story, who is torturing these people.

Victory Gundam is a good example of the latter. The cast suffers terribly, not because of anything inherent to the setting, but because the writer/director was having a breakdown, and attempting career suicide.

& I see. The writers might have some unresolved issues or they could just be they just watn darkness for the sake of darkness that reflects in their writings.

Darker and Edgier can definitely lead to breaking Willing Suspension of Disbelief, if not complete Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy.

When I looked up Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy, I was willing to bet The Shadow Line would be in the Live Action TV section and I wasn't wrong. That series came across as way too Dark to be remotely realistic - the events of the last episode left me shaking my head in disbelief as there seemed no rhyme or reason behind the events other than "ooh, let's make this really dark" and people behaved in ways that did not seem realistic or in-character.

Frankly, if a building inexplicably had fallen on top of the surviving characters or the whole world had been swallowed up by a sudden supernova in the closing scene, it wouldn't have been much more unrealistic/contrived than what had gone before and by that point I really wouldn't have given a fuck if it did happen.

edited 9th Jul '15 9:08:57 PM by Wolf1066