Writing Low/Dark Fantasy aimed at a young audience

Right now, I'm writing Chapter 8 of Maranatha: Heathendom in which Aminara, our 12 year old protagonist fully becomes a Satria Squire and begins her final part of the Satria Ritual. In this strangest part, Aminara suffers a vision when she sees the Holy Cross and undergoes a ecstatic radiance of a shapeless young girl.

Now to the main subject. I'm trying to write a Dark Fantasy or Low Fantasy aimed at a young audience. Stylistically, it resembles a kid-friendly version of A Song Of Ice And Fire, Disney/Zootopia and The Lord of the Rings.

The main setting of Maranatha is set in the titular Empire of Maranatha in the year 3015 AWH (Anno Warrenus Hiedlerum). The world is populated by Theriomorphy where they come in many species and tribes. In the Vatican-style Citadel City of Maranatha, the capital of the titular Empire, is best described as a Medieval Roman Industrial Renaissance Holy City.

The Satria is a Grey Warden or Samurai-like organization which protects the Emperor, the Empire and serve God.

East of Maranatha is Mount Anathema. It is a Forbidden Zone where the Ungodly Ones live in the Netherworld. According to the Journal of a Satria who Wandered to an Earthly Inferno the mythical Kingdom of the Ungodly Ones is real and the Ungodly Ones call it Rem.

Due to Aminara's curiosity to venture into the Kingdom of the Ungodly Ones, the story gets darker and one by one - AwfulTruths and dark secrets are about to reveal which forces Aminara and her allies to Save Both Worlds by making sacrifices and horrible actions to stop the forces of the Imperial Regime of Maranatha led by the Emperor and Mastema of Rem led by Lucia Morgenstern.

For the first question.

How do you tone down dark and mature themes such as:

• War Is Hell: The First Emperor wiped out the Ungodly Ones with the Blood Order 3000 years ago and Hallel's (Aminara's father) guilt on the Battle for Los Angeles 7 years ago before the events of Maranatha.
• Genocide: Both villains intend to wipe each other due to Feeling Oppressed by Their Existence and their hatred. This also includes the Backstory Horror on why Maranatha and Rem existed.
• Extremism: The Emperor is a Knight Templar who wants to nuke Rem to destruction, Lucia Morgenstern is a Well-Intentioned Extremist who wants to activate the Tormentor to cause the end of Theriomorphy and the First Emperor is responsible for the After the End setting with the existence of Theriomorphy and humanity's extinction.

That's ... something of a hard one to answer. I feel that the very answer you seek depends on what exactly you mean by "kid-friendly", because darkness tends to be seen as not kid-friendly by default, and as such the whole thing is about letting as much darkness seep into it as you can whilst protecting the readers from certain monsters that lurk in the darkness.

Case in point, the War Is Hell one. Is your wish to protect your audience from the fact that war can be a genuine nightmare that can make even hardened man weep and that sometimes has no good come out of it and that can force people to make choices for the good of others that may see them reviled by those they held dear and them never being able to forgive themselves? Or is merely one of those things the bit you find problematic? Alternatively, mayhap it is the presentation of it accepted as standard that finds you wanting, the grim and bloody portrayal of all the content but not the actual content itself?

With the second one you can deal by filtering your content, removing the exact things you want your audience not to see and leaving the rest, weaving it all carefully so that the elements you want not are also ones that you need not. The third one can to some degree be solved by framing all that is this dark in a different frame, having the stories of old wars be told by storytellers as tales full of regret and warnings to not let it repeat, making the character block out certain things whilst on the battlefield (presuming that is a thing that will happen). And if it's the first one ... I'm afraid you've chosen your genre wrong in that case.

If I want to get in case, remember Avatar: The Last Airbender? You know the Air Nomad Genocide and its horrific aftermath in the very third episode. Kinda scary for kids who watched it, expecting for a lighthearted adventure series. Toy Story 3, the inceinerator sequence and Lotso's true nature. Pokemon and all its horrors.

Also, the War Is Hell theme is quite subdued. It tends to take in a form of implications from Hallel's journal and the reactions of Aminara and Emmy's viewing of the Homunculus.

The story of Maranatha is dark and disturbing, but not without hope unlike many Dark Fantasy stories where a happy ending is typically prevented.

Ah, yes, Avatar: The Last Airbender dealt with it by having the most horrible things be framed and also by providing a distraction whenever the creators thought it necessary.

The near-genocide of the Air Nomads is framed with what Aang feels. We see fragments of what'd happened and we see the skeletons which are a dark thing to show but not dark enough for it to be above children's ability to take in; anything else is shown to the readers via Aang's grief, rage, sadness, a torrent of emotions mostly negative. Since the tale of genocides you have is quite likely without any emotional investment for the protagonist, this means that for as long as you know what to do showing the readers those things with an appropriate frame that lessens how dark it appears and yet does not take from what it is should not be too hard for you.

A look at another grim and dark thing from the A:tLA universe gives us the state of the Earth Kingdom in the finale. You know that the people are suffering, you know that anyone that will be shown will be miserable, there's not even a question about it. And yet, nobody is shown, not really. You see desolation, it is dark and grim and crushing but at the same time there aren't really any suffering masses that you are shown and all of that mostly provides the background for the desperate struggle of the heroes. Dark? Yes. Desperate? Yes. Hellish? Yes. But too dark for children? I don't really think so.

And how many situations were genuinely dark and should have been way more crushing but weren't because you had Sokka and whoever happened to be near him in the function of a comic relief slash distraction? More than you can count, I think.

So yeah, framing the dark things is what you seem to have already decided to be your chosen course of actions. It's not a choice I disagree with in any way, that I will note, but any ideas you come up with yourself are probably going to be more applicable for your work than whatever stuff I could come up with, so I will lurk in the shadows unless you want to hear any random ideas I could have.

Going to second that. Disney's been creating animation with really dark themes successfully for a long, long time and they did it by not showing the really dark stuff explicitly. Frollo is one the vilest villains in the Disney canon and wouldn't be out of place in G.R.R.Martin's works, but they've made him kid-friendly enough to keep the rating and to make it clear what his motivations were.

Don't expect the kids to get all the nuances of War Is Hell aesop, the best approach would be "veiled anvil", of sorts.

edited 22nd Sep '17 7:48:15 AM by Millership

Time for the next question

Invoking cognitive dissonance in a reader

In the first chapter, Maranatha seems like a Medieval fantasy. Then you notice things like trains, electricity and cars existing in a world which resembles Germany in 1099 AD. Add to the kicker is the Theriomorph religion of Nasrani which resembles in every way.

When the chapter where Aminara arrives at Rem, it is designed as a Wham Episode where Maranatha isn't a medieval world but rather a post-apocalyptic world where Theriomorphs are dominat species and the Ungodly Ones, are humans forced to survive in that Netherworld fighting Theriomorphs who live in it.

That's a fairly tricky one.

Cognitive dissonance comes from expectations, from being led into what one thinks is a pattern they know that later proves to be one different enough to resist shoehorning it into the same pattern and yet not different enough to be completely different and as such easy for the reader to reject its connection to the pattern.

As such, cognitive dissonance is something that to a certain degree requires that the reader's experiences with the elements you are playing with to outweigh their own imagination's ability to take the pattern you've given to what you wrote and imagine it as a whole new pattern instead of trying to link it. While it is not impossible, because children tend to have a smaller experience base with anything written than an adult has and their imagination tends to be, or at least tends to be imagined as being (it definitely was when I was a kid, but nowadays people are lamenting that kids aren't using their imagination so I'm just guessing there), somewhat more flexible than that of adults, at least for this particular task, I would expect it to be more difficult to cause cognitive dissonance in them. And many things that you could use to shock the readers a bit, throw them off their mental train in order to make them more confused as to what is happening and trigger cognitive dissonance, are things that children do not yet have a frame of reference for which means they aren't going to be fully effective, if at all.

Honestly, I would expect it more likely that an average kid reader would react with "oh, okay" and move on.

I believe the correct thing to do would be to write the story as if you would, maybe use some creative framing to shake the readers' perception for a bit in case it helps as that's pretty much the one mostly effective against children thing you can use, but to not rely on the effect happening.

But then again, I don't write stuff for children; I had, but that was poetry and I was a kid then so yeah. Point is, if anyone with actual experience with writing kid stuff claims to have a way of doing this that works, they are likely to know better than me.

edited 22nd Sep '17 5:36:52 PM by Kazeto

For the new question:

What would be Aminara's reaction to Remmite society?

Context:

Rem is a city where humans who survived the the Great Holocaust 3000 years ago. The city is half-submerged in Mount Anathema's crater lake and humans live in the ruins of high-rise buildings that are overrun with plant growths.

Food in Rem isn't real food. It's a patented lie made by MASTEMA. The food comes from wild or aggressive Theriomorphs who are hunted and butchered by the Beastkillers. Those Theriomorphs are descendants of criminals, heretics, outlaws, bandits, smugglers, outcasts, untouchables and all sorts of undesirable or inferior Theriomorphs put to death by exile by the Maranathan sovereigns, got to the wrong place or ended up here.

The first things about Rem is Aminara seeing a violent battle between Theriomorphs and the Beastkillers. She sees the slain Theriomorphs being butchered to make meat for the Remmite's hunger.

edited 23rd Sep '17 4:10:25 AM by Huthman

That depends on what kind of person she is. So far the only one definite thing that we know about her personality is that she is curious, with the rest being fairly vague for one reason or another.

One child would accept what is going on with a shrug, another would poke around to satisfy their curiosity with no regard to what is happening, another one would ignore it entirely and focus on something else, yet another one would lose their last meal, another would not show anything but would have problems sleeping for some time. And so on, and so on, kids are a very ... hmm, diverse bunch.

Since I've also been a naturally curious person but with my own share of issues as a kid, for the sake of trying to answer it somehow I will compare it to me from that time. So, if I were in her position I would at first watch, cautious but curious, from whatever passed to me for safe distance. Then, I would feel somewhat nauseous at the butchering (it took me a long time to get used to it enough to not feel nauseous at the sound of raw meat being sliced butcher-style) but not enough to actually feel sick or to leave, just enough to "look green". After that I would have a lot of questions for whomever I could ask, questions that I'd probably get fake answers for which I would say I believe but I really wouldn't. After that I would have problems eating meat because the fact that it is meat would make me associate it with the butchering sound which would make me nauseous and that would make me fear that it may be something human or stuff; though, obviously, if I really had to eat and meat was all that was there I could eat it, it's just that with the nauseous reaction being psychosomatic forcing myself to eat would be full of gratuitous drama (think having to stop yourself from something akin to a panic attack in order to be able to do something, in this case consuming a meal).

But yeah, that's more or less just projecting. Whether your character would be anywhere close to that in how she'd react is anyone's guess (but yours; you should know if that is something she would do unless you haven't fleshed her out yet).