In Defence of Grimdark

And how to do it right

If you have light on light, you have nothing. If you have dark on dark, you basically have nothing. It’s like in life, you’ve got to have a little sadness once in a while so you know when the good times come. - Bob Ross

As is becoming something of a begrudging trend on this Substack, I am once again discussing literature itself, rather than telling the story of my own world. Today’s inspiration comes from a conversation between

The Black Sun Archives

,

The Brothers Krynn

, and me. I have taken up the rather contentious position of defending grimdark, and now, I shall elaborate.

For some reason, whenever the term “grimdark” comes up in discussions, fantasy literature enjoyers tend to think of A Song of Ice and Fire. It’s no secret that I enjoyed reading ASOIAF, despite its flaws (and they are many), though unlike the works of Tolkien, I would not consider re-reading it. However, I don’t consider this series to be the poster child of grimdark as some do; the first book of ASOIAF, A Game of Thrones, was published in 1996, and the term grimdark is nine years older than that, originating with Warhammer 40,000.

In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.

WH40K is based largely on Frank Herbert’s Dune series, but there are plenty of other plagiarisms homages within, such as the Dark Eldar being space Melnibonéans. If you think that’s a bit on the nose, do not get me started on The Witcher… as if I’m one to criticise others for lack of originality, given that I named my airship Zaphnôra and based the design largely on the Pallada-class cruiser, and that’s ignoring my name and appearance when you consider my former employment as an arms dealer for a country called Alexandria.

Anyway, 40K is the better-known space opera counterpart of the older Warhammer tabletop game, retroactively named Warhammer Fantasy, which itself is a strange take on Tolkien’s legendarium if you squint at it long enough. If you’ve ever read The Silmarillion (and you should if you haven’t), you will notice certain parallels, such as the main chaos gate, the ultimate evil stronghold, being located at the North Pole, and the inherently chaotic alignment of certain races, e.g. Orks. Unlike in the Elric series, and also in my own world, chaos is unambiguously evil in the Warhammer universe, and given its far-reaching capacity for corruption, is brutally purged by the forces of order wherever it is found. In 40K, for example, the God-Emperor’s Holy Inquisition regularly, albeit only as frequently as absolutely necessary, carries out a type of operation called Exterminatus on planets that have been lost, in essence irredeemably corrupted. It has become something of a meme…

…but within the diegesis, it is treated with utmost solemnity:

That scene always makes me choke a little, and before anyone asks, I do know what Captain Angelos (the second voice) is referring to by confessing to setting those events in motion. In fact, that plot, along with the nature of the chaos gods, is brilliantly explained here:

Ruinous Powers

In a galaxy overrun by aliens, mutants, and heretics, the Imperium of Man is perpetually teetering on the brink of collapse, and humanity itself is fighting for survival, nothing more, nothing less. The glory days of the Great Crusade can never be reclaimed, only honoured. For the Eldar, the situation is even more dire, as the core worlds of their ancient empire were swallowed up by the Eye of Terror, a massive warp storm and gateway into the immaterium, the realm of chaos, not unlike what my people call the Void, or more properly, The Great Void of Everything and Nothing. In the ten thousand years since the opening of the Eye, awakening of a new chaos god, and near-extinction of the Eldar, their ancient enemies, the Necrons, have returned. In that time, a new enemy has also appeared, one which none had seen before, and which most likely comes from another galaxy: the Tyranids. There are also the T’au, but the less said about them, the better.

Grimdark is less a genre, and more a setting, specifically the setting of a ruined world. The core mistake of ASOIAF is twofold in this regard. The grim darkness of the world of Ice and Fire is not in the environment, but entirely internalised within the characters, which, now that I’ve had time to take a step back, doesn’t make a lot of sense. While I can certainly appreciate the commentary on decadence, decadence itself is characteristic of a society in decay, not one that was recently revitalised with the toppling of an old and corrupt dynasty. For this reason, the high/late mediaeval aesthetic simply doesn’t work; even Warhammer Fantasy doesn’t make this mistake, opting for a slightly more modern historical analogue, seeing as cannons are commonplace on the battlefield. 40K, of course, is entirely different, set in a far future in which all things are in a state of decay from their zenith, for instance technology, which is so backward that, in addition to having its own version of the Butlerian Jihad in the lore, it is akin to Canticle for Liebowitz in its approach. Even the enemies of the Imperium have made note of this, with one story (whose title escapes me, regrettably) of an Alpha Legion marine noting that the loyalist marines of the 41st millennium pale in comparison to the loyalist legionnaires he faced during the Horus Heresy.

ASOIAF was originally meant to be a trilogy, but then it stretched into five books, and now seven, though I am confident in saying that even the sixth book will never be finished. Moreover, the entire series has not aged well, and the more you know about mediaeval history, the worse it is. It was doomed to never be finished from the beginning, because GRRM does not know when to quit. He had the opportunity to write a Shakespearean tragedy by simply killing off all the main characters and leaving everything in utter ruin, thus setting the stage for true grimdark, but he didn’t. Instead, there is always another chance at resolution, one which will inevitably fail, some new player entering the game of thrones, or a revelation about an existing character that potentially changes everything, only for them to immediately die. The story devolved into complete tedium, and unless this pattern is broken, there is no end in sight. What was supposed to be a subversion of clichés became a cliché itself.

Sadly, because 40K is owned by a soulless corporation, it is undergoing a similar degradation as all our other favourite franchises. There is a series of novels about the Horus Heresy which have not been well-received by older 40K fans, for reasons that I’m sure Krynn will appreciate, among them that it deconstructs the God-Emperor of Mankind. Even in the context of lore which players have access to but the characters within the story don’t, the Emperor is a mythic figure, one about whom many legends exist, but very little explanation. Even his name was unknown, lost to time. Such questions, who he was, where he came from, and so on and so forth, should never have been answered. Furthermore, older lore attributed many great achievements, miracles even, to the God-Emperor. Those same achievements have been taken from him, either cheapened or attributed to other people (or in the case of creating the space marines, both). If I didn’t know better, I’d say these authors are trying to take away the very legendary heroes that the people of the Imperium need to inspire them to endure such troubled times. Oh, but not to worry, the troubled times are over, Guilliman is back, and he’s leading another Crusade as well as a spiritual successor to Imperium Secundus! I’d better stop ranting, otherwise you’ll be here all day.

While 40K isn’t what it used to be, and in my opinion, anything post 6th edition (DoW is based on 4th edition, DoW II is based on 5th edition) shows significant decline, it can teach some important lessons on grimdark. First of all, stories need definite beginnings and definite endings. For all the talk of “realism,” actual history is not as gritty, not as continuously convoluted, and compelling stories of real events can told quite easily. It comes from choosing a limited number of perspectives and sticking with them. I may have nine books planned in order to tell my own story, two more than ASOIAF, but I have absolutely no intentions of adding any more (also, the books themselves will most likely be shorter), because the whole point is to tell the story of a specific conflict. In the case of 40K, many of the novels are either based on actual tabletop games that have taken place, or adaptions of lore found scattered throughout rulebooks such as Imperial Armour. Though the Imperium may be in a near-constant state of war, individual conflicts are finite, erupting for a reason, and getting resolved in one way or another. Such events sometimes serve as elaborate backstories for certain characters or factions, case in point: the Badab War, which is partially about the slow fall of space marine chapter master Lugft Huron of the Astral Claws, who, through a series of misfortunes, ended up as an enemy of the Imperium, was almost killed, and fled into the warp. If his name sounds familiar, that is because, some time after the Badab War ended, Huron would re-emerge bearing the moniker of Blackheart, and at the head of a chaos warband called the Red Corsairs.

I will end this with an observation most ironic. There is a tale of heroic fantasy, which the internet has given the cringe-worthy brand of “noblebright,” whose setting actually fits my description of grimdark: The Lord of the Rings. No, I’m being completely serious, allow me to make my case. As the hobbits set out on their journey through Middle-Earth in 3018 of the Third Age,¹ they encounter, save for the Elven refuges, nought but ruin, remnants of great civilisations that have either decayed or been destroyed. First they pass through Weathertop, once the ancient watchtower of Amon Sûl, which was destroyed in 1409 by the Witch-King of Angmar. Eregion is next, the Elven city sacked by Sauron in 1697 of the Second Age. Khazad-dûm, once the pride of the dwarves, is in a sorry state and overrun with goblins, and is the place where they lose beloved Gandalf at the hands of the Balrog that had appeared there in 1980 of the Third Age.² Amon Hen, another ruin but one which still retains its power as the seats of seeing and hearing are still intact, is likewise the site of not only the loss of another member of the Fellowship, but its breaking altogether. Even more depressing, most of the strongholds of the Enemy were originally built by men of the West, such as Minas Morgul, formerly Minas Ithil, and Cirith Ungol.³ Even Rohan is a shadow of something greater, once being the Gondorian land of Calenardhon, before the devastation of the Great Plague in 1636, possibly a device of the Witch-King,⁴ if not Sauron himself. Gondor did not have the means to reclaim this land, and instead gave it to the Éothéod in 2510 as payment for their aid in fighting back the Wainriders from the east, who had overrun Calenardhon along with roving bands of orcs. The Éothéod, descendants of the Northmen of Rhovanion, later became known as the Rohirrim, and while they built a civilisation of their own, they did not restore the glory of Númenor to those lands. No-one could, for with the kin-strife of the 15th century, the downfall of Arnor in 1974, and the breaking of the line of kings in 2050, those glory days were over and seemed beyond reach. By the time of the War of the Ring, Sauron was dangerously close to achieving his final victory over the men of the West, and dominating all of Middle-Earth once more. He may have lost a massive army and his most powerful lieutenant in the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, but this was only a minor setback. Still, even with Sauron’s defeat, no part of Middle-Earth was spared, as the hobbits returned home from their grand adventure to find their home in ruins. They vanquished evil, possibly for good, but it would take several lifetimes for the damage to be undone. Since I cannot resist sticking in one final comment on 40K, The Siege of Vraks ends in a similar fashion.

The Lord of the Rings focuses on a specific group of characters, rather than trying to tackle everything happening everywhere at that time. The War of the Ring was widespread, with armies of orcs and other foul creatures issuing forth from Dol Guldur to attack the woodland elves, and great battles between Easterlings and the dwarves of the Iron Hills. In fact, this is one of the reasons that The Hobbit film trilogy (no, I’m calling it by its director’s name, PJ isn’t to blame for the terrible script written before he even signed on) failed, because it crammed in other events taking place at the same time,⁵ but which weren’t mentioned in the original book because Tolkien hadn’t written them down yet! Again, there is so much I could rant about, but I’ll not subject you to that.

The point of all this is that the grimdark world is one ruled by evil, not in the sense that evil must always triumph, but that being good is a difficult path, and very easily strayed from, even for the mighty or wise, like Lugft Huron or Saruman. Hopelessness is something that the characters must grapple with, not something to beat the audience over the head with.

1. All dates here are taken from Appendix B of The Lord of the Rings.

2. Emphasis on Third Age, why in Eru’s name is it in in the trailer for Amazon’s The Rings of Power?! Fanservice?!

3. Fun fact: “ungol” is the Elvish word for “spider,” which makes one wonder if the Gondorians knew about Shelob, or simply noticed a lot of webs in the general area.

4. A somewhat contentious issue among Tolkien nerds is the plot of The Battle for Middle-Earth II: The Rise of the Witch-King, which not only directly credits Angmar with unleashing the Great Plague, but also heavily implies that Carn Dûm is built atop the ruins of Utumno. A neat concept to be honest, but highly unlikely.

5. In that script. Those events actually took place almost a century apart, as Gandalf visited Dol Guldur for the last time in 2850 and urged an attack the following year, Bilbo Baggins was born in 2890, and the entirety of The Hobbit takes place in 2941-42.