How do you avoid the "edgelord" trope, when entering the "grimdark" subgenre?

My apologizes for the lousy title, couldn't think of a better one for this topic.

When your crafting a hyper violent character that indulge in some of the most heinous atrocities imaginable, how do you avoid them coming across as overly gratuitous "edgelords?" In other words, how do works like Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian or George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire avoid the pitfalls of "juvenile obsession with shock value?"

 

I think it would help in the first place to stop thinking of it in these modern, shallow internet-hip slang terms like edgelord. If you let yourself slip into that mode of thinking you're going to have a hard time breaking out of it I think. Terms like that have a way of infecting your thinking. You could try translating to more nuanced and meaningful terms first, and think about all the books you've read about story structure etc. In other words activate more thoughtful terms and ideas.

 

Then of course it would be helpful to be familiar with a lot of classic stories featuring violent characters, from a time before things got so shallow. Of course that said, there definitely were violent characters even in ancient times, like Odysseus for instance. But his violence was controlled and cunning, not just wanton and bloodthirsty. He carefully planned his attacks and executed them precisely. Except when he let his arrogance and temper get the better of him, but that was just verbally. In fact it's what got him into the big mess known as the Odyssey in the first place, insulting and bragging to the cyclops son of Neptune, who then put a curse on him that he would have to struggle for 10 more years before getting home.

 

I always despised that word myself. Not only that it’s unnecessary insulting, its definition is also vague and weak. I’ve seen been used to describe anything from simply describing brooding kids who dress in dark clothes to those that mindlessly commit overly gratuitous atrocities. With that amount of variation, it's not useful for anything but cheap ad homiem attacks.

 

This is a tad unrelated to the discussion at hand, but how do you edit titles of threads in this forum? It has a few grating typos I want to fix, but I can't find the "edit title" button anywhere. Any help offered will be appreciated.

Edit: Never mind, found it. Sorry for the premature and now redundant post.

 

I'm not personally familiar with either, aside from having heard of them. I've only seen a few minutes here and there of Game of Thrones. But I would think your MC could have his or her own code of conduct that, even if it allows extreme violence, retains some kind of honor, at least in the character's eyes.

It would also be beneficial to understand the concept Nietzsche calls Master and Slave Morality. Basically, master morality was the morality of the strong—of conquerors—and slave morality the morality of the conquered. Master morality doesn't divide things up between good and evil intentions but between strength and weakness. The strength to kill when necessary, to stand against a superior force if necessary, even in the face of death.

Master morality is the code of conduct for characters like Conan the Barbarian. They despise weakness and people who indulge in it.

 

Dirty Harry was not an edgelord. Struggling to think of some good examples of some though. Maybe Batman?

 

Under most definitions I've seen used, Batman definitely qualifies as one. This doesn't stop from being one of the most popular and iconic protagonists in all of fiction.

 

I think it just boils down to quality and it being natural in the story. I think edgelordiness comes in when it appears like the violence is just there for shock value.

 

I'm sorry but I simply can't restrict myself from posting. You say Martin avoids the pitfalls of, "juvenile obsession with shock value." But that's all his books are. They're antithetical to the fantasy that I love. His writing is more juvenile than anything written by a teenager.

She was sopping wet when he entered her. “Damn you,” she said. “Damn you damn you damn you.” He sucked her nipples till she cried out half in pain and half in pleasure. Her cunt became the world.

And suddenly his cock was out, jutting upward from his breeches like a fat pink mast.

Sunset found her squatting in the grass, groaning. Every stool was looser than the one before, and smelled fouler. By the time the moon came up she was shitting brown water. The more she drank, the more she shat, but the more she shat, the thirstier she grew, and her thirst sent her crawling to the stream to suck up more water.

"Men call me Darkstar, and I am of the night."

Rain lashed at his face, blinding him. His mouth was full of blood again. The ship groaned and growled beneath him like a constipated fat man straining to shit.

And people dare to say this trash is on par or better than Tolkien, Eddison, Dunsany... I have less respect for Martin than I do any almost any other writer.

 

I've never read Martin but honestly those quotes make me want to.

Doesn't come off as shock value to me. Doesn't come off as extreme either but I can understand it might be more crude than what some people are used to.

But that brings up a good point. That everyone has different opinions and darker works will always have people who dislike the crassness/gore/sex/etc but then also have people who love it for those things.

Henry Miller was banned in America for a while because of his crass work that people saw as nothing but pornography (they put him through something called "obscenity trials" ) but he's respected as literature. Tropic of Cancer has some interesting quotes...

 

That's the thing, I'm not in the least bit a prude or sensitive. When I want dark, I read Emil Cioran and Brian Evenson. Most of what I enjoy is existential or pessimistic. What I hate about those Martin examples is the pure irreverence of them. They all have this one voice that takes nothing seriously. Even as a teenager I didn't enjoy writing like this. The ship groaned and growled beneath him like a constipated fat man straining to shit. This just reads at a lazy attempt at trying to be funny, like a mediocre comic who thinks that using the word shit is ground-breaking stuff. The Other Side by Alfred Kubin, for example, has some of the darkest fantastical imagery out there, people fornicating and killing themselves as their city crumbles before their eyes, but it's all done with tact and poetry. To me there's no difference between what Martin writes and what a teenager spews out on an online forum when he or she is trying to sound cool.

 

Haven't read Blood Meridian but I have read a couple other of Cormac McCarthy's works, including The Road which is generally considered to be both grim and dark. I would say the key is to keep the amount of explicit hyper-violence to a minimum. If the point is to use it to shock people, then overdoing will simply make it lose its shock value. To me this is one of the things ASoIaF gets wrong--it tips over the line into just being gratuitous (like @Teladan I am not a fan of ASoIaF). Violence is really just an event, and if you wrote a story using only one kind of event it would quickly get boring no matter what it was. What we care about is how it affects the characters. So maybe take a couple scenes to describe the event itself, but then most of the work should be put into thinking through and writing the implications.

Trying to think of some examples from grimdark fantasy, which I've not read a lot of but is specifically what you asked about...does The Blade Itself count? Again, in that book the scenes of explicit violence are kept to a minimum, and a lot of what does happen is directed against enemy mooks who (according to in-universe reasons) don't have much moral weight to their deaths so the implications can be skipped over. Another way it's used is as backstory, like one of the main characters whose history of being tortured a lot is described in some detail but it's central to explaining a lot of his motivation/characterization in the present.

Anyway I'm sure there are other ways to do this. Just my $0.02 on what I've thought worked well.

 

I mean, this just seems like another opinion thing. It's the type of description I'd expect from an uneducated pirate/brute trying to be metaphoric and that's what I find funny about it--light dry humor. I could see how it could get old within an entire book. And I think it would be entirely juvenile if this description was used when the main character was a queen.

 

Interesting admission. Have you ever considered your emotional revulsion towards his work might be keeping you from understanding and respecting why others might admire it?

 

Yeah, I gotta say, I have no idea who Martin is, but reading those excerpts felt freeing to my mind—expansive, which makes it feel like literature. But of course, if it just constantly keeps on with the juvenile sex references and bodily functions, that would get pretty childish after a while. So I don't know, I guess I'd have to read more to get the feel for it. I don't think Henry Miller was so juvenile-obsessed in his work, was he?

 

Heh heh. I guess it depends what people mean by juvenile but he was sex-obsessed. I can't even post the quote I'm thinking of (very NSFW) but it's on this blog post: https://sorrytelevision.wordpress.com/2011/10/14/tropic-of-cancer-is-definitely-nsfw/

 

Ok, that also sounds very literary to me, but again, I might check out after too many pages if it's all the same. It depends on if there's anything happening under the surface, themes or insights into human nature beyond what you tend to get in genre fiction, and I feel like there is with Miller. Also, it said it's not really a novel so much as his journal about a trip across Paris, and that makes it seem more literary. One of the big differences being literature often has no structure and no character growth or arc. Lit is also more character-driven than genre, which tends to be plot driven, and I do get that feel from what I just read.

But yeah, I'd need to red more to get the feel for either. Oh, I don't think Miller sounds as juvenile. Sex-obsessed, yes, but not using the words and phrases a 10-year-old would use. His imagination and wording feels powerful and creative, even if sex-obsessed.

 

That brings up something I don't know the answer to. Is grimdark meant to be literary? For instance, a lot of romance sub genres are not and overly literary writing will turn off a lot of readers because they are seeking something simple, clear, but entertaining. I'm not familiar with grimdark since high fantasy isn't really my thing (although I'm well acquainted with other dark sub genres).

Also, seems Teladan is right that it's the opposite of what he likes (Tolkein). I found this quote on wiki: "grimdark is an "anti-Tolkien" approach to fantasy writing". I can see that. Tolkien is... well not gritty and grimdark seems the definition of it.

 

I don't really know what grimdark is honestly, but I hope you don't think Tolkien is all light and fluffy. That's a common misconception. The Legendarium is full of brutally dark events. Hurin chained to a seat by Morgoth Bauglir, prime dark lord, and forced to watch his family fall to tragedy after tragedy. The hermit dark elf Eol thrown off the walls of Gondolin. The ships of the Teleri burned during the First Kinslaying by a madly revengeful Feanor. Turin son of Hurin committing incest with his sister by accident and then killing himself on his own sword.

Sorry, I know I'm not adding much to this conversation. Whenever someone mentions Tolkien I must respond! You can see more of my ramblings in the recent 'Large scale fictional worlds' thread.

 

Thanks @marshipan , I had no idea Grimdark was an actual genre. I looked up that wiki page and am now enlightened.

And yes, there's darkness in Tolkein, but it's about good vs evil, and the good is pretty pure (until it's tainted by the ring). Grimdark is nihilistic, positing that there's no such thing as absolute good, that heroes are nasty and evil inside and rulers all corrupt etc.

 

I'm not a big fan of grimdark, but I thought it was supposed to be over-the-top cruelty and violence. For example (not exactly grimdark) the movie Hardcore Henry is perfect for what it was intended to be, an ode to video game violence. Put that level of carnage into any other movie and it would be pointless, but in HH it is the point.

 

Here are some SFW quotes from Tropic of Cancer (by Henry Miller—this is still that same thread, right? )

“When into the womb of time everything is again withdrawn, chaos will be restored and chaos is the score upon which reality is written.”

“For a hundred years or more the world, our world, has been dying. And not one man, in these last hundred years or so, has been crazy enough to put a bomb up the asshole of creation and set it off.”

“New York makes even a rich man feel his unimportance. New York is cold, glittering, malign. The buildings dominate. There is a sort of atomic frenzy to the activity going on; the more furious the pace, the more diminished the spirit. A constant ferment, but it might just as well be going on in a test tube. Nobody knows what it’s all about. Nobody directs the energy. Stupendous. Bizarre. Baffling. A tremendous reactive urge, but absolutely uncoordinated.”

Yeah, this definitely sounds like literature now. Not infantile or juvenile. The jury is still out on that other author whose name I don't remember.

 

By the ring. The Lord of the Rings trilogy is a miniscule part of the whole. Everything I said in my last post has nothing to do with the One Ring. They're conflicts that took place thousands of years before the Fellowship's adventure.

Two examples:
Hurin: "Húrin was brought captive to Morgoth, and despite horrific torture, he refused to reveal the location of Gondolin. Due to his defiance, Morgoth cursed him and his family to misery and hopelessness. Húrin was placed high on the peaks of Thangorodrim, either chained or magically immobilised in a seat where, through the power of Morgoth, he could see all the evils that later befell his son Túrin."

Eol: "As the First Age progressed, Eöl developed a great hatred for the Ñoldor and therefore refused Aredhel and Maeglin permission to seek out their kin. While Eöl was away at a feast in Nogrod, Aredhel and Maeglin left for Gondolin, stealing Anguirel from him, and Eöl followed them. When denied permission to leave with Maeglin, he grew furious and tried to kill his son with one of his javelins. Aredhel got in the way and it instead hit her; she died from poisoning."

Silmarillion, Children of Hurin, Unfinished Tales, Book of Lost Tales and more. None of these are two to do with corruption of the ring.

(https://www.writingforums.org/threads/large-scale-fictional-worlds.169665/#post-1917014)