"Hopeless and engaging in despair": A conversation on dark!fic

[seraphcelene]

There's a conversation floating around LJ, begun with, I think, rahirah here and continued by swetawaybayou and glossing (on dark, and also what I like about my stuff). I'm jumping in just because the subject is more in line with what I enjoy in fic and also my tendencies when writing.

As usual with this kind of thing, I feel the need to attach some sort of preface. Although I enjoy fic analysis, by the author or a third party, I avoid it with my own fic because I'm never sure if anyone else is going to be interested and there is nothing more painful in LJ-land than a deep, meaningful post that gets no replies. Flops hurt, ya'll.

Anywho.

Dark!fic for me is bottom of the barrel. It is hopelessness. Pushing the characters as far as you can make them go, breaking them down and leaving them there. I'll add that building them back up is optional, but for me, that's not something likely to happen. I do tend to abandon them down in the abyss.

Superb dark for me, as everyone above stated, doesn't necessarily concern sex. It's a feeling of dedicated chaos, of deliberate malice. It is being lost and confused. Self-punishment, self-loathing. Angelus to me is not really dark. He is evil, but he is also just being Angelus. Dark, for me, is acting outside of the normal parameters of one's behavior. Grey!Angel is dark. Buffy in Weight of the World and The Gift, threatening to kill anyone who harms Dawn, is dark. Giles smothering Ben is dark, Buffy sleeping with Spike is dark. Mal shooting a man in the head after abandoning him to Reavers is dark. Tess mindwarping Alex to death and then mindwarping Kyle into carrying the body to her car is dark.

I can't say that I know what my appellation among readers is or would be. I border between angst and darkness, but I don't know that I am specifically known as a dark!fic writer. I know that I have great difficulty with happily ever after, and that the one time I very deliberately made the attempt (not including this valentine's day), the fic (Deep and Shining) was still commented upon as being melancholy.

Mostly that's because I want to see how bad can it get and remain realistic or true to the character. How bad can it get?!

Off the very top of my head, things like: What the Scarecrow Saw, Apnea, Asystole, Story Endings O.Henry Didn't Use, Ursula, Black (Ghosts) are dark fic.

As rahirah said, "it's got a lot to do with the character's attitude towards what they're doing than with what they do." Self-destructive behavior is dark. Sex and torture are not necessarily dark in and of themselves. Someone who wouldn't usually enjoy torture or hating themselves while doing it, well that's a different story. Buffy having sex with Spike and hating herself AND him for it. That's darkness.

If I had to identify my own fic as dark, I would choose:

Have You Seen the Wind?
Hemorrhage
and if you should have a future (section three: Ophelia)
Concerning Flight and Landing On the Moon: A Coda
eyes like the summer, all beauty and truth
A Pivot for the Sun
Yours, Eternally
Eternal Return
Secrets Not Long Buried

Not such a long list, considering.

Regardless, what I would love for everyone to take away from this little meander is WRITE MORE DARK FIC!! Don't be afraid to go there, to take it there. To stretch the characters past the limits of what you think they can endure.

Dark fic. Write more dark!fic and then go write gorgeous and lovely things like kormantic's Ice House and annakovsky's One Thing That Happened (Grey's Anatomy). Stuff to make us all smile and go aaww! After you break me heart, please, give me a happy. I'm endeavoring to learn that particular trick.

Really, I am.

Comments

[ludditerobot.livejournal.com]

Unless Mal is continually dark I don't see shooting the guy as specifically dark. When the Reavers come, he makes a choice to save everyone he can, by getting his people on the mule and out of there and anyone else possible into the vault. If he took people that aren't his on the mule, that'll hinder his ability to save him and his, so the guy had to stay. But the guy didn't get into the vault and was grabbed by Reavers. What possible kindness is there? Just one. End his suffering then and there. A Mal who would leave the guy to be raped and killed when he could take that shot? That would be dark.

[seraphcelene]

I see your point. Although, there is something in the action that I find deeply disturbing, and not so much that Mal shot him but that he was so brutal in the way that he pushed the guy off the mule. Maybe it was the violence of the action or the look on Mal's face, the fear and desperation with which the guy begged, dunno.

And I do understand that there wasn't room and I totally see the necessity of not allowing him onboard. Who do you sacrifice in the situation? Mal made the obvious and most reasonable choice considering. But he is our Hero, and in terms of what is expected, that was definitly not it.

Actually, my first thought when I thought of Mal being dark was him kicking Niska's bodyguard into Serenity's engine. Even him stabbing Atherton after the duel was over and he had won. But there's something so comic in those moments that I can't quite bring myself to label them as dark, just petty and in the case of Niska, self-preserving. But Mal is, for me, a dark character. Maybe it's just in the breath of potential. He was a character so on the edge that I don't think the fall would really be that far or that surprising.

Maybe I just always expect it.

;)