"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

[astarte59.livejournal.com]

Hi! I kind of got led to your essay via metafandom and following some essays mentioned there that led to yours. I love darkfic, and particularly what you say about pushing the characters as far as you can. I want to stretch them as far as I can consistent w/ my own reading of them, and in the case of Giles, for instance, that's pretty dark, IMO. I have been known to bring them back to a happy ending, but there's almost always some ambiguity about at least one character. People write me feedback asking if there's going to be a sequel, and then I know I've accomplished what I've set out to--leaving it up to the reader where the characters might go next. I find that I never reread my own happier stories, but the story where Callisto kidnaps Xena and tortures her for a couple of weeks or the story where Buffy and Spike have kinkier and kinkier sex, but she's convinced at the end that one of them is going to end up dead--but what actually happens is never stated. Or the story where I left Giles completely heartbroken over Spike, and people kept asking for a sequel so he'd be happy again. Why? I like torturing my favorite characters--it's a kind of intimacy for the reader to see way past the surface of the character--where the character *really* lives.

I think the case w/ Mal that you mentioned wasn't dark in itself--it was a leadership decision. But the darkness to be explored would be what is the cumulative effect of all those leadership decisions and on the things he's seen on him? And I think the audience can't help being fascinated when a strong character is made vulnerable--like Picard in "Best of Both Worlds" and "Chain of Command," esp. in the aftermath when we see him crying in front of his brother in "Family" (after BoBW) and confessing to Troi he was just on the verge of giving in to the Cardassian Inquisitor's demand that he say he sees four lights when there are really five. We like our heroes to be strong, noble, smart, etc, but we don't want them to be robots. That's why I love that moment when Giles kills Ben after noting that Buffy is hero, but he (Giles) and Ben aren't heroes, and in that moment, a non-hero is precisely what's needed, and Giles does the necessary thing.