"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

[sweptawaybayou.livejournal.com]

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.

Perfect! Yes!

Although I tend to think that Angelus is dark, but for the same reasons that you stated. He is dark. I don't like him in my head. I will write him, but there will not be erotic sex. Not even with other vampires. He is pain and death and torture and rape. He does not love, he does not sympathize and he sure as hell does.not.care. for anyone, with the exception of himself.

:)

I admire people that can write fluff and humor and schmoop. Although I don't always read it, I tend to wallow in conflict and hurt, I envy them for the ability to write it. I consider, as with acting, writing comedy to be head and shoulders harder than drama/angst ... but that might just be me.

*waves*

[seraphcelene]

Hi. Hi. I meant to link to your post and forgot to add the link, *facepalm*.

I tend to think that Angelus is dark, but for the same reasons that you stated. He is dark. I don't like him in my head. I will write him, but there will not be erotic sex. Not even with other vampires. He is pain and death and torture and rape. He does not love, he does not sympathize and he sure as hell does.not.care. for anyone, with the exception of himself.

I should amend that thought. Angelus is dark, of course he is. But, for me, the severity of his darkness is actually dependent upon his exact actions and the circumstances under which he 'performs'. He can so much be the kid in the candy store, malevolently gleeful but with a strangely pure joyfulness that I get a kick out of him. However, there are things that he's done that totally creep me out and I think, damn, dude!. Sketching Buffy while she was sleeping is a big one for me. Her vulnerability in that moment and the deliberateness with which he sat there, drew her and then left the drawing? Just to fuck with her mind. That bothered me. Driving Dru crazy, not so much because he did it (we expect that sort of behavior), but the process through which he accomplished it. Watching Dru huddled and insane in the corner while he fucked Darla in front of her, just to twist the knife a little more! That is dark Angelus for me!


I envy them for the ability to write it. I consider, as with acting, writing comedy to be head and shoulders harder than drama/angst

Dude!! Word. Totally. Totally. :D

[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.

;)

[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.