Darkness Sensitivity
So I've been noticing lately that I really have a growing distaste for darkness in my fictional pleasures, like books and tv shows. This might seem odd, considering how vocally i champion Hannibal, arguably the darkest tv show to hit American airwaves in recent years. Let me amend my statement: I'm getting tired of gratuitous darkness, and my idea of what counts as gratuitous has become more sensitive. I think my tolerance level took its first notable hit back when i was still at CSULA, when I had to read Terra Nostra for a class in latin american literature. Steph knows how terribly it affected me, with its many accounts of feces,shit, etc. To this day, I kind of resent the professor who assigned it. It was over a thousand pages for Christ's sake and it was clearly Carlos Fuentes' manifesto or masterpiece that he never really perfected before he died. Instead all this violence, darkness, apostasy, and passages about a man contemplating his bowel movements was unceremoniously dumped into my head. I realized my sensitivity after, when I watched Attack on Titan. But all the brutality was obviously intentional and cracid to the plot, so it didn't turn me off, though it did have me feeling a bit" shook", unpleasantly so.
Anyway, these days I just see these moments as obvious signs that the show, or book is trying to be edgy, trying to make an impression by being more brutal,gory, or perverse than a viewer would expect. And they make their point, they do shock me. But it's at the cost of my respect, when the show doesn't immediately justify its trespass with something meaningful.
I meant to elaborate long ago. First, the reason I have been thinking about this is an anime called Fate/Zero. There's a whole confusing universe in the 'fate' anime series, which was originally a video game/novel like Steins;gate was. The first anime was Fate Stay Night and then a couple of standalone movies came out and other series followed. I think there are maybe 4 or 5? Anyway, Fate/Zero is the 'prequel' to Fate Stay Night and Art recommended it. And... I HATE IT. More than house of cards, I think? In the second episode, we are shown a little girl who has been thrown into a room full of large bugs (teeming, crawling bugs) that have basically been...eh...raping her? for like a day? all day? Basically, there's a periodical competition that is called the Holy Grail War. The 'masters' are humans (some who possess magic) who have been chosen by the Grail by a mark appearing on their hand. And then they summon 'servants' that are heroes from Spiritus Mundi (not their words), but the universal storehouse of mythical stories. So, King Arthur, Gilgamesh, etc. Anyway, there's a character who doesn't want to fight for the holy grail and has been the black sheep of his ruthless, magical family. He finds out that because he is not willing to accept this role, this little girl he cares about is being groomed to become the next magician for the family. And, this family uses something called crescent worms to create/augment their magical powers? So they're bugs that are IN THE BODY of the magician and when the magician uses magic, the worms take that much more out of them. So basically, that's why that girl is in the pit of bugs/worms. This guy says he'll take her place instead, and so HE has the worms in him, and like he's so traumatized by it that his hair goes white and he looks like half his face has had a stroke (sort of) and when he uses magic, you can see like writhing underneath his skin and you know it's the bugs. uh...YEAH. WHAT THE FUCK. Anyway, the only way he can win her freedom from his vampiric father (they call him a vampire in the series, I don't know if it's what we think of as vampires) is if he wins the war. But in the meantime, the girl is still in the possession of this vampire guy, and she still has to go to the 'bug room' like every few days or something. Like, is this really necessary?!?!
Then I got reeally fed up because it shows this human who is a serial killer. And like they show the victim's body staring sightlessly at the t.v. that has the news story about the child that's gone missing and that's how we meet this guy. And he gets the mark on his hand and he gets a Servant, who is even more evil and dark than him. He's based on a historical figure that literally killed hundreds of children, and sodomized them and tortured them (i looked up the wikipedia article). Yeah so like the human was about to kill this boy, his new victim, and the Servant guy tells him to let the boy go. And the boy's like, heading out the door and the Servant acts all nice and tells him, don't worry, I won't let him hurt you. And then he summons some shadow tentacle monster thing to kill the boy anyway, very graphically.
SO YEAH. WHY. DOES. IT HAVE TO BE THIS GROSS AND DARK? It doesn't add to the story AT ALL. And why is this guy chosen for the holy grail??! What kind of selection process is this?! On top of these dark moments, the story is convoluted, with lots of names thrown at you and the 'masters' all look like theyre dead inside and blah. BLEEHHH.
Another example is Black Mirror. It's received so much hype but it's just relentless darkness, pain and anguish, and bizarre grotesque situations that has like ONE theme or ONE note and it hammers on that note for the whole episode, but there's no MEANING, no POINT to it. For instance, the first episode is about a fictional prime minister of britain being coerced into having sex with a pig on live television in order to save the life of a popular princess that had been kidnapped. So he finally does it, his wife is forever repulsed from him, and while he's doing this on national television everyone is watching and then they show that the princess is freed, so he could have stopped a while ago, she's already safe, but she's like wandering on a bridge. The kidnapper kills himself. Like. WHAT. why. WHY.
I watched a video on Black MIrror by Nerdwriter and he said that the reason Black Mirror is so dark is because all of the ways the characters are punished are cruel, and unjust. We all have pain and sorrow, but it's the sheer degree and injustice of it, the level of it, that makes Black Mirror stick out. He points this out as a positive thing like wow this is why it's so groundbreaking and impactful. But to me, there's no impact, just terrible ideas, hamfistedly executed, with some sort of implication that it's supposed to be satirical or a cautionary tale of some kind? But there's NO depth to it, no layers, it's just oh SHIT that sucks, OH BOY it's still sucking, AND OH MAN that was so dark. It just feels like I killed a part of my soul for no fucking reason.
This is really a rambling rant now and I want to condense it and explain more clearly, maybe I'll use this as a rough draft for a thinkpiece on medium or something lol. But, anyway, an example of darkness done right, for good reason is 100 years of solitude. Some fucked up shit goes down in that book as well, there's incest, there are political massacres, there's corruption, there's also rot and decay. But it's infused with this..humanity? I feel connected to it, it's talking about something real, despite its magical realism, there's an impact and there's a reason for the darkness. The darkness is not the focal point, it's a detail to add to the tapestry of what life is. I'm really not being coherent...the point is, it's not self-referential and touting itself as super meaningful and look ooh look how far I'm willing to go to be different. It's natural, and it somehow covers the scope of human existence within its pages without darkening my soul; rather it enlightens it because of how complete it is, how insightful it is, and there's just this significance to it that makes you feel like you understand the world in a whole different way after you finish it. Man. I feel so frustrated because I don't think I'm getting it across to you guys!
I'll try again, but this is just what I mean..I guess hahaha...