The State of the Loon • 23 March 2021

First up, congratulations to Scott Huggins for winning the 2021 Jim Baen Memorial Award Grand Prize for his story, “Salvage Judgment.” While Scott is a Stupefying Stories contributor and I’d like to be able to claim some small credit for helping him win this award, I can’t, as I still have my marked-up copy of his manuscript sitting in my to-do stack with a note on it saying, “Finish writing this up and send it back to Scott.” The best I can claim, then, is that I didn’t sabotage his chances of winning.

That aside: CONGRATULATIONS, SCOTT!

And watch for his twisted tale of Lovecraftian horror, “On the Menu Stains of Madness,” coming soon to Stupefying Stories!

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Next up, I have received a few polite queries as to what happened to “Dark and Gritty Week” and last Friday’s installment of “Ask Dr. Cyberpunk.” The two got sort of tangled up together. I was writing a column for the latter—I mean, cyberpunk as an idiom pretty much wallows in dark and gritty, and a case can be made that the 1980s cyberpunk boom was basically the dark and gritty reboot of the whole damned science fiction genre—when my wife looked up from reading one of last week’s columns and said, “You know, you guys really have it all backwards.” 

Then she proceeded to explain why from a female perspective we were completely missing some major points about the appeal of “dark” fiction. This turned into a long, interesting, and at times eye-opening conversation, which I was hoping we could capture and turn into a column, but that didn’t work out. She’d just finished her latest round of radiation treatments the week before last and begun her new round of chemotherapy last week, so while the mind was still sharp and the spirit still willing, the flesh decided it needed a nap.

All the same: she raised some interesting points that deserve further development and exposure, so I suspect we’ll be continuing to explore the dark and gritty side for some time to come. In the meantime, as an example of the difference in perspective, she suggested that you read “Dark Will Come For Me,” by Tara Saunders, which you will find over on the old SHOWCASE web site. 

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Third on the agenda—actually first, but third as far as topics for this column go—is that I’m continuing to work on content for SS#24 and SS#25 at the same time as I’m continuing to dig down through the sizable pile of correspondence that’s accumulated. It’s become apparent that things went off the rails much earlier than I thought during our 2019 open reading period. I’m finding stories for which acceptances were sent but never followed up with contracts; stories marked as accepted in our manuscript tracking system but for which acceptance letters were never sent; and more than a few submissions that never received any response at all. I’m also working through our contract files, trying to figure out which stories under contract are still available for our use and which authors assumed we went out of business (understandably so; we very nearly did) and sold their stories elsewhere.

Be patient, please. It took a while to create this mess. It will take a while to sort it out. In the meantime, if you get an email from me about a submission of yours and it doesn’t seem as if I have a clue as to where we stand: in all likelihood, I don’t.

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Finally: Pete Wood has proposed that our theme this week be “Music in Science Fiction,” because he had a column he was just dying to write about the subject. I agreed, because it’s a subject that is near and dear to my heart. Looking back, I was surprised by just how many music-themed SF stories I’ve written and had published—for just one example, “Jimi Plays Dead,” which is not merely a rock ‘n’ roll story, but also hard sci-fi that was right on the edge of cyberpunk. 

(The B-side story, “Buck Turner and The Spud from Space,” is of course all true, except for the parts that aren’t.)

Looking into it further, though, I realized that we here at RLP have published a lot of really good music-related SF stories over the years, and that most of those stories are out of print now. So as I worked on developing Pete’s theme, I found that we have far more than a week’s worth of content on the subject of Music in Science Fiction in the pipeline already, and the pieces began to fall into place as if preordained. We could very easily put together a reprint anthology of music-related SF stories and have it ready to release in a matter of weeks. There are only two things holding us back.

1.) We don’t have the cover art yet.

2.) And we don’t have a good idea for a title for such a collection. 

Any suggestions? I suppose we could make this a proper contest and give some suitable prize to whoever suggests the title we end up using, but I have no idea yet what that prize might be. Let me think about it.

Thanks,
—brb

  

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Putting My Writing Where My Mouth Is • by Guy Stewart

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My premise is that writers feel that their stories aren’t being taken seriously, so they write what they feel is “more realistic” fiction.

Hopelessness is real. Suicide is real. Isolation is real. Depression is real. Global pandemic is real. The Collapse of the Environment is real. Problems So Big They Cannot Be Solved are real.

Besides, it’s easy to present the problem, show despair, then end on an unhappy, realistic note. It’s much harder to suggest a possible way out of the problem. It’s much, much harder to write positively with conviction.

In a recent blog of mine, I was looking at what made William Sydney Porter such a popular writer. Everyone knows who he is, but few people write like him anymore. (https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2021/03/writing-advice-short-stories-advice-and.html) 

You don’t know him? Oops. You probably know him better by his pen name: O. Henry.

Poet James Whitcomb Riley wrote of O. Henry, “One can readily see that he is the natural father of ‘the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating’, which moral reflection is the thread upon which most of his stories are strung.”

People LIKE reading O. Henry stories…at least they DID at one time. Creating such a story though, manipulating readers from sadness to gentle smiles IS HARD WORK. It doesn’t require a great deal of skill to write a dark story. I found this out myself when I wrote a short story with my son-in-law that ended like this:

Ryan sighed then said to Zilpha, “The only person I ever thought I could love became undead eighteen years ago.” He looked at Arroyo-Torres and said, “You’re sadly mistaken, Major. I wasn’t trying to destroy the Containment Area.” He turned his back on both of them and walked out the door and away from the Workhouse.

In front of him, stretching to an abandoned mall, the ground had shattered from the explosions of the dynamite and settled. But now, as Arroyo-Torres and Zilpha pushed their way out of the office, the rubble had started to move, heaving occasionally as if something were trying to push its way to the surface. Ryan said loudly, though to no one in particular, “I’m all that’s left of the Crew of the first International Zombie Containment Area,” he tapped the door frame. “I think zombies could be news,” he paused. “Maybe one of you can figure out how to use the roller before anything bad happens.” He turned around, flashed a feral grin then asked, “Or do you want me to get back to work?”

The main character was being retired just before his pension would have started. Management had no real use for him as “the zombie” problem had been dealt with and they were shutting it down.

Do people whose jobs aren’t deemed “important” and who are losing their only source of income while management and politicians keep right on working, sound like any recent response to a pandemic you know of?

Certainly I wasn’t advocating barkeeps, servers, and daycare workers blowing up anything. But I WAS advocating action. Trying to do something innovative. Not giving up hope. I can guarantee you that the conclusion to the story did NOT come easily. It required some deep thought and trying out other solutions until we hit on one that made good sense.

It’s my thoughtful opinion that the current dash into grim hopelessness is a reflection of a “starry-eyed” view of the future that once seemed to be dawning.

I’ve noticed this drift in my favorite magazine, ANALOG Science Fiction and Fact. The current issue has two points of data for my research. First of all is the Guest Editorial, by famed British SF writer, Ian Watson. I found it downright grim as he seemed to be stating with finality that Humans living anywhere except on the surface of the Earth is ridiculous. Forget it. Give up. Don’t even bother…It might have been ripped from the pages of your nearest Bible book that currently carries the milquetoast title, “The Revelation of St. John the Divine.” That’s a decided soft-pedaling of its original Greek title, “Apokalupsis Iesou Christou Tow Doula Autou Ioanne”, or The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ to His Slave John. We typically shorten that to The Apocalypse.

The second is the Fact article by Christina De La Rocha, “From Atmospheric Rivers to Super Typhoons: The Future Looks Bright for Weather Disaster Fans.” She concludes, “As climate change gains pace, so will the numbers and intensity of severe weather events coming hopefully only to a television screen near you.” Whew…sarcasm is a tack I often take myself, though I usually give it a humorous twist. That last sentence didn’t seem particularly humorous to me…

Neither one appear to offer any hope at all. Of course, that keeps the articles short and disturbing and scary. As anyone who has ever had children, it’s far easier to startle a baby than to calm them down. Which, I’m certain, is exactly what the editor ordered. (I’m not going to mention that the essay and article are in the vicinity of “preaching to the choir.” The people who should be the target don’t typically read ANALOG.)

So, to answer Bruce’s set of questions, “Dark and Gritty: necessary? Unnecessary? Merely a trendy fictional fashion statement, or clinical evidence that too many writers out there have profound unresolved Daddy issues? Is there any room left for fiction that leaves readers with a positive or at least hopeful view of the world, the future, life, and the people who live it?”

I don’t think it’s trendy or that there are unresolved Daddy issues. (Though there may very well be. I’ve got a few of those I’m still dealing with!) I think that “dark and gritty” is a response to the world around us.

I think that “positive and hopeful” views of the world are on a strictly “let’s just wait and see.” In fact, I think we’ve reached a point where we, as a world, are a bit fatalistic. Sort of like how the world came crashing down around American ears after the ebullience of post-WWII ran into images of shadows burned into Japanese walls not destroyed by exploding A-bombs; race issues finally drawn out of the closets they’d been thrown into (which closets were also painted shut, boarded up, after which the entire wall was re-studded and sheet rocked over); assassinations of public figures; air pollution; silent springs; the population explosion; poverty and sexism pushed into the light instead of hidden in a closet on a different wall from the one where racism had been hidden…and those were only the biggest issues to rise from the shadows of WWII.

In the shadow of all of the events since then – from exploding space shuttles to the scars left by colonialism, and (maybe) at the end of a pandemic; we are now dealing with the first set of problems as an underlayment (put over the original flooring of expansion, slavery, and the rape of the environment), after laying carpet over racism, sexism, terrorism…that carpet of prosperity has gone threadbare…

But here I am, doing exactly what I think we have to stop doing. Ahem.

Excuse me while I go refigure the endings of some of my recent stories and examine how I might offer even the HINT of a solution to some of my characters, because I think we CAN get back to being a literature that both raises issues (disguised as story plots) and offers solutions to be pondered, sometimes tested, and maybe implemented.

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A coda to the above: Shortly after I wrote this, I read (in the same issue of ANALOG with the articles I referred to above!) the short story “Recollections” by Elise Stephens, an author who has landed in Stupefying Stories in the past. In it, the situation is textbook “dark and gritty,” but she doesn’t allow the story to overshadow hope, in a quintessential O. Henry way. If a good short story is indeed ‘the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating’, then in “Recollections,” Elise Stephens managed to do just that.

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Guy Stewart is a husband supporting his wife who is a multi-year breast cancer survivor; a father, father-in-law, grandfather, foster father, friend, writer, and recently retired teacher and school counselor who maintains a writing blog by the name of POSSIBLY IRRITATING ESSAYS (https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/) where he showcases his opinion and offers his writing up for comment. He has 72 stories, articles, reviews, and one musical script to his credit, and the list still includes one book! He also maintains GUY'S GOTTA TALK ABOUT BREAST CANCER & ALZHEIMER'S where he shares his thoughts and translates research papers into everyday language. In his spare time, he herds cats and a rescued dog, helps keep a house, and loves to bike, walk, and camp.

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Punch Them in the Feels • by Eric Dontigney

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So, earlier this week, Bruce put up the Dark and Gritty Reboot post. He’s not alone in giving this trend to ever-darker content the side-eye and wondering what it’s all about. It’s something I’ve thought about and written about before, not least because my own fiction trends dark. It’s tricky ground. As a writer, one of the things you can’t avoid is that you must do bad things to your characters. Conflict drives narrative action. Yet the bad things don’t automatically have to be enormous, terrible things. If you write fiction for a mainstream, non-speculative fiction crowd, you can get a lot of mileage out of something as simple as someone getting their hours cut at work.

Think I’m oversimplifying? Picture this. Abby is a single mother raising two kids. She holds her family together with her $12/hour full-time job, occasional overtime, a little extra from babysitting neighbor kids, and a budget so ruthless that it would make pre-Christmas Eve Scrooge nod in approval. Her car has 180,000 miles on it and the engine makes an unhealthy noise. Abby has socked away about one month’s rent in her savings account. One day, her boss calls her in and says he needs to cut her down to 28 hours a week. In one fell swoop, she goes from taking home about $1600 a month to about $1150 a month.

What’s the fallout? Abby has just gone from a hard situation to an impossible one. If she had health care coverage through her job, that’s gone. Let’s say she’s living somewhere cheap and shelling out $800 a month in rent for a two-bedroom apartment. Now she’s got $350 a month to cover everything. The threat of homelessness becomes immediately real. She’s got to figure out a way to pay for gas, for food, for utilities with way less than she can do it with. Sure, there are potential solutions. She can get another part-time job, but probably working somewhere in the evening. She’ll also probably end up working 50 hours a week and not sleeping enough. So, then she needs to think about the problems of childcare and being an absentee parent. If she doesn’t hire childcare, the threat of social services looms large.

In the vernacular of literature, this is all the substance of pathos. It’s the way in which you evoke an emotional response from an audience. In fact, by the end of all that, you probably felt at least a pang or two of pity for Abby, if not some empathy. More importantly, I didn’t need to say anything about her personality to make that happen. I didn’t have to make her dark and gritty. The situation is plenty grim all by itself. Yet, if this was a science fiction or fantasy film or novel, I’d be expected to make her a humorless, hard-bitten person with an allergy to smiles.

In the back of my head, I think of this as the “punch them in the feels” approach. My theory is that it originates in some form or another with something called the negativity bias. For all the people who didn’t minor in psychology, the negativity bias is the human brain’s tendency to register, note, and react more strongly to negative input. It’s why news coverage of a disaster gets better ratings than news coverage of the guy who takes his golden retriever to visit with sick kids every weekend for a decade. It’s probably also why news coverage has taken a turn for the hyperbolic negative in the last 30 years. When you apply the negativity bias to fiction in novel or film form, the punch them in the feels approach calls for making it as dark as possible.

There is also at least some level of what I call the crappy copycat effect in action here as well. People see something like Game of Thrones or Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy and they look for a simple explanation for why they’re successful. Now, while I personally loathe Game of Thrones, I understand enough about constructing a story to get why people like it. The fact that it’s dark and gritty is a factor, but it’s not the most compelling factor. Nolan’s Batman films, which I personally love, also upped the grit factor to 11. Again, that grittiness is not the main reason why people loved them. But dark and gritty it is the low-hanging fruit on the explanation tree.

The real secret of why things like Game of Thrones and Nolan’s Batman movies work so well is multifaceted. Game of Thrones benefited from source material that wasn’t created by a committee (except maybe that last season that everyone hated so much). The source material was the product of one person’s creative process, and the show writers apparently did a good job of carrying that story intact over into the scripts. That means you got a much more cohesive and frankly sensible story than you typically see on screen. While it’s hard to know exactly how much studio interference happened on the Nolan films, the scripts for those also appear to be primarily the product of Nolan, his brother, and prolific screenwriter David S. Goyer. The end result was, again, more coherent storytelling.

Both examples also benefited from unusually talented casts. Imagine The Dark Knight if they’d cast Jeremy Renner as Batman, Megan Fox as Rachel Dawes, and Charlie Sheen as the Joker. You’d end up with a very different and almost certainly inferior film, despite the outstanding script. Imagine the first season of Game of Thrones if they’d cast Dwayne Johnson as Khal Drogo and Jude Law as Ned Stark. Johnson and Law are both adequate actors, but neither is as good as Jason Momoa and Sean Bean. Both of these examples also display outstanding results in terms of production values. That speaks to a lot of hard work on the part of all the crew members and post-production teams that never get more than a passing nod when the accolades go around.

Unfortunately, the usual TV and film production process doesn’t enjoy all of these advantages. TV shows get written by teams of people in a writer’s room, often on a bitterly short schedule. Film scripts get written by a screenwriter, then usually rewritten with “input” from studio higher-ups, and frequently rewritten by an entirely different screenwriter or two. Can you imagine the mess you’d get if novels were written this way? The whys and hows of casting remain utterly mysterious to me. Production values on films and TV shows vary wildly. Sometimes they vary from one episode of a show to the next. I suspect this leads the people who greenlight projects to assume that factors like good writing, good casting, and high production values are simply random factors and the real secret is to make it dark and gritty.

People respond to dark stuff. Punch them in the feels, dammit!

This creates an unfortunate knock-on effect. Like it or not, every writer is influenced by the books, shows, and films they read and watch in their formative years. When my writer’s voice was first being developed, I was watching films like Seven, The Usual Suspects, The Matrix Trilogy, and Heat. I was also watching things like the excellent Granada Sherlock Holmes series with Jeremy Brett and the outstanding ITV Poirot series. This might help explain some of the darkness in my writing, as well as my tendency to unintentionally write everything like a mystery. Of course, I was also reading some top-shelf authors, like Neil Gaiman, Asimov, Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, and Stephen King. I credit King with saving my writing from descending into irreparable grit and gloom. Say what you like about the guy, he has a knack for working humor into some pretty dark stuff. If I learned the art of working in humor, I learned it from him.

For people who came along later than I did, though, their influences were things like the godawful Saw movies or Hostel. That’s to say nothing of all of the other dark and gritty, but not especially good, stuff I never saw because I didn’t know it existed. All of those writers were subconsciously learning bad lessons about storytelling and mimicking them in their own fiction. This was at the same time as the Potter books, which are pretty good storytelling. Unfortunately, it was also the time of the Twilight books and the Hunger Games books, which are both (by all reports) absurdly dark and not especially good storytelling.

So, where does this leave us? It leaves us with a generation of writers who were brought up watching and reading popular books and movies that glorified grit and darkness without the saving grace of humor. These writers, in turn, seek pathos through the wrong channels. They write dark and gritty characters into dark and gritty situations, rather than building pathos through careful construction of story and situation. It’s unnecessary and unfortunate because it violates the essential rule of writing: what you know.

What every writer knows best, whether they realize it or not, is other people. Every writer has a vast web of prior and current relationships that should teach them about how people react to situations. Yes, some people react to bad situations with stoicism or grim determination or anger. Others meet those challenges with humor or can-do pluck. Some get worn down and give up. Others rise to the occasion and shine. The amplified nature of speculative fiction doesn’t change that reality. It should simply offer a bigger imaginative canvas on which to express those variable reactions.

In short, don’t punch people in the feels.

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Eric Dontigney is the author of highly regarded novel, THE MIDNIGHT GROUND, as well as the Samuel Branch urban fantasy series and the short story collection, Contingency Jones: The Complete Season One. Raised in Western New York, he currently resides near Dayton, OH. You can find him haunting obscure sections of libraries, in Chinese restaurants or occasionally online at ericdontigney.com.

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How to Make a Really Good Scary Movie • by Pete Wood

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It’s bad enough that they remade Archie comics into the dark and brooding Riverdale, where suddenly even Jughead isn’t any fun. They had to make horror movies too dark, too. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. Horror movies are supposed to be dark.

Yeah, maybe. Unless they become so dark they stop being scary. Hear me out.

If I ran Hollywood, every aspiring horror filmmaker would have to watch two movies: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and the original The Haunting.

The 1940s comedy team of Abbott and Costello showed how seamlessly a good movie can blend horror and comedy. In 1948 Universal Studios brought an all-star lineup in with Bela Lugosi as Dracula, Lon Chaney, Jr. as the Wolfman, and Glenn Strange, later the bartender on Gunsmoke, as Frankenstein. The plot ping-pongs between scary and funny effortlessly. The monsters play it straight and some nasty things happen, but just when you think you can’t watch anymore, Abbott and Costello start doing their shtick The comedy duo relied on the horror/comedy mix to good effect in Hold that Ghost, Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy, Abbott and Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff, and Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man.

There is nothing funny about The Haunting [1963, directed by Robert Wise who also directed The Sound of Music]. Based on Shirley (“The Lottery”) Jackson’s classic novel, the Haunting of Hill House, it tells the story of a group of paranormal investigators who foolishly decide to spend a few days at the most haunted house in the world. Not even the New England estate’s two caretakers have the guts to spend the night. I’m not going to give away the plot, but the movie works more by suggestion than by explicitly showing things. How scary is the movie? Well, when I popped it into the VCR many years ago while home from college, I got so spooked during the title sequence and opening narration that I hopped in the car and drove thirty miles to hang out with my Dad and his friends. At four in the afternoon.

The senseless 1999 remake is so bad it highlights the greatness of the original. Subtlety and suggestion are thrown out the window in favor of hokey special effects, very visible ghosts, over-the-top acting, and an amped-up body count. Not even Liam Neeson and Bruce Dern can save this movie. (As a side note, would you stay in a house where Bruce Dern is the caretaker? Just sayin’…)

Things have gone horribly wrong since then with the movies. Horror movies have abandoned suggestion for graphic violence that borders on torture porn. Some filmmakers don’t see the benefit of humor at all.

Consider The Night Stalker. Richard Matheson (I am Legend, Hell House, and many episodes of The Twilight Zone)  wrote the screenplays for two of the highest-rated made-for-TV movies of all time. In the Night Stalker, (1972) a wise-cracking tabloid investigative reporter (Darren McGavin, the Dad in A Christmas Story) in Las Vegas can’t seem to convince anyone that a vampire is on the prowl. Darren McGavin repeated his role as Karl Kolchak in the superior sequel, The Night Strangler, (1973), where nobody believes that a monster is murdering women in Seattle. McGavin has impeccable comic timing and some serious acting chops in the scary scenes. Simon Oakland plays his long suffering editor, Tony Vinchenzo, and he and McGavin play off each other like they’re in a screwball comedy.

Chris Carter based The X Files on The Night Stalker. He adopted the monster-of-the-week format from the short-lived ‘70s TV show (also starring Oakland and McGavin), as well as the theme of government cover-ups. He also kept the humor. David Duchovny has some pretty good comic timing himself.

Some rocket scientist had the brilliant idea to remake The Night Stalker in 2005, but without the humor. Kolchak becomes a chronically depressed sourpuss with demons in his past. The reboot went off the air quickly as viewers preferred the original.

The first Stalker was scarier for the simple reason that the characters seemed real. We can relate to wise-cracking reporters who give their bosses ulcers. We can’t relate to the second Kolchak, a stoic loner looking for his wife’s killer. He never even cracks a smile. The first series felt like horror invading real life. The second series felt like, well, a TV series.

Okay, so maybe you think horror doesn’t need humor. Fair enough. Make it too graphic and it stops being scary.

His House is a 2020 horror movie that illustrates my point. Two refugees from South Sudan seek political asylum in London. They’ve just lost their daughter in a horrible boating accident as they fled Africa. There’s enough pathos and horror right there, but then director Remi Weekes just had to make it into a horror movie.

The couple start seeing things. Their home is haunted with that gooey ectoplasm that has dominated horror movies since Alien. Everything in their new house is wet and dripping and phlegm-like. Why? I don’t know. Third base. (A little Abbott and Costello reference there for y’all.)

Then the torture porn starts. I hate seeing people tortured. I hate seeing demons and monsters that love to torture and ooze all over the place at the same time and leave a mess that they never clean up.

What could have been a great drama with a peek into the lives of political refugees becomes a paint-by-numbers horror movie with too much gore, too much phlegm, and no damned humanity. I hated the main characters. I wanted to like them. Honest, I did, but somehow the movie got me to hate two political refugees from the Sudan. The haunted house is so contrived and over the top that everything seemed unreal, even the very real political nightmare that is South Sudan.

There is a genuinely terrifying scene in The Haunting where director Robert Wise shows nothing. No monster. No jump scares. No gore. No violence. Just darkness and narration, but it culminates in the scariest moment ever on film. See the movie and judge for yourself. You’ll know the scene when you see it.

For horror to be scary, it can’t be unrelenting. There have to be quiet moments where you can imagine the monster for yourself rather than gawking at CGI. Unrelenting horror isn’t scary. It’s a cartoon. Horror that comes after a good laugh or a quiet moment or anytime that you aren’t expecting it: now that is scary.

Don’t believe me? Watch The Night Stalker or Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein or try to sit through The Haunting by yourself, even in the middle of the afternoon on a bright sunny day.

 

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Pete Wood is an attorney in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he lives with his kind and very patient wife. His first appearance in our pages was “Mission Accomplished” in the now out-of-print August 2012 issue. After publishing a lot of stories with us he graduated to being a regular contributor to Asimov’s, but he’s still kind enough to send us things we can publish from time to time, and we’re always happy to get them

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Stupefying Stories: The Dark and Gritty Reboot

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Just kidding. Not happening. Oh, you might from time to time notice somewhat more adult language and situations in upcoming issues. There was a business reason why I was struggling to keep the magazine G rated—and it was a struggle—but that reason turned out to be invalid, so going forward I’m going to be relaxing those rules a bit.

But this whole “dark and gritty” thing: what the Hell is with that? TV and films in general, and the DC cinematic universe in particular, have turned so dark and gritty it’s as if someone was running a sale on dark blue lens filters and anti-depressants in industrial quantities. And it’s rarely a new idea, either: it’s almost universally a dark and gritty reboot of what was originally a lighthearted and fun-filled property. 

Is it simply a matter of making the CGI cheaper to do, because the audience doesn’t need to be able to see anything clearly? Are the decision-makers in Hollywood so bereft of original ideas that the only things they can think of to do are to torture the characters they once loved when they were children? What’s next: Toy Story: The Dark and Gritty Reboot? The Sound of Music: Only With More Nazis?

When I learned that The CW has greenlit a dark and gritty reboot of The Powerpuff Girls—I am not making this up—this time as a live-action TV series, with Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup as “disillusioned 20-somethings who resent having lost their childhood to crime fighting,” I snapped. 

Okay, it’s Dark and Gritty Week here on StupefyingStories.com. Let’s take a few days to talk it out. Dark and Gritty: necessary? Unnecessary? Merely a trendy fictional fashion statement, or clinical evidence that too many writers out there have profound unresolved Daddy issues? Is there any room left for fiction that leaves readers with a positive or at least hopeful view of the world, the future, life, and the people who live it? 

Let the arguments begin.

—Bruce Bethke

 

P.S. I would dearly love to run some guest posts on this topic. If you have something to say about it that feels like it should be longer than a comment, drop me a line at brb[at]rampantloonmedia[dot]com.

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