Avoiding Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy
Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy is when the audience is put off by the incredibly dark nature of a fictional work and won't care what happens next, lose interest or want all the characters to die off. For example, A Song of Ice and Fire can cause this due to its cynical tone, characters making morally questionable decisions in order to achieve their goals and many of the villains being irredeemably evil.
The reason I'm bringing this up is that my trilogy, The Ragnarǫk Cycle is pretty dark. The protagonist is incredibly self-centred, an existential nihilist and suggested to be suffering from depression. The only person serving as his moral compass is heavily implied to be insane, uses her religious faith to justify some rather... dubious actions she committed and secretly wants to die.
Said protagonist and deuteragonist are pawns of a military organization crippled by corruption and its politically correct dogma (think a more "progressive" version of Blackwatch) in conflict with parasitized humanoids, who seek to eliminate all forms of discrimination, by turning humans in genderless parasitized humanoids and "cleansing" themselves of people with disabilities and other undesirable traits. Things get even worse when later into the series, this organisation crosses swords with a cult that worships and is dedicated to unleashing a soul-devouring, omnicidal, aeons-old monstrosity responsible for the downfall of countless interstellar civilizations.
I plan on having several moments of levity strewn throughout the series (although I'll trying my best to ensure that they don't cause tonal disparity), having my leads become better people through the power of character development and the series becoming less cynical with each installment. However, I feel that readers will still think that I'm trying way too hard to be controversial and "edgy," rather than being concerned with trying to tell a good story.
So, what are ways to avoid Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy?
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/36944. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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Your answer is given by your first trope link; on DIAA, perhaps you have misunderstood it!
The protagonist is incredibly self-centered, an existential nihilist
Then why should the reader care about this hero? DIAA is induced by an Evil v. Evil story.
It happens when the audience doesn't care what happens, because no matter who wins, the world still sucks.
It happens when the good guys (your protagonist and sidekick) are awful people and the audience cannot relate to them.
It happens when the audience has nobody they like, or are rooting for, or hoping will be saved or survive.
With DIAA they suffer through your movie (because it is only two hours, they can afford that), or put down your novel, because you have given them nothing to really care about; they don't care about your dystopia, or how your politics work out, or who wins.
Why? Because they read to have an adventure. They want Luke Skywalker and Leia and Hans Solo and Chewbacca to prevail! They want Indiana Jones to get the treasure and keep it this time! (in the opening boulder seq, he loses...)
Being dark is fine, the bigger the stakes, the more we root for the good guys to win, to prevail against the Emperor and a reign of terror and cruelty led by Darth Vader and his Death Star that obliterates a billion lives on Leia's home planet (or however many they said).
Read your Darkness Induced Audience Apathy trope again; when it says:
MEANINGFUL conflict is the soul of drama.
Followed by,
"The conflict between the two equally horrible sides is essentially meaningless, there is no dramatic tension."
Good guys have to be good in some sense the audience can root for. They can be criminals, hit men, thieves -- but they need some kind of humanity and must be relative good guys compared to their antagonist(s). They may kill criminals, their opponents kill babies, or intend to kill millions.
Your story has to have a likable hero, from the beginning, a self-centered nihilist psychopath is not likable, or a hero, they are a selfish psychopath and a bad guy, fighting other selfish psychopaths and bad guys, and who cares?
You avoid DIAA by making the outcome matter, which means making the audience care who wins, which means they need to root for one side to win and worry about how much damage and sacrifice their hero must endure to win.
Rethink your hero, his sidekick, and their mission.
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At the heart of every story there is a moral choice -- a choice about values. The hero will be brought by some means to a point where they must choose between two things that they love. They may choose well or ill. The consequences may be for good (comedy) or ill (tragedy), but there must be a choice and that choice must matter, both to the character and to the reader.
To sustain the reader's interest, they must perceive early on that the hero cares about something, that they have values that may be challenged, that may be brought into conflict with each other, and that events may bring them, are starting bring them, to the point where they will be forced to choose.
In this sense, there is some darkness at the heart of every story, some sacrifice, some loss. But just as a light story cannot be entire light, a dark story cannot be entirely dark, for in an entirely dark world, there is no love and therefore no values to choose between. Find that spark of light, however, even if you intend to extinguish it at the end, and you will find a way through the darkness.
This theme, following a spark of light into the darkness, is one of the great theme of human art. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death...
If there is something that the hero loves, and some choice of values they will eventually be forced to make, and if the reader can feel the story moving towards that moment of choice, then the audience has something to care about and will stick around. A deep darkness can make that spot of light shine all the brighter, but if the light is not there, there is nothing to see and that audience will wander away.
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