Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/41504
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

## No, you world is not too dark

Before I continue, let me clarify that statement: your world is not too dark for most people, and equally dark (or darker) settings have seen wild success.

Settings of that tone have succeeded across a variety of media. Though I can only speculate as to why, I can certainly give some examples.

Have you heard of _The Walking Dead_? The premise is that zombies are real and have caused a global collapse of society. One of the central tenets of this series is that, even with real monsters out and about, the thing that humans must fear the most are each other. The plot is full of examples of humans betraying one another, people giving in to their darkest impulses, well-intentioned people's mistakes getting beloved characters killed abruptly and unceremoniously, and carries an over feeling of bleak fatalism. It doesn't take very long at all to make the reader/viewer wonder whether the title is referring to the hordes of zombies outside, or the few survivors struggling to make it to tomorrow.

Then there's _Game of Thrones_. If you haven't heard of that, you might have been living under a rock. One of the most common refrains throughout the books is a phrase that translates to "All men must die," and this is a theme that follows the entire series. The reader becomes afraid to get attached to any character because so many likeable characters are abruptly, sometimes arbitrarily, killed. Any clash between opposing sides becomes a frightening ordeal for the reader, because no matter who wins, the reader knows that somebody they like will end up dead. "Main Character" status is almost irrelevant, because, as George R. R. Martin once answered when asked why he killed so many MCs, "I can always just make another." Yet, this series has been wildly successful, sparking a mainstream HBO series by the same name!

In yet another form of media, there is the Grimdark setting of Warhammer: 40k. This is a dystopian sci-fi setting where everything is bad, the good guys are still the bad guys, and daemons are going to eat all of our souls, unless the space bugs from other galaxies eat us first, assuming that the space robot magic zombies don't wipe out all life before that, assuming we don't accidently destroy ourselves first by creating another evil god and all getting eaten by it. Essentially, everything is bad all the time, and it almost always only goes from bad to worse.

Even so, the setting has sparked [a rather ridiculous number of books](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Warhammer_40,000_novels) written in that setting, and has one of the most popular tabletop wargames tied intrinsically to this setting.

The thing about all of these is that their darkness is, for the most part, written or handled well. But, all of them are dark. Each of them has scenes and plot threads every bit as brutal and bitter as the one you have described, but people keep reading them.

So no, your setting is not too dark to succeed.

Original score: 1