454 – Making Dark Stories Pay Off
The Mythcreant Podcast
Exploring the Balance of Darkness and Tension in Storytelling
This chapter delves into the intricacies of writing dark stories, highlighting the difference between dark themes and narrative tension. It examines the impact of character deaths on storytelling, referencing popular series like 'Grimm,' 'Buffy,' and 'Serenity,' while also inviting listeners to support the podcast on Patreon.
Are dark stories deep and meaningful, or are they edgy and empty? It all depends on whether there’s a payoff at the end. Basically, if you throw a bunch of upsetting stuff at the audience, did you have a reason to do that? Having something to say does require more effort, but the results are worth it, and we’ve got some tips on how to do just that!
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Lady Oscar. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.
[Intro Music]Oren: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren, and with me today is…
Wes: …Wes…
Chris: …and Chris.
Oren: [dramatic voice] Today on the podcast we will endure great hardships. Our favorite microphone will die tragically in our arms, and the RSS feed will burn down, destroying all that we’ve worked so hard for. [end dramatic voice] And that’ll be it, then we’ll just go home. That’s the end. [laughter]
Chris: And the RSS feed and the microphone will both scream in pain, even though they are technically objects, or not even objects, that cannot feel pain. Somehow it will happen. It will be excruciating.
Oren: A magical fairy will appear to give them just enough semblance of life to scream at us in agony.
Chris: We’ll see the RSS XML code just strewn everywhere in gory detail.
Oren: How is that different from a normal RSS feed? [General laughter]
Chris: It’s inside, it’s in the proper order, and things are inside their containers.
Oren: So today’s topic is going to be making a dark story pay off. And this was born out of me watching the Strange New Worlds episode “Under the Cloak of War”, which I wrote an article about. But it was a positive article, so of course nobody cared. [laughter] Now we’re coming to the podcast with it, so y’all can not care about it here too. Because I really loved that episode, and it reminded me of the best parts of Deep Space Nine and other times when Star Trek has gotten darker in a way that actually worked.
Chris: But Oren, I think you’re forgetting how controversial this will be. Because some people really do not like the idea that their dark elements should have to pay off in some way.
Oren: Yeah, they don’t like that. Look, if you’re trying to write a story that is just upsetting everyone, and you don’t have anything to say, go do that. Do it if you want to, you still have the legal right to do that. I can’t tell you how to make people like that. I can only give you advice on how to not do it. If you don’t care, then who cares? [soft laughter]
Chris: This is one of those places where I think the Pareto improvement, this is a concept I brought up in a blog post a long time ago about concepts for becoming a better storyteller, where people get very defensive about stories. So, when you say something could be improved, sometimes their response is, “but I liked it”. But the issue isn’t whether you liked it, the issue is could we do this thing that would improve the experience for other people, and you would still like it? So it’s an objective improvement, because some people like it better, and no one likes it worse.
And in this case, when it comes to dark material, and whether or not it pays off, there are some audiences who just love dark stuff, and they love edgy things, and they just want to have a fantasy about where you have to kill your best friend or something. We all have our separate tastes. But there’s a possibly significantly larger audience, or at least larger enough, that will like dark material, but expects there to be some kind of payoff. As a storyteller, it simply makes sense to give that payoff to broaden your audience, so that you can include both the people who just want to see the edge, and also the people who are willing to get through dark material ,as long as they get some benefit from that. Some other benefit besides just feeling pain for the sake of feeling pain.
Oren: Yeah, I don’t think there are going to be too many people who are going to read your dark story and be like, wow, there was something important you said at the end there. I hated it. [laughter] Very unlikely that anyone is going to like your story less because it had a point. I’m not going to say that’s 0%, but vanishingly small. Just in general, if you care what people think of your writing, and most writers do, this is usually the right course. So I have a question for the panel. When you’re watching or reading or smelling, if they have smell-o-vision, a dark story, what do you expect to get out of it? What to you is payoff here? What does that mean to you?
Chris: I would put it in a couple categories. One is simply making victories better. It’s kind of where the harder it is to achieve victory, and the more long time coming it is, the more strife, the more meaningful, more significant, that victory feels. So, I think one way is just, is this there to make some later victory more powerful? And we’ve seen a number of stories where it’s just, the villain does terrible things to the protagonist, but it’s so that we really care when that protagonist finally manages to turn the tables on them. You see this a lot in horror stories, where the protagonist of the horror story is just watching all their friends die, and just going through all sorts of things. But then, the reactive hero finally becomes proactive, takes charge, and beheads the villain or monster, whatever it is.
Wes: Spoilers for Get Out, but that movie did that. [laughter] I was here for that. That was a great example of going through the dark stuff for a good payoff on that. I don’t like horror movies, but enough people that I respect their opinions told me to watch Get Out, and when I was in the first half of that movie and through it, I was just like, thoroughly creeped. I was like, okay, there has to be something to this. This can’t just be horrible. And yeah, hero gets out and makes them pay, so hey.
Chris: Or even something like the protagonist has to travel on foot through Mordor. Their achievement feels more significant. But if we don’t have an achievement or a victory that is a direct response to the dark element, if it’s just there to be tragic and we have no lighter mood that comes after it, then we don’t have that particular type of payoff.
Oren: In my experience, payoffs from dark content most often fall into one of two categories, and sometimes they’re both at the same time, which is they make a later victory matter more, there’s something affirming that they enhance, or they are commenting on some kind of actual problem that matters. And sometimes they can do both at the same time.
But “Under the Cloak of War”, to a certain extent, is mostly the commenting on a real problem, because spoilers, if you haven’t seen the episode, it’s very good. It ends with Dr. M’Benga probably killing this Klingon war criminal. It’s not really a victory, even M’Benga, he says, “I’m not sad he’s dead,” but it doesn’t really seem like he’s celebrating. There’s not like a, “Woo, that guy’s dead, we killed him!” But instead, the point is to comment on the Federation’s complicity, because the Federation was willing to ignore or cover up this guy’s war crimes because he was politically useful to them. And the message was, that was wrong. They shouldn’t have done that. This is what happened as a result. That’s the sort of thing where that doesn’t necessarily have to go to a victory later. The victory later is just, I would say, an easier and to a certain extent, less risky strategy, because if you’re commenting on a real problem, the problem with that is you have to comment on a real problem and you need to know what you’re talking about, and you need to have something to say, and very often a lot of people who do that don’t.
Chris: I think it’s also worth pointing out that a lot of times when we’re talking about meaning, which is the other way that it can pay off, that comes with that karmically satisfying ending. In a lot of cases, when you have a dark element that resolves an arc, we get some sort of meaning from that. For instance, if a protagonist sacrifices themself, we are creating meaning by saying that something is worth sacrificing for, and that also creates a victory. Or, if we have somebody who fails, and it’s a really tragic ending, there can be a valuable point about what led to that failure and what they did wrong.
Oren: Yeah, you show how the character’s actions arrived at that point.
Chris: Which is different than, for instance, a character getting killed by a stray bullet, that dies for absolutely nothing. Which is, again, just to shock the audience as much as possible.
Oren: And, of course, there are always going to be stories where you want to show a character dying, or otherwise having something bad happen to them, even if they did everything right. And that’s a reasonable thing to want, but you need a little more thought than it just being a random thing. The story could be powerful if it ends with a character who did everything right, but still can’t get what they want because of systemic oppression. That could be a message there. The message could be that you can’t individual exceptionalism your way out of racism, something like that. But if they do everything right and then die in a car crash at the end, it’s like, what was the point of that? Sure, that can happen in real life, but what are you saying by doing that? What is the purpose?
Chris: I will say, though, that a character who does everything right and then dies at the end to prove a point that some things are not within our control, that is still going to be an unsatisfying story, because the character doesn’t have any agency. Now, it can be worth it. Sometimes we might want to create a story that bothers the audience in various ways because we have a goal, like bringing up an issue, and we’re okay with accepting that penalty of the audience being disgruntled. But just to be clear, if you had that situation, the audience would be disgruntled.
Oren: That can also just get into questions of whether or not that’s your story to tell a lot. I’m not going to say that a Jewish filmmaker or author shouldn’t do that about antisemitism, but if a Gentile person did that about a story where a Jewish character, after doing everything right, died because of antisemitism, that would make me uncomfortable. To me, that would just feel gratuitous. It’s complicated. Maybe it could change based on the movie, but the idea does not…it does not spark joy. [laughter] So that’s a whole other issue. We’ve talked about that sort of thing before, but I just felt it was worth mentioning here.
When it comes to things to avoid, the biggest one, I think, is message confusion or dilution. You show this horrible oppression, and you’re like, yeah, that’s probably bad. Maybe. I critiqued a lot of books on the site for doing stuff like that. City of Brass comes to mind, a novel that had a real problem with that, where it was like, yes, the poor Shafit, the half-Djinn, they are super oppressed to really extreme levels, but also they’re a big threat, because they might riot and kill a bunch of the privileged Djinn. And it’s like, okay, that’s… what are you doing? Why are you equivocating on this point?
Chris: Because, you see, black-and-white is boring. So what we’ve got to do is take an inherently black-and-white situation and then just graywash it a bunch.
Oren: Get some grimdark sauce on there.
Chris: Can’t just write a situation that’s naturally gray. No.
Oren: And then of course there is what we talked about before, which is the danger of being more extreme than you have to. And it, first of all, often just feels contrived. There’s a moment in… I’m going to not describe the details because it could be gross, but in the show From, mild spoiler for the second season, there is a scene where a character is dying, and they have to decide whether or not to end the character’s life early. And that is a pretty powerful moment, and it actually works pretty well because of how dark and dangerous that place is. It feels reasonable that they might have to make that kind of choice, but then they go way overboard with it and try to make it more painful and horrible. And, “No, man, you already had me with the initial dilemma. That was already dark enough, right? I was already invested.” Adding more stuff on top of it just, A, doesn’t make sense, and B, just feels like you’re trying to ruin my day for no reason.
Chris: If you’re going to put a character through intense suffering, you have to make sure that is well-reasoned. Coming up with contrived reasons why a character goes through intense suffering looks very bad. This is the issue with Icheb in Picard, where it just doesn’t make sense. The villain would just make him unconscious, give him painkillers or something, because the situation is clearly impractical for the villain. And so it just always looks worse if you have to come up with contrivances to explain why you’re doing something that is really unpleasant for audiences.
Oren: Yeah, and along a similar line, I always recommend keeping the dilemma as real as possible. You can have sci-fi or fantasy elements to it, but you want it to feel real. And if you use an entire techno or magical grounding for the dilemma, you’re encouraging your audience to dig through your tech or magic system looking for a solution.
Again, to get back to “Under the Cloak of War”, one of the dilemmas in that story, it’s a war story, in one of the flashbacks, they’re treating wounded soldiers. They have a situation where they use the transporter to keep a wounded soldier alive in the hopes that he can be evacuated somewhere with better medical care. And then they have a dilemma because they need to beam in more wounded soldiers. And, if they do, then the transporter will stop keeping this soldier alive and he’ll die. They’re using the transporter, so obvious sci-fi element. But the basic dilemma is medical supplies and attention in a high danger, high casualty zone. That’s a very real dilemma. That dilemma is incredibly real. As opposed to something like the infamous “Tuvix”, where they’ve combined Neelix and Tuvok, and then they have this whole thing about uncombining them. And that one is a pure techno problem. And one of the consequences is that everyone who watches that episode is, “What about all these things you could have done to not have to make that horrible choice?” There are all these technical ways you could have gotten around that problem.
Chris: The short story “Cold Calculus” [Note: “The Cold Equations”], which is infamous for this, is very similar, in that we have a situation where there’s a girl who has stowed away aboard a ship. And the writer is just–I should say the writer, but actually this ending was enforced by the editor. Not–the writer didn’t actually even want this ending. But the story insists that every pound of weight on the ship matters, and there’s no room for error. But if you have to go to that level of explanation to justify why something cruel is needed in the story, then it’s too late. It’s all over. If you have to do that level of explanation, it’s not working, period.
Oren: And it’s notable that the same thing could potentially happen with “Under the Cloak of War”. If you were inclined, you can look through the way the transporter has worked in other episodes and be like, “Why didn’t they do this?” But the episode is not encouraging you to do that, because it’s not using the transporter to make up a dilemma out of whole cloth.
Chris: I do think it’s worth looking at to what extent is really dark material worth it when we’re, for instance, creating tension. And I think this goes back to, is this excessive for its purpose in the story? An episode I like to bring up is the Discovery episode “All is Possible”, where Tilly is training some cadets on a planet. I have a spoiler for it, but it’s honestly a fairly minor spoiler. This is a situation where one of the cadets dies. If TNG or Voyager had done this story, they just would have had everybody live. But no, there’s still a little bit of edginess left in Discovery, even though it’s season 4, I think. What’s also remarkable about this situation is that Discovery is absolutely not prepared to take this death seriously, because they just don’t have time to honor this cadet’s life, and to have people actually mourn at the end. They just gloss over it, until he’s like, “Oh, training cadets was so great. Can’t wait to do some more!” Somebody died.
I’ve seen this before where we want to have a minor character die, but we don’t have time to really treat this with the seriousness that somebody dying should be treated. I think that one of the reasons they did that is because they wanted it to be a really tense episode. And so having a cadet die, see, now the situation is serious. People could die. But we could have created the same effect by just having the whole team struggle more. What if somebody got really ill, and people got injured? You had two people who had to be held up by the rest of the team, and they’re like shuffling around. We could have absolutely created that tension without a death that this episode just wasn’t prepared to handle.
Oren: And we can directly compare this episode to two similar episodes from Voyager and The Next Generation. The Voyager episode is called “The Good Shepherd” and the Next Generation episode is “The Lower Decks”, the name inspiration for the cartoon Lower Decks. And in “Good Shepherd”, while certainly not a perfect episode, no one dies. They have tension, because there’s aliens and spooky stuff. And then they get back and they all have a firm, wow, we had a fun adventure together. And we sure learned a lot when the captain took all of us problem kids on an adventure. And then there is the “Lower Decks” episode, and a person does die in that episode. Probably. There’s like a tiny sliver that she might still be alive because they weren’t sure if they wanted to use her in Deep Space Nine. She never comes back. So the assumption is that she died. And it’s very somber, like the end of the episode, everyone’s sad because she died. We’re not doing like, oh, well, that was a fun Lower Decks plot right there. Those are your two options. No one has to die if you don’t want them to. You’re the writer. You can just say they don’t.
Chris: I think it’s also worth mentioning that the death has some meaning in that the whole point of the episode was to highlight all the people on the ship, all the crew members that weren’t senior officers, and what they were doing and what their struggles are. And so having one of those people, and she chooses to go on an extremely risky mission, that’s also extremely politically valuable and has a chance of doing a lot of good. So she decides to do that sacrifice. So it has some meaning, because she knows what she’s getting into when she does it. Her death, again, highlights the fact that the entire crew, not just the senior officers, put their lives on the line in Starfleet all the time, and then treats it very seriously. It’s very different.
Oren: And of course, Discovery is not alone in terms of Star Trek that kills off extras and then doesn’t really acknowledge it. And I don’t mean to single out Discovery for that trope that Star Trek has struggled with for a long time, but that Discovery episode is particularly notable because it’s like a fun adventure with the kids. [laughter]
Chris: It’s also just this is when Discovery is finally leaving its edgy phase, finally getting into the seasons where the tone is not quite so melodramatic and then it’s, nope, we need to do the last hurrah of the edgelord.
Oren: That’s been a problem with modern Trek that it has really struggled to shake off. This has been odd for me, because I’m a Deep Space Nine fan, and back in the day, Deep Space Nine was the show everyone yelled at for being too dark and edgy. And now I’m just watching the new Trek like Picard and early Discovery, being like, “Why is it so edgy? It’s so daaark. And have I become what I hated, or is it the children who are wrong?” [laughter]
Chris: When I look back at Deep Space Nine, I really do feel like all of their dark elements did pay off.
Oren: At least, with a much higher hit ratio than some of the newer stuff has. Deep Space Nine’s not perfect. I remember that one episode where we met the weird eco-terrorist lady who tortured people and forced them to live without any technology so they died from random illnesses. And then at the end it was like, “Maybe she had a good point.” [laughter] Which…that wasn’t good. That wasn’t a great way to end that episode.
Chris: That episode would have been significantly better if the writers had not sympathized with this lady for some reason. The moment that Sisko goes back in the box, rather than take off his uniform, I just felt like that was a very iconic, memorable moment.
Oren: So I don’t want to say that Deep Space Nine has never had any misfires. I just think that in general, they were much better at handling dark material than the newer shows have been. But, we do have “Under the Cloak of War”, which shows that they can do it. So I just hope they do more of that.
Chris: It definitely feels like Strange New Worlds is in a better place when it comes to how it approaches this kind of thing.
Oren: I’m genuinely pretty excited for Discovery season 5. Season 4 had still some growing pains, but overall it was quite good. So maybe season 5 will be a little more mature. We’ll see.
Wes: Chris, I think to get back to your earlier point about reducing tension, in my experience I think in the darker stories, it’s almost like the more explicit the darkness, the less tension I experience. And, I remember this very clearly in the series finale of Grimm, where Big Final Bad, who of course was new to that season, whatever. There’s other problems there. Somebody on Team Good dies, and yikes. Oh crap. We’re here. It’s the end. That person’s not coming back. And then another person on Team Good dies. And then another person on Team Good. And I’m like, “Okay, nope, they’re all coming back to life.” [Chris laughing] It’s too much. This is just not real. So much focus was put on the first death that when other Team Good characters died, because of time constraints, obviously, there was less focus on them. And so I was like, okay, something’s going to happen where main character Nick gets a deus ex machina to basically bring everybody back to life and save the day. I’m just like, okay, great. That meant nothing. [laughter]
Because it was striving so hard to force me to feel something through these elaborate deaths by how powerful and dark this whole bad guy is. But by going so explicit in that effect, it had the opposite effect on me, the viewer. Good dark elements should still have elements of subtlety, uncertainty, to continue to drive tension. And I feel like if you’re not including those, you’re just laying it out there, this person’s dead. Let’s move on. There’s nothing inherently that raises tension about that.
Chris: I think about it with fake deaths at this point. I guess I won’t say that we should never, ever do death fake outs. But I think at this point, they really do have to have big story significance. It has to matter that person almost died. It has to create complications for the story. This whole, “Oops, somebody died, and then they’re back.” We’ve done it too much. At this point, it just feels cheap. And now it makes it so that when any character dies, we’re constantly questioning whether they really are dead. It does depend on the setting. Because I remember in Serenity, we have some significant characters die at the end of that movie. But this is a sci-fi setting where there isn’t just like magic that we can wave a wand and possibly bring people back from the dead. When people died in that movie, I was not thinking that they would come back. And after a while, I started to wonder if everybody was just going to die.
Wes: Yeah, that one was done really well, because there were still lots of things uncertain. Like we don’t see a way out here. There’s no magic MacGuffin that’s waiting for them around the corner.
Oren: The situation that Wes describes in Grimm is fascinating, because it feels like it has several different problems all happening at once. Because first, there’s the fact that, as Wes pointed out, each new death has less time. So they aren’t as focused on it. So it doesn’t feel like it matters as much. Then, of course, there’s the repetition aspect. The first time something happens, it’s very tense. But the more times it happens, it’s, “alright, I’ve seen this before.” And then there’s the last one, which is the weirdest one conceptually, which is the whole “I’m calling your bluff, writers. I believed that you would kill one character. I don’t believe you’re going to kill ten.” And that one’s weird. That one’s almost existential. Because on the one hand, you can create tension, even if the audience intellectually knows the protagonist isn’t going to die. But you clearly at some point reach a moment where something has flipped, and now they don’t emotionally believe it either.
Chris: I also think it’s worth pointing out that, and this happens a lot, we see it in manuscripts all the time, where writers will not understand the difference between dark material and tension. And so they’ll just make bad things happen, thinking that’s what excitement is. In this situation in Grimm, when somebody’s alive, we have tension over whether or not they die. Once they are dead, that tension is gone. And to some extent, if one character dies, and we think that everybody else is more likely to die, that can actually raise tension. But the tension over that specific character has now dissipated. I think that sometimes when you have enough characters die, that can start to, not only does it have diminishing returns, because okay, we already know that characters can die, but now half the cast is already dead, I don’t have to worry about them dying. [laughter] And, I know that they’re coming back, and it just all goes downhill from there.
Whereas in Serenity, just enough characters die. But the setting also matters, because in a setting like Grimm, or like in Buffy, Buffy is hilarious because they bring all of these characters back from the dead, and then when Tara dies, they’re like, “Nope, death is permanent, can’t do anything about it.” It’s very arbitrary. Grimm probably had a setting that has lots of magic running amok, and was fairly low realism, so that you could believe that they would just pull something out of their hat to bring all the characters back to life. But Serenity, again, has a setting that’s a bit higher in realism, still has its supernatural elements, but it’s a sci-fi. That one, it would be hard to believe that a character would come back to life.
Oren: With Buffy, of course, that entire season is predicated on bringing a character back.
Wes: Anyway, with that, I think we will call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you got a good payoff from this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com slash mythcreants.
Oren: And if you didn’t, consider supporting us because of how cool and edgy we are. [laughter]
Wes: Before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Callie Macleod. Next, we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
[Outro Music]This has been the Mythcreant Podcast, opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.
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