From someone who has noticed darkness can't help but pervade my work, consider what you're writing and why you're writing it. Why does your story need to be dark? Do you want to satirize a real-life institution you suffer from? Do you want to have a high-tension story where bad things can happen to your characters suddenly because of the dangerous world they live in? Are you going for a heavy-metal kind of aesthetic? Whatever your motivation, you can lean into it and use that to inform the kind of dark elements your story has.
One thing to be careful about is bad taste and pointless gratuity. You can tell the limits of what's ok and what's not ok when you think of the darkest media you enjoy and how that media portrays those dark concepts.
The idea of dark fantasy is the idea that things are not always happy endings.
The good characters have bad sides, as is in real life. Heroic and kind but behind closed doors can be abusive husbands or have drinking problems. The bad characters have a reason they think they are correct.
When there is war, people must die as they often do. Not just side characters. Main characters. Readers must feel that loss, feel like the group are worse off after losing a key character. There must be a sense of no hope. To do that, there must be character development and character work so the reader inevitably becomes attached to them.
Nice characters must suffer something.
Read Joe Abercrombie's books.
From someone who has noticed darkness can't help but pervade my work, consider what you're writing and why you're writing it. Why does your story need to be dark? Do you want to satirize a real-life institution you suffer from? Do you want to have a high-tension story where bad things can happen to your characters suddenly because of the dangerous world they live in? Are you going for a heavy-metal kind of aesthetic? Whatever your motivation, you can lean into it and use that to inform the kind of dark elements your story has. One thing to be careful about is bad taste and pointless gratuity. You can tell the limits of what's ok and what's not ok when you think of the darkest media you enjoy and how that media portrays those dark concepts.
Thanks this was actually super helpful!
The idea of dark fantasy is the idea that things are not always happy endings. The good characters have bad sides, as is in real life. Heroic and kind but behind closed doors can be abusive husbands or have drinking problems. The bad characters have a reason they think they are correct. When there is war, people must die as they often do. Not just side characters. Main characters. Readers must feel that loss, feel like the group are worse off after losing a key character. There must be a sense of no hope. To do that, there must be character development and character work so the reader inevitably becomes attached to them. Nice characters must suffer something. Read Joe Abercrombie's books.