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I discovered last semester that the manga/anime Berserk has a certain 
ambience and tone about it that was really inspirational for dreaming up Ilium Agonistes. It's epic fantasy, but it's very dark. If you'd like to know how dark, go ahead and read the wikipedia article on it. Ilium Agonistes is not that dark, but it is going to be a Dark Fantasy, a lot darker than Lord of the Rings, for example, which I would consider pretty "light" as tones go. If you're going to go about breaking assumptions and having prophecies that are wrong, and masses of people dying because everything they believe is wrong, and their refusal to change regardless (the Da Vinci code motto, "How Dark The Con of Man" would well apply to Ilium Agonistes too)... you either have to go very sarcastic and comedic or very dark and heavy, and I don't do funny. I do blood.
Dark Fantasy is not its own official subgenre yet, but it should be. For Berserk if for no one else, although there's argument that another creative hero of mine, H.P. Lovecraft the one and only master of horror (Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker and all y'all ain't got nothing on this guy, and props to Stephen King for giving Lovecraft lots and lots of nods... his short story "Jerusalem's Lot" and the miniseries it spawned, "Salem's Lot", are all fundamentally based on Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos), wrote Dark Fantasy. Basically, Dark Fantasy can't decide if it's horror or fantasy, but why does it have to decide? Beowulf, the world's oldest epic fantasy, tends toward horror pretty heavily when Grendel's attacking everyone in the Heorot and eating them. Dark Fantasy is also grittier than sword and sorcery and high fantasy. There tend to be demons, gods (usually very, very dark gods who are more like invincible demons, like Cthulhu), massacres, betrayals, really monstrous monsters, heavy violence, and complicated sexual relationships. There's usually magic, though seldom is it used for good. There are rarely the standard fantasy things of wise beautiful elves and sullen short dwarves. Just lots of monsters. Heroes tend to be more like anti-heroes or outcasts or deformed or really fucked up in the head. Sometimes heroes act very, very badly. Dark Fantasy usually has to be rich in the world of evil magic it creates and is often set in some kind of alternate timeline/future/past of our own world. Basically, people who write Dark Fantasy take the usual tropes of fantasy and say, "what if that's used for evil? what if he's corrupt? what if we explicitly say how the monster killed all those men? what if evil (and good) is aware of sexuality? is there artistic beauty in the grotesque? what if heroes make mistakes? what if there's no such thing as a hero?" etc., etc.
Other works that I would personally consider fall into the category of Dark Fantasy: Princess Mononoke, Akira. I know Akira is supposed to be sci-fi, but come on. It's sort of both. And at any rate, if Akira is sci-fi, then I write sci-fi, and we don't want to jump to those conclusions, do we? Princess Mononoke, despite being sort of "kidsy", is Dark, I feel, because of the presentation. There's a lot of gore in that movie, if you think about it. Lots of blood and wounds and fucking decapitated gods looking for their heads. Okay, ANYTHING that has a decapitated god looking for its head is Dark Fantasy. That would just never happen in the nice clean world of LOTR. Another scene that I would describe as Dark Fantasy is found in Neon Genesis Evangelion, when the robots, uh, eat each other. In fact, this is called going "berserk", if I'm correct. The only videogame I ever played, Diablo, is classified as Dark Fantasy. Hey, in the second edition, you discover that the nice town you were living in in the first game has become infested with demon amazons and one of the bosses you have to kill is your former bartender, now zombified. And your former priest has been locked in a hanging cage. So yeah.
Dark Fantasy is grotesque and explicit and painful. Its characters live very hard lives. Nobody's perky. People are selfish. Actions, from all ends, are brutal. They have desires, and they'll do a lot to attain those desires. They have tragic downfalls. Sometimes they don't get up.
Anyhow, Berserk captures that Dark Fantasy atmosphere that I'm looking for so well that I've decided to include some pictures from it. Truly, the way this guy, Kentaro Miura, creates his work is amazing. Like really, I might marry him.
( He has mad talent. )
ambience and tone about it that was really inspirational for dreaming up Ilium Agonistes. It's epic fantasy, but it's very dark. If you'd like to know how dark, go ahead and read the wikipedia article on it. Ilium Agonistes is not that dark, but it is going to be a Dark Fantasy, a lot darker than Lord of the Rings, for example, which I would consider pretty "light" as tones go. If you're going to go about breaking assumptions and having prophecies that are wrong, and masses of people dying because everything they believe is wrong, and their refusal to change regardless (the Da Vinci code motto, "How Dark The Con of Man" would well apply to Ilium Agonistes too)... you either have to go very sarcastic and comedic or very dark and heavy, and I don't do funny. I do blood. Dark Fantasy is not its own official subgenre yet, but it should be. For Berserk if for no one else, although there's argument that another creative hero of mine, H.P. Lovecraft the one and only master of horror (Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker and all y'all ain't got nothing on this guy, and props to Stephen King for giving Lovecraft lots and lots of nods... his short story "Jerusalem's Lot" and the miniseries it spawned, "Salem's Lot", are all fundamentally based on Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos), wrote Dark Fantasy. Basically, Dark Fantasy can't decide if it's horror or fantasy, but why does it have to decide? Beowulf, the world's oldest epic fantasy, tends toward horror pretty heavily when Grendel's attacking everyone in the Heorot and eating them. Dark Fantasy is also grittier than sword and sorcery and high fantasy. There tend to be demons, gods (usually very, very dark gods who are more like invincible demons, like Cthulhu), massacres, betrayals, really monstrous monsters, heavy violence, and complicated sexual relationships. There's usually magic, though seldom is it used for good. There are rarely the standard fantasy things of wise beautiful elves and sullen short dwarves. Just lots of monsters. Heroes tend to be more like anti-heroes or outcasts or deformed or really fucked up in the head. Sometimes heroes act very, very badly. Dark Fantasy usually has to be rich in the world of evil magic it creates and is often set in some kind of alternate timeline/future/past of our own world. Basically, people who write Dark Fantasy take the usual tropes of fantasy and say, "what if that's used for evil? what if he's corrupt? what if we explicitly say how the monster killed all those men? what if evil (and good) is aware of sexuality? is there artistic beauty in the grotesque? what if heroes make mistakes? what if there's no such thing as a hero?" etc., etc.
Other works that I would personally consider fall into the category of Dark Fantasy: Princess Mononoke, Akira. I know Akira is supposed to be sci-fi, but come on. It's sort of both. And at any rate, if Akira is sci-fi, then I write sci-fi, and we don't want to jump to those conclusions, do we? Princess Mononoke, despite being sort of "kidsy", is Dark, I feel, because of the presentation. There's a lot of gore in that movie, if you think about it. Lots of blood and wounds and fucking decapitated gods looking for their heads. Okay, ANYTHING that has a decapitated god looking for its head is Dark Fantasy. That would just never happen in the nice clean world of LOTR. Another scene that I would describe as Dark Fantasy is found in Neon Genesis Evangelion, when the robots, uh, eat each other. In fact, this is called going "berserk", if I'm correct. The only videogame I ever played, Diablo, is classified as Dark Fantasy. Hey, in the second edition, you discover that the nice town you were living in in the first game has become infested with demon amazons and one of the bosses you have to kill is your former bartender, now zombified. And your former priest has been locked in a hanging cage. So yeah.
Dark Fantasy is grotesque and explicit and painful. Its characters live very hard lives. Nobody's perky. People are selfish. Actions, from all ends, are brutal. They have desires, and they'll do a lot to attain those desires. They have tragic downfalls. Sometimes they don't get up.
Anyhow, Berserk captures that Dark Fantasy atmosphere that I'm looking for so well that I've decided to include some pictures from it. Truly, the way this guy, Kentaro Miura, creates his work is amazing. Like really, I might marry him.
( He has mad talent. )
