Why do we seek the darkness

[Emilymcplugger]

So in my latest adventure I explore some darker themes and it’s slightly further away from the previous stories I’ve done, both of which had relatively happy endings, but both did have some horror elements to them, to be fair.

I didn’t think I’d be heading in this darker direction with this story but… it is now set this way and I couldn’t change it even if I wanted to, which raises the question…these darker issues that we explore and look at, even within the fantasy erotic realm that we all work in, what is it about these topics that pull us in?

I’d let to get your take on this and discuss your darker stories.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

You have to experience darkness to truly appreciate the light. One without the other doesn't exist.

 

[alohadave]

Darkness is more interesting than light.

IRL, we look for less conflict, less drama, less confrontation. But in fiction, all those things drive the story forward and gives the characters something to respond to.

We don't read stories where nothing really happens, because that shit is boring.

But when there is conflict, how the characters react to and deal with conflict, that's why we read/write.

 

[Emilymcplugger]

"Soren Kierkegaard, a philosopher, believed that people are attracted to those who hurt them because it allows them to feel a sense of passion and power in their relationships. He argued that this attraction to pain is rooted in our innate desire for authenticity and the search for true selfhood. He claimed that the human desire for intense experiences, even those that may be harmful, is a natural part of the human condition and should be embraced and not rejected."

Sociopaths

DITTO!

 

[Djmac1031]

I'm a huge fan of Stephen King. I know, some love him, some hate him. I'm in the Love camp, sue me.

He has this nasty habit of getting me to fall in love with a character only to kill them or have something horrible happen to them.

And I hate him every time for it.

Yet... I keep coming back for more.

I think dark stories allow us a safe place to explore our own darkness; our own fears, traumas, pains, and loss.

A story can hurt us, but it's pain we accept because we know, unlike real life, it's not a TRUE pain.

And sometimes reading a darker themed story can also remind us of the GOOD we have in our own lives.

 

[NotWise]

Good question, I think.

I dislike the horror genre, but I still find myself drawn to writing darker themes, and some stories have come out darker than I ever thought they would. "One Night in Gormaz" is nothing if not harsh, and I wonder sometimes when I re-read it (I think it's worth that) what other people see in it.

The uplifting ending is one thing that comes from darker stories. It's the daylight at the end of the storm--a contrast to fear and suffering. In "The Third Ring," Tannehill looses his wife and confronts his own mortality, but instead of going softly into the night he raises a timeless monument to their love. In "Oscar's Place" three ghostly lovers face oblivion, but their plight gives rise to a mortal love, and the young couple sees them put to rest.

I've been sitting a dark story idea for I/T for a few years now, but I can't imagine the readers there going for it. Maybe someday I'll find out.

By and large, I don't think readers are here for dark stories. To enjoy it, maybe the story needs to have some quality of relief or redemption that justifies the journey.

 

[Winter_Fare]

I like exploring themes of survival, that life is worth living, even after the worst has happened

To that end I don't tend towards what I'd consider really dark, or perhaps unjust endings for characters. My stories are often superficially dark, but hope, or growth is usually the message.

Reading though... I enjoy stuff that's gory for the sake of it, violent for the sake of it. Always have, as far back as I can remember

 

[AchtungNight]

My author name is literally a translation of “Hello, Darkness.” It was inspired by the Simon & Garfunkel song Sound of Silence. If you want to know why anyone communicates words, check out that song.

 

[SAILOR954]

I find a ton of meaning in this song.
Every time I stay away I end up eventually coming back & I can hear the words in my head…
Hello darkness, my old friend
I've come to talk with you again

It’s not the darkness you seek. It’s coming into the light you crave.
That’s who you are. It’s what you need.

 

[lovecraft68]

I'm a believer in the theory of the Shadow Self(Jung?) I have a lot of darkness in me and writing became a great way to crack the valve and let some out in a creative way. Sometimes when a darkish theme comes to me, I feel I'm not ready and push it back, other times I embrace it.

My siblings with benefits series turned the I/T genre on its ear...not in a great way, it had small readership, but the overall consensus of "My god, what did you do here" was exactly what I wanted.

 

[Euphony]

My feeling is writers, in general, tend towards having higher curiosity traits and explore/try to deconstruct the information this incredibly complex existence regularly dumps on them.

We are the most "dumped on" generation in the most inundating informational times.

Dark themes offer complexity, novelty, and a bit of spiciness which keeps writers (who tend towards a higher bar to be motivated/interested by a subject) better engaged.

We write the human condition. To better represent it on page, we explore the spectrum of it.

 

[Emilymcplugger]

I'm a huge fan of Stephen King. I know, some love him, some hate him. I'm in the Love camp, sue me.

He has this nasty habit of getting me to fall in love with a character only to kill them or have something horrible happen to them.

And I hate him every time for it.

Yet... I keep coming back for more.

I think dark stories allow us a safe place to explore our own darkness; our own fears, traumas, pains, and loss.

A story can hurt us, but it's pain we accept because we know, unlike real life, it's not a TRUE pain.

And sometimes reading a darker themed story can also remind us of the GOOD we have in our own lives.

Yeah, I used to be a King fan. Not read anything of his in ages mind, but he did have a knack for that.

Guess we’ll have to see how this one goes.

 

[onehitwanda]

Most of my stuff is tangentially dark, though Lighthouse is ironically very dark (the FMC was stabbed and left to die after a long history of abuse).

Shadows define shapes. Shadows show perspective. Shadows show distance and topology. A scene with no shadows is flat, a story with no darkness is for toddlers.

Humans are capable of the greatest acts of altruism and the most heinous acts of darkness. But it's the darkness we find more interesting, more compelling - out behind the circle of light from the campfires, our subconscious still imagines the fangs and fur of the Pleistocene.

We don't want to read stories about people who donated millions of dollars to guinea worm eradication, we want to read stories about how they pay young boys to peg them.

 

[Jmanchu]

We as human beings are just attracted to the forbidden, the taboo, the terrifying, the shocking, the drama, the uncertainty of life, highs and lows of emotions, especially when it brings that tasty contradiction between our shameful wants and fears and our moral outrage and boundaries that we know is wrong. We like to push and break boundaries between wrong and right, especially wrong things that feel right. We like excitement, we like control, we like losing control, and we all like to be a little wicked sometimes.

 

[gunhilltrain]

"Soren Kierkegaard, a philosopher, believed that people are attracted to those who hurt them because it allows them to feel a sense of passion and power in their relationships. He argued that this attraction to pain is rooted in our innate desire for authenticity and the search for true selfhood. He claimed that the human desire for intense experiences, even those that may be harmful, is a natural part of the human condition and should be embraced and not rejected."

Sociopaths

That would explain a lot of both personal and political events. When it become political, usually masses of people are going in a direction that few of them imagined that they be in just a few years earlier. When it reaches a certain level, the desire of authenticity expresses itself, paradoxically, in a need to kill and destroy. ("Oh, but the victims brought in on themselves!") Whole societies can become sociopathic.

https://info.echoesandreflections.org/hubfs/WarsawGhetto.jpg

A bit heavy, I know, but Titan brings that out in me.

 

[gunhilltrain]

I'm a believer in the theory of the Shadow Self(Jung?) I have a lot of darkness in me and writing became a great way to crack the valve and let some out in a creative way. Sometimes when a darkish theme comes to me, I feel I'm not ready and push it back, other times I embrace it.

My siblings with benefits series turned the I/T genre on its ear...not in a great way, it had small readership, but the overall consensus of "My god, what did you do here" was exactly what I wanted.

Oh yeah, that was Jung alright. But you're also right in that, instead repressing it, he said our dark side has to be confronted and, if possible, put to some use. (I think he said the two biggest components were aggression and sexuality.) So writing? That certainly seems like one way of doing it.

 

[SimonDoom]

Darkness is appealing because it's true. There's a lot of darkness in us, and we don't like to admit it. There's a part in most of us that wants to be bad, at least just a little. And I say this as someone who grew up almost never getting in trouble. Breaking rules once in a while is fun. It can be cathartic and liberating, too. It can be an opportunity for growth and self-learning.

I think there are two basic ways of looking at things. Hobbes saw life as "nasty, brutish, and short." Rousseau said, "man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." I incline to the Hobbesian view. To my mind, people who think like Rousseau (and there are many of them) tend to be constantly surprised by all the grimness and injustice in the world. And my reaction to that attitude is, "Are you paying attention? How can you be surprised?" For most of human history it's been a grim slog. But things tend to get a bit better, slowly, though not inevitably.

I believe it's appropriate and even necessary to incorporate darkness in art. Without it the art is not true.

Most of my stories are light-hearted, but there are notes of darkness, mostly in my gravitation toward transgressive behavior: incest, exhibitionism (to a degree that would be illegal in many or most places), fetishism, power exchange. I wrote one story, Penis Fish, which is about the end of humanity as we know it, so I guess that's pretty dark.

 

[Emilymcplugger]

Darkness is appealing because it's true. There's a lot of darkness in us, and we don't like to admit it. There's a part in most of us that wants to be bad, at least just a little. And I say this as someone who grew up almost never getting in trouble. Breaking rules once in a while is fun. It can be cathartic and liberating, too. It can be an opportunity for growth and self-learning.

I think there are two basic ways of looking at things. Hobbes saw life as "nasty, brutish, and short." Rousseau said, "man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." I incline to the Hobbesian view. To my mind, people who think like Rousseau (and there are many of them) tend to be constantly surprised by all the grimness and injustice in the world. And my reaction to that attitude is, "Are you paying attention? How can you be surprised?" For most of human history it's been a grim slog. But things tend to get a bit better, slowly, though not inevitably.

I believe it's appropriate and even necessary to incorporate darkness in art. Without it the art is not true.

Most of my stories are light-hearted, but there are notes of darkness, mostly in my gravitation toward transgressive behavior: incest, exhibitionism (to a degree that would be illegal in many or most places), fetishism, power exchange. I wrote one story, Penis Fish, which is about the end of humanity as we know it, so I guess that's pretty dark.

For a person called @SimonDoom that was surprisingly uplifting.

Nice.

(Nice? Nice is your reply to quotes from Hobbes and Rousseau? Jesus H. I might as well go back to watching Hobbes and Shaw. Ugh!)

 

[SimonDoom]

For a person called @SimonDoom that was surprisingly uplifting.

In retrospect I would not use the name "Doom." It in no way expresses the way I think. I just thought it sounded kind of cool at the time.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I generally write vanilla mood pieces, intimate and slow, because I don't do angst, I'm not angry, and it's not therapy. Every now and then there are darker element's, but they're few and far between - although I have one story where the protagonist disembowels her twin brother, hara-kiri, so the themes behind that story went dark.

Generally though, my psyche runs on an even kilter. Someone once described my story telling as being curled up with a whisky by a log fire, stories flowing like rivers to the sea.

I hit my chops as writer, and began to think more about the power of erotica, when someone commented, "Your stories give me a safe haven from my usually troubled life" (words to that effect), which humbled me, made me think twice about my content. It was then I coined the notion of socially responsible erotica - it's still self-indulgent, but its not so self-involved.

If I can conjure up worlds where someone can find some peace and an orgasm or two, I'm content.

 

[Voboy]

Darkness is more interesting than light.

IRL, we look for less conflict, less drama, less confrontation. But in fiction, all those things drive the story forward and gives the characters something to respond to.

We don't read stories where nothing really happens, because that shit is boring.

But when there is conflict, how the characters react to and deal with conflict, that's why we read/write.

What he said.

 

[lovecraft68]

Darkness is more interesting than light.

IRL, we look for less conflict, less drama, less confrontation. But in fiction, all those things drive the story forward and gives the characters something to respond to.

We don't read stories where nothing really happens, because that shit is boring.

But when there is conflict, how the characters react to and deal with conflict, that's why we read/write.

Well said, let's face it, the bad guys are usually cooler.

 

[AchtungNight]

Well said, let's face it, the bad guys are usually cooler.

Not always. I prefer dark good guys over light ones. Cloud over Sephiroth, the Shadow over the Light, Batman over… damn, no good analogy here. I also prefer angels over demons, there you go.

 

[SeraphNocturne]

Call it morbid curiosity, I suppose. I don’t always write in a sinister tone but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy writing things that are dark and psychologically thrilling. I have always leaned toward the strange and macabre when it comes to literature.

I don’t doubt my tendency to write in the darker realms can be connected to not so pleasant real world experiences—things I don’t discuss publicly, however, I do think delving into a darker sense of self in a safe and controlled environment using artistic mediums is quite therapeutic. I’m no psychologist, though, so don’t quote me on that.

 

[Bramblethorn]

So in my latest adventure I explore some darker themes and it’s slightly further away from the previous stories I’ve done, both of which had relatively happy endings, but both did have some horror elements to them, to be fair.

I didn’t think I’d be heading in this darker direction with this story but… it is now set this way and I couldn’t change it even if I wanted to, which raises the question…these darker issues that we explore and look at, even within the fantasy erotic realm that we all work in, what is it about these topics that pull us in?

I’d let to get your take on this and discuss your darker stories.

Different stories, different reasons.

Sometimes it comes down to the idea Chesterton discussed:

Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.

I want my readers to find joy in my stories, and I want them to come away believing that that kind of joy is attainable in the real world where they live, not just some fantasy land where everybody's 18 forever. Sometimes that means acknowledging the darkness in this world and showing people who manage to carve out joy even while they're caught in the dragon's fangs, with no St. George on the way.

Sometimes it's about articulating the hard stuff, because it can feel easier to deal with knowing that somebody else feels that way too.

Sometimes it's about understanding our own potential to contribute to that darkness.

And sometimes it's just because brains are weird and poking them with scary things produces pleasurable sensations, like a roller-coaster ride does for some people.