Why Grimdark?

Quick, what is the easiest way to make clear that a story is meant for adults (or, sometimes, for what an edgy fifteen-year-old sees as adult)? Grim and dark elements, of course. In a world where violence is frequent and people get sexually assaulted, a story must certainly be one for adults. Or so, one might think, some authors justify the more than liberal use of grimdark sauce. Why do people think that, though?

First of all, by definition, all stories not categorized as ‘for children’ or ‘for teens’ are adult stories. The Sherlock Holmes canon is made up of adult stories, even if children or teens might be reading it, because it was written with an adult audience (mostly the readers of the Strand magazine) in mind. Yet, the world of Sherlock Holmes is neither overly grim nor overly dark. It is the world of late-Victorian Britain. Yes, it had dark and grim aspects, but it’s not governed by them.
Not all adults want grimdark stories, either. If your life is grim and dark to a degree, the best escapism is usually found in the opposite — light and fluffy stories with happy endings. That is why you can see that when life is hard people want light entertainment and dark stories bloom when life is good. Humans often seek the opposite of their own situation when they consume media.
To entertain an adult audience, neither grimness nor darkness are a necessity. There are genres which have a tendency towards both — horror stories or thrillers, for instance. If you write about a monster killing all the teenagers in a summer camp or about a serial killer the police has a hard time catching, dark themes like murder (and not the simple, everyday variety, either), death, torture, and pain are to be expected. Rape might be happening.
Yet, the whole genre of cosy mysteries as it has evolved over the last decades partially goes back to the Golden Age of Murder when the classics of the mystery genre were mostly written, but it partially also provides readers with less brutal and grim mystery stories where the victim is not slowly drained of all blood while alive and then cut into small pieces — they’re ‘only’ stabbed, shot, or poisoned.

The worst offenders of the use of grimdark sauce recently, though, were the reboots of several shows for children or teenagers that were ‘adapted’ for an older audience — “Teen Titans”. “Riverdale”, “The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina”, or “Fate: The Winx Saga”. The last iterations on screen of all of these stories (although at least the first three are long-running comics and have had their darker stories) were bright and positive, something for children or teens to watch and feel good about.
The worst of the examples might actually be “Fate: The Winx Saga”. “The Winx Club” was a bright series for pre-teen girls about six young women connected by a strong friendship. One interesting aspect of the original series was that three of the six main characters were not white — one was a Latina, one was Asian, and one was black. Another interesting aspect was that the Italian production company had young fashion designers dress the characters — so they were wearing what was top fashion in the 2000s.
The Netflix reboot, on the other hand, turns the bright fairy world of the Winx Club dark and dreary. The girls are dressed more like thirty-something women. Their friendship, which saved the day over and over again in the original series, is non-existent. Latina Flora is missing completely, replaced by a white ‘cousin.’ Asian character Musa is white as well now — at least the actress is definitely white-passing. The only character who is still not white is Aisha who gets sidelined and is the only of the five main characters who does not have a personal arc in season one. The most interesting of the six fairies, Techna, is missing completely, probably because the new series has gone back on the interesting concept that magic and technology can exist together.
What we get are burned zombies, genocide, a regular ‘you’re not really my child’ adopted daughter relationship (while character Bloom had a wonderful relationship with her adopted parents in the original series), a lot of death, a lot of grimdark, and not even proper witches (the witch trio called the ‘Trix’ in the original has been compressed into one fairy called Beatrix — be a Trix … really?). I will give the series that there are now male fairies and female specialists (fighters who protect the fairies), but that bit of a positive change can’t balance out the rest.

In a lot of grimdark stories, the authors consider the easiest way to make them so using gendered violence, such as sexual harassment and assault. Usually written by men, those rape scenes are often a throwaway, just to show how ‘dark’ the world is. The world is dark, so women who leave the house (or just exist in some cases) run the danger of being sexually assaulted. “See how dark it is?!” the author screams at you, “See how adult this is?!”
Admittedly, sex is an adult topic, be it consensual or non-consensual. You won’t find sex scenes in books aimed at children or teenagers. Yet, that doesn’t mean a book needs sex scenes in order to be adult. Adult is the standard setting for every book that’s not explicitly written for children or teenagers.
Sexual assault is also a very difficult topic for many people and likely to alienate a part of your possible audience. If the rape is an integral part of the story and dealt with well, then by all means use it. If it is just part of your grimdark flavour, leave it out.

Being an adult includes far more than just murder, blood, torture, rape, and other regular grimdark ingredients. A lot of stories manage to be for adults and about adults without adding all that. Grim and dark can happen in adult literature, but they are not a prerequisite.
If your story requires a dark and grim world, then make that world truly dark and grim, don’t smear grimdark sauce all over it and call it a day. In a truly grim and dark world, your main characters will truly suffer and truly be in danger, they won’t have any plot armour. In a truly grim and dark world, bad things happen to the characters we follow, not just to one-off characters who don’t play a role. Anything else is grimdark sauce and should be avoided.

What can we learn from that? Grimdark stories are those which give themselves a seeming depth by handing out dark and grim features, but don’t really use them. For them, grimdark is just a sauce, a condiment to be smeared all across the story, which gives it some flavour, but doesn’t add depth. There are truly grim and dark stories, but they incorporate those factors, they don’t just play with them. Don’t make use of grimdark sauce, it doesn’t automatically make your story more adult.