{"id":21644,"date":"2025-07-19T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-07-19T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=21644"},"modified":"2025-07-11T19:42:01","modified_gmt":"2025-07-12T01:42:01","slug":"fantasy-from-a-to-z-n-is-for-noblebright","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/fantasy-from-a-to-z-n-is-for-noblebright\/","title":{"rendered":"Fantasy from A to Z: N is for Noblebright"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

While the quote comes from Warhammer 40k, a science fiction franchise, it very soon became applied to the \u201cdarker and edgier\u201d fantasy that started coming out in the 80s and 90s. Indeed, the quote itself spawned the term \u201cgrimdark\u201d for a fantasy subgenre that became very popular in the 00s, with the rise of George R.R. Martin\u2019s Song of Ice and Fire and subsequent Game of Thrones TV series.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Grimdark combines the scope and feel of epic fantasy with the savagery and moral greyness of sword & sorcery, ramping up the violence and savagery to levels that would have made even Robert E. Howard blush. It often features twists that subvert the old fantasy tropes, such as killing off the \u201cchosen one\u201d hero who would typically be the protagonist, or presenting a horrifying dystopia of a world that is the utter antithesis of an escapist fantasy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In part, I think the grimdark phenomenon was a reaction to the Tolkien formula that dominated fantasy for so long. After J.R.R. Tolkien\u2019s Lord of the Rings<\/em> became wildly popular, his publishers tried to replicate that success by explicitly creating a formula that they wanted their writers to follow. This resulted in a bunch of Tolkien clones, such as Terry Brooks\u2019s Shannara series and David Edding\u2019s Belgariad series. For a couple of decades, these dominated the fantasy shelves, until writers began to revolt, and their books began to take off. After all, Game of Thrones<\/em> was originally published in 1996.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But while there\u2019s some truth to that theory, I don\u2019t think it\u2019s sufficient to explain the rise of grimdark. After all, Stephen R. Donaldson was rebelling against the Tolkien formula back in the 70s, and while his Thomas Covenant books were quite successful, they didn\u2019t spawn a new subgenre (though arguably, they paved the way for later writers like Martin and Abercrombie). Instead, I think there\u2019s something generational about the grimdark subgenre\u2014that it\u2019s the sort of thing that only could have arisen in the 90s and 00s, because of how the generational cycle works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wrote a lengthy blog post about this, which remains one of my more popular posts. My basic thesis is that the fantasy genre goes through generational cycles just like history goes through generational cycles. In its simplest form, the cycle looks something like this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n