Humanity, Hope, and how I approach a dark world
Credit to @jacobboavista
So, I love a dark story. I love when something is emotional and gritty and thought-provoking, but with that love comes an almost inevitable… sadness. I start to think about the implications of that dark world, about what it says about its inhabitants and what it does by proxy. The worlds I love most (i.e Silent Hill, Metro, Metal Gear, Fear & Hunger so on) are extremely dark at times, and it makes me hesitant to make my own if only for the fact that I’m typically in a darker place when I write as-is.
But, I’d like to think (and it’s worth noting this thought reflects in a lot of the media I gravitate toward) that the darkness of a world isn’t its be-all-end-all. I find it really easily to be a nihilist, stuck in the dark depths of whatever awful things are happening (be they in a book, or the real world — and it’s worth noting, they are important to discuss!) but I feel we, as people, owe it to ourselves, each other, and our greater world, to carve that abyss out bit by bit, slowly strip it layer by layer, until the hope and love and light are visible again. Humanity can be remarkably cruel, and it’s easy for it to stick to that, it’s what I’d almost call the “easier” path for the collective to follow. And yet being helpful, being kind, fighting that cruelty even if you’re outnumbered or certain you’ll lose is what I love most. You can crush hope, smother out that light, but you can’t ever fully erase it. It might just take a while for people to see it again. Fighting hope, ironically enough, is pointless.
And so, my books, and the dark dreary world that humanity inhabits within it. Drahvon isn’t a world full of cruelty, but the humans within it have been (either by force or misdirection) steeping in that smog for far too long. Why are there no other races within humanity’s borders? They’ve driven them out. Why is humanity fighting itself and glassing whole provinces? They’re convinced that this is the only way to see the light again. It isn’t. It never is. War and death and cruelty help no one but the orchestrators, and to cut those strings the people have to first see that they’ve been entangled. The Great Karsk War isn’t the only conflict within the continent, nor will it be the last, but the goal of this series (at least, I hope) is to show that the darkness, no matter how thick, can be stripped away. Yes, sometimes it takes force to meet force, and yes, sometimes the ones you fight cannot be convinced that what they are doing is fueling that smothering blanket, but the only way to expose the light is to start somewhere.
Violence is intrinsically linked to humanity. I can’t help but wonder if that’s because humans have spent their entire livelihood warring, or if they’ve been convinced that they need to in order to be safe. The world will turn long after we are gone, but doesn’t that just give us an even bigger, stronger reason to care for it, for each other? If not us, then who?
The protagonists of my project all come at this from different angles, and not all of them are equal. My final question is: how would you?
