Grimdark

Let's talk about Joe Abercrombie and The Blade Itself.

Oh, the undisputed blueprint for modern grimdark fantasy.

Grimdark.

Even just saying the word out loud, it sounds heavy.

It conjures up this image of a world totally stripped of all nobility, a place where everyone is morally compromised, the weather is always terrible, the violence is visceral, and nobody ever gets a happy ending.

Today, Adam takes the lead on the philosophy of Warhammer 40K, joined by John Greenaway, the Lit Crit guy, and Leon Kato of The Left Page.

They take on grimdark cosmology, empire, and the tiny painted soldiers for which Warhammer has become known.

Full disclosure, I myself was indoctrinated with AD&D First Edition, and then I flirted with GURPS and Shadowrun.

I was lodged in a different nerd niche, hence I would be out of my depth in this conversation.

Like, so it becomes a kind of like cross-me- a trans-media mode of narrative construction, and that in itself is probably worth paying attention to as well.

But yeah, I think it's important to point out that when we're talking about Warhammer, we are, we are in effect talking about multiple intersecting cultural forms of production, which are geared around perpetuation of a, of a singular shared narrative kind of life space within which the player and the various kind of psychopomps, the various representatives of the player kind of move and interact.

And all of it is geared around this question of, of the worst possible worlds, [laughs] right? Obviously the, the introduction, the famous phrase of Warhammer 40,000 of, "In the grim darkness of the, of the far future, there is only war," has given its name to an entire kind of subgenre of grimdark.

And it's very important I think that, that it's fundamentally a kind of fantasy space.

But I like to think of magic as a tool, because I've read a lot of fantasy books where magic is just minimal.

I think Joe Abercrombie does a good job of this in his Grimdark books.

When it does show up, it's badass.

But it's also sometimes almost science at the same time.

The...

Have you se- have you seen the Trovarian videos of painting Grimdark?

No, I haven't.

That's what I was thinking of.

There we go.

I was just addressing the fact that there's a lot of different views on whether the Tau fit into Grimdark or should fit into Grimdark or are...

It's a split in the fan community.

That's all I was saying.