Help understanding a sub genre

[Richard]

I'm kind of new to fantasy literature in a sense. I've been seeing a sub genre thrown around a lot and I'm kind of confused about it. Can someone help explain what Grimdark is? I'm a tad bit curious about this.

[Jack]

"Grimdark" can be a bit hard to pin down but essentially, it's stories that are so dark, so miserable, so gorey that people generally think you need to be a certain kind of person to enjoy them properly, or you need to go into them expecting misery.

Some examples of popular grimdark:

A Song of Ice and Fire: lots of rape and violence and swearing. Most popularly called grindark because the "good guys" often come out on the losing side of a conflict.

The Broken Empire: Again, rape and violence and killing. Especially lauded as grimdark because it's the protagonist who is doing a lot of said rape and killing, and he's not very sorry about it.

Joe Abercrombie: Haven't read his stuff and I forgot the series names, but again from what I hear, lots of good guys losing and some focus on protagonists who are crippled and suffering as part of their daily life.

Warhammer series: Warhammer 40k is an especially good example, where I believe the term came from. You have whole words of billions of people made explicitly to be cannon fodder, several dozen evil factions who are probably going to win in the end, and an ungodly amount of murder.


Basically, if a series acknowledges some particularly taboo subjects as these series do, and especially so if the protagonists partake or accept these things, it's going to be labelled as grimdark. Mark Lawrence, who wrote the Broken Empire series, wrote a rather nice summary on the approach of calling something grimdark and why it's a bit of a fallacy, but it's a hard label to remove.