My perennial problem with discussions of dark n’edgy vs. light n’fluffy – which is absolutely coming up in the most recent iteration – is that no one takes the time to define the terms. For example, when we say “dark”, do we mean tropes, or themes, or aesthetics?

Take Christopher Nolan, who is often referred to as a trailblazer of “dark” superhero stories. Except that Nolan’s Batman films aren’t really that dark thematically. They have plenty of schlocky comic book tropes, and of course moments of inspiration like the ferry scene.

What they are is dark aesthetically, or more precisely, they take a naturalistic approach to their comic book universe and tropes, and place characters in them who are recognizably adult in their behavior, demeanor, and professional conduct.

This is important in the Batman context because Nolan’s films followed up on Schumacher’s films, which were characterized by a cartoonish, camp aesthetic that put a lot of fans off. So when people pointed to them as what Batman should be, it was in response to what he had been.

(We should always remember that a lot of the time, when people say “this is good”, what they actually mean is “someone did X, and then everyone did X, often quite badly, and then it was run into the ground, and now someone has done Y and it feels incredibly fresh and new”.)

And yes, when discussing the backlash to Schumacher and the way that Nolan’s aesthetic was embraced as the “right” way to do superheroes, we have to acknowledge that camp is always seen as dangerously queer and un-masculine, and attacked on those grounds.

Especially given the way that Nolan’s films (and films inspired by him like Joker) tend to instrumentalize women and eliminate their perspective, it’s worth noting how much this aesthetic has become associated with a certain type of masculinity, even if it didn’t have to be.

At the same time, getting hung up on aesthetics can ignore deeper problems of theme and execution. Snyder’s Superman movies look like ass, but the real problem with them is that they’re thematically incoherent, and try to obscure that fact by feigning a mature cynicism.

A lot of defenders of those movies will try to pretend that they’re a deconstruction of superhero tropes, particularly the idea of Superman as an idealistic, aspirational figure. When the truth is that they just gesture at those ideas, but lack the courage to follow through.

Meanwhile, something like Wonder Woman (or even the Batman/WW scenes in Justice League) reaches for something a lot deeper and richer, a true complexity that actually justifies the “dark” label.

Wonder Woman is not a light, fluffy film, but neither is it performatively dark. It’s a movie about loss and damage, and the courage to pull through them for the sake of a world that often doesn’t feel worth fighting for.

You have to distinguish between dark storytelling that seems to exist merely for outrage factor, or out of the belief that violence and nihilism are inherently mature, and dark storytelling that is actually saying something worthwhile about human nature.

This last observation brought to you by this @nberlat thread about The Boys, which talks about the ways that the show takes what in the comics was mere outrageousness and turns it into something that is no less dark, but actually has something to say. https://twitter.com/nberlat/status/1294876345751744512

Having said all this, it’s also needs to be said that the same problems – confusing aesthetic with substance, prioritizing buzzwords over emotional depth, sacrificing thematic coherence for a brief hit of audience reaction – exist on the light, happy end of the scale too.

A lot of the ideas that are currently being lauded as the “right” way to do pop culture storytelling – kindness, empathy, friendship, a bright, cheerful aesthetic – can also be applied in ways that are thoughtless, self-satisfied, and ultimately oppressive.

My go-to example for this is of course She-Ra, a show that has many good qualities but ultimately falls so thoroughly for the notion that friendship is the ultimate redemptive force that it never asks its formerly-evil characters to do any work to change or make amends.

But another example is Thor: Ragnarok, which for all its many other qualities is still a film that takes a character who was – rightly and brilliantly – depicted as Nazi-adjacent and turns him into a bumbling, harmless oaf.

There is, clearly, a direct line between Ragnarok’s treatment of Loki as harmless and funny and a similar attitude towards actual Nazis in Jojo Rabbit, and it runs through Taika Waititi’s belief in the power of kindness and empathy – which is here entirely misplaced.

I think what’s going on here is that we’re all struggling to find ways for pop culture to address the terrible problems we see in the world, but we keep trying to find hard and fast rules for how to do that instead of admitting that it’s all about context and execution.

Like, one conversation that comes up a lot right now is villain protagonists, with many people (rightly) pointing out that real life bad guys are rarely this complex, and that these fictional counterparts are often used to create sympathy for real people who don’t deserve it.

(A sympathy that is, of course, often also rooted in whiteness and other forms of privilege. Pop culture teaches us to see handsome white men as more human than everyone else, even when they’re villains, and that’s definitely an aspect of “dark” storytelling worth calling out.)

But the response can often reach the extreme of saying that we shouldn't have morally complex characters at all, or (the She-Ra, Ragnarok approach) that we should make villains harmless and cuddly, erasing the terrible things they’ve done.

When really the answer is, if you want to deal with complicated subjects, you have to write to a higher level. To go back to The Boys, one thing it gets right is to recognize that Homelander, its evil Superman character, is both terrifying, and deeply boring and pathetic.

I know it feels like a copout to say this, but you can do just about anything if you do it thoughtfully and carefully. The problem with most tropes isn’t the tropes themselves, but how shallowly they’re executed.

To bring this back to Game of Thrones: yes, that’s a show that had a lot of outrage-for-outrage’s-sake (all the sexposition in the earlier seasons, for example). But its core problem wasn’t “darkness”. It was that it had no idea what it was about or trying to say.

Honestly, even the moral that a lot of people try to impose on it – everyone’s a bastard and the world sucks – often feels read-in. It was a show about nothing, and it obscured that fact with dragons and tits and, yes, a lot of violence. But the violence wasn’t the problem.