DISCLAIMER: This article was originally posted to Medici's livejournal; a Harry Potter fan resource with leanings toward the dark fiction writing genre, alongside the DarkOnes livejournal community. It ain't got nothing to do with raving, raves, or drugs (unless you're writing while tweaked out). As such, if you're lurking on the outskirts of the fandom - come check us out. We're pretty visceral. http://darkones.livejournal.com

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A Discourse on Darkfic
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If you want real horror, watch the news.

Dark Fiction is a nebulous umbrella-term that claims more writers than I could possibly shake a stick at within the Harry Potter fandom – some, however misguided, misappropriate the title and use it as a descriptor for angst writing, or horror writing. They use it to inspire, to terrify, to categorize stylistic tendencies that fall beneath it, certainly – but they’ve missed the point. It’s a mood that either permeates their work, or is drawn from it.

What is darkfic? How can you classify a bit of fanfiction as “dark”?

Are there requirements to fulfill? For example, does one of the main characters have to die? Is their a mourning period? Does someone become trapped by the beast within? Are they stricken by the psychological preoccupation that failure is immanent? Have they given up hope?

Or does darkfic embrace something more romantic?

For me, I claim the latter as my “excuse” – a feeble reasoning, certainly, but it allows me the opportunity to overturn the rock and poke at the bestial, wriggling, things underneath that some – aye – most – choose not to look at.

That’s what it boils down to – a choice. You can either embrace it, or deny it – but denying its existence does not disclaim it. Denial doesn’t placate it – true, it’ll continue on without out you and grow and fester, or change into something much more sinister.

“Once you bite the apple – or the apple bites you – you can never unsee. You can only stop looking. You can only forget or deny, let the two feed on each other, as they so often do.” (John Mason Skipp)

The fanfiction glossary defines “Darkfic” as “…A story involving a large amount of death/pain/trauma being inflicted on the characters, often to force out characterization. To quote Elsa Bibat's essay "A Long Strange Walk": "Those who really don't like seeing their favourite characters slaughtered or emotionally and mentally scarred for life are advised not to read anything with a [DARK] tag or warning."

For the most part, it’s an apt description – but it’s simply not enough to placate someone who enjoys traipsing along the boundaries of genre-defiance.

There is something key to this definition that struck me the first time I came across it – it does not stipulate when or how the “darkness” must manifest. Is it supposed to permeate each and every facet of the writing so that it prevails in every nuance, nook and cranny?

If that were true, it would lead me to believe if we were all doing just that, we’d be skirting the perimeter of clichéd horror writing; A dark and stormy night as our setting, creaking floorboards, roving dust bunnies and naturally, a boggart under the bed waiting for the precise instant when our beloved character nods off, crawling into the arms of Morpheus unwittingly only to be drained, torn to bits and then stuffed haphazardly into the fireplace.

That brings me to the next point – all being loosely formulated of course – I didn’t see a thesis statement anywhere at the top of this rabble, if you’ll forgive me for it…

Terror is not something that needs to be prescribed to make a darkfic good. Surely, dark fiction would prey on the emotions of the reader, and surely, we’d love to bring them a sense of security or calm before the storm hits. If you introduce balance, a sense of normality, the instant where you tear the carpet out from under the reader, or, for a better analogy – snap the light switch off - they’re less prepared for it, and the impact is doubled.

We’d like our readers to become so enthralled that by the end game, when everything seems ok and it looks as if everyone will pull through, you take whatever foreshadowing you mustered in your first few chapters and turn it against your characters. You win, they suffer, and your readers sit back in stunned silence or pull out the box of tissue.

That, to me, is and has always been the purest form of dark fiction since the first time someone deliberately neglected a ‘character death’ warning in a twenty-one-chapter fic.

The sense of loss is tenfold. The impact was unanimous. (And in the case of that inaugural blow – that particular chaptered fic and its subtle, creeping ending that left me sobbing like a complete idiot – darkness won out. For a moment after its completion, I truly believed that despair was a tactile and tangible thing, and the author – brilliant woman that she was – wielded it like the subtlest weapon).

So what does this boil down to? I think it’s very simple. Everything continues on as it does in the real wizarding world, there is laughter and there are practical jokes, there are arguments and scheming and the results of these things – even in the most bleakest scenarios when the war is inching towards its screaming crescendo – you keep it feeling genuine and you empathize with it, until…

You give up.

You let it win.

You find your unhappy ending.

That, dear friends, is dark fiction is its purest form without the bells and whistles of gore or devices included for shock-value. Rape, suicide, torture, necro, bestiality – all fringe benefits.