Just as a Lighter and Softer tone is typically part of an attempt to bring a fictional world to children or to younger children, a 'darker' tone is often intended to make a setting appeal to older children or adults. In fact this is often the purpose of a Darker and Edgier turn.

This doesn't make it a bad trope though- when this is used subtly such as in the Harry Potter series, it can create the effect of a series growing up with its audience. However, this all works IF it's done right.Īs one could predict, this is fairly easy to screw up and poor use of these tropes may just result in Too Bleak, Stopped Caring if the setting gets too hopeless, or Narm if the edginess becomes just silly. When a show uses this trope as a tagline, you can expect a mixture of: awful things happening to the characters, twisted backstories giving them a reason to angst, good and bad becoming less obvious, and the setting becoming much bleaker. When done right, Darker and Edgier works are a case of Tropes Are Tools.

This is not to be confused with Tough Love.

In practice, however, writers can be too lazy to realize all that potential and end up randomly 'spicing up' a work with gratuitous gore, cursing, and sex to make it more 'adult' - often overdoing it in the process. In theory, this means that archetypes which we are accustomed to see acting in a more noble setting will have to act in one where they must think and act grimly in order to make progress, thus forcing re-examination of the tropes involved, or the use of new tropes and expansion of the setting, utilizing different sorts of characters and stories. The Riddler, Secret Origins, ' When Is a Door'Ī Tone Shift that seeks to make a work of fiction more serious, cynical or gritty.

Dark darker darkest parts