grimdark n.

The trend I see is that grimdark gets licensed for R1 and waffy doesn’t; Japan makes both.

Also, rebooting Superman again? Cool. Eviler and grimdark? Superdumb.

There is a middle ground between the camp of ’60s Batman and the grimdark realism of the recent Christopher Nolan features.

Something unexpected—grimdark fantasy for people who aren’t necessarily very young, just those who don’t have the patience or stomach for Game of Thrones

Grimdark…[has] become shorthand for a subgenre of fantasy fiction that claims to trade on the psychology of those sword-toting heroes, and the dark realism behind all those kingdom politics. But there are arguments over who fits the definition…and whether the nickname is a useful genre marker or just a needle. Some…have embraced the term (his Twitter handle is @lordgrimdark). Others see it as a dismissive term for fantasy that’s dismantling tropes, a stamp unfairly applied.

Grimdark is a subgenre or a way to describe the tone, style, or setting of speculative fiction (especially fantasy) that is, depending on the definition used, markedly dystopian or amoral, or particularly graphic in its depiction of violence. In most grimdark literature the supernatural is a passive force, controlled by humans—unlike supernatural horror where the preternatural forces are most often an active entity with agency.

[Alexandra] Rowland [in coining ‘hopepunk’] was responding to the idea of ‘grimdark’—a literary descriptor for genre texts and media which evoke a pervasively gritty, bleak, pessimistic, or nihilistic view of the world. These are the worlds of modern-era Batman, Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, and so many other contemporary pop culture properties—universes in which cruelty is a given and social systems are destined to betray or disappoint.