It’s Tuesday, which means I’m about to bludgeon you over the head with another entry from that great timesink in the cloud, TV Tropes. This week, we’re examining one we like to call Darker and Edgier.

A Tone Shift that seeks to make a work of fiction “more adult”. Usually, this is practically interpreted as “add more sex, profanity, heavy violence, and controversial content”.

This trope usually means that a show will attempt to shift towards seriousness, cynicism and grit. In theory, archetypes which we are usually accustomed to 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 and making a different sort of character. In practice, though, writers often are too lazy to make use of what most of those words mean, and ending up randomly “spicing up” a work with gratuitous gore, cursing, and sex. See Not A Deconstruction

When a show uses this trope as a tagline, expect anything that can go wrong will go wrong, the setting to be a World Half Empty, everyone to be bastards, lots of unpleasant things happen to the characters or backstories giving the characters a particular issue they can spend time angsting about.

As we can expect, this is fairly easy to screw up and poor use of these tropes can just result in Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy and Narm instead.

Thankfully, the Expanded Universe hasn’t fallen victim to this trope. I mean, it’s not like fans are keeping a running tally of how many major characters get killed, abandoned the tone and philosophy of the source material, or shifted the villains from tactical geniuses to more trite Eldritch Abominations or any…

Erm…