That Lucky Loser

It's not Logen who undergoes a character arc. It's the reader who starts the series with a certain imrppession of him and by the end abandons it as entirely misguided.

Logen's life is an endless circle of vaguely gesturing at change, then never committing and doing what he's always done.

Of course his story would come full circle too, of fucking course.

This was kinda born because I keep seeing certain takes on the genre (some naive. Some just plain bad) and I want to throw out my two cents.

The common critical take I see from people who aren't fans of the genre is they believe that Grimdark is "Everything sucks. People suck. You shouldn't fight to make things better. Just give up" and I just find this to be both a naive and pessimistic way of seeing things in this genre.

Yes, in Grimdark there's usually never a happy ending and the bad guys end up winning, but from what usually take from that is "don't want to be like these people".

I'll use The First Law trilogy by Joe Abercrombie as an example (because I love it so much).

The character, Logen Ninefingers constantly goes through the first two books saying that he wants to change. He doesn't want to be The Bloody Nine, he doesn't want to commit his life to violence anymore. He has a saying "you got to be realistic about things" and you think he's being wise. Until the third book comes along where Logen finds himself back in his comfort zone because, to him, change is too hard and that saying truly shows how much of a defeatist he is. He could've changed, he was at the point of changing but once one thing didn't pan out the way he expected, he decided that change was too hard and went back to his old habits (One of the things I took from The First Law was "If you want to change. You have fully commit to it").

So yeah, at the end of the third book, I ended up thinking, "I don't want to be a defeatist like Logen" (There are other characters I can go on about, like Jezal also wanting to change but ended up back as an entitled, pathetic, self-righteous brat for the most part... He's just fully aware of it now compared to before).

What it boils down to for me is unlike other fantasy genre where I get inspired and think "I should follow this example", Grimdark is the opposite and makes me think, "I definitely SHOULDN'T follow this example".

This is especially true of horror RPGs and it’s doubly true of Haunted House RPGs

Me: And we're not gonna delve into that even a little bit, huh?

Queer-Friendly Indie Tabletop RPG #137: Here's 5000 words exploring the implications of undead skeletons being fully integrated members of society.

To be fair, sometimes it's more along the lines of "our goblins have exactly the same stereotypical traits and propensities as their Dungeons & Dragons counterparts, but the text awkwardly tries to spin those as virtues".