Hey Sup Forums, how would one make a dark and interesting story without being edgy?

Hey Sup Forums, how would one make a dark and interesting story without being edgy?

make it a comedy

Have a low-key comedic tone from now and then.

Exactly

Do any of you actually get what "edgy" means?

...

Make sure every dark thing has a reason and not edgy for the sake of edgy

Give us characters that we want to root for, and makes us hope that they make it through okay.

Experience real darkness in your life.

Have lighter themes to balance out the edgy. That's what Togashi does in Yu Yu Hakusho and Hunter X Hunter.

>anime
>not edgy
You're gonna have to search long and hard to find one of those.

Fuck off, frog.

I think the movie 'The Wrestler' is an example of something that does this extraordinarily well.

It's unrelentingly dark in tone, but it still feels appropriate within its context. It doesn't rely on cheap emotional low-hanging fruit, or mere shock-value, but simply relates a dismal story in all its raw emotion and lets the damaged characters and their all too real but tragic circumstances speak for themselves.

I think you underestimate the amount of moeshit

>implying moeshit can't be edgy
You underestimate what anime can do.

Edgy to me is entirely context sensitive. If a story is established as being dark but gets too much then I just think it's corny.

Edge to me is taking an unexpected dark turn for pure shock value that doesn't follow the pre-established content and tone.

Eg
If a rape and murder happens in The Walking Dead, it's not edgy. TWD is established as a dark post-apocalyptic world where people do anything to survive and some try and take what they want.
If that's not for you, then it's not for you. That doesn't mean it's edgy, the same way it doesn't mean youre a pussy for not enjoying it

>he hasn't seen Yotsub&
She's the fucking mascot, user. I can see her scrolling my page. Not a long or hard search

Is this exchange from an edgy moeshit anime, like Yuru Yuri?

I guess you shouldn't pile one tragedy after another. Or if you do treat them as respectfully as possible instead of making them an excuse f your characters to be "so kooL!"
Guts has a pretty edgy backstory but for the most part people take it seriously because of how it's treated.

I'm not sure it's possible. People have different opinions, and if you intend to go for a dark tone, there's probably always going to be someone who'll complain that it's too edgy for his personal tastes.

Still, I think it might help if you focus on psychological themes instead of graphic imagery. Keep the most horrifying parts unseen and implied. If it's illustrated, it can often seem like gratuitous shock tactics. But if you leave things up to the audience's imagination, they can imagine much more horrifying things than anything you could draw. It's an important horror movie trick to keep the monster hiding somewhere out of sight as much as possible.

But that's not advice you should follow all the time. For example zombie stories are expected to feature mangled corpses, and I'm not sure how a zombie story would work if it avoided showing dead people. Also, shock imagery can be memorable and full of impact if used sparingly.

This too I've stopped reading/watching some series because too many endearing characters died mid-series, and I lost my emotional investment in the story. Dangle some kind of hope for a happy resolution. It's okay to pull off a downer ending where that hope gets crushed, but keep the audience hooked until it happens.

Stop constantly worrying over whether or not something is "edgy" like a retard just because you saw a bunch of other retards on the Internet doing the same.

Don't go overboard on the dark aspect and don't fuck up your dialogue. Dialogue is what makes things the bad kind of edgy.

don't be to obvious think of interesting ways to convey edginess.

Pedophilia jokes are edgy

This
If your dialogue is shit, and mostly serves as a platform for sociopolitical rants then its going to be edgy shit.

Take a look at noir style stories. They can be edgy but only when the dialogue/internal monologue is bad.

Like, seriously, I've read things filled to the brim with fucked-up characters and gratuitous violence, but I usually end up liking it anyway because the dialogue is good. Then you get shit like Crossed where the awful dialogue usually just makes every other aspect seem even worse.

Because Yuri On Ice Is so fuckin edgy.

...

But what if the scene involves no dialogue whatsoever?

Then the scene's quality revolves around what you can convey without using any dialogue. Draw good shots of what's happening and make sure that your character expressions are done well so that you can understand how they're feeling in the moment.

Do you? Most of the dark stories I know that are also interesting have more to offer than just "m-muh dark"
>Wind Waker is a post-apocalyptic story about letting go of the past covered up by cartoony cel-shading
>Moral Orel is a harsh critique on fundamentalist christianity, but with the mask of a 1950s nuclear family sitcom
>Finding Nemo is about the terrors of losing your child, especially when they're the only family you have left. That one's not even thinly veiled, you feel it from the very beginning of the movie. But it's also a Pixar adventure flick

I guess you could say 'edgy' is dark without substance. If that's all you have going for you, it's bound to be edgy. It can still be enjoyable, but not by a wider audience

Yotsub& isn't an anime.

Post apocalyptic setting with barely any human characters. The cause of the event would remain a mystery that is shown but never outright stated to the viewer procedurally and vaguely. The MC wouldn't be interested in that, having never known a different life. We'd just follow their exploits.

Don't put Edgefish on it.

None of those are dark. Wind Waker isn't even the darkest Zelda, Majora's Mask is, and that game is just a Brother's Grimm fairy tale. Wind Waker is a bright, colorful adventure with silly things like Link getting launched into the sky and comically splatting against one of those rising towers.

Make it to where their is a vague hopefulness that keeps the protagonist running.
Even Berserk has some good Comedy.

Main character is a ball of joy and light in a dismal, dismal world.
Throughout the series this changes, as the downtrodden denizens of this place find themselves unable to resist the sheer positivity of the MC.
Damn I just realized I pitched 'slightly darker WoY'
I suck.

just do whatever, people call anything with violence edgy, write whatever you want and how you want. Your writing quality isn't going to be better just because it's less edgy

Edgy is a meme

I guess you can make something like Made in Abyss and make the darkness of the story something that would be natural to the setting or plot.
>Let's go on an adventure!
>But not all adventures are fun.
Something like that, surprise the audience in a way they can accept it, "edgy" it's more commonly used to describe dark aspects that come out of nowhere or feel forced.

Name 1(one) thing wrong with edge

Liefeld

>Moral Orel isn't dark
>Implying I said WW is the darkest Zelda, or that not being the darkest Zelda means it isn't dark
>Opening to FN isn't dark, as well as the fear of losing your child in a place as big as the Pacific Ocean
The Zelda part really gives me the impression you never actually played the game, or magically forgot about what actually happened in the game for the sake of replying. Regardless you should probably fix that mistake, and differentiate between edgy and dark