Grimdark

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If your protagonist or antagonist isn't at least this edgy, then you're probably doing Grimdark wrong.
It's totally the opposite of this.
Inspector Gadget, reimagined with a grimdark feel.
Grimdark versions of the TMNT. Their mentor is a Skaven.
Grimdark means war, and always endless, brutal war.

"We are not men disguised as mere dogs, we are wolves disguised as men"

– Captain Muroto, Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade

"They say, 'Evil prevails when good men fail to act.' What they ought to say is, 'Evil prevails.'"

– Yuri Orlov, Lord of War

"Tᴀᴋᴇ ᴛʜᴇ ᴜɴɪᴠᴇʀsᴇ ᴀɴᴅ ɢʀɪɴᴅ ɪᴛ ᴅᴏᴡɴ ᴛᴏ ᴛʜᴇ ғɪɴᴇsᴛ ᴘᴏᴡᴅᴇʀ ᴀɴᴅ sɪᴇᴠᴇ ɪᴛ ᴛʜʀᴏᴜɢʜ ᴛʜᴇ ғɪɴᴇsᴛ sɪᴇᴠᴇ ᴀɴᴅ ᴛʜᴇɴ sʜᴏᴡ ᴍᴇ ᴏɴᴇ ᴀᴛᴏᴍ ᴏғ ᴊᴜsᴛɪᴄᴇ, ᴏɴᴇ ᴍᴏʟᴇᴄᴜʟᴇ ᴏғ ᴍᴇʀᴄʏ ᴀɴᴅ ʏᴇᴛ... Aɴᴅ ʏᴇᴛ ʏᴏᴜ ᴀᴄᴛ ᴀs ɪғ ᴛʜᴇʀᴇ ɪs sᴏᴍᴇ ɪᴅᴇᴀʟ ᴏʀᴅᴇʀ ɪɴ ᴛʜᴇ ᴡᴏʀʟᴅ, ᴀs ɪғ ᴛʜᴇʀᴇ ɪs sᴏᴍᴇ... Sᴏᴍᴇ ʀɪɢʜᴛɴᴇss ɪɴ ᴛʜᴇ ᴜɴɪᴠᴇʀsᴇ ʙʏ ᴡʜɪᴄʜ ɪᴛ ᴍɪɢʜᴛ ʙᴇ ᴊᴜᴅɢᴇᴅ."

– DEATH, Hogfather (while explaining that since humans believe that it does, the way we believe Santa or the "Hogfather" does, we make it so it does.)

Grimdark is an adjective derived from the tagline for Warhammer 40k, which states that "In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war," and in some of the novels (at least a few of the Ciaphas Cain stories, for instance) it states straightforwardly, "in the grim dark future..." Whether this came after "grimdark" began to be popularly used as an adjective is not wholly clear (probably after). It is generally used to describe a dilapidated, dystopian "crapsack world" setting which it would really suck to live in, as say Somalia, North Korea, or the setting of Warhammer 40k itself. In fairness to the franchise and its defenders, this is because the published material primarily focuses on war and cults and other horrible things. There are supposed to be many pleasant and peaceful worlds and sectors in the Imperium, but they are mostly ignored as they are boring -- and when they DO appear in lore or fluff, they're usually to go from "0 problems" to "totally fucked", very quickly. It can also be used to describe artwork that has a grimdark feel, even if the setting itself would not normally be considered grim or dark, or something sinister or uncommonly threatening/intimidating in real-life. This often applies to fan-art and writefaggotry as well.

Depending on your own personal tolerances for grim darkness of course, it can be taken to the extreme, just like with all descriptive traits. There is a point in which it becomes more ridiculous than anything else, because everything is indefeasibly tragic all the time - the term for this being grimderp, which is explained further below.

This is an accusation often leveled at Warhammer itself, and leads some to rail against "Grimdark" as a whole, decrying the concept as ridiculous attempts at edginess (typically by teenagers), and using the expression to refer solely to such over-the-top settings in a strictly pejorative manner. Others actually embrace this ridiculousness and run with it (including Warhammer 40K itself, due to being a much more obviously comedic setting in early editions), insisting that the detractors or even the creators who take it seriously are making a mistake. Some people embrace the grimdarkness and mix it up with some humor (like painting Necrons with bright colors to make them look like edible candy figurines), especially if they are Ork players. But the schism between taking Warhammer's grimdarkness seriously or not is mostly visible with races such as the Tau, who are noticeably less grimdark visually than most of the other races and are either loved or absolutely hated for it (when not hated for being overpowered as shit). Meanwhile, another sizable percentage postulate that Grimdarkness lends greater moral and ethical complexity to a setting, based on the fallacy that darkness always equals depth. Such people usually cite the works of Dan Abnett and many other Warhammer 40K writers to lend credence to such suppositions; these people are clearly ignoring that fact that most writers tone the grimdark WAY down. What, you didn't think the fact that the Imperium being an effective government, civilians having normal happy lives on par with the Scandinavians, Commissars who never *BLAM* their troops was odd? Needless to say, grimdark is a rather polarizing subject whose discussion often leaves little room for a middle ground.

Speaking of, the polar opposite of grimdark is Noblebright, a deliberate inversion of grim and dark nature where honor, chivalry, happiness and high adventure rule the day, as opposed to dying in a ditch from a supernatural plague as you run out of potable water and can no longer wait for the logistics department to process your dead comrades into something slightly more palatable before you start eating them. Oh, and being *BLAM*ed by a Commissar for even starting to look a little sad from these thoughts.

Although, it could be argued that 40K proper is actually Nobledark. Although the lore claims one man cannot make a difference and heroes are meaningless (Grim), we see the complete opposite of that actually happening in the lore. 40K fluff (40K, not just 30K) is crammed to bursting with heroes who made major differences. If anything, 40K seems to be about the difference one man can make rather than showing one man cannot make a difference. Even the events revolve around the Great Man idea of basically superheroes and supervillains moving the galaxy (and it's not just actual superhumans doing this). It is nonetheless a very dark setting, though.

Common grimdark themes

Stuff considered Grimdark

This page is in need of cleanup. Srsly. It's a fucking mess.

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A world where the only way to beat grimdark is by introducing something even grimmer and darker
The Grimdarkian, by IronShrineMaiden
  • Warhammer 40,000 (Naturally, coined the term).
  • Warhammer Fantasy Battle, but less than you'd think. It's a lot closer to nobledark until the world was actually destroyed.
  • The World Wars, especially the Western Front of WW1, the Eastern Front of WW2, and everything involving WW2 Japanese army/navy and PoWs/civies.
  • The countless wars of the 1990s in Africa, including, but not limited to: The Rwandan Genocide, Liberian child soldiers, Sierra Leonean amputations, slave labor in the Congo, etc.
  • Dwarf Fortress
  • Dark Sun
  • End of War
  • Blood, The main character is a undead wild west gunslinger who has to bring down a dark god's cult!
  • Shakespeare's tragedies, especially Macbeth and Hamlet.
  • 1984
  • Soylent Green.
  • Paranoia (though used for parodying 1984).
  • The majority of the tragedy genre of stories.
  • RIFTS.
  • The Half-Life universe after the resonance cascade.
  • Portal once you get past the memes.
  • The Helghast from the Killzone universe.
  • The Kerberos trilogy, but special mentions to Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade. A series of films that basically gave birth to Killzone singlehandedly (Seriously, look at the comparisons between the Helghast and the film's Protect Gear, it is blatant). Set in an alternate-history where Japan was occupied by Germany rather than America at the end of WW2. In Jin-Roh, the nation is constantly in social turmoil with left-wing communist terrorist guerillas using children as bomb couriers against two police force of Japan: the normal-looking police force (Backed by the Japanese KGB/CIA hybrid) and the ORIGINAL Helghasts called the Kerberos Panzer Cops. Jin-Roh is a political thriller film that largely talks about the problems of the "Good guy, bad guy" dichotomy and how juvenile it is for stories to portray these things in real life. All of the films have a downer ending, so if you are looking for a happy ending, you're gonna get dissapointed. Despite what some people may argue, the Kerberos trilogy is a condemnation of all extremist ideas and actions. Its a Mamoru Oshii film of Ghost in the Shell fame, what do you fucking expect.
  • Everything in Gears of War. The fact that the primary weapon in the series features a Chainsaw bayonet designed to utterly rip out the innards of anyone unfortunate to be at the receiving end is already by itself Grimdark.
  • Everything in the Resistance universe.
  • The MachineGames Wolfenstein games. The Nazis crushed the Allies in 1947 with insane technology and won World War II. The setting pulls no punches in depicting how nightmarish the world would become if the Nazis were free to enact their racist and reactionary ideology to its fullest. Manhattan was nuked off the earth, London is now a slum filled with humiliating monuments to the Nazi victory (and a giant robot that literally crushes any uprisings), indigenous peoples in Africa and South America are being exterminated wholesale, there are concentration camps on the Moon, Hitler has been deified, and untermensch live in hiding and constant fear for their lives.
  • Blame!.
  • Devilman. (especially CRYBABY)
  • Berserk
  • Goblin Slayer.(Pretty much Berserk if it was set in a Dungeons and Dragons world)
  • Emergence. (177013)
  • Kingdom Death (Makes 40k's setting seem pleasant and cheerful).
  • Eastenders (especially at Christmas).
  • Grimdark Songwriting
  • Don't Rest Your Head
  • SLA Industries
  • The Matrix
  • World of Darkness, with special mention going to Wraith: The Oblivion, a game so bleak it's rumored to have actually caused fits of chronic depression in players.
  • CthulhuTech
  • Call of Cthulhu, depending on how you do it.
  • Everything from H.P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos, though this can vary when you add in other Mythos writers like August Derleth.
  • Playing mortals in Exalted
  • Neon Genesis Evangelion (Especially End).
  • Muv-Luv Often compared to 40k in how bleak and brutal the series is.
  • Midnight setting for D&D.
  • FATAL.
  • Rebecca Black.
  • I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream. Just the title itself should give you a clue on how horrific the game is. (The video game is terrifying, especially with its endings, and the short story it is based on is even more horrifying).
  • The Medieval Dark Ages that Warhammer 40,000 was originally based on.
  • The Witcher. Racism, genocides, dozens of monsters that want to eat your face whenever you enter a random forest. Or cave. Or ruins. The video game adaptation even features a medieval Hitler running the Witch Hunters, a fanatical order of racist scumbags dedicated to wiping out both mages and non-humans in the name of the Eternal Fire. Meanwhile, the neighboring empire starts a series of wars against northern kingdoms (where the series takes place), in which both sides descend into scorched earth warfare, all the while backstabbing their allies and generally being a colossal wall of dicks to the point that close to 70% of civilian population in war-zones died from raiding, famine and occasional outbreaks of extradimensional plagues. To add insult to injury, the whole world is doomed due to the (slowly) encroaching Ice Age, and the only person that could save it took two glances at this shitshow and decided to fuck off to a parallel universe and let them all die, because it would be a mercy. (To be fair, though, she comes back, if only to save her adoptive mother and father from said Ice Age, as she still maintains her 'fuck the rest of humanity' attitude.
  • Dark Souls. The entire world is dying. Specifically, most of the population is undead, you die constantly, and you have to fight enemies larger and filthier than you are, including a naked bitch with a spider vagina. Also, FAKE TITS. Stuck in an infinite loop where a hero constantly saves the world, and everything goes back to normal before hitting another grimdark cycle every thousand years. Compare with nobledark and check your mileage.
  • Drakengard and its related franchise: Nier. Basically, the "god" in this setting is a massive dick so he infects humans with zombie aids out of boredom and watch them kill each other for the lulz. Caim (the player), the former prince of a fallen kingdom (due to his parents being killed by a black dragon) had to fight the zombie army. He unironically enjoys slaughtering any living things after waging a bunch of other conflicts and lost his ability to speak after he made a pact with a dragon in exchange for companionship and power (in Drakengard, making such a pact with another creature makes you lose a certain part of you). He had to team up with a blind pedophile priest, a baby eating elf witch, and a ageless shota. His sister unknowingly to him is a crazy incest bitch, driven mad by the pain she endures because she was forced to become a "Goddess of the Seal", some kind of administrator chosen by the "god" to maintain space and time. The job sucks, she had to be separated from her family and she's unable to kill herself because her caretaker would prevent that from happening. And to top it off her parents die tragically. And then you have the villains. Manah, an abused 8 year old child descended from one of the evil clone sister's brother from the prequel, was controlled by the eldritch forces of "the watchers" (read: the dick head "god" himself) who are in charge of the zombie armies with humanity's extinction being their goal. Due to the influence of the watchers group on the Empire kingdom of its setting, the world is engulfed in flames and corpses. The true ending for the game is that everyone except Caim dies and he somehow end up moving a magical doomsday device created by the god to other world (Tokyo Japan of our world to be exact), detonate it and doom the human race. It is said that Drakengard as a series has a fuck ton of timelines and a timeline was born from each of the endings with each ending being bad, or if not worse than the previous. Surprisingly the ending mentioned above is consider canon and it is where the sequel Nier took place (after 1462 years no less) with more grimdark ensuing. Drakengard 2 was pretty bright light since it was directed by a different director but is still part of branch timeline while Drakengard 3 is the prequel retelling how the god tries to destroy the world by sticking an evil parasite flower on some psychopathic girl. Each time the girl died it creates an evil clones of her that will try to rule the world with their evil song magic. Obvious, it's also grimdark since it led to the tragic grimdark rape sauce that is the plot of the first game.
    • In Nier, the world sets 1462 years into the future. After our "hero" and his dragon fucked up the world by killing and detonating the doomsday device, it release some kind of magical evil virus that mindraped and turned people into salt if they don't submit. After countless grimdark conflicts involving child soldiers, human experiments and more resource shortage, the scientist decided to separate the rest of the survivors souls (gestalt) from their bodies, hoping they could outlast the pandemic. But of course all these attempts are futile failure because Nier, our "hero" ended up killing the only thing that could save humankind, dooming them all to extinction.
      • Finally we have Nier: Automata, 8480 years later, where new androids were created by the last human survivors. One of the Nier's companions Emil, a bizarre magical weapon created from some crazy experiment (he is over 8480 years old or so at this point) had to clone himself over 9000 times just to fight the aliens, which not only made him lose his mind and memories but also his sanity. Oh and the humans that escaped to the moons turn out to be long dead. When the rest of androids find out, they proceed to kill themselves in a batshit frenzy. To make this sound even more painful and tragic, the androids have the human concepts of pain and emotions programmed to them, making their death even more painful to be felt.
  • Mass Effect: While its universe overall is hardly grimdark in any fashion, the Reapers and what happens to "harvested" individuals is some of the sickest forms of grimdark possible. During the Reaper War, billions of people across the galaxy were vaporized, dissolved slowly, and/or converted into robotic, feral slaves.
    • There are many other forms of Grimdark in the relatively Nobledark/Noblebright universe of Mass Effect, one of the most notable being the Genophage, a bioweapon deployed against the Krogan race as to halt the Krogan Rebellions. This bioweapon was basically a massive, permanent genetical Fetus Deletus that drove Krogan birthrates down extensively, leaving them vulnerable to extinction.
  • Killzone, again. The Second Extrasolar War alone deserves its own page of Grimdark: Humanity and their alien descendants, the Helghast, engage in a near-racial war of genocide, more genocide, and even more genocide. Technology has devolved in many areas, and battles turn into endless slaughters as hundreds of thousands of men and women are thrown into a Verdun/Stalingrad hybrid scenario. What's even more horrible is how literally everyone is evil. Not just the Helghast. Literally all of humanity is warped. The Earth-based UCN? Corrupt and bureaucratic. They want to strangle all their colonies with an iron fist and they intentionally keep the colonial military, the ISA, weaker than it otherwise could be so the centralized military could easily crush them if they rebelled, (UCN cruisers for example are basically dreadnoughts in comparison to those of the ISA), which has caused more than a few problems for the ISA when fighting the Helghast. The Vektans? Hypocritically imperialistic, believing the Helghast deserve to perish for their militarism and (failed) invasion of their planet. The Helghast? Racist, imperialistic genocidal maniacs, believing themselves to be "superior" and even some thinking they need to kill every human in the universe, for "Helghast Purity".
    • The Helghast are a literal representation of a society and people warped by Grimdarkery: The planet of Helghan is inhospitable, forcing almost all its inhabitants to wear gas masks. Society is highly fascist, militaristic, and any form of dissent is met with "reeducation" (A bullet to the head), while the government itself is highly nepotistic, where opportunistic scumbags manipulate Helghast Nationalism for their self-benefit. Also, technology and living standards in the civilian sector is extremely poor, as the majority of the advanced technology went over to the military.
    • The fanbase of the series is certainly odd though due to the fact that this concept that everyone is evil has went completely over their heads and due to the blatantly unfair treatment of the Helghasts (kind that makes the Treaty of Versailles seem all fair and good by comparison) in the lead up and aftermath of the First Extrasolar War, they have a tendency to see the Helghast, despite being the antagonists, as the good guys. Their totalitarian society and the fact that the Helghast commit more or less every warcrime known to man apparently didn't make it obvious that this is not so.
  • Gears of War, again. Decades of civil war, genocide and weapons of mass destruction has turned your home planet into a quasi-dead world. The human race is close to extinction, women are reduced to birthing machines, your government is an uncaring fascist scumbag, the weather is often rain consisting of razor sharp ice crystals that could cut you into ribbons, you're fighting a never-ending war with genocidal monsters from the underground and the world is literally dying from super fuel.
    • To make matters even worse. Even before the Locust War, humanity was locked in a near 80 year war between two rivaling superpowers over the aforementioned super fuel. The COG and the UIR. Both governments are ruthless, imperialistic, fascistic, communistic bastards of a government whose war crimes will make the likes of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany look like amateurs. When even the Locust have a point by calling us out for being exactly the same genocidal monsters as they are, you know Gears of War is fucked. Oh and the planet is called Sera, or Ares when said backwards.
  • The Resistance series, again: Humanity is losing a brutal war of genocidal attrition against a parasitic alien species, the Chimera. Russia, Asia, and nearly all of Europe has been converted into a desolate wasteland, suitable for the Chimera species. Whatever is left of humanity has been driven into cave dwellings. Humans captured by the Chimera are converted into a Chimera Hybrid (Basically the Chimera equivalent of Arco-Flagellants).
  • Hellgate London.
  • Most of David Bowie's songs about 1990.
  • World Devastators in Star Wars. Seriously, if you read about them without knowing that they are from Star Wars, you could easily mistake them for something from 40k. And we're not talking about Star Wars Legacy and the genocide of the Mon Calamari.
  • The first two Hellraiser movies
  • Event Horizon
  • GANTZ
  • Cyberpunk 2020.
  • Shadowrun. While not the worst in the grimdark department, Shadowrun definitely has its moments (the Renraku Archology Shutdown being a prime example); for instance the oppressive megacorporations reducing people to an identification number, with people not having one (for... reasons) don't exist legally.
  • Hellsing... just all of Hellsing... Though it can easily slide into grimderp. (A little girl seeing her mother killed while hiding in a closet? Yeah that's intense. In a moment of desperation, shove a rod into the guy's eyeball, only for him to not be mortally wounded? That's pretty unfortunate. Said guy deciding to fuck the corpse as his smashed eyeball hangs from the socket? That's just silly.)
    • Drifters, by the same author. The protagonists are a bunch of kill-happy murderhoboes drawn from various psychos from all throughout history into a generic fantasy world who have decided to save the world by conquering it, one country at a time. One of the major powers of the setting turns out to have been founded by Adolph friggin' Hitler. Even Joan of Arc, who IRL was noted for being a pacifist, is warped into a bloodthirsty psycho. The BBEG, who wants to kill all humans (and is noted to be a step up from his subordinates, who want to kill everything) is all but outright states to be Jesus.
  • Bioshock and Bioshock 2 (as well as Bioshock Infinite, though it comes hidden behind a smiling facade of barbershop singing and the Fourth of July).
  • Anything from the Xeelee Sequence.
    • The Interim Coalition of Governance for example, is such a grim-ridden shit-hole that they make the Imperium of Man look like pussies filled with sun-shine and rainbows in comparison and make the Adeptus Custodes shit themselves in collateral fear. Despite achieving time travel, conquering the entire Universe through xenocide that would make the Necrons look like children and shooting Neutron Stars at .99c at the speed of light, The ICoG is still a minor nuisance compared to the Xeelee and their enemies, the Photino Birds. Stephen Baxter was able to construct the insignificance and petty malevolence of Man in a few books better than GeeDubs more questionable authors did in decades. tl;dr the IoM wishes they would be as cool as the ICoG.
    • All of Steven Baxter's works arguably qualify. Evolution can be summed up as "humanity almost overcame its flaws, fixed the damage it did to Earth, and ushered in a noblebright future, and it might have worked, but just then a supervolcano erupted, wiped out human civilization, and everyone died. The end. There's even a chapter in the middle of the book outright stating it. Also that humans are nothing but vicious bastards who rape, kill, and destroy everything they touch and have been ever since our ancestors were rats under the feet of dinosaurs, but other animals aren't much better.
  • North Korea, which is essentially "Real Life Oceania", a totalitarian nightmare almost completely isolated from the rest of the world with a leader whose name you are literally forbidden from saying without the prefix "supreme leader". Universal conscription is in place for men with service lengths of over ten years from age 17 to 30 (for comparison, in South Korea, where compulsory military service length is also among the highest in the world, the service length is 21 to 24 months depending on the chosen branch). The country has no access to the internet and only has it's own intranet with government controlled websites. Long gone are the days when the government had any interest in making the country good. Now all they care about is simply staying in power, no matter how much poverty and how many famines the rest of the country has to suffer for it.
  • The Goon comic series by Eric Powell (because circus hillbillies, werewolves with midget hand phobias, and the Zombie Priest are the least of it all).
  • Children of Men: A future where humans are no longer fertile and going extinct, and then someone finds a pregnant woman and nearly everyone in the world fights over her.
  • A Song of Ice and Fire AKA Game of Thrones: Good guys screw up monumentally or never win, the only people who get ahead are amorally manipulative assholes and everyone is going to be massacred and enslaved by the evil ice elf necromancers in the end. And if they somehow survive, then another war for the Iron Throne will happen after the winner gets their revenge-boner satisfied and later, their kids would need to clean up the wankstains.
  • Dishonored - Grimdark, and steampunk. Only in the "Kill fucking everyone" ending though.
  • Dark Seed, Grimdark to the core! the first game is about the main character being fucked in the head. Hr giger's artwork helps too.
  • X-Com (The remake and the original, as a parody of the G.I. Joe Badass stereo type, you're struggling with funding and even your gods in human form, some of whom make certain chapters of Astartes weep, can get fucked over by Sectoids!)
  • Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Being Meguca is suffering.
  • Adventure Time's backstory.
  • Path of Exile. The game's setting is basically a documentary on the corruption of Roman Empire. Basically there is this continent called the Wraeclast. The land is pretty much cursed with undeath and mutation due to Thaumaturgy aka magic in the form of gems that grants ability, which came from the beast, some kind of eldritch abomination living in the mountain and the source of all this evil magic shit. Many great Empire rose and fell on the continent with their own fucked up and downfall. The first empire: The Vaal were somekind of Aztec, Mayan inspired Empire who loves to sacrifice people for power, so much that they were responsible for corrupting the beast, which partly responsible for what Wraeclast is today. After that, a new Empire called "the Eternal Empire" was built on top the former and began outlawing Thaumaturgy and gems for the next 1000 years, until a tyrant was throne after he cheat a death maze trial and was killed in a rebellion staged by Voll, who is obsessed with the old purity ideal and decided to trust Malachai, a previous evil asshole Thaumaturgiest employed by the previous Emperor to destroy the beast, the source of all magic (in detail, Voll was convinced by Malachai into thinking that only those who study Thaumaturgy could destory Thaumaturgy). Obviously, Malachai ended up betraying Voll as well as everyone in the Empire, as well as the godamn world by merge with the beast and unleash a series of cataclysm that made what Wraeclast is today, and the bastard achieve a twisted sense of immortality where he is now but a evil monster living inside the beast, who is obsessed with creating nightmarish monsters.
  • Space Station 13 : Space paranoia simulator. Some might not consider this game grimdark, but the lore is set in a dystopian future where capitalism and unforgiving bureaucracy rules the universe, your life is expandable, and the media is controlled; your only choice is working until you die, or getting killed by either rival corporate operatives, space wizards, cultists, deathsquads or spies posing as your co-workers.
  • Barotrauma : Inspired by Space Station 13, centered on a submarine crew in the underground oceans of Europa. Crew members are expendable, you're always outgunned, the submarine is almost constantly under attack by massive sea creatures, and most missions are much more likely to end in disaster than success. Also, you explode as soon as you step outside the sub.
  • LifeWeb : A complex SS13 spinoff taking place in a cave forteress of a neo-medieval world in the far future, combat is more lethal, and it explores subjects like murder, corruption, rape, torture, cultism and general human suffering.
  • Pokemon Tabletop Adventures (optionally).
  • Original Grimm's Fairy Tales ("Hansel and Gretel", for example).
  • Alien (as in the biomechanical, parasitic, acid-blooded brainchild of Ridley Scott and the late H.R. Giger).
  • Halo (the setting of Halo is one grand scale of a Cosmic Horror Story centered around absolute hopelessness and bleakness of a Universe governed by hyper malevolent gods. Our good guys, the UNSC? It's a semi-authoritarian 'Big Brother is Watching You', fascistic style government that have no qualms dumping nukes on a civilian population if rebellion is sighted. The UNSC also have no problems dicking over their only alien 'friends' to benefit humanity, while also being bogged down in a political quagmire. The Covenant are much, much worse, while anything from the Forerunner trilogy is just a high concoction of Nightmare Fuel inside a depressing milkshake.
  • Battletech.
  • Factorio. Subtle, but, lone human, aliens want to kill you, everything you do makes smog, and your goal is to cover the world in industry, concrete, machines, and gun turrets. The world isn't dead when you arrive, but you're damn well going to kill it yourself or die trying.
  • Kane & Lynch. Sweet Emperor, Kane & Lynch. Forget your GTAs and Paydays. In it, you control two murderous middle-aged fugitives, one of which is explicitly mentally troubled, and not in a funny way. The kind of true underworld scum that can only be described as genuinely repulsive. That, plus the fact that nothing ever goes right for anyone in the story just adds to it.
  • Attack on Titan (You cannot win, ever. And if you do, you've probably lost all your friends, who've been eaten by giant freaky Mutants, who don't even need food. Yeeeah).
    • To put things bluntly, it turns out even the Titans are perpetually suffering, the whole setting runs on a system of human sacrifice and cannibalism that would make the Aztecs proud, this is a series where facing the apocalypse does not bring out the best in humanity but instead remains as fractious, self-destructive, and divisive as ever (which is honestly one of the points of the story), and the leaders of humanity make the High Lords of Terra look competent. Things are such a clusterfuck with no hope of change that one of the characters has decided the only way things can get better is to wipe out every human that isn't a member of their ethnic group, and what's worse the plot seem to be proving them right.
  • Metro series (both the books and games, but mostly in the books, where the last known humans are hiding in underground subway tunnels, and when not trying to finish each other off are fighting endless hordes of mutants and other, much worse things. Also, if you're one of the stalkers, the few brave ones that head to the surface to loot anything they can find, you risk being eaten by flying daemons. Hell, it even has the same "abandon all hope" vibe in the intro, just like 40k. And that is just the tip of the iceberg.)
    • Note as the books go on the grimdarkness does tone down by showing the areas outside of the city to be in much better living conditions and other metros.(though not all the books are written by the same author).
  • Madness Combat - no regret, no remorse, no reason, only madness.
  • LISA the RPG.
  • The Darkness videogames. Fairly average if utterly spoiled gangster is almost killed and inherits an ancient lineage of shadow monsters that feed off of shadows. Said gangster then decides to go on a revenge-killing spree against his uncle who ordered the whole thing while also fighting off the will of the monsters and protecting his girlfriend.
  • The first two Hyperion books.
  • Elfen Lied (where the next step of the evolution of mankind is a group of schizophrenic homicidal mutant girls with invisible tentacle hands and a hair-trigger temper who will either kill you in the worst way possible or infect you with their gene to increase their numbers.)
  • Most of Stephen King's works.
    • As the joke goes, some people say that Stephen King's works are so fucked up they should come with a content warning. The reply is that they do have a content warning, they have the words "written by Steven King" on the front.
  • S.T.A.L.K.E.R. You travel a desolate landscape filled with mutants in all the horrific varieties, failed science projects (courtesy of the secret cabal of scientist settled there after USSR' s dissolution), anomalies that you often can't see and kill you instantly and a lot of renegades/bandits/fanatics/zombies. Your gear breaks all the time, resources are scarce and your goal is to get to the highly dangerous Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, which is also protected by lots of fanatics with the best gear available. If you make it through that hellish place that is The Zone, you'll likely get one of the 5 really grimdark endings, and if you paid a lot of attention to certain seemingly useless items along the way, you may get one of the other two grimdark endings. The rest of the world largely ignores what's happening inside The Zone, aside from a few scientists that study the deadly phenomena and the international military that maintains a cordon around The Zone so the nasty stuff doesn't get out and sometimes send expeditions inside, killing everything and everyone in sight. Also, A NU CHEEKI BREEKI IV DAMKE.
  • The Slenderman Mythos (HE ALWAYS WATCHES).
  • The Old Testament.
  • Dante "you hurt my feefees so I'll put you in hell" Alighieri's Inferno. Put simply short, God is a fucking Sadist. If you suffer from depression/PTSD so much that you commit suicide, God will mutate you into an immortal tree that still feels pain and is constantly torn apart by harpies forever. How merciful. Sinners who committed Gluttony are punished by being eaten/mutilated alive by Cerberus, who transforms your corpse into slowly regenerating shit mud, all while a costant snowy rain (or rainy snow) hits your head; after being whole again, thou art eaten while trying to flee in despair, and it starts anew.But that's not the worst punishment. How about being under constant fireball rain in a desert for loving a person of the same gender? And being annihilated by snakes, then rebuilt? Or you find funnier being stuck in the ice? For ever. Because some old dude called Minos decided so.
  • The F.E.A.R. series (even the third vanilla-by-comparison game is fucked up).
  • Total War: Attila (Unlike the previous Total War titles, which were about your faction's rise to power from small backwater city/tribe/country into a mighty empire able to boss around its neighbors into doing your bidding, this one is about the decline of your faction as you desperately try to survive the onslaught of the Huns, who's sole purpose in the game is to worship Tengri by burning, pillaging, and raping their way through the known world. Particularly if you are the Romans. Winning is defined by being the last guy standing who gets to clean up the rubble and dead bodies, trying to rebuild their world after Attila destroyed it. Seriously, even the music sounds depressing and foreboding as fuck.)
  • Darkest Dungeon. Your ancestor awakened some kind of God that is pretty much Cthulhu's brother and sent you a letter before killing himself, asking you to mop up the huge mess he created. Enjoy sending parties of 4 adventurers ranging from badass lepers to sickle-wielding jesters to their deaths in cultist-infested ruins, sewers filled with mutated cannibalistic pigmen, sea caverns serving as anthropomorphic sea creatures and forests corrupted by evil. And I'm not going to talk about the Darkest Dungeon itself. Also, have fun dealing with those bandits that are raiding the Hamlet for which you spent a fuckton of resources in upgrades.
  • The Day After, and its worse Brit counterpart, Threads.
  • Lord Of War. The worst is that it's based on real events.
  • SCP Foundation universe as a whole is borderline grimdark, as many aspects of the Foundation are mixed between absurd comedy, derp, and pure grimdark. At its very worst, the SCP Foundation has things that make the Daemonculaba look nice by comparison. Above all: Secure. Contain. Protect. Imagine a semi-totalitarian world power, funded by world governments to capture and contain anomalous entities, objects and locations so that the rest of mankind can live in a world that makes sense. We're talking animate statues that move when you blink (predating that episode of Doctor Who) and a creature that kills anyone that sees its face in any form. One of the most Grimdark anomalies is a girl pregnant with something that could cause the end of the world if it is ever born and the only way to stop it from being born is to regularly put her through something unimaginably horrible (The author has said that they never will reveal what exactly it is but it probably involves Rape) and periodically erase her memories to make sure she doesn't get used to it. And not all of these threats can be contained or stopped and are roaming free to harm innocents. And some of the captured SCPs are not necessary hostile or evil, but are still imprisoned in a worse case scenario. Oh, and the apocalypse has already happened several times over, whenever it does humanity is replaced with clones, and they have lost track of how many times they have done this. You can't even escape by dying, as the most of the possible afterlifes are just as bad if not far worse. While the SCP Foundation tries to avoid being outright bad guys, they are willing to do ANYTHING to keep the world normal and most of the other factions are morally grey at best, and the few good guy factions tend to cause a lot of unintentional harm. But still, Secure. Contain. Protect. Just another day at the office.
  • Shisha no Teikoku, the Empire of Corpses. Steampunk, Grimdark, Zombies, Cross-References and Conspiracies everywhere. It has even become possible to ressurect the dead, giving them their soul and intelligence back, but only 2 characters profit from it in the end, while everyone else stays a slave.
  • The Eternal War, as the name suggests
  • Dystopian Wars, as the name suggests
  • Clockup Games where you get a firsthand look a sex cult and their destructive side effects.
  • World War Z (the book). After zombies overran most of the world, many people had it so bad that they simply lost the will to live. Fighting in the Paris Catacombs with weaker weapons that wouldn't cause a cave-in due to hazardous gasses everywhere. Russian soldiers rioting over unfair treatment and enforced secrecy ordered under pain of death to kill one in ten of their own squadmates - with rocks - to teach them the price of freedom and democracy. Which they then happily traded away. The survival of the human race hinged on governments following a plan including elements of eugenics and leaving settlements of people behind as zombie bait. People resorted to cannibalism to survive in Canada. North Korea entirely vanished without a trace. Pakistan and Iran nuked each other. After the war officially ended, there are still loose zombies wandering around, Russia has started a breeding program to deal with severe underpopulation, several species are extinct, and diseases thought to be wiped out are coming back en masse.
  • Space Runaway Ideon
  • Re:Zero
  • Uzumaki. Basically a Lovecraftian horror manga where a seaside town gets raped by spirals. Not as weird as it sounds. Or maybe it is as weird as it sounds but not as bad. Also has enough body horror to put most Chaos Spawn to shame.
    • Pretty much anything by Junji Ito. Except Junji Ito's Cat Diary: Yon & Mu.
  • Doom. Demons from Hell have overrun Mars and Earth. You are the lone space marine capable of anything. Somewhat of a subversive case of grimdark: it's not you who is afraid of demons, it's the demons who are afraid of you. Commence with the Rip and Tear.
  • Armored Trooper Votoms, an old-school mech anime. Mankind has been at war for so long that even the computers created to direct strategy don't know what the goal is. War isn't glorious either, most of the first arc is about a squad that goes rogue and raids their own side's armory to find some loot. While the mech designs aren't pretty or fancy, they are more industrial and utilitarian than many contempoaries, being repurporsed exo-suits. The main character is a Perpetual done right, through a mix of natural regeneration abilities, skills and nigh supernatural luck; unlike, you know, Vulkan, who was just handed something that should have probably belong to all Primarchs just so that he could make some people jealous. Take notes, Gros Wotour, take notes...
  • The Prototype games. New York City is infected with a virus created by a generically-unethical corporation called GenTek that mutates people into mutant zombies and/or fucking huge deformed beasts. A secret division called Blackwatch is sent to brutally contain the virus, except it turns out they originally created the virus as a way to purge minorities. This may sound like Resident Evil but the resemblance ends here because you play as Alex Mercer (Prototype 1) and James Heller (Prototype 2), both of them infected by a strain the virus and became superhumans who can shapeshift and gain someone's memories by consuming them (read violently absorbing them into their bodies) and can grow weapons like claws or a blade arm.
  • Saw: I just wanna play a game.
It was going to be a kids show they said. It was going to be as whimsical as Pokemon they said...
  • Digimon Tamers. (Digimon as a franchise is noted to be surprisingly dark and adult for a kids anime in the 'Mon' genre, but Digimon Tamers is exceptionally depressing even by the series standard. Children attempting suicide, child abuse, attempted murder on a child, multiple on-screen deaths of major characters, torture, psychological mind rape on a young girl, PTSD on said young girl, eldritch abominations, horror and psychological horror. You think Tamers would have a happy ending? Lolnope, Tamers has a bittersweet ending in which the main kids lose their Digimon partners for ever. This is what happens when you allow a guy notorious in psychological horror anime to do a kids show. There is a reason why Tamers is considered the Neon Genesis Evangelion for kids.)
    • Digimon Adventure Tri (aimed towards adult fans of the series) takes Tamers up a notch in just plain creepyness. Deaths, assisted suicide, infanticide of Digimon babies, psychological damage, grief-induced madness, corruption, attempted genocide, racial supremacy, racism, immense property damage with collateral damage and attempted rape from the series' former mentor and teacher becoming a creepy sexual predator molesting one of the main characters and choking another one to near death (Both female by the way). Digimon doesn't fuck around.
  • Most good 'Real Robot' anime/video games. Further discussion will result in skub.
  • Full Metal Alchemist: The World is coated by a side of Noblebright at the beginning but morphs into 1984 the more you watch/read. The world Amestris starts out as fine and dandy (despite being a fascist military Dictatorship (the head of state is literaly called führer)), then it morphs into a world where the Main Country (Amestris.) is at constant war with almost all it's neighbors commits Genocides Left and right and Murder's anyone who finds out the dark truth.
  • Bet On Soldier/Iron Storm: WW1 got extended by 80 years, leading to a world where war is everything (including a televised past time), peace is considered a horrifically dissident ideal and there is a shadowy cabal behind the scenes plotting to make the war last forever.
  • Noir in general, from Raymond Chandler's novels to games like This is the Police.
  • Magical Girl Site (so grimdark it makes Meguca look Noblebright)
  • Wanted. A comic book series which inspired the 2008 action flick. The villains won the war against the heroes and completely erased them from reality. The world of Wanted is one of the most horrific comic book series as it deconstructs the 'action macho man' of the superhero genre and insults the reader (As in break the fourth wall) if they ever felt like rooting for the 'protagonist'. How bad is Wanted? Crime is not only rampant but is actually part of the law, enforced by the Fraternity (Justice League for bad guys), and the only way to even have the closest thing to a 'safe and happy life' is by murdering your next door neighbor out of paranoia. Furthermore, as the world is cut up into sections and ruled by different supervillains, you will most likely be born in a country ruled by either a psychotic bastard who shoots children for shits and giggles, a Lex Luthor archetype who hungers for more unrestrained power, a literal Nazi from the future who wants another Holocaust, or a megalomaniac and sociopathic Chinese emperor who makes Mao Zedong like a chump or a completely immortal 'President-for-Life' Mugabe expy that will probably rule for eternity.
    • Our 'protagonist' is a sociopathic, violent, sadistic rapist who assassinates people in ridiculous violent manners that makes the Punisher, Konrad Curze and Batman look like Constable Care in comparison. His first 'character development' was shooting his neighbor in the face because he was too damned nice... yeah... our 'heroes' are literally no different than the villains at all. If you could even call them 'heroes'. While characters in WH40K and Gears of War commit atrocities usually because they have a reason, idea or dogma behind their actions, the villains of Wanted commit them because they felt like it. Don't even get us started with the supervillains who are so repulsive that they are barely redeemable. Wanted is one of those franchises that just makes you feel like a bastard for even trying to root for anyone. In terms of the moral scale, if DC is the classical Black and White franchise and Marvel is the classical Grey and Gray franchise, than Wanted is the classical Black and Black franchise. Chaos wishes it could be this efficiently evil.
  • Grim Dawn. In a world called Cairn there is magic, monsters, and humans using 19th century tech. A group of mages failed some sort of ritual and accidentally called in a ghost called an Aetherial, setting off a chain of events that would lead to the "Grim Dawn". They invaded the world by possessing many creatures and humans for their own world domination plan, and the ensuing chaos allowed the Cthontic Cult (Mix Khorne and Slaaneshi pain cults) to come out of the shadows just as the Aetherials started getting shit done. This results in a never ending struggle between humans and multiple otherworldly powers. An optional meeting with a god from the universe tells the player that there are many gods watching this world and none of them, him included, gave a shit about their followers since this is just one of many realities they observe and the tragic event is nothing more than a normal day for him. So players have to fight through undead (who are cursed to forever linger in the world, only to get back up as soon as they are defeated), a land corrupted by the aether's green shit that is as harmful as the warp itself, and a crimson forest filled with Cthonic Cultists. The factions of the 'Good Guys' aren't much better either. There is either a necrophiliac ice ninja that will enslave the dead or a pretentious templar order whose god is just as bad as the others. The only hope lies in survivors from the aetherial encounters that gained unnatural powers which may potentially corrupt them in the process. Nothing will ever change though since the world now is filled with horrifying creatures and humanity is reduced to pockets of bandits squabbling over the pitiful remnants of their civilization. Invasions are still going strong despite your efforts at the very end of game and other gods are ready to back stab, corrupt, raid and torment every living creature in the world for their own selfish needs.
    • The new expansion Ashe of Malmouth adds more grimdark and even a rare instance of sick fuckery in modern video game. The city Malmouth is said to be the first place hit with Aetherials forces so the entire place is nothing but a fucked up zombie town with buildings made out of human flesh. But before the player can get to that "fun party" however, they would need to cross the jungle, bog place of Ugdenbog, a wild swamp and evil infested shithole filled with cannibals and witches that got gangbang from both the Aetherials and Cthontic forced during the grim dawn. You are even allow to side with the local cannibals in Barrowholm (a much lesser evil mind comapre to the Cthontic and Atherial mind you). Once you got to Malmouth, the true sick fuckery begin. The local Aetherials had spare a few human survivors just so they could hunt them down and replenish for their needs of flesh. What's worst is that they have abducted local females (especially younger one) and use them as breeding cattle to produce more "test subject" and "soldiers". Doesn't that sounds like Daemonculaba? It also means that the enemies like Aetherial Scamp and Aetherial Imp, those little shit that are the size of a child you fought are actually.....yeah, I'm done with this shit.
  • Peter Watts. Brutal neuropunk sci-fi horror, as bleak as H. P. Lovecraft but with a list of scientific citations at the end to let you know just how realistic it really is. Hits you with a world-ending catastrophe and then manages to make it a thousand times worse -- an alien invasion DURING a hard-takeoff singularity, for example. Sociopathy and post-human augments abound. Also, the books are free!
  • Armored Warfare. Terrorist/ultra-nationalist/anarchists with tanks, corporations that rule and enslave large portions of the world and the rest of the world might as well be a wasteland, as far as we know.
  • Pandora from the Borderlands games. A whole planet covered in tonnes of rubbish, industrial equipment, pollution and debris from mining operations by huge intergalactic corporations. A classic example of unregulated capitalism where the few inhabitants (mostly from the abandoned mining operations) fight for survival against hideously mutated and highly dangerous wildlife and go completely mental in the process. What little rational civilisation there is is constantly under attack from all sides, including by the Hyperion corporation which wants to purge the planet of all life and start again from scratch. To do this the BBEG has built an army of robots and seeks to awaken an ancient, all-powerful, immortal, alien warrior (which, as it turns out, is very easy to kill). Pandora is essentially a Death World. And people still go and live in this shithole just to search for hidden caches of ancient alien technology. TL;DR Australia on steroid with alienz lmao.
  • Call of Duty: Black Ops 3
  • Homefront (the game, not the similarly-named but unrelated movie)
  • Made in Abyss. It is one of those Trap anime/manga that fools unsuspecting viewers into watching a cute, whimsical Studio Ghibli esque show filled full of wonder and adventure....what the series WON'T tell you is the amount of Grimdark it would throw at you at the most unsuspecting turn. You want to see cute moe loli children getting tortured, horribly disfigured, experimented on, brutally killed, discarded and abused? Made in Abyss got your back! You want to see a Deathworld so extreme it even kills you when you think of trying to escape? Made in Abyss is completely centered around that! You want to see a society run on child labor, in which death and injury is so common that a 12 year old knows how to amputate an arm and be unfazed by dead bodies? Made in Abyss is proud to include these! You want to see a Josef Mengele Cosplayer/Evil Daft Punk/Super Furry Loli Fetishist/Completely Best Dad EVAR! as the main villain? Made in Abyss is a proud sponsor of this! You want to have a deep and dark philosophy on how deep one's humanity can go before completely losing it and what counts as truly human before succumbing to the human excess of wants, needs and pride? Made in Abyss have plenty to showcase this! You want to see what would happen when Laputa's Flying Castle and Madoka Magica fucked Berserk? Made in Abyss is the end result of their sweaty lust! You want to hear absolutely beautiful music and see eye-poppingly gorgeous art which is contrasted against the raw, brutal and savage realities of the setting? Made in Abyss would win over you! You want to get emotionally attached to a bunch of moe furries and cry manly tears without feeling too dirty? Don't worry, we in /tg/ can tolerate it... just about...
  • Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. A manga/anime film made by Hayao Miyazaki, yes you heard us right. The man who was the main founder of Studio Ghibli and gave us childhood gems such as Tortoro, Spirited Away and Ponyo, gave us a Science-Fantasy Epic of the brutality of war. Sure there was Princess Mononoke, but that was basically a spiritual sequel to Nausicaa. The setting of Nausicaa is centered around a post-apocalyptic Deathworld in which humanity had nuked itself back into the early renaissance via kilometer tall, biomechanical, nuclear-firing GOD-WARRIORS. Most children don't make it to adulthood and the remaining human civilizations are on the verge of collapse due to scarcity of resources and the ever growing encroachment of the Sea of Death/Corruption, a forest of highly toxic fungal jungles and incredibly violent mega-insects that goes completely anal if you dare pluck a 'Shroom or two. To make matters worse, the state of technology has been declining over the years either due to loss of knowledge or the sheer amount of dead children failing to reach the proper age to spread such knowledge. Nausicaa, especially the manga, does not shy away from human slavery, biological WMDS, genocides, nuclear holocaust, a gratuitous amount of inferred and overt infanticides, inquisitorial purging and the likes. By far the most mature and grittiest of Miyazaki's works. The one main thing that Nausicaa stands out from the rest is its titular character. Princess Nausicaa is an actual pacifist and a self-impose Jesus archetype. Yet despite such Noblebright characteristics, she is an absolute BADASS. Nausicaa may hate fighting and war, but she is not afraid to split some heads open and gut your belly empty. She is also a surrogate mother for a giant walking WMD and a surrogate big sister for a psychic boy with the assets to boot; this gives her extra brownie points for being Awesome. Seriously, Merida and other Princesses has nothing on this chick.
    • Because of the fact that Nausicaa for all intents and purposes, kickstarted the foundation of Studio Ghibli in the first place, its influence had a profound impact on Ghibli's future works. It basically was the progenitor of every Ghibli trope imaginable. You got the strong female heroine and her equally strong and capable male deuteragonist? check. A setting based upon fantastical elements and a blatant anti-war/pro-environmentalist message? check. Giant, awesome planes? check. Scenery populated by eye-candy artwork? check. A quirky, animal side character? check. The bad guys being revealed to be either not so evil/misunderstood/have morally grey beliefs? check. Furthermore, Nausicaa influenced other works such as the Chocobos from Final Fantasy being a complete copy of Nausicaa's Horseclaws, as well as the God-Warriors being the main inspiration of the motherfucking EVAs (Seriously, the main creator behind Evangelion first got the idea after animating the God-Warriors for Nausicaa. Seriously look it up, the resemblance is uncanny).
    • Another studio Ghibli film called Grave of the Fireflies is far worse. The plot of film is "A pair of orphans starve to death in Japan at the end of WWII." That is the entire plot. This movie utter torture to watch and a great reminder of why war may be fun in games but is the worst thing imaginable in real life.
  • Synthicide. "When robots are gods, killing humans is fair game." In the deep darkness of the far, post-mutagen virus future, Human life is worthless (Murder and theft against them and each other is entirely legal), murder of sentient bots (Who are given free-range to torment humans with impunity after being let go from service to the major faction that makes them), however is one of the greatest offenses, and one the PC's are bound to commit at some point in their careers. Also, everything has a black and white color pallete.
  • Destiny/Destiny 2's backstory. Basically, there was a very short-lived race of people called "The Krill" which lived only ten years on a planet called Fundament (fair note, Fundament is a gas giant, and Jupiter's orbit takes 10 years. So the Krill may have lived to a few hundred). There was a ruler called the Osmium King, and a traitor named Taox killed him. His daughters, Xi Ro, Aurash, and Sathonna took a ship to the planet's core where they met the Worm Gods, or Ahamkara. What happened is that the Worm Gods grant immortality, but in order to become immortal you have to kill or the worm will eat you, this was called The Sword Logic, and the Krill were re-named The Hive after killing that fucking traitor Taox. They proceeded to exterminate every living thing in the galaxy, harboring xenophobia and militarism which would make the Imperium look tolerant and pacifist in comparison
  • The aftermath of Avengers: Infinity War. After the battledust settles, no one really wins at the end of the movie.
  • Spec Ops: The Line, due to disguising itself as a run of the mill shooter, but disregard for orders and going in all guns blazing in quest of "becoming a hero" and "saving everyone", unlike most FPS, rather realistically leads from bad to worse, resulting in the player committing vile acts and outright war crimes. At the time of its release, its atmosphere and presentation made it a standout. Due to being heavily reliant on the player having no foreknowledge that it'll drown them face-first in the horrors of war, the game has undergone a sort of "Rosebud effect", and at worst can be considered grimderp. Granted, even then it's far less so than the examples below, and can be considered a period piece of sorts whose themes retain relevance.
  • The Suffering and The Suffering: Ties that Bind. Two messed up stories about an unwell guy who may or may not have murdered his family tries to survive the worst prison in all of Maryland while it's being infested by nightmarish creatures symbolic of the countless atrocities committed on it (Being not only a prison, but also the former site of a WWII POW camp run by a paranoid lunatic, an old-timey mental institution run by an...eccentric who still haunts the place, and a puritan village that saw it's own recreation of the Salem Witch Hunts). The sequel sees the man in equally worse surroundings as Baltimore has it's own infestation of the monsters symbolic of the city's corruption and is now haunted not only by two deranged murderers, but also a figure from his past who supposedly know the truth about his family.
    • In Ties That Bind, it's implied that every city of decent size has the potential to be turned into a haunted hellscape. Because humans are shitty and have been doing shitty things to each other for all of recorded history, and hence every city has a number of bloodsoaked ghosts created by atrocities and desperate for vengeance.
  • The first two seasons of Animals of Farthing Wood, a animated series for kids infamous for having graphic depictions of violence and a death rate of major characters on par with Game of Thrones. Though somewhat at the low end of the Grimdark spectrum, the fact this show was for kids earns it major points for being grimdark. The third series noticeably toned down on the Grimdark elements and ended up being the least well regarded. Notable deaths in the series include but are not limited to:
    • The Pheasants, a couple of, well, pheasants who die at a farm in an extremely cruel manner. First, the wife is forced by her husband to take his watch and is spotted by the farmer, then shot. The husband, overcome with grief, elects to go back and find Adder, hoping to atone for causing his wife's death. Instead, he sees the cooked corpse of his wife and breaks down in tears, unable to pull himself together and is also shot dead by the farmer.
    • Three baby mice are born in one episode. The very next episode they are all killed onscreen by a shrike, a bird infamous for impaling its prey, as seen here.
    • The hedgehogs, while trying to cross a road, have to fight not to curl up into a ball... but eventually, the husband goes crazy, unable to stop himself from curling up, and his wife elects to stay with him, leading to both their deaths when a lorry runs them over.
  • Ava's Demon, a webcomic who's cutesy style doesn't hide how fucking dark this world can be. For starters, in the opening itself, a planet is destroyed by Silent Scavengers, which are Tyranids and Necrons mixed together, then the main character ends up impaled when they crash land, her soul going to turn into space dust until she agrees to help the demon who's been possessing her since she was born to get revenge on TITAN, who can at best be described as the God-Emperor if he were every negative stereotype about the Imperium taken to the extreme and then some. How bad is TITAN? It's implied he turned a star into a black hole solely because of its planets inhabitants wouldn't do what he wants. And trust us, things can only get worse in this setting.
  • Dragon Ball Z: History of Trunks. Could just be expanded to Trunks' timeline in general. Dragon Ball has always been known as a sort of noble bright anime, but this, damn. Everyone is either dead, dying, or living in fear of two walking machines of pure evil. And then when Trunks does actually take care of his enemies, another more powerful one shows up and just sends everything back to the way it was. Even the parody of this movie is oddly depressing.
  • Power Rangers RPM plays with this trope, being what is effectively Terminator meets Mad Max "for kids." It is still Power Rangers, and does still have its fair share of comic relief, but this is also the season where a young girl is brainwashed into becoming a child soldier for Skynet and HAL 9000's demented love child, while also having her humanity stripped away and replaced with cold metal. That's not even starting to mention the fact that most of the planet is wiped out, with billions dying over the course of what seems like a few weeks.
  • Postal. Not the sequels, which play the violence for laughs and topical humor, or the crap Uwe Boll movie, just the first game and it's remake (Postal Redux). Once you get past all the shock and outrage of being a forefather of the "Ban Violent Video Games" movement, you'll realize that this game is genuinely fucked up with its imagery and the protagonist is a mentally unwell individual.
  • Resistance : Fall of Man.
  • Romero's "Dead" series, especially the later entries. Night is grim for the heroes, even if the overall story ends somewhat happily with the zombies taken care of. On the other hand, Dawn and Day are much darker, with zombies overrunning society, and though both end on positive notes, the journey there is a grim fight for survival. Most of the heroes die in Dawn (all of them if you count the depressing alternate cut), and in Day most of the characters, even the heroes, are hateful, unhinged, and/or just plain crazy.
  • Requiem for a Dream. If you have seen this movie, this is self-explanatory.
  • Blakes 7. The BBC broadcast this against coronation street. And it was written by Terry Nation. It opens with a show trial after the hero gets set up to join a terrorist cell post mind wipe, gets accuses of paedophilia, and then exiled to the world of warhammer where Brian Blessed is king of the cult of scientology. Then you get 4 seasons of basically terrorists fighting the evil space empire, with the worlds most sarcastic computer, special effects that make your mates larp when they were 14 years old look high budget (ffs the federation are armed with caulking guns and some pipe). It's fucking GLORIOUS.
  • The Promised Neverland. An anime/manga about a bunch of cute children raised in a nice orphanage, that is really a farm set up by demons who raise the children as food. Hence the "Neverland" part of the title, the children don't grow up, because they are killed by monsters. A handful girls get to survive until adulthood by getting selected to act as mothers to children, but they are still prisoners who can't leave the farm. If they are unlucky they will have to watch over their own children until the day they are killed.
    • The world outside the farms is even worse. A thousand years ago the world was divided between humans and demons. The children are in the demons' half. Demons used to hunt humans until the two sides made a truce where the world was divided in two halves to keep peace and humans were handed over to the demons to farm as food and the wealthy family of humans who made the deal are out to kill the escaped children to uphold it. Demons actually need to eat humans or they degenerate into mindless animals that attack everything in sight, except of the demon nobility thanks to them consuming blood that removed the need. And they still insist on hoarding the best quality human meat for themselves while leaving the commoners to feed on meat from humans raised on factory farms where the humans are force fed until they die. This inferior quality meat isn't enough to keep demons from degrading and so the demons' human allies are doing horrifying expirements to produce better quality meat. Something could have been avoided if the demon nobility didn't make sure that only they were free from dependence on human meat as means of maintaining their control with their supply of meat, because as you can probably tell, they don't care about the commoners.
  • Dorohedoro. Described by its own author as "a song with really dark lyrics, but a melody that's so happy that you want to dance to it". So happy grimdark? The title can literally be translated as "from shit to shit". Seriously, the setting wouldn't look out of place among a 40k underhive. The entire setting is a massive slum, with horrible pollution, mass poverty, and human body parts polluting the waterways. Your options for living are being a normal human, living in poverty and treated like toys, lab rats, and livestock by the various magic users. Or being a magic user, and either be lynched by the terrified normies or captured by other magic users and boiled down to make drugs. And if you're a magic user, regardless of how good you are when you die you're guaranteed to be sent to hell to be tortured by devils for all eternity (unless you become a devil yourself). Or being a devil, and worry about being screwed over by your boss for shits and giggles or eaten by Store, who is implied to be an angel and treats devils the same way devils treat mortals. Or being said boss, and dick around with people for all eternity because you're absolutely bored with existence, can't die, and are horribly lonely since you can't form a meaningful bond with anyone else. Of course "your options" being metaphorical in this sense, since you are either born a normal human or magic user and can't change who you are (which is a major plot point for several characters). Three of the most moral people in the entire setting are a mob boss and two different flavors of serial killer. Even when the normal people manage to fight back by creating a god through the merger of thousands of souls of those killed by magic users, it immediately tries to kill everyone just to end its suffering. The only time the weather changes in the series is when it rains, which causes magic users to fall sick because it's the manifestation of the will of said god and if you're a magic user it hates you. Well, at least the food is good.
  • Lobotomy Corp/Library of Ruina. Two game made by a Korean game studio named Project Moon, known for its dark setting. I have decided to leave most of the detailed explanations to this guide here to avoid further paragraph bloat. To put it simply, the first game: Lobotomy Corp, is about a corporation trying to harvest energy from monsters that was extracted from human's mind: Abnormalities. Each Abnormalities has special powers to mess with people's mind or just straight up killing people in very gruesome way and the corp's employee has to suppress them. Does that sounds familiar? it gets worse. SPOILER ALERT: It turns out the energy is not to only used to power other corporation's devices, it is also used to power up some kind of positive energy beacon that spread its power aka light to everyone in the city just so they could feel hope and be "saved". The plan failed several times due to Abnormalities were failed to contained and suppressed. The reasons why the plan can be carried failed despite its constant failure was due to a certain time control technology that could rewind the time back before the incidents happened. As you can see, the guy that was managing this shithole has to go through this tiresome process, witness his employees' death again and again until he finally reached a satisfy conclusion. The employees that died were revived from every time rewind without ever remember their death, but not the managers, nor the Sephiroth, whom were brain jar robots that oversees their own department. As you can see, suffering from constant rewind has made them lose their mind with made them sometimes throwing fit, forcing the manager to tell them to calm their ass down. There was this robotic AI waifu assistant that were created to help managing the place. For some reasons, she was given the abilities to feel emotions just so she could experience the same cruel passage of time and the scenery of Abnormalities killing the employees, driving her nut. It was made all the painful for her since she can perceive time in even slower rate, making her torture all the more painful. So just why is it the corp decided to went through all this tragedies and tortures to save peoples that doesn't understood their suffering? why do the the city people needs to be saved?
    • Now things gets interesting in the second game: Library of Ruina. Turns out everyone living in the city has become "ill", as in mentally depress to the point they could not have any free will to do anything they like. The world they lived in is controlled by Corporations: Wings, who holds the most power and they forced everyone to pay expensive taxes or else get fucked by their scheme. This unfair demand created a huge poverty circle, forming countless of Backstreets where death and crimes became the norm. In order to pay tax, people results other ways to earn steady incomes. Some becomes a Fixer, mercenaries police man who would fight for anyone with money (Note: there are no functional police department in the setting). Some became part of the Syndicates, Fixers' criminal counterpart who earn money by doing crime instead. Note that neither Fixers or Syndicates members has any choice but to keep climbing their rank. Sure the higher their rank, the better their living conditions becomes, but it is a never ending grind that will eventually results to their death or depression to the point of suicide. Move on to the upper class: The Nest. People who lives in The Nest are rich and well educated, but says who? Like the Fixers and the Syndicates, they are forced to climb their social ladder in order to survive, and the dangers of Syndicates still exist in some isolated area of The Nest. Worse is that the corporations they've worked for often use them as test subject to test their super precious technology: Singularity and see how much they get fucked up. Basically, office wage slaves with higher mortality rate. Speaking of Singularity, it is futuristic technology like nanomachines, devices so advance, it is as if they were taken from sci-fi movies. Despite their usefulness however, it has dark side to them, like REALLY DARK. For example, there are these trains that are capable of transferring passengers to other place in 10 seconds. What happened was that the passengers were actually stuck inside the train for 2000 fuckoff years. During that time, the passenger's body states just stopped functioning, like unable to feel pain as if the "time" for their body just stopped. After 100 days, they began tear eachothers' flesh parts out of boredom or insanity, to the point they eventually tearing themselves into flesh bits that merges with one another. By the time the train had arrived, the agents sent from the corp had to "restore the passengers" using time control Singularity power from the corp they've partnered with, restoring their body states back to when they were but 10 seconds on the train, as if nothing ever happened. With such dangerous technology in their hand, who is there to control The Wing? meet The Head, the shit head that put everyone in their misery. They are the one with the absolute power in the setting. Having the best combat force, the power over The Wings and the being giant rat that made all other rules. It is hinted that they intended for humans in the setting to suffer under the stresses of survival and death. Although not much about them has been revealed yet, they were known for shaping the world that is today with their armies of Arbiters, Singularity-infused assassins who is so powerful, one of them could take on everyone in The Wing. Other than Arbiters, they have their own super fixers called The Claw, who are comparable to a high grade Fixers but in larger numbers. They also have the The Eyes, agents that report The Head for any potential tax evaders as well as any potential threats by surveillance the masses. No one fucks with The Head. NO ONE. All these are just a tip of the ice berg to how shitty life is in this setting. It gets potentially worse as Distortions, Abnormalities monsters from the first game that were made in the city due to the failed result from the 1st games and are now roaming the city to further spike up the mortality rate, making everybody's live even more miserable. Despite that, the Fixers still demands payment to kill them and The Head refuse to even lend a hand to kill them. Oh and it is impossible to not live in the city, for the outside lies the Outskirts, where monsters, robotic death machines and other abominations created from fail experiments resides. It is a wasteland composed of pretty much everywhere but the city, caused by the constant resource wars from the past and it is literary impossible for humans to lived in there. Even if it could, it would be filled with hostile exiles, outlaws or whatever godfosaken engineered inelligent species.
  • Warframe's lore. What's so dark about Warframe? You're a space ninja which just chops stuff up and shoots right? Oh you're DEAD wrong. The main characters, the Tenno, are survivors of an accident when a ship tried to use a metaphysical realm called The Void to perform a faster-than-light jump to Tau Ceti (which was previously terraformed for their arrival). And what do we know about using metaphysical realms to travel faster-than-light? It goes fuckingly bad, invest in a warp drive.
    • The Tenno were discovered by the Orokin, pansy hedonistic little faggots which sent them there, and then treated like absolute shit. The only person who treated the Tenno with absolute respect was a scientist called Margulis. When the robots sent to terraform Tau Ceti, the Sentients, evolved intelligence and came back to anally rape the Orokin, their built-in weakness was void stuff, which the Tenno were full of. After a victory over the Sentients, the Tenno bitchslapped the Orokin and bludgeoned them like the fucks they are.
      • The Orokin are just a bunch of shitbags in general. They treated Tenno, Lorist healers, and Grineer like absolute shit until they need their help. They execute scientists when they fail to produce results, because a GREAT way of increasing productivity is executing a scientist who is doing the work. And the way they maintain their immortality is by capturing children, and mind-raping them to download their own consciousness into theirs. The reason that they couldn't control the Warframes and needed the Tenno to do so is because they lack basic human empathy, they just abuse and torture everyone under them.
    • The Grineer were slaves to the Orokin which are now free, and are now absolutely terrorizing the system. They're a bunch of rotten clones which are highly augmented, and they kill everyone who isn't them, which aren't any better. Then there are the Corpus, who are greedy money-grubbers who care only for profit, and imprison a colony of debt-bondage slaves called "Solaris." And so on. Pretty much all Post-Orokin civilizations are pieces of shit.
  • Unhallowed Metropolis, a game representing probably the outer limits of how Grimdark you can go without sliding into Grimderp.

Grimderp

" Why don't people band together to fix things? Because GRIMDARK. Why hasn't an external system supplanted the current, barely functioning one? Because GRIMDARK. How does such a woefully inefficient system manage the logistical nightmare of endless total war? Because I murdered a baby seal, that's why! You should feel bad."

– Terrible Writing Advice (The GRIMDARK Episode)

Grimderp is what happens when a writer takes grimdark so far that it goes derp. The writer puts something in that makes the setting more grimdark, but it's generally reliant on at least one party involved suddenly abandoning all sense of reason and logic, or else caused by a lack of forethought on the implications of how the element interacts with the world. Many long-runner grimdark works will become this sooner or later, as either the setting or the cast's morality (rather a usually extreme lack thereof) will induce complete and utter apathy in the audience and cause them to give up out of sheer pointlessness. Most "dark" anime/manga tend to be more or less grimderp, as attempts to attract mature audiences ends in violence, blood, and sex without consequence (at BEST, mind you. At worst...), all in gratuitous quantities.

To be clear, grimderp is not just that something is "dark" or that a character behaves stupidly. Human beings make dumb, short-sighted, irrational, and morally objectionable decisions all the time, just crack open about any book on human history. Grimderp is when a character breaks character to do something they would normally never do or engage in behavior that is logistically impossible (there are as many elves as the plot demands), simply "because it's dark".

  • The Last of Us: Part 2, the sequel to the critically acclaimed The Last of Us, is Grimderp in its purest form: Characters prolong suffering simply out of the blue. Basic logic is thrown out as countless characters dive headfirst into a rabbit hole of violence, suffering, and depression, often to the point of literal edginess.
  • Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons is a fanfiction about magical ponies so grim, dark, and derp that it would almost be comical if it wasn't so fucking horrifying. With characters that get shit on (both figuratively and literally) more than the Lamenters, and with a world so bleak (and missing the point of Fallout, FiM, and the original Fallout: Equestria) that an heroing seems like WOULD ACTUALLY BE the happiest ending (Assuming it will end, it probably never will as long as there's enough cybernetics to keep rebuilding the constantly-dying protagonist) HOLY SHIT IT ACTUALLY ENDED!), it's the prime example of how to make readers stop giving a fuck about the story at all.
  • On that note, 90% of all grimdark fics are grimderp since writers are under the impression that just making things dark makes it good writing. There are exceptions, but they are rare, because Sturgeon's Law is a thing. On the flip side, however, certain examples have reached the apotheosis of Grimderp and become gut-bustingly hilarious.
  • Warhammer 40,000 gets called out as this by some. Certainly it's a valid criticism of certain parts, but as we said earlier, you could argue about what is and is not grimderp in 40k for weeks without conclusion. For example, the Imperium is excessively self-destructive and tyrannical to its own people, but in the hands of a good writer, it's meant to underline how corrupt and desperate the Imperium has become without the Emperor's guidance, and how even those who are neither incompetent nor malicious still have to make brutally difficult choices. In the hands of a lesser writer, it's unnecessary evil purely for the sake of evil. We should call our next book "Darkness of Darkest Dark!"
    • Historically, the Grail myths drift, not from Christian sources, but Celtic ones (and beyond the Celts, older civilizations), and a typical feature of these myths happens to be the healing of a King through forces of restauration and regeneration (i.e. to put one in touch with his sources, with his roots), and the King was typically seen in agrarian societies as the King of a land, avatara of a Sky-Father, and the Queen as the Earth Goddess. The Geokinesis psychic discipline has a power called Earth Blood who would do just that; if only someone let Librarians enter the Imperial Palace to do some Perceval style healing.
    • Khornate Knights
    • The Grey Knights (who seem to get this a lot, really) equipment and how it is made. Specifically, every bolt shell that the Grey Knights use is consecrated by the blood sacrifice of a righteous man or woman in a borderline Khornate ritual (and it has to be a good person, not just anyone. How the Imperium determines if someone is sufficiently "good" or not remains an open question). Those Aegis armors? Made from thousands of psykers (including children) burned in a furnace to channel their power to the armor. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of people have to die to make one Grey Knight combat-effective. This has caused a lot of skub as to whether it is grimderp or not, as it raises the question of where the Grey Knights find enough good people to consecrate all of the bolter rounds they go through every battle (especially in the 41st millenium, of all places).
    • Gellar Fields being powered by the dreams of a comatose psyker being used as a battery (which also burns out and has to be replaced regularly). While very dark, it crosses the line into grimderp when one realizes 1) that Gellar Fields were said to be invented long before psykers began appearing among humanity, and 2) psykers are apparently rare enough in the Imperium that the Imperium has an entire institution dedicated to rounding up psykers and bringing them back to Terra to make use of them, like making Astropaths or feeding the Astronomican and the Golden Throne. And according to recent editions the Black Ships are just barely meeting the quota to keep the Golden Throne going, so it's not like there are a lot of spare psykers around to be made into Gellar Field batteries.
    • Originally, the Black Templars were treated as refusing to suffer the witch no matter who they were, to the point of refusing to ally with any Imperial instutition that made use of them. This got retconned to only hate enemy psykers in 6th edition after it was pointed out it would be really hard for the Black Templars to do anything if they refused to tolerate Astropaths or Navigators, and thus have no Warp travel or faster-than-light communication.
    • Agri-Worlds. Seemingly in response to the common fandom sentiment that most worlds in the Imperium are actually quite decent places to live, just so long as you don't get invaded by Orks, Chris Wraight in Lords of Silence outlines a typical Agri-World, describing a horrific hellscape wracked by permanent Dust Bowl conditions and so much pesticides that the sky turns orange and it is not safe to walk around outside without a biohazard suit, and goes on to say that all Agri-Worlds are like this. This has caused a lot of skub within the community. Some say that this practice is perfectly acceptable grimdark, and that unsustainable farming practices aren't exactly unusual in human history (look at slash-and-burn farming practices in Brazil, or aquifer use in the United States). However, what people find issue with is the claim that all agri-worlds are invariably like this, when the fact that conditions on various planets in the Imperium vary massively from world to world as needed for the plot and there is almost no standardization has always been considered one of the big selling points of the setting (not to mention contradicting descriptions of Agri-Worlds in Ciaphas Cain and the Last Chancers). The other aspect that people tend to find unbelievable is that the Imperium is claimed to not even use crop rotation in their Agri-Worlds, simply farming the same crop over and over again until the soil gives out and the planet becomes a Death World. The Imperium may have lost a lot of its ancient knowledge, but crop rotation as a practice goes back to the freaking Stone Age. Its absurd to see knowledge that basic being lost in the horrors of Old Night, or not been rediscovered in the time after. This also means the Imperium would literally have run out of planets thousands of years ago if this was true.
    • The nature of how Imperial ships work has caused a great deal of skub. Namely the fact that the weapons of Imperial ships are loaded by hundreds of chem-bulked, rabid slaves dragging them into place while being whipped, the exertion being so great that many die frothing at the mouth by the effort or have their hands crushed by chains. They do this completely by hand, hauling the munitions across the ship with chains. This despite the fact that hydraulic power systems have existed since the 18th century. They don't even use inclined planes or levers, something which humanity has been using to haul large objects where they want them to go since the days of Stonehenge, the Pyramids, and Easter Island. Or they could literally just use a Chimera or a team of grox to do the job, you know, the reason why humanity built large vehicles and domesticated large animals? Meanwhile the Adeptus Mechanicus is using autoloaders, and is deliberately keeping the technology from the rest of the Imperium so they will have an advantage in case another civil war ever breaks out. Some say this is perfectly acceptable grimdark, others say that this is just too ridiculously inefficient to take seriously, even for the Imperium.
    • The Marneus Calgar comic has caused a shitstorm with the recent revelations that the average life expectancy of the BEST place in the Imperium is in the mid-thirties, which is fucking STUPID. Because that means that the life expectancy of other non-Ultramar worlds are drastically shorter, which makes the machinations on how the Imperium is run, fucking unsustainable. If child mortality rates are that high, then entire worlds would have quite literally run out of humans especially in warzones, while entire sectors' worth of economies would collapse or stagnate as more kids die before they grow up and be a productive member of society. This creates a drain in resources and long-term stability; it was already considered unsustainable during MEDIEVAL times, so you could just extrapolate this to a million worlds and the Imperium should collapse under its own inertia and weight by this point. I don't care how 'disposable' human life is, it is still a resource and the Emprah fucking hates wasting resources. We get that the comic writer is trying to shoehorn even more feudalist themes in the comics, but the problem is, this is not Krieg we're talking about, but fucking Ultramar. So either the author does not know what sense of scale is, or that he does not understand the works of Guilliman, because Papa Smurf WOULD. NOT. let this shit fly under the radar. The author has confirmed, however, that it was added to make Ultramar feel more grimdark. To give you some context, Somalia in the mid 1960s has a higher life expectancy than this. This is not grimdark, this is just fucking stupid that breaks the suspension of disbelief. It is one of the few things that both 4Chan and Reddit concurrently agree upon as fluff breaking.
    • To be honest, the whole idea of humans being the "teeming multitudes" faction winning battles by sheer weight of numbers and which breed quickly and are easily replaced is kind of silly if you know anything about human reproduction. Among species on Earth, humans are notable for being one of the slowest reproducing species out there. It takes nine months for a human to gestate to maturity in the womb, more than any other animal aside from elephants and whales, and even after birth humans take longer to reach maturity even compared to our close relatives the Neanderthals and Homo erectus. Additionally, it takes a huge amount of parental care to care for a child and raise them to functional adulthood, more than any other animal. On top of this, pregnancy is incredibly crippling for human females, and women have a one in three chance of dying in childbirth if giving birth without any external aid or midwives (as would be the case for a citizen of the underhives), something almost no other species has to deal with. The way our species generally works is we breed incredibly slowly but live an incredibly long time and invest a lot of resources to make sure those few that are born survive to adulthood, which basically makes us the elves of the animal kingdom. Barring some major technological breakthrough like artificial wombs or genetic engineering to reduce the crippling side effects of human pregnancy or long adolescence, humans are unlikely to be able to outbreed anything. And while some factions in the Imperium do have access to artificial wombs (like the Mechanicus, most of humanity in 40k are shown to still reproducing the old fashioned way. Even if humanity starts out with a huge population it can throw at any problem, that population is going to be depleted pretty fast because humanity can't replace their losses. Even if are the greatest resource the Imperium has, they're still trying to fight a war of attrition against the species that reproduces by fighting, the one whose gimmick is being the rapidly reproducing horde of space locusts, and the ones who can't even be properly killed, you’re going to lose horribly. However, fans tend to ignore this because of the whole “to be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions” thing that is part of the general lack of regard for human life that makes 40k 40k, so people give it a pass.
    • Some 40k sources claim that millions if not billions of guardsmen are killed EVERY SECOND. Even with the scale of the imperium taken into the account, having many times the current population of the Earth die every minute would be ridiculous for the whole of Imperium, let alone just the Imperial Guard.
    • Watch Captain Artemis saying better to let the galaxy burn and allow the Imperium to fall to Chaos than allow the xenos to live, right before fucking up an eldar ritual that would have awakened Ynnead early and fucked over Slaanesh, indirectly causing all of the ruckus of 8th Edition. Granted, while this does come from the Deathwatch, who tend to be rabidly anti-xenos even by the Imperium's standards, this is for Chaos, the Archenemy, the Big Bad Evil Guy of the Warhammer 40k setting, the one faction that even the notoriously xenophobic Imperium will begrudgingly admit is a bigger threat than the xenos and will team up with them to fight against it. A loyalist saying they prefer Chaos over anything, even as the lesser of two evils, should be grounds for an insta-BLAMing and a red flag for Chaos corruption. And no, Watch Captain Artemis was not BLAM-ed for this, nor is this treated as the beginnings of his corruption and a slow fall to Chaos. And so a loyalist Space Marine managed to single-handedly save Slaanesh. Seriously, Chaos champions have been elevated to Daemon Princehood for less.
  • Star Wars: Although Star Wars is 40k's high fantasy twin. There has been a few grimderp things that came out recently in Canon that has given 40k a run for its money. According to Canon, specifically the novel Ashoka, the Galactic Empire forces farming worlds by gunpoint to harvest a particular breed of crop to be used as rations for their troops. The problem? These crops were specifically designed to soak up every bit of nurtients on the planet until it becomes sterile. Meaning that the particular farming world is only capable of harvesting the crops a few times AT BEST before it becomes a sterile death world. Let's put this in context here, the Galactic Empire is currently fighting a galaxy-wide insurgency and being a galaxy-wide government, the GE NEEDS a sustainable way to produce food in order to keep its giant military well-fed for long-term camapaigns. So forcing farming worlds to produce crops that intentionally leave their worlds sterile after a few farming cycles is just fucking STUPID. Because realistically, the GE would have quite literally, ran out of food in a decade, collapsing due to galaxy-wide famine. This shit is so fucking stupid and retarded that it makes the abovementioned IoM agri-world farming practises look eco-friendly in comparison.
  • Drowtales: The whole series is Grimderp on steroids, but there are a few particularly nauseating examples: nothing like the protagonist Mary Sue of innocence and purity blowing up the light elf MILF slave called Maya in an argument with a rival, an argument in which she feels morally justified right after buying a fighting slave which was doomed to die in underground Arenas even most Drow find disgusting, ran by a complete monster of a drow, regularly visited to watch slaves die, that's right, by the protagonist Ariel. Maya dies crying in her native tongue about "what she did to deserve this", crying she'll never see sunlight again. Protagonist feels a bit bad about a few days, and only that when she sees a few naked light elf slaves for sale, reminiscing Maya's face. Years pass and she thinks all the slavery and needless murder isn't so cool... just before visiting a surface colony who was taken from humans. She and her lesbian lover have an orgy on the settlement they just conquered by massacre. After a blissful after-sex sleep, the settlement is counterattacked by desperate humans coming to save their kin... which are promptly murdered by the half-light half-dark elf paladin of Sharess (Yes, a Mary Sue worshipping a total Baldur's Gate rip-off) who is all high and righteous when she is burning innocent humans who wanted to save their kin from slave traders about to buy the survivors. The protagonist's lesbian empath Drow (yes, with a length of purple hair paint, straight out of Deviantart) friend berates the cornered humans with a lame excuse line of "I feel your pain, why don't you take your survivors and run?!" when the said humans scream in desperation to save their families from the town's locked buildings, die horribly and our "I'm glad my clan Sarghress prevents slavery, let's shake hands and feast on the food we just plundered!" protagonist shakes hands on it. It's not even depressing, it's plain fucking logic diarrhea with enough depressive themes to OD an edgy 13 year old. (considering the authors were that old when they started...)
  • Jeph Loeb's run on Ultimate Marvel: people dying brutally (most well known being Wasp getting eaten by the Blob) and completely gratuitously (Dr. Strange is killed the one page he shows up on and is completely forgotten afterwards), lore rape worst than anything Ward ever did (the heroic Pyro is now a rapist version of the mainline Marvel Pyro with no explanation, Thor going from new age hippie to mainline-style viking with no explanation... at least that last one is kinda cool). Overall it was so bad it effectively made the Ultimate Marvel universe (with the exception of Spider-Man and his cast) completely unusable. Small wonder that years later, Marvel thought smashing it and the main Marvel universe together would be a good idea.
  • Koutetsujou no Kabaneri, an anime with a similar premise to the already-grimdark Attack on Titan: It's set in (presumably feudal) Japan, where people are hiding behind walls and communicate with each others using trains to travel from town to town, and trades the giants and horses for guns and zombies. Several of the characters have moments of team-killing ineptitude that end up prolonging the conflict far longer than it should:
    • The samurai don't bother with armor and generally aren't very combat-savvy when it comes to zombies, and their Lawful Stupid tendencies turn any defense against a wall breach into an utter clusterfuck. The antagonist is an absolute failure AND wanted for crimes against humanity, being a pretentious Che Guevara wannabe with pink hair and wielder of an ugly-yet-somewhat effective sabre. He also has a devoted following despite being thoroughly unable to grasp the basics of warfare and its ethics (he thinks children are cowards for not being able to fight monsters that ambush and run through trained adult fighters with ease, and considers destroying one's own resources and castles to be a viable strategy). Meanwhile, the main protagonist has found not one, but TWO miracle solutions that would allow mankind to fight back against the zombie plague, but no one will listen to him, especially not the main antagonist, both because of the above and because of course they wouldn't, it's grimderp GRIMDARK.
    • Ironically, Ancient Shintoism (a main religion of that period) has the only known anti-zombie deities: Kukuri hime no kami, a goddess of purification (despite being rather sado-masochist) whose followers would bind a corpse with ropes, place a big stone on the chest and bury it (coffins are optional). Insane as it was, it was the most common form of burial in the Jomon period, and never went completely out of date through all the medieval period. Despite the rites being a perfect defense against an undead invasion, apparently they didn't take in this setting. Three guesses why.
  • Most dark fantasy/"Ryona" hentai games and manga like Kuroinu, Redo of a Healer (see below) and whatever bargain basement hentai game developer puts the heroines through horrifying rapes, tortures and debauchery with no way to escape, all for little more purposes than to degrade, humiliate and mind-break them.
  • FATAL
  • Black Tokyo
  • Teenagers bad attempts at recreating stuff they like such as Creepypasta's.
  • Garth Ennis's "The Boys" (Almost every superhero is an irredeemable sexual deviant who's only crime fighting accomplishments come from corporate PR lies.)
    • Surprisingly averted with it's Amazon Prime adaptation. By actually making the heroes less unambiguously rotten, cutting down the childish silliness, making the violence less gratuitous and more justified, and making the Boys themselves more human, the series actually manages to be WAY darker than the comics. Hell, Billy Butcher actually contemplates MURDERING A CHILD in the series, which is something the way more psychotic Butcher of the comics would not.
    • About half of Garth Ennis's work goes so far around the bend that it becomes compelling or is goddamn hilarious. Below is one of his most infamous creations.
  • Crossed: Most of the world is dead or turned into murder-raping sadists á la the Reavers from Firefly. Showing any courage will get you killed or turned into one of the aforementioned murder-rapists, and there are survivors that are just as fucked up as the infectees. Supposedly a dig at arm chair survivalists, it's now mostly remembered for being edgy for the sake of edginess and being overall boring as hell.
  • Hatred: Remember how your family told you that GTA was breeding criminals and that games created "monsters"? Well, Hatred tries to cash in on that by making a game dedicated to killing innocent people and making a "parody" out of those reactions, but fails miserably to do that. This is because not only is our main "hero" a complete asshole with literally nothing redeeming about him, but most of the gameplay consists on you shooting unnarmed civilians and members of the policy/military that are extremely easy to beat, and coupled with the monochrome colors the game becomes very boring in a very quick pace. And unlike these old games that caused oh so much controversy, Hatred doesn't even have that good old orkish humor and tries to take everything inside it seriously, which makes the "Grimdark" aspect come off as very dumb.
  • Carl Sargent's total rape of the Greyhawk setting in From The Ashes. His grimdark was well-done; it's that he had to fuck over the game's oldest and most-beloved setting to do it that made it Derp.
  • The anime Redo of a Healer has caused a fucking shitstorm involving massive levels of skub in the anime fandom. It's basically a revenge fantasy hentai when the main character, a healing slave who was physically and sexually abused, resets time and fulfills his fantasy. Now, a normal person would just kill the abusers, but then this sick fuck tortures and rapes the first abuser, the kingdom's princess, on-camera. The epitome of sick-fuckery comes when the main character sneaks his way into the Imperial Army, and turns the guard into a little girl, and turns all his men into horny rape zombies, and has him raped to death. I'm serious, this show has such undiluted levels of sickfuckery and edge, and even more rape than Berserk. How they even allowed this to air is beyond me.
  • Most of the anti-HFY content in the World of Darkness, especially the unmitigated misanthropy in parts of Werewolf: The Apocalypse.

Grim Tragedy

Naturally in a universe such as 40k, the grimdarkness of the setting would mean nothing if not tied into the ironic tragedy of the lore. This includes:

  • A species so afraid of the dauntless perils of Chaos that they will brutally harass and execute entire populations out of mere suspicion, all to stop the spread of ruin while indirectly strengthening those who seek to destroy them (particularly Chaos). They, as a people, have progressed massively in population, technology and power since their species conception, yet they, more than anyone else, have lost one vital element: their humanity.
  • A race who was once at a zenith of civilization and prosperity, capable of bending the very Gods to their will. But by their own hand reduced themselves to scattered isolated fleets and colonies always on the run; their pompous and arrogant leaders hide behind a dwindling sense of security based in superiority over other races who are far more successful and perhaps destined to be greater than they ever were. A number among them, after their unholy and insidious near-demise, continue (with oblivious glee) to empower the very being that brought them to ruin in order to save themselves.
  • A race of creatures who possess the brightest "potential"; with near mastery over the psychic, near-natural physical perfection and almost limitless numbers from their highly successful methods of reproduction... And yet they are genetically restricted by an unquenchable thirst for conflict which drives each to idiocy, leaving them hopeless of advancing beyond simple barbarians.
  • An ancient people who were so envious of their neighbors' power that they were ready to cripple the entire galaxy just for the sake of petty superiority - a superiority neutered by their unwitting transformation into metaphorical and literal automatons. They are now mindless machines who, bar few, care nothing of their past and seek only one thing: Conquest. And those who still have their personalities are either insane, demented, brooding, psychotic, or any combination of these in various proportions.
  • A newborn race who innocently believes that there can be peace and acknowledgement among each other. Unfortunately the sinister methods they employ hoping that it is for something better is slowly, but steadily driving them into the decadence that plagues the other species. In doing so they become proof, both of the fact that anyone, no matter their intentions, can be corrupted, and also of the kindness that the rest have forsaken for damnation and despair...
  • The fact that, despite tens of thousands of years of knowing nothing but war, these peoples are woefully unprepared for what is to come. No matter how many regiments can be raised or Craftworlds restored, what is out there is all consuming, diabolical and numberless... Unless, they are themselves on the verge of extinction, and as such, desperately trying to cross over the great void between galaxies, which implies fighting against invincibles foes and fate dodging cheaters unnaturaly empowered by the grief of an unspeakable Eldritch Abomination beyond the cosmos. The good option is that there are a thousand galaxies worth of the fucking bugs; the bad option is that there are billions upon billions of galaxies worth of the fucking bugs. The worse option is that billions upon billions galaxies worth of what is essentially the perfect organism is running away from something worse.

See also

External Links

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