(Mental note: is this thread spam yet?  I would say almost, but not quite.
With that in mind I'm going to make this one contribution and then let it
go..)

Martin Bennett postulated:

I find that darkfics tend to go far more into the depths of the characters
and look at them, warts and all. They also get away from all that syrpuy 
happy stuff that I dispise so much. The fact is that life is NOT all roses
and happy endings. Life is pain. If you can't face the pain you should get 
out, and that's precisely what happens sometimes and it's good for overall
balance. Think how boring it would be if all fics were ended as tidily and
happily as...say... Kun-chan's? It's ammusing in it's own right, but let's
face it, there is such a thing as being TOO flowery! (no puns)

Okay, my take on this is, exactly: Life is pain.  We get plenty of pain in
real life.  Most of the time, I read fanfics to *escape* from real life to a
place where you can afford to be silly and problems tend to get solved
satisfactorily at the end of ten or twenty pages.
Darkfics can be an interesting change once in a while (especially if they're
extremely well done, like "Storm's End") but I have to agree with Stefan
(was he the one who started this thread?) in saying that being dark and
depressing just for the sake of being dark and depressing tends to get
tiresome rather quickly.

Which is not to say that no one should write darkfics, of course.  Everyone
should write what they're interested in; de gustibus non est disputandem.*
All I'm saying is, don't knock escapism and happy-ending fics either.  A
whole lot of the entire anime and manga genre is based upon embracing things
other than reality.

Ok, that's the end of my rant.  The list won't have to listen to anything
else from me on this topic. ^_^



*If i'm being to obscure here, that's "matters of taste are not to be
disputed" (in Latin).

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| Ben Elgin Benjamin_Elgin@hmc.edu              http://www2.hmc.edu/~belgin |
< Harvey Mudd College: East 116 x4855                 ^_^    Anime Forever! >
|Member of the #SkAS#: Skuld Appreciation Society - The goddess of debuggers|
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  "listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door; let's go"