So, What Exactly Defines An Edgelord In Your Eyes? Some Of Your Own Characters Also Have Dark Aesthetics

So, what exactly defines an edgelord in your eyes? Some of your own characters also have dark aesthetics and kill people and have traumatic backstories, but none of them are really edgelords. Is there anything that conceptually makes someone an edgelord or is it more in the way they conduct themselves?

I think this is self-explanatory.

A lot of my characters are hardened in battle, but I mean... Aliana's a Sith, Anevay's a soldier, they kinda have to be. In private, where we see them most, they're actually cinnamon rolls. They're emotional, they crave the affection of their loved ones. My characters don't brood, they cry.

An edgelord isn't allowed to be soft. They're harsh, gruff, damaged, brutal people who are forced to stay that way because of the aesthetic. Their trauma isn't a layer to their character, it's a fetish for the audience.

It seems like you just...don't enjoy stories that have too much depth and force you to get too invested? The stuff you call addiction-based storytelling is what most people call "engaging." I mean, don't get me wrong, casual media enjoyers are totally valid but the way you seem to imply that having a deep and heavy investment in media is a moral failing seems really weird to me because it's almost as if you're encouraging people to stop having fun and get back to work.

It seems like you just…don't enjoy stories that have too much depth and force you to get too invested?

Tell me you did not just say this to someone who adores Kingdom Hearts? You absolute buffoon.

The problem with depth is that you can be deep with an interesting or complicated theme, and you can also be deep by scattershotting lore and random metaphors everywhere. And because fandom is stupid it can't tell the difference between the two.

My problem is when a concept is deceptively simple, but because fandom just gotta do a fandom they gaslight themselves into thinking it was more deep than it actually was. Fantasy can be pretty fucking deep, but it's not going to do that just by virtue of networks of lore. It usually does it through being rather profound because their writers had things to say that didn't need an entire seven seasons to get through.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but one of the most beautiful lines of dialogue I've ever seen in a fantasy story literally hammers this point home.

"Saruman believes that it is only great power that can hold evil in check. But that is not what I have found. I've found that it's the small things. Everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keeps the darkness at bay. Simple acts of kindness and love." - Gandalf, The Hobbit

The Hobbit is about how nice it is to think of home, and how most of the main characters have been forced from their homes by a greedy monster who is completely obsessed with gold. GEE I WONDER IF THE AUTHOR IS THE VETERAN OF A REALLY DEADLY AND POINTLESS WAR.

You know I remember my ex once opined that she didn't like all the time the Lord of the Rings spent on characters talking instead of the big fantasy battles, and I have literally never seen anyone completely and utterly miss the point of Lord of the Rings any harder. This was someone who was taking a college course about the fantasy genre.

You can have all the dense lore and interconnected continuity until you're blue in the face, but if at the end of the story you're like "And then the prophesized hero defeated the great evil and there was peace throughout the land" then that story is about as deep as a fucking puddle and no amount of complicated magic systems are going to make it any less shallow.

At that point, you're not deep. You're padded like a menstruating firehose. You're just filling out a fucking wiki.

And when a story does have something to say, terminally stupid asshats like you will it "Preachy." Because you don't want a deep story. You just want a fucking glossary of places and names and spells. An actually deep story is about as much use to you as a professional grade drawing tablet in a fingerpainting class for baboons.

You're the kind of person who sees a trauma survivor escape their abuser and find a found family and calls it a "redemption arc."

You don't want deep stories. You don't want to be engaged. You just want to pretend that you are by memorizing useless information and never actually thinking about anything because fandom has beaten it into your head that critical thinking is bad and mindless consumption is "based."

If you want to do that, if you want to pick nits like an amphetamine-fuelled chimp, go right ahead. But don't come to me and try that Uno Reverse bullshit. Don't come to me telling me you appreciate deep stories.

Because you don't.

Achan Biong by Bartek Szmigulski for Wonderland Magazine Spring 2022

I had an argument with some friends a while back about where evil comes from and what makes someone a villain. They believed in the "power corrupts" theory, but I disagreed because a world where nobody has power is a terrible place. My theory was that evil comes from a delusion of superiority, where someone believes themselves too be better than they actually are. In that sense, power doesn't corrupt, it's the belief in one's own hype and the illusion of being powerful that corrupts. Do you, at all, agree with this theory? I'm just asking out of curiosity.

Power doesn't corrupt. It reveals. The reason people think it corrupts is because the power a horrible has, the more damage they can do.