Catherynne M. Valente
patreon
A Tale of Two Gritties: Miracles, Survival, and Hope in "Serious" Stories
🕑 Added 2025-06-01 00:46:36 +0000 UTCLike many others, I watched the second and final season of Andor over the last month, a show I love more than is totally socially acceptable to express.
This isn't a review of Andor, though, and this essay isn't about whether Andor is good or very, very good. The second season wasn't perfect but it was Its Own Thing, without concern for anything but its own integrity, which is better than perfection, almost all of the time.
Nor is it, strictly speaking, about how Andor ends, though there will be a fairly minor non-specific spoiler about that ending shortly, and since Patreon's rickety fucking excuse word processor, bounteous though it be with almost all the hot new features of WinStar circa 1990, does not offer spoiler tags, this is your warning.
It's about realism. I know, right? Ew. Wash your hands.
(Here's your vague spoiler, and it is vague, I promise.)
You see, while many people definitely die over the course of Andor's conclusion, as you'd expect both from an actual rag-tag galactic rebellion and a gritty (oh, get very used to that word, my friends) modern prestige drama with a science fictional premise, the soul-toll...is actually not nearly as high as said prestige dramas usually put up, or as high as most fans fully assumed it would be.
It's not that fans were upset by that, per se, though some were, because fans, and Star Wars fans specifically, love to be upset on the internet about something. But in the immediate aftermath, the Discourse, she was a bit...surprised.
So was I, and then surprised that I was surprised. And it's all been sort of bubbling around in the cauldron of my head over the last few weeks as I work on the dramatic conclusion to a novel of my own, one that attempts something closer to realism on at least one or two of the pillars holding the thing up.
Into every generation's media environment there is born Some Particular Point of Storytelling Order we all decide, for whatever reason, We're Gonna Take This Bit Super Seriously for Awhile Because We Are Serious Adult Artists Who Only Create Super Serious Adult Art for Adults.
We then take it SO FUCKING SERIOUSLY for SO FUCKING LONG everyone eventually hates the New Cool Way of Doing Things so much they start running the minute they hear an ironic, detached, highly mannered voiceover from an ironic, detached, highly-mannered youth.
Sometimes it's a medium--Super Serious Adult Art used to a Strictly Motion Picture thing, and the silly shit went on TV or into video games or comics or whatever didn't take millions to create. But before that, movies WERE the silly shit, and the THEATAH, DARLING was where the Real, Gritty, Very Solemnly Important work was being done. And of course, television has become the Complex Stories Depot for Auteurs while they seemingly have just given up on making feature films of several different kinds entirely. (Somewhere in there radio did its best. )Anime got to be the new Serious Artistic Medium in the first decade and a half of the 21st century. In the 80s and 90s it was the Western, in the 70s it was Noir, so on and so forth.
But most often its a genre, or subgenre, or narrative or stylistic technique. In my generation, over the last 20ish years, the genre glow-up has obviously been science fiction generally (fantasy to a lesser extent, for enough reasons that it's an entirely separate essay) and superhero stories specifically. Not only were these suddenly Super Serious Adult Stuff (which they can be), but it all needed to be written and shot to be as gritty, grim, dark (literal and figurative), sad, angst-riddled, desaturated as possible, with as much emotional and physical brutality as you could get away with. Not to mention, these stories ought to be 100% certified camp-free, please and thank you, absolutely no camp in my cape-and-tights stories! (Again, probably another essay, but there's a rock-hard core of anxiety about masculinity in all this rush to get as violent, emotionally inexpressive, and monochromatic about traditionally boy-coded stories.)
And while Marvel stepped carefully because they knew children were going to be watching it, absolutely grinding violence, sex, grueling death, despair, and trauma became part of almost every kind of story. It was a new toy. Everyone loves a new toy. Kicking out the cheerful, no-one-is-in-actual-danger-here-despite-the-very-scary-situation blitheness of the previous generations' goof-ass Flash Gordon stylings. In part because we could; censors had lightened up so much and people were hungry for whatever they hadn't been allowed to see before. The edgelord trends of culture in general. The longing to see the things a generation loved and feverishly imagined as children treated like they mattered, like they were Real Art, like they were Worthy of adult attention. (And that's every generation--Westerns were insanely popular because Boomers grew up on the cheesy ones and wanted to reinvent it, same with Noir, same with comics and all the rest. What a generation loves when they're small is what they want to see given the epic treatment when they're big. Arguably the first television show with feature film production values/complexity, Twin Peaks, started out as an idea to take soap operas completely seriously and create one for NIGHT TIME when ADULTS watch. So I guess what I'm saying is, beware the DRAMA, the AGONY, the GIRTTY REALISM of Citizen Skibidi in about 10 years, everyone.)
And in the end, it was and remains interesting as fuck to consider how the world-threatening plotlines of these kinds of stories would actually play out in real life, without the safety-rails of fiction.
But that trend in televisual science fiction and fantasy came out of the general gritty-and-grimdark trend non-speculative entertainment had been going through since HBO decided to go way harder at TV than anyone else. And starting in the late 90s, even creators who weren't making Serious Arthouse Adult Content for People Who Own Stuff Now started picking out some aspect of their stories to makeover that way, a Grimdark Accent Wall, if you will.
This isn't an academic essay, it's just me THINKING THINGS and I SWEAR I'M GOING SOMEWHERE WITH IT ALL, so I'm not going to do another History of Television thing where I like...actually look up dates and cite my sources and try to be fair to more obscure early creators. I'm just gonna say Joss Whedon and hope for the best. Not because he's so awesome, necessarily. (You don't have to tell me the bad, I am a geek, I know.) Because he was making Buffy in the late 90s. And then, in the early 00s, Buffy was soft-cancelled at FOX and brought back on UPN (if you're not old enough to know what that is, it literally doesn't matter except that it was the TV channel equivalent of the old garden shed out back), where Joss proceeded to start angrily chucking fucks out windows, because no one really cares what you're making in the old garden shed as long as you don't try to bring it in the house.
So in seasons 5, 6, and 7, we get the totally stripped-down, very realistic and gutting Buffy's Mom Dies episode, both insane BDSM trauma-sex AND the shock death of a main character, then several more Main Character Deaths in and around the finale, only one of which gets take-backsies. Let's not get into Angel on this one.
Joss could never let that trick go in any other project of his--and neither could anyone else after that. It's super effective! When the audience is expecting a comedica action romp and gets hit in the face with Grounded Emotional Consequences and Maybe Also Shrapnel, they get much more upset. (Look, I'm not proud, wrote Space Opera, I like that trick PLENTY.) And part of the joy of creating art is making people get as upset as possible! It's so effective, it basically became a requirement. Yeah, we all knew half the universe wasn't going to stay dead at the end of Infinity War, but we knew for a stone-cold fact someone was going to eat it in Endgame, probably multiple someones. At this point, it's FAR more surprising to have a speculative fiction tv show end without any significant characters brutally dying in ostensibly "realistic" ways than to have the whole cast wiped out.
And it's been so long that Real Serious Stories have had to be this way, at least in part, that it became a joke, and then kind of settled into just How you Do It. Especially if the story has the stink of...genre fiction...all over their premise. That musk (no relation) seems to make people instinctively nervous and suspicious that what they're about to brain-gobble is Actually Kid Stuff, which is why speculative fiction overdid it with the NO COLOR NO SMILES ONLY PAIN zeitgeist for so long. Much in this life is compensation or projection or both.
So when Andor, a show that is the dictionary definition of Science Fiction But Do It Grimdark Realism, ends with, sure, some of the people we didn't hear a word about in Rogue One dying, but not nearly as many of them, as horribly, or as graphically, as you just tacitly assume will have to, as a canny consumer of 21st century television, it is surprising. Because Hollywood has spent quite some time and energy convincing us that all that brutality IS realism. Is the only realism. That if someone isn't getting ripped apart in front of you, either in the flesh or in spirit, it's Not a Serious Story.
And this is what I keep thinking about. (Yay! A point!) Because I do understand all that wasn't just an industry singing DARKNESS NO PARENTS into the void, it was a reaction against decades of rah-rah war movies, campy action flicks, and totally ahistorical historical epics where human bodies were basically made out of bubble gum, everyone got over feeling any kind of way about whatever Hieronymus Bosch orgy of horror they just sailed through immediately, if indeed they had a feeling about it at all, and whoever the script designated "the good guys" always won.
But as satisfying as it might be to nod solemnly and hold forth on the very unforgiving realities of war and human misery, actual reality, even the reality of war, isn't really like that.
Or at least not all like that.
In real wars, people do survive. Sometimes whole squads. Sometimes almost everyone survives, even when they were sure they wouldn't. People do incredible things, things human bodies shouldn't be able to do, fueled by loyalty or panic or adrenaline or dedication to a cause or love for their fellow soldier or their village or their children or hope for the future. They survive by dumb luck, the bullet misses by a hair, the bomb doesn't go off at the last minute, the gun jams, the horse kicks at just the right time, the guys on the left and right die while the guy in the middle calls his life a miracle forever after.
People survived Omaha Beach. Not a ton, but some. One dude survived Thermopylae because he got pink eye (not making that up, I swear) and his name meant the best of all people. People survived Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, an afternoon walk you'd very much think no one could realistically saunter back from. And not just a few stragglers, either. counting both sides, the death rate, which includes the wounded and the captured, is only just over 60%. Of some 12,000 involved, 6,240 were killed, injured, or taken prisoner. That makes Pickett's Charge, one of the dumbest, most dangerous, straight-up just walking directly into every gun, actions in military history, is a real, grim, dark, ugly, gritty story where 5,760 people weren't even seriously hurt that day.
And in rebellions, in revolutions, successful or otherwise, people are rarely walking into traffic like that. They're hiding in plain sight, choosing their moments, fighting guerilla-style from the shadows, taking risks only when necessary. Thousands and thousands of human beings live through revolutions in which they see active combat and die decades later in the wrinkles of their sleep.
In fiction, we usually call them protagonists. And until deconstructing all the things became the way to art, they were usually the protagonists because they survived. That's why we get so shocked when main characters die. There is or was a tacit understanding that we weren't experiencing this story from the perspective of This Guy Over Here to whom Crazy Stuff Happened by total, and not-too-believable coincidence at random, but because Crazy Stuff Happened to This Guy Over Here and that's why the story isn't about someone else. It goes all the way back to Greek theater--a messenger arrives to tell the story of the battle. Because the messenger saw it all and lived.
Someone had to live.
Survival IS part of the story of war. Not just darkness, not just monstrous inhumanity and gore and loss, but also miracles and grace. Also kindness and friendship and last-minute rescues. Not just tunnels, also light. Every conflict in history is full of these stories. Sometimes the cavalry does come over the hill just when all seems lost. The cheesy, unrealistic stuff is part of the story of life, even the hardest life. Not because those who survive are superior in some way, but because chance rules this world. You cannot tell a brutal, realistic story of war and privation using only pain. There is also redemption, hope, striving, bravery, crazy coincidences that make you believe in God. And if you don't think a massive, gnarly root of religion itself isn't the desperate need to explain why I lived and my friends all around me died, well, I have a bridge over the Dardanelles to sell you. The guys at the VFW couldn't let go of their war experiences because it traumatized them, yes. But if you get really into talking, some of them also experienced more camaraderie, joy, purpose, and hope than they ever did again. And they felt horrifically guilty about that part. Because that's part of the story, too.
It's not so grimdark, reality. Even now, even in this hurting world. Grimlight, maybe.
Realism, very occasionally, must include the possibility of everything turning out much better than we thought they could.
We get so wrapped up in wanting things like Star Wars to be taken seriously that we ignore the plain objective fact that in real life, all the time, people are saved, wild coincidences do happen, those lost are found, and happy endings aren’t actually a lie invented by Hollywood.
They’re just rare. That’s why they’re precious. That's why we pick them out specially to tell a story about.
And maybe, by some unguessable, primal sympathetic magic, to draw those happy endings out into the sun to meet us and carry us home.
Comments
Molly McEnerney
I've just seen a Saturday Night Live sketch about wanting to create a serious, adult version of Spongebob, so you are definitely on to something with people wanting to make their childhood silly stuff into adult serious stuff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyzPEkT_eZQ
Howard Chu
Ultimately, I read fiction for escape. If I want reality I can just look out the window. We had 3 seasons of Star Trek TOS in which the Enterprise dutifully bears the crew place to place. Then a bunch of movies where the ship isn't ready, the crew isn't ready, and everything blows up. Nobody could write a good story where the ship functions properly, and the crew is competent and experienced? So annoying...
