What do you think of when you think of dark fantasy? Dark fantasy can encompass many different ideas, from complete moral corruption to a teenager falling in love with a 300-year-old vampire. Why is it always a teenage girl? Why not a teenage boy? Perhaps because we think of teen girls as innocent, but not teen boys? I really don’t have the answer to that question, just a hypothesis. But I digress.
I think Dark Fantasy, at least for myself, is a way to deal with real-life traumatic events in a therapeutic way. Hear me out on this, as it may seem a bit unorthodox.
One of my comfort TV shows to go to when the world looks bleak is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Yes, it’s a teen girl falling for a 300-year-old vampire. Yes, if he were an old human male, it would be disgusting, but hey, no matter the age of the female, simply falling for something that is not alive is disgusting, all on its own. Let’s look past this problematic plot point, shall we?
What makes Buffy one of my comfort shows is the mixture of dark themes with humor. Is it dark fantasy? You bet it is. A girl too young to consider a long-term relationship becomes infatuated with someone twenty times her age! He’s dead! She’s forced to fight for all of humanity before she even really knows what life is about. And she’ll never have a normal life. She lives in a world of evil, though some of what we might think of as evil turns out to be the good guys, and some of the good guys turns out to be evil.
Oddly, the show’s themes are right out of real life – you know if we take away the supernatural elements. Girls in particular are statistically more likely to be forced to grow up early, usually due to some form of abuse and/or neglect. We’re thrown into caretaker mode at an early age, sometimes even before we are teenagers, and have no guiding force to show us how to get it done. At least in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy gets a guide on how to handle the traumatic shift from girl to keeper of the world. Most of us do not have a watcher to guide us.
I have personal experience in this area, and perhaps this is why I find the show a comfort show – it gives me a good outcome to something in my life I had no control over. Maybe it’s a bit therapeutic as well, watching Buffy slay all the evil that I did not have a chance to slay. Granted, the evils in my life were not demons or vampires, but it doesn’t make what happened in my life any less evil. And it does it with a dose of humor all while offering me a controlled way to beat the evil – by watching Buffy do it.
It’s this feeling of comfort, a sense of controlling trauma and chaos on the written page, or viewed show/movie that I find when I write. Even the supernatural must find a way through their chaotic world, usually without a guide.