Grimdark

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 40,000, 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 in which it would really suck to live, and it is the setting of Warhammer 40,000 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

• Massive, imperialist, overbearing, bureaucratic, dystopian dictatorships; e.g. Nazi Germany clones, Soviet Union/China clones, or straight out examples of "Big Brother is watching you".
• Constant, never ever-ending warfare, usually as a horrific combination of outdated tactics and technology (And sometimes overly advanced technology). E.g., sending line infantry armed with single-shot Lasguns against a Heavy Bolter nest.
• Horrifyingly large death tolls are perfectly normal. Genocide is also perfectly normal, and in many cases encouraged and espoused.
• Slavery is also perfectly normal, and sometimes considered a great necessity. Massive constructs are often built via slave labor.
• Everyone is racist towards non-humans/elves/mutants/fungus/lizards/worms/robots/aliens/each other. Vice versa for literally every race.
• Speaking of xenophobia towards every species, those who express sympathy for a hated race and/or intermingle with said race, are usually publicly humiliated, tortured, and usually purged.
• Daily dose of HFY. And Awesome.
• The vast majority are poor people who literally live in shit, pollution, crime, and a plethora of all kinds of filthy diseases, except for a few greedy upper 1% who own 99.9% of everything. This has become increasingly ironic as 0.1% of our real world population began to own 99.999% of everything.
• You, a poor bastard, are being farmed for shits and giggles by said few greedy upper 1%.
• Most of the poor bastards are being forced to work 23 hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, in factories and/or forced labour camps, until their bodies give out. Forever.
• They're probably making weapons and equipment for the military (which is where the rest of the poor bastards are).
• Dark, disgraceful and recondite past covered with lies propanganda, deception and partiality.
• The Higher Powers do indeed give you consideration, they're just malevolent as all fuck.
• Chronic backstabbing. Just like in real life relationships. (Who hurt you?)
• "Friendly fire"
• Child soldiers. Just like in real life.
• Your morning alarm clock is the stray bullets you hope don't hit you, from the gangsters doing a drive-by on their enemy who happens to be in the same district to whom you don't even belong to or like.
• Status quo is god. Literally.
• Change is worse.
• Cybernetics and cyborgs; the less human, the better.
• Daily forecasts reguarly call for a 80% chance or more of *BLAM*.
• Police brutality.
• Even minor crimes can have major punishments.
• Being innocent or even a victim of crime can be counted as a crime. All participants in a crime, whether perpetrator or victim, are charged.
• Government agencies that are always there to fuck you over at the slightest hint of heresy.
• Did I mention that the Inquisition commits planetary genocide 24/7?
• The cocksuckers responsible for most of the shittiness are not only getting away with it, but are surviving and thriving, without becoming major targets for the noblebright forces.
• Torture that makes the CIA look like saints.
• Sanity checks.
• Criminally insane delusional psychotics tortured in filthy mental asylums (in case of no/failed SAN checks).
• Disgusting, horrifying, tentacled eldritch abominations that are often the cause of aforementioned criminal insanity.
• Rape. Just like in real life. (And often by said tentacled Eldritch Abominations.)
• Surgery without anesthesia.
• Cannibalism, in three forms:
  1. For power (embracing the myth of "you are what you eat").
  2. For food value; sometimes this is concealed by callous authorities as some other kind of food; sometimes, it's just a biological, cultural or desperation thing.
  3. For the sheer fun of it.
• Want chemotherapy or some other expensive treatment? Well, you have to eviscerate that old dropout student of yours in order to pay.
• In fact even surgery without anesthesia is a luxury available only to wealthy or important ones, as are all other forms of medicine. 99% of people are expected to die when they fall sick or get injured. That is when they don't get executed FOR falling sick or getting injured.
• Human experiments. Sometimes willingly, but most of the time not!
• Zombie plagues.
• Ritual cult sacrifices.
• Massive amounts of blood, gore, guts, pain and hatred.
• No personal opinion or choice. Only the illusion of it, in which you probably end up an unwilling slave. Or...something worse.
• Anti-intellectualism.
• ...and it's justified because even an instant of unprotected thinking risks mass destruction.
• PTSD.
• Nihilism.
• Racism is actually right.
• Gothic and emo aesthetics (with the help of tons of "decorative" skulls).
• There are no "good guys". Everyone's a jerk, including yourself. Especially yourself.
• Everyone is evil either because they’re just plain monsters or because they are trying to survive which makes everyone evil to everyone else.
• The guys everyone refer to be "good" or "nice" are actually just the least evil bunch, and would still make your average high fantasy/sci-fi arch-villains look like saints in comparison.
• The REAL good guys are either the ones (usually) mostly hated, and are going to get fucked over beyond human recognition usually without any logical reason or too few to make any difference.
• Aforementioned "good guys" are only "good" because they do care about their allies and civilians, and generally try to make the place less shitty for those they care for. But they still wouldn't hesitate a second before doing pretty horrible things like terrorist actions against "The Man", killing a defenseless xeno child, etc...
• The aforementioned defenseless xeno-child needed to be killed either because it was guaranteed to grow up to be a monster, would grow to compete for resources needed for survival, would be corrupted, was already a monster, or any number of reasonable justifications that would leave a modern man in frustrated tears trying to justify not killing it. Welcome to Warhammer 40,000.
• Magic is inherently malevolent and actively seeks to corrupt and destroy those unfortunates 'gifted' with magical abilities. And everything around them at the time.
• You either die a worthy death or you live long enough to see yourself becoming something that you've always hated.
• Everyone will most likely die in the end. Especially the ones important to and including the main character.
• Always polluted, never sunny.
• No ice cream. No lollipops either.
• Death or suicide will only make things much, much worse in Lovecraftian levels, as a hive of disgusting, incomprehensibly evil supernatural daemons are waiting patiently to eternally torment your un-life and roast your soul alive day and night forever and ever, again and again and again and again.
• Tremendous potential for offensive/dark comedy/lulz.
• And if you ever, EVER try to change this shitty world or try to help one person just a little, you will probably suffer terrible consequences, because altruism is a dying philosophy. (And because your reasoning is flawed.)
• Life sucks.
• There's only war.
• You're probably going to get eaten by Tyranids.
• no gf
• Good luck and have fun.
• Even using the wrong calendar is heresy.

Stuff considered Grimdark

A world where the only way to beat grimdark is by introducing something even grimmer and darker

The Grimdarkian, by IronShrineMaiden

/tg/

• 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. Now, Age of Sigmar continues it and is slightly better, in so much that it is unlikely to be destroyed, though that may imply an even worse eternal stalemate.
• Grimdark Songwriting
• Dark Sun
• Call of Cthulhu
• CthulhuTech
• Don't Rest Your Head
• Playing mortals in Exalted
• FATAL
• Kingdom Death. Makes 40k's setting seem pleasant and cheerful.
• Midnight setting for D&D.
• Paranoia (though used for parodying 1984).
• Pokemon Tabletop Adventures (optionally).
• RIFTS
• Fragged Cyberpunk: A prequel to the more optimistic Fragged Empire. Fragged Cyberpunk focuses on the twilight years of humanity as Habsburgian levels of genetic erosion and degradation leave it only a few centuries of life, while the powers that be, that could cure it do not bother and instead focus their efforts on terraforming hospitable worlds for their new, engineered super species. All the while herding humans into cramped cities on dead planets that are effectively concentration/death camps for what remains of mankind.
• 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.
• SLA Industries. Imagine if the Emperor was not only still walking around, but was a callous businessman with a permanent skeleton face and no bling armor. Imagine a civilization that exists almost entirely to strip mine itself in the name of consumerism, with snuff television being the primary source of entertainment and anyone trying to do business not on SLA's pay roll being branded a "Soft Company" to be exterminated. Oh, and truly horrid aliens that were thought extinct centuries ago are now making a comeback AND occult fuckery of varying flavors is manifesting in increasing amounts in Mort City, SLA's capital.
• 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.
• Unhallowed Metropolis, a game representing probably the outer limits of how Grimdark you can go without sliding into Grimderp.
• 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.

Vidya

• 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.
• 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.
• Battletech about half the time. On a good day, mercenaries fight proxy wars and follow the Geneva convention to keep damage and body counts low, ComStar keeps everyone in line, and "bombed back to the stone age" actually means "your spaceships blew up and you enjoy a comfortable 1990s era lifestyle." On bad days, the Crusader Clans storm in and break everything, the Word of Blake jihad starts nuking everyone they don't like, and all FTL communication breaks plunging the galaxy into a new dark age, erasing centuries of political and technological progress.
• 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.
• 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. We're pretty sure the creators are Warhammer fans since one of the DLC bosses is an Inquisijanny stamping out heresies (read: you infected with the vampire curse).
• Bloodborne or the love child of Dark Souls (gameplay) and Lovecraftian mythology (its main inspiration for setting and theme). Another masterpiece from FROM software and Hidetaka Miyazaki. TLDR, the game is a mix of elritch horrors, omnipotent creatures which are fundementally gods and Dark Souls, though this time there is no fire to link, only FEAR.
• Cyberpunk 2077
• 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.
• 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.
• Dead Space. A group of human discovered a device of unknown origin called a Marker and it turned them into undead alien monsters. In the sequel, it was revealed Markers were created by a long extinct alien species, and the Markers continue to infect other intelligent species, to the point the corpses of their entire civilizations formed into a giant undead moon capable of telepathically mind fucking people.
• Destiny: While the game itself is Noble Bright/Neutral, the lore is definitively Grim Dark. Entire civilisations were destroy by the Darkness, Brainiac style. Humanity is reduced to one big city on Earth, literally under a the protection of a paracausal entity, the Traveller, that actively help you AND your enemies. Through experimentation that would make Fabius Bile proud, millions of humans were transform into robot to fight a secret and seemingly endless war against temporal machines. At one point, you and your kind, the Guardians, were hunted down to serve as battery, and the carcass of your companions, the Ghosts, which give you your "immortality", were used as currency. And I did not talk about the Hive and their Gods.
• Dishonored - Grimdark, and steampunk. Only in the "Kill fucking everyone" ending though.
• 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.
• 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. You play Caim, a mute zombie slaughter enthusiast who teams up with a blind pedophile priest, a baby eating elf witch, and a ageless shota. The true ending for the game involves Cain and his dragon transporting the queen of the Lovecraftian Watchers to a greyscale version of Tokyo (Yes, the Tokyo of our world) and engages it in a rythm-based battle of song. After defeating it, the queen disintegrates into particles that start turning the entire population into salt statues, while Caim and his dragon get shot down by fighter jets.
• Elden Ring, aka Dark Souls 2: Electric Boogalooo. The titular metaphysical object responsible for the previous prosperity of the world has been shattered, the demigods are in an eternal stalemate, and you are called upon to decide the fate of the Lands Between. A magnum opus of a collaboration between FROMsoft, Miyazaki, and George R.R. Martin of Game of Thrones fame. Like the other Soulsborne (would it be Soulsbornering now?) games, be prepared to die. A lot.
  • Nier takes place 1462 years into the future. After countless grimdark conflicts involving child soldiers, human experiments and more resource shortages, a scientist decided to separate the rest of the survivors' souls (gestalt) from their bodies, hoping they could outlast a mind rape pandemic. But of course all these attempts are futile failures 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 androids were created by the last human survivors. But the humans that escaped to the moon 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 even more painful and tragic, the androids have the human concepts of pain and emotions programmed to them, making their death even more painful.
• Dwarf Fortress
• Factorio. You're a 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.
• Grim Dawn. A farming game about a never-ending struggle between humans and multiple otherworldly powers.
• Hellgate London
• 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). Humanity has been wiped out except for five people, who trapped inside a complex controlled by a misanthropic, reality-warping supercomputer keeping them alive to torture them and altered their minds and/or bodies in cruelly ironic ways.
• LISA the RPG.
• Lobotomy Corp/Library of Ruina AKA Project Moon's setting. To summarize its setting, think of it as Shadowrun with less gun, more melee combat, and subtle rants on corporate dystopias. Also has a bit of philosophies and studies on human behavior, personalities and emotions. Read more on their lore wiki.
• Madness Combat. No regret, no remorse, no reason, only madness.
• Mass Effect. While its universe is hardly grimdark overall, the Reapers and what happens to "harvested" individuals are some of the sickest forms of grimdark possible. During the Reaper War, trillions of people across the galaxy were vaporized, crushed, dissolved slowly and/or violently converted into cyber zombies or brainwashed slaves. And that's just the latest Reaper War. The Reapers have committed so much galactic genocide beforehand, they turned it into a regularly scheduled event and made the galaxy their farm/laboratory.
  • There is also the Genophage, a bioweapon deployed against the Krogan race as to halt the Krogan Rebellions. This bioweapon was basically a massive, permanent genetic Fetus Deletus that dramatically lowered Krogan birthrates and caused a lot of stillbirths (literal "piles of children that never lived" - actual in-game quote). If that wasn't bad enough, they live on a death-world and have a warlike culture, so this puts them at risk of extinction. And if THAT wasn't bad enough, they've been suffering under the Genophage for over a thousand years after the Krogan Rebellions ended, with prior attempts to cure it unsuccessful or sabotaged.
• Path of Exile. The game's setting is basically a documentary on the corruption of Roman Empire.
• Portal once you get past the memes
• 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.
• 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.
• Space Station 13 : Space paranoia simulator 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.
• 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.
• 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!)

Animation and Comics

• Adventure Time's backstory.
• 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. Notable deaths in the series include but are not limited to: the pheasants, a couple who die at a farm in an extremely cruel manner; three baby mice who are all killed onscreen by a shrike, a bird infamous for impaling its prey; and 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.
• 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 contemporaries, being repurposed 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.

It was going to be a kids show they said. It was going to be as whimsical as Pokemon they said...

• 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.
• Ava's Demon. 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.
• Blame!
• Berserk
• Devilman. Especially CRYBABY
• 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.) Unsurprisingly, the writer has written Cthulhu Mythos short stories.
  • Digimon Adventure Tri (aimed towards adult fans of the series) takes Tamers up a notch in just plain creepiness. 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.
• Dorohedoro. 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.
• 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.
• Most good 'Real Robot' anime/video games. Further discussion will result in skub.
• 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.
• Emergence aka Metamorphosis. 177013.
• Everything is Fine. A horror webtoon about a seemingly perfect society where everyone wears giant cat masks with cutesy expressions, have to pretend that everything is fine at all times and be perfectly moral, upstanding citizens... or watch their kids commit suicide in real-time. In other words, it's a horrific dystopia taking the image of a perfect suburb where you are made to ignore everything that is going wrong, or those you love most kill themselves horribly, then you get kicked to the curb as a broken shell of a human being, forgotten and ignored.
• 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.
• 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).
• GANTZ
• Goblin Slayer. Pretty much Berserk if it was set in a Dungeons and Dragons world.
• Grave of the Fireflies. The plot of film is "A pair WW2 of orphans from a high ranking officer in the brutal Japanese military freeloads off on his aunt's goodwill then refuses to sell his mother's clothes and piano and sets off on his own without a plan, only for him and his sister to starve to death." The movie is taken by 99% of the viewers overseas as showing how innocent the Japanese were, but the Japanese see it as an allegory about the leaders of Japan (the older brother) disregarding the suffering of their own people (his little sister), telling them childish propaganda that they are doing really well in war, and then obliging the childish tantrums of the populace enabled by such propaganda. This is an allegory of Japan, when shit hit the fan, told people to press on and declared everyone must sacrifice their life for the one true living god that is Emperor Hirohito.
  • Even in this period millions of people did what work they could find to feed themselves despite the war time inflation brought on by the wars they started, yet the protagonist would not "deign" menial labor because he was the son of a rich, high ranking Naval officer. Starvation was NOT rampant in Japan, but the protagonist (Japan)'s arrogant laziness and subsequent death was an allegory of making his bed and sleeping in it. Note how while it wasn’t easy, they WEREN'T starving when they were under their “evil” aunt's care.
    • For instance, the day the battleship Yamato sank in 1945, it was scheduled to serve the men aboard canned beef, canned red bean rice, and sweet bean porridge for dessert.
  • This movie was based on a book by Akiyuki Nosaka who lived through WW2 as a boy. He admittedly regretted killing his toddler of a little sister by hungrily stealing food from her and dashing her head against the ground and giving her concussions when she would cry about it. The novel was to be his penance of sorts.
    • This is still absolutely nothing compared to what the Japanese were doing to other colonies though, it was rather 2 million Vietnamese that were butchered to rob and feed Japanese, just between October of 1944 to August of 1945 alone. Not counting all the families traumatized or permanently crippled via malnutrition. Thankfully the war ended with an Allied victory that put a quick end to this, Japan surrendered because of USSR's August push through Manchuria and was poised to land on Japan proper (Japan did not surrender because of American nukes which they themselves were busy making unlike the Nazis who didn't bother. Japanese high command got casualty reports like that everyday at the end of the war, they were only afraid of being split in two like Germany did in May. Japan also sent only foreign slaves to clean up the radiation and killed them afterwards to hide their war crimes.) In Korea people were dying from intestinal bleeding from eating boiled tree barks too rough for the human body as a regular prolonged diet because anyone who touched the crops were beaten or executed, because food was robbed and taken to Japan. In Korea particular, due to proximity, the nation’s hills were rendered barren dirt hills for all the trees were cut down to make desperate turpentine oil that was going to be a makeshift fuel source for ships and planes, sent to Japan once the Southeast Asian territories and their oil fields were liberated by Allies. The dead cannot speak and the living can whine louder about the troubles they faced, that's why so many killings happened at the end of the war to hide war crimes.
    • Director Takahata Isao himself said this is NOT an anti-war anime, but an allegory of idealists bringing people death. Also note he is a rare kind in modern Japan who accuses the Japanese government for all the sins of WW2, and used to fight the riot police who were quelling anti-imperialists like him. Note that Japan is a place where saying Japan was at fault can get one shot dead. Mayor Motoshima of Nagasaki in 1990 got shot in the heart for accusing his government of starting the wars that got his city nuked. Mayor Itoh got shot in the heart for saying the same in 2007. There's just no way ordinary criminals could get their hands on a gun in a country with really tight gun control laws, unless...
• 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 stated to be Jesus.
• 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.
• Magical Girl Site. So grimdark it makes Meguca look Noblebright.
• Made in Abyss. A death world disguised as a cute loli adventure featuring on-screen death and mutilation, child labor, and philosophical exploration of just how far humanity can go before completely losing it.
• Muv-Luv Often compared to 40k in how bleak and brutal the series is.
• 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 Totoro, Spirited Away and Ponyo, gave us a Science-Fantasy Epic of the brutality of war. 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.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion (Especially End).
• Now and Then, Here and There. The setting takes place in an alternate world, 10 billion years into the future where the sun is about to go into a red giant and whatever scraps of humanity are fighting each other for the last remaining sources of water. Expect a lot of child soldiers, child abuse, child torture, child rape and ethnic cleansing to a scarily realistic degree. This is a post-post-apocalyptic world that is designed to break the viewers. It is an anime darker than 40k despite the 'happy' ending due the sheer levels of nihilism and unforgiving horrors of human depravity.
• Re:Zero
• 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. 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. 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.
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Being Meguca is suffering.
• 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.
• Wanted. The villains won the war against the heroes and completely erased them from reality. 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.

Literature

• 1984
• All Quiet on the Western Front Among all the wars World War I was particularly grimdark one and the writer, who himself served in the war, thought that the war destroyed his whole generation whether or not they survived the shells. The book follows a group of Germans barely the age of 18 who join the war with enthusiasm, only to be met with the worst kinds of horrors of war only World War I could bring. Even if they survive the battles, they are broken by the war. By the end of the novel they are all dead and the field report simply states "all quiet on the western front".
• Cormac McCarthy is an American writer whose most famous works are considered some of the darkest novels ever written, due to the near casual way violence is depicted and the rather bleak outlook it takes on humanity's place in the world. Notables include:
  • Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, a book following the exploits of the Glanton Gang, a real-life group of scalpers in the 19th Century. Kids die left and right, lawlessness runs rampant, sickfuckery abounds, it's... brutal.
  • No Country for Old Men, also adapted as a film, covers the rising violence of the drug war on the US-Mexico border. Or simply suggests things have always been that bad and there's no way for good men to stop it.
  • The Road, along with the film, can be summarized as follows - the biosphere is dead with no hope of reviving it. A man and his son now traverse the dying, bleak landscape along a road, without any remnant of human civilization left, only able to depend on each other. Seriously, this setting is bleak in ways Warhammer 40k can only have nightmares about.
• Clive Barker in general. His works include Hellraiser, Rawhead Rex where an ancient god of male sex eats kids, the Midnight Meat Train where an ancient cult feeds people to an underground society of monsters so New York isn't destroyed, and... let's just say there's a reason he's basically a BDSM enthusiast given way too much handle.
• Everything from H.P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos, though this can vary when you add in other Mythos writers like August Derleth.
• Mistborn, a trilogy of books by Brandon Sanderson (at least the first Era). The stories themselves rarely meet the criteria of Grimdark, but hoooo boy the background setting and villains sure do. About a thousand years ago, a hero rose up to stop a mysterious enemy… and failed. Now, volcanoes spew ash down on the land, choking all but the most hardy plants. The brightest color is yellow, and flowers are an alien idea. Modern fauna include ectoplasmic monsters composed of the skeletons of other creatures and… that’s mostly it. The rest is dead. 95% of the population are slaves, and it’s a revolutionary idea to consider that they may be able to think. The nobility rule mostly because the immortal Lord Ruler gave their ancestors powers, and some of them still have some today (the titular Mistborn). The only way to trigger these powers is through trauma, and so even among the good portion of the population, all children are nearly beaten to death to see if they have these powers. Usually, they don’t. The villains also deserve a dishonorable mention, as the average one is a pedophiliac, slave owning rapist. Even the “good guys,” are only good by comparison. Variously, they are rebels who know full well there is no hope, a thief who could and would kill anything that contradicts him, and an optimistic young man who is eventually forged into a warmongering emperor. Oh, and the only way to “save the day” involves killing a minimum 1/16th of the planetary population.
• Grimm's Fairy Tales ("Hansel and Gretel", for example).
• The first two Hyperion books.
• Metro. 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).
• Noir in general, from Raymond Chandler's novels to games like This is the Police.
• Post Apocalyptic stuff tends to default to Grimdark.
• 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.
  • 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.
• 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.
• Shakespeare's tragedies, especially Macbeth and Hamlet.
• Shin Sekai Yori also known as From the New World is a novel by Yusuke Nishi (also has an anime adaptation). Basically it's a dystopian story with people using magic to run their society instead of machines in a world that has deliberately regressed to the medieval level. Every child who doesn't manifest magical abilities by a certain age is killed, and all existing non-magical humans have been genetically engineered into a slave-race of mole-people so long ago they've forgotten their origins. The magical people are instead engineered to commit unwilling suicide should they use their powers to harm another human (mole people are fair game, though), and those of them who are too strong and can't manage to control themselves become Lovecraftian abominations.
• The Slenderman Mythos (HE ALWAYS WATCHES).
• 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.
• 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 Stephen King" on the front.
• 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!
• The majority of the Tragedy genre of stories.
• 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.
• 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.
• Anything from the Xeelee Sequence.

Films and TV

• Alien (as in the biomechanical, parasitic, acid-blooded brainchild of Ridley Scott and the late H.R. Giger). Bonus points when you realize it's pretty much an allegory of the human fear of unwanted pregnancy, with sexual role reversal thrown in.
• The aftermath of Avengers: Infinity War. After the battledust settles, no one really wins at the end of the movie. Even the villain, who won, was badly injured and the victory was very costly.
• 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.
• Come and See A World War II movie which instead of focusing on big battles focuses on Nazi death squads in the Byelorussian SSR. Do we even need to say more?
• Eastenders, Especially at Christmas.
• End of War
• Event Horizon
• The first two Hellraiser movies
• The Day After, and its worse Brit counterpart, Threads.
• Lord Of War. The worst is that it's based on real events.
• The Matrix
• 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.
• Requiem for a Dream
• 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.
• Saw: I just wanna play a game.
• Shisha no Teikoku, the Empire of Corpses. Steampunk, Grimdark, Zombies, Cross-References and Conspiracies everywhere. It has even become possible to resurrect 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.
• Soylent Green Inspiration for 40k’s Soylens Viridian.
• Tetsuo: The Iron Man A cult Japanese horror film about two men slowly becoming cold heartless machine men settling a score with each other and then deciding to destroy the world.

IRL

• Africa's wars, including, but not limited to: The French extorting its ex-colonies to still PAY FRANCE for “letting them become independent” (Even Haiti in the Caribbean had to go through this), the French assassinating presidents who wanted to break free from France's tyranny just to get a puppet installed who would gladly sell their national resources for dirt cheap to France, The Rwandan Genocide, Liberian child soldiers, Sierra Leonean amputations of voting populations, slave labor in all but name in the Congo, etc.
  • Belgian Congo. Throngs of people put to work to get their masters rubber, and when they spend so much as an hour getting food to prepare for week-long trip to the rubber forests, the masters will chop not their hands, oh no, but their children's hands and feet. Photographs remain of shocked father listlessly staring at such his toddler daughter's feet thrown to the floor.
  • Post Colonial Africa in general until the 21st century and even then there are various minor problems like ISIS and other religious extremists, rebel attacks, constant coups and piracy.
• Ancient Sparta: A militaristic empire thankfully smaller than it could have been due to its innate oppressive brutality not guaranteeing you can afford to expand far and wide. Eventually the Spartans got too busy quelling slave rebellions to expand far enough, particularly frequent as even the slavers of other cities were appalled at particularly brutal and violent slavery under the Spartans. Some rebellions were deliberately instigated by Spartan spies as an excuse to go in and slaughter 100s of slaves and add another tally to their "honor" and martial glory, rather than actual martial glory fighting tough external threats.
  • The Battle of Thermopylae of 300 fame was a hoax: Along with 300 Spartans guarding the retreat of the 5,000 Greek coalition, there were 700 Thespians, 400 Thebans, and 900 Messenian Helot slaves under Spartans with the promise to free them if they fought with them. The Spartans spread the propaganda that 300 Spartans did all the fighting because they were the only true warriors there. So essentially, it wasn’t enough for the 900 Helot slaves to have spent their entire lives toiling in the fields to feed good food for the Spartan warriors to oppress and kill their Helot children for fun, they were baited by Spartans to shell out the last thing they had, their lives, with promise of freedom of their families and kids back home. Turns out that was an empty lie as Spartans still enslaved them most brutally. So the Messenian city rebelled more fervently than ever before, until Thebans later forever freed them from Spartan slavery. Still, Spartans used this false propaganda to garner political clout within the Greek world on par with the rich powerful Athenians for some time.
  • The myth that ascetically culling men from youth guarantees tough warriors the Spartans tricked themselves into believing was proven false when the 300-man Theban Sacred Band, aka "The REAL 300," crushed them at Battles of Leuctra and Tegyra. The Sacred Band was recruited from 150 pairs of certifiably gay adult couples. So instead of killing like 10 kids to get 1 kid honed in war from youth, these guys made full use of ancient era birth rates and were not psychos devoid of humanity whose individual rite of passage was to slaughter a slave up close and personal and offer the superiors his corpse as proof.
    • The fall of the Spartans in Leuctra also herald the coming of an age where the brainpower to think up new tactics have proven to outperform individual martial prowess of murder machines.
    • Not to mention, the Spartans culling their boys from youth is plain stupid and wasteful. Being a strong boy is no guarantee that he will be the strongest man by adulthood. There are plenty of late bloomers, and boys who were picked on who want to overcome their weakness to become strong when given a chance later in life, like Robert E. Howard and Fyodor Emilianenko. Aleksandr Karelin couldn't even do a single chin-up when he was a boy! So, countless kids were killed in Sparta for nothing. Not to mention boys who could grow to lead other fields of excellence than fighting died, and for what.
  • The Spartans did all that only for their rival, Athens, to achieve a grander victory through cultural legacy. Effects of Athenian version of the Greek culture are felt all over the Western World to this day.
• Aztec Empire Let's just say there was a good reason 1,000s of natives from different cities subjugated throughout the Aztec Empire happily rushed to join Hernan Cortes and his few hundred Conquistadors in a united front to overthrow the cannibalistic oppressors of Tenochtitlan. What, you thought 400 men could conquer a subcontinent let alone a city?
• North Korea, a regime like all other communist regimes in Asia, was born only because of the hyperinflation and power vacuums left by Japan's destruction of regimes that could have normally stamped out puppet communist cells, much like Germany's destruction left Eastern Europe communized. In fact it should not even exist but was artificially prolonged through aid from the old USSR, and this existential crisis is what drives it to focus its efforts to brutally keeping people in line. It LOOKS like it has a huge military but that's really declaring half your workers as "military" to cook the numbers as a bluff, those soldiers don't even have the fuel to run exercises and spend all day farming instead. Because it is a starving nation where climbing the ration distribution listing is important for most people, but not a problem for the elites so they can afford to ignore military service. Almost completely isolated from the rest of the world, it's own intranet with government controlled websites spouts propaganda, desperately trying to keep its people from rebelling from the famines and poverty. But this is in vain because ironically the stark famines eventually got the police desperate enough to accept bribes and turn a blind out to black markets and through these, the people have imported (largely South Korean products and bootleg media through Chinese bootleggers) learned the truth and nobody over the age of 12 believes in state run propaganda for decades. The elites are genuinely frightened any leniency will get them and their family lynched by the mob as they have seen many other regimes fall in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, so they clutch their power and shrink back into isolation ever harder, and the only way they keep the civilians down is take entire families hostage. So if you get on the government's really bad side, you and 2 other generations of your family get sent to prison camps to be executed or become the playthings of the prison guards until you die. Proving the writing is on the wall, every year, 3,000 people escape and make it to South Korea as refugees.
  • For comparison, South Korea has a compulsory military service length is also among the highest in the world due to being beset and outnumbered by enemies on all sides harder than Israel (Israel itself has 32 months of mandatory military service for men, 24 for women as of 2022). Japan still actively attempts to reinvade and take islands to the East, China not making any movements yet but is looming in the West. Both are within the top 5 military powers in the world. Thus Korean miilitary service length is 21 to 24 months depending on the chosen branch, but women are exempt from both service, and neither do they pay a defense tax for not going into service.
• Incan Empire: Massive, massive child sacrifices by the 100s at a time. Even when the Empire was waning. Especially when the Empire was waning, in hopes to garner favor from the gods to save the empire.
• World Wars
  • Western Front of WW1: the Armenian/Greek/Assyrian genocides, the Eastern Front of WW2. Feel free to fill in.
  • WW2 and Meiji Japan: The perfect real world example of the Imperium of Man. Due to the Japanese, 30+ million lives were lost due to Edgy rape and massacres that served no purpose, but also due to indolence, short-sightedness, racism, jingoism, stubbornness, nepotism, arrogance, and all flavors of bureaucratic fail. It may actually justify some of the sillier grimderp listed in Warhammer 40,000 in sections below his page, by virtue of being a real-life example. Aside from the basic massacres of a bloodthirsty empire, includes Cannibalism, mass suicide, half a million Sex Slavery of underage girls then summarily executed after use, false apologies to lower your would-be opponent's guard, preceding undeclared war, and use of all 3 kinds of Weapons of Mass Destruction (Atomic, Biological, Chemical).
    • Belief in the Yamato Tamashi samurai spirit that the One True God that is Emperor Hirohito is proof that the Japanese are the chosen race and will easily subjugate all inferior others because if your faith in the Yamato Spirit is hard enough, you can even weather through bullets. Death is just proof you didn’t believe it hard enough and are unworthy, traitor. The Americans, not having the holy Yamato Tamashi (Note that Yamato is the ancient name of Japan, like Albion is for England.), are but indolent undisciplined capitalist swine, and will fall to the might of the holy samurai, making them cowering sheep just like the billion enslaved in Asia. If Japan immediately follows Pearl Harbor with an offering of peace so magnanimously, Americans will gratefully worship the Japanese for their infinite mercy and gladly give Japan the American Oil they sorely need to continue invading dozens of nations (invading Southeast Asia for its strategic resources like rubber and oil). Oh, how wrong, literally dead wrong they were.

      • The extent of their xenophobia was so vast, they chose to erase Western culture since it was deemed indolent and not blessed with samurai spirit. From tiny things like the musical scale was renamed from Do Re Mi etc. into Japanese syllables, to eating them because they were subhuman livestock. Colonials must speak Japanese or be punished, even clothing was sometimes enforced, and only the approved Japanese hairstyle was allowed.
        • Karate, from Okinawa (think of England ruling over its Irish colony), was originally named 唐手 (Karate, "Chinese-hand"), owing to originating from what was taught by a passing Chinese voyager. It was taken and sold as Japanese while being respelled to 空手 (Karate, "Empty hand") when it wasn't even meant to be done unarmed, as much of its "unarmed" movements don't make sense unless paired with weapons, because most of these movements were preliminary exercises to wield as weapons, everyday agricultural tools like grindstone handles (Tonfa), threshing flails (Nunchaku), chained sickles (Kusarigama), because the oppressive samurai have been taxing the Okinawans with a 90% tax rate and to deter rebellion, confiscated all weapons.
      • The weathering through bullets by belief part was actually applied from analyzing the WW1 French military doctrine of “Attaque à Outrance,” which focused on fearless charges to keep the pace of the offensive going. Heresy grows from Idleness, and caution will get soldiers’ mind to wander and morale to waver. Sounds good when you want to affix bayonets and the only thing that can break a charge is terror among the soldiers when they get shot at with a volley of semi-accurate musket balls. Battle of Verdun begs to differ. 20th century weapons were too deadly to breakthrough with fearless charges without massive casualties. Problem is, this was already the case in 1914. Imagine trying this shit in 1944. Bonus points for yelling TENNOU HEIKA BANZAIIIII (”For the Emperor!”) as loud as one can for buffs from the Holy Spirit Yamato Tamashi. There’s a reason everyone ditched this doctrine and was criticized both inside and outside France. But the Toyama institute salvaged it, devised tactics and training regimen and requested every soldier to be equipped with a useless katana so he can hit the enemy with his sword for a trench warfare that never came in the very mobile WW2 warfare. They were also advising officers to march/charge headfirst through enemy territory because romanticism with samurai and whatnot. Whereupon he will be the first to fall and the squad will soon be running around like a headless chicken, ripe for the butchering. Which was a problem especially for the Japanese Army, because they were notoriously rigid and did not trust soldiers to understand objectives but merely as expendable automatons to be commanded around, even through heavy gunfire.
    • The Imperial Cult: In the civilian sector, all religions were one by one, abolished. Even the Shintoists were kicked out of their temples and the local shamanistic deities they worshiped were replaced by the mandatory cult that worshiped the Emperor Hirohito as the One True Living God-Emperor. The rhetoric was, Emperor-worship is not even "religion" like Christianity or Islam, those delusions of inferior races. National Shintoism was BEYOND such a childish concept. Every man, woman, and child must therefore bow towards Tokyo every day, the holy city where their emperor resided in his palace. A portrait of the Emperor was to be put up in every public space, office, and school classrooms. Indoctrinated kids were praised and went on newspaper as heroes for jumping into burning buildings to (die trying to) rescue the Emperor's portrait. It was taught, sacrificing your life for Him will get you to become a minor god enshrined in a Shinto shrine.

      • Zen Buddhists also proclaimed that blowing yourself up in kamikazes will get you to Zen Buddhist Pure Land Paradise and ultimate bliss in Nirvana, and to kill a slave or an American is to do the ultimate good by giving them an early access to the Pure Land. Pretty ironic sinister the Zen Buddhists have never repented for their part in their war machine, and have marketed their religion to the Western World as "esoteric religion of peace so much better than the barbaric Christianity with their Crusades" for decades, and gullible people gobbled it up.
      • Centuries-old Shinto temples have been accused of being HERETICAL by that uppity new government-backed cult of personality, and had gone into hiding in rural mountains for a time. After the war, understandably the real Shinto priests were angry to return to see their deities' statues defaced, and that the offending cult still persists, is still funded by the government ran much by the same fascist families who successfully scapegoated a few of their own to escape responsibility. The cult still pretends to serve as a national cemetery that enshrines literally convicted war criminals so bad the emperors themselves, whom the cultists purportedly support, all stopped going there after the enshrinement.
      • Emperor Hirohito himself scapegoated his war crimes onto generals. He merely doesn't want to "honor" the generals who gifted him a humiliating defeat and an embarrassing photo time trying to look tall next to the 6' of Douglas Motherfucking MacArthur, which did demoralize the Japanese.
        • Along with having had to go on radio to declare surrender and embarrassingly admit he lied when he said he was God Himself.
        • Son of Emperor Hirohito, Akihito, who was a grade schooler during WW2, was always against the war, and as a gesture of repentence, has said in 2001 he is not alien to the pains of his closest neighbors as he himself owes his ancestry to Korean kings according to the Shoku Nihongi. He is powerlessly called by Prime Ministers to ultranationalist gatherings where against his approval, is given the Imperial Japanese hail to the emperor and worshiped. His grandson takes after him, having said he wants to go formally apologize for his nation's and grandfather's crimes, but having been stripped of powers since WW2, the government did not allow that.)
        • Anyone who was deemed weaseling out of service or coming back as a survivor of a bloody battle, had their families lynched by local mobs for being a coward and branded "not a citizen [of the Japanese Empire] (Hikokumin)." This was one of the reasons why hardly anyone surrendered even in impossible odds. The other major reason being, they were scared all the war crimes they already gladly did, as "right of conquerors," will be done back to them. No, it is not some superficial cultural difference like bushido or shame in surrender, and even if it was, this was the underlying core reason behind that. You thought it was some fictitious bushido, something the government went at great lengths to propagandize and glorify but deep down not even the Japanese believed it? That's both a faux pas by orientalism and also an over-focus on the wrong cultural differences.
    • Civilian imperialism: You thought military=bad, therefore you can clearly separate the civilians from military and peg all the bad stuff on the military, didn't you? Oh you naive thing, that's not how grimdark works: if you read any bit about Clausewitz's On War, on how civilian sentiment drives war, you will know that already. Because Japan banned eating legged animals for 1200 years from 675 to 1872, its livestock was of rather poor stock and not very palatable. Hence millions of cattle were robbed from other Asian nations and rebranded as Japanese for consumption and sale overseas, while crop fields in colonies were commandeered and reformatted to be forcibly standardized to an unhealthy monoculture, to maximize their robbing away to Japan for Japanese civilians and soldiers to eat for cheap while creating a shortage in the colonies that caused hyperinflation. This also had the side effect of uniform agriculture that became susceptible to diseases and thus famine. Japanese civilians by the millions gladly taking land stolen from people of other nations and forcing them into slavery on ancestral farmlands because the Japanese government cooked the books and put them under the settlers' names.

      • The ruined colonials were deliberately kept more illiterate than their fathers (reading Chinese, Korean, Ryukyuan is forbidden) so as to not know how to better their station but be gaslighted to believe the robbers and slavers sprinkling mere crumbs towards them were the only source of food and should be worshiped. Illiteracy was so deliberate in the colonies (and indigenous languages forbidden), that it just took 5 years to fix it after American nukes liberated 1 billion Asians from the looming Japanese threat and years if not decades of oppression. Malnutrition widespread because of the crops robbed away for the hungry Japanese military to eat (this is how 2 million Vietnamese died so quickly). Civilian companies were gladly using slave labor to keep their munitions and weapons factories running, like Toyota and Mitsubishi who, unlike Porsche and Krupp, still in their grimdark, deny their war crimes.
      • Colonial kids were put into tiny coal mine shafts and forced to work 16 hour days and their exhausted dying bodies burnt like in concentration camps.
      • When slave factory complex that is Nagasaki was nuked, and the war was over, Japan sent slaves forced to work in dark mines of nearby Hashima Island, to clean up the radiation with no radiation protection. They died most painfully as their flesh slowly sloughed off with no idea how and why, as Japan dumped them into the sea. The few survivors still say "despite that, I am grateful for the American nukes, because otherwise we would have all died on that Japanese slave camp island." On this island, slaves were dying so often, that by 1944 the bodies being burned created a constant black streak of smoke. Slaves were put in basements without sunlight, injuries were deliberately not treated with anesthetic (those were reserved for the Japanese laborers who commanded them around), and even rats would only pick out a few grains of rice in the black sludge they were given to eat (made from beans pressed clean of oil to use as crude bio-fuel when Japan lost its Indonesian oil fields). This was actually one of the "nicer" slave camps, in some of the other mines sent foreign slaves down and when it got flooded or gas was flowing in, the Japanese civilians deliberately locked the gates and tried to kill the workers desperate to escape.
      • In many places, for several months AFTER the surrender, Japanese civilians tried to hide the truth that the war was over and kept slaves in the dark and tried to work them to death to avoid paying reparations and simultaneously ask Americans for alms for the evil destruction they caused.
      • 1,000s who did survive the brutal slavery, were made sure to be killed by the Japanese spiteful to their victims. Like on the Ukishima-maru, deliberately advertising a Japanese transport ship as the final one of its kind to go back to ex-colonial homelands, packing it to 7,000 passengers when the maximum space was for 1,000, then the Japanese crew telling all the slaves to go underdeck, then blowing the engine room up internally in a series of 3 or 4 small blasts while secretly leaving the ship on a lifeboat in the dead of night before it happened. Japanese again, blamed it on American depth charges but wreckage showed all the steel warping outwards.
      • The militaristic machine that had Japan a field a whopping 3-million-man military force from just barely over 70-million population. This should normally be impossible, but only enabled by having the economic footprint of a nation many times its size. This means the oversized military force was powered by slave labor and robbed crop requisitions across its numerous colonies, and the military was backing all this. Also note that there are millions more veterans which meant everyone knew a family member who served. This also meant since Japan had decades of conquest after all, there were generation upon generation of millions of people who raped and massacred and gassed civilians for fun. Across generations, this skewed and redefined what meant to be “the norm.”Consider how Nazi Germany only lasted 12 years. The Japanese Empire lasted 77. Already in 1870 recommencing of the butchering the last native tribe of Japan to escape total eradication, the Ainu, whom they chased away to Hokkaido in feudal times, officially calling it their "colony."
        • These men would be emboldened to commit heinous crimes back at home when they ran out of foreign slaves to butcher, and had their crimes be waived off to a degree due to entire generations of men were collectively introduced to the experience of rape and cannibalism. (Example: Kodaira Yoshio who was a veteran coming back to supervise munitions factories, but having his way with the female students requisitioned for the war effort there, because "I can't forget the taste of young girls savored back in the conquered Chinese territories." because such things were deemed normal in wartime by Japan. Only after the war he was caught and only because he started murdering the women too.) Unlike Germany, millions of Japanese soldiers were allowed to return to Japan safe and sound, with no accounting for their crimes, and even given several months to finish pillaging and butchering millions of victims to cut down on reparations and hide war crimes or sometimes blame it American troops instead (like the Chichijima Incident.) Unlike Germany, Japan's soldiery was allowed to peacefully go back home, and were expressly protected by Allied forces as they robbed the last things they could to take back to Japan to use it for its post-war economy, primarily because everyone was focused on making Germany pay, they totally did not care about Asia.
    • Infighting at the expense of soldiers and nations: The Navy and Army had such bad blood since they were centered on rival feudal fiefdoms of the Meiji Restoration period, that they refused to share information with each other that could prevent them from saving soldiers' lives. So the emperor had to act as go between at times. Instead of a normal country whose government singly collects resources and distributes them as needed, the Army and Navy had their own separate oil fields conquered from places like Indonesia. Thus the Army couldn't even reliably count on the logistics of the Navy, and vice-versa, so the Army started making little supply submarines out of train engines and the Navy tried to make tanks. They wouldn't even agree on a unified maintenance system so some machines had pentagonal instead of hexagonal nut, just to screw with each other + discourage the other side requisitioning their stuff on the "pretense" of an emergency. This meant that in real emergencies, they can't limp to a closer base for repairs if they weren't correctly affiliated. They were already spread thin with dozens of invasions (all undeclared, as per Japanese tradition), yet the Navy was uncooperative while the Army had to rely on them for logistics and transporting soldiers overseas. But to win the emperor's favor, instead of cooperating they went back to the time-old Meiji Restoration (the civil war that was the 1868 Boshin War) tradition of "Peace comes from unification through killing all opposition." They each saw the other as another enemy to conquer, instead of partners.

      • This is why they were constantly trying to convince the emperor that they should be given more clout and order the other side to become auxiliaries for their campaign... by going off and starting their own invasions without a plan. (Sometimes, when that didn't work, they surrounded and besieged the other's HQ.) The Army decided that killing and pillaging and raping would be a good substitute for proper logistical support from the Navy. The Navy in turn decided that they can't let the Army shine so they needed a separate simultaneous war of their own (a war on two fronts, which only America was ever to pull off through sheer production scale and population. Except, for Japan it was more like 3+ fronts since the invasion of China in 1937 that saved the Chinese Communist Party was still going), so they decided to attack America for Oil, because America forbade exports of steel and oil when it was clear that these were enabling Japan to invade the Republic of China.
      • America already had reasons to be unhappy with Japan, from being backstabbed over Japan breaking the 2nd London Naval Treaty Japan got America to sign that restricted each nations' total naval tonnage, so relations were already sour + preceding undeclared war, the killing the men on the USS Panay escorting oil tankers, a prelude to Pearl Harbor. America on the other hand, by upholding the Naval Treaty, was tied down by the Japanese to a disadvantage, and did not have the ships that could have defended Southeast Asia by the time Pearl Harbor was attacked).
        • The aforementioned USS Panay incident was when Japanese were bombing cities through China. In 1937, the US Embassy officially warned Japan in advance of US ships and oil tankers planning to pass through the warzone in Nanking (right before the Rape of Nanking) on a specific day when the skies were clear and American colors were flying on those ships. The Japanese sank US ships and killing of Americans by Japanese bombers. Japan's insidious response was 1) make a show about firing the commander of that bombing (then promote him secretly for "showing the white devils the samurai spirit and teaching them fear") 2) give a dumb excuse saying "we were sure Chinese soldiers were retreating away from the Japanese army via that ship" which makes no sense cuz the US Ship was sailing TOWARDS Japanese positions, why would anyone retreat towards the enemy they are running from. Still no excuse for bombing a 3rd nation's ship no matter who is aboard it, it's not their jurisdiction. 3) And send 1,000s of handwritten apologist letters by Japanese schoolgirls to the US Embassy saying how sorry they are.
          • They just thought it was not the time to attack America yet, but plans were already underway at that point, with making casual and not serious proposals with the 2nd London Naval Treaty to tie Allied navies down with full intent to back out of the Treaty shortly after. Anyway, 4 years later, Pearl Harbor.
          • They did the same thing in the failed assassination of Czarist Russia's Crown Prince Nicholas during his tour in Japan in 1897. Shit fails, send apology letters, bide time, then launch an undeclared war on Russia.
      • Sometimes even within the branch, generals would do stupid things to get in each others' way: the infantry generals did not want to be outshone by the cavalry so they would rather put 10s of 1,000s of their soldiers into the grinder instead of using tanks, with the excuse of "we cannot sacrifice armored vehicles as they are sacred gifts from the God-Emperor."
    • Stubborn Pride, glorifying death, military first: Instead of receiving feedback from the field and spending money to develop better planes throughout the course of the war like a sane military, the Imperial Navy had only 1 type of shipborne plane actually fielded throughout the entire war (Mitsubishi A6M "Zero"). No, the Empire thought it was more cost-effective to sacrifice 1,000s of men on human-guided suicide bombing tactics known as Kamikazes, going to Paradise in the afterlife for blowing themselves up for their one true god whom they prey towards everyday. Nowhere else will you find mass-produced, standardized models (of a regular military no less) that have no weapons but are solely designed for the purpose of blowing up, with designs that are absolutely made to prevent (with gas tanks too small for return flights and cockpits with holes for screwing shut) the pilot from every surviving lest he "be a coward" and try to veer off course and NOT sacrifice himself for the Emperor to go to Zen Buddhist Paradise. Even that wasn't enough so the pilots were given their final drink, a cup of sake laced with meth and squadrons were accompanied by a veteran plane that acted like an AIRPLANE COMMISSAR that BLAM'd anybody daring to veer off course. By the time they got to the battle, the veteran would leave to round up more kamikaze planes. There are actually more designs fielded as human-guided bombs than there were fighter planes (The Yokosuka MXY-7 "Ohka (cherry blossom)" and Nakajima Ki-115 "Tsurugi (sword)" ).

      • The kicker was they thought this was an effective tactic because the Japanese command looked at the statistics and decided that massed suicide planes actually had BETTER kill to death ratio than conventional warplanes as the war progressed. But this is a fallacy: it meant the original designs need to be updated and newer, more advanced models should be fielded, not to stubbornly keep the old designs that the enemy is developing specialized counters for, and certainly not to keep SENDING IN THE NEXT WAVE. In which even the better-educated college students and factory technicians were conscripted to blow themselves up while unskilled schoolgirls took up producing the goods at shoddier quality which made weapon quality and operational failures more rampant than the already shoddy Japanese weapons because they didn’t realize that all these years, they were heavily dependent on importing superior American machinery for their industries (Which resulted in things like grenades that went off prematurely way too often, and the Nambu Pistol: a gun that BLAM'd the shooter).
        • Contrary to popular belief, suicide planes weren't even the only weapon mass-produced for kamikaze tactics. Boats, manned-torpedoes, submarines, diving suits, trucks, manned anti-tank mines, TANKHAMMER lunge mines (I don't care how any Battlefield games depict this, you're not surviving a shaped charge explosion designed to blow a tank up at point-blank, let alone be able to run fast with a heavy charge while dodging M4 Sherman's hull + coaxial + cupola machine guns to get that close in the first place, and even if you found someone who can, congratulations, you wasted an Olympics-level, 1-in-a-million athlete on a suicide mission to take out a medium tank. Now do that 50,000 times. (not counting the other tanks in the Allied arsenal).)... the list is too long to cover. Coupled with the 4,000 men on suicide planes, these rocketed the number of suicide bombings to 5-digits. Imagine how many regiments you can fill out with this headcount in a military with any sense of sanity.
      • Naval captains were encouraged to be like the fictional notion that samurai died in battle so if their ship sank they were to die with it. This led to a lot of blunders because nobody came back alive to report how the US Navy was exploiting Japanese weaknesses. Captains who dared come back from defeat were disgraced and sent on a penal crusade of sorts, like being sent back to the frontlines in a more minor position, their original position filled by a rookie commander who would play by the strategies laid out by the high command which were based on wrong assumptions and thus would also lose, and the with each repeat of this vicious cycle, 1,000s of men died pointlessly. All because the strategists who were appointed due to nepotism were insecure with their lack of skill and took an affront to any implication that they made errors in their strategies, and so blamed every failure on the field commander.
        • Ironic when you know the Sengoku period history, the heyday of the samurai. This is when opportunistic brutal samurai saw "backstabbing" as "pragmatic" for survival amidst 200 years of civil war and if brutal and ungrateful, had no hollow delusions about honor in death. The false notion of a samurai who is "unquestioningly loyal" was made in the 18th century romanticists, namely Tsunetomo Yamamoto, a chickenhawk who never saw a single battle yet lamented how samurai like him are not respected like in the "good ol' days." His greatly influential and hilariously wrong book on what samurai is supposed to be, Hagakure, literally began with "To die is to be samurai." and his book was primary reading material for the militarists, which is why Japan was very liberal with spending human lives. 18th century was actually when samurai started reading Confucianist books and was fantasizing about "(unquestioning) loyalty" no matter the evil of the regime. Note that samurai have been upholding the oppressive regime by taxing 3 times more than both the European and Asian feudal averages (25%). According to 19th century scholar Nobuhiro Sato, 1 in 3 peasant households commited Mabiki infanticide every year (remember contraceptives didn't exist then), due to lack of food. The resulting desperate disgruntlement was quelled with terror of the "kirisute gomen," a license to BLAM any peasant on the spot without any trial or reason given.
          • This is rather grimdark considering Confucius taught the exactly opposite lesson, since he himself said something along the lines of "an evil subject lies and praises his lord's tyranny as benevolent leadership, but the truly loyal subject tells tyrants 'fuck you' to amend their evil ways. Even in the face of likely death, and those who were executed for speaking the truth were oft hailed as martyrs posthumously. This is the very essence of true loyalty. And the ideal lord listens to such subjects." A sort of social contract. And he did exactly that himself, publicly opposing tyrants. Blind obedience praised by 18th century samurai from a proper Confucianist light, was seen as being a cowardly or scheming yes man.
        • The propaganda machine did not help, either. The Battle of Midway, turning point of the Pacific Theater, was a devastating defeat for the Japanese Navy, but the Daihon'ei (Imperial General HQ) reported to all the media that it was a heroic victory. Officers who made it back though, were all locked up to prevent them from speaking the truth, because the Navy did not want to be upstaged by the Army's own bluffs and tried to hide their failures, and over-reported the enemy's losses. The term "Daihon'ei report" since has become a tongue-in-cheek phrase of government/corporate claims pretending everything is fine and no mistakes were made when the situation is actually FUBAR.
          • This battle was ultimately lost by the Japanese due to arrogance, underestimating the enemy, being ill-prepared, and overturning every bad result in simulations as "There's no way the Imperial Majesty's Navy would be hit by that many torpedos from those inept Americans!" (Admiral Ugaki did this A LOT), and complete lack of radar. Again, racist doctrine posited that, the US Navy uses radar but have no fear, that's actually because the American eyesight is racially inferior to the unerring eyes of the seamen of the mighty Imperial Japanese Navy, who do not need them! This is hilarious when you realize the radar that was used then were the old "TV-antenna" that is the Yagi-Uda Radar made by a Japanese lab assistant Uda (who for decades was sidelined as his professor, Yagi, unjustly took all the credit, typical), patented in England, thus legally used by the Allies, but shunned by the Japanese because "His Imperial Majesty's Military lives by ambush" and to use a radar that emits radio waves just means exposing your ambuscade to the enemy.
        • The Japanese Navy stupidly was obsessed building the largest ship on the planet at the time, the Yamato-class battleships, but the irony is that because they were afraid of losing face in a possible battle, they actively avoided these truly expensive ships from engaging in combat and had the lesser ships do all the fighting throughout the war. This was so stupid because unlike the new main naval weapon that was the aircraft carrier, this ship was built using the old naval doctrines of uselessly big Dreadnought battleships slugging it out with enemy battleships, where bigger guns with longer ranges prevailed, hopefully in a single decisive victory that would turn the tide of war (Wunderwaffen). So the Navy was both being a bit behind the times AND not using the Yamato-class for what it was built for. Despite being able to, America did not see a need to nor delighted in building a battleship that huge, but instead focused more on the new technology of "Aircraft Carriers," made 98 carriers throughout the war starting out from just 7 surviving after Pearl Harbor, against Japan's 14 carriers.
          • A whopping full 1% of Japan’s GDP was spent on maintaining this pampered monstrosity of a superweapon that did jack all. Contrast this to how modern European nations in 2022 except Poland are struggling to raise its military spending to 2% of its GDP.
          • The Yamato was also furbished full of luxuries and served lavish food while the other parts of the military were starving, they were actually nicknamed "The Yamato Hotel," for so pampered were the men aboard, just to bestow prestige to service aboard the flagship. By 1945, when people were malnourished and cannibalizing their slaves and robbing locals at gunpoint was rampant in the Pacific island holdouts (some soldiers would do this into the 1970s), and even government MINISTERS could barely afford to get "a sweet potato dipped in butter" (according to Nobusuke Kishi, grandpa and nepotic sponsor of the Prime Minister that got shot), the folks at the Yamato Hotel were living it up -- journals of the sailors at the time of its sinking in 1945 showed, they had meaty curry over rice with ice cream for dessert and were sleeping in beds. Oh and they even had a full complement of musicians aboard to play music for the feasts. And feasts it often had whenever an important figure was visiting (and that was frequent both because it was the flagship, and also because it was always available for feasts due to being too busy AVOIDING THE DECISIVE BATTLES IT WAS SUPPOSED TO FIGHT.) Chefs conscripted aboard were required to hone their skills to chefs of 5 star hotels. Apologists argue the luxuries were all for morale that can win the war, but even those sailors with journals even admitted feeling guilt whether they should even be savoring these luxuries in a time like this, and the sailors of other ships in the Japanese Navy were suffering from putting too many guns on deck to sidestep the restrictions on naval power by making each tonnage account for more firepower, at the expense of crew spaces and shared magazines (a huge fire risk). In contrast, the US Navy just used hammocks for most sailors, and you know, actually won the war.
          • The end of the Yamato was a hilarious mess of saving face and idiocy. Because the flagship kept dodging engagement for the excuse that it’s saving itself for a hypothetical "final decisive battle" between battleships, the Japanese Navy wasted its advantage from ambusing Pearl Harbor without declaration of war, and wrote its battleplan entirely on the monolithic idea that the US Navy will desperately go through all the fortified islands in the Pacific, whereupon the Japanese Navy will hound the US fleet and whittle them down to a ripe size for the “final decisive battle." And so because not declaring war and hitting Pearl Harbor was so successful, they will recreate a microcosm with “a top secret superweapon saved for the final strike.” This didn't work because there's no guarantee the enemy will move into your traps like some tower defense game, much less in the very maneuverable open ocean. The Yamato could have finally gotten its big battle in the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, but had no fuel to fuel the Yamato... because they decided to give its fuel to the lesser ships to go fight in Guadalcanal in its stead. On top of that, to save face, they couldn’t ask the Army for spare fuel, so it sat that one out. In the end, the writing was on the wall when it found that it no longer had a sizable fleet to accompany the Yamato. So against every general's wishes, high command took it out to battle with the argument, "if the Yamato doesn't fight at least once before the war ends it will look like they cost Japan the war by being cowards." So just to save the Daihon'ei high command's face, 4242 Japanese sailors were sacrificed... while taking out 12 Americans in Operation Ten-Go. The biggest ship on the planet that was top secret by an evil naval-based empire, went down hordes of torpedo bombers which swirved the behemoth just enough to make the colossal 18.1” gun, slide off internally and spill its load of massive ammo in a deadly cascade, setting them off and with it, all the shells stored deep down in the magazine. Picture the Rebel Alliance sending fighter planes dropping torpedos to set off a chain reaction that destroyed the never-before revealed imperial superweapon called the Death Star, the largest ship in the galaxy... built by the leader of an empire who was actually called “The Emperor” who purportedly has supernatural powers... hmmmmm
            • The scheduled dinner on the day it sank was to be canned beef, canned red bean rice, and sweet bean porridge for dessert. It was lavish for war time, to the point even the crewmen worried whether it was even right for them to be eating like this, putting the military before the civilians even for a militaristic empire hellbent on conquest.
      • As mentioned above, waging war for glory of conquest without a proper plan for logistics nor cooperation between the Army and Navy led to the outcome of 2 million of 3 million soldiers committing cannibalism at least once, usually eating the slaves. In fear of the looming threat of American forces, ate American POWs to dehumanize them and raise their failing morale. One famous example is on Chichijima, which the Japanese on trial for war crimes actually dare claim they died from American bombs, because American bombers loved bombing too much they didn't even care about blowing up their own boys. The truth is "'they were eaten as sushi."' George H.W. Bush was the sole survivor because he was the only man who was rescued by the US Navy when they crashed from enemy fire.
    • Sexual violence on a scale unprecedented in history: Someone in high command somehow got it in their head the idea that somehow, raping underage girls is a crucial component of what makes a mighty samurai warrior. (Historically speaking, they are not far off if that is whom they wanted to model their soldiers after, and by all the propaganda they spew out, they were). In the indoctrination written in soldiers' field manuals, it was even written raping any underage girl they could see was actually ENCOURAGED as an exercise of the "righteous conqueror." When raping and killing girls in lands they conquered wasn't enough, they would "maximize rape efficiency" by having 500,000 girls of 35 nations were permanently kidnapped/captured/coerced/lied in military brothels to be raped with 80-men quotas per day. 100 when the men are flocking right before a major offensive. The girls are raped till they die, get too sick, or get pregnant by which they will get executed with their unwanted baby. If they are in the chemical/germ bomb human experimentation center, Unit 731, under the direct command of the emperor and nobody else (unlike the Army/Navy), girls were impregnated by the scientists precisely for the purpose of making pregnant specimen for various vivisections of either the baby, the mother with the fetus, or the mother and the newborn together in pointless experiments like "How long does it take until the mother in a hot furnace goes from trying to save her baby in her stead to sacrificing her baby to save her own life, on average?" And countless other evil shit that would make slightly more sense but was done just to get slightly more accurate medical data than experiments about poisoning/vivisecting animals already done in Europe 20+ years ago. Scientists claimed after they got used to the lab environment, they soon had developed daily cravings for vivisections saying, the day did not feel over until they cut up at least 2 people.

      • The Japanese to this day tote documents on how girls as young as 10 years old somehow "signed" papers that they agree to go to the frontlines to "comfort" the soldiers, claiming that Japanese soldiers were not rapists and the girls were just very willing prostitutes. But if you have an actual brain, it shouldn't take much to realize 10 year girls will have no idea what that “job” even entails, let alone 10 year-olds should not be given any agency to make such decisions. It's the typical tactic of putting someone's name on paper at gunpoint, exploiting the fact that it is easier to prove there was something signed rather than trying to prove there were guns pointed to someone's head at the time, because that leaves no traces. It's even less legal than the contracts illiterate men had to "sign" for press-ganging AFTER they were kidnapped and out at sea. Minus actually being paid: the best "payment" was in Japanese military ration tickets which were deliberately designed by the Japanese to be worthless after the war and prevent a way to run off and live in a town elsewhere with money that could be used in the civilian sector. Disencourage them from running away to ease butchering them after giving them unwanted pregnancies, both as a way to get rid of mouths to feed during the war, and after the war, kill as many survivors possible to hide their war crimes to ease in playing victim later. Aside from the rampant rape-and-kill in the midst of tearing through towns, Chinese, Korean, Taiwanese, Singaporean, Filipino, Vietnamese, Dutch, Australian girls were raped repeatedly and then executed in ditches or random locations in jungles.
      • The origins of trafficking sex slaves goes back to 1500 when samurai, like numerous African warlords, used to sell girls to buy muskets from Portuguese slavers to better kill each other. When the exorbitant 60-90% tax rates wasn't enough to fund their wars, (Hideyoshi also abruptly banned the sale of Japanese girls but started to kidnap Chinese and Korean instead to sell to the slavers... at one point trying to make up for the losses incurred in the failed invasion of Korea in the 1590s, started capturing so many slaves to sell to the Portuguese that this temporarily crashed the European slave market prices by 1/6th going rate), the samurai looked to earn income by establishing overseas brothels. The thing is, this never stopped until the early 20th century. In the short Meiji period alone, the Japanese sold 300,000 Japanese girls overseas to earn expensive American dollars and British pounds which were vastly stronger than the Japanese yen, to make easy money to fund the over-glorified Meiji Restoration. The leaders of Japan weren't even ashamed, either. The girls, who earned the nickname "Karayuki-san" ("Miss-gone-to-China" where "China" in this sense can mean anything overseas) by the 19th century, were praised by Japan's leaders and foremost thinkers as "Joshigun," meaning "Army of Girls," in the sense they are (forced to) fighting and sacrificing themselves for Japan's progress. These Japanese brothels reached far and wide, up to America, Australia, and even India. Using girls as military sex slaves from 1930s till the end of WW2 was a natural conclusion to this barbaric practice. In rare occasions a few made it long enough to amass enough money to buy themselves a small, easily forgotten tombstone for their own death, and these are scattered around Southeast Asia but mostly neglected and forgotten and/or the jungles swallowed them.
      • The Rape of Nanking was where the killing and raping was so horrendous and massive, a full-on Nazi Party member, John Rabe, had to do the Schindler's List thing to save the Chinese citizens around Nanking, who were Allied and therefore should've been his enemies, against the Japanese, who were Axis and should've been his allies. One of the many beheading contests of civilians was gleefully reported back home as heroics between two rivals with historic katanas they brought from home, babies were thrown into the air and caught with bayonets, people were tied to posts and used as live bayonet practice up close and personal, soldiers stuffed glass bottles in girls' vaginas and shattered them for fun, samurai katanas were proudly brandished to threaten civilians to put on shows for the Japanese troops such as fathers forced to rape their daughters and mother forced to rape their sons.
        • The woman whose book exposed this in the West, Iris Chang, was hounded by Japanese for so long, slandered and sent death threats for years, that she ended her own life. Daring to be a champion of light gets one attacked and slandered, unto death. Truly Grimdark.
      • Girls like Jan Ruff O'Herne and women like Vivian Bullwinkel were raped, and many were executed. A rare few barely managed to survive, but were shamed by the Australian and actually commanded such girls/women to shut the fuck up so they can appease the sensitive Japanese overlords and recommence trade with them. The Dutch government even brokered a deal with Japan and took bribes to keep this war crime quiet in spite of the protests of the girls who were raped periodically as permanent sex slaves. When O'Herne before she died, did finally brave through her PTSD and started to speak about her experiences in the 90s, she was actually counter-accused by Japanese and Japanese-Australians, of being a racist and bigoted liar.
    • Aftermath over Okinawa was especially grimdark. The Japanese occupiers already experienced Pacific Islands' natives eagerly cooperating with the American liberators and telling them weaknesses in Japanese positions, so by the time US forces arrived around Okinawa they made sure to strengthen propaganda and corral the colonials to fight as pawns. The Japanese gaslighted the Okinawan natives to die as cannon fodder under the rhetoric, that if they did not blow themselves up for Empire and the holy God-Emperor, Americans will land, and will proceed to eat their babies and violate them. Basically gaslighting that the enemies are worse than all the Japanese brutality the people have suffered thus far (for 400 years), kind of like some reverse-Commissar. In just WW2 alone Okinawans were forced to fight and when wounded were executed (given milk secretly spiked with cyanide, etc.), butchered for slightest offences like speaking native Ryukyuan instead of Japanese, executed for picking up airdropped American pamphlets written in Japanese offering them a chance to surrender while warning them the destruction the US forces are capable (you dare come in contact with the bluff of filthy American pigs!?), or gaslighted in fear to flee to uninhabited islands where many died from hunger and malaria. On top of all that, when Okinawa was finally about to be taken, the Japanese were not ready go peacefully, and forced everyone to commit suicide to "show them the iron will of the superior Japanese race and refusal to be slaves." The real reason though, is sinister and fucked up:

      • What really happened was the Japanese overlords wanted to fool and discourage Americans from landing in Japan proper, so they banked on the expectation that Americans won't know the difference from the enslaved Okinawans and Japanese, and so if the people on this small island "appear" that all civilians are willing to fight and die to the last man, the Americans will hopefully be afraid to land on the Japanese mainland lest they face even fiercer resistance. The Japanese were also, as seen post war, very keen on killing all victims/witnesses to their war crimes, so they thought, "might as well use them up now." Mass seppukus were forced upon them to make it look "voluntary" just to save Japanese face of being "fearless samurai" at the expense of not-Japanese. Okinawans were surprised to find US forces did not come to rape their children but give out much needed medical care and food.
        • This mentally devastated the Okinawans who were prepared to go down fighting (some were even told to make makeshift bamboo spears and use kitchen knives and attack from ambushes), because the Japanese already told many Okinawans to kill their own children to spare them the fate of being gang raped by American devils, and follow suit with their own seppukus. Accounts say the horrified parents took the food and medical aid they received as offerings to the graves of their own children they buried, and wailed cursing Japan, crying tears of blood. This is the aftermath of being enslaved for 400 years and suddenly offloaded the duties of a full citizen to die for the God-Emperor so that mainlanders don't have to.
        • In some cases it was the opposite, like a conscripted teenage boy commanded to murder his sister and mother before battle so he would have nowhere to return to and fight harder, uner the excuse that he is saving them from rape and sending them to Zen Buddhist Pure Land paradise early.
        • This is why when prince Akihito came ashore Okinawa in the 1970s when Okinawa was "returned" to Japan, the enraged natives sent numerous death threats. Originally, his father emperor Hirohito was going to come, but this was deemed too dangerous.
        • You will not believe the uproar when the Okinawan survivors found out that, without their knowledge, the names of Okinawan men forced to die for Japan have been for years enshrined in the Yasukuni Shrine, the de facto national shrine headed by remnants of National Shintoist organization and still used in nationalist rhetoric to glorify the Empire of Japan. The shrine refused to have those names erased. This is also the case for other colonials conscripted as cannon fodder. Okinawans erected memorials for both Okinawans and Koreans who were sent there as slaves and cannon fodder and accuses the Japanese government for lies and denial of their atrocities.
      • That's not all, the survivors soon found that it was the Japanese who have been raping their children anyway. One such infamous example was the Himeyuri Schoolgirls, who were lied to by the Japanese army they will just be taken to make knickknacks and provide basic medical care for soldiers, but really conscripted for far more than that (sex slavery) and once the Japanese had their fun, tried to get rid of proof of their war crimes by sending the victims to attack US lines where they were shot as they were not proper combatants in uniforms, because the Geneva Convention only protects regular uniformed troops and not insurgents and fighters hidden among the population. The Japanese exploit the worldwide publics' lack of knowledge of how the Geneva Convention works, and actually makes it sound like an American war crime to shoot attackers not wearing uniforms. And on top of that, used these Okinawan girls they forced to die, as propaganda to drive the rhetoric that "so righteous was the Japanese Empire, even underage girls by the droves willingly laid their life down for God-Emperor Hirohito, and it is a tragedy the American invaders were so brutal and ruthless monsters to cut them down. This underlines why America should not have attacked Japan." Textbooks were found saying this as recent as 2011 and unedited since. Basically, innocent girls' deaths are used as political fodder by an unrepentant regime to fuel more jingoism and fool people to come feed the meat grinder.
        • Just like the glorified Kamikaze pilots screwed shut into cockpits. Non-kamikaze pilots in the Navy testified they have never seen anyone eager to blow themselves up like wartime propaganda said. The closest would be people gaslighted to believe if they did not blow themselves up for Japan, Americans will eat and rape their family... This notion ordinarily would be too far-fetched, passed over for propaganda in any normal nation, but it WORKED in Japan because that's what the Japanese soldiers themselves were doing for GENERATIONS, it felt all too real a prospect when those things were taught and done as the "natural right of victors in war."
          • What makes this even grimmer is that all those people that even died for this lie died in vain because, their own Japanese government themselves, NOT 10 DAYS AFTER SURRENDER, founds an organization called the Recreation and Amusement Association, specifically made to pimp out girls to those Americans who not 10 days prior, were propagandized as subhuman rapist demons that must be put down. And unlike the wartime sex slaves, the women were voluntarily coming for work and the promised pay was not robbed away, not entirely, once the program was shut down by Eleanor Roosevelt's pleas in 1946, and allowed to start a burgeoning prostitution industry as "pan-pan girls" instead of being taken out back and knifed in the belly with the unwanted fetus and thrown in a ditch or the jungle for animals to tear apart. The Japanese government lulling the Allied troops into prostitution is used to poison the well on the issue of wartime sex slavery, to exaggerate and incriminate any incidents among prostitution caused by Allied troops as "being no different from Japanese troops after all" and simultaneously play down their own wartime sex slavery as being well-natured, and also drive the rhetoric that the onus of this is all on Allied invaders, that Japan was forced against its will to make their own girls prostitutes in a systematic "wall of flesh" to calm the torrent of violent sexual energy the Allied troops exuded who will "undoubtedly" rape everyone if their sex drive is not appeased. (Who do they think the GIs are, Japanese?)
        • Battle of Saipan was the first time the Japanese government told civilians to commit mass suicide, a direct order from God-Emperor Hirohito no less, on the 30th of June, 1944. This was in fear that Japan will lose face if the Japanese settlers (who lynched and killed the natives to take their land and belongings) ever became displayed on US media. Like samurai seppuku of the past, the God-emperor promised glory after "brave" suicide. A whopping civilians 20,200 complied, lots of them pushing their families off cliffs and being pushed by others in a stampede, so effective was the Japanese propaganda about subhuman American devils they chose death. One such cliff is now called the Banzai Cliff because 5,000-8,000 people in one sitting were marching off cliffs "supposedly" voluntarily, shouting TENNOU HEIKA BANZAI ("For the Emperor!"). The place now features memorials including those for the Korean and Okinawan plantation workers sacrificed in this way.
          • One time some scared civilians hesitated before jumping off some cliffs, and were found at a distance by US troops who coaxed them to turn away from a cliff. Civilians were still scared of US troops, and did not dare come closer but hesitated. But soon this hesitation was rectified by a Japanese soldier who shot them dead to "inspire" the remaining survivors to suicide. They were mere moments away having the war end for them, but Japan was determined to not lose face, nor allow peace before death. Worried about mere national image before lives. GRIM DARK. The Japanese soldier was later caught and killed by angry US troops.
          • Like in other islands, Japanese troops hid out in mountains and caves and soon started killing each other for limited resources and butchered natives, slaves, and eventually each other as food. Grim dark. The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On is a documentary following a Japanese veteran who accuses the government of war crimes and hunts down his former officers.
          • Some islands like in the Philippines, had Japanese officers using their own rifles to terrorize and kill the locals and steal their livestock and supplies and refused to surrender until the 1970s. Some of them did so because they wanted to avoid being told to answer for their war crimes, like Hiroo Onoda, and even when finally surrendering, was proud to be a bandit and murderer and was totally unapologetic to the locals, posing like some samurai hero, and even wrote books glorifying his "heroic" acts and was received by the Japanese as an exemplary man of justice who did not bow down to the evil Americans.
    • All out ABC warfare: Atomic, Biological, Chemical, the 3 main pillars of the Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). Unlike Germany, Japan was very into using chemical and germ weapons on the battlefield. Anthrax, bubonic plague, dysentery, typhoid fever, diseased fleas, etc. all flavors of germs were used. Cyanide grenades, mustard gas bombs, CS gas bombs, etc. were used on both civilian and military targets, much of these WMDs were produced in factories of Hiroshima. The bulk of these were used in the vast, continent-wide theater of the invasion into China (1937-1945) up to 2,000 odd usage cases. Biowarfare was scheduled to extend to America in the September of 1945, in Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night. Japanese nuclear weapons development was going on right up to the end of the war as well, hellbent on trying to finish the nuke without knowing anybody else was trying to make them as well (the Manhattan Project was Top Secret). Two nukes were in development, the Ni-Go and F-Go, unlike Nazis who hardly decided to pursue this when Nobel Prize winner Werner Heisenberg deliberately canceled the German nuclear weapons project (1992 declassified 6-month recordings listening in on him and his fellow scientists prove this was intentional).
      • On the other side, Japan actually did not give a damn about nuclear casualties, (you thought a government that gaslighted 10s of 1,000s of civilians to die, just to save face, cared about that?), records and witness accounts actually cite that when the nukes hit, it was considered nothing special because Daihon'ei high command has been receiving casualty reports on that scale for months by then, and high command proceeded to argue about how to fool the Americans to accept letting them keep all their remaining unliberated colonies under Japanese enslavement, and sign a peace treaty favorable to Japan. The firebombing of Tokyo had greater casualties (150k) and you hardly see it toted as a political talking point. Nor the according to General Curtis Le May, he bombed 20% (4 million) of the population to death in the Korean War that happened 5 years later, and you hardly hear any Korean complain about that. Oh, and just like with the Okinawan schoolgirls sent to die and tallied along with "loyal citizens of the empire willingly sacrificing their lives for the God-Emperor Hirohito," about 1/3 of the nuclear casualty numbers include these foreign slaves, both those who got bombed, and both those forbidden from returning home after WW2 but instead commanded to clean up irradiated cities, all of them who wouldn't even have been there were it not for Japan forcibly putting them there. Only foreign slaves were sent to clean up the irradiated rubble, and Japan dumped their moaning dying bodies were into the sea, then proceeded to start propaganda that goes on to this day, on why Americans must bow in apology to innocent victimhood of Japanese while denying any wrongdoing or demanding everyone forget their war crimes. Nagasaki was a civilian hub for driving slaves in Mitsubishi's war factories. Hiroshima was the poison gas WMD production hub. 1 billion Asians cheered for their liberation (even if nukes weren't the cause, and the Japanese were actually too stubborn to fear the nukes they themselves were making).
• The Cold War: You know what is the most grimdark about the Cold War? The nations devastated the most from the Axis Powers Germany and Japan, one would think their happy liberation would last thereafter and great evils of history rectified, right? But on the contrary: for the crime of not destroying other countries and colonizing them for their greedy personal benefit, they were not able to become as powerful as those who happily bloodied their hands with the blood of others, and thus became subjugated. And even after they were liberated, by Allies, they were left so weak, their people butchered, their governments destroyed, their economies left with hyperinflation... that they were not able to stamp out communist cells like they normally would have, had their capitalist regimes not been attacked by the Axis. (Eastern Europe may have been directly conquered by Soviet forces, but in Asia, the communization started with the largest nation: China, from where communization of other nations were enabled). In fear of the Domino Theory, Germany and Japan were soon rewarded with trillions of dollars for butchering millions, to build up their economies and given loads of American tech. Despite several backstabbings like Japan selling US tech to the USSR, (even after America totally excused from any war reparations, too), the nations did not actually do anything for checking the Soviets, and the role soon fell to China itself in the 70s, it too getting a late cash boost and tech transfer just like Japan, which was responsible for sparking the post-war Chinese economy as much as it did Japan's.

  • TL;DR The perpetrators of WW2 caused a bigger problem for their old victims and the victims are left having to waste a huge portion of their economies to maintain militaries and establish highly dangerous frontlines against whatever their old oppressors left behind, while the people who caused this were given vast sums of money instead, because it was thought that frontlines were too risky to invest in. Also victims of war crimes were told to keep quiet because those Axis Powers are being hailed as (hopefully) bulwarks against the communist tide when they didn't actually do anything.
  • If China was not communist, the Laotian, Cambodian, North Vietnamese, and North Korean communist regimes would either not even have happened or been mere footnotes in history, as they would not have received backing from Communist China, or capitalist forces would not have to worry about escalating into World War 3 if they helped these weak nations on the brink of communization. In fact a capitalist China would have actively sought to end communist regimes on its borders, so great were the Nationalists' hatred of communists represented by Mao.
    • Mao Zedong and his communists were mere weeks away from finally being arrested and executed, when the Japanese invaded in 1937, starting World War 2. The Chinese Nationalist army had to put out this bigger fire, and reluctantly signed a peace treaty with the Chinese Communist Party. Throughout the war, the Nationalists suffered many gas and germ attacks from the Japanese, 200 Chinese generals died, 25 million people died, and most of the elite soldiery were killed in action. Meanwhile, even the Soviet military advisors for the CCP reported to Moscow that the CCP avoided all conflict, and focused on amassing resources and spreading influence by lying that it was THEY who were bleeding in the frontlines for China, while Nationalists sat back and hoarded all the supplies. When the Japanese were finally being beaten back in 1945, the communists backstabbed the Nationalists by starting a new front all of a sudden, and in 3 years drove them to the small island of Taiwan. In 40k terms this would be if an Imperial world was finally beating back some massive Xenos occupation, only to find their homeworld overtaken by Chaos cultists, then finding refuge on fringe world they liberated, but much to their dismay discovered this last refuge too was contaminated, through decades of foul indoctrination, the worshiping of Xenos as gods and hating their own humanity. This is why Mao Zedong later thanked the Japanese for invading China and saving him, and without their help, he would have been dead.
  • After killing 2 million people in Vietnam in WW2, Japan during the Vietnam War got trillions MORE US dollars while not shedding a single blood to help fix the problems they created. By the time Vietnam was hung out to dry and became overrun by communists, Japan was glad it did not have to pay a single yen as reparations to Vietnam because the Cold War atmosphere provided easy excuse for not paying communists anything. In 40k terms this is deliberately throwing the surviving families of your victims to chaos cults just to get them hunted down by the Inquisition/Exterminatused.
  • Once the Cold War was over, Japan's backstabbings (because unlike Germany, Japan's same WW2 fascist political families who feign alliance with America but have always spoken of conquering America with their own dollars, still ruled Japan to this day, 50% of their positions hereditary and one-party rule has been in effect since 1955, called the 1955 system) and outright tech thefts were seen to with lawsuits from various tech firms (side note: The SONY Walkman wasn't invented by SONY at all, but stolen, then with ill-gotten profits sued the inventor to bankruptcy, and finally when everyone was done with it decades later, settled for a measly sum. There are tons of false propaganda like this). They still managed to lobby Senators to get them out of paying for their treachery, but even so, future American aid was cut short. Without trillions foreign aid, without colonies to exploit, they have finally had to rely on their own selves: and are now wallowing in the world's greatest debt-to-GDP ratio (only recently surpassed by Venezuela) and a 30-year recession unprecedented in the history of any human civilization on the planet, starting right from the end of the Cold War in 1992. Weeaboos pretty much have been worshiping what was essentially their grandparents' tax dollars. And you thought 2.3 trillion spent in Afghanistan was costly.
  • Polish soldiers and government-in-exile in of Free Poland fought for against the Germans in WW2 on the Allied side, but around 1944, the Allies decided to fuck them over, and was happy to let them not take back their country but instead merely change hands and become taken over by pro-Soviet communist puppets. This decision among the Allies was even deliberately kept hidden until the end of the war so the Polish would keep on laying their lives down for them and fight until Germany surrendered. The veterans had no choice but to live in allied nations, mostly England. These veterans were not allowed to rear their heads in the Allied nations they were taking refuge in, and were ostracized, spat on, or even depicted as squatters who were taking jobs from the English. Those few who did go back to their now communist homeland were living lives worse than before, or outright arrested and executed for political reasons, as the communist puppets were worried their true heroic deeds would drive an insurrection to retake Poland from foreign powers once more. Most never lived to see their country finally regain its sovereignty when the USSR dissolved in 1991.
  • The South Vietnamese government in exile suffers the same, as having to weather through the colonization of the French, then the abject butchering rape and destruction caused by the Japanese in WW2, then the destruction causing a power vacuum and a fight that went on for decades, only for the communist North to takeover in full, and the South Vietnamese refugees had to discard all their livelihoods or be raped or butchered by the communists. The communists' Hue Massacre during the Vietnam War was nothing compared to what was in store for people who were not able to escape South Vietnam in 1975... Only for Cambodia to start a war with Vietnam. And while Vietnamese army was putting that fire out, the Chinese suddenly invaded from a 2nd front (which quickly ended when the Soviets, having skirmishes and even threatened a very one-sided nuclear war with China, threatened the Chinese to pull out of Vietnam). For the Vietnamese for quite some decades, it was quite grim dark and there was only war.
• Most of David Bowie's songs about 1990s.

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". To put it in another way, it is basically the author(s) writing dark things for the sake of edginess. The end product often comes out as painfully juvenile and sounding like something out of a 13-year-old fanfic that thinks adding barbwire coated in feces to everything makes something 'deep'.

That is not to say it is impossible to make an absurdly dark fiction without straying off course into grimderp territory. The post-apocalyptic short story, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison avoids the grimderp label due to the historical context the story was written in as well as the philosophical debate on the idea of cruelty as presented through AM. Is AM a spiteful, cruel monster or a product of man's penchant for violence and warfare trapped in its own database prison? Another example that avoids this title would be Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence, whose entire ethos is a critique and ruthless deconstruction on the entire Humanity Fuck Yeah and Cosmic Horror tropes whilst still crafting an unbelievably depressing multiverse. So yes, it is possible to write pure concentrated grimdark, but it should be done with a level of delicacy and self-awareness for it to be seen as legible.

• 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.
• The Dothraki of "A Song of Ice and Fire". We are asked to believe that an entire culture can sustain itself by raiding settled people (when the Mongols and Plains Indians they're based on hunted and herded large animals) while not selling or eating the livestock they plunder, eating horses whenever possible despite borderline worshipping them and relying on them as beasts of burden or war steeds, solve literally all their disputes with murder and defeat their enemies with mass charges (despite real nomads having small populations, and winning battles with cavalry skill and/or surprise). At the point where the story says that "a wedding without at least three deaths is considered a dull occasion" and mentions warriors casually raping dancers (the first fight to the death started over two warriors wanting the same dancer), the whole thing just looks like an edgy Magical Realm based on "hordes of eastern savages" clichés.
• 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 (missing the point of Fallout, FiM, and the original Fallout: Equestria) that becoming an hero WOULD ACTUALLY BE the happiest ending, 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 alive 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 42nd millennium, considering the monstrous spike in Chaos activity post-Rift).
  • 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 institution 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 go 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 Grandpa 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 they are the greatest resource the Imperium has, they're still trying to fight a war of attrition against foes including ones who can't even be properly killed and two races who can easily outbreed humanity; one reproduces by fighting and the other are a rapidly reproducing horde of space locusts who go from conception to combat-ready within a Terran week. 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.
  • The whole thing reached the lowest point by 3rd edition, considered the Darker and Edgier version of 40k, this is when some of the silliest things mentioned in this wiki were added or accentuated, after that 40k required more than 5 EDITIONS of fluff update, novels, characters and additional background to finally come back from "we no longer care" to an actual war with stakes and actual chances for all sides involved.
  • On Catachan, half the population doesnt survive infancy. Of the ones that do, half don't survive past 10 years. Its not even a guarantee that people past ten years of age survive into adulthood. Between the amount of kids EACH WOMAN would be required to have just to SUSTAIN the population, the amount of care that would be required for the pregnant women and her kids, along with (at absolute best) a precarious battle against nature itself, the Catachan population would be completely unsustainable. It's an honest to God-Emperor miracle that the planet even managed to accumulate a population of 12 million people, and even more miraculous that the Space Rambos were the byproduct.
  • The Emperor forcibly teleports Angron away from his final stand with his gladiator comrades, leaving them to die and telling Angron to get over himself. He also does absolutely nothing to ease Angron's suffering or convince him of the necessity of the Great Crusade. When asked by Angron why He would do something like this in spite of the wealth of other options, the only excuse Big E gives is that He's the Emperor and has more important shit to do on a much wider scale. Between there being no narrative or in-character precedent for Big E doing this and a laundry list of explanations as to what He could've done differently, this part of Angron's backstory and The Emperor's role in it can only be summed up as ADB yet again being guilty of shit writing and overly relying on daddy issues as a plot device.

• Star Wars: Although Star Wars is 40k's high fantasy twin, there have 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 nutrients 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 campaigns. 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. Even if they did something somewhat reasonable like restricting this practice to worlds that sided with the Confederacy of Independent Systems during the Clone Wars as a punishment, it's just spiteful beyond all reason.
  • Seriously, this is a level of grimderp surpassing the Yuuzhan Vong; sure, they were be a race of machine-hating, masochistic religious zealots, but even they had organic technology to compensate, some were capable of pragmatism and they didn't make unsustainable food sources... and this is before they overhauled their society.
• 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.
  • Jeph had lost his 17-year-old son to cancer not long before and apparently was taking his sorrow and anger out on the Ultiverse. It's no excuse, I suppose, but it is actually kind of sad.
• 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 like Redo of a Healer (see Edgy for details), Kuroinu, Maggot Baits 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
• About half of Garth Ennis's work goes so far around the bend that, if you don't stop caring about anyone in the story and put it down first, it becomes compelling or hilarious. Practically all of his original stories are drowning in grimderp (and author ax grinding). Prime examples include:
  • The Boys: Almost every superhero is an irredeemable sexual deviant and loose cannon whose only crime fighting accomplishments come from corporate PR lies, and the story's protagonists are little better.
    • Surprisingly averted for the most part with its Amazon Prime adaptation. By actually making most of 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. On the other hand, Homelander was made worse: Homelander's worst atrocities from the comics were actually done by Black Noir who was gaslighting him, while Homelander in the series really did those things and Black Noir has another story.
  • Preacher: One of his most infamous works. An edgelord power fantasy against all Christianity, including/especially God, it revolves around a former priest with a mysterious power, his criminal ex and a heroin addicted vampire.
    • Even worse in the Amazon Prime adaptation. The salvageable parts of the plot were swapped out for even more edgelordery, a prime example is dinosaurs being extinct because God killed them all when one did something gross.
  • Crossed: Another of his most infamous creations. Most of the world is dead or turned into murder-raping sadists á la the Reavers from Firefly due to a virus with a visible symptom being boils forming a cross pattern on the infectee's face. 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 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 (unlike the video game "Postal 2") 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. This is a unique case in that the grimdark was actually fairly well-done; it's that he had to fuck over the game's oldest and most-beloved setting by retconning out (ex.: The Horned Society) or altering to the point of demonization (ex.: Celene, the southern duchies) anything that disagreed with the new über-grimdark direction he wanted it to take that made it grimderp.
• Most of the anti-HFY content in the World of Darkness, especially the unmitigated misanthropy in parts of Werewolf: The Apocalypse. Humans vary from 'Apathetic fools responsible for most of the world's ills' to 'Cackling, moustache-twirling villains', civilization and all its fruits are EVIL!, and the tribe of bestiality-born werewolves that want to exterminate the human race down to pre-Stone Age levels are presented as heroes that're unequivocally morally justified in their actions both in and out of setting. Yeah.
• Anything made by biggest hack in Hollywood, Zack Hack Snyder.
• LifeWeb: A complex SS13 spinoff taking place in a cave fortress of a neo-medieval world in the far future, combat is more lethal, and it claims to explore subjects like murder, corruption, rape(with no regard for age), torture, cultism and general human suffering. In reality, the themes it "explores" just means "it's in the game and you can do it" and it's a farce on every level possible.
• The Hearts of Iron IV mod The New Order: Last Days of Europe has numerous dystopian "failstates", but there are a few standouts.
  • The first is the SS Ordenstaat Burgund, also known as Burgundy. Covering northeastern France and Belgium, Burgundy is ruled by Heinrich Himmler and the SS as a giant concentration camp. Its sole purpose is genocide, first on the local and ultimately on the global scale. When it isn't killing its own inhabitants, it's backing SS agents throughout the Third Reich's sphere of influence to further its cause of EEEVIL. Economic minister Oswald Pohl even points out that killing massive swathes of the nation's population just for not being Aryan isn't sustainable, but Himmler regards such criticism as treason. Realistically, Burgundy should have collapsed on itself before the game started, but it can stick around regardless. Playing as it is as difficult and miserable as you'd expect from a Holocaust management sim.
    • Recent updates have focused more on the "derp" than the "grim", apparently as a reaction to Burgundy's pre-rework supervillainy. Unlike before, where it could last into the '80s because the plot would break otherwise, nü-Burgundy experiences Not As Planned moments on a near-FAILbaddon scale. Himmler shooting Oswald Pohl for his "treason" not only tanks the economy but also makes economic management impossible. Over time, the slaves, French and Belgian collaborator legions, and even Burgundy's own ministers will eventually get fed up and rebel. If Himmler purges them, literally everyone else will rise up in an event called the "Burgundian Spring". Even in the rare event that Himmler actually gets his nuclear Holocaust, it ultimately fails; the "pure" Aryans he chose to preserve emerge from their bunkers...and peacefully join post-apocalyptic society without issue. Why? Himmler told them that only true Aryans would survive the nuclear holocaust, so they assume that all the survivors are Aryan by Himmler's definition, even if said survivors are Jewish or black.
  • The next is the entirety of Russia. What-was-once Soviet Russia has collapsed into several warlord states, and many of these are grimdark as fuck. Standouts include All-Russian Black League of Omsk, a hyper-nationalist warlord state led by revenge-mad ex-Soviet generals determined to launch a no-holds-barred genocidal war against Germany called the "Great Trial" (imagine if the Death Korps of Krieg ended up in charge of Russia and you have a pretty good idea); Hyperborea, which is Russia run by batshit-insane neo-pagan Slav supremacists who practice human sacrifice; and the Holy Russian Empire, which... honestly deserves its own section, it's so utterly glorious in its grimdark:
    • Russia is unified by a ultra-right wing Komi government headed by a deranged, self-loathing Jewish antisemite named Sergey Taboritsky who believes that Tsarevich Alexei miraculously survived the massacre of the Romanovs in 1918 and, like a proverbial king under the mountain, will come back to rule once Russia is sufficiently "purified". To this end, Taboritsky implements "Esoteric National Socialism" i.e the "Burgundian System" (an even more extreme ideological offshoot of Nazism emphasizing inflicting horrible state-mandated cruelty on everyone living under it to strengthen the Aryan race) in Russia, creating a theocratic totalitarian dictatorship that purges anyone deemed sufficiently "un-Russian", with an emphasis on the Jews. To this end Taboritsky deploys copious amounts of chemical weapons against dissidents, including one named "Taborite" that melts people's flesh into slurry on contact, to the extent that vast tracts of Russia are ecologically devastated for thousands of years. Murdering the mentally-ill and disabled children, burning priests at the stake, declaring that the idea of innocence doesn't exist and changing laws so that even dropping your tools at work can get you tried and summarily executed; that kind of shit. In a world where Adolf Hitler not only exists but achieved even more of his evil plans to reshape the world than in real life, he is considered a secondary evil to Taboritsky. But eventually Taboritsky has a beautiful vision of Alexei coming back that turns into a vision of a little pile of bones with a bullet hole through the skull, and the old man realizes that Alexei is dead and not coming back and literally dies of despair. This is only the very beginning of Taboritsky's wild ride and subsequent events show the nation's descent into complete insanity that has been affectionately named "Post-Taboritsky Meta-Horror Neo-Warlordism". Because nobody in their right mind would dare confront or question a man who might strangle you thinking you are Cain, everyone settles into default orders through sheer fear. Purification squads just... keep killing, until they lose their minds a la Heart of Darkness; one soldier is so far-gone that he doesn't even recognize his own parents shortly after executing them. Factory workers are made to work themselves to death because the order to let them go home never comes through. Whole towns and swathes of Russia are completely destroyed by the army bombarding them with chemical weapons or abandoned as people begin fleeing west into Nazi Germany just to escape the horror. Eventually the armies, the ministers and even the flag of the Holy Russian Empire disappear, Russia turns into a black borderless DMZ, and the portrait changes to an unlit abandoned shack in the middle of nowhere and the nation gains the "Radio Silence" trait, with only one broadcast leaving the nation's borders, presumably forevermore: "REMAIN CALM. THE REGENT ENDURES. ALEXEI LIVES. THE HOLY RUSSIAN EMPIRE SHALL ENDURE. THERE IS MUCH WORK TO BE DONE". Apparently according to the developers, what Taboritsky does to Russia is so thorough that it's like the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust and the trauma is so great that Russia will never reunify ever again. The sheer number of references to the Imperium of Man in Taboritsky's path is sometimes seen as a message: in literally any setting except Warhammer 40,000's unique circumstances, a theo-fascist state comparable to the Imperium is doomed to auto-genocide. And it only gets worse from there...
    • The After Midnight update adds a post-Taboritsky epilogue and paints a nightmarish picture of what "Post-Taboritsky Meta-Horror Neo-Warlordism" fully entails. After a period of total anarchy where mechanized warbands of radicalized ultranationalist soldiers roam the country killing everyone they encounter, successor states eventually emerge headed by some of the most deranged and unstable people you can imagine. The Black League of Omsk becomes even more insane, expanding the Great Trial, a project of genocidal war against the Germans, to also include any "corrupted" Russians not outside their borders. The once-persecuted Kazakhs are launching genocidal crusades into Russia to wipe the Russian people from the earth as revenge. A band of Shturmoviki stranded in Omsk and driven mad by the revelation that the head of the Holy Russian Empire was a Jew have pledged their allegiance to Satan out of despair and madness, engaging in human sacrifice and inviting nihilistic thugs and serial killers into their ranks. Magadan is a wretched hive of smugglers and ex-fascist thugs. The Eurasian Republic is a megacorp warlord state convinced that explicitly rejects all dreams and ideals beyond sustaining the state, and that Russian national identity is so tainted irrevocably by the HRE that it seeks to create a new "Eurasian" identity in its place. I could go on.
• Kane & Lynch: Dog Days. The First game already bordered on Grimderp thanks to having two completely villanious outlaws going against others villanious outlaws, but avoided it by having an engaging if edgy plot, but the second game? Oh boy, it jumps the shark from grimvile to shitvile. Our "heroes" return, just as horrible as ever, except with the addendum that the game tries to create the most disgusting, creepy atmosphere possible - shaky camera in order to portray the protagonists diminishing mental health, flares that block your victims blown up parts and others thing done to really showcase violence as "disturbing". It "succeeds" while making the game completely unplayable as the shaky camera ends up being vomit-inducing, the screen being blocked by blood and trash coming off as more obnoxious than anything else and the lack of heroic, or even simpathetic motivation from the main characters making it impossible for a player to empathize with the omnicidal maniacs who by the end of the campaign have ruined the lives of hundreds of innocent people just save their own face. Your "reward" for going through this shit treck? A clifhanger ending that doesn't promise a single good thing out of it. Imagine all the problems mentioned above regarding The Last Of Us 2, swap the zombie apocalypse scenario for a criminal story and slap outdated gameplay and an atmosphere done on purpose to be off-putting in it, and you have a game a player will barely endure a single playthrough - while at the same time not caring for any of the two assholes you are controlling. Or to quote our hate/fuck buddy from Zero Punctuation:

"Much as the visuals succeed too well at being deliberately hideous, the characters succeed too well at being deliberately wankers. There's nothing fun about the game. No light relief, just one nauseating heap on unpleasantness after another, like a roadside café breakfast special by Jeffrey Dahmer."

– Yahtzee

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 with so much potential, but 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' lifespans 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, depressed, 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

• Noblebright
• Edgy
• Eversor
• Lamenters

External Links

• KnowYourMeme has examples from outside of /tg/
• Trope Talk: Grimdark, a analysis of the "Grimdark" style of storytelling and why it works (and why sometimes it doesn't)