Darkness Induced Audience Apathy

After a great deal of willpower and just forcing myself through it, I finally finished shortskirtsandexplosions' "Background Pony." And for the most part, it's earned its hallowed place in the fandom's halls; it's incredibly well-written, even beautiful and poignant in several places. But here's the thing. You see how I started this paragraph? I should never have to say that about a great piece of fiction. Everything about the story just felt draining, and after a good while I really didn't give a damn about any of the characters or the crap Lyra was getting shoved through.

Fortunately, TV Tropes, that eternal enemy of productivity, has a term for just such a feeling: Darkness Induced Audience Apathy.

A lot of people like darker stories. It's one of the reasons so many turn to fanfiction for FiM; we can go to more mature and drearier places than the show could ever hope to reach. A great many fanfics explore death and destruction on a grand scale, have characters go through tumultuous relationships, and even paint the characters in harsher lights than before. And all of that is a good thing on its own. But when you do something like that, there is a point where you just have to stop, and if you cross that line, things can get very bad, very fast.

Darkness Induced Audience Apathy is what happens when a story is so hopelessly bleak that there's really no point in caring about what happens anymore. That doesn't just mean things end badly; you can have a downer ending but still make a work that matters. Where things fall apart for stories like this is when everything in the story becomes dark and broken, every character is either reduced to a punching bag or a borderline villain, and the whole setting is rigged in such a way that no hope or joy could possibly escape.

But hey, that's not a bad thing, is it? After all, darker and edgier stories can be very good. But the best ones I've found are the ones that temper the bleakness of the situation with some sense of hope. "The Immortal Game," for example, is relentless in how royally screwed everypony is, but there's still a sense of hope that things can get better, and in the end victory, while costly, is still earned. Even "Return of Harmony" was almost soul-crushing in how broken and twisted the Mane 6 became, but Discord's insanity provided some light comedy to help ease the tension, and in the end the darkness of the preceding events was used to make the ending all the more triumphant. But to turn it back to the starting example, "Background Pony" punches you in the gut over and over again, finally offers some possible hope...and then takes it away and ends things in a hopeless state, where no matter what Lyra does, she's effectively screwed.

So what can be done to avoid this (highly subjective) trope? A couple of things:

A) Provide some sort of humor to the proceedings. I don't mean cram in jokes where they aren't appropriate (a dramatic death scene shouldn't have Pinkie riding around on a unicycle in the background), but instead facilitate little moments that can lighten the mood just a little. It's amazing what a little laughter can do in the darkest of times.

B) Take a breather from the heavy moments. If Twilight just got her hind legs broken by the Smooze, the next scene should not be Tirek ripping Angel's head off. Pace the weightier scenes out so that the audience has time to breathe. This also makes the impact of those moments all the more powerful.

C) If you're going for a downer ending, be sure to scale it to fit what happened before. For example, an ending where everyone's dead is fine, but an ending where they all die, only to then show their souls being picked apart, all while the narration talks about how awful they all were and how everyone is now screwed because they failed is not only ridiculous, but also feels like a slap in the face.

D) Stay away from Diablous Ex Machina. This refers to any sort of last-minute, out-of-nowhere plot point that works to either bring ruin to the heroes or bolster the villain. If this is in the middle of a story, it's more acceptable, and can be a way to raise tension if utilized correctly. But NEVER USE THIS AT THE END. All that does is serve to piss the audience off by reminding them that their time has been wasted.

Creating a dark work is always difficult to pull off correctly, and especially when the subject matter is cartoon ponies. Just...try to take at least some of this to heart. Now if you'll excuse me, I have an appointment with Dr. Chardonnay.