True Art Is Angsty

"The butterfly had an abortion as a teenager."
"Exquisite."

"It isn't gloomy, it's profound."

— Henrik Egerman, A Little Night Music

The experts have spoken! The greatest stories ever written are only ones full of cynicism, suffering, injustice, tragedy, and hopelessness. Yes, only the grimmest of tales can effectively explore the horrid realities of life itself; like the fragility of human existence, the crushing agony of love and regret, hopes and dreams never coming to fruition, the utter futility of happiness, and other life-defining themes, such as why mommy never really loved you. Therefore, any other story with an unambiguously Happy Ending is just a piece of cheap boring commercial tripe, or even propaganda. As for comedy shows, they're all just bourgeois garbage.

In these types of stories, nobody is really the good guy. Not even the hero. If there are otherwise any nice characters present, you can expect them to get killed off sooner or later, or alternatively, suffer a Fate Worse than Death. If there are characters with sympathetic viewpoints, don't expect their suffering to be the prelude to an ultimate triumph (especially when they work so hard to achieve it). No, they have to ultimately fail in the end. Not only that, they've got to be traumatized for life, lose everything they hold dear, give in to despair, or even be killed off, along with their friends and loved ones. Heck, if there are villains around (especially hatable ones), why not let them win the day and have them get away with their crimes scot-free? Maybe even have them prosper over all the good guys while we're at it? Yeah! That ought to drive home the message that LIFE IS SUFFERING! (...and unfair.)

But in all seriousness, True Art Is Angsty is an Audience Reaction when a particular work is being praised for its dark and/or cynical tone. It's also a mindset that is adopted by both cynical writers and audiences who believe that adding plenty of angst in a work can make for compelling storytelling. However, it also has a tendency to drive away the more sensitive and idealistic members of the audience, and can make a story worse when its darkness is too intense to stomach, too unadulterated to bear, and/or isn't handled with the proper grace. Expect accusations of Wangst, pandering to the critics, or intentionally exploiting hot-button topics to pop up in discussions about media and creators who adhere to this trope, whether deserved or not.

Related to Comedy Ghetto, Oscar Bait, Maturity Is Serious Business, Death by Newbery Medal, Silly Rabbit, Idealism Is for Kids!, Creator Breakdown and Creator Recovery. In stories, the Sensitive Artist is the one most likely to make this kind of art.

Contrast Angst Aversion^note where people avoid a work because it's angsty (though it's not uncommon for the two to overlap), Angst Dissonance^note where the angst is overused to the point of becoming annoying or hilarious rather than emotionally captivating, Too Bleak, Stopped Caring^note where the angst is so relentless that audiences can no longer anticipate a happy (or at least bittersweet) ending in a story, and subsequently stop caring about said story or its characters, and Silly Rabbit, Cynicism Is for Losers!^note in which the notion that angst adds realism is mocked by showing how harmful a bleak mindset can be.

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In-Universe Examples Only:

Anime & Manga

• Delicious in Dungeon: Discussed in an omake regarding a type of monster called the Nightmare, which generates bad dreams to feed on the resulting emotional energy of its hosts. The question is asked, why does it only generate bad dreams to create emotional energy? Why not good dreams? Laios tells of a researcher who set out to discover the answer by willingly sleeping with Nightmares, finding the dreams were initially of a great assortment, but gradually the number of bad dreams increased and overtook good dreams completely. Right before the researcher died, he concluded the reason that Nightmares only make bad dreams is because happiness quickly becomes boring, but the well of sorrow is bottomless and provides mental stimulation indefinitely; it is the human desire for tragedy which compels Nightmares to make bad dreams.
• Hello Sandybelle: After the Countess of Wellington is killed in a traffic accident, her son, Marc, becomes a shell of his former self. To make matters worse, his father wants the Wellington family to save face by arranging a marriage between Marc and the wealthy heiress Kitty Shearer. Marc, however, hates Kitty because she's an Alpha Bitch and only has eyes for Sandybelle. He breaks off their engagement and runs away, becoming an artist for a living. The grief of losing his mother at a young age motivates him to create dark and unconventional art. One day, famed art collector Roussanne notices Marc's artwork, likes it, and puts it on a museum, catapulting Marc into wealth and fame. Marc and Sandybelle eventually get together, and live happily ever after.
• Octave: Setsuko gains some praise for a song she composed during a rough patch of her relationship with Yukino.
• Princess Tutu: The author Drosselmeyer is fanatically obsessed with pain and tragedy. He flat-out states that he considers stories with happy endings to be "boring." It likely comes from having been struck by tragedy himself, being essentially killed and having to write himself back into existence with his last breath because the townspeople around him were afraid of him. Heavy duty Creator Breakdown followed.
• In the 25th chapter of Spy X Family, the terrible Griffin model that Damian made (with Anya's "help") somehow won first prize. Apparently, the judges were moved by its determination to "stand proudly despite its plucked wings", which serves as "a powerful vision of our nation as it rebounds from the war". Neither Damian nor Mr. Henderson agree with the judgment, and still see the resulting model as nothing but trash.
• Translucent: The philosophy of Shizuka's idol, the visiting stage actress. She sees Shizuka practicing outside by herself, and figures out that the drama advisor must have asked her to hide because of her translucent syndrome acting up. The end of the chapter is the actress talking during an interview where she says she feels angst is important for a developing actress.

Comic Books

• In one Archie Comics strip, Betty submits a macaroni sculpture depicting a victorious athlete for an art contest, and was lambasted by the critics for being too naively optimistic. When the heat of the spotlight causes the sculpture to melt, the critics start to praise its brutal portrayal of despair. However, Betty defies this by declaring that life isn't just Angst, embraces a positive outlook of life, and withdraws from the competition.
• Arne Anka: Arne seems to belive this, with most of his work being either incredibly confusing, or dark and depressing.
• Bamse: Usually, Brum's artwork is pretty cheery, but the trope was invoked in the story where he went through a "dark" period due to a rejection from a girl he liked and was promptly "discovered" as an artist.
• In the final issue of Flex Mentallo, the Hoaxer invokes this trope while discussing the nature of comics. He mentions how it's usually the darkest, most depressing books that win the most acclaim, but goes on to argue that the desire to have everything be as bleak and Darker and Edgier as possible is just as juvenile as an insistence on constant happy endings.
• X-Men: An anthology story had Colossus running into someone who believed this at an art exhibition, criticising Piotr's initial artwork for not being nihilistically depressing. For whatever reason, Piotr decides this guy has a point, and paints another piece while thinking about his dead little sister. The gloomy art critic approves of this second piece.
• Daredevil: One of Daredevil's more recent villains, Muse, is very much a Mad Artist, so naturally he believes this. What's interesting, however, is that Muse believes the process of art should be angsty and almost never mentions the art itself, going into detail about how people just assume that a work of art is instantaneous, fully sprung from the artist's mind.
• Grant Morrison's Animal Man run gradually turns out to be a massive Deconstruction of this attitude and the negative effects it sometimes has on artists and their work. Their run climaxes with Animal Man meeting Grant themself in the form of an Author Avatar that is suffering a Creator Breakdown where they turn to this trope in a misguided attempt to cope with personal losses, an inability to change the world, and general artistic disillusionment. Animal Man is forced to confront the existential horror of knowing that his life is being systematically ruined all for the sake of cheap drama and propping up the political beliefs of his writer. Ultimately, this conversation drives Grant to a change of heart, realizing that even fictional characters can deserve to be treated with some kindness and dignity, using a Deus ex Machina to undo the suffering they put Animal Man through and implicitly regaining some measure of enjoyment from writing.
  We thought that by making your world more violent, we would make it more "realistic", more "adult". God help us if that's what it means...
• Viz: The Critics have this attitude, along with True Art Is Incomprehensible. Possibly the best example of their obnoxious "angsty" view is one where the story was a version of Cinderella, with The Critics taking the Fairy Godmother role. At the end where it has already ended with the version of the Prince and the Ugly Sisters leaving her behind, Cinderella begs The Critics for help, only to be told by them that they hate happy endings and magical plot devices and a much more poignant ending would be for her to die starving in poverty and squalor!

Comic Strips

• Funky Winkerbean: The parents who don't like the drama class performing the play Wit because "School plays are for fun and relaxation, not art."

Films — Animation

• Parodied in The LEGO Movie.
  • Wyldstyle claims that Batman is a "true artist" because he's dark and brooding. In addition, his song is pretty much entirely about darkness and having no parents.
  • Also comes up in The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part, this time played more seriously as an aspect of the conflict between Finn (who has come to subscribe to this trope) and his sister (who hasn't). It's brutally deconstructed, as it's ultimately shown how this trope, in its own way, is just as childish as naive idealism.
• At the start of Bolt, a woman from the network tells the director of Bolt's Show Within a Show that the show is too formulaic and optimistic. They are losing the 18-35 audience because the show is too happy for them.

Films — Live-Action

• In A Bad Moms Christmas, Ruth insists that the Russian version of The Nutcracker is superior because it's "not the sugary version, with dance and joy".
• The original Godzilla (1954) was intended to be a basic generic giant monster film with the titular monster waking up from a nuclear test, and rampages through Tokyo. Then enter Ishir⁠ō Honda, who was a former Japanese Imperial soldier during World War II, and saw the aftermath of the Little Boy Atom bomb in Hiroshima, and it traumatized him for life. The film goes out of its way to get its point across when a mother holds her children and tells them they'll see their father soon, and runs with Reality Subtext and a literal Real Life Writes the Plot with the Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb test in the Pacific. It also subvert the usual giant monster formula, and portray the monster as a sympathetic victim of the same nuclear warfare as the Japanese.
• In The Life of Émile Zola, Zola insists on writing about all the injustices and social ills of French society. When the publisher that Zola works for suggests that Zola write about safer topics Zola reacts with contempt, and the publisher fires him.
• Moulin Rouge!:
  • How people react to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's art.
  • Also the ending itself, as what starts out as a happy love story with humor to spare eventually evolves into a tragic drama (though the framing narrative reveals at the start that it will end this way); Satine's consumption is only brought up in the third act, the doctor told others before her, and it guarantees that she'll die at the end.
  • Most likely because the whole plot is heavily inspired by the opera La Traviata, by Giuseppe Verdi, where Violetta (Satine's opera counterpart) also shows mild symptoms during Act 1, but is only severely ill and dies at the end, just minutes after her lover reconciles with her.
• In The Third Man, Harry Lime makes the remark (which was written by Orson Welles):
  Harry Lime: You know what the fellow said — in Italy, for thirty years under The Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and The Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace — and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long Holly.
• The inciting incident of Cold Souls has Paul Giamatti remove his soul to better play the titular role of an Uncle Vanya stage production as the intense material drives him to tears during the middle of rehearsal. Taking out his soul fixes that problem, but it ultimately robs him of the ability to act.
• Music and Lyrics: The lyricist Alex Fletcher's manager hires, Greg "the rhyming psychopath", seems to believe this as all of his ideas for lyrics are aggressively dark and he mocks Sophie's much lighter lyrical attempts. Alex himself is an aversion as he explains to Sophie that a good pop song such as "My Girl" can be more effective at changing someone's mood than most "serious" literature.

Literature

• Parodied in Isaac Asimov's Author! Author!, in which the protagonist, a successful author of detective stories which he despises, wants to write a Serious Novel.
  June: Is the setting a coal-mine district?
  Graham: Uh— yes.
  June: And are the people concerned real, earthy, unartificial, down-to-earth characters, speaking and thinking just like you and me? Is it a story of basic economic forces? Are the human characters lifted up and thrown down and whirled around, all at the mercy of the coal mine and mechanized industry of today?
  Graham: Uh— yes.
  June: I remember distinctly. First, you got drunk and were sick. Then you got better, and told me the first few chapters. Then I got sick.
• Confessions (Saint Augustine): Young Augustine, like many his age, used to love plays and theatre because seeing characters be so miserable on stage would cause him to feel misery and compassion for them. When he's older and escaped many of his own self-inflicted miseries, Augustine finds his enjoyment of tragic shows pathetic because they let one excuse themselves for their staying in their own miseries.
• In Søren Kierkegaard's work Either/Or, "A", an aesthete and the author of the "Either" section, expresses this in the first paragraph. He says:
  "What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music. It is with him as with the poor wretches in Phalaris's bronze bull, who were slowly tortured over a slow fire; their screams could not reach the tyrant's ears to terrify him; to him they sounded like sweet music. And people crowd around the poet and say to him, 'Sing again soon'—in other words, may new sufferings torture your soul, and may your lips continue to be formed as before, because your screams would only alarm us, but the music is charming. And the reviewers step up and say, 'That is right; so it must be according to the rules of esthetics.' Now of course a reviewer resembles a poet to a hair, except that he does not have the anguish in his heart, or the music on his lips. Therefore, I would rather be a swineherd out on Amager and be understood by swine than be a poet and be misunderstood by people."
• Falling Up by Brian J Bromberg: Alvaro insists to Gregg that art comes from suffering, convincing Gregg to throw away his comfortable life in the pursuit of artistic spark.
  Alvaro: You know, it seems to me that one cannot create great art if one is too content. […] What can you write, eh? You have the steady job, loads of money, the girl—all the comforts of life. So why make art? You are not suffering. Sufferers make art. You? You are too comfortable. You are not miserable enough. […] You've stopped struggling, Greggeralidad. Which is good, it makes your life livable. But art is a struggle against an unlivable life, you know? So it's a trade-off. Make yourself comfortable, lose the art.
• Mocked in IT, which, like many Stephen King stories, features a writer as a major character. Bill Denborough, one of the novel's leads, attends a writing program in college in the late 1960s/early 1970s, and finds himself butting heads against the other students in the class and even the teacher, who insists on analyzing every detail of every story in an anti-war, psychosexual model (the same teacher praises another student's play, which lasts for hours and consists of a cast of actors repeating individual words — one word each — that eventually become a sentence against capitalism). When Bill finally gets tired of the constant insistence on finding deeper meanings in everything they write, he asks, "Can't you guys just let a story be a story?" Notably, he's the only one in his class who becomes a major success.
• I've Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level: Played for Laughs with Curalina's over-the-top gloomy drawings. Insisting she's drawing "the inside", she takes considerable creative liberties — a cheerfully posing model becomes a dark Corner of Woe — but they sell well in the big city, to the models' disbelief.
• Life of Pi plays with this trope. The main story is a fantastical one about Pi surviving 227 days on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger. The officials do not believe this account, so Pi tells an alternate, but similar story in which the animal characters are replaced with humans who cannibalize each other, with the audience implicitly being posed the question of which one is true. Those who believe in this trope may be more inclined towards the human story.
• Spes Phthisica: Helen's art only becomes popular when the dead landscapes of her dreams start entering into it.
• Alex in Terry Goodkind's The Law Of Nines is criticized by an art gallery owner for only creating paintings that look beautiful and celebrate life and other dumb stuff like that, instead of exploring humanity's inherent depravity like a real artist.
• Harry from Eye of a Fly, who dreams of writing the Great American Novel, seems to believe both this and True Art Is Incomprehensible.
  Patricia: You wrote twenty-five pages about taking a shit? That's your fucking work of art?
  Harry: It's a metaphor for life, goddamn it! You strain and strain, and it never comes out the way you want.

Live-Action TV

• The Crazy Ones: Invoked by Simon in "Sydney, Australia" while he is trying to get Danny Chase, Sydney's stalker-ish former co-worker^note who's subsequently slapped with a restraining order preventing him from getting withing 50 yards of Sydney until 2015 (played by Josh Groban), to sell him the rights to the saccharine love song he'd written. Simon succeeds by pointing out that the material written after Sydney broke the co-worker's heart is much better than the song he's trying to buy.
• Doctor Who: In "Vincent and the Doctor", Dr. Black — Bill Nighy's character — who is an art expert, explains in Van Gogh's presence how the latter managed to "transform the pain of his tormented life into ecstatic beauty" and "use [his] passion and pain to portray the joy and ecstasy and magnificence of our world". And this is why he is the greatest artist who ever lived.
• Drop the Dead Donkey: Joy's doodles of hideous fates for her superiors are lauded as high art.
• Girl Meets World: Maya Hart does very well in art class and uses it to express her difficult life living in borderline poverty with her single mother and a Disappeared Dad that left when she was 6 years old. In contrast, Riley Matthews has a stable home life with a nuclear middle-class family and her art skills mimics that of an average kindergarten student and multiple paintings of purple cats, no matter the assignment. Lampshaded by Riley when the art teacher still encourages her to do art because she enjoys it.
  Riley: I’m a happy artist...This is why I stink.
• In season three of The Good Place, it is revealed that Kamilah's creative drive is born from the emotionally toxic Sibling Rivalry she and her sister Tahani had forced upon them by their abusive parents.
• The Joy of Painting: Invoked only to be defied by Ross, who said, "We want happy paintings. Happy paintings. If you want sad things, watch the news."
• Parks and Recreation:
  • Played for Laughs in "The Camel" when Leslie believes that a photo of a historic bread factory fire will win the contest for replacing one of the unpleasant murals in City Hall precisely because it's a tragic event in Pawnee's history.
  • In "Road Trip", Andy thinks the opposite is true.
  Andy: (to April) 'Cause your music is sad, and depressing, and weird, and art... is supposed to happy, and fun, and everyone knows that.
• Humorously parodied in these sketches from Saturday Night Live. Six high school students put on a bizarre, supposedly symbolic show about contemporary life, including the all-white cast pretending to be shot and declaring "AND WE WERE ALL BLACK" and annoying audience interaction. Their parents, and even the drama teacher (who is seen chain-smoking cigarettes), are all confused and occasionally offended by the "artistic" piece.
• Six Feet Under: Played straight with everyone but Claire. Claire attains some moderate artistic success with a more upbeat portfolio, but keeps trying to pitch her own work, which is all gloomy shots of gravestones. No one is interested.
• Brian from Spaced can only paint when he's unhappy. When he starts dating Twist and becomes very happy, he can't paint anymore, until someone tells him that his uncle died.
• Lampshaded in the penultimate episode of That Mitchell and Webb Look, where the guys discuss giving the show a Darker and Edgier Killer Finale for the sake of winning acclaim and awards. They specifically cite the similar bleak ending to the final series of Blackadder. To that end, they seek out and kill the cheeriest cast member they can find for the sake of "Narrative Purposes".
  Robert Webb: If this series is to mean anything, someone's got to die!

Music

• Satirized in the song Miserablism by Pet Shop Boys. The Other Wiki article suggests that it was aimed at Morrissey, formerly of The Smiths.
  Deny that happiness
  is open as an option
  ...
  No happy endings
  but a message to depress
  ...
  Just for the sake of it
  make sure you're always frowning
  (Angst! Angst! Angst!)
  It shows the world
  that you've got substance and depth
• The song "Fueled by Angst" by Worm Quartet is about the performer's life becoming so good that he no longer has anything to complain about.
• Frou Frou's song "The Dumbing Down of Love" contains the line "Music is worthless unless it can make a complete stranger break down and cry."
• Bowling for Soup:
  • Mocked rather ruthlessly in the song "I'm Gay."
    I think rock and roll is really funny when it's serious.
    Don't hate us 'cause we're happy,
    don't hate us 'cause we're beautiful!
    Don't hate us if we make you smile,
    or if we go the extra mile
    to make someone feel better on a really shitty day.
    If you're hearin' what I'm sayin', then I want you to say:
    I'M GAY!
  • Most of the band's work in general makes a point to avert this — even their sad/angry songs tend to have a silver lining to them, or at least a bit of comedy to take the edge off.
• In an interview with MTV in 1999, Eminem joked that if his personal life got less horrible, that'd be when he'd start writing love ballads. Fortunately (...?) his fame and Lost in Character issues destroyed his mental health, marriage and ability to live a normal life... though after his Creator Recovery he did start making a lot more love songs, oh dear. (Though they are usually anguished songs about toxic, emotionally dysfunctional relationships).
  • In "Guts Over Fear", he discusses how he got big talking about his horrible life, and then expresses insecurity about his artistic direction now that he's experienced Creator Recovery:
    But what am I gonna do when the rage is gone
    And the lights go out in that trailer park? Oh
    And the window is closing and there's nowhere else that I can go with flows and I'm frozen
    ‘Cause there's no more emotion for me to pull from
    Just a bunch of playful songs that I make for fun
    So, to the break of dawn, here I go recycling the same old song
    But I'd rather make “Not Afraid 2”^note "Not Afraid" from 2010's Recovery was an uplifting and inspirational song about overcoming addiction that has helped a lot of struggling people, but that a significant portion of his fans found to be Glurge than make another motherfucking “We Made You” ^note a satirical Black Sheep Hit Misogyny Song from 2009's Relapse about Slim Shady lusting after female celebrities, which was criticised for being outdated.

Tabletop Games

• Defied by the Troubadors of Princess: The Hopeful. Their First Oath is that their art must always be used to inspire and uplift, never to cause despair or stifle hope.

Video Games

• MacGuffin's Curse: Played for laughs. The Mayor's office is full of abstract paintings, and Lucas is generally unimpressed.
  Lucas: This one's called "PAIN BEAUTIFUL PAIN" but it's just a bunch of squares. The corners could be sharp, I guess?
• In Alice: Madness Returns, in the oriental level, the Cheshire Cat has this to say about one of the paintings.
  Cheshire Cat: The artist obliterated the distinction between poetry and pessimism.
• Played with and ultimately subverted in Persona 5. Yusuke’s Confidant arc has him attempting to portray "the grim, painful struggles of humanity" through his artwork, but he is met with derision in the art community. It is only when he learns to see both sides of humanity, the good and the bad, and portrays it in his work that he gains success.
• Rimworld: Certainly true for pawns with the Tortured Artist trait. They get a pronounced and permanent mood debuff, which puts them at higher risk of having a mental break... but every time they have a mental break of any severity, once it ends they have a high chance to get Inspired Creativity, and thus make a piece of much better quality than usual; a masterful artist can end up creating Legendary pieces this way. This being Rimworld, there will be many, many ways to keep such pawns inspired.
• Pokémon Scarlet and Violet: Brassius' most well-known art piece is a statue installation known as "Surrendering Sunflora", which depicts the titular Pokémon with somber expressions. Just what these Sunflora are surrendering to has been heavily debated amongst connoisseurs. During an art class he helps teach, he reveals the "surrendering" part was more a reflection of himself prior to getting over a terrible art slump, where he nearly surrendered to his own grief.

Web Animation

• Extra Credits: Discussed in the episode "Hard Boiled", where they show that just because Max Payne 3 is Darker and Edgier than its previous entries in its series, doesn't inherently make it more artistic.
• Parodied in Awesome Fantasy VII where Cloud and Vincent act hilariously emo, ending with an old man telling his grandson "And that's why it's the best game ever!"
• Parodied in the Eddsworld short Art is Serious, where Edd makes an animation which is initially about a joyous-looking little girl, but Tom instructs him to add more angst to it by making the girl in the animation look more angsty and with darker colours, and the final animation being about said girl crying in a somber forest with a sad music. Ultimately subverted with a quick rolling credits cut and the girl farting while doing a goofy face.

Webcomics

• Ava's Demon: Tuls Tenebrose liked a girl named Ranunculae, but then he died before he Could Spit It Out. He now spends his days in Maggie's Dream Land, painting portraits of Ranunculae to the point of bordering on a Room Full of Crazy.
• Last Res0rt: Kurt "Geisha" Striaeta figured out that not only was it easier to just kidnap, rape, and petrify his victims in order to make his sculptures, it also got him better reviews from the critics too.
• Penny and Aggie: In-universe, Aggie's rigid adherence to this attitude helps her to produce florid poetry and abysmal videos, and blinds her to the fact that she's quite good at drawing.
• True Believers: Joe Quesadilla claims this as his reason Spider-Man would sell better if Spidey weren't Happily Married.
• In The Bird Feeder #143, Lewis states that to sing as well as him, your soul must be filled with terrible sorrow.
• Sandra and Woo: Larissa and her father are both artists but the two of them clash over their opposing tastes in art. Larissa makes a colorful flower painting while her dad makes a dull painting of a desolate landscape. Larissa sabotages her dad's painting by adding a smiling sun to it and he gets back at her by adding a hanging skeleton to hers. While the two of them are arguing about it the sabotaged paintings end up becoming successful, to their surprise.
• Sarah's Scribbles rejects this in one of her webcomics, arguing that a happy artist makes great art.
• Dominic Deegan: When Gregory starts up his own band, he and his band members draw upon a theme of "honest and ugly", reflecting the corruption in the world and Greg's own horrific experiences with necromancy and dark magic. The results are somewhat mixed, with half the audience walking out of his debut concert and some dicey reviews, but he apparently finds enough success to make a living off it.
• The Nerf NOW!! strip "The Ends" associates this trend with indie studios being more "artistic" about their games (though by no means exclusive to them). In comparison, it depicts the AAA studio as making a good ending "so the players are happy with the experience and buy the sequel" while siding with them nonetheless because good endings feel good.
• Webcomic Name boils it down to its bare essentials here: a smiley face is not art, a frowney face is art.

Web Original

• Airheads: Claudia Malave's mother states that even as a young child, Claudia would've rather "drawn a witch under the moonlight than a princess."
• Television Without Pity: During a review of Angel:
  Strega As usual there's plenty of angst and gloom.
• SCP-3817 from the SCP Foundation is an immortal clone of deceased German composer Felix Mendelssohn whose body has numerous self-inflicted injuries. He has no intention to end his existence, but instead embraces his suffering because he believes it enhances his artistic merit, owing the decision to the other great artists whose difficult lives inspired their work. Turns out his work hasn’t changed at all.

Web Videos

• Commentary! The Musical: Parodied, of course. (With Self-Deprecation, as Joss Whedon known for putting his characters through the wringer.)
  Neil Patrick Harris: An Internet musical is a wacky idea that's zany! Where did it come from?
  Joss Whedon: It came from pain.
• Epic Rap Battles of History: Bob Ross accuses Picasso of this and specifically mentions his "Blue Period". This contrasts his own belief that paintings can be happy and loving.
• The Cinema Snob parodies this as part of the character, such as insisting that if you have a movie with a plot similar to Xanadu it should take itself a lot more seriously. Though he also parodies the inconsistent application of this mindset when it comes to certain genres, such as Slasher Movies.

Western Animation

• Batman: The Brave and the Bold: "Legends of the Dark Mite!" takes a hilarious swipe at viewers who complain about the Lighter and Softer feel of the series.
  Fanboy dressed as Batman: I always felt Batman was best suited in the role of gritty urban crime detective? But now you guys have him up against Santas? And Easter Bunnies? I'm sorry, but that's not my Batman!
  The Creators: [whispering among themselves, eventually handing a note to Bat-Mite] Here, read this.
  Bat-Mite: Batman's rich history allows him to be interpreted in a multitude of ways. To be sure, this is a lighter incarnation, but it's certainly no less valid and true to the character's roots as the tortured avenger crying out for Mommy and Daddy. [makes the paper disappear] And besides, those Easter Bunnies looked really scary, right?!
  Bruce Timm: [dressed as Mark Hamill's Joker] Meh.
• What's Opera, Doc?: Invoked by Bugs Bunny at the punchline:
  Bugs: Well what did ya expect in an opera — a happy ending?
• Mocked by The Fairly OddParents!, at the end of the episode "Action Packed", when a French kid is given back his fairy godfather: "My heart she is glad! But my art... she will suffer...".
• Parodied in one episode of Kaeloo, where Stumpy shoots his own head off with a bazooka after making art, since Mr. Cat told him that artists revel in pain.
• BoJack Horseman:
  • During season 2, Bojack and film director Kelsey Jannings try to make a gritty, realistic and tragic movie about the life of the racehorse Secretariat. The studio eventually develops some reservations about the movie, leading to Kelsey getting fired and a script rewrite making the movie more sentimental and optimistic with a new director attached. This is portrayed as a creatively bankrupt decision made entirely with money and audience accessibility in mind, with the new direction being treated as trite and hackneyed compared to the honest, emotionally weighty movie that Bojack and Kelsey wanted to make. Though things become a bit more mixed when the movie is released and it's a lot better than Bojack was expecting.
  • In season 6, Diane is attempting to write up a memoir about herself and her rough past, such as her Abusive Parents, childhood bullying, divorce, depression, and other personal traumas. However, she finds that she can't put her experiences into words no matter how hard she tries, but does have fun writing up a light-hearted detective story about a girl named "Ivy Tran" while procrastinating. The trope is deconstructed, as she's angry at herself for being unable to share her life-story with others because it would mean that everything she suffered through was meaningless in the end and this realization greatly worsens her mental health. After considerably prompting from her boyfriend Guy, Guy's son, and Princess Carolyn, she eventually decides to publish the Ivy Tran story instead and write children's novels instead of an angsty memoir, with the lesson that personal trauma doesn't need to define something, sometimes it's just meaningless.
• Dethklok of Metalocalypse are firm believers in this (which is par for the course for a death metal band) and try to make every aspect of their lives and their music as "brutal" or "metal" as possible, but the biggest in-universe case of it is in "Dethsiduals", when they temporarily kick Toki and Murderface out for embarrassing them with scandals. Initially it seems like no big loss since Skwisgaar wrote both of their parts anyway and their productivity massively increases, but the band quickly becomes disgusted with how "happy" the songs sound without the negativity that comes from their frustration with Murderface.
• Discussed in Daria. Its second season opener "Arts 'N Crass" features Daria and Jane being pressured into submitting a work of art for a cheesy poster contest (Jane by their art teacher as the only student with talent, Daria by Jane so she'll have someone to work with). The two create a painting of a beautiful girl admiring her reflection, with a poem attached about how she's bulimic. Having known this was a fluff contest, Daria explains she specifically wanted to create something that would make its audience think about standards of beauty and to show support to people who don't want to be judged by their appearance. The art teacher comes to praise the poster when she has the meaning explained to her, but everyone else is disgusted by the mention of vomiting and try to force the girls to alter the message. When they refuse and decide to just resign from the contest, Ms. Li basically steals the poster and planned to have it displayed under their names with a heavily rewritten poem. Daria and Jane respond by destroying it when it's clear they can't salvage the message. They get out of punishment when Daria's mom threatens to file a lawsuit against Ms. Li for stealing Daria's work and violating her civil liberties.

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