IndustriousArc
Since: Feb, 2016
07/05/2022 00:00:00
Author here: The story is very much and Old Shame for me. Bear in mind, I was a teenager at the time of writing, and at that time everything was about making everything Darker and Edgier.
I look back on some areas with a bit of nostalgia and humor, but most of it is cringe for the reasons you listed: darkness for the sake of it. If you managed to get past the first few chapters you\'d find it lightens up a bit as I got older, not that I\'d expect anyone to slog through the entire thing just for the good bits here and there.
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Not much light at the end of this tunnel.
If I could describe A Brighter Dark in two words, I would choose "inherently contradictory". For every point it wants to make, the writing goes out of its way to nullify it.
The title implies that even in the darkest of times, things will always get better, but the story itself has this pervasive melancholy tone where almost everyone is angry and/or miserable, and even its few moments of levity don't do anything to lighten the mood in a world where death is always around the corner.
It wants to give as many characters a voice as possible, but of the multiple POV shifts throughout the story, only a few of them give a fresh perspective on the events.
It wants to tell a tale where no one is the bad guy, but it spends most of its time following a protagonist whose actions regularly prove her to be more villain than hero, in spite of the narrative saying otherwise.
It wants to show a more logical and grounded side of a war between two countries, but by removing and/or ignoring large portions of lore crucial to Fire Emblem Fates' story and replacing it with the "real world" equivalents, the story ends up looking less logical in the process.
Between its grimdark tone, wildly inconsistent voice, unrelatable lead character, and an overall message that seems to always be at odds with itself, I can't honestly find much to recommend in A Brighter Dark. The fight scenes appropriately evoke FE's "death is but a mistake away" feel, and this story's version of Sakura makes for a way better heroine than Corrin, but like the rest of the story, such glimmers of light are too few and far between.