There's been a bunch of fuss recently in the writerly corners of the internet that I occasionally poke my nose into about "gritty fantasy" and "grimdark" (which I'd parse as "horrible dismal worldview" and generally attempt to avoid like cholera, because really, life's too short for unalleviated misery*) and whether they're more "realistic" or inherently worthy by virtue of their (very specific & usually anti-female sorts of) awfulness. The part of the argument I've seen is mostly the people I more or less agree with, and most of the obvious things ("all rape all the time" isn't necessarily historically accurate,
and if it were it would apply to guys as well;
predictable misery is as shallow as predictable sweetness & light, etc) have been covered.
The thing that bothers me that I haven't seen addressed is that some people's actual reality is grimmer and grittier than other people's. We all have to deal with a certain level of basic biology and things (dirty diapers...) and bad stuff happens all the time, but it is the nature of random distributions that the shares of joy and misery will be disproportionate. We've got a pretty good statistical sampling in this household.
The Megatherium (at a whole 33 days of age) has endured no trauma greater than being born, or having a heel stick at the doctor's office, and I guarantee that at the moment as she coos and looks about the room next to me she remembers neither of these things.
I've been through my share of misery, but it was mostly emotional things brought upon myself (career indecisiveness, and depressive tendencies coupled with a string of poor relationship choices of the sort that mostly involve incompatibility and heartache rather than anyone actually being unkind.) Aside from the slowly increasing number of intermittent headache/migraine triggers I'm baseline healthy, no broken bones, and just had my first set of stitches from the stupid episiotomy. I've never lacked food or shelter or potable water except in the most short-term sense, and furthermore always had at least a little discretionary income.
Grauwulf, who pulled himself up by his proverbial bootstraps, has had enough grit for all three of us: childhood peppered with uncertainty, accident & death; smashed bones from a nasty car accident; jinxed luck dealing with administrative nonsense that leads to things like the year of Verizon setting collection agencies on him for a bill they couldn't identify on an account that he paid in full and closed six months previously. (On the upside, he's also got the kind of immune system you get from surviving childhood in places that can't be sanitized.)
Oh, and the earliest thing we know about the cat is his wandering the streets of Baltimore with a nasty leg injury, though based on his attitude towards people we're pretty sure he's been happy & well cared for both before and since.
I fully admit that (besides the ongoing thing with my father) I'm a bit of a spoiled brat. But that doesn't make my life any less "real" than grauwulf's or anyone else's, and either of us could easily pick bits of our lives that make up a decent story. My experiences would not be made any more real by the addition of the sort of things that produce screaming nightmares, so arguing that this is required to add realism to fiction seems a bit, well, unrealistic.
*If you happen to *like* unalleviated misery for some reason (either reading or writing) I don't mean to discourage you. But there are a number of things I've crossed off my personal list based on years of always regretting having read them, from Garfield comic strips to Russian literature.
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