Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy/Quotes

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
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Alice: I like the Walrus best because you see he was a LITTLE sorry for the poor oysters.
Tweedledee: He ate more than the Carpenter, though. You see he held his handkerchief in front, so that the Carpenter couldn't count how many he took: contrariwise.
Alice: That was mean! Then I like the Carpenter best, if he didn't eat so many as the Walrus.
Tweedledum: But he ate as many as he could get.

Alice: Well! They were BOTH very unpleasant characters.
Making every hero on earth as dark as Batman? That was your master plan? Great. So, after the audience gets bored to tears by every hero being just like every other hero, they'll be so depressed over how freakin' BLEAK they are, they'll KILL THEMSELVES!
"When there's no hope -- and there is no hope for any of these characters, trust me; they all die, they all die in every flick -- When there's no hope for any of the characters, and they basically know there's no hope, I can't get invested in any of them. I don't care if they live or die cause they're all going to die."
Noah Antwiler, in his V-Log discussing Final Destination 5
"The characters have achieved nothing, learned nothing, and will hopefully now jump into a big black hole and return to nothing. Just as the visuals succeed too well at being deliberately hideous, the protagonists succeed too well at being deliberately wankers. There's nothing fun about the game, no light relief, just one piece of nauseating unpleasantness after another, like a roadside café breakfast special by Jeffrey Dahmer."

"It's the monotone crapness of everything-- governments, cultures, people, Exalts, gods, the cosmos, everything. No redeeming features, nothing worth fighting for, nobody who'd bother to get up off their ass or stop filling their pockets to do the fighting even if there were.

Dark and shitty."
Exalted freelancer Holden Shearer, defining the term 'shitdark'
They require that the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones. But the reader of the Deerslayer tale dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together.
Mark Twain, on the lack of attachment he felt towards the characters of The Leatherstocking Tales, Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences