Catharsis through sad/dark/depraved story telling

Out of curiosity… Do you feel satisfaction when consuming media that Is centered around the above themes? Perhaps feel relief? If so why? Are you able to connect with that sort of story due to relevance from personal experience, or is it for a different reason?

A good focus group for this discussion would be women who enjoy murder porn. It's weird. But the podcast My Favorite Murder discusses it often in their earlier podcasts. I listened to it until about episode 70-80ish... dailey while I worked. It went to a really dark place. I don't think I bounced back from the Albert Fish episode.

If we are talking about Elfen Lied or god forbid Harmony, then no! Those shows gave me literal depression for an entire Sunday afternoon. Don't get me started on Speed Grapher either. If a narrative only seeks to create despair without a real objective asides from moving to yet another depressing scene of people being terrible because that's all they can be, then a story is pointless. If I know from the beginning that every character is a monster with zero motivation to be anything else, I find it a waste of time. In certain cases I can see exceptions. Berserk, though graphic and filled with horrors does have a light within Guts and his genuine love of Casca. They suffer together, yet they don't stop trying to survive or improve. The world tests their wills and yet they carry on in hopes that something better can exist. Griffith the main antagonist serves as a reminder that victory gained through embracing the despair as the only reality is not a kingdom worth ruling. His blindness to his foolish sacrifice is the lesson to be learned. Losing 2 friends and an army of good followers for demonic power and immortality in damnation is worthless compared to Guts' resolve to fight for a better life no matter how finite it may be. Valuing what he has left rather than what may be. Hellsing Ultimate is another example of showing the dark comedy in supreme nihilism. Alucard once threw his humanity away out of desperation and pride much like Griffith. However unlike Griffith, Alucard's story is more of a redemption arc where his trust in Seras Victoria and Integra Fairbrook Wingates Hellsing serves to guide him back to his own humanity. As Seras clings on to hope and optimism, she wards off the cynical loathing of mortal men that her master once drowned himself in. By staying human even as a monster herself, Seras rebukes Alucard's excuse for having no way back to acting like a good person inspite of all he's done. Integra likewise shows how not to give in as well and the strength that humans can hold even in the face of hopeless circumstances. Every main opponent he faces off with in some way reflects Alucard's various weaknesses. From the base apathy and vain glory of the Valentine brother's to the Major's obsession with fighting for perverse pleasure, Anderson's blind dedication to his own ideologies, though rooted with good intentions, lead him down the same path as Alucard to throw away his humanity, and lastly Wlater C. Dornez falling victim to nostalgia and yearning to fall back into bad habits that make a once wise and resourceful old man digress into a childish misguided fool! My point in summary is that a dark story is only as good as the purpose for which it is told. If it lacks purpose other than to make people hopeless or show why such thinking is flawed, then why bother watching it in the first place. Hopelessness and depravity gets boring quickly. Gore by itself lacks creativity.

the general theory on why we enjoy horror films and sad films is because it we get the sense of going through something second-hand and getting out of it safely. like, we get the chemical benefits of surviving something I love psychological/tragedies, but i usually don't like happy endings because its unrealistic, but fire punch had a perfect ending the entire theme was "live" and every time agni heard this, he felt so much pain because all he wanted to do was give up and just die but in the end, because he listened to the people he cared about, he got his happy ending. if he had just given up and died, he never would have gotten the sweet, comfy ending he did. https://i.redd.it/ciohtuhy9tr61.jpg

the happy ending in tokyo ghoul was much less deserved because the manga outright states his life is tragedy so to give him the best ending out of anyone, to give him the perfect life, for him to have two children despite it being nearly impossible to have a half ghoul child to begin with is just spitting on the canon that the very manga set up. why does he get his happy ending? because he 'deserved' it? he self sacrificed time and time again, so it would be a more fitting ending if he gave his life so that others could have a happy ending. self sacrifice isn't a virtuous thing, its a purely selfish act that kaneki should have been punished for. it was his greatest flaw, that he was willing to ignore the real desires of those around him just so he could feel good about protecting them. it was even STATED that it was a selfish act, because that's what his mother did and kaneki suffered for it. but kaneki was rewarded for it? wtf? that is not how you end a 'tragedy.' that is not what it means to persevere. it is wholly unearned.