This video is sponsored by our friends at World Anvil.
For when you just got to HAMMER out those little plot details.
Ayyy!
Most people like a happy ending, and most happy endings are about heroes winning.
But in order for that win to really mean something, we usually have to watch the heroes lose a lot first.
Mentors die, artifacts are lost, friends are damseled, innocents are hurt, villains win.
For the heroes to win in the end, the villains usually have to win In the beginning and middle,
and because narrative pacing is a thing, in most cases, the heroes aren't allowed to win
until they go through what is known as a Darkest Hour.
A hero's Darkest Hour is the lowest point in the story, where the situation is at its worst,
and our heroes at their most hopeless.
One or more characters might be dead or dying, the villains are winning or have already won,
and the heroes are dealing with despair.
This is the part where even the audience is questioning if they're gonna be able to do it.
But we can't stay in the Darkest Hour forever.
It can be gradual or sudden, but the heroes will emerge from the Darkest Hour,
change for the better, and prep for a final victory.
The darker the Darkest Hour, the more cathartic the victory will be.
Narratives are usually about overcoming some kind of conflict,
and this is the part of the story where that comes to a head.
Darkest Hours see a lot of use in fiction, not all of them obvious.
For example, many superhero origins are Darkest Hours:
Spider-man and Batman experience Darkest Hours after the death of their loved ones,
feel personally responsible for the tragedy, and devote themselves to stopping that tragedy from ever repeating itself.
It's a rare case where the hero's Darkest Hour happens before they really get their personal story started,
where the Darkest Hour is also the inciting incident.
And in my Pure Evil Trope Talk, I also mentioned a villain trope: the Third Act Breakdown,
where a villain's machinations crumble around them, and they freak out to an unprecedented degree.
This is essentially a villain's Darkest Hour.
The only difference is we're usually rooting for the heroes in this scenario.
But while other wacky versions exist, most Darkest Hours happen after the halfway point of the story
and serve a semi-inciting role in whatever the climax or finale will be.
Now before we go further, I think it's important to subdivide Darkest Hours into two categories:
Personal Darkest Hours, and Plot Darkest Hours.
Plot Darkest Hours happen in almost every story,
they're the narrative point where the situation looks its most hopeless.
The bad guy army is wreaking havoc, the romcom love interest is boarding the plane,
the super villain has the hero in a death trap, et cetera.
Technically, you could argue that every story has a Plot Darkest Hour
in the same way that every finite two-dimensional curve has a minimum value.
There will be a point in every story where things look worst,
but sometimes it's more of a little blip than a major story beat.
And while Plot Darkest Hours have some associated tropes, they're not where the real drama happens.
Personal Darkest Hours are more... well, personal.
There when a character is experiencing an awful emotional low point and feels completely hopeless.
A character in this scenario will sink, feeling trapped in some way,
and the only way to escape this Personal Darkest Hour, is through the power of character development.
A Personal Darkest Hour is almost always a pivotal character development moment.
We touched on this a little when Blue covered The Hero's Journey,
where Campbell described the Darkest Hour as 'The Belly of the Whale',
where the hero finds themselves incapable of progressing as they are,
and must change in some way in order to carry on.
Campbell didn't have *many* good ideas, but this was a pretty solid one.
A character experiencing a personal Darkest Hour is stopped from progressing by themselves,
and must change themselves to move forward.
This change can be the simple hopeful determination to carry on even if things look rough,
But it can also be much less optimistic.
God of War 4, (also known as Dad of Boi) had a very striking personal darkest hour for Kratos,
when his son Atreus becomes very sick as a result of his own warring nature.
Atreus is a god, but he doesn't realize and he thinks he's human,
and Kratos has been *so* unwilling to confront or explain his own past shenanigans,
that Atreus is straight-up dying because of it.
Kratos, who spent the entire game staying as far from his origins as he can,
slowly, brutally returns home, haunted by visions of the goddess Athena as he retrieves the Blades of Chaos:
The iconic weapons of the older games, as well as the ultimate symbol of Kratos' slavery to the gods,
and his old life of brutality and crazy knife-swinging combos.
He escapes his Darkest Hour by reclaiming his TRULY AWFUL past and accepting that he's a monster,
but, he's not Athena's monster anymore.
Not exactly the hopeful optimism one might expect, but it's still cathartic in its own way,
and more importantly, it's the *only* way he can move forward.
If he doesn't recognize and accept his own past, his son, his future will die.
But Personal Darkest Hours can also be very hopeful and optimistic.
A really overt illustration of one of these comes in the Teen Titans season 4 finale,
where Trigon has emerged, destroyed like, 99.9% of the world,
and his daughter Raven is reduced to a 99.9% powerless child.
While Raven feels hopeless, since the worst case scenario has already happened and the bad guy has won,
Robin and the rest of the gang refuse to give up.
And when she sees them actually manage to hurt Trigon,
just that little spark of hope is enough to leverage that .1 percent power she still has,
since her powers are, you know, controlled by her emotions.
Just by seeing that Trigon *can* be hurt, she goes from hopeless, to just a bit hopeful.
And just a bit hopeful is all she needs to realize that not only can Trigon be hurt, SHE can hurt him.
This leads to a full-on hope induced power up where she gets all her power back and then some,
and then effortlessly kicks his ass.
But these two examples actually help illustrate another internal distinction in Darkest Hours.
See, most Personal Darkest Hours have two components:
"This sucks and I'm miserable" and "I don't know how to make the situation better"
And solving one doesn't automatically solve the other.
Actually the best example of this split comes from that literary monolith Lord of the Rings,
where in the Two Towers, Sam and Frodo on the steps of Cirith Ungol,
discuss how it feels like they're at the *absolute* lowest point of their story,
and how if they were in a book, this would probably be where the kids would ask their dad to stop reading
because things are so bad and how can they ever get better.
The split is in how our heroes respond:
Sam finds a reason to keep on hoping, while Frodo resolves to continue onward even without hope.
Sam works the emotional problem, feeling hopeless and miserable, while Frodo focuses on the practical problem.
Escaping the terrible situation by getting to Mordor and destroying the ring, no matter how bad they feel.
Now, most stories really only require the hero to solve one of these,
if they feel hopeful or if they draw up the strength to carry on even if they have no way to deal to the other part,
the story will usually reward them with the full solution.
The hero musters up the determination to continue fighting on their own,
and just then the cavalry arrives to back them up so they don't die in the process.
Now I bring this up specifically because I feel like this has kind of reflected into the real world in a slightly unfortunate way.
See, Darkest Hours closely resemble depression,
but the social understanding of depression is pretty bad and inaccurate.
It looks and often feels like it's a bad situation that you can fix
in order to escape and feel better again, like a fictional Darkest Hour.
But in actuality, depression usually has no external cause,
because it's literally your brain refusing to produce the right neurotransmitters in the right amounts.
Someone dealing with depression hears a lot of advice
from people describing how they pulled themselves out of short-lived bad moods that had tangible causes,
and none of it is usable because it's solving the wrong problem.
Because the Darkest Hour narrative tells us that raw determination and hopefulness
will bend the story to reward you with a fix to all your problems,
the real-world reflections of this turned sour fast.
It doesn't fit the narrative that yoga, and nature walks and a positive attitude won't fix the serotonin machine,
and this can be... you know, Depressing.
Sometimes, things just feel bad,
there's not always a root cause or something on the outside to fix.
Stories teach us that things feel bad because things *are* bad,
and it's the hero's responsibility to make things better, and then be able to feel better.
And while this is sometimes true, it's not always true.
And it's important to know that so you don't beat yourself up over feeling bad about something.
It's an unfortunate truth that even though we *know* that fiction is not representative of reality,
we still *learn* from fiction and compare it to reality.
This is a case where the fictional structure guarantees a cathartic happy ending,
which has unfortunate resonances when those lessons are applied to reality.
And much like coding, I think this is one of the things that can be unfortunate, but kind of can't be avoided.
People learn lessons from fiction,
it's just important to recognize how much of our worldview is defined by fiction,
and to be suspicious of any conclusions we draw from those parts.
Anyway, let's dial down the life lessons here,
and take a look at some ways the Darkest Hour has been done very well,
and some ways it sometimes falls apart.
Many episodic shows will have a Darkest Hour of some scale in every season finale.
Avatar, for example, has one in all three.
In the first season, the Darkest Hour, both narratively and literally, comes when Admiral Zhao kills the Moon Spirit.
One thing you'll notice is that Storytellers like projecting the narrative bleakness of the Darkest Hour onto the world overall,
so Darkest Hours in visual media are usually also visually dark, and this one's no exception.
Everything fades to black and white, except for the Ocean Spirit when it fuses with Aang to form a rampaging kaiju,
and princess Yue's eyes, which stay blue to signify her lingering connection with the Moon Spirit.
This Darkest Hour doesn't last too long, as they quickly realize Yue can sacrifice her life to restore the Moon Spirit,
and Aang spends most of it wreaking havoc on the Fire Nation soldiers,
but it's a pretty emotional low point nonetheless.
It's outdone by the season 2 finale though,
where after some pretty significant character development
where it looks like Zuko might actually turn to the side of good,
he instead turns right back to being a bad guy and helps Azula fight the good guys.
Iroh is captured, Azula hits Aang with lightning and he DIES,
and the gang barely manages to escape.
Aang's only brought back by Katara's magic healing water.
And it's still a pretty significant downer, especially since the gang is fully on the run,
the Earth Kingdom has fallen, and Aang has lost access to the Avatar State.
No real cathartic victory after this Darkest Hour.
Which is actually not uncommon in three-part stories like a trilogy or three season show.
The Darkest Hour at the end of part 2 is usually pretty dark without much in the way of a follow of victory outside of surviving.
You could call it the Empire Strikes Back Effect.
The season 3 finale is the finale to the series overall, so its Darkest Hour comes in the middle of the final battle,
where Aang is fighting Ozai, Zuko's fighting Azula, and Sokka, Toph, and Suki are trying to take down the airship fleet.
Aang starts losing, Zuko gets hit by lightning, Suki is separated from the others by a disintegrating airship,
and Sokka and Toph are dangling off the side of an airship,
injured, missing all their weapons, and surrounded by enemy soldiers.
This cliffhanger is of course where one of the episodes ends,
and the next episode picks up with Suki swinging in to rescue Sokka and Toph with an airship,
Katara fighting Azula in Zuko's place, and Aang unlocking the Avatar state and thoroughly demolishing Ozai's ass.
As the final Darkest Hour in the show, this one comes with the most complete victory for the heroes.
In ascending order of importance:
We see the airship fleet destroyed, Azula defeated, Zuko healed, and Aang totally wrecking Ozai
before finding a way to stay true to his pacifist principles while still neutralizing Ozai as a threat.
I'd apologize for putting Avatar into every single Trope Talk I make, but I'm not sorry!
Go watch it. Do it, even if you've already watched it. I'll wait.
Hopping from generation-defining cartoons to generation-defining movies,
Avengers has its Darkest Hour around the halfway point of the movie,
when Loki wreaks havoc on the Helicarrier, ejecting Thor and the Hulk,
and Coulson dies.
Kinda.
I hear Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. makes this complicated.
The splintered team faces a communal Darkest Hour before resolving to unite and kick Loki's ass,
leading into the third act where they're just fighting a big faceless space army.
Marvel movies don't quite follow a consistent formula since they're all done by different directors,
but they've all got those Marvel fingerprints on them, and a lot of them do feature a Darkest Hour,
even if it's a little bit token.
This is actually a problem sometimes,
when the Darkest Hour is pretty.. minimal?
Like, maybe things look rough, but it doesn't really seem to be hitting the characters that hard.
The audience will empathize with the characters more readily than they'll feel for the plot overall.
So even if it looks like the bad guys might win,
if the heroes don't seem to personally care, your audience might not either.
This is a thing in the first Guardians of The Galaxy movie, which is a great movie overall,
but it kind of has its Darkest Hours split a little bit.
Structurally, the Darkest Hour happens after Ronan kicked their asses and got the Power Stone,
just before the team decides to be a team,
when they do that thing where they're all sitting in a room
and then one by one stand up and say they're gonna do something.
This is structured like the Darkest Hour where things look hopeless but the hero is resolved to do something anyway,
but nobody actually seems really.. bummed?
Like, the character focus up to this point was more on Peter failing to flirt with Gamora,
or Drax not getting subtlety, or Groot being cute.
So it's a fine scene, but it doesn't.. really feel dark.
The actual dark scene comes in the middle of the final fight,
when Groot sacrifices himself to save the rest of the guardians.
This is a huge downer, and it's accompanied by a structural Darkest Hour, where all the heroes are down,
and the bad guy is up, looking like he's about to win.
Peter breaks the Darkest Hour by dancing at Ronan and singing 'Ooh Child (Things are Gonna Get Easier)'
Which is uh.. a little on the nose for a Darkest Hour,
and then they win.
Amusingly, this Darkest Hour structure is replicated almost identically in the second movie,
when during the fight with Ego, their empath is KO'd, all the heroes are down,
the bad guys up, it looks like he's gonna win,
and then Peter breaks the Darkest Hour by doing something Peter'y.
Although in this case, it's accompanied by a celestial power up, and a giant statue of Pac-Man.
Thor: Ragnarok does a much more textbook Personal Darkest Hour,
when during the final fight with Hela, Thor gets his ass kicked into a near-death experience,
and chats with his dead father.
Thor realizes he can't win as he is, or rather as he thinks he is,
and Odin points out that Thor is not the God of Hammers, he's the God of Thunder.
One moment of self-realization later,
Thor's pulling out the lightning to a kick-ass 70's soundtrack,
and he actually keeps the self-realization ball rolling,
when he recognizes that they don't need to save Asgard,
they need to save its people, and Asgard will survive through them.
He also finally comes into his own as a genuinely responsible and wise King.
Until his character development is completely negated by the events of Infinity War and Endgame.
But that's cool, I'm not bitter...
Now, if you want a Darkest Hour formula, for that we go to the masters of formulaic storytelling:
Disney.
Every Disney movie has a Darkest Hour just before the climax.
If the movie has a liar revealed plot,
where the main character is keeping something from the other characters,
the Darkest Hour will be initiated by this lie being revealed.
But even without that, Disney knows their Darkest Hours are most effective
if they paired dark plot developments with personal conflict,
so the main characters will usually be separated one way or another for the Darkest Hour.
The Darkest Hour in Frozen sees Elsa imprisoned, while Anna nearly dies of a frozen heart,
and they're both still mad at each other from the thing in the ice castle.
In Mulan, her identity has been exposed, and she's been abandoned by the army
while the Huns secretly invade China, and she has to stop them with basically no help.
In Moana, the Darkest Hour comes when Maui's fishhook is damaged and he abandons the quest.
And Moana gives the heart back to the ocean, telling it to choose someone else because she's failed.
In Wreck-it Ralph, the Darkest Hour happens when King Candy tells Ralph that Vanellope is a glitch,
and if she's allowed to race, the game will be unplugged and she'll be unable to escape, so she'll die.
In order to save her, Ralph destroys the car he made for her, along with her dreams,
sinking into a depression because he feels he'll never be able to be anything other than a villain who destroys everything he touches.
And his game is gonna be unplugged because this isn't sad enough already.
It's only when he realizes Vanellope's face is on the actual arcade machine
that he realizes she can't be a glitch if she's part of the branding.
So he goes back and fixes everything.
In a similar vein, Zootopia gave us a Darkest Hour that's um...
A little complicated because of all the allegories in the narrative, but basically:
Judy accidentally makes everybody racist and commits a microaggression on Nick so they're not friends anymore,
and she goes home to her parents farm to wallow,
until she accidentally learned something that doesn't line up with what the bad guys told her,
so she goes back to fix everything.
This kind of happens a lot, Disney heroes are very trusting.
There's a lot of Darkest Hours basically,
and it's a very popular trope in.. what I can only describe as formulaic storytelling.
It sees plenty of use in creative media,
and can be a very effective tool to pair character growth with plot development,
but it's almost seen as a requirement by anyone who follows a narrative formula to pace their story out.
And because it's seen as a requirement sometimes,
it's not always written with much thought, which can cause problems.
So let's talk a bit about how Darkest Hours can kind of fall flat.
First problem: If the Darkest Hour is token.
Not actually all that dark, just there because we need to have one.
The one in Guardians of The Galaxy is fine, but it is kind of token,
doesn't really add much other than a bunch of a-holes standing in a circle.
These Darkest Hours don't pack *much* of an emotional punch.
On the other end of the spectrum, sometimes Darkest Hours hit *too* hard.
If it goes *really* dark, or if it goes on for too long,
Then you can actually make your audience too miserable for the post-Darkest Hour Catharsis to work.
Being mean to your audience is a delicate balance,
and if you stray too far out of the Goldilocks zone,
you might end up hitting your audience too hard.
Sometimes for example, a Darkest Hour will feature a major character death
that the post-Darkest Hour catharsis doesn't fix.
This sours the victory because it's a little hard to celebrate when people are still DEAD.
This also happens in say...
Superhero movies when the Darkest Hour had a LOT of collateral damage
and it's a little hard for the audience to celebrate, when the background of the shot is 9/11 times a hundred.
The third big problem, is the zero-agency protagonist.
If your hero doesn't take any action to escape their Darkest Hour,
if they're just pulled out of it by circumstance,
then that completely negates the actual benefits of a Personal Darkest Hour.
We're not seeing our hero triumph, we're seeing them dragged into a victory they didn't earn.
Your hero should never feel like a sandbag on the plot.
A Darkest Hour is the perfect place for some character development,
and a character can't develop if they're a passive player in their own story.
Ugh... This is running a little long...
Uh... Basically, Darkest Hours are structural elements that lend themselves very well to character development
and are good for emotional catharsis and stuff,
but you got to make sure you're putting some thought into them,
so they actually impact instead of just being a dip in the enthusiasm of the plot.
So... Yeah.
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[Subtitles by Corporal Corgi]