http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DarknessInducedAudienceApathy

Please don't list this on a work's page as a trope. Examples can go on the work's YMMV tab.

Demotivational Poster ◊ with the with the Eight Deadly Words "Ruined World + cast of Jerk = I don't care what happens to these guys"

It is often said that "conflict is the soul of drama". Without some form of conflict to fuel things there's no engine to drive the story and thus little reason to engage with it. However, we here at TV Tropes would like to propose an amendment to this phrase which includes something important but sadly all-too-often forgotten, as tropes are, after all, tools:

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Meaningful conflict is the soul of drama.

Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy occurs when a conflict exists that simply lacks any reason for the audience to care about how it is resolved. This crops up where the setting is extremely but meaninglessly Darker and Edgier, or all sides are Evil vs. Evil or, at least, far enough gone that any difference is a Distinction Without a Difference. Even if the heroes are not only heroic because the authors say we are, sometimes shows with sympathetic heroes have this trope happen because the heroes lack any agency — anything good happens? It'll be jerked away.

In other words, there is nothing really at stake. It might seem like there is, but ultimately if you're presented with a choice between supporting one of two equally horrible groups or hoping for one of two equally despairing outcomes, that's not really a choice at all. The outcome's going to be awful either way, so who cares who wins?

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This is not just an audience reaction to stories they see or are told. In an interactive medium (Video games, Roleplay, Tabletop game), this can happen depending on how sadistic the players are being in constantly punishing their characters. Why bother getting emotionally involved in a character who may end up dead in a moment? Why bother going on a quest when you have virtually no agency in making anything better?

Author and L.A. Writer's Lab founder Alan Watt has described this trope as knowing the difference between conflict and a dilemma . As he describes, a conflict is just the negative result of a character rubbing up against something they may not want to, but a dilemma is a potential sacrifice that the character needs to make in order to achieve their goal.

When applying to individuals, this is one of the reasons why the "Wangst" trope happens. This results in readers saying the Eight Deadly Words, or concluding that the plot boils down to a wangst-fest.

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Compare Angst Dissonance, Audience-Alienating Premise, Sadist Show, and Only the Author Can Save Them Now.

Contrast Tastes Like Diabetes, this trope's polar opposite, and also Rooting for the Empire, but only when all sides involved are evil and yet the audience still likes them. Compare and contrast Glurge, which is what happens when you combine the sickeningly sweet and the depressingly dark.

See also Too Happy to Live and True Love Is Boring.

Not to be confused with Angst Aversion, which is for when people avoid a work regardless of its conflict because they hear that is too dark or depressing, though it is possible for both tropes to apply to a single work if the same darkness that drives people off makes the conflict meaningless. If people take issue with darkness in a work for being dark rather than how the conflict plays out, you're looking at Angst Aversion rather than this trope.

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Interactive Fiction

Adam Cadre's Varicella attempts to avert this by having its Villain Protagonist, while still amoral and self-centered and willing to murder people to claim the Regency, not as evil as his rivals for the Regency, nearly all of whom are truly horrible people who seem to enjoy their acts of abuse and rape. But Varicella is still a short-sighted person who can't foresee just how horrible things become when the prince takes the throne and becomes even worse .

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The big plot twists of Act 2 of Ebenezer are so dark and cynical it can be hard to care about anything that happens before or afterward, even A Christmas Carol itself. Jacob Marley was in love with Scrooge's mother, swore vengeance on the family when she died in childbirth, impregnated and killed Scrooge's sister Fran, concocted a plot to make Scrooge think Emily was cheating on him with Bob Cratchit, and foreclosed her orphanage, killing everyone there while breaking Tiny Tim's leg just to be cruel. It's then revealed Scrooge knew about it all from the start and didn't care, even though he himself attacked Emily viciously and ordered Marley to foreclose her orphanage beforehand. Scrooge's speech detailing this revelation hammers it home. Scrooge: You must think me a simpleton, sir. Don't you think I've known about everything from the start? Don't you think I've known about Marley's motives all along?

Dickens: Then why have you stayed here?

Scrooge: Because I learned a long time ago that there is no goodness in this world—and whatever goodness there is is extinguished like a sputtering candle.

Repo! The Genetic Opera in both a musical and the film of the musical. The basic premise is that a company controls the supply of organs needed to live, and they remove them by force if you are late making payments. The characters include an heiress addicted to drugs and surgery, a mass-murdering heir, a man who wears the removed faces of women, a Corrupt Corporate Executive who sends hitmen out to remove the organs of those who fail to pay him, and the titular Repo Man. There's only three characters with a shred of decency - the tragic opera singer, the Incorruptible Pure Pureness Ill Girl, and the grave-robbing, drug-dealing Greek Chorus. It just keeps getting worse.

Sweeney Todd pits a barber who murders innocent men and sends them to his Psycho Supporter to be baked into pies, against a corrupt judge who drugged and raped a woman and then holds her daughter hostage with the intent to marry the girl he brought up. There's a Token Romance (or Romantic Plot Tumor) between a couple of flat characters, but other than that it's a revenge story between a mass murderer and the monster who wronged him.

Titus Andronicus: The protagonist is a horrible person, the antagonist is a horrible person, the side characters are horrible people, there's overreactions galore, rape, cannibalism, murder, torture, insanity, but it's so over the top and over done it just ends up unpopular and buried in the back folder of Full Annotated works of Shakespeare. Though it was probably meant to be a parody of similar Revenge Dramas that were very popular at the time by going completely over the top. Also, there are a some likeable characters (such as Titus' brother Marcus), and the ambiguity in some areas (such as Aaron's baby), allows some characters to be more likable.

This is an intended feature of the works of Bertolt Brecht, which he called the Verfremdungseffekt ("alienating effect"). By discouraging the audience from relating to any of the characters (which was dismissed as a form of escapism), the goal was to draw attention away from them and towards the socioeconomic system that shaped them, and by extension, that same system which exists in real life.

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