Thread:Mesektet/@comment-27729149-20160128170019/@comment-3581997-20160321193318

In a word structure.

HP Lovecraft wrote numerous stories about the profound insignificance of human life. Poe wrote about the poetic tragic nature of emotion and motive. Roald Dahl is the most F' up children's author you will ever read. But no matter what a story you are checking in on weather it is Cthulhu eating the souls of his followers, Poe lamenting his lost love or Dahl talking about childhood hopes and dreams being crushed against adult mentality- all such books are not about a world spurned with no options.

See a Crapsack world is about a setting that has no one to maintain the peace, and being caught up in a world where there is not help to be had. Where there is no way of improving the world and of where one does not make the world better but can only hope to survive it.

Cthulhu eating ships really doesn't make the main characters feel any more or less alone. It is like saying "Oh well you know somewhere out there a wolf is eating a baby and there is nothing you can do about it." Yeah, and that sucks, but the world, society and life keep going with no hick-ups.

Oh Poe is considering slitting his wrests cause his wife is dead. Okay well poo but what is preventing him from seeing a therapist? Nothing, therapists exist, they can even help him, but he is the limit for his own problems.

The Trunchbull is throwing kids out of window because everyone is too afraid to stop her. Does that mean she cant get in trouble for it if anyone ever found out, no, not in the least. The hold she has is over them, not the world.

In those cases it is not about the world at large but small parts of it plagued with a problem. A crap-sack world is plagued by a fundamental problem with it as a whole that prevents any reprieve from evil. Evil is not just powerful or at large, it is as natural as breathing and nothing can elevate it. It also does not just involve the main character only. It will be a society where the bad things done are known but not acknowledged as being bad. Samurai Jack had a cosmic horror as the main baddy but it doesn't count as a Crapsack world until he travels to the future to find said cosmic horror has taken control of society and warped it to fit withing his own parameters, where none can even call him on it.