Dark Fantasy Pirates

In my first post to this community, I mentioned there was a video game that I really enjoyed and wanted to find more games with a similar aesthetic. This is the game I was referring to. It's about a cursed pirate ship and its undead crew. I realized that when I think about stories with Dark Fantasy Pirates, I don't actually care about the nautical/sailing aspect. I just like the ruthless outlaws in a world of monsters. And that's what this game delivers. The cursed ship is nothing more than a home base; you never actually steer the ship or engage in naval battles.

As far as gameplay, this is a squad-based stealth action game. Each undead crewmember has their own special ability and you choose which crewmembers to take before each mission. The levels are designed really well such that any single crewmember can succeed in any mission, but certain crewmembers will make things easier depending on who you choose. Also, for stealth-based game mechanics, this game gives you every advantage it can. You can pick a spot on the map and it'll tell you which guards can see it, you can view any single guard's vision cone (but not all guards at once!), and you can pause time to coordinate multiple crewmembers to perform simultaneous tasks. The game even reminds you to quicksave every 5 minutes (can be disabled). The levels are still difficult, but the game gives you every tool you could need to succeed.

If you like pirate games set in a dark fantasy world, I think this game is fantastic. It perfectly scratched my itch and made me want to find more games like it (if not in gameplay, then aesthetic). I created this community and started searching for more Dark Fantasy Pirate stories thanks to this game.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1545560/Shadow_Gambit_The_Cursed_Crew/

When discussing the creation of a genre in my post about Pirates of the Caribbean, I said there's usually an early work that arguably invented the genre but wasn't influential enough to set the template for that genre. For this Dark Fantasy Pirates genre, that was 1987's On Stranger Tides. It takes place during the golden age of piracy (it has Blackbeard as a character!) and has a bunch of ghosts, zombies, and other supernatural creatures. But prior to the PotC movie of the same name, I'd never heard of this book. And PotC really only kept the concept of the Fountain of Youth for the movie and ignored everything else in the novel (Disney only bought the rights for the name).

This genre is admittedly very small, so it's hard to determine which work had the larger influence. On Stranger Tides was influenced by the PotC ride at Disneyland, but that ride doesn't have any supernatural elements. And the PotC movie was influenced by On Stranger Tides, so it's all somewhat self-referential. The creator of the Monkey Island series of video games said his inspirations were both the PotC ride and On Stranger Tides. So while I can't dismiss the influence of On Stranger Tides entirely, I still think if you asked a random person to name a story with pirates and ghosts/zombies they'd say Pirates of the Caribbean. So there's a question of "which came first" versus "which was the most popular".

It's hard to say which work influenced the most later works since there are so few works in this genre to begin with; neither work led to an explosion of imitators. I do think it's strange that I can't find any other novels in this genre though. There are plenty of books about pirates, but I can't find any others with dark fantasy elements. In my search, I found some fantasy novels that had pirates but they weren't dark fantasy. Maybe I have too narrow of focus here but I like the horror elements dark fantasy brings. I'm not interested in Captain Hook dealing with mermaids or fairies in Peter Pan. And I'm not looking for a story set in a fantasy world where magic exists that also happens to have pirates. I like pirates being the protagonists facing darker forces. So maybe the issue is with me.

Anyway, if you have any interest in a Dark Fantasy Pirates genre like I do, check out On Stranger Tides. And if you can find any other novels that fit my (possibly too narrow) criteria, definitely let me know.

I saw a comment online awhile ago which I'm going to paraphrase here (and most likely butcher it). When discussing the creation of a new genre, you can usually argue which work was the first to embody most of the elements but there's always some definitive work that achieves widespread success and it's impossible to argue anything invented the genre after that work. For example, you can argue punk rock existed prior to The Clash but once The Clash hit the scene, you can't argue punk rock was invented after them. Similarly, you can argue cyberpunk existed prior to Neuromancer but you can't argue cyberpunk was invented after Neuromancer. When creating a new genre, there's always some work that sets the template for all others to follow and after that, the genre simply exists.

That's how I view Pirates of the Caribbean. There might have been some earlier works that were close but the PotC series defined the template for what this genre means. It's pirate protagonists in a world with supernatural elements. If the Weird West genre is the Wild West with supernatural elements, this is the pirate equivalent. I'm calling this genre "Dark Fantasy Pirates" for lack of a better name. See my first post in this community for more of a rant on that topic.

I'm not going to pretend PotC is the greatest movie franchise ever; each movie in the series is worse than the one before. But it's easily the most well-known example of this genre. And it's still crazy to me that Disney invented this genre in 2003. How had this not been done prior to 2003?? But that's why I created this community; I want to find more works like this. And maybe a better name for it.

Awhile back, I played a video game about pirates that was set in a dark fantasy world and I really enjoyed it. I had previously created !weirdwest@lemmy.zip so this video game got me thinking about how there's probably a genre similar to Weird West but with pirates. A "weird pirates" genre. Weird West is when you take the Wild West setting and add supernatural elements to it, so there's no reason you can't just take a pirate setting and add supernatural elements to it too. After all, the Pirates of the Caribbean movies did exactly that.

So I tried looking for more movies and games in this genre... and found nothing. I tried to find if this genre had a name that I mistakenly wasn't including in my search... and found nothing. It seemed like the Pirates of the Caribbean movies invented this genre, but surely that can't be right... can it??

I made a post on asklemmy asking that question. And yeah, it seems this genre doesn't have a name and Pirates of the Caribbean basically invented it. This is crazy to me because pirate stories have been around longer than Wild West stories; how is it possible that nobody ever added dark fantasy elements to these stories? Pirates (and sailors) were extremely superstitious so it seems like this would've been a natural combination.

I had a great conversation with someone in that post who helped clarify my thoughts and made some great points of their own too. First of all, pirate movies are extremely expensive to make. At the very least, you need a ship as a set. Whereas for a Western, you typically just needed to drive over to the studio's back lot. Also, during the Hays Code days you couldn't have a pirate as a protagonist (you couldn't show "sympathy for criminals"). This made it hard for movies to be made with pirates unless those pirates were specifically the villains. Yet it was very easy to make a Western with a noble hero sheriff. With fewer pirate movies being made in general, you were less likely to see directors playing with the formula/tropes. Conversely, there were so many cheap Westerns being churned out that you eventually needed to play with the tropes to stand out.

I also think there's some element of a feedback loop where making so many Westerns kept them in the cultural zeitgeist which meant more people wanted to make more Westerns and the cycle just kept perpetuating. Yet with so few pirate movies being made, no one wanted to make more pirate movies (there wasn't a demand/audience for them). I know the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie had an uphill battle to be made at all because the studio didn't think people would show up for a pirate movie (Cutthroat Island famously ended the pirate movie genre for years). But even if that was true of movies, why weren't there any "weird pirate" books being written, where the budget doesn't matter? To that, I have no answer other than there truly must not be much interest in pirates to the general public. Nobody cares.

And yet, I keep thinking about this niche-within-a-niche. I made a Weird West community on Lemmy knowing there weren't that all that many works in the genre, and it was fun to document the ones I did find. So I figure I'll do that here too... although there are fewer than ten works I can find in this genre so far. This community likely won't have many posts and will probably be sitting idle very soon. Still, I'd like to have a place I can post to when I do find something.

Finally, while I kept referring to the genre as "weird pirates" in this post, I know that's a terrible name. "Weird West" has some fun alliteration and rhymes with "Wild West" so it makes sense. "Weird Pirates" just sounds like I'm calling a group of pirates "weird". So I'm calling this community "Dark Fantasy Pirates" because that's specifically what I'm looking for. I don't want "fantasy pirates" like Peter Pan or One Piece, I want dark fantasy elements with skeletons, ghosts, zombies, and the kraken.

And if anyone other than me ever posts to this community I'll be very pleasantly surprised. Welcome!