I couldn’t decide if I should post this to the gaming community or movies community so I decided to split the difference and just post it here since I’m open to games, movies, or book suggestions.
I have an itch I seem to have trouble scratching. I want more pirate stories that involve dark fantasy elements (skeletons, krakens, ghosts, voodoo, etc.) yet there seem to be very few of these. The best example of what I’m looking for is of course the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, but those have diminishing returns. Even though it’s exactly what I want, each movie is worse than the last.
I just finished playing Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew and that was also exactly what I wanted. And I’m unreasonably excited for DAVY x JONES to come out. And yet… that’s all I can find. Those are the only properties I know of that actually scratch my itch. And I’m shocked at how few entries there are in this genre.
I don’t want a straight-forward pirate adventure like Cutthroat Island or Black Sails, or… I don’t know, Muppet Treasure Island; I want something with dark fantasy elements in it. I recently watched a Korean movie on Netflix called The Pirates: The Last Royal Treasure and while it had the adventure/comedy feel of a Pirates of the Caribbean movie, there were no fantasy elements in it at all.
Is there a name for this sub-genre that I just haven’t stumbled across? Are there really so few entries in this sub-genre? I created a [email protected] community awhile back, and I guess I’m really just looking for the pirate equivalent of the Weird West genre. I guess the Vampirates book series meets my criteria, but it’s at a middle school reading level and that just isn’t for me. Maybe I should just re-watch Pirates of Dark Water…
So can anyone here help me out? Is there a better term to search for than just ‘pirate fantasy’? Are there any other movies, books, or games you know of that might scratch my itch?
Yeah, I understand your shock at this. And don’t give Disney too much credit - Jerry Bruckheimer and the screenwriters made an objectively great movie with Black Pearl. One screenwriter wrote Aladdin, (story for) Treasure Planet, and Zorro movies, so swashbuckling movies were already his jam.
Personally, I think it makes sense that dark fantasy pirate media is so meager compared to dark westerns. The 30’s to 50’s had a lot of pulp media and adventure movies that were churned out at an insane rate. Pirate movies were a tiny portion of that because they’re expensive to make. You need, at the very least, one big-ass wooden ship. Maybe two. Plus a bunch of sets. Westerns are much, much cheaper, and could be filmed in a studio lot within the Los Angeles city limits, or even just a 30 minute drive north or east. If you look at the most expensive Westerns ever made, it’s mostly just salaries, none topping $200 million adjusted for inflation. And those are rare, with being animated anyway. Black Pearl cost $140 million to make, and then every one after is between $225 million and $410 million.
Also, with the actual Wild West being simply “retro” close to the 1930s, this was alive and vibrant in people’s minds, Real cowboys were still around. Dude ranches, literally experiential travel to LARP being in a Western, were popular starting in the 1920’s. Most “Wild West” plots are (or should be) set between the Civil War and 1900, so that’s “Grandpa, were you a cowboy?” close to the post-WWII era. Contrast that with the Golden Age of Piracy, which took place in the century before the US was even established. Sailing ships were antiques by the time the Civil War rolls around, so pirate movies occupied a sort of middle ground between the Medieval age and Revolutionary War stories.
As for magic and the fantasy/sci-fi element, two factors IMO. First, that the poorly understood Native American traditional religion opened the door to magic as a plot device. Mystery is built in to the environment. With the market saturated for plots, it was worth a try for many writers. Second, that sci-fi picked up as a genre in the 1950s, so it’s a natural conclusion to mix the two. As westerns were often also about people living “wild” against the contrast of an industrializing country, they’ve remained popular, and are a fantasy themselves that people find attainable.
Also, that is just super niche to most people. Add to that the fantasy-magic element and you’re, as you’ve found, sub-categorized to a point where someone essentially created the genre by making the perfect genre-setting media, and setting the bar too high. Anything in that genre suddenly is “oh, so it’s Pirates of the Caribbean or something?” It can’t even be its own thing.
First of all, thank you for spending so much time and effort thinking about such a nonsense topic. I agree with everything you said but it got me thinking even more.
Pirate movies are definitely more cost-prohibitive than Westerns, but I wonder if that also led into a feedback loop of keeping Westerns in the public consciousness. Since Westerns kept being made, it kept people thinking about Westerns, which kept the desire for more Westerns alive. I also think there’s an aspect of the Hays Code at play where you were able to make righteous characters in Westerns (those boring John Wayne movies I can’t sit through) yet you can’t really make a “righteous pirate” character. So pirates were always delegated to the role of “bad guys”, if they were present at all. There just wasn’t a demand for pirate movies to expand into supernatural elements.
And yet none of that explains the lack of supernatural pirate stories in literature (or video games) where your imagination is the main limiting factor. Even if we ignore movies, there are very few dark fantasy pirate stories prior to PotC. And I guess this just comes down to my own lack of awareness to, I guess I’ll say ‘the zeitgeist’ even though that makes me sound pretentious. In my mind, I lump together gunslingers, pirates, and hackers as “outlaws glorified for living by their own code”. And yet it seems one of them is drastically less popular than the others. I never really thought about how few people actually care about pirates. Weird West and Cyberpunk are both niche genre fiction, yet dark fantasy pirate stories don’t even have a label. That’s a weird realization for me.
Oh, no problem. I think it’s kind of fascinating how we chose to do our storytelling. And plus I would also love to see more dark pirate fantasy fiction as a genre.
And one element is that while Hays Code pirates were just syrupy sweet sanitized romance and stupid action for the sake of it, history (which was ignored) is problematic for pirates. All the big names were literal rapists and murderers, and many executed, so lack of being a noble outlaw confirmed. No one named cities or bridges or anything after them. So while Jack Sparrow being fictional helps, even within the PotC universe he’s atypical for not being a thug. So it’s hard to really sanitize the whole group when the most notable real life pirates were terrible people, or mercenaries for the English or the Spanish. Then you get into geopolitical nuance. Also, there’s an awkward point if a child loves pirates that they start looking up IRL pirates and it can be a record-scratch realization that real pirates were filthy. Other than the comedy, The Monty Python-Adjacent movie Yellowbeard actually has some real and faithful depictions of pirates.
Personally, I think sci-fi does a better job with this because the limitation of a large crew needed to run a ship can be waved away. Once you get out of that limitation, get out of the period itself with cannons and flintlocks, things get a lot more open in terms of plot options. But it’s all the same dynamics to some degree.