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?

  • hansolo@lemmy.today
    2·
    23 hours ago

    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.