This isn't unique to Magic: The Gathering's storyline fandom. Fandom discourse generally seems to have taken a turn toward the escapist, demanding positive and uplifting narratives. Leaving aside the fairness of this demand — should a reader's demand for positive emotion supersede an author's need to express a negative experience? — I can't help but find myself tripping over the assumption that the natural, necessary response to negative circumstances is to seek out upbeat, cheery art. I mean, the first album I bought with my own money was Pink Floyd's The Wall and I'm listening to melodic death metal while I type out this article, so it's kind of hard for me to relate to this presumption.

But, fine, I don't expect my personal experiences to sway people really committed to reading Amonkhet as an edgy grimdark creative failure. Is being edgy and grimdark really such a bad thing, though? Isn't there something to be said for a story that unflinchingly looks at how a culture and belief system can go rancid and self-destructive?

Core to Amonkhet's story is the possibility that apparently benevolent systems are vectors for suffering and atrocity. It's a topic touched upon in Kaladesh, of course, though Kaladesh presented systems that were, on the whole, reformable. Amonkhet, on the other hand, is fundamentally broken, and the Hour of Revelation, aptly named, reveals the basically malevolent nature of Amonkhet's whole social system.

This is a story worth telling, because all too often in our own reality people accept their own destruction or the destruction of others rather than accepting fundamental faults in their social systems. Personally, I expend much energy expressing to people the fact that, yes, oppression of queer people is real, and moreover it is all too frequently systemic, the product of the way society is ordered. Bluntly, I do not pass — if I am dressed a certain way in public, I am read immediately as gender non conforming. This makes navigating certain spaces intrinsically dangerous to me, even in a largely progressive city, because things like bathrooms are frequently set up to accommodate a gender binary that I do not fit easily into, making me vulnerable to assault no matter which of two bad options I select. These are problems that many people seem not just unaware of but uninterested in learning about. I could run down the street screaming that the way society is ordered is fundamentally deranged and deadly and I would be dragged away just as Samut is.

Amonkhet, from this perspective, is a dark cautionary tale about refusing to question the world around you, or see the cost of your beliefs. This lines up rather perfectly with Gideon's overall story arc. As I've described before, his arc is more like a circle worn in the ground, continually following a path where he aligns himself with some dodgy higher power only to become disillusioned with them when their authoritarianism becomes impossible to ignore. When Gideon's hopes are dashed so completely on Amonkhet by the nightmare of the Hours, Gideon falls back on his strongest faith: faith in his own indestructibility.

This does not end well for the Gatewatch.

It turns out that pluck and having Justice On Your Side does not compensate for a lack of actual planning, magical skill, or unit cohesion.

And yet, in all of this faith-gone-toxic, in all this dashing of hopes, there is one character who never loses hope or faith.

Samut.

It is this faith, paired with a clarity of perception that eschews false hope, that allows her to become a god-touched leader of the survivors of Amonkhet. Notably, Samut does not simply believe that she can, through her personal power, defeat The Scorpion God. The victory Samut wins comes from her people working together as a team, multiple followers avenging multiple gods, every blow contributing in a small way to a tactical plan to best a far more powerful foe. What a contrast to Gideon and Jace, pinning their hopes on some idea of justice that will carry the day! It is ultimately mortals working in concert with their last living god to defeat this great evil.

Now is faith justified.

If anything feels off in this storyline it might be Samut's ascension to 'walkerhood. Not the ascent itself — that's great and actually essential to her overarching development and to the development of Amonkhet's storyline. Samut ascends at the moment when she receives the love of her goddess Hazoret, so filled with joy at having her faith affirmed that her nascent Planeswalker Spark ignites. In a sense, Samut has joined the growing, frustrating ranks of native 'walkers who have no reason to actually leave home, and her trip to Theros is perfunctory, just long enough to establish that she's on Theros and yeah she's a 'walker now. But it makes for a fantastic metaphor-made-literal, and one of the most brilliant affirmations of hope and faith in the whole Magic canon, a moment when a character is radically transformed through joy at having her beliefs fulfilled.

That's the problem with the "grimdark" critique, at the end of the day. It simply doesn't hold water. In the context of the apocalyptic destruction of Hour of Devastation, we see the possibility of resistance, survival, and recovery. In a world that so often and increasingly presents us with reasons to despair, I legitimately can't fathom what "escapist" fiction could offer us by way of strength that Amonkhet's story does not.

In my very first article I wrote that for some people, people like me, it's important to have narratives about being transgender that incorporate what we might call problematic elements — trauma, ambiguity, moral complexity. Not every story needs to explore those kinds of ideas. Some readers are inevitably going to want different kinds of comfort and expression of what they're feeling. Nevertheless, for some of us the world is too distant from simplistically hopeful and optimistic stories for them to seem like anything other than a cruel joke. They feel less line soulful sustenance and more like the kind of fables that primed Amonkhet for genocide.

What I come to Magic's story for is not a simple assurance that everything will turn out ok in the end if we just believe. Instead, I come for stories like those of Xantcha and Ratepe, like Elspeth, like Agrus Kos, like Darigaaz, like Djeru and Samut, who see that all hope is lost and, nevertheless, persist. Despair, certainly, but also, always, hope.