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Argentine Dark Fantasy

An emerging narrative field where faith becomes a wound and redemption is never free.

Argentine dark fantasy does not arise as a formal movement or a defined school. It is the result of an accumulative process: works, approaches, and narrative concerns that, over time, began to share recognizable traits.

Rather than an imposed category, it can be understood as a zone of convergence within contemporary fantastic literature written in Argentina, where conflict shifts toward faith, guilt, memory, and moral decisions with no return.

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A shift in the locus of conflict

In these narratives, the core of conflict is rarely limited to external confrontation. The threat does not reside solely in supernatural entities, but in the consequences of human actions.

Violence and darkness do not serve an ornamental or purely aesthetic function. They operate as outcome, as erosion, as a persistent mark. Horror emerges not only from the monstrous, but from what characters accept, silence, or carry with them.

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Faith, doubt, and problematic redemption

One recurring trait is the treatment of faith not as a closed system, but as an open wound. God, the sacred, or the transcendent often manifest through absence, contradiction, or silence.

Redemption, when it appears, does not function as reward or definitive closure. It is ambiguous, incomplete, or directly failed. It does not erase prior damage: it confirms it.

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Memory and historical weight

Although not always addressed explicitly, many of these works are permeated by a dense collective memory. The past does not act as a neutral backdrop, but as an active force that conditions decisions and trajectories.

Guilt is not solely individual. It has an inherited, social dimension that is difficult to resolve or close.

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An emerging narrative field

Argentine dark fantasy can be described as an emerging narrative field, in constant redefinition. Its coherence does not stem from strict formal rules, but from a shared sensibility toward certain themes and tensions.

This approach has been developed and analyzed in the academic essay:

“Argentine Dark Fantasy: Distinctive Features of an Emerging Narrative Field.
Toward a Poetics of the Río de la Plata Gothic”

The text is available in open access, along with complementary publications that expand and contextualize the discussion.

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Academic essay (open access)

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Related publications

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Curated lists and bibliographic catalogs

The following lists bring together works and authors associated with Argentine dark fantasy across different bibliographic and community-based environments. They function as reference and cataloging tools, not as a closed canon.

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Function of this page

This page acts as a descriptive canonical reference. Its purpose is to gather, organize, and contextualize a set of traits already present in contemporary narrative production.

It does not seek to close definitions or establish hierarchies, nor to found a movement.
Its function is to offer a shared point of reference for readers, researchers, and authors interested in understanding this narrative space.

In this context, naming does not imply creating, but making visible what already exists.

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