A Dark Quiet Truth: Creativity, Compromise, and the Courage to Stay True

I never expected a workplace comedy to remind me why I started writing. But Mythic Quest did just that with one of the most unexpectedly powerful episodes of television I’ve ever seen several years ago. I have thought about it almost every single day since, and don’t want to stop because it reminds me why I’m still writing.

Episode 5 of Season 1, titled A Dark Quiet Death, steps away from the main cast to tell a quiet, haunting, and deeply resonant story about creativity, compromise, and what happens when the heart of a story gets lost in the machine of commercial success. It begins with two passionate creators—Doc and Bean—who fall in love over their shared passion of horror games.

Doc and Bean are opposites in every way—and that’s exactly why their connection seems to work. Doc—played to perfection by Jake Johnson—is upbeat, bright-eyed, and quietly hopeful. He sees the potential in people and ideas, even when the odds are slim. He’s the type to believe that success doesn’t have to come at the cost of integrity. He’s been involved in game development before and knows a few things right out of the gate. Bean—who shows the next perfect line of casting with Cristin Milioti—on the other hand, is a full-blown nihilist with a deadpan delivery and a worldview soaked in cynicism. She doesn’t believe in happy endings, doesn’t care for social niceties, and views the world, and the industry, with a kind of grim amusement (and honestly I love it). Where Doc wants to create something meaningful and reach people, Bean’s satisfaction comes from creating something honest, even if it alienates everyone else. Their partnership thrives on that tension, with Doc pulling toward connection and Bean grounding them both in uncompromising truth.

Together, they build something bold: a game called Dark Quiet Death. The mechanics are minimal. There’s no way to win in the traditional sense. You’re alone. You can’t fight back. You can only try to survive. It’s eerie, artistic, and honest. The kind of game that means something. And it turns into a big hit.

But then come the meetings. The studio growth. The investors. The marketing teams who say things like:

“What if you could shoot the monsters?”

“What if there was a cute sidekick?”

“What if you could… and stay with me, here… actually win?”

Bit by bit, Dark Quiet Death changes into something safer, more marketable. Something that hits all the marks, but, in doing so, loses all its meaning. The heart is gone. The vision that brought Doc and Bean together is no longer theirs. And as the game grows, they drift apart.

It hit hard.

Because if you’re a storyteller, a creator, someone with a world inside your head that you’re trying to drag out onto the page, you’ve probably felt that tension too: the pull between staying true to your vision and trying to make something that “sells.”

The Quiet Cost of Compromise

There’s a version of this story that ends with “but at least they made a lot of money,” and maybe that’s enough for some people. And honestly? That’s fine. We don’t often talk about the invisible toll that “success” can take on creative work. It’s easy to assume that if your story is picked up by a big publisher, or optioned for film, or turned into a franchise, then you’ve made it. And maybe you have. There is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting financial success from your work. In fact, for some creators, that’s the whole point—and I salute them. Truly.

But this post isn’t really for those folks.

This is for the creators staring at their work and wondering if they need to change it just to get noticed. The ones who think they might have to pivot to a more “acceptable” genre, chase a trend they don’t care about, or rewrite a character just to fit an algorithm.

You don’t have to:

Add a romance subplot.

Make the protagonist more relatable.

Zombies are trending again—can you add zombies?

Before you know it, the thing that once kept you up at night with excitement becomes something you no longer recognize. It’s not yours anymore. It’s been workshopped and polished and rebranded until it’s smooth and marketable and dead inside.

I don't have anything against a collaborative process with creativity. Though I haven't been involved in a group setting like that very many times, I did love bouncing ideas off people, and seeing the stories and tales of others being brought to life. Nothing can be more inspiring than sharing your works with others and giving them behind-the-scenes looks. So don't leave this thing thinking John's bashing folks who thrive in that kind of environment because that's not what I'm trying to convey. If that's your thing then go for it!

The Solitude of Vision

There’s a quiet kind of solidarity in being a lone creator. It’s not glamorous. It’s not always rewarding. Sometimes it’s lonely as hell. But it’s honest. You’re the one who decides where the story goes, what it means, who it’s for.

And sometimes—though most people don’t really like to say this part out loud—it’s not for everyone.

Maybe that’s not a flaw. But maybe that’s the point.

If you’re creating something from the heart, it actually won’t resonate with everyone. It can't. That’s the nature of honest art. But when it does connect, it connects deeply. Your vision, unfiltered and fully formed, becomes a lifeline to someone who didn’t know they needed it until they saw it.

In A Dark Quiet Death, the heartbreak isn’t that the game failed. It’s that the end version of it that succeeded was no longer a reflection of its creators. The machine ran fine, but the soul was gone. It’s a stark reminder that mass appeal—or what some people in a boardroom think is mass appeal—doesn’t always mean creative fulfillment. Boot up literally any Ubisoft game from the last five years if you don’t believe me.

In the end, Doc and Bean’s relationship fails, along with their involvement in the game. One of the most heartbreaking scenes in the episode is when they are arguing about yet more changes the folks upstairs want. Bean has already been struggling for years seeing her vision being ripped to shreds to appeal to the masses, while Doc has been there the whole time trying to find a middle ground with appeasing the shareholders and somehow not letting them rip apart DQD.

Bean says, “They took the dark. They took the quiet—”

“They’ll never take the death. We will always have the death,” Doc says.

Spoiler alert: they take the death, too.

Let Me Tell You a Story

I self-published a sci-fi series a while back. Maybe some of you have heard of it, I don’t know. I mean, it was 2011 so who even remembers, really?

No launch team. No social media blitz. No big release day splash. For over a decade, the books sat in relative obscurity. Sales? Rough. Reviews? Almost zero. It felt like I’d made something invisible.

But I didn’t change it. I didn’t rewrite it to fit what was selling. I didn’t chase a trend to try and find an audience, though, to be fair, I’d written most of it when I was 14-16ish so I didn’t even try other methods. I knew they weren’t well-written, edited properly, and were weird—but I stuck to it.

And then, in March 2023, something changed.

After turnaroundalan, more eyes got on my work. The books started selling. Readers started leaving reviews. Recommending them. Messaging me about how much they loved it. I hadn’t touched the stories since I wrote them years earlier. They were the same raw, weird, imperfect books from when I started writing them at the age of 14.

Were they well-written? Definitely not. Were they well-edited? Not even a little.

But they were mine. And I think they resonated with people not in spite of their flaws, but because they were authentic.

And that’s the thing: your story doesn’t have to be for everyone. In fact, maybe it shouldn’t be. Stories with edges and flaws and specificity might not light up the charts right away—but when they connect, they really connect.

And in the world we now live in, you don’t have to wait for a gatekeeper to decide if your story matters. You just have to keep telling it.

Stay True to the Story—and Yourself

There’s a myth in creative industries that every project should grow. More content. More updates. More platforms. More profit. And while growth can be exciting, it’s not the same thing as success.

Some things are meant to be small. Intimate. Personal. Not everything needs to become a franchise. Some stories just need to be told. Once. Exactly the way they were meant to be.

If you’re a creator—especially one doing it alone—there’s a unique kind of power in owning your vision from start to finish. It’s hard, sure. And lonely sometimes. But it’s yours. No committee. No compromises. No brand strategy team telling you what will sell better in Q4.

Just you and the story only you can tell.

This blog isn’t a manifesto against traditional publishing or commercial success. It’s a reminder that your story is still worth telling even if no one’s buying it right away—or at all. That chasing trends isn’t the only path forward. That creative integrity is not naïve. It’s damn brave.

You don’t need to change your voice to fit into a mold. Maybe your story is quiet. Maybe it’s weird. Maybe it doesn’t check the boxes of genre or market expectations. That doesn’t mean it won’t matter to someone.

Your voice matters. Your vision matters. And if you believe in it—truly, stubbornly, unshakably—then it will find its place in the world.

It might take years. But that’s okay.

Circling Back

In A Dark Quiet Death, Doc and Bean didn’t fail because their game flopped. It didn’t. It succeeded—wildly. But they lost themselves in the process—more so Doc, who finally had the hit of a game he always wanted—while Bean was trying to keep a steady hand on the wheel of her vision. But over time, compromises were made (or just shoehorned in by shareholders), and the game that connected them became something they didn’t even recognize anymore.

They got everything except the thing that mattered to them.

Bean leaves the company, and Doc is the only one left still trying to defend DQD’s future. But, over time, he also gets the axe from the board.

The final scene shows them bumping into one another at the store where they first met years later, walking past rows of mass-produced copies of their game—now a franchise complete with a schlocky, over-the-top, Michael Bay-esque film series. Their creation, polished and packaged and completely disconnected from who they were when they started.

That’s the quiet tragedy behind so many creative journeys. We think the goal is success. But maybe the real win is holding onto the spark that made you want to tell the story in the first place.

So if you’re someone out there worrying that your story is too weird, too quiet, too niche, too slow, too you—I hope you’ll keep writing it anyway.

The world has never been more connected than it is right now. If your story is honest and truly, deeply yours, it will find the people who need it.

It might take time and it might not be easy.

But it’s better than walking through a store one day, seeing your name on a product you no longer recognize, and wondering what it used to be before everyone else had a say. Back when it was just you, a coffee, and the flashing cursor on a Word doc.

Tell the story. Tell your story.

Even if it’s just a dark, quiet one.