Do We Want Nature, or Nice Nature Documentaries?

Margo hasn’t watched a nature documentary in over a year. It all began with a lioness—a strong, proud mother raising two cubs under the unforgiving African sun. The footage was stunning. She nursed them, protected them, and taught them to stalk. But then came the drought. Water vanished. Prey disappeared. The lioness grew thin. One day, without warning, she walked away. Her cubs, too weak to follow, died under a thorn bush. Margo was shattered. She turned off the television and said, “Someone should’ve helped them.”

I reminded her that nature documentaries don’t intervene; they observe. But she didn’t want observation; she wanted hope.

Next week, there’s a special on loggerhead turtles. A pregnant female crawls ashore, lays her eggs, and leaves. A month or so later, the hatchlings dig their way up through the sand and sprint toward the sea. Only a few make it. The rest are picked off by birds, crabs, or the sheer exhaustion of being born in a dangerous world.

I asked Margo if she wanted to watch it with me. Her face hardened. “No,” she said. “I know how it ends.”

She’s not wrong. Statistically, it’s a massacre.

And I get it. Not everyone wants to see life’s cruelties played out before bedtime. But I can’t help wondering: is this how people read fiction, too? When I write my dark stories—murders, moral ambiguity, love that twists into obsession—am I losing readers like Margo? Do they want comfort, not truth? Happy endings, not haunting ones?

Nature doesn’t care about story arcs. It doesn’t wrap things up in nice bows. Sometimes, the lioness walks away. Sometimes, the turtles don’t make it.

And yet, I watch. I write. I look for meaning in the messy, the raw, the real. (SEETHINGS is downloadable and free for a limited time)

Maybe some people, like Margo, need stories where the cubs survive and thrive. And maybe others, like me, need to sit with the truth that sometimes they don’t do either.

–Michael