For the second entry in my "doing it wrong" series, I submit that "black metal" RPGs are doing it wrong. Essentially they are black comedy RPGs, not what they want to be which is misery tourism. Basically I liken them to movies from the 80s (or contemporary movies from Neil Breen) where the writer/director/star thinks they have something important to say, but ultimately their drama is unintentionally a farcical comedy, often nearly as funny or more funny than the farcical comedies of the same era. Mork Borg is funnier than Toon. Paranoia at least knew what it was trying to be and played into the same vein.
If you make an entire setting and it's inhabitants as terrible as possible, bad things happening to them is funny, not miserable. There is some shock value here and there to settings, usually when bad things happen to innocents, but those innocents would invariably grow to/become despicable humans like the rest of the dark societies they discuss, so it's edge is blunted a bit.
If you want to disturb players, give them interesting NPCs that they LIKE and RESPECT, and then kill these NPCs. Like what Game of Thrones did up until it's last season when it refused to (and then dropped in quality to the point that hundreds of thousands of people signed a petition for a do-over for the first time in TV history, and for the first time ever a supplier denied selling something to a customer TWICE). But don't just have the NPCs die offscreen without player involvement. Make the players have to witness, or better, choose. Give them agency into killing what they like. Because it will hurt more when they have to.
D&D can be a darker game than Call of Cthulhu. All it takes is this concept made real.
