One of the reasons why I hate dark romance is how the power imbalance is too big. Like if BOTH of them are equally toxic, and have just much as an equal say in that toxicity, then fuck yeah I'm in. Like it's wayyyy more entertaining if both sides are toxic and both have the power to destroy each other, y'know? Most of the time I see how there's a clear victim and abuser in those dark romances, and somehow, it's always the men that are toxic, like people DO know women can be just as toxic, right? RIGHT?!! 😭😭😭
Ooo or like they're super toxic to everyone, met and tried to out-toxic the other one, ended up being equals because they can predict what the other is doing, and suddenly they're a couple being toxic to everyone and even to each other, but with each other it's like 'i know what you're doing and you know i know' so it's like not real toxicity anymore-
@@angleofsweetrevenge yes yes yes fuck yes! Y'know what came to mind when you said that? Fyozai 😃😃 got fucking traumatized from that ONE fic and it's like, 3 chapters in 😭😭
Ok but I'm still not in, even if it's "equal". Abuse is abuse. I do not support toxic relationships and it is NOT something to glorify. Can we just normalize healthy relationships PLEASE
@@Lmao_mooodi didnt expect a BSD MENTION⁉️⁉️‼️‼️ Fyozai is so toxic in a good way when its written by ao3 writers even if i dont like the ship myself 😋
my favorite part of the dark romance and booktok brain rot is these people thinking they're somehow above people watching corn or they're intellectual bc it's a book. you spend hours at a time reading smut, you are no different
@@Mittens5824 yeah, y’all watch movies with sex scenes that are full-blown porn and yet you have the right to judge people who read books about it make that make sense
Ironically these people who read dark romance have audacity to say don't judge, every one has their own preference. Like no I'm gonna judge u for glorifying rape and stupid shit like this. Like just bcuz u have diff choice doesn't mean it's right choice, get ur head straight.
@@PaizuruInsanal Booktok, like any fandom culture, is primarily bad. There are fans and there are people who recommend books, and then there is a Fandom and there is Booktok. Huge difference. Frankly it makes me sad that booktok is continuing to perpetuate horrible romantasy tropes. Makes me even sadder that they're POPULAR... The fact that Sarah J Maas's godawful "romance" books are treated like a holy bible book set makes me actually want to give up searching for book recommendations 💀 I love fantasy and I enjoy a romance here and there, but I'm never going to pretend like flawless edgy Mary Sues are cute
yeah,,, that's one of the things that upsets me about the "don't like? don't read/follow" line of thinking...people have the right to think your fictional interests are odd and icky; I'd never tell someone not to judge me for the weird shit I'm into
I respect the dark romance author who listed all trigger warnings. She's not like Collin Hoover - she doesn't claim that she write romantic books full of chocolate, roses and a little bit of angst
Oh my god, yo, my sister said she read that one book by that author you’re mentioning, she said it was disrespectful to domestic violence victims. I believe her.
@@StrawberryCakeStudiosYT this may be the hot take, but there is no way Colleen actually wrote up It Ends With Us as an homage to her mother, because there is NO WAY you can write up smut about your parents just to have them beat on each other when its over.
Lets say it: Dark Romance is weird and problematic, but when read with caution and awareness it is acceptable. As long as it stays a fantasy, it’s fine. But the people that really scare me are the ones who really want that to happen to them. Let’s just not romanticise FUCKING SA OR CRIMES man
If you truly think like this you need to touch grass, reality is nobody really cares and just wanna make fun of weird girlies and RU-vidrs and other content creators say shit like "don't judge" so they don't get hit with the harassment strike.
@@PaizuruInsanalim like 99% sure you cant get a harassment strike for saying "Yeah maybe don't write up a romance where a dude barbecues and stalks his future girlfriend so people can jill off to it" Not even to one specific person either, its a group of hundreds of thousands who decided to have their kinks be public while also asking for universal acceptance regardless of what it is.
If you write or read depraved bs about romanticising horrific crimes then people are going to criticise you, and find it unacceptable. Best you can do is grow thicker skin or stick to ao3 which was literally made for this kind of issue.
Fr. Like if it's just a kink, I'll still not be friends with people who like it but they can do whatever they want. But what crosses the line for me is if they try to actually say the horrors that they're reading are "not that bad". Like, own up to the debauchery, or stfu. Just because you found the story about a 16 year old and a 38 year old getting together to be beautiful, doesn't mean that it's all of a sudden not creepy to the rest of us. If you can't acknowledge that what you're reading is problematic then you probably shouldn't be reading it.
What's worse is that this shit's in YA novels too, I'm pretty sure. Young Adult. And not one person realises Young Adult is literally for 12- 16/17 year olds. It's supposed to be the transistion from like children's books to adult books, with these books being mature enough to engage them and introduce them to adult style writing, while also being age-appropriate, but most people seem to only register the Adult part. The whole genre was created FOR this stage when people aren't quite children but not yet grown up, but now it's being erased by porn addicts who think that so long as they don't see anyone doing the deed then it's not real porn. I've seen so many people online being like 'oh just look at the reviews' when getting books. Sir/ma'am/bitch, newsflash: teenagers won't always think of checking online if their books have smut because their books are not SUPPOSED to have smut! Plus, let's not forget most parents do not want their kids reading smut, and with smut spreading into Y/A, those kids are gonna end up reading from the children's section up until they're adults because their parents will not allow them to touch YA or the kids themselves will not go near it. At this point, even I'm scared of new books because I do not wanna end up reading something explicit. And don't get me started on fantasy- for some reason I feel like that's the most likely to have smut in it and I don't know why. Someone needs to start putting PEGI ratings on books at this point
Omg yo you’re totally right, cause I remember one time my sibling (back in 2013-14) (she was 16) had gotten a book from the library or school library. This book had graphic - like GRAPHIC descriptions of sex, violence, and murder - I could barely stomach it despite being 19. I was in shock she even had that to read. I told her that that’s too much.
Having survived DV and r and attempted m this sht is so naive and disgusting to me to romanticize it to the point where people literally think I’m trying to be special when I try to explain horrors I’ve survived.. then they claim *I’m* the messed up one.
Crazy how people constantly say "People read/write this as a way to cope with trauma", besides the fact that I haven't heard a single person actually say this as a personal experience, its still just flat out fetishizing and nothing about it seems to be therapeutic in any way. Especially when it comes to the sexually dubious nature of most of these things, I feel like this would retraumatize someone if they went in blind. Speaking of, a lot of dark romance readers for some reason reccomend people go in blind, not a single warning. Movies and video games at least give you a vague warning, these mfs want you to go off the cover
@@xxlittlekittyjess666 I can definitely understand it, because to those people, you included, I'd be part of the target audience and I absolutely despise this type of content And to clarify if you need it, ive been sexually harassed, sexually assaulted and graped starting at the age of 9, if I wanted to get my power back it would be in the form of revenge, not sexualizing and idealizing my assaulter and harassers just to excuse what she did.
My step mother once gave me (14y/o at the time) a dark romance sm$t book. All because she liked the cover.😭 I never got over THAT trauma, that's for sure.
As a CNC enjoyer (HARD ON THE FIRST C) who reads some less than savoury fics on AO3, I HATE the sensationalization of “booktok” and “dark romance” because what I read on AO3 should not be romanticized and should definitely NOT be exposed to children. It’s kind of like if everyone started talking about h3nta! in anime community spaces. Also, I’m talking about the dark romances where its specifically romanticizing something that it shouldnt. You can have dark stuff in your book if you handle it well.
Nicely said. Ao3 was created to solve problems like this. And no one really criticises the authors there because they can just avoid all the crazy stuff using the tags, as long as it's honestly tagged. Really the only ok way to do it.
CNC is rape glorification. Say it like it is. When you romanticise rape, you normalise it. It's sad. Women know that they can't make this stuff go away so they settle for it and convince themselves that they're into it to protect themselves. It's like Stockholm Syndrome.
You can tell who was never hugged as a child or wasn't hugged enough. So many touched starved people who want control in their lives but can't so they fantasize about other people doing it for them, but that doesn't happen either so they have to read these kinds of books lol. But one of my main problems is the sexism in these stories. The helpless girl who becomes a slave or whatever. It's never the other way around or with a tough guy and a tough girl. Someone always has to be weak and taken. I'd be a little more tolerant of it if it habd different relationship and gender dynamics. But it's honestly just weird r*pe fantasies with extra steps.
This whole “debate” about dark romance is crazy. Like yes video games don’t cause violence, fiction doesn’t directly influence realty, etc, but like. There is absolutely a line somewhere and some booktok authors are using the line for bondage
I feel like the only people who can enjoy dark romance are either lucky ass people who’ve never had anything bad happen to them in their lives or people who are so traumatised that they don’t realise how fucked up it is that they can enjoy reading such distressing content 😭 like surely the people writing these books fall into one of these two categories too
humans are innately drawn to the macabre and reading fucked up content does not, in turn, make a person fucked up or immoral, many people enjoy dark topics 👍
I like dark romance side plots because I like bad endings in things, but I've also liked true crime for years. I only really like it when the narrative doesn't romanticize it for obvious reasons and I always skip sex scenes, but yeah. I've never had anything bad happen to me, really. I just love dark storylines and feeling the desperation of the characters
tiktok's version of dark romance is just the romanticization and fetishization of a lack of consent and unhealthy power dynamics. and i will stand by that.
My problem isn’t even that the fucked up shit is romanticized it’s that they talk about it like they’re actually into it like if it were real and happened irl. Cause like you can think something’s hot in *fiction* without thinking it’s actually hot irl yknow. But they never talk about it like they only think it’s hot in fiction 😭 plus them posting it all over sites like TikTok where teens have access to it and exposing teens to porn is also bad
dark romance is the female gaze (and the occasional men) version of corn that sounds justifiable because they're using their brain to make shit up instead of seeing it on a screen.
Honestly props to the book at the start that listed out the trigger warnings and said take care of your mental health, we need more of that. I've heard horror stories of dark romance books with zero content warnings, it's one of the (many) criticisms of the genre, the way they handle this content.
Why do I actually just want to read a parody of these mafia romances about some random girl from a middle-class suburban getting kidnapped and meeting the mafia boss but falling in love with a hopeful, down-on-his-luck mafia grunt who does the cleaning and the two teaming up to dismantle the mafia bosses’s control from the inside out through shenanigans and playing the parts they’re supposed to be in while scheming for the big guy’s demise 😭✋
When I was a teen, for some reason I was really into Wattpad dark romance in which the male character was always the forceful villain type and the female character was the shy damsel type.... I would fantasize about some hot guy taking full control over my life. But then when I actually started dating a guy for like a week and the second he told me I shouldn't wear my favourite short skirt... All hell broke loose. Now I do not even like the idea of a guy even raising his voice at me without me getting an intense urge to punch him let alone fantasize about controlling my life choices.
@@Smallweeweeman i witnessed such monstrosity that no arrangement of the 26 letters of english alphabet could explain and then I submerged into the body of god to wipe out the guilt and disgust i felt after reading the descriptions of her books.
I found your channel on accident and am about to watch all videos but i need to drop in to say that your humor and editing is top notch. The Stockholm bit killed me and the Dire Dire Docks music revived me.
man this reminds me of the time i was at a gathering and one of my mum's friend's daughters (12 years old btw) was reading 'Haunting Adeline' in the corner (a dark romance obvi) and she made us read this one page (invovling a gun lets say) and i was very disturbed to say the ABSOLUTE least. dark romance is literally just romance without the consent. i will always be the NUMBER 1 hater of that whole demonic genre.
some of the “dark romance” people give off the vibes of gross people in the anime community that say things like “it’s okay if i like this anime character! she’s fictional and she’s canonically 100 years old even though she’s drawn to look like a toddler!!1!1!1”
@@bojacklynno it's not long enough. if it's a shorter video i gotta choose what to watch next instead of one topic being discussed for 30+min. at least for me. i know other people do bypass vids this length bc it's too long to pay attention for them. to each their own
@@latesummer I thought you meant it the other way around haha I do wish his videos were longer even though this length is like a middle ground between audiences
It is genuinely so crazy that you don’t even have 100k followers, you are the exact type of quality RU-vidr who would have like 2M+ followers. I’m so glad to have found u while your still not too famous so I can say I’m one of the OGs💪💪. Your videos are awesome every time and I really hope you keep making them, you’re amazing man
I read Haunting Adeline and it was worse than i ever thought, it made me feel so sick, because the way its written is absoluetly how SA victims feel, and also matched my own fear. Like it felt like something i shouldnt be reading and it was nasty.
As someone who occasionally dabbles in dark romance because I like SOME of the tropes, the amount that i've started and had to dnf because the writing was absolutely horrendous and had no proper plot is high 😅
You can't just mention SCP like that when I'm having my character take care of 999 on janitor ai! The double-take I double-took Thanks for the silly little cat though, adding to the wholesomeness that is 999
I've read some dark romance books, but I can tell you I would never ever want any of that in real life. It's just fiction. You can just hope people don't actually think this stuff should fly in real life
This was so hilarious. 😂 I couldn’t stop snorting, this is why I don’t read a lot of dark romance books cause reading a lot of it messes with my mental health.
8:44 just sent me down a rabbit hole of nostalgia with "where tf do I know this from?" and now I'm back from a nostalgia trip and all the things that unsetteled me in SM64 lol
When ray reads from the stories, instead of my brain saying, “damn, this is hot” it just floods me with “DANGER!! WE’RE IN DANGER!!” I do not understand dark romance 🤷🏻♀️
