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Los Angeles Times
11-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Opinion: The rise of dark romance and the controversies behind it
CONTENT WARNING: The article and sources below contain references to items of a sexual nature. Reader discretion is advised. Booktok —the reading community on the social media app TikTok— has shaped the publishing industry, its dedicated members playing a crucial role in whether a book joins the New York Times bestseller list or gets buried between other titles crowding the bookstore shelves. Romance has become the most popular literary genre in the U.S., making $1.4 billion in revenue in 2022 with the help of Booktok. Dark romance, a subgenre that focuses on messy, twisted, and often morally questionable love stories and explores themes of abuse, violence and trauma, has also gained significant popularity with the rise of Booktok in 2020. The genre delves into taboo, complicated topics, with some of its tropes being mafias, kidnapping, violence and stalking which are often painted as love or desirability. Dark romance could be considered an evolution of Dark Romanticism, a genre that emerged from the Transcendental philosophical ideas that grew popular in the nineteenth century . The literary movement was often associated with gothic fiction —another origin of modern dark romance— which originated from works such as Horace Walpole's 'The Castle of Otranto' (1764) and continued by English writers such as Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte and John Polidori. However, dark romanticism emphasized the fallibility of human beings while gothic writers attempt to create an atmosphere of mystery and suspense, making readers feel intense emotions by using elements of horror. Dark romance books are filled with triggering content such as sexual violence, murder and stalking, yet many of their readers —primarily women — find great comfort in the story. Readers often use fiction as a form of escapism , and the argument can be made that dark romance is therapeutic because no matter what the female protagonist goes through, the story always ends with a 'happy ending' and find love. In addition, the intense tension between the two morally-ambiguous characters can be intriguing to many readers. The main appeal of the genre is how it touches on real-life issues combined with the fantasy it creates, in which the protagonist survives and even finds some sort of love and happiness in the end. Some supporters of the genre, such as bestselling author of the 'Twisted' series, Ana Huang , argue that 'fiction is a safe way to explore those fantasies and experience these visceral emotions without them actually being in danger .' However, studies also show that repetitive exposure to violence through entertainment, particularly electronic media, increases the risk of violent behavior from viewers . In addition, continuously experiencing negative emotions due to violent or gory scenes through media can lead to the habituation of certain natural emotional reactions or 'desensitization.' This means that consuming dark romance can impact one's perception of the world and shape their behavior, even if they do not consciously romanticize its content, especially for young readers with undeveloped minds . Readers often use these dark romance books as a form of escapism, which leads to withdrawal from social relationships, potentially blurring lines between healthy, realistic boundaries and toxic behaviors depicted in fictional novels. For example, many dark romance fans on TikTok depict anger, forceful love, jealousy and over-possessiveness towards a partner to be a sign of strength, passion and love. 'Fifty Shades of Grey' is a popular example of the harm of dark romance. The book is considered the bestseller of the decade and it depicts the abusive characteristics of the relationship between Anastasia and Christian, such as stalking, intimidation, and isolation, as romantic. The study also proves that reading books containing romanticized violence against women is also directly associated with health risks in adolescent and young adult females. Despite the book having multiple explicit and intense themes throughout the story, the book is purchased by many teenagers , who are especially vulnerable to being mentally impacted by the media they consume. The study emphasizes that if women experienced adverse health behaviors first, reading 'Fifty Shades of Grey' or similar works of fiction might reaffirm those experiences and potentially aggravate related trauma. Likewise, it is possible that the book influences the onset of health behaviors in its readers by creating an underlying context for the behaviors. Such books mold young women's perception of what a relationship should be, and overall, can have negative influences, no matter how much the reader consciously separates reality from fiction. Another harmful aspect of the genre is how it downplays and misrepresents serious, real-life issues. For example, H. D. Carlton's 'Haunting Adeline,' which has become one of the most popular dark romance books online, depicts Adeline being stalked and forced into a non-consensual relationship by Zade Meadows. Not only does the book glorify a stalker and assaulter as a 'love interest,' but it also tries to depict Zade as a hero by stating that he works to protect women and children from human trafficking. This was not used as an opportunity to discuss and explore a serious and relevant topic, but is simply a plot device to make the character more likeable. However, Zade's harmful behavior towards the protagonist overpowers the subplot of his 'altruistic' actions. A Youtube book reviewer, Cindy , argues that the novel depicts human trafficking as something that happens completely randomly, downplaying the many factors, such as ethnicity, disabilities and status , that raise the possibility of falling victim to trafficking. Dark romance is a subgenre that has been popular in the past and will remain popular in today's world, despite its many faults. However, this does not change the fact that the contents of these stories are extremely harmful and that the consumption and distribution of such novels should be discussed more by fans and critics of the genre alike. Fiction is one of the strongest bonds between people worldwide, allowing it to shape individual minds as well as the society as a whole. This means that the rise of a genre that explores darker themes has the potential for writers to explore and bring awareness to issues that are often ignored, rather than romanticizing them. Related
Yahoo
29-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
How Victorian melodrama turned the sweet music of gothic into something dark and sinister
In 1764, Horace Walpole published the first gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, set in a labyrinthine castle surrounded by woods. The novel features the supernatural, with a dark secret from the past at its core. Today, 260 years later, gothic is still with us in the form of 'contemporary gothic' plays, fiction, films, music and computer games. Central to the popularity of gothic is the way it affects its audiences. It is supposed to unsettle, to make the flesh creep and provoke feelings of claustrophobia. Soundtracks for gothic films are integral to creating such effects, building suspense and unease while amplifying the visceral impact of sudden jump scares. Alejandro Amenábar's soundtrack for The Others (2001), for example, weirds its listeners out. The hollow but reverberant timbre of brushed piano strings evokes the spaces of the house, conjuring up the old-fashioned alienness of the place. Action, set and music sympathetically resonate. Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here. The soundtrack for The Substance (2024) shrieks with the strings and sudden dissonances of The Nightmare and Dawn (taken from Bernard Herrmann's score for Hitchcock's 1958 masterpiece, Vertigo). Then, it deepens the sense of disquiet with the sinister incantations and medieval-sounding harmonies of Swedish composer Anna von Hausswolff's Ugly and Vengeful. Both soundtracks impressively succeed in doing what we expect gothic music to do: provoke unease, create suspense and drive home the horror elements. But has the music of the gothic always been called upon to unsettle and scare? Has it always sounded so, well, gothic? These are questions I explore in my new book The Music of the Gothic 1789–1820. Over the last few years, I've been rummaging through archives in London, Oxford and Dublin searching for settings of songs from novels and music associated with gothic plays such as The Mysteries of the Castle (1795). I uncovered many treasures, some of which probably haven't been performed for a couple of centuries. Thanks to a grant from the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust, I was able to bring some of this music to audiences once more with the help of a group of wonderful musicians, headed by Seb Gillot, who performed the tracks you can hear in this article. You can see them performing live below. The gothic novels and plays of the 1790s were populated by sweet-singing heroines and heroes. Among the music I encountered was a song by the composer and singer Harriet Abrams (c. 1758-1821), in which a woman imprisoned in a madhouse sweetly pleads with her cold-hearted jailer. I also found music for gothic plays by the Northumbrian William Shield (1748-1829) and the Irish tenor Michael Kelly (1762-1826), who wrote songs about jolly mariners , comic poachers_ and young peasant girls on their way back from market. None of this material sounded remotely what we would now describe as gothic. Even the music accompanying the entrance of a blood-covered ghost in The Castle Spectre (1798) was warm and stately – and singularly unterrifying. I realised that none of the music from the 1790s – a period when gothic was phenomenally popular – was intended to scare. On the contrary, it was called upon to provide relief from the scare. In late 18th-century gothic plays such as The Italian Monk (1797), music was associated with romance, comedy and sublime religious experience, but not horror or terror. At what point then did the kind of gothic music we know today come into being? The evidence can be found in books such as Remick Folio of Moving Picture Music (1914) which contains music for silent film accompanists. With names like Mysterioso, or Forboding and Wind Storm, or Hurry, they were evidently designed for scenes of suspense and mystery. Such music is indebted to the music of Victorian melodrama, but what I wanted to know was when melodrama acquired its distinctive gothic sounds. Very often in research you discover that things happen gradually. There is trial and experiment, a series of influences, a slow accumulation of examples, and then a tipping point. But when it comes to gothic music, that is not the case. There is a definite date when a specific kind of music erupted onto the entertainment scene. The date was 1802, and the occasion a new dramatic production – a 'melo-drame' or musical drama called A Tale of Mystery with music by Thomas Busby. Busby's music was conceptualised very differently to the music of the 1790s. For a start it was intended to add to, not to provide relief from, the gothic elements of the play. Most crucially, it was not part of the imagined world of the drama. The fictional characters did not sing it – they did not even 'hear' it: Busby's music was directed at the audience. Instrumental music calculated to disturb, it was chaotic and unnerving, with lots of fast, disjointed short phrases, disturbing chords and cliffhanger endings. Instantly recognised as new and revolutionary, it caused a sensation. After audiences had a taste of the new gothic in A Tale of Mystery, music on the page and on the stage soon became something darker and more troubling. The older kind of music didn't disappear overnight, of course, but melodrama took hold and the music of gothic was transformed. Not just on stage but also on the page. Gothic music was no longer uplifting but sinister. As seen in The Woman in Black (2012), there's nothing like a music box in a deserted house to terrify audiences. And who doesn't thrill to the sound of the diabolically thundering organ in Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera? This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Emma McEvoy received a research grant from the British Academy and Leverhulme Trust for the project "The Music of Gothic Literature and Theatre 1790-1820".
