When it comes to books and discussing them, online spaces for that have always existed one way or another. Personally, as I never experienced the old web, I'm not familiar with how that was back in the day, but I assume it was through forums, as those seem to have been very present in the past. Nowdays, people look for different outlets to talk about them, which beyond sites made for tracking your reading progress like Goodreads and Storygraph, the most popular alternatives are social media.

I've been a reader my whole life. Everyone in my family reads and right now, I'm in my first year of studying literature and language and I'm quite happy with that. I still enjoy my time looking for book related thing on the internet as it is fun to find more like-minded people and find about new books. Places like YouTube, Instagram and TikTok have been the center of this social media book community sphere for the past couple of years, and it's impossible to not come across it at some point.

This article will be focused on BookTok as the newest sphere of them all and my opinion on it. By the title of this piece, you probably know my feelings about it, but I will go more in detail on why I hate the hate BookTok gets, why most of the time the "critiques" of it are misogyny and why banning NSFW books is just cencorship that will fuck over minorities in the future.

Beofer we start, I will note that a lot of the things mentioned here are US centric. Some of these things might not be seen in the online spheres if you are mainly a non-English speaker and those are communities you are a part of, even on social media. I do not live in the US too, but it's hard not to notice that these things are prevelent when you spend a lot of time on the English speaking side of the internet.

Genuine critique or masked misogyny?

An age long tale: is this thing really bad, or is it just something a lot of women do? If you look at the majority of people who tend to have a platform on BookTok, you will notice they're mostly women. There are always exceptions, but in general, majority are them. This imidietly creates a situation where the moment something that was previously considered a men's hobby or thing to do, they imidietly try to downplay or insult the women doing said thing. With reading, this is nothing new. When Jane Austin was writing, people were losing their mind over it, because she was a woman. When Twilight was popular, people were finding all ways to insult teen girls for liking the books and saying so much stuff about it, insulting them.This happening now is nothing new, but people for some reason seem to think it's fine because there's a lot of NSFW and dark romance involved. I'll touch upon this topic later, for now we'll stick to the broader side of things. Long story short, if it's made by a woman or enjoyed by them, it's bad, according to people.

There are valid ways to critique some of the things seen, but most of the time, it's all abanmdoned for the "they're porn addicts", "women are iliterate" and "all they do is read trash" that helps no one and just does the same thing people did centuries ago when they didn't want women to be educated.

All the books there are garbage - or are they?

The topic of quality comes up often when talking about BookTok. It's important to note that there are different subsections of the community, and depending where you end up, the books you get reccomended will be different. The most popular books, usually, do not have the quality certain people will seek, which is not really surprising. It usually means the book is easy to read to most people, so it will be easier for general audience to read it. This was happening before, it is happening now and it will happen in the future on whatever the next platform/place for sharing what people read will be. Due to this, there's perception that all the books BookTok reccomends are 'trash'.

In general, I hate when these people call the books trash, not even because of the 'it hurts the autor's feelings' attitude, but because of how the people who say that approach the commentery of it. More ofthen than not, it's not even just saying stuff about books, it's the fact that they're insulting people who like them. 'If you like Colleen Hoover books you're stupid and I don't trust you' Really? Is that were we're going? Insulting people over books? I've seen even worse things, like calling them predators for liking dark romance (again, on this later), buddy are you sure? Is this really the hill you want to die on? This isn't helping your case. This is not going to make them read 'better' books, it will just push them away from reading overall if anything.

To add to this, as someone who's been reading for so long and has read book that are popular on BookTok, I have yet to read one that was what one could call 'trash'. Some of them might've been underwelming, sure, but none that I would considert truly horrible. Maybe it's because I do avoid books that cary that reputation (maybe if I had read Fourth Wing and Lightlark I could have a book to call trash, but I haven't) and tend to only pick things I have interest in, so all of the so-called horrible books just were never on my radar. I don't doubt that there are badly written popular books, there will always be something like that, but so far the most that I've seen it's either mediocre or something that was hyped up a lot and then was not as amazing as people said it was.Or maybe it's that I rarely get hyped for books, regardless of from who they are from.

Other things people say that make me roll my eyes is 'You can tell who was a reader since they were little and who just staretd because it was popular' and 'they never had an ao3/wattpad phase'. For the first claim, what? No you can't? What sort of stupid assumption is that? And for the second one, why are we comparing fanfiction to published work? I know that what they're refering to here is the NSFW scenes, but they do know that traditionaly published works cannot have odd, weird, or downright wild things fanfiction can?

Smut - no, it's not ruining books and it's mostly Amazon's fault

I recently watched a video that talked about explicit scenes and why there seems to be more of them now. Long story short, Amazon. Big surprise, I know. They have been surpressing erotica and erotic romance, so authors have to pretty much misstag their works as romance if they wan't to sell their books. As for some thier livelihoods depend on this, there's not much they can do.

The other thing that sometimes makes me want to have a fit or rage but I hold back every time are the words 'porn additction'. Now. I'm going to hold your hand when I say this. Porn addiction is not real. It does not fit the criteria for addiction. It was made up by christians to make other members of the church feel guilty for feeling horny. And those who say they can't read books if there's no smut? That's not real. That's an exaggeration. They're not being serious when they say that. 'How spicy is this?' is something I've never seen in the wild, only videos making fun of it. Maybe it happens sometimes, but let me tell you, they're not commenting that on video of a classic book, it's gonna be on a video of a romance book.

I do think we can talk if NSFW scenes are used correctly or not in books, but that has to be done with an intention to critque it in goof faith, not call people 'porn addicts' and say 'smut is ruining books'.

Dark romance - just learn what the genre conventions are here pal

Dark romance seems to be the hot topic when discussing BookTok, and boy, do I sometimes hate it because people do not know what the genre is and what it's about. The outrage is sometimes compared to (and rightfully so) to how some people will get upset when the gothic literature they're reading has incest in it.

"Dark romance is about characters being in bad situations and killing people for each other, it's not rape, stalking and sexuall assut!" I hate to break it to you, but it's both of those. Dark romance can be many things, and characters having complicated or toxic relationships between each other is one of them. As long as the romance genre conventions met (characters being together at the end of the book) it can then have whatever messed up stuff it wants to have.

"But children are reading those books!!" Where are the parents? I'm not the one to advocate for parents being over their children's heads and watching their every move, but they should at least be aware of what their kids are reading. For my whole childhood, there was only one case where I got a book that was not apropriate for my age, and it was a birthday gift from a freind who shopped for the book on her own, said she thought I would like it because it sounded dark (i liked vamprires and read a lot of children's horror books at that point in time), not checking to see the genres (it was horror and erotica). Outside of that, every single book was apropriate for my age. My parents did just hte pare minimum of letting me be in the children/teen section of the bookstore. This only became less true as I got older an was in high school, but even then anything physical was apropriate (let's not lie to ourselves, most people have picked up a fanfiction that has sex in it if you were part of a fandom for anything. in my case, the first thing ever was a creepypasta one)

Teens will always find a way to get something they know they shouldn't, but most of the time, it won't even be the dark romance books, it's more likely to be some fanfiction (which in truth, depends where you find it, ao3 does have a lot of things though it's all tagged 99,9% of the time) or a book they found a PDF file online that's probably tame in comparasent to dark romance. What does matter is that they are thought sex ed and know what's right or wrong. You know, something adults already do, which is why dark romance is an adult genre.

Is the genre above critisism? No, of course. We can talk about bad stereotypes or bad writing (something that seems to be present in a lot of the popular books) as long as you keep in mind what genre you're reading. Not liking it is fine, no one will be angry at you for that. People will be angry if you tell them that they're 'deranged and dangerous' for liking said books.

Now, this is not exclusive to discourse about dark romance, but there's an alarming number of people who treat others who enjoy dark themes in fiction that are related to sex, abuse and other taboo subjects, that will scream 'problematic!!!' at you for even enjoying these types of things, saying it romantasizes said topics and how you're a horrible person who deserves those things to happen to you if you like it (no, this is not a joke. I've seen this way too many times). But the moment the conversation is about violance, murder or gore? There is no same treatment. It's always 'I know it's bad so it's ok write about that' all of a sudden. You will not see a person lose their mind about these topics when written, sometimes even regardless of the quality or if it's done in poor taste. We're cherry picking which topics are ok to portray in fiction and what not. In reality, all is bad. No one writing any of that wants that to happen in real life, regardless of what that someting is. If you think people who enjoy dark romance want any of that, you're dead wrong.

Cencorship - it always ends up fucking over minorities

The reason I mention this, is because a lot of the times, people who call for removal of NSFW media are often not conisdering the fact that with who is actually is the ruling party. NSFW bans will automatically result in banning of queer media because to right wingers, queer people existing is sexual and pornographic. To them, we do not deserve to be seen or heard, which is why you will see them call anything that's not made with only cishet white audience in mind "woke". They think people who are different just existing in their country and want to be seen in media as political. No amouth of people who are in those minorities and are siding with them will actually make them like you either, because you're only 'one of the good onces' until you're the only one left and then they're remove you too.

This same thing can be apllied by works made by POC by the way. They're already not as presented in publishing, and it's just going to get worse as time goes. The US is in a very bad situation right now and just by looking it from afar, it's not looking good at all.

There are things one can critique abotu BookTok - but often it's not exclusive to it

I've seen muultiple videos and posdt about people behaving badly in the BookTok community, and let me tell you, trying to frame is as if it's only an issue for that place is not correct. People being invasive, rude to creators and real people is not something new, especially nowdays. Take a look at any korean k-pop fanbase. That's more toxic that all stories you've probably heard about bad BookTok behaviour combined.

It's right to critisize someting, especcialy when you know there are problems. People lying about liking a book to appeal to the larger opinion on the book, not disclosing paid promotions, caring more about followers over the actual books sometimes, buying way too many books in one go, all of these things can and should be adressed. But it's still importannt to note that a lot of these aren't exclusive to BookTok, but are rather things that are present in every filed online when it comes to reating content for others to see, especially in a video format. A lot of these things mentioned can be applied to any influencer doing anything, meaning that this is something that comes when a hobby is monetized.

Conclusion + additional things to watch regarding the topic

This was all really just a ramble on my part, mainly because I am sick of people saying "booktok bad, smut bad" every time someone want's to have a conversation about it, especially because they know that will get them views and likes. Like with anything, there is nuance to every discussion and this one lack it very much. I think it's important to talk about what happens on there and to call out bad behaviour when we see it, but way too many people don't think about finding the middle but rather haate for the sake of being a hater.

Before I finish (and because there's a chance my rambles might not have made sence to some), I wanted to offer some videos that are nuanced and are not just "booktok bad". There are a few that I've seen that do a very good job of exdplaining everytyhign and bringing up points that are valid and valuable.

the dangers of removing smut from books by Leah Nicole - a video mentioned above regarding smut and why saying you want it removed is not a good thing

Let's Talk About BOOKTOK - FunkyFrogBait - amazing video that goes in depth about the misoginy of a lot of arguments against booktok, including dark romance and spicy books

According to Alina booktok related videos - this is not a single video but still a good reccomendation to watch. She has a lot of interesting and good points on a lot of discourse around booktok and overall the book community in general. I have not seen all of her videos but the ones I did ('Why is booktok discourse so shallow?' and 'Why we're so OBSESSED with what other people read' were my favourites of those) are very insightful.