perfect days dir. wim wenders

this post began writing itself (in my mind) when i happened upon this instagram reel that just had me completely flabbergasted. for the fortunate who don’t have instagram, or for the sane who don’t want to mess up their algorithm, the reel is basically the clip of jennifer lawrence saying “what do you mean [laughs]? what are you s—what do you mean [laughs while teary eyed]?” from her episode on hot ones, i’m pretty sure. the text on the actual reel says as follows: “when she finally lets her guard down and accepts a coffee from him. but after she finishes it, he says… btw that wasn’t salted caramel in your latte 💗” yes, pink heart and all.

the caption was no better with the op writing “🖤HSH🖤 Current WIP: Dark stalker romance with Dateline vibes 🔥💀🥀”. when i sent this to gabby, they said “please seek psychological help” (i have to agree).

now, i’m not exactly what you’d call a prolific reader. i’m someone who flip-flops between devouring books and slowly going through them. hell, i even have a book i’ve been reading since november (i’m only 40% through it)¹.

what i am, however, is a hater at my core. and the recent target of my hate is #booktok and the ever growing list of poorly written smut (or books) by people who were too cool to be on wattpad at the ages 13-16. i can tell you right now that some teenager on ao3 whose first language isn’t even english can write better prose than some of these new “writers”. harsh, i know, but please—let’s all face the music: the publishing industry has become a mess; a fast fashion-esque dump since the onslaught of booktok.

we all know that if there’s one thing tiktok’s good at promoting, it’s hyper/mass consumerism. booktok is no different, with readers consuming literature at an insane rate and publishers putting out one book after the other. don’t get me wrong, i have nothing against people who can read 20 books in one month. i think that’s really cool and that if my attention span granted me the same abilities, i’d probably be doing the same. though it seems that on booktok, the focus is consuming rather than reading; to read to consume, but not to digest—but that’s not entirely what bothers me right now. what vexes me is mostly the sudden mass publication of books that definitely should not have been published, or at the very least, should not have garnered that much attention had it not been for the coverage brought about by booktok.

i know i probably sound stuck up. haha look at me, sitting in my ivory tower of carefully curated books, but seeing how some of these booktokers (is that what they’re called?) talk about the books they’re reading really has me raising an eyebrow at what’s being published now.

okay, before my rant gets insanely out of hand, i think we should first address the good that tiktok has done for the common reader. as someone who fell in love with japanese authors in her mid teens and as someone who also lives in a place where the only japanese author who was constantly stocked was haruki murakami and maybe one or two books from other japanese authors (e.g hiromi kawakami, natsume soseki, osamu dazai, etc.), i will say that it’s delightful to go into a bookstore and see more japanese authors and books being stocked just because they’re trending on tiktok. gone are the days where i had to specially order a book or wait for months on end to see if maybe they’ll stock a new banana yoshimoto book.

i think booktok has also given us tons of good recommendations, like babel by r.f. kuang, piranesi by susanna clarke, normal people by sally rooney, and the woman destroyed by simone de beauvoir.

booktok has also brought back some old best sellers and given them a new shine. which is great, especially for those who’ve never read them before. i also think that it’s always nice to see a (well deserving) author come back into the spotlight after some time out of it. i remember when my friend martha was raving about the song of achilles and circe by madeline miller long before tiktok got its hands on it. seeing the books get new covers and coverage was definitely something i enjoyed.

however, as with many things in life, good things must also come with its own pitfalls. one cannot stay elated in heaven for too long without crashing and burning. life humbles us that way, really. with booktok, it’s the surprisingly large amount of (majorly white) women who are somehow glorified porn (or as tiktok users like to say it 🌽) addicts.

the reel i mentioned in the opening of this rant alone, i feel, is enough to give you a glimpse into the type of books and people i’m talking about. but let’s look at the others that i happened upon during the duration of seeing that reel and writing this rant:

there’s this one that i sent my friend maurice, where the caption is: “pov: you always wished for a 🌶️spicy🌶️ bee book that reminded you of this movie [the bee movie, 2007]🔥”. like, first of all, no, i did not wish for erotica about a goddamn bee or bee alien. who on earth asked for that, minus the lady in the 2007 comedy movie “the bee movie”? second of all, how is this getting published, please. who is looking at the drafts and approving it?

this other one that i sent gabby also sent me into a conniption. the caption in the reel was: “he brutally un@lives her family in the middle of the night. also him: uses silk ropes to kidn@p her so she doesn’t get hurt.” the background song? taylor swift’s slut! specifically the lyrics in a world of boys, he’s a gentleman. gabby replied: this is a porn rotted brain. what the fuck (once again, i agree). for now, we ignore the very clear language that is pretty much only used on tiktok (unalived and other strangely censored words), lest we go completely off tangent.

this genre of tiktok/reel goes hand-in-hand with a bunch of people refusing to read anything that doesn’t have explicit smut in it.

gabby, myself, and a handful of internet strangers agree on one thing: this is the cishet (typically white) woman’s version of being a porn addict. they brag about reading their mediocre dark fairy porn everywhere, don’t venture into anything that isn’t smut or doesn’t contain smut, and talk about it online nonstop. the only reason it’s glorified/deemed okay, we theorise, is because it’s reading, which automatically makes it more intelligent and a matter of intellect, i guess. even if the dedication of their books start with: to the girls who fuck the villains, open wide—or something like that².

okay. let’s go further down into the rabbit hole of this corner of the internet, shall we?

on this side of tiktok, everything is boiled down to tropes. it’s enemies to lovers, grumpy and sunshine, there’s-only-one-bed, slowburn, and surprisingly, omegaverse (iykyk)—tags you’d find on your average fanfic on ao3 and wattpad.

while i understand that these tropes have always existed in literary fiction, it’s just weird using this as a subgenre or as a way to describe a book’s plot. most of the time as well, the tiktoks that use these tropes as a way to recommend you a book that they’re either reading or currently working on, are the so-called “spicy” books (see: smut/porn).

and these books, while i don’t want to generalize, are usually… well, averagely written, to put it nicely. there’s nothing spectacular about their writing, or their character creation and world building—things you’d think are important when reading a book. people just like it for the smut—and it blows up so quickly on tiktok, luring you in only for you to be disappointed at the end.

i genuinely don’t have a problem with you if you consume these types of books for the mindlessness of it; something to minimally engage your brain while giving you a break from the more complex thoughts usually associated with life. my bone to pick is when you exalt these books and try to dissect the phrases and prose, as if there’s anything more substantial to it, and try to frame it that way.

one (in)famous booktok recommendation that seemingly blew up overnight and had, or still has, everyone salivating was rebecca yarros’ fourth wing. now, don’t come at me if you enjoy this book. i personally dropped it after one page. from what i heard, the writing was mid—cringe and shallow, even. something you could easily find on wattpad in its heydays.

to my surprise, the sequel to fourth wing was released almost immediately after the book garnered fame on tiktok. this triggered a ton of discussion on how booktok was turning publication and reading into fast fashion. how we’ve stopped giving value to what we read and publish. we consume for the sole act of consumption and companies publish books to earn a buck.

i understand, though, that books like these have long existed in a more niche section of the bookstore. however, the way tiktok frames these books and talks about them constantly, giving them more coverage than they’d usually have is causing a new wave of people to fall into the habit of reading “dark romance” and dark romance only. the ever present question of people in the comments of booktok recommendations asking if a book is “spicy” or if it has smut and get sad when someone says there’s none is something that we gloss over quite often lately. it’s even begun to spread to the manga community, where people deem a josei/shoujo manga boring unless it had erotic scenes in it, which again—concerning. i don’t think The Fandom™ and their fanfics ever resulted in this type of brainrot (though it did result in people only ever seeing things through ships, but that is a conversation for next time).

just recently, i talked to someone who said that 15 year olds at their job would blatantly purchase these types of books all while their mom trailed behind them. 15, purchasing what is essentially written porn. think about that. an 18+ warning disregarded that simply. while i can’t say much, considering i was on tumblr at 15—i, at the very least, can tell you now that a 15 year old shouldn’t be reading dark romance; shouldn’t be reading about a nicely-packaged abusive relationship or sex with bee aliens (because i shouldn’t have read the hat fic or the milk fic at that age range either).

i think what further attributes to the popularization of terribly written books being published or avidly read is people’s fear of rating a book low. while perusing the storygraph ratings for the fourth wing, i found people criticising the book while giving it a rating of 3. i’m talking straight up hating on the book but giving it an average rating, contributing to its general average being on the higher side than its supposedly true rating.

i recently watched a tiktok about a person saying how you’re an “asshole” if you rate a book lower than a 3 simply because writing a book takes a lot of time and work for authors³. if your 3 star rating = bad, then what’s the point of a 5 star rating system? it goes against and devalues the whole reason it exists in the first place. points for effort is a thing, but nobody ever owes an author an average rating simply on what they deem is a bad book simply because their feelings would get hurt, or because they exerted time and effort into writing the book, ergo we should give them an “okay” rating for their effort.

if a book is bad, it’s bad. there’s no need to coddle an author with your thoughts or opinions on it. when i shared this tiktok to my dad he said “that is the dumbest thing i’ve heard to date.” to which i agree, as harsh as it sounds. we all venture into the public space knowing there are all types of people out there and when we put our work in a public setting, we understand the criticism and praise that comes with it. if you can’t handle someone giving your work 2 stars.

social media, tiktok specifically, has created a space where it’s nearly illegal to be a hater. you get flamed for hating something, or get called a try-hard and pick me if you don’t like any piece of media that’s popular. and while it’s true call-out posts have gotten out of hand, tiktok has made it near impossible to post legitimate call out posts on problematic reads and authors. there’s always a ready argument (more often than not it’s a rehash of the same argument ten times over) that people reply with whenever someone points out what’s wrong with any piece of media; a book, a movie, a song—just about anything.

this mindset, i feel, has propelled mediocre and less-than-worthy books to the forefront of booktok, taking over what’s genuinely worth your time. and to a certain degree, you feel the need to like the book even just for a bit, simply because everyone else likes it.

while talking to my friends about it, they mentioned a few things i feel like should be placed here:

maurice questions if this is all it takes to be published nowadays, a half-baked, poorly written story containing more smut than plot. and if so, maybe i should take an old fanfic and rehash it to fulfil my dream of having a published book under my belt (i’d like to think i have more pride than this).

gabby says that this goes hand in hand with her post “the public’s fear of intellectualism” and how so many people are afraid of or against picking up a book that has more depth to it—something that doesn’t involve fucking some red-flag male lead.

my take is, we need to put books like this on the backburner again. there’s nothing inherently wrong about liking this genre, but we need to start pausing and reevaluating ourselves when we hit the point where we refuse to read anything but, or if we start saying things like “books should have a list of tropes in the first few pages so we can tell what the story is about” (the synopsis is a thing, people!)⁴. i understand wanting to stay in our comfort zones, especially because reading is something we do to relax, but please. the brainrot has to end somewhere.

anyways, if you made it to the end of this post, i’m pretty amazed. this was nothing more than a sleep deprived hater’s ramble. i spent most of my time writing this during my shift, which is a gruelling 2am-10am, so forgive me if it’s all over the place.

the tldr is booktok somewhat needs to be eradicated and some of us need to read more than just porn. and let hating exist freely again! that is all, thank you for listening to my ted talk.

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thank you for reading my rant spanning 2.5k words! i clearly had a lot to say (ᵕ— ᴗ —) if there's one thing about me that you can be sure of, it's that i WILL be yapping.

i just want to reiterate that there's nothing wrong with enjoying dark romance or smut. that really is not the message that i'm trying to deliver. i think the problem starts when reading these sort of books consumes you whole. gabby also mentioned that constantly reading or consuming media like this will lead you to having a muddy view on what healthy relationships should look like. i agree, if you can't be "locked up" or in the same room as the types of male leads you read about, then you need to rethink certain aspects about your life and what you consume.

anyways, a song as always. i hope you enjoyed your stay here!

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1. the book i'm talking about here is dragonlance, a book my dad has been asking me to read since i was 13.↩

2. i found the title of the book with this description. it's called fate of a royal and by god i wish i was the person i was before reading that dedication.↩

3. i couldn't find the original tiktok, but i found someone who stitched it and you can find it here.↩

4. this is based off the tiktok in this tweet. i just want to say that if you want tags because you don't want to read the whole thing, then maybe reading isn't for you. also what the hell is "romance no spice"?? please touch grass.↩