Tolkien wrote trauma in a way to reflect the horrors of WW1. The entire story of TLotR is reflecting that. Frodo's wound that never truly heals is to reflect his longterm, chronic PTSD and depression. SJM wrote trauma as an excuse to be edgy and had a classic mary sue as a main character. She has no quantifiable comparison between her books and Tolkien's works of masterful literary art. To be honest I feel like she never read them and only saw the films. Having read just a few chapters of ACOTAR was enough for me. Insufferable prose if you can even call it prose.

As someone who grew up reading the classics (Little Women, Crime and Punishment) and recently read Determined: A science of Life without Free Will, is was incredibly refreshing to read The Haunting, a middle school novel🤣anti-intellectualism is absolutely on the rise, but some of us have to read academic literature and technical writing for a living. It was such a relief to read something low effort. Some of us actually exercise our intellect all the time in other ways, and leisurely reading doesn’t have to be a mental exercise too. My concern is that reading is many people’s ONLY form of cognitive exercise. It’s healthy to challenge themselves or consume something impactful and meaningful to society and your development as a person.

Thank you for your video!:) In some ways, I have a problematic relationship with the romance genre. I have always read romance books and mostly enjoyed them. At the same time, I study (Finnish) literature at the university and have noticed talking down my romance reads if my course friend for example sees me reading romance in the hallway. None of them has ever said anything about those books but I seem to have internalized the idea of romance being a lesser genre so I avoid being seen as a romance reader in my "literature circle". There are several courses I wouldn't have survived, like the Finnish literature in the 1800s, without my Red White and Royal Blues:,)

Some points: Two words: Adult. Fiction. Adult female readers are intelligent enough to differentiate between fiction and real life. Other genres also have set tropes, not just romance. If you’re after romance without s3x scenes, they have separated it into another sub-genre, and it’s called sweet romance.

I loved the beginning of her throne of glass series. It really went downhill very fast

i have a complicated history with romance genre, partially due to being an aromantic person and queer. most romcoms don't appeal to me but there exceptions and i find that i spend a lot of my time in fandom thinking / writing about romantic ships that i love. most of the time i think it boils down to preferring a story to have bigger things at play than romance (strong plot, the characters embody themes, the characters act the same within the relationship as they would even if it wasn't a romantic relationship, etc) for similar reasons that i prefer the higher stakes of fantasy/sci fi stories to contemporary works (and even then, have some of the latter as my favourites). i think some of it is "Romance is the most important thing ever" that is saturated in society so much > "romance and romantic feelings can be important, if your partner is your top priority they should also be your friend / have unconditional love for each other" and not usually liking more traditional cishet male leads (but there is increasingly more romance marketed towards queer ppl, which is nice).

Booktok: Big word bad! Too many word in book more dan one sybull...silabl...syllable! 😡

0:46 Lolololololololol “Oasis of piss (sic)”

You’re doing the lord’s work with this take ❤

Men written by women are moody, literally growl and bite you, and are simultaneously extremely primal and always conveniently waiting for consent

Uh, because men are not women, and women are not men. The author can only idealise about the opposing gender because they don't live like the other.

NOT THE SURFACE TO AIR MISSILES BRO 💀

wasting time on reading/watching someone's fictional relationships instead of doing it by yourself is what makes me hate it, probably the only genre combined with isekai that i hate. I dont think someone who is succeseful in life and has a partner they wanted will read romance, those who lack one and could not get will be obsessed, just like isekai, for losers that daydream of another life

Hi, absolutely loved your video! Just discovered you. ❤

This video is really well scripted! your commentary is in-depth and easy to understand, plus your voice is really calming and nice to listen to! (the taylor comparison made me flinch as a sjm hating Swiftie tho lollll)

I was surprised when I saw the views and comments. This deserves way more recognition, very interesting deep dive into romance! Personally, I indeed find romance to be cringeworthy and cheesy, but that's because I didn't take the time to look deeper into the genre and find actual literature, only the superficial, marketable books. My favourite genre will always be horror, suspense, thriller and mystery, though.

Something I get confused by in regards to Booktok is the Song of Ice and Fire books by George Martin. For a community that seems deeply obsessed with smut, power dynamics and abuse, I feel like they reject Martin's work for those exact things. That the books are too violent, there's too much abusive relationships. But then their reading list is "self insert gets railed by quintuplet werewolves who seem to really like leaving bruises on her"

Male gaze = good taste.

6:28. No. It's not serious and should not be taken seriously. We've seen what has happened to Western entertainment in the past decade when some cuckoos decided listening to Twitter was gonna make them bank: some of the worst writing in history to grace the screens and pages. It worked so well people steer fifteen miles clear of any movie with a female lead on the poster. Not to mention every such "debate" turning into a political yelling contest. So no, thanks. And please, do not use the word "problematic" because I for one find it to be ptoblematic itself. Crazy that.

Im a writer and a reader, not really good at either, but I understand the sort of irritation that comes when people read a book such as a book I personally have beef with "A little life" and swear that it is the greatest piece of literature they have ever read. I also feel this way with a lot of Colleen Hoover, and while on the same topic, I think It ends with us fits well with what the first tiktoker was talking about. It is not typically advertised as a book about DV, It is marketed as a romance book, most of the tiktokers Ive seen treat it as if it is a simple romcom, as if the DV is just another trope. In instances like these, reading for entertainment (although not immpossible) completely steam rolls through the serious topics the books are centered around. This whole idea can lead into my opinions on dark romance but I'll spare you.

if a book has a price tag and wants you to spend your hard-earned cash on it - gosh, yes!!! a book should be out through a critical and sometimes negative review - I am sorry hard-working author, that's in the interest of the public. The author put a f price tag on it.

I honestly always thought of terrible depictions of the opposite sex as mainly a thing women do, I don't read romance books but the few I have for various reasons were written by women and included uncomfortable descriptions of massive muscular men with what seemed like feminine personalities

12:05 is WILD bro I would like to meet the guy who wrote that shit

To your point about women not being able to distinguish between novels and real relationships. I'm not sure I believed that grown women woud see a toxic male lead and think "Great. Ill seek him out in real life." It's more that I thought that women already in toxic relationships would see those books confirm that those relationships are normal. Seeing other women praise those books and those toxic fictional men would make their real life partners seem less escapable. I talked to a trans woman once about the toxic romances of booktok. We concluded that there are a lot of straight, cis women from conservative backgrounds who are just starting to realize that they can have romantic and sexual fantasies. They can't imagine healthy ones, but they're overly excited about smut, in a very puritanical way, because they've been repressed for so long. They're playing out their late self-discovery in a very public way. Plus, as a woman, it's super embarrassing to see women screaming with excitement over a horrible "love" interest. It probably makes relatively good men feel uncomfortable too, and not just for reasons of misogyny.

17:56 Yo SAAAAAME

I think the most frustrating part of this entire book in my opinion was having to be reminded how frail and weak Violet was as if I could ever forget lmao. Otherwise, I didn’t hate this book as much as I expected!

In Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson you see great representation for women! Same for The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson and The Stormlight Archives by Brandon Sanderson. Really awesome books.

Maya Rodale (that is now a Historical Romance author) says in her book "Dangerous Books For Girls: The Bad Reputation of Romance Novels Explained" the same thing you said, about considering romance books terrible, until she started reading them. Indeed, that book is a very good complement for your video (is it almost 10 years old e a little bit outdated, but I think is still a relevant read). All the genres have good and bad cheap books, but for romance all books are terrible. It's almost a 10-15 years moral panic cycle: 10 years ago, it was about 50 shades, now is about "too much sex" in romance novels. My friends, romance now it's not different for novels from 20, 30, 40 years ago in terms of sex in them. Erotica is not invented em 2010's. It's sad but, people always will complain about romance books. But I love them, a lot of people love them as well, so read what you like and try not be an idiot about other people's literary taste. P.S: it's so ridiculous (and misogynist) thinks that women are so dumb that they don't know how to separate fiction from reality and that women don't know that toxic relationships in real life are bad.

The lack of variety in romance these days is REAL! I diskile smut to bits and can hardly find any book that isn't smuttified😂

That first stretch was wild

"Her Barbie doll vagina." _...What?_ That doesn't even make sense!

I work in a cinema and when the ‘Little Life’ stage production was filmed and showed we had to give out warnings about the subject matter as well as put a warning on the door with a list of themes that’s what puts me off the book majorly

When guys are written to be big, hulking idiots, like brains and brawn can't coexist

Whenever I go browse through a bookshop, I see loads of pretty books with colored edging with marketing labels that sum up the tropes..."slow burn", "enemys to lovers" etc. ... People should read whatever they want and I am happy to see people on the train acually READING *yay*. But seems more and more publishers seem to care less about well-written (and I am not saying INTELLECTUAL!) literature, but more about selling special editions with collectors cards and other gimmicks. I have read a few of the popular booktok recommendations. Some of them really got me hooked, but MANY are boring, foreseeable, badly written, with shallow or stupid characters, because manuscripts are chosen by trope, not by how much time authors have spent developing a compelling plot, story arch and their characters. Booktok is a blessing because it brings more people to reading - but it also has an influence on the book publishing market ...and I am not sure it is only positive.

8:00 men do something good, women say that guy is written by a woman. don't they realize how insanely sexist that is. imagine a women doing something good and i would say "this women was written by a man". sexism goes both ways, you can't just try to take good traits/actions for your gender. besides it being immature of course.

I am really interested in why a lot of women write the most douchiest, toxic individuals to be love interests in their stories. Or maybe it's just in smut? I've seen plenty of videos where the spicy scenes are the most borderline illegal stuff I've heard and no women would actually want that in real life. Is it a guilty pleasure thing? Maybe its just a vocal booktok minority

The LoTR comment... Oh yeah totally agree, not like Tolkien was a WW1 vet or anything. What would he know about writing about trauma.

I think another thing that needs to be discussed is the way tiktok's simplification of books down solely to their tropes and spice level has diminished the quality of books being published. Publishers only push the books they know will become part of the tiktok algorithm because they're like SJM or CoHo or emily henry, and its disappointing because this approach takes away from the unique stories that people might bring to the table but do not conform to the stock standard tiktok trope favourites and as such do not get published because of the fear of not being as sellable as those other books. I am a reader who constantly reads for entertainment, there's nothing wrong with that, however, the insane lack of variety in booktok book recs and the consequent lack of variety in new publishes is what's making me sad and annoyed at the influence of booktok. Its frustrating to walk into any bookstore and see that 99% of all new books have the exact same fucking plot with changed names. The writing is often incredibly bad/unedited/subpar and the story reads like bad fanfiction from the 2000s but it will sell a million copies because of tiktok and become a huge sensation amongst people who don't care about the writing or character development and just want to read smut disguised as a romance book. I'm no english major or professional literary critic by any means, but I love books. I love reading, and have done since I picked up my first book in kindergarten. As such, I have read a lot of different books over the course of my life so far, and it's such a joy to pick up a new book and immerse yourself into a new world with characters that feel real and that I can care for, to fall into a world that feels so wonderful, to escape from reality. But these days, I have to actively hunt down books that are not copy pasted from each other, i have to scour the bookstores and find niche recommendations just to find something new. That is the irritating part. Just because I don't want to read the same exact format of book a million times means that I have to go to extreme lengths to find something new and interesting. It's heartbreaking to think that the next generation of readers will be subjected to a plethora of books that are mere mirrors of each other with no soul/heart of its own. And I do not blame the authors for this, because unfortunately due to the demands of the publishing world, authors that want their work to succeed have to put forth book pitches that contain all the common favourite tropes or else they might never get published. They could be the greatest writers in the world and not be picked up for publishing unless they cater to the very specific booktok mass market. It's genuinely depressing. So yes, we need to go deeper about books on tiktok. Deeper than their fucking tropes or spice level. Because it impacts publishing in a very real way and it puts the very future of literature at jeopardy because how can we get any new stories, ideas, opinions and thoughts if we are force fed the same bullshit by the publishers all the time? And tiktok influences the publishers, so booktok has a responsibility to uphold the foundation of literature by ensuring that more diverse reccommendations are part of the algorithm and thus tell publishers that even unique, weird and different ideas can sell books and make them the money they so desperately covet.

I've long since stopped putting stock into this as even a gendered problem, as I've seen character after character decried as objectified for the male gaze that then turned out to be designed by a woman as a power fantasy. As for the storied descriptions, we can call it what it is, pornography. And that's never going to be realistic; it's always going to be exaggerated, bordering on grotesque and hyperreal. And that's not really anything that needs fixing unless it slips into stories it doesn't need to be in.

Great video. I've found that many people, when they strongly love or hate a piece of media, are unable to think critically about why they love or hate it, so when someone comes in with an opposing analysis, they think that person is wrong, stupid, trying to go against the grain for clicks, etc, because they don't even understand their own views. From what I've seen, I think the book community is a diverse in its discussion than in the TV/movie sphere, where many people seem to have the same dominating opinions and base these opinions off the opinions of others either in their circle or in some position of authority, and those with more "unpopular" opinions are too afraid to share these in case they get hate. I wish people would realize that learning how to think critically about media doesn't ruin the experience of consuming media, and that it's okay to challenge commonly accepted viewpoints, even when those viewpoints are your own. Reading or watching something with your brain turned on doesn't have to be some massively draining experience. There have been books where I know it's not some groundbreaking piece of literature, but I enjoyed the experience without having to "turn my brain off" and that was that. Then there have been books that are considered incredible forms of high literature that straight up suck. We have to be able to voice our criticisms AND our praises without fearing harassment so that we can actually converse intelligently about trends and topics when it comes to writing and consuming fiction.

In a sense, I couldn't give two fks for how bad the writing, how objectifies men and women are in fanfics and smut material. People want to go wild and be true to their desire in fanfiction and smut, both authors and readers. Sure, the writing can be more delicate and beautiful, but they do not really need to. Sometimes, it feels like going over porn scripts and then criticising movie industry for having bad dialogues. It is laughable because it is dumb and bad writing. Overanalysing? Now that is too much. Take it easy and chill out.

I was relatively chill with one of the descriptions until he started talking about missiles.

Traditional hero archetype exists to instruct men on how to conduct themselves appropriately. They must step up and be a champion for her because that is what women want. They need to have the courage to act and confront danger, the courtesy to treat her with attentive consideration, and the emotional maturity to be the bigger person and be able to act as her rock when she needs it. Women want men who are confident, capable and courageous, someone who she can fall back upon when her own abilities are insufficient. Women henpeck men more than enough so that most men don't bother arguing with their woman or trying to micromanage her. It's far too much hassle and generally won't end well. You don't seem to realise just how much power women are able to wield in modern society, with the deck stacked overwhelmingly in their favour from both a social and legal perspective. You have quite a distorted view of what a lot of these stories involve. They are instruction manuals for young boys and you would like to take that away from them to focus on the girls instead. But it's about your target readership. Also, fanfic is always amateurish and cringe, it seems bizarre that you would treat this seriously. If you were to take aim at actual works of fiction that people may have heard of, this video might be worthwhile, but it sadly seems not. But fanfic is also trying to appeal to something fantastical - you don't read about an unremarkable person doing their perfectly ordinary daily routine, it's escapism. It's doing it in a stupid way, but the target is not altogether incorrect.

Mishima can write both good

i think people mistake confidence as mean 🥲 ( you don’t know people personal like this so it’s hard to actually tell who someone actually is )

I'm currently writing a fantasy story where the protagonist is a woman. I haven't mentioned her breasts even once!

It may just be a me thing but I feel like readers who read enough cannot really turn off their brain for a book. There is a reason people dislike books for bad writing or harmful messages, because the brain is reacting to the book as you read. Even when you read for entertainment you are always analyzing the work you are consuming.

I think its kind of ridiculous to expect people to put in a bunch of work into their fun hobby even if i read jane eyre am i gonna write an essay after to talk about the themes of the story and the nuance? (Gods im starting to hate that word) no am i going to watch the movie and fangirl most likely you can take fun books and analyze them i recently read the first book in the shopaholic series and i had to ignore the fact that i kept thinking about how the main character takes after her mother and learned her problem through her or has an actual problem and addiction how you can easily tell she's become depressed and is losing pleasure in even the addiction she has because of the hole she dug herself i did however watch the movie afterwards and complain about every single discrepancy in the story (they made her best friend marry her cousin im still mad) so fun turn off brain books or not both can either be read for pleasure (or dare i say fun) and analysis

Literally Haruki Murakami and John Green... Like... bro 💀🤧🖐️

I wrote a post WW1 story about a german aoilder that comes home and is traumatised from war. He has PTSD and interacts with his comrades and his wife. I, as a woman, wrote this story mostly from the manly perspective. And I think, I did it good. I read tips from man and I asked my bf. So i think its possible but not to hit it acurratly 100%