@@pizzadogma So true, the amount of times a horror bro has recommended an "amazing horror" movie/book only for it to just be the most violent (both sexually and regular), against feminine people specifically, thing I've ever seen, is too many to count. Like I think gore has its place if used correctly. I think Talk to Me is a good example. Hell, when it's super campy I think it can be fun. But shock for shock value is not what makes great horror.
@@FortuitousOwlI'm definitely a big horror fan, but I 100% agree that it is terribly flawed in the sense of female suffering exploitation and sadism/senseless gore. I Believe horror as a genre should have more to it - not a worshipping of violence but a subtle commentary on it. Pretty sad that many, if not most horror media, fall into the issues you mentioned.
As a black dude that fucking inhales romance stories, When i think of dark romance, i think of like Vampries, Ghosts, werewolves. Instead, we get racism. That's crazy
I'm not sure what it is about romance books, but for some reason they're often very toxic. Straight ones often have downright abusive tropes, gay men are often looked at through a straight lense and if they have people of colour it's either very specifically written that way or the person is some side character. Same with things like handicaps? Unless it's very specifically about the handicap it's never a thing (I can remember 1 side character in a wheelchair and I do because I was so surprised). I personally find it very frustrating because in some cases you're literally reading the same book by a different author. You'd get so many incredibly interesting stories if people would diversify. I'm very happy that they're starting to sell way more queer books and books that are written by different people *here (even though the majority is still US, which is a whole different topic)
Yeah, I can relate to this. If someone wants the 'enemies to lovers' or 'love redeems the villains' thing lets keep the circumstances fictional rather than supporting real world evils.
Oh no... that just gave me a horrific thought of one of these weird writers making a romance "redeeming" a Jigsaw-esque character. Sadly, it probably already exists.
Not going to lie, I find that the romance genre has fueled my creativity as a horror writer in a way that no other genre does. There isn't a genre more conducive to good horror than romance.
This! And all the more so because depending on their environment, interracial couples can still face obstacles and dumb cliches in real life, and would definitely benefit from more depictions in media that are free of bullsh*t power dynamics and underlining exoticism...
I hate the fact that Tanner’s father is abusive because it feels like the author is trying to say it’s not Tanner’s fault that he’s racist. Anyone who has racist relatives will tell you that them being racist doesn’t necessarily mean that they treat their family badly. Some racist relatives can be one of the sweetest people you’ve ever met until you’re not one of their own.
@@barbararab6390 I know that’s the point I’m trying to make. Most racists are not cartoonish evil people so the author making them so diminishes the problem to it being a personal defect rather than a generational and systemic problem.
Actually that was my experience as well. Rented an apartment from a former Hitler Jung (yup! And I'm of Jewish decent too; if you want to know why: because I needed a place to stay and I had very limited options). He was 1) still indoctrinated but 2) very loving and considerate of his family and his circle. He somehow really liked me. And I will admit, when I was faced with a horrible bully at work, and my liberal colleagues did not stand up against the bully (who was just..I have stories for another time), the Nazi actually offered support-financial and emotional. Still...he believed in Nazi propaganda. Yeah, racist people can be sweet and they can sometimes do the right thing, but still racists at the end of the day. Still refusing to accept their daughters sexual orientation at the end of the day. Still ranting about immigrants at the end of the day. I never knew if I was safe in his place, or if he'd turn on me. Bonus: his wife was an immigrant and a person of color; they met in Germany as kids. She rolled her eyes every time he bashed immigrants. He loved her dearly. He still didn't stop his xenophobic rants. :(
@@barbararab6390honestly even if you’re a different race, they will often overlook it and consider you “one of the good ones.” Or basically dark white. Racist people often will have family of other races and just think of them as the exception.
The type of Brits to say that would also defend imperialism and colonialism because 'At least they got trains and learned English' like they were doing the global majority a favour
For real, it's been only a few years since anti-immigration talking points convinced half our idiot country to leave the EU. If that's not numerical proof of our continued lack of welcomingness, I don't know what is.
Fr like I read this book abt a Jewish man and a nazi woman and at one point she basically said that Jewish ppl only deserve to live bc they are hot. And no I don’t remember the name of the book bc at that point I threw it away
@@Sasu123456789x1soooo true. Always in "dark romance", the big bad tough love interest who kills everyone and everything with no hesitation ONLY provides mercy to the mc because she's hot. It's so common
My mother was the daughter of a Nazi man and a Mexican immigrant woman. It was not a warm and fuzzy story of inspiration and redemption. It was a childhood of abuse and hate for my mother that ended in a messy divorce. My poor mom has so much generational trauma and internalized racism packed into her psyche. She looks like her mom - she is clearly Mexican but she "identifies" as white and supports Trump. It's very painful to see and if your joy comes from fetishizing the very real generational trauma that people like my mother have gone through I will yuck your yum all I want, thank you.
I'm sorry you had to deal with that growing up :( ppl need to realize that's the actual reality of those relationships, not the happily ever after they keep pushing
that is very terrible, thank you for putting in the time to write this comment. i think most people like me just think fetishizing this type of stuff is terrible because "this would never happen, it's offensive to even think these things are just the trials and tribulations of being in love" but it in fact does happen in real life and to that exact degree. it is something truly traumatic and really it's really telling of what the author thinks whenever they interact with systemic opression. they think not wanting to be murdered because of your race is just being "sexily feisty"
I'm just sooooo over the "racist white man learns women of color can actually be more than just sex objects" trope in romance. It's actually incredibly disturbing how common it is and how often NEW stories are being written about it 😫😡
“it takes an alpha male to handle a latina” / “can a country boy and a goth girl be in a relationship?” but turned up to 11…..purple hearts is shaking in its boots
It’s amazing how some authors think just because they classify their books as “dark romance” they’ll get a free pass to write the most controversial shenanigans without facing criticism for it
i see similarities to this with the antics of authors in the extreme horror genre too. it's an easy excuse. even if the crap you write was actually applicable to the genre, that doesn't mean you're exempt from criticism
@@withcindyI feel like if you were a person who really embodied the love of an extreme genre, you would revel in criticisms like this or disregard it and not argue with it tepidly on Twitter. If you were really just occupied with a controversial art, you would go boldly forth and own it as a niche content rather than defend it as valid mainstream content.
@@sparingharbor2600 Who is canceling anyone? What do you think criticism is? Take a bath. Listen to some soothing music. No one is out to get you or your genre. If you like this book, good for you. The rest of us will be disturbed your "kink" is racism no matter what you say. I wish you luck. It's rough out there.
i just can’t wrap my head around the fact that a GROWN adult woman sat down, thought of this plot, started writing a draft, and thought to herself “hmmm yes this is it i will put this out to the world.”
@@withcindy when you first started talking about the book, I thought about this ua-cam.com/video/SjcqpUwpP1U/v-deo.htmlsi=Uyso3-v4WAo7D1oq as if the author took it as a prompt and tried to make a story out of it....until you started reading passages 😵💫
18:47 "My uncle is Muslim" has the same vibes of "I'm not homophobic, I have a gay friend." This person really need to learn about the history of the British Empire.
Immediately where my brain went as well. If they do indeed have a Muslim uncle, I hope the poor man isn't constantly asked to legitimate their bad takes, and still has time remaining in his day.
A lot of romance books fetishize abuse and unequal power dynamics. I have nothing against the enemies to lovers trope, but certain authors use it as a framing device for serious societal issues that aren’t at all sexy for marginalized people (i.e. racism, misogyny, homophobia, etc.).
Also, enemies-to-lovers isn’t “lead that’s part of a marginalized group hating and then falling in love with the lead who is bigoted and fundamentally against marginalized groups getting basic human rights,” and I need yt ppl to stop acting like that’s the only way they can understand enemies-to-lovers.
@@cristenkray5192 Shout out to “This is How You Lose the Time War.” Enemies-to-Lovers between one person from the Singularity and another from an organic hive mind. Also they’re both women.
That book that has a nazi and a jewish prisoner falling in love..... And the sign of them finding a middle ground..... Is for them to convert to christianity, completely ignoring that the nazis were already christians, and that the Jewish woman has to actually convert as though her "hate" was tied to judaism, and not the discrimination she faced. Like..... I just don't even have the words
Exactly. Pretty sure there's a lot of misinformation floating around, especially in Christian spaces, that the Nazis were atheist. But they were unabashedly Christian. The Nazis talked A LOT about Christianity, and the crusades being a big motivator for them in their speeches and propaganda. It was NOT AT ALL subtle. I think a lot of teachers, public and private, are just uncomfortable teaching that part of history because it makes their religion look terrible. Not to mention risking the ire of conservative parents if a child brings it up at home. But it NEEDS to be taught. Otherwise, you get idiots like many modern racists and antisemites who insist it's not *themselves* who are the nazis, but the [gay/trans/nonreligious/people of other religions/etc] who are the "REAL" Nazis because, "the Nazis were obviously atheist because no Christian would ever be the bad guys. Christianity is the source of ALL morality!" "So it must be those icky liberal folks who "go against god" who are the real Nazis!" 🙄 Idk where that awful rumor started, but it is deeply entrenched in many Christian spaces. Despite the fact it takes 5 seconds to google! 😡
RIGHT. my jaw dropped and it makes me terrified of how this author wrote their jewish characters in this book. she has to cut ties with her religion and culture that is already under threat of extinction by the hate group her man was PART OFFFF??? like the forceful conversion of jewish people was part of the genocide! its insane!!
It's also super gross considering the fact that if you look at the history of Jewish persecution, the root cause for that persecution in the first place was because they didn't convert.
it's also the fact that she was just able to spit out all racial slurs possible in that book just being under the guise of speaking through a white supremacist...
Once I saw a TikTok with an author saying that she wasn't racist, the characters were. And she shouldn't be held accountable for what her characters said.
@@fuunosenshi dang that author earned the gold medal for the mental gymnastics of trying to defend herself. I'm betting $100 that she's secretly racist.
@@fuunosenshiit's completely possible to write racist characters without being racist yourself. It comes down more to how that behavior is portrayed, imo.
@@missallisnow you are still accountable for how you portray those topics, though. Saying "my MMC is racist, not me" is pretty much trying to avoid blame.
This is literally how I feel when I read romance webtoon/manwha. Male love interests who have done some horrid shit (and I MEAN HORRID SHIT) still get forgiven and seen as "understandable because of their past", while female "villain" characters whose only crime is to be mean and rude get the worst punishment. Also, when webtoons do add people of color, they are always seen as barbarians or exotic races. Literally, they have no other personality but being "rough, animal-like, and thinking about killing/fighting all the time." Cindy, if you ever read some romance webtoons, I guarantee you will be seething (although I love to see your reaction LMAO).
Which is why it pisses me the fuck off when Webtoon constantly promotes those Reincarnation romance manhwas which are often the biggest offenders of these tropes. People complain a lot about isekai anime but there's the same sense of staleness and reliance on gimmicks with those stories, but bc it's more character focused than action focused, the main problems manifest in the character writing itself. That and there's an awful lot of islamophobia and xenophobia towards middle eastern people in a lot of these manhwas, though moreso with the action ones
If you want to know something sad, this attitude towards the female character has been around since humans began living in cities, in Mesopotamia 5500-1800BC. While researching for a novel, I read a book on common Sumerian proverbs and adages, one that stuck with me was: “a rebellious man will be allowed reconciliation, a rebellious women will be dragged through the mud” 🥲
Tessa Gerritsen is a biracial author of Asian and Caucasian decent. She trained as an MD before she started writing romance and crime fiction. I participated in a meeting where she was asked why the characters in her books were white women. Why didn't she write from the perspective of an Asian woman? Her answer was heartbreaking. Her agent or publisher ( I don't remember which one) told her the audience would not be interested in an Asian main character. She said that after writing for so many years from the perspective of white women, she was uncomfortable writing an Asian main character. And that is the problem that Cindy was referring to. The white domination and whitewashing of a lot of literature. The people who complain that white authors don't stand a chance of getting published right now don't know what they're talking about. I'm an aspiring author, and I can tell you. The white authors are just fine. Male authors are just fine.
Let me guess. She’s got a asian mom and white dad? And let me guess, she married a whites guy? Asian women are so predictable. Just say you want your legacy to be white because you are self serving. Social media is littered with Olivia Munns and her mother.
This is exactly why I don't publish my own ongoing works, cause I don't do things from a completely "white" perspective, as I do tons of research to be as accurate as possible and have a variety of ethnicities
@tamarleahh.2150 I don't know exactly what you're trying to say. But if you're saying that the race of the character won't matter if the story is good I'll tell you one story: I wrote a story about a doctor in Toronto. I lived in the city at the time and worked next to the hospital. The city is 60% immigrants and a lot of them are not white. Patients of the hospital are of all colors, all hours of the day. More then half of the medical staff was not white. So I was asked to REMOVE the non white characters with the question: why can't they be white. Mind you, the diverse races were an important part of the story (it was a speculative science mystery where a disease was spreading accross all races and social classes, and therefore the issue was not genetic nor environmental) plus it was accurate. So no, people don't just care about the quality of the work.
I don't usually comment, but I felt the necessity to do it haha. As a Mexican woman, I can not forgive the romanticization of the cartels, we literally live in a constant war (people in Mexico die in the same amount as people from countries at war). I read some parts of the book, and it was also horrible to see the disinformation of the way the narcos work, it is not like the mafias people see on TV or in other countries, in Mexico they do not have morals, families or harmony, there is only hate, blood and horror. Using "Adelita" as a victim of her family erases the reality of her and her family being the villains, it is their fault that our country is literally in pieces. Also, I find it disrespectful to use the name that we use to refer to the women who fought in the revolution against the corrupt government and society, and this "Adelita" being named like that is a mockery against our culture. We have enough from our own culture praising the narcos, we do not need the foreign to see it as a kink or something cool. The war between groups is real, but Adelita saying that she can not even touch the street without something happening to her is a lie, the common women from Mexico are the ones who can not touch the street without the risk of being a victim of feminicidio, trafficking or even turning them into killers (sicarias). Not the fully protected by the police, government, and cartel people woman. I just felt so angry reading that one of the main characters is part of the villains in real life, but she is treated as a victim. Idk, it is so hard to live in this narco-state that kills our society day by day, and people from outside think it can be used as a matter of fiction without the proper information. Sorry for the intensity, but I live in a country where you could be eating in a restaurant and be part of the killing in plain sight of the day of a person, and each member of those groups is guilty, even the "pretty Adelita" that lives in the expenses of the lives of Mexican people.
Amén! Hearing anyone correlate a frigging cartel member with oppressed groups makes me feel like I am trapped in a stupid(er) alternate reality from which I really want to escape 🤮
This reality is why people romanticizing the mafia and the cartel makes me want to scream. Can't these people just make up fictional organizations to giggle at, instead of real horrifiying institutions?
As a latina, I do want to take a moment to talk about the stereotype of the drug cartel heir latinamerican character. It's always us, always the narcos, always the heir to the drug empire. Also, nothing irritates me more than the names they give those characters... It's always Juan, or if it's a woman, then it's ALWAYS with the "ita" at the end. Those are nicknames. You'll never find a Juanita or, in this case, Adelita in Latin America that is actually called that. The name should be Adela. And finally, they always throw around Spanish words that are not relevant, as if we're stupid and can't speak English without constantly switching back and forth. But yeah, you can't expect much from a white yankee to write good representation.
i tried not to laugh while reading "Adelita Quintana" in the video because it was truly the most stereotypical fictional name someone can think of. like i am pretty sure the author is not friends with any mexicans/latin americans lol
I'll never get why authors don't just browse Facebook pages for communities in the country of origin their character is supposed to be. I had someone message me that they were surprised I got names right when I got nothing about geographical locations right but when I was writing about a Cuban character in Florida, it was really easy just to look at communities for Cuban hobbies and locations and pluck out realistic names. was a lot harder for me to find out that apparently Floridians don't do basements.
Haven’t read any of the books that sparked this video, but the fact that the author calls the characters a KKK “prince” and cartel “princess” like a wattpad gang romance written by a middle schooler tells me everything I need to know about whether or not the author handled the topic with nuance.
@@withcindyRight? The vibe I get off so many “dark” romances like this is more tween edgelord fanfiction rather than actually pushing societal taboos in meaningful ways. They wanna feel like big kids who read serious books for grownups without committing to the real thought and effort to give heavy topics the weight they need because that would cut into smut time.
@@aconstantstateofbladerunne5251 yesss exactly. You can’t just put “dark” or “extreme” in your genre tag, write whatever you want, and expect mainstream approval. That’s just lazy in every direction.
@@VeronicaWarlock OMG yes! I like writing dark topics, but it doesn't mean I'm immune from criticism. I hate how other dark authors act like they're invincible because they label themselves as "Dark/extreme". They just end up sounding like conservatives by saying "well if ur offended by it, thats on u." like df?
1:20 reminds me of that one tiktok by a girl who was of mixed race and she said something along the lines of "i would love to experience an enemies to lovers arc in my life but it would probably consist of the guy being heavily racist" 💀
someone saying “british people are the most welcoming people” with their WHOLE chest is fucking insane i had to pause the video just to stare into the distance
Straight authors be scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to search for a new spin on forbidden love, meanwhile they’ll be oppose any same-gender relationships
@@asterismos5451 lowkey scouring these comments for book recommendations from the people sharing 'antidote' books- and thank you! I'm not usually enthusiastic about historical romance, but from the blurb alone this book sounds pretty great.
I think its also interesting how in nearly all these examples, it's the man who is racist and needs help from the woman to unlearn his beliefs, sorta like a really bad "I can fix him" trope
I’m adopted from South Korea by yte parents and the amount of times they just don’t think about things because they don’t have to is sad. My sister and mom were teachers and I had to tell them “hey, don’t make the Asian kid speak ‘their language’ in front of the class like they’re a fucking side show,” and they got angry at me lmao. Or they’ll say “you’re only saying this because you like to argue” whenever I disagree about something racist they do. The worst thing about it is that I know they use me as a crutch to justify the ignorant shit they say
As a Mexican woman, there’s nothing worse than experiencing the same old stereotypes over and over again. I love being nothing more than an exotic spicy latine who sells drugs. I just genuinely want to know why someone read that description and went mmmm racism, let me read it. Since when is racism a kink? It’s truly baffling. Once again, thank you for your emotional labor.
I knew romance had a major role diversity problem, as this isn’t the first racist book to come under fire. But the fact that concepts in this vein are so ubiquitous that we had two controversies within a month, this and a book deal announcement for a book about a white woman obsessing over a Black nanny, is what really blew my mind. Not to mention Goodreads coming and reminding us how white mainstream romance is, with a book featuring a Black lead by a white author getting nominated as opposed to some of the truly stunning books that came out from Black authors this year.
I was just thinking of that book too. I was scrolling thru the comments and quote retweets on it and every single person that praised her for the book was white, and loads of black (and some nonblack) people were pointing out how racist the premise was. Like, did that not raise any red flags for her? She said she was trying to tell a story about prejudice and racism or whatever but the only people who approved of it were white people. Like... dude.
I had no idea about the Goodreads Award Nominee! Which book was it? I tried to figure it out by reading the synopses, but I can't tell which book has a Black character.
@@monster-enthusiast not to mention the people who dared speak up (mostly BIPOC) getting attacked for “bullying” the author (Kate wasn’t bullied but the critics absolutely were). I found a vile article written in response to this situation where the piece’s writer punches down on one critic in particular, an Asian aroace author who has a debut coming out next year. I swear, do these people think before they speak or type? How do you put so much vitriol into the world and have the audacity to accuse *others* of being bullies in response?
The part that gets me is that so many of these books’ issues could be fixed by making one change: have the character leave the hate group before meeting the love interest. You can still have development on the character’s end as they’re dealing with unlearning the hate that they have been living with, losing family and/or friends, etc. But them making the choice to step away is a decision on their part and not pushed by someone that they had been oppressing.
Earth and High Heaven kind of does this! I say "kind of" bc Erica (a white Anglo) is never actively racist or antisemitic, she just has a racist dad and, despite being progressive herself, makes herself unlearn a lot of uncomfortable things she's internalized. Marc (her Jewish love interest) gets to talk openly about the systemic hatred he's faced living and working in Canada, and while he's showing Erica how bad it gets for him, you never get the impression that she's just now learning that Jews are people. It's not a perfect book, but for something published in 1944 that still addresses North American antisemitism, it's phenomenal.
One of my fave responses to the “freedom of speech” argument in situations like this is actually a tweet from Justin McElroy: “the first amendment protects you from the government, it does not protect you from the Justin”. Being pretty hard anti-censorship myself it’s wonderful reminder that just as you say they’re not banned from writing it, we’re not banned from putting them on blast for it.
I'm sorry but good cooch will never make an oppressor suddenly wake up and decide, "oh wow, I should probably stop oppressing people all the time. She's changed me with her magic snatch." Like, the stories that prop up this sentiment need to be tossed in the garbage because they are not realistic.
Especially since throughout history, white men engaged in sexual relationships with oppressed people while continuing to use their oppression as leverage against them. Like so many slave owners forced women to have sex with them and they didn't become not-racist when they started doing that...
LMAOOOO ur so right. Besides, people who right those sorts of plots are so out of touch they don’t even realize that a majority of these super racist yt dudes ALREADY fetishize poc women’s/Afab’s bodies.
The thing that is crazy is that there are so many of these white supremacist books, but it takes fighting tooth and nail to be a person of color and get published. Then get somebody to believe in your book enough to push for your book to be advertised or on best seller lists.
@@withcindyhey cindy another bool that does the concept of someone unlearning their racism after falling in love with a woman of colour is the Lies we Tell Ourselves by Robin Talley. It is also a sapphic romance, abd she explores homophobia as well. But its realky good, sje does her research really well and it isnt romanticised. If you read it it would be a good book to bring attention to on your channel as an example of how to do these kind of books correctly.
Enemies to lovers trope can work only if there was a desire to understand and help the other party and not the hate that turns to passionate desire crap 🤢
Recently I've been noticing a TON of covert nazi apologism in entertainment -- not just books but also movies about "not so bad" hitler youth members, redeemed wehrmacht soldiers, etc. I think it's dangerous and suspicious and I'm glad you're pointing this out because someone needs to. Also, I think something about the enemies-to-lovers obsession is causing authors to just mash together the most hostile groups of people they can think of and trying to redeem them through romance. I think it doesn't really work a lot but booktok-popular books need to be reduced to snappy summaries and enemies-to-lovers is a surefire way to jump on a trend. As someone who never really read an enemies-to-lovers work I enjoyed, I am excited for this trend to die lol
The “not so bad hitler youth members” thing drives me crazy because, while there were some who were misled or forced, the focus is always on redeeming someone who, in some cases, might be victims themselves, when there’s a damned good story that can be had in showing that the regime above them is so evil to its core that it’s not above abusing their own soldiers, threatening to kill the families of their own soldiers, threatening to torture then too if they don’t do XYZ. That sort of story could highlight how deep the evil runs in the very core of those in power. There were Black overseers who would whip other slaves, but no one in their right minds would blame that overseer when we know the penalty could have been exceedingly harsh. We wouldn’t treat a story about a person in that situation as a romantic redemption of that person-it wouldn’t be a romance at all, and any redemption for any harm that that person was forced to cause would come second to somehow getting that person the hell away from the institution above them that has so much power that they can strip free will from people who wouldn’t freely and openly participate. But being able to write like this takes an exceptionally high level of skill and understanding, something I admit I don’t have (which is why I won’t even try), and something like the authors discussed in this video definitely don’t have. And it really won’t work to have it be an enemies-to-lovers story.
Never underestimate how skilled, patient and even sometimes subtle the fascist propaganda machine is and how it starts to permeate every corner of society, from political commentary channels to romance novels.
@@haggisaIs it possible that authors or their agents are paying BookTokers to promote their stories and not telling anyone? HBO Max already got caught hiring people to attack critics on Twitter and we know some authors have faked their numbers to become New York Times bestsellers. I wouldn't be shocked if money is exchanging hands in this case too. 🤔
@@withcindy I don’t think that people don’t notice, but that a lot of people see a book in the romance section with the KKK and NOPE the fuck away. Ironically, videos dedicated to discussing one or two books is a lot of free press for books like this, and will result in increased sales and library rentals (which still makes the author money), which rewards the author. Not all the people who buy/borrow will be supporters of the concept, but it doesn’t matter if some is a supporter or if they’re reading to see if it really is that bad-it’s still money to the author. When it comes to shit like Colleen Hoover, she made her own self a household name and openly talking about her will not do much, but people like…what’s the name of the author in this video again? It just serves to make her name more known.
@@NoelleTakestheSky i kind of agree, not that i see it as necessarily bad to talk about these authors when you measure the importance of bringing light to this subject and the free publicity thing, but when it comes to far more known people in the industry it hardly matters, but when you are introducing a mostly unknown author into the scene it puts things into perspective. It's like the reaction youtubers rule of only responding to channels bigger than themselves and never smaller ones, because than you're just giving them a free stage. Also, tiktok groups and niche communities make for such a ludicrous percentage of people that although they serve for publicity and ads, your average run of the mill local will probably not care to read books with such tabu and inflammatory topic on their free time just because it was on the popular online section of the bookstore. Idk, in the stage of notoriety, the most Cindy is doing is responding to the echo of the online chamber that is booktok, and i don't mean this in a bad way, i just think those types of authors will hit their desired public with or without influencers and youtubers. They always have, and always will, so i think "platforming" or showcasing them is a worth cost to displaying very valid criticisms over their work and antics.
When you really think about it it's insane how many books, movies and even tv shows pull the 'You can just fuck away bigotry' trope and it's always made by people who know how bad discrimination can be in theory, but still view decades of constant discrimination and oppression as nothing more than something you can maturely agree to disagree on and expect to be hailed as if they just brought about world peace with their Wattpad romance
The fact that this video came out right when the Goodreads choice awards nominees came out, and the romance category has one author of color, really drives your point home.
@@withcindythe new “Romantasy” category wasn’t much better with three authors of color, and considering one of the white authors had THREE books on the list, there was definitely room for more diversity.
Not exactly on the subject, but aren’t Goodreads Choice Awards reliably unreliable when it comes to choosing good novels? Haven’t both Sarah J. Mass. and the MAGA queen and writer of abusive “romances” Jamie McGuire won some of them?
@@haggisait’s not about the books being good but lacking diversity, both in race but also sexuality. Goodreads has been called out year after year for this but they still choose straight, white authors to uplift and it’s bullshit.
my question is why do these primarily white (or all) authors think that this is their story to tell? They’re not the victims of these hate groups so what right to they have to redeem and romanticize these men? As a latine it makes me so angry that this British author can use a Mexican character to fulfill this weird forbidden romance when she has 0 idea what it’s like to actually be a victim of racial discrimination
I said the same shit like it’s the arrogance for me and the delusion that they think they are educated enough in social and historical matters with us POC and our suffering to think they can write this it’s giving trauma porn.
Exactly! Not to mention all the reviews praising the book. A lot of them seemed to be pale colored. Which just drives it more for me, like you don’t see it an issue because you aren’t being affected. To you it’s just a spicy novel but to others it’s a nightmare!
Yeah...this is maybe why serious "enemies to lovers" should stay in fantasy! Because it's one thing if your love interest is a wizard who hates elves, or whatever. But it hits differently (that is: badly!) if he's a member of a real life hate group that has murdered actual humans.
Naw fr. I think games like Dragon Age handled it pretty well. In DA2 you can be a mage who romances this dude who hates magic (but y'know he has a complicated past) and in DAI your character as a mage can romance a Templar (people who actively fight against magic) cause he has character growth and overcoming what he's been taught as a Templar. But trying to write something like this? Omg. I can't believe they actually did it. It would have been so easy to throw it into fantasy with two warring kingdoms. Like wut. 😮
yeah, i second this I loved Six of Crows but like... please stay away from the actual nazis with romance? please? I'm from germany and in serious pain rn
Holy shit i am so shocked about the concentration camp romance. I cant believe someone wrote this. And then published this. And people read it and nominated it? WTF? And that there are so many books in the german-soldier-genre? There IS a german-soldier-genre?? Coming from germany, this is unbelievable. I cant
same here, I'm also from Germany and this makes me double down on my opinion every country should have history classes like Germany. I have my problems with it but at least i don't think the concentration camp romance would have gotten published over here...
@@mer_acle8101I’m American, my grandmother was born in West Germany to Transylvanian war refugees; I was the only one in most of my high school classes that took German. I once had to explain to my duel-credit history of Western Civilization class why “the work will set you free” was a bad slogan to put on a T-shirt. One time in college I had to explain what the night of broken glass was. No wonder so many people deny the Holocaust, nobody teaches about it!
@@staralchemist129 yeah that's so insane I had the holocaust taught in History I think three separate times, plus visiting a concentration camp, plus like ten different museum excursions, bc Germany takes it so seriously, and then there's America being like what do you mean History lessons, having people with an education ask Germans whether they met H!tler in person won't make anyone look uninformed XD
What really got me kind of livid about this book isn't even its horrible premise, but rather the fact that an actual publisher green-lighted it 😵 The industry is truly in shambles, it seems Thank you for an informative video, Cindy! I really appreciate you starting this important discussion
I've also noticed how a basically any love triangle ends with the girl choosing the white boy over the brown boy (very important that he is only brown, not a darker black, it seems), like in To All The Boys or Twilight or The Kissing Booth (and some random unpopular, also kind of bad fantasy trilogy i read as a kid, where she chooses the traumatized ice prince over the southern fire boy), and I'm sure there are MANY more examples.
What was the ice prince books name? Not because im going to read it but I also distinctly remember reading or watching a cartoon with something like that. Or was it on Wattpad I don’t remember…
@@ophelie2620 ummm like arcus or argus or something like that. The fire boy was called Kay or something along the lines. And i totally forgot her name, because she was severely lacking a personality i think
@@paularoth4915 now I realized I didn’t read it at all. It was a children’s anime about a witch crushing over an evil blonde boy I guess and there was twins one of them falling for her. Now thinking about this, it actually sounds a lot like Ouran High School Host Club and a zutara fanfic I might read on Wattpad.
This conversation reminds me so much of the “why are there so many confederate vampires” convo / vid & it’s discussion regarding southern lost cause propaganda. It’s not exactly the same, but it stems from a similar problem At this point I can’t help but insist that Dan Olson’s Fifty Shades trilogy videos are mandatory viewing. Truly a must watch and it really helped me crystalize my feelings on this sort of stuff. It’s such a good entry point for understanding how even taboo subjects can be handled ethically. His comparison between 50 shades vs. lady killer in a bind is excellent. Ymmv on lady killer, but at the very least intends for you to think critically about it’s content. Imo I think framing is always more important than the content itself. As a poc I tend to be pretty disgusted with these kinds of racist/poc or liberal/confederate romances not on principe but because they’re so reductive, & it’s clear their energy is placed way more into redeeming the racist than anything else. The framing is escapist, it’s “love conquers all”. It’s not a story, it’s selling you something. it’s selling an escapist easy solution to systemic complex problems. The framing is “meeting in the middle” & “compromise” & I reject the idea of meeting on a middle ground between “I just want to survive” & “I wish people like you didn’t exist”. On a subjective level, I just have a hard buy-in for the love interests of color, they just don’t feel like real people because they so happily endure whatever is thrown at them in the name of “opposites attract” or “enemies to lovers”.
this is why i have a problem with the less extreme examples of these books, like the contemporary romances between a liberal and conservative where they learn more about each other, "understand" each other better, and meet in the middle. to promote a centrist message is to still promote white supremacy, homophobia, etc because it tolerates (and even forgives) those harmful views without actually challenging them. their version of a happily ever after is to avoid doing the hard work of dismantling these structural problems and instead saying "agree to disagree! we still love each other!"
@@withcindy true! I’m not saying the couple has to solve racism but these kids of stories fall into two camps that I think are fall flat in different ways. 1) they make no changes, agree to “compromise”, & go agree to disagree while the unspoken rule is that. What’s really going on is that the liberal capitulates to the conservative while the conservative makes no changes (i.e. Purple Hearts). Or 2) the liberal has to do all this unbalanced labour just to get the conservative to acknowledge their humanity! Like. That just doesn’t feel real to me. I’m not saying cut everyone out of your life, conversation can be incredibly helpful to actually change ppl’s perspective, but all that work for a boyfriend????? No thank you lol
i think a big contributor to this phenomenon is that in fantasy, or even historical fiction sometimes, it’s really easy to divide people with little to no nuance. you have the “purebloods” and the “muggles”, you have rivaling kingdoms, you have differences in social class that make your parents disapprove. and so it’s really easy to give characters a relatively harmless reason to both hate each other, have it forbidden to be together, and then to learn to overcome and bring the two worlds together. which is usually the pattern of enemies to lovers. however, when you attempt to bring this concept to the modern world, where interpersonal relationships are much more nuanced, the only instances of “forbidden” love are usually those in which one party is literally just in a hate group of some kind. which as we can see, does not work nearly as well💀💀 a kdrama called “snowdrop” comes to mind, a romance between a south korean student and a north korean spy, which failed miserably, being accused of romanticizing this delicate historical event
@@withcindy If I may add some context, what's more insidious about Snowdrop is that the heroine, a naive liberal university student, hides a North Korean spy after mistaking him for an anti-government protester. From the 60s to the late 80s (the series is set in the late 80s btw), the South Korean government spy agencies NIS(National Intelligence Agency) and ANSP (Agency for National Security Planning) have framed numerous anti-government human rights activists as North Korean spies and kidnapped, jailed, tortured, even killed them. Sometimes they weren't even activists, just people working or studying abroad who got framed and kidnapped (the East Berlin Affair). So the implication that all dissentors were North Korean spies all along, and naive liberal college students were dumb enough to fall for them, is not just cringy but actively harmful and dangerous. It also didn't help that an ANSP agent character was described as an "honest, upright man" in the official website.
i'm anti-censorship and a huge fan of dark romance myself (i have a few kinks, what can you do) but you can't really overlook the implications of a white woman writing a story where uber racism is redeemed bc "love sees no color" this is a white woman downplaying the severity of racism and, intentionally or not, putting the weight of changing racist minds on the back of POC's ability to be desirable and pleasant (WOC on the case of her book)
as someone who lives in the south and straight up had the KKK targeting school children for recruitment with candy flyers as a child, it is definitely NOT sexy 💀 what is wrong with these authors
The more i see and hear about the shit like this happens and goes on within publishing the less stressed I get about my writing capabilities and the plots and characters I came up with honestly
Same here but you gotta remember the difference is since they are white and writing all these problematic books in a sense it gets harder for you to find your audience as they gobble up these other crappy books really as a writer myself these kind of books are problematic to many of us who want to have a decent plot within our work.
What’s crazy is how white authors can be allowed to write poc characters in racist settings like this, but god forbid an author of color can write a book with a poc protagonist. It’s insanse
Cindy, this is probably one of your best videos. Thank you so much for discussing this issue in the book and publishing industry. Personally, I think this trope is overdone and the "enemies to lovers" arc can really only work in fantasy imo, because when we use it in historical/contemporary genres, it always ends up being an oppressor being "saved" by someone in a marginalized group. That power imbalance is honestly gross and sounds like a horror movie to me :(
I love enemies to lovers as a trope and I think the biggest way people mess it up (often constantly with het romances) is that the enemies are rarely in equal footing. Rivals to lovers tends to pull that a lot better but people viewing enemies as a sort of dynamic where one despises and hurts the other while they just feel resentment and suffering instead of mutual retaliation is why it's got such a bad rep nowadays. It's like those bully x victim stories but just copy pasting that dynamic across all sorts of stories.
As a Colombian man who rarely reads romance at all, this shit doesn't surprise me at all. There are tons of romance where the oppressed has to do the work to "save" their oppressor. Colombian telenovelas are choke full of this shit (Mexican ones too) in our case the trope takes the form of a poor girl struggling to even survive "saving" the rich douche that would have hated her if she wasn't hot. Side note: I hate that my brain immediately started trying to draft something on that same vein while using your points for nuance. I can't write romance for shit 😂😂
I hate the entire genre of dark romance. At it's very best it romanticizes abuse and beyond toxic relationships. Most of it also seems pretty targeted at young women and as a former teen who read much of it, it definitely gave me a highly inaccurate and dangerous perspective on the types of guys I was attracted to or wanted to date. I literally had to experience abuse and assault personally before I realized where on earth I'd gotten the idea that abusive men were sexy. The latest addition to the genre teaching folks to sympathize with racists is not shocking at all to me. The whole genre is literally that. Simp for the jerk who hurts everyone around him! Sure people suffer abuse and brainwashing all the time and it's not their fault. However it's up to each individual to choose what kind of person they want to be. I will never again sympathize with abusers. The dark romance trend honestly makes me worry for all the women- especially teens- who get their hands on such trash. What message exactly are we sending here? Ugh puke I hate it so much.
It's also not just that these books are getting recognition from literary awards as well - Purple Hearts (liberal x conservative) was adapted into a multi-million Netflix production, something a lot of other, better-written books deserve so much more! I will say that the book version (which I read out of morbid curiosity) generally focuses more on the MC's drug addiction issues/her issues with health insurance and diabetes rather than their political leanings though, which I found interesting. Off topic, but TIL that the main dude in Purple Hearts the movie was supposed to be Charles Melton until he backed out - it would have been kinda crazy to have a dude with Asian roots in that movie??
_"your love interest will literally hate crime you"_ absolutely sent me 💀 but fr this is when i once again thank cindy for doing the things i cannot emotionally afford to do bc i'd much rather hear a fellow gaysian woman (w a matching shaggy mullet nonetheless 😌💅) explain these things w care and nuance than read through the triggering dumpster fire quotes that are floating around book-ish socmed rn. it's wild to me that there are so many yt romance readers who are happy to argue w their twt/redditor moments on behalf (or against) people of color yet not censor the murder scenes jfc 🤦🏻♀ appreciated this discussion a lot!! co-opting happy endings for cishet yt subtext is huge across pop culture and it felt cathartic to hear you talk abt how it's perpetuated in the romance world. if you ever have the energy/time, would LOVE to hear more about romance publishing tea bc how on earth have i not heard abt this courtney milan business before?! such a mess and it'd be awesome to hear a critical cindy commentary (ft. coochie jokes 😂) someday! if it's to your interest ofc tho, have fun while getting your content bag too! tysm for this video
Tysm!! Omg we r shaggy mullet twinsies?! And I actually didn't find out about the Courtney Milan situation until I looked up other examples of these questionable books, which led me to the RWA awarding those books, which then led me to look up the RWA's background... It is def a whole story, and their diversity problem is unfortunately a reflection of how white the genre is. They closed in 2019 due to all the issues within their group
@@withcindy your hair is impeccably bleached better so ngl my fried waves can only dream to reach your levels of hair slay someday... 😔💅 but super glad you're loving the new style!! :(( sucks to hear that the big romance writers' association is more similar to a suburban-soccer-mom mean girls group than a welcoming group for authors whether they're huge bookstore staples or upcoming indies. i only knew abt the RWA for their awards since i thought it was really cool that romance had its own version of the Hugo Award/ _insert book honors that are more micro than the Pulitzer but more macro than Goodreads since idk_ . aiya regardless it's clear there's a lot of messiness and i have all the more respect for BIPOC romance authors who're stuck in that hybrid-publishing limbo of working w big-box-companies and hustling their own online marketing. o7 hope you can inspire other readers to learn more abt how systemic prejudice affects the industries that fuel our book-ish sad girl escapes!
@@withcindy Right?? Lord 😩 Anyways I've got some thoughts:tm: that kinda only just occurred to me now? What's interesting is that I kind of see the same thought processes with horror games that people have with Dark romance. If conversations arise because of triggering stuff in horror games, people will inevitably be like -- "It's horror, it's supposed to be gross/horrifying/whatever synonym." I saw this especially with that Rachel Foster horror game some years back. My thoughts is basically that if you write triggering or controversial stuff, you better be ready for the conversations that are gonna arise. It being "Fiction" does not protect it from being scrutinized. ESPECIALLY when many books contain triggering stuff that many marginalized groups and/or those that have trauma have dealt with in real life. And if you've never dealt with the kinds of stuff depicted, be inevitably ready when someone tells you that you're wrong.
WHY WOULD YOU HAVE THE JEWISH WOMAN IN A CONCENTRATION CAMP CONVERT TO CHRISTIANITY AS THE END OF HER POSITIVE CHARACTER ARC?????? WHO THOUGHT THAT WAS A GOOD IDEA?????? As a Jew, or actually just as a person with a brain, I am appalled.
Man I've been watching cindy for years now and I think it's pretty neat how she's grown from calling out the bs of booktube to calling out the bs of the industry itself, and that folks is what we call character growth edit: on a completely unrelated note have you tried slicking back your hair?? When I grew my hair out from a buzz I tried a bunch of different shit and it was so fun! ALSO not to thirst or anything but I bet itd look like... Kinda cool or whatever...
I feel like this type of enemies to lovers fantasy of love "fixing" racism, or really any kind of ism, exists because a lot of people are desperate for a simple solution to a very complex issue that will require a nuanced solution that comes from a lot of time intensive labor.
This isn’t shocking to me at all. This is how interracial romance novels work. The POC character can only feel validated, confident, wanted, or loved if their romantic interest is white. Just look at “All the boys I loved Before” or anything Mindy Kaling writes.
I was thinking about this the other day and completely came to the same conclusion as you about the market... The last data I found was this As of 2021, 50.45% of US authors are women and 49.55% of US authors are men. Black or African American authors have increased by 0.87% since 2010 and currently represent 5.93%. Asian authors have decreased by 0.72% since 2010 and currently represent 4.93%. This leaves most authors as white so I think a lot of writing is based on personal experience and considering things such as redlining and other intersectionalities in our real world it completely makes sense you'll see a lot of whitewashing/supremacy in the book realm. It'd take an insanely aware author to write past that. The only time I will complain is if you make a vampire blonde...don't ask me why I just don't find blonde vampires sexy. Also, keep in mind and I say this as someone who grew up in a largely conservative/white/polish midwestern town a lot of people who grow up around that have no idea how biased/racist they are or how they embrace microaggressions without realizing it. Overall, an important topic for people to discuss because minority voices on these book charts needs to happen, but the publishing industry needs to happen first. As for algo's I don't know how they'd fix that most developers I know who work for these companies are a-holes and there's not getting around that at the moment. I'm a woman in a predominantly male industry of ego's and salaries and oddly enough I do benefit from diversity inclusion just by being a woman in the industry even though other minorities won't get the same consideration. It just people don't want to hear this or admit it.
At first I was like 'you are absolutely correct, although those stats do match up with population percentages'. Then I remembered that I'm Canadian and the US has a _ton_ more black people, even percentage-wise. And then I did some Googling and realized I'd be wrong anyways because 17.4% of Canadians are from somewhere in Asia. So I learned a lot of things today.
YOU ABSOLUTELY KILLED THIS WITH THE ANALYSIS. It applies to real life, and not just book drama, like any mixed child knows the struggles of supposed inspirational love stories between the oppressed and the oppressor. It's part of the reason why I'm so over the Left Tube critique videos that say "Leftist UA-cam isn't interested in doing the hardcore analysis and debate that converts nazis and white supremacists into leftism. They're so elitist and useless." To be fair, this was a trope back in the day, people would joke that Contrapoints converted them from Naziism. The only issue is that those same converts are STILL RACIST/SEXIST. They'll still say slurs when a woman is someone they don't like or they'll misgender someone because it's the rhetorically persuasive strategy. They act like their 'redemption' is so important that all the movement should focus on that, on converting others like them, that it's the moral thing to do, that they kind of forget that they're asking marginalized people to essentially subject themselves to bigoted abuse on the off chance that a nazi will change his mind. And then those nazis are STILL racist/sexist because there's so much in your upbringing you have to unpack that most of them won't bother to do because they only changed by an easy to watch youtube video. For instance, you absolutely are so correct for bringing up how these narratives of "redemption" are actually disguised narratives of born again christians, of converting to christianity and becoming 'good,' and that's something that would never occur to them because that's a pillar of their understanding of the world. Which brings me to another point: Mixed children of white/POC. These stories make it seem like loving a POC would automatically make someone less racist or evil. Love is the opposite of hate, right? But the problem is that this IS NOT TRUE. 1/10 times a mixed child will have a good white parent who isn't ignorant to their struggles, but 9/10 times the white parent is WOEFULLY ill-equipped to address the racism they'll face, or actively perpetuating the racism themselves. Like, do y'all remember that trend on social media when people were like "I want mixed babies!!! 😍😍😍They're so beautiful!" That's starting in early on racial fetishization of THEIR OWN CHILDREN. Racism does not end with 'love,' and shows like 90 day fiance do nothing but highlight this exploitative relationship, even if the producers were trying to show otherwise.
cindy girl i need u to know i cant stand booktok so i completely removed myself from it but i could never abandon u girl ur my queen. also all correct takes as always
just to get on a nerdy little soap box, there are a lot of romances that claim to be, or that people refer to as, a Romeo and Juliet retelling. but they miss the First Line of the play. 'two houses both alike in dignity'. that means that the two lovers are of equal social and economic status. theres no Real reason the houses hate each other, they just do. so these romances where one lover is opressed and the other lover is from the opressor group are not Romeo and Juliet retellings. star-crossed lovers, sure maybe. but not romeo and juliet.
Love your new hair! 😍 The fact that stories like these get published and maybe even demanded these days really just expose the western publishing industry's deep rooted biases. Thank you for the nuanced pov!
there's a difference between books containing and discussing niche(?) kinks, taboos, etc. and doing them well or authors learning from their mistakes and authors pulling the "it's dark romance!" "this is censorship!" and "this is cancel culture!" cards when they're rightfully called out for glorifying and romanizing taboo/messed up things (like making the love interest a rapist or the heir to the kkk) but lots of "dark romance" readers who love reading from the latter don't care because they don't want to ask themselves why they enjoy reading about racists, rapists, and abusers who are extremely violent, toxic, abusive, and spewing bigotry to the woman they're supposedly in love with and literally everyone else as they don't want to acknowledge their ACTIVE role upholding the (white) patriarchy, white supremacy, misogyny, fascism, etc.
there isn't any other youtuber that has the ability to articulate the complex interplay between class, art, race, and our weird internet culture as poignantly as you do. these r my fave videos everrr keep doing what ur doing
No because another booktuber I love @ReadsWithRachel also covered this and it's so true!!! And I'm glad people are talking about this more excited to see your perspective!!! :)
A minor thing, but I also don't get is why stories this melodramatic and about controversial topics/situations are labeled as "dark romance" to begin with. What happened to calling them dramas?
I don't understand why authors would even put actual real life organizations in romance books written for entertainment. Once I read a webtoon and the moment I saw a hot character introduced as a former KGB I immediately closed it... I feel like the authors disregard that including a real life organization isn't just taking the parts of it that are needed for the plot but its whole history.
People are out here defending dark romance the same way people saying racist slurs or fucking terrible jokes defend dark humor. Dark romance shouldnt be SA, racism, or anti-semitic things. Dark romance should be the undead like vampires or werewolves, or maybe some consensual BDSM. Like if you have to turn to racism to make your theme "dark" then you're just racist. There are ways to do things without putting down a minority group.
The first time I came across the dark romance genre I thought it was a character study + romance, I didn't expect it to be just an excuse to write toxic relationships / unhealthy dynamics without facing the morality problems
Cindy thank you so much for this video. It's so well researched and the receipts all show what's wrong with books in this genre of romance but also relationships presented in books in general. I would also like to note books and authors (mostly white cis gendered women) also write a submissive female (or submissive)protagonist that has that good-good naughty bits that solves the racism problem and as many times as we see that in movies, tv and books people should be rolling their eyes. If a good lay cures your racism what is the lesson or thought behind that? Only good **** is worth fixing narrow minded racism and opens your world to, "we are deserve respect." One thing that always has me rolling my eyes is they always pick the most racist or sexiest thing to have the minority character have as their backstory. Be it drugs, prostitution, debt, immigration and so one. It's almost like a white savior, with complexity can pull that poor minority out of their terrible situation and build such wonderful future and blah. Anyway, thanks again. Your book reviews and deep dives are great.
Yeah, redemption should not be earned from sexual attraction, otherwise it's a very shallowly earned way of getting basic respect and decency. Ppl shouldn't have to be deemed sexy to u in order to be respected!
Especially when it comes to the Nazi romances (I can't believe I'm typing this sentence I hate it here) it's simuch a huge difference if it's someone who got drafted without really believing in it but went along with it until he learned that it's actually bad or someone who was actively working in a concentration camp, that's so incredibly messed up I have no words It makes sense to have stories about people growing and changing but it's framed in such a weird way, WHY
@@withcindy I might have to check that out! I also remember reading the Guernsey literary and potato peel pie society AGES ago and I think it handled it well especially because it didn't just focus on the romance...
seriously. people need to really educate themselves on that topic more. I think as far as the romance genre goes, maybe they should just... stay away from Germany in the 30s and 40s. (I mean romance focused stories, not stories including romance) Bc if the first thing that comes to mind when you hear concentration camp is forbidden romance, you've got some massive learning to do. I'm from Germany, and I wouldn't touch Nazi romance with a ten-foot-pole Also watch Schindler's List if you want a redemption story and are willing to feel some bad feelings
@@withcindy To expand on that, in All the Light We Cannot See, not only is Werner facing an internal struggle, but he is meant to be representative of growing up and being indoctrinated, and he makes decisions that as a reader you aren't pushed to support. If anything his character development from what could have been closer to his sister Jutta as a child to who he is at the end of the book shows that his moral development is a casualty of the war. I think it's also notable that he doesn't get a happy ending.
Any other sapphics of colour remember that Robin Talley (?) book set in the late 50s in the South about the racist white girl who falls in love with a Black girl and constantly does the “I thought all Black people were subhuman but you’re different” thing? I think about that every so often. Who remembers Save the Pearls? Enemies to lovers pretty much only works how it should in fantasy, otherwise it’s just people forcing the concept.
you either die a dark romance girlie, or live long enough to become a extreme horror bro
Oh no,,,,
Underrated comment
The extreme horror fans are so much worse
@@pizzadogma So true, the amount of times a horror bro has recommended an "amazing horror" movie/book only for it to just be the most violent (both sexually and regular), against feminine people specifically, thing I've ever seen, is too many to count. Like I think gore has its place if used correctly. I think Talk to Me is a good example. Hell, when it's super campy I think it can be fun. But shock for shock value is not what makes great horror.
@@FortuitousOwlI'm definitely a big horror fan, but I 100% agree that it is terribly flawed in the sense of female suffering exploitation and sadism/senseless gore. I Believe horror as a genre should have more to it - not a worshipping of violence but a subtle commentary on it. Pretty sad that many, if not most horror media, fall into the issues you mentioned.
As a black dude that fucking inhales romance stories, When i think of dark romance, i think of like Vampries, Ghosts, werewolves. Instead, we get racism. That's crazy
Right? Since when does dark romance mean toxic, abusive, white supremist love interests.
True , they are glorfy our studgles and turning it into romance
I'm not sure what it is about romance books, but for some reason they're often very toxic. Straight ones often have downright abusive tropes, gay men are often looked at through a straight lense and if they have people of colour it's either very specifically written that way or the person is some side character. Same with things like handicaps? Unless it's very specifically about the handicap it's never a thing (I can remember 1 side character in a wheelchair and I do because I was so surprised).
I personally find it very frustrating because in some cases you're literally reading the same book by a different author. You'd get so many incredibly interesting stories if people would diversify. I'm very happy that they're starting to sell way more queer books and books that are written by different people *here (even though the majority is still US, which is a whole different topic)
Find worrying that usually this books have eh... certain things.
Yeah, I can relate to this. If someone wants the 'enemies to lovers' or 'love redeems the villains' thing lets keep the circumstances fictional rather than supporting real world evils.
calling the KKK heir "the White Prince" has me in shambles already... why did they say it like that 😭
WHITE PRINCE?! 💀
with a capital W too! for extra emphasis!
Because she's fetishizing this KKK dude.
I'd never even known there are HEIRS to the KKK??! 😭😭
@@withcindy The capital W lets you know to pronounce the H as well.
funny how some romance books have some of the most horrific concepts that scare me more than actual horror
romance has that power of defying genres
Oh no... that just gave me a horrific thought of one of these weird writers making a romance "redeeming" a Jigsaw-esque character. Sadly, it probably already exists.
Why read Cormac McCarthy when you can read Tillie Cole?
Not going to lie, I find that the romance genre has fueled my creativity as a horror writer in a way that no other genre does. There isn't a genre more conducive to good horror than romance.
It’s because there are people who ACTIVELY want this. It makes you wonder how many of the would act on racist fantasies if given the chance.
can we PLEASE just get some romance books about interracial couples where one of them ISN’T horribly racist. it happens in real life guys I promise
Go read Talia Hibbert! She’s amazing, so funny and heartwarming!
This! And all the more so because depending on their environment, interracial couples can still face obstacles and dumb cliches in real life, and would definitely benefit from more depictions in media that are free of bullsh*t power dynamics and underlining exoticism...
Act Your Age, Eve Brown!! Also the white guy male interest is autistic and the Black woman protag has ADHD
.... I can recommend "Cinderella is dead". It has an interracial wlw relationship and it's a pretty cool book imo.
I've been married for 16 years. It happens everyday❤
I hate the fact that Tanner’s father is abusive because it feels like the author is trying to say it’s not Tanner’s fault that he’s racist. Anyone who has racist relatives will tell you that them being racist doesn’t necessarily mean that they treat their family badly. Some racist relatives can be one of the sweetest people you’ve ever met until you’re not one of their own.
very true!! i think it's the author's very non-subtle way of showing how hate is learned
Yeah, like, no shit they treat you well, you are the same race as them
@@barbararab6390 I know that’s the point I’m trying to make. Most racists are not cartoonish evil people so the author making them so diminishes the problem to it being a personal defect rather than a generational and systemic problem.
Actually that was my experience as well. Rented an apartment from a former Hitler Jung (yup! And I'm of Jewish decent too; if you want to know why: because I needed a place to stay and I had very limited options). He was 1) still indoctrinated but 2) very loving and considerate of his family and his circle. He somehow really liked me. And I will admit, when I was faced with a horrible bully at work, and my liberal colleagues did not stand up against the bully (who was just..I have stories for another time), the Nazi actually offered support-financial and emotional. Still...he believed in Nazi propaganda. Yeah, racist people can be sweet and they can sometimes do the right thing, but still racists at the end of the day. Still refusing to accept their daughters sexual orientation at the end of the day. Still ranting about immigrants at the end of the day. I never knew if I was safe in his place, or if he'd turn on me.
Bonus: his wife was an immigrant and a person of color; they met in Germany as kids. She rolled her eyes every time he bashed immigrants. He loved her dearly. He still didn't stop his xenophobic rants. :(
@@barbararab6390honestly even if you’re a different race, they will often overlook it and consider you “one of the good ones.” Or basically dark white. Racist people often will have family of other races and just think of them as the exception.
As a Brit, hearing someone say Brits are ‘the most welcoming people’ actually made me laugh out loud.
Yeah. For hundreds of years they’ve ‘welcomed’ themselves to other lands through colonialism.
Maybe if they lived in the world of heartstopper
I had to stop myself to figure out if she was joking. 😭
The type of Brits to say that would also defend imperialism and colonialism because 'At least they got trains and learned English' like they were doing the global majority a favour
For real, it's been only a few years since anti-immigration talking points convinced half our idiot country to leave the EU. If that's not numerical proof of our continued lack of welcomingness, I don't know what is.
I feel like pretty privilege is also overwhelming in these genres. Like he would've killed her but she was so beautiful it changed his ways.
Fr like I read this book abt a Jewish man and a nazi woman and at one point she basically said that Jewish ppl only deserve to live bc they are hot. And no I don’t remember the name of the book bc at that point I threw it away
lol her p*ssy "saves him?"
@@obsidianpaw2373Sounds like something Trisha Paytas would've said before.
Omg this is so true... don't even get me started
@@Sasu123456789x1soooo true. Always in "dark romance", the big bad tough love interest who kills everyone and everything with no hesitation ONLY provides mercy to the mc because she's hot. It's so common
My mother was the daughter of a Nazi man and a Mexican immigrant woman. It was not a warm and fuzzy story of inspiration and redemption. It was a childhood of abuse and hate for my mother that ended in a messy divorce. My poor mom has so much generational trauma and internalized racism packed into her psyche. She looks like her mom - she is clearly Mexican but she "identifies" as white and supports Trump. It's very painful to see and if your joy comes from fetishizing the very real generational trauma that people like my mother have gone through I will yuck your yum all I want, thank you.
I'm sorry you had to deal with that growing up :( ppl need to realize that's the actual reality of those relationships, not the happily ever after they keep pushing
that is very terrible, thank you for putting in the time to write this comment. i think most people like me just think fetishizing this type of stuff is terrible because "this would never happen, it's offensive to even think these things are just the trials and tribulations of being in love" but it in fact does happen in real life and to that exact degree. it is something truly traumatic and really it's really telling of what the author thinks whenever they interact with systemic opression. they think not wanting to be murdered because of your race is just being "sexily feisty"
All Hail for your mom. TRUMP 2024 ✋
wow@@UbermenschOst
Its been so long and yall still talking about trump 😩😩😩
I'm just sooooo over the "racist white man learns women of color can actually be more than just sex objects" trope in romance. It's actually incredibly disturbing how common it is and how often NEW stories are being written about it 😫😡
I never once read a book like that. And I've been reading romance for 7 years now.
Quite frankly, white men should also be a little offended that they're written like that.
You don’t have to read them you know
You don’t have to read them you know
Why are you reading them than? Lol
“it takes an alpha male to handle a latina” / “can a country boy and a goth girl be in a relationship?” but turned up to 11…..purple hearts is shaking in its boots
purple hearts walked so this book could run
💜 Literally shaking and crying rn.
Purple Hearts is the first entry level to hell
It’s amazing how some authors think just because they classify their books as “dark romance” they’ll get a free pass to write the most controversial shenanigans without facing criticism for it
i see similarities to this with the antics of authors in the extreme horror genre too. it's an easy excuse. even if the crap you write was actually applicable to the genre, that doesn't mean you're exempt from criticism
@@withcindy the living example of that is Stephen King with “It”
@@withcindyI feel like if you were a person who really embodied the love of an extreme genre, you would revel in criticisms like this or disregard it and not argue with it tepidly on Twitter. If you were really just occupied with a controversial art, you would go boldly forth and own it as a niche content rather than defend it as valid mainstream content.
I LITERALLY SAW SHIT ON INSTA REELS THAT ROMANTICIZED AND FETISHIZED NECROPHILIA :(
@@sparingharbor2600 Who is canceling anyone? What do you think criticism is? Take a bath. Listen to some soothing music. No one is out to get you or your genre. If you like this book, good for you. The rest of us will be disturbed your "kink" is racism no matter what you say. I wish you luck. It's rough out there.
i just can’t wrap my head around the fact that a GROWN adult woman sat down, thought of this plot, started writing a draft, and thought to herself “hmmm yes this is it i will put this out to the world.”
the human brain works in mysterious ways
I use it as hopium, if this book can get published then so can I, so can anyone lol.
@@withcindy when you first started talking about the book, I thought about this ua-cam.com/video/SjcqpUwpP1U/v-deo.htmlsi=Uyso3-v4WAo7D1oq as if the author took it as a prompt and tried to make a story out of it....until you started reading passages 😵💫
Imagine if she has kids.
"What does your mom do?"
"Write books"
"Oh, what kind of books?"
".... books"
She wasnt wrong: the 4 stars average is proof, there is an audience for it.
🙃
18:47 "My uncle is Muslim" has the same vibes of "I'm not homophobic, I have a gay friend." This person really need to learn about the history of the British Empire.
No, but the way they commented that so confidently despite being British💀. There are no British people who are white supremists.
Immediately where my brain went as well. If they do indeed have a Muslim uncle, I hope the poor man isn't constantly asked to legitimate their bad takes, and still has time remaining in his day.
they managed to jam-cram like 10 different 'im not racist actually' stereotypical phrases into one paragraph 😂
"I'm not ______ but," never ends well.
A lot of romance books fetishize abuse and unequal power dynamics. I have nothing against the enemies to lovers trope, but certain authors use it as a framing device for serious societal issues that aren’t at all sexy for marginalized people (i.e. racism, misogyny, homophobia, etc.).
how ironic that romance for white ppl can be horror for marginalized ppl
Also, enemies-to-lovers isn’t “lead that’s part of a marginalized group hating and then falling in love with the lead who is bigoted and fundamentally against marginalized groups getting basic human rights,” and I need yt ppl to stop acting like that’s the only way they can understand enemies-to-lovers.
@@cristenkray5192yeah, I feel like trying to make that kind of dynamic an “enemies to lovers” thing really weirds me out
@@cristenkray5192 Shout out to “This is How You Lose the Time War.” Enemies-to-Lovers between one person from the Singularity and another from an organic hive mind.
Also they’re both women.
SLAVERY romance in fantasy setting is always such a turn-off for me. I just cant do it.
That book that has a nazi and a jewish prisoner falling in love..... And the sign of them finding a middle ground..... Is for them to convert to christianity, completely ignoring that the nazis were already christians, and that the Jewish woman has to actually convert as though her "hate" was tied to judaism, and not the discrimination she faced. Like..... I just don't even have the words
Exactly. Pretty sure there's a lot of misinformation floating around, especially in Christian spaces, that the Nazis were atheist. But they were unabashedly Christian.
The Nazis talked A LOT about Christianity, and the crusades being a big motivator for them in their speeches and propaganda. It was NOT AT ALL subtle.
I think a lot of teachers, public and private, are just uncomfortable teaching that part of history because it makes their religion look terrible. Not to mention risking the ire of conservative parents if a child brings it up at home. But it NEEDS to be taught. Otherwise, you get idiots like many modern racists and antisemites who insist it's not *themselves* who are the nazis, but the [gay/trans/nonreligious/people of other religions/etc] who are the "REAL" Nazis because, "the Nazis were obviously atheist because no Christian would ever be the bad guys. Christianity is the source of ALL morality!" "So it must be those icky liberal folks who "go against god" who are the real Nazis!" 🙄
Idk where that awful rumor started, but it is deeply entrenched in many Christian spaces. Despite the fact it takes 5 seconds to google! 😡
RIGHT. my jaw dropped and it makes me terrified of how this author wrote their jewish characters in this book. she has to cut ties with her religion and culture that is already under threat of extinction by the hate group her man was PART OFFFF??? like the forceful conversion of jewish people was part of the genocide! its insane!!
Holy hell, that's awful
🤮 honestly this makes the racist ass kkk/cartel princess book seem tame lol
It's also super gross considering the fact that if you look at the history of Jewish persecution, the root cause for that persecution in the first place was because they didn't convert.
“I can fix him.”
- “Bestie, he’s in the KKK.”
“Nevermind.”
"I can still fix this"
"Bestie--"
*loads shotgun*
"Oh, carry on."
it's also the fact that she was just able to spit out all racial slurs possible in that book just being under the guise of speaking through a white supremacist...
yea she was a lil too confident in writing all that down LOL (laughing uncomfortably)
Once I saw a TikTok with an author saying that she wasn't racist, the characters were. And she shouldn't be held accountable for what her characters said.
@@fuunosenshi dang that author earned the gold medal for the mental gymnastics of trying to defend herself. I'm betting $100 that she's secretly racist.
@@fuunosenshiit's completely possible to write racist characters without being racist yourself. It comes down more to how that behavior is portrayed, imo.
@@missallisnow you are still accountable for how you portray those topics, though. Saying "my MMC is racist, not me" is pretty much trying to avoid blame.
This is literally how I feel when I read romance webtoon/manwha. Male love interests who have done some horrid shit (and I MEAN HORRID SHIT) still get forgiven and seen as "understandable because of their past", while female "villain" characters whose only crime is to be mean and rude get the worst punishment. Also, when webtoons do add people of color, they are always seen as barbarians or exotic races. Literally, they have no other personality but being "rough, animal-like, and thinking about killing/fighting all the time."
Cindy, if you ever read some romance webtoons, I guarantee you will be seething (although I love to see your reaction LMAO).
Deplorable male characters getting more grace than flawed female characters sounds unfortunately like a common trend among all media😭
Which is why it pisses me the fuck off when Webtoon constantly promotes those Reincarnation romance manhwas which are often the biggest offenders of these tropes. People complain a lot about isekai anime but there's the same sense of staleness and reliance on gimmicks with those stories, but bc it's more character focused than action focused, the main problems manifest in the character writing itself. That and there's an awful lot of islamophobia and xenophobia towards middle eastern people in a lot of these manhwas, though moreso with the action ones
If you want to know something sad, this attitude towards the female character has been around since humans began living in cities, in Mesopotamia 5500-1800BC. While researching for a novel, I read a book on common Sumerian proverbs and adages, one that stuck with me was: “a rebellious man will be allowed reconciliation, a rebellious women will be dragged through the mud” 🥲
Can I recommend This Isekai Maid is Forming a Union?
its ok you can say get schooled
Tessa Gerritsen is a biracial author of Asian and Caucasian decent. She trained as an MD before she started writing romance and crime fiction. I participated in a meeting where she was asked why the characters in her books were white women. Why didn't she write from the perspective of an Asian woman? Her answer was heartbreaking. Her agent or publisher ( I don't remember which one) told her the audience would not be interested in an Asian main character. She said that after writing for so many years from the perspective of white women, she was uncomfortable writing an Asian main character.
And that is the problem that Cindy was referring to. The white domination and whitewashing of a lot of literature. The people who complain that white authors don't stand a chance of getting published right now don't know what they're talking about. I'm an aspiring author, and I can tell you. The white authors are just fine. Male authors are just fine.
Let me guess. She’s got a asian mom and white dad? And let me guess, she married a whites guy? Asian women are so predictable. Just say you want your legacy to be white because you are self serving. Social media is littered with Olivia Munns and her mother.
This is exactly why I don't publish my own ongoing works, cause I don't do things from a completely "white" perspective, as I do tons of research to be as accurate as possible and have a variety of ethnicities
I heard it's either that or type-casted into writing the minority protagonists only. Two different symptoms, one cause.
I don't think you need to worry that much about it. Just focus on the quality
@tamarleahh.2150 I don't know exactly what you're trying to say. But if you're saying that the race of the character won't matter if the story is good I'll tell you one story: I wrote a story about a doctor in Toronto. I lived in the city at the time and worked next to the hospital. The city is 60% immigrants and a lot of them are not white. Patients of the hospital are of all colors, all hours of the day. More then half of the medical staff was not white. So I was asked to REMOVE the non white characters with the question: why can't they be white. Mind you, the diverse races were an important part of the story (it was a speculative science mystery where a disease was spreading accross all races and social classes, and therefore the issue was not genetic nor environmental) plus it was accurate. So no, people don't just care about the quality of the work.
I don't usually comment, but I felt the necessity to do it haha. As a Mexican woman, I can not forgive the romanticization of the cartels, we literally live in a constant war (people in Mexico die in the same amount as people from countries at war). I read some parts of the book, and it was also horrible to see the disinformation of the way the narcos work, it is not like the mafias people see on TV or in other countries, in Mexico they do not have morals, families or harmony, there is only hate, blood and horror. Using "Adelita" as a victim of her family erases the reality of her and her family being the villains, it is their fault that our country is literally in pieces.
Also, I find it disrespectful to use the name that we use to refer to the women who fought in the revolution against the corrupt government and society, and this "Adelita" being named like that is a mockery against our culture.
We have enough from our own culture praising the narcos, we do not need the foreign to see it as a kink or something cool. The war between groups is real, but Adelita saying that she can not even touch the street without something happening to her is a lie, the common women from Mexico are the ones who can not touch the street without the risk of being a victim of feminicidio, trafficking or even turning them into killers (sicarias). Not the fully protected by the police, government, and cartel people woman.
I just felt so angry reading that one of the main characters is part of the villains in real life, but she is treated as a victim. Idk, it is so hard to live in this narco-state that kills our society day by day, and people from outside think it can be used as a matter of fiction without the proper information.
Sorry for the intensity, but I live in a country where you could be eating in a restaurant and be part of the killing in plain sight of the day of a person, and each member of those groups is guilty, even the "pretty Adelita" that lives in the expenses of the lives of Mexican people.
Well said.
Amén! Hearing anyone correlate a frigging cartel member with oppressed groups makes me feel like I am trapped in a stupid(er) alternate reality from which I really want to escape 🤮
This reality is why people romanticizing the mafia and the cartel makes me want to scream. Can't these people just make up fictional organizations to giggle at, instead of real horrifiying institutions?
As a latina, I do want to take a moment to talk about the stereotype of the drug cartel heir latinamerican character. It's always us, always the narcos, always the heir to the drug empire. Also, nothing irritates me more than the names they give those characters... It's always Juan, or if it's a woman, then it's ALWAYS with the "ita" at the end. Those are nicknames. You'll never find a Juanita or, in this case, Adelita in Latin America that is actually called that. The name should be Adela. And finally, they always throw around Spanish words that are not relevant, as if we're stupid and can't speak English without constantly switching back and forth. But yeah, you can't expect much from a white yankee to write good representation.
i tried not to laugh while reading "Adelita Quintana" in the video because it was truly the most stereotypical fictional name someone can think of. like i am pretty sure the author is not friends with any mexicans/latin americans lol
@@withcindy It's the cho-changification of nonwhite names
I get the point but there are.ladies called Juanita as birthnames in my country ex Colombia
I think the author stopped her research at the Mexican revolution 😅
I'll never get why authors don't just browse Facebook pages for communities in the country of origin their character is supposed to be. I had someone message me that they were surprised I got names right when I got nothing about geographical locations right but when I was writing about a Cuban character in Florida, it was really easy just to look at communities for Cuban hobbies and locations and pluck out realistic names. was a lot harder for me to find out that apparently Floridians don't do basements.
Haven’t read any of the books that sparked this video, but the fact that the author calls the characters a KKK “prince” and cartel “princess” like a wattpad gang romance written by a middle schooler tells me everything I need to know about whether or not the author handled the topic with nuance.
i am 100% positive this white british lady has never encountered anything violent or dangerous in her life
@@withcindyRight? The vibe I get off so many “dark” romances like this is more tween edgelord fanfiction rather than actually pushing societal taboos in meaningful ways. They wanna feel like big kids who read serious books for grownups without committing to the real thought and effort to give heavy topics the weight they need because that would cut into smut time.
@@aconstantstateofbladerunne5251 yesss exactly. You can’t just put “dark” or “extreme” in your genre tag, write whatever you want, and expect mainstream approval. That’s just lazy in every direction.
@@aconstantstateofbladerunne5251 As someone who read Dark Romance for a while and then stopped...this is 100% correct.
@@VeronicaWarlock OMG yes! I like writing dark topics, but it doesn't mean I'm immune from criticism. I hate how other dark authors act like they're invincible because they label themselves as "Dark/extreme". They just end up sounding like conservatives by saying "well if ur offended by it, thats on u." like df?
1:20 reminds me of that one tiktok by a girl who was of mixed race and she said something along the lines of "i would love to experience an enemies to lovers arc in my life but it would probably consist of the guy being heavily racist" 💀
Nooooooo but it's true 💀
someone saying “british people are the most welcoming people” with their WHOLE chest is fucking insane i had to pause the video just to stare into the distance
"British ppl are the most welcoming" - Me after my lobotomy
Literally, we didn't get the nickname terf island for no reason. 😭😭😭 I hate it here.
Straight authors be scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to search for a new spin on forbidden love, meanwhile they’ll be oppose any same-gender relationships
or when they do write same-gender relationships they'll fetishize it within a straight lens
And they refuse to make one of the straight characters trans like in a lady for a duke, which was great and had awesome forbidden love
This is why I’ve been sticking to romance by queer authors for the most part.
@@asterismos5451 lowkey scouring these comments for book recommendations from the people sharing 'antidote' books- and thank you! I'm not usually enthusiastic about historical romance, but from the blurb alone this book sounds pretty great.
Fr, like-
_Your answer’s right there_
I think its also interesting how in nearly all these examples, it's the man who is racist and needs help from the woman to unlearn his beliefs, sorta like a really bad "I can fix him" trope
YUP
I feel like it's worse than ordinary "I can fix him" because suddenly it's "I, his victim, have an obligation to fix him"
I’m adopted from South Korea by yte parents and the amount of times they just don’t think about things because they don’t have to is sad. My sister and mom were teachers and I had to tell them “hey, don’t make the Asian kid speak ‘their language’ in front of the class like they’re a fucking side show,” and they got angry at me lmao. Or they’ll say “you’re only saying this because you like to argue” whenever I disagree about something racist they do. The worst thing about it is that I know they use me as a crutch to justify the ignorant shit they say
im so sorry u have to deal with that :(
As a Mexican woman, there’s nothing worse than experiencing the same old stereotypes over and over again. I love being nothing more than an exotic spicy latine who sells drugs.
I just genuinely want to know why someone read that description and went mmmm racism, let me read it. Since when is racism a kink? It’s truly baffling.
Once again, thank you for your emotional labor.
Race play has been a thing for a long time and a lot of it borders on genuinely hateful
@@Joe-qm4yvrace play is inherently racist
I knew romance had a major role diversity problem, as this isn’t the first racist book to come under fire. But the fact that concepts in this vein are so ubiquitous that we had two controversies within a month, this and a book deal announcement for a book about a white woman obsessing over a Black nanny, is what really blew my mind. Not to mention Goodreads coming and reminding us how white mainstream romance is, with a book featuring a Black lead by a white author getting nominated as opposed to some of the truly stunning books that came out from Black authors this year.
i did not hear about that book deal announcement wtf. what is the book called?
@@withcindy it’s since been deleted from Twitter/X, but it’s called Greenwich by Kate Broad.
I was just thinking of that book too. I was scrolling thru the comments and quote retweets on it and every single person that praised her for the book was white, and loads of black (and some nonblack) people were pointing out how racist the premise was. Like, did that not raise any red flags for her? She said she was trying to tell a story about prejudice and racism or whatever but the only people who approved of it were white people. Like... dude.
I had no idea about the Goodreads Award Nominee! Which book was it? I tried to figure it out by reading the synopses, but I can't tell which book has a Black character.
@@monster-enthusiast not to mention the people who dared speak up (mostly BIPOC) getting attacked for “bullying” the author (Kate wasn’t bullied but the critics absolutely were). I found a vile article written in response to this situation where the piece’s writer punches down on one critic in particular, an Asian aroace author who has a debut coming out next year. I swear, do these people think before they speak or type? How do you put so much vitriol into the world and have the audacity to accuse *others* of being bullies in response?
The part that gets me is that so many of these books’ issues could be fixed by making one change: have the character leave the hate group before meeting the love interest.
You can still have development on the character’s end as they’re dealing with unlearning the hate that they have been living with, losing family and/or friends, etc. But them making the choice to step away is a decision on their part and not pushed by someone that they had been oppressing.
It would also make an interesting conflict if the other person learned about their background/history and how that would affect the relationship
Yes! I was thinking that the whole video!!
Earth and High Heaven kind of does this! I say "kind of" bc Erica (a white Anglo) is never actively racist or antisemitic, she just has a racist dad and, despite being progressive herself, makes herself unlearn a lot of uncomfortable things she's internalized. Marc (her Jewish love interest) gets to talk openly about the systemic hatred he's faced living and working in Canada, and while he's showing Erica how bad it gets for him, you never get the impression that she's just now learning that Jews are people.
It's not a perfect book, but for something published in 1944 that still addresses North American antisemitism, it's phenomenal.
One of my fave responses to the “freedom of speech” argument in situations like this is actually a tweet from Justin McElroy: “the first amendment protects you from the government, it does not protect you from the Justin”. Being pretty hard anti-censorship myself it’s wonderful reminder that just as you say they’re not banned from writing it, we’re not banned from putting them on blast for it.
I'm sorry but good cooch will never make an oppressor suddenly wake up and decide, "oh wow, I should probably stop oppressing people all the time. She's changed me with her magic snatch." Like, the stories that prop up this sentiment need to be tossed in the garbage because they are not realistic.
Especially since throughout history, white men engaged in sexual relationships with oppressed people while continuing to use their oppression as leverage against them. Like so many slave owners forced women to have sex with them and they didn't become not-racist when they started doing that...
LMAOOOO ur so right. Besides, people who right those sorts of plots are so out of touch they don’t even realize that a majority of these super racist yt dudes ALREADY fetishize poc women’s/Afab’s bodies.
Right? Have romance authors ever heard of colonisation and chattel slavery?!
😭😭😭😭
Fr!! I hated that so much, he stopped being racist magically because the snatch was too good???😑 like be fr
still watching the video but "using dark romance as a trojan horse" is honestly SUCH a good way to phrase the issue(s)
it's a very easy way to terminate critique by not challenging why are these stories being written
@@withcindy You should make a video about Stephen king's usage of horror to write graphic CP. He's getting away with it too frequently
@@Horologicaand the racism in his books
People would really publish anything they shat out from the toilet, yet we're still waiting for Cindy's book for more than 3 years.
JASKDJKLSAJDKLSJKDSAJ the way i've been procrastinating writing the epilogue for over a month...
You're at the epilogue? Congratulations!
Congratulations 👏
The thing that is crazy is that there are so many of these white supremacist books, but it takes fighting tooth and nail to be a person of color and get published. Then get somebody to believe in your book enough to push for your book to be advertised or on best seller lists.
TRUUUUUU THATS THE WILD PART
@@withcindyhey cindy another bool that does the concept of someone unlearning their racism after falling in love with a woman of colour is the Lies we Tell Ourselves by Robin Talley. It is also a sapphic romance, abd she explores homophobia as well. But its realky good, sje does her research really well and it isnt romanticised. If you read it it would be a good book to bring attention to on your channel as an example of how to do these kind of books correctly.
It's almost like the publishers are racist and don't want black authors books getting out into the world. Wait a minute-
Enemies to lovers trope can work only if there was a desire to understand and help the other party and not the hate that turns to passionate desire crap 🤢
Recently I've been noticing a TON of covert nazi apologism in entertainment -- not just books but also movies about "not so bad" hitler youth members, redeemed wehrmacht soldiers, etc. I think it's dangerous and suspicious and I'm glad you're pointing this out because someone needs to. Also, I think something about the enemies-to-lovers obsession is causing authors to just mash together the most hostile groups of people they can think of and trying to redeem them through romance. I think it doesn't really work a lot but booktok-popular books need to be reduced to snappy summaries and enemies-to-lovers is a surefire way to jump on a trend. As someone who never really read an enemies-to-lovers work I enjoyed, I am excited for this trend to die lol
It IS sus bc of how insidious it is. Because who is this actually benefitting? Not POC that's for sure
The “not so bad hitler youth members” thing drives me crazy because, while there were some who were misled or forced, the focus is always on redeeming someone who, in some cases, might be victims themselves, when there’s a damned good story that can be had in showing that the regime above them is so evil to its core that it’s not above abusing their own soldiers, threatening to kill the families of their own soldiers, threatening to torture then too if they don’t do XYZ. That sort of story could highlight how deep the evil runs in the very core of those in power. There were Black overseers who would whip other slaves, but no one in their right minds would blame that overseer when we know the penalty could have been exceedingly harsh. We wouldn’t treat a story about a person in that situation as a romantic redemption of that person-it wouldn’t be a romance at all, and any redemption for any harm that that person was forced to cause would come second to somehow getting that person the hell away from the institution above them that has so much power that they can strip free will from people who wouldn’t freely and openly participate.
But being able to write like this takes an exceptionally high level of skill and understanding, something I admit I don’t have (which is why I won’t even try), and something like the authors discussed in this video definitely don’t have. And it really won’t work to have it be an enemies-to-lovers story.
Never underestimate how skilled, patient and even sometimes subtle the fascist propaganda machine is and how it starts to permeate every corner of society, from political commentary channels to romance novels.
@@haggisaIs it possible that authors or their agents are paying BookTokers to promote their stories and not telling anyone? HBO Max already got caught hiring people to attack critics on Twitter and we know some authors have faked their numbers to become New York Times bestsellers. I wouldn't be shocked if money is exchanging hands in this case too. 🤔
Because not all of them were bad duh. Im tired of pretending the Allie’s were all good guys when we were just as awful back then
Cindy,you are hella right.A lot of literature has a white supremacy problem and I'm glad there are more discussions calling it out.
it's so insidious that many ppl don't notice!
Lol Cindy you don’t need a redemption arc, you need a “winning the lottery” arc!
@@withcindy I don’t think that people don’t notice, but that a lot of people see a book in the romance section with the KKK and NOPE the fuck away. Ironically, videos dedicated to discussing one or two books is a lot of free press for books like this, and will result in increased sales and library rentals (which still makes the author money), which rewards the author. Not all the people who buy/borrow will be supporters of the concept, but it doesn’t matter if some is a supporter or if they’re reading to see if it really is that bad-it’s still money to the author.
When it comes to shit like Colleen Hoover, she made her own self a household name and openly talking about her will not do much, but people like…what’s the name of the author in this video again? It just serves to make her name more known.
@@NoelleTakestheSky i kind of agree, not that i see it as necessarily bad to talk about these authors when you measure the importance of bringing light to this subject and the free publicity thing, but when it comes to far more known people in the industry it hardly matters, but when you are introducing a mostly unknown author into the scene it puts things into perspective. It's like the reaction youtubers rule of only responding to channels bigger than themselves and never smaller ones, because than you're just giving them a free stage.
Also, tiktok groups and niche communities make for such a ludicrous percentage of people that although they serve for publicity and ads, your average run of the mill local will probably not care to read books with such tabu and inflammatory topic on their free time just because it was on the popular online section of the bookstore. Idk, in the stage of notoriety, the most Cindy is doing is responding to the echo of the online chamber that is booktok, and i don't mean this in a bad way, i just think those types of authors will hit their desired public with or without influencers and youtubers. They always have, and always will, so i think "platforming" or showcasing them is a worth cost to displaying very valid criticisms over their work and antics.
When you really think about it it's insane how many books, movies and even tv shows pull the 'You can just fuck away bigotry' trope and it's always made by people who know how bad discrimination can be in theory, but still view decades of constant discrimination and oppression as nothing more than something you can maturely agree to disagree on and expect to be hailed as if they just brought about world peace with their Wattpad romance
Every time Cindy says the words "White prince", I feel my soul get punched.
for me it's "cartel princess" 💀as a Latina it hurts my soul
The fact that this video came out right when the Goodreads choice awards nominees came out, and the romance category has one author of color, really drives your point home.
wish they had posted the nominees sooner so i could have exposed them in this video smh!!
@@withcindythe new “Romantasy” category wasn’t much better with three authors of color, and considering one of the white authors had THREE books on the list, there was definitely room for more diversity.
Not exactly on the subject, but aren’t Goodreads Choice Awards reliably unreliable when it comes to choosing good novels?
Haven’t both Sarah J. Mass. and the MAGA queen and writer of abusive “romances” Jamie McGuire won some of them?
@@haggisait’s not about the books being good but lacking diversity, both in race but also sexuality. Goodreads has been called out year after year for this but they still choose straight, white authors to uplift and it’s bullshit.
Aren’t they chosen by statistics?
my question is why do these primarily white (or all) authors think that this is their story to tell? They’re not the victims of these hate groups so what right to they have to redeem and romanticize these men? As a latine it makes me so angry that this British author can use a Mexican character to fulfill this weird forbidden romance when she has 0 idea what it’s like to actually be a victim of racial discrimination
I said the same shit like it’s the arrogance for me and the delusion that they think they are educated enough in social and historical matters with us POC and our suffering to think they can write this it’s giving trauma porn.
Exactly! Not to mention all the reviews praising the book. A lot of them seemed to be pale colored. Which just drives it more for me, like you don’t see it an issue because you aren’t being affected. To you it’s just a spicy novel but to others it’s a nightmare!
Yeah...this is maybe why serious "enemies to lovers" should stay in fantasy! Because it's one thing if your love interest is a wizard who hates elves, or whatever. But it hits differently (that is: badly!) if he's a member of a real life hate group that has murdered actual humans.
Even in fantasy it mirrors real life too often
Naw fr. I think games like Dragon Age handled it pretty well. In DA2 you can be a mage who romances this dude who hates magic (but y'know he has a complicated past) and in DAI your character as a mage can romance a Templar (people who actively fight against magic) cause he has character growth and overcoming what he's been taught as a Templar.
But trying to write something like this? Omg. I can't believe they actually did it. It would have been so easy to throw it into fantasy with two warring kingdoms. Like wut. 😮
yeah, i second this
I loved Six of Crows but like... please stay away from the actual nazis with romance? please? I'm from germany and in serious pain rn
She wrote 7 damn books then apologized ??? PLEASE 😂
I swear the ghetto of it 🙄🤣
Afro Latina here… wild how these concepts get out there. It’s wild the excuses ppl make for despicable things especially when they don’t affect them.
Holy shit i am so shocked about the concentration camp romance. I cant believe someone wrote this. And then published this. And people read it and nominated it? WTF?
And that there are so many books in the german-soldier-genre? There IS a german-soldier-genre??
Coming from germany, this is unbelievable. I cant
Not just a German soldier genre but a German soldier ROMANCE
same here, I'm also from Germany and this makes me double down on my opinion every country should have history classes like Germany. I have my problems with it but at least i don't think the concentration camp romance would have gotten published over here...
@@mer_acle8101I’m American, my grandmother was born in West Germany to Transylvanian war refugees; I was the only one in most of my high school classes that took German. I once had to explain to my duel-credit history of Western Civilization class why “the work will set you free” was a bad slogan to put on a T-shirt. One time in college I had to explain what the night of broken glass was. No wonder so many people deny the Holocaust, nobody teaches about it!
@@staralchemist129 yeah that's so insane
I had the holocaust taught in History I think three separate times, plus visiting a concentration camp, plus like ten different museum excursions, bc Germany takes it so seriously, and then there's America being like what do you mean History lessons, having people with an education ask Germans whether they met H!tler in person won't make anyone look uninformed XD
What really got me kind of livid about this book isn't even its horrible premise, but rather the fact that an actual publisher green-lighted it 😵 The industry is truly in shambles, it seems
Thank you for an informative video, Cindy! I really appreciate you starting this important discussion
I think the series was self published? But there are many questionable books w these dynamics that are traditionally published
The craziest thing is the British saying they’re not racist and welcoming in the year of our lord 2023 post-Megan Markle
They’re very welcoming…unless you’re a brown person protesting the slaughter of Palestinians. Or a trans person asking for equal rights.
I've also noticed how a basically any love triangle ends with the girl choosing the white boy over the brown boy (very important that he is only brown, not a darker black, it seems), like in To All The Boys or Twilight or The Kissing Booth (and some random unpopular, also kind of bad fantasy trilogy i read as a kid, where she chooses the traumatized ice prince over the southern fire boy), and I'm sure there are MANY more examples.
THANK YOU. people don't call this out enough
What was the ice prince books name? Not because im going to read it but I also distinctly remember reading or watching a cartoon with something like that. Or was it on Wattpad I don’t remember…
@@ophelie2620 ummm like arcus or argus or something like that. The fire boy was called Kay or something along the lines. And i totally forgot her name, because she was severely lacking a personality i think
@@paularoth4915 now I realized I didn’t read it at all. It was a children’s anime about a witch crushing over an evil blonde boy I guess and there was twins one of them falling for her. Now thinking about this, it actually sounds a lot like Ouran High School Host Club and a zutara fanfic I might read on Wattpad.
🎶 Every kiss begins with K...KK 🎶 No but seriously as a black woman Im so tired 🤬
This conversation reminds me so much of the “why are there so many confederate vampires” convo / vid & it’s discussion regarding southern lost cause propaganda. It’s not exactly the same, but it stems from a similar problem
At this point I can’t help but insist that Dan Olson’s Fifty Shades trilogy videos are mandatory viewing. Truly a must watch and it really helped me crystalize my feelings on this sort of stuff. It’s such a good entry point for understanding how even taboo subjects can be handled ethically. His comparison between 50 shades vs. lady killer in a bind is excellent. Ymmv on lady killer, but at the very least intends for you to think critically about it’s content. Imo I think framing is always more important than the content itself.
As a poc I tend to be pretty disgusted with these kinds of racist/poc or liberal/confederate romances not on principe but because they’re so reductive, & it’s clear their energy is placed way more into redeeming the racist than anything else. The framing is escapist, it’s “love conquers all”. It’s not a story, it’s selling you something. it’s selling an escapist easy solution to systemic complex problems. The framing is “meeting in the middle” & “compromise” & I reject the idea of meeting on a middle ground between “I just want to survive” & “I wish people like you didn’t exist”. On a subjective level, I just have a hard buy-in for the love interests of color, they just don’t feel like real people because they so happily endure whatever is thrown at them in the name of “opposites attract” or “enemies to lovers”.
this is why i have a problem with the less extreme examples of these books, like the contemporary romances between a liberal and conservative where they learn more about each other, "understand" each other better, and meet in the middle. to promote a centrist message is to still promote white supremacy, homophobia, etc because it tolerates (and even forgives) those harmful views without actually challenging them. their version of a happily ever after is to avoid doing the hard work of dismantling these structural problems and instead saying "agree to disagree! we still love each other!"
@@withcindy true! I’m not saying the couple has to solve racism but these kids of stories fall into two camps that I think are fall flat in different ways. 1) they make no changes, agree to “compromise”, & go agree to disagree while the unspoken rule is that. What’s really going on is that the liberal capitulates to the conservative while the conservative makes no changes (i.e. Purple Hearts). Or 2) the liberal has to do all this unbalanced labour just to get the conservative to acknowledge their humanity! Like. That just doesn’t feel real to me. I’m not saying cut everyone out of your life, conversation can be incredibly helpful to actually change ppl’s perspective, but all that work for a boyfriend????? No thank you lol
i think a big contributor to this phenomenon is that in fantasy, or even historical fiction sometimes, it’s really easy to divide people with little to no nuance. you have the “purebloods” and the “muggles”, you have rivaling kingdoms, you have differences in social class that make your parents disapprove. and so it’s really easy to give characters a relatively harmless reason to both hate each other, have it forbidden to be together, and then to learn to overcome and bring the two worlds together. which is usually the pattern of enemies to lovers. however, when you attempt to bring this concept to the modern world, where interpersonal relationships are much more nuanced, the only instances of “forbidden” love are usually those in which one party is literally just in a hate group of some kind. which as we can see, does not work nearly as well💀💀 a kdrama called “snowdrop” comes to mind, a romance between a south korean student and a north korean spy, which failed miserably, being accused of romanticizing this delicate historical event
omg not a north korean spy....
@@withcindy If I may add some context, what's more insidious about Snowdrop is that the heroine, a naive liberal university student, hides a North Korean spy after mistaking him for an anti-government protester. From the 60s to the late 80s (the series is set in the late 80s btw), the South Korean government spy agencies NIS(National Intelligence Agency) and ANSP (Agency for National Security Planning) have framed numerous anti-government human rights activists as North Korean spies and kidnapped, jailed, tortured, even killed them. Sometimes they weren't even activists, just people working or studying abroad who got framed and kidnapped (the East Berlin Affair). So the implication that all dissentors were North Korean spies all along, and naive liberal college students were dumb enough to fall for them, is not just cringy but actively harmful and dangerous. It also didn't help that an ANSP agent character was described as an "honest, upright man" in the official website.
us: “we want more diversity in romances!!”
⚪️ authors: alright!
the diversity in question….
I love your preview intros! They’re always so unhinged and I respect it
to be fair, the source material made it easy to be unhinged
i'm anti-censorship and a huge fan of dark romance myself (i have a few kinks, what can you do)
but you can't really overlook the implications of a white woman writing a story where uber racism is redeemed bc "love sees no color"
this is a white woman downplaying the severity of racism and, intentionally or not, putting the weight of changing racist minds on the back of POC's ability to be desirable and pleasant (WOC on the case of her book)
as someone who lives in the south and straight up had the KKK targeting school children for recruitment with candy flyers as a child, it is definitely NOT sexy 💀 what is wrong with these authors
This is such a well detailed video. Proud of you to make this discussion even though it must be have been mentally fucking exhausting.
it does indeed take a while for me to gather my brain cells for this stuff
The more i see and hear about the shit like this happens and goes on within publishing the less stressed I get about my writing capabilities and the plots and characters I came up with honestly
Same here but you gotta remember the difference is since they are white and writing all these problematic books in a sense it gets harder for you to find your audience as they gobble up these other crappy books really as a writer myself these kind of books are problematic to many of us who want to have a decent plot within our work.
What’s crazy is how white authors can be allowed to write poc characters in racist settings like this, but god forbid an author of color can write a book with a poc protagonist. It’s insanse
Cindy, this is probably one of your best videos. Thank you so much for discussing this issue in the book and publishing industry. Personally, I think this trope is overdone and the "enemies to lovers" arc can really only work in fantasy imo, because when we use it in historical/contemporary genres, it always ends up being an oppressor being "saved" by someone in a marginalized group. That power imbalance is honestly gross and sounds like a horror movie to me :(
Yeah enemies to lovers in contemporary settings don't rly work unless the author does a hella good job w the redemption!
Full agree!
I love enemies to lovers as a trope and I think the biggest way people mess it up (often constantly with het romances) is that the enemies are rarely in equal footing. Rivals to lovers tends to pull that a lot better but people viewing enemies as a sort of dynamic where one despises and hurts the other while they just feel resentment and suffering instead of mutual retaliation is why it's got such a bad rep nowadays. It's like those bully x victim stories but just copy pasting that dynamic across all sorts of stories.
As a Colombian man who rarely reads romance at all, this shit doesn't surprise me at all. There are tons of romance where the oppressed has to do the work to "save" their oppressor. Colombian telenovelas are choke full of this shit (Mexican ones too) in our case the trope takes the form of a poor girl struggling to even survive "saving" the rich douche that would have hated her if she wasn't hot.
Side note: I hate that my brain immediately started trying to draft something on that same vein while using your points for nuance. I can't write romance for shit 😂😂
I hate the entire genre of dark romance. At it's very best it romanticizes abuse and beyond toxic relationships. Most of it also seems pretty targeted at young women and as a former teen who read much of it, it definitely gave me a highly inaccurate and dangerous perspective on the types of guys I was attracted to or wanted to date. I literally had to experience abuse and assault personally before I realized where on earth I'd gotten the idea that abusive men were sexy.
The latest addition to the genre teaching folks to sympathize with racists is not shocking at all to me. The whole genre is literally that. Simp for the jerk who hurts everyone around him!
Sure people suffer abuse and brainwashing all the time and it's not their fault. However it's up to each individual to choose what kind of person they want to be. I will never again sympathize with abusers. The dark romance trend honestly makes me worry for all the women- especially teens- who get their hands on such trash. What message exactly are we sending here? Ugh puke I hate it so much.
Asking the real questions with that title, Cindy
and we all know the answer
It's also not just that these books are getting recognition from literary awards as well - Purple Hearts (liberal x conservative) was adapted into a multi-million Netflix production, something a lot of other, better-written books deserve so much more! I will say that the book version (which I read out of morbid curiosity) generally focuses more on the MC's drug addiction issues/her issues with health insurance and diabetes rather than their political leanings though, which I found interesting.
Off topic, but TIL that the main dude in Purple Hearts the movie was supposed to be Charles Melton until he backed out - it would have been kinda crazy to have a dude with Asian roots in that movie??
Charles Melton dodged a bullet lol
_"your love interest will literally hate crime you"_ absolutely sent me 💀
but fr this is when i once again thank cindy for doing the things i cannot emotionally afford to do bc i'd much rather hear a fellow gaysian woman (w a matching shaggy mullet nonetheless 😌💅) explain these things w care and nuance than read through the triggering dumpster fire quotes that are floating around book-ish socmed rn. it's wild to me that there are so many yt romance readers who are happy to argue w their twt/redditor moments on behalf (or against) people of color yet not censor the murder scenes jfc 🤦🏻♀
appreciated this discussion a lot!! co-opting happy endings for cishet yt subtext is huge across pop culture and it felt cathartic to hear you talk abt how it's perpetuated in the romance world. if you ever have the energy/time, would LOVE to hear more about romance publishing tea bc how on earth have i not heard abt this courtney milan business before?! such a mess and it'd be awesome to hear a critical cindy commentary (ft. coochie jokes 😂) someday! if it's to your interest ofc tho, have fun while getting your content bag too! tysm for this video
Tysm!! Omg we r shaggy mullet twinsies?! And I actually didn't find out about the Courtney Milan situation until I looked up other examples of these questionable books, which led me to the RWA awarding those books, which then led me to look up the RWA's background... It is def a whole story, and their diversity problem is unfortunately a reflection of how white the genre is. They closed in 2019 due to all the issues within their group
@@withcindy your hair is impeccably bleached better so ngl my fried waves can only dream to reach your levels of hair slay someday... 😔💅 but super glad you're loving the new style!!
:(( sucks to hear that the big romance writers' association is more similar to a suburban-soccer-mom mean girls group than a welcoming group for authors whether they're huge bookstore staples or upcoming indies. i only knew abt the RWA for their awards since i thought it was really cool that romance had its own version of the Hugo Award/ _insert book honors that are more micro than the Pulitzer but more macro than Goodreads since idk_ . aiya regardless it's clear there's a lot of messiness and i have all the more respect for BIPOC romance authors who're stuck in that hybrid-publishing limbo of working w big-box-companies and hustling their own online marketing. o7 hope you can inspire other readers to learn more abt how systemic prejudice affects the industries that fuel our book-ish sad girl escapes!
I hate how I instantly knew which book you were about to talk about since I just finished a book rant about the same book from Rachel 💀
rachel is sooo quick to report this stuff idk how she does it!! she got so many receipts too lol
@@withcindy Right?? Lord 😩
Anyways I've got some thoughts:tm: that kinda only just occurred to me now? What's interesting is that I kind of see the same thought processes with horror games that people have with Dark romance. If conversations arise because of triggering stuff in horror games, people will inevitably be like -- "It's horror, it's supposed to be gross/horrifying/whatever synonym." I saw this especially with that Rachel Foster horror game some years back.
My thoughts is basically that if you write triggering or controversial stuff, you better be ready for the conversations that are gonna arise. It being "Fiction" does not protect it from being scrutinized. ESPECIALLY when many books contain triggering stuff that many marginalized groups and/or those that have trauma have dealt with in real life. And if you've never dealt with the kinds of stuff depicted, be inevitably ready when someone tells you that you're wrong.
Not just romance, most things and fandoms have a white supremacy problem too. I'm honestly tired.
"Hate turns to desire. Desire turns to love." Love turns to fear. Fear turns to anger. Anger leads... to the dark side.
For once I want to read a romance book where Therapy wins.
Suggestions welcome.
That part
WHY WOULD YOU HAVE THE JEWISH WOMAN IN A CONCENTRATION CAMP CONVERT TO CHRISTIANITY AS THE END OF HER POSITIVE CHARACTER ARC?????? WHO THOUGHT THAT WAS A GOOD IDEA?????? As a Jew, or actually just as a person with a brain, I am appalled.
because (these) christians think you can only be a good person if youre also christian 🙄
As an avid romance reader and romance booktuber, I can tell you for sure that it’s a problem. No question.
Disappointed but not surprised
Man I've been watching cindy for years now and I think it's pretty neat how she's grown from calling out the bs of booktube to calling out the bs of the industry itself, and that folks is what we call character growth
edit: on a completely unrelated note have you tried slicking back your hair?? When I grew my hair out from a buzz I tried a bunch of different shit and it was so fun! ALSO not to thirst or anything but I bet itd look like... Kinda cool or whatever...
gotta evolve to making bigger enemies
@@withcindy go after gutenburg next. Bro thought her could just??? Print books? L
Your Love Interest will literally hate crime is so crazy but that is just like the least insane line in this video 😂
truly taking the Bad Boy trope to the extreme
so strange seeing Cindy without her asymmetrical hair. looks good tho :)
thank u! its sooo hard to grow out asymmetrical hair lol
@@withcindy it seems almost done haha
I feel like this type of enemies to lovers fantasy of love "fixing" racism, or really any kind of ism, exists because a lot of people are desperate for a simple solution to a very complex issue that will require a nuanced solution that comes from a lot of time intensive labor.
This isn’t shocking to me at all. This is how interracial romance novels work. The POC character can only feel validated, confident, wanted, or loved if their romantic interest is white. Just look at “All the boys I loved Before” or anything Mindy Kaling writes.
I was thinking about this the other day and completely came to the same conclusion as you about the market... The last data I found was this As of 2021, 50.45% of US authors are women and 49.55% of US authors are men. Black or African American authors have increased by 0.87% since 2010 and currently represent 5.93%. Asian authors have decreased by 0.72% since 2010 and currently represent 4.93%. This leaves most authors as white so I think a lot of writing is based on personal experience and considering things such as redlining and other intersectionalities in our real world it completely makes sense you'll see a lot of whitewashing/supremacy in the book realm. It'd take an insanely aware author to write past that. The only time I will complain is if you make a vampire blonde...don't ask me why I just don't find blonde vampires sexy. Also, keep in mind and I say this as someone who grew up in a largely conservative/white/polish midwestern town a lot of people who grow up around that have no idea how biased/racist they are or how they embrace microaggressions without realizing it. Overall, an important topic for people to discuss because minority voices on these book charts needs to happen, but the publishing industry needs to happen first. As for algo's I don't know how they'd fix that most developers I know who work for these companies are a-holes and there's not getting around that at the moment. I'm a woman in a predominantly male industry of ego's and salaries and oddly enough I do benefit from diversity inclusion just by being a woman in the industry even though other minorities won't get the same consideration. It just people don't want to hear this or admit it.
thank u for sharing those stats!! it's baffling how low the stats are in representation
At first I was like 'you are absolutely correct, although those stats do match up with population percentages'. Then I remembered that I'm Canadian and the US has a _ton_ more black people, even percentage-wise.
And then I did some Googling and realized I'd be wrong anyways because 17.4% of Canadians are from somewhere in Asia. So I learned a lot of things today.
YOU ABSOLUTELY KILLED THIS WITH THE ANALYSIS. It applies to real life, and not just book drama, like any mixed child knows the struggles of supposed inspirational love stories between the oppressed and the oppressor. It's part of the reason why I'm so over the Left Tube critique videos that say "Leftist UA-cam isn't interested in doing the hardcore analysis and debate that converts nazis and white supremacists into leftism. They're so elitist and useless."
To be fair, this was a trope back in the day, people would joke that Contrapoints converted them from Naziism. The only issue is that those same converts are STILL RACIST/SEXIST. They'll still say slurs when a woman is someone they don't like or they'll misgender someone because it's the rhetorically persuasive strategy. They act like their 'redemption' is so important that all the movement should focus on that, on converting others like them, that it's the moral thing to do, that they kind of forget that they're asking marginalized people to essentially subject themselves to bigoted abuse on the off chance that a nazi will change his mind.
And then those nazis are STILL racist/sexist because there's so much in your upbringing you have to unpack that most of them won't bother to do because they only changed by an easy to watch youtube video. For instance, you absolutely are so correct for bringing up how these narratives of "redemption" are actually disguised narratives of born again christians, of converting to christianity and becoming 'good,' and that's something that would never occur to them because that's a pillar of their understanding of the world.
Which brings me to another point: Mixed children of white/POC. These stories make it seem like loving a POC would automatically make someone less racist or evil. Love is the opposite of hate, right? But the problem is that this IS NOT TRUE. 1/10 times a mixed child will have a good white parent who isn't ignorant to their struggles, but 9/10 times the white parent is WOEFULLY ill-equipped to address the racism they'll face, or actively perpetuating the racism themselves. Like, do y'all remember that trend on social media when people were like "I want mixed babies!!! 😍😍😍They're so beautiful!" That's starting in early on racial fetishization of THEIR OWN CHILDREN. Racism does not end with 'love,' and shows like 90 day fiance do nothing but highlight this exploitative relationship, even if the producers were trying to show otherwise.
cindy girl i need u to know i cant stand booktok so i completely removed myself from it but i could never abandon u girl ur my queen. also all correct takes as always
it's ok i only peep in when there's tea for me to profit from!!
just to get on a nerdy little soap box, there are a lot of romances that claim to be, or that people refer to as, a Romeo and Juliet retelling. but they miss the First Line of the play. 'two houses both alike in dignity'. that means that the two lovers are of equal social and economic status. theres no Real reason the houses hate each other, they just do. so these romances where one lover is opressed and the other lover is from the opressor group are not Romeo and Juliet retellings. star-crossed lovers, sure maybe. but not romeo and juliet.
Love your new hair! 😍
The fact that stories like these get published and maybe even demanded these days really just expose the western publishing industry's deep rooted biases. Thank you for the nuanced pov!
Thank you so much!!
I will never write "..." again because now, when I do, I don't see them, Cindy. I hear them in your voice. LOL
girl, i just saw the thumbnail and i just wanna say, i love the hair.
thank u!! i got the haircut when i was in japan and asked the hairdresser to fix it for me lol
The "the author is British" as a defense for potential racism made me actually CACKLE
there's a difference between books containing and discussing niche(?) kinks, taboos, etc. and doing them well or authors learning from their mistakes and authors pulling the "it's dark romance!" "this is censorship!" and "this is cancel culture!" cards when they're rightfully called out for glorifying and romanizing taboo/messed up things (like making the love interest a rapist or the heir to the kkk)
but lots of "dark romance" readers who love reading from the latter don't care because they don't want to ask themselves why they enjoy reading about racists, rapists, and abusers who are extremely violent, toxic, abusive, and spewing bigotry to the woman they're supposedly in love with and literally everyone else as they don't want to acknowledge their ACTIVE role upholding the (white) patriarchy, white supremacy, misogyny, fascism, etc.
"I'm Mexican, you're Klan, we can never be together!!"
That sentence sent me to the stratosphere and back again!! 🤣😂
there isn't any other youtuber that has the ability to articulate the complex interplay between class, art, race, and our weird internet culture as poignantly as you do. these r my fave videos everrr keep doing what ur doing
Thank u bb ❤️
No because another booktuber I love @ReadsWithRachel also covered this and it's so true!!! And I'm glad people are talking about this more excited to see your perspective!!! :)
She brought a lot of good receipts! Idk how she works so FAST lol we stan a hardworking queen
A minor thing, but I also don't get is why stories this melodramatic and about controversial topics/situations are labeled as "dark romance" to begin with. What happened to calling them dramas?
Bc the situations presented are often dark or taboo like non-con, etc whereas I think dramas are still palatable for a mainstream audience
"Romance" has lost its meaning, it's sad. Romance books are supposed to have optimistic endings, and not be chock full of abuse, at the base.
CINDY I LOVE THESE DEEP DIVES/VIDEO ESSAYS!! You explain gossip I’ve never heard of in a way that’s so interesting you are the best
I'm so glad the gossip and tea can be informational as well!! ❤️
I don't understand why authors would even put actual real life organizations in romance books written for entertainment. Once I read a webtoon and the moment I saw a hot character introduced as a former KGB I immediately closed it... I feel like the authors disregard that including a real life organization isn't just taking the parts of it that are needed for the plot but its whole history.
People are out here defending dark romance the same way people saying racist slurs or fucking terrible jokes defend dark humor. Dark romance shouldnt be SA, racism, or anti-semitic things. Dark romance should be the undead like vampires or werewolves, or maybe some consensual BDSM. Like if you have to turn to racism to make your theme "dark" then you're just racist. There are ways to do things without putting down a minority group.
The first time I came across the dark romance genre I thought it was a character study + romance, I didn't expect it to be just an excuse to write toxic relationships / unhealthy dynamics without facing the morality problems
"we are the most welcoming people" in regards to the british is CRAAAAZZZY
Loveeee book drama with Cindy! Give us the tea please 🎉
ive got plenty of tea to spare!!
Videos like these give me so much hope that we're all going to become authors one day. 😭
The hair cut and the way it frames your face looks so good. Also wtf is that first book 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭 KKK whattttt
thank u!! i have the hairdresser i met in japan to thank!!
@@withcindy periooddd tew good
Cindy thank you so much for this video. It's so well researched and the receipts all show what's wrong with books in this genre of romance but also relationships presented in books in general. I would also like to note books and authors (mostly white cis gendered women) also write a submissive female (or submissive)protagonist that has that good-good naughty bits that solves the racism problem and as many times as we see that in movies, tv and books people should be rolling their eyes. If a good lay cures your racism what is the lesson or thought behind that? Only good **** is worth fixing narrow minded racism and opens your world to, "we are deserve respect." One thing that always has me rolling my eyes is they always pick the most racist or sexiest thing to have the minority character have as their backstory. Be it drugs, prostitution, debt, immigration and so one. It's almost like a white savior, with complexity can pull that poor minority out of their terrible situation and build such wonderful future and blah. Anyway, thanks again. Your book reviews and deep dives are great.
Yeah, redemption should not be earned from sexual attraction, otherwise it's a very shallowly earned way of getting basic respect and decency. Ppl shouldn't have to be deemed sexy to u in order to be respected!
Especially when it comes to the Nazi romances (I can't believe I'm typing this sentence I hate it here) it's simuch a huge difference if it's someone who got drafted without really believing in it but went along with it until he learned that it's actually bad or someone who was actively working in a concentration camp, that's so incredibly messed up I have no words
It makes sense to have stories about people growing and changing but it's framed in such a weird way, WHY
the former was the case of the MC in "all the light we cannot see", and i think the author handled it well there!
@@withcindy I might have to check that out! I also remember reading the Guernsey literary and potato peel pie society AGES ago and I think it handled it well especially because it didn't just focus on the romance...
seriously. people need to really educate themselves on that topic more.
I think as far as the romance genre goes, maybe they should just... stay away from Germany in the 30s and 40s. (I mean romance focused stories, not stories including romance)
Bc if the first thing that comes to mind when you hear concentration camp is forbidden romance, you've got some massive learning to do. I'm from Germany, and I wouldn't touch Nazi romance with a ten-foot-pole
Also watch Schindler's List if you want a redemption story and are willing to feel some bad feelings
@@withcindy To expand on that, in All the Light We Cannot See, not only is Werner facing an internal struggle, but he is meant to be representative of growing up and being indoctrinated, and he makes decisions that as a reader you aren't pushed to support. If anything his character development from what could have been closer to his sister Jutta as a child to who he is at the end of the book shows that his moral development is a casualty of the war. I think it's also notable that he doesn't get a happy ending.
Any other sapphics of colour remember that Robin Talley (?) book set in the late 50s in the South about the racist white girl who falls in love with a Black girl and constantly does the “I thought all Black people were subhuman but you’re different” thing? I think about that every so often. Who remembers Save the Pearls? Enemies to lovers pretty much only works how it should in fantasy, otherwise it’s just people forcing the concept.
Funny how most of these types of romance books just romanticize DV and DA.
That shit is more scary than actual horror 😢