Cate's Writer Room

dark academia, more like dark ac-ugh-demia

          I know, I know. I finished Ninth House a few days ago and I have Thoughts.

          I have a total of three "dark academia" books (Counterfactual, Project Oxygen, and All This Bad Blood), and even I will have to admit I'm kind of a sucker for that type of books. I'm also not saying I'm the queen of dark academia because a) I'm not and b) that's not my favorite type of thing to write (I like light-hearted stuff OKAY). I'm also not calling myself an expert (because I'm not) or saying that dark academia is a bad genre (because it isn't).

          What I'm trying to say is that dark academia is—and should be—more than and different from The Secret History. Groundbreaking, yes?

          My problem is that pretty much every dark academia book I've been reading (even here, especially here) is beginning to sound identical—not just to TSH, but to each other. The characters are pretentious, almost unbearably so, spew out purple prose as though they'd just swallowed a thesaurus (people don't talk like that in real life. Unless it's a stylistic resource), and it's always about these picture-perfect rich, white people, and some literature class.

          I love Dead Poets Society too. I'm just not a fan of seeing it be replicated over and over and over.

          What I'm also not a fan of is blatant plagiarism, including of my own stuff, but we're not getting into that here. For now, at least.

          My point is: there's so, so much more about dark academia than pretentious students and Henry Winter and a clique of rich kids. There's a reason why TSH got so popular and it's because it was innovative, because it brought something new to literature, and its success won't be achieved by nearly identical copies or books following the exact same pattern—guy who decides to be a detective of some sort gets involved with a group of rich kids who binge read Oscar Wilde and drink wine for breakfast (you know. Like yours truly!) and there's a sketchy professor.

          And why am I writing this? It's a call-out rant towards myself, really, but also as a plea for change, as though my opinion counts for anything around here.

          Give me the hidden depths of those characters. Give me new motivations. Give me ambitious students who fight for what they want because they want to one-up themselves and not because they think they're the last slice of bread. Give me friendships and romances built on mutual trust instead of a sick need to manipulate people and hold their secrets against them. Give me dark academia books about science and economics instead of it being all about literature. Give me students who actually attend their other lectures. Give me non-sleep deprived students. Give me female characters who aren't used simply to further the main male character's character development.

          Give me that sense of novelty. We need unique books. Let's read them. Let's write them.