Does it romanticize the toxic and harmful?

I am going to say it up front. I love dark romance. Give me your criminal alphas, all your bullies, stalkers, all the codependent relationships, and all of what is typically considered problematic in mainstream romance. There is something about this subgenre of romance that just does it for me.

Not too long ago, Tillie Cole found herself in hot TikTok water over her book “Darkness Embraced”, a dark MC romance featuring a former KKK member as the book’s hero. The TikTok person (who admits to not reading the book and was basing her entire thought process on the back matter) accused her of romanticizing the KKK and said she prayed Tillie Cole’s downfall would be swift. A great hulabaloo ensued. Tillie Cole subsequently posted an apology, removed the entire series from sale, and exited social media.

I have no opinion on this book as I have never read it. I do have lots of thoughts about how all that went down, the review bombing, and the awful rhetoric against Tillie Cole by other authors and readers who had not read the book in question – thoughts that all belong to their own blog post. However, I did start thinking a lot about the subgenre of dark romance in general. I have read some pretty dark books. Some were so dark I asked myself was a reading a romance or a general fiction story about a taboo relationship with graphic sex. Some also made me raise my eyebrows way up into my hairline (are you raising your eyebrows?) and induced a bit of guilt that I was actually reading what I was reading and probably maybe liking it. In others, I found myself hoping the hero got pushed off a cliff and the heroine given a different hero.

My thoughts boiled down to one question – does dark romance romanticize bad people, relationships, topics, and social, moral, and ethical taboos? In other words, does it make these things look better than they really are? And my answer was sometimes – it depends on the book – but does it really matter? From what I have found in reading about the Tillie Cole problem and others’ thoughts about dark romance in general, it appears that many people seem to believe that dark romance is okay as long as it doesn’t cross the lines drawn by any given reader or potential reader. But this idea is not sustainable as authors in the genre can’t ever be expected to please everyone. It really is a matter of – if it triggers you, if you find it offensive, if you don’t want to read about certain themes, characters, or plots – then don’t read it. It is a matter of reciprocal freedom – if I have it, then you have it. We should not ever want to censor what authors should write or what readers should read. That is a slippery slope that leads to all sorts of book-banning nonsense.

Authors and readers alike are human beings with thoughts, feelings, friends, and families. And we have a responsibility to each other. We, as readers, have a responsibility to consume what we want to read and leave others to what they want to read, regardless of how you feel about the content. Authors have a responsibility to write for the audience of their choice and accurately represent the major theme(s) of their book in the blurbs. I don’t know if Tillie Cole romanticized the KKK or if she didn’t. Looking at the blurb, it is probably not something I would have ever read as I likely would have been a bit taken aback by the overall theme. I don’t read historical romance set in the south on plantations due to my not wanting to read books that could potentially have characters I want to like justifying slavery in any way. But I would not have ever – ever – judged this book, its author, or its readers in a public forum without reading it. It is unkind and unnecessary for either the author or the reader to shame or critisize the other over opinions and books that aren’t for them, and certainly no one should be praying for the downfall of the other.