No you're right, dark romance is what you imagined. The characters might be morally gray or have committed crimes, however theyre not supposed to be sexual assaulters, molesters or rapists.
Most people nowadays try to justify rape and SA by passing it off as dark romance.
If the FL is raped by the ML or vice versa, or if either of them have raped/assaulted someone else, its not dark romance it is simply a poor attempt at justifying romance.
A lot of people fail to understand that the more they read such 'dark' romances, they slowly alter their stances on these crimes in real life as well. Whatever you consume will shape you, whether you do it consciously or not. Every crime can be justified based on the situation, except rape and SA.
Nah. The sad reality of things is that "Dark romance" is splattered on ANY romance media with a hint of red flag. It's not even a 'nowdays thing'. This "R!pist being the endgame love interest thing' has been going on for ages... If one do not venture in the rabbit hole of erotica books and fanfic that aren't the well know stuff, one would think this deviant kink and type of storytelling is a new thing.
This toxicity justified thing has been around for a long time. What's really a" Nowadays" thing is the use of Dark romance tag. Back in the days (more than 15 years ago) books with this type of content and R!pist love interests wasn't even tagged with any warnings.
Like think of Twilight. Bella, Edward and Jacob were are all toxic characters from an objective point of view but, the book back then was heavily tagged with the "Most romantic story of all time".
Honestly they should make a specific tag for this kind of dynamic. Because there are different approach of the SA content too: some sexualized and romantize it for kink enjoyers while others heavily and rightfully condemn it.
my biggest problem with this site is that I wish it had a system similar to AO3 and that the tags were more specific. the other day I was reading BL and out of nowhere there was some light shota content, which I don't like. if it were AO3, that wouldn't have happened. not to mention that the comment sections would be much cleaner, there would only be people who are reading for the content and not being surprised by the content.
That is true and I agree with it. However the recent problem is that originally dark romance used to refer to books where the lead characters were problematic in the sense that they might have had twisted sense of morals or might be a part of a gang or whatever, but usually they still had reasons behind their actions which was not pure crime. Nowadays a lot of authors use this dark romance tag to their advantage and brainwash readers into thinking that crime and assault and rape is normal. Because earlier there wasn't a tag to this, so it was easier for people to speak up about it since there wasn't a label it came under, but now that its marketed under a label to the public, the audience that enjoyed books with those labels slowly started defending this and now more and more people defend this in fiction.
I wonder how long it will take them to start justifying this in real life as well.
I want to word it slightly differently. They should market things for what it is. If your content has rape and assault then market it as such. Stop trying to water its intensity and impact down by fitting it under the label of 'dark romance' to increase its publicity.
If you aim for porn then market it as porn and people will treat it as such. Rape kinks should be marketed as RAPE. They should not sell it under the guide of any sort of romance dark of not
I used to think dark romance was just gothic style but with love. Good morals. Think Gomez and Morticia Adam’s. Castlevania Dracula and Lisa Tepes.
I have clearly not read dark romance.
I didn’t know dark romance meant dark grey characters, little to no morals, etc. Now that I know this, I guess I can accept this for what it is. A trial at dark romance.