Dark academia: sub-genre or trope? Where to start on reading fantasy

By Dana Brown

Hello and happy Sunday!

Photo by alex geerts on Unsplash

I can’t believe it’s almost the end of October!

This week has been full of noise and updates from everyone who started to read Britney’s memoir. Apparently, it’s been the best-selling memoir on the day of its launch, but the source for this piece of information is Britney herself, so I don’t know if that’s true. I do believe its impact is the equivalent of Prince Harry’s memoir for Americans. Though I never liked these associations, Britney is like royalty in American pop culture, and her confessions of who cheated on whom especially when she was with Justin Timberlake have set the internet on fire. And I won’t deny, it’s been fun to watch what some people came up with in dismissing Justin. It’s like a cheap chick flick, but with real people. So, although only remotely connected to books, this week has been fun to witness unfold.

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The Villains of The Secret History. Source

I have made good progress with our current read, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, and without spoiling it for anyone, I was disappointed and am constantly surprised at the parallels between this book and If We Were Villains.

It’s enough to mention both titles in a Google search, and you will find opinions both sides of the coin. While some prefer the newer M. L. Rio book, there are others, especially older fans of Tartt’s who consider the former a “rip-off”.

Personally, I was disappointed by the formulaic story. I like that they both start grippingly with the narrator divulging that a murder took place to which they had a contribution (this was within the first pages of both, so not a spoiler, hopefully). But more than with the Villains, I had flashbacks to How to Get Away with Murder, and Damages, an earlier TV show that centres around a powerful and charismatic female lawyer who takes a young new lawyer under her wing. Both these TV shows start with scenes from the murder that is led up to throughout the season.

I have asked myself what makes a genre as opposed to it remaining a trope, since both these books have been labelled as belonging to the dark academia genre, though some sources call it a sub-genre or sub-culture but they don’t mention the sub of what main one they are. I haven’t delved into too many books so far, but with the only two I have tried one is almost a carbon copy of the other and it makes me wonder: if you read one dark academia book, have we read them all? If you pick up a sci-fi, you don’t expect them all to be The Invisible Man retold. You pick up a few crime thrillers, you don’t just read iterations of Murder on the Orient Express. So how is dark academia a sub-genre and not a trope?

I have to hand it to M. L. Rio who wrote If We Were Villains: she has done a very good job of creating a believable setup for the almost identical story. Her book is a delight for Shakespeare lovers, though many readers felt exasperated by the quotes and the obscure references. In the end, she is a Shakespeare professor, so I’d like to think it came very naturally to her and she probably uses it as a material in class.

Those who preferred Donna Tartt have said her academic references are not too tedious and are generally easy to follow, even if you’re not a speaker or connoisseur of Greek and the Greek culture.

Momswhowrite.com say the following:

(…) Think of genres and tropes as your animal kingdom vs. species (…). A genre is a type of story with a familiar model, such as a mystery or romance. A trope is a plot mechanism commonly used within that genre, like a damsel in distress situation or a “chosen one.”

These are not to be confused with reading age groups, such as “middle grade” or “young adult,” which you may find tacked on to the beginning of a bookshelf genre. For instance, Harry Potter is a middle-grade (age) fantasy story (genre) centered around a “chosen one” (trope).

Of course, there differences between the two books, and being the reader than I am, I am enjoying the beautiful language, phrases and words that Donna Tartt chooses, more so than I did Rio’s. It feels like a significantly more thoughtful book, it’s better put together and every word is placed where it should be. The atmosphere she creates is tangible, the angst that the narrator feels it nauseating. I found myself highlighting paragraphs and taking so many notes. It has reminded me of everything I love about reading.

While I adore her writing style, I am not a huge fan of the story. But considering she came up with something that was then copied so much and turned into a ‘sub-genre,’ I have to accept it’s effective.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow review

I feel I have done this book injustice. I had not seen the Macbeth reference coming when I was dismissing it for not having a very catchy title, nor could I see the connection with the story. I finished it when my schedule and my patience were under a lot of pressure, and I never went back to ponder on its value and depth.

I was writing at the time:

Taking its title from the famous soliloquy from Macbeth, Zevin’s novel has it that one is but “a poor player” in the game of life. But, unlike Macbeth, Zevin’s protagonists have the privilege of twentieth-century video game technology. In video games, the game of life never ends. “It’s tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win.”

Harvardreview.org

I’ll leave this review on the book here, if you’d ever like to read on it.

Reading fantasy - where does one start?

Photo by Cosmic Timetraveler on Unsplash

I received a question this week and a challenge: where should one start reading fantasy of they have never any before, and could I write about it in the Grapevine. Here we are. Consider this part one if I don’t know how many yet.

I myself am not an avid reader of fantasy and I feel lost and intimidated in the fantasy bookstore section. Thankfully, the biggest and nicest bookstore in my hometown has just expanded last week and decided to set the manga and fantasy books in a separate section than the usual fiction. To be honest, I was beginning to feel frustrated at the fiction shelves getting smaller and smaller to make room for the volumes of colourful and intricate book covers of authors I don’t know and titles that contain a lot of made up words.

This feels like a longer term project, but for now I will resume to two things. My humble opinion is that fantasy starts with Lord of the Rings. Everything else stems from the amazing writing Tolkien did back in the ‘30s and ‘50s.

The second is a link from Penguin who wrote the below article to answer our question.

To be continued…