Hello and welcome to the article where I share my experience reading BookTok books and observing the BookTok community. This article is purely my opinions and experiences so if you like the books that I talk about, feel free to ignore this if you want to. I do have to give some warning because I will be talking about/mentioning spicy scenes, SA, r*pe, consent, and just some of the most frustrating and disgusting behavior I have seen in my time on the internet. With that being said, if you feel that you need to click off and not read this, please do whatever you need to feel comfortable (take care of yourself).
Introduction
If you are not aware of what BookTok is, it is a subcommunity in the app TikTok where people share book recommendations, reviews of books, theorize about books, etc. It is also important to mention that the majority of the books that are recommended on BookTok are romance books that can incorporate fantasy and sometimes elements of dark romance (we will discuss this later on). BookTok has also had a major impact on the publishing industry which we will also talk about a little later. I personally do not use TikTok very much so I am more a part of the group that finds out what is happening on BookTok because it makes its way to the YouTube shorts as well as some of the BookTubers which is essentially the same thing as BookTok except there tends to be longer content where you can watch people do an in-depth of analysis of books.
A little intro as to why I am writing about this is that I love to read and when I got out of my reading slump I found BookTok where mass amounts of people were recommending books. In the span of six months I have read 35+ books from BookTok and while I see the good side of BookTok I also wanted to share my opinions and concerns that I have had and noticed throughout my time reading and interacting with the community and books.
Lack of variety/Diversity
One of the major critiques I have with BookTok is that I feel like the same ten books get recommended to me every time I look on there. That is basically the gist of it. I have to scroll quite a bit to get recommended some different books which can be very frustrating when I have already read most of what they have recommended. It also sucks because the books that are recommended are written by some of the most famous authors so if you want to find a book from a newer author or about a different genre you have to dig really deep to find them.
The lack of diversity is also a very big issue because most of the authors that blow up because of BookTok, such as Colleen Hoover, Sarah J. Maas, Madeline Miller, etc. are all white. I admit, this is a problem with white readers, like myself, who don’t go out of our way to read books by BIPOC authors. I am planning to read more books from authors of color in the future but just looking at the algorithm in TikTok, it promotes mostly white authors.
As for queer representation in BookTok, there is a little more of that than there is of BIPOC representation, in my opinion but there are really popular books like Song of Achilles and Red, White, and Royal Blue that are extremely popular.
Writing quality
The quality of writing is one of the most talked about in terms of the general public’s knowledge of BookTok and I have to say that I agree in some ways. I would like to say that when I am reading book recommendations from BookTok, especially the romance recommendations, I am not expecting a literary masterpiece but I do expect it to not read like poorly written Wattpad fanfiction. I have standards.
Unfortunately, my wishes of some of the romance recommendations have reminded me of the time when I used to write fanfiction (and trust me, it was terrible). I think the poor writing quality is due to how the books in BookTok focus more on the marketability of the book and making a book fast which puts a heavy burden on the author and editors. A popular example of this would be what happened with Rebecca Yarros and her Empyrean series (Fourth Wing and Iron Flame) that took BookTok by storm with it’s fantasy and romance. Fourth Wing, the first book in the series, was published on May 2nd of 2023 and Iron Flame, the second installment in the series, was published on November 7th of the same year. This is one of the series from BookTok that I have read and I can say that the writing in both of these books isn’t the greatest I’ve seen but it is SO much worse in Iron Flame. The book suffers from poorly written villains, loads of repetitive and boring fights between the main characters, poor pacing, grammar mistakes, multiple answers from both the first book and the second go unanswered, and the list goes on. I don’t know if that is because Yarros had virtually no time in between the publication of Fourth Wing and Iron Flame.
Infuriating and Disgusting behavior towards minors/other people
Now on a darker note, in what I hope is a small part of the BookTok community, there are people who are clearly adults making weird comments towards people who are minors.
Background information: BookTok often intersects with other subcommunities on TikTok as well as the real world and a couple of those communities are the hockey and BikerTok community. I would also like to mention, before we go into detail about these disturbing actions that the majority of people who are a part of BookTok are women between the ages of 16 and 40 years-old.
BikerTok: This is a different subcommunity that has recently been connected to BookTok because some of the people who are on BookTok like the dark aesthetic that members of the BikerTok community have. BikerTok is exactly what it sounds like, usually men who post about their motorcycles. Like I said before, they tend to have a dark aesthetic that matches the vibe and aesthetic of some of the dark romance books on BookTok. Oftentimes, people on BikerTok would post about one of the dark romances, such as H.D. Carlton’s Haunting Adeline, books and people who were on BookTok would comment something about the book (these books can include heavy themes such as smut, SA, r*pe, etc.).
Eventually, this made its way to a particular member of BikerTok who was harassed by members of BookTok who recommended him books with heavy smut scenes and sexualized him. The member of BikerTok then revealed the books that he liked to read which included books like the Hunger Games series and the Maze Runner series and purely based on these book choices, assuming that members of BookTok can think critically and take a hint, we probably would assume that he was a teen and would think that BookTok people would stop recommending books with smut and inappropriate topics for a teenager as well as not continuing to sexualizing him. He later added that he was 16 in his bio but women from BookTok still continued to make weird comments about him.
This is absolutely disgusting on so many levels. First of all, continuing to sexualize a minor after they have stated that they are a minor and you are a grown adult is disgusting. Second, you shouldn’t be making those comments in the first place unless the creator is of age and consents to having these interactions (and they can retract that consent whenever they want because that is how consent works)! More on the consent issue later.
The Hockey Incident: So, for context, there is a subset in BookTok that focuses specifically on hockey romance and there are also some creators who have taken that love for hockey romance books and translated it into them actually watching hockey (for the United States it is the NHL). There are also people in this subset who use actual NHL players as “proxies” for the fictional characters in the hockey romance books. One creator on BookTok (I won’t be mentioning names of anyone in this situation) made some videos on her account that were aimed at a specific player on an NHL team that were quite, I don’t want to say thirsty but… they were uncomfortably sexual. The wife of the player commented that she and her husband felt that the comments crossed the line and were sexual harassment to which she was then harassed by a lot of the BookToker’s fans. The player had to then make a statement about it and how he felt uncomfortable with the comments that were made both towards him and his wife.
This whole situation is, yet again, disgusting. If someone is not comfortable about the sexual comments that you made about them, you need to stop making that type of comment and respect that person and their wishes. Also, the backlash that the wife got, in my opinion, were unacceptable because she knows the player on a personal level, she lives with him, and if she says that this type of behavior is crossing a line, it is crossing the line and should immediately stop. This is yet again, another example of what I will talk about next.
Not understanding consent/Justifying abuse and abusive behavior
Moving on to my final point (because writing this makes me both angry and exhausted). I have noticed the lack of knowledge about consent and also not understanding that there are a lot of toxic characters/relationships that are being written in, specifically, the romance books on TikTok. Again, we are going to split this up.
The issue of consent: I genuinely have never seen so many people not understand the definition of consent is, so let’s define it.
According to the National Domestic Violence Hotline, consent is “an ongoing mutual agreement between partners about what they do or don’t want to experience.” Consent can be withdrawn at anytime, it also applies to people in romantic or sexual relationships (just because you are in a relationship does not mean consent is given). “No” means “No” and the absence of consent also means “No” and/or “Stop”. Consent is also not given if “if you’re afraid or unable to say no, or manipulated, pressured, or threatened to say yes.” This refers to if you are asleep, unconscious, or under the influence of drugs, medications, alcohol, etc.
Even looking at how consent was handled in the earlier situations, it is clear that not everyone in the BookTok community has proper knowledge about consent which concerns me because these are actual people, mostly women, and they need to be aware about these types of things.
Justifying Abuse, Abusive Behavior, and sick behavior: Alright, this topic can be very disturbing to talk about and I will be talking about heavy topics like SA, r*pe, and murder so if you need to take a break or stop reading, please feel free.
There is a certain type of romance, called dark romance, that deals with dark themes and often times is accompanied by a trigger warning page before you start to read the books. These books have explicit content that sometimes border SA (in the case of the book that I will talk about, it is SA and r*pe). I want to preface that I do not want to kink shame anyone but there are certain scenes that are not part of kinks and that are SA and r*pe that need to be talked about.
The best example of this, that I know, is the book called Haunting Adeline which is a dark stalker romance that I, unfortunately, have read. The premise of the book is that this girl named Adeline moves into her grandmother’s old, scary, house and she is stalked by Zade, the hacker vigilante that busts sex trafficking rings and organizations. There are scenes in this book where Zade breaks into her house, leaves roses, texts/calls Adeline while he is watching her from outside her house, hacks the police system to delete her complaints that she made with the police from their system so that he can further harass her, s*xually assaults and r*pes Adeline with a g*n (in her house), and murders the man she previously was having relations with because he didn’t like anyone else touching her.
In the SA and r*pe scenes, Adeline never gives consent and is left to deal with the scene and describes her feelings after the event by using words like “numb”, “violated”, and “trauma”. This is SA! This is a CRIME! This is not a kink! With kinks there is aftercare that usually is the responsibility of the partner to make the other feel safe. One of the trigger warnings was CNC which stands for consent non consent, where there is CONSENT between two people for one person to SA the other. Notice I bolded the word CONSENT! In this book, there was NO consent between Zade and Adeline, hence why it is SA and r*pe! Again, this is abuse. This is a crime.
Later on, Zade admits that he didn’t regret r*ping Adeline and “to take something without consent.” There is no question as to whether Zade is a r*pist because he literally admits it but does not regret it and does not stop harassing Adeline. Also, the fact that his job is to hunt down predators that run s*x trafficking rings and organizations where they do r*pe and SA men, women, and children and he does the same exact thing to Adeline is DISGUSTING to me.
The only thing that I am kind of glad that I took away from this book is doing the research about safe s*x and seeing everything that is wrong with this character (Zade) and the toxic relationship.
This is the biggest problem I have with BookTok because it is not uncommon to see comments and posts where people discuss who the best “book boyfriends” are and Zade is one of the most common that I have seen in those posts when he is a criminal, abusive, r*pist! The justification for this type of behavior is mostly because the men are hot which I don’t understand because a bad guy, is a bad guy, no matter if they are hot or not!
Conclusion
Alright, the last section was probably the most exhausted I have ever been while writing. Thankfully, I have never experienced SA or anything like that but even researching the topic and what is happening with that on BookTok made me exhausted and angry at the same time. I also would like to say that the majority of these issues on BookTok are a small group of very vocal people and that BookTok is, for the majority of people, where we discuss, recommend, and promote books in a safe and kind environment.
If you, or anyone you know, is experiencing domestic violence, please use the link and phone number below.
National Domestic Violence Hotline Website
National Domestic Violence Hotline Phone Number: 800-799-7233