The year is 2020. The world is locked down in quarantine. There’s absolutely nothing to do but sit, watch “Tiger King,” make whipped coffee, and rot on TikTok. One day, at the height of all content consumption and loss of brain cells, a community forms on TikTok called BookTok, and it is fantastic. People are able to reignite their love of reading, a conversation is flowing about new and upcoming books, and authors have found a place where their work can be properly recognized and celebrated for the first time. People flock to read all sorts of romance novels, from fantasy to comedies to sports and business romances, and the genre begins to flourish in this new era of literature.
Flash forward to 2024. BookTokers flood comment sections with hate, if someone criticizes their favorite author, and middle schoolers, are part of book clubs that read rom-coms containing 95% mature material. How could a community trying to bring back the love and appreciation of reading have gone so downhill? The answer is the basis of BookTok itself. Being platformed on Tiktok, an app on which it’s so easy to get absorbed in the latest trends, caused its members to do exactly that.
One huge detail that led to the appeal of rom-coms on BookTok is the mature material featured in these stories, usually cleverly disguised by a happy, colorful cartoon cover. One would never even know that the pages were lined with explicit content and depictions of sex that were only previously accepted on fan-fiction platforms like Wattpad and AO3. These hidden issues, coupled with the obsessive nature of TikTok users in general, have resulted in smut becoming a trend among novels being promoted on TikTok, going so far as people flooding comment sections of recommendation videos asking if the story is “spicy” while others flat out admit to not being able to read a book at all if it doesn’t have any sex in it. We’ve even seen young adult authors being bullied and pressured into including mature content in their books despite the YA genre being written for 12 to 18-year-olds.
In addition to this pressure, younger readers are also being led to adult romances and fantasy novels, as most parents are just happy to see that they are reading and don’t question the content of the book they are picking up. Youth book clubs have been reading books featuring domestic violence, like Colleen Hoover’s “It Ends With Us,” and middle school teachers have made videos detailing how their students are bringing adult romances like Hannah Grace’s “Icebreaker” to school. There is no regulation on what age someone has to be to buy these books, and so many kids are consuming inappropriate content due to a lack of parental supervision.
Of course, kids having access to things they shouldn’t be seeing has been a problem long before TikTok and BookTok became a thing, but with the intense saturation of these books throughout social media and the book-selling market, it is much easier and more encouraged for young people to get to these adult novels than it ever has been before. Unfortunately, there isn’t any clear path to a solution for this issue: kids are almost always going to find outlets for things they shouldn’t have access to, especially if they want it badly enough. However, we can start being more aware of the books we read and recommend to others and be careful of who we’re recommending them to.