Booktok... :/ (bit of tw for booktok itself)

i've found some of my fav books through booktok popularity but i will always avoid romances despite being a romance fan T-T. its all just porn and ppl romanticizing abuse, pedos, and incest!! like how is colleen hoover, penelope douglas, and especially haunting adeline so popular?? its not taboo if its an adult going after a child or a stalker sa-ing their victim...

I don't know much about BookTok since I rarely use TikTok and idk if what I'm about to rant about is even related to it (I think it was tagged booktok?) BUT this reminded me of a supposed ad for a romance book where it just talked about this tropes in the book:"Bad boy golfer" aside, I actually kinda went on a hunt to see if this was a legit ad for it and not, like, some fan account's recommendation but I couldn't find a source. It could've been on TikTok, though. STILL, I don't particularly care if this specific ad is fake because I do know that there are authors who do indeed focus a lot more on tropes in a story than the actual story itself and it seems like BookTok, with it sounding a lot like Wattpad fans lmao, is making a trend of that and I just...despise it. I don't actually think it's a trend, or I sure hope not (I don't read modern books that much), but the fact that popular communities like BookTok seem to paint the picture that a book should be advertised that way is really infuriating because no! A book shouldn't revolve around tropes in order to be popular! I'm not saying I want the book itself to be a thought-provoking piece of literature; I just really hate the concept that the author themself has to apparently break down their own work into its most basic fundamentals just to gain attention from a community like BookTok. 

I'm an avid fanfic reader so I'm very familiar with authors tagging tropes to their fanfics. I'm bringing this up because, with the mention of Wattpad, it seems to me like a good portion of BookTok is used to reading fanfic (or similar works) to the point that they expect published books to be the same...? Although I get that tagging tropes in fanfic sites is very useful and I love using it to search through certain tropes, it should be noted that 1. it literally spoils the reading experience for the reader and 2. people have the option to not do it!! It's ok, take deep breaths, you can totally read a story without having to know every single trope within it! In fact, you probably should do that, since a big factor why people love reading is witnessing all the twists and turns of a story for the first time, which isn't something you can experience if the story is already summarized in tropes >:OOO

Listen, I do believe that people can do whatever they want and like whatever they want ù_ú If the ad is real and the author truly wanted to advertise their book like that, that's fine! If a person prefers to read stories where they're told everything beforehand, whatever! The whole reason I'm taking issue with this, though, is because it just feels like a lot of people in BookTok simply aren't opening their minds up to other stories and/or formats. Like I said before, I don't know much about BookTok specifically and maybe I'm just targeting a niche group of people, but I really am getting the impression that there's a big community out there that just solely focuses on the typical Enemies to Lovers, Opposites Attract, Sexual Tension, etc. in a simple, easy-to-read format without ever leaving their comfort zone. A community like that becomes a big echo chamber with no variety and that's such a tragedy when it's a community based on a creative medium such as literature.

my apologies for the essay omfg, apparently im very passionate on this topic even though i havent touched a book during my free time for a while lmao

everything on tiktok is an absolute travesty

smut strikes me as a relatively niche genre, and the only time it's ever brought to my attention is when i inevitably run into someone else complaining about it. i'd suggest maybe just looking for book recommendations/discussions somewhere else?

granted, i don't use tiktok, maybe it's a genuinely horrible issue on there, but from my perspective, i only ever see people screaming at each other over romanticizing this and fetishizing that, and it strikes me as silly, since i've never run into a story like that on accident...

i almost want to say it'd be refreshing to meet someone who just genuinely likes those stories for whatever reason lol