An Unhinged Deep Dive into Booktok Tropes

there is nothing more Immaculate in my opinion than the Vibes that come from listening to an audio book on like public transit or in a public place and it's a spicy scene so they're all just like going about their business they grocery shopping and you're grocery shopping too but more so than that you're also listening to an incredibly profane scene I just recommend it it's a very good experience and honestly have a laugh try it [Music] [Applause] [Music] out hi hi welcome back to my channel freak said loving lovingly My Name Is Karly and today we are doing a lovely presentation all about book talk romance okay I'm honestly enamored with like the science behind book talk we simply don't have the time to unpack it I don't have uh the scientific skills to do it quite frankly and that's okay I love women in stem I support women in stem stem but I am I am not a woman in stem I can barely do basic arithmetic and that's okay that's valid normalize not being able to do basic arithmetic so today what we are going to be talking about is different tropes and like what that means okay I love a good romance I love a contemporary romcom I truly love like romcom movies but I also love romcom books they make me feel warm and fuzzy inside I wouldn't say I am a hardcore romance reader for for reasons that will become apparent as this video progresses also online there are people whose encyclopedic knowledge of every single aspect and little tiny nook and cranny and corner of the romance genre it's honestly an unfathomable amount of knowledge you know like they are the stepen Hawking of dark romance between cousins and that is important we need all types of knowledge to make the world go around and I'm so happy for them I'm a recreational hobbyist romance reader when I'm in the mood for it I read it and I love it but I'm enamored by this like the way that book talk has completely changed how romance is marketed and read and communicated online and I'm lowkey obsessed I have questions I want to explore it as an outsider looking in on the outside always looking in will I ever be more than I've always been I am the dear Evan Hansen of YouTube horrifying to think about such an insult it hurts to be alive sometimes honestly so before we get into this I want to do a couple of disclaimers mainly I want to say love what you love if I say something about a romance book that you love while I am going through different tropes and aspects of romance I am not the Arbiter of taste read whatever you love the fact that people are reading it all I think is good you know so that's that and my uh credentials for making this thank you so much for asking what makes me feel like I can just kind of talk with Reckless abandon for minutes on end for dozens of minutes why why why me why me not anyone else in the entire world uh doesn't other people in the world have more important things to say it's a great question Spotify paid me to do this nothing but peace and love to all my haters out there uh this video is sponsored by Spotify we're going to get more into that later but with your Spotify premium account you can now get Audi books so as I go through different romance tropes and kind of break down and deep dive into the different aspects of modern-day Romance I'm going to be offering a couple of examples of different books that I've read and enjoyed that fall into those tropes and I would recommend to you get an audio book on Spotify to to read those books there is nothing more Immaculate in my opinion than the Vibes that come from listening to an audio book on like public transit or in a public place and it's a spicy scene but nobody knows that it is so they're all just like going about their business they grocery shopping you know and you're grocery shopping too but more so than that you're also listening to an incredibly profane scene I just recommend it it's a very good experience and honestly have a laugh try it out a couple of things that I feel like I need to unpack so you can understand what's going to happen in this video basically when you are looking at book talk especially when it relates to ROM it has its own language right and I'm sure a lot of you have picked up on it from just like being online and if you haven't like I'm really jealous of you I really I feel as though 2024 is the year in which I go off the grid um I think that's really the best thing for my mental health at this point that being said being chronically online does have its positives right and one of those is that you can be fairly well-versed in areas of the internet that you have not traversed before so some of these like specific terms and words that book maybe they haven't necessarily made up but have definitely popularized the one that I feel like is one of the most popular is spice not cumin or pepper but like the levels of sexual content in the book in a lot of romances there's like a sliding scale a kiny scale if you will of spice that basically a book can fall anywhere on the scale of like there is no sexual content two there is a lot of it and people want to know what amount is cuz some people love spice and some people don't right another part that we're going to be heavily focusing on is the idea of tropes and kind of like the tropication of the romance genre that sounds like I think this is a bad thing I don't honestly actually think it is I don't know I did study publishing in school it was one of my like specializations that being said as I get older the more I know that I don't know literally anything it's awesome it's like how can a person know everything at 82 or nothing at 22 uh right like when I was in school I was like I'm the most genius person in the entire world I'm a prodigy why does nobody think I'm a prodigy and now as I age every year I'm like I know nothing but basically tropes are these like identifiable terms um that refer to like instances in books or aspects of the main characters or their relationships in Romance right when people are promoting a book on book talk specifically because you don't have that much time to like give an in-depth review or a recap you use these tropes to communic like these are the things that happen in the book these are like the types of characters or relationships you're going to see so if you are looking to read types of books that have these tropes you can read them it's like basically watering down and making it incredibly economic and efficient to communicate what these books are about this is good and bad like literally most things in the world you know what I mean I think it's really easy to just like criticize book talk because sometimes when a social media is it feels like it's like the downfall of humanity and like I feel that too I understand that but in actuality like it is a very effective way to make sure that if you are reading and you just want to read the kind of books that you want to read you can read them do you know what I mean like we only get so many hours on God's green earth and sometimes you just want to spend those reading and you don't want to spend them finding out what books to read also books are expensive so you don't want to buy a bunch of books that you don't like but if you're looking for specific tropes and you like specific things then that's okay you can just do that now here's the thing books are expensive but they're not expensive with Spotify oh my God amazing seg I'm I'm killing this right now this video is brought to you by Spotify I don't have to tell you why that's iconic I feel like that is just kind of across the board amazing I'm so excited to work with Spotify that's Bonkers that's bananas okay now now I said before audio books are a great way to read not just romance but any book that you're interested in Reading it's not only like a great way to revisit books that you've already read if you want to experience them in a new way which is what I did for a couple of books that I mention in this video also audiobooks are books and listening to audiobooks is reading so that's if that's your jam then that's absolutely how you should be reading books I love listening to audio books because I can read these books while like doing errands like I said before grocery shopping or cleaning my house and now in Canada you can consume your audiobooks with a Spotify premium account there's over 250,000 titles to choose from fathom that number I can't and with a Spotify premium account like you just have access to them it's in it's it's absolutely insane and this is all live right now in Canada with Spotify Premium if you are a master account holder so I'm going to be sprinkling some recommendations throughout this videos as I unpack different tropes I'm going to say if there's like a book recommendation I have that follows that Trope of just like a romance book that I thoroughly enjoyed I don't really feel like I can say what's good or bad but I can say what I enjoyed and I enjoyed all these books I love listening to romance specifically with an Audi book because it's literally like watching a romcom but you're listening to a romcom one of the most recent books that I listened to on audio book that I absolutely loved was Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin like I'm not breaking new news to you saying that Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin is a good book like it's famous for being good but it truly is the original enemies to lovers romance slowburn I truly loved every single second of this book like it's a classic for a reason baby girl like it is so so so good good and I listened to this on audiobook and I really enjoyed it because sometimes with older books the language can be dense for me but the performance and just listening to somebody act out all of the dialogue and the kind of like internal thoughts made it so easy to understand and I was engrossed start to finish I can't believe that I'm trying to like influence you to read Pride and Prejudice but it's amazing if you're looking for just like an audio book recommendation get your Spotify premium account and listen to Pride and Prejudice okay it's just so immersive the performances are great and it's so accessible sometimes when you're trying to buy an audio book again people look for tropes because they are afraid of purchasing a book that they don't actually like but with Spotify Premium you can try out as many audiobooks as you basically want to okay that's wild so if you want to enter your audiobook era get a Spotify premium account today if you don't already what are you doing I've had my Spotify premium account since the womb basically but with your Spotify premium account if you are the master account holder you have audio books now that's wild okay and this is live in Canada right now let's just get into the rest of the video but I just wanted to let you know and um I'll give you a bit a couple more rcks sorry for my British listeners a couple more rcks that's how you sound to me so I'm going to break down and react to some of the most popular tropes and also just tropes that I found really interesting I scour book talk bookstagram book Instagram for the uninitiated also readit I just looked up and tried to really figure out what are the tropes online that people are talking about right now and I have divided them into four different sections it's not a tier ranking none of them are good or bad it's just sections that I feel is appropriate I am nothing if not organizing things in a way that makes sense basically only to my brain so we have the classics then we have character specific these are tropes that basically refer refer to either of the love interests or something like that we have vocation slocation specific when I figured out those two words rhymed oh baby girl it was best day of my life These are tropes that basically either refer to the location of the love story or the vocation of either of the characters and finally the last section is just for a laugh come on let's have a laugh all right some of these are a little kooky to me and I've got questions about them but I'm not here to to to Trope shame so we're just going to go through and talk about it something that I realized um that is super interesting to me as a Fanfiction Reader I'm not going to say if that's past or present because sometimes boundaries are important between a Creator and the audience but I grew up reading fanfiction and we don't need to explore whether or not I read it now it's not important um it's not really it's not really important but when you're reading FanFiction on like Archive of Our Own or whatever um there are tags and those allow you to search the database for basically tropes of stories you want to read whether it's like alternate universe or slowburn specific relationships and that's like what the tropes are which is really wild to see like so many of the tropes are word for word fanfiction tropes like or like tags do you know what I mean I think like now we're seeing a lot of authors who have come into the space who are quite literally fanfiction authors who now are writing Romance an and a lot of their books are formerly fanfiction titles that have been kind of reworked to be original characters so it makes sense that like these tropes get more popular something that I feel like is really interesting is Ali Hazelwood who wrote The Love hypothesis which we're going to get into later which is a very fun romance read that book is if not based inspired by Rayo Star Wars Ray and kylo ren fanfiction and Ali Hazelwood gave an interview like a year go I want to say where basically she said that her new book is the first book that she ever wrote from scratch and she didn't know what to write because she had signed a three-book deal so what she did was talk to her agent and her agent was like I'd love to read an academic Rivals to lovers book and gave her a bunch of tropes and she wrote the book around that and some people because people are kind of just like I don't know if you know this about the internet but people love to be outraged anything that they don't remotely agree with violence against them and people were very upset about this because it does create this like it can feel consumerist but at the end of the day like it's basically a writing prompt do you know what I mean like if you're in a creative writing class usually the teacher's like here's the first sentence write up write a story but nobody's like all of these short stories are the it's the tropifongo lovers and friends to lovers these are absolute Classics I said before Pride and Prejudice great example of an enemies to lovers we also have beach readed by Emily Henry I am an Emily Henry girl to the day I die if Emily Henry has 500 fans out have one of them if she is one fan I am one of them if she is zero fans I'm in the ground you know what I mean Beach readed is basically about two Rivals who hate each other they're two authors and they live in cabins on Lake Michigan next to each other one of them is a very serious literary fiction kind of kudin and the other writes romance and they are mad at each other and they hate each other but then they fall in love and kiss I read this book like two years ago and I relistened to it in audiobook format absolutely sings had the time of my life in a Canadian winter I need a lovely romance to kind of cocoon me with Comfort that's exactly what this book did and I enjoyed it a lot okay um another recommendation is this is a super famous book there's like a Lucy hail movie about it but the hating game The Hating game is a romance between two people at a workplace who are competing for the same promotion and they hate each other and then they kiss basically these are books in which the love interests are enemies they hate each other but then they grow to love each other there's often times a lot of like witty banter and like basically it's somebody being like you wore those shoes and then they're like yeah and I hate you and they're like I hate you they're like what are you why are you talking to me it's like I don't know why are you talking to me and then they like kiss and I eat it up every time you know what I mean slop that down onto my plate put that grul onto my Victorian orphan plate I Chow Down every time friends to lovers is when the characters are friends and slowly throughout the course of their relationship they fall in love people like this because there's just like a lot of pining the human race all of us somebody's got to study why pining is so it's so important to to us but it is it's just idea of being like I'm secretly in love with you never going to say anything I'm never going to say a thing about it but I love you the next Trope is fake dating this is a classic one like without fake dating I just don't think that the institution of fanfiction could survive it's basically like there's some convoluted reason why the two main characters have to fake date does fake dating happen in real life I'd be curious to find out I want to know if you have fake dated if you have fake dated somebody in your life how and what how because I feel like if somebody came up to me and they were like we need to fake date I need a fake date for my cousin's wedding because my cousin's getting married to my ex and I've got to show my ex that I've moved on I'd be like honestly I was going to be like I'd be like no but honestly I'd say yes for the plot so actually I'm eating my words because that sounds absolutely very fun but basically it's exactly what I just explained two people through some kind of convoluted reason fake date whether it be like it's a PR relationship and they're celebrities or one of the characters needs to show off to their ex that they've moved on you know and while they fake date um they fall in love and the whole thing is being like what's real what's not they don't feel the same way I feel and again eat it up every time an example of fake dating is the Spanish love deception a great lovely um winter read for you all basically the main character of this has lied to her family about having an American boyfriend she has to travel to her sister's wedding with her entire family that she's lied to about having an American boyfriend so she has to find an American boyfriend um to to complete her lie and they fake date and they kiss and they fall in love we and again every single time I eat it up I am in a committed relationship but there is like a part of me because I think I've been fed just like romcom narrative my whole life where I'm like that sounds prettyy fun in real life it'd be a full disaster if I told any of my friends I was fake dating someone they'd be like girl why why would you do that but for the plot it's pretty funny we also have um Second Chance romance which is basically where the two main characters either did like a one night stand that didn't end well or they were in a long-term relationship that ended basically they were having a second chance at romance also another classic is slow bir burn this basically denotes that um often times it doesn't have the Trope of insta love which is love at first sight it basically means it's a very very slow progression for them to fall in love it takes a long time for the characters to realize it and mention it to each other and again it's the thing that as humans we love more than oxygen itself yearning why somebody do a study on this I would love to know but basically it's just pages and pages and pag of Yearning and I say it with me eat it up every time I want my characters to be an emotional distress over communicating their emotions because that's how I operate every single day thank God I'm in a long-term relationship nobody's been worse at flirting I don't flirt I um act strange and off-putting to somebody and um arrive at places they are also at and then don't talk to them so actually the Riz I have we have the one bed Trope also closely related to the four proximity Trope basically where the two characters are like snowed in or whatever and then they're like there's one bed I don't want you to sleep on the floor so we'll just share a bed let's just share what if we just share a bed we just have to share the bed and then when they share the bed they fall they kiss and fall in love and then in the final two we have our right person wrong time and miscommunications miscommunications pretty standard stuff it's a full word already in in the English dictionary basically the characters miscommunicate the whole time and that's what keeps them apart this can take many different forms but basically in some to some effect it's like I love you but you don't even like me and then the other character is like I love you but you don't like me because we've miscommunicated in some way and then some character has to be like you idiots get it together you both like each other but it's that kind of thing of somehow a miscommunication whether it be on a large scale in some kind of Fantastical environment I don't know a scroll or something gets lost or it's like over hearing some kind of thing that the love interest says about the other love interest or you know one of the love interests is leaving the the bed after a one night stand and uh they're going to get breakfast but the other person thinks that they've left uh forever and are feel very very used some kind of miscommunication keeps the love interests apart when in actual they feel the same way about each other right person at the wrong time is a heartbreaking Trope it's just a sad one I really it's really sad to me and it's kind of horrifying to think that in our human lives you can meet so many people that are perfect for you but the timing isn't right horrifying to think about I don't like to unpack it but it's basically where these people are perfect for each other but something about the timing doesn't work now we have some characteristics and tropes that are very character specific a lot of these have to refer to like the kind of relationship it it is I don't know if this is in the vocation or character section but basically online there's these kinds of images where it'll be like a book then there'll be like little text bubbles around it of all these different tropes so it'll be a book that's called I don't know if I were to write a romance be called um Love Love is a Battlefield by and then it'll be like enemies to lovers slow bur he owns a book shop and she owns a cafe and and and it's winter and you those images exist okay but basically that all that's to say is you can basically find any Trope online that applies to any job you ever want your main characters to have you know what I mean you want he's a dragon slayer and she makes artisanal ice cream for dogs I feel like you could find that romance you know in the character specific section we have absolute classic grumpy sunshine this basically means that one of the characters in the main relationship is grumpy and the other is very very positive uh outgoing a sunny person if you will and they like that because the grumpy person is nice to the sunshiny person it's also kind of explained as like black cat golden retriever couple where one of the characters is the human embodiment of a golden retriever and the other is the human embodiment of a black cat and I do agree with this on a certain extent I think that a lot of really good relationships have one person who's got like raw raw R2D2 energy and the other's like C3PO you know what I mean like somebody's like we shouldn't be doing this this is bad and the other one's like and I'm obviously the second in my relationship I'm just a maniac and um I just think that you know Dynamics within relationships where you are different from your partner in minor ways um make them very interesting to read so that's why a lot of people live and die by either Opposites Attract or grumpy sunshine I hate everyone but you is basically either one both of the characters hate everyone in the world except for the person that they love uh is pretty self-explanatory and and relatable we also have ice queen where basically the main character that is fem is mean which I also love as mean as a as I I identify as mean like no I'm not actually mean but people think I'm mean because I'm I I have a face that looks like I'd be mean the amount of comments I get on my videos being like you seem like a mean girl and I'm like how what about this I'm talking about Romance Books I'm not a me whatever but the main character is in some way like an icy woman she's mean which basically means she's not the sunshine and grumpy Sunshine she's got other things going on she's got boundaries she calls people out on their BS and that's her whole thing and then she falls in love and somebody's got to melt the Ice Queen's exterior with love and and and kindness and patience okay we also have an absolute classic he falls first that's just a sentence I feel like you could par it out take a guess right now what that means if you don't know is that he falls in love first cuz that's literally what happens love this one no notes there but yeah it's he falls in love with her before she falls in love with him and we don't need to get into the psychology of why that's popular it's just a good a good time and we don't need to over we don't need to make it psychological we also then have scars this is where the main character either like has scars um from some kind of accident something's happening or you know they might be self Haring or things like like that and they've been hiding them and the other love interest sees them and it's like what happened who did this to you what's what's going on just kind of a manifestation of vulnerability and Trust we love humans are so cute man we just love each other we want to be vulnerable with each other it's really sweet now moving on to vocation location specific tropes again these are just tropes that relate to the location of the romance or the jobs of the people who are in the romance these are some of the classic ones I'm going to be breaking down right now but again you could literally be like she's a she's a dog groomer in the Empire State Building and he is the king of the sewer rats um and they're academic Rivals to lovers like you it could be it's literally word s you can pump in whatever you want and you can just punch it in and then it become and then it exists and that's what the beauty of romance is starting off hot and strong we have a sports romance a different facet like a smaller version of this is hockey romance a sports romance is where either both of the main characters or one of the main characters is like a professional or Collegiate athlete in some way uh hockey romance is incredibly popular there was that whole like Kraken drama online but at the end of the day it's basically somebody's an athlete and that M you know that's fun Icebreaker is a really really popular romance I've been listening to that one right now and enjoying it thoroughly it's basically a romance between a figure skater and a hockey player and they're forced to share a rank but it's fun you know what I mean like I'm not going to apologize I'm Canadian you know what I mean like you know how some people are like all the world's a stage I'm like all the world's an ice rink and the men and women are simply ice skaters they're simply figure skaters or hockey players do you know what I mean um enjoying it thoroughly we have academic Rivals where the main characters are in some kind of academic setting you can basically just have Rivals where the characters are competing for something which kind of Falls in in line with the enemies to lovers but people also love an academic setting a little dark Academia moment uh this is where they are competing for something academically and fall in love absolute classic kind of in this area we also have the very popular now stem Romance the love hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood another book that I read physically a year or two ago um and Rel listening to is is a joy you get to re-experience Something in like a new way these books basically mean that both characters or one of the characters is a is in STEM Science technology engineering math I did that off the top of my head and I love that I think it's actually just like a really cool Society thing more representation of women in stem is good and women in stem also they should they women can be in stem and also get to kiss and that's activism I think we have the classic small town romance this can take like very many forms you can have the classic small town romance where it's like she's a big City lawyer who's commitment phobic and doesn't know how to love but then she goes to this small town with a hot chocolate competition and um the man is a lumberjack who's been running his grandmother's pancake farm and she falls in love with him and learns that the big city life isn't all it's cracked up to be and she doesn't need the rat race she needs love but like a very classic traditional romance you now get the alternative of that of um basically like people falling in love in like anti-c capitalist way in a small town very fun Trope I love like a quirky small town with lots of kooky cast of characters you know I love it every time I maybe I should live in a small town maybe I should move to a small town and fall in love with a cow trainer he trains the cows to jump over high jumps and the Sheep skateboard sounds fun to me we also have a work workplace romance in the context of real life maybe the the maybe not good maybe problematic but in the context of a book that you fall in love in the workplace baby very fun we have Romany this is a massive genre this is basically romance fantasy a court of thorns and Roses um is like the most popular romance fantasy book out there I feel like right now people love this it's super fun you know we got fairies you've got myth mythical creatures you've got a prophecy you've got battles it's basically like a traditional fantasy book but they get to kiss so like that's a real Improvement in my books um and now I've included just for fun just for a laugh the tropes that I found when researching this that I've got questions about no Trope shaming here I'm not here to yuck your yum whatever tickles your fancy whatever is your jam I love that for you these are just ones that to me either gave me a laugh or I'm like confused by the first one is knife to throat like what's going on here I'm I'm assuming after reflection like it's in a Fantastical world or like maybe it's like an assassin situation where one of the characters holds the knife to the throat of the other character and it's kind of like it's it's horny and spicy as well as being scary but I didn't make that connection at first so I was just like it's an academic Rivals to lovers but she holds a knife to his throat you need to go to jail babe you can't that's that's assault then we had one that I found that just says bad bad boy golfer which is an oxymoron you can be a bad boy and you can be a golfer but the two combined I've got questions about because golfers wear those little polo shirts and it feels like the second you put on that little polo shirt you've undone any Bad Boy energy that's been built up the second I see a man in a visor I'm no longer like that's a bad boy you know we also have touch her and die this is just in quotations it's a thing that generally speaking The Mask love interest says about the fem love interest a lot of these romances deal with like those kinds of gender Dynamics somebody will be will be you know nasty to her and he'll go touch her and die and again just the romances I read the stakes are a lot lower so when I imagine that in the context I'm like you need to chill if I was with someone and they would touch her and die I'd go oh my God I'm good like it's I've got it under control and then we also have an incredibly popular Trope um where he says She's Mine she's my wife but she's ALS she's my C she's property in the way she's also my couch and I'm just jesting I mean obviously you don't always have to like read romances for appropriate Dynamics it's just funny seeing out of context being like Oh my God he said I belong to him I love it that's everything those are some of my favorite tropes that I've explored I hope you have enjoyed this journey today thank you so much to Spotify for sponsoring this video again there is over 250,000 titles to choose from if you are a premium account holder and you are like the master account holder go in browse all the different audiobooks and read some of the recommendations I've given you here or explore there's so many different ones to choose from truly amazing this is all live right now go do it other than that take care of yourself and I'll see you soon bye

Channel: uncarley

Views: 283,346

Keywords: booktok, booktok romance, booktok video essay, booktok commentary, hockey romance, colleen hoover, the love hypothesis, acotar, best romances, booktok books, the problem with booktok, it ends with us, colleen hoover books, ugly love, romance tropes, deep dive, rant review, uncarley, booktok is bad, booktok is good, romance book recommendations, what are tropes, tropification, sarah j maas, a court of thorns and roses, romance tropes tiktok, romance tropes i hate

Id: GJhn_X_zdTI

Length: 33min 14sec (1994 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 09 2024