By Emi Gruender
“Only One Bed!”
“Fake Dating!”
“Who did this to you…?”
And, of course, the all famous:
“Enemies to Lovers.”
Booktok—the colloquial term for a genre of Tiktoks dedicated to recommending books—uses a strategy called “trope marketing” in an effort to entice readers in favor of specific novels. While book summaries and loglines of the past relied on premise to sell their books, Booktok represents a new generation of literature advertisement, and quite a diluted one at that.
Tropes like the ones outlined above serve as simplistic marketing strategies for today’s commercialized authors. Rather than selling their books on premise, authors today rely on overused but highly popular tropes. These tropes—popularized by fanfiction—describe any plot device that has been used similarly many times over, such as two characters meeting and falling in love in a coffee shop. Another popular trope often referenced: protective grumpy character loves a sunshine-and-rainbows happy character. There’s nothing wrong with writing dynamic relationships such as these, however. But the problem arises when authors rely on their arsenal of tropes to make their book sell, rather than their premise itself. As a result, these characters can become overly stereotypical, becoming caricatures rather than characters. And yes: there is a difference.
When authors create a story thoughtfully, they make sure to give their characters motivation, depth, flaws, and strengths. While it’s not necessary to know your character’s every favorite trinket or pet peeve, knowing characters deeply gives them…well… character. They are shaped by their narrative, and in turn, their narrative shapes them. They are not grumpy just for the sake of being grumpy. Just as real people are too complex to label with a single word, so must authors create their characters to be nuanced. Therein lies the problem of selling books upon the premise of fanfiction-esque tropes. Instead of becoming a dynamic relationship as a result of the plot, these characters—or, if they can be described with a single word, caricatures—are formed upon the story premise that the author thinks will sell best.
But it’s not only character dynamics that are impacted by the booktok-ification of popular YA literature. Specific events, also popular in fanfiction, further cheapen what could have been a well-thought out plot. The most infamous example of this is the “Only One Bed” trope, which is exactly what it sounds like. Two platonic (for-now) characters, for any reason between booking the wrong hotel room or struggling to survive in the midst of war, have to sleep next to one another in the same bed. They’re always reluctant, making sure to place as much distance between the two of them as possible. Maybe they construct a pillow barricade. But alas! For any reason from a panic attack to lack of warmth, the two characters end up…well…cuddling, further teasing their future pairing. When this trope serves to drive the story, it’s more forgivable. But when overly used for no other reason than to get readers kicking their feet back and forth, it reads as redundant fan service.
Tropes like these are deemed as “fanfiction-esque” because their use is best fitted, and most often used, in fanfiction. Popular franchises whose most popular pairings never became “canon” (a part of the media’s actual storyline) find solace on websites like AO3 or Fanfiction.net, where amateur authors take the plot into their own hands. Since the final product, whether it be literature or on-screen entertainment, had already developed characters, setting, backstories, etc., the “cotton-candy” tropes prevalent in fanfiction encourage readers to riff on the source material. Or, in other words, these tropes only work in fanfiction, not stand-alone literature, because the original story was constructed without heeding the popular structures that make contemporary books sell.
When artists make art for the sake of making art, their heart shines through. However, in such a commercialized society, everything must sell. As a result, fanfictionized literature stuffs the shelves more and more, as authors prefer to use a pre-existing structure to craft their story, rather than letting the structures appear on their own as the story develops.