So according to Pinterest, I am now a dark academia guy! (What a weird way to start a post.)
Let me explain. I've never really used Pinterest until recently, when my curiosity got the better of me and I wanted to potentially make some boards of my own. Which I did not. What I instead came across was a never-ending rabbit hole of posts regarding specific topics, because unlike Instagram which is gradually finding it harder and harder to recommend me new stuff, Pinterest never seems to run out! So, having read this book recently and having loved it, one search for If We Were Villains fanart (yes, go ahead and laugh) spawned a gazillion further posts not just about If We Were Villains but about the dark academia literary genre as well. I didn't know it actually qualified as dark academia having mostly thrown around the term "dark academia" as a label for someone broody and tragic and definitely not myself, but there you go. And clicking on a few of these posts quickly led me to a novel very similar in outline to If We Were Villains that people often associate with it, The Secret History.
Occassionally people like to be snobbish and tell you "If We Were Villains is basically just a ripoff of The Secret History". To them I say, "shush". Okay, I'll concede there are a lot of similarities and the broad outline is fairly similar, but the devil's in the details. I've always found it very surface level to ignore writing style, tone, characters, key messages and themes, the vast majority of the plot and the setting, and call If We Were Villains a ripoff simply because they share the plot of "uni students done do a murder". (There are more similarities than that but it's mainly that specific concept that the two books have in common and not much else.) To those who have in fact read both books, I would encourage to place any scene from The Secret History into If We Were Villains, change a few names and see how similar it seems, then try it the other way around.
Now what's weird about me writing this article about The Secret History is that...*brace yourselves*
I didn't reeeallly like The Secret History.
If this resonated, great. If you think The Secret History is a work of literary art and that I'm a delusional imbecile who should keep his opinions to himself....well, you're probably right honestly. But let me say my piece. The Secret History rubbed me the wrong way for some reason...actually, for several reasons. To justify my stance, I will say it's not just me thinking "hmm, there was something wrong with that book for me, I just can't figure out what irked me". No, no. I know exactly why I didn't like this book, but I don't really want to go into why because I'm actually not the best (okay, I'm terrible) at actually arguing my points, and (an even worse flaw) I am terrible at having opposing arguments thrown at me. I'll be up all night thinking about them, thinking of newer, better points that I could throw back, my heart racing, my thoughts racing and my body wishing that I'd gotten my bloody 8 hours in. And after all that, I'll probably never even make those points I thought of. They probably wouldn't come up again and the other person would've done the healthy thing and moved on from the argument, like a silly little adult.
But what I will say is that I definitely should have read The Secret History BEFORE I read If We Were Villains. Had I done this, I will, I admit, have had a far greater appreciation for the plot, the chilling tone, the grim details, all of it. Furthermore, from the perspective of a reader in 2023, The Secret History is written in the style of a classic. Apart from the frequent cursing, which, combined with the drug references, admittedly probably made it an unconventional and engaging piece of fiction for 1992, it does feel like something you might read for A Level English Literature. If We Were Villains feels more modern, like the characters are people you might actually know, or the setting is a place you might actually have been to. Clever modern pieces of fiction don't get weighed down by details like I would argue past fiction does (thousands of literary critics clench their hands in anger), so If We Were Villains feels like a breath of fresh air compared to The Secret History. I know I said I wouldn't go into details, but all the non plot-centric details in If We Were Villains come across like pathetic fallacy, or world-building, or setting the scene, and in The Secret History it's often like "sorry, what possible reason could I have to need to know the unique history of this bar Charles is getting drunk at?"
And to return to the English Literature analogy, reading The Secret History really did feel a lot like reading The Age of Innocence for A Level (all my fellow English students know how frustrating a read this was), except The Secret History is way, way longer. And the general vibe you're feeling is "I know I'm reading a great work of literature here, but why do I feel so damn ANNOYED??" It's little nitty gritty details about the characters in particular that make me just so sort of irritable, like yes you're a fictional character in a book I'm willingly reading but can you please shut the f*ck up???
So enough of me slagging off works of literature my casual writing and blog posts couldn't hold a candle to in my wildest dreams. And back to Pinterest! So as I was saying, posts about The Secret History came up on my page and I ended up clicking on more once I'd finished the book as I could actually understand them. And the thing was, a lot of them were actually quite quirky and fun, and made me feel as if perhaps I'd misjudged the book somewhat. The posts poke fun at the messy sexual confusion of the protagonist, Richard, given he says he's straight but also internally says and does a few things that...don't indicate that. They depict the characters in fancasts or fanarts that make the characters seem enigmatic and attractive, like you'd actually want to meet them, even though they're all really bad people....off topic. The posts give a bit of humour to the dark subject matter. It made me wonder whether I'd read too much into what I perceived as the failures of The Secret History. Yes, I am still talking about Pinterest posts. Fans' love of the content made me think that there is stuff to love about The Secret History-if not as a literary classic, as an angsty, youthful, drug-addled murder mystery with a bit of culty Greek stuff too.
However, seeing it as something unserious and escapist ignores one of my other key problems with the book, which is that after the murder is committed things get so cartoonishly tragic and dark. It almost feels like there wasn't much the characters could actually do after that, so it feels oddly directionless and I feel that Donna Tartt (who I by no means mean to slag off) just threw in a bunch of horrific details just so there would be something of substance there. It's not intriguing anymore as the murder has been carried out, and it's not even like it was leading up to them being caught, because they aren't. Things just kind of happen, and the explicit and dark events which occur from then on (which, by the way, I could go on a huge rant about but won't mention in this post) aren't really related to anything that's happened in the book so far, they're just sort of there.
So the fan-made content which I've been talking about seems fairly untethered to the original story. I get it, there is a certain "vibe" to works of fiction that might not match up with the actual content. Tell someone that The Secret History is about Greek students doing a cult ritual, committing a murder, ends somewhat tragically and includes a bunch of dark and twisted details, plus it's a literary classic defined as "dark academia", sure! That sounds super appealing to me! Reading it though, less appealing. The Secret History feels like someone creating a moodboard with words like "dark", "macabre", "murder", "explicit language", "university", "Greek", and finding that even though all of that sounds really cool, it's actually hard to make truly brilliant content out of.
This discrepancy between fandom culture and the content matter which generates such a culture is something I've been interested in since watching Quinn Curio's video essay on the Slytherin house in Harry Potter, in which she makes reference to the way fans' associations of characters in Slytherin are different from the characters themselves. (I'll include a link down at the bottom.) Fans associate characters (through posts on various social media platforms) with mystery and intrigue, and associate the traits of the house with a persona of a "tough exterior" friend who actually has a heart of gold but is a little sneaky and sarcastic. While I will say that if the Pottermore quiz sorts you into Slytherin it's somewhat likely you are that friend, within universe there is literally one Slytherin who isn't a really bad person and if you're a casual fan you won't even know that Horace Slughorn exists. So of course fans only shed light on the more wholesome version of their Hogwarts house.
To use a couple examples I can relate to a bit more (of course), Taylor Swift's fans do this as well. Something I personally love about her music is the unique sense of identity she gives each of her albums through a combination of aesthetic, style and storytelling within the songs. People are so intent on finding out "what's your favourite Taylor Swift album" because her 10 studio albums (I'm excluding re-recordings) to date feel as if their vibes are entirely different; this completely sets her apart in the industry, as I would argue most other artists' content never varies with the twists and turns that Swift's does.
Indeed, I would go further and venture that from her fourth studio album, Red, to her most recent, Midnights, the albums have such different tones and styles that they could have been written by different artists each time. To circle back to my point, everyone wants to pick an album that's "theirs", even if it's not necessarily the one they believe is of the best musical quality. ("My" album is Speak Now, though I think her best is folklore.) Her albums have such strong identities that people take the traits of them further and exacerbate them to create something greater and something more personal to them. (I feel at this point I'm just referencing fandom theory from Media Studies A Level, and am only now registering how ironic it is that I am actually finding my A Levels relevant today.) Fans' content may indeed be (and are likely to be) strongly based off these albums' content and visual aesthetic, as well as possibly inspired by Taylor Swift's own comments on them. But to give an example of them being re-interpreted somewhat, whilst Swift's evermore may allude to winter, folk, stories, an orangey-brown aesthetic, melancholia and the like, the social media posts depicting an image of a woman looking at old, dusty books by candlelight in a mansion is never explicitly mentioned. It just fits the vibe of the album, so why shouldn't fans like doing this?
To use a less modern pop culture-y example, you might find that fans re-interpret content to make it more...shall we say...acceptable, and for this, I turn to my degree, Ancient History, or more specifically, Greek mythology. I have less concrete evidence and more general conversations with Classicists or Classics enthusiasts as proof for this one, but oh well. The Greek gods are often re-interpreted into what their personalities should be, rather than the more...problematic aspects of the lore surrounding them. To put it into context, if you think that something from 20 years ago appears problematic due to its outdated nature nowadays, just imagine something created around the 8th century BCE and try to make it politically correct. It takes a lot of work.
No wonder mythology enthusiasts romanticise the more wholesome, quirky aspects of the gods. Athena is a badass female goddess who's gone toe-to-toe with the male gods in very significant encounters-there's a reason why she's the patron deity of Athens, not Poseidon. But she's also cruel, petty, and a victim blamer to a horrifying extent-I won't go into details, but Medusa being turned into a gorgon was in fact a result of something very much not her fault. (Edit: this is Ovid's account, and a later one at that. My mistake, in earlier versions she was born a gorgon. I think if you take this pretty well-known version into account my point still stands, though.)
But who wants their canon of a goddess who's a badass female icon to include instances of severe antifeminism to the point of turning a female victim into a literal monster? So we don't talk about that, nor do we talk about Achilles other than as the most badass soldier who's ever lived and a gay icon, and his being a badass soldier definitely did NOT include any massacres that are almost certainly war crimes by our (albeit anachronistic) definition. I've literally heard a lecturer refer to Dionysus as "the god of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll"-which I adore by the way. And I mean suuuure, on the surface Dionysus is the most quirky, fun god who's nothing but a wine-obsessed party guy! And he's definitely never basically puppeteered a bunch of Argive women into committing a bunch of horrific crimes just because he didn't like his half-brother, right? Right? Guys? The only god I think absolutely everyone is happy to let suck and stay sucky is Zeus, because there are too many instances of him being an evil creep to excuse said instances. They're so numerous that there's nothing likeable about his personality left to salvage from the wreckage-this is his personality.
If it sounds like I'm criticising this culture of shedding light on the more appealing aspects of fan obsessions, I'm actually not. Well, I'm making fun of it. But I'm guilty of it, too. I often see too clearly what a character in a movie, TV show or book is intended to be, and like them because of this, with the...dodgier moments being justifiable as "well, writers can't get it right ALL the time, can they?" What I mean to say is I've written a fair bit about loving historical fiction that is sadly divorced from reality quite a lot of the time, and concluded that the moral is: do your research, and be aware of what the actual people were like rather than the characters. And I think the same principle applies to shedding light on the aspects of characters you like rather than the aspects you don't, and creating your own headcanon based on this. Except with this, if you've absorbed all the content, you don't even have to do research! Fun! Just be aware of the flaws if you want to consign them to the basement. They'll still be there, but you won't see them.
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