Thousands of people bought the “romantasy” fashion book because it was cute. An unpleasant surprise awaited them.

The consumerist desire that invades any area of ​​our lives also contaminates our hobbies. We are no longer talking about your identity being determined by your style when it comes to dressing or the music you listen to; Now, not missing the latest literary viral phenomenon in #Booktok also forms that identity that is built through what we consume.

And if not tell everyone who bought ‘Catabasis‘, the author’s new novel RF Kuangfor its colorful edition and supposed themes related to a whole legion of readers, only to end up with a disappointment that leads them to abandon it after a few pages.

Be aware of the latest news and let your private library be ground zero of your literary diogenes, full of those decorated songs so instagrammableis a new aspect of consumerism. The essential thing is not to search and select a book that suits your taste or surprises you, but to look for that pompous edition in trend on Tiktok.

With the rise and increase in the number of readers has given way to a community on social networks that consumes books, mostly from a specific genrehe romanticasyand that follows like a mantra literary fashion of the month. As we have mentioned, marketing strategies can confuse the public and in order to attract the largest number of buyers, sometimes blur categories and genres that should be delimited.

The fever for colored songs

As a regular reader, it is healthy to get out of that nebula and inform yourself well about the reading you are going to do or, on the contrary, go with an open mind and let yourself go when starting those new pages. Because if you don’t, you can come to ‘Catábasis’ looking for a romance within an academic-fantastic environment and end up with your head full of equations, formulas and philosophical postulates.

If we dive in reviews from ‘Catábasis’, we will find an alleged romance Dark Academia with the clichés of rivals to lovers (rivals to lovers), forced proximity (forced proximity) or one bed (the famous trope of rom-coms where the protagonists are forced to share a single bed). This would lead us to place our perception of the work in an erroneous perspective. The novel has been sold as if it were addressed to the general public, when It’s niche.

RF Kuang is not your typical romance writer. In his previous books such as the ‘Poppy War’ trilogy (named by Time as one of ‘The 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time‘) we find an epic fantasy of Asian inspiration; in ‘Babel’, a criticism of British imperialism; and in ‘Amarilla’, a satire on the publishing world. Perhaps it is from there that we have to establish the starting point of ‘Catábasis’.

It may be that the public has been launched en masse to buy Kuang’s new novel infected by expectations, but just look at social networks to see that the outcome has been disappointing for not a few. The result of this phenomenon is curious because the criticisms of Kuang’s novel are based, for the most part, on issues that have little to do with its theme or the characters. It seemed that part of the book’s audience, directly, I didn’t know what he was facing.

On this occasion the #Booktok community was a victim of “what goes” and an elegant and striking edition: but, dear readers, not everything has to be romance and romanticasy. This lucrative sales strategy that consists of labeling all the literary novelties under clichés that are associated with romance to attract more attention ends up being a double-edged sword for books like Kuang’s.

hell is a campus

In this new novel we find the story of two Cambridge doctoral students who, after the death of their thesis advisor, decide to travel to hell to look for him and obtain a letter of recommendation that will determine their professional future. And yes, we can accept the label Dark Academia since it has several of its elements, just as we also find a romance that floods and emerges throughout the story; but ‘Catabasis’ (a Greek term that refers to the descent to hell and subsequent exit from it), is about something else.

RF Kuang, in essence, uses the underworld as MacGuffin to create a critique and a satire of the academic world through a raw and realistic vision.

The author shoots us with scenes in offices that cause more chills than Dante’s own inferno; while talking about toxic rivalries, directors who abuse their power, gender inequality and academic obsession with knowledge. And, despite fantasy and a system of magic based on logic and paradox, these unreal situations trigger a conversation and social criticism about the academy.

While the protagonists Alice and Peter wander through the “eight circles of hell” we are immersed in numerous philosophical and mathematical elements. Dante, Piranesi, the myth of Orpheus or the scrolls of Hecate are part of the daily narrative. The book is full of mathematical theories, academic references, and terms that will make you stop several times to do a Google search.

The fact that for some doctoral students hell is, literally, their own university, already makes us suspect that we are not facing a rivals to lovers to use; not even in the face of academic criticism of Ali Hazelwood style. ‘Catabasis’ is dense and requires active reading; In fact, we can say that it is an essay disguised as a novel that sometimes sacrifices the rhythm of the plot or its development in favor of the style and ideas it wants to convey.

With an acidic, witty and harsh tone, Kuang uses Alice as the epicenter of the narrative. A character who is not designed to make you like him, but to embody the loss of health and identity caused by the pressure of his tutor and the academic environment. The message that we can filter is quite clear: Sartre said that hell is others but, in reality, it is defending a doctoral thesis.

This ‘one bed’ in hell is not what I expected

With everything that is presented to us in the book, we would expect criticism that may question the tone of the narrative or the certain romanticism that is transmitted from the precarious situation of the protagonists at the university.

However, readers’ reviews are based on disappointment when reading something that It didn’t fit into his schemeas if he FOMObookstores or #BookTok itself, with its consumerist desire, would have betrayed them. And be careful, it is very valid that you do not like a work, but to articulate a criticism that a book by Dark Academia talk about the Academy or saying that it is bad literature because it uses terms that are somewhat more complex or that are beyond the knowledge of the average viewer is not the most fair or constructive.

So all that debate has also awakened the need for that another part of the community reader to explain, point by pointthe reason for the inadequacy of the foundations of these criticisms. By doing a simple search for the author, many readers would have saved themselves the trouble (in addition to the more than 20 euros that its physical edition costs).

It is not the first book that a marketing campaign It does a disservice, making potential readers believe that it is something different from the product that later reaches their hands. There is the case of ‘Where Are You, Beautiful World’ by Sally Rooney, which was advertised as a new book in the style from his successful ‘Normal People’ and it disappointed more than one because it was a friendship story without the previous romantic focus.

Even in cinema there are similar cases like ‘Mother!‘ by Darren Aronofsky, which was sold as a psychological horror film to end up being a Christian and even environmentalist allegory. Although if we talk about disappointments, the one who was part of the fandom of Star Wars with the eighth episode by Rian Johnson for breaking away from the monomyth so common in the franchise.

Even this month something similar is happening with the long-awaited book ‘Alchemised, There Is No One Left to Save’, the novel that emerged from a Popular fanfic based on Harry Potter that it has little of a children’s book. We already have several network users warningas trigger warningthat both the theme and the style of the work are harsher than some readers might anticipate. But between the ostentatious layout and the commercial bombardment, more than one is going to spend money on a book that will do little more than feed their always hungry library.

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