Liam Parker, 25-year-old billionaire. Arrogant, handsome, ruthless, the only thing he cares about is his son and his job. Bella Adams, a simple and effervescent 24-year-old girl, who lives in an orphanage. What will happen when Bella arrives as a nanny for Liam’s son?” It is the summary of one of the thousands of stories that flood the youth section of the Wattpad platform under headings such as dangerous relationships, bad boy, spicy stories… They are followed by millions of young readers around the world, who make m like such revealing titles as Yes and you say no, From torture to love, Twisted pleasures or Eres mía. In the top ten of the printed books most read by young people (young people, rather) there is a delicate protagonist, a dragon rider, in love with a dark character full of secrets. She is the anti-heroine of the Empiri series by the American Rebecca Yarros, the romance that is making a fortune among young women, hooked on a novel full of romantic tension, explicit sex and a lot of violence. And since Anna Todd’s After burst onto youth bestseller lists around the world in 2013, the dark and toxic romance style has only escalated in youth literature, and and that publishers present them within the diffuse categories of new adult or young adult, the truth is that their reading takes place at ever earlier ages.
“We tell the girls that they can be and do anything and that makes them feel a great responsibility. Those girls put incredible pressure on themselves: at university, at school… That’s why many read to escape, that’s what these novels are for. Someone comes and takes care of everything for you: they’ll make everything okay if there’s danger, they’ll buy you the best car and the best clothes… Whatever, but you know it’s fantasy, like vampires and werewolves or the witches”. This is the opinion of bestselling Tracy Wolff, author of the popular Crave (Planet) series from the United States, another romance starring gargoyles, vampires, werewolves, dragons or witches, all of whom are students at the Kartmere Institute, a school for students with supernatural powers. And it is not the only bestseller that defends the escape route. So is Ana Huang, one of the leading young writers of picy romance, a booming trend fueled by booktokers that has seen Huang sell more than three million books worldwide. “What I like in real life is far from what I like in books. In books, I love the drama, the danger… It’s a safe way to explore things that I wouldn’t want to experience in real life. For example: I really like alpha heroes, morally gray, but in real life I love someone more sensitive and thoughtful”, says the author of Twisted love (Planeta), a series filled with bad boys with a moral questionable but capable of melting the hearts of its protagonists and readers. She, however, and unlike Wolff (a former English teacher), hesitates when asked if she would let her future daughters read her novels: “Oh, well, I don’t know. For my mother, for example, I’m forbidden from it”, he says honestly. Shame? “No. It’s because it constrains my creativity, especially when I write the sex scenes.” But Huang defends by all means the protagonists of his novels, even if they fall in surrender before billionaires with sky-high libidos: “They may seem submissive, but they are the ones who have the power, not men. They can say no at any time. The relationship exists simply because they consent.”
The Venezuelan Ariana Godoy, author, among others, of the Trilogía de los Hermanos Hidalgo (Penguin Random House), is at the age of 33 one of the most valued firms in romantic literature written in the Latin language. She emerged precisely from the Wattpad platform, where her followers numbered in the millions. Godoy shares with Wolff the idea that toxic relationships should not be idealized in books, although she acknowledges that she too flirts with the dark side in her novels. “Readers can enjoy the clichés, the tension and the problems of a toxic or healthy relationship and then close the book, leave it there and that’s it,” she reflects. But he adds: “A single type of relationship is not very limiting in terms of creativity and it also takes a bit of realism out of the stories because, although we would like all relationships to be healthy, that’s not the case.”
The power of first love, the idea that someone will show up and do anything for you, the heroine saving the bad guys… “These are very powerful ideas,” acknowledges Tracy Wolf, who cites Twilight and 50 Shades of Gray for to point out that they are also claims that transcend what is strictly youthful. However, this retired teacher does not lose sight of who her target audience is: “Writing for young people is a privilege, but also a great responsibility and the last thing I want in life is to romanticize a relationship that could be dangerous” . Are there limits, then, in fiction? “The truth is that I have never started to think about limits, maybe I will think about them when I come to consider some issues with a view to the future. For now, I am guided more by the story I want to narrate and I make sure to tell it in a genuine and responsible way, even without characters with questionable morals”, concludes Godoy.
