The Crisis: We’re Losing Experts — and Calling It Gatekeeping One of the strangest shifts happening in book culture right now is the idea that expertise is elitist . We’re living in a moment shaped by: • parasocial reading habits • algorithm-driven discourse • a distrust of institutions • and, frankly, epistemological decay — the belief that nothing is knowable and anyone can be an expert if they “feel strongly enough.” This mindset shows up everywhere. Suddenly: • craft is “

I’ve been thinking a lot about how fandom culture has shifted — and why so many of us feel exhausted by modern BookTok discourse.

There was a time when fandoms were small, intentional, and tucked away in corners of the internet — Early Tumblr, MySpace forums, fan-made websites, and niche spaces you had to seek out. If you were in a fandom, you were there because you loved the thing.

Let’s do a quick history crash course on how trends in genre fiction actually evolve. ACOTAR was drafted long before the romantasy boom. Sarah J. Maas started writing the earliest version around 2012, right at the tail end of the YA vampire craze. Paranormal was fading out, dystopian was peaking, and no one was touching fae in a mainstream way. When she finally published ACOTAR (2015), she absolutely reframed the fae mythos.

(A calm, grounded take — not ragebait, not a clapback, just clarity)

What Trend Reading Actually Is Trend readership isn't new. It arrives in waves, always has, always will.

Then Open TikTok and Enter a Parallel Universe I know I’m not the only one who’s had this experience.  When I finally read ACOTAR, I read it like a genre reader. I’d read fantasy. I love fantasy: • I enjoyed parts • side-eyed parts • loved some characters • felt “meh” about others • understood the messy bits • appreciated the arcs • clocked the trope lineage • took the world as it’s written You know — a normal reading experience. Then I opened TikTok. And suddenly I was in a

Reclaiming nuance, respect, and critical thinking in fandom spaces There’s a reason we love to talk about books.To analyze. To question. To tear apart a scene, a line, a look between two characters and say — what did that mean?  What does it tell us about the world, the writer, ourselves? That’s what makes storytelling powerful: interpretation . But lately, online book culture — especially in fantasy romance and romantasy spaces — has been leaning more toward demolition than

There’s a moment that happens in almost every fandom:A character does something selfish, angry, or cruel — and someone says, “But they’ve been through so much.”And someone else fires back, “Trauma isn’t an excuse.” They’re both right. They’re both wrong. And most importantly, they’re talking past each other.

We live in a time when more people are reading than ever before — and yet fewer seem equipped to actually understand what they’re reading. Scroll through BookTok, Bookstagram, or fandom threads, and you’ll see it:A growing wave of misreadings, emotional hot takes, and confidently incorrect interpretations of characters, arcs, and themes. It’s not that readers are less intelligent — but that literary and media literacy have quietly eroded , even as content consumption explodes

It’s fascinating how modern fandoms will rewrite entire storylines instead of engaging with what’s actually on the page. Take the Supernatural  fandom. Sure, it was chaotic — ship wars, character debates, lore contradictions — but very few fans outright claimed that Sam and Dean were destined to kill each other or that every season’s core themes were a lie. Compare that to ACOTAR , where there’s a persistent push to invent an alternate narrative: Rhys is secretly evil , the m