A short history of Dark Academia
Though it’s unclear how and where, exactly, Dark Academia began, many users discovered it on Tumblr. Ana Alsan, for example, a 21-year-old English literature and linguistics student in Brazil who runs the Dark. Academia Instagram account, said she initially encountered the subculture on Tumblr in 2014.
“It was not the ‘Dark Academia’ that we know today,” Ms. Alsan said. Instead, Dark Academia on Tumblr focused on dark photos and written posts about what books to read. “But it had a lot of gothic and classic aspects.”
Bateman, Kristen. “Academia Lives - on TikTok.” The New York Times, 30 June 2020.
Also in 2020, The Secret History becomes the hot new book all over again. During COVID lockdown when the doors of schools across the nation are bolted shut, a social media phenomenon known as Dark Academia flowers. In fact, so big does it get that it warrants a piece in the New York Times. Quote: "Created largely by users 14 to 25 years old, posts tagged with the Dark Academia moniker have racked up over 18 million views on TikTok ... it is a subculture with a heavy emphasis on reading, writing, learning...It’s not unusual to see fans dressing up as their favorite book characters or posting vintage photos of novelist Donna Tartt, author of The Secret History, Dark Academia’s essential text."
Anolik, Lili. “S2E14 It Was Like I Went Where I Failed To Go.” Once Upon A Time In Bennington, Stitcher Podcast Documentary, 08 December 2021. 49m03s
After 2014, this aesthetic genre retroactively included the following works and their tropes featured:
- 1929: Rope
- 1989: Dead Poets Society
- Hollywood New England - The story takes place at a boarding school in Vermont
- Trope Maker
- Set in 1959, 30 years back
- Boarding School
- Elaborate University High
- True Companions - Neil, Charlie, Knox, Meeks, Pitts
- Broken Ace - Neil, who is also Driven to Suicide
- New Transfer Student - Todd
- Mentor Archetype - John Keating
- 1992: The Secret History
- Trope Codifier
- Reverse Whodunnit - We are given a description of the deceased on the first page, and told by our narrator that he and some other characters murdered that person.
- Penny Among Diamonds - Richard Papen
- Hollywood New England - The story takes place at a university in Vermont
- Set in The '80s, roughly 10 years back
- Ambition Is Evil - The central cast attempts to reenact a Bacchanal
- Fire-Forged Friendship - Murder and cover-ups brought them closer together
- Sliding Scale of Realistic vs. Fantastic - The other characters claim to have met with the god Dionysus, perhaps in a collective hallucination or perhaps—as one character is said to still have the bite marks that prove The encounter—it was a mountain lion that they all mistook for an Ancient Greek god.
- Mentor Archetype - Julian Morrow
- Driven to Suicide - Henry Winter
- 2013: Kill Your Darlings
- Set in 1944, about 70 years back
Blogging and Social Media website members begin to trend with a category aesthetic #darkacademia in 2014, concurrently and anteroactively including the following works:
- 2017: If We Were Villains
- 2022: Babel, or the Necessity of Violence
- 2022: Fraternity
From many of the above examples, we can glean the following:
The Dark portion of Dark Academia can be:
- Murder Tropes
- Prejudice Tropes
- Choosing Death
- Depending on the Shades of Conflict there may be a Special Aesop Victim or Aesop Collateral Damage
- Family of Choice and/or Criminal Found Family (but they're often The Proud Elite with maybe a Penny Among Diamonds Scholarship Student type of criminals.)
The Academia portion of Dark Academia can be:That it is set at or operates by any of the following...
- prestigious grammar school
- boarding school
- university
- professional academia
- independent study
- Oxbridge
- Boarding School
- Hollywood New England
The work may or may not resolve a synthesis between Romanticism Versus Enlightenment.
Finally, the characters are prone to...
