Well... I Tried Booktok...

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Is BookTok really as shallow as people make it out to be?

▬▬▬▬ Tale Foundry Community▬▬▬▬

▬▬▬▬ Tale Foundry Team ▬▬▬▬
• Talebot — The Talent
• The Taleoids — The Talent's Helpers
• Benjamin Cook — Writer, Director, & Voice Actor
• Kathryn Healy — Researcher & Writer

[TheTaleFoundry]

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[hollowspecs]

You... Ventured into the forbidden depths?

[catbatrat]

I LOVE how he represents Tiktok's feature as a clown making balloon animals out of people's requests! 🤣

[greenhydra]

"less reskinned Star Wars fanfiction" That was... weirdly specific.

[polec]

I am incredibly impressed that a youtuber with almost 1 milion subscribers doesn't use social media and is genuinely confused about how to operate something like tiktok

[asexualtrickster]

Once again I scream out: THIS IS WHY LIBRARIES AND LIBRARIANS ARE IMPORTANT!!!

[theblackwithin]

the algorithm isn't designed to give you the content you will like the most... the algorithm is designed to glue as many people as possible to the phone as long as possible. it's not meant to enrich your time, but enrich the shareholders at the cost of your time.

[AmyLove-lxiu]

One thing I hate on Booktok is the love for books with abusive relationships. Don’t get me wrong there is nothing wrong with reading them but I hate the community loving the romanisation of the abusive relationship portrayed in books.

[benholland]

So glad Talebot got tiktok so I don't have to. He is a true hero

[deathroll]

I also thought "booktok" would be an open discourse on books. Which sounds cool, if it worked like that.

[trade]

For the anime watchers here, Spicy Booktok is like the less demented female version of guys who only watch Ecchi/harem/isekai anime.

[BaobhanloreArt]

As a seventeen year old girl, I read a book I didn't know what a Booktok book because my mum bought it for me from a local supermarket. But it was The Cruel Prince by Holly Black. And though I initially enjoyed the series, looking back I see so many moral problems with it and I think it serves as a good example of everything wrong with the current state of romantasy.

In the first act, the love interest and his friends used magic to essentially drug and SA the protagonist, but it's always just called bullying by the book and fanbase. And I mean SA. They made her take off her clothes, crawl around and tries to start with her kissing the LI's foot before they were stopped.

The book attempts to be feminist, but I've learned most feminist books are actually just books that feature women. So many of these series romanticise physical, emotional, and sexual abuse under the guise of being "dark romance". And as a teenager, the main demographic, I didn't see anything wrong with the series. But then I ended up getting abused, and now I look back and wonder if perhaps my normalisation of that scene might have contributed to my ignoring of the warning signs throughout.

And whenever YouTubers here refer to books they found on Tiktok, their complaints are often the same. They treat women like purely sexual punching bags and promote them to children. They are often mislabeled as romance when erotica is more accurate. And tiktokers who promote these series, who are mostly adults, have no media literacy to understand how harmful they are.

It happened with Twilight making girls stay in abusive relationships too. It's not a new thing, but it's never been as blatant and unashamed as it is now.

[AstonishingRadish]

"Human Man" nice
As someone who doesnt use tiktok besides watching the occasional thing my friends send me, I appreciate your sacrifice on our behalf :)

[mutedups]

The main gripe I see with Booktok is that it's really smutty. There's no other real issue just very smutty.

[catylist]

I did not expect to see ACoTaR in the thumbnail of a tale foundry video…

[wercia]

It was nice to see content maker who acknowledge pretty specific preferences of the most popular(and major) side of booktok and yet not demonizes them. Heck, even defending them at some measurement. What a professional/objective take of this topic!

[tamar]

Pretty solid summary of tiktok and how it operates. I briefly got STUPID addicted to that platform when the pandemic first hit, and while there are good creators and bad creators like any platform (some of the indie animators on there are absolutely amazing) the way the app itself is structured is designed to tap into your most compulsive monkeybrain. Misinformation and bullshit rises to the top more than almost any other platform, which is impressive yet horrifying, and the kind of longform discussion that is necessary for something like a book community is basically impossible.

Plus, cults. So many cults.

[Damonkyking]

I love how Talebot is so positive in the face of the general stupidity of the internet, he is doing his very best to not say anything offensive, even when meeting the potholes everywhere.

[lionmom]

From an article on the dangers of reading, written in 1864:
"Listen to the evidence given by a physician in Massachusetts: 'I have seen a young lady with her table loaded with volumes of fictitious trash, poring day after day and night after night over highly wrought scenes and skillfully portrayed pictures of romance, until her cheeks grew pale, her eyes became wild and restless, and her mind wandered and was lost – the light of intelligence passed behind a cloud, and her soul was forever benighted. She was insane, incurably insane from reading novels."

The moral panic about women reading Jane Austin novels (and men reading Charles Dickens) never fails to amuse me.

Just adding some perspective on "modern" topics about reading for entertainment, rather than reading out of necessity, academic, religious, etc.

[Mr.Axolotl]

I found that thing you said about hypnosis interesting because hypnosis is a naturally occurring phenomenon, and most entertainment is a form of hypnosis. One example of this is someone so consumed by a book that they become unaware of their surroundings.