At the end of the day, Kallmekris was harassed for her input regarding BookTok and the books that users let go viral and she ended up deleting the video. This decision will haunt the legacy of BookTok and I'm not entirely sure that's a bad thing considering the established tendencies.

...does lead to outcomes that could have been easily avoided. To add personal experience, reading novels such as "Verity" and "Twisted Love" I can say there are little to offer there outside of sex scenes. Especially with the former, the actual story stuff doesn't happen until the ending.

BUT. How you're marketing the piece is where the problems arise. The fact of the matter is that BookTok (blanket) had a weird obsession with not outgrowing childhood "ships" and crushes. Continuously utilizing cartoon characters on covers for books that are explicitly 18+ without blatant warnings...

Neither Kris nor I are promoting purity culture in this way. It's not puritan to say "keep your weird fetishes to yourself" and should not be considered as such. With films currently playing right now like Babygirl, there's nothing wrong with being interested in a fetish story like that...

Factoring other titles like "Birthday Girl" and "Credence" (which were both examples in Kris' video), it should be no wonder why exposing that kind of material would cause controversy. Fantasizing about taboo subjects should be something left under lock and key, not on the for you page.

So, the fact that these were the chosen pieces of literature to showcase the interest of BookTok did give the subculture a bad reputation. Books like "Icebreaker" have covers that illicit comparisons to children's novels. This fact SHOULD weird you out.

If you had watched her video, then you would find that her examples are strange. Was it ALL that BookTok was reading? No. But the books she presented were incredibly popular pieces that are prominently displayed in bookstores and big box stores. The influence of the subculture expanded beyond TikTok