Hi! I absolutely loved Manacled and it is by far the best fanfic I have read in a long time. Recently though I saw a tik tok made by a creator who claimed that Manacled romanticized r@pe and shouldn’t be praised. I have been feeling very conflicted about this lately and am not sure how to feel. What are your thoughts about how the fandom romanticizes your story? Did you ever intend for Manacled to come off this way?
If it’s the Tiktok I saw, the creator only read six chapters of Manacled and then was reacting to the trigger warnings on the fic. If anyone who has read the entire story wants to bring examples of where they believe I’ve romanticized rape, I am more than happy to have a conversation about that with them.
But I’m not going to spend my limited free time endeavoring to change the minds of people who themselves admit to either having skim-read or only partially-read Manacled, and then proceeded to go to a public platform and make sweeping judgements about me and my intentions as an author, and why they think people have read and enjoyed the story.
Personally I have never regarded Manacled as a romance. It is romantic in certain gothic romance regards, but in my opinion, fundamentally, Manacled is a dystopian horror story and a tragedy, insofar as literary categorization goes. Admittedly the characters don’t die, but the structure of the story is not actually very romance shaped. Tragedy and romance have many similarities, but the form of their climax is distinct, which is part of why many people are dissatisfied with the epilogues, because they don’t do the things that readers expect to feel at the conclusion of an epic romance. They’re not supposed to, because it wasn’t.
Horror and romance are also closely related, they have many of the same beats, but they’re inversions of each other. One of my favourite tumblr posts puts it thusly:
something about horror as a genre is very inherently similar to romance, but it’s differently romantic. it’s like if romance could be compared to a rabbit, then horror is a hare. a hare is the same shape-ish as a rabbit, but it’s different; it’s upturned and eerie and comes at you from a sideways angle.
i think this connection between the two genres is the presence of love. love as a concept. romance is the genre that beautifies love, and horror is the genre that explores love in ways that aren’t beautiful. horror is the monstrosity of love gone sour, or the absence of love, or the emotions that the intensity of love and pain birth. slasher horror is monstrous obsession, while existential horror always has a narrative that makes you rethink what love means, what being human means. just like romance.
That’s very much the way I see Manacled. It was intended as the Black Mirror version of JKR’s power of love premise in the HP series. The question I wanted to ask in writing it was what kind of love is truly enough to win a war? Manacled is the horror version of Harry Potter, where love is monstrosity.
Much as I occasionally wish it, I cannot police interpretation. I don’t create characters as moral endorsements, and I expect that anyone old enough to read a M rated story to have the critical reasoning to understand that.
