Elements of Dark Academia
Was just reflecting on some of the major elements that make up–and, I think appeal most strongly in– dark academia plots and help to define the genre, as well as the lifestyle some people want to emulate from DA works.
Romance – to romanticize the present (late nights studying, long bus rides, decorating your apartment, the rain, hangovers, fresh flowers, the small rituals of life, the bad and the good); to romanticize the past (the ancestors whose faces and talents and fortunes combined to make your own; the thrill of antique china, of writing with quill and ink, of secret inscriptions in battered books; recalling the poets, and artists, and scientists, and activists who laid the scaffolding for your work– how they suffered and prospered, in circumstances so different, and yet, so similar to your own; the pain of nostalgia, for your own past or another’s); to romanticize the world around you (seeing the horns of Diana in the moon and the wink of Ishtar in the morning sky, greeting the birds in the morning, letting yourself be carried away by the smell of fresh bread and the taste of cold fruit).
Secret societies – be they as small as a clique of intensely close friends, or as enormous as the Masons; their rites as ancient as the Orphic cult’s or as modern as a sorority initiation; their purposes as grand as the decoding of the DNA strand or as simple as studying for finals together.
Profound interest – in a subject, or a number of subjects, frequently to a level that others might find strange or even tiresome, such as J.R.R. Tolkien’s great love of plants and nature walks, which were always long and rambling due to his habit of frequently stopping to examine a flower or tree and regale anyone present with its history, etymology, taxonomic information, folklore, and any other facts that came to mind.
Isolation and intimacy – the loner vs. the crowd. The person apart, without kindred spirits, meeting others who share their passions and ideas. The students drawn together to work on projects that are specially, secretly, their own, and no one elses’. The solitary scholar vs. the classmates thrown together at random. Lovers alone with each other, but not alone themselves. The displacement of not belonging even while in a group. The clique vs. the crowd. Happiness in solitude. The togetherness of two or three people, silent, absorbed in their own work or their own thoughts, but together in the space and in their intimacy with each other.
Excess – enjoyment pushed to hedonism; fashion carried beyond ideas of style or good taste; interests and hobbies indulged to the point of eccentricity, eccentricity to the point of affectation, passion to the point of obsession.
Intensity of feeling – to be carried away by art, by nature, by music, by love, by religion, by knowledge, by history; being moved to tears at seeing a Michelangelo in the flesh, or the sunrise on a cold morning; Katherine Earnshaw declaring “I AM Heathcliff!”; the out-of-body feeling from walking over steps curved from ages of wear and knowing that others stood exactly where you do now, decades and centuries before you; William Wilberforce dazed in his garden in Amazing Grace, or when Orlando flings herself onto the moor and declares “Nature, I am your bride! Take me!”; the pursuit and experience of ekstasis– of ‘standing outside oneself’.
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