#dark acad

[dark-diary11]

Some Light.

The stars are proof that eveen on the darkest night there is a little light.

[acadarnia]

painted my nails black today 🦇

[willow-ashes]

Are you a disheveled long haired gay or a perfectly styled hair gay?

[montagnotmontarg]

I adore dark and chaotic academia so much i think we need more gryffindor xx academia rep 😞

[writing-mp3]

We are all made of grief

 a poem, unfinished

[h0lyground]

about your tags on that post, not all da is more critical of its characters than other media, dead poets society for example is mostly sympathetic id say. And dwp is critical of its characters where it needs to be: Sam for ignoring the struggles of her darker skinned friends, troy for putting the movement aside for his own gain, Reggie for always prioritizing the civil rights movement over women’s rights,, etc.

This got way longer than I thought it would and I don’t know how to do read mores on mobile, and take all of this with a grain of salt as I may be misremembering something about the show (I’ve only seen it once all the way through)

I see what you mean, although with regards to dps I have already mentioned somewhere on my blog why I think it’s not actually a terribly good example of dark academia (as tumblr has sort of made the genre synonymous with a regular campus novel, which I think dps is). I suppose what I really meant was that, if it’s not critical of their actions, you’re not supposed to believe they’ve made the right choices for the situation/have the correct motivation.

In the secret history, arguably the seminal dark academia piece, the reader knows that they should never have killed bunny, that he may have been an unpleasant person but he did not deserve to die. This is then made clear when each character suffers terribly in the aftermath of the murder, as they were motivated only by their own egoism and a sort of mass mania. (On a side note, read Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm for possibly the earliest example of dark academia, also dealing with the idea of mass mania and the dangers of the hive mind, and is criminally underappreciated).

And I suppose this is where I would argue dwp differs, as they are (generally) good people. Their hearts are in the right place, obviously with some exceptions, so when they make mistakes and poor decisions, the audience is perhaps more sympathetic than they would be to a stereotypical cold/cruel/elitist dark academia character. When the characters are taken down a peg, rightly so on most occasions, they do make an effort to change (sometimes). Fundamentally change is at odds with dark academia, as the characters are so entrenched in their world view/their view of how events should go down.