The Mythcreant Podcast 580 – Writing Dark Academia
Do you like spooky nights spent sneaking through dusty old libraries? Of course, literally everyone in the world likes that. Fortunately, now there’s a whole subgenre for all your creepy academic needs. Kinda. Maybe. We’re actually a little unclear what dark academia even is. On the bright side, everyone else seems confused, too, so maybe we can figure it out together.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Melanie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
[Intro Music]Oren: Welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren.
Chris: I’m Chris.
Oren: So, I’ve been hearing a lot about the dark academia subgenre, which makes sense, because what’s spookier than student loans?
Chris: Hmm. They are pretty spooky.
Oren: I assume that’s what it’s about.
Chris: They follow you forever, wherever you go. And just when you thought you got rid of them because they were canceled, it turns out they were un- canceled.
Oren: Yeah. It’s actually illegal to cancel your student loans, apparently. Great job. I love this country.
Chris: Perfect bureaucracy horror.
Oren: First of all, you might wonder what is dark academia? The answer is that it’s a social media aesthetic with a little sidehustle.
Chris: Another meme genre. Those never go wrong.
Oren: Yeah, it’s just a little sidehustle as a fiction genre. The actual origins of the social media aesthetic are highly debated and I don’t know much about them, so I can’t really comment on that. I tried to research more of it and I immediately was hit with videos about how “dark academia doesn’t mean anything anymore, it’s changed so much.” It’s like this is a three-hour video. Um, okay, I don’t think I actually need to know about this part. I only need to know about the fiction genre.
Chris: Um, this is why all the serious scholars are on TikTok, Oren.
Oren: Yeah, obviously. So, it’s a marketing term. Nowadays things get labeled dark academia if they involve vaguely higher education and anything spooky.
Chris: Yeah, I mean I guess it’s pretty self-explanatory. There’s dark and it’s academia seems to be all it is. As far as I can tell.
Oren: The label is applied retroactively quite a lot. Donna Tart’s The Secret History is from 1992. It absolutely was not advertised as dark academia, because that term didn’t exist yet. But now it’s often considered a foundational work in the genre.
Chris: And that book is not speculative, right?
Oren: No, it has occult elements, but it’s not actually magic.
Chris: Right. I mean that does kind of make sense because I feel like if we have a speculative subgenre, we usually have something with more novelty than a college or university in it.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Otherwise, there would probably be something else to remark upon. Other than that it’s academia.
Oren: That is interesting to me, right? Because supposedly the social media genre is all driven by nostalgia. I have not read a single dark academia book that I would consider nostalgic. Some of them are willing to acknowledge that some parts of college are fun, but each and every one of them—except for the one that like barely had any college in it at all, and I don’t even know why it’s called dark academia— was deeply critical of the institution of higher learning. So maybe there are some nostalgic novels out there somewhere with the label dark academia. But of the eight that I read semi-recently, none of them were like that.
Chris: Yeah. I’m not sure dark works are known for being nostalgic.
Oren: Right.
Chris: I’m trying to think of where have I seen a work that is dark but also nostalgic? Yeah, that’s a hard one.
Oren: I can only assume it just makes more sense in the social media aesthetic because in the books it’s like, hey, it’s a dark story and it takes place in college. So, chances are the college is not going be the greatest place to be, otherwise we wouldn’t call it dark, it would just be a campus novel.
Chris: Yeah, I mean, I can imagine that if this is in a very visual medium, then what we’ve got are lots of really pretty pictures of gorgeous university architecture, that kind of thing, and even if it technically looks kind of creepy somehow, I could still see how that would be perceived as glorifying because we’re showing pretty pictures of these institutions.
Oren: Ninth House is kind of like that (the novel by Leigh Bardugo). It makes a big deal of the aesthetics of Yale and how cool it is to be in a dusty room full of old books. We love that, but it’s still deeply critical of Yale’s student societies, sometimes called “secret” societies, which exaggerates how secret they really are. But they do get up to some pretty, uh, not great shenanigans. As a book, it’s very critical of all that, which feels definitely like something someone wrote before 2025. Back before our own government just declared war on higher education. Now that would seem kind of weird because we’re trying to save higher education over here, but before then, yeah, it made total sense.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, I think there’s always been a little bit of that dynamic when it comes to universities and the fact that they have done lots of bad things, but they also have done lots of good things, including sometimes being very inclusive, even though they did a lot of harm.
Oren: Right. Well, and the people who are most likely to critique and dissect institutions also all went to university. You have these institutions whose job it is to train people who critique institutions. So yeah, they’re going to get critiqued a lot. That’s just the nature of the beast.
Chris: Although I’m sure, like any other institutions, they’re not that inclusive, too.
Oren: Sure.
Chris: They probably all have old, white, privileged people who don’t want to let others in.
Oren: You know, we all live in a society.
Chris: We all live in a society. I have obviously been critical of universities many times in our field, but they still do good work and we need them to not be destroyed, please.
Oren: Much more fun to critique universities back when that wasn’t a thing that could actually happen. But onto the more fictional side of darkness that is happening, I do find dark academia a little interesting because I have had a number of clients who have told me that they want to write dark academia. Then the question becomes, is there anything different about dark academia compared to other novels that you have to think about when you’re writing it? No. Call that done.
Chris: The thing I find interesting about it is it’s like the Magic School genre generally. Especially if you’re writing speculative, generally that means that university’s teaching magic things. It’s not impossible to get away from that, but it would be a little hard to get away from that. Gosh, I still remember when I ran that role playing campaign for you folks in a university and you were all expecting the classes to be magic classes. And I was like, no, no, the afterschool clubs are magic. And you kept wanting to go to class. And I’m like, oh no, I’ll have to come up for something for you to do in your normal computer class.
Oren: I have to create content for English 101 over here.
Chris: Yeah. Eventually you figured it out that the action was in the outside of your regular daily classes, but that was a little bit of an uphill battle at first.
Oren: Well, that is the first thing to think about: are you writing a dark Magic School story? Because that is pretty specific. A dark Magic School story does have a lot of requirements because magic schools in themselves are a very tricky genre to write.
Chris: But I do think that if we are willing to make the school dark, we have made it easier.
Oren: That’s true.
Chris: Because the trickiest problem with magic schools is you have to ask the question: why are loving parents sending their young kids to such a dangerous place? Because if it’s not dangerous, then there’s no story to be had there. And you have to figure out, okay, well if it’s safe, how do I get excitement into this tale? And one option is just, well, no, the school’s totally evil. But that takes away from the wish fulfillment part of it, usually, but if we’re just going for creepy, that’s fine.
Oren: And also, because dark academia by default is assumed to be college, your characters are adults. So it’s much easier to create a motivation.
Chris: Yes.
Oren: Parents are not sending them to a dangerous school. They are going there of their own volition, and they can have their own reasons for doing that.
Chris: Right. And it could be risky, but they think the payoff is worth it and they are not in immediate danger as soon as they step at the door. It’s just a lot easier. I published a post recently talking about how to keep your characters in the danger zone.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: And the thing about the stories I was talking about is if you have a haunted house story, for instance, there’s usually a point at which just being in the house is clearly an immediately life-threatening situation. And you have to figure out, okay, why don’t they leave the house at that point? But if we don’t have a serial killer sitting on the other side of the entrance who’s going to immediately “ax” you a question, then we have a lot more flexibility when it comes to why is the character there in this dangerous situation? And people at college age are fairly reckless anyway. Not haunted house reckless, but still somewhat reckless. And so being like, okay, well I’m going to be one of the people who makes it through this situation unscathed and then makes a million bucks. Yeah, that’ll do it.
Oren: And you also have a lot more flexibility when your setting is a college campus, because those are generally pretty sizable as opposed to a haunted house, which is a single structure and, short of some pretty intensive conceits you might add, not that hard to just leave. Whereas with a college campus, sure you could also leave the college campus, but you have a lot more room to build reasons why they don’t want to leave, why there’s something there that they need to do.
Chris: So it is like magic school, but easier.
Oren: Of course, you don’t necessarily have to go the full magic school route. I do think that you usually would want to incorporate the fact that this story is related to higher learning. Otherwise, why are you using that label? But you don’t necessarily have to be as straightforward as we go to class to learn magic. This could just be a normal college, but have some magic around the edges. Have some spookiness in specific electives or hidden in a certain textbook or something.
Chris: Yeah. Usually has to be involved somehow. Would you consider Magic For Liars to be possibly dark academia?.
Oren: To the extent that it’s a very flexible genre term, sure.
Chris: Magic for Liars is basically a noir, but it was a magic school.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: The non-magic main character is investigating a murder at a magic school.
Oren: I, personally, wouldn’t have called it dark academia because it’s high school. And I just associate that term with college. But as we’ve seen, people will label almost anything dark academia as long as it has someone wearing tweed, like Peranesi.
Chris: Like Peranesi. I guess he is studying the house? He is taking notes in his notebooks. There’s not really an institution, I guess we could call the house an institution. Maybe the house is his university and he’s a student.
Oren: Yeah, I mean it’s one of the biggest stretches I’ve ever seen as far as genre-categorizing goes. But Magic for Liars is an interesting example because it isn’t about going to class and learning magic, which is what typically takes up a lot of your time in a magic school story, but it is still about being a school, because it’s a murder investigation where the dynamics of high school are very important to solving it. Because we’re looking into who is this kid friends with? Or they may have been bullied. What’s the teacher relationship here? There’s a lot of that sort of thing.
Chris: The other one that we see a lot besides the school just teaching magic is they’re being a cult at the school. So, I don’t know if you consider The Order to be dark academia. This is an urban fantasy TV show, but there’s a secret society at the university that the main character joins called The Order of the Blue Rose. And they do magic, and they’re clearly supposed to be kind of menacing.
Oren: I mean, I would call that show pretty bad, but you know, if it was written as a book, sure someone would absolutely slap the dark academia logo on it. I would be kind of disappointed because it does take place at a college, but it could take place basically anywhere and very little of it would change. Probably the most college aspect of it is the fact that the werewolves are all written like frat bros. To a pretty extreme degree, right? Where they all make difficult decisions by playing rounds of beer pong. Otherwise, it’s just like, yeah, there’s a secret society and it happens to be on a college campus. The characters almost never go to class, and the classes they go to don’t matter, and there’s the fact that there is no interesting use of the academic organization. I keep coming back to Ninth House because I think it did a really cool job with this. We don’t really go to class much in Ninth House either, but the way the school functions is still important. The student societies play a really big role and the way that they operate and the way that they really don’t want to be regulated, and it’s the protagonist’s job to regulate them, that plays a very big role in the story and really makes the most of its setting as a college campus.
Chris: So, a book I know that was praised for its dark academia atmosphere is the indie queer romantasy Love Immortal. What that one does is it has a New England university and it has a special vault with like super rare books, and Dracula’s diary is in there but has been stolen, so it’s part of the plot. And then the main character’s internship is working at this rare book collection. And then he also attends a gothic literature class, so then we have discussions. It’s kind of like a love letter to gothic literature honestly, this book, which is one thing I enjoyed about it. So then being in that class gets you discussion of gothic literature, and then there’s a rare book collection, but the actual external plot is frat bros sacrificing people in order to make themselves vampires.
Oren: Like one does.
Chris: But at first people are disappearing and there’s a murderer about, so it manages to do enough with those different aspects and kind of weaving them together that people liked the atmosphere and felt that it was dark academia.
Oren: An interesting example was the Joe Hill novel, King Sorrow. So, some spoilers for that since this is a pretty recent book, which starts off having all the dark academia that I crave because the protagonist is at an elite liberal arts college on a scholarship, but he’s kind of precarious. He doesn’t come from money the way that all of his classmates do, and so he is kind of in a risky situation. And so then he ends up getting blackmailed to steal spooky rare books from the cool rare books collection he works in. Rare books are common theme in a lot of these, and I really liked that concept. It was a lot of fun while it lasted. Sadly, that’s only about the first fifth of the book, and the rest of it kind of goes off and does something else, but that was a really neat idea. I also thought it was very funny that he goes to a place called Rackham College, which is a real place, but the real one is in Michigan and this one is in Maine for some reason. It’s not exactly the same. The one in Michigan is a grad school, and this one seems like it’s both an undergrad and a grad school, but it’s odd that you picked that name for it. It feels like you could have done a Google search on that one.
Chris: Yeah, I mean, it sounds like what dark academia maybe needs is more bureaucracy horror. And that’s something that I think a lot of writers just aren’t prepared to write.
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: Because it’s complicated. But that also allows you to have creepy stuff, but like thoroughly grounded in academia as opposed to, gosh, I just don’t feel like I can do anything fun while hanging around at the university. Okay, well, let’s just put the plot over there then.
Oren: A number of these books that I’ve read that are tagged with that label start that way. Oh, we’re on a college campus and the protagonist finds a spooky book. All right, cool. Tell me more. It’s like, well, he immediately leaves the campus and we never go back. Oh, okay.
Chris: I would guess that the storytellers are just having trouble putting plots at the institution.
Oren: I also suspect that the storytellers probably never had this particular sub genre in mind when they were writing and their publisher was like, Hey, this, eh, there’s enough university in here. We can call this dark academia. That’s a hot genre right now. Or at least it was when these books were being published. Who knows if it’s still a hot genre?
Chris: Who knows. What also can happen with this kind of things is that sometimes publishers are like, Hey, look, this is really popular on BookTok, and then start labeling books with it. And if they don’t actually see sales bumps from that after a while, they might be like, okay, that doesn’t work, and they move on or something. Sometimes it’s really hard to tell just because something is being passed around or talked a lot about on social media that doesn’t necessarily translate to a lot of sales.
Oren: I have read a couple of books that did have the academic part down, but not the plot part, which is interesting. It’s usually the other way around.
Chris: So instead of starting in a university and being like, oh, look over there and going, running off to some other plot, they just stayed at the university and there’s no plot?
Oren: Yeah. So in this case it wasn’t technically a university. It’s technically a magic library, but close enough. And it’s called The Atlas Six, and these six mages get hired to work at a cool magic library. And it’s very cool. We love this library. It’s great. And then they’re told, oh, but at the end of your trial period, one of you must be sacrificed.
Chris: Oh, no.
Oren: This place is cool, but it’s not that cool. But then again, we twist it where it turns out that actually that just means one of you is going to be fired and doesn’t get to stay.
Chris: Really?
Oren: .Oh, well, why does that mean anything? What is even the point? You find out early enough that it just completely kills the plot. And so these characters are just hanging around at this library.
Chris: So is that like grimdark Librarians then? Anybody’s who’s not familiar, there’s a cute kind of campy show called The Librarians that was filmed in Portland. But that one actually has plots in it. But, of course, in this case by “librarian” they mean the keeper of a huge magic archive who also basically has magic.
Oren: Yeah. They don’t really do much book collecting in The Librarians.
Chris: They don’t do much library work. Unfortunately.
Oren: It’s almost all artifact hunting. It’s basically Warehouse 13, but instead of working for the government, they’re five randos. What made The Atlas Six interesting to me was that this was clearly an example of an author who was very passionate about books and about reading and about libraries, but just hadn’t quite been able to translate that into a compelling story. It’s not like it didn’t work for anybody. I found some reviews that really raved about it, but it was clear you had to be in exactly the same headspace as the author, or it’s just six characters hanging out at a library for 10 hours.
Chris: Yeah. It sounds like that really needed some stakes that were actually linked to doing academic research, et cetera.
Oren: Yeah. What it needed was more stakes and some urgency.
Chris: Solving a mystery in a library by doing book research, if you really want to get into like the books or looking through documents could be a thing. Definitely in a lot of mystery stories we go out and we fight danger. But if somebody knew enough about books and was passionate about it, I think they could make a compelling story with somebody examining documents and books in a library, especially if you have weird visitors come in so you get some interactions with people.
Oren: And if your characters are already magic, they can have cool magic duels in between serious book reading sessions. That’s kind of what I expected The Atlas Six to be at first. I thought what the book was going to be was going to be these characters all maneuvering to get advantages over each other to make sure they’re not the one that gets sacrificed, which wouldn’t have been perfect, but would’ve at least provided them things to do and some tension. But they find out way too early that they don’t have to do any of that, and so they occasionally still flare their ruffs at each other, is the best way I can describe it. It doesn’t really matter.
Chris: I just love that.
Oren: It’s like, yeah, okay, sure.
Chris: They’re all in this dark library wearing regency costumes with ruffs and lacy frills.
Oren: They kind of come up to each other and try to out alpha nerd each other and, okay, look, this could be interesting if it mattered. If the outcome of this had any effect on anything, I could potentially care about it.
Chris: Yeah we could do library intrigue if we did have a really compelling competition between them. But, again, all of this stuff takes more thought and work to plot than your average plot and plotting is already pretty hard, so a lot of storytellers are just not going to feel up to doing something like that.
Oren: It’s also worth thinking about how evil do you want the institution to be? Assuming that an institution is actually going to play a big role in your story. And I would say that by default, you probably want to go with the idea of it being more like an amoral place where bad things happen sometimes, as opposed to like an active force for destruction. Because even though I wouldn’t say any of this glorifies college, there are still usually some things about it that people like, and most people writing this have been to college, and our memories of it are not usually wholly negative, but that can be kind of weird if you make the whole college evil and then at the end you’re like, no, wait, we have to save the college. Like, do you have to save the college?
Chris: That’s so funny.
Oren: With the book, An Academy For Liars—not to be confused with Magic for Liars, different book, also some spoilers—when we first go there that whole school is evil. It’s a school that teaches nothing but mind control, which is traumatic for both the person using it and their victim. So ,everyone is messed up. And just completely in it for themselves and love hurting other people. The students and the faculty are all like that. All right, well, I guess we’re going to have to end this story by the protagonist either turning evil and that’s going to be the big sad ending, or we’re going to have to burn the school to the ground. No, neither of those things happen. Instead, the big climax is about how we have to heroically save the school. Um, do you?
Chris: Did we find some reveal where they were secretly appeasing the elder gods or something? Is it a load-bearing school?
Oren: No. Instead, what happened is that out of nowhere, the student body turned good and helped the protagonist fight the evil professors, which was wild to me because the students were just as evil as the professors until that point. They did a hazing ritual where you have to mind control the other person into stabbing themself in the hand.
Chris: Because you could do something like Cabin in the Woods, where we have an evil organization that does sacrificial rituals.
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: And then we find out they’re doing it to appease the elder gods.
Oren: Right. And they have some reason for it.
Chris: Or we could just not do that and have everybody change their character. That’s another option.
Oren: That’s an ending where if you wanted an ending like that, you can definitely show that this college, to the extent that it is magic or not, has some good things and some bad things, much like real colleges do. It was just that this book went a little too far into the school is evil and irredeemable side of things.
Chris: Yep. That would be a problem. Doesn’t make for very good stakes anymore.
Oren: Another thing to consider is how much magic your character has. Because again, you know, this is speculative fiction and this is as much a problem in any darker or horror themed genre because the more magic your character has, the harder it is for it to be spooky.
Chris: Yeah, that is a problem.
Oren: Because if your character’s just a normal person, a ghost can be spooky. But if they’re a level 12 mage and they can cast teleport and see astral plane and all that stuff, well okay. A ghost is just another manifestation of magic that you know how to deal with. In general, you want to limit how much magic they have just because otherwise the story’s not going to be very scary.
Chris: Yeah, certainly. I mean, if we want that spooky atmosphere, a human protagonist who does not have magic is very helpful so that magic can stay mysterious.
Oren: In Ninth House—this is going to be both praise and critique—I really liked that the protagonist’s power was that she could see ghosts, and we did a lot with that. She’s not a powerhouse. She doesn’t cast lightning bolts, but she can see ghosts and that does matter in some circumstances. And then eventually we reveal that she can also become super strong by absorbing ghost powers.
Chris: Wow.
Oren: And at that point I was like, why? Why did you give her that ability? It trivializes a lot of her problems.
Chris: That definitely takes away, because the more empowered the character is, the less scary things come off.
Oren: There are just so many issues that she has that as she’s trying to deal with, I’m like, you know, you could solve this by just hulking out? Right? Ghost style.
Chris: I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m a sucker for characters that like power up during the course of the story, but I definitely like less powers end up being cooler in the long run. Just simpler, smaller powers that are used in creative ways.
Oren: Well, with that, I think we can go ahead and say that class is dismissed on this spooky episode of the podcast.
Chris: Well, since we know that Piranesi is definitely dark academia because the narrator is very intellectual and writes notes, and we’re very intellectual and our Patreon is just full of our notes. So, when you really think about it, is our Patreon, not dark academia?
Oren: Hashtag makes you think.
Chris: Yeah. So, if you want to read some of these dark and mysterious notes, you can sign up at patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: Before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber, who’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.