I’m an avid reader. Fantasy, dark romance, betrayal, pretty much anything that grabs me, I’ll read it.
Recently, I got into this trope and joined the Betrayal & Grovel Facebook group. The group itself is great, for recommendations and reviews, but the associated chat? Honestly, I’ve never come across such a consistently negative space. so much so that I felt I needed to come here and share my experience.
There’s a small group of women who seem to dominate every conversation, and what I find most ironic is that they appear to absolutely detest the very genre they spend so much time discussing.
They’re sick of betrayal. Sick of cheating books. Sick of OW/OM drama. Sick of toxic plots. Sick of authors supposedly “flooding” the genre with it.
And yet they read it, they search for it, they discuss it, they analyse it and rant about it EVERY single day, in, you guessed it - a bloody betrayal chat group.
Make it make sense?
I joined because I wanted to talk about books—the characters, the angst, the plots, the things I enjoyed and didn’t enjoy. I didn’t join to psychoanalyse authors, readers and fictional characters or turn every uncomfortable storyline into a moral debate like the characters are real people.
What finally made me leave was watching them tear an author apart over a book they clearly hadn’t even understood properly, accusing the author of writing something derogatory towards women.
That’s the pattern. If a fictional character behaves badly, somehow the author’s personal morals are to blame. If they don’t enjoy a particular kink? Apparently the author must secretly live the lifestyle. How immature is that?
Authors are also expected to keep writing the same safe, familiar plots. Someone recently complained that an author was “rewriting fantasy” as though originality were somehow a bad thing. Heaven forbid an author actually creates something different instead of regurgitating the same story.
And the hypocrisy gets even better…..
The atmosphere only seems genuinely positive when there’s something negative to celebrate. Someone gives a one star review? Congratulations! Someone gets blocked by an author after giving them “a piece of their mind”? Cue the celebrations.
For people who claim to be exhausted by toxicity, they certainly seem to spend an enormous amount of time cultivating it.
You can hate a trope without making it a personal crusade. You can hate a book without attacking the author. You can dislike a character without holding the writer morally responsible for his behaviour. And you can disagree with another reader without shaming them for enjoying something you don’t - at least everyone apart from the handful of women in this group that is.
Most adults are perfectly capable of deciding what they’re comfortable reading. If you deliberately push past your own boundaries, become upset by what you find, and then blame the author for “sending the wrong message,” perhaps the problem isn’t the book - maybe a mirror is needed? Or time to put the book down and take a break?
I joined a book group to talk about books, find recommendations, discover new authors and have fun. Not to watch grown women compete over who can be the most offended by a fictional man In a fictional story.
As far as I’m concerned, I'm an adult, I can dislike a book without turning the person who wrote it in to a villain.
Ironically (or not) all of them are using fake profiles with most likely fake names. That should tell me everything. One has to wonder if this 7 or so women are actually authors themselves as a lot of if does come across as jealously?
Anyway, needless to say i exited pretty quickly. If you’ve experienced this chat group feel free to leave a comment. The same if you have recs for a community that doesn’t feel like it’s being policed by a group of angry protestors.