Absolutely infuriating that people keep trashing on R.F. Kuang for “being pretentious” when they knowingly pick up a novel in a genre KNOWN for using academic language. Like please don’t read dark academia if you’re not prepared for references to classic lit, footnotes, or elevated language like babe those are genre staples.
my most pretentious take is that people are waaay too comfortable claiming the "dark academia aesthetic" while not actually practicing the academia part. it's ok if you like easy, fast books to forget about your reality and disconnect from the real world but, sometimes, books are DIFFICULT, they also may be CHALLENGING READINGS or COMPLICATED and that's FINE and ACADEMIC authors are not PRETENTIOUS for writing books with an ACADEMIC language in an ACADEMIC approach
