APHASIA|Dark Academia: The Psychology of a Genre

It is worth investigating two of the more foundational texts of the genre of dark academia for the macabre insights they offer into exceptionally brilliant scholastic minds — Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and ML Rio’s If We Were Villains.

In The Secret History, one gets to see how a clique of students of the Greek classics at a fictitious liberal arts college gets so immersed in the study of Greek mythology, drama, language, and practices that they attempt to re-enact Greek rituals and experiment with alternative moral codes to the point that they become embroiled in crime, exposing their darkest feelings, petty rivalries, and errors of judgment that have fatal consequences. Similarly, in If We Were Villains, students at a highly exclusive drama school centred on creating the best Shakespearean actors find themselves reliving the violent, murderous aspects of characters in the plays as they grapple with rivalries and clashes in their own group. Like well-constructed crime dramas, they show how inevitable the descent into ‘the dark side’ can be, and how utterly unpredictable.

Perhaps a part of the fascination of dark academia is how it dramatises the psychological conflicts of its characters in environments that simultaneously fuel their creative impulses and their anti-heroic dimensions, pushing readers to reflect on their own relationship with knowledge, expression, experience, and human fallibility, and reminding them of the echoes of the Faustian bargains made by other characters such as Oscar Wilde and Macbeth who traded in their ambition for far darker consequences.