How Does Dark Academia Turn College into a Lost Paradise?
Even though I have happily devoured many murder mysteries and fantasy books about students at various creepy or magical colleges, I’ve never thought of myself as a dark academia reader. But recently I’ve ventured into the writing of R.F. Kuang, who’s pretty much as dark and academic as it gets—from the sound of her author bio, she’s lived her real life in some of the most ivied and venerable universities the world has to offer. I started Kuang’s book Babel expecting that I wouldn’t get too invested in the squabbles of overeducated college students, but now, a week later, I’ve finished the book, my heart has been torn into tiny little pieces, and I’m feeling rather shell-shocked. So today I’m going to attempt to give myself closure by going back through the book and trying to figure out how exactly R.F. Kuang pulled off such an effective piece of emotional manipulation.
My problem with dark academia is the fixation on college as this bygone time of hope and fellowship, full of beautiful old buildings and glorious academic success and the best friends you’ll ever have. The characters are always determined to build up the college experience into this golden ideal—they’re trying to make a kind of holy destiny out of something that is, ultimately, just school. It feels like they’re walking the line between getting an education and joining a cult.
But I’m starting to realize that the point isn’t college itself, it’s the nostalgia that college evokes. If your characters meet in a particular time and place to live out the best years of their lives, and then, as seems to be the dark academia genre convention, something terrible happens and it all comes to a crashing halt—well, college or not, those are the ingredients for a very moving story. The emotional keystone of dark academia seems to be this potent, poignant nostalgia for an idyllic time that has been lost forever.
And there’s a lot of clever writing that goes into building that mood. The paragraphing in certain scenes, the character development, even the overarching emotional arc of the story is all engineered to make those college days seem incredibly precious so that the disaster that ends them feels really, deeply tragic. When I went back through Babel, I noticed emotional manipulation happening simultaneously on three different levels.
Level 1: Scene/Paragraph Structure
What I noticed, as I was reading Babel, is that the way certain scenes are structured—sometimes even the way certain crucial paragraphs are structured—can do a lot to inspire emotion. For example, look at the chapters where Babel’s main character, Robin, first moves to Oxford University. His first days at Oxford are one long sequence of rich sensory details and imagery—the weather, the food, the new people, the conversation, it’s all lovingly and thoroughly described. In the context of a book that’s otherwise mostly about students shut in small rooms reading books, this makes Oxford feel extraordinarily vivid. The only reason you'd lavish so much attention on anything is if you love it, or you hate it, or if it’s in some other way important to you. So when the book pays such close attention to Oxford, the place begins to feel full of significance.
That first introduction to Oxford in Babel is also bookended with pieces of narration that seem to be an older and wiser Robin looking back on this time of his life. The beginning of the chapter dwells on the fact that this is Robin’s first time living alone, choosing his own friends and filling his own free time, which sets the mood—we enter the scene with this heightened sense of newness and possibility. And the chapter ends with an ominous kind of flash-forward—there are a few portentous closing sentences hinting that the happiness Robin feels isn't going to last. Those opening and closing statements frame Robin’s first experience at college and hold it suspended in amber; it feels special and unique and doomed.
As the book goes on, another scene-level tactic comes into play: the scenes with Robin and his friends making a home for themselves at Oxford run side-by-side with a very different plot in which Robin starts to discover unpleasant secrets about the university. The book comments on how difficult it is for him to keep those things separate while they overlap more and more. That high-contrast scene structure, where the halcyon college days are juxtaposed with this brewing trouble, feeds right back into the tension between the beautiful paradise of college and the forces that are gathering to corrupt it.
Level 2: Characterization
The main cast of characters in Babel is designed to build this sense of a special place and time and group of people. This is the ideal set of college friends, charismatic and interesting with lots of experiences in common—it’s almost too good to be true. Robin’s friends are all also extraordinarily clever. They’ve studied for years, they’ve passed competitive entrance exams—they’re objectively very gifted students. So when Robin becomes friends with this group, he feels like he's been let into an exclusive society of brilliant and world-changing people.
The sense that Robin is miraculously lucky to meet these people and get to know them is especially intense because he comes from such a deprived and lonely background. The book goes too far with this sometimes—in places, the characters feel like windup toys primed with the events of their pasts and set running on fixed courses they can't change. But the fact is that if you take a character who has nothing and you drop them in a college setting where they have friends and purpose and respect, then of course they’re going to love college, and the readers are going to love college as seen through their eyes. When Babel drops all those little hints about how Robin’s happiness might not last, it’s unbearable—if he loses what he's gained, that would be heartbreaking.
Level 3: Themes and meanings
I think the reason Babel delivers such a gut punch is that it's not just Robin’s academic aspirations that are at stake here. Oxford isn’t just a university for Robin, it’s a symbol of the life he briefly dares to hope for, with fellowship and comfort and time to unravel the mysteries of translation. The crisis that overtakes him—and I won't go into detail, but there's a reason the book's alternate title is The Necessity of Violence—that crisis is more than an external event, it's a brutal blow to Robin's sense of himself and the person he thought he would become. What I’m seeing after reading Babel is that dark academia is a mythmaking engine that takes our cultural memory of college and transforms it into this universal story of lost innocence. We all go to college, we have our time in paradise, and then we all have to leave and live in the fallen world outside. There’s a kicked-out-of-Eden message embedded here that says we’re all going to lose our first and most powerful dreams, and we’ll have to live our lives in their shadows.