Book cons are supposed to be the good part. The part where the parasocial relationship you’ve been cultivating with an author through their Instagram Stories becomes an actual handshake, a signed copy, a photo you’ll frame on your bookshelf. After months of reading about fictional men doing fictional horrible things in ways you find inexplicably thrilling, you get to stand in a room with people who get it. Your people.
So it’s a real shame that some people have been absolutely ruining that.
Over the past year, multiple incidents at dark romance conventions have allegedly come to light — and the picture they’re painting isn’t pretty. We’re talking about a pattern of behavior that has the community asking some uncomfortable questions about what it actually means to be a dark romance fan in public.
What Allegedly Happened
Let’s just get into it.
At one prominent dark romance convention, Sinners & Stardust, (the kind where attendees dress up, pay for VIP packages, and shell out real money for the experience multiple alleged incidents of sexual misconduct were reported. A male performer at the event was allegedly sexually assaulted by multiple guests (their post has since been removed). Separately, at least one attendee allegedly approached others while wearing a strap-on beneath their dress, lifting it to reveal themselves to strangers without warning or consent. There are additional reports of people being groped in public areas of the hotel.
These weren’t dark corners. These were convention floors. Hotel hallways. Shared spaces.
Meanwhile, on the organizational side of things, a separate con allegedly imploded in spectacular fashion, staff not being compensated, hotel rooms not delivered as promised, a cosplay competition cancelled after people had already invested time and money, a VIP banquet that reportedly had no food or decor, a wardrobe team that walked out, and a fashion show that the organizers were allegedly just… wandering through while their event fell apart. Not criminal, but a slow-motion disaster of a different kind.
Authors, too, have been sharing their own experiences. One shared a story about being followed into a bathroom stall at a book event, with someone waiting outside to tell her they recognized her shoes. Another reported having a stranger ask “do you wanna see something?” before revealing their strap-on, no context, no warning, no permission asked. The community has been vocal: these weren’t isolated incidents. They’re part of a trend.
Why It’s Not Okay (And Why “But It’s a Dark Romance Con” Doesn’t Cut It)
Here’s where I’ll get a little ranty, and I think I’ve earned it.
Reading dark romance means you have a sophisticated relationship with the idea of consent. The genre, at its best, uses transgression and fantasy to process real feelings. The readers of dark romance are, generally speaking, very aware that what happens on the page is fiction. Most of them are also acutely aware of what they want and don’t want in their actual bodies and actual lives.
So there’s something especially galling about people weaponizing the genre’s aesthetic against its own community.
“It’s a dark romance con” is not a permission slip. Being in a space with people who read spicy books is not implicit consent to be touched, flashed, propositioned, or assaulted. The women (and men, and everyone else) attending these events are not characters. They’re people who paid money to be there, who dressed up, who traveled, who wanted to have a good time. The fiction is in the books. The con is real life.
One commenter put it plainly: it was a book event, not a sex club. Just because many of the books are smutty doesn’t mean anyone wants to be on the receiving end of it IRL.
The con is also, notably, not a kink event. And even in actual kink spaces, which have consent built into their DNA—you don’t touch anyone without explicit, prior agreement. The allegedly unhinged behavior at these events wouldn’t fly in a BDSM club, and they shouldn’t fly at a romance con either.
Romance Spaces Are Not Consent, Online or Off
Here’s the thing that doesn’t get said enough: this problem doesn’t start at the convention center. It starts online.
Dark romance communities (Discord servers, Facebook groups, BookTok comment sections, author DMs) have a persistent issue with people treating membership in a shared fandom as an invitation. Members report being cold-DM’d by strangers on the basis of their reading tastes. Propositioned out of nowhere. Sent unsolicited content. The logic, presumably, is: you read books with sex in them, so obviously you want sex from me, a stranger, right now, in a Discord server for fans of a specific book series. No.
The pattern is the same whether it’s a Threads message or a hotel hallway. Someone decides that a shared space equals a lowered barrier. That enthusiasm for the genre means enthusiasm for them. That the person in front of them is an extension of the fantasy rather than a human being with preferences and boundaries that have absolutely nothing to do with their taste in fiction.
It’s parasocial logic gone rogue. You feel like you know someone because you’ve seen their BookTok or follow their reading updates. The convention makes it worse, because suddenly the online closeness becomes physical proximity, and some people apparently can’t make that adjustment without malfunctioning.
The community has been clear, loudly and repeatedly: knowing what someone reads does not mean knowing what they want. Following their social media does not mean you have a relationship with them. Being in the same room does not grant access to their body.
So What Do We Do With This
The good news (if you can call it that) is that the community is not being quiet. The posts are going viral. Authors are naming behavior. Attendees are documenting what happened. Organizers are (in at least some cases) being held accountable.
The harder conversation is the one about what makes these spaces vulnerable in the first place. Some of it is inexperienced organizers scaling events too fast without infrastructure or safety protocols. Some of it is the hothouse atmosphere of conventions, the same dynamic that makes them magical also makes a small number of people feel like normal rules don’t apply.
And some of it is about the genre itself getting bigger, which means a wider and more varied audience, which means a higher statistical chance that some people in the room are not operating in good faith.
Dark romance deserves better than this. The genre is genuinely interesting — it does things with power, trauma, and desire that mainstream romance often can’t or won’t. The community is, by and large, thoughtful, funny, and self-aware. It also sells a lot of books.
It would be a tragedy to let a loud, predatory minority ruin the whole thing.
Show up. Have fun. Sign things and take pictures. But let’s make it impossible for the con to be used as cover for anything it was never supposed to be.
The fiction is in the books. Act accordingly.