TROPE · WP-XL

dark romance

A capacious umbrella covering stalker, mafia, captive, dub-con, knife-play, and all variants where the MMC is genuinely dangerous and the love is genuinely dark. The genre runs on consent through transgression — the heroine's choices are bounded by the threat but they remain her choices. Triggers list matters in this category more than any other; the strongest dark-romance authors front-load CWs so the reader opts in with full information. Five-pepper territory.