The “Morally Gray Alpha Male” Trope was a SERIOUS Epidemic

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If you were an active romance book reader between the years of 2020-2021, or if you were on "that" side of TikTok/BookTok, I'm sure you are familiar with the "morally gray alpha male" trope. If you are not familiar, let me HAPPILY fill you in. During quarantine, romance books based on "dark romance" and "mafia bosses" were HEAVILY trending. These books were like liquid gold at the time, and not necessarily because they were well written.

One reason why these books rose to fame was escapism. They became extremely popular during quarantine when we were all rooted in our homes with little sources of imagination. As we all know reading a book is the perfect way to escape reality, and let me tell you, dark romance books are the perfect escape because the contents of these books tend to be extremely far fetched and unrealistic. Common tropes in these dark romance books were: Mafia/Bratva Bosses, Forced Proximity (a sub group in this is Arranged Marriage), Kidnapping, and a fan favorite "Touch her and die". These tropes included (but were in no means limited to) murder, stalking, obsession, violence, abuse, and a couple other borderline toxic and criminal elements.

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If you have not had, what some would consider, the pleasure of reading one of these books, let me break it down for you. I'll use the book King of Wrath by Ana Huang (a popular romance novel author) as an example. This book follows Dante Russo who is an extremely attractive, cold, arrogant, and controlling billionaire CEO. He is forced into a marriage arrangement with a woman named Vivian Lau who is extremly kind, smart, and a successful event planner. One thing you should know about morally gray alpha men: they almost always find themselves a woman who is the complete opposite of them. Anyway, the book goes on with Dante hating the marriage, trying to keep his super secret life a secret from Vivian, and trying to find ways out of the marriage all while simultaneously fighting his attraction to Vivian. Talk about having your plate full. As you can imagine, Dante becomes possessive over Vivian not wanting any other man to even so much as look at her, and wants to take claim of her. I should also mention that Dante doesn't really believe in love and isn't fully sure of his feelings for Vivian. All Dante knows is that he doesn't want any other man to have her. I'll spare you the nitty gritty details of the rest of the book so here are the SparkNotes: the major conflict and secrets Dante was hiding eventually gets revealed to Vivian and the two of them have to decide if this is a marriage of love or just convenience. Obviously in the end Dante lets down his walls and admits that he does in fact have genuine feelings for Vivian and they get together in the end.

Now, all this begs the question: what makes a character morally gray? Morally gray characters are ones who have ambiguous motives and cause a lot of harm (physical or emotional) for their own personal agenda. You can't really tell if they are a good guy or a bad guy and the lines ultimately get blurred in the end. These male characters also tend to share the same thoughts. For example they will say things about not wanting to corrupt the female character with their "sins and dark past". There are many male characters who fit this "morally gray alpha male" description (Zade Meadows, Alex Volkov, Christian Harper, Xaden Riorson) and though I have not read every single alpha male book, I'm sure they all follow very similar plot lines.

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So, if the "morally gray alpha male" trope is predominantly based off aggression, secrets, male ego, and toxicity why were they flying off the shelves? Truthfully, smut was a big part of it. I'm sure we all know in some capacity what smut is so I won't dive deep into the description, but I personally remember reviewers on BookTok would rank books based on how "spicy" they were. It seemed to be that the darker the romance the bigger, longer, and more frequent the smut scenes used to be. It got to the point where it was 70% smut and 30% plot, and as someone who actually enjoys a good plot, I never found interest in these kinds of books and found it distasteful. Obviously, not everybody shares this opinion because even when Wattpad (throwback I know) was popular these kinds of stories always got the most attention.

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I think for the time that a lot of these books were trending, having a morally gray alpha male character was interesting and spiced life up a little bit. However, I found that this trope got very redundant overtime. Romance books should be more than an egotistical CEO who can't decide what his true feelings for you are, but makes it his life mission to not let you out of his sight. This gets old very quickly. This though, isn't me saying that I'm "holier than thou" and have never read a romance book with a morally gray male character. I haven't read any recently published romance books so I can't say for certain, but I hope that they aren't all super redundant. Perhaps I'll do some research to see.

Thank you guys for reading and have a great week!

~ Side Note xo