I don’t know why I’m so surprised to learn about this… but Tillie Cole is now the latest white indie romance author to get roasted on booktok and beyond for a white supremacist romance series… Eight books into a series where at least one character is a white supremacist.

I mean, that he’s actually in the klan.

In Darkness Embraced, book seven of her Hades Hangmen series, the main character Tanner is “the heir of the Texas Ku Klux Klan”. Which, by the way, isn’t even how that works? He could be a legacy member like that one book I roasted years ago… But you can’t be an heir to something like the klan in the state of Texas no less. Oh, and his love interest, by the way is a “white passing” cartel princesa.

I’m actually screaming.

She’s since took the entire series down and posted a mid semi-apology on instagram that took time to thank the people who shared love and supported her for… writing a klanmance. In this cultural climate? So, unsurprisingly, the KKKarens of booktok and Romancelandia who can’t own that racism is part of what turns their crank are getting their jimmies good and rustled over the idea that maybe, people find it fucked up that white authors can choose to write a klanmance and rake in the dollars.

“But but but you didn’t read it” is never going to be a good rebuttal for these authors because they don’t actually want you to read it, they just want you to shut yo. But ultimately, I don’t feel like you even need to read this stuff because if you’ve read one klanmance or nazi rehab novel, you have literally read them all. There’s no originality there, nothing new. It’s all “this bigot is a babe and my pussy don’t discriminate” kind of shit.

One of the things I hate about dealing with booktok and fandom broadly is this “well I like it so it’s empowering, everything has to be accepted or else it’ll all be banned” rhetoric that almost always prioritizes bigoted content. It’s wild because it’s a constant white woman/queer insistence that they have to let bigotry slide because next someone will come for their daddy kink omegaverse or age gap student teacher romance… but those are literally separate things. You’re choosing to defend bigotry — often overt racism — because the actual thing you find sexy (transgressive relationships without bigotry) comes under fire from different people for different reasons.

It is so embarrassing.

In the end, Mizz Tillie will be fine. Her fellow racists will have her back and buy her books. She might even rebrand with a new name and throw out some racist diverse books. Or the NYP and/or Jesse Singal will pick up her story and churn it into “innocent romance author attacked by the woke for showing complicated romance with a happy ending”.

But for me? I’m still gonna be here in semi-shock that people are writing, reading, and defending klanmances at the same time we’re seeing this massive rise of white supremacy globally.

Yikes.