The Captive Woman Trope
Kidnapping as Romance?
The trope of captive women has been getting a lot of attention thanks to the explosion of “Dark Romance Girlies” on BookTok. However, the captive women trope can be found in any genre and is usually an excellent source of tension, plot escalation, and yes, sensuality.
If you’ve read any of my novels, it will come as no surprise that it’s one of my favorite tropes.
And to be clear, I will be talking about the TROPE of captive women and not the Dark Romance genre. This is because Dark Romance has a unique (ADULT) readership intentionally looking to have boundaries pushed. As such, those books break the rules I'm about to tell you. Intentionally.
This is not that.
A Truly Filthy Book
If you spend time in the book corners of TikTok and Instagram, you have noticed that a lot of the posts are about romance, specifically “dark romance.” If you’re unfamiliar with the term, dark romanc…
The captive woman trope involves kidnapping, intentional isolation or stranding in a remote place, or hostage situations involving a woman as victim and a male as perpetrator. It’s often seen in thriller genres like in Mary Kubica's The Good Girl, which used it and relied on audience expectations of the trope to conceal the twist…