Why ‘Trash’ Fiction is Good For Business
Following the article on internet genre fiction, this article takes a deeper dive into a very lucrative area of literary fiction that has greased the wheels of the culture and media industry, while garnering a big share of the publishing sector pie.
Where It All Began
When we were children, we read, watched, or listened to stories that appealed to us, without the barriers of judgment and prejudice. Even if we did none of the above, stories still permeated our lives through play, make-believe, and the kind of gossip that only children could conjure.
But as we made our way through the school system, we were conditioned to form judgments through the literature courses we took and the books that we were encouraged to read. While what counted as ‘good’ books differed across cultures, nationalities, and standards of morality, there were still certain universal judgments that we were bequeathed with, premised as much on dominant standards of aesthetics and quality as on universal understanding of ethics and virtue.
With exceptions, many of these ‘suitable’ works of literature were written by the already-dead authors, or authors whose world-building did not broker immediate identification and familiarity. Most importantly, to be able to enjoy thoroughly all the literary tropes hidden within the narratives, one would have to have accumulated background knowledge that comes from either reading enough similar types of literature (which may or may not be readily accessible to students); or be in an environment where one might find ‘easy’ representations of such works (i.e. adaptations into one’s favorite cartoon/animation or live action/film, or even highly-viral social media content).
Both within and beyond the school walls, these same students would trade the type of literature that school authorities may deem as ‘trashy’ or of ‘bad influence.’ In this day and age, there is less of a need to trade anything physical when one could merely share hyperlinks in chatgroups. The communities fostered from shared interest of such ‘trashy’ works have evolved with time. However, human desires have not changed much.
Popularity of Trashy Fiction
What is ‘trashy’ fiction (once known as pulp fiction) and why is it given so much flack despite being part of a billion-dollar industry? And does the popularity of a work among a mass readership/viewership, a popularity not born out of literary aesthetics or an appreciation for the innovativeness of the narrative, readily consign the work to the category of ‘trash’? Other writers have pointed out the various reasons why trashy fiction is popular, but in this article, I will go further to unpack what ‘trashiness’ means in this case, and why trash fiction is good for business.
Firstly, we need to understand that what is deemed as ‘trash’ fiction is relative to the value system out of which that work has emerged, and also the unstable moral-political-aesthetical sentiments around such a system. Moreover, many of the popular fiction that had since risen to the ranks of the ‘greats’ were also considered as ‘trashy’ by critics and cultural establishments of their time. This particularly was true for the novels written by women for other women, even if male authors (or those writing under male pseudonyms) had not escaped such judgments.
There have been many other adjectival labels thrown at works labelled as trashy: formulaic with wish-fulfillment fantasies (escapist, unrealistic, stereotypical), morally dubious, while containing egregious violence/smut (what some called not-safe-for-work or nsfw), just to name a few. The publication route for this could range from traditional publishing houses to self-publishing. Some arbiters of tastes (now known variously as key opinion leaders and influencers), self-proclaimed or otherwise, may claim that such works are toxic and could lead astray a generation of juveniles who are not yet capable of forming their own judgments .
When one becomes addicted to trashy fiction for several reasons, not least to romantic depictions found in such works, one might even experience a mixture of fictophilia, fictoromance, and fictosexuality (these are not the experiences of underaged juveniles still developing their own understanding of romance, but otherwise, seemingly ‘normal’ adults). One could see the obsession of fictophilia in several fan fictions produced online, be through the production of real person slash (RPS) or fan fiction reproductions of fictional characters.
That said, high octane trashy fiction (especially those that are published as a series) are also the most likely to make it to book toks, have influencers talk about them on YouTube, get the most views on online platforms if the works are born digital, and get offers for adaptations into various other non-book genres (games, live action, animation, cartoons, audio dramatizations, audiobooks). With adaptations and increasing visibility come further income that could be generated through product placements and fan events. Most fandoms are created around works that literary critics might have considered as trash fiction, which is something that I will further explain in the next section.
Why Call It Trashy Fiction
While each era has its own version of ‘trash’ fiction within popular literature, the focus in this article will be on what trash fiction means in the present era of the internet and why it holds so much capital despite the derisive label attached to it.
Writing Quality
First, there is the quality of writing, which could be judged objectively and subjectively. We would expect a professionally published work would, at the very least, meet the minimum in terms of grammatical and stylistic accuracy, regardless of the quality of the story-telling and language of the work. That had always been the case until the rise of self-publishing online platforms led to lowering the barrier for entry even further, especially as such platforms allow amateur writers to publish first drafts that would otherwise never reach readers. At the same time, praises and encouragement from readers who may care more about the story’s genre than the quality of writing have encouraged some of these beginner writers to persevere and improve on their writing skills. Previously, I had written about the rise of the cellphone novels in Japan due to the existence of platforms that allowed writers to share the works of fiction that they had composed on their flip-phones. These cellphone novel platforms served as predecessors of the present day trashy/pulp fiction publishing platforms.
Beyond grammar and style, there is also the quality of story-telling, even if the author may utilize the most straightforward narrative form. While some trashy works are riddled with plotholes, predictability, the overutilization of the most cliché of tropes, and poor writing to boot (‘poor’ in the sense of having limited and repetitive vocabulary, clumsy phrasing, and shoddy transitions between scenes), there are others that could exert surprising descriptive prowess and even demonstrate high levels of literacy in how they are able to control a fairly complex plot. Even in supposed ‘trashy’ fiction, one would still need to differentiate between a professional author and a high-schooler getting their kicks from writing their own Wattpad (or any other platform) stories or fan-fiction inspired original stories. For instance crime and romance writers have particular requirements for quality in their writing, and their writers must be capable of hooking their writers while maintaining linguistic styles that conform with what is expected of the genre they are writing for.
For crime and mystery writers, even if the whodunit or how-did-they-do-it follow a particular structure of development and revelation, writers would still need to come up with sufficiently fresh crime scene puzzles, unpredictability within predictable plot twists, and even sufficiently complex and believable development and resolution of the cases, to keep their fans interested in following through to the next book. This is particularly the case when such works are serialized with individual cases contributing to a greater story arc.
For romance fiction writers, many of whom also combined different genres even if romance is the primary goal of the story, they have to get their readers to ‘ship’ (worshiping a relationship) the characters (especially in a serialized work), create sufficient character development, create scenes that are idealistic but not laughingly improbable, and project some human-ness and vulnerability even in the most perfect and swoon-worthy love interests. Most importantly, such works must be sufficiently identifiable and familiar, but not too rooted in reality, to be able to suck their readers into a world they would be reluctant to leave. To be able to do this consistently suggest a writer who is a master craftsman rather than a mere hack.
Tropes and Narratives
Popular fiction is never about experimenting with different forms of narration, especially narrative forms that may lead to destabilizing or discomfiting the reader. Even the most shocking of stories contain fairly linear story-telling methods, with non-linearity mainly confined to the use of flashbacks, jumping between time-lines (in a fairly linear manner), and the use of parallel worlds or parallel times (which still progresses fairly linearly). Even then, each genre has its own set of meta-references that fans of that genres could quickly pick up on. This includes having cross-over characters or references to another story that may share the same universe with the primary story.
For most born digital fiction, especially web-novels, one would always catch glimpses, sometimes dropped as hints and other times as features within the stories, of the production processes that produced these stories. Many of these meta-references also function as tropes to the stories. Tropes refers to types of pre-defined structures that produce the particular settings (or archetypes) of the plot and characters. Unlike in literary fiction where the reader may only get to understand the main characters through the characters’ explicit interaction with the events, and each other, in the story, where the character would continuously morph and change under the eyes of the reader right up to the final chapter; in trashy fiction, the settings of the characters are largely fixed even as the author could still be free to add complexities and layers to the characters’ development.
The story could be plot-driven or character-driven, but regardless of either, the development of the story would still follow a largely expected route despite the twist and turns. In other words, story-telling could either be a clever and sophisticated deployment of tropes, or a flat, to-your-face deployment, depending on the skill and experience of the author. Whenever one visit forums or fandom spaces discussing these works, agreements or disagreements around the stories are usually centered on how the fans decide to position the story against the known-tropes, rather than deep discussion into various literary ornamentation and allusions.
Unlike literary fiction, popular fiction caters more explicitly to the experiences of the reader, therefore allowing the reader more possibility of self-insertion into the story. If anyone here is a regular reader of certain types of interactive stories where the reader is invited by the author to self-insert, you would know what I mean. But in less explicit ways, the type of characters that the reader is expected to identify with (more in a wishful rather than a realistic sense) could be both ordinary and extraordinary at the same time. For instance, the main character could be an ordinary person but surrounded by extraordinary, powerful and very beautiful/good-looking characters that are vying for their attention (something we find in trashy romances/otome games). Or, one could be an ordinary character that discovers hidden powers and go on an adventure (this could range from space operas to stories centered around martial arts).
Obviously, there are different types of trashy fiction, each with their own particular choices of most-frequently used tropes. Some authors may choose to complicate how they deploy tropes, making the ensuing story more complex. At other times, tropes allow the authors to drag out certain stories by providing for more narrative layers. But it is in the use of tropes and archetypes that make these stories more accessible for adaptations. If you were to look at the popular adaptations of certain classics, you would soon realize that the classics that get adapted the most regularly used to be popular (or perhaps even ‘trashy’) fiction of their period, and contain many of the same tropes that we might find in contemporary popular/trashy fiction — it could be that the authors of these classics demonstrate a more skillful deployment of such tropes.
Social Media Fiction
These are the kind of fiction that could only come about as a consequence of the synchronous and asynchronous interactivity provided by social media platforms. Although social media has already made its appearances in contemporary works of fiction, what I am referring to here are not fiction that use social media as sources of plot, aesthetics, and characterization (although there is much to be said about these that I may tackle in another article). Instead, I am referring to two kinds of fictions here. The first is the creation of on-demand fiction inspired by fan requests or fan conversations around particular scenes or plot development. The second are actual creations that would not have been produced were it not for the communities that social media platforms have fostered, for better or worse.
In the first kind, we have authors that create alternate or chapter extras to an official work, either directly on the original platform they have published on, or in other venues. While such practices had been ongoing for a decade or more within the publishing world of East Asia, even within more traditional publishing settings (we see this in manga and light novels), this is only a more recent practice in western publishing for fiction, where the authors may choose to produce extra chapters to please their fans. The other would be the creation of shorts, usually in the form of vomics (known as voiced comics that are lightly animated), to accompany a manga/manhua adaptation of a light novel. These shorts are not necessarily mere excerpts from the original work, but could become additional accompaniments to the original works.
In the second kind, we have works of fiction that came out of certain interactions and activities on platforms. For instance, there is a subreddit called Two-Sentence Horror (there is also a Netflix show of the same name) where redditors are encouraged to tell a horror story (loosely-interpreted) in just two sentences (without there being a limit to the length of each sentence). Back in the day before Twitter became X, there were also attempts to create very short stories that were limited by 140 characters, which led to the publication of a compilation of 250-character short stories. Around the same time, more than a decade ago, when there were Twitter users who had launched bots that created scheduled postings that were simultaneously surreal and fictional.
With the advent of the powerful generative AI, new modes of story-telling compiled through a combination of all the stories that had ever appeared in the digital world through the use of large language modelling could mean that it is becoming easier to reproduce certain types of stories without a human author. What could this then mean for authorship and content ownership? And what if the same technologies are then deployed to create commercial content using the tropes, plot development, and characters of a popular trash fiction — with the commercial content being either a game or an advertorial?
How Trash Fiction Could Sell Dreams
As readers become captivated by either a popular work or popular series of work, secondary creators would find opportunities to produce merchandise that could tantalize the fans of these works to obtain them. Even if the merchandise is produced under a generic label, its value is embellished by association with the original brand — the captivating story. Imagine when more-known brands were to take on the production of these merchandises through the creation of limited editions and/or new product series. I am not referring to IP adaptation franchises but rather, to other industries creating products influenced by the popularity of these works.
The popularity of such works has also influenced the production of other kinds of content. For instance, within the East/Southeast Asian context, the growing global popularity of the boyslove genre has also infiltrated the entertainment business in that there are certain categories of male celebrities who reproduce certain romantic or cute interactions found in these fictions, leading to the promotion of the ‘shipping’ culture in K-pop, thereby drawing in even more new fans. Outside of cosplay activities, we see the influence of particular aesthetics promoted within such works (and not only of the romance genre) on fashion styling and beauty for both genders. In China, certain entertainment companies have cashed in on the popularity of webnovels by not only creating audio-dramas, but also virtual idols that could sing the theme songs of these dramas while gaining human fans.
Some of you might even have remembered how Star Wars (of the trashy space opera genre) has gone through many revivals, and each revival has been an attempt to interest old and new fans in new merchandise and products associated with them. As a genre that has pre-existed social-media from the time of its first adaptation, we could also see how much the reception of the original story has changed with successive generations, due to a need to adapt to global competition from popular fantasy and science-fiction content emerging from Asia. The sequels that were produced after Star Wars was acquired by Disney tried to globalize and diversity its cast. In addition, it had also expanded from the rather skeletal story-telling focusing on the heroic actions of the few main characters to include more backstory of all the other characters (humanizing your characters is the trend now) while adapting to contemporary developments in the world of fantastical and science-fictional story telling. This is in line with how story-telling has changed in various popular fiction genres as new generations of fans are interested in more than just the few main characters and want to see the background story that made these characters what they were.
Finally, the rise of internet platforms created boom-times for the different genres of ‘trash’ fiction. Fans’ thirst for content-on-demand and their associated products could mean that there are still other under-explored possibilities as new technologies for immersive world-building develops and as repetition with a difference could go down unknown paths. If there is a singular reason why trashy fiction is good for business, even without the side commercial activities, it is because they could serve as comforting ‘fast food’ that allows you to dive into the story quickly even when you are riding a bus or have had a hectic day.