Captive Prince

Dark romance is a genre that combines the common elements of romance (including love, marriage, and sexuality) with dark elements from various other genres, such as horror, thrillers, and mysteries. Dark romances often deal with disturbing or offensive topics, like sexual assault, navigating different perspectives on these experiences through elements of fantasy or trauma, depending on the author’s goals.

Captive Prince is an unconventional dark romance in that the main love interests don’t begin a relationship in the novel. Instead, Captive Prince is the first novel in a series, and this first installation merely lays the groundwork for Damen and Laurent to develop a romance later on. Nevertheless, the novel includes content that some readers may find disturbing, specifically, descriptions of sexual assault, enslavement, and pederasty. Though most dark romances include fantasies of domination and submission, Captive Prince these topics to a more serious degree, since the ownership of one person by another is inherently enslavement, intensifying the normal dom/sub dynamic.

Pederasty is a form of pedophilia in which older men take younger men as lovers. In contemporary understanding, the gender or nature of any dynamic in which an adult has a sexual relationship with a minor is pedophilia and is discouraged in most modern cultures.