48 pages • 1-hour read
Vicious
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Background
Series Context: Sinners of Saint
Vicious is the first installment in L. J. Shen’s Sinners of Saint series, which follows Vicious and his friends, known as the “Four HotHoles” of All Saints High School in the fictional town of Todos Santos, California. The 2016 novel, published on Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited/Kindle Direct Publishing platform, is commonly recommended on “BookTok,” the book-themed community on the social media platform TikTok.
The series contains four novels and a prequel novella, which takes place before the events of Vicious. This prequel novella, Defy (2017), follows Jamie, one of Vicious’s close friends, and his affair with his teacher. The protagonists of this taboo romance (a genre term for romances centered on relationships that defy social norms) are married in Vicious.
The other installments in the series include Ruckus (2017), which features Vicious’s friend Dean and Emilia’s sister, Rosie; Scandalous (2017), which centers on Vicious’s friend Trent; and Bane (2018). This last book is the only novel not to feature a character from Vicious as a protagonist.
Shen has a further spinoff series that takes place in Todos Santos. The All Saints High series features the children of the main characters in the Sinners of Saint series. There are four installments in All Saints High. The second installment, Broken Knight (2019), features Luna Rexroth, who is born in the Epilogue of Vicious, while the third book, Angry God (2020), follows Vaughn Spencer, Vicious and Emilia’s son.
Both series feature relationships between morally ambiguous characters. The male protagonists are frequently the aggressors in the combative relationships between the romantic leads, while the female protagonists help them find moral redemption.
Genre Context: Bully Romance
A bully romance is a type of romance in which one character, the “bully,” begins their narrative arc by being cruel to their eventual love interest. The bully’s feelings gradually change to affection; they then must find a way to make amends to their former target in order to earn the target’s affection. Bully romances rely on high emotional drama. The character arcs of bully romances generally follow the bully as they learn to see the errors of their ways and behave more ethically, while the target gains self-confidence and learns to stand up against the former bully.
The bully romance trope is distinct from the enemies-to-lovers trope due to the difference in the power dynamics between romantic leads in each. In enemies-to-lovers stories, characters dislike one another but have equal power. In bully romances, the bully has more power than the target. This is often social power, as bully romances often take place in high school or college. Sometimes, as in Vicious, this social power is exacerbated by other forms of influence, such as socioeconomic power.
Proponents of the bully romance praise texts in this category for showing how dislike and cruelty can transform into love if a character changes their actions accordingly. Fans express their interest in watching a seemingly irredeemable character reveal vulnerabilities until they become likable.
Bully romances often take place in contemporary settings, but this trope can appear in other romance subgenres, as well. Caroline Peckham and Susanne Valenti’s Zodiac Academy series, for example, takes place in a fantasy school setting. J Bree’s Broken Bonds, meanwhile, features a bully trope in a paranormal setting that includes magic elements in a world that otherwise resembles the real world.
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