Two Scotsfolk both alike in dignity,
In fair Manchester, hiding from the sun,
A hare-brained plan to hold a bookish party,
With puzzles, snacks and Shakespeare, packed with fun.
Read forth, I shall describe what did ensue:
A pair of star-eyed scholars did indulge
In misadventures, more for us than you,
Yet of our party’s acts I shall divulge.
Each humble passage of our antics blogged
Commemorates that we enjoyed our day,
And if you find the writing dense and clogged
I do beseech you, do not deign to say!
The which if you with patient eyes attend
You might enjoy, if make it to the end.

Prologue

Ever since I purchased the Dark Academia OwlCrate back in August 2025, which came with an If We Were Villains inspired teapot and teacup set, I’ve had machinations to host a tea party for Calum and myself, based on the novel and Dark Academia in general. The book is mostly told through the voice of Oliver, who as a student at the fictional elite performing arts university, Dellecher, took the blame for the murder of a classmate during his final year. Getting out of prison ten years later, he recounts what really happened (which the reader is expected to take with a tablespoon of salt) to the now-retired detective who worked the case. It’s just the kind of overindulgently theatrical melodrama that it makes sense to throw a party over.

Even before I finished reading the book, I’d already ordered a second cup and teapot so that Calum could have one too. And, for almost a year, I’ve been gradually accruing an assortment of activities and ideas from across the internet, waiting for the perfect time to take the plan to Calum.

Initially, when it was announced in March this year that there were plans to adapt the book into a TV show, I thought I might hold my tea party when it was released. But upon realising this is not the first time the book has been up for a TV version (a different studio had planned and then shelved an adaptation back in 2022), I decided it was too risky to wait for a project that may yet never come to fruition.

So on Bank Holiday Monday, during the heatwave sweeping the UK, Calum and I decided to stay in our far cooler house, put on ridiculously extravagant costumes, and celebrate the arrival of my super-fancy custom-bound copy of the book that I’d purchased as a belated birthday present to myself from Mrs Yoflam Books.

Act 1

Dressed in our gothic Dark Academia attire, we decorated our table with some of my most If We Were Villains themed accoutrements, including a Dark Academia candle Calum had gifted me for Christmas, a mini chest of drawers in the shape of tomes, a tiny mirror with a quote from The Picture of Dorian Gray, and a selection of fan-made library cards and show tickets from various Dark Academia titles. I also stacked some of my fanciest leather-bound editions: rebinds of The Secret History and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, the Franklin Library edition of Nine Plays by Euripides and, in pride of place atop them all, the newly arrived If We Were Villains.

Display set up, I laid out the activities for the evening.

I had purchased an activity download from the Vanilla Book Club Etsy store, packed with suggestions for holding an If We Were Villains gathering. The pack included a music playlist, prompts for discussing the book, puzzles, and recommended themed food suggestions. One of these was a recipe for a Charcuterie board to “mirror the group’s closeness and indulgence”, so Calum and I created our own version with mini sausage rolls, stuffed peppers and cheese and salami ‘rollitos’, serving it (to ourselves) on a wooden platter.

Act 2

Then we started the activity book. Now, if anyone needed any further proof that Calum is the best partner in the world, I think it is about time to admit he hasn’t even read If We Were Villains and doesn’t intend to. He was truly mostly indulging my obsessions. For that reason, I’d been planning that we just do the wordsearch and other puzzles that didn’t require prior knowledge of the book to complete. But Calum suggested we go through the discussion prompts too!

This led to a several-hour conversation (or, several conversations, depending on how you look at it) where Calum would read out a question and I would provide an answer and then we’d talk about it. The prompts kept us on topic surprisingly well, even as we veered delightedly into related tangents:

• Agents of Shield (talking about the parallels between Ward’s betrayal of the team and the significance of the narrative in If We Were Villains being conveyed largely by a trained actor.)
• Ready Player One (discussing why the Shakespeare scenes in If We Were Villains work well, while Ready Player One’s description of a character quoting a scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail word-for-word does not. It’s mostly to do with thematic relevance, character exploration, Oliver’s viewpoints of the action and the physical layout of verse on the page.)
• Ender’s Game (in response to a prompt asking which character it would be most interesting to be the viewpoint character if it wasn’t Oliver, and Calum mentioning that one of the Ender’s Game sequels literally does that. It occurred to me later that that’s also what Midnight Sun is to Twilight.)
• And the genre of Dark Academia more generally (for example, the significance of character ages – many Dark Academia novels are about teenagers or very young adults, and that lends a lens of sympathy that older characters wouldn’t receive – even when they’re doing terrible things, like murdering their classmates!).

Although Calum hasn’t read the book, he is very interested in media in general, and we are both pretty familiar with Shakespeare. So he was able to take my descriptions of scenes, plot points and overall effects of the book and discuss the text with me in genuine depth. The prompts actually really helped me to explain the relevant scenes and story; usually I’m very bad at describing book outlines after the fact. But because the questions were chunking the novel, I was able to give Calum the relevant information to discuss the prompt without being overwhelmed or just forgetting everything that happened. Both of us really enjoyed the process, and I think I (and Calum!) now have a much deeper understanding of the book.

Act 3

As we discussed the prompts and completed the wordsearch (using a feather-quill biro that Calum had purchased as a prop for the RPG he is currently DM-ing), we drank our tea. The OwlCrate with the If We Were Villains teapot and teacup set had also included “Carpe Diem” tea (apparently inspired by the film, Dead Poets Society).

This was one of the films I had previously convinced Calum to watch with me, so the themed tea led us on another tangent about what does and does not ‘count’ as Dark Academia. Calum quite rightly pointed out that, while the film doesn’t really get ‘dark’ until its final few scenes, unlike quite a lot of media given the ‘Dark Academia’ publishing label, Dead Poets Society is still actually about the problems within the elite American school system. A lot of so-called Dark Academia is about students killing a classmate or investigating (or covering up) a murder, without exploring the institutions that the students are embedded in, in any meaningful way.

For example, I recently read (and very much enjoyed) Tana French’s The Likeness. Despite frequently making its way onto Dark Academia reading lists, I don’t remember it mentioning academics much at all. If I had to guess, it mostly gets included in these kinds of lists because the main group of murder suspects bear a deliberate resemblance to the students in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. However, Calum noted that this was like putting Hotel Transylvania on a list of horror movies because it features vampires!

Act 4

The activity prompts took a little longer than expected, so it was almost seven by the time we were eating our dinner (tomato soup, farmhouse bread and a camembert fondue) as we completed an If We Were Villains jigsaw.

I had purchased the puzzle on eBay months ago and was just waiting for the perfect time to complete it. Being Dark Academia themed, I should have realised that there’d be a lot of very similarly coloured, dark and difficult-to-see pieces. It made the outer edges particularly tricky to assemble, and it was a proper challenge trying to work out where on earth this or that tiny dark tile with a little line or vague detail was meant to go. (And there was me worrying that it might have been completed too easily!)

The image, I think, is meant to depict Oliver and James, although when it was completed Calum christened it something along the lines of “two moody twinks in a tea shop.” I’m planning to look into the logistics of getting the completed jigsaw glued so we can hang it on the wall in our living room!

Act 5

After the jigsaw, we wound down to the final activity of our evening. I had got us some meringues and chocolate sauce and chocolate buttons and mango slices with a plan in mind that worked better in my head than it did in execution. The idea was for us to create skulls with mango crowns, like that famous Hamlet image. But the kitchen was very hot, and the chocolate melted very quickly, and the chocolate sauce was far more runny and less of an adhesive than I’d envisioned. Nonetheless, we persevered, and the resulting confections were still delicious on account of being meringue, chocolate and mango.

Epilogue

We ended the night with Calum doing a complete rendition of Mitch Benn’s Macbeth Rap, which he still knows entirely by heart – and me providing the “my name is” interjections. Eat your heart out, Dellecher.