Dark Romance: 24 trope pairings readers ask for, each with the counted reader asks in this lane naming both tropes together and the counted trope-tagged titles carrying both. 2 are open gaps. Free, no sign-up.
| Pairing readers ask for | Reader asks in this lane | Titles carrying both | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mafia Romance + Marriage of Convenience separately: 59 and 179 tagged titles | 172 | 14 | Open gap 12.3 asks per published title |
| Dark Romance (as trope) + Obsessive Love separately: 170 and 22 tagged titles | 169 | 16 | Open gap 10.6 asks per published title |
| Dark Romance (as trope) + Stalker Romance separately: 170 and 21 tagged titles | 145 | 15 | Thin on the shelf 9.7 asks per published title |
| Dark Romance (as trope) + Mafia Romance separately: 170 and 59 tagged titles | 294 | 34 | Thin on the shelf 8.6 asks per published title |
| Forced Proximity + Mafia Romance separately: 758 and 59 tagged titles | 299 | 48 | Thin on the shelf 6.2 asks per published title |
| Enemies to Lovers + Mafia Romance separately: 383 and 59 tagged titles | 142 | 24 | Thin on the shelf 5.9 asks per published title |
| Dark Romance (as trope) + Possessive Hero separately: 170 and 98 tagged titles | 156 | 28 | Thin on the shelf 5.6 asks per published title |
| Mafia Romance + Possessive Hero separately: 59 and 98 tagged titles | 125 | 28 | Thin on the shelf 4.5 asks per published title |
| Dark Romance (as trope) + Found Family separately: 170 and 345 tagged titles | 189 | 50 | Thin on the shelf 3.8 asks per published title |
| Dark Romance (as trope) + Obsessive MMC separately: 170 and 151 tagged titles | 195 | 71 | Well served 2.7 asks per published title |
| Dark Romance (as trope) + Forced Proximity separately: 170 and 758 tagged titles | 301 | 114 | Well served 2.6 asks per published title |
| Obsessive MMC + Possessive MMC separately: 151 and 213 tagged titles | 182 | 75 | Well served 2.4 asks per published title |
| Dark Romance (as trope) + Possessive MMC separately: 170 and 213 tagged titles | 154 | 69 | Well served 2.2 asks per published title |
| Dark Romance (as trope) + Morally Grey MMC separately: 170 and 266 tagged titles | 257 | 127 | Well served 2.0 asks per published title |
| Dark Romance (as trope) + Enemies to Lovers separately: 170 and 383 tagged titles | 179 | 90 | Well served 2.0 asks per published title |
| Morally Grey MMC + Obsessive MMC separately: 266 and 151 tagged titles | 161 | 92 | Well served 1.8 asks per published title |
| Morally Grey MMC + Possessive MMC separately: 266 and 213 tagged titles | 153 | 112 | Well served 1.4 asks per published title |
| Forced Proximity + Obsessive MMC separately: 758 and 151 tagged titles | 124 | 92 | Well served 1.3 asks per published title |
| Forced Proximity + Marriage of Convenience separately: 758 and 179 tagged titles | 148 | 155 | Well served 1.0 asks per published title |
| Forced Proximity + Protective Hero separately: 758 and 187 tagged titles | 128 | 150 | Well served 0.9 asks per published title |
| Enemies to Lovers + Forced Proximity separately: 383 and 758 tagged titles | 259 | 316 | Well served 0.8 asks per published title |
| Forced Proximity + Slow Burn separately: 758 and 296 tagged titles | 137 | 241 | Well served 0.6 asks per published title |
| Forced Proximity + Found Family separately: 758 and 345 tagged titles | 129 | 236 | Well served 0.5 asks per published title |
| Forced Proximity + Second Chance separately: 758 and 309 tagged titles | 125 | 232 | Well served 0.5 asks per published title |
Reader asks is a counted number: parsed reader requests — from Goodreads and Amazon reviews and Q&A, Reddit and BookTok — in which a reader writing about this lane named both tropes in the same request. 1,972,935 reader signals sit behind it. Titles carrying both is counted the same way over published titles tagged trope by trope: 22,102 distinct titles, 163,929 trope tags. Neither number is modelled, sampled or estimated.
Two things to be straight about. The supply count is registry-wide, not lane-scoped — our demand data and our title tagging use different subgenre vocabularies, and rather than fake a join we count titles carrying both tropes anywhere in the tagged registry. And a pairing is only listed when both of its tropes carry at least five tagged titles on their own (the two figures are printed under each pairing), so a zero in the “carrying both” column means the pairing really is unwritten in what we have tagged, not that we simply never tagged the trope.
The verdict column is a rule, printed here so you can apply it yourself: ten or more asks per published title is an open gap; three to ten is thin on the shelf; below three is well served; and a pairing readers ask for that no tagged title in the lane carries at all is called out as such. Pairings with fewer than three asks are not listed — too few to mean anything.
What it is not. It is not a sales forecast and it is not advice to write anything. A gap can be a gap because readers ask and nobody delivers, or because the pairing does not work. That judgement is yours; the counting is ours. Counted 2026-08-26 and restated whenever the corpus is recounted — the raw JSON behind any lane is one query string away.
Free to embed on any blog, newsletter template or author site. The widget renders the pairing board for this lane and must keep its visible “Data: Tropesmith” credit link — that link back to tropesmith.com is the licence, and it is written into the payload server-side so it cannot be shipped without it.
<div id="tropesmith-trope-pairs"></div> <script src="https://tropesmith.com/embed/trope-pairs.js?lane=romance.dark" async></script>
Prefer an iframe? <iframe src="https://tropesmith.com/embed/trope-pairs?lane=romance.dark" width="100%" height="440" style="border:0" loading="lazy" title="Tropesmith trope pairings"></iframe>