At first it pained me to add this to my dark academia shelf, but honestly? It's dark academia through and through, and the fact that I viewed it as something of a guilty pleasure (at best!) when I read it as a snobby teenager with writerly ambitions does nothing to change that. Not all dark academia is homoerotic subtext and Dionysian ritual; some of it lands square in the "dad books" realm, and I guess that's okay.