The taboo is the product: why vertical drama keeps its darkest tropes

On 25 September, Erin E. Gross reviewed Lights, Camera, Obsession, a My Drama series, for Fangirlish, and her headline asked a question much larger than the series: "why does BDSM have to be every man's secret in verticals?"

The heroine, played by Miah Green, searches her boss for leverage and finds a video of him with a woman strapped to a cross. "Someone's sexual preferences aren't dirt," Gross writes. The series disagrees. It "treats his private life like it's the crime."

Gross draws a line worth keeping. "When kink is part of who a character is, it tells you about trust, control, and vulnerability. When it's used as a reveal, it just becomes the thing that's supposed to make you gasp."

So why does the format keep choosing the gasp? The people who write, fund and police vertical drama have been answering for two years, and very few of their answers are about taste.

A writer's answer: the taboo is what the coin buys

Gilles Daniel is a French screenwriter and producer who wrote four vertical series in 2025 and sits on the board of the Guilde française des scénaristes, the French writers' union. In written answers to Streaming Radar in August, he did not dress it up. "Many stories rest on violence, psychological or physical, done to women, taboos close to those of dark romance, but handled with even heavier hands," he wrote (translated from French).

Then he said why the format cannot simply drop them. Vertical drama is opening to thrillers, fantasy and romantic comedy, but "the very reason for micro-payment is, exactly as with dark romance, the transgression of a taboo. If you want to make morally cleaner stories, there are already plenty on free broadcasters and streaming platforms, so you move away from a distinctive offer."

Viewers pay for the next episode because they cannot get it elsewhere. Clean up the episode and elsewhere becomes free.

Daniel also said where the payment falls. The strongest twists go "at the key moments, including the arrival of the paywall," and the paywall itself is, to him, "only one more cliffhanger". A reveal is a cliffhanger by construction. Gross's jump scare is not a lapse in the writers' room. It is placed.

The model chose the genre

In "Le dernier loup-garou", published in July, I traced how the pay-per-episode apps built their bestiary: the billionaire, the werewolf, the forced marriage, the humiliated woman rescued. ReelShort founder Joey Jia told Rolling Stone how a story earns its place: "if a story cannot be promoted, that's trash." The founding hit, Fated to My Forbidden Alpha, took 110 million views in under six months in 2023. It is the one in which a werewolf courts a woman with a bucket of fried chicken.

Genres die when their money dries up, and audiences get bored later, if at all. The werewolf billionaire was a yield more than a character. Advertising buys the familiar and the brand-safe, subscriptions buy prestige and known faces, and pay-per-episode buys whatever fantasy is strong enough to justify the next coin.

The critics saw the same machine from the other side. Lotte Hondebrink wrote in The New Feminist in November 2025 that Fated to My Forbidden Alpha "not only portrays tropes of possessiveness and coercion, but even idealises these traits in the name of love." A month earlier, Janko Roettgers in The Verge described the default hero, a billionaire who frees a woman from an abusive partner and who "is probably also into BDSM, just because." Just because is doing a lot of work there. Daniel's answer gives it a revenue line.

A regulator's answer: cut the fantasy, keep the format

China, where the format began, went after the tropes and left the business model alone. In November 2024, Global Times reported guidelines attributed to the National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA), the broadcasting regulator, on "CEO romance" micro-dramas. Creators were told to stop "promoting ideals that glorify marriage with the powerful, wealthy individuals or families", to make fewer such series, and to stop putting "domineering CEO" in titles to lure viewers.

Money, power, marriage: the tropes you can read off a title. A title can be policed from a list. Gross's reveal sits at episode 20, and somebody has to watch nineteen episodes to reach it.

What this site's catalogue can see

This site keeps a catalogue of 4,027 vertical series, most of them described in the platforms' own words. It has the regulator's blind spot.

Read by hand for BDSM vocabulary, it holds three series whose own platform sells a BDSM premise: ReelShort's Dominated by My Dad's Boss, GoodShort's How to Train Your CEO Good Boy and ShortMax's Tie Me Up, My Dom CEO. Seven synopses out of 3,455 use the vocabulary at all. None of these series ranks on the charts this site treats as live.

Where kink is the premise, the platform says so and the heroine walks in by choice. Real-Reel praised Tie Me Up, My Dom CEO in March for putting "its attention on trust, consent, and emotional safety", against a formula it summed up in four words: "Brooding billionaires. Questionable consent." That is characterization, in Gross's sense.

The toxicity itself is easier to find. ReelShort files Obsessed With His Silent Bride, ninth on its TOP shelf, under "Toxic Romance", "Possessive", "Controversial" and "Dark", and promises a heroine "trapped in a toxic union". On a platform page, toxic is a search filter.

The kink-as-reveal that Gross objects to never shows up in any of this, because a twist is kept out of a synopsis on purpose. If Daniel is right, it waits near the point where payment begins.

The same studios, other genres

If the trope follows the money, other money should buy other stories. It is starting to. On 25 September, duanju.news listed the series well-known actors are now making for vertical platforms. vertTV, founded by three television-film producers, announced a faith comedy, a supernatural thriller and a murder mystery, and not a single romance. Issa Rae's Screen Time for TikTok's PineDrama is a thriller. Lime Pictures bills its Revenge Is A Dish as a "romantic thriller".

The audience moves with it. The same piece reports a Holywater and Owl & Co study in which men went from 1.1% of monthly active users on the MyDrama app in the second quarter of 2024 to 30.3% seven quarters later. One app, but the easy story of one viewer buying one fantasy does not survive the number.

These genres arrive mostly on advertising and platform budgets, where the coin matters less. Daniel's warning still holds. A cleaner vertical drama competes with everything already on free television, and free television is very good at being clean.

The cost is paid on set

In January, TheWrap reported on actress Barlow, who shot a sexual assault scene for a vertical series. She had an intimacy coordinator and felt safe, but found the environment "triggering". The scene "performed the best, generating the highest viewership of any vertical she had appeared in." TheWrap also quoted an instruction heard on set at the paywall episode: "OK, this is the paywall part right here… Make it good. This is where we're gonna make the money."

My view: Gross is right that the reveal is lazy writing, and Daniel explains why the laziness survives. Enjoying a domination fantasy is not wanting domination, and Gross makes that distinction first. The pay-per-episode model rewards something narrower, a transgression held back until episode 20, when the card comes out. Beijing can rename the domineering CEO. Nobody has yet shown what a vertical drama sells at the paywall once the taboo is gone.