Nakajimas ── Miscellaneous

Incomprehensible rant on Colleen Hoovers' books

okay

edit: IGNORE THE FORMATING I TOOK AN EDIBLE BEFORE WRITINGTHIS.

last night i stumbled across this author called colleen hoover and her books and it has made me lose faith in progressive literature. honestly.

if u don't know what her books r abt, i read ugly love, and november nine, she has a very cliche, formulaic style of writing. like even as i looked at her other books, i could tell the plot-which is one of those, angsty, no progression, lots of sex ones-was pretty similar.

there's nothing wrong w writing this kind of literature honestly. the romance genre is built on the fantasies of the audience. the writers just basically toss out a 400 page steamy waffle of various sex scenes, poetry and romance. and it doesn't have to be good. it just has to be readable.

there's a place in literature for colleen hoover's novels. i'm serious! if you had to break down her plots, they're actually very clever. it's just how she executes them which i have a huge problem with, as well as the inherently dangerous message she sends to her audience. she writes about very toxic relationships but then idealises them.

you can write about shit like dubcon, trauma, toxic relationships, in a romance novel. you just have to make it expressly clear that this isn't a desirable relationship, that you have to teach your audience that sometimes, this is what a relationship looks like, this is what a red flag looks like, but colleen does this, then EXCUSES it, then gives the couple a happy ending.

i'm of the opinion that a romance novel's happy ending doesn't mean the couple have to be together, or co-parent for that matter (see it ends with us). if we take november nine for example, by the way HEAVY SPOILERS!!, fallon shouldn't have asked benton for forgiveness after leaving him for a year-which she only did bc he got a gf-after she herself found out the single most life-changing event in her life was because of him.

like what the hell. it should have been benton getting therapy for his mother's suicide and raising kyle's son because that made him happy, and fallon emancipating herself from her father and staying in new york.

here's the formula for her fics

girl meets boy [in a quirky setting], boy appears mysterious, boy flirts with girl, girl goes against her instinct and flirts back, boys mistreats girl, girl becomes his therapist, sex, sex again, boy's trauma hurts girl, girl runs away, they meet, girl forgives boy after one speech, make up sex. marriage.

ALSO. why the FUCK does colleen hoover come up with the stupidest names for her protagonists. like wdym tate? tater tots? benton? big ben? i actually want to kill myself like so many white midwestern middle-aged women come up with Lily blossom bloom kinda names for their characters and it's like-

if you wanted your book to be relatable... why not give them... i dunno... normal names? and yeah you might think "this doesn't matter to the plot," ACTUALLY. i think it matters to the message. ahem [puts on nerd glasses]

in the same way in fantasy they have silly names like Katniss, those names are a reminder that it is "fantasy", it's FICTION. it's not real. and their identity with abnormal names can honestly be seen as a sign of their characters being put through situations that are so like... idk what the word is but yknow that feeling when a book or a fic makes you want to gobble it up like NOMNOMONOMOM chewing on paper? that was me reading this fic on ao3 like ystd omg.

but yeah. hoover making her character's names so weird and QUIRKY. (this word triggers me. i can feel years of my life SLIPPING AWAY. ooh la la la. ethereal orbs. Pearls of Jupiter. poetry. i fjklbjkln/k)