TW: SA/Abuse Mentions
So I’ve been watching a lot of videos critiquing Colleen Hoover (Alizee, in particular), and for the life of me, I can’t understand how she (Hoover) can justify writing characters the way she does. The average CoHo male lead is toxic, abusive, a gaslighter, etc., and they always have some sort of “justification”that’s meant to make us sympathize with them. Take Ben from “November 9th”. Motherfucker lit someone’s house on fire, lied to his girlfriend about being responsible for the worst day of her life, fetishizes her burns despite her stating that she’s uncomfortable with it, and violates a restraining order, yet we’re supposed to root for him, see him as this misunderstood, insightful poet. And then there’s the dude from “Maybe Someday.” He straight-up assaults a girl, and even before that, insults and slut-shames her for being in a porno WHILE LOOKING FOR THAT VERY SAME PORNO. The fact that she defended one of her sons after he apparently assaulted someone sure doesn’t help.
And the female leads are generally, “Tee-hee, I’m so quirky/I’m not like the other girls.” Manic Pixie Dream Girls, I think they’re called. And if you want to write a character like that, that’s cool, go ahead, but the fact that most of the female protagonists she writes are like that, and have very little agency or development that doesn’t revolve around the male leads really gets under my skin. Worse still, though, is that they often get vilified for refusing to stay with an abusive partner.
And then there’s the obsession CoHo seems to have with pregnancy. If a woman in her books doesn’t want to be pregnant/keep the baby, she’s written to be the villain (again, very little agency.) Come to think of it, just try having a drinking game whenever pregnancy gets brought up in a CoHo book.
On a less serious note, I’ve come to the conclusion that if I were a character in a CoHo book, I’d wanna be a frequently drunk hobo sitting on a park bench somewhere. I’d only appear a few times, give surprisingly realistic/insightful advice to the protagonist(s), and they’d immediately ignore it. Gotta keep the tone of the story consistent, after all.
But yeah, seriously, what gives with her?
by mR-gray42