Colleen Hoover has taken the romance genre by storm after her meteoritic rise to fame on TikTok. However, her most popular “romance” novel, It Ends with Us, is not a romance, but a novel about abuse. In this paper, I analyse how Hoover exploits romance tropes and the safety-net of the “happily ever after” to entice readers, only to blindside them when the hero, Ryle, is branded a domestic abuser. I use a reception and reader-focussed lens to elaborate this claim through close analysis of It Ends with Us and its social media reviews, exploring how Hoover uses romance tropes to present Ryle as a “bad boy” instead of an abuser. By deconstructing Hoover’s history with the romance genre, I argue that the immense affective success of It Ends with Us relies on Hoover’s expert knowledge of romance tropes and her willingness to experiment with genre. By analysing examples of the text’s reception, I explore how the rich history of tropes within the romance genre can be manipulated to maximise affective responses to fiction. I relate this understanding to the textual, social, and economic tensions informing contemporary genre fiction publishing.
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Due to the sheer size of the romance genre, romance readers must rely on their personal taste to narrow down their book selection. Romance tropes assist readers in making these decisions. Romance tropes are repeated plot lines, character types, and narrative situations across the corpus of a genre. These similarities work to create sub-genres through repetition, like the “bad boy” romance: a trope-based subgenre that stars a controversial, hypermasculine love interest. This overarching trope can include cold billionaires, brooding cowboys, and mafia bosses. Tropes assist romance writers in fulfilling the requirements of what makes a “romance”, namely, the genre’s token “emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending” (RWA), as each repeated plotline indicates to the seasoned romance reader that they are one step closer to this happy ending. Tropes also allow authors to experiment with the genre. The required happy ending, commonly seen by critics as “depressingly predictable”, forms a safety net, allowing authors to take risks in their characterisation and plot (Fuchs, 2004, p. 130). Readers know that however bad the narrative gets, whether the hero gets violent or engages in criminal activity, the narrative will always have a happy ending, where the protagonists will be romantically together. Tropes therefore give scholars key insight into the complexities and flexibilities of the romance genre’s formula.
With these genre-based expectations, questions arise as to what happens when a romance text breaks the happy ending rule. Colleen Hoover’s 2016 release, It Ends with Us, a novel that was marketed and shelved in most libraries and bookstores as a romance, shocks readers with a twist in its 14th chapter: its supposed hero, Ryle, is abusive. It Ends with Us leans into its romantic façade with its pink, floral cover and blurb that refers to itself as a “too good to be true romance”, luring unsuspecting readers into an affective trap.
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It is important to outline why I use terms like “exploited”, “tricked”, and “deceptive” in this article to describe Hoover’s utilisation of a plot twist, a common literary device. I argue that Hoover was aware that It Ends with Us would read as a romance novel. I believe this to be true due to her history of writing romances. Hoover notoriously dislikes being “confined to one genre” as an author, writing in her Goodreads biography that “If you put me in a box, I'll claw my way out” (Hoover). However, many of Hoover’s releases prior to It Ends with Us were new adult romances, with Hoover publishing 11 novels and novellas within this category between 2012 and 2016.
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