@@astridc06 her mother has, though, and there's no way a child witnesses that and comes out unscathed. there's definitely a lot of therapy needed for her
Well, my mom thought she was a good person because she never killed anyone. Which okay and? Isn’t that like having a common sense? Yet, she mentally and physically abused me. And she denied it every time I confronted her about it. Her definition of abuse was when you hit for no reason. So, by that ”logic” she had a good reason to hit me? It doesn’t make any sense.
@@chriswildfire Aww thank you:) . But I’m doing fine. As fine as I can to work through my own issues. But my childhood definitively taughtwhat not to do. Once I have kids myself. I would be fine with Colleen if she wasn’t a romance author. If she was as thriller author and marketed her books as domestic thriller. Then that would be fine and actually interesting discussion. But to market as romance. Even fanfic dark romance doesn’t go as dark. And I love reading characters that are messed up. When they are written well. I think Colleen Hoover read Wuthering heights by Emily Brontë and tried to replicate it. Somewhat by having a disturbed male love interest. Except Emily Brontë writes better. That’s what her works remind me of.
@@veraanastasiaramirezrozas1633 I read this when it came out thinking it was romance was so upset when it turned into a dv situation with graphic scenes of violence especially being a domestic violence situation and the ending was so upsetting this book definitely needs trigger warnings
THIS like wdym she stay away from him because he’s (obviously) too dangerous yet allowed her daughter around this monster?? and She made the connection between Ryle and her father saying “oh my father never hurt me” but he DID her father attacked Lilly, her mother and Atlas to the point she thought he DIED, so even when she tried to make a point it failed. I’m assuming that the character Lily made that decision because the mother of Colleen also made that same decision to allow a violent and dangerous man around her child
To be fair, it's realistic. The justice system isn't build to protect victims or children. Someone with Ryle's reputation and money would destroy Lily in court, there is little way to keep him away from the baby unless he himself hurts the child. At that point, it's too late though.
While listening to this I thought: Wait. Lilly starts thinking her father is a douchebag. Ryle learns hitting women is bad, because he has a daughter. And Lilly learns that her father was actually someone loveable because she loves Ryle? So a big part of her character arc is learning to love abusers?
Nope. Not at all. I get that the writing in the book sucks, but it doesn't tell you to forgive your abuser. She chooses the guy who treats her right, divorces the abuser because she refuses to repeat the cycle. The thing that is kinda iffy is that she can't get herself to distance her daughter from the abuser since he is the real father, and I guess she wants her daughter to make her own opinion of him as she grows up. The book is meh but many criticisms (such as yours) are just done because they want to prove the writer is a bad person.
i think its more the case of the fact that an abuser can take any form. It can be someone whose charming, sweet, rich and nice-and someone who is cruel, mean and narcistic. I didn't like the book, but i do think it achieves its goal by showcasing that ANYONE can be a victim, even those who has seen abuse firsthand. Its a cycle that can hook anyone in, and its a cycle that is meant to be broken because of that.
@@AlanisOcasio123 both. and tbh from what I've heard she is lol BUT I find it stupid that people alwaaays want to prove people that make bad movies or books are awful people. It's not always like that.
@@maryyy222-z4j I am actually not. ^^ I don't care about Colleen Hoover, why would I want to prove she's a bad person? I know nothing about her. I started reading this book way back when and the writing style wasn't for me, so I actually just have these analyses to go off on. My comment was meant from a analytical standpoint. This is the implication if you do things in this order. I am not saying that Colleen Hoover intended for it to be so. A lot of authors put messaging into their books that is horrible and they just don't realize it. (BTW I also don't think it's fair to call her a bad author. Not for me, surely. But she has a big audience and I am off the opinion that success in this kinda means that you are doing something right. Not for everyone, not for me, but for enough people that it is unfair to call you a bad author.)
As someone who had my abusers baby. The pregnancy part wasn’t the conflict!!! The conflict was within myself and within figuring out how to go about raising my kid, what involvement the other person has and how that would affect me and my daughter.
Thank you for your perspective! yeah that part was definitely just my opinion as someone who cannot begin to fathom the idea of having children so i can see how that might not be the case for everyone. I would’ve loved if they explored these conflicts that you mentioned in the book i think it would’ve been so much more interesting and impactful. But again thank you for sharing this! 🫶
and they say that he's in therapy as if that solves everything! these are deep-rooted issues he has, it's not like you can have a couple of sessions and boom redeemed. Co parenting in these cases is not safe and i think a couple of years of low-contact would benefit them
I just had an idea! Maybe it would’ve made more sense if her journals were actually letters to her future self that she had planned to read on a specific future date. That would make it both less cringy and also narratively make sense for why she’s going back over her journal now
Yes!! Or i thought maybe to have her run into Atlas before she started reading her journals so it could be like “oh well I’m with Ryle now but I can still reminisce on my time together with Atlas” and then it would also have their romance arc build up alongside her journals
The problem with Colleen Hoover irl and as an author is that she believes all women want to get pregnant and that men, she precieves as hot, shouldn't be held accountable for their actions. Like Ryle is the easy answer but also Atlas was 3 years older than the MC waited until the day she turned 18 to sleep with her (after disappearing for a while if I remember correctly). He's like one of those creeps who tracked Millie Bobbie Brown's birthday to know when they could legally start perving on them. And it's just so telling that Colleen never holds Ryle accountable because he's "hot" and has such a promising future, much like that judge who gave the Stanford rapist Brock Turner a pass because he didn't want to penalize the rapist too harshly.
@@heatherofhyrule9050 ugly love most of her stories , there is even a worse korean writer called solche , her female protagoinsts many of them gets impregnanted one of the stories the fl was 12 and the ml was 18 at the begining , when she became 18 he was like she became a grown woman like what , don't get me started with how he cheats on his fiance and its romanticised , his fiance had better personality than the fl too but the writer has to torture rich female characters in her story
ryle was a red flag from the start throwing furniture around on the rooftop and obsessively wanting to take picture of her, he was abusive frim the start, arguably she dialed it down, but the unwellness of this character was obvious from the start imo
The thing is, Colleen Hoover romanticizes this type of behaviour so much on her other books that it's difficult to say if she intended for Ryle's actions to be seen as red flegs or if she just thought it was hot and decided to write it in the book to make Ryle's abuse seem like a plot twist later
idk women were groomed to think this is normal in the past. They aren't genZ girl who is taught feminism all the time now so all the "I would have not..." things fall flat to me
Hoover writes psychological thrillers disguised as romance and that’s what scares me most. Being in denial about your abuse, covering up and imposing romance on abuse, misremembering past events, whitewashing the extent of abuse, choosing to stay with and identifying with your abuser are all valid and very real trauma responses. Sometimes you need an external intervention to help you face the fact that you’re being abused and need help. It’s not that cut clean. But Hoover tries to say otherwise. That all that *is* normal and excusable as long as someone “loves” you. It’s not. It’s just horrendous.
I find it interesting that in the book Ryle has this “dark side” that he can’t control yet he can control himself perfectly fine at his Job extremely stressful + is definitely in contact with patients and their family or coworkers who could be extremely mean to him yet his dark side stay hidden, his sister with who he never abused and all of is friends who also never saw his dark side, so basically Ryle can’t control himself but the uncontrollable monster mysteriously only appears to his gf/wife💀 and I’m pretty sure the book never acknowledged that
I mean, a lot of people are like that. I have known people who are abusive, but are very good at their job and admired by coworkers. Although the book is badly written, I found it realistic. Not everyone is a perfect victim or abuser. People say lily should have no contact with ryle, but in reality its really difficult to do when you have a child together.
Unfortunately there are a lot of people like that🙁. Ppl that have near perfect control of their emotions with their job and friends, but turns those repressed anger and dissatisfaction to their spouses behind closed doors. That’s why a lot of DV victims are reluctant to report their cases bc allegations abt their partners are shrugged off by ppl around them saying “They’re very kind in the workplace” or something similar
I like this comment because although it is true that many abusers are perceived well in many other areas of their lives, it brings attention to the myth that the person “lost control”. Cuz really what it is, is that person is intentionally choosing to abuse and deliberately chooses who to abuse. This myth is used by abusers to avoid accountability and makes it hard for the survivors to leave. So Yuup good point!
I just want to say I have not read this book and have no interest in reading it or anything CH writes. With that being said, I am so happy to see so many young women realizing it is not their job to fix problematic men. I am now 53 and I had a son with my abuser. My son was born in 1993 and is a father of, soon to be, 2. And I absolutely HATE how CH tries to romanticize abuse, and how the "I can fix him" mentality is so wrong. I never denied to myself that he was abusive, I just thought, that I was special and that my love was enough to make him change; This was the result of reading books similar the C.H's books 😡, so I don't agree when people say "let them read what they like, it’s just fiction" because in a young mind it can defiantly warp your sense of what romance and love looks like. When I found out I was pregnant and I had another life to think of, and how the abuse would affect my child, I left; I was 8 months pregnant when I finally left, but from the moment I found out I was going to have a child, I started making moves to leave, it just took 8 months. He followed me to every place I moved to and it took me 5 years to finally get rid of him, not by my own actions, but by him having to move out of state due to legal issues. I never hid from my son what I went through with his father, because I wanted him to understand what it was like, so he doesn't think what his father did was normal. I was so upset when i heard they were making a movie based on this book and really hope they fixed all that was wrong with the book. If you want to watch a movie that better protrays what its like to be married and get pregnant from an abuser, I would recomend Waitress (2007) with Keri Russell.
36:09 Sorry that point was mildly upsetting and I have to disagree. A person who loves you can absolutely hurt you. That does not minimize the abuse or should sway anyone to forgive their abuser. In fact it does not matter if the abuser truly loves their victim or not, what matters is the hurt they inflict. I would even go as far as saying "a person who loves you will never hurt you" is dangerous because it also implies that "this person loves me so it cannot be abuse" (a mindset I myself used believe in). You would never be in a long-term relationship with someone if you are not 100% sure they love you, but even after 7,8,9+ years a partner can turn abusive. Also let's not forget a big portion of sexual violence happens in committed relationships and between family members. If you have an abusive parent this situation gets even more complicated because not only would you have to deal with the parent's behaviour but also with the knowledge you are unloved ("they abuse you so they never loved you"). I agree with all of your other points.
I agree with you. My mom was abusive. But she liked to deny, and even go as far as blaming me for being the cause of her losing her temper. Then again she never saw it as abuse. So there’s that. We did have good memories. But that pain, never goes away. I don’t remember most of what happened. Such as what was the context of the conversation. I guess I blocked it from my memory.
i think the thinking behind that is that, if you REALLY love a person, you would do everything to make sure you don't hurt them. As in, control themselves, go to therapy, even leave and make sure the other person knows the violence etc was not their fault. Therefore, if you are being abused, it is important to understand that a love like that is very flawed and incomplete, and not how it should be (so, yes, you should leave, or put up firm boundaries). Is that hurtful - to realize the people who should love you, does not, or in a way that is severely lacking? yes, of course. But, it makes you maybe more realistic about that other person, their limits and flaws, and about your relationship ❤
they can SAY that they love you, but they don't ACTUALLY love you. It's a lie. The most you can say is that they don't know how to love anyone, including themselves. Ppl who love themselves don't do sh*t like this. They're just not able to actually love anyone. It doesn't matter why they're fked up, it can be a variety of things. but either way, love is NOT hurting yourself or the people you love. That's what ppl are trying to say. As a society we have no problem seeing people who hurt themselves as ''self-hating". Causing pain is their substitution for love. It fills a void, there is some emotion attached to that, some intensity of emotion which you can feel IN them...but it is *NOT* ''love". It is an extension of that hate, and sometimes it is an extension of self-hate. They're just not able to love so they keep hurting instead. The end :).
Colleen Hoover seems like someone who believes only physical abuse counts as abuse. In “Slammed,” no, he doesn’t hit her, but he’s her teacher and there’s a power imbalance between them. In “November 9,” no, he doesn’t push her, but he explicitly states in his narrative that he wants to (and in the first publication he actually SAs her…). It’s VERY frustrating.
She doesn't seem to see anything wrong with men manhandling and/or blocking women from walking away, either - it's only bad when he hits her, apparently. IIRC In Slammed, the teacher yanks the protagonist around by her arm, pours water on her and locks her in the bathroom, but it's totally okay and unproblematic because she was being ~hysterical~. In Nov 9, I distinctly remember the dude blocking the MC from leaving a room at least once, but this behavior was totally not alarming at all because she refused to hear him say how much she loves him or whatever. Not to mention, him undressing her while she was sobbing and saying no, but it was fine, because he was doing it for her own good, I guess. To coho, women't boundaries don't seem to matter if a guy is overstepping them out of "love". It acrually makes me sick that she has such a massive following that enhoyes her works completely uncritically.
I’m grateful I’ve seen this comment because eventually I’d want to read it, not knowing about the SA theme. Even Ryle attempting with Lily, I really struggled reading and and watching, so thank you for mentioning this about November 9 💛
I think the thing about Colleen Hoover's writing is that it's competent enough to be mistaken as "good". People with little experience with good literature and little life experience will not realize the toxicity of her love stories and her inability to engage with any challenging subject matter. It really does scratch the same itch that bad fanfic does, but since it has a hard cover and is dressed up as if it's actually serious literature, people fall for it.
i genuinely can't begin the understand how colleen has internalized the abuse she experienced within her own household. it feels like she's desperate for some kind of resolution that she didn't get in real life. i watched my dad abuse my mother to the point of needing inpatient treatment. he only changed when he married another woman and had kids with her and forgiving him feels impossible, even if i know what his childhood was like. there doesnt always need to be forgiveness, and not everyone deserves it or needs a happy ending. hoover treats abuse like its a trauma response and not an active choice, and its so vile. i worry for the kind of man her son will become.
I find it interesting that at the end Lily know that Ryle is dangerous and should divorce him but still allow her daughter to be around him 💀 like “yeah he’s dangerous for me but you go ahead he definitely won’t abuse you too!” She compared Ryle to her father but: 1 Ryle is NOT her dad, yes they are similar but not the same person Ryle could snap and hurt his daughter too 2 her father DID hurt more than just her mother like you said he hurt her and Atlas and probably more 3 what happened if Ryle gets a new gf? He showed that he didn’t changed and show a clear pattern of abuse with no intention of fixing himself what if his daughter see it? She will be traumatized for sure just like lily was 4 even if he doesn’t abuse his daughter or a future gf( i highly doubt it) WHY would you want your daughter around someone like that?!?💀 he’s objectively a horrible person who shouldn’t have any contact with Lily or the baby
thank you. i've seen even the most critical of reviews giving the book more credit for the sole reason of having domestic violence "explored" in it. like😭😭not to be or to be that person, but everything colleen hoover touches scrunches in disgust and withers away with nothing left to be explored. personal experience or not, this is just too poorly written to have good enough eyesight to see and explore.
From a neuroscientist's perspective... I feel deep sympathy for the author. She's clearly trying to figure it out herself, being torn between "abusive behaviour is bad because everyone in the modern world says so" and "abuse is actually not that bad because facing the fact that I had a really terrible person as my father is too painful". I do think that producing a piece of work with the intention to send a message about something that you haven't even figured out yet is quite irresponsible, considering how young and wide her audience is...
As poor as Hoover’s line-level prose I remain grateful to this book for affording me a way in to understanding how women find themselves in such awful, violent relationships. Obviously, I knew that it rarely starts off that way, but reading this book helped me to feel that slow progression and how insidious it actually is.
Dude, you're the reason why I hate her books. It is not ''INSIDIOUS"! He starts off their first meeting by punching stuff! And ends up punching her. WTH are you all smoking??? O_O...........What is INSIDIOUS about that?? Seriously, if you have a gf who sees a crazy drunk punching holes in walls and that's a turn on for her: 1. you WILL have to save her from abuse as some point, I suggest you start a savings account for that NOW, bc it's guaranteed to happen. 2. you should get away from her unless you want to be constantly in danger of her abusive BFs knocking on YOUR door in the middle of the night looking for her sorry a$$. 3. get her into therapy if you can and move on with YOUR life. Not everyone can be saved and definitely not by you. There are women who accidentally end up in bad situations but there are also women with ZERO instinct for survival. If we were 20,000 years ago, a bear would have eaten them. But we're not...so they're everywhere now. Not every man can be saved from himself and definitely not every woman either. Some ppl are just horrible people. There's no fixing what's broken in them. If you saw your mom get SAd by your dad and 30 years and 3 kids later you want to use that for smut material, the problem is YOU now. You DO know better. You just don't give a sh*t to DO better.
My father wasn't physically but very emotionally abusive towards my mom, so if Ryle is anything like my dad you bet your ass he's going to manipulate their child as soon as they're old enough to understand words into helping him get back with Lilly or into moving in with him and start hating Lilly for revenge.
Never understood the love for this book how can you betray your mom and think your dad is a good guy if he never got help and abused your mom even though he didn’t to you his still a criminal and you should be on your mom side and wow Lily should get a restraining order and raise her daughter on her own because you can’t trust him with your daughter with that angry this book pissed me off and it’s one of my worse reads ever especially since they make it seem like it’s a romance wtf
it irks me so much when authors don't give their heroines the OPTION of not keeping the baby. they will keep it? good for them, but don't present it as the only option
In South Africa, august ninth is our national Women’s Day. I forget it’s not international and thought they intentionally made the release on women’s day and it made me so much more mad !! 😤😂
I just don’t know why people like CoHo books. I start reading a lot last month, and i was searching for books to read. I asked my friend and she said to me “oh, you have to read It Ends With Us”. Hell no girl, I am NOT reading that shit 💀
So I have never read one of her books, but isn't the thing that is happening there that Colleen Hoover is writing a normal male Colleen Hoover main character and she just kind of strapped the DV onto that person? Like in that sense it seems like her readers are kind of tricked into like the guy because he is the guy she always writes, crass and crude, very into one thing and one thing only and very hot. So when the DV comes into platy they are already programmed to like him and since he is exactly the person she always writes and the female protagonist is telling them "he's a good person, my dad is a good person" it makes it almost seem like that is more of the message here than the ideas about domestic abuse.
It's really eerie to me how it seems like she's writing all her male love interests like this... cus this is the kind of man that's been modelled to her by her father, and she believes he's a good person. It feels uncomfortable that a lot of young people read this book, Ryle being portrayed with this personality, and then they'll pick up her other books that romanticize the SAME PERSONALITY as Ryle... only they're supposed to not be abusers. But they do a bunch of other really fucked up abusive things to the female protagonist that she then portrays as being acceptable, and they get everything they want. Every time. And the fans love these men, even those who are as bad as Warren and Ben. She dresses up all these warning-signs as hot and romantic, and then when they do the really bad things, the reader has already been made attached to the guy, and their actions are rationalised with pity and blaming everyone else, even the protagonist. If the men are given any flack at all for their behaviour, they're "fixed" by the power of love (aka sex). But usually these shitty men are shown (according to the narrative) to ultimately be in the right, or being the victim.
The big issue I have with this book and the film by extension is the presentation of it as a rom com. Like, no, it's a horror story. And even the author doesn't seem to realise that which is weird because she chose to write about this subject, you'd think she'd know what kind of story she's telling.
Dickmatized. 😂 To be fair, the way a traumatized person's brain works, it weirdly makes sense that Lily would be like, "My dad was a good person", but then we'd never see that. It's the cognitive dissonance of someone who's supposed to love you hurting you. Hoover probably could have done that better.
Some of us do want to read romance with some saucy scenes in them - some of us being me - but I don't trust the genre if I'm honest. I don't WANT to be fed toxic or hyper-masculine love interests😥when there are a bunch of other types of really attractive and SEXY personalities. There are character flaws that aren't red flags that can create tension and conflict. But for some reason... this is what sells. So it's everywhere, or so it feels like. Idk. I'm so jaded at this point.
I DNFed this book, so I’m no fan, but I think you’re interpreting a few things wrong. Ryle’s blackouts are an excuse that he makes that Lilly believes because the truth, that he’s abusive, is too difficult to bear. When you’re in an abusive relationship, it’s hard to see things clearly. It’s the same thing with her dad. He’s not a good person. She’s trying to convince herself. The reader should know neither he nor Ryle are good, or honest, from context clues.
Whoof. I get the feeling Colleen growing up knowing her dad, it makes her want to rationalise the bad things he did to her mom. She probably didn't know these bad things about him until she was older, and she already had an image of her dad as being a good person, so she probably doesn't want to believe anything else about him... and men like him. It's giving copium for me. And her learning some bad things by her dad being allowed to be part of her life.
no, no. She knew!! OR she is lying about literally everything all the time. But according to her interviews, she KNEW this. It was her very first memory of her parents and her dad especially... so, no.
My mom--a survivor of domestic abuse and currently escaping an abusive marriage--is watching this movie right now. I tried to warn her that the movie would most likely trigger her, but she said she'll be fine.
Saw the movie, didn’t and will not read the book. The dv was treated with hardly any complexity and only incidental to the love story between lily and atlas
Idk if im just reading too much into it but maybe they dint show her dad being a good person because he wasnt. Maybe lilly is only really the good moments because she wants to remember her dad as a good man. The lack of good memories is (in my irrelevant opinion) probably because there werent many
Came here to get all the tea on this book after the whole PR thing happening between Justine Baldoni and Blake Lively. You did not dissapoint! I loved every minute of your hate rant:)))
I have never read the book, as far as I know, CH wrote it this way purposefully (in regards to how Ryle abuses Lily and how Lily sees her abusers). i thought she did it bc her mom or grandma face abuse herself, and she wanted to go for the reality rather than a lesson. not to say the other issues aren’t glaring, but i think that CH probably was betting on the reader understanding that Lily shouldn’t be with Ryle and shouldn’t be viewing her abusers as positively as she does, but that it is normal for that to happen to victims
Although this book is very flawed and don't get me started on hover I like the realistic aspects of this book. A lot of times we imagine these book/movie like men who are aggressive but have soft spots for us and yet when a man is aggressive its genuinely just a red flag like Ryle when he was throwing furniture around and leading up to us finding out he's abusive. Although he's attractive and successful and we believe that we can change those aggressive behaviors we can't and in truth he is an abuser
A book does not need to be a fable with a moral message. Why can't a book be about people making bad decisions? Why you thing the message is "a woman in a violent relationship must forgive her abuse because their children"? This happens in real life. It's a very complicate situation. This book is about that. Why need to have a happy ending? Sometimes a bad guy does not go to the jail. For fear a woman in a toxic relationship does not report the husband to police. Do you judge that? A character does not to need to change. He is bad, not get caught, does not change. That is. Books can be about that. Collen does not write well, and a I think it's a not a good book. But the point is, just because a book tells a complicated story about a terrible situation with a terrible ending, does not implicate the author agrees with what happens in the book. Or the author is "romanticizing" the situation. Read between lines is important.
Yes, I agree. It annoys me when people insist that all books and stories need to have some sort of moral, as though every story needs to be Aesop’s Fables or something. Not all stories need to be prescriptive, and actually I sometimes don’t want to read stories that have these strong lessons and morals; it can come off as preachy and cheesy. Stories that describe a harsh and yet relatable reality can be powerful and can teach a lesson to the reader indirectly, which I think can stick to the reader in a way that a preachy message can fall flat sometimes. So I’m with you. I guess where people get uncomfortable is that this book is marketed as a romance. Not a thriller, not a melancholic realistic fiction, not even a cautionary tale. We’re encouraged to root for the two main characters and we’re supposed to root for their romantic relationship. The writing, the marketing, the movie deal, all of it is framed as though this is the next “The Notebook” or something in the romance genre. But the relationship itself is obviously abusive, so there’s this mismatch that causes a lot of dissonance and confusion, especially when you combine all of this with the fact that the main demographic of this book are 16-30 year old women who have varying levels of experience and emotional maturity. Maybe if the framing of this story was darker, framed as a thriller, and marketed towards an older audience that already has pre-existing context for trauma and abusive relationships and can pick up on the subtleties of the main relationship, I’d be more comfortable with it. For context, I’m a middle school teacher and I’ve seen eighth grade girls reading Colleen Hoover books and discuss them amongst themselves as “hot and exciting romance novels” and it really actually is disturbing. Now most of that is on their parents for not vetting what their children are reading… but the marketing doesn’t exactly discourage younger readers either.
I think, with a theme like that, and with the reach of her books and their content, some things should be made more clear and obvious. Like, write the same story, but make sure that the gas lighting is recognised. That the manipulation is obvious (for the reader). Make his struggles struggles, without making him a "good person" with inner demons. As in the video, if she is an unreliable narrator, make that clear (even without the main character reading herself). In short, if you are writing about a complicated topic, make sure that you get the nuances right (or at least the publishing house should make sure to look at that, because this isa big best selling author, not a small independent writer and book).
I found this video pretty invalidating to women who have experienced a very similar situation to Lily’s character. *Trigger Warning: There will be mention of DV and SA* I experienced a very eerily similar situation to Lily. I did witness my mom being abused by my adoptive dad when I was a child, my mom did eventually leave when I was 7, she checked me and my sister out of school and all of our stuff was in the car and we ended up staying at a shelter for women and children escaping DV situations. It is very confusing growing up witnessing that, trauma is confusing because on the one hand I loved my dad, I still do, but I also know what he did to my mom, and that’s still confusing on how to handle to this day. My mom allowed me and my sister to still see my dad, he got us every summer, for the entire summer and he was a few states away from my mom, and she still let us go. And my mom always said, she was planning on leaving until she found out she was pregnant with my sister and then she got stuck with him another 4 years till she felt she could leave again. Growing up, I didn’t think this situation had that much of an effect on me. However, I found myself in increasingly worse relationships and after a s*icide attempt, and moving out of my parents house, getting a full time job, and living on my own found myself meeting my first husband. He, and every guy who displayed red flags to me previously was easily overlooked. I was always downplaying the significance or misremembering it, and I was romanticizing it. This is a response to unhealed trauma from my childhood, it didn’t manifest itself until I was in actual relationships with men. If someone else had been going through what I was going through I would encourage them to leave, I would think it was wrong, I would think there was no reason to stay but when I was in the situation myself it was not that easy. I personally found myself misremembering how things went, and even when my ex husband successfully r*ped me after our son was born to a point that I’m t*rn down there and the scar tissue is so bad it cannot be repaired and I was screaming so loud from the pain, a business heard me next door and called the police and I was too scared to say what happened, that I lied to protect him. When he stole money from my parents safe, $8500 to be exact, I lied to protect him, and I am the one who paid it back His sister was constantly using the fact that they were adopted because their parents were cr*ck addicts and both of them to get cr*ck and eventually ending up in foster care and being abused before being adopted as an excuse to justify his drinking and violent outbursts. Which did start off seeming “accidental” but escalated to a point I couldn’t justify it, and it was thought out and calculated to a point I was in vulnerable situations and had to endure it. He also used that trauma when we first met as a way to get me, he literally told me that he wished someone who love all of him, even the dark parts no one knows. Which I found interesting, I was ashamed of being abused before, being cheated on before, being used, left, trying to k*ll myself that I downright felt like I was a charity project and would be lucky to have anyone want me at that point. So when he opened up about his childhood and him ending up in foster care, I immediately thought to myself “how could anyone not love you, for something you had no control over” and I felt the same way about myself, like why couldn’t people love me because of trauma I had no control over. It was manipulative from that gate, it was a way to relate myself to him, this makes gaslighting easier. They know your fears, triggers, trauma responses. They weaponize them against you to make you feel like you are going crazy. During all of this, I was thinking of my first love (who I am married to now) and I would talk to him in secret, telling him everything that was going on, and trying to find support to leave. I also felt like I knew him because I loved him in high school but I had no real reason to suggest he would be different than anyone else, I believed that because my younger self did, and that was a self I trusted more than the current version of that time where I felt I was literally in hell. And when I did finally get the strength and courage to leave my ex husband, I tried to have him around our son too, I was so fearful of him trying to get full custody and take him away from my completely that I thought just being cooperative would help the situation. I did eventually move away to a place he doesn’t know where I am and has no way to get in touch with me, but that took a few years after I left him. And my pregnancy was conflicting for me because as soon as I knew I was pregnant and I was aware of who I was married to, I didn’t know what to do, I always wanted a baby, but I hated that he was the dad. Which played a huge role in my PPD once my son was born. I believe that this perspective that you shared comes from this mindset that this situation is unrealistic but it is very realistic, and I think that’s why so many people are confused. There is no perfect victim, if we noticed the red flags right away and ran from them we wouldn’t have been in the relationship and dealt with DV. If we left after the first time of being abused, it wouldn’t be so many deaths. The point is that abusers are a lot like Ryle and victims are a lot like Lily. Not all of them, but a good bit. Just like it was Colleen’s mother’s experience too, which everyone is invalidating.
Not me thinking this book was some cute romance 😂 I never read it, just heard people rave about it. From your explanation it seems like Lily has no character development which I HATE in a book.
I just left an advanced screening of the movie. Never read the book. But the movie itself is different in the way it ends and how everything is portrayed.
I’m curious how they handled the DV scenes tbh Did they downplay it? Leave it out? Bc I remember how controversial the book was and how much was handled poorly. Supposedly this is based on her mom which is really weird???
@@Stonedandbookishthe abuse scenes are really fast and leave you questioning what even happened, they just establish the moment but leave it open a bit so you are unsure if it was an accident or not i cant explain properly, but you should watch the movie, it changes a few things from the book that makes it better but still flawed since its a colleen hoover story
I hate this whole cluster cuss that is this book. However the fact the main male lead is named RYLE???? He's as awful as his name. Edit: i just looked up this book and its rated 4.2 stars on Goodreads???????? Are people insane?
I never liked Colleen Hoover and never read her books for a reason but when I watched the movie I was truly impressed, but actually hearing how much changes was made, is crazy. Still don’t like her and thankful they made the movie more realistic
I loved your analysis and understand that you are starting your channel so you will improve with practice. But I will strongly recommend you to try to be more concise when explaining your points. Because in more than one instance you kept explaining the same idea over and over despite it being clear to the viewer. I think refraining from doing so could make your analysis more compact. I wish you the best on your journey and I’m sure you will improve with each video.
I think It Ends with Us is not that bad. It talks about the harsh reality of how daughters and mothers see the abuser differently. The main character chooses 50/50 custody because she doesn't want to rob her daughter of a relationship with her real father, but the reader knows her boyfriend is the better man. In comparison to Hoover's other works this one feels the most authentic and the dialogue is less cringy
The main issue is sort of the narrative hypocrisy This book made people retroactively attribute this line of logic to the rest of Colleen's catalogue, however prior to this book's release, people just went along with everything either being a drama, a thriller or a romance but not an underlying message for an abusive relationship Which i have to ask, why would all of her books be about the same thing? It's kind of boring, but that would mean every consistent reader is just rereading the same fanfic with different characters. Oh another thing, people wanted a sequel for this book. What about this would get a sequel? No one knows, but that sequel is literally just a retread of everything else she made and people are fine with it
There are a few things that I dislike about this book and Colleen's writing. The lack of any real chance of a pro-choice thought in Lily's head and the fact that Colleen wrote that someone likes toast. Something about that toast line bothers me the most. 🤣
Hoover strikes me as a woman who is deeply traumatized, but would rather normalize her trauma than heal it.
The thing is she hasn’t gone through the trauma she writes about, so her writing is a very interesting romanticization of that abuse
@@astridc06 her mother has, though, and there's no way a child witnesses that and comes out unscathed. there's definitely a lot of therapy needed for her
@@arieslofi ohhh that makes sense, yeah makes sense on why she defended her son if thats what she grew up with and romanticizes it so much
Absolutely
@@astridc06because in the book she’s technically the baby lily and Ryle had and her mother is basically lily
Imagine being collen's mother and reading that your daughter portraits/believes that your abu*ser was "a good person"
I couldn’t understand how can you not be in your mom side hated that about this book especially being a victim of physical violence
Well, my mom thought she was a good person because she never killed anyone. Which okay and? Isn’t that like having a common sense? Yet, she mentally and physically abused me. And she denied it every time I confronted her about it. Her definition of abuse was when you hit for no reason. So, by that ”logic” she had a good reason to hit me? It doesn’t make any sense.
@@veraanastasiaramirezrozas1633 sorry that happened to you that’s a reason I didn’t like this book you just don’t get better just like that
@@chriswildfire Aww thank you:) . But I’m doing fine. As fine as I can to work through my own issues. But my childhood definitively taughtwhat not to do. Once I have kids myself.
I would be fine with Colleen if she wasn’t a romance author. If she was as thriller author and marketed her books as domestic thriller. Then that would be fine and actually interesting discussion. But to market as romance. Even fanfic dark romance doesn’t go as dark. And I love reading characters that are messed up. When they are written well. I think Colleen Hoover read Wuthering heights by Emily Brontë and tried to replicate it. Somewhat by having a disturbed male love interest. Except Emily Brontë writes better. That’s what her works remind me of.
@@veraanastasiaramirezrozas1633 I read this when it came out thinking it was romance was so upset when it turned into a dv situation with graphic scenes of violence especially being a domestic violence situation and the ending was so upsetting this book definitely needs trigger warnings
What makes me most mad about the book is that Ryle was allowed anywhere near the baby by the end of the book
THIS like wdym she stay away from him because he’s (obviously) too dangerous yet allowed her daughter around this monster?? and She made the connection between Ryle and her father saying “oh my father never hurt me” but he DID her father attacked Lilly, her mother and Atlas to the point she thought he DIED, so even when she tried to make a point it failed.
I’m assuming that the character Lily made that decision because the mother of Colleen also made that same decision to allow a violent and dangerous man around her child
To be fair, it's realistic. The justice system isn't build to protect victims or children. Someone with Ryle's reputation and money would destroy Lily in court, there is little way to keep him away from the baby unless he himself hurts the child. At that point, it's too late though.
While listening to this I thought: Wait. Lilly starts thinking her father is a douchebag. Ryle learns hitting women is bad, because he has a daughter. And Lilly learns that her father was actually someone loveable because she loves Ryle? So a big part of her character arc is learning to love abusers?
Nope. Not at all. I get that the writing in the book sucks, but it doesn't tell you to forgive your abuser. She chooses the guy who treats her right, divorces the abuser because she refuses to repeat the cycle. The thing that is kinda iffy is that she can't get herself to distance her daughter from the abuser since he is the real father, and I guess she wants her daughter to make her own opinion of him as she grows up.
The book is meh but many criticisms (such as yours) are just done because they want to prove the writer is a bad person.
i think its more the case of the fact that an abuser can take any form. It can be someone whose charming, sweet, rich and nice-and someone who is cruel, mean and narcistic. I didn't like the book, but i do think it achieves its goal by showcasing that ANYONE can be a victim, even those who has seen abuse firsthand. Its a cycle that can hook anyone in, and its a cycle that is meant to be broken because of that.
@@maryyy222-z4jthey want to prove she’s a bad person or just a bad writer?
@@AlanisOcasio123 both. and tbh from what I've heard she is lol BUT I find it stupid that people alwaaays want to prove people that make bad movies or books are awful people. It's not always like that.
@@maryyy222-z4j I am actually not. ^^ I don't care about Colleen Hoover, why would I want to prove she's a bad person? I know nothing about her. I started reading this book way back when and the writing style wasn't for me, so I actually just have these analyses to go off on. My comment was meant from a analytical standpoint. This is the implication if you do things in this order. I am not saying that Colleen Hoover intended for it to be so. A lot of authors put messaging into their books that is horrible and they just don't realize it. (BTW I also don't think it's fair to call her a bad author. Not for me, surely. But she has a big audience and I am off the opinion that success in this kinda means that you are doing something right. Not for everyone, not for me, but for enough people that it is unfair to call you a bad author.)
As someone who had my abusers baby. The pregnancy part wasn’t the conflict!!! The conflict was within myself and within figuring out how to go about raising my kid, what involvement the other person has and how that would affect me and my daughter.
Thank you for your perspective! yeah that part was definitely just my opinion as someone who cannot begin to fathom the idea of having children so i can see how that might not be the case for everyone. I would’ve loved if they explored these conflicts that you mentioned in the book i think it would’ve been so much more interesting and impactful. But again thank you for sharing this! 🫶
and they say that he's in therapy as if that solves everything! these are deep-rooted issues he has, it's not like you can have a couple of sessions and boom redeemed. Co parenting in these cases is not safe and i think a couple of years of low-contact would benefit them
I just had an idea! Maybe it would’ve made more sense if her journals were actually letters to her future self that she had planned to read on a specific future date. That would make it both less cringy and also narratively make sense for why she’s going back over her journal now
Yes!! Or i thought maybe to have her run into Atlas before she started reading her journals so it could be like “oh well I’m with Ryle now but I can still reminisce on my time together with Atlas” and then it would also have their romance arc build up alongside her journals
OR, just include a line saying she was cleaning or something and ran into the journals....? Like, literally ANYTHING would have worked. Anything...
The problem with Colleen Hoover irl and as an author is that she believes all women want to get pregnant and that men, she precieves as hot, shouldn't be held accountable for their actions. Like Ryle is the easy answer but also Atlas was 3 years older than the MC waited until the day she turned 18 to sleep with her (after disappearing for a while if I remember correctly). He's like one of those creeps who tracked Millie Bobbie Brown's birthday to know when they could legally start perving on them. And it's just so telling that Colleen never holds Ryle accountable because he's "hot" and has such a promising future, much like that judge who gave the Stanford rapist Brock Turner a pass because he didn't want to penalize the rapist too harshly.
And its not just in It Ends With Us! November 9th is even worse
@@heatherofhyrule9050 ugly love most of her stories , there is even a worse korean writer called solche , her female protagoinsts many of them gets impregnanted one of the stories the fl was 12 and the ml was 18 at the begining , when she became 18 he was like she became a grown woman like what , don't get me started with how he cheats on his fiance and its romanticised , his fiance had better personality than the fl too but the writer has to torture rich female characters in her story
ryle was a red flag from the start throwing furniture around on the rooftop and obsessively wanting to take picture of her, he was abusive frim the start, arguably she dialed it down, but the unwellness of this character was obvious from the start imo
The thing is, Colleen Hoover romanticizes this type of behaviour so much on her other books that it's difficult to say if she intended for Ryle's actions to be seen as red flegs or if she just thought it was hot and decided to write it in the book to make Ryle's abuse seem like a plot twist later
@@anacarla6888 yeah exactly
@@anacarla6888 I'm getting the impression she only sees it as abuse if there's physical violence
YES! Thank you! It really was. As with 100% of CoHos books. She's got issues.
idk women were groomed to think this is normal in the past. They aren't genZ girl who is taught feminism all the time now so all the "I would have not..." things fall flat to me
Hoover writes psychological thrillers disguised as romance and that’s what scares me most. Being in denial about your abuse, covering up and imposing romance on abuse, misremembering past events, whitewashing the extent of abuse, choosing to stay with and identifying with your abuser are all valid and very real trauma responses. Sometimes you need an external intervention to help you face the fact that you’re being abused and need help. It’s not that cut clean. But Hoover tries to say otherwise. That all that *is* normal and excusable as long as someone “loves” you. It’s not. It’s just horrendous.
very interesting point
I find it interesting that in the book Ryle has this “dark side” that he can’t control yet he can control himself perfectly fine at his Job extremely stressful + is definitely in contact with patients and their family or coworkers who could be extremely mean to him yet his dark side stay hidden, his sister with who he never abused and all of is friends who also never saw his dark side, so basically Ryle can’t control himself but the uncontrollable monster mysteriously only appears to his gf/wife💀 and I’m pretty sure the book never acknowledged that
Ngl gives Jekyll and Hyde vibes (my interpretation is that Hyde a "Cover up" to keep Dr Jekyll's name clean)
@@cupcake-td2zk i like the comparison!
I mean, a lot of people are like that. I have known people who are abusive, but are very good at their job and admired by coworkers. Although the book is badly written, I found it realistic. Not everyone is a perfect victim or abuser. People say lily should have no contact with ryle, but in reality its really difficult to do when you have a child together.
Unfortunately there are a lot of people like that🙁. Ppl that have near perfect control of their emotions with their job and friends, but turns those repressed anger and dissatisfaction to their spouses behind closed doors. That’s why a lot of DV victims are reluctant to report their cases bc allegations abt their partners are shrugged off by ppl around them saying “They’re very kind in the workplace” or something similar
I like this comment because although it is true that many abusers are perceived well in many other areas of their lives, it brings attention to the myth that the person “lost control”. Cuz really what it is, is that person is intentionally choosing to abuse and deliberately chooses who to abuse. This myth is used by abusers to avoid accountability and makes it hard for the survivors to leave. So Yuup good point!
I just want to say I have not read this book and have no interest in reading it or anything CH writes. With that being said, I am so happy to see so many young women realizing it is not their job to fix problematic men. I am now 53 and I had a son with my abuser. My son was born in 1993 and is a father of, soon to be, 2. And I absolutely HATE how CH tries to romanticize abuse, and how the "I can fix him" mentality is so wrong. I never denied to myself that he was abusive, I just thought, that I was special and that my love was enough to make him change; This was the result of reading books similar the C.H's books 😡, so I don't agree when people say "let them read what they like, it’s just fiction" because in a young mind it can defiantly warp your sense of what romance and love looks like. When I found out I was pregnant and I had another life to think of, and how the abuse would affect my child, I left; I was 8 months pregnant when I finally left, but from the moment I found out I was going to have a child, I started making moves to leave, it just took 8 months. He followed me to every place I moved to and it took me 5 years to finally get rid of him, not by my own actions, but by him having to move out of state due to legal issues. I never hid from my son what I went through with his father, because I wanted him to understand what it was like, so he doesn't think what his father did was normal. I was so upset when i heard they were making a movie based on this book and really hope they fixed all that was wrong with the book. If you want to watch a movie that better protrays what its like to be married and get pregnant from an abuser, I would recomend Waitress (2007) with Keri Russell.
"...and to that I say disrespectfully, get up, get off your goddamn knees and put them to the floor of a church. Jesus Christ." 🤣🤣🤣
36:09 Sorry that point was mildly upsetting and I have to disagree. A person who loves you can absolutely hurt you. That does not minimize the abuse or should sway anyone to forgive their abuser. In fact it does not matter if the abuser truly loves their victim or not, what matters is the hurt they inflict.
I would even go as far as saying "a person who loves you will never hurt you" is dangerous because it also implies that "this person loves me so it cannot be abuse" (a mindset I myself used believe in). You would never be in a long-term relationship with someone if you are not 100% sure they love you, but even after 7,8,9+ years a partner can turn abusive. Also let's not forget a big portion of sexual violence happens in committed relationships and between family members. If you have an abusive parent this situation gets even more complicated because not only would you have to deal with the parent's behaviour but also with the knowledge you are unloved ("they abuse you so they never loved you").
I agree with all of your other points.
It was a bit confusing, but I think her point was Lilly believes 'someone who loves you cant hurt you' and that's flawed logic.
I agree with you. My mom was abusive. But she liked to deny, and even go as far as blaming me for being the cause of her losing her temper. Then again she never saw it as abuse. So there’s that.
We did have good memories. But that pain, never goes away. I don’t remember most of what happened. Such as what was the context of the conversation. I guess I blocked it from my memory.
i think the thinking behind that is that, if you REALLY love a person, you would do everything to make sure you don't hurt them. As in, control themselves, go to therapy, even leave and make sure the other person knows the violence etc was not their fault. Therefore, if you are being abused, it is important to understand that a love like that is very flawed and incomplete, and not how it should be (so, yes, you should leave, or put up firm boundaries). Is that hurtful - to realize the people who should love you, does not, or in a way that is severely lacking? yes, of course. But, it makes you maybe more realistic about that other person, their limits and flaws, and about your relationship ❤
they can SAY that they love you, but they don't ACTUALLY love you. It's a lie. The most you can say is that they don't know how to love anyone, including themselves. Ppl who love themselves don't do sh*t like this. They're just not able to actually love anyone. It doesn't matter why they're fked up, it can be a variety of things. but either way, love is NOT hurting yourself or the people you love. That's what ppl are trying to say. As a society we have no problem seeing people who hurt themselves as ''self-hating". Causing pain is their substitution for love. It fills a void, there is some emotion attached to that, some intensity of emotion which you can feel IN them...but it is *NOT* ''love". It is an extension of that hate, and sometimes it is an extension of self-hate. They're just not able to love so they keep hurting instead. The end :).
Colleen Hoover seems like someone who believes only physical abuse counts as abuse. In “Slammed,” no, he doesn’t hit her, but he’s her teacher and there’s a power imbalance between them. In “November 9,” no, he doesn’t push her, but he explicitly states in his narrative that he wants to (and in the first publication he actually SAs her…). It’s VERY frustrating.
She doesn't seem to see anything wrong with men manhandling and/or blocking women from walking away, either - it's only bad when he hits her, apparently. IIRC In Slammed, the teacher yanks the protagonist around by her arm, pours water on her and locks her in the bathroom, but it's totally okay and unproblematic because she was being ~hysterical~. In Nov 9, I distinctly remember the dude blocking the MC from leaving a room at least once, but this behavior was totally not alarming at all because she refused to hear him say how much she loves him or whatever. Not to mention, him undressing her while she was sobbing and saying no, but it was fine, because he was doing it for her own good, I guess. To coho, women't boundaries don't seem to matter if a guy is overstepping them out of "love". It acrually makes me sick that she has such a massive following that enhoyes her works completely uncritically.
I’m grateful I’ve seen this comment because eventually I’d want to read it, not knowing about the SA theme. Even Ryle attempting with Lily, I really struggled reading and and watching, so thank you for mentioning this about November 9 💛
I think the thing about Colleen Hoover's writing is that it's competent enough to be mistaken as "good". People with little experience with good literature and little life experience will not realize the toxicity of her love stories and her inability to engage with any challenging subject matter. It really does scratch the same itch that bad fanfic does, but since it has a hard cover and is dressed up as if it's actually serious literature, people fall for it.
i genuinely can't begin the understand how colleen has internalized the abuse she experienced within her own household. it feels like she's desperate for some kind of resolution that she didn't get in real life. i watched my dad abuse my mother to the point of needing inpatient treatment. he only changed when he married another woman and had kids with her and forgiving him feels impossible, even if i know what his childhood was like. there doesnt always need to be forgiveness, and not everyone deserves it or needs a happy ending. hoover treats abuse like its a trauma response and not an active choice, and its so vile. i worry for the kind of man her son will become.
I find it interesting that at the end Lily know that Ryle is dangerous and should divorce him but still allow her daughter to be around him 💀 like “yeah he’s dangerous for me but you go ahead he definitely won’t abuse you too!” She compared Ryle to her father but:
1 Ryle is NOT her dad, yes they are similar but not the same person Ryle could snap and hurt his daughter too
2 her father DID hurt more than just her mother like you said he hurt her and Atlas and probably more
3 what happened if Ryle gets a new gf? He showed that he didn’t changed and show a clear pattern of abuse with no intention of fixing himself what if his daughter see it? She will be traumatized for sure just like lily was
4 even if he doesn’t abuse his daughter or a future gf( i highly doubt it) WHY would you want your daughter around someone like that?!?💀 he’s objectively a horrible person who shouldn’t have any contact with Lily or the baby
thank you. i've seen even the most critical of reviews giving the book more credit for the sole reason of having domestic violence "explored" in it. like😭😭not to be or to be that person, but everything colleen hoover touches scrunches in disgust and withers away with nothing left to be explored. personal experience or not, this is just too poorly written to have good enough eyesight to see and explore.
I cannot wait for the wave of film/book essays about this, including yours!!
From a neuroscientist's perspective... I feel deep sympathy for the author. She's clearly trying to figure it out herself, being torn between "abusive behaviour is bad because everyone in the modern world says so" and "abuse is actually not that bad because facing the fact that I had a really terrible person as my father is too painful". I do think that producing a piece of work with the intention to send a message about something that you haven't even figured out yet is quite irresponsible, considering how young and wide her audience is...
As poor as Hoover’s line-level prose I remain grateful to this book for affording me a way in to understanding how women find themselves in such awful, violent relationships. Obviously, I knew that it rarely starts off that way, but reading this book helped me to feel that slow progression and how insidious it actually is.
Dude, you're the reason why I hate her books. It is not ''INSIDIOUS"! He starts off their first meeting by punching stuff! And ends up punching her. WTH are you all smoking??? O_O...........What is INSIDIOUS about that??
Seriously, if you have a gf who sees a crazy drunk punching holes in walls and that's a turn on for her: 1. you WILL have to save her from abuse as some point, I suggest you start a savings account for that NOW, bc it's guaranteed to happen. 2. you should get away from her unless you want to be constantly in danger of her abusive BFs knocking on YOUR door in the middle of the night looking for her sorry a$$. 3. get her into therapy if you can and move on with YOUR life.
Not everyone can be saved and definitely not by you. There are women who accidentally end up in bad situations but there are also women with ZERO instinct for survival. If we were 20,000 years ago, a bear would have eaten them. But we're not...so they're everywhere now. Not every man can be saved from himself and definitely not every woman either. Some ppl are just horrible people. There's no fixing what's broken in them. If you saw your mom get SAd by your dad and 30 years and 3 kids later you want to use that for smut material, the problem is YOU now. You DO know better. You just don't give a sh*t to DO better.
My father wasn't physically but very emotionally abusive towards my mom, so if Ryle is anything like my dad you bet your ass he's going to manipulate their child as soon as they're old enough to understand words into helping him get back with Lilly or into moving in with him and start hating Lilly for revenge.
Never understood the love for this book how can you betray your mom and think your dad is a good guy if he never got help and abused your mom even though he didn’t to you his still a criminal and you should be on your mom side and wow Lily should get a restraining order and raise her daughter on her own because you can’t trust him with your daughter with that angry this book pissed me off and it’s one of my worse reads ever especially since they make it seem like it’s a romance wtf
it irks me so much when authors don't give their heroines the OPTION of not keeping the baby. they will keep it? good for them, but don't present it as the only option
THANK YOU
Yeah, CoHo has made it very explicit that she is anti-choice and only makes her villainous women ‘baby killers’. God is she a piece of work
Tried to read a page and couldn’t. I felt like I was reading a Wattpad story written by a 9th grader.
yes everyone and their mother has made a colleen hoover video, but not everyone is listen2kristen 💅
OOP- this is it this is the comment 🏆
@@Listen2Kristen_ i would like to thank my hamster and the youtube algorithm and-
In South Africa, august ninth is our national Women’s Day. I forget it’s not international and thought they intentionally made the release on women’s day and it made me so much more mad !! 😤😂
Especially bc domestic violence crime rates are abnormally high here. ❤️🩹
Stumbled on your video randomly and I love how calm your voice is! Thank you for this interesting review🫶
The maid from netflix is a good movie in my opinion that deals with DV
I just don’t know why people like CoHo books. I start reading a lot last month, and i was searching for books to read. I asked my friend and she said to me “oh, you have to read It Ends With Us”. Hell no girl, I am NOT reading that shit 💀
She lost me at naming her character Lilly Bloom. 😹😭😭
You forgot her middle name. Blossom 😭
Its just so on the nose 😂😅
@@kkrb1212 NOOOO!!!! You are kidding!!!! 😹😹😭😭
@@viriatothelusitani1203 Right??? like wth. lol
@@badlilkitty96 everytime I think Im a bad writer I remember a character named Lily Blossom Bloom exists and shes a florist 💀
So I have never read one of her books, but isn't the thing that is happening there that Colleen Hoover is writing a normal male Colleen Hoover main character and she just kind of strapped the DV onto that person? Like in that sense it seems like her readers are kind of tricked into like the guy because he is the guy she always writes, crass and crude, very into one thing and one thing only and very hot. So when the DV comes into platy they are already programmed to like him and since he is exactly the person she always writes and the female protagonist is telling them "he's a good person, my dad is a good person" it makes it almost seem like that is more of the message here than the ideas about domestic abuse.
It's really eerie to me how it seems like she's writing all her male love interests like this... cus this is the kind of man that's been modelled to her by her father, and she believes he's a good person. It feels uncomfortable that a lot of young people read this book, Ryle being portrayed with this personality, and then they'll pick up her other books that romanticize the SAME PERSONALITY as Ryle... only they're supposed to not be abusers. But they do a bunch of other really fucked up abusive things to the female protagonist that she then portrays as being acceptable, and they get everything they want. Every time. And the fans love these men, even those who are as bad as Warren and Ben. She dresses up all these warning-signs as hot and romantic, and then when they do the really bad things, the reader has already been made attached to the guy, and their actions are rationalised with pity and blaming everyone else, even the protagonist. If the men are given any flack at all for their behaviour, they're "fixed" by the power of love (aka sex). But usually these shitty men are shown (according to the narrative) to ultimately be in the right, or being the victim.
The big issue I have with this book and the film by extension is the presentation of it as a rom com. Like, no, it's a horror story. And even the author doesn't seem to realise that which is weird because she chose to write about this subject, you'd think she'd know what kind of story she's telling.
Dickmatized. 😂 To be fair, the way a traumatized person's brain works, it weirdly makes sense that Lily would be like, "My dad was a good person", but then we'd never see that. It's the cognitive dissonance of someone who's supposed to love you hurting you. Hoover probably could have done that better.
Thank you for your commentary. CoHo is horrible.
Some of us do want to read romance with some saucy scenes in them - some of us being me - but I don't trust the genre if I'm honest. I don't WANT to be fed toxic or hyper-masculine love interests😥when there are a bunch of other types of really attractive and SEXY personalities. There are character flaws that aren't red flags that can create tension and conflict. But for some reason... this is what sells. So it's everywhere, or so it feels like. Idk. I'm so jaded at this point.
I DNFed this book, so I’m no fan, but I think you’re interpreting a few things wrong. Ryle’s blackouts are an excuse that he makes that Lilly believes because the truth, that he’s abusive, is too difficult to bear. When you’re in an abusive relationship, it’s hard to see things clearly. It’s the same thing with her dad. He’s not a good person. She’s trying to convince herself. The reader should know neither he nor Ryle are good, or honest, from context clues.
So glad I’ve found your channel💗
"Look at look at me, this isn't you" effing kill me 😂
Whoof. I get the feeling Colleen growing up knowing her dad, it makes her want to rationalise the bad things he did to her mom. She probably didn't know these bad things about him until she was older, and she already had an image of her dad as being a good person, so she probably doesn't want to believe anything else about him... and men like him. It's giving copium for me. And her learning some bad things by her dad being allowed to be part of her life.
no, no. She knew!! OR she is lying about literally everything all the time. But according to her interviews, she KNEW this. It was her very first memory of her parents and her dad especially... so, no.
My mom--a survivor of domestic abuse and currently escaping an abusive marriage--is watching this movie right now. I tried to warn her that the movie would most likely trigger her, but she said she'll be fine.
It's just hard to take this book seriously as a look into domestic abuse when Colleen's other romance stories are basically the same as this one
You failed to mention teenage atlas victim blames his mother abuse along with Lily towards her mother
I really appreciate this entire review
Thank you so much for this review!
Saw the movie, didn’t and will not read the book. The dv was treated with hardly any complexity and only incidental to the love story between lily and atlas
WAIT THAT COMES OUT TODAY !??
I still have the book but have not read it. Might see if it’s worth checking out
Idk if im just reading too much into it but maybe they dint show her dad being a good person because he wasnt. Maybe lilly is only really the good moments because she wants to remember her dad as a good man. The lack of good memories is (in my irrelevant opinion) probably because there werent many
Hoover DID make a statement with this book - we're just shook because it's the opposite of 'DV is bad' 😭😭😭😭
Came here to get all the tea on this book after the whole PR thing happening between Justine Baldoni and Blake Lively. You did not dissapoint! I loved every minute of your hate rant:)))
with everything Blake Lively stands for I was so surprised she took this role
I mean she got married on a former plantation soooo
I have never read the book, as far as I know, CH wrote it this way purposefully (in regards to how Ryle abuses Lily and how Lily sees her abusers). i thought she did it bc her mom or grandma face abuse herself, and she wanted to go for the reality rather than a lesson. not to say the other issues aren’t glaring, but i think that CH probably was betting on the reader understanding that Lily shouldn’t be with Ryle and shouldn’t be viewing her abusers as positively as she does, but that it is normal for that to happen to victims
This book literally pissed me off so much
I love this, just gained a new sub
Although this book is very flawed and don't get me started on hover I like the realistic aspects of this book. A lot of times we imagine these book/movie like men who are aggressive but have soft spots for us and yet when a man is aggressive its genuinely just a red flag like Ryle when he was throwing furniture around and leading up to us finding out he's abusive. Although he's attractive and successful and we believe that we can change those aggressive behaviors we can't and in truth he is an abuser
banger analysis and commentary!! Also we have the same name lol
26:25 uhm, exCUSE me, betas do not have heats, OMEGAS have heats. get 👏 it 👏 right 👏
(lol loved the video tho)
no because how dare i mess this up im sorry my apology video is coming next 🙏😭🤣
A book does not need to be a fable with a moral message. Why can't a book be about people making bad decisions? Why you thing the message is "a woman in a violent relationship must forgive her abuse because their children"? This happens in real life. It's a very complicate situation. This book is about that. Why need to have a happy ending? Sometimes a bad guy does not go to the jail. For fear a woman in a toxic relationship does not report the husband to police. Do you judge that? A character does not to need to change. He is bad, not get caught, does not change. That is. Books can be about that. Collen does not write well, and a I think it's a not a good book. But the point is, just because a book tells a complicated story about a terrible situation with a terrible ending, does not implicate the author agrees with what happens in the book. Or the author is "romanticizing" the situation. Read between lines is important.
Yes, I agree. It annoys me when people insist that all books and stories need to have some sort of moral, as though every story needs to be Aesop’s Fables or something. Not all stories need to be prescriptive, and actually I sometimes don’t want to read stories that have these strong lessons and morals; it can come off as preachy and cheesy. Stories that describe a harsh and yet relatable reality can be powerful and can teach a lesson to the reader indirectly, which I think can stick to the reader in a way that a preachy message can fall flat sometimes. So I’m with you.
I guess where people get uncomfortable is that this book is marketed as a romance. Not a thriller, not a melancholic realistic fiction, not even a cautionary tale. We’re encouraged to root for the two main characters and we’re supposed to root for their romantic relationship. The writing, the marketing, the movie deal, all of it is framed as though this is the next “The Notebook” or something in the romance genre. But the relationship itself is obviously abusive, so there’s this mismatch that causes a lot of dissonance and confusion, especially when you combine all of this with the fact that the main demographic of this book are 16-30 year old women who have varying levels of experience and emotional maturity. Maybe if the framing of this story was darker, framed as a thriller, and marketed towards an older audience that already has pre-existing context for trauma and abusive relationships and can pick up on the subtleties of the main relationship, I’d be more comfortable with it.
For context, I’m a middle school teacher and I’ve seen eighth grade girls reading Colleen Hoover books and discuss them amongst themselves as “hot and exciting romance novels” and it really actually is disturbing. Now most of that is on their parents for not vetting what their children are reading… but the marketing doesn’t exactly discourage younger readers either.
I think, with a theme like that, and with the reach of her books and their content, some things should be made more clear and obvious. Like, write the same story, but make sure that the gas lighting is recognised. That the manipulation is obvious (for the reader). Make his struggles struggles, without making him a "good person" with inner demons. As in the video, if she is an unreliable narrator, make that clear (even without the main character reading herself).
In short, if you are writing about a complicated topic, make sure that you get the nuances right (or at least the publishing house should make sure to look at that, because this isa big best selling author, not a small independent writer and book).
relationships are always complicated, even those without physical abuse.
I found this video pretty invalidating to women who have experienced a very similar situation to Lily’s character. *Trigger Warning: There will be mention of DV and SA*
I experienced a very eerily similar situation to Lily. I did witness my mom being abused by my adoptive dad when I was a child, my mom did eventually leave when I was 7, she checked me and my sister out of school and all of our stuff was in the car and we ended up staying at a shelter for women and children escaping DV situations. It is very confusing growing up witnessing that, trauma is confusing because on the one hand I loved my dad, I still do, but I also know what he did to my mom, and that’s still confusing on how to handle to this day.
My mom allowed me and my sister to still see my dad, he got us every summer, for the entire summer and he was a few states away from my mom, and she still let us go. And my mom always said, she was planning on leaving until she found out she was pregnant with my sister and then she got stuck with him another 4 years till she felt she could leave again.
Growing up, I didn’t think this situation had that much of an effect on me. However, I found myself in increasingly worse relationships and after a s*icide attempt, and moving out of my parents house, getting a full time job, and living on my own found myself meeting my first husband.
He, and every guy who displayed red flags to me previously was easily overlooked. I was always downplaying the significance or misremembering it, and I was romanticizing it. This is a response to unhealed trauma from my childhood, it didn’t manifest itself until I was in actual relationships with men. If someone else had been going through what I was going through I would encourage them to leave, I would think it was wrong, I would think there was no reason to stay but when I was in the situation myself it was not that easy.
I personally found myself misremembering how things went, and even when my ex husband successfully r*ped me after our son was born to a point that I’m t*rn down there and the scar tissue is so bad it cannot be repaired and I was screaming so loud from the pain, a business heard me next door and called the police and I was too scared to say what happened, that I lied to protect him.
When he stole money from my parents safe, $8500 to be exact, I lied to protect him, and I am the one who paid it back
His sister was constantly using the fact that they were adopted because their parents were cr*ck addicts and both of them to get cr*ck and eventually ending up in foster care and being abused before being adopted as an excuse to justify his drinking and violent outbursts. Which did start off seeming “accidental” but escalated to a point I couldn’t justify it, and it was thought out and calculated to a point I was in vulnerable situations and had to endure it.
He also used that trauma when we first met as a way to get me, he literally told me that he wished someone who love all of him, even the dark parts no one knows. Which I found interesting, I was ashamed of being abused before, being cheated on before, being used, left, trying to k*ll myself that I downright felt like I was a charity project and would be lucky to have anyone want me at that point. So when he opened up about his childhood and him ending up in foster care, I immediately thought to myself “how could anyone not love you, for something you had no control over” and I felt the same way about myself, like why couldn’t people love me because of trauma I had no control over. It was manipulative from that gate, it was a way to relate myself to him, this makes gaslighting easier. They know your fears, triggers, trauma responses. They weaponize them against you to make you feel like you are going crazy.
During all of this, I was thinking of my first love (who I am married to now) and I would talk to him in secret, telling him everything that was going on, and trying to find support to leave. I also felt like I knew him because I loved him in high school but I had no real reason to suggest he would be different than anyone else, I believed that because my younger self did, and that was a self I trusted more than the current version of that time where I felt I was literally in hell.
And when I did finally get the strength and courage to leave my ex husband, I tried to have him around our son too, I was so fearful of him trying to get full custody and take him away from my completely that I thought just being cooperative would help the situation. I did eventually move away to a place he doesn’t know where I am and has no way to get in touch with me, but that took a few years after I left him.
And my pregnancy was conflicting for me because as soon as I knew I was pregnant and I was aware of who I was married to, I didn’t know what to do, I always wanted a baby, but I hated that he was the dad. Which played a huge role in my PPD once my son was born.
I believe that this perspective that you shared comes from this mindset that this situation is unrealistic but it is very realistic, and I think that’s why so many people are confused. There is no perfect victim, if we noticed the red flags right away and ran from them we wouldn’t have been in the relationship and dealt with DV. If we left after the first time of being abused, it wouldn’t be so many deaths. The point is that abusers are a lot like Ryle and victims are a lot like Lily.
Not all of them, but a good bit. Just like it was Colleen’s mother’s experience too, which everyone is invalidating.
Not me thinking this book was some cute romance 😂 I never read it, just heard people rave about it. From your explanation it seems like Lily has no character development which I HATE in a book.
LMFAOOOOO TOE LICKING IS CRAZYYYYY
I just left an advanced screening of the movie. Never read the book. But the movie itself is different in the way it ends and how everything is portrayed.
I’m curious how they handled the DV scenes tbh
Did they downplay it? Leave it out? Bc I remember how controversial the book was and how much was handled poorly. Supposedly this is based on her mom which is really weird???
@@Stonedandbookish you need to see it, I think you would be pleasantly surprised on how everything plays out.
@@ivxnlsI'm not sure, if it came to streaming services I might but I'm not really a movie theater person
@@Stonedandbookishthe abuse scenes are really fast and leave you questioning what even happened, they just establish the moment but leave it open a bit so you are unsure if it was an accident or not
i cant explain properly, but you should watch the movie, it changes a few things from the book that makes it better but still flawed since its a colleen hoover story
Love this vid Kristen!
I hate this whole cluster cuss that is this book. However the fact the main male lead is named RYLE????
He's as awful as his name.
Edit: i just looked up this book and its rated 4.2 stars on Goodreads????????
Are people insane?
I never liked Colleen Hoover and never read her books for a reason but when I watched the movie I was truly impressed, but actually hearing how much changes was made, is crazy. Still don’t like her and thankful they made the movie more realistic
‘Dickmatized’ haha.
Everyone has made a CoHo video but I LIVE for everyone reading these books to filth so, I see no problem
Colleen Hoover coming up with the worst names for her characters in every single one of her books
I feel Atlas deserved so much more than an epilogue to get the girl he always loved from the start
If J.D.Vance wrote fiction, this would be it.
I loved your analysis and understand that you are starting your channel so you will improve with practice. But I will strongly recommend you to try to be more concise when explaining your points. Because in more than one instance you kept explaining the same idea over and over despite it being clear to the viewer. I think refraining from doing so could make your analysis more compact.
I wish you the best on your journey and I’m sure you will improve with each video.
great video you have a new fan
Damn why do so many people like this book?
And what’s even worse is this is not Colleen Hoover’s worst book.
The REAL question is: do we think Ellen will make a cameo in this dumpster fire movie?
❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤
Great video!! insta subscribe
I was so shook that the feminist Blake Lively chose this role...Ryan Reynolds is becoming unlikable to me as well nowadays
I think It Ends with Us is not that bad. It talks about the harsh reality of how daughters and mothers see the abuser differently. The main character chooses 50/50 custody because she doesn't want to rob her daughter of a relationship with her real father, but the reader knows her boyfriend is the better man.
In comparison to Hoover's other works this one feels the most authentic and the dialogue is less cringy
The main issue is sort of the narrative hypocrisy
This book made people retroactively attribute this line of logic to the rest of Colleen's catalogue, however prior to this book's release, people just went along with everything either being a drama, a thriller or a romance but not an underlying message for an abusive relationship
Which i have to ask, why would all of her books be about the same thing? It's kind of boring, but that would mean every consistent reader is just rereading the same fanfic with different characters.
Oh another thing, people wanted a sequel for this book. What about this would get a sequel? No one knows, but that sequel is literally just a retread of everything else she made and people are fine with it
There are a few things that I dislike about this book and Colleen's writing. The lack of any real chance of a pro-choice thought in Lily's head and the fact that Colleen wrote that someone likes toast. Something about that toast line bothers me the most. 🤣