It Ends with Us hit the international screens on August 7th, but you might have seen it as a flowerful pink cover in your local bookstore. 

Colleen Hoover, is an author, well-known on #BookTok, for her “romance” books that seem to have very little romantic interaction, and are promoted with pink covers. In fact, this caused a lot of controversy and backlash on the same platform, as many of her books were going viral for being publicised by the author and by creators on social media as romance books, even though lots of her books contained heavy doses of abusive relationships, domestic violence, manipulation,… just to name a few. 

Her best-selling novel It ends with us was in the middle of this dispute, as  Hoover almost released  a colouring book for children in the theme of the novel. The thought of children being exposed to such topics gathered readers together and collectively cancelled the writer. The problem with these novels doesn’t lie with the issues of abuse and such, but rather with the target audience of her advertising, which is teens. The teens reading these so-called “romance novels” might not fully make the differentiation between healthy and toxic relationships and get the idea that romantic relationships are ones involving domestic violence or manipulation. 

How did they manage to overcome the internet hate and make a movie? Well, no one quite knows. What we do know is that the hate absolutely did not stop there. The story revolves around a couple, florist Lily Bloom and neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid, who,  after a period of bliss and love, find themselves in a  relationship that turns sour when  Ryle shows his manipulative side. 

The two-part controversy surrounding this book isn’t about the adaptation into the movie itself, but about, once again, the advertising of the story. Blake Lively, who portrays the main character is at the centre of this new scandal, as during promotion interviews leading up to the premier, she kept avoiding questions about the domestic violence displayed in the book. In fact, she kept publicising the movie as a love story, and overall when answering interviewers’ questions she appeared “tone-deaf” about the subjects portrayed in the story. This was further highlighted by old interviews resurfacing on the web where she was rude to multiple interviewers and the fact that at every interview she took the time to promote  her hair-care brand or her husband , Ryan Reynolds’, new movie: Deadpool & Wolverine.

This led the internet to do what the internet does best: cancelling famous people.