A real bad boy: How Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us exploits romance tropes

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.