Welcome back everyone, happy Monday! For this week’s post, I wanted to talk about a juicier topic: cancel culture online, specifically in the BookTok community.
For a good amount of time, I ended up on BookTok, the term for the community of readers on TikTok. I was on the romance novel side of TikTok because my algorithm knows me very well.
I get a ton of book recommendations from this side of TikTok. I was seeing tons of book recommendations like “The Love Hypothesis” by Ali Hazelwood and “Icebreaker” by Hannah Grace. “Icebreaker” floated around TikTok for a while; there are tons of mixed opinions about this one because it was kind of crazy (if you know you know).
An author who rose to fame very quickly is Colleen Hoover, a romance author for the most part. She writes very cutesy novels but also has a few thriller/mysteries such as “Verity” and “Layla.” These two hooked me right away because they were different, and I read them quickly because of their fast-paced nature.
The first novel of Hoover’s that I read was “It Ends With Us,” which was all over BookTok. Everyone and their mother seemed to be reading and talking about this novel. So, like the follower I am, I bought the book and read it in about two days.
This book deals with past relationships, breaking the cycle of domestic abuse, and making difficult decisions.
I saw several people on TikTok take issue with the fact that Hoover creates an relationship between a young Lily, the main character, and her first love, Atlas. Atlas was a homeless boy that young Lily felt sorry for yet related to, and they ended up falling in love.
The issue is that Atlas was seventeen, and Lily was fifteen. People thought that there was a more predatory relationship going on between the two characters, and that Hoover’s age choice was weird.
Their relationship did not seem predatory, and I do not think that this was Hoover’s intention. The point of their young love was to demonstrate how they found each other and comforted each other when they were both struggling with life.
Lily’s father steps in when he finds out about his daughter’s relationship with an older homeless boy, in a horrific way, and Atlas kind of disappears and ends up joining the military.
So, this author went from being loved by pretty much everyone who reads romance novels to being questioned for her ethics.
I’m not sure if this is a “hot take” or not, but I am wondering if something like this age gap is really that big of a deal within a fictional book. It is classified as fiction for a reason: nothing in the book is real, and these are made-up individuals and stories.
Of course, we should take non-consensual underrage relationships seriously, but within a fictional story where nothing really happened, I do not think it is necessary to “cancel” the author who created it.
To me, this is very typical of online culture, especially on TikTok. People love to build others up and keep them on a pedestal for a while, then find a minor issue, or major in some cases, and switch their feelings. We see this happen with singers, artists, authors, and especially influencers.
How many apologies have we seen from people with a large following? How many YouTubers have cried in front of their cameras when old tweets and posts surface from their past?
This has become a normal cycle within online communities. Influencers and famous individuals do something that their followers disagree with, and many people will jump on his “hating” trend, for lack of a better term, and suddenly this person is “canceled.”
The cycle starts by the creator being essentially attacked in their comment sections. Some will ignore it, some will make the dreaded apology video, and some will just wait until the storm dies down.
Online culture moves quickly; therefore, people will eventually get bored and move on to the next big thing. This allows people who have been “canceled” to return to their online platform as if nothing happened.
This also occurred with the incredibly famous J.K. Rowling, who wrote the Harry Potter series. The books are beloved by many, but when word hit that she had said some terrible things about the LGBTQ+ community, people were very upset.
Things are a bit different with Rowling, however. She is very consistent in her beliefs.
This starts to touch upon the idea of separating the art from the artist. How do we begin to do this when the artist has said or done something that completely disagrees with our values, morals, and ethics?
Every case of cancel culture is completely different and depends on what the artist or creator did to upset their audience. Regardless of what they did, their credibility is weakened each time they are canceled. They always end up coming back to their platform in one way or another.
What do you think about Colleen Hoover’s books if you’ve read any? Does she deserve to be canceled for the age gap between Lily and Atlas? Or this a minor detail that does not need to be picked apart?