#inheroes-wetrust

[acotars]

i saw your list of top 5 romance authors and ilona andrews was there so clearly you have great taste but i also saw christina lauren - i read love and other words and ADORED it until the end, which i thought was so incredibly awful that it totally ruined the entire book and the author for me. what did you think of LAOW/did you think other books were better? the whole "cheating but actually rape but skimmed over and never clarified or discussed" REALLY threw me, esp bc i loved it so much before

first of all, thank you!!! secondly, this is so real and it totally surprises me that this isn't talked about more. i've had great conversations about it with some mutuals but it's.... bizarre the way the end of love and other words goes down and in my experience, so unexpected from CL. putting the rest of this under a cut because it got long!!

what happened to elliot was rape, hands down and without question. but the narrative never (never!!) treated it with the gravity it required? and because it happened to him at the same time that he lost macy without any explanation, all of his feelings about each experience get so tangled up and intertwined with each other. when he sees macy again, he drops everything in his life to make things work with her, and we get the distinct impression from the (very few) glimpses into his adult life that it's taken him a very, very long time to rebuild. his recent ex rachel even says something snidely to macy about how much she "fucked [elliot] up," how what macy supposedly did to him impacted elliot and rachel for the entire year they were together. this, combined with other subtext throughout the book suggests elliot had a very hard time with physical intimacy, and his ex-girlfriend rachel very much believes this to be macy's fault.

without digging into blame too far (no one is at fault in what went down on new year's except emma, the girl who took advantage of someone far past the point of consent), i find it so intensely strange that CL still have elliot apologize to macy, that macy still feels justified in her anger at him, that after allll the pieces are laid out between them, macy laments the tragedy — not that elliot was assaulted, but that this "tiny whimper of a drunken misunderstanding" blew up their lives so completely.

the simplest course of action would have obviously been to never write this scene into existence at all — there are so, so many other ways to have broken them apart and left them both reeling for years. any book featuring on-page rape is a massive undertaking, as this is a subject that requires so, so much intention and care in the writing. love and other words handled it so poorly, it ruined the book for a lot of people. and i don't blame them!!! of all the christina lauren books i've read, this is the only one to feature on-page sexual assault. it is also the only book by then two of them that was published as women's fiction and not romance, which i think contributed a lot to the tone and introspection of this book. it could very well be that romance publishers are stricter about guidelines when publishing sexual assault scenes and that influenced the genre switch. it could also be that christina lauren never intended for elliot's new years encounter to be considered rape (even though it so clearly is) — they write about it with a flippancy that is so incongruous with the stances they've shown in other books. the whole thing confuses and disappoints me, but luckily isn't present in their other books.

i really enjoyed the soulmate equation by them — i think it has similar levels of yearning and pining, with less of the will-they-won't-they and none of the assault. others have loved the unhoneymooners but it wasn't totally my thing. the then-and-now situation is also explored really well in twice in a blue moon, but i found the "now" portions less compelling. i would recommend checking out their other books if you feel comfortable doing so, because as far as my memory serves, none of the rest of them feature anything similar to the train wreck that is the end of laow. but also! if that ending was enough for you to never read another book by them, more power to you!!! it was.... so bad and it still doesn't sit right to this day.

[santakinard]

i watched all of julie and the phantoms bc of your posts and thank you for that bc it was flawless. also you warned me about unsaid emily and i thought i was emotionally prepared i was not it was devastating

omg I’m soooo incredibly happy I got you into this fantastic show! 

and ikr??? I don’t think all the warnings and preparation in the world can fully prepare oneself for the emotional devastation that is Unsaid Emily. I mean, I already cried on the show before, especially during Wake Up. But damn that still did not prepare me. I will forever be crying about it.