Please Please Please Don't Listen to Anything Anna Todd's "After" Series Tells You About Life

I found out about this book called "After" by an author named Anna Todd a few days ago and I can't stress what I'm about to say next enough: Please Please do NOT take the themes about relationships from that book and apply them to real life. 

I want to make it clear right here that I am not attacking Ms. Todd, her writing ability, or even her book. I am attacking the themes it presents.

Personally right away when I read the description I knew the book wouldn't be one that, would tell a story I wanted to read/fit my taste, but was curious about the whole "fanfiction" aspect of it and I wanted to know what it was a fanfic of and... two things: Fifty Shades of Grey and One Direction. 

Now I don't know about you, but when "Fifty Shades of Grey" comes up alarm bells start going off in my head. 

Then I read some more and all I can say is that it allegedly (since I haven't read it) portrays a MESSED UP relationship as love. Basically, it follows the story of a woman in her early twenties named Tessa and the relationship she develops with a "Harlin Scott". (Originally this character was named Harry Styles, being a 1D fanfic and all)

In this relationship there are components such as emotional abuse, obsessive-possessive behaviour, and manipulation. 

I just want to make it very clear that components like that in a relationship are NEVER okay, (no matter what may have happened in the person's past) and are NEVER  a part of love. (Or at least not love that's worth sticking around for)

From what I've seen of the series' book synopses, the series wraps up terrible behaviour, even cruelty, (After's book description actually says the word "cruelty" when talking about the characters relationship) and physical attraction and calls it love. 

The book just shoots off unhealthy messages in all directions such as "anything is forgiveable if it's "love"", (It is not, this all depends on how much the person feels right to forgive) that sabotage is okay, and just an unhealthy definition of love in general.

Why does this matter? Well first off the story started off on wattpad, and it's main readers were tween girls and the thing racked up a billion views. No matter what the actual numbers are, that is a LOT of young girls whose definitions of love are influenced by this totally wrong portrayal of it. 

It's already done a lot of damage, all we can do now is try to remedy that and try to keep any more from happening. But undoing damage is always harder than doing it, and just how many will we be able to reach in an attempt to undo the damage?

And things like this do cause damage. 

When people think it's okay for them to be mistreated, in a relationship that involves the word love or not, they're not going to be focusing on reaching their full potential, they are not going to be able to contribute to society to the best of their ability.  

So not only do they suffer, there's the potential for the rest of us to suffer, too. 

It's also important to note what the fact that this story exists alludes to. This book was written by a woman, and if it's presenting this kind of relationship as "love" that means she probably thinks it's okay for men to treat women this way, and if you broaden it some, the book can also be seen to mean that it's okay for people to treat other people this way. 

First, the fact that there is a belief like this out there is a problem.

Second, it gives the message to women that's it's okay for men to treat them badly, it tells men that it's okay to treat women that way, and most worryingly of all it tells men that women think it's okay for them to treat women badly. (But guys is ISN'T, so please don;t listen to that. Abuse is really not cool and never will be) And if people think it's okay, there's a lot less reason to not do it. 

There is nothing wrong with telling/reading whatever story you like, but when you're telling, it's never going to hurt to consider the consequences your story may have on other people, and when you're a reader, ALWAYS evaluate how appropriate things are before you take them into real life, and DON'T let fiction define what you believe to be true about real life. 

Fiction can represent situations in a way that may work in a story, but would not in real life -- that's why it's fiction. And feel free to disagree with me, but I definitely think this "After" series is a prime example of this. 

Read more about this issue here.

I'm not trying to get people mad about the books existence, I just don't want it's existence to affect yours.

(On a side note, if you want to look into a book I think handles an abusive relationship right, may I just recommend "The Taming" by Eric Walters and Teresa Toten? That book was magnificent. Here's a link to the book on Indigo, here's a link for Amazon US)

I'm not going to try to get people to boycott the book or anything, (that's a bit too extreme) but it's safe to say I would choose to cheer #WESSA (aka #Twill) over #Hessa any day.

#TheInfernalDevices #CassandraClare ;)