Warning: Spoilers for Ali Hazelwood’s Adult Romance Novels: “The Love Hypothesis,” “Love on the Brain,” “Love, Theoretically,” “Bride” and “Not in Love.”
Ever since the success of the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise, the famous Twilight-fanfiction-turned-blockbuster-movie series, the romance novel community has seen a rise of published works that began their lives in the cradle of all bad fanfiction: the internet.
These proto-novels are often supported by an online community of fans who enjoy seeing their favorite characters placed in vastly different settings or situations. In AUs (alternate universes), characters are transplanted from their usual settings to coffee shops, regency-era England and even college campuses. In 2024, it seems we have come to the final frontier: These works are being published as their own original novels. This is where the romance author Ali Hazelwood has found her niche, writing transplanted novels and changing details that reference the original universe in what the industry calls “filing the serial numbers off.”
Hazelwood’s first published novel, “The Love Hypothesis,” went viral in 2021 and sold over 750,000 copies. The book’s status as a former “Star Wars” fanfiction is glaringly apparent, even just from the cover art. The hype for its release was centered around the source material. Readers not only wanted to see if Hazelwood could pull off the genre-switched romcom, but also to take part in the fun of watching the fanfiction equivalent of Supreme Leader Kylo Ren (Adam Driver, “Star Wars: The Force Awakens”) throw himself at the nerdy, dorky and awkwardly relatable main character.
What makes Hazelwood’s novels worth looking at is that since the release of “The Love Hypothesis,” she has continued to dig herself deeper into the exaggerated tropes and characters that she has unabashedly carved out — unafraid to double down on the dramatic story choices that writing fanfiction demands. Each plot is extremely unserious, and Hazelwood’s characters are oddly reminiscent of each other. Each incarnation follows the awkwardly adorkable female and brooding but overprotective male stereotypes that the forefathers in the fanfiction community have lovingly passed down. Hazelwood loves to stack these overripe characteristics on top of each other in each new book, crafting a cast of characters that behave in insane yet extremely predictable ways. So let’s meet our entertaining but recycled main characters, shall we?
She is always in academia but always less established in her career than her male counterpart. Whether the pair are doctoral candidate and professor, adjunct and tenured faculty or literal werewolf alpha and vampyre daughter who is married off by her estranged father, they never start on equal footing. This allows Him to save her career later in the novel, when She is inevitably betrayed by someone she trusts, usually a secretly-evil/misogynistic scientist colleague.
She is always awkward, physically tiny and insistent in her belief that he hates her, even when directly told otherwise. Her emotional intelligence is always nonexistent, and we often find her life and emotions being managed by the male main character almost as soon as he enters her life. My personal favorite plot point across each book is that they always “fall in love” (he always falls first) through extended sequences of forced-proximity antics. Sufferers of second-hand-embarrassment beware. (Oh no! All the seats are filled at this research conference. Guess I have to sit on my hot male colleague’s lap. Because that’s a normal conclusion to make!) She also always appears to be fresh off of the internet circa 2010. There are mentions of fandom, the couple in “Love on the Brain” run their own popular academia-focused Twitter accounts — and there’s mention of one particularly memorable outfit: white tank, nose stud and galaxy leggings.
On the other hand, the male love interest is always physically huge and completely feral whenever he comes within a twenty-yard radius of the main character. He’s tall, obsessed with Her and did I mention big? In her more recent novels, Hazelwood has increased the height of the female main characters, perhaps due to negative reviews about this phenomenon, but the good intentions of this move seem futile when her leading men are still described as the “Mount Rushmore of STEM academia” and have at least a head over her 6-foot-tall leading ladies.
The way Hazelwood writes her female protagonists is also always very contradictory: they are capable and career-driven women on one page while reinforcing the damsel-in-distress archetype on the next. Her characters always need to be taken care of by their love interests, and the emotional labor in assisting the lead with her baggage is never reciprocated to Him. He springs forth as a perfect guy — emotionally stable and secure in his attraction — whose only flaw is his standoffishness. Meanwhile, She is initially introduced as capable and smart, always working on an important project. By the end of the book, She’s reduced to a helpless girl who watches as He puts Her life back together. Hazelwood sacrifices the integrity and strength of these characters, just so they can be grateful for His grand gestures later on.
In none of her novels is this more present than the latest, “Not in Love.” This damsel-in-distress trope comes into play whenever She is inevitably betrayed by the ever-present evil scientist. In an effort to represent the challenges that women face in their careers in academia, Hazelwood constructs the most insane plot points or twists in each novel — or for frequent readers, the most anticipated plot points. In “Not in Love,” she seems to acknowledge this awareness that her readers have of her writing habits, and, instead of drawing out a betrayal that we’ve all seen coming, Hazelwood establishes early on that the evil shady scientist — this time a woman — has been up to some evil shady stuff, and the tension is more focused on whether She actually believes the betrayal of said evil scientist or sides with Him.
Perhaps the most comical element in the evolution of Hazelwood’s novels is the ever-increasing high stakes of the third act. Her first novel finishes fairly tame: The leading man Adam (read: Supreme Leader Kylo Ren) gets into a fist fight at a restaurant defending the main character Olive. But her second novel, “Love On the Brain,” ends with a gun being pulled on the main character. “Bride,” her 2024 Werewolf/Vampyre Omegaverse novel, ends with the main character being abducted and thrown into captivity by her psychopathic father, who has been plotting to overthrow the human and werewolf governments. Still with me?
The plots are always the same and ridiculous. The characters are more like caricatures, tossed into an echo chamber and left to become more and more adorkably helpless, gullible or overly protective in each incarnation. So why do I continue to pick up these books? Well, for me, a large draw of Hazelwood’s books is that they all follow a woman in STEM. The focus on the main character’s career is interesting and makes for fun dynamics and workplace drama, and Hazelwood’s choice to continue to return to these settings and careers for her characters demonstrates an appreciation for academia and science that perseveres even through the difficulties she herself portrays of being a woman in STEM fields. Out of the sea of consistencies across these books, it’s nice that Hazelwood commits to accomplished main characters. If you do decide to pick up the aforementioned “Bride,” you can trust that despite the heroine, literally named “Misery,” being essentially vampyre royalty, she is still a computer science wizard.
Maybe it’s the romantic in me, but I catch myself smiling every time I close one of her books to the predictable warm and cuddly ending. It’s cheesy and corny and I hate myself for it, but maybe there’s fun in being swept away by the over-the-top dramatics that Hazelwood delivers in each of her books. The endings are always happy, after all.
Although my enjoyment of these books is mostly due to their resemblance to a car crash, I have to admit that there is more bad than good. The relationships are at best cringe-worthy; the emotional conclusions and miscommunications are drawn-out; and by far, their biggest crime is not even bothering to rework the main characters in each incarnation. Despite the small part of me that awhs and sighs at every ending, it’s hard to ignore the extremely obsessive and overprotective love interests and the awkward, nerdy, fanfiction-born main character to match. The academic and romantic charm I find myself teasing out of these books is dulled by the reminder that not only are the extremely annoying and melodramatic main characters in this book, but they will most definitely return in the next one.
Daily Arts Writer Cora Rolfes can be reached at corolfes@umich.edu.
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