AFTER: A Review

The After!movie sequel would be out soon, so I decided to make a review on the whole series. I’ll just go straight into it. The plot of the movie was basically ‘bad boy meets girl and tells his friends he’ll make her fall for him. Along the way, he falls in love and tries to fall back on the bet. But because nothing is hidden under the sun, she finds out.’ Soooo basically, cliché high school romance. Anna Todd, however, doesn’t do cliché high school romance and I love her for it. The love in ‘After’ is more realistic than most of the ones in the other books I like…I think. The dude that was used too was cute and his British accent was out of this world. A total ‘book boy’ come to life. Everything was so toned down in the movie, even I lowkey stanned. Don’t judge me, lol. To be fair, movie!Hardin was different from book!Hardin.

However, in the books, the story is  fifty shades darker(both literally considering how much sex these people had{they were like the miniature version of Anna and Christian Grey} and figuratively, the dreary plot twist). Anna Todd is, in Harry Potter’s words, brilliant. Beautiful writing, amazing execution; she’s a gifted artist and I admire her. She wrote a series that would make her readers feel every emotion there is. I really should take notes. Now, let’s get down to business. Hardin and his friends bet over her virginity. Like literally, the person amongst them that would take her virginity would be given money. Now, Hardin had been longtime friends with her roommate, Stephanie. So he had easier access to their room and of course to Tessa. Then, you couple it with the fact that he was always intentionally getting on her nerves. Open hatred is hidden love, right? The part I found to be the absolute worst in book 1 was the end when everything started unravelling. His friends really made her watch the video that was recorded when the bet was made. The day he gave her her first orgasm, he conveniently had a second shirt in his car that he gave her to clean herself. He took it from her and told her he would take care of it. Then, there was the night she lost her virginity to him. He took the stained sheets from the bed and told her he would dispose of them. As in the sheets with her blood on them. Have you put two and two together yet? Yep, it means Hardin was updating his friends every single time something happened between them. Wait for it, and showing them evidence- the shirt, the stained sheets. Like sis and her business were out in the open and she didn’t even know, blissfully ignorant in what she thought was love. The sad thing is that he did love her. In his own sick, twisted way, he cared about her. Pray no one I know has to experience this kind of love though. The part that would forever burst my brain is that some people read the books and still thought Tessa and Hardin are relationship goals. Like, wait what? I don’t think that’s the least bit healthy.

Another red flag in their whole thing was it started from cheating. I’ve never seen any relationship that started out from cheating and they lived happily ever after. Just ask Rick when he soul-bonded with Morty’s dragon. As at when Tessa was messing around with Hardin, she had a boyfriend, Noah. Granted, he wasn’t exactly poster boy for tall, dark and handsome, but he was a good person that didn’t deserve what he got. One part that irritated me was that point when he came to visit her in school. Her boyfriend came to see her, he rented a hotel room to protect her privacy and while he was away one night, she went to Hardin’s house to comfort him because he was having a tantrum and she slept with him. Sis, with a wholeass boyfriend! The next day, she snuck out of Hardin’s house to go back to Noah. Hardin caught up to them and told this poor boy in his face that his girlfriend had slept with him the night before. I swear, if it was possible, I would have reached into that book and slapped her deaf. Noah broke up with her and left, obviously. And she still went back to Hardin. Sometimes, I wonder how some people’s cerebral cortex functions, seriously. Then, it started. They’d break up like a million times and come back a million and one. Tessa had more unhappy days than happy days. There were times they would cheat on each other, there were times he would ‘unintentionally’ hit her cos he ‘has anger issues’, he would start fights when he saw her talking to other guys, etc. And don’t even get me started on how she isolated herself from everyone else(she hardly had any friends) because she was so lost in the emotional rollercoaster that was Hardin. Omo. Their relationship was really the textbook definition of ‘toxic love’. Even when she found out about the whole bet thing, she still took him back. Blew your mind? Cos mine was blown.

Oh, and the icing on the humongous cake of toxic; when they were broken up in book 2, there was a time he came to beg and she was drunk. She had invited a guy into her room. He beat the guy out and locked Tessa and himself in the room. That night, Hardin had sex with an intoxicated woman that he knew wouldn’t have slept with him if she was sober. His defence? She had said and I quote, ”You have two options here: you fuck me or you leave.” This part made me think of many books that have proved that those are never the only options in such a situation.  I remember a book I read once when a girl was intoxicated and the guy she loved had to seal them both in a room to protect her from doing something stupid that would make the people outside who already wanted to kill her have a justifiable reason. Title- The Covenant series by Jennifer Armentrout. Her name was Alex and his, Aiden. They loved each other, but they couldn’t be together because in their society, he was from a higher race than she was and if they were caught, she would be killed for ‘tainting’ him. I pitied Aiden that night because Alex literally threw herself at this boy. Over and over and over again. And they were trained to be warriors from birth, so she was easily straddling him and finding interesting ways to be handsy. Yet, Aiden wouldn’t do it because he knew that this wouldn’t be happening if she was sober.  Another example is from Cassie Clare’s ‘The Shadowhunter Chronicles’. Isabelle and Simon were basically an item already, but Simon wouldn’t even do anything with Isabelle that night because she wasn’t sober. In Cassie Clare’s exact words, “He had been thinking of pulling her into his arms and kissing her gently, but ‘Simon Lewis, Molester of Passed-Out Women’ wasn’t really the epitaph by which he wanted to be remembered.” Hardin, apparently, didn’t care about being remembered as a molester of passed out women. I mean, he could have fended her off quite easily till she was out cold or locked himself in the bathroom or something if it was compulsory he had to stay there for her safety. But nooooo. And of course, he and Tessa’s issues just kept on coming, with them breaking up like every five minutes all the time. How do you not get exhausted living like that?

  Of the 5 books in that series, I read 3. Couldn’t bear to finish it. Tessa and Hardin were like a train wreck. You know you should look away, but you just can’t seem to. Till I decided I was tired of the anger their whole relationship was making me feel. I even became a little irritable in real life. Empathy is funny like that. Decided no more, this is where I draw the line. Like her friends and family would advise her and she wouldn’t listen. When they asked why she stayed everytime, she didn’t have a reasonable reason or a redeeming quality. The only answer she had was that she loved him. That was literally it. The parts that made my heart break for both of them were when she showed time and time again that she wasn’t proud of the fact that she loved him. It was something she said with hardly an atom of happiness. Love that is so beautiful and makes you feel so full, you feel like you could shout it from the rooftops is what someone was ashamed of because of the kind of person she chose. Moreover, there is a funny thing I noticed and not just in ‘After’. Some books have this thing about a guy being completely terrible, but he loves reading, so you should forget everything else and stan. Like reading has become some redeeming quality that justifies bad behaviour. If you have issues, work on them. Don’t suffocate someone else’s child. No one is perfect, we all have hang-ups. Everyone in the world is going through something they don’t talk about. However, actions borne from trauma are understandable, but they aren’t always excusable. Love people, but love yourself too to know when you’ve had enough.