There’s a man on everyone’s mind as of late, and that man is John Green. While the rest of us have been sleeping our life away and stuffing our face with as many hostess cakes as we can get our grubby little hands on, this man has managed to rack up a sizeable following that could easily smack down the belieber race like the hand of god. If you consider yourself a part of the mindless population that follows this self-righteous preacher for 21st century literary era, this article is probably not for you. If you’re still reading out of curiosity as to what I’m about to write and are an avid John Green merch guzzler, then I beg you to please not hunt down my house and throw your editions of The Fault in our Stars through my windows because I’ll just catch them and throw them back at your face.
After reading and viewing the currently popular phenomenon The Fault in our Stars I came to a startling realization I missed earlier when reading a gaggle of Green books. Not only are almost all of his protagonist’s males, minus the ever so popular Hazel Grace, but he also seems to live in this hyper sensitive, overly unrealistic world that could never possibly exist in order to get his point across. I’ll admit, I did love his decision to go with a strong female lead and kill off the weaker male character (complete sarcasm, I heavily considered crying when Gus died) but that doesn’t take away from the fact this book fell in line with every other one he’s written that portrays the characters in a less than relatable light. An Abundance of Katherine’s main character kept spitting out facts about math the average person would never even dream of knowing, and considering the type of character Green set him up to be, how would he have dated as many girls as he did? The closest to reality Green ever got was with Looking for Alaska, and even then he relied heavily on the overused manic pixie dream girl esque love interest. Been there, seen that.
“But Meggie, it’s fiction, don’t you understand?” Yes I understand, fictitious person I’m using to pose a rhetorical question to myself, but Green himself is already a strong enough writer that adding all these abundant, exaggerated facts distracts from the true message he is trying to deliver. He should be focusing on what he’s trying to say instead of throwing as many facts at the reader as he possibly can because it takes away from the essence of the story.
“Why do you care, you’re just some nobody from the Midwest who will probably amount to nothing in her meaningless life.” What are you, my parents? Although this statement is incredibly true, I feel it necessary for someone to call out the overly idolized man who seems to be quickly rising to light as some sort of monumental voice of our era. We shouldn’t be praising someone who’s leaving ideas in the heads of our youth that these sorts of amazingly unrealistic people exist, because they’ll spend their days hoping to find the perfect man or woman to fill the empty half of their heart. SPOILER: they don’t exist, and thank god for that. I’ll take pieces of a person to mend back together with my own broken self any day over the ideal soul mate. Because what’s more fun, building a puzzle together or joining in when it’s almost complete?
There’s no real conclusion to this article, since I know whatever I say won’t matter in regards to how Green frames his stories. A rant that will go disregarded, but one that I believe needed to be had, at least for my souls sake. What I’m trying to get at is that in lieu of all the talented writers that have come and gone, John Green can hardly be considered as one of the most influential writers of our generation; and if he is, then I’m incredibly sad for the road ahead of literature.
