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4:07pm June 10, 2014
Anonymous asked: What's with this weird hate that's wrapped in this reductionist narrative that John Green 'exploits & hates kids with cancer & writes about white teen romance'? I enjoy his videos on youtube, I'm just really confused at how he's now Tumblr's public enemy #1. You seem really well informed on his books. I've just been seeing a lot of weird, long rants against him on my dash.

alliecat-person:

Thanks. I actually don’t even know his books, aside from TFiOS. I tried to read Abundance of Katherines but didn’t get far into it. Maybe I’ll finish it some day. I don’t know. I’m not really a Green fan so much as a fan of TFiOS in particular.

It is true that TFiOS is about romance between white teens, but IMO there is quite a bit more to it than just the romance. And the idea that Green is somehow exploiting teens with cancer or dehumanizing them is completely preposterous b.s. invented by people who wouldn’t know a good representation of teens with serious illness if it fell down on top of them.

It’s confusing me too.  Like everyone was saying how great TFIOS was and then suddenly everyone’s supposed to hate it.  I really can’t stand the way people think they have to like or hate a thing based on what tumblr says.  I mean, the way people are encouraged to think that way.  Like what you like, hate what you hate, do it for your own reasons, not because you read about it somewhere.  

I happen to have loved TFIOS, it had qualities I’d never found in another book, I read it at a time in my life when I thought I was dying (and would have, if they hadn’t finally diagnosed and treated the illness that was killing me), and it really meant a lot to me.  I’m not a literary critic, I can’t emulate a literary critic, I can’t analyze books, I just like them or don’t like them or sort of like them or whatever.  And I see a lot of this attitude among fans like you have to be able to be a literary critic or a film critic or whatever in order to talk about this stuff.

I liked it because I was dealing with a precarious illness that kept bringing me close to death and then pulling me away, and it dealt with feelings that I had that I couldn’t share with anyone at the time.  Everyone has their own reasons for liking or disliking it, that was the biggest reason I liked it.  I’m going to go see the movie sometime this week.  I don’t care WTF tumblr thinks about any of this, other than I’m annoyed that tumblr thinks it has any right to dictate people’s opinions at all.

Notes:
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  7. thenkeepgoing reblogged this from withasmoothroundstone and added:
    I think everyone forgets that when John Green was discerning the Espiscopalian priesthood, he was a hospital chaplain...
  8. spookyscaryskelelander reblogged this from withasmoothroundstone and added:
    I mean, I can respect that people think John Green’s kind of pretentious, or that he shouldn’t have assumed he had a...
  9. averyroundbird reblogged this from withasmoothroundstone
  10. withasmoothroundstone reblogged this from alliecat-person and added:
    It’s confusing me too. Like everyone was saying how great TFIOS was and then suddenly everyone’s supposed to hate it. I...