been seeing posts recently about the time john green was bullied off of tumblr like its something to laugh about– i even reblogged one of them that was talking about how tr*mp should try to join tumblr and see how it goes (which was, admittedly, funny)– but i just want to throw it out there that john green gets a bunch of shit that he doesnt deserve and i am tired of hearing it.
So heres my incomplete list of great things John and Hank Green have done that dont mean that theyre perfect people but just mean that for FUCKS SAKE people need to lay off and actually recognize that they are good people and actually making the world a better place.
1. in their podcast, where listeners write in with questions, they always refer to people asking the questions with gender neutral pronouns unless the person specifically expresses a gender in the text of the email. They dont talk about it, its just a thing that quietly happens.
2. Their books are fucking good
John uses his books to subvert common harmful tropes that affect the way people view women and people dealing with chronic illness. “Looking For Alaska” and “Paper Towns” are absolute refusals of the MPDG trope and absolutely condemn the main (male) characters for seeing Alaska and Margot as less than full human beings. “The Fault In Our Stars” is all about how illness in general but cancer specifically doesnt mean anything, its just a horrific thing that happens to people, and how nothing you learn from having cancer is valuable enough to be worth it, and how romanticizing illness hurts people who are dealing with it. “Turtles All The Way Down” is about OCD, about feeling like a burden on people around you, and sometimes actually being hard to be around and actually hard to deal with, but how that doesnt make you less of a person, and doesnt make you any less loved, and how “getting better” or being “cured” is not the end goal of mental illness narratives, sometimes you just need to be able to get through the day and that is OK.
Hanks books are a trip and a half. “An Absolutely Remarkable Thing” and “A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor” are simultaneously the books that have made me the most afraid of the future, and the most hopeful for the future. I dont know how else to say it. Also. well. written. queer. women. HOLY FUCK. WELL WRITTEN QUEER WOMEN. WRITTEN BY A STRAIGHT WHITE GUY. How?? you ask??? because he fucking talked to queer women, hired sensitivity readers, and actually values the input of marginalized people and wants to represent them well. Read these books.
3. This isnt even touching on all of the charity work that they do in which they NEVER CENTER THEMSELVES so im going to do it for them because they deserve some recognition for this. They are so generous with their time, attention, platform, and money in a way that i hope becomes more common, but damn, they are making concrete change in the world in a way that most people only talk about. and theyre DOING IT.
4. THEIR FREE EDUCATIONAL CHANNELS. FREE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES. FREE. EDUCATIONAL. RESOURCES. and thats not even close to all of them. They also make really great explainer videos on their main channel about really difficult topics and they break them down into something you can understand.
They are just earnest, silly, and interesting people who are committed to experiencing the world with curiosity and i could go on and on with the just– fucking GOOD things both of them have done and people choose to ignore those in favor of laughing about the john green c*ck monologue and making up twitter style canceling manifestos based on not having read any of their books or having engaged with any of their content in any way and straight up garbage. I just think they deserve better than that.
tldr: stop talking shit about the green brothers. ready for a keanu reeves style green brothers renaissance on this hellsite.
