Not to start discourse or anything like that but I really wanna talk about all of the people whose only real problem with Looking for Alaska is that it's "fake deep"? And don't misunderstand me, I'm in no way saying that it's a perfect unproblamatic piece of work, but I feel like in a way it's meant to come across as fake deep and pretentious? Like, I don't think that John's overall intent was to make these characters overly wise and knowledge and "deep" so to speak. Not to make any generalizations, but so many times whenever I'd meet other teens like these characters who were self proclaimed "intellects", they did come off as fake deep. They're so many kids who I've met who do act like this and they absolutely come off as cringy and pretensious and I think that when writing these characters John knew this. I don't think John's intent was to wow us with the supposed "deepness" of these characters, but to more so portray how these kind of teens really are. I'm almost certain that his intent was to portray these teens as real people and I feel as if having them go from acting all "deep" and smart and hollier than thou to completely isolating one of their supposed closeset friends over something as trivial as "ratting" was how John was really trying to portray the juxtaposition of teenagers as a whole. It goes to show the audience that even though they seem to think that there these highly intellectual people, at the end of the day these are still just kids who make mistake and are impulsive and still have so much to learn about their emotions and relationships and life as a whole. And with that goal in mind (that is, portraying realistic teenagers), I feel like John did a pretty good job in all honesty.
