I hear you rationalist motherfuckers like walls of text so here’s one quick before I go to work.
ok a bunch of people have asked me to do a When Posting Goes Wrong for cock-loving John Green, but imo, that particular story does not lend itself well to a video. That said, I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t put entirely too much thought into John Green getting cyberbullied off tumblr, so I might as well share those here.
John Green didn’t get “cancelled”. He broke under the weight of his own success.
Think about where John Green was at in 2011. He was a successful author, but not a famous author. You wouldn’t really hear people talking about his books unless they were fans of his youtube channel or just like, general book nerds. He had a highly successful youtube channel, but in an era before being a “big youtube channel” meant massive brand deals and multi-million-dollar mansions. Green was big on youtube back when the number of channels with a million subs could be counted on one hand, it was just a very different environment. John Green was legitimately huge on tumblr, but as anyone who’s been on this website for more than a few minutes knows, the entire concept of “tumblr fame” is kinda bullshit.
Basically, John Green wasn’t famous, he was like... niche internet famous.
Then The Fault In Our Stars came out. Suddenly, he’s ACTUALLY famous. I was in high school when TFIOS dropped and it was INESCAPABLE. It got featured in Time Magazine. There were thinkpeices written about this goddamn book. Now John Green is a famous author. He’s a household name. Great! Awesome! Dude’s probably making a lot of money, good for him.
Now he’s inked a movie deal. Double good for him! Now he’s making even more money! The movie comes out in 2014. Unsurprisingly, it’s goddamn everywhere on tumblr.
Here’s my theory: Green never wanted to be this kind of famous.
I was still a vlogbrothers fan when the TFIOS movie came out, and the thing that struck me most from that period of time was just how depressing the John videos got. Between exhaustion from doing a media tour in support of the movie and his mental health (Green has OCD and severe anxiety) acting up, Green was having a BAD time dealing with the popularity of TFIOS, and it was very obvious in those videos. Despite having achieved what most authors could only reach in their wildest dreams, Green couldn’t seem to enjoy it. I think fame stresses him out, he’s just not comfortable being that level of popular. In fact, I distinctly remember when Vlogbrothers started getting even more attention post-TFIOS, Green explicitly stated that he never wanted to change their content to adapt better to the youtube algorithm (which used to favor 4 minute videos of the type him and Hank make, but now prioritizes videos that are 20 minutes or longer) not because of some artistic commitment to four minute vlogs, but because him and Hank didn’t want their community to grow too large.
Now the second element of this is his tumblr fame. Someone once made a post where they said something to the effect of “every tumblr callout is either something extremely serious reduced to the level of fandom drama, or something extremely minor blown way out of proportion.” I think the reason there are so many of the latter is because tumblr does not like popular users. The people who like tumblr like it, in part, because you don’t have to deal with your relatives or politicians or journalists or celebrities. Follower counts are hidden so no one is encouraged to follow big accounts. Basically, tumblr has this culture of like, “we’re all just losers honking our clown horns at each other”. All the clout-chasing that comes with most social media platforms isn’t supposed to exist here. Because of this, I feel like when users get too popular, there’s this natural instinct to want to take them down a peg. Like “I’m sick of this motherfucker showing up on my dash every five posts, they have to have done SOMETHING problematic!” When you look at what John Green was criticized for: it was all pretty innocuous. You can read through his whole Your Fave Is Problematic post and come away fairly underwhelmed. People suggested he was a creep for maintaining an active presence on tumblr where he answered questions from his teen fans, which to me feels it’s on the same level of logic as suggesting a high school teacher might be a pedo because “why would he want to hang around teenage girls all the time?”
There’s also this element of meme culture and internet culture where 2012-2014, the period where John Green was at peak popularity, was when memes were slowly transitioning from simple, straightforward formats like rage comics or advice animals, to more abstract multi-layer irony jokes. John Green, more than anything else, was always extremely earnest. Maybe too earnest and too straightforward... like a human advice animal. When he first started making youtube videos, doing things like calling your fans “Nerdfighters” and founding a 501(c)3 called “the foundation to decrease worldsuck” was cute and quirky. If you tried starting something like that in 2014 or 2015 you’d be laughed off the proverbial stage. He was the perfect target for an absurd copypasta like “cock is one of my favorite tastes”. One could argue John Green getting pushed off tumblr was a turning point. That much like the destruction of the Pruitt-Igoe Projects in the 1970s marked the transition between modernist and post-modernist architecture, the destruction of fishingboatproceeds.tumblr.com marked a transition to increasingly ironic and obtuse forms of memes.
Anyway, as previously mentioned, John Green was really stressed out when cock-loving John Green became a meme, and specifically stressed out about his own popularity. It makes sense that he would ditch the platform where he was probably the most dominant because he just didn’t want to be that kind of famous anymore and the pressure was getting to him. In the post where he responds to the copypasta and explains why he’s leaving, he essentially explains the joke behind cock-loving John Green (that he is not the type of person to loudly proclaim his love of the taste of cock and balls) but then ignores that correct interpretation to willfully misinterpret the meme as a homophobic insult that implies loving the taste of cock and balls is a bad thing. He could have ignored it, but he made a decision not to, because he was done being so popular that people would even make a cock-loving John Green copypasta in the first place.
John Green was not meant to be the level of famous that tumblr made him on this website, and he ultimately paid the price for that.
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