Backing Into John Green
John Green evaporated as a part of my universe. Suddenly, I was a minuscule part of his.
By NICK CAMPBELL
I spend an inordinate amount of my free time on my Roku, watching “Popular on YouTube” videos and letting the Recommended engine whisk me down the deepest of holes.
This is a relatively new thing for me, using YouTube as more than housing for a specific destination and more like a portal. The Roku makes it so easy, and my TV is so much better as a screen.
I can connect to it with my phone and search and add to my queue with grace that would make the denizens of Hill Valley 2015 blush. Yeah, Back to the Future 2 (1989), you may have flying cars and Jaws 19, but do you have smart phones and the Internet of Things? No. No, you don’t.
I use Roku to trawl YouTube for videos of people eating things from other countries and music videos of my adolescence. I imagine this is how everyone uses YouTube? But it’s never how I used it, not until I had a gadget I needed to use all the time to make it feel like it was worth the money.
I tell you this not to advertise Roku or to convince you I am a Luddite (I am not; I know so much about the internet). Instead, it’s to tell you that my light, casual use of YouTube means that my contact with YouTube stars and personalities is minimal — which is one of many excuses I have for not knowing who John Green was until a few months ago.
Yeah. I know.
The Mental Floss Guy
My first blush with John Green was as the fast-speaking, fact-tossing, occasional host of many Mental Floss videos, which I liked for its marriage of trivia and Gilmore Girls-speed dialogue.
I know he introduced himself at the beginning of every episode, but I never really registered the name. It didn’t seem as though I needed to. This was the Mental Floss guy.
When referring to John Green among like-minded company, that was enough information for people to know whom I was talking about. If they didn’t know, then they hadn’t watched the videos, and that was the end of the conversation about the Mental Floss guy. And if they did know, they kept the obvious facts of his “other career” to themselves because of the obviousness of it all.
Like if I was talking about Ronald Reagan’s early movies, no one would interject, “Did you know he was also President of the United States?” Yeah, man, we know. So there was no one to tell me this guy did something else other than sit in front bric-a-brac and wax quickly about twenty-eight foods named after people.
To be clear, I had heard about a John Green who was a young adult (YA) author and who was also popular on Twitter. I vaguely remember his being in the news for something he said — or maybe it was an article about how he was an author who often connected with the fans and this was the DEATH KNELL OF OLD MEDIA AND THIS IS HOW CELEBRITY WILL BE FOREVER. You know, something grounded and thoughtful like that.
It was a blip that hooked into my mind as something important, maybe even something to look into. But, at the time, YA had a stigma to me. Box office dollars, industry legitimacy, and popular credibility be cursed: YA was for the youth! I know this because of the name. John Green, YA Author, was for someone else, someone living in a more precocious time.
I’d also heard of a book called The Fault in Our Stars. I thought it was a clever title. I didn’t care to learn who wrote it.
Then Came Crash Course
Then came Crash Course, which was like Mental Floss but longer and larger in scope. Like everything else about John Green so far, I stumbled onto it accidentally.
I’d fallen into a hole researching the origins of fundamentalist groups of the Muslim world (as you do), looking for a history of Islam with some context for whatever the hell ISIS was/is trying to accomplish. Lo and behold, John Green had it covered.
Crash Course is great for a lot of reasons, but mostly it’s because of that speedy dialogue with fascinating trivia. Plus, pretty animations!
Watching more and more, I actually learned this guy’s name — though on first watch I pointed out to my girlfriend, “Hey, look! It’s the Mental Floss guy!” And I even grew to love the series… mostly. I didn’t care for Hank.
Somehow, I’d become accustomed to Green’s style, so when I listened to Hank, he sounded like a facsimile of the neo-transatlantic accent with similar emphases and delivery. But he lacked gravitas. Not that John Green, often intentionally silly, is exactly wading in gravitas, but Hank came second to me. So, unfair as it is, to me, Hank was clearly just copying.
At this point, I was in a parasocial relationship with John Green, a one-sided relationship with a scamp who existed in a world of trivia and animation-aided education, always ready to teach me things at 120 words a minute.
I was watching Crash Course to break up the work day. I was inserting facts into conversation based on what I’d come to know from the Thought Bubble. Everything I’d learned over a week had come from the realms of Green’s World History and Literature, because screw Hank and his science videos.
Just Like That, the Artifice Was Gone
Then, one day, while watching Crash Course on our TV, my girlfriend pointed out something no one else had thought needed to be pointed out.
SHE: “You know he’s also an author. You can read his books.”
ME: “Oh, really?” I asked. “Like history books? Is it like this? Are they books of run-on sentences about lesser presidents?”
SHE: “No, he writes fiction,” she said, quizzically. She was trying to needle me a little since she’d recently read one of his books on a plane and sobbed the whole way home but she wasn’t aware of how delusional I was.
ME: “Oh, really?” I asked. “What does he write about?”
SHE: “He writes YA.” I knew it before she could get it out… the connections… the synapses... “He wrote The Fault in Our Stars.”
ME: “HE, WHAT?”
And just like that, the artifice was gone. The concept of John Green’s being a small part of my universe evaporated. Suddenly, I was a minuscule part of his.
After that, all the things John Green was, is, and has been — and all that had always been there — were now things I’d notice:
- John Green, the author of bestsellers.
- John Green, the inspiration and producer on giant movies starring veritable A-listers (or at least B-plus-listers).
- John Green, co-leader of the Nerdfighters.
- John Green, the Vlog Brother.
It was like listening to Paul McCartney for the first time in 2015 and thinking Man, this guy could really go places — I’m glad I got in on the ground floor only to have your heart broken that you share that feeling with everyone. It’s feeling like a dunce while also being excited there’s so much to enjoy.
The point here is I identified with John Green as someone like me that had struggled to find a niche. He was common like his name. He was part of the rabble. An everyman. I was happy he’d found his way through this small cranny labeled “Fast-paced and Goofy Education Videos” within the rock wall of available content. It was hope for me as I struggle to find my place.
And then, when I realized John Green was already this machine, he went from being very close to very distant. I thought I was invited to this exclusive party and then got there to realize it was a warehouse rave that’d been going on for hours without me and I didn’t have my furry boots. I went from wanting to throw down in the middle of the floor to being content nodding my head on the fringes.
After this realization, I watched a video in which Hank (who’s since grown on me) and John Green play Super Mario Bros. I laughed at how they are successful humans who struggle with the game while I, less successful, have muscle memory that would take me blindfolded to at least World 4. NOTE: it’s not lost on me that our levels of success might be related to that.
It’s an interesting thing, the evolution of parasocial relationships with media personalities. You identify and support them, particularly when you see yourself in them and think you’re the only one who knows that person exists. You cultivate your feelings for that person and his subsequent success because you feel as though you “own” them. You feel like a unique snowflake.
And then everyone starts to learn about that person and you feel the distance. It’s what punk and ska kids called “selling out” as a way to deal with their feelings of this separation. This, of course, doesn’t really apply here. By that definition, John Green sold out years before I knew him.
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