Forget what you think you know about John Green and watch Turtles All The Way Down
At the height of John Green’s popularity, most people knew the YA author for a very specific genre: sad teen books, usually about shy-yet-pretentious boys in love with spirited yet emotionally available girls. That was always a derogatory oversimplification of Green’s novels, which often deconstruct common YA tropes more than they give into them. But years of warped online perspectives on Green’s work, heightened by aesthetic Tumblr posts and Pinterest mood boards, meant that when the 2014 movie adaptation of Green’s tragic teen romance The Fault in Our Stars came out, the were calcified, preconceived notions of what a John Green Book™ was. (Never mind thatThe Fault in Our Stars flipped the gender roles, with a reserved girl and a vivacious boy.)
Hulu’s Looking for Alaska overcomes 15 years of contentious John Green fandom
As with many figures who get very popular — especially those whose niche fandom blows up into mainstream success — John Green and his assumed conventions became very uncool to like. And when the movie adaptation of Green’s book Paper Towns released in 2015, detractors began harassing and bullying him online to such a degree that Green left social media. The vitriol against Green has since died down, though his work and the many adaptations based on his novels still inspire shallow readings based on a specific internet era.
But Turtles All the Way Down, a Max adaptation of Green’s 2017 novel, steps away from those previous conventions — which is interesting, considering Green has stated this is his most personal book. It goes to show that what he’s become known for doesn’t actually speak to the power of his work. The coming-of-age drama follows a 16-year-old named Aza Holmes (played by Isabela Merced in the movie) grappling with OCD, and Green poured a lot of his own personal experience with the disorder into the novel.
[Ed. note: This post contains setup spoilers for Turtles All the Way Down.]
Like many John Green stories, this one starts
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