John Green and Jay Asher they are at war between each other in an epic battle of epic proportions to see who can glorify and romanticize the most terrible and potentially life-ending things
ACT 1: Jay Asher started first with 13 Reasons Why in 2007 because why can’t suicide and depression and blaming that on other people be romantic, huh?!
Well from first hand experience there is nothing romantic about being so depressed that you want to die
I was 12 years old two years after Jay Asher’s book came out and I was in my room not knowing about the book cutting myself for the first time and jesus christ I bled like a stuck pig
Fast forward to seventh grade three years after the book was out on shelves and I had my own copy that I read through in one day and came away from it with a vaguely sick feeling in my stomach
Because I saw myself in that girl who wanted to die so badly that she actually went through with it but what I couldn’t understand was why she felt the need to set up this sick game where she gave 13 whole reasons why to her fellow students some of which she had never talked to they were each why she had killed herself like what the hell
And even more so I couldn’t understand why Jay Asher thought he had the right to write this book to make suicide and depression into this tragic and romantic and horribly glorified thing because being suicidal is just so much fun
But what wasn’t fun was jumping ahead a few more years to when I was 16 and doing online school because of the massive mental breakdown I’d had over Christmas break in my freshman year of high school and I tried to **** myself
And there was nothing romantic about waking up in the middle of the night and then in the morning and having to tell my mother that I had taken forty of my sleeping pills there was nothing romantic about that at all
ACT 2: then in 2012 just five years after Jay Asher’s book it was John Green’s turn to fire back and since depression and suicide and blaming that on other people was already taken why John just shrugged his shoulders and made it his mission to romanticize and glorify the big C of diseases CANCER
Because what isn’t romantic about these two dying kids and so many others and chemo that makes you puke and strips your body of its immune system so that a cold might **** you and what isn’t there to glorify about radiation to **** the thing that is attacking your body from the inside out and even if the radiation does **** your white blood cells and leaves you wide open for all other kinds of infection at least the cancer is temporarily under control right
Because even if you lose your hair and your brain has a potential of being damaged as well as your thyroid blood system heart gastrointestinal tract reproductive tract and bone marrow just think an author may choose to make a romance story around this disease that is slowly killing you and doesn’t that make you feel better
And even though if Augustus Waters was real almost every girl and guy within a five mile radius would probably sneer at the cigarette that was never lit because it’s all about the metaphor sweetheart he was just the perfect guy in the book and then in the movie where the audience was actually able to kind of not really see the prosthetic leg that that character had because hey why just go after cancer when you can go after amputees as well go big or go home ya know
And even though the book wasn’t so much about cancer as it was about this girl that even though she literally has to wear a cannula all the time and drag around an oxygen tank so that she can even breathe at least she can still somehow have *** right and there’s no bruises in the morning because that wouldn’t be realistic to someone suffering from cancer right
This is where you nod along and try not to think of the people you know that have had cancer two of which have died and just get through the book because who are you to let the cute little pastel blue packet of tissues that come with the book go to waste huh
ACT 3: Well god big kahuna in the sky that you are you see mam sir holy mother and father I have never harmed a book before except in that I dog-ear the pages I wanted to burn these two books so bad that it almost physically hurt like going to the funeral of a good friend and I saw red I was so angry and it hurt so much
Well god you see I have a proposition for you okay and it’s a good one
Well god you see I’ll go out and buy these two books The Fault In Our Stars and 13 Reasons Why and I’ll build a great big funeral pyre and burn them into the ground okay and then you take those ashes they’re all for you take them and give me back my friends