The Tumblr renaissance continues with the return of prodigal son John Green
John Green is back on Tumblr to sell coffee eight years after leaving the platform in 2015
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Get your key-smashing fingers ready because John Green is back on Tumblr. For those who missed Tumblr’s golden age, the appropriate response to this statement is something along the lines of asdffingworignw;!1!11 omglmao #mysweetprince. Memorize that, because—like the protagonists in a John Green novel—2023 and the renaissance of Tumblr seem to be written in the stars.
For a while, The Fault In Our Stars author John Green–with all his damaged-but-in-a-beautiful-way male protagonists and their manic-pixie-tough-but-not-really love interests–was atop the Mount Rushmore of famous Tumblr users. That was until he was essentially bullied off the platform in 2015 amid controversy surrounding his personal interactions with fans online and a viral meme wherein users would edit his posts to look like he had published sexually explicit content. Green’s expulsion didn’t cause the slow decline of the platform but it was certainly an early signpost: if a man who writes the literary equivalent of a Lana Del Rey song couldn’t survive, who could?
But none of that matters now because John Green—and Tumblr—are back, whether we like it or not. Green is back to promote his coffee subscription service, Awesome Coffee Club (the ads are naturally smothered under 15 layers of twee, but they’re still just capitalism doing its thing) and the platform has been returning in popularity because, to use another Tumblr-ism, *vaguely gestures to whole Elon Musk mess*.
But as anyone who was on Tumblr during its heyday can tell you, the platform was never a monolith. It wasn’t just John Green fans, it was a network of small micro-communities dedicated to different media properties (that all just happened to be really, really similar.) But don’t worry, many of those things ended in the early 2010s, like Supernatural, which is currently airing a prequel series on The CW, or BBC’s Sherlock, whose creator is begging for a return, or David Tennant, who just made a surprise return to Doctor Who, or Lana Del Rey, who is currently promoting new music, or, well, you get the picture.
#It’sHappening #We’llNeverEscape
15 Comments
I thought he was “canceled” for something?
“I thought he was “canceled” for something but didn’t bother to read this short article?”
You must be busy.
There was a year (or more) recently that he decided to take a break from social media in general, so maybe you mistook his disappearance from those platforms as having been cancelled. He’s still been making his Vlogbrothers videos with Hank (which I follow). Got a new film adaptation of one of his books coming out sometime soon, too.
His “Crash Course World History” videos (easily findable on YouTube) are also absolutely brilliant. If you want to quickly (12ish minutes) learn about any historical topic covered by one of them, there’s nothing else out there that will do as good a job. They feature regularly in my history classroom.
Wow. You really can’t win being an internet celebrity. Or being on the internet at all, maybe. Especially if you’re sincere.
Yeah, I’m not a fan of his books (but I’m too old to be the target audience), but he and his brother just seem to be genuinely nice people and it is weird how many people seem to attack them for it rather than go after all the actual assholes on the Net.
ALL profits from the Awesome Coffee Club go to Partners in Health mission in Sierra Leone. It might be promotional content for a coffee club but it’s for a good cause.
Right? I’m not sure I’d call that “capitalism doing its thing”, but go off, thou shell-of-its-former-self, AV club.
Our Even Faultier Stars: Electric Boogaloo
Call me when the porn comes back.
This smells like sponcon, but I can’t imagine John Green or Tumblr paying the AV Club for anything.
Surely if it was being sponsored they’ve put “try not to write it as if you were a snide eighth-grader” somewhere in the contract as well.
I only know of him because of his now mothballed podcast The Anthropocene Reviewed. It is excellent like 99 Percent Invisible but is 65% good vibes and 45% interesting info instead of 45% good vibes 65% info. In case that’s confusing 99pi : 65int.inf/45GV & tAR 45int.inf/65GV. Doesn’t matter. I have yet to see a post of mine here not not get posted. I don’t know what I’d be banned for, especially since no comment I’ve ever written here has ever been seen.
Ah, yes, capitalism: famous for donating all their profits to help reduce maternal and infant mortality rates in poorer countries.
I mean, who cares about this guy when Lynda fucking Carter just joined Tumblr and is posting memes and gifsets with the girlies.