Theme Essay by Karen J. Ohlson
A YouTube-Fueled Literary Lovefest
It’s a clear night in late January, and the brightly lit marquee of the historic Fox Theater in Redwood City, California, is drawing teenagers from all directions. As I crowd into the lobby with my 14-year-old daughter, we barely have time to take in the scene—the sconce-and-chandelier-lit splendor, the mob jostling toward the merchandise table—before deafening thuds of rhythmic bass send a signal that it’s about to start, sucking us all into the auditorium.
Inside, the pounding bass feels even louder. Almost every seat—there are more than 1,300—is already filled, mostly with teenagers bouncing or swaying to the beat. Arms wave. Knit caps bob. Spontaneous screaming erupts. Any minute now, we will all witness the much-awaited arrival of…John Green, YA author. Yes, I said “author.” This event is not a rock concert, star-studded musical, or mega-hyped movie premiere. It’s a reading and book-signing event celebrating the release of John Green’s new young adult (YA) novel, The Fault in Our Stars. It’s also a traveling show of sorts, featuring puppetry (well, sock puppetry), costume changes, and the proudly nerdy folk-rock anthems of John’s brother, Hank Green. And, above all, it’s a testament to the phenomenal bonds that can form when a writer reaches out and connects with readers through a YouTube video blog.
Waiting with Teen Anticipation
As a man with a microphone—gray-haired, portly, in a pink button-down shirt and khakis—stokes the audience (“You guys are by far the coolest crowd ever!”) and tells us we are a mere five minutes from seeing John Green, I recall the previous YA book event I attended with my daughter.
The author involved was, like Green, a winner of the Printz Award, YA fiction’s highest honor, and he boasted the added teen appeal of working in the graphic-novel format and being a popular teacher at a local high school. The crowd size for that event? About 25 or 30, chatting quietly on folding chairs in an upstairs corner at Barnes & Noble.
Here, at the sold-out, sole Northern California event in John and Hank Green’s 2012 North American tour, Microphone Man is prompting the crowd to shout, on the count of three, “We love you, John!”—which many do, giddily.
I duck into a seat way in back, my daughter having squeezed in with friends about twenty rows closer to the stage. In front of me, a keyed-up teen girl with short dark hair keeps popping up out of her chair with excitement. Her white T-shirt is hand-decorated with quotes (presumably from books by John Green), except for an empty white rectangle between her shoulder blades that bears the annotation, “This space reserved for John and Hank Green.”
The empty space onstage—warmly lit, surrounded by a red-scalloped curtain, bare but for Microphone Man and a small, handmade puppet theater—is also waiting for the Green brothers, as the volume on a song with the refrain “I’m sexy and I know it” diminishes, sending a signal that slows the swaying, dancing crowd.
“Are you ready?” asks Microphone Man, as if the answer weren’t overwhelmingly obvious. Finally, he gets to the magic words “…Mr. John Green!”
Earsplitting screams. The house lights dim.
We will not, in fact, see John Green for several more minutes. After this fake-out intro—the first hint, for the uninitiated, of the Green brothers’ love of self-mockery—a sock puppet appears in the puppet theater’s window.
Introducing himself as “Hank Sock” (in a slightly nasal voice that is clearly Hank Green’s), the sock puppet chats disarmingly about his life as a sock and confides that “John and Hank are a little nervous” about appearing in front of such a huge crowd. Basically, he quiets the audience for the actual entrance of his brother, who soon strides onstage in a suit and skinny tie—his glasses and combed-back hair making him look like a cross between a 1980s New Wave rocker and a door-to-door missionary.
“Hazel Grace Lancaster has just met Augustus Waters at a cancer support group and finds herself in his basement bedroom,” he says, by way of introduction to the book passage he’s about to read. (The implications of the words “basement bedroom” prompt a “Woooooooo!” from a segment of the crowd.)
It’s as though he is continuing a conversation with the audience that’s already in progress. And, in a way, he is—it’s a conversation that’s been going on for about five years, on YouTube.
Brotherly Chat Gone Viral
The Fault in Our Stars—surely the funniest, most heartbreaking novel ever written about a doomed romance between two whip-smart, cancer-struck teens with three good legs between them—has been a long time in the making, as all Nerdfighters know.
“Nerdfighters” (nerds who fight to make the world a better place, not people who fight nerds) is how the Green brothers refer to the audience of their video blog, or vlog. In the videos they post weekly on their Vlogbrothers YouTube channel, John and Hank talk about anything and everything—including, in John’s case, the books he’s working on.
When John called for Nerdfighters to submit potential cover art for The Fault in Our Stars, my daughter composed a layout and sent it in. When he promised to sign every preordered copy, she made sure we ordered one months in advance of the release date—and then enjoyed watching him go through the humorous misery of making good on his pledge, signing copy after copy during the weekly videos, with stacks of books behind him.
So, Nerdfighters in this audience might justifiably feel that the book they are here to celebrate belongs, in part, to them. They are toasting its success, much as John and Hank pay tribute to Nerdfighter successes, regularly, on their vlog. Such is the nature of the intense mutual admiration between the Vlogbrothers and their audience.
The vlog apparently started out as a lark: an experiment with the premise that, for all of 2007, the brothers would communicate with each other only by means of public video blog entries. The videos were initially posted on YouTube by John and Hank on alternating weekdays.
What ensued was a mix of brotherly repartee, musings both highbrow and low-, and deadpan silliness—punctuated by songs from Hank and occasional brother-to-brother dares. This infectious combination drew an increasingly large audience as the year went on. Fans of John’s books and Hank’s songs tuned in, commented freely, and found that the brothers responded appreciatively to those comments in subsequent vlog posts.
By the end of the year, the brothers’ videos were addressing not just each other but a large audience of Nerdfighters—many of them teenage, all of them “awesome.” Rather than abandon this devoted community at the end of 2007, the Vlogbrothers decided to keep the project going.
Even now, in early 2012, testaments continue to accrue on the very first video they posted. “You are my heroes,” reads one of the recent comments, while another says: “These two men, and Nerdfighteria as a whole, have changed my life.”
Why are they so popular? Maybe because, despite being adults (now in their early thirties, having started the vlog in their twenties), they recognize and salute all aspects of teenage nerdiness: the intelligence, the humor, the lust, the insecurity, the desire to hibernate in a bedroom surrounded by books and the Internet, and the desire to change the world.
Both in their YouTube posts and at this live event—this coming-together of exuberant, book-loving teens—there is a sense among the participants that something vital and powerful is happening. Vital, powerful, and often laugh-provoking.
A Palpable Connection
During the reading from The Fault in Our Stars, the audience is raptly attentive.
As the basement encounter between videogame-loving Augustus and bookish Hazel unfolds, several lines trigger big laughs, including the following hopeful questions from Augustus after Hazel names her favorite book: “Does it feature zombies?” (No, she says.) “Stormtroopers?” When Augustus casually takes hold of Hazel’s hand while passing her a book, a sigh travels through the female portion of the crowd.
Acknowledging the applause when he comes to the end of the excerpt, John tells the audience, “I am very grateful, as well as…deeply terrified.”
In the subsequent explanation of why he wrote the book, he treats his audience as worthy of an adult discussion, while still acknowledging that most of them are teens. The adult part: Connecting his experience as a 22-year-old hospital chaplain among teenage cancer patients with his desire to write a book about ““small acts of heroism,” in which he examines the question, “What constitutes a good life if it’s not a long life?” The teenage part: Describing another literary work about heroism—Homer’s Odyssey—by starting out, “There’s this dude who’s really good at warring….”
Soon, he yields the stage to another dude: Hank, who strides out in a black T-shirt and jeans, slaps on a decorated guitar, and begins to sing. With his bangs, serious glasses, and big smile, he looks exactly right for the topics of his songs, which are geeky, teen-oriented, and often related to science or books—especially books by his brother and by J.K. Rowling.
There’s a poignant ballad based on The Fault in Our Stars, then a rousing anthem—which gets the crowd clapping rhythmically—about the need for “Book Eight” in the Harry Potter series. When Hank gets to “I want J.K. Rowling to say…,” the audience finishes the line, “…that the epilogue was crap ’cause we all know that it’s crap,” singing along.
Hank is clearly awed by the massive response of this manifestation of so many Vlogbrothers fans. At one point, he makes a Dr. Who reference that raises a wall of cheers from the crowd. He staggers back, as if hit by the sound wave, and says. “That was a physical response.” Then, in a fake deep voice, “We’re totally gonna go backstage and do…cupcakes!”
Rockin’ Shockin’ Bro-Bots
The pace of the performance seems to accelerate after that point, as if the brothers are absorbing bursts of energy from the crowd.
There’s a rousing singalong to a song about particle physics, then Hank exits as John comes back to prep the audience for the imminent onstage appearance of a woman who is legend among Nerdfighters: his wife Sarah, known as “the Yeti” because she is often mentioned but never seen on the vlog. He ends the intro with a ringing “…my wife!” and out comes…Hank, in a blonde wig and tutu, launching into another song.
The following Q&A promises to feature literal absorption of energy—from an electrical shocking device the brothers produce with much fanfare. Apparently, whichever brother is talking when the timer goes off will get a shock, helpfully administered by his brother.
I forget completely about this setup as the brothers respond to a set of audience questions that are impressive in scope. At one end of the range are serious inquiries about the theme and literary references in The Fault in Our Stars (causing John to explain how the book connects to Thoreau’s journals and to T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”) and about whether making YouTube videos is a way to “fight against oblivion.” At the other end are questions like, “How does it feel having most of your fans be teenage girls?”
John acknowledges that teen girls are “a plurality” of his fans, but notes that most viewers and readers are over 18—to which a deep, masculine voice from the crowd calls out, “Thank you!” (My counts of random segments of the crowd at this event are showing between a half and two-thirds to be teen girls and maybe a quarter to be teen boys; the rest are adults, more women than men.)
Hank also gets a chance to talk. When asked what he’d change about his brother, he tells John, “I would give you awesome pecs, so you’d be like, ‘Thanks, Hank, for the awesome pecs!” But it’s John who’s talking when the timer goes off. Hank gets to shock John—who jumps back, wringing his hands—before taking the spotlight for a few more songs.
The end of the show is pure rock concert, Nerdfighter-style. Kids pop up from their seats to dance and sing to a song about real-life high school being no match for Harry Potter’s wizard school. (“This isn’t Hogwarts. This is a concrete box. The pictures on the wall are never gonna talk.”) There’s a crowd fave about the mating ritual of the anglerfish, then a last thank you and cancer charity donation pitch from John as the brothers leave the stage—only to return for an encore before truly making an exit.
As the confetti they fling over the crowd floats down onto the seats, many audience members stay put. A table is being set up onstage, and Microphone Man announces that the book signing will proceed row by row. My cue to head to the lobby and hold a place in the merchandise line for my daughter and her friends, as they wait…and wait…for their moment with the Greens.
Teenish Envy
During the hour and a half that I spend in the slow-moving merchandise line—which is already snaking up a staircase, across the mezzanine, down the opposite staircase, and out the door onto the sidewalk before I find the end of it—I have plenty of time to think about why this whole experience makes me feel so deeply envious.
It could be professional envy, of course. Not only is John Green a deservedly award-winning writer, he has crossed a frontier into a whole new kind of writer-reader relationship. What started as a jokey attempt to create “Brotherhood 2.0” in a YouTube vlog has instead created something more like “Readership 2.0.”
Instead of seeing YouTube as competition to their books and songs, or simply as a marketing opportunity, the Green brothers have used the video-sharing website to build a mutually beneficial, refreshingly real community. They talk to their viewers, entertain them, offer them advice, publicly celebrate their successes, link them with opportunities to make the world a better place, and even connect them to each other—in one video, they phone a Nerdfighter girl and pop the question on behalf of her boyfriend.
At this point, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that The Fault in Our Stars shot to the top of the New York Times Best Seller List for Children’s Chapter Books when it was released in January 2012. (And it’s still up high, at #2, as of this writing, more than two months later.) So, yeah, there are plenty of reasons for me to feel envious of John Green.
Actually, though, what I’m feeling as I stand in this long line is not really envy of John Green. It’s envy of these teenage Nerdfighters.
My own teen reading experience was much more solitary, my nerdiness quite uncool. No one I knew was reading the same books I was. And I never came close to attending an “author appearance,” unless you count successfully pestering my father to drive me to the nearest town during a camping trip so I could catch a TV appearance by one of my lit-crushes, Harlan Ellison. The firebrand editor of the Dangerous Visions anthology turned out to look and sound…well, nerdy. I judged him as harshly as I judged myself.
In contrast, this Nerdfighter summit within the warmly ornate walls of the Fox Theater feels like a celebration of what I once faulted in myself. Relaxed-looking teens eddy and flirt, wearing shirts that say “NERD” and “Dr. Who” and “DFTBA”—Nerdfighter shorthand for “Don’t Forget to Be Awesome.” (The evening’s program includes a definition of “Nerdfighter” that begins “Someone who, instead of being made of bones and organs and stuff, is actually made of awesome.”)
A girl walks by wearing something on her head that looks like a strap-on Mohawk with glowing tufts of hair-like fibers. “That is really cool! That is so cool,” says the girl in front of me.
Behind me, a boy with glasses, a cracking voice, and an eccentric cane chats intently with a blonde in a Hogwarts-style button-down shirt and striped tie. “Technically, they’re not asteroids anymore,” I hear her say.
It occurs to me that any of the fictional teens in John Green’s novels would fit in here: the washed-up child prodigy; the band nerds; the huge, gay football player; the literary, drama-seeking girls who stoke the flames of drama-avoiding boys; and, of course, Hazel and Augustus, with their failing body parts, blistering insights, and “small acts of heroism.”
Both in the novels’ worlds and here, at this improbable, YouTube-stimulated Book Tour on Steroids, smart teens are connecting to each other with intensity and humor—showing fans like my daughter a wide-open realm of nerdy, awesome, heroic possibilities.
Publishing Information
- The Fault in Our Stars by John Green (Dutton, 2012)
Art Information
- Photo of John and Hank Green on tour © Elyse Marshall; courtesy of Penguin Group; used by permission
- Photo of John Green © Ton Koene; courtesy of Penguin Group; used by permission
- Photo of Hank Green; courtesy of Penguin Group; used by permission
- Tour de Nerdfighting, Fox Theater, January 2012 © VaguelySerious; Creative Commons license
A Vlogbrothers Introduction
In case your household lacks a Nerdfighter evangelist to drag you to the computer and insist that you make the acquaintance of the Vlogbrothers, here are a few links:
Karen J. Ohlson is the reviews editor of Talking Writing and a longtime member of a mother-daughter book group. At a recent meeting of this group, she witnessed the shrieks of hilarity that ensue when five teenage girls, inspired by a Vlogbrothers video, run from bookshelf to bookshelf reading titles aloud with the words “in your pants” appended after each one. She'll never think of The Sound and the Fury in quite the same way again.
