The film adaptation of the latest young adult bestseller, The Fault In Our Stars, smashed expectations at the box office, grossing a reported $48.2 million in its first weekend. With its cinematic opening came chaos; teenagers screaming at the ticket office and the hashtag #TFIOS was tweeted more than 350,000 times on the opening day. Even before the unexpected success of the movie, it was impossible to escape the hype of the book, which has by now sold more than 9 million copies. However, critical analysis of the novel has been lost in a cyberspace whirlwind of hashtags and memes. It seems that aggressive online marketing campaigns, and the impact they have on teenage fans, have become more important to critics than the actual quality of today’s Young Adult fiction.
The Fault In Our Stars centres on the burgeoning romantic relationship between two teenagers, Hazel Lancaster and Augustus Waters, both of them suffering from terminal cancer. It’s the kind of book you can read really quickly because it’s dialogue-heavy, with very little description; typical of a Young Adult novel. Now that we can all communicate so quickly, it seems as if Green is afraid that a couple of pages of scene-setting are going to bore the hell out of teenagers. Green sometimes seems to be in too much of a hurry to even bother describing an ordinary conversation. Twice the book lapses, for no apparent reason, into movie-type dialogue, as if Green is writing a script. The writing can sometimes be clunky, too. Several scenes are awkwardly written, and the quirky “humour” of the book often falls flat. But that’s okay, because Gus and Hazel do teach us a lot about life and love and dying, and that is what the book is meant to be about — “the tragic business of being alive and in love”. It is the central love story, and all the little quirks and in-jokes that come with it, that really lights up the book and draws in the millions of obsessive teenage superfans.
That’s the thing about John Green’s books. Their brilliance lies in gimmicks, concepts, and a few highly quotable snippets very conducive to establishing a cult following — at the expense of good prose. Green is not a very good writer, but he is a fantastic marketer. He knows exactly the kind of things that teenage girls will obsess over. Hence the hyper-characterisation of the pretentious-but-cute Augustus Waters, who refuses to call Hazel by anything but her full name, spouting the kind of twaddle you have never once in your life heard a teenage boy come out with. Green knows that he is creating not just a book, but an obsession, a romance that teenage girls will fawn over because of the “fandom material” provided by its quirks and catchphrases. Green popularises signature phrases from the book via social media, turning them into online phenomena that demand further explanation, thereby inducing people to read the book in order to figure out what they refer to. For example, Hazel and Gus’s famous “Okay?” “Okay” exchange — their underwhelming alternative to “always”, or “I love you” — has been floating around the Twittersphere in the two clouds of the book’s front cover design for months, piquing the interest of those who haven’t yet read TFIOS.
Selfie after TFIOS. Tbh got home and sobbed in my room and on the car ride home and in the rr after the movie pic.twitter.com/XLN6zomBld
— Savannah Olson-Thong (@Savannah102795) June 6, 2014
Green knows exactly how to market his product, and he does it very well. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The main cause for consternation is this; superficial, artificially quotable teen love stories full of snappy one-liners and words like “doucheface” and “awesomesauce” are swamping the Young Adult market and taking all the spotlight. Green’s social media presence is an added blow, as it seems that these days an author needs to have a 2.5 million Twitter following to connect with their readers, whereas it used to be enough just to write a good book. Back before the advent of social media, the books that were enjoying the same kind of popularity and critical acclaim as The Fault in Our Stars were the Harry Potter books. Instead of memorable slogans that looked good on movie posters, what stood out about Harry Potter was good storytelling, a well thought-out plot, and lovable characters who talked like ordinary teenagers. With the success of the Twilight franchise, the YA gimmick market really exploded, as “Team Edward” and “Team Jacob” T-shirts became widespread and the famous quotes from that series, such as “and so the Lion fell in love with the Lamb” became widespread on the internet, stamped over pictures of dying roses before memes were even really a thing. Hollywood lapped up the marketing potential of the Twilight series as movies; it is no coincidence that it was the Twilight series’ producers, Wyck Godfrey and Marty Bowen, who wanted to adapt TFIOS in the first place.
We all know that we are living in a consumerist age of instant gratification, where teenagers are hungry for a quick fix of emotional satisfaction, and that this is what they can derive from The Fault in Our Stars. What can be understood from the success of TFIOS is that the marketing of Young Adult books has entered a new phase — one governed by the ability of a book to establish a cult following based on social media exposure. The future looks bleak for YA authors struggling to be noticed without Green’s added privilege — that of 2.5 million Twitter followers and a plethora of snappy catchphrases.
