 Okay, stop me if you've heard something like this before. Two teenagers meet, and one, or both of them, have cancer slash some other incurable, deadly disease. They might argue a bit, but they discover that they have strong, romantic feelings for each other and start a relationship. Then one of them dies, and everything is sad. But they got to have a good last few months, and the surviving one has learned a lot about the value of human life, so it's not all bad. Obviously, I'm being a bit vague with this description, but I think it's safe to assume that all of you were reminded of at least one or two books that have come out in recent years. A Walk to Remember, The Fault in Our Stars, Me and Earl in the Dying Girl, Before I Die, Everything Everything, and Keith are all based on this formula, though with some variations and some subversion. And if you count books that aren't about teenagers or are similar but don't deal with terminal illness, then we can include Me Before You, It's Kind of a Funny Story, and If I Stay. There are a lot of these, and they've been around for a while. A Walk to Remember is about 20 years old now. The genre has just exploded in popularity in the last decade. You want to know the really crazy thing? These are all just books that were successful and turned into movies. If we expand the search into similar books that were less successful and weren't adapted then the list gets... just so long. It's an entire subgenre now, primarily in the YA category, and sometimes it's referred to as sick-lit. Honestly, that's kinda gross. Now that sounds weird, so let me explain. But before I can explain, you have to let me set the stage. Themes of death have been explored in fiction since forever, and themes of young love have been around just as long. Combining the two goes back pretty far as well. Just think of Romeo and Juliet. There might not have been illness involved, but their romance was doomed from the start. This sort of story takes a lot of boxes that appeal to all of us, particularly teenagers and young people. Despair, loneliness, existential dread, the thrill of your first love, living in the moment, and knowing exactly what the future will bring all strike a chord within us. Even if the future is going to bring pain, just knowing when and how you'll die sounds pretty great to a lot of people, it takes away the stress of worrying. None of this is inherently bad so far. When you include the romance aspect of it, the wish fulfillment becomes even more obvious. Love is a powerful emotion that we can empathize with, especially when it's in young people who are experiencing it for the first time. That's part of the reason that sicklet features teenagers as main characters such a large proportion of the time, and why they're so often the target audience. They also usually have lower standards, but we'll ignore that. Then when you add in the large role that death plays in the story, the emotion is pushed up to eleven since it's not only their first love, but most likely their last, and they all know it's the entire time. The romance is the primary draw of the sicklet, God I hate saying that, genre. All the illness and death only exists to amplify the pre-existing drama. All the books I brought up earlier are romance stories first and foremost with everything else taking a back seat. This in turn is amplified further by the power of fiction where things always happen at the most dramatic moment or in the most dramatic way. I'm deciding to call it tragedy porn. I don't know if that phrase has been used before and I refuse to check, so just tell all your friends that I came up with it. And hey, I'm not knocking anybody who enjoys this type of story. I like a good tragedy now and then, and I enjoy a well-written romance as much as the next guy. And even if I didn't, we all have subjective tastes, and I'm not judging anybody for that. I just want to talk about some of the underlying themes with some of these stories, which are a little bit less okay. Let's take a minute to examine the most well-known recent example of this trend, The Fault in Our Stars. This book came out in 2012, and the movie adaptation followed in 2014. There's also a Bollywood adaptation coming in November. Really. It was written by John Green, who you might be familiar with from his other books as well as his work here on YouTube. It's by far the most popular example of this genre, along with being one of the least subversive, so I think it works great as a sort of generic template. The story follows a 16-year-old girl with cancer named Hazel. She's depressed since, you know, cancer, and her mother forces her to attend a cancer support group. While there, she meets another teenager in remission named Gus, and the two strike up a friendship. Obviously. This turns to a romantic relationship pretty fast. Obviously. Meanwhile, Hazel's condition appears to be getting worse, and she winds up spending time in the ICU. Hazel spends a lot of her time reading a book called An Imperial Affliction, but it ends mid-sentence, and the author refuses to tell anyone what happens next. Gus manages to get into contact with the author and uses his wish from the Make-A-Wish Foundation to get him and Hazel a trip to Amsterdam to meet him. Unfortunately, the author, a man named Peter Van Houten, is an old, bitter alcoholic who repeatedly insults their condition and refuses to tell them anything. They leave angry, but wind up enjoying the rest of their trip. They lose their virginity to each other, confess their love, and head back to the US. You know, teenager stuff. When they're back in the US, Gus reveals that his cancer has come back with a vengeance. His health worsens, and he dies only a few weeks after this. Hazel is heartbroken, and it's made even worse by her own deteriorating health. Van Houten shows up at Gus' funeral to apologize, and Hazel sees his actions in a new light, but she's still angry with him. At the end of the book, Hazel receives a letter that Gus wrote as an obituary for her, wherein he states that we don't get to decide whether or not we get hurt in life, but we do get to decide who hurts us. It ends with Hazel saying she's happy with the choice she made, and she has no regrets. Overall, I think the book is... fine? I can appreciate the actual prose of it. The whole narration is filled with quips and sarcastic banter, so it really feels like a teenager is telling the story. At first, I thought it was weird that Hazel would be so humorous when she's dying, but partway through I realized that she was using it as a defense mechanism. The story and characters are mostly pretty paint by numbers, and I'm definitely NOT in the target audience, but I can appreciate that there was genuine effort and skill here. It wasn't a quick cash grab. The surface message is very good too. Anyone who's ever had depression knows the desire to withdraw from the world and not form any connections, or put effort into anything because it all just feels pointless. This book is a very clear refutation of that, and that's a great thing to get out there to young people. But let's talk about the more problematic messages that these types of stories are sending unintentionally. Like I said before, everything is designed for maximum drama in the land of sicklet. The emotions and personalities are exaggerated to help get across the message, or just to make the reader feel more of whatever emotion is being pushed at the moment. The ending of The Fault in Our Stars wouldn't have seemed nearly as sad if Hazel and Augustus had stayed together for eight months, and then broken up when they realized that they had nothing in common except the cancer. Even if that would have been a lot more realistic. So the whole idea boils down to enjoying the passionate honeymoon phase of a relationship and the tragic ending of it brought about by the cruel hand of fate without having to put up with all of that boring shit in the middle. There's no examination of what it takes to maintain a healthy relationship over the long term, which, let's be real, most young people could use a lesson in. Most people in general, really. If you're familiar with the comedian Jim Jeffries, then you might have heard this joke. So I think the only way out for me is to, like, meet a woman, marry her, get her pregnant, she has the child, and then if she could die, that would really help me out, because your kid couldn't hate you then because I'm doing my best, your mom's dead, you know? This is just a humorous take on the same idea, and it pretty clearly points out all of the strangeness in it. People are very interested in the beginning of a relationship and the end of it because that's when emotions are highest. The middle part is boring and no one cares about it, so that gets left by the wayside. But that's not the real issue here. It's a bit problematic, and it's not limited to this particular subgenre, but it's not the end of the world. The real problem is the title of this video, the romanticization of terminal illnesses like cancer. That probably sounds confusing, so let me explain. Cancer is a horrific illness that kills you extremely slowly, and most sicklet books acknowledge that. But at the same time, don't these stories also make cancer look kind of awesome? Look at the faults in our stars. Hazel falls in love with Gus, which is unambiguously a good thing, and it makes her happy for a while before he dies. If that's the case, shouldn't Hazel be glad she got cancer? If she never got cancer, she wouldn't have met Gus after all. On the surface, the book portrays cancer as a horrible thing, and let's be clear, it is. But that conflicts with the core theme of the entire book, that we shouldn't hesitate to form relationships with others just because we're afraid of being hurt, because the happiness makes the pain worth it. The love Hazel shared with Gus was good, therefore the fact that she met him was good. But she wouldn't have met him if they didn't both get cancer. Maybe an argument can be made that the message is really that you should just make the best of whatever happens to you, but again, cancer is portrayed as being an absolutely horrible illness that eats your body over the course of months or years. If all of that sounds like it contradicts the idea that Hazel's cancer led to something good, that's because it does. I know for a fact that John Green wasn't trying to secretly indoctrinate our youth into wanting cancer. In fact, the book was inspired by one of his friends who died of cancer. And he said later that he wrote this book as a response to illness being romanticized in literature. It's just that I think he did a bad job of it. The cute teenage romance, which I want to reiterate is outright said to be a good thing and worth the cost, is dependent on the characters getting cancer. Then look at Before I Die, another one of these books where a young woman named Tessa wants to experience the dangerous and fun side of life before her cancer kills her. Throughout the book, the fact that she's dying seems liberating, like it allows her to just let loose and have fun without worrying about the consequences. Her actions aren't always portrayed as harmless, to be sure, but her condition undeniably gives her a level of freedom most of us would love to have. She doesn't have to worry about her grades or her job or taking care of her health or maintaining any of her relationships. She can just say fuck this and do whatever she wants. It's grade A wish fulfillment right there, even if it's tempered by the fact that she'll die soon. Recently, a movie called Five Feet Apart appeared in American theaters, and strangely enough, it isn't, based on a book. It's all about two teenagers with cystic fibrosis who have to stay six feet apart at all times or risk infecting each other, but they decide to, quote, take one foot back and only stay five feet apart at all times. This, along with a couple other decisions from the film, is extremely dangerous, but it's portrayed as being liberating and fun, which some people with CF have taken umbrage with. What I'm saying is that the illness is all just a plot device. In all of these examples, it's trivialized to make a teen love story at best and outright making deadly illnesses look like the key to happiness at worst, since, as all teen romance stories have taught us, finding your true love when you're 16 is the real measure of success in life. And it gets worse. See, these types of stories don't just romanticize terminal diseases. They often romanticize dying of them too. At the end of Five Feet Apart, Cole Sprouse, I know his character has a name, but I'm calling him Cole Sprouse, reveals that he'll die soon. And it's sad, but it's also kind of okay, because he showed his girlfriend how to enjoy life, or something. It's not a very good movie. In A Walk to Remember, Jamie dies, but Landon now believes in miracles, and he's a better person. In Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, Rachel's death convinces Greg to be himself and follow his dreams. And I've already spent enough time talking about The Fault in Our Stars. In all these cases, the death that functions as the main emotional beat of the story is shown to have positive impact. There's never an example of someone getting depression after watching their loved one die and then succumbing to substance abuse, at least not outside of a tragic backstory. Sicklet isn't just about death. It's about having a pretty death. A death where you get to experience happiness, follow some of your dreams, and then have everyone be sad that you're gone. Dying was a good thing all along. There's never a story about someone becoming ill and dying right away before getting to do anything, because, well, that'd be boring. The thing that makes life worth living is not the end of it. And fetishizing a pretty death in a time period where suicide in Americans ages 15 to 24 has risen by over 40% in the past 20 years seems pretty fucking irresponsible to me. This next part talks about suicide, so if that bothers you, skip to this time. Among suicidal people, it's very common to experience the feeling that they're a burden to others, or they feel guilt over something, or sometimes they feel that if they kill themselves, then others will feel bad for the way they treated them in life. And the reason why most of those who suffer from suicidal urges don't wind up going through with it is because going through with it is scary. I can tell you from personal experience that if you told someone suicidal that they had cancer, they would most likely be relieved. They'd see an end to the pain, a light at the end of the tunnel. A commonly known factoid is that men die of suicide more often than women do, even though women attempt it more. The primary reason for this is that women's preferred method is self-poisoning, while men use more violent methods like shooting themselves. When survivors are asked about why they used poisoning, they often express a concern over who would find their body. They didn't want whoever found them to see a violent scene. They wanted to appear almost like they had just fallen asleep, kind of like how a lot of people who get cancer die in their sleep. So in other words, romanticizing dying of cancer also romanticizes certain types of suicide, at least in the minds of those who are already struggling with suicidal urges. To a mentally healthy person, this probably wouldn't make that much of a difference. It's not at all uncommon for those suffering from depression to self-harm as a sort of cry for help. So if people start to put out the idea that when you start to die, you'll find your true love, well, you can see how that could affect a few people who already have severe problems. And I'm not blaming Hollywood or the publishing industry for the increase in teen suicides, so put your pitchforks down. I am, however, pointing out that they're taking advantage of a rise in depression and suicidal behavior, albeit unknowingly. And this is even more of a problem because these messages are wrapped up in others that are actually positive, like the Fault in Our Stars' message about not isolating yourself out of fear of getting hurt. The positive distracts people from the negative. And like I mentioned before, I think this is totally unintentional. I think authors just don't realize what they're doing, and in most cases are trying to write something that refutes pessimistic thinking. I would ask them to stop and find a better way of doing it, but I'm not going to bother. Partially because one YouTube video isn't going to reach many people, and partially because it's not going to convince Hollywood or the publishing industry to stop sucking on a golden tit. Sicklit stories are published by publishers and filmed by movie studios because they make money. They're businesses, and businesses are fueled by money. Any unsavory messages, even if they're unintentional, take a backseat to profit 100% of the time. And if you disagree with my conclusions here, that's fine. One of the wonderful things about all forms of art is that we can all see the same thing and come away with different interpretations. So let me end this by telling you to be aware of the sorts of messages that you're absorbing or promoting, even if they are unintentional. Thanks for watching, and thanks to Desk Brennan and all my other patrons. I couldn't do it without you guys. I'll see you next time. And if you are a loved one who's experiencing suicidal urges, please check out one of the resources below.