The quirk-ification of terminal illness in YA.

[00:00:00]Thank you to my patrons and to Clean My Mac for making this video possible.

[00:00:04]>> I'm sick. I'm sick.

[00:00:05]>> I guess you heard I'm sick.

[00:00:06]>> She's sick.

[00:00:07]>> Like all kids with cystic fibrosis, I was born terminal.

[00:00:10]>> I'm not healthy and I'm going to die. I have cancer.

[00:00:13]>> Why were we obsessed with dying teenagers? The fall in our stars, My Sister's Keeper, Everything Everything, Midnight Sun, 5 Ft Apart. The wire genre turned terminal illness into a catalyst for whirlwind romance. This trend didn't start in the 2010s, but it definitely exploded. Then the narratives became more ridiculous, more cliched as Hollywood and publishing execs saw that the new ITG girl was the sick girl. Why was there such an appetite for these stories in the 2010s? What, if anything, do these stories teach us about disability and illness? And does our collective experience of a global pandemic change how we view these romantic stories? 2010's YA was obsessed with sickness and death. We had the like limbo films like If I Stay and Before I Fall. We had the mental illness subgenre which treated mental health with a varying degrees of success. I think 13 Reasons Why, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, All the Bright Places, and it's kind of a funny story. And finally, and most important for this video, we had the terminal illness subgenre. In the 2010s, we had four teen cancer films, a cystic fibrosis film, a sun allergy film, an everything allergy film, and a teen TV show with various chronic and terminal illnesses. The 2010s terminally storage full. If only I had an app that let me effortlessly free up storage.

[00:01:45]Today's video is sponsored by Clean My Mac. Clean My Mac is your ultimate solution for Mac control and care. It's notorized by Apple and with 17 years of expertise in developing Mac software, you know you're in good hands. I myself have several years of experience with Mac software and some of it, like video editing or graphic design apps, will eat up my memory in an instant. I have spent hours combing through the darkest recesses of my computer library, hunting for files to delete. Clean My Mac takes that stress off my hands. It cleans up the caches, broken files, and duplicates. I got rid of 25 GB of cache files and in total freed up almost 80 GB of space on my hard drive in my first run. The Space Sense builds a visual map of your hard drive to lay out exactly how your storage is divided and cleanup helps you clear space. You can also clean up storage on your cloud drives with cloud cleanup. And all of the scanning happens locally so your data is safe. The app has a sleek, user-friendly dashboard that gives you complete control over your Mac's performance because your Mac should keep up with you, not the other way around. If you're interested in tidying up your Mac, you can try out Clean My Mac for 7 days for free and use my code literacy for 20% off. Thanks, Clean My Mac. Whoa, suddenly I feel lighter. Suddenly, I feel like 80 gigabytes has been lifted off of me. Weird. Anyways, what was I saying? The 2010s terminally ill boom, which is a crazy turn of phrase, is the natural continuation of sick lit and sick flicks. Sick lit and sick flicks package terminal illness into consumable grief. These stories are not preoccupied with a realistic depiction of what it's like to live with illness or disability.

[00:03:26]Their goal is to maximize melodrama.

[00:03:29]Literature has long memorialized characters that suffered beautifully. In 19th century Irish, consumption or tuberculosis was, in the words of Susan Santag, the preferred way of giving death a meaning. This quote comes from Santag's 1977 illness as metaphor, where she examines how illnesses like TB and cancer are portrayed in art, how we speak about illness, and how this all informs our real life perception of illness. Sant highlights how illness has been used as a way to bestow stories with meaning. a vehicle for character development and narrative devices rather than illness being treated as a real condition. Simply put, the stories use illness as metaphor.

[00:04:15]Wait, I just put that together. Illness is metaphor. Just kidding. Sag continues, "The dying turercular is pictured as made more beautiful and more soulful." And she contrasts this with the person dying of cancer. portrayed as robbed of all capacities of self-trcendence, humiliated by fear and agony. However, I'd argue in the 50 years since Sontag wrote Illness as Metaphor, cancer has taken over TB's role in making a character suffer beautifully, the romantic disease which cuts off a young life. And nowhere is this more visible than YA fiction and film, which really emphasized the romantic part. The sick narratives all center around cancer, cystic fibrosis, and immuno deficiencies. They're all illnesses that affect the body physically, but they're rarely portrayed as having any visual impact. There's no disfigurement, no weight gain, very little visual impact except for making the characters have dark circles.

[00:05:12]Sicknesses don't affect the character's mood or the brain's cognitive abilities.

[00:05:16]Despite the physical deterioration, the characters remain articulate, aware, and serene. This all allows the surrounding characters and the audience to pedestal the sick character as an angel. Their illnesses are all quite straightforward.

[00:05:30]They're kind of random strokes of bad luck in the genetic lottery. And it isn't a product of the character's own actions, be it addiction or unprotected sex or reckless behavior. There's nothing in the sickness for the audience to pass a moral judgment on. And all of this maximizes sympathy. There's no nuance or complexity. There's no character flaws for the audience to overlook. Across the genre, terminal illness is boiled down to very easily digestible and identifiable tropes and visuals. The oxygen tube or canula, baldness and short hair, dark circles, and slightly pale skin on otherwise thin beautiful actors. Ed Sheeran and Birdie popping up on the indie soundtracks. The styling feels very 2010's Tumblr. All of the characters bedrooms have like beautiful little twinkling fairy lights.

[00:06:21]There are handdrawn graphics, hospital montages, a quick lesson for the audience in illness 101. My immune system sucks. Here's a drawing to explain. And Manic Pixie Dream Girls, the clumsy, awkward YA protagonist, Allah Bella Swan, got a rebrand from Manic Pixie Dream Girl to Manic Pixie Sick Girl. And you may be thinking, "But there's boys, too." And there are, I'll give you that. But out of the eight films I've watched in the dozen or so books that I've researched, the only time sick boys pop up is with a sick girl. There's never just a story about a sick boy. And the type of sick girls we see remains consistent across the genre.

[00:07:01]By the way, I'm using the term sick and healthy very simply. I know it's reductive and things are much more nuanced in real life, but most of the YA sick genre establishes characters in a binary of healthy, able-bodied, or sick and dying. So, my like simplification is mirroring the genre's simplification. To understand the stereotypes and cliches of the sick lit genre, we could go back to tuberculosis literature like Susan Sag. We could go back to Beth and Little Women. We could go back to 1970s love story or the books of Lerene McDaniel who is the queen of cichlid and whose books include too young to die a time to die please don't die 16 and dying she died too young someone dies someone lives but I don't think we have to go back that far I think the true blueprint for the 2010s YA sick flick cichllet is a walk to remember a walk to remember is a 2002 film based off the Nicholas Sparks novel of the same name and it stars Mandy Moore as good Christian girl Jamie and Shane West as capital Bad Boy Landon. Jaime sings in the church choir and volunteers in her spare time. Her father is a reverend. She's beautiful, kind, smart, modest. Basically, she's perfect and completely one-dimensional.

[00:08:19]Bad boy Landon grows close to her while doing community service to avoid getting expelled. Neither Landon nor the audience know that Jaime is terminally ill with leukemia. and we don't find out until there's a dramatic confession scene about an hour and 10 minutes into the film with like half an hour left in the runtime. This cliche secret cancer or secret illness kept coming up. I understand it when a character wanted to live a normal life and they didn't want people to treat them differently, but most of the time its sole purpose was to build tension around uh romance. And I found it to be a pretty cheap trick.

[00:08:52]Also, all the media, bar one, starts after the character has been diagnosed and has come to terms with their illness and they're dying in some way.

[00:09:01]>> You know, I I was getting along with everything fine. I accepted it and then you happened.

[00:09:06]>> Even if you died >> when >> even when you die, >> you win. Same.

[00:09:14]>> I found this really dullled a lot of the emotions. We don't see the shock or the change from normal life to sick life.

[00:09:23]And a lot of the big emotions come from other characters with the sick character having to comfort them. The focus isn't on how they feel about their own illness. This furthers the idea of them being inspirational, being the perfect patient, and maximizing sympathy from the audience. We rarely see someone break down, be mean or moody, lash out in some way. They're always suffering beautifully. They've always just accepted their fate. The sick characters are always wise and mature beyond their years. And I know that dealing with a terminal or chronic illness would age you in some way. You're not afforded the same recklessness. You can't experiment as much. You miss out on a lot of like school and social formation. But the children and teenagers don't act their age. They feel like mini adults. And A Walk to Remember is no exception. Jaime has a bucket list, which is another trope that we see over and over in the sick flick genre, and it serves a couple narrative functions. It signals that the characters don't have much time left. It provides an excuse for a cute montage of characters completing their quests, and it shows us that the sick character is determined to like live life to the fullest before they die. This zest for life is contrasted to the male character who doesn't think about their future. He doesn't appreciate the life that he has.

[00:10:46]It's usually, but not always, the love interest. In this film, it's Landon.

[00:10:50]Over the course of the film or the novel, the male character learns to take his life seriously. He becomes grateful for what he has, and he's happy to be alive and healthy. Landon starts off rebellious. He doesn't care about college. He has a fraught relationship with his dad. He's reformed by his relationship with Jamie.

[00:11:10]>> Jamie has faith in me. She makes me want to be different.

[00:11:15]>> He stops hanging out with the cool, popular kids. He helps out in the community and he starts dating Jaime with her father's permission. Of course, through Jaime, he reconciles with his dad. He figures out what he wants to do with life and he decides to go to medical school. But it's not just Landon that transforms. Jaime's illness and death is a catalyst for the entire town's growth. All of the mean popular kids are suddenly kind and apologetic.

[00:11:43]Like they've all found God. These stories are not for sick or disabled people because they are not truly about sick and disabled people. They are about how healthy characters change. I watched a fantastic TED talk by the late Australian comedian and disability rights activist Stella Young. It's called inspiration porn and the objectification of disability. Young talks about this idea of inspiration porn. how disabled people are so often valorized or viewed as inspirational just for existing.

[00:12:14]>> For lots of us, disabled people are not our teachers or our doctors or our manicurists.

[00:12:21]We're not real people. We are there to inspire.

[00:12:25]>> It's dehumanizing. It's objectifying.

[00:12:27]And not to dismiss the hardships caused by disability, but disabled people are people. They are not characters for inspirational anecdotes. The purpose of these images is to inspire you, to motivate you, so that we can look at them and think, well, however bad my life is, it could be worse. I could be that person. But what if you are that person?

[00:12:52]>> Disabled people do not exist to inspire able-bodied people to take full advantage of their lives or be grateful for what they have. This way of thinking paints disabled people as cautionary tales and terminally ill films and literature so often fall into this inspiration porn. A lot of the time the stories depict sick dying girls inspiring healthy boys to live their lives, but they rarely depict the realities, the difficulties of living with a disability or illness.

[00:13:24]>> Before I got sick, I was just waiting for my life to start. The most we get in A Walk to Remember is Jaime looking frail in a cardigan. Jaime is an angel in the house. Even though she is sick and dying, she takes care of her father.

[00:13:37]>> I'm going to go make us some dinner.

[00:13:38]Okay.

[00:13:40]>> She's self-sacrificing. She puts everybody else first. She never complains. She never gets angry or lashes out. She suffers quietly and stoically. Her mother died before the events of the film. And this may sound strange, but this is another trope that kept popping up. the like other dead family member and it might be a sister or a parent, but it makes the protagonist death more tragic. It also brings up anxieties around leaving their family alone or childless. It brings up survivors guilt. Landon helps Jaime complete things on her wish list, like getting a tattoo, being in two places at once. He builds her a telescope so that she can see a comet. He tells her he loves her on like, I think, their first date.

[00:14:26]Maybe they're second.

[00:14:27]>> You have to promise you won't fall in love with me. I told you not to fall in love with me.

[00:14:33]>> The illness is very generic. We know it's leukemia, but the hospital scenes might as well be stock footage. Another cliche is what I'm calling the big collapse. This is where the sick character, who up until this point has been full of energy, has been on top of the world, like no sign of sickness whatsoever, they suddenly collapse and end up in hospital. This is like the first sign of serious illness. It typically happens in the third act and it shows the audience that it's the beginning of the end. The one thing I will give a walk to remember is that money and financial difficulties are a plot point. Landon reconciles with his dad who is a doctor to beg him for help and his dad pays for Jaime's private home care. The question of money is bizarrely absent from every other story, which I found really surprising considering that they're all set in America, a country notorious for its unaffordable healthcare. The emission of any whisper of financial difficulties, further exposes the sick narratives as romantic fantasies. Jaime and Landon get married, and we never see Jaime die. We just to hear about it in voiceover from Landon. Jamie and I had a perfect summer together and then she went with her unfailing faith.

[00:15:47]>> Sick fix tend to skip over death. Time and again we see a sick person and then it cuts away and we're either told in voice over or we cut to a funeral and we know that they're dead. The focus is then on the living characters, their grief, how their lives have been touched. The sick characters often have little to no agency in the story and I think A Walk to Remember exemplifies this perfectly. Landon is the protagonist, not Jaime. We don't spend much time with Jaime without Landon. We don't find out about her cancer until there's half an hour left in the film.

[00:16:19]Her health deterioration is a catalyst for Landon's growth. He narrates her death and tells the audience how he changed because of it.

[00:16:26]>> Jamie saved my life.

[00:16:30]She taught me everything. I was actually surprised to see that the story was inspired by Nicholas Sparks's sister who died of breast cancer because the cancer in the film is treated as so surface level. It is a blatant device for melodrama rather than an actual exploration of what it's like to have and die of cancer. Everything about the film is manufactured to make you cry. It didn't succeed for me personally, but it was a commercial success. And as we've seen, it has so many of the popular tropes and character dynamics that we will continue to see. To put the formula very simply, it is this. Boy meets girl, girl sick. Maybe boy sick too. Boy hate life, girl love life. Girl teach boy to love life. Girl dies, boy changed forever. It's not all the stories, but it's a lot of them. With the YA trends, there's always one book at its center.

[00:17:27]The book that launched a dozen franchises and a million fanfictions.

[00:17:31]For the supernatural romance trend, it was Twilight. For the dystopian craze, it was the Hunger Games. And for the 2010s Cichlit, it was The Falter Stars.

[00:17:42]I believe we have a choice in this world about how to tell sad stories.

[00:17:46]>> The Falter Stars was published in 2012.

[00:17:48]The film directed by Josh Boon came out in 2014. This [ __ ] dominated Tumblr.

[00:17:54]It's hard to emphasize for the ones who weren't reblogging. Okay. Okay. Graphics or Augustus Waters Gifts. I was there. I was obsessed with this book. I read it.

[00:18:07]I reread it. I bought the audio books on CD. I think they were the only audio books I ever bought on CD and I like imported them into my iTunes to put on my iPod. I was obsessed. I cried when the trailer came out and I would listen to the song from the trailer and cry again. 14 to 16year-old me loved this book. The Fall in Our Stars has many of the hallmarks of Cichlit, but I think a lot of its treatment of cancer and disability is actually quite unique. It doesn't feel as manipulative or formulaic as the other films. It doesn't have some of the issues that I have with the genre as a whole, but it definitely has some. The Fault in Our Stars follows Hazel Grace Lancaster, played by Shayen Woodley, a 16-year-old who got diagnosed with thyroid cancer at 13, and now spends most of her time rereading her favorite book, watching America's Next Top Model, A Woman After My Own Heart, and occasionally going to cancer support group. It is at the support group that she meets Augustus Waters, or Gus, played by sexual predator Anel Elgort.

[00:19:14]Never forget. Gus had osteioaroma. He's now clear, but he lost his leg and has a prosthetic. Hazel and Gus are instantly taken with one another. They're both very intelligent and pretentious. I'm by far from the first person to say this, but they absolutely do not speak like teenagers.

[00:19:30]>> There's always a hamaria, isn't there?

[00:19:32]Welcome to the sweet torture of reading an imperial fiction.

[00:19:34]>> I am in the midst of a grand salinoquy here.

[00:19:37]>> Some of the dialogue is so clunky, I don't think it works as well on screen as it does in the book. Gus's cigarette metaphor in particular.

[00:19:48]If you're not familiar, Gus has a pack of cigarettes, but he never smokes them.

[00:19:53]>> You put the thing that does the killing right between your teeth, but you never give it the power to kill you. A metaphor.

[00:19:59]>> I know they're like 16, 17. Could you imagine being out or like being in the smoking area and meeting someone who is like, I actually don't smoke. I just kind of put it in my mouth and leave a dangle. I guess the 2020's version would be like, "Oh, yeah. No, I have I have a vape, but I actually I don't use it. I just kind of waft it around. I don't know. As a 28-year-old, reading and watching this cigarette metaphor made me roll my eyes so hard that I think I could see into the back of my skull. It does not feel as deep as it once did.

[00:20:33]And I think a lot of the text feels like that. But look, Gus is supposed to be pretentious. I get that. and my teenage self loved it. And this is a book for teenagers. Anela Elgort and Shane Woodley are both conventionally attractive people. The book characters got the Hollywood glow up as they very often do. In the book, Hazel describes the bloating she experiences from her cancer treatment. She says that her drugs make her cheeks kind of puff up to look like a little hamster. We don't see that in the film. In none of the films do we see like weight gain or weight loss. We don't ever see how illness or treatment affects their body or their body image. And I get that this is maybe difficult logistically to film, but it does get tiring watching these very ill and dying teenagers just remain as beautiful as models throughout the whole thing. In the book, Hazel has a friend, Caitlyn, who's absent from the film, and there's a lot of contrast between Caitlyn as a stereotypical teenage girl and Hazel. It shows how Hazel misses out on a lot of teenage life, but again, she's that kind of wise beyond her years. And there's a trope in a lot of cicklet and sick flicks of sick characters just kind of looking sadly most time out of a window at like other teenagers living their lives. And the characters often try to manufacture their own version of teenage milestones.

[00:21:59]In My Sister's Keeper, there's a prom at the hospital for the teen patients. In red band society, the 16 teens crash parties and they crash homecoming. The Falter Stars doesn't have any of that, but they do go to Amsterdam. It's not an impulsive decision. It requires a lot of planning, conversations with doctors. I mean, Amsterdam, I want you to have everything you want in the world, but we don't have the money.

[00:22:23]>> And I appreciated the realism in depicting that these characters don't have the freedom or the health to just pick up and go somewhere really impulsively. and the needle drop of Charlie XX's boom clap when Hazel and Augustus are in Amsterdam.

[00:22:42]That was life-changing. Though Hazel and Gus like each other, Hazel resists any romantic relationship for quite some time. This delayed intimacy and romance is very common in the genre. Hazel says that she's a grenade and she stops herself from getting too close to Gus because she's afraid she's going to hurt him. She's also feeling a lot of guilt and anxiety around dying because she's an only child and she worries about the impact it's going to have on her parents that their lives will just stop that they will like stop being parents.

[00:23:16]Thankfully, the falter stars works through these feelings and it doesn't feel as cliche as the other stories. By the end of the fall in our stars, Hazel realizes the foolishness of trying to save others from her own impending fragmentation and the pair start dating.

[00:23:29]That notion of we can't be together because we're only going to hurt each other pops up over and over again.

[00:23:36]Sometimes it's emotional like in the fall stars. Other times it's literal in 5t apart, midnight sun, and everything.

[00:23:43]They all have the romance impeded by physical barriers. The focus on those stories isn't on the emotions of the sick characters, on their anxiety or loneliness. It's purely a device for romance. The physical barrier fosters emotional intimacy because they can't be physical. And I think that this really bolsters the desiraability of the male characters. In mainstream media, teen boys are often portrayed as hormone crazed, girl obsessed, and it's a rare gem to find a boy that isn't interested in in hooking up or making out that they're interested in in the girl herself. But if I have to see characters like press their hands together through a pane of glass one more time, I am going to explode. The terminal illness in these stories is another way of applying time pressure and creating the sense that these characters are us against the world. It functions the same as the threats in dystopias, but you know, the media has swung from rebelling against a totalitarian government to fighting against your own body and like reckoning with mortality that way. The illness acts as an emotional accelerator, a shortcut to romance and intimacy. these teenagers accelerated romance and intimacy feels more earned because as an audience we recognize that time crunch. There's that pity, that tragedy that they only have so much time. In Hazel's words, they have a little infinity. And in these like teen films, it's not as scandalous to show something like teens having sex. Not that the Falter Stars even really shows teens having sex, but again, they only have so much time. So for maybe more conservative audiences, the pity wins over that scandal. These narratives turn I got to lose my virginity before college to like I got to lose my virginity before I die. The one kind of taboo thing in the fall stars that really pushes and I would say breaks the the limit of acceptable behavior happens in Amsterdam. You probably already know what I'm going to discuss. Hazel and Grace visit the Anne Frank house and when they get to the attic, they kiss for the first time. Okay, let me actually just read it to you because it's so much worse than I remembered.

[00:26:05]So, for context, while they're in the attic where the Frank family hid, there's a video of Otto, who is the only surviving member of the Frank family playing in the background. Augustus Waters, I said, looking up at him, thinking that you cannot kiss anyone in the Anfrank house, and then thinking that Annef Frank, after all, kissed someone in the Annefrank house, and that she probably would like nothing more than for her home to have become a place where the young and irreparably broken sink into love. I must say, Ottofrank said on the video in his accented English, I was very much surprised by the deep thoughts Anne had, and then we were kissing. My hand let go of the oxygen cart and I reached up for his neck and he pulled me up by my waist onto my tiptoes. As his part of lips met mine, I started to feel breathless in a new and fascinating way. The space around us evaporated. And for a weird moment, I really liked my body. This cancer ruined thing I'd spent years dragging around suddenly seemed worth the struggle, worth the chest tubes and the PICC lines and the ceaseless body betrayal of the tumors. It was a different Anne I had known as my daughter. She never really showed this kind of inner feeling. Otto Frankfrank continued. The kiss lasted forever as Otto Frank kept talking from behind me.

[00:27:14]I realized that my eyes were closed and opened them. Augustus was staring at me, his blue eyes closer to me than they had ever been. And behind him, a crowd of people three deep had circled around us.

[00:27:25]They were angry, I thought. Horrified.

[00:27:28]These teenagers with their hormones making out beneath a video broadcasting the shattered voice of a former father.

[00:27:34]I pulled away from Augustus and he snuck a peck onto my forehead as I stared down at my Chuck Taylor's and then they started clapping.

[00:27:42]All the people, all these adults just started clapping and one shouted, "Bravo!" in a European accent. Augustus smiled, bowed, laughing. I curtsied ever so slightly, which was met with another round of applause.

[00:27:59]And that's the Anne Frank scene from The Falner Stars. Every time I read it, it just feels worse.

[00:28:10]>> Let's discuss, shall we? I want to say that this didn't age well, but it was just distasteful and horrific to begin with. I think the book feels worse than the film. I've never been to the AnFrank House, but I have been to Holocaust museums and I went to the Hiroshima Museum in Japan. Obviously, very somber, serious atmospheres in places like this.

[00:28:37]Very sobering, very depressing, very quiet. People aren't chitchatting or joking, let alone kissing. Because I think we all understand that there is a degree of respect that is required in these sorts of places to respect the tragedy of what happened to respect the dead. I don't even think I need to explain this to you. But I'm more so saying it because it's so utterly baffling and to be like, "Oh no, I think Anne Frank would think like this and just as a justification is crazy to me."

[00:29:06]Also don't know why everybody would clap. It really makes it feel like a Tumblr story. Like and everybody clapped. Nobody knows that this is their first kiss. Nobody knows that this is like a big moment in their relationship.

[00:29:17]In an FAQ on his website, John Green addressed the decision, "Why Anne Frank's house? It's a sacred space, but it's important to remember that real people lived there. Our usual way of honoring the dead by freezing them in time and mythologizing them by building the marble statues Shakespeare rails against in that sonnet. That's not Hazel and Augustus's way of honoring the dead.

[00:29:38]As Hazel notes, Anne Frank made out with a boy in the Anfrank house. I think Hazel wants, and I wanted to reclaim that sacred space for doomed people who are nonetheless still alive and still full of desire. Annef Frank kissed someone in the Anne Frank house because she was trapped in that house hiding from the Nazis.

[00:30:00]I understand death is in the near future for Anne Frank and Hazel and Gus, but they have a freedom of movement that that Anne Frank did not have. And this justification is just not enough for me.

[00:30:11]This reminds me of the time that Justin Bieber went to the Anf Frank house and wrote in the visitors book like I know or I hope that Anf Frank would have been a believer. Something crazy. Anyway, Amsterdam is also where we find out that Gus's cancer is back.

[00:30:29]Wow. I will never forget reading the phrase I lit up like a Christmas tree at age like 14 and sobbing.

[00:30:40]Sobbing. It is devastating. You know, we spend the whole thing thinking that Hazel is going to be the one to die, but it's Gus. John Green did a little switcheroon there, which kind of subverts the the cliche of the dying girl as well. Gus obviously knew that his cancer was back before the trip. So, we do have that um secret cancer secret illness cliche here. In terms of how the Falter Stars represents cancer, Hazel is very knowledgeable and specific about her cancer. She explains it to the audience or the reader and she does simplify it to like child friendly terms. At some point she says, "My lungs suck at being lungs, but I don't think that she dumbs it down as much as other stories or kind of quirkifies it as much as other stories. We don't get a quirky animation explaining what's wrong with her or what the illness is. Hazel is disabled by her illness and we see that constantly. She gets out of breath from taking the stairs or from standing for too long. She has to carry her oxygen tank around with her everywhere she goes. There's not one like contained montage of hospital scenes either. Hazel is repeatedly getting scans or going back into hospital for treatment. And it's integrated as part of her life, part of her like daily reality. It's not this linear thing we see in the other stories of like they're fine, they're fine, they're fine, they collapse, and then they're dying. You know, the oxygen tube is a constant visual reminder of her disability. It's a very neat and easy signifier. It is excellent cinematic shortorthhand for illness. And we see it pop up all the time. H Gus is also permanently disabled from his cancer. He lost his leg. He has to wear a prosthetic. And we see the prosthetic.

[00:32:22]We see him limping and we do see his like amputated leg at one point as well.

[00:32:27]Their friend Isaac is blind after losing both his eyes to cancer. We didn't have a lot of disability representation in YA. We still don't. And side note, something that we really missed out on, I think, from the Hunger Games films is Katniss's hearing loss because after uh the second film, I think they there's an explosion in the arena and she's like permanently hearing impaired after that.

[00:32:51]In the YA sick, the image of illness and disability is very neat. It's very clean. It's sanitized for easy viewing.

[00:32:59]The Fall in Our Stars, though, details some of the more grosser kind of bodily aspects of illness. Hazel describes her lungs filling up with fluid and how she feels like she's drowning. She talks about her near-death experiences. Then, when Gus is dying, she says that he wets the bed. He vomits on himself, and he gets an infection in his G ttube or gastronomy tube, which allows for nutrients to go straight into the stomach. The Falter of Stars addresses cancer cliches headon >> on the same journey. journey.

[00:33:30]>> Really?

[00:33:31]>> What's your story?

[00:33:32]>> I was 13.

[00:33:32]>> No, not your cancer story. Your real story.

[00:33:34]>> They joke about cancer perks like getting a driver's license or Hazel's like Makea-Wish Disneyland trip. They aren't treated as precious angels. When they go to Amsterdam, they meet Hazel's favorite author, Venon, and he addresses them very cruy. He offers them no sympathy just because they are children dying of cancer.

[00:33:53]>> You seem so intelligent in print, Mr. Waters. Has the cancer found its way into your brain?

[00:33:59]>> When Hazel and then later when Gus uh is in hospital, neither parents let them in to visit. I really appreciated these boundaries and made it feel more realistic to a hospital experience. Gus does sneak in briefly to be fair, but there's not this romantic rallying of every doctor, nurse, and janitor like behind the romantic couple and like flouting all hospital protocol in favor of romance. They don't treat the hospital as a playground. The Faller Stars does the same as the other films.

[00:34:30]We don't see Gus die. We don't see his final moments. Hazel tells us in voice over and we see her reaction. John Green inserts meta references to the formula of the cancer story.

[00:34:42]>> One of the less bullshitty conventions of the cancer genre is the convention known as The Last Good Day. In the book, after Gus dies, Hazel looks at his Facebook wall and she gets angry at the like hollowess of the posts, at the cliches from people that Gus hasn't seen for the cliches from people Gus hasn't seen in years, who he's never mentioned, and it directly acknowledges how we romanticize people and our relationship with them in death. John Green was inspired to write the Falter Stars after working as a chaplain in a children's hospital and it is dedicated to his friend Esther Earl who died of thyroid cancer in 2010 and she was a 16-year-old YouTuber. John Green said in his video for Esther after she passed, >> but she wasn't an angel or a model of perfection or anything. She was a person. She was a teenager. In the book, he writes, "The thing about dead people, you sound like a bastard if you don't romanticize them. But really, I mean, aside from us, obviously, cancer kids are not statistically more likely to be awesome or compassionate or perseverant or whatever. A cancer diagnosis doesn't change who you are. It doesn't immediately erase all of your negative qualities." John Green really resists painting a romantic or one-dimensional portrait of his sick characters. That said, try as it might, the film and book still feel like cancer melodramas.

[00:36:10]Though they resist cancer making their their lives or their death meaningful in the narrative itself, cancer acts as a catalyst for the main romance and the tragic death makes it feel more meaningful. The New York Times film critic AO Scott calls the fault in our stars an expertly built machine for the mass production of tears. And he's not wrong. The same year The Fallen Our Stars hit our shelves, so did Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. The book came out in 2012 and was written by Jesse Andrews. And the film came out in 2015 and was directed by Alfonso Gomez Rahon.

[00:36:46]It premiered at Sundance and won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award. The film cast is stacked. Olivia Cook, Connie Britain, Molly Shannon, John Bernthal, Nick Offerman. And this is one of the rare platonic dynamics.

[00:37:02]And I feel really torn about this film.

[00:37:04]It was my favorite of all of the films that I watched and I really enjoyed it.

[00:37:08]It's very fun stylistically. The the main characters are movie buffs, so there's a bunch of homages and different styles. There's stop motion sequences.

[00:37:17]It's also very funny. It did make me cry. But in terms of how it portrays the sick girl, I'm conflicted because it does fall into a lot of the same tropes that we have seen before. The title Me and Earl and the Dying Girl tells us quite plainly what we're dealing with. It is the story of a dying girl, but it also tells us that it is not from the perspective of the dying character who doesn't even get a name in the title. She is the dying girl conflated with her illness. Me and Darl and the dying girl is from our main characters Greg's perspective played by Thomas Man. I didn't read the whole book, but I read parts of it for context. Greg addresses the reader and audience directly. He is writing in hindsight and it is very meta. You may have already figured out that it's about a girl who had cancer. So, there's a chance you're thinking, "Awesome. This is going to be a wise and insightful story about love and death and growing up." This book contains precisely zero important life lessons or little known facts about love or sappy tearjerking moments when we knew we had left our childhood behind for good or whatever.

[00:38:19]Despite addressing this head-on, I think that the narrative contradicts it because Greg does learn and grow from his friendship with the dying girl, with Rachel. Greg writes and speaks like a teenager, an intelligent teenager, but a teenager nonetheless. At the start, it feels like a quintessential high school coming of age story with these kind of intrusions of cancer narrative, like trips to cancer, as Greg calls it. He describes the social hierarchy of the school and it's like stock characters that we see in any high school media.

[00:38:51]Greg Gaines belongs to all and no groups. He is a people pleaser like playing all sides. These themes of social hierarchy and identity are classic themes of any high school narrative. Greg spends most of his time making films with his friend or what he calls his coworker Earl. Greg doesn't start off friends with the dying girl from the title, Rachel. And he's forced by his mom to hang out with her once she gets sick. It's a kind of chore. Rachel doesn't want his pity, but he basically appeals to her of like, "Actually, can you pity me and do me this favor?"

[00:39:22]>> You want a favor from me?

[00:39:24]>> Yes. Just let me hang out with you for one day. I can tell my mom we hung out and then I'll we'll just be out of each other's lives. Olivia Cook plays Rachel quite aloof with these kind of breakthroughs of smiling or laughter in the book. She's a lot goofier. She's also, as you might expect, not as beautiful in the book. She got the standard Hollywood glow-up. This is the only narrative that starts right before the diagnosis. At the start of her senior year, Rachel is diagnosed with leukemia. And Greg explains to us what leukemia is because every sick narrative needs a an illness 101 lesson. Do you know any facts about uh leukemia?

[00:40:04]>> Leukemia? Yes. Cancer of the blood and or bone marrow?

[00:40:10]>> It's not a romantic story, and we're told explicitly several times that it is not and will never be a romantic story.

[00:40:16]It's quite refreshing to see a platonic dynamic, especially between a boy and a girl. In a lot of these stories, the romance takes center stage and overshadows all other relationships. So much energy goes into developing the romance and fleshing out the the love interest that the secondary characters, the friends, the siblings, the parents feel quite underdeveloped. I noticed that from book to film adaptations, a lot of siblings and friends would also just be cut out entirely. These teenagers feel like teenagers. Greg doesn't know how to talk to Rachel about her cancer. He feels awkward, makes jokes, and does a lot of bits to compensate. And this felt more real to me than the fulturer stars where the teenagers are like as articulate as an English professor. It was refreshing to hear teenagers speak naturally to hear them curse and use slang.

[00:41:09]>> Chemotherapy. It really sucks.

[00:41:11]>> What the hell, bro? Don't say it suck, dumbass.

[00:41:14]>> That's kind of suck.

[00:41:15]>> Rachel's friend and Greg's crush ask Greg and Earl to make a film for Rachel.

[00:41:21]They interview her mom, her classmates, but most people just say impersonal and like cliched oneliners.

[00:41:28]>> I believe in you and you can do it. You can do it.

[00:41:31]>> I believe in you.

[00:41:33]>> You can do.

[00:41:34]>> Greg really struggles to make this film for Rachel to find his own film making voice. Up until this point, him and Earl have made parodies and remakes. They've never started a project from nothing, like without a template. Rachel encourages him to get over himself, get over his self-loathing, and apply to colleges.

[00:41:53]>> You have to be less of an idiot about college.

[00:41:55]>> Towards the end, Greg skips prom to visit Rachel in the hospital when she's dying. And the film that Greg made for her is much more abstract and avantgard than anything that he had made up until this point. Rachel starts seizing up and Greg tells us that she slipped into a coma and died shortly after. In the book, she sees the entire film and dies a couple days later, I'm pretty sure.

[00:42:21]But the choice to have Greg with her and her last moments be watching this film emphasizes the melodrama and foregrounds Greg and Rachel's relationship. In the book, Andrews writes, "I was thinking also that we had made a film about a thing, death, that we knew nothing about. Maybe Earl sort of knew something, but I knew absolutely nothing about it. Plus, we had made a film about a girl who we hadn't really gotten to know. Actually, we hadn't made the film about her at all. She was just dying there, and we had gone and made a film about ourselves. We had taken this girl and used her really to make a film about ourselves. And it just seemed so stupid and wrong that I couldn't stop crying.

[00:42:59]Rachel, the film is not at all about Rachel. It's about how little we know about Rachel. Despite Jesse Andrews pushing back against the cliche cancer narrative, the book and film do the exact same thing that Greg is upset about here. The book and film are about Greg. They're not about Rachel, not about the dying girl. The audience knows very little about Rachel. And I really wish that we had known more. All of her scenes are with Greg because it's entirely from his perspective. She doesn't have much dialogue. It's only really in response to anything that Greg says. We don't know much about her, her life before she got sick, her experience with leukemia. The day before she starts chemo is overshadowed by Greg and Earl accidentally getting stoned. So, the whole scene is played for laughs rather than dealing with this big scary moment for her. She does break down over losing her hair and feeling ugly. But besides that, we don't know much about her treatment, how she feels. There's a montage of Greg visiting her with different hats and wigs. Sometimes she's chatty and in a good mood. Sometimes she's withdrawn. We see Greg visit her in hospital once, but that scene becomes more about Greg not taking his college and future seriously. Ultimately, she decides to stop treatment, dealing her fate that she will die, and Greg is really upset and fights with her about it. He stops seeing her for a while after that, which means that we as audience and readers don't see Rachel either. They only reconcile when she's hospitalized towards the end of her life. In the book, Andrews describes Greg witnessing and processing his first death. This was just a stupid, meaningless loss. Just a [ __ ] loss. A loss, loss, [ __ ] loss. There was no [ __ ] meaning to it. There was nothing good that could come out of it.

[00:44:42]The same with Fall in Our Stars. Despite the character saying that this is not a meaningful death, this is not profound, the very narrative gives it meaning.

[00:44:51]Rachel's sickness and death play a central role in Greg's coming of age, in his character development. The story that we just read or watched is written by Greg to send to college admissions.

[00:45:02]He's literally using the story of Rachel's cancer and death for his own good. His college acceptance got rescended after his grades fell because he was spending a lot of time with Rachel. In a letter that Rachel passes on to Greg after she died, Greg discovers that she wrote to college admissions and explain the situation asked for them to readmit him. This is really touching. It was one of the things that made me cry in the film and it shows how much that she cared about him despite her very kind of aloof appearance. But it's another instance of the sick character helping or inspiring the healthy one. There's a lovely scene at the end of the film where Greg sneaks into Rachel's room at her Shiva and he discovers a bunch of art that she's made kind of seeing this whole aspect of her personality that he didn't know about and that we didn't know about. It echoes an earlier scene where his teacher tells him about his dad passing and how he continued to learn about his dad after his death and how he found some comfort in that. And I did cry, but I wish that we had learned more about Rachel. And like I said, I think like the fall stars, these kind of meta rebuttals of it not being a cancer story ring hollow.

[00:46:15]There were some other cancer films in and around the 2010s. My Sister's Keeper came out in 2009. Now is Good came out in 2012. And in 2018, we had the most blatant teen cancer film that I watched for this video. It's called Then Came You. Maisy Williams character, Sky, is the most manic pixie sick girl character I've ever seen in my life. She puts a goldfish in her IV bag. After a couple cancer films, Hollywood moved on.

[00:46:45]Not away from the 16 romance, but just onto a different illness. We had Everything Everything in 2017 and Midnight Sun in 2018. Not the Zara Larson album or the Stephanie Meyer book. The writers picked really rare diseases which essentially gave them free reign. they did whatever they want and just use the illness as a narrative device because 99% of the audience watching this is not going to know anything about the super rare genetic disease and there won't be any like belief to suspend because there's no pre-existing beliefs in the first place.

[00:47:19]These rare diseases make the story more fresh in theory. Both of those films were so so bad. Midnight Sun was particularly ridiculous. The Guardians film critic Peter Bradshaw titled his Midnight Sun review No toe Left Uncurled, which I love. He also called the film a genetically modified Saobfest. And he's not wrong. I'm just going to spoil Midnight Sun because I don't think anybody should watch it. Bella Thornne's character has a rare genetic condition, zeroderma pigmentotosum.

[00:47:52]>> The sun hits my skin, I get skin cancer, my brain starts to fail, and I could die. Pretty fun, right?

[00:47:59]>> This is according to the film narrative, not medical literature. At the end of the film, she decides to go watch the sunrise with her boyfriend, effectively killing herself. This film was, how long was this film? An hour and a half. It was about an hour and a half too long.

[00:48:12]In 2019, a year after that nightmare hit cinemas, 5 feet apart was released.

[00:48:18]Directed by Justin Baldoni and starring Haley Lou Richardson, Cole Sprouse, and Moises Aries. The inspiration and writing process for this book and film is very interesting, but I actually want to talk about that at the end. I just wanted to give like a little teaser. 5t apart follows Stella and Will, two teenagers with cystic fibrosis or cfers.

[00:48:40]Cystic fibrosis is a genetic disorder that causes mucus to build up in the lungs and cfers must stay at least 6 feet apart for their protection. The six feet mandate is now very familiar to us from co. Um, as are the masks and gloves that the characters all wear. On the note of the characters, I hate them.

[00:48:58]>> It's just life. It'll be over before you know it.

[00:49:03]>> Cole Sprouse's character Will is basically Jug Head. He's emo. He wears combat boots and has anti-war posters on his wall. He draws. A, he's so sensitive. Will has a rare case of CF buggyenia which makes him ineligible for lung transplants and extra dangerous for other patients.

[00:49:27]Wow. I wonder if this extra danger will come into the plot or the romance at all. Probably not. He doesn't take his treatment seriously until he meets Stella. It's almost like until he meets her, he doesn't have anything to live for. Stella is a control freak. She's very intelligent. She knows how to code.

[00:49:46]But I found her so annoying. The film does that thing where a character is like, "I'm so OCD." And the only OCD trait that they have is that they like to organize things and clean. She organizes her pill cart. She organizes wills and nags him into doing treatments. I don't really understand how these 16-year-olds are responsible for their own medication and treatments.

[00:50:10]I would expect to see more nurse interaction, but what do I know? I don't know how realistic it is that the nurses would just leave these kids to their own devices constantly, but they do. These kids really run wild in the hospital.

[00:50:24]They sneak into a pool one night, they sneak into the kitchen another, they sneak onto their roof, they sneak out of the hospital. You'd think that there would be like stronger security precautions in play. Or maybe there could be some commentary on like finances of the hospital had to cut back and they're understaffed so there's not enough nurses to to watch over everyone.

[00:50:44]Uh nothing. It's so surface level. I have no idea why I or anybody else would expect any nuance from this film because there's none. Will loves to sneak onto the roof um and sit on the edge in like the classic reckless I don't care about my life. I'm a bad boy kind of way.

[00:51:01]Stella decides to be rebellious against their six-foot mandate and reclaim one foot so that her and Will are only 5 ft apart, hence the title. The pool scene, where they sneak into the pool, is the most intimate and the hardest to watch.

[00:51:20]Stella and Will can't touch each other because it would be too dangerous for their health. So, for a little intimacy substitute, they undress to their underwear in front of one another. It's supposed to be this moment of great vulnerability, they're showing each other their their scars and their tubes.

[00:51:37]But again, these are very thin, beautiful, conventionally attractive actors. It kind of undercuts that feeling of like, I'm hideous. Don't look at me. You know, they jump into the pool and my friend pointed out to me that this comes right after scenes of Stella going in for surgery to replace her infected G ttube. So, I don't know if swimming is very high on the list of post-op afterare. Crazy that these patients with severely impacted lungs can sneak into a pool and go swimming with no supervision, no pool alarms.

[00:52:19]That sounds really dangerous. There's one scene maybe like halfway through the film or in the third act where Will Googles his symptoms and then he isolates himself because he doesn't want to hurt Stella. That's a big barrier for the romance for like 5 minutes. It's such a manufactured relationship obstacle and also I find it quite unrealistic that he doesn't know anything about his chronic illness. The hospital is ridiculously glamorous and this is kind of what I was talking about earlier with the finance aspect of things. The hospital has a meditation room, the affforementioned pool. There's only one mention of finances which comes from Stella's gay best friend who is also the only sick person of color.

[00:53:00]>> You know what someone gets for loving me? You get to pay for all my care.

[00:53:04]>> Po is a very underdeveloped character.

[00:53:07]We know he's a foodie. We know he's gay and he pushes away all his romantic partners. And that's about all we learn about Po before he dies. We don't really have much time to sit with that death because immediately Stella and Will decide to rebel and sneak out of the hospital to the city to like see the city lights.

[00:53:32]They canoodle and they hold hands.

[00:53:36]>> Glove. We're good.

[00:53:38]>> I don't really know if that's how how that works. They play on the ice and there's two fake outs of Oh, are they going to fall through the ice? Oh, they don't. But then Stella does fall through the ice. Having this tension build three times feels a bit too much. Will has to give her mouth to mouth to save her. And after all of this stress on how dangerous and contagious his condition is, how they absolutely cannot be less than 6 ft apart, you'd think that this is a guaranteed infection, but somehow she's fine. That that really stretches the credility. Stella is rushed to the hospital for a lung transplant, but then she's like, I don't want them. It's not worth living five more years without Will.

[00:54:21]Okay, then give the lungs to someone else.

[00:54:23]Ireie Stella has the surgery and afterwards Will decides to say goodbye and they say goodbye through the window.

[00:54:34]I am going to explode. Stella is intubated and she doesn't get a word in.

[00:54:40]It's literally just Will talking the entire time.

[00:54:42]>> Finally got you speechless.

[00:54:46]>> It's supposed to be sad, but I don't care about them at all. The film doesn't do anything original. The characters are so one-dimensional and tropey and honestly again not very likable. I think Hale Richardson was great, but Cole Sprouse was so flat. I don't find him very charming. And the the lines that are supposed to be romantic are delivered with so little emotion that they're even cringier.

[00:55:12]>> There's that smile. God, you're beautiful. I need you to be safe from me. I thought the film was so boring and formulaic, but Mr. Justin Baldoni wants the film to be inspiring.

[00:55:26]He said, "When I set out to make this film, my original hope was to make audiences leave with an appreciation for life." This film has had its fair share of controversies. Justin Baldoni films and controversy just seem to go hand in hand. For the inspiration for this film, Baldon made a docu series for the CW called My Last Days in which he talked to dying people. One of those people was Claire Welinand. a YouTuber with CF who has since passed. And when Baldoni asked her if she'd ever dated another CFer, she told him about the six-foot rule. In an interview with Entertainment Tonight, Baldon said that after hearing about that rule, he thought that it would be a great love story. I'm a hopeless romantic and I just knew I wanted to make a movie that could inspire us not to give up, to fight for love.

[00:56:10]>> When I set out to make this film, my original hope was that I wanted audiences to leave with an appreciation for life. And I wanted people to kind of walk away from this movie and have a little bit of like a new found sense of, oh wait, that might be worth it.

[00:56:23]>> Baldon then hired writers to write both the book and the film. Like he conceptualized the story literally using chronic illness and disability as a romantic device. He tells us he wants to inspire us not to give up, to fight for love. Literally, he's literally making inspiration porn.

[00:56:41]>> A lot of the kids I met with CF were just wise beyond their years.

[00:56:45]>> And he didn't see anything wrong with that.

[00:56:47]Some Cfers took issue with the inaccuracies and the romanticization, particularly around the five- foot apart rule and how that is extremely dangerous and careless. But the film's biggest misstep was in its marketing. Production reached out to Instagram influencers to share their stories of long-term relationships or how hard it is to be away from your friends and family. A yeah, because living with a chronic illness and missing your family, that's like the same, right? The Instagram posts were deleted. I think five feet aparts narrative hull of representation and controversies are a great example of the problem with so much cichllet and sick flicks. Baldoni didn't approach the film with any interest in what it's like to live with a chronic illness or disability. His hopeless romantic brain instantly turned a disability into a narrative device. We've seen with most of these stories that despite being about cancer or CF or zeroderma pigmentotosa, the writers aren't interested in disability or illness.

[00:57:48]They're interested in romance and they use illness to heighten drama and as a catalyst for romance. The illness in these narratives is devastating because it breaks up relationships, not because it disables and kills people. Like I said at the start, these stories are not for sick or disabled people to make them feel represented. These are stories to make healthy audiences feel sad for an hour and a half and then walk away feeling grateful and inspired. I think the shallowess is clear from the way that Hollywood dropped stories of illness and disability as soon as the trend passed and that almost all of these stories are romances as well. 5 F feet apart was at the the tail end of this trend in 2019 because you know what will sour an audience's appetite for illness narratives? A global pandemic.

[00:58:35]5t Apart's iconography might have felt novel when it first came out, but watching it after we all experienced co social distancing and isolation. It feels eerily familiar. I wonder what effect that has on audiences. I don't have a definitive answer because there's not any scholarship that I could find of CO's impact on audience uh reception towards sick narratives. Quite niche to be fair, but I do have some ideas. I think on the one hand, it stripped away the layers of fantasy and romance. We all experienced standing six feet apart, not being able to see or hug our friends and family, wearing masks, being in isolation, and working or doing school from home. And it wasn't fun. It wasn't a cute barrier that fostered emotional intimacy with a cute boy. It was incredibly isolating and lonely. Many of us had years of normal school or college experience taken from us by the pandemic. YA films don't really linger on that aspect of social isolation. It's always just solved by a love interest.

[00:59:39]On the other hand, you could argue that the pandemic gave us more sympathy for people with chronic illnesses and disabilities like cystic fibrosis. We experienced some dose of the restriction and isolation that disability can bring.

[00:59:53]We all had an immediate collective fear of getting sick and we had to be more cautious because of that. So maybe watching films like 5 feet apart is a reminder of that. This is obviously very simplified, very condensed discussion of co's impact on these films. It's actually something that I would really like to hear more about your opinions if you would comment and how you feel about these films. if you like them in the past, if you like them now, if co has changed your opinion of them. There are more sick flicks on the horizon though.

[01:00:22]So maybe Hollywood feels like we're far enough from co trauma to dive right back in. The probability of miracles is currently in production for a prime video. It's based on a book from 2011 by Wendy Wonder about a girl named Cam with terminal cancer who moves to a place called Promise where miracles happen.

[01:00:40]She falls in love. It was also announced in 2025 that there's going to be a remake of a walk to remember.

[01:00:46]Very interesting. Before we end, I do acknowledge the people who do feel represented by cichllet and sick licks.

[01:00:53]There is a case to argue that they raise awareness around certain illnesses or disability and that's great. A lot of pieces that I read pointing out the inaccuracy in different representations did also say that they are hopeful for more representation and more awareness.

[01:01:08]I don't have any experience with any of the illnesses depicted, but I do have a chronic illness, um, a lot of menstrual issues, and I also have ADHD.

[01:01:18]So, I know for myself seeing neurode divergent characters misrepresented or like informed by a very narrow understanding of like neurody divergence is incredibly frustrating for me. I find it very tough to see hollow or token representation that doesn't feel genuine and seeing your disability used as a narrative or character device isn't very nice. That's kind of the lens that I was applying to the like cichllet and sickflick narratives. I don't think the solution is to rule out this material altogether, to feel like nobody can write about illness or disability, but I think it's important to treat it with respect rather than plopping it into a formula with boring characters and a tropy plot. Of course, we can always turn to memoirs or stories written by people with firstirhand experience of chronic illnesses. And I'm hopeful that as Cichl continues, as it surely will, we will see more nuanced, more complex narratives. That's all for me, folks.

[01:02:18]Thank you very much for watching. Happy Pride Month. By the way, if you would like to support my work, you can like, comment, subscribe, pipe points, whatever they do. You can also check out the Patreon where I do some bonus content. Thank you very much for watching and I will see you in my next video. Special shout out to my patrons, Kelly T, Paula Boon, Icarus Moore, Eric Danielson, Cecilia Diarville, Euphoric, and my Shar Evans tier patrons.