The Tumblr renaissance continues with the return of prodigal son John Green

Get your key-smashing fingers ready because John Green is back on Tumblr. For those who missed Tumblr’s golden age, the appropriate response to this statement is something along the lines of asdffingworignw;!1!11 omglmao #mysweetprince. Memorize that, because—like the protagonists in a John Green novel—2023 and the renaissance of Tumblr seem to be written in the stars.

For a while, The Fault In Our Stars author John Green–with all his damaged-but-in-a-beautiful-way male protagonists and their manic-pixie-tough-but-not-really love interests–was atop the Mount Rushmore of famous Tumblr users. That was until he was essentially bullied off the platform in 2015 amid controversy surrounding his personal interactions with fans online and a viral meme wherein users would edit his posts to look like he had published sexually explicit content. Green’s expulsion didn’t cause the slow decline of the platform but it was certainly an early signpost: if a man who writes the literary equivalent of a Lana Del Rey song couldn’t survive, who could?

But none of that matters now because John Green—and Tumblr—are back, whether we like it or not. Green is back to promote his coffee subscription service, Awesome Coffee Club (the ads are naturally smothered under 15 layers of twee, but they’re still just capitalism doing its thing) and the platform has been returning in popularity because, to use another Tumblr-ism, *vaguely gestures to whole Elon Musk mess*.

But as anyone who was on Tumblr during its heyday can tell you, the platform was never a monolith. It wasn’t just John Green fans, it was a network of small micro-communities dedicated to different media properties (that all just happened to be really, really similar.) But don’t worry, many of those things ended in the early 2010s, like Supernatural, which is currently airing a prequel series on The CW, or BBC’s Sherlock, whose creator is begging for a return, or David Tennant, who just made a surprise return to Doctor Who, or Lana Del Rey, who is currently promoting new music, or, well, you get the picture.

#It’sHappening #We’llNeverEscape