There is something highly appealing about an artist who openly praises the winner of an award they were also nominated for. When John Green showed footage of the book awards in today's Vlogbrothers video, he deliberately included the winning author speaking to the importance of underrepresented voices seeing themselves in young adult literature and seconded the win. There are many reasons John is one of my favorite authors, and things like this are quite high on that list.
Welcome (or welcome back) to Vlogbrothers Rewatch! This is an ongoing series of short articles in which I document my journey through the entire back catalog of Vlogbrothers YouTube videos and share my observations and commentary. Using this playlist, I am rewatching everything in chronological order, one video per day, starting from the very beginning.
It's another notable Nerdfighteria video today -- what is essentially the birth of Song Wednesdays, in which John challenges Hank to write and perform more songs, which he does, because he's Hank Green and Hank Green very rarely backs down from a challenge. Most notably, "Accio Deathly Hallows (no spoilers)" which went a 2007 version of viral and drastically increased visibility of the channel from that point forward.
It genuinely takes a lot of courage to perform original music on the internet, no matter how confident and carefree a person might appear while doing it. Even back then I admired Hank's bravery because it was something I was too scared to do myself. Heck, I'm still too scared to do it almost 20 years later.
Music brought Nerdfighters together the way music has the power to bring any group of people together. There's something spiritual about it, and I don't mean in the religious conotation. Music is and always will be universal, and that will always be beautiful.