Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda
written by Becky Albertalli
So I just finished watching Love Simon and I am infuriated. Typically I avoid saying the cliché that “the book was better than the movie”, but I cannot hold back this time because THE BOOK IS BETTER! It’s so much better. I love Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, and I was looking forward to the movie because I was excited to see the qualities that make the book special represented on screen for a wider audience to see. Nope. It’s one thing when the movie makes basic changes from the source material, adds or subtracts a minor character, skips over some plot points, or ignores everything but the major themes, but this time the movie industry has gone too far for even me to tolerate.
In Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, Simon is in his junior year of high school when he meets Blue, or bluegreen118@gmail.com. It started when Blue shared a post on the school’s Tumblr page, as the anonymous Blue, about feeling “so hidden and so exposed about the fact that he’s gay” (18). Simon relates so heavily that he begins an email conversation with Blue as hourtohour.notetonote@gmail.com, signing off as Jacques. Simon doesn’t know Blue, and Blue doesn’t know Simon, but they both know the other is gay and goes to their same high school. And as the book progresses, each chapter bring more emails and intimacy between the two, but when a classmate named Martin discovers the emails, Simon finds himself blackmailed into helping Martin or risking his and Blue’s secrets, and quite possibly, their relationship.
This book is unputdownable. I should know because after reaching chapter ten I could no longer pull myself away and happily resigned myself to spending an entire afternoon reading the rest. I even texted my reactions and theories of Blue’s identity to my friends as I read. The question of who Blue is is probably the most addictive thing about this book. Since you know that Blue attends Simon’s school, any character that fits the description that Simon interacts with is fair game for guesses, and as is true with any mystery, red herrings can abound and sometimes it’s the person you least expect… or is it? Either way Simon and Blue’s growing flirtation will have any reader squealing at the sheer adorableness and melting with the genuine caring these characters exhibit. Which brings me back to my main point, where I believe the movie butchered the adaptation: the genuineness.
The plot seems all too perfect for a movie adaptation with the blackmailing, secrets, drama, and blossoming romance, but the thing that made Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda one of my new favorite books, is the surprising amount of realism. Simon’s high school is not a caricature, it actually reminded me a lot of my high school. For example: Simon’s school having spirit week before the homecoming game; Simon and his friends going out to Waffle House after play rehearsals; and, the day to day dramas that occur with friend groups and hormones. Everything about the setting and characters was grounded, believable, and never boring. I have found that few books can capture the feel of high school and the seemingly small yet big moments that can happen there.
“I try not to change, but I keep changing, in all these tiny ways...And every freaking time, I have to reintroduce myself to the universe all over again.”
The significance of holding hands with your crush for the first time, the fear of showing your true self, having arguments about oreos, playing video games with friends. There is something profoundly special about all of these things that the author truly understands and represents. This is what the movie missed. Watching part of an Adventure Time episode during lunch in your car with your best friend is traded out for drunken Halloween keggers. An insecurity is turned into a fabricated crush. A significant moment for one person is no longer enough and must be used to start a social media movement which both plays on the pretense that your life doesn’t matter without a large audience and serves as a Dear Evan Hansen knockoff. These small beautiful moments from the book serve to remind how love, friendship, and adventures are all had every day, but the movie has taken away every single trace of them and traded them in for the campy, cliché, unrealistic drama provided by every other screen portrayal of high schools attended by twenty-something-year-old actors.
Stop convincing middle and high schoolers that ‘likes’ are the only way to know you’re popular, that beer pong is meant for fifteen-year-olds, and that sex is the only way to define the intimacy of a relationship. Love Simon could have been different. It was right there in the source material. I am furious this is the adaptation that the world got because often movies get more exposure than books, but at the very least maybe it can serve as advertising for a novel truly deserving of it.
