John Green’s original ending for The Fault In Our Stars was way more tragic

Is it even possible to have an ending more tragic?

The bestselling book The Fault in Our Stars was written almost five years ago, and while it was very popular while it was first released, the feature film which followed it saw it become a firm favourite among young people everywhere. The author of the book, John Green, was relatively well known before the film came out as he wrote other popular books such as Looking for Alaska and Paper Towns. Known for his more romantic soppy tone when it comes to novels, John Green's work have been known to have extremely tragic and heart-wrenching endings which seem almost unbelievable to readers. According to Seventeen, the ending where Augustus dies and Hazel lives almost didn't happen as author Green had different plans for the end of the iconic novel. Speaking on the Nerdist podcast, John spoke of how he had other ideas for the end of Augustus and Hazel and it's pretty depressing.

"In the second draft of The Fault In Our Stars, the novel ends shortly after reclusive Dutch-American author Peter Van Houten ties one of the characters to railroad tracks as an exploration of the trolley problem, which is a really interesting idea to me in philosophy."

John Green is referring to a dilemma which was invented by Philippa Foot, which asks whether it's more ethical to change the course of a train trolley in order to save 5 people tied to train tracks even if you kill one person. So in basic English terms, John was going to have both Hazel and Augustus killed off somehow. Lovely. John explained the initial response he got from people when he revealed his trolley idea.

"[My editor] was like, ‘I can’t tell if this is a joke,'" "...I was like, ‘No man, this is a really interesting way into the trolley problem.’ And she said, ‘I don’t think this book is about the trolley problem.'"

Yikes... It seems there's truly no chance of a happy ending with this story. Do you think this ending would've worked better than the original?