Paper Towns is not a book supporting the manic pixie dream girl trope it's an explicit deconstruction and harsh critique of it and the book is NOT subtle about that. I can point you to the exact passage in the book where he spells out that people you like don't belong to you and maybe aren't even thinking about you at all, like there's a reason Margo is upset and confused when Quentin finds her, she didn't leave those clues for him and it's weird to her that he thought she did and that he came to find her, she didn't want to be found. If the book ended with her swooning and being so proud of him for understanding her clues and finding her so they can now run away together that would be manic pixie dream girl bullshit but the exact fucking opposite thing happens!! Did you even read the book???
And you aren't supposed to think the teens in The Fault in Our Stars are cool and quirky, they're children seeking meaning and identity while dealing with the horrific and profoundly dehumanizing and autonomy stealing expirience of terminal illness, the cigarette doesn't mean anything deep or profound, it's clearly just a coping mechanism for Augustus to help him deal with his health being out of his control, and Hazel's obsession with an old, obscure book isn't bcs she's cool and quirky it's because she's terrified when she dies her parents won't be okay and she won't be there to help, so she NEEDS to know what happens to the other characters once the main one dies so she knows what will happen to her parents when she's gone, and the story is not subtle in showing what these "quirks" are really about. Augustus is just dealing with reality in his own weird way and Hazel is experiencing something a lot of people with terminal illnesses do, deep concern for the people you'll leave behind. (When I had a cancer scare all I could think about was how worried I was about my fiancé, and when my best friend got cancer the first thing he told me was that he couldn't die because he was worried I wouldn't be okay without him. You forget to worry about yourself, you really do. That's not quirky, it's painfully true to reality.)
