El Hematocrítico, 47, dies of heart attack, sparking online debate

El Hematocrítico, 47, dies of heart attack, sparking online debate

How long does it take for a death to stop being just a death and become something else? A few hours. The Twitter user known as El Hematocrítico died of a heart attack at 47, and what would have been a brief obituary in any other biography almost instantly turned into a battlefield where something unrelated to him was being settled. His account's final hours, according to the messages spread, were dedicated to a balanced nutrition campaign for primary school students: a series of interactive tweets presented alongside a well-known brand of Canary Island bananas.

The heart attack, at 47. That is the hard fact. With no detailed prior pathologies or previous warnings in the spread messages, a middle-aged man collapses and public conversation stops talking about books, humor, or illustration to start talking about something else: vaccines, "repentinitis," and whether heart attacks among young adults are now more frequent than five years ago. The underlying question is simple and the answer uncomfortable: no one has the clean data.

Who was El Hematocrítico and why his death generated so much reaction

The figure who passed was not minor in his niche. Under that alias moved a creator linked to graphic humor, comics, and children's literature, to the point that a specialized graphic novel publishing house announced his death with a terse "#ThanksHemato". That could have been all: a heartfelt farewell, some tweets recalling his jokes, and back to the news.

It did not happen that way. Because, according to several messages in the thread, that profile had been one of the most active during the pandemic in ridiculing those who doubted official measures. And that archive is what ordered the grief. In a few hours, the news jumped from the obituary to settling scores. A testimony from someone who claimed to have known him before the internet summarizes it: "He was a fantastic kid, I assure you. Long before entering the internet, he already showed impressive natural wit". This same contrast—the private humorist and the public polemicist—traverses much of the reactions.

From condolences to celebration: the grief that was never celebrated

What trinc is not pleasant and should be told with distance. A part of the conversation did not lament the death: they celebrated it. They dedicated dark humor to him with his own nickname—the artistic name contained "hemato" and someone did not long to point out the irony—and there was those who turned the obituary into a settling of scores for the treatment received during the health crisis. "I did not know him, but if he attacked Eric Clapton for not wanting to play in places with mandatory vaccines, I get an idea of how tolerant he was", summarizes another intervention.

Against that current, the defense: he was a professional with published work, not a militant, and laughing at a heart attack at 47 says more about who laughs than the dead. The score-settling argument does not hold either: no one signs a contract with biology according to their ideological ID card.

Are heart attacks multiplying in young adults?

Taking advantage of the gap, a satirical piece circulated attributing to doctors an alert about these heart attacks—"they have doubled among men aged 18 to 44," it said—and blaming tobacco and alcohol with a sneer. It is parody material, not a report: it is important not to confuse it with evidence. Another message pointed to a figure, that of 1.8 million official elbichito deaths in the world in 2020, to underline that the figure stopped being the center of the narrative. These are two different registers and mixing them is the error of almost all this debate.

Children's literature, Michael Ende, and a question that remains unanswered

Amid the noise, a curious derivation. Several messages ended up discussing the books read as children: Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver, by Michael Ende, or the novels of Enid Blyton, against current albums of one sentence per page. A digression that, in the end, was another way of discussing the same thing: what is taught to a child and who decides it.

The bitter close

Hours later, the death continued to feed two trenches that are not going to change arguments with each other. The dead, meanwhile, would have been enough with ten fewer hours of life to not have to read any of this.