things you should totes not view as positive portrayals of love/romance:
the great gatsby
romeo & juliet
the phantom of the opera
snape
50 shades of grey
Ted Mosby’s pursuit of Robin from How I Met Your Mother Ross Geller’s obsession with Rachel Green on Friends
TWILIGHT
agree with everything but snape. his love was so pure
I don’t wanna be That Guy but Romeo & Juliet is debatable because it’s old as balls and Shakespeare ain’t around anymore to ask for context.
Hear me out. I did go into hella debt at theatre school so I could learn about stuff like this. IRL, it’s super weird to kill yourself over someone you met 3 days ago but that’s… also kind of the point. Nobody goes from Neurotypical to full-blown suicidal in that kind of time frame.
Remember the kind of things that the 2 characters have in common, which are largely established before they even meet: they’re both the scions of noble families, whom are in horrible, bloody war with each other. Both have parents that are extremely out of touch with how their kids feel, and in Juliet’s case she is robbed of personal agency and treated like a political tool by her father. The repressive lifestyle where women have to shut up and marry well is bad enough, without also growing up witnessing your friends and family getting murdered and raped. I am serious. The 2 dudes the play opens on are discussing the rivalry and mention “taking the maidenhead” of women from the other house. Considering that R&J’s romance is so inherently scandalous, its clear that these houses haven’t tried making peace via courtship before, so yeah: that Montague goon is probably planning on raping Capulet women. The city is very clearly plagued with horrendous violence on the regular.
Long story short: the titular characters were probably pretty depressed and questioning of the value of life before they even met each other.
There are 2 very telling scenes which often get cut from performances of the play. Both revolve around how Lord Capulet reacts to Juliet’s presumed death and then her actual death. When he finds her after she takes the sedative, he gets sad and then… starts yelling at his servants about the logistics of dinner and funeral arrangements. The other scene is at the end of the play and has the Montague and Capulet parents discover their children’s bodies and Lord Montague declares that he’ll erect a golden statue of Juliet to make peace. Which sounds lovely, but then the fathers start debating how to finance it and how much each of them will pay. The image of these 2 men haggling over the still-warm corpses of their children is straight-up one of the most nihilistic and tragic moments I have ever seen in a play, but so many productions of it just… leave it out and make it a teen angst story!!!
Romeo and Juliet takes on a very different mood when you stop looking at their relationship as “I just met you and love you”, and more like an unspoken understanding that they are each other’s salvation in a chaotic, uncaring, war-torn life that neither can escape. It’s not about how silly it is that they ‘suddenly’ can’t live without each other, but why they can’t. They couldnt live in the first place, and losing the only other person whom could have really understood you was the last straw.
Overdressed & Underappreciated 