4) Romeo and Juliet
Take your pick of which version of the story you want to focus on, the Romeo and Juliet of 1968, the Romeo + Juliet of 1996, or any incarnation before, since or in between those two staples. Some of their plots differ slightly but they’re fundamentally the same: two ridiculously young teenagers who have barely experienced life fall in lust love even though their families are enemies, Juliet fakes her own death and Romeo misses the memo so thinks she actually died so he kills himself and she learns he killed himself so she kills herself, as I’m sure anyone would do in a similar situation.
I can’t sum up all that’s wrong with this better than my Sassy Gay Friend does, but I’ll try anyway. It’s a perfectly fine story, but only if we take it as a warning about how stupid teenage emotions can be. It’s honest about how strongly pubescent boys and girls are driven by hormonal impulses, but this shouldn’t be celebrated, it should be guarded against and in the case of insanity like Romeo and Juliet, mourned. I suspect this is the intended message of Shakespeare’s original work, but in the cultural conversation around it, it’s taken just as a romantic love story, and that’s stupid.
