#sun and moon brawl methinks

[cacaocheri]

HIII HIHIIHI I MADE AN ARCHIE AU!!!!! i read the comics obsessively as a kid and have a collection of the digests so you know your girl had to combine them. yn is archie and sun is betty and moon is veronica ofc. except their personalities dont really align (i didnt want to make moon a stereotypical rich girl) so its basically just like teen romance shenanigans from the 1950s. they are silly i love them

also chica is jughead btw

[arisefairsun]

ok I seriously love romeo. when I read this in freshman year everyone hated him bc he was so sensitive and emotional but that was what I loved about him. even though I'm a girl I relate to him so much bc of that and he thinks with his heart far more than he does with his brain. I love how he is so different from the other boys in verona bc he doesn't want to fight, and I love his contrast w juliet. it's like they're fire and water or the sun and the moon like I just love his character so much

THANK YOU. It’s nice to know that I’m not the only one in the world who loves Romeo’s personality. Let me just ramble about him because I absolutely love this boy.

He lives in such a dark, abusive, coercive society, doesn’t he? A society that does not allow its citizens to achieve freedom—a society that despotically forces the men into violence, war, bravado, machismo, and this empty, meaningless concept of a dehumanized man that should have no feelings, no fears, because otherwise he is unmanly and shameful. It is a society that does not accept those men that do not behave as such. Look at the deification of machismo in the opening dialogue between Sampson and Gregory. Look at Mercutio’s constant mocking of Romeo for choosing to be a lover and a poet rather than a fighter:

Alas poor Romeo! he is already dead; stabbed with awhite wench’s black eye; shot through the ear with a love-song; the very pin of his heart cleft with the blind bow-boy’s butt-shaft: and is he a man to encounter Tybalt?

Look at the way the Nurse urges him to ‘man up’: ‘Stand up, stand up; stand, an you be a man’. Even Friar Lawrence shows his contempt for his unmanly attitude:

Art thou a man? thy form cries out thou art.Thy tears are womanish; thy wild acts denoteThe unreasonable fury of a beast.Unseemly woman in a seeming man!O ill-beseeming beast in seeming both!

Romeo, as Montague’s heir, is expected to perpetuate these senseless masculine ideals. Benvolio is certain that Romeo will fight Tybalt (‘Romeo will answer it’), and so does Mercutio (‘Marry, go before to field, he’ll be your follower’). He does not, cannot comprehend why Romeo didn’t accept Tybalt’s challenge, why he stated that he loved the Capuet surname ‘as dearly as mine own’, why he literally said he loved Tybalt (‘O calm, dishonorable, vile submission’). To Mercutio, Romeo is only truly Romeo when he is jesting in his male circle: ‘Is not this better now than groaning for love? Now art thou sociable; now art thou Romeo. Now art thou what thou art by art as well as by nature’. (Little does he know that the reason Romeo is in such a good mood in this scene is that he spent the previous night talking to Capulet’s daughter about the insignificance of names and social labels.)

This is brutal. This is terrible. This is the abusive impact that patriarchy and toxic masculinity and social oppression have on a boy who just wants to go on talking about blushing pilgrims and love’s light wings. Unlike the other boys in Verona, Romeo does not care about his social identity. He simply chooses to ignore it. Think of his reaction to the fight in the first scene: ‘O me! What fray was here? / Yet tell me not, for I’ve heard it all.’ There is weariness in his words. He is tired of the feud. He immediately starts rambling about love instead: ‘Here’s much to do with hate, but more with love. / Why then, O brawling love, O loving hate…’ But it’s not as simple; he just cannot forget about it so easily. In act III, his identity as Montague’s heir brings him so much anxiety and distress that he attempts to take his own life, hoping that this will allow him to extirpate his own name from himself:

O, tell me, friar, tell me,In what vile part of this anatomyDoth my name lodge? tell me, that I may sackThe hateful mansion.Drawing his sword.

These lines are heartbreaking. He is so tired. He is ‘world-wearied flesh’. I don’t think it’s fair to dismiss his emotions and say that he’s just an idiot going through an emo phase. No. Romeo is desperate. Romeo needs affection to survive, and I don’t think that’s a joke if we take into account the brutality of his society. He needs to believe that there is something that’s more powerful than hate in life.

For instance, I can never get enough of the juxtaposition in the first scene. The chaos of the fight, the phallic violence, the toxic pride of Sampson and Gregory—all of this contrasts beautifully with Romeo’s first entrance. From the moment Lady Montague asks, ‘O where is Romeo?’, the characters shift toward a more lyrical, dreamlike speech. They mention Aurora’s bed, the worshipped sun, an artificial night, etc. The force of poetry accompanies Romeo’s character even before he comes on the stage. The language of the scene invites us to conceive Romeo as a different boy, one that isolates himself, one that cries under sycamores, ‘with tears augmenting the fresh morning dew, / Adding to clouds more clouds with his deep sighs’, while the other men shed blood over a thumb-biting gesture. Romeo is lyrical, he is poetry itself, an ardent defensor of the power of dreaming. And yet, in the first act, his poetry is poor and his understanding of love limited, stereotyped, void. It’s artificial and forced. As Friar Lawrence remarks, ‘thy love did read by rote, that could not spell’. Romeo’s 'love’ for Rosaline exposes again the banality of his society. 

It’s not until he meets Juliet that he transcends the limited customs of his society and begins to explore his real self. With Juliet he finds a new kind of love, one that’s personal, real, daring, full of meaning. During his first conversation with Juliet, they both triumph at composing a perfect Shakespearean sonnet together. The poetry is finally mutual, real, alive. From that moment on, though, they will generally speak in blank verse together; Romeo finds a new voice, a different sort of dream, in Juliet’s company. He changes his nonsense, excessively elaborated speech for a much more honest, spontaneous language. He can do so much better than his society—he can be a far better poet than he thinks. Juliet, who shows a greater command of her language, demonstrates this to him.

Something I love about him is that even if he is the romantic lead of the story, he is far from being the perfect prince: he is a helpless, scared child. Juliet is certainly more determined than him, far more careful and resourceful. When she is threatened by her father to marry a man she dislikes, she immediately asks the Nurse for help (‘O Nurse! How shall this be prevented?’). When the Nurse betrays her, she immediately turns to the friar (‘I’ll to the friar to know his remedy’). After Romeo’s banishment, on the contrary, he just lies on the floor 'with his own tears made drunk’, refuses to listen to the friar’s advices, and even attempts to kill himself. But I don’t think we should despise Romeo for this; Romeo needs help and protection and that is not a joke. Romeo goes through a lot of anxiety because he is forced to become someone he doesn’t want to be and that’s just not his fault.

Even if both of them are very protective of each other, it is Juliet who most mentions her need to protect 'my Romeo’. Despite all her fears, this is what finally makes her drink the friar’s potion:

O look! Methinks I see my cousin’s ghost,Seeking out Romeo that did spit his bodyUpon a rapier’s point: Stay, Tybalt, stay!Romeo, I come. This do I drink to thee.

Juliet fears that Tybalt, one of the major exponents of toxic masculinity in the play, will destroy her Romeo if she doesn’t defend him. It is as if there were two Romeos: his imposed identity as Romeo Montague, based on honor and violence; and then the identity he chose himself as her Romeo, based on love and tenderness. He attempts to break the patriarchal norms by rejecting his household in the balcony scene ('Had I [my name] written, I would tear the word’); however, he doesn’t ask the same from her. Ultimately, his death in Capulet’s vault destroys his obedience to the feud (and he uses poison, often attributed to women and weakness, as opposed to Juliet’s dagger).

Juliet revitalizes him in every possible way. She introduces him to a brighter, kinder world. Picking up again the saint/pilgrim motif, he asks her to 'call me but love and I’ll be new baptized’. He finally finds someone who doesn’t believe in the coercive customs of their society—someone who fearlessly states that he would still be as valuable even if he were not a Montague. While their households continue to fight over the importance of names and honor, Juliet is so skeptical that she even wonders, 'What’s Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot, / Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part / Belonging to a man.’ She’ll fight anyone over her Romeo. She is ready to do anything in order to take care of him (more on this here). And Romeo himself rejoices in her protectiveness. He knows she’s stronger than all the swords in Verona ('Look thou but sweet and I am proof against their enemy’). To him, she is a light forcing her way through the physical restrictions of their world, freely expanding her light across the whole sky and shaming 'those stars / As daylight doth a lamp’. She is his sun. There is so much life in her that he believes she could revive him with her kisses as if he were a Disney princess (‘… And breathed such life with kisses in my lips / That I revived and was an emperor’). He is in love with her mind, with her light, and not only with her body (FIGHT ME): 'How is’t, my soul? Let’s talk, it is not day.’

In short, Juliet builds a new identity for him, one that’s free from Verona’s rules and the feud, one that’s tender and blissful and full of light, as they always say. This brings him hope—Juliet’s brave, restless energy turns his dreams into reality. Look at his intrepid words:

With love’s light wings did I o'er-perch these walls,For stony limits cannot hold love out, And what love can do, that dares love attempt.Therefore thy kinsmen are no stop to me.

Love is his strength. Romeo’s courage is of a different kind than that of the other men. It is not based on violence and rage—he dislikes those. Romeo’s bravery lies in his tears, his softness, his emotions, his dreams. His inability to live without Juliet denotes his inability to live without freedom, subjugated to the toxicity of the feud and masculinity. In the balcony scene he tells Juliet 'I would I were thy bird’; he tells her he wishes to say there 'forgetting any other home but this’. And indeed, he chooses Juliet’s breast as his final resting place. Productions don’t generally make him die on her breast, but that’s what Friar Lawrence describes: 'Thy husband in thy bosom there lies dead.’ It tragically echoes his words in the balcony scene: 'Sleep dwell upon thine eyes, peace in thy breast, / Would I were sleep and peace so sweet to rest!’

They are a team. They love, help, save, trust each other. The intimacy they achieve by the end of act III is remarkable. Look at the Nurse’s words when she finds Romeo crying in the friar’s cell:

O, he is even in my mistress’ case,Just in her case! O woeful sympathy!Piteous predicament! Even so lies she,Blubbering and weeping, weeping and blubbering.

He shows as much despair as her. They are not the typical straight couple—a perfectly disciplined man, an oversensitive woman—Romeo and Juliet share their pain. For instance, I’m in love with this passage from the farewell scene:

JULIETO god! I have an ill-divining soul!Methinks I see thee there, thou art so low,As one dead in the bottom of a tomb.Either my eyesight fails or thou lookst pale.ROMEOAnd trust me, love, in my eye so do you.Dry sorrow drinks our love. Adieu, adieu!

This could be paraphrased as ‘I’m scared.’ ‘I’m scared, too.’ This is beautiful and not so easy to find in literature. This is a man who doesn’t pretend he is too strong to show weakness. Romeo imagines his blood being sucked by sorrow, and he doesn’t mind telling Juliet. Indeed, he always stands up for his own emotions and his right to feel. I’ve always been in love with his response to the friar’s words in 3.3:

Thou canst not speak of that thou dost not feel:Wert thou as young as I, Juliet thy love,An hour but married, Tybalt murdered,Doting like me and like me banished,Then mightst thou speak, then mightst thou tear thy hair,And fall upon the ground, as I do now,Taking the measure of an unmade grave.

Romeo is unable to cope; he is weak, sensitive, and spends too much time dreaming. He is the kind of person who needs people by his side. He simply needs affection and that’s precisely what his society prohibits him from having. But instead of mocking him for this, I believe it would be fairer to judge those that instill such anxiety and despair in this poor child who just wants to spend his life poetizing the power of love but who is tragically forced to kill and hate. He is such an idealistic young boy, isn’t he?—completely governed by his dreams, madly in love with his own fantasies. I can never get enough of this funny exchange between Mercutio and Romeo:

ROMEOI dreamt a dream tonight.MERCUTIOAnd so did I.ROMEOWell, what was yours?MERCUTIOThat dreamers often lie.ROMEOIn bed asleep while they do dream things true.

This is not only a man showing his emotions and clinging to his dreams, this is a man who was raised to promote toxic masculinity, rage, and violence, and who does what he can to distance himself from that. We should never forget that. Let’s not decontextualize Romeo and Juliet’s actions from the feud. They are not ‘normal’ kids living in a ‘normal’ world. I think that’s people’s problem with this play—they forget the patriarchal, abusive society Romeo and Juliet were raised in. Two idiots getting themselves killed? That’s dumb indeed. But that’s not what happens in Romeo and Juliet. Romeo and Juliet cling to each other because they accept each other for what they truly are. It’s the fact that they are left alone, that nobody else is willing to accept them, that their society feeds itself with blood and hate and prejudice—this is what kills Romeo and Juliet. To me, it’s the story of two young people who rebel against all the chaos they are to inherit from their parents. And Romeo’s rebellion lies in his emotions. This is the 21st century, for God’s sake. Are we going to mock a boy who is just too tired of all the unhealthy ideals being forced on him? Romeo is quite a unique character—how many men living in a society that encourages them to show off their masculinity would refuse to perpetuate it? Let Romeo cry. Let him fall on the ground in tears. Let him sigh and talk about how his 'heartsick groans, mist-like,’ will 'infold me from the search of eyes’. The fact that he is vulnerable is proof that he doesn’t want to be dehumanized by social constructs. It’s the bravest, most revolutionary thing he could have done in his world. The problem is not Romeo, but Romeo’s society.