the tragedy of it isn’t that it’s a romance and they’re starcrossed lovers or whatever, it’s that children kill themselves because they hate the world they live in that much. plays and movies and stuff usually have much older actors play them (that’s how you automatically know the people making it don’t understand the play), but romeo and juliet are only like 13-15 years old
when the play opens, verona’s in the middle of a blood feud between these two families that’s been going on so long they don’t even know why they’re fighting anymore, they just blindly hate each other and are willing to kill just because their parents are like “yeah, those people? we hate them.” people are always like “romeo and juliet are so stupid, they got all these people killed” but like. no, the feud between the families started way before either of them were even born. people were already dying all the time because of this nonsense feud, nothing changed when these two kids started sneaking around together
when romeo is introduced he’s completely in love with some other girl, rosaline. he’s talking about her the way he later talks about juliet. that’s the whole point: he’s a dumb innocent kid in love with every girl he sees, not at all concerned about the blood feud and hatred his parents and older friends are so preoccupied with. part of the importance of romeo and juliet being so young is that ~the world hasn’t corrupted them yet~
in the end, they both kill themselves because 1) they are literal children making rash decisions, but also 2) they see each other as the only good thing in the world, a world where people kill each other in the streets and don’t even know why. that is why the play’s classified as a tragedy, not a romance
after they’re dead, the two families come together and are like “ok wow holy shit why are we like this” and the deaths of these two children are what end the feud. for generations, a whole lot of people died because of this ignorant hatred and it all only fueled the conflict. like “we don’t know why they hate us or we hate them, but they killed x person so let’s go kill y person” back and forth forever. then, two children die for love (not necessarily what we define as romantic love, though romeo and juliet saw themselves as that) and that is what ends all the bloodshed. the deaths of innocents made the adults look at themselves in horror and wonder why and how they let this happen and realize they were the reason
if shakespeare intended for it to be about an actual romance (the way it is commonly interpreted), then the main characters would’ve been adults like in all his other stuff. the feud wouldn’t be as important or even mentioned after setting up the story. the tragedy is, as stated above, that children kill themselves because their world is so hateful and they saw no other options
i would say that i’m surprised society fetishizes pre-teens killing themselves and takes a story about the damage blind hatred has on young people and turns into a mindless romance, but.
Note to vacationing non-Americans: while it’s true that America doesn’t always have the best food culture, the food in our restaurants is really not representative of what most of us eat at home. The portions at Cheesecake Factory or IHOP are meant to be indulgent, not just “what Americans are used to.”
If you eat at a regular American household, during a regular meal where they’re not going out of their way to impress guests, you probably will not be served twelve pounds of chocolate-covered cream cheese. Please bear this in mind before writing yet another “omg I can’t believe American food” post.
Also, most American restaurant portions are 100% intended as two meals’ worth of food. Some of my older Irish relatives still struggle with the idea that it’s not just not rude to eat half your meal and take the rest home, it’s expected. (Apparently this is somewhat of an American custom.)
Until you’re hitting the “fancy restaurant” tier (the kind of place you go for a celebration or an anniversary date), a dinner out should generally also be lunch for the next day. Leftovers are very much the norm.
From the little time I’ve spent in Canada, this seems to be the case up there as well.
Oh….
Probably due to the Depression followed by rationing followed by a Post-War boom.
Hold up do non-Americans actually think we eat like that all the damn time?
Oh hon…we can’t afford that. XD
Probably yes because it ties into the stereotype that all Americans are gluttonous fatasses.
“Hey kids I made your favorite: deep-fried pancakes drizzled in chocolate! You all get 5 each!”
spiders will pull their own legs clean off if they get damaged because most of them can regrow legs during molting, which explains why you often see spiders missing a leg but never any missing half a leg?
some remarkably distressing scientists proved this by getting a spider to pull off all of its legs and then feeding its limbless torso for months until it sprouted a full complement of legs again and then hopefully used them to get the fuck out of dodge
baby spiders don’t get lenses until their first molt and before that they just have baby eyes and while this ought not to be any weirder than the concept of baby teeth, welp,
there are so many spiders floating around thousands of metres up in the air that they’re described as “aerial plankton”
The Sky Is Full Of Spiders
there are spider-parasitising spiders but instead of laying eggs in organs or stealing blood or anything like that they just ride on top of bigger spiders and steal snacks when their mighty steed is eating
there are ant-mimicking spiders that use their disguises to raid ant nests and w/e but there are also ant mimics that just. hang out. they make fake ant colonies full of fake ants. sometimes the actual ants that they’re mimicking find their house and live with them. stealth 100
some mother spiders live in communal family nests, where multiple mothers can work together to bring down bigger prey while all their collected babies are cared for by the babysitters
some mother spiders feed their babies mouth to mouth like birds
some mother spiders carry their babies around and i was aware of this but not the fact that if you steal their eggsac they’ll freak out and search for it for hours and sometimes end up adopting anything that’s vaguely the right size, they will carry around empty snail shells for weeks and lovingly dote on them…
guys i am literally about to cry over spider moms
i borrowed the book op cites from the library (biology of spiders by rainer f. foelix) because of this post and my two favourite new spider facts are
-they don’t just have an exoskeleton – they also have a secret partial inside skeleton
and
-you know the guy who gave spiders drugs and took pictures of their fucked up webs? he ended up studying them because his buddy was studying garden spiders and they spin webs at 2-5 am and his buddy was like, Ugh, fuck this, i want to sleep in, do you have anything i can give these spiders to make them spin webs at not two in the morning -and this guy, A Pharmacologist, was like, hell yea, here are some amphetamines for your spiders -and all those did was make the spiders spin some exceptionally weird webs at 2-5am -and i guess his buddy gave up in disgust at these spiders who wouldn’t let him sleep but mr. spider amphetamines was like, you know what, this is cool, i’m gonna keep going with this
Mineta has the best quirk for hero work, esspecially in a team setting
Here Me out
villian incapasitation
using his gape attacks he can set traps for enemies that can be fallen into by a fleeing enemy,used to disarm/incapasitate enemies and have them stick to something should it get on them, and distract an enemy while fighting another hero
recue ops
weather its a building with a unstable foundation or attaching it to a rope to stick to the side of something so you KNOW you can have people climb it without it falling, or making a make shift floaty becouse apparently these balls float and this are good for ship patching and making it harder for people to drown, this quirks great for rescue operations
stealth/villian hideout raids
I mentioned before about him sticking one to rope or chain in order to make a ladder right? villian hide out raids where he sneaks into the enemies base, potentially stick his balls onto the camera lenses in the building if the situation called for it, lock doors with villians inside it by sealing the door, giving a few minutes before trying to break the door down, and a host of other shit like that
also might be useful as an emergency wound closer, if your desperate. stick grape ball on cound then on the other side stick some rubble or a large book and tell the patient to hold it, probably would have medics giving him shit but hey buy a few hours while working
I hate to say it but, there is some potential there
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