#i was gonna get into romeus & juliet too. but decided it wasnt as relevant to the video

[aibafiles]

I've been sitting on why this video rubbed me the wrong way for a few days trying to formulate my thoughts on it and I really have to disagree - "Romeo is a fuckboy" is a very much a modern take on the play that ignores the literary devices at play and Juliet's own agency. Romeo and Juliet asks us to suspend our disbelief for the "love at first sight" trope, and Rosaline's presence (or rather lack of it) is critical to that.

Exploring Rosaline as a character through a modern lens is great—hell, I did the same myself for a personal project in high back in school—but the fact that she doesn't appear is very deliberate. We can't see Romeo's love for her as genuine because we don't even get to see who she is as a person, only his impression of her.

When he speaks about Rosaline in early scenes, he does a (bad) attempt at the Petrarchan sonnet form, a style of poetry associated here with flowery language pining after an unattainable woman. That tells us exactly what she is to him—the unattainable object of his shallow teen affections, and exactly what Juliet is not.

Juliet is a real flesh and blood person on the stage, one capable of engaging with Romeo on equal footing and actually reciprocating, and her first meeting with Romeo blows all of his cringefail poetry out of the water. We love to be cynical about love at first sight, but it's crucial to look at it in a theatrical context. The very first lines the two exchange form a sonnet: Romeo opens with a metaphor and lets Juliet expound on it. It's poetry created through mutual participation, the musical theatre equivalent of breaking into a duet. We are meant to take it seriously as an expression of mutual love, and Romeo's verse improves later on as well to drive the point home. If you have the time for it, there's a really great breakdown of the sonnet by Ben Crystal here (timestamped around 11:30 if it doesn't work) that I love. (And the whole video is worth it if you enjoy Shakespeare!)

So when Rosaline keeps coming up throughout the play, Shakespeare isn't secretly undercutting the romance or trying to frame Romeo as fickle and insincere—he's highlighting the contrast between Romeo's feelings for the two and reinforcing his relationship with Juliet. The tragedy doesn't lie in the two of them being Stupid Teens trying to rush things prematurely, but rather the adults responsible for the toxic environment that won't allow them to explore a relationship in the first place.