Tired of people comparing every forbidden love story to Romeo and Juliet, especially ones about class or racial divides. It’s important to how the story works that the Capulets and Montagues are alike in dignity and that the feud is baseless and petty on both sides. If the Capulets had spent centuries systematically disenfranchising the Montagues, it wouldn’t be Romeo and Juliet. The play relies on both families facing roughly equal losses and being able to make roughly equal apologies and roughly equal reparations. Romeo and Juliet is a play about two kids who weren’t allowed to love in a world full of senseless hatred, and if you give one side a valid reason to hate the other—if either the Capulets or the Montagues are right—it stops being that and starts implying that the opressed have as much to do with the environment of hatred as their opressors do
