A Queer Tragedy
Y'all. Y'all. I'm struggling to put this into coherent words. But Romeo & Juliet is kinda the PERFECT classic to make into a queer adaptation? But like, holy fuck, the story changes so much depending on how you make it queer. Is it Ramona or Julien instead?
If it's Ramona, it's not even "history will say they were friends" it's "history will villainize any girl who fell in love." Because I swear, R is always bisexual and will always fall in love with J's cousin first. Cardinal rule. Ramona gets so obsessed with Tybalt, who hates her because of her house, but then sees Juliet and has her gay moment. There's a lot of premeditated murder because I swear it makes sense, I wrote out the plot (badly), but Ramona is forced to get married to Tybalt but she'd rather kill him or take her life than be married to him. Juliet tries to stop that, puts herself to sleep, tries to get Ramona to do the same, doesn't get the news there fast enough. Ramona is told Juliet is dead. She kills Tybalt. Kills herself. Juliet kills herself. All of the tragedy is blamed on Ramona for being so love struck she didn't think of anyone beyond herself or something like that. (It's too late for this, I'll do one better later)
But if it's Julien? Suddenly it's messy in a different way and if you thought people weren't gonna die you'd be wrong. Tybalt (because of course he's the problem child) thinks Romeo is grooming Julien, Mercutio backs Romeo up and says he's an upstanding guy, what the fuck you talking about. Battle commences. Julien accidentally kills Mercutio while defending Tybalt. Romeo kills Tybalt in a rage after Tybalt mocks Mercutio's death. The Prince is FED UP with this shit, says they're to be executed. And BY GOD, it's not ending there yet. There's an entire act where they're imprisoned separately, knowing their doom is coming. Friar Laurence comes to both and basically gives them both suicide ways. He tells Romeo is he takes his life and the blame for the deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt, Julien will be free. Obviously, Romeo does so. When Julien hears of this, he steals Friar Laurence's knife and does the deed. It's messy, it's complicated, but it's harder to hide the relationship these two had and that has consequences at the end.
But I just. This is eating at me. As I said, I've got the full breakdowns. I'll share them later. I just had to share this now with a question.
What makes the better retelling?
Romeo + Julien
Ramona & Juliet
