The Sorrows Of Young Werther and The Rise of Parody
Here’s a story for the ages: emo kid falls in love with hot girl with a boyfriend. He confronts her and she loses it. Maybe she’s his? But she can’t let family and friends down, so she tells emo kid the score. Since he can’t have her, he blows his brains out. Everyone regrets not digging what a winner emo kid was.
This plot could sell the hell out of a crappy movie today, which is probably why in the late 1700s, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther defined European pop culture. Helped by a heartstring-pulling story and a brevity rarely seen in novels at the time (many of [...]
