Get the tissues ready because this is the saddest story that you’ll read all day.
Hundreds of people who have been arbitrarily using the example of Mr. Darcy to represent a romantic, gentlemanly figure have been devastated upon having read Pride and Prejudice and realising that Mr. Darcy is a total twat.
Darcy, an elitist prickbasket who is good on ‘the inside’ where nobody can see or appreciate it has served as an icon of romance and the perfect gentleman for years. Darcy is known for looking down on everybody and just generally being the worst. When he is called out on this he seeks to re-evaluate his behaviour, but he’s still pretty much the same only now he’s nicer to rich people. Darcy later displays his gallant, heroic nature by forcing Lydia to marry a man who tricked her into sex because otherwise her family would experience social ruin, which is the pretty much the worst case scenario this walking paper cut can imagine. All in all, people have not been impressed.
‘I had no idea!’ said one very sad person who didn’t want to be identified because they have an ugly crying face. ‘I thought Darcy was cool but he’s really he’s just what I’d imagine would happen if Robin Thicke and the Queen had a child.’
‘I’ll never believe in love again.’ said another person, tearing up a picture of Colin Firth and definitely not whoever played Darcy in the Keira Knightly one. ‘Why did nobody tell us that he’s basically the personification of mansplaining?!’
With Darcy out, people have been looking around for other romantic heroes, only to discover that they’re all basically twats.
‘Wait, Mr. Rochester locked his wife in his attic?’ asked one person in confusion. ‘What is he, a Scientologist?’
‘Romeo is HOW fucking old!?’ screamed another person. ‘I have debts older than that!’
Sitting smugly in a corner, one person simply rocked back in their chair while reading Wuthering Heights. ‘Pffft, they got their romantic heroes. But nobody’s gonna beat Heath… oh. Oh dear.’
Now the search is on to find a man whose name can become shorthand for romance and good behaviour who isn’t, in actuality, one of the worst fucking people in the world. I suggest Snape. After all if creepily obsessing over a girl and then bullying her traumatised child because she chose somebody else isn’t romance then really, what the hell is?