Every 21st century piece of writing advice: Make us CARE about the character from page 1! Make us empathize with them! Make them interesting and different but still relatable and likable!
Every piece of classic literature: Hi. It’s me. The bland everyman whose only purpose is to tell you this story. I have no actual personality. Here’s the story of the time I encountered the worst people I ever met in my life. But first, ten pages of description about the place in which I met them.
Modern writing advice: Yes your protagonist should have flaws but ultimately we should root for them and like them from the beginning :)
Charles Dickens: Here is the worst ugliest rudest meanest nastiest bitch you’ve ever met in your life.
Modern writing advice: Make sure your POV character goes through a significant arc! Make sure they are changed by the narrative! Make sure they learn a lesson!
Narrators of every book of the 19th century: the lesson I learned is these people fucking suck, sayonara you freaks
Modern writing advice: It’s all about the character overcoming obstacles and learning! They learn their lesson so they can fix their mistakes and make good choices in the future! It’s a character arc! It’s called growth! Readers love it!
Everyone from ancient times through the 19th century: would you like to watch a Guy fuck up twenty times in a row
everyone on this site is all ‘yearning’ this and ‘pining’ that and ‘dark feral sublime monsterfucker’ yes but as soon as the actual full-fledged jealousy comes out you cowards uwu your ‘top ten reasons x is an abusive no good very bad person’ thinkpieces all over the goddamns tags like a repressed nerd’s premature orgasm and I for one can not abide this hypocrisy
Pray tell, how does one
pine andyet skirt the indignant sting of perceived rejection?
How can one
yearn without feeling the ache of envy for those privileged to bask in their love’s brilliant light? How can one’s love be considered wild or feral or monstrous if it does not light a fire of bitter fury in the cold dark corners of one’s broken heart? And moreover, what better measure of one’s character than for them to smother those flames and swallow the poison fumes so no one else will have to choke? What, pray fuck, is the god damn dramatic point of want if it has no bite?
basically y’all are boring and I’m revoking your yearning rights until you take a long hot sec to ponder why you need to pathologize regular-ass emotions do not pass go do not collect 100k coffee shop au go directly to jail and face the divine terror of your all too human hunger.
The oldest inn in Denmark sounds like something that was taken straight out of a horror story bordering on being too cliche or weird to be believable.
I present to you Bromølle Kro
We don’t know how old it is because it was first mentioned in a text from 1198 when it had already been open for years. I could go into detail about how it also used to function as a mill and store but that’s boring.
The first strange part is that the current building isn’t the original. You see, it was build on a bog and slowly each incarnation of the inn would get more and more damp, the floor would become soggy, mould would spread and the walls would bend as the whole thing sank into the ground. Eventually the owners would tear the whole thing down and build a new inn on the rubble. They did this over and over again, leaving everyone to wonder why they didn’t rebuild it somewhere else.
Then in the 1700’s guests started to disappear. It took a while for people to notice because most guests were travellers who were expected to be gone by morning anyway, but eventually so many people disappeared it couldn’t be ignored.
The couple who owned the inn were accused of getting rich patrons senselessly drunk, dragging them to their room and beating them to death with a club hidden under the bed. They then threw the victims out the window into the river that ran behind the inn.
For years people weren’t sure how true the story was. Did they really kill that many people? How would that even be possible without anyone seeing or hearing it?
Then in the 1950’s people wanted to straighten the river out for convenience and after they temporarily dried it up they started digging and found a skeleton. And another. And another. And another.
In all they dug up 28 skeletons from one small stretch of the river very close to the inn. And those were just the ones they found.
And despite all this the inn stayed in business. It wasn’t closed despite repeatedly sinking into the ground. It didn’t close when the owners were hanged for being serial killers. And it didn’t bother anyone that they had been sleeping and dining next to murder victims for years.
Today the ground has dried up and you can even enjoy the view of the river while you have lunch. They keep two of the skulls in the reception and named one of them Frede (a name that means peace/rest) for your viewing pleasure.
And somehow Bromølle Kro just keeps going and going…
The people in the tags saying this is just normal Denmark/Europe either lives in a horrific alternative universe, only read about the most insane cases or are Americans who think that because Europe is old all bad things have happened everywhere.
Sorry to disappoint but as someone who likes to read up on old buildings and is always looking for something juicy the history of most old places is in fact incredibly boring.
I live next to no less than three manors that are also so old we don’t know when they were build, just when they were first mentioned in writing, and the worst thing that happened at any of them was a jealous farmhand who strangled a milkmaid and the people at the time thought it was so horrible they raised a stone to commemorate her. Even a single murder is relatively rare (unless it’s a royal castle because royals are insane)
Most old buildings just have a history of siblings buying each other out or the king buying it so he can sell it later or give to a friend or whatever.
And if you look into the history you’ll notice that most castles have a ghost or five but people usually don’t know why but there’s this story/rumour that can’t be confirmed about a thing happened so that might be the origin of the ghost. In other words, the ghost came first and then people tried to come up with a reason why. Bromølle Kro is one of the few places where the thing happened first and then people started seeing ghosts.
And there are other places like that but they are few and far between compared to what people think and that’s usually why we know about them; because they are unusual. So not to spoil anyone’s fun but normal everyday European history and historical places are pretty boring unless you’re really into siblings fighting over how to split the field between them until one of them throws down some cash.
