Have you SEEN the SparkNotes twitter!?
I’m probably a bit behind the curve here, but as an Extremely Online Millennial™, I’m required by state law to be aware and obnoxious about stuff on the Internet that does things right.
To that end, LOOK AT THE SPARKNOTES TWITTER!!!
I absolutely cannot get over how hysterical and absolutely on brand this is. SparkNotes exists to translate very old stories into plainly understandable language. Because they truly believe that the stories have value, even if deciphering them is based in an older version of English and of storytelling.
And here they are, quite literally speaking the language of their target audience, telling precisely the same jokes their source material told in the first place, just in a way that will actually land as a joke.
I mean just look at these, and you instantly understand complex themes from literary classics. The conch shell is a flimsy barrier holding back inevitable chaos in Lord of the Flies. Frankenstein is hopelessly naïve in the face of an overwhelmingly obvious danger. Romeo falls in love at the drop of a hat, and Tybalt is comically desperate for an excuse to kill him. Hamlet’s destined revenge takes an absurdly long time. The complicated logical underpinning to these concepts is now easy to understand. And that’s what SparkNotes exists to do.
it’s just wonderful to see a brand with a mission of literacy really embrace ‘internet literacy’ as part of that. These memes—and in fact most Internet memes—are phenomenally complex. And young people are preternaturally adept at deciphering them. Sparknotes takes advantage of that to show kids—and to show the world—just how much they already understand about literary classics, and might not even realize it.