Northanger Abbey is so underrated like no offense but the heroine of that book is into sports and shenanigans growing up and doesn’t learn anything in school or have any accomplishments or interests until she has a growth spurt, gets hot, and reads so many gothic novels that she almost ruins her relationship w her love interest bc she convinces herself his house is haunted and does an inappropriate ghost hunt.
Northanger Abbey is my favorite Austen and by far her meanest book.
If they made a modern teen movie adaptation of it, it would be about a girl who consumes nothing but Buffy, Twilight and Teen Wolf, moves to a small, pleasant town, and continually expects it to be a secret hotbed of supernatural activity. This never happens, but she does make and lose a terrible BFF and eventually starts dating the cute, smart older brother of her other new friend while he’s home for a college visit.
There are never any vampires, no matter how many times she expects them, but her boyfriend’s asshole dad does send her home one night with a dead cell phone and no money for a cab, so she has to take the bus. This is the worst thing that ever happens to her.
Landslide by Fleetwood Mac except it’s playing through your car’s old radio cassette player as you drive alone through the desert at night. As far as you can tell, the nearest human life has got to be wherever that distant thunder is rolling in.
The poem is generally first person and begins with “My name is…”, unless part of a series; series are structured as dialogues.
Cow poems are in strict iambic dimeter.
A cow poem has the scheme *A*A*B*B.
The cow stanza is a 6-line stanza followed by a 2-line ‘punchline’, varying on “I [do the thing]//I lick the [thing]; much like Benadryl Cabbagepatch, the closer the conformity, the better the effect.
Spelling is more-or-less phonetic, especially for vowels, with some exceptions (classical cow poems make exceptions for “I”, notably) and certainly no numbers; the effect is often described as ‘pseudo Chaucerian’. The grammar too is fairly standard.
Or to put it another way
My naym is pome And wen you noe The rouls that mayk My strukchur floe And poeits bend Tou hone ther art
I remember all the Doctor Who fanfics I used to read where Rose often got badly stereotyped as a damsel in distress whom the Doctor had to swoop in and save and smooch but the way I remember Doctor Who 90% of their relationship was the Doctor just setting Rose loose on people who had done something to offend them and sitting back giggling in the corner as she shouted
if it happened at all, it happened like that 