The Emo History of the World
by HisnameisDaveyoufool

     I have some sad news to bring to positive-thinking people today: emo attention whores laid the foundation on which modern humanity is built. Every time MCR releases an album, Chris Crocker posts a video, or a 13-year-old cuts his or herself to show friends, they’re really just tapping into a tradition as old as man itself. Without this tradition, we’d still be wearing animal skins and dragging our wives home by the hair.

The Mesozoic Era
Dinosaurs ruled the Earth for millions and millions of years—but one little asteroid came, and they had no way of stopping their extinction.
The reason: Dinosaurs held themselves in too high of an opinion. They had no motivation for technological advances that could easily save them from a meteor. Were they to want friends an attention, they would have done radical things to separate them from the other animals. However, they were happy just the way they were, and this led to their downfall.

Stone Age Emos
In Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, a giant monolith gave prehistoric apes the ability to use tools, and thus began the evolution into humans. This is mostly true, with the exception that there was no monolith—there was, however, a mysterious, overly depressing album from some emo band in the Alpha Centauri system that landed on Earth. With their lyrics about angry self-harm and breakups, prehistoric man was inspired to create, but only as a means of getting attention.
The first of these creations was more than likely fire, when lightning struck a tree near a member of mankind’s closest relative, Emoanderthal Man. While a normal creature would have run away from the flames for fear of death, the early man went nearer to the mass of heat because he hated himself and wanted to die.
Then, a burning branch fell off. The Emoanderthal picked it up, then he realized he could show it to the rest of the primates because its ability to cause harm was symbolic of his pain and suffering throughout his life. When he brought it to the village, it instantly became popular and paintings of it gained him gave him more wall-views on deviantcavewall. This Emoanderthal’s success was furthered by his discovery of “The Eternal Circle of Misery,”better known as the wheel.
His Homo Sapien ancestors later discovered bronze working to form more efficient tools to cut their arms with when they weren’t being noticed enough. This ushered in the Bronze Age.

Ancien Egyptian Emos
The first recorded examples of attention whoring, and possibly the most profound, were in ancient Egypt. The leaders of Egypt insisted that, upon their death, their bodies be preserved and be placed in large pyramids. If it sounds like a poor attempt to be mysterious and poetic, that’s because it is. Other cultures would want to forget about the death of their leader, but the Pharaohs wouldn’t let anyone stop pitying them, even beyond the grave. The Great Pyramid of Khufu is the largest of all Egyptian pyramids, providing clear evidence that Khufu is one of the greatest and most influential figures in emo history. Tourists still flock to the pyramids and act like he did something incredibly deep, and he wouldn’t have it any other way.
Tutankhamun, however, is one of the better-known attention whores of Egypt. He died at around the age of 18, more than likely from slitting his wrists when his cat died. He was given a lavish funeral with people assigned to be mourners, and his tomb was piled with gold and other treasures so that he would enjoy them in the afterlife. This last idea was probably spawned from the horrible poetry he wrote for the latest version of deviantcavewall.

Ancient Greek Emos
Where would movies be without Grecian theatre? Where would most of the entertainment industry to begin with be without Grecian theatre?
Now, where would any theatre be without overemotional theatre geeks?
Yes, Greece was a nation swimming with emos. Emos that made theatre, emos that called themselves poets, emos that called themselves philosophers, emos that worshipped gods they made up on a whim like they were actual deities. Just about anything emos did, Greek emos did well. They probably weren’t looked upon with the highest regard during their lives, as with their current state today, but fame has a way of catching up after death.
The majority of Greek theatre, which paved the way for the entertainment industry as stated before, is tragedy. The Oedipus trilogy, Medea—they’re all stories lacking a happy ending, and where the actors go into cathartic stupors of angst for the audience’s pleasure.
As for the poetry and philosophy, we know we wouldn’t be anywhere without those works. However, the great men behind these works were complete emos. They took the phrase “think outside the box” and ran with it to demented extremes to see if anyone would pay them attention.
Pythagoras only trusted his own theorem and wouldn’t open his mind to anyone else’s flawed, belligerent, and racist ideas on finding the hypotenuse. Socrates never wrote down his work, perhaps to spite the single-minded sheep he called friends that were writing down everything. Hippocrates thought that every doctor should take an oath so that they wouldn’t do the terrible things to patients that the evil, soul-sucking businessmen wanted them to do to gain money.
     They didn’t really believe in any of the principles backing these ideas, they just wanted to be loved.
     As for the Greek gods: these Greeks thought up those flamboyant, romantic Gods to look cool. Gods that killed things, Gods that saved everyone, Gods that fell in love—it’s the equivalent of a bad anime, only it actually existed to them. I’ll bet there were people extremely upset when Aries didn’t end up with Aphrodite in the end.
     While their rituals were inherently pathetic attempts to look cool, they did form the fundamentals of religion for centuries to come.

Next up: Ancient Rome, the Gospel, the Dark Ages