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Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 1176239" data-attributes="member: 812">You betcha.Yeah, pretty much.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />Look, nobody's going to tell me that William Shakespeare ISN'T the greatest writer in human history. My admiration of the man's ability knows no bounds, pretty much.But look at his greatest stories. Let's pick three that you could make a reasonable case for being the best Shakespeare plays:Hamlet, King Lear and The Tempest. With heroes Hamlet, Lear and Prospero.These are not sympathetic people. Now, Shakespeare's a genius, so he can do things us mere mortals cannot. He can create unsympathetic people (really look at those three characters -- they don't have single flaws, they're just BAD people. Hamlet lets Ophelia suffer and die rather than give up his pretense of kookiness. He cuts down Polonius for no reason and never even thinks twice about it. He casually sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths. He dances around in graves. And all the pain and suffering of Hamlet could have been avoided if he'd either A) told the ghost to get lost, or B) just up and killed Claudius from the get-go.Lear, likewise, is weak and petty and selfish and costs everyone around him massively. Prospero is a manipulative, cold-hearted SOB who, far from learning any big lesson, really just gets rewarded for being so. (wait, I was in the middle of a sentence here. How did that go? Oh, yeah, "He can creat unsympathetic people")) and tell stories about them that drive us to care about what happens. Even get emotionally involved.Every time I read Lear I get to the end when he comes out carrying Cordelia and I start to cry. Every bleedin time. It's amazing. Here's this old shrivelled up whiner of a man, and by the end I'm crying over him. I don't like him any better, but there I am, suffering his pain right along with him.But all that aside, I'm NOT saying (or didn't MEAN to say) that a story with sympathetic characters is bad. What I MEANT to say was that creating a compelling story WITHOUT using sympathetic characters was a mark of real genius. Of greater genius, let us say, than doing the same thing with sympathetic, likeable characters.And that's different than taking an unsympathetic character and MAKING them sympathetic. What I love about Kill Bill is how QT refuses to give us even that. The Bride is no more likeable than any of the bad guys -- less so, to some degree. And yet, she's what we watch the film for. To see what she'll do next. To find out how she'll overcome this next challenge.THAT'S storytelling.Did that make sense?</blockquote>

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