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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 9346291" data-attributes="member: 6801228">And yet... I can't say that I agree. I have never read a single original Sherlock Holmes story. Yet, I have dabbled in making Sherlock Holmes inspired stories, based off of the adaptation. Sherlock Holmes gets adapted or re-imagined because he is the Ur-archetype of the detective. Everyone thinks of him, because they have been told he is the Greatest detective. I've read a decent amount of Shakespeare, most notably Romeo and Juliet "the greatest love story ever told" and frankly the original is... not a good love story. It isn't a badly written comedy, but it certainly isn't a love story. Yet, we are told it is the greatest love story, Romeo and Juliet is synonmous with star-crossed lovers. I don't think that is because of the power of the original work. I think it is because our culture has consistently pointed people who consume very little media to that work and SAID it is powerful and good. And I've certainly had to explain a Victorian Era joke to a class of kids, who just don't have any idea why it is supposed to be funny. This isn't to say that the original works are badly done, but they are not the pinnacle I think. We tend to have this habit of looking to the things that culture has told us are "the greatest" and just... accepting that. Tolkien is good, but I don't think he was the pinnacle of all fantasy forever. In fact, I've found the movie adaptations far better stories. Much more streamlined and easier to get through. Which makes sense, Tolkien was a professor and writing a mythology, but mythologies aren't written to be compelling novels. I wouldn't even categorize Romeo and Juliet as a Love Story, let alone the greatest love story. I've read FAR better. Far better comedies too. And none of Shakespeare's tragedies ever hit me as hard as some of the best tragedies I've ever read. I think we get... stuck sometimes, when it comes to long-standing classics. Mozart and Beethoven are not the greatest music ever written, but they are the names of composers who have been listened to for centuries, that we are told are the greatest music, that we see the classiest people who we are told have excellent taste listening to... and they are great... but do we hold them up as the greatest because no one has done better, or because everyone says they are the greatest and the old stuff is always better than the new stuff? And, we have absolutely seen adaptations that are better than the original, in music, in movies, in books, in comics. It has been done. So I think we do ourselves a disservice by declaring not only that something that has stood for centuries will continue to do so, but that it will also continue to be better than anything that came afterwards. Because then if something does come along... no one will be able to see it.</blockquote>

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