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Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 1343724" data-attributes="member: 5171">Well, both, actually.  I do like the classics, but what I was writing wasn't actually classical.  I was in an SF writing group, and I was feeling pressure (self-created and based on what people said they found interesting, as opposed to "a fun light story") to write heavy stuff with a ton of philosophy and an unreliable narrator and no plot or action scenes.What I discovered is that I love the classics, but also that most of the classics, at the time they were written, were intended to be incredibly freakin' popular and entertaining.  I think that if Shakespeare were resurrected and told about, say, a space-opera retelling of Macbeth that was an enormous summer hit smash and combined the strength of his original ideas about fidelity and guilt with flashy effects and revamped writing for the modern audience, Ol' Billy would be annoyed for about thirty seconds, and then he'd smile and be glad that his stories are valued enough to be carried on and changed to meet the needs of a new audience.(He'd still be ticked off about Strange Brew, though.)So I don't think of myself as having turned my backs on the classics, because I love 'em.  In fact, I think that the classics have been stolen by the stuffy people and neutered by centuries of academic debate designed to advance the pet project of a thousand professors fighting for tenure.  When you learn to read Shakespeare's language, he's making sex jokes up the wazoo.  He's raunchy.  He's playing for the people in the cheap seats just as much as he is for the people in the booths.  His monologues aren't supposed to be delivered in a thoughtful, controlled voice -- half of the time, they oughta be screamed or ranted.  You look at Henry IV, part i, and it's a dry political drama with a lot of complex language, but really, it's the story of a screw-up son who doesn't want to inherit his dad's business -- he just wants to pal around with his hell-raising sidekick buddy.  And then some bad guys come in, and everything hits the fan, and the son rolls out his shoulders and cracks his knuckles and says, "Well, s<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />, I guess I do care about this stuff," and unloads a can of whoopass on the bad guys and redeems himself in his father's eyes.C'mon.  Cast Will Smith (Henry) and Martin Lawrence (Falstaff) in this thing, with Samuel Jackson as the dad and Clancy Brown as the bad guy.  Put the end fight on a moving subway, only still with swords -- instead of being English royalty, have them be the heirs to mystical magical power that has lain hidden in the world for millenia.That movie would kick so much ass.But in order to make it, somebody has to understand the old language first somebody who likes the classics enough to go in and see what they're really about but who isn't so rarified that he turns up his nose at modern entertainment.  Kind of like a cultural translator.Enter the Tacky.Someday.</blockquote>

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