I went to a poetry workshop on Saturday at school. The poet speaking was a woman named Shara McCallum, a white Jamaican woman who writes very good poems and who is very nice, but she was kind of patronizing when it came to our classical background. Now, most of the people there were juniors and seniors, and one of them was actually in college. She seemed to think that we didn't know anything about the Odyssey (which we read freshman year here) or that Greek myths came first, followed by the Roman thievery, and various other things. This nettled me, but I guess it's plausible that some people there didn't know that... I don't mean to sound supercilious or something, but I really think people who want to be writers should have some background in myth, folklore and legend, ESPECIALLY Greco-Roman. Writers should also be familiar with Biblical tales, I don't CARE if you hate Christians, the Bible is an important literary work and a wonderful resource for references.

And if you're a reader, you should have that background too (most writers are readers though, and vice versa), otherwise you won't fully understand a lot of what you read. Hell, if you don't have that background, you won't even be able to fully enjoy RPG's, since they're usually brimming with references to myths and legends and so on.

For example. It amuses me that Ixion (which is also a reference to Greco-Roman mythology.. Ixion [who was an incredible jerk] was the father of the father of the Centaur race [according to some accounts, this is disputable], and Ixion is a horse. Hm!), the lightning fayth from FFX, has his overdrive attack as Thor's Hammer..and in BoF3, the strongest lightning attack is called Myollnir, a phonetic spelling of Mjolnir, which is the -name- of Thor's hammer. Okay, so it's not amusing in a funny way, but I thought it was interesting. =P