The Mythcreant Podcast: Recent Episodes
Mythcreants
Hark young traveler, for not all is as it seems in this strange land. In fact, nothing is as it seems. If something ever is as it seems, that’s just a sign it’s extra not as it seems. Sounds confusing, but that’s just how it works in the weird and wacky worlds that fairies and dreams inhabit. This week, we’re taking a stab at such settings: their strengths, weaknesses, and why everything always seems to come in threes.
Show Notes Area X * Holodeck * Severance * FROM * The Broken Earth * Piranesi * Wonderland * Oz * The Witches’ Road * The Staryk Realm * Wicked Lovely * Strange and Norrell * Uprooted * Butcher of the Forest * The Nevernever * Sandman Duel * Inception * Why You Should Theme Your World TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Latifah K.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[Intro music]Bunny: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Bunny and with me today is-
Chris: Chris.
Bunny: -and.
Oren: Oren.
Bunny: Welcome to my dark and twisted game. Don’t you know that this is what happens when the number is five and then two and then two again are put together? We are going to play a tricky game of dice, which could be your doom. That wailing? That’s the souls I’ve trapped within the dice. Barter your true names or you’ll never leave here.
[sinister chuckle]Oren: This sounds very whimsical and surreal. I’m into it. I like it.
Chris: I don’t. I’m not sure I want to roll these dice. Maybe I could play a different game instead.
[chuckles]Bunny: Well, there’s the spooky chess board, and this rarely seen game of Uno. That’s also spooky.
Oren: Spooky Uno reverse. Okay, I’m into that. I think I can make that work.
Bunny: But if at any time any of these sets come up, all threes I turn into broccoli. And if you know my true name, then I become a mollusk. That’s just how things work.
Chris: What if I just put the dice, all of threes? Because I want you to be broccoli. Can I do that?
Bunny: No.
[chuckles]Chris: Yes, I won.
Bunny: No, you’re too witty. You have outwitted the trickster I am. But maybe I’m lying. Maybe I’m lying. Maybe I won’t actually turn into broccoli.
[laughs]Bunny: It’s 16-dimensional chess that’s also dice; that’s also Uno reverse.
Chris: Maybe I’ll have to suss out the pattern in your lies. To find out what is lying, and what is truth. Do you have a twin and one of you always says a lie and the other says the truth?
[chuckles]Bunny: Exactly. So, today we’re talking about “Fairylands and Dreamscapes” and basically places where things are all weird and trippy and normal rules don’t apply. And there’s probably someone challenging you to a game which is very surprisingly common.
Oren: I’ve been preparing since 2014 to argue that Area X from The Southern Reach is basically a fairyland, so I’m ready for this.
Chris: I see your Area X and I raise you, the Holodeck.
[laughs]Bunny: Fight.
[chuckles]Oren: I mean, it’s not wrong.
[laughs]Computer and program.
Chris: I feel like the holodeck is used for this in so many Star Trek episodes. There are also Star Trek episodes that basically become a weird alternate reality that don’t use the holodeck, but holodeck is a common one.
Oren: They use the holodeck for that when they don’t feel like coming up with an exposition to explain what’s going on because the holodeck exposition is always the same. It’s like, “Oh, man. Ensign Bradley’s abstract milk painting holodeck program came to life. I guess we’re all in abstract milk paintings now.” It’s the same thing every time. They just do whatever they want.
[chuckles]Bunny: There is usually, as with both of these I assume, I haven’t read Area X, but I do know that the holodeck frequently does this. There is usually an element in these stories of like nothing is as it seems. What you think is there is not actually there. It’s like it’s to trick you and there are mind games and word games and chess games and consequences if you fail the games.
Which are usually existential consequences like losing your name or your memory, or taking years off your life, or being forced into servitude. I think a lot of these are coming from literal fairy tale, fairyland. They will kidnap you if you step in the fairy circle type of mythology.
Chris: When I tried to think about– okay, what are the various settings that we have where they have the elements of you don’t really understand how the world works? And the reality is weird, and you have to figure it out. But there’s fairylands, there’s dreamscapes, there’s spirit realms. Mindscapes, also very popular.
But I would even go so far as to say some mystery box TV shows like From and being the big one kind of do that. From, probably more than others because in that one, it’s like they’re not even living in a regular reality anymore. Whereas if you have something like Severance.
This is a really weird workplace. It does not work like other workplaces, but I guess technically we could say that physics is the same here. People are very strange though.
Oren: This is often down to feeling more than anything else, but I would argue that there’s a pretty distinct difference between a place that we might call a fairyland because it’s weird and different versus just a world that’s kind of unusual but still feels like it more or less operates on the same cause and effect that we’re used.
I always bring up The Broken Earth because it has a really interesting world. But it doesn’t feel like a surreal place. The world is very strange because of all the seismic activity, but you could figure out how it works without too much trouble.
Chris: Here’s one for you. What about Piranesi?
Oren: No, Piranesi absolutely has elements of a fairy world. It’s not the most extreme, especially because the main character has been in the house or the labyrinth as if it were long enough to learn the rules. But there is elements of it for sure. If you were going there for the first time, it would have a stronger fairyland-type feel.
Chris: But that one doesn’t have any overt magic. It’s just very strange. It’s just statues everywhere and I guess what is a big house with an open sky that’s flooded with water.
Oren: You’ve got the really chaotic examples like Wonderland and then you’re slightly less, but still pretty chaotic examples like Oz. When you see a bunch of munchkins, you don’t really wonder, “What is their food production?” You don’t ask the question, “What do they eat?” Because you know this is a world that does not have a good answer for that.
[chuckles]Chris: I think this– the surrealism really is the distinguishing factor here to some extent because surrealism generally comes with low realism. I think it’s that low realism that kind of takes away the questions of like, “Okay. What do the munchkins eat?”
Because we’re not doing something really and super realistic feeling. I wouldn’t normally say that Oz would be kind of a dreamscape, but at the same time there’s no hard line there. It’s just become surreal enough.
Oren: And you can do stories where characters can move from the more real grounded world into the weirder one. For example, if they were to go on some kind of witches’ road as a possibility.
Chris: Man. Okay, spoilers for the end of Witches’ Road for anybody who’s not seen it.
Oren: Which is Agatha All Along is the name of the show in case anyone’s curious.
Chris: Yes, but the witches’ road is what matters to me.
[chuckles]I was so disappointed at the end of the show– when we made that not real and I understand that the reveal that the witches’ road was kind of an on-the-spot invention, fits other aspects of the show, and is in its own way. But I just wanted the road to be a permanent part of the setting. That’s all I wanted, and they took that away.
Oren: Don’t worry, Chris, because this is the MCU. So, anything that was fake but popular will become real.
Chris: And bring it back to life like, “Oh, I thought you thought that that was dead, but actually, we should go to an alternate universe and it’s just like this universe, except for the witches’ road is real.”
[laughs]Don’t you want more, and more, and more?
Oren: Or they’ll be like, “Well, actually, you thought that Teen invented the witches’ road, but he was actually just channeling a much more ancient magic of a real witches’ road. Don’t worry, the witches’ road can rise again whenever we need it.”
Chris: But part of the nice thing about Agatha All Along is that it didn’t feel like the rest of Marvel. So, I don’t know. It’s like the Zombie Resurrection. Like you loved somebody, and they were brought back, but they were brought back wrong.
Oren: Do you not love it when Marvel brings back a thing you like, but not as good?
[chuckles]Chris, you’re terrible at consuming things. My favorite classic fairyland, as it were, is of course the Staryk realm from Spinning Silver. Well, a big surprise or unlike Spinning Silver, we never heard this one on the podcast before.
[chuckles]Chris: I thought about that because we also started a series called Wicked Lovely that had kind of fairies that were initially invisible, and the protagonist learns more about that and kind of becomes a fairy. And I think one of the things that really distinguishes the Staryk, is that yes, that’s a separate universe, but it is the fact that Miriam has to learn how they work.
Whereas in Wicked Lovely the protagonist just doesn’t have enough agency, and it never feels like she has to figure out the rules and then use them in a clever way. And I think that’s one of the things that makes the Staryk realm just work so much better in Spinning Silver than it does for most of the other stories, with Fae in them.
Oren: Well– and the Staryk have– strike this very tricky balance between a world that is weird enough to be cool and novel, but also stable enough that people can live in it.
Because I have seen other authors try that and they tend to end up in, well, this place is either so weird that it feels like nothing matters or it just seems like kind of a slightly more colorful version of the real world.
Chris: What did you think about the Vinland in Strange and Norrell? I know in that story there’s a woman who half of her time is bartered away to a fairy, and so whenever she goes to sleep, she ends up in fairyland and has to dance all night.
Oren: I haven’t read the book in a long time. My memories are mostly of the TV show, so I’m going to go with that.
Chris: The TV show was good, the mini-series. I think it’s six episodes. I’ve never read the very, very long book, but the mini-series is great.
Oren: Find someone who loves you as much as the people who made that show love the book, but I thought it was good. Again, it’s not a place where you could go and spend long periods because they use the fairy world in that show like spooky and creepy and weird.
There’s like a bizarro party that this girl has to dance at constantly, and that’s kind of scary. She never gets to sleep. She wakes up in the morning and her feet hurt from dancing all night. That’s mildly horrifying. It’s very uncanny, I think, is the word I would use, and it works great for that. I don’t really think you could have large parts of the book set there with the civilization of the fairies the way that you do in the Staryk realm in Spinning Silver.
Chris: You might lose some of its mystique, I suppose.
Oren: I think you would either be forced to lose a lot of mystique or just feel like this doesn’t seem like a place where anyone can actually live. It’s too weird.
Chris: Yeah, the forest is the reason to read Uprooted in my opinion.
Oren: That’s why I find the Staryk so impressive is because it feels like they managed to thread that needle. Although honestly, Novik is really good at that in general, like her forbidden forest in Uprooted. I didn’t like Uprooted at all, but I liked the forest. It’s spooky.
Bunny: I think that both of these examples you’ve mentioned and Piranesi to an extent touch on a really common feature of stories that have like fairylands, which is that the protagonist is an outsider to them, which means that it’s time for me to pull the mask off our Scooby-Doo monster and say, “Oh, hey. It’s portal fantasy. Discourse.”
Oren: Let’s see who you really are.
[laughter]Bunny: Oh yeah-
[chuckles]-but it’s true that a lot of fairylands, dreamscapes, fairy stories, types of things, are portal fantasies because you kind of need an outsider who doesn’t understand the rules for it to be-
Chris: Mysterious.
Bunny: -yeah, for the mystery. For the weirdness.
Chris: I think having them being mysterious and– really requires an outsider to come in and kind of gives it that sense of mystique. And also, a part of the point is you have to learn the rules and you feel off balance.
Bunny: I think because a lot of them come from those like original literal fairy tales that are about, “Don’t go in the spooky woods because there are fairies there and they’ll make you dance for them all night or whatever.” There are some common features in a lot of these types of stories that the book, The Butcher of the Forest, has pretty much all of.
Which is, I made a list, let me go through the list really quick. Don’t eat the food; a tricky guy wants to play games; it’s all an illusion; don’t tell anyone your name; spooky animals; disembodied voices; pretty things are evil; recognizable things are fake; children; things come in threes; and everything is kind of proper and genteel, even when it’s killing you.
[chuckles]Chris: That definitely seems very Fae.
Bunny: Yeah. They’re not all necessarily Fae, but it seems like these are pretty common features of worlds like these, and they’re also– speaking of the outsider’s thing, they’re usually contrasted with a normal fantasy world or a more normal world, right? So, even when we have a fantasy story that takes place in an alternate world, if there’s like a fairyland or a dreamscape, it’s usually another section of that world.
So, in Butcher, the Elmever, which is the fairyland area, is part of the bigger fantasy world. Like a dissection of it rather than the entire world being the Elmever. So that our character, who’s from a fantasy world is still an outsider to this world within a world.
Oren: Oh man. When they’re trying to tell their kids not to go in there, do they say Elmever, more like Elm Never.
Bunny: Oh.
[laughter]I don’t even want to dignify that.
Oren: Having the weird, surreal part of the world be in either a specific place or separate from the rest of it. That’s pretty common. You’ve got your Dresden Files, which is written by Jim Butcher. So maybe there’s a butcher parallel here, but it’s got your regular urban fantasy area, and then you can go into the magical world, which is called the Nevernever, I think.
And that was a little boring. Honestly, it’s been a while, but it felt very like– after a little bit of being there, you’re like, “Yeah, Okay. This is sort of the normal world, but everyone is a little more colorful, I guess.”
Bunny: Yeah, the real world but quirky doesn’t quite cover what a fairyland is.
Oren: Or at least what I would argue it should be. I don’t know. Not every fairy world can be as weird and surreal as I want it to be, but I still want them to be. And one of the big perks of this sort of thing is that you can design the setting around fulfilling very specific plot arcs that you want, especially character arcs.
Like if you want your protagonist just wrestling with some kind of issue from their childhood, good news, the world can reconfigure itself into the house they grew up in. That’s very helpful.
Chris: I do think that there are some tricky things about– once you have your protagonist there and you’re going to have some conflicts there and some plot there, there can be some tricky things on making the realities work and how much this becomes an issue can depend on, how much time you are spending there?
For instance, Lockwood and Co. has a spirit realm at the end of the series, and they just have to travel from point A to point B and they get colder the longer they’re there. So, it’s a pretty simple; we know what they have to do, we know how it can go wrong.
But a lot of times the farther you get from reality, if your world is really, really weird, the more you have to kind of make up in order to support the story and have people kind of understand how things work and that can be challenging. Because you have to do things like, “Okay. First of all, make sure people can still– there’s still stakes.” So, if you have a spirit realm and everybody’s dead.
[chuckles]Which is– we talked about this before in the previous podcast episode about making it so that people can die in the afterlife, which is strange.
Oren & Bunny: Double death.
[chuckles]Chris: Double death. But you need something. What are people capable of doing and making sure that’s balanced? So, if reality’s an illusion, how do we know what the protagonist’s chances are of getting through this.
Oren: Well, it’s very simple, Chris. They get into a duel with somebody, and they say, “I am a super-fast snake.” And the other person says, “Well, I’m a creature that kills snakes.” Then they say, “Well, I’m a creature that kills things that kill snakes.”
[laughter]Bunny: Oh my gosh. Oren is referencing Sandman, if anybody– we’ve made jokes about this before.
Oren: That was so silly.
Bunny: It is the silliest magic duel, like-
Chris: Scribblenauts.
Bunny: Yes.
Oren: It’s just kindergarten. I have Infinity plus one.
[laughs]Chris: But literally, it’s like, “I’m the hope and I’m the death of hope.” Really?
[chuckles]You could just do that. So, whatever your opponent says, you can just be like, “Well, I’m the death of that.” Done.
Bunny: I’m A. Well, I’m not A.
Oren: The only way that dual makes any sense if the real test is it’s just about who can keep talking at a quick pace. It’s like those games where you’re supposed to name words that end in a certain letter or whatever. There’s no shortage of them, but eventually you stop being able to think of them.
So, I guess that’s the real part of that game. It’s just who can keep improvising new stuff the fastest.
[chuckles]Bunny: I need to put that in my oof with chess and Uno.
Chris: We basically need rules that make it so that your protagonist doesn’t die instantly, but it’s also not too easy. And if things are very very strange, just narrowing it down to be like, “Okay. This is the problem. This is what the protagonist has to do to solve that problem.”
Like, “Hey, the longer we’re in here, the more we die.” “This is what the protagonist specifically has to do to get out.” “Oh, there’s a door that can appear, but it will only appear if the protagonist cries enough.”
[chuckles]And then now we have a challenge that we understand, “Okay. The protagonist has to make himself cry.” And now we’ve put it in terms that the audience understands. So, we know what the conflict is and what we’re trying to do, and how hard that will be. Because otherwise– yeah, you get that fight where it’s like, “Okay. Well, I summon a waterfall.” “Well, I summon a bunch of fire.”
Oren: And I would say that most of the time in these sorts of more surreal worlds, usually things like riddles, then you’d solve a puzzle, or they need to admit something about themselves or whatever. Those usually make for better conflicts than a Kung Fu fight.
Bunny: Yeah, it’s usually about wits over who has a bigger sword.
Oren: Right. Because sword fights or gunfights or whatever, those all depend on physics to work. And if the whole premise of this place is that physics are weird, it’s not impossible to do in physical conflict, but much harder and hard to do in a way that your reader will care about without the world just seeming boring.
You don’t want to end up as Inception, which is theoretically in a dreamscape, but just feels like a series of action scenes in regular normal places.
Chris: And also, even if you have wits, this can be an issue of what I call the clever Ex Machina where you’re doing a bunch of technobabble like Star Trek technobabble, or it could be magic babble.
And the protagonist is, “Oh, I know. My solution is to run clockwise three times because of the moon and being at this angle and blah blah.” If the audience can’t follow the logic and it can’t click into place for them, then you’re just making up random stuff at that point.
Bunny: The world might run on dream logic a bit, but your story still has to follow cause and effect. Otherwise, it’s going to be a very frustrating experience and Butcher of the Forest is a book that does this. There are weird rules, but the protagonist is clever about it.
There’s a scene where she has to play dice with a tricky Foxman for her soul or whatever, and she’s clever about it. What happens is that the Foxman is like, “We’ll do best of two.” And she’s like, “What if we tie?” And he’s like, “Well, we won’t tie.” So, she’s like, “Oh, he’s going to cheat.” And so, she cheats.
And it’s like, “Okay. She gamed the system. She learned information by doing something clever and then she exploits it and that gets her further along the path that she needs to go.” If it were just the Foxman going to play dice with me, but instead of playing dice, I howl at the moon for two minutes and he lets me go. That would make a whole lot of sense.
Oren: If I was playing dice with someone and they just started howling, I would probably encourage them to leave, to be fair. I think that would work on me.
[laughter]Bunny: It would be pretty awkward.
Chris: And if you do have to, sometimes if you are making up a lot of stuff about how this works because it’s really fantastical. You have to be careful that you make up stuff that feel like they are thematically consistent and that you are building off of a few elements.
Having that good theming, world theming makes a difference that it doesn’t feel like you’re arbitrarily making stuff up. So, for instance, I have a world where everyone is a floating bubble and wait, I need a reason why these two bubbles don’t pop when they run to each other like normal. It’s like, “Well, the supercomputer designed them not to.” And then it’s like, “Wait a second. Why is there a supercomputer here?”
Oren: Because a wizard made it, obviously.
[chuckles]Bunny: End program.
Chris: Exactly. It feels made up, and that may seem like an extreme example, but that happens all the time. If you don’t come up with an explanation for why these two bubbles don’t cut pop in this case, that feels like it builds off of what you’ve already established about this area.
You kind of have to choose some common themes and some common traits and kind of reuse those things in your explanations, or else things just feel made up.
Bunny: And I will say Butcher of the Forest does actually stumble at the very end. Spoilers, but there’s a point at which the character needs the price of continuing means she needs to tell her worst memory to the tricky Foxman, and she tells a pretty brutal memory. And then later, they are confronted by the lord of the Elmever, who’s like, “You lied about.”
We’re just kind of supposed to be like, “Oh, he knows somehow.” But even with all the dream logic and stuff, there’s been no indication that he’s done anything– that any of the creatures in this place have automatic access to your memories. They pretty clearly need to be told to them, which is why they’re a valuable resource.
But I don’t know. I guess the guy just knows them now and in a regular story– in a normal world that doesn’t have all the dream logic going on. That would be a lot more noticeable, but I think readers in a squishy surrealist fantasy fairy tale world are more willing to skim by that, but I would say that’s a place where the book, even within this place, where things aren’t supposed to make sense, like the story itself seizes to make sense, which is not what you want.
Chris: There is going to be some fun in having a protagonist sort of outwit people or learn the rules. If you get the sense that there isn’t actually a consistent rule set for them to learn, that really puts a damper on it. You don’t want to feel like the protagonist succeeded because the author said so, so you need some feeling that there are rules to learn, even if the place is really surreal and mysterious.
Bunny: You want them to win because the wizard said so.
[chuckles]Oren: Hang on. I’m going to pull a double Scooby-Doo and take off the mask that we didn’t think was a mask. We thought it was a face, but it’s actually the podcast’s other mask and reveal that this podcast was actually, “Why you should theme your world?” A blog post posted by Chris Winkle on August 26th of 2022.
[chuckles/laughs]Bunny: Oh shoot. It’s masks all the way down, isn’t it? Spooky.
Chris: I’ve just had some clients recently make some really imaginative worlds which are really cool, but it’s really just highlighted the challenges that come with having a world that’s really different and how much burden it puts on the storyteller to figure out how the world works in a that supports the story and is actually believable. And that’s just harder than if we’re taking the real world or a typical genre with setting conventions that you could just reuse.
Oren: I’ve had some clients who I think have been led a bit astray by the current state of the romantasy market, with the way that it portrays Fae as just kind of asshole magic people. So, as a result, their fairy worlds are kind of boring because there’s just not a lot going on. It’s just normal people live here except their wizards and their jerks, is the entirety of what makes Fae different.
Chris: I think that happens a lot when you have some starting works in the genre and then you have people copy it a lot of times. Some of the magic is lost and it almost becomes more cursory. It’s like the difference between Lord of the Rings that spends a lot of time building up things like the elves and making them feel magical, and having a current fantasy where elves just walk in.
And it’s not that those elves that are just walking in are bad, but now they don’t have nearly the mystique that they did in Lord of the Rings because they’re just familiar and we’re not spending all this time setting them up. I think there is a common pattern when something becomes popular and people repeat it a lot, it becomes more and more like cursory and less and less effort is put into it.
Oren: Do fairies good is the good place to end the podcast, I think. Just write them good and your story will be gooder for it.
Bunny: If you enjoyed your time in this land of the Mythcreants podcast, consider supporting us in the mysterious land of Patreon at patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: It’s very strange there. You give us money and then we have some. Weird.
[laughs]Bunny: The rules. Can you figure them out?
Oren: Before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber, he’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then, there’s Kathy Ferguson, he’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
[Outro music]Outro: This has been the Mythcreants podcast. Opening/closing theme. The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.
A common complaint about spec fic stories is that the world feels like it has no history, like entire planets simply appeared fully formed from the author’s mind. And yet, most readers get annoyed if presented with a block of historical exposition, which puts authors in a bit of a bind. How do we create histories for our stories without boring everyone? This week, we’ve got a few ideas of how to do just that, plus a lesson on why it’s important for your history to sound like juicy gossip.
Show Notes Space Needle * The Bean * The Broken Earth * The Abbess Rebellion * Byzantine Silk Industry * The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms * Middle-earth * Dragons of Pern * Sauron * Plus One * Dune: Prophecy TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Phoebe.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You are listening to the Mythcreant podcast. With your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny.
[intro music]Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren. With me today is–
Bunny: Bunny.
Oren: And–
Chris: Chris.
Oren: Now settle down. I have 500 pages of Mythcreant podcast history to get through. We’re gonna cover every significant event and also every insignificant event.
Bunny: Oh no, I thought I finished this class in high school.
Oren: So obviously we’re gonna cover the times when we changed hosts and the creation of Sandwich Discourse.
Bunny: Oh, he’s holding a textbook, Chris, we might wanna run.
Chris: Yeah. Before I introduce any idea, it’s important that I stop and to just tell you my entire evolution of how I came up with that idea, what I was doing at the time when the thought occurred to me, and all the posts that I had on that topic, so you know exactly how it happened.
Oren: Yeah. We need to cover things like how often we adjust our recording levels. That’s part of the history of this podcast.
Bunny: Can’t understand us without it.
Oren: You might notice that despite being more than a decade old, the podcast hasn’t really changed at all. Actually, that’s not true. It’s changed a lot. It used to be so much worse.
Bunny: Thereused to be somebody named Mike–
Chris: Yeah!
Bunny –I’m told, I don’t know who this Mike is.
Oren: This was the ancient days. The ancient days when Mike was around. And then the slightly less ancient days when Wes was around. Things change over time. Come back in 10 years and we’ll be telling some new person about Bunny, like “Bunny once was here!” and they’ll be like, “Uhhuh. Yeah, sure, Oren, you podcasted with a bunny. That’s real.”
Bunny: Very sentient bunny. Don’t worry.
Chris: Before the Bunny reckoning.
Bunny: Yes. Before I deposed Wes.
Chris: And then after the bunny wars we banned Bunnies.
Bunny: No bunnies anymore. And since I’m a part of this podcast, that means I need to explain where I was 10 years ago. Get ready to hear about me as a tween.
Oren: It may or may not be relevant to the podcast, but we did research for it, so now it’s everyone’s problem. So we’re talking about giving your world history ’cause that’s the thing that in theory, everyone wants, but no one likes reading. So, that’s worth talking about, I think. First I have a process question for my other hosts, which is when you guys are writing, whether it is prose or you’re creating a campaign world or any kind of creative activity, how do you go about building history?
Bunny: So for me, because my stories tend to be standalone and not multiple stories set in the same world, I’m usually most concerned with what the present day looks like and how it got there as the most relevant parts of the history. For my most recent project, I’m only really focused on one specific part of the world. So the history there is what’s most important, and the story is set in a former mining town that had a boom when the fantasy natural resource called Radiance was discovered there, and it became a huge mining town, and then the resource ran out and everybody left, and now it’s a ghost town.
So that is the history that’s relevant to the story. So I think when I look about putting together history for my worlds, it’s very “how did we get to where we are now for this specific circumstance?” I don’t know much about the greater politics of the country that the story is set in or whatever. It’s very focused in on this little town where the story takes place.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: For me, the first question I would have to ask is how much world building am I trying to do in this particular story and how much room I have? I’ve been doing a bunch of shorter stories. I completed a novella recently. There’s just not room for a super detailed, nuanced world. And my answer to that, I just didn’t. I didn’t add history.
It’s like, “hey, this is how it is now.” ‘Cause it is. It’s a little realism, fairytale world, which doesn’t demand a lot. If I was doing something super high realism, maybe I would have to think a little deeper, but that’s the point where you need things to be simple and you don’t have room. If I tried to do a short story and make a super unique world that would not usually go over very well.
I would be squeezing and squeezing to try to make everything fit. Now that I’m actually plotting a novel, yeah, I can feel like I have room to add more nuance and interesting things to my world.
Oren: There’s so much space.
Chris: Yeah. I’m just like, okay, so. What things do I have in this setting that are unusual that the plot makes use of in researching those specifically? So, for instance, I have a big spire that’s like a natural feature, and I decided that that spire was caused by some kind of volcanic eruption of some kind that was somewhat magical in nature. And then I did research on geology features around different types of volcanic activity, and then used that to hape the geography of the area. So that would be really far back history.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: My story also features a religious order and did some history there, and so just took the things that were unusual and let most other things go without tons of research. But then I used the research, of course, to make things feel—to gimme more ideas for more ways I can make the world creative, but that fit the things that I already have. So adding more novelty there and adding context that makes things feel a little bit more realistic and more detailed and that kind of thing with, again, the goal not being to sit down and give people a history lesson, but if you have more knowledge about the world, hopefully that translates to more nuance when you write about it and readers can tell.
Oren: Right. A lot of your world’s history is gonna be implied. ‘Cause if you’re trying to directly communicate it, you are probably gonna have a bad time. Usually the history that you’re directly communicating is gonna be whatever is really relevant to the plot.
Bunny: See appendix one for more information.
Oren: Right. I mean that’s basically backstory, that kind of history where you straight up lay out the events that happened. That’s backstory for your setting, and you should treat it the same way you treat backstory for your characters, which is that sometimes you need it, but only as much as you need.
When I’m creating a world that is big enough that I’m gonna be spending more than a short story worth of time there, I try to have signifiers of things that give the impression of the passing of time. I don’t want to have a world where it feels like everything there was built today. Everything here is from, we built it two weeks ago. It’s all modern. Everything’s from the same time period. Unless I’m doing an unusual world, a popup city on an alien planet or something.
Bunny: There’s still someone named Mike here? What’s going on? This hasn’t changed at all.
Oren: I try to think about, okay, what are different, easily distinguishable time periods that stuff can be from? And that’s not gonna work all the time. Again, sometimes you will have places where things were all built recently, but that’s its own thing. I have the ancient walls of the city. Those are the oldest part, and you can distinguish those in how they’re described. And then you can have the really nice buildings.
Those are newer but still pretty old. And then you can have the ramshackle buildings that burn down every time there’s a fire and those are gonna be brand new. So that sort of thing.
Chris: My setting has periodic, let’s just call them mini cataclysms—
Oren: Yeah!
Chris: —that tend to destroy buildings, instructors. So I thought it’d be fun.
Like, okay, there were city walls. They’re now past the period in which they would be using walls. They didn’t take any time to take the walls down. But the walls would basically be destroyed a lot faster because of the environment. So now I can put in old remnants of the pieces of the walls that are still there, they haven’t bothered to take down, but it’s not like a full wall anymore because that stuff goes away pretty fast.
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Bunny: Yeah, people love ruins. One thing that I’ve had fun with in this mining town setting is that the mining town itself is a ghost town, right? It’s been abandoned for a hundred years, 50 years maybe since it was at its peak. And so the protagonist that’s coming from a world that’s gotten a lot more technologically advanced, so that’s given me the opportunity to have the protagonist go around and comment on, “oh wow, that’s pretty ancient by my standards piece of technology, everything’s all rusty and falling apart,” and when there’s a shiny new piece of technology in this rusted, dusty old town, it stands out like ruins do, right, exactly. Finding a way to have the history really clash with the modern stuff, I think helps make the world feel like it’s had a progression.
Oren: Yeah, I agree. And you also wanna think about what is in here that needs to be explained, that is gonna stick out as weird to readers, and they’re gonna be like, what is that? A lot of the stuff we’re talking about here are subtle details that help make the world feel more real, but don’t necessarily need a big explanation, like Chris’s city walls that the town has outgrown and are now in ruins. That’s a cool detail. You probably don’t need to go too much into it. You could throw in some lines about it, but it wouldn’t be confusing anyone if you didn’t.
Chris: The only time I’ll probably mention it is I think I have one scene planned where there’s some gawkers that are looking at something and a convenient place for them to gawk would be to climb up on this old city wall. So it’s just a description. It’s not gonna really affect the plot that much.
Oren: But like if your medieval town has a giant glowing orb in it, even if the orb has been there for a long time, and to the locals, it’s just the orb that everyone already knows about.
Bunny: You know, the orb.
Oren: Yeah, the orb.
Bunny: Orby.
Oren: To readers, that’s gonna be weird and it’s gonna be very confusing if you mention that and then just keep going as if that’s a normal thing.
Bunny: Wait, you mean you don’t have an orb?
Chris: Yeah.
Bunny: What’s wrong with you?
Chris: Although, I would say that I think that the most important thing there is that you have a world where the orb fits in. If this is a fantastical element, you could give the orb history, but history by itself is not necessarily gonna make the orb feel less bizarre.
Oren: True.
Chris: So if our goal is to take something fantastical and make it feel like it’s a natural part of the world, we need to see other parts of the world that are orb-like, whether it’s, this world has lots of glowy things, or this world has lots of altars to a particular God that glow and for this city, it happens to be an orb, or in some way that gives it some thematic unity with the rest of the world.
Bunny: I’m gonna write a story set in Seattle, but instead of the Space Needle, it’s an orb.
Oren: Yeah, the Space Orb.
Bunny: And that’s the only difference. It’s a space orb. It’s just an orb.
Chris: Somebody has a story about somebody traveling to the most uninteresting, alternate worlds ever. Went to an alternate reality, and it’s exactly the same as this one, except for the Space Needle is an orb.
Bunny: You go to alternate reality, you go to Chicago and instead of the Bean facing downward, the Bean is curving upward now.
Oren: We flipped the Bean. It was a pretty pivotal moment in history.
Chris: I did some dangerous alternate world traveling for this.
Bunny: Worth it? Surely.
Oren: I do have an important tip for the writers at home, which is that if you love history and you love creating history, and you wanna tell your readers more about the history you created, there’s one weird trick. Nobody hates it. Everyone loves it, which is to make the history important to your plot. I’m not gonna say that gives you free reign to give all of the history, but it will greatly increase the amount of history you can give.
Chris: Yeah.
Oren: The most obvious example I can think of is The Broken Earth by NK Jemisin, which has a really weird world that has a lot of strange history about constant apocalypses and how the mages were enslaved and all that stuff, and that’s very important to the story and to the plot that’s happening now. So there is more of an opportunity to explain it.
Now, Jemisin still has to work it in over time. She can’t just open up with, “here, read this textbook and then I’ll tell you about the world.” But that allows her to do a lot more with it. In my book, I of course, ’cause I’m a huge nerd, I have a lot more history for that world than is in the story because most of it’s not relevant.
I included the bits that were relevant and a few bits that I probably shouldn’t have, but I thought I could get away with it when Chris wasn’t looking.
Chris: Not the silks. Silks had to go.
Oren: Yeah, you wouldn’t let me keep the Byzantine silk parallel that I was really excited about.
Bunny: You had a Silk Road, is that what I’m hearing?
Oren: I did sort of.
Chris: They were traveling at the time, so.
Oren: It was a reference to the Byzantine silk industry that was supposedly, this part’s probably apocryphal, but was supposedly created by smuggling silkworms out of China in a hollow walking cane.
Bunny: Whoa.
Oren: It’s a fantastic story, and I love that story, and I wanted to reference it, and Chris was like, no one knows what the heck you’re talking about, Oren. Stop that.
Bunny: Well, now you can put an asterisk in the book that says, “refer to podcast 521 at minute 15” or whatever.
Oren: Yeah, find out all about the silkworms. I’ve got history that I thought of about, the main character has a darker skin tone than some of the other characters that she encounters, and I’ve got a whole history to explain that. But I didn’t need to put that in the story. It wasn’t important.
Chris: Speaking of NK Jemisin, I think another good one is 100,000 Kingdoms, because some people like to have world mythology of how the world was made, and that’s one where it’s actually relevant because the story is about a struggle between three ancient gods who created the world. And so that world origin story is their backstory of their relationship, and it matters. Whereas if you pulled out an origin story for the world and it just wasn’t relevant, people, their eyes would glaze over pretty quickly at that point.
Oren: Yeah, and much like too much exposition in general, it’s not super common to find published novels, at least not published novels that have any wide readership, that have too much history, just because to get published, you generally have to understand that you want to cut that down to the minimum you can get away with. But there are a few, Lord of the Rings has both, right? It has the stuff about the mines of Moria, which is really interesting and contributes to the story.
And then it also has a bunch of stuff about various princes of Gondor and we don’t need to know any of that. Like that doesn’t help.
Chris: Yeah. When it comes to really old history, like you’re doing mythology for your world, if you don’t have Gods, you can use it to explain something. Let’s say your origin story explains how magic works to the audience. That might be helpful.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: I do think, again, people have to remember that it’s not just the fact that it fits your story. Also, how much you tell readers at once really matters. You can only get them to learn a few things at a time. So if you have this origin story that’s full of very useful information, you still probably can’t give it to them at once just because they can’t remember all of that.
Oren: Yeah, and I suspect tolerances for that are lower than they used to be. The Belgariad books, which have a lot of problems, but they open with, at least what I remember, and granted it’s been a while, maybe it’s shorter than I remember it, but I remember them opening with a very long creation story of how the gods made the world and how one of the gods was a dick, and then they had to fight him and then they did a lot of fighting and made an ocean. They’re like, this is this. It seems like a lot.
Chris: So, uh, hot tip. Don’t make your world creation story racist.
Oren: Yeah, that’s also a good idea.
Chris: I cannot not think about that. If you talk about the Belgariad and that origin story, it’s just oof, it’s messed up.
Oren: Well, the Belgariad is like the ultimate example of why a wizard did it is a bad explanation. ‘Cause that’s a thing that some people in fantasy or even sci-fi think is acceptable to be like, “yeah, well I have a world where people of different skin tones really are stupid, and it’s because Gods made them that way. I’m not racist. The gods are.” And it’s like, that’s not, mm-mmm. Mm.
Bunny: And who made the gods? Huh? Huh?
Oren: Or like [Dragonriders] of Pern, where we eventually get the backstory on why girl dragons can’t breathe fire. It’s not ’cause the author’s sexist, it’s ’cause the person who made the dragons was sexist. It’s just like, why? Just don’t do it.
Bunny: Yeah, you could just not.
Chris: Another thing that you can use a little history for even a little history in exposition is just building mystique around things. And I think that’s also really important to Lord the Rings.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Is that we build atmosphere where we build up Sauron. Sauron would not be impressive if he did not have a long history.
Oren: That’s true.
Chris: And even if we don’t necessarily need to know that history, having some of that history really builds him up as a villain. And so you could do other things if you’re introducing a new noble house, be like, oh, this was the noble house that was marked a traitor after the reckoning. You would have to keep it really brief and really focus on what is the impression that you want to create for this story element, and make sure that emphasizes that and that it’s a simple, iconic, easy to remember. But that’s another thing that history is great for, especially in fantasy.
Oren: [My] experience of both written stories and role playing games is that audiences have much higher tolerance for spicy history as it were history that has some kind of ooh factor of, okay, so this is the family that was cast out for having cowardice at the important battle. It’s like, oh, really? Tell me. That sounds juicy.
Bunny: Oh, the Real Housewives theory of exposition.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Yeah, just make all of your history sound like gossip, and you’re good to go.
Oren: Yeah, I mean, honestly. You know, people, they’re not gonna care that much about a trade deal, even if the trade deal is gonna be important later. But they might care about the merchant who made everyone’s clothes suck for a year ’cause they bought up all the good cloth, right. That’s a little more interesting, you know. To a certain extent there, you can even test it by just imagining, would my friends be interested in this story? Sometimes that can be a surprisingly good bar for whether or not this is worth including.
Bunny: Would someone go “ooooooooh” at it?
Oren: Yeah, exactly. That’s the perfect sound effect.
Chris: Another thing I think that history can be good for is helping to flesh out your culture and another place that history can show up. So simple things like readings, prayers and ceremonies, any symbols or ideologies people have can be shaped by past history, and so you can have a scene that is supposed to be a wedding scene or any other thing that’s supposed to be fancy, and you need people to say something that sounds grand, then you can reference any beliefs that they have or remaining, “Let’s never let the reckoning happen again,” you know.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: “For unity, so we never sunder again” or something like that, you can build it in. I do like having culture that has some level of memory. It’s not as simple as, “oh, there was a war, so we banned X,” which we’ve seen just way too many times. Oh, the eugenics war. Now no gene manipulation whatsoever. There may be reasons to ban eugenics, but people use, “oh, but there was a war, and so then we did this ridiculous thing.” It’s like, look, we’ve had lots of wars in the world and we have not banned love yet. So.
Oren: Yeah, I mean, we haven’t banned the things that actually caused the wars, let alone a random unaffiliated thing like love or friendship or like in Plus One, where it’s like, hey, the world is divided into people who work at the daytime and people who work at night. Why that? Because of the Spanish flu. That’s why.
Bunny: Really?
Oren: Yeah, that’s the explanation. ‘Cause the Spanish flu caused a shortage in workers and so they were more divided. It’s like, what is this? No explanation would be better than this.
Chris: There is cultural change that can be brought about by historical events where people shortly after a disaster are usually more motivated to ensure that it doesn’t happen again and take certain precautionary measures, and that can include having some kind of ideology that started, or new rules or something like that. But it’s just, be practical with it. We fought over oil and unfortunately have not banned oil yet, so.
Oren: Yeah. We wish.
Bunny: Turns out the things we go to war over are things we care a lot about most of the time and are probably going to war to keep ’em around rather than get rid of ’em.
Oren: Yeah. I would also encourage wherever possible to think of history in terms of things that make the story more immersive instead of adding friction. I see this is a thing people online sometimes like, ’cause they’ll be like, well, “the save icon is a floppy disc and a lot of people using computers don’t know what a floppy disc is. So in your setting, you should describe how something is weird and out of place like that.” But should you? I would argue no, usually, because that just makes the reader think that you’re going to go into that and then you don’t.
Chris: I do think that we have to consider cognitive load. Part of this is how much detail do you have room for for your world in your story? If the complexity of all of the other story elements are low and you have a fairly high word count, maybe you have room for lots of details and you can explain some of those details.
But at the same time, there can be a cost when we add more detail and especially if we’re making up new terms. And there is something to be said for just immersing somebody in a world and having context clues and some terms used in ways where you tell what they mean without stopping and explaining everything.
But that also can be a liability if we just add tons of unfamiliar words in there, especially for your first few pages when people are getting to know your story. It all just adds up to the point where it becomes really confusing and disjointed for somebody to try to read. So again, some terms are good and it’s not like you can’t do that at all.
It doesn’t mean you always have to explain terms and things you’ve added because you understand history, so you know that people do X, Y, Z, but that can become confusing and it all adds up. So just a limit on how many weird things that the reader’s just gonna run into while they’re just trying to read a paragraph and trying to understand what’s happening.
Bunny: For the most part, you should definitely name your historical events intuitive things. You’ll notice we usually do that in the real world too, right? It’s World Wars One and Two. They didn’t even have Electric Boogaloo in the second one, and you hear about something called the God War, you’re probably like, oh, it’s a war involving Gods. Pretty straightforward. If it was called Boopdi Wawa War, even if that’s something in your setting—
Chris: When the Boopdis and the Wawas went to war!
Bunny: Yeah, the Boopdis versus the Wawas.
Chris: Very brutal.
Bunny: Everything changed when the Boopdis attacked.
Oren: I can absolutely think of a bunch of historical things with names that do not make sense, and I wouldn’t hazard a guess as to say which is more common. But I would generally agree unless you are trying to make some kind of statement that is important to your story, you probably don’t want to name something that is neither Holy Roman nor an empire, the Holy Roman Empire. Yeah, it’s real, it’s from real life, but it’s probably not worth the time it would take or the confusion it would cause in most cases.
Chris: Descriptive names in general are gonna cause less confusion. So it doesn’t mean that you always have to use descriptive names or a reason not to, especially if you have a con lang and you want all of your world terms to feel like they come from the same language. It’s just, it all adds up.
So you have to conserve that where it’s not important. If this is not important to you, make it simple. And that way you can spend your complexity points on some other part of the story, some other part of the backstory, some other terms.
Oren: Yeah. One more thing I wanna cover before we end the podcast is the issue of whether your world was actually different if you go back in time, back in your history. And that’s a thing that for a lot of us is never going to matter because we are never going to tell a prequel story. We’re never gonna go back in time from the present. So you don’t have to worry about it too much. But if you are planning something like that, be it because you wanna tell a bunch of stories in the same world, or you just are big into prequels for whatever reason, that’s something I would consider because it gets real weird if your story is set 500 years earlier and everything is exactly the same.
Chris: Or 10,000 years earlier. Looking at you, Dune: Prophecy.
Oren: Oh man, I tried to think of a joke, ‘Cause in Dune, 10,000 years before the book starts, you still have the Atreides and the Harkonnens, the same houses. And I was like, okay, what joke can I make using a famous historical figure to show how long a time period that is? And I can’t because 10,000 years ago is 8,000 BC and we don’t know the names of anyone from that time period.
Chris: That’s too long before our recorded history.
Oren: The best I could come up with is, okay, so imagine if the Caesar and Magnus families, which are Julius Caesar and Pompe Maximus, or Pompey Maximus, respectfully, were still fighting for control of Italy, but times eight. That is how long these families have not only been around, maintained the same name and the same enmity. My gosh.
Bunny: It’s like if the earliest known customer service complaint.
Oren: Yeah.
Bunny: If the copper guy and the other guy were still beefing
Oren: If Ea-nāṣir’s copper industry was still around, times three or something. Alright, well with that I think we will go ahead and call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you would like this podcast to continue our long and storied history, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons who have been with us for quite a while. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
[outro music]Outro: This has been the Mythcreant podcast. Opening/closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Colton.
Narration styles: Some are good, some are bad, and some are just frustrating! They leave you wondering whose thoughts you’re reading, how the narrator knows so much, and why they have to act so damned smug. Or maybe it’s just bad storytelling disguised under the banner of an unreliable narrator. All of that is our topic for the week, as we discuss books that did their very best to turn our hairs gray with frustration.
Show Notes Dr. Strange Looks at All the Futures * First Person Omniscient * Eifelheim * The Last Murder at the End of the World * Black Swan * Ministry of Time TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Elizabeth.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [opening song]
Bunny: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Bunny, and here today is:
Oren: Oren.
Bunny: And:
Chris: Chris.
Bunny: So I’ve run the numbers and I already know everything you’re going to say because I’ve been very clever and I’ve guided you into a probabilistic path that will result in the best possible episode.
Chris: Oh, I see. So we just do what you tell us to do then.
Bunny: Well, I knew you were gonna say that.
Oren: Or alternatively, we don’t do what she tells us, but she knew we were gonna do that, and that was all part of the plan.
Chris: She was just using reverse psychology on us?
Oren: Or if we do what she was gonna say, then it was double reverse psychology.
Bunny: Look, I just have a hand of Uno reverse cards right here, and I’m not afraid to use them.
Oren: This is great because it means everything automatically makes sense, because if you think it doesn’t make sense, actually Bunny has complete knowledge of time and space, and this is the only way it would’ve worked.
Bunny: All the other universes where something happened slightly different, they just ended in ruin. So this is the only way that we’re gonna save the day.
Oren: It just makes sense. It just works.
Bunny: Don’t worry, it’ll be a hilarious romp. So much hilarity. Just very romp. Trust me.
Chris: Do you wanna tell me where this book hurt you and which book? [Bunny laughs]
Oren: It was in a lot of places, Chris.
Bunny: So many places in multiple places, and this is an episode that’s definitely not born out of Oren and I sharing grievance about certain books that we’ve been reading and I’m sure anyone on our Discord can already guess where this is going.
Oren: [grandly] Begin the ritual airing of grievances. [Bunny laughs]
Bunny: Today we are talking about frustrating narration choices.
Oren: That title was a frustrating narration choice because it’s hard to say.
Bunny: It’s actually clever meta commentary when I trip over my own tongue.
Oren: We’re very smart.
Bunny: Perfectly calculated it.
Chris: You had to do that, otherwise the day wouldn’t be saved.
Bunny: Yeah, Oren’s computer would’ve exploded if I hadn’t pronounced that in a horrible way.
Oren: Oh, no.
Bunny: So both of the main offenders today that inspired this episode were a version of pretty much first person omniscient. Starting with that makes sense because it seems like the perspective that’s easiest – or maybe not easiest, but has a very prominent ability to go wrong.
Oren: I have only read three first person omniscient narration stories, and they have all been bad. Not bad for unrelated reasons; the narration has actively contributed to their problems, and it’s like my bugbear, second only to oppressed mages.
Bunny: The thing is, it’s hard to have an all-knowing narrator who’s also a character, ’cause if they know everything, there’s much less tension. And there’s also just the question of why we aren’t just in someone else’s head. I don’t know if I can think of a first person omniscient story that wouldn’t have been better by just being third person omniscient or a limited perspective in a character’s head.
Oren: There are several different ways you can go with first person omniscient, and none of them work. First you can go with, well, they’re not a character in the story. They’re like God watching the story. But why bother with a first person pronoun at that point? It’s just gonna cause confusion. Just do third person.
Chris: If they’re not in the story, why are they talking about themself?
Oren: But if they are in the story, how on Earth do they have all of this information? And how does it not just make them OP? The answer is either it does make them OP and they are ruining the story by being there, or you just have to ignore the fact that they know all of this when there was no way they could know it.
Chris: They’re not really omniscient, but somehow they’re omniscient and we’re supposed to just live with that contradiction.
Oren: The example of that one was from this book, Eifelheim, that I’ve mentioned a few times. I really love Eifelheim. It’s very good. It has this omniscient first person narrator who just turns out to be a random friend of the protagonist. It’s like, how on Earth did you know all this stuff, man?
Bunny: Or at least all of the first person omniscient stories, to some extent that I’ve read have been like, the omniscient characters are like puppet master-type characters, and you have to hear them talk for the entire story because they’re narrating it. Even if they’re not puppet masters, they’ll pop in and provide commentary and I don’t want that. I want to read the story.
Oren: I don’t mind commentary. Omniscient can provide commentary in a way that works very well. You have two options with this. You can either have the first person omniscient narrator, just be there constantly, in which case their presence gets very old, or they can just disappear for long sections of the book and then suddenly reappear. And you’re like, what? Who are you? Have you been here this whole time? And I guess we should stop dancing around the bush. I’m talking about The Last Murder at the End of the World.
Bunny: Oof. That title.
Oren: Yeah, so spoilers for that, ’cause Bunny and I both had to read it and certainly our time was spoiled.
Chris: Wait, let’s be accurate. Neither of you had to read it. You’re not in class, this was not assigned reading, I wasn’t grading you, I was not giving you credit-
Bunny: And it was Chris’s fault! [laughter]
Chris: This is something that you punished yourselves with, okay?
Oren: We were so depressed from Chris being mean to us last episode about our short stories that we made a bad decision and went and read this book.
Bunny: It was a coping mechanism [mumbles indignantly] Our interfering leads were better than Abby! [laughter] They didn’t have Abby in my story, so…
Oren: I don’t know this for sure, but I looked at some of the reviews for this novel. Because this author just likes to do weird, trippy murder mysteries, which in premise is fine. Weird, trippy murder mysteries can be very interesting. But I noticed that fans of his previous books were in the Goodreads reviews being like, what is this? What’s going on? And I’m not positive because his books are weird and trippy. But the difference seems to be that in this version, he has introduced the character of Abby, who is an omniscient AI narrator, and I don’t think his previous books had anything like that, and I really think Abby is the reason that fans of his previous books didn’t like this one as much.
Bunny: Yeah. There’s also the setting. I don’t know if his other books have the strange asinine setting details that this one does, but man, I did not like Abby. I don’t think Abby added anything, and in fact, I think she subtracted a lot of things. She’s an AI that’s embedded in everyone’s head. Her role is to keep them feeling good and tell them the time when they ask, things like that. But she’s also got Dr. Strange powers. She’s calculated that the only path forward is if these things happen.
Oren: And much like with Dr. Strange. If you think about it for two seconds, you can immediately tell that that’s just complete BS. Like with Dr. Strange, it’s like this 50,000 universes, this is the only one where we win. It’s like really? There’s no other universe where, what’s his face—Chris Pratt guy didn’t mess up the plan to defeat Thanos, because you guys were like this close to beating him and then Star-Lord messed it up.
Chris: Or Thor aimed for Thanos’ head. They make a big deal of that.
Oren: There’s no universe where he aimed a little higher or just his aim was a little off and it went higher? Come on. And it’s the same thing with this book, right? The moment the convoluted reveal gets made, you’re like, wait, hang on. That was your goal? There are so many more efficient ways you could have gotten about doing that.
Bunny: The other thing about Abby is that, did you even pick up on the fact that she can apparently control people’s bodies?
Oren: The book makes a point out of making you stumble over things that you would expect to have been established earlier.
Bunny: So we find out that she can control them when they’re asleep, but it turns out, no, she can just control them anytime. You’d think this would factor into things. I’m pretty sure if I went back through the book and looked at it with that in mind, I could be like, why didn’t she just control that character then?
Oren: There are a few points where that happens, where you’re like, hang on, you can control most of the characters, and if you could do that, you could have solved this problem much more easily and you simply chose not to. Then it does other things where it’s like, well, I have to obey the human characters’ directives, but clearly you don’t. You disobey them all the time, or you can interpret their directives in such a creative way that it’s basically no different.
Chris: It’s supposed to be a murder mystery, right? So how does a murder even happen then?
Oren: Through a very contrived series of events. It’s very hard to explain. It’s like 10 levels deep of “Then this happened,” and then it’s like a Rube Goldberg murder.
Chris: Why didn’t the AI stop the murder?
Oren: There’s reasons, okay? There are reasons, and they do not make any sense.
Bunny: Once the actual murder mystery investigation starts, the parts when Abby is very minor or functionally not present and the characters are doing some good old fashioned investigating—those parts can be very good in places. Just proving the point that Abby should not be here.
Oren: Abby is just what drags that book down, like a weight around its neck. I don’t know if she’s supposed to be smug.
Bunny: I don’t think she’s supposed to be. I think she’s supposed to be neutral. I mean, she’s what inspired our episode on emotionless characters. She talks about how she’s not supposed to have emotions, but you could tell the author seems pretty smug about Abby.
Chris: The thing about a know-it-all character is that she probably seems know-it-all because she’s supposed to literally know it all. Puppeteers, not a great narrator.
Oren: Abby has a lot of problems that are not specific to her being a first person omniscient narrator, but her being a first person omniscient narrator makes them all worse because you can’t get away from her. You don’t even have the advantage of her being a normal character who could potentially have problems that they encounter, because to be omniscient, she can’t really have any problems. It’s just a no-upside scenario other than it technically allows you to withhold information from the reader so that you can have a bigger reveal. That’s the only thing it does, and it’s just not worth it.
Chris: If a narrator has an annoying personality, that’s hard to get away with. Again, this was one of my issues with 10,000 Doors of January, and this was just regular first person retelling. It was not omniscient. It just felt like the narrator took joy in scolding you and telling you what you think, and then in fact, you were wrong within the first line. The first paragraph, I just already wanted to punch her.
Oren: That’s the book that tells you that actually, this is a great love story and if you don’t like it, you’re an imperialist. Gotta love the nerve of that to be like, my story’s actually great, and just have the narrator tell you the story is good.
Bunny: See, Chris, I should have put that in my short story. I should have ended it with “And if you didn’t like it, you’re an imperialist.”
Chris: Make sure you summarize the entire love story too.
Oren: I should clarify. Unlike first person omniscient, I do not think first person retelling is a viewpoint to be generally avoided. I like first person retelling.
Chris: Yeah, it’s fine.
Bunny: That was also like pretty common, whereas first person omniscient is like extremely rare. I can think of maybe three books off the top of my head that use it.
Chris: I think it depends on how often we’re using first person. I think that we would find the number is greater if we found every single mention of the word ‘I’ in any book. But I think if we’re talking about where the narrator is calling attention to who they are and using ‘I’ a lot, I think we would get it down. Maybe A Series of Unfortunate Events. That one actually does have a first person narrator who is a person, who I think is supposed to be somebody who researched events after the fact. It’s unrealistic. At the same time, the book is light enough that I feel like it gets away with it a lot easier than if it was really serious, and the overall realism is low enough that I think that narrator gets more leeway.
Oren: You can get a lot of mileage by being funny. There is an issue with first person retellings, which is that you need to be disciplined. You need to have discipline. Pardon if that sounded weird.
Bunny: [laughs] Sit down on the caning bench.
Oren: You have to have self-discipline because first person retelling can be an excuse to indulge in bad habits. We talked about 10,000 Doors of January, where the character is just lecturing us on the fact that her story is good. And I’m not gonna say that couldn’t happen in some other viewpoint, but I think an author would be much less likely to do it. And then the same thing with something like Deadly Education, because first person retellings allow you to do some pretty powerful things. Like, you could pause the action for your narrator to talk, which normally in a normal limited perspective, you couldn’t really do that, because narration indicates character thoughts, so passing time. But that means that if you have a tendency to ramble, now there are no safeguards to stop you from doing that, and you’re just gonna ramble.
Chris: Again, first person tends to encourage people to get more into character and write in a more casual voice, which often is good. For a lot of writers that’s very helpful, but it also can encourage a little bit too much rambling. Related to this, of not using enough restraint, I’d like to talk about the thought dimension. So we say, oh yes, there’s no safeguards, but sometimes when there are safeguards, authors ignore them anyway. The thought dimension is what I’m calling it when you have a narration that is supposed to be unfolding events, so it’s not a future character retelling the story. It’s not an omniscient narrator that’s outside the story. It’s the character experiencing events as they happen is your narrative premise, but the thoughts just defy time and space. It can happen anywhere, but it’s usually most obvious in dialogue. So he’ll have dialogue like, ‘“Are you okay?” And then he’s looking at me with his deep blue eyes as though I’m insect pinned to a board. There’s only one time he’s looked at me like that before.’ There’s a whole backstory around that look and what that look from him means in the middle of a conversation.
Bunny: It’s time for my manifesto, reader. Settle in.
Chris: The premise here is that the character is somehow thinking all of this before they answer. You can tell, if the character comes to some conclusion that changes their answer, there’s no way to explain that other than they had all of those thoughts. There’s other parts of the narration that shows they must have been thinking all that, but like, who can think all of those things?
Oren: They’re just like Xavier in the X-Men movies who just freezes everyone and has a little chat while everyone’s frozen.
Bunny: It only works if they come out of the thought dimension and the other character has been snapping their fingers in front of their face for the last minute.
Oren: Are you in there? Are you okay?
Chris: Again, it’s just a matter of restraint about how much are you gonna prioritize pacing when you really want to talk about his deep blue eyes, and what kind of look he’s giving, and how you’re interpreting that look, all of the previous instances where he’s had that look. And I think a lot of authors just want to say all that stuff ’cause they like the nuances of reading deeply into conversations or other stuff like that. But I think you should just keep it trim, and then create pauses in the conversation for you to add commentary.
Oren: Just to head this off at the past, ’cause I’m sure some smart aleck is listening to this and thinking, oh, I will make a character whose superpower is that they can pause and have a thought dimension. I’m not gonna say you shouldn’t ever do that, but be really careful because you would be amazed at how many sequences the drama is going to depend on your protagonist not having a lot of time to think. If they can pause and think about things, there will be no tension. They will just see the obvious solution and do it. Before you get real clever, consider the potential consequences.
Bunny: Ah, the thought-dimensionator. Another book that gives into its impulses in the first person retelling and hamstrings itself with the specific premise it’s chosen to do the first person retelling within is A Ministry of Time: the other book that inspired this episode, and part of our Hugo Bait binge. So the premise is that the British government has a time machine and they’ve brought forward some people from the past. And the main character, her assignment is to basically host one of the guys who is like a sailor from Old England who is on an Arctic expedition that got lost. And so she’s introducing him to the world and teaching him things and also getting really horny over him in weird and uncomfortable ways.
Oren: As one does.
Bunny: But the problem is once the novelty of time travel stuff and the kind of comedy of manners witticisms that they exchange, once all that wears off, you realize that nothing is happening and nothing can happen. Because the reveal of the end of this book is that all these tiny moments, they mattered. You’re just not gonna see them pay off in this timeline.
Oren: I’ve had dates like that. Nothing is happening and nothing can happen. [laughter]
Bunny: Because the twist at the end of the book is that it’s the narrator writing this—question mark—for her past self so her past self doesn’t make the same mistakes, but the sorts of things that she points to as like, oh, don’t do this. Or she’ll go off and meditate and be like, man, if only I had done something a little differently. If only I hadn’t paused for 12 seconds.
Chris: That was the one where the narrator was constantly pointing at everything in the story and being like, and this would be super consequential.
Bunny: Yes, exactly.
Chris: That’s its own frustrating narration habit there.
Bunny: Pinky swear, this really super matters.
Chris: I know this seems boring to you, but I swear this will change the world. And it’s like, will it really? And then you go to the next paragraph, and this will upend time.
Oren: Many things can upend time and change the world, Chris, you don’t know.
Bunny: It’s like Butterfly Effect, the book, except you never see the hurricane that the butterfly summons, because that’s in a different timeline. Didn’t happen in this book.
Chris: I would actually say that effect is a subset of another thing that really frustrates me which is overhyping, or if I’m gonna be a little more critical, lying, which is the one where the narrator is basically overselling the content to try to make it more exciting instead of just having exciting content. And this one is that you’re talking about is particularly special because the payoff is completely outside the book, and so the narrator can just say whatever she wants.But a lot of times what you’ll see is that I have a lot of my lessons post, my critiques post, is a deliberate setup that raises expectations only for it to just blatantly not meet those expectations. Probably the most blatant one is The Alchemist. You have a chapter that ends with “And in that instant, Josh Newman realized that the world would never be the same again.” And then in the next chapter, it’s just, oh, the bookshop he’s working in, there’s a couple robbers.
Oren: By the nature of entropy, the universe is never the same again from moment to moment. So it’s not technically wrong.
Chris: Or in the beginning of the Remnant Chronicles, we’re doing all this kind of meta mystery, vague buzzwordy opening where, oh, wouldn’t you know what to know what this ritual is where they’re scraping the protagonist’s back with knives and it’s like, calm down. They’re just applying henna.
Bunny: Yeah. You’ve ever been to a festival?
Oren: This is how they put henna on you, okay. Calm down.
Bunny: special knife henna.
Chris: So I’ve seen a lot of those and it’s all just like, why? Don’t get me wrong, I do understand that you do wanna make your narration exciting and sometimes there can be some judgment calls to make over whether you are selling it or overselling it.
Bunny: The other problem with this narrator is also that when she’s not saying, “Don’t worry, this little moment, it matters, pinky swear, trust me,” she’s apologizing to the reader about the bad choices she’s making. The government program she works for is shady, right? So she goes along with a shady thing that they’re doing and you, the reader are like, aargh, when is something going to happen, and she’s like, I know I did the shady thing, please. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done the shady thing. Please. You gotta understand where I’m coming from when I was doing the shady thing. All right, moving on.
Oren: Look, I can see the value in a first person retelling of pointing out that the thing that they were doing in the moment was wrong. But that doesn’t help the fact that it’s boring.
Bunny: and it is quite a boring book.
Oren: An interesting one that I ran into recently was the Watsonian viewpoint, which in retrospect, I actually almost never see in published fiction these days.
Bunny: Yay, pop a champagne.
Oren: I almost always see it in unpublished manuscripts, and I try to tell the author, please don’t do this. The reason is it’s a bad viewpoint choice, and it was annoying even back when Arthur Conan Doyle was doing it. We just let him get away with it ’cause he’s old and famous. I actually encountered a book recently that used it, the Justice of Kings, which was just the worst. We have our Sherlock character, the Watson character, and then a third character who is the POV character. The Watson’s Watson, if you will. This one is unusually extreme, so it might not be entirely fair to judge the entire practice using this one ’cause she gets nothing to do in the first scene. She has so little dialogue. I thought maybe there was gonna be a reveal that she was a ghost and that no one can see her. But no, she just has no presence.
Chris: That’s something that I’ve seen happen in client works is if you don’t have enough for a character to do in a scene, it can just feel like they evaporated. And sometimes it can happen with a viewpoint character where it just feels like the viewpoint character just isn’t there anymore.
Oren: But the beautiful irony is that I have seen more direct Sherlock retellings, and they do not use the Watsonian viewpoint anymore. Usually what they’ll do is one of three options. They’ll either just make Sherlock the main character, they will make Watson the main character, or they will make them more equal co-protagonists and switch between them. The Mimicking of Known Success does that.
Chris: Yeah, it’s much better.
Oren: I really liked it, and it worked really well. That’s where the actual Sherlock style of story has evolved to. And then you just have occasional weird throwbacks like the Justice of Kings, where the viewpoint character is like a camera following the main characters around. And you might as well just use a non-embodied viewpoint at that point. What’s the point of giving it a character?
Bunny: Just make it an actual floating camera. It’s just Cambot from Mystery Science Theater.
Chris: Okay, I got another one. I gotta mention framing devices where people talk about the story. [laughter] So, Interview with the Vampire, there’s the boy who is technically supposed to be the interviewer, but it’s really just the audience for Louis to tell him like, “Oh, what happens next? What’d you do?” Or the Titanic movie where we have this whole framing device that’s just not completely unnecessary. Or even Name of the Wind where we gotta talk about how cool Kvothe is before Kvothe tells us his life story.
Oren: Chris, if the story is boring, that’s just because it’s about a real thing that happened and real life is boring sometimes.
Chris: It just feels like all of these framing devices, their actual purpose is just to hype the story.
Bunny: If you’ve got a character whose only role is to be like, “Wow, gee, tell me more, man, what happened next?” you don’t have confidence in your story to carry itself.
Chris: It’s very storyteller wish fulfillment. They’re inserting somebody to be like, “Oh wow, storyteller, your story’s so cool. As your audience insert, I’m totally riveted.” Honestly, I’m not a fan oftentimes of narrators talking about stories at all. Like 10,000 Doors of January, for instance, is very much about stories. I found it all insufferable.
Oren: As people who our entire lives at this point are built around stories, being lectured by the fictional narrator about how stories work doesn’t work well.
Chris: I think my issue is that usually when we talk about stories within stories, it has a very romantic culture and connotation where we’re saying what to me is just a bunch of nonsense that sounds poetic.
Bunny: [long noise] Oh man.
Chris: I just don’t have patience for that.
Oren: Well, I think with that final pet peeve, we are gonna have to call this episode to a close. And wouldn’t you agree, Chris, that it was a very good episode.
Bunny: Just as I predicted.
Chris: We’re gonna need a minute while I go into the thought dimension to review this episode and ask our listeners to support us on Patreon at patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: While Chris is off in the thought dimension. I am going to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
[closing theme]This has been the Mythcreant podcast. Opening and closing theme, “The Princess who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Colton.
Novels are a delicious meal, but sometimes what you want is a snack. A bite-sized bit of fiction. Hence, the short story. These compact narratives pack a punch, but they also come with unique challenges. Fortunately, if a short story doesn’t work out, you can move on to a new one relatively quickly. This week, we’re talking about the best practices when writing short stories and also getting our own work cruelly roasted!
Show Notes Bunny’s Short Story * How to Write a Short Story * Save the Cat * Magnum Opus * Storytelling Constraints * Deathslinger * Shattered Ascension * Honor Among Thieves * Chaser of Shadows * Hellgate Incident 24 * Gently Down the Stream * Dragon’s Hoard * The Dragonet Prophecy * Spinning Silver * The City Born Great * The City We Became * Vorkosigan Saga TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Sofia.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts: Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[Intro Music] Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is…
Bunny: Bunny
Chris: …and…
Oren: Oren.
Chris: Oh, sorry. This episode could only be five minutes long, so we need a topic that we can completely cover in that time. Quick, what should we do?
Oren: How about a topic about how this was supposed to be five minutes long, but ended up being two hours. Because that’s usually what happens when I try to do this sort of thing.
Bunny: [laughs] Unfortunately, I have to agree with Oren.
Oren: Or maybe we could just play the first five minutes of another episode as its own episode.
Chris: [laughs]
Bunny: What if we just played The Princess who Saved Herself for five minutes?
Oren: Yeah, here we go!
Chris: We could just cut it off at five minutes and then say To be continued, then promise somebody will make a follow up, and then never do it.
Bunny & Chris: [laugh]
Chris: So yeah, this time we’re talking about writing short stories, which is partly because I’ve recommended short story writing on the blog, and I’ll explain why.
But if you’ve been writing novels and really longer works for a while, you might not know how to pivot to writing a short story. And there’s lots of different types of short stories. There’s not necessarily just one way to do them.
At the same time, I think it’s worth going over some tips and what tends to work better for them. And I’m gonna focus on the 3000 ~ 5000-word length, just because that’s usually the standardized short story side that if you’re size it, if you’re submitting to a publication, people are writing.
But I don’t mind talking about other sizes if the need arises.
Bunny: Oh!
Chris: Oh no, I just rhymed.
Oren: You did it. There’s an excellent rhyme there, but you should obviously do is start by saving the cat on page three.
Chris: And that ends up being like the very end of the story.
Bunny: And the cat was saved.
Chris: The cat was saved. The end.
Bunny: To be continued.
Chris: To be continued.
So first: why two short stories?
We’ve talked before about how we work with a lot of writers—when we’re editing—that are on their magnum opus: Their first story, which is usually super huge, often a series. And what I personally experienced is very often you start this big passion project when you don’t know anything about storytelling, and then you learn a whole bunch of stuff because you wanna make your magnum opus that you’re super passionate about work.
But what ends up happening is, unfortunately because of practical reasons, it’s just hard sometimes to get something that you thought of when you were new and didn’t know anything to a really good place. It’s not impossible. Some people have done it, but it’s like pulling teeth. It’s real hard and you have to rethink everything.
And a lot of times you’re attached to everything, and you don’t want to give anything up. And so you’re working under 20 different constraints. We had a whole episode about constraints and storytelling and how they make everything hard. And it’s just really easy to get discouraged and think that’s how storytelling always is when your project has just made everything really hard for you. Because it can be really hard to rearrange those pieces.
So if you work on a short story, that gives you the chance to start fresh. Focus on your skills as they are now, and to also experiment, which a lot of new riders really need—to get some experimentation out of their system. So that’s a really helpful place to do it at the same time.
And then you could get a feeling of accomplishment because you could actually finish something that’s short.
That doesn’t mean it’s like super easy. It tends to be more intense per word than writing a novel, but it’s still a short length. Again, it’s easier to just get it done and call it finished.
Bunny: See, I can intellectualize why all of these points are good reasons to write short stories. And yet I am god awful at it.
I don’t think I would write a short story of my own volition. I’ve mostly been made to write short stories for various classes and granted. Those classes usually had us read short stories that were far longer than the short stories we were actually able to write for the class. So most of my frustrations with short stories come from specifically the 10-to-12-pages-double-space-Times-New-Roman-font-size-12 limitation.
But I just, I cannot. So I’m glad someone here has tips about it.
Oren: Yeah. I used to have fun with a biweekly little flash fiction “contest”. The prize was that you got a little emblem to put next to your forum name for a week.
Bunny: Oh yeah. I love flash fiction for some reason. I can do extremely short and long things, but the short story is simply the wrong length.
Oren: Yeah, it’s ’cause the flash fiction is enough for one kind of neat idea. And then the moment you’re like, okay, I need a second one, and then that just opens the flood gates and it’s like, why not all the ideas?
Bunny: Exactly. See, Oren gets it.
Oren: I do.
Chris: This is process advice, but again, if you have not been consuming any stories that are about the length that you wanna write.
Right, because that helps you get a sense of what kind of stories can you tell in a small space and helps get those ideas flowing. So I think that if you do wanna write a short story and you’re having trouble pivoting, one of the first things I would do is just look for how you can consume smaller stories on a regular basis.
But I do think that sometimes it comes a matter of if we’re writing longer stories, we have a sense of what kind of material we find motivating. And that’s gonna change because you can’t do some of the things you’re used to with a novel. But you can do other things that might not hold your attention for a whole novel.
And so, getting used to like, okay, this is what actually works for me at this length and this is what I like writing. I can take some kind of experimentation.
Oren: Yeah. Like I mentioned a few podcasts ago a manuscript that out of nowhere has a really intense car chase. Why does it have this? Well, the person watched Fury Road.
If you want to write about a car chase and there isn’t room for one in your novel, just write a little short story. Car Chase is a perfect thing for a short story. They’re fun, they’re tense, they’re easy to explain what’s happening. Go for it. That’s a perfect scenario.
Chris: So just to be mean and stir up some drama on this podcast.
Oren: Oh yeah…
Chris: I gotta point out something I’ve seen both of you do in the short story, that does not work very well. And that is the fraught interaction. Between two characters that have a long history together.
Bunny: No! [laughs]
Oren: Chris, no, no! You can’t take that from me. Come on, Chris, have you no decency?
Chris: It just doesn’t work very well at a short story length because again, what you learn is that that matters if you already have emotional ties to the characters. If you already understand their history, so that you can be invested in that conflict.
Whereas with a short story, you don’t have time to set any of that up, so you’re dropped in with characters you don’t know, with a history you don’t understand, and it really kills the emotions in their interaction. It really makes something that would be really heartfelt just fall flat.
Backstories in general require—
Bunny: Don’t take my backstory from meeee!
Chris: [laughs]
Oren: Maybe I want the emotions to die, Chris. maybe this is a story about emotional ghosts. You can’t be the boss of me.
Bunny: Ugh, I’ve been burned so thoroughly.
Oren: Yeah. I didn’t realize I was gonna be personally attacked on this episode.
Bunny: But you’re right though. I think that is another thing that I struggle with with short stories is that we want a climactic, heartfelt, dramatic confrontation, but you don’t have time for much context.
And it sucks because I want you to weep at my scenario, but you don’t care about it.
Oren: It’s not my fault that I love interactions between characters with lots of history. It is a medical condition that I have, Chris.
Bunny: [laughs]
Chris: People can definitely do heartfelt short stories, but I do feel like by default the ones that are most successful, particularly speculative fiction, short stories, tend to be the ones that focus on high novelty concepts and fun ideas and gimmicks, and not on creating deep emotions.
Because of that upfront investment in, okay, we have to get to know the characters and get to know their situation. And emotional investment takes time. So, I think that if you were gonna try to do that in a short story, you really have to focus in on it. You have to simplify, cut it down. And I’m not gonna say it’s impossible, but it’s gonna be a lot more difficult.
And you gotta think about, okay, how am I gonna sell my audience on this character real fast? And is the character in a really sympathetic position, for instance, for me to do that? So it’s definitely a higher bar, whereas I think the ones that tend to be do really well are just like, Hey, look at this cute, fun monster.
Oren: Yeah. Sometimes this can be a good opportunity to make use of one of those high novelty storytelling prompts that float around Tumblr and potentially other social media sites, but they’re like always screenshots of a Tumblr exchange. Some of those can work pretty well as short stories.
What if that frog that we see dancing a lot was trying to start a dance school or something? That could be a short story maybe, but like probably not the ones that are like, okay, so what if a woman sold her firstborn to both a witch and a demon, and then the witch and the demon had a custody battle, and then they had to co-parent and then they fell in love.
That probably wouldn’t work for a short story. There’s too many steps there.
Chris: There’s a lot of different steps there. Yeah, but here’s some example of concepts I’ve used for short stories. I have a short story—
Bunny: [sarcastic] Which are perfect and without any flaw. Cause I don’t do that tiresome, ineffective, dramatic character confrontation. Isn’t that right, Chris?
Chris: I mean, I do have serious short stories. I just think that the novelty ones work better. I’m just shoving them under the rug so that you don’t see them. [laughs]
Bunny: Are you gonna passive aggressively link to Honor Among Thieves with the show notes? Just to leave that there.
Chris: I don’t make the show notes. This is up to Oren.
Oren: But I was definitely going to do that, so…
Bunny: Oh, no. Cut it. Now I’m passive aggressive.
Chris: I didn’t name any names. I did not name any stories.
Bunny: Look, mine’s not published so you can’t prove it even exists.
Oren: Yeah, we’ll see about that.
Bunny: I don’t even remember what I called that one.
Chris: But again, these are things like little shadow creatures must tame the household cat that’s terrorizing them. It’s a fairly familiar situation. There’s something that’s different, but it’s also something that can happen relatively fast, like you’re trying to monitor a gate to hell, but your asshole coworker won’t get you in an important document.
Again, something that has something novelty in it, but is a relatively familiar situation otherwise, and is something that could be resolved quickly.
Oren: Based on reader feedback in a mild defense—but not really—of my bad habits. My two best received short stories on the site have been Deathslinger and Shattered Ascension.
Both of which have characters with backstories but getting that backstory across was the hardest and probably worst part of the story.
Chris: But those are also your longest ones.
Oren: That’s true.
Chris: Those are notably your longest short stories.
Oren: They are longer.
Bunny: They’re so good!
Chris: Which is fine if you decide that, okay, I wanna do my backstory and I need all this set up and I can’t fit it in the standard story length, and you don’t have your heart set on sending it to a publication or whatever, then yeah, go ahead! Make it a little longer! Make it a novelette instead or something that’s at a slightly longer size. Make it the size that it needs to be, and then you can try for a shorter idea for your next one.
Oren: And even in those two stories, I didn’t depend on characters who knew each other super well. In de Slinger, the protagonist.
Meets a character who she knew as when they were kids, but they haven’t seen each other for a while, so it’s not like they have a long history. And then in Shattered Ascension, the protagonist doesn’t know either of the two main characters who are also there with her. She’s only just met them. And so instead, I spent the time explaining this weird premise of what if everything was airships.
Chris: I do remember having to very carefully manage how your backstory and context was communicated in Deathslinger. I do remember working a lot on that.
Oren: Yeah, that was hard. It was a hard thing.
Chris & Bunny: [laugh]
Bunny: And that’s why you should write novels only.
Chris: [laughs]
Oren: Yeah, only ever novels.
Bunny: [laughs] See, I think the problem I have with a lot of short stories is that they feel like scenes from novels, and that’s because I’m used to writing novels and because I want them to be novels. And that’s how I end up doing these interactions that require so much context.
I think the first short story that I’ve written that was alright but not very good was basically just an action scene. It was just an action scene grabbed out of context and it still wasn’t very good for that reason. Cause I had to explain in the middle of combat how the magic system works.
Oren: Yeah! [laughs]
Bunny: And that was, difficult, let’s say. But required less personal setup.
Oren: I did basically the same thing for the first and possibly only short story I got to write for college.
Bunny: Wow. How’d you get away?
Oren: All of the classes said creative writing. And I finally found one that didn’t entirely lie.
We did one short story exercise. And I wrote something similar, it was an action scene. And with very little setup, it was like, assassins want to kill this lady and she’s very cool, so she’s not gonna get killed. And I turned it in, and the professor’s feedback was basically: It’s not very good. Make it better.
Which you’re right, it’s not very good, but I don’t know. Could I get something a little more specific?
Bunny: Right. And I think Chris, with the short story that you mentioned, of mine, that you’re subtweeting here: I made it more difficult for myself because not only was it this backstory between two characters, but they were also on a quest to retrieve or reach a magical object that also needed to be explained because it was affecting the environment. So there were eight different things going on at once.
Chris: Bunny. I hate to break it to you, but I’m not referring to just one story.
Bunny: Oh, no. [laughs] Wait, what else would mine have you read?
Chris: I’m so much a meany. I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t help it. I had to say it.
Bunny: Okay. Okay. Okay. You gotta name ’em then.
Chris: I don’t remember their names.
Bunny: Oh… [laughs] we were gonna fight about this.
Chris: That was one of them. The other one was actually a play.
Bunny: Oh, it was a short play with the monsters, wasn’t it?
Chris: Yeah.
Bunny: Okay. Yeah, that one too. I like that one though. Aw.
Oren: Please stand by as the Mythcreants hosts air their dirty laundry.
Bunny: [laughs] I mean, maybe I’ll just give you a link so you can post one of them, so that people actually know what we’re talking about here.
Oren: If you want, you might as well.
Bunny: I might as well.
Oren: If they’re available, I’ll take a link. I’ll put that in the show notes. Just see if I won’t.
Bunny: Yeah, I think Stormcaller was that first one. I will get you all a link so you can see how bad that short story was.
Chris: Yeah. Oren just has lots of them. Oren has even more of them than you.
Bunny: Look, I think Honor among Thieves is very good. Don’t listen to her, Oren.
Oren: It’s less bad than it originally was. You put it that way. It’s part of the expanse punk genre of stories where you can tell whoever wrote this had just recently read The Expanse.
Chris: Again, the other thing, backstory is huge. That’s a really big deal and trying to jump into super emotional moment without enough context…
But I think it’s also worth talking about, okay, how much stuff do you have in your story and how unique are you trying to make it? So you have a unique and complex world and tons of characters and lots of places and things. It can just be too much. That’s unfortunately a lesson I had to learn when writing short stories is that I don’t really have room. To do an interesting world.
Even in my novelette, Gently Down the Stream. I tried to do an interesting world and I realized it was a bit overburdened. That I struggled with that one a bit because the world was actually more complex than my 12,000 words short story could really handle.
Oren: I do remember there was a bit of discussion about whether we could have letter carrying dogs.
Bunny & Chris: [laugh]
Chris: I really wanted the letter carrying dogs.
Bunny: Oh my gosh.
Chris: I really wanted them.
Bunny: Okay, well now I want them.
Chris: That was the darling I had to kill.
Oren: We tried to figure out a way to make that work and we just could not do it.
Chris: Yeah, we had to kill, I had to kill that darling
Oren: But the dog is fine, to be clear
Bunny: This episode is just trauma. This is just short story related trauma, some of which is inflicted.
Chris: Now that I’m working on stories that are longer, that’s the thing I’m enjoying: doing more worldbuilding.
With the short story, again, it works much better if you just take a stock world from the nearest sub-genre. And then if you want something unique, make the story about that so that you’re not overloading. The story has to be directly about that.
I mean, Gently Down the Stream is a post-apocalyptic version of Seattle with a unique monster that causes a post apocalypse and then people live an entirely different way and it’s just, you know, it’s just too much.
Oren: I would say that the pick a standard sub-genre and then add a weird thing is a very successful way to do short stories. Because one of the issues with short stories is that they cannot deliver the same level of satisfaction as a novel because they’re very short and they aren’t gonna have the same attachment ’cause they are short.
So giving something that is a big novel hook. Is a good way to get people to read them. And good news: By the time the novelty fades, the story’s over.
Chris: And that’s also why they work really well for subversions. Cause you can then use that stock story and then make something different about it.
Oren: Yeah. I don’t have to do an entire novel from the point of view of a dragon. What is a dragon gonna do for the entire novel? I’m sure I could come up with something, but it’s not easy.
Chris: I mean, there are a surprising number of novels now about dragon main characters.
Oren: Yeah. But they all just turn into people. Boring!
Bunny: Yeah. You’ve read The Dragonet Prophecy?
Oren: Yeah, they’re just people.
Chris: They do kind of just become people.
Oren: They’re just people that are vaguely dragon shaped a little bit. Whereas when I just did it, it was just for a short story. It was for 2000 words. What’s the point of view of this dragon as adventurers attack her in her cave?
And that works great. I couldn’t have done that for a novel. There wasn’t a novel worth story in there, but it was fun for a short story, and it was neat. People were like, oh, that’s interesting. And also kind of gross, it turned out. But you know, you take what you can get.
Chris: Horror also can be novelty driven. So I think horror can actually work surprisingly well. cause you can bring out all of the surprises and kill a character right away and you’re done.
Oren: Yeah. Horror works well as a short story for the same reason. And that is that in a novel, horror fades over time. You get less scared of things as you learn about them with familiarity. And that’s not to say you can’t make a horror novel. You can.
It’s just more challenging, you need to figure out how you’re gonna keep the spook factor going—
Chris: or just do a much slower buildup.
Oren: Yeah. Whereas with a short story, you can have a spooky thing and then the story ends like BOO! Story over.
I have also personally found that spooky stories work well as short stories because if I’m going for a spooky ending, I often don’t have to figure out a way to get my character out of the trouble I got them into. Because they just die. Or some other spooky thing happens. And you still need a downward turning point or whatever to make it feel satisfying. But logistically, it’s easier.
Chris: Big twists work really well with short stories. So if you’re like, oh, that would be a cool twist, you don’t have to write an entire novel just to be a vehicle for a twist. You can write a short story instead.
And you don’t want it to be boring before the twist, but because there is less to get through, if you have a twist that really is surprising and works, there’s almost like less burden. You want some entertainment factor before there, but the twist could make the story more just because the story’s short.
Oren: So we could address the elephant in the room, which is: Can I write a short story and then turn that into a novel?
Chris: I think it’s interesting. The thing we usually see is, again, people making short stories out of their novel world and characters to advertise their novel.
I feel like that’s an uphill battle right there, because things inherently need to be simpler and less complex and nuanced in a short story, so they come off strong right away, and you’re not overloading yourself with complexity.
Whereas with a novel, if you make things more unique and more nuanced, that tends to pay off with a larger amount of space. So I feel like you would need to have some way to show something that is simple enough, and then be able to expand it into something more complex if you’re willing to just rewrite it. How canonical does this have to be?
Oren: Yeah, the examples I was gonna bring up are that there are a number of books that are on lists as being based on short stories. And they are—sort of—but they’re also very different from their source material.
Like Spinning Silver and Enders Game are apparently both based on short stories. And just based on the descriptions of these short stories, they were not available anywhere that I could read.
Chris: Oh, that’s too bad. I would like to read the original Spinning Silver.
Oren: But apparently it was about Rumpelstiltskin.
Chris: You can still kind of see the Rumpelstiltskin element in the novel, but I didn’t realize it until I was told that it was a Rumpelstiltskin story.
Oren: And then Ender’s game was supposedly different in some other way. I think Ender’s Game was really narrowly focused on the reveal of actually you were killing the aliens and you thought this was just a game.
Bunny: Spoilers!
Oren: So those are both very, very different. It’s not like you took the short story and then wrote a novel at the end of it. It’s like you took the short story as inspiration and then wrote a novel.
Bunny: I’ve actually managed to do that. I turned one of my flash fiction pieces into a game.
Oren: Oh, very cool.
Bunny: A branching game, which seems to have been well received. I don’t know. It got one five-star review on itch. And the short story was basically about—I guess spoilers for the game—It was about a bride who’s about to be married and she’s turning into a bug. She’s gaining the characteristics of a mantis. The groom kind of sucks and she eats him at the end.
But obviously, for a branching story, you have to have it go other places. Other than that, so it became much more fleshed out. I could not have kept it as simple as I did in the initial flash fiction piece.
Oren: Oh, wait, wait. I read the game. Okay. That’s why it sounds familiar. Yeah. I’m beta reading on the game itself.
Bunny: Yes, you beta read the game. That’s right.
Oren: It’s a good game.
Bunny: But yeah, I’d say it ended up being successfully fleshed out, but I needed an actual setting. I needed different ways that it could go. At one point I considered just calling her the bride the way I do in the original short story. But that didn’t really work for the purposes of a longer piece, what was functionally a novella. So I don’t know. It can be done.
Oren: The one warning that I’ll give is that it will probably not work to just use your short story as chapter one of a novel. If it does work, chances are your short story wasn’t a good short story to begin with because that suggests you did not really wrap up the plot properly. And you can see this in the book The City We Became, which is based on a short story. And the short story basically just becomes the extended chapter one.
But—spoilers for this book—the short story is the bad guy getting the shit kicked out of her and losing. And so the novel just has that as its opening and then at the end she barely manages to escape.
Chris: That is not a good opening for a novel.
Oren: It’s a bad opening and it makes everything else that comes after it feel way less interesting because the characters are slowly discovering their magic. But we’ve already seen like a giant magic city battle in the first chapter. So, none of this is that exciting.
Yeah. So just don’t, just don’t do it.
Also don’t take the epilogue and sell that as its own short story. I think it was Escape Pod which did that with like a Raksura book.
You’re listening to it like this is clearly not a short story. Like this is the end of some other story that I haven’t read. And then I finally found that Raksura book and read it and I was like, Hey, guys, what the heck?
Bunny: [laughs]
Chris: If you’ve already written a novel and you have fans and you want tidbits for your fans, then it becomes more reasonable to write short stories with those characters and that world because they already know and like the characters.
Oren: Yeah. I guess if your name is Lois McMaster Bujold, you can do it.
Chris: Martha Wells has some short stories that are related to her that Raksura books with the same characters. They’re not bad if you know the characters. But there’s so many characters and she wants to put them all on her short stories, and it just wouldn’t be any fun if you didn’t know and like those characters already, but as a way of something to give fans while they wait, for instance, for the next novel, then yeah, they’re pretty good for that.
Oren: All right, well, I think we are gonna have to call this podcast to a close. We’re out over time, once again. I told you we couldn’t stay within the word count limit!
Bunny: [laughs] At least it’s not two hours. Maybe someday we’ll turn this into the first part of a two-hour episode.
Chris: And if you can spare a dollar for this poor podcast that has gone over time, please go to patreon.com/mythcreants and become a patron today.
Oren: And before we go, I’m gonna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Amon Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of marble. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek.
We will talk to you next week.
[Outro Music]This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Coulton.
If you think about it, podcasts are a separate world that only consists of audio, so we’re already a kind of portal fantasy. Or maybe portal fantasy is any fantasy story in which someone goes through a doorway, aka, a portal. What, are those not great definitions? Fortunately, we’ve got some better ones in this week’s episode, plus a healthy debate on where exactly Hotdog Finger Dimension falls on the scale.
Show Notes The Ten Thousand Doors of January * No Exit * Hero With a Thousand Faces * Idiocracy * Outlander * Oxenfree * Demogorgon * Hotdog Finger Dimension * Rock World * The Wormhole * The Other Mother * At Attin * Neel * Super Scouts * Enchanted * Hot Frosty * The Ministry of Time * Amphibia * The Owl House * LitRPG * Otome Game * Stargate TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Ari.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast. With your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny.
[Musical Intro]Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren. With me today is…
Chris: Chris
Oren: And-
Bunny: Bunny.
Oren: All right, everyone, we quickly have to go through this magical gateway into a world where the Mythcreant podcast doesn’t have a portal fantasy episode.
Bunny: Whoa.
Chris: What is this world like?
Bunny: That’s not real.
Oren: It’s so weird and different. It’s so strange. Wait, actually, this is this world. We don’t have a portal fantasy episode. I’m so surprised. I was sure we had done portal fantasy at some point.
[laughter]Bunny: I mean, when you think about it, isn’t any story where a character moves from a familiar place to an unfamiliar one a portal fantasy?
Oren: Yeah, portal’s just a door. So if your character ever goes through a doorway, that’s portal fantasy, boom. Done. Podcast over.
Bunny: If they’re stuck in the same room, well, it could be a metaphorical door.
Oren: Yeah, the door, anything could be a metaphor if you think about it.
Chris: Yeah, I mean, 10,000 Doors of January taught me that we have tons of stories about doors, [laughter] so the door’s real. So we’re definitely living in portal fantasy.
Bunny: Look, No Exit is a portal fantasy. No, they don’t leave the room, but their feelings.
Oren: Oh man, I love that book so much ’cause it’s so proud of being like anti-establishment, but it’s basically just reusing the arguments of Joseph Campbell, which is that anything can be whatever you want as long as you call it a metaphor. [laughter] Anyway, so we’re now gonna take the portal to Sandwich Land for discourse. Because we have to decide, what is portal fantasy?
Chris: It’s true. Is Idiocracy a portal fantasy? Portal sci-fi maybe?
Oren: You know, it’s, it’s certainly in the area, right? It’s in the vicinity.
Bunny: You know, if you count time, travel as portal, that really broadens things because that’s a pretty big question, isn’t it? Right? Like Outlander, that’s one where you portal back and forth between, I don’t know, ancient Scottish Times and World War II or something. I don’t know. I haven’t read that one.
Oren: Well, 1700’s Scottish Times, but sure, sure.
Bunny: But like, old Scottish times, I think, I think.
Oren: Yeah. Old timey Scotland.
Bunny: Old Timey Scotland, or Oxenfree where there’s a bunch of time loops. But I wouldn’t call that one portal fantasy. It’s just, it’s also got shenanigans like that.
Oren: Well, as with any genre, it is defined by an association of related traits that a story will have some of, and maybe not all of them. The most important feature, I would say, the one that really makes us go, ‘yeah, this is portal fantasy’ is like a different world, like a different world that the protagonist is unfamiliar with and it’s like, ‘whoa, what’s going on?’ Which is why I would say Outlander feels more like portal fantasy than something like Oxenfree. Because even though in Oxenfree, I think you do go through some actual portals at various points, you’re not really being taken to another world. It’s the same world. It’s just a little weirder than you thought.
Chris: I will say in urban fantasy, like Neverwhere for instance, it can be a portal fantasy world technically being in the same world. I think the point is that the character goes from the familiar to the unfamiliar, to the point where there are different rules that they have to operate by in the other world.
Oren: Yeah. And different urban fantasies will have different levels of separation between the human world and the magical world. Like sometimes they are very sharply segregated and at that point, sure. If you wanna call that a portal fantasy, I’m not gonna stop you; I’m not gonna stop you anyway. You can call portal fantasy whatever you want, but I won’t scold you I guess is the difference.
Chris: I mean, at the same time, we could say that Luke goes from his familiar home in Star Wars and travels, and that’s unfamiliar.
Bunny: See, see! Anytime you go somewhere unfamiliar!
[laughter]Oren: You see the reason why I would say that Star Wars is not going to trigger anyone thinking it’s portal fantasy is simply that, sure, Luke leaves Tatooine, but he’s still very clearly in the Star Wars galaxy, which is sort of the same everywhere. It’s like there are some minor variations depending on where you go, but it’s not like a completely different world that he has no experience with, right?
Bunny: Okay, okay. I have some ones that I want us to fight over, okay?
Oren: Okay. Yeah.
Bunny: Stranger Things.
Chris: Ehh, I’m gonna say no because they don’t spend enough time in the Upside Down.
Oren: Yeah.
Bunny: There are some of these which are like, it feels like it’s a portal from the other perspective, I guess it’s a portal fantasy for the Demigorgan.
[laughter]Chris: Who is not a protagonist. If a Demigorgan was the protagonist of the first season of Stranger Things, sure.
[laughter]Bunny: Everything Everywhere All At Once.
Oren: Hmm.
Chris: Mmm, I’m gonna s- I’m gonna say no.
Oren: Hmm. I would say no. ’cause again, like the places that she jumps to are mostly different, but not that different except for the hotdog finger dimension.
Bunny: Oh, there’s Rock World, right?
Oren: Like there was Rock World very briefly, right? But for most of that story, it’s not like she’s going to a place and it being like, wow, everything’s so different. It’s more like things are the same, but like a little different.
Chris: And on top of that, most portal fantasies aren’t about world hopping. They’re about getting to know the other fantastical world or adjusting your life to live there in some way.
Bunny: All right. What about Deep Space Nine.
Oren: [laughs] There is a literal portal.
Bunny: Yeah.
[laughter]Oren: There are some episodes of Deep Space Nine, I would argue could constitute portal fantasy or portal sci-fi as the case may be. I wouldn’t say DS9 as a whole. Sure, the wormhole is there, but like functionally, it’s not any different than any of the other Star Trek shows when they just go to another planet. It’s just you go there through this cool special effect. That would be my argument. But there are definitely some Star Trek episodes that are very portal fantasy.
Bunny: All right. Last one. Coraline.
Oren: Hmm.
Chris: Hmm!
Oren: Hmm!
Chris: Y- I’m inclined to say maybe yes on that one.
Bunny: Because she moves back and forth, which is a little unusual.
Oren: Yeah. I’d say my view core-aligns with that.
Bunny: Ah-oh (painfully).
Chris: Oh, no.
Oren: [delightfully chuckles] Got that really buttoned up, you know?
Bunny: Oh [laughter] I, I see what you did there.
Oren: Oh, see, it’s spreading.
Chris: I refuse to engage.
Oren: Take the high road, Chris. But yeah, I would say that if nothing else, it certainly has strong portal fantasy elements. Right? Even though she doesn’t spend the whole time there, there’s a very strong aspect of ‘wow, this place is super different that I’ve gone. Right? Everything’s weird. What’s happening?’
Chris: Okay, so can we talk about Skeleton Crew?
Oren: [laughs] Oh gosh. Oh, Skeleton Crew is so funny. All right, mild spoilers for Skeleton Crew. It’s the new Star Wars show on Disney Plus, and they so desperately wanna do Star Wars portal fantasy! [cackles]
Chris: It’s so interesting because it’s technically not a portal fantasy, but they’re clearly trying to make it one just by changing various details. Because one thing that we noticed when we were watching the trailer for skeleton crew is how much, like just the neighborhood that they show where the kids live looks like a normal suburbia.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: It’s deliberately designed to look like the real world, which is kind of off putting ’cause it’s Star Wars.
Oren: Yeah. I know several people who couldn’t handle that and were just like, ‘Nope, sorry. I can’t do it. I’m out. This is, this doesn’t look like Star Wars. This looks too normal. It’s weird. It’s creepy.’
Chris: And when they introduced the two, like first two kids characters, the two boys, they’re like clearly Star Wars fans.
Oren: One of them is also an elephant, but yes.
Chris: It’s true. We still have some Star Wars in there. But what they do is they’re like, oh, well they just love Jedi, right? And they’re just talking about Jedi adventures, but it’s just clearly code for like they love Star Wars. And then at the end of the first episode. Again, spoilers, but it’s just the first episode, they basically do something that is equivalent to going through a portal where they end up in a ship and press some buttons. It’s kind of contrived, but you know, we do what we have to-
Oren: -for reasons.
Bunny: Wait, as someone who hasn’t seen the show, what is the premise? It’s Star Wars in suburbia?
Chris: So, no, no. That’s the thing, is that they start in what is designed to feel like a familiar suburbia, And then they find a hidden ship inside a hill, and then the ship takes off with them in it and goes towards other places in the galaxy. And they don’t know their way home.
Oren: Yeah. And their planet is surrounded by a plot barrier that keeps anyone from knowing about it.
Chris: So like there’s an active, yeah, barrier that they pass through that separates their planet from the rest of the galaxy.
Oren: And it is so clearly aimed at young Star Wars fans, that it’s a kids show obviously, and it is designed for kids who like Star Wars. My only question is; are there any still of those? Do kids like Star Wars? Any? I don’t know.
Bunny: Oh.
Oren: I don’t know if kids still like Star Wars.
Chris: They want kids to like Star Wars so they can sell toys.
Oren: Yeah.
Bunny: Oh, I’m looking at the posters. One of them is just Dumbo.
Oren: Yeah, that’s the elephant alien. He is a good friend!
Bunny: One of them is, at least in one of these like promo shots, the kid just looks like the kid from a Christmas story. He’s got the same glasses too. And then this other one, the girl is just fully wearing a, like a JanSport looking backpack.
Oren: Yeah, ’cause they’re normal kids! They’re normal kids from a normal planet, in Star Wars! [laughter] The elephant’s name is Neil, but it’s spelled weird.
Bunny: Oh, you know what? You know what the elephant also reminds me of? There’s this old Mystery Science Theater movie called Pod People, and there’s an alien in it named Trumpy who’s got basically that exact same face. That’s a little unnerving.
Oren: Yeah, there we go. Mystery Science Theater returning with a vengeance.
Chris: Yeah. I can just tell some executive is like, ‘okay, so we want young kids to watch this show. Especially boys.’
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Or we just expect, you know, they start with the boys. Introduce the boys first in a way that’s designed for them to be most relatable. And that could just be like, ‘well. Boys won’t watch it if we make it about girls who knows.’
Oren: Rude of you to assume it’s the fantasy of many boys for a pretty, super competent, girl to be kind of mean to them. [laughter] I wouldn’t know anything about that.
Chris: Right. Some executive is like, ‘okay, we want a relatable character that a kid can imagine themself being, and then getting to suddenly explore the Star Wars universe and hang out with your smugglers and maybe look for a Jedi and all those other things.’ I could just see the marketing pitch.
Oren: There’s a section that is obviously advertisements for a ride.
Bunny: Oh my gosh.
Oren: Right? The part where they go into the gun turrets and it’s like the camera panning is such a way to be like, ‘whoa, look how cool this is! You are sitting in a Star Wars turret!’ [laughter] Oh, it’s amazing. I don’t dislike the show, it is just so funny watching them do this!
Bunny: All these posters are also kind of like, they’ve got the kids on Star Wars bikes, I guess? But it’s arranged in a way that it looks like an eighties movie, E.T looking.
Chris: But they hover, so they’re not regular bikes, you see, because they’re hovering.
Oren: Yes, they would really like you to bring your ET nostalgia to this movie, please, if you’re a grownup,
Bunny: Maybe the Ralphie kid is the elephant. Maybe they’re just the, maybe that’s just what he looks like outside of the elephant. This is fascinating to me. I’ll stop looking at pictures now.
Oren: So the point of all of this, 15 minutes later, we have agreed that portal fantasy is a kind of broad genre, but it has some characteristics that you start to recognize after a while.
Chris: One of which is again, I recently discovered that portal fantasy can be used in more ways than I had previously imagined. But one of the key elements that they often have is a super relatable protagonist for the audience to identify, often a blank character, that’s the main character. Because that’s the reason a lot of times for doing a portal fantasy in the first place, is having a more relatable, main character. And so it’s a complimentary choice to make that main character fairly bland.
Oren: Yeah, and usually it also allows you to have a main character who is in a fantasy world, but has the same cultural touchstones as your audience, or at least some of your audience, and that’s helpful. It also usually decreases the amount of explaining you might have to do because in an urban fantasy setting, there’s a higher chance that you’re gonna be expected to explain how magic has always existed parallel with the human world. But the more separate they are, the easier it is to avoid that question, which is why Skeleton Crew is so funny ’cause it doesn’t get either of those benefits. Like they have to explain how this like regular earth planet can exist in Star Wars and none of the characters have the same cultural touchstones as anyone from real life, except that they’re Star Wars fans.
Chris: Look, we can make things in their universe that are coded as things in our universe.
Bunny: Maybe they should have just set it on Earth.
Oren: I’m sure they thought about making it set on Earth and decided that was a step too far. I’m sure someone was thinking-
Chris: -somebody definitely suggested that, yeah.
Oren: Can we just do the Super Scouts from the old Battlestar Galactica series? Can we do that? And somebody with good sense was like, ‘no, that is a step too far, sir. They’re not ready for that.’
[laughter]Bunny: I don’t know. I think Dumbo looking characters are automatically sympathetic.
Oren: He is a fun character. I do like him. You know, like the story is doing its job. I like most of the characters.
Chris: Which honestly, again reinforces my argument that Idiocracy is a portal fantasy because Idiocracy makes a huge deal about the protagonist being average in every way.
Oren: This is true.
Bunny: Oh yeah.
Chris: And has the same, like, adjustment to life in the future that is pretty typical of a portal fantasy.
Bunny: So it can be a portal fantasy if you go into the future. It can be a portal fantasy if you go into a past, if you do time loops, it’s probably not a portal fantasy. If you go to another world, it’s a portal fantasy. If there’s just a multiverse, it’s not a portal fantasy, [it’s] world hopping.
Oren: At least it’s less likely to be, right?
Bunny: It’s less likely to be.
Oren: Not impossible.
Chris: We’ll not eliminate a multiverse as a portal fantasy, but I would feel like it has to have some key characteristics about how the protagonist adapts to life in their new environment, basically.
Bunny: Right, and they don’t have to be farm boys.
Oren: That’s true. Although they could be.
Bunny: They could be.
Oren: That said, I have noticed that there are some, shall we say, weaknesses that come up a lot in portal fantasy stories. I don’t think any of these are inevitable, but they’re common enough that they’re worth thinking about. One, maybe this is just me, I’ve brought this up with other people and they look at me like I don’t know what I’m talking about, so maybe this is only a me problem; but I get really tired of the inevitable learning how the world works sequence because it sometimes just feels like, I wish they would just figure it out already and move on.
[laughter] And at least in some specific stories, I have encountered this problem where it’s really boring to learn about the world in info dumps. That’s not how we, the audience, wanna learn about it. But there are many situations where it would make the most sense for the character to request info dumps from like their allies who are from the world, or whatever. So then the author just has them not do that so then they can be surprised by more things, but I don’t know; they’re in a strange, dangerous world, you figure they would ask how things work? Like I’m sure there are limits, right? If you go to another country, you can’t just have everything explained to you. But at least if I was thinking clearly and I ended up in, I don’t know, Singapore, I’d ask some basic questions about how things work here.
Chris: Yeah, no, I see what you mean. And definitely writers can have a habit of just, okay, let me explain my entire magic system in three pages. I do think a lot of that is a matter of implementation. Like for instance, if you had a show doing that and they were talking and it would be exposition, which again, this is why it’s actually really useful for visual media that have less ways to give information and have to do more exposition and dialogue because it makes that exposition feel more natural, but you could have a character explain a few key things to the audience and then just cut away. And really what’s happening is your main character is learning more right off screen, speed up that process. So there’s definitely a balancing act to how much do you carefully teach the audience and how much do you speed up the story.
Bunny: Oh yeah. I was just gonna say that I think there are different levels of it too. Like for example, Oren, I think you might have mentioned this in your notes, but Enchanted.
Oren: Yeah, reverse portal fantasy.
[laughter]Bunny: Right, reverse portal fantasy from the fantastic to the mundane, where there’s less that has to be explained to a character like that. There’s still a lot that needs to be explained. She’s still like singing to the rats and stuff, but there’s probably less that needs to be explained in that portal fantasy than there is in some portal fantasy that goes somewhere completely unfamiliar.
Chris: It’s similar to when you have a time travel romance where the love interest comes from like, the past, and is unfamiliar with the present day. You get the kind of jokes about how, ‘oh my gosh, cars.’ But at the same time, you definitely, since the audience already knows how the real world works, you definitely don’t want to sit down for any lectures. You wanna skip all that, which is again why we see funny things where the protagonist, like the love interest or whatever, just learns things super fast. The latest conversation I’ve hilariously heard about this is with Hot Frosty, the Netflix Christmas movie.
Oren: Oh boy.
Chris: About… [laughs]
Bunny: Ah, the famous portal fantasy, Hot Frosty.
[laughter]Chris: About a snowman that comes to life and is like super ripped and is really hot, right? Where again, what they do with a lot of these characters that are– that come to the real world and dunno how it works, is they look at the internet or they watch tv, and then suddenly they know everything so that we can just skip over that learning process.
Oren: Yeah, for, it’s like that scene inevitably happens as soon as the writers are done making jokes about how the love interest doesn’t understand the modern world or whatever, it’s like once that concept gets in the way of moving the plot forward, they’re like, ‘okay, watch TV for a while and solved. Right. We’ve figured that out.’
[laughter]Chris: Suddenly they know everything.
Bunny: It’s also an issue I had with Ministry of Time, which rides very high on its novelty at first of like this man from like a doomed Arctic Expedition has basically been rescued through time and brought to the modern day UK and the story is mostly about acclimating him to the modern day UK until he just becomes a regular dude.
Oren: Yeah.
Bunny: Like at some point the story is like, it’s still about acclimating him, but he’s going for runs and stuff like that and seems to basically get things. And at that point I was like, where’s the novelty anymore?
Oren: Yeah. Going for runs on purpose? What a weird mutant.
Bunny: Bizarre.
Oren: A strange person from a forgotten era.
Bunny: And then there, there would even be like, ‘oh, he is something of a modern man right now.’ And then it just oscillated between how much he was actually a modern man or not, because the story sure doesn’t have anything else going on other than this novelty. But you know, we’ll get to that in a later episode.
Chris: I think it’s also worth talking about what kind of plot stuff a portal fantasy can do. I’ve noticed that in a lot of stories, like having a protagonist that comes from the real world, it’s used for relatability but can also be used to single them out in various ways that either make them special or give them like plot problems because they don’t know how the world works and now everybody’s after them, or something like that. Or give them special knowledge that other people don’t have. Like if your character goes to Fantasy World and they bring a phone, actually this happens in Amphibia, [the] main character brings her iPad in [and] it takes quite a long time before it runs out of battery.
Oren: Don’t they like, recharge it with an electric eel at one point?
Chris: [laughs] Something like that.
Bunny: Is there wifi in Amphibia?
Oren: No no, she just downloaded a bunch of movies before she left.
Bunny: Oh, I see.
Oren: Seems to be the premise.
Chris: But sometimes characters know science or tech and then use that to their advantage as a way of giving them some empowerment, et cetera.
Oren: Yeah. Although there is a whole genre of anime that over does this to the point of me instinctively not liking it anymore, which isn’t really the tropes fault, but I just, I can’t handle it now when a character is like, ‘aha! Now with my modern knowledge of economics, I’m gonna take over the world,’ it’s like, ‘no, God, please don’t.’
Bunny: ‘With my modern knowledge of Bitcoin, this kingdom’s gonna get rocked!’
Oren: ‘It’s all on the blockchain, baby!’
Chris: One thing that we haven’t mentioned is, in some portal fantasies, the protagonist goes into a book or a game, which has some different dynamics. Obviously we could talk about lit RPGs.
Bunny: Let’s not talk about lit RPGs.
[laughter]Chris: Yeah. Well, the whole idea as a protagonist goes leveling. But I do wanna talk about this, the weird niche portal, fantasy genre, isekai genre I found on Crunchy Roll, which I’m calling Villainous Isekai. I found a bunch of anime shows that are specifically about a protagonist that goes into otome game, which is like a dating sim. And these ones are interesting because usually, again, the purpose of having it be portal fantasy is partly for relatability and you have a super relatable main character, but these shows often don’t show the character in the real world environment, like, at all.
Bunny: Hmm.
Oren: [wheezes]
Chris: They’re just, it’s like not there. They, you start when they’re already in the otome game. So it’s very interesting because that part is so cursory. What I realized about these ones is that there are only portal fantasies to explain why the protagonist knows the future, because she knows how the outcome of the game works, right? And has to avoid a doom that’s coming. Which is why she always ends up in the game as the game’s, the villainess instead of the heroine.
Oren: Although you mentioned at least one that did the same thing without having the game premise, the protagonist just goes back in time.
Chris: That one’s not isekai. It’s a very similar premise.
Oren: But that’s my thing is that like this particular branch of the isekai genre is starting to mutate, where the actual isekai part is getting more and more vestigial to the point where we have figured out how to just dispense with it and have [a] normal fantasy story. Nature is healing.
Chris: Yeah, I mean, some of them use the knowledge more actively, like, ‘Hey, I know that if these characters have this romantic moment, then this outcome will happen and that will lead to my doom this way. So now I need to specifically intervene in this character’s life to prevent that game outcome from happening.’ Right. Which would be a lot more active, almost like playing the otome game in its own way. But a lot of others are just like, ‘Hey, I know I’m going to die at the end of the game, so I gotta prevent that from happening.’ And you could do that with the main character, just getting foresight about the future too. But yeah, the other one I saw that was, that had a strangely similar premise, was about somebody like just as she was dying, getting thrown back in time so that she’s like, her mind is older but she’s in the body of her younger self at a specific time in her life and decides to take a different life path in order to avoid the doom that she knows is coming.
Oren: All right, well I have a question for you all. Portal fantasy question, if you will, with these traditional portal fantasies, the main character goes from the normal world into a magical world. The main character is usually a kid, again, in the very traditional version of the portal fantasy. So the question; must the child return to the regular world or may they stay in the magical world? Discuss.
Bunny: Hmm. I feel like authors have an incentive to send them back to the normal world.
Oren: Do they? Hmm.
Bunny: They do because otherwise it’s like, ‘and then the kid was gone forever.’
Chris: It depends on how you start the story, because if you do give them loving parents and then they disappear into the magical world and never return again, that definitely feels like an unresolved plot hook right there.
Oren: Yeah. But if I’ve never seen their parents and have no investment in them, do they really matter? Could the child simply not decide that, actually, it’s not that important?
Bunny: I feel like you could easily end up with a scenario that a lot of maybe vampire stories do, where although your audience are humans, but it’s just like, objectively better to be a vampire, so they have to like contrive ways for humans to be cool and the vampires to be human and stuff just so that your audience doesn’t feel like they’re being crapped upon.
Oren: In this case, I think, I mean, Chris said that it depends, and that’s absolutely true, right? Like the two obvious examples are Owl House and Amphibia. And in Owl House it would’ve been really sad and dismal and depressing if Luz had just gone back to the human world.
Chris: So are you saying it wasn’t sad and depressing at the end of Amphibia?
Oren: Uh, hang on. I’m getting to that. [laughter] I would say it was, it was sad, but I wouldn’t say it was depressing or dismal, because Amphibia started off with this theme of sometimes you have to move on, sometimes things change. That was the whole point of Amphibia. And that was not the whole point of Owl House, so it would’ve just been a needless punch on the fans if that had happened.
Chris: Not to mention the fact that the main character, like, gets a girlfriend in the magical world in Owl House.
Oren: Right. Whereas in Amphibia that wasn’t the case. Like in Amphibia it was more of a like, ‘in real life we’re moving, so our friend group is probably going to break up, so we have one last adventure,’ was the concept. And I thought both of them worked. I thought both concepts worked. It was just a matter of setting it up in advance and knowing which one you wanted.
Chris: Right. If you want to avoid your protagonist going back home, you could do something to just eliminate the parents from the equation.
Bunny: Dun, dun, dun!
[laughter]Chris: Or this is where you have either the asshole parents, or tragedy; everybody dies except the protagonist. Or other devices so that we don’t worry about them going back home. Or you could do something similar to Owl House where you just give the protagonist the ability to just world hop back and forth as much as they want.
Oren: Or you could just follow the advice of a comic that I found randomly on mythcreants.com. Where the kid just brings his parents to live with him in the magical world. [laughter] Interesting that that comic exists and happens to prove the point I was trying to make.
Chris: Wow.
Oren: Fascinating that.
Bunny: Who’d a thunk.
Chris: Mm-hmm. I don’t know where that came from.
Oren: Yeah. We may never know. All right, well, we’re almost outta time, but I have one last portal fantasy, or not portal fantasy to put before you; Stargate.
Chris: Mmm.
Bunny: I have not seen it, but it’s got a gate. So…
Oren: It does have a gate!
Bunny: That’s like, 80% of the way to a door.
Chris: I’m- I- I find myself strangely reluctant. Even though they are technically going through a portal and investigating a new world every episode, I guess it just feels too much like Star Trek where they go visit planets.
Oren: Maybe it would help if the places they go weren’t all Vancouver.
[laughter]Bunny: I don’t know what you’re talking about, Vancouver is a very bizarre place.
Oren: It’s very strange.
Chris: Yeah, again, I think it’s, it’s very purposeful. Like I think often in portal fantasy, the going through the portal is like, something that’s not entirely in the protagonist’s control. And when they just decide to go visit a new place every episode, there’s something about being lost and disoriented and having to adjust that just isn’t present in that concept.
Oren: All right. Well, that sounds like a final verdict to me. With that final bit of sandwich discourse done, we’re gonna go ahead and call this episode to a close.
Chris: If we transported you, consider supporting us on Patreon, go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: Patreon has a portal and we fantasize about having more patrons if you think about it. [laughter] Before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
Bunny: (sound effect) That’s the portal closing.
[Outro music]
It’s easy to assume that the classics must be better than whatever drek is being published today. Isn’t that why we call them classics? However, such an assumption is wrong. That’s both because older stories aren’t always good, but also because new stories aren’t always bad. This week, we’re comparing the two and also discussing how spec fic stories have changed over time. Plus, what if college professors were the only ones writing fiction?
Show Notes The Expanse * A Song of Ice and Fire * Lord of the Rings * A Wizard of Earthsea * Sword of Shannara * The Great Gatsby * The Grapes of Wrath * The Catcher in the Rye * Cinderella * Vampire’s Kiss * Swamplandia! * Save the Cat * Hero With a Thousand Faces * The Hero’s Journey * Piranesi * Great Expectations * Professor Challenger * Middlemarch * Gloucester * Ran * The Bayeux Tapestry * Understanding Comics * How to Be Pretentious * Freytag’s Pyramid * The Odyssey * The Tempest * Romeo and Juliet TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Maddie.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast, with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [Intro Music]
Chris: This is the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is…
Oren: Oren.
Chris: And…
Bunny: Bunny.
Chris: Now we’ve been going for over a decade. So we’re older than most other podcasts. What do you think that says about us?
Oren: Hmm. It’s a classic question.
Bunny: I think we’re very wise, even though you’re the ones who have been around that long. [Chuckles]
Chris: Well, obviously our podcast must be really deep and profound because it’s so old. How can something that’s lasted a decade be bad? It stood the test of time.
Oren: [Chuckles] It’s been around for a while. As we know, all podcasts are timeless.
Bunny: And it can be reinterpreted for each generation. Of which there has been one, but theoretically, future generations.
Oren: What did the hosts mean when they said, “Don’t use oppressed mages?” Is it possible they meant use oppressed mages?
Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]
Bunny: We’ll never know. [Chuckles]
Chris: This time we’re doing modern versus classic stories. Because we like making people mad, I guess.
Oren: We record several of these at once and the last one always has to be the spiciest ’cause it’s getting late and we need to stay awake.
Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]
Bunny: Last episode we were talking about hunger being an emotion and I haven’t eaten yet, so…
Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]
Bunny: It’s getting pretty emotional over here.
Chris: Get ready for hanger.
Bunny: Oh yeah.
Oren: Speaking of hunger, we must again begin with sandwich discourse because, what is a classic?
Chris: What I say it is, that’s what I’ve decided.
Oren: Yeah. [Laughs]
Chris: Chris says. [Chuckles]
Bunny: [Chuckles]
Oren: It does seem like a classic story is one that is old and one that we laud for whatever reason.
Bunny: That seems like the only consistent definition.
Chris: I wanna say a classic is a backlist book that sells well.
Chris, Bunny: [Chuckle]
Bunny: That’s a cynical answer.
Oren: [Chuckles] We’re getting to the point where The Expanse isn’t a classic yet. But it could be one eventually, and we’re getting to the point where Game of Thrones, the book, is a classic almost. I would say it’s probably not quite there yet. I don’t think it’s gonna be too much longer. Lord of the Rings is obviously a classic, people call it that. The Earthsea books are classics. Sword of Shannara is probably not, even though it’s old enough, it’s not lauded enough to be considered a classic.
Bunny: Mm, maybe.
Chris: Definitely there is a fame and cultural influence factor. The people still think about it even though it’s older, which is why it still sells, but also the cultural influence a book has. I do think, it maybe isn’t necessary, but what is a big factor, because that makes people want to go back to the original to see that kind of line of influence.
Oren: We are talking about in terms of speculative fiction. Whereas when you talk about classic books, most of the ones that show up are not gonna be spec fic.They’re gonna be significantly older than what we’re talking about in a lot of cases. They’re gonna be the stuff you probably had to read in high school, or maybe not anymore. Apparently that’s less common now. But if you’re our age, The Grapes of Wrath and The Great Gatsby and Catcher in the Rye for some reason, stuff like that.
Bunny: [Chuckles] Supposedly being good is a prerequisite to being a classic, but I’m not sold.
Oren: I said lauded, not good.
Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]
Chris: When we’re talking about classic stories, we don’t have to be just talking about novels here. So Cinderella, for instance, it’s a fairytale that’s maybe 2000 years old. That has a hugely long, classic, Disney… It is classic before Disney.
Bunny: It was classic before Disney. I guess what I’m getting at, is there are classics and then there are classics of things, which suggests a classic is also meant to be representative of a genre. So if I say, “Vampire’s Kiss is classic Nick Cage,” I don’t mean Vampire’s Kiss is like The Great Gatsby, but I am saying it’s classic Nick Cage as in representative of Nick Cage.
Oren: I’ll say Vampire’s Kiss is like The Great Gatsby. I’ll be brave enough to make that stand.
Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Laugh]
Bunny: I might even say it’s better. [Chuckles] I think we should laud it more.
Chris: Whereas, when I say modern, we could also use very different definitions of modern. I would say the type of book currently being published today.
Bunny: And then there are many things called “modern” classics, which I have read a couple of, that don’t seem to have anything to do with each other.
Chris: Is that just an advertising blurb phrase?
Bunny: Yeah.
Chris: That’s what I thought. [Laughs]
Bunny: It’s the sort of thing you’ll read on the quotes.
Chris: “They” say. Generic “they”. Somebody says this is a modern classic. Does it happen to be the publisher of that book, who says it’s a modern classic?
Bunny: They might also say something specific. I think Swamplandia!, a book I read recently was a “modern Floridian classic” or something like that.
Chris: Oh wow. We’re getting really niche with our classics.
Bunny: Maybe it was the “great Floridian novel,” I forget, but it was something like that.
Chris: The “great Floridian novel.” “Florida Man” classic novel.
Bunny: Classic Florida Man.
Chris: I think there’s some interesting discussion to be had looking at kind of the older stories we still read today and we still discuss today, versus the books we’re publishing now. Mostly because in storytelling, in literary circles, there’s this big myth that stories are unchanging, that sometimes we have to tackle when we’re talking about stuff.
I recently had an article on Freytag’s pyramid, which if you don’t recognize what that term is, if you’ve seen the little triangle graph where it has rising action and climax and falling action, that’s Freytag’s pyramid, and it’s about 200 years old. And in my article, I was like, “Okay, so this actually did not originally mean something we’re thinking it means today. It means something entirely different and it’s outdated.” And I had a commenter who just couldn’t wrap their mind around the idea of a story structure being out of date, because this notion of like, “Oh, but stories are eternal. And, what do you mean?”
Bunny: Definitely monomyth-esque.
Chris: The hero’s journey is definitely one of those things like, “Oh, don’t you know all of our mythologies have the same points in them, and all stories are the same?”
Bunny: It was great when Gilgamesh saved the cat.
Chris: [Laughs] Which again goes back to the whole discussion about pseudo-structures and how the hero’s journey sometimes definitely does this weird thing where in one hand they’re like, “All stories automatically have the hero’s journey.” But also you are supposed to make your story like the hero’s journey, so it’ll be good. It can either be prescriptive or it can be descriptive. It can’t be both.
Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]
Chris: And I do think a lot of times in academic fields when they’re studying folklore or stories in general, they take a very descriptive approach, which kind of assumes all stories are of equal quality and our job is to just look and see what they’re doing. Whereas a storyteller is trying to master a craft. You kind of have to take a prescriptive approach. You can’t become better unless you acknowledge some things are better than other things.
Oren: That’s sort of a requirement, but also, I don’t want any of the things that are better to be the things I didn’t wanna do. Let me know when you get that one solved, okay?
Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]
Chris: I definitely don’t wanna hear that my multiple points of view might be detrimental in some way.
Oren: You leave my multiple points of view alone.
Bunny: [Chuckles]
Chris: You can take away my extra viewpoints over my dead body.
Bunny: [Chuckles]
Oren: Hands off my characters with way too much backstory. That’s a real problem I have. I write characters with way too much backstory. Stop telling me I can’t do that, Chris. [Chuckles]
Bunny: Rude.
Chris: Part of the culture is this huge myth that our stories have not advanced, when they absolutely have. My favorite anecdote about stories advancing is from ancient Egyptian literature, when they didn’t have first person the way we do today.
As far as I could tell, they didn’t have any professional storytellers. What they had is lots and lots of scholars who could write, and so these people would all write fiction as a hobby, but they didn’t seem to even have a court jester or storyteller. They didn’t seem to have plays. They didn’t have any professional storytellers, but they had tons of hobbyists in their scholar class.
Oren: So it’s like if all novels were written by college professors? Ugh, I don’t love, I’m not, mm-mm. No, no, no, no. No thank you.
Bunny, Chris: [Laugh]
Oren: I’ve changed my mind on who built the Great Pyramids.
Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]
Chris: But back then they didn’t have first person directly. So all the stories that used first person, they specifically have a framing device where they start in third person and a character shows up and then is like, “Hey, let me tell you what happened to me.” And then the rest is them talking, which is where we get that kind of first person retelling narrative premise where it’s a future version of the character telling their past.
That idea had to be introduced. And then now when we talk about first person, we have not just a first person retelling, but we may have more kind of immersive forms and we get right into it and start with “I”. But that’s not a thing we had a couple thousand years ago.
Oren: My hottest take as it were, is stories have generally gotten better over time. I said it, I said what I meant and I meant what I said.
Bunny: That’s interesting.
Chris: Oh, Oren, how could you?
Oren: [Chuckles] And people who don’t think that, people who look at modern stories and are like, “Eh, Booktok, eh, Romantasy, eh, LitRPG.” It’s like, sure. I say, “Eh, LitRPG all the time.” But I am aware the past also had many really bad stories, just atrociously bad. I have read some of them. So if you think stories were better in the past, it is a symptom of you not being well read enough.
Bunny: I would agree with this. [Chuckles] That’s hotter than the desert outside Egypt.
Chris: And our classics are also, of course, cherry picked. Not that all of our classics are good, but I’m pretty sure the average classic from a period is gonna be better than the average story from that period.
Oren: And even then, if we look, best stories that are coming out now compared to the ones that have been preserved because they were good enough that people cared about them and wanted to keep talking about them. I put Piranesi against any of the classics I had to read in high school. From any perspective, it’s a better book, and I think you would have a much better time reading it than you would The Grapes of Wrath.
Bunny: I think people do forget the quote unquote “classics” are just the ones that have been preserved. There were tons of crappy stories in Edwardian England or whatever, but of course they haven’t been preserved. For every Great Expectations there is an Ironay Itleslay.
Oren: Or they have been, but no one reads them. Everyone’s read Sherlock Holmes, which has its ups and downs, but it’s miles better than a lot of Doyle’s other work. Like his, I can’t even remember the name now. Professor something, Professor Champion or whatever.
Bunny: Challenger I think, which is a tryhard name if I’ve ever heard one.
Oren: That’s what it is. Oh God. Challenger stories are abysmal and there’s a reason Doyle is known for his Sherlock stories and not his Challenger stories. Even though the Challenger stories still exist, you can read them. It’s just no one wants to.
Bunny: Nobody’s making you. I’m trying to read Middlemarch right now. Well, trying. Basically I’m reading Middlemarch as I wait for other books to arrive at the library, and now that they have, I can put it aside. And because Middlemarch is one of those things that’s often called a classic, I looked online to be like, “Okay, what do people say about Middlemarch?”
And there are so many haughty takes and I feel like we can’t talk about classics without talking about some of the elitism that also keeps them aloft. There was an especially bad New Statesman article and a quote from it published 150 years ago. Oh, this is the tagline of it: “George Elliot’s epic humanist novel is the antidote to our witless online world.” That’s boring. Middlemarch is pretty boring.
Oren: Wait, hang on. That statement wasn’t from 150 years ago.
Bunny: Virginia Woolf apparently called it “one of the few English novels written for grownup people,” which has a similar vibe. But the New Statesman article was recent. Calling something a classic kind of sets up this environment where the story is uncriticizable, and if you say it’s boring, you’re not a real grownup. You’re a child who doesn’t understand the genius of Dorothea and whatever her guy friend is.
Chris: Ohh no.
Oren: I got in so much trouble in college when we were doing Shakespeare for saying the Gloucester character in King Lear is unnecessary because he’s a duplicate. He has the same arc as King Lear, and it goes exactly the same way and there’s no reason to have this other character here.
And then we watched Ran, which is Akira Kurosawa’s version of King Lear. It’s very good. And notably, it has simply deleted the Gloucester character. Everything else is almost a shot for shot remake, but not Gloucester. He’s not there, and you wouldn’t even notice if you weren’t looking for it. Thanks, Kurosawa. It’s rare that I get such a beautiful demonstration of my point like that. I’ve never seen anyone make a movie to prove me right before.
Chris: [Laughs]
Bunny: Wow. How about that? Who’da thunk?
Chris: I do think this again, comes along with the myth that old equals good. Which maybe in a time before we had science or advanced understanding of how things worked, something lasting might have been a halfway decent sign. Be like, “Okay, well that’s still around, so maybe it works, since we don’t really know.” Now, it’s very silly. But I’ve seen lots of very serious people try to argue things are better or profound because they’re old. In fact, Bunny. Do you remember that ridiculous romantic literary book about comics you lent me that one time or showed me?
Bunny: Oh, was it Understanding Comics?
Chris: So your comics class, that turned out to be about narrative nonfiction comics?
Bunny: It ended up being about journalistic comics. I don’t know, we weren’t allowed to do fiction in that, so I snuck in fiction by writing about Mystery Science Theater. But, I think it must have been Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud.
Chris: So I looked at one of their textbooks in that class, which was in comic form and it was very into validating comics and why comics are serious and why you should respect them. And doing that by being like, “Oh, and we define comics as a series of images. Then therefore, ancient,” was one of the arguments that was made in there.
Bunny: Don’t get me wrong, McCloud has some useful stuff about understanding how time moves in comics and how it’s different than other mediums, but then he definitely has a “comics are good if you define them this way. You can see, actually the Bayeaux Tapestry is a comic and so is the scroll.” Or something like that. Which, I don’t know if you need to justify comics by doing that. Whether or not you think his definition actually holds water, comics can be recent and also good.
Chris: He was one of the people I was making fun of in my satirical, How to Be Pretentious article because of these ridiculous arguments. The other thing he did that really annoyed me is his effort to distance himself from superhero stories. It’s like, we gotta make comics look better by saying comics aren’t always about superheroes and superhero stories are ridiculous, but we’re deeper than that. Comics can be better than that, and it’s like, we didn’t have to throw superhero stories under the bus. That was not a necessary part of this.
Bunny: Modern comics owe a lot to superhero stories.
Oren: As a very armchair anthropology enthusiast, I desperately want the modern obsession with things being older, being better to be a result of the fall of the Western Roman Empire, after which there was a period in which big public works and that sort of thing got a lot less common because there was less central authority, and what there was was a lot weaker. But I know that’s not true because the Romans also thought older things were better.
Bunny, Chris: [Laugh]
Oren: So it doesn’t matter. It seems to be a universal idea that older stuff is better than newer stuff. That’s just, I don’t know. I don’t know what to tell you.
Bunny: It goes hand in hand with the “kids these days.”
Oren: Yeah. [Chuckles]
Chris: I think it is interesting to look at what are the differences between stories today and older stories, what are we seeing? Personally, one thing I feel I noticed between older, newer stories is the emphasis on immersion in prose works I definitely feel is a very modern thing.
To be fair, fairytales are all told in summary, but they also were oral stories. And I suppose maybe if the Brothers Grimm were working today and collecting these oral tales, maybe they would’ve written them down in more detail and elaborated on them a lot more than they did, for instance.
But we wouldn’t usually read a book of stories that are completely told in summary, even though, again, if we’re talking about the limits of somebody’s memory, for oral tales that does make a certain level of sense. But I think there’s gonna be a lot more summary and exposition in older works and also the prose style, more omniscient narration, whereas we’ve been moving more towards close perspective and first person and emphasizing vivid detail.
Bunny: I think oral stories too, probably had their own kind of immersion that isn’t totally captured by writing it down, because even if it is summary, there’s a theatricality to it. So oral stories that are kind of blandly summarized in written work probably didn’t feel that way at all when they were being told aloud. And now we figured out how to get that immersion back in a prose medium.
Oren: A somewhat direct comparison I can make, ’cause it’s hard to say the differences between modern stories and any classic, because that’s a huge time period. But if I’m looking at the differences between modern speculative fiction and stuff that is pre-Lord of the Rings. I would say now there is a bigger emphasis on trying to make the world make sense, and I think some of that definitely comes from Lord of the Rings, even though I’m not saying Lord of the Rings’ world makes perfect sense. But Tolkien definitely influenced people to work harder on their setting to the chagrin of weird essayists everywhere.
Bunny: [Fake cough] paid by the word.
Oren: But then there’s also, and this is definitely not Lord of the Rings, there’s something else. Where there is more respect for the reader’s time. Older stories tend to spend a lot more time messing around.
Chris: Or don’t you think it’s because we all have super short attention spans and we’re all going downhill?
Bunny: [Chuckles] It’s this witless, social media age.
Oren: I’m sure that’s what it is, but if that’s what it takes to stop having stories that have a bunch of prologues and then we fart around for a while in nowhere-ville. It’s like, “Please get me to the part that matters.”
Chris: This is an interesting one because I’m not sure a shorter attention span is always bad ’cause it means you value your time more. I don’t know, maybe back in the day, several hundred years ago, a book that was much slower paced would’ve been considered more engaging, either because there were less books to compare it to, and so there was a novelty in reading a book, or maybe it was because other forms of entertainment were less entertaining, so we had less competition for entertaining media. Their standards are lower.
Or maybe it was the kind of thing where people like me wouldn’t have read books several hundred years ago ’cause they would’ve all been too boring to keep my attention. And that makes books more attractive to more people. It’s kind of hard to say exactly what’s going there, but it is pretty apparent stories today are more engaging, they are spending the time more efficiently and getting right into the story in comparison to older stories.
Oren: It might be worth pointing out even older stories often did this. At this point, kind of well known that Shakespeare plays, they don’t necessarily seem this way to us, but went out of their way to include jokes and stuff that would keep the audience’s interest in the middle of the 15th mistaken identity scene.
Bunny: [Chuckles] Oh boy, it’s another banquet.
Oren: And the same thing with the sudden bursts of violence and the murders and stuff. And that doesn’t translate super well to a modern audience. But as far as Elizabethan theatergoers, that stuff was definitely written to hold people’s attention and help stop ’em from getting bored. So that’s been going on for a while. Maybe the Elizabethan Englishmen didn’t have any attention span. Maybe they couldn’t handle it.
Chris: And another thing we’ve talked about before, one of the things that is reason why I said Freytag’s pyramid is outdated, is the emphasis on tragedy that happened during that period of plays, not just older stories. There was a specific period of time in which tragic plays were normal. And that was during Freytag’s pyramid time. So the falling action in that structure assumes the hero is going to experience a downfall and then die. [Chuckles]
Bunny: [Chuckles] And also that you two will bash, what was it, the Poles? Does he really hate the Poles?
Chris: He was very racist against the Polish. Gosh, the Polish. We went through some European history videos recently, and man, the Polish had a real tough time for several hundred years there.
Oren: It was not great. One thing I always wonder, and I’m not well read enough to say this with certainty, but based on what I have read of older, European specifically and near Eastern story tradition, I do kind of wonder if the emphasis on tragedy comes from the fact that any stories that had happy endings were not good.
If you look at stories that have happy endings, especially the older ones, there’s a reason the term “deus ex machina” caught on, like that was a real thing. It’s like, “Well, we don’t know how to end this story, so the gods will show up and set everything right.”
That happens at the end of the Odyssey. The Odyssey has such a weird ending. Where it looks like Odysseus is gonna have to kill everyone on his island because he showed up and did a bunch of murders on these guys who were trying to seduce his wife. And now everyone’s mad at him.
Bunny: And all the serving maids.
Oren: Kills a lot of people. It’s pretty brutal. And then Athena is like, “Nope! Everyone stop, back to your corners.” And then they all lived happily ever after, the end.
Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]
Oren: It’s the weirdest way to end that story, especially after reading the Iliad and even in Shakespeare, other than comedies, the Shakespeare story that could be considered to not be a comedy and also have a happy ending is The Tempest. Which basically has the deus ex machina again, although only this time, it’s also Shakespeare’s self-insert OC uwu. Do not steal.
Bunny: [Chuckles]
Chris: So nobody had invented the turning point yet, basically. It’s too hard to figure out how heroes can solve problems. So what if the hero just dies instead?
Oren: Did we not have enough stories that have a satisfying, triumphant ending and so everyone assumed they must be bad? I don’t know. I can’t say that with certainty, but it feels like that when I look at older stories.
Chris: It does make you wonder because the ones that had a happy ending were generally called comedies. Which speaks to the idea that you didn’t feel you could have a story that was serious and deeply emotional and also have a happy ending. Those two things were considered in conflict.
Bunny: The tragedies, Shakespeare’s tragedies were often also comedic. They had comedic elements, notably the beginning of Romeo and Juliet has a lot of antics with Mercutio mostly. There’s that scene where he is, I think right before he dies, where he is teasing Romeo about Queen Mab and stuff like that. A scene in which I think some of the playfulness of that scene has held up. And that’s an interesting thing worth analyzing, whereas some of the dick jokes don’t so much.
Chris: I do think it almost takes more confidence and perhaps more skill as a storyteller, to feel that I don’t need to make dick jokes and I can still hold the audience’s attention.
Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]
Bunny: Let’s say that. All my stories don’t contain dick jokes because I am very confident.
Oren: So I guess this leaves us with a final question since we’re running outta time here. Is, should you read classics? My answer is if you want to, yes. If you like classics, read what you like. Otherwise, I don’t think you should make yourself do it. I think there are modern stories that are just as good, if not better than any classic you might be recommended.
Chris: If you are fascinated by stories, which you might be since you were listening to this podcast, then reading classics gives you the opportunity to see the origin of many story tropes. Which I find rewarding when I can manage to pay attention to them ’cause they are so boring.
Bunny, Chris: [Laugh]
Bunny: They’re also interesting historical snapshots, not because they’re necessarily representative of the time, but because they’re representative of what sorts of stories were being told about the time.
Chris: They can be a rewarding experience to see, and of course sometimes people like being tuned into the cultural conversation since they heard stories that are often referenced and discussed. And it’s nice to feel like you’re in the know when somebody references a classic. So there’s plenty of reasons to read them, but I don’t think anybody should feel they’re not cultured if they don’t read them or they’re obligated to read them. I think it’s fine to find modern stories that you enjoy.
Oren: With that, I think we can go ahead and call this episode to a close.
Bunny: With that hot take.
Chris: Well, if we didn’t make you mad or if we did make you mad, you can still support us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel, and there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. [Outro Music]
Outro: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening, closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.
Emotionless characters seem to abound in spec fic. Robots, aliens, anime boys who never smile, the list goes on. But are those characters really emotionless? Some of their actions certainly seem emotionally motivated. Just as importantly, what would it mean for them to be truly emotionless? This week, we’re tackling the question of character emotions and whether we can truly go without them.
Show Notes Data Using Contractions * Is Hunger an Emotion? * Blindsight * Riley * Seven of Nine * The Android * The Measure of a Man * SNW Vulcan Scene * V’Lar TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Mukyuu.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Intro: You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. With your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[opening song]Bunny: Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Bunny. And with me today is–
Chris: Chris–
Bunny: and–
Oren: Oren.
Bunny: And this is actually gonna be a pretty short episode. We’re asking if characters can be emotionless. The answer is yes, and the rules are so simple. So here are the rules. Write ’em down.
Speak in a monotone. Only say factual statements because you are a rational logic machine. Statistics only, but you can’t say them in any context where they could have an implied emotion.
Oren: [chuckle in background]
Bunny: And because you are a rational logic machine, say “beep boop” now and then. And you can’t have any contractions. It’s as easy as that.
Chris: [chuckle] No contractions.
Bunny: No contractions. That’s how you know someone’s a logic machine.
Oren：Unless the writers, or perhaps the actor, slip up and insert a contraction here or there —
Chris: That doesn’t count.
Oren: — And then some jerk on YouTube 20 years after your show is over does a compilation of all the times Data used a contraction when he wasn’t supposed to.
Bunny: [Laughter]
Oren: That would be bad.
Bunny: Nobody could ever program contractions into a computer. It’s true.
Oren: It’s just impossible.
Everyone: [Laughter]
Oren: Well, first we have to do definition time, which means it’s also sandwich discourse time.
Bunny: Oh, my favorite. Yum. Yum.
Oren: Because we should probably define what we’re talking about when we ask about characters being emotionless, right?
Bunny: Right.
Oren: Because what is an emotion? And that turned out to be a surprisingly difficult question to answer.
Bunny: Well, it depends what side the bread is on.
Oren: [Still laughing]
Bunny: So emotions are very complicated in the clinical sense, which shouldn’t be too surprising. And as it turns out, characters being emotionless is also more complicated than not using contractions. There are a lot of theories on emotions and stuff about brain states, but I think for the purposes of storytelling, we can mostly say that it’s the biggies like disgust, fear, sadness, or general dispositions, like curiosity.
Oren: I found multiple articles arguing that hunger is an emotion, and now I’m just lost. Now I don’t know what happened.
Chris and Bunny: [Laughter]
Chris: Well, the interesting thing is that apparently people vary a lot both in how intense their emotions are, but also in their ability to detect the emotions that they are experiencing. Apparently that is also correlated with all sorts of other inner body sensations.
Bunny: Right.
Chris: So if you can feel your heart beating, you’re also more likely to be able to easily detect what emotion you’re feeling, which–
Oren: Fascinating.
Chris: It is fascinating, which really goes to how fuzzy this category actually is. I wouldn’t call hunger an emotion, but I can see how that line would start to blur a bit.
Oren: Right now I’m feeling mild superiority because I’m so good at figuring out my internal emotions.
Bunny and Chris: [Laughter]
Bunny: [deadpan] Wow. You’re not a rational logic machine after all.
Oren: [Chuckle]
Bunny: If Data ever got hungry, that would be the solution to that debate.
Oren: Well, Star Trek does treat hunger as an emotion. Like Data starts to have food desires once he turns on his emotion chip. And also taste. [slightly confused] Taste is an emotion?
Bunny: I don’t think taste is an emotion.
Chris: Or is it that things give him joy ’cause they taste good, whereas before he had no opinion?
Oren: Maybe before he drank the blackest coffee and was like, “all right, that registers as a 9.5 on the bitterness scale. Whatever”.
And then he drank it with his emotion chip in, and he was like, “well, I feel like death now. So that’s nice.”
Bunny: [laughter][slightly deadpan] My hands will not stop shaking. I cannot just observe this as a fact anymore.
But I guess if you start to think about hunger as desire for something, I could see it being an emotion, but calling hunger itself an emotion, that’s not one I’d heard before.
Oren: I mean the argument isn’t that needing to eat is an emotion. It was specifically that the feeling of desiring food was. And okay, sure. Maybe?
Bunny: I’ll accept that if it’s hangry.
Oren: Yeah. Hangry is an emotion.
Bunny: Hangry is definitely an emotion.
Chris: I don’t know. According to all the Vulcans in Enterprise, anger is not an emotion because they don’t suppress that.
Oren: [Laughing]
Chris: They look angry all the time. That’s the only emotion they express.
Bunny: It’s the “cool” emotion.
Oren: There are a lot of very not mature people on the internet who would agree with you. The Vulcans are fun because they have a built-in escape hatch where they say they’re emotionless, but in canon, they actually have very powerful emotions that they just suppress.
So anytime you see one being emotional, they can be like, “oh, that’s ’cause some of his emotions was slipping through. That they definitely have. That we established in one episode.” So healthy.
Chris: It also reminds of the main character in Blind Sight — which is this terribly edgy book with very, very bad science in it — where the main character is supposed to be emotionless because he got a procedure, which does not actually change your personality at all.
Oren: [sarcastic] No.
Chris: You know, 10 minutes of research on the internet will tell you that. But the one emotion he can apparently feel is anger.
Bunny:Yeah anger is an emotion. Look, we’ve all seen the inside of Riley’s head in Inside Out. And Anger is there. So we could confidently say that’s an emotion.
Oren: Yeah. Don’t erase Louis Black. He’s trying his hardest. He’s really good in that movie.
Oren and Bunny: [chuckle]
Chris: I think that also brings up a question. There’s definitely a big incentive for some people who want to have a character act in really immoral ways to use emotionlessness as an explanation for why they’re doing things. But I think it’s also important to distinguish that you don’t necessarily need emotions to act in moral ways.
Oren: [Agreeing sounds]
Chris: And a person can intellectually prioritize something. Again, this goes back to arguments of empathy. Some people experience empathy more than others as an emotion, but the people who don’t experience empathy as an emotion are still capable of prioritizing the feelings of other people.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Does it make them a serial killer or something?
Oren: The one thing that just is my pet peeve, my personal pet peeve now is any story –usually scifi and occasionally fantasy–where some person or group will be like [sarcastically] “because I lack emotions, I have discovered that actually there’s no such thing as ethics, and I can do whatever I want because everything is equally meaningless.”
Bunny: [resigned laughter]
Oren: At this point, even when it is presented as an idea to be rebutted, it’s just so irritating. It’s just peak “edgy I’m-13-and-this-is-deep” kind of thought process.
Bunny: Right, and being emotionless doesn’t mean that you’re more rational. In fact, you might have a character that’s less rational and less able to navigate situations if they don’t experience emotions.
Emotions are all about facilitating survival. You feel fear when you’re in danger, or disgust if something looks poisonous, or joy that leads you to do healthy behaviors because you get joy as a result of doing them. We use them to make decisions and relationships. That’s how we bond. Like —
Oren: [teasing] Wow, you feel joy after doing something good? I guess you can’t be a true altruist.
Chris: [laughing]
Bunny: [holding back laughter] Excuse me. Yeah. I guess I’m just selfish to the core. I could never give money to charity because it makes me smile to have done something good and really I should just be self-flagellating.
Oren: [teasing] Wow. So selfish.
But on the topic of characters, it is notable that most supposedly emotionless characters have emotions.Part of that is just that when characters get described as emotionless, what they actually mean is that the character is stoic.
Bunny: Or jaded.
Oren: Yeah, or jaded. I looked up a list of 17 emotionless anime characters and 13 of them had descriptions of them having emotions in that list. Sure, they’re more reserved, most of them, than the other characters. But that’s obviously not the same thing as “emotionless”.
Bunny: Emotionless isn’t the same thing as calm or stoic. Emotions are not just strong emotions like chewing the scenery or wailing or yelling or whatever.
We’ve all known scenes where they’ve got a lot of emotional intensity or weight without them being loud and dramatic.
Oren: And then we have characters who are specified to be emotionless, but it’s just kind of hard to write them without any emotions. It’s really hard to argue that Data doesn’t have any emotions. It really feels like he has, if nothing else, curiosity.
And you can argue that well, he’s programmed to want new information, but at that point it’s pot calling the kettle black here. It just feels like you’re talking about the same thing.
Bunny and Chris: [agreeing in the background]
Bunny: At the very least, there are a lot of emotion-like things that I think are close enough that you’d have trouble calling a character who experiences them totally emotionless. Like hostility or suspicion. Those aren’t in the Inside Out cast, but they’re pretty clearly like dispositions are kind of moods. And I doubt that you can have a mood without an emotion. There’s something emotional in that.
Oren: And with Data, it’s interesting because they show that he doesn’t have anger in that he does not do the things we associate with anger. He doesn’t raise his voice, he doesn’t lash out, he doesn’t retaliate, he doesn’t hurt people because they’ve made him upset.
He doesn’t do any of the things we associate with anger, but he does all of the things we associate with curiosity, which is why it’s hard to deny the idea that he is curious and curiosity is definitely an emotion.
Chris: Well, I do think that any protagonist, especially, is gonna have to have motivation of some kind and want something. And you could easily argue that itself as an emotion. Like Data, for instance. The neat thing about Data is that instead of using his supposedly emotional status to make him edgy, they use it to make him a cinnamon roll–
Bunny: [Laughter] This is the way.
Chris: —where no matter how mean people are to him, he’s perfectly nice back. And very selfless. But he still has priorities as a person that he logically follows. Without any kind of emotion, there would just be no reason to have those priorities. There’s some judgment about “I endeavor to be more human”- which I honestly wish robots would stop doing that, because it just feels weirdly self congratulatory on the part of the human writers — but okay, well why did he make that choice?
Oren: [Laughing in the background]
Chris: That seems like an emotional decision. Or his choice to become part of Starfleet or do any number of other things, right? He has priorities and values and without emotion, without some level of wants, it’s hard to set those priorities in the first place.
Oren: So if you’re starting out to write an emotionless character, I think the first thing to decide is: do you want an actual emotionless character? Do you want that to be part of the story or do you just want someone who is calm and reserved?
Because that second one generally will pass without any note and just be part of the character’s traits. No one’s gonna be like, “huh, I wonder why that character is calm and reserved?” Not that you couldn’t get into it, but it’s certainly not gonna raise any questions.
Bunny: Those are just traits.
Oren: I do think it’s worth comparing data to Seven of Nine because it’s very revealing. ‘Cause Seven of Nine also has a very novel trait, being former-Borg. So outwardly they have some very similar mannerisms, right? Where they talk with a higher vocabulary, with more formal language that makes them sound a bit like robots.
Bunny: Ah, contractions, huh? [laughing]
Chris: They also want to become more human, both of them, and seem to value rationality and science and math and all those other things that are designed to make them more robot-like. But with Seven of Nine you get that novelty from having those traits, but canonically she has emotions. Whereas Data’s not supposed to. I think it becomes really important whenever Seven has any kind of internal arc or relationship arc. Then you can just show Seven caring. You can just show how it affects her emotionally.
You can show her struggle, you can show her having strife. Whereas with Data, whenever that happens they have to like make the other person do all of the emoting. I still remember one episode where he tries to do a relationship, be in a romantic relationship, and his partner shows all the emotion and he is just kind of intellectually trying to figure things out and we have to sort of imagine he kind of cares with the little emotional hints in the acting and the suggestiveness of the situation and other things. But it’s just much harder to put Data in those kinds of internal arcs than it is for Seven.
But they both have some of the interesting traits that are kind of robotic.
Oren: And with Seven, it’s definitely like much more straightforwardly that, yeah, she has emotions, but she doesn’t really know what to do with them because she’s been a Borg for most of her life and now she has a mind of her own instead of just being one node in a collective, which may or may not actually be a collective. There’s a lot of discourse to be had on whether the Borg are actually a collective or not. But anyway —
Bunny: I think there are some questions you can ask in that way, and yeah, I like the idea of someone who has, until recently, not had really emotional experiences now dealing with having emotions again for the first time. That’s interesting. I don’t think I’ve seen that before outside of Seven of Nine.
Oren: There’s a character who does a sort of very similar thing. It’s the Android from Dark Matter.
Now, in her case, it’s more that she’s only sort of just been activated. So she’s sort of figuring things out. It’s not that she doesn’t have… she has emotions, it’s just that she’s not experienced with them. Definitely the best character in that show.
Bunny: And then I think one thing that we should probably mention is that with emotion and reading emotion and having and expressing emotion, some of these things, the way they’re depicted, can be coded as neuro-atypical. These are also traits, like reading someone else’s emotion and struggling to respond the right way to it, is something that people who aren’t neurotypical also sometimes deal with. So that’s something to be aware of when you’re creating a character who struggles with interpreting other people’s emotions or expressing them in the right way.
Oren: I also try to be careful with assumptions that a character can, with a hundred percent accuracy, tell what another person is feeling. Because neurodivergent or not, people express emotions differently. It can just be kind of flattening to be like “all right, well, I could tell that guy was angry ’cause he had the subtle anger cues and those are the same for everybody.”
Bunny and Chris: [chuckle]
Oren: Just allow for a little more uncertainty.
Bunny: You can let your emotionless or semi-emotionless character have trouble navigating society. That probably would happen. There are a lot of expectations for expressing emotion and understanding emotion that are just unspoken cues. And if you had no background in it –if you weren’t human, for example, and didn’t understand human emotions or how they’re expressed, you would’ve a lot of trouble in a social scenario. And I think it’s worth asking for the robot AI characters and the emotionless characters: do they fake emotions? Are they inclined to hide them? Are they any good at that? If they do, do they understand how the people around them experience emotion or do they just completely not understand that?
Chris and Oren: [agreeing in the background]
Bunny: Do they recognize authority? That’s an interesting question.
Oren: It’s also interesting to think about what their motivation is. What makes them do what they do? And again, there can be motivations that are not emotionally based. It’s just that those tend to be the ones that writers reach for.
So if you have an emotionless character, they usually will have some kind of code of ethics that they have decided is good to follow for whatever reason, or some kind of program directive or maybe they’ve picked another person to model their behavior. There are various ways you can explore it.
Chris: I do think that one thing that’s important if you do have a relatively emotionless character in your story–and it could be somebody who’s just really stoic–is how that affects how problems are seen by the reader. Because usually the protagonist caring about something is a signal that readers should care and if a protagonist thinks something is bad or is afraid of a villain, those are all signals to the reader.
So what can happen is if you have a protagonist who just doesn’t care about problems, sometimes that can diminish or completely remove the tension. And if you have a higher-stake arc, this isn’t usually that big of a deal. You can have other important characters say why something matters. If you have a side character that is just explicitly in trouble and readers are attached to that person, that will matter to readers. You have a number of ways to show, even if your character is emotionless and doesn’t feel grief when a person dies, why that would still be bad.
However, if we’re looking at lower-stakes arcs, in particular character arcs…I have sometimes had clients who wanted to do a specific character arc but they wanted that arc to be something where the protagonist doesn’t care and has to learn the value of something. And you can do that, but in some cases, it just won’t feel like it matters. Because your character’s not unhappy because they don’t care. So if you have something where they’re making poor judgements that an outside observer can see, then that’s something that could be a character arc the reader would still care about because we see that they’re making misjudgments and they need to learn better.
But if it’s gonna be something that’s “moral”… A lot of times people like to use a character being emotionless or gaining emotions to sort of teach them morality or human connections and bonds in some way. You just can’t have the problem be so bad that “Ugh, I hate this person because they’re just letting people die in front of them and they need to learn better”.
Actually, this was an issue with Resident Alien. So the first episode of Resident Alien — the first thing that happened, so it’s not really a spoiler — is this alien shows up and then kills a guy. And this is our main character of the show. He just straight up murders somebody, and it’s part of a general ongoing character arc for him where he basically gains human emotions and human preferences and learns not to be amoral, but at the same time, that gave us a very bad introduction to him.
And later we learned this guy was a murderer, but we don’t know that in the first episode. So it’s just extremely off-putting.
Oren: Yeah, don’t worry, we retroactively made it okay.
Bunny: Now the character didn’t know that but…
Oren: It doesn’t help that how much that character understands humans is extremely malleable, depending on what the authors need. And then like we also meet some other members of his species eventually, and they also seem to have emotions. They’re just jerk emotions.
Chris: That’s the problem with emotionless just being an excuse to be edgy.
Oren: It’s not that they don’t have emotions, they’re just assholes.
Bunny: [chuckling]Asshole is an emotion.
Chris: So in that case, you could have them learn the value of something as a kind of slow arc, but you wouldn’t wanna depend on that for your tension. You’d wanna build something that has little higher stakes that readers can care about and use that to create tension and then just have the character arc or something happen at the same time.
Oren: And for those amoral characters who are like “whatever, I don’t understand that it’s wrong to kill people”, usually the obvious play there is to arrange things so that they don’t actually end up killing anybody. That’s just how it turned out.
That’s how you do it. And for some reason they didn’t do that in Resident Alien. I dunno why.
Chris: Just because of how people judge characters and morality at an emotional level, how much harm a character does matters a huge amount when we’re judging if they’ve gone too far. So you can have a character that is ready to kill people, but if you just prevent them from doing it they are much easier to like than the person with the exactly the same inclinations that actually goes through with it.
Oren: If that story had been like, oh, I’m gonna kill that guy and take his body to infiltrate earth, and then he was about to do it and then the guy slipped on the ice and died in an accident, that would’ve been a lot easier to swallow, even though it’s the same character.
Chris: So basically it’s just about doing damage control whenever you have a character that’s super amoral and just trying to keep them from actually doing harm, especially to characters that readers are likely to sympathize with or care about. Sympathy for a character like that can also be reduced ’cause you don’t see them struggle as much. You don’t see them go through anguish.
For Data, he’s still put in many hard positions. Like the guy who, in the whole trial episode, Measure of a Man, where somebody wants to take him apart. Even though Data doesn’t experience — I mean, he does experience emotions, you can tell even though they’re not obvious — we can still sympathize with him when he’s in a really hard place. But again it’s just easier to create sympathy if we can see that the character is affected.
Oren: Here’s a question. This is what I was thinking about and I was like, I’ll explain this in the podcast, and then I realized I don’t really know how. In a prose medium when you don’t have an actor there to help you out, I’m trying to figure out what the differences between writing a character who comes off as stoic or intentionally emotionless versus a character who is just flat.
There’s gotta be a distinction there, but I’m not really sure what it is.
Chris and Bunny: [sounds of agreement]
Bunny: Yeah, that’s tricky. When we talk about emotionless characters, we’re not talking about actors who play their characters poorly.
Chris: Yeah, what I’ve recommended for stoic characters before is showing a difference between what they say and what they do.
Somebody else is grieving and the character doesn’t say “oh, I’m so sorry for your loss” or what have you, but maybe you see them do something without remarking on it to help that other person out In a way that doesn’t call attention to itself. It’s just there.
Oren: And then since they don’t feel good about doing it… BAM. True altruism.
Bunny and Chris: [burst into laughter]
Bunny: Wow, you got ’em.
Oren: [sounding fake-smug] Take that philosophy department.
Bunny: Oof. Ouch. I’ve fallen to the ground.
Chris: If this is your viewpoint character, I do think that you have a lot of room for subtlety if you’re internalizing and showing their thought process. To some extent it goes back to the basic priorities — Data has values that he follows when he’s making logical conclusions — and showing what the person values.
Bunny: And it’s worth noting that with stoic characters there is a difference between actually lacking in emotion and just not emoting. And I think you’re right about either just showing what they do or finding alternate ways of demonstrating a very subtle emotion. A character who’s not stoic might go hug the grieving person. But a character who’s not outwardly emotive might just go silently sit there and offer support through presence rather than physical touch.You could see a stoic character doing that.
Chris: I guess Vulcans are all stoic characters.
Bunny: [laugh]
Chris: That’s what they technically… Or I think there’s been some evolution of the explanation for Vulcans not having emotions, if I understand correctly.
I always understood them as having deep emotions under the surface, which seems to be what recent shows are going with, but that’s not always been the explanation in various shows.
Oren: Well, it’s been a while since I’ve seen TOS, but I think that explanation was there too. I do think that even in, even in the original series, the idea that Vulcans actually had very powerful emotions that they kept in check was present.
Bunny: Well, there was that time that Spock got horny and Kirk had to fight him.
Oren: The pon farr was definitely its own thing. Someone had the idea of “what if Vulcans had to have sex every seven years”, which I’m sure seemed like a good idea at the time.
Bunny: Of all the ideas one could have…it is one of them.
Oren: The idea of Vulcan emotions being very powerful is at least as old as, I don’t know, the original series movies. It’s pretty well established now. I’m a little concerned about this preview clip we got from the new season of Strange New Worlds where they seem to take some kind of medication that turns them into Vulcans and then they immediately all start acting as the classic stoic Vulcan look, which doesn’t seem to be an act, it seems to be that’s what their personality is.
And it’s weird to sort of imply that that is just something you get from Vulcan genes, but maybe there’s maybe there’s context missing that we don’t have yet.
Chris: I assume they had lots of training for that.
Oren: Yeah. Maybe. We’ll see. It certainly didn’t strike me as great when I saw it.
And they also immediately start being down on Spock and it’s like, wait, so you’re telling me–
Chris: It gives them an immediate superiority complex too.
Bunny: [Laughter]
Oren: — that Vulcan prejudice is genetic. That’s a weird thing to establish.
If that is what’s going on, I’m sure in the writer’s mind it’s just a funny joke, but I didn’t love it. I’ll wait. I’ll withhold final judgment until I actually see the episode.
Chris: I will say the whole Vulcan deep emotions under the surface is very convenient for storytelling.
Because they can be mostly emotionless to add novelty during your character interactions, but then when we want that big dramatic plot moment there, that big internal arc, you can suddenly be “now they’re super intense”.
Bunny: Plus you gotta give the Spork shippers something to hold onto.
Oren: We’re almost outta time, but I do wanna mention one of my favorite, if not my favorite, Vulcan, who is actually from Enterprise. She’s a one-off guest star. Her name is V’Lar. She’s from the episode Fallen Heroes. And I really liked her because for the most part, Enterprise’ Vulcans are not good.
They’re not really emotionless so much as they constantly feel smugness and it got to the point where in the fourth season, they even decided to make it a plot point that the Vulcans were acting too emotional and make that like part of the story for better or worse.
But I really liked her. Because the implication that she gave was that she’s old enough and experienced enough to allow herself a little bit of emotion without going overboard.
Bunny. That’s a treat,
Oren: Which I find an interesting concept of the Vulcans being, when they’re younger, they have to really commit to the emotional suppression because otherwise they lose control.
But as they get older, they learn perhaps healthier ways of dealing with it. It’s just kind of a neat idea, you know? It didn’t feel like it broke anything that had been established before, and it was a neat twist on the classic Vulcan archetype. So I really liked that.
That was one of my favorite moments in Enterprise.
Bunny: The last shout-out I wanna do is if you’re depicting a sociopathic or psychopathic character, do your research please.
Oren: Your research may turn out…that’s complicated. I’m not even sure if those are real terms anymore. I’ve seen competing claims on that one.
Bunny: Yeah, I don’t know either. That’s why I’m saying do your research ’cause I genuinely don’t know. I just know that often those are used as a shorthand for why a character seems emotionless or amoral. And uh, a little bird in my brain is like “that’s not it, folks”.
Chris: Yeah, I’m not sure if those were ever actual scientific terms.
Oren: With that word of warning, I think we will go ahead and call this episode to a close.
Chris: If this episode made you feel an emotion, even hunger, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson who is a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
[closing theme]
This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.
Political stories have a reputation for being boring slogs, and that’s only about half deserved. Politics generate a lot of overhead in terms of exposition, and they often make it difficult for readers to find a character they can cheer for – assuming they can tell what’s going on at all. Fortunately, we’ve got a few tips on how to address these issues.
Show Notes Dune: Prophesy * Foundation * Succession * Game of Thrones * Bene Gesserit Breeding Program * Always Sunny in Philadelphia * House Stark * Hunger Games * Should You Show or Tell? * The Abbess Rebellion TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Savannah Bard.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[Intro music]Oren: And welcome, everyone, to another episode of Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren and with me today is−
Bunny: Bunny
Oren: and…
Chris: Chris!
Oren: So, it’s time to start the story, and obviously the first thing you’re gonna have to do is memorize the list of 20 different noble houses.
Bunny: Is there a dramatis personae?
Chris: A dramatis personae with at least 90 characters, then it’s just not adult enough for me.
Oren: It’s not grown up enough. They each have a paragraph of introduction in the dramatis personae. No, you can’t skip it! There’s critical plot information in there. Each of these characters−it should be noted−they’re all scheming and mean. They’re all bad people. You don’t want any of them to get what they want. And also, you don’t know what any of their schemes mean.
Chris: What do they want?
Oren: Yeah, what would the outcome be? Why does it matter? Why is anyone doing this?
Bunny: They want power.
Oren: Yeah. They want it. Maybe they want− Who knows? Definitely not only doing this because I recently watched Dune: Prophecy, Foundation, and to a lesser extent, Succession, which all have these issues. We’re gonna talk about making politics compelling, because you wouldn’t think that would be hard, but it is. A lot of stories have trouble with it.
Bunny: Well, clearly the first step is to have a one word title.
Oren: Colon, right? Like Dune-colon-Prophecy.
Bunny: But only one word on either side of the colon. You can’t have more than that.
Oren: The issue that I’ve been seeing, and I see this in client manuscripts, too, is that there’s a trifecta of problems that these stories have. They have lots of information, because politics are complicated. They have no one to cheer for, because political dramas tend to be about morally gray characters where everyone’s a jerk. And since they don’t have a main character, they don’t get to develop characters very quickly. So it’s harder to build attachment.
Chris: Certainly the high number of characters that are usually involved in political intrigue divides your time more.
Bunny: But there are some choices that are just unforced. You don’t actually have to make everybody a jerk, and you don’t have to have all 20 combatants in the first episode.
Oren: There are solutions to this. Good, compelling political stories do exist. It could be part of the issue is the new way of streaming shows being made where they have fewer episodes, but they seem unwilling or unable to condense their story down to something that will fit in those smaller episodes, so everything is super rushed, and we’re never really sure what’s going on.
Bunny: And then the show gets canceled.
Oren: Or, I guess it could be Rings of Power, and it’ll just get made forever because it’s Bezos’ pet project.
Chris: But it does really make you appreciate Game of Thrones, which wasn’t a failure of basic storytelling, which is what some of these other ones are. Just the very basic things that you can usually take for granted at any big budget TV show or movie are just missing in some of these shows.
Oren: Which is funny because as much as people like to talk about the original Dune being a huge subversion and not a classic hero story or whatever, Dune−the original book−does pretty much the same thing Game of Thrones does in that it invests us in the Atreides before it starts the really complicated politics.
We at least care what happens to House Atreides. We don’t want them to die, and then once a bunch of them die, we are poised to cheer for Paul because the Harkonnens are the worst. But then you have Dune: Prophecy that comes along, and we don’t have any of that. Instead, it’s like the Bene Gesserit. They want to get a wedding because maybe it will stop a calamity that they think is maybe gonna happen.
But why should I care? What do I care if the Benedict Cucumber Bunch continue as an order? Right? What does it matter to me? It’s the same thing with the Emperor who was like, “I’m worried because the great houses are messing with me on Arrakis.” Who cares?
Chris: So we start with the “Bene Gerriet” as Oren called them.
Oren: Yeah, that’s what they’re called now.
Chris: Just call ’em something slightly different every time. The idea that they’re now starting their breeding program, because it’s based on eugenics, it’s almost an uphill battle. We’re supposed to root for the character who, her very first move is to engage in a power struggle so that she can do the eugenics program she wants to do.
It’s because they foresee some future something that has a fancy name. What it entails, we don’t know, and they wanna make sure that the “Bene Gerriet” survive. Why do I care if your order survives? Especially if you’re an order that, you know, does eugenics. “Hey, there’s a calamity that’s coming.” What does that mean? Are lots of people gonna die? What exactly is gonna happen in this calamity that we need to avoid? And why is that bad? Any number of things there could have really helped. But no, that’s actually very brief, and then suddenly we’re thrown into the future. Okay, so we’ve been doing eugenics for a while.
Bunny: Does the show ever acknowledge that it’s got eugenics going on, or is it always like…
Chris: If you’re familiar with Dune, you know, they’re basically a breeding cult. That’s what they do. Kind of hard to avoid that. I think you could downplay it, though, and just− instead of being like, “Yeah, we’re gonna arrange marriages to mix just the right genes together,” just focus on the other things that they do, like being counselors to kings and trying to help them make decisions.
Oren: I’m sure in the show creators’ minds, the idea is that, “Oh, well, you’re not supposed to cheer for the Bernard Jesuits. They’re not good people.” Sure. Why do I care if they win or not then? What is supposed to be compelling here? I’m not a hundred percent against the idea of a story with no good guys, where everyone’s a jerk, but you gotta give me something.
Chris: Some reason to be emotionally invested in the outcome or else it doesn’t work.
Oren: It’s harder to do that if you decide everyone’s a jerk and everything is bad no matter what. It’s not impossible, but this show has certainly not done the work to overcome the hurdle of “I don’t care if anyone here wins or not.”
Chris: Very basic of hurdles.
Oren: What was ironic with Succession− We’ve only seen the first four episodes, right? So, I’m sure the show’s fans are ready to tell me that it changes and it’s different. It was funny because the first couple episodes actually cleared this hurdle because it was funny. The show was fun. It was, these characters are all bad people and it’s funny to watch them scheme against each other. The only people who get hurt are also bad people. It’s kind of like really high-budget Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
Chris: In the first episode, they scheme over whether they’re gonna sign this contract where their father wants them to modify the family trust to give his wife more power in the event of his death, which you can imagine is not necessarily appealing to his kids. And we can get that basic idea, but there’s a lot of things about one kid wants him to fire a particular person−you’re probably not gonna remember who that person is−and just a lot of details that are fuzzy around the edges, but that’s easier to let go of if the scenes are just funny. Maybe you don’t need to understand the politics.
Oren: But then hilariously, it regressed, because by episode four, it really feels like we’re solidifying around Kendall as the main character. That was a bad choice. I didn’t like that choice. I don’t really care about him. Even though they had that really awkward Save the Cat moment where he’s like, “What? My subordinates are pressuring a woman to date me? That will not stand. I am a crusader for women’s rights.” Where did that come from?
Bunny: Saved the cat, and the cat was woman.
Oren: The cat was ethical gender dynamics at work. It’s not like it had it a hundred percent guaranteed that he didn’t care about those things, but he certainly didn’t seem like he cared about it. The way that he talks to his other business partners, he’s basically sexually harassing them because he thinks it makes him look like a big man. Very weird. It was very awkward. It felt forced to me.
Chris: When Succession, the humor dies down, what you’re left with is a very flawed protagonist, that they want you to feel sorry for him enough that you are willing to root for him. And I was like, well, now it’s just a drama with a jerk protagonist. It’s not interesting anymore. Again, I’m sure that the show goes places, but that’s how I felt after four episodes.
Oren: Yeah, and Foundation was even worse. It was like Dune, but−granted, we’ve seen all of Foundation, so we know it doesn’t get better. Whereas theoretically, Dune: Prophecy still could because by this point we’ve only seen the first episode. But Foundation, I had no idea what anyone was doing half the time. And I certainly didn’t care. You’ve got the Evil Empire, which is doing Evil Empire stuff. Then, you’ve got the Foundation, who is trying to make it so that we can reestablish the Evil Empire after it collapses, and then towards the end there’s a thing of, well, maybe that’s not what the Foundation is for. It’s like, all right, well, a little late to establish that, don’t you think?
Chris: The Foundation show does start you off with a character that they deem to be sympathetic so they find somebody who could actually be an underdog and talk about how she’s really into math. Math is illegal on her own planet, or something. Then, she works for this famous guy. But the issue with that is that she’s not actually that central to the story, and she doesn’t have that much agency. Then she ends up working for this guy that we’re supposed to believe in, and we don’t have any reason to care about him. And then we of course keep going back to the weird emperor dude… or clans? Clones?
Oren: Clone emperor drama.
Chris: The Foundation, I have to say, that was a very difficult adaptation because it’s just an idea. It sounds like there’s not really an ongoing storyline to the original book.
Oren: The book is not good once you get past the initial, “Oh, that’s a cool idea.” It’s what happens when people try to write books based off of high novelty social media memes. What if the empire was gonna collapse, but a bunch of scientists camped out on some distant planet and saved all the technology? That sounds cool for a couple chapters and then it would get boring, which is what happens.
Bunny: You gotta keep it up.
Chris: Yeah, I think what Game of Thrones and the original Dune did well is we have to start with some characters that we can say, these are good guys. You’re supposed to root for them.
Bunny: Or at least not despise them.
Chris: Likable enough that you can get emotionally invested in their success. From there, introduce people who are against them, so you have some initial starting investment, and then from there, as you get to know more people, maybe you can humanize the antagonists, start to make things a little bit grayer. Maybe the antagonists have done bad things, but they’re in a tight spot and expand outward and try to keep things apprehensible.
Oren: That’s maybe something that writers now have trouble with. Maybe I shouldn’t say that as “writers now”. That makes it sound like I’m panicking about the youth of today and their stories. Some writers have a problem where they look at stories like Game of Thrones, and they’re like, “Wow, in Game of Thrones, we really ended up caring about some very flawed people. So what I’ll do is I’ll just fill the story with the worst people you can imagine and just assume that the same thing will happen.” Not realizing that, in Game of Thrones, we had some pretty uncomplicated good guys. Then, we slowly humanized the seemingly jerk bad guys, and eventually, we found out they weren’t all bad guys. So we had a lot of time to build that attachment. It wasn’t just, this is the start of Game of Thrones. All of your protagonists have pushed children out of windows. Those are who you’re gonna follow from now on.
Chris: And again, making those initial characters that you’re rooting for central to the plot. In the beginning, the Starks are the perfect example. We open with them. We get attached to them. Then, we follow Ned Stark, right as he has a crucial job in supporting his friend, the king. That goes wrong. The Starks do become less important to the politics. But at first, they’re at a very central role, and they’re still important later. You gotta have your likable characters also have agency. They can’t just be on the sidelines. But having that central role to start with is also important.
Oren: The Starks provide a really important service, which is that they allow enough people to like the story so that it can get popular enough for its diehard fans to be like, “Well, actually I’m not really a Stark because the Starks are too goody-two-shoes. I’m more of a Baratheon. I’m a badass, but I can be sneaky,” kind of thing. If it wasn’t for the Starks, the story would never have been popular enough for us to get into arguments about which great house was the best.
Chris: When it comes to the complexity of those politics, just being able to say what the stakes are in tangible terms and have the conflict be over something that people understand. Like, “Hey, there’s a valuable piece of land that has spice that we want.”
Bunny: I do think there’s often an issue where if the conflict is just politics, the consequences can feel pretty abstract, especially if all of your characters are like high power nobles or something like that. Maybe they care about their people or whatever, but it’s also like, oh no, I’m insulated from the bad thing that will happen, but other characters who aren’t part of the story might end up feeling bad about it. If the stakes mostly feel like they’re about other people, that’ll be harder to get invested in unless we can see the outcomes directly affect the character as well.
Chris: That’s the issue with Dune: Prophecy, where they decide they’re doing eugenics. Suddenly we’re 30 years in the future. The conflict is over whether a marriage happens so that a princess can come train among the Bennys so that she can maybe somehow end up as an empress on the throne. Then, whether or not the current emperor maintains control over Arrakis. Why is a marriage important? Oh, so that she can come and study. Well, why is that important? He’s got several layers to go trying to dig under the surface to find why any of this matters.
Oren: My favorite part of that was that apparently the lady who founded the Bunny Jumping Jacks, she wanted the eugenics program, but apparently created a doctrine where it was heretical to do eugenics. I don’t know what’s going on there. I’m so confused.
Chris: Yeah, they had their hardliners, apparently, were opposed to eugenics. So it suggests that there were some other religious orders before they became Ice Cream Town.
Bunny: This is all bizarre to hear without having seen a lick of the show.
Oren: I mean, it’s a weird show. The first episode is very confusing. Beyond having a character who is likable or what have you, I think the best thing you can do is to ease readers into the politics, in most cases. You don’t have to start with every single grand plot at the same time. You can start with a relatively straightforward situation of the king is coming to your castle, and now he wants you to be the hand of the king to replace the last one who died under mysterious circumstances.
That’s fairly straightforward. You can understand that. And once you get your grounding, then you start the more complicated stuff.
Chris: And in that case, we can clearly see that there are some life-or-death stakes that are at a more personal level. So, the last hand of the king died under mysterious circumstances. That implies that if Ned takes the job, he might die under mysterious circumstances. And because we care about Ned, that matters. Even if we don’t understand, for instance, what kind of beef somebody might have with the king and what the stakes are there.
Bunny: I think that’s another fumbling point. A lot of stories rely on physical stakes without life-or-death or physical threat, writers might not be as adept at keeping the tension up.
Chris: Doing a political storyline with not-high stakes, I’m not gonna say it’s impossible, but that just seems very difficult because you need something important to attach all of these schemes to. And if it’s not high stakes, especially when you have so many people participating, usually things that are lower stakes are also small in scope, like whether the family business goes under. I mean, you could have 20 different relatives in a political conflict over whether the family business goes under. You can have, I guess, smaller scale politics, but generally it’s gonna be high stakes.
Bunny: I’ll also say deescalating from life-or-death stakes to stakes based around talking is a letdown. At the end of the first Hunger Games, Katniss has to talk to President Snow or whatever, and there’s this line about, “Oh, the most dangerous part of the Hunger Games is about to be begin.”
Oren: No, it’s not.
Bunny: No, we’re past that, I think. I get that you’re nervous about this interview, but you’re not about to get shot with an arrow, probably.
Oren: The chances of you dying in this interview are not high. I’m not gonna say they’re zero, but they’re fairly low.
Bunny: I think what it was trying to do is be like, “Oh, the fate of my district rests on my shoulders.” But it’s like, Katniss, you’re good at interviewing. You charmed a bunch of people before the games started and during the games. You’ve just come out of this really traumatic, high-stakes conflict. I think you’re not gonna be too fazed by this interview.
Chris: To be clear, you can have high-stakes talking even with high immediacy. It’s not like you can’t set up a story situation where, “Hey, answer my riddle. If not, you die,” and create that same high-stakes immediacy with talking. You can attach a lot of other stakes to talking, but one of the reasons fight scenes, in visual media especially, are so compelling is because somebody could get sliced open at any moment. The stakes are high, and the immediacy is really high.
Oren: Yeah, but what if they have a sharp tongue, Chris? Then anything could happen.
Chris: Often political intrigue stories do have high-stakes talking. That’s not unheard of.
Bunny: I’m not saying it can’t be done. It’s just, if you have to tell me that, “Oh, this is more dangerous than the other part,” then it doesn’t feel that way.
Oren: Right, you could try showing.
Bunny: That’s a solid idea.
Oren: There might be some aphorism about that. We’ll never know.
Chris: I’m thinking of situations in Game of Thrones, after Little Finger throws the leader of the Eyrie to her death some other noble people come in and then they start questioning Sansa about what happened with the idea that they could arrest Little Finger and drag him away.
So, you have those kinds of tense conflicts there, and Sansa actually decides to back Little Finger, which is really surprising, with the idea that she’s now so suspicious of people that she’d rather go with the enemy she knows than these strange nobles where she doesn’t know what they want.
Oren: I have definitely noticed that with some of my clients, they’ll set up some kind of political, or at the very least social, intrigue story. Then they will also have an action plot that is either disconnected or only sort of connected, and it really feels like they would rather be writing about the action plot because there is just a lot more description of it, even though it’s not happening on screen, and we keep stopping the social stuff to hear about the action plot that’s happening somewhere else.
Once that happens multiple times, you start to feel partly it might just be that you would prefer to write an action story, in which case please do that. Action stories are fun, but it also could just be that you aren’t sure how to make the politics feel important. A good way to do that, and this is much easier for novelists than it is for TV show writers, is start with characters who are not super big, important leaders. Characters who happen to be in the right-slash-wrong place at the right-slash-wrong time and get involved in this. And you see this in stories like The Expanse, which has this complicated political struggle between Earth, Mars, and the Belt, but the protagonists are a normal crew of randos who just happened to be an important place, and then they become central to this political conflict and how it turns out matters to them. They’re not just going home to their mansions at the end of the day.
Bunny: I was going to call this trope the fish out of water, but I think the fish in Parliament would be a better name. This is, incidentally, The Abess Rebellion.
Oren: No, stop that. Stop bringing up my books. No one’s gonna believe it wasn’t my idea.
Chris: Our new hobby is embarrassing Oren on the podcast by bringing up his book.
Oren: Also, it should be noted that The Abess Rebellion, the main character of that book is definitely more important, politically speaking, than the main characters in the Expanse. It has some unusual circumstances, but I did decide to start with a fairly high-up leader character for reasons.
Chris: I do think another thing that you can do if you have a complex political situation, you need to simplify it. Besides just being like, what are the stakes? Have a conflict be over something that people can understand. Narrow things down to what the determining factor is in this conflict. Maybe inheritance comes down to which person has the church’s approval. Everybody’s evenly matched. And so people think that’s gonna be a determining factor. And then you can narrow down the scope and focus on who has the church’s approval. And then while you’re doing that, set the stage a little bit more so that if you wanna complicate things after somebody gets it, and then make things not certain, you can do that.
But for now, we understand, oh, church approval. Now, what does a character have to do to get church’s approval and why might not they get the church’s approval? Much simpler than the entire conflict over inheritance and all the various assets and liabilities each potential heir could have. Or, if a country may or may not become independent, maybe it comes down to whether they get a powerful ally that’s willing to back their play and war and side with them against the people that they want independence from.
Again, a way to just narrow that conflict down a little bit, focus a little bit more while you set the stage so that if you wanna broaden the conflict again, people will understand what’s going on.
Oren: Part of it is also just understanding the scope of what kind of politics you’re planning to bring into it versus how long a story you wanna tell. I did get some feedback on my story from people who wanted the politics to be more complicated, and I thought about it, and I was like, all right, if I wanted to do that, I would just have to make the story much bigger, and that’s just not within my capacity right now. The politics are gonna have to remain as relatively straightforward. I don’t have the endurance to write the first Game of Thrones novel again. And that’s a bigger issue for people who write movies or television shows. I can imagine an interesting version of the separatist conflict from the Star Wars prequels, but it’s hard to imagine explaining it in a two hour movie.
Bunny: Man, Sophie is such a goody-two-shoes.
Oren: Well with that, I think we can declare that our political objectives have been completed. I hope everyone memorized the dramatis personae, because it will be on the test.
Chris: If you found any of our tips useful, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
[Outro music]
We love stories where two contrasting characters overcome their differences to become good friends, but we don’t love how that genre of stories is forever associated with cops. This week, we’re discussing how the vaunted buddy cop arc actually works, what it requires, and how you can use it in your stories without ever involving law enforcement. Also, a fun moment to remember how mad certain goobers got about Fury Road, and now they don’t say a peep about it.
Show Notes Three Types of Friendship Arcs * Loki * Sherlock & Watson * Magic School * Planes, Trains, and Automobiles * Han Solo * Venom * One Dark Window * Maybe We Should Be Afraid * Bashir & O’Brien * Practical Magic * Fury Road * Rush Hour TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Latifah K.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[Intro music]Bunny: Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Bunny and with me today is-
Oren: Oren.
Bunny: -and
Chris: Chris.
Bunny: And today we are going to be talking about creating a buddy cop dynamic without cops, and from doing my research and studying a lot of classic buddy cop movies, I come to the conclusion that buddy cop movies are just rom-coms for straight dudes.
[laughs]Yeah, I said it.
[laughs]Chris: That doesn’t make sense.
Bunny: They’ve got so many of the same traits as rom-coms, so many of the same romantic beats, maybe we should call them brom-coms.
Oren: Brom-coms. Oh yeah, that’s good. I like that.
Bunny: Like bromance. Bro-coms.
[laughs]Rolls off the tongue.
Oren: Well, fortunately for us, the famed Chris Winkle has already written about this in a blog.
Chris: I did?
Bunny: Uh, praise be.
Oren: Yeah, “How to write three types of friendship arcs?”
Bunny: Oh, yeah.
Oren: The second one is the buddy cop arc-
[laughs]-and as we point out in there, it doesn’t have to be cops. It’s just what it’s called because it’s associated with that genre. So, we’re just going to go ahead and read this aloud for the next half hour, and we should be good to go.
[laughter]Chris: And I’ll just be like, “What? I wrote that.”
Bunny: You could be like, “Oh, wow, that’s really smart. Oh yeah, that’s that sounds good.”
Oren: To very simplify it. What we tend to think of as the buddy cop arc, and there are different stories that this label gets applied to. They don’t all fit this definition, but the most common version is basically two characters who don’t like each other forced to work together or at least be in proximity and then slowly overcoming their differences and being better together than they were apart, but usually as friends.
And yeah, that’s very similar to a lot of romances.
Bunny: Yeah. Enemies to lover is the classic romance, right?
Chris: Yeah, if you have any romance where the world is forcing them together, they don’t want to be together. That’s the kind of archetype we’re going for here.
Bunny: And usually the sort of buddy dynamic also as humorous elements. I won’t say that’s absolutely necessary, but it will be less recognizable as like a buddy cop dynamic if it’s just completely serious. Hence brom-com.
Oren: And having it be funny is useful because that way the characters not liking each other can have less edge, because similar to a romance if the characters don’t like each other and are just crappy to each other for a while, it can just be like, “Okay, seems like maybe they shouldn’t be together,” but if it’s funny, if it’s comedic antagonism then it’s like, “Oh you scamp.”
Chris: I think probably what you would end up with if you played it really seriously is the kind of thing where you have the villain and the hero teaming up. Maybe it would be like Loki and Thor, except for that probably has comedic elements as well.
Oren: They do make Loki funnier as they are redeeming him.
Bunny: Loki is already a comic villain, right? Comedic villain from comics, I should say.
Oren: Nope. Mm-mm, Mm-mm, Mm-mm.
Bunny: No?
Oren: Assuming we’re talking about the MCU one, right? I don’t really know Loki in the comics, but no, when Loki first shows up as like the big villain, he’s not really funny. In like, the Thor movie, he’s got a joke here or there, but not much of one. He’s supposed to be serious.
He’s not that threatening because his power is that he’s supposed to be good at lying and he can’t actually be that good at lying. So, he gets found out pretty quickly.
But he’s not what I would call funny, right? He starts to get funnier as they work on redeeming him and granted, a lot of that happens in Ragnarök, which is a very, you know, they turned the humor up to Taika Waititi levels.
Bunny: All right, that makes sense. I guess I’m going off of that.
Oren: And there are some sequences where he is humorous before then, some of them ill-considered like everyone laughs when Hulk is thrashing him around. But to me, that just drove home how underwhelming he was as a villain.
It’s like, “Yeah, I’m pretty sure they’re going to beat him because there’s just one of him and there’s five of them.” He has minions, but they don’t matter.
Bunny: I can’t say I’ve seen a whole lot of Loki, but I guess, just the general impression. Now, maybe just because he’s played by a charismatic actor is that he’s like a goofy dude, and I guess canonical great mythology Loki was never all that good at lying either, but you know.
Oren: Yeah. Although it’s hard to tell if him being bad at lying is because he’s supposed to be bad at lying, or if the people creating these stories just didn’t create very convincing lies-
[chuckles]-like his lies are often fallen for despite not being very good. So, is that like a commentary on how gullible the other characters are. I don’t know.
[laughs]Chris: But you could certainly have a drama about, for instance, estranged siblings who have to come together because somebody in the family died. For instance, we could say that’s not buddy cop anymore, but you’re going to find a lot of similar things without the comedy, I think.
Bunny: Yeah, I do feel like the comedy is a pretty important part of it, even if it’s not absolutely necessary, and these elements still work without it. I think it’s pretty important.
Oren: A lot of it’s going to come down to how strong an arc do you want because you can have characters be friends, but if there’s not a strong arc, it’s not necessarily going to scratch the same itch, and there will be different levels of it, right?
Like in the show, Loki. Loki teams up with Mobius and he doesn’t like Mobius at first, but Mobius doesn’t have any problem with him. So, the arc is entirely one-sided. It’s just part of Loki’s general chilling attitude arc and it’s over pretty quickly.
So, there’s an element of it, but most stories that we think of as being buddy cop movies have a stronger relationship arc because that’s a big central part of the movie.
Bunny: Yeah, and I think the other key part of buddy cop dynamics is that the two buddies have to be different like you’ll have grumpy, sunshine or like one of them is shy and the other’s outgoing, one of them is earnest and the other one’s conniving, one of them is hip and cool, and the other one’s dorky, right?
But no matter what their differences are, they need to have comparable skill sets, which is part of realizing why they’re better together than apart because usually they ultimately end up either teaching each other their skill sets or learning to play off of each other. So, we need a level playing field. One of them should not be like a tiny baby compared to the other one.
Chris: So, when I was looking at duos, generally I think any duo, you need contrast of some kind and so usually they are designed so that they are very different. Having them be at the same level so that they’re equal in skill, I think if you want a kind of buddy story, I think that’s important.
But for instance, we have a lot of important duos that people really like that are essentially hero and sidekick like Sherlock & Watson. Clearly, Sherlock is supposed to be more–
This is complicated because the story is told from Watson’s viewpoint, which definitely muddies the waters a lot. I think it’s actually clear in a visual medium where we just take away that complication, that Watson is a viewpoint character and then it becomes more like a hero and sidekick dynamic. So, we could have important duos that don’t have them on an even level, but then the character with more skills is more central and the story is usually more about them.
Bunny: Yeah, I don’t think every duo is a buddy cop. I don’t know if I would count those as buddy cops.
Oren: I wouldn’t. Yeah. I’m just talking about different types of relationship arcs you can have.
Chris: So given that we’re not doing buddy cops, since we’re not doing cops.
[laughs]Another question is, we can cast a broad net or may keep it small and narrow depending on what we want to do and what we want the dynamic to be like. But if it’s like best friend buddy is the important thing, then yeah, we want them to be on the same level.
Oren: Yeah, and you want them to be very different just– partly because that’s the trope, but also because that’s how you create contrast and it’s not as much fun to watch two characters who are similar in a scene together. This is like, “Okay well, do they really both have to be here.”
Chris: I will say, I really like Gravity Falls, but like one thing that does annoy me is Dipper and Mabel are initially presented right there as two siblings, and they are equally important, but it’s very clear that the storyteller identifies with Dipper and thinks of Mabel as being the sister, and the story gravitates and prioritizes Dipper more.
Which, again, I was personally annoyed by this because I thought that they should be on the same level. I would just say that’s why setting expectations is important. If you do want to have one character be more important than the other, people should know that from the start, so your audience doesn’t feel jilted-
[chuckles]-when the character that they thought was important was shoved to the side.
Oren: It’s just this, oh, it’s disappointing because Mabel just doesn’t really solve that many problems. Not like she never does, but usually, Mabel just does random stuff and creates chaos, and then Dipper has to fix it. It’s not inherently wrong, but it’s definitely a disappointment.
Chris: I think if we were going to make the story about Dipper, and Mabel as one of the side characters, that’s just how it should be presented and packaged. Whereas the way that the show is framed makes it feel like it’s about them two as a duo.
Bunny: I felt not so similar because they’re definitely a duo, but parts of the Good Omens show felt like Aziraphale and Crowley weren’t on the same level. Like in the book, they pretty much felt comparable, but I was watching the show and there’s like a montage where Aziraphale keeps just stumbling into situations and then Crowley saves him, which is one of those situations where it feels like one of them is a tiny baby compared to the other one.
Chris: Yeah, no, it definitely has that problem where Crowley has all the candy and only Aziraphale makes mistakes.
Bunny: You could definitely tell who the writers liked more, and Aziraphale just acts childlike and naive.
Chris: I also think the problem there is that they’re trying to– Crowley is technically a demon, and I think that they are afraid of making him make mistakes because he would make immoral mistakes. So, they’re trying to start him off where he’s already learned to be good.
He just has bad boy persona, and so, it’s riskier to show him– because he would do evil things. So, it’s easy to show Aziraphale making mistakes in the direction of being too lawful, for instance, and following the rules too much.
Bunny: Although in some of those cases, it’s just like he’s trusting people too much which is like, “You’re friends with a demon. I think you can still be angelic. Give this guy a little side eye, you know.”
Oren: One of the problems that Good Omens has is that it can’t decide if heaven and hell are actually good and evil, or if they’re law and chaos. And often it wants to make them good and evil, but if they’re good and evil, that’s a boring conflict and it doesn’t want it to be boring. It wants it to be two-sided and so the way that it handles that is by making the angels all just real not smart.
[chuckles]That’s Aziraphale’s thing is that Aziraphale just makes very bad choices because that’s the only way they know of to write him as having anything to learn.
Bunny: It’s not a level playing field If one of them is just so bubbly. It does feel like you can have one buddy cop be very earnest and genuine, and even a little naive, and the other one be cynical and street smart. In fact, that’s the Zootopia model. Judy, the– one of the buddy cops, the bunny cop buddy cop, is the earnest, dedicated loyal one, while Nick the fox is the conniving street smart, a little sleazy one, right?
And the same is true in Rush Hour, Jackie Chan’s character, Lee is very loyal and devoted, and Chris Tucker’s character is brash and foul-mouth and so they clash with each other, but neither of them are like infants.
Oren: [chuckles] Yeah. I do think it would be useful to talk about what it is you’re going to need if you want to do this arc without them being cops because there are some things about the cop setup that have been being grained that authors who leave it behind can find themselves lacking.
Chris: Like for instance, they are assigned to the case together by their boss.
Oren: Yep, that’s a really convenient thing that is used in the cop framework as not only do they have a reason they have to work together because the boss said so, but they also have a built-in problem they need to solve because in fiction cops solve crimes. Hot take, I guess so.
[chuckles]That’s something that authors often forget when they are trying to do something similar without using actual police. And so, you end up with, “Why are these characters working together, like they hate each other? Why would they even bother?”
Chris: Because they’re on an adventuring party and the GM told them to.
[laughs]Oren: Right. And what are they trying to do exactly? Do something eventually. Be roommates.
Bunny: This is another thing that you can take the page out of romance, right? Because a lot of the enemies to lovers’ arcs are like how do we put them together like forced proximity, not just for romance.
Chris: Arranged marriage.
[laughs]That’s it. I mean, I will say I do like arranged marriage romances, but this might not be the best time for that.
Oren: No, no. You got to take the other thing from romance and have them be friends at first sight, but then constantly be like, “No, that person would never want to be my friend, even though we’re magically destined to be best friends, they hate me. They would never want to be friends.” And that’s just the entire story.
Bunny: Brilliant. That’ll go great.
Oren: Yeah, I love it. Just churning out good ideas over here.
[laughs]Bunny: You know, I even managed to find one buddy movie where the one-bed trope comes up, which is planes, trains, and automobiles, where our buddies are Adele and Neil, and at one point they have to share our hotel room bed and there’s only one bed
Oren: Oh no.
[laughs]Bunny: I was like, “Oh my gosh, this really is just romance for straight dudes.”
Oren: But you don’t necessarily need to have a boss who assigns them together, although you could, right? There are bosses in the world other than cops, so that’s still an option. Your characters could be study partners at a magic school, and they are put together by their teacher, and now that’s why they have to be together.
But you can also create a situation where there is simply a recognized problem that both of the characters understand is important enough that they will try to work together despite their differences. Like they can be union organizers at a workplace, even if they don’t like each other. If they’re union organizers, they probably understand the need for there to be a union and will make some effort even if they have very different styles and very different ways of going about it.
Chris: If they recognize they have the same antagonist or fighting the same struggle that will give them a strong incentive to at least start interacting and coordinating a little bit, and then they might have to realize that, “Okay, it’s going to take two of us to do this thing, so we’re going to go breaking into this together because one of us can disable the alarm and the other can crack open the safe.” Or something like that.
Bunny: And you can also have the comedy of circumstance too, right? Again, planes, trains, and automobiles. The two characters dislike each other, but they keep being forced together because they’re trying to reach the same destination and one of them always has what the other one needs.
Oren: I’m a big fan of stories where both of the characters each have one piece of information, or maybe an item you could get away with, but usually it’s going to be a piece of information that is needed to accomplish whatever it is they both want. So, you might have two smugglers who are trying to find a hidden space treasure and one of them has the location and the other one has the code to get into the treasure vault that is otherwise impenetrable. And that’s a good reason, right? Even if they don’t like each other, they both want the treasure and they have to work together because otherwise with only one of them, they can’t get it.
Chris: You could also do the Han Solo trick where one of them hires the other and usually with that, they have an arc, or at first, they’re like, “Oh, I don’t care about causes, I’m in it for the money,” and then they come to care. And then they’re like, “Okay, you’re not actually– actually I don’t want you to pay me, and I’m just going to help you from the goodness of my heart,” at some point.
Oren: Generally speaking, anytime you have a character who starts off doing the plot for money, they will almost certainly want to develop a reason other than money for doing the plot, because after a certain point, money is just not a convincing set of stakes anymore.
Bunny: It’s the thing– The opening situation, a thing that gets them together and then they must grow beyond that.
Chris: You can also create and use magic or technology to just tie them together like Eddie and Venom, one of them being a parasite, or in One Dark Window, Elizabeth and the monster that possesses her and talks to her. I was honestly disappointed that the monster was not the love interest.
Oren: Yeah, that’s so sad.
[chuckles]Bunny: They shouldn’t have done that.
Chris: Instead, we have a cardboard love interest, unfortunately.
Bunny: More and more monster love interests.
Oren: Or I think Chris will actually really like this one. You could have a science fiction show where the captain and his doctor love interest, get these little implants that require them to be close together-
[laughs]-but also let them share their thoughts and they have like a bonding thing. And then at the end, they say, “Maybe we should be afraid.”
[laughs]Chris: So, everybody knows this is an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, where they decided to have a romance episode between Captain Picard and Dr. Crusher. And they did this whole thing where they get these random implants, where they have to stay close to each other and they hear each other’s thoughts, and they do this whole thing where they realize that they like each other. And then we have this closing scene where they’re all dressed up in super romantic garb. Crusher has a fancy dress on, and even Picard has an open silk shirt or something like that.
[laughs]And we’re like, it’s like they’re all ready to confess their love and then it just ends. Picard is like, “Maybe we shouldn’t be afraid to explore our feelings,” and Crusher is like, “Or maybe we should be afraid,” and then she just gets up and leaves. And that’s it. It’s like, “What? What just happened?”
Bunny: Every great relationship is built on dramatic exits.
[chuckles]Oren: One of my favorites is from Deep Space Nine with O’Brien and Bashir. Their story is interesting because it develops over a period of several episodes. There are three episodes where they go from not liking each other to being friends, and it takes some time, but you see them, they’re forced to be together because they’re on a mission together or trapped on a planet together. And they start to learn from each other. Bashir learns to be a little more circumspect, and not just rush off and try to do everything because O’Brien is there to give him caution and O’Brien learns that maybe he doesn’t have to be super grumpy all the time.
[chuckles]It’s a valuable lesson for him to learn and that one, I could not find if this is true. That one in fan lore was added because Rick Berman was worried that Bashir and Garak were too gay.
[chuckles]If that’s true, it’s unfortunate, but I actually haven’t been able to find any direct evidence that it’s true. I think this is the thing fans repeat, and since I’ve seen Star Trek fan conspiracies be born in real time, I’m not convinced until I see some evidence. But it’s still a good friendship regardless, like they do some cool stuff with it, and I get why. According to some writers, every one of the writers wanted to do O’Brien-Bashir episodes because they were just really fun to write.
Bunny: Yeah, and I think you just also touched on the other crucial part to the buddy dynamic, which is that they bond through antics.
Oren: Antics. Yeah, everyone loves antics.
Bunny: They have to have antics; they’ve got to deal with crazy aliens. In Toy Story, Woody and Buzz are forced together because they get abandoned together essentially, and they have to deal with the mutant toys and catching up with the truck and stuff like that and playing trains and automobiles. They’ll need to deal with cars catching on fire, delays, breakdowns, and all the worst parts of travel. When The Emperor’s New Groove, Kuzco and Pacha have to escape crocodiles and outsmart the bumbling antagonists and get back to the palace. It’s always antics.
Chris: Yes, certainly dropping the duo in trouble together is a good alternative to putting them on the case together where we just drop them in the middle of dangerous territory and have to make it back or what have you.
Bunny: It can’t just be danger, it has to be antics, Chris. Antics.
[chuckles]I mean, your danger sounds a lot like antics. That’s what I’m going to say.
[laughs]Oren: It was sad as I was looking up examples. Man, this is a sadly gendered trope. There is no reason you couldn’t have this arc for women. There are a couple with a woman and a man, but it’s really hard to find this for two women, at least in my experience.
I’m sure commenters can point us to some, but I was like– I was just digging through everything I’ve read or seen, and it’s, I don’t know, maybe Nancy and George from the Nancy Drew show. George is a girl in that version, and they started off not liking each other, but I don’t remember how much of an arc that was, or if they just got over it at some point.
Bunny: I think George was always a girl. I seem to remember in the original, she was a girl as well, but I could be wrong about that.
Oren: That’s very possible. I have not much experience with the original.
Chris: I almost wonder if for one thing, movies that do this would be women’s movies-
[chuckles]-and they might not get as much attention-
Bunny: Chick flicks.
Chris: -but I also, when I think about it, I think that relationship stories with women could have a bigger variety. So, there are some like Practical Magic, you can think of that as a story between two sisters. There’s also a romance in there, but the two sisters and their relationship is really important.
I’m thinking there’s less stories about mothers and daughters, about groups of women. Often their stories about a group of four women who are all friends, have been friends as childhood and get back together. Ugh, when I think about it, I almost feel like there’s a greater variety and that men are given this one template.
[chuckles]Oren: So, what you’re saying is we should let men have this one.
[laughs]Bunny: Problematic, Chris.
Oren: But what about the men?
[laughs]Chris: No, I think there should be more women buddy cops, but also, I think there should be both.
Bunny: It does seem hard to find this dynamic between female characters or just non men characters, which was probably a combination of bromance cop. This is the word that they come up with brom-coms because brom-coms, the target audience being male and then the fact that it’s cops, most cops being male and it has its roots in cops and then good old male default syndrome, probably a combination of those.
Chris: If we’re not keeping the comedy requirement then Mad Max: Fury Road, I would say definitely fits this template between Max and Furiosa. That one’s a little unusual because instead of contrasting with each other, they’re actually very similar characters.
Oren: And they hate it.
[laughs]Chris: Which maybe is less necessary if it doesn’t have a comedy element.
Bunny: I feel like, again depending on how narrowly we’re going to define it, I think the three elements that would make it most recognizable as a buddy cop dynamic, regardless of whether they are cops or not, is enemies to friends or coworkers with vastly different personalities with comparable skill levels bonding through antics. I think that is the most basic, “Does it have the buddy cop oof as those three things?”
Oren: Although you can branch it out a little bit and I think people will still recognize it, like you could have a mentor or student type vibe, like something from Men in Black for example. Where Agent K and Will Smith, Agent J, they’re not on the same level. K has been doing this a lot longer and is clearly more skilled, but he’s also teaching Jay despite Jay’s best efforts.
Bunny: That’s true. That one has a lot of the similar vibes.
Oren: So, if you’re trying to make it something that people will be like, “Oh hey, this is like Rush Hour.” Then I agree that those are specifically the things you want, but there is a kind of deeper arc at play here that can look different on the surface but still have the same dramatic elements.
Bunny: Yeah, no, definitely. I just mean if someone is looking at your story and you want them to go, “Oh, that is a buddy cop dynamic.” Those are like the three most recognizable things.
Generally, the arc tends to be, again we talked about this, forced together against their will, and then the characters usually have some sort of active animosity, like sometimes including trying to humiliate each other and there’s like friction between their approaches to life or their personalities or their skill sets. And then through antics, they begin to build a grudging respect, and then they bond, which might involve dancing to War (What is it good for).
[chuckles]Not to subtweet anything. And then eventually working together and playing to each other’s strength.
Oren: All right, well with that I think we will go ahead and call this episode to a close. We’ve all clearly bonded and learned things from each other.
Chris: If you found this episode helpful, support us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber, he’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, he’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
[Outro music]Chris: This has been the Mythcreants podcast. Opening/closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.
One of the most common obstacles for new authors is making their story too complicated. When you’re first putting pen to paper, there’s a powerful urge to include everything you can think of. But this leads to stories that are either impossible to finish, collapse under their own weight, or both. Simplifying is the best solution, but it’s not always easy. This week, we’re talking about how to decide what’s really necessary, along with several options for removing the chaff in as painless a manner as possible. Also… The Machine.
Show Notes Why You Shouldn’t Write a Masterpiece * Hades * Fury Road * Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell * Jeff VanderMeer Interview * George RR Martin Interview * The Rise of Skywalker * Is Backstory Necessary? * The Wheel of Time * Interludes * A Deadly Education TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Arturo.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Intro: You are listening to the Mythcreants Podcast, with your hosts: Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[music]Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is…
Bunny: Bunny.
Chris: And…
Oren: Oren.
Chris: Alright. After more than 500 episodes, I’m afraid this podcast has just gotten too complex. Nobody can follow it anymore, so we have to decide what we’re going to give up. Are we going to give up Wraith McBlade?
Bunny: No!
Chris: Are we going to give up sandwiches?
Oren: Hmm.
Chris: What about the Holistic Cup of Depression? Is that going to go?
Bunny: Okay, no. That’s the only thing that stays.
Oren: Ever since Bunny joined the podcast, you two are now the ones whose voices people can’t tell apart. It used to be me and Wes. So I’m afraid we’re going to have to consolidate you into one host. I’ll just go and fire up the machine.
Bunny: No, not the machine! Anything to save the holistic cup of depression.
Oren: Yeah, we have to make sacrifices. Or you two, apparently, have to make a sacrifice in this scenario, is, I think, what I’m learning here.
Bunny: I’ve made my peace.
Chris: Maybe we should just diversify a little bit, because if we’re not fulfilling the same role, we’re less expendable. And we know Bunny’s the villain.
Oren: Mmm, that’s true.
Chris: So I think you need to be the love interest, Oren. Given that you’re not another protagonist.
Oren: Mmm. Okay, all right, all right, hang on.
Bunny: I noticed that you’re the main character, Chris. I’m sure this is coincidental.
Chris: What? No, that’s just the only logical choice.
Oren: Just writing friend fiction over here.
Chris: This time we’re going to talk about simplifying your story, and I think the first thing to note about this is sometimes it’s kind of too late. If we’re being realistic about people emotionally, it can be too late.
Oren: Yeah.
Bunny: Look, I get it. I like trinkets, I like shiny things, and sometimes those mean pages-long worldbuilding digressions.
Oren: It’s one of those things where, theoretically, any manuscript can be edited in any way, but practically, authors have a limit of how much they’re willing to change, and often, if you have finished the manuscript and you are at the point where it is too complicated, it will be difficult to simplify it to the point where it probably needs to be simplified. So often you are much better off incorporating these when you’re starting the story.
Chris: Yeah. It’s possible for us to find targets for simplification with a story that’s already drafted. But part of the problem is that writers just get super attached to what they’ve created and they don’t like giving things up. And we try to convince them, but a lot of times they do not cut things that we think that they should cut to make their story stronger. So, again, simplifying as you come up with ideas and just being in this ongoing habit of keeping things simple as you develop the story is really key. And if you have that mindset as you start from the very first time you come up with that little flicker of an idea in your head, you’ll just be much better off and you’ll be able to do it much more thoroughly and come up with a story that is much stronger and simpler and easier to understand and doesn’t cause you headaches and all of that stuff.
Bunny: Wow. I think the simplest solution is just to not write it.
Chris: It is very simple! Well, actually no, that’s not true because, if you don’t write it down, it’s only going to develop in your head, and you’re going to think it’s simple, but you’re going to be wrong.
Bunny: So you have net complicatedness.
Chris: That’s the thing: actually, people’s first story is usually by far the most complex, what we jokingly refer to as the Magnum Opus, which is this often series (sometimes it’s a novel, but it’s often a series) that people come up with as their first huge project when they’re new to everything.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: And it’s usually super duper complicated, and I think there’s many reasons, but I think one of the reasons is that, because it’s your first time writing things down, you let it develop in your head for a super long time before you ever actually start writing, and it’s really hard to tell how complicated things are when they’re in your head. They seem really simple. And only when you put them on paper do you realize, “Wow, I actually have a lot here.”
Oren: Yeah. And there’s also just a factor of you don’t know what you don’t know, and everything seems easy when you’re thinking about it, and there’s a good chance you were inspired by some complicated story that you really liked. And I’ve been there, right? Some of my early stories were like that, and they were unworkable because of how complicated they were.
Chris: Yeah.
Bunny: And I think, when you’re first writing something too, you’re just really optimistic and maybe more excited because your expectations aren’t tempered by anything, by what you might have to simplify.
Oren: That’s true. Yeah, the worst part of being an editor is having to tell an author that they are not as far along as they think they are.
Chris: Yeah. Waa-waa.
Oren: I hate having to do that.
Chris: It’s a huge bummer.
Oren: I wish there was a way I could outsource that to someone else.
Chris: Yeah, I don’t want to be the one who has to disillusion you. Can somebody else give you your reality check?
Bunny: Maybe that’s my role in this podcast.
Oren: Yeah!
Bunny: You can pay me and I’ll be the harsh truths person.
Oren: Bunny will get a cut off all my editing going forward. I need you to tell the client. I don’t wanna do it.
Bunny: “I’m sorry, client. Bunny’s going to step in here for a couple minutes.”
Chris: When they see Bunny, they run away screaming. They know what’s coming.
Bunny: I mean, I guess that’s consistent with villainesses.
Oren: One that goes hand in hand with this kind of ambition we’re talking about is a simple lack of focus. This is also more likely to affect new writers, just because, when you’re first writing, stuff is cool and you see stuff and you wanna put it in the story ’cause it was cool. And my players in an urban fantasy game that I ran a few years ago noticed that there was a lot more Greek stuff in it about halfway through. It’s ’cause I was playing Hades and I loved Hades. It’s not my fault ’cause Hades is too good.
Chris: I also think that the Magnum Opus stage also encourages that, because, instead of people thinking about having a long career where they write many stories and no one story needs to completely fulfill them, they have this idea of, like, “No, my grand big story! I’m going to be working on it forever! It has to be everything to me!” So this idea of, like, “No, that’s a cool idea. I should make another story with it,” that’s too far away. That’s not real to them. Your big grand story has got to have it.
Bunny: Anecdotally, talking to people who are having their first big Magnum Opus moment trying to write everything in high school, were planning sprawling series. It’s never one standalone type of thing. You imagine this huge…
Chris: I have encountered a Magnum Opus that is just one novel. I have encountered, but they’re often series. Or more likely to be series.
Bunny: Yeah. Or at least I don’t think I know anyone who actually went through and finished a series. Usually, and this is myself included, the interest tapered out as you realized that this is maybe a little much.
Chris: Yeah, that can happen for sure.
Oren: One of the neat things about working with clients as opposed to reading a published manuscript is that I can ask them, “Where did this stuff come from?” And often it’s a direct one-to-one. There’s a car chase here in a story that I wouldn’t expect to have a car chase. And it’s because they saw Fury Road. Or the characters suddenly start focusing on comedy of manners two-thirds of the way through the book, that’s when they read Strange and Norrell, and I really like the comedy of manners aspect. And I suspect a lot of published authors have the same thing. If they’re successful, they’ve probably managed to tone it down a bit, but I’ll never know for sure because I can’t ask them. But with clients I can.
Bunny: “Why is there a car chase in here?” “Oh, well, I’ve been playing a lot of Hades.“
Oren: It’s all coming into focus.
Chris: Yeah.
Oren: Sometimes authors give interviews, and in which case we do know some of this, I’m reading Absolution right now, the fourth Southern Reach book. It’s super scattered, it has all this random stuff, and Jeff VanderMeer did a bunch of interviews promoting it, as one does. And I’ve read one on Polygon where, at least the way he tells it, there’s just a bunch of ideas he had, and he wanted to put them all in the book. And you got the backstory of Old Jim and working in this encounter that VanderMeer had with a manatee in real life, and this big metaphor about the state taking away agency and following up on the rabbits from the previous books, and that all had to be in there. Yeah. That’s what this book reads like. It reads like there’s a lot of random things.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Bunny: But Oren, every sentence was intentional.
Chris: Every sentence was planned.
Oren: Which is like, look, people say things in interviews that are off the cuff, I don’t wanna hold that to him too much, but he also says in that interview that he doesn’t remember writing big parts of it. How does he know they were all planned?
Bunny: Shades of Memento.
Chris: Yeah. No, I’m sure he didn’t actually mean that he outlined every sentence and then wrote it again in the draft. It just sounds very funny.
Oren: And we also know this isn’t just VanderMeer who does stuff like this. We know that one of the reasons why Martin is having so much trouble finishing Song of Ice and Fire is that he was too ambitious. He made it too big, there are too many characters, and then he also killed off too many of the characters he needed, because it was shocking when he did that, and now he doesn’t… Nowhere to go. The garden has been overgrown, to use his metaphor.
Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Bunny: Is this something he admits about it?
Oren: I don’t think that he said it in quite that many words, but I’ve looked at a number of interviews where he has talked about it, and there have been some instances where he mentions that the story has grown in ways he did not expect. And just from reading the books, I have no idea how to resolve this. If someone came to me as an editor with the first five books as they are now, and was like, “How do I end this series?” I’ll be like, “I don’t know. You killed all the characters you needed to end it. They’re all dead. I have no idea how to end it now.”
Chris: Oren, I need you to plan Rise of Skywalker for me. You can’t change anything about the previous two movies in the sequel trilogy.
Oren: Oh, no!
Chris: But you need it to somehow make Rise of Skywalker good. Can you do it?
Oren: I can’t. I can’t do it.
Bunny: Could have done it better than what they did.
Chris: There were some unforced errors in there.
Oren: I don’t know why Rise of Skywalker has “Somehow, Palpatine returned” as a line. I know why they brought Palpatine back. I don’t know why that’s how they explained it, and I don’t know why there are so many scenes where a character seems to die and then didn’t die. That happening once is probably enough. But yes, this has been a thing I did for quite some time after Rise of Skywalker came out: “What would I have done with Rise of Skywalker, assuming I couldn’t change anything about the previous two movies?” And I do not know. It feels like an impossible task.
Chris: Okay. I think we’ve fleshed out the problem. So what are some recommendations for keeping things simple? I said: be in the habit as simplifying as you make things up. And I think that the key thing here, and this is when we talk about consolidation, is, when you decide to develop a story or add new things, always reuse the stuff you’ve already put there whenever possible.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: So if you’re like, “Oh, I need a character that does this,” always look at the characters you’ve already created and say, “Can I add a role to this character?” before you, for instance, introduce a new character. Everything. Always return to the story elements, the worldbuilding rules, everything that you’ve already created, and reuse those whenever possible instead of adding like a whole new person, place, item, or anything named that the audience is going to have to learn.
Oren: Yeah.
Bunny: Yeah, I think that your story should only be as complicated as it absolutely needs to be. That’s a good rule of thumb. I will allow for adding tidbits that make the world feel more fleshed out, even if they’re not directly applicable to the story, but it’s easy to get carried away with those, and they can consume your plot if you’re not careful. I think the most genuinely helpful piece of advice in terms of figuring out what to focus on in the story and building everything else around that, I’ve gotten from Mythcreants, is to center your darlings, and that can help the rest of those elements fall into place.
Chris: I think we did go over this in a recent episode, but if you are starting fresh, right? (I think we should talk more about what if you’re not starting fresh), but if you are starting fresh, the very first thing to do is figure out as precisely as possible what is exciting to you about the story, and then build everything else around that to reinforce that. And that kind of gives you some idea of priority, what is important. And if something is unrelated, again, maybe that’s a thing to start a new story.
Oren: Yeah. So one option, and this depends on the story, and you might need an editor to help you figure this out, because sometimes this can be hard to judge, but there are often parts of your story that simply don’t connect to anything else, and you could just remove them. I’ve worked with a number of clients that are like that, where it’s, “We have a story about the protagonist, and the main story is about the protagonist taking down the Dark Lord, but there are several chapters in the middle where they go and hang out in the Morpho Kingdom for a while, and the Morpho Kingdom is complicated and adds a bunch of burden to the audience’s attention, and then they leave and it’s like we were never there. And removing that is not painless. It will probably hurt, but it is relatively low on effort. Because it’s just not connected, and you can just try to run some thought experiments to be like, “If this never happened, if we took these chapters out, what would be different? What is it that the audience wouldn’t get later?” And you might find that the answer is very little.
Chris: Yeah. I think that the thing that I find that usually can be simplified or cut is backstory.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Backstory, people, I think. Especially if they do character development and they come up with all this backstory to develop their character, they are very tempted to include it. Or it could just be, if you absolutely love this character, or something is an important part of them to you, that becomes really attempting to fill that in. And sometimes you do need backstories, or sometimes giving the backstory in brief is helpful, but in many cases, because it doesn’t actually take place during the story, that’s one of those things that can go. Or, if something about the backstory is really important to the character, like you have a character who… the villain killed their parents, right? That might be something you want to state, but you don’t need a sequence of ten events in their backstory detailing exactly how the villain went about killing their parents. You could usually distill that down into something much simpler. Meeting for the first time makes it easy to keep audiences on the same page with the characters if they just met. We know everything we need to know. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have characters with a long history. But you wanna use that history if so.
Oren: I get it because I love the idea of two characters who’ve just been through so much together. That’s just very appealing to me. But that is hard. If the audience didn’t see any of that, communicating that in a way that will feel real is challenging. So I would say: only do it if that’s something you’re really interested in. It’s going to be hard to do casually.
Bunny: I think backstory is also one of those things that people have the impulse to overexplain when it’s just not as necessary. You can allude to things, and the backstory might be not crystal-clear, you might not know exactly what the villain said to the hero when they switched sides, the exact wording of that, sure, but you can still get the point across, right? without so many words.
Oren: Yeah. One option that is very useful, and is also fairly low on the pain threshold, is combining characters, ’cause you’ll often find that you have a character who’s doing one thing and they could also be doing something else, and you can get the thing you liked about both characters in one, instead of having to introduce another one.
Bunny: I don’t know, or in your machine. Looks pretty painful.
Oren: But in the current story that I’m working on, I had a thing where I needed a witch character to give some ooh! key foreshadowing. And I needed a physician character because there was a subplot where someone got injured and needed a physician and I was like, “Hey, hang on. Those don’t need to be separate people. I just have the witch also healing stuff.” And now the witch can give spooky foreshadowing while also providing medical services.
Bunny: Give spooky medical services!
Oren: Yeah, very spooky.
Chris: Sometimes you have to keep characters away, write ’em off with a stick. I have a story where I have a main character who interacts with their sister, but I just don’t want to introduce the parents. Those two more people, you know? Even though the parents technically are… it’s an agricultural family, right? work in the same lands, so they’re just over there, tending a different plot of land, and I just keep them away.
Bunny: That should be the excuse for everything.
Oren: Yeah.
Bunny: “Where are they?” “Oh, well, they’re tending a plot of land.”
Oren: Um, as you were going, this is more of a series thing, although it could happen in one book, when you have magic, I always advise trying to figure out new ways to use existing powers than adding new powers. It’s not like you’ll never want to add a new power, but I would recommend doing it as after you’ve already exhausted all the new ways you could use your existing ones.
Chris: And just say no to multiple magic systems. Do not need multiple magic systems!
Oren: Yeah!
Chris: Don’t do it!
Bunny: Dare to say no!
Chris: If you want it, the feeling of multiple magic systems, it’s still possible to just… they’re technically the same system, but two different groups go about it in slightly different ways, so the magic technically works the same, but it has different flavors.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: You can split it into categories and do other things like that, but I think that, most of the time, when people have completely different magic systems, a lot of times it’s a legacy of D&D, where they’re used to just a sorcery versus divine magic or what have you. But you don’t usually want to do that kind of thing in a prose work.
Oren: Which is very funny, because in D&D you have to explain, “Okay, sorcerers get their magic this way, wizards get it this way, clerics get it this way, druids get it this way.” And then you’re like, “Okay, so what do they do?” Pretty much the same thing. They don’t actually have any difference in their mechanics. There are some spells that are exclusive to certain classes, or that others don’t get, but they’re drawing a lot of the same spells. So it’s just this huge amount of worldbuilding effort you would need to go to for almost no benefit.
Chris: Again, with magic, the same principles of always reusing what you have whenever possible instead of adding new things.
Oren: If you’ve spent a lot of work explaining how wizardry works, and it’s complicated and there are a lot of different things you can do with it, you probably don’t then have to create a completely new system for druids. Even if you want there to be druids in your setting, you could probably have them use the same principles of wizardry, but maybe they call it something else and they’re slightly different with it. But you don’t need to start with a complete clean sheet design.
Bunny: And I think this approach can be applied to scenes as well. Elements of your plot. Do your characters need to go to location A to do a thing and then go to location B to have a conversation? Well, no. They can probably do the thing while they’re having the conversation, right?
Chris: And the multitasking. Again, I’ve told people it’s very useful if you do outline. Outlining is not for everybody. Some people really want to discover the story as they create it. But if you do outlining, if you lock out your scenes, it’s a lot easier to see where that stuff is happening, and you’re likely to have a conversation and then a whole new scene to do something else that’s small, when you can just combine them together. And that’ll be more efficient. But in general, I would look for anything that has the same role, ’cause those are the things that are most likely to be efficiently rolled together. So, if you have two mentors, for instance, you can have two mentors that have lots of contrast with each other and do very different things and justify their presence, especially if the story’s not already over complex, but those are good candidates to combine together.
Oren: Yeah. Does your hero need two rivals? If you want to have a new enemy, does it really need to be a new enemy? Or can it be a minor enemy from several chapters ago who turns out to be a bigger deal than you thought? Now that one’s risky. ’cause if we beat this guy up several chapters ago, having him show back up to be like, “I’m more important than you thought” might not work. But if there was a minor confrontation with some bandit or something, you could be like, “Okay, here that bandit is going to turn out to actually be a local crime lord or something,” instead of introducing a different crime lord.
Chris: And sometimes with locations. Do we have to go into the other city? We just combine them into one city and not have a traveling sequence.
Oren: Yeah, traveling is a huge thing. Sometimes your story does need to take place across a large geographic area, but if it doesn’t, don’t force it. If it does, see if you can consolidate how many places your character needs to be.
Chris: But how will I show off all the cities I created in my world?
Oren: Yeah, well, just going to have to acknowledge that it’s better to give a more complete picture of one city than an incomplete picture of several ones.
Bunny: That’s the first Wheel of Time book. Did that where it was just journey between different towns that were all the same, but had one thing different.
Oren: I mean, yes, the Wheel of Time world is incredibly samey. Everything is the same. I could not tell you which nations were different, except for the one where everyone talks like a pirate. It’s like the only one that is different than any of the others.
Bunny: Mm-hmm.
Chris: And of course, if you have been listening to this podcast, you should know this, but let me just say it again: if you have any interludes, just imagine us sitting and editing your story with you. And I’m going to tell you: we’re going to look at your story and we’re going to say, “Just cut all of them.” Okay? We have now given you a custom edit. It’s imaginary, but it’s very real at the same time, and your editor has told you to just cut out the interludes. All right? They just have to go bye-bye.
Bunny: That’ll be $200, please.
Oren: Yeah. Another one that comes up a fair amount is what I can only describe as going with your world or story’s momentum as opposed to against it. And this is where you might have a plot point where your bad guy just needs to do something that is out of character for them, you know, you have a bad guy and the bad guy has been established as trying to conquer the world, but you need them to not conquer this one city. And so they come up with a bunch of excuses and it’s like, “Okay, that’s more complicated. Better to come up with an initial motivation for this villain that makes sense as to why they wouldn’t conquer this one city, as opposed to get there and then try to explain why it’s not going to happen.” I’ve critiqued Deadly Education for this problem, because Deadly Education is a project trying to justify inherently unrealistic worldbuilding concepts. And so it suspends so much of its runtime arguing with you that absolutely it makes sense, but it might just be easier to design a world that does make sense.
Chris: I’ve said this before: explanations only help if they’re compelling.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: And to be compelling, they first need to be simple. And then you should reuse what you have in your explanation. That’s the theme of this episode. Reuse the stuff you’ve got.
Oren: Reduce, reuse, recycle. We’re just Captain Planet up in here.
Bunny: Get your plot from Goodwill.
Oren: All right. I think we’re about out of time. We’re going to avoid overcomplicating this podcast. We’ve given our message, and now we’re going to go ahead and call things to a close.
Chris: If we didn’t make you mad by telling you to cut your interludes, please consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who is a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
[music]Outro: This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.
The turning point is so vital that many authors instinctively try to include one, but it’s so rarely articulated that mistakes are very common while doing so. Authors forget to show how the hero’s actions lead to victory or establish why that victory is deserved in the first place. This week, we’re talking about those mistakes and how to make sure your story doesn’t fall victim to them.
Show Notes What Is a Turning Point? * Types of Turning Points * Star Wars Climax * Buffy The Vampire Slayer * Waymond * Dormammu * Technobabble * Three Parts Dead * One Dark Window * Red Rising * Wax On, Was Off * Age of Ultron * Fury Road * I Have the High Ground TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Michael Martin.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[opening song]Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren and with me today is…
Chris: Chris.
Oren: And…
Bunny: Bunny.
Oren: So we’re about to defeat the big bad, but we can’t just do that by sword fighting better. Right? Something should happen. Maybe I’ll give a little speech about how we’re gonna win ’cause we’re all full of determination.
Bunny: Yeah. I could use a pick me up.
Oren: Yeah, just a little pep talk and everyone will feel great and then we’ll win. It’ll be very satisfying.
Bunny: I need to be roused a bit. Yeah.
Oren: Maybe I’ll say something dramatic like, “Now it’s war.”
Bunny: Whoa.
Chris: [Deadpan] Wow. I didn’t know it was war.
Oren: [Laughs]
Bunny: That’s pretty deep.
Chris: But now that I know it’s a war, it’s just totally different. Changes everything for me. I think I’ve got more spunk now.
Oren: Yeah. People will be like, “How is war different from what we were doing before?” And I’ll never tell.
Bunny: [Laughs] Yeah. My sword seems spunkier too. I don’t know.
Oren: Yeah. That’s great. So we’re talking about common turning point problems today. ‘Cause turning points—they’re a really important concept in storytelling to the point that a lot of writers instinctively know there should be something there, some kind of ‘extra oomph’ that gives the heroes the edge to win or makes them fail if you’re going for an unsuccessful resolution. But because the concept is very rarely articulated, there are a lot of mistakes.
Chris: Yep. Including just not having them.
Oren: Sometimes they are just missing. They’re definitely one of the ones that I see people try to do incorrectly more often than other concepts that we cover. ‘Cause before Chris wrote her article about turning points, like, I knew there had to be something. And in my head I called it, like, the ‘extra oomph,’ which is not a great term.
Bunny: Copyright. Trademark. Do not steal.
Chris: Very specific. That’s exactly what to do.
All: [Laughter]
Chris: What you need is that Dragon Ball Z power to power up. That’s it right there.
Oren: Yeah. Where they just yell. Oh man. I rewatched some of Dragon Ball Z for nostalgia recently. I’d forgotten how much grunting there is.
Chris: [Laughs] That’s what you need. That’s the ‘oomph.’ You gotta grunt.
Bunny: Yeah [Laughs]. It’s literally ‘oomph.’
Oren: Although the scene that I watched did have a turning point, it was just not a good one. It was an interesting example of a bad turning point, ’cause the writer knew there should be one, but didn’t know how to set one up very well. And in this case, it was a turning point where it just raised the question of, okay, I guess that was a clever deduction. You figured out how you could use your moves that way. Why don’t they do that every time now? Because he, like, figured out he could teleport to a place where the enemy wouldn’t be expecting it using his teleportation move and then blast him where his guard was down. Which makes sense.
Bunny: But is that clever?
Oren: It’s not great, right? It raises the question of why they aren’t just always doing that.
Bunny: That would be the first thing I do with my teleportation powers.
Chris: Let’s back up and talk about what a turning point is.
Oren: If we must.
Bunny: Oh, oh! I know, I know.
Oren: Oh yeah.
Chris: Okay.
Bunny: It’s when you miss your exit on the highway and then you have to find a turning point, which is a problem, ’cause you don’t know that stretch of highway. Right?
Oren: Yeah. It’s that crisis when you get a reroute on your mapping app.
Oren: Sometimes you take an exit assuming you can just cross over and get back on the highway, but that exit takes you to another highway and now you’re in Eastern Washington suddenly.
Bunny: No!
Chris: So turning points: what are they? Just in case we have one person who has not listened to this podcast before. So, basically a typical plot arc or plotline starts with a problem and ends with a resolution to that problem. So, problem: “Oh no! The Empire has built the Death Star, which can destroy planets.” And then the resolution: “Oh, we’ve destroyed the Death Star. But it could also be, like, “The Death Star has destroyed all of the planets.”
Oren: There are no more planets!
Chris: That would be a hard one, because to resolve things in a tragic manner you have to have that the worst has already happened. Right? There’s no possibility for hope left.
Bunny: I thought you were gonna say that’s a hard one, ’cause there’s a lot of planets.
Chris: [Laughs] There are a lot of planets. So, the Death Star’s pretty much gonna be threatening and create the sense of tension, which keeps that plotline going until it’s destroyed all of the planets.
Oren: Well, in Star Wars—probably—it would’ve been, I think, not too hard because we imply that the, like, Rebellion is like the only hope for stopping the Empire. And they all live on this one moon. So the Death Star doesn’t have to destroy every planet, just that one. And then that would’ve been a negative resolution. Good guys lose. Everyone’s sad.
Chris: Right. If we’re talking about the threat actually being the Empire, and the Empire is gonna use this Death Star to take control, right? Once the Rebellion is completely quashed and the Empire has complete control, and doesn’t need the Death Star to destroy planets to intimidate people anymore we could say that that might be a way of permanently resolving it in a tragic direction.
But in any case, for that ending to be satisfying you can’t just have the resolution happen in any way that you want. It has to come out in a specific way, which means the protagonist has to do something to earn that resolution. And they can do it in a positive way or a negative way. They can have an action that we would say earns them good karma, which means it feels like they deserve something good. They’ve earned something good and then you have success.
Luke trusted in the force. That’s the thing that he did that was good and now the Death Star is destroyed. Or they can do something that makes it feel like they’ve earned a tragic ending if we have a tragedy. Which is, of course, less common at the climax. But you can still do that. And you can have multiple turning points if you want.
But basically, we have a specific moment that for the story, all for all, it’s gonna be at the climax. But arcs aren’t just at the climax, right? They’re all over in the story. So you can have a smaller conflict. That smaller conflict will still have a turning point. It’ll just be less impressive. And that will determine how the conflict goes and whether the protagonist succeeds or fails, usually. And it’s that one moment that makes it feel like that has been earned.
Oren: Yeah. And you’re usually having the character demonstrate some aspect of cleverness, selflessness, or perseverance. There are others, but those are, like, the most common. And that shows both how the protagonist was able to win and also why they deserve to win. ‘Cause it’s just not satisfying if they just win by being really good at stuff. Or by, in the Dragon Ball Z case, figuring out a pretty obvious exploit to these two moves they have.
Chris: So, they do something that, for instance, makes it feel like they earn a good ending. And it has to be the cause. That’s the other thing. Has to be a clear cause and effect where they persevered, and because they persevered in an impressive way—not just in a normal way, in an impressive way. That’s why they succeeded. Or they were impressively clever and that’s why they succeeded.
So, that causality has to be there for it to work. And yeah, some people do not like the simplicity of the good karma versus bad karma, and … I but…Sorry I didn’t make that up. That’s just how it works.
All: [Laughter]
We’re just describing what we’re seeing here. We’re not being prescriptive on this one.
Bunny: As we established, Chris speaks nothing but facts.
Chris & Oren: [Laughter]
Chris: But you could have multiple—if you wanna make a more complex story—you could have multiple turning points that go, and one of them can be happy and one of them can be tragic. And there’s still ways to have complexity and ambiguity in your story if you want that. It’s … you just, you know. A turning point has either a … sort of a positive or a negative charge. And that’s how it goes.
Oren: Yeah. And if, look, if you wanna have your character do everything wrong and still win; I mean, I can’t stop you, right? Like, we’re not gonna tell you you can’t do that. It’s just not gonna go well.
Chris: Right. I mean, mostly we want people to know how it’s likely to affect the audience. It’s, like, people will be unhappy, but if it’s your, like, art piece and you’re cool with that … Right? I’m not gonna say that’s bad, right? Just want you to know what effect you’re probably gonna have on the audience, that’s all.
Bunny: Fly free, little bird.
Oren: That joke we were making earlier about giving a speech is an interesting example of a case where a writer knows there should be a turning point, but doesn’t know how to make one. And this was very common in the last season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There are just, I think, half a dozen times.
Chris: Okay. So, a speech can be a turning point.
Oren: Yes.
Chris: Let’s not say that a speech is not necessarily a turning point. But, just because somebody gives a speech doesn’t mean it’s a good turning point. Do continue.
Oren: That’s the thing: it’s that close, right? Because it could be perseverance. And I think that’s what it’s supposed to be when they’re all beaten down and Buffy’s like, “No, we are gonna win and we are going to defeat the bad guy.” The problem is that the turning point is in the wrong place because that speech could be a decent turning point for the team wanting to give up. Like, they want to give up, they don’t wanna fight anymore and Buffy gives a speech. And they, like, show perseverance and they don’t give up. That could work. But they’re used to explain how the team is now able to defeat an enemy that Buffy could not defeat before. And that’s where it breaks down, right? There’s no connection between the speech and why we were able to beat the super vampire this time.
Chris: ‘Cause it doesn’t require the team. She’s just doing it by herself. She’s doing exactly what she did before and for some reason this time she succeeds. And I think that is probably, especially in popular media, the most common mistake I see. It’s that the protagonist fails and fails, and then suddenly they succeed. And it’s like, well, why did they succeed this time. Right? We haven’t demonstrated that anything changed.
Bunny: They were … better.
Oren & Chris: [Chuckling]
Bunny: They fought, and then they fought better and won.
Chris: It’s like they didn’t have enough spunk before. Now they do for some reason. Sometimes I also refer to this as the ‘emergency mode turning point’ where the idea is that the character fails and fails. And then when it matters, they succeed. So when they’re suddenly faced with a crisis and life or death is on the line, they do the same thing. And this time they just do it just fine.
And again, I feel like that could work if we filled in a reason why being backed into a corner and having lives on the line makes a difference to the character. So if they were lacking in resolve before and we showed that, and then having a crisis causes them to really rally and show that kind of perseverance and … we could do something like that. But usually that’s not what happens.
I mean, again, I do have some sympathy with storytellers in visual mediums that have a little bit harder time flushing out what is happening inside the character. Because I think to a certain degree a lot of turning points, they feel very about what is inside, and what the character’s thinking and feeling. And those things are just hard to show without any kind of internal narration.
Bunny: I was trying to think of turning points where a speech does work. And one that came to mind was Waymond’s speech at the end of Everything Everywhere All at Once, which critically is not how Evelyn, the main character, defeats the villain in this case. Because, not to spoil too much, but she doesn’t really defeat the villain. She gives the villain a hug essentially, and things become all right again. But, if I’m remembering this correctly, Evelyn is teetering on the edge of nihilism, becoming like her daughter, who has essentially become this nihilistic, universe-spanning thing that’s built a donut that’s destroying everything. Don’t worry.
Oren: Excuse me. It’s a bagel.
Bunny: Oh, that’s right. It’s a bagel.
Oren: Uh, pardon you.
Oren & Bunny: [Laughter]
Chris: Yeah. Isn’t it an everything bagel?
Bunny: It’s an everything bagel. It’s a bagel with everything on it.
Chris: [Chuckles] It’s ‘everything’ is the entire universe is on the bagel.
Oren: It has the power of bagel puns.
Bunny: [Laughs] The donut is from the other good movie, which is Knives Out. So, I’m getting them confused. And then Waymond is like, “Please.” And he comes up and this is … you know. Evelyn throughout the entire movie has been pretty dismissive of her version of Waymond. She thinks he’s kind of pathetic. And then he comes up and he’s like, “Please, be kind.” Like, “Stop doing this,” essentially. And that pulls Evelyn back from the edge of nihilism.
So, I think that’s a turning point that kind of works where she realizes that, no; Waymond’s optimism and what she’s interpreted as naïveté has validity. And that allows her to defeat the nihilism in her daughter.
Oren: And that’s, like, a perfect example, because the issue in that scene is that Evelyn is about to give up. And so we have Waymond, and everyone loves Waymond. It’s true.
Bunny: Everyone loves Waymond.
Oren: Who has the superpower of perseverance and inspires Evelyn to keep going, right? So that’s the perfect turning point for a speech of some kind.
Bunny: Jobu! That’s the name. I was like—I kept thinking Dormammu and I was like, that is not it.
Oren: No, that’s from Dr. Strange.
Bunny: Jobu.
Oren: The turning point in Dr. Strange is also very funny, ’cause it’s like it’s supposed to be a clever deduction where he figures out he can use his superpower time stone to do an infinite time loop on the bad guy. But it’s like, okay, how did you figure that out and why can’t you do it on anyone else?
Bunny: Look, that’s easy. Every Computer Science 101 student accidentally writes a wild loop without a break function.
Oren: Yeah, it just happens sometimes.
Chris: Which reminds me of another common problem I see when the audience cannot follow the reasoning of the clever deduction or can’t follow what’s happening. So they have no understanding of how this turning point worked.
And this generally happens with either technology or magic. Technobabble or magic babble, in most cases, it’s all nonsense to the audience. So basically the storyteller’s just declaring by fiat that, “Oh, they were clever.” Which is not particularly satisfying, right? We expect there to be foreshadowing. We expect to be able to understand and see, oh yeah. See for ourselves. How impressive, you know, putting the clues together was and coming up with this new insight. I’ve called it the ‘clever ex machina,’ because it really is just a thing the storyteller made up on the spot. Or could be. Might as well be if you can’t follow it.
Bunny: “We can reveal the anomaly source by creating a phase-induced reverse particle beam and bouncing it off of the deflector dish while we eat pretzels.”
Oren: That language always confused me, ’cause they say bounce it off of the deflector dish. So, it isn’t emitted from the deflector dish? Where is it coming from? It’s being deflected.
Bunny: That’s why it’s called a deflector dish.
Oren: Where are they shooting the beam from to hit the deflector dish? Is there some other part of the ship that has this beam on it? I have questions.
Bunny: The afflicter dish.
Oren: [Chuckles]
Chris: That’s true. It’s like, it’s going out in space, right? What is reflecting it back so that it hits the deflector dish?
All: [Laughter]
Oren: That issue can be one of two things. One is it can just be complete nonsense, right? Like Star Trek, technobabble is nonsense. There is no rhyme or reason to it. They make it up for every new episode. Or it could be something that, in theory, does make sense, but is simply beyond your capacity as a writer to explain in a way that doesn’t confuse a good percentage of your readers. And I would argue in most cases those are functionally the same. Like, I remember the end of Three Parts Dead—this isn’t exactly a turning point, but it’s close enough—when the bad guy is, like, explaining his evil plan. And I’m like, okay. I think that makes sense if I, like, stop and listen to it again and take some notes and create, like, a flow chart of who was doing what at what time. But I think for most people, they’re just gonna be like, “What are … what are you talking about?”
All: [Laughter]
Bunny: It’s a lot of work to go back and check.
Oren: Yeah. So, be careful with that. Even if you take your audience to court and prove that your ending does make sense, if they didn’t get it the experience is gonna be the same.
Chris: Another one that can happen is just the karmic action not being exceptional enough. If what the character does … And again, if this is just for a small conflict within the story it doesn’t have to be super exceptional, right? Just one idea for how to solve the problem is usually fine, or one simple act of kindness, or what have you. It doesn’t have to be super exceptional, but the bigger the arc is, the more exciting that climactic scene is, the more you have to do something impressive. And if it’s not impressive enough, like for instance a clever deduction for something that seems obvious, then that becomes a problem.
A recent instance I saw—spoilers for One Dark Window, which is a dark romantasy—There’s what should be a sacrifice turning point at the end where the protagonist decides that she is going to give over control of herself to this, like, monster that’s possessing her, right? With a request that the monster help her love interest, but she’s gonna kinda lose herself to this monster that’s possessing her. And in most cases that would be just fine as a turning point. The problem is that she solves every turning point, like, every problem in the story that way.
So she is continually asking the monster to do things for her and it takes her a surprisingly long time to catch on that she’s actually—the monster’s getting more control over her every time she asks, even though it’s obvious.
Oren: I kept forgetting that she was supposed to not know that. Like, it’s so obvious. They keep saying that magic has a price. Every other paragraph they say that and it just never occurred to her.
Chris: Like at one point she asked for the monster to give her night vision because she just wakes up in the morning while it’s still dark. And it’s just like, really? Anyway, she keeps doing it after she knows. I think that one even comes after she knows.
Bunny: Yeah. Just get a flashlight.
Chris: Yeah.
Bunny: Use your phone. We all carry around phones with flashlights.
Chris: I mean, it’s fantasy. But she can light a little candle or something. So after she solves every problem that way, it’s not exceptional enough once we get to the climax anymore. So, it just doesn’t feel like a turning point that she’s earned. So, I would say again, another reason to vary your turning points and vary the ways that your protagonist solves conflicts throughout the story.
Oren: Another thing that was wrong with that turning point was just that the implication that it gave—because she used that ability so freely and, like, without any thought to the consequences—it made it seem like a foregone conclusion that this monster was gonna take her over, because she apparently just has no self-control. So, like, when she does it in the climax it’s like, okay. I mean, I guess it might as well happen here as opposed to some other time.
Chris: Maybe she’s, like, giving up a week.
Oren: Yeah, maybe. Before she needs to see in the dark again, right?
Bunny: Just stumble around and bang your shins on things like the rest of us.
Oren: [Deadpan] It was like, “Ah, minor inconvenience. I guess it’s time to be possessed.”
Oren & Bunny: [Chuckling]
Chris: I think this is also a reason why it’s really important that things seem hard enough and difficult enough at an important turning point like the story’s climax. And just the more difficult it is and the more they have to struggle, usually for the turning point to work, the better it works out. Now, I think some storytellers just put in the struggle and don’t know what else to do. But, you know, that does help.
Oren: And of course, even if that turning point had been good, the repetition at a certain point—this is a little less common, but I’ve seen it twice now; there was One Dark Window, like we mentioned, and then I critiqued Red Rising for this problem, where every single conflict is resolved via a hidden plan. Where we just reveal, yeah. The hero, he had a plan this whole time. He just didn’t tell you what it was. And it’s like, okay. The first time that was kind of cool. But then afterwards, the second, third, fourth and fifth times, it’s just like, all right. Now I just know there’s no danger. Because every danger that arrives, the hero will have a plan for it.
Chris: Yeah. And just to be specific, the hidden plan is what we call—it’s very popular in heist movies, where it looks like everything is going wrong and then it turns out that everything has actually been going according to the hero’s plan. So they were never really in any danger. You just thought they were. And so as soon as they revealed your plan, everything suddenly goes their way. And so it doesn’t lend itself to a terribly exciting climax. And you have to use sleight of hand to be like, oh yeah. They looked like they were struggling.
Oren: And there are ways to do a hidden plan that’s not quite that, like, everything-was-going-the-way-I-wanted-it-to. A hidden plan can be, like, a small thing you had planned that might not work or whatever. And then it feels a little bit less like, oh, well I guess there was never any danger to begin with.
There is a strong temptation to make it like, “Actually we were always going to win because I was playing nine-dimensional chess.” But, it doesn’t have to be that way.
Bunny: I gotta say one of the worst kinds of hidden plan, or I guess maybe prior achievement turning points, I’ve ever seen is—and this happens multiple times in this movie, which is Now You See Me … and all of the problems turned out to have been solved before the movie started.
Oren: Well, that’s nice. [Chuckles]
Bunny: So, they perform a magic trick and you’re like, “Wow, how’d they do that?” It turns out they robbed a bank, like, months ago, and that’s why there’s money coming from the ceiling now.
Chris: [Laughing] That definitely sounds like a ‘deus ex machina’ at that point.
Bunny: I mean, you could just tell whoever wrote it was just so impressed by these characters being so smart that we can’t have them be smart on screen. They have to have done everything like weeks in advance before the movie started. Incredibly frustrating.
Chris: I should probably specify what is … when you say prior achievement. So, we talk about this turning point having a kind of karmic action by the protagonist that is the cause of the resolution. But actually, the karmic action can take place before the climax. It can take place much, much earlier in the story and then we can reveal—
Bunny: —But it has to take place in the story!
Chris: Yeah. It does have to take place in the story.
Bunny: Not years ago. I saved someone long before the story started.
Chris: But the key is that they have to actually earn the good karma. We have to see them earn that good karma. I’m assuming this is a happy ending earlier in the story. And they have to be … get no reward for it, right? So, it’s almost like they still have that positive balance, right? They’re still owed something for doing something good in the audience’s mind. And then we can connect it to the outcome at the climax. Right?
So this is what we do with the characters that, like, you know, doing the training montage where they’re like, “Hey, you just need to learn your basic footwork” or “your basic breathing.” And the protagonist doing the training is like, “Oh, but that’s boring. I wanna do flashy moves!” But then they do it right and they put all that work in, and it never seems to matter until the climax when they’re, like, exceptional, extremely basic thing like breathing or footwork wins them the day.
Bunny: “Wax on, wax off.”
Chris: So that would be … “Wax on. Wax off.” Exactly. So, that’s what we’re talking about. But yes, you have to actually earn that good karma early in the story. And again, the protagonist has to not get any prior reward for it or else it doesn’t work. It’s already paid off, essentially.
Oren: Yeah. And this is, like, a big way that you manage to do the, like, surprise reinforcements trope in a way that doesn’t feel like a ‘deus ex machina.’ Like, you have your protagonist take a big risk or incur some cost to help someone, and then later that person, like, shows up and returns the favor. And yeah, that feels satisfying. That was earned.
One of my favorites is what I’ve started calling the unrelated virtue. Where the characters do something that’s like, oh wow, that’s a cool thing they did. And then they win. But there’s no connection between the things. Like, the most stark example is from Age of Ultron, where the city they’re on is falling to earth and everyone’s gonna die and they can’t evacuate everyone in time. And so the heroes are like, “Okay, we could leave, but we’re gonna stay and face our fate with the civilians.” And it’s supposed to be like a really noble moment.
Chris: It’s like, why?
Oren: And I would certainly argue it’s not really noble because it’s not like them staying there is helping. It’s not like they’re giving up their seat on the last transport.
Chris: I don’t think they’re the captain of this ship as far as I know.
Bunny: Oh, he is the captain of America though.
Oren: So, there’s that problem. But even if they were right, even if it was like, no, Iron Man takes off his jet pack and gives it to a kid so the kid can escape or something, what then happens is that Nick Fury shows up with a helicopter—or excuse me, a helicarrier—and evacuates everyone. But, like, he would’ve showed up anyway. Like, if they had left, he would’ve shown up and they would’ve been like, I don’t know, thirty feet away from the city and been like, “Oh. Hey Nick. Thanks for bringing that.” And then turned around.
Chris: Yeah, so the causality is missing there.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: It seems complicated, like how your protagonists do something incredible that directly causes their success. But once you witness enough of them, once you watch enough stories, you’ll see that usually there’s a way to do it that is not too difficult, that matches whatever you’re doing with your story.
Oren: And one that authors tend to fall back on a lot is just telling you that their character’s putting in special effort. Like to win this race I ran harder than I usually do. You gotta be more specific than that and sometimes it can be very simple. There’s a classic moment where the character has, like, a rifle and is trying to line up a difficult shot, and they, like, take a moment to pause, breathe, and then take the shot. And that’ll often do it, right? Because that’s them showing wisdom in not taking the shot too fast and risking losing their target.
Chris: And I think the discipline—I think that kind of ties into the perseverance. The fact that they have to keep themselves from panicking in the moment and show kind of discipline. I feel like that kind of strength of will … I mean, I don’t really like the word ‘strength of will’ because I feel like it feeds into a lot of misconceptions about will and how will works in human beings. But nonetheless, that’s the idea behind this perseverance is that if you are really determined and you put in a big effort that you deserve something.
Oren: Whereas, like, a failed version of that would be the author just narrates that the protagonist, like, aimed better than they ever had before. Like, you gotta give me some specifics here.
Bunny: I think that the scene in Brave is the one that you might be referencing where Meredith splits one of the arrows down the center. That’s very much the, like, she focuses, breathes, ignores her mother and then fires the arrow. I don’t know if that counts as a turning point.
Oren: That was pretty early in the movie, right?
Bunny: Yeah, no. That’s quite early in the movie. But it does feel earned that she got the shot, I suppose.
Oren: I mean, and that’s fine, right? If that was the ultimate climax I would say that’s probably not enough. But for an early turning point, especially a turning point where we turn from what the preview said the movie was gonna be about to what it was actually about, that’s … I think that could work fine.
Chris: I like the one in Mad Max: Fury Road. Max’s turning point is giving the gun to Furiosa and having her take the shot instead.
Bunny: Yeah. That one’s good.
Chris: Which, I dunno. It shows humility, right? He earns it by admitting that maybe he’s not the best person to take the shot and that’s why they succeed.
Bunny: I’ll tell you something else that’s not a turning point.
Oren: Oh yeah?
Bunny: Having the high ground.
Chris: Don’t do it. Don’t do it, Anakin. I mean, what that is supposed to—again, if we talk about downward turning points, right? That’s supposed to show carelessness—right?—on Anakin’s part and a lack of perseverance in succumbing to temptation, which is actually a fairly typical thing that you’ll see in downward turning points. The explanation for it was just exceptionally silly.
Bunny: It’s shown by Obi-wan somersaulting over his head. Very deep.
Chris: [Laughs] But sometimes what you’ll see is there’ll be a turning point that’s not. When you look at it it isn’t really a turning point for the protagonist. It’s a turning point for the antagonist where they do something to earn their failure. And, I don’t know, I think usually it’s better for the protagonist to be in the driver’s seat, but these aren’t always bad. But most often you’ll see them; the protagonist has a turning point where they win and then the villain has a downward turning point where they die.
Oren: Yeah.
Bunny: [Laughs]
Chris: They die as a result of their crime, so the protagonist doesn’t have to finish them off.
Bunny: They usually fall off of something.
Oren: Thanks, gravity.
Bunny: Or a chameleon trips them and kills them.
Oren: Good job, chameleon.
Chris: Usually one of their victims comes back and then drags them away.
Oren: Alright. Well, I think we are just about out of time. We’ve reached the turning point where we win the podcast by having podcasted real good.
Chris: And if you think that we’ve earned some good karma with this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson. She’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
[closing theme]
Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme, “The Princess who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Colton.
We all know that, despite sayings to the contrary, books are guaranteed to be judged by their covers. However, there’s another important component in getting readers to hand over their hard-earned cash: sales blurbs. Whether on the back of a physical book or the top of a web page, these blocks of text must be both short and appealing. They can’t describe the entire book, so they must describe the idea of a book instead. Or maybe they could just tell you the book’s great and leave it at that. Is it true? No one knows!
Show Notes Lessons Posts * Holistic Cup of Depression * Throughline * Dunkirk * Legends and Lattes * The Girl From the Sea * One Dark Window * Piranesi * Where Peace Is Lost * A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Phoebe Pineda*. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny.
[intro music]Bunny: Hello and welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Bunny. And with me is–
Chris: Chris–
Bunny: and–
Oren: Oren.
Bunny: Ah, it takes three to make a podcast. Life was normal for struggling high school student Bunny until the day she discovered Mythcreants, a website after her own heart. From that day forward, her life felt pretty normal except she had something more to read on Fridays and weekends.
Analytical and irreverent blogger Chris had run Mythcreants for years doing website things and writing articles about stuff alongside her opinionated and wisecracking co blogger, dad pun Oren. That is until a mysterious new reader going by Bunny appeared in the comments raising their SEO ever so slightly by a macron or two and not really changing much else.
What these three don’t know is that the Great Goddess Podcastia had sent their lives on a very slow, very gradual collision course towards joining forces. Will Bunny depose Wes or will Wes depart on his own? Will the ever vengeful fan ragers simmering on Reddit take Oren out? Will Chris ever launch the new version of the website?
Most importantly, will the Mythcats ever get the scritches they deserve? Listen to this podcast. Or die. Eh? Eh?
Oren: Yeah, I’d buy that for a dollar.
Chris: Honestly, my favorite part is the fact that Oren is opinionated and I’m not. I just state the facts. I just state the facts.
Oren: Just the facts. Nothing but facts.
Bunny: I never said it was a good blurb. I am very bad at writing blurbs. Maybe it was a little misleading, which is a commentary on blurbs.
Chris: No, I think that’s the general reputation that Oren has. He’s the opinionated one. I’m just factual. All of my opinions become fact because I said them.
Bunny: I thought about mentioning a lessons post, the one place in which people will probably agree that you’re quite opinionated. I also thought about calling Oren provocative, but that didn’t seem like the right word.
Chris: We are provocative sometimes. The difference is that we aren’t actually provocative for the sake of being provocative like you would think. We’re just–take our opinions and put them out there without being shy.
Oren: I’m just a very naturally abrasive person, okay. I don’t have to work at it.
Bunny: Oren is just a jerk!
Chris: Also, that was my experience. I’m always a person who is critical of everything and piss people off. That’s just my natural personality.
Bunny: And you do it so well. So that’s why we’ve got a blog going here. And you know, I did actually notice, so we don’t have a sales blurb. The podcast page just says “for fantasy and science fiction storytellers” and not a single mention of the holistic cup of depression, I gotta say.
Oren: Very sad. We really need to update our lore.
Chris: No, here we go. In a world ruled by the Iowa workshop. One podcast offers a holistic cup of depression.
Bunny: One podcast stands against the storm. One podcast speaks out in workshop. But yes, today we’re talking about what makes a good sales blurb. I’m not very good at these, which is why it’s gonna be interesting to discuss, but I have been reading a lot of them lately and have noticed some trends and themes and good things and bad things, and Discord discourse.
Chris: Our specialty is craft, not marketing. So we’ll talk about them, but again, this is not an area where I claim to be an expert.
Oren: I have feelings, okay, and what is a podcast for, if not feelings?
Bunny: Feeeeeelings. Strong feelings.
Oren: It’s like legitimately really hard to measure what effect the blurb has on sales of a book.
Like even though the blurb is a really important part of marketing, it’s like, if the blurb is bad, how much did that affect whether the book was a success or not?
Chris: I think it’s safe to say that the cover is more important than the blurb.
Oren: Probably.
Bunny: The cover is the thing that gets you to read the blurb. At least in my experience. If I think the cover is silly, I probably won’t pick it up.
Oren: Sorry. There are so many books. I have to judge them at least a little bit by their cover. There’s too many.
Bunny: That’s what the cover is for.
Chris: Covers are also actually surprisingly good and most of the time at conveying the general genre of the book, people like a pretty cover. I think speculative fiction fans especially and fantasy fans, especially like a pretty cover.
Bunny: And pretty deckled edges.
Chris: But also if I see a book, it’ll often tell me whether something is speculative fiction or not, and if it’s not, probably not interested, probably not gonna look at that blurb.
Bunny: But looking at the things that I’ve noticed on most sales blurbs, whether they’re done poorly or not, the characteristics that they usually have are the story background or the setup.
So, answering the question of where we are when the story starts, the major characters, so who are we following, what’s their relationship? The setting, where does this take place? This is definitely more important in spec fic than it is in other genres. And then the conflict. So. The throughline in Mythcreants parlance, and then the stakes.
Chris: I’d be willing to bet that a lot of times the back blurb does not actually clarify what the throughline is because it’s just supposed to be intriguing enough to get people to read it, and sometimes the throughline requires some explaining. Again, looking at what you need to engage. A lot of them start with a protagonist and their general starting position, but we’re looking at, what details make you interested in reading about this character or this world?
And then there’s usually going to be a tense plot twist in the blurb somewhere, and sometimes it tells you what the throughline is, but I don’t think it necessarily has to.
Bunny: I don’t think it’s necessary, but it is common. And I think most blurbs are trying to point towards that, at least.
Chris: I think the big question is, does this give you a good idea of what the book is gonna be like? ‘Cause sometimes if it’s misleading and we don’t know that this is a big political intrigue instead of just a thriller, for instance. Like, that might be an important distinction.
Oren: One thing that some blurbs do that I just can’t stand, and so I hope that means it’s less effective–like, sometimes that’s not the same thing. Sometimes things you hate are effective at marketing. What I hope is ineffective is when it tells me what a good book this is.
Bunny: Usually does that in the quotes.
Oren: If they wanna put quotes. Sure. Sometimes the quotes themselves make me go, that can’t possibly be real, even if it is real. Sometimes the blurb itself will be like, “In this heartwarming tale,” it’s like, don’t tell me it’s heartwarming.
That’s, like, a qualitative assessment. I’m the decider around here. That’s my decision.
Bunny: That’s for me to decide. That’s my heart being warmed.
Chris: Obviously those are very telling and flattering. At the same time, I do think that they do play a role in telling somebody what kind of book this is, because heartwarming does indicate tone.
Oren: Yeah, I suppose.
Bunny: It does feel like you should be able to get that from other parts of it though. I don’t know. I kind of feel like that the same way I feel when movie trailers do that, when the narrator comes in and is like, “In this heartwarming tale of friendship and bravery.” It’s also one of those things that’s just quite vague.
Chris: A lot of these sales [blurbs], they start with a bolded line at the top. And I think that’s a good idea because that tells people, okay, if you’re only gonna read one sentence, this is the sentence I want you to read. And they tend to be less descriptive because there’s not much space, a lot more buzzy. And sometimes it is a description of what’s in the book.
Here’s one of the ones that Oren was talking about, and this is for Wintersong: “Dark, romantic, and unforgettable. This riveting debut for fans of Labyrinth and Naomi Novik tells a fantastical story of a young woman’s journey towards love and acceptance.”
Bunny: That’s so vague.
Oren: At least there’s some comps in there, or some comparables, I should say. Like at least Dark Romance is a genre, right?
Chris: Yes. And that is part of it, is we have a lot of these, if they’re not that descriptive, they have, “here’s the other bestselling books that we think you’re reading, that if you read Labyrinth or you like Naomi Novik, just in general, I guess, we didn’t wanna name one of Naomi Novik’s works.”
Oren: They need some help, okay.
Chris: This is for fans of the Temeraire book, of course.
Oren: When I look at a blurb, what I’m looking for is something that will give me at least some idea what kind of story it is and something that will make the case for me, something that will set the story apart, and I tend to judge anything where it just tells me that this is a heartwarming or a pulse pounding story, I immediately discount that because that is just a thing they can say.
They have no shame against putting that on the cover of a book that is actually very boring or not at all romantic.
Chris: [At] the same time, dark, romantic. We have some–we know this is probably romantasy. Naomi Novik has a couple romantasies. Of course, “tells a fantastical story,” it’s like, oh really? I thought this was not fantasy. Is it fantastical?
Bunny: I thought this was going to be Dunkirk.
Chris: But I mean, I don’t know. Somebody might not know it’s fantasy and neither were fantastical there. We don’t know that Labyrinth is a fantasy work.
Bunny: I think the distinction here is not necessarily whether it’s accurate or not, it’s whether you, the reader, find that it would be something you’d want to read. And for Oren, that’s, “you’re preaching to me, you’re just saying things,” but at the same time it is getting at something.
Chris: At the same time, they’re still telling whether or not the book is particularly tense. Like, if they’re advertising an edgy book, they’re not gonna put heartwarming on it. And if it’s like Legends and Lattes, they’re not gonna put “pulse pounding” on it.
Like they could. They could be lying. I can understand the logic if you have your one sentence teaser of putting descriptors in there to identify the type of book as opposed to the longer blurb, which has more room to actually give you details about the story and show rather than tell things like that.
Make it sound heartwarming. Make it sound pulse pounding. But if you’re doing one little line, I can see how that would be harder to do.
Bunny: I also think that one little line is much harder to just do well in general. Like, I was grabbing books on my shelf to see how they did their blurbs. And one of my favorite books, The Girl From the Sea, [the] one liner is, “One summer can change everything,” which is extremely vague and not what I would highlight about the book.
Chris: Is that a speculative fiction? That doesn’t sound like–to me, that does not sound like speculative fiction.
Bunny: It is. So The Girl from the Sea, and this is a graphic novel, so you’d know kind of from the cover, it’s a selkie romance essentially, and it happens at a whirlwind over the summer, which is what they’re getting at.
But you can’t really tell anything about the book from that phrase. Like, I guess that phrase is supposed to be, I guess, a theme of the book, but it’s not very helpful for someone trying to decide to read the book. The rest of the description on the back for that one is fine. It’s nothing special, but it never mentions anything about the fact that this has fantasy elements.
We know that Morgan, the main character, is queer, and that Keltie, who turns out to be a selkie, is mysterious. But the fact that she’s a selkie, which is a big selling point for me, is not mentioned.
Oren: Sometimes there is, of course, the fear of spoilers in the blurb. So if her being a selkie was a mystery, I can see why they wouldn’t put it in there. If it was revealed right away, yeah, I get it. I could see.
Bunny: For this one, so you can kind of tell from the cover that there is something mystical about Keltie, and from her first appearance, it’s pretty clear that she’s not just an average person, but when Keltie shows up, she’s like, I’m a selkie. And of course Morgan is like, no, you aren’t. But you as the reader are like, oh, she’s a selkie.
Chris: Sometimes they don’t specify things like that because they don’t think it’s competitive. They don’t think that selkies are drawing in readers, and so they wanna leave it vague and be like, oh, maybe people will think she might be a mermaid, ’cause mermaids are more popular.
Bunny: They’re wrong. They’re wrong! They’re wrong! Selkies are in.
Oren: In with the bunny demographic specifically.
Bunny: Yes. Demographic of one. Selkies are very in.
Oren: One thing that I guess we should have mentioned earlier is that the nice thing about blurbs is that if you’re traditionally published, you almost certainly don’t need to care about them because your publisher will probably make it for you, or at least that is my understanding of how the traditional publishing industry works.
Chris: I wouldn’t be surprised if you, especially if you have a small press, if somebody runs ’em by you. That also means if somebody does a bad job, it’s gonna be hard to get it changed
Oren: And that’s a problem. But at least you don’t have to come up with this.
Chris: Although, honestly, I do think that there’s a significant overlap between the way that you need to write for your back blurb and how, if you wanna query. So if you are interested in querying, I feel like it has some of the same, you need to write a teaser version of your story and figure out how to condense it down into something that sounds interesting. And I think you could probably reuse some of the same stuff in your query, and not everybody’s querying either.
Bunny: Definitely the Novik comparison feels like something out of a query letter. Back in the day I was trying to query, and in hindsight a book that would never have been picked up by a publisher. I was just optimistic about it. So I had written a couple of query letters and read some of the literature and how you’re supposed to write them.
And one thing you are supposed to do is situate it in the genre, like, “what are its peers?” So saying “this book is like this other book and this third book” is definitely the sort of thing you’d put in a query letter. And so I kind of wonder if that blurb was drawing straight from that query letter.
Chris: Well, I think that’s actually–can be kind of normal to draw from query letters because again, usually a query letter also has a little synopsis, not necessarily a synopsis, so much as a teaser, very similar to what you see in these back blurbs. Because if you’re querying, you’re trying to get the agent intrigued about your book, just like a sales board is trying to get the customer willing to buy the book, right?
You’re still trying to sell the book’s merits, and an agent is going to be primarily concerned with whether they can sell the book to an acquiring editor and how pitchable it is, whether it has a high concept and all those other things. “Do we have an interesting premise?” And so you kind of still want to do very similar things in a query letter.
Oren: What birthed this topic was some discourse over on our Discord server–which you can join by becoming a patron. Plug!–about comparing blurbs that either did tell you a lot of what the throughline was, at least theoretically going to be, versus ones that just hinted at it and built atmosphere.
And my hot take is that those can both be good. Specifically we were comparing Piranesi to Where Peace is Lost. The first one is by Susanna Clarke, and the second one is by Valerie Valdes. Now I’ve actually read Piranesi. I love it. It’s one of my favorite books. And this blurb, it hints at what the plot is, but it doesn’t really say.
What it does is try to build atmosphere about this strange place that this protagonist lives in and this weird other who he talks to. Whereas Where Peace is Lost has a much more detailed like, “and this is what the plot’s about.” And assuming that is accurate and that it’s not a lie, ’cause sometimes these lie, I also love this. This is a great blurb as far as I’m concerned. I would definitely read this book. In fact, I’m planning to.
My hot take is that I think either of those can work. If you’re describing the plot, make it sound exciting. And if you are not doing that and you’re building atmosphere, make the atmosphere sound intriguing. That’s the best advice I can give.
Chris: Well, this is also where comparables come in handy. Look at books similar to yours and see what their blurbs sound like. And I feel like that’s gonna be your best guide to what your blurbs should sound like. I still think that even with Piranesi, you see the kind of same rhythm of, we start by setting up an interesting premise and character, and then we set up one plot twist that adds some tension to the blurb, and then we end with like a vague teaser about the future.
We put a little bit more word count into the kind of starting premise because Piranesi has such a kind of unusual and interesting premise. If you have some novelty in your story, you want that in front, but just don’t forget to add the details because it’s the novel details that really matter, not just like the general concept.
So for instance, a good example is Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking. So our kind of starting paragraph that adds the novel premise and you know, gets people interested in this character says, “14-year-old Mona isn’t like the wizards charged with defending the city. She can’t control lightning or speak to water. Her familiar is a sourdough starter and her magic only works on bread. She has a comfortable life in her aunt’s bakery making gingerbread men dance.”
Now, some key things about this paragraph, and it’s just the same skills you build as a storyteller in miniature, honestly. First, we have some, a little bit of sympathy and spinach with Ramona, because she doesn’t like the other wizards, she can’t control lightning or speak to water. Giving her some spinach, some sympathy that makes her more likable. Then we have the novelty when we have specific details. A familiar that’s a sourdough starter. Magic that works on bread dancing, gingerbread men.
And if we’re just like, oh, she does baking magic, it would not be the same. We have to give those details. It’s those details that bring out the novelty of the premise.
Oren: Yeah. Without the details, it would’ve been half baked.
Bunny: [groans] I need to delete “wisecracking.” And just put it with “dad puns.”
Oren: We’ll get the audio editors to deal with that.
Chris: And then it proceeds with our tense plot twist of the teaser. “But Mona’s life is [turned] up upside down when she finds a dead body on the bakery floor. An assassin is stalking the streets of Mona’s city, preying on magic folk, and it appears that Mona is his next target.” Then we have the tension. It’s funny because on Goodreads, this book had the word “cozy” attached to it, which people seem to be putting on everything.
And yes, it has the baking magic, which does resemble a cozy fantasy, but the assassin, it just– it [does] not qualify.
Bunny: There aren’t usually that many assassins in cozy stories.
Chris: And then we have our vague teaser that’s about what comes next. “And in an embattled city, suddenly bereft of wizards, the assassin may be the least of Mona’s worries…” Dot dot dot. But that kind of like, I see that same structure in just a lot of them, right. And that also works for querying when you’re giving an idea of what your book is about.
Bunny: And this also still hits those five notes that I identified. We start with a character, so Mona. We get the setting, there’s a city full of wizards. The setup is that she has a comfortable life in her aunt’s bakery, making gingerbread men dance.
That’s the setup. That’s where we are. And then we have a conflict. Mona’s life gets turned upside down. There’s a dead body, there’s an assassin, and then the stakes, Mona might be the next target. And then also this bigger thing about the embattled city. We have all of those points there.
Chris: I do think that the key here is to just use the same storytelling skills that you normally use to create novelty, to make your protagonist likable, to add tension, do all of those things. Just do them in little miniature bits.
Bunny: That’s our tip. Do the same things in little.
Chris: Little, which is not easy.
Bunny: Little is harder in my experience.
Chris: Admittedly, ’cause trying to explain the story without putting in tons of details that are just logistical, like even Piranesi, the back blurb has some parts of it that just feel like they’re there as logistical details to set up the twist. And sometimes you can’t get away from that. But the idea is to try to simplify that as much as possible.
Oren: Or, and we could address the elephant in the room, which is what I sometimes call black hat blurbing, where you’re just making something that sounds neat.
It just does not reflect the book at all. I don’t like it. I can’t say it doesn’t work. But I hate it. I will be disappointed in you if you do this. An example is on the Amazon sales page of the Three-Body Problem. It makes this big deal about how it’s set against the backdrop of China’s Cultural Revolution.
A secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens, and then it talks about the aliens a little bit. And it says different camps start to form on earth about whether to welcome or fight them. And let me tell you, that is not what this book is about. The Cultural Revolution stuff is briefly there in the prologue, and the aliens are there, but they never show up.
We occasionally get some interludes with them, and then the camps they’re talking about is the tiny cult of alien lovers and everyone else. And that’s it. That’s not really what dividing into camps typically means. If there’s 5,000 people in one room and three in another room, you wouldn’t call that two camps.
Bunny: Two camps, Oren. I’ll have you know that the world is divided into two camps. One camp, which is–in which selkies are out, and one camp in which selkies are in, and I am the only one in the second camp. Two!
Oren: Looking at this blurb, you would have no idea that most of the story is an extremely slow mystery trying to uncover why a bunch of scientists are dying by suicide and spending a lot of time in a weird MMO.
You just wouldn’t have any idea that’s what the book’s about by reading this blurb. The blurb does not sound like that kind of book.
Chris: I do think it’s hard for them to advertise a book where people are dying, but it’s still boring. It’s like, what do you say at that point? They probably try to make it sound like it’s a thriller or something because people are dying, but it’s not.
Bunny: It’s a boring book with boring death.
Oren: You can also look–there are some warning signs to look out for in blurbs. Anything that has two different characters who are just described as doing their own thing. Because at that point the book’s just telling you that it has a fractured story. ‘Cause if they couldn’t make the characters feel like part of the same story in the blurb, the book almost certainly isn’t doing that. Unless you are okay with that sort of thing, stay away from that book.
Also, if, if the blurb feels really vague, you read it and you’re like, what does any of that mean? That probably means that the story is really unfocused and whoever was writing the blurb doesn’t know what to do with it. “How am I supposed to tell them what this is?” And they don’t wanna lie, unlike whoever wrote this Three-Body Problem blurb.
Chris: I would take a book that had a back blurb that was like a romance and had a little intro paragraph for each character, and then the next paragraph was like, “oh yeah, and here’s how they end up meeting each other.” Because if it’s a romance, I know that they’re gonna spend their time together. They’re not gonna be on other sides of the world generally.
No, that’s not true. We have seen epistolary letter romances, but that would be unusual.
Bunny: That’s pretty common in romance.
Oren: They’re writing letters to each other, right?
Chris: They’re still interacting.
Bunny: They’re interacting. Romance also shows a case where what counts as a spoiler varies from genre to genre. If there’s a teaser for a romance and it’s like, “X has feelings for Y. Will X and Y start a relationship?”
If this is a romance novel, then yes. It’s romance. So suggesting a “will they, won’t they” isn’t really a spoiler because it’s like, well, we know where this goes, but you can’t reveal a huge source of tension in the story. You can’t reveal a reveal in the teaser. That’s a big one. If part of the tension comes from who’s the villain, and we have a secret villain, you can’t reveal who the villain is in the teaser.
Trailers do this sometimes. One of the recent Mission Impossible trailers, I think for Mission Impossible: Fallout, spoiled that Henry Cavill was the villain because the trailer had a shot of him shooting an AK 47 at Tom Hanks [actually Tom Cruise], and it’s like, “Ooh, he’s a baddie.” But that’s supposed to be a twist in the movie.
Don’t do that. Sorry. Spoilers, I guess, for a several years old movie.
Oren: Oh, no. Rude. Sometimes there’s no option there. Like if we’re talking about trailers now, like the movie Abigail, the trailer gives away the entire twist that the first, at least 40 minutes of the movie is building up to, but on the other hand, without the twist, there is no reason to see this movie.
It’s just a kind of average movie if you don’t have that twist, and I have no idea how you would advertise it without mentioning the twist.
Chris: We have a blog post coming out about this. It talks about the fact that sometimes people wanna make the basic premise of their story a reveal. And that leaves you with nothing to advertise and that’s a big problem.
I think the thing that Abigail should have done was plotted the story like Megan, because Megan, it’s similar in that the thing that’s the big draw–
Bunny: The title that’s a girl’s name?
Chris: Well, Abigail is about a ballerina vampire who kills people, and Megan is about a doll who kills people. I do think that they appeal to a very similar audience.
But, in Megan, the beginning of the story is written with the idea that people will know that Megan is gonna turn into a killer. So it uses that to build suspense, whereas Abigail is trying to hide it and build up to it as though it’s a reveal. So then it’s just an underwhelming reveal and we’re not seeing any of this ballerina vampire ahead of time.
Bunny: There’s a larger issue of blurbs that set up the reader to just wait and wait and wait, wait for the things in the blurb to happen. And this is a peeve of mine. The way I approach blurbs, and maybe this varies from person to person, but the way I approach it is like, this is giving me the general sense of where everyone is when the story starts. Two thirds of the blurb is usually like, “here’s how things are normally.” And then the last third is like, “and here’s what’s changed,” and that’s the story. So I hate it when it takes 150 pages for the story to fulfill the things it promised in the setup.
Chris: I do wonder if some of these books are just under some constraints. Piranesi has a really novel premise that it can spend a bunch of word counts on the back blurb, and then it’s just kind of a contemplative story. Whereas if you had a story that kind of goes places and you couldn’t tell from the beginning moments what kind of story it’s gonna be, I can see the temptation to add more events to give a better idea so that people know that this is a war story, ’cause it doesn’t seem like a war story early on.
Now granted, that’s also a thing the storyteller could proactively address, but sometimes we’ve got the story we’ve got and we’re just trying to advertise it the best we can. I can see there being issues there, but I generally agree that it’s better to not go halfway into the book with your plot twist, if you can avoid it.
Bunny: I’m gripey about this because I’m reading a book called Swamplandia and I’m 150 pages into it, and the blurb promised me four things. One, the main character’s mom dies. Two, her father withdraws. Three, her sister falls in love with a ghost. Four, her brother goes to work at a theme park. And then it says that the main character goes on a mission to save them. And I’m 150 pages in. Those events happen in a different order. The mom’s death happens in the first couple pages and the brother leaves, and then the sister falls in love, and that’s just happened, and I’m still waiting for the mission to save them to start.
Chris: Here’s a question. [Does] the story feel slow?
Bunny: I don’t know. It’s one of those stories that’s definitely trying to be literary, so yes.
Chris: Sounds like yes. This might be less of a complaint if the story wasn’t slow. And again, that might be why the back blurb pulls in so many later events is because actually, the story is kind of slow and doesn’t have enough tension, and we’re trying to make up for that by taking later events and pretending they happened earlier so it seems like a tenser book than it is.
Bunny: It definitely has been like 70% the father withdrawing and then the rest of those other three things.
Chris: But it sounds like a more interesting book if you imagine all of those events happen in the beginning. So the real issue here is that the book is not engaging enough.
A salesperson is always gonna have an incentive to mislead, to get people to buy the book. And some of ’em just want sales. But I think they also hope that if we just trick enough people into buying it, that some of them will become true fans and the book will succeed anyway. Because it’s hard for a book to succeed without word of mouth, I think, or become real big without word of mouth.
Bunny: Wow. I’m gonna have to erase “irreverent,” and replace it with “cynical” in your blurb, just to be more accurate.
Chris: No!
Oren: So we’re definitely out of time. We’re like five minutes over time. It’s time to call this, the blurb has gotten too long.
Bunny: But we were complaining, Oren!
Oren: I do love to do that. There’s more I could complain about, but we don’t have time.
Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, support us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jabar. He is an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek.
We will talk to you next week.
[outro music]Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening/closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.
The word “drama” gets used a lot in storytelling, but sometimes we need to stop and ask: What makes a scene dramatic? That may sound like a circular question, but it turns out that dramatization is often the difference between what feels like a laundry list of information and what feels like a story. This week, we’re talking about this elusive concept and what scenes are most likely to suffer from it, along with how to do better. Plus, a reminder that as authors, we are the masters of time and space!
Show Notes Malazan * The Biologist * Louis * Lestat * Temeraire * The Red Knight * How to Earn Clues TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Mukyuu.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Intro: You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. With your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny.
[opening song]Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is–
Bunny: Bunny–
Chris: and–
Oren: Oren.
Chris: Hey, so I heard about this podcast called the Mythcreant Podcast. Apparently they taught someone to swim by making them watch others drown?
Bunny: Despite how horrible that sounds, that does sound like a pretty cool podcast.
Chris: And apparently they brought in like a huge holistic cup of depression to do this. But I’m just glad that we’re far away from watching anything dramatic like that happen.
Oren: Yeah. We wouldn’t wanna actually show anything like that. We can just tell you it happened in the driest manner possible.
Bunny: [Chuckle]
Chris: Just pass on all the rumors that people somewhere are saying.
Oren: Maybe we can do it while standing on a wall with a weathervane in the background or something.
Bunny: Maybe we can gaze upon it from afar while sitting on our saddles.
Chris: Now, let me tell you my entire backstory in detail. It happens over many years.
Bunny: [Laughter] When Chris was a child —
Oren: We need a flashback scene to establish that Chris was, in fact, a child at one point.
Chris: No, no, no. No flashbacks. I have to tell you without any flashbacks.
Oren: Silly me. I forgot. My bad.
Bunny: We don’t even get photographs from the family album.
Chris: Yeah, we can have a documentary where we just stare at a photograph for a really long time and maybe zoom in, zoom out. Use the “oohhh” dramatic voice, trying to make this sound interesting.
Bunny: There’s a thing you can apply that’s like a camera movement in iMovie that’s called Ken Burns. It shifts the view from one part of your screen to another. It’s just that, bouncing around a single image.
Chris; So this time we’re talking about dramatization. That’s probably something that you take for granted if you’ve been storytelling for a while, but nonetheless, especially for people who are new or just sometimes people who are not new, it does get messed up from time to time and it’s a good thing to think about because there’s a good chance that you could go further.
Basically it’s the process of creating specific, impactful events to represent your story and your story arcs. If you think “okay, I wanna write a story about two childhood best friends that grow apart and then one becomes a hero and the other a villain”, that’s a very vague concept.
There’s no specific moments there. It’s a really long process and very abstract. To dramatize that you need to choose events to represent those concepts. I’m gonna make a scene where they’re best friends in the scene, but then they encounter something that they disagree about. And then maybe I’ll have another scene years later where they’ve now, because of that thing, grown distant and they’re ready to go to blows.
So you have specific moments that you’ve sketched out to represent that general concept.
Oren: So if I’m understanding this correctly… lemme see if I get this concept ’cause it sounds like it might be a big brain elite concept.
Bunny and Chris: [Laughing in disbelief]
Chris: What?!
Oren: I just wanna make sure I understand. So something that might have trouble being dramatized is stuff that happens entirely off screen and that the author does not know how to translate into something in the events as they’re actually unfolding.
So an example that I’m thinking of is the biologist’s relationship with her husband in Annihilation ’cause that’s entirely offscreen. We are just told about it and it doesn’t really seem to affect anything she’s doing in the present until she randomly finds his journal and then reads more offscreen stuff about what he did.
Chris: Yeah, that would be an example of something that isn’t really being dramatized. Basically stories and visual mediums are forced to do this all the time because they have to show you something that you can witness. So they have to turn it into actual scenes, whereas novels can do more or less. They can include just a bunch of summary or exposition instead, but often they shouldn’t.
Yes, we should have exposition. Yes, we should have summary. Using a little bit of those is a great advantage because we can convey all sorts of information that would just be boring or awkward if we stuffed it in a scene or had a character say it as part of their dialogue. There’s a limit to how much you want to do because that’s gonna be less interesting and engaging.
Also, there’s a matter of not just how much you do it, but how you do it. There’s a process of taking that vague concept of “oh, I want two childhood best friends that grow apart and become enemies” and then actually make interesting scenes that create an engaging story out of that.
Bunny: So the idea here–just to be clear– is to step back and look at the story level, what the scenes are that you have, rather than necessarily revising the scenes you already have because they just might not be serving the drama well enough.
Chris: Exactly. The scenes that you have might not be the best scenes for what you’re writing. You might be able to design your events better to create a better narrative or drama out of the general concepts that you came up with. It can also be a matter of how do you design the scenes so that everything comes together well, and what events do you include in your scenes?
I can give you some examples of stories that kind of struggled with dramatization a little bit, where this became an issue.
Oren: This feels like trying to explain water to a fish. This is where I’m trying to wrap my head around this. So some examples would be great.
Chris: For instance, Interview With a Vampire. If you’ve never read the book, it’s a retelling with a first person premise where Louis is just talking about life as a vampire.
A lot of that is just him talking in general about what vampire life was like without talking about specific moments. So he’s doing a lot of summarizing and a lot of telling, and not a lot of showing. He has, for instance, a place where he’s in general talking about Lestat preying on victims. “Oh, he liked to have a youth early in the evening, and then for his second pick of the evening, he liked to eat a woman” and then he talks about that.
Whereas then when we look at the movie, which struggled honestly with some of this general narration because the movie is forced to dramatize it and turn it into actually a series of events that we can actually show on a film. It makes a lot of use of voiceover to try to fit some of that in, which is clunky.
Oren: Don’t worry. People famously love voiceovers.
Bunny: [Laugh]
Chris: So we have a scene where Lestat turns Louis into a vampire, which is a good choice for a scene to show in the movie, but it’s hard to fit all of the interesting descriptions that Louis has about being a vampire. So we use voiceover to be like “oh, and the statues seem to move” and we show him looking at a statue once.
Bunny: [Laugh]
Chris: And then we have a specific scene where Louis and Lestat go hunting together, where we can actually show Lestat picking a youth for his first target of the evening. So we make some actual scenes to show what vampire life is like. But those now can be specific events and not just like general statements about their life.
Oren: Does the TV show handle that differently?
Chris: Yes. So the TV show doesn’t have such a heavy voiceover.
Oren: Yeah, that’s nice.
Chris:The TV show instead has the interview. Occasionally they would cut to the interview and talk in more general terms in that kind of conversation. But I think the thing about the show is it has more time.
If you have more time, then you can show a lot more scenes. If you’re trying to get a general idea of what life was like for a vampire, it’s just gonna be easier in a show where you have a number of episodes to do that.
Bunny: Yeah, I’ve seen What We Do in the Shadows.
Chris: I also think that the AMC version is willing to depart more from the book, hence this premise where they acted together for a second interview.
It’s not trying to copy as many specific quotes from the book, like the “Oh, statues seem to move”. That line is probably not in the AMC show whereas they were really trying to capture that in the movie.
Oren: I’m realizing now that one of the most common places this shows up in client manuscripts that I work on is when the client wants to do a political story. They want some big politics to change in the story somewhere, like for there to be a revolution or for the emperor to liberalize or whatever it is.
But they have also picked a character who isn’t really connected to that plot, at all. And sometimes it’s that they are connected, but they have no agency. But in a surprising number of times, it’s not even that they lack agency, they just aren’t where that stuff is happening. They’ll be in the imperial capital running a bakery and we’ll keep hearing about how there are these rebels fighting the evil empire out in the provinces. And I just desperately wish we were there.
Chris: That’s exactly what a good narrative design, good scene design, and good event design should be avoiding. And sometimes that happens because, very early in the process, the writer just didn’t consolidate their ideas and created something that was too sprawling and too complex to make a cohesive story.
Bunny: To put it in short, it’s basically that in order for it to be dramatic, you have to see it.
Chris: But you also wanna see it in a dramatic way. We want that conflict and that tension and all of these other things.
Bunny: Right, it’s a necessary but not sufficient condition for the scene being dramatic.
Chris: Yeah. So generally, you wanna choose key points of change to show.
So if I were to have those two friends, instead of being like “oh, they just grow apart very, very slowly”, sometimes in that situation, you wanna just change it. What if instead of growing apart slowly, there was one dramatic event that created a huge rift? Because many times that is gonna create a better story because you can show that in one scene and it’s more dramatic, but not always.
It’s not always what you want, in which case you can skip forward through time. But a lot of times it just works better if you have things happen faster.
Oren: Having a story that takes place over a hundred years is very difficult. I think, at least in my case, the reason this tends to happen is that I feel like the same group of authors who want to tell stories of big political change are also the kind of authors who know that historically the views of regular people tend to get left out.
So they come at the story wanting both of those things, and I think that’s where this divide comes from, at least in the clients that I work with.
Chris: Problems with dramatizing often happen when the storyteller is trying to fit in far too much complexity because you can stuff in more by telling instead of showing.
And so the first thing you have to do, if you want good scenes to actually bring the story to life, is to pare it down to a reasonable size to actually fit and show everything. If you make it too complex, it becomes a lot harder to actually dramatize appropriately because you just don’t have time.
The thing is one of the issues with Malazan, AKA sunk cost fallacy, the book series.
Oren: [Laughter]
Bunny: [Teasingly] Ohhh, burn.
Chris: Honestly, the way the fans talk about it really strongly suggests that. [Laughter] They’re already mad at me, so I’m not too worried about making them more mad.
Bunny: That burn was so strong. It smells like pork or whatever it was. [Laughter]
Chris: I did a critique on the first book of the Malazan series, just the beginning.
I criticized it for a lot of things, but actually the thing that I thought was its weakest point–beyond the characters or even how confusing it was, which is everyone’s big complaint–was just how terrible the scene design is. Because as Oren was joking earlier, it does start with just a kid on a wall being like, “Hey, did you hear about this famous guy and how he died because a god smited him? Are the rumors true?”
And anytime you have a character asking if the rumors are true, there’s a good chance the events have not been consolidated appropriately. We could be here on the wall with this precocious child, or we could be watching this guy get smited by a god. That sounds way more interesting. Why isn’t that the representation of these events that we’re seeing? Why are we just watching people talk about it?
Oren: That’s my favorite thing about the Malazan fan rage response. They’re always talking about how it starts in medias res, and you just need to be able to handle that.
This is the least in medias res opening I have ever seen. It’s like the opposite of whatever in medias res is.
Nothing is happening. We are just here with a kid and he is delivering exposition to us.
Bunny: Yeah. What isn’t in medias res?
Oren: [Laughter]
Chris: On the wall they have this convo about my gal Laseen.
Oren: Yeah, everyone loves Laseen. She’s cool.
Chris: They’re like “oh no, she’s getting uppity”.
Oren: [Laughter]
Chris: And then we cut after this prologue or what have you, we cut till a year later when she has apparently murdered the emperor and taken his place. And I’m just like, why don’t we see that? I would’ve liked to see my gal stab the emperor.
Oren: Spoilers for the very end of the Temeraire books, but it just reminds me how we spent all of the second to last book building up to the big battle with Napoleon, and the book ends right before the big battle, and then the last book starts after the battle.
Bunny: [Disbelief] No wait really?
Oren: Yes. Oh, it was so bad.
Bunny: Wow. It’s like the author lost confidence or something.
Oren: I think it was that if she had started the last book with this giant climactic battle, where is the rest of the book going to go after that? She made this attempt to reset and be like, “oh, okay, the last book’s actually going to be about the peace negotiations after the war”. Which, sure but we didn’t get to see the war end. It happened somewhere else. Please go back. I wanted to see that part.
Bunny: That does seem like bad planning. That seems like a victim of the stuff Chris was talking about.
Chris: With Malazan, again, the dramatis personae at the beginning of this book has like a hundred people, and some of them probably don’t need to be there, but you just know that there’s tons of viewpoints.
And so this really looks like an example where Steve Erickson, the author, was just trying to fit tons in. A lot of fantasy writers have this really big ambitious vision with all these viewpoints, but there are still limits on how much you can fit. And if you try to stuff too much in, you resort to things like a character giving a big lecture instead of showing your message in the story, which is gonna make it come off as preachy. This is another example where you have to create a narrative out of it.
Oren: There are some books that show the problem of trying to dramatize everything instead of downsizing your story. The Red Knight is an example of this. I don’t use the Red Knight as an example of why multiple POVs don’t work because it has over 20 of them and they’re really bad. The way that you switch between them is super awkward and hard to track. So it’s like trying to critique cars by critiquing a Pinto.
This book tries to dramatize everything. Every character who might matter, even a little bit, gets their own POV and their own chapters. That doesn’t work either. You need to downsize to something manageable.
Chris: Definitely simplifying the story is really important for having good scenes. If you try to do something too complex, you’ll end up with too many exposition dumps, too many dialogue dumps, telling instead of showing.
Or if you were to make those all into scenes again, you could end up with something that’s really slow and fractured. So you have to prioritize. Then make sure you’re not leaning on dialogue too hard ’cause a lot of people just don’t know how to dramatize yet because they’re just getting started. They may just not think about it too hard and just start by like “oh, I know how to do this, I’ll have somebody talk about it!” Because that’s just easier, especially if they’re going “how do people know about events that are happening far away” and they’ve forgotten that they’re the overlord of space and time. You can just move the event closer and create an exciting scene out of that. It just may be a reflex to have people talk about the event instead.
Bunny: It’s certainly the easier path. It’s hard to depict dramatic events, especially dramatic events when they involve a lot of action and you’re working in a written medium rather than a visual one. So you don’t have that flash and bang. So you have two difficult things on your hands: narrating action and making it dramatic.
Oren: The opposite extreme can also create problems. Game of Thrones, for example. They did wanna show all the important stuff, but because the world is so big and there are so many different places where important things could be happening, and they wanted the major characters to be there for them, the later seasons are often critiqued for it feeling like the characters can just teleport around to be wherever they need to be as if travel time’s not a thing anymore
Bunny: “Often critiqued”. We know who’s making that critique.
Oren: [Protesting] It’s not me! I have very little opinions on the later Game of Thrones shows. I have not watched them.
Bunny: Hmm, okay [Bemused laughter]
Oren: So for all I know, maybe all those people were wrong and actually it does great at this. That’s a good example of how this could go wrong. From my clients, at least one place where I have seen this happen sometimes is in mysteries when the characters need to find clues.
Clues are challenging. The clue needs to be something that doesn’t just spell out what’s happening ’cause that’s boring. But it also needs to be indicative enough for the characters to make believable inferences and for the audience to be able to tell what’s happening.
So sometimes that’s hard, and I’ve sometimes had clients who instead just had their characters say that they found clues that indicated a certain direction. That makes the mystery not as satisfying. Did you find clues? Can you tell me what those are? I would like to know please.
Bunny: Yeah, we wanna see the reasoning. We wanna see the clue, and then what led them to make a conclusion about it. I’ve been writing a mystery story. I get the temptation to be “and then I figured this out.”
No, we’re in the character’s head as they’re investigating, and we need to see that train of thought.
Chris: And also, we wanna make a problem out of this. Making that engaging story structure right? Instead of just, “Here’s the answer. Oh, okay, I thought of it. We’re done.”
Bunny: I made myself an extra challenge where the character is supposed to be reading some detailed paperwork and finds the clue in there. I have them find the clue without making the reader also read the long dry paperwork. [Laughter]
Chris: That’s where we want a summary. But a lot of times those kinds of junctures are changed, showing the causes of distress or problems directly. Sometimes problems are ongoing when the story starts, and that’s fine. But in many cases, instead of a character saying they feel bad, you wanna show an event that makes them feel bad, and that makes the audience kind of go “oh, I would feel bad too if I were in that circumstance”.
Actually show events playing out instead of somebody being like “oh, I just feel bad about this. Make them do something that they would feel bad about.
Oren: I’ve mentioned this problem of what if you have a big story with a big setting and you don’t want your characters to just teleport around. Maybe I should have given a possible solution.
Chris: A teleporter, obviously.
Bunny: [Laughter]
Oren: Okay, so the real solution is to plan your events so that the important ones take place at places the main character already has a reason to be. That’s the best offer I can give, and I’m afraid it is tinged a bit with processed advice because if you have events scattered around your world at wherever it first feels like they should be, that’s how you’re gonna get into the teleporting hero problem.
Instead, what you do is you look at both the world and the plot as one thing and figure out, okay, there are gonna be big battles at these three cities ’cause they are important for these reasons. I will now craft a plot that credibly gets my hero to the place they need to be for those battles while also being engaging and fun.
That’s how you solve that problem.
Bunny: And I think it’s also important to stress here that while lack of drama can come from just characters talking about things rather than being involved in the events or witnessing them directly, it’s also important to mention that you can have lots of drama in talking scenes.
It just doesn’t come from talking about events that are more interesting happening in other places.
Chrisb: Talking can facilitate social conflicts and show the scene play out appropriately. It’s more like social events are happening. We have an encounter with a thief, and then we argue with a thief about whether they should come back and give back the item they stole and something is still happening and the social conversation facilitates that, which is very different from “hey, we’re just sitting around having a coffee and, oh, hey, did you hear about this dramatic thing that happened?”
Oren: What about quiet scenes? Because we talk about these sometimes when we do pacing. A story, even a really high action story, can’t be all tension, all the time. You need some dips, and I often describe those as quiet scenes. I’m just wondering — if the quiet scene feels boring, is it likely that that’s a dramatization problem or is something else going on?
Chris: If you have too much to do…. Again, sometimes this is just management of information and management of complexity. Generally, even in a quiet scene, you would have just lower stake arcs kind of playing out. Like the character is now dealing with the guilt from events, or they’re planning their next move, putting their supplies together, taking care of a friend that was injured. So usually they are still solving problems. They’re just more likely to be emotional problems, personal problems, lower stakes.
Oren: So there’s still movement on something.
Chris: Right. There’s still movement on something that usually happens. It’s just not as exciting as your high tension scenes.
Bunny: The relevant thing is still happening, it’s just that the relevant thing is downtime.
Chris: Let’s say we have a quiet scene. We’re tending to the injured friend. The injured friend reveals their dark backstory. That’s the kind of thing where if this was a movie, the movie would actually dramatize that too by showing scenes of the backstory. You notice in any high budget movie/TV show, when a character’s telling a story, they don’t just show the character telling the story. We don’t just watch a character talk.
We have flashback scenes to dramatize that. Now the reason that we don’t do that in novels —
Bunny: I have just seen this in a novel actually, and it was pretty awkward ‘cause it was someone telling someone else’s story too and flashback levels of detail.
Chris: So I should revise that. It’s not usually advisable to do that in a novel–
Bunny: [Laughter]
Chris: — because we can keep it efficient enough and short enough that it’s better than dramatizing it because this is a segment that is not gonna move the story forward. I would say that sometimes there may be exceptions. But in those cases, I would usually pare that conversation down and make it short. A few dramatic statements.
Sometimes you also need to question: does this character really need this much backstory? Are there more events that you need? If they are just supposed to have a relationship with an antagonist or one tragic event, do you need to talk about their 10 years at school?
[Laughter]Sometimes you just do more than you need to do, and you need to choose what’s important and pare it down. With that kind of situation in a novel, you would just keep it brief instead of dramatizing it or doing a full flashback.
Oren: As you know, I was once a child.
Bunny: [Laughter]
Chris: My mother died tragically.
Oren: She was beautiful and kind. I have her eyes.
Bunny: [Laughter] I just had to be raised by my brave swordsman father who was very gruff.
Chrisb: That covers most of what I wanted to talk about. There’s a lot of different factors that go into choosing what scenes you have. It’s fine to factor in, I need to give this information and set scenes in places that will provide some context.
It’s usually just not the only factor. So if I have my childhood friends, we might set a scene that creates context that they’re childhood friends, but then we also need to have something interesting happening there. And then you want your key points of change, the instigating events that change what happens in the story with some problems and conflict and tension and all that, and wherever possible to multitask what you’re doing to keep the story kind of tight and consolidated.
If we have a disagreement between my two childhood friends, there are also things that foreshadow them becoming a hero and a villain, because that’s something else I also need to do. Put your character arc in the same scene where something really eventful happens. Don’t trade off between them and then just make it engaging.
And that’s basically what you do when you’re dramatizing your story.
Oren: All right. With that, I think we will call this very well dramatized podcast to a close.
Chrisb: If you’ve got any useful tips, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons.
First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson who is a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
[closing theme]
This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.
A lot of old stories are bad. Even the good ones have elements that don’t hold up anymore. But when those stories are popular, both writers and readers want to revisit them, be that in the form of sequels, prequels, or remakes. This presents a conundrum, where making the story better may damage what people liked about it in the first place. This week, we’re talking about what causes such situations, discussing what to do about them, and also cutting the Gordian Knot that is Star Trek’s transporters.
Show Notes Buffy Reboot * Women Can’t be Captains * Space Global Warming * Imperial Stormtroopers * Conservation of Ninjutsu * The Droid Problem * Wheel of Time Magic * Rings of Power Orcs * Temporal Wars TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Ace of Hearts.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny.
[Intro Music]Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Oren and with me today is…
Chris: Chris
Oren: …and…
Bunny: Bunny.
Oren: So for today we are going to update episode 15, which is from more than 10 years ago about the Hero’s Journey. And our views are a lot more critical of the Hero’s Journey today than they were in 2014. So that’s a free gotcha for anyone who wants to call us hypocrites. You don’t even have to research that one.
Bunny: We’ve had 10 years of character development.
Chris: Yeah. The important thing though is that we stay true to episode 15, so that nobody who liked episode 15 will dislike anything we say now.
Oren: Right. But we also sort of understand that that is not really tenable anymore given our current opinion. So how about we just put in a quick aside to be like “maybe the Hero’s Journey is bad,” and then continue with episode 15, you know, as normal.
Bunny: We could do the thing where if you play our voices backwards or like play the theme song backwards, it says [distorted] “Hero’s Journey not good,” And then the superfans can spot it.
Oren: [sarcastic] Well, I’m completely sold. I don’t see what could go wrong with that. So today we are talking about updating potentially problematic stories, and by problematic, we can of course mean social justice related, but sometimes it’s just that the story was bad.
Bunny: The most basic kind of problematic. It’s just not good. It’s a problem!
Oren: You know, maybe it got a pass at some point because stories used to be worse, or because there was a convention or something, and now it’s not good anymore. So… tastes change over time. And of course the obvious solution that I’m sure a bunch of people are already saying is to just make new stories. And I agree that’s ideal, but that’s not a real solution because as much as I would love to have more new stories, even if we do get that, there are still going to be attempts to update old stories, partly because of money, but also because people like old stories and want to revisit them. That’s just the facts.
Bunny: Yeah. New stories are hard.
Oren: New stories are hard! You know, I like old stories too, right? I like Star Trek. I would be sad if we never made more Star Trek and we’re, you know, just focused on new sci-fi. I do want new sci-fi, but I also want Star Trek.
Bunny: What can I say to make people feel old? Like, I like old media. I like old literature. I like Toy Story.
Oren: Yeah. Big fan of ancient classics like Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Bunny: I’m a stan of Finding Nemo personally.
Chris: Uh, speaking of a story they have not managed to reboot: Buffy. Every time I’ve tried, it’s just gotten stuck in development.
Oren: Yeah. Now it’s got stuck in the fact that we all know Joss Whedon’s terrible. So that’s the latest hurdle to overcome.
Chris: Yeah. I don’t know whether he has – sometimes, he might have rights or not, depending on various situations.
Oren: Yeah. I mean, last time I checked, it’s not that he has rights, it’s just that he’s so associated with it that they would feel weird doing it without him. They think people wouldn’t watch, and who knows. Maybe that’s true.
Chris: [doubtful] Hmm.
Oren: I don’t know. That’s as I understood it. Granted, sometimes these rights agreements are hard to judge from the outside. They aren’t always clear about them.
Chris: Well, what if we just got somebody else to direct and be really mean to the actors.
Oren: Yeah, that should probably work.
Bunny: I think we can just delete Joss Whedon, personally.
Chris: Pretty sure we can find another jerk in Hollywood.
Bunny: There are plenty.
Oren: Yeah, we can find out about their abuses in 15 years.
Bunny: Can’t wait for the exposé.
Oren: All right, so sometimes you have things that are relatively easy to fix. And these are things that outside of bad faith actors, nobody is really going to notice that you changed them. And they get changed all the time, and in fact, no one notices. It’s only when you know, some right wing YouTuber finds one and makes a three hour rage video about it. Then suddenly it matters. Right? And these are things like, in Star Trek there’s an episode where they say – in the Original Series – women can’t be captains. Who cares? No one. We ignore that. We retcon, it’s over. No one cares about that.
Bunny: Good riddance!
Oren: There’s also a Star Trek episode where they establish you can’t go above Warp 5 without causing space global warming.
Bunny: What?
Chris: It was such a bad decision because they had every reason, like, to know that that would be a thing that would be annoying in future episodes.
Oren: Right? Like, pro tip, don’t make the thing your story is about bad to do. It’d be like if we had an avatar sequel that was like “actually, bending causes cancer.” Well, uh… why? I came here to watch bending. I didn’t come here to watch responsible not-bending to avoid cancer. What on earth?
Chris: Yeah. I mean, I understand wanting to do a global warming analogy. They should have just used something else.
Oren: They had many options that were not the thing their show depends on. And then you have stuff that is not even at all related to problematic stuff like in The Dresden Files. The first book has this thing about how people are starting to realize that magic might be real because the government didn’t stop drugs. And uh, yeah, that’s… silly. Why on earth would you – that’s bad! That’s bad worldbuilding.
Bunny: Like LSD breaks the masquerade!
Oren: Or like, I think it’s just part of a list of things that are going wrong, and that’s why people are thinking about magic more. And one of the things that’s going wrong is drugs, you know? Middle class white author, the fear of drugs is always big on their minds, right? So like… that’s a thing. And obviously that was very silly and it was never mentioned again because it was bad. And I think most Dresden Files fans probably don’t even remember that part. So sometimes these things still don’t get fixed, like. Star Wars. There’s no reason that stormtroopers have to be cannon fodder. They don’t have to, but they always are for some reason.
Bunny: But the memes, Oren. Won’t somebody think of the memes?
Chris: Would we recognize the stormtroopers if they’re not cannon fodder?
Bunny: I don’t know!
Chris: Would they even be stormtroopers at that point?
Oren: I think we’re ready for that. I think we’re ready for stormtroopers who can actually fight well.
Chris: I mean, I think if I saw some stormtroopers who knew how to aim, I would just be like, well, clearly those can’t be stormtroopers. They’re spies wearing stormtrooper uniforms.
Oren: What if we called them like stormtrooper version 2.0 or something?
Chris: Yeah, they’re clones again. We went from clones to like convicts and now we’re back at clones.
Bunny: Storm-two-pers!
Oren: Oh, there we go! Got it! It’s still very funny to me that in the first Star Wars movie, stormtroopers are actually supposed to be like elite badasses and they are! And like, the very first scene where they appear, where they just mow down a bunch of rebels in silly hats and then Obi-Wan is like “only Imperial stormtroopers are so precise.” It’s not until they get onto the Death Star, and the only way for them to not all die is for stormtroopers to not know how to aim, that suddenly “stormtroopers being bad” as a meme is born.
Chris: Oh, really? Because the protagonists were outmatched.
Oren: Yeah. That’s the reason. It’s, and they just kept going. Empire Strikes Back kind of pushed back on it a little bit. Like if you watch the Cloud City sequences, the stormtroopers are not as incompetent as we’re used to thinking of them as, but by the time…
Chris: Yeah. Well that’s kind of how inverse ninja theory works though, right? Because when you fight more ninjas, there’s no way for the protagonist to survive unless all those ninjas are less competent,
Bunny: Or if you fight them one ninja at a time for some reason.
Oren: Best webcomic ever is when Dr. McNinja, the bad guy, uses inverse ninja theory against him by making a bunch of Dr. McNinja clones. And so Dr. McNinja turns it on the bad guy by making his outfit look different. So now he’s a heroic lone ninja against the horde of ninjas. Oh, it’s beautiful. It’s my favorite webcomic moment I’ve ever seen.
Bunny: Beautiful.
Oren: Speaking of old media that I love. So by the time of Return of the Jedi, the stormtroopers had been completely memified. Right? They were basically done.
Chris: But also, you have to gimme your opinion on this Oren, but it also seems to me that gunfights in general, it can be kind of tough to choreograph without people just not aiming correctly. At least a lot of films and shows do a very poor job.
Oren: Yeah, I mean, I would say that’s correct. I’m not a film choreographer. Uh, I’ve choreographed some fight scenes on stage a couple of times. We don’t use guns there, mostly because in live theater there’s not enough room. But in general, yes, it is more challenging to choreograph gunfights without everyone just being bad at shooting.
Bunny: I feel like the best gunfights are kind of the cat and mouse type gunfights where there’s more emphasis on sneaking and hiding.
Oren: Yeah.
Bunny: And less on just aiming the weapons at each other.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, I think in general, guns are just too lethal.
Oren: Yeah, you wanna avoid the like, “everyone is hiding behind something and every once in a while they pop up to take a shot and then get back down.” Right? Unless you’re doing some kind of First World War trench warfare commentary type stuff, that’s real boring. But there are ways to make that more interesting. You’ll have to watch some movies where they do that because I, you know, again, I’m not a film choreographer, but what makes the stormtroopers special is that it’s not that everyone in Star Wars is bad at shooting, it’s that they are uniquely bad at it. So like if everyone in Star Wars was just kind of equally bad at shooting, it would be less of a problem.
But anyway, those are like the easy mode problems that usually are solved without too much trouble, unless they’re a meme, at which point we’re stuck with stormtroopers. Then we have like medium mode problems where these are a major point of the story, but they’re not what I would call load-bearing. And so this is stuff like the droid problem in Star Wars. Where droids are clearly sapient beings that are all slaves and are, you know, enslaved by good guys as freely as bad guys.
Chris: The bizarre thing about this one is how recent Star Wars has only gotten worse-
Oren: Yes.
Chris: -about this. And it’s like, how, how did you take a problem that was bad and then just make it even more bad?
Bunny: They’ve drawn attention to it, which they really shouldn’t have done.
Chris: Right, by having like a rebellion that the protagonist put down, and by having Mando just have a ridiculous amount of bigotry against droids, only to like, “oh, this is the droid I really care about. Now let me grab his body and turn it into a suit for my child.” I mean, it’s just like… really? This is what we’re doing?
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: First step, stop making the problem worse.
Bunny: Second step, don’t, don’t turn people into bodies for your children.
Oren: Or, I mean, if you’re gonna do it, do it equally. Right? Dig up your organic best friend and make them into a vehicle for your children. Oh, I’m sorry, is that gross?
Bunny: Do it, Star Wars.
Chris: And you know, I would be personally all up for taking Star Wars in a direction where all the protagonists admit that they were wrong and that they were slave owners and… You know, I would be up for that drama, but obviously that’s not gonna happen. Tons of people would get very, very angry if their beautiful protagonists were canonically depicted that way. So there’s really only one way to do that. It was just to basically retcon it but not acknowledge that you retconned it.
Oren: Just a soft retcon.
Chris: What? They’re paid workers and they’ve always been paid workers.
Oren: Yeah. Don’t ask.
Chris: Just no one speaks to the past.
Bunny: People weren’t bigoted. They were just kind of mean. Don’t worry.
Chris: What are you talking about? We’ve always given them credit!
Oren: And like, every once in a while there’s news out of Disney that suggests maybe they’re finally going to move the Star Wars timeline forward, and that would be just a great opportunity to do this and just not even mention it.
Bunny: I don’t know. Is that just gonna fall in the Disney “first gay character” for the 10th time camp?
Oren: Well, the way that you would avoid that is you just wouldn’t say anything. Like the reason the whole “10th first gay character” thing is a meme is because Disney keeps trying to get credit for things that should be basic decency by now. Right? Like Agatha All Along is a show that’s out that’s very good and has a number of gay characters. But you notice that Disney didn’t be like, “look, it is our first gay witch character.” ‘Cause that would be a real silly look. They just let the story speak for itself, right. So anyway, I think that that could work. There are other things where this is tricky, like the Wheel of Time’s gendered magic system. In some ways that can be fixed without any trouble like we saw in the show, the idea that the Dragon can be anyone, it doesn’t have to just be a guy, and they took out all of the like “to channel man magic, you wrestle it into submission and watch football, but to channel woman magic, you submit to it and perform domestic cleaning tasks.”
Bunny: Although one of their extra features I remember watching did still kind of do that, but it’s not in the show proper. It’s one of the like, “you can optionally watch this if you’d like” content.
Oren: They saved the gender essentialism for the special features?
Bunny: Well, it was a while since I watched this, but it was like, “these are the two types of magic and this one is like a river that you have to flow with and this one is like fire that you have to grapple with” and that sort of thing.
Oren: I do really love, and I don’t know if this was on purpose or not, but in the first Wheel of Time episode, they’re doing an initiation ritual for Egwene, I think is her name. Yeah. Egwene or whatever.
Bunny: Egg Ween.
Oren: Uh, and the initiation ritual is that she has to jump in a river and it’s this really violent, difficult, like strenuous task and I can’t help but feel like that was a reference to the idea of “you submit to the magic of feminine rivers.” Right?
Bunny: I think it was. And in that extra feature I mentioned they do show someone floating on water and stuff like that. I’m pretty sure that was intentional.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: It was a very weird initiation ritual though. Jump in a river!
Oren: But this does leave a few odd aspects of Wheel of Time, like now that we’re playing down the differences between man magic and woman magic, we arrive at this odd place where for some reason, only men can see man magic, and only women can see woman magic. And it just kind of leaves you wondering, why? Why is that? That’s weird.
Chris: There’s still the Red Ajah. The full-on man-haters in the show.
Oren: Right. The Red Ajah are actually much harder to fix. I would put them in hard mode. Now, making them all man-hating lesbians is an unforced error. And I don’t remember if the show, I don’t think the show plays up the idea that they’re all gay, or at least that’s where all the gay characters are, is in the Red Ajah. ’cause the show actually has a fair number of queer characters, which is very cool.
Bunny: They also have a poly triad, which is cool.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: I would expand their antagonism. So instead of focusing on them being man-haters, because it’s just so terrible to find guys who are gonna murder people and take away their powers. Just focus on them being the security outfit in general, where they’re also busy hunting spies.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Right. So it’s not just man-hating that their job is.
Oren: I mean, it feels like the obvious play is to just show them being corrupt. They’ve gotten, you know, they have an important job, but in the service of doing that job, they’ve gotten more powerful and now they like being powerful. As opposed to what’s in the books, which is that, no, taking magic away from men is bad and evil. If you don’t do it, the man will explode and kill everyone around him. But it’s still bad of you to do.
Bunny: Right.
Oren: And then like, I think if you did that, I think you could even still have all the stuff about being afraid of the Red Ajah because they’ve gotten corrupt and now they are, you know, they don’t care. And I’m sure some Wheel of Time fans will tell me that’s already what’s going on in the books. I could just say, go read the books again. That’s not what it is. The idea is that they are inherently bad for going after men who have magic. That’s just portrayed as an evil act, even though everyone agrees it’s necessary.
Bunny: Yeah. I want them to be more interesting. I liked… I’ve only seen the first season, but I liked the Red Ajah lady and her cheekbones.
Oren: Yeah, and I mean obviously you could also…
Chris: She’s a good actress. And very distinctive looking, yeah.
Oren: And I also think you could probably change the plot a little bit because again, in the books, the Red Ajah are like the evilest Aes Sedai. Now granted all the Aes Sedai, except for a handful of main characters, are kind of evil in the books because the author does not like powerful women. And so powerful women are kind of inherently sinister in the series. But there’s no reason the Red Ajah has to be the most evil of them. Right? Like the plot will work regardless of which Ajah the various bad guys come from. So I think that could have worked just fine. I think the show chose to not make that change to the plot because, I don’t know, maybe the writers liked that part. Maybe they were afraid of backlash. It’s hard to say.
Chris: I think they could have also just snuck in giving the Red Ajah, what are they called? The wardens? You know, so they have… so there’s men basically participating in them too. I mean, that would be a deviation from the book, but basically the only reason that they don’t have wardens in the book is because they’re man-haters. So I feel like you could just slip those back in and it wouldn’t be a big deal.
Oren: Yeah. I agree.
Chris: To anybody, but like the fans that are already mad. Yeah.
Oren: The fans you would lose with that, you have already lost by making choices like “the women aren’t terrible.” And, you know, removing the idea of man magic being inherently more powerful than women magic. And now speaking of hard mode, now we are getting to the areas that are legitimately… I do not know how to solve this problem.
Bunny: New story. Erase it, delete it. Put it in the pit with Joss Whedon.
Oren: I mean, it’s like, I’m sad because I like Lord of the Rings. There is a lot about Lord of the Rings that I enjoy. I have only run one Lord of the Rings one-shot, but I really enjoyed it. It allowed me to do things that I don’t normally get to do. I got to really play up the epic nature of the fantasy in a way that feels cliché or silly in most other settings, but man, them orcs. I don’t know what to do about the orcs.
Chris: Okay, so I have a possible suggestion. Obviously we’ve seen from Rings of Power, the thing that just obviously does not work is humanizing the orcs more because if you humanize them only to shove them into the role of being just 100% cruel enemies people hack down. That doesn’t, that just makes the problem worse. Which is what Rings of Power did, was showing like orc babies and families and kind of being like, oh yeah, well maybe they’re these poor orcs, they have nowhere to go, and also the term orc is offensive. You shouldn’t call them that.
Bunny: Wait, that’s part of the show?
Chris: Yeah, it’s in season 2, and season 1 mentions it too. And then, but then we just turn around like, oh, ha ha, fooled you. They’re gonna kill the leader who loves them and follow Sauron instead.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: So, I mean, maybe it’s supposed to be a tragedy where the orcs, you know, Sauron turns them against their leader and they make the wrong choice. But we’re just, again, we’re just doing all of the things Lord of the Rings does, and that’s the pitfall of trying to humanize them. It doesn’t really make anything better. But I do wonder if maybe, again, if you were allowed to deviate a little bit from the source material, but not too much, you could just go in the other direction and just go with the idea that they’re like undead elves.
Bunny: Yeah, I mean, it kind of seems like you have to, if you want them to serve the purpose that they served in the originals, which is cannon fodder largely, you can’t go making like a complex society we’re supposed to understand and empathize with, because then it’s pretty clear that they are victims here as well.
Oren: And I should probably clarify ’cause again, to people who sometimes haven’t tried to do this, on some level it seems like the obvious solution is, well, why don’t you just make the orcs like any other fantasy ancestry? And in a new fantasy setting that would work. But in Lord of the Rings, the orcs being evil is so baked into every element of it that I don’t think you can change that aspect of them without just removing the things that even regular everyday Lord of the Rings fans recognize as being important to that franchise. I believe very hard in my soul that nobody outside of the Griftiverse cares about black elves. I think they were perfect. Like your average Lord of the Rings fan is perfectly fine with that. But if you start taking the orcs as evil out of that, that’s gonna change so much. I think you’re gonna have problems.
Chris: Especially since so many of the villains in Lord of the Rings are like shadowy background figures that kind of rely on the orcs to be cruel and… cannibalistic, honestly, so that they don’t really need a leader who’s forcing them to be cruel because the leader is always some shadowy figure in the background. They’re always roving on their own and just trying to eat hobbits and stuff. It’s just… but I do think maybe they could be pushed in the other direction, so they’re just canonically not an actual race or species, and instead they’re just, you know, elves risen from the dead. Or something like that. Shadowy monster demons. Something that’s just more canonical, these are not people.
Oren: Yeah. I mean, you know, as much as I don’t really love praising Wheel of Time, that is actually something Wheel of Time has, is that the cannon fodder evil monsters are just kind of Frankenstein creatures that the Dark One cooked up. There’s no implication that they have a culture, right? There’s no menus for meat to be back on, that sort of thing.
Bunny: And the thing is, the Lord of the Rings setting already seems to have something like this with those like undead king guys, right? Like it wouldn’t be too far a stretch if you were like, well it’s, you know, thematic resonance. You can make these undead king guys. You can also make this weaker undead-ish version of elves or whatever.
Chris: Isn’t there even lore about the orcs being made from elves that were tortured or something?
Oren: Sometimes, the lore on orcs is kind of inconsistent, and it requires digging into a bunch of secondary source material that I do not have time for. But yes, there is some material about how they were corrupted elves in some places. So if you played that up and you know, played down the idea of them being their own species that is separate but similar to other species, I think you’d probably be at least better than what we have now. The non-social justice related thing, there’s also stuff like Star Trek’s transporters.
Bunny: Famously.
Oren: I just, I wish we could go back and…
Chris: Transporter cancer. Instead of warp cancer, how about transporter cancer? I mean, that would be kind of gloomy in the setting because everybody’s been doing it.
Oren: Yeah, I mean, okay, so if you’re not sure what I’m talking about, the transporter is just a nightmare for trying to plot episodes because it makes it way too easy to get into or out of a place. And a lot of plots depend on it being hard to get into and out of places. And to say nothing of all the different abuses of it, where you can, you know, beam bombs over. And so when writers start to think about this, it’s like the entire episode becomes an exercise in reasons why the transporter won’t work, and that’s just boring. Like, why have this piece of technology if you’re never allowed to use it? And so if it were up to me, I would never have invented transporters.
Chris: Transporter global warming!
Bunny: You can transport, but it turns you into a lizard.
Chris: It makes you evolve.
Bunny: You evolve into a higher form of humanity.
Oren: Maybe this makes me a toxic fan, but if a new Star Trek series came out and it was like, by the way, we all stopped using transporters because we found out that they give you cancer. Like, I wouldn’t like that. Even though I don’t like transporters. That would seem bad to me.
Bunny: Oren’s hot take is “transporters bad, cancer worse.”
Chris: Well, I think the problem is that it’s a utopian setting. And so the assumption would be if the technology was unsafe, they would’ve caught that a long time ago.
Oren: Right? Or like we could come up with another reason, right? Like we could say that one of the God-aliens running around has blanketed the entire universe in a transporter stopping field, something. We could do something like that.
Bunny: The very specific God.
Chris: Yeah, it just becomes very arbitrary.
Oren: Right, and I wouldn’t like that if they did that. I would roll my eyes very hard at that, even though I support the goal.
Chris: I know what fits this setting! The Transporter Clone Wars! But what if there was a war? I mean, they’ve already done this a couple times with like, androids and eugenics. Where there’s a big war in the setting, and then as a result something gets banned to an extreme degree. So we could just do it with the transporters. There were, somebody made a transporter clone army. It caused a huge war, and the transporters were banned.
Bunny: Transporters are too much trouble.
Oren: They also did that with time travel stuff in Discovery, which went to the future to explain why they don’t have time travel technology. They were like, oh, yeah, we all banned that after the Temporal Cold War.
Chris: See? See, it’s the perfect solution.
Oren: You know, I gotta admit, I think we’ve cut the Gordian Knot. All right. I’m gonna write to Alex Kurtzman and explain to him that we’ve solved this problem.
Bunny: Have you got transporter issues? Are your transporters gumming up your plots? Call 1-800-Oren.
Oren: No, this is Chris’s idea. I’m not stealing it!
Bunny: Oh, 1-800-Chris.
Oren: Any time there’s a problematic technology in Star Trek, there was a war about it and everyone banned it. Don’t ask questions about why the species who love war banned it. Just go with it on this one. Okay. Well, with that, I think we have hit the end of our time and I mean, we solved transporters. I think we can call it a day on that.
Bunny: It’s been a pretty successful episode.
Chris: Yeah. If you would like us to solve your problematic technology with a war, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of marble. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
[Outro Music]Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening/closing theme: The Princess who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.
What if everyone in this episode was… A GHOST? We’re not, but we could be, and then choices would have to be made about how to portray our audio afterlife. That’s our topic this week: all the different ways writers can depict what happens on the other side. From fun and cartoony town builders to the most serious spookums, we’ll discuss the options authors have at their disposal, plus the pros and cons of each.
Show Notes Spirit Fairer * Crescent City * The Good Place * Liesl and Po * Hazbin Hotel * Dead Boy Detectives (Not Sandman) * Elsewhere * Kaos * Orpheus and Eurydice * Avatar Spirit World * Beetlejuice * What Dreams May Come * Hades TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Savannah Bard.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
[Chris] You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [Intro Music]
[Bunny] Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Bunny, and with me today is…
[Chris] Chris!
[Bunny] And…
[Oren] Oren!
[Bunny] And I am speaking to you from beyond the grave because the podcast died in episode 505, very disappointingly. It’s pretty misty where I’m at.
[Oren] Ooh!
[Bunny] I can see some shapes, but the special effects budget isn’t that large, guys. Don’t expect much.
[Oren] Wait, hang on. So, the podcast died in episode 505. This is 508. Does that mean for the last two podcasts we’ve been dead and didn’t know it? Is that the kind of afterlife story we’re doing?
[Chris] Yeah, we just had a dramatic twist where we realized we’re dead.
[Bunny] The twist happened between episodes, but it did happen. Rest assured.
[Chris] That’s why we haven’t been getting any comments. I’m like, why can’t anybody hear us?
[Bunny] Oh, oh, oh, okay. That’s why. But now, we’ve breached the barrier between the land of the living and the land of the podcast dead. So, we can upload 506 and 507 just fine now. Don’t worry. I’m going to be super cryptic about whether I’m a ghost, but you know, I am dead and piloting a really cool boat with orchards and fishing off the back, and it’s been a great time.
[Chris] Yeah, but even though we’re already dead, we can still die somehow?
[Oren] Yeah.
[Chris] There’s still an oblivion that we can go to, maybe through a door or something. That’s very disappointing.
[Bunny]There’s extra super death.
[Oren] Yeah. Look, it turns out that the possibility of death underpins a lot of storytelling, and when you take that away, stories get weird. So, most stories will introduce double death because they don’t know how else to do it.
[Bunny] Extra-super-maxi-extreme-ultra death.
[Oren] And to be clear, I am most stories in this situation, right? I’m doing that too. I’m currently working on a story that sort of takes place in an afterlife, and I’ve introduced double death because I did not know how to tell this story without it.
[Chris] You have to do something for stakes.
[Bunny] And you can approach double death in different ways depending on the type of story you’re telling. Certainly if you’re like a ghost who’s restless because of a murder or whatever. The double death is moving on to peace.
[Chris] You could have a low-stakes, happiness-based story, like a cozy, that’s in the afterlife where we lose our afterlife coffee shop.
[Bunny] Oh, we’re going to get the afterlife mob boss to sponsor the rebuilding of our afterlife coffee shop.
[Chris] We could just say that the afterlife is kind of miserable and everybody in there’s miserable. But if we create this coffee shop, suddenly it’ll make the afterlife less miserable, and that’s a thing that we are invested in.
[Bunny] Right.
[Oren] Is the afterlife my neighborhood now? Because a coffee shop would make us all a lot less miserable.
[Bunny] Oh no, the afterlife is being gentrified. The afterlife has a light rail now.
[Chris] Oh, no, no, no. Too real. Too real.
[Bunny] I mean a very cozy afterlife, which I was just referencing because I’ve played 10 hours of it in the past week, is again, a spirit farer where the extra-double death is like, the character has resolved their daddy issues and now they can move on peacefully, and that’s a video game.
[Chris] Move on to where?
[Bunny] It’s just through the door, Chris. Don’t worry.
[Oren] It’s probably fine.
[Chris] Death can’t tell you.
[Bunny] Gwen’s happy.
[Chris] They still can’t tell you what’s on the other side.
[Bunny] In that game I guess you’re technically, you’re the spirit farer, so you’re ferrying people through a liminal space, and it’s kind of the afterlife, but also kind of not. But I think it counts because definitely the mysterious slash liminal afterlife is one of several different kinds of afterlife that writers tend to use. One is this one. One is the scary, the spooky, frightening kind. And one is the pedestrian kind, where it’s just basically normal life, but with maybe one or two things different. And one is the spunky kind, where everything’s funky and weird, but in a spooky Halloween-y kind of way.
[Chris] I have to admit that every time you say the word “liminal”, something inside me recoils, but I know that you’re actually using it appropriately, that this is an appropriate use of the word “liminal”. It’s just−
[Bunny] Wait, how do people use it?
[Chris] It’s become a buzzword where people use it to show off their vocabulary or make something seem mysterious and profound.
[Bunny] Oh no!
[Chris] Yeah.
[Bunny] Don’t take my liminal from me!
[Oren] We get it in angry reactions to our articles sometimes where we’ll criticize something and say, “This didn’t make sense,” or “This character didn’t act according to the way they’ve been previously established to act.” Things like that. And someone will be like, “Oh, well, you see that character or that plot point exists in the liminal space between being good and being bad, presumably.”
[Bunny] No! Oh my gosh.
[Chris] Yeah.
[Bunny] That’s too bad. I am justified here, though.
[Chris] No, it is fair to call limbo liminal.
[Bunny] Limbo. Maybe we can just go with limbo and sidestep this whole issue because that is definitely one of the types. It’s the one where it’s probably misty and hard to make out, and everyone tends to have unfinished business. It’s the place between life and double death.
[Chris] I think that’s particularly useful for stories where the protagonists are still alive, because then we can bring in the afterlife without making it too much like when people die, they’re not really dead, because we could just… go to the next neighborhood over and talk to them like in Crescent City, apparently.
[Oren] In Crescent City, the fact that there’s just a place where ghosts hang out, and one of the ghosts there knows the answer to the mystery, and we just don’t go talk to them. Ick.
[Bunny] Who killed you? I don’t know. Just go ask.
[Oren] We could find out, if only Danika could tell us what happened, and then at the end of the book it’s, “Oh yeah, we could have gone and asked her like any time, and we just didn’t.”
[Chris] But having that temporary space where ghosts go sometimes and then they leave again, allows for some contact with people who are dead without it being plot-breaking or world-breaking in some way. It’s a very different world if every time somebody dies, all I have to do is make a seance phone call and talk to them.
[Bunny] And you can make the rules more flexible, right? If it’s a mysterious limbo and we don’t know a ton about it, then you have more wiggle room for the connection and the seance being unclear rather than a telephone call.
[Oren] And that kind of afterlife world is also particularly useful if your story is going to focus heavily on the fact that the characters are dead or are maybe dying or are going to die or whatever. Right? That’s a big part of your story because it lends itself pretty well to it because you have to make peace with whatever your issues are or be okay with the way you died or solve your own murder or something in this space as opposed to a story set in Asgard with some Einherjar who did technically die. This is technically the afterlife for them, but we don’t really care how they died that much. Right? It’s probably not that big a deal.
[Bunny] No, don’t worry about it. One book that does the mysterious afterlife is a book called Liesl & Po [pronounced with a long “i” sound], which might be Liesl & Po [pronounced with a long “e” sound]. I think it is actually Liesl & Po [long “e”], because recently I met someone named Liesel, and it wasn’t Liesl [long “i”], and I embarrassed myself.
[Oren] We’ll split the difference and call it Liesl & Po [long “a”].
[Bunny] Liesl & Po [long “a”].
[Oren] That way we know we’re wrong.
[Bunny] Yeah, you can annoy both sets of people.
But Poe is a ghost who has been in the liminal space, which is called the Other Side in this book, long enough that he’s pretty much lost all of his memories, including his body and his gender for most of the book. So, for most of the book, Po is it. And ghosts are able to pass beyond the other side when whatever unfinished business they have is completed− so, Poe remembering who he was. And for Liesl, bringing her father’s ashes to a significant place for him to be buried and also resolving his murder. But she kind of does that on accident. She didn’t know he was murdered.
[Oren] You solve a murder sometimes. It just happens.
[Bunny] Yeah, oops!
[Oren] My favorite is, and I’m not just talking about Hazbin Hotel here, but I am talking about Hazbin Hotel, a lot of new stories tend to not really know what to do with hell. It tends to get thematically confused. Is it a place you get sent for actual bad things? Or is it a place you get sent for being cool and rad?
[Bunny] Yeah.
[Oren] Sometimes it wants them to be both.
[Chris] I’ve seen the movies that seem to embrace hell being a bad place and are building off of Christianity in some way. The thing that they often do is have the one character who dies by suicide because then they can say, oh, see, that’s a sin, so now they go to hell. But it’s also very sympathetic. Nobody actually wants to believe that people who die that way go to hell. Now there’s somebody that they can go rescue from hell.
[Oren] The problem with that kind of story is that if you think about it for even five seconds, you realize that basically nobody deserves the things that happen to you in most versions of hell−of the Christian hell anyway. Like maybe some of history’s greatest monsters. That’s its philosophical point. But most people, even most bad people, clearly don’t deserve that.
It came up in The Sandman show where they were able to rescue one of the bullies, the most sympathetic of the bullies. The other bullies all live in hell forever. But I don’t think that what those bullies did was bad enough to be in hell forever. Just seems bad, man.
[Bunny] Definitely, hell is the most common place that I’ve seen the scary afterlife type of trope. Outside of classical mythology or works drawing on classical mythology, I don’t think I’ve seen a lot of stories with the afterlife as a prominent part where the afterlife is definitely horrible and frightening.
[Oren] It would be depressing, right? It would be hard to have a real story just set in the classical Christian hell, right? You’d have to do something to change that up.
[Chris] It’s like you need the uncertainty. So just as you need the after-afterlife so that we have stakes, something could go wrong if characters were in hell, they would also need some hope of escape to create tension at that point. We can’t just have everything bad forever. That also is tensionless.
[Bunny] And I think that goes to what, how stories interact with the afterlife and what they use it for. Three of the main ones I could think of are the character is dead and navigating the afterlife, so our main character is figuring out what this thing is all about. There’s a book called Elsewhere where the character is dead, and basically it turns out the afterlife is an island where everyone ages backwards until they’re ready to be reborn as little babies.
[Chris] Honestly, that’s probably one of the better uses of the aging backwards trope that I’ve heard of. I’ve seen other stories where people age backwards, but that actually gives it a reason to happen.
[Bunny] Yeah. It’s like, you grow old and then you die, and then you go to this place and you grow young, and then you’re born again. It makes a sort of sense, right? In this case, the tension and the story is about she really wants to get back to earth, and now she’s trying to make peace with the fact that she’s dead and whether she wants to speed up the process and do an early release or something, whatever it’s called, where instead of living out a full afterlife, they’ll age you down really quick and send you back. And it’s about her being like, maybe I don’t want that. Maybe I want to experience this afterlife thing. And I think that’s what she ultimately does, but she makes her peace with it. And then the book ends with her in the future, having aged back down to a little baby and being sent back to earth.
[Oren] The advantage of making your own kind of abstract afterlife that isn’t obviously modeled off of the one that we’re familiar with, makes it easier to have a wider number of people there. Because if it’s a Christian afterlife, you have to start asking some questions.
[Bunny] It’s good for a joke. Good Omens jokes about what composers ended up in hell.
[Oren] It’ll be like, okay, I guess the story either can’t have any Jews in it, or we have some uncomfortable questions to answer. That’s a little weird. Whereas if you make up your own afterlife, it’s less of a problem because it could just be everyone ends up here on the weird town-building boat. This is a non-denominational place. Don’t worry about it.
[Bunny] And they all happen to be connected to me in some way.
[Oren] Yeah.
[Chris] I think that’s the other convenience about the limbo, right? If you say, oh, it’s a temporary space, then you don’t really have to define what happens or ask any of the questions.
[Oren] Or you could be like The Good Place and say you’ve made up your own, but it’s definitely just heaven and hell. Every religion got it about 5% correct. Mm-hmm..
[Chris] Uh-huh.
[Bunny] The Good Place is definitely the−at least from what I understand, having not seen it−the pedestrian afterlife where it’s pretty much real life, but there’s… a couple things changed. They’re dead, but it’s just a normal neighborhood, right?
[Chris] Uh, kind of.
[Oren] It’s kind of complicated. There’s a whole in-universe reason why they’re in what looks like a normal neighborhood. The plot is hard to explain, but suffice to say, the actual afterlife is separated into the good place and the bad place. And the good place is heaven. The bad place is clearly hell, even though they claim otherwise. And I love The Good Place. It’s a fantastic show. But I did notice that as they were starting and they were claiming that this was not just Christianity, it is like… I’m not saying there aren’t any other religions that this matches, but I can name several that it clearly does not.
[Bunny] I think that would count as pretty much earth. More or less, at least in how it looks. That and Elsewhere, except Elsewhere also apparently has talking animals, which I learned from its Wikipedia; I don’t remember that. But it does have the same thing for animals, so you got that fun thing where the character can meet up with their childhood pet or whatever.
[Oren] The Good Place sometimes does the whole, oh yeah, this place is actually a mind-bending alternate reality, but we’re not, we don’t have the budget for that. So, your brain is interpreting it as an office.
[Bunny] Sure. We’ll go with that.
[Oren] The Good Place is fond of that premise, because it saves on the budget.
[Chris] That is the issue with world building in any TV shows, right?
[Bunny] It’s the plot equivalent of the misty space because we don’t have special effects.
[Chris] Honestly, that’s one of the reasons why CHAOS, the show, it has problems as a show, but it’s basically like an alternate world urban fantasy, but where the Greek gods are an active presence in people’s lives, and we do have the whole Greek underworld thing.
[Oren] The premise is what if Zeus was real, and it’s just as terrible as you think.
[Bunny] That’d be pretty terrible.
[Chris] And we have, when they go into the underworld, there’s another hole that’s like the terrible place that you don’t want to go when you’re in the underworld. Apparently, people can still leave it. So maybe if we went in there, there would be another after-afterlife. After-after-afterlife.
[Bunny] There’s another classic way that stories engage with the afterlife, with the prime example being Orpheus and Euridice, is trying to rescue someone, right? Bring them back. Don’t look at them. Don’t look over your shoulder. Don’t you dare!
[Oren] I love Greek mythology for starting the weird type of confusion of, yeah, I’m in the realm of the dead, but I’m not dead, right? I don’t have the ghost type, so I take different damage types as I’m down here.
[Bunny] I do love that trope, though, unabashedly. Just a living person going to the land of the dead or the spirit world or whatever. Sometimes those are the same. Sometimes those are different. I guess that’s another thing is whether the spirit world is the same thing as the land of the dead, which makes me think of Avatar, and I’m not sure if they ever answered that.
[Oren] Sort of. In Korra, we do meet some just ghosts hanging out in the spirit world, and that’s a whole thing. It’s unclear if that’s where all of the dead go or if Iroh was just there because he’s particularly cool. Although, man, Avatar, the spirit world is a huge problem if you try to run an Avatar RPG, because canonically, bending doesn’t work there, and players do not want to spend an entire session without their bending. They get ornery.
[Bunny] This is where your Kyoshi warrior shines.
[Oren] You have to think of a reason for them to still be able to get their bending.
[Chris] The fantasy audience does not like it when their magic is taken away.
[Bunny] No.
[Chris] And, of course, RPG players do not like it when their most powerful abilities are taken away.
[Oren] Right. With Avatar, with the show, it’s like, okay, whatever. The audience can tolerate it for a while, right? Don’t get me wrong, it would be sad to have an entire season in the spirit world and no bending. That’s not what I’m here for. But one episode? Sure. But with a session of an RPG, they’re crawling the walls by the end of it.
[Bunny] Funny enough, I had this problem with a story I had once intended to write where the first book of it was set in an alternate fantasy world, and then it− the twist would be that it’s a portal fantasy, and I think they’re going to a spirit world when they go through the portal, but it’s actually earth. And then I was like, wait but then the second book is set on earth, and nobody wants that.
[Chris] Yep.
[Oren] I had a slightly different problem. The first time I envisioned a story within an afterlife premise, I realized that this is a problem because it just raises the expectation that there’s going to be a plot about how each character died because they’re in the afterlife, and I realized I didn’t want to do that. That wasn’t what was interesting to me. So, I changed it a bit to have one character who is a dead human. Everyone else is just a magical creature who lives there. So I can have one plot about the human and how they died, and I don’t have to do it for everybody else.
[Bunny] As a treat.
[Chris] You do want to make it feel like the afterlife somehow, which is a trick. So, it doesn’t seem like we’re just in another world. It would be a little strange if your character dies and then it seems like they just go through a portal into a fantasy dimension.
[Oren] That is kind of what I want.
[Bunny] But what if I did do that?
[Oren] I want an excuse for a modern character to be in a fantasy world, which I know that’s called portal fantasy.
[Chris] Well, we just need some kind of theme that accurately reflects that this is an afterlife in some way.
[Bunny] Oh, stop that, Chris. Don’t be applying your logic and critical thinking to this.
So, I think the last kind of afterlife that− well, there’re lots of different kinds of afterlives. I don’t want to be discriminating here, but the last major genre of afterlife that I could think of was the spunky afterlife, where it’s weird and wild, but in a spooky way. And usually darkly comedic. I feel like this is entirely Tim Burton.
[Chris] Oh, like Beetlejuice?
[Bunny] Yeah, exactly.
[Chris] One of my favorite things about the afterlife and Beetlejuice, again, it’s supposed to be very comedic was−and I have not seen the new Beetlejuice, by the way. I probably should, and it is just the fact that they become ghosts who are haunting their house, which was really cool; we’ve had more of those types of stories since then, but you know, at the time being from the perspective of the ghosts haunting the house had a lot of novelty−was the fact that they when they try to go outside their house, there’s just sand and sandworms that want to eat them.
[Bunny] They just appear on Dune.
[Chris] It’s like Dune, but way wackier because they are black- and white-striped and much goofier. But yeah, that’s definitely the dark and wacky and goofy. It’s like, nope, you can’t leave your house. Sandworms will eat you. It’s like, okay, that was a little random, but the overall world is just colorful enough−because it’s comedic, especially−that it can handle the low realism, and I think it’s a little bit more disparate.
[Bunny] Everything’s bizarre. The afterlife is a bureaucracy, too.
[Chris] I have to go and get a number and wait in line, and the number is−
[Bunny] −it’s got caseworkers, and everyone’s wearing funky prostheses.
[Oren] Yeah, the idea of the afterlife as a bureaucracy is very popular. We can’t just send people magically to where they need to be. There needs to be infrastructure for that.
[Chris] It’s a great contrast between the things that we experience in the real world and the afterlife, which is supposed to be mystical and magical, and so there’s novelty in mixing those two things together.
[Bunny] Probably the most obvious one in terms of the contrast is Corpse Bride, because the real world is mostly grayscale. And then you get to the afterlife, and it’s bright and it’s colorful and there are big bouncy musical numbers. And there’s literally a bar with a band singing.
[Chris] Yeah.
[Oren] Which is the opposite of how a lot of purgatory stories are shown because if you have a story that takes place in purgatory, you can basically just shoot anywhere and then put a gray filter over it, and now you’re in purgatory.
[Bunny] It’s like the blue filter for night. Don’t worry about it.
[Oren] I was just wondering if you’d seen Hazbin Hotel. I was curious where you thought it fell on the spectrum.
[Bunny] I have not seen it. I haven’t seen most TV. I’m just bad at TV shows.
[Oren] That’s why you’re so normal.
[Bunny] Oh, I don’t know.
[Oren] That’s why you’re so well-adjusted.
[Bunny] That means I can’t do the banter. It’s a trade-off.
[Chris] That one takes place in hell, but it’s definitely a very wacky hell. A lot of very colorful character designs.
[Oren] Yeah. When you die, you become a fun, animated character, and you might get some animalistic traits if you’re feeling like a furry, or you might just be a weird-looking guy, a weird little guy. So, it allows for a lot of creative freedom.
[Bunny] Well, this begs the question, do you think you are a furry, a weird little guy, or just having some animalistic characteristics?
[Oren] I’ll never tell. I liked that show. It is fun, but it does show some of the thematic clashes with the way that it’s trying to portray hell because it−on the one hand, it wants to do the whole “hell is an actual punishment that you get sent for doing real bad things” but also, hell is the cool place where you go for wearing leather jackets and having a healthy sex life.
[Bunny] Is Satan not the ultimate bad boy?
[Oren] I mean, they make that joke, but at the same time, the whole story is weird because the protagonist is theoretically trying to help people improve so they can get into heaven. But by the end of the first season−mild spoilers, I guess; the show’s been out for a while now, but still−by the end of the first season, they’ve also basically declared war on heaven and fought off an attempt by heaven to kill them all, and so it’s unclear why they would even want to go to heaven at that point. It seems like the only problem is that hell is an exploited population that hasn’t been able to have a proper representative democracy.
[Chris] Once too many angels are jerks, then heaven’s just the jerky place for privileged people.
[Oren] And maybe that’s on purpose, I don’t know. Maybe season two is going to start with them being like, actually, trying to go to heaven makes you a class traitor. Let’s try to clean up here in hell, because the only problem with hell is that it’s ruled by a bunch of jerk-ass demon lords. So, we’ll overthrow them, and everything will be great.
[Bunny] So, Satan’s a bad boy who is also Marx.
[Oren] In this story, Satan or Lucifer is a disaffected emo kid. The idea is that he tried to do something cool and it failed. So now, he hangs out in his room and is sad most of the time, which is not an uncommon portrayal of Satan.
[Chris] But also in hell in the show, they have their mercenary hoard of cannibals that they use.
[Oren] People who did actual bad things, right?
[Chris] It’s kind of ambiguous.
[Bunny] In addition to the double death, we also have the hell and then the real double hell where the actual bad people are. Is that the shtick?
[Oren] Well, it’s all the same place. It’s just like how they feel in portraying it in different episodes, right?.
[Chris] There’s double death, I think. In Hazbin Hotel, the angels can permanently kill people that are in hell, I think. And then what? Do they just go to oblivion or something?
[Oren] Unclear. Question mark.
[Bunny] I feel like we see hell a whole lot more than we see heaven in stories just because most depictions of heaven seem boring and tensionless just because everything’s pretty good. That’s the selling point of heaven. Right? I don’t- I can’t think of a story set in heaven.
[Chris] So, What Dreams May Come, again, it uses the kind of surreal approach where we try to make the environment colorful and creative. And they do, again, they have−it’s basically about a family, and so they do have the one person who dies by suicide, who they have to rescue from hell, right? And that’s how they end up escalating the tension in that movie. But in the beginning− this is starring Robin Williams−we have when he first enters, his landscape is a painting literally with paint. So they use a lot of creativity there and build this wondrous atmosphere.
In that case, the novelty−and just obviously death has some tension to it−works okay, but then when they want to actually escalate things, they still end up including hell.
[Bunny] Definitely going with a more…. Taking the spunky afterlife, or just going that more creative route to heaven rather than just your typical Christian heaven or something like it, makes things a lot more interesting.
[Chris] Utopias are always difficult to write in. You can do kind of personal stories, but if you’re having a utopia, you’re eliminating any world-level source problems, and that just makes it much harder to plot.
[Oren] Oh, I do feel like I should just give a shout out to Hades, one of my favorite games of all time.
[Bunny] Yes! How did we not talk about Hades?
[Oren] The reason why we didn’t talk about Hades that much is that it’s only technically the afterlife.
[Bunny] Oh, okay.
[Oren] Our protagonist is like a god who was born there, right? He didn’t die, and we try not to think too hard about all the minions he’s smashing his way through on his way up to visit Mom.
[Bunny] Don’t worry about it.
[Oren] That’s a great game, but it’s only kind of an afterlife. With that, I think we’ll go ahead and call this episode to a close.
[Bunny] We’ll kill this episode, if you will.
[Oren] Let the episode die. Kill it if you have to.
[Chris] If you would like to resurrect this episode as another episode later…
[Bunny] Ooh!
[Chris] …consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
[Oren] That’s very good. Before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who is a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week. [Outro music]
Don’t you just hate it when characters stubbornly refuse to change their views when encountering new evidence? Unless it’s a character we like, then they’re bravely sticking to their guns in the face of adversity. That’s clearly a double standard, but it’s a fairly mild one when looking at all the ways we inconsistently judge characters. Our topic this week is figuring out how and why this happens, plus what we can do about it.
Show Notes If Books Could Kill * Echo Fight Scene * Prey * The Acolyte * The Broken Earth * Good Omens * Ratio of Women * The Tolkien White Guys * Candy and Spinach * Mary Sue * Fallout * Burn It Down * Crunching Book Sales Numbers * When Women Don’t Smile TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Michael Frank*. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[opening song]This is the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris and with me is…
Oren: Oren
Chris: And
Bunny: Bunny
Chris: Now we all know that everybody likes Bunny’s evil laugh since Bunny is the villain
Bunny: [laughs evilly]
Chris: But somehow people find it weird when Oren and I as protagonists laugh. Isn’t that a little unfair? Shouldn’t all the characters get to do an evil laugh.
Oren: It’s only because my evil laugh sounds like a screaming goat. People are not into it.
Bunny: Maybe my laugh is just inherently better.
Oren: It seems like it.
Chris: It’s entirely justified, yeah. OK.
Bunny: You’re not villains, so you don’t get to.
Oren: I’ve also been told my normal laugh sounds like an evil laugh, so when I try to do an evil one, it’s just kind of forced.
Bunny: Maybe you should just lean into it. Maybe you’re destined to become a villain.
Oren: Maybe. Yeah. I’m just gonna join the bad side.
Chris: Gosh. That would be so awkward if there was a villain who just had a very forced laugh all time. Gosh, it just would set off my embarrassment fear.
Bunny: Cringing on behalf of the villain.
Chris: Yeah, probably. So more seriously, we’re gonna talk about unfair or character double standards that generally reflect unfairness in the real world.
Oren: What do you mean unfairness, Chris? I have been told by a number of very reliable internet commentators that discrimination doesn’t exist anymore–if it ever did. I think we’re probably fine. I don’t see what’s the problem.
Bunny: We did it. We solved it. Haven’t you heard about Obama?
Oren: I read an entire book by Stephen Pinker about how discrimination doesn’t exist anymore. [laughs]
Bunny: Oh, that was Pinker. I didn’t realize that.
Oren: Well, he’s a person who has said that. I don’t know if he still believes it, but that was one of the premises of The Blank Slate. It’s a very unfortunate book.
Bunny: Oh, I say that because that is a name I know from If Books Could Kill.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: But any case, we have run into a number of people who just weren’t aware of some of these dynamics, and I think it is really important when we’re talking about stories and criticizing stories especially, that we understand the double standards that are out there, so that we don’t inadvertently reinforce them when we’re talking about stories.
There are a number of stories where, unfortunately, we criticize everything.
Bunny: [laughs] Unfortunately.
Chris: But some stories we have to tiptoe around a little bit. Not because we are afraid to criticize them, but because other people are applying a really unfair lens to them. And if we just criticize them normally as we would any other story, we can seem like we’re feeding into that or make that worse because that’s how a lot of this stuff works.
People just reflexively pile onto something and it’s not necessarily that people are intending to be unfair. Unfortunately, it doesn’t require intent.
Oren: Although, to be fair, there is a lot of intent. There is a whole ecosystem of people who do an outrage grift based on this sort of thing. They’ll look at a fight scene from Echo, the more recent Marvel show, and be like, “this fight scene is so bad. It’s so much worse than Daredevil. Why are they making the fight scenes woke?”
Bunny: The punching is too feminist.
Oren: Right. So what they do is they’ll slow the fight scene down or play an early version of it that doesn’t have all of the smooth editing or all of the effects they put in to make it look more real. Or they’ll zoom in really close and be like, “Aha! If you zoom in at fifty times zoom, you’ll see that they didn’t actually make contact.”
Now, of course, if you apply any of these standards to Daredevil, the show that they claim is so much better before everything was woke, Daredevil’s fights would also be bad because this is an impossible standard we’re suddenly holding echoes fights to. And it’s not like Echo is a perfect show, but these people are either extremely uninterested or very bad at actual critique, so they come up with this nonsense instead.
Bunny: I take it you’ve been steeped in the sewage of this discourse recently.
Oren: I try to keep abreast of what they’re saying ’cause it’s gonna come up in comments and I need to know if someone is repeating a narrative they heard deep in right wing YouTube.
You can also just tell if you look at public comments on some new trailer that has a visibly marginalized character in it, and all the comments are saying the same thing. They all got that from somewhere.
Chris: At this point, any popular speculative fiction show whose main character is a woman of color, right? You can just guarantee. It’s not hard to identify which shows are gonna be the target of this.
Oren: Right. And the way that it typically works is that these grifters will pick a show that has a woman or a person of color, or a woman of color as its protagonist or a main character, and they’ll hate on it for a couple months from the early trailers.
Then it’ll come out, and if it is well received, they move on and pretend that they never talked about it. And if it’s poorly or mixed reception, they’ll keep hammering on it for the next year. And they do this with almost perfect prediction. This is what happened with Prey where when the Prey trailer first came out, they were like, “Ah! Indian woman in the movie! Blah, blah, blah.” But then everyone loved Prey, so they all immediately stopped talking about it. Whereas with something like The Acolyte, which people didn’t really like, they were like, “Aha! The wokeness.” And that’ll power their algorithm for the next year.
Bunny: And it sucks for us because stories featuring marginalized characters can also just be bad independent of that. But now there’s this whole gross ecosystem of obfuscation.
Chris: On one hand, when we do criticize a story…yeah, it can possibly make it look like it’s worse, but at the other hand, we are also creating discourse about that story and can actually benefit a story too. Having that extra discourse, even if it’s critical.
So, all stories should have some level of criticism if they’re big budget, or bestselling or really popular stories.
Oren: Right.
Chris: We don’t need to do that with somebody’s unknown novel that’s languishing on Amazon. But generally, all stories are worth discussing, including stories that star marginalized characters. And of course they’re gonna have flaws in them too, like everything else.
Oren: There’s definitely a line you wanna walk there where you don’t want to just pile on, and you don’t wanna only critique stories by, or about, marginalized people. But you also don’t wanna ever do that ’cause then that suggests you don’t take them seriously.
For a long time, I avoided talking about The Broken Earth in my various oppressed mages discussions just because it didn’t seem fair to go after a black author for doing something that white authors have been doing for decades. But, like, eventually I did have to talk about it ’cause it was getting weird that I wasn’t mentioning it. ‘Cause it’s a very influential book, and if I never talked about it it would be like I don’t take it seriously. But it’s important. It matters.
Chris: Yeah. It’s important and influential and worth talking about.
Bunny: And I feel like these reactionary lines of reasoning go a couple of paths. One of them is that the character is only marginalized to get favor with annoying feminists, or it’s been infiltrated and bent to the whims of these feminists. The second one is representation as being forced down our throat, because you have to look at someone I guess who might have a different skin color?
Oren: Yeah. Well, their eyes actually live in the bottom of their throat, so they kind of have to unhinge their jaw to look at the screen. It’s not pleasant. It’s not a fun site.
Bunny: Oh yeah. Maybe in that case it is better if we withdraw from the forcing, and then after the thing comes out, usually say something like, how you can’t criticize things anymore because we’re all too politically correct. And then they’ll appeal to the idea that things used to be good. But no, they aren’t anymore.
Oren: Yeah, that’s my favorite. The, “I don’t hate this type of character. See, I like these ones from 30, 40 years ago. I just don’t like these new ones.”
And this is usually with white female characters, because there were more of them in the eighties, or at least in science fiction, than other options. But I do see it with people sometimes saying, “I don’t have a problem with black guys in movies. I liked Blade back in the 90’s. I just don’t like Finn ’cause he’s a beta cuck,” or whatever.
Bunny: “My best friend is gay.”
Oren: Yeah, that sort of thing. Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley is their favorite. Everyone constantly loves Ripley, but hates every character who is like Ripley that was made recently.
Bunny: And look. Ripley is objectively good, but so are many characters these days.
Oren: A Starbuck was a really funny one that came up recently in one of these videos. “Ah, why can’t they make them like they used to with Starbuck, the character who everyone was furious about at the time because it was a gender swap.
Chris: Yeah. So let’s move on from–
Bunny: You’re stopping us from complaining! Come on.
Chris: I just think it’s worth–we know that there are jerks out there. They probably don’t listen to our podcast. So let’s talk about the things that happened that are a little less intentional than that.
Oren: Okay. If we must.
Bunny: Fine.
Chris: Taking this whole, “oh, I’m not sexist, but…,” “I’m not racist, but…” And then making complaints. One that I have seen from somebody I knew was looking at, for instance, the romance in good omens and being like, “well, aren’t men allowed to be friends on TV anymore?”
Somebody’s experiencing a little privilege loss. Their basis, what they’re used to, is always having nobody be gay on television. And then we get like one gay couple and they’re like, “oh my gosh! There’s so many gay people.”
Bunny: When the paradigm shifts, even a tiny bit, you got these people popping outta the woodwork to be like, “oh my gosh. Now you’re not even allowed to have friends,” or something.
Oren: There is no shortage of media where guys are friends. [Scoffs] That is not an endangered species. Don’t worry. It’s fine.
Bunny: Have you seen the entire genre of buddy cop movies?
Chris: Yeah. That’s one of those things where you have to make people aware of the fact that whatever they’re used to becomes normal, and when they see a change that seems unfair, even if it’s not.
If a straight guy is used to all of the men in TV shows being straight, two gay guys suddenly feels like there’s too many gay people, because that person’s definition of normal is all straight people. Not because that person thinks that there shouldn’t be any gay people on television if they reasoned it out. It’s a reflexive reaction to having two guys who don’t represent you [laughs] when you’re used to every male character being your stand-in character.
Oren: That’s 200% more than there used to be, if you think about it. So that’s actually quite a lot.
Bunny: I wish I knew more specifics, but I feel like there was a study where people would think that a room was half men and half women, simply because there were more than just a couple women in it, even when the ratio was ten men and five women.
Chris: One thing that I love is–so Orin’s novel, the Abess Rebellion. A very frequent beta reader feedback to that one would be like, “Oh my gosh. There’s so many women in this book.” And then Oren would just point out that that novel has more men than most novels have women in that.
Bunny: Yes. That is so good.
Oren: I promise I was not going to bring this up. The point of this episode was not to be like, “yeah, look how feminist I am.”
Bunny: That is such a good retort though. Just such a clap back.
Chris: Yeah, yeah. Oren did not plan this. I just decided to bring it up because it was such a good example of how unused to people were of having women in their books.
Oren: Yeah. And to be clear, most of them were saying it as a good thing. I wasn’t trying to do a ‘gotcha’ on them. Most of them were excited to be like, “there’s so many women!” with a couple of minor exceptions. But it was still just an obvious example of they have been taught to expect so much less.
Bunny: I think a similar point, at least, was made with Black Panther. Obviously that one was dealing with race in an extremely explicit way and the Abis Rebellion was not dealing with gender in that sort of sense. But it was pointed out that even as this was a movie full of black people, and that was the whole point, there are still more white characters in Black Panther than there are black people in most other superhero movies.
Oren: Yeah. And we get to call them the token white guys. Come on. That’s so beautiful. I love it.
Chris: Okay, so beyond just the pure number of people, there’s also the inherent judgments that people make that are different depending on a character’s demographics…
Oren: Oh yeah. This is hard.
Bunny: Yeah…
Chris: …that we have to talk about. Right? And we’ve talked about candy and spinach a lot. I think this one is so big and so important for double standards, and the reason is because in the way that candy and spinach work with characters, identification is just a really important component of that.
Probably most of our listeners have heard us talk about candy and spinach before, but let me just break it down a little bit. So candy is like wish fulfillment regarding how cool a character is. It’s basically things that the storyteller puts in the story to make a character cool. And if you identify with that character, then that feels good. It’s empowering and validating. It’s great wish fulfillment and people love it. But if you don’t identify with a character, it makes ’em absolutely insufferable and you won’t be able to stand that character. Whereas spinach is like candy’s opposite, where we’re making a character more relatable, but it means they’re less cool. They’re more average or unattractive, and they don’t have as many skills, and they fail when they try things. As opposed to the candy character that has all the skills and wins all of the fights, and stuff like that.
Bunny: The spinach is the character wearing frumpy clothes and glasses, and candy is when they let their hair down and take their glasses off.
Chris: Yeah, I love that analogy.
So, the fact is that plus spinach makes a character relatable, which also can be something that people respond differently to, whether they’re likely to relate to a character because they have similar demographics. And candy–it feels good if you identify with a character, and the people who are most likely to identify with a character are people who are similar to that character. And that’s a natural thing that happens. But power dynamics makes it so that we have very different standards where white, male characters are definitely allowed to get away with a lot more, either being on one end of the spectrum or the other. And more marginalized characters have to do the tightrope walk between these two things in order to be not…hated, shall we say.
And that’s just because, again, a lot of our stories have been because men have been more powerful and white people have been more powerful, have just a long legacy of catering to white men in the way that they’re constructed, because white men usually have the power somewhere in the company, there’s probably an executive who’s doing the budget or a committee who’s approving a bestselling book that has men in control, and that matters.
Bunny: Wow, Chris. You did such a good job explaining this, that I think you’re turning into a bit of a Mary Sue.
Chris: Oh, no! No…
Bunny: I don’t know if I can believe this anymore.
Oren: From, like, an editing perspective, this is a challenge. It’s possible for an author to make a woman, or a character of color or some other marginalized character still have too much candy. But do they really? You gotta look closely. You gotta take a second. You gotta use your second thoughts to really examine what you’re doing.
Bunny: You have to make the comparison, right? That’s the whole double part is you have to look at the other half of that. What judgments are we making here that haven’t been made in other places?
Chris: Oren did an article on Fallout, which is just a great example because in Fallout, Cooper is a white guy and he has tons of candy, but people love him. And Maximus is a black guy, and he has too much spinach and people hate him.
Oren: Yeah. And not like everybody, right? The show is pretty popular. But I definitely noticed as I was looking through comments on the show, a really strong bias against Maximus.
Chris: Mm-hmm. And people like Lucy, but that’s because she’s doing the tightrope walk. She’s got that balance just right, and that’s why she’s popular. When we’re looking at characters, the fact is that if you look at really big budget media, it is far more likely that there will be a super candied male character, not a woman. But yet, Mary Sue is the big insult that we have, and it’s targeting women specifically. So, it really shows the male lens that has been applied to our characters and that people just jump on board without thinking about it.
Oren: If you switched up Cooper and Lucy, if a woman was playing the ghoul, you would not be able to look at the comments of the show for shouts of Mary Sue. It would be unlivable.
Bunny: It also reminds me of the existence of the term ‘chick lit’ denoting something that’s a deviation from the norm. The fact that we have a term for it and the norm is that media is not produced for women, or by women, which is usually what that term denotes. And it’s usually applied to romance too, which is predominantly written by and read by women. It’s a term that we have that signals that that is something out of the ordinary. We don’t really have ‘dick lit.’
Chris: One thing that is sad is that the majority of readers are women, and somebody did some number crunching and found that publishers tended to underrate the sellability of books by marginalized people, including women. So, they tended to underestimate how well those books will sell in comparison to books read by men and written by men. It’s just a wildly bad business decision considering that women are the majority of the customers for a publisher.
Oren: But it is heartening that it shows that the buying public is less biased than the people at the top think they are. ‘Cause that’s always a question whenever these things come up is, is the general public actually going to reject this movie or book, or whatever, because it has too many marginalized characters in it? And it’s not impossible that they might, I mean, people can be really racist. But there also might just be that that’s not the problem at all, and the issue is that either the thing is being under advertised or starved of money, or maybe this particular one’s just not very good.
Bunny: Or just the people who like it aren’t being that noisy.
Oren: If anything, I feel a little heartened by the fact that those books overperform expectations, because that shows that the problem is with the decision makers and not with the general population.
Chris: Yeah. There’s also numbers for Hollywood too. And I read the book, Burn It Down, which gave some numbers. But basically it showed that there is an untapped market with an audience of color.
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: So Hollywood is losing money because they are not catering to this market that’s ready to buy films or shows, or what have you. You normally think that all companies are great at figuring out how to make money, but this is an area where they’re apparently not as good as you would think.
So yeah, back to candy and spinach; we can directly compare a lot of characters like Janeway versus Sheridan. Those are both candied characters.
Oren: I do love making that comparison ’cause they are so similar.
Chris: They’re very similar.
Oren: In weirdly specific ways. They both have the fake funeral, so that other characters can say how cool they are, and they both have episodes where the way that we show that someone else has been mind controlled is the fact that they are questioning the Janeway slash Sheridan’s decisions. Because why else would you possibly do that?
All: [laughter]
Chris: Yeah, but only Janeway, who was derided for being a Mary Sue. Sheridan doesn’t get criticized for being candied. Unless you’re on Mythcreants, right?
Bunny: Unless you’re hanging out with the cool kids.
Chris: Hanging out with the cool kids? Anyway, we could just take lots of those comparisons. It’s just something to be aware of.
I think general likability outside of candy and spinach also is a thing to just be very aware of, especially when it comes to who is allowed to be a jerk, or abrasive or aggressive. Galadriel, to me, is the one of the latest big examples.
The Rings of Power is not by any means a perfect show, but one of the big criticisms when it came out was that Galadriel was unlikable. And she is just the gruff warrior type. There have been so many male characters that are just like that, and they are not criticized in the same way. There’s nothing about her that’s exceptional for the main character of a TV show, but there’s a whole thing where if women don’t smile, people think they’re, like, angry or aggressive. If you look at any newscast that has a woman newscasting and a man newscasting, and just look at their facial expressions, you’ll see that the woman is smiling a large percentage of the time and the man isn’t, because that’s what people are used to. The smiling woman is like a baseline, and so if she’s not smiling, she must be angry, for instance.
Oren: Yeah. That was the same problem that Maximus had actually. And Maximus and Cooper, beyond just the candy, there’s what kind of bad behavior are they allowed to do before the audience will turn on them? And with Cooper, he’s allowed to randomly shoot people because he feels like it. That’s not a problem. But, Maximus got some payback on a bully of his, and people were like, “whoa, wow. What a bad thing for him to do. He’s such a bad person.” [laughs]
Chris: That was so weird. Those guys were jerks. I won’t feel bad that Maximus–that was just poetic justice.
Oren: People are always lecturing me about how important flawed characters are, and it’s like, Hey, look. Here, we’ve got Maximus. He’s actually a flawed character. The one you guys are always saying you want, and everyone didn’t like him. And by everyone, I mean some people; lots of people did like him.
Chris: Right. Whereas Cooper deliberately baits a young man by telling him he killed his brother. And when that guy attacks him, ’cause he was just baited, Cooper just kills him. That kid was like maybe sixteen. What the hell?
Oren: And this is where we get into some difficult discourse because my take on all this is that in most cases what we should be doing is not letting any characters get away with things that we let privileged white characters get away with. There are exceptions, but I don’t want anybody doing what Cooper does. I immediately turned on Cooper the moment he did that, and I think in a potential future where we have less prejudice, more people would. So, I don’t think it’s necessarily a good thing to be like, “well, I want my marginalized character to be able to shoot innocent people and still be liked.” I think that’s not the way forward. I think we need to stop Cooper, not create other Coopers.
Bunny: #StopCooper.
Oren: #StopCooper!
Chris: Yeah, I mean, it’s very clear just looking at some TV shows that people are very used to very toxic behaviors, and a lot of people don’t realize how bad those behaviors are. Because as a culture, our awareness of those kinds of things is just low.
We were watching Resident Alien recently, and the sheriff met with his dad in the diner. And then his dad rips into him. And just says really mean things about, “oh, you’re a failure and so maybe you should go back to New York” or something. And I’m like, okay, so we’re saying his dad is abusive. This guy has an abusive dad. And then later, no. That person is not supposed to be–What kind of parent deliberately attacks their kid’s self-worth that way? Targeted psychological attack.
Oren: Yeah, he’s fine. Don’t worry about it.
Chris: But he’s fine. Don’t worry about it. And that kind of thing happens so often in shows. And that’s just one of those things that hopefully people will become more aware of–and they are, certainly. It’s getting better in many places.
Oren: Oh, another thing that is interesting–this is a little bit outside the candy and spinach, but I wanted to mention it since we’re nearing the end of our time–is when you have a marginalized character–and this tends to come up most often with women, but I’m sure it affects other characters too–suddenly people become real sticklers for the kind of character arc they’re allowed to have.
Oh, with Captain Marvel, it’s suddenly a huge problem that she didn’t start off without powers. ‘Cause that’s not a proper arc.
Bunny: I had never heard of this discourse.
Oren: This is very common. Even somewhat progressive people will sometimes make this criticism of Captain Marvel, which is this idea that because she started out with all of her powers, she didn’t have a proper arc.
A), there are obviously lots of male characters who start the superhero story with their powers, and that’s just silly. But B), y’all have been poisoned by too many origin stories. Not every superhero story has to start that way. She has an obvious arc about learning to not let other people control her. You can argue whether it’s good or not, but it’s clearly there. So, the idea that she needed to go from not powered to powered is just a weird bit of brain rot that people suddenly think that she has to have this very specific arc. I don’t see anyone doing that with male characters.
Bunny: Yeah. Just because it’s a common arc doesn’t mean it’s the only arc. And it’s telling that this is where you’ve decided to draw the line.
Chris: Yep. And suddenly we get really nitpicking about all of their small failings, supposedly. That one’s just very made up.
Oren: That one’s just fake, ’cause people have seen too many origin stories.
Okay, well now that we have solved double standards forever, I think we can call this episode to a close.
Bunny: And you two are never allowed to laugh again.
Oren: [laughs]
Bunny: Stop it.
Chris: If you would like to help us continue talking about double standards, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who is a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
[closing theme]
Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme, ‘The Princess who Saved Herself’ by Jonathan Colton.
Most of the time, stories do a good job encouraging us to cheer for the hero. But what happens when they don’t? Sometimes, Team Good is too powerful to cheer for or downright obnoxious. And what if the underdog hero is especially charismatic or has a good point? The results probably aren’t what writers want, and that’s our topic for today. Plus, more discussion of an old turn-based tactics game than you might think.
Show Notes Song of Achilles * Likability * For the Uniform * Loki * The White Witch * Aslan * The Flagsmashers * Erin Kellyman * The Vox Populi * Kingsman: The Secret Service * The Mortal Instruments * Final Fantasy Tactics Advance * Mary and the Witch’s Flower * WandaVision * Malazan * Crescent City * Dawn of Wonder TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Arturo.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Intro: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts: Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[music]Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren. With me today is…
Bunny: Bunny.
Oren: … and…
Chris: Chris.
Oren: Alright, so for today’s episode, we’re going to fight another podcast. We’re bigger than them, we have more money, and we started the fight. So clearly you’re going to cheer for us, right?
Bunny: The Mythcreants podcast, famously powerful.
Oren: Yeah.
Bunny: And rich.
Oren: Look, we have like four listeners, which maybe gives us twice as many as they have.
Chris: Let’s not forget that we have the Holistic Cup of Depression.
Oren: Yeah.
Bunny: Oh, yeah, yeah! That’s like our super special combo power move.
Chris: Yeah, yeah. See, we like to watch people drown, so that’s what it does to our enemies.
Bunny: I’m sure we force it down their throat a bit.
Oren: And we can climb up on the Soulless Saddle of Sadness, and that lets just give us a speed boost.
Bunny: Does that mean we have a horse? I guess we have an evil horse too.
Oren: The saddle may just be floating in midair. We may not ever know the answer.
Bunny: It’s powered by the immense strength of Mythcreants.
Oren: So today I wanted to talk about stories that inadvertently make you cheer for the wrong side, because… admittedly, this is mostly because I was reading Song of Achilles for work, and I got to this part where most of the story is neutral about the actual war. The war is just something that happens, but then there’s this part where the story is trying to build tension because Achilles won’t fight, and the Trojans are going to win, and… good! The Trojans should win! The Greeks are the ones who attacked them! The Greeks are clearly the bad guys in this scenario. Regardless of this casus belli the Greeks created around Helen, they started the war for all intents and purposes, and they’re the ones causing all of the damage. So it was really weird when the story was like, “Oh, no, Patroclus is sad ’cause maybe the Greeks will lose!” I’m just like, “I don’t care, book. I want the Greeks to lose.” Which of course they don’t.
Bunny: Yeah, it’s definitely a weird myth to base things on, because the myth itself is already just kind of strange. Like the whole Helen element, you gotta buy that everyone would go to war for a pretty lady.
Oren: Well, the premise of this book, and this makes sense to me, is that the Greeks don’t go to war for Helen; they go to war ’cause they wanted to go to war, and Helen provided a useful excuse.
Bunny: Ah, okay. That makes more sense. At least they justified it.
Oren: That makes sense to me. I think that part is reasonable. “Yeah, we want to conquer Troy and take all its money, and Helen gave us a reason,” or the kidnapping or possibly running away of Helen; the book’s kind of vague about that, so that part’s fine; it’s just that mostly it doesn’t expect me to care if the Greeks win or not. That’s not what most of the book is about. But this one weird part is. And at that point it’s like, “Sorry, book, you lost me. I don’t want the Greeks to win.”
Chris: What, Oren? You can’t empathize with just going to somebody’s city and just waging war until you can get in there past their walls and then loot all their stuff and burn it down? That’s not sympathetic?
Oren: You know, it turns out I couldn’t quite go there. It was also just very funny because the book was having Patroclus, who was the narrator, be like, “Oh no, all my friends are going to die,” and it’s like, “Book, you have done nothing to invest me in any of these other characters.” There are like three characters that I have any investment in: there’s Patroclus, there’s one lady, and then there’s Achilles. Nobody else matters. So it was just a very odd choice.
Chris: I have to say, the thing about this problem where you are actively rooting for the side that you’re supposed to be rooting against, because I think usually there has to be more than one thing wrong to make that happen, not necessarily, but at least something that is mediocre, ’cause we have lots of stories that we can point to where the protagonist is just an unlikeable person for a variety of reasons, but that by itself doesn’t get you cheering for the villain. There has to be usually something wrong with the hero and something about the villain that gets you on their side when you’re not supposed to.
Oren: Yeah. Although I have encountered situations where it wasn’t that I liked the villain; it was just that I wanted the hero to lose so badly I was willing to cheer for anybody.
Bunny: I’ve been in that situation.
Oren: I mean, I vote in the United States; I’m familiar. The Deep Space Nine episode “For the Uniform,” which is this episode where Sisko is going after the Maquis, and the Maquis are bad people in this story, like they’ve ditched the whole “heroic rebels” thing and they’re doing a bit of light ethnic cleansing, which is pretty bad.
Bunny: Not a good look.
Oren: No, it’s bad. I don’t like the Maquis. They’re bad people. But Sisko is worse. Sisko, by the end of the episode, is also doing ethnic cleansing in a way to try to force the Maquis militants to surrender, and it’s just… Sisko is so bad in this episode, especially because he’s the representative of the giant Federation military. He has to be held to a higher standard.
Chris: Well, that’s the thing, is there’s actually two things wrong there. It’s the fact that clearly the antagonists are underpowered in this situation, and it feels like Sisko is coming from the more powerful group that’s on the more powerful side, and you don’t sympathize with. You don’t think what Sisko’s doing is moral.
Bunny: I do wonder to what extent this is somewhat inevitable with underdog villains. I’m sure there are some that work, but it definitely seems, at least in both of these examples, and in our fight with the other podcast, the villain that you’re cheering for being the underdog seems to be the thing wrong with the villains’ side, like the mistake you’ve made in crafting the villain.
Chris: Yeah. That does seem to be the most common cause, because that makes the villain sympathetic, which increases their likability.
Oren: In general, people like to cheer for the underdog, partly just because cheering for the more powerful side in the story is boring; they’re probably going to win already. Why should I be invested in that?
Chris: I would still say, if you have a really sympathetic… a likable hero though, then maybe that wouldn’t be an issue. A good example, I think, is Loki in Avengers. A lot of people liked Loki. Became a little too sympathetic. And he is underpowered, that’s definitely part of it, but he’s also just very charismatic, and I think that’s another part of it. And it’s not that the heroes are unlikeable, but he has two things going for him.
Oren: Yeah, I mean, I think you’ve definitely hit on something, ’cause my other examples would be something like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, where Aslan is just literally God-moded, and you have the witch, who is making these clever, complicated plans to try to win against a much more powerful enemy. And it’s not like the witch is a nice person. She’s not charismatic the way Loki is, but she is putting in effort. And then I don’t like Aslan because he represents weird Christian dogma and I’m not into it, so I end up cheering for the witch.
Bunny: Right. I feel like the other way that this can topple into cheering for the wrong side is if the villain has a point and the point is too good. I feel like this, combined with maybe underdog status…
Chris: Flag Smasher is, I think, the really good example of this one, in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. One of their big mistakes was casting Erin Kellyman as the Flag Smasher, and if anybody’s not familiar, she’s the actress who was… let’s see: she was in Solo, and she was in the new Willow show, and a number of other things. But she has a very distinctive look. She’s part Irish, part Jamaican, so she has really curly red hair and lots of freckles, and she’s just very distinctive. You can recognize her, and she’s often used for rebel characters who you want to like. And so Flag Smasher feels like an activist who has the people’s best interests at heart, and honestly, I never quite understood what the cause was supposed to be in that show.
Oren: Very unclear.
Bunny: Could you say that she was… a rebel without a cause?
Oren: The show is really vague on what exactly it is that they’re fighting over. There is some kind of problem caused by the Blip in, you know, where a bunch of people disappeared and then reappeared. What that problem is, I could not really explain.
Chris: But I think she’s supposed to be an example of the sympathetic villain who is, you know… people are genuinely in pain and she’s fighting for them, but she also goes too far, blowing up a warehouse or something. I’m like, “Sure, go ahead, blow up that warehouse. That’s fine with me.”
Oren: She goes too far in a really random and over the top way where it’s like, “We’re going to destroy this facility, which is part of the government relocation program,” I think. Something about the government she doesn’t like. And then she, like, leaves all the people tied up inside to die. That’s a pretty radical escalation for a conflict that until now has been largely nonviolent.
Chris: Like Bioshock Infinite, right? Where we have the marginalized group fighting for freedom and then suddenly, because Bioshock wants to make it so that there’s not an obvious good side and a bad side, suddenly these people fighting for freedom also murder children, and it’s like, what?
Oren: They’re bad people!
Bunny: That’s so annoying because it’s not actually engaging with their point. It’s like tacking on an additional bad thing.
Chris: I would call it graywashing, right? It’s where you take a situation that is inherently black and white and then do something to try to make it gray, instead of just taking a situation where there could naturally be difference of opinion.
Bunny: Right. It’s like condemning environmentalism as a whole because it has roots in the eugenics movement. That’s awful. Of course, that’s awful. But guys, environmentalism has a point.
Oren: We still need a planet. Or, if this was done with an environmentalist story, and I have seen this done with environmentalist stories before, is it would be like this bad guy wants to stop global warming by blowing up everyone’s head. And I think the Kingsman is that story that I’m thinking of, and that one’s a little different. I didn’t really end up cheering for the bad guy in that one, just because his plan was so random and didn’t really feel like it was engaging with the material at all. The global warming aspect just felt like it was there because it was topical. “Kingsman! it has the bold message that middle-class white guys should also get to be heroes, not just aristocratic white guys.” The bold, powerful message we need.
Bunny: How subversive.
Oren: It spoke to me personally. But in general, the concept that you’re talking about of having the heroes be in the position of trying to prevent some kind of positive change, even if the positive change is being perpetuated by an asshole, is definitely one of the ways you’re going to get people to cheer against the hero.
Bunny: I feel like this is especially true if the point that they have is systemic or social. Like if it’s a critique and then the villain is disposed of through lots of punching. Again, like the environmental stuff, like maybe they’re doing this for environmental cause. Are you going to engage with that at all? No. You’re going to punch them until the problem goes away, and I guess we don’t have to worry about global warming.
Oren: I mean, that’s arguably sort of presented in Infinity War and Endgame in the silliest way possible.
Bunny: Here’s the thing: there are ways to engage with issues like environmentalism while grappling with the nuances of that. Like I mentioned, that environmentalism has roots in the eugenics movement, and that’s true. You could do something with that, right? Like, you could talk about the issues with the early environmentalist movement and how it fed on these bad, bad ideas that were all the rage in the 50s or whenever that was. But what you don’t want to do is be like, “Here’s an environmentalist who also wants to kill everyone of this ethnicity.”
Chris: You could have a struggle within the environmental movement so that we’re not just equating this cause that’s important with, you know, saying that every environmentalist is a eugenicist. So we could have a struggle: both environmentalists, but one person is also a eugenicist, for instance.
Oren: The broken moral compass, sometimes gets called. This is a problem that’s going to come up a lot, especially if you’re adapting older stories, because a lot of old stories are based on things that are bad. Hot take. So you know that’s an issue you might run into.
Chris: I was looking at my critique posts for examples of this, and I found some interesting ones, especially since this is just covering a short period at the beginning of the story, but that’s still pretty important. So, for instance, at the beginning of the first Immortal Instruments book, there was this antagonist that I started rooting for that I just called Evil Hot Guy because he wasn’t even named. But what happened here is he is introduced in the very beginning as being A Hot, which we know from romantasy how much… how many people like a love interest that seems to be evil, and also just having an interesting look. He has hair with tendrils that are compared to an octopus.
Bunny: His blue hair, which makes him the target of every Tucker Carlson complaint.
Chris: And then they… everybody’s going into a club. And then you briefly get a little bit of viewpoint description where he’s kind of laughably evil, but at the same time, we talk about how he escaped from this dying world and is now looking around for prey. And then all the characters in the beginning, other than him, are just boring. They’re just very boring people. We have our very normal relatable girl protagonist and her best friend who just came to the club ’cause he has a crush on her, which is uncomfortable. And then the cool kids who we’re supposed to like. And so he just stands out for being an interesting character. And so that’s one where it was generally sad when they just killed him. I’m like, “No!”
Oren: Aw.
Bunny: Rest in peace.
Chris: Yeah, wanted that guy to stick around.
Bunny: Rest in hell.
Oren: My favorite are the ones where it’s hard to tell if this was just a mistake, that the writers just don’t know the scenario they’ve created, or if they honestly believe that this is the correct way to do things, and you just live on a completely different moral plane than they do. Like the video game Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced has this, where I genuinely don’t know if this was a mistake or not, but the premise of this game is that you and several other people get teleported into this really cool magical fantasy land from the real world, and all your real world lives sucked, and everybody hated them. And your protagonist immediately is like, “All right, everyone, we have to go back to the real world and I’m taking you back by force if necessary.”
Chris: Wow!
Bunny: Oh geez. No, thanks.
Oren: And it just feels awful to play this game. And the message of the story seems to be that you can’t live in the fantasy world. But you can! In reality, in this scenario you’ve created where the fantasy world is literal, you can live there!
Bunny: Yeah, it seems like you’re currently living there.
Oren: And so at the end they’re all like, “Yeah, thanks, friend, for violently bringing us back to this place we hate. Good job!”
Chris: It reminds me of the anime movie Mary and the Witch’s Flower, where it’s supposed to be condemning magic. Like, you would never know that by watching it, but we looked it up and found out that the message of the movie is supposed to be that magic is bad. But they make magic look so cool, the entire thing that you would never think that that was supposed to be the message.
Bunny: You really have to justify that, especially if it’s cool and/or pretty.
Chris: It just goes against a fantasy audience too, right? The people who are watching fantasy also like magic; this is not a thing that they’re going to be very receptive to.
Oren: Yeah, and with Witch’s Flower in particular, there is a bizarre moment at the end where the protagonist gives the celebratory yell of, “This is the last time I’m ever using magic!” and it’s like the only time in the entire movie that the creator’s intent shows through, because at no other point in the movie has magic been shown to be evil. There have just been some people who do magic who are evil. It was so random. Also with Tactics, I remembered something. There is a part very late in the game where the tune changes a little bit and the guy’s like, “Oh, we also have to stop the fantasy world,” because he’s realized that a bunch of normal people from town have been pulled into it and are basically being turned into NPCs, which is genuinely a bad thing; that’s like WandaVision. So that’s actually a reason, but that’s clearly not the real reason! You were already on this path before you learned about that, and that’s not the reason that the game emphasizes constantly, because there’s no real moral there. That’s just like, “Yeah, don’t kidnap people,” I guess. There’s nothing to say about that, although WandaVision seems to think there is.
Bunny: I feel like, maybe because just I tend to vet my books a lot more before I read them, because it’s not my job to read bad books, although maybe it is now, who knows? I did read The Sleepless recently, after all. I feel like I haven’t seen this a ton. The main example I could think of was, once again, that really awful obnoxious kid from Last Halloween and how I wanted him dead. But that’s not a very nuanced example. That’s just me hating that terrible little monster vampire kid.
Chris: I think one that might be a good example, again from another critique post I did, the first book of the Malazan series.
Oren: Oh yeah.
Bunny: Oh, are you about to spoonfeed us?
Chris: This first chapter doesn’t… not a lot is happening. Those characters are just talking, which I actually think is part of the problem, right? And I think, again, not having read the whole book, so I’m making some assumptions here, but it really looks like part of what’s happening is that Steve Erikson is trying to fit too much of the book ’cause everything is super, super complicated. And this is a common thing; writers end up with this problem a lot, especially if they’re new, because they underestimate how much material they have. And if you tell instead of show, you can fit more stuff in. And so this first chapter is just people talking. And we have a couple of soldiers, and our precocious child character, and then they start just, like, badmouthing the person who is clearly supposed to be a villain. But I think part of the issue here is, because we’re telling the story and not showing, all we have is their word for it. And showing is just much more convincing to the audience than telling is. And so, when the guys start badmouthing her, you have to either a) assume the audience is going to empathize with them and trust that she’s a bad person, but they might not, and in my case, since the villain was a woman, and we have three male characters who have been introduced, and I just, again, from my experience, know that epic fantasy has a very bad track record when it comes to depicting women, seeing a couple of guys just automatically, you know, “Oh, she’s awful! We hate her!” and she comes in and she’s also very unique. She’s got, like, blue skin, she’s got some weird floating, maybe magical constructs with her, and then they made the mistake of insulting her based on the fact that she used to be a serving maid or something like that, so now she has an underdog backstory. So, even though technically she’s supposed to be more powerful than them, because she’s got the ear of the emperor, and they’re like, “Oh, this woman, she is scheming, she’s getting uppity…”
Bunny: As 2 out of 10 females.
Chris: All those factors… again, she’s supposed to be more powerful than them, right? she’s supposed to be a bad person, but none of those things are actually shown. They’re all told, which means it comes down to whether the reader believes these characters or not. And I was like, “No, I’m cheering for Laseen! I’m cheering for this villain!”
Oren: Well, it’s like if you come across people who are just randomly gossiping and badmouthing a person you otherwise don’t know, well, gossiping about someone behind their back is inherently a not nice thing to do. So, knowing nothing else about the situation except what the gossips are saying, I’m inclined to take their side, because they’re the only ones I’ve seen doing anything bad. Now, for all I know, maybe this person really is terrible and maybe it’s justified to gossip about them, but in a vacuum, I don’t know that. And then, when she shows up, she both a) is way more interesting-looking than any of them ’cause they’re all boring, but also, if you are at all inclined to be sympathetic to people who are typically mistreated and misrepresented in this kind of story, as women tend to be, you’re also going to latch onto her for that reason. So it’s a perfect situation to make someone with our values be like, “Oh, actually she seems pretty cool,” both from a combination of a storyteller/value mismatch and from technical stakes. When you’re trying to figure out what are your story’s morals, that’s a complicated subject, but I think you just have to think about it in terms of how consistent are you being and what is this going to look like to the audience. You can’t just depend on the audience to forget everything that’s previously happened or to know that what is in your head makes it fine. Like, in that Deep Space Nine episode I mentioned, there’s a part at the end where they joke about the whole thing and they’re like, “Oh yeah, by the way, all the people that were displaced by the terrorism we were doing, they’re all fine. They all switched places with each other and everyone lived happily ever after.” And it’s like the writers expect that to make everything okay, but it’s like…
Bunny: That’s the tell-and-show thing Chris mentioned.
Oren: Yeah. And it’s also just, I don’t believe you. That’s obviously a fake excuse you came up with at the end.
Bunny: All of those people went to live on a farm upstate.
Oren: Mm-hmm! Mm-hmm!
Chris: Yeah. I definitely think for a lot of writers… again, there’s an assumption that because we’re told that the protagonists are the good guys, that we will just assume everything they’re doing is okay. And I think some readers might go along with that a little bit, but we can’t necessarily count on them to, and also we don’t really want our readers to get on board with things that are morally repugnant. I mean, I think as a storyteller, maybe I would prefer not to endorse immoral things, even accidentally.
Oren: My favorite is when it’s not even that we like the villains, because we just haven’t seen them, they just aren’t there, but the protagonists look so bad that we just, in our minds, imagine that the villains are probably cooler people. That’s what happens in House of Earth and Blood with the whole human-versus-magical-people fight, where, first of all, the humans are terribly marginalized and terribly treated. So, if you know anything about the way systemic power works, you’re immediately going to sympathize with them. And they’re also underdogs because they don’t have magic, although we do find out later they have mech suits.
Bunny: Yeah, pretty much the same thing.
Oren: Yeah, this world seems to have normal early-21st-century technology and also mech suits that we never see, but we hear news reports about them.
Bunny: They have magic. It’s just the ability to manifest mech suits.
Oren: The only human who’s part of the rebellion that we ever meet is this guy who’s already in jail, and sure, he seems to be bad, but he’s one person, and we don’t ever see the other humans. They’re all offscreen fighting, for all we know, a glorious resistance. But we do see all the magical creatures, and they’re all awful! Every single one of them! It’s just like that’s the only way that Maas knew how to write characters in that book, and until we find out about the mech suits, the humans are the underdogs. So it’s just like this amazing, perfect storm of problems. They also, and this part I just am confused by, is in the middle of this murder mystery, which isn’t even about the human rebellion; they work in this incredibly compelling story about when the magic people first came to conquer this planet that humans lived on, which I don’t think is Earth, but might be, and the last human army gave its life protecting this library so that human knowledge could be smuggled out and not lost forever.
Bunny: Oh, my gosh.
Oren: And it’s just this incredibly compelling story. And then… “Oh, anyway, back to how these humans suck, I guess.”
Bunny: I want to read that other one.
Oren: Yeah, I know, right? I mean, I don’t, because Maas would have to write it, and I don’t think I would like it if she wrote it, but it’s very compelling in that brief moment.
Chris: I think the funniest instance I’ve seen is the beginning of Dawn of Wonder, where we have this main character, Aedan, who was basically a bully, but, like, the writer doesn’t know that he’s a bully, so he’s doing this hazing ritual where he’s got this other boy, Thomas, and he’s trying to get him to jump off a bridge into the water, and Thomas is afraid. And so he’s trying to use social pressure to get Thomas to jump, and it’s very clear that, the way that it’s written, Aedan is supposed to be like a leader and he’s doing this for friendship. Uh-huh, friendship. And Thomas, the way that he’s made fun of, we’re not supposed to sympathize with him, because he’s not manly enough.
Bunny: Poor Thomas.
Chris: Yeah, I mean, it really speaks to a very different idea of what’s okay to do. Thomas jumps and then it hurts because he has like a belly flop and then he’s like mad afterwards. And the female character, who has been almost completely silent for everything, because of course she must not speak, you know, was like, “Oh, here, maybe I can make him a nice food dish to make him not mad at us anymore. Do you want to help me?” And the main character’s like, “Eh, no, you can do it. I don’t want to.” You know, like just complete…
Bunny: Oh, my gosh.
Chris: … just complete insensitivity. It’s written so he’s like, “Oh, you know, in the future I will cherish this memory of Thomas’s scream.”
Bunny: Not villain behavior at all. “I’m going to relish this memory of this boy falling out and screaming in fear as he falls towards a river and then injures himself.”
Oren: Lots of bullies think back fondly on high school because, as far as they knew, there were no bullies around. All right, so with that very insightful comment that I’ve just made, I think I’ve just solved the social problems in high school. We’re going to go ahead and call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And remember, we need that support ’cause we’re going to fight that other podcast that I mentioned.
Bunny: Keep us rich.
Oren: Yeah, bringing it back. So, before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
[music]Outro: This has been the Mythcreants podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Colton.
It’s hardly a secret that endings are often disappointing. A story’s finale is often the most difficult part to write, as it has the burden of making good on the story’s earlier promises. But what makes an ending disappointing, and why do we feel that way? This week, we’re discussing mechanics of a disappointing ending and how we can avoid such gristly fates for our stories.
Show Notes Cliffhanger * ANTS * Game of Thrones * Mass Effect Three * Battlestar Galactica * Outlining vs Discovery Writing * My Lady Jane * The Acolyte * Great Gatsby * Velocity of Revolution * The Art of Prophecy * Magia Record * The Sleepless * The Factory Witches of Lowell TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Lady Oscar.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[Intro Music]Bunny: Hello, and welcome folks to an episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Bunny, and with me is…
Chris: Chris
Bunny: …and…
Oren: Oren.
Bunny: And this is the end of the Mythcreant Podcast. I am so sorry everyone. I know it’s very sudden and jarring and a lot of things are unfulfilled, and we also intimated at the end of other episodes that we might do more of them. But you have to understand the importance of making a point. And this is real life. Podcasts end this way in real life, so you can’t be mad. [Chris and Oren laugh]
Oren: Oh man, they do. Although, to make it really realistic, we would’ve not said anything. It just would’ve been like a normal episode, and then we just never upload any more. [everyone laughs]
Bunny: That’s true. That would’ve been far more disappointing.
Oren: Way more real.
Bunny: But since we have ended this podcast, you’re hearing us end it. But nobody is actually seeing us end the podcast. And despite all of them weeping over the end of the podcast, nobody actually saw or proved that the podcast was dead. So, maybe there’ll be a hackneyed sequel.
Oren: There was no pod body. [laughter]
Chris: Yeah, there’s a dramatic ending, and then the sequel gets canceled. [laughter] This will always have…
Oren: We’re in the streaming era now. There’s not gonna be a sequel. [laughter]
Bunny: We’re stuck in streaming hell. Even though we’re not on any streaming platforms, it’s just reality now. [Oren laughs] For some reason, we are at the will of Netflix, despite not being associated with Netflix in any way.
Oren: We’re just part of the extended Netflix universe.
Bunny: Yeah. So a couple weeks ago we talked about cliffhangers, and while I think that’s a pretty crummy way to end something, and it is disappointing, I’m not sure that’s exactly what people mean when they say disappointing. Certainly if the cliffhanger is never resolved, that’s super disappointing. But, you know, at least the cliffhanger implies there’s something afterward and that eventually you’ll get some sort of resolution, whereas I feel like a lot of the disappointing endings are–that. They’re endings. Like, there’s not an implication that it will continue.
Oren: Yeah. Cliffhanger endings are frustrating. I don’t like them, but I wouldn’t describe most of them as disappointing. Usually with cliffhangers, the disappointment comes either in there never being a follow-up because of production issues, or the follow-up arriving, and it not living up to the hype that the cliffhanger created.
Chris: Right…
Bunny: Yeah. I mean, it’s cognizantly not an ending.
Chris: What can happen with cliffhangers, or something that is kind of similar to cliffhangers where you just don’t have an ending, that the story just, again, stops at that point, is that people tend to feel cheated.
Bunny: Right.
Chris: Right. But that’s not really the same thing as, oh no, we got our, like, final and permanent resolution, and it was super disappointing.
Bunny: Right, exactly. If there’s a cliffhanger, what’s disappointing is the fact that the show was canceled or something, and, you know, not necessarily the cliffhanger itself. It’s disappointing that the cliffhanger was left as a cliffhanger.
Oren: Right.
Bunny: Or sometimes it’s hilarious, as in the case of that old Super Mario Bros. movie. [laughter]
Chris: It’s like somebody promised you cake, and it’s the difference between them just not giving you the cake they promised, or them giving you the cake, and it’s just awful. It’s the worst cake you’ve ever tasted.
Bunny: [laughing] Right. That’s a good metaphor. I think that broadly, disappointment comes from a lack of resolution, or I guess in Mythcreants lingo, a lack of satisfaction.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Oren: The most elusive of the ANTS.
Bunny: Yes. It’s the ANTSss, because it’s mysterious. So when people talk about endings that were disappointing, they might talk about a mystery being resolved in a way that is contrived, or hasty, or like the authors are scrambling to wrap things up, and it doesn’t feel good. They might also talk about forcing a conclusion that doesn’t make sense from the setup, like Game of Thrones.
Oren: Yeah. [Bunny laughs] I would put Game of Thrones firmly in the, like, contrived endings. Because it just obviously does not make sense, right? Like the ending they wanted does not work with the setup they had, and they just did it anyway. And that kind of ending tends to, I would say, get the most attention, because it’s really easy to identify, and so it’s very easy to dunk on. And so we just do that for a while, whenever there’s a big popular story that has a really unsatisfying ending. It was the same thing with Mass Effect 3, like it was super contrived, and Battlestar Galactica, and there’s all these examples. There are other kinds of disappointing endings, but in my experience, those are the most famous ones.
Chris: Yeah. I think, again, a disappointing ending could be just about anything, because endings really do come with tons of requirements, and everything has to go right for people to be happy with the ending, pretty much.
Bunny: Right. It’s hard to stick landings. Especially if you’re someone like me who kind of plots as they go along, and, you know, doesn’t always have the end in sight when they’re writing the middle. And ideally that’s the sort of thing you would edit, but sometimes it seems like it’s just not. [laughter]
Oren: Yeah. On the other hand, I don’t wanna. [laughing]
Bunny: Ah, yeah. On the other hand, it’s hard.
Chris: So yeah, I mean, I do think the saving grace of endings is that you have the entire story to put pieces into place, unlike the beginning where you’re starting from nothing. But at the same time, yeah, some people like to kind of discovery write, or pants, or whatever you call it, and nobody likes to revise. Actually, well, that is not true. We have found the people who like to revise; they exist on our Discord server.
Oren: They’re strange and scary. [everyone laughs] Like a Deep One situation over here. What’s going on?
Chris: So some people do like to revise. Good for them. It must be–life must be good.
Bunny: Must be nice. [everyone laughs]
Oren: One kind of disappointing ending that I find much more often in books than in movies or TV is the big arc, the most important arc, whatever, the throughline, getting resolved by someone other than the main character…
Bunny: Oh yeah. Some guy…
Oren: Or main characters, and I think the reason that it’s more common in books is–this is my own personal hypothesis–is that with movies and TV, they gotta pay a lot for their lead actors. And so they’re gonna get the most use out of them that they can, whereas with books, the author’s not paying for any particular character. And so it can be very easy for the author to just sideline their protagonists in favor of someone else they might like better, or for some other weird reason, right?
Chris: Yeah. I mean, I will say that movies and TV shows generally have a lot more people involved with the story. For movies in particular, you might have one person who wrote the original screenplay, and then it’s changed so much that they still get credit for the screenplay, but none of the lines are theirs anymore.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: [laughing] It’s like that’s not an inconceivable thing to happen. And I do think that not giving the main character the star role in the end is a pretty big mistake that requires a writer who is kind of following their whims a little bit. And at some point, I think with so many people reviewing and giving input on scripts when you have something that’s super high-budget, I think that’s a problem that probably just gets ironed out.
Bunny: The flip side of that is the hero whose story has ballooned so out of proportion that it’s just as disappointing that they solve it in any way other than something equally proportionate. Like, the author has gotten beyond the scope that the hero could realistically affect. So the hero scolds some baddies and everything’s better. That’s also disappointing.
Oren: Right.
Chris: Why we made the problem too hard?
Bunny: Right?
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: Yeah. I mean that one is a little bit harder problem to solve. I mean, you can’t be hunting for reasons why the main character can affect events at all or can be the hero of the story. That’s gonna affect the entire thing. And I think for a movie or TV show that’s not gonna–I don’t know. Have we, Oren, have you ever seen a movie or TV show where the main character was just not in the position to make any change on the plot?
Oren: Uh, not off the top of my head. I’m not gonna rule it out entirely. There may have been…
Chris: There’s probably some show that has, like, an ensemble cast, and one person is supposed to be in the main character, but they’re like the humble, relatable character…
Oren: The closest I would…
Chris: …and they don’t have a lot of agency.
Oren: Right. The closest that I’ve seen recently that does something like that is actually My Lady Jane, that we were talking about last week.
Chris: But she does have the power to affect events. They just won’t give her any agency for some reason.
Oren: Right. It’s not that she’s underpowered. If anything, she’s kind of overpowered, but her skills never matter, which is…
Chris: They just don’t let any of her plans actually work. It’s amazing how little agency she has.
Oren: Yeah.
Bunny: For being the queen.
Chris: But they still put her at the center of events, and they have her come up with plans and try to enact the plans. So they just, I think they just had, because they’re following kind of this historical template where they want things to be similar to real life events, but, like, different in key ways. I think that this was an issue of “But if the protagonist had agency, then she would win all the time. And then we wouldn’t have half these things happen.” And I think that’s what they were struggling with.
Oren: Oh! I actually did think of a TV show that did exactly this, what we’re talking about.
Chris: Oh yeah?
Oren: Acolyte.
Chris: Oh! Yeah, Acolyte has that problem.
Oren: Spoilers for Acolyte, I guess. I wanna be careful when I critique Acolyte because a lot of weirdos are, like, gleefully mad about it not being very good. And I don’t want to be one of those people, but it does have an issue where the main character can’t do anything, and so she spends most of the story just following other characters around. And I do not know what the thought process was on that. Like, I’m genuinely confused why they thought that was a good idea.
Chris: Yeah, I mean, I see how it happens. You want a humble protagonist who is involved in events that are bigger than them in some way. Then you’re not thinking too hard about the logistics of, okay, how are they gonna actually make a difference here?
Oren: Yeah. It’s just, I would expect it to go the other way and have her do things despite not having the skills for it and being a little contrived. That’s the normal way that this goes. But no, instead it’s like, yeah, she’s a normal, like, mechanic surrounded by Jedi, and most of the problems in this story can be solved with lightsabers. So she watches them do that. [laughter] I mean, realistic, I guess.
Bunny: Definitely a story that got beyond its scope was The Velocity of Revolution, which I know I’ve talked about before. The ending was also just generally confusing, which is another way to get disappointment. Nobody knows what’s happening.
Oren: Yeah.
Bunny: I had a couple people, a couple friends that happened with The Great Gatsby, like they didn’t realize that Gatsby had been shot, which caused some confusion and, uh, it’s kind of important to the end of the story.
Oren: Great Gatsby? More like the okay Gatsby.
Bunny: The disappointing Gatsby. [Oren laughs] But The Velocity of Revolution, the problem that the story ended up tackling was this deeply entrenched caste system, systemic racism, colonial occupation. And the story is about motorcycles and mushrooms, like, [sigh] it turns out going really fast with a, like, a lady who’s infused with mushrooms makes all the foreigners sick, and then they go away.
Oren: Gotta go fast!
Bunny: Gotta go fast. [laughter]
Chris: It’s such a strange story.
Bunny: And that just was like, this is too big a problem for going fast with some mushrooms, you know?
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Oren: Yeah.
Bunny: Like, the story was correctly about fighting these systemic issues, and it was very concerned with them, but the ending–that just didn’t work.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: There’s also the stories where the writer’s just really uninterested in solving the big problems, and I’m thinking of City of Brass here.
Oren: Yeah, City of Brass was at least theoretically the first book, so I guess maybe if we stuck around, maybe there would’ve been more of that, but it was so badly handled that I wasn’t interested in finding out.
Chris: Yeah, I mean, I will say, if you have a series, again, it’s going back to the, like, is it that the cake tastes bad, or do you not have any cake?
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Right, like people expect to get at least one piece of cake at the end of each book of the series.
Bunny: [small voice] May I have more?
Oren: Here’s a setup where there’s this group of people who is horribly oppressed to a degree that would make most human oppression stop and ask them to chill out. And you just keep thinking, okay, maybe the protagonist is going to help a little bit. She never does. And then at the end the oppression gets worse because it turns out the oppressed people were evil. Like, what? What was that? I guess that was a disappointing ending. [Bunny laughs] I mean, maybe an enraging ending would be a better way to describe it. I don’t know.
Bunny: It just definitely falls under general confusion, I think. Based on that description as well.
Oren: A kind of disappointing ending that you all don’t have to deal with all that often because you don’t read unpublished client manuscripts [Bunny laughs] is just not resolving the ending. Like, most published stories remember to do that. But if you’re new to writing, sometimes you just get to the end and you don’t know how to resolve it. So the story just ends.
Chris: I mean, especially if you don’t have a throughline or don’t know what your throughline is.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Right, it may just end at some point. Or what I’ll see is the writer doesn’t have a throughline, but they still understand that there’s supposed to be this thing called a climax that’s exciting.
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: So they’ll write just kind of like a meandering story, and then they’ll bring in a sudden action scene sometimes, which doesn’t really fit the rest of the story, to be the climax. And then when the action scene is over the story just ends. But again, the action scene isn’t really part of a larger plot, right?
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: It’s just some random action. So it’s still not satisfying, because we don’t, again, have that structure in place.
Oren: Yeah. This is a weirdly specific one, but I have seen this at least a couple times, which is a story that starts off with what looks like an interesting arc and then just shunts it aside, and it’s like, “Nope, we’re not doing that.” And then the whole book is spent getting back to doing that arc again.
Bunny: [laughing] No…
Oren: And the most obvious example is from The Art of Prophecy, where we start with the main character as a mentor, and she’s gonna train this young chosen one, and then she doesn’t do that. And we spend the entire book getting back to the point where now she’s gonna train the young chosen one. And it is like, I don’t know, man, you could’ve done that at the start of the book. You didn’t need the rest of this book. We could’ve just started there.
Bunny: Follow the hook.
Chris: It’s what we call zero movement.
Oren: Yeah, we just went in a giant circle. [laughter] I see that sometimes. That’s a specific kind of disappointing ending. Chris mentioned the one where like there’s kind of a meandering story, and then we pivot to sudden violence at the end. A similar but legally distinct kind of disappointing ending to that is a weird sudden pivot at the end where suddenly the ending is about something not what the rest of the show was about, or the rest of the story, whatever it was. Like the anime Magia Record does this, where we have the whole series, we’re getting ready to deal with these two villains, but then it turns out we talk those villains down. So the final boss is against some rando who we’ve seen once or twice.
Bunny: It’s, you have a story about raising unicorns, and all the unicorn trainers are competing to raise the best unicorn, and don’t do drugs, kids, goodbye. [everyone laughs]
Oren: Or, like, at the end of Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet where the whole thing is this kind of cozy, low-stakes, low-tension story. And then suddenly a character dies at the end in, like, this really unpleasant way. And it’s just to set up the next book, right? It has nothing to do with any of the arcs that were happening in the first book. That sort of ending.
Chris: Yeah. To get into more complex territory, obviously you want the ending to feel earned. Besides the main character having some agency and actually making a difference in the ending, they also have to earn the ending, which is where you get a lot of the more complex problems with having good turning points, and karma, and foreshadowing, sometimes.
I recently read a pretty good book, The Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking. And that one, you know–little spoilers–has like a side character come in and basically save the day at the end, but it’s supposed to be the main character earning that by being willing to sacrifice herself, and then that inspires the side character to come in. But it’s not quite there, because the side character is just so powerful that it doesn’t feel like that has been set up properly.
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: Okay, just being willing to sacrifice, you know, earned such a good ending that it’s okay for somebody to just, like, snap their fingers and there’s still–so it has a little bit deus ex machina feel, which is when you have just a great ending come out of nowhere, and nobody earns it, and there’s no foreshadowing, and it’s totally unexpected just because…
Bunny: You still want some sacrifice.
Chris: Right, just because of the scale. The scale of the help was just disproportionate. That one was also really funny because we actually had a perfectly good explanation where we had an army that was gonna come in to save them, they just weren’t there yet. And so all we had to do was just have them hold out until the army arrives to take care of the rest. But instead, we have, like, deus ex machina friend.
Oren: Thanks, deus ex machina friend.
Chris: [laughing] So it was just, it was also just very unnecessary.
Bunny: Always helpful to have one of those.
Chris: Yeah. But other issues with, you know, again, an ending that feels earned. Right? You don’t want anything to be handed to the protagonist on a silver platter. Where somebody else is just like, “Here, I’ll just do this for you.” You don’t want that. You don’t want the outcome to feel like it’s entirely luck or fate. And so again, they have to do something and–slightly different flavor of karmic problem–you want the actual polarity of the karma to fit, so you don’t want an asshole that readers hate to just be rewarded at the end. [laughing]
Oren: Wow. But it’s so edgy though. [everyone laughs]
Bunny: That it is, and going off of that, when the story just kind of…ugh, yeah. This is me segueing into complaining about Sleepless again.
Oren: Hooray!
Bunny: I think this goes back to, like, the sort of karma–I guess this might be karma–but an ending that is just, like, dismal? Like, okay, the book kind of scolds you for expecting a better ending.
Oren: Oh, no.
Bunny: Basically, what happens is the world kind of ends worse than it begins. These dangerous sleepless drugs are booming in popularity. They don’t really know why the sleepless are having memory holes, and then the protagonist goes to prison, and it ends with the protagonist narrating from prison. I get that there were big issues on the stage, and I expected a resolution on the scale of those issues. So, like, why are you scolding me for expecting the big corporations to get some comeuppance, when the story was about getting, like, bringing comeuppance to the corporations, right?
Chris: I mean, that just sounds like it’s unresolved, because, I don’t know, is the protagonist gonna be in the prison for the rest of his life, or…?
Bunny: No, he’s just there for now, but he does narrate about how, like, explicitly about how nothing changes. How the story didn’t affect anything in the long run, how the society is still awful. And it’s, like, okay, maybe that’s true…
Chris: But that’s telling and not showing. I do feel like, okay, let’s say we wanted a downward turn. We wanted a, like, tragic ending. So they’ve got these dystopian organizations that are doing bad. Their goal is to change them, defeat them, whatever. And we want a tragic outcome where they fail to do so. And in order to resolve the tension, that failure needs to be permanent, right? It needs to feel like there is no possibility that this is gonna be turned around. And it sounds like what happens is the main character just tells people, “Oh yeah, nothing changes,” without actually showing why it’s not possible to turn things around.
Bunny: And it’s also not a tragedy. Like, it’s a mystery story, and he solved the mystery successfully, and then…nothing happens.
Chris: But he’s also trying to…
Bunny: It ends in, like, depressing jail, about as miserable as it can be. Like, he steps out of the jail, and that’s the end. But the last chapter, which drags on, it’s all about like, “Oh, it’s Christmas now, and there’s really sad tinsel around, and now I can kind of faintly smell fresh air outside. Man, wish I could be out there.” It’s just dismal.
Chris: Did the protagonist do something to earn being in jail here?
Bunny: Here, he’s talking about the villain here, I’m pretty sure. “Whenever I think of him now, I ask myself, what was the point?”
Chris: [laughing] This just has all the hallmarks of a writer who believes themself to be clever. It’s like, look, I’m not gonna make a pat ending. I’m gonna make it an ending that’s rebellious.
Bunny: Yeah. This is talking about his villainous friend. “Despite his efforts, the lies and manipulations, despite his ultimate sacrifice, the world still ended up the way it is. Was it all worth it? Simon probably thought so, but I’m here alive, and I know damn better.” Like, the conclusion is the world is awful. Thanks for reading.
Oren: There is a subreddit called “I’m 14, and this is deep,” and I cannot help but feel like that’s where this ending belongs. [everyone laughs]
Bunny: It does kind of feel like that. Like, maybe it’s setting up a sequel, but the ending was just so downer and frustrating that I wouldn’t pick up another book, even setting aside the world building.
Chris: Yeah.
Bunny: Which, heh, visit the Bad Metaphors episode for that.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, the fact that what you’re relating is what the protagonist says, again, strongly suggests that this outcome is not something that we see unfold. It’s something that is simply told and declared.
Bunny: Right. I think we’re supposed to get the sense that he has, like, the moral high ground? But, I don’t know. It’s…
Oren: I mean, authors sometimes like to scold their readers for not liking their endings. I’ve read a couple of books that do that. I don’t understand why you would do that. Like, it just, the thought of it makes me kind of recoil inside, because I want my readers to like my story, but some writers seem to enjoy that part, so I, I guess?
Chris: Yeah, I mean, defensive reactions are what they are, I guess.
Bunny: I was like, excuse me. I wanted to see some of the villains who are part of these corporations, like, pay a price, but it seems like, you know, nothing got better.
Chris: Yeah.
Bunny: No, the mystery was solved, but ultimately nothing mattered, and that was disappointing to me.
Chris: It is really frustrating when authors seem to want to scold their readers for liking what they created, and this almost feels like an example of that where, okay, you successfully got me invested in this world and invested in seeing it change for the better. Now I’m just kind of being scolded for caring, a little bit, and that’s certainly frustrating.
And again, with the disappointing endings–yeah, if you’re trying to do everything right, and your readers aren’t happy, or you’re trying to do something different ,and your readers aren’t happy, it can be really frustrating. But they’re–it’d be frustrating for you, as well as them, but your readers aren’t happy because they cared about the story, right? They wouldn’t have as much reason to be frustrated with your ending if you hadn’t succeeded in roping them in.
Bunny: Right.
Chris: So I just–some cases you can kind of take that as a backwards compliment. Where they care enough about your story to get frustrated…
Bunny: Care enough about your story, but also be angry at you when you screwed it up? [laughing]
Chris: Yeah. But also on your end, I just think we should have some appreciation for the fact that we did things to get them really invested in a specific outcome. So it’s a little bit mean to then turn around and be like, [laughing] “Like what, you cared?”
Bunny: “You’re silly for caring.”
Chris: You’re silly for caring, when that’s our job, right?
Bunny: I mean, to paraphrase Jenny Nicholson, the worst thing a story can do is make you feel kind of stupid for being invested in it in the first place. And that’s probably at the heart of all of this disappointment, you know?
Chris: Yeah. Certainly, again, a lot of the things about endings that are most disappointing is there is some broken promise somewhere, some expectation that was not fulfilled, whether it’s, like, main character switcheroo, where we got you invested in a specific main character, and the main character was just shoved to the side so that somebody else could save the day. Or, you know, we brought in something that was a gruesome fight scene when that was not the expectation we set, or something like that.
Oren: All right. I have a conundrum to end the podcast on, because we’re getting close to the end. This is a riddle, if you will.
Bunny: Ooh.
Oren: So, okay. So…
Bunny: 43.
Oren: As we know, satisfaction is the feeling you get when you successfully resolve tension. Right, this is a basic ANTS principle. We got articles about it. So here’s the question. If the story never properly establishes tension, and you get to the end and there’s no satisfaction because of that, is that a disappointing ending? Or was the story just boring to start with? [Bunny laughs]
I’m thinking of something like The Factory Witches of Lowell, where they–which I know it sounds like I’m saying “The Factory Witches of LOL,” but I promise that’s not how it’s spelled–where it seems like they’re, they go on strike and it seems like it’s gonna be hard, but then it turns out that they’re magic and nobody else is. So they just use magic to solve all their problems. And so then we get to the end, and they solve the last problem with another magic spell, and it’s like, well, that was boring and disappointing. I felt like I was disappointed, but was I really disappointed in the ending, or was it just the entire story?
Chris: I mean, I do think that sometimes when the story’s slow, because we know that generally the goal is to escalate the tension as the story goes, we hope that it’ll turn around.
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: And stories don’t generally turn around. [laughing] I experience lots of stories. If there is a problem in the beginning, it’s very unlikely that that will get better that much. I mean, some stories do speed up a bit as the story continues, but the problem will keep showing itself later, even when the story gets tenser, usually.
Bunny: I mean, maybe it is satisfying, in that it gave you exactly what you expected. [Chris laughs]
Oren: That’s true. My expectations were not subverted. [Bunny laughs]
Chris: Yeah, geez. I have to say there are, going back to streaming, there are so many shows that would have so much more satisfying endings if they just had enough time. And it’s strange, because you can plot a story of any size that is satisfying.
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: And so I don’t know if part of the problem is that we have a bunch of show writers that are used to having a longer season, and so they just don’t know how to scale down for the length? Estimating complexity can be really difficult, or they thought they had more, and then parts were, like, unexpectedly cut out. Right? Or, there’s just expectations that the show will have a certain number of characters, and a certain amount of overhead and complexity, that simply can’t resolve satisfactorily in, like, eight episodes. But there’s just been, again, more and more streaming shows that have been a disappointment at the end, partly because there was not actually time to properly set up things, and properly explain things, and show characters doing things like changing their mind about stuff, or giving background and stuff, and all of those things. And that’s just, it’s been real disappointing.
Oren: Alright, well with that extremely fun moment to think about, [Bunny laughs] we’re gonna go ahead and call this episode to a close.
Bunny: You can almost call it…disappointing that we ended on that note.
Oren: Yeah, but if you didn’t like it, that’s actually your fault. [everyone laughs]
Bunny: Sometimes podcasts just end this way.
Chris: Well, I have to say, if you were disappointed in this episode, maybe if you supported us on Patreon, you’d be less disappointed. Did you think about that?
Oren: Ooh.
Chris: Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants, and I don’t know, maybe with more money we can make it less disappointing for you.
Oren: Before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
Bunny: [spooky voice] Or will we? [everyone laughs][Outro Music]
This has been the Mythcreant Podcast, opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.
In this episode, we have a very serious complaint session about all the goobers who try to gain clout by redefining worldbuilding as something it isn’t, then raging against it. After that moment of catharsis, we turn to the real topic: What level of worldbuilding must you actually do? Surprising no one, the answer is “it depends.” It always depends!
Show Notes Very Afraid * Theming * My Lady Jane * Transporter Bomb * Redshirts * Discworld * Legends and Lattes * They Mostly Come Out at Night TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Phoebe.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny. [opening song]
This is the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is—
Bunny: Bunny.
Chris: and—
Oren: Oren.
Chris: Now I’ve realized something since I’ve been pondering a lot on the nature of world building, which obviously is always about re-imagining how planetary physics works. So it is, I’ve realized, the cause of flat eartherism and hollow eartherism.
Bunny: Whoa.
Chris: If you worldbuild, you’re just gonna become a conspiracy theorist. Just inherently an anti-science practice. Worldbuilding is bad, and instead it’s just better to gently imagine the setting of your story. I call this world imagining. And it’s completely different from worldbuilding and totally superior to it. Any questions?
Oren: How come you’re still trying to crush my creativity by talking about worlds? I don’t want worlds in my speculative fiction. They shouldn’t exist. They’re crushing my spirit by existing.
Bunny: Well, I have a rival term, which I think is superior to yours and more conducive to the creative muse within us, and that is universe summoning.
Oren: Because then it can just be whatever you need it to be at any moment. And it doesn’t matter if it makes any sense or serves the story at all. Do whatever you feel like. Summon it into existence.
Bunny: Frankly, you’re being reductivist by reducing this to simply “worlds” or just whatever term you think will boost the thinkpiece’s SEO.
Oren: Yeah, I gotta get those clicks.
Chris: Internet discourse on world building gets really weird sometimes.
Oren: Yeah. Every couple of years, like on a schedule, we get this outburst of people being very weird about world building.
Chris: My whole bit, that was not based on a single incident. This has happened multiple times now where people have done this.
Bunny: The fact that there are many is distressing.
Chris: We’ve relentlessly made fun of world conjuring guy, but he’s not alone.
Oren: He’s not even the weirdest. They always have the same hallmarks. Like someone will define world building as something other than what it is, which is simply the act of creating the place where your story happens. That’s what world building is, and they’ll define it as something other than that, and then rail against that definition of it. And it’s a definition they always just made up. No one ever uses it that way, including them, because it’s not a useful definition of a word.
Bunny: World building is when you kick puppies. That’s why you need to do universe summoning.
Oren: The definition they’ve created is still wrong, but it’s not even bad. World building is when you figure out how dragons would work in your setting and it’s like, okay, I guess that’s one aspect of world building and I hate dragons. Why would you do that? What is going on? The farthest back I’ve been able to trace this is to an article from 2007 titled, “Very Afraid,” but it’s more commonly known as “The Great Galumphing Foot of Nerdism.”
It’s probably not the original, but it’s the oldest one I can find where this guy just rants about how bad world building is. At first he doesn’t define what it means, he just hates it, and he attributes all these problems to it. And he then finally gives us a definition where he says, “I refer to immersive fiction. Any medium in which an attempt is made to rationalize the fiction by exhaustive grounding, or by making it logical in its own terms.” That’s obviously a specific kind of world building, which is not bad, but he’s decided that’s all world building is and that it’s bad.
Bunny: So wait, he wants either realist or completely absurdist stories?
Oren: You know, I do not know. He says what he wants in there and I could not follow it. It is just nonsense. It only makes sense if you also have your head all the way up your ass and have internalized bullshit terminology and then it will kind of start to sound like maybe it means something, but it doesn’t. It is pure emperor’s new clothes over here.
Chris: I think all of this stems from the idea that world building is inherently like hardcore. That we’re not just talking about any type of world building, we’re talking about some kind of stereotype of a specific kind of world building that is super intense and super comprehensive and results in tons of exposition or something like that.
Bunny: Brandon Sanderson. You can just say it.
Chris: The voices of people who do that are pretty loud sometimes. Having some sort of backlash to that, to me, feels overblown, but I have encountered multiple books that are about fantasy or fantasy and sci-fi writing that just state, “here’s how you create a story. First start by creating a world.” There’s a certain assumption that you’re going to do some kind of thorough world building before you even come up with a story idea, and that’s just false. Some people do it that way, and that’s fine.
But it’s just as fine to come up with a story idea and build a world around that and do only as much as you need to instead of just mapping out all of your continents on an entire planet or something. They can be pretty loud. And so this is probably a backlash to that if I were to guess. But again, that’s just not entirely what world building is about. It does not have to be hardcore. You can do a tiny bit. And that’s why when we define it, we just define it as, again, anytime you make any choices about your world, that is not just, oh yeah, we’ve got Earth. As soon as you add vampires or aliens, you’re world building.
Oren: People are really loud about characters and how characters need to be a specific thing and can get pretty prescriptive about it. But I’ve somehow managed to resist going on a rant about how characters are bad and defining them as a kind of character I don’t like.
Chris: Now what we need to do is redefine character development.
Bunny: Character development is when you kick puppies. What you need to have is person be better…ing.
Oren: Yeah. This is the way.
Bunny: I think that there’s two distinct questions here, one of which is how much world building do you need for the purposes of a particular story, and one of which is just how much should you do in general, even if it’s just for you.
I kind of feel like the answer to the second one is just, oh, well, however much. It’s a much harder thing to determine how much you need for your story than it is to be like, how much should you do in general? And the answer to that just seems like however much you feel like
Oren: Yeah, I can’t give you an answer in world building units. It depends. Copyright, trademark, do not steal.
Chris: We didn’t go over what I would consider to be the most essential world building tasks as to, what do we usually recommend by default to people, even if they have a story that does not have a lot of world building? I would start there, what is the basics and also what are the basics for, right?
If people are intimidated by the idea of world building or just don’t like it for whatever reason, knowing, what do you get out of bothering? One is just add entertainment value. Same reason we do anything else, why we have characters or plot or anything. ‘Cause they can add entertainment value. Avoid breaking believability, and plot holes that cause headaches.
Again, if an author doesn’t wanna bother and they’re just like, yeah, I’m not gonna worry about potholes and I’m not gonna worry about believability, that’s their choice. But generally people wanna avoid those things.
Oren: Like everyone’s big on not world building until they run into a story that messes up something they care about, and then suddenly they’re like, ugh, how could someone make something so unrealistic?
It’s like, I don’t know. If you paid a little more attention to the setting you were creating, you wouldn’t have that problem.
Bunny: Yeah, it’s definitely important for that. You want internal consistency unless you’re doing something completely absurd.
Oren: No, that’s the great galumphing foot of Nerdery. It’s bad to do it for reasons.
Chris: And then the last thing that I would mention is just not spreading harmful messages or misinformation. And that depends on what you’re depicting. That’s gonna come into play for some things a lot more than others. If you do stories that are darker, I think that starts to become more important, ’cause then you’re covering some important and sensitive issues usually.
But that is another thing where when we talk about world building, sometimes we’re talking about, what does this say about how the world works and does that do good or harm?
Bunny: Yes. See our episode on bad metaphors for more on this.
Chris: Those are the basic goals. It doesn’t have to be like, create an internally consistent world that you feel is super real. Those don’t have to be part of your goals. The thing that I like to talk about first is usually theming. Again, if anybody’s super intimidated by world building, many writers do theming without even thinking about it. I think it’s still worth talking about because we still run into a lot of writers who don’t have themes by default.
And theming is just, make the world have a cohesive feel and a united impression, rather than being a collection of random stuff. That’s what it means, is to feel like everything comes together in one story, whereas collections of random stuff tend to feel hokey and unbelievable. And so that theming is just deciding what impression you want to create and doing that and adding things that enhance that impression, or if you have really disparate things, you have both elves and aliens in your story integrating to the point where it feels like they belong together.
Bunny: And a lot of that is aesthetic. Writers often also picture aesthetic without really thinking of it as part of world building. There’s a particular aesthetic that goes along with a lot of the -cores and -punks we’ve discussed before, and that is a kind of theming.
Chris: And I suspect a lot of the people who are like “world conjuring” or “world contextualizing,” whatever light term they make up.
Bunny: Universe summoning, Chris!
Chris: “Universe summoning,” theming is probably part of what they’re thinking of. Still probably thinking about what impression they wanna create and making things create that impression. Theming isn’t drawing every continent on a map and coming up with government systems and naming all the places, it’s just thinking about the experience and the impression.
Oren: And I would say for the people who like to do that sort of thing, who want to draw out a huge map and create all the governments and all that, doing things that’s fun is fine. You don’t have to justify doing something you enjoy. I would say that from a storytelling perspective, be careful because if you create your world and make it too rigid, you may find that you cannot tell the story you wanna tell in it.
So at that point, you’re gonna have to change something, be it the story or the world, whichever it is. And eventually you are going to need to write the story. So you can’t spend all of your time world building. But if it’s just a fun exercise you do, especially if it gets you energized to write, there’s no reason not to do it.
What is your process?
Chris: Besides theming, the thing that we usually emphasize is paying a little more attention to your magic and technology, just because those are the things that are almost always causing the plot holes and the headaches later on, if you don’t pay any attention to them.
Bunny: Especially in longer stories, probably wanna devote a lot more time to making your world internally consistent and smoothing over potential wrinkles that just putting tonal elements together might not cover because you don’t wanna set up something that will cause you headaches down the line in your series.
Oren: Yeah. And there’s gonna be a directly proportional line between how big a role your tech and magic plays in the plot, and how much you’re gonna wanna think about how it works.
If your setting has magic, but it’s very distant and mysterious and maybe your hero encounters it once or twice, okay. You probably don’t need to put that much thought into it. If your hero uses it in every scene, yeah, you’re gonna wanna know how it works. ’cause otherwise you’re gonna have the classic problem of why didn’t he do that earlier, which is not fun.
You don’t want readers supporting that. I guess if you do whatever, all the power to you.
Chris: Also, you’re just trying to avoid a transporters on Star Trek situation where that would just make everything too easy all the time, and so you’re constantly coming up with reasons why the hero can’t do that.
You don’t wanna deal with that later.
Bunny: The scale is also super important for this. Really, it’s centering what the story is about. If it’s a really small story that’s not kaiju-sized problems, like the Tea Dragon Society is about tea dragons and friendship and there’s magic in the setting, and there are like fantastical creatures, but that’s not really important to the story, which is mostly about cultivating relationships and raising little tea dragons.
Chris: If your setting is about, I don’t know, the social or emotional effect of magic, rather than solving problems with magic, you can get away with a lot more and you don’t necessarily have to worry so hard about figuring out what magic is capable of. If you do have a protagonist who’s gonna be solving problems with magic, you don’t necessarily have to plan out a magic system that’s logically consistent. I do think it’s useful to, when you create some new magic, maybe put it on a list somewhere and keep track of it, and then of course, by impulse, always just do the least powerful effect that you can think of that will take care of what you need in that moment.
That will be less likely to cause you headaches later.
Oren: You’ll need less world building if you do that.
Bunny: There’s an exercise, which I’ve actually found kind of helpful, even though it feels a little silly to do, which could be applied here as well, which is that whenever you describe a character, write the literal adjectives you use somewhere in a document that you can refer to to make sure you’re not causing an inconsistency, referring to them having brown hair or blonde hair, that sort of thing.
I think doing the same thing with your magic or your technology, what has it done in the past? What have characters suggested it might do? That could be really helpful.
Oren: Yeah, and we mentioned the scale earlier. The bigger the conflict, the bigger the plot that will require you to know more about your world.
If you’re doing a cyberpunk story that’s about a family trying to steal enough parts to keep their cybernetic implants going, that doesn’t need a ton of world building, right? You want something to make the world stand out a bit from every other cyberpunk world out there. But you don’t need a ton.
You don’t need to know the inner workings of the evil corporation’s board meetings. But if your cyberpunk story is about leading a revolution to overthrow the corporate oligarchy and spread your anarchist commune across the world or whatever, you’re probably gonna need more world building there.
You’re gonna wanna know how those things work, ’cause they matter all of a sudden.
Chris: Yeah. If we’re getting into what types of stories need more or less world building, the scale that the plot operates on, matters a whole lot. This is funny ’cause we’ve just been watching My Lady Jane, which is historical fantasy.
We’re re-imagining what happened to Lady Jane Gray and the ascent of Mary to the throne. It’s clear that whoever was just doing the plotting was not really prepared to understand how the politics of the day actually worked so that it could be used in the plot meaningfully, because I can just see the struggle. Historically, Lady Jane Gray was queen for like nine days. There’s a reason why she was deposed by Mary. There’s an actual power struggle.
What happened is they changed the world so that instead of having a Catholic-Protestant split, we have the magical people and the normal people. And of course we have an oppressed mages setting, or oppressed shapeshifters in this case, but it doesn’t work the same, and we have problems because then the main character is now the queen, and realistically, Mary overpowered her. And that happens in the show, but they just don’t know how to create conflicts where technically the protagonist is supposed to have absolute power as a monarch, but they also need her to not solve the plot instantly, and they don’t really understand how the historical political system worked well enough to actually explain what the constraints are on her power and why she can’t just behead the villains as soon as she wants to.
Oren: And there are other scenes where suddenly she can just give edicts and everyone has to obey her ’cause she’s the queen. I don’t know, guys. Which one is it?
Chris: Again, the conflicts, they don’t feel real. It feels really flimsy. You’re left not knowing what she can do and what she can’t. Everything is contrived because you’re like, why is she trying to prove that they’re guilty when she can just behead them whenever she wants? Okay, we really needed a better idea of how this world functioned so that we could have conflicts that feel robust enough for this kind of political intrigue story.
Oren: It’s definitely one of the shows of all time. Of all the shows that came out, everyone agrees that that was one of them.
Chris: If you’re gonna do political intrigue, you gotta think about it a little harder. That’s one of those things that calls for a little bit more intense thinking and research. And warfare can too, for sure.
You could have a story where you have one soldier going into battle and it’s just their journey and you’re not worrying too much about how the battles work or the war is going, but that is a larger scale conflict.
Bunny: No matter how much world building you do behind the scenes, it’s good practice to narrow the window of relevance as tight as you can for the stuff that’s absolutely necessary. We talk about focus on your darlings, center your darlings, and if you’re worried about having too much world building, doing this is probably the best way to reduce it.
Chris: It is worth knowing what you care about. Again, if you’re telling a personal tale and keeping the scope of the story down because you don’t wanna do world building, that’s perfectly fine with those kinds of, like, dragon tea parties.
Often the realism can be really low too, which is another thing I think that helps. You don’t have to do as much world building. So like a lot of, for instance, fairytale fantasy has like royalty everywhere and who cares what kingdom they come from. Their purpose is just to talk about who is betrothed to who and who is gonna fase that dragon and what quest they’re gonna go on.
That works partly just because we have a consistently fanciful, whimsical, surreal, you know, whatever flavor of low realism you like story. And in the sci-fi genre, space opera is often also low realism, where we just got lots of playful alien races from different planets and we’re not worrying about how gravity works on spaceships.
It just works a lot better if you are really consistent about that, ’cause once you start adding gritty elements, that’s when it starts to feel weird that we don’t know where the royalty comes from.
Oren: Or on Star Trek, one of the many things, aside from the transporter bomb that everyone on Star Trek loves.
There’s also a thing where some Star Trek writer every so often will be like, oh hey, what if, to stop an enemy on their ship, they just mess with the gravity? Like they turn the gravity way up or turn it off, and, okay, sure. But once you do that, you can’t have cool phaser fights on the ship anymore because turning off the gravity or turning it way up wherever the enemy is, is a way more efficient way to stop them.
You just have to be wary of stuff like that. I actually have a fun little cheat, ’cause this is my thing now. When we come up with a topic, I tell people a way they don’t have to do it.
Chris: Oh, a hack.
Oren: One weird trick if you want to avoid most of the problems of not doing a lot of world building, but you also don’t wanna do a lot of world building.
A good option is the fun subversion where you take a recognizable set of world tropes and a recognizable genre and you do something weird with it. You subvert expectations in some way. Right? Now doing this with D&D is very popular, where you have D&D characters running coffee shops or inns or what have you, Scalzi has done it a few times with space opera. This is how the Discworld books started. They were basically just a spoof of high fantasy.
Chris: You were not meaning to suggest that Scalzi wrote Discworld. I think that was just two list items blurring together.
Oren: Sorry. No, I did not mean to suggest that.
Bunny: Scalzi is usurping Pratchett!
Oren: Anyway, the point was, if you just ran a standard D&D world, it’s pretty boring, right?
People have seen that a lot, but you make it weird by having the characters run a coffee shop, which is the hot new thing, and that makes it interesting. But you also don’t have to spend a lot of time thinking about how the world works. So this is a way to save on your world building budget as it were, and not have to pay any of the costs that would normally be associated with that.
Chris: Works like a parody because the whole point is that you’re commenting on the original, so you wanna make it resemble the original. And if there are things that are unrealistic, that’s also something you’re commenting on.
Oren: The two downsides to this are, versions lose their novelty as more people do them. That can be an issue. It’s like, oh, hey, I’m subverting D&D adventures with a coffee shop. Okay, we have seen this before, but also this doesn’t tend to work for longer stories. That’s why Discworld eventually stopped being a spoof of high fantasy and started to have its own very distinct world building as the series went on, because otherwise it just wouldn’t have been sustainable.
Chris: Certainly the humor starts to decrease and then we need more tension.
Oren: Discworld’s always funny, but it starts to have its own very distinct flavor and stops just being, what if Lord of the Rings was a joke?
Bunny: Also, a third reason is that some people are obnoxious about the subversions and they do the subversion to gawk at the original and the stupid people who like it. Don’t do that.
Oren: Yeah, you could be mean-spirited about it. I would generally not recommend that.
Chris: As an example of when High Realism starts to become more demanding in the world building…I did a critique of this book, They Mostly Come Out At Night, in the Yarnsworld series, and it’s kind of a fairytale fantasy ish, but we set up what feels like is an intentionally gritty setting where people live in just, like a one room hovel. And then everything is really dangerous and they’re always hiding at night. This idea of, we’re impoverished and everything looks kind of ugly, the town is ramshackle and all those things. I start questioning the fact that the grain is sitting out, that’s not in a grain ark because we might as well just eat that.
And I start questioning the fact that a character says that berries are too sweet ’cause that would actually be a great luxury in that kind of setting. Like, people don’t have a lot of access to sugar. Whereas if this was not intending to be this kind of ugly poverty and it was instead more light and whimsical, then I just wouldn’t really worry.
Like whatever, we’re pretending, there aren’t mice that are gonna come and eat your grain during the night. Of course, people have access to sugar, even though historically they wouldn’t have because that’s the kind of setting it is.
Oren: One more thing I wanted to mention, since we’re almost out of time, from what I can tell at least, part of this weird animus about world building we mentioned earlier definitely seems to come from authors who want to do more surreal stories, which don’t have settings that are logically consistent because that’s not how surrealism works. As far as I can tell, if that’s the kind of story you wanna write and go for it. I think the question that comes up when I look at these stories in editing, is that really what the author is going for? Or is it just one or two scenes that don’t make sense? If it’s consistently surreal, cool. But if it’s a normal story and then suddenly it’s like, oh, well the plot here doesn’t have to make sense ’cause I’ve decided it’s surreal, that’s not gonna go over well, that’s not gonna land with any audience.
Chris: The last consideration about world building where some thought is sometimes called for is just doing what you say you’re gonna do in the story, so if you have a futuristic setting and your book advertises the setting as futuristic, it should actually seem futuristic.
And if it has tons of anachronisms in it, where culture hasn’t changed in like a thousand years, that’s not going to seem futuristic, and so that contradiction is just going to feel like a contrivance to readers. If you want to have an egalitarian setting, then it should actually be egalitarian, which means you should be counting your characters and looking at how many people belong to which demographic and how they’re distributed.
Because if you say it’s egalitarian and all of your characters are like white dudes, especially in leadership positions or something like that, you’re not doing what you say you’re doing. Finally, if you’re gonna depict oppression, please work on making it accurate to oppression. Otherwise, if you wanna fight oppression in your work, just leave it out and go for an egalitarian setting.
That honestly takes way less thought than putting oppression in your setting.
Oren: Well with that, I think we will go ahead and call this episode to a close. We can stop world summoning now, Bunny.
Bunny: Ugh, “universe summoning,” Oren.
Oren: Oh, oh no.
Bunny: Brought to you by World Summoning Flakes.
Chris: Well, if we helped you with your world imagining—
Bunny: Boo.
Chris: Consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He is an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
[closing theme]Outro: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening/closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.
Settle down class. Everyone pay attention as I write on the blackboard. Schools still have blackboards, right? This reference isn’t horribly dated? Anyway, this week is about building tension in stories that take place in school. That’s more difficult than it might appear, at least for the kind of high-action stories that speculative authors are fond of. Fortunately, we’ve got some ideas, and only one of them involves getting pedantic about what exactly constitutes a school.
Show Notes A Deadly Education * Starfleet Academy * Magic School * House on the Cerulean Sea * Fourth Wing * Red Rising * Mad Max * Over My Dead Body * Sorceline * Legend Born TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Ace of Hearts.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny.
[Intro Music]Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Oren, and with me today is…
Chris: Chris
Oren: …and…
Bunny: Bunny!
Oren: Everyone, settle down! It’s time to learn things in a structured environment that also has a duty of care. If you need an adventure pass, you’re gonna have to raise your hand. You can’t go on a dangerous adventure without a pass. And if you misbehave, there’ll be a very normal consequence, like detention in the seventh layer of hell.
Bunny: Ah!
Chris: Oh no, but I just gotta break the rules. I just gotta!
Bunny: How else am I supposed to be cool?
Oren: Yeah, there’s no other way. You’re gonna have to go out and do extremely dangerous things. What other options could you possibly have?
Bunny: But won’t I get extra credit for being brave and kind-hearted while I’m doing these things?
Oren: Yeah. Mostly for being in the Team Good house, I guess, is where you’ll get most of your points. That’s just how it goes.
Chris: Yeah. Your reward is that the headmaster will declare you and your fellows superior to everybody else. This is very healthy.
Bunny: Even though we’re not supposed to be doing that, but, you know, you can’t quash brave-heartedness.
Oren: So today we’re talking about creating tension in school stories. ‘Cause I’ve been thinking about this a lot because Starfleet Academy is finally happening as a TV show. It’s been like everyone’s second best idea for 50 years. And now they’re like, we’re finally making it! We’re doing it, full steam ahead. And I’m concerned to be honest.
Chris: Yeah. I wonder if the impossibility of the premise is why they keep punting it.
Oren: That seems like it to me, right? It just doesn’t seem like it would work very well because it’s a school, and school stories are notoriously difficult at the best of times.
Bunny: So is the premise just our heroes are in school? Is that it?
Oren: We don’t know. We don’t know much about it. All we know so far is that it’s called Starfleet Academy and we have like a cast list, which is a combination of actors from previous shows and like a group of hot young people who are presumably the students.
Chris: Maybe we should start placing our bets on whether in the first episode the entire school is just like attacked and then all the students have to flee, and then it’s just them fleeing around the galaxy. But you know, it’s a metaphorical school. I mean, it’s still technically a school ’cause there’s teachers with them. So we’ll call it school.
Oren: I have been wondering, okay. By Starfleet Academy, do they mean like a ship with cadets on it? Because that seems like a thing they might do. The USS Starfleet Academy. Surprise!
Chris: I’m sure that that’s not the original concept that they intended. Because I mean, we’ve seen these other Star Trek episodes where they hearken back to their academy days and tell stories about it. So I’m sure the idea is supposed to be that people are just at school. But yeah, that will take all of like a few writers in a room for a few hours to probably go out the window.
Oren: So I guess at this point, rather than just ragging on a show that doesn’t exist yet…
Chris: Yeah, maybe we should be optimistic. We should be kind and, you know…
Bunny: 20 points to you for being kind.
Oren: Yeah. Maybe it’ll be good. Who knows? I would like it to be good. It’s not like I’m cheering for it to fail, I just have concerns about the premise. But, okay, so the obvious obstacles to tension are that schools are learning environments for kids. And when people have a choice, they don’t typically send their kids somewhere dangerous. And then schools also have a direct incentive to not let their students get eaten, ’cause it’s harder to attract more students if your students get eaten.
Bunny: Especially private schools, because you are paying to be there. And presumably some of that is so that you don’t get eaten.
Oren: One of the ways we will go into a little bit of making this easier is not all schools are super well-funded, and not all schools have great incentives. So there’s that. And then the last one is that, especially in magic schools, which is the most common type of school narrative in spec fic, you have a bunch of teachers around and the teachers are usually more powerful mages than their students, ’cause that’s just how magic schools typically work. And then that creates another problem of if there’s an issue, why aren’t the teachers fixing it?
Chris: When I think about these problems, I think about a couple things. First, why parents would send their children to the school. And you could have a situation where everyone at the school is an orphan, but writers don’t usually wanna do that.
Bunny: They want their special chosen one to be an orphan!
Chris: Right? And they also want, usually to have like rich, privileged kids at the school. Other things like that. So we need an explanation for why parents would want to send their children to school. And if it’s too dangerous, that doesn’t work. And also, why doesn’t the school shut down if things start happening, right? If there’s, if kids are no longer safe, if they used to be safe, but that has changed… a normal school would just shut down and send all the kids home. So it’s hard to come up with a premise that works and creates tension when those two basic facts are in play.
Bunny: Right. And I think a lot of the conflict that we’re used to in like real world school is also like, not conflict that necessarily makes for a super exciting story. Like grades.
Oren: I mean, you can do a school drama, right? Where the drama, you know, all the storylines are emotional problems that kids are having. That’s a famous thing that happens even at well-run schools. And you know, you can be trying to study hard for tests, but let’s be honest, that’s not what most people want when they sit down to write a speculative fiction school story.
Bunny: Right, you want the magic part to have some salience, and in that case it could just be like your normal high school.
Oren: Yeah. If, if you go to a magic school and nothing magical, adventurous ever happens, readers are gonna wonder why this is a magic story in the first place.
Chris: I wouldn’t eliminate the possibility of a magic school cozy. It wouldn’t actually be necessarily that different from House in the Cerulean Sea, where we just have a bunch of magical kids. House of the Cerulean Sea basically has a threat of this orphanage shutting down as its throughline. That’s how it manages, but it still brings in lots of things that are from the outside and it doesn’t actually focus that much on the schoolwork. But you could probably, again, take some pressure off if you did want to do a lighter story.
Oren: So you can use the schoolwork itself to generate tension. I’ve seen people talk about that and, you know, you can attach some pretty hefty stakes to schoolwork depending on the type of story you’re telling. It can be potentially life or death stakes. Like it’s possible that your character is like some kind of renegade super mage or whatever, and they’re like, “you’ve got one chance to shape up. You’ve gotta stay at this school or else bad things.” So that’s an option. It could be something a little more reasonable that’s like, well, I need to do well here so that I can, you know, get a good job out of magic school.
Chris: Or something with the skills that they earn. Like, my family is cursed and I gotta somehow become good at magic to lift the curse on my family.
Oren: Yeah. So you can attach stakes to that. Those tend to make good background stakes and create like a base level of tension. It’s kind of hard to use those for the whole story just because if nothing else, it’ll get repetitive after a while of like, okay, well we’re studying for another test. Great.
Chris: Yeah, I mean, I would say that if you have stakes like, okay, my family is cursed, or I gotta shape up, you’ll also need them to be present at the school so that you can find ways to ramp up tension. So if your family is cursed, then you would want that curse to somehow be present at the school and easily affecting the kid if possible, so that we don’t just have people periodically sending messages, “oh no, your uncle is getting worse. You better learn that magic!” And then you need a reason why the protagonist is struggling with their schoolwork, which is doable, but it just shouldn’t be asshole teachers who are bad at training.
Bunny: Right. And I think also we need to see why the schoolwork is difficult, which in some cases it’s clear. Like if you’re at a fighting school and you have to fight, clearly that’s difficult. But when you’re using a very abstract magic system, it can just feel like… I don’t know, your protagonist is thinking really hard and then failing to produce results for reasons.
Oren: Concentrate!
Bunny: Yeah. Think more!
Oren: Just tell them to concentrate harder. That’ll do it.
Bunny: Right. So I feel like it’s important to know if the classwork is going to be part of the tension, why it’s tense, why it’s difficult, why it’s a conflict, rather than just being like, well, you know, it is difficult.
Oren: Yeah. If you’re gonna use the school work as a source of tension and it’s a magic school work or a tech school work, in the case of Starfleet Academy or what have you, you do need to know how it works, at least on some level. I think Starfleet Academy is gonna suffer from that because we already know how Star Trek technology works and it’s bullshit!
Chris: It works by technobabble.
Oren: And that’s not an easy thing to make interesting stakes out of.
Bunny: Right, but obviously if your magic school is about like… to cast spells, you need to pull from the evil nether realm, and that might cause a demon to pop out onto your lap, it’s a little more intuitive why that might be difficult.
Oren: If you’re the kind of person who likes making detailed magic systems with specific rules and how they work, then a school story is a great place to introduce that, ’cause you have a built-in reason why we have to learn all of it.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, I do think that if you were writing a long series, it might be hard, if you were just focusing on schoolwork, to keep that fresh after a while, but I do think that that might work pretty well in combination with some other solutions, right? Like if you had a curse and that curse caused some life or death stakes at the school occasionally on its own that you had to deal with besides just having the protagonist learn the schoolwork to try to eventually solve this problem, then that would give it some variety. When you run into really difficult plotting problems, sometimes the best you can do is a combination solution, so that no one solution is leaned on too hard.
Bunny: I will say I’m quite tired of the type of story in magic school settings or really just, you know, fantastical school settings where it seems like literally every part of the schoolwork is trying to kill you. Like you have gladiator battles that kill students, and this is not really commented upon like, oh, there’s just a tough school.
Chris: I do see some people wanting to make the school antagonistic, just like outright cruel. That is part of the premise. That’s not unheard of. But I do think that even in those stories, even if again, there are no parents, there are no loving parents sending their kids to school. So your backup like everyone is an orphan or something like that.
Bunny: There’s also not much point to it. Like if you try to position this in the larger society, I feel like I mostly see this with like, it’s the military, right? But then you’re killing all the soldiers.
Chris: Bunny, you can just say Fourth Wing.
Bunny: Look, I wasn’t gonna.
Oren: Or, I mean, Red Rising, if we want another example. Red Rising is one that supposedly all of these high caste gold families send their kids to murder school where half the students are killed on the first day. And it’s like, well, I don’t really believe you. And you know, I was willing to just buy into it, ’cause whatever, this is like a high octane space adventure where we kick ass and take names and don’t really worry about the societal implications that much. But then, like we also tried to use it for drama. So that the main character could have to feel guilty ’cause he had to kill a student who wasn’t prepared. And it’s like, well, I mean now I just kind of feel like you’re taking advantage of me. I was willing to suspend my disbelief, but now it’s like you’re trying to make me feel bad with it and I don’t appreciate that.
Bunny: Yeah. That would be kind of like if, I don’t know, like halfway through Mad Max, the title character got down outta the rig and just started weeping over all of the war boys he’d killed. Like it would feel dissonant.
Oren: Right. It’s like, that’s not what we’re here for, man. This is the story where we go to murder school. I am trying my best to buy into that premise.
Bunny: Yeah.
Chris: Fourth Wing definitely has this problem. Again, it’s a Dragon Military Training Academy. So people try to become dragon riders and it’s supposed to be prestigious. Now, granted, if the death rate is too high, none of the powerful families would wanna actually send their kids there, probably. And if I’m gonna be really generous to it, we do have a setup where there are fewer dragons than riders. And the dragons, some of them seem kinda evil, so they don’t like the students. They might just burn them to death. And so you can theoretically see, the school is run by an evil empire, why it might let that go. Because the dragons have all the power in this situation and they’re the more precious resource. But like there’s still lots of things where, you know, on day one to even get into school, they have to go across this parapet that they could easily fall off of to their deaths. And there’s just no reason for that. It’s like, put some mats down there, so if they fail, they just don’t get into the school. There’s no reason to just have them fall to their death. It doesn’t make any sense. We’re just wasting resources at that point.
Oren: Plus they continue the whole “students can die at any moment” thing after they’ve bound their dragons. And we’ve been told that a rider dying can kill a dragon. So… what? Like, what’s going on?
Bunny: So be a little more careful guys, especially if dragons are a precious resource.
Oren: I get that they’re an evil empire, but that doesn’t make them incompetent, especially if they’ve conquered all this, their military must work on some level. Yeah, that’s a whole thing. One thing that I see people often reach for is the idea of like, well, what if the school is actually impoverished, right? And so it doesn’t have the resources for proper safety measures or the money to hire teachers who have the students’ best interests at heart. And sure, like that’s a real problem that exists. It’s tragic. I’d be careful throwing that in. I’m not gonna say you shouldn’t, but is that really the story you want to tell, is the question I would ask. ‘Cause when I run into a lot of authors who try this, they think it sounds cool for about five chapters, and then they’re like, “oh, this is actually a huge bummer. This isn’t actually what I wanted.” And then they end up doing something that just doesn’t fit with this supposedly poverty racked school they’ve created.
Bunny: Well, that’s because it’s like, you know, a big part of magic school is wish fulfillment and there’s not a lot of wish fulfillment in going to, I don’t know, a shabby public school where all they serve is meatloaf.
Oren: And also with a lot of these schools, even poverty isn’t gonna explain it anyway, right? Like, if you’re dealing with schools where demons are constantly attacking, even parents who don’t have any other options, they’re just gonna keep their kids home because like, okay, they’re not getting an education, but they’ll be alive. That explanation has limits and it very often doesn’t mesh with the kind of story authors wanna make anyway. You can also do what I’ve started calling the worldbuilding bonanza explanation, which is what you find in stories like A Deadly Education, where the entire novel is basically set up to try to justify this inherently illogical premise. And I wrote a whole article on why I didn’t buy it and why I felt like it really slowed the story down. But even if you think that it did a great job, Novik is basically – Naomi Novik is the author – is basically spending the entire book fighting her story’s momentum, and I just have to feel like there’s a better way. You want a setup where you don’t have to spend the entire thing fighting the premise you created.
Chris: Yeah, honestly, at that point, I think-
Bunny: Right.
Chris: -just having a completely unrealistic school and ignoring the problem is better. I would choose that over spending my entire book with lots of exposition, trying to justify everything.
Bunny: I do wonder if part of this is sort of a bifurcated problem with two different types of magic school, one in which the danger could come up at any time and does, and the other in which like a cataclysmic danger has just showed up and it’s an anomaly. And I think most of these are dealing with the first one, right? Like you want this environment where the danger is all part of it. But I feel like the other option is something that more authors should think about. I think that there are a lot more plausible premises where everyone is out of their depth. And like students and teachers alike, it makes more sense that the students would be jumping in on the action or that maybe the teachers are antagonistic and they are part of what caused all of this. Like the call is inside the building.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, attacks and emergencies that are just one-off and aren’t normal at the school are definitely a solution that helps. The problem is that they only work for so long before they just become as unrealistic as everything else that’s been happening, because you have to explain why the school doesn’t shut down and send the kids home at that point. Now, you could have something like a literal siege where the kids can’t go home ’cause they’re surrounded. But sieges are pretty bleak. Again, so if we’re going for wish fulfillment, you know, having everybody like run out of food and start eating rats is probably not…
Oren: You’d also have to justify, why are we still doing classes at this point? Like is it really a school story if it’s a siege that happens to take place at a school? Like, it’s probably not what most people are imagining,
Bunny: Right, I feel like this would probably, unless you want to do the siege storyline and have your students eat magic rats or whatever, I think the premise that makes the most sense is like a mystery story in the setting where it’s not very bombastic, but like the students are investigating and who can you trust and stuff like that. I’ve actually read two different graphic novels recently that basically had that premise of like, it’s a mystery at magic school, one of which was Over My Dead Body, and the other, which was Sorceline, which was thoroughly meh, but did do the like, it’s an isolated school where weird things have started happening and it might be one of the professors, or it might be the protagonist inadvertently causing the spooky things to happen. So she doesn’t want to tell anyone.
Chris: Yeah, I mean if it’s subtle and under wraps enough, right, that the school can keep running. Yeah, you could keep that going for a while, right?
Bunny: And Under My Dead Body uses- or, Over My Dead Body uses- uh, wrong direction! Uses the antagonistic teachers thing to explain why people aren’t doing more, which ultimately works in its favor when that twist is found out.
Chris: Yeah. But again, just as a reminder, when we’re talking about things like mysteries, a mystery doesn’t typically on its own create tension, right? Because it’s more curiosity inducing, but that doesn’t sustain the plot in the same way. It is definitely an enhancement, but usually a mystery story also has stakes added to the mystery so that there’s like tension going forward. So right in this case we have the question of what’s happening, but the source of tension is like the actual threat that’s being perceived by the student when weird and possibly dangerous things are happening. And if it’s at a more personal scale, if it’s not an epic scale thing that’s threatening all the students in the whole school and it’s just one student, and the student has a reason not to disclose that, maybe they don’t trust their teachers, then yeah, I could see that that working for a while. I mean, maybe not an entire series, right, but for a book.
Bunny: Yeah. Right. And Sorceline, it was like people, I think people turning into glass, so like what’s causing that is part of the question. And they think it’s a one-off. But that does like, again, it veers towards the ” why aren’t they closing down? Because students are turning to glass” type of thing.
Oren: In my experience, you can figure out ways to make these sorts of special circumstances work and they can often work for maybe even an entire book if you’re devoted enough. One that comes to mind is Legendborn where the protagonist has to get into demon hunter school because she thinks that someone at the school killed her mom. And so she’s trying to find out who, so obviously she can’t tell anybody ’cause you know, they might protect each other and she doesn’t know who it was. So that worked out. Now that book ends and she’s no longer at demon hunter school, which I think is the right choice. ’cause I can’t imagine that premise working a second time. But it was strong enough to sustain a relatively long novel. So that worked out.
Bunny: Oh, now her other parent is dead and someone else might have done it!
Oren: No, I really like her dad!
Bunny: Let her stay another four years.
Oren: No, no. Her dad is great. Don’t touch her dad. Her dad is a precious snowflake. I love him a lot. You can also do one of my favorites, which is to dodge the issue entirely and just use the school as a backdrop for something else that’s happening. I love to like, find a difficult problem and just not deal with it, just cheat by doing something else. So, you know, this is like you’re technically students at a school. But really you’ve been recruited by the weird criminology professor to do a murder trial and you just happen to have shots at class sometimes, stuff like that. That sort of thing allows you to get some of that school flavor without having to deal with the huge constraints that being in a school puts on your plot.
Chris: Yeah, I mean, that’s not so different from the mystery plot that Bunny suggested, where something happens at school. It just has to be, again, there can’t be too much danger at the school. Our weird teacher can’t take us on adventures that are too dangerous, and at that point it’s just, okay, can you bring in the school enough that it still feels like they’re at school?
Bunny: It’s an internship for which you get class credit.
Oren: Another one that I haven’t actually seen much, but that I think has a lot of potential and I might have stolen this from Chris, if so, I apologize. It’s the idea of extending some kind of political conflict that is going on outside the school into the school, like if there are factions that are vying for power in the mageocracy or whatever, and those factions, you know, have a presence in the school that can create a lot of fun conflict and at the same time feel much more believable why the school doesn’t intervene to shut it down, because it has to also appease these much larger factions.
Chris: Now that I think about it, I did have some weird idea for a school political intrigue that I might have told you about.
Oren: This was a while ago now.
Chris: It was a while ago.
Oren: Yeah. I had this concept for like a magic school story and the idea would be that like people were in their school houses or whatever, but those houses are also like, you know, political factions outside the school. And so there was conflict within the school trying to recruit the best students. And then like the factions also would, some of the teachers were loyal to different factions. So that was a whole thing. I think that could probably work, you know, you’d have to actually make the politics believable. You probably don’t wanna have a house that is explicitly for evil people. That’s probably not gonna work.
Chris: I think you’d also, again, the institution of the school would need to be really culturally and politically important.
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: So that what happens at the school matters at large. And that’s not impossible to do, but I think that would be important so that you can have like larger stakes beyond, you know, so when we do weird things at the school, other people notice.
Oren: Red Rising tried to do that, but it ended up actually making it worse because, so they have this thing where like, it’s not like the houses that they’re in, the Mars, Jupiter house or whatever… I don’t think those exist outside the school, but there are networks of people who know each other from the houses they were in at school. And so they like, you know, have a loyalty to their school and they do all kinds of politics in that regard. So like, getting to know people in your school is supposed to be important. But at the same time, the author really wanted the protagonist’s house to be like the disadvantaged, scrappy one. And there’s no explanation for why, they just get less stuff than everybody else. And I’m just wondering why that is. Why aren’t the patrons of that house on the outside objecting? ‘Cause this is hurting their chances of recruiting more qualified people out of the school. And it, you know, it was a weird thing that they added in, that clashed with another thing the author wanted to do, which I mean, story of my life. Fair enough.
Chris: I do wanna talk about rule breaking, since that is a fairly obvious source of conflict, that it can help, but it also has limited use. Which is, basically, you give your protagonist some reason to break school rules and get into trouble. And it could be, you know, them doing their own investigation and then doing forbidden things where they go spy on other students, or you have to arrange something, but it’s not too hard to arrange something. I think one of the things about that is besides just like, okay, how bad are the punishments? Like you could potentially make it so that there’s a reason why the protagonist has to stay at school and getting expelled from school would be bad, but you could only take that so far before the school starts to look toothless. So either the protagonist keeps breaking the rules and they never get caught, in which case it loses tension because the chances of them getting caught then feel really low, or the school catches them and gives them a punishment. But unless, again, we’re doing something really dangerous that no school would actually do as a reasonable punishment, that punishment is just not gonna look like much until this student reaches the point where they might actually be expelled or something, at which case, again, the punishments start to look meaningless as you give them more punishments.
Oren: The punishment is that you have to participate in the school’s amateur production of The Breakfast Club, which I think we can all agree is a fate worse than death.
Chris: So yeah, that after a while, again, the only way to make that last longer is to have punishments that are actually cruel.
Bunny: It’s also, I feel like you can extend that too. If the hero, like say if you’re doing that political maneuvering school story, if the hero has allies who call in a favor about it, so you don’t get the ultimate punishment, but now the stakes are higher because they’ve called in that favor, and also you owe them something. And that puts you in the bad graces of people who think you didn’t deserve that, etc.
Oren: That’s where you have the antagonistic love interest, who now you owe a favor to. Ooh!
Bunny: 10/10, would read.
Oren: All right, so that is about it. We are done for time. Class dismissed. All of you go home. Do your homework though, otherwise, you’re going to the murder forest.
Chris: No! Your homework is to go to patreon.com/mythcreants and support us.
Oren: All right, so before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber, he’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
[Outro Music]Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening/closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.
Sometimes you immediately fall in love with a character and want them to succeed. Other times, you want nothing more than to fire that character into a passing sun. It’s the second category we’re talking about today. What is it that makes characters unlikable, and how do you fix it? Assuming you want to fix it, of course. If not, then just do the opposite of everything we talk about in today’s episode.
Show Notes Save That Cat * Do Characters Need to Be Likable? * Eleanor Shellstrop * Quentin Coldwater * Wednesday * Lisa Frankenstein Outfits * Candy and Spinach * Understanding Character Karma * Kvothe * The Sleepless * The Bone Shard Daughter * House on the Cerulean Sea * Leap Year * Neelix * The Last Halloween * Skin of the Sea * John Wick * The Ghoul/Cooper TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Savannah.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny. [opening song]This is a Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is:
Bunny: Bunny!
Chris: and…
Oren: Oren!
Chris: You know, you two are both such pathetic losers who are so uncool. I’m so much better than you. But hey look, I just saved a cat, so you have to love me now. Even though I said that to you.
Oren: Chris, you didn’t have to save that cat. You were already a cool, truth-talking rebel [laughter from Chris], who doesn’t let society censor what you have to say.
Bunny: Now that I see you holding that cat, I realize I disliked you and whined over here in the corner. It’s just because you’re just so cool and nice.
Chris: Obviously, you were jealous of me.
Bunny: I was jealous. It’s true.
Chris: Yeah. Everybody who hates me is really jealous. That’s how this works.
Oren: Yeah, that’s just how it works.
Bunny: I’m jealous and therefore weak, and everything you said was correct. Now, can I please touch the cat?
Chris: Okay, but only because I’m very gracious.
Bunny: Oh!
Chris: But also this cat likes me better ’cause I’m the coolest.
Bunny: [laughter] That’s only fair.
Oren: Wow. We just love this character.
Bunny: It has great taste, that cat.
Oren: This character is just so great.
Chris: Uh huh, am I not the most likable character?
Bunny: We all bow down to your supreme likability in the face of our whining, quivering inferiority. We’ve both got, like, unflattering haircuts, and we’re constantly kind of sweaty in a really sullen way.
Oren: Yeah, there’s a lot of descriptions of “moist” when people talk about us…?
Bunny: Yeah, we’re like, mopping our forehead. Got damp handkerchiefs. Everyone’s like, oh, Chris is the only normal one in this podcast.
Chris: Yeah. So yeah, this time we’re talking about what makes protagonists unlikable, ’cause there are a lot of things that can get in the way and make people hate a character that generally the storyteller does not intend. Just to clarify, I do think, again, defining what we mean when we say “likable” can be important. This is a pretty contentious topic−
Oren: Little bit.
Chris: And to be clear, we are not talking about whether or not you would like somebody if you met them in real life. We are not talking about whether somebody is moral or immoral, although that does factor in. We’re specifically talking about whether this is a character that readers enjoy reading about. That’s it. That’s pretty self-evident, ’cause that kind of aligns with the storyteller’s goals, right? You have an immoral character where readers enjoy reading about them, enjoy having that person as a protagonist, then you don’t have a likability problem.
Oren: And it’s one of those things where it’s true that it isn’t a question of would you like them if you met them on the street? But there is more… overlap to that then is sometimes convenient for the way people want to talk about this question. Things that you can do that would make a character likable that wouldn’t work on a real person, but at the same time, a lot of the things that would make you dislike a person in real life will also apply to characters.
Bunny: It is just technically true that you will be spending a lot of time with this character. You’re not going to be hanging out with them at a coffee shop per se, but you are gonna be with them a lot. So, I think it’s true that at some level you want to be… not actively turned off by them.
Chris: I think the biggest difference is that us storytellers, we have our tricks because whether something has emotional impact really matters. So, if you meet somebody and you find out they’re scamming seniors on the side, you might be like, “Ugh, I don’t think I should be this person’s friend.” But if you watch a show about The Good Place and you have a character, Eleanor Shellstrop, and you find out that she’s doing that, but the show is funny and the storyteller does their tricks to make sure that you never feel bad, you never meet any of those seniors, you never see them get scammed, you never have that emotional impact of the bad things that she’s done, they can get away with a lot more.
So, I think that’s the biggest difference, especially when it comes to people judging immoral actions. Part of that judgment is always the harm, and that is always judged at an emotional level. So, if you can keep people from feeling something emotionally, you can get away with a character that does more.
Oren: There’s a certain taste question to it. I have a specific pet peeve that makes me instantly dislike a character, which is when they are “fake” outcasts. They act like outcasts, and the story treats them as one, but they have all the traits of a popular person. Or, at least, the thing that they are supposedly outcast for isn’t a thing that would actually happen with−
Chris: −like, every magical high schooler is like, “Freak!” Looks like a really normal, cool high schooler. There’s nothing here.
Oren: Or Quentin in The Magicians, the TV show version. He’s supposed to be a nerd, ’cause he likes theLord of the Rings, and people don’t like him for that. And, I don’t know, maybe in the 80s that was true. It’s definitely not true now. Or when the show came out, which was in the late aughts, early tens? Being a nerd was very cool by then.
So, the idea that he was outcast ’cause he liked Narnia and Lord of the Rings is like, nah, no thank you.
Chris: I mean, it wasn’t cool when I went to high school, but I don’t think it counted against me either.
Bunny: Definitely nothing out of the ordinary now. Everyone likes Lord of the Rings.
Oren: Yeah, a more extreme version is Wednesday from the Netflix show where she’s like a social outcast who hates all of the things that it is socially acceptable to hate, like social media. Oh wow. What a trailblazer there. Hating social media. That’s certainly not a thing anyone does, but not everyone seems to care about that, so that might not be a broad spectrum thing.
Chris: There are a lot of big budget or popular bestselling stories that meet storytelling requirements or requirements for likability through some very serious contrivances, and it has definitely divided people on whether or not you buy it. Are you gonna buy that this super attractive, cool-looking teen is gonna be bullied because they have magic? I wouldn’t buy it. But obviously some people might want to buy that. So, that definitely gets divisive, I think.
Bunny: I will say, one thing that’s not necessarily in the writing of a character’s likability, but in the presentation in visual media−talking about the fake outcasts thing−when you have a very attractive actor and you dress them in baggy, unflattering clothes and then have everyone tease them about being ugly. That’s really obnoxious.
Oren: Yeah. I’m not a fan.
Chris: I do understand the appeal of the transformation movies. We just wanna see a character go from unstylish to stylish so that we can have that sequence where she’s gotten her hair straightened or something and she walks out in her new dress and people are like, [gasp] understand the appeal.
Bunny: Wow, you are hot all along! Holy crap, you’re played by Halle Berry!
Chris: Makeovers can be fun. It reminds me of this trope that has now found new life−the 80s trope where we watch a character go try on a bunch of different clothes, and we have a montage of them just wearing different clothes.
Bunny: I think the Wonder Woman movie had that, of all things.
Chris: Yeah, and I watched Lisa Frankenstein recently, another movie that had a sequence like that. It is very cheesy, but I can see that it’s in service to a specific trope that people enjoy seeing.
Oren: Yeah, okay, so moving away from that specific trope. Probably the most reliable thing that will make a character unlikeable is if you give them too much candy. Just tell everyone how cool they are, and they’re super cool, and they’ve never failed at anything, and they’re perfect and beautiful.
Bunny: Yep.
Chris: Candy characters have the opposite of sympathy. Because usually a lot of candied traits are very inherent traits to them, not things that they’ve earned. So, they just… are automatically good at everything. They’re just a genius who takes to every skill immediately. That’s not really something that they had to struggle for. So that puts them in karmic debt where we feel like they have more than they actually deserve.
Now, some audiences are just sweet tooths. They just do like these characters. I think kids are more likely to like candied characters. So, it’s not like nobody grabs onto them, but if you don’t immediately like them, then you start to resent them instead of the character winning the audience over, which is ideal.
Oren: And a lot of it has to do with, do you identify with the character or not? This is why Kvothe is able to be popular despite the fact that he’s the best at everything. He does all of the things that even basic writing advice says not to do, but he manages to be popular okay, because a significant number of the readership were like, “Oh man, what if I was Kvothe?” It’s also turning off everyone who didn’t think that. So, it’s a really major division of your audience.
Chris: And this is the kind of ironic and unfair thing. We call it “candy”, but outside of us, what most people would recognize is the term Mary Sue.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Which blames this on women, but actually, if you look at popular stories, these are usually men because female characters are much less likely to be given that kind of budget if they have lots of candy.
Bunny: Yay.
Chris: There’s a double standard where if it’s popular and has a budget, it’s probably a male character. Not that there are no popular stories with female candied characters, but they’re less likely because everything is still male-centric.
Oren: Yeah. On the bright side, I haven’t seen this that much in novels in the last five or six years.
Bunny: I unfortunately just read a novel that had an over-candied main character.
Oren: Oh, really?
Bunny: The Sleepless.
Oren: Oh.
Bunny: The story begins with several pages of him describing how many cool skills he has because he now has all this time to learn cool skills, which is everything from kung fu to cooking really good steaks, but then those never come up, really.
He gets in a really brief fight at one point, and then immediately gets his ass beat. I was like, where’s your kung fu? So it’s got the kind of weird situation where he’s got all this awesome, cool knowledge, and he tells you about it. He’s so empty inside, but he’s still got all this cool stuff, don’t worry. But then it’s just… it’s window dressing. So he is both candied and not, it was very weird, but I did dislike him at the beginning because I was like, stop bragging.
Chris: Yeah. Characters also have a tendency to be hard on other characters. They tend to steal the spotlight from other characters and render those characters helpless so that the candied character can just get all the glory and save the day every time.
They often are smug. A lot of times, the author gets joy of having them get one over on other characters and show other characters up. So these are all things that tend to make candied characters a lot less likable.
Oren: I’ve actually recently been running into the opposite problem more often than I would’ve expected, which is when they have too much spinach because then they’re just unpleasant and downtrodden and dejected.
Mm-Hmm.
Oren: Like in the book that I had to stop, The Bone Shard series. Spoilers for the first second book. I really like Lin, the empress character, but in the second book, it’s just a series of her being told she’s wrong over and over and over again. And it didn’t help that me and the author were clearly not jiving on what the correct solution to these problems were because every time Lin would suggest a solution, I’m like, yeah, that’s probably the best solution in this circumstance. Then she would be told, “No, that’s the wrong solution. You have to do this other thing.” And I’d be sitting here being like, no. And then that other thing would work, and I would get so upset.
Bunny: Oh, that’s frustrating.
Chris: I recently read The House of the Cerulean Sea, and this one is a funny one because it’s clear that the author just loves all of the side characters, and so the main character just gets all the spinach and all of the other characters, they’re candied, and they’re constantly telling him that he’s wrong about things or being condescending to him or forcing him to do things.
It’s like a character arc by telling, not showing, but like every other character other than the main character is the author’s mouthpiece. And so again, a lot of this comes with a difference between the storyteller and the audience, or a difference between different audience members, on which character is the character that you are emotionally attached to.
So in this case, it felt like this author created a main character to just be the person who’s downtrodden and wrong about things, who then has to learn better because the author liked these other characters. And probably some audience members did too, because they’re the ones that are given cool stuff.
The main character doesn’t get any cool stuff. Doesn’t get any magic powers, for instance. But I really liked the main character. And that’s always going to happen when you make somebody your main character, because if you open several chapters with this person and they have to like the main character to continue the book on some level. Which again, is just why if you have a candied character or favorite character, I always recommend making it your main character because that is the person you are basically telling your audience to like, and that’s the character you need them to like in order to want to continue the book. So, falling in love with a side character and giving that character all the candy, going to be a bad time for some of your readers.
Oren: I had that problem with my villain in The Abbess Rebellion. One of the things that I did several times when I was editing the book was adjust scenes so that the villain didn’t seem more right than I wanted him to be. I wanted him to not be cackle-y and mustache-twirly. I wanted him to seem like he believed he was doing the right thing, and I think I mostly succeeded by the end. But in the beginning I definitely gave some signals that some readers were picking up on that actually, he’s right the whole time, which is not what I wanted. So I had to balance that and I think I did okay. Buy my book! It’s okay!
Bunny: What an endorsement. I do wonder if comedies sometimes have more of that spinach problem. On St. Patrick’s Day, I watched Leap Year, which is a romcom set in Ireland, and the female lead in that, it goes out of its way to humiliate her. At one point, she’s driving with a love interest, who at this point is like really prickly and doesn’t like her, and they get stopped by a herd of cows, and she gets outta the car to move the cows out of the way, and then she steps in cow poop, and then the car rolls backwards into a ditch. They have to walk because the car is now busted.
And then she thinks she’s about to get a ride from some guys who then steal their stuff, and the love interest this entire time is just making a smug “I told you so” face. The poor female character−the lead−doesn’t ever really get to use her actual skills in this. It’s just the cool one is the love interest, and he gets to be sad and somewhat snarky, and she’s always on the back foot. I just found it really frustrating.
Oren: Characters failing things is great comedy gold. That can be very funny. I have seen comedies that, at least for me, take it too far and make the character just unpleasant to watch, and it’s hard for me to say where that line is with comedies, especially filmed comedies, right? That’s two degrees of separation outside of what I normally work on.
Chris: I think there’s a couple things that happen. One, a joke can just become too repetitive if you overuse it. And also, this is what I would talk about with the spinach-candy balance. Its spinach becomes a lot more tolerable if they also have time to shine.
If they also have some cool skills, if they also get to solve problems and make a difference−and those things should just balance each other out a little bit−you can have a character that tends to have more candy, but still has a little bit of spinach, or a character that tends to have more spinach but still has some candy, but gotta have both, or it’s just not gonna land well with a lot of people.
Bunny: And I think it was also that this wasn’t just a straight comedy either, like it’s a romcom. We’ve also got the romance element and some more, like, serious tender moments in there because romance, right? The main female character supposedly does have skills. Her skills are, she’s an interior decorator, and I expected that to come up at some point because the love interest is kind of a rough man of the earth, I guess. He doesn’t have a lot of soft skills. So, I expected that she would have more of that or that her interior decorating skills would come in handy. At one point, they’re staying with an older couple, and they’re starting to connect, and they’ll make dinner, and that’s the only time that her skill comes up is she arranges some flowers on a table. I just wanted to see her doing things well.
Chris: Another thing that I think is really important in the context of characters being unlikable is character flaws. There’s so many other writing outlets out there that just emphasize flaws a lot. Literary genre types especially like to emphasize character flaws, I think, in rebellion to characters that they see are not flawed enough probably. And also, if we’re doing character arcs−and a lot of people put a lot of focus on character arcs−they don’t have to start with a flaw. A character who’s grieving doesn’t have a flaw.
Chris: For instance,they often do start with a flaw, and writers tend to get very focused on flaws, but flaws−especially if they take over a character−really can push audiences away. So thinking about having a flaw there in a balanced way, because I’ve seen a lot of stories where it basically entirely defines the character, the writer’s hitting that flaw button so hard.
Yeah, I get it. There’s gonna be a character arc, but we don’t need it to be their main feature of their personality. That’s just unpleasant.
And it does vary depending on what flaws they have. Some flaws are much more unlikable than others. Arrogance and selfishness are the two biggest ones. But for instance, when I did my retelling of Snow Queen, my character is meek to start out with, and some readers were just fine with it. There were a few readers who… they didn’t like how meek she was at the beginning. They wanted a character that was more empowered. And so, not sure that there’s any flaw that if you have it there strongly is entirely safe when it comes to likability. And maybe that’s okay. Sometimes we’re okay losing a couple people, but I do think it’s worth just thinking about that balance of having it present but not having it take over too much. And especially readers get really frustrated when they watch a character make a decision that they know is the wrong decision and watch that blow up in the character’s face.
Oren: Yeah, they’re not fans. Something that is very common, not quite in either the candy or spinach area, is a character who hinders the other characters in moving the plot forward. That kind of character is especially annoying. Probably the archetypal character for this on TV is Neelix ’cause Neelix is constantly messing things up and making it harder for the other characters to do their jobs.
And so you’re just sitting there wondering, “Why is Neelix even here?” But you can have subtler versions of it. The superhero stories. The superhero’s love interest is often pushed into this role of the, “No, superhero, don’t go out and save the world!” Well, he’s obviously gonna. He has to do that for the plot to work. This doesn’t feel like anything other than delaying the story.
Chris: Or the wife that’s like, “How dare you go save the world. You need to spend more time with your family!”
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Oh, why did we create this scenario? We really created a scenario where people are gonna die. Now, we’re putting them in a position where him taking care of his family is being made into a bad thing, and then his wife is being made into the bad guy for wanting him to spend time with the family. I don’t like it.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: I don’t like it at all.
Oren: It’s not great. I wish writers would stop doing that.
Bunny: There’s also−maybe this is just because of film media−I feel like child characters have a higher probability of being annoying or unlikable when they display these traits. The character I’m thinking of−this was from the webcomic The Last Halloween−is an obnoxious child, and the cast are children, but the author clearly loves this awful vampire kid who’s constantly being the worst.
Chris: That sounds like a candied character. Anytime you’re like, oh, I know the author loves this character, that’s a huge sign of candy. And it can be hard to recognize because it’s not just that a character is objectively super cool. When you see a character is just getting a lot more energy from the author, the author makes them quirky and elaborates on the backstory and describes what they look like, seems to make the story revolve around them a little bit more, even though they’re not supposed to be the main character.
Bunny: I think the author just found this guy fun, and I found him awful. It was clearly, “Oh, what a little rascal, ha ha!” But his being a rascal involved actually killing people or leaving them to burn alive while also being all of the worst things that a little boy can be. When he disappeared, everyone was sad about it, and I was like, thank God.
Chris: Yeah, no, that’s so much candy.
Bunny: And then he reappeared!
Chris: Yeah, no, that’s another common candied character thing is a character’ll even die sometimes or whatever, just so everybody else can be like, “Oh no, I should have done what that character wanted. And I never appreciated how cool the character was. Oh, aren’t we all so sad? This character was the best.”
Oren: When a character fake dies so that there is a funeral for the other characters to gush about them over, that’s too much candy. That’s too much.
Bunny: It’s pretty telling that that sort of thing would happen to my terrible self inserts when I was learning how to write and just sticking myself into every hero. They would always have a fake death, and then everyone would be like [crying noises].
Chris: But hilariously, I’ve also encountered a couple of annoying child characters that it wasn’t actually that the author wanted to give them candy. It was that the author didn’t know how to make them likable, and the child was just supposed to die.
Not what I expected! So, Skin of the Sea, a book that has a lot of good traits, I have used it for word craft examples ’cause I do love the prose in that book, but it has this precocious child character that I’m just like, why are they bringing this character? He is obnoxious and he really shouldn’t be going on this dangerous mission, and it’s frustrating that they’re bringing a child along. Sometimes having undue emphasis on a character by the storyteller really does doom that character.
And maybe they’re doing it ’cause they want the audience to like that character. Maybe they’re trying to make you care about the child just to kill the child off, which is a bad idea. Don’t do that. Um, if you succeeded, you would make your readers real upset.
Oren: It feels like I’m being bludgeoned or almost like emotional blackmail.
Chris: It feels manipulative. I didn’t feel natural.
Bunny: I think the only story I’ve seen do that sort of thing decently is also pretty brutal, which is John Wick. Where he’s just lost his wife. He’s having a really hard time. The wife as a parting gift gave him a dog, and then the villains come in and wreck his house and kill his dog. And that’s the impetus for sending him down a murder destruction pathway. And John Wick is an extremely violent movie, but I was listening to an interview with the directors and they were like, yeah, you only ever kill one dog in your career. We’re not doing that again.
Oren: John Wick does a lot to make it seem this character is doing his best with his dog. It’s not like he brings his dog with him into the den of the evil mafia, and then the dog gets killed. Yeah, which is what was happening in Skin to the Sea, which is one of the reasons that character was so obnoxious. It’s like, why are they still with this child? Why have they not returned this child to his house? They know where his house is.
Chris: Yeah. In fact, I feel like there was even an elder that was like, “Hey, after you show them to this village, come right back.” And then he just doesn’t, and it’s like, I don’t think you have permission from his elders to bring him with.
Oren: Yeah. He stowed away on their boat, and they basically decided, “I guess we don’t have time to take him back.” And I was honestly thinking, I think you have time.
Bunny: Probably have time.
Oren: He is going to make your mission worse if you bring him. So, that was weird. A thing that is a little more subtle that I think might be worth mentioning before we end the episode is when your character has an unpaid karmic debt. This is a thing that authors struggle with a lot because sometimes they’ll have the character do something that to them just seems like either a fluff moment or establishing who the character is.
But to the reader, it’s like, well, that was a bad thing he just did. He should pay for that. You have your character who is mean to a barista. In the first scene to establish that he’s gruff and having a bad day, but he was mean to a barista. Rude. He should pay for that! I don’t like him.
Bunny: He’s a meanie.
Chris: The character in Fallout−Cooper−he has a fair amount of candy, and he mostly gets away with it because he has a charismatic actor who is also a white guy. But even though he’s kind of immoral, I tolerated him for quite a while. Until he shot that young man. And it was the kind of thing where like, yeah, maybe the young man was gonna shoot him, but Cooper deliberately provoked him. Right? That was a situation−
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: −that Cooper could have easily just not told the kid that he just killed his brother−And avoided any violence.−and the fact that he just does that and walks away and doesn’t have to pay for it at all. That was it for me. Now, I don’t like this character anymore. Sometimes it’s just one thing that they do that’s bad.
Oren: For a villain, okay, sure, ’cause we’re hoping to see him get his comeuppance, but he’s clearly not a villain. He was clearly an anti-hero who was moving closer and closer to just being a protagonist by the end, but he still killed that kid for no reason. So, yeah, it’s obnoxious.
Chris: So if you do wanna have a character that’s a sympathetic villain that you want to be likable or who is selfish or does bad things, you really do have to carefully manage, okay, what are we gonna actually show them doing and make it so that they only kill people who the audience already hates?
For instance, or we assume they’re supposed to be killing people, but we only ever see them knock somebody out or kidnap them.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: That careful management of emotions so it’s not too far. And Oren has a post on redemption arcs where you use the concept of, okay, but it’s about how far they go and having to be redeemed and the amount of time you have for the story to redeem them. If you’re not willing to spend tons of time making them grovel in order to stop the audience from feeling resentful about the bad things they did, then you really shouldn’t make them do things that are very bad.
Bunny: Yeah.
Oren: Okay. Well, on that note, I think we will call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you found us likable, please consider contributing on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And if you didn’t find us likable, contribute anyway so we can buy likability lessons.
Bunny: Yeah, maybe they’ll teach us how to clean off our foreheads. Stop being so moist.
Oren: Yeah, and before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
[outro music]
What does your protagonist do when they’re not righting wrongs and saving days? Main characters often have action-oriented jobs like mercenary or battlemage, but what about everyone else? Theoretically, a hero might be a teacher, custodian, hairdresser, or podcast editor, just to name a few possibilities. But we don’t usually see professions like that among our main characters, so this week, it’s time to talk about why.
Show Notes Oddjob * The Abbess Rebellion * Follow the Sound of Snow * Cleric Class * Dexter Morgan * Richard Castle * Arthur Conan Doyle’s Crime Opinion * The Truth * The Sleepless * Tintin * Cate Randa * Keiko O’Brien * The Art of Prophecy * The Masquerade * Guinan * Dr. Culber TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Mukyuu.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Intro: You are listening to the Mythcreants podcast. With your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny.
[opening song]Bunny: Hello and welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Bunny, and with me today is…
Oren: Oren…
Bunny: and…
Chris: Chris.
Bunny: And despite the title, as it turns out, looking at my notes, unfortunately we are not discussing the Bond villain Oddjob with his razor bowler hat –
Oren: The best weapon!
Bunny: Which seems so very effective and not at all cutting yourself when you take it off with your flesh hands.
Chris: So did he have an odd job then? I don’t think I’ve seen this Bond villain before.
Oren: No. He just does odd jobs.
Bunny: He’s just called Oddjobs.
Oren: His odd jobs are to kill James Bond all the time. [Chuckle]
Bunny: It’s a pretty odd job. It’s pretty specific, you gotta admit.
Oren: Yeah. There’s not a lot of growth potential in that sector, okay? [Laughter]
Bunny: He could move on to something odder one day, but it’d be a hard market finding one. There’s only one James Bond.
Chris: The odd job industry is just laying off so many workers right now. [Laughter]
Oren: It used to be there was job security back when we all thought James Bond was a code name, but thanks to Skyfall, we know that that’s his actual name. His parents were Mr. And Mrs. Bond and they died and left him Alfred.
Bunny and Chris: [Laughter]
Bunny: So although we aren’t talking about Oddjob–rest in peace–we are talking about unusual jobs in fiction. Jobs that characters have that aren’t super common or uncommon jobs that would make for cool jobs for protagonists that we’d like to see more of.
Just to narrow it down a little bit, I’m mostly talking about jobs that are specifically relevant to a plot. If the character is a middle manager who then gets whisked away to Narnia and doesn’t do any middle management, they don’t file Aslan’s taxes or anything like that, then that doesn’t really count.
Oren: So would an abbess count? Is that a weird job?
Bunny: [Laughter]
Oren: Perhaps one who was in rebellion? Hmm?
Chris: But does she do much abbess-ing?
Bunny: I guess she does some.
Oren: She does like a little abbess-ing, right? Just a little. As a treat.
Bunny: Yeah. She talks religiously, I guess.
Oren: Look, I chose not to have any magic in this fantasy setting, so I need to scrape every drop of novelty I can out of any other aspect of the story.
Bunny: I think whether the abbess is an unusual job depends on if you count D&D clerics? Although you’re right, there is no magic. Those are kind of defined… So maybe it is an odd job. Not Oddjob, but an odd job.
Chris: An abbess leading a rebellion certainly is not a normal combination that you see a lot.
Oren: I’ve also never seen a D&D cleric perform religious services. D&D clerics just treat gods as their personal spell bang.
Bunny and Chris: [Laughter]
Oren: It’s like the idea of them as religious leaders is [pitch rising] meh, meh.
Chris: Eh, don’t think about it.
Oren: Anyway, buy my book.
Bunny: Anyway, The Abbess Rebellion is now available on mythcreants.com or wherever you get your books. Certainly we see a lot of rebels, but we don’t see a lot of abbess rebels, so I will count that.
Oren: Yay.
Bunny: As a favor to a friend.
Oren: Ah, there’s a lot of nepotism going on in this podcast.
Everyone: [Laughter]
Chris: It was interesting for me to look and see stories that had characters with unusual jobs and why. What was their purpose in doing that?
For instance, I found a couple stories that seemed to assign an usual job because they wanted a quirky but uptight protagonist that has to learn to let loose. Like the IRS agent in Stranger Than Fiction, for instance.
And I have to say with some of these, like I’ve just read the House on the Cerulean Sea, where you’ve got a caseworker for magical orphanages. That’s what the main character does. And I dunno, some of these stories are kind of judgy. They like following rules. Why don’t you just let them follow the rules, right? Why do you have to try to fix them?
Bunny: So it’s like the job is the hairband on the love interest who takes off the hairband and lets her hair fall around her shoulders to become beautiful?
Chris: Yes [chuckle]. Honestly, I wanna see a badass IRS agent that goes after rich people.
Oren: It’s weird to me that that’s not already a movie.
Chris: [Stern government agent voice] It’s like “Hey, those schools don’t fund themselves, billionaire”.
Oren: People are so turned on by the idea of billionaires paying their taxes, I’m amazed no one in Hollywood has grabbed that idea yet. Give us a movie or a TV show or something of the IRS auditing SpaceBezos, or whatever.
Bunny: Again, if you made it a comedy, you can have an IRS agent that becomes an action hero. First, they audit the billionaire. The billionaire really doesn’t like that and sends goons after them.
Chris: But little do they know.
Bunny: Little do they know this IRS agent is packing.
Chris: IRS really just stands for I am Really Super.
Oren: [stern announcer voice]File under W9, as in you’ve been wasted nine times.
Everyone: [Laughter]
Oren: This dialogue practically writes itself.
Bunny: This is 10 out of 10 dialogue. I would read this. I know back in the day we had an article about undersung protagonists, something like that.
Chris: Yeah. I did write an article.
Bunny: And I think the IRS agent was on there.
Chris: Yeah. I totally did. This is how many years I’ve wanted somebody to write more IRS agent protagonists.
Bunny: You gotta do it, Chris. You’re done with the fairytales. Get onto the [gruffly, with emphasis] “Real Stuff” .
Chris: I don’t know. It’s kinda hard to fit in my other world fantasy setting.
Bunny: [Laughter] Well the snow queen needs to file her taxes too, I’m just saying.
Chris: Or, another reason. This is funny. Police procedurals always need more novelty and they’re always desperate for novelty ’cause police procedurals always go the same. So they always come up with a weird job for the detective to have. Like Dexter is a blood spatter pathologist. He’s also a serial killer. That’s really where the novelty’s coming from. Or a bone analyzer, or a mortician-
Oren: Or an author, like a mystery author. They like that one a lot.
Bunny: Have there been multiple police procedurals where the main character was a mystery writer?
Oren: Maybe there’s only one. Isn’t that the premise of Castle?
Chris: Yeah, he’s a writer of some kind, right?
Bunny: What’s he doing there?
Oren: They call him because he is so good at writing murder mysteries that he knows how crimes work.
Everyone: [Laughter]
Bunny: [sarcastically] Yep. I’m sure.
Oren: That sounds ridiculous, but that was a thing with Arthur Conan Doyle. I don’t know if the police ever actually called him, but he would give his opinions on famous crimes and people would pay attention to him. And think, oh, well, Arthur Conan Doyle thinks it was this, so it might have been this.
Chris: Oh, wow.
Bunny: That’s just early podcasting though.
Chris: See, I would’ve just assumed that’s something a writer would write.
Bunny: That really does sound kind of self-aggrandizing. [pretentiously] “Oh, I could figure this out. I write political intrigue. And so the president calls me and asks me what to do in this situation. The president needs help with witty dialogue. I can do it.”
Oren: There are definitely a lot of stories about writers to the point where, I don’t know if you can call that an unusual job.
Bunny: No, definitely not.
Oren: But it’s always funny to see how various storytellers portray different types of storytelling. With novels, it’s always very romanticized. But with TV writers, when they write about themselves, they’re very prosaic about the whole thing. I much prefer that approach.
Bunny: Yeah, I don’t think we can count writer as one of the uncommon jobs just because it shows up so much. And also it’s kind of meta. Whoop, whoop, whoop.
And another one that shows up I think less frequently, which is surprising, is reporter or journalist. I think that technically a lot of characters are journalists, but you don’t see them doing much journalism. Or is that just my impression?
Oren: It’s not as common as something like detective, but it comes up a fair amount.
Chris: I think when there’s a lot of stories about journalists, it often focuses on the research part of the job where they basically have to do detective work to get a story and not on other aspects of the job. So they basically become detectives.
Bunny: Well, it all arcs around back to detective.
Oren: Outside of the Discworld novel Truth, there aren’t that many specfic stories with newspapers in them. So it’s a little hard.
My sample size is biased. I haven’t read very many stories about reporters, but that’s because most of the stories that I read don’t really feature the news.
Bunny: They’re common in the superhero genre, but superheroes aren’t as popular in books, so that’s a lot of comics and shows and movies.
Oren: Some of the noir detective stories that I’ve read have a reporter as a secondary character, usually as a romance interest.
Bunny: Actually… The Sleepless, now that I’m thinking about it. The main character worked in a newsroom, I’m pretty sure. So I guess that counts. Also, when I was typing up notes for this episode, I remembered that Tintin is a reporter and man, he does no reporting.
Chris: [realization dawns] Oh yeah.
Oren: Really? I thought Tintin was a professional dog owner.
Bunny: That would be a better job for him.
Oren: Wait, wait, is Tintin the guy or the dog?
Bunny and Chris chorus: The guy.
Oren: Okay. I couldn’t remember.
Bunny: Snowy is the dog. Snowy is a professional snark. Snowy could write the president’s witty commentary, I’ll say that.
Oren: You don’t see, at least in my experience, you don’t see a ton of teachers in speculative fiction.
Bunny: At least not like professors.
Oren: Yeah. Despite magic schools being an entire genre, those are almost always from the point of view of the students. I can think of a number of non-specfic stories about teachers, but once you get into magic, it’s like, eh, no, we’re not gonna do teachers anymore.
Chris: The new Godzilla show had a teacher, but she wasn’t teaching anymore.
Bunny: Yeah.I feel like they have teachers but they don’t have a lot of teaching.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: I guess Keiko on DS 9.
Bunny: You don’t see a lot of her though.
Chris: Yeah, I think if it’s about the adults and it’s for adults, they just don’t really wanna have a lot of kid characters necessarily.
If it’s a film, they have to hire all those child actors, and that’s a little tough to manage. And there’s a question of, okay, how high stakes is it appropriate to get while keeping this light if we have lots of children? And I think there might be some practical things in film that sort of limit that.
Oren: I liked the concept behind the novelThe Art of Prophecy, which is about the mentor of the chosen one. I thought that was an interesting idea.
Unfortunately, it turns out that’s a hard premise to maintain, and so spoilers for that novel, but after the first few chapters, she dumps him with a friend and then goes and has her own adventure. He then becomes a separate POV with nothing to do for the rest of the story.
Chris: [disappointed] Oh.
Oren: But I liked that concept for a while. It was an interesting idea of her having to figure out how to solve problems and how to train this kid. I don’t know if a whole novel could support that idea, but for a short story? Sure. I think that could be interesting.
Bunny: I think all of these sorts of common jobs that we’ve been listing and when they use a less common job and make it work for the story point to the core components of what makes a job good for the story that the character is in.
At the very least, in general a job needs to come with a conflict or conflict stemming from that job is possible, or be useful in solving problems.
Chris: Right.
Bunny: And the protagonist has to have knowledge relevant to the conflict, whatever the conflict of the story is, or their job should let them acquire that knowledge if the job is relevant to the story.
Chris: I looked at it and any type of travel plus research is really good. So you can study archeology or just biology. Or any person who has expertise and can go travel and use that expertise tends to work really well. Anything that responds to problems or emergencies, right?
And it can be something creative: Oh, I’m a person who enforces the masquerade by erasing evidence of magic after an incident. Or I stop time from unraveling. Or that’s why we have emergency workers that are often in stories. Or anything that puts the protagonist in the know before they’re targeted for that knowledge is another one that I’ve seen before.
Like in Paycheck, the protagonist has a kind of unusual job. What he does is he helps companies reverse engineer competitor products. The point is that he created something advanced doing that, which shouldn’t be let loose on the world. But now he has amnesia and et cetera, et cetera. But like his job put him in the middle of that situation.
Bunny: And then the job should also place the protagonist somewhere that they have a hand in the resolution of the conflict as well. Obviously if you have the other components where they have the knowledge and stuff, the knowledge and the proximity, et cetera, et cetera, it does follow that they would therefore have a hand in the resolution. But it always bears repeating because we don’t want some guy swinging in and solving the story for you.
And then I think it also bears mentioning that all of these factors also depend on the scale of the problem. So some jobs are more relevant to a globe trotting adventure or a thriller. That’s why we have spies. We have a lot of spies and security agents and hitmen and that sort of thing. But if the conflict is to figure out who stole the office candy dish, then you might have the middle manager there. They have to do some conflict resolution with their dastardly employees. I don’t know.
Chris: Or if it’s a drama or personal story, obviously we need a bartender.
Oren: [Chuckle]
Bunny: Ah, fiction loves its bartenders.
Chris: Loves its bartenders. So many bartenders.
Bunny: Although I do feel like often there is a bartender in the story, I feel like I’ve seen a lot of stories where the bartender isn’t the main character, but they’re there for the main character to vent to.
Chris: That’s a good point. We could use more bartenders that are the minor characters in somebody else’s story and have heroes coming to them all the time and unloading all of their packages.
Oren: Yeah, bartenders are on the list of professions that are allowed to do therapy. But not therapists. Like that’s been getting better I think recently, but for a long time on TV, the moment a character went to talk to a therapist, it’s like, well, obviously this isn’t gonna help. Instead later they’ll go talk to a bartender and they’ll have a breakthrough.
Bunny: Guinan will be the author’s voice and say exactly what they should do.
Chris: As it turns out, the bartender is the shrink in disguise.
Oren: Yeah, Star Trek was really bad about that. I did appreciate that Discovery went out of its way to try to make the ship’s counselor actually be able to do counseling. It took a while, but they got there. I really appreciated it.
Bunny: Yeah, brownie points for that. I can’t think of more than one actual therapist main character right now, but maybe that’s more common in genres that I haven’t read as much of. I feel like crime and thriller might have more of those. I recently read a book — another meta mystery, which annoyed me — called The Silent Patient, which was a thriller mystery, and that had a therapist protagonist. So they’re out there.
Chris: Yeah. I do think that it’s a little tricky because they often don’t go anywhere and they spend all their time in conversation. You can only have so much dialogue. You want somebody who goes out and does things, and they also are required to keep all of the therapy confidential unless there are specific things that are revealed.
So, it’s not that you couldn’t necessarily do therapy, but I just think if you have a traditional therapist that’s licensed, that’s a lot trickier than having, for instance, a priest who talks to people but then also does other things and is more realistically proactive in, for instance, solving community problems.
Bunny: For instance, leading a rebellion.
Everyone: [Chuckle]
Oren: What I always tell my clients is, what you need for your protagonist is you need your protagonist to be equipped to interact with what the story is about. And since spec fic tends to err towards the action side of things–not always, but a lot–and the adventure side of things and the magic side of things, you will need a protagonist who can at some level interact with those things.
If you have a long time, you can build up that stuff. This is why it’s hard to have something like: I’m a completely normal person with no special skills and I’m going to quest to save the world. Because you have to put in a lot of lead time if you want them to develop the skills necessary. And if that’s not what you wanna do, this is how you get characters who are thrown into a group of much more competent NPCs, who then just do everything. And that’s boring. No one wants to watch that.
So you really just need to ask, okay, what is my story about? And then what the character’s job is will have a lot to do with that.
Chris: I think one of my favorite examples of an interesting profession combined with a speculative fiction plot was the show Surreal Estate—
Oren: [Laughter]
Chris: Where they’re all real estate agents and they deal with houses, but then the houses end up being haunted and so they have to resolve the hunting before they sell the house.
Main issue with that show is that honestly, it would be a great premise for a comedy, [trying to hold in laughter] but it actually takes itself a little too seriously for a premise like that.
Bunny: What?
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Which is really funny. But it’s still real campy, so you can still watch it and laugh at it. Not all is lost, but that’s just such a great concept for a comedy. Opportunity’s a little wasted.
Bunny: That’s such a good name too. I gotta say. Surreal Estate. Yes.
Chris: Well, you can see how haunted houses and real estate just naturally go together really well, and how they would then have to deal with the supernatural just in doing their regular job. That’s a good one. That’s very complimentary.
Bunny: Yeah. Another one that I think did a great job pairing the job of its protagonist with the conflict is Arrival. The entire movie Arrival is about communicating with these aliens which have touched down. The main character is a linguist, which makes a lot of sense. It’s about learning to speak another language.
The linguist needs to figure out how to communicate with these creatures who, as it turns out, don’t even experience time the way that humans do.
Chris: One thing I really loved about Arrival is the fact that it showed interesting things about her job that you would not normally know. Because when the aliens arrive, people think that, oh, can you just translate it?
That’s not how that works. We have to already know the language and have encountered it to just translate. So we have to go through a specific process to have a common language for the first time so that we can even start translating in the first place. So it actually showed that process and I just love that. I like to learn interesting things about what other people do and other skill sets and professions and then putting it in a speculative fiction context just adds more novelty to it. So that was really cool. That was a really neat part of the movie.
Bunny: Yeah, there’s not a lot of protagonists who, A) have a job that’s so deeply central to the plot, and B) have a job like linguists. And it’s also just a really good movie. So that helps too.
Oren: I also really like the approach of taking a fairly traditional fantasy/sci-fi job and putting a little twist on it. So for example, monster hunter. Pretty normal job for a protagonist to have, right? But I like the novel Trail of Lightning ’cause she’s not just a monster hunter, she’s a [with emphasis] freelance monster hunter.
She doesn’t do this for free. You gotta pay. You think bullets and monster healthcare are free? No, she has to pay for that stuff. She doesn’t have an employer. She’s not saving into social security. If you want a monster hunted? Pay up.
Chris: I think that’s another thing that people liked about the Witcher. I don’t know if Geralt feels like as a freelancer to me but-
Bunny: Bounty hunters are all freelancers, but they don’t all act like it.
Oren: Geralt makes a lot of mention of coin. He says “coin” a lot. Coin, coin, coin. And in The Mandalorian, he talks about credits and uh… oh gosh what’s the name of that special metal they have?
Bunny: Unobtanium!
Oren: No, there’s real word for it. Beskar!
Chris: Oh, beskar, oh yeah!
Oren: Yeah. Yeah. And it talks about beskar and credits a lot, but for the most part it doesn’t really seem to matter if he gets paid. Whereas that was what made Trail of Lightning, at least the opening, really compelling was that her getting paid actually mattered.
Spoiler. Later on, it doesn’t matter as much, but I liked that beginning. That felt like that really mattered to me.
Bunny: This character’s not a freelancer, but the book was making a lot of commentary on soulless work and in this case literally. It’s the novel Hench. The down on their luck henchmen, the henches who are doing their henching to pay the bills and the supervillains pay the bills.
Again, that’s not the perspective we see often, which makes it interesting.
Oren: One that has potential but I think is also tricky is various gig jobs. Because that’s the thing a lot of people have personal experience with, so there’s a lot of identification there.
But at the same time, it’s also very dismal and bleak.The gig economy is not good, so I think you wanna be careful with that. But I think there’s potential there. You can imagine how that might work in a more novel setting with monsters or sci-fi problems or whatever.
Bunny: It reminds me of the beginning of Snow Crash.
Chris: Even though that was pre gig economy, but at the same time he starts by delivering pizza in the beginning and he’s trying to cut corners to deliver it on time because the company he works for keeps such close tabs on how fast he goes, which gig workers would probably identify with.
Oren: Yeah. And I’ve seen a few stories where characters are gig workers at some point. I haven’t really seen it be a huge plot point other than something like the Kaiju Preservation Society where the protagonist is doing food delivery at the beginning, but then he meets someone who offers him a more interesting job.
Bunny: Yeah, I feel like food delivery is often the base point where the character starts. Didn’t the new Laura Croft movie start with her delivering a pizza or something? I could be totally misremembering that.
Chris: Yeah, there are some professions that are just put in there to emphasize how downtrodden the protagonist is, and that’s definitely one of them.
Bunny: But some of them, like Space Sweepers, have them doing garbage collecting or space salvage, so it’s got the speculative fiction element, but they’re also doing a contracting job. It’s like gig work because they’re not technically employees. They’re technically a contractor, but of course they only have one client so it’s an uneven power dynamic that’s used against them.
Oren: Yeah, I mean Space Sweepers has a very cool premise. I like that a lot. One of my favorite weird ones is the Newsflesh series. I forget what the first one is called. That’s the one I read where the main characters are.
Bunny: [pained] No, they’re bloggers.
Oren: Yeah, they’re bloggers.
Chris: No, that was so bad. I did not finish that book. I could not. It’s like “we wrote this political piece”– Here’s the thing. Running a website, I can tell how bad the titles are–
Bunny: [Laughter]
ChrisB: And it’s like “this was a hit post” and “this is what it was called” and I’m like, no, something with a title would never be a hit. That’s a terrible title.
And your title really matters because that’s what people look at and decide whether to click on something. And of course, somebody who’s a novelist doesn’t necessarily have practice or expertise in making a title that will get clicks. So. Maybe it’s unfair for me to expect it, but I was just like, no, these titles are bad. [Laughter]
And then they go “our site is now number three”, and it’s like number three according to what? What rank? That’s not a normal ranking in Google when you type it in Google.
Oren: But my favorite was that apparently in this world, every website publicly reports their traffic data in real time. So you can always see who has the most active users at any one time. There’s just a board for it.
This does make me wonder. Has anyone who is a professional of some kind watched a movie or read a book about their profession and been like, yeah, that’s how it works. If that has happened to anybody who is listening, please comment and let us know.
Chris: I think you have to have a writer who’s also been in the profession, and then it can definitely work.
I mean, a lot of military sci-fi is based on that. It’s all people who’ve been in the military writing for other people who’ve been in the military about that kind of military experience.
Bunny: Why didn’t they hire a blogger as a consultant? Get some SEO.
Chris and Oren: [Laughing in the background]
Chris: Oh god, that would be kind of hilarious. The other thing is like the idea that any — ‘cause they were writing about politics; they were following a presidential candidate around and writing about him — the idea that a political website would be like number three or whatever it was. No, that’s gonna be cat videos or porn or something.
Bunny: Well, they’re number three behind the porn and the cat videos.
Oren: Yeah. I mean, have we filtered out Taylor Swift in this setting?
Bunny: One job that I would love to see more of, and maybe this goes back to Arrival, but I feel like we don’t have a lot of just translators.
You two have been watching Shogun, right? And the translator is not the main character, but I feel like that show has been demonstrating how ripe a role for that.
Chris: She’s real important. But we have talked about how difficult it is to make. It’s almost the same reason why there aren’t more therapists. It’s difficult to make that interesting because good translation involves a lot of, almost by rote, repeating of what people are saying.
The reason it works in Shogun is ’cause she’s a real bad translator. She’s really bad at her job. And so by paraphrasing and changing what people are saying, which translators are not supposed to do, it makes it fresh, right? So we’re not just like listening to the same dialogue twice all the time.
Bunny: That’s true. I guess it would also be hard in a prose medium. If your viewpoint character is a translator, they’d be hearing both languages in whatever language the story is written in, which would be weird to convey.
Chris: But I think Strange New Worlds does have some of the Star Trek characters do advanced translations, and that’s supposed to take place earlier in Star Trek when Universal Translator doesn’t work as well. Or sometimes in Star Trek they encounter an alien species that can’t be translated. So there have been a few interesting storylines about translating in Star Trek, but I do think that’s a little difficult because at that point it can get really technical into linguistics.
Oren: [imitating Star Trek] Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.
Chris: We can’t translate idioms, we just can’t do it. The memes are untranslatable.
Oren: Shaka, when the walls fell.
Bunny: [Laughter]
Oren: Okay. Well, with that amazingly smooth Star Trek reference, I think we are going to call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you’d like to help us with our unusual jobs, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: Our very unusual jobs of blogging–
Bunny: and podcasting.
Chris: Yeah, well maybe soon a speculative fiction element will enter and we’ll realize that in order to keep blogging, we have to deal with ghosts or time travel or something.
Bunny: [Spooky voice] Audacity is infected with ghosts.
Oren: All right. Before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of marble. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
[closing theme]This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.
As of today, we’ve recorded five hundred of these episodes, which is kind of a lot. To celebrate, we’re gonna slack off and talk about ourselves. Okay, in fairness, we’re mostly answering questions about us. But wow, it’s still much easier than a normal topic. We’ll be back to business as usual next week, so for now, we hope you’ll enjoy getting to know us a little better.
Show Notes The Alchemyst * Apple Podcast Review * 444 – Storytelling Education in School * 445 – Interactive Fiction * Sandwich Discourse * The Poetic Edda * Hunting Monsters * Mary Roach * Because Internet * If Books Could Kill * Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead * All Systems Red * Piranesi * Thud! * A Spell for Chameleon TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Sofia.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[Intro Music]Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren. And with me today is…
Chris: Chris
Oren: …and…
Bunny: Bunny.
Oren: Back in my day, we didn’t have none of this fancy voice chat and editing technology. We all gathered in a single room around an old gaming headset, and then we uploaded the raw footage. And we liked it!
Chris & Bunny: [laugh]
Bunny: Our footage had to go up the hill both ways when it was being uploaded.
Oren: Yeah, there was a lot of snow on the internet back then.
This is our 500th episode since 2013 or so. And to celebrate, we decided to do less work this time.
Bunny: You do the work for us!
Oren: Yeah. We decided to be really lazy for our 500th episode, and we’re just gonna talk about ourselves.
Chris: We’re like the beginning of the Alchemist, when Nicolas Flamel has this journal entry where he just talks about how awesome he is.
Bunny: [laughs] Dear diary, I’m very suave and quite a sexy girl, and I think everyone should listen to me and my life story.
Oren: Death has no hold on me… or whatever it was he said
Bunny: Even death cowers before the Mythcreants podcast.
Oren: Before we get into that, we actually have a few questions from our lovely patrons who had wanted to know things about podcasts, so we’ll go ahead and go through those first.
The first is from Emma, and she asked: What inspired / how did the meta intros come about? And which are your top three?
Chris: When we did our 10 year anniversary podcast, I actually tried to look into this and find out where the meta jokes came from. The thing is trying to find out where something comes from, requires listening to a lot of podcasts because our early ones don’t have any transcripts, so I found one as early as episode 53, which is really early.
Oren: What?
Bunny: Wow.
Chris: But I didn’t wanna listen to the 50 episodes before that, but they certainly became more common. So that one was me. But what I noticed is a pattern of one of us introducing an episode and then Oren, cause of course it was Oren making a meta joke.
Oren & Bunny: [laugh]
Chris: …And so I think that we picked up on that. And of course we would always alternate who was introducing a topic. That’s a lot of pressure because you’re trying to introduce it in an interesting way. So I think coming up with a meta joke was a pretty reliable way to create an intro that was better than just, okay, and today we’re talking about blah, blah.
So by the time that Wes became a host, in 2017 or end of 2016, that’s about the time when they became pretty constant. But I think before that they were just more and more frequent.
Oren: And even once Wes joined, there are a few where we don’t have them. Wes took a little while to warm up to the idea, cause he had real things to say.
Chris & Bunny: [laugh]
Oren: At this point, honestly, starting an episode by telling you what the topic is feels really boring to me. We gotta spice it up a little bit. Not too much, though. I don’t wanna have too much shtick. I need the perfect amount, a mild amount of shtick. I hate starting a YouTube video and before it gets to the topic, it’s five minutes of the presenter just goofing off. That’s too much. That’s too long.
Bunny: You don’t wanna get stuck in the shtick. You don’t wanna stick in the shtick. Stop sticking in the shticking!
Oren: I’ll just leave that as a note on any YouTube video that I don’t like. From now on. I don’t know if I could pick a top three. We’ve done so many.
Chris: It’s honestly hard to remember them.
Oren: Yeah!
Chris: The whole idea of a discussion podcast, it’s all ad hoc and very ephemeral. Comes in one ear out the other. So it’s hard because again, to pick a favorite, I would almost have to go through the mall. Some of them really cause a lot of banter and a lot of interactions. We go back and forth. Those are definitely the better ones. The ones that I remember.
The few that I remember, there was one after we had that hilarious review on Apple podcasts talking about like the holistic cup of depression. There was one episode where instead of just opening with, you’re listening to Mythcreants podcast, I started with, you’re listening to the Mythcreant Kettle of Soulless Commentary with your hosts…
Bunny: [laugh]
And then Oren and Wes, they were supposed to answer me, but they just started laughing instead. And then I was like, so you’re not supposed to laugh. You’re supposed to be straight faced. And they’re like, you didn’t warn us so…
There’s also the one where, as part of the joke, I told Wes that he was supposed to be the annoying character with the repetitive comedic gimmick, and then he made a weird noise that was genuinely funny, completely undermining my intro. So, I think those ones are the ones that I actually stuck in my memory.
Oren: I looked back through some and I had the same problem, Chris. I just don’t remember them at all. But the one that I remembered is actually more recent ’cause my memory’s not as good and it was bad metaphors episode that we did a little while back. It’s only like a few weeks old at this point, but I just thought that our opening about oppressed podcasters, it was unintentionally very good.
Bunny: [laughs] Well, gee, thank you. I was pulling from ample source material.
Oren: I love podcasting, but I’m also just embarrassed about podcasting because some of the people who podcast are very weird about it.
Bunny: Not familiar with that.
Oren: It’s a whole thing because nowadays. Podcasting is unfortunately associated with very weird people on YouTube who do podcasting on the most unfortunate topics, and I don’t think that’s a hundred percent fair. There are a lot of other podcasts that don’t do that, but that kind of podcast is very prevalent.
Bunny: It’s definitely found its cultural definition, and that stretches in some weird directions. It’s like when you go down to the fourth definition on Miriam Webster, that’s those special podcast people.
Oren: And there’s also a group of those people who are known for doing nothing except podcasting. And so it creates this impression that they are sort of detached from reality and just going from podcast to podcast talking about a world they never experience.
Bunny: [laughs]
Oren: You could also tell they’re detached. cause most of these people are like men’s rights activists and they’re detached no matter how much they know about the world. But the fact that they don’t seem to do anything outside of podcasting also lends this very surreal bent to a lot of what they say.
Chris: I have to say, I only started listening to some podcasts recently. Because usually my audio listing time was devoted to fiction because I gotta fit that in somehow. On top of everything else I’m doing.
And so, it was interesting to hear what other people were doing after 10 years of podcasting and not listening to podcasts.
Bunny: Wow. I’m surprised you avoided it.
Chris: What I realized is that we are very high energy. We’re very hyper, apparently, in comparison to a lot of other podcasters who tend to be more laid back often, talk a little slower. It feels like most people have less banter than we do. That was my impression as to how our style differs from others.
But I do get really impatient with other podcasts that are supposed to be on the topic, and I like personality, but I don’t really wanna listen for 10 minutes about what shirt they’re wearing today and other things like that.
Oren: I tend to be the same way with my podcast listening. Like for example, I would hate this episode, that we’re recording right now. I would be like, what? This isn’t what I signed up for and I would just skip to the next one.
I get really nervous whenever I listen to a super well produced podcast. Cause we do our best, but we don’t have the time or the budget to do that. Every time I listen to one, I kind of wonder, is this what people expect us to sound like?
Bunny: Oh, they’ve gotta be used to this by now.
Oren: Yeah, we’ve been here for a while. Does being 10 years old give you the right to slack off a bit? Cause you’ve been doing it for a long time.
Chris: Well, I feel like if we were gonna drive people away it probably would’ve happened already.
Bunny: Yeah. They’ve drunk their holistic cup of depression and left.
Oren: Bunny, we never heard what your favorite meta intro is. Do you remember one?
Bunny: Oh, it was actually the very first podcast we recorded with me, although I think it came out in a different order. The first one I appeared on the show was the Writing Instruction podcast.
Oren: episode 444.
Bunny: Oh yeah, that’s my special lucky number. This was then the first podcast that I led, which was the interactive fiction one. And I was able to keep the bit going. I remembered that I had said, skip ahead to the five-minute mark to hear me laugh maniacally.
Oren: [laughs]
Bunny: Um, and then I remembered to do that, which I was very proud of.
Chris: [laughs]
Bunny: I don’t know if anyone noticed that, but I also enjoy being the podcast villain. I think every podcast should have a villain.
Chris: [laughs] Yeah. You think these are laughs but really they’re nervous laughs because Bunny has some weapons that are getting closer.
Oren: Laughs of terror.
Bunny: Yeah. My microphones double as cudgels.
Chris: That is, I think the best part of having such a long running podcast. It’s how it builds on itself until new people come and listen and they’re like, I do not understand what you are talking about. What is a sandwich? Why are you talking about sandwiches so much?
Bunny: That is good recurring guest Sandwich Discourse.
Oren: Oh man, that is a struggle, right? I don’t want to make our podcast unlistenable to people who are not familiar with it, cause how far back are you supposed to go? We have too many episodes, you can’t listen to all of them.
But at the same time, it’s unavoidable that we are gonna develop some recurring banter. Otherwise we would sound fake.
You gotta do what you gotta do. I hope that sandwich discourse is a well-known enough term on the internet that most people have an idea of what I’m talking about, but maybe not.
Bunny: It’s very easily Googleable and fall-down-rabbit-hole as well.
Oren: There’s diagrams.
Bunny: Oh, there are diagrams. There’s cube theory and alignment charts and all that.
Oren: Okay, so our next question is from Julia. And Julia was sneaky and actually has two questions in one.
Chris: Is this like more of a comment?
Oren: No.
Chris: I don’t have so much a comment. Question. Is a comment a question?
Oren: Oh man. The worst I’ve been at multiple panels where people have lined up to ask a question, and I have been the only one with a question.
Chris: Right after, somebody’s like, Really. We just want questions. No comments, please. Just questions. And then people line up.
I get it now, after listening to more podcasts. People have told this before where they’re just itching to be part of the discussion and bring up something that we haven’t brought up.
Sometimes people are like, why didn’t you bring up this story? Is, this story was an obvious example. Sorry, there’s so many stories out there. We can’t bring up every story in existence that’s relevant.
Oren: Well, I mean, we can. We choose not to, just so you know.
Chris: [laughs]
Oren: We have actually read them all, and if there’s one we didn’t bring up, it was a personal affront to you.
Bunny: Our brains are so full of stories that they just bulge out of our skulls and we have to drag them behind us.
Oren: The actual questions are: First question is, do you guys have jobs outside of mythcreants? And will you ever sell a mug saying big holistic gulp of soulless commentary on them?
Bunny: [laughs] I mean, I feel like we have to.
Oren: The answer to the second one is, sadly, probably not. Because our best research suggests that most people don’t want merch.
Chris: We’ve dabbled in merch a little bit, but the internet is just saturated with merch. There’s so many influencers doing merch, and that’s not really what our followers want. What they want is for us to help them with our story, because of course, that’s what we write about. Makes perfect sense.
Oren: Really unreasonable of them. [laughs]
Chris: So yeah, that’s what we’re focusing on.
Bunny: We need to start including examples in our articles that are like T-shirt-centric…
Oren: [laughs]
Bunny: …So that slowly they’ll be inundated with a desire to buy a T-shirt.
Chris: Start separate fashion content that’s very picky.
Bunny: There once was a lonely T-shirt, wishing it had a wearer. It was purple.
Oren: [laughs] Okay. But for the other one: Do you have jobs outside of Mythcreants?
For me, that depends on whether or not you count my editing as outside of Mythcreants. Not really, if not, cause half of my time is creating stuff for the website or running the website or answering questions or all that stuff. And then the other half is editing client work. So that’s pretty much my entire day.
Chris: I did, for the first nine years. I was a freelance web designer and developer, which honestly is why we can afford to have a big elaborate site that takes a lot of work. And if you hire an outside developer, that’s real expensive.
In fact, just last year, LitReactor closed down, and a big reason they cited is that they had a founding member who was a web developer and that person was no longer involved and they couldn’t afford to redo the site. And the site had gotten old and wasn’t mobile compatible, all that stuff.
So, yeah, pretty important skills, which I will hopefully maintain enough to continue working on the site. But what happened is that just doing Mythcreants on top of a day job, it’s too much long term. It’s not something that I can continue for the rest of my life. I would burn out. And I realized that I just can’t get Mythcreants to a place where it could be my primary income source unless I put my day work and use that time to develop revenue.
So fingers crossed, that was just a couple years ago that I’ve wound down my day job to work on Mythcreants. So here’s hoping it works out and I won’t run out of savings.
Bunny: Anyway, this episode is brought to you by Squarespace.
Oren: [laughs]
Chris: [laughs] No, no! No, no!
Oren: I had a kind of basic warehouse job for the first couple years, and I was working there. It was at a gaming company, and I worked there basically in the hopes that I could move up to a creative position. But I had been there for a total of four years by the time I left because it just became clear that was never happening. And so it’s like, well, this place is not paying me enough for the time I’m spending here.
To be clear, that was something I could do because I’m very fortunate to have a family that is both supportive and capable of supporting me. So that’s not something a lot of people could do, but in my position, it was the right choice.
Bunny: Going off of that, because I am a youngin and a foolhardy youngin, I am currently looking to get into the game industry. Unfortunately, it’s a hot mess.
Oren: Yeah, a little bit.
Bunny: With tons and tons of layoffs, like over 10,000 people have been laid off in the past year across the industry, probably more. And suffice to say, there aren’t a lot of narrative design roles open, especially not for entry level people. It’s always like senior lead, lead senior five years. And then you’ll see an entry level job and it’s like three to five years experience, and I don’t have that. So I am looking for work in that area currently.
But aside from that, I am working retail. I work at a big outdoor retailer that most people have probably heard of, so I get to interact with the public and all the special people that entails.
Oren: You could start a podcast about that.
Bunny: I could start a podcast about that. It would be called a Big Outdoor Retailer Special People. Rolls off the tongue.
But yeah, I actually graduated college this last May and when I was in college, I majored in creative writing, minored in philosophy and computer science, two thirds of which are highly unemployable. One third of which I don’t think I’m good enough to get a job in.
Chris: I will have to admit that Bunny and I had had a conversation and I was like, do you really wanna do creative writing as your major and computer science as your minor? And I even went so far as to accidentally slip up and be like, yeah, that’s the wrong choice.
Bunny: Look!
Chris: But Bunny was like, excuse me. Don’t tell me what to major in. I’m like, okay, you’re right. That was a little far.
Bunny: Look, you’re not wrong though, but I am certainly not gonna be finding any hot roles in philosophy, but that’s okay. I can argue ontology a little better now.
Oren: That has made the podcast a lot better. So really, who are we to complain?
Bunny: That’s true. Technically bringing in revenue. If anyone credits their subscription to me, which, wow, what are you doing?
But yeah, I’m taking the summer off before I really start job hunting and get myself more thoroughly crushed to work on my portfolio. I’m making games. Just please someone pay me, someone pay me to do that. That’d be great.
Oren: And then finally, we have a third question. This is from our good friend Perspiring Writer, and they want to know: What are your personal favorite and least favorite books? Which could definitely be an entire episode, but we got 10 minutes, so we’ll do our best.
Bunny: Oh man. This was a hard question. Go ahead.
Oren: So first, I don’t think it’s fair to compare all books together. I just don’t think that’s something I can reasonably do.
If I was gonna go with nonfiction, I’ve read some nonfiction that I really liked recently. I really liked Jackson Crawford’s Poetic Edda translation.
Chris: Obviously related to a fiction writing project he’s working on.
Oren: Maybe I just like Old Norse. You don’t know.
Chris: The fantasy writer tells you their favorite nonfiction book is Old Norse. Like, okay, but this is clearly for a fiction project.
Bunny: Okay, suuuuure.
Oren: I found a bit about how Loki and Hell had their own undead soldiers to fight the Einherjar, and no one has written about them as far as I could tell, and I’m gonna tell their story.
Bunny: Goddammit, somebody has to!
Oren: Someone’s gotta.
Anyway, I’ve also really liked Hunting Monsters by Darren Naish, which is about cryptids and the psychological phenomena that lead to people seeing cryptids.
Bunny: Oh, I really wanna read that one.
Oren: Yeah, it’s really good.
Bunny: It’s been on my list.
Oren: And how sometimes people just wanna sell newspapers and so they say that they saw a monster.
Bunny: For my nonfiction–I guess I’ll jump on that there—I have trouble with this just because there’s so many categories of books and so many that I have positive feelings towards, but wouldn’t necessarily describe as my favorite. So I tried to narrow myself down by basically saying it can’t just be a book that I’ve enjoyed. It has to be a book that I would read multiple times or have read multiple times.
But for nonfiction, my favorite author in nonfiction is Mary Roach, who writes about weird scientific topics essentially. And so, my favorite of her books is Stiff. Which is about what happens to human cadavers. I find that really interesting.
But she’s also written one about the digestive system.
Oren: Is that where the cadaver ends up?
Bunny: Cadavers show up in a lot of places talking about science. The cadaver’s gonna come through the door at some point.
Chris: The bar of reading it more than once… for me, nonfiction is too high. I’m not gonna be able to name a nonfiction book that’s like that.
Bunny: That’s fair.
Chris: The one that stands out is something that I did enjoy all the way through, because a lot of times with nonfiction, I will buy it and then I will skim it or just pick out the parts that I want. cause usually I’m seeking particular pieces of information.
And I’m not searching on Google for it because there’s just so much trash that comes up these days that I’d prefer to buy a book that has no ads in it. Well, some of them do [laughs].
Bunny: But they don’t stall the book down to the point that you need to restart it.
Chris: But one that I did enjoy all the way through is Because Internet, that one is about the evolution of language on the internet. And how technology changes and how people express themselves online and what is the equivalent of a gesture, for instance, in person and all that stuff. And I found that very fun.
Oren: If we’re gonna talk about our least favorite nonfiction books, I got one of those too. Of ones that I have read all the way through—because if we include ones that I’ve only read, parts of it’s Atlas Shrugged hands down. but I have not read all of Atlas Shrugged.
Chris: Atla Shrugged is fiction.
Bunny: Is it not fiction?
Oren: Oh, right. Yeah, it is fiction.
Chris: Sorry, that was on my least favorite fiction list. Maybe somebody wishes it was nonfiction, but it’s definitely a fiction book.
Oren: That’s a good point. I don’t know how I got that mixed up, but books of nonfiction, books that I’ve read all the way through. My least favorite is probably The Blank Slate.
At least of the ones that I feel comfortable mentioning on the podcast. Cause there are a few that I don’t think anyone’s heard of, and I’m not gonna mention them in case they get more marketing. But this one’s already like a bazillion bestseller and I hate it so much.
Cause the whole book is basically arguing that we don’t need social safety nets or anti-discrimination laws because we’ve actually solved all of our problems already.
Bunny: [laughs]
Oren: But it’s so subtly written that if you aren’t looking for it, you don’t notice that. And as you’re reading, it sounds like it’s basically disproving the idea that people care about each other and that you should just free market solutions baby to everything.
And it’s pretty convincing. I only figured out it was all wrong cause it got to the end and that was when he suddenly said, oh yeah, by the way, we don’t need anti-discrimination laws for gender anymore because the wage gap’s not real. And I was like, hang on a second, my mom just got an equity raise. cause the university did a study and found out she was getting paid less than her male counterparts with the same experience in the same role. So clearly that’s not right. And then once I realized that the book could just be wrong about the things it was claiming, everything else fell apart.
Bunny: Yikes.
Oren: Yeah, it’s a bad book and it’s a bad book because it cloaks itself in seeming reasonable and it has tricked a lot of people.
Bunny: So many of these big theory like economics or law pop nonfiction books. We were talking about podcasts earlier. I know I got you thrown onto a podcast that made you unproductive, which I’m still not guilty about. But every book they read on that podcast is basically that like they’re just saying stuff in these books.
Oren: They’ve done another of that same guy’s books. I’m hoping they’ll do The Blank Slate eventually cause that would be cathartic release for me. Listen to them tear it apart.
Chris: You should send them some fan mail.
Oren: Oh, I should, that’s a good idea.
Bunny: You could, that’s true.
Oren: And you’d know how to write it too. Cause we’ve received lots of mail and I can tell them that I’ve developed a parasocial relationship with them and that I would like them to do the thing that I care about.
Chris: Gosh, listening to podcasts, I also felt like I’d experienced the parasocial relationship thing for the first time on the fan end. And I was like, I do not like this.
Oren: [laughs]
Chris: I do not like this. This is frustrating. Sorry folks, that it’s happened to you.
Bunny: I think when I was splitting up my list into most and least favorite books to put it wordily, I feel like I had to go through in a couple tiers, partly because my memory is short and I was only able to think about the last couple books I’ve read, and partly because I feel like I’m pretty good at having avoided the things I will actively despise. I think I’m pretty good at identifying those and then not reading them. However, there are a few.
One is Cathedral, which I’ve mentioned on this podcast before. It’s a short story that I was forced to read in multiple creative writing classes.
The story itself is fine. It does include the phrase, juicy thigh.
Oren & Chris: Ew.
Bunny: But I didn’t like it and I didn’t understand why we had to read it multiple times. There are other short stories in the world, please. Choose any other, so I have a dislike of that one.
Chris: Yeah. For me, in fiction, I just stopped reading fiction very quickly if I don’t like it. And so the ones that stand out in my mind as being my least favorite are the ones that I was compelled to finish, even though I don’t like them, like Atla Shrugged. That one was not actually assigned to me, to be fair.
We were doing an assignment where we were pairing up in class and we had to choose a book together. And my partner suggested it, and I did not know it was over a thousand pages long. And then I was committed to reading it.
Bunny: Oh gosh.
Chris: So yeah, that and Catcher in the Rye.
Oren: [laughs]
Chris: Catcher in the Rye was assigned in class.
Bunny: There was a book I read for my senior thesis where I was studying mysteries and thrillers because I was writing something along those lines. My professor hadn’t read this, but she was like, oh, I’ve heard good things about this book.
Chris: Mm. That’s definitely something you shouldn’t trust. I’ve heard this is good, but is it though?
Bunny: I looked at it. What is it though? That’s right. And it’s this book called Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, which was pitched to me as a thriller mystery. It wasn’t, it was mostly the main character hanging out in the woods. And then murders happen around her and like the towns folk are shitty and she’s got a unique way of narrating and then— spoilers—It turns out she was the killer. So it was also a meta mystery. No.
Chris: Sounds like it did not actually succeed in being tense.
Bunny: No, it felt meandering.
Chris: That would be hard if she knows that she’s the killer and you’re trying to make her act realistically, why would she be worried?
Bunny: She thinks she’s the killer, but she thinks she’s doing it on behalf of the animals, but she’s still killing people, which was obscured by her first person narration. And she would’ve been thinking about that. And when I talked about this with my professor, my professor was even like, yeah, that seems like a bad decision on the author’s part. It just shouldn’t have been pitched as a thriller. The characters spend a lot of time sitting around and translating poetry.
Yeah…
Chris: Yeah.
Oren: Is that not thrilling?
Bunny: [laughs]
Chris: Okay, let’s talk about the fiction books we like.
Oren: Yeah. Cause we’re pretty much outta time already. But anyway, we’re gonna finish this question.
Chris: I did not know it would take us so long to answer three questions. Well, four questions, Julia.
Oren: Thanks Julia.
Bunny: Thanks Julia.
Oren: Of the books that I’ve read recently, I wanna pick either all Systems Red or Piranesi cause they’re both really good.
Chris: I’ve read all Systems read three times now, so I, that has to qualify as my favorite.
Oren: But I think my all-time favorite book is probably still going to be Thud! from Discworld. There are a lot of good Discworld books, but I think that one’s my favorite. It’s the culmination of several storylines and it moment in Vimes’ parenting storyline, which I found really, really touching. So I think that one’s probably gonna be my favorite.
And my least favorite of books I’ve actually read is probably a Spell for Chameleon, which is so gross and so bad, and also so boring. It’s not even bad in an interesting way. It’s just bad.
Chris: What’s your favorite, Bunny?
Bunny: Well, again, narrowing it down to things I’ve read multiple times. Wildwood by Colin Meloy, who’s also a singer for the Decemberists, interestingly, and his wife did the artwork. Wildwood was a book I loved growing up, and I still love, it’s just, I just really captured my imagination and saw this interesting world and I just love the characters and the setting and the vibes of it all, and I’ve read it many times. So that has to qualify.
I also really like Good Omens. That was the first Pratchett I was exposed to and it went over well. And I’ve read that one multiple times as well.
I also just really like a whole laundry list of graphic novels, but I think The Girl From the Sea, which is about a selkie human romance between two young girls. There’s no creepy skin stealing, thank God.
And then the Tea Dragon Society, which is about these dragons that like grow tea leaves. And when you drink the tea made from the tea leaves, you get to relive the memories of the dragons and their owners.
Oren: We finally answered the questions. So, I guess our 500 episode was actually just a mailbag, so that’s great. Good job everybody.
Bunny: Everyone loves a mailbag.
Oren: I think with that, we’re gonna have to call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you would like us to make 500 more episodes—but please give us 10 years for real—Consider supporting us on Patreon so that we can keep going. It’s not a given that we will last another five years. So just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Amon Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
[Outro Music]This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Coulton.
A writer can be a great thing, but would two writers be better? Three? Theoretically, there’s no limit to the number of authors you can combine, Voltron style. Though there may be practical limitations, depending on the project and how you approach writing. This week, we’re talking about co-writing, a practice that has driven some authors to success while baffling many others. What are the benefits of co-writing, and what are the downsides? And perhaps most importantly: who do we get angry at when a co-written story disappoints us?
Show Notes Sanderson Takes Over Wheel of Time * This is How You Lose the Time War * Sorcery and Cecilia * The Expanse * Warriors * Animorphs * The Long Earth * Center Your Darling * First Avatar Episode * Starship Down * Alan Smithee TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Lady Oscar.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[Intro Music]Bunny: Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Bunny, and with me today is…
Oren: Oren
Bunny: …and…
Chris: Chris.
Bunny: We’re talking about co-writing today, and I think really the only way to make sure that it’s truly co-writing is to trade off each sentence, and to have each sentence be roughly equal length. So I’ll start, and we’ll go in a circle. “The worm was having a good day.” Oren.
Oren: Yes, “…and the early bird was also there.” I think you all know what happens next.
Bunny: Uh-oh. Chris, you wanna conclude us?
Chris: “The worm ultimately had a very bad day.”
Bunny: Oh no. That was beautiful. That really teaches me something about loss and hardship. And stories taking unexpected directions.
So, I think co-writing, beyond playing an improv game, can be broadly defined as just when there are multiple people involved in creating a story. And that can take a lot of different forms, like obviously TV shows and games and stuff have writers’ rooms and teams, which might shift throughout the show’s runtime. And it might even get new creative directors. That sort of setup is also fairly hierarchical, so everyone’s writing towards the vision of one or two people who are the showrunners.
There’s also graphic novels, which I would argue are co-written, even if there’s only technically one writer, because the images have a big effect on how the story is told. So I think that’s also a kind of co-writing.
There’s also what happens when people trade off between books in a series, so, like, Wheel of Time started with one guy and ended with another guy. I don’t think that quite counts as co-writing, but it’s certainly still multiple people having inputs into the creative process.
Oren: If you’re a real weirdo, you get dice involved. [Bunny laughs] Then y’all sit around pretending to be wizards for an evening.
Bunny: I don’t know who would do that. That sounds weird. Disturbed behavior, very strange.
Oren: Big old nerds.
Bunny: They just sit around and co-write together for a couple hours every week. There’s also ghostwriting, which I don’t think really counts. If you do count it, that’s probably one of the main ways that co-writing happens with regard to novels. I feel like novels are the hardest thing to co-write simply because you can’t do things like assigning particular characters to a particular writer. There’s just so many words.
Oren: Au contraire, you definitely can. [laughing] It’s arguably less convenient. So depending on how you split the responsibilities, you can definitely have one person who is responsible for the dialogue of a character. Depending on the premise of the story, that can be easier or more difficult. If it’s something like This Is How You Lose the Time War it’s very easy, because that’s a series of letters.
Chris: Similar to Sorcery and Cecelia, two writers that were writing letters back and forth to each other is how they wrote the book.
Oren: But supposedly with, for example, The Expanse, which is written by two authors who go under a single pen name, supposedly Daniel Abraham was in charge of some characters more than others, and then Ty Franck had more influence on the other characters. Abraham in particular is noted for writing a lot of Miller, the detective, because that was based off of Abraham’s D&D character. It wasn’t actually D&D, but it was whatever roleplaying game they were playing as a setup for The Expanse. Now that doesn’t mean Abraham would write Miller’s line of dialogue and then he would turn the page and hand it to Franck, who would then write Holden’s dialogue. I’m not saying they did it that way.
Chris: You could probably have improv-ed chats to get ideas for how the conversation goes if you want.
Oren: And when it comes to ghostwriting, that is often a very squishy topic. Sometimes a ghostwriter is literally just told by a celebrity, “Write a book and put my name on it.” And then sometimes you have something more like the Animorphs ghostwriting. As the series went on, Applegate was busy and didn’t have time to do all of the writing herself. Supposedly, K. A. Applegate is already two people, like supposedly that also incorporated a lot of the work of her husband, and then they brought in more writers and Applegate would create outlines and then give those to the ghostwriters who would write dialogue and fill in description.
Nowadays, the impression I get is that we would be more likely to just call that co-writing, and those authors would get their names on the books. It would be less common for that to be done in secret now. That’s just a feeling I’m getting from hearing people talk about it.
Chris: I get the sense that with an IP work where somebody is hired, a writer is hired to write a story in an existing franchise, publishers don’t necessarily want some people to know that this is an IP work. A lot of times a writer does get their name on those, but not necessarily, and it could be secretive, and they want all the books to be under the same pen name.
Bunny: Yeah. One of my favorite book series growing up as a kid, Warriors, was four people writing under the pen name Erin Hunter, and I have no idea how that work was split up. My little kid brain was not nearly developed enough to be like, “Yes, I bet this was written by writer number two, and this has the oeuvre of writer number three.”
Chris: I suspect that most IP books are more heavily supervised and edited. All the contracts are different, but I think there’s more likely to be an editor who goes in there and just makes changes on their own to make them fit whatever franchise it is.
Oren: And sometimes we are fortunate enough to have interviews and behind-the-scenes material where the writers tell us, and that’s how we know a lot about what was going on with The Expanse. We know that Ty Franck created the setting originally, and he was trying to pitch it as an MMO, which I have so many questions about how that was supposed to work. Do you mean like a space MMO, like they were supposed to fly the ships around, or are you imagining that they were like a people-scale MMO, and they would use ships to fast travel. That sounds really wild. And when that didn’t go anywhere, he ran it as a roleplaying game for a while. And as someone developing a setting for both prose and a roleplaying campaign, I can see that makes him smarter and more attractive.
[Everyone laughs]Bunny: How clever and sexy of him to do such a thing.
Oren: I know, right? Just a really classy act. And then he brought Abraham on board, and that was when they decided to go the novel route, and they collaborated on different parts of the story, basically. And so we know that, because they’ve talked about it in interviews.
But then other times it’s a lot less clear. Like the Long Earth books are co-written by Stephen Baxter and Terry Pratchett. We don’t know how they split those roles. As far as I know, neither of them ever said. There are some characters who are a lot more Pratchett than others, like Lobsang, the AI airship who believes he is a reincarnation of a Tibetan motorcycle repairman. That is just a Discworld character right there, let me tell you.
Chris: [laughing] It does speak to some of the liabilities of co-writing. It can be weird if the work is written in two completely different styles. And sometimes it’s fine. Again, if you have characters by different authors that can give them separate personalities, that makes them distinct, and separate voices, that makes them more realistic as characters. With something like that, I would be nervous about, is a story tonally unified. There is Pratchett doing his thing.
Oren: It worked fine in The Long Earth. The Long Earth had its problems, but I don’t think clashing writing styles was one of them. I did notice that the book felt less and less Pratchett as the series went on, which makes sense, his health was declining by then. I don’t imagine he had a lot of time for co-writing, so that part I was made a little sad by, but I don’t think there was any serious clashing.
I have noticed that in other books, for example, Good Omens, the book. It’s very noticeable that of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse three are entirely evil and have no redeeming characteristics. And then there’s Death, which is just Death from the Discworld novels and is almost a good guy. That always struck me as weird, right? It’s not like you couldn’t have Death be different than the others, but the book never gives any indication of why that would be. It’s just that’s how Pratchett likes to write Death. And I love that Death, so I’m not complaining too hard, but…
Chris: Sometimes writers divide up the works in different ways to try to mitigate the unevenness. Either you have one person do the entire first draft, and the other person do like a second pass, or they edit each other’s writing. Or as we said, if you have the idea that there’s two different viewpoint characters, they might naturally sound a little bit more different. Or two people writing to each other, two different authors will give each their own voice, so there are ways to mitigate the style unevenness, but sometimes that can take work to resolve.
Oren: Yeah, I have tried co-writing a couple of times. I’ve discovered I’m not good at it. I have not communicated well with the person I was writing with, and I would end up taking the story in a direction that they didn’t want it to go, and I didn’t talk about it to them enough. Then they would look at it and be like, “This is not at all what I wanted, and I’m so far into this I don’t feel like I can stop.” And then the project would fizzle.
Chris: I think that’s the number one downside. We talk to a lot of writers about trying to make their stories cohesive, and we talk to them about “find out your darling,” and “center your darling,” and make everything about that, and it’s just really easy for two different writers to have two different darlings and to try to put the story in two different directions, because they care about different things. And so I think for co-writing to work well, you really need writers that have–either are very determined to make it work [laughing], because they’re like, both famous, this is a great opportunity. But in a lot of cases, co-writers with just very similar tastes.
Like Sorcery and Cecelia, one of the reasons it works well, even though it’s got what are basically two different viewpoints in different locations, because that gives them an excuse to write letters to each other, is that they’re both cute little regency romances, fantasy regency romances. Both of the authors are into that, when a reader reads them, if you like one, you’re more likely to like the other, and it gives the whole book a more unified feel despite the fact that each writer has their own playground to work in. Whereas if you try to work with somebody who just likes different things in their books, it’s gonna be a lot harder.
Bunny: And even when everyone’s aligned on the goal and the story and where we’re going with it, and so on and so forth, there can still be little blips where someone has a strange amount of passion for one particular small thing that doesn’t quite fit what everyone else is going for.
So like right now I’m writing a script for a game with two other people, and we’ve had a couple of cases. So what we’ve done is essentially divvy up all of the characters in the game between us. And whenever we write a scene with our character and then another person’s character, usually one of the characters is leading the scene. And so that’ll probably be the person who writes the first draft of it, and then they just add “this is what I want to convey” type of dialogue for the other person’s characters. So you’ll write your character’s dialogue and the serious tone of the scene, and then you want the response from their character to have the gist of like, “Oh no, that’s awful! Frowny face, frowny face.” So you write that, and then later they’ll come back through and replace that with dialogue in that character’s actual voice.
Chris: Have you ever had a circumstance where somebody came in and saw that and was like, “Yeah, I actually think my character would react in a different way,” and that created problems? Or did you all outline together closely enough that hasn’t been an issue?
Bunny: We did a lot of outlining and brainstorming together, so I don’t think we’ve had that be a huge issue. I’m trying to think…we’ve had instances where we get attached to our various NPCs and want them to have bigger roles than they should in the story.
Chris: [laughing] I have also encountered this, where somebody else who was just like helping me a little bit fell in love with the character that was supposed to be a random side character and wanted to give him, like, all the candy.
Bunny: Right, in this game, people will be clicking through this dialogue. We don’t want it to get too long. People are gonna be like, “Why does this random bug guy have deep and tragic backstory about the main character’s brother?” And then we’ll have to go in and talk about that and see if we really wanna center this character more, or whether this is just going to confuse the player.
Oren: Mind your own business, that’s why.
Bunny: [laughing] Sit down. Let me talk about the bug guy’s trauma, star-crossed lovers. So we’ve outlined and stuck together closely enough, I think our main strength, and the thing that’s made this particular co-writing experience work so well, is that we all communicate a lot, and I think that is probably the most important thing when you’re co-writing, on an interpersonal level. Like, the cohesion part, obviously that’s important, but that’s a problem of the script. Getting the script out there, you’ve gotta communicate. There is no way to co-write if everyone’s not on the same page.
Oren: Yeah. That’s why my attempts at it have all failed. By the same token, I also think that just my temperament with writing makes co-writing difficult for me, because I’ve also tried the other way where we all have access to the same document, and we can see it as it’s being written. And I hated it so much. When I’m actually writing, getting the words out is hard, and having to constantly worry, like, “Oh man, am I gonna have to delete this because my co-writer didn’t like it? Oh, no. Now I can’t write at all.” Now, obviously, that’s not a problem for a lot of people, so I’m not suggesting that’s a general issue with it, but certainly it was for me.
Chris: I mean, for me, the opposite can be a concern. This experience is not fun because I’m stressing about the fact that I want to change what the other person has written. And it’s one thing if they, for instance, hired me as an editor, because I’m there to give them feedback. But I also know as an editor that their vision is the most important, and all of my suggestions are in service to their vision for the story. They are the creative here. But when you’re co-writing, and you’re like, “Okay, that plot point seems a little contrived to me, and I’d like to change this, and other things, I think I would like this to just be a little different,” then every single point you would have to explain to the other person why you don’t like their version.
Bunny: I think, Oren, you make a good point about the temperament that you have to get to successfully co-write. Whatever temperament you have towards writing, there’s no good or bad necessarily, but I feel like there are better and worse temperaments to bring to a co-writing scenario. You cannot be defensive, for example, when it comes to co-writing. You’re gonna have eyes on your work constantly, and depending on the amount of co-writers, like you’re always going to be reading each other’s work and giving feedback and rewriting.
Like, we just got out essentially the third draft of our script to our next round of beta readers. We were supposed to have it done earlier this week, and then we just kept bouncing it back and forth with like, “I’ve resolved these comments and I made some comments on your comments. Could you take a look at that?” “I made some comments on your comments, and added a few things here and there. Could you take a look and review that?” And you gotta be willing to do that quite a lot.
Chris: It also brings up the question of when is co-writing faster, and when is it slower? Faster writing could potentially be a huge benefit, because prolific writers definitely have a big career advantage. And it’s not just because they have more books to sell, because you could be like, well, I have more books to sell, but now we have to split the profits between two people. But I think just putting out stories more often helps writers keep the attention of their fans, and build a reputation, and all of those things that are beyond having twice as many books to sell. So that’s a big benefit if you can put out books more fast by working with somebody. But if you’re going back and forth a lot and everything has to be coordinated, do you ever feel like it’s just really slow?
Bunny: I feel like the pace that this is going at, because this is a game project, and we’re part of a pretty big team, and we’re all doing this as a portfolio project–we’ve been pretty regimented with schedules and stuff because we have a producer, and she’s been pretty on top of things. She’s actually one of the other writers.
We’re pretty lucky in that regard, but I think if it were just us three writers, we would be bouncing it back and forth for eternity. Being like, “I’ve commented on your comments.” “I’ve commented on your comments.” “I’ve made some more comments,” like that sort of thing. It probably would’ve been faster if one of us had been the only one writing it, but I don’t think we would’ve had as interesting of a product.
Oren: It definitely helps if you have one person who can be in charge of saying, “Okay, we’ve debated this enough. We have to make a decision.”
Bunny: That was what was happening last night, when I finally got the scripts out. I was like, “All right, I’m locking this. Resolve the comments. Some of these lines we’re still not happy with, we can revise them later. We need to stay on schedule.” This project is lined up into “sprints,” which are just sections of time with specific goals in them. That helps keep things on track. But obviously not every set of co-writers will have that sort of thing.
Oren: Closest I’ve ever come to make anything like this work is co-GMing a campaign. The most successful I’ve ever been at it is when there were too many players for one GM to handle, and so we split them into multiple tables that people would occasionally switch between, and that was fun. That worked. The campaign was more chaotic than normal because we sometimes had to revise things. The GMs communicated ahead of time and tried to have some basic ideas of what was going to happen. But it’s roleplaying games, right? Stuff happens in real time. You don’t plan the story a hundred percent. So sometimes the two tables would diverge a bit, and then we’d have to see if we could bring them back together, or if we just had to roll some stuff back.
Bunny: That sounds far more complicated than the current co-writing thing I’m doing, because at least there aren’t a dozen wild card act player characters.
Oren: But the upside is that with roleplaying games, the standards are a lot lower. [everyone laughs] You know, with roleplaying games, my players will accept a lot of contrivances as long as I make their play, their characters, feel cool. And that’s not necessarily the case with an audience for a written work or for a video game.
Chris: You understand the story is gonna be less polished, but what you get is a customized story that’s for you.
Oren: The one that did not work at all was when we once tried to have two GMs for the same table. Not saying no one could make that work, but it did not suit us.
Bunny: How did you even try to make that work?
Oren: The original idea was one person would handle NPCs, or combat, or whatever, but one of the reasons it didn’t work was that we didn’t communicate very well on what our delineation of tasks was.
Chris: It was back to the communication.
Oren: It was both of our faults. I started doing more and more, and that was on me, because I was taking up more space, but I was doing that because they had decided to do less, because they saw that I was doing more.
Bunny: It’s like any group project.
Oren: So it was both of our faults that time, but it just didn’t work. I just ended up becoming the sole GM. It’s not impossible, but it certainly didn’t work for me.
Chris: I’m sure that you can also have a beneficial partnership by having people who are a little bit more specialist in what skills they take on. Like one person who likes to perhaps discovery-write that first draft, and another person who loves to have a draft to start with and wants to revise it and make it reflect their own vision, that would be a potential partnership. Or if somebody really likes the story, and somebody else is more into the prose and the wordcraft. I think there’s a lot of potential for that kind of thing. But I do think with those kinds of partnerships, it means that both people have to be ready to let go of the other area. [laughing] It seems like the biggest obstacle in many cases, besides communication, is if people have different visions for the story, it’s gonna be hard for them to both be happy with it.
Bunny: If you’re doing anything in a non-hierarchical structure, like any co-writing that’s not that TV writer’s room example where you’re all following the direction of a creative lead or whatever…
Chris: Or an IP work where you have the author that’s hiring people to fill out their outlines or something like that.
Bunny: Exactly, like an IP work. Everyone has some level of creative control, and that means you’re gonna be doing a lot of compromises. Everyone’s going to need to have a level of accountability. Gets complicated very quick.
Chris: Do you think that’s why in something like Sorcery and Cecelia, which two writers, they were just having fun over a summer and then decided to take all of their fun letters and make it into a book, giving them each their own playground where they had their own set of characters, but it was only cohesive because they were doing something very similar.
Oren: Probably wouldn’t have worked if one of them was living in, like, a steampunk dystopia. [Bunny laughs]
Chris: After they were done, they did bring them together and decide to make some revisions. But if I understand, it was largely improvised, and they would do things like come from the countryside to London, or London to the countryside, which is the location of the two protagonists.
Oren: One of the things that’s funny about TV shows is because so much of the writing is done in a very team environment, and there are a lot of hands on the script over time, it’s very difficult to tell who came up with specific lines and whose story goes with who.
Chris: Yeah. I wanna know who from the Avatar live-action show was writing those terrible dialogue lines.
Oren: What if we front-loaded all of the exposition?
Chris: To me, it felt like some other person came in, and was like, “No, we need exposition here,” and deleted somebody’s perfectly good dialogue line to put in something terrible. [laughing] That’s what it felt like. I don’t know if that’s what was happening.
Oren: I listened to an interview once with one of the writers of the Deep Space Nine episode “Starship Down,” which is an episode about the Defiant getting damaged and flying around inside the atmosphere of a gas giant, doing like a whole submarine parallel. One of the two people who was credited as a writer on that episode, the way he tells it is that they wrote their script and originally it was actually underwater. It was literally submarine stuff. It was accepted, and then it was almost completely rewritten, and almost none of their original script is in the episode, but they’re still credited as the writers. [Bunny laughs] And assuming that story is true, then we just have no idea who wrote that.
Chris: Yeah. It sounds like with TV shows, it can get political which person is credited, and can be sometimes a little arbitrary.
Oren: It certainly has a lot to do with your ability to make more money later. The more writing credits you have, the easier it is to get a job, et cetera, et cetera.
Bunny: Yeah, a lot of things are just black boxes, which is weird because we’re used to thinking of media as having only one author in general, but there’s a whole, dare I say, an ontology of authorship that you could get into. You could argue that plays are coauthored, simply because reading a play and seeing it are two different things. And just as the illustrator of a graphic novel contributes to the story, the actors of a play also do. It’s a weird and difficult thing, authorship.
Oren: Yeah, but I need someone to form a parasocial relationship with. [Bunny laughs] Can’t do that with a diffused group of creatives, each of whom has donated a small but vital component to the piece. What do I look like? Some kind of epitome of the human spirit? No.
Bunny: [laughing] When I take something they write personally, who do I write my email to?
Oren: I need the hate mail address.
Bunny: I need Alan Smithee.
Oren: Okay, so now that we’ve covered that the most important part of authorship is who we send hate mail to, I think we’ll go ahead and end this episode for today.
Chris: If you would like to help us co-write more episodes, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: Before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons, who while not technically co-writers, definitely make the show possible. First, there’s Ayman Jaber, who’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
[Outro Music]This has been the Mythcreant Podcast, opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.
Rise, podcast episode, rise from an auditory grave and do our bidding! Muahahahahaha! Necromancers are a staple of speculative fiction, whether they use arcane arts or a spooky lab. They’re absolutely always evil, or are they? Perhaps they’re just misunderstood, even if some of their practices are a bit unsavory. That’s what we’re talking about today, plus a return of everyone’s favorite dystopian setting idea: the necro-industrial complex.
Show Notes Eclipse Phase * Gideon the Ninth * Three Parts Dead * Joyce Summers * Generative AI * Magic Bites * Mage: The Awakening * Sabriel * Zombie T-Rex TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Phoebe Pineda.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is—
Bunny: Bunny.
Chris: —and—
Oren: Oren.
Chris: Now, listeners, you’ve only heard our voices. You don’t know that we’re really alive. Perhaps someone used magic to reach beyond the grave. Someone who shall remain nameless but is definitely Bunny.
Bunny: [laughs] Ooooooooh.
Oren: Ooooooooh.
Chris: Why did you do it, Bunny? You know there are consequences for violating natural laws.
Bunny: Natural laws? I’m above such things. [evil laugh] Nature bends to my whims, and by nature I mean podcasters.
Oren: Yeah. Consequences typically for violating the laws of characters being dead, because when we want characters to die, it needs to be dramatic, and if we could bring them back, that would be a problem. Other natural laws, like not being able to throw fireballs, it’s perfectly fine to violate those. No problem.
Chris: It’s hard to have stakes if you could just bring everybody back to life exactly as they were.
Oren: It really is.
Chris: Do you hear that, DnD players slash writers? Yeah. I understand why it’s useful for an actual tabletop role playing game where people could die on accident to get resurrection, but it is not great for a story you plan ahead.
Oren: The worst one, if we’re talking about RPGs, is Eclipse Phase, where everyone is just digitally immortal and as long as you have money, you can just print a new body and download yourself into it. It is so hard to create stakes in that setting. You can do it, but you are working against all of the gravity of the world because it’s a combat game, right? It’s not like a political drama game. You’re supposed to spend most of it shooting guns, but you can’t die. So [stressed noise].
Bunny: Dying is like nicking your finger.
Oren: Yeah, it’s a little annoying. You have to pay to get a new body, and if you’re a successful adventurer, that’s not hard.
Chris: I guess, first rule of necromancy is, your necromancy can’t just bring all the characters back to life. No problem.
Bunny: Okay. I was thinking about—this is like, full on resurrection. Do we count that as necromancy? Does that seem like it’s a necromancy type thing? It seems adjacent.
Chris: I think we should have an expansive definition of necromancy because we need to keep it fresh and just doing the same very narrow thing over and over again just makes it get old.
Oren: No, it’s gotta be bones and rotting flesh, or it’s not necromancy. It’s gotta be like a creepy green, or—
Bunny: It has to be purple.
Oren: It could be purple. I’ll allow purple, but the natural color of necromancy is green. I’m sure we’ll all agree.
Bunny: It’s the color of the slime from Ghostbusters, which is fitting ’cause ghosts.
Chris: Yeah. I think it needs to be black with green accents to be precise.
Oren: That’s fair. That’s fair.
Bunny: It’s like an eyeshadow palette.
Oren: But necromancy in most settings tends to be flavored evil and bringing people back from the dead perfectly intact and normal is usually considered a good thing. So even though logically that would be a kind of necromancy, socially speaking, it’s not usually qualified that way.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, you could potentially have another consequence where you bring somebody back perfectly intact and then something else really bad happens.
Bunny: Yeah. There’s ways to flavor that if you want it to be dark.
Oren: Yeah. If there’s, like, negative consequences, you’re more likely to call it necromancy.
Bunny: Yeah.
Oren: But of course, that’s just an expectation, right? There are plenty of stories—especially now ’cause people love to be counterculture and stuff.
Chris: I think when any villain or monster starts to get well enough used, right, it becomes really fertile ground to make it into protagonists and good guys.
Oren: Sure.
Chris: Because that adds some novelty that is lost just by again, being used for villains over and over again. Not that you can’t have good necromancer villains in your stories, it’s just you have to do a little bit more work at this point to make them cool and scary. Whereas if you turn them into a protagonist, then you know there’s already a little more novelty to that. It won’t last forever. But right now.
Bunny: Oh, so you could say, you either die a villain or live long enough to see yourself resurrected into a hero?
Oren: Well, there’s also just an element of, wow, okay, so necromancers are classically evil, but that’s largely aesthetics-based.
Bunny: Yeah. Let’s throw some bones on it.
Oren: People reasonably ask, okay. Is there anything inherently wrong with animating a skeleton to do stuff? Does it not matter more what the skeleton does than that it is a skeleton? And the answer to that is a little more complicated than I think some fantasy fans are willing to admit. We also generally understand that a person’s remains—we have at least some responsibility to leave them as the person wanted them to be left, and that probably didn’t include being made into a skeleton and dancing around for amusement.
Chris: Yeah. You could create a culture where everybody’s like, yeah, no. The ultimate death is to have my skeleton walking around.
Bunny: Yeah, I once wrote a flash fiction piece where if you were convicted of certain crimes, then you would be sentenced to—essentially your body would be used for necromantic labor.
Chris: So now was this, they executed and then it’s used from necromantic labor? Or is it just like eventually when you die?
Bunny: In this case, I think they were executed because I was being edgy, but…
Oren: Ooh, so dark.
Bunny: It was so dark.
Chris: Yeah. Honestly, being like, “yeah, someday when you die, we’re gonna use your skeleton for labor” does not sound like a great deterrent when it comes to crime.
Bunny: No. I think at that point you’d be like, oh, I don’t give a crap.
Chris: Yeah. I would love to see a protagonist who is a skeleton and they have to like, somehow regain their health and get free of the necromancer master. Hmm. I think we could do that.
Oren: That’s another one, right? Is that the trope, the default is that any undead you create are basically mindless. And if they’re conscious, that’s certainly a lot more complicated.
Bunny: Yeah, it’s a lot more interesting and it’s a lot more interesting than having just like zombies, but they’re controlled by someone. Distinguish yourself from those zombies a bit. Be a bit more nuanced with it. Don’t make it just like basically a robot or a golem, but it’s a corpse because spooky. Like, you could do more.
Chris: I also do think that if you are gonna make your necromancer a protagonist, one of the tricky things is that having undead minions is inherently a pretty powerful magical ability. And it’s great for villains, right? ’cause they automatically have minions that your protagonist can fight first before they get to the final boss. That’s very useful. But if you have a protagonist, you have to make sure that they’re not too powerful. If they’re like, raising lots of minions everywhere.
They could have really big obstacles. Well, honestly, at that point I would [be] inclined to—how about, like, a newbie necromancer? A wannabe necromancer. They’re just getting started. They can raise one finger from the dead and the finger will crawl along and try to do their bidding. It’s the ultimate pull my finger.
Oren: Once you take the magic and give it to a good guy, you have to start thinking about limits that were less important when a villain had it. Or I guess you could just do Gideon the Ninth and just have everything be super bombastic and powerful and, uh, not have to worry about that part. But…
Chris: Yeah. But Gideon is not a necromancer herself.
Oren: That’s true.
Chris: And I think that’s important. Again, we can talk about other stories like Three Parts Dead, where the main character is a necromancer and can just do who knows what
Oren: Sort of.
Bunny: Yeah. Kind of. There is a skeleton in that one.
Chris: Yeah. But in Gideon, again, there’s another character. Even Gideon’s ally, Harrow, is semi antagonistic. So again. There’s tons of necromancy everywhere, but we know what Gideon can do and that is hack at things with a long sword.
Oren: And before anyone emails us, yes, we do know that Harrow is the protagonist of the next book, but we haven’t read that one, so we can’t comment on it.
Bunny: I don’t want to ’cause I don’t like Harrow.
Oren: Yeah, that’s the reason. You solved it. We’re all on the table now.
Bunny: You’re just prejudiced against necromancers.
Oren: Uh, everyone knows the best necromancer good guy was a DnD character that I played back in college because I found this absolutely busted ability in one of the Unearthed Arcana books for 3.5 that let me exchange my familiar for a skeleton warrior who got stronger as I leveled up and was actually a better fighter than the fighter in the party.
Chris: Oh, no.
Bunny: Oof.
Oren: Oof.
Bunny: I feel bad for that fighter.
Oren: I felt a little bad, but not bad enough to stop.
Chris: Isn’t that how it always goes?
Oren: And then I went around and I actually read the rules on how to raise undead in 3.5. And they were a little busted. They were like, primarily limited by how many opals you had access to. ‘Cause that was the material component for raising undead and wasn’t that hard to get opal. So I ended up with a lot of minions and then I made my GM play—we were doing a little strategy game instead of DnD ’cause okay, the enemy rolls up and it’s like, all right, I position my five giant undead shrimp on the ridge here.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, okay, so besides having a necromancer who is a villain or protagonist, necromancy can be used in other ways. You can have it as more of a cosmic-horrory thing, like a temptation for your characters. “Don’t resurrect your loved one. Don’t do it, Dawn. You hear me?” Yeah, and what can be there is just something that people shouldn’t touch in the dark book or whatever you have, or it can be a part of your world where there’s not necessarily lots of necromancers that are famous, but the actual magic itself is used often.
Which I feel like should lead us to the Necro Industrial Complex.
Bunny: We knew it was coming.
Oren: It’s been a while since I’ve talked about the Necro Industrial Complex. For anyone who hasn’t listened to our old episodes, this was a concept I came up with, uh, from reading the 3.5 rules on skeleton raising ’cause in Fifth Edition, there were pretty strict limits on how many skeletons you can control. But those didn’t really exist in 3.5, at least not by my reading of the rules. It was basically just again, how many opals can you afford? And it occurred to me that these skeletons can basically do everything a human laborer can do, but forever. And they never tire and they don’t need money and they don’t need food and they don’t rest. So the amount of things you could do with them, like you could have a bunch of them turn a crank and start the Industrial Revolution with skeleton power.
But skeletons are also powered by negative energy, which is established in some other parts of the book as having bad effects on stuff and turning everything more evil. So no, I figured that no process is a hundred percent efficient. So some negative energy must leak out of the undead over time, and if you have enough of them, you get Global Negative, Inc. And that’s a problem.
Bunny: The hole in our optimism layer.
Oren: That could be an interesting story, I suppose.
Chris: Yeah. If you did have a world with lots of necromancy, it seems realistic that you would have a lot of labor offered by necromancers and everybody has their own skeleton servant.
Oren: Yeah, but hang on, they gotta license those skeletons. You can’t just scrape everyone’s skeletons out of the ground. People whose skeletons those were deserve to profit from them. So you gotta pay a licensing fee.
Chris: I don’t know. They were out there just like in an open graveyard that was open to the public. Does that mean that it’s free for me to just scrape them and use them for my own skeleton training purposes?
Oren: Yeah. I wouldn’t wanna inhibit progress.
Bunny: Yeah. Can’t stop innovation with too much regulation. I mean, in some places there’s—I’m pretty sure here in the US we think you put someone in a grave and they stay there forever. But you know, in some places in the world, it’s actually pretty common that you’re essentially leasing the grave. Like, your loved one will stay there for maybe five years and then they’ll get moved and someone else will take the grave. I think they get moved to—I don’t remember what they’re called, but it’s like they’re all stacked in like a building. It’s—
Oren: Like a crypt?
Bunny: More serious than that, I guess. Like a crypt or something. I forget. But at that point, why not just cremate everybody? Maybe they do get cremated, I forget, but I don’t think they just get cremated. I should have done my research on this.
Oren: There are a lot of different burial rights and a lot of different funeral customs, right? You do have cremation. The reason why they might not do cremation is that’s actually hard. Cremating a body in a meaningful way without modern technology is difficult and resource intensive. Like, you can do it. You don’t need a blast furnace, but just doing it with whatever you happen to have lying around is not easy. So that might be a reason.
Bunny: Yeah. But I feel like this happens in European countries and stuff, like thoroughly developed countries like Germany or something.
Oren: I would imagine it’s a tradition at this point, right? It’s probably not.
Chris: I think that what this means is that we all need an urban fantasy setting where Necromancers run all the funeral homes.
Bunny: Yeah.
Chris: And take care of your dead for you. And some of them may be on the side, animate some of those dead, but they’ll deny it if you ask them.
Oren: Going back to the fantasy side of it, that is an interesting thing you can do if you wanna play with the morals of necromancy. Maybe necromancy isn’t inherently evil, but there’s a good chance depending on how your necromancy works, that your characters are like—any necromancers are directly benefiting from death.
They either—it gives them more bodies to raise or it gives them more death energy to power their spells or whatever. And sure, people die all the time naturally on their own, but if you get power directly from that happening, you have a pretty strong incentive to move things along. So that could be interesting. You could play with that.
Bunny: Yeah. If you wanted to get a little silly with it, it could also be like organ donation, right? I don’t know. Like you will your body to this necromancer, “this underserved industry needs more workers. Be generous. And will your skeleton to Nursing Homes Incorporated” or something?
Oren: Look, if they’re gonna profit from my skeleton, again, I’m going to need a share. Please send money to my heirs for all the work my skeleton does.
Chris: I wanna earn above minimum wage. Oh man. Can you imagine having some families just be inherently richer than others because they have a long line of skeletons that they still profit off of? Because they have a long family history with lots of people.
Bunny: Oh, I’d read that. That definitely gives nouveau riche a new meaning.
Chris: And then the orphans are extra poor ’cause they have no family connections and therefore are not making passive skeleton income.
Bunny: Oh.
Oren: Oh no. Oh my gosh.
Bunny: This is how you have a four hour work week, is that you have all of your ancestors working in the mills.
Oren: Big oof.
Chris: I do think it’s worth talking a little bit more about what kind of powers, right? Obviously we’ve talked about skeletons a lot and there’s so much rich material that has not been tapped there. But again, I do think it’s worth broadening what powers might be considered necromancy, just a little, so that you can come up with more interesting things.
And of course it always can be a combination [of] things, like, you can always include reanimation if you want to. So we talked about having intelligent undead, or [were] talking about, I think it’s Magic Bites that has—vampires are raised by necromancers, but for some reason that means they’re just mindless corpses.
Oren: I hated that, I did not like that part of Magic Bites. For one thing, the necromancers are called the People, which is the worst name for them, like, they’re not even communist. You would hope they would be communists with a name like that, but no. They’re just a group of necromancers, so it’s such a generic name that I had to keep reminding myself who they were talking about when they said the People.
Bunny: Those ones over there.
Oren: Then also the vampires are just, yeah, we have vampires, but they’re really just flesh golems that our necromancers pilot around, which is—why call them vampires at that point? Is it just to give a little middle finger to any vampire fans who read this book and were hoping for real vampires?
Bunny: Yeah, I’d feel cheated.
Oren: It’d be like if you had a, “Hey, we have werewolves in this setting,” and it’s just like a dog that sheds all its hair once a month. And we call them werewolves. That would be disappointing, right? It’s a weird thing to lead people on about.
Bunny: Disappointing to us and disappointing to the rug.
Chris: But you could have a situation where necromancers do create vampires and then maybe the vampires are self-sustaining after that, but they have an interesting relationship with a necromancer who started the line, for instance?
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: That could be a thing.
Oren: I’ve seen fantasy stories before [where] that’s the origin of vampires, is that they were originally created by some powerful necromancers, such and such.
Chris: And maybe they’re beholden to them or they have to like, they’re indentured for a while or something like that. Obviously there’s Talking to the Dead. I don’t feel like I see enough necromancers doing things with ghosts.
Bunny: [spooky voice] Ghosts!
Chris: Instead of just zombies.
Bunny: [spooky voice] Ghosts!
Oren: Oh man. Getting flashbacks to every Mage campaign I’ve ever run where we have to have a huge argument about whether or not ghosts fall under death or spirit.
Bunny: I think the answer is just yes.
Oren: And that’s one of the reasons why I don’t like the changes they made in Mage: the Awakening. ‘Cause they added death as a type of magic, which hadn’t existed before in Ascension. And it just has a lot of weird overlaps with the other types of magic and it’s confusing and I did not love it.
Chris: You could have a necromancer that deals with living spirits as well as the dead, or does things like steal souls from people’s bodies and swaps their bodies, or maybe even temporarily, somebody’s on their deathbed. It’s like, okay, we need to get some information on this person. I can keep them from crossing over for a little while.
Oren: For me, I think what it comes down to is like you want it to feel like it’s its own thing and not just a reskin of another type of magic, and there’s always gonna be some gray areas, but if you want your necromancer to have like offensive spells, I think you can do that. I would just like them to be more in theme with like death or maybe even like vitality forces than like, for shooting a green ball of fire and saying that’s necromancy.
Bunny: Or purple.
Oren: I find that kind of boring. DnD does that sometimes. Like a bunch of spells or—they have a lot of damaged spells, but this one’s necromancy. For whatever reason, we said this one was.
Chris: That does sound like something that would happen in a game where somebody’s trying to manage the mechanics and doesn’t want to create all new mechanics for raising skeletons, right?
Oren: Yes.
Chris: Instead of just casting a fireball.
Oren: Correct.
Chris: I think another one that’s really good is having your necromancers travel to the underworld, like Sabriel was probably one of the coolest depictions of necromancy I’ve seen, where she got her bells.
Oren: I love the bells. Those are so cool.
Chris: And they take her to different levels of the underworld and kind of command things. Very cool.
Bunny: Underworld is just inherently cool.
Chris: And of course, immortality. Powerful mages gotta have immortality.
Oren: Immortality is definitely one of those things that like, depending on how you flavor it can be necromancy or it can be something else.
Bunny: Yeah, I feel like flavor, as we’ve been talking around, is a very important part of what makes something necromancy or not, like a Frankenstein’s monster type of creature is flavored as science rather than magic. So we probably wouldn’t think of it as necromancy, even though it’s pretty much necromancy.
Oren: I was gonna list one of those actually.
Bunny: Okay, maybe I’m wrong.
Oren: Frankenstein and Reanimator. I mean, we don’t call them necromancy, but I think a lot of the same tropes apply. Right? You are bringing to life something that was dead in a weird way. Things don’t go great when either Frankenstein or Herbert West does this. So that falls under the same milieu as it were.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, it is interesting that they are given—some science aesthetics are put in there, but they’re also aesthetics like seeing bodies sewn together in the green color of Frankenstein’s monster and a lot of popular depictions that feel similar to magical necromancy.
Bunny: Look, science is also green.
Oren: Science is often green. That’s true.
Bunny: I think you could also do something interesting with the necromancers if instead of focusing so much on like, just death, you could do more with Chris mentioned earlier as well and focus on like, vitality and the transfer of like vital forces and stuff like that because as much as it’s about death and that is, I would argue one of the important parts of necromancy, you could do more with the other half of that equation.
Oren: Yeah. I’m a big fan of necromancers that just drain the life from other people to fuel themselves. I like to literalize the metaphor of the powerful draining the life from the less powerful. It’s a lot more fun with magic.
Chris: I also think you can get more novelty if you focus more on non-humans. So you got your skeletal or zombie dragons, or—
Bunny: Yeah.
Chris: —perhaps your necromancers are just like all the plants around where they walk, die. Right, as [you] draw the life from them. And maybe you have weird skeletal trees, right? So you can—doesn’t always have to be humans and undead humans all the time.
Bunny: The trees are necromancers.
Oren: There’s a very fun moment in the Dresden Files where he is like looking at the rules against necromancers and he notices the law only technically applies to human remains. So he like, summons a zombie T-Rex from the museum. I don’t remember if the book acknowledged the fact that the dinosaur on display is probably a plaster mold and not the actual bone, but I was willing to give him a pass on it.
Chris: Yeah, that’s cool enough. If you believe hard enough that it’s bone, it’s bone. Was there an explanation for why it’s not allowed with humans? Is it just we’re being disrespectful to dead bodies, or was there something inherently harmful?
Bunny: Skosh.
Oren: I’m pretty sure—okay. If I remember correctly in the books, it’s been a while. There was an implication that necromancers are inherently evil, but it was never really explored. Dresden does that and he doesn’t suffer any negative effects. He doesn’t become corrupted from using necromancy to bring back a T-Rex. It’s possible that it was supposed to be like a closed-minded law, or maybe we were just not supposed to question it, and we assumed that it would be evil to bring back a human who knows.
One thing that I was surprised by is from reading a couple of books with necromancers in them, I think people maybe have a stronger sense of like necromancer costume aesthetics than I did. Like in Three Parts Dead, there was this thing about necromancers wearing skull caps, which is a pun obviously, but also literal. The character Tara was playing against type by not wearing a skull cap, like a literal skull cap, not a figurative one made of a skull. I was really confused by that. Is that a thing? I try to think of all the necromancers I’ve seen and I don’t remember them having that outfit.
Chris: Yeah, that’s news to me. That must be just—I would’ve not thought of them wearing skull caps.
Bunny: That must just be like a Three Parts Dead thing. If I had to guess. I don’t know.
Oren: Gideon the Ninth did the same thing too, where it was like, ah, necromancers, and their like goth punk aesthetic with lots of spikes and stuff.
Chris: Was that all of them or was that just like the Ninth House that wore the like skull face paint?
Oren: At least like the skull face paint. Okay, sure. Skull is bones and stuff. They do that. But I swear they had like silver studs and stuff. Maybe I’m making that up.
Bunny: Did they also have skull caps?
Chris: I don’t think so.
Oren: Not that I remember.
Bunny: Okay. Okay. So that’s not a universal part of the aesthetic then. I was gonna say, I feel like. Yeah, I would be very behind if I’d learned that right now.
Chris: Yeah. The most aesthetic thing, I think about Three Parts Dead of Tara is just learning that even though they seem immortal and unaging over time, they do wither away into like skeletons themselves. So that was a neat detail. Other than that, it was interesting ’cause she seems a lot more like a magical lawyer than she does like a necromancer for most of the book.
Oren: Yeah. She is only a necromancer on a technicality. What kind of magic can Tara do? Yes.
Bunny: Face removal magic.
Oren: Yeah. She just has, among other things, a spell that lets you take off someone’s face and keep it in your bag. And they are, of course, they cannot be harmed while their face is removed. Obviously. You can’t be hurt without a face.
Chris: But removing somebody’s face while leaving them alive does seem appropriate because it sounds like next to manipulating death, but not exactly traditional necromancy. So I like that one. But yeah, most of what she does, it sounds like all magic in that setting is just powered by souls.
Oren: Maybe. The book is vague about what powers a lot of magic.
Bunny: The stars.
Chris: Oh, that’s right. I forgot. That was very strange. I guess I just wanted it to all be powered by souls because that would make it feel more cohesive.
Bunny: That’d be thematically cohesive. The star thing is…
Oren: That was one of the things that bothered me about that book series is that it was like, Hey, magic comes from people’s life energy. And so you get magic by convincing a bunch of people to give you some of their soul or life energy or whatever. Or also you can get it from the stars, I guess NBD.
Chris: It’s like, what?
Bunny: But not if it’s Cloudy.
Chris: So last thing I might mention is. Again, should you have other forms of magic besides necromancy in your setting? Three Parts Dead has just divine magic and necromancy. All the mages, as far as I know, are necromancers I think, and that can depend on if you want a setting that’s really horrific and you want magic to feel horrific, it can actually be better to not have any other form of magic. Because this disempowers people and makes it a bigger temptation to use necromancy.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Because there’s nothing else. And that’s very creepy and can be very cosmic horrorish. Whereas if you add other kinds of magic, that will, again, empower people and give them magic to fight necromancers. That is not evil, but you can make aesthetic contrast that way. You just, as Oren said, don’t just have the fireball be different colors. You want it to feel like a different type of magic, but at the same time you can have your golden rays of light and plants blooming and other things that are meant to contrast with your darker necromancy magic.
Oren: All right, with that, I think we will rebury this podcast ’cause the energy animating it is starting to fade.
Bunny: No, [it’s] not starry enough to sustain my power.
Chris: And if this episode helped bring you back to life, then consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Slash Mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to invoke the spirits of some of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He is an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
Chris?: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening/closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Colton.
I’d love to tell you what the topic is this week, but then what reason would you have to keep reading the rest of this blurb? Obviously, the best option is to string you along by abruptly ending each sentence without really giving you any information or closure. At least, that’s the strategy behind cliffhangers, which is what we’re talking about today. Advice around these can get pretty weird, and if there’s one thing we hope you take away from this podcast, it’s to not treat your audience as the enemy. Also, we’re upset at the streaming model even though we will never willingly go back to the way things used to be.
Show Notes Annoying Cliffhangers * Buy My Book! * Unreliable Narrator * Demon Slayer * Best of Both Worlds * Orphan Black Cliffhanger * First Kill Ending * Dark Matter * Red Seas Under Red Skies * The Alchemyst * Luke Tosses His Lightsaber TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Arturo.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Intro: You are listening to the Mythcreants Podcast, with your hosts: Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[Music]
Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Orie. With me today is…
Chris: Chris.
Oren: And…
Bunny: Bunny.
Oren: Oh, no! This podcast is going to end without saying what the topic is. I’d better say it now! The topic is… Thank you for listening. Please do the Patreon stuff and like that smash button and share/scribe to all of your friends and yeah, that’s… I think we can call it, guys. That was a good podcast.
Bunny: Yeah, if we don’t do that, why would people listen to the next episode?
Oren: Yeah, come back next time and you’ll find out what today’s topic is.
Bunny: It was a princess with a shiny tail… I don’t know the closing theme as well. I definitely won’t be too mad to continue if we do that.
Oren: Yeah, it’ll work right. Everything’s fine. Nothing bad is going to happen here. I wouldn’t worry about it.
Chris: It’s only a cliffhanger if they’re literally hanging off a cliff. Otherwise, it’s sparkling dissatisfaction.
Oren: That’s good. That’s good. We need to get into term policing of cliffhangers.
Bunny: That was going to be how I was going to start.
Oren: Yeah. So today we’re talking about cliffhangers and whether they are a good idea or a bad idea. And if you’ve read my previous coverage of the topic, you probably won’t be surprised which side I take. We do first have to answer what is a cliffhanger. So I discovered, having published a book… Oh, I published a book. Buy my book. That’s my whole personality now.
Chris: Ooh!
Oren: …that people are way more liberal with the description of what a cliffhanger is than I thought, because I had several people tell me that my book ended on a cliffhanger, and I didn’t think it did!
Chris: No, that is not…
Oren: I don’t think that’s a cliffhanger, guys! I didn’t think it was one, but, you know, they didn’t like it. It was annoying. So, you know, the customer’s always right to a certain extent, I guess.
Bunny: Yeah. Customer is always pedantic. I don’t think that counts.
Chris: Granted, you can’t always expect all the people online to be… It’s like with the unreliable narrators. People now use that for all kinds of things that are not unreliable narrator, and we can’t necessarily expect people on the internet to be very particular about the way they use terms.
Oren: And I don’t want to make it sound like I’m putting people who read my book on blast if they didn’t like the ending, and that’s perfectly legitimate. Maybe the ending’s bad, who knows? But I don’t think it was a cliffhanger because, without any spoilers, it leaves a plot thread unresolved, but it doesn’t end in the middle of a fight, which is what I would consider a cliffhanger.
Chris: Yeah.
Oren: I would consider a cliffhanger something that ends in the middle of an open, urgent conflict. So it could be literally hanging off a cliff, it could be an argument, it could be a fight. That’s what I would consider a cliffhanger.
Chris: Yeah, I think so. In most cases, there’s something new that arises, some new urgent threat that becomes last minute, and then it’ll cut off immediately after it happens. Like someone breaking in, and then lifting a knife to stab the protagonist! And then cut, go to black, would be something that is a typical cliffhanger. It’s something new, but it’s also annoyingly urgent, so it gives you a feeling of annoyance. Whereas we talk about hooks a lot, and we recommend those to end with, because people… I’ve heard a lot of people recommend, “Oh, you just end chapters with cliffhangers.” That is not my opinion, but I do often recommend having a little hook, and the difference is just… Again, it’s not something that you feel like has to be addressed that second, so the… For instance, the protagonist might learn the villain broke into a place and stole powerful weapons. Like yeah, they will probably use that weapon in the future, it is going to cause trouble, but they are not currently aiming that weapon at somebody, about to shoot that.
Bunny: Yeah, it seems like it’s a cliffhanger if you’re justified in using the Dun Dun Duuuun music.
Chris: Yeah, that… That’s a good measure.
Oren: And people also describe endings where a sudden new thing shows up, even if it’s not necessarily a conflict. You’ve spent the whole book with the protagonist doing stuff and having an adventure, and then the book ends, and in the final scene, their long-dead spouse walks in the door and then you cut to ending. People might describe that as a cliffhanger. And even though there’s not a fight, right? they’re not like… As far as we know, there’s no reason to think that the spouse is attacking anyone. But the extreme curiosity of, “What, hang on, I thought the spouse was dead. What’s happening?” That could be considered a cliffhanger, maybe.
Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Bunny: Yeah. And I think also what counts as a cliffhanger can also depend on the scale that it’s appearing at. So something that might count as a cliffhanger at the end of a story would be less of one if it was simply ending a chapter, just because one happens on a smaller scale than another one. At the very least, that’ll change how the audience takes it.
Chris: Yeah, I would say that if it’s something that’s designed to make it so that the audience cannot rest at a place that is normally designed for them to take a break, including chapter endings, that it could qualify as a cliffhanger. But I would say that, generally, the type of hooks that people would have as end of chapter often would not be as large. They could be as large as the end of the book, but often just because that’s a smaller break.
Oren: So the way that I look at it is that cliffhangers at the end of chapters, or the end of scenes, to a certain extent, are probably inevitable if your book has interesting high-tension conflicts, just ’cause you do want to end those with a hook; you don’t want to feel like the story is over. And those don’t have to be cliffhangers, but they probably will be sometimes. Like, that’ll just be the most convenient thing you’ve got to hand. It’s like, “Man, I’ve been going for a while, I need a stopping point, but I’m about to start another fight.” I could put in a new, completely different hook, or I could just have the fight be about to start. “All right, I’m calling it, this chapter needs to be ended at some point.” So that’s probably going to happen. I would say don’t do it a lot, but a few times it’s probably not going to kill your story.
Chris: I would also say, if it’s a hook, it’s more likely to be accompanied by some kind of satisfying resolution, and that’s more usable because we fulfilled some of our promises to readers, but at the same time left something open for interest instead of closing up nothing.
Oren: Right.
Bunny: Right.
Chris: Or, for instance, I think it was Demon Hunter, the anime that just had this really annoying habit of always ending an episode right before a fight started. The actual story arcs were deliberately misaligned with where episodes would end.
Bunny: That’s obnoxious.
Chris: So that you always felt like you had to watch the next one, and then they would actually resolve the arcs in the middle of the episode and then open new ones.
Bunny: See, I feel like the reason people, and by people I think I mean us, because by now I feel like our standpoints on this are pretty clear, the reason that cliffhangers are so annoying is because they tend to be used for things like commercial breaks, for instance, where it’s really disingenuous: “Watch this commercial about Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, the sponsor of today’s podcast, to learn where things are going next.” And I think about cliffhangers the same way I think about jump scares: It works, but it’s a cheap trick, and sure, it can be done well, I suppose, and some people really like jump scares, and true, it affects me the way it’s supposed to, I jump when I’m jump-scared, but it’s not a pleasant experience.
Oren: It has been fascinating to look at streaming shows over the years as they evolved from regular TV shows, which had commercial breaks built into them, because everyone knew what the commercial breaks were going to be approximately, and so they would build those into the episode, and so you had these obvious breaks for commercial, and they were often cliffhangers, right? because commercials are annoying. “Don’t change the channel! You have to come back.” And then streaming shows came out and they had those same breaks for a while, even though they didn’t have any commercials. And then those went away and streaming shows stopped having those breaks ’cause they didn’t need them. But now all the streamers have commercials again, and a lot of their shows haven’t caught up. So a lot of the breaks for commercials are in very awkward places.
Bunny: Ugh, the villain turn.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, I do think, again, hooks are good, and there is definitely a fuzzy boundary between a hook and a cliffhanger where it gets more annoying. I do think that a lot of cliffhangers, especially if the storyteller is in the habit of always using a cliffhanger at the end of everything, in effort to bring the audience back, I feel a little like that starts to get into Black Hat storytelling, where our purpose is no longer to actually serve our audience and give them the best experience we can, but instead to manipulate them for our benefit. And that’s the thing that I don’t like. I think that I want to win, but I also want them to win. I don’t want to feel like I’m in competition or playing against my audience, right?
Bunny: I think I have genuinely quit shows before because I reached a place where the episode didn’t end on a cliffhanger and a thing got resolved and things seemed to be okay, and I’m like, “I know if I keep watching, I’ll start hitting those anxiety-causing cliffhanger endings again and just be dragged along,” and it gets exhausting. I would rather end here in the middle of the show where there’s a semblance of resolution than continue being dragged along.
Oren: That is the best way. If we could all get the audiences for all shows together and convince them to do that, that would stop writers from putting in annoying cliffhangers. So, hang on. I’ve got my new organizational platform ready.
Bunny: I’ll sign up.
Chris: Yeah.
Bunny: Yeah, where’s the dotted line?
Chris: I do think there’s a real chance that cliffhangers give a short-term boost, right? where people are more likely to read the next installment, but at the cost of a long-term following. And because, again, short-term gains are always just so much easier to measure than long-term loss or gain, but we don’t really know, I think for sure. But I have also, you know, I quit Orphan Black because of the cliffhanger at the end of the season. I felt very cheated by that. I felt like that was what was supposed to resolve at the end of the season, so even though I had been mostly enjoying the show, I decided not to continue for that reason. So it can cause people to leave. It’s possible. The numbers are hard to tell, right?
Oren: Yeah. One of the reasons I quit Foundation over on Apple was the same reason, although Foundation wasn’t a great show in other ways, but…
Chris: Oh, Foundation was the absolutely… like, when I think of the ultimate worst cliffhanger I have ever seen, it’s the Foundation show.
Oren: Yeah. Spoilers for Foundation if anyone cares. So there’s an episode where we discover that someone we thought was a good guy has murder-knifed another good guy, and they’re all dead and it’s all terrible and bloody. And our protagonist sees this and is like, “Why did you do this? What’s going to happen?”
Chris: And to be clear about the emotional investment here, it’s the protagonist’s boyfriend who kills their mentor.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: So this is like a group of three who are very tight-knit as far as we know. They’ve been getting along great; we have no reason why he would just suddenly turn around and murder the mentor, so it’s very bewildering.
Oren: And then the murderer throws the protagonist into an escape pod, and she is sent off into the void, and episode ends. Okay, I guess we gotta come back next episode to find out what that was about. Next episode we’re like, “Hey, we’ve jumped to the future. You don’t get to find out what that was about.”
Bunny: Ugh, that’s awful.
Chris: Yeah, now we’re at the colony with other people now, and it’s three episodes of that before we get back to her, and even when we get back to her, we don’t get answers, right? She’s now in the future. So it’s just… it’s awful.
Bunny: And that’s the problem that… A very similar thing happens when you do too many cliffhangers in your chapters, especially if you have multiple points of view. Again, I’ve had books do this to me where a chapter will end on a cliffhanger and then it switches to another character’s point of view and I… I just… I skip that chapter because I know that chapter is going to end on another cliffhanger, and so I just read the chapters out of order.
Oren: Man, Feast for Crows ends… Spoilers for Feast for Crows, I guess; it’s a billion years old now, one of its endings is this big cliffhanger of whether Brienne is still alive or not. We had to wait six years for the next book, and in the next book she’s maybe alive. It’s actually unclear if the character we see claiming to be Brienne is actually her. And then that book ends. So we never even found out. And we never will.
Bunny: Oh my gosh.
Oren: Which is the biggest danger of ending your show, book, or whatever on a cliffhanger, because you might not ever get back to it. If you’re an author, you might just lose steam and not ever write the next one. And if you’re a television show creator, especially now, where it just seems like they murder shows left and right because the streaming bubble is collapsing, there’s an even higher chance that you’ll never come back to finish the show. So it’s… oof, it is a… Man, that is a gamble you are taking.
Chris: Yeah, I was going to say, Isn’t that what happened to… uh, I think it was called First Kill, where it ended at least on a very low note and then it didn’t get renewed?
Oren: No, I wouldn’t… Okay. I wouldn’t say quite that with First Kill.
Chris: I think First Kill still resolved a lot of things that were mainly addressed in the season. It just opened up another big hook for the next season. I think that was a little more reasonable.
Bunny: Ah, okay.
Oren: Yeah. For spoilers for the end of First Kill, but it’s like a Romeo and Juliet-type story, and it ends with the two of them running off together. I think that’s what happens, right, Chris?
Chris: Yeah. But then, I think, one of their brothers has got some bad evil plans of some kind. It’s been a while.
Oren: Yeah, it’s clearly laying a big hook for season two, and it’s disappointing that that was never made. I liked First Kill. But I’m thinking of something more like the show Dark Matter, or I should say one of the shows called Dark Matter. This is the sci-fi one that tried to be Firefly and it ends with an evil alien fleet from another dimension warping in. And that’s it. Show over.
Bunny: Wow.
Chris: I mean, they were probably trying to do a TNG, which I can sympathize because The Next Generation, Best of Both Worlds, again, if you’ve only seen it in reruns, you may not know how torturous this cliffhanger was, because Best of Both Worlds, that two-parter was three months apart.
Oren: Yeah. Although I have to be honest: I’ve joked about that, but nowadays, three months apart for a show cliffhanger feels like nothing. I used to joke, “Oh, we had it so much worse.” I actually realized: no, it’s worse now!
Chris: Yeah!
Oren: It takes two years, if you’re lucky, for a show to get another season now. It’s ridiculous!
Chris: And honestly, those streaming service shows are really relentless with trying to do all the cliffhangers and fancy doodads. Honestly, they just get too elaborate with their stories and try too many reveals. Just tell a good story, come on. But in any case, we got only eight episodes that are two years apart, and I just… I’m just waiting for streaming servicess to realize, “Oh, we need to keep our subscribers, not just to get them to subscribe in the first place. So we should actually have a 22-episode season now.”
Oren: Yeah, someone can suggest, “Hey, what if we spent less money per episode so we could have more episodes?” And they can call it, like, Disruptive Micro-Prestige Television. And it’s not really that simple, there are other reasons why streaming seasons are so short, but one of the reasons is the arms race of spending so much money per episode. Not the only reason, but it’s a big one.
Bunny: And the gaps between seasons and stuff like that is one of the reasons I just can’t really get into television, I’ve found. Because not even necessarily… and I think cliffhangers are a big part of it, but not necessarily the only part, is because you’re never guaranteed to get a satisfying outcome to anything that happens.
Chris: Especially if it’s a mystery box show.
Bunny: And an incomplete TV show. Yeah, no, exactly.
Chris: Yeah, that’s true.
Oren: I could complain about what TV is like now for the next five hours, but moving back into the realm of books, because I think most people who listen to this are probably more likely to be writing books than TV shows…
Chris: That’s right, those things.
Oren: Those weird, like, collections of pages. Who knows?
Chris: Going back to just when cliffhangers work personally, regardless of the medium (books, shows, graphic novels), I am much more sympathetic to a cliffhanger if it’s the end of the penultimate installment. So if we have a series of any kind where it’s the second-to-last episode of the season, or the second-to-last issue in a series of comics, or the second-to-last book in a series, I’m just much more sympathetic to having a cliffhanger on those ones, because I feel like that kind of helps escalate and generate excitement for the finale, so it just feels more appropriate to me.
Oren: Yeah. One thing that I would strongly recommend for anyone who’s thinking of adding a cliffhanger, regardless of where you’re adding it, is make sure you can actually follow up on the cliffhanger.
Chris: Yeah.
Oren: Because sometimes that’s harder than it sounds, and there are a number of cliffhangers that are more annoying than normal because they end with, like, “Oh no, what’s going to happen?” And then they come back and it’s like, “Oh, it wasn’t actually a big deal. Don’t worry about it.”
Chris: Which I think is another issue with this whole mentality, that every chapter needs to end on a cliffhanger, is writers try to push it too much and it’s like, “Oh, I don’t really have a cliffhanger here.” Okay, does this make up something that doesn’t actually work?
Bunny: It’s definitely like… If you watch a lot of old serials (not the food, the serial shorts and stuff like that), where it’ll feature some hero doing heroics and stuff like that, like the old Batman shorts or something, it’ll always end on a cliffhanger because they want you to watch the next installment or whatever. And so it’ll be like, “Oh, the hero’s in a car, and the car went over a cliff and it crashed. And it exploded. How will the hero escape?” And then the next episode, it’s like the hero got out of the car before it went over the cliff. And they weren’t actually in any danger, and that’s the worst way to pay off a cliffhanger.
Chris: That happens a lot with the “Oh, I know! Let’s create a threat by making a character that does not actually mean any harm/look threatening,” or having them end on a dramatic line that suggests they’re mad when they’re not actually angry.
Oren: My favorite is when it’s just like, “Yeah, it was just the thing you guessed it probably was, but we’re going to pretend like that was a surprise.” In Red Seas Under Red Skies, which is a novel I otherwise actually like a lot, but it starts with this flash-forward of, “Oh no, my friend is betraying me!” And of course, as you’re reading, you’re like, “Okay, these characters are tricksters and they all are constantly pretending to betray each other.” So he’s probably only pretending to betray you ’cause you’ve done that several times at this point. And then you catch up to that point in the story ’cause it’ll flash-forward and yeah, he was pretending to betray you. Whoa, whoa!
Chris: Yeah, there’s a lot of places in books where I can tell a line is just too dramatic, and so the storyteller is definitely just inflating a hook because there’s just no way that they can follow up on that. I think a good example is in The Alchemist. There’s this chapter that ends with saying this character “saw something and realized that the world would never be the same again.” And it’s like, “Okay, what? I very much doubt…” And then the next chapter it’s like, oh, he saw some people robbing the shop. That’s what it was. That’s your chapter hook.
Oren: The worst thing that’s ever happened to anyone.
Chris: World will never be the same!
Bunny: It’s like the trademark trailer lines that are just like in there to have a soundbite that sounds intriguing and dramatic but doesn’t actually have much to do with anything.
Oren: It’s like lines that don’t make sense in context if they actually make it into the show or the movie.
Chris: Right. Sometimes they don’t.
Oren: In season two of Discovery, they have Pike say, “We’re going to go exploring and have a little fun along the way,” and you think, you stop for a second, you’re like, “Why would he say that?” That is a weird line in context. That doesn’t sound like something he would say to his crew. But the reason he says it is that in the trailers, they’re trying to let us know that season two will be less grimdark than season one.
Chris: And it was a lie.
Oren: Yeah, it was kind of a lie. But they knew that we thought it was too grimdark. So there was marketing about how it was going to be less grimdark this time, and that’s why that line exists.
Bunny: I didn’t see him do a sarcastic eyeroll and finger quotes. “Let’s have some ‘fun.’”
Oren: Oh, another one that is just one of the most annoying kinds of cliffhangers ever is when it seems like the story is over, and then, to create a cliffhanger, the author undoes the victories that the protagonists just won.
Chris: Rude of you to attack Stranger Things 4 that way.
Oren: Yeah, rude of me, except I’ll never apologize ’cause I was right to do it.
Bunny: It’s the anti-resolution.
Oren: It’s like, Stranger Things 4, they go through this whole thing of blowing up the bad guys and doing all the stuff, and they win and they have their hard-fought victory. And then at the end, oh no, the bad guy did the thing he was trying to do anyway. I guess he just did it after you left. Good job, everybody.
Bunny: Oops. Should have stuck around another five minutes.
Oren: Yeah. Come back in five years and you’ll maybe see a resolution to this. All of the children will be in their late twenties by then.
Chris: In the category of having a cliffhanger and then skipping over the actual resolution to that cliffhanger in the story, which happens for a couple reasons, I think, and sometimes it happens just because the story doesn’t really have anything to do there, like a character walks dramatically in, is like, “We need to talk,” and then they just skip the conversation ’cause they didn’t have anything for them to say. Like in The Last of Us, where the characters are in a really tough situation to get out of, you know, as they’ve just been shot, and we end there, and then, “Oh, look, they’ve arrived at safety when we open the next episode, please forget where they left off.”
Oren: There is another kind, and you can argue whether this is a cliffhanger or not, but it’s certainly related, and this is where you end the story, not on a new conflict, but right before the resolution of your conflict. So, like, the conflict is over, but you haven’t seen the resolution yet, and that is especially awkward because you can’t start the next story with resolution, ’cause that’s boring. That means the next story would start off on a really boring note. But it also means that the next story, if it doesn’t have that resolution, then it will make the first one feel unsatisfying. And I’m not just talking about the first two Star Wars sequel movies, but I am definitely talking about them, right? Because The Force Awakens, the whole movie is spent trying to find Luke, theoretically. And we find him, and then the movie ends before we can get the resolution. And Rian Johnson gets a lot of flak for having Luke just toss his lightsaber away and having that be the opening of Last Jedi. Or not the opening, but that’s like where it starts with Rey, right? But on the other hand, what else was he supposed to do? Like, just have the Rey sequence be, “Alright, you found me. Now we’re going to do uncomplicated training”? No, that should have been the result of the last movie.
Bunny: Yeah, it’s definitely… I feel like that plays into the sort of weird, staggering thing that you talked about earlier, where things resolve in the middle because you want to constantly have cliffhangers at the end.
Oren: Yeah. Gotta keep bullying me into coming back, ’cause you couldn’t just make the show good.
Bunny: That’s hard, Oren.
Oren: You gotta withhold satisfaction from me.
Chris: It might be worth giving some tips for. Okay: if we do want something at the end of the chapter, then we create it without something that’s annoying. I do think that just having a resolution first helps, again, so people get some satisfaction. Having it so that you have, for instance, a chapter plot arc that actually ends before you bring up something can be helpful. A lot of times I don’t think you necessarily need to add a new problem to create a hook; you just have to remind people of the plot that’s already there that hasn’t been resolved yet. So if you have your big throughline for your story, whether it’s defeating the big bad or going through a dangerous journey, right? talk about what step is next and why that step is going to be dangerous. That can help. You can raise questions that are not somebody dead walking in the door, but then just be like, “Hey. I thought back about this. How come this happened? Or why did this person do that?” to bring a little curiosity in without having a huge twist right at the end.
Bunny: Yeah. I feel like the biggest one is just keep it relevant. Don’t completely pivot. It should have something to do with what you’ve already done and where you’re going.
Oren: Admittedly, the current project that I’m trying to work on, I do really want to end it with the long-dead spouse walking through the door, but I probably shouldn’t. The urge is real.
Bunny: You’re putting it on record saying you think that is bad and should not be done.
Oren: Do as I say, not as I do!
Bunny: You’re shaming your future self into avoiding the worst temptations.
Chris: I do think, as storytellers, we’re naturally drawn to the big, dramatic things. In addition to things that are clever, of course.
Oren: We do love to be shocking and clever at the same time.
Chris: Yeah, I think often a little hook is just about advertising what’s next, right? Because presumably you’ll continue to have cool, exciting things in the next section of the story. So if you have the ability to bring those things up and remind readers of them, that can be a good way to do it.
Bunny: Yeah, really, if you have that, you shouldn’t need cliffhangers per se. Like, you can have them, but if you’ve got this other stuff going on, you shouldn’t need them to get the reader invested in continuing to read or watch or whatever.
Oren: All right, with those words of wisdom, I think we’ll go ahead and call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you felt satisfied rather than annoyed by this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: Yeah, and before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons who have never left us hanging. First, there’s Aman Jaber, who’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel, and there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
[Music]
Outro: This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.
Generative AI is everywhere these days, whether we like it or not. And to be clear, we very much do not like it. From LLM slop crowding out real search results to image generators putting artists out of work, we are not at all fans of this Franken-baby created by unregulated tech companies and amoral venture capital. But, zooming in a little further, today we’re talking about how so-called “AI” affects writers and storytellers. We’ll talk about our own experience with it, why the ethical implications are so important, and why this feels like the Metaverse all over again.
Show Notes AI Generated Novella * LLMs Stealing Stuff * Pompei Scrolls * Google Books Case * Failure of the Metaverse * New York Times Lawsuit * Adobe’s Image Generator * Perplexity: LLM That Defeats Paywalls * Ao3 Getting Scraped * Problem of Investigative Journalism * Open AI Takedown Request TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Mukyuu.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Intro: You are listening to the Mythcreants podcast. With your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny.
[opening song]Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Chris and with me is
Oren: Oren
Chris: and
Bunny: Bunny.
Chris: I’ve got it. The new podcast creation tool of the future.
Bunny: Ooh, what could it be?
Chris: Okay, here we’re gonna just republish our previous episodes, but then re-edit it to mix them up. So every episode will be a clip show, ’cause people love clip shows, right?
Oren: Famously.
Bunny: Yeah. You gotta put those on TikTok.
Chris: Yeah. So you see the future is really the past. It’s so deep.
Bunny: My brain just curled into a knot.
Chris: Oh shoot. I just realized something. We need new ideas, of course. We’ll just take them from other podcasts. It’s fine. You know, we could ask permission, but they might say no.
Bunny: [Laughter]
Chris: So I’m thinking maybe we shouldn’t ask permission.
Oren: Right. ’cause we wouldn’t wanna give them a chance to inhibit progress. [sarcastic]
Chris: Yeah, we’re being very innovative, okay? [sarcastic]
Bunny: Don’t they know this is the internet and therefore they should have known what they were getting into? [sarcastic] It’s just a thief’s paradise.
Chris: If they didn’t want us to use pieces of their podcast and insert it into our own podcast, why did they make it public? Okay? It’s publicly available. [Laughter] Clearly. It’s a fair game. [sarcastic]
Bunny: [Laughter] Slam dunk.
Oren: Or it might not be publicly available. [Chuckle] Maybe we’ll just buy a big stack of private podcasts and pirate them and then use them for our clip show.
Bunny: Oh, even better
Chris: Or sneak past their paywall to steal their podcast and add it to our clip show.
Oren: Crime is the answer, okay? We have discovered entirely new ways to commit crimes.
Bunny: Podcast crime.
Chris: So innovative. So we’re talking about machine learning, commonly called AI and in particular generative AI or large language models.
Bunny: Thanks. I hate it. [Laughter]
Chris: Now, I have to say I’m not all against machine learning stuff, not all of it. I’m not just “the technology is bad.” I do like to differentiate the actual technology from how it’s being used. I don’t even hate all generative stuff.
There are definitely use cases where it is helpful and makes tedious work faster. I think the big problem is that for tech companies, what they want to advertise is replacing creative workers because that’s flashy and gets them all the investor bucks.
And that’s the whole “move fast and break things” mindset where they identify a new niche and then they try to raise tons of money really fast and move into the space really, really fast and claim territory before anybody else and be “disruptors”.
Oren: Right. Because the investor class doesn’t care if you’ve created a piece of software that can help analyze burned scrolls from Pompeii to help us figure out what they say, which is a real thing that machine learning is being used for and is super cool, but that’s not gonna get you a billion dollars of investor money.
What is gonna get you a billion dollars of investor money is telling people that you found a way to not have to hire writers anymore.
Bunny: So unfortunately that is the main thrust of a lot of the hype, and I don’t know, for me, I feel like I have… some of my friends and my parents call this kind of a basic view of AI. And maybe it is.
But my fundamental problem with AI is that the way the current models are trained. I feel like the ethics question — you can’t talk about the ethics of AI without that — and I think that’s pretty patently unethical. So is there a way to use AI ethically when it was trained in this way? I don’t know. I don’t think so.
Chris: Yeah. I feel like AI, generative AI that’s being widely advertised is like an ouroboros, where it has a basic conceptual problem, which is that it depends on training data, which it also destroys, right? [Laughter] By competing with it.
Again, I’m not an IP lawyer, so take any legal stuff I say with a grain of salt. But everybody is citing this Google Books court case because if somebody wants generative AI to be fair use, they will make the argument that it is. That’s just how it works. Just like they’ll make the argument that, oh, well, this is just the inevitable future, so there’s no point in fighting it. There’s just a lot of disingenuous arguments that come with it.
But the Google Books case was ruled fair use. Google was taking everybody’s books and it was scanning them in, but it is not creating a competing product with the book. If you’ve ever had a Google Book search result, it shows you only a really small portion of the book. You can’t read the rest, right? So it’s not replacing a book sale and that’s really crucial to one of the reasons why it was ruled “Fair use”.
Generative AI is just a very different case. Because it has a huge effect on the market of the original and can destroy its own training data by putting all the people who create that training data out of business, which is just shortsighted from the tech perspective too. But when everybody is afraid of getting left behind and they’re all racing to claim the space first, they don’t really stop and look at what is the long-term viability.
Bunny: It’s definitely bandwagoning. I noticed this in just a lot of websites that suddenly have AI features where none are necessary. LinkedIn now has an AI feature and Quora has one.
Chris: Don’t even talk to me about Quora.
Bunny: [Laughter] Okay, I shall not say its name. But my roommate’s book recommendation app. The point of the app was to ask people for book recommendations and now it’s got like a stupid little AI thing that responds in addition to those. And you can’t turn it off.
There are just AI things in a bunch of places now where they don’t need to be. Even putting the ethics aside, it’s really obnoxious.
Oren: It’s also definitely hit the point where the people who have invested so much money in this are now also invested in making you think that this is gotta be the way of the future, ’cause they’re so committed.
It’s like how Facebook wouldn’t shut up about the Metaverse for several years because they had invested so much money in the metaverse. And fortunately it was only Facebook. This is like if everyone had invested in the Metaverse.
Chris: Mm-Hmm.
Bunny: Oh boy. Quora is part of the Metaverse, now.
Oren, Chris, Bunny: [Laughter]
Chris: Again, there is a way to fix this problem with the technology. It’s simply to pay for the training data. It’s that simple because if the training data is paid for, then that supports the creation of new content. So it’s no longer cannibalizing itself anymore. And of course companies don’t wanna pay and they say they can’t.
Oren: That wailing you just heard is all of the companies claiming they can’t afford it.
Chris: And they’re probably lying, but we don’t know for sure. There’s other expenses involved. It’s impossible to know for sure. At the same time, Adobe has an actual licensed image generator, but it did it in a very underhanded way where it had Adobe stock and some pre-existing contracts that were agreed to before the existence of generative AI.
But the language just allowed for the creation of new products. So a lot of people who did not actually wanna agree to this have a contract that technically allows it. At the same time, it seems like it could be viable for, for instance, a large stock photo site to get mass buy-in to create generative images. So that’s one reason I think they’re probably lying. But at the same time, if our choices are between AI and the creative workers who actually create new ideas and are actually innovating in countless areas of knowledge, I’m gonna have to choose the creative workers.
Obviously, I’m biased since I am one, but…
Oren: If I can’t afford a hammer, I don’t just get to demand that I be given one. That’s not how it works, man. Did you all suddenly forget money? That’s the premise of our economy. And I should just be clear. I do wanna mention that the thing about content holders using their contracts with creators really underhandedly with AI? That is a real problem.
I don’t want people to think that OpenAI is the only issue here. Because if Simon and Schuster decides that, oh, actually all of those contracts that you signed with us to publish your books, those all expand to AI now. And there’s no legal precedent saying they can’t do that? That would be a disaster. So let’s keep that part in mind too.
Of course, this brings us to the very existentially uneasy question of: can AI write fiction? And the answer currently appears to be that it can write bad fiction with some human input. It can use probability models to create a block of text, which resembles bad fiction.
I’ll put this in the show notes, but I read an AI generated novella for this podcast, which was not pleasant. Both just because AI makes me feel bad at the moment, I feel like I’m under siege by it. But the story itself was also really bad.
Nothing made any sense. Characters appeared from nowhere. The plot never went anywhere. The super genius hacker was really surprised that there were electronic defenses around the big government thing he was hacking.
But I also should note that it wasn’t like it was uniquely bad. There are humans who write this way too. So I, I don’t wanna sound like I’m trying to make some kind of appeal to the human soul.
Chris: Do you know if this novella had any human intervention at all in it?
Oren: Yeah. So the process, according to the person who made it, is–this was done using a specialist writing LLM. It wasn’t done with standard ChatGPT.
And what this person did was they typed up a brief synopsis of this cyberpunk story they wanted. They fed that into the program. The program then spat out a chapter by chapter summary/outline, and then the human rewrote the outline to the point where it was largely unrecognizable and then put that back into the app, and then the app spat out the text itself.
Chris: One thing that I personally think is the toughest is the small stuff. Sentence by sentence is definitely easier to predict than the large conceptual big picture stuff. My prediction when this started was that I didn’t think AI would write good novels anytime soon. And so far that seems to be true. And my reasoning was, it’s all about concepts. And this is something we talk about actually fairly regularly with lots of people trying to create plot structures that are too concrete and too specific. But real plot structure is based on very loose, abstract concepts that are based on emotion. And those are the very things that machine learning has trouble with. It doesn’t understand concepts. It only sees patterns in words and the correlation between concepts and emotions and specific words is a very loose correlation.
And it’s not that it’s not theoretically possible, but I’m not sure there are enough novels on earth to train an AI to actually write a good novel.
Bunny: There’s also just the issue of people disagreeing on what a good novel is, which is maybe a very basic point, but I feel like if we’re going to be heading towards a space where I type “write a good novel” and an AI spits one out, it feels worth mentioning. That in itself is not obvious.
Chris: Yeah, I mean there are definitely differences in opinion for sure. At the same time, there are also some works that people agree are good generally, or that more people agree these works are good. So we can honestly, [laughter] with some data, that’s something that machine learning is fairly good at, like creating an image that resembles images that people have rated highly, with the data.
Oren: And with this story in particular, it’s notable that the prompts being put into it were not good either. And I don’t mean to knock the person who was doing this. I’m sure this was for a work assignment. I don’t think they put their A game into it, but if I was getting this outline that they created as a content edit, I would be like, okay, what’s the throughline? What is the bad guy trying to accomplish? How does the hero feel about it? Where did these two characters come from? They come out of nowhere in the outline too.
But this also speaks to something that people were asking me when ChatGPT first hit the scene. There was this question of, can I have a rough idea for a novel and ask ChatGPT to write it so I don’t have to think about the difficult choices of what actually goes into the novel?
And as far as I can tell, the answer is no.
It’s possible that the software has gotten better since this article was written, but I haven’t found any other coverage of it. So that suggests to me that it hasn’t, if it’s even possible.
Chris: As far as I know, the most effective way to use AI to make a fiction work is to, again, start with a high level outline, right? You still have to have all the storytelling knowledge yourself to make a good high level outline, and then have ChatGPT or whatever, expand it, and then fix that, and then do it again, and then fix that [Laughter] So that you are creating the high level conceptual structure because machine learning does not know how to do that.
Oren: And could you fix the prose that it spits out? Maybe, but I’m not convinced that would be less work than just writing it yourself, because that prose is really bland. You’re gonna have to do a lot of work to make that prose any good.
Chris: I’ve heard of people who have said that it speeds up their work. I suspect if you’re super picky about your prose, it won’t.
I think that if I try to use something like that. Every sentence it put out would be like, no, that’s not the sentence I wanted. [Laughter]
Oren: There was an article, this one’s even older, about an author whose business model is to write super fast and put out, I think it was at least one novel a month, maybe more, and they were like, oh, it’s great for this.
And I looked at their books. I looked at some of the ones from before they started using this software and some of the ones from after. And admittedly I couldn’t tell the difference. But it was bad before. it was just generic and bland. And sure, I bet it can replicate that.
Chris: Again there are a lot of writers, especially indie writers, who are just under a lot of pressure to write really fast to make their living. And so that’s probably where it will make the most inroads. Because under that pressure, a lot of people who are catering to a more sort of niche group and selling more books to fewer people, are I think where that comes in. And there may be people who are okay with planned prose if the story is exactly the type of story they want because it’s niche.
Again, on an ethical level, we should probably separate concerns because a lot of people are reacting very, very negatively to the idea of AI in fiction writing. And often, some of it is for very good reason, but there’s a difference between just being disgusted at the idea of having sentence writing be automated and the concern about those automated sentences being based on stolen works, works that were just outright pirated, [laughter] or whether those automated sentences aren’t very good.
I, personally, as a person who likes word craft and cares about my sentences, I don’t like the idea [laughter] of the computer doing that work for the human. At the same time, I don’t think that’s enough reason to be opposed to it.
If we had a situation where writers were all choosing to pool stories together to train an AI that would automate that process for them and everybody was choosing to do that and choosing to contribute… But that’s not what we have right now.
Instead, we have stuff scraped from AO3 and the Omegaverse showing. If anybody’s not familiar, the Omegaverse is a whole area of fan writing that is raunchy and people found Omegaverse elements coming out, I think it was in the software SudoWrite, which revealed that Archive of Our Own had been scraped and fed into it. People were not happy with this. They did not consent to that.
Bunny: Even if it were a bunch of artists pooling their work, which critically would be an opt-in system rather than the opt-out one, and right now we can’t opt out. So it’s just a no-opt system with how it currently works.
Oren: Currently opt-less.
Bunny: We’re currently opt-less, unfortunately. Even in that case where it’s an opt-in, I feel like we kind of, no matter what, run into this Ship of Theseus situation. How many elements of AI do you add or remove until it becomes your own work? Or the AI’s work? Or the stolen person’s work? Even in that scenario–
Oren: I mean, from a purely abstract standpoint, you would probably have to apply the same standard you would use if you were deciding whether or not to credit someone else as your co-author.
Just in terms of nonfiction — this comes up on the site sometimes — usually when Chris and I do editing on each other’s work, it’s pretty minor. It’s like, “Hey, this part’s not working. Can you fix it?” Stuff like that. And we don’t list each other as co-authors for that.
But sometimes Chris will change a big section of my text or add a new subsection or whatever. And when she does that, I list her as a co-author because that’s her work. And so it’s the same level, I would say, if you’re doing something like that with an LLM.
Even if you’ve solved all of the other ethical problems, the LLM is your co-writer at that point.
Chris:Yeah. I do think that labeling is good because I just believe that consumers should have a choice, especially right now because of the ethical problems with training data.
If we had a world where that was taken care of, there would still be a lot of people who just want to know where the art came from and how it was created. That matters to people. And knowing even if machine generated text was normalized, people would still care whether or not it was created by a human. And so I think that we should always have those labels.
Oren: Yeah. At least we will. Who knows? Maybe if you’re young enough, it’ll all seem completely normal. I don’t know.
Chris: These days, if you have, for instance, a photo that was not put in Photoshop, that would be unusual enough that the person would advertise that photo as “no, this is the original without any Photoshop enhancements”. Because Photoshop is just a normal part of working with photos these days.
So that could happen. I would prefer it not to, but that could happen.
Bunny: Yeah. I guess all this leads to where will it go from here? And the answer to that is, I don’t know. I hope it dies. [Laughter]
Oren: It certainly feels like on the whole, at least as far as the average public facing stuff, it’s been a huge net negative, right?
It’s like we have all these problems and then as a side benefit, also way more energy consumption.
We have seen some positives, right? Some mild positives. Now, if we shut down all of the unethical uses of this stuff, is the technology gonna be worth keeping around for figuring out what these scrolls from Pompeii say? Or is that gonna be prohibitively expensive?
I don’t know the answer. I’d like to still know what those scrolls from Pompeii say, but I don’t think I’m willing to pay this price for it.
Chris: Just to go into other uses that are not competing with training data.
Bunny: Oh, I thought you were gonna say that are not Pompeii scrolls.
Oren: [Laughter]
Chris: Not Pompeii scrolls. We have things like automated transcriptions. A human can listen to speech and copy it down by hand, but that’s pretty tedious work. That’s not creative work we really want to be doing. It can improve transcriptions, it can do some more audio filters. It can’t replace an audio editor or engineer, but it could take away some of their tedious work.
On the image side. You know, I have been looking at Photoshop’s Remove tool that has become suspiciously good. But again, all it does is if I have, for instance, a book cover and I wanna feature this book and I want part of this cover to be the feature image of the post ’cause we’re gonna discuss it. We get a lot of awkward situations where part of the title is cut off, so we have partial letters and the background is really complex so you can’t just easily take them out.
The tool assesses this irregular complex background and fills in a plausible background to remove the letters so that the image looks a little nicer. Again, it’s not impossible for me to go in and create that effect, but it would be pretty tedious and I’m not really worried about it replacing an artist by doing that.
So it can do good things, but it’s a lot more of an incremental “make things that we have better” type of a change in many cases, and that’s just not sexy enough.
Oren: That’s not gonna get five bajillion dollars in venture capital funds.
Bunny: I wish that was the sort of thing that money would go to. It’s a shame that it’s not being used on Pompeii scrolls rather than thieving the internet.
Chris: I will say a couple things as Mythcreants. We’re talking a lot of fiction writing, but obviously Mythcreants itself has a really large stake in this, and the biggest threat to us is honestly probably Google. [Laughter]
So Google is responding to this by creating AI generated answers to search results. And Google, because it has a huge search monopoly, has become a huge choke point in the internet and has increasingly decided it would like to keep all of that traffic for itself, please.
Oren: Yeah. Why would you wanna go to a website? You can just stay on Google forever.
Chris: You could just stay on Google forever and it’s taking people’s content. The only way to get Google to stop is to just not be on Google’s search engine, which for most websites, that’s just professional suicide. Because again, people just use Google as a utility. It’s like a basic navigation feature of the web. I feel like it probably shouldn’t be a private company.
There’s even this new search engine that is trying to raise money right now called Perplexity. It snuck past Forbes paywall–and apparently Forbes is not the only website it has done this with — to steal content.
It doesn’t even have links like Google. It’s just an answer engine. I would advise not investing in them. I do think they’re gonna get sued. In fact, I feel like the New York Times and its lawsuit against OpenAI can just use Perplexity as an example for why the courts should side with them.
Bunny: That feels pretty clear cut. It’s really blatant.
Oren: I hope they get sued. It just feels wrong that they’re just allowed to do that. Someone should stop them.
Chris: That’s exactly how I felt when ChatGPT and these other image generators came out. I was like, what’s happening? Where is everybody? Where are the people stopping them from doing this? Stopping them from violating copyright?
And is it that all the businesses that should be stopping them think that they will profit from this? Or does it just take a long time? And the answer was both.
Lawsuits take a long time, so they probably will get sued. But I think that people hire lawyers, they talk about it, they do data gathering.There’s a whole lot of steps to filing a lawsuit and it just takes time, which is why there’s this whole strategy of we’re gonna become so big that courts don’t wanna side against us because they’re afraid of destroying us because we’re too big now.
Bunny: I think I heard — and I don’t know the exact details of this–but I’m pretty sure Google, even before all this AI stuff really hit the scene, Google was facing a lawsuit in Australia because of those little preview things. You’d look up how to change a light bulb and then it would have a little dropdown. It was already doing this. It’s just accelerated.
Chris: Google was absolutely already doing this stuff.
Bunny: Yeah. But it’s gotten way worse. Absolutely. And I am glad that finally I have a workaround to get away from that AI and just use the web like it was. It’s frustrating that it’s something you have to go out of your way to do.
Chris: All the social media companies are doing something similar where they’re also algorithmically hiding things that have external links because they wanna keep all of the traffic for themselves.
And it’s just… But at least most of the time when they’re doing that, they’re not actively stealing your content and using it to keep the traffic to themselves.
Oren: When they started talking about walled gardens, I assumed the walls were to keep people out. I didn’t realize this was a Berlin Wall situation.
Bunny: [Laughter] It’s also just the issue of now we’ve got AIs that will be writing for a search engine optimization, and then the Google AI is picking those out. And so it’s just AIs writing for AIs. And are we kinda losing the point of this whole internet thing, guys? Let’s pull back a little bit and think about the users.
Oren: Hang on, hang on. Are you suggesting that a user does not want to be trying to find reviews of an older book and find a review that doesn’t really make a lot of sense at the top of the search result and realize that it’s because it’s an AI generated site trying to sell me off-brand accessories? I could have bought a really cheap purse, and if you all have your way, I would never have seen that purse.
Chris & Bunny: [Laughter]
Bunny: Oh Oren, what a specific example. I’d almost think that’s what happened to you.
Chris: Just a really hypothetical thing, you know.
Chris: And I should also add, a lot of these AI content farms are deliberately targeting articles and other websites and plagiarizing those articles.
So they’re not just making up random works. They’re taking original investigative journalism and just rewording it. Just plagiarizing it. And so it’s very blatant. Investigative journalism was famously just fine before this all happened, so I’m sure that these extra knocks aren’t gonna cause any problems for it. [sarcastically]
Bunny: [Laughter]
Chris: Just as a last thing, ’cause of course we’re going over time, I just wanted to add that if you were somebody who is copyright skeptical, obviously we have a different position, especially since most authors can’t make a living on their work and really do need those copyrights. But I think it’s worth pointing out that tech companies are absolutely not on the anti-copyright side. Hilariously, OpenAI recently did a copyright take down request on a ChatGPT fan Reddit that was using their logo.
Bunny: Oh my God. It really is an ouroboros, isn’t it?
Chris: And they really get mad when they find other machine learning that are training on their AI.
This is a thing that’s happened. It’s apparently a faux pas in the machine learning community if you train your machine on their machine.
Bunny: [Laughter]
Chris: So they are willing to take everybody else’s work as training data, but oh they get mad if somebody uses their work for training data. They are absolutely not anti- copyright, they just want to be able to take other people’s work when it’s convenient and protect their own copyright and their own machine generated outputs, which are not copyrightable right now. But they certainly want it to be.
Oren: Alright. Well, with that, I think we will call this podcast to a close and we will all give a silent prayer that this ends up like NFTs, but we don’t know. We’ll just have to see in the future.
Chris: And if you’d like to help us keep going as the internet collapses, potentially consider supporting us on Patreon. It really does make a huge difference to whether or not we’re able to continue in our budget. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Bunny: Help us fight OpenAI single handedly in a brawl.
Oren: That’s what we’re doing. Imagine us as the plucky hero against OpenAI. And before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of marble. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek.
We will talk to you next week.
[closing theme]
This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.
Thousands of novels are published every year. No matter how niche your genre, other people will still be writing in it, to say nothing of all the previously published books out there. Clearly, we all want our stories to stand out. But how, exactly? Should we just focus on making the story really good, or does it need a gimmick? That’s what we’re talking about this week, and as always, the answer is: it depends.
Show Notes Follow the Sound of Snow * Rebel Moon * Grimm * The Midlist * Magic Bites * Brinkwood: Blood of Tyrants * The Book Eaters * The Martian * Originality vs Novelty * Legends and Lattes * Wish Fulfillment * The Wandering Inn * The Kaiju Preservation Society * The Expanse * The Murderbot Diaries * This Is How You Lose the Time War * Lockwood and Co * Vampire Royals TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Sofia.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[intro music]Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Oren with you today is…
Bunny: Bunny
Oren: …and…
Chris: Chris.
Oren: Every podcast needs something to help it stand out. Look at Mythcreants: We’ve got Chris’s superb understanding of Wordcraft. We’ve got Bunny with philosophy and plant knowledge, and we’ve got me. I’m mad about wizards.
Bunny: Um, Oren, fungi aren’t plants.
Oren: Whaaaaat?
Bunny: That’s what I’m here for.
Oren: See, this kind of cutting observation isn’t something you could find on other podcasts.
Bunny: [snickers]
Oren: So today we are talking about making stories stand out, and this is partly because I have read a bunch of stories recently that did not. And I found myself describing them in terms like generic, bland, or even derivative.
Whoo! Spoooky!
Chris: I have thought about this word derivative, that lots of people like to sling around.
I understand the impulse to use it as a pejorative, but I don’t think it’s the right word. Because there are lots of works that are intentionally derivative for very good reason. Any kind of adaptation, for instance, is a derivative work. Any retelling of a public domain work is derivative.
It’s just done in lots of positive ways. There are some stories that I think go so far is to be copycats because they’re so intentional and try to copy everything about a story at every level. If it’s copying both the plot and the word craft, then that’s a little too far. But that’s really unusual.
Honestly, and that’s not what people are talking about.
Bunny: You would say that, Chris, wouldn’t you? You have a stake in the adaptation game, don’t you?
Chris: [laughs] Guilty as charged. Yes, I did do a fairytale retelling recently, which is basically an adaptation. And adaptations are hard. They come with lots of constraints, so don’t be mean to us, okay?
Oren: In my experience, when [people] say derivative, what they usually mean is bland or generic.
Cause there are a very small number of stories that are actually copying another story in a way that is bad. We all are fine with endless remixes of Sherlock Holmes. We want the new Sherlock Holmes to have something new to bring to the table. We’re not upset that they are remixing Sherlock Holmes. What is upsetting is if it’s just another Sherlock Holmes story that we’ve seen before.
And people might call that derivative, but it’s not really the derivativeness that’s the problem. It’s how bland is it.
Chris: It’s the fact that it doesn’t have anything new to bring to the table. It’s not the fact that it has things that are copied. The fact that it doesn’t have anything that’s not copied.
Bunny: I think in visual media too, the aesthetics play a big role in figuring out whether something seems derivative in the negative sense or too copycat. Like that new moo… moon rebel—rebellion, rebel… rebel moon? Rebel Moon. Man, that’s so derivative, I forgot the title.
Oren: Rebel Moon is definitely taking really heavy inspiration from both Star Wars and War Hammer 40K in terms of its aesthetics and certain plot points.
I don’t know if I would care if it was good. Rebel Moon’s real bad and the fact that it’s real bad makes the parts that it borrowed from other stories feel worse.
I’m told that the opening sequence is extremely similar to the opening sequence in Inglourious Bastards—which is intentionally spelled wrong apparently—but I’ve never actually seen that movie, so I’m only told this. I can see how that would be annoying if you’ve just seen Inglourious Bastards than you put on Rebel Moon. It’s like, hang on a second. Why is this scene the same?
Chris: Rebel Moon stands out in that it feels like a bunch of scenes clipped from other movies just mashed together, and that really is something.
Oren: But like if Rebel Moon, for example, wasn’t two hours of gathering the party, which is basically what Rebel Moon is, we spend the whole, almost the whole movie doing that, then I might not care so much. I’d be more willing to let it slide. I’d be like, okay, yeah, that weapon is clearly a lightsaber. But sure. Other sci-fi settings have laser sword type things and yeah, those guys are clearly wearing armor that’s inspired by Warhammer 40k. I like big shoulder pads and blocky guns, so I’ll, I’ll let it go.
Bunny: Yeah, you’d be right at home in a 1980s businesswoman outfit.
Oren: [laughs]
Chris: Certainly there are a lot of things about Rebel Moon that look visually cool. They just, everything is so underdeveloped except for the wheat for some reason.
Oren: Yeah. There’s so much time on the wheat.
Chris: I mean, the wheat is different. It does stand out. People keep talking about the wheat, so there’s that.
Oren: The wheat is an interesting example of the topic we’re talking about today, actually. Because it does stand out, but not in a good way because it’s not interesting.
It’s not cool space wheat, nor is there any kind of interesting contrast between the fancy high tech world and the nitty gritty farming reality of the wheat, the way that you might expect in a show like Firefly. Or in the Fallout games, there’s some interesting parallel between the world that’s besieged by super mutants, but also people need to grow corn.
But there’s nothing like that in the movie. It’s just a lot of wheat harvesting, which doesn’t end up mattering at the end anyway. And so, it stands out. It’s the meme now, which I guess you could argue is better than no one knowing about it, but it’s still not great.
Chris: And if I understand, the wheat harvesting could just take place in the real world. Is it fantastical wheat harvesting in any way?
Oren: Hard to imagine real world wheat harvesting being in that slow motion. But otherwise…
Chris: [laughs] What was it, like Gladiator or 300 where the character spends a lot of time gazing out over a wheat field?
Oren: If it was 300, that would fit, because that’s also a Zack Snyder movie, so maybe Zack Snyder is just telling us something about his wheat interests.
Chris: I mean, it does go to show that something that’s not gonna hit home as well if it is superfluous, which is a problem with the wheat.
And generally, again, we talk about speculative fiction, that’s our whole thing. Sci-fi, fantasy, horror, what have you. Those things should matter to what you’re doing.
So, if it really was about the wheat harvesting, you could have a space fantasy weed harvesting if you wanted, but there should be a reason why the wheat harvesting is happening in a space fantasy setting. And that should change the harvest in some way. It shouldn’t just be the fantastical elements sitting alongside a perfectly normal wheat harvest.
Oren: Yeah. Like maybe talk about how it’s difficult to grow wheat in an alien planet, something like that. Again, not to keep beating the dead Fallout horse, but that’s what they do in Fallout, right? You have to deal with trying to grow plants in irradiated soil. So it feels like it’s part of the conceit, part of the premise instead of just, oh, and also there’s wheat.
Chris: Part of this being called a Mars Western. When you have a story where the speculative elements just don’t matter and don’t make any difference or have any impact, the idea is that you have a shootout and it happens to happen in Mars. But it could have just been a Western and it doesn’t really make any difference. That’s something we don’t see all the time, but we see sometimes like in Grimm, in the early seasons of Grimm show.
Oren: Yeah. This is obviously just a police procedural and supposedly some of the bad guys he captures are magical, but they would have the same plot if they weren’t magical.
Chris: And that one is so funny because there’s an obvious reason for it. It’s that he needs to be able to report the crime is closed to his boss, which means that he needs a non-fantastical explanation for how he closed this crime. And as a result, all the fantastical stuff doesn’t matter. And it would be exactly the same without it. And I’ve heard that this does get fixed in later seasons.
Bunny: That’s such an unforced error. They could have made him the boss, for one thing and for another, maybe the boss knows.
Chris: The Secret Fantasy Police Division or whatever, do X-Files style, right?
Bunny: Right! But fantasy, no, I’d be into that. Not just police procedural, but we swear there’s magic somewhere.
I haven’t got as much of a finger on the pulse of what’s standing out in the larger scheme of things. Oren, you’ve been discussing and reading the midlist.
Oren: Mm. [indeed]
Bunny: …And I guess I would have trouble picking the midlist out of a lineup based on anything other than advertising, just because I feel like a lot of standing out is advertising and in this case, quality for sure.
Oren: Spoilers, you have probably never read a midlist book, or at least not very often.
The term midlist is a publishing term. What it means is no or very little marketing. And if there’s no or very little marketing, you’ve probably never heard of these books. That’s why reading them was kind of a shock because I was looking at books that do have something that makes them stand out. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re good, but they at least have something that you can imagine someone being like, oh, that’s neat. And focusing on that either as a sales point or just as a thing they remembered from reading the story.
Whereas some of them are just straight up bad, right? Some of them have serious problems that are not addressed, but others are competent, but not exceptional in any way, and they don’t have anything that makes them feel special.
One example, and this is a problem I think particular to the subgenre, is military sci-fi. I read a military sci-fi novel that I actually liked okay. But it was really low novelty because the whole point of military sci-fi is to replicate the feeling of being in the US military. So that limits your opportunities for novelty. And so, for a lot of the story, it felt like we weren’t really in space. Every once in a while, we would mention, oh yeah, we’re on a space station. But mostly it was the minutiae of army bureaucracy.
Chris: I do think it’s fair to say that stories end up on the midlist for a whole variety of reasons. This is not a comprehensive take.
Not standing out though… We’ll talk more of a high concept. Publishers love having an idea for the book that they can pitch and sell easily. So, if it doesn’t stand out, it’s less likely to be high concept, so they’re more likely to put it on the mid list if it’s otherwise competently written.
And of course, there’s unfair double standards when it comes to marginalized writers and authors for sure.
So, I don’t wanna generalize about the midlist too much because there’s a whole different variety of works that are on the mid list for various reasons. But these are the books that the publishers decided not to risk tons of money on trying to market or replace large bets on, let’s say.
Oren: Yeah, and I’ve certainly read books that were heavily marketed and I thought they were bad, or even I thought that the thing that they were marketed on was a lie.
I recently read Magic Bites, which is a fairly famous work of urban fantasy at this point, and the marketing for it, including the sales blurb, makes a huge deal about how this is a setting where magic and technology take turns working. So you’ll have a magic tide will come up and now magic works. And then the magic tide will recede, and now technology works. And that’s huge. That is in the sales blurb where they talk about how when the magic tide recedes, it leaves behind stranded monsters that cause problems and the protagonist has to deal with them.
And that is a lie. That is just straight up not true. That is not what the book is about. That never happens. And they do mention the magic tide thing a little bit in the book, but it’s so ancillary. You could take it out completely and the book would not change. It’s just a standard urban fantasy. But you can tell that some marketer was like, Aha, I can sell that! So high concept isn’t necessarily the same as a good story.
Chris: Also, bland books can also end up getting big marketing pushes if they’re on trend. That’s another thing. So books which you might look at and be like, Okay, I feel like this is just copy without any heat energy put into it, can get pushes because that particular thing that it’s focused on is just really hot right now and is selling really well. And it was similar to other books that sold well.
And again, marketers that are doing sales assessments for all these large companies that manage creative works. Always looking for a sure bet. Something that, oh, I’m sure that this will sell. I’m sure that it will make us money. And it’s always somewhat in conflict with creative work because things get less interesting the more they’re used. And so safe bets means we don’t get cool new breakouts either.
Anyway, that’s what they like. So sometimes you’ll have something that is very bland, that is pushed, and there are a few people who do try to write on trend, but for the most part, by the time it’s big, it’s too late. And you have to get lucky for those to work out.
Oren: Yeah. Unless you’re really fast.
Chris: If you’re really fast, yeah. But even then, a publisher usually takes two years.
So, I think this is very relevant for a lot of indie works. If you’re fast and you’re an indie writer and you can publish it quickly too, then writing on trend can make you big without making your story stand out.
Oren: Oh, and by the way, I feel like I should have done this earlier, but to define high concept real quick, it’s specifically means a simple, easily sellable idea. And I know that’s a little confusing. I thought high concept meant the opposite of that. For a long time, I thought it meant something really like…
Chris: [pretentious voice] high concept.
The word high makes it sound like it’s supposed to be snooty or something.
Oren: Yeah, no, it means the opposite. It means very commercial.
Bunny: I did not know that.
Oren: Yeah, that confused me for a while too. And there are plenty of other examples. A lot of them are from, interestingly enough, the role-playing Game space. It has a lot of high concept games because role-playing games depend on Kickstarters a lot. And a high concept is a great way to get people signed up for your Kickstarter.
So, you can have Brinkwood: The Blood of Tyrants, which is a vampire game that is sold under the tagline, drink the Rich. And that sounds pretty neat. People love that. They latched onto that with their little vampire teeth, and it made tons of money on Kickstarter.
I’m not saying that’s the only reason. I’m not saying the game’s bad, I’m just saying that was definitely a bonus for them.
Bunny: Is the game bad?
Oren: I don’t know. I’ve never looked at it.
Bunny: Okay.
Chris: And there is a distinction between something that is unique and has things that make it stand out and high concept, because I think what marketers like the most is something that is otherwise fairly familiar but has a big thing they can pitch, that makes it stand out. Because that often makes it easier to explain. Whereas some works are very unique and they’re unique enough that it’s not easy to explain anymore because we don’t have as big of a frame of reference.
So if you were to say, oh, this is Twilight with zombies instead of vampires, then Twilight is your frame of reference. You can get works that have wonderful, unique ideas and are great reading and are high novelty but aren’t necessarily pitchable because it takes too long. Again, a novel has a fair amount of time to set up the world and explain. It’s not necessarily gonna be easily condensed down into a two second pitch.
Whereas there are also things that are unique that I would maybe put into more of the bizarre category. And some people do like bizarre stuff, like a lot of the avant-garde crowd, but it tends to have more niche appeal. I think with a lot of the unique elements that are bizarre, there’s a question of like, why? Why do this? This is totally out of the blue.
Interestingly, The Book Eaters, which is a bestseller because of the premise of vampires that eat books, which is a high concept premise. There were a lot of people who felt that was actually also bizarre. And it has a lot of scenes of people just nomming on pages, on the physical pages of the book.
Bunny: So it’s not like they drink the knowledge or anything, it’s that they just…
Chris: The thing about The Book Eaters is that the premise which is used to sell the book, is actually only a small portion of the book. So, it’s another one of those cases where the publisher latched onto part of the book as high concept and then marketed that. And then some readers come in disappointed because they expected it to be a bigger deal. But they also absorb the knowledge, but it doesn’t matter very often it’s not very impactful.
Whereas a lot of the description is just focused on what the texture of these pages is like to eat, for instance. What does the ink taste like? The physical process of just nomming on a book, which I think people might have found a little bit more bizarre.
And again, some people have a taste for that stuff, but I do think that’s when storytellers can lose people too.
Oren: We’ve talked about high concept a lot, but there is another way to make your book stand out. And I’m not saying this make your book like have sales success because I don’t necessarily trust publishers.
But as far as with readers go, you have our good friend, the ANTS, which are Attachment, Novelty, Tension and Satisfaction. Which we talk about a lot. We call them the critical factors that make stories popular. And the reason we call them that is if your story has a lot of them, it is both better to read and people are more likely to remember it and it will stand out from the other books that do not.
Bunny: You will stand the ants.
Chris: Unfortunately, ANTS will not give you a marketing budget
Oren: [snickers]
Chris: …but it does mean that somebody reading the book is more likely to like it.
Oren: Yeah. Novelty is the most obvious because again, novelty tends to line up better with marketing. Not always; The broken Earth is very novel, but not easy to market. Not impossible. You can talk about it’s a world of endless apocalypses, but that doesn’t really get at what it is and why it’s so interesting.
Chris: And novelty really does represent the things that are different in an entertaining, fascinating way. So, it is definitely the one that is gonna make your work stand out the most.
Oren: It’s also a lot based on whether some other book has done this before. Before 2015, I think it was? Whenever it was that Weir published his novel. Before then, the concept of an astronaut trapped on Mars and having to escape would be a lot more novel than it is now because there’s a very famous book and movie about it.
Chris: But I will say that novelty is not the same thing as originality. I try to discourage people away from originality because I think that standard is just too unrealistic with 8 billion people on the planet trying to find something that nobody else has thought of is just… don’t torture yourself, please.
There are some things that are just not used very often, and that’s enough. Or they haven’t been used in a really long time, that could be enough.
Bunny: And recontextualizing things like existing things is something that I’ve seen work a lot. Legends & Lattes did this with its orc main character, and that was also doing the thing where you fill a niche and a genre that’s beginning to grow.
Cozies existed, but I feel like Legends & Lattes gave them a huge boost.
Chris: Yeah. I think the plot is the thing that stands out in Legend & Lattes. A novel element, because yeah, there are definitely other stories about doing things like creating a coffee shop or stuff that’s similar to that. But they’re just not that common, and especially not when combined with that D&D-type setting.
Oren: Legends & Lattes also brings up another thing that can make your story stand out, which is wish fulfillment. Maybe we need to add that to the ANTS and have it become the WANTS, but we haven’t done that yet. So right now, wish fulfillment is its own category.
Chris: I consider it to be secondary. I have a list that I have not yet written about.
I’m starting to write about it in the blog, what I would call like secondary engagement factors. Which means that they do add entertainment value, but they are usually lower priority than the main ANTS. So, you don’t wanna trade off where you get them at the cost of the ANTS, for instance.
Oren: But in this case, with Legends & Lattes, it manages to have really high wish fulfillment without sacrificing too many ANTS. And the ones that it does sacrifice, I think were unnecessary. But the wish fulfillment of We get to open a really cool cafe and have coffee and delicious baked goods and really cool friends who we found who will help us with our business enterprise. Everyone liked that.
Bunny: Baked goods that are maybe a little too delicious, if we’re being honest.
Oren: They’re fine, okay. There’s a magic baking rat in there and he can make a croissant that is frankly a little higher than PG-13, if I’m being honest.
Chris: [laughs] Now, if people want to buy anything, any croissants at their coffee shop, they have to bring some government issued ID to prove that they’re 18 or older.
Bunny: [laughs]
Oren: Not appropriate for minors, these croissants.
Legends & Lattes does sacrifice some tension. Not like all tension. It still has some, but it does sacrifice some tension because it would be harder to enjoy the wish fulfillment if the coffee shop was constantly under attack.
But it still has decent ANTS in other areas, especially in attachment. It does pretty well there and in novelty.
Chris: I will say that The Wandering Inn, which has a similar setup where somebody’s creating an inn. That one had a lot of tonal whiplash where the attacks were just way too grimdark compared to the rest of the story. But we build up the battle a little bit more, we deal with some goblins, like that could have worked okay if the goblin attacks weren’t quite so grim.
But in any case, there’s definitely a place for stories that are not so tense, but Legends & Lattes still does have tension. It still has a plot. It’s just not as high stakes.
Oren: One book that I think did a really interesting job, and I’m not really sure how to categorize this, is the Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi. It is about a person who signs up with a scientific mission to go study Kaiju.
On the one hand, it has some recognizable ANTS as I would describe them, right? There’s definitely some novelty to going to another world to study kaiju. And the protagonist is a fairly selfless, likable person, so there’s some attachment there. But they’re not super high. Description has never been Scalzi’s strong suit. So the kaiju are vague in their general description, and the other characters are a bit one note.
But the book still strikes a pretty good note. I think it’s because we really like Kaiju and this story allows us to have kaiju without the weird problem that Kaiju movies have of having to focus on boring humans for so long, because who cares about the humans in a Kaiju movie? Who does? And this book is about a human, but it’s about a human who is there to study the kaiju. So you cane in their perspective. And I think it solves that problem and I think it fills a want that people had.
Chris: I think if you’re looking to make your story stand out one way is to just break it down to the different areas. In speculative fiction, we talk about worldbuilding a lot. And worldbuilding is obviously one area it can stand out. A famous example being Dune with its giant sand worms and other stuff. That was work that really stood out because its world was different and there’s lots of others like that. The Expanse too, made waves because it had a world that was different.
But that’s not the only area you can stand out. If you have an interesting main character who just has unusual character traits. Like Murderbot and the Murderbot Diaries, for instance. Murderbot basically makes the Murderbot Diaries.
Bunny: Yeah. Speaking of another author whose description is maybe not the strong suit.
Oren: The world of Murderbot is exceptionally bland, but Murderbot itself is an amazing protagonist and is really what sells that series.
Chris: Or, as I said, the plot like Legends & Lattes, a very different kind of plot for that setting.
There are cases when we usually focus on the story aspect, but if you like wordcraft, having a distinctive style does make a difference. I think that the book This Is How You Lose the Time War has an interesting preference, but I really do think it’s the style that really sells it. It’s two lovers on opposite sides of a time war writing back and forth to each other, writing love letters, and it just sounds like poetry. It’s just a very elaborate style. That’s very distinctive.
Oren: It definitely struck a chord with people who are a fan of certain Doctor Who dynamics. You can also just have a story that is not a 10 in any one area, but if it’s generally high across the board, again, that will help a lot.
Lockwood & Co. is one of my prime examples of this. Lockwood has decent characters. They’re not amazing, but they are better than average, I would say. And its world is cool, not as interesting as something like Broken Earth, but pretty neat, right? Ghosts becoming a public health problem and needing freelancers to deal with them. That’s neat. And then it has a pretty good plot with pretty strong tension and strong satisfaction.
And those are all high enough that it is a memorable book, even if, I wouldn’t say that any one category is exceptional.
Bunny: I think it might be helpful to just briefly mention what doesn’t necessarily make a story stand out that people tend to give a lot of credit to.
And we touched on this, but one of those is just the idea, talking about high concept. But that’s not necessarily gonna make your book stand out because ideas are easy and execution is hard.
Oren: Or you could end up with a situation where a marketer markets the idea and then you make a ton of money, but you get some maybe not super great reviews of people being like, Hey, I thought this was gonna be something else. And it wasn’t so…
Bunny: Annoying people called Oren!
Oren: [laughs] So, I think we can all agree that is a fate worse than death.
Bunny: That’s true.
Chris: I’ve definitely read books that had a world that could have been interesting. But the author poured absolutely zero energy in it.
Like again, I talked recently about the Vampire Royal series that I started and didn’t finish. And I don’t actually know the intent behind this work, but when I read it on the page, I just feel like there’s a complete lack of passion on the author’s part. And maybe that’s just the style. But it’s kind of like vampire post apocalypse because vampires came and everybody’s technology went away. And that could have been interesting, but there’s no detail given to it. It’s not elaborated on at all.
And it just makes me wonder if this was a book where the publisher came up with the idea to mimic other bestsellers and then with an IP work and then hired an author to write it. Because it just feels like there’s no interest in that actual subject matter of the book.
Bunny: We were talking about stories being derivative earlier, and this one is pretty explicitly The Selection and Twilight, right?
Chris: Yeah. But again, the problem isn’t that it’s taking inspiration from the selection and Twilight, I think it’s that it doesn’t have any of its own life. It doesn’t feel like it has its own passion, its own distinctive feature that really brings it to life. So it just feels a little bland and generic.
Oren: Okay. I think that is an excellent note to end the podcast on. Now that we have shared all of our wisdom, I think you can agree that this definitely stands out as an episode.
Chris: And if you would like to stand out to us, consider becoming our patreon, just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patreons who definitely stand out, cause we mentioned them at the end of every episode.
First there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
[outro music]This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Coulton.
What if one thing was representative of another thing? Bet I just blew your mind. No? You already know about metaphors? That’s probably good because otherwise this episode wouldn’t make any sense. Today, we’re talking about fictional metaphors, specifically the kind that don’t work because those are always the most fun. We talk about parallels for race, pandemics, weapons of mass destruction, and also British crime dramas, for some reason. If you think about it, this podcast is basically a metaphor about listening to three people discuss things. Whoa.
Show Notes Oppressed Mages * Let This Be Your Last Battlefield * Peaky Blinders * Priest of Bones * Jetrel * Vampire Royals * Winter Tide * Graywashing * Bright * When Women Were Dragons * Turning Red * World War Z * Quisling * The Matrix Trans Analogy * Space Sweepers * Sleepless TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Ace.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast, with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny.
[Intro Music]Bunny: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Bunny, and with me today is…
Chris: Chris
Bunny: …and…
Oren: Oren.
Bunny: And I wanna run a little thought experiment that I think will be illuminating for our audience who maybe haven’t thought hard enough about certain issues. So I want you to imagine a world that hates podcasters. Podcasters are just too sexy, we’re too smart, and we’re too brave and too successful.
Chris: Are you saying we don’t live in this world already?
Bunny: It’s true. Podcasters do have it pretty rough.
Oren: I referenced a meme earlier about how having a podcast means you’re unemployed. Everyone hates us ’cause of how cool we are.
Bunny: Exactly. You have to understand how downtrodden podcasters are in this world. Just everything is about how podcasters are the worst, and we’re crimes against God. Religious zealots and bigots and pundits wanna take us down. There are zoning laws that restrict where podcasters can live because everyone hates podcasters. And there are anti-podcaster hate groups that hate crime podcasters too, because they’re jealous of podcasters.
Oren: Of how cool podcasters are. They could never record half an hour of dialogue a week. That’s just, they couldn’t do it.
Bunny: Exactly. Resentful.
Chris: All the people who oppress us secretly wanna be us. That’s definitely how it works.
Bunny: It’s all about jealousy, and you can see thinking about this world that it’s sad and bad, it would be a bad world. And so I hope we all have learned that oppression is bad and a very serious issue for us podcasters.
Oren: I guess I feel like I did learn something. I learned that oppression is bad, maybe.
Bunny: Yes, we’ve learned something significant about bigotry and the way it works.
Chris: Definitely very accurate things about bigotry and the way it works.
Bunny: Bigots just be jealous, really. Thankfully, we do not live in this world and can therefore go about our podcasting ways, even having learned something important. So keeping this in mind, how potentially oppressed we could be in an alternate world, us podcasters… today we’re gonna talk about bad metaphors and analogies in fiction.
Oren: [sarcastic] I don’t know why! That was a perfect metaphor. This is not an appropriate topic, Bunny.
Bunny: I’m introducing the topic by doing it well so that we can talk about doing it poorly.
Oren: Ooh, that’s clever. That’s good.
Bunny: It’s very smart. People who are in the Discord will understand where this is coming from because I’ve recently been griping about a book called The Sleepless, which inspired this and made me start thinking about the ways, especially oppression, but many other issues are depicted through these metaphors and analogies and fiction that use essentially a parallel for some issue to discuss that issue in a speculative way. And I feel like I’ve seen more negative examples than positive ones of this. But then again, there’s kind of a question of what counts, because one could argue that just about any conflict that you can base a story around could be potentially read as an analogy for something, but there are some that are more obvious than others, shall we say.
Chris: I will say it is hard to depict any kind of fictional oppression that does not map directly or at least to some category of real-world oppression. Anything that you can come up with if, again, if it’s actually a good oppression analogy and not something that nobody would ever oppress, you can usually map it on to some category of marginalized people in the real world.
Oren: And even if you’re not doing that on purpose, there are only so many ways that people get oppressed. So there’s gonna be language shared to a certain extent. And if you’re not, I would question whether or not your story is actually about systemic oppression.
Bunny: Certainly there are many stories that are trying to be about that and many parallels for real-world oppression, that’s trying not to simply tell a story about that oppression, but tell a story through the oppression of a different group to illustrate something. And I feel like that’s the main reason people do this. Okay, we can talk a bit about why storytellers do these. I think that one, to shed new light on it or look at it from a new perspective, that’s like a high concept one. Another one is just that a story wants to talk about racism without showing brutality towards black people, which is completely understandable.
Chris: Done well, it can just reduce the sensitivity of the material. So it hits less hard and gives people a little bit of objective distance on contentious issues. And that can be useful. And we can talk about all the downsides, but when done well, it does do that.
Bunny: I think another one is like the reduction to absurdity, which I think is reductio ad absurdum, which is showing how ridiculous a certain form of bigotry or oppression or some sort of social structure is when presented in a different context. Wasn’t there that Star Trek episode where people are oppressed based on… what color what side of their face is?
Oren: That one is definitely trying to make a point about real racial oppression with varying degrees of success. I think it was certainly valuable at the time. Nowadays, I think we can probably do better, but I appreciate it for what it was.
Chris: I do think for some real world issues, not necessarily talking about oppression here, using an analogy can add novelty. So for instance, when people use zombies as a parallel for a pandemic. That’s not usually an issue of oppression, but maybe readers don’t really wanna read all of the details about how pandemics work. But if you’re like, “it’s zombies,” then they do wanna read it.
Oren: Zombies are a lot more fun to deal with than actual pandemics, just like straight up. They’re much more entertaining.
Bunny: What if you could chop up the virus? What if you could shoot the virus? I think people also sometimes just include things because they seem deep and relevant and have Insight with a capital I. Even if they are none of those things, ’cause I do honestly feel like sometimes storytellers just put them in because that is a deep thing that people have made comments about.
Oren: It’s hard to guess at a storyteller’s motivation, but I have certainly read or watched stories where some weird parallel will come up and it doesn’t really seem to fit with the rest of the world. And I’m just left wondering, why was that in there? And it gives the impression that maybe the author or the writer or whatever just wanted some recognition for having deep thoughts, but maybe they had another reason and they just didn’t accurately portray it very well.
Chris: Maybe it used to be part of their big vision and then they made revisions and it’s left over, or… there’s so many things that can happen.
Oren: And this isn’t always about bigotry either. We’re talking about bad metaphors or bad analogies or what have you. You can also have one of my favorites. I read a book recently called Priest of Bone. It’s clearly Peaky Blinders, but reimagined in, I guess a Renaissance, maybe late medieval fantasy setting. And there are certain parts of it that just don’t work super well and the degree to which they don’t work will matter more depending on how much you’ve studied this period. Some of them are pretty obscure, like it really bothered me that this society had mass conscription. Because that’s not a thing that this type of society would have. But I don’t think most people are familiar with the details of the history of mass conscription and how it was invented in the French Revolution. I don’t think that’s common.
Bunny: No, I don’t think that’s common.
Oren: But what more people might notice is that it kept the part from Peaky Blinders where the fantasy gang hates the government and distrusts them and feels like they can’t trust the government for whatever reason. And in the show, that’s because the gang is made up of Roma and Irish travelers. Who are both marginalized groups, so they have a really obvious reason why they don’t trust the government. In this story, that’s not the case. Everyone seems to be part of the same race and ethnic group. Now, it could be class solidarity, but it doesn’t seem like it. None of them really seem to have that much sympathy for poor people who aren’t their friends. So it’s just this weird like, yeah, that was in the show, so now it’s in the book too.
Bunny: Ah, weird.
Chris: I do think that with analogies, probably one of the biggest cons is that it’s just really easy to create a situation that doesn’t map over well.
Bunny: The moment you have an analogy, you are saying something that seems like it should have a parallel, like whatever you include, because it’s an analogy, it seems you are saying something about the thing it’s an analogy to. And if you, the storyteller, forget that, things can get really weird really quickly.
Oren: Like in the Voyager episode Jetrel, they wanted to do a big atomic bomb parallel. So they bring in this guy and it’s like, “you invented the space atomic bomb, and it killed a bunch of people. Think about what you did!” And it’s like, all right, okay, sure. But Voyager could do that with one torpedo. This isn’t a new technology. We live in space. Like this stuff is pretty common at this point, so, hmm. Hmm!
Bunny: Me just bringing Oppenheimer onto my show to scold him for a while.
Oren: Yeah, I have some issues with that episode beyond that portrayal. But if you are paying attention to the way that the sci-fi premise works, you will immediately notice that. It’s not like you couldn’t do a sci-fi weapon of mass destruction storyline, you just need to think about it a little harder.
Chris: We were talking about oppression analogies, and there’s just so many ways that oppression analogies in particular can go very wrong. Persecution flips, we’ve talked about that, where you make the powerful people oppressed. I was just reading the Vampire Royals series, clearly supposed to be a reveal, but there, again, are vampires and the royals, but we’re clearly going to reveal that they were the ones who were mistreated all along.
Oren: Oh no!
Chris: And humans need sensitivity training. The idea is that vampires have, you know, intervene when a new vampire is made to keep them from killing anybody, but they still have an impulse to attack and feed on humans, and they’re obviously invincible and way more powerful than humans.
Bunny: I was gonna say, they have superpowers.
Oren: They also conquered the humans and made them all live in poverty, so… heck ’em.
Bunny: The kings are the real oppressed people.
Chris: I’m pretty sure we’re gonna find out… I did decide to discontinue this book ’cause I could see where it was going, but I’m pretty sure we’ll come up with some explanation for why it was totally okay for the vampires to take over the humans and take all their stuff.
Oren: They had to do it!
Chris: They had to do it!
Bunny: The humans were too mean! What were we supposed to do, if not seize control and rule with an iron fist?
Oren: Often bad analogies happen when you want something to be an analogy for more than one thing at the same time and those things are not compatible. So in the novel Winter Tide, which I really like, disclaimer, the Deep Ones are clearly a parallel for the interned Japanese in World War II, and in fact, they are interned in some of the same camps as the Japanese. I mean, they meet and form family bonds, which I thought was pretty neat. Those are my favorite parts of the story. But the Deep Ones are also a giant undersea empire from the ancient times, and it doesn’t work. They can’t be both of those things at the same time, ’cause it creates all kinds of questions like why didn’t the giant Deep One undersea empire use any of its extensive resources to try to free the Deep Ones who were taken prisoner? And the answer is… there isn’t one, ’cause if they had, they would have succeeded. So that’s just an example of why you want to think about what kind of parallel you’re looking for, and make sure that the thing that you’re doing it with is not being placed under too much stress.
Chris: The other thing to look out with any oppression analogy besides, okay, what is supposed to be the marginalized group is way too powerful to be oppressed. There’s also, I guess they call it gray-washing, where you take an inherent black and white situation and try to make it gray, and it has problematic implications. Basically, these are story scenarios in which we make the marginalized people to blame for being marginalized to some extent. So Bright is notorious for this, having orcs that are dressed up to embody stereotypes about black people. But they also had the backstory where they used to like, serve some dark lord or something, as in that was used as a justification and it’s like. Now we’re actually coming up with real things this marginalized group did to make the situation feel less one-sided, but oppression is one-sided in real life. That’s how it works. Doing anything like that, making marginalized people dangerous, to any degree, anything like that.
Oren: You have to think about, what is it a parallel for? Because you can have oppression scenarios that are not super one-sided. They can be more complicated. They can have a complicated history if you are prepared to deal with that and make sure you’re actually exploring it. But these orcs are just the most clear parallel for black people that the show could make them to a cartoonish degree and then being like, oh yeah, and it was because they were bad guys and attacked humans. Okay, that’s where it breaks down because you already made it clear who they were a parallel for, and spoilers that’s not part of racism against Black people in the United States, in case anyone was unclear about that.
Bunny: Black people do not serve a dark lord.
Oren: Generally not.
Chris: Another one that I tell clients who are doing this that I see is if you are doing any kind of oppression analogy, don’t erase the people who are actually being oppressed in real life. This is the thing with X-Men where we use “have you tried not being a mutant” and there’s no characters in there that are obviously queer to viewers, but we’re using that as an analogy for oppression against queer people. So if you’re gonna do anything like that, if you have a racial oppression analogy in there and almost all of your characters are white, that doesn’t look good. It really doesn’t.
Oren: You could make arguments about how at a certain time we couldn’t have those characters on TV or in popular books, so all we had were parallels. And sure, maybe that was true at some point, but if you’re writing a book today, it is not true anymore, especially if you are of a privileged background yourself.
Bunny: I think we’ve been gesturing at this, but another problem that I’ve seen in a couple places that really bugs me is just going to the most obvious place. With your parallel. Okay. I haven’t finished this book yet, but the reason I’m having trouble getting into it is this is a book called When Women Were Dragons, which is about, there was a mass dragoning where a bunch of women in the 1950s turned into dragons and I was like, that’s a really cool premise. But then they’re using the dragons as an analogy for sex ed, where talking about the dragons is like this awkward thing. And then it’s treated like quote/unquote “women’s issues.” They’re dragons. They turned into dragons.
Chris: Ah, the story is running on analogy logic, as I like to call it.
Bunny: It’s exactly that.
Chris: It’s when the actual details of the story stop making any sense because now we’re going by “what if the analogy is the reality,” not what’s actually in the story, and it causes a lot of dissonance. The big story I remember this from is in World War Z, which again has zombies as a parallel for a pandemic, but like the writer really wanted false positives for, because that’s the thing that happens in pandemics where people think they have it and they don’t, and that like messes up the data, but you don’t usually have false positives for zombies. So he adds these people called quislings who’ve decided that they’re loyal to the zombies and they pretend to be zombies and bite people. So then we have false positives, and it just makes no sense, it’s like nobody would do that. That would not be a thing.
Bunny: Quislings?
Oren: So the term quisling, if anyone’s not familiar with it, refers to a guy named Quisling who was the leader of the civil administration that the Nazis set up to be like, “hey, Norway, you’re being run by other Nordish people, don’t look at us.” And so they picked this guy. He was obviously a traitor. And so his name is now synonymous with people who betray their own country or whatever to serve the enemy. And in this particular case, I’ve seen people talk about the quislings in the light of Covid and compare them to people who went around spreading Covid, either, usually just by ignoring safety precautions and occasionally on purpose in some truly bizarre situations, but it doesn’t really fit. Because again, these people aren’t spreading the zombie virus, they are just pretending to be zombies. You can do the thing where people spread the virus by ignoring safety precautions or maybe even on purpose in a zombie apocalypse, ’cause there’s a zombie virus, and that’s not what the quislings are.
Chris: There’s no equivalent to false positives in a zombie setting. So we just made up something that didn’t make any sense so that we could continue our analogy. That’s analogy logic, which is another problem I see. And I don’t know if some people, if they read the story and the analogy is the only thing in their head, and they’re not thinking about the situation literally at all. Maybe that’s, for some people that would be fine, but it drives me up the wall.
Bunny: First and foremost, it’s a story and it has its own eternal logic. And even in an analogy, like you’re making a parallel to something, but you’re also doing the parallel. The parallel in itself has to make sense. It can’t just be the other thing, because it’s a parallel.
Chris: That is the reason you’re choosing the parallel is for the layer that it adds to the original issue. And so if they’re dissonant… I’m sure there was some symbolism there with the women turning into dragons and being a dragon being a woman’s issue.
Bunny: It’s definitely doing that, but I was like, well, this just felt like the most obvious way to take it. We have this really interesting event that’s called the mass dragoning and what we have to say about it… it’s kind of taboo and awkward to talk about. It’s like talking about periods. I don’t know. It’s turning into a dragon.
Oren: It feels like it would be a little more interesting than that. I haven’t read this book, but a movie that I can think of that actually did the same thing really well is Turning Red, which got a lot of hate because people figured out what the analogy was and were like, “ooh, no menstruation, ew.” And so that one is clearly, among other things, a metaphor can be about more than one thing, it is clearly a metaphor for menstruation and puberty in general, but it makes more sense. It makes more internal sense. It’s not just, “hey, you’re becoming a panda. Here is your panda pad.” You know, it’s not that literal, although they do mention actual menstrual products in the movie, which also made people mad. So as far as I’m concerned, A+ move.
Chris: Yeah, A+. And in Turning Red, everything that happened in the story still made sense and there were just clearly parallels to the analogy of growing up and going through puberty, but we never had things that didn’t make sense literally because we prioritized the literal interpretation first, and then had the analogy as a second layer.
Bunny: It needs to make internal sense.
Chris: Another issue that can happen with analogies is a lack of clarity about what it is that you are covering and what point you’re trying to make. That can allow things like misinterpretation or appropriation of your message, particularly if the people that are involved are erased from it. So the poster child for this one is The Matrix, because The Matrix was intended as a trans analogy, and one of the reasons it doesn’t come out that way is because the studio basically, there was supposed to be a person who was essentially genderfluid that was taken out by the studio, and The Matrix has some very powerful symbolism in it, but it was not clear that it was a trans analogy, which meant that it could be appropriated by misogynist groups.
Bunny: I, yeah, I never would’ve guessed that.
Oren: And it’s also like the symbolism in general is something that is very broad in its appeal, which helped The Matrix as a film, but it also means anyone can interpret it however they want, ’cause it involved things like realizing you’re not who you thought you were or realizing that society has been lying to you and things like that. And those things happen and they are real, but they also are things that everyone kind of imagines happening to them often in ways that are fake. And so that’s how you get the guys who are like, “ah, what this means is that society has been lying to me about women. And the truth is that women are evil. And the truth about myself is that I am a double alpha man who will go my own way, but also sleep with lots of women.” And so you can see how that analogy, by being general, also made itself very easy to co-opt.
Chris: Whereas just as a counter to that, like the movie Space Sweepers. It’s not a perfect movie, but it does have some very interesting messaging in there. And one of the things about it is that it’s very clear who it stands for and against, because there’s a specific character in there that is like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos put together.
Bunny: Oh yes. Good friend, Elon Bezos.
Chris: Elon Bezos, the villain of Space Sweepers. That makes it really hard to misinterpret or misappropriate, ’cause we can see there’s a specific person who is a stand-in, and when the people are erased, if we’re trying to represent them, that’s when it becomes the most unclear.
Oren: Space Sweepers also managed to have a message that was both clear and widely popular. So it can be done.
Bunny: It can be done. I think another issue, and this is me circling around to The Sleepless because I want to rant about that.
Chris: Yeah. I think we’re ready for the Sleepless rant.
Bunny: Are you ready for me to unleash this? Every issue we’ve been discussing, just about every one, applies to this depression metaphor and The Sleepless, which is trying to be a metaphor about everything, every kind of oppression, using language that’s explicitly used against specific marginalized groups. It’s very deliberate about this, despite being in an otherwise egalitarian near future setting, which made it like extra weird because this is supposed to be a world we recognize, but then it’s like the author just took a bunch of bigoted rhetoric and copy-pasted, find-and-replaced any mention of groups with the word Sleepless. So you get the exact rhetoric of like “crimes against God” and “unnatural” and “chasers.”
Oren: “Coming out.”
Bunny: “Coming out.” Yep. Coming out is what it’s called when you reveal that you’re Sleepless to someone else. Chasers are people who fetishize the Sleepless, which is a really weird thing to fetishize. Gets so abstract like, “oh, I’m turned on by the fact that you don’t sleep.” It’s like being attracted to insomniacs. There’s also like, okay, all of this, you have to accept that this sleeplessness is like this thing worthy of being oppressed. But at the same time as we have all of these religious zealots calling for zoning laws and trying to keep Sleepless people in the closet or whatever. At the same time, we’re also meant to believe that everyone wants to be Sleepless. There’s a huge semi underground pharmaceutical industry.
Chris: As there would. Realistically, yes, people would want to not have to sleep.
Bunny: Because objectively sleeplessness in this world, which is like a capitalist quasi dystopia, sleeplessness would be a massive asset. And so they’re talking about how oppressed they are, and then they’re also being like, also, I’m really fit and healthy and I have all these skills and I learned jiu-jitsu and I work multiple jobs because I don’t need to sleep, and so I’m filthy rich. And it’s like. These people should be running the country. Why are you making them parallels for homosexuality? Oh my God, there’s just so much to talk about. There’s so much that doesn’t make sense.
Chris: My favorite from what you mentioned on the Discord was that even the environmentalists want to oppress them.
Bunny: And the thing about the environmentalists is like, okay, that’s one that I could see more than the others because whatever, you have your lights turned on more or something.
Chris: By that measure, Americans should be very impressed by the environmentalists because we use way more energy per capita than most other countries.
Oren: Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there would be some environmentalists pointing out that the more people that become Sleepless, the more resources we’re using. But the jump from there to “and now the environmentalists want to regulate us out of existence” is like, they haven’t come from me or my computer yet, so I’m okay. When they start hunting Bitcoin miners in the streets, then maybe I’ll reconsider.
Bunny: Now we need that story as long as it’s not an oppression analogue. Here’s the thing, is that sleeplessness could have made a really good discussion of labor, but not because Sleepless people are oppressed, because they are a risk to non-Sleepless people, and a market that would prioritize workers who don’t need to sleep. That would be a labor issue. People would be, what do unions have to say about this? That could be really interesting, but it’s not that Sleepless people would be the ones on the short end of the stick. They are poised to have so many advantages here and the book kind of limp-wristedly is like “corporations exploit us.” You don’t have to work multiple jobs. You could just play video games for eight hours while everyone else is sleeping. Yeah, corporations do exploit, and maybe you could say more about that if you wanted to with the sleeplessness thing, but like in conjunction with everything else, the Sleepless are very well positioned in this scenario.
Chris: I can imagine an interesting story where everybody suddenly doesn’t need sleep. And then there is a battle over whether employers get to claim that time, right? For the same level of pay. And a kind of movement to try to make that into free time for people and not more work time. I can imagine that struggle, but when you only have a small portion of the population not needing sleep, it’s hard to imagine that being a big issue.
Bunny: It’s like a quarter of the world population. I think they specify that. That’s what frustrates me about this book is that you could have some really interesting emotional and even philosophical points to think about when it comes to this idea of what would it mean for a society to be sleepless? Would you give up sleep if you could, that sort of thing. But it’s just this lazy oppression analogy that uses the exact same language as like gay rights. I didn’t even talk about the villains. The villains are a hate group of Sleepless people who are like, Sleepless supremacists. And then the main villain is like a Sleepless CEO, which is like, yeah, the Sleepless people would be CEOs.
Oren: But have they come out yet, is the question? Has the Sleepless CEO come out?
Bunny: As the Sleepless supremacists say explicitly, they are out and proud.
Oren: Oh. Big oof.
Bunny: I’m not kidding!
Chris: It’s just painful to create a scenario where a group can be both supremacist and oppressed at the same time. That is not how that works. That is so painful. Oh my goodness.
Bunny: But is also like yo-yos between whether the supremacist group is like, people consider it a real threat and like we are told that someone who is a member of this group did a suicide bombing on a research facility that was trying to figure out how to prevent sleeplessness or something. Like they have actual acts of terror, but then people are like, oh, they’re just a bunch of harmless kooks. Make up your mind!
Oren: We are pretty much at the end of our time, and I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.
Chris: Indeed. If you would like to prevent us from being sleepless, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to take a minute to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
[Outro Music]Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening/closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.
The most important skill in dating is being able to see things from your partner’s perspective. In storytelling, we can make that literal! But what happens when you give the love interest as well as the hero a viewpoint? What are the costs and benefits? That’s our topic this week, and, with our three perspectives, hopefully we’ll get to the bottom of things.
Show Notes The Problem With Multiple Viewpoints * House of Earth and Blood * Sarah J Maas * Meta Mysteries * Lord of the Fading Lands * Constructing a Compelling Romance * Mysterious vs Relatable Hero * Digging Up Love TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Phoebe Pineda.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny.
[Intro music]Bunny: Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Bunny, and with me here today is
Oren: Oren.
Bunny: and
Chris: Chris.
Bunny: Okay, so you guys, long ago, you remember this, episode 446, we established that we encountered a dark and brooding podcast that daringly fought fanragers on our behalf, and it seemed maybe a little interested in us? Yeah? You remember that?
Chris: Oh, yeah.
Oren: So dreamy.
Bunny: And I thought that we’re too humble for such a suave podcast to notice, but you guys, I encountered a super secret soundbite of the host saying the same thing about us.
Chris: What? We are super special.
Oren: What?
Bunny: That’s true.
Chris: Naturally, another podcast would notice us.
Bunny: Yeah. I understand why they’re so attracted to the Mythcreant podcast and now we have intrigue. Will they email us? Will they like, comment and subscribe? Will they even invite us on?
Chris:Oh…
Bunny: That would be a lot. I guess we have to keep listening to those super secret soundbites to find out. So once again, trying to avoid the awkwardness of implicating the hosts in an episode about romance.
Oren: Yeah, that is tricky.
Bunny: I have pulled on Chris’s earlier joke in order to introduce this episode about multiple POVs in romance, which are pretty much a trope or expectation of the romance genre itself by now? From what I understand.
Chris: So what do you mean expectation? Because a lot of romances are not multiple POVs. It’s common, but I would not call it an expectation in terms of the average romance is expected to have them. Would you?
Bunny: Yeah. Maybe expectation is the wrong word, maybe. I guess it would be at least as expected as having a single point of view, which isn’t the case in just about any other genre. Does that make sense?
Chris: Yeah. Certainly more common. I do think that there are different types of romances that might lean towards one or the other.
Bunny: Maybe I’ve just encountered a higher volume of romances that are multiple POV.
Chris: Here’s a question for you, Bunny. What percentage of romances do you read are queer romances?
Bunny: Uh, quite a few.
Chris: Yeah. So from what I, again, casual observation, I have not looked at numbers, but I do think that hetero romances are more likely to be single POV. Not that they can’t be multiple POV or that queer romances can’t be single POV, but I think there might just be trends there. Because generally in a single POV romance, the focus tends to be more on having a single relatable point of view character, and then a really impressive mysterious love interest.
And the assumption then, in a straight romance, is that people are gonna read and identify with the same person who has their gender, right? So, you know, we have a straight female main character. The assumption is that straight women are gonna read that and identify more with her than with the male love interest.
Whereas I think that often in queer romances, that’s no longer an assumption anymore that the audience is going to relate to one person a lot more than the other person, and so I think that they might tend more to having multiple POVs in that case.
Bunny: That’s an interesting theory. I think that might hold water.
Chris: Yeah. I think a lot of the multiple POV romances I’ve read are queer romances. Again, I’ve read some hetero romances that are also multiple POV, but I’ve certainly read most heteromances–most hetero romances, hetero, heteromances, hetero romances–
Oren: Heteromances!
Chris: –heteromances I’ve read, and a lot of these are romantasy, are single POV. More often than not.
Bunny: Interesting. Yeah. The most recent romance I read was a dual POV straight romance. I think maybe my sample size is skewed as to how common that is in the genre as a whole. Just thinking about the romance genre, generally, straight or queer romance, I think it makes sense that there would be a higher proportion of books with dual POVs or multiple points of view.
Just because in romance, the romance is the central part of the plot, whereas in something like romantasy, the romance might still be pretty central or even the central part of the plot, but when you think romantasy, you also think of a larger conflict beyond the romance, like House of Earth and Blood had this whole city conflict going, but it’s also romantasy.
Chris: Yeah, well there’s often higher stakes. It’s still designed to make the romance front and center, I think a lot of the time.
Oren: Chris, quick question. You’ve read Maas’s more famous series, Thorn and Roses, is that single POV?
Chris: I’ve only looked at the first book, but yes, it’s [single] POV and Feyre’s viewpoint.
Oren: Okay. I wonder, ’cause Crescent City, the first one, has at least two, it’s possible it goes off into some other POVs. Honestly, I lost track, but at least Bryce and Hunt each have their own POVs. So I wonder what the thought process was there.
Chris: I do think that YA is more likely to be in a single viewpoint. So Thorn and Roses is YA and Crescent City is not.
Oren: That makes sense.
Chris: So that might be one reason.
Oren: It’s so baffling in Crescent City, why we gave Hunt his own POV, because he has his own little secret plot that he’s on is just a completely different story that we don’t hear about until about three-quarters of the way through. And then we find out he’s been doing this other thing that is completely unrelated to the actual story, except that it gets him in trouble to create some drama. It’s like the most convoluted backstory I’ve ever seen for the love interest getting sent to jail.
Bunny: You see, that is the opposite of the reasons that love interests usually have their point of view, which is to reveal things about them not from the start, not to suddenly reveal that they have a reason to go to jail.
Oren: Yeah, that’s so weird. It was really weird. Normally you would do this specifically because you want the reader to know more about the love interest, but not this time.
Bunny: That is very confusing and yeah, I would say that’s, if not the reason, definitely one of the major reasons is just by definition, the lovebirds are all mostly equally as essential to the story as each other because them getting together is the driver of the plot in a pure romance.
And so you get to know both of them. I think that’s the main reason. And so if one of them is hiding something that would be pretty important for you to get to know about them, that’s a little odd choice there.
Oren: Yeah. Although, to be fair, Mythcreants is one of the few places that I have seen that even talks about what a meta mystery is. I see a lot of authors do this, so it’s very likely that Maas just did not consider that a problem. Just, yeah, whatever. It’s not gonna make a difference that Hunt has this entire secret plot that he’s on. It’s like the character equivalent of finding out about a secret family. It’s fine, don’t worry about it.
Bunny: Now that would be a romance twist.
Chris: Yeah. It’s funny from our perspective. ’cause why did you give him a viewpoint just to introduce a meta mystery. Makes no sense.
Oren: Yeah, but then you remember everyone does that. It’s also interesting sometimes, at least from the very limited sample size of stories that I’ve read that do this, another motivation for giving the love interest a second POV, is that you have the theoretical main character, which is usually the woman in a heteromance as we call them now. And then you have the love interest, who is the guy. But the guy is the only one doing the plot because he’s the one with all the power and agency. And so if we didn’t cut to his POV sometimes–
Chris: Oh no.
Oren: –we would never know what was happening. That’s what happens in The Fading Lands, which is some old-school romantasy, and by old-school, I mean 2014. The ancient year of 2014, where our protagonist is theoretically the main character, but she doesn’t do anything for basically the entire story. She just hangs out at her house and feels bad. Whereas the love interest is this super hot, powerful Fey guy and he’s theoretically going around doing stuff. His point of view is also boring, but he’s at least, in theory, fighting the bad guys. So we gotta cut to his POV as often as possible. Otherwise, it would just be the protagonist lady sitting in her house for chapter on chapter.
Bunny: It’s the thought that counts.
Chris: Mm-hmm. I will say in Thorn and Roses, the idea is that the love interest is keeping a lot of things from the protagonist that frankly, the book would probably be better if she knew. Like, ’cause the plot and the stakes and all those things–a lot of the book are just, people just refuse to tell her anything. And that’s, I guess, better that we’re not showing his viewpoint, but it’s still a bit frustrating. So yeah, it, I think it would’ve made more sense if she’d been more involved earlier.
Oren: Once you tell the protagonist something, you can’t use it for a reveal anymore. So just never tell them anything.
Chris: Basically, just leave a blank page and it’s the most basic form of suspense. But personally, I think that the main reason to use multiple POV in romance is so that you can focus more on internal obstacles to the relationship and misunderstandings, and tell it from both characters’ perspectives.
So you can clarify that they’re still into each other when their actions suggest otherwise. Or you can explain misunderstandings they have with each other. If one person might look like they’re being super unreasonable or doing something bad, you can explain why they’re doing that. And I think that when you do have a lot of obstacles that are psychological or emotional, that is really helpful to be able to dig into what’s going on [with] both sides and see exactly why they’re doing what they’re doing and better empathize with both of them.
Bunny: And if one of them starts acting, from one character’s perspective, rude or unpleasant, we can go into the other character’s head and understand them for that perspective. And I also feel like if a character has a point of view, we’re just primed to like them more because we’re literally with them. At least that’s the hope. And it can explain why the lovebirds don’t just get together as well. We can see their emotional reasons for that, like Chris said, rather than just one being like, “No, I can’t!”
Oren: Although it could still end up happening if you don’t have a reason.
Bunny: Yeah, you do need a reason.
Chris: Yeah. When it comes from one person’s perspective, I think it leans a lot more on not knowing if the other person is interested, and that often doesn’t last for the entire romance arc, but at least for a portion of it.
Oren: It lasts a lot less time if you cut over to the other person’s perspective and find out that they are in fact interested and there goes the conflict, there goes the obstacle to your romance.
Chris: Yeah, but a lot of it’s just what kind of romance you want. I think people get into trouble when they want a romance that is really heavy on the wish fulfillment of having somebody really hot and powerful be into you. And so to provide that wish fulfillment, we have lots of scenes and it could be in this person’s POV or not, fawning over the protagonist and then we have a lot of burden to figure out, okay, why aren’t they together? Whereas if you like the type of romance where your protagonist is, oh my gosh, that super awesome hot person would never love me, then you can keep that going for longer and use one POV to do that very well.
Bunny: Yeah, having multiple perspectives also kills the mystery element of some romances where the love interest is mysterious and you want to seek to understand them better through the protagonist, but if the mysterious love interest just has their own point of view, then unless you’re doing a meta mystery, I guess, which don’t. It’s not that mystique so much.
Oren: Yeah. You definitely don’t wanna give a POV to a character who’s supposed to be mysterious, and that includes your protagonist.
Chris: Your protagonist can’t be mysterious. I’m sorry. Your main character should not be mysterious.
Oren: Yeah, we need to know about them, but the POV is useful for a love interest who is more relatable. And you can set up the fun little dramatic irony where you’ve been inside the other person’s head, so you know that they have a hangup around or they’re really touchy about phone calls, so then the protagonist is like, “Okay, I’ll just call them instead of going over to their house,” and you’re like, “No, don’t do it!”
Bunny: [mock horror] “Their parents were killed by a phone call!”
Oren: Yeah, phone calls haunted their dreams!
Chris: I think it’s worth mentioning that I think comedies, right, often work really well with multiple POVs in this case because a lot of it is about misunderstandings often and just humorous exchanges, and those often work a lot better if we understand. Again, we can have a dramatic irony where we know more than either character knows alone, so that works great.
Oren: So whenever we’re talking about multiple POVs, we should of course think about the normal costs that are associated with them. The good news is for romance, it is more likely that your characters are involved in the same story since presumably you want them together so that you can do romance if that’s what you’re writing. You’re less likely to have a problem of the, “one POV character is on continent A and the other POV character is on continent B, and maybe they’ll catch a glimpse of each other at the end of the story.” But I’m not gonna say you’re immune to it. I have seen stories that start off with this point of view of some random guy and you can’t figure out why he’s got a POV and then 10 chapters later it’s like, oh, it’s ’cause he’s the romance interest. That’s why. It’s like, the solution there is to introduce him earlier, not to give us a split POV until he finally shows up.
Chris: Yeah. So book one is the lovebirds on different continents, just being lonely. And then I’ll make the readers wait for them to meet for the entire book. And then at the end they’ll just see each other and then it’s done. As soon as they glimpse each other. Why book two?
Bunny: Yeah. I feel like the way I’ve seen it done that works pretty well is that especially in a story where you have more or less equivalent viewpoints between the love interest, but maybe one is slightly more central than the other one, and that’s usually the character whose POV opens the story, that we see that character and then the character meets the love interest, and then we get the love interest’s point of view. I think that serves as a natural transition between the two, rather than having continents as the divisor.
Chris: Yeah, that’s definitely a good way to do it. And I think another thing to note about multiple POV is that one thing that often pops up in romance is usually the writer puts a lot more thought into why the protagonist likes the love interest than vice versa. And it’s not that every reader will notice, but it’s just better if we have an understanding for what is so special about the protagonist for the love interest, and I do think that putting the love interest’s viewpoint in there does encourage more of that thinking. Doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s well thought out or that it’s in there, but it’s more likely to be in there.
Bunny: Yeah. It’s not just that they have heterochromia and purple hair.
Oren: Yeah. Although you could just be in for more chapters of, “Wow. So hot.”
Bunny: Look, I basically–so the last book I read was this book called Digging Up Love, which was a fine book, but the characters were so horny over each other to the point that it just got absurd. And then the chapters did really just feel like they were about to drop their pants at any moment. And then we didn’t even get a sex scene.
Oren: I have noticed that at least some authors have a tendency of making their characters really, really horny, and at that point you do have to start asking, why are they not just having sex? And there can be a reason, but often the author doesn’t include one, because then it would be awkward when we do want them to have sex.
Bunny: No, [they] didn’t even mention it. We learned that they’re Catholic, but they’ve just been so horny throughout the entire book. That feels like an afterthought. It almost feels like they dialed the horniness back after they started dating, which they do halfway through the book. It’s not really a “will they, won’t they,” because then the author would have to justify why these two people living in the modern world, who are sweating all over themselves at the sight of the other person, are not banging.
Oren: That’s the sort of thing where if you’re hitting exactly the wish fulfillment goal you want for a very specific audience, that can work. But for anyone else, the same feeling repeated over and over again is gonna get repetitive, even if it makes sense in character. It’s like having a character who’s angry all the time. It’s just constantly angry and that’s the only emotion they have. That’s just boring. Gets repetitive.
Bunny: Right, yeah. And they should have feelings about each other that aren’t just animal lust. That’s my hot take. I mean, you can have that, but then you might not be writing a romance.
Oren: I’ve also noticed–this is more in client stories than in published ones–is you often will have the protagonists who start off together and get their different POVs as their romance starts, but then the story splits them up and, okay, great. Now we’re on the continent A and B situation.
Bunny: Yeah, that’s also not good.
Oren: And that can happen with any two characters. That’s not just a romance thing. But the point of doing this was to give the two lovebirds their own POVs so that we could understand their romance better, and that is ruined if you then split them up in addition to the normal problem of having completely separate POVs for most of the story.
Bunny: I will say another issue I had with Digging Up Love is the characters feeling inconsistent when we jumped heads, and I think this was a function of the author maybe not knowing how to write a point of view where the character doesn’t feel perpetually inadequate, I suppose. The moment that we moved into the other character’s point of view, that character became ridiculously bumbling and clumsy. And the character whose viewpoint we were previously in becomes so smooth and suave and sexy. And it’s not just that they feel like they’re being bumbling, but they’re actually being suave. It’s that they literally become bumbling, they start falling over each other. Are they clumsy or not? And so it just felt like two of the same character who were one person when you were looking at them from the outside, and a different person when you were in their point of view.
Chris: That’s a neat idea. Right? I could definitely get behind a romance where the point of view character is insecure and looks at themself one way and then looks at the person that they’re crushing on and be like, that person is so cool. I’m so inadequate. And they’re both secretly thinking that, and their viewpoints reflect that perspective. But I think when you do things like, they literally fall over, it has to stay in the subjective arena.
Bunny: Right, and it’s very much physical descriptions of them being bumbling and doing meet-cute behavior. And it just started feeling repetitive because both characters were acting the same way, but also inconsistent.
Chris: Maybe the writer had a certain habit of writing in a specific way with specific types of jokes, and just continued to do it. But something that was like that but was clearly about subjectivity when it comes to viewing people and viewing yourself could be cool. Could be a neat thing.
Bunny: Yeah, that’s true. That’s definitely one of the things that multiple points of view in romance is good for, right? The outside versus inside. You can’t really do that when you just have one inside point of view.
Oren: Yeah, I mean it was interesting that Crescent City did not have that problem, but [the] reasons why are fascinating is ’cause, so Hunt, the dude, he is exactly one personality trait, which is that he’s mad. He’s very mad and, okay, well, that’s not fair. He’s also possessive.
Chris: Typical powerful love interest asshole.
Oren: Yeah. And he is like that whether you’re in his POV or not. When you’re in his POV, he’s constantly thinking, Bryce, I must have her. I’m so mad that I can’t have her and she can’t be allowed to do things I don’t want–
Bunny: Ugh.
Oren: –because of how much I want her. And then when you’re outside his POV, he’s like, Bryce, don’t do things I don’t want, ’cause I want you.
Chris: That sounds like a very uninteresting POV. It’s like, why go in his head at that?
Oren: I’m just calling it like I see it. Meanwhile, Bryce’s character just changes depending on what chapter we’re in. Sometimes she’s very relatable: “I’m just like you, I’m just a normal lady.” And then in other chapters she’s like, “I’m basically James Bond.” And when you’re outside her POV and watching her, sometimes she acts all like, “I’m just a normal lady and I can’t do anything.” And then other times she’d be like, “I’m basically James Bond and I know Kung Fu.” And it’s the same character no matter what. You gotta give Maas that much. They are consistent about being bad characters.
Bunny: Consistently bad. Don’t write bad. That’s my advice.
Oren: Only write good characters.
Bunny: Yeah, avoid bad. Write good. Thank you for coming to Mythcreants.
Oren: Well, with that, in my point of view, I think it is time to call this episode to a close.
Chris: And if you want to help us hook up with that other dark, broody podcast, just go to patreon.com/mythcreants to support us.
Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson. She’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
[Outro music]Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening/closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.
Most people have encountered language barriers at some point in their life, but they’re rarely a problem for fictional characters. And when an author does include a language barrier, it’s usually overcome in short order. Is this the right way to do things? Maybe. Sometimes. It’s complicated. Good thing we’ve got an entire episode to talk about it!
Show Notes The Universal Translator * Star Wars Languages * Ark: The Animated Series * Shogun * Mariko * Lingua Franca * Prima Facie * Michelle Yeoh * Project Hail Mary * Esperanto * Trigedasleng * Darmok TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Arturo.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Intro: You are listening to the Mythcreants Podcast, with your hosts: Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[Music]
Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren. With me today is…
Chris: Chris.
Oren: And…
Bunny: Bunny.
Oren: And for the rest of this podcast, I am going to be speaking entirely in droid beep boop sounds. boop boop boop…
Bunny: Oh yes.
Oren: beep boop
Bunny: Of course.
Chris: That’s no problem. I’ll just use my magic autotranslate technology that’s never sampled this language before. And it’s a completely unknown language, but it can, you know, know exactly what you’re saying.
Oren: beep boop beep
Bunny: Oh, that’s a great observation.
Oren: I think I made a good point, and thankfully, now that you have a magic translator, it can translate what I’m saying for the convenience of anyone listening, but in character, I’m still speaking in beep boops, just so we’re clear.
Bunny: This is going to be true for the rest of the podcast’s mortal life.
Chris: Somehow the technology also silences all the beep boops and has audio to create a new voice for you, and we just can’t hear the beep boops anymore.
Oren: Yeah, and if I occasionally want to do something just in beep boop for emphasis or as an idiom, it will know to let that through.
Bunny: Well, now you’ve gotta start punctuating your points with very loud beep boops.
Oren: Yeah, I will definitely remember to do that. We have a history of keeping our opening bits going like that. I think everyone can agree. So today we’re talking about language barriers in fiction and whether or not you should have them or not. Maybe you don’t want them, ’cause I’ve seen stories that have them and don’t handle them well. And then of course there’s the running joke of “everyone speaks Common.”
Chris: Somehow I miss this running joke, maybe ’cause I’m not on social media really.
Oren: It’s mostly a D&D joke. Common is the language everyone speaks by default in D&D for some reason.
Chris: Is it really called Common?
Oren: Common.
Chris: It comes from the country of Commlandia.
Oren: RPGs have it a little harder because they have to actually tell you what’s going on, whereas a lot of settings just don’t say anything, but if you look, you can still tell that the languages in the setting don’t make any sense. Like in Star Wars, everyone speaks Basic, except for, I guess, Hutts for some reason. There are two languages in Star Wars. No, three: there’s Hutt, Basic, and Wookie.
Bunny: And I guess droid, but everyone just… See, I feel like in Star Wars everyone just understands what everyone else is saying, and then the dialogue from the characters speaking in English convey to us what they have said.
Oren: Yeah, it’s real… They can all basically tell what their droids are saying. With Wookies it’s weird because Wookies have names that Wookies cannot pronounce. So it’s just the languages in Star Wars are just a mess. None of them… they don’t make any sense.
Chris: The Wookie thing is a metaphor for how people of other cultures are assimilated into the Basic culture.
Bunny: They’re all so basic.
Oren: I would accept that as an interesting explanation if Star Wars at all explored it. But it’s… Anyway, I understand why people don’t want to do language barriers, because if you’re not interested in them, they are a huge pain. Like they just get in the way, your characters can’t really do anything complicated if you have a bunch of language barriers and they can’t understand each other, so it’s just easier to be like, “No, everyone just speaks the same language. It’s fine, whatever.”
Chris: No, no, but there’s a solution to this. You just have the characters look into each other’s eyes, and then you could describe, “Well, he gave me a look as though he wanted me to reverse the polarity of the deflector dish while eating pretzels.” We know eye contact can communicate anything in fiction.
Bunny: That’s the real common.
Oren: Yeah, I’ve seen that. I’ve seen magic hand gestures. Like, don’t get me wrong, hand gestures can communicate, and people have used them to communicate, but there’s a limit to how complicated information they can get across, especially in short periods of time that tend to be relevant in high-stakes fiction. Sure, if you have plenty of time and you don’t share a language, you could use gestures to arrange the sale of something, right? You could point to the thing and then point to the money, and you could work that out, right? That could take some time. But in a high-stress situation, are you going to be able to communicate “A flanking maneuver over the third ridge,” like, when you only have 30 seconds? Probably not. That’s just not going to work. And I’ve seen stories that do that because the author clearly just got tired of the language barrier. And at this point, I would rather there just not be one.
Chris: The essential problem is that at first a language barrier makes it feel real that people come from different cultures and adds realism. But as you continue, that gets old and it’s still in the way of the plot.
Oren: Yeah. Your mileage may vary on how much of this you tolerate. Chris and I were watching Ark, the animated series recently, and the premise of that show is that people get grabbed from across time and space and brought to the magical dino island, and so they speak different languages from wherever they’re from. That seemed like it was going to be realistic, and the first time we met a guy who didn’t, you know… The first person we met was from the United States, so he spoke English. Then we met a Roman guy who had recruited like a British scientist, so he had a reason to speak English. But pretty soon, everyone they meet just happens to speak English, except for one Finnish woman. She’s the only person on the entire island who doesn’t speak English.
Chris: The Finns famously cannot comprehend English in the slightest
Oren: And it’s like it just doesn’t make any sense. There’s no reason for English to be the common language everyone speaks in the context of the show. It probably should have been Latin, ’cause that seems to be the biggest power block on the island, is from Rome. But instead it was English. And honestly, for me, I wish they had just said the island has a magical translation field rather than doing that, ’cause to me it just called attention to how silly it was. But it was also cool to see the multiple languages. So your mileage might vary there.
Chris: I wonder if there was… I don’t know much about the techniques using kind of visual media for this, but to do the premise where they are actually talking in Latin, but then still express it to the viewer in English. Because if we have a conqueror who speaks Latin, and we’d have a main character who speaks Latin, you could say that, well, everybody was forced to learn Latin. The main character already knows Latin, and then still have the occasional character who hasn’t managed to learn Latin and then use the language barriers there. It would just be easier in prose, because in prose you can just say they’re talking in Latin and express in English. It’s a little stranger when you’re watching something and hearing audio, because they’re obviously speaking English. And if the entire show takes place in another country, you can go with the premise that they’re all speaking another language, but when you have language barriers built into it, that’s a little weirder.
Bunny: What if they spoke English but with an accent?
Oren: With a Latin… What is a Latin accent in English?
Bunny: I don’t know. You put like eus at the end of most words.
Chris: I guess it’s a dead language, right? So we don’t know.
Bunny: Yeah, that’s true.
Oren: Maybe in Pig Latin. The character’s constantly talking “ex-nay on the upid-stay” sort of situation. But okay, so they could have done what Shogun does. Shogun, of course, is the poster child for integrating language barriers into the story, both the book and the show. In Shogun, Japanese is Japanese on screen. Portuguese is English on screen, and no one speaks English in the entire show. Technically, Blackthorn presumably can speak English, but he never does. So they could have done something like that, right? They could have had a character who is not an English speaker, but I don’t know, starts off speaking her own language, whatever that is, maybe she’s from… I don’t know, maybe she’s from China, she speaks Chinese, and then, when she gets to this island, we translate Latin as English, which is the one that everyone is speaking. I think that could have been done. The transition might be a little awkward, but I think we could manage it.
Bunny: Yeah, that would be one way to do that.
Oren: Speaking of Shogun, the way that Shogun uses its language barriers is, uh, first is it has translator characters and it works them into the plot. Having a translator character in a story where you’re not taking advantage of them is awkward because it basically means that your main character has to have an extra character with them all the time, and that can be logistically difficult. Protagonists tend to go through pretty high-stress situations in which an extra character may not fit.
Chris: Can I just say, though, that Mariko is a terrible translator?
Oren: But she’s so great for drama!
Chris: That’s just the funny thing, is that in a show, it would be a little different. Again, ’cause in prose you can handwave things that you can’t if you are watching, you know, film or watching a video where you have to see what’s happening. In prose, you could just be like, kind of summarize that somebody is translating it first. You can spell it out and then you can handwave it and just have the conversation happen with the assumption that there’s a translator there, but not really narrate all the translation. But in video we have a translator there who’s literally translating every line. And if she was actually a good translator, it would be really boring, because we’d basically be hearing, ’cause we can understand what the main character is saying. ’cause he’s, you know, it’s supposed to be Portuguese, but he’s speaking in English for us. And so then she would just say the same thing and it would just be really dull. So instead, she’s just this terrible translator who is always summarizing what he’s saying and always adding her own agenda.
Bunny: So for story purposes, never have a translator unless they’re a bad translator.
Chris: Well, it makes it interesting, and again, this is a person who doesn’t understand Japanese etiquette, so he says things he really shouldn’t say, and then she smooths it over, right? By paraphrasing or even changing what he says.
Oren: Yeah, which has given us a beautiful new meme format where you have Blackthorn say something like, “Tell Lord Toranaga that I currently run three podcasts,” and then Mariko translates that to, “The Anjin says he is unemployed.” I love it so much. It’s my favorite new meme format. And in most cases Mariko has pretty good reason when she is altering the translation. Not 100%, there are a few points where I wonder, “Mariko, why did you change that? That’s an odd change you made.”
Chris: There are also places where she’s actually called out for inserting her own agenda. So she’s not supposed to be a perfect person.
Oren: And there are also some instances, you see this more in the book, they had to cut some of this from the show for time, where Blackthorn’s translators are just straight up hostile to him. In the show you see the little bit of this where they call the Portuguese Catholics to translate for him and he doesn’t like them, so they translate what he’s saying badly or sometimes just make up stuff and claim he said it. Uh, so that also adds some drama. Shogun also takes place over a long enough period of time that Blackthorn can slowly begin to learn Japanese, whereas if your story takes place in a short period of time, the urge to have your character magically learn the language really fast is strong.
Chris: I’m also thinking, okay, what if you wanted a situation like Blackthorn and Mariko, where you can… the readers understand both of them? You’d probably need to use either omniscient or it would be from the translator’s perspective. So you’d have a character who’s like, “Oh gosh, this person who doesn’t understand our culture is constantly being rude to really powerful lords, and somehow I have to translate in a way that makes it better.”
Oren: I mean, a translator having to manage a rambunctious VIP sounds like a fun story. I’d read that.
Chris: That does!
Oren: I don’t know if it could support a novel, but by the same token, it doesn’t have to. Language barriers don’t have to be all or nothing. They can come up sometimes, so that could be like a thing they have to do for a little while and then the story advances.
Bunny: Right. I’ve noticed that, and this is unsurprising that in stories where the language barrier is handwaved away by a universal translator, the universal translator then breaks. And hence shenanigans.
Oren: Yeah, they like to do the occasional episodes where the translators break. That’s fine.
Chris: I do like reminders that, if we’re going to… if there is supposed to be a language barrier and it’s downplayed a lot, by using technology or something, I think it is nice to get reminders that people are actually speaking different languages, but I think it’s really hard to keep that consistent, because every time Star Trek, “Oh, the Universal Translator breaks,” it just feels very contrived when it works and when it doesn’t.
Oren: Yeah, especially since if you’ve stopped thinking about it for a second, most of the human characters would be speaking different languages. Like maybe they all learn multiple languages in school, just ‘cause. I suppose that’s possible.
Chris: But would Picard be speaking English, British English, or French?
Oren: No, we’ve established that Picard’s family are actually an émigré family from the UK and they live in a little enclave in France and refuse to learn French. That’s the backstory on the Picards. I do think that the Star Trek-style universal translator is similar to aliens with bumpy foreheads in that it’s something we let Star Trek get away with, but it would be pretty hokey to do that in your novel. I think you would want something a little more believable than that.
Chris: Yeah, if you have a really advanced space opera setting with really high technology levels and you want to just handwave language barriers, I don’t think that’s a terrible way to do that. I think you could just state it once and then not call attention to it again.
Oren: Yeah. That, maybe. I do think, if you want to try something that’s a little bit more immersive, we made fun of Common earlier, but the concept of a lingua franca. That is perfectly legitimate. You can definitely have a language that people learn as their second language for the purposes of communication. You just want it to make a little more sense than “every fantasy species has one language, and the human one is called Common.”
Chris: That’s a little funky.
Oren: Typically speaking, a lingua franca is going to be the language of some powerful group. And it can be as simple as whoever the most powerful state around is. Their language is the lingua franca, and maybe they even enforce learning it. That’s the thing that can happen. It can also be a state that is not militarily powerful, but has a lot of commerce. Arabic is a lingua franca and has been historically, because Arab traders went around all over the place, so speaking Arabic was a good way to talk to people you’d otherwise wouldn’t share a language with.
Chris: I do understand the impulse to call some language Common or Basic because, again, it’s avoiding adding one more word the readers have to memorize. But if you already have a powerful country, empire, or another well known name in your setting, then you can just potentially reuse that, as long as it sounds similar enough that people can guess, “Okay, that word is for the language that people in this place speak.” So people don’t have to learn, “Oh, what is that again? Oh, that’s the name of the language.” Especially since people don’t necessarily talk about the name of their languages that often, so it’s hard to remember.
Oren: First, you need to introduce the concept of a lingua franca and then explain that the lingua franca is not French. It used to be, but now it’s a different language.
Bunny: And Picard does not speak it.
Oren: And, of course, depending on the scope of your setting, you can probably just handwave it and say that whoever the main character runs into happens to speak whatever language they speak. That might get hard to believe if your character is going, you know, is well traveled and goes around a long way, but if your character stays relatively close to home, that’s fine. Even if they meet a foreigner, it’s reasonable that foreigner would know the language of the country they’re traveling in.
Chris: Yeah, I think there’s a lot you can do if your scope is smaller. Like the issue with the Ark show is, of course we’re taking everybody from around the world in all time periods and putting them together, which is a really difficult position to be in when it comes to language barriers. But if you just have a few travelers going to a different country where they speak a different language, then you can just be like, most of them learn it, or a few people are fluent, one person has it rough but can get by, and you’ll be okay. Or if they’re just going to one place, you can have a local pidgin that everybody uses that works well enough. It’s when you’re doing a lot of combined people from all over the place that it just gets hard.
Oren: Yeah. Oh, and also, I’m sure we should have mentioned this with the Ark thing. I’m sure there’s also a group of people who wouldn’t mind if most of the dialogue was in Latin with English subtitles. That would probably have reduced the show’s audience, so I suspect that’s why they didn’t do it.
Chris: I just think that would be hard for the all the voice actors.
Oren: Sure. But on the other hand, how many people know Latin and can tell they’re messing it up?
Bunny: You haven’t met the Philosophy Department.
Chris: Think of how hard it would be to memorize your lines if they were in a language you didn’t know.
Oren: They do it. They don’t do it at wellness.
Chris: I mean, I just don’t think that’s how you’re going to get the best acting.
Oren: Yeah.
Bunny: Philosophy is how I learned, through one of my philosophy professors who used to be a Classics professor and studied Latin, that philosophy pronounces the phrase prima facie wrong. It’s actually like prima fak-ye or something. So that’s a… prima facie is a good way to get Latin enthusiasts annoyed if ever the need arises.
Oren: Look, there are a lot of actual Latin pronunciations that sound pretty silly by modern English standards, and so we’ve massaged how we say that.
Bunny: I would just say that if we had to go with only actors who knew Latin, we wouldn’t get Michelle Yeoh in there. And that would be very sad.
Oren: That would be sad.
Bunny: Hey, maybe she secretly knows Latin.
Oren: She could. We don’t… we just don’t know.
Chris: Michelle Yeoh is really having a moment right now, I gotta say.
Oren: So let’s assume that you… instead of doing all that, you want to have bridging the language barrier be part of your story. A prime example of this is in the novel Hail Mary, where our protagonist meets an alien and has to figure out how to talk to him.
Chris: Yeah. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.
Oren: Yeah, that is real challenging. And Hail Mary manages it. It’s like decent, but it did at the time strike me as a little handwavy. Like they do a lot of work. He figures out some computer programs and assigns sounds to it and that’s neat. But it just… it did feel like he probably accomplished that much faster than he would actually be able to do it.
Chris: Yeah. I’m okay with a little fast forward. On something, I think for practical reasons, stories do that for all sorts of things. The training montage, for instance, whenever a character learns how to fight, they somehow do it really fast. And languages take so long to learn. I think a little fast forwarding, a little bit, is not going to throw too many readers out. But he really did put a lot of emphasis on it, and I think it did help that there was computer software that was programmed to do the translation for him also involved. Again, not perfect, but that’s probably, besides Arrival, that’s probably the most I’ve seen a story focus on translation. Arrival is neat because it has an actual linguist who actually has to figure out how to speak with aliens that, again, you can’t just translate, because it’s a completely new language. So even a universal translating program doesn’t have the ability. There’s no data. So she has to go meet these aliens and start working with them to develop a vocabulary. Um, and that’s also what happens in Project Hail Mary. It’s just… I don’t think she gets all the way there. I don’t think it needs her to get fluent with them in the same way that the main character has to get fluent with alien in Project Hail Mary.
Oren: Right. Like she doesn’t have to construct complicated engineering devices with these aliens. She does have to learn time travel though, so, but that’s like a function of the language apparently.
Chris: That’s… yeah, she just gets that as a bonus.
Oren: Yeah, strong bonus power.
Bunny: Yeah. The harder you think in the alien language, the more time travel you get.
Oren: One other thing with lingua francas I forgot to mention, which is that, especially in a sci-fi setting, you could probably manage it so that everyone speaks a constructed language. Space Esperanto. That’s more believable to me in a sci-fi setting than in a setting that’s more historical.
Chris: So here’s a question: if they had Space Esperanto, would they just call it Common or Basic?
Oren: They might call it Basic. Okay, I’m willing to believe they might call it Basic.
Bunny: They would call it Esperanto, no matter the context.
Chris: So maybe in Star Wars they’re just speaking Esperanto, which is called Basic.
Oren: If you go into the Extended Universe…
Bunny: Well, let’s not go into the Extended Universe.
Chris: Oh, no! What have I done? I have podcasted too greedily and too deep!
Oren: I do not remember what the origin of Basic is in the Star Wars Extended Universe.
Chris: Gosh, I remember our early podcast episodes, when Star Wars would come up, and then you and Mike would just go off onto long tangents about the Star Wars EU.
Oren: Let me tell you about the time Han Solo kidnapped Princess Leia and took her on a romantic vacation to rancor planet.
Chris: I had to interrupt and be like, “Let’s talk about Buffy now.”
Oren: Hmm, I think it’s time to talk about rancor planet, Chris. I’ve got an essay prepared.
Bunny: So, for the purposes of say, the odd person who might be writing their language barriers in written medium that does not have sound, do you think, and I think I know the answer to this, but do you think it’s ever worthwhile to write down the actual sounds that the other language is making, or do you think it should always be description? I don’t know, “She spoke something in a low voice.”
Oren: As opposed to writing the phonetic spelling?
Bunny: Yeah.
Chris: I do have a couple articles on this, if you want to have a conlang in your story, for instance, but that’s where it tends to come up a lot, because people make their conlangs for their worlds and then they really want to show them off. Naming is usually the best place to do that. So you can name places or things like that after words in the language, but I think there are other things that are like repeated phrases, like greetings, for instance, a standard greeting or a standard goodbye. If you want to show that off, it’s a good place to do that. Things that are like repeated phrases that your readers can slowly learn. But just like a normal dialogue, I don’t think there’s a whole lot of reason to do that.
Oren: Yeah. Especially ’cause this is not like a language that some of your readers might know, right? This is a made up language. No one reading this book will know it. And it’s just a very high barrier. And if you don’t know how to do conlangs really well, there’s a good chance it’s just going to come across as silly, so I’m not going to say there’s never a period where you might want to do more of that, maybe you are really good at con languages, in which case that could add some fun novelty to it, but the authors that I’ve worked with who’ve tried this have not been at that skill level and have honestly not been interested in committing the time to do it ’cause they just want to tell their story.
Chris: Yeah, I would think of using it for proper nouns, like place names, and then maybe you could teach your reader 10 words during the course of the whole novel. Something that’s just… really, you gotta set your ambitions a lot lower, and writing an entire dialogue line in a language the reader can’t understand just doesn’t make any sense. It’s just not going to be a good experience.
Bunny: Yeah. I will say I’ve seen the stunt quite poorly, where it feels like the character starts unlocking words because suddenly certain words are in English, but we’re meant to be understanding that they’ve just realized what those words mean, which is really awkward.
Chris: Speaking of which, we haven’t even talked about The 100, which is one of the more interesting uses of conlangs in a TV show, where the funny thing is, the characters have been in a space station since the apocalypse, and they come back down to Earth and they meet people who have been on Earth, and technically, it’s only supposed to have been 100 years, but every time they say that, I just plug my ears and go, “La, la, la, I can’t hear you.” It’s ridiculous. So then they find that the people there have developed their own language called Trigedasleng. But they also speak English, because that would be too much for them to have the language barrier. But I have to say, I still like the language. During the course of the show, you learn a lot of words and then later, when they travel somewhere else, by that time, all the characters who used to be in space have learned this language, and now they can use it, so that the other people can’t understand them, which actually makes it useful in the plot, whereas it was never useful in the plot before.
Oren: It was so goofy, though, when they were talking to this guy and trying to understand his language, and then he just switches to English. What?
Chris: I mean, yeah, there’s multiple things here. Like how do they develop a language so fast? If they were going to develop a language so fast, how is it that they still know English? Yeah, that was interesting.
Oren: It’s cool later on, when they actually use it for something, but I don’t think that was worth the cost at the beginning, is my hot take. As opposed to my favorite language barrier that doesn’t make sense: Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.
Chris: Yeah, Darmok and Jalad! Their arms open!
Oren: Where they all speak in memes. Nothing about that makes any sense, but I love it anyway, and therefore it’s perfect.
Chris: Shaka, when the walls fell. I’m probably getting all those words wrong, I don’t know Darmok very well.
Oren: Look, it’s fine. It’s a meme. What’s important is the meme, okay? That’s like… the fact that you speak in memes, you can also say things like, “Surprise white guy, his eyes blinking,” and there, now you’re in the spirit of things. Okay. Speaking of which, I think we are about out of time for this episode. So remember I’ve been speaking in droid bleeps this whole time, so if it sounded like English, it’s just ’cause that’s how great our translator is.
Chris: And if you would like, or to continue speaking in something that sounds like English instead of beeps, we need to keep that universal translator working. So consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Aman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
[Music]
Outro: This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.
We all love to exercise our imaginations in the infinite land of storytelling, but what if we can’t just do whatever we want? What if we were limited by things like our previous choices, poor special effects, or our inability to kill off a major villain? This week, we’re talking about the kind of constraints that stories get put under, from the famous movie examples you’ve probably heard of to the more mundane kind that we novelists have to deal with. Plus, how nice it feels when your next story isn’t under a bunch of constraints.
Show Notes We’re Alive * Sylar * Jaws Animatronic * Differences Between Filmed and Prose Stories * Human Cylons * The Problem With Multiple Points of View * Furiosa * Mortal Engines * Follow the Sound of Snow TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Elizabeth.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[Opening theme plays}Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is:
Bunny: Bunny,
Chris: And:
Oren: Oren.
Chris: You know, I think this episode will be more successful if we meet some additional requirements, don’t you?
Oren: Yeah.
Bunny: I mean, heck yeah.
Oren: They could be very logical and not at all arbitrary.
Bunny: What if we didn’t say the word “the?”
Chris: Great, great idea. Also, I should mention we have a sponsor, Wraith McBlade, attorney at law. And so we do have to mention Wraith McBlade three times during this episode and very naturally. Has to be worked in a conversation.
Oren: He’s a very real lawyer.
Bunny: I mean, with a name like that, I think you just walk in and they just hand you an attorney certificate.
Oren: He’s on the cutting edge of the law.
Chris: Ooh.
Bunny: Ouch. That cut me deeper than the Wraith McBlade did.
Chris: Also, I was thinking the Goddess of Podcast, Podcastia, absolutely has to be happy. And she doesn’t like it when we mention books or movies because that’s competing entertainment media so we better not do it.
Oren: It’s all right. I listened to a lot of audio dramas back in the day. I’m ready. I’ll complain about We’re Alive, the zombie audio drama. No one alive today, ironically, remembers that show. But I’m ready. I’m ready to talk about it.
Bunny: I don’t wanna risk anything and then get smited, so maybe I’ll just be silent.
Chris: Alright, let’s go. This is gonna be a great episode. Sponsored by Wraith McBlade, attorney at law.
Oren: Very natural.
Chris: Very natural. Number one, down. So anyway, talking about constraints and storytelling, firstly, why constraints? When I was thinking about this episode, I did not realize that Bunny loves constraints. [laughter] So we may have to do battle. But no, really, I wanted to talk about it, because in many cases it does feel like it’s the invisible force sabotaging your story and making your job hard, and you may not realize that it’s there.
Bunny: Yes, we’ve established pretty firmly that I’m the villain of this podcast, and even though I was reformed a couple weeks ago, I think this is my villain turn again.
Oren: So you’re just Sylar then?
Bunny: Yes, exactly. Because I do think constraints, I think they’re a net good, but Chris, elaborate.
Chris: So it’s not that constraints are necessarily, like any constraints are bad, but I do think that stories inherently have lots already. You know how to tell a good story; there are certain things that the story needs to do just to keep readers entertained, and so that already comes with a lot. And if you add tons more, then it just becomes a problem and you may not realize that you’ve, added constraints or how many. And I think new writers are especially vulnerable to this because they’re usually very ambitious and like to take on big challenges, but are also sensitive to feeling like failures because they don’t have lots of stories under their belt. Whereas a more experienced storyteller will realize, oh, this particular project is just really tough. When it’s your first project, you just assume that’s how it always is. And it means you’ve written yourself in a corner in some way.
So this is the reason why sequels and prequels, as a rule, are not as good as the original. They can be. They can, and sometimes even be better, but even in the best of conditions, if you were to average it out, I think you would always find that originals have an advantage over sequels because they just don’t have so many constraints that they’re working on.
Oren: I mean, you could say that the fundamentals and best practices of storytelling, or the rules of storytelling—spooky—are constraints, depending on how you wanna define the term. When I heard the topic, I assumed we were talking about constraints that are not for the purposes of making stories better, but you could say that having a throughline is a constraint. Because now you can’t tell a story that doesn’t have a throughline, if you’ve decided that your story needs a throughline, which it should.
Chris: Yeah. My point is mostly that storytelling is hard enough without adding additional requirements.
Bunny: I see. Okay. Maybe I was tracking… or prescriptions. We wanted rules, prescriptions. We are prescribing things like some prescriptivists.
Chris: [jokingly] No, not the constructivists.
Oren: If you zoom out really far and someone doesn’t know what they wanna write a story about and they’re told to write something, and it can be about anything. Well, right now I have analysis paralysis, but usually by the time authors get to the stage where they’re seeking out our kind of writing advice, they at least have some concept of what they wanna write their story about. The alchemy of their brain has produced that set of constraints. But we do occasionally get people who are like, we have, I have no idea what I wanna write about, what should it be in? The only thing I can tell them is they have to go figure that out for themselves.
Bunny: I guess I was thinking about this more along the lines of what Orrin mentioned, but as someone who does get analysis paralysis and blank page syndrome quite a bit, I think on the whole constraints can be quite helpful.
Chris: Yeah, certainly there are times when they provide writing prompts. For instance, a lot of the structures that I would call pseudo-structures that I don’t think actually provide good plotting advice; I do think that one of the reasons that people enjoy them is they give them ideas for what to do.
Oren: Yeah. I mean that they can be useful for that. The problem is that, again, they tend to either be so specific that they’re just counterproductive, or so vague that they’re not really restraining anything. They’re not really constraints at that point.
Chris: I don’t think the point though, is necessarily to constrain. I think it’s to give ideas. It gives something to start with.
Bunny: It might help a moment here to define constraint because I feel like we’re working with two different parallel, but both definitely constraint-y definitions. So one form of constraint is like you’ve written, this is the one you mentioned, Chris, you’ve written a story and now you have to write a sequel that the constraints are, you have to follow from the first one in a way that makes sense. But a different kind of constraint could be something like a production constraint, which, maybe it was more along the lines that I was thinking, like famously the shark animatronic in Jaws was a piece of crap. And then the director had to use it pretty sparsely, and then that ended up being good because it turned out using it that way ended up creating better feelings of tension and ominousness. And then another form of constraint could be bickering in the writer’s room, right?
So there’s a couple different types of constraint, and I feel like some of them might be medium specific. Like you probably won’t have bickering in the writer’s room if you’re not writing a TV show or a movie if you’re just sitting alone in your room. But yeah, maybe we need a little definition here.
Chris: I would think of constraint as any requirement that your story has to meet, and it can be imposed by you. So if you’re writing a sequel, for instance, a requirement would be you need the same main character. That main character has to be in the story after, in the timeline, after the previous story, for instance. That would be a constraint. If you have an animatronic that’s bad and you’re not supposed to show it, that certainly removes your options. And I think that’s what constraints largely do, and that’s a situation where I think it’s really rewarding for somebody to come up with a good solution to a problem that they have. Okay, I can’t show this shark, right? And here I did something clever, and that’s really rewarding. At the same time, we don’t necessarily know that if the effect had looked better that would’ve been worse.
Bunny: That’s true. However, consider the million Jaws knockoffs that slap the shark across the screen like it’s a dead tuna.
Chris: But this is one instance and I think that a lot of people get a lot of satisfaction over, hey, I had all of these constraints I had to work with and look what I came up with. And that’s a really satisfying thing to do. But in many of those scenarios it may not turn out better.
Oren: And there’s a certain amount of survivorship bias when we’re talking about production constraints because we tend to hear about the ones that turned out well, because those are the ones the creators wanna talk about.
Bunny: That’s fair.
Oren: We hear about the shark one. We hear about the cylons in Battlestar Galactica. Because the human cylons was not part of the initial conception of the 2004 reboot of that show. That was something that they did pretty late in production because they realized that having robot cylons on screen all the time would be really expensive and look bad. So they were like, aha, there could be human cylons, and that was pretty cool. But also they didn’t have any idea what was going on with that. And so it turned out when they told us they had a plan, that was just a lie. Because by, by the end, it was just like, why are there human cylons? [mumbles] I don’t know, God maybe.
Chris: [ominously] There’s cylons, they have a plan. Hear that every episode. It’s like, they don’t have a plan.
Oren: Then you also hear about it with the new thing people love to talk about is the constraints of practical effects make the movie look better. And I’m not really convinced that’s true. I think it’s that special effects are cheaper. And so you get, you know, there’s this idea that you can do anything with CGI. I should say now special effects, that’s too broad, but you can do anything with computer animation and that’s something studios want you to believe because it’s much cheaper to do it that way. But as a result, it ends up not looking as good as if you had used more expensive practical effects.
Chris: I’ll say, here’s a couple examples of where constraints are really helpful. And not that you necessarily couldn’t go without them, but that you have to use much better judgment. ‘when we’re talking about, for instance, point of view. One of the reasons we’re really critical of multiple points of view is because having a single point of view is a constraint that is usually very helpful because it encourages good practices. It encourages you to keep things focused on your main character and keep your plot tight, and not jump around and fragment your plot all over the place. So that does mean less freedom. And you can use multiple POVs to great effect, but it comes with a lot more judgment calls. You have to be more disciplined.
Same with having a limited point of view versus omniscient. If you’re using a limited point of view, that just sticks in the character’s head and you can only write what that character knows and their perspective. Again, it, it encourages you to stay focused on them and stay focused on the story and not go into diatribes. And so that’s a constraint that is really helpful and helps you make good choices. Whereas, once you’re writing an omniscient perspective and you’ve got a narrator who knows everything and could tell the reader about literally anything, at that point, you have to make more judgment calls. You know that [dramatically] freedom and power comes with responsibility. So yeah, in those cases, I would call those in many cases good constraints. Not constraints you’d want for every story, but helpful.
Oren: Yeah, and it’s interesting looking at which types of story give you constraints in exchange for something, because a sequel, for example, is going to have some constraints. You’re going to need to address whatever happened in the first one, or leave a really unsatisfying story, I guess you could just not address it. And you’re going to need to work with the same characters and stuff like that. But as a trade off, you get more attachment because the readers or the audience has been with these characters for longer. You can build a more complicated story than you could in just one installment, so you can build up to an even more satisfying ending. So you have lots of benefits there as well. Now, some stories will impose so many constraints that the sequel is basically impossible, but on the whole, sequels can work decently, especially if this original story was set up with sequels in mind. Prequels… [laughter]
Bunny: I was like, when is this coming? If he doesn’t mention it, then I am jumping on this one.
Oren: We gotta talk about prequels, because prequels have even more constraints. And few, I would argue none, of the benefits in most cases.
Bunny: Yeah. I think a world without prequels would not be a worse timeline than the one we’re in.
Oren: Yeah. It’s not that there are zero good prequels, but I’m not sure I can think of any stories that were better for being prequels.
Chris: I think the reason to do prequels is because you’ve already exhausted all the potential storylines in the sequels, but you wanna tell another story about the same characters.
Oren: Yeah. Or not even the same character. Sometimes it’s just a different character who we saw once in a frame somewhere and it’s like, hey.
Chris: That’s not really a reason to do a prequel. [she laughs] They will do it, but at that point you might as well just use the same world and setting with a completely different character that hasn’t appeared.
Bunny: Look, you two can stop dancing around it and just say money. [laughter]
Chris: Yes. The benefit of prequels is money. You got the constraint, which is that the story is awful, but the benefit is money.
Bunny: That’s the trade off.
Oren: It’s sometimes money. Although, I’m not sure it’s always money. Some of these projects really look like passion projects. I could be wrong. Maybe Miller thought that Furiosa was gonna make him a ton of money. I don’t know. But from the general reporting I saw around this movie, it just really felt like this was a thing he wanted to exist.
Chris: But didn’t he make it in conjunction with Fury Road originally?
Oren: Yes.
Chris: Right, so I don’t know. Did he make it as a prequel or did he make the story about Furiosa and then write Fury Road, and then end up making Fury Road first?
Oren: As far as I can tell, Fury Road did come first, but this was made at about the same time. It’s not really clear which script they wrote first, but I think it was Fury Road. But some version of the script for Furiosa existed while they were filming Fury Road. Charlise Theran, excuse me, Charlize Theron, yeah— is on the record saying that she looked at the script for Furiosa for inspiration on how to play her character and a deeper understanding of her character, which suggests to me that either A, uh, she’s a bit of a fibber, or B, the script has changed at some point because I don’t know what insight we were supposed to get on Furiosa from watching the movie Furiosa other than some of the things they suggested happened, happened, I guess?
Chris: Maybe she looked at it for insight on her character, but she didn’t actually get any. [laughter]
Bunny: That could be.
Chris: Then she glossed it over for a press meeting.
Bunny: It’s not a lie, it’s misleading.
Chris: I did look at it for inspiration and insight.
Oren: It’s really weird that Furiosa— the one thing about Fury Road that suggests a prequel, and I’m not saying this would’ve been a good idea, but it does suggest one, is that Furiosa talks about needing to atone. So that kind of raises the question, atone for what? And according to Furiosa the movie, the answer is nothing.
Bunny: Well, yeah, I feel like this project was, I mean, I still think it’s like… To be clear, I liked the movie, but I think it was also kind of doomed from the start by the fact that we understand from the original that she’s done bad things.
Oren: Hang on, hang on. I should put a spoiler here for the movie Furiosa. I forgot to do that. [he laughs]
Bunny: Oh, that’s right. Yes. [sing-song] Spoilers.
Oren: I haven’t actually given anything away, I just mentioned a thing that didn’t happen. Okay. So we’re good.
Bunny: So we’re continue knowing this is spoiling Furiosa, but yeah. We don’t do see her do anything truly morally reprehensible, like she killed Dementus, but we already knew that was going to happen, or she planted him in her tree.
Oren: I don’t quite know what to make of that. Yeah, that was just, okay, I guess that happened. Maybe. It’s not actually clear if it’s supposed to have happened! It was a little too cartoonish for this world that they’d set up.
Chris: So I think it’s worth talking about—okay. It’s beyond… We can talk more about prequels and sequels. There are plenty of things that can be dissected there, but it’s worth talking about what imposes tons of constraints besides that, because that’s not the only one. One thing is a work that you are adapting. Any adaptation is dealing with all of the constraints of the original, depending on how faithful it stays is original. In some movies that are adapting books, for instance, if you’re adapting a whole novel into a movie, it’s actually a much shorter story. So you have to take some level of liberties. I think we saw Mortal Engines that was trying to stick very closely to the book; did not work out. Yeah, that one can be a big one.
I’m just having finished a retelling of a fairytale. I will say that now that I am plotting a novel that is not an adaptation, because I did stick fairly close to the original fairytale, it’s amazing how much easier it is to plot than when I was doing an adaptation and trying to figure out how to stay close to the original fairytale while actually making it work as a plot. Because fairytales, they’re usually summarized, and that makes a huge difference. You don’t really have to have engaging conflicts, and a lot of those things don’t work as well when you expand them. Or some future cool scenes that you are want to add that you first dreamed up and you haven’t added yet. Those can, again, kind of like the prequel effect. There are some premises we can talk about that inherently hem people in a lot, and are just hard to pull off.
Bunny: I have suffered from this, I must say. As much as I think constraints can spur creativity, I have been trapped in a locked room with ideas that I want to carry out and cannot figure out how to get to.
Chris: Is this something you haven’t written yet?
Bunny: Yes and no. It’s something that I’ve plotted, but that I spent a long time banging my head against because of part of this. Okay, so this was the thesis I wrote as part of my senior project, and I wanted a twist at the end. Spoilers, but maybe I’ll change this. I wanted this reveal that there’s been a spooky cult essentially. And as this is a mystery and a speculative fiction, I feel like I can lay the groundwork of there being spooky, supernatural things. But some of my readers were like, oh, this seems like a story about the relationship between these two characters. And then suddenly spooky cult comes outta nowhere. Now granted, this was just them reading my outline and being like, that seems contrary to the rest of the story. But looking at it, I’m like, okay, I can see why this slow burn mystery suddenly having this flipped switch into this cult plotline. I can see why that would feel strange and like I hadn’t set it up properly. So it’s partially a question of setup and partially a question of whether it’s the type of story where that sort of reveal would feel satisfying.
Chris: Yeah. Any storyline that relies a lot on withholding information or secrecy or has a big twist, those generally come with more constraints, because if you’re trying to withhold information, you have to figure out how to plot the story without revealing things. And that can become a problem if, for instance, that information is needed for a good story, but you also want it to be a twist. Or a lot of twists and reveals, they rely on a double interpretation, right? So you have to look at it before the reveal and be like, okay, I’m looking at X. And then after the reveal, you have to go back and think back on it and be like oh, that was really Y. And what that means is when you’re writing it, it has to fit the requirements of both X and Y. Or like stories where, this could be, this magic is real, or it could be imaginary.
Bunny: Oh, I also caught that issue with that same thesis. [laughter] It’s ambiguity. I want ambiguity in the room for spiritualism, but also…
Chris: Any time you add an interpretation because you’re doing a reveal or you want ambiguity, you have to then extremely carefully maneuver everything so it can be interpreted in multiple ways. That adds a lot of constraints to the project. Or just antagonists that are just misunderstood, and aren’t actually bad. Those ones… I have written some plots where people just needed to work it out, and there’s always so much harder because I just can’t have an antagonist that’s really malicious. That means they can’t do a lot of the things that they would normally do to create tension in this story. And it becomes so much harder to plot. Anything where the plot is spoiled if two people just talk to each other is the worst.
Or you can have characters that are too powerful, I think is another one that makes the premise hard. You know, a powerful ally that you have to constantly keep them away, or a villain that you have to constantly come with reasons they don’t squash the protagonists, or worse yet puppeteers and string pullers where oh look, now I have to make it so all of these events could be masterminded by some character. Those are all things that just make the whole process of plotting have to fit additional requirements. That makes it hard.
Oren: Yeah. You can do the same thing with any villain you want to do a redemption arc on. Assuming that you want the redemption arc to be satisfying, you’re now operating under constraints. Because you can’t have them do anything too bad, because if they cross the moral event horizon, that’s just gonna be upsetting if you try to redeem them at that point.
Chris: Yeah. How many times can I have them just toss people to the side? And then just have them roll. I trying to remember what show we saw where they were just throwing people off of buildings and being like, no, really, they’re okay.
Oren: Everything’s fine. They’re fine.
Bunny: Don’t worry about it. They’re all rubber people made of rubber.
Chris: Okay, but here’s the big one actually, as far as constraints that we work with all the time, is your existing draft.
Bunny: [dramatically] Noooo!
Chris: Your existing draft that you were revising. [she laughs]
Bunny: My enemy.
Chris: But this is a big deal for if you’re working on a big project for a number of years and you get better as you go, but you made your entire, like all the ideas from your story and how you constructed it and all the events, you made those when you knew nothing, oftentimes, or you knew less than you do now, but you are attached to all of it. And you’re trying to make it work, and you’re trying to make the story better while changing as little as possible. That’s a huge one and it can be really crushing. And again, if this is this first work you’ve worked on, you don’t realize just how crushing it is.
Bunny: It’s also, again, speaking from experience, really hard to go back to old projects that you were once super duper into, but knew way less about. You can just feel like it’s better to cut that one loose than it is to edit it.
Oren: That’s the reality of most of the clients I’m working with, is that’s one of the reasons why I spend so much time asking them questions and getting their buy-in; because you can give someone the best recommendations in the world to improve their story, and if they’re not able to make those changes, then that’s all useless. A large part of what I work on is, what changes can we make to improve this? And at the very least, what lessons can I teach you so that you’ll know better next time? It happens all the time.
Chris: So I, I think that this episode wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t at least mention the Star Wars sequel trilogy.
Bunny: You knew it was coming.
Chris: I mean, everybody of course has ranted about them, but this really is just the epitome of how constraints can sink something. Not that the directors were making great choices on their own, but there was no way for that third movie to be good. It was impossible.
Oren: Yeah, by the time you get to the end of the Force Awakens and it’s like this isn’t a great place for to start a second movie. It does not open well, and then you get the Last Jedi, which is just, I’m taking my ball and going home, I don’t want to deal with any of the things that were in the last movie, and then you get Rise of Skywalker, which at that point I don’t know how to fix Rise of Skywalker. Given the constraints of the previous two films, I’m not sure it can be done now. Obviously that movie also takes its ball and goes home even harder. [laughter]
Bunny: Goes home with a vengeance for sure.
Chris: The biggest constraints, the biggest problems that it was put under, was the fact that the villains had been completely destroyed, and then Rey had then been given powers.
Oren: Yeah, she has more powers now, but her powers were super vague.
Bunny: She makes rocks float.
Oren: The villain thing is the biggest constraint. The villains have been all destroyed, but also so have the good guys, like the Resistance is completely gone. What are we supposed to do with that?
Chris: Because usually each story in a series is going to increase the scope to make things more epic than before, and at least definitely in a series like Star Wars, that’s what people expect. You would have a big Starship battle. But if you’ve destroyed all of your starship fleets, that’s hard to do.
Bunny: But Chris, you could just raise some up out of the water, fully crewed.
Chris: [laughs] Yes, you could do that. Which is, if you’ve ever seen, oh, there’s a big time jump right in between seasons of a show, especially, one of the biggest reasons that people do that is to give things a soft reboot to try to get rid of constraints. Because if we just made it so, okay, five years passed, now more things could have happened in between that time and it feels more realistic to change up things more. If the last Star Wars sequel film took place 20 years later, then it’s more realistic for them to have fleets again.
Oren: Yeah. But no, instead everything’s fine. We’re back. Don’t worry about it.
Bunny: And they did that. They did jump forward for the Last Jedi. Oh, wait.
Oren: The Force Awakens?
Bunny: Yes. That one jumps ahead to an identical scenario, which is about the most disappointing thing you could do with a time jump.
Oren: The Force Awakens was definitely the least constrained of them other than constrained by the fact that its director just seems to want to have done Star Wars again. But even it was under some constraints. It was clear that people wanted the original characters, but also clear that the original characters could not convincingly do a Star Wars movie because they’re all much older now. So that was the biggest constraint that the first film was working under. And that’s a challenge in its own right. And then it decided to just do A New Hope again. Because why not?
Chris: I do think though, that as we’re talking about the sequels. We should probably praise Obi-wan the show. It’s not a perfect show, but it’s a mid-quel. And considering the fact that it’s a mid-quel, I think they did a really good job. Yes, if you watch A New Hope, you’re not gonna believe that Leia and Obi-wan have ever met before.
Oren: Not only met, but gone on this bonding adventure. It’s like, no, that is, that did— no. There’s no way that happened in the New Hope timeline.
Chris: But honestly, that’s the kind of minimum thing that they could do, is to fill in things that we didn’t believe were there, but at least aren’t directly contradicting really huge parts of the setting and storyline.
Oren: Yeah. Obi-wan being as good as it was is frankly a miracle. I was really not optimistic when I heard the premise.
Bunny: I noticed that neither of you have mentioned our sponsor since the beginning of the show, which was one of the stated constraints.
Oren: Call now, Wraith McBlade, good legal advice.
Chris: Yeah. If you’d like to save us from Wraith McBlade, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want thank a few of our existing patrons, which is technically a constraint. We do have that in our Patreon rewards, but we like to do it, so it’s not really a constraint. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel, and then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
[closing theme plays]Chris: This has been the Mythcreant podcast. Opening and closing theme, The Princess who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.
Have you ever wondered what it was all about, maaaaaaan? A lot of writers have, and they love to put such philosophizing in their work. When it works, we get The Good Place. When it doesn’t, we get weird interlude chapters that exist for no purpose but to lecture us. This week, we’re talking about how to get closer to the former rather than the latter. That means a discussion of moral dilemmas, what certain philosophers said, and something called “gothstatic wronging.” Or maybe it was “dogtastic wronging.” The world may never know.
Show Notes The Good Place * The Trolley Problem * Sandwich Discourse * Doxastic Wronging * Death Wish * The High Ground * The Measure of a Man * Past Tense * Plato * Aristotle * John Stuart Mills * Machiavelli * Marx * Paley’s Watchmaker Argument * Kant * Bobiverse * The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas * American Born Chinese TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Ari.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Intro: You are listening to the Mythcreants Podcast. With your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny.
[Music]
Bunny: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Bunny, and with me is-
Oren: Oren.
Bunny: And-
Chris: Chris
Bunny: I’ve noticed that there’s been a lot of this, like, what’s the meaning of life stuff and blah, d’blah, and people just love going on about that. But me, I figured it out. Life is meaningless without podcasts. Easy. I don’t know what these philosophers are on about.
[laughter]Oren: Podcasticism, we’ll call it.
Chris: It’s the answer to life, the universe and everything.
Bunny: Exactly. You thought it was 43? Oh no, child. It’s podcasts. If only all of those old philosophers had podcasts, they would understand it too. Actually, that’d be terrible.
Oren: Part of our philosophy is that when we make Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy references, we intentionally make them wrong so that everyone can quickly type comments about how it’s 42, not 43!
Bunny: Oh, well, excuse me.
Oren: We did that on purpose to make you think! Hmm.
Bunny: It’s comedic genius and also very smart.
Chris: Honestly, if you want a bunch of speculative fiction nerds to start spouting philosophy, just ask them what the meaning of different genres are.
Oren: Oh, no!
[laughter] Bunny: Oh, I love genre discourse. I love ontology! It’s the stupidest thing ever!
Oren: It hurts. It hurts so much, every time! They’re like, ‘science fiction is what’s pushing boundaries, and fantasy is what’s exploring the past.’ Oh God. I can find like a bunch of stories that are pushing the boundaries and have wizards and dragons. Are you gonna call that science fiction? Anyway I’m done. Moving on.
[laughter]Bunny: Ontology is, which is essentially like, what is it and what’s it like? Is definitely like the most obnoxious field of philosophy, and that’s why I love it.
Chris: You mean it’s like sandwich discourse?
Bunny: It’s like, sandwich discourse is ontology. That’s- how do we define a sandwich? That’s exactly what ontology is.
Chris: It’s been fun sometimes though, looking into that.
Bunny: Oh, it’s great fun! It’s obnoxious, but it’s so much fun. I love it!
Chris: We had a whole argument about what wizards are.
[laughter]Oren: I may have had less fun with that than everyone else. I don’t know.
Bunny: My roommate once asked me as a brain teaser, ‘Do you think there are more doors or wheels in the world?’ And then I like turned it around on him and I was like, ‘all right, define a door.’ [laughter] And this went on for hours.
Oren: That explains why I heard someone shout ‘fatality!’ a while back. Oof.
Bunny: Today we’re gonna be talking about writing stories that explore philosophy without just writing either an essay or a manifesto. Both of which you could do, but they probably won’t be stories.
Oren: Probably not gonna sell great as fiction.
Chris: Yeah. I had somebody recently ask me about, can you blend fiction [and] non-fiction and make my story teach something? And there are stories that try to teach philosophy, but the trick is to use the mechanics of the story and not to get tempted into putting in lectures. And think people are really tempted to do lectures because they want to say more than they can fit if it’s actually embedded in the story. And so they’re just really tempted to have those interludes.
Oren: Look, I spent five hours googling this, and now I’m gonna make it your problem.
[laughter]Bunny: Otherwise, the research will be for naught! I’d say that generally some people might have trouble coming up with philosophical conflicts. Like I’ve noticed that there are stories that treat something obvious as a philosophical conflict. Usually it’s anti utilitarianism, but we can get into that later. But generally, the good rule of thumb is it’s a philosophical conflict if someone could really disagree with it, like heartily, and have good reasons for that. Like make a sound case against whatever case you are making. This is why philosophers bicker.
Oren: I would say that to have a story that explores philosophy, it’s not like you necessarily need to be communing with the collected works of Plato. You can have philosophical arguments that are not from the great well known philosophers. It’s just a question of, is this something that actually has any interest in being argued or is there just one really obvious answer?
Bunny: That’s a good point. So when I’m talking about philosophy, I don’t mean putting Aristotle in your fantasy world.
Chris: Also, is this another trolley problem? Because can we stop with the trolley problems?
Bunny: No more trolley problems.
Chris: I’m sure we’ll talk more about “The Good Place” since its the ultimate example of this, but I do find it very funny that in “The Good Place”, when they talk about the trolley problem and they start doing a bunch of trolley problem simulations, it turns out that is just a trick by a demon to torture them using the trolley problem. [laughter] It’s not really for any value other than just making them feel bad.
Bunny: An accurate representation.
Oren: The reason why the good place works so well is that “The Good Place” has a lot of philosophy with the capital “PH”, I guess from the big ones from Aristotle and from Marx and from John Stewart Mill probably; there’s a bunch of them in there. But the actual message of “The Good Place” is very straightforward, which is that people can get better and they deserve a chance to get better. That’s the actual statement about humans that the show is trying to make, and the rest of it basically is to fulfill specific plot points.
Chris: I do think that it is important in “The Good Place” when it comes to… they want to actually teach philosophy to their viewer to some extent; that learning philosophy is the main character’s way of solving problems. And so she has a reason to sit down and learn philosophy, and the audience has a reason to watch that happen [laughter] because there are stakes where she has to become a, a good person or go to hell are the options. Betting it in the story using story mechanics is really important and you can do quite a lot. And I tell people, ‘Hey, if there’s specific kinds of scenes that you wanna have, make that your character’s way of solving a problem.’ And “The Good Place” does that with lots of learning ethical philosophy.
Bunny: That’s a very straightforward way to do it. Your character has to learn philosophy and thus you put philosophy [in] your story. I do think that some philosophical arguments would be easier or harder to convey in a context that would be relevant to a story. Like for example, there’s this concept of doxastic wronging, which basically means wronging someone without expressing a belief in any way. So if you have racist beliefs towards someone, the idea is that you are wronging them even if you never express those beliefs. And that’s really hard to convey in a story because by definition those beliefs are unexpressed. So like good luck telling a story about doxastic wronging where nobody ever acts on their beliefs and thus it’s very hard to have a story.
Oren: Someone who is subconsciously racist wouldn’t count, like someone who doesn’t think of themselves as racist but checks their wallet twice after having business dealings with a Jew. That doesn’t count as sarcastic racism.
[laughter]Bunny: Doxastic!
Oren: Ducks-astic? I’m not gonna say that, right. I’m sorry.
[laughter]Bunny: Uh, well, okay, so just. So ‘doxastic’ comes from ‘doxa’, which just means opinion. Doxastic wronging is like wronging someone with an opinion. It’s very you- what you’ll learn here is that philosophers love making up fancy terms for words that we already have terms for like, opinion. [laughter] According to the philosopher who’s currently like putting out essays and stuff on this, I know it’s a modern philosopher, it’s not Plato, is that any like racist belief, even the person who doesn’t think they’re racist, is still being racist. This theory doesn’t go so much into stuff like what is objectively racist or not. It presumes that there are these things and if there are then having a racist belief about someone directly wrongs them. And one of the problems with this belief not to get in, or this theory not to get into it too much, is that it doesn’t define what wronging is. So I guess you’re shooting like mental lasers that create magical wronging fields around someone.
Oren: (making sound effect) bweenh bweeh-bweeh bweenh
Bunny: Yeah, that’s what it sounds like.
Chris: See, I would just say that theoretically somebody who harbors a lot of racist beliefs are going to express those in some way, shape, or form, right? And so that seems… [laughter]
Bunny: And so the impracticality of these- of certain philosophical theories like this one, because it requires these things being unexpressed, would make it hard to tell a story.
Chris: But I would say most philosophies have hypotheticals that they use in their arguments that you could just make them real, right? And put them in your story, which also could reveal how realistic they actually are, which is a hilarious thing about Atlas Shrugged. [I gotta] take some digs at Atlas Shrugged because it’s over a thousand pages long and I read the whole thing in high school. Uh, but it’s just very funny because it’s so weirdly unrealistic, because reality in that book follows what Ayn Rand thinks reality is. Uh, there’s a character that like, [runs] in terror because somebody loves them unconditionally.
Oren: Aaaah!
Bunny: Whenever I see my parents, I just like, bolt in the opposite direction.
[laughter]Chris: And of course we’ve got Galt’s Gulch where somehow all of the rich people leave to create their science fiction paradise.
Oren: Rich people are great at farming. This is just a known fact.
Chris: Right? Without any labor.
Oren: Yeah. Bunch of subsistence farmer billionaires up there.
Chris: ‘Cause all of their employees were apparently just freeloaders, [in] Ayn Rand’s mind. Um, and that’s what it takes to try to show her philosophy is doing really odd things like that, that are just clearly not realistic.
Bunny: And it’s definitely a good indicator of whether a theory is reasonable or not is how far you have to stretch to come up with scenarios that seem to counter it. Like if you can come up with a normal everyday scenario that like, violates the premise of your argument, it’s probably not a good argument. But if you have to be like, imagine a universe of cows and these cows have teapots, and what if the cows all poured their teapots at once? You’re like, I think maybe that’s not a very good counter argument. Maybe that argument that you’re trying to counter argue is stronger than the point you’re making against it.
Oren: But my precious cow teapot world. [laughter] So I don’t know if I have anything as cool as that, like “dog-tastic” stuff you were talking about earlier, [laughter] but uh, I did do, my contribution to this episode is I talked to our patron, Kathy Ferguson, who I cite at the end of each episode as teaching political theory in Star Trek, and that includes some philosophy and, [in] Star Trek what that means is that she uses different Star Trek episodes as a way to illustrate the different philosophers and their ideas to her students. And I have a list! And I am fascinated by it. We don’t have to go through all of ’em necessarily, but I wanted to mention a few of them.
Chris?: Let’s hear it. Let’s-
Oren: Okay, so my favorite, the one that like, is really interesting to me, is when she uses the Voyager episode “Death Wish” to illustrate the ideas of Plato and Socrates.
Chris: Which one is “Death Wish”?
Oren: “Death Wish” is the episode where they meet a Q who wants to die.
Chris: Oh.
Oren: And the reason, and this is like I wouldn’t say that this is a good idea necessarily for most types of characters, but the Q are so weird and omniscient and they know everything. And so his point isn’t really so much about death as we would understand it, because the Q are so different and strange. To him, it’s more like, ‘I wanna see what happens next’, and the other Q are like, ‘nah, no, that’s dangerous. You have no idea what would happen. We can’t risk it.’ And so he takes on the role that would be called “the dissident citizen” who goes around and like, tries to bother everyone and make them question what they know and if he’s anything like Plato, tell them to be less democratic, I guess.
[laughter]Bunny?: Don’t get me started on the Republic.
Oren: Yeah, so that’s, that is how that episode is used as [an] introduction to Plato and Socrates. It’s not like, it’s reading that episode is the equiv- or it’s not like watching that episode is the equivalent of reading “The Republic”, but it gives you like, an interesting, entertaining sci-fi version of it.
Bunny: Interesting. I tried to read the synopsis of that episode and was very confused by it. I think, because I don’t have the proper context, and I was like, ‘I guess it’s about euthanasia, but it sounds like it’s more nuanced than that.’ I was trying to figure out how euthanasia related to Plato.
Oren: The end does have a very obvious Socrates reference because at the end, Quinn is the name of the Q who wants to die. The other Q, the main character Q who was trying to stop him, is brought around to his way of thinking and Gives him some hemlock.
Bunny: Oh wow.
Oren: Some magical Q hemlock and it’s like, man, yeah. I wonder what that’s a reference to. We may never know. [laughter] And obviously it’s not the same, like, Socrates was executed. He was forced to take hemlock by the state. Whereas this is something that Quinn wants to do as an experiment so it’s not identical, but the parallel is obvious. Um, then there are some other ones like that are really easy, like the deep space nine episode “Past Tense” which is the one that’s supposed to take place in 2024, so that’s fun, which is an episode about extreme poverty and class warfare and alienation of the working class when their dignity is taken away. And can you guess which philosopher that is used for? [laughter] If you need more than one guess, then I’m taking marks (Marx) off your report.
Chris and Bunny: Oh. Whoa. Oh!
Oren laughs
Bunny: Does Kathy use that one?
Oren: She does! [laughter] She’s a fan of puns. So that one’s pretty self-explanatory, right? Because that’s the only other- you could also use the one where they, where they form a union and quote from the Communist Manifesto. [laughter] I think that “Past Tense” is actually a bit more direct in showing the deprivations that people face, you know, have under wealth inequality whereas the union episode is a little bit more comedic. The one that I don’t get, and Kathy explained this to me and I still don’t get it, was that she uses “The Measure of a Man” to illustrate the philosophy of John Stewart Mill, who is a philosopher I have no context for. I at least know something about Marx and Plato, uh, Mill I’m just like, I guess that was a guy, presumably. And Kathy explained it as like he had ideas about individuality and self-creation and, sorry, that went completely over my head. I’m just like, ‘yeah, that’s, that definitely makes sense. Mm-Hmm. I wanna get good grades.”
Chris?: Smile and nod.
[laughter]Bunny: Well, embarrassingly John Stewart Mill is one of the philosophers I don’t really know. But just again, having looked at the plot synopsis, it does bring back our good old friend ontology and a bit of metaphysics in how we define intelligence and consciousness. And it seems to conclude that we can’t, or at least that there’s no satisfactory answer. Uh, in the case of Data, because this is the one about-
Oren: Whether Data’s a person.
Bunny: Yeah. Whether Data’s a person. So that’s what is a person and what are they like? And that’s ontology.
Oren: Yeah. And for storytelling purposes, they have to leave it open because they wanna maybe do this sort of episode again. [laughter] ‘We can’t say if Data is a person or not because that would limit the number of episodes we could do in the future.’
Bunny: Whoops.
Chris: That’s a good example of having two characters, again, get in conflict to bring out philosophy, right? And argue different viewpoints from each other.
Bunny: And I think conveying characters’ philosophical perspectives and using those to shape worldviews and create conflict between characters is a really good way to bring philosophy into your story, [perhaps] a way that’s not like story level per se, but certainly like relevant in creating your characters. So there’s a bunch of different things that your characters might have distinct philosophies on. One of the big obvious ones is like their religious outlook. So if there’s someone who takes, I think it’s like Paley, I’m pretty sure it’s Paley’s Watch in the watchmaker argument, which is essentially an intelligent design argument. The theory is you find a watch in a forest and you can presume that the watch was made and just did not appear there. And basically it makes the same argument about the universe. So someone who takes that viewpoint might find like, beauty and perfection in like even mundane things, and that could be an interesting viewpoint. Another big one, that’s something that varies a lot between cultures is like, how do we view the mind body problem? Which is; is the mind distinction in the body? If so, how? Like, how does that work? So dualism.
Oren: I have several problems with my mind and body. Can I consolidate them into one problem? Sometimes that’s easier to deal with.
Bunny: Oh, I wouldn’t be- I wouldn’t be so fast to, uh, make two problems into one bigger one.
Oren: Oh, I see. Is that a philosophy faux pa?
[laughter]Bunny: Uh, no, that’s just advice.
[laughter]Chris: So we have another patron who is a professor of philosophy, [laughter] apparently, just know a lot of these people [laughter].
Oren: Accruing philosophers, up in here. What is happening? What kind of vibes are we giving off? [laughter]
Bunny: By which you mean two, who both like to argue.
Chris: We have another blog post on the site from her and hopefully we will get another on this one from Sophia Jeppsson and she talks about using deontology for like having a principled hero and what that would actually mean. And I found that kind of interesting because boiling down, and this is like philosophers like Kant, hopefully it was notorious for having this idea that if a murderer asks you where your friend is so that the murderer can murder your friend you’re supposed to not lie. But no, in a more practical sense this is about, basically respect and holding everybody to the same standards.
Bunny: Uh-huh, it’s basically the golden rule. It’s ‘treat others the way you want to be treated’. Don’t treat others as, like, ‘a mere means’ is the way he puts it. Stuff like that.
Chris: But also just not being paternalistic when it comes to things like withholding information Because you shouldn’t be making choices for other people because you’re putting yourself above them, for instance.
Oren: I read a book recently that all I could think of was, ‘y’all need Kant.’ ‘Cause it was a second book in the Bobiverse series and the protagonists, who are a bunch of sentient spaceships by this point, find like an alien planet with some industrial age ferret aliens on it. And the big bads are gonna come and kill everything on the planet and they can’t be stopped. So the good guys are like, ‘all right, we need to evacuate as many of the ferret aliens as we can. But obviously we can’t take more than a small number of them.’ And instead of being like, ‘Hey, alien ferrets, here’s the situation. Help us figure out who we should take with us.’ They just kidnap a bunch of them in the night and then leave.
[laughter]Bunny: What?
Oren: And I was like, ‘no!’ And they justify it by being like ‘if we told them there’d be mass chaos’, and it’s like, well maybe. But you don’t have the right to decide that! For all you know, They might have an answer and be like, ‘please take as many of our children as you can.’ Or maybe they’d be like, ‘here, take these ones. These are the ones who know all of our important cultural stories. Take them!’ We don’t know what they would’ve done and we’ll never find out ’cause you didn’t give them the chance. Y’all need Kant!
[laughter]
Chris: Get some deontology in that story.
Bunny: Have you let Kant into your heart?
Oren: Can I speak to you about our Lord and Savior, Kant?
[laughter]Bunny: Ethical outlooks, obviously, I feel like people do philosophy in their stories without meaning to because often a big source of conflict is ethical conflicts. And usually that’s the conflict between the hero and the villain, but you can also have conflict between protagonists who have different ethical outlooks on the world. Certainly, we just talked about the trolley problem. One of the ones that comes up a lot because it’s really basic is utilitarianism. It’s easy to explain; maximize pleasure, minimize pain. That’s basically the guiding principle and maybe the most obvious story that does this is “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”.
Oren: Oh yeah, that’s a story for sure.
Bunny: That is, of all the stories, that is one of them.
Oren: God, they’re calling us about that damn kid again, aren’t they?
Bunny: It’s a kid. It’s always a kid. [laughter] It’s basically, so a city believes it’s only happy so long as it tortures this young child. Not tortures it, but like neglects it. And then The Ones Who Walk Away are the ones who object to this philosophy. And so this is basically a critique of utilitarianism because utilitarianism would justify the position that you torture and neglect this kid so long as the happiness produced is greater than the kids suffering, blah blah.
Oren: See, this is why I always thwart all attempts at utilitarianism by becoming a utility monster. My favorite concept is like if you can mess up utilitarianism by enjoying things more than everyone else. And so if you enjoy a cookie a thousand times more than other people, you should get all the cookies, [laughter] because you’ll be generating the most enjoyment. [laughter] I have no idea how that could possibly work in a real world scenario, but I want to be it. That’s my goal now.
Bunny: This is your aspiration. It’s good to have dreams.
[laughter]Oren: To be clear, I’m generally a utilitarian. Everyone has a certain amount of all of these things, and it’s when the answer becomes unclear that we have to search our feelings.
Bunny: I mean, my hottest take about philosophy is just that it’s feelings all the way down.
Chris: So somebody did a study looking at the way people solve ethical questions by looking at the Reddit Am I The Asshole? subreddit. And what was interesting there is they found the biggest number of questions that needed [to be addressed] were about relationships and obligations. Which again, is something that when we talk about a lot of philosophical questions, is we’re assuming everything the same in people’s relationships to each other is the same, whereas a lot of those real life quandaries were very much like, okay, what do I owe my boss, my spouse, my kid? And what is fair given that interpersonal relationship? Which I found very interesting.
Oren: Now I wanna know if there’s any way to judge how many of those stories are real. I don’t know. It feels like most of ’em are made up, but I don’t have a statistic there.
Chris: Yeah actually relating to that, one dilemma that I found interesting was in “American Born Chinese”, because it has the same argument and what it does is it has it pop up in parallel in several different times in several different storylines in different ways, but it’s still the same argument. And it’s between the Chinese characters who are dealing with systemic oppression. And you have one character that just wants to go with the flow and fit in, and the other character that insists on taking big risks and sometimes pushes the character that wants to go with the flow into kind of upsetting the system and taking big risks and that being a big disagreement. So I found that one really interesting in the fact that it… the same argument was used in several different places in the story.
Bunny: And that’s a good sign that it’s being approached in different scenarios that could put it in [a] new light. And perhaps, I don’t know, I haven’t seen “American Born Chinese”, but perhaps providing a perspective that’s like, here’s another scenario that might challenge the way you think about this dilemma that keeps reappearing.
Oren: Oh, I know another way. That is a very easy way to work philosophy into your story, which is just to pick a philosopher who was also like a statesman, because they often have really specific scenarios. So like you do Machiavelli and everyone knows Machiavelli’s famous, like, uh, “better to be feared than loved”, but you can get way more weird and specific with it. Like he also has opinions about locally raised soldiers versus mercenaries. So if you have a story about a character who is trying to get their city to switch from mercenary companies to using locally trained soldiers. Congratulations, that’s philosophy now.
Bunny: Homegrown organic, grass fed soldiers.
Oren: It’s like, look, Machiavelli, I get it. Everyone in theory agrees that home raised soldiers are better, but you don’t always have a population. If you’re a small Italian city state with lots of money and very few people, where do you think those homegrown soldiers are gonna come from, Nicolo? I have questions.
[laughter]Bunny: If you listen to Plato, they spring from the earth with a certain amount of metal in their souls that determines what class they are.
Oren: Okay. Can we like, separate that from ’em when they die? ‘Cause that seems like leaving money on the table otherwise.
Bunny: Yeah, you can smelt the soldiers I guess.
Chris: Speaking of which, I can’t believe we got through a philosophy podcast episode without talking about Plato’s Cave.
[laughter]Bunny: Oh yes, the allegory of the cave.
Oren: I’ve seen the matrix. I’m familiar.
[laughter]Chris: Go into the cave and get a bunch of soldiers. Then do you have soldiers or not?
Bunny: See, the funny part is that the cave is part of “The Republic”. Like the allegory of the cave is an extension of “The Republic” that’s meant to illustrate things. In the logic of “The Republic”, the commoners, the toilers, the workers are the people stuck in the cave. And the guardians, the philosopher kings, are the ones who have made it out of the cave. But then the auxiliaries, the like, soldiers who are above the working class but below the guardians are like kind of partway out of the cave? They’re sort of in the mouth of the cave? [laughter] Kind of starts breaking down there.
Chris: Yeah, it sounds like an analogy that’s being stretched way too far.
Oren: What’s important is that it just so happens that the people who are best qualified to be in charge are the same group of people who are writing this book. That was a really happy coincidence.
Bunny: The least likely part of Plato’s “Republic” is thinking that philosopher kings would stop bickering long enough to run a republic.
Oren: If we had philosopher kings, we wouldn’t have all those problems we have under boring, normal kings. We’d have different, much more exciting problems!
Bunny?: It’s true.
Chris: Speaking of which, if you would like to make us your philosopher kings-
Bunny: 10 out of 10 a plus pivot.
Chris: Go to patreon dot com slash Mythcreants and it will happen eventually.
[laughter]Oren: I do think we’re gonna have to call this episode to a close, but before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber, who’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, there’s Kathy Ferguson who contributed some material for this episode. So thank you, Kathy. We will talk to you all next week.
[Music]
This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening, closing theme, The Princess who saved herself by Jonathan Colton.
Authors add dark content to their stories for all kinds of reasons. They might be writing about an inherently dark subject, or they might just have a taste for dark stories. In less fortunate cases, they’re doing it to show they’re a big boy and this is a grown-up story for grown-ups. The thing with dark content is that it’s, well, dark. It can turn ugly fast if not used with thought and care. This week, we’re talking about how to take your story over to the dark side – and when it’s a good idea to do that in the first place.
Show Notes Grimdark Sauce * Death of a Hero * Brown Girl in the Ring * Atmosphere and Tone * Locke and Key * Elric * Moral Dilemmas * Parable of the Sower * The State of Nature * Lord of the Flies True Story TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Sofia.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. With your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[Intro Music]Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is…
Bunny: Bunny!
Chris: …and…
Oren: Oren.
Chris: We’re just having a great conversation among friends. Nothing to worry about here. That is until I spend 10 minutes describing how my parents were murdered in front of me, how their blood flowed over my hands and into dark, warm pools.
But it’s cool. I got over it in a couple weeks.
Bunny: Oh good.
Oren: This isn’t your grandma’s podcast. We’re all big boys here. We’re ready to do dark stuff, very dark stuff!
Bunny: But don’t worry about it because Chris seems fine.
Chris: Yeah, I’m fine. That was last week.
Bunny: [laughs]
Oren: Consequences are irritating, so I’m not gonna.
Bunny: Yeah. I just hate it when your parents die in their blood pools and cross your hands and in warm pools. It’s just a big downer.
Chris: Yeah. And also, I was gonna have a funeral for them, but that takes time. And, uh, I’m busy.
Oren: Man, I’ve gotten really sensitive to sequences where a character dies and the other characters are sad for a scene and then they move on. It’s, look guys, I get that it’s hard to depict a realistic grieving process in stories cause it takes a long time, but it just feels so inhuman to me now. I don’t like it.
Bunny: I feel like grieving in a lot of stories, people go with the do-characters-have-to-go-to-the-bathroom approach and just wave it off.
Oren: Yeah. It just doesn’t feel right. It just feels like there should be more effect in how they act if they’re sad.
Sometimes the reason they don’t act sad is cause the writers know that character is coming back and so they don’t wanna waste your time with a bunch of grief for a character you’re gonna see again. But that still creates dissonance even when that is the case.
Bunny: Oh, we did a comic about that.
Oren: [laughs]
Chris: Yeah. I would say that if you want your audience to feel sad that somebody died, then take just a little bit of time to show how they gathered up the body and set it out to sea (or whatever you have in your setting) and put it into space and said a few words. It doesn’t have to be a full elaborate thing, but just something, because it’s weird when that is just skipped over and the characters are all fine again.
So in any case, we’re talking about when and how to add dark content. And this is because a pretty common mistake that we see in a lot of manuscripts is just getting some basic tonal choices wrong, and a lot of that involves the decision to add dark content and how much, and whether it fits the story. So I think it’s just worth talking about: When do you want dark content? What makes something dark? How to actually pull that off in a way that it feels like it’s doing the story justice and that feels like it fits the story?
Bunny: I think it would be helpful to try to define it a bit just because dark is a bit of a nebulous concept and it’s something larger than just making someone feel sad or something downer.
It’s more than just serious topics. ’cause it’s also how you handle them. And it’s also not the same as gritty and it’s different than just a horror movie or a horror story. But then it could be all of those things. But none of those are like necessary conditions perse. So how would we define this?
Oren: Yeah, is a dark story a sandwich?
Bunny & Chris: [laugh]
Chris: Yeah. Obviously, it’s a collection of things. And so, we can talk about, okay, what are all the things that are belong in that collection? Right? And that’s, I think one of the reasons why it’s tricky is people think, okay, there’s this pool of things that I associate with dark stories, right? And I put a few of those in my story. Does that make it dark?
Sometimes. Sometimes not, right? Sometimes it just doesn’t fit. So, you know what’s included, right?
Gritty. Generally gritty is a kind of dark because it implies two things. It implies high realism and it implies dark. [laughs] So usually if you’re gritty, you have things like drugs and violence and sickness, and a lot of real-world non-glorious problems generally would be something that’s gritty. Things are run down, things are broken.
Bunny: So all gritty is dark, but not all dark is gritty?
Chris: Yes.
Oren: Yeah. I suppose in like thought experiments, you could come up with edge cases where something might qualify as gritty and not be dark. Maybe if you were doing a really realistic portrayal of someone’s job as a park ranger.
Chris: I would say that’s probably high realism and grounded, but I don’t know that people would call it gritty.
You could have a story that’s consistently gritty, but otherwise doesn’t have any dark elements and have it feel consistent. So you could say that story is gritty, but overall not dark. But I think the gritty elements would still make it darker.
So yeah, gritty would be one, but that’s a combination of darkness that is specifically just high realism.
So there’s also things like graphic violence and how explicit is it? Are we seeing lots of blood and gore, or a thing that I think writers don’t realize is if your character gets hurt, you do not have to describe a bone snapping. If you describe a bone snapping, that is a very graphic sound.
Oren: It’s also pretty long lasting.
The absolute worst is when they describe really serious wounds, really grievous injuries, and then the character either walks it off or they have super magic healing. So it’s just, yeah, all of my entrails are hanging out. I cast cure wounds! [magic sound].
I don’t like either option. If you’re gonna inflict serious wounds, I wish you would be ready to handle the consequences.
Bunny: It is very annoying, like you’re totally fine until your mouth starts bleeding. Then you’re screwed.
Oren: If you get a nosebleed, and that is a bigger problem in visual mediums than it is in prose because they have to communicate that a character is injured. And there are only so many ways to do that. Whereas like a prose author can describe more specific injuries. But I still see it in books, right? I still see characters get hurt and then are fine in the next scene.
Bunny: And we just touched on this, but I think this also brings up the point that. There can be like dark scenes in books that aren’t otherwise dark, which can cause dissonance for a class.
We read a book called Brown Girl in the Ring, and at one point in this book, a character gets skinned in a very graphic way. The book otherwise has some gross description of gore, but just general, there’s a duppy made out of meat essentially, and it’s not like anything so visceral and graphic as someone getting skinned. And people in my class were all like, that skinning scene was just, that came out of nowhere, that didn’t fit the rest of it.
Chris: I can talk more about tonal whiplash, right? I would call that an incident of tonal whiplash. Often that happens with graphic violence, and this is comes from a misunderstanding of what goes into an exciting scene. But yeah, anything that’s really graphic like that.
Then there’s also, just on the tension side, really high tension usually is considered a little darker. If it gets to the point where something feels outright scary, in particular, like in horror. Again, there can be stories that have a lot of life or death sequences that don’t necessarily feel dark, right?
But there is a point where it gets incredibly intense, that the story is interpreted as darker the more intense it is.
Or sadness if people die. If characters that readers are supposed to be attached to are supposed to care that they die and they’re supposed to feel bad about that, is definitely darker.
Or general world that’s just like bleak and filled with evil. Nobody’s happy in this world, everybody’s suffering. That would be instant of something that’s dark.
Bunny: Which can get silly, which I might talk about more later cause I have a bone to pick.
Chris: [laughs]
So those are the really obvious things. But there’s also less obvious things like how much humor does the story have.
Because if you have a dark comedy, the humor element actually lightens the story up somewhat. So you can have dark comedies, but part of the special thing about a dark comedy is the humor takes some of the sting off. So generally the more humor you have that’s gonna lighten up the story a bit.
Are villains or problems ever laughed off? That’s a sign of a lighter story. Are the problems inflicted on your important characters (readers care about them) or is it nameless people who are suffering that we don’t care about that has less emotional intensity. And then we talked about this, but like the consequences. So when something bad happens, does the narrative actually take the time to realistically go into its full effects? Or does it just gloss that over and pretend like it didn’t happen, or like it doesn’t matter, or that people aren’t feeling the emotional blow of that, et cetera, et cetera?
So dark is a huge category and there’s a whole lot of different stuff that goes into it.
Oren: You can almost say that trying to find the answer is dark and murky.
Bunny & Chris: Ooh, ooh.
Oren: One thing I’m curious about is to what extent you can change the tone of a story before you develop tonal whiplash? Because I think in a vacuum, we would mostly agree that it is possible for a story to get darker as it goes, harder to do the reverse, harder for it to get lighter as it goes. But at the same time there’s also an obvious point where it’s too far. Maybe you were starting to get a little darker, but now you tortured a character to death to summon an angel for no reason. Now we’re too dark. Pull it back.
Chris: Honestly, I feel a good example that talks about what kind of consistency you need is if you just think of your average haunted house movie. At the beginning, there’s going to be a house that’s creepy. There’s not gonna be ghosts coming out and murdering people, [laughs] but there’s still gonna be a house. It’s gonna feel creepy. There might be some backstory told about the house that’s creepy, and that kind of sets the stage and sets expectations for the dark things that come later.
That’s very different from, you think that this is like a romantic comedy or just a family drama and the family comes and settles in right, and everything seems happy, and then suddenly the ghosts come out and murder them all.
Oren: Yeah. I’m not gonna say you could never do that as a subversive joke, but you would probably do it pretty quickly, right? If you did this like an hour in. People are gonna be mad and your movie’s not gonna do well.
Chris: Yeah. Even as a subversive joke, I just think you have to think about what kind of audience you’re trying to attract and how you single to them, what kind of story it is, so that you’re not misleading them and getting bad reviews as a result.
Oren: Yeah, that’s true.
And the perfect example is something like Madoka Magica, which has what looks like a fairly light aesthetic and then gets much darker as it goes. But even early on there are signs that this isn’t gonna be like a perfect fun cakewalk. The characters talk about it being dangerous. Now we have been trained to think it won’t be because it has the magical girl aesthetics. Although nowadays everyone has seen Madoka Magica. So, we’re all in on the joke at this point. But when it first came out, that was a pretty big shift.
Chris: Yeah, I don’t remember the first episode, but I do know that the soundtrack for Madoka Magica is pretty dark, sets the mood pretty well.
And I would guess at least by some time in the first episode, you would have some serious sign that things are not, whether it’s characters trying to kill Kyubey. Kyubey being the character that makes girls into magical girls, and he’s very cute. He’s a cute animal, but he turns out to be not good.
Oren: He’s the woooorst!
Chris: But while you think he’s good, one of the protagonists is shooting him. But whatever, it kills his one body, he comes back in another one. Still, the sight of one of the protagonists shooting a cute animal is definitely out of the ordinary.
Oren: Yeah, that’s true.
Bunny: It does seem like most dark stories set up immediately that their atmosphere is going to be dark. Although, like you said, you can be subversive with the atmosphere as long as you provide hints and foreshadowing, I suppose that things will take a turn.
I don’t usually partake in much dark media, but one of my favorite series of books that are extremely dark is the Locke & Key comic series. Those set you out that this is gonna be a dark story, like right off the bat. It starts with a murder. And then so much of the rest of the books is dealing with the fallout of that and the ongoing grief and how characters become self-destructive and use the magical keys to become more self-destructive.
Chris: Yeah, so somebody important to them dies in the beginning and readers. Don’t have enough time to really get to know or care about him. But again, we are realistic about the consequences of what it’s like for this family to have their dad get murdered, right? Which is a real sign of something that is darker. Okay, somebody died and it was important to these people. And then we actually see the emotional blow. I think their mother struggles with alcoholism. Some of those kind of gritty, realistic problems in the story.
Bunny: And then there’s one of the characters who uses one of the keys to remove her sense of sadness or her sense of fear, and then she becomes like wildly reckless and even more self-destructive than she was to begin with.
So you could argue, of course, that’s not realistic cause it’s using a magical key to reach into your brain and take out a little representation of your fear or whatever. But it’s using that fictional element to further its realistic premise of grief and grieving.
Chris: And the aesthetics, again, support this because how that key works is… I think that she probably sticks it into her head.
Bunny: It goes into the back of your head.Up at the top of your neck. Yeah.
Chris: Yeah. So, when you grab this key a keyhole, it’s viscerally a little body horror there. The keyhole appears in the back of the skull. She inserts the key into it, and then what the graphics show is that her like head opens up like a hinge. She can dig into her brain. It’s not actually, you don’t actually see the brain as like images of the things that are in her mind, right? The whole thing looks creepy.
Oren: I remember there was some hubbub about when the show came out and it, they didn’t have that effect. Instead, it like opened a door and you stepped through the door into someone’s mind.
Chris: The show was so strange because it felt like somebody looked at the age of the protagonist and then assumed it was for a younger audience, and then made it lighter. Yes, there is a little boy character and a younger teen. And an older teen as the three protagonists, but this is not a story for preteens.
Bunny: No, very much not.
Chris: It’s like they just got the audience wrong.
Bunny: Did they age them down?
Chris: No, I don’t think they aged them down. I think they, it felt like their idea of who their audience was younger.
Bunny: Oooooh.
Chris: In both stories. The protagonist. Kind of represents your target audience. And so if you have a younger protagonist, that means a younger audience. And so I’m guessing somebody looked at this story and was like, oh, well we have this little boy and we spend a bunch of scenes showing him playing with these keys and misread, or, I don’t know, maybe it was successful and they were happy with our choice. I don’t know. But the audience for the graphic novels were certainly older than I feel like what the show was targeted at.
Bunny: Yeah. I would never gift that serious to a tween.
Chris: But that’s what it felt like who the show was for. I dunno, from my viewpoint.
So again, avoiding tonal whiplash is about being consistent with what kind of dark elements you have and not mixing up. Being what’s exciting with dark, right?
Because yeah, high tension is a little bit darker. But if you have a fight scene where people are technically could kill each other. They’re pointing laser guns at each other and trying to hit each other. But nobody has a wound that then they spent months in horrible pain recovering from. Then we don’t need intense graphic violence.
You can make things exciting with good tension principles, right? Having high stakes, having a lot of urgency and immediacy to the fight. Making it really difficult, right? That’s what makes it exciting, not seeing somebody split open.
And I think that’s one reason why people have tonal whiplash is cause they’re like, oh, I need to make this exciting now. Then they add really dark stuff that are just inappropriate for the tone of the story.
Oren: Yeah, this is gonna be a different equation based on personal tastes. Cause there are people who just really like dark content, as a matter of taste. And then there are other people who don’t. So you might be writing a darker story because that’s the audience you wanna reach is, but that audience will also probably be annoyed if your story is suddenly randomly light at some parts of it because that just doesn’t match up with the dark stuff that they were promised.
Chris: If your audience really comes for a dark story and your opening chapters show, no sign of that, they’re also gonna be disappointed. That’s the point of having it be consistent.
Another problem that I see commonly is what I call grim dark sauce.
Oren: [laughs]
Chris: Grim dark sauce is basically when you have excessive use of dark elements, but without any emotional impact that matches that.
Oren: Yeah, that’s when you like barbecue a bunch of side characters cause this is serious business and like none of them matter, but you do get to describe how horrible their screams are. That was unpleasant, but it doesn’t really feel like it affected the story at all. Other than that I did not like reading it.
Bunny: Or do something really bad and then characters move on and just forget it. Even if it should traumatize them. And in this case, I think sometimes writers escalate to really intense what should be intense dark material because they don’t know how to make their dark material more intense and they want their story to be intense. So they just keep making it more and more extreme.
Oren: More! More!
Bunny: darkerrrrr!
Chris: Cause they don’t know how to make what they do have impactful. So the solution to this one is to just make less mean more. So to bring dark things to life, ensure they have impact. So start small and have things happen to characters the audiences care about, and then actually illustrate their effects. Instead of glossing over them.
A smaller injury that causes ongoing pain and needs recovery time as opposed to a big excessive injury. And just being more realistic about the impact of things and getting detailed and encouraging emotional investment instead of just having everybody get slaughtered in the background.
Oh gosh. One of my hilarious ones for, this is the original Elric book. The premise of this book is supposed to be that the main character who is the emperor, is the only good person in an evil empire. But Moorcock has all of these side mentions of what this empire does to their slaves and they kill their slaves in so many ridiculous, creative ways.
It has me wondering how do they have slaves? How are there any left?
Bunny: Also, I feel like you, good emperor, could do something about this.
Oren: No. Cause he has to pretend he’s not good or they’ll kill him. Shh. It makes sense. It makes sense. Don’t say it doesn’t.
Chris: Again, a lot of times with grim dark stuff, it’s not actually particularly realistic. And again, people tend to equate being realistic with being dark, but that is not the same thing.
Oren: It’s the same thing with contrived moral dilemmas. That stories come up with because you know you’re an author, you can theoretically create any set of cold equations if you want to.
You can create a scene where there is a basket of puppies and a baby on a seesaw, and there’s only time to save one of them. Which of them are you gonna save? And yeah, that’s unpleasant, but I don’t know if I would call that dark, exactly. It’s just annoying.
If you wanna use dark moral dilemmas, you have to pick one that feels real. And rather than just inventing one, using either authorial fiat, or your sci-fi or magic stuff. Because man, we have enough moral dilemmas in the real world. Why are you contriving new ones?
Bunny: And I think talking about the Elric book brings me back to what I was going to complain about, which I know many people will disagree with. And I’ve had arguments with friends about this. So I’m speaking from what I as a reader, experienced as dark content becoming silly in Parable of the Sower.
People like to call this book insightful. It’s drawing back the curtain on humanity, Hobbes and the. State of nature. That’s just awful with everybody killing each other, brutal, nasty and short or whatever he called it. It’s right. Can’t you see? And I’m like, this is a fictional scenario and it doesn’t prove anything.
Oren: Are people, Lord-of-the-Flies-ing it, where they’re treating it as evidence of how humans act?
Bunny: I’ve seen them Lord-of-the-Flies it. I’ve seen them do that, and I’m like, this is fiction, my friends.
Chris: I just found it really hilarious when there was a news story about a bunch of Catholic school boys actually being abandoned on the island together.
Oren: I’ll put a link to that story. So, they weren’t actually Catholic school boys. They were I think Tongan school boys, but yes, it was a similar situation. They were fine. They cooperated. And I’m sure people will argue that if they’d been Catholic, British school boys, they would’ve been different because they’re evil. And maybe that’s true. I don’t have an opinion on how evil British Catholic school boys are.
But Lord of the Flies is fake. It is made up. The person who wrote it has no special expertise to predict what would happen in this scenario. It’s not even clear if he was trying to predict what would happen in this scenario. He might have just been spoofing another novel that was popular at the time.
Anytime someone points to a work of fiction and is like, yeah, see that’s how people act. It’s like, no, no, it’s not. That’s made up. I made that up.
Bunny: The thing with Parable is also that Butler has been explicit that her intent with depicting the world, like the world of the United States. She wanted to show it as if it had become a third world country, which makes it extremely uncomfortable when her idea of a third world country is that everybody is constantly beating up and raping each other.
Okay, I am gonna say rape a bunch in this section, so be warned listening listeners.
It really did feel like. It would, some time would go by in the story, and then the story would be like, I haven’t mentioned rape in a while. So yeah, an attack happened and a lot of babies were raped. This literally happens in the story. And another point the characters come across, like kids roasting a leg on a spit like Butler, is this what you think third world countries are like?
Oren: Yeah, that’s one of those things where if you look in isolation, there are some truly horrific things that can happen in areas of conflict. But it’s way more nuanced than most fiction is prepared to get into. And so it just often feels cartoonish when books try to do that.
Bunny: At some point it stopped feeling dark and just started feeling silly, like the words were just being tossed around.
Oren: After a certain point, it can’t shock you anymore, right? It’s already done. All of the things it can do. And I was like, oh, that’s happening again.
Bunny: And I’m sure people defending the book will bring it up and oh, it’s supposed to show Lauren, the main character, getting jaded. But Lauren is always just kind of jaded like this. She always describes it in the same way, which to butler’s credit is never gratuitous. Lauren describes things in a very matter of fact way without going into the grizzly details.
But it is also still full of these things, even if they’re not overly described. And it just felt goofy. I was like, I shouldn’t be feeling like this is goofy.
Oren: Look, it’s war crimes a clock. Okay? I have it on the watch and it’s been 10 minutes since the last war crime, and so now it’s time for another one.
Chris: So I think it’s worth just talking about the choice to make your story dark and whether you should or shouldn’t do that. There are lots of reasons to make the story dark. In some materials it makes more sense. Stories like Locke & Key, that was creepy and emotionally intense and did it in a great way. I would discourage writers from choosing to make something dark, just to make the work look serious.
Bunny: Yes.
Chris: Do you actually like dark material? If you really like that intense experience and you’re ready to cry while you’re writing, right then go for it.
But if you are doing this as performance to look legitimate, I just don’t think that’s gonna end up in a good place. I think you’re less likely to be consistent and you’re less likely to be happy.
Oren: I guess this is process advice, but I would just generally recommend against being like, this is gonna make my readers cry. I don’t think that’s a productive way to look at whether or not something dark should happen in your story. That can get pretty performative pretty quickly.
Chris: Yeah. I do think that making our audience upset makes us feel effective as storytellers, right? Because we had effect of them, and there’s nothing worse than handing them a story and they just feel nothing. So, we can get into this, Oh. But if we make them upset, that means that we successfully made the story powerful.
Just assume that you are a competent storyteller and you can make them feel whatever you want to. You don’t need to flex. Instead of thinking of, oh, I wanna make ’em cry. Right? Think of what payoff you want them to get. If you’re gonna do something upsetting, what do they come out of that experience with, that makes that worth it to them?
And then there definitely has to be a level of consistency. You know, if you look at your writing and you’re used to not being burdened with doing lots of scenes showing characters recover and showing the emotional fallout, are you prepared to then take the time to do that? If you want to have a darker work, as we said, spare that time for the funeral scene so it actually feels like characters are grieving somebody who died, that kind of thing.
If you do want a story that has lots of spooky monsters or blood and gore and you don’t wanna think too hard, you can just use dark aesthetics without having anything that’s really upsetting. I wouldn’t do the grim dark sauce where all the minor characters are dying in the background. But you can have something that is just, has creepy and spooks, but doesn’t actually have tons of death in it, and is not designed to make people sad, is just designed to be spooky.
So you can have a story like that is consistent in having haunts. That’s also another option. Or something where people are technically all monsters, but they’re kind monsters. So you’ve got skeletons and ghosts, but they all get along and hold hands.
You can do different combinations. Just think about that emotional impact and whether you’re ready to be consistent and show things have consequences or not.
Oren: Okay. Well, with that, I think we will call this daaark eeepisode to a close.
Bunny: [spooky] Wooo wooo! Wooo!
Chris: If you would never like to hear us moan again…
Everyone: [laughs] Woo!
Chris: …you can bribe us by going to patreon.com/mythcreants and giving us some support.
Oren: Before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
[outro music]This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Coulton.
Villains need to be cool and intimidating, but that doesn’t mean they have to spend the whole story locked up in their spooky towers. With the right setup, your villain can be a major character, getting a lot of screen time and development, all without ruining their threat level or bringing the plot to a screeching halt. How do you make that happen? We’re happy to explain! Plus, you get to hear about why Bunny has such a crush on villain romances.
Show Notes Designing a Memorable Villain in Prose * Villain Viewpoints * Mustache Twirlers * Dead Boy Detectives * Vecna * Hugh * Mysterious Benedict Academy * Spinning Silver * A Study in Drowning * This Is How You Lose the Time War * Children of Blood and Bone * Maximus * Kylo Ren TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Maddie.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast, with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [Intro Music]
Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren. And with me is…
Chris: Chris.
Oren: And…
Bunny: Bunny.
Oren: So today, Chris and I are the heroes of the podcast, and as we established four or five episodes ago, Bunny is the villain. She’s the evil puppet master villain.
Bunny: [Evil laugh]
Oren: That’s good. That’s good. We want her to be in the episode too. So we’re gonna do a bunch of cutaways where Bunny can monologue about her evil plan.
Bunny: I need to come up with an evil plan, which I’ve had this entire time. I think I’m going to, for big and terrible reasons, I think I’m going to start throwing cats off of cliffs. [Evil laugh]
Oren: No! Kitties. It’s all right. They have parachutes.
Chris: I mean, that will be very effective.
Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Laugh]
Oren: And just say that you’re gonna do that. Every time we cut to you be like, “I’m gonna start, I’m gonna start one of these days.”
Chris: Just hold a box of kitties. And then every cut scene, you’re 10 feet closer to this cliff that’s several hundred yards away. [Laughs]
Bunny: Then I can like monologue to the cat. I’m gonna be like, “Oh, you’re gonna fall off that cliff so bad one of these days. Any moment.”
Oren: So this episode is about making your villain a major character. I’ve noticed that this is the standard in TV and movies. The villain is often very present. I have an article about making the villain memorable, but this is related but not the same. It’s a little different. In TV and film, the villain almost always has a bunch of screen time.
There are exceptions, but they tend to be very around, whereas in most books that I have read, the opposite is the case. The villain is often off screen for most of the story. If you interact with them at all, it’s through seeing evidence of their presence in the world. You don’t come face to face with them very often.
And as a result, I think that’s another reason why movies and TV tend to have more memorable villains than books do. That’s just the nature of the medium sometimes. But I do think that maybe there are ways authors could make their villains more present and that would make them something that people would think on more about from the books.
Chris: I do think it’s worth just going into why we don’t usually recommend villain viewpoints, because this is the main big difference why visual mediums cut to villains so often and narrated ones typically don’t, is because narrated work typically has point of view where when we narrate a scene, we are in that character’s head. And this tends to not work very well with villains because being in a viewpoint of a character just inherently makes them feel more familiar and better understood.
And as a result, they tend to be more sympathetic and less threatening. Usually what we want is for the villain to be threatening. So that kind of works against what their purpose is. And sometimes it even sets the wrong expectations. A viewpoint can also mean that a character is an important protagonist, and they might even think that the villain is going to convert over to Team Good and then be disappointed when they don’t.
We talked before about mustache twirlers and how common it is, and writers definitely have a little more trouble making their villain feel real and nuanced. And unless the villain’s characterization is really good, putting scene in their point of view will really bring that to light and make them look bad. Whereas if they were more mysterious, maybe the readers wouldn’t have noticed.
Oren: Or even just from the outside, not even necessarily more mysterious, but just not seeing events through their eyes. You spend so much work developing your characters that, doing that for a villain, just so that the villain can be a little more present in the story, developing their own narration, and then their voice. I don’t know. I just don’t think it’s worth it.
Chris: This is something that honestly, also can be a problem in filmed works. Does your villain have anything to do in their POV scene or cutaway other than cackle about their scheme? [Laughs]
Bunny: Look, I’ll have, you know, I’m holding a cat right now, Chris.
Chris: [Laughs] Cackle and pet their evil cat evilly, but we were watching Dead Boy Detectives recently, for instance, and the season villains, you know, even the ones that seemed strong to start with.
By the end I just disliked all of them because of the frequent cutaways and then the cackling, and then the cut back to the protagonist. And then another cutaway to the villain and some more, “Ha ha ha. Cackle scheming, scheming.” And they’re not really doing anything.
Oren: The Night Nurse was especially bad. The witch wasn’t great either, but with the Night Nurse, mild spoilers, we just constantly cut back to her being like, “And when I get the paperwork signed,
Bunny: Oh, not the paperwork.
Oren: I guess that could have worked as a joke if it was funny, but it just wasn’t funny. It was just very like, “Yeah, we’re waiting, waiting for you to get that paperwork signed. For sure.”
Bunny: You don’t want to like the villain in the way that you would like a hero, but you also can’t be just relentlessly annoyed by them in the way that makes you want to put the book down.
Oren: It certainly didn’t help that the Night Nurse’s character was this extremely bombastic, constantly yelly type villain. Not a funny one. It was just, very loud is the most consistent trait I can give the Night Nurse. It was a very odd combination. At least the witch was interesting. But even so, when we keep cutting back to the witch over and over again and she’s like, “I’m gonna get those dead boys one day. You wait. Just wait. I’m gonna do it.”
Bunny, Oren: [Chuckle]
Bunny: I was thinking about when you might not want to have the villain be a major character, and I think the obvious one is where you want the villain to be mysterious by definition. And then obviously you don’t want, when there’s not really a villain to begin with. If you are battling a hurricane, the conflict of your story is getting people out of the way of a hurricane, right? The hurricane will be there, but that’s not really a villain, right?
Chris: I mean, maybe the hurricane talks, you know. [Chuckles]
Bunny: Maybe the hurricane talks. That’s true. You could have a well fleshed out, evil hurricane, and I would read that.
Oren: Are you going to not believe it? If I introduce a mysterious NPC named Her A. Cane and they’re friendly and they want to be the protagonist’s best buddy. You’re not gonna see that coming?
Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]
Bunny: Oh, nothing’s up with good friend Her.
Oren: Yeah, Her A. Cane, “A” middle name. Very important.
Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Laugh]
Bunny: And that’s how they introduce themselves.
Chris: If you liked nuanced and personal villains, that works great as a major character. If you like a villain that has a dark swishy cape, it’s not impossible to make that villain a major character, but those tends to be the kind of archetypes that may not work so much because the longer they are on screen, the more complex they have to be to stay interesting. And so if they’re just there to be evil, don’t necessarily want them to be in the scenes quite as much.
Bunny: You don’t want to turn a non-villainous… Horror is something that’s interesting because it’s not a villain, like cosmic horror, into a villain because you risk making it less interesting. I’m looking at you Stranger Things.
Chris: Ohh yeah, that was sad. Certainly if you have the Elder God, that is not really supposed to be a person ’cause it’s too great and powerful and mysterious to be personable.
Bunny: But what if it was some guy.
Chris: I stand by my theory that they did that because they did not know how to defeat it, and they needed a way to end the series.
Oren: That one is particularly bad because not only is he a person now, but he’s less cool than we thought.
Chris: I actually really liked him in the backstory before he revealed himself to be super evil, because that was when he had some nuance, because he liked Eleven and they were buddies. That made him really interesting and sympathetic too, right?
Sympathetic villains are also great for being major characters, but oftentimes they’re not as threatening. So that’s a situation where you have maybe two villains. One that’s the Big Bad and in the background, and one is the sympathetic villain that’s your first antagonist.
Bunny: I’m pretty sure they did that earlier in Stranger Things. So I think your theory holds water. It’s especially frustrating in a show that had balanced the cosmic horror with knowable villains.
Oren: And I’m not gonna say it would never work to make your cosmic horror villain into a more personable character. Stranger Things is a particularly bad example. I’ve seen some that work okay, but it’s definitely risky and you really need to think about what are you gaining by doing this? Do you have something that you actually want from this? Or are you just making the villain less scary now?
Chris: It’s that situation where you have a villain who is pretending to be good, which I think we’ll talk more because that is one way to have them on screen, and then as soon as you reveal that they’re a villain, they have a personality transplant and they become a mustache twirler. It was one of those situations, and that’s always very disappointing.
Oren: That’s actually my first method for how to make your villain more of a character, and that is to cheat and not let on that they’re a villain. You’re a cheater now. I hope you feel good about yourself.
Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]
Chris: You know, there are many reveals and twists that get writers into trouble. I have to say, I think that’s one of the better ones.
Oren: Because one of the biggest obstacles to making your villain more present in the story is theoretically your villain and your hero do not like each other, and so it’s hard to have them in proximity very often. But if your villain is pretending to be on Team Good, or is actually on Team Good and will turn evil later, that is a great opportunity.
The main risk is that they will turn evil and then suddenly just act completely different. And it’s like, “Well then I actually don’t know this person. This is an entirely different character. And I guess they were just really good at acting.”
Chris: And we’ve talked before about how valuable it is to have a villain that’s polite and charming. Again, this is a great time to have a villain that stays polite and charming, and that shouldn’t change. They just need a conceivable motivation for why they were evil the whole time. They don’t wanna actually need a personality that’s different. Just a secret motivation.
Bunny: A good example of this is probably in a lot of mystery stories. The villain has to be present. Otherwise the reveal of who dunnit…
Oren: Some guy.
Bunny: Yeah, some guy. The best possible reveal. Otherwise it will feel random. You need to have the villain be there rather than it being a character we’ve never met before. So probably the villain and the hero will be interacting quite a bit in these mystery stories.
So it’s not surprising that things like Knives Out have villains in disguise. Spoilers for a couple years old movie. Hugh pretends to be teaming up with the main character because he wants something from her, which is how much she knows about what’s going on.
Oren: Wait, who was teaming up with the main character?
Bunny: Hugh.
Oren: Wait. You were teaming up with the main character?
Bunny: Yeah, it was me.
Oren: I don’t think you’re in this movie, Bunny.
Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]
Bunny: Well, he also likes to throw cats off of cliffs, so we bonded. We have a little villain romance going.
Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]
Oren: You can also, if you have very specific circumstances, it’s possible to have a secret villain who is only a secret villain to the protagonist. The main example would be the novel Piranese, which hot take, is good, and has a bad guy who, it’s not hard for the reader to guess that he’s a bad guy almost immediately, but the protagonist doesn’t know that.
Chris: Right. And again, this is done without showing readers anything that the main character doesn’t see. It’s just that the main character has a specific perspective and is also a sweet cinnamon roll. And so he does not suspect something, but the audience has additional knowledge.
Oren: We know that guy’s shady.
Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]
Oren: The main risk is once the reveal comes and this villain turns out to be evil, you need to make sure that their reasoning for pretending to be a good guy actually made sense.
Chris: There are some situations when they have already done something in the course of being a pretend ally that they definitely would not have wanted to do as a villain, like saving the hero when really they wanted to kill the hero. Why did you do this thing to help the protagonist so much if you actually had this motivation the whole time?
So if they need the protagonist for something, that’s really good. I like allies who, the protagonist help them gain more power because they work as a team and power for the ally is power for the protagonist. But then it turns out this ally was just using them as a stepping stone.
Oren: My favorite is you have a villain pretend to join Team Good while Team Good is taking out another villain who the first villain also doesn’t like. ‘Cause then we cooperate. We have a common goal. But I was pretending to be a good guy actually. I’m just a different flavor of bad guy. That’s one of my favorites.
Bunny: The parallel to this is getting to know the villain because the hero is spying on the villain rather than the villain spying on the hero. I think this one applies in a much more limited context. This is the characters taking on a role to get close to the villain. The risk with this one obviously is making the villain look incompetent when they don’t notice that there are the heroes around.
But this is something that works really well in the Mysterious Benedict Society, which is a middle grade novel where the main characters are kids going to this spooky academy to see what’s going on with its mind control radio waves that it’s sending out.
And so they interact with the villainous headmaster of this academy and his goons, his lieutenants. So you get to know the villain a bit more that way. But I don’t know if this would work so well with protagonists who aren’t child protagonists. Depending on the conflict. If the conflict is the hero is trying to kill the villain, you can’t really have: Hero go spying on villain and interacts with them and doesn’t just kill them and complete their mission.
Chris: I’m trying to remember the name of the movie where we have a female protagonist who romances a murder suspect. That works partly well because we’re not really sure whether or not he’s a villain. So he’s tempting. [Laughs]
Oren: This is a movie or are we thinking about Wednesday?
Chris: (While laughing) Oh, no.
Bunny: It sounds like something Wednesday would do.
Oren: It’s a pretty broad definition is all.
Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]
Chris: If outright investigating somebody, then you can balance the threat level. You do have to still make them menacing, which is the tricky one there is trying to balance that characterization.
Oren: These are all various flavors of my second method, which is basically finding a way to force the hero and villain to be in proximity because you have a premise that is something other than “arch-enemies, scorched-earth, must fight now” premise. This wouldn’t work with Lord of the Rings. You can’t really have Frodo and Sauron in close proximity to each other.
Chris: Just make them get stuck in an elevator.
Chris, Oren: [Chuckles]
Chris: Works every time.
Bunny: Ooh, there’s only one bed.
Chris: [Laughs] Stranded on an island.
Oren: All kinds of ways. If you have a lower stakes story, this tends to work better. If your stakes are not life or death, then you could very easily have a situation where protagonist is in close proximity with the villain. They might even live together.
There’s a certain amount of that in Pride and Prejudice. ‘Cause they are, you know, no one’s trying to kill each other, but there are characters who don’t like each other and characters who work in opposition to each other. And they all kinda have to hang out in this small society of aristocrats.
Bunny: Awkward.
Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]
Oren: You can also do the “held captive” model. Often the hero will be a captive of the villain. The risk there is that your hero can end up with no agency, so you need something for the hero to be doing while they are captive. Spinning Silver is a great example of that.
Chris: Yes, Spinning Silver does something that is interesting that I noticed in a couple stories where we have a mysterious villain possessing a lesser villain. This is an interesting combination. So you have your human antagonist who is supposed to be sympathetic because they are at least partially under the mysterious villain’s control. The mysterious villain, when you actually want to talk to them, they control the human antagonist and say a few words, and then they can mysteriously disappear again.
Admittedly, Spinning Silver doesn’t do it, in my opinion, quite as well as A Study in Drowning does. Where in Spinning Silver, the big powerful villain is this demon. Whenever it appears, it’s just like, “Feed me, I’m hungry. Tasty.”
Bunny: [Laughs]
Chris: You’re losing some of your mystique.
Oren: But so sympathetic, who amongst us has not been hangry?
Bunny: I too get hungry. This is what I sound like every midnight.
Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]
Chris: Whereas in A Study in Drowning, the possessor who’s the fairy king genuinely stays mysterious. It’s unclear to what extent he’s even real, but then he shows up more towards the end. But that’s just kind of an interesting combo. So you can have a villain that’s present and still keep your “Bigger Bad” mysterious.
Oren: This sort of premise is also great if you wanna end up with a villain romance.
Bunny: Yes.
Oren: Bunny has some experience with that. Maybe she can tell us about it.
Bunny: Me? I’d never.
Oren: [Laughs]
Bunny: So the long and short of it is I romanced the villain of a campaign Oren ran and it was wonderful, and now I just really like villain romance.
Oren: That was also Chris’s fault. Chris suggested it.
Chris: I did have a habit of suggesting everybody romance people in that campaign. What can I say? I like romance.
Bunny: Chris was the matchmaker.
Chris: That was actually a great example because I was just like, “How is Oren gonna do this? [Laughs] How is Oren gonna pull this off?” The answer is long distance communication, which worked really well. So the villain would just appear in a vision to Bunny’s character and they could have a chat, but she wasn’t physically present, so they couldn’t actually fight.
Bunny: And they went on one date. There was some temptation too, which worked with the character arc of not getting tempted into using this unethical magic.
Oren: That also worked out, because I had several instances where Bunny’s character would be in serious trouble and then the villain would show up as her spectral self and be like, “Hey, I could help you out with that. It looks like you’re trying to save a bunch of your friends from dying. Would you like help?”
Bunny: Well, I guess…
Oren: And so there was some temptation along the way ’cause I had created multiple sides to this fight. So there were points in which it would make at least some sense for the eventual final villain to help the party out in exchange for something else.
And because they had a mutual enemy, that worked out. I also just did a lot of sleight of hand on where that villain was at any given time. It’s like, “She’s around, but you probably won’t find her. She’s very sneaky. Don’t worry about it.”
Chris: This is the villain that also could make blood clones of herself. So if we ever got in a fight with her and we rolled too good, turned out that was just a copy.
Bunny, Chris: [Laugh]
Oren: A very useful power for your bad guys to have in role-playing games is to create copies of themselves that are in theory weaker than they are. Because in role-playing games, you can’t control when your players win or lose fights. It just happens. So you have to be able to keep your villain threatening even when they roll really well. And that was how I did it. It’s like, “This is a bit of a kludge,” but it worked.
Bunny: And it was great. That was one of my favorite character relationships I’ve ever had in a RPG campaign just ’cause it was a lot of fun and my character was constantly trying to arrest their love interest, which was very funny.
Oren: It was very cute. They had a whole bit.
Chris: Reminds me of This Is How You Lose the Time War, different form of long distance communication. It’s all love letters, so they just send messages back and forth. Obviously there has to be some motivation for engaging in communication. Trying to tempt people over to the other side can work pretty well.
Maybe trying to unnerve the other person, if you have a villain who can go into your hero’s dreams, trying to disrupt them by giving them dreams that freak them out, for instance, might be something that you could do.
Oren: And we had also, I mentioned earlier, the possibility of a villain lieutenant with a POV, and this is my third method and that can work. It is usually better than giving the main villain a POV, but you still need to make sure that your secondary villain is actually doing stuff that is relevant to the heroes.
Chris: Not just cackling or watching the big bad cackle.
Bunny: [Chuckles]
Oren: It doesn’t really make any difference if your POV is a guard in the evil base versus the bad guy himself if all they’re doing is standing around. Good model for this is when you have the heroes who are running away, and there’s a lieutenant villain who’s chasing them at the behest of a big villain, because then you can do a cat and mouse scenario.
Everyone associates this with Zuko from Avatar, but that’s a TV show. So it operates under slightly different rules, but it works pretty well in prose too. Children of Blood and Bone did that and that part of it worked out. I liked it.
Bunny: as a random example that this just brought to mind. I’m pretty sure they do that in Tangled too, with the horse.
Chris: Yeah.
Bunny: Maximus the horse, trying to capture Flynn Rider at the behest of the villain.
Oren: It’s been so long since I’ve seen that movie.
Bunny: Me too. I don’t know where I pulled that from.
Oren: That’s a perfect example. And your secondary villain, who you very often are gonna have on a redemption arc. And if you’re not, then I would recommend some other character arc because if we’re gonna just be spending time in their POV, getting some kind of development for them is just gonna make that a more satisfying experience, even if that development is that they have a chance to turn good and don’t take it or something. So it doesn’t necessarily have to be redemption, but it should be something.
Chris: Maybe lieutenant just decides that they’re gonna quit the field and run away from the villain, but they’re not joining the good guys. They run off or something. Just because, again, if you’re in somebody’s viewpoint, you’re getting to know them and having some kind of conclusion or payoff for that person is a good idea as opposed to just casually discarding them.
Oren: If you’re really ambitious, you can have the secondary villain overthrow the main villain and become the Big Bad. That’s hard, because you need a way for that secondary villain to go from a lieutenant to the Big Bad level threat. You don’t want this to feel like the bad guys are now easier to beat.Cough. Cough. Kylo Ren. Cough. Cough.
Chris, Bunny: [Laugh]
Bunny: Yeah, I was waiting for that.
Oren: That’s an advanced level move, let me put it that way, but you can do it if you’re determined.
Chris: In most cases, the lesser villain is there to lose the initial fights so that the Big Bad is still threatening. So they have to have a different role if you want them to take over as a Big Bad.
Oren: The last method that I have is the old fashioned way, which is you just have the hero and the villain clash a lot, if not in direct personal combat, then indirectly through their armies or their ship or what have you. The big problem with this is that if the hero wins these fights, then your villain is basically done ’cause they have no threat anymore.
But if the villain wins them, it can be hard to justify why the story is still going because the villain has won all these fights. Are they not trying to get the hero? Are they not trying to accomplish things? This works best if the hero and villain are fighting over something that is tangible but not a toggle switch.
For example, the novel series Temeraire, the villain, Napoleon, is very present throughout the series, if not in person then commanding his armies that the protagonist is fighting, but they’re fighting over territory. So if Napoleon wins a battle, the story’s not over ’cause the heroes can retreat and regroup and try to do something else.
Chris: You can have a hero that has to be clever and get some victories, as far as just keeping all from being lost. The villain is mostly winning any direct conflicts they have. And again, this is not just conflicts where lives are at stakes, right? There could be anything that they’re struggling over. It could be social clout.
Oren: Why isn’t anyone liking my memes?
Bunny: I’ve got all these funny cat memes, but I want to throw cats over cliffs, so people aren’t going, “Ha ha.”
Oren: No, it’s okay. Bunny. You’ve had your redemption arc. Now you’ve adopted the cats. That’s how we ended this. ‘Cause you had a POV.
Bunny: Oh good.
Oren: That’s the rule. You had a POV. You need a redemption arc.
Bunny: [Laughs]I’m just petting them all without the evil cackling, my box of cats.
Oren: Alright, on that beautiful image, we’re gonna go ahead and call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you enjoy this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson. She’s the professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week. [Outro Music]
Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.
We authors face a conundrum: One the one hand, it’s exciting and cool if our hero is always in danger, likely to be attacked at any moment. On the other hand, it’s hard to justify how there could be functioning towns in an area where bandit patrols lurk around every corner. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways around this difficulty, and that’s our topic for this episode!
Show Notes History of the Filibuster * Fallout Show * Raider Town * Area X * The Butter Battle * The City In the Middle of the Night * Lockwood and Co * The Raksura * The Masquerade * Keeping the Authorities Out of Your Plot TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Arturo.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Intro: You are listening to the Mythcreants Podcast with your hosts: Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.
[Music]
Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren.
Chris: And I’m Chris.
Oren: And today I want my hero to constantly have to fight for their lives. This world is full of dragons and meteors and roving murder bands, and it’s so dangerous. No one could possibly live here unless they’re constantly fighting. Also, here’s my nice little village with farms.
Chris: That somehow has missed all of these dangerous things.
Oren: Yeah, somehow it hasn’t just been flattened by all the meteors or the dragons or the murder bands. Who do those murder bands attack normally?
Chris: Yeah, murder banding must be very profitable if there are murder bands, and that many of them.
Oren: Yeah, there’s just a very high density of murder bands. I have so many questions about the economics of this area.
Chris: Is there a stable market? Can people get to go to the trade or does that not work anymore?
Oren: Works until you murder everyone, I guess. That actually happened once in a very ill-faded roleplaying game I was playing in, where someone had the idea of, like, “What if we played as bandits?”
Chris: What?
Oren: Yeah, and they tried it and then, like, we killed the villagers, and then we had no one to sell stuff to, and that was the end of the campaign.
Chris: Oh my gosh.
Oren: It was an extremely bad idea.
Chris: Yep. Sometimes, if you want to understand what the people would do in your setting, you need to get some roleplay in there too.
Oren: That is an advantage if you want to try testing your setting out with some player characters, ’cause your player characters will go for the most advantageous route every time. They will not stop to consider your precious plot.
Chris: Yeah, no. It’s funny because at least, again, it goes fast, but in a lot of situations, there are social conventions that won’t hold people back forever, but for a limited time will hold people back, right? Like the filibuster. That was always a broken rule, the filibuster that makes it so that you need 60 votes to stop debate and actually vote on something in the US Congress. But that didn’t get out of hand for a while because it wasn’t a social convention, and that social convention has deteriorated over time. Whereas if you have role players in there, they have no restraints and no ethics, and it’ll be gone immediately.
Oren: Role players: no restraints and no ethics. That’s a good description. I like it.
Chris: Yeah. So, of course, we’re also talking about Fallout.
Oren: Yeah, a little bit. This isn’t only because I saw Fallout, but it is a little bit because I saw Fallout.
Chris: Fallout is particularly ridiculous and it is a pretty low-realism setting. And again, it gets annoying because every time there’s something dark, people tend to equate darkness with realism. But I feel like Fallout is a great example of something that is dark, but obviously low realism. It’s obviously not even slightly realistic, and I think that’s one of the reasons why it’s honestly less obnoxious, because it doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s not trying to make you feel bad every time something dark happens; it’s almost supposed to be funny instead.
Oren: Yeah, there’s a town in Fallout 3 that is a Raider town and they’re all auto hostile, and I just want to know: How do they know I’m not a Raider? Do they have ID cards? Like, there’s so many of them; they can’t possibly know each other all on site. Like, how do they… how can I not just show up to their town and be like, “Hey guys, I’m a Raider. I have weapons, and some of ’em have blood on them.” Like they… they somehow know.
Chris: You don’t walk the walk.
Oren: Checked my, like, Raider ID badge, and it didn’t check out.
Chris: Your swagger is not on point. And Fallout is, again, they have… We’re talking about markets. They had that scene where it’s like a market town basically, and everybody gets together to actually trade, and then just somebody comes in and just shoots everybody down and, like, that’s not a situation in which you can have trade.
Oren: Yeah. If that happens regularly, your market town is just not gonna work.
Chris: Which again, it goes to the central problem here, which is that civilization and danger just don’t go together very well inherently.
Oren: Yeah. I did like how in that scene, the shop, the one shopkeeper lady is like, “Hey everybody, shoot that guy who’s disrupting our business.” And they all try to shoot him, but he’s kind of immune to bullets and so it doesn’t work.
Chris: But yeah, the whole point of society is just get rid of things that kill people, really.
Oren: Like, you probably can’t have the stationary village if there are always monsters running through it and killing people. Like, you just… it’s not gonna work, right? Like your village will fail, people will leave.
Chris: And I think more importantly is just that constant, like, theft and murder is bad for business. So, like, powerful economic forces, they want stability. If they’re powerful and in charge, what they want is to maintain the status quo. Which means not chaos, not disruptive, right? There can be situations in which, again, there are powerful criminal forces, but by default, right? whoever has power does not want things disrupted and doesn’t want their business cost to go up. And so that’s one of the reasons why, even if you have a society that’s fairly dystopian, why you’re not gonna just have tons of murder bands on the street murdering each other.
Oren: And there definitely are, unfortunately, places where there is a lot of chaos and a lot of violence for various reasons. And that can get complicated. But to put it simply, very few stories have that context, ’cause that’s real bleak. And even if you don’t mind being real bleak, it’s more complicated than most stories want to get.
Chris: So again, by default, if you’re gonna have… once people are organized, they’re going to put a stop to that.
Oren: But it occurs to me I don’t think we ever said what the topic of today’s podcast was. We were just so excited to talk about various worlds. Okay, so the topic, six minutes in, is making your world dangerous, because people want a setting where your protagonist has to carry weapons to defend themselves and is constantly running into problems that require violence, and that’s tricky to set up if you want a world that’s believable.
Chris: So should we talk about how do we… what are different ways that this works?
Oren: Yeah. One way is, of course, that you can just set your story in a place where people don’t live. Or at least no organized groups of people live. Once you do that, you can pull out a lot of stops to make it real weird and dangerous. Like the Southern Reach comes to mind with Area X, and it’s like, “Yeah, Area X is like a weird pocket dimension created by an alien probe where everything is constantly trying to kill you, but also beautiful.”
Chris: Yeah, you can have cool speculative survival stories if somebody’s alone. I think that it’s also possible to have a wilderness and have you encounter people, right? You want to encounter other people who are dangerous in the area where there literally is no law and no civilization, and nothing stops one person from just killing somebody else to steal their stuff. But you have to, you know, if it’s gonna be a big, large wilderness, you have to create a reason why these two people run into each other.
Oren: You also just want to be careful here because there is the tendency to go with… to the idea that, “Oh, well, if they don’t have an organized state, then they exist in a state of barbarism and violence,” and that’s not true. People don’t go around murdering each other regularly, regardless of whether or not they have created something as organized as a state.
Chris: Well, if we want stories like Fallout…
Oren: I mean, in that case, what you need to do is think about what their motivation is, right? If everyone going into this area is a treasure hunter, then absolutely, there could be a lot of violence, because maybe instead of hunting for treasure, they’ll just kill you and take your treasure. We want to avoid the, “Oh wow, this is a vast and untamed wilderness, and it has savage tribes,” stuff like that. Even if you avoid coding them as any real people, that’s just not nice, but gross.
Chris: And, unfortunately, that happens a lot in post-apocalyptic stories, right? and not just Fallout, the idea that if you run into somebody, people just kill each other in this setting. And it’s like, why would they do that?
Oren: But how are there any people left if that’s everyone’s default?
Chris: That’s the other problem, of course, is how could there possibly be people left? Why is there anybody still in this market town if this is a thing that happens with everybody getting shot down? But yeah, no. Some reason why people run into each other there, and of course, if there’s something valuable and scarce, right? it gives them a reason to fight over it, which is why treasure hunting works so well. I mean, you could also have a situation where you have a context where there’s multiple people who have a long history of animosity to each other, and so, whenever they encounter each other, tensions are really high because they’re afraid of each other and then it only takes one thing, you know, for them to start shooting or something like that.
Oren: Yeah. Like, you can have an area where there are multiple factions who are deeply bitter enemies, and maybe within their own areas they try to maintain safety, but, like, in the areas between where they live, like, they… anytime you run into each other, it’s, like, “Man, you who’s put your bread with the butter side down, we’re gonna get you.”
Chris: Bandits are not out of the question, but you have to have a place that is not protected but still has a lot of travelers going through there. So, you know, you have to have… civilization has fallen enough that there’s no authority that can clear the roads or the whatever, travel. Usually, when people would travel on roads, if there are roads, but there’s been some instances where, like, through the prairies or other land that’s already flat, right? there can just be wagon trails, for instance.
Oren: Right. And you want to try to make it feel natural. You want to make it seem like this is a thing that could be expected. So, for example, if your setting is… if you’re in an area where there is no real law, you could very easily have some local strong guy who sets up at the only bridge for a while and demands a toll for crossing it. Or if they’re more violent, maybe they ambush people who go to this one crossing area, because they know that’s where everyone has to be. But what you want to avoid is the random crime zone encounter where it’s like, “Oh, we’re walking down the street and this part of town looks, like, more economically disadvantaged than the other part, so obviously some thugs show up.” That’s just: A) potentially racist and B) feels real goofy. Are we in a video game? Did the screen shatter and now we’ve activated combat mode?
Chris: Yeah, it’s hard not to have the story be punching down at that point if there’s entire… if there is the implication of an area where people actually live, where the assumption is: If you walk in there, people just, you know, they’re just criminals, so they just attack you. It’s like, that doesn’t make any sense. And that’s possibly… stigmatizing somebody probably at that point.
Oren: Particularly if your protagonist is your standard fantasy/speculative fiction badass, which they usually are when you are doing this trope, because you were trying to create a reason for your badass to have to defend themselves.
Chris: Who really wants to attack your badass?
Oren: Then you’re just getting into the video game meme of the level 2 bandit who sees, like, a level 50 protagonist with flames coming out of their eyes and a giant glowing sword being like, “Yeah, I think I want to mess with that guy.”
Chris: Um, one thing that I like is just making civilization small in comparison to the context of the world. So the civilization you have is just several city-states, for instance, and there’s, like, kaiju running around, right? At that point, humans are just a small part of the world, and the world is big and overwhelming, and maybe it’s just hard to travel between city-states because the world is inherently that dangerous, and that way you can just have a lot more threats and say that humans just aren’t prepared enough to handle them.
Oren: Certainly not most humans, right? Your protagonist might be a little bit more capable than your average villager ’cause, like, they’re the one who goes outside, but it’s still very dangerous and they will need to defend themselves.
Chris: Or if your character is part of a group of nomads. They travel around and they’re alone wherever they go. You can have mini-civilization that is in a larger world that is more dangerous.
Oren: Another option that is good for some stories, less good for others, is the fact that, sure, you might have civilization and it has authorities, and those authorities try to keep violence down, but for whatever reason, they are targeting your protagonist. And at that point it becomes very likely that your protagonist will have to defend themselves.
Chris: The old bounty trick.
Oren: Yeah, you’ve got a bounty on your head.
Chris: Just you want to aggro against your protagonist. You just put out those little posters and then you can make a joke about how your protagonist looks on the poster.
Oren: You know, your protagonist is traveling through a territory occupied by an enemy nation. They have been declared a traitor to the king because they didn’t clap properly at the king’s royal banquet. Things like that. The downside to that, of course, is that they tend to be all or nothing. If your protagonist is, like, public enemy number one, it might be hard for you to do non-fighting stuff in an area. Although, if your protagonist is good at disguise, you can fix that problem. “Oh, no, we’ve alerted the guards. Fight! Fight! Fight! Okay, now hide under a box for 10 minutes and the guards will forget you were there.”
Chris: Another trick, I think, for all-out chaos is just make it so that you’re in a transition period in your world, right? Because, again, there are various reasons why there can be violence in the area, but by default, power inherently concentrates, somebody takes charge, and that person will impose their own semblance of order. So if you have, like, a bunch of chaotic factions, and I am definitely talking about City in the Middle of the Night, like, that’s not gonna last forever. City in the Middle of the Night is funny because it has… it makes a point of there being two very different cities. And one is like the Dystopian Order City and the other is like the Chaos City. And the Chaos City has all these different factions competing, but all I could think about when I was there is how unrealistic that is, because one of them would’ve taken over.
Oren: Yeah. What is stopping one of them from eventually winning or making an alliance with the others and consolidating? The people in charge don’t want to be in constant competition. They want to win so they can get back to the task of stepping on everyone below them.
Chris: And again, whenever somebody gets more power, they can use that power to get even more power, which is why generally… this is why we have to break up monopolies because, inherently, power concentrates. And so, like, any situation where you’ve got a bunch of different factions, and nobody’s really in charge and everybody’s just at war with each other, that generally does not last forever. Because eventually, again, somebody wins. But if it’s a period of transition, like, for instance, a foreign leader has just died, right? and now there’s a power vacuum and people are fighting over the power vacuum. That’s a good time to have something that’s really chaotic, and maybe there’s a lot of warfare happening in the streets and everybody’s hiding in their homes.
Oren: You can also use an emerging supernatural threat to create a similar effect. This is the case in Lockwood & Co., which is a book series that everyone at Mythcreants read a while back, and, you know, that one has a ghost problem emerging all across (presumably) the world, but they only talk about the UK. And so that’s a situation where there are increasing ghost problems everywhere, but they are emerging inside an existing civilization, and so it’s not like everyone in London can just leave. So they have to stay and deal with this problem, and then the protagonists have to fight the ghosts, and it all works out.
Chris: That one has an interesting balance because they have certain public things that they do to try to keep ghosts away from certain areas. They have special lamps or whatever, but at the same time, it’s generally expected that everybody will just be inside their homes by nightfall, when more of the ghosts come out. So they… it’s still dystopian, we still have a curfew, but at the same time, we see the ways that civilization is functioning in this ghost apocalypse.
Oren: And then, of course, there’s the classic placing your story on, like, the border between your dangerous wilderness and your more inhabited area. Now, that one is a tried and true classic. I’m not a huge fan of it, just ’cause I don’t like anything that feels like my protagonist is fighting animals. But if you make the creature sufficiently monstrous, that’s like less of an issue.
Chris: Or just anything that’s out on the outskirts where you’re far away from authorities and help can, you know… Or, for instance, if people went to start a new settlement somewhere in the wilderness, right? So they’re alone.
Oren: Yeah, moving to a new area is a good one, right? ’cause you’re not familiar with its dangers and you haven’t set up whatever is necessary to create like a stable living area, so you can… that can be the story.
Chris: Right. And then, if you want people to fight each other, and you’re like an isolated group, right? then there can be a power struggle within that group, and there’s no outside help to enforce who’s supposed to be the leader in this situation.
Oren: Right? It’s like, “Well, I’m in charge. We all voted on it.” “Okay, but did we vote on the fact that I have a gun?” There you go.
Chris: This is definitely what should happen inside the Fallout bunkers or what have you. Vaults.
Oren: Significant spoilers for the Fallout show if you haven’t seen it, but, like, it really weirded me out, this idea that everyone in Vault 33, I think it was, would just kill each other when they found out about what was going on with the overseer. Like, I can buy that some of them would want to kill the overseer, and that the overseer would probably have loyalists, and maybe there would be other factions, but a 100% fatality rate? I don’t buy it. Oh, another one that I’m a big fan of: I’ve sort of mentioned this a little bit, but it’s worth talking about specifically, is a place that has been relatively safe and stable, but something has happened that has changed that, and it’s no longer safe and stable. Because then you will have people who try to stay, right? People who try to cling on, who try to preserve what they have or maybe make things better. But because you’re in a transition period, it’s a lot easier to justify why there would be danger all over the place. But, like, also things that we associate with more stable areas, like a store.
Chris: Yeah, that’s what everybody wants. Probably one of my favorites… again, this… you actually did an article on the worldbuilding of these books, and they have some problems, but Martha Wells’ Raksura books also have some really cool things about it. And one is just a world that inherently feels very wild and dangerous, because she focuses a lot on megafauna and also on tons of different… there’s no humans in this setting. There’s just tons of non-human species, like countless ones. And what that means is that any sapient group is small in the scope of the world. And then there’s just tons of large predators everywhere. And so the characters, whenever they’re traveling, are constantly on the lookout for… even though they’re predators and they do hunting, constantly on the lookout for predators even bigger than them, that they wouldn’t be able to handle and… constantly on guard. And their group is a, you know, an independent unit that is inherently little, like a little clan, right? in the context of the world, but there’s no larger government, not really.
Oren: And they can’t just go roll up to another unit and just be like, “All right, we’re team members now,” because then they would have to deal with resources, right? Because they all need to eat and, like, a certain area might not have enough food for two clans of these… Raksura, they’re called.
Chris: So they all have their territories and they all have to very carefully manage their relationships with each other so they don’t fight other Raksura, so that kind of makes them end… like act more like independent entities. And then, when something happens and something gets stolen that they need, that’s really important, and taken far away, they don’t have any big authority that they can call. It’s just them and… and the context of the story, they’re a clan that’s been failing, right? So, when they find, like, a big wizard has something really important that it was stolen from them, it’s just up to them to get it back from the big dangerous wizard.
Oren: Yeah. And you can do similar dynamics with, say, urban fantasy, right? Where, especially if you have a masquerade, don’t ask too many questions about the masquerade, but if your urban fantasy is one in which the creatures in some way derive sustenance from humans, whether that’s literally by feeding on them or if it’s like the humans produce a certain amount of emotional energy that your creatures need or whatever, that can be a really good way to have to spread out how many magical creatures there can be, ’cause you can’t have more than a certain number of psychic vampires in an area, or else the humans will all leave. Then you can have them be cool, territorial, like big cats.
Chris: Yes. And same thing, right? if they can’t announce themselves to the humans, they can’t also benefit from the support of human authorities.
Oren: Yeah, that’s why all urban fantasy stories have similar politics to, like, feudal fiefs, like all arguing, each with each other. Sure, maybe there’s a distant authority somewhere, but really, your neighbor is the one you have to worry about.
Chris: Of course, Buffy completely ruined this. Like, in multiple ways. It’s like Buffy is going with this idea that, “Okay, we can’t go to the cops ’cause the cops would just get killed.” So Buffy’s on her own, but we have both all this Watcher Council, which sounds like a group with resources, and then, of course, we involve the US government for some reason in season four, and then they have to disappear.
Oren: Choices were definitely made in season four. That’s the best we can say.
Chris: That’s the best we can say.
Oren: All right, I think we’ve successfully made this podcast a pretty dangerous place to be. So we are gonna go ahead and call this one.
Chris: And you can seek safety at our Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Aman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
[Music]
Outro: This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.
It used to be that lacking a throughline was the most common problem in client manuscripts, but no longer! That particular issue has been dethroned by a lack of agency for the protagonist. Yay? That’s why today’s episode is all about identifying problems with agency and repairing them, so your main character remains the most important person in the story. Don’t worry though, we also find some time to complain about magic schools.
Show Notes Agency: It’s What the Sexy Lamp Is Missing * Snyder’s Org Chart Advice * Magic Schools * Spotlight Stealing * Parents * Authorities * Agency When Things Go Wrong * Don’t Look Up * The Daughter of Doctor Moreau TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Ace.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.
[Intro Music]Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Chris.
Oren: And I’m Oren.
Chris: Now, this wasn’t my idea or Oren’s. We just ended up here because Bunny told us to do it. In fact, I have a sheet that I’m just gonna read off of for this podcast.
Oren: Curses to that Bunny, always puppet mastering us!
Chris: But it’s good ’cause now I don’t have to figure out what to say. Bunny can just tell me what to say.
Oren: Hmm. You know, that is actually really relaxing. No decisions. Just go with the flow. Whatever.
Chris: Doesn’t it feel wonderful to just have Bunny to write the podcast for us?
Oren: I do love it. All right. This is how we’re gonna do the rest of the podcast from now on.
Chris: I’m sure Bunny will love that. Okay, so this time we’re talking about character agency and the problems that we often encounter with it and why people often don’t have it in their manuscripts and how to fix those problems. So first of all, what is it? What is agency?
Oren: My experience is that agency is a thing that disappears when authors write a story. In my experience, authors are machines that take story and put out agency problems. Which is to say this happens a lot in client manuscripts that I work with.
Chris: Do you have a, if you were to guess, what percentage of client manuscripts have agency problems?
Oren: 50%, easy.
Chris: Yeah, that’s… I would’ve said that too.
Oren: That might be a conservative guess, to be honest.
Chris: That might be conservative, and it might be more like 75%.
Oren: Possibly the most common problem is an agency issue.
Chris: That’s probably partly because we have hammered home the throughline issue so much that now we have more clients who have throughlines than we did before.
Oren: Yeah, they’re all like, we’ve heard you yell at us about throughlines. Please don’t yell at us about throughlines anymore. Here’s the throughline. We’re like, all right, moving on to agency next.
Chris: Progress! But it’s like a story, where you solve one problem and then another problem instantly peers up to raise the tension.
Oren: I don’t want my life to operate according to narrative principles anymore.
Chris: Are you looking forward to the climax?
Oren: It’s all fun and games until someone raises the tension.
Chris: Okay. Agency is basically the feeling that your protagonist is making a difference for good or ill. It’s usually for good, but it can be for ill. And those differences have to be attributable to them. They have to be the one to credit or blame, basically. So if they’re just doing what somebody else tells them, you could replace them with any old follower and that person could do the same thing and so it does not feel like it’s attributable to them. Their contribution has to feel like it happens because they uniquely are there.
Oren: Right, and just to be clear, that doesn’t mean that they can’t be ever following someone’s directions or commands or whatever. I don’t wanna sound like we’re, you know, Snyder over here saying that your protagonist always has to be at the top of their local org chart. It just means that if they are following a command, they still have to be making important choices and accomplishing things, even if it’s things that they were generally commanded to do.
Chris: So they have to make choices and solve problems that affect the plot, but that doesn’t mean that other characters aren’t also doing that. You can shift around in your story, what things you want to be your turning points, right? Where your character makes a difference. And in any sort of five-step process, let’s say, to solve some conflict, you can decide, okay, what is the hard part? That is what things really rest on, and that’s where my protagonist comes in. Whereas other things can be supplied for them, right? They don’t have to do everything, but the plot is just gonna rest on that one pivotal moment where they make a difference. And that’s what you’re gonna focus on when you’re narrating. Whereas if you have a friend that’s off fighting somebody else, that’s gonna be happening more in the background.
Oren: Correct.
Chris: And the other thing is, we’ve covered previously that this is not the same as proactivity. And the reason we have to say that is ’cause when I talk about agency, usually a common response is, “oh, but like I don’t want my character to be proactive.” And you don’t have to make them proactive. You don’t have to make them outgoing, right? They can be reluctant. They can feel disempowered.
Oren: They don’t have to be extroverts.
Chris: They don’t have to be extroverts. If we find a character that lacks agency, making them more proactive is often a really nice way of fixing it. Because it forces them to have agency more. But you can absolutely have agency without a character that’s super empowered or proactive, right? It’s just in that case, the problems come to them and they decide how to react, and maybe by choosing how to react, the result they get is that they can just cope for longer.
Oren: Yeah, and you just have to scale your story to your protagonist or scale your protagonist to your story, whichever one. It can go in either direction, but the disconnect is when you have a protagonist who you’re like, well, my protagonist is too small scale. They can’t possibly affect these big events. And it’s like, all right, why are you telling a story about these big events then? That’s the wrong plot. You need to find a plot that works with your protagonist. Your plot can’t be an alien invasion if your protagonist is some rando gunslinger. Like they can’t stop an alien invasion with their revolver. They just can’t do it. There has to be something else going on.
Chris: Problem one that I’ve written down: the protagonist doesn’t have enough power for the plot that you’ve created. And that one unfortunately is one of the hardest to fix because a lot of times it involves the premise that you chose for your story in sometimes bigger rewriting, right? So that’s probably the toughest situation, where, again, it’s hard for a child to stop a war or a villager to influence politics in the capital city. If your protagonist just doesn’t have the ability to handle the kind of plot of a specific scope, it needs people that have more power, that have some kind of authority or are just in proximity to the problem, right? Or positioned to work on it. So if you don’t do that, that can be real tough.
Oren: If you wanna have a protagonist who starts off unable to do those things and gains the ability to over the course of the story, that can work, right? Your character can have a growth arc of some kind, that’s also fine. But are you prepared for that? Is there room in your story for that growth arc? Because often there’s not, and that’s how you end up with a protagonist who doesn’t do anything.
Chris: You can have a protagonist who starts off with no ability and is just, they’re incredibly clever, so they start to climb ladders. But I feel like people who create these story situations, that’s not usually what they want. They want a protagonist that is very humble and relatable, and if the protagonist is super clever and managed to find, you know, as a child who managed to find a way to get themselves in with the general, become the general’s confidant because they’re just that clever, usually they would not make those choices in the first place. Now, granted, that one could happen in the middle of a great story, but when we see this kind of situation, usually it happens because the writer is invested in the protagonist’s humble standing, as it were. Sometimes we often mention a magic power. The right magic power can do a lot here to make your protagonist special, or they can have unusual social influence because, for instance, an incident happened that was really iconic and they’re the last survivor of some tragedy or something like that, and they became a figurehead for a specific social cause. For instance, it might be a reason why they have influence beyond what you would expect for someone like them.
Oren: Although in that case, you still have to make sure that they can’t just turn to their nearest advisor and be like, advisor, what should I do? And then just follow the advisor’s advice for the entire story, right? There needs to be some reason for them to be making independent choices.
Chris: Yeah, I think we have to cover powerful allies too. Before we do, I wanna talk about ways to reduce the scope a little bit. ‘Cause that’s the other factor here, besides what the protagonist can do, there’s also how hard the plot is to solve. So for one way, one thing that you can do to shrink the scope of your plot is to just bring it closer to its conclusion. So for instance, instead of a raging war, there’s already peace negotiations happening, but they’re very tenuous. Nobody expects it to go well, and that again gives your protagonist the ability to maybe just start talking to the people in the peace negotiations. It’s just a step easier than handling the entire war. And maybe the people in the peace negotiations want it to work, but they don’t understand each other and they need somebody who, for instance, lives in a village bordering both nations to help them understand each other, or something. That would be a way of shrinking the scope by just making things closer to the resolution. So you just have to take it over the edge or you just need some kind of catalyst, that kind of thing. Or you could, of course, just make it smaller, like instead of a whole war, we have one skirmish or two neighboring towns that end up on opposite sides of the war, and we’re trying to reconcile those two towns. Or something like that.
Oren: You can zoom in and look for smaller conflicts within a bigger one. So you’ve got your war, your protagonist is a normal villager. They’re not gonna have a big impact on this war. Within the war, there could be a conflict over keeping this villager’s family fed ’cause that’s hard to do during wartime and this villager just can’t do anything about the war, that is outside of their control. They can try to keep their family fed.
Chris: Same thing, shrink down your entire political movement to the passage of one law or trying to survive the passage of a bad law and make your scope smaller until it’s something that your protagonist can handle. Leads us to problem two, which is probably the most common problem. Like I say, problem one is probably the hardest to deal with, but I would say this one is probably our most common, which is that we have a more powerful ally overshadowing the protagonist.
Oren: Hey. Hey, now, that’s not fair. Sometimes it’s a bunch of allies.
Chris: Sometimes it’s an entire herd of allies just surrounding the protagonist in a protective cocoon to ensure that they never have to solve their own problems.
Oren: It’s like, hello, random farm kid. My name is Badass McWarriorFriend, and here’s your next best buddy, the wisest mage and the most caring healer. And we’re all going to stand around you in a circle and whenever you move, we’ll move. And that’s the story.
Chris: Also, you’re a secret princess, so here’s your bodyguards. A special team of bodyguards that we’ve naturally assigned to you, and we’re gonna send you to Magic School where there’s also teachers.
Oren: And maybe you’ll have a really cool friend who hangs out with you and is way better at everything than you. There we go.
Chris: Let’s not forget that at Magic School, of course, you have to meet the love interest, who is the best magic student and is a prodigy and can really just level entire armies by himself.
Oren: Get outta here, love interest!
Chris: And he lives to protect you. He lives to protect you!
Oren: Yeah, but he doesn’t even like you. Shut up.
Chris: So, yeah, we’ve seen this a lot and it happens for various reasons. In some cases where the storyteller, again, is just struggling to figure out how the protagonist can solve problems, it may feel like a shortcut to just add a mentor that can just tell them what to do. ‘Cause then you don’t have to figure out how to make your protagonist do various things like clue finding and being clever and all those things can be hard. But in those cases, again, toning down the ally. If you can bear to tone down the ally a little bit, that’s the first thing to do. If you don’t need that mentor and that mentor is just there to spare the protagonist from having to figure things out, then you can cut the mentor. And do they have to be powerful? Can you make them so they’re like, they’re frail, right? And so they have some knowledge from their prior experience, but they’re not able to go and do a lot of things that they used to ’cause they’re older or something like that, as another good one. Or maybe they don’t like the protagonist and they only help them begrudgingly and they resist helping them whenever they can.
Oren: Antagonistic mentors are great. I love them so much.
Chris: Yeah. There needs to be more antagonistic mentors. They really are the best.
Oren: And by antagonistic mentors, I mean like a mentor who doesn’t agree with the protagonist about something as opposed to a mentor who’s just a jerk, and then we later are like, “oh wow. By being a jerk, he was actually the best teacher!” Just to be clear.
Chris: Oh. Oren, you wanna tell me where those overcandied characters hurt you?
Oren: I don’t like them. I really don’t, and I especially don’t like it when they act like terrible teachers, and then the story rewards them by telling them what great teachers they are. Like, ’cause I’m kind of a teacher, like editing is kind of a teaching position and it’s just, I would never treat my clients the way that these mentors treat their students. And it’s upsetting to me when they get away with it.
Chris: Oh man. Yeah, we had a whole podcast episode about training. And it’s just the amount of toxic training material there is out there is just very sad.
Oren: Being mean to your students does not help them learn.
Chris: Mm-hmm. But for instance, your protagonist is out in the street, they meet another person out in the street who’s very experienced. They try to get that person to help them, but that person doesn’t have any reason to help them. Maybe they ask for payment or demand favors in return, or that would be, uh, somewhat antagonistic, semi-antagonistic mentor. That gives a reason why they’re not just doing things all the time. Okay, so again, if you can tone down their abilities a little bit or take them out or make them more antagonistic, those are all good steps to do. But sometimes in these situations, there are a couple sticking points. One is just the realism. If you have a child that has caretakers and you don’t want their caretakers to be terrible people; or another is that you have a wish fulfillment situation, for instance, a powerful love interest and it’s just really important to you, feel like it’s important to your readers. It definitely can be important to readers to have that super badass, sexy love interest that wants to protect their protagonist, for instance. That makes it a step harder.
Oren: Yeah, ’cause you can’t just banish that one, ’cause that’s the whole point of the story.
Chris: Um, so we have different solutions for this. We actually have several blog posts that you can look up. Oren has a great post on what to do with parents and one on what to do with authorities. And then I have one on what to do with powerful allies that works well for wish fulfillment, love interests, etc. But basically if you’re gonna have a character that’s like a powerful love interest, for instance, or a powerful wish fulfillment mentor of some kind that’s gonna, that’s you want to be around and you want them to be really powerful. It just requires a variety of techniques and constant management, right? It’s just something that you’re gonna have to think about for every conflict. How you’re going to make it so that your protagonist still makes a difference, and you don’t wanna use the same thing over and over again too many times because that starts to look contrived.
So you need a portfolio of tactics at that point. Make the ally go off on a mission sometimes. Injure them or make them sick sometimes. Find some situations in which they’re not so powerful, right? Give them a weakness. You can make it a curse if you wanna say, “oh, without the curse, they really could take care of everything but oh darn. With this curse, they’re not quite so powerful, but it’s totally not their fault. They really are the baddest ever.” So some situations in which- make them weak to water and put them in an island or something, or where they are off balance because they’re in an unfamiliar situation or some situations in which they are just not so powerful anymore. And then create some tasks that require at least two people doing stuff at the same time. Either because there are so many attackers and the ally can’t be everywhere at once, or one person has to do something while the other person protects them or something that requires two people. That way you can still have your ally around participating in some conflicts with your protagonist. It’s just, if you need to do that for every conflict, it’s gonna get hard.
Oren: Yeah, and that’s why this often pairs well with a story where your protagonist is going to become more powerful. You want them to start off all weak and relatable, but you want them to be a badass later. Okay, so you can manage this powerful ally/allies for a while, and then eventually your protagonist will unlock their true potential or what have you, and then they will be strong enough that they can do stuff even when the ally is around. And that is just much more manageable than trying to do this over the course of a series. It’s like, okay, you have book one where you have successfully tap danced your way around this really powerful ally. If by book two your protagonist hasn’t gotten strong enough to make a difference, you are probably gonna be in trouble.
Chris: Certainly, the protagonist should be this MVP for your climax. So you definitely have to find a way for them to do that. Okay. So problem three, which I have seen before – this is less common, but I’ve definitely seen it – where everything needs to go downhill. And so bad stuff is gonna be happening in the story, and you feel like, “okay, if the protagonist had their way, the bad stuff wouldn’t happen. So I guess I have no choice but to give them no agency.”
Oren: Right, there was no way they could have succeeded. They just fail. Nothing they do matters. They’ve just been swept along on a dark current of Evil Destiny.
Chris: Again, I have another article on this one ’cause we encounter these problems that often, but in this case, if you want things to go wrong, and you don’t know how your protagonist could make a difference when everything goes wrong. Three basic possibilities here: first, you could have them influence the plot in a negative direction, and this one is the most contentious. Yes, it does preserve agency to have the protagonist do things that have bad results. It does very easily frustrate the audience. They generally do not like that. So this one kind of has to be handled carefully. You have to try to make the situation as understandable as possible. It works, honestly, a lot better if you have lower stakes in your story, or you could have something where your protagonist does something that’s only a little bit wrong, and then the results are disproportionate. Right, but they still technically caused that. That’s a great way to have them feel really guilty and have them get blamed and all those other things. But if you make it disproportionate enough, it’ll create sympathy for them. ‘Cause it’s like, “hey, yeah, maybe they shouldn’t have done that, but really that wasn’t a big deal. And wow, all this happened.”
Oren: Yeah. Okay. So they shouldn’t have snuck out to go through a side gate when they were supposed to be attending, like the royal feast or whatever, but like they had no idea that there was an enemy army secretly camped outside that then used that same way to sneak in. There was no way they could have predicted that, but their actions still caused it.
Chris: And that can be a good way to have some sort of arc for them. Another way is to make it so the situation would’ve been even worse without them, and by doing something they preserve hope that things can someday recover. The town was invaded, but they managed to lock the inward keep. So there’s a few people who have not been captured inside. Or they snuck away with the secret invention that could allow them to cure all the ills that are happening.
Oren: Or like the bad guy came to steal the McGuffin that will let them take over the world. And the hero wasn’t able to stop them, but they were able to take a piece of the McGuffin, and now the McGuffin won’t work without it.
Chris: And then another way is to just pick, again: this is the same kind of lowering the scope, right? Let them achieve some kind of small objective, where they’re just trying to survive the situation and they have to use their ingenuity to survive. They can’t save the city, but they can escape or they can protect somebody or something small that they achieve in this.
Oren: Yeah, they can’t win the battle, but maybe they can save some of their soldiers, right? That sort of thing.
Chris: And then problem number four, the protagonist is supposed to be paralyzed or powerless.
Oren: Yeah, this one’s tough.
Chris: This one is a very tough one to do. Again, this is when the storyteller just has a goal that’s incompatible with agency. And look, I won’t say that there’s never a time, which if you have a specific goal, and that goal is more important to you than audience engagement, I’m not gonna argue with you. What’s important to you is what’s important to you. And maybe you have a really important point to make, and having the protagonist be completely powerless is part of that. I think where I have seen this is Don’t Look Up. Don’t Look Up is a cautionary tale. And the protagonists try really hard to stop tragedy and they do not succeed, and as a result, none of their actions end up mattering. So for most of the experience of the movie, it does feel like they have agency. And that reduces audience frustration. But in the end they don’t, and this is because this is meant to mirror a real life lesson. And the people who do have agency in that situation are the villains. But if we made those villains into the protagonist, we would be endorsing them on some level. And it’s like a society level cautionary tale. And so it focuses on the people who are trying. So that would be an example of where somebody decided to reduce agency for their character, and they had reasons for doing so that sort of filled a bigger purpose that had its value for audience members, and they also minimized the impacts of that.
But if you want a protagonist who is just paralyzed or powerless, I feel like you should try to go for effects that don’t quite remove agency, right? Not that you need agency for every scene. You could try a few startup scenes that don’t, again, minimize that effect, but I think reactivity is probably the way to go here.
Oren: And you can also, like, when people talk about wanting their character to be powerless, what that often means is systemically disadvantaged. People in that position, while they lack advantages, they don’t lose the ability to try to do things, right? And that you would be amazed at the ways people can figure out to improve their situation, even in really desperate times. I’ve mentioned this on the podcast before, but one of my favorite examples is from The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, where the daughter, the eponymous daughter, is in this very difficult situation where she’s engaged to be married to a guy who she is into, but clearly is not a good guy. Like she’s into him the way that you’re into a first crush or whatever. And she’s trying to help her family, but she has very little influence. Like all of her power is basically just whatever the men in her life will let her do. And so she has to try to very carefully steer her fiancé in the direction she wants him to go and she can’t push too hard or he’ll realize what’s happening and he’ll backlash. So that was really interesting and super compelling. And then we ruined it so that another character could have his arc, which, I was so upset when that happened. But while it lasted, it was really great.
Chris: And again, you could try shrinking this plot scope so that they make a difference, but it’s to really little things. If they’re, for instance, in prison, maybe their ingenuity goes towards coping, right? And when it comes down to it, stories are about what people can do, and what power they do have, because they’re at some level kind of lessons for what people do in various situations. And so it’s not that there- that your protagonist can’t be in a world where they don’t have power over something. It’s just that the plot itself is focused on what they can achieve, right? So a factor in poverty, of course, can’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps and just become rich, right? But maybe they can get by. So you can change the scope of what they’re affecting and make it so that problems appear and come to them. And then they just have to find a way that those problems don’t totally destroy them, and that will definitely make them feel pretty powerless without completely taking away their agency.
Oren: There is one more that I’ve encountered, which is like an odd one, but does come up sometimes, which is when you make the character a badass, but like the wrong kind of badass.
Chris: Fascinating.
Oren: Yeah, it’s weird. The place where I see it the most often, not universally, is when you have a female protagonist and the author has read some discourse about strong female protagonists or what have you, and so they’re like, okay, I’m gonna give my lady protagonist like, cool sword fighting skills, or I’m gonna make them a really talented politician, or whatever, right? They give them some kind of traditionally strong capability, but then the story isn’t about that thing they’ve given the protagonist and so then they’re just back to square one. Like you make your protagonist a really good sword fighter, but then the entire story hinges on spell casting ability that they don’t have. This sword never matters ’cause everything is solved by spell casting. And wouldn’t you know what the love interest is? The spellcaster.
I see that a fair amount of times and I’m sure some of that is just someone trying to deflect potential criticism where someone will criticize their book for their character never doing anything, and they’ll be like, “no, see, I made them strong! I made them a sword fighter!” But I think a more common explanation is that people just don’t always match character to plot properly, which is not to say your protagonist has to always be prepared for whatever problem that they encounter. A character’s dealing with stuff they’re not ready for is super fun and like arguably the entirety of stories, but they need to be able to interface with it on some level, right? So that doesn’t mean they have to be an expert spellcaster if the problems require spellcasting, but they need to spellcast at least a little bit, or they can’t do anything.
Chris: I will say a lot of these problems also can originate from not correctly understanding the role that characters play in the story, right? I’ve encountered at least one person who read a lot of writing advice that used the word character instead of the word protagonist. And we use the word protagonist for a reason. It’s ’cause a lot of the things that we’re saying don’t apply to other characters. They only apply to the protagonist or like your Team Good, right? You can have secondary protagonists too that they apply to towards a lesser extent, or an ensemble cast, whatever. When we say protagonist, we’re talking about the person somebody’s cheering for, the person who’s supposed to have the most agency, the person who’s supposed to make a difference and be the star of the show. And not all characters fit that bill. But if somebody, they’re writing and they’re not thinking about that and they think, “oh, well, characters have to make a difference,” then it could feel like it could be any character. And of course somehow it’s always women and sometimes children. We can, there have been male characters with agency problems. That’s something we’ve encountered, it’s just significantly less frequent.
Oren: Yeah, if you’re playing the numbers game, you can bet it’s gonna be a female protagonist who has agency problems. Okay. One thing we definitely have agency in is deciding when to end the podcast, and that part is now.
Chris: And if you feel more proactive and empowered as a result of this podcast, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
[Outro Music]Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening/closing theme: “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.
Abracadabra, your hero casts Plot Destroying Magic, at sixth level! That’s a major problem for the story, but what if it didn’t have to be? In this episode, we’re discussing how you can prevent your magic system from becoming unbalanced in the first place, along with potential fixes if the first strategy doesn’t work out. We discuss why it’s so important to know how your magic works, what happens if you don’t, and why getting tired isn’t as effective a limit as authors often believe.
Show Notes No Wishing for More Wishes * Magic Systems * Bending * Allomancy * Bloodbending * Metalbending * Rational Magic * Elemental Magic * Arbitrary Magic TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Leen.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You are listening to The Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.
[Intro]Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of The Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Oren.
Chris: And I’m Chris.
Oren: It’s just the two of us today. Bunny is off having her own adventures called “Fun Times with School.”
And today I’ve been thinking, wouldn’t Aladdin have been better if he’d just been able to wish for more wishes?
Chris: Oh yeah, absolutely.
Oren: Just imagine the creativity, right? No rules, just whatever he wants.
Chris: I have to say I am outraged on Aladdin’s behalf because he wished himself to be a prince, and then everybody was like “you’re not a prince.” It’s like he spent one of his three wishes on that.
Oren: Is he a prince?
Chris: He was a prince. He wished to be a prince.
Oren: How does that work exactly? Did he become prince of an existing country? Is there a new country that was spontaneously created for him to be Prince of? I have so many questions. Is he not a prince at all? And like the genie just made him look like one?
Chris: I just feel like that would be violating the contract. He’s gotta be a prince of somewhere or something.
Oren: Did the genie just mind control everyone into accepting that he was a prince? ’cause it didn’t work on Jaffar for some reason.
Chris: So basically he’s a prince by consensual reality.
Oren: Yeah, I guess the genie made everyone agree he was a prince and Jaffar made his will save and he’s the only one.
Chris: except for everybody in the end agrees that he’s not a prince, so. Because they’re saying he got cheated there, not a very good wish.
Oren: The genie switched like, controllers, and so that dispelled all of Aladdin’s previous wishes.
Chris: No, that’s an interesting limit, if all the wishes go away, you have to guard. You get three wishes, but you have to guard this lamp for the rest of your life because as soon as somebody else gets it, all your wishes are undone.
Oren: That’s all I got. That’s the best I can think of.
[Laughter]Oren: But I wanted to talk about how to put limits on magic systems partly ’cause I wrote a post about that and it’s on my mind now and so you all get to deal with it.
Chris: Every time we talk about magic systems, we have to talk about this, right? So no matter what kind of magic system I’m giving people directions on, limiting is always a central feature.
And you know, how to limit it can vary depending on what you’re doing. People use magic in a lot of ways. We often think about an epic fantasy setting where we have all these different spells, but if you have superheroes, that’s a form of magic. It’s just defined by having people who each have one unique spell that can cast pretty much.
Oren: Yeah, and their spell is punch
[Laughter]. Chris: And there’s also our elemental systems and other kinds of things. So different magic is different, but it all needs to be limited.
Oren: Actually Chris, bending is not magic. They said so in the first episode, so none of your advice applies to bending.
Chris: That’s how you limit your magic system. You just have a couple characters be like “actually it’s not magic” and then, done.
Oren: It’s not, it’s…
[Laughter]Chris: You don’t have to limit it anymore.
Oren: And then of course there’s the question of like, do you have to limit your magic system? ’cause other people don’t wanna do that ’cause they want magic to be free and unrestrained and magical and if you put limits on it now it’s just boring. Old technology. It’s boring.
Chris: Yeah. So I guess we should talk about why we are obsessed with magic limits and when you should do it.
Oren: The reason is that if the magic is gonna be a big part of your plot, then you need to know how it works. That’s really that simple.
If it’s not, then you know, who cares, if it’s like just some mysterious background stuff, it’s not that big a deal, whatever. Although you’d be surprised how quickly mysterious background stuff becomes important to the plot the next time you wanna write a sequel. It doesn’t hurt to figure that stuff out in advance.
Chris: Usually it’s most detailed if protagonists are gonna use it to solve problems. To a lesser extent if antagonists or if important side characters or protagonists are gonna get help from.
But I will say that for instance, if your protagonist has powerful fight magic and they’re the best fighter ever ’cause of their badass magic at level 9,000, but all of your conflicts are like social conflicts where their ability to fight doesn’t matter, right?
It’s to some extent that magic may not feel like it matters unless they can somehow use it in social conflicts. But at that point, okay, the magic isn’t actually being used to solve problems because the problems are happening at a different level.
Oren: If you’re doing a subversion of ‘the arch wizard has to do paperwork for a day’ and that’s the premise of your story, and they don’t really use much magic, whatever, it doesn’t really matter what their magic can do if they’re not using it.
Chris: or if the magic is just like a mysterious thing that’s out there and nothing is controlled, it’s kinda like a weather system right? You don’t necessarily need to have a magic system.
But as soon as you’re gonna have conflicts where people are going to be using the full extent of their magic in order to beat an opponent, then it starts to become pretty important what people can do, and having that consistent.
Oren: Right, defeat an opponent or achieve some other goal, right? To do stuff.
It could also matter if you have a world that has a specific aesthetic and then you just have some magic that really goes against that. If you want to have a really gritty and realistic aesthetic, you probably don’t want to have something like magical clouds that rain bread, even if there is no specific bread shortage problems in your story.
So now that we’ve established the ’when you need to limit your magic system’ it’s time for a cautionary tale. What happens if you don’t limit your magic system?
Chris: I think something that often happens, and this can happen without magic too, but magic certainly accelerates this process, is authors who basically play a game of one-up mischief with themself,
where your protagonist ends up in a tricky situation; they’re backed up into an alley and they’re surrounded by enemies. They’re like “okay, cool.” They obviously… Cards are stacked against them, somehow I gotta get the protagonist out of this, and wouldn’t it be cool if they pulled out some flashy magic and got themselves out of this alley?
It’s like, great, now they have the magical ability to defeat five opponents when they’re cornered outside. Okay, that’s great.
Now, next time you are like, okay, now I have to put them in another fix so that my story is tense, but I know they can beat five opponents [laughter] So now what if they were surrounded by 10 opponents and one of them is a wizard? They’re like, okay, cool, now that’s threatening.
And then you pull out another bigger magic ability and it just keeps going where you’re trying to invent bigger and bigger magic and then make bigger and bigger problems to counter the magic that you’ve invented.
And pretty soon the audience will be like “wait a second. If they had this super duper magic all along, why didn’t they just, why were they ever afraid of those people in the alley? Why didn’t they just use that earlier?” you can’t make things tense anymore because no problem is big enough for the fact that you’re like ‘protagonist can pause time and then just punch people while they’re frozen’. And then pretty soon your protagonist just forgets that they have it.
So that’s basically why putting limits on your magic, so that you are following, being consistent and not just writing your story and then ‘okay, here’s what I need right now’ and then inventing something that’s gonna make everything harder for you later, basically.
Oren: And of course, the alternative to this constant one-Upmanship, is that the author just acts like that power isn’t around anymore and hopes no one notices, which is a risky game, not one I would recommend.
Chris: Mm-Hmm. Or comes up with like really contrived reasons. Antagonist can do this too, right? What you don’t want is an antagonist who has a magical power that would just instantly kill the protagonists, and then you have to come up with reasons why they don’t use it.
So the story can keep going. It’s like “oh, I gotta crush their spirit.”
Oren: Yeah, and we’re mostly talking about magic, but this can apply to technology too. That’s the transporter, right? The transporter is so powerful and has so many uses that like every Star Trek episode, they have to give an explanation why the transporter doesn’t work this week, and it is just repetitive and boring. And I just desperately wish they had never invented the transporter. I wish I could go back in time to Star Trek…
Chris: and tell them that was a bad idea [laughter]
Oren: Look Jean, I know that the shuttle craft set’s not ready yet. I am begging you to find another solution to get them onto the planet. Just cut them down to the planet and have them be like “well, the shuttle ride down here was very uneventful.”
[Laughter]Oren: Just save so many problems later. So then I think the next step would be to talk about how you limit your magic system. So how do you do that exactly?
Chris: Well, it depends on the system, but I think that the first thing, which is the most surefire method, because there are various methods we can talk about, and a lot of them have liabilities. So we’ve seen them in action before and not really working that well.
But the one that really works the best is what I would call ‘the theoretical limits.’ Where your magic just can’t ever in any circumstance do X, Y, Z, It just has a limited effect.
And in a lot of cases, instead of defining your magic as a wizard, cast a spell, and like a classic wizard this could be absolutely anything, a spell could do anything. Having a magic system where magic can do specific things, not like everything under the sun.
So for instance, if you have an elemental system and your mage can set things on fire, that can still be overpowered, but it’s definitely easier to deal with than magic that can do literally anything because a fire mage probably can’t turn people into animals, for instance, or go back in time.. Oh my gosh. That’s the worst [laughter].
Oren: This is especially difficult for people doing stuff like urban fantasy where there’s a kind of an expectation of very wide ranging magic if you’re including witches or wizards. But if you’re creating a world from scratch, then it is almost always better to start by thinking in terms of what your magic does as opposed to assuming it can do whatever, and then trying to define what it can’t do later down the road.
Chris: And if you have superpowers, and so you’re making up a lot of individual powers for people – and I have a post about this – but it’s up to you to look at your list of superpowers and make sure that they’re smaller rather than bigger.
And I know it’s always tempting to be like “okay, but what if my protagonist is super special because they have the best, biggest superpower” But that gets out of hand really quickly. And I would just keep in mind that how powerful a character looks is often relative to other people in the story.
So if you give your protagonist a more powerful ability than others, they will look powerful to readers ’cause that’s what you’ve established in that context and so you can just take everything down a couple notches.
But you really do have to think about, at that point, every single one and how powerful they are. And a lot of times in these cases, if somebody’s writing a superhero story, they want to do what Marvel does and use the abilities that Marvel has or whatever stories they’ve consumed, and they already have an idea of all their superpowers in their head, and at that point they don’t wanna let go of them, and that’s when it becomes really difficult if we’re working with a client, for instance, and trying to tame their magic system.
Oren: I don’t know this for a fact, but I strongly suspect that one of the reasons why superhero novels are relatively uncommon is that once you take it out of the movie format and put it into a format where people are more likely to ask questions, it just immediately falls apart.
And the only well-known superhero novels I can think of get by on some kind of major subversion, they’re almost never playing it straight. I think the reason is that superhero magic gets ridiculous pretty quickly if you are using the Marvel DC method of “all the powers, who cares what they do, just keep adding more powers.”
Chris: And also you can have a superpower magic system, but not have a superpower aesthetic. So people aren’t thinking of this as superheroes, but you still have one spell per person, for instance. It’s worth mentioning.
Oren: the way that I prefer. My favorite kind of magic system to do ’cause this is just easier to balance. Each group gets their own type of magic. That’s how I run urban fantasy settings. For example, you get “werewolves have this collection of powers and vampires have this collection of powers” and that’s easier to keep a lid on unless you’re doing the white wolf thing, where each group has to have 15 books worth of powers [laughter].
That’s a little extreme, but outside of role playing games that have to sell you more expansion books, that’s not usually gonna be a huge problem.
Chris: I should also mention that if you’re doing that and you want to pile on miscellaneous abilities onto the same group, whether it’s as an elemental system or you just have different factions that each have, their abilities can also get outta hand really fast.
Like in Avatar: The Last Airbender, the choice to give water benders also healing pretty under wraps in Avatar: The Last Airbender, but I’ve definitely seen people start to do way too much of that, where then pretty soon water bender have these five different abilities that don’t seem correlated with each other, and then fire benders have these five different abilities and it can spiral out of control pretty fast.
Oren: Healing is awkward, and then of course, in Legend of Korra, when suddenly blood bending can do 15 different things.
Less is more when it comes to magic and adding more powers is something you should be careful of and not just do when you want to get your character out of a problem. It is generally better to try to find new ways to use your existing powers than to just add more. Because the more you add, the harder it is to keep track of them.
Chris: And if you want your protagonist to be special, one thing I recommend is choosing an ability that’s important for this plot, or for the events that are happening in the world, or is rare, instead of making it the most powerful ability because you can make them feel special without making them really, really powerful.
Oren: Speaking of plots, this is actually a test that I have found to be very useful, which is to think about what kind of problems your character is going to encounter in the story, and then think of the most powerful thing they can do with their magic routinely, not something they need a special one in a lifetime event to pull off or whatever, what they can do just with the powers they have at their disposal.
And see if that just overwhelms whatever the problem is they’re going to face. Because if it does, then the character is too strong. You’re going to need to either lower their magic or make their obstacles bigger.
Chris: Okay. So theoretical limits are the most solid. Absolutely. Another thing that’s just worth talking about that can work well, but also sometimes does not work well, is any kind of resource limit where the magic uses up some resource that spell casters need when they use magic.
The nice thing about it is it’s very intuitive. It feels natural, it doesn’t feel contrived, but there can be issues with tracking those resources and being consistent about the usage of those resources.
So fatigue is a big one. It feels, again, very intuitive and natural that a character uses some kind of internal energy that makes them more tired as they continue to cast more spells.
But most authors just do not stay consistent about this at all, you can tell, and so it doesn’t feel like there’s any limit because every time the character would normally cast magic, somehow they’re not fatigued and then they continue to push past their limits and they can still cast spells and then they push their past their limits even further for the next conflict and they can still cast spells. And you’ve got almost like that one upmanship element again when it comes to just ignoring fatigue.
Oren: And it’s a question of how are they approaching it to start with, right? Are they approaching it with just telling you that casting spells makes you tired?
’cause swinging a sword makes you tired but that doesn’t really, in fictional terms, I don’t really have a limit on how many times my character can swing a sword, like it’s enough times, it’s just assumed that they can, unless something really unusual has happened. And magic where the author just says “yeah, they’ll get tired if they cast the spell enough” is the same way.
If they really wanna use fatigue as a limit, they have to come at it from the other direction. They have to be like “okay, I can cast this spell twice before I’m too exhausted to stand” and then maybe if you are careful and only do it a couple times, you might be able to have a special turning point where your character is able to push through and cast it a third time.
Chris: I think what happens with this one is, again, the storyteller is always looking for a way for a character to get out of a tight spot. And if they rely too much on magic, and they’re like “I don’t know how my character’s possibly gonna get out of this situation unless they use magic” they just keep their character using magic regardless of whether resources would realistically be used up.
If you actually had a situation where you’re consistent enough with it, and sometimes, your character actually runs out, on a consistent basis, and when they would normally need it they actually don’t have it, and it’s not just a plot convenient way for you to have them get kidnapped because readers can tell, right?
I’m not gonna say that using fatigue is impossible. I think if you’re consistent about it – and I have seen this before but it’s pretty uncommon- you can make it work, but you really have to be consistent and enforce that even when it’s inconvenient and be ready to have your protagonist fail to cast that spell because they’re too fatigued.
Oren: I also think you can, if you want, like to have either a fatigue or a specific kind of type of component that is mostly there for flavor rather than a limit, that’s also fine as long as you balance the magic with that understanding.
So like for example, in the mistborn books, the theoretical limit on how often the characters can use magic is how much metal they have available. But I’m not keeping track of that, maybe Brando Sando is, maybe he’s got a spreadsheet.
Chris: I honestly wouldn’t be surprised.
Oren: yeah, like it’s not impossible, but from the reader’s perspective, they have as much metal as he wants them to have, so that’s not a real limit. It’s generally assumed they can use their magic when they need to. And if the story is balanced for that, it’s not a problem, the metal is just an interesting bit of flavor.
Chris: And the same goes for spell ingredients. Spell ingredients quickly become overwhelming, and therefore you no longer can track it.
Any resource limit should allow the reader to anticipate when the character will run out and what they can do and not do. And so if your protagonist has a dozen different ingredients in their bag, and the reader has to memorize what each and every one of them allows the protagonist to do, or you just don’t tell them, then it’s no longer giving the reader the ability to anticipate what the protagonist capabilities are, and at that point, it’s effectively whatever you decide it is. And there’s no real limit, again, it feels arbitrary.
Whereas if you’re like, okay, your protagonists are on a journey and they occasionally collect one thing, it’s like “Hey, I got this feather. I can use this feather one time to fly” and you have three things like that. Then they could use them once each and that would probably be just fine.
Oren: Yeah, in my experience, readers can keep track of up to four or five components fairly easily, and more than that, you’re gonna start losing people.
Chris: One thing I do like better is environmental limits, because a lot of times they’re easier to understand and more intuitive and less changeable.
So if you have a water bender, you know, who needs water nearby, a fire bender, who needs things to catch fire, which means it has not been raining recently. That one, again, I would still say that’s a backup because it’s almost not flexible enough.
Oren: It’s a toggle switch, right? either they can or they can’t use their power.
Chris: But at least it’s, I think, simple and intuitive, which is, a lot of these other resource limits aren’t.
Oren: Then of course there is the either “I haven’t figured out how to use my power yet” or “I have some kind of emotional block that is stopping me from using my power.”
This is a perfectly legitimate character arc to have, but it’s not gonna be an effective limit unless you’re never planning to tell any stories after the protagonist gets past whatever their issue is.
Chris: There are some situations in which you can design magic that doesn’t feel like it’s a character arc, right?
Like the magic is just inherently wild. But I think that when people use this, they like it to be a personal trait that the protagonist has because then it creates drama and angst.
And whereas if it’s just an inherent part of the magic. This is chaos magic. And so it always does a random, unpredictable thing then it doesn’t have the same drama element. And so I think that’s another reason that people are less likely to do it that way.
Oren: But it’s like, if you have a power that is super strong, but your protagonist won’t use it because it’s tied to their lost loved one, and they are still so upset that they can’t bring themselves to use this power. Okay, that’s interesting. But what happens when they get over that? Or if someone else has that power?
Chris: Who will think of the sequels?
Oren: Yeah, you do wanna think about this sort of thing. And it’s not like you can’t do this. Characters improve themselves all the time and they gain a new power or whatever, but it has to be a power you are ready for, needs to fit in the world and not break your plot once they have it.
Chris: Another one, consequences and risk-taking can be really fun. It can add a lot of flavor and create more problems and plot-hooks, which is really neat if you have consequences for using magic. But the thing again, to keep in mind is that it’s not an effective limit unless the incentive they have to not use magic outweighs the scenario, their motivation for using it.
And if you have a story where it’s always a matter of life or death. Whether they succeed or fail at any given conflict, then they have an extremely strong incentive to use magic, and that will usually blow past any consequences or risks.
So it can add plot-hooks and problems, but it’s not necessarily a limit on the magic at that point.
Oren: Yeah, especially since you generally don’t want it to be so intense that they never use magic. That can be a problem. I see lots of stories that are the equivalent of “my protagonist will get magic cancer if they use magic too much.”
And yeah, that sounds dramatic and interesting, but if your protagonist is about to get eaten by a monster, they’re definitely gonna use magic to defend themselves, even if that increases their chances of getting magic cancer later.
Chris: You can also have time limits, which are useful if you specifically wanna stop people from being good at fights, but otherwise are not as effective. Even fights can get outta hand if you allow people to prep their spells in advance.
So there’s a lot of magic systems where it’s like “no, you have to take the time to cast spells” but then they allow them to make a bunch of magic grenades and load those up.
At least at that point they have a limited number of prep spells, right? So that can be a limit. But then whenever the protagonist has downtime, there’s no limit.
Oren: Downtime is something you wanna keep a real close eye on. You wanna really beware of powers that allow the protagonist to create permanent changes or permanent objects or whatever during downtime, because sure, in a fight, maybe those take too long to use.
If you’re writing a novel, you’re gonna have a couple weeks between tense short fight scenes. So if your protagonist can do something as simple as freeze water into ice. Okay. Are you prepared for a protagonist who can sell ice whenever they want to?
Because in some settings that’s very valuable and you won’t be able to have your protagonist have no money, which you might want. In a modern setting, not as big a deal, but in a low tech, medieval setting, man, that’s valuable.
Chris: And then finally as a last resort, we have a set of limits that I just call “can’t touch this” [laughter] where you just arbitrarily say they can’t do specific things. And this is, again, it’s a last resort because it often comes off as very contrived.
But there are some scenarios in which you do wanna use it and it’s useful. The biggest one I think of is in an elemental setting when people control the elements and you just don’t want them to directly control people’s bodies because that would just be way too powerful and you also don’t want the type of setting where every water mage freezes or evaporates or whatever the water in somebody’s body. That’s just not the kind of setting you want.
So then you just arbitrarily be like “yeah, no, you can’t affect somebody’s body, ’cause power of spirit et cetera, et cetera. Don’t look too hard.”
Oren: That was a problem that The Legend of Korra ran into when it made metal bending a thing that someone besides Toff could do. Because suddenly metal was now not only useless, it was actively detrimental to have metal in a fight, which was a problem because they also wanted to do steampunk stuff. And so their solution was “you can’t metal bend platinum.” “Why not?” “You just can’t. Okay?”
And you know, nevermind how terrible a building material platinum is. It’s fine. We made a giant robot out of platinum.
[Laughter}Chris: Yeah, so again, last resort, stated simply, don’t spend too long in it. Allow people to forget it.
Oren: One limit that I think is underused but is potentially very helpful is specific places where magic can be used. ’cause you might wanna have an adventuring scenario where your protagonists go out and fight monsters and stuff, but you don’t want everyone bowing and scraping to them when they come back to town, which is what would happen if a group of level 10 D&D adventurers rolled into a regular village.
So instead you say, out in the Miasma Wastelands, you can do all this powerful stuff because you also can channel the Miasma that creates the monsters, but the towns are all built in places where there is no Miasma. So you’re just a normal person when you go there.
Chris: Yeah, that sounds like that would be very handy.
Oren: Yeah, and that won’t balance your miasma powers when you’re out in the miasma. But in this case, the issue specifically is you don’t want your character to just be able to tell other people what to do anytime you want. ’cause you want to have some conflicts in the village.
Chris: If you combine that with a long casting time so that you had something to limit the magic during fights. The fights that you do when you’re out in the wilderness within Miasma, then that would be a good combination.
Oren: All right. Well, I think with that, we will successfully put a limit on this podcast so that it doesn’t go on forever.
Chris: If you didn’t find this podcast too limiting, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons.
First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek.
We will talk to you next week.
[Outro]This has been The Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.
The concept of historical accuracy can get really weird in speculative fiction. If you add magic, is it history anymore? What if you change everyone’s name slightly? Or maybe you just like to brag online about how much history you researched. At that point, how important is historical accuracy? Surprising no one, the answer is: it depends! And this week, we’re talking about all the ways in which it depends. Plus, desperately trying to remember the name for some fantasy creatures which may or may not be German.
Show Notes Taking Inspiration From History * The Last Samurai * The Dothraki Horde * George RR Martin Explains Why There’s So Much Rape in Game of Thrones * The War of the Roses * History of Internment in the US * The Calculating Stars * Bridgerton Controversy * Shogun * William Adams * Monique Poirier * Jägermonster * For All Mankind History * The Mercury 13 TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Arturo.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Intro: You are listening to the Mythcreants Podcast with your hosts: Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[Music]
Bunny: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Bunny. And with me is:
Chris: Chris.
Bunny: And:
Oren: Oren.
Bunny: Long ago, in the Before Times, Oren did a post, a very famous post, a post that went down in history. And now, looking back as older and wiser podcast hosts upon this gentler time, we’re feeling inspired, but we can’t just copy the post, right? Or, like, maybe we can.
Oren: I’ll just read it; it’s fine. It’s from 2017. It’s not my best work.
Bunny: I mean, that’d be an easy answer. On the other hand, we can say we’re copying it and being entirely faithful, and then add a bunch of stuff about how Oren is good at fighting because he lives in the desert and only wears leather.
Oren: Perfect desert attire. Leather really breathes.
Bunny: Yeah, so today we’re going to be talking about taking inspiration from history, how to do it, how not to do it, and whether history nerds are going to come for our precious story babies. The answer to which is: Yes, probably.
Oren: Maybe? I’m trying to think of a big question about accuracy in historical fiction or fiction that is based on history, at which point the question of what accuracy even means starts to get weird. Like, pfft… different accuracy matters more to different people, I guess.
Bunny: If you want to get philosophical about it, even if you’re writing historical reports or whatever, you’re never going to get it 100%. It’s always going to be falsified to some extent.
Oren: I was hoping to find whether there were any studies on to what extent people’s views of actual history are influenced by either historical fiction or fiction that has a historical vibe to it, and I couldn’t find any. So I can only go by my anecdotes, which is that for a long time my friends group and I in high school believed that The Last Samurai was an accurate portrayal of Meiji Japan. And we just assumed that’s what Meiji Japan was like. And, I don’t know, that seems bad.
Chris: I do think it depends on what is the knowledge base society already has on this topic. But when people’s knowledge is low and they’re not passionate about something, I definitely think people assume what’s in a story is true, especially when it’s a trope that all the stories are using and then it just becomes like a default assumption without people really thinking about it real hard. Whereas if they have a history education, it’s not like it’s going to brainwash them into thinking that it must be true. But for a lot of people, they don’t think that hard about these things, and so it definitely will give them false ideas. I guess it’s hard to tell a story in history without taking some liberties. I think the question is: How big are we willing those liberties to be? And are there other ethical implications when we take certain kinds of liberties with history?
Bunny: I think, in terms of just broadly historical accuracy, a lot of it depends on what expectations you’re setting for your story. For example, something like Game of Thrones implies a much higher bar for realism because it’s trying to be all gritty. And Martin even likes to talk about all the history he took inspiration from, which makes it extra embarrassing that things like the Dothraki are pretty crap when it comes to being historically accurate to the groups that he claims they were inspired by, or literally taken from.
Oren: I mean, the Dothraki don’t make any sense with their own context, let alone, I don’t know what part of them he thinks is inspired by the Plains Indians tribes. But the more obvious inspiration is the Mongol Empire. And they don’t make any sense in that context or in their own context. They’re just a bunch of very violent boys, and their economy is violence, and their relationships are violence, and their entertainment is violence.
Chris: Yeah, I would say that for Game of Thrones, this is not a historical setting. I do think that in many cases the claim that something is historical in some way is used to try to make it look like the storyteller isn’t making biased choices, which is absolutely not true. And when we’re looking at Game of Thrones, the realism in Game of Thrones is not about historical accuracy; it’s about atmosphere, and I think that’s really important when it comes to… Martin said that’s why he put rape in his story, and so it’s very different if you’re like, “Oh, well, this needs to be historically accurate, so I included rape,” or “I was building atmosphere, so I included rape.” One of those things looks more justified than the other, and if it’s a fictional setting, I don’t think that you have an obligation to be historically accurate. And other ethical concerns, like: “Are you representing a group respectfully?” “Are you being respectful to survivors of sexual assault?” become much more important than the idea that you’re trying to be historically accurate when it is literally not history. Not that historical accuracy couldn’t enhance Game of Thrones in some ways, but I feel like at that point, it’s a tool for creating a setting that feels real in building that atmosphere that he wants.
Bunny: And he’s been explicit about wanting to be drawing from history here as well, and he’s definitely saying that to make the setting sound like it is, anyway,
Oren: I think that’s just a clout thing, to be perfectly honest. It’s like if I went around bragging about how my book is based on the Byzantine Empire, it was like a “kinda” in that I had a big fandom of the Byzantine Empire at the time I was writing it, I incorporated some aspects in a completely different context, but that’s what it sounds like to me whenever I hear anyone talk about how “historical” Game of Thrones is. I think that’s just a flex. I don’t think that has anything to really do with how the story was written, especially considering how, if you have even like a passing knowledge of the War of the Roses, you can tell all the stuff that is not in there that would’ve been if this was actually War of the Roses-inspired fiction.
Chris: Can you give us some examples?
Oren: I mean, look at what people in War of the Roses wore. It’s real goofy. Their fashion looks ridiculous. It would be impossible to take that seriously.
Bunny: Oh, look at that hat!
Oren: Yeah, it’s bad.
Bunny: They should be wearing hats like that.
Oren: Also, guns. War of the Roses is a gunpowder war. Not like the Revolution or the Civil War, but firearms existed, and the fact that in the actual War of the Roses, the various leaders tried not to pillage and to spoil the country they were fighting over, because they still wanted it to be intact when they won, and I’m not saying Medieval warfare was nice or gentle; there are many, many, many examples where it was absolutely horrible and brutal, but in that particular instance, they often tried to avoid that, because this was their kingdom they were fighting for. So there are so many parts of the War of the Roses that don’t match up with Westeros at all. So this whole, like, “It’s drawn from history”? No. That’s just a flex. That’s just ’cause it sounds good on social media.
Bunny: Also, if you want a more nuanced breakdown of why the Dothraki are not accurate at all to the steppe people and the Plains Indians, go check out the blog A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry by Brett Devereaux. I hope I’m pronouncing that right. Because, wow, does Martin’s claim that he only put a dash of fantasy in there really not hold up.
Oren: I mean, in general, if anyone ever tells you that a society is 90% warriors, no, no, it’s not. It’s 90% food producers 100% of the time.
Bunny: A lot of the criticism boils down to: Where are the sheep? But I think, if you’re using another setting, like an alternate history setting, or one that seems largely like Medieval-inspired or whatever, if you’re writing a comedy that’s already much lower in realism, people aren’t going to ding you about not being faithful to the fancy hats in the War of the Roses.
Oren: Yeah. To be clear, I’m not suggesting he should have put in the hats.
Bunny: I’m suggesting that.
Oren: I am very well aware of the fact that history does not conform to best narrative practices. So, if you are writing fantasy and you’re inspired by history, I don’t think that means you have to be historically accurate. I think that’s A) impossible, and B) would make stories worse. And yeah, it still annoys me a bit that some people think that Lord of the Rings is an accurate reflection of Medieval life, but I don’t think that can be Tolkien’s fault. I think at some point the responsibility has to be shifted elsewhere.
Bunny: Right, and the exception, I suppose, is that, if you’re setting your story during an actual historical event, and this is like historical fiction or alternate timeline fiction, even then you have to have the bones of the scenario pretty accurate, right?
Chris: Yeah. I definitely think it matters what you are depicting. And again, a lot of times there are just other ethical considerations when it comes to representing something well, besides just, “Is this factually correct or not?” Especially when there’s people involved who got hurt. So, if you’re depicting a specific event in history, I do think you have to worry more about erasing bad stuff that happened. I think Game of Thrones, which is a fantasy version that only uses history as a tool, it’s definitely not supposed to be historical, doesn’t really have any excuse for having atrocities in there, because that’s not real. It’s not erasing them, because it’s a fantasy world. Whereas if you have a real war like World War II, and for instance, in the US the Japanese are put in internment camps, you don’t necessarily want to exploit the pain of Japanese Americans by showing that in any excruciating detail. But at the same time, you also have some obligation to not pretend that the US did not do bad things. And to not make that look like that didn’t happen.
Oren: That can get real gray real quickly, like pretending that internment didn’t happen. Obviously bad. Having a Jewish character in the ‘50s who maybe encounters less antisemitism than would be statistically average? Uh, I’m less upset about that. That was a critique I saw of The Calculating Stars, was a claim that antisemitism was a lot more prevalent in the immediate post-World War II years than that book suggests. From my research, that is probably correct, but it’s not like it is impossible that this Jewish character could have the events happen as they do in the book. It just means that she would’ve been running into more forward-thinking people than were 100% common. And, I don’t know, to me that’s OK, but also, I’m Jewish; I have a reason to speak about this. There are much more complicated arguments that I have no stake in.
Chris: Again, there’s a lot of this balancing factor between how do you make sure that marginalized people that existed in history are not erased, but if they’re marginalized and you’ve got, for instance, grand politics, sometimes those people aren’t well positioned to influence story outcomes, and so then it becomes tricky to figure out how you make it not erase them and still represent them. I know Bridgerton had a lot of controversy around the way that it decided to just reimagine history.
Oren: Yeah, I do not have an answer to that one.
Chris: That’s hard, I know. I don’t feel qualified to talk about that one, but what I want to say is those ethical considerations about things that are particularly sensitive are just more important than, “Okay, we took a random event. Now, did this part of the event actually happen or not?” It can be sometimes more of a matter of fact than it is of it’s sensitive or there’s ethical ramifications about those things in particular.
Oren: Yeah, but I want to complain about how Shogun is not an accurate portrayal of Tokugawa Ieyasu. That’s not accurate! He’s not like that!
Chris: Do you need to complain about Shogun? Do you want to tell us where Shogun hurt you?
Bunny: What is a podcast for, if not complaining, Oren?
Oren: I mean, perhaps in an attempt to be somewhat constructive, Shogun is an interesting example. This new TV show, which is actually the second time this book has been made into a show, and it is an interesting example of accuracy in historical fiction because, first of all, it’s alternate history in that all the names are changed, but you still know who everyone is very easily. It’s not hard to figure them out. Like, Toranaga is obviously Tokugawa. The dead Taiko is clearly Toyotomi Hideyoshi. But there’s a lot of stuff like that, and obviously Blackthorn is William Adams. It was a real person, real English guy who came to Japan. So that’s all there. Then you get into the question of how much does it matter that in this version, Toranaga is this really upstart, ethical, almost Ned Stark-like character who doesn’t want power and is super loyal to the heir of the previous ruler and he only goes after power ’cause he has no choice, as opposed to the real Tokugawa, who really wanted power and forced the heir of the previous ruler to commit suicide. Does it matter? Is that a big deal? I don’t know. It bothers me a little bit, but I’m not sure it’s a huge issue. I don’t think there are a lot of Tokugawa apologists out there. Maybe there are in Japan, I don’t know. Not Japanese, but certainly in the United States, there aren’t a lot of people being like, “Tokugawa did nothing wrong.”
Bunny: I think it’s a salient observation that the real-world implications of the things that you’re changing, if it’s just some guy in history who played a small role and nobody gives a crap about, you’re probably not doing any damage by messing around with that story a bit. Whereas if you’re claiming there weren’t concentration camps, now that is a different matter, my friend.
Oren: Especially ’cause there are real people who claim that, and who think that’s a thing, and those people can die mad about it.
Chris: Or just all the people who assume that any period of history in Europe doesn’t have anybody except for white people, where it’s like, look, a lot of things happened in Europe and it’s a big enough place. People came and went. So it’s not necessarily as white as people think it was. And so, again, looking at a period of Europe and not looking for where there was diversity can play into narratives that then are used by people to complain about any story that has, like, a Black person in it, for instance.
Oren: Right. Although Shogun is also interesting from another angle. Shogun the book uses Blackthorn as its main character, Blackthorn being the fictional equivalent of William Adams. Now the show can’t deviate from that too much. Like, they make some changes, but they can’t not have Blackthorn as the main character. The problem is that the real William Adams didn’t have anything to do with Tokugawa’s rise to power. He was there, but he was important afterwards. He was important for helping Tokugawa break the Portuguese shipping monopoly, and for Tokugawa’s… ultimately didn’t go anywhere, but at the time, important attempts to build a European-style navy for Japan. So he was an important person, but not for the specific period of time that the story covers. And so the show is a little unclear what to do with him. In the book, the author just goes with the idea that none of these Japanese people know what a gun is, and he teaches them how to use guns.
Chris: Hmm.
Oren: The show was not willing to be that inaccurate, probably ’cause it’s insulting. So instead they went with the idea that he has better canons than they had, which is maybe possible. But then they very quickly learned how to use the canons, so we’re back at square one of why is Blackthorn here. The answer right now is that he has witty things to say. He’s a very witty guy.
Chris: Oren, do you know why the original guy was kept in Japan?
Oren: Because he was very useful to Tokugawa, because Tokugawa did not like the Portuguese. He really didn’t like Christianity.
Chris: But what about him was useful?
Oren: Because otherwise Tokugawa had no one to tell him about the Portuguese except the Portuguese.
Chris: Okay.
Oren: There were so few Europeans who had made it to Japan at that point that he just needed someone who understood European politics and knew what was going on, and Adams fit that bill.
Chris: Okay.
Bunny: See, when I say that history nerds will come for your precious story babies, I am talking about Oren.
Chris: And also me, because then Oren tells me. I wouldn’t know that all of this was wrong, but then he tells me, so then I do know, and then I’m grumpy.
Oren: Yeah, now Chris is going to make it all your problem.
Chris: And then I, on the podcast, tell Oren to complain about the show. So people besides me have to suffer in knowing that Shogun isn’t accurate.
Bunny: And so it spreads and spreads.
Oren: I don’t dislike Shogun. I’m enjoying it just fine, but I do feel like Blackthorn is a bit ancillary to the actual story they want to tell.
Bunny: Yeah. And to go back to the point about who are you representing in this historical or historical-inspired setting, one community and genre that has had this conversation quite a bit, in which there’s not really a consensus, is steampunk. Steampunk is interesting in that it is both a genre and a community disconnected from media in the genre. It is also just an aesthetic that people like to dress up for, without being connected to a particular book, which makes it especially interesting. And so there’s been a lot of conversation about whether taking this Victorian aesthetic and sensibility, whether that is a kind of Victorian nostalgia. The Victorian period was not like a super great time, guys. This was a very colonialist time then.
Chris: Yeah, I think you could really make the argument for just about a lot of fantasy genres, and I can understand the fear of glorifying, like we’ve talked before about glorifying monarchy, for instance, and that’s maybe not great, and that there are still some places where monarchy could be a real threat. I personally would, again, not go so far to say that this aesthetic is automatically bad because we are validating periods of history.
Bunny: No, and I’m not saying that either, to be clear. I think that steampunk is quite fun, and the aesthetic is fun, and I like to put gears on things as well, but it does leave non-white fans in an interesting scenario. So there’s a cosplayer named Monique Poirier (Poirier? I write these things down, and then I say them, and immediately second-guess myself because I forget that this is an audio medium) who is Native American. And so she’s written about how to incorporate her cultural identity into something that’s very Eurocentric. And then, when she tries to do it, she goes to conventions and then people ask her where are all her feathers, if she’s inspired by Native Americans.
Chris: Augh!
Oren: Yeah…
Bunny: That’s painful.
Oren: I mean, that’s weirdly gross, I guess short of saying, don’t do that!
Chris: Don’t stereotype people, please.
Bunny: Don’t stereotype people. That’s good advice. Hot takes for Mythcreants.
Oren: Let me put it this way: I think that the most viable path forward is for us to work on creating spaces where people don’t do that, and then having us folks be like, “Yeah, we’re going to do the English-inspired steampunk, ’cause I’m not going to do Native American-inspired steampunk. I’m not Native American.” And then we can just try to be better people, I guess is the way I would solve that problem.
Chris: Yeah. I would also say that steampunk is already diverged from history quite a bit, and yes, a lot of its aesthetic is inspired by Victorian England, but I don’t necessarily think that it can’t branch out more, because it still has a lot of aesthetic components, like the clockwork, that could be combined with other things. And I feel like it’s so loosely based on history already that I would rather move towards just detaching it altogether. In this case, I would almost say that steampunk is better if you don’t pretend it’s real world. Put it in a second world, do what you want with it.
Bunny: The problem with steampunk, too, is that, at least when most people think about it, they do tie this so much to alternate history. I’ve been doing research on this as part of my senior project, and it’s very difficult to find a definition that’s not related to a diverging timeline in actual history or something, which sucks for me, because I’m writing a second world steampunk-type thing, and so I’m like, “This doesn’t help.” But it is closely tied to that, and I don’t know if it will ever be completely divorced from that, especially since some of the founding works in the genre were alternate histories, like The Difference Engine, for example. But Monique Poirier (Poirier? I’m so sorry. Monique) has, as a cosplayer… a lot of steampunk cosplayers come up with histories for their characters and stuff. So she sort of asked how could native technologies be translated into a sort of steampunk setting or aesthetic? And she went with that. And so she came up with this whole alternate North America where the tribes are in a confederacy that includes the Kingdom of Hawaii and stuff like that, which I thought was an interesting and new way to go about it, rather than just remixing England again.
Chris: It also sounds like a great way to freshen up steampunk, too.
Oren: That sounds really cool. I’m glad that she is writing that. I’m not going to.
Chris: Well, yeah.
Oren: But for me it’s going to be, if I want to make steampunk cool and interesting, I’m going to set it in a world where there’s no ground and there’s just floating islands of stone that you have to take airships between. That’s how I’m going to freshen up steampunk.
Bunny: And then you fight over hammers, It’s clearly not Earth, and so you don’t have to worry about the fact that you’re in a colonial setting at a specific time on Earth anymore. You can make it go on its own way.
Chris: Yeah, I’d love to see more second-world steampunk.
Bunny: Let us free ourselves from England and create wonderful gear-powered contraptions.
Oren: Isn’t Girl Genius second world?
Chris: Yes, I believe so. Or if it is Earth, it’s only very loosely.
Bunny: Well, there are, like, German…
Chris: Yeah, it’s true. They do have clearly a family that comes from Germany.
Oren: Are they German or are they like Eisenfaust?
Chris: I feel like it’s probably the latter one.
Oren: Are they French or are they Montague?
Chris: Yes, I suspect it’s the latter one, where it’s clearly Earth-inspired, but not actually. It’s been a while since I’ve read that one.
Bunny: Yeah, it’s been a while for me too. But I do remember that they have those goblin guys, I… I don’t remember what they’re called, but they all have really thick German accents.
Oren: Hmm. I would probably not make that choice, but sure.
Chris: Yeah, I don’t… I don’t recommend…
Bunny: But they’re not goblins. What are they called?
Chris: Okay, but they’re not humans. Just don’t recommend taking a non-human species/race or whatever and applying a real-world ethnicity of any kind. I don’t know. I wouldn’t complain if it was the English.
Oren: Certainly not in a way where it’s really obvious where you’re like, “Oh, those guys are Germans.” Germany’s not really in danger from this. I’m not worried about people mistreating Germans ’cause of it. It just doesn’t feel good.
Bunny: Okay. So I’m trying to look this up. First of all, I looked up “girl genius species” and it’s correcting it to “girl genus species.”
Oren: Well, that’s not helpful.
Bunny: To which Wikipedia says, “female.” So thank you. So I can’t find this right now, but it’s true that a lot of the characters have distinct German names, but I think you’re right, Chris. And not just German-accent alternate-species guys, but I think you’re right that there’s not actual Germany there.
Chris: As far as what makes sense in the real world, I think For All Mankind is a good example of alternate history that is molded in such a way that we include more marginalized characters, and it feels based in history, and is rigorous enough that it feels justified that it takes place on Earth. Because the premise of For All Mankind is that Russia or the USSR got to the moon first, and that extended the space race, which pushed both the USSR and the United States to invest more in their space programs, so we had more cool space things than before.
Bunny: Bigger monsters!
Chris: There we go.
Bunny: Oh yeah, yeah. I remembered them. Continue.
Chris: Those are not in For All Mankind; those are in Girl Genius, by the way.
Bunny: Crossover? Crossover?
Chris: Yeah. But in For All Mankind, as an example, the USSR shows off by getting a woman to the moon first. And at that time there are no female astronauts in the United States, and so then they’re like, “Oh, [?? 23:36 ??], we need to match them.” And so then they restart, find the old… The astronauts were real; the US really did train some women to be astronauts only to cut the program. So in this alternate history version, they go and bring some of them back and get that started. And so the various levers like that are pulled so that we can have faster social progress during the course of the show. But it’s very much somebody’s looking at: “Here’s the specific events that happened in history, and here’s how they would go differently, and then here’s the effects that would have,” and it has rigorousness that a lot of people like from historical settings. Whereas when you have something like steampunk, where being accurate to history was never the point in the first place, it feels like maybe you should just give it its own world and break free of that.
Oren: That’s certainly my plan. Although, before we leave, I do have to complain a little bit about For All Mankind, because it does show an interesting problem that when you create a point of divergence, you change more and more. It becomes increasingly difficult to include references that the audience will recognize and still be believable. Some of them are small, like there’s a lot of pop culture stuff that, if you really think about it, probably wouldn’t have happened in this new timeline. But the one that just really gets me is that Al Gore is elected president in 2000, even though in this timeline Clinton was never president, so Al Gore was never vicepresident. Why was he even running?
Chris: He gets speech coaching much earlier.
Bunny: He’s a cool dude!
Oren: Who do these people think Al Gore was before he was vice president? I don’t think Al Gore was popular enough on his own to be a presidential ticket without Clinton. It seems unlikely to me.
Chris: And when he was running for president, the big complaint was that he just had no stage presence. That he was like a boring nerd that would just talk at you in a boring way.
Bunny: Hey, as a boring nerd who just talks at you in a boring way, I take offense to that.
Chris: But then I remember when the documentary An Inconvenient Truth came out, and he was actually a good speaker in that documentary, everybody’s like, “What the hell, Gore? Why couldn’t you do this earlier?” So I’ll just imagine this is an alternate timeline where he got speech coaching because he didn’t get the VP pick.
Oren: All right. With that very important historical critique done, I think we are going to have to call this episode to a close.
Chris: If this episode inspired you to write about history, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Aman Jabber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
[Music]
Outro: This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.
If you’re a writer, you’ve probably heard that heroes are more sympathetic when they’re underdogs, but what does that mean? Is any hero an underdog so long as the villain is stronger? Why does it even matter? This week, we’re talking about all things underdog: how they’re defined, what makes them so useful, and why being an underdog doesn’t automatically mean your protagonist is great. Plus, did you remember that Shape of Water had a plot outside of the sexy fish guy?
Show Notes The Glass Cliff * Judy Hops * Moist von Lipwig * Captain Ed Mercer * Miles Morales * Elisa Esposito * Katniss Everdeen * Wade Watts * Inigo Montoya * Princess Ariel * Darrow O’Lykos TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Paloma.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You are listening to the Mythcreants Podcast. With your hosts Oren Ashkenazi. Chris. Winkle and Bunny. [opening song]
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast! I’m Chris, and with me is…
Oren: Oren.
Chris: and…
Bunny: Bunny!
Oren: How many of us do you think could fit under a dog? It’d have to be pretty big, right? Like a very large dog, like maybe a Great Dane?
Bunny: I could probably fit under a Great Dane, but I don’t know if there’d be much room for either of you.
Oren: Yeah, we have to get a couple of ’em in there. This is we’re, this is gonna be a little logistically challenging, but I think we can manage it.
Bunny: Underdogs.
Chris: Any case. This time we’re talking about depicting Underdog Heroes because underdogs are automatically heroes, of course.
Oren: Naturally.
Chris: Naturally.
Oren: That is a problem in various historical conflicts when people try to make entertaining narratives out of them because sometimes the underdog is not the good guy.
[Group laughter]
Oren: I’m not saying that the allies in World War II were great, but I am saying the access was worse and they were definitely the underdogs in that fight.
Bunny: But there is a reason why so many heroes are underdogs in stories. It works much, much better, makes the character relatable and often sympathetic, which aids attachment. It adds tension because then they have an uphill battle, so not making your hero an underdog can sometimes mean that you have a pretty boring story. So storytellers have a pretty strong incentive to make their heroes underdogs – not that needs to be exactly like that all the time. Sometimes it just depends on how you flavor it, but, generally, the villain has to be more powerful or whatever obstacles have to seem more powerful than the hero.
Chris: So we just need farm boys, right? It’s just all farm boys.
Bunny: Just all farm boys. That’s the solution. Just put a farm boy in every story.
Oren: So are we defining underdog fairly broadly, then? That was something I was thinking about. I was like, most heroes are less powerful than their antagonist, and if there’s no direct villain, then they are less powerful than whatever force they’re opposing. How broadly are we defining underdog?
Chris: I would personally say in this case, ’cause obviously we could define it really broadly. We’re talking about heroes where the author is doing something very specific in the beginning to set them up as less powerful than the people around them, even the other protagonists, generally. If they’re like outcasts, for instance, that would be one way or something where they have an unusual circumstance that is pretty unique to that character; whereas, for instance, an underdog that just has bigger obstacles might be a captain of the ship that has a whole crew and they’re facing a much bigger villain with a whole fleet. Technically, those are all underdogs, but we haven’t done anything that’s special to that if our captain is the main character, to make our captain seem unusually put upon or powerless. I think leaders are worth talking about because it is hard to make leaders an underdog, but not impossible.
Oren: Right. This is why Frodo is more of an underdog than Aragorn is, even though Aragorn is technically still fighting a much more powerful enemy, but Aragorn is also a badass and has experience and knows what he’s doing. Whereas Frodo is veryinexperienced and small and has even fewer abilities than Aragorn does, so it’s a spectrum of underdog, as it were.
Bunny: It does seem like the underdog heroes tend to have humble backgrounds where they don’t have very many means or much money, or they’re low in a society even by that society’s standard, and it seems like all odds are against them in a way that’s greater than just having fewer ships than the enemy.
Chris: Yeah, I think Frodo is interesting too, because in the context of the Shire, he is not an underdog, and the movies gloss over this, but in the books, he is basically an aristocrat.
Bunny: [giggles] Really?
Chris: The hobbit version of an aristocrat, yeah, and Sam is just his gardener, and there’s definitely a class difference between them, but of course the movie kind of gets rid of that, but then as soon as he leaves the shire. The idea is that he’s going with characters who are a lot more worldly and a lot more powerful, and now in that context he feels small.
Oren: But I think Bunny also had an important point about how, generally speaking, if you want a character to come across as an underdog, you’re gonna have them be from a less advantageous background, partly because that increases – makes the character more relatable for most of us. Most of us are not aristocrats.
Bunny: Or captains of space fleets, unfortunately.
Oren: So yeah, if an underdog ends up being a captain, it’s gonna be something like, uh, they scrounged and saved and bought a really junk ship that secretly turned out to be great anyway – don’t ask questions about that.
[group laughter]Bunny: Or they really had to fight hard to get into their captain school and really prove themselves in a way that the other kids didn’t or something.
Oren: Yeah, they had to walk uphill to Captain School both ways.
[group laughter]Bunny: I guess it’s a question partly of where the story starts because, if in that situation, I would think that they actually would not be a captain right away because by the time they become a captain, they’re not really an underdog anymore, but if that’s like book two, then you’ve already got attached to them in their underdog position where they were still scraping to put away money so that maybe someday they could be a captain in book one, for instance. Whereas if you want a character to start your story as a leader and still be an underdog, and I think the biggest reason to do this is – the trickiest thing with underdogs is giving them agency and letting ’em actually change things in the story. Whereas leaders are well positioned to actually make a difference and solve bigger problems, but I think that you need to make it so that their position of leader still seems precarious.
Oren: It can be precarious and you would also play up that being a leader is a responsibility and a burden. more than a cool thing that they have, but I’m not sure if that would help.
Bunny: Yeah, I don’t know if that makes them an underdog. It can be helped with sympathy if you do it well. I’ve, frankly, seen more than a few stories of ‘Oh, being this cool, powerful position is such a burden’. Yeah, that’s a showing versus telling problem. You’ve gotta show how it’s a burden not just talk endlessly about how it is a burden.
Chris: It’s hard being rich.
[group laughter]Bunny: You don’t understand the place where I usually get my nails done, just closed. I think the best thing you could do, honestly, is give them a position that nobody wants because it’s something that’s a complete disaster and as soon as it goes belly up, whoever’s leading it will take the fall.
Oren: Right! Like ‘Yield, you’ve been given a command – Yay! – It’s one of the tiny outposts in the middle of nowhere that no one cares about – Oh… – and hey, there’s super secret alien enemies that just happen to be out there. Have fun.’
Chris: They did that in Zootopia, too.
Bunny: So, I think Going Postal is a good example of this, right? Where Moist is given charge of the post office that has been defunct for like 40 years.
Oren: Yeah.
Bunny: It has two remaining employees that are still there, even though they haven’t gotten paid and it’s filled with undelivered mail, so it’s a complete disaster and it’s a position that nobody wants.
Oren: Plus his name is Moist, so that kind of makes him an underdog by default, I would argue.
[group laughter]Bunny: That’s a good point.
Chris: There are real situations in which, for instance, you have a company that’s failing and as a result, the board switches who the CEO is and finally give somebody, for instance, a woman or somebody who’s marginalized a chance at leadership, but now that person is expected to turn the company around, even though it’s the last white guy that got it in the position that it’s in now, and if it doesn’t get turned around, they take the blame. It’s like a real dynamic that happens.
Oren: The glass cliff that’s called, I love that term.
Chris: So that kind of situation, at that point, the leader is an underdog, even though they’re in a position of power, they’ve been set up to fail. If you have a character that you know is on the verge of getting fired for the right reasons, it can’t be because they’re undeserving.
Oren: It can’t just be ’cause they’re bad at their job.
Chris: I mean, Zootopia actually is a good example of this. Judy’s not really in a big position of power, but when she finally gets put on a case, her boss has been very unfair to her, and so he’s looking in it for an excuse to fire her.
Bunny: Yeah, he gives her like a day or two to solve this massive case.
Chris: But a bad example I think would be The Orville, because they try to make him an underdog, but it’s like completely his fault. Like he does not deserve this position. He does not deserve being Captain.
Oren: Chris, how can you say he doesn’t deserve to fail-up? Is that not every mediocre white man’s role? Is that not our birthright?
[Group laughter]Bunny: It’s the iron ladder that goes up the glass cliff.
Oren: You just keep making different materials and different things of height. I go, this is good. We keep this going.
Bunny: Yeah, it goes up above the glass cliff to the iron mountain. It’s so sturdy.
Chris: I think it’s also possible to put a character in a position of responsibility before they’re ready, but then you need a really good reason why they’re getting that position.
Oren: It shouldn’t feel like a reward. A lot of it depends on like the context of the story: ‘Hey, does this job actually seem hard and that really bad things are gonna happen to you and that maybe having it is worse than not having it, ’cause if so, you could be an underdog for getting it, but not if you’re Scott Lang getting made into Antman.’ That’s that. That’s just a job with all upsides, and so when the fact that he’s like, ‘Oh no, I’m not ready,’ Well, maybe you should let someone else do it then Scott.
Bunny: I do think one of the keys there is the presence of other people who should just be doing instead, like in Antman, where there’s clearly, but ‘oh, she can’t be a hero, she’s a woman who’s clearly way more qualified to do this.’, but if it’s a very necessary task and your hero is really, for some reason, the only person who can do it, then them having to do it before they’re ready…
Chris: I think Into the Spider-verse did a good job with this dynamic where Miles Morales is very clearly an underdog. He’s just a kid who randomly gets these powers and he is trying to get through school and he makes a fool out of himself at school by accident with his new powers – How embarrassing – then other people, other spider people show up and they’re all absurdly qualified, and we’re cheering for Miles. We’re like, ‘Miles, you must learn your powers,’ and they qualify him to be the one doing the heroism because everyone else is falling apart. I think it did good. It did a good job with that, where the hero is underqualified, but there is a genuine reason why they need to be the one to do a thing.
Oren: Yeah, there’re various spider stories are pretty good at that. Spider-Man does a, usually, pretty good job of seeming like an underdog as long as people stop like writing those, ‘Actually Spider-Man is the fifth strongest hero in the entire MCU,’. That’s a thing people like to do and no. No, it’s important that we not think about him that way or the story stops working.
Chris: Yeah, I really like the Into the Spider-verse depiction of Miles Morales and him being out of place at school. It’s just so perfect because again, so many people just pull these cartoonish bullies out of nowhere that come and just agro on the hero for no discerning reason and instantly start with violence in a very exaggerated depiction of what typical bullying looks like and it just feels very cheap and it feels like they’re not actually handling the issue responsibly, whereas I really think more skilled storytellers will take smaller issues and then make them feel like they matter. I think this is a great example because Miles Morales ends up going to a new school that his friends didn’t go to. They went to a different school, and so now he feels really out of place. It managed to bring that to life and make him feel like an underdog just because he feels different at the school and is not at home at the school without just being like, ‘Oh, I’m different because I have magical magic,’ and then every side character’s like, ‘Oh, the hero is so weird,’ and we haven’t actually shown anything that’s truly weird about the main character, except for maybe their cool magic, which nobody knows about.
Oren: One of the things about underdog heroes is that you have to be prepared to bridge this gap you’ve created between the underdog and whatever their opposition is, because sure, having a big gap makes the underdog more sympathetic, it makes it easier to relate to them. It builds tension. It’s good but, do you know how you’re gonna cross it? Because the reason it does all those things is because it looks like it’s gonna be hard to cross and if you aren’t, you can end up with something like The City We Became, where the bad guy is supposedly, basically, Cthulhu and the main characters are brand new and they don’t know what they’re doing, they’ve only just gotten their powers. This seems like it’ll be really hard, but then every time Cthulhu attacks them, they spontaneously generate a new ability and beat Cthulhu. By the third time, it’s like, ‘Wow, I wonder if that’s gonna happen again – Oh, look, it did,’ because that story doesn’t have any insulation between the heroes and the villain.
And it’s a classic problem if all various urban fantasy TV shows have the same issue where the bad guys have nothing to do but show up and try to kill the hero. The hero can’t die, so they, the bad guys, run away and now they’re not scary anymore.
Chris: Yeah, this is why I think the farm boys ending up having to have a secret lineage tends to pop up so often, but that can like de-underdog them if you’re not careful, because if there’s a trial and they’re going to court and how will they pay the bills and suddenly they have all the money. They’re definitely not an underdog anymore, and this also isn’t much of a conflict anymore.
Oren: It’s very easy for that to feel contrived. In general, my take for the most reliable way to do this is to have the villain not immediately know who the hero is, so the hero is so insignificant that the villain does not even know their name at this point and that makes it much easier to give your hero time to get better until they’re actually ready to face the villain. The character of Sierra from Shadow Shapers does this really well – shoutout, that’s a novel, I’ll put that in the show notes – where she starts out with no magic at all and has been denied her magic ’cause thanks to the patriarchy, and she’s gotta learn really quick ’cause there’s an evil wizard on the loose. This makes her seem like a big underdog, makes her seem relatable, but the evil wizard isn’t going after her specifically, so she has some time to figure this stuff out. She doesn’t have to immediately beat him in the first chapter.
Chris: Yeah, giving your antagonist some other plan that does not involve killing the hero or, if you can manage it, giving them a good reason to kill the hero, but it has to be like a real intuitive reason, not a, ‘I wanna crush your spirit’. No reason is better than a bad reason, let’s put it that way. Or some other reason why the villain can’t just instantly smash them like a bug.
Bunny: Not knowing about them is a good way to do that. I was thinking of the Shape of Water. Where Eliza, is that her name? I think it is – is a disabled custodian in this government facility, people overlook her and so she has little or no social capital, and it takes a long time for the villain to realize that she’s even up to something.
Oren: I gotta admit, I had forgotten there was a villain in that movie.
Chris: There is a villain, but it’s mostly sexy Fishman.
Oren: I remember the Fishman romance. It is like ‘There was more to that movie than that’.
Chris: Yes, there was a whole external plot. There was a weird body horror with the fingers.
Oren: Ah!
Chris: I mean, I think another important thing about underdog heroes is again, how you manage allies that are more powerful than heroes, allies, mentors, secondary characters, because on one hand they can be really helpful in getting your underdog to a place where they can make a difference, right? That’s what the mentor is for, basically to give them skills, to give them equipment, whatever they need to actually participate in the story, but that can also turn around and be a problem if all of those characters are again, telling the underdog what to do. If they’re a hero, they have to figure things out for themselves, make their own choices. Taking care of all of the problems for them, which is something that we see repeatedly in many stories, especially when the hero is a young woman.
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: So, you need ways to allow them to help, but then just get them out of the way.
Oren: Yeah, I recommend killing them all the moment that they have fulfilled the use you needed for them in the plot. Just have them immediately self-destruct. Done. Solved that problem. Moving on.
[Group laughter]Chris: Acme, anvil falls from the sky. What it takes can depend on what kind of conflicts you have in your story. If everything is a fighting conflict, then you wouldn’t have a mentor who is just older or gets sick or injured and just not physically up to fighting. If you have social conflicts, you could have a situation where nobody trusts the mentor or powerful characters anymore, whereas you have a down to earth relatable hero that people might listen to. Sometimes you can have situations where the antagonist goes for your hero when they’re alone or the hero sees something that they need to intervene in when the other characters aren’t present, but generally you want some ongoing reason why they have a way to contribute and why they can make a difference and that they’re in the center of things, as opposed to having like your peasant character and then having your court politics and your peasant is still in their village and has no way to affect the court politics, which is a thing that sometimes happens in people’s manuscripts that has to be taken care of.
Oren: Yeah, that’s when you add another POV.
Bunny: Nooo, no, no.
Oren: Occasionally cut-back to your peasant character to assure us that the peasant is still the main character.
Chris: Oren, you gotta really resist the allure of the dark side. Okay.
Bunny: I don’t know, this might be a call for help.
Chris: No lightning, no four-stroke.
Oren: The call of the dark side is so much shorter. Well, I don’t even know if I would say easier, but definitely shorter. Definitely takes less consideration to figure out.
Bunny: So I was looking online to try to figure out how most people tend to define underdogs and who they consider to be underdogs, and I ran across quite a few characters that I don’t think are underdogs.
Oren: Oh yeah?
Bunny: Like Wade Watts from Ready Player One, like he’s got all of the aesthetics of an underdog. He’s poor and lives in a trailer or whatever, but the main conflict of the story, he is ridiculously overqualified for. He’s read or watched every eighties property ever and is always on top of the ball whenever there’s a challenge. He knows everything, so you can’t just be poor. I will say, the poverty, having read this years ago, before it was commonly mocked, I read this before, it was not cool. Part of the point of doing an underdog is to build sympathy for the main character and build that attachment, and I don’t necessarily think that just because they have the skills that they need to win the day. That makes them not an underdog because they still have that sympathy factor and some of that relatability, and a lot of times a character like this main character that attracts an audience will have both the candy and the spinach factors, right? They need some candy, they need some positive traits in order to justify why they’re the main character and bring a bright side. Bring a little bit of wish fulfillment so that it’s not just all doom and gloom. So, yes, it’s true that in the context of the virtual reality, he is definitely very capable and a lot of his downsides, his weaknesses, are negated. They do sometimes, switch back to the real world, but I wouldn’t necessarily say that he’s not an underdog because a lot of the important things about underdogs, like building that sympathy, are definitely present in the book, even if you think it’s bad, this is still a technique it uses to engage readers.
Yeah. It’s also that he very quickly becomes rich when he wins the first challenge and then his home gets blown up, which sucks for him, I will admit, it does suck when your home gets blown up, but then he like moves to the big city where there’s no lag and buys expensive equipment and also a sex doll for some reason.
Oren: That’s fun times for everyone, but I would say that from, at least from my understanding of Ready Player One, I think that you are both right in that it is definitely setting him up as an underdog. We can question if it is doing that effectively. That sounds to me like it also wants to give him tons of candy and that kind of backfires in a lot of ways.
Bunny: But I would say that for most underdogs, the goal at some point in the story is for them to gain in status and get the cool things. The goal is for the audience to get attached to them as they’re an underdog and then want that thing, want that for them. Want them to level up, want them to get riches, so at some point they are going to not be so much of an underdog anymore usually, and maybe it happens early in Ready Player One, but at the same time, the setup Ready Player One uses is very similar to a lot of other stories that use underdogs.
Chris: Fair enough. Another one that came up was an Inigo Montoya.
Oren: From Princess Bride!
Chris: Hmm, he has a tragic backstory.
Bunny: But he seems to be a pretty equal swordsman to the guy he is trying to get revenge on.
Chris: We do establish that they’re working for, oh, what’s his face? Um, because he was an alcoholic and he was not doing well, and then he doesn’t have work. He goes and gets drunk again. So yeah, that one I would say at the very least, is subtle.
Oren: So in the movie, I have no idea what’s in the book. I’ve not read the book, but in the movie, at the beginning, he’s just an antagonist. I guess you could say he’s an underdog because Wesley is the best at everything.
Bunny: Underdog antagonists. Wow.
Chris: You can have underdog antagonists.
Oren: Yeah, that does happen, but also I don’t think it’s obvious how great Wesley is until after he’s beaten Montoya, and then at the end where they have to break it into the castle, a little bit but not really, ’cause by once they get in the door, it’s like, ‘Yeah, look, there’s a guy, a bunch of mooks,’ he takes care of him and now he’s gonna go fight a guy who we’ve never really established as being particularly good at sword fighting.
Bunny: Look, he has six fingers or something, and that means he’s got the good sword fighting gene.
Oren: He’s got that extra finger for really good pommel control.
Chris: I can identify ways he’s supposed to be sympathetic, but I feel like certainly if I were looking for, ‘Here’s some underdogs,’ I would not just pick him.
Bunny: Another one is Katniss, definitely, who I feel it’s similar to Wade and she’s actually very well equipped to win the Hunger Games.
Chris: Although one of the big plot points in the First Hunger Games book, yes, she’s definitely designed to have the right skillset, similar to Wade is, but we also make a big deal about money mattering and that they need sponsors. So yeah, I think that there’s definitely a balance between, we want a character to be an underdog, but they still do need a way to participate in the plot and succeed.
Oren: I think the Hunger Games does mess up a little bit in that it gives Katniss the right skills, but that it does not give its main antagonists for most of the Hunger Games, the privileged tributes, it does not give them the right skills. For some reason they’re all trained in close quarters combat as if that’s the main thing that matters in the Hunger Games, so I do think there is a little bit of that. This at least has a problem at the beginning where she’s trying to keep her family fed and also lives in a super oppressive regime, so that helps a bit, but yeah, the Hunger Games is definitely doing some sleight of hand of like ‘Just, I ignore the fact that this protagonist has exactly the skills necessary to win this game’.
Bunny: Yeah, I guess the thing that I’m associating with the underdog protagonist, which is maybe why Katniss and Wade both get to me a bit, is that I associate underdogs with needing to improve from their starting status, and neither of them really have to.
Oren: Katniss does have to improve her ability to fake a romance on camera.
[Group laughter]Bunny: That’s true. She does need to do that.
Oren: She’s really bad at that at the beginning, and she gets better by the end, so I think I love that journey for her.
Bunny: With cake camouflage guy.
Chris: I do think that is nice when we get to see a character improve and that could have definitely been something, I think, in Ready Player One, again, just the way the plot is set up where all of the important skills are knowing obscure trivia, I feel like that would’ve been a little bit hard, not that this is good. That would’ve been a little bit hard to bring Wade up to speed during the course of the story.
Bunny: Yeah, that could’ve made it worse actually.
Chris: Yeah, I think with Katniss Everdeen, I would probably keep her skills that are very useful, but then add additional skills that are just important for understanding the game and doing the right things out in the arena that she has to learn in addition, but yeah, I think Orin has a good point about what it’s supposed to be, is that there are career hunger games players, even though only one of ’em can live, but they’ve been prepared for this their entire life and so that is supposed to give them a huge advantage, and it’s not as big as we would expect considering.
Oren: And the Hunger Games definitely has it a little difficult, because the trick I would normally use to preserve an underdog protagonist are hard to make work in a big arena deathmatch, not impossible, but difficult because if the other tributes actually were good at the things that win, the Hunger Games, which are stealth, tracking, survival, stuff like that, Katniss would just be dead. It would be very hard to justify that she lives so long. Now, I’m not saying you couldn’t do it. I can think of a few options, but we are running close to running out of time, so it might be a little late to get into those.
Bunny: Okay. Speed round. Two more. Ariel from The Little Mermaid.
Chris: Mmm, I’m gonna say no. She is a princess.
Bunny: She’s a princess.
Oren: She’s a princess, but her dad sucks.
Chris: Yeah, but I still feel like she gets to disobey him, and for the most part, the way that she, for instance, just doesn’t show up to the concert at the beginning of the movie, if we’re talking about the Disney version of The Little Mermaid, to me, that just speaks of a person who’s used to not having consequences for their actions. I’m gonna say no on that one.
Bunny: Now, Darrow from Red Rising.
Oren: Maybe for the first 20 pages, before he gets his super-training, right? And then he’s, before he becomes like a sup, a literal golden boy. Okay. Here’s the thing, Darrow should be an underdog, I think from a setup perspective. He is, because his house, even though this doesn’t make any sense, his house has way less stuff than every other house and his people don’t wanna obey him and stuff like that, even though he is personally really good and super skilled and good at everything. I think he could have been an underdog. The thing that makes Darrow not feel like an underdog is that he wins every challenge via a hidden plan turning point, which gives the impression that he can’t ever fail because anything that looks bad can just be revealed to actually be part of his plan the whole time.
Bunny: Sounds like he’s similar to Wade, right? There’s definitely, ‘I’m trying to evoke the underdog to give him sympathy in the beginning and get people to get attached to him’, but then really what we want is lots of candy for him.
Oren: Look, it’s hard to have underdogs win conflicts. Okay, I get it.
Chris: Yeah, exactly.
Bunny: Now what you need to do is make Darrow reference Monty Python.
Oren: Yeah, that would do it.
Chris: I think if we’re looking at underdogs comparing Ariel to Cinderella, right? Cinderella is definitely an underdog.
Bunny: Oh, they prototypical underdog.
Chris: The prototypical-underdog, exactly.
Oren: All right. Well, we are definitely out of time now. I think we’re gonna have to call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you would like us underdogs to become the overdogs, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: I think the overdogs are like a kind of levitating wolf, but before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Aman Jabber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel, and then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. [Outro music]
Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast opening, closing theme The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.
Delicious food, spacious housing, and a supportive partner: what do they all have in common? They’re all forms of wish fulfillment, and that’s our topic today! Wish fulfillment is an important element of storytelling that rarely gets talked about, and when it is brought up, it’s almost always in a negative context. There are reasons for that, but the idea is so much more than its worst examples. Listen on for a discussion on how wish fulfillment works, the best ways to add it, and why it should come in the form of cats.
Show Notes Why the Term Mary Sue Should be Retired * Candy and Spinach * The Room * The Name of the Wind * The Raksura * Pride and Prejudice * Animal Companions * Morwen’s Cats * Legends and Lattes TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Elizabeth.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Intro: You are listening to the Mythcreant podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[Music]
Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren, and with me today is:
Bunny: Bunny.
Oren: And:
Chris: Chris.
Oren: We don’t actually have a topic today. We’re just gonna talk about airships and Discworld and why oppressed mages are bad, and all of my wishes will be fulfilled.
Bunny: Well, I’m sold.
Oren: Yeah, that’s basically the same as having an episode, right?
Bunny: Yeah. A+ episode design. Would listen, would talk again. [laughter]
Oren: So we’re talking about wish fulfillment, which is not a term that we coined or anything, but it does feel like we might be one of the few sites that talk about it in any depth.
Chris: Or in a positive way, in some cases.
Oren: It is really commonly derided, and I understand why to a certain extent. It is often associated with various forms of garbage-ness, often touching on various systemic injustices, but it’s not inherently bad and it’s very useful.
Chris: It is sad how many people are just like, oh, enjoyment bad, entertainment, bad. Liking things in your story is bad. It is like, what do you think we’re doing this for?
Bunny: Are you having fun? Stop that.
Chris: Yes, we can give people meaningful or quote unquote “challenging” experiences, but if we don’t do anything else…
Bunny: Silly Chris, you know you can’t be challenged if you’re also having a good time.
Oren: God forbid anyone enjoy a story with a deep point to make. That would be weird and wrong.
Chris: Everybody knows the level of enjoyment is subtracted from the message. They have an inverse relationship.
Oren: So now that we’ve established where we stand philosophically, what is wish fulfillment? This is something that we probably should define at least a little bit, and the way that I think of it is that it’s something that the audience wishes they could have for themselves on various levels. You do sometimes get some wish fulfillment that is a thing that sounds nice, but maybe you wouldn’t actually want it in real life if it happened.
Chris: I think a good example of that is love triangles. It is wish fulfillment to have these two dreamy guys are lusting after me and they want to be in a romance with me, and I want to be in a romance with them. Oh, what will I do? But in reality, that was probably gonna be a pretty stressful situation. I would consider wish fulfillment to be pleasure gained by living vicariously through a protagonist. The reason why I would specify you’re living vicariously through a protagonist, because I do think that the protagonist matters in this, so if you have various characters and one character is just like a jerk, and that character gets lots of cool stuff, you not generally get the same enjoyment from that.
Oren: That’s true.
Chris: Whereas definitely with some of these stories, there is a sense of if the audience strongly identifies with a character or at a lesser extent relates to them or is just attached to them, then I do think wish fulfillment becomes more effective.
Oren: Yeah, it’s certainly harder to have wish fulfillment through the villain. Not impossible, but it’s usually gonna be through the main character or maybe a major side character. And the famous ones that you’ve heard of are definitely things like food porn or having a really hot significant other, that sort of thing. But they also can include having a nice house or solving a systemic problem. Things that are fantasies people have in real life.
Bunny: When I was younger, I had a very particular – like if you read through the stories I wrote when I was young, you will notice this because it was a plot point in just about every one of them. I think it’s bound to be wish fulfillment, even though it’s something that I wouldn’t want to happen to me, which is a heroine sacrificing herself for a cause, and then everyone weeps over her, and then she gets brought back to life. I would not want that to happen to me in real life. That sounds very PTSD-inducing, but it was definitely wish fulfillment for me.
Oren: But what if there were no negative consequences? What if psychologically everything was fine? [laughter]
Chris: That’s a big example of candy. Candy is definitely wish fulfillment. Just to catch people up if you’re one of the few people who is new to this podcast, instead of having listened for a while, we’ve talked about candy and spinach as far as characters go, but candy is basically anything in the story that is designed to glorify a character in some way. And it’s often very powerful as a form of wish fulfillment, which is why people like it, and one of the reasons that people use it a lot and overuse it. This is why I think it’s important to think of it as living vicariously through the protagonist, because with candy, if you are attached enough to the protagonist and if you identify with the protagonist enough, the candy is great and it’s great wish fulfillment, and it’s very fun. But if you are not, then it absolutely backfires and destroys your attachment to a character.
Usually it’s that dynamic, but definitely a character dying [laughter] and having everybody gather around and weep about them because that’s just like a lot of praise. That’s a lot of social recognition, which is, I think, really powerful wish fulfillment. And yes, the character is technically dead or temporarily dead, as the case may be.
Bunny: It is temporary. You, you have to have her come back so she can like invent democracy or something. I think one of my protagonists literally did do that.
Chris: But sometimes these wish fulfillment characters, they do just die so that people can weep over them. Sometimes it’s like in The Room. [laughter] Okay. Just like in the movie The Room, the whole setup there is that people wrong him and then he dies as a result, and then everybody’s so sorry. He really showed them.
Oren: The whole ‘character fake dies or pretends to die or whatever so there can be a funeral where everyone says how cool they were,’ that plot device shows up in both Voyager and Babylon Five. And I used it back in my early explanation of why we call some characters Mary Sues and others not. But both of those are just these super candied captains whose candy includes having all of their subordinates think they’re dead and gush about how great they are.
Bunny: Oh man, it’s so insufferable on Voyager. If you love Janeway, maybe you’ll enjoy that scene.
Oren: I also hated it on Babylon Five. If you identify with one of those characters, that scene could be fun for you. But otherwise, this feels weird. I don’t like this.
Bunny: Obnoxious. Wish fulfillment is legally distinct from candy, right?
Chris: Wish candy would be a type of wish fulfillment. It’s much more specific. We’re talking about specifically anything in the story that glorifies the character, and when I talk about candy, it can include traits of the character, like this character has blue hair and violet eyes and is really attractive and is the best at everything immediately. Those would all be forms of candy, but it’s really about what the author’s choices are. There’s a big difference between a character where, yeah, that character technically has blue hair and violet eyes and is skilled, but the story puts very little emphasis on it. The story instead focuses on where that character is lacking. They have all these skills, but the one skill that’s important to the plot, the character doesn’t have that and their face is constantly being rubbed in that. That’s very different from a narrative where the character has all the skills and the narrator is just constantly being like, oh yeah.
This is what happens in The Name of the Wind with Kvothe where other characters show up just to be like, oh wow, Kvothe, you’re amazing. A guy shows up to the end be like, oh, you are that singer. You have the best voice in the entire world. I wanted to cry. It’s the amount of emphasis that the author puts in validating that character and glorifying that character in the narrative.
Oren: But you can also have wish fulfillment that is not directly part of the character and that’s the classic. Really good well-described food is the classic wish fulfillment because we all love food. It’s a thing. People like it. Most people don’t have the time to have lots of really nice home cooked meals.
Chris: RIP. Redwall feast bod.
Oren: Yeah. That’s a thing that a lot of us wish we could have more of. And maybe it’s less effective for billionaires with personal chefs for every meal. I don’t know. That’s not a demographic I’m very familiar with.
Chris: I’m reminded of Martha Wells’ Raksura books, where in the second book there’s like the whole beginning is all the characters who are in this, you could call it the clan, in this group, going back to their ancestral home, which has just been waiting open for them. Even though they left it, nobody’s taken it, and it’s a giant mountain tree, but they live inside and it’s so perfect for them because apparently their ancestors magically grew the tree to their own specifications just to be their house. And it’s giant and has all the things that they ever want. And since they left, it’s just been left open waiting for them. And all they have to do is go back in. And that’s definitely there for wish fulfillment purposes.
Oren: And there were plot reasons they left. I promise there were plot reasons. They totally make sense. Shut up. [laughter]
Bunny: So I’m curious about wish fulfillment in angst. I was thinking about this and it does seem like angsting can be a form of wish fulfillment, and I think people love brooding heroes, and I think part of that is because they’re brooding over important things and not like, taxes. I do think that angst, even though in and of itself it’s quite negative, you don’t want to be in a situation where you have a lot of angst. We do have heroes where it seems like the angst is part of the appeal.
Chris: There can be a difference between, hey, I think angsty boys are attractive, and I want to be in a situation where I’m angsting, and that can be a hard distinction to make. But there are definitely some situations like, for instance, the character that is right, but everybody doubts them so they can be vindicated later; in which they face a lot of obstacles, but it’s like those obstacles are designed to validate them in the end, like from The Room. Some characters may angst as a form of almost showing how moral they are, because doing this thing that’s… They were forced to do something unethical and it just hurt them so much, so therefore they must be a really good person. I guess I would consider wish fulfillment to be mostly kind of focused on positive experiences and positive anticipation. You can get anticipation for wish fulfillment, just like you could get anticipation for tension, which would be like negative anticipation because you’re anticipating whether something bad would happen. But wish fulfillment can also be, you are looking forward to good and fun things happening. And I think that happens a lot actually.
Romances lean a lot on wish fulfillment. Just, there’s a huge variety and they work in many ways and engage in many ways. And one, it’s the kind of Cinderella romance, where oftentimes it’s not really so much about the chemistry between Cinderella and the Prince, for instance. He’s barely a character. It’s about all the cool stuff that comes with marrying the Prince. And Pride and Prejudice absolutely does this. In the beginning we don’t know Darcy barely at all. And we don’t really have that much reason to really be attached to him as a character, really be invested in his relationship with Lizzie, just because we don’t actually know him that well yet. But when he like walks in, we establish that he’s like good looking and he’s very rich, and the fact that he looks down on everybody means that it’s great wish fulfillment if he then falls for Lizzie, because he didn’t like anybody else.
Oren: I’d also point out that there is another thing that, at least in the BBC movie version that I watched, is that Lizzie also looks down on everybody, just not as hostilely as he does. Lizzie is definitely portrayed as the smart one in this town and so there’s a certain amount of connection where that’s one smart person to another. I’m not sure how much that figures into it, but I didn’t think it was worth mentioning.
Chris; Although it is really funny in Pride and Prejudice because Elizabeth basically falls in love with Darcy’s house.
Oren: That was a thing. [laughs] That’s her wish fulfillment.
Chris: She goes and like tours his home and it was like, wow, this is some really hot mansion you got here. Some really steamy grounds. These gardens. [laughter]
Oren: He’s got huge tracts of land, as it were.
Chris: And it’s funny because canonically, that makes a difference to her, but it’s also a way of emphasizing the wish fulfillment of marrying Darcy.
Oren: I do briefly wanna return to the question of angst based on the way I have seen people describe certain YA stories in particular, and I’m not a psychologist. I cannot guess at what the mechanism behind this is. But it does feel like there is, at least for some people, a certain amount of wish fulfillment in a story that takes their big feelings seriously and is like, yeah, actually your big feelings are really important. Now, that doesn’t have much appeal to me because I spend a lot of my life trying to avoid depression, so I don’t really want big feelings. But different people are at different stages in their life, and that at least seems to be an appeal that some of these really angsty stories have. That is just me going off of what various people have said. It’s not a phenomena I understand well enough that I would recommend an author try to duplicate it.
Chris: That seems reasonable, though.
Oren: That at least is a thing that I have seen people talk about. So just on the angle of different things can be wish fulfillment to different people… But there are some things that are gonna have a broader appeal that I think are worth talking about. Things like a nice house. There’s an unfortunate number of people for whom that is very effective wish fulfillment.
Chris: I think rare and cool pets, especially in speculative fiction. All those fantasy books where people get an animal companion that they have a psychic link with –
Bunny: We all have animal companions.
Chris: – So that we don’t have to deal with our animal companion jumping on the counter all the time. You can just talk to it and reason with it.
Oren: It’s still an animal. In my experience, once it starts to become a person, the wish fulfillment fades, but you could still kind of get it to do things like it was a person that, with an animal, I guess maybe aside from a really well-trained dog, that wouldn’t work. You can’t just tell your pet to do stuff most of the time.
Chris: Well, if you have, again, if it’s a character, it can still sometimes be like, for instance, in Eragon. He’s mentally linked to a dragon and she can talk, but at the same time he still has a cool dragon he rides.
Bunny: I think that’s also true of Morwyn’s cats in the Enchanted Forest Chronicles. They’re often snarky little jerks, but in quite a fun way, and they’re cats and they hop around and help with stuff.
Oren: That makes sense. I do love having magical cats, so you know, I’ll take that. I’ve also found that having supportive friends can be a good one, and I don’t even know if this has to do with whether or not you have supportive friends in real life. I don’t know. I find that to be pretty wish fulfillment-ty and I’m not lacking in friends. Humble brag. But maybe it would mean more to someone whose friends group isn’t great, but it seems to have a pretty broad appeal in general, finding people who want to help you with your dream or whatever. That seems to be pretty big.
Chris: I know a lot of people are very attracted to the found family feeling and getting that kind of support.
Oren: There is, to a certain extent, an aspect of these people are going to put a lot of work into what I want instead of necessarily what they want. Or just coincidentally it happens to be the same thing. That’s certainly the friends in Legends and Lattes, who are a lot more focused on the same goal that Viv has than most friends in real life who have their own pesky ideas about what they want. Rude.
Chris: I will say sometimes the characters in Legends and Lattes really feel like they’re like an entrepreneur’s wish fulfillment. I need the perfect employee that, like, doesn’t want much money and does amazing work and will never leave and I don’t have to train ’cause they already know how to do their job perfectly. Like Baking Rat.
Oren: Magical baking rat is a lot. [laughter]
Bunny: But the wish fulfillment croissants, though.
Oren: Those are, I think, officially rated for adults only. I don’t think kids should be reading about that. It’s too steamy.
Bunny: There is a line about how the succubus character gets hot over the croissants or something.
Oren: Oh goodness.
Chris: In my opinion, wish fulfillment can go in any story, but it does tend to go very well with lighter stories. I think it’s because it focuses on more positive things, so it just has more kind of overlap with a light story like Legends and Lattes, where there’s problems in setting up this business, but also a lot of the pull is the fact that we get to do all the fun parts of starting and running a coffee shop without any of the actual hard parts.
Oren: Jobs can be a good form of wish fulfillment in my experience. Just money on its own isn’t great wish fulfillment ’cause it’s too abstract, but a really cool job where you get paid money to do great – like fun, creative things. That is definitely a form of wish fulfillment.
Chris: I do think money can definitely play in. You wanna translate it to what’s tangible, but if you have a character that levels up in anyway, so there are lots of stories that are like rags to riches that talk about, okay, character does this and then makes a little money and then they take some money and put it into the next thing. And then they start a bigger business venture and then you show them go up in the world, for instance. That would definitely involve some wish fulfillment.
Oren: Yeah, I have read LitRPG. [laughter] Kind of wish I hadn’t, but I have.
Bunny: I think wish fulfillment can also be just part of the story’s context as well. So it’s pretty wish fulfillment for me to read a story that’s in a setting without much bigotry, like a pretty egalitarian setting.
Chris: I should mention that the prequel to Legends and Lattes –
Bunny: Bookshops and Bone Dust.
Chris: – Definitely involves some author wish fulfillment that’s in getting people to read books. Because the bookshop, honestly, is often not that important. It’s not nearly as essential as the coffee shop is in Legends and Lattes. But the character who runs the bookshop asks people questions, and then always finds the perfect book that they love and just gets people to read. And as an author, I can imagine how attractive that wish fulfillment would be. [she laughs]
Oren: Buy my book.
Chris: Can you please buy my books?
Bunny: Is there any commentary about how people are spending too much time reading the news bulletins and they have no attention span anymore? [laughter]
Chris: Thankfully, the author is not particularly grumpy about current times. It is funny though, because he does do the thing that a lot of people do, where when they talk about novels and novel writing in an abstract way, they get way more like literary and romantic in their language, and it’s just very weird. It’s like, you know what you’re writing, right? This is not the type of books you write. It’s very funny.
Oren: It’s like, well, this is not the kind of book that people like that would enjoy. Who is this part for, exactly? We’ve talked about what is wish fulfillment. I think we should now talk about when is wish fulfillment. ’cause if you spend too much time on wish fulfillment, sure you’re gonna get the people who that wish fulfillment really speaks to. But you’re gonna lose everyone else. You do need to consider, is this the appropriate time?
Chris: I do think that wish fulfillment in many cases isn’t too hard to multitask. It’s only if you make choices that will actively reduce tension or do it instead of something else. So for instance, an example of wish fulfillment would be dressing up and going to an ornate masquerade ball. That in itself is an experience that’s wish fulfillment, but that is 100% compatible with having a plot event where you need to find the assassin at the masquerade ball. They definitely don’t have to choose there.
Oren: But once you get to the ball, you are gonna have to do some assassin finding. You can’t spend the entire scene describing how great the canapés are and how beautiful everyone is. You can do some of that, but you do need some assassin finding in there.
Chris: And similarly, in something like Legends and Lattes, I do think that there is a balance between making it so that building the coffee shop comes with enough problems, but is not too bogged down in boring business details, or solving them so easily that you don’t really have any tension. I would’ve honestly liked some of those problems to have been a little bit more rigorous instead of instantly solving them, which could be good for wish fulfillment, but also make some problems feel cheaper and less satisfying when they’re solved.
Oren: I feel like if Legends and Lattes had a little bit of a harder time solving some of those problems, I don’t think it would’ve lost any of its current fans, and I think it could have gained some people who don’t like it. Now, we’ll never know. I don’t have an Earth 2.0 to run a test on, but just based on my understanding of stories, it seems unlikely that anyone would’ve walked away if Viv had had to work a little harder to get customers in the door.
Chris: I should also mention, a lot of wish fulfillment I do think has a novelty aspect. We’ve got the attachment aspect and you have a protagonist you’re usually living vicariously through. But also, obviously these are experiences we don’t have in everyday life or they would not have the same impact on them. So there is a novelty element that can wear off. And sometimes timing, like if it’s pretty powerful wish fulfillment.
Like in the beginning of the second Raksura book, them coming in and being like, hey, cool, we have this giant tree house, and we spend some time going and seeing the features of the house. We can sometimes get away with a few scenes doing that. And I think honestly, it helps that it’s a sequel because if somebody’s reading the sequel, they probably already know the characters in the first book or they’d never get to the sequel. Whereas I think opening a first book with a sequence like that would’ve been a big mistake. But not, again, doing it for too long before we get our plot hook, which in the case of the second book is actually somebody did steal something from this tree and it’s gonna slowly die unless we get it back.
Bunny: [dramatic voice] No!
Oren: No precious wish fulfillment tree!
Bunny: The tree house!
Chris: Which shows you that those scenes actually had an extra focus is because saving this tree is the stakes. And so by focusing on it in the beginning, we’re both showing why this tree is cool and why it should matter, that we save it. And getting some of that wish fulfillment in.
Oren: I also think just from a wordcraft perspective, I should emphasize that details make wish fulfillment work. You can say, and then there was delicious food on the table – that is not wish fulfillment. You gotta describe to me the crispness and the spice and the savory. I wanna know what it tastes like or what it would fictionally taste like; if it actually wouldn’t taste that good, that’s fine. Lie to me. [laughter]
Bunny: That’s like the fruit and mushroom thing.
Oren: But the tree house is the same thing. It’s like, yes, here’s this tree house, but let me describe to you all the cool rooms and the way it was made and how a nice place to live this would be.
Chris: It’s a form of novelty in that aspect. Absolutely. And so again, if it’s really novel, you can sometimes get away with some scenes devoted to it. It can be tricky for people to judge. I usually tell people not to rely on something being super novel, but in most cases you can find out at least if you have beta readers, ’cause they will say. If something is novel, they will say that they like it. They will point it out. Even if you don’t ask about it.
Oren: Beta reading can be challenging sometimes when you’re trying to identify certain qualities of your story, because if the story is tense, there’s a good chance your beta readers will just keep reading and not comment. But if it’s got high novelty, they’ll stop and be like, hey, that thing’s cool, I like that, and they’ll leave a comment. So that’s pretty easy to spot. Okay. I think with that, my wishes have been fulfilled because we talked about wish fulfillment, which was the thing I wanted to do the whole time. Haha, tricked you.
Chris: Well, if your wishes for a wish fulfillment podcast have been fulfilled, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
Outro: This has been the Mythcreant podcast. Opening and closing theme, The Princess who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.
We’re all familiar with plants and animals, but there’s an entire third category that doesn’t get as much attention: the humble fungi. From tasty mushrooms to creepy parasites that hijack insects, this unique kingdom of life always does its own thing, including in fiction! From colorful zombies to galactic stardrives, we’re talking about the many ways storytellers have used fungi, and hopefully a few ways they haven’t thought of yet.
Show Notes Minecraft Mushrooms * Entangled Life * Badger and Coyotes Teaming Up * Destroying Angel * Velocity of Revolution * The Spore Drive * Wood Wide Web * World’s Largest Organism * Ophiocordyceps * Ladybug Wasp Virus * Fungi and Medicine * Last of Us * Annihilation * Lichens * Panspermia * Three-Body Problem * Zelda Cooking * Heterotrophic Flowers * Fungi Predators * Macrovirus TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Arturo.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Intro: You are listening to the Mythcreants Podcast with your hosts: Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[Music]
Bunny: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I am Bunny. And with me today is:
Chris: Chris.
Bunny: And…
Oren: Oren.
Bunny: And maybe I should call this the Mycocreants podcast, the Mushroomcreants podcast, because today we are talking about the fungus among us.
Oren: Ah, I could have sworn I got rid of that with that cream. I got. Damnit.
Bunny: Now it just keeps coming back. It’s everywhere. It’s in the floor, baby. It’s in the sky. It’s in the soil of a spacecraft.
Oren: It’s a good thing I’m renting, not buying. This is someone else’s problem. Get the heck outta here.
Bunny: We are talking about fungi today, and allow me to start with my pet peeve, which is that there’s only two types of fungi in Minecraft, which is personally offensive.
Chris: So is there either the weird, creepy fungus or the very cutesy fungus?
Bunny: Minecraft is just blocky fungus. There are mushrooms, which are the cute kind of fungus, and they’re also cows, but there’s the red-spotted fungus and there’s brown fungus, and that is quite boring, Minecraft. Do better.
Oren: Minecraft discourse! It’s as if 2010 was alive and before my very eyes.
Bunny: I know! Comment and subscribe. So I just wanna start this episode by calling out Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake, which more or less inspired this. As you probably can guess after the episode about senses, I am on a bit of a nonfiction reading kick currently. So we are talking about fungus and fiction, what it does and what it could do, and the answer is lots of things.
Oren: It makes Mario big.
Bunny: That’s true. Doesn’t it also turn him into an elephant now?
Oren: Is that a mushroom? I know that’s a power he has, but I don’t know anything about the latest Mario game.
Bunny: I don’t either, but I hope it’s a mushroom.
Oren: He gets fire powers from a plant, which is not a mushroom. Those are different, fungus and plants, very different.
Bunny: Ah, well…
Oren: I mean, I looked this up ahead of time. Animals and fungi have more in common than either of them do with plants.
Bunny: This is a whole thing with their roots in the mycelium, the hyphae, and how plants, like, wouldn’t really have roots without it. I don’t know. It’s a whole complicated thing, but yes, they are technically different.
Chris: There is a whole like mutualistic symbiosis between roots and like mycelium that they go together.
Oren: They team up a lot, right? So do badgers and coyotes. That doesn’t mean that a coyote is more similar to a badger than it is to a wolf.
Bunny: We need to make more of these comparisons. Is badger more similar to a fungus or is it more similar to a vacuum cleaner?
Chris: We need more stories with slime molds. Will sometimes move around like an animal and sometimes stick around like a plant.
Bunny: Bring forth the slime mold. Slime mold solving puzzles, you guys, it’s so cool.
Oren: I definitely feel like fungi stories have gotten creepier in the last, I don’t know, decade or so. And unfortunately, unlike the zombie episode, I didn’t have time to do historical research on this, so I don’t know if that’s true. It’s just what it feels like.
Chris: I suppose if we read all the books with fay in it, we might come upon some cutesy mushrooms, because I think that’s where a lot of the cutesy mushrooms come from, is like fairy stuff, right? Like the fairy rings. They pop outta nowhere overnight and suddenly there’s a ring of mushrooms, so it must be magic. Or like little mushroom houses. I don’t think the romantasy inspired by Moss actually has little cutesy mushroom houses, I’m guessing.
Bunny: Better should. Love interest lives in a little mushroom house now.
Chris: Yeah.
Oren: As far as internet memes go, the circle of mushrooms is also creepy now. People share one of those and it’s like, “Oh no, run away! It’s the fairies! Aaah!”
Chris: Yeah. I’m sure there’s some folklore about disappearing in those or something, but mostly I think they’re cute.
Oren: Definitely feels like the more that you learn about how fungus actually works, the easier it is to make them creepy. When you see a mushroom, most of the actual organism is underground and the mushroom is just the fruiting body, and there’s no way “fruiting body” doesn’t sound creepy as heck. It’s like, “That is just a creepy-sounding term. Who came up with this term?”
Bunny: Then you realize that it’s like the mushroom’s genitals, and it’s sending out little invisible things that go and, like, seed the environment.
Chris: By the same approach, we could say that, of course, that flowers are plant genitals.
Oren: Uh, the internet memes love that one, too. Don’t get me wrong
Chris: Yeah they do I just want some context here when we say the mushrooms are genitals.
Bunny: I feel like people are less spooked by flowers than they are by fungus.
Oren: They are, but I think the reason of that is that we interact more with flowers. We have them built into our daily lives, whereas with fungus, we eat mushrooms, but that’s about it. We try not to interact with fungus more than we have to.
Bunny: And they are tasty.
Chris: And of course there’s always gonna be some drug stories.
Oren: That is another way that spec fic writers can use fungus, is to make the magic mushroom literally magic. I’ve done that a few times in various stories or roleplaying games that I’ve run, where consuming a certain variety of special mushroom will give you some kind of magical ability, but it will also make you very high. So have a fun time with that.
Chris: Best of both worlds. Maybe this is just because we tend to reduce mushrooms down, treat them like they’re the same thing. Imagine if we thought all plants were like the same plant, inherently. Then it would be like, “Oh, some of them are poisonous and some of them will get you high, and some of them you can eat,” because they’re like different plants. But, like, when we think about mushrooms, right? there’s something intriguing about the fact (and sometimes it’s actually very hard to tell apart), if you go mushroom foraging, is something you really have to watch out for. The delicious mushrooms and the poisonous mushrooms can look nearly identical. But for storytellers, I think there’s something fun about that. This mushroom could be TC or it could be poison, or it could be drugs.
Bunny: Right. And they’re like, they’re rare. They’ve got cool names like “destroying angel,” and they look unlike anything else. We have one book, that does the drug thing quite a lot, I know I’ve talked about on this podcast before, is The Velocity of Revolution, which is definitely inspired by the psychedelic mushrooms. Psilocybin is the mind-altering drug that is found in magic mushrooms. But in The Velocity of Revolution, basically people take this particular strain of mushroom and when people are on the same strain, they, like, share physical experiences and emotions and like low-level telepathy, and then it got out of hand in the end where they were like literally stopping time and then making all the foreigners sick because they didn’t live with the mushroom or something.
Oren: That’s a very flexible mushroom.
Bunny: It does interesting things with the internal consistency of the mushroom, like I can buy that there are different strains that do different things to, like, your mind and physical state. As long as they have this family resemblance about them, then there’s an internal consistency, but then it just got out of hand. And Chris likes to make fun of it because the mushrooms get stronger when you go faster.
Oren: That part’s a little out of theme. You’re using the same strain of mushrooms, so you share experiences. Okay, that tracks, but introducing velocity into it, obviously that’s in the title, but mushrooms have nothing inherently to do with going fast. That’s not a theming connection that is at all obvious.
Bunny: Gets dieselpunk and they have motorcycles. And motorcycles go fast, and so does the fungus.
Oren: It’s a fun-gus, not a boring-gus, so it’s gonna go fast, okay?
Bunny: Yeah. Chris, come on. It’s the rules of dad jokes.
Oren: My apparently hottest take about fungus is that I actually liked the spore drive from Discovery. I thought it was neat. I wish that they had built up to it a little more rather than just, like, having it already working when the story started, because I don’t think that the idea of a galactic mycelial network is wrong in Star Trek. I think it could actually fit fine. I just thought it needed a little buildup ’cause it’s a really big thing to just introduce and have, like, already known in the show.
Bunny: Entangled Life actually interviewed the mycologist. The character in the show who has the drive, I think, has the same name as him. An actual consultant that they brought on, this real mycologist, which is cool.
Oren: I thought that was a neat idea and I like the idea of them traveling along it. I think that’s cool. It does highlight the completely unforced error of making Discovery a prequel for no reason ’cause it just creates weird continuity issues that didn’t need to be there. But as an engine, I thought that was neat. Star Trek has a lot of quasi-magical technology. Let’s maybe introduce something a little different this time instead of just the same five tech that we’ve seen every time before.
Chris: Yeah, and I think the network effects are one of the neatest things about using fungus, and that also brought something to Last of Us. It also toned down the zombies ’cause now zombies don’t have much novelty anymore, but it also gave them fungus to make them unique. And one of the neatest part of that was, again, we have this unseen underground zombie network that all the zombies are attached to, which we can use then to explain like, “Oops, you stepped on the fungus. Now the zombies know you’re here,” which was great for the story.
Bunny: Right, it’s a much more interesting mechanic. Not a lot of stories, sadly, seem to use mushrooms, and you can play around with the properties of mushrooms in interesting ways, like the mycelium, like the wood-wide webs are this living computer that can stretch for miles and miles. I’m pretty sure that the largest organism in the world is a fungus that goes for miles and miles.
Oren: They get really big, maybe not the largest, but they can get very large.
Chris: The Last of Us is based on zombie ant fungus, right?
Bunny: Oh, yes. Let me tell you about Cordyceps. Ophiocordyceps. I hope I’m saying that. So there’s actually quite a few types of this particular type of fungus, but manipulative fungal parasitism, which is what happens when an ant gets infected by this fungus, has evolved multiple times in unrelated lineages across fungi, and then also in things like viruses.
Chris: So there’s more than one zombie amt fungus. There’s not just one zombie fungus.
Bunny: Yes.
Chris: Do they always affect ants or do they affect anything other than ants?
Bunny: It’s mostly insects, but no, there’s one that’s a virus that wasps inject into ladybugs, and then the ladybugs, like, become guardians for wasp eggs.
Chris: Whoa. That is weird.
Bunny: No, it’s really bonkers. They’re parasites, but, like, sometimes this virus, the wasps have essentially used this virus as, like, part of their reproductive strategy to keep their eggs safe. So there’s both the virus and the wasp that are being parasites to this ladybug. This behavior, again, it’s evolved across, like, unrelated species. So it’s like a very successful strategy, but the one that’s like most well known is Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, I think is how you say it, which is the carpenter ant fungi. Ants get infected by the fungus and then they lose their fear of heights. They leave the nest, and then they climb up to the nearest plant. And at exactly like 25 centimeters off the ground, they bite down on a vein in the leaf. It’s like this death grip. That’s where they will stay. And then the fungus stitches their feet to the plant, and then a mushroom grows from its head and showers spores down on other ants below. And that’s the lifecycle, essentially, of this fungus.
Chris: Is it trying to get itself eaten by a deer?
Bunny: No, in this case it’s just trying to infect more ants, although there are, I think there are fungal parasites where it, like, has the bug climb up a leaf and then tries to get eaten by a bird and then it, like, reproduces in the bird’s digestive tract or something. I don’t know if that’s a fungus, but that is also another parasite behavior.
Oren: I’m just really looking forward to the Disney adaptation where the father fungus says to the child fungus, “This is the circle of life, son. We take over the ants and use the ants to create our own reproductive cycle, but eventually we die and become plants, and then, like, the ants eat those.” And the son will be like, “Yes, that is a just system.”
Chris: “We look down on our land from this grass. Look at all, you, all the sun touches. That is ours. Our kingdom.”
Oren: “We will bless the ants with our presence. Look how much they love us!”
Chris: “What’s that shadowy place? Oh, that’s fungicides.” I hope it’s a musical.
Oren: I have noticed that fungus is a popular choice among people who wanna do like an end-of-the-world-style event, because fungus are not unknown in medical science, but they’re… we have less encounters with them, so there are fewer treatments. That kind of story is gonna be changed forever because of Covid and I can’t even begin to estimate how big an impact that’s going to have. But I was definitely noticing before Covid that fungi were becoming more popular as a thing that would end the world with a super plague.
Bunny: Actually, fungus come up, not for the average person, like, thinking about what medicine is, but medicine does use fungus for quite a few things. Actually, the Cordyceps fungus, some of the, like, chemicals it uses to regulate, like, host behavior, one of those is cyclosporine, which is an immunosuppressant. Yeah. We actually use as an immunosuppressant in, like, organ transplantation. And obviously penicillin is like the big boy. We all know penicillin, but they are used in a medical context, not necessarily for superbugs.
Oren: All-natural, baby! I also noticed a funny little loop, and I don’t know for sure that this is what happened, but it just looks like it’s what happened, ’cause you have the Last of Us video game, which precedes the TV show by quite some time, and it’s got the fungus zombies and it’s got the whole person who died against a wall with fungus coming out everywhere. It’s got that image. And then along came the movie Annihilation. And if I remember correctly, the book doesn’t really have much in the way of fungus horror. If there was any, I didn’t pick up on it.
Chris: There’s a lot of creepy weird stuff in it, the book, that it’s unclear what kind of lifeform this is. We can just say that, but I don’t think it calls out fungus in particular.
Oren: But the movie has that very similar image of, like, the person embedded in a wall with an explosion of fungus all around them, and it’s very beautiful and has these really vibrant colors and feels like it was inspired by the game. And then the Last of Us TV show came out and it does the same thing and it feels like it was inspired by Annihilation! And I don’t know that’s actually what happened. It’s just, when I look at the pictures together, it seems like it’s a progression.
Bunny: Now that you mentioned that, I have seen those two images and they do resemble each other. That is strange.
Oren: It’s a very powerful image, right? I get why multiple filmmakers want to use it.
Chris: Do we see real fungal images that look like that? I guess that’s the question. Could they have been inspired by real fungal pictures?
Bunny: They could be. Honestly, it might look more like lichen. Lichen is very interesting. Lichen is a partnership between one or more algae with one or more fungi. So they’re like this composite organism.
Oren: Plants and fungi teaming up again. As an animal, I’m concerned.
Bunny: Yeah, they’re coming for us. No, lichen are really cool. Don’t want to get too sidetracked, but they’re like poly-extremophiles and go into suspended animation and like radiation that would kill tartigrades. Like, they’re just fine. They can get rehydrated and they just go on growing.
Oren: They’re cool with multiple romantic partners, ’cause you did say they were poly.
Bunny: They are polyamorous: they’ve got multiple fungus, multiple algae, making a big cool baby.
Chris: In what situations do they go in suspended animation? Is it just like when things dry out or… ?
Bunny: When scientists send them to space, for one. There’s a hypothesis that maybe life on Earth started through, like, contamination from space. And so people are like testing that theory, and lichens are like a candidate for what type of life could have survived, like out in space and then reentry.
Oren: The unfortunately named panspermia.
Bunny: Yes, panspermia. I do not like that name.
Oren: Nobody likes that name!
Chris: Did not think about it until you mentioned that. Now I can not not hear it, so thank you.
Bunny: I prefer “galactic lichen.” I think that’s a better name for the theory.
Oren: I’m definitely lichen that one more.
Bunny: Oh… yep.
Oren: I much prefer the idea that lichen did not come from space, but have this space hibernation anyway, just in case. Just to mess with scientists a bit.
Bunny: They do mess with scientists. They’re like really weird and can do some pretty cool things, including the suspended animation for 10 years, and then they rehydrate and they just keep on doing their own thing, but if you start thinking about lichens, you can’t think about them in terms of fungus and algae, or then you start missing the lichen. So they’re really interesting in how they complicate concepts of individuality and symbiosis.
Oren: What is a species, even? That kind of reminds me of the aliens from Three Body Problem, and that book’s been out for a while, but spoilers in case you’re watching the TV show: the aliens in that story have a thing where they will dehydrate themselves and go into suspended animation for long periods ’cause their planet is always like slingshotting around too close to their sun, which is a neat idea. It did create some plot problems because you’re sitting there wondering, “Okay, hang on. How do you guys have the infrastructure to create an interstellar invasion fleet if every 10 to 50 years, your civilization gets destroyed and you have to start over?” But plot holes aside, I like the concept.
Chris: Yeah, we need more stuff inspired by lichens. Like what if you had a culture that took a more lichenistic view of, like, individuality versus community? That’d be pretty cool. Or what about if astronauts have learned how to do suspended animation? I guess they also just dehydrate themselves.
Oren: They could have done that in Discovery, ’cause they had this problem in Discovery where there, like, I think, weren’t enough symbionts and they were trying to figure out a way to solve it. Fungus is the answer. They will help you to live in harmony.
Bunny: Fungus are the answer, you guys. I think maybe there’s a fungus growing in me that just makes me wanna talk about fungus.
Chris: Oh no! Don’t put it anywhere near grass, okay? When you get 25 inches up that grass, you’re done for.
Bunny: No! Centimeters, Chris. Centimeters.
Chris: Oh. Oh no. I need to embrace the metric system.
Oren: No, we’re gonna use freedom units here.
Chris: I know it’s less intuitive, but…
Oren: From a storytelling perspective, you can do more prosaic uses of fungi. You don’t necessarily have to be embracing, like, the full mycelial treatment. Your characters maybe just need some food in the forest. Fungus are very good for that.
Bunny: That’s true. Fungus be tasty.
Oren: And of course, just for regular cooking. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a survival situation. The fact that many fungi are poisonous is also a fun little plot point that you can add in there.
Bunny: I want more fungus forests.
Chris: I don’t recommend stewed mushroom and fruit medleys, though. I know that Link likes them in the little cook pot. I’m not digging it. I don’t think you should make that.
Bunny: Gosh, there’s been a lot of video games with fungus, which is what I’m learning from this episode. There’s Minecraft, there’s Mario, there’s Link. Books really need to catch up.
Chris: Luckily for Link, none of his mushrooms are poisonous, right? He can just scavenge all of the mushrooms and put ’em in his pot, and it’s fine.
Oren: Nothing is placeless in the world of the modern Zelda games, or at least if there is, it’s very uncommon.
Bunny: No, mushrooms are tasty. I love me some mushrooms, sautéed and buttered. Not necessarily related to fiction, just a tasty thing in general.
Chris: I think something that also tends to make fungus creepy is just, it’s a decomposer. It’s very related to death, decomposition in a way that flowers aren’t, although flowers grow on dead things, but they’re not like so intimately involved in the process of breaking down dead matter.
Oren: Mushrooms can, of course, also live without sunlight. Fungus doesn’t photosynthesize on its own. Lichen does though, right? That’s part of the process.
Bunny: That’s part of the partnership, is that the algae provides photosynthesis, essentially.
Oren: But since fungi don’t, by default, photosynthesize, they can also live in dark places, which tends to make them spooky to us ’cause, “Ooh, we can’t see what’s in there.” There could be anything in there. There could even be a zombie.
Chris: There is a heterotrophic flower that doesn’t actually use sunlight, that’s also pretty creepy. Like it’s white, it’s not green.
Bunny: They’re called like pipes or something. Those are also connected, literally connected to the mushrooms, and that they’ll like tap into the network of mycelium that grows underneath forests and they’ll just get energy from that, essentially.
Oren: Is that a parasitical relationship or symbiotic? Are they giving anything back?
Bunny: So what a lot of plants give back is phosphorus, but if they’re not photosynthesizing, I’m not sure. It might be a parasite relationship. I don’t remember.
Oren: Just freeloading on the mycelial network. I approve. I respect that level of laziness.
Bunny: They’re hackers hacking into the mycelium Man. This is something that I haven’t ever seen done, and because it’s really spooky and creepy, it definitely should be. People don’t talk about it because it happens on the micro level and it happens to worms. It could happen to people too. I think people should extrapolate from this.
Chris: Okay, but first, is this something I’m gonna have nightmares about?
Bunny: Hard to say.
Chris: Okay. Our listeners have been warned.
Bunny: We don’t think of fungi as predators, but they are. Some of them hunt nematodes in some really freaky ways. Some of them set nooses, essentially. Yeah. And they constrict around nematodes in a 10th of a second and trap ’em. They’re these circles and then they inflate and the worm gets stuck inside them. Another one is, they make adhesive nets like spiderwebs, my favorite. Some of them have little toxins on the tips of the hyphae that paralyze the nematode. Once the nematode touches it, and then the fungus grows in through its mouth and digests it from the inside.
Chris: Okay, there’s my nightmares right there.
Bunny: If there was anything that’s gonna give nightmares, it’s… it’s that one. And then my favorite: there’s like little gunboat spores that they’ll send out through the soil that can swim through the soil, and they get attracted to either like pheromones or other chemical signals that the nematodes put off, and then they attach to the worms and, like, harpoon them.
Chris: So it’s like a heat-seeking missile, but a pheromone-seeking missile? It’s like a little spore that follows pheromones to nematode and then shoots it?
Bunny: Gun cells. They’re literally called gun cells.
Chris: But these are spores, right? So they would form new fungus?
Bunny: Yeah, I think so. They would grow into a new fungus rather than feeding the existing fungus.
Chris: They don’t, like, bring the nematode back to the origin point? That would probably be difficult.
Bunny: It’s like a whaling boat that sends out the people to stab the whale, and then a new whaling boat grows where the whale was stabbed.
Oren: Pretty economical. So this could either be like a really creepy high-budget, like high-production-value show, like Last of Us, or it could be a really cheesy episode of nineties Star Trek.
Bunny: Yes.This is what we love about fungus. It’s so flexible.
Oren: Like the Voyager episode with the macroviruses that are just these, like, CGI blobs floating around.
Chris: That was pretty funny, seeing Janeway struggle with them, jump and hold them, and then we pretend after, like, she holds them, that they can actually have leverage to move around in the air and she’s like struggling with it.
Oren: She’s doing her best, okay?
Chris: Viruses are scary because you can’t see them and punch them.
Oren: “Look, Kate Mulgrew, we need you to pretend that you’re wrestling with a CGI virus. So, I don’t know, here’s like a teddy bear for you to hold.” And that’s called acting.
Bunny: A moment of silence for the actors who had to tussle with fake viruses. So, we mentioned fungi being decomposers, and they are. But one really interesting thing that you could do in your fiction with fungi is that it’s also… currently people are using it to build things as well. So fungi is really good at decomposing things. It can decompose very happily cigarette butts and, like, use diapers and agricultural waste. It’s quite good at that. But there are certain companies that are trying to, like, grow it into shapes and use it as building materials. NASA is thinking about growing buildings on the moon out of fungus, and the way this works is, I think, you mold it into a shape, and then you kill it, and now you’ve got your fungus house. If you can get the fungus to absorb, like, electrodes or something like that, then you, when you kill the fungus and put it to use as a house, then you have, like, a built-in electrical system already, which is cool and weird.
Oren: This is just an objectively cooler 3D printer. 3D printers are already cool, but they don’t have mushrooms.
Buny: I think you can even make batteries out of them. People are trying to make batteries out of fungus instead of a toxic metal.
Oren: Any replacement for batteries would be an improvement at this point.
Bunny: Get the fungus in there at all costs.
Oren: I am prepared to charge my phone with a shiitake mushroom.
Bunny: Please someone write this story. I want, like, an environmentally friendly solarpunk post-plastic story where it’s just… all runs on mushrooms. Everything’s built out of mushrooms. You plug your environmentally friendly phone into a shiitake.
Oren: With that, I think we are going to have to call this episode to a close.
Chris: And if we have not given you nightmares, consider supporting us on Patreon, or even if we have. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: Yeah, it’s a service, really. Before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
Outro: This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening/closing theme: The Princess who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.
What’s this podcast episode about? Can you tell? Does it even matter? This week, we’re talking about curiosity in fiction: how stories create it, what purpose it serves, and why it can be detrimental if taken too far. Don’t worry, we love a good mystery as well, but like any flashy move, it’s easy to get so caught up with it that you neglect the fundamentals. We discuss the interplay between tension and curiosity, plus how to use one to create the other.
Show Notes ANTS * Mystery Stories * The Hound of the Baskervilles * Knives Out * Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals * BBC Sherlock * Lost * Severance * Silo * FROM * The Expanse TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Maddie.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast, with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny. [Intro Music]
This is the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is…
Bunny: (Singsong) Bunny.
Chris: And…
Oren: Oren.
Chris: So I wonder what the topic of this podcast will be about? Well, we can’t say it, ’cause then nobody will wonder about it anymore and we don’t wanna give it away.
Bunny: I must know more.
Oren: I think wondering about the topic is as good as having a topic, actually.
Bunny: [Chuckles]
Chris: We need to buy ourselves time so that we can continue to wonder and not actually give it away. So maybe we could just talk about tangents for a while and then drop hints, but only really perplexing hints that build it up and raise everybody’s expectations for what it will be. This topic is one weird trick, editors hate it.
Bunny: [Chuckles]
Oren: This topic killed our parents.
Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]
Oren: And then of course, we end the show without ever saying what the topic was.
Chris: Of course, we want them to come back for the next episode!
Oren: [Laughs]
Bunny: You can look back on it fondly and be like, “Oh man, I was so invested. I wanted to know the topic.”
Chris: No, we’ll have dramatic twists at the end of the episode that maybe has something to do with the topic. And maybe I’ll be like, “Oh, and I told Oren the topic,” and then he’ll be like, “Gasp.” And then we’ll end the episode or something like that.
Bunny: Yeah, you can have a musical hit there. And then “The Castle by the Waterfall” plays.
Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]
Chris: Alright. Luckily for our listeners, we’re not actually gonna do that.
Bunny: Fortunately for our listeners, the title is already up there on the website.
Chris, Oren: [Laugh]
Chris: So yeah, we’re talking about curiosity and storytelling. The good, and the bad, and the ugly. Curiosity is a double edged sword. It absolutely can boost engagement. I’m not saying curiosity is purely a bad thing, but it has a lot of costs and limitations, and generally I consider it to be a secondary source of engagement.
For instance, when we talk about ANTS: Attachment, novelty, tension, satisfaction. Those I would think are the bread and butter of engaging your readers. Whereas there’s other things that do matter and sometimes are important to more niche genres, but are more secondary sources, like wish fulfillment, for instance. And I would place curiosity in that category.
Bunny: And just to be clear, how would you define curiosity exactly? Is it just the pull that keeps the reader reading?
Chris: No, lots of things can pull the reader, but I would say that tension is usually a better pull than curiosity is. Curiosity though, can be stronger and milder, just like tension can be. So let me talk about the differences between curiosity and tension then, so we know what we’re talking about.
So, curiosity is a reaction to having unknown information that you know that you’re missing and you think it’s relevant, but most of all, it’s especially strong when you don’t feel like there’s anything that could fill that place, that it has to be wild and weird so that you’re really missing something. Like, a example I’ve used. If you randomly came home one day and all of your pets were wearing sweaters.
Bunny: [Chuckles]
Chris: And you swore nobody had been in your home. That’s a very wild thing to happen. It also seems very impossible. So that would be something that is very curiosity inducing. Because you don’t have any information that could seem to ever lead to that outcome, yet somehow it happened.
Whereas tension also has uncertainty. It also comes with a question, but it’s specifically needing to know whether or not something bad will happen. Whereas curiosity is like an unusual question, not necessarily about something bad.
Bunny: So it’s just the sweaters and not necessarily evil sweaters.
Chris: Tension is very forward looking. Will something bad happen in the future? Curiosity could be backwards looking. What happened? And tension often requires more information than curiosity to work. You have to have a certain level of context to understand what bad thing could happen. And why it’s likely to happen, for instance. Whereas curiosity is often evoked when odd things happen that are out of place with no explanation at all.
And so this is why people aiming for curiosity often destroy tension, because they want to give so little information to keep up the curiosity that people don’t have enough information to feel any tension.
Oren: And also not enough information to know the characters, so they can’t build attachment either, or even enough information to see what’s going on in the setting, which also removes novelty. Just makes it harder to invest in anything. Because curiosity is a spice. It’s wondering what happened or what’s going to happen. Those are all things that you can be curious about and it can be great. But the problem that we keep running into is stories that neglect the fundamentals because they want to encourage curiosity.
Chris: I think that overall people are actually more familiar with curiosity. The fact that we have a common word for curiosity says something about how familiar it is to people in general. Whereas what tension is. And people don’t necessarily use the word tension universally for tension. Sometimes people use suspense instead, for instance.
A different storytelling device source could use a completely different word for tension, or not have a concept of tension, or divide tension into two concepts, or do something else. So curiosity is just a much more familiar universal concept, and I think that to some extent, that encourages people to try for curiosity when that’s actually not what they should be going for.
Oren: Mysteries are a good example of where the two can and should work together, but often don’t. One of my favorite examples of an old mystery story that has both is The Hound of the Baskervilles, my favorite Sherlock Holmes story. It’s got curiosity. There’s a weird, demon dog, maybe? That’s weird. What’s going on with this demon dog? Spooky.
It’s also got tension ’cause maybe the demon dog is gonna kill somebody, or someone is gonna get killed by something that’s not a demon dog. So there’s tension there because we’re worried something bad is gonna happen. And we’re curious. What facts could exist that would explain these demon dog sightings we’ve been seeing?
Chris: I would say most mysteries have a curiosity element, but if it’s a main mystery plot, if it’s important, it isn’t usually just curiosity. It usually also has tension too.
Oren: You could also have a mystery story about, why do cars keep disappearing off of the street and then being found on the tops of buildings? That’s weird. That’s certainly curious.
Chris: That’s both very curious but also very tense. Because if cars are disappearing, that’s a dangerous thing. That creates tension. More cars are going to disappear. That’s very forward looking and anticipates, but it’s also very strange what’s happening, and it’s hard to imagine what could be happening that would be doing that. That’s very curiosity evoking.
Oren: Admittedly, I was planning to use that as an example of a story that doesn’t have much tension. Oops. [Laughs]
Bunny: Well, Chris is really invested in those cars.
Chris: Oh, I assumed people were in the cars.
Oren: Oh, okay.
Bunny: [Laughs]
Chris: This is the problem with hypothetical examples, is that it’s easy to read various details into them, and then people interpret them in very different ways.
Oren: That shows how they would be different. If there were people in the cars that’s a big deal. But if they’re not, if there’s no one in the cars, then who cares?
Bunny, Chris: [Laugh]
Chris: I guess, ’cause I use things disappearing as an example of something that would create tension so often. So I imagine people driving away with their car, and they disappear, and then the car shows up on top of a building. [Chuckles]
Bunny: Do you think there’s any mystery story with tension, but no curiosity?
Oren: So you would have a question of, is this really a mystery? But, sure. You could have a story where it’s really obvious who did it, and then it’s just trying to catch them before they kill again or something.
Chris: So, Knives Out for a while. The assumption that’s revealed in the beginning of this movie is that our protagonist actually did it, and she’s trying not to get caught for a while, but it still unfolds like a standard mystery story. And of course, then there’s twists in that. It doesn’t really stay with that, but there are various situations in which you’re not necessarily expecting a very profound, surprising answer.
I think that’s kind of how you can tell the difference, is that the more it relies on curiosity, the more pressure there is to come up with a really surprising answer that still makes sense. And that is one of the reasons why it can be difficult to come up with a good answer to your mystery and why you’re not supposed to just, “Hey, these are two suspects,” and then reveal one of them did it.
Because in many cases, if you’ve built that up as a very curiosity-inducing thing, then that’s going to not pay off like it should for something that’s driven by curiosity. But if it’s more, “Hey, we know this person is the killer, but we need a way to prove it.” Or, “How did they do the crime,” or something like that, then we might have less pressure to come up with a really surprising answer, ’cause it’s more about the tension of whether we succeed at the task.
Bunny: So curiosity is more about weird thing than dangerous thing.
Chris: Yes.
Bunny: And I’ve definitely run into, I guess for lack of a better term, unfulfilled curiosity. Where it turns out that the thing you’re curious about was actually less interesting than you thought it was. Oxenfree II unfortunately does this with the spooky ghost cult, which turns out to just be some hippies, which disappointed me.
Oren: I did not like that. [Chuckles]
Bunny: I wanted it to be a spooky ghost cult and hippies are just not as interesting. I’m sorry.
Chris: One thing that’s interesting is when sometimes fantastical elements are actually not a good payoff. I did a critique of one of the Pendergast books, Brimstone, and it sets up this mystery where the person who died, there’s tons of locks. The gates are locked and the outside of the house is locked, and the room is locked and barricaded. Yet somebody still got inside and tore this person apart.
And that’s the murder scene. And if there was no fantastical elements in the story, it would be like, “How could somebody possibly get in and out to murder somebody in this manor while leaving all of those locks and barricades perfectly in place?” And that’s very curiosity inducing, and you would need some kind of answer that’s very not intuitive and seems like it could be impossible. But if you add like, “Oh, they had a space laser, or a wizard did it,” then that’s no longer a profound thing. And that’s actually a let down in that situation.
Oren: You can also use speculative elements to increase curiosity. It’s all just a matter of what you’re promising. Like the locked room scenario, you’re promising a clever solution, whether you mean to or not. But if you have something like, “Oh man, our protagonist catches a glimpse of a mysterious figure in the woods,” at that point, if it turns out to be a supernatural creature, no one’s gonna be disappointed.
You’ve raised curiosity, what was that? And it turns out it was a spooky fae. That’s cool. Or maybe not now, ’cause people are tired of fae ’cause of Maas. But you know, some other magical creature that hasn’t been overused yet.
Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]
Oren: That’s not going to disappoint people because you weren’t promising a specific thing that you then couldn’t deliver on.
Bunny: The other kind of unfulfilled curiosity is something we were joking about at the beginning of this, which is just, it never pays off. The BBC Sherlock show is infamous for this. Always ending on cliffhangers that didn’t end up going anywhere. It’s like, “What’ll happen next?” And then the next time, “Whoa, we don’t know, what’ll happen next?” And it keeps teasing you like that rather than actually resolving anything.
Chris: The ultimate example of this that everyone is familiar with is Lost. Because Lost had no plan. And it’s like, “Why is there a polar bear on this island? It seems impossible for a polar bear to be on this island.” They would do just tons of stuff like that. “Oh, where did this big silo come from?” Everything. Everywhere. They had no plan. They had no answer.
So most TV shows I think are are trying to do a lot better, but there are TV shows that are modeled off of that. Severance definitely is. Severance, they’re in this weird corporate workplace and they run into a room full of goats. I think they’re baby goats. This is obviously inspired by the Lost polar bear. Are we ever gonna explain why there is a room full of baby goats in this weird corporate workplace?
Bunny: It’s for goat yoga.
Chris: [Chuckles]
Bunny: All the cool startups are doing it.
Chris: [Chuckles]
Oren: And why does the main employee reward involve a weird BDSM show? That doesn’t match with the rest of this corporation at all. This is a problem with curiosity, is that curiosity more than most other storytelling aspects, has a kind of toxic incentive where you can end up borrowing more than you can pay back, essentially. Where you create a bunch of really curious elements that make people wonder what’s going on.
And the more you do that early in the story, it can make people engage more because they wanna know the answer. But you’re also making it increasingly difficult to actually give an answer. And that’s just a thing you have to be careful about. You exercise some self control.
Bunny: You gotta have some kind of plan.
Oren: Otherwise, you just end up digging yourself into a hole you can’t dig your way out of.
Chris: The big thing that I see with some of these TV shows, like Severance and Silo is another of ’em. That again, is another thing I was joking about in our intro, is the fact that they are trying to use curiosity, but it can be really hard to move the plot forward if your main plot line is supposed to be really curiosity inducing.
Because usually to move the plot forward, you need to learn new information. But if you learn new information, it dispels the curiosity and they don’t wanna do that. So these shows have very serious movement problems where they’re absolutely stringing you along and nothing is happening because they want to keep the curiosity up. And it’s not impossible to move the plot forward without this happening, but it’s much more logistically trickier than it is to keep up tension. Which is one of the reasons why tension is just usually more powerful and much more practical way to pull people in.
You would have to be like, “Okay, why are there goats in this room?” And you would have to answer that question in a way that openly opens up more questions. So it’s like we’ve gotten our answer to the goats and that makes it feel like we moved forward towards solving this mystery. But the answer only opened up more questions so that we have more things to be curious about.
And I’m not gonna say that’s impossible, but it definitely is not easy for a storyteller to do. Whereas keeping up tension is more like, “Okay, I solved this first problem, so I got closer to avoiding the big bad outcome that’s creating tension. But oh no! Another complication happened to make things worse,” and that keeps up the tension.
Bunny: At some point, things have to start falling into place, and if you want nothing but curiosity, then you have to keep withholding that moment. Because then we get the kind of resolution to the question.
Oren: Then once you dispel the curiosity, what if there’s nothing left? And then you just never can. So that’s a whole thing.
Chris: I think this is one reason why I think some of the best, more curiosity focused mysteries are subplots. That you’ve got another main plot that has tension that moves forward, and this other mysterious thing is a thing that is not so urgent that we feel like the main character needs to drop everything and pursue it. So it can just be mysterious for a while, and then at some point it’s resolved.
If you were traveling and you saw a mysterious figure in the woods, going back to our mysterious figure. Maybe that’s also tension inducing. ‘Cause a mysterious figure could also be threatening. That could create more tension too. But your main problem is that you need to get from point A to point B safely. And so to do that, you move forward. You keep traveling. You don’t go into the woods chasing after the mysterious figure.
Oren: The Expanse books do a pretty good job of that because they have this big source of curiosity, “What’s going on with the protomolecule? What’s that deal?” But that’s not the main source of tension. The main source of tension is the political conflict in the solar system. So that gives the protomolecule plot plenty of time to cook and to be mysterious, and for them to introduce little tidbits and you don’t get bored or feel strung along because you have a really compelling political conflict going on around you.
Now, of course, that book series did still have a problem where they built up this incredibly powerful enemy that was the result of the protomolecule plot line, and there wasn’t really any way to defeat them, so we just ended the series.
Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]
Oren: So that’s a problem that is a different thing. But for the first six or so books, it does a really good job. My favorite kind of curiosity is what I call “meta curiosity,” and as an editor, I encounter this all the time. I imagine people who don’t analyze stories for a living, it happens less.
Where I’m just reading or watching and being like, “Oh, hey, is that a love interest?” They’re introduced with a bunch of candy and they have an odd amount of dialogue with the hero. Are they a love interest or is there some other reason the writer is doing this? Or when you mentioned that there was “legends of a beast in the woods,” is that foreshadowing or just imagery? I wanna know what that’s gonna be.
Chris: Be careful, Oren. You don’t wanna encourage listeners to create meta mysteries.
Bunny, Chris: [Laugh]
Bunny: Danger, danger.
Oren: This happens when the story is bad too. I’m just sitting here reading a story with a million different POVs and wondering, “Are they gonna eventually meet up at the end? Or are they just gonna be separate for the whole book?” And it’s not like either option is good. I’m just curious to find out which way the author is going.
Bunny: I have found a sort of genre-based curiosity, like in The Mimicking of Known Successes, for example. There are events that appear to be unrelated. They’re investigating the disappearance of this one guy from the university. That’s the main plot. But then this doomsday preacher gets murdered and Mossa gets drawn off to deal with that. And you, the reader, are like, “This wouldn’t just be a random addition. These two events have to be connected.” But the characters don’t know that. So there’s a level of genre-savvy curiosity that you can have.
Oren: You as a reader can wonder about it as long as the plot keeps going forward. We can come back to that later.
Chris: I will say that you do have to be careful with lots of random things that ultimately end up being related because that can make it feel like there’s not enough movement, even if they end up being related later.
Oren: It can also just be that you get to the end and then the bad guy is like, “It was me. I was behind all of those things.” Okay. What things were those? Those happened a long time ago.
Chris: Let me relate my convoluted plan that explains why I did each one of these things. And of course it doesn’t make sense.
Oren: It’s not a good sign if your villain has to give a PowerPoint presentation at the end to explain all the things they were doing.
Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]
Oren: Even if it does make sense, it’s probably not gonna feel like it makes sense and most readers are gonna be bored anyway.
Chris: I think that when curiosity works really well, it’s often at the micro level. Where you don’t necessarily wanna just dump all information at once, especially the very beginning of the story. You don’t have time to explain everything at once, so usually in your opening paragraphs, opening scene, even, curiosity can be a really good supplement. Because when you can’t just exposition dump and have everybody understand everything that’s going on at one time, you can give them tidbits that are intriguing and a little curiosity inducing.
The key is to not purposely string it out just to maintain curiosity. That curiosity buys you time to build attachment and tension and other forms of engagement, other ways to hook the reader and pull them in. But it is a good supplement when you, again, haven’t done that yet.
Bunny: Yeah, you can’t just eat vitamin D gummies, you gotta have vegetables. Those would be your primary source of nutrition.
Oren: We’re coming up on the end here, but we’ve still got some time. Maybe we should talk about how to create curiosity in the first place. Maybe not “meta curiosity”, ’cause you’re probably not writing for an audience of editors.
Bunny, Oren: [Chuckle]
Bunny: Or what your book cover looks like. You can get curiosity from a book cover, I will say.
Oren: That’s true. Book covers can be very suggestive. If you have a good book cover, you can desperately hope people will judge the book by it.
Bunny: [Chuckles] It’s true. This is something that happens. In fact, Chris and I went to a bookstore once and did it for a whole afternoon.
Chris: I guess the first thing I would say about creating curiosity is, again, we think about it as a deprivation of information, but everything requires some level of context to understand why it’s relevant or why it’s weird and different. Including curiosities. For instance, when I see people’s opening sentences and it has too little information, that can be a problem. ‘Cause I don’t have the context to know why something is strange.
So for instance, my example of, you come home and you find that your pets are not wearing sweaters. That they weren’t before. We have to know the context of, there was nobody at home, you lock the doors, nobody was planning to come home. You have a house with pets or whatever. In order to make it seem odd that this happened.
Oren: If you just describe that and there’s no context that these pets were not wearing sweaters before, then what does that mean? Nothing.
Chris: Again, if you were creating tense hooks, it’s good to focus on one mystery at a time, not to just throw tons of curious things at once at your reader.
Bunny: And this isn’t a rule, but it seems like if the character has a reason to be curious about this thing, so does the reader. Of course you can make a mistake, the reader just doesn’t find it interesting. But if the character comes home and they’re like, “Why are my pets wearing sweaters?” Probably the reader will pick up on that and be like, “Yeah, I wonder why. I wanna know too.”
Oren: That certainly helps. You could certainly build curiosity even if your character doesn’t necessarily pick up on it right away, that’s possible. It’s more challenging, it requires more subtlety. Whereas if it’s just something that your protagonist is curious about, that’s much easier.
Chris: And then I think from there you really do have to think about, again, not biting off more than you can chew. Because curiosity gets bigger the more something seems out of place or even impossible. The more difficult something is to explain, the more curiosity it will induce.
Also, there’s relevance. If it’s something that’s trivial, like we don’t care about. That’s gonna be less curious, something that matters, a mystery that matters. Let’s get people’s attention more. We have to think about, “Okay, can we explain this polar bear on this tropical island in a satisfying way?”
Or in Severance. Okay, we want something weird in curiosity-Inducing in this workplace, are we gonna be able to, you know, if we put goats there? That is very strange. It’s very out of place. It’s also very hard to explain and that’s directly and correlated to how curious it is. And can we give somebody an answer that is surprising and satisfying?
As opposed to if you have an answer that’s too easy. Just like our example of locked rooms, but it turned out a wizard did it. [Chuckles] It’s not gonna be a satisfying answer. It’s not gonna have a payoff that people want. It has to be something that clicks into place. I totally wouldn’t have thought of it, but now that you mention it, that makes great sense
Bunny: And it does have to make sense. Let me drive that home.
Oren: As a word of caution, ‘cause I know a lot of novelists get their primary learning from TV, which is not inherently bad. You just need to understand the difference. A novel writer has a much stronger incentive to not string their readers along and then not have an answer at the end than a TV show writer does. Because a novel writer is a brand in themselves, and readers will remember you, and if they had a bad experience with one of your books, they’re not gonna wanna pick up another one.
Whereas TV writers tend to be much more anonymous. I’m not saying TV writers do this on purpose because they hate their audience or whatever. But, once the TV writers for Lost were done, they mostly just went and took other jobs. Even Damon Lindelof, who is most famously associated with Lost, isn’t a household name, even though he’s a super important person in Hollywood, people are more likely to know movie directors. So they don’t necessarily have the same problem that a writer does.
Chris: And a TV show, there’s also kind of how short term or long term the thinking is. And oftentimes TV shows are just trying to get renewed for another season. Once the show actually ends, that’s when they don’t have anything to lose, ’cause the show is ending anyway. They’re not trying to get renewed. At which point, if they fumble the end, they’re much less likely to chase any consequences for it. Game of Thrones, the TV show was very unusual in that the ending was fumbled so badly that the showrunners actually faced consequences for doing so.
Oren: They actually lost some projects, although they still landed on their feet. They’re doing Three Body Problem now.
Bunny: I thought you were gonna say that the ending was unusual and I was gonna say, well, that is one way to put it.
Chris, Oren: [Laugh]
Chris: As far as our locked door example, an answer to that could be, maybe this is at the very top floor in the attic, so maybe somebody actually came down from the roof and there was a hatch or something. That might be an answer. That’d be like, “Okay, that makes sense. I was not expecting that. But that could explain this.”
Oren: Or you do the classic of, the person is actually still there and has never left. Sherlock Holmes did that. So that one works.
Bunny: That’s good for tension.
Chris: Again, another answer that’s surprising but can be like, “Okay yeah, no, that totally fits.” So in this case, it’s just, okay. I don’t even know how I would explain those baby goats in the corporate office.
Bunny: Goat yoga, goat yoga.
Chris: Yeah, you can do goat yoga, but that doesn’t click together. That’s not like, “Oh, that makes sense.” So it’s bizarre. Anything that doesn’t click, is surprising, but doesn’t make sense in any way, just feels bizarre. And it doesn’t have that same payoff.
Oren: And you could do something like, “Oh, we keep them as a sacrifice to the demon that we’ve made a bargain with.” But that creates this whole other thing. There’s nothing inherently supernatural in this show. So just having a demon or a Cthulu god show up at this point is probably gonna feel pretty weird.
Chris: I think if you took Severance, you had showed goats in the beginning, and then throughout a couple seasons you slowly built up the fact that this is a corporate workplace that actually is a Cthulu cult. And then you finally got to the part where there were sacrifices and that actually fit and made sense. You could go back, “Oh yeah, that’s what the goats were for.” [Laughs] If you wanted, I think you could probably do that.
Oren: Alright, with that very good explanation of curiosity out of the way, I think we are gonna go ahead and call this episode to a close.
Chris: If this episode satisfied your curiosity, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you all next week. [Outro Music]
Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.
We try our best to give actionable writing advice that makes stories better, but, unfortunately, not everyone else follows the same code. There’s a lot of terrible writing advice out there, much of it dressed up specifically to tell writers what they want to hear. This week, we’re talking about how you can spot it before throwing away perfectly good money. Whether or not you think our own advice is good, you’ll be forewarned about anything that sounds too good to be true.
Show Notes Scheme in British English * Writing Advice Cultures * Hyperion * Brandon Sanderson * Process Advice * Parable of the Sower * The Virgin’s Promise * Kishotenketsu * Save the Cat! * Save the Cat! Writes a Novel TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Ari.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Intro: You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. With your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny.
[Music]
Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren. With me today is…
Chris: Chris
Oren: and
Bunny: Bunny.
Oren: Good news, everyone! If we just follow this five step writing advice book, $19.99 with shipping, we’re all gonna be best sellers in no time!
Chris and Bunny: Woo. Wow. Wow.
Oren: Yeah, it’s that easy. The first piece of advice is to stop plotting your story.
Bunny: Second piece of advice, write.
Oren: It might be. You have to write, writers write. This is definitely deep wisdom, and we are- instead of plotting your story, we’re going to scheme our story.
Bunny:Ooh.
Chris: Oh, I see. Plotting is bad, but scheming, story scheming is good.
Oren: Yeah. We’ve defined plotting as plots that are bad, and so plots that are good will now be referred to as schemes.
Bunny: I can drum my fingers together and stroke a long hair cat while I scheme.
Oren: That’s my favorite part about British English is that the word scheme doesn’t seem to have the negative context that it does in American English. So you just hear people casually refer to the scheme for a new bike path.
[laughter]Oren: Sounds so evil.
Bunny: [as an evil villain] Ooh, transportation! Ahhahaha.
Oren: So today we are talking about signs of bad writing advice ’cause man, have I seen a lot of that recently. I’m not gonna mention most of them by name because if people haven’t already heard of them I don’t want to just be doing free advertising. So instead I’m hopefully gonna give you the tools to spot them on your own. And then if you find them in the wild, you will at least be forewarned.
Bunny: Yeah, it’s definitely an invasive species.
Oren: Yeah. [chuckles]
Chris: I do think it’s worth when thinking about advice first, thinking about what your ultimate goal is from getting advice. What are you actually trying to achieve so that you can make sure that your advice achieves that? And at Mythcreants we’re really focused on helping our readers make their story more engaging so it lands better with readers. We have some pieces on improving writer’s happiness as well, and various things like that.
But most of our content is you want to make your story more engaging for readers, and that’s the result that we’re aiming for. Other places might be narrowly focused on trying to increase your output. That’s not necessarily bad, but it’s a different goal than what we’re aiming for. There are many places that are more focused on creating content that appeals to writers in some way without getting results.
Oren: You can tell a lot of bad advice is basically just telling writers what they want to hear.
Bunny:It’s a good hustle. You gotta admit.
Oren: It is a good way to sell stuff. It’s just not what most writers actually want, at least not in my experience. What most writers are doing is they’re trying to do the same thing we are, which is they’re trying to make books that their readers will like. Otherwise, you don’t really need advice. You just write whatever you feel like.
If you don’t care about the reader experience, none of this matters, but, and most places pitch themselves as also wanting that but are just dishonest about it. The exception to this are the word count fanatic people who just say ‘it doesn’t matter if your book is good, just write, write, write more, and then maybe you’ll make money.’ At least they are sometimes honest that they don’t care if the book is good or not.
Chris: They’re not always honest, though. Sometimes they’ll be like, ‘just write, write, write, and then like magically, your books will get better.’ Without you paying any attention to making your books better.
Bunny: Any advice that says your first draft is best we should all know that’s wrong. Anyone who’s written anything…
Oren: That one’s not hard to spot.
Chris: If you really- all you want to do is write first drafts, and you’re willing to be like, ‘okay, well this final stories I create aren’t gonna be that good. This is what I care about.’ I’m not gonna tell somebody that’s the wrong way to do it, and it’s not impossible to get- make better first drafts as you go. But like usually these places are very much, don’t pay any attention to quality. Don’t try to think about what’s good or bad or what will make your story better and the problem will just magically solve itself.
Bunny: Look, stories are made up of words. The more words, the better.
[laughter]Bunny: The more story it is.
Chris: At the very least, if you’re gonna practice, you have to know what the difference is between the result you want and the result you don’t want as a result of practicing. If you were practicing the piano and you couldn’t recognize the difference between when you got a note right and you got a note wrong, there would be problems. You wouldn’t necessarily get that much better by practicing. There’s a lot of advice that it may be fun or it may be motivational, or it may feel good in some other way.
But that’s just different than advice that meets the goal that you’re trying to meet by getting advice and that, I think that’s just an important thing to think about; what is it that you want? And if all you want is to feel better when you’re feeling down and the advice does that, okay, but that’s different from it actually getting some kind of result.
Oren: If I just want to get some self-esteem boost and I’m gonna go check this advice site that’ll tell me all these fun meditation techniques I can do before I write, great. That might help you. Maybe those will get your words flowing, who knows? But it won’t teach you story craft. And if it, if they promise that it will- they are lying to you.
Bunny: There’s a few things that I think are worth noting that they might pitch themselves as writing device, but they are by definition disqualified from being writing advice. One of those, and I’m sure we’ll get into this in more detail, this writing is inborn type of thing. Anything that prefaces its advice with that is disqualified from being advice ’cause advice needs to be doing something. And if writing is inborn, you don’t gotta do anything! You’re just magically [a] writer.
Chris: It’s not impossible. And I’ve seen writing books, books that are supposed to be about writing and storytelling, where the person’s, ‘you have to be like a born writer.’ And they’ll try to make the excuse that like, ‘oh, but if you are a natural born writer, then advice could help you.’ [laughter] At the very least, anybody who’s doing that is creating excuses for themself if their advice isn’t effective. Because anytime their teaching doesn’t work, they could just be like, ‘that’s because that- blame the person, blame their student for their own failure. It’s a very bad sign.
Oren: Anyone who is creating a set of criteria in which it is impossible for them to fail because if they get a good result, then they succeeded, and if they got a bad result, it was someone else’s fault; go away from those people. They are not honest and there’s no reason to think they will be honest about anything else. Speaking of dishonest, I think the biggest flag that is really easy to spot and that you can immediately notice is when they promise you that this book will make you some level of success. This advice will make you a bestseller, or this course will make your book great and will make readers love it. I’m sorry. No one can promise that.
Bunny: Unless this is like a publishing house, CEO, coming to be like, ‘write a book and I will publish it.’ Which is not advice, but that’s the closest thing you’re going to get to it.
Chris: There are some services that will claim that- what they’ll do is like, ‘oh, follow it. If you follow this perfectly, we’ll publish you.’ But there’s always some caveat where they’ll take the cream of the crop. It’s just another submissions, or they’ll make it extremely complicated so they always have some way of coming back and being like, ‘you didn’t follow this.’ But there are places that will try to lure you in with the idea that you could get published from them and just in every single case, they’re just working like any other publishing house that takes tons of submissions and publishes a very small portion of them. There’s nobody that’s guaranteeing that they’ll publish you if you do X, Y, Z. They’re always finding some way around that.
Oren: Even in the bizarre scenario where the, you know, person in charge of a publishing house came to you from off the street or whatever, I was like, ‘I’m publishing your book.’ Even they couldn’t guarantee it would be a best seller. If they could do that, then the publishing industry would be in a much better place financially than it is now.
[laughter]Bunny: That’s true. They can market the hell out of it, but that doesn’t mean people will enjoy it.
Chris: If you are already a very famous writer who’s… all writings are of yours are popular because you’re a big name. Sure. [chuckles]
Oren: Unless you’re that one guy from Hyperion whose book sold like, a trillion copies and then everyone magically knew not to buy his next book because the poetry was too good.
[laughter]Bunny: What?
Oren: That’s my favorite plot point in Hyperion. One of the characters is a writer and he wrote this book that sold a million bazillion copies and then he wrote another book and no one bought it. And the explanation is supposed to be that the masses are not smart enough to appreciate his amazingly deep poetry. But how did the masses know that the book was full of poetry they couldn’t get? They had all already bought his last book. Did they all just like go and read the critical reviews? And make carefully considered decisions like, ‘I don’t think I would enjoy this poetry after reading these reviews and cross-referencing it with how reliable I found those reviewers,’ my God!
Chris: Like his first book is as popular as the Bible or something. I feel like his next book would be a bestseller even if it was very bad, [chuckles] because at that point he’s a brand name, right?
Bunny: Are there examples of this magical poetry in the book?
Oren: Is- there is some of it. I, I think I, I honestly don’t remember. It’s been a while since I’ve read Hyperion. That was clearly just the author expressing their angst about how people don’t read books anymore. Which was funny because during the time when that book was written, the reading level of the United States was going up. Again, it’s gone down more recently, but not like the sky is falling levels. People don’t read as much as they used to, but they still read a lot and there’s at least some data to show they are actually buying more books than they used to, even though they aren’t reading them which is weird but not bad for writers.
Bunny: Oh, I feel like that’s an attack on me actually.
[laughter]Oren: Look at what it promises to do. There is a reason Mythcreants does not promise that we can help you, that we can make your book sell good or that we can even make it good. All we promise is that we will do our best to help you.
Bunny: Here’s the promise I will turn you- You’ll wake up one morning and look down at yourself and realize you are Brandon Sanderson.
[laughter]Oren: That’s good. I like that. That’s a good promise. I’m into this now.
[laughter] Chris: All you have to do is follow these seven steps and the seventh step is becoming Brandon Sanderson. Admittedly, the directions for that stuff are a little vague, but you sure you, if you do become Brandon Sanderson as directed, you will be a bestselling author.
Bunny: Then the next step is profit. Easy.
Oren: You just put that Wired article about him under your pillow for like a week and then you’re good to go, I think. I think that’s how it happens.
[laughter]Chris: Another sign that I think is worth paying attention to because people kind of don’t think about it, this distinction until we bleed it out to them often is, basically when process advice is used in place of craft advice.
Bunny: Gosh, I can’t stand that.
Chris: And again, just to explain anybody who is not familiar with these terms ’cause process advice is a term that we coined. [chuckles] So process advice is anything about how you go about your work habits. As opposed to craft advice, which is about what should be on the page, like what your final result in the story is, not how you come up with that final result. For instance, dialogue craft advice would be like, ‘Hey, people don’t actually use each other’s names in dialogue that often. So that sounds unnatural.’ That’s something very specific. That’s about what you’re putting on the page.
Process advice would be like, ‘go listen to people. And take notes’ Because that’s about how you study. It’s not about the actual result that you get. And process advice definitely has its place. Like for instance, if you’re trying to raise your productivity, you’re gonna need process advice to do that. That’s a process result that you’re looking for. There’s other things that are just, again, hard to quantify without process advice in some way, shape, or form.
If people want advice on outlining, outlining is a process. Now, of course, a lot of people who want advice on outlining what they actually want is plotting advice. Parts of that can be difficult, but whatever process advice has its place. However, what tends to happen in lots of places is that people substitute process advice when craft advice is actually called for. So you try to get advice on characters and they tell you to write your characters backstory. As a way of getting to know the character without telling you, but what outcome do you want for this character on the page? We just talked about that when we were talking about what is character development actually for?
And when you see this, when you see lots of process advice in place of craft advice, it suggests the vice doesn’t actually know what they’re talking about. They don’t have the knowledge needed to give you that craft advice, or they are. So again, in that like romantic capital R mindset that they’re simply unwilling to express craft opinions that there’s like, oh, it’s all subjectivity and it comes from the muse and I couldn’t tell you what a good story is. Either way, they can’t really help you.
Bunny: It’s at best, it’s good for like giving you ideas for how you could like go about approaching something. Being like, you know, if you already have some idea about the craft part, you could be like, yeah, okay, maybe I can write the backstory of this character and see if that helps me, like get to know them better or whatever. But that’s not related to the actual craft of the thing. It’s just an idea for how you can get your juicy juices flowing.
Chris: Process advice isn’t banned, but like again, if it’s substituting when you actually need craft advice, is when it becomes a problem.
Oren: Because the same process can have very different results for different people. Like if you take that classic ‘listen to people talking and use that to prove your dialogue’ okay, but what am I listening for? I have definitely encountered some authors who that was a thought I had. It’s like ‘these people don’t talk like regular people. Maybe you should listen to the way regular people talk,’ but of course if that’s all you tell them, then they’re gonna end up copying all of the parts of how people talk that you don’t want in your dialogue. The stuff that we edit out as much as we can from the podcast. Otherwise, it would just be. Uh, right, you know-
Bunny: Awkward pauses.
Chris: And if you’re getting process advice from an editor or somebody who’s giving feedback on your work, the problem is that this is often a substitute for actually telling you what is wrong. If you write dialogue and it sounds unnatural, and they just tell you, ‘go listen to people’ they’re not telling you why your dialogue sounds natural or what about it is unnatural. And that can leave you completely unequipped to fix it, resolve the problem.
Bunny: Just create more problems at worst.
Oren: The next one that is a really big red flag that you need to be very careful of is vagueness. And this one’s harder to spot than some of the others. And this can be in both what a product you’re buying says it will do and the actual advice that it gives. Because a lot of courses and writing books and online classes kind of obscure what is actually in them. It can often mean you’re buying nothing of particular value. If you look at a writing course and it looks pretty cheap, it’s only $60, but then you see what does it include and it includes a bunch of blog posts.
Chris: Or resources! [dry chuckle] We have good advice. We have lessons. In this class, this class has class material. Lots of class material.
Oren: And if it’s not specific, it could just be that the class giver is going to send you 10 blog posts. That is not worth $60. If they tried to sell that as a book, they would get laughed out of town for $60. If they don’t tell you what’s actually in there, you can’t make that judgment for yourself. You just have to trust them. And I wouldn’t.
Chris: When it comes to the specifics, for instance, of a story. If we’re talking about craft advice that’s vague, this is also very commonly used for what I call pseudo structures where people are giving you what is supposed to be a story structure, but it doesn’t really work. And they’re trying to cover for that by making it vague. Like ‘your character should have a victory here, but by a victory we could also mean a defeat.’ [laughs] Or it’s so like, ‘oh, they will metaphorically come out of the bag.’ But, and that could be absolutely anything because it’s a metaphor. What they’re doing is making it so that you can’t actually pin their advice down or ever prove them wrong. It means that they don’t need to know what they’re talking about.
Bunny: The other thing with vague advice; it lacks nuance. Those story structures you’re talking about, just they have to be vague because they don’t account for everything. I’ve noticed this with the term like inciting incident in particular where a lot of the stories I’ve read, the thing that you might call that happened before the story started.
It starts in the middle of the story after it’s been kicked off. But then if you’re trying to warp around like inciting incident to fit that and you’re looking for like the next exciting thing, it’s either at like word zero is the inciting incident, or it’s like much further down the line after the first scene of the story has happened, which also doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
Oren: The inverse of this is hyper-specific advice, which is less common, but you still see it. And hyper-specific advice can be appealing to writers because it can make them feel like they just need to do whatever this book says. Because it’s, and it’s easy to follow. But the problem with hyper-specific advice is that it’s useless. If this actually worked, everyone would do that. And this is stuff like, I can actually say this one, because it’s famous, the Save the Cat, the original, the screenplay book has stuff like ‘at page 15, your hero must meet their arch enemy.’ Like why?
Bunny: Not all heroes in movies have arch enemies.
Oren: And those that do often the plot’s not gonna work for them to meet on page 15. Why would they? That’s a weird non-starter, and it just, for most novelists know better than that. Which is why in Save the Cat Writes A Novel, Brody takes those points and then vague-ifies them.
Chris: So they mean nothing instead of being hyper-specific.
Bunny: You swing back and forth. It’s a pendulum.
Oren: Because in Snyder’s version, ‘the midpoint is at exactly this page in the script your hero must have a false victory,’ which is silly. A lot of stories aren’t gonna have that, and so then Brody’s version is, ‘somewhere around the middle of your story, your hero must have a false victory or a false defeat, by which I mean a real victory or a real defeat, or a false victory or a false defeat.’ Anything in which your hero does or does not win something could qualify as long as it happens somewhere around the middle of the story.
Bunny: Your protagonist also has to do something. Or maybe they don’t.
Oren: Who knows? Authors of novels tend to not like super specific advice, so that I’m not as worried about that one, but it still is out there. People need to know about it.
Bunny: Usually it’s a tell when they can’t justify it. I’m sure the Save the Cat guy tried to justify the page 15 thing, or maybe he didn’t. Maybe he was just like, ‘this is what successful screenplays do’ and then left it at that.
Oren: He waffles back and forth on that. Sometimes he gives weird justifications and sometimes he’s just like ‘a movie I like that made money did this so you should do it.’
Bunny: I mean, that is a justification, but it’s not a good one.
Oren: And like people get mad at us for this because they say that’s what we are doing with our stuff about things like turning points and character karma. But we’re not telling you that your story has to be a very specific thing. We are telling you things that it should have in it if you want to have certain effects. We’re not giving you like, ‘this is the instructions. This is what must happen in your story.’ That’s the difference to the extent that you can tell it.
Bunny: A story is not an IKEA shelf, guys.
Chris: I think well related, we’ve talked about this before, is trying to put all stories into a fixed number of categories. Which, and this is usually a very absolutist thing, where it’s like every single story is one of six types or one of… Save The Cat has like 15 genres or something? That he made up [laughs] from movies and they never work. Every time we look at them, they do not work. And I think theoretically, one of the reasons they can’t work (it’s impossible for them to work), for one thing they never take into account the fact that some stories are bad and poorly formed.
There’s some mix up between what’s descriptive or if we’re talking about prescriptive in a constructive way as opposed to prescriptive, meaning overly pedantic. Where when we give advice, and this is the thing is that lots of other people, other than Mythcreants, try to avoid criticizing stories. The idea is that every bestseller is a success story and that’s what we’re trying to get and so we never wanna criticize them, but it doesn’t fit the reality of the fact that stories have flaws and lots of them aren’t doing a lot of things right.
And every time you try to say, ‘Hey, this is the ideal formula,’ if you try to fit all stories into it, including the really janky ones that have no plot and only worked because they were just like really novel when they first came out but everybody would find them boring now, that doesn’t work. There has to be some division between best practices and not as good practices.
Bunny: I think people make the mistake of assuming that what’s in a popular work, it’s like in its best and most ideal form which is not necessarily the case. And then that any changes you suggest or criticisms you make would therefore be tacked on or like distract from the essence of it. I ran into this in a class where I brought up that it’s kind of weird that Parable of the Sower doesn’t even mention queer people, especially since Butler’s other stuff has dealt with themes like that. And I had gotten into a huge argument with classmates about… They were like, ‘oh no, it would be shoehorned in if she included it.’ I was like, ‘why do we assume that it would be shoehorned in? Don’t we trust Butler to like, include things gracefully?’
Oren: When something’s a classic people cannot imagine it any other way. So if you talk about, say for example, how Lord of the Rings could have been different, all they imagine is that you’re taking away Lord of the Rings. They cannot imagine that there could have been a better version of that story that we never got to see. And that’s just a problem with classics. That’s why it’s hard to talk about best practices in terms of classics, just because they have calcified in people’s minds and they just must always be that way.
Bunny: Which is really annoying.
Oren: It’s a problem. It’s one reason why we don’t only talk about classics. People are more willing to accept that newer stuff maybe could have been different.
Bunny: It’s also worth noting, back to your point, Chris, it’s a big thing in philosophy of art that if you have a theory of what is art that doesn’t include bad art, then you have a bad theory of art. [laughter] Because there is bad art out there. If your, if your criteria is like, ‘all art is beautiful,’ there’s some ugly ass art out there, I gotta say!
Chris: But again, when we’re talking about what is our goal with writing advice, if our goal is to improve our writing in some way, then by definition when we’re trying to create useful categories we are not trying to include the bad stuff. And so the lack of recognition that we have to make a distinction between good and bad quality on some level, even if it’s a fine line and lots of shades on the spectrum, is always gonna leave people astray.
Besides the fact that, of course, stories are highly variable, and the idea of trying to put them into categories that are useful is almost impossible just because of… the natural variety that they have is so great. And we have categories sometimes, but it’s very much, ‘Hey, here are some easy starter categories that you can use, but we’re not trying to claim that everything fits into them. These are just some easier, simple ways to get started.’ Like our blog posts on six turning points for climaxes, there’s six types of turning points that are very common that we see a lot. We don’t try to pretend that everything fits into one of them.
And then I have another blog post that explains more of the mechanics of how turning points work without sorting them into categories. So it’s a little more broad and flexible. We see lots of places that are desperately trying to give writers that ‘here, just follow these easy steps. Here’s how you do storytelling without having to think too hard.’ I don’t think that works. You’re gonna have to think about it storytelling’s-
Bunny: It’s not easy!
Chris: It’s not that simple.
Oren: And we’re almost outta time. So one thing that I wanna mention before we go is the last thing to really look out for is; anything that is presenting itself as a quick fix. A simple solution to a complex problem, and you have things like ‘if you just follow the hero’s journey, you won’t have to plot a story.’ ‘If you just use the Virgin’s promise, you won’t have to do character arcs because these will just tell you how to do them.’ ‘If you just use Kishotenketsu, you won’t have to have conflict or tension.’
The thing that- keep in mind for these quick fixes is that you have to remember that most other people are about as smart as you are, and if these things actually worked, everyone would use them. The fact that other people aren’t doing that, or at least are not doing it in a way that is noticeably successful, can show you that this is obviously not a thing that actually works. Because if you could figure it out, other people could too.
Bunny: I’m guessing actually this isn’t much of a guess that, because I’m sure that Save the Cat and Save the Cat Writes A Novel, have sold like a quadrillion copies each, and that doesn’t mean we now have a quadrillion bestsellers.
Oren: That was the thing I pointed out in my critique of Save the Cat Writes A Novel is like, ‘well, this book promised miracles and I haven’t seen any yet.’ All of the really glowing reviews of it from authors who were successful before it came out. Feels like if it could do the things it said it could do, we would already have a bunch of authors who were super successful saying that it was all thanks to Save the Cat. So with that, I think we’re gonna go ahead and call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you found this episode helpful, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank two of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber, who is an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel.
And second is Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
[Outro Music]
This has been the Mythcreant Podcast opening, closing theme. The Princess who saved herself by Jonathan Colton.
Swords? How droll. Guns? Completely unfashionable. Aren’t there any weird weapons out there to satisfy our thirst for novelty? You know what we’re talking about: the kind of completely bizarre contraption that’s as much a danger to the wielder as to the enemy. Fortunately, there are actually quite a few of those in both fiction and real life!
Show Notes Mass Effect Weapon Heat * Transporter Gun * HL Hunley * The Claw of Archimedes * Greek Fire * Point of View Gun * Air Rifle * Mancatcher * USB Arrow * Kylo Ren’s Lightsaber * Laser Bow * Lirpa * Bamboo Cannon * Panjandrum TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Ace of Hearts.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[Music]
Bunny: Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Bunny, and with me here today is…
Chris: Chris
Bunny: …and…
Oren: Oren!
Bunny: And I’m just so tired of this sword. I’m tired of this gun. They’re so basic and chunky. I want something unique. I want something that makes you scratch your head and ask who designed it, and I think the best way to do that is to stick two other weapons together. So I’ll go first. I’m going to have a gun, but it shoots nunchucks, and when the nunchucks are shot, they unfold into scissors.
Oren: That’s pretty scary. I’ll admit I would not want someone shooting that at me.
Bunny: What about you Oren? What weapons are you gonna jam together?
Oren: Okay, so obviously it’s gonna have to be a whip and a shield. ‘Cause we’ve already seen whip swords, right? For some reason, only sexy characters use whip swords. So I tried to think of what the opposite of that was. So a whip shield is like the least sexy weapon you could possibly use.
Bunny: Captain America and Catwoman.
Chris: Okay. I think I want a gun that when you pull the trigger, it actually dissolves into a bunch of nanites that fly over to the person you pointed the trigger at, which really begs the question of why you did the whole trigger thing and just attacks them.
Oren: Also, you better hope you don’t need your gun while the nanites are over there.
Bunny: Usually you confuse them. It’s psychological. They thought they were gonna be shot with a gun, but they were shot with nanites.
Chris: I mean, it might be cool if you had like a big gun that got smaller every time you shot it, as some of its nanites flew, and then those nanites would return and recombine with the gun.
Oren: That was the idea of the guns in Mass Effect. Not quite, but the idea of Mass Effect was that there wasn’t any ammo because the guns fired by shaving off little bits of metal from basically a bar of metal inside the gun and then accelerating them up super high. And so the idea was that in theory you could run out of material, but it would take so long that there was no reason to track bullets. So instead, it tracked how much heat your gun generated, which was a cool mechanic, but it turned out to be too hard to balance. And so in the second one, they invented heat clips, which are basically bullets. It’s just very funny to be Shepard and wake up in Mass Effect 2 after you’ve nearly died and had your near death experience and everything… and it’s like, “Hey, Shepard, while you were asleep, we invented bullets!”
Bunny: It’s the future, in which they have bullets! I think I didn’t get far enough in that game to encounter that particular lore, but what I do remember is that you can turn your gun into healing goo. Which is not a feature of most guns.
Oren: Oh, yeah, obviously, just shoot people with healing bullets. There’s some weird lore in Mass Effect if you read the in-game text, if you’re a nerd.
Bunny: Unfortunately, I’m just a nerd and not a very good gamer, so I could not get to the actual nerd stuff.
Chris: One weapon that I was surprised was not introduced earlier is the transporter gun in Star Trek because transporters are literally death-clone machines. So I’m surprised that nobody weaponized them earlier.
Oren: So there are a couple of different ways you can weaponize a transporter. Every time Star Trek does this, it raises the question of why they don’t do it all the time. But some writer is just really eager and they always are like, yeah, I’ll be clever by weaponizing the transporter.
Chris: We always knew the transporter was very dangerous. We actually need to forget that because characters use it all the time, and each time we’re cringing.
Bunny: Don’t think about it. Stop thinking about it.
Oren: No, you chaotic drama llamas, don’t do that. It’s hurting the entire setting when you do that!
Bunny: Don’t people always get stuck in the transporter too?
Oren: Yeah. The transporter can be used to cause and solve most problems, but this particular one was from the DS9 episode where it transports the bullet into the room and shoots you with it so that you can shoot through walls and stuff.
Bunny: Wow. That is OP.
Oren: Which is, yeah, it’s pretty OP and the answer to why they don’t use it all the time was some handwavium. It was like, it didn’t turn out to be viable… but it looks pretty viable to me in this episode!
Chris: It just really does ask the question, why doesn’t the gun instead just transport someone into nothing?
Oren: There’s transporting a bomb over, there’s just transporting away pieces of the target.
Chris: Oh, yeah. They also thought in the movie, thought they were so clever. Oh look, we transport a bomb!
Bunny: That’s the first thing it would’ve been used for.
Chris: The first thing. It would’ve been used for.
Oren: Some of the shows have done that too, and it’s annoying then too. Like guys, come on. We have to pretend we can’t do this, or the show doesn’t work.
Chris: Just like all the episodes where it’s like, okay, how about we solve this deadly disease by just running a person through the transporter and modifying them during transport? No, we need to pretend we can’t do that or else no medical drama works.
Oren: My favorite weird historical weapons are the ones that you hear about and they sound like a terrible idea, and then you see how they were used and it turns out that they were exactly as terrible as they sounded.
Bunny: “Why would someone do that? It must have a point.” Oh, oh child. Nope.
Oren: My favorite, my absolute favorite is the spar torpedo. ‘Cause back in the day, torpedo actually was just a synonym for what we would now call mines, just a floating explosive that a ship would run into. Nowadays they’re self-propelled weapons. But that wasn’t the terminology way back in the day. When they were making the first – or actually the second, the first one was during the Revolutionary War, but that’s a different story – the second combat submarine known to exist during the Civil War, and they were thinking of how to arm it. They thought, okay, what if we put a torpedo on the end of a long stick?
Bunny: I see where this is going…
Oren: And then we pedaled up to the other ship, ’cause this was a pedal driven submarine, and hit the other ship with our torpedo on the end of a stick and blow ’em up.
Bunny: Gotta be a pretty long stick.
Oren: Yeah. And so you can see the immediate problem with this is that this requires you to be very close to the ship when your torpedo goes off. For a long time, we didn’t know what happened to that submarine, the CSS Hunley, because it never returned from its mission when it was able to sink a single Union ship. But we eventually found it and did a bunch of studies, and right now the main theory of why it sank was that everyone on board was killed instantly by the torpedo explosion.
Bunny: Wow. Who would’ve thunk, you know?
Chris: But did they test the radius of the torpedo explosion?
Oren: They absolutely did not.
Bunny: This was before math, Chris.
Chris: Before math!
Oren: You have to understand how cursed this submarine was, okay? This submarine literally killed two entire crews in training.
Bunny: Oh God.
Oren: It got to the point where the Confederate naval personnel would not go inside it because it was a death trap, and so they had to get Army people to take it out on its mission. This is the most cursed ship you have ever heard of. It’s very grim, but I also love it.
Bunny: Save the submarines for a different war, guys.
Oren: Yeah, they’re not ready yet.
Bunny: They’re not quite there. Speaking of ships, when I was doing research for this episode, I learned of the claw of Archimedes.
Oren: Yeah!
Bunny: Which is just a very funny title, and it’s basically, I guess like a grappling hook that grabs an enemy ship, lifts it up, and then either drops it, turns it, or chucks it, and it sinks the ship. It’s just a big hand that grabs ships and sinks them.
Oren: Yeah. It doesn’t really work though ’cause the game is rigged so that the claw can’t actually grab onto the ship for long enough to get it over to the prize. So you have to put in more coins.
Bunny: A claw. A claw! You know, I have gotten a plushie with a claw of Archimedes.
Oren: What? No, you, that’s impossible!
Bunny: I know. I did it once!
Oren: Some kind of chosen one.
Bunny: I got a branded bee.
Oren: Mm. Very nice. So it should be noted that the claw of Archimedes is probably made up, but Archimedes is a real person – or was a real person, he’s probably not still alive – but a lot of the things he’s credited with inventing probably never happened. Like the claw of Archimedes, that’s probably fake. There’s that idea that he had the soldiers shine light from their shields and burn other ships as they were coming in. That probably didn’t happen, but it’s a neat idea. In a fantasy setting, you could probably make it work.
Bunny: Is that the same thing or a different thing than Greek fire?
Oren: Greek fire? Okay. All right. All right. Hang on. I gotta talk about Greek fire.
Bunny: Go off, Oren.
Oren: Okay, so first of all, it should be called Roman fire because it was invented in the Byzantine AKA Eastern Roman Empire. Mm-Hmm. Take that, historians destroyed by facts and logic! So Greek fire is just a general catch-all term we have for a kind of incendiary liquid that was used by the Eastern Romans from around, I think the nine hundreds, probably a little earlier than that. And they used it to protect Constantinople from various invading fleets. And it should be noted that they were not the only ones to have incendiary fluids. Incendiary fluids have been used for basically forever in warfare, but Greek fire, at least from the history records that we have, seems to have been more effective than whatever anyone else was using at the time. But it gets confusing because the term Greek fire got so popular that people would start using it for any kind of incendiary liquid. Often it’s hard to tell if this thing that they’re talking about is the same as the really famous Greek fire. But Greek fire basically made the Byzantine navy unbeatable for a certain stretch of time because there was just, there’s no answer to it. If you don’t have a gunpowder weapon and your enemy ship has a flamethrower… sorry, that’s over.
Chris: This is maybe an odd question, but were the flames from Greek fire a normal color?
Oren: Last time I checked, there’s different reports on that.
Chris: Oh, really?
Bunny: Interesting.
Oren: Yeah. ‘Cause we don’t really know exactly what it was made of. There are different ideas, but like the actual formulas for what the Byzantines were using were so tightly guarded that we don’t have them anymore. And that may have actually been why the Byzantine stopped using it after a while because it’s such a small circle that eventually they lost it.
Bunny: Well, that’s embarrassing.
Oren: There are illustrations that show them as orange and red flames, but I believe there are accounts that describe them in different colors, so it’s likely that they may have had different colors because who knows what was in there.
Chris: I think in Game of Thrones there’s what’s clearly Greek fire-
Oren: Yeah, alchemist fire.
Chris: -clearly inspired by Greek fire, that’s green flames or something like that.
Oren: As far as I know, there isn’t a lot of evidence that Greek fire burned green. I think that’s a George R. R. Martin invention, but I don’t know. I wasn’t there.
Chris: I mean, it’s certainly a cool image. Works great on film. One of my favorites when it comes to weird weapons is the point of view gun-
Oren: Yeah, that one’s great.
Chris: -that’s added to the Hitchhiker movie. It’s not from the book. They added it during the app adaptation, but it’s cool, so, when you shoot somebody, they understand your point of view on the situation.
Bunny: Okay, that’s great.
Chris: So it helps you win the argument. The description of it is weirdly gender essentialist though, because the movie explains its history by like a coalition of angry housewives that wanted their husbands to understand them and that it supposedly doesn’t have much effect on women because their empathy is high already.
Bunny: What?
Chris: It’s like, okay, we don’t, that’s weird. We don’t need to go there.
Oren: Look. I will accept that a group of housewives had to create this weapon because patriarchal standards make it so that men are not supposed to understand each other. But don’t tell me that one gender is inherently more empathetic. Come on guys, we can do better.
Bunny: And does that imply that women always empathize with the other side of an argument? Because that is emphatically not the case. I’ve had enough arguments with friends in philosophy class to know that.
Chris: But I like that because there is still almost something weapon-ish about it, in that if you’re having an argument, you could use it as part of your argument, but it’s also just entirely peaceful.
Bunny: But it is a gun!
Oren: I also really like historical weapons that sound like they should be superweapon game changers. And it turned out they weren’t. And so then you get a lot of people being like, why didn’t they use this thing more? And then that leads to weird conspiracy theories, which are very fun. I mean, fun to learn about. One of my favorites is the air rifle, which is an invention from around the late 17 to early 1800s, which was literally a gun that was fired using compressed air instead of gunpowder. And it had a really high rate of fire ’cause you didn’t have to do the whole ramming a ball down the barrel thing and it could fire in the rain more easily. It didn’t produce any smoke, so it seems like a wonder weapon. Why isn’t everyone using these? And so you get these weird conspiracy theories about how Napoleon hated them and would kill anyone who was using one, and none of that’s true. The reason is that they were really expensive and hard to make and had a tendency to catastrophically fail when you were using them. So that’s why. But they’re just a very fun weapon to imagine.
Bunny: “Eight Weird Weapons – Napoleon Hates Number Four!” One weird one that I learned about was apparently still in use – by, of course, the police, of all things – is the man catcher, or rather the person catcher, it will catch you either way. And it was used for pulling people off of horses. It’s basically those sticks with a little grabby thing on the end that you use to pick up trash. It’s basically that, but human sized.
Chris: What?
Bunny: And then it has spikes all over it.
Chris: Oh!
Bunny: Yeah. So you grab someone off their horse and they’re presumably wearing armor, so the spikes don’t kill them, but it could kill them and the police use it. They don’t have the spikes currently. But very funnily, in my opinion, people in India were using this to capture fugitives during covid so that they could social distance while they were arresting people.
Chris: Wow.
Oren: You gotta do what you gotta do, I guess.
Chris: But it’s for grabbing people off their horses.
Bunny: Yeah, but it can be just used for grabbing people too. It’s like a big trash picker upper, but for people.
Chris: Woof. That’s very strange.
Oren: I feel like that’s gonna become an overpowered weapon in the Avatar setting, because in Avatar, any weapon that is at least theoretically non-lethal is super good because they can’t kill or cut anyone, hence the prevalence of bolas in Avatar. Everyone loves bolas.
Chris: Right? So many bolas. So Hawkeye has an arrow that shoots bolas. I don’t know how that works, but apparently he has one.
Oren: My favorite thing about his bola arrow is that he also has at least one arrow that just like traps you in foam, which is obviously a more effective way to-
Chris: I like the big purple foam arrow. That’s cool.
Bunny: That sounds goofy.
Oren: I can only imagine that the purple foam arrow is more expensive. So he is like, “I’m on a budget, man. I retired from the Avengers. Tony Stark’s not paying for all my arrows anymore.”
Chris: So your bola arrow is like the poor man’s big purple foam arrow.
Oren: Yeah, exactly. Some video games make you track ammo, so you have to keep your very best ammo for the boss. And for the minions, it’s like, all right, I guess I’ll use bola arrows for these guys.
Bunny: Oh, what he should be doing is using heat clip arrows.
Chris: They even in the show, this one was kind of a joke, but he apparently has a USB arrow.
Bunny: Look, when your computer is on the other side of the room…
Oren: The problem with the USB arrow is that it wouldn’t work because to plug in a USB, you have to try to plug it in once, not work, take it out, turn it over. It still doesn’t work. You take it out and you turn it over a third time and now it works.
Chris: Maybe the arrow does that. You don’t know.
Oren: I’ve seen it. It doesn’t do that!
Chris: Maybe you just shoot three arrows, so you shoot one one way and then the other way, and then back the first way.
Bunny: You gotta rotate them.
Oren: It always goes in perfectly the first time, and my suspension of disbelief is ruined!
Bunny: That’s the most unrealistic thing in that show.
Oren: I do find it funny on Star Trek when they’re trying to come up with a unique weapon for aliens because there’s only so many ways you can put variety on like a point and shoot laser weapon, at least with the budget Star Trek is usually working with, so you’ve got like the Ferengi laser whips, which is just… sure, what if you had a phaser, but you also had to make this really awkward arm swing motion to use it? How do you aim that?
Bunny: There is that- we referenced the urumi, which is the whip-sword-whip. You can stick a bunch of these into a hilt and swing around and whip people with it. I guess it’s sort of like that.
Oren: The phase whip is supposed to be a ranged weapon.
Bunny: Oh.
Oren: It’s a whip, but when you crack the whip, it shoots a bolt of energy.
Bunny: What?
Chris: Why would you do that? A gun is so much easier!
Oren: Because the Ferengi, back in early TNG when we thought the Ferengi were gonna be the big bads of Star Trek-
Chris: Oh, isn’t it that first weird one where they’re super goofy and they’re introduced?
Oren: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The laser whip stuck around for a few episodes after that, but then they retired them and just decided that Ferengi used phasers like everyone else, but they had a different shape of phaser.
Chris: That honestly reminds me, because it seems like it would be dangerous to the Ferengi, of Kylo Ren’s lightsaber handguards. The things on the sword that stick out on either side, they’re to protect your hands. Okay? They’re not to kill your opponent with, so making them a burning laser is not a good idea.
Bunny: Just get a little stabby stabby when you get really close to your opponent and you can’t impale them on the big one. You gotta like, stabby stabby on the side.
Chris: You’re just more likely to burn yourself with that at that point.
Oren: Man, okay. So there are like pages and pages of discourse on this because if you look closely at Kylo Ren’s lightsaber, you can see that the energy bits don’t come directly out of the handle. There are sections of just metal, and then the energy comes out of those. So at least in theory, if he slides his hand too far forward, he’s not just gonna burn it up on lightsaber stuff. But then this raises the question of what happens if someone else slides their lightsaber down the sword, which is the whole point of a handguard. Aren’t they just gonna cut through those little emitters? Which then led to the fan theory, I think propounded by Stephen Colbert, that those are not emitters, that those are actually just conduits and the lightsaber bits are coming off of the main one. It is so confusing.
Bunny: What? They wanted it to look cool.
Chris: Yeah, I mean, clearly they’re designed to look like handguards. That’s clearly what they’re inspired by. So regardless of the technical design, if you look closely, that’s what they’re supposed to be reminiscent of.
Bunny: Yeah. But what if he swung them around and it made a crack and then he shoots you?
Oren: Lightsabers are just a weapon that if you think about them for five seconds, you realize just how incredibly silly they are and how nothing about them makes any sense. So I just generally advise against making me think about the mechanics of lightsabers because like for example, I don’t want lightsaber fights where what people do is when they go to clash swords, one of them just turns off their lightsaber for a second and then turns it back on and kills you. That’s boring. I don’t want that kind of fight. A martial artist on YouTube pointed out that if lightsabers actually weighed nothing, the way you would use them is by kind of waving them around like a flashlight, and that also looks very silly. I don’t want that. So we just have to assume that lightsabers have weight somehow. Things like that.
Bunny: Like how far can you extend the blade?
Oren: Yeah. There are some of the books where the guy’s like, I have a nine foot lightsaber blade. Okay. At this point, why are you not just using a gun?
Bunny: I have a lightsaber where if you point it at someone and turn it on and off very quickly a beam shoots out and impales them.
Chris: Speaking of “why not gun,” I think we should talk about Omega’s laser bow on Bad Batch.
Oren: Oh my gosh.
Chris: Okay, so for anyone who’s not seen Bad Batch, Bad Batch is about a bunch of clones in the Star Wars universe who end up defecting when the Republic turns into the Empire and leaving, and the clones start getting replaced with other recruits. So it’s a bunch of burly guys, and then they have a little girl with them. Her name is Omega, and so she needs to learn to fight. But instead of giving her a blaster, they give her this laser bow and it’s big and bulky and apparently takes strength to pull back, ’cause you know, bows, a conventional longbow, or even a shortbow takes a lot of strength to pull back. And we even establish that she’s having trouble with the amount of strength that it takes to pull this bow back, and that’s affecting her aim. But then instead of being like, okay, Omega, you need to go weightlift until you can have enough strength for this bow, they just have her keep shooting at a target. It’s like, clearly strength training is what she needs. But anyway, it’s big, it’s bulky and all it does is shoot the same kind of blaster fire that just a normal gun would shoot, that you wouldn’t need strength for.
Oren: And it doesn’t have a stun setting. It’s just an objectively worse weapon and she’s the worst person on the crew to have it.
Bunny: Oh, it is massive!
Oren: Yeah. It’s such a weird choice for her and every time she’s in a face-off with someone and she has pulled the string back, the laser string, and is holding it on someone and they’re holding a weapon on her, I just think of how hard it is to hold a bow string like that.
Chris: That takes a lot of strength. You can’t just-
Oren: I just keep expecting her to lose her grip on it after a while. ‘Cause even a trained archer can only hold that for a short amount of time. Yeah, that bow is so silly.
Chris: I understand the impulse to want to give her a signature weapon. It’s also like… pink.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Which opens questions about like, I mean, pink is fine, but did you give the girl a pink bow because she’s a girl?
Oren: Yeah. It becomes noticeable in that context. I noticed none of the burly guys have pink laser weapons.
Bunny: One has to wonder, we can only guess.
Oren: I also feel bad for sci-fi TV show prop designers who are trying to make alien melee weapons.
Chris: Oh, like the bat’leth?
Oren: Yeah, the bat’leth is the main example.
Chris: I mean, it looks cool with all its curvy blades, but yeah, probably wouldn’t actually make any sense to wield a bat’leth.
Oren: Yeah, it’s a very awkward weapon to try to use. It’s a big two-handed weapon with no reach and its swing is very awkward. And the way that you swing it, you’re trying to hit people with the spikes on the end, but the spikes are always at an angle to whoever you’re swinging it at. So you’re never getting full power from it. It’s just the weirdest weapon. But there are only so many ways to design a practical melee weapon, okay? And we’ve explored most of them as humans.
Chris: Okay, so, pointy object that is designed to hurt another person. There’s only so many optimal designs. It’s not that complicated. It’s actually very simple. You try to get creative, you’re just making it suboptimal.
Oren: Or at least the ways it is complicated are very hard to read on screen. You can look at two swords that to most people would look almost identical, but to a trained swordsmith, there’s a lot of differences.
Chris: Sure. Absolutely. But to a viewer, so, trying to make it seem cool to somebody who doesn’t know anything about weapons…
Bunny: And then there’s apparently, I was remembering there’s that episode of, I think we see these in the original series, but I could be wrong about that. Where Spock gets really horny.
Oren: Yeah!
Bunny: And has to go back and then he and Kirk fight each other with these big pizza spoon looking things.
Chris: What?
Oren: Those are spears that have a big half moon blade on them.
Bunny: Lirpas?
Oren: Yeah. Those are pretty silly looking. I’m trying to remember if that’s based on a real weapon or not.
Bunny: If it is, I’m lost. I could not tell you.
Oren: Because I mean, there are some odd looking weapons historically speaking, especially because sometimes it’s not clear if a weapon was ever really used or if it was ceremonial. There are a lot of swords that are in museums and stuff that look too big for a person to have ever used, and the two explanations for them are that they were either ceremonial, or that there are secretly giants that the Jews are hiding from us. So I’ll leave it to you, which one of those you think is correct. Speaking of Star Trek, I unironically love Kirk’s bamboo canon in the Gorn fight. I don’t care if it works or not. There’s internet discourse about whether or not you could actually make that work. And I’m on the record as “I do not give a crap.”
Chris: I’m not familiar with this cannon. Tell me about the cannon.
Oren: So this is the first Gorn episode and the Gorn are rude guys and an alien beams Kirk and a Gorn down to fight. ’cause why not? The Gorn is much bigger and physically more powerful than Kirk. And so Kirk figures out that he has all the things he needs to make gunpowder, and he uses a reinforced bamboo tube as the barrel, and then he uses diamonds as the ammunition.
Bunny: Uhh…
Oren: And he builds this thing and he uses it and he shoots the Gorn and then doesn’t kill the Gorn, therefore showing that we have evolved as a species, and it’s great. I love that part. Fantastic episode. Except for the part where we just let the Gorn get away with murdering a bunch of people for no reason.
Bunny: Well, I’ll keep that survival tip in my back pocket in case I ever have bamboo, diamonds and gunpowder.
Oren: Mythbusters did an episode where they tried to recreate it and they couldn’t get it to work. I think their conclusion was that the bamboo is just not strong enough and that it would explode.
Bunny: Fancy that.
Oren: But there are competing claims. There are other people online who claim to have made something similar. So I think it is conceivably possible. As an engineering obstacle, it might be too much for Kirk to realistically overcome, but wooden cannons are not unheard of in history. They have happened. They’re just- obviously metal is better. I have never tried it. I just know that there’s discourse about whether or not this would actually work.
Bunny: So, I know we’re running out of time here, but I wanna mention one more, and I’m curious if either of you have heard of it. I think it’s the Panjandrum.
Chris: A drum.
Bunny: So it’s basically a steel drum full of explosives – This was in World War II – put between two big wheels, giant wagon wheels that were propelled by rockets. Rockets around the rim of these wheels.
Oren: Yeah, why not? It seems like a fun day at the beach.
Bunny: Yeah. And then you light the rockets and set the thing going and it just rolls through whatever barrier you put in front of it. For some reason it was never used, which is sad.
Oren: There are a lot of very odd weapons that you can find in World War I and II.
Chris: So it was supposed to basically carry explosives into something.
Bunny: Yeah. The ultimate goal is to bust down big defenses like concrete walls and fortresses, and it could get up to 60 miles per hour with these rockets on it.
Chris: So if you have a flat, no man’s land, whatever, that you don’t want a person to go on. You set this thing rolling into the wall with a bunch of explosives. And the idea is that it hits the wall and then explodes.
Bunny: Yeah. And like crashes through it. And it’s to get a tank sized hole in it, so then you can get your tank through it. And the best way to do that is a rolling ball of explosive death.
Oren: Well, maybe not the best way.
Bunny: [laughing] No. Shut up Oren!
Oren: As it turns out…
Bunny: Shush!
Oren: Alright. With that we will, I think, call this weird episode to a close.
Bunny: Closing it with a bang.
Oren: Ah!
Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons who help make sure we can afford to research all of these bizarre weapons, which, you know, is a very important process. I think you’ll all agree. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. Finally, there’s Vanessa Perry, who is our foremost expert on the works of T. Kingfisher. We will talk to you next week.
[Music]
Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening/closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.
Tension comes from problems that the characters have to solve, and if a character is important, they should contribute to solving the problem in question. But how will they contribute, exactly? This question can be difficult to answer, especially if you have a bunch of characters with different power levels on team good. Fortunately, we’ve got a few suggestions for you!
Show Notes Animal Companions * Avatar Beach Episode * Echo * Tech * The Winchester Brothers * Toph * The Buffy Gang * The Fellowship * Cersei * Margaery * Holly Munro * Counselor Troi * Temeraire * The Northman * Ops * First Officers TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Lady Oscar.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast, with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[Intro Music]Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is…
Oren: …Oren…
Chris: …and…
Bunny: …Bunny.
Chris: Okay, quick. We all need to make sure we are contributing to this podcast, or the post author might decide we’re superfluous and erase our existence.
Bunny: Oh, no!
Chris: Oren, what’s your contribution?
Oren: I have one joke that I make all the time, and it’s the same joke, and it was really funny the first time, so it’ll probably be funny the next 500 times.
Chris: I see nothing wrong with this. Bunny?
Bunny: I’m the pretty lady who walks around and shows you the car you can win on the game show.
Chris: Ohh, very good.
Oren: That is very useful.
Chris: So, for me, is providing the intro enough? Am I done now?
Oren: You served a purpose early in the story, so that should work for the rest of it, right? You can just hang around for the rest of the story and not worry about anything.
Chris: Yeah. Or just, like, engage in active listening, just to remind people that I am still here. I haven’t disappeared, I swear. But I won’t actually provide any information, or offer any tips.
Bunny: We could just imagine you leaning forward and nodding intently. [Oren laughs]
Chris: Yeah, with the same body language every time, because we’ve got to change it up.
Bunny: It’s like when you’re playing a video game and the animation begins to loop, but it’s active, don’t worry.
Oren: Oh, it’s a podcast idle animation? [general laughter]
Bunny: Yeah. It comes with a track that goes, “Yep. Mm-hmm. Yeah.”
Chris: [laughing] This time, we’re talking about how to give protagonists a way to contribute. Basically, the reason why is because you need every character to make a difference. So, from a plot perspective, you should not be able to cut a character out and have nothing change, right? That’s bad. They’re just not gonna feel like they belong there. They’re going to feel extra and useless.
And then, also, contributing helps make your secondary protagonist in particular more likable. When they help the main character, they really do come across better. Whereas if you have a side character that is constantly creating trouble for the main character, maybe they’re just always getting into trouble and the main character always has to bail them out, and they’re never actually helping anything, they get really annoying.
Oren: Why would you personally attack animal companions everywhere, Chris? [laughter]
Bunny: Like the lady showing the cars, they can just be cute, right?
Chris: If they’re cute, and they’re not contributing, but they’re also not hindering…. but animal companions, you also don’t really have to develop them or invest in them that much, like they’re not there. [laughing] Which is a low…I think we can usually do better than that, but I’ve seen worse. The other nice thing about getting your protagonist to contribute is that it just helps distribute the candy among Team Good, or Team Evil–in some cases, stories, generally not narrated stories, film stories, will have a Team Evil. I’m thinking about like the beach episode, which I know Oren hates the beach episode of Avatar, the Last Airbender.
Oren: I don’t love it. It’s not my favorite. [Oren and Chris laugh]
Bunny: Refresh my memory?
Chris: So this is when we have an episode where Zuko and Azula…they all hang out on the beach.
Bunny: They brood.
Chris: Yeah. In some situations, if you have a Team Evil with charismatic characters, it may be helpful to also make sure they’re all contributing, just because anybody who does not contribute, they feel like they’re getting the short end of the stick. They feel like they’re not being treated as well by the story, they’re getting more spinach, that kind of thing. And yeah, it can create resentment against the characters who are doing all the contributions, and make people sympathize with a character that never gets to contribute, or, again, make somebody annoyed with the person who doesn’t contribute, because they’re weighing everybody down and never helping.
Oren: If you introduce a team of characters, different people in the audience are gonna like different members of the team. And if those team members just become useless, then it sucks to watch, or read. This is a special topic to me, because it was one of the first times when I was a kid when I, like, distinctly noticed and identified a problem that was making me enjoy a story less.
Because I used to watch a lot of Cartoon Network anime when I was a kid, and I always noticed that Dragon Ball Z introduced this big group of characters, and then over the course of the show, a bunch of them just stopped mattering. But they were still there, like they never left. They just hung around and didn’t do anything, and I hated it, so much. Because naturally every character I picked as my favorite would end up being one that became useless.
Bunny: And the rest is history…
Oren: I could not catch a break. I was so upset. Okay, fine. This new guy, he’s got a sword and he’s also a Saiyin, so he’s gotta stay important for the whole show, right? No, he doesn’t matter anymore. He’s not Goku. Oh God, please stop. I hate you all.
Bunny: And thus, a critic was born. [Oren laughs]
Chris: It also helps to distinguish between the characters and remember the characters. I’m thinking of The Bad Batch, which is a Star Wars cartoon, where in the beginning, the character Echo just doesn’t do anything. And the problem is that there’s a repetitive skillset between him and Tech. They’re both like tech people. And so it’s clear that the writers just don’t know how to help give him contributions. And so he just fades into the background like he’s not there. And he’s much less memorable, as a result. And we don’t really get to know him. We don’t remember what his personality is like, because we don’t ever hear him talking as much, and that kind of thing. How a character contributes can definitely help distinguish them in the group.
Oren: And–spoilers for the second season of Bad Batch–but that’s the reason why he leaves for a while, and then they kill Tech at the end of the season. Because now, when Echo’s not around, we don’t have to deal with this problem of he and Tech competing for the same content, because he’s off doing something else. And then Tech is the obvious choice to die, because it’s tragic, we like him, but we also have a replacement ready. We still have a tech character, someone who does tech problems. So when Tech dies, the team doesn’t lose anything that we need to make the story work, which is what would happen if we lost any of the other characters.
Bunny: Yeah, except for he was the only one who had just a hint of romance. I’m like, why…
Oren: I’m not saying I liked his death…
Bunny: …and why did you bait me with a romance? And then… [laughing]
Oren: I’m just saying that’s the reason they picked him to die, because they had a replacement ready. [laughing]
Bunny: Is there any story that you think didn’t have enough team members?
Oren: Didn’t have enough team members? Hmm.
Bunny: Yeah. There’s probably a lot of stories where you’re like, “that team member was unnecessary,” but was there one where you felt they were lacking?
Oren: Supernatural.
Bunny: [laughing]
Oren: Supernatural, it definitely became noticeable after a while that they would recruit allies, and then those allies would just leave, and sometimes they would kill them off, and then sometimes they wouldn’t. And it just got to feel strange, after a while? It just, it seems like they should know more people by now.
Chris: Yeah. I do think that–Supernatural had like 15 seasons, right? And so we’ve got these two brothers, and I think the problem is that after a while, they just end up rehashing their issues, or they become such different people in order to keep their interactions fresh. It’s like, how much interpersonal drama can you do with just two people over 15 seasons, you know? [laughing]
Oren: I watched a mere seven seasons, and…
Bunny: [dramatic outraged voice] Fake fan!
Oren: You could already see they were at a point where they were just switching off between Sam and Dean of which one would have the arc of going too far this season. [Bunny and Chris laughing] Who is it? Is Sam going too far this season, or is it Dean who’s going too far this season? Because they’re always doing that arc.
Chris: So potentially if you had, like, a novel series, and you liked a lot of interpersonal stuff, two characters might not be enough, and you would probably have room to bring in other skills, another person, that kind of thing.
If you have one person, a story could definitely work with one person, like The Martian, for instance. But sometimes the second person is really helpful in creating some contrast, making some foils of each other, and bringing somebody to life. Yeah, there are instances, but it’s much more likely to go towards the other end.
Oren: There are a few stories that I can think of where the team doesn’t really feel complete until they add a certain character. But I’m not sure that’s an issue of there not being enough of them. Like with Avatar, honestly, watching the first season of Avatar now is a little bit of a chore, because Toph’s not there, and I love Toph so much that she really completes the group. So having her not there feels like something is missing.
Chris: But that might be because–you might not have noticed the first time you watched.
Oren: If Toph had never been there, or if I had never gotten to the second season, I doubt I would’ve felt like there weren’t enough characters in Avatar.
Bunny: I feel like bringing up Toph also raises an important thing with characters, which is that they need to not just contribute different things, but also feel like different people. Which should go without saying, but Toph is memorable, not only because she’s the earthbending master, but she’s got, like, an attitude, and she’s got a different appearance, which, some teams don’t manage that.
Oren: Yeah, if you’re gonna have a character who overlaps with another character, you have to really have a lot of that to go around. If you’re gonna have multiple fighters on your team, you need to have a lot of fighting.
Chris: I think a really good example of that is actually how many information gathering characters you have in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Because, you wouldn’t think that would be important, but anytime you have a monster of the week episode, usually part of that is figuring out, “Okay, what is this new monster we just encountered? How do we defeat that monster?” And so there is research, or information gathering, that has to basically be done for most episodes. And so a bunch, a whole bunch of the characters, they just do it in different ways, and that makes them more distinctive. Like, Giles looks at books. Whereas Buffy, she also gathers information, but she does it by scouting, and therefore going directly into danger, because she’s also a fighting character. Spike networks, right? He knows all the demons…
Bunny: …he has on LinkedIn. [Oren laughs]
Chris: So he talks to them, and then, some people have psychic powers, science, there’s a whole bunch of different ways, but it’s all about finding clues and information. And because the show has so much of that, they have room for a whole bunch of characters that do that, in different ways. Whereas, if you have a story that’s lots of fights and doesn’t have much conversation, you might only have room for one social character.
Oren: Yeah. And then when it comes to, like, aesthetic, or personality, or attitude, I don’t think you really want characters that double up on that unless you’re specifically trying to contrast them. If you have two goths on the team, you would probably wanna show what makes them different kinds of goths, as opposed to just having them both be goths, because then it would feel like they’re cramping each other’s style.
Bunny: Yeah, and it also–style, attitude, appearance, those sorts of things can’t be the only thing making them different. Otherwise you’ve just got, like, “fighter, but this one’s wearing a different hat”.
Chris: Going back to Bad Batch, let’s say we have Tech and Echo. If they had lots of conflicts involving technology, and then they, for instance, made Tech so that he, like, makes things or repairs things, and Echo does all of the hacking, does all the software, and Tech does all the hardware, or something, that could have worked. And I think the issue was that the show didn’t have enough need of a technology character to fill two roles.
Bunny: Yeah, subspecialties help.
Oren: And it becomes easier with similar roles, again, if you are putting them into some kind of contrasting or competitive situation. Like in Lord of the Rings, Aragorn and Boromir work decently because even though they have very similar roles and contributions to give, they are somewhat antagonistic towards each other. Boromir, at least, is not super into Aragorn until the end, spoilers. And Gimli and Legolas don’t really become super prominent until the second book when they start, like, getting into competitions to see who can kill the most Orcs, right? Like in the first book, they’re both just kind of there. They’re hanging around, they’ll be there eventually.
Chris: If you need more things for characters to do, oftentimes the kind of support roles are easy to overlook, but you can make them relevant. So that includes healing, repairing people’s equipment, getting people fed, or logistics things, like mapping the area, being a guide. All those kinds of things that support all of the other characters in a team.
Bunny: Think about making an RPG party. You’ve got the sneaky one, you’ve got the fighty one, you’ve got the magic one.
Chris: Yeah. Don’t forget the social one. In some stories, social is like the equivalent of fighting. Where there are lots of social conflicts, and actually, Game of Thrones, for all its fights, it’s surprisingly like this, right? There are tons of social conflicts in Game of Thrones, and lots of different social characters who engage in social conflicts in different ways. So Cersei is always, like, leveraging her power against other people, where Margaery is always using charm to get people on her side.
Oren: Yeah, so that’s what I call a shared task type situation, where there is a thing that your characters engage in so often that you can have multiple characters who do that thing and not have them step on each other. So in Game of Thrones, you can easily have multiple political characters. Now, of course, in Game of Thrones, they’re often on different sides. But even if some of them are on the same side, there is so much political drama in Game of Thrones that you can have multiple characters on the same team doing that, and it’s not so much of a problem.
With support characters, the two things to look out for are, one, make sure to show that their support actually matters, and show how and why it does. Because in theory, the character Holly in Lockwood & Co. is a support character, but her support doesn’t matter. Like the story just doesn’t know how to show why it matters. And so she’s just around for most of the story.
Chris: I do think that one of the things to think about that, is, do you need the character to stay in one place, or move, go into danger, right? Because Lockwood & Co. is very much a story that really focuses on the characters going into danger. And it does have scenes where they’re at their, like, home base, but a lot of the important stuff actually happens at danger. And so, the problem with Holly just doing her support stuff is it leaves her at home base, and she doesn’t travel with them for all of those dangerous scenes. So sometimes it’s something that you need to think about. Okay, if Holly’s providing support, how does she provide it? Is there a kind of essential support she needs to provide while they are out at a haunted house getting rid of some ghosts that might fit the urgency of the situation? Maybe some of the support keeps people safe in those emergency situations, and she has a reason to be there. And then you can see how she helps in an emergency, and that makes a difference.
Oren: And you also wanna make sure you don’t add a support character when you’re planning to do a bunch of stories that depend on the support not working. And I’m not only talking about Troi from The Next Generation, but I am definitely talking about Troi from The Next Generation. [Bunny and Chris laughing] Because so many Next Generation plots depend on protagonists having, like, serious mental health problems that they don’t get any support for. Which is weird, that’s not how we think of The Next Generation, but there are a surprising number of plots where that’s the case. And so as a result, Troi cannot help them, because if she helped them, then their problem would be resolved, and then we wouldn’t have a plot anymore.
Chris: I can think of at least two episodes where Troi literally goes to Captain Picard and tells Picard that he has to do it, instead of her. This person needs, you know, this boy from this super patriarchal planet needs, like, a man to tell him, give him directions. He won’t listen to me. Or, I think there was another one with Data. Data won’t admit that he’s having emotional problems because he doesn’t have emotions, but he is, and he needs you to do it, Picard, or something. [laughing] And it’s just, it’s sad, because it’s like, why don’t we let Troi do her job? But you wouldn’t have an interesting variety of internal conflicts, if Troi always fixed it by just sitting down and doing her job.
Oren: Yeah. And when they really want someone to talk to a more nurturing support character in TNG, they almost always use Guinan. And, like, I get it. I like Whoopi Goldberg, too. So I’m not even mad that they wanna use Guinan for that role, but, like, you have a main character whose job this is…why. [laughter] You wanna be careful with that one. [Oren laughs]
Chris: If you do have a big team, and okay, sometimes this happens, where, you’ve done the thing, you’ve added too many characters, right? And now you’re like in book two [laughter] and it’s hard to get rid of them, and you’re trying to figure out how to make the best of it. In general, we try to keep characters together, but for really big, important conflicts, like big fights or battles, or something like that, splitting characters up does really help.
I’ll give them a task, something like, one group distracts people–the enemy–while the other one attacks something or steals something. One group sneaks in somewhere, unlocks it to let the others in. One group, maybe, if they’re doing a con, dresses up as security, while the other ones act like they’re thieves, that kind of thing. So, if you have lots of people, and you have to find a way for them all to contribute during big conflicts, it can be helpful to think of a strategy that requires more than one role that’s happening simultaneously, and then split them into smaller groups. And then once they’re in the smaller groups, you may need to think about, okay, they’re sneaking in somewhere. Let’s give it a lock that has to be picked, for our lock picking character, and then let’s give us a guard that we have to talk our way past for the social character, to split it into multiple stages, or something like that.
Oren: What you have to do then, is you have to plan a plot that is robust enough to require a bunch of people.
Bunny: A plot? I don’t know…
Oren: Yeah, you have to bring plot into your characters, and you’ve got characters in my plot. Oh no!
Bunny: What is it driven by though? [everyone laughing]
Chris: Well, that’s how you make a character-driven story, you just add more characters! [laughter]
Oren: Pretty soon there’ll be nothing left! But like the Temeraire books, for example, have a lot of characters, and there’s a funny thing where they graduate the extras on the dragon crew to named main character status over time, so you end up with more and more of them. And it does a pretty good job, because that’s like an epic war story, so there’s a lot that needs to be done.
A story that doesn’t do as well is Shadowshaper, which, I like Shadowshaper, it’s good, but it does have a problem where the main conflict is that the protagonist needs to beat an evil wizard in a magic fight. And there just isn’t really much for the other characters to do, but there are a lot of other characters.
Chris: Yeah, I’ve sometimes seen these stories where it feels like what the writer really wants to do–I think in that case of Shadowshaper, it felt like the author really wanted to highlight the value of the community, which involves bringing in lots of characters, but then he didn’t have enough for all of those characters to do. And so they just…
Oren: You need a community action! What does it take a community to solve? Right? That’s the question you need to be asking yourself at that point.
Bunny: Raising a child. [Oren laughs]
Chris: Another tricky situation is if you have a super humble character in a group of heroes. Which sometimes we like those dynamics, and this is like the Frodo character, who is, “Oh, I’ve fallen in with all of these great heroes, but I’m just a normal farm boy.” [laughing] Whatever you have. How do you let that character, especially if this character is your main character, how do you give that person something to do?
I have a post for this, but obviously, Lord the Rings does it by giving Frodo a special, basically magical role, where Frodo is the best person to carry this ring. Other people can’t seem to handle it, so Frodo does it. So you can do something like that. Any magical ability that is special really helps. Of course, that makes your character less humble, so you may not want that.
Those support tasks, again, we were talking about the fact that you do have to find ways that they matter. But I think of it this way, one, let’s say your support character is cooking for people. When might cooking really be crucial? Maybe in situations where everybody gets poisoned. Or maybe in situations where it’s actually that food is starting to get scarce, and you have to get creative. Or if they’re cleaning, maybe they find something that was lost, or repair something that everybody assumed couldn’t be repaired, or what have you. So those support tasks, they’re a little bit trickier to work with, but you can make them work, and it still leaves your character feeling humble, even if they make a big difference.
And then you can also–again, this is ad hoc–what you really want the most is a skill that can reliably give them a way to contribute, for every character, ongoing. So if you have to depend on how you arrange the specific events in the plot to make them matter, that’s gonna be really hard because yeah, you can do it one or two times. It’s gonna get exhausting and logistically impossible if you rely on it all the time, but for a couple times, you could have, you know, nobody else is there, right? Your humble character has gone off by themself to go fetch some water. They run into an antagonist, for instance. That kind of thing. It’s just, you can’t rely on that all the time, and which is why it’s really important to give characters the right skillset so that you have a reliable way of letting them contribute.
Oren: Yeah, and that’s why so many humble characters have an arc where they, like, get more skilled, or learn how to use their powers, or something.
Chris: Right. That’s also just good wish fulfillment.
Oren: It is. [laughter] You can also use a social connection as a way to make a character prominent when they otherwise wouldn’t be. This is like a common one, is that the character inherits something.
Bunny: Ah, a nepotism character.
Oren: Yeah, exactly. That’s exactly what it is. Because now they’re responsible for it, whether they wanted it or not. “Congratulations, you are the king.” “Well, I don’t know how to be king.” “Well, deal with it,” or, “Congratulations, you’ve inherited this spooky ghost property,” or something. Now, the trick with that one is to not then surround them with friends who know how to handle the situation. Which is the thing I see authors do sometimes where they’re like, I know, I’ll make my main character a fish outta water who inherited like an evil spy business. And then I’ll give them like a bunch of spy friends who will just tell them what to do.
Bunny: Yeah. The main character has to be in that position. Even if they’re a fish out of water for story purposes, they need to seem like they should be there.
Oren: And if you have them, if the more experienced characters are people they can’t trust, then you can solve that problem, right? It’s just, if you give them like a random connection that makes them important, but then have a much more capable character who they can rely on, then they never have to do anything for themselves.
Chris: Strategizing is probably one of the skills that is most associated with your main character. Not always. There are some exceptions, like in Avatar, the Last Airbender, Aang isn’t really the strategist, but he’s important because he’s the Avatar, and so everybody trusts him, and puts a responsibility on him anyway, and that frees up Sokka to do the strategizing. But in most stories, your main character is like the idea person. And what really makes a difference is them coming up with plans and making decisions, and that can easily go away if you surround them with characters who are just a lot more experienced. It becomes harder to be, like, okay, how come my main character can come up with a good idea or a solution for this?
Oren: Yeah, that was the problem with The Northman, where he was supposed to team up with this lady, and she was supposed to use brains, and he was supposed to use brawn, but he was also the brains, ’cause he’s the main character, and the main character is usually the one coming up with the ideas. So she just was also in the movie.
Chris: That was super irritating. I think probably what they should have done in that situation is had her come up with plans, him start to follow the plan, and then something goes wrong. And then he has to do the improvising, when something goes wrong.
Oren: Yeah, that…I think that would’ve been better than what they did. [Oren and then Chris laugh] You can also make this easier for yourself if you create a setting that has prescribed niches that give characters specific skills that you know are gonna be important because that’s how you’re setting up the story. This is your basic Star Trek scenario, where everyone’s got a job, and because those jobs are all on the ship, they matter, presumably. You just need to know, make sure you know what those jobs are. Like, no one actually knows what Ops does in Star Trek. It’s just the other guy, who isn’t steering the ship.
Bunny: They op, come on.
Oren: Yeah, they op. [Chris laughs] The only ops character who ever does anything is Data, because he’s also an android, and so he’s super overpowered. But if you look at the other Star Trek shows, the ops character is just hanging out. And sometimes he has a Russian accent, so that’s fun, I guess. [Bunny laughs softly]
Chris: At the same time, we still need, if they’re part of the main cast, when there’s an actual something that goes wrong in the Enterprise–they also still need to be involved in that. It doesn’t help if they, for instance, have a routine thing they do on the ship, like they’re the janitor, and there was no role for the janitor to play when something goes wrong. You can be vague what the ops person does. I think the ops person is just like whatever miscellaneous thing that we could use somebody for.
But we have a way, you know, there’s a pilot, for instance, and there’s a way in many of the conflicts where there’s some tricky piloting somebody has to do, because they’re sneaking a shuttle onto a planet, or what have you. And you have the chief engineer, and there’s again, in a lot of conflicts, there’s damage to the ship, in which case the chief engineer becomes really important. And having…the first officer one is probably the trickiest one to make work. It only works if they, again, have an away mission. So they have one person commanding the ship, and one commanding the away mission. The problem was with TNG, they always wanted Picard, after a while, to be in the middle of the action, and so Riker didn’t end up going onto as many away missions as he should have.
Oren: Yeah, that’s why most of the Star Trek shows give the first officer another job. Because otherwise, they’re just the emergency backup captain, and that’s just not much to hang your hat on. And Riker absolutely has that problem. There are a lot of episodes where Riker just has nothing to do because Picard is there. And, I mean, Chakotay has it so much worse in Voyager. Because he’s got nothing, and Janeway does all the captain-y stuff, and there’s nothing for Chakotay to do. But if you look at the original series, Spock is also the science officer, in Deep Space Nine, Kira is also the Bajoran officer, so she does all the Bajoran politics stuff. And in Enterprise, as much as I hate to praise Enterprise, T’Pol is the science officer again, so you don’t have to worry about that. Although Enterprise then has it so they give us a specific cool pilot guy who has been in space before, and has all this experience, and then they have Archer do all the piloting stuff.
Chris: They basically take all the piloting away from their actual pilot so that they can make their asshole captain do more cool things. Instead of their, like, one Black character.
Oren: Yeah, that was bad. I did not like that.
Chris: It was really bad.
Oren: All right, so with that sufficiently big “oof”, I think it is time to call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you feel we contributed to the character roles in your story, please support us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants
Oren: Perhaps we at least contributed an “oof”. [general laughter] Before we go, I want to thank our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. And finally, we have Vanessa Perry, who is our foremost expert on the works of T. Kingfisher. And it should go without saying, that all of these people contribute to Mythcreants being here to annoy you in podcast form. [laughter] So we will talk to you next week.
[Outro Music]This has been the Mythcreant Podcast, opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself,” by Jonathan Coulton.
It’s well known that Mythcreants hates it when novels employ multiple viewpoints, but what if we didn’t? In a handful of specific situations, that is. Don’t want to get too wild here. This week, we’re discussing when additional POVs are actually good for your story, and why that’s the case. We discuss political drama, fraught relationships, groundbreaking cinema, and also whether readers need to know which floor everyone is on.
Show Notes Sauron * Saruman * Tyrion Lannister * Jack Torrance * Santiago Singh * Interlude * Maplecroft * Why Cliffhangers are Annoying * L (Death Note) * Brown Girl in the Ring * Rashomon * Midnight Sun * Bean TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Sofia.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You are listening to the Mythcreants Podcast. With your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[Intro Music]Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren and with me today is…
Bunny: Bunny
Oren: …and…
Chris: Chris.
Oren: I have a very serious question: when do multiple points of view actually work? Trick question! The answer is never. Moving on. Podcast over.
Bunny: [laughs]
Chris: Down with multiple POVs.
Bunny: Hey, in fairness, we are on a podcast sharing multiple POVs.
Oren: You could say we each have a unique and beautiful viewpoint we bring to the podcast.
Bunny: Contributing a personal flavor.
Chris: Yeah. The important thing is that when I talk, you know what it’s like to be where I am right now, which is in a completely different place across the country from where Bunny is. So, if you didn’t include me, how would you know what it’s like to be over on the West Coast? You just wouldn’t. You need to see the West Coast. Otherwise, you won’t know what’s happening there.
Bunny: Yeah, you could be keeping secrets.
Oren: I would argue that being on a different vertical plane in the same air column known as being upstairs is equally different and worthy of its own viewpoint.
Bunny: [Dramatic] If not for Oren, what would we do with those rooms? They might as well not even exist.
Oren: That’s the secret. It’s okay if they don’t.
Chris & Bunny: [laugh]
Oren: I do wanna talk a little bit about when multiple viewpoints are actually good for a story. Cause this is one of those things where we’re known for being very anti-multiple POV. Partly because we’re the only people who have that particular axe to grind and everyone thinks we’re weird.
It’s easy to stand out if your opinions are strange enough.
Bunny: To be fair, you have the article decrying multiple points of view, but you do also have several articles talking about how you can do them. And now a podcast.
Oren: Yeah. Now we can do it in audio form. Because that’s a thing. There’s a lot of people who listen to the podcast and don’t read our articles, so we have to have crossover selection.
Chris: Looking at when they don’t work is still helpful, in this case, to seeing when they do.
Oren: And if you know why they don’t work, you can be sure if you’re actually picking them correctly.
Bunny: We’ve gotta resist the temptation to just fall into complaining about them.
Oren & Christ: [laugh]
Oren: Okay, so the first one that comes to mind, I don’t know if it’s the most common, but it’s certainly the one that I use as my most common explanation, is a political drama.
And you can do political dramas with a single point of view. You don’t need multiple points of view, but they can provide some benefits and you can structure them so they don’t take things away from your story as well.
And these are usually conflicts that have, if not morally gray or equivalent, at least not completely black and white, good and evil. So not Lord of the Rings cause we don’t really need Sauron’s perspective. Or a perspective of whichever inherently evil orc we might follow around.
Chris: We might need to explain that because there are many people who do try to add the villain’s perspective. We have a whole article on why that’s usually a bad idea, not 100% of the time a bad idea.
Bunny: We also see glimpses of the villain’s points of view in Lord of the Rings.
Chris: Not in the book, just in the movie. They have Sauruman, they show scenes with him.
Bunny: Well, there’s him digging the Uruk-hai out of the gunk. I think we have a scene with that.
Chris: Yeah. I’m not sure if that’s actually in the books.
Oren: Yeah. The Lord of the Rings is not a book I would hold up as a beneficial example.
Chris: No, it’s not.
Oren: It is worth noting that movies often have to cut away to what the villain is doing because that is simply the most efficient way for you to know what the villain is doing. Movies are under much tighter constraints when it comes to information portrayal.
The reason why I say not Lord of the Rings when it comes to political drama is that Sauron’s perspective is not interesting. Sauron is a perfectly good villain. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with Dark Lord evil villains, but the thing that makes them good villains is not their nuanced take on the world.
Honestly, Sauruman is more interesting cause Sauruman was a good guy and switched sides cause he thought it was impossible for the good guys to triumph. I still don’t know if that justifies him having a POV. I would say no, but he is a little more interesting as a perspective than Sauron is.
Chris: You have to know what the effect is of giving a character a POV.
One thing is it sets expectations about how important that character is. If a character has a POV, they’re considered a significant character, but also it helps you understand them. And in doing that, it helps humanize them and helps you sympathize with them.
And these are not things that you want for a Sauron. They’re what you want for a more sympathetic character, which is why it works so well for gray conflicts. Because when you have multiple people fighting against each other and none of them is strictly the good guy or the bad guy. That’s a situation in which it makes sense to humanize both of them and make both of them sympathetic, and then really dig into what their perspective is and then help understand why they disagree with each other so much, even though they’re not terrible people.
Oren: And it’s often a question of who you want to pick as your POV character. There’s a reason why in Game of Thrones, we have Tyrion as our Lannister viewpoint character, and not Tywin. Tywin’s not Sauron, but his point of view isn’t that interesting. Tywin is basically, I want power and money, and I will kill anyone I have to kill to get it. Tywin is a fun, intimidating, big bad, but he’s not an interesting POV character, whereas Tyrion very much is.
Bunny: I think it’s worth noting though that viewpoint characters don’t necessarily have to be in conflict with each other. It’s just that in political dramas at least, they often are.
Oren: This is one place where it can really help to have POV characters on both sides of a complicated political conflict.
Bunny: Yeah, and I mentioned keeping secrets, and that’s also something that you can’t do in one point of view, right?
Chris: Yeah. If you have a character who has a secret and would not talk to anybody about it, adding their POV can be a way of delving into that. Especially if they’re doing things that the audience does not understand and doesn’t seem to make any sense, or you want people to sympathize with them more.
They are coming off like a jerk, but there is a important emotional reason they’re being a jerk and you want to make it so they are more likable despite being a jerk. A POV is also really good for that.
Not usually what you want for a big, bad life of Sauron, but some other villains sometimes that is what you want.
I think a good example is in The Shining where you have this family hanging out in this haunted hotel. Jack, the father basically becomes a murderer cause he’s seduced by this hotel.
It’s clear that Stephen King wants readers to root for this family to work things out and stay together. He doesn’t want the reader to just write jack off and be like, nevermind, that guy can just go die somewhere. He wants them to understand his mindset and see his decline because that’s interesting to see the way that he slowly moves towards being more and more enraptured by this hotel, falling to his worst habits and patterns.
The story is, because it has a haunted hotel, scary enough even if we sympathize with Jack. So that works really well to give him a POV.
Oren: It occurs to me we should probably cover maybe the fundamentals of what it is that helps multiple POVs work. I maybe jumped right into a specific example before I should have. That’s the wonder of podcasts, everybody.
The thing that’s most important, and we’ve talked about this a couple of times in our articles, is that these POVs have to be part of the same story. What happens in one POV has to be obviously relevant to what happens in the other points of view. If they’re off doing their own thing, even if it’s a political conflict, that doesn’t matter.
And it doesn’t matter if you’re gonna bring them together at the end, which is the thing I see a lot. We need to be able to tell from the beginning why these characters matter to each other, whether they are on the same side or on opposite sides.
Chris: And just to go into some of the reasons why that is: if the viewpoint characters are affecting each other. What one character does in their viewpoint has an impact on what happens in the other viewpoints.
It raises engagement when that happens because then if the reader cares about only one of those viewpoint characters, they still have a reason to be engaged when they leave and go to a different viewpoint character. Because what that viewpoint character does will actually affect the character that they like. So, it gives them more reasons to care what’s happening.
Oren: Yeah. You never end up with a situation where suddenly you get pulled away from this character you like, and now you have to spend a bunch of time with someone you don’t care about who’s doing nothing you care about. Cause they’re all connected, baby!
Chris: If they’re all silos, they’re all doing their own thing, the book’s time is divided between different independent stories. Each story gets much less time and each story only moves forward at a slow crawl. So, you get to see just a tiny bit of one story and then it cuts off and then you have to get through several other viewpoints before you go back to that story and see the plot move forward just a little bit again.
Whereas if they’re interconnected when you switch viewpoint, that story that you just experiencing before is still moving forward. The story actually comes to a conclusion, feels like it’s coming to a conclusion more, and that’s a lot more satisfying and rewarding.
Bunny: I think it’s worth noting that there can be degrees of separation from the main story, and if the degree gets greater, you have a greater risk of losing people.
Characters can be in the same scene and working on the same problem between their viewpoints, and that’s the close end of the spectrum. And then characters can be both working on the throughline, but in completely different ways. That’s the series’ throughline. And for me at least, those are the ones that start losing me because there will be two high tension situations, but they’re completely, or almost completely disconnected.
We know that the characters know each other and they’re working towards the same goal or whatever, but they’re far apart in space and facing down different antagonists or sub antagonists. And every time it cuts, I’m like, I just wish it were continuous.
Oren: They have to be obviously affecting each other, right?
It probably shouldn’t be We’re two characters fighting a war and we’re fighting the same guy, so we’re part of the same story, but we’re both on different planets fighting different battles, and it’s not really obvious how one of our battles affects the other one. That’s probably too distant.
Chris: Location is a fairly good way to start looking at how connected they are, but it’s also not the end word, right?
It is possible to have two characters who are on the other sides of the world who are directly interacting in some way, depending on what kind of elements you have in your story that allow for communication or other interaction. But that is definitely logistically much harder than two characters who are in the same room.
Oren: If you do want one of them to be on the bad guys’ team, even if it is a not a hundred percent black and white—if you have one team that is the clear bad guys—you have to think really carefully about whether or not you should actually give one of them a POV. And usually that’s gonna be someone you’re gonna want to be making more sympathetic.
Children of Blood and Bone has its Zuko-type character. He’s chasing the protagonists across the world, and that’s a reasonable place to give a villain a POV. Cause he’s a secondary villain and he’s meant to be sympathetic, unlike his more conventionally evil boss.
As opposed to something like in the later books of the Expanse. They introduce another brand of new evil bad guys, and they’re very bad and we get a perspective from one of them, and he starts off the story bad and arguably gets worse as it goes along. But he was already evil, so who cares?
The best I can say about that.
Chris: A lot of writers are tempted to add viewpoints for logistical reasons. How will a character know what’s happening somewhere else if I don’t give a POV to that other person?
But that’s also a warning sign. That doesn’t necessarily mean it wouldn’t work out. But usually, if you have to add a viewpoint, there’s a good chance that’s a bad choice that will lower engagement. Whereas if you don’t need it for logistical reasons, then what you’re considering is not that you have to, but will this actually improve the experience?
Bunny: Especially if you have this one piece of information that you need the audience to know. That’s happening elsewhere that the main character wouldn’t know about. Don’t throw in an extra viewpoint just to narrate one event.
Oren: Yeah, those are called interludes and nothing good ever happens in an interlude.
Bunny & Oren: [laugh]
Chris: So if you have a story that’s really tightly plotted and you have several essential characters that are hanging out together, and you could tell the whole thing from one person’s POV, but you’re like, maybe I should put some scenes from the point of view of this other central character. Maybe you wanna flesh out their internal struggles or what have you.
That’s a sign that it’s actually going to do less damage to switch POVs because they’re already covering the same events. So you’re not gonna cover a event that is completely disconnected from anything else.
Oren: This is a great place for conflicted relationships to shine using multiple points of view. Romance is the most common way that this happens. It doesn’t necessarily have to be romance.
The one that I always use as an example is Maplecroft, which has different perspectives of, I think, three characters who are, broadly speaking, the good guys and their very difficult relationships. It helps bring out the conflict between Lizzie and her sister Emma, and the way that they try to keep their doctor at arm’s length and all that sort of thing.
That kind of relationship is often a good indication of that. You might get some benefit from a second viewpoint.
Chris: And in romance, oftentimes if you do have a lot of internal obstacles to the characters hooking up, one person has to learn to stop distancing because they’re afraid. For instance, the other person sees their partner as the enemy or something, and they have to learn to trust them.
Whatever you have, those things are definitely easier to dive into in more depth if they each have a POV. It doesn’t mean that romances need POVs. I think it depends on what kind of romance you’re telling with what kind of obstacles and conflicts. So if you like a story where they’re just made for each other, but the world wants to keep them apart, if you like that kind of star crossed lovers type romance, that doesn’t so much need two POVs in most cases.
Again, any of those like really complex emotions that explain character behaviors that are otherwise difficult to explain, A POV really helps with that a lot.
Bunny: There’s a series, admittedly I haven’t read this in a while, so I hope I don’t get some of the details wrong. But it’s interesting in terms of talking about POV because it has in the first book a romance, and then it becomes like more of these action intrigue stories later, which is a zone problem because I came to the first book for like Hot Dragon Romance or whatever, and now it’s a spy thriller.
Oren: Why are there so many knife fights now? I wanted kissing.
Bunny: Come on. There’s more kissing and like surfboard dragon, but the first one is a romance between a dragon who’s shapeshift into a human and a dragon hunter. So we get their different POVs. We get to see the dragon hunter coming to realize that this is a dragon and like dragon trying to hide and stuff like that.
And I thought that was a good use of multiple POVs. And then in the later books, they get separated. I guess they’re both fighting their own evil organizations. The Evil Dragon Organization and the Evil Dragon Hunter organization.
Oren: There’s a little couple split, one for each of them. That’s nice.
Yeah. Everyone’s got their own special antagonistic organization to fight, but then that became the thing where it feels like broadly they’re fighting for the same cause. But both of the stories were so high stakes that I would end one chapter and be like, shoot, I really don’t wanna read about the other character right now. Like, I wanna get satisfaction for what just happened in this last scene. So I’d be skipping chapters, which is not what you want.
Chris: Especially if it ends on a cliffhanger.
Bunny: Every chapter was a cliffhanger. I was like, where did my California Dragon Romance go?
Chris: It’s like black hat storytelling.
Oren: Do not use additional viewpoints to drag out the time between when you put the character in a dangerous situation and when you resolve it. That’s not good.
Bunny: That’s exactly what it was doing.
Oren: It’s hostile architecture, but a book.
Chris: Similar to political conflicts, another type of story that can really benefit is Cat and Mouse. The one that always comes to mind, even though this was not actually in a narrated format as far as I know, is Death Note. Because Death Note has such equal weight in highlighting both the criminal and the police officer who’s chasing him.
Oren: I could see that working in a written narrative for sure.
Chris: So, if you were to put that in written narrative, you would definitely want both of those characters to have their own POV. And it has to do with the fact that they’re both equally important and giving them a POV is a way of saying who is important. Their relationship to each other is important, even though they’re enemies. That gets surprisingly close later.
Oren: [knowingly] Mm-Hmm mm-Hmm.
Chris: Debating, how many in Death Note, the relationship to each other. I think that’s a good sign of when multiple POVs is helpful.
And even though they’re not in the same place many times, their antagonism means that they are interacting with each other. They spend their time figuring out how to outwit the other one, right? And so, anything that they do in their viewpoint affects the other person.
Oren: Another potentially useful, although very specific kind of story where multiple POVs can be helpful, is what I’ve been calling the vignette anthology. What is sometimes known as daisy chain plotting.
Instead of a single story, you are telling a bunch of small stories with a common theme, usually around a common event or sometimes a common item that links them together. But they’re still separate stories.
World War Z is probably the most famous book version. It’s a bunch of vignettes about the zombie apocalypse, and they all have the zombie apocalypse in common, but there’s not a single plot thread that runs through any of them other than the general rise and fall of civilization during the zombies.
Chris: I have seen some series that, again, feel more ensemble focused that make rotating POV work better. For most series, when you focus on a single main character and you move to the next book and you switch the main character, that feels icky. Because you got really invested in the main character of the first book.
But for some stories where they have an ensemble cast to start with, and then they devote one book to give each character a POV, it feels more like a TV show with an ensemble cast where some episodes focus on one person.
The series throughline is often less important than the actual plot of each book, and I think that’s one reason it tends to work better in those situations.
Oren: I am speculating a bit here because I’ve never actually seen this work with full novels. I’ve only ever seen it work with the Animorphs, which are very short.
Those are novella length books, and there’s a ton of them. But I think it could have worked fine in, for example, the Dragonet Prophecy, where each book gives one of the five dragons the center of POV. I think the problem there was honestly not even the POV change. It was that whoever wasn’t the POV character didn’t matter in the next book.
If each story had been about the team and we had seen the team from a different perspective each time, I think that would’ve been fine. But this one was more like, this is the story where the sand dragon matters, and this is a story where the shadow dragon matters, and the other ones mostly might as well not be here.
Chris: That is, I think, a big problem that can happen with those stories, and I’ve also seen them where the author really just wants to promote their next book. So, they include the characters from the next book, but a lot of times what you have is excess characters that just don’t matter to this story. They’re just there and I start to resent them.
I want to read the next book less. I learned to hate the characters early. But yeah, with the Dragonet Prophecy, I think the issue with handling an ensemble cast is how you get everybody involved so that they’re not superfluous. And I think that was the problem with that one. And if it had been a smaller number of dragons, then it would’ve been easier for the author to handle.
Bunny: Oh, I just wanted to talk about an interesting example. I just read from a Nalo Hopkinson’s book, the Brown Girl in the Ring, or just Brown Girl in the Ring, actually. It keeps the multiple viewpoints focused on the same actions and stuff taking place, but it hops a lot between their heads in the same scene. It’s all clearly delineated, every time it moves to a different perspective.
There’s three dots, so you know you’re moving to someone else’s head now. And I thought it worked surprisingly well, maybe because it was all in the same scene. So even though it wasn’t close limited, it felt omniscient because we were moving around so much.
Chris: Again, if everything is in the same scene and you could tell the whole story from one person’s perspective, then you know that all of the plots are better linked together.
Don’t get me wrong, a single POV story can still go on tangents and things instead of events that shouldn’t be included. Then you know that adding the viewpoint isn’t really like breaking the plot because you’re covering the same event.
Bunny: And there’s a lot of viewpoints in that, including the villain.
The villain starts off the story, but then the story follows a sort of intergenerational conflict against the villain. So, it makes sense that each of the three generations of women who fight this guy have a little bit of viewpoint. Ti-Jeanne is the main character, but then we have Mi-Jeanne and Gros-Jeanne. They’re French-Canadian names, I’m sorry.
But then sometimes we’ll get a viewpoint that only shows up once and then we move away from it. And I didn’t find it drawing. I thought I might, but because it did it so much and there weren’t just like long sections.
Chris: Sounds like it was consistent and very clear about when it was moving.
Bunny: Yeah, it felt deliberate.
Chris: And that really makes a big difference about setting the right expectations for how this experience is gonna go.
Bunny: Yeah, it was. I know you two hate the term cinematic. It was cinematic in how it was able to move around between these scenes.
Oren: Yeah, as long as it’s clearly delineated. Otherwise, you’re gonna have the head hopping problem of being, I don’t know whose perspective we’re in right now, and that can be really confusing.
Chris: It is possible to hop heads in a scene and have it work. It’s just difficult. That’s not tried by most people.
Bunny: No, this definitely is the exception.
Oren: And there was of course, one other scenario that comes to my mind that I just wanted to mention, which is if you have a Rashman type plot, which is a movie, but has also become its own genre where there are multiple accounts of the same event, and part of the plot is trying to figure out who’s telling the truth or more likely how each version is wrong.
In that case, you’re gonna need multiple perspectives. And as long as you’re doing something interesting with them and actually showing differences, that could be very fun. Just replaying the same scene again but the cloak is a different color, that’s probably not enough.
Chris: If you’re doing that type of story, you do have to carefully fast forward through the parts people have already seen and always go the way you would expect, and then spend more time on the things as they deviate from the last person’s tale.
But yeah, that’s a premise that depends on multiple points of view to work.
Bunny: I feel like we should note that this is different than, say, retelling the same story over again from a different character’s perspective without changing anything like Midnight Sun.
Oren: Oh, right. Yeah. That was the one where Edward got a POV.
Yeah, the same thing happened with the Ender books, which kind of confused me. I haven’t read Ender Shadow in a long time, but I just remember feeling it. I wasn’t really sure what the purpose was.
Chris: If you wanna sell more stuff to your super fans.
Bunny: That’s the answer to probably Midnight Sun and that weird Christian Gray spinoff that I think came first. That’s the answer: Money.
Oren: All right, so we figured it out. The reason is if you want mooooney, that’s the right way to use multiple viewpoints. Alright, I think we will call this episode to a close on that note.
Chris: If you enjoyed this episode and you have now unlocked the secret to using multiple POVs whenever you want, consider supporting us on Patreon.
Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Before we go, I want to thank some of our existing patrons, each of whom brings a unique and valuable point of view to our podcast story.
First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. And finally, we have Vanessa Perry, who is our premier expert on the works of T. Kingfisher.
We will see you all next week.
[Outro Music]This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Coulton.
A wise wizard once told us that our eyes can deceive us and we shouldn’t trust them, so maybe that’s why we’re always giving our characters additional senses. This week, we’re using narrative-o-ception to sense what this topic is about and how writers can incorporate it into their work. We discuss super powers, aliens, and just about every animal sense we could think of. Also, cats. Lots of cats.
Show Notes Sting * Umwelt * Daniel Kish * Parable of the Sower * Echolocation * The Hidden Memory of Objects * Whiskers * Electroreception * Lockwood and Co. * Ian Waterman * Vox Machina Dragon Sense * Spidey Senses * Proprioception * Predators With Side-Facing Eyes * The Purpose of Zebra Stripes * Dazzle Camouflage * Wolf Pack * Hench TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Leen.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Intro: You are listening to The Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny.
[intro music]Bunny: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Mythcreant podcast. I’m Bunny. And with me here today is…
Chris: Chris
Bunny: And,
Oren: Oren
Bunny: and I’m sensing something. It’s like kind of a tingling in my brain. Just listening to both of you, I’m realizing you’re like me; you’re both podcast hosts. I thought I was the only one..
Oren: special podcast senses activated.
Bunny: Yeah. The environment around me has gone blue and red for some reason, and there are squiggly lines coming out of my head.
Chris: Do you glow blue when other podcast hosts are near?
All: [laughter]
Bunny: Rival podcast hosts.
Oren: I wonder if Sting still works if you put it inside a lead box. What is the mechanism it uses to detect orcs?
Bunny: [giggles]
Oren: Are orcs mildly radioactive? I have questions.
Bunny: I like that explanation. Maybe podcast hosts are radioactive too.
Oren: Yeah, that’s why we have so many hot takes.
Chris: [giggles]
Bunny: Ohhhh [laughter].
Today we are talking about the wild world of senses, and I first wanna give a shout out to the book “An Immense World” which inspired this episode. And I’m going to use one of the concepts it introduced, which is – Germans, forgive me – “Umwelt” which refers to the sensory world of animals; the different bubbles that we live in based on our senses.
So the umwelt of a bat is a whole lot different than that of us, or a spider or a snake. A lot of researchers have made the error of thinking about animal senses and other creature senses with regard to our own, usually in a very visual context because we are very visual animals.
So today we’re gonna be talking about how you can use the inspiration of the animal world and, in general, to give your characters unusual senses. I’ve found that usually this manifests in one of two ways:
It’s either superpowers, or it’s like aliens or a different species that have different physiology. We have Daredevil, for example, It’s the superpower, but he doesn’t have massive ears and he also doesn’t click, which is really weird because it’s supposed to be like radar.
Chris: Yeah. For echolocation or radar, you have to emit a wave and then it bounces back. And there are people who do echolocation and they click; they make clicking noises.
Bunny: Yeah. Look up Daniel Kish if you’re curious about that. But you don’t send out waves automatically. You have to do it.
Chris: I suppose an alien species could send out waves that are non-perceptible by human characters, automatically.
Bunny: Yeah, bats do that, but I don’t think Daredevil is a bat.
Oren: The human ear has to be able to hear it. Right? So by definition, other humans will be able to hear it too, unless you have very special ears.
I’m a big fan of active senses. I think those have a lot of potential because, by default, our senses are mostly passive, they mostly receive information; we have very little in the way of active senses most normally.
Although it has been pointed out, humans can and do navigate by sonar, which is one of the reasons why I would recommend not generally having that as a superpower. It’s kind of like giving your character the superpower to memorize long stories; most people don’t do that, but a human can absolutely learn to do that. They don’t need a superpower [giggles].
Bunny: You can tie a cherry stem into a knot with your tongue and that’s your superpower.
Oren: Yeah. You can learn to do it. It’s like ‘my superpower is that I can bench 200 pounds’. That’s a lot. That’s a decent bench press, at least by my standards, but it’s obviously not something that most people would need a superpower to be able to do. It would just need training.
Chris: I also get the feeling that Daredevil gets echolocation from all directions.
Bunny: Yeah, that also doesn’t work.
Chris: You usually click and then there is a specific area that your waves are in that direction, and that’s the direction that you can see in.
Oren: He’s just emitting clicks in all directions at all times.
Chris & Bunny: [laughter].
Oren: Everyone around him has just learned to tune it out.
All: [laughter]
Bunny: It would be really funny if his suit came with a crown that had little clickers at certain intervals, and those are just constantly going.
Oren: But that is the dynamic of active senses is that you are sending out some kind of signal, which means that you will get information when it bounces back to you.
But anyone who can receive that signal, presumably members of your species, whatever it is, will also receive it, and then they will see that you sent that out, and this is a really fun game.
You can do, if you’re in sci-fi, you can have two ships that are trying to locate each other and they have to decide whether they wanna risk sending out an active ping because it gives away where they are, but also will give them information.
So that is fun and you can do that with characters if they have that kind of active sense going.
Chris: I think the other nice thing about that is, again, there’s always situations where we want things to take a character by surprise. Whenever we have a character that can, for instance, automatically hear, even just read the motions around them…
Think about that. If you could automatically sense everybody’s emotions, you would know whenever a person was nearby, because you could sense their emotions, even if they’re being perfectly quiet and they’re behind you.
Oren: There was a D&D (dungeons and dragons) argument that went on for years in one of my gaming groups about whether or not being able to sense magic automatically let you detect stealth characters if they had magic items on them.
Logically, it sounded like the answer was yes, but obviously that was really overpowered. So we said no and came up with a nonsense explanation to try to justify it.
Chris: So anytime you have any kind of passive sensory perception, if that’s associated with people, you’ll all know where people are all the time [giggles]
So if it’s active, the character has to suspect somebody’s nearby in order to do the sensing, and then it just, oh man. So much easier for the plot. Every time you need that person to be taken by surprise, they still can be.
Bunny: I’m reading “The Parable of the Sower” right now, and the main character has, well it is a magic power, but it’s explained through drugs, which makes me feel bad because I didn’t put this in the drug episode
Oren: [laughter]
Bunny: It’s called “hyper-empathy” but I think the way it works is she has to look at someone and then she feels strongly what she interprets them as feeling.
And I think that makes a lot more sense than the Troy dilemma, where it kind of works sometimes, and when it does work, either it’s overpowered or it’s just things that you could tell by looking at the character.
Chris: And we never have Troy… Like there’s two people in the hall outside [laughter] She should be able to do that.
Oren: But she can sense cosmic being sometimes. But also, other times not so who knows?
All: [laughter]
Bunny: It’s the power of plot convenience.. plot sense.
Oren: When I try to write a character with a sense other than the various human ones, I generally end up defaulting to ‘it’s like one of our senses, but a little different’ because I don’t know how to describe a sense that I don’t have!
Chris: That’s not the worst thing as long as it has novelty on its own. It is cool if we’ve managed to break away a little bit from anything that replaces sight and is now just like sight and works exactly the same way, or anything that involves talking just becomes sound.
It is nice when we can do things differently. Like with echolocation, it doesn’t give you the same information that vision does. It can replace vision in that it tells you where things are, but it gives you different information, like how soft or hard things are, instead of what color they are.
Bunny: And the other thing that’s interesting about echolocation and bats admittedly get most of the publicity on this. Whales and dolphins also use it, and they use it to create a 3D world because the ways that it bounces off of things can construct, for lack of a better word, a different picture. And the thing about humans being so visually oriented is that our Umwelt tends to revolve around sight or our other dominant sense Probably being, hearing or touch.
Honestly, super touch is not something I’ve seen before. One could make it happen, I guess.
Chris: Usually when there’s super touch it’s like you touch something and you get visions.
Oren: Yeah. I actually really like that as a power; a character who can read the history of an object or whatever by touching it, because it’s really easy to get information to your character that they need to have that would otherwise be difficult for them to get. But it’s also easy to deny them that because they just don’t get the item.
Whereas if they can just look back in time, my gosh, that is so hard to plan around. Don’t give your character that power.
Bunny: Yeah, There was a book, I think it’s called “The Hidden Memory of Objects”, which is all about the character having the ability to touch things and then get their history, and then becoming increasingly overwhelmed by that, where the power gets stronger and then she can’t touch anything without getting overwhelmed by this. I don’t know. It was an interesting plot.
Chris: The other thing I like about touch related powers is that it gives an excuse for your character to have to go somewhere or put themselves in danger, even, because they have to be in close enough proximity to touch something. It’s like ‘Hey, maybe I could see what’s going on in the villain’s head, but I have to go and touch the villain’ [laughter]
Bunny: Yeah [laughter] that’s awkward. Trying to get close enough to hold the villain’s hand.
Oren: Yeah. But makes for a great reason to do fake dating which is one of my favorite tropes. So, yup, more please.
All: [laughter]
Bunny: That’s a good trope. Touch also involves one sensory organ that’s often involved in touch and with seismic sense, which we can talk about later, is whiskers; which can be extremely sensitive.
For example, we usually think of whiskers on cats and that makes sense, cats do use their whiskers.
But whiskers on seals and sea lions? Aren’t they really powerful hunting tools? They can be just completely blinded and still function just fine because their whiskers are so good at that, because fish leave ripples and then the seals can follow the ripples maybe even as far as like a hundred meters away,
Chris: That seems like it might be more powerful in the water.
Bunny: Vibrational senses tend to be stronger in water, just because water conducts that more. But cats do a similar thing where they can sense airflow with their whiskers. They also can’t see very close to them, so they use the whiskers to get sensory information that way.
Oren: I’m a big fan of good old electro-reception.
Bunny: Oh yeah! Electro-reception.
Oren: Electro-reception is very fun because it’s specifically used for finding the electrical signals generated by living creatures so you can snack on them, which I find fun.
I don’t know how to describe it though. I wanna give my aliens electro-reception or a superpower or maybe through some kind of gear. At least if it’s through gear, I can assume that whoever made it is already gonna try to translate it into a picture because, presumably, the person using it will be able to understand that.
But if it’s a superpower or a magical ability or something. I don’t know how to describe that. What do you just, you get a vibe? like how does it work?
Bunny: You just get the feel of it, you know?
Oren: Tell me what your Umwelt is like, good friend, hammerhead shark.
All: [giggle]
Bunny: Electric sense is cool, also because we were talking about active and passive senses, it can be either depending on the animal; like there are some fish that just have it on all the time, and other fish that can turn it on, which is pretty rad.
Oren: Although active electro-reception is like you’re shooting electricity out. That’d be interesting. ‘Hang on. I gotta get a look at you… Boom’ [laughter].
Bunny: [laughter]It’s like they generate an electric field and then when it gets distorted, like if something enters it, they know there’s a thing there and they can take a bite.
Oren: Did not know that. Learning all kinds of fun things today [giggles]
Bunny: It’s interesting. There’s a particular type of fish, and I’m forgetting what kind it is, but they did tests on it and observed that it could swim backwards just as easily as it can swim forwards.
And the reason for that is that it has electro-sense all along its body. And so when something impacts the electrical field, it knows not to hit it.
Oren: Yeah. Although it does make that annoying ‘Beep beep beep’.
All: [laughter]
Bunny: Oh, that’s right. It was the dump truck fish.
Oren: [laughter]
Chris: Probably one of my favorites is when a character senses something that is technically in a different realm, but they see echoes of it that are creepy.
So, for instance, in “Lockwood and Co”, they have characters who have ghost sensing powers and they split it up between the regular senses; So some people can see glowy ghost trails if they have really sensitive sight, others hear voices, but then at one point they actually go to the realm where all of the ghosts are hanging out.
And so you see that in that realm they can see them regular, and what they were seeing before was just an echo.
That happens a bit, at least in the Lord of the Rings movies too, because when Frodo puts on the ring, you can tell that his perception is changed; he saw dark, creepy shadows before, he puts on the ring, and now they’re like glowing and white because he has moved through space and his perception has changed, and I find that having two different versions of the same senses for the same item to be interesting.
Bunny: I think to some extent you do always have to translate it into a human Umwelt just because it’s mostly humans reading this, I assume. For things like the electro-sense and senses that are pretty hard to translate into those of us that don’t have intellectual sense. It’s probably easier to put that on other characters and see how they use it. Or for example, like alien creatures or non-sapien beings that also use electro-sense.
Like maybe you have a sidekick who is beeping their way along the story.
Oren: I also am a fan of, if you’re going to do the whole ‘it’s a normal sense, but it gives extra information’, which I always do, so I’m not judging. I do think you can still spice it up by having it be something other than sight.
If you’re gonna give a character the ability to sense electro-fields or magic or whatever, they don’t necessarily have to sense it as a vision overlay, which is a standard. They can sense it as pressure in their skin,now you’re using an enhanced sense of touch, it’s really more where it’s coming into play where as you get closer to a magical item, you can feel more pressure on you as you move closer to it.
Bunny: That’s a good idea. Oh, just quickly, I wanna mention that common knowledge is that people have five senses. It’s sort of true, but it really depends how you define senses.
The classics are sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell. But then, some people argue we have over 30 senses depending on how you define that, but sticking with shorter numbers, smaller numbers here, there’s two other ones that often get put in with the five.
One of them is proprioception, which is where your body parts are in relation to each other, even when you can’t see them. If you put your hands below the desk, you still know where they are relative to each other, and there’s actually been a case where someone lost the sense and had to completely relearn how to walk and navigate by sight alone, like having to have visual contact with his limbs at all times. This is the case of Ian Waterman, or IW as he is sometimes called.
And then there’s vestibular sense, which is where your body parts are in space. Just generally, if you have your arm out to the side, you can know where it is.
Oren: What about my sense of fashion? Does that make 31?
All: [laughter]
Bunny: Yeah, that’s 34 I think. Some people say up to 33, so I guess yeah, it would be 34.
Chris: Can I just say what the worst sense has ever been? In the original Buffy, the Vampire Slayer movie; before the show, Buffy gets menstrual cramps when vampires are near.
Bunny: That’s terrible. Does she get her period too?
Chris: [laughter] Not as far as we know, but it’s like ‘does she have to fight with cramps?’ [laughter] It’s just the worst!
Bunny: That’s like getting a migraine every time you see the color blue. Don’t be a creep, Whedon.
Chris: [laughter] That’s what answers that. It’s like nobody, that’s not wish fulfillment. Nobody wants to have menstrual cramps when they’re…
Bunny: Right. There are so many other routes you could have taken with that.
Chris: Yeah, and it’s not just that they’re painful, they’re painful and distinctly unpleasant in a number of ways. It does not work.
Bunny: No. It’s like getting a migraine when you see the color blue and then you have to fight the color blue.
Chris: [laughter]
Oren: I get a sore throat whenever dragons are around.
Bunny: [laughter]Yeah, I get the flu If there’s a fairy nearby.
Oren: That was one of the things that was weird about the first season of “Vox Machina”, they were struggling sooo hard to explain how the ‘Rangers sense favorite enemy’ thing works because Rangers has supposed to be able to sense whatever their favorite enemy is, and hers was supposed to be Dragon, and every once in a while she would get this weird look and we could never figure out what was going on.
And for some reason she couldn’t tell that there was a dragon shapeshifted into a human with them in the room.
Chris: Didn’t she get headaches or something?
Oren: Yeah, she would get headaches.
Bunny: Oh wow. It’s just literally the color blue.
Chris: And she would just randomly get them and we’re like ‘okay. So that character is secretly a dragon, isn’t he?’
Oren: For some reason they never put that together. It was very weird
Bunny: and she never knew. Despite having a headache.
Chris: Just having a headache. You think about that for a while if you had to punish a headache every time. But yeah, it still brings up the question; when she fights dragons, does she always have a headache then? because that doesn’t sound like a favorite enemy anymore.
Bunny: You always gotta keep some Tylenol on you.
Chris: As opposed to like spidey senses, which I think are supposed to be like tingles or something where Spider-Man knows when to dodge just in time, except for when he’s not supposed to dodge because that would be plotting convenient.
Oren: The spidey senses are weird because they’re pretty vague. I actually assumed that the new Marvel movies didn’t have them because we see a couple of scenes where Peter, like the hairs on the back of his arms stand up or whatever, but often he wasn’t in immediate danger when that happens, what is he sensing when that happens?
And then there are other scenes where he can get surprised just like anybody else. So I just assumed he didn’t really have spider senses in this version. But then suddenly one of them made his spider senses a huge plot point, which was because he was fighting mysterio who can trick your visual senses very easily and ‘wow, wouldn’t you know it? This hero just happens to have a non-visual sense he can use’. Solved, I guess.
Bunny: Which is funny. It seems like there should be, given how much super senses are a thing in media and superhero media, there’s not a single character like Daredevil with super-hearing, who can hear Mysterio putzing around.
Oren: Nope. Can’t do it. Look, the Avengers were all on vacation that day. Okay. Don’t ask where the Avengers were.
All: [laughter]
Bunny: I think it would be fun to talk about if you do want to either ‘superify’ the big five senses, I’m not really sure how to superify proprioception or vestibular sense; feeling like your limbs are in the extra right place doesn’t work.
Chris: I suppose if you attune an item, it could feel like a limb and that you always know where it is. That sounds very creepy to me though, but maybe it would be okay if your story was creepy. It might fit.
Oren: Actually, I think this could be a really interesting idea. You could have someone whose ability is if another person is close to them or they’re concentrating on that person or whatever, they can sense where those person’s limbs are. That would be really helpful in a fight, like in a fist fight. You could do some really interesting stuff with that.
Bunny: Okay. I like that. That’s a good direction to go with it. Someone take that, that’s a good idea.
Okay. Here’s one thing you can do when you’re thinking about how to design your alien species or your superpowers as well. Draw “the Beasties” in our world and think about the reasons that they developed the senses that they do.
So humans, as we’ve talked about, are very visual animals, and we’re good at pinpointing where things are in space, we can get up really close to something and see it clearly, or you can be really far away from something and if your eyes aren’t crap like mine are, you can see that thing pretty clearly as well.
We can also see the color red, which is unusual in the animal kingdom, and, due to that, we’ve put social weight on things like blushing, which is interesting. If you didn’t have that sense of red, you wouldn’t be able to see blood filling someone’s cheeks.
I wanted to think about, when you’re talking about unusual senses in the visual realm are things like where the eyes are on your creature. Like cows, their eyes are on the sides of their head which makes them look kinda dopey and tired. But what that gives them is a huge panoramic view of the horizon.
Dragonflies have those big compound eyes, which gives them 360 degree vision, including above and below. A really interesting thing with some, I think mostly bugs is that they experience time differently and I’m pretty sure this has to do with how close their eyes are to their brains.
Like they have a really fast track from their eyes to their brains, and so, things that look really fast to us are pretty slow to them.
Chris: Bunny, when you were reading that book, did you find confirmation about how predators have their eyes in front?
Bunny: I don’t know if they discuss that a lot.
Oren: Well, actually I can answer that. The answer is usually yes, but with enough exceptions that you can’t always tell.
This is a thing that gets brought up in a lot of popular archeology communities is because, generally, predators have forward facing eyes and prey animals are much more likely to have wider set vision, but it’s not universal.
First of all, many animals are predators and prey at the same time.
Bunny: Your typical house cat is both, but they have forward facing vision because they hunt.
Oren: But even animals that don’t hunt sometimes have forward facing vision for a number of reasons. And occasionally animals that do hunt have more spread out vision.
So it’s not a guarantee, it’s an indicator. But you can’t just find a fossil and be like ‘look, it’s got forward facing vision. obviously a predator’. It’s not that direct.
Bunny: Interesting. I don’t think I knew that, but I guess that makes sense. Even predators can benefit from a 180 degree view, and while dragonflies are predators, in fact, they’re some of the most efficient predators there are, and their eyes are just bulbs, they’re not forward facing or sideways.
Chris: I think another thing about us being very vision oriented that is easy to take for granted is the fact that it’s not just that we have a good ability to perceive light, it’s that we have brain mechanisms for understanding what we’re seeing and that makes a huge difference.
When we look at things, we can see what is a distinct object and process that information. For me, it was always weird this idea that, for instance, zebras with stripes would hang out together because it’s hard for a predator to pick out an individual, because when we look at it, it’s extremely obvious what an individual zebra is, even though they have stripes.
But for a creature that can’t process visuals as well and tell what visuals create mean, a distinct object, then yeah, it might be hard to pick out an individual zebra in a herd.
Bunny: So there’s something interesting I learned from this book and that is that zebra stripes might not actually have something to do with camouflage. There’s some research suggesting that they have something to do with avoiding biting-insects of all things; the insects are too confused to land on them so I guess in a way that is camouflage.
Oren: I actually have the answer to this, I’ve done some research and the answer is that zebras used to be plain gray and then they were painted in that black and white during the first World War to hide them from German submarines.
Chris: [laughter]
Oren: Wait, hang on, I’m thinking of freighters again. I’m think that’s not zebras, ships is what I was thinking of.
All: [laughter]
Bunny: Ships need to be painted like that so they can avoid the lions.
Oren: Yeah. Please look up dazzle camo, I love it, It’s my favorite thing.
We don’t know if it works or not. There was not enough data gathered to say
All: [laughter]
Oren: One thing I wanted to mention real quick, since we’re coming up on the end of our time, is a surprisingly powerful thing to give your characters is super-smell.
Bunny: Yes.
Oren: Because again, we as humans are pretty much used to the idea that if a person or whatever it is we’re looking for is not in our immediate vicinity, then we can’t perceive it.
But smell is a weird one because smell leaves a trail and our sense of smell is not really developed enough that we can track most things by scent unless the smell is really strong.
But a lot of animals can, and they have a much better ability to follow things. If you give a human the ability to do that, it becomes very hard for them to, for example, lose a suspect if you need a scene that depends on them seeing someone and then losing sight of that person in the crowd, it’s like ‘hang on, I’ll just smell them It’s fine, I got this’.
Bunny: Smell is very interesting because most senses keep track of where things are in space, but smell has the additional dimension of time -how recently was the smell emitted-, It can also travel in weird ways, like it can get dispersed in a plume or in a stream.
Chris: This reminds me of Wolf Pack, where we have this group of teenagers and we’re pretending that there’s nothing they can do because they’re supposed to spin their wheels for most of season one.
But one of the teenage werewolves has super-scent. We established that she has super-scent, and so there’s a big werewolf killing people out there. She has superset, I don’t believe that she couldn’t find it.
Oren: I had one player in one of my burning wheel games take the special ability “nose of the bloodhound”. I don’t know why that ability is in there, but it’s in there and wow, it was suddenly really difficult to structure a mystery.
Bunny: That’s the thing, super-smell would be so helpful in anything involving crime or mystery. There’s a reason we have a lot of dogs that sniff corpses or identify missing people, I think they also sniff mines. So if you had a character who had the super-scent, they could find drugs, corpses, mines, missing people, anything like that.
Chris: Admittedly, I was in one of Oren’s games with a character that did have enhanced smell, and by then I think he’d gotten some practice because he came up with a variety of reasons why my character… there’s like ‘there’s too many people in here. The smell gets lost. It’s been too long. You can follow it up to this point, but at that point you think maybe they changed cards’
Oren: I got some practice by then. I knew I was wise to your ways.
Bunny: Yes, I recall this. It’s definitely the most maligned scent. People call it ‘primitive’ and ‘it came from like our fish brains’ and stuff like that.
But no, it’s extremely helpful. I think the only place I’ve seen super-scent really is Hench, where a side character has super smell and has to wear nose plugs most of the time.
And I think that might be the main reason that super-scent isn’t more common is because it’s just not very cool for a character to be able to smell a fart really well.
Chris: I think that we’re a little self-conscious about the idea of smelling each other. It’s like, oh man, you can smell everybody’s BO (body odor) and it’s not necessarily what we wanna think about.
Bunny: but just think of all the information you can pull from someone’s BO
Chris: Honestly, you got a character who always smelled everybody’s BO and also all of their scented products because if you could smell that, you could smell their scented skin cream or their scented shampoo or all that stuff. I feel like after a while it would not be a big deal.
Bunny: We see a lot of colors and we don’t get overwhelmed when there are a lot of colors around. You can, but your head’s not going to explode. You can get used to it even when purple and brown are side by side and it looks really ugly.
Well. Now that you’ve listened to this podcast with your super-hearing, you should head on over with your super-touch and click on our super Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: Before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons;
First, there’s Ayman Jaber; he’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. And finally we have Vanessa Perry, who is our foremost expert on the works of T. Kingfisher.
Thank you all so much. We’ll talk to you next week.
[Outro]This has been The Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Johnathan Coulton.
Everyone knows that stories should have well developed characters, but what does that mean? Should you be racing to give your characters as many traits as possible? Does it matter at all what those traits are? The truth is a little more specific than some advice may have led you to believe, and that’s what we’re talking about this week. We discuss how character development works, which characters need it, and why it’s important to remember that fictional heroes aren’t real.
Show Notes Game of Thrones Ending * Murderbot * Friendship Arcs * Legends and Lattes * Aang vs Ozai Fight * Character Arcs * Eldest * Meta Mysteries * Backstory * Anthony Lockwood * Kaz Brekker * Wade Watts TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Elizabeth.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[opening song]Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is:
Bunny: Bunny.
Chris: And:
Oren: Oren.
Chris: Bad news folks. We don’t feel real enough. We have to fix that. Okay, so first we each need a memorable trait, so pick one.
Bunny: I have brown hair.
Chris: Very memorable. Oren, what’s your memorable trait?
Oren: My memorable trait is I’ve decided is that I’m now gonna be really into crypto.
Bunny: Oh no. I think we’re getting too three dimensional here.
Oren: Look, you guys are never gonna be able to forget the blockchain, okay, because I’m gonna bring it up in every conversation.
Chris: Yeah. My memorable trait will be that I complain a lot. I’m gonna first start by complaining about your crypto obsession.
Oren: You can’t silence me, Chris. This is who I am. I’m just a real true person.
Chris: That’s too true. It’s too real. And now we’re a little bit flat caricature, so we need more traits, because Bunny, you’re entirely defined by having brown hair.
Bunny: Damn. Oh well. Somehow I need another trait.
Chris: Or how about a deep motivation? What do we really want during this episode? What overriding desire is driving our actions?
Bunny: I could use a drink.
Chris: And this episode is your way of getting a drink.
Bunny: Yeah, I wouldn’t be able to do it otherwise.
Chris: Okay. Very good.
Oren: Okay. My motivation is that I want to convince everyone that I would totally vote for a progressive candidate, just none of the ones who are actually running.
Bunny: Oh, that’s elaborate.
Oren: That’s, look, I just feel like that fits with my crypto obsession. I’m not racist, but…
Chris: Oh no.
Bunny: Oh, you’re becoming more rounded by the minute.
Chris: Yeah, maybe I have layers because my complaining is a way to get attention. And that’s why I’m a podcast host.
Bunny: Oh, that’s right. You’ve got a tragic backstory now.
Chris: Yeah. I just want people to notice me, okay. And if I complain about your terrible crypto obsession and your brown hair – which is too brown, okay.
Bunny: Oh no! Don’t come after my hair like that.
Chris: Kids these days, the Gen Z, their hair is too brown. Have you noticed all the Gen Z kids have brown hair?
Oren: It’s so brown.
Bunny: Well, you damn millennials and your crypto.
Oren: There’s an NFT for that. I actually already own your brown hair because I bought an NFT of it, but that’s how crypto works.
Bunny: Oh no. I guess I have to dye my hair now.
Oren: Yeah, you better. Otherwise you’re gonna have to pay me 1 million Doge fan coins; that’s probably a real currency by now.
Bunny: I don’t even have a single Doge fan coin. What am I gonna do?
Chris: Alright, I think we’re off to a good start. Now I’m just gonna hand you 10 pages of random questions like what your middle name and favorite food is, and then we will be good. We’ll be totally developed.
Bunny: Sushi, easy. That’s my middle name and my favorite food.
Oren: Man, that’s efficient.
Bunny: Brown hair wants to drink sushi. In every scene.
Oren: I think we’ve got real winners on our hands here, Chris. I think we’ve solved it. I don’t know what it was, but we definitely solved it.
Bunny: Was there a problem? I don’t know, but it’s fixed now.
Chris: We’re very real now. Very real. So, this time we’re talking about character development, and I guess the first question is, what is it? It’s for the most part just designing a character or making stuff up about a character, but it’s really vague, and the implication comes with that your end goal is to create a quote-unquote “strong character,” which is also an extremely vague term, and it all just boils down to, like, design your character real hard, so they are a good character. That’s what the rhetoric – basically doesn’t have more to it than that.
Oren: Yeah, my official stance is that character should be good. Make your character a good character, not a bad character. I want quality of character to be high, please.
Bunny: Look, this is the hot takes people want out of Mythcreants.
Chris: So, not really helpful. I blame Romanticism because of course I blame Romanticism, but for everything.
Oren: That’s your real defining trait.
Bunny: So cliché, Chris blaming Romanticism.
Chris: So I guess the question is, is a real seeming character what we should be aiming for? To some extent. Obviously I don’t want a character to walk in and be completely unbelievable.
Bunny: Yeah. But I feel like realism is a bit misleading. Like, we want to believe in them as a character. You don’t want them to necessarily be like a real person, because they’re your character and they’re going on an adventure for a reason. Like, why is it them on this adventure?
Oren: Yeah. It depends on what you mean by real. If I wanted to be hip and cool, I would say you want a believable character. I would say you want a character who seems real, like, don’t get me wrong, if your character feels fake, people will notice that. If your character does things that just don’t seem to fit with who they have been established to be, then people will react and they’ll say, this character doesn’t feel real, or this character feels like a cartoon or something. So I think that is a real thing, like your character should feel real, but what it means is very context sensitive.
Chris: Yeah. I think for the most part, the realness of characters is an illusion, just like the realness of dialogue is an illusion. We want our dialogue to seem natural sounding. We don’t actually want it to be real. I think characters are the same way. You want them to not be so fake that they interrupt the experience, but real people are mostly kind of dull.
Bunny: That’s true. This is why I struggle with creative nonfiction.
Chris: I think about it, we can’t remember real people’s names very often, but we want our readers to remember character names and remember our characters.
Bunny: I’ve started reading Parable of the Sower, and there are so many characters. I can’t keep them straight. I can’t keep the people in my class’s name straight.
Chris: Yeah, and we want our characters to be entertaining at some level: to be interesting, or fascinating, and have something that stands apart. And all of those things are not typically present with the average person we happen to meet. But that – again, how real a character seems is one of those things that’s also often mentioned in the same conversations that character development and quote-unquote “strong characters” are mentioned.
Oren: Yeah, and it’s not even so much that real people are dull. It’s that, at least in my mind, they are unlikely to demonstrate things that are interesting in a fictional context most of the time. You could hang out with a person and they could very well have a lot of interesting things about them, but very often you won’t ever find out those things. And for a fictional story, it’s not just that they have to have interesting things about them, they have to have interesting things about them that feel like part of the story. Because you can have a really interesting backstory about how your character grew up in a protest camp and was part of an environmental movement. That could be interesting. But if the story is about, I don’t know, building Lego bricks in a tournament, how is that relevant? That just feels like some random side thing you brought up.
Chris: I do think that the conventional character advice treats characters like they exist outside of the story. Like they’re completely independent of the story and like they’re developing on their own with no consideration of what their role is. And I’ve even seen plotting advice that makes no distinction between protagonists and antagonists, which is very bad. And seeing people use that plotting advice, I’m like, no, you don’t do that with antagonists, that’s for protagonists. But if you don’t make any distinction, then they’re all just characters, because we’re thinking of characters as people who exist outside the story, which again plays into the whole like real, you gotta make somebody seem real, like a real person that you could just grab if they from the street when they feel like they step outside the story and start talking to you.
Bunny: I do think it can help to consider who they are outside of the adventure. Usually that comes in when they’re just about to start the adventure, and then they of course change over the course of the adventure. I think that can be helpful, but they are also in a story and their role needs to reflect that.
Chris: Yeah. And I think that’s why at Mythcreants, we spend so much time discussing what makes a character work in their role. Because that is largely what feels like it’s missing elsewhere, and that is a huge factor in whether they are successful. Again, conventional characater development is, there are some things right that are important for any character, and so we can talk about that too. But that kind of optimization for the role is a piece that is often missing.
Oren: Here’s the thing. If you come at this purely from the angle of I’m just gonna make a set of people and then I’m gonna put them in a room and see what happens, which is a way I have seen advocated of writing a story, and you’re not willing to like make any changes to these characters to facilitate a story, one of two things is almost certainly going to happen.
You’re either going to not have a story because you didn’t just magically, by extreme chance, stumble onto a connection of characters that would make a dramatically satisfying story. Or, you are going to have to suddenly make some of the characters act differently to how you’ve established them to get a satisfying ending, and neither of those are gonna go over well. People don’t like it when you do either of those things. The most obvious example of the latter recently was Game of Thrones, season eight, where suddenly Daenerys had to act like a completely different person to get the ending that the writers wanted. And we don’t see the first one that often because that almost never makes it to publication. I just threw some characters into a room and they just hung out. At least not in spec fic. Not in the kind of books we tend to talk about on myth grants.
Chris: So should we talk about what should we do when we’re developing a character? What things are we trying to do with our characters? What properties or traits should they have?
Oren: I think you should just draw random traits out of a bucket, and then that character just has the trait now, and just keep doing that. Because more traits is better.
Chris: They’ll be multidimensional. Each new trait you pull out is a dimension, and you want a hundred dimensions.
Bunny: So they have brown hair and they complain.
Oren: Yeah. That’s good. And just keep adding.
Chris: And they talk about cryptocurrency. I think that one thing that good characters tend to have is looking ahead to character arcs. Good characters tend to have character arcs. Yes. But then that means that when the character’s going into the story, when you’re first sitting up the character, they need to have something to overcome, like a misconception or a flaw. Learning to trust, for example, is one that a lot of action heroes have, where you’ve got the gritty veteran who needs to learn to trust the newbie, or something like that.
Murderbot, also; learning to trust the humans. Pacifism is another one that I’ve seen, like trying to learn nonviolent solutions. Legends and Lattes: the whole center theme is about this putting away the sword and all, and she gets tempted now and then to use it to solve problems. And then Avatar: the Last Airbender tried to do that, but it couldn’t really commit to it because the heroes had already beat a bunch of people up over the course of three seasons.
Oren: Yeah. But now suddenly fighting a guy means we have to kill him. Suddenly.
Chris: So I would think of this as an internal problem the character has, then make it part of a character arc. Usually either they are unhappy in some way, or discontented, or they’re making some kind of misjudgments where even if they don’t know there’s a problem, the audience is looking at them and being like, this doesn’t look good. That’s definitely something that I’ve seen for important protagonists. For minor characters, that’s a lot of investment because anytime you build an arc, you have to follow through.
And so you can’t give a character arc to all of your characters, but if you try to do a viewpoint character, especially your main character who has a viewpoint, and you try to give that person emotional struggles or just a bunch of negative feelings, and you do not think through a character arc for them, oftentimes just… call it spaghetti, like spaghetti emotions, where we just have strands of possible arcs everywhere and it feels like a mess. It feels very inconsistent. Suddenly the character’s angsting about one thing and then another thing, and they don’t seem to have consistent issues from one scene to the next.
Bunny: Their problem can’t just be angst.
Chris: Generally angsting about whatever happens to be in the scene at that time. Probably my favorite is from Eldest, the sequel to Eragon, where Eragon seems like a nihilist in one paragraph, and then he changes from paragraph to paragraph what his emotional issues are.
Oren: He just has a lot of facets, Chris. He has so many.
Chris: For anybody, if you wanna give a character deep driving emotions, a character arc provides structure. It’s just, we don’t necessarily have that much time for every character in the story.
Oren: Yeah. What I have seen is that audiences really like getting to know a character. They like to feel at the end of the story as if they know the character better than when they started. And often that means an arc. Not necessarily a hundred percent of the time, but arcs are very helpful just because they also have some attachment and drama while you’re learning things, and it’s more likely that they will feel relevant to the story and not just random pieces of information.
They’re especially useful for viewpoint characters because with viewpoint characters, unless you’re doing meta mysteries, which you shouldn’t, we’ve covered this. Stop doing it. Then you can’t do the thing where you just find out more random things about them, because in most cases, those are things you should probably already have known. Whereas with a non-viewpoint character, you might be surprised to find out that the jerk rival takes care of their siblings at home because their parents aren’t around. That might be part of an arc, but it might not necessarily be; but that’s hard to do with the protagonist.
Chris: With a protagonist, you can still get to know them better, but they have to be like embellishing details, right? A meta mystery happens when there’s something that would naturally come up. And the only reason it hasn’t come up is because the storyteller has decided to arbitrarily keep it a secret, giving the audience the feeling that there is something they don’t know or something missing, or just they don’t understand where the character’s coming from. Emotions are coming off as flat, and just missing. That kind of thing. Certainly if it’s something that’s more of an embellishing detail that wouldn’t have naturally come up and it’s not important to the story, sometimes those details are fun, right? A character really hates mushrooms.
Bunny: Oh no. They’ve gotta learn to overcome that. Nobody should hate mushrooms. Mushrooms are so good. That’s a character flaw.
Chris: …What have you. So you can add some of those things. But yeah, for non-viewpoint character, giving ’em a little bit more complexity, I think gives you more to learn. Giving them layers. Sorry, whenever we talk about a character being deep, or layers, it just, there’s just so much… I can’t take those words seriously anymore.
Oren: They get used for, I would argue, less than admirable purposes. You get the people who are like, the character arc is the true soul of the novel, and they tend to talk about that sort of thing. I will say that absent those perhaps ulterior motives, having a character with more than one side to them, if you see that character a lot, I would say is valuable, because if they are the same every time you see them and you see them all the time, then that starts to feel weird.
Bunny: Especially if they’re in a bunch of different contexts. Like maybe your character will be putting on a different face when they’re talking to a police officer than they do when they’re at home. And that can be useful and feel real. And you can still see the interiority of the character. They can still be having thoughts and feelings to themselves. In fact, they can think about how they wouldn’t normally act like this or that. They’re consciously trying to be a bit more rigid and official than usual. That can absolutely work. But if they act the exact same in every context, that doesn’t make sense.
Oren: If you have a wise mentor who is in two or three scenes, wise mentor can be their character. They could be memorable as that, as long as there aren’t a lot of other wise mentors. But if that wise mentor is in a lot of scenes, you’re gonna wanna show some other sides to them. Common ones are, this character’s normally show wise and calm. Let’s show what would make them show anger. And that feels cool. That creates contrast. People like that sort of thing.
Chris: I think another important thing to think about in this category that lets you learn more about a character, that is useful for non-viewpoint characters, is the fact that people are not going around purposely showing everyone their emotions all the time. A lot of times there’s what they’re feeling and their motivation, and then what they choose to show other people. What they’re trying to show other people is different from that. So that gives you opportunities for them to put on one face, and then when you hit the right situation, for them to reveal what they’ve been thinking underneath the brave face. They put on a brave face, but really they’re scared. That kind of thing. And you can also have that with motivation.
You can leave a character who has a very simple, obvious motivation. But you can also add a deeper motivation. Like, I want good grades just because I am kind of a teacher’s pet or something being superficial; or I want good grades because I really need approval, because I have low self-esteem and I really need the approval of others, being a deeper motivation. That’s more emotional about their personal identity, that kind of thing.
Oren: So here’s a question. How does backstory fit into character development? Because I have a tendency to write characters with too much backstory. That’s just my toxic trait. So how does that work exactly?
Chris: I think backstory, again, is one of those things like character arcs that is a very high investment choice. If you’re gonna do it, it has to be usually for an important character, and also it has to matter. I’ve seen a trend with candied characters where we reveal a backstory and it just doesn’t change anything. Again, it just feels very glorifying. The author’s like, don’t you care that this character used to work for the bad guys? No. I don’t. It doesn’t change anything about the story. It’s like, but isn’t that cool? No, I don’t care.
But for a more important character that you wanna spend more time on, explaining their character arc is probably one of the number one things. It depends on the character arc. Sometimes characters have flaws that don’t really need explaining very much, like they’re impulsive. Maybe they’re just started that way and they have to learn restraint, but there’s no deep backstory reason why they’re impulsive. But there could be deep backstory reasons why if they have trust issues. That suggests somebody hurt them. And then that backstory could end up being very relevant because it might change which situations are really sensitive for them, or what kind of people they trust, or the person that hurt them might show up in the story.
Bunny: And I feel it’s very difficult or impossible to create a character without any backstory, I guess unless they’ve just been born or something. But at the same time, you have to know how to doll that out in ways that are actually supporting the story. And in that case, I think you’re right that it’s usually explanation. I’m thinking of backstory that can explain their relationships with other characters. I think that’s another big one, especially if that ties into the character arc. And I think that’s especially important if they have a character arc about either reconciling with or finding a different way to relate to another character.
Chris: For a relationship arc backstory, their relationship can also be important, but I would say that when you talk about backstory, it has to be something that is not self-explanatory, that’s important enough to actually take time out of the story to relate something complex. And there are many cases in which, especially if you have a young character, where things are fairly self-explanatory, and then the issues start when the story begins.
They’re a young character who’s naive, they have a friend that they grew up with… That doesn’t really take much explanation. And then when the story starts, then stuff goes down. Then they lose things, then they develop their flaw. Then they have a fracture with their friend. And it’s all in the story proper. None of it is backstory. So if you’re going to take time to relate something that happened in the past, that doesn’t move the story forward, there has to be a bigger reason for it.
Oren: My favorite weird backstory thing is when the author gives their character more backstory than it feels like they’ve had time to do. It’s like, you’re not that old. How did you have time to do all these things?
Chris: How did you have time to watch every single episode of All In The Family, or whatever it is that Wade does in Ready Player One?
Oren: Yeah. The ones that come to mind immediately are Lockwood and Co. and Six of Crows. For one thing, it’s really obvious that in Six of Crows, those characters were not supposed to be teenagers. They don’t act like teenagers. They don’t have any teenager related arcs. They clearly were supposed to be at least mid-twenties, and were aged down because YA is hot. That seems very clear to me reading the story, but Kaz still has the backstory of someone in his mid- to late twenties and I just don’t believe he had time to do all the things he is talking about having done.
Chris: Yeah, Buffy made fun of that in the episode, I think it’s called Superstar, where Jonathan uses a magic spell to give himself all the candy. Like how did he have time to go through medical school and do all of these other things?
Oren: Yeah, and Lockwood has the same problem, specifically the character Lockwood. He just has too much backstory; he has so many people that he knows and so many things he’s supposedly done, and it’s like, was he 10 when he was doing these things? My favorite is that he supposedly has had a rotating cast of casual girlfriends and the story – he’s 15 when the story starts. How many girlfriends could he possibly have had by that point? He hasn’t been dating age for that long.
Bunny: You went through puberty two years ago, Kaz.
Chris: One of my favorites is a newspaper article about the death of his sister that’s like, you know, oh, and the sister died and her brother was unable to stop it, or something like that. And it’s like, okay. He was a young child. What was he, eight or… he was seven. His sister was older than him. How many newspapers reporting the death of somebody are like, oh yes, and their seven-year-old younger brother was unable to stop it.
Bunny: This tragic child death occurred, and the family hamster was not able to stop it.
Oren: What a scrub.
Chris: So another one that is sometimes worth thinking about is the character’s motivation, which people make a lot of. I think a simple motivation goes a long way. And the reason is just to make the character more consistent, usually, so that you can catch if they’re doing things that are inconsistent with whatever they might want. Because there’s a good chance readers will notice if the character switches sides inexplicably, or seems to go do something in one scene that’s contradictory to what they do in a different scene. And if you know what they want and their primary motivation is, that just helps you make them more consistent.
Oren: This one is hard for me to intellectualize. It’s like, I know when I see it that a character is going against their established motivation, but it’s hard to give advice on it beyond don’t do that. Very helpful advice.
Chris: I will say that one thing that does happen, and I think we talked about this a little bit when we went over believability, is that it’s one thing to know, but you also actually have to communicate to the readers. So if you have any issues with consistency and believability, the first step is actually knowing what’s going on yourself. And the second step is making sure that readers do. Because if you do have a character that’s complex, for instance, and you’re thinking, oh, they’re on the fence about this, or they have nuanced feelings, they’re really divided, it is tricky to make that come across as being complex instead of just inconsistent.
Oren: Yeah. My advice to clients I work with is when in doubt, simplify their motivation, because a lot of the issues that I’ve encountered of ‘this character is doing something that just seems to contradict what they wanted,’ is that the author has this very complicated idea of their motivation in their head that is hard to portray on the page. When in doubt, simplify, is my constant refrain.
Bunny: I’ve had this problem myself, especially in short stories, which I’m terrible at writing, where I’m like, I want this complicated background and I want the characters to have history with each other and interact in complex ways. So I come up with a backstory that’s completely tangled and requires tons of explaining. And then my professors, “This feels like a chapter of a novel,” and I’m like, goddammit.
Oren: No, I get it. I have the exact same thing. Okay. So these two characters, they used to date until they had to split up because of a war, and then they met again, but that one of them cheated on the other one, and then the other one stole all their money and then they worked for rival crime syndicates for a while. How long is this story again? 5,000 words. Don’t worry about it.
Bunny: Yeah. The one I’m thinking of was that there was like two vampires and initially one of them had turned the other one, and then that one wasn’t ready for it and went on a rampage, and now they blame the first vampire for that. And it’s all very hard to explain in a ten minute play with only dialogue.
Oren: Sounds like it could be a good novel premise though.
Bunny: That’s my problem!
Oren: Just saying.
Chris: Backstory, there’s the issue of communicating, but I think the other issue that happens with lots of backstory is that you want your audience to be on the same page as a character and feel what they’re feeling. And so you have to be able to relate the backstory in enough detail that you can feel that with them. So if you have them meet up with their ex, you want that to be an emotionally meaningful moment. The audience has to understand all that history enough to feel something about it, right? Feel whether that this is a good ex or a bad ex, or what have you, so that when you see the ex, they’re like, oh yeah, the ex, or like, oh no, not that ex.
And when all of those emotions are poured into the backstory, not only is it hard to explain, but it can also be really hard to then bring forth emotions in the story because it all depends on all this stuff. So, yeah, that’s again a matter of how much time do you have to develop your character. That’s a big one. And you have less time in a short story than you do in a novel. It depends on basically, what is the total number of words you have to devote to this character? And if you don’t have that many words, you gotta pare it down. And if it’s a character that only makes a small appearance, they can be a flat character. You’ll get away with it because people won’t have time to know the difference, and they’ll probably just be memorable, which is good if they appear more than once.
Oren: Okay. Now that you know all of our backstory and we are all very well developed around here, I think you can agree we are very real people who exist. We’re gonna call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you think we are real enough, consider supporting these very real podcast hosts on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: Before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Finally we have Vanessa Perry, who is our foremost expert on the works of T. Kingfisher. Thank you all so much. We’ll talk to you next week.
[closing song]
Even the best villains must eventually come to the end of their run, but what if you could bring them back? It would be so easy, what would be the harm—NO. You stop that. Do not give in to temptation! This week, we’re talking about why it’s almost always better to leave a villain dead and then complaining about stories that didn’t leave their villains dead. You could say there’s a bit of an Echo in there, and that, somehow, Star Wars discourse returned.
Show Notes When to Kill a Hero – Or Not * Kingpin * Peter Hale * Kate Argent * D6 Star Wars RPG * “Ursula’s Crazy Sister!” * Sheev Palpatine * Darth Maul * How to Bring Back a Defeated Villain TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Paloma Palacios.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Intro: You are listening to the Mythcreants Podcast. With your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny. [opening theme]
Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Orin. With me today is –
Chris: Chris.
Oren: – and –
Bunny: Bunny.
Oren: Now, you might remember that I was vanquished at the end of the last episode, but I have risen again, better and stronger than before.
Bunny: Nooooo!
Chris: Oh man, I put so much work into killing you.
Bunny: It was such a struggle. Could you just go back to being dead? That’d make it a lot easier.
Oren: No, since people liked me as a villain the first time, they are guaranteed to like me even more the second time. That’s just how stories work.
Bunny: You know when someone comes up to you and they’re like, did you miss me? Did you miss me? Yea, I always miss them more.
Oren: This is the process. You just brute force everything. It’ll work out.
Chris: But marketers really need easy, profitable successes, can’t we just take the last story and just do that again?
Oren: Yeah. Minimize the investor risk.
Bunny: Look, even if you have an evil laugh, it’s even better ’cause then you can put it in trailers
Chris: Or the end of the credits, like we think the villain is dead, and then we have the entire credits, and then we resurrect the villain at the end of the credits. Like when most people left and then everybody’s like, why is the villain – I thought this person was dead and we made a really big deal about how this villain was dead. At the end of the last movie.
Oren: I hope you watched the mid credits scene!
Bunny: Psyche!
Oren: So today we’re talking about why your villain should stay dead. They almost certainly should. The good news is that, from what I can tell, this is mostly a TV and movies thing. I actually could not find many novels that did this.
Bunny: That’s not too surprising.
Chris: I wonder if it has to do partly with, again, bringing in big name actors that play the villains again.
Oren: I think it really is. I think it’s the franchise obligations from what I can tell.
Bunny: Also Oren, go away if villain should stay dead. Hoo. Get outta here.
Oren: [laughs]
Chris: Well, that’s a nice evil laugh, that will do.
Bunny: I would put that at the end of the credits.
Oren: So there’s the big franchises like the MCU or what have you, where they have a bunch of characters and no one ever wants to get rid of them because each new writer wants to be able to use them. You see this in comics too, right? They’re never gonna permanently kill off a named character. That’s just how comics work, or at least how mainline, Marvel and DC work. And it’s the same thing when it comes into TV and movies, but you occasionally see it in other places where it makes even less sense and is even more confusing.
Bunny: Here’s a question – Do you think it’s better or worse to bring back a dead villain or a dead hero?
Oren: I would in most cases say a dead villain is worse. Neither is good. You shouldn’t start killing people and then bringing them back. It’s very tempting, but don’t.
Chris: Either one can seem really contrived, so they can both have that issue, but at least with a dead hero, I think people are more likely to be excited that the hero comes back and they can still function in their role as a hero.
Oren: The hero doesn’t have the same problem that the villain has of, if we killed them, they’re probably not threatening anymore.
Bunny: That’s true. What you need in a villain is, primarily, threatening. If you’ve gotten the crap kicked out of you, I think you’re just a little bit less threatening.
Oren: There are some edge cases where that’s not the case. Sometimes the villain doesn’t get taken out by the heroes, and in those cases it’s not that specific problem. There are other problems, but it doesn’t have that specific one. But with a hero, that’s never gonna be an issue, or probably not ever gonna be an issue, but you’re still resurrecting a dead character is always gonna have a serious cost that is always going to erode audience trust in what you’re showing them. This is true of anything when you take back something that should be untake-backable, but it comes up the most with character death.
Chris: I think that the way it really destroys the experience is if when you do want a character to die. What you want is for your audience to be focused on that tragedy. You do not want them to spend all of their attention being like, okay, is this character really dead? How graphic was this death? Have they been bisected? Have they been set on fire? Their pieces been sewed back together? If you actually have a dramatic death scene, you want them to be in the moment feeling the tragedy of that death when you know so many characters are brought back, that is less and less possible, and it becomes harder and harder to actually make deaths look permanent even if they are, and this is happening with injuries too. Marvel’s very bad. Marvel has become extremely bad about injuries.
Bunny: It also makes the audience just trust you less. It also, no matter whether or not it was planned, it just feels sloppy, I think. It seems very difficult to me, even if it was planned to make it not feel uncreative and sloppy, like you didn’t have any other ideas.
Oren: There are ways you can do it if you really set it up in advance. Maybe. I’m not gonna rule out a hundred percent of those possibilities, but it’s pretty rare, and most of the time, there’s no question. Most of the time when we see this happen, if people are complaining about it, that means you’ve already failed.
Chris: Yeah, some implementations are definitely better than others, and so it’s impossible to say never, ever, ever, but it’s so uncommon for it to be done well, and of course, every time somebody does it, now they have the legacy of all the other storytellers have done it, right, in a cheap way.
Bunny: That makes it even harder, at the very least, that legacy is accompanied by a lot of unhappy people.
Oren: I also think we should consider another reason why you shouldn’t bring back a dead villain, and this one’s a little more subtle, but I think it’s just as important and it’s ’cause it’s repetitive beyond the lack of threat. We’ve already done this and you made it seem like we were getting a new villain, right? That’s what happens when you kill off a villain. It seems like we’re getting a new one that’ll be interesting and some novelty will be added, and instead you brought back the old one.
Chris: Or just new problems because usually when you have the same villain, there’s a limit to how different the next problem the heroes are gonna tackle will be, so that also just limits, besides just the villain character, other types of variety in the plot arc.
Oren: Then of course there’s the practical consideration, which is that most settings don’t have an explainable way to bring a character back from the dead and the ones that do have their own problems. And so as a result, most of the time when a character gets brought back beyond the more abstract level of, ‘well now I don’t believe you’ when a character dies, it just doesn’t make sense. It’s just not believable. They almost always end up having survived an unsurvivable injury. How did they get back by not dying?
Bunny: I think the way to do this is just to say. How did they come back? That’s a secret.
Oren: If you don’t explain yourself, everything’s fine.
Chris: I also think that it can be, again, really unsatisfying and frustrating when the hero does everything right and they’ve gone through their climax, their turning point, they’ve proven themselves, saved the day, and despite, through some examples here that we’ll bring up, despite doing everything, somehow the villain is just comes right back again and it just feels like authorial fiat, where we, the story, took it in one direction and the heroes didn’t succeed because the author just said so, and it undoes all the agency that the heroes have in many cases. That’s just a really unsatisfying way to end the story.
Oren: So I think we’ve talked, covered the principles enough. I think we get to complain now about specifics.
Bunny: Specific examples! Okay, my favorite part.
Oren: I think we’ve had our vegetables, we can have our dessert now. So spoilers for echo, but yeah, kingpins back. He’s alive. How is he alive? It’s ’cause he didn’t die. That’s how he’s alive.
Bunny: It’s a secret!
Chris: It’s also, spoilers for Hawkeye, because Echo is a spinoff of Hawkeye, but that just tells you how many times Kingpin should have died because he started in Daredevil. He was a Daredevil villain. I didn’t even think he was a good Daredevil villain.
Bunny: Isn’t his shtick just being rich, like being a crime guy?
Oren: No. His shtick is that he’s large.
Chris: Yeah, and he is a crime guy, but like he’s not very good at it.
Oren: And in Daredevil, he at least conceptually made sense. Right? Because Daredevil was a very gritty show. Daredevil arguably doesn’t even have superpowers, because his superpower, and there’s a lot of ableism wrapped up in this, but his superpower is that he can see. He has about as much perception as a sighted person. That’s his superpower.
Bunny: About that – apparently, we’ll get to this in a couple episodes, but he has a really random grab bag of powers that mostly amount to extreme senses and also sight.
Oren: Right, but in that specific show, he almost doesn’t have a power, so going up against a normal crime boss enemy works fine and Kingpin can be a big dude who’s good at punching. That’s not a problem. In execution it was a problem in that Kingpin wasn’t very smart and seemed really bad at running his crime organization, ’cause I guess part of his character is that he throws temper tantrums. And I thought we all agreed after Kylo Ren, that’s probably not a good trait for your villain to have, but apparently it’s okay when Kingpin does it.
Chris: They make him almost an underdog because there’s other crime boss antagonists that are also Kingpin’s antagonists, and they all seem much smarter and more competent than he is, and he just comes off as really pathetic to me, just not an intimidating villain. He feels like a goon, a typical goon, who then somehow ended up in charge and had no idea what to do.
Bunny: But what if he’s really tall?
Oren: He is very tall. He’s a big guy. But then it gets way worse in Arrow. Where, in Arrow,he’s up against Hawkeye, who, yes, is the most loser Avenger, but is still an Avenger. Hawkeye has still fought intergalactic alien space warlords, and now he’s fighting a guy who is large, and the show even recognizes that at some point, because it just keeps beating up Kingpin. Kingpin will show up in a scene and get beaten up, and then someone will drive a car into him.
Chris: Yeah, there was literally a scene where somebody drives a car into him and then he just gets up again and I’m like, what is happening?
Bunny: The human punching bag.
Chris: Does he have indestructibility powers? ’cause he isn’t supposed to, but he acts like he does.
Oren: That’s a whole thing, and it did not make him a good villain, and then finally he died.
Chris: Oh, finally, I would just rejoice. Finally, this character, more minor antagonist, (again, spoilers) Maya, she finally shoots him in the head at the end of Hawkeye.
Oren: Not just in the head – in the eye. You could not be more lethal than that.
Chris: It goes into his brain. Okay, great. We hated that villain. We hated him when he showed up in Hawkeye, but at least now he’s done. He’s been in two shows, which is more than he deserved, but he’s done and – suffer – He wasn’t done.
Oren: No! And then he comes back in Echo and he has a little scarring around his eye. How did the bullet leave those scars? His eye is not even not working, his eye is intact! Did the bullet bounce off of his eye and he was just stunned? What happened?
Bunny: He’s not even that big of a guy. I’m looking these up and he’s smaller than some wrestlers.
Oren: Yeah, he’s a moderately large man. I don’t think he’s bulletproof. I, I don’t get it.
Bunny: You can get an action figure of him that comes with detachable fists.
Oren: Oh, that’s nice. That’s a good. He should have that power in the show.
Chris: Yeah, he should have actual powers. Oh man. And then of course, at the end of Echo, he is, instead of like, again, he’s willing to kill lots of people. He has no problem with that, but at the end, Maya decides to heal his trauma instead of killing him, and it’s like, oh no, he’s gonna be back.
Oren: I noticed we didn’t heal the trauma of the Rocket Launcher dude, that guy we just shot. Does he not have trauma that could be healed? Why does Kingpin deserve to have his trauma healed? He is one of the worst people in the Marvel universe. Bringing back Kingpin for a second time was just ridiculous and it completely killed a lot of the drama, and at least they didn’t kill him again knowing they were gonna bring him back. At least this time, they were honest enough to just have him run off into the darkness, like, that’s a little bit better, but man, that was so irritating.
Bunny: I guess he could come back evil again. Man, I didn’t wanna be de-traumatized.
Oren: The reason this happened was clearly that they just made a mistake at the end of Hawkeye, probably because they didn’t know if Echo was actually gonna get to be a show or not, and they wanted to give Maya’s storyline in Hawkeye some closure, so they have Echo kill Kingpin as closure, but then they get their spinoff and they decided it needed to be about Maya and Kingpin, even though it didn’t. There are so many things it could have been about other than Kingpin.
Chris: I just wonder why they brought Kingpin into Hawkeye in the first place. Were they out of villain ideas?
Oren: I do think that’s actually it. I think it’s because the MCU seems to really, really, really like pulling in all of the stuff from other stuff you’ve seen, and they’ve run out of most of that, so they were like, Hey, we haven’t used the Netflix shows – let’s grab those, people liked those! and that seems to be their motivation as far as I can tell.
Bunny: It was just extra weird because they have so many comics, dozens and dozens of villains that they could pull from.
Oren: People liked that villain in Daredevil, but from a storytelling perspective, it’s obviously a bad choice.
Chris: So somehow Palpatine returned.
Oren: Yeah. Ugh…
Bunny: I’ll have you know, it’s cloning Dark Magic Secrets only the sith know.
Oren: Palpatine returning is the opposite from Kingpin returning, and it’s still bad, but it’s the other side of bad because with Kingpin it’s like, how did he come back? He didn’t die, we’re not gonna explain it. With Palpatine, it’s like, uh, force Magic cloning – those might exist, who knows? Those technically exist, you can’t tell us we’re wrong.
Chris: At least we know why they did it. It was absolutely desperation.
Oren: Yeah, it’s ’cause they didn’t have a villain. It’s ’cause they were like, oh crap, it’s the third movie, nobody planned anything! We can’t use Kylo Ren as the main villain for a number of reasons, and so we need a new one.
Bunny: When I went looking for that quote, because I was like, did they explain it anymore? Did they just say somehow Palpatine is back? And the answer is no, they didn’t explain it, but there was an additional quote about how they don’t explain it, and I found a lot of horrible discourse about how somehow Palpatine has returned is actually a really smart line.
Chris: Well, it’s definitely lamp shading, I think. There’s no question it’s lamp shading that ‘look, we don’t know, okay.’
Bunny: They’re trying to be like, look, it was actually so obvious! There was someone on Reddit who is ‘clearly, it’s a soul transported into a cloned body, everyone else just wants to be spoon fed.’
Oren: Oh, did they say spoonfed? That’s a classic. Yeah. You can tell it’s implied to be cloning. You don’t need to read Reddit discourse to tell that they have big cloning tanks. It’s just that it doesn’t matter.
Bunny: It translates to, yeah, we dunno.
Chris: I also just love the idea that they decide to make a clone of Palpatine and instead of making young palpatine as he looked when he was like a senator, they decide they’re gonna, once again age that clone, so he looks like the wrinkled dark Lord.
Bunny: Why isn’t he sexy? That’s my question. He could have come back as sexy as he wanted.
Oren: Especially since this is a story about him having a granddaughter come on, show us this face that wooed this lady that we don’t know who she is, but she was around, she had to find something interesting about him.
Bunny: Yeah, why is he like missing fingers and stuff? Why is he being hoisted around on a crane? Does his clone not have legs?
Oren: There’s almost certainly a tie-in novel that explains how using the dark side of the force makes your body fall apart in this particular case.
Chris: And he used lots of dark side really fast. His clone did as soon as it was resurrected.
Oren: Lots of dark side characters don’t do that, but this time it did for reasons, read, this tie-in novel, it’ll explain it.
Bunny: He got up from his cloning tank and immediately shot lightning for two months.
Oren: Hang on, I’ve solved it, I figured it out. So in the old Star Wars D6 RPG, there was an exploit where your force lightning did damage based on how much dark side points you had, but using Force Lightning gave you a dark side point. So, in theory, if you could just force lightning a rock for several days and then your force lightning would do infinity damage.
Bunny: You just wrinkle yourself.
Oren: So that’s that. We’ve solved it, everybody. We’ve figured it out. He’s just power gaming.
Bunny: Who would’ve known?
Oren: This is the ideal Sith body. You may not like it, but this is what peak force lightning looks like.
Bunny: Maybe it’s what the Siths find sexy? Maybe that’s why he removed his clone’s fingers? He’s like, oh yeah, that’ll get ’em going.
Oren: This is not the only character that Star Wars has randomly brought back. They usually do it in the animated shows, which is a little less annoying ’cause those are understood to be their own thing. Darth Maul is brought back, which isn’t great, but it’s better than Palpatine.
Bunny: I think they should have just gone in with Palpatine coming back and rather than explain it in the opening crawl, they should have had a character see him, slap their hands to their face and go, Palpatine’s crazy sister!, just pull a little mermaid, too.
Oren: That would be perfect. I don’t see a problem with that.
Bunny: You can bring your villains back as much as you want, but you have to say ‘villains crazy sister!’
Chris: I do think that the Palpatine Fiasco is a good example of how a film that’s even quite good, becomes terrible if you bring them back, for all the reasons.
Oren: Especially with Palpatine, because he was just so thoroughly defeated. That was just the completion of a really major arc. Whereas with Darth Maul, it didn’t really feel like his arc finished. He had a lot of unspent potential. People saw Darth Maul and thought he was really neat. He looked cool. He was the first character to use a non-standard lightsaber. He fought two Jedi at once. He seemed like he was an important guy, and so him just dying at the end there felt like a real letdown, and so we’re more willing to forgive when Darth Maul comes back. I’m still not advocating for it, but I see why that’s less annoying. Whereas with Palpatine, it’s, look, this guy has nothing left to give. Okay.
Chris: We fully explored this character. We spent a lot of time defeating this character. We defeated him very thoroughly. He’s been dead for quite some time now.
Bunny: He even looks like a towel that’s been rung out.
Chris: But I do think the tricky thing is if they had a third movie. Where is their villain gonna come from? I might have gone with a hut instead or something like that.
Oren: I don’t know. I have thought about this a lot.
Chris: How, where will the villain come from?
Oren: Randomly theory crafting: How would you fix episode nine if you can’t change anything in the previous two movies? And I’m at a loss.
Chris: Time travel.
Bunny: Oh no, that doesn’t open up any other problems.
Chris: At the very beginning , your characters travel back in time. Change what happened in the previous films.
Bunny: This can only go well.
Oren: Both the sequel Trilogy and the prequel trilogy have the same problem and that there’s just so much wrong with them and it is so unclear what anyone was trying to achieve that it’s really hard to try to come up with fixes ’cause you just have to start from scratch.
Chris: The whole thing. The whole thing needs to go in the trash bin.
Oren: Teen Wolf is another series that likes to bring back dead villains, although after the first two, they just stopped killing them and just had their villains hang out instead of dying.
Chris: That’s what’s so funny about Teen Wolf! The teen Wolf, he usually has two villains per season, and the first season, they kill both of them and they both end up getting resurrected. It was like they realized their mistake, oh, actually we wanna keep those villains. Drat, why did we kill them? And so then for the rest of the seven seasons, two of those seasons are like, have a part one and part two with their own villains, right? They have lots and lots of villains and they never kill them ever again, so the show just collects more and more villains as it goes on. It’s like, oh, come on, you probably could have afforded to kill a few of those villains.
Oren: They just keep building up.
Bunny: Should’ve just put ’em all in a house together. They can share a condo and it’ll just be the villain house and they hang out there and antagonize each other.
Oren: They honestly did need something like that because that was a problem they had at the end of one, I think it was season three, where they have the big bad guy who they’ve defeated, temporarily, and they don’t know what to do with him, and so they just give him like a stern talking to and send him on his way is. He’s killed so many people, but don’t worry, they’re confident he won’t do it again.
Bunny: You pinky promised.
Oren: It’s like you guys, I don’t know man, you need some kind of system in place. I just, I feel like your solution of doing nothing leaves a lot to be desired.
Chris: I do think though that the villains that they killed and brought back do make very interesting case studies because they are handled in different ways. So we’ve got Peter and Kate, and Peter is probably the bigger villain in the season, and he’s brought back, but they don’t try to make him a big bad again, well, for the most part, there is one scene in one of the episodes where they have this like big hook where Peter’s scheming, like, ha ha, I’ll get you. And it’s like, really? That’s not – now, Peter, Peter, I’m sorry, You can’t handle this, this is not happening. But for the most part, he becomes an untrustworthy ally so they don’t need to make him threatening again and he’s interesting in that role.
Oren: Although they do then try to turn him back into a villain in the climax of one of the seasons and it absolutely doesn’t work, but it like, just comes outta nowhere. It’s like, oh yeah, I guess he’s the bad guy, sure, why not?
Chris: They take care of that problem that way. They do also give his resurrection a lot more buildup, then they do for Kate’s, and it’s still a bit contrived, but I do think investing more time and building up towards it makes it feel better.
Oren: One of the reasons it feels better is that it helps alleviate the possibility that anybody could come back at any time. ‘Cause if you establish the rule, that is gonna take a lot of effort, like a lot of narrative effort to bring a character back. We can at least feel like if we don’t see that the character’s probably not just gonna pop up one day.
Chris: It also just feels like, again, the show earned it and it doesn’t feel as cheap anymore. In this case, we have another character who is a banshee and she can sense death, so it gets combined with her arc of realizing she’s a banshee and she starts getting visions of him and doesn’t realize it’s him at first and that kind of a thing, so it’s a major investment to bring him back. Whereas Kate, instead of her becoming just a untrustworthy ally, she is actually a big, bad again and actually works pretty good because instead they put her their investment into revamping her so that she can be, but she has to be more powerful. She was originally just a human in the first season, and she’s a human who knows how to use firearms, which in Teen Wolf, has the whole constraint where only humans use guns.
Oren: Kate’s actually interesting, because after she’s brought back, she’s a were-jaguar or something, and she’s, I think, one of the only characters who has magic and guns, which doesn’t make sense, but that’s a thing. She’s able to break the guns rule because she used to be human, I guess is the argument.
Chris: It’s a little contrived that she’s a were-jaguar. Teen Wolf has established that when people get bitten by a werewolf, they might become something other than a werewolf, but to me it, feels contrived every time. This person has a tragic backstory, so they became this other thing, all these characters have tragic backstories.
Bunny: Jaguars are just more tragic.
Oren: If you look at a Jaguar, haven’t you ever thought, that it is a sad wolf? If a wolf was really sad, that’s what it would look like.
Chris: And they don’t take – her resurrection is a surprise, so they don’t really take time with it, however, they put a lot more investment into she gets new powerful minions and new magical powers and other things to make her more threatening again.
Oren: And to make her feel different. So it’s not just, oh look, it’s Kate again. It also helps that when she died, the heroes didn’t actually kill her, the other villain killed her, so it didn’t feel quite as repetitive. It wasn’t like, oh, well we’ve already beaten this person, so it worked okay.
Bunny: Compared to some of these other examples, I’ll say.
Oren: It worked well enough for me to use her as my case study of how to bring back a villain. If you’re gonna, this is the way to do it. I still wouldn’t recommend it, but if you’re going to try, this is probably the best model you’re gonna get.
Well with that, I think we are gonna go ahead and draw this episode to a close, since I’m going to go be permanently dead this time and not brought back again, I promise.
Bunny: Good riddance!
Oren: Pinky swear, but you might meet my weird sister next time. That’s all I can say.
Bunny: Oh, it’s Oren’s crazy sister.
Chris: Now, if you would like us to bring Oren back from the dead so he can host another episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: Before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Amon Jabber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek, and for the first time, we’re thanking Vanessa Perry, who is our foremost expert on the works of T. Kingfisher. Thank you all so much, and we’ll talk to you next week.
[Closing theme]Chris: This has been the Mythcreants Podcast
Holy podcasting, Batman! It’s time for an episode about stories that have two main characters instead of one. A story so nice they main charactered it twice. Whether it’s a hero and their sidekick or two siblings equally sharing the spotlight, this week we’re talking about how to balance the needs of both characters. We cover how to keep them both in the plot, how to keep their interactions compelling, and why they shouldn’t steal development from each other.
Show Notes The Winchester Brothers * Bo and Kenzi * Slayers: A Buffyverse Story * Sherlock and Watson * Nine Personality Clashes Character Conflicts * The Daughter of Doctor Moreau * Lirael and Sammeth * Frodo and Sam * The Mimicking of Known Success * ART and Murderbot * Laurence and Temeraire * Tom and Diana * John and Dorian * Harrow and Gideon TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Maddie.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast, with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle. [Intro Music]
Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren…
Chris: And I’m Chris.
Oren: So there’s two of us. So we are gonna need to divide the spotlight evenly, but I know you’re gonna try to steal it because you’re clearly the author’s favorite.
Chris: What, me?
Oren: Look, I’ll divide the spotlight in two and you can pick which one to take. Does that seem fair?
Chris: I’ve got an idea. How about if I say things and then you doubt me each and every time so I feel very put upon. And then at the end of the podcast, I can be proven right about everything?
Oren: Wait, how is that different from normal?
Chris, Oren: [Laugh]
Chris: No, careful, too much self-deprecating humor will make you Sokka.
Oren: Oh, no! Now everyone is Sokka.
Chris: Everyone is Sokka.
Oren: Okay. So. Today we’re talking about designing dynamic duos, which is not just an alliteration, which I’m very proud of.
Chris: Here’s your Hugo.
Oren: Yeah, one Hugo, please. [Chuckles] But is something that I work with clients and I see them try to do, and they don’t want just one main character. They want two main characters. And I could be wrong, but as usual, I blame TV.
Chris: [Chuckles]
Oren: There are a lot of famous spec fic shows that focus on two characters instead of having a single main character. You’ve got Supernatural, Lost Girl, Loki, Harley Quinn, The X-Files, the list goes on.
Chris: I also think though, that we shouldn’t underestimate a writer’s tendency to get attached to their characters. Maybe they just want multiple characters to be important ’cause they like their characters a lot.
Oren: There is that too, for sure. And I think TV has a tendency to do this because it’s valuable in TV to have a character for your first character to talk to. Because they don’t have narration, so they have to explain a lot more through dialogue.
Chris: Basically visual media without much narration wants to have more than one character in pretty much every scene. And when they don’t have a character, sometimes they’ll have a pet. I’ve listened to the Buffy audio drama recently and they have a very convenient pet dog and a pet monkey so that whenever a character was alone, they always had a person to talk to.
Oren: Man, that is so much harder in audio dramas. You can’t use visuals even to communicate what’s happening. You can try to use sound effects, but that is dodgy. That is unreliable. But the reason why you then have perhaps just two main characters instead of a larger group of characters, like with a Star Trek show, is that having two regular actors you have to pay is a lot cheaper than a whole cast of regulars. So just from what I’ve seen, I think that is why this thing is popular on TV shows. I could be wrong. I don’t work in the TV industry. That’s just what it looks like from the outside.
Chris: And we’re talking about, again, if you’re writing a story that is primarily about a relationship, like a romance, although romances don’t have an exclusive right to relationship-related stories, it could be platonic too. There’s a lot more reason I think to have two main characters, but I think a lot of visual media chooses that even when the story’s not necessarily as focused as much on the relationship.
Oren: I do think that if you are going to have two main characters, deciding what kind of relationship they’re going to have is important. There’s obviously romance, but it does not have to be a romantic arc. There can also be a friendship arc or a mentor-student arc.
If you don’t want them to have a major relationship arc, if you want them to start with the same relationship, that they more or less continue throughout the story, I would recommend thinking: How do they fit into each other’s emotional arcs? ‘Cause you don’t wanna have one character going through a really intense emotional arc and the other one is just there. ‘Cause at that point you’ll start to wonder why this story is about two people at all.
Chris: Generally you want them to be equally central. ‘Cause I do think if one of them is having a lot of strong emotions, that sort of signals that maybe the problems are more about them than the other person. And usually you want the character that is at the center of your problems to be your main character. So that would put one character in the position of feeling more central, even if they’re getting 50% of the screen time, for instance.
Oren: That actually is another thing that you should decide at the beginning, is what spotlight dynamic do you want for these characters? Do you want it to be a co-protagonist situation where there is a 50-50 split, or do you want a hero and a major sidekick? Second one tends to be a little easier, but I know that a lot of people are really devoted to the two co-protagonists.
I just think that it is important to choose that from the beginning because you can increase a character’s importance, but decreasing it is very hard. ‘Cause if that character was well written, then people will like that character. Some of your readers will get attached to that character, and if you then try to decrease their importance, those readers will be mad.
Chris: And they can also start resenting the character that becomes more important. Setting clear expectations so that people don’t find their favorite character has been downgraded, is important. The advantage of having a single main character is then you can focus your attention on one person and focus on making the plot about that one person, and it’s all very complimentary. You get everybody attached to that person and then make the plot about them. It’s all very synergistic.
So if you divide that up more by having two, basically co-protagonists, then you have to be a lot more careful in maintaining that or else people can get upset. This is what I feel like when I watch the BBC Sherlock and I just desperately want Watson to get more candy, but everything is about how cool Sherlock is, and I just start to hate Sherlock.
Oren: Yep. “And Watson was there”. In general, you can promote a character from sidekick to co-protagonist. So you could start with protagonist and sidekick and then evolve that into co-protagonists a lot more easily than you can have co-protagonists and then try to change that into co-protagonist and major sidekick. Honestly, at that point, you would be better off giving the character you want to leave some kind of grand farewell. And then just having them leave the story instead of demoting them and then sticking around.
Chris: You might get some people who are like, “Okay, that character is why I was reading so I’m gonna leave now”. But they won’t stick around and be resentful. I guess whatever your goals are. I would personally prefer, just set correct expectations and say goodbye rather than have a bunch of fans that hate me.
Oren: You might lose a few readers, but you’ll have fewer one star reviews.
Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]
Oren: So the next thing that I would recommend once you’ve figured that out, is make sure that they are part of the same story. [Chuckles]
Chris: Yep. What we just talked about, consolidating your story, making it cohesive.
Oren: And that generally means making sure that they can both participate in whatever the activity of that story is. If it’s a demon hunting story, they should both be demon hunters. It’s possible to have secondary characters who are not demon hunters, but a co-protagonist or a major sidekick, probably not.
Chris: I was thinking of doing some Lord of the Rings fanfic, where it’s about Sam and Frodo, but Sam just stays at home.
Oren: [Laughs] Yeah, and that’s the other thing is you typically want them to be in physical proximity to each other. It is much harder to have two main characters who are separated by distance. In a advanced technology or maybe an advanced enough magic setting, I’m not saying it’s impossible, if you have enough instant communication and the ability to interact over long distances, but man, is it hard and it is much harder if you don’t have that technology. Probably impossible to be perfectly honest.
Chris: Going back to our demon hunters example, they both need a reason for collaborating in this demon hunting related plot. But for instance, if you didn’t want them to both be demon hunters, maybe one person is the person that the demons are going after. And the other person is a demon hunter. So they wanna protect that other person and use them as bait, maybe.
But in those situations, you still need to make sure that other person who’s not the demon hunter has something to contribute. Maybe the demons are going after that person because that person is a scholar who has studied the history of how demons came into the world and knows the key to defeating them, for instance. So as long as they both have a reason to be engaged in these conflicts together and solve problems together, for the most part, then you should be good.
Oren: And this applies even if you aren’t talking about a action packed spec fic premise. If it’s a political story, you need both of your characters to be involved in politics in some way. It doesn’t really work to have one main character who is a politician and another main character who doesn’t pay attention to politics and never votes. That’s just not gonna work.
Chris: Need to get some politics in this relationship.
Oren: Speaking of politics in the relationship, one thing that you should also consider at the beginning is, what makes these characters interesting together? Some of this is just chemistry, which is the fact that their interactions are fun to read about, is typically what people mean when they say chemistry.
It can mean romantic chemistry, it can mean a touching friendship, or it can mean a rivalry. They don’t like each other that much, or they have some beef that they have to work out. Those things are all fun to read, as opposed to two characters who exist in the same place and are polite to each other. That’s not really much.
Chris: And I think they can have a lot of personal reasons to dislike each other as long as they have a compelling enough reason to work together. If they have something that makes it so they don’t want to be in the same room together, they just have to have a compelling enough motivation to overcome that.
The other thing that I see, of course, is that people want there to be more antagonistic chemistry, but they just can’t come up with a reason. They have a hard time thinking of a reason why their characters would fight and so then they just randomly hate each other.
Oren: Yeah… [Chuckles]
Chris: Or they just rub each other the wrong way. But you gotta think about that ahead a little bit. What exactly is it about their personalities that makes them rub each other the wrong way? Is one person very like, “I hate planning ahead ’cause I don’t wanna commit to anything. I just wanna do what I feel like in the moment and make sure to keep all of my options open” and the other person is like, “No, we need to have a schedule and we need to get on time everywhere”? That would be specific, different approaches that would clash with each other and create some of that rubbing each other the wrong way. Sometimes if you just try to wing it as you’re writing your draft, the characters seem to act out for no reason.
Oren: Yeah, and if you’re looking for reasons why they might rub each other the wrong way, I would recommend the post: Nine Personality Clashes for Character Conflicts by Chris Winkle.
Chris: [Chuckles]
Oren: It’s got a very lovely picture of two birds yelling at each other. [Chuckles]
Chris: Yeah, that was very cute. I think you found that picture.
Oren: Yeah, I might have. It’s been a while, but it’s a good article and it’ll give you a lot of ideas. Ideas that are very helpful without going into the area where it just feels like these characters hate each other and have no reason to be together or are just mistreating each other so badly that it becomes unpleasant to read about.
Chris: Normally our recommendation for that is to basically give them conflicting goals, but if this is like a dynamic duo, so that you want them to be together solving problems together during the story, it is a little harder to give them conflicting goals. Now what you can have is a temporary alliance, like they both need to travel from Point A through dangerous territory to Point B. And they know they can survive better together, but they actually have different ideas for what they will do, that are in conflict, which they reach Point B.
And then that way, their different goals can still create some conflict because they know that other person is gonna do something they don’t like and they’re trying to convince each other, or something. So you could have a situation like that, but, again, if they’re supposed to work together that much, it can be harder to give them conflicting goals in that situation. So you might rely more on personality clashes in order to create that antagonism.
Oren: Okay, so those are like the best practices for creating your dynamic duo. There are also some common mistakes I’ve encountered that I would like to talk about. The one that I was not expecting, but that I have encountered several times now and is really irritating is when the characters interfere with each other. This is like a scene in a roleplaying game where the GM has put out a plot hook that’s clearly for one character and another character is like, “No, that’s my plot hook now”.
Chris: Is this because that character is the writer’s favorite? Is that why it happens?
Oren: It can happen for that reason. Other times it makes less sense. The time that I saw most recently was in The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, which has this really interesting social conflict story where Carlotta is working on this social manipulation that she’s doing, and it’s really important and cool. And then because another character, this guy named Montgomery, has this jealousy arc. Where he has to learn not to be a controlling asshole, he just calls in an NPC who unceremoniously ends the social manipulation arc, and we never got to see any conclusion. It just stopped.
In that case, it’s hard for me to say that the writer liked this other guy more than they liked Carlotta. But in this case, for whatever reason, Carlotta’s material was sacrificed for Montgomery’s jealousy arc. And man, did it make me hate that character. I just wanted him out of the story so badly.
Chris: Yeah, no, that would be very frustrating because, sounds like he took her agency away.
Oren: And that’s not the only way it can happen. You can also have, in theory, you could have something like a wish-busting moment where one character takes away a cool item from another character and stuff like that. In arcs and other story material is the most common. That’s where it happens the most.
Chris: That seems similar to spotlight stealing. Spotlight stealing on a very specific plot point, level.
Oren: It’s a very specific kind of spotlight stealing, because with spotlight stealing, that can be anything that makes one character just seem a lot more important than the other one. Stuff like what we saw in Lirael, where it seemed like Sameth was gonna be important, but then once they finally meet up with each other, Sameth barely does anything. Lirael does everything.
Chris: Well, actually, the dog does everything. [Laughs]
Oren: Yeah, that’s true. The dog does everything.
Chris: I mean, Lirael gets two important roles and eventually we find some sort of title for Sameth, don’t we? But initially, he doesn’t get any of the magical roles we expect him to get. Lirael gets all of them and later he gets some kind of consolation prize.
Oren: Yeah, he makes a sword for her at some point. I had honestly forgotten that happened. I found out about it rereading the plot synopsis for this podcast.
Chris: Lirael is just altogether a mess because neither of them have agency because there’s this “God dog” escorting them, on an escort quest, to get them to the end of the plot, because the writer clearly thought that was clever. But I do feel like, again, he’s given some consolation prize later, but it’s last minute at the end, he’s certainly not given the same level of development, or definitely not the same level of candy that Lirael gets.
Oren: Yeah, so that’s a very broad form of stealing the spotlight, whereas interfering with each other, that one’s very specific.
Chris: I will say that with Frodo and Sam, for instance. Frodo is just set as the more important character, and Sam is the sidekick. And so again, because those expectations are set, it’s okay for Frodo to have more of the spotlight than Sam does because we set that expectation in the beginning and we continue the expectation. So spotlight stealing happens when you deviate from the expectations that you set and what is rewarding to the audience.
Oren: Now in terms of dynamic duos that I think are worth imitating and I’ve tried to come up with a list that are from books just ’cause again, I feel like this is a slightly different situation in TV. So my favorite that I’ve read recently are two characters whose names I have trouble with. They are the main characters from The Mimicking of Known Successes, and I believe their names are Mossa and Pleiti. This is a Sherlock retelling, although you might not know it immediately. And I think Pleiti is the Watson character, and Mossa is the Sherlock character. One of them is one and one of them’s the other.
Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]
Oren: And it’s basically what you were talking about earlier, where it’s watching the story and you’re begging, “Please give Watson some candy”. This is what would happen if you did that. It’s what if Sherlock and Watson were partners instead of Sherlock being a genius and Watson watching him be a genius.
Chris: [Chuckles] Definitely sounds like an improvement.
Oren: Yeah, I like it.
Chris: How was that split up? What did Watson get that Watson doesn’t normally get?
Oren: Okay, so the way that it works is that the Sherlock character is the eccentric weirdo who has big ideas and is their information compiler, more or less. Whereas the Watson character is the more action-oriented character. She is the one who gets things done and actually does a lot of the investigation legwork. So they have a fairly equal share of the spotlight.
And of course she’s the one who remembers that they need to do non-investigative stuff. ‘Cause Sherlock is still the investigation-obsessed weirdo, that hasn’t changed. Maybe we need to go get medical attention before we run off after the weird space cat, stuff like that. And of course, they’re also lesbians on a gas giant, which is fun, but not actually the main important thing about them, in my opinion.
Chris: How about ART and Murderbot?
Oren: Yeah, that one was tough. ‘Cause I don’t like ART.
Chris: Yeah, I don’t like ART either.
Chris, Oren: [Laugh]
Chris: But in the last work, Wells did finally nerf ART quite a bit by having ART load its consciousness into a smaller drone. And then they went off with the drone. So instead of having a huge ship that could just bully anybody, they had a drone that was not as powerful. So it wasn’t as grating.
Oren: Yeah, and again, similar to Frodo and Sam, ART and Murderbot have a very clear hero-sidekick relationship where ART is the sidekick. It’s an important sidekick, but it’s still a sidekick. Murderbot is the main character. It has a pretty good split. Again, Murderbot is the one doing all of the action stuff for the most part. ART’s drone does a little bit of action, but it’s fairly minimal, whereas ART is running a lot of the support stuff and compiling data.
Honestly, it’s not that dissimilar from what I was just talking about with the Sherlock and Watson split. You see that a lot in these kinds of stories. I’m also a big fan of the Temeraire books and the two main characters there. Laurence and the dragon, Temeraire.
Chris: Yeah. You got to have your animal companion, except for Temeraire talks.
Oren: Temeraire does talk.
Chris: So not really an animal companion in the way that we talk about it being the pseudo-character. Temeraire is a full-on character.
Oren: Yeah. Although Temeraire does still have some traits that you would associate with being an animal companion in that he’s very powerful and strong, but he’s also just, extremely earnest and trusting, which is a trait because every animal on a long enough timescale becomes a dog.
Chris: [Laughs]
Oren: Temeraire is just not at all duplicitous or capable of really thinking in those terms, so Laurence has to protect Temeraire from his own trusting nature, that sort of thing. Those two, they go for the touching friendship angle of chemistry where they are just really good buddies for the whole story. Except for briefly when Laurence gets amnesia. ‘Cause that happened.
Chris: Yeah, that happened.
Oren: [Laughs] Hey guys, we’ve been doing this for a while. We’re kind of out of story.
Chris: We ran out of ideas. How about if Laurence gets amnesia?
Oren: [Laughs]But beyond that there, the relationship doesn’t change a whole lot. They have their initial bonding period, which honestly, we cheat because dragons magically bond to whoever feeds them first. So that was easy. But beyond that, their friendship is pretty set. It doesn’t really change a whole lot, but it is like a rock that the two characters can hold onto when they’re having their turbulent emotional issues, which happens to both of them as they go through different phases of the story.
Chris: So how important do you think banter is?
Oren: I like banter a lot. For characters who are a little bit antagonistic, banter can be great fun.
Chris: I think the main thing is to make sure it’s banter and not one character being an asshole.
Oren: If it’s just one character being rude to the other one and constantly making jokes at their expense or getting to pull one over on them ’cause they’re so clever, that’ll get grating real fast.
Chris: I’ve seen a couple TV shows like this. So for instance, in The 4400, there’s a cop duo and it’s noticeable, one of them is a woman and one of them is a man. And man is just really mean constantly. And I’m trying to remember if he’s actually explicitly sexist or it just came off to me like he was sexist because he was giving her such a hard time.
Oren: I think it’s a little bit of both. I don’t think he makes any super overt, sexist remarks, but there is definitely a vein of, “Ha ha. Why are you taking this so seriously, lady? Do you not have a sense of humor, lady? Come on, lady”.
Chris: And it felt very similar in Being Human, where we have a cop and a character that is an android, but also black. And so this white dude cop is supposed to be really skeptical and mean to this other character because he’s an android but it’s impossible for the viewer to ignore that he’s black and it really just looks like racism. Also just being an android, you could consider another form or something very similar, very akin to racism.
Again, those types of stories assume that we will be on board with a character who is being mean because we identify with them. And so it reveals what audience they care about and expect to have, or that they just expect everybody to identify with that character because of their demographics.
Oren: And to be clear, that absolutely works. It’s just narrowing your audience in a way that you very much don’t have to do.
Chris: I have no doubt that there were people who either, just identified with the white guy in this scenario and liked him and was ready, like, “Oh, I know he’ll learn better”. And it’s like, okay. He probably would. I just have to not want him to die, first, to get through the show. So that makes some certain assumptions.
I also think personally with the sexism example, that there are a lot of people who just have low expectations of the way that men behave socially and might just look at that and think that it’s normal. And that has changed over time, but especially when we get to generations that are older, their expectations for how men are supposed to behave towards other people can be lower.
Oren: I mean, it’s the issue of, the difference between an arc where the character eventually learns better, and one where that’s just the accepted way that they act, is hard to spot at the beginning. And you just have to ask the question: Is this worth that? Is it worth alienating a bunch of your potential audience so that you can have an arc where one of your characters learns to not be a jerk?
Chris: Now, there were not those exact same bigotry dynamics in Gideon the Ninth, but there were still power dynamics. So we’ve got Harrow and Gideon. And Gideon is an indentured servant who is not free, and Harrow has control over Gideon. Obviously everybody’s excited about space lesbians, and it’s natural that people were shipping them. But on the page, what’s happening is that Harrow has tons of power over Gideon and is also very mean to Gideon. So, why I was not a fan.
Oren: Yeah, but it’s okay because Harrow eventually had an arc where she briefly questioned her magic powers and then decided actually her magic powers were awesome, and she was awesome for having them.
Chris, Oren: [Laugh]
Chris: She was supposed to feel guilty about her magic powers, but it never felt that way.
Oren: All right. With that, I think we will bring this episode of the “Mythcreants Dynamic Duo Podcast” to a close.
Chris: If you enjoyed this podcast, please support us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Callie MacLeod. Then there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. [Outro Music]
Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.
Every story is made of countless little pieces, from characters and arcs to locations and magic powers. But if those pieces are scattered around randomly, they won’t amount to much. For a story to be as much or more than the sum of its parts, we need to make it cohesive. That’s what we’re talking about today, with discussions of fractured plots, random Cthulhu aliens, and diverging viewpoints. Did you think we were going to let this episode go by without grinding the multiple POV axe a little?
Show Notes Whale Sounds * A Game of Thrones * Monarch: Legacy of the Monsters * Kaiju Preservation Society * Throughlines * A Memory Called Empire * Project Hail Mary * Wheel of Time * Rebel Moon * Travel Story * Voyage of the Dawn Treader * Lord of the Rings * Center Your Darlings * The Next Generation TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Arturo.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You are listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.
[opening music]Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Chris.
Oren: And I’m Oren.
Chris: I’ve been thinking, what if we split the podcast into segments? So in one segment I’ll play the harp, in another you can talk about whatever video game you’re angry at the time. Maybe we’ll give a few storytelling tips and then we’ll just play a recording of whale sounds for the rest. Everybody likes whale sounds.
Oren: Everyone does like whale sounds. More variety is better. They say it’s the spice of life. So I say: just put all the variety on there without any thought to the consequences.
Chris: The podcast wouldn’t really be about anything anymore, but we can include whatever we feel like.
Oren: Yeah, like a little cabaret number.
Chris: Obvious bonus. This time we’re talking about making a cohesive story. First: What is that?
Oren: It’s when the story sticks together properly. Wait, no, that’s an adhesive story.
Chris: Yeah, so it’s where all the parts fit together. None of the story elements are easily extractable, everything has something to do with everything else, and it has things like foreshadowing and callbacks and references. Elements make more than one appearance. Basically, it’s the result we get after we consolidate the story. Similar to consolidation, it’s just that everybody uses the word “cohesive.” The verb for that is “cohere,” which doesn’t sound great. I don’t wanna talk about “cohering” story elements. So we talk about the process of making this happen as “consolidating,” making all of your elements work together more, which I technically consider to be different than simplifying or trimming, but that’s also necessary if you want a great end result. And it also kinda assumes that the story didn’t start that way, but I think that this is actually best when you start early as possible.
Oren: If you get to the end of your story and then look back and are trying to make all of the different things you just threw in there cohesive, that’s gonna be a much bigger job than starting from the beginning.
Chris: And so having the cohesive story is really important for kind of creating that feeling of unity, right? Which is also what we’re looking for when we create a throughline. If having a throughline is an important part of making the story feel cohesive, it’s really important for reducing complexity and keeping people engaged, ’cause if nothing has anything to do with anything else, they don’t have as many reasons to be interested in something. Whereas if everything is interrelated, then they can be interested in one thing, passionate about one character, for instance, and they’ll have a reason to care about everything else because that character is interacting with everything else and related to everything else.
Oren: It’s the difference between the related POV chapters in Game of Thrones and the unrelated ones. You’ve got Catelyn, who is trying to figure out what’s going on with Bran, and who pushed him, and then trying to warn Eddard, and they’re not in the same place, but they’re clearly part of the same story. Then you’ve got Tyrion and Jon, who are going up to the Wall, and that’s not super related, but at least it’s establishing like the spooky, magical stuff, which is the backdrop of the political conflict. And then you’ve got Daenerys, who is off with the fantasy Mongols on a different continent, and it’s so weird how, even before Viserys dies, you can just tell that they’re never going back to Westeros. Like, Viserys confronts Illyrio and is like, “Where’s my army to take back Westeros?” And Illyrio is like, “Yeah, eventually, whatever. When we get to it, who cares?” And it’s weird because theoretically that’s Illyrio’s motivation, is to use the Dothraki to conquer Westeros. But man, I have never seen a character who cared less about that.
Chris: Without making your story cohesive, later you’ll probably end up cutting and reworking a bunch of it because the story doesn’t feel right. The story elements start to work against each other or compete with each other. That kind of thing becomes overly complex.
Oren: If you’re really unlucky, you end up with a studio-mandated project with two elements that just do not work together, like giant monster kaiju and human-focused spy drama.
Chris: Talking about the Monarch TV show.
Oren: God, that show.
Chris: Um, to be fair, it is really hard to make things related to the kaiju. As they stomp human cities, they also stomp cohesion.
Oren: I think the core issue with that show is that it is a kaiju story, and kaiju stories have the basic premise that nothing humans do matters. And also a human drama spy show. So the spy show isn’t about anything. They’re just running around being like, “What’s your secret?” No one has a secret that matters.
Chris: Problem with the kaiju is that kaiju are very expensive for a special effects budget, so we need to fill in the time with something else.
Oren: It doesn’t help that it’s a midquel, so it can’t disturb the precious canon of Godzilla: King of the Monsters, or whichever one comes next.
Chris: Kaiju stories have this entire problem where they’ve got human characters that are hard to relate, make them interrelated with the kaiju. Kaiju Preservation Society did surprisingly well with this, and I think it really helped that they spent a lot of time in Kaiju World, so we could interact with the kaiju when they’re not stomping on cities.
Oren: The kaiju were like a cool thing for the characters to learn about and not the reason we were there, ’cause that’s the awkwardness, that’s the creative pull of kaiju stories, is that no one is here to watch the human characters. We’re all here to watch Godzilla blow up a city. And that wasn’t the point of Kaiju Preservation Society, so it just worked much better.
Chris: We got to be with human characters who also just wanted to watch the kaiju. I really think that, when you wanna make your story cohesive, get in the habit of doing it regularly, starting at the concept stage, starting when you have that little idea, start thinking about this. And when I work with writers who have a concept, I help them take all of the bits and pieces that they have that they wanna put in their story and make sure that they can actually work together. A typical writer might come with various ideas that they want, like, “Oh, wouldn’t it be cool if I had these crystals that gave off magic? Oh, and I really like Elder Gods. I want Elder Gods in my setting. I want a central romance. And oh, I just really relate to this idea: I have a protagonist who has to overcome their fear. Oh, and fake dating is so much fun. I wanna put that in.” We have all of these miscellaneous ideas that we wanna put in, and the question becomes, how do those things fit together? How are Elder Gods relevant to this romance? And how is overcoming fear important to the romance? There has to be a reason why they’re all there together at once. Otherwise, you just get competing story elements that kind of pull the story in different directions. If you have a bunch of little miscellaneous ideas like that, they will not all fit. You’re gonna have to shake things out and decide. Maybe having a bunch of cool, powerful crystal magic just doesn’t really work with the idea that magic is a dark corrupting force, ’cause that’s something that is strongly associated with Elder Gods, and that is supposed to be part of the danger that Elder Gods create, since we don’t usually have our protagonist fighting 1v1 against an Elder God.
Oren: I just want to go nine rounds with Great Cthulhu!
Chris: So maybe when you look at it, you would find that things don’t really work together very well. And so then you start sectioning off Crystal Magic Academy over here and these Elder Gods over here, I’ll have these characters do crystal magic and these characters do Elder Gods. And pretty soon you’re drawing like a divine line down the story. Maybe the only thing the crystals can do is help protect you from the Elder Gods, or they make you unseen by the Elder Gods or something. It might not work the way you originally envisioned this idea. Crystal magic is something that is just like super powerful and people just like blowing away their enemies, fighting the Dark Arts with them. It’s not very compatible with a cosmic horror setting.
Oren: Spooky crystals maybe. That’s not impossible. Weird crystal growths, cosmic horror term, but they’re not gonna be like beautiful and sparkly.
Chris: So it’s about: Okay, are you willing to change this idea? And then, if you can’t, which one is more important? Basically, the sooner you make the choice about what stays and what goes, the better off you’ll be, because most writers get really attached to their ideas. Especially once you’ve drafted, it’s hard to cut your draft down or discard ideas. Basically, you wanna nip anything that doesn’t fit in the bud so that you don’t cry over it later. And then you wanna build off of what you keep. So the next time you’re like, “Okay, I need to add something to the story. I want a sidekick, I need a character arc for this character,” then you look for something that you already have in the story to build off of. “Hey, I need a character arc for my love interest. That’s what I want. Oh, okay, I have Elder Gods.” So maybe the love interest has been corrupted by the magic and has to get free of that corruption. So now we have a character arc that is inherently related to the Elder Gods. We take what we already have and look for opportunities whenever we add new elements to build off of that.
Oren: A common cohesion problem that I see is there’s some kind of setting or occasionally plot element that appears out of nowhere at the end. Thinking of stuff like A Memory Called Empire. Suddenly Cthulhu aliens, they just aren’t part of the plot for whatever reason, they just hang out in the background. We get an occasional interlude that hints to us that Cthulhu aliens exist.
Chris: Do you think in some of those cases there’s an intended twist where it’s supposed to be like a big, exciting surprise?
Oren: That can work under the right circumstances. Admittedly, those circumstances are a little harder to nail down intellectually ’cause there’s a difference between building up to something and then revealing a cool thing at the end, and your story going along and suddenly, “Ah, this random thing popped up.” I don’t know exactly where that is.
Chris: It’s about having it present at some level to set expectations for what fits. Now, I haven’t read The Expanse books, but just judging on the show, we have a weird protomolecule alien presence that kind of builds up and feels epic at the end. But in the beginning of the story, it’s something that’s killing people and is weird, but is not like a huge thing. Somebody’s science experiment, it appears differently. Or if we take Project Hail Mary (spoilers here), but we start with a single alien molecule, the astrophage, and that sets expectations for alien life. But it’s still a surprise when Rocky shows up. Sapient, sophisticated aliens show up, but at the same time, the presence of the astrophage makes it so that fits, especially since we are as good at explaining the science and making Rocky feel pretty high in realism, despite being an alien who is intelligent.
Oren: ‘Cause that was part of the main character story, right? I think the problem with A Memory Called Empire is that the Cthulhu aliens are not part of the protagonist’s story, but they are important for the ending twist. That’s where the interludes come from and part of the reason why I think they feel so random. I can imagine ways to make the protagonist’s story about the Cthulhu aliens, although I think that would be hard because the main story of the first.book is to explore the Teixcalaan Empire, which is this space empire that’s like a combination of Rome and the Aztec Empire, which is interesting, and they have a lot of cool stuff. So it would be weird to then also be looking at cosmic horror stuff that would diminish how weird and novel this human empire is.
Chris: At that point we have a couple elements working at cross purposes. I think that you could still make the culture interesting and still have the Cthulhu aliens. I don’t think there’s enough focus, again, on these disappearances, ’cause there’s some ships disappearing. So if you set up a situation where the kind of nation the protagonist comes from has been losing ships, so we set up that there’s something kind of mysterious, set up that kind of cosmic horror mood, and then one of the reasons the protagonist has to go to this empire is because they need to sort of build an alliance and get help, but in a way that doesn’t subjugate their nation, then we could still make it relevant, but not front and center until we want it to be front and center. Again, I think setting up that mood, making it through that not only are ships disappearing, but there’s something that feels cosmic horrory about those disappearances, even if you have… nobody has laid eye on these cosmic horror aliens yet.
Oren: What about having too many characters? Is this a cohesion issue or is this something else?
Chris: It’s definitely a complexity issue, but it’s not necessarily a cohesion issue if all of those characters are together and working on the same plot arcs. It’s not necessarily a cohesion issue, but simplifying is still a good idea. Consolidating the story is one way that you reduce complexity, but it’s not the only way you reduce complexity.
Oren: So Wheel of Time has a cohesion problem for its too many characters. ’cause every character has their own plot and they’re all off doing their own thing, whatever. Rebel Moon has too many characters, but not that specific cohesion problem ’cause they’re all part of the same plot, for lack of a better term.
Chris: And certainly simplicity is also something that you want to get just in the habit of. Of never adding more story elements that you need, of thinking why you’re adding them, of not adding cool characters just because you came up with a new cool character concept. As hard as that is, it’s gonna be even more painful to cut them once you’ve had them.
Oren: How do travel stories fit into this? Because the whole idea of a travel story often is to visit a cool new location every new section, and if you are visiting a new location and you then leave it behind, is that gonna create an issue? Is that gonna feel like, “Oh, we introduced this cool thing and then it didn’t end up being a big deal later?”
Chris: Episodic stories do have slightly different expectations. So if we’re talking about the type of travel story that is really episodic, then I think we can get away with a lot more elements that don’t repeat. They’re just important to one episode. I had one client who thought… the characters were traveling, and thought they had to bring in all of the important characters they met while traveling back for the climax. You don’t need to do that, because people will understand if we have these adventures in different places. That’s a separate episode that’s a little bit more independent than a typical child arc is. Often, it still could be a child arc, but in that case, the difference is that the story in that one place is higher attention, right? and more important than the overall quest during that time, feels much more present. Like, in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the quest is really just a motivation for traveling. They’re trying to find these guys who disappeared, and they’re journeying farther and farther out, so there’s a question of their safety. When they get to an island where, you know, the water turns things to gold, and then everybody gets greedy and starts fighting each other, that feels much more important, that they deal with this gold island, than it does their quest to find these people. As opposed to Lord of the Rings, which also has a little bit of episodicness to it, but is a little more overarching because we have this very important One Ring, and Sauron is hunting them, and that’s much higher attention.
Oren: We don’t stop anywhere in Lord of the Rings any longer than we have to.
Chris: Yeah. Even in Lord of the Rings we have various characters that come in and out. There’s a little bit higher expectations that they are interrelated with the big arc. Even when they go to Lothlórien, Galadriel helps Frodo with the main quest. Even as the elements change out, it’s still a little bit more focused on that big quest because that’s the structure that story has. Even so, though, where it’s still allowed for characters to come in and out, but if you had like the story taking place in just one city, the big plot arc was most important, that might be weird. It would have to feel a little more episodic for switching out characters. You could have an episodic story in one city. It would just be a little more unusual.
Oren: It would be a little harder to justify, but not impossible.
Chris: One thing that’s worth talking about, because it is really important, is just finding out what’s important to you. What I tell people is: You wanna start with whatever element you really care about the most, the one that is not acceptable to cut.
Oren: Center your darlings.
Chris: Exactly. And build everything else around that, and that’s the most productive use of your time. This works with plotting too, right? If you have an end, if you are driven to write the story, because you can just see this one moment at the climax or at the very end of the story that you’re really drawn to, sometimes it’s easier to just work backwards from that. Okay, what would need to happen for them to get there, instead of starting at the beginning? Whereas, if you’re really drawn in by a good beginning situation that you find compelling, then you can work from beginning to end. But regardless, I always think you should start with your darling, right? and fit other things around that, to make for sure that it’s saved and that it stays as central as possible.
Oren: This is where starting with the throughline can help a lot because you really want your throughline to be the plot that you care about. Once you know what that is, then you can make sure that you add stuff that supports it and then just build a cohesive story around the throughline. Whereas, if you start with a throughline, and that’s not really the one that you care about the most, you’re always gonna have problems.
Chris: When we look at, “Okay, what do you want to write about?” Like, in a general sense, do you love writing where your character is gardening? What kind of scenes do you enjoy writing becomes relevant here because the throughline determines what problem you have and the fact that problem needs to be resolved at the end, but there’s also choices for what type of conflicts do you have, right? What activities is your character engaging in? Those activities allow you to write about what you wanna write about. If you like to write about gardening, you have an excuse for lots of gardening because your character can solve the problem by gardening. Causality is often very useful here. If the problem, you know, if bad gardening causes the issue, which sounds silly, but let’s say the village doesn’t have enough food. There’s been something wrong with the field, there’s been flooding or rot, or potatoes have had a disease again and gone bad. The big problem is caused by that. Then you can focus on gardening all you want to solve that problem.
Oren: The order of your scenes should matter to make the story feel more cohesive. And this is something that might sound obvious, but I have worked with authors who haven’t quite mastered it yet. Maybe because they were watching old shows like Next Generation, where you can watch a lot of the episodes in any order you feel like, because nothing changes between them. But with a single story, for it to be cohesive, it should feel like these scenes could only have happened in this order. If you can rearrange them, something’s probably wrong.
Chris: You shouldn’t be able to just cut something out without making edits elsewhere because it all should be essential.
Oren: Stuff should change. Plot should be different. Character relationships change. Even just the stuff that they’re using can change. It doesn’t always have to be a huge change, but, like, readers like to be able to track that stuff as they go. It’s why some TV shows, even though their plots are very episodic, they have more consistent character growth. Supernatural was like that. It had a lot of one-off episodes, but there was still like a feeling that the characters were changing over the course of time, at least for a while. And then they ran out of ideas, but no one’s perfect.
Chris: Long-running show.
Oren: 15 years old. That’s, uh, quite a while.
Chris: Signs when you need to trim or change: If you have any story element that’s just standing alone, it doesn’t affect anything, isn’t affected by anything. A similar sign: If you find yourself going back and forth between elements, you can’t logistically put things in the same scene ’cause you have one plot and some side characters that have nothing to do with that plot, so you have to keep alternating back and forth between which one you’re writing about, that’s a really bad sign.
Oren: If you have a story or if you have a plot line or something in your story that is more exciting than the one that your hero is on, that is a problem. And I have run into this a lot with clients that I work with: They set out to write a story that is about interpersonal relationships and character growth and working with an oppressive system, and then they also have a badass rebellion story, but the main character’s not part of that badass rebellion, but that badass rebellion has clearly captured their attention, and so we spend a ton of the story talking about it. Write whatever story you want. It can be about a badass rebellion. If that is what is in your heart, then that should be what’s on the page. You are not obligated to not write badass rebellions. You’re not doing penance.
Chris: There’s also a place where input from others can sometimes do damage, is if you’re like, “Okay, I just wanna write my characters being cute together, right? and having a little personal time.” And then you’re like, “Okay, but I gotta do a climax.” So then you put in a villain who swoops in to give yourself an exciting climax, and then your beta readers read it and they’re like, “Oh, this villain should be in there earlier, ’cause you need your plot to be exciting.” So then you start adding that villain earlier, and as you go through revisions, you’re pushed by various people to start doing more and more about that exciting villain plotline, but that’s not actually what you ever wanted to write about. You just felt obligated to write about it. That’s fairly typical, and you wanna give some structure to your cute personal strings, but it should keep the focus on those characters and allow you to write the type of content you wanna write.
Oren: This brings us to your regularly scheduled Mythcreants corner about how you shouldn’t really be taking revision suggestions from your beta readers. In most cases, they don’t know what the stories should have. They can only tell you what they liked. Unless they’re an expert, what they like might not be what’s best for the story.
Chris: In that situation, adding more of those villain scenes could lead to a story that some readers would like, but if you don’t like it, that’s gonna cause problems because the way that you write it is not gonna fit, right? and also you’re gonna be unhappy and unmotivated. It’s not good for you or for the story. The last thing, of course, is: Anytime two elements are clashing, especially if there’s two different themes, if you want it to be about folklore, but then you are also putting in superheroes, those things, again, just have very different feelings, and so those are things that typically do not… It’s not that you couldn’t do folklore/superheroes, but usually you would really have to work hard to integrate those elements with each other. If you’re… when you’re thinking about that stuff, you’re like, “I like the Witcher. I wanna give it an Eastern European feel,” you gotta commit to that. You wanna make everything an Eastern European folklore feel. If you just, “Oh, I’m now excited about a superhero,” you gotta let that go so that you can keep that theme that you wanted.
Oren: All right. With that, I think we will call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you’ve got some useful tips, please support us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Callie McLeod. Then there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
[closing music]This has been the Mythcreants podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.
We all love the classic spec fic genres like space opera and cyberpunk, but have you noticed that they can get a bit… stale? Genres change over time, but some are more difficult than others, which results in a bunch of stories that all feel the same. Join us for a discussion of why that happens, how to break into new territory, and perhaps most surprising: why high fantasy isn’t on the list.
Show Notes Legends and Lattes * The Wandering Inn * The Expanse * The Space Opera Was Dying * The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet * Revenger * Sisters of the Vast Black * Rebel Moon * Ahsoka * Warhammer 40,000 * Crescent City * Always the Harvest * The Witcher * Fallout * Gently Down the Stream TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Ace of Hearts.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.
[Intro Music]Oren: And welcome, everyone, to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Oren.
Chris: And I’m Chris.
Oren: We’re doing a podcast today and it’s nice, but those are pretty mundane these days, right? We all know what to expect. We get two to three hosts bouncing ideas off of each other with occasional obscure references that no one else will get. Wraith McBlade for life. Maybe we could spice it up by adding some music or some sound effects… [music plays]
Chris: …or die.
Oren: …or would that just destroy what makes a podcast cool to begin with?
Chris: [sarcastic] And this has nothing to do with our topic today, of course.
Oren: No, this is just random hypotheticals. So what I wanted to talk about today was how to add novelty to classic or possibly stale genres, depending on how nice you feel like being.
Chris: I do find over time most genres have to change, right? If they’ve been around for a significant length of time. Not solarpunk, because solarpunk only kind of exists, but many of the others have changed.
Oren: Yeah, solarpunk is also very new, right? Like it hasn’t had a lot of time to establish what a base solarpunk is, and I’ve definitely noticed this problem in some genres more than others. Like ironically, the one everyone is always complaining about, which is high fantasy, I actually find that one to be one of the least stale spec fic genres.
Chris: I think it’s really helpful for stories to be in other world settings. I think it makes it feel like there’s a lot more possibilities and people then tend to embrace more variation. Don’t get me wrong, I have still seen my fair share of stories where there’s just elves and orcs by different names but they feel exactly the same. But there’s still quite a bit of high fantasy that has branched out at this point.
Oren: And I think that’s because the things that people want in high fantasy are actually pretty loose. So you can call something high fantasy, still give people what they want, but also give them something new because we live in a constant war between a desire for the familiar and a desire for something new at the same time.
Chris: Yeah, I do think that there is an exception though, and that makes me wonder if the actual issue is just that there’s not a lot of Middle Earth-like high fantasy settings anymore, because that’s not where the popular zeitgeist is. That’s not what people are most enthused about anymore. But the thing that I am seeing a lot of is D&D-style high fantasy settings.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Because D&D has become really popular, right? And people have had some great games, or they’ve been watching their, you know, these roleplaying sessions shows.
Oren: I did not think that was gonna take off. Probably nine years ago, maybe longer at this point, I first started hearing about these and I very confidently said, that’ll be a flash in the pan. No one would just watch roleplaying games. Oh boy.
Chris: Turns out people do. I do think there’s something fun, especially when they get like celebrity actors in-
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: -is that they get that like personal connection, that parasocial relationship, if you will.
Oren: Yeah. The runaway success ones all have professional voice actors or comedians. Those are the two, but there are a bunch that don’t have either of those that do okay. They aren’t super famous. Most people wouldn’t have heard of them, but there are enough people who just listen to these or watch them to get by without having famous voice actors or comedians. And that is the part that I just did not see coming. I did not think that was gonna be a thing.
Chris: But in any case, now when I see something that’s more Tolkien inspired, it’s actually through a D&D lens. And I do think that causes some problems because again, all the Tolkien tropes that D&D uses are fairly stale. But also there’s another issue, that if you take all the conceits of D&D, we’ve got something that’s really low realism, but it’s also popular to have very like, gritty, high realism / grounded – since grounded is the hot new term for this – settings, and having a bunch of of adventurers running around. This is not very compatible with creating a gritty atmosphere.
Oren: Especially not adventurers who are at all like D&D characters, right? Because D&D is, it is so weird that D&D is now inspiring a lot of fantasy fiction. Obviously D&D has always had fantasy tie-in fiction, that’s not new. But just the amount of it is new. And it’s weird because D&D is already a weird blending together of a number of different fantasy tropes into kind of odd extremes. And so then you have, we’re taking that and running it back into the fictional medium from which it came and it’s weird. It is creating some odd issues.
Chris: Yeah. One of the issues with D&D-inspired settings is usually there’s just nothing to make them stand out. They really could use more novelty. D&D, but the typical settings people run – I mean, people can run D&D in all kinds of settings, of course – but if we just look for the standard Tolkien inspired setting, it is fairly generic. It’s a mishmash of tons of different things, right? Without often very strong theming other than being Tolkien-esque, which is pretty stale. So those settings by default just don’t have that much novelty to them. But I do think that it’s interesting to see, I think some of the best D&D inspired settings, like stories with novelty are actually focusing on the personal level, and not focusing on those adventure stories. So like Legends and Lattes and The Wandering Inn are two examples.
Oren: I feel like those are really interesting because you don’t need to have read a lot of D&D-inspired fiction. You just need to be familiar with the tropes of D&D. And so it’s then it’s like, yeah, we can have a story about an orc who retires from adventuring and opens a coffee shop and that clicks without having to read a bunch of, shall we say, less than inspired D&D novels.
Chris: So I think that is basically how the successful stories have been adding novelty to the D&D setting, is simply by looking at a different part of it, looking at those personal stories, looking at the urban areas, right? Instead of just doing the typical adventuring activities.
Oren: Yeah, like “what’s it like to run a potion shop in a D&D world?” that sort of thing. Yeah, the one that I have the most trouble with is actually space opera, which is admittedly a very broad subgenre, and people argue about what its definitions are more than they do with most genres, but in my experience, what it boils down to is settings with big space countries and ships that you fly around and shoot stuff in. That seems to be the important part. The last time that I found anything new in space opera, it was The Expanse. And by anything new, like on a broad scale. I’ve seen some exceptions since then, but the big change in space opera is The Expanse.
Chris: Which stood out because it has very high realism, but also did interesting things with it. Like that sweet spot where everything feels realistic, but it’s also very novel.
Oren: And like every other new space opera story I pick up is basically the Expanse again.
Chris: Because of course it is.
Oren: It’s like The Expanse-punk. It’s like it’s completely taken over. And Charlie Jane Anders has a piece in Esquire saying basically the same thing. And you know how weird it is when Charlie Jane Anders and I agree on something.
Chris: Yeah.
Oren: Something is going on at this point.
Chris: A lot of genres have these trends, right? This is the hot new thing. Everybody’s really inspired by The Expanse. Also, publishers are like, wow, The Expanse sold really well. So give us more of those. I think the danger though, at this point, it’s not that there aren’t necessarily people buying Expanse-like space opera. There probably is. It’s just that with all of these trends, there’s a peak at some point, and then as soon as the demand cools, as soon as people start getting tired of it, then suddenly what you have is a glut of storytellers writing these stories because they were excited about it. And then publishers don’t want any of them. And you could still publish yourself, still indie publish if you want to, but the demand is gonna cool. So I feel like if you’re going to try to do a trend wave, you gotta jump on it as soon as possible. And since it takes years, usually, to write a novel, at this point, I wouldn’t recommend an Expanse-type story.
Oren: I think the Expanse-punk subgenre is probably not the greatest thing to start in right now – would be my opinion based on the works that I’ve seen. Although one, even though I didn’t really like this book, as far as novelty goes, I thought it did a decent job, was The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet.
Chris: Yeah, it was good at the alien races that were not just, it didn’t feel like Star Trek Forehead Aliens, but they were still close enough, like human enough that they could share a ship together.
Oren: That’s like the sweet spot that the author managed to hit very well was, okay, these aliens are not just Klingons, whatever, but they’re not so weird that we can’t work with them.
Chris: Yeah, and I think it did help that it was, again, a lighter story because that kind of allowed it to not be too rigorous about this idea of these other types of strange aliens that can all communicate with each other.
Oren: And then another one that had some interesting elements was Revenger, which is a part of a series. It’s pretty popular, I’ve forgotten the name of it off the top of my head. But it had an interesting dynamic where the ships were like sail powered in space. They were using basically sailing ship dynamics instead of either what was the previous dominant force in space opera, which was World War II naval ships, or the Expanse paradigm, which is more realistic ships that generate gravity by shooting their engines, basically. This one was different. It was, the ships fly around using solar sails and the physics of it was a little questionable, but whatever. That part was neat. Although that book also, to me, demonstrated the potential weaknesses of just trying to add new stuff, because a lot of it just didn’t feel like it made sense. It wasn’t cohesive. It was just like, okay, so here’s a setting. They have solar sales. All right, that’s neat. They have, they seem to exist in a world full of ruins from much older civilizations. All right, that’s cool, that provided us with a sense of adventure. And they communicate with these weird skulls. Do they use weird bones for anything else? No, just the skulls. Those are, that’s the only one.
Chris: So would you qualify that as a space fantasy? ‘Cause it does feel like space fantasy is having a bit of a moment.
Oren: Yeah, I mean, it is certainly on the edge. It’s hard to say if I would call that space fantasy or not. Like it seems like it should be when I describe that they communicate using skulls, but the skull communication is so mundane that I hesitate to call it space fantasy.
Chris: Yeah. As bad as Rebel Moon is-
Oren: Oh, Rebel Moon!
Chris: -yeah. I mean it does, I think, show a little bit of where people are going with this right now, where Rebel Moon is a space fantasy, right? Similar to Star Wars. Star Wars, the IP itself has been struggling obviously because it has been mishandled. But we did see in Ahsoka that they brought in more fantasy, even more overt fantasy elements, and we had witches, basically, were spell-slinging now pretty much. And do you feel like that’s compatible with what people wanna get out of a space opera?
Oren: I mean, probably? The issue that I think that would create is just that Star Wars is so omnipresent that if your story looks at all like Star Wars, that will be all people can think about. And that certainly happened with Rebel Moon, even though I would argue that Rebel Moon is aesthetically much closer to Warhammer 40K than it is to Star Wars, it is close enough to Star Wars, that is the connection everyone made. And of course we also know that it used to be a Star Wars script, so that didn’t help. But I think Space Fantasy is viable. I would almost, I would be hesitant to recommend doing space opera fantasy just because Star Wars is so dominant in that specific sub-genre that you would have to do something real different to not immediately be compared to Star Wars.
Chris: I guess the question is, is being compared to Star Wars bad?
Oren: I mean… [question noise] yes and no?
Chris: It just depends on how much demand there is for Star Wars material. Maybe Star Wars has embarrassed itself so badly that anything looks bad by comparison, right? It hasn’t generated excitement in space fantasy.
Oren: Yeah, and I don’t know, maybe I’m looking at this the wrong way because when I am looking at it, I’m thinking about it in terms of people saying it as a negative, “it’s just Star Wars again.” But I don’t know, maybe people will buy that anyway. So if you’re looking at it from a sales perspective, maybe that’s fine as long as you don’t mind a bunch of reviews saying how this is just Star Wars. But I wouldn’t want that, right? If I was publishing a book that was Sci-fi, I wouldn’t want people to look at it and be like, “it’s Star Wars.” I would have a hard time writing that if nothing else.
Chris: I mean, I think it might be possible to break away more from Star Wars by having it more overtly fantasy-ish. Like having a magitech space setting perhaps.
Oren: Yeah, that’s true. Magitech is a good option, ’cause Star Wars doesn’t really have much magitech. It has technology, which I mean admittedly is pretty magic, but not explicitly. And then it has the Force, which is always separate. So yeah, magitech is probably a good way to go.
Chris: Another genre that I find interesting, right, that has big trends is urban fantasy, which I felt like had a lot of settings that were disappointingly the same. Because the idea is that we’d have the relatability of an Earth protagonist with fantastic creatures, but everybody was using the same blend of like, folklore filtered through pulp culture creatures, right? We got the vampires, the werewolves, and what have you, and the settings tend to be very eclectic and not really have a strong identity and strong theme. And now it feels, and this is not entirely urban fantasy exactly, but it’s all fae all the way down. The kind of portal fantasy, somebody gets kidnapped by the fae or humans with fae. I mean Sarah Maas is just so dominant in some of these, her influence is so big.
Oren: I believe that is the “romantasy” genre as it is known by the kids these days.
Chris: But a lot of like, there was a lot of overlap between romantasy and urban fantasy, typically.
Oren: That’s true. Urban fantasy is definitely one of those ones where I know that the things that I read before are stale now. But I don’t know how to update them without losing the part about urban fantasy that I wanted, which is, I want a bunch of different monsters to live in factions and to fight each other. That’s a thing that I want.
Chris: I think that Crescent City was important in having basically urban fantasy, but other world urban fantasy, right? So we have relatable, very relatable earth things like cell phones, but it is technically not Earth anymore. But we can use all the same quips that were used, language that’s more like Earth language, all those things, so that we could basically have that urban fantasy feel in a different world, and that opens up a lot more options.
Oren: Yeah, no, that’s true. I did think that was like, the one cool thing about that story. Well, that’s not true. The other thing was the lost human civilization. There was a lot of interesting stuff there. Unfortunately, the humans were the villains in that story. That didn’t go anywhere.
Chris: Yeah, that was not great. But yeah, again, with the fae being so popular now, that’s another thing that I wouldn’t, novels take years to write. Even if they’re selling right now, I still wouldn’t recommend jumping on that bandwagon at this point.
Oren: Lemme put it this way. I have seen multiple YouTube videos where they’re like, “tropes we’re sick of.” And fae come up on those lists, which confused me because I don’t read a lot of romantasy. So I had no idea what was going on in that subgenre. And then I looked at it and found out, I was like, okay, I get it now. I understand why you guys are sick of fae.
Chris: I personally really like fae, but a lot of times it feels like the fae that is being depicted right now is just not that fae-like.
Oren: Which does, I think, create an interesting situation where you could probably get novelty by writing more actual fae. Fae that feel more fae-like and are not just jerk dudes with superpowers.
Chris: I do think that generally that’s something that storytellers find more challenging. So you could get novelty if you wrote fae, but like, better.
Oren: Although you would have marketing problems at that point, right? Because how are you gonna market that? It’s like, “it’s got fae.” Everyone’s like, yeah, we’ve seen that. We know what it’s like. “No, I promise. Mine are different!” Another genre that I have had this problem with is cyberpunk, and I could be mistaken, but I suspect that one of the reasons that a lot of recent cyberpunk fiction has been video games is for this exact same problem, because in video games it’s not as big a deal if you’re doing stuff people have already seen before. Because A, they can actually see it with their eyeballs, so that has a benefit of its own, but also they get to play it and they get to immerse themselves in their favorite oeuvre, if that is the right term, their favorite milieu. So that has a benefit that you don’t really get to the same extent in written stories. And the biggest one that I don’t know how to overcome is this inherent contradiction where it is increasingly desired that cyberpunks be actual punks, be on the fringes, on the margins of society – this is the roots of cyberpunk, it’s a thing people really like – but also have cool cybernetic implants that with any kind of logic would cost a lot of money.
Chris: You know, they’re commodities in the future. They’re all created in whatever country creates all of the cheap products.
Oren: I guess everyone has implants, but like your characters have the cheap knockoff versions.
Chris: Personally, cyberpunk feels so retro now, and maybe for some people that’s okay. I feel like we’re at the point where we should update all of our technology tropes in sci-fi.
Oren: Yeah, I mean, there is that too.
Chris: So I guess seeing, there’s definitely an opportunity for people to change cyberpunk to reflect what people are currently – machine learning, I’ll say – what people are calling AI, but it’s not actually AI as we’ve always defined it, at least in science fiction.
Oren: Yeah, that’s certainly hitting pretty close to home. Nothing says you can’t do that with your sci-fi stories there. One interesting cyberpunk story that I liked the concept of quite a lot is Always the Harvest. It’s a short story by Yoon Ha Lee, and in this story, the premise is that the story takes place on an alien colony, I should say, a human colony on an alien world. And the implants that they use are like weird bits of lost technology that they’ve found that are left over from the aliens. And so they don’t really understand how they work. They just know that they can use them in certain ways, and that creates some interesting plot ideas and it allowed for them to look weird and different, which I thought was neat. I also just, I’ve been thinking about it more and I honestly think putting it in space would be a cool way to spruce up cyberpunk. We’re used to cyberpunk happening on planets in dingy cities, but you can have cool implants in space and then that would also bring some new novelty to space opera, which is typically- the people are more or less unaltered in space opera.
Chris: There’s no reason you couldn’t do cyberpunk space opera.
Oren: I think you could feed two birds with one hand that way. I just think that would be neat. And while you’re at it, you could add some cosmic horror!
Chris: Add some cosmic horror!
Oren: A little bit, just a little cosmic horror.
Chris: I dunno. I feel like that might be, I don’t know. My instant reaction is maybe, I’m not saying it’s impossible to integrate those things, but I already have a lot going in there with cyberpunk and space opera, but I’m just imagining a Star Trek ship where instead of a holodeck, there’s virtual reality. That just makes perfect sense.
Oren: I did that for a Star Trek campaign once because I just didn’t wanna deal with the holodeck.
Chris: Didn’t want players to be like, and now I make this holodeck character sapient and aware, and now let’s make holo-emitters so they could leave the holodeck.
Oren: I was worried that was gonna be a problem, and I later ran Star Trek campaigns where I was just like, whatever, holodeck exists, it’s no problem. I never did a holodeck malfunction episode because I just couldn’t bring myself to do that.
Chris: There’s a lot of existential problems with the holodeck, right? Because all of the characters of the holodeck certainly feel very real. And once you start being like, oh yeah, Moriarty now is self-aware and wants to leave. Then you gotta start asking about all the other characters that you are creating and erasing on the holodeck.
Oren: Yep. I also start all of my Star Trek campaigns with a little primer about how in this setting the transporter works by opening a small wormhole and pushing you through it.
Chris: Yeah. So we don’t have murder clones.
Oren: Yeah, I don’t wanna have an argument about whether or not you die every time you use the transporter. I would rather skip that, please.
Chris: So, one that I find really interesting is sword and sorcery, because when I think about sword and sorcery, I always think about Conan, right? Which is like the classical sword and sorcery and Conan’s title stories have been out for a long time, much too stale. At the same time, The Witcher is basically today’s sword and sorcery. The idea is that we’re focusing on a very hack and slash story with a lot of action, but that typically focuses on smaller scale battles among various lords or kings and not really doing the huge epic fight of good versus evil so much, which has some of those elements too. But for the most part, we’re talking about “monster of the week” as it starts and things like that. And it makes it different ’cause we don’t have the desert barbarian anymore. We’ve swapped out the aesthetics so that we’re using Eastern European folklore and it just looks very different and has very different aesthetics. But I think it delivers the same thing, right? They’re still- the people who are interested in the Witcher today, I feel like were probably the same type of people who would’ve liked Conan back when Conan-style stories were really popular.
Oren: Yeah. As far as I’m concerned, sword and sorcery is a mood of high fantasy. Like, the meaningful differences between them are so subtle that I would almost consider them the same genre. But I agree that I think that The Witcher brought new novelty to that concept, and I think that much like with high fantasy, because what people want from sword and sorcery is a kind of dingy, perhaps morally gray adventure where the badass protagonist fights things. You have so many options with that, that it’s hard to imagine that you couldn’t come up with something even newer and weirder to add to it.
Chris: In general, folklore is in right now, and fairy tales generally too, although most people are doing dark spins on them, except for me. So, because that’s much broader than for instance fae, hopefully that will, that trend will stay true for a while. We’ll see, of course.
Oren: And the nice thing about sword and sorcery is that if the current blend of Witcher-likes, for lack of a better term, does get old, I think you could modify it pretty easily. I just, honestly, I have been really impressed by the variety of fantasy novels that I’ve picked up recently. They haven’t all been good. They’ve had other problems, but as far as settings go, yeah, this isn’t something I’ve seen before. This is neat, okay, cool. And some of them are using non-European cultures as their origin and some of them aren’t, and it’s just, there’s a lot out there. We have a lot to choose from as far as high fantasy goes. One more that I wanted to talk about before we finish up is the post-apocalyptic genre. Because similar to Star Wars, anything that looks like Mad Max is going to be compared to Mad Max. And it’s hard to be better than Mad Max, at least in people’s minds. A lot of the Mad Max movies – hot take, not actually that good – but people think they’re very good and Fury Road is very good. So that’s a hard road to climb, and it also can just feel derivative, even though the tropes being used are very broad.
Chris: Yeah. I think with post-apocalyptic, it’s almost like the sword and sorcery angle where we’re so used to post-apocalyptic with these increasingly very desolate environments where it’s very deserty, right? Or otherwise just, you know, all the environment has been destroyed, all the plants are dead, and again, a very barren environment.
Oren: And of course the alternative to that seems to be Fallout, which is also not new, but is a similar concept, but way zanier, right? It’s like, yeah, this is the post-apocalyptic wasteland, and we got all kinds of monsters around these parts. Because that’s what radiation does, it turns everything into monsters in this world.
Chris: I still remember watching The 100 again and just, oh wait, there are monsters in this show? I had completely blanked them out ’cause they don’t have anything to do with anything.
Oren: Yeah, just a random gorilla attack.
Chris: I just like, I had forgotten about the random, giant gorilla and just… wow, okay. There’s random monsters in this show just because we’re on a radiation-filled Earth.
Oren: But I will say that, I think the biggest thing you can do to make a post-apocalyptic story fresher is to change the nature of the apocalypse. There’s the green apocalypse, that one’s pretty popular these days, but there’s also the frozen apocalypse and the alien invasion apocalypse. You’ve got a lot of options and you can do a lot of the same stuff, a lot of the stuff people like in post apocalyptic stories, and still feel new and fresh.
Chris: But not zombies.
Oren: Yeah, I don’t know how to make zombies feel new and fresh. I’d have to do a whole podcast about that.
Chris: I think we could keep the zombie dynamic of having an overwhelming thing, force, out there, perhaps even overwhelming by the numbers. I think at this point, they have to just not be zombies anymore because other than people who are just zombie enthusiasts, I think we’ve just been oversaturated with them to the point that we just have to go back to hordes of vampires or something.
Oren: Okay, but what if I call them something other than zombies?
Chris: Infected?
Oren: Yeah, it’s gotta be a new word. Every new zombie thing has a new word, so mine’s gonna be groaners, I’ve decided. That’s what my zombies are gonna be called.
Chris: Very unique.
Oren: With that, I think we will call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you found this novel, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: Before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Callie MacLeod, then there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
[Outro Music]Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening/closing theme: The Princess who saved herself by Jonathan Coulton.
From wholesome pipe-weed to shady ThreeEye, spec fic writers have a long history of inventing new drugs for their stories. Sometimes these drugs are a metaphor for something else, but other times, something else is a metaphor for drugs! This can get pretty confusing, so today’s episode is all about getting to the bottom of things. We’re talking about mushrooms that are literally magic, Super Soldier Serum, and the world’s most 90s video game. Plus, why lightning is drugs, but levitation isn’t???
Show Notes Force Lightning * Willow’s Dark Magic * The One Ring * Spice (Dune) * Spice (Star Wars) * Lucy * Super Soldier Serum * The Velocity of Revolution * The Magicians * Perdido Street Station * Dreamshit * The Game * Risa * The 100 * Mountain Men * ThreeEye * Naloxone Training TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Lady Oscar.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[Intro Music]Bunny: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Bunny…
Chris: …and I’m Chris.
Bunny: And I hear some straaange music. It’s like snare drums and the harpsichord, and it’s really funky. And there’s a strange filter on us, Chris, and we’re cross-faded in a kind of rainbow way. And I’m hallucinating that Oren’s gone. What’s going on?
Chris: Oh no. It’s like in a fish eye shape and everything.
Bunny: Yeah, and every time I move there’s like a weird shhwhshh sound. I think we’re trippin’ on fantasy drugs.
Chris: The big question here is, by being on a fantasy drug, does that mean we’re also on magic? Or is there, are we having magical visions that will become real?
Bunny: Yeees? Or maybe nooot. I dunno, we’re on drugs, it could be anything. Who am I to say?
Chris: Maybe we’re on drugs so that some hero can come and find out who is selling drugs to us and put them in a room.
Bunny: Maybe we could be like, maybe we’re goofy, like maybe we’re on drugs, but we’re on drugs in a kind of goofy way, where we’re like stumbling around and it makes spring noises whenever we bump into something.
Chris: Or maybe this is a deep metaphor for drugs.
Bunny: That’s true. It could also be that, although probably not, if it’s also comedy.
Chris: Maybe we’re high on metaphors.
Bunny: Yes. We’re high on metaphors. Metaphors for magic, perhaps. But, yes, today we are talking about fantasy drugs, which we may or may not be on.
Chris: Which may or may not be magic.
Bunny: Which may or may not be magic. [laughter]
Chris: The question is, is magic drugs, or are drugs magic? [laughter]
Bunny: A lot of fantasy drugs seem to just be magic. Like, you get addicted to magic. That is certainly a very large trope.
Chris: Right. I think Willow in Buffy is the most notable and the most ridiculous one. Because they clearly want there to be magic in Buffy, and they want characters to cast magic. But then, because everything has to be terrible in season six, suddenly Willow is addicted to magic, and magic is drugs, and then she has to get over it. But they don’t actually want to just give up characters casting spells, because that would be no fun. So then they have to retcon and be like, oh, well, you know, it was the black magic that was addictive. Now Willow’s fine, and she’s super powerful, and she can cast tons of magic now, and it is no longer a drug, for reasons. ‘Cause she’s attuned to the earth, I guess.
Bunny: Yeah. The moment you make magic into a drug, but you still want magic to be cool, it ceases to be a drug metaphor. Like, it doesn’t make sense if you try to apply it to drugs. So, like, what? You were addicted to cigarettes. And you got off of cigarettes, but now you can smoke good cigarettes, and it’s fine.
Chris: It’s also just very unclear, because in many fantasy settings, a number of them, their evil, magic, or dark magic, is supposed to be addictive. But there needs to be a clear line between what is good magic and what is evil magic. It’s like Star Wars. Dark side. Light side, basically. But in Buffy, it’s just we, we have not previously made that distinction, so it’s just very unclear. Good magic is attuned to the earth, guess, maybe. And all of these like spells that have nothing to do with the Earth are apparently attuned to the earth as far as we know.
Bunny: [laughing] It’s whatever you say it is. It’s like in the drug metaphor, you can eat apples, and that’s fine. But if you have bananas, you’re gonna get addicted to them, and they’re dark fruit.
Chris: Or in Star Wars, you can kill people by throwing them off a cliff. And that’s fine, that’s good magic. But if you kill them with lightning, that is bad magic and that will screw you up.
Bunny: They should just start calling them “side A magic” and “side B magic”. There’s nothing really light or dark about that.
Chris: Lightning is very dark. You can see how dark it is.
Bunny: Of course, if we’re gonna talk about those, and we’re already touching on this, we have to answer the question of what is a drug, which is ontological, and in my opinion, very family resemblance-y, like, I don’t know. It looks like a drug, so I think it is, in this case The dictionary says that it’s “a substance that causes a physiological effect, or that causes addiction, habituation, or a marked change in consciousness”. Thank you, Merriam-Webster. But that is quite broad.
Chris: In stories, it really seems to be the addictive component that the stories usually focus on, especially since it’s such good fodder for plots, right? To have a character get addicted to something. And so usually, as soon as something becomes addictive, it becomes an analogy for drugs. Everything to, like, the One Ring in Lord of the Rings, for instance, even the One Ring, it starts to change people’s behavior because they have to have it.
Bunny: Yeah, that’s true. I didn’t think of the One Ring, but I guess that is the hot take of the episode is that the ring is a drug.
Chris: [laughing] Right? Their precious…
Bunny: Getting high on ring, man.
Chris: Where characters start acting in destructive ways just because they want the One Ring. And it does extend their life, right? It does have, if we’re going for a physiological effect of some kind…
Bunny: You can look at Gollum, and it’s definitely had a physiological effect on that guy.
Chris: Right. But. It makes them live longer, but it’s like too little butter spread over too much bread, as Bilbo would say.
Bunny: It makes you invisible, too. Life extension and invisibility.
Chris: And besides magic being addictive and therefore quickly becoming an analogy for drugs, we of course have drugs that are magic. Not to be confused.
Bunny: [laughing] Not to be confused.
Chris: I think the spice in Dune is probably the most iconic one there.
Bunny: That was definitely the most well-known fantasy drug if I had to pick one. Um, and I learned today, looking at your notes, that there is a spice in Star Wars, too. Why did they do that?
Chris: Okay, that’s a weird one because I think spice had pre-existed, like had been a thing that had been mentioned in one of the Star Wars stories, and then later they decided it was a drug. And that created some weird effects [laughting] because I had been talking before about, I think, that Owen had claimed that Luke’s father was like, had been working in spice trading, and then they made spice a drug. So it means that…
Bunny: Look, Dune was out by then. Why did they call it that? They could have named it anything?
Chris; I think that the word “spice” really indicates its value in trade, right? Because the spice trade in the real world is so famous.
Bunny: We should call it silk. That doesn’t sound as cool. [laughter]
Chris: Well, yeah. I don’t know. It’s a good word for a valuable substance. And you can imagine somebody calling something “spice” that’s not actually a spice, as we would know it. I don’t know, maybe it is a spice. Maybe it’s a spice that gets you high.
Bunny: We have weirder names for drugs. We have, like, drugs named, “tweezers”, and “sunshine” and “big chief”.
Chris: Big chief? [laughing]
Bunny: Yeah, big chief. “Simple simon”. I looked up some of these and it’s like, I can’t believe anyone actually calls them that, but okay.
Chris: I will say that when the drug is illegal, people have a lot more incentive to make up names.
Bunny: And it also means that if you give your fantasy drug a goofy name, people might accept it, because we do that too.
Chris: There’s lots of things that are goofy in real life that we probably still shouldn’t do in our fantasy because it’ll sound goofy. [laughing]
Bunny: That’s fair. That’s fair. We talked about pykrete a while ago. I’ve got a bit of a list here about why people use the drugs.
Chris: Ohh, let’s hear why people use the drugs.
Bunny: [laughing] Why authors put the drugs in their stories, shall I say? To be more specific. I think the first and foremost one, although maybe this is disqualified, if we’re defining it as needing to be addictive, is it gives you powers. It makes you super. It’s a serum you put in your body, and now you’re a Spider Man, or you’re a Hulk.
Chris: Right. And, which brings up the question of are we talking about any medical treatment that includes a substance that somebody imbibes as a drug?
Bunny: Yeah, those ones I think are on the edges if we’re putting addiction as like our main criterion. But there are, there’s like, the villains deal in drugs. I guess that makes it a bit more central, because those are usually bad because they’re trying to get people addicted, and the villain in Catwoman’s got the evil face cream that makes you wrinkly if you stop taking it, which I guess is a little like addiction. And then they have thematically appropriate ones. Joker can’t have a normal drug. He’s gotta be cool and have one that makes you laugh to death.
Chris: Mm. I do think that making up a non-real drug is just very convenient, because then you don’t have to worry about accuracy.
Bunny: Yeah, no, that is certainly one of the highest appeals of it, I would say. It can also be like mysterious mixtures, and they cause weird events that you can’t explain, and you can’t explain it anyway because it’s a fantasy drug. But like it explains why you can’t replicate a fantastic event or something if, again, this is mostly in regards to superhero origin stories.
There’s one that I noted here was Lucy. I think that counts, because it does give her superpowers. It’s also labeled as a drug specifically, but we don’t see Lucy get addicted to it. She just becomes telekinetic, or whatever.
Chris: Yeah. It’s like a one-time drug. So it’s more like a treatment, one-time treatment…
Bunny: Yeah.
Chris: …than an addictive drug.
Bunny: Apparently it’s something that one of the villains explains is produced by pregnant mothers in like very small amounts. So I don’t know why they bother trying to explain that, because that makes it even sillier, like our baby’s low key telekinetic.
Chris: Yeah, that’s real weird.
Bunny: I don’t know why they did that. Another reason is because there are settings that want to be grittier than there being magic, but they want something that’s basically magic. So they make it a drug, or a chemical, instead.
Chris: To give it that gritty atmosphere.
Bunny: Like it’s, it feels airy-fairy if you’re like, “this is my gritty setting and [silly voice] add magic in it.” But you can say, “this is my gritty setting and it has drugs” and that feels a lot more in theme. I read a book recently called The Velocity of Revolution. And the drug that features prominently in there is myco, which is a mushroom, it’s like powdered mushroom. And it gives them heightened…if users are using the same strain, then they can communicate and, like, sense people who are nearby. And I was like, okay, that all makes sense. This is a dieselpunk city. And it would be a little weird if it was just, like, “and also there’s magic.” Like it’s clearly going for a different tone.
Chris: Yeah, that reminds me of The Magicians. Because The Magicians, the thing that story does is take fantasy tropes that are normally in stories of average or light tone, and then make them very dark and gritty and depressing. And apparently the series tagline is, “Magic is a drug”.
Bunny: Noo. [Chris laughing] All right, just hit me over the head with it, I guess.
Chris: But this is the one where people can turn into geese, [Bunny laughing] but you can’t cure any sickness or ailment with magic. That’s not allowed, but you can turn into animals, but arbitrarily you’re not allowed to do anything good with it.
Bunny: What if I turned into an animal that had like superhealing, though?
Chris: Yeah. I don’t know.
Bunny: Or what if I broke an arm, and then I turned into a snake? Problem solved.
Chris: This is also the one that has grimdark Narnia. And they travel to grimdark Narnia. [Bunny laughing]
Bunny: Why didn’t they just make it a drug then? Why call it magic? Just call it a drug. It’s the goose change drug.
Chris: No, because they specifically want to subvert traditional fantasy tropes, by making them super dark and gritty. So you gotta have something that is obviously Narnia, but is also very dark and gritty, where everything is bad and wrong. You have to have the magic school–because it contains a magic school–but just have the magic school be horrible. Just that’s the shtick for The Magicians.
Bunny: Sounds like a very, I don’t wanna say…I feel like that would get old. That’s what I’m trying to say.
Chris: It did for me. Other people like it, of course. There are always people who like things that are very dark and gritty and edgy. That has its audience. I’m not among them, but they exist.
Bunny: I don’t think I’m among them either, but I think that also points to a potential with this, like the magic drugs thing, which is that if it’s taken too far, it can become silly. At some point you are just, like, “your drug is magic”, but at some point it just is magic and you are taking magic via a pill.
Like the myco at the beginning of The Velocity Revolution is like, it’s got great internal consistency. I really liked how it was used. It makes sense that they’re, like, “they can communicate”, and I can buy that. People on the same strain of mushroom can communicate with each other. And then they expanded a bit and they’re like, “if you make this extra special mushroom by mixing different strains, then, you know, you can take over someone else’s body who’s on the myco.” Which, because the myco lets you share sensations, I was like, okay, that’s a bit more of a stretch, but I think I could still buy it. And then by the end of the book, they’re like seeing God and broadcasting memories into each other’s brains and….
Chris: But just using the mushroom?
Bunny: Yeah, and like hijacking people’s, like, radio waves.
Chris: If you take enough spice in Dune, you transform into a weird creature that can teleport ships.
Bunny: [laughing] That’s silly!
Chris: [laughing] Don’t remember what the mechanics are, but there’s these navigators in Dune that are very powerful ,and they are basically created by imbibing tons of spice, in which case they actually transform. And they have like huge brains that can do whatever is necessary to do faster than light travel in this setting.
Bunny: I feel like that’s more acceptable in Dune, because Dune already has a much lower, like…
Chris: Lower realism?
Bunny: Yeah. But The Velocity of Revolution is like, it’s about class conflict in this fictional city in a fantasy world, but it’s clearly trying to be, like, it’s not trying to be space opera.
Chris: The realism is high, and that’s why they use a drug for the magic. But then when it becomes more and more stretched that mushrooms could do all of this, [laughing] that starts to break down, right? And then just starts to feel silly, because it clashes with the realism of the story, I assume.
Bunny: Yeah. And then the problem is that, and like the story is very centered on myco, like it’s all about the myco, the plot revolves around it, so you expect it to be a big feature of the climax, and it is. And they do, to be clear, they do a really good job with the myco for three quarters of the story. The problem comes once things start escalating and becoming ridiculous. I cannot buy that a mushroom could do this. This is how they resolve the climax–spoilers for Velocity of Revolution–but basically because the myco, this particular strain of myco, is native to their continent, one of the of the characters–and myco is, its strength is increased when you go fast. One of the characters goes really fast with this other person who’s been experimented on with the myco, and that makes all of the foreigners violently sick. And they leave.
Chris: What? So wait, let me get this straight. They take the magic mushroom. The magical mushroom somehow becomes more potent if you, like, run while it’s in your system. [laughing] And this character has like super-speed running. And by running around the planet, they managed to enchant all of the foreigners to make them sick.
Bunny: [laughing] That would be even worse. So, this is dieselpunk, so they have motorcycles. They’re not just like running really fast. They’ve got trains and stuff. And to be clear, the speed thing, I was on board with, I was like, okay, it’s cool that this gets stronger when you go faster. It’s a story where everyone rides motorcycles, and they’re a big part of the setting. So I’m like, cool, I’ll buy that. But then if you’re looking at the myco at the beginning of the story, even though there’s this whole element where it’s this person that has been so experimented upon by fantasy evil Nazi doctor, she’s got all these different mushrooms and has weird powers, I still don’t buy that a mushroom could let you hijack radio waves or make a bunch of foreigners sick, no matter how fast you go.
Chris: If it was explicitly a magical mushroom…
Bunny: But it’s not. It’s a drug.
Chris: But it’s supposed to be…but this is supposed to be a scientific explanation for this.
Bunny: Yeah. Like, it’s not trying to be magic fantasy, if that makes sense. Like it’s using the myco instead of magic, and they don’t call it magic.
Chris: There’s supposed to be an underlying scientific explanation for how this works, and we see that a lot, right? In a lot of settings where they’re not explicitly supposed to have magic. They’re supposed to have science, and then the science gets more creative. At some point, it doesn’t really fit science anymore.
Bunny: And they’re definitely trying to make this science, because you’ve got fantasy Josef Mengele experimenting on people with mushrooms. You’re making this very clearly science. It’s a science. Yeah, anyway. I like that book, but that was ridiculous.
Chris: Going for something that I think works better but is pretty trip–so, the book, Perdido Street Station has very animalistic themes and is kind of absurdist, and it has this drug called “dreamshit”. And it comes from this moth that basically is predatory towards sapient beings by having these wings that hypnotize them, and then it sucks out their like mind, sucks out their dreams. And so the dreamshit is literally the shit from this moth… [laughing]
Bunny: Oh my God. [Chris laughing] That’s memorable.
Chris: …that has the remnants of all the dreams it like sucked out of people when it ate them. [laughing]
Bunny: I’ve never heard of something like that, so that’s unique.
Chris: Yeah, that’s unique. Again, very wild, but because it fits the actual setting of the book, which is very animalistic and very absurdist.
Bunny: And it sounds like it’s a book where things are magical.
Chris: Yes.
Bunny: It’s a setting where you have a moth that sucks dreams out.
Chris: Everybody’s like animal people in that book, and they’re like living in the carcass of a giant being. That had giant rib bones left over. Or, that’s where the city is. So yes, it all fits. And it sounds like there was a theme clash with those mushrooms that was really the problem.
Bunny: And the mushrooms could have been really cool. They were really cool. They just had power creep.
Chris: Yeah. In many stories, drugs are used as a means of control by antagonists, and that’s part of the plot.
Bunny: Dystopian vibes.
Chris: Yeah. Or there’s a lot of vampires, right? There’s a lot of vampire drug stuff, where it’s like people get addicted to vampires’ saliva, or whatever it is, and that’s how vampires control their victims. Star Trek has some really funny drug episodes. Probably the funniest one is this TNG episode called “The Game”.
Bunny: [laughing] Oh, I read about this one.
Chris: Yeah, Riker goes, I think it’s Riker, goes to Risa, [laughing] which, for anyone who is not familiar with Star Trek, Risa is like the tourist pleasure planet. [both laughing] Where everybody goes, and we assume has lots of sex with the Risans, but…
Bunny: …but they play games, like a bunch of neerds.
Chris: There’s just insinuations about what happens on Risa. So he comes back and he brings “the game”, which is this little device, and they show them playing the game, which is supposed to be really addictive, and it is the most awkward, worst nineties CG you have ever seen.
Bunny: Oh no, I’m looking at it now. Terrible.
Chris: It just looks hilariously bad. The CG…
Bunny: It looks like pancakes.
Chris: …that appears when they play the game, and they just get this like funnel, and they just toss discs in the funnel, and just seem to get a high from that. And the entire ship, the game spreads around the ship, and the entire ship becomes captive to the game. And I think Wesley saves the day or something, because of course he does.
Bunny: Yeah, I think I remember reading about that. But they chase him around and try to force him to play the game. I don’t even know if that’s supposed to be more a metaphor for drugs, or if it’s a metaphor for video games, by way of drugs, or if it’s like two layers deep, and it’s trying to say, “video games are a drug because of this game”, so it’s a metaphor for the metaphor of video games being a drug?
Chris: [laughing] Unclear, unclear. In a better use of this, in The 100, there’s this group, and they’re like the Reavers in Firefly. They’re just a bunch of people, and they look like they’re designed to be disposable villains that you can just kill off, right? That they’re all like cannibals, and really aggressive barbarian types. And then it’s revealed that they’re actually all captives to a more powerful, privileged group that has kidnapped all of them, and then has given them this drug that they inject that is very addictive, and also makes them very aggressive. And so then we have a protagonist that actually gets captured and joins them briefly before escaping. So, I definitely liked that, because I’m pretty tired of groups where everybody’s just evil, and it’s an excuse that you can just kill people without remorse. And so it was nice to see that kind of turnaround, and the drug was used as an explanation for why they weren’t just evil cannibals like they first appeared.
Bunny: No, that’s a good way to use it. That’s one of those things where–this was The 100, right? That’s one of those more grounded shows, too.
Chris: Yeah, when the monsters aren’t there. It’s so funny, because I had–after watching The 100 for the first time–I had completely forgotten that there were random monsters. [Bunny laughing] Like I somehow, I had just clipped them out of my memory, because they’re so anomalous, and they make no sense. But then when I went back and watched a second time, oh wow, there was episode that randomly had a giant gorilla.
Bunny: What? Okay, so it’s 85% grounded? [both laughing] Maybe not as grounded as I gave it credit for.
Chris: And I had completely forgotten, because they’re just so random and one-off, that that existed in this show. This show tries, definitely tries, to be more gritty and higher in realism. There are some things that I have to bleb out, like they keep saying that people evolved radiation resistance in only a hundred years. Every time, I just put my fingers in my ears and go, “La, la, la. I can’t hear you.” [Bunny laughing] No, I’m just going to pretend it’s been a thousand years, instead of a hundred years, at least. But they made a conlang. That’s the other thing, it’s supposed to be only a hundred years, but the people on Earth have evolved a new language, but they still speak English. [laughing]
Bunny: Ah, we accept that for weirder things.
Chris: So yeah, it has its foibles, but certainly it is trying to be grittier.
Bunny: And you could believe that a drug would do that, too. Like you can buy it, even though it’s still a fantasy drug.
Chris: Star Trek: DS9 did something similar with the Dominion. The Founders of the Dominion, they have various races under their control, and some of them they control with the drugs, although that one was a little strange, because they also just–a lot of these races they had actually created through genetic manipulation, and were so loyal that it didn’t really seem like they would even need the drug to keep control of them. But…
Bunny: Just in case.
Chris: Just in case.
Bunny: Yeah. So those are some funny examples. I will say sometimes the coward’s way to do this, in my opinion, the least interesting way, is when you want basically heroin or cocaine in your setting, but you don’t wanna call it that. That’s not a fantasy drug. You’re just giving it another street name.
Chris: [laughing] Do something weird with it.
Bunny: Let them trip balls!
Chris: Give people visions!
Bunny: Yeah, make them turn into fishes when they’re on the drug or something, I don’t know.
Chris: Like ThreeEye in Dresden Files, people get second sight, which apparently is very bad, because you can’t forget anything that you see in second sight. So their mental wellness goes rapidly downhill as they take this drug.
Bunny: What do they see?
Chris: You know, I don’t remember specifics, or I’m not even sure how much there were specifics in the book, but the idea is that they get visions that they can never forget.
Bunny: Huh. And they also get addicted to the visions?
Chris: To the drug, yeah. So it’s an antagonist that is making this drug, and Dresden has to track them down, and finds out that it is made by somebody who is magical, who is creating a drug that actually has magic effects and gives people a kind of magic ability, but one that is not good for them.
Bunny: It’s interesting, because that one is one that I think would work in a setting that’s trying to be non-magic?
Chris: Right. Because it’s very similar to the hallucinations that people get on many drugs.
Bunny: Yeah. It’s just like a hallucinogen, and I can buy that they can’t forget it, for whatever reason, for some technobabble-y reason.
Chris: But what if it gets more potent if they run fast?
Bunny: [laughing] Let’s keep the Flash out of this. So before we sign off, I did also wanna talk about a couple ways of making them work, which we’ve also gone over here by examining positive and negative examples.
So, I think many fantasy things, like magic, whether or not the drugs are magic, or magic is drugs, they need to have an internal consistency, which was the problem with the myco, is that it started with having a clear set of rules that I could buy. And then spiraled out of control into like time shenanigans, and radio wave control, and that kind of thing. So that’s perhaps an obvious one, but I think bears mentioning.
Chris: I think I would like to add is if you’re going add an addictive substance to your setting, it’s good to think about what you were saying about real-life drugs, in particular, narratives where a character just has to use their willpower to stop taking the drug that they’re addicted to, is not a good idea. Because in real life, that’s a method of blaming people who essentially have a disease, and they need treatment, they don’t need blame. So I would just be very wary of any of those types of narratives that really put the onus on the character to just use their willpower to not take a drug they’re addicted to anymore.
Bunny: And yeah, be careful too–drugs in the real world obviously have huge and racialized histories, so if you’re using it as a shorthand for someone’s moral character, or that there’s a place that’s inherently bad and backwards, probably shouldn’t do that. Read up a bit on the history of drugs, specifically Black people’s incarceration and marijuana.
Also, just in general, go get trained in Narcan, people. That’s just a good thing to do in the real world. That’s the lifesaving drug nasal spray.
I think perhaps maybe the last one, if you’re trying to make them a huge and obvious stand-in for something else, maybe you should just be doing a story about the something else, like that weird Star Trek video game thing.
Chris: [laughing] The game.
Bunny: The game. Yes, the game. You can use them to explore some really interesting issues, but if it’s just, “Don’t do drugs, kids,” that’s not the most interesting thing you can do with your fantasy drugs, I gotta say.
Chris: All right…
Bunny: With that, our high is fading. We’re coming back into focus, and we’re gonna have to wrap this episode up.
Chris: If this episode gave you a high, or at least didn’t make you feel like you were going through withdrawal, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. And, before we go, I also want to thank our existing patrons. First, there’s Callie Macleod, then there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Until next week!
This has been the Mythcreant Podcast, opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.
If there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that dialogue goes inside a set of quotation marks. Wait, we can’t all agree on that? Uh oh. What else don’t we agree on? What other wild choices are writers making out there? That’s what we’re talking about this week: everything from using dialogue as a wall of exposition to necessarily labeling animals as being from Mars. Plus, did you know this character is very weird and wacky? Their dialogue will remind you!
Show Notes Dramatic Dialogue * The Road * Bad Batch * The Cruel Prince * Malazan * Travis Mayweather * Name of the Wind * Santa Claus Conquers the Martians * Guinea Worm Etymology * Charles Chesnutt TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Sofia.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast. With your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[Intro Music]Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris. With me is…
Bunny: Bunny
Chris: …and…
Oren: Oren.
Chris: Now, as we all know, this is episode 468 of the Mythcreant Podcast, a podcast where we talk about speculative fiction, writing, and storytelling. We are the three hosts of this podcast, and we cover the topic of each episode using a loose discussion format.
And as you know, we start with an opening meta joke that is quite bad.
Oren: “It doesn’t really bother me.” He shrugged.
Bunny: I do know this. That is very astute observation that my fellow podcast host Chris is making currently.
Chris: But have we asked ourselves: What does a podcast mean? We live in a society where podcasting is more than discussion; it is our very being that we give to our listeners.
Bunny: Between podcasts, I go to my box and sleep.
Oren: Chris, you can’t just say what a podcast means. That makes me feel angry.
Bunny: I’m feeling the very similitude of this conversation.
Chris: Yeah, this time we’re talking about dialogue mistakes.
Bunny: Perhaps the number one thing that I see gotten wrong.
Oren: I don’t know if I have mistakes to discuss so much cause this is way beyond what I normally do as a content editor. I mostly have complaints.
[Chris laughs]Bunny: Look, that’s what we’re here for.
Oren: I have things about dialogue that I don’t like, and I wish they would stop.
Bunny: That’s on brand.
Chris: Yeah. I do think that when people are starting, the dialogue is the thing that is fussiest. And if you don’t do things the way they’re meant to be, the way people are used to, that is what is most noticeable and most grating.
Bunny: It’s very squishy.
Chris: However, there is one thing that’s more obvious, which is if you don’t have paragraph breaks.
Oren: [laughs] Yeah, that’s a tough one. Not having paragraph breaks is gonna make it real hard for any editors or beta readers.
Chris: But then I would say after paragraph breaks, the next biggest thing is dialogue. So, since dialogue is very fussy, let’s cover some of the things specifically that people do wrong.
One of the things that I opened with was exposition in dialogue. Which is very noticeable and it feels very unnatural when the characters say things that they don’t have a reason to say because they all know.
My advice is just not to use dialogue for exposition. I don’t know why this is a thing that people use so often. Other than that, in visual media, it is used because they don’t have narration as an option for exposition. They don’t have as many options, so they resort to stuffing their dialogue. But if you’re using a narrated medium, if you’re in written work, then you shouldn’t have to do that. You can put it in the narration instead. And only use it if a character actually wouldn’t know that information and would actually say it that way for reals.
Bunny: I wonder if people do that because they’ve also been told that big block paragraphs of exposition are bad too. So they’re like, let’s break it up. Let’s put it into dialogue.
Chris: That would make sense. There’s a lot of overreaction to exposition dumps in paragraphs for sure.
Oren: From my experience, that’s exactly why they do it. It’s because people have an understanding that too much exposition is bad, but exposition is necessary.
At the same time, a lot of people are trying to solve the problem of their story needing too much exposition by fiddling around with how they deliver that exposition when the issue is that the story is too complicated.
Bunny: Or that they’re trying to get all their exposition out in one place rather than introducing it naturalistically.
Oren: That too.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that you should never put dialogue in exposition. I think there are times when that makes sense.
Most often, of course, if the protagonist or your POV character doesn’t know the information. But sometimes you can work a bit of exposition into dialogue, even if it’s something that the protagonist does know. It needs to make sense that they would say that. It needs to feel natural.
But you also have to understand that if the exposition would be boring as narration, it will be boring as dialogue. Making it dialogue doesn’t make it not boring.
Bunny: But it makes it snappy and in scene.
Chris: It’s not impossible to make it sound natural and come up with a reason for somebody to say something that they already know, but I just see writers all the time try to make it natural and fail.
I just think that if the exposition goes wrong in dialogue, it’s going to come off much worse than a narration where people usually have a little bit more latitude. We don’t expect narration to actually be a realistic stream of consciousness on the part of the viewpoint character.
Bunny: [fake coughing] Ulysses. [fake coughing]
Chris: [laughs] So you can get away with a lot more narration than you can in dialogue.
Oren: Yeah, that’s true. People are much more likely to notice if there’s an issue.
Bunny: The umbrella to this is just that it’s hard to make dialogue sound realistic. Realistically, people don’t walk up to each other and say, “Hello, friend. Don’t you know that I’m your friend?” “Yes, I know that you’re my friend. What good friends we are!” And then just go on about their lives like that. That sounds pretty unnatural.
And honestly, looking at the transcripts of these very podcasts, I see why people do that, right? I see why they filter out all of these filler words and backtracks and run-on sentences like the one I’m speaking right now.
But the problem is that they overcorrect in the other direction, just make it sound stilted. So that’s what, in my opinion, makes dialogue so difficult. It’s that you have to sound natural, but not too natural.
Oren: Yeah, and it’s also an issue of you want your dialogue to sound like something people would say. But beyond the stuff that Bunny talked about of filler words and whatever, in conversations, a lot of the conversations people have are not things that merit a place on the page.
If two friends meet, they might chat for a while about stuff. And that could take 10 minutes. You don’t want to have to put that in there, of casual talking, unless that relationship is really important to your story.
Chris: Right. Definitely, small talk almost never should be in your conversations. It’s better usually in most cases, if you can’t come up with a natural way for two characters to greet each other without being like, hi, how are you? Good, how are you? Then you should just skip forward a little bit to when they’ve been talking for a while.
Bunny: Yeah, you could just say they greeted each other. That’s a perfectly fine thing to say.
That said, small talk can be great for if you want a conversation to be awkward. [Chris laughs] I will say that. You can certainly highlight these characters being uncomfortable with the way that they make small talk. It’s a cliché to go, oh, the weather today. Am I right?
Oren: Yeah, and you can also use that for furthering a relationship between two characters. So there are options.
It’s just that if you look at conversations in well-written dialogue, they’re almost always much shorter than conversations would be in real life. Just cause we’re skipping over a lot of stuff that people would say to each other for whatever reason but isn’t worth putting on the page.
Chris: People do not talk to each other very efficiently.
Oren: Um, there’s a reason why podcasting is a casual format and if we really need to deliver information in a very efficient format, we use an article.
Bunny: Yeah, I think what Chris told us at the beginning, it’s just that you should be reading this in an article. We shouldn’t be talking about it. This is bad dialogue guys.
[Laughing]Chris: There’s all the labeling, attributing tagging issues that dialogue needs. Which—
Bunny: Okay, I’m gonna revise my earlier statement. That’s the thing I see done most wrong.
Chris: Okay, so what is your biggest pet peeve with the labeling and tagging?
Bunny: Oh my God, this is an easy one for me. My biggest pet peeve far and away is when people tag dialogue using nondialogue verbs. So instead of saying, he said, she said, they said, sometimes they shouted or whatever, they’ll say, he smiled.
“Hello,” he smiled.
Or
“Good to see you,” she bounced up and down.
Chris: To clarify though, this is specifically when people use the punctuation that comes with a tag, right? Because without hearing the punctuation, that actually sounds fine. But what people are doing is they’ll be like,
“Hello (COMMA)” she (LOWER CASE) smiled.
As though she was smiling the words.
Bunny: This is an important clarification.
Chris: Somehow her smile formed those words.
Bunny: If you end it in a comma, it’s gotta be a speaking verb. The verb is the manner in which you spoke. If you say something or you shout something or you whisper something. You can’t smile dialogue. You can’t jump dialogue.
“Hello,” he punched me in the face.
No, you can’t punch-me-in-the-face dialogue.
Chris: [laughs] I can understand how this happens because dialogue, punctuation can feel a little confusing and complicated. And also, I think people would just get in that habit of adding that comma and then writing the next line without thinking about what’s actually going on there.
But yeah, if you have a verb that does not actually mean speech in some way, you gotta start a new sentence. So, you get a period and then she smiled is a different sentence.
Bunny: Yes. Tag dialogue with actions all you want, just please, for all that is holy, put a period or some punctuation that’s not a comma at the end of the dialogue.
That is admittedly very trivial, but that is my pet peeve. Easy.
Chris: That’s understandable. My pet peeve, I talked about this before, is created by that often-repeated guideline to start a new paragraph when a new person speaks. And unfortunately, that’s just wrong. Or at best, simplistic.
Cause what people will do is they’ll put an action by a character and then they’ll hit, then they’ll be like, oh, that character’s about to speak and they haven’t spoken before. So, then they’ll paragraph break. And so, that person’s line of dialogue is on the next line, and then they’ll put an action by the next character on that same line. And then when that character’s about to speak, they’ll hit a paragraph break.
So, what you have is an action by one person on the same line as a line of dialogue by a different person. So, the action labels, the action tags, action labels are all wrong and make it look like somebody different is speaking.
Bunny: So like:
Amy jumped up and down. (PARAGRAPH BREAK)
“Hello there!”
And that’s Amy speaking, but…
Chris: Yes, exactly. And then:
Tim waved. (ON THE SAME LINE) (PARAGRAPH BREAK)
“Why? Hello, Amy.”
Bunny: [laughs] This is A+ dialogue, by the way. The only thing wrong with the dialogue is the punctuation.
Oren: So, it’s not that it’s wrong to say you should make a new paragraph when someone new is speaking. It’s just that is not the only time you should do it.
Chris: Well, no, I would say that if you follow it, literally, which many people are doing, it is wrong. Because if you put an action by that person and then they speak and they haven’t spoken before, a new person is speaking.
Bunny: So, the rule should really be: Clump dialogue.
Chris: Right. The rule is: The characters should alternate paragraphs. And you should put all of the actions, the body language, the movements, the dialogue from one character in the same paragraph together. And then the next paragraph should focus on a new character.
Oren: That totally makes sense. I just wanted to clarify, because if we hear that the rule that you should start a new paragraph when a new person is talking is wrong, and we’re not specific about what that means, what we’ll get is people saying that they should put the different dialogue speakers in the same paragraph.
Chris: It’s just the wrong guideline. Or you could just say it’s simplistic instead.
But I think that people say that, but they actually mean that you should group all the things for one character in a paragraph together. But then they say this rule, and those two things are not really the same, right? And so, anybody who’s literally following this rule is gonna end up putting breaks in the wrong places.
Bunny: So, the real rule is: Keep it clumpy.
Chris: Keep it clumpy. That’s one way to say it.
But this is another thing I see a lot where one person will be speaking, but then another person will have a body language. They’ll shake their head or whatever. And then since only one person is speaking, they’ll put the dialogue from the body language from the other person in the middle of somebody else’s speech.
Oren: “Hello.” He raised his gun. “Goodbye.”
And the hello goodbye is by the same person, but that’s not the person who raised the gun. In the same paragraph. That is so hard to read.
Bunny: Okay. That’s impenetrable.
Chris: Right? That’s the kind of thing that people do when they follow this guideline. Because that’s what it seems to say. It’s that you should always do a new paragraph when a person who speaks when they haven’t spoken before and then otherwise not do it.
Bunny: What about you, Oren, what’s your pet peeve?
Oren: Well, this isn’t a mistake, really, cause I can forgive mistakes. This is a thing people do on purpose, which I can never forgive.
[Bunny and Chris laugh]And that’s not using quotation mark.
Bunny: Oh, oh. That’s gonna be contentious among the snobs.
Oren: I’m sure there are people out there who haven’t learned the rules of grammar enough to know they’re supposed to use quotation marks. That probably happens. I doubt that they have finished a novel manuscript, so I don’t interact with them all that much.
Most people who write a manuscript understand the basic uses of quotation marks, so this is not a mistake. This is a thing people do on purpose when they get famous enough. I hate it so much.
There are quotes about how if the writing’s clear, you don’t need the quotation mark. And guess what? Without the quotation mark, it’s not clear, my friend.
Chris: No, it’s a very bad idea because it requires extra brain power. Even if you can tell by looking, that still adds to the cognitive load, and that means that your reader has less brain power to use for just appreciating the story and understanding other aspects of it.
At the very best case scenario, if you look and can look and tell, it still just takes extra focus and effort to do that.
Oren: It also distorts the dialogue because to try to make the dialogue stand out as not just narration, because of course, that’s the reason what quotation marks exist, right? It’s because without quotation marks, you can’t tell the difference between dialogue and narration. If you’re trying to separate your dialogue without them, the dialogue ends up sounding really weird because it always has to start with a new pronoun or something.
I noticed The Road did this when I tried to read The Road. The way that McCarthy would try to set off his dialogue would be by having it start with an I pronoun a lot. And it just sounded really unnatural.
Bunny: That’s some very unnecessary hamstring I must say.
Oren: It is, and you know there’s a simpler way and it’s to use quotation marks
Bunny: But Oren, what about italics?
Chris: In some cases, italics are okay. Again, if we’re writing speculative fiction, we can have, for instance, characters telepathically talking to each other. And if it’s not in huge blocks, sometimes it may be a good convention to indicate when they are talking telepathically by using italics instead of quotation marks.
And in a scene that might matter, because maybe people are saying things that the third person who is present can’t hear, and it’s important to distinguish that.
At the same time, the only thing about italics, is they’re a little bit less easy to tell visually than double quotes. But also, it’s a little harder to read. So, if you have an entire paragraph in italics, you’re just making things harder for readers.
Oren: If we were starting from scratch. It’s not like the quotation mark is magically the best way to indicate dialogue. There might be a better symbol for it. There might be a better way to offset dialogue. I don’t know. I’m not a conlang creator.
But I know that it is better to offset your dialogue in some way, then to not do that. Because otherwise you can’t tell the dialogue from the regular narration, and it’s important to be able to do that.
I’ve tried to figure out like, why do writers do this? And I’ve looked up lists of reasons and they include things that are just wrong. Like claims that it’s easier to read really pretentious stuff, that it forces the reader to consider the writer’s prose with greater care. And it’s like that. No, it doesn’t. It just means, I don’t know what you’re saying. You are being less clear and your prose is bad, so I don’t know what you want from me.
Bunny: I wonder if it could come from poetry a little bit. I don’t see a lot of quotation marks in poetry, but then a lot of the authors who do this aren’t poets. So, I don’t know.
Chris: I just don’t understand what the benefit is for removing quotes, other than posturing.
Bunny: That’s a big one, Chris
Chris: I don’t see how that enhances the reading experience to just leave them out. All it does is make things harder for you and for them. It would have to have some benefit to justify why it’s making things harder. And now I’m like…
Bunny: it makes you probe the author mind.
Oren: So one thing that’s been occurring to me recently—since I don’t think we want to talk about quotation marks forever—is the difference between making dialogue that makes your villains sound cool and evil, and making dialogue that makes your villains sound goofy, like they’re talking evilly on purpose.
Because there’s a line there somewhere, and I don’t know where it is. I just know there are some characters that I read, and that evil dialogue, it’s like, yeah, that’s great. That’s what an evil person sounds like. I’m super into this. And then other characters, it’s like, ugh, why is he trying to sound evil? Such a poser! And I don’t know what it, I don’t know where that line is. I can’t find it.
Chris: I would stick to the typical recommendations that we have for villains, which is make your villain polite.
Bunny: But sometimes you just want a villain that smashes around on snarls and stuff.
Chris: If you writing a comedy?
Bunny: Yeah, a barbarian villain or something. Barbarian in the D&D sense, not Germans.
[Oren laughs]But if your villain is doing something really mundane, like eating an apple. Unless you want the apple to be like deep and symbolic or something, you don’t need to have them say how much they enjoy crunching the flesh or whatever. If that’s the sort of thing you’re discussing, Oren.
Oren: That is what the more exaggerated version of it. Sometimes it’s just that in the tone of voice. Sometimes it’s the dialogue itself.
I was really annoyed on Bad Batch, the Star Wars cartoon, where when one of them goes evil, it’s the one that sounds evil. The one who talks like, I’ll eliminate every target. Yeah, I guess that guy’s evil. He sounds evil.
Bunny: That’s the villain.
Bunny: This sounds related to one of my pet peeves, which is lines that are overly dramatic. Like trailer lines, lines that you think the actor said, just so it could show up in a trailer. I’ve got one from the Cruel Prince, which I did a Lessons post on recently.
[dramatic voice] “I’ve seen many impossible things,” the man said. “I have seen the acorn before the oak. I have seen the spark before the flame. But never have I seen such as this: A dead woman living. A child born from nothing.”And this is just a guy who shows up in a suburb and like knocks on somebody’s door.
Bunny: [laughs] I’ve never seen things that logically come before other things.
Chris: [laughs] And I see that a lot sometimes when it’s just… gosh, it’s your first scene, your first chapter. Why are people making grand speeches?
I think one of the things about it is that normally people talk about the particulars of their situation. And when they start talking about some deep philosophy or some grand message that their situation is supposed to represent, that’s when it gets really weird.
Or maybe a character that senses the nearest protagonist and dispenses deep, wise life advice. Like in Malazan there’s a guy who’s like, oh, you shouldn’t wanna be a hero kid, or something like that. And it’s like, how did you even know? That I don’t think he told you that.
Bunny: He’s got you, the protag.
A little pet peeve for me is dialogue on a similar note, that’s just there to remind you that this person is unusual. I call it the Can-you-tell-I’m-from-spaaaaaace dialogue.
Chris: [laughs] Yes. Yeah, so I’ve definitely seen this.
Bunny: I feel like Star Trek does that a lot. Like I’m an alien. Look at me, reference aaaalien things.
Chris: Yeah. I actually mentioned this on my post on dehumanizing species or cultures. Because it usually comes with a group that is been reduced to a gimmick.
Oren: Yeah. Although they do it with some of their human characters too. That was a running joke for a while on enterprise, that Travis, the helmsman, he’s been in space. And every time he’s in a conversation in the early episodes, somehow, he brings up that he’s been in space before.
Bunny: “I met Johnny.”
“Oh, who’s Johnny?”
“Johnny Cash!”
“Oh goddammit.”
Oren: Part of the issue was that character had nothing to do. And so they were trying to come up with something that would make him distinctive and somehow—I’ve never understood how—they couldn’t figure out a way to make the fact that he has a lot of space experience and no one else does relevant.
It doesn’t sound like that would be hard. That would be easy to bring into the plot, but no, they could never figure out how to do it. So instead, he just mentions that he’s been in space before.
Chris: Reminds me a little bit of The Name of the Wind, where there’s this guy who shows up. I can’t remember what he is called, but he’s just like a tinker or something. He just brings things and does sell stuff. But he speaks only in rhyme and refers to himself in the third person.
Bunny: That’s certainly a shtick. I guess.
Oren: Look, I might accept a character who speaks only in rhyme if they were a magical fairy. If you tell me a person does that and it’s not part of a bit they’re putting on, I’m gonna call nonsense on that.
Bunny: There was a recent line of the space talk and in a movie I watched recently, a very bad movie, called Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. Which is now going to end up in the show notes. So, I’m sorry about that. And it’s a line, the villain says this, which also qualifies under the villain dialogue.
But it’s “Me, Voldar, hiding in a dirty cave like a speckled Mars worm.” He’s from Mars, you know?
Chris: Okay. That’s very colorful.
Oren: You know the Mars worm.
Bunny: You have to—you see—he is from—he’s from Mars—from space.
Oren: I saw three Earth dogs across the road earlier today.
Bunny: Me sleeping in the pillows like a tabby Earth cat.
Oren: Don’t get me wrong, sometimes things do get named after places in ways that don’t even always make sense. So that does happen. Like the Guinea worm, that name doesn’t come from nowhere. It’s because it’s associated with the country of Guinea, fairly or not.
But at the same time, it sounds pretty silly without any context.
Bunny: It sounds very cute, and that is not a cute worm. I will tell you. Don’t look up Guinea worms unless you’re morbidly curious.
Chris: So, while we’re talking about characters speaking in weird ways, I think it’s good to mention that you should not write accents into your dialogue. So, use standard spelling. Do not spell words how a character pronounces them.
So for instance, if you’ve character who has a Scottish accent, do not try to change the words. To reflect a Scottish accent. At best, it’s going to be annoying. Because it’s gonna be constantly distracting people as they try to pay attention to the story and read the dialogue. And often it will make things harder to read.
At worst, it can be offensive, right? There’s a good chance that a Scottish person would look at that and be like, that is not how we speak. And it can feel very stereotype-y.
Bunny: So historically, that sort of thing has a lineage from plantation narratives. It’s very racially charged, especially if you use it for a person of color. Because there is a long legacy of these plantation narratives where a white person will go to a slave and then the slave tells them a story in this extremely exaggerated, colloquial, spelled out dialogue. And that’s just no, that’s just no bueno.
Oren: Yeah, and don’t get me wrong, I work with authors who have their own dialect or their own accent that they want to represent in fiction. I’m not gonna say they shouldn’t do that.
Chris: If somebody’s writing their own dialect in there, I’m not gonna tell them don’t do that.
Bunny: Yeah. And there was actually a mixed race author on the turn of the century who did basically a bunch of takedowns of that plantation style of narrative. Charles Chestnut. There we go. Yes.
Oren: And I recently read some stories by a Jamaican author who chose to spell out the main character’s accent. Which was her own accent, and all the power to her.
Now, as someone who’s not an expert on languages, I could not tell if that was authentic. I don’t know what a Jamaican accent would be spelled. I barely know what one sounds like in real life, not from tv. So, your average reader may not understand, but I just wanted to make sure we understood the nuance here.
But I generally agree if this is an accent that you don’t have, I would do not try to spell it. You will almost certainly get it wrong.
Chris: Yeah, instead just describe how the character has that accent.
Bunny: You’re probably okay if you throw in a couple of flavor words, though. Like you’re writing a pirate, and they say aye sometimes.
Chris: Well, is a pirate accent a real accent?
Bunny: I mean, there’s International Talk Like a Pirate Day.
Oren: How to make a character distinct without making them silly or cartoonish is a whole other thing. We’re talking about dialogue mistakes right now. I don’t know if we have time to get into that.
Chris: I think the gist is that language is very difficult, right? Most of us are not linguists and not to try to take on more than you could handle. And certainly if you’re putting in an accent that’s not yours, you are representing a different group of people and taking off, taking on something that is very difficult.
If you’re trying to distinguish your fantasy group, I would generally discourage doing anything weird. I think it’s more likely to come off as silly, than it is to come off as, oh, cool. They speak in a different way because of this is their culture.
Oren: Yeah, I would generally agree with that.
Chris: I think one last thing that’s worth covering is just how much narration you have in between lines. Because in a lot of cases that will slow things down and make it so that it feels like the character is having a deep think.
In the middle of a conversation that like should be going pretty fast, dialogue is very timing sentence sensitive, so it’s not the best place to have your character contemplate the world.
The other issue that I do see is that if it’s too long between lines, it’s really easy to forget what the previous line is. If somebody asks a question and then you spend two paragraphs on narration, you cannot expect your readers to remember what that line was from two paragraphs ago.
So if you’re not sure, if you have a legitimate reason in your story for a little time to pass between when somebody, for instance, asks a question and then answers it, you almost might need to recap the question a bit. And not rely on your readers to remember that.
Bunny: Yeah. I can’t even remember what’s happening in the same conversation when someone talks for a while.
Oren: All right. Hopefully we can remember what happened in this podcast. Cause I think we’re at the end of our time.
Bunny: What a segue.
Chris: And as you and I both know, Mythcreants is supported by our patrons. So, if you found this episode useful, you can support us at patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Callie Macleod. Then there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Finally, there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek.
We’ll talk to you next week.
[Outro Music]This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Coulton.
Careful with that podcast tuning dial: you might end up having to make impactful choices on a haunted island full of spooooooooky ghosts! This week, Oren and Bunny nerd out over the Oxenfree games – both because we just wanted to talk about the game, but also because it’s an interesting exploration of how branching narratives work in practice. Which choices do you make, and how much do they matter? More importantly, who is the best NPC to take with you, and why is it Nona?
Show Notes Oxenfree * Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals * Armored Core 6 * Alex * Riley * Jacob * Ren * Nona * Jonas * Clarissa * Michael TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Elizabeth.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You are listening to the Mythcreant podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi and Bunny
[opening theme]Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren, and today with me is Bunny.
Bunny: Hi. It’s me.
Oren: It’s just the two of us. We’re giving Chris a break, especially ’cause we keep getting weird radio signals from… ghosts?
Bunny: Oh wow. I didn’t realize we were recording this over the radio.
Oren: Yeah, I know. It’s real creepy. We gotta do a fun little radio tuning game.
Bunny: [spookily] Woooo.
Oren: Because the only other controls are to walk around. There’s not even a jump button.
Bunny: No, you gotta walk around and look for the little circle, and then you can interact with something. You can push a thing with your back. You can push a dumpster with your back. In fact, I’m pushing a dumpster with my back right now. So there.
Oren: Really? Oh, exciting. Very good. So today we are talking about the video game Oxenfree because it is a game about branching narratives, at least to some extent, and I find that interesting. We will probably also talk about Oxenfree Two at least a little bit. I don’t know if we’ll have time to get to it in detail because we only have half an hour. But spoilers for both of those games. They’re both quite good, so if you haven’t played them and you care about spoilers, I’d recommend going to play them first.
Bunny: Yeah, go play them, especially the first one.
Oren: So first, Oxenfree. The basic premise is that you’re a teen. You go to an island to do a fun teen party and then spooky stuff with ghosts, radios, and time starts happening when you’re there.
Bunny: Yeah, you show up and the party is really sad, but then the ghosts come in, and a spooky triangle shows up and everything gets weird.
Oren: Yeah. They save you from an awkward party, I think is really the thing we should be thanking these ghosts for.
Bunny: Yeah, that’s the thesis of the game. If you have an awkward party, summon submarine ghosts. They might possess you, but it’ll be interesting.
Oren: And as we were hinting at, the gameplay is very minimal. You walk around in a 2D environment. This is not a fighting game, or a 3D adventuring game, or Dark Souls. It’s very basic in what you can actually do.
Bunny: A gorgeous 2D environment, don’t get me wrong. You go left to right and you go right to left and you walk. Do you walk, man? Do you walk? Get walking. Get steps in.
Oren: There are cars, but you’re not allowed to use them. In the second game you get a car, but it’s broken.
Bunny: It’s broken when you get there and you have a whole conversation about how you can’t fix it, so get walking.
Oren: It’s impossible to fix this car. No one in this town has the Lyft app.
Bunny: No. You get to walk along a highway. There aren’t cars there either.
Oren: Yeah. I have so many questions about that highway.
Bunny: Yeah. Camina isn’t even, like an island, right? Where is it?
Oren: Because the first game, you’re on the island, but on the second game, you’re on the town next to the island. That’s like somewhere on northwest Oregon. So the first kinds of choices that you make in this game are dialogue options you’re gonna pick, including none.
Bunny: Yeah, that’s a cool addition because some dialogue games, you have to pick one of them. They won’t go away unless you pick one of them. And in Oxenfree you can be completely silent, except for one, the crucial end of the game decision that you have to make. That’s the only one that you have to speak for. And admittedly, Alex, when you interact with the environment, Alex or Riley will be like, that’s an interesting thing, or, gosh, I’m gonna jump this fence. The dialogue is better than that. I don’t remember any of the specific ones. But they will speak when you interact with things. But you do have the option of going through almost the entire game silently.
Oren: You can get a cheeto for that, I guess. Although I could never play the game that way. It makes, it’s too creepy, just never saying anything.
Bunny: Aawkward. Even the radio ghosts can’t save you from that awkwardness.
Oren: Of course, I have to give the games’ writers and actors credit for making the dialogue sound very natural no matter which option you pick.
Bunny: Oh yeah, for sure. If anyone is looking for a great case study in how to write naturalistic dialogue that doesn’t have stereotypes and it doesn’t feel easy, like the author was just recording something, like it’s all got very strong characterization that it does very well. This is a good case study if you want to look at how to write good dialogue or how to voice act, but that’s not so much Mythcreant’s wheelhouse.
Oren: Yeah, I was just thinking about how in a lot of games there are instances where you’ll pick a dialogue option and it feels like that wasn’t the one you were supposed to pick. And the response that the person gives feels like it was supposed to be for the other dialogue option, and I never felt that way in the Oxenfree games. I thought that they just made it a really good job of seamlessly integrating what you say and then how there’s a response, and it just felt like it always made sense.
Bunny: I’ll say that, I think I mentioned this in a different podcast, that Alex would often be meaner than I was trying to make her be.
Oren: Yeah.
Bunny: I would choose what I thought was the nicest option and she’d just spit out some sarcastic response and I was like, [indignant] Alex!
Oren: No, Alex has sick burns to hand out. You don’t control Alex. You can just nudge Alex in different directions.
Bunny: That’s true. Alex controls you.
Oren: And of course, with many of these dialogue options, there’s always the question of does this dialogue option matter? And the answer is sometimes yes, sometimes no. Most of the time, no. But occasionally, yes.
Bunny: Yeah, most of the ways in which it matters is the way it affects your relationships, and I don’t know enough about the mechanics behind the game to know what sorts of tally systems are going on.
Oren: There’s some kind of scoring happening, but it’s in general, if you want to be friends with an NPC, you say nice things to them. And if you, then I think the other big one that’s determined by your dialogue choices is whether or not Nona and Ren get together at the end, which is always tough for me because I do not like Ren as an NPC. I just find him really irritating. But him and Nona getting together is clearly the good ending. They’re supposed to be happier together. So I’m always really torn about that. Guys, I don’t actually think you’re good together, but the game is telling me you are.
Bunny: Yeah… There’s also like one big event, which which can ruin one of your relationships, which actually happened to me the first time I played it through. I ruined my relationship with Jonas because I decided not to take him from the tower when we have to break off and leave two of the characters in the tower. Apparently the good way to do it is to leave Ren and Nona together because-
Oren: No, I refuse.
Bunny: They like each other or something. And then you take Jonas and your bestest step buddies.
Oren: No, Jonas can deal. I wanna hang out with Nona.
Bunny: I know. The real question here is why can’t Alex date Nona? They would be better together.
Oren: Not allowed, sadly. But he, but like dating aside, look Jonas, I spend most of the game hanging out with you. Okay? I finally get a chance to hang out with another MPC. That’s not Ren. I’m gonna take it.
Bunny: You can have other friends, Jonas. I was salty about that. I was like, okay, so I chose Nona over you one time, and I get the ending where we’re estranged. Thanks.
Oren: I’m pretty sure you can make up for that because I always picked Nona, all three of my play throughs. I’ve picked Nona and I have also always managed to get a good relation with Jonas.
Bunny: Okay. Maybe I was just being too mean to him earlier in the game. I don’t know.
Oren: I think a big one is actually whether or not you let him talk to his mom ghost.
Bunny: Oh, yeah.
Oren: Which is weird because that’s, again, one of the issues with branching games that they have sometimes, which is designer moon logic, because that does not seem like the right choice.
Bunny: It seems highly sketch, I gotta say.
Oren: All of the ghosts that you’ve met so far have been at best amoral, and at worse outright evil, and they’re all trying to steal your bodies. And the implication is that being a ghost, which is apparently very rare in this setting, just messes you up over time, and you become more and more hostile, and less and less caring about other people.
Bunny: And also the mom wasn’t on the submarine. What’s she doing here?
Oren: Yeah, it definitely feels like a trick by the ghosts. And even if it’s real, it feels like the mom is probably gonna be just as evil, because why would the mom be special? It seems like this happens to all the ghosts. In the second game, it even seems to be happening to the ghost of Alex.
Bunny: Yeah.
Oren: She seems to be evil now, although she’s less evil than the submarine ghosts because she hasn’t been dead as long. But she’s still definitely more selfish than she was in the first game.
Bunny: I have some issues with how they handled Alex in the second game, but I thought the first game did pretty well with its ghosts except for the Jonas mom, because that definitely seemed like a trick, and also it showed up like right before the conclusion of the game. So it just was like, Jonas, you can’t come with me. Shuffle Jonas off to his own side quest.
Oren: It’s definitely a thing where I let him do it because it seemed like that’s what I’m supposed to do, but in my own head I was like, this is an obviously a terrible idea.
Bunny: Yeah.
Oren: And then there are a few other choices that affect your ending a bit. There are some interesting flashbacks that turn out to be actual time skips where you can change the outcome and make Alex’s brother be alive or not.
Bunny: I only recently found that out. With me trying to be all nice and enjoy my time with my brother, I was like, go do your thing. And I only realized later, I put together that you’re supposed to realize that him leaving is what led to his death. So I haven’t actually saved Michael yet because I haven’t played the game since I learned that.
Oren: Yeah, saving Michael is a fun little Easter egg. I do- it would’ve been really nice if saving Michael made the next loop different. Speaking of which, this is the big ending, which is that no matter what happens at the end of the game, the game suddenly starts again. And it is implied that you are now doing the same events another time because you’re stuck in a time loop. And Alex starts to imply that she can remember previous time loops, although that does max out after a while, the game doesn’t have infinite content. But at least your second and third play throughs have some minor differences to indicate that you’ve done this before. And it would have been really nice if saving your brother made it so that he was alive in the next loop.
Bunny: Yeah, no, that’s actually a really good idea.
Oren: Yeah, and I get that they can’t, like, they have limited resources, so this isn’t even necessarily the thing that I’m saying they should have done this, it just would’ve been cool. Gimme the DLC, gimme the Brother is Alive DLC. I’ll pay for that.
Bunny: That would’ve been like, I did actually, I wanted to talk about like how to fix the loop ending, which didn’t bother me as much as it bothered you, I think just because I thought it was cool, that built-in reason to replay the game, Also, it seems to be responding to the fact that you’ve played it before and I thought that was cool, but having an actual way to escape the loop and every time you go through it learning new things or remembering more or whatever, that would’ve been cool.
Oren: [sighs] The loop was… Just, it was a really bummer ending for me. It’s implied that there’s no way to escape. You can tell your past self to just not go to the island, and that maybe breaks the loop. The game’s kind of vague about whether it breaks the loop or not. It’s a non-canon ending though, because in the second game, you are still in the loop. As a result, I felt really sad at the end. I was not really hyped for the next game, even though I love the first game.
Bunny: Yeah, that’s fair.
Oren: And the different loops were not different enough. Recently I played Armored Core VI, which has a similar concept where you’re supposed to play the game several times, and when you do, you unlock new content each time until you get to the true ending. But Armored Core VI had an advantage in that first, Armored Core VI is a combat game. It has a lot of mech fighting, so I’m not just watching the same story again. I’m also having action scenes that entertain while I’m doing that. But even then, even in the story, events are different in a way that the story events in the loops of Oxenfree just aren’t. They’re pretty much the same.
Bunny: Oxenfree should have had a level where you beat up the radio ghosts, is what I’m hearing.
Oren: In a giant mech. [laughter]
Bunny: Yeah. It turns out the tower, it’s actually a giant mech, because it just steps out of the ground and Alex goes and punches him.
Oren: I’ll play that version. How much for that DLC?
Bunny: There’s that part in the second one where she’s talking, the characters are on the tower and Maggie Adler’s friend shows up and becomes giant for two seconds.
Oren: Yeah, that happened. Oh man. The scavenger hunt is a really interesting quasi-choice.
Bunny: Yeah, I like the scavenger hunt.
Oren: The first game I missed that was a thing. I just didn’t understand what it was when I got it, so I just didn’t do it. And nothing is different if you don’t do it right. Again, the endings don’t change. Your main actions don’t change, but you as the player have very little idea what’s going on if you don’t do the scavenger hunt and find all the notes.
Bunny: That’s funny. I didn’t actually – I’m just a sucker for lore, so of course I did it. I’ve done that every single time I went through. But thinking about it since then, I think you’re right that it would be a bit disorienting to not have that context.
Oren: Yeah, it’s just odd like this. My second play through is definitely my favorite because my second playthrough, I knew more what I was doing. I did all the stuff, I got all the extras, and I had the most fun doing it. The third play through was a little bit out of obligation because I wanted to get the technically escape the loop option, which in itself is disappointing, because what you’re basically doing is saying, actually we’re not going to have any of the character development that happens on the island. So Alex is just gonna be a different person.
Bunny: I mean, obviously they couldn’t have done this, but wouldn’t it have been cool if once you found, that you kept playing and there was an entirely different game going on. It becomes Life is Strange or something.
Oren: If only they had infinite resources while making this game.
Bunny: If only.
Oren: Yeah, of course. This is the, just because I know someone’s gonna bring it up in comments somewhere, I know this is the promise that various large language model advocates are making for games, and let’s just say I’m skeptical of how that would work.
Bunny: If infinite resources means large language models, then no. Then I object, actually. Give me my limited Oxenfree, thank you very much.
Oren: Doesn’t seem as enticing anymore. You gotta leave us wanting some more, apparently is the answer.
Bunny: Yeah. And boy, it did leave me wanting more.
Oren: Yeah, it did. And then Oxenfree Two came out, which I also really liked.
Bunny: Yeah, Oxenfree Two was fun. I’ve admittedly only played it once, and I’m now on break and therefore separated from my computer with all the games on it. So a lot of this is just me recalling. This is gonna be a lot of my first impressions, I’ll put it that way.
Oren: I certainly didn’t really feel the need to replay it. I’ve replayed Oxenfree One, mostly because the first time I missed some important stuff that I wish I hadn’t. I would’ve liked the game more if I’d seen that the first time. So the second playthrough was just to get that stuff. And then the third time it was because it had been a while and I wanted to replay it before I played Lost Signals. That’s Oxenfree Two – Lost Signals. So that’s the only reason I played Oxenfree One multiple times. I don’t usually replay games that much, whereas Oxenfree Two feels like a very complete experience. Like the first time I did not really feel the need to play it again.
Bunny: Yeah, I think I feel the same way. I’ve replayed that first game quite a lot. The first time I played it was on a really long trip and my dad needed the iPad I was playing it on, which I did not take offense to, not at all. [Oren chuckles] And then I played it more, and then I went back to it this summer, both to play it again before the sequel release and also because I was doing a project on it. And then I played Oxenfree Two and I was like, hmm, good experience. And I went on to other things.
Oren: Yeah. And Oxenfree Two is much bigger, which is neat. There’s a lot more to explore. I think you have a jump button in Oxenfree Two.
Bunny: Can you jump on command though, or is it still that you have to-?
Oren: Specific places where you’re allowed to jump. They also gave you more minigames in Oxenfree Two.
Bunny: Oh my gosh. The minigames.
Oren: [laughing] There’s so many minigames.
Bunny: So the first time you were spinning the thingy to make the music play right, like that was the main minigame.
Oren: Yeah, I still don’t know how to do the waveform minigame. I’ve played through the whole game and every time the waveform game came up, I would just randomly fiddle with the controls until it eventually solved itself.
Bunny: Yeah, there’s not really any method to it. You get on there and you spin the thingy until it becomes not a sine wave, and then you have to align the thingy with another thingy, and it’s all very abstract, and I’m not sure what I’m actually doing in the game.
Oren: I had no concept of what the relationship was between the commands I was entering and the thing that was happening on the screen.
Bunny: Yeah, and I get why they did it. Like, they want it to feel more consequential. You’ve earned what you’re getting from this, but I’m not sure that was the completely right way to go about it because the story also can’t advance until you do the minigame.
Oren: Yeah. The minigame with the radio in the first game, which is still there in the second game, where you basically tune a radio to access a plot point, is fine.
Bunny: Yes. It’s okay.
Oren: There’s nothing really to write home about, but it works. Whereas the one in Two is like, this is certainly more complicated. I don’t think I would say it’s any better.
Bunny: It did feel, well, I don’t know. It was definitely different from the first one. I don’t know if it was more or less tedious. I didn’t mind the tuning thing. It was just spinning a dial back and forth. But this one, you actually gotta hope the sine wave cooperates.
Oren: Yeah. Come on, sine wave. Help me out here. Oxenfree Two also had some interesting choices around the walkie-talkies that you have.
Bunny: I did like what they did with the walkie-talkies.
Oren: Yeah, I enjoyed the walkie-talkies quite a bit because you end up with a walkie-talkie first, and at first I thought that was gonna be your only tool for the game. It gave me this weird impression. In the first game you had the slow buildup to the radio, and then the second one was like, no, here, use the walkie-talkie. You don’t have to tune it. We did that for you.
Bunny: The second game really just throws you right in. It’s like you get to the island, you get a little bit about Riley. Riley meets Jacob in his broken-down car. You start walking and then boom, the spooky triangle is here and you’re doing spooky things and everything’s just gone wild and there are ghosts everywhere, and you gotta deal with it.
Oren: Yeah, the supernatural heats up much faster in the second game, which I think is fine. You already played the first game. You know what’s happening.
Bunny: I kept reading reviews that were like, it can stand on its own. And I was like, it’d be very hard to parse this game if you had completely no knowledge of the first one.
Oren: You would have no idea who Alex is if you played this without having played Oxenfree One. And Alex is a really important character in Oxenfree Two.
Bunny: Maybe too important. That was one of my critiques of it, is that first of all, they didn’t know what to do with the non-Alex characters from the first game.
Oren: They were around.
Bunny: When it ended, I guess they just don’t remember it, even though it’s been five years. What are they gonna experience once they walk off screen?
Oren: Yeah. About that, who knows?
Bunny: But then Alex shows up in a kind of confusing twist where there’s actually been two sets of ghosts.
Oren: Yeah.
Bunny: And it’s not clear who was doing what. I’d have to play it again with that in mind, I think. But I remember I was talking to you on the Discord about that, and you thought it was just Alex the entire time when you were playing it, and I don’t think it was. It’s also the submarine ghosts.
Oren: Yeah, they’re still hanging around.
Bunny: And then Alex shows up and then Riley gets led around by Alex for a while, and Alex seems a bit more like the main character in some scenes. That was – well, I love Alex – a bit annoying.
Oren: Yeah, that’s interesting. I don’t remember thinking about that as an issue. My main problem with that section was I was just so bummed out by it because I was already sad at the way the first game ended, and then in the second game it was like, my hero from the first game had turned evil because she didn’t wanna be dead and was trying to take over someone else’s body. And the game strongly suggested that there was no way around this because in the first game, you tried to help the ghosts from the submarine and it’s like, nope, sorry. There’s no way to do it.
And so in the second game, I just assumed that was still true because I have no in character reason to think otherwise. And I was so sad that I stopped and I looked up the ending to assure myself that no, there is a way out. You just have to get there. And then I finished the game and had more fun, but if the internet didn’t exist, I probably wouldn’t have finished that game. I probably would’ve just stopped.
Bunny: Oh no, they’re not gonna leave our girl trapped like that.
Oren: They might. They did it the first time.
Bunny: That’s true’s. I mean, that’s one of the awkward things about doing sequels to interactive narratives is again, limited resources. You have to canonize one of the endings and remaining in the loop is the dominant ending.
Oren: Which makes sense. That’s fine. That part I don’t mind. It’s just that one game already ended on a really sad note, and it’s not like they knew for sure they were gonna be able to make a sequel when that happened. So they were clearly okay with ending the game that way, which made me have to seriously consider they might do it again.
Bunny: Yeah, that’s fair.
Oren: And it turned out that wasn’t the case and I was very grateful, but it was tough. I was emotionally very attached to those characters and it was a rough ride with the idea that they might just be stuck as ghosts forever.
Bunny: No, maybe that’s the curse of Oxenfree, is the characters are too well written.
Oren: Yeah. They build up a lot of attachment except for Ren. Ren can stay in oblivion forever I guess.
Bunny: Maybe if the ghosts had taken over Ren instead of Clarissa, just leave Ren in the void.
Oren: Which is weird because objectively Clarissa is…
Bunny: Clarissa’s a jerk.
Oren: Clarissa is pretty awful. But I didn’t dislike Clarissa the same way I disliked Ren. I dunno, call me a hypocrite, but I found her more interesting.
Bunny: She was, I think it’s because you were annoyed at Ren, and Clarissa you were angry at.
Oren: There were also just a few scenes where, I don’t know, maybe this wasn’t even intentional, but it felt like Ren seemed like he felt entitled to Alex’s affections. I wouldn’t even say if it was romantic exactly, but Ren definitely gave me really strong ‘you owe me because we’re such good friends’ vibes, which is always weird for an NPC. I don’t know. It’s like, I’ve never met you before, Ren. I don’t know what’s happening here.
Bunny: Yeah, that’s true. I will say I think the first game was better served by establishing that these characters already have relationships, then the second game was by having Jacob and Riley be complete strangers.
Oren: They do share a lot of personal details for complete strangers.
Bunny: Yeah, I think they should have had maybe they’re cousins or something, some connection. I think that the Jonas and Alex connection was well done because they’re getting to know each other, but they also already know each other.
Oren: Yeah. They have a connection. Whereas with Jacob in the second game, it’s like, yeah, he’s a guy that I met.
Bunny: Yeah, he is a cool dude. He’s got a nice hat.
Oren: You bond really fast when you’re putting up radio transmitters.
Bunny: It’s the best team building activity.
Oren: But I mentioned that there are some walkie talkie choices in the second game, which I find really interesting. There’s park ranger and boat guy.
Bunny: Boat guy!
Oren: I don’t remember boat guy’s name, but in retrospect, it’s funny because you can convince the park ranger to not die, but is again, that’s one of those developer moon logic problems where what the actual choice is, you’re convincing her whether or not to go out and do her rounds when it’s storming. And sure that sounds dangerous, but also, she was gonna do that for a reason, right? What if someone needed help? And so it feels kind of weird that convincing her to stay in is just the right choice and there are no consequences to that.
Bunny: Yeah, they probably could have made a different dilemma. Also, I think she was gay, which is cool.
Oren: That is cool. Appreciate that. So I’m glad I made it so she didn’t die.
Bunny: Yeah, it’s good when she doesn’t die.
Oren: But I did look up the answer because again, I hate game developer moon logic. I have trouble following these things. Boat guy was more straightforward, because with him you can convince him to sail his boat into a big dimensional portal.
Bunny: I don’t think I had him do that. What happens when he does that?
Oren: Yeah, no, he goes to a portal, and godspeed boat guy. I dunno what you’re seeing on the other side. But have a good time man.
Bunny: Live your best life, boat guy. Say hi to the ghosts.
Oren: I told him it was okay to go and do that because, you know, nobody can charge you boat taxes on the other side.
Bunny: This is true.
Oren: So we’re near half an hour. We should definitely talk about the main difference between the end of the two games, at least mechanically, is that the end of the first game, there is a choice, but it’s not strictly a different, here are your three endings. It’s more like the ghosts have made you an offer, are you gonna take it or not?
Bunny: Yeah, I found that a whole lot more interesting than whether you pick one, two, or three.
Oren: Yeah. Again, I didn’t mind the ending so much, just again because I didn’t want bad things to happen to these characters, and this was a way for fewer bad things to happen, so I was more okay with it. But yeah, I agree. It was certainly much, it felt much more natural in the first game.
Bunny: And then the first game, you could also influence the ghosts if you’d read the letters and learned more about them. You could bargain with them and get them to release Clarissa on their own, which was just a lot more engaging, I think.
Oren: That’s cool. I actually, I guess I didn’t realize that was a thing. I think that’s what happened in my games. Interesting.
Bunny: You can call the name, you can name one of the crew members, and that makes them start remembering themselves and they let you go.
Oren: Whereas in the second one, there’s a very clearly a pick your ending moment where the narrative kind of stops. And there was definitely some foreshadowing that you would’ve to pick someone to go through the portal, but it wasn’t very strong. Whereas with the first game, it was very obvious, you’re gonna have to make a choice, do you bargain with the ghosts or not? Whereas in the second game, it was a little bit like, all right, here’s the ending. Pick which one you want. So it was definitely less immersive.
Bunny: And it did feel like there was an obvious choice in that one of the characters wants to go through the portal.
Oren: Yeah, you’re supposed to feel more hesitant about that because she’s a teenager, but at this point it’s like, whatever. She wants to go, that’s fine. She can go live in holodeck dimension, I guess was the implication.
Bunny: Yeah. Another ghost parents thing, I’m not sure how that works.
Oren: I think the idea is that she’s gonna be reliving a stretch of time with her parents forever, is what I think it was.
Bunny: Oh, okay. I guess I didn’t pick up on that.
Oren: Whatever. I don’t really like this character. This character was really obnoxious for the entire game. I know I’m supposed to feel bad for her because she has dead parents, but it just didn’t quite click. So for me that was a pretty obvious choice.
Bunny: Yeah. I didn’t love her either. And I will say, I wanted the cult to be more. I wanted more cult. I’ll just say that.
Oren: There’s a weird bait and switch where you thought there was a cool cult on the island and it turned out that they were nothing. They were just hippies.
Bunny: Astrologer neopagans. Not actually a ghost cult.
Oren: And it’s like, oh, the thing turned out to be less interesting than we thought.
Bunny: Yeah, never a good twist when it turns out to be less interesting.
Oren: Okay. I think that will be it for our discussion of Oxenfree, unless the time loop resets and we have to do this all again.
Bunny: Oh, no. Better just listen to it again, or you’ll be stuck. Gotta wait for part two.
Oren: Or send yourself a message to not listen to it in the first place.
Bunny: Yeah, and just never go on Mythcreants ever.
Oren: If you found this to be an interesting time loop to go through forever and ever, you can support us on Patreon, which will help us continue to put you through the Mythcreants time loop. You just go to patreon.com/mythcreants. And before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Callie MacLeod. Then there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
[closing theme]Chris: This has been the Mythcreant podcast. Opening and closing theme, The Princess who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.
Most of the time, we try to keep our podcast focused on important topics that matter to writers everywhere. Not today, though. This week, we’re complaining about all the wordcraft annoyances that bother us most, and maybe we’ll discover a bit about how writing works along the way. If you can’t trust three voices in a podcast, who can you trust???
Show Notes The Goblin Emperor * I Am Number Four * The Fisherman * Elantris * Omniscient Narration * Epistolary Narration * The Alchemyst * A Study in Drowning TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Mbali Mathebula.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle. [Opening song]
Wes: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Wes, and with me today is?
Chris: Chris.
Wes: And?
Oren: Oren.
Wes: I’m sure you two will agree with me that, really, you’ve never met any other kind of word person who just didn’t have a bunch of just-like peeves, right? And just get unreasonably angry about things that a reasonable person just would say. Oh, why are you so mad about this? But I think that’s just the way it works. And so today, I want to share all of ours with everybody out there.
Chris: This is probably why people become copy editors… I guess.
Wes: I guess so.
Chris: I wonder how many of our volunteer copy editors decided to do it because they read our blog and they’re like, I like Mythcreants, but I wish they just wouldn’t do this one thing.
Wes: I can’t say that was the reason why I joined up. And I still affirm that the reason why… I like editing, copy editing is to try to help people make good stuff even better and bad stuff passable, right? But it’s hard to not like let certain things really get to you when your world is words. It’s just, it’s fine. And that’s okay. I’ve made my peace.
Chris: Somebody on the internet is using words wrong.
Wes: They’re using words wrong, but I don’t know. But I can also say I don’t care about that person. But if it’s in something that I’m responsible for, oh boy. And this is our podcast that we’re going to talk about. Dang it.
Oren: Yeah, I try not to be a jerk about shifting speech patterns. Some of them bother me, but if one bothers me, I usually try not to use it. But it’s unless we have a podcast, in which case then I might complain about it.
Wes: I generally subscribe to that as well. And I’ll use an example here momentarily. I think just the root of some of my peeves, is if there’s already a perfectly serviceable word. Or a different way of expressing the same thing, but just unnecessarily and it’s not fun. Whatever. Here’s my suggestion. So a good example of that is we know that taking verbs and making them nouns is a thing. And I think it’s good, right? I think you’ve got to play around with language. If you don’t, what’s the point? But the one that I’m having a really hard time getting over is the nouning of the verb ask. As in someone saying, oh, what’s the ask? Or, oh, that’s a big ask.
Oren: I’m sorry. I say that all the time Wes.
Wes: Oh, Oren man
Chris: And every time Wes is just seething inside. And plotting against you
Wes: Okay. So one, request is a perfectly good word. Sure. It’s an extra syllable.
Chris: Yeah, I think those syllables matter, personally.
Wes: Two, I find what’s the ask to be rather passive. In the sense of somebody not being direct with me. With, what they want. And that is, I think, the core of my frustration with that. It’s like, you’re in a meeting or when you’re talking to people, and they’re like, oh, what’s the ask on this? No, tell me what they want us to do. And then we will do it. What are they requesting of us? Not like, oh, what’s the ask? And let’s get chummy about it. No, just be direct. Tell us the thing.
Chris: People will go out of their way if it sounds like they’re being rude. It’s like, tell me what do they want? That, that now has a connotation.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: Being annoyed. That’s the problem. I feel like there are some words that are on a never-ending, escalator of creating new phrases.
Wes: Yeah, I think you’re right.
Chris: Because I just thought about it. Now, when you send somebody, an email, you ask them the end, does that make sense? And that’s supposed to be the polite way of being like, OK, was my message received? But I think previously it was, do you have any questions? But then what happens is people start using, that end, after they give directions or something, in a very passive aggressive, do you have any questions? And then suddenly nobody can use that phrase anymore. And they have to defend it. And then, OK, let’s see, did that make any sense? Or did I make any sense? Or, right? And I think a lot of phrases are just on that, constant escalator of being taken and used in rude context. And like, oh, no, that’s rude. Have to invent something new. And saying, what do they want, now sounds rude. It sounds like you hate them.
Oren: We can’t say, per my last email anymore. But sometimes I need to refer to an email I sent. That’s a thing I need to do. And I can’t do it anymore.
Wes: Yeah. You’re right, Chris. I like to rephrase it, that elevator. Because it’s real. We get it. And the elevator speeds up by the fact of just how much we’re sending correspondence, right? Like, through IM, email, anything, any of these mediums, right? So the same things show up. But context is important. And that can be challenging. And another good example, I’ll just carry on with my peeves and you guys can get yours in.
Chris: Eventually.
Wes: It bothers me when someone that I consider to be a friend will, like, let’s say we’re in the kitchen cooking something together and I say, oh, do you want to hand me the spatula?
Oren: Hmm-mm.
Wes: Say, hey, hand me the spatula. We’re friends. You’re not going to make me mad. Do I want to do that? And I have been sometimes this horrible person who will say, no, I don’t want to do that. But I will.
Chris: No, Wes.
Wes: Look, you guys, the whole point of these things is to just be honest. And here we are.
Chris: Are you the person who, when somebody says can instead of may you respond, I don’t know, can you? Do you do that as well?
Wes: No, I do not. But I do think it’s an important thing for me. And again, I have another quick follow-up that is going to make you guys hate me even more. The point is, I don’t have to want something to do it. I will do something if I don’t want to do it. But if it’s important to you that I do it, I will do it for you.
Chris: But you want to do it for them, then?
Wes: I want to do it for them.
Chris: I really feel like we could mince this definition of want to enter certain definitions. You do want to do it.
Wes: I think so, yeah. But that’s just where I’m coming from, is I don’t think my want has anything to do with helping. I’m here for you. Just tell me what you need. And that’s being raised in a pretty, maybe like too formal of a household. And I just wish… I could just be a little bit like rawer with some of the people that I care about.
Chris: I think it’s a matter of habits that you build that you then use in other places. And there was at least one study that showed in workplace environments, when it came to giving commands to your subordinates, that women were far less likely to just give a straightforward command. And more likely to be like, hey, could you do this for me? Or something like… That’s what sometimes people bristle. And that kind of waffly language… That’s used to be polite and avoid pissing anybody off, is a lot of times language that women end up using so that people don’t get mad at us.
Oren: And admittedly, I use that kind of language a fair amount. And I hope we can still be friends. I know it’s a big ask.
Wes: Oh Oren. Oh, okay. So I will say the last thing that did not endear me to my colleagues. But we had an icebreaker meeting. And it was… The icebreaker was, what are some of your pet peeves? And I said, I’ll go first. My biggest pet peeve is when people pluralize pet peeves, because there can only be one pet peeve. Because pet, it’s like a teacher’s pet. There’s only one. That’s the whole point of that adjective, pet.
Chris: The teacher can’t have multiple pets?
Wes: No. They just would have favorites. And that’s just how that word works. But again, that’s the point. It’s like language grows, and blah, blah, blah, blah. But I can still be upset about it and accept it.
Chris: Didn’t you suggest the title of this podcast is Pet Peeves?
Wes: I did. I did say specifically in our chat, I would like to talk about Wordcraft Peeves.
Chris: Oh, I see.
Oren: It’s getting meta up in here.
Wes: Oh, Lord. Okay. One of you guys needs to go less, because I think I’ve made everybody turn off their audio.
Oren: I’ll admit, one that annoys me is when people say penultimate when they mean ultimate.
Wes: Ooh, yeah.
Oren: And the reason why it annoys me is that I feel like they are losing a very useful word. I think penultimate is a very useful word. It means second to last, and it’s way easier to say than second to last.
Chris: And we already have words for last and ultimate. And yeah.
Oren: Yeah. And so when they say penultimate and they think it means the last one, I won’t lie. Part of it is because I know it’s wrong and I’m a petty person, but at the same time, I do think that they are having a disservice, perhaps done onto them by whoever taught them that word, because they are missing out on a really useful word. And I can’t point it out. There’s no way to point it out; that’s not going to make me sound like a jerk.
Wes: That’s why we have this podcast.
Chris: I have a theory about the use of penultimate to mean ultimate. There is a lot of wordcraft, and word distinctions are about when we want to add emphasis to a statement or when we want to de-emphasize. Wes was annoyed with; do you want to pass me the spatula? But those extra words are to de-emphasize that statement. And in this case, I think that extra syllable, when you want to say the ultimate, that extra syllable, it’s easy to imagine that. It’s extra-ultimate. Making the word longer somehow makes that feel more significant.
Wes: Yeah, that’s a possibility. That would make sense.
Chris: And so it’s being adopted because it almost sounds grander than ultimate, even though it actually means before ultimate. In any case, should I do one?
Oren: You’ve got to give us one now.
Chris: I have so many that anybody who reads my lessons posts has encountered. Much of my pet peeves, I have so many. Okay. Specific words that I don’t like. Anything that indicates a very unnatural, uncanny valley body movement that is clearly not intentional, like vibrating. Okay, people don’t vibrate. We have so many words. Quiver, quake, tremble. Right? We have so many words. Or just say shake. For when somebody shakes. Vibrating is so uncanny valley because it sounds mechanical and maybe sort of sexual. And we just don’t need people to vibrate. Similarly, the Pendergast book that I did lessons posts on had a character describe her as waddling. And, oh, that just sounds so dehumanizing, right?
Oren: Yeah, it’s dehumanizing. It’s fat shaming specifically. That was just gross. Come on, man.
Chris: Just stop. And in Eragon, a character runs, and it’s described as bounding, which is just strange for a humanoid, right? To be, that’s, don’t really have what we would usually consider a bounding, unless we’re like jumping from various points.
Oren: Or anamorphic. Save your bounding for your weird human deer hybrid creatures. Okay, those things can bound.
Wes: Oh, that sounds horrifying.
Oren: Deer with hands.
Wes: Oh, no.
Oren: This one is zooming out for me a little. It’s specifically in. Books. When authors don’t think about what this is going to sound like in audio. And they give their characters names that look different on the page but sound the same. An example from the book, The Goblin Emperor is the one where this came up a lot. There was, there’s a character named Setheris and a character named Csevet. And Csevet has a C in front of it. It’s spelled C-S-E-V. And Setheris is just S-E-T-H. So if you’re reading that. You’re not going to get those names mixed up because one of them starts with C and one starts with S. But if you’re just listening to it, you don’t know there’s a C there. You just hear two names that start with “Cse”. And they’re used very close together in the scene. And you’re just like, wait, which of them is which? I’m getting so confused.
Wes: Oh, boy. Something that I don’t like reading in dialogue is laughter. It’s like people literally writing hahaha hehehe or something. Absolute worst. I’m listening to a book. That I love. And it’s from decades ago. But I was like, oh, I want to do the audio version. I’m loving the audio narration. Except one character. The whole thing is he has a verbal tick where he laughs. Just he does that. And when I was reading it, I didn’t like it. But I could skip it. But on the audio book, the voice actor is doing all of it. And it’s driving me wild. I’m just like-
Chris: That poor voice actor.
Wes: -Oh, I can’t. Props to that guy, committed. But also, it is grating.
Chris: Yeah. Don’t write your laugh out in the dialogue. Don’t do it.
Wes: Don’t write your laugh out. Don’t do that. Yeah. We will edit that right out.
Oren: There are a lot of those, right? Long strings of random characters that in a text, your mind just glazes over. But in audio, you have to listen to the whole thing. And it’s like, oh, God, this means this is so aggravating. Or sometimes a book will shift into chat format if the characters are using a messaging service or something. And in, again, in a page, you can just ignore the fact that each line starts with a character’s name. But in audio, you can’t. You have to listen to them say, Steve. And then Steve’s dialogue. Bob. Bob’s dialogue. Steve. Steve’s dialogue.
Chris: When I did a short story that was based on emails for the audio, just had the narrator start to slowly drop those things off. Right. And then only say the time after a while, so I do think there’s options for that. It’s just that whoever is making the audio book is not using them.
Wes: Other things that annoy me are it’s more of just like a copy-editing thing. But these things just happen, but if I have a say in it, I’ll probably cut it. But just redundancies, like a closed fist, is there an open one? There can be a closed hand, right? But a fist, if you can show me an open fist, please.
Chris: Like that chapter that started house at the end of the world. That was one alone.
Wes: One alone.
Oren: Alright, so I’ve got my hand and, like kind of a partial fist where it’s like my fingers are curled in but not fully closed up. This is like a weak, wobbly fist. You got to close it all the way up.
Wes: Yeah, but this shows up a lot. Right? Free gift added bonus advanced warning. Like, those are all redundant, right? They’re just unnecessary, but I don’t know. Every day, it’s also a battle of, do words have meaning anymore?
Chris: One thing that gets me all the time is when women scream.
Wes: Oh, yes.
Chris: I’m not gonna say there’s no situation ever in any book where it would be okay for a woman to scream, but the behavior that we see in movies where something scary happens and then a woman just opens her mouth really wide and then sometimes pauses to take a breath first.
Wes: That deep breath, yeah.
Chris: Top of her lungs. That is not a real human behavior. People do scream, but it doesn’t look like that. It doesn’t sound like that. And women don’t scream with a drop of the hat. And a lot of writers, it’s just anything intense happening, and we want to make a big deal out of it and the nearest woman screams. And I just hate when a lot of times screaming is over the top already, but it’s just a big pet peeve of mine. I think the most notable one that I remember is I Am Number Four, where… the main character, he’s just on the edge of a boat, dangling his feet in the water, and then, he has this magic charm around his calf that suddenly starts to glow and grow hot. Right? And I think it’s painful for him. And then when she sees it, the girl next to him screams. And I’m just like, what? She screamed because something glowed around his leg in the water.
Oren: She must hate going to raves. Oh no. The glow sticks. They scare me. There is… This one is even more zooming out a little bit, but this is a Wordcraft thing that I just can’t stand, which I’m calling chained narration, which is a narration format where the story is being relayed through several different people. And I just… every time, it bothers me because I never know who is being referred to as the narrator. So like, in The Fisherman, we have the protagonist who’s telling us a story he heard from a cook, who heard it from a minister, who heard it from an elderly adherent, who heard it from her husband and father. And so I have no idea who the I pronoun is. Like, ever. It’s just so irritating.
Chris: For me, some point of view stuff is I get annoyed with omniscient, that’s not really omniscient, and with epistolary narration, that is nothing like epistolary narration. In the case of omniscient, it’s when there is supposedly omniscient perspective, but then the writer just doesn’t make any use of it. It just feels very uncreative. It’s like, when you’re using omniscient, you have the ability to include any information from anything, anywhere, any facts at all. Right? And so if you’re just going to narrowly focus on your character, maybe you just shouldn’t be omniscient at that point. Maybe you should just use a close perspective then instead.
And sometimes writers will open in omniscient, and then they’ll move, they’ll get closer and move into the character’s head, which is fairly typical. But then, immediately, they’ll do something very awkward to maintain the viewpoint from within the character’s head. And I’m just like, why don’t you just stay in omniscient and do that in omniscient instead of doing all these contortions to justify, instead of that awkward block of, for instance, in the beginning of Elantris, Brandon Sanderson’s Elantris, we open in omniscient and then we move into the prince’s head, and then we have to have him look at the city of Elantris before thinking things about it. It’s like, we wouldn’t need to do that if we just stayed in omniscient for a couple paragraphs.
Whereas for epistolary narration, oh man, I’m seeing especially so many cases of a writer claiming that this is coming from a journal entry or a diary or whatever it’s supposed to be. And that is nothing like what people talk about. For instance, with The Alchemist. With a guy, writing in his journal about how, I am legend. I am death.
Wes: Yes.
Chris: This is like his daily journal entry that he’s talking about. How great he is.
Wes: He had strong coffee that morning.
Chris: But just other things where it’s like, we can’t just do a normal teaser at the beginning of the book. We have to make that teaser come from somebody or some fictional work within the world. It’s just like, why did that person write that? It doesn’t look like something somebody would write. Or 10,000 Doors of January.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: Which is obviously a first-person retelling. But at the end, the narrator claims this is a book written for one of the other characters. No, it’s not. It’s obviously not something you wrote for this person. It’s just not.
Wes: That person really wanted to see your dad’s weird thesis on portals.
Oren: A really new weird one I discovered that I hadn’t thought of before. So this is only once, so maybe I will never see it again. But it’s describing emotions as vague or mysterious or unidentifiable when their source is right there. So this was in A Study in Drowning. Very mild spoilers. The protagonist is describing how I’m afraid of this guy for reasons I can’t identify. And it’s like, alright, in just this scene, he has made multiple and increasingly aggressive unwanted advances on you. And now he’s driving at reckless speeds down a washed-out road with you in the passenger seat. I know why you’re scared of him. It’s right there. You don’t have to pretend it’s weird.
Chris: Yeah, it reminds me of the opening of The Alchemist, where we describe there’s a character who’s behind a window of a shop and there’s light, afternoon sunlight cast on the window, right? That would make her less visible. And we describe that in detail, and then she’s like, I just had a feeling that you couldn’t see me or something or shouldn’t be able to see me. How is this a feeling? You just described exactly why.
Yeah, I think we know. That’s a hard balance because in order for something like that to work, it would not make it seem either completely unbelievable, that they feel something that comes out of nowhere or not just explain it. So, why is this just a feeling? You have to choose something that’s a little bit more subjective. So that one’s a little tough.
Wes: Maybe they’re just trying to cultivate an air of mystery by being vague, which is also a peeve.
Oren: Yeah, I suppose there is that. Oh, another, this is a more random real word one. This one that I found the hard way was I was on the internet a few years ago, and I hadn’t heard the term fight me, at that point. And I now know that fight me means don’t fight me. It means I don’t want to talk about this. But when I first saw it, I thought it meant the person wanted to debate because they made some provocative statement and then said fight me. So I thought they wanted to argue, and so I went to argue with them, and they got really hurt and were like, why are you arguing with me about this? I don’t know. I thought that’s what you wanted. Look, I just, if you’re saying something that means the opposite of what it literally means, then maybe don’t assume everyone seeing it knows that secret meaning.
Wes: Yeah, yeah.
Oren: Be aware of your context here. I’ve learned since then that when someone says something I don’t understand, I should just not engage with them because I have no idea what they’re talking about, and it probably means something completely different than what I thought. But at that point, I hadn’t quite put that together yet.
Chris: Another thing that’s a pet peeve of mine that is also frequently in A Study in Drowning is metaphors that bring up imagery that just don’t match the scene and just feel very out of place and bizarre because when you bring up a metaphor, I imagine the thing, right? And sometimes it’s just like this feels, so… A Study in Drowning does this a lot, and it has things like, oh, she’s about to eat a meat pie and there’s steam coming up, and the steam rises like a spirit. I’m like, why am I imagining a ghost coming out of this meat pie? It makes an overly dramatic statement about a mere meat pie.
Oren: Which is weird because I feel like the point of that was to make us empathize with the fact that she does not want to eat this meat pie because she does not like this kind of meat pie, and she’s being pressured into it by this dude who doesn’t care about her feelings. But there’s a much more visceral and like straightforward way to do that, which would be describe the smell. Describe the smell and how she does not like that smell.
Chris: Just describe the pie so it looks unappetizing, right? And right there. Or just like other things, like I touched the love interest, elbow, and he came alive like a sprout coming out of the ground. I’m like, really? And just like they’re together in bed and you want me to imagine like just a sprout? It’s just very random.
Oren: Is that not what it feels like when you hit your funny bone on something, and you just have this enormous energy to do something because your arm hurts for no reason?
Chris: But just I’ve seen this all over the place, right? It’s clear that just a lot of writers who use metaphors just are not thinking at all about how they fit into the context and whether the imagery they are evoking actually mashes with the scene. And it can. You can easily use metaphors that do, but if you’re not thinking about that, they just they feel very bizarre and don’t create an experience that feels like it’s clashing instead of a unified experience.
Oren: There’s also one that keeps getting to me is authors who try to make something threatening by describing how it looks weird or spooky, but never have it do anything threatening. Yeah, it never does anything dangerous. Like, sure, when you don’t know what it is at first, you can create some tension just by making it look spooky. But at some point, it’s gotta do something. The whole story goes by and all it does is, be a fish person.
Chris: Dagon. Lovecraft’s Dagon.
Wes: I was gonna say, if you’re talking about Dagon, this is definitely Dagon.
Oren: It’s not just Dagon. Interestingly, another one from A Study in Drowning actually did something similar where they find some sexy pictures that some guy took and the protagonist describes the woman in the picture as like, if you gutted her like a fish, she would have two even sides. I was like, what the hell? What? Where did that come from?
Wes: Oh my god, gross.
Oren: It’s just a sexy picture. It’s not actually doing anything bad to you.
Chris: Yeah, speaking of people reacting to things, again, one of my pet peeves is, obviously, I think that emotions should be shown rather than told. I’ve said this many times. Telling them is still better than not having emotions, though. But there’s one particular emotion that people get way too elaborate with, which is fear. Fear.
Oren: Fear!
Chris: Fear. And so, stating fear, I think, is more pet peeve-y for me than the other emotions. Many cases when, again, just a lot of writers are just trying to create a dramatic story, and they want it to be powerful, and they just don’t know how. And so, they just use a lot of exaggerate language, and fear, fear, fear is one of the things that is done.
Wes: Italicize all caps. Actually, that is I don’t like using italics. You don’t see bold too often, but I don’t like emphasizing words that way. I like using word order to emphasize words, but I will not fight over this, because I think there’s a time and place for that tool.
Oren: Yeah, look, sometimes in dialogue I have to communicate that the character puts emphasis on a certain word, and I don’t know how else to do it, Wes. I’m sorry.
Chris: The order matters. It’s just subtler.
Wes: It’s best used sparingly… yes.
Oren: So, like, only once a sentence, then.
Chris: Yeah, that reminded me of a very strange instance in one of the lessons posts, where we had a line of dialogue, and one word was italicized, and then after that, we had a description of how the speaker emphasized a different word. How did this happen? Did you not want to italicize two words because it looked tacky, but you still wanted to learn emphasized, or I don’t know. Yeah. But no, I definitely think there’s a place for italics, but it certainly calls a lot of attention to itself and is much stronger emphasis than other forms.
Wes: I could bring this podcast to close with one, even though I still have, like, 30, because there’s still a lot of things that bother me. Like, cliche is a perfectly good noun. I’m a fan of cliched as the adjective form. Don’t like centered around. I don’t like firstly, thirdly, secondly, any of that. Like, flat adverbs are a thing, people. Just say first, second, third. It’s okay. I don’t know. It just bothers me. It’s by accident, not on accident.
Chris: I had never heard of cliched before copy editors started correcting me. Thought that was also an adjective. I thought cliche was also an adjective. I don’t know what to say.
Wes: Yeah, I don’t think you have to say the D.
Chris: You don’t have to say the, wait, you don’t have to say the D, so it’s like a silent D?
Wes: I don’t know. I’m not a French speaker, but maybe. You don’t have to. All the French loanwords are just full of mysterious letters that don’t mean anything. It’s fine. Yes. And I will always notice, but never correct anybody when they say that they’re nauseous.
Chris: Wait, how is that supposed to be?
Wes: It’s supposed to be nauseated because, like, the toxic flower is the nauseous thing that makes me nauseated.
Chris: But that’s not how it’s spelled. The state of being.
Wes: The thing that causes someone to experience nausea is nauseous. The person experiencing nausea, is nauseated.
Chris: Oh, okay. But that’s more syllables. I will murder people to reduce syllables, okay? The syllables gotta go.
Wes: If we want to just cut syllables, then we lose so many fun things. But also, like I said, I also am a proponent of that. I do not like based off of when based on is right there. So, again, better close this podcast.
Oren: Yeah, based off of that …, I think we’re gonna have to call this episode to a close.
Chris: If we did not give you a new pet peeve, which was listening to our pet peeves, multiple pets that are peeves here.
Wes: Oh boy
Chris: Consider supporting us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com slash Mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, we have Callie McLeod. Next, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
[Closing song]Chris: This has been the Mythcreants podcast opening and closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.
Is this really a podcast you’re listening to, or is it actually the psychic whispers of ephemeral beings from beyond the veil? Maybe that’s just what they want you to think! This week, we’re talking about giving your story a mysterious atmosphere, which isn’t always the same as having a mystery plot. Spooky manor homes and opaque bureaucracies are the order of the day, plus complaining about Lost. A lot of complaining about Lost.
Show Notes Mysterious Atmosphere * Lost * Watchmen * A Study in Drowning * Piranesi * FROM * The Way of Kings * Silo TranscriptGenerously transcribed by [name].* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythgram Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.
[Opening Theme}Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is…
Oren: Oren.
Chris: And…
Wes: Wes.
Chris [in an intense voice]: There are three hosts on this episode, but at times there are also pauses while the wind whispers, as though it speaks words just out of perception. Did we leave these breaks in during audio editing? Or did they sneak into the recording while it rested on the web server? Was there another host with us whose words were erased? Maybe if you turn up the volume and play those segments backwards, you will find out the answer. After the season break, return for season two of the Mythcreant Podcast.
[Laughter]Oren: Occasionally, you can hear a cat meowing in the background. What does that mean? What does it symbolize?
Wes: Very spooky.
Chris: So, this time we are covering creating a mysterious atmosphere. Which is all the rage these days after Lost made a big impression. There are many TV shows doing it.
Oren: I love mysterious atmospheres in books. Like, I just think about the books that I’ve enjoyed recently, and they’re always mysterious, and something’s going on, and what’s happening? But I can’t think of a mysterious atmosphere TV show that I’ve seen recently that I didn’t find very frustrating. I don’t know why that is.
Wes: I guess maybe you just prefer letting your own brain do the mystery for you?
Oren: Maybe that’s what it is?
Wes: That’s it, right? This is not a mysterious story. It’s slightly off topic, but I remember reading the Watchmen graphic novel and enjoying it. And then I made the mistake of watching Zack Snyder’s version of it, and that guy leaves nothing to the imagination. I’m just like, “okay, this is horrible.: It’s just… visual mediums sometimes just overshow. They go too hard. And we just didn’t need that. You ruined the atmosphere.
Chris: So I do think it’s because TV shows also do it differently. So specifically, a lot of times when we have something mysterious, we’re leaving it in the background so that we don’t have to spend time exploring it. Whereas the TV shows that are doing this really make it so central that the protagonists don’t have a lot to do other than explore the mystery. But that’s actually really tricky because then as soon as they uncover some facts, you don’t want it to dispel the mystery. So you have to raise more questions. And so they end up doing this thing where to maximize viewership, they make things really bizarre, so they’re difficult to explain. And then the characters start trying to uncover the mystery, but they’re not allowed to, because that would just spoil the mystery. So we just get a bunch of weird events and it’s very dragged out. We add a bunch of filler so they don’t end the mystery too fast. And also TV shows are just very long stories, right? The length sometimes matters because how long can you sustain this? And so I think the incentive is to maximize viewership and worry about how it comes together later. And so I think that they handle them a little differently than a book. Like, for instance, Oren and I are reading A Study in Drowning, which has a mysterious atmosphere, but the plot is not about it. It’s about uncovering a separate mystery that’s actually not that mysterious.
Wes: The advantage of reading a prose story is that you get to be that character. You’re invited into their mind in most POVs, and you just don’t get that with TV. So Oren doesn’t get to feel like he’s solving the mystery and experiencing the mysterious atmosphere, because he’s watching some other mooks do it. You know? That definitely is a factor for me. Definitely.
Oren: That definitely has something to it. It’s also just possible that fewer books are influenced by Lost, and more TV shows are. I can recognize the Lost method as soon as I see it. Which is just to keep opening new questions. Don’t ever resolve any. And then just keep asking more and continually adding to the burden of whatever the ending is going to be.
Wes: I like that definition. I was going to jump in and say that the Lost method is just being withholding. [laughs]
Oren: Yeah. And I can think of a few books that have done stuff like that. But not many. Area X does it a little bit, especially in Authority, the second book. There are a lot of things that just get thrown at the wall, and you reach a point where it’s just that there’s no way that whatever the reveal is going to be can possibly explain all of these things. And lo and behold, it does not.
Chris: The Lost method is where you have characters that are in a situation, usually. Like, Silo for instance, or From. [laughs] Which is a weird name for a show. They’re all shows where the characters are trying to figure out what’s going on. And so the writers have to string you along, just like in Lost. Because we don’t actually want them to solve it. And that kind of creates a more frustrating experience.
In any case, I thought it might be good to clarify the difference between mystery and mysteriousness, because obviously they’re related. So when we’re talking about a mystery plot. We’re talking about a plot arc about finding out a specific piece of information that’s missing. And unless it’s also mysterious, everything else is basically known, and we know exactly what we don’t know, or pretty close to what we don’t know. And so it’s not about the general atmosphere. It’s about a specific plot arc. And that’s a mystery story. Whereas mysteriousness is a sense that lots of things are unknown. You don’t even know exactly what you don’t know. There’s an entire world hiding just out of sight–not completely out of sight, just out of sight, because we need our evocative hints.
Oren: Right. We need to see a little bit of it, otherwise it might as well not be there.
Chris: And there are lots of writers who try to do mysteriousness and don’t manage it, because it requires depriving the audience of information. And if that information is, for instance, too important, it could be bad to not give people that information. Or they could just do too much and reveal too much, and then it’s not mysterious anymore and they don’t know why and they want it to be mysterious.
Oren: If I can bring up what I think is a good example of a book with a mysterious atmosphere — that also has a mystery, but it’s not necessarily the same thing — is our good friend Piranesi.
Wes: Oh. Surprise surprise.
Oren: The Mythcreants podcast mentioning Piranesi?? Not possible! Who would have foreseen this? So mysterious. Because with Piranesi, we have the house that the protagonist is in, and we know it’s weird. You can tell that it’s maybe a labyrinth. But he doesn’t know that much about it. He’s studied things, like he knows the tide cycles, and he knows where the birds roost. But he has no idea who built it. Or what it’s for. Or why it’s here. So that’s real weird and mysterious. And then he knows one other living person, who he calls the Other. And that’s a classic mysterious name right there. And then there’s a third person who shows up. What do we call that person? That’s so weird. I think that’s just a really good strong case of building a mysterious atmosphere and then building a mystery within it. “How did I, the protagonist, get here?” And we slowly advance that as the story goes forward. We never actually solve exactly what the deal is with the house.
Wes: No, but elements in that story that add to the mysteriousness of this house world are accomplished in ways that still matter to the story. Like when the Other is searching for a power and he asks Piranesi for a specific room where, I think, he could see the stars or something like that. And Piranesi knows that room. And he says, “All right. You need to go there.” And that room is super weird. It’s dark. The statues are weirder. But that whole journey leads him out there. We don’t learn more about that, but we do get that sense of creepy wonder that comes with this place. We learn a little bit more about it without getting any of that thing revealed. But then he finds the pages from those missing journals. So that expands the mysteriousness of the world, but also works toward solving the mystery of what’s going on. So both can be accomplished in the same scenes.
Chris: One character does posit a theory as to what the world is. But it’s just a theory, and it doesn’t really explain everything necessarily.
Oren: An interesting example from the book that we’re reading now, A Study in Drowning — Mild spoilers — is an interesting case of what to do and what not to do. Early in the book, the protagonist is driving to this weird, spooky house and catches sight of something in the headlights. And then it’s gone, and she has just a brief glimpse of it, and it looked weird, but we couldn’t see much. And that’s very evocative. For one thing, we don’t know much about it. We don’t know exactly what she saw. And just the concept of seeing something very briefly in the headlights is something a lot of us have experienced. So it’s very like, “Oh. That’s real. That seems creepy and weird.” A little later in the book, she walks out of a room and sees a ghost. And it’s just there. It’s floating there. It’s a ghost. And then the ghost leaves. And is like the least mysterious thing I’ve ever seen.
Chris: Yeah. Mysterious atmosphere really benefits from some level of doubt over what you perceived. When I advise describing mysterious things, a lot of times I suggest using phrases like “it sounded as though,” or “it seemed that,” or “it felt as if,” to create some kind of doubt as to what the perception is. And then you can describe something long and elaborate that’s very weird and mysterious. “As the water rippled, her reflection seemed to look past her toward the shadowed trees,” or something. Your reflection is looking the other way. But it’s subtle enough that it could be imagination or maybe we just saw something that only looked like an elaborate spirit. Although I will say, in A Study in Drowning, when she’s in the car and she sees what looks like somebody with long black hair and a bone crown, and then the driver’s like “Oh yeah. That was a deer,” [laughter] I’m sure it was supposed to be inaccurate. But at the same time, we could have probably made it a little bit more mysterious if we had a more plausible explanation for what it could have been.
Oren: I definitely feel like shows that use the Lost method — and, to a certain extent, books, if books use it — is that they’re compensating for a lack of plot. That’s just really what that feels like, because if you have a strong plot, you don’t need to be constantly opening new questions. You don’t need to be constantly withholding information, and you don’t need to be constantly dragging out the reader’s excitement to try to learn what’s happening next. You can just have stuff happen that’s exciting and fun to watch, and then you can have mystery in the background. Whereas if you look at From, for example, the first season doesn’t have a lot of this, because the first season has a very strong plot. But then the plot gets a little more diffuse as the show goes on, and they have done the thing they were trying to do with the monsters, and now that plot is over. And so we’re just relying more and more heavily on the “What is this weird place that the town exists in?” I’m sorry. There’s no way you can answer that. There is no explanation that will be satisfying.
And Lost definitely had the same problem. There just wasn’t that much for them to do after the initial episode or two of island survival. Because it turns out that they weren’t really that interested in that concept. So after the first couple episodes, they just magically have all the food that they need.
Chris: The other thing that really helps is to not have too many fantastical things in the world. I think we talked about this in terms of magic. If you want your magic to be mysterious, having lots of magic everywhere is not going to make the magic mysterious. A Study in Drowning is a setting that doesn’t have magic everywhere, but there are superstitions, and that means that when the main character sees weird things, it’s mysterious. Whereas if this was just a high fantasy setting or a setting where everybody had a wand and was casting spells all the time, you wouldn’t be able to get that “oh, there might be a fae king here. That’s so mysterious.” Instead it would just be like, “yeah. The fae king can go sit right next to the dwarf at the high table.” And so you do have to tone it down, and if the protagonist has lots of flashy magic, it’s not impossible to add something more mysterious to a setting where there’s lots of overt magic. But it has to stand out and be different in some way. If everybody’s doing wizard magic, sorcerer magic is not going to be different enough to feel mysterious. It’s possible that if everybody’s doing magic, the only dragon in the world might still feel mysterious. It’s still possible. But it’s going to be more of a stretch. And if you want something that’s magical or supernatural, it’s just going to stand out a lot more if you have lots less natural or supernatural things in your setting.
Oren: With role-playing games, at least, I’ve had a fair amount of success taking a fantasy setting — be it urban, or high fantasy, or whatever — and then using more Cthulhu-y cosmic horror aspects to be the mysterious stuff. Because that feels very weird and different as opposed to if you’ve got an urban fantasy setting where there’s werewolves and vampires and selkies. And then you introduce… I don’t know. An elemental type creature, that’s not really that mysterious. At that point, those feel about on par with each other. But you might be able to do it if you introduced an angel, because angels don’t show up in urban fantasy all that often, and they’re usually not mixing it up with the regular folks. So that might work if you did some work to make it not just seem like a stereotypical, out-of-a-renaissance-painting angel.
Chris: It’s also worth talking about what you should hide, what you should not hide. Because obviously, you want to reduce the amount of information your audience gets so that things can seem mysterious. No meta mysteries, please. We’ve talked about meta mysteries before–it’s basically anything that your protagonist knows [that your audience isn’t told]. It’s just not going to work. It’s just not going to work as a mystery or something that’s really mysterious, because those go in two directions. Either A, we just don’t understand the protagonist or where they’re coming from at all. We can’t feel what they feel. The story loses its emotional power. The protagonist becomes less likable. And we’re really stealing the momentum of the story just to make a cool reveal later. Or alternatively, it’s not important. Okay, sure. So what?
Oren: It’s rude to call out Way of Kings both times. Like, oh man, what happened with Kaladin’s brother? Something bad happened to him. What was it? Oh. He died in a very predictable way. Exactly what you guessed happened. But we really dragged that out for a while.
Chris: So you want your protagonist to be questioning what’s happening along with your reader. And it’s–you want the reader to know what the protagonist thinks about whether things are real. And you want the reader to know, other than that, anything that the plot relies on. Like, tension often requires a lot of context. So you need some kind of stakes. And that–your villain can still be mysterious. A monster can be mysterious. A threat can be mysterious as long as it’s obviously a threat. And we don’t, you know, it’s not so mysterious we’re not even sure if it means harm. Unless you have, of course, another source of tension. But you need something to hold up the story. You don’t want to make it so that we don’t have a sense of–we don’t have a deadline or we don’t have anything that holds that up. So if you don’t undermine attachment and you don’t undermine the tension of their story, then you’re probably okay.
Oren: Yeah. You need–you can have a reveal that there’s more at stake than we thought or something. But the key word there is more. There still has to be something at stake. If it’s like, “Oh, well, the fairies are going to open a portal that will plunge the world into eternal winter,” alright. That’s a strong set of stakes. But. If your protagonist doesn’t know that, and the story is just them occasionally going out to the edge of the property and feeling an unseasonably chill breeze, that’s kind of nothing. It’s a little mysterious, but it’s not helping your story at all. You need something to bridge that gap.
Chris: And if there’s a question of whether beings mean any harm, that can be tricky to balance. Because if your protagonist–you want to justify why your protagonist takes risks. For instance, by going into the woods and looking at these mysterious beings. And then your protagonist is like, “Oh, I don’t think they mean any harm,” as a way to justify their motivation. But then if your readers believe that, they may not feel any tension. So there can be a balance there. That’s why, again, it’s helpful to have another source of threat. But otherwise, it has to seem likely that they are threatening, likely enough to convince the audience that they’re a threat. And if you have a main character that doesn’t think they’re a threat, having other credible characters say they are can help. Something to look out for.
Wes: So what I’m hearing is, setting expectations for your story are important, and then not just introducing elements that seem too out of sorts, or just having too many of them in there. And explaining it is bad. I go there because we’ve talked about Stranger things before. Season one, there’s a lot of mysteriousness going on there, then–I don’t even want to bring up the later seasons, but it’s just gone. It’s just gone. And it’s not sustainable. We know it’s different. But the questions that get raised, and some things get answered in the first season. But both the Upside Down itself has an uncanny mysteriousness to it, because it’s a weird mirror of Hawkins. But because there’s like the predator loose in the town, there’s also that threat there of, “How is it getting there?” And I remember the scene where–R.I.P. Barb–the monster apparently just ripped a hole through a tree. How did that happen? That adds a new layer to it. There are tiny portals into this place that we can access. And they don’t explain that. They don’t need to explain that. But it opens up the world.
Chris: Speaking of Stranger Things–to some degree, for most stories the novelty may decrease as the story goes on. Because people get used to things, and they just naturally become less novel. In this case, mysteriousness is a form of novelty. As things become more familiar, that novelty is going to wear off. That’s natural. Your goal is usually to build up tension and attachment to your characters, so that by the time the novelty is gone, everybody’s invested. And Stranger Things succeeded in doing that, so I wouldn’t criticize it for, in general, being less mysterious. As the show goes on, it compensated, and that’s pretty normal. But there were some choices like in season four, when we initially had this cool spider monster in the sky, this leggy monster. It felt like a cosmic horror being up there. And then no, it was just some guy. Some guy created that. Wow, that really deflates it. The creepy being was mysterious. Some guy, not so mysterious.
Oren: That was definitely an example of them explaining something that didn’t need to be explained, which doesn’t happen that often in my experience. The big question. “What is the Upside Down?” And honestly, I don’t think that was a big question people were asking. I don’t think we needed an explanation to “What is the Upside down?” Especially since the explanation they gave was that a psychic person made it up from a plane of pure energy. What are those things? Where did those things come from? And now it’s just a bottomless pit.
Chris: Honestly, I was really hoping that it was an alternate universe version of Hawkins that had been taken over by the monsters already, because that would add some tension. These are universe-traveling monsters that gobble up universes, and see how a universe just like yours was already gobbled up.
Oren: That definitely would have been the simplest explanation, and if I was going to explain it, that’s what I would have gone with. It requires the least leg work. It’s the easiest to comprehend. It would not even be that hard to figure it out. Instead they went with, “some guy made it because he likes spiders.”
Wes: Each element of mystery and whimsy throughout the show was blowing up this balloon of whimsy and mystery, and then they pop it by making all of that due to just one person. It’s a terrible decision.
Oren: I think Chris was the one who suggested that the reason they did that might have honestly just been because they didn’t know how to defeat the Mind flayer as an enemy. Like the Mind Flayer was too big. So they down-shifted to a guy who is much easier to defeat and so they can maybe hopefully wrap that up before Netflix goes out of business.
Chris: This is why giving the protagonists another problem to focus on while they are experiencing mysterious things is very helpful. And you can still circle around if you want them to uncover what the mysterious stuff is by the end, as long as they have something to do in the meantime. Maybe your main character has come to the home of an ailing relative to try to convince them to move into assisted living because they aren’t able to take care of themselves in this big mansion. That is very mysterious. But then you can have, for instance, family drama and weird things happening. Or, your character is running from the authorities, and then something else is also following them. But they have a main thing to do, which is hide from the authorities. What you want is that the main character has more urgent things to work on rather than just trying to figure out what the mysterious stuff is, but the mysterious stuff is still affecting them and therefore influencing the plot, so that it still feels like it matters. But it’s not as urgent as the other problems, or we have a tangible way to fix our problems, so I’m not going to spend my time trying to figure out what the weird moving shadows are, because I can just talk to my ailing relative. That seems like the practical way to address this problem. That way, you don’t have that issue, the Lost show issue, where we’re trying to uncover things but we can’t really get anywhere, because then it wouldn’t be mysterious anymore. So we just open up new questions and then slow down the movement of the plot, like in Severance. And then have the character look at something, and their eyes widen, and they gasp, and then you fade to black and tell them, “you can come back next season.”
Oren: An unusual problem–I’m not sure how likely this is to happen, but it would be worth mentioning just in case. This can be found in the show Silo–spoilers for that show–which is, if you introduce an intriguing mystery or a mysterious part of the environment, do not then take the story away from it. Because what happens in Silo is they’re in a post-apocalyptic survival bunker of some kind, and the big mystery and where most of the mysterious atmosphere is focused around is what it’s like outside. And you basically find out in the first or second episode. Then you spend the rest of the first season on a murder mystery desperately trying to get back to where you were at the start. This murder mystery just feels incredibly unimportant, because it’s pretty obvious. The government of the Silo is evil. Yes, I figured that out in the first episode. Don’t particularly care who it is.
Chris: We get some information about what’s outside above the Silo, but it’s still unclear, if there is something, what dangers or threats could be there. But the thing is that matters. It matters whether or not people can live outside the Silo. That affects everyone and everything, so it’s really important. Whereas what they’re trying to make mysterious for most of the first season is just, “Why is the Silo here? What is the unknown history of the Silo that everybody’s trying to hide?” It’s a little curious what this history of the Silo that they’re trying to hide is. But it doesn’t matter, so it’s just curiosity. There’s no tension behind that. Whereas what’s outside really matters. I don’t really care that much about the history of the Silo. Can we just go outside and see what’s going on? It’s a cautionary tale about making sure that the things that are important in your story still matter to the plot and still have an effect on people.
Oren: All right, with that, I think we’re going to call this very mysterious episode to a close.
Chris: And if we helped you be mysterious, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, we have Callie MacLeod. Next, there’s. Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week! [Outro music]
Chris: This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.
What if I told you that you can’t trust what this summary says about this week’s episode? Unless you can, of course. Whoa. This week, we’re discussing unreliable narrators and, specifically, how to use them in your story. We’ll discuss how you signal that a narrator is unreliable, why you might want to use one, and the reason so much discourse on the subject is useless.
Show Notes Unreliable Narrators * The Repairer of Reputations * Lucy Carlyle * Unreliability of Human Memory * City in the Middle of the Night * Piranesi * Dracula * The Final Problem * Code Name Verity * The Thief * The Haunting of Hill House * White Cat TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Maddie.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast, with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle. [Intro Music]
Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren, with me today is…
Wes: Wes.
Oren: And…
Chris: Chris.
Oren: And today, you shouldn’t believe anything I say. Unless it’s something you agree with and think is cool, then you should believe it. In fact, disbelieve the things you don’t like, and anything you do like, you can believe, and don’t worry about it. Because I am an unreliable podcaster.
Wes: Wait, I’m confused. Are we believing you or not? Or just…
Chris: That depends. Did you like the intro?
Wes: Oh, okay. I get it.
Oren, Wes: [Chuckle]
Oren: Yeah, so we’re talking about unreliable narrators this week, and the “unreliable narrator” is probably the most weaponized literary term I’ve ever encountered in various discourse and comment sections. Things like “in medias res” and “character-driven” come close. But I think unreliable narrator has to take the cake. Just because of how hypocritical it is used. Because, any time we critique something, they’re like, “No, that didn’t happen”. Some comment will show up and say that. Because it’s an unreliable narrator.
Chris: Any point of view is unreliable. If you have a character, and they have a point of view, clearly it’s an unreliable point of view. What even is reality anymore?
Wes: That’s such a horrible take.
Chris, Wes: [Chuckle]
Oren: The reason this matters to me, beyond what an unreliable narrator actually is, that, not only is that viewpoint dishonest, and you can tell it’s dishonest because they don’t apply it to the parts of the story that they like, or that we agree on. Those are mysteriously not unreliable. Those we can rely on.
I’ve had commenters tell me in the same comment, “I can’t believe what this character said, so this point is illegitimate, but I can believe what the same character said a chapter later, and therefore this other point I made is illegitimate”. This is not an uncommon interaction. Beyond being dishonest, this is a corrosive mindset. Because we cannot discuss anything if we cannot agree on a frame of reference. A geologist cannot debate plate tectonics with someone who thinks rocks are a myth.
Chris, Wes: [Chuckle]
Oren: We have to be able to agree on the basics, and this is not difficult in most cases, so I’m not actually expecting anyone is going to stop doing this because I made a podcast complaining about it, but I am hoping that maybe people who are not doing this on purpose or see it happening in reality will be able to understand better what’s happening.
Wes: You can hope so.
Chris: We will explain what an unreliable narrator actually is, because any normal point of view of a character has some level of bias, but that is different from an unreliable narrator, and you can’t use that bias to just dismiss things that happened in the story as though they didn’t really happen.
This is very similar, I think, to the point of view about authorial endorsement. And talking about when a main character says something, whether that is actually endorsed in the narrative or not. And a lot of people who don’t want to think that it is because they don’t want to be responsible for what their main character does. Or, can’t their main character just be a person and that’s just their character? Look, there are very practical reasons why we have to believe the main character the majority of the time. Storytelling just doesn’t work without that.
Oren: Now, we’ve talked some about what an unreliable narrator isn’t. Perhaps we should talk about what an unreliable narrator actually is.
Wes: My quick take on that is, an unreliable narrator is a narrator whose version of events do not match stated facts in the book. And those stated facts are best when they come from other characters, but just other things that kind of contradict what they’re saying. And it needs to be consistent. That’s it. Anything that suddenly makes you question what you’re being told is a good example of that. It’s not just somebody who’s walking around lying all the time. Robert Chambers’ short story, The Repairer of Reputations. It’s a great story. I won’t… Well, I guess I’ll spoil it a little bit.
Oren: [Chuckles]
Wes: He thinks he has this crown locked up in a safe in his basement that he will wear when he rules. And basically, this guy comes in to bring him something and says, “What are you doing with that piece of garbage?” Just casually, offhandedly mentions the fact that the safe is made of cardboard and the crown is made of tinsel. No agenda. Nothing there. But suddenly you’re like, “Oh, wait, what?” [Chuckles] Just subjective reality clashes with the narration you’ve been told thus far.
Chris: And I think that’s the important point. Objective reality, stated facts. A normal narrator has subjective opinions, but they’re obviously subjective opinions, which are distinctly different from things that are objective fact, that we would not expect a person to have a slightly different opinion on.
People don’t generally have different opinions about whether there’s another person standing there or not, for instance. Yes, there can be some conditions that can cause different opinions, but that would be considered unreliable as opposed to whether somebody is attractive or not. Which is obviously a subjective opinion.
Oren: The example that I love to use is the character of Lucy, from Lockwood & Co., the books. Lucy is extremely biased, because she has a nuclear powered crush on Lockwood, one of her coworkers. So everything Lockwood does in Lucy’s mind is amazing. And when they hold hands, it’s the bestest handholding that has ever happened. No one has ever held a hand that well.
Wes: [Chuckles]
Oren: So obviously, that much we can raise our eyebrows, take that with a grain of salt, that’s a subjective opinion, but the fact that they actually held hands is not in dispute. Now, I’ve seen some people get up on the idea that because there are plenty of studies showing that human memory is very faulty, and that people will truthfully claim that things happened, that objectively, because of recording devices that we have now, we know that they did not happen. So that is real, but I’m going to tell you that it’s not a good way to write your story most of the time.
Chris, Wes: [Chuckle]
Chris: The narration is not… actually supposed to be 100% realistic stream of consciousness.
Oren: If you ever write character dialogue and you don’t write it the way people actually sound, because then it would be hard to read, you understand why.
Chris: [Chuckles] Sometimes people do get caught up a little bit, especially when it comes to exposition. “Oh no, is this exposition something my character would actually think?” It just has to not interrupt the reader experience.
Wes: Save your dialogue for that.
Chris, Wes: [Chuckle]
Oren: And, of course, there are a bunch of different ways that a character can be unreliable for a number of reasons.
Chris: If I can just add one thing about that. When we’re talking about objective fact, the way that this works is that the author has to do something, just like Wes was saying, another character, to call into question what the narrator says. That’s the other thing about this. Why we can’t just be like, “This person is unreliable because maybe those things didn’t happen”. What is the evidence in the text that is wrong? Has another character made a statement? Has some other description contradicted it later? There has to be something.
And just like when we’re talking about authorial endorsement, if a main character states an opinion and the author doesn’t do anything to show that it’s wrong, that has authorial endorsement. Similarly, if we hear about something that’s supposed to be objective fact or some event that happened, a thing that was there [Chuckles], and we don’t have anything in the text, the author has done nothing to call that into question, we need to trust that it’s there.
And both for the same reason. Because nobody can spend an entire book constantly questioning every detail. We have to take things as they are in order to understand and experience the story.
Oren: You can’t spend the entire story playing the “what is true” game. If an unreliable narrator is well used, you can spend parts of the story playing that. But the whole thing? What’s the point of even reading it then? These aren’t even words. These are just letters on a page. I don’t even know that they mean anything.
Wes: Disagree. That’s edgy and clever.
Chris, Oren, Wes: [Laugh]
Wes: You just don’t understand me, Oren.
Chris: Is it a zebra?
Oren, Wes: [Chuckle]
Chris: Or a crocodile? Or whatever? Yeah, I’m thinking about City in the Middle of the Night. We had a podcast about that book where there’s some very interesting word choices. [Laughs]
Wes: It’s true. A buffalo with giant teeth.
Chris: It’s a buffalo that swoops out of the air in a second and eats half of a person.
Wes: What a funny way to not be unreliable, but just be confusing for no reason. [Laughs]
Chris: [Chuckles]
Oren: Yeah, that book confused me in a lot of places. The book opened with the protagonist being thrown out what I thought was an airlock onto a planet that was locked in a tidally locked orbit with its sun. So one side is always facing the sun. And I just assumed such a planet wouldn’t be breathable. And the story never mentioned that it was. And so I was so confused why the character wasn’t dead. It took a while to realize there’s supposed to be a breathable atmosphere there.
Wes: [Chuckles]
Chris: And for anybody who’s not familiar, that was a case where it was supposed to be an alien planet and there were supposed to be alien wildlife. And the names given to the alien wildlife [Laughs] …A lot of times we didn’t necessarily have a whole lot of description of the wildlife, like the buffalo. I don’t think that she ever described what the buffalo looked like.
Wes: Yeah, winged teeth. [Laughs]
Chris: [Laughing] Only that it definitely did not behave in a way you’d expect a buffalo to behave. Whereas we got some description of the crocodiles and it was like pincers and things, things that crocodiles do not have. That was a wild ride.
But that wouldn’t necessarily be unreliable narration because there was no expectation that the narrator was trying to create a cohesive narrative that turned out to be wrong. It was just… confusing. Which actually, that is a tricky distinction. I think it is easy to try for unreliable narration and end up with confusion. We can talk about that more later.
Oren: And I would say that the essential quality of an unreliable narrator, because you can get it all to these weird edge case scenarios of “Is this character unreliable? Is that character unreliable?” I think that what matters most is the feeling that you cannot trust them. Or at least you can’t trust them completely.
In Wes’s example, that’s definitely true. Because this guy thought that this thing was a crown and someone else came and said it was a piece of trash. One of them is wrong. We don’t know who it is yet, but obviously, there’s something weird going on here. Wheras opposed to something like the novel Piranesi, which I love, and I saw people calling it an unreliable narrator…
Chris: No.
Wes: What? Okay, I just recently finished reading that book and that makes me mad.
Chris, Wes: [Laugh]
Chris: We can understand why they think that. I have to beg to differ.
Wes: Okay, fine. Dracula. All of them are unreliable narrators.
Chris, Oren: [Laugh]
Wes: All of them. Every single one of them. Van Helsing, biggest liar there ever was. [Laughs]
Oren: That I’ll believe. I subscribe to Wes’s theory that in The Final Problem…
Wes: Oh, yes. Holmes and Moriarty. They’re the same person.
Oren: Yeah, Moriarty is just made up. Holmes invented him. That’s my theory.
Wes: Holmes is just telling Watson these things and he’s the most unreliable narrator there is.
Chris, Oren, Wes: [Laugh]
Oren: The reason people say that about Piranesi in this case, I do not think is malicious. I think it is just because they see a character who thinks things that are obviously wrong. He thinks that there are only, what, 72 people in the world or something like that.
Chris: No, he actually thought 72 was a really, really high, impossibly high number.
Wes: A huge number. Yeah. [Chuckles]
Chris: No, he thinks more like 15 or something like that.
Oren: He thinks that there’s 15 people in the world and that this weird labyrinth that he’s in is where he’s always been from and that 2016 is a fake date. He thinks things like that. So, I understand where that thought came from, but I don’t think this character is unreliable in any way that matters because, he’s very honest about what he sees and he tells us his biases right away. And so, there’s never a moment when you’re reading through him where you’re like, “I don’t know if I can trust what this character is telling me” because he’s… Partly, he’s just so earnest.
Wes: You nod at this. You open a book and there’s a conceit that you’re just going to trust the narrator. Otherwise, like Oren said, the story doesn’t work. And you experience so much of Piranesi’s world right away, you trust him. And then when he’s confronted with new information, he deals with it appropriately. He doesn’t just… I don’t know. There’s room for growth and we see that.
Chris: Right, we see what logical conclusions he comes to and often they’re wrong, but we know exactly how and why he comes to that conclusion, what information he’s working with, and it never leaves us in doubt about what actually happened and what reality is. We see that his conclusions are wrong and he doesn’t understand reality, but we do.
Wes: Which is actually just better examples of dramatic irony. The audience understands things that the character doesn’t.
Oren: Yeah, that’s a classic example of it. Anyway, Piranesi, great book. Go read it.
Chris, Oren, Wes: [Chuckle]
Oren: I don’t think you’re going to get that many examples of all three of us agreeing that a book is good.
Wes: It’s fantastic. It’s so good.
Oren: So hopefully that means something.
Oren, Wes: [Chuckle]
Oren: But okay, so on to actual unreliable narrators. Usually this happens because of either some kind of narrative premise where the narrator is allowed to be dishonest. Usually they’re retelling the story. It’s either epistolary or some kind of less stated retelling narrative. Or, they have some kind of magical curse or head injury or trauma or something that affects their perception. And you can mix and match those a little bit, but those are your basics.
Chris: Whereas you wouldn’t normally have unreliable narration that’s from an omniscient narrator. Because omniscient narrator doesn’t have to tell you everything, but the assumption is that they will tell you the truth [Laughs]. Otherwise, it doesn’t have the characterization that adds to unreliable narration. It would just be a storyteller telling you wrong facts and then like, why are you messing with me?
A storyteller is what it would be like if it was to happen in omniscient. So we do need a character that has some issue that causes them to be unreliable. So it’s a retelling narrator usually or epistolary. Or it could be in the moment if the character has some kind of condition.
Oren: Right. If it’s an unfolding narration and the narrator is unreliable, it almost certainly should be because something is skewing their view of reality rather than they are intentionally lying. Just because someone intentionally lying in an unfolding narration is just kind of…
Chris: Doesn’t really make much sense because it’s what the character experiences in the moment. They’re not talking to anybody.
Oren: Who are they lying to?
Chris: Who are they lying to? And you can see instances where in unfolding narration where the character is in denial, but usually what would happen is they would still perceive things correctly and then they would just come to an incorrect conclusion, just like Piranesi. They wouldn’t just see things wrong because they’re in denial about it, for instance.
Wes: And just withholding information does not make a narrator unreliable. Require more than that for this definition to work.
Chris: I suppose if they withheld something that you would obviously say in that context. Where it’s a lie of omission.
Oren: Yeah, I suppose if it was something really big, someone came in and shot someone in the scene where they could see it and they didn’t tell you that happened. I guess that might count as unreliable. Maybe.
Chris: They tell you that somebody punched them and neglect to tell you that they punched that person first [Laughs]. It’s technically possible, but it would really have to stand out.
Oren: Now for the lying concept, authors like this one because it allows them to do a special kind of turning point more easily. That is usually the realm of… TV and film, which is the hidden plan turning point. Technically you can do hidden plans with a reliable narrator, but they get contrived really fast.Whereas an unreliable narrator, you can lie more easily. But I would say that you really want a bigger reason than that. Because making your story unreliable just so you can get a specific turning point is a huge overkill. You’re spending way too much for not enough gain.
And a story that does this pretty well is the story Code Name Verity. Spoilers for that story. Because this entire story is about information and concealing it. Because the protagonist is doing an epistolary story where she’s being interrogated by the Gestapo during World War II because she’s an allied spy. And so at that point, the motif, I guess, the story is largely about what she does or does not tell them. So that feels like an appropriate place for her to tell lies. And for those lies to be important in how the story is resolved.
There’s another novel that I read for my whole extravaganza of unreliability, which was called The Thief. And in that one, the thief just doesn’t tell you why he’s trying to steal this thing for the entire book. So there can be a big reveal of, “Oh, actually, I was working for this different person the whole time”. So what?
Chris, Oren, Wes: [Chuckle]
Chris: Yeah, that sounds more like a meta mystery.
Oren: And, technically, the thief can lie to you. It’s a retelling. So it’s technically not breaking his narrative perspective. But it, A: Kind of doesn’t feel like anything at the end. And it has a weird side effect of, the thief just goes through the entire story without a motivation. And I think the author was just hoping you would ignore that part.
Chris: I would say similar to Code Name Verity, you could have a Rashomon-like story. Rashomon is the classic movie that retells the same events from different perspectives. And everybody has a slightly different version. And it’s like a murder mystery.
And so lots of stories have then used this technique. And again, some of the basic premise is about the fact that these perspectives clash. And that’s the central premise that gives you a reason to do unreliable narration. But also, it gives, when there’s authorities there, any kind of interrogation or people could be held responsible for what happened, we automatically have a motivation for the characters to lie. And you are preparing the audience for potentially unreliable information. Which is important, too. Because what you don’t want is for people to think that your unreliable narration is a mistake.
Oren: Mm-hmm. Yeah, because it can look like a mistake. At that point, it almost doesn’t matter that you did it on purpose. If it looks like a mistake, it will give the same negative effects as if it was just an accident.
Chris: Similarly, if your character is supposed to be under the influence of something, they have a condition, they’re being influenced by magic, or Cthulhu [Laughs], or whatever. Setting that up, and then showing that they are being influenced becomes more important in some way.
Or setting up a premise like Annihilation, the first book of Area X. It’s another book that has some good unreliable narration. And we set up that there is a weird Area X where weird things happen ahead so that we understand the cause of the discrepancies.
Oren: So then there is the more open-ended version of an unreliable narrator, which is the tilted narrator, for lack of a better term. The one whose perceptions of reality are off in some way.
And this one is weirder. Because I’ve definitely encountered at least some readers who just enjoy that feeling for its own sake. For whatever reason. I’m not one of those readers. So for me, it has to be in service of something like The Haunting of Hill House. I really liked the way that Shirley Jackson used the fact that we couldn’t really trust everything that the main character was telling us to help enforce how weird and disorienting this house is.
Chris: Right. And that one was very general. Instead of one thing that is specifically unreliable, there’s a general context where a lot of things are unreliable. And we also get the sense that we’re not sure what is reliable, what is not reliable. So you can do a broader experience of questioning more of the narrative. It should still be targeted so that it’s not just exhausting. So it actually adds to the experience.
Wes: What’s good about that one, too, is as it gets closer to the climax the unreliable events start to amplify, too. Because the narrator’s getting worse. That’s good. It builds appropriately.
Chris: Right. But that one also has a specific moment where there’s a turning point where the main character gives into the house. And after, that’s when her perspective really becomes unreliable and really feels like she’s being influenced. Now, earlier, there were things like some people heard bang noises. The other people didn’t hear.
Oren: Yeah. And the cold spot that they measure.
Chris: But that’s more like mysterious phenomenon. It’s less like unreliable narration. And then once we have that point that really identifies, OK, this is why her narration and her perspective would start becoming unreliable.
Then we get into things that are a lot more subjective. They cross that boundary between objective fact and subjective opinion where she thinks other characters are plotting against her and things like that. And she starts to read their body language in ways that suggest that they are more malicious. And things that would not necessarily be… most people could tell. So there is some subjectivity there [Chuckles]. But on the other hand, you’re not really sure if people are actually mad at her or if she’s just imagining they are.
Wes: What I remember really enjoying about that part was the dialogue. You’re looking at the words those characters are speaking are arguably pretty neutral or even perhaps some concern. But then immediately how the narrator starts to describe, draw insight from what they are saying, colors how you’re reading it. [Chuckles]
It really is a fun part where it’s just, “OK, evidence here, seems neutral statement, seems like concern”. Narrator says, “Hold on, let me step back in here and make sure that you know that these people are after me”.
Chris, Wes: [Chuckle]
Oren: There is, of course, a kind of elephant in the room when it comes to these sorts of stories is that people often want to make it either a parallel for or just straight up an example of someone who is not neurotypical, or who has a mental illness, and I’m not going to say you should never do that. I know at least some people who talk about feeling validated from that kind of story.
It’s not like a “never do it”, but I would be very cautious and I would specifically avoid this trope that I’ve seen in a number of these stories, which is the, “Oh, look how scary this weirdo was and how they murdered people”. You expect that in older stories, but I was reading a story called White Cat, which is from just a decade or so ago, and it started with the same thing. It was like, “Here’s this autistic-coded boy and he seems very nice and cool and polite, but he brutally murdered a girl”. It just felt like I was being invited to salaciously see how that had happened.
Now, to be fair, spoilers, I mentioned this in the article, there is the reveal that he didn’t actually kill her and that this was a lie planted in his head, but that reveal honestly feels more like it’s just there to preserve his likability and it still feels like we are trading on the same trope up until that moment. I was supposed to have this kind of voyeuristic interest in how this kind of person could be a murderer. I’m going to trust that was not the author’s intent, but it was really unpleasant. And I just do not like to imagine someone who doesn’t realize that’s what’s happening reading this book.
Chris: I do think that in those situations, an accurate and respectful depiction just has to come first. I won’t say that you shouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t say that you should never use neurodivergence for novelty, but a respectful depiction has to come before maximizing that novelty.
So Area X, one of the things that I really liked about that one, and this is pretty early in the book, where it’s a clear and very interesting instance of unreliable narration, is the narrator refers to something as a tower. And says that she’s looking at a tower. And then you find out that this tower is a hole in the ground.
Oren: [Chuckles]
Chris: And it ends up being really cool because what it is that this alien presence in Area X kind of copies things. And so there’s a lighthouse elsewhere and this hole in the ground that is a vertical hole in the ground that inside is a copy of the lighthouse tower.
And so it indicates her weird connection with this presence in Area X that she sees it as a tower. We hear other characters refer to it as a tunnel, so we know that there’s some discrepancy. And then we actually have it described [Laughs] and it is not a tower. In Annihilation, we have the Area X influence and she’s also not candid about the fact that she’s, has at some level been infected.
Oren: Eh, she’s fine. I wouldn’t worry about it.
Oren, Wes: [Chuckle]
Wes: That is a good kind of, as a reader, you get checked. You’re like, “Okay, here’s this weird premise”. And when she called it a tower, that was a moment of “What?” Immediately there, it was described as something else and you’re just like, “Okay, everything’s weird”. [Laughs] We can’t trust this stuff. So I thought that was good.
It’s the power of an unreliable moment like that, can show how it can be worth it, but it’s tough. Just to really be able to check the information in a powerful way that keeps your interest and doesn’t make you just disregard everything about the story.
Chris: I will also say that book has a moment where she discovers the leader of their exploration group has been hypnotizing them. And rewriting their memories. And when she discovers it, she’s now immune to it. But it definitely raises the question of how often this has happened before.
And it’s one of those “the ground moving under you” moments that is part of the point of unreliable narration. So it’s nice, but it doesn’t actually make you go back and question everything that happened because the things that happened before really aren’t that important, but it still gives you the sensation of not exactly knowing what’s real. So that was another nice moment.
Oren: All right. I think, what is real, unfortunately, is that we have come to the end of our time here on this podcast.
Chris: If you found us reliable and not unreliable because we said a bunch of bad things you don’t like, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to Patreon.com/Mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing, very reliable patrons. First, there’s Callie MacLeod. Then there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. [Outro Music]
Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.
Choo choo, the steam train is leaving the station! Everyone check your top hats and gears, which will serve as your tickets to this podcast. All abooooooooard! This week, we’re talking about steampunk. What is steampunk? Why is steampunk? Can you even have steampunk without airships? Obviously the answer to that last one is “no,” but we have a whole bunch more to talk about!
Show Notes The Guns Above * The Origin of “Steam-Punk” * Howl’s Moving Castle * Castle in the Sky * Nausicaä and the Valley of the Winds * Warmachine * Girl Genius * Wild Wild West * His Dark Materials * Carnival Row * Mortal Engines * Rising Tide * Paddington * The Effluent Engine * The Black God’s Drums TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Lady Oscar.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[Intro Music]Bunny: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Bunny, and with me here today is…
Chris: …Chris. And…
Oren: …Oren.
Bunny: And I hope you’re wearing a top hat right now. And if you’re not wearing boots, put them on and stick some gears on them, because we’re going to talk about steampunk today.
Chris: Yeah, the key to steampunk is just gluing gears everywhere? On everything?
Oren: Do the gears need to do anything, or can they just be aesthetic gears?
Bunny: No comment. [Oren laughing] But there do need to be gears.
Chris: We need to pretend that they do something, but they don’t actually have to do anything.
Bunny: Yeah, they can clink and rattle a bit. That could be their purpose. Who needs laces when you can tighten up your shoes with gears?
Oren: Yeah, just put a little coal in the little boiler you’ve got in your heel, and yeah, what could go wrong? [general laughter]
Bunny: Put on your shoe, and it’s a nice panning shot up your leg, and it’s going like, “Shhh…chk, chk, chk, chk, chk, chk, chk.” And it’s the coolest way to put on your shoe ever. It’s like those shoes that have like a goldfish tank in them, but cooler.
Oren: That is one of the unstated, or sometimes directly stated, conceits of steampunk, is that steam technology is way lighter than it actually is.
Bunny: Yeah, it’s kind of gotta be.
Oren: Here’s a big robot with a giant boiler on its back. That thing would collapse under its own weight. Boilers are heavy. [laughing]
Bunny: [stage whisper] Shut up, Oren. Shut up. Stop talking. [laughter]
Oren: That was the part that I found very funny about The Guns Above which is…it’s arguable whether it’s steampunk or not,because it has airships, but its airships are hyper-realistic in how they’re made, except for the fact that they’re powered by a steam engine. There have been steam-powered airships. It’s not completely made up, but they were very limited and immediately abandoned because steam engines are too heavy to make practical airship engines.
Bunny: Yeah, isn’t that the one where they’re very particular about how they have wicker gondolas hanging underneath the airship.
Oren: They have to save every fraction of weight. A big part of the story is that they can’t bring any extra people on board, and they need to know when anyone moves around, because the ship is that sensitive to weight. Admittedly, I’m not an engineer. I haven’t done the math. Maybe they could save enough weight for a steam engine, but I just feel like it would probably be too heavy.
Bunny: It does sound like having a unicycle, then putting a combustion engine on it. [laughter] So I suppose this does raise the interesting question of what is steampunk? Is it an aesthetic, or are there certain tropes and plot requirements? I think it’s both, but a lot of it is aesthetic. Not gonna lie.
Oren: First, I’ll have you know that it should be steam-punk. I see y’all spelling that as one word.
Chris: Steam-what?
Bunny: Punk!
Chris: No dash. That’s an atrocity.
Oren: Look, when it was first coined, supposedly, in a letter by Kevin Wayne Jeter to Locus magazine in 1987, he spelled it steam-punk.
Bunny: Well, they were also spelled cross-words when they were first invented, so…
Chris: Yeah, a lot of compound words started with dashes.
Oren: The line must be drawn here. This far, no further. [laughter]
Bunny: So you have to say “steam”, and then you have to teeter on the edge of it for a loong time, like you’re Dr. Frankenfurter.
Oren: The etymology is generally accepted to be that it’s an evolution of cyberpunk, which, of course, by then, the term cyberpunk was already in circulation. It’s interesting, because cyberpunk, the “punk” part, comes from the fact that these early foundational works of the genre tended to focus on characters who were on the extreme margins of their cybernetic society. Not universally, but enough that that became what the genre was associated with.
Chris: A lot of them were punks. [laughter]
Oren: Yes, they were punks, and that’s where that term came from. But, steampunk never had that, as far as I can tell? Of course, nowadays steampunk and cyberpunk are both primarily aesthetics. You can have a cyberpunk story that’s about punks, or about rich CEOs, and it’s equally cyberpunk either way, but I do find that interesting as an evolution of the term.
Chris: I do think cyberpunk has a bigger legacy of having certain types of plots, but those plots still aren’t essential for it to be cyberpunk. Steampunk, you can argue some plots are common, like exploration plots are popular in steampunk, but it’s clear that the aesthetic is the most important thing.
Bunny: Yeah, and there are certain character archetypes that, you know, some genres don’t have so particularly specific character archetypes. Steampunk definitely has the mad scientist, with lots of wacky inventions and vials bubbling in their labs, and steam hissing out of the corner, and stuff like that.
Oren: And of course, like most genres, steampunk is a collection of associated traits, rather than any single hard-defined group of them. We tend to associate steampunk with Victorian. We tend to associate Victorian fashion and all that. But there’s a lot of very famous steampunk that isn’t Victorian, at all. A lot of Miyazaki movies, for example, we would consider those steampunk, but they don’t have Victorian aesthetics at all. In that case, it’s the steam tech that is the glue that holds them together.
Bunny: That’s probably really Howl, though, right? What other one is there?
Oren: The other ones are Castle in the Sky and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.
Bunny: Castle in the Sky seems pretty sci-fi to me, but I guess some of it’s got that brown…
Oren: I mean, the place where they explore is not steampunk. That’s alien robot tech. But the place where they come from is steampunk. The airship pirates have a steampunk ship and Air Destroyer Goliath, the big old government ship that rolls in, that’s very steampunk.
Chris: If Howl’s Moving Castle isn’t Victorian, is there a specific period that it’s supposed to be? It doesn’t look that far from Victorian to me.
Bunny: Howl’s Moving Castle was playing in the background at some point over the summer, and I was doing other things. So I was walking in and out, and watching it when I was in the room. And to me, it seemed kind of World War I, but I could be completely wrong about that.
Oren: I think World War I is roughly accurate. I don’t think it has a specific time period, but if you look at the way they’re dressed, they’re in “old-timey dress”, as far as I can tell. But I wouldn’t categorize anything they’re wearing as specifically Victorian. But granted, I’m not a fashion expert. Maybe a fashion expert would look at it and be like, “Ah, that’s actually completely Victorian. You just don’t know anything about Victorian fashion, you”.
Chris: Maybe they’re just not fancy enough. But you don’t see a lot of corsets, for instance, in Howl’s Moving Castle.
Bunny: There are people with top hats, though.
Oren: There are top hats. And some of the aesthetic of steampunk is just the aesthetic of engineering. If you work around machines, you’re going to expect to see things like goggles, and leather safety equipment, and big gloves, stuff like that. Most of the Miyazaki movies have those, because it would be weird if someone was working in this big steam-powered engine room and was wearing a light sundress. That would just be odd. [laughter]
Chris: So, Oren, can you describe the difference between steampunk and dieselpunk?
Bunny: Oh, I’ve got three more of those, but go ahead.
Oren: Does it go steam, or does it go gasoline, or oil or whatever? They’re very similar. Very often you have stories where they overlap. I think Bunny had some specifics that I thought were interesting.
Bunny: Yeah, so it’s really hard to tell how these intersect. As I was looking around trying to research these–so there’s dieselpunk, which is steampunk, but internal combustion engines, or electricity. So, I don’t know a lot of dieselpunk stories. I think it’s probably less common than steampunk, or at least less well-known. But I would categorize it as kind of grimier, and more 1920s, just from what I’ve seen. And then there’s the two that are closest to steampunk, and I can’t tell what the difference is. One of which is clockpunk, and the other of which is gaslamp fantasy, which is not punk, but it is…
Chris: The only story I know that’s been called gaslamp fantasy is Girl Genius, in which the creators of this comic like to call it gaslamp fantasy. I felt like that was just another name for steampunk.
Oren: Did they make that up? Is that where that term comes from? Because I used to work at Privateer Press, and the people in charge insisted we call it “full metal fantasy”.
Bunny: What?
Oren: Which was just the most absurd…
Chris: [laughing] Full metal fantasy?
Oren: Full metal fantasy.
Bunny: That’s terrible.
Chris: Is that named after Fullmetal Alchemist?
Oren: No, it’s named after nothing.
Bunny: They’re trying to be special…
Oren: As far as I could tell, it was named after branding desires. [laughter] I could be wrong. My deep suspicion–they never told me this, so this is just me guessing–but my deep suspicion was that someone did some market research and found out that steampunk is not popular with the target audience of 18 to 35 year old white male gamers that they were trying to reach. [laughter] And so they were like, we gotta call it something else, guys. But, I don’t know that. I’m not saying that’s actually where it came from. It was just so weird to be told we had to call it “full metal fantasy” when we were talking to customers.
Bunny: No, that’s so bulky. A lot of these are very much splitting hairs. I think gas lamp fantasy… I’ve heard two things called that by now. I think it’s just that there are explicitly magical elements. But Girl Genius doesn’t acknowledge that it’s magic. I mean, it is magic.
Chris: In Girl Genius, you have some people who have the Spark. And that Spark basically makes them wild and chaotic inventors who make contraptions that can do impossible things. But steampunk generally has contraptions that scientifically couldn’t actually do those things. That’s the fantastical element. Girl Genius is only different in that there’s this sort of inborn Spark aspect to it that is much like inborn magic in a lot of stories. But other than that, it just seems like wild or low realism steampunk.
Oren: TV Tropes is claiming that this was specifically coined to describe Girl Genius by its creators. And supposedly, their reasoning is that they were trying to avoid confusion with another comic that was actually called steampunk. And because they wanted to emphasize that this wasn’t any kind of setting where the word “punk” would apply because their characters aren’t punks.
Chris: Yeah, you look at Girl Genius and you’re like, that is a steampunk comic. [Oren laughs] I guess I can’t blame them, since apparently I made up “light stories”.
Bunny: They’re not light stories, they’re “sunshine fantasies”. It’s not a light story unless it comes from the light story region of France. [laughter]
Chris: Otherwise, it’s a sparkling fantasy.
Bunny: Yes, exactly. So, that’s gaslamp fantasy, which I guess is very niche in that it only refers to Girl Genius.
Chris: It’s steampunk. Let’s just be honest, it’s steampunk.
Bunny: It is steampunk. It just is steampunk. Sorry, guys. But then there’s clockpunk, which I’m having trouble squaring because a lot of steampunk also involves clocks, and clocks have gears. But I think the main point there is that it’s not powered by steam? Like, you need to wind it with keys.
Chris: I feel like that’s steampunk without the steam, and people are like, “Hey, this doesn’t really fit.”
Bunny: But it’s like a very similar aesthetic.
Oren: Yeah, it’s similar to dieselpunk in that they’re very similar. And you could easily have a story that is both. But eventually, if you really lean on the clockwork elements and don’t have any steam at all, eventually someone might start to think maybe this needs another name.
Bunny: Yeah, I just feel like I haven’t seen a story that’s pulled that differential enough to merit it.
Chris: I think this is people trying to make genres less chaotic. But I just think genres are inherently chaotic and you should just embrace the chaos. “Steampunk” can refer to a story that has neither steam nor punks.
Bunny: Yeah, punk is just kind of a tack-on by this point.
Chris: I think if we were to go with the meaning of “punk” in genre names, I definitely think it’s an indicator of the aesthetics being important. Similar to “core”, though. [laughing]
Bunny: Oh, no, not the punk versus core again.
Chris: Aren’t they the same thing at this point?
Oren: Technically, we all have to call it “steamcore” now. [laughter]
Chris: Cottagepunk.
Bunny: Maybe you need to call it “lightcore”. No, no, no, that sounds dirty. Never mind.
Chris: [laughing] Oh, no.
Bunny: But yeah, there’s a reason my notes have a whole section which is just like, “What are these other punks? I don’t know.”
Oren: Yeah, similar to, but legally distinct from.
Bunny: Yeah, exactly. The one other one is cattlepunk, which is a weird way to put it, because they might not have cattle. It’s just Wild West steampunk. And apparently, again, according to TV Tropes, this genre, not by that name, but it predates steampunk. I couldn’t really figure out more details on that. But if that’s true, it’s interesting. I’m actually in the middle of my own genre confusion writing a story that’s set in something like the American Southwest and features steampunk-ish technology, but it also does not have cattle. So what do I do?
Chris: Maybe it’s a weird Western.
Bunny: Maybe it is a weird Western.
Chris: So, I was looking up some steampunk stories for this. There’s a lot of things that are, “Is it steampunk?” An example, for instance, is Wild Wild West, which is a Western, but with steampunk technology in it, that people would often call “a weird Western”. But it’s also, I think, appropriate to call it steampunk–unless it’s diesel punk. Does it have steam? Every time, I have to check, “Does this have steam, or gasoline?”
Bunny: I feel like the thing with steam is that steampunk is not so much about steam, as it is about gears.
Chris: Mm hmm. It’s true.
Bunny: It should be gear punk.
Oren: Look, are you telling me that a nuclear submarine isn’t steampunk? [laughter] Because that is a steam-powered vessel right there. The steam is produced by nuclear fission. You don’t tell me that’s not steampunk.
Bunny: Oren, that is radioisotope punk. [general laughter]
Chris: But yeah, if you want, you can call it a weird Western, I guess, or just call it steampunk. It’s fine.
Bunny: It’s not steam powered. It’s powered by an energy source I made up. So I don’t–I guess it’s “made-up punk”, “made-up energy punk”.
Oren: That’s a good one. You should copyright that while there’s still time.
Bunny: “Cattle made-up energy punk”.
Chris: [laughing] Trademark.
Bunny: Copyright trademark.
Oren: Do not steal.
Bunny: [laughing] That’ll sell.
Chris: Okay. So here’s some questions about, “Are these stories steampunk?” [laughing] Because these are things that I saw online listed under steampunk. The Dark Materials trilogy.
Oren: Little bit. It’s a little steampunk, because it’s got airships.
Chris: Isn’t it mostly just a fantasy that’s kind of Victorian-ish era?
Oren: It’s also pretty light on fantasy for most of the book. It’s like alternate history that’s…a little bit magical? Like there’s the daemons. I’m not calling them demons. Quiet you. [laughter] The daemons that they have are the most magical thing about the book for quite a long time. And they don’t actually play a huge role in the story, as weird as that seems. It seems like a setting where everyone has a magic animal following them around would be different. But it’s not. But they use another word for electricity. I noticed that when I reread it recently. I forget what it is. But instead of saying electric, they say something else. They say “galvanic”, or something. Which I think is just a synonym, but not one that is in common usage. And they have a lot of airships. So that feels a little…
Chris: [interjecting] Really? I just didn’t remember the airships. But again, I didn’t finish the series, so…
Oren: Because the good guys don’t have them. They’re bad guys.
Chris: [laughing] Only the bad guys have airships.
Bunny: Way to ruin your airships.
Oren: Well, because it’s a travel story. Right? It’s hard to do a travel story when your main characters can fly. Not impossible. Avatar exists, but…
Chris: And there’s like a couple magic gadgets in it. But altogether it’s not very big on gadgets, which is what I would expect in steampunk. In general.
Oren: I get why it is classified as that. I would not classify it that way. I think if someone is looking for a steampunk story and they picked up The Golden Compass, they would probably be disappointed, like this is probably not what they were looking for.
Bunny: Yeah, I feel like it needs to have some focus on gadgets to be properly steampunk, and those gadgets should have gears in them, I’m just saying.
Oren: It does have the actual golden compass, which does have some gears, so that’s some gearpunk.
Bunny: Yeah, that’s one thing.
Oren: Yeah, but it’s pretty important. It’s pretty central to the story.
Bunny: It’s also not a compass, Oren.
Oren: Yeah, it’s an alethiometer, I’ll have you know.
Bunny: The golden alethiometer.
Chris: Okay, how about Carnival Row?
Oren: Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Chris: [surprised] It is? But okay, so it’s fantasy Victorian. Where is the steampunk part in there?
Oren: There’s also airships in Carnival Row.
Chris: So if we have any Victorian setting and you add airships, then it’s steampunk. I just, I feel like the airships aren’t enough.
Oren: The airships are doing a lot of the lifting, you could say. [general laughter]
Chris: I feel like maybe there’s a divide between the pro-airship camp and the neutral airship camp. [laughing]
Oren: You see more of the steampunk elements in the war flashbacks. Not just the airships, but there’s at least somewhat more advanced tech. But not much.
Chris: I just feel like if the story doesn’t have any kind of gadgetry, it doesn’t feel like it qualifies as steampunk to me. It’s just Victorian fantasy.
Bunny: I think this is more gaslamp fantasy than Girl Genius. If we were to slap a label on something as gaslamp fantasy, it would be this.
Oren: When I first heard the term “gaslamp fantasy”, I thought that meant like a fantasy story in a place that had gas lighting. And so I assumed it was for stories that are vaguely historic, but that don’t have the high tech to qualify them to be steampunk. So that’s what I thought that term was, and then I found out it was for Girl Genius. And it’s like, that’s the opposite of what I thought that was.
Chris: This is our new hot take. Like, Carnival Row is gaslamp fantasy. Girl Genius is steampunk. [laughter]
Bunny: I gotta say, these Carnival Row snapshots that they put on the internet are not very good.
Oren: Well, it’s not very good. So that’s truth in advertising. [general laughter]
Bunny: Apparently there’s also people who have horns for eyebrows. Okay.
Oren: Yeah, that’s just some good clean Tiefling fun.
Bunny: [laughing] Fair.
Chris: Okay, how about Mortal Engines?
Oren: Oh, yeah. That one’s the most steampunk.
Bunny: Does it run on steam?
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: That one is so odd. Because it’s post-apocalyptic. And they have computers in it. So it has, like, more modern…but I don’t know. I guess it’s not technically Victorian. But it definitely has weird gadgetry and retro-futuristic technology.
Oren: Yeah. And in the movies, it definitely has a very steampunk look. And they actually look pretty Victorian in the movies, too. It’s not Victorian. It’s post-apocalyptic. But apparently there’s like a retro fashion trend going, where after the bombs fell, everyone started dressing like the 1890s. [laughter] So, yeah, that one is more obviously steampunk. Because it has, like, these really advanced technologies that are powered by boiling water somehow. Don’t ask how they do it. It’s just a thing, okay.
Chris: Disney’s Atlantis is another one that is commonly–I think that one’s hard because all the pics you look at are just in the Atlantis part. But it’s got the whole, “we make contraptions so that we can go explore,” your traditional Victorian explorer’s outfits, and everything like that.
Oren: Yeah, it’s got some elements of it, I would say. It’s got some elements of steampunk. I don’t know if I would call it a steampunk story, if it were up to me. But I can see why people call it that. So that is one of the appeals of steampunk, is that you can create some pretty advanced tech to do some pretty high speculative stuff, like have giant robots, or replace limbs with robo arms, and stuff like that, without having to get into the emergent qualities of that technology. If you were using, say, obviously advanced stuff like cyberpunk or more sci-fi, or if you were using magic–you don’t have as many implications. So it has a value for that as well.
Chris: I do think that maybe one of the reasons why aesthetics is so important is because if aesthetics weren’t important, there would be less reason not to have a futuristic sci-fi setting instead. Because usually when we have fantastical technology, we’ve got that white and chrome minimalist futuristic look, which can be fun.
Bunny: Look, steampunk is not allowed to be sleek. Get your chrome out of here, heathen.
Chris: So if you’re not going to do that, then it’s because you want these other aesthetics that are associated with the historical period instead, and therefore the emphasis is on them. So that might be one reason.
Oren: I mean, there is the Victorian aspect of it. People like Victorian fashion, or at least riffing on Victorian fashion.
Bunny: It’s often pretty Gothic, I will say.
Oren: That’s true. Various historical fashion trends, people like those a lot. And so that can have a really cool aesthetic to it. Steampunk dovetails really nicely with spooky stories, because a lot of common traits in steampunk are either spooky on their own, or can be made spooky, because you got stuff like gas masks, very common in steampunk, incredibly spooky. You got vials of various colored liquids, very spooky. Steampunk robots are easy to make spooky, because they’re big and hulking and they move in awkward ways. Again, makes that easier to make that spooky. Not to say that you can’t have spooky, sleek cyberpunk robots, it’s just you have to work a little more at it.
Bunny: I have a question for this very obscure property. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it. I just want to know whether you think it’s steampunk. It’s by some guy, it’s called Rising Tide. [laughter]
Oren: Hmmmmmm. I don’t know, sounds like a weirdo.
Bunny: Yeah, I think it’s a little spooky.
Chris: Some weirdo decided to make an expansion for Torchbearer.
Bunny: Very strange.
Oren: Yeah, that was a weird choice.
Bunny: Oh no, maybe it’s another alternate-energy-punk one.
Oren: I mean, it does have, Rising Tide does have a magical material that changes the laws of physics, which is different than coal. It also has coal. But in Deadlands, a popular RPG that uses steampunk horror, they’ve got this stuff called ghost rock, which I didn’t know about until after I’d already published Rising Tide, and someone pointed out that it was basically the same thing.
Bunny: Oh no.
Oren: It’s like, “Oh, all right, great job, me.” [laughter]
Bunny: Ghost rock…
Oren: So yeah, Rising Tide is definitely an example of where I was using the steampunk aesthetics to be on the spooky side.
Bunny: I do like spooky steampunk. Perhaps because Lovecraftian horror was, I guess, from around the time that some of steampunk tries to emulate. He was later, he was 1900s. But maybe that’s why. Lovecraftian steampunk is a thing.
Oren: Yeah, that’s a very popular cross genre. Oh, I should have also mentioned steampunk is really useful, because it’s much easier to get audiences to believe that you’re mixing swords and advanced technology with steampunk. If you’re doing that with cyberpunk, it basically has to be katanas. [laughter]
Bunny: People won’t buy anything else.
Oren: Because audiences will accept mixing machine guns and katanas only. Any other melee weapon and they’ll be like, “No, this is too silly. Why are you doing this?”
Bunny: I can’t bring my club?
Oren: No, no clubs, no spears, no great swords. Get that all out of here. No one would be using those in a world where everyone has easy access to guns. Only katanas specifically. [laughter]
Bunny: It’s also worth mentioning that there’s quite a few stories that just use elements of steampunk. The Paddington movie of all things has this one…
Oren: Really?
Bunny: Yeah. No, there’s just this one–the Geographer’s Guild. This might be Paddington 2, actually. I forget. Which is also good. It’s one of the rare sequels that lives up to, or perhaps exceeds, the original. I like Paddington 2. But they go to the Geographer’s Guild, and it’s all pneumatic lines and stuff like that. It’s very retro. Very Victorian. And I think that kind of qualifies as steampunk. But Paddington is emphatically not a steampunk story.
Oren: Yeah, you can get little elements of that showing up at some point. We’re getting close to the end here. But I should also reference that there are some inherent problems with steampunk, too. They don’t have to be there, but they crop up a lot, similar to any kind of historic genre. But this one gets extra problems, because it’s about the British. And people who write steampunk uncritically tend to get very enamored of Empire, and think that’s really cool. Because Victorian Empire, pretty big deal. So that can be a thing. You can also get people who just are like, “Hey, restrictive gender roles were actually great! Because women could nag their husbands.” So that was a thing. I’ve read steampunk stories like that. It’s unpleasant. I don’t like it.
Bunny: I will say a good subversion of that–although this isn’t like a heavy steampunk–this is a very light steampunk story. But it’s a story called N.K. Jemisin. By N.K. Jemisin.
Oren: It’s a story called N.K. Jemisin? [laughing]
Bunny: Yes. It’s just Self-Titled N.K. Jemisin Steampunk Story. No, it’s called The Effluent Engine, and it’s about the racism of the time. It takes place in New Orleans, and the main character is trying to, I think–it’s been a bit since I read it–trying to get an important technology in Haiti working. To free Haiti from Empiric rule. So that’s good. I like it when they subvert it, or embrace the troublesome history of these things and do something new and good with it. So good on you, N.K. Jemisin. That was a good short story.
Oren: N.K. Jemisin and P. Djèlí Clark should team up. Because he also has books that are similar to that, in a similar time period, with a similar aesthetic. And they could do like a crossover between them. That’d be great. I’d read that.
Bunny: There you go. Name it after both of them.
Oren: Yeah. It could be called N.K. Clark. That’s the title of the story now. [laughter]
Bunny: Oh no. It sounds like we’re shipping them now.
Oren: Eugh. Alright. Moving on.
Bunny: There’s a couple of just the original steampunk writers that I suppose are worth mentioning, like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. They’re kind of like Tolkiens, in that sense. I saw someone refer to, I think, H.G. Wells as the first speculative fiction writer. And I don’t know if that counts. [Oren and Chris “hmm” skeptically in the background] I don’t know if I’d go that far.
Oren: You’d have to define speculative fiction extremely specifically for that to have even a hint of relevance.
Bunny: [laughing] Yeah. But, burrowing into the ground with a big old steampunk drill that you can ride in, as I think happened in Journey to the Center of the Earth. So those big giant mechanical drills go with airships and stuff. Just saying.
Oren: That’s true. Alright. Now that we have successfully established that airships are the true mark of whether something is steampunk or not…
Bunny: Yes. That’s what you should take away from this.
Oren: Yeah. You should probably call it airship punk, to be perfectly honest. I think we’re going to go ahead and call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you enjoyed this podcastpunk, [laughter] please support us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Bunny: [ironically dramatic voice] We’re such outsiders.
Oren: And, before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Callie Macleod. Then there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
[Outro Music]This has been the Mythcreant Podcast, opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.
Sometimes you open a book, try to read the first few pages, and are hit with so much confusing terminology that your only recourse is to abandon civilization and return to the sea. This is not the ideal outcome, but how can we prevent it? A story’s beginning is intense pressure, as it must be entertaining enough to hook the reader while also delivering the information needed to understand what the heck is happening. Fortunately, we know a few tricks to alleviate the problem, and that’s what we’re talking about this week!
Show Notes Malazan * Rosemary and Rue * Prologues * The Quantum Thief * The Marvellers * Soul-Rendered Eliptar * Antigua The Land of Fairies Wizards and Heroes * The Forensic Certified Public Accountant * Middlegame TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Arturo.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast with your hosts: Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[intro music]Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is…
Oren: Oren.
Chris: And…
Bunny: Bunny.
Chris: Oh no! Our microphone shield can’t withstand the great voice eater now that it’s crossed the seventh boundary to reach us. Quick! Get Anne, Danika, and Malcolm to assemble under the boundary along with our calibration of the podcast frequency to match the voice eater’s song. Drat! It just passed by us faster than a lightning sigil. I think we’re doomed to be recorded by the voice eater.
Bunny: Oh no!
Oren: That sounded like a great intro to me. I don’t think we need to change anything, because if we made that a little easier to understand, it would be spoonfeeding! That’s everyone’s favorite term when you say that a story is confusing. They’re like, “I guess you just want to be spoonfed!”
Chris: “I like stories for adults.” Look, it is the voice eater. It’s gotta eat out of some sort of utensil. It might as well be a spoon.
Oren: It’s not gonna eat with its fingers. Come on.
Chris: It’s really very deep once you apply some of your brain power and figure out what it all means. That’s a metaphor. It’s very profound. Symbolism. It’s got some Shakespeare or something. Allegory. This time we’re talking about avoiding confusion during your opening. That first-page confusion and disorientation. And this is one of those things that’s much more common in manuscripts than it is in published stories. Which means either that publishers are just rejecting stories with confusing openings, or that editors are just really good at cleaning them up. Because of that reason, it’s one of those problems that’s easy to miss. Because, for instance, when I do critique posts talking about the openings of bestsellers, I’ve caught some disorientation in them sometimes. But it’s much lighter. It’s not as big of a problem there as it is in manuscripts, which people see less often.
Bunny: I guess that part of that is because when you’re querying agents, you have to include the opening of your story. Back in high school, I was way more confident than I should have been about this one manuscript. And so I was shipping it around and querying it. And of course the opening… was not the greatest, and probably turned people off even if the rest of the story had been good. So if you have a very confusing opening, you’re probably not even going to get past the agents.
Chris: Recently, I just looked at a whole bunch of openings from our followers for a 10-year celebration. And this was the most common issue; going over it a little bit more to help people look at their opening and make it easier to understand.
Oren: I don’t usually encounter this. Although I am having a lot of trouble with The Witch King by Martha Wells. And I can’t really say why. With something like Malazan, I understand why I’m having trouble. Whereas I’m not sure what the problem is with Witch King. It’s just constantly confusing me. The first few pages were especially bad.
Chris: It’s funny because I still think that The Witch King is an improvement on clarity over some of Martha Wells’ other works.
Bunny: Yeah, speaking of naming too many characters!
Chris: It is a complex world. And probably some of the confusing ones really come in when people have a really complicated world. And they’re using a lot of new terms. And they want it to feel very natural. And so they’re just like, “Oh, you’ll just pick things up. I’ll just have the characters talk the way they would normally talk, and you’ll just pick it up.” It’s not really friendly to readers who are coming in.
Oren: One reason might be, with Witch King, that I had trouble is that Witch King starts with two unusual things happening at the same time. It’s hard for me to figure out which either one is. Because first you have the protagonist and his weird situation. Because he’s, like, in a tomb. But he’s not dead. But he is dead. And you have to figure that out. And then at the same time he is seeing some bad guys bring in captives for a magic sacrifice. And I’m also trying to figure out what that is and what’s going on with that. And so that, I think, might be the reason why I was having trouble.
Chris: And then he has somebody that he’s talking to through something called a “pearl.” It can definitely add up.
Bunny: That sounds like too much.
Chris: It’s not that it’s impossible for the readers to figure things out. When people are creating their opening and they feel like they’re creating enough context, they don’t think about the way that it all adds up. Yes, the readers can probably figure out from context that Waffles is the dog. But if they have to do that while they are also figuring out who is speaking, which person is the dog’s owner, whether they’re presently at a dog park or in somebody’s yard, it’s like it compounds upon each other. And every single thing that you add makes everything else harder to understand. And it’s not that this can’t happen later in the book. But it’s especially easy to have it happen in the opening just because the reader starts with no context for anything. What is this place? When is this place? Who are these people? What are they doing? Why are they doing it? What is your fantasy terms? The other thing that I think makes openings really tricky when it comes to this is because we’re just working so hard to get the reader hooked. When everybody really wants to make their opening as exciting and engaging as possible, a lot of times they end up jam-packing it full of things. And that only results in cognitive overload. Basically, you’re making readers do too many mental calculations at once to sort through what’s happening. So they can’t just relax and read, and it raises the chance they’ll miss something important or they’ll misunderstand something because they’re having to pay attention to everything at once.
Oren: One thing that is a big cause of confusion is in medias res. Both the actual meaning of it and the weird fan rage thing that people use it for when you say an opening is confusing. What in medias res actually means is starting the story with the plot already going on. You don’t start at the beginning of the plot. You start partway into the plot. That’s what it actually means. And that can be really confusing. If your plot is defeating the supervillain and you start the story in the supervillain’s base fighting the supervillain, yeah, that’s kind of confusing. You’re starting in the middle of something. It can be exciting, but it’s also, “What is going on? Why should I care about any of this?”
Bunny: Wow, I didn’t realize until now it was in medias res.
Oren: I think it’s in medias res.
Bunny: No, it is. You’re right. I’ve only ever heard in media res. This is fascinating.
Oren: Maybe I’m saying it wrong. Who knows? I’m sure people will be happy to correct me.
Chris: Is it a light story or is it cozy?
Oren: And then people misuse that term to think that any opening that’s confusing is in medias res. We got all kinds of angry comments on the Malazan post claiming that we just couldn’t handle in medias res openings. And this is the farthest you could possibly get from in medias res. This is a kid standing on a wall talking to a guard for page after page. There is no plot happening here at all.
Bunny: If you go by that, then what it actually means is just things happening.
Oren: Technically, you could argue that it’s “in the middle” because time has passed in the universe before the story started. But that will mean all stories are in medias res unless they start with the Big Bang. There wasn’t time before that.
Chris: If you have any relevant backstory communicated at any time in the story, you’re in medias res. Checkmate.
Oren: People sometimes use that definition as a weird fan rage defense, which is making the term less useful because the term actually means something and it’s important to know what that is. But also, it doesn’t really make any sense, because maybe a story is in medias res. That can still be really confusing! That doesn’t change the fact that it’s confusing.
Chris: Look, it’s confusing, but it’s not the confusing thing you thought it was.
Oren: Yeah, that’s my first advice, is: know what in medias res is. That will help you a lot.
Chris: If I were to choose the biggest piece of advice, it’s that sometimes you need to slow down a bit. So that you can fit in context. And there’s a balance here, obviously. But a lot of times people are so eager to optimize their opening, fit so much in at once, get the story opened up right away, that they end up rushing too much. You just want to slow down and take just a little bit of time with every new story element you introduce. The tension actually sometimes gets better because tension is about anticipation. So if you rush your opening too much, readers don’t have time to feel tension because things happen too fast. You want the reader to be able to experience that something is coming. And so you want to sit and watch it come. Watch it headed this way for a bit. Before “Oops, suddenly it’s here.” So that we can do that little bit of build up of anticipation. And it doesn’t mean you can’t start with a hook. Just develop that hook a bit. For instance, if your hero is in danger, take some time to describe their surroundings and what that danger looks like. Why is it dangerous? What could it do to the hero? If your hero is unhappy, go into their current situation a little bit so readers know why they’re unhappy. What factors in their life are at play? If they’re trying to impress somebody, take some time. Describe that person. Who are they? What happens if the hero fails? This context is important and you don’t want to rush so much you don’t have time for it. So, if there’s a conflict between two different groups, what is the fight about? What are each group? What’s going on? And basically, if you introduce one thing and get readers comfortable with it, then you can introduce the next. And this might just be like a couple paragraphs. It’s not necessarily like a whole chapter describing what the hero’s surroundings and the hero’s in danger. But often we don’t even have a paragraph to appreciate the danger before something big happens.
Bunny: I’m curious what you think of openings that have a good opening conflict and they’re interesting and they dole out information pretty well, but then they time-skip into the future but the setup was still necessary. The book I’m talking about is Rosemary and Rue, where the opening is the protagonist in pursuit of villain. It sets up that she’s got a family and a kid and that she’s this half-fairy person and there’s all these different fake kingdoms and magical creatures all in San Francisco. And the prologue ends with her failing in her mission and getting turned into a fish for 14 years. And then obviously the story is not going to be about her being a fish. It needs to skip forward to when she gets turned back. But at the same time, it would be weird if the story started with her having just turned back into a human and not get this nice scene with her talking to her daughter and her husband. So we really feel, like, what she’s lost. I’m curious what you think of that.
Chris: Usually the prologues that we really object to are prologues that don’t even feature the main character. So no, that’s just a time jump. “Prologue” label can be on anything. When there is a time jump early in the story like that, where the initial context for the hook that we need to set up happens years in the past, sometimes we put a “prologue” label on that. But a lot of the traditional prologues I’ve seen previously were the villain cackling, or in the viewpoint of some person that you think is the main character, only to watch them get murdered so that the villain can cackle. And the first chapter is now the main character and their sheltered little village. Villain’s not anywhere in sight. Completely disconnected. But no, I have no issue with opening up your context early and then doing a time jump if that’s really, like, the important context that sets up the plot and sets up the problem. Even though in that story you were talking about, Bunny, even though she’s no longer a fish in the next chapter, the fact that she was turned into a fish for 14 years is a big issue that kind of creates the problems that she’s dealing with.
Bunny: She starts the story in a very bad place, having been a fish and not wanting to return to the magical world, and then of course she gets sucked back into it. But she’s still estranged because she was a fish and absent and she can’t explain why. Didn’t get to see her daughter grow up and now her family doesn’t want to see her anymore. It sets up the stuff that’ll be relevant later in the series. So yeah, I think it was important that we saw her pre-fish. Not a lot of openings feature their main character getting turned into a fish for 14 years.
Oren: My personal thought on an opening like that is I do think it can be jarring. Anytime readers think they know what the story is about, and then suddenly the story is about something else, not about something else but it radically changes, so they think the story is going to be about the protagonist catching this guy, and then it’s actually about her recovering from being a fish for 14 years, that can create problems. But sometimes that’s what you gotta do. And I can’t throw stones: I did that in the manuscript I’m working on, because I could not find another solution. My beta readers told me that it was a little jarring, but I think that the cost was worth it.
Chris: What are the chances? You also had someone turning into a fish?
Oren: Yeah, specifically a fish, exactly. I’m actually making a Rosemary and Rue clone. I’m gonna call it Time and Tiffany.
Chris: But you can also do things to better set expectations about what the story is going to be on about. And try to prepare them. But yeah, sometimes you want to start a little earlier to get your context. There is definitely a balance. And it’s definitely good to start your plot up right away. That is not a bad thing. It’s just getting that kind of right balance where you’re not moving so fast that things are just whizzing by and the reader doesn’t have time to get their balance and appreciate any of it. Another big one is new terms that are specific to your world that your reader is not going to be familiar with. And character names. People have to remember a name and figure out who that person is and remember them. Another thing that’s hard in Martha Wells novels.
Oren: Another thing that will just contribute to a confusing opening that you should just think about a bit: Is your story just confusing? Because sometimes stories are confusing, and the beginning is confusing, and the story never stops being confusing because there’s just a lot happening. The novel The Quantum Thief is like that. It has some cool stuff in it, but it starts off super confusing, and it never stops being confusing. I kept expecting to eventually get it, and I never did. This is the first sentence of the plot summary, not the actual plot, just the plot summary: “Countless gogols of the legendary gentleman thief Jean Le Flambeur are trapped in the virtual Sobornost.” The heck does that mean?
Bunny: Am I having a stroke?
Oren: Pretty sure those are just non-English words. As the first thing to hit you, it’s just, “What is going on here?” What it means is that the protagonist is in a prison where tons of copies of his personality have been made. For reasons. So that’s what it means.
Bunny: Goobles and Snorfnorth?
Oren: Gogols and I think I might have pronounced that wrong. Sobornost, I think is actually how you say it.
Bunny: I like Snorbnorsst better.
Oren: Snorbnorsst perhaps not the correct pronunciation, but I think the true one, we can all agree.
Chris: Agreed. There’s this one book. The prose is just disorienting all the way through. It’s beautiful, though. So I can understand how the book got published, because there’s so much beautiful prose, but very hard to understand prose. It’s called The Marvelers. I think it’s a middle-grade magic school book. A lot of times when you describe something, you want to describe the big picture and then get into details. But for instance, she’ll just skip the big picture and just start giving you a bunch of details. Get the puzzle pieces and now you’re trying to assemble them into a puzzle and figure out what the picture is.
Oren: That was the book that I bought for Chris, because I tried listening to it and I could not visualize anything. Am I doing something wrong? Why can’t I visualize any of it? There’s all these details. Then I showed it to Chris and she explained.
Chris: A lot of things referred to in passing or implied or hinted instead of stated outright just adds up to the point where it’s almost like you can’t clearly see anything. And it’s exhausting to read because your brain has to do so much work. Again, as I said, a lot of the prose really is very lovely. So hopefully this writer will just get that clarity figured out.
Bunny: I wonder if that came from poetry. I wonder if that person was a poet.
Chris: I don’t know, but this is the kind of pretty wordcraft that I tend to teach people. I don’t think there’s anything unique to poetry in the way that it’s pretty.
Bunny: That’s fair. I do feel like I’ve seen, doing workshops in class and stuff, people who are normally poets, I think sometimes struggle to unlearn the more… “abstract” is the wrong word, because I don’t want you to be too abstract in poetry. But that style of writing, there’s information that you need to convey a bit more clearly here. It’s not so much open to interpretation on the wordcraft level when you’re telling a story.
Oren: “Ephemeral,” perhaps, is the word.
Bunny: Ah, indeed, “ephemeral.”
Oren: That can work a lot better in poetry than in a novel because the novel is still there after I read the opening paragraph. I still need to continue. I’m not just done reading it.
Chris: With poetry, it makes a lot more sense for the reader to spend more brainpower on fewer words because it’s real short. The creative expression, and sometimes over clarity, is usually what people expect from poetry. But when you have to read an entire novel, that really adds up if it’s not clear.
Bunny: Especially in a middle-grade novel. I feel like I had a much shorter attention span then.
Chris: That would be hard. When it comes to terms for your world, again, a lot of times people have terms to use. If you just delay a little bit and call something “the protagonist’s home village” instead of naming the home village. Call a person “the protagonist’s sister” instead of naming the sister. If you can just delay so that you’re pacing out your introduction of words, then that’s really helpful. Try not to use multiple terms for the same thing!
Bunny: Please!
Chris: If you’re going to use a nickname, try to do it carefully. Do it close to where the name is, especially if it’s just not an intuitive nickname. In fact, if it’s not an intuitive nickname, if it’s a nickname based on somebody’s last name, maybe just introduce their nickname and clarify what their full legal name is later. Or switching between first and last name for a character is definitely something you want to avoid.
Oren: English has too many names. I want fewer names. I want everyone to have only a single name.
Bunny: What if they also had an epithet, though?
Chris: It’s repetitive if we always use the same name for a character. We’ve got to be creative. We’re flipping the thesaurus. Use as many terms for characters as we can.
Bunny: Look, if you’re not talking about the soul-rendered Elliptar, I don’t know what you’re doing.
Chris: When you do put in a new term, you can put in exposition if it’s really important. But if you take the time and be like, “The city of Marca is the big trading hub on the coast,” you’re also asking the reader to just pause and remember that city. Worth it if you need to know what Marca is, or you’re not going to understand anything else. But otherwise, mostly what people need is just like, is this an animal or a vegetable? Is it like a type of spell? Is it a city? Is it a humanoid species? So, “They set out for Marca, hoping to reach the city’s markets by the following month.” You’ve inserted some words indicating that Marca is a city. Usually in the beginning, as much as they need to know. Although if you have the relationship, “This is the enemy city,” or something that indicates it’s relevant to the story or the character, that is also a really helpful thing to include when you introduce a new term.
Oren: Something you can hang a bit of drama on. I’ve definitely found that the starter conflict, I call it, is a good tool to use here. There are some situations in which the protagonist is just interacting with a bunch of weird stuff that is going to be really hard to explain all at once, in medias res or not. Like if your protagonist is commanding a space fleet in the middle of a complicated sci-fi battle, or even just getting ready for one, that’s going to be a lot. And I’m not saying you couldn’t make it work, but you might be able to make it a little easier if you first introduced your captain having to take a call from an admiral they don’t like, who’s going to give them some orders that are bad. So you have a little bit of a starting conflict, as opposed to like, “And here I have to introduce all the bridge characters, and this complicated sensor system that we use, and how the weapons work.” That’s a lot. That’s just maybe a little too much.
Chris: Your characters should definitely split up to cover more ground in your opening. No council meetings for opening scene. Please no. Don’t do it. That’s a hint towards a particular property.
Oren: At the meeting of Congress, there are 500 representatives, and you’re going to learn all of their names.
Bunny: There’s a book called Antigua, the Land of Fairies, Wizards, and Heroes, I think, that one of the other podcasts I listen to did. And mind you, this is not a good book, nor one that is by any means well known. The thing that’s significant about it, among many others, is that it has 200-something named characters.
Chris: Wow.
Bunny: Someone did the math on it. It was something like 80 characters per 100 words. Or, sorry, per 100 pages.
Chris: 100 words, what? So all of the words were just names. Just a list of names.
Bunny: For reference, I think Game of Thrones, or something, had 30 characters per 100 pages. Which is a lot.
Chris: I made fun of Malazan for having 90 characters in his Dramatis Personae, which is, I think, too much.
Bunny: Less than 200. And a lot of these characters were just mentioned, or you get a scene with them and never come back.
Chris: It’s very inefficient.
Bunny: A different book from the same podcast, a podcast of 372 pages, will never get back. And this was the third or fourth book they did. It’s called The Forensic Certified Public Accountant and the Cremated 64-Squares Financial Statements.
Chris: Ugh.
Oren: Someone’s doing a lot of work on that title.
Bunny: Every character in it has not only their first and last name, plus their list of certifications, but they say it every single time they say someone’s name. The main character, every time he refers to himself, says, “I, Titus Uno, Certified Public Accountant, Forensic Certified Public Accountant, Chartered Global Management Accountant,” and then says what the rest of the sentence is supposed to say.
Oren: That’s weirdly specific. Are we sure this isn’t a troll?
Bunny: Can’t be sure, but again, this is one of those super-obscure books. And there’s also multiple of them. I don’t know. It’s impossible to tell.
Oren: Having too many characters? That is something that is very easy to see coming up. Giving your characters too many different names that audiences need to remember? Also very common. Stating their credentials every time? Very specific.
Chris: Never heard of that.
Bunny: The host of the podcast just resorted, when they were reading through the books, they just had to go, “I, Titus Uno, etc., etc.”
Chris: A few other things that cause issues, real quick: Metaphors. It’s not that you can’t use metaphors in the opening, if they’re clear or if your opening is fairly simple, so it doesn’t have a lot of stuff going on. But again, a metaphor is something that people just have to take an extra bit of processing power. If your opening already has a lot going on, that can be an issue. Long sentences: Again, long sentences can be great, but in a lot of long sentences, the construction makes it so that people have to hold all of the ideas of the sentence in their head until they reach the end, and then assemble them together. Then it’s dependent on how the sentence is constructed, but a lot more can go wrong, so just shortening sentences can make things a lot easier to understand in certain situations. Abrupt changes to the narration: That is a big problem.
Oren: Do you mean changes in narrative premise or changing from first to third person?
Chris: Sometimes it’s just going from a regular narration to a thought immediately in your first sentences. Sometimes, people put little weird snippets before their narration starts. Thoughts is one of them. Thoughts that aren’t marked. It only goes from person to first person. Or something like that. Or changes tense. Or anything that changes how the narration works.
Oren: The novel Middlegame had an odd example of that. This might have been more clear in the print novel or the ebook version, but when you were listening to it, each chapter starts with an excerpt from an in-universe fictional book. That book exists, incidentally. Seanan McGuire, the author, just went and wrote it and published it, so you can read that if you want. But at the time, that book didn’t exist. It was a purely fictional novel. Each chapter of the novel Middlegame would start with an excerpt from it. The first couple times that happened, I didn’t realize that those were excerpts. I thought that’s just where we were. We were just in this story. And suddenly it would start talking about someone else, and I had just no idea what was going on.
Chris: Audiobooks can be an issue because sometimes Audible just doesn’t include chapter headings or episode headings or other things like that. “Wait, am I in a new chapter or a new episode of this audiobook? What is happening?” Starting with dialogue can work, but because people are usually in the middle of a conversation, again, it’s just more likely to be disorienting. I’ve seen dialogue openings that were fine, but it’s a little bit harder for people to catch on mid-conversation. Some works start with exposition, and that may sound bad, but exposition gives us a lot of freedom, and sometimes it can be used really well. You can have a really engaging voice with exposition, you can bring in really interesting information with exposition, and sometimes that will make the best opening paragraph. But that freedom that exposition offers means it’s also very easy to pack in a lot of stuff in a small space. Easier than it would be if you were just narrating action that’s happening, or a description, or something like that. So that’s another place where you have to be a little bit more careful.
Oren: Okay, with that, I think we will call this episode to a close.
Chris: If we helped reduce confusion about confusion, you can support us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com slash mythcreants.
Oren: Before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Callie McLeod. Then there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
[closing music]This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.
It’s all very well to talk about stories not needing grimdark dilemmas and gory violence, but how does that actually work? How can you make a story that’s light and optimistic without also making it boring as paste? That’s our topic for today, and the answer depends heavily on the difference between low tension and no tension. Plus, a surprising demonstration of why “eria” only really works as a suffix for “pizza.”
Show Notes Strange New Worlds * The Orville * Lower Decks * The Dark Ending of Game of Thrones * Legends and Lattes * The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet * The Mimicking of Known Success * The Devil Wears Prada * The Kaiju Preservation Society * Gravity Falls * Unpacking * Lake * Wayward Strand * Papa’s Pizzeria * Starter Villain * Pacific Edge * Netflix Creepy Theme Park Show TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Leen* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast with your hosts, Orin Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[Opening Theme]
Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren. With me today is…
Bunny: Bunny!
Oren: And…
Chris: Chris!
Oren: And I have good news, everyone. We can finally declare victory [proud].
Bunny: Oh. Over what? Sounds exciting.
Oren: See, back in 2017… We recorded a podcast about light stories, and, at the time, we were complaining about how Hollywood especially, but not just Hollywood, was obsessed with dark stories. And it felt like everything was dark, and we were using dark as a synonym for good “Look how dark it is” “it’s so dark!”
And that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. I feel like we finally won!
Chris: Did we thouuugh? There’s still an awful lot of those stories.
Oren: Don’t get me wrong, there will always be grimdark nonsense. That will always happen, but I don’t feel oppressed by it anymore.
Chris & Bunny: [laughter]
Oren: That’s maybe a strong word to describe how I felt.
Chris: Strange New Worlds. I think it would be one victory in that area, because ‘Star Trek’ was pulling dark, and everybody was like “whyy? This is not what we want”.
People were watching ‘The Orville’ instead [laughter] because it was lighter.
Bunny: [laughter]
Chris: And I know ‘The Orville’ gets better, but hmm… [laughter] But now we have ‘Strange New Worlds’, and also a comedy, ‘The Lower Decks’. At least that franchise learned its lesson a little bit, so I think we can declare a victory there.
Bunny: Unfortunately, Hollywood also took dark too literally for a while there, and you just couldn’t see anything that was happening in movies.
Oren: Rude to attack ‘Game of Thrones’ personally like that
[laughter]
Bunny: I regret nothing [laughter]
Oren: It’s not that there isn’t anything out there that’s just “empty edginess” for the sake of it. ‘Picard’ still exists, and that was pretty recent, but I feel like I don’t have to constantly be like “alright, is this going to be another story where everything’s dark and a bunch of puppies die to show nothing?”
That just doesn’t feel like that’s constantly happening anymore, and instead, very anecdotally, mind you, I’m now seeing the edgelords who are mad because ‘Legends and Lattes’ is popular.
Chris: Oh no! Like, one story, come on!
Oren: The shoe is on the other foot now! [laughter] Uno reversed on ya!
Bunny: I will say the annoying thing is all of the ‘Legends and Lattes’ copycats, but the existence of ‘Legends and Lattes’ as an epistemic threat to your enjoyment of dark stories? That, I can’t get behind.
Oren: I’m also very confused by the concept of the ‘Legends and Lattes’ prequel.
Bunny: Okay, I’m so confused by that. Literally, I have it in my notes here. Like, what’s up with that?
Oren: Because that exists, I don’t get it. I haven’t read it, so maybe it’s special, somehow, but that doesn’t seem like a story that would bear a prequel, because the whole point of that story is the protagonist putting aside her life of adventure to do something she’s never done before, which is to run a coffee shop and have friends and do cozy fantasy.
So are we now finding out she’s actually done that before? Is that what’s happening?
Bunny: Is the premise like “she sprained her ankle” or something? And now she has to work in a bookshop?
Oren: Yeah, it’s just to hang out while she’s healing.
Bunny: But in the end, she’s going to go back to fighting again. I think that’s the problem. I think you could have a cutesy story about her summer working at a bookshop, that was fun. But yeah, she’s going to have to leave the bookshop. I don’t think people are going to like that very much.
Oren: Yeah, it just seems like a weird concept.
Bunny: They should definitely do a sequel. This is not something where the prequel has a lot of benefits.
Chris: Or, actually, I would go with a spin-off because I think once you establish the cute coffee shop and all the characters are working there you don’t really want “oh no, a sequel, the coffee shop is in danger”, you can only really set up the coffee shop once,
but if you have a spin-off, what you can do is take a character from the first book and be like “I’m gonna start a bakery”, magic baking rat can start a bakery or something like that, in the same city and have the other characters pop in or whatever.
Bunny: Or the orc goes on to start a corporate coffee chain.
Chris & Oren: No [laughter].
Oren: We’re doing light stories, Bunny, Light Stories.
[laughter]Bunny: “and she basked in her millions”, so happy.
Chris: What is a light story? please tell me I didn’t just make up this term but other people are also using this term.
Bunny: When you look up light stories, Mythcreants is the fourth search result.
Oren: It’s the third for me.
Chris: Oh nooo, that means it’s not a competitive search term, I didn’t think I made up this term! it’s obvious there’s dark stories so ‘light stories’.
Bunny: It makes sense but I feel like what we consider ‘light’ is covered by cozy in most contexts.
Chris: See, I’d only ever heard cozy in the mystery context in which it meant something veery specific, not just light.
Oren: Yeah the two are often used interchangeably at this point, cozy is a specific sub-genre of mysteries, but nowadays people use it to describe any story that is light.
I’ve seen other places use the term ‘light stories’ because it’s such an obvious one, because it’s the opposite of a dark story which is the thing everyone talks about, but it’s definitely not as widespread as you would think.
Chris: It’s so strange, the idea that people wouldn’t have a term for something that is the opposite of a dark story.
Bunny: When you look it up there’s wedding photography, a Wattpad tag, Mythcreants, and then a story called ‘a story of light and darkness’, a story about light in the dark.
Oren: Maybe this is why hope punk caught on, it’s because people didn’t know there was already a term for that kind of story.
Bunny: What is lighting in a story
Oren: [Grinning]
Bunny: What is narrative lighting
Chris: This is still blowing my mind. How can people not have a word for that? it does explain a lot though;
things like ‘The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet’ where people kept calling it “character-driven” and it’s not, it’s just light, but if you don’t have a word for light to indicate a lighter tone of story…
Oren: Okay but look, character-driven is also a euphemism for not having a good plot.
Bunny: [laughter]
Oren: It’s not just that they use it for light stories, it tends to get wrapped up in those somehow.
Chris: Sure, but if you’re looking for stories that aren’t so high in tension, a broken plot is one way to get there.
Oren: That’s true. If there’s no plot, it’s harder to have tension.
Chris: and now, again, I don’t recommend that because then you’re also missing out on satisfaction, and just a little bit of tension goes a long way,
which I’m not sure there’s that many people out there who really hate even this tiniest because they wouldn’t even be watching like… cartoons like an ‘Amphibia’ at that point anymore.
Bunny: Are you telling me it’s more complicated than “choosing where to hang fixtures as well as what fixtures, gel colors, gobo patterns, and angles of light to use”
Oren & Chris: [laughter]
Bunny: That’s storytelling through lighting, Chris.
Chris: noo [laughter]
Bunny: You’re welcome, “dramatics.org”, for the free marketing.
Chris: [laughter]
Chris: Man…but that does explain a lot of the weird discourse if people just don’t have a term for light stories.
Oren: or at least one that hasn’t been codified to the extent that other genre terms have.
Chris: so when we talk about light, we mean ‘lower tension’ but not ‘no tension’, just lower tension.
A lot of people who prefer lighter stories are usually more sensitive to tension and more easily stressed out by it and so they don’t like lots of tension, just less of the the grim’s dark stuff; the graphic violence or body horror and things that are overtly unpleasant or shocking, for instance.
Oren: and of course there’s gonna be a spectrum~ because some people are gonna say ‘The Lord of the Rings’ is a light story, I wouldn’t call it that personally. It’s lighter than ‘Game of Thrones’ but I wouldn’t call it ‘light’.
I think if you called ‘Lord of the Rings’ a light story and someone picked it up, they would probably be disappointed, that’s probably not what they were looking for.
Bunny: I was trying to figure out the difference between cozy and light, and if I had to separate them I’d say that cozy is more of an aesthetic, while light is more of a plot structure or the amount of angsts there are in something.
So the example I was thinking of was whether ‘The Mimicking of Known Successes’ is light or is it cozy. According to the dust jacket it’s cozy but also one of the reviews calls it as much hard science-fiction as it is gritty xeno biological noir, and I don’t think that’s right.
Oren: there are some noir bits in it, like the part where the detective at the first chapter is observing everyone, and “that’s a grody bartender who sees everything” and “this is a platform where no one will miss a stranger”. That’s a little noir
Bunny: that’s not gritty
Oren: no I wouldn’t call it gritty by any means, if that’s cozy then I don’t know what cozy is.
My image of cozy is like a little old lady solving a murder or a crime of some kind without ever really being in danger. That’s what I thought cozy meant.
And ‘The Mimicking of Known Successes’ is definitely not that. It’s not super high tension, but it’s higher tension than anything I would have considered calling cozy. I don’t even know if I would have called it light, to be honest.
Bunny: Then again, there’s a lot of sitting around, talking to people, and eating scones.
Oren: There is that. They do talk and eat scones a lot, fairness.
Chris: But I do think that light stories are more likely to have some things that are designed to replace the tension and provide another form of engagement, like wish fulfillment.
This is a big thing in Legends and Lattes, right? Because there’s a whole wish fulfillment of starting your own coffee shop, and we don’t get any of the really hard parts of starting a coffee shop, only the fun parts. And we meet exactly the right people and, “hey, look at this cool place”.
And I don’t think that’s as strong as engagement factor as tension is necessarily, but it definitely is a good supplement and often appears in light stories because it works best when it’s very idyllic.
Oren: Light stories are typically leaning more on novelty and attachment as far as angsts go and are also using wish fulfillment as a supplement, as it were.
Chris: More likely to be comedies, more likely to focus on internal arcs, right? Small personal arcs, stuff like that.
Bunny: Here’s a question. Do you think it’s easier for a book to be light than a movie? I tried to look up light movies and again, because the term, probably a big part of this is because the term is not that common, but I got ‘The Devil Wears Prada’, which I wouldn’t call that a light movie.
Chris: I think that it’s easier if the story is shorter and or uses smaller arcs. I think that, in some ways, it’s a little challenging for a novel than for a movie.
There are plenty of family movies that are a little bit more challenging for instance, are quite light because kids, we don’t usually give kids dark stories. So, there are actually lots of light movies out there.
Oren: Or they’re dark in weird secret ways that kids don’t notice. That’s the other way of doing that.
Chris: But one thing that you’ll notice for TV shows is that light TV shows are often shorter. They have a shorter runtime than darker TV shows. For instance, a typical sitcom is 30 minutes long, whereas a darker show is usually going to take an hour time slot.
Oren: Yeah, most light TV shows or movies I can think of are family shows, kids shows, or comedies. I cannot think of a movie or TV show equivalent of ‘The Kaiju Preservation Society’, for example. I’m not going to say there isn’t one, but nothing comes to mind.
Because ‘The Kaiju Preservation Society’ by Scalzi isn’t a comedy, but it’s very light. It focuses really heavily on novelty and wish fulfillment and attachment to a lesser extent. Hey, you get to go work at a science station that studies Kaiju. That’s fun. And then you just do that for a while.
I cannot think of a filmed equivalent of that. The closest would be, I don’t know, something like “Gravity Falls”, which has a lot more direct conflict and threat. It’s just the tension is low because it’s much more comedic.
Chris: There’s also, for instance, some 10-minute TV shows and cartoons. Again, they tend to be very light.
I think the issue is that the bigger the arc is, your story’s arc, the more you need tension to go up or escalate, usually. And that kind of limits your ability to keep the story light and keep it engaging over time.
But if you have more short arcs, more like episodes, episodic structure, I think that gives the ability to change things up more. Which is another way to compensate for not escalating the tension.
So, if you have a lot of variety, again, then you have more novelty, and you don’t have as much time for anything to get old before you conclude that little arc or that episode and then move on to the next one, and then you’re doing a different thing. And that’s a way to keep it engaging without continuing to make the situation more and more dire and bigger fights and leading up to a climax.
Bunny: I did think it’s interesting because there’s a lot of video games that I might describe as pretty light. And the exact mechanics wouldn’t directly transfer over to stories. You couldn’t really tell a story. That’s all about unpacking boxes. Even though that’s the premise of unpacking and it’s delightful.
But there are, like, very light, not-action-heavy story games that are mostly about talking to people. There’s one called ‘Lake’ where you’re just delivering mail, mostly, and talking to the residents of a small town. And the protagonist has come back to fill in for her father, the mail care. And it’s just, you walk around, you drive the mail truck. It’s great. And then I know I’ve mentioned Wayward Strand. And I think a lot of farming sims also probably have that.
Oren: The relaxing aspect. Those also often have a heavy dose of wish fulfillment. Right? And papers have been written about the fact that owning a home is wish fulfillment now. That’s a whole thing.
Bunny: I guess unpacking is wish fulfillment then.
Chris: And for a video game where you have an interactive element and you get to make everything just the way you like it, I think that has extra synergy with wish fulfillment; not only do you have your coffee shop, but you get to decide how your coffee shop’s interior is designed, for instance. Or what you put on your menu, or that kind of thing.
Bunny: I guess that explains the success of the Papa’s whatever-eria. There’s like so many of those.
Oren: This is a video game franchise?
Bunny: Yeah, it was started with Papa’s Pizzeria, I think.
Oren: I have never heard of this. Perhaps I am too elderly. This is beyond my time [laughter]
Bunny: There’s Papa’s games. There’s Papa’s… Oh my god, there’s so many of these. Papa’s Sushi-eria? Papa’s Scoop-eria?
Oren: Yeah, why not?
Bunny: Papa’s Cheese-eria?
[laughter]Bunny: Papa’s Cluck-eria? Sorry.
Oren: I have concerns [laughter].
Chris: But yeah, Kaiju Preservation Society. If we’re looking at novel, right? And we want something that’s light, but novel length, which is actually pretty long for stories.
Obviously, the Kaiju Preservation Society has a setup where the protagonist goes into a completely new place that has really high novelty. We’ve got the Kaiju, right? And we cross into a new Kaiju world.
And it’s so entertaining to learn about that Kaiju world and how the Kaiju Preservation Society works for a while that we don’t really need that much tension. We need to have tension come back in as that novelty, when that entertainment factor of the Kaiju starts to wear off. But we don’t need it immediately. So that’s one way.
Again, having something that’s a little more episodic and can also help with the novelty factors. ‘The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet’ or ‘Voyage of the Dawn Treader’ are both examples of travel stories where we have little episodes and the characters go and visit different places, and we can just enjoy the new place for a little while as we have just a small arc. So it doesn’t have to be super high tension, and then we move along to the next new novel place with our next new little arc.
And that’s another way that helps keep it up for a novel length story.
Oren: Yeah. And I do think ‘The Kaiju Preservation Society’ has it’s a big advantage in the fact that even though the early chapters are not especially high tension because we’re exploring the space and seeing how these things work. There’s a little bit… There’s a baseline of tension because we are on Kaiju Planet. So there’s a little tension. It’s not a ton, but there’s an understanding that potentially something could happen.
As opposed to Scalzy’s more recent story, which is called ‘Starter Villain’, and some spoilers for ‘Starter Villain’ if you haven’t seen it, which is very similar; they have similar premises, except this time the relatable normie is whisked off to a James Bond villain subgenre instead of a Kaiju subgenre.
The problem with this one is that it seems like there should be high tension because there are all these villains who want the protagonist dead. But then that tension is completely diffused because both the protagonist and his hyper competent assistants are like “we don’t have to worry about those guys, they suck. They’re all just a bunch of Sam Bankman freed types. They can’t actually do anything.”
[laughter]Oren: Now there’s ZERO tension and that’s too low. You dispel too much of it. You got to amp it back up a little bit.
Chris: There’s a huge difference between zero tension and just a little bit of tension, Right? Especially if you have good pacing.
Again, in ‘Legends and Lattes’, which is mostly a wish fulfilment story about making a cool coffee shop, but they always have their problems that they’re solving; We’ve got to find the right place to have it. We’ve got to find a way to fund it and make it cut a good deal. We’ve got to attract the right people. We’ve got to, how do we educate our customers about what coffee is, when they don’t know what coffee is?
Bunny: You need to find new things to bake.
Chris: So every time they do things, they tackle a little business challenge, Right? But it doesn’t take them long to overcome it, this keeps the story moving. Each challenge doesn’t have to be that hard. We move on to the next one. And as we complete a challenge, we get to add a cool new thing to our coffee shop.
Oren: It also has the ever present, but not super, urgent threat of the Madrigal, who is the city mobster who wants protection money that the protagonist, or Viv is her name, right? Has decided that she’s not going to pay. And that’s, it’s a little way off. So it’s not like we have to deal with it right now, but it just helps. It produces a little bit of tension.
Now, the resolution to that arc, I would argue is not very good, but before then, I think it was very effective.
Bunny: I’m curious how you would have ended that arc to continue. If you were able to do a write over of it. How would you have ended it while maintaining the lightness?
Oren: That is a difficult question. If I was doing a content edit on ‘Legends and Lattes’, I would probably recommend some kind of, I think you might be able to get away with either the protagonist is able to convince the mobster to back off, or maybe finds out that the mobster is not as evil as she thought.
Chris: We could have a situation where the city government is not providing necessary social support, so the mobster is actually doing it instead.
But I think I would actually go with something that has a little bit more community building to it, because the community adds some of the emotional warmth that is often present of these stories and people like. So if Viv made more connections to other shops in her area and everybody liked the coffee shop, and when the coffee shop was threatened by the mobster, everybody banded together and said “well, no, we’re not paying you mobster anymore”.
Because a protection racket like that does depend on keeping everybody afraid because it’s unlikely the mobster can fight the entire city. So there is an element of threatening people in isolation and making example out of somebody. That kind of thing. And it’s if you build a collective action [laughter] I think could be a good way to solve a problem like this.
Oren: Yeah, that’s a good idea.
Bunny: I think that would be a good solution. I don’t have as much problem with the way it ended. As I know you two did. I felt okay about the community coming together like that, but that could have been a good way to bolster that.
Oren: Yeah, if Viv had gathered the community to make them not have to pay protection money anymore, I would definitely feel better about them than returning the favor by helping her rebuild her coffee shop after it gets burned down by her angry ex-coworker. We could have fed two birds with one hand. That solution.
Chris: So we’re talking about what is a good premise? because again, if you’re going to be a light on tension, you want to supplement that with other things. And some premises are going to make that much easier for you than others. Choosing good premise helps you with that novelty and wish fulfillment and that kind of thing.
Oren: Yeah. So I think a good starting place would be to think about your protagonist who wants to do something that is both cool and new and also is a thing that lots of real people want to do, and at the same time has some kind of time limit, not like a super immediate one, but some kind of thing that will be bad if they don’t do the thing.
Chris: We still need some kind of stakes in there. They just don’t have to be as high.
Oren: You can do, for example, you could have a dryad who’s doing wilderness restoration, because dryads are cool, lots of fun plant magic and real life, and people really want wilderness to be restored. That’s a really important thing that not only should we be doing, but that we love to see in fiction.
So you’ve got your novelty and your wishful element right there. Now you would have to do some more focused in work to build attachment, then that gives you a good premise and then you create some kind of thing that’s going to happen if the dryad doesn’t succeed at their wilderness restoration project; like maybe the spirit, the local nature spirit that is the amalgamation of “the environment will not be able to recover if the dryad doesn’t get the thing done quickly enough”.
Chris: Or the dryad has to convince the local government of the value of this place, or they will instead do something bad to it, develop it or in ways that are bad for the environment or something like that.
Oren: Then you can build in fun child arcs because you’re going to need to get in new soil and you’re going to need to get plant seeds and make sure everything is set in the proper ratios and you’re going to need the right animals and you’re going to need to negotiate for land usage, which I’m sure could be fun for some people. You weirdos.
[laughter]Bunny: What’s that one story that’s all about a guy saving a hill or he like really likes the hill?
Oren: Oh, that God,
Chris: I don’t think we’d necessarily recommend that one.
[laughter]Oren: Yeah, that’s ‘Pacific Edge’.
Chris: It’s no ‘Legends and Lattes’.
Oren: Yeah. Gosh, I don’t like that book. There’s a lot of reasons I don’t like that book. One of the reasons I don’t like that book is that it is interspersed with chapters that appear to just be the author talking to you, until eventually you realize these are actually the backstory chapters of a side character. And God, was that not worth that?
Bunny: If I wanted an essay, I’d go on JSTOR.
Oren: I can read essays on the Internet. I don’t want I didn’t pick up this novel to read an essay. It continues Kim Stanley Robinson’s weird obsession with Switzerland. It’s just a thing. He really likes Switzerland. But that story in the main plot is, the only conflict is that some guy wants to build something on a hill. And the protagonist kind of likes that hill because I think he took his girlfriend there to make out at some point. And that’s it. That’s the thing. It’s nothing else. It’s not an important habitat, it’s not part of some nature reserve, it’s not a beloved community spot; it’s just a hill he likes.
[laughter]Chris: Oh, boy.
Oren: It’s nothing. And by the end, the guy is going so out of his way that I ended up cheering for the villain. Man, let the guy make a store. Maybe the community would like having a store.
[laughter]Bunny: But is it light?
Oren: It’s boring, so…
[laughter]Chris: again, people who are sensitive to tension and don’t like too much tension often seek out stories like this where there’s just not really a working plot at all, because they don’t know how to find the works that they actually want otherwise. And so they prefer broken plots.
I will say other than just creating something for novelty and humor, you can also use a subversive premise where you take something that’s normal, dark and just give it a really light twist.
For instance, maybe your story is about a demon who’s really lonely and tries to make friends with everyone who summons them, but the summoners just want the demon to do magic and exchange for favors and makes the demon feel so used, so they choose favors that they hope will get the summoners to like them and try to make friends.
[laughter]Bunny: I think you need to write this.
Chris: You took something dark and then you make it warm and fuzzy, and there’s novelty and humor at that junction.
Bunny: I think that is, to maybe a lesser extent, what a lot of children’s stories do where there’s a bear, but it’s very cuddly and it lives out in the forest, but you just pick berries with it and stuff like that.
Chris: Children’s stories are almost always light, right? It’s just people tend to underestimate the demand among adults for light stories, and that those stories shouldn’t only be for children.
Oren: There’s a lot of children’s cartoons that are like “what if there was this creepy thing, but actually it was fun”.
There was ‘Gravity Falls’, and there was this show on, I think it’s Netflix, that is about a theme park that’s a spooky theme park, except it’s not really that spooky. “What if a creepy theme park was fun”, is the premise.
Bunny: I’m sold.
Oren: Yeah, it’s a cool concept. I think that’s a very useful technique. Not every light story has to be about building something, it’s just a popular concept right now, and there’s a lot more variety than all of the ‘Legends and Lattes’ clones might lead you to believe.
You don’t have to do exactly what ‘Legends and Lattes’ did. People like all sorts of building cool stuff.
Bunny: The clones annoy me so much; can you not think of anything other than… even the titles sound the same.
Chris: Some of that is because in marketing, people are trying to signal to readers that this book is like that other book to attract the right readership. That they have an incentive to be like “hey, you like ‘Legends and Lattes’, so you should read this book” and “if I make my book look as much like ‘Legends and Lattes’ as possible, then they’ll know my book is similar”.
It’s a way of trying to make the type of book fit the audience and attract the right audience. So I can understand why people do what they need to do. It’s very competitive in marketing. At the same time, it is a little sad that, I think with the copycats, we understand so little about what makes a story successful that people feel a need to copy everything exactly.
Bunny: Yeah, there were sometimes some things that are more shameless than others. I’m remembering someone posted on the discord a terribly photoshopped, like literally exactly ‘Legends and Lattes’, but just stock photos that they’ve color shifted green, and awkwardly placed a few cups around.
Oren: What? That is a very new and original story, ‘Callings and Cappuccinos’.
[laughter]Bunny: Get lost in this cozy fantasy. Man, what are they going for?
Oren: You know, it’s really still weirding me out that there were no Cappuccinos in ‘Legends and Lattes’.
Bunny: There were no Mochas either.
Oren: There was a coffee shop, but it was clear that the author’s heart was really in the baked goods, the sensual description of chocolate croissants. I don’t know, maybe this should come with a warning label [laughter].
Chris: But yeah, I think whatever you choose, if we’re thinking of cozy as an aesthetic, thinking about those cozy aesthetics is also helpful.
Whether you want there to be like a cottagecore feel or a solar punk feel, or you want lots of tea parties [laughter] with dainties and everything, that kind of idyllic time where characters can get together and share some tea or what have you.
Bunny: Maybe, for example, you could have a castle by a waterfall with a pink and purple wall and a princess living there. Maybe she has a guitar, I’m just saying (referring to the podcast’s theme song).
[laughter]Oren: You can tell I’ve been doing this for too long. It took me a second to realize what you were referring to. It’s just, those words are just noise to me now.
[laughter]Oren: All right, well, with that, I think we are going to call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patreons. First, there’s Callie McLeod. Then there’s Ayman Jaber, he’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, there’s Kathy Ferguson, she’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
[Closing theme]Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme, ‘The Princess Who Saved Herself’ by Jonathan Coulton.
We’ve all read a book or watched a show that we could only describe as soooooooo slooooooow, but what makes a story feel that way? What choices take the plot from zooming along to a painful crawl? The answer is, naturally, a lot of things! This week, we’re exploring a few of them, from multiple POVs to red herrings, all in the name of making sure our stories keep moving and get us the delicious tension we crave.
Show Notes The Wheel of Time * The Witch King * Lord of the Rings * First Person Retelling * A Deadly Education * How to Pace Your Story * Understanding Conflict and Tension * Buffy the Vampire Slayer * Trese * The Art of Prophecy TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Elizabeth.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to The Mythcreant podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.
[opening theme plays]Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren.
Chris: And I’m Chris.
Oren: And I’ve written up the perfect opening bit. And it’s only two hours long! You can wait that long for a punchline, right? I promise it’s very good.
Chris: Oh, what about the deleted scenes from this opening bit? Can we add those in?
Oren: Oh yeah, absolutely, that will definitely bump the length up quite a bit. And anyone who doesn’t like those are not real fans.
Chris: Yeah, I mean, if it’s a serious opening bit, it should be at least three hours long.
Oren: No pausing for bathroom breaks. So today we’re talking about what makes a story slow. And it’s not just because we finished the Wheel of Time’s second season recently. But it’s not not because of that either. [laughter]
Chris: Slow is a generic term, but usually when we call something slow, the issue is either pacing or movement; we had a whole podcast on pacing and movement, but what it boils down to is it’s boring. [Chris laughs] But in any case, pacing is more, there’s no tension or excitement, and movement is like, it’s wasting time and not getting anywhere.
Oren: I’ve noticed that there are a couple of very different things that people will describe as being slow. And they look very different, but they contribute to a similar feeling. So there’s… The lack of movement, which you were talking about, and also sometimes lack of tension, although movement is the most common one, and this is where stuff happens but no major arcs are any closer to resolution.
And then there is the multiple plotlines, which also often gets the show or book described as slow. Even if each plotline has movement on its own, if you are constantly splitting your time amongst them and you have a bunch of them, your show feels slow, because you go through a whole episode and ten minutes of real time have elapsed, because you keep cutting back and forth between everybody.
Chris: In each arc, because you’re only getting a few minutes for each arc in, like, the whole episode, they still feel like they’re slow, because for every episode you watch, each arc only moves a tiny bit because you just don’t have any time with them.
Oren: The most blatant example of this in the Wheel of Time second season is the episode where they, at the beginning, bring up that Nynaeve is gonna do a dangerous magic ritual to graduate to the next stage of magic apprentice. And it’s like, okay, that’s neat. Let’s do that. And then, a bunch of stuff happens in the episode, because we have to cut to all one million other characters who are all in different places doing their own thing. And by the time we get back to Nynaeve, it’s like, okay, Nynaeve, are you ready to do the thing? Come back next time.
Chris: Yep, that’s pretty irritating. We’re so sure that we would get to her magic test that episode. Nope. Nope. Multiple viewpoints is the movement killer.
Oren: I have to admit, I have developed some sympathy for this recently. Not that I think it’s good, but because I do a lot of roleplaying. I do a lot of Game Master, GM campaign running. And in those scenarios… A lot of the things that people like are that I’ll give the players a plot hook, there’s some weird, destroyed vegetation down by the lake, and we don’t know why people are doing that, you should go and investigate. They’ll be like, alright, I’m gonna go investigate, and then they stop somewhere to get some equipment, and I’ll mention a character, and they feel like that character’s doing something suspicious, so one of them’s like, I’m gonna go follow that character, and I’m like, alright, that’s where the character is going, so I’m gonna make that a storyline.
And it’s not like that can’t ever be a problem in roleplaying games – you don’t want to let someone go off on a ten day solo adventure that has nothing to do with the rest of the party – but you have so much more leeway in roleplaying games. And it’s hard to remember that you don’t have that when you come back to other mediums.
Chris: I do think a lot of times it is the result, and definitely in Wheel of Time, of having too many characters. We’ve talked about that a lot, where the author puts in too many characters, they don’t want to give any of their characters up, but they also have trouble finding things for all of their characters to do. And this is definitely something that Wheel of Time struggles with. The show writers are clearly struggling with it. And they’re trying to rework it and give the characters things to do when they didn’t really do anything in the books.
So to give them something to do, you start to split them up, because if you have the party together, it’s actually much harder to balance them and sort them apart from each other and give them all a role because there’s just too many of them. If you split them up and have it so that you just have two or three characters together, then you can all give those characters something to do in their storyline, ideally. And it’ll allow you to keep all these characters that you probably should be cutting from your story.
Oren: Yeah, again, I do that in roleplaying games. If I have a group of six people, I very often split them into three and three. Or sometimes three groups of two, because that is easier than trying to run one blob of six people. And in roleplaying games, people accept it because we want to hang out with our friends, and it would be really rude to give one person all of the spotlight time, but you just need to understand that other mediums don’t have that tolerance.
Chris: So besides Wheel of Time. Let’s start at a small scale, because all sorts of things will make a story slow. And so maybe we can talk about the wordcraft level a little bit.
Oren: Eh, but words are hard. I don’t do those. I’m not a word person, Chris. I don’t even see the words. I just look at a manuscript and I seeplot hole, character contrivance, setting issue.
Chris: Shall we plug you back into the narration matrix because ignorance is bliss?
Oren: It’s fine, I just want to eat my delicious, seriously flawed main plot and not have to worry about sentence structure.
Chris: Oh man, they did make that steak look really good in that scene.
Oren: It looked very tasty.
Chris: Even thinking about it makes me want steak. Okay, enough Matrix references. So obviously, if your wordcraft is too verbose, that’s gonna create a sense of slow, it’s gonna slow movement down, nothing can happen because there’s just too many words. And, obviously there’s some common culprits – exposition is notorious for being too much, and that varies from writer to writer. Some writers, yeah, just write mountains and mountains of exposition and there’s nothing happening. Some writers become too extreme on the other end of the spectrum because exposition is so notorious.
But usually if you have tons of exposition and there’s no action happening in real time, you really want to examine what you’re doing and if you have a lot of summary, a lot of time passing really quickly, It’s like, why isn’t there a scene? A real time scene happening, and if you need to change some of the logistics of the events so that you can do real time, you should do that. Other times, exposition is just, we don’t need to know all this. It’s too much.
Oren: We don’t need to know the heraldry and the family trees of every knight and noble who comes to help fight at Minas Tirith, Tolkien. Tolkien, pay attention. We don’t need to know that.
Chris: Related to exposition, often exposition is thoughts and there can be too much internalizing. I just listened to Martha Wells’ Witch King, and the narration was pretty good, but the main character does a lot of thinking in very time sensitive times [Chris laughs] where somebody will ask him a question and he does a whole bunch of thinking. It’s like, Are you going to respond to that person? And then eventually… Again, the wrong time for that.
But any block of the same kind of text for too long will make it feel slow. Dialogue dumps. If you have a character that is just filling in, this is basically a replacement for exposition. Character that’s just doing a whole lecture. It’s like, alright, maybe we should break that up, get somebody more involved in it instead of just saying it. You might need to show instead of tell again. Or excessive description. This is what Tolkien was known for. That and lots of songs. So many songs. The only book where songs are slowing the story down cause Tolkien just liked writing poetry.
Oren: Tolkien was ahead of his time on that one because in written form, songs, eh, but in audiobooks, the songs are great because they get the voice actor to do a little singing, and it’s nice. It’s like a little musical in the middle of your fantasy book.
Chris: Fair, I did read Lord of the Rings instead of listening to it. But yeah, I think the classic one with a high fantasy is like the characters enter a new city and then we have several paragraphs telling us exactly what the city looks like. Nobody can remember that, alright? You need to give your city some standout traits that make it memorable, and not try to just draw a map inside somebody’s head. That doesn’t work.
Oren: Yeah, but in defense of the writers everywhere, that is a very hard balance to strike. Man, I had so much trouble when my characters get to the big new city. I had beta reader comments that were like, I need more description, I can’t picture this city. And I also had beta reader comments that was like, there’s too much, I’m overwhelmed by this city. Which one is it? Is it a blank, empty void, or is it overwhelming? I, how could it be – I don’t know how to fix it if it’s both.
Chris: That’s tough. I think breaking it up into pieces and doing it periodically is just a lot better than doing it once. And part of it is, I think, when people can’t picture it, maybe what they are complaining about is whether or not you have enough detail that’s evocative. Because if you say something vague, it’s much harder to picture than if you say very specific details in the picture.
Oren: Then if I say vague things, they can’t pin me down on them later. If I’m specific, I’m opening myself up for someone to notice that my plot doesn’t make any sense.
Chris: If you just don’t tell them how many people are in all of your armies, then they can’t notice that you have weird discrepancies in the number of people throughout the novel.
Oren: Guilty as charged.
Chris: Oh, logistics are terrible, just being vague is better when you can get away with it. Unfortunately, we cannot always get away with it.
Oren: I definitely think that authors should need to apply for a permit if they want to use a first person retelling narrative. Because I love first person retelling, I think it has a lot of value, but man, some authors use it as an excuse to just go off on tangents because, technically speaking, unlike with an unfolding narration, a retelling narration can, theoretically, break the timeline as often as the author wants to, without the main character just sitting there thinking for two hours. Because this is the main character’s later, future self, thinking about all these things. But that doesn’t mean you should spend 19 pages describing how your magic school works in the first chapter.
Chris: Yeah, I was gonna say, did A Deadly Education hurt you, Oren?
Oren: A little bit. You could say it was… Deadly.
Chris: [pained] Oooh… Yeah, no. Retelling narrators, first person retelling narrators are notorious for being really long winded. Not that they always are, though. The Murderbot Diaries are also first person retelling. They’re fine. No pacing problems there. Sometimes the action is a little confusing, but being too long-winded is not one of their issues.
Oren: I think all books should just be Murderbot from now on. That’s my solution to this problem.
Everyone just write Murderbot.
Chris: Yeah. The other thing that can happen at the wordcraft level, if you end up filling in stuff, that just doesn’t matter, you gotta use your power to time skip when necessary. You don’t have characters come in and just make small talk about the weather before they get to the point, right? Or just little actions that don’t matter. You don’t have to have your character walk up to the door and knock on it and somebody answers. You could just skip to when they’re inside on their visit. So that’s just a habit thing in practice. You get used to trimming off those little unimportant bits and making that natural, but that’s another thing that can slow things down on a wordcraft level.
Oren: I had a really hard time in the epilogue of my current novel. I needed to describe the scene that they were in, and it was a new location because plotwise, there was no previous location they could go to for this epilogue to make sense. So I had to describe it and I just felt so conscious of every paragraph. I was like, this is so much description at the end of the book. And we’ll see. Hopefully it’s okay, because the main plot has already resolved itself and this is like the saying goodbye period.
Chris: And also, people can always just, if they get bored, they can put it down. Right? The story’s already resolved, they’re not missing anything.
Oren: That’s the hope, but oof, man, I felt every single line. This is so much description, I am asking so much of people at this point.
Chris: But the assumption is that we’re saying goodbye. It had a little bit different purpose. But yeah, at the upscale, we’ve got the scene level. Extra scenes. Good scene design, good scene selection: also very important for keeping readers entertained and keeping the story from feeling slow. This is one reason why I tell people who are outlining in some detail to just block out their scenes. You tell me what’s going to be a real-time scene ahead of time. Figure that out so that you don’t get into weird situations where you have, for logistical reasons, a whole bunch of scenes where people just talk to each other to make the plot work, but not because that’s exciting, or there’s anything interesting happening.
Oren: Yeah, it’s like, when you describe all these things, is this gonna happen in a scene, or is this just gonna be summary? That’s actually very useful for an editor to know, if you’re doing content editing on an outline, is to just know when this is a real time scene, and when it’s summary.
Chris: Yeah, because if it’s not blocked out, we have to guess, and that determines whether this section of your story is going to be too slow or not.
Oren: And if we guess wrong, that can really warp our perception of your story, right? And we try to correct – we ask questions, we try to get clarification – but if I get the really strong impression that this story is too slow because I thought that these were all going to be scenes, and in the author’s mind they were just some summary, that can color my judgment later, and it can make it harder for me to give good recommendations.
Chris: But yeah, of course, there are tons of stories where the author also just wants to squeeze in extra scenes where heroes introduce a couple of characters that I really like that I just made up, or here’s a scene just to advertise some of my world building that I worked so hard on.
Or repetitive scenes. That’s another big one. Again, this is another movement issue, is that things need to keep moving forward, right? If you have a character who is struggling with something, you don’t want to show three scenes of them struggling with that thing without anything changing. You want to use your scenes to show how things change. Something’s got to be different, or else it’s just going to feel repetitive.
Oren: Yeah, in terms of pacing, I generally recommend one high tension scene followed by one quiet scene. There are some reasons to break that pattern, but in general, if you have two low tension scenes, one after the other, something’s probably gone wrong.
Chris: Yeah, if you have two scenes, again, I think the important point is that you escalate and so the tension goes up every scene until you get to something that’s exciting, and then you can drop it again. So, what you don’t want is two scenes that are about equal in tension. You want the second scene to be higher in tension than the first on so that things are ramping up. And then once it gets exciting again – and what exciting is depends on your story. That’s one of the hard things, is this is all relative.
And that’s another thing that can make something slow is if you have a high tension arc, right? Something that’s really exciting, and that arc is not complete and it’s urgent, and then characters are like, okay, let’s react, relax, and go to the beach [laughter] people are just going to resent that beach scene, even though it might be a really cute interpersonal character moment, because it’s being drowned out by the higher tension arc that feels very urgent. It’s like, but there’s people dying over there. Why aren’t you helping them? Or people could die over there. Why are you at the beach when people are suffering right now?
Oren: You do not have time for a low key social event, right? You’re in the middle of a ticking clock. Stuff’s gonna happen.
Chris: And this is also partly why the filler episode problem becomes a problem, is that, especially now when all of these show writers are making much more serial short shows for streaming services than they used to, and they’re used to something like Buffy has 22 episodes per season, and we do have a big bad for the season, but there’s no urgency there. So we don’t really worry about – the villains there, but we know that we don’t have to take care of the villain now, so we can just have our little monster of the episode, and sometimes it doesn’t have to be that much tension per episode.
But then when you take something like the Mandalorian, and it’s only eight episodes, and now there’s a really urgent problem that always exists, in which bounty hunters are like, hunting down Baby Yoda. And you’re like, okay, we’re just gonna have a small scene where Mando tries to make some money. People start to resent that, and resent that that’s not part of the season arc, because we made the season arc feel overwhelming and urgent, as opposed to Buffy, where the season arc didn’t feel important for most of the season.
Oren: Yeah, it’s just a question of if you want a lot of these self contained episodic storylines, you need the throughline to not feel as urgent. That’s just the way it is. You ramp up to the throughline feeling urgent rather than establishing it in the first episode. If we’re talking about sort of the episode or maybe several scenes level, one thing that also makes stories feel slow is red herrings, because you have someone working on a plot or looking for a clue or whatever or fighting a bad guy, and you get there, and nothing happened. You fought those guys, and it didn’t matter. They got away, everything’s the same as it was. And even if that was an exciting action scene, it’s still gonna feel slow, because it didn’t bring the big conflict any closer to being resolved, one way or the other.
Chris: Or if you retroactively remove your character’s agency. So there’s nothing that they did mattered. It felt like the plot was moving forward, and then it’s like, oh, actually, none of that. You were just dinkering around.
Oren: That’s why we always recommend that with red herrings, it can be something other than what the protagonist thought it was, but it shouldn’t ever, or almost never, be just a complete dead end. They should still find something that moves the story forward, even if it’s not what they expected to find, or what they wanted to find.
Chris: And sometimes you can have them move the story forward by giving the villain a win. The protagonist chased a red herring they shouldn’t have and now, that gave the villain time to capture a side character. But that still moves the confrontation forward because now the protagonist has to go and rescue that character, bring them one closer to their final fight with the villain, for instance.
Oren: That’s the old, fun little dance where you need to both move the story closer to a conclusion, but also make it seem increasingly more difficult to resolve in the protagonist’s favor.
Chris: Yeah, the red herring should make a difference somehow. We don’t want to just realize, oh, that was all for nothing and we haven’t actually moved the story forward like we thought. That’s disappointing. What about at the throughline level? Oren, what have you seen?
Oren: Well, we were talking about multiple points of view earlier. You can also have too many plots with a single character. It’s rare, but it happens. This is, there’s an animated show. It’s from the Philippines. I believe it’s called Tress, or Trés [spelled Trese]. I believe that’s how they say it in the show. And that’s, I think, the main character’s name. And she has weird errands that she goes on. There’s an investigation that she’s working on, and then she gets called, and now she’s working on a different investigation. And that feels really slow. It’s like, hang on, what about the first one? We’re not moving, nope.
Chris: So rather than focusing on one investigation at a time, we do it in a more realistic manner where she’s got a whole plate load of investigations, but that means they all move very slowly.
Oren: And that’s actually one thing I was wondering about, Chris. Maybe you can solve this for me right now, podcast. Is there a way to do that correctly? Because it feels like that should be a thing you could do, of having a character who’s super overworked and having all these problems they need to solve that aren’t necessarily related to each other.
Chris: Honestly, I think the way that you would do that is make them secretly related to each other. And you can’t, it would still though be a problem if they all seem to be separate until the end. And only at the end when they come together, that’s still going to be a problem as long as they’re separate. We need that chain of causality, is what creates movement. And as long as all of them are on a separate chain of causality, we’re going to have that feeling of very slow movement.
I suppose it’s possible that the different investigations could affect each other somehow without having the same root cause. A lot of times what happens is the protagonist will investigate one thing and it turns out that one thing is the result of the other, the villain they are looking into, or something like that, so that they were always underneath related to each other. I suppose you might be able to have something where, for instance, the protagonist is investigating two different villains. As a result of those investigations, the villains come into contact with each other, start fighting or something, or start working together so that their presence in the protagonist’s life ends up linking them together so that they influence each other in some way. That would be interesting, but I think it’s less common.
Oren: Also at the throughline level, a big cause of a lack of movement is just not knowing what the throughline is, from either an authorial or a reader perspective. Because sometimes you have books that start off with what looks like a plot, and then they resolve that plot, and then you’re just left wondering, what is the story about now? And this is tricky because as the writer, you don’t want to just lean out from behind the page and be like, oh hey, the story’s about this now. You have to show that in character.
And an example that I always go to is the Art of Prophecy. It’s a novel I’ve talked about on the site a few times. It starts off with this kinda interesting premise of the protagonist being a wizened old mentor who has to train the hot shot young chosen one to face the bad guy. And it’s okay. That’s an interesting concept. But then the bad guy, spoilers, dies a few chapters into the book. He’s just randomly killed by some soldiers, and at that point the book stops knowing what it’s about, and we briefly have a storyline about trying to keep the Chosen One alive, because now all the political factions want to kill him. But then we resolve that pretty quickly, and so now we have the mentor is gonna go look at some records to see if maybe there’s any more plot material for this Chosen One to do. And the Chosen One is gonna hang out at a training hall for a while, have some kind of nebulous character arc.
Chris: Here’s the thing. I would say that your throughline ultimately is the biggest source of tension. Now, generally, we can set up an episodic story where there’s a lower, overarching sense of tension in episodes, but generally, especially in a novel, right? And I think that the mistake that writers make is they think of, this is my problem, but then they don’t think of what is actually generating the most tension, and usually, the easiest way to find that is with the stakes, because the stakes are generally the biggest part of what determines how high tension an arc is. So, what is the thing that is a big deal that is bad that could happen? What is creating that sense of threat? And find that, and then that has to be sustained.
And I think the mistake that people make is, their sense of tension is coming from the threat that, for instance, this chosen one the protagonist is training, will be killed by the villain, but then when the villain dies, the stakes are gone. The tension is gone, and then we can start up tension again, but now it feels like a different story then it was before. It feels like we’ve ended one story and we’re starting a new one.
We have to use, we want to use some kind of causality so that our earlier threat, if we want to kill off that villain, we almost need – I don’t want to say another villain behind that villain, because that can definitely get overplayed. But let’s say this villain turned out to come from a bunch of people who were very angry and they have been sending out multiple warriors and this villain was just one of them. So we’ve moved the root cause of that threat somewhere else. Then we can kill off that villain, but the threat is still there, and have the threat sustained all the way through.
Oren: Yeah, I could be wrong, but with that book it really feels like a big part of the problem is that the author wanted to subvert a trope that they really needed. And it’s hard for me to imagine, if that’s true, it’s hard to imagine what a solution would be, because the trope they wanted to subvert was, oh, you thought we were gonna fight the bad guy, and now they’re dead. And it’s like, sure, we could replace them with someone else, but then that’s not going to be subverting the trope the way this author wanted to.
And if that’s the case – I’m guessing, right? I don’t know what this author actually wanted, that’s just what I’m guessing from the text. If that’s the case, that would be really hard to fix. Because at that point the author would be trying to do something that is just sabotaging their own story. And that would be a tough one. If someone came to me with a project like that, and I haven’t had that specific one, but I have had a couple of clients who their core concept was a thing that was negatively affecting their story, and I can’t do anything about that.
Chris: [dramatically] At what cost?
Oren: Yeah, I’m not a miracle worker. Alright, with that, I think we have come to the end of our throughline. We’ve worked our way up from the small stuff all the way to the big stuff, although we started with the big stuff to make it a little more confusing. Maybe it’s gone in a circle.
Chris: If you’d like to keep us from getting too slow, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, we have Callie MacLeod. Then we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, there’s Kathy Ferguson, professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
[closing theme plays]Chris: This has been the Mythcreant podcast. Opening and closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Coulton.
The prophecy has spoken: We must now destroy the discourse and bring balance to the podcast. Whatever “balance” is supposed to mean. This week we’re talking about those special protagonists chosen by the gods, weird aliens, or an amorphous destiny. Such characters get a lot of well deserved criticism, but do they have any redeeming qualities? It’s time to find out!
Show Notes Ditch These Five Character Archetypes * Jen and Kira * Taran Wanderer * Benjamin Sisko * Garion * Rand al’Thor * Aragorn * Lirael * Buffy Summers * Avatar Aang * Emmet Brickowski * Jack Crusher * Steven Universe * Willow Ufgood * Elora Danan * Force Dyad TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Sofia.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.
[Intro Music]Chris: Welcome to The Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Chris.
Oren: And I’m Oren.
Chris: All witness the prophecy written in the stars! That one day a podcaster of no note will lead our world to victory against the silent scourge. Also, the prophecy specifies the podcaster will have a first name of Oren, a last name of Ashkenazi, and will be born in March.
Oren: Okay, well…
Chris: I think this is a sign that you are the chosen one, Oren. Let’s put you in charge of all the audio content in the world. I’m sure it’ll go fine.
Oren: But I have only ever done simple farming podcasts. A simple farm-pod-boy, as it were. Are you certain, Chris?
Chris: Maybe after we give you a mentor who will train you and give you a magical microphone.
Oren: Meanwhile, we’ll be like, there are a lot of other people around who probably could have benefited from that training a lot more, or were maybe just ready and didn’t need it. It’s fine. Don’t worry about that.
Chris: This time we’re talking about chosen ones. And that level of relevancy today, they can be surprisingly contentious.
Back in 2015, I talked about them in an article Ditch These Five Character Archetypes. And at the time I was complaining about how the trope was used to prop up characters that were otherwise irrelevant and hadn’t really earned anything.
The character that most qualifies in my mind is Jen in the original Dark Crystal.
Oren: Yeah!
Chris: It’s just, he’s raised as a last gelfling, but it turns out there is another last gelfling and she has to do everything for him.
He doesn’t know how to travel or get anywhere. He knows math, but that’s hardly important. There is one scene where he reads the prophecy and she can’t read. So that’s something. But other than that, she can talk to animals and she has wings and he doesn’t. And there’s just no reason that he has to complete the prophecy.
At one point he even throws their precious prophecy item, the crystal shard, away… [laughs]
Oren: Whoops!
Chris: … and then she has to go and find it for him.
Oren: Oh no!
Chris: So anyway, that was, I think, my main complaint.
However, since then I’ve seen enough just ridiculous anti-chosen one takes to back off on that to some degree.
Doesn’t mean that a typical chosen one is perfect and should just be used in the story as is. I mean, if you love it, go for it. You may get a few negative reactions. But at the same time, we’ve seen takes where it’s like all main characters qualify, so we shouldn’t have main characters anymore because they’re all chosen ones.
Oren: Yeah, what is a chosen one is a fascinating bit of sandwich discourse.
You have your obvious examples where there’s literally a prophecy and it literally is choosing someone because fate has arranged it. And then you have weirder ones where it’s not really a prophecy, but the character has unusual parentage or is the inheritor of a special power. And then you get people who are basically any protagonist with an unusual ability as a chosen one now. It’s like if they aren’t the most boring everyperson you can possibly think of, if they have any unusual background or history, chosen one.
Chris: Katniss is a chosen one.
Oren: Katniss is a chosen one.
Chris: I don’t still don’t understand. She has skills she earned herself through years of hard work.
Oren: Katniss is just a source of weird takes.
My other one that I loved was someone was trying to do a video about how rich people versus poor people are portrayed in film and media. And was trying to make the argument that poor people are portrayed as unintelligent and ugly, and rich people are always pretty and smart.
And was using Katniss as an example. Jennifer Lawrence from the movies. And it’s like, wait, hang on. Are you saying that Katniss is rich or that Katniss is poor and is thus an example of a person who is not smart and not attractive? Because it could be either one. I don’t know which one it is. And they’re both just mind-blowingly wrong.
Chris: I think of a kind of the stereotypical classic chosen one as, again, a farm boy usually. Or it could be another young character of newest significance.
But I think that the farm boy is so iconic because, again, originally a lot of these were boys. Of course, there’s a lot of chosen ones of other genders today, but the classic one was usually a boy. And even today, if there’s a random side character, side child in a story that’s a chosen one, it’s usually a boy still. If you have a team of characters in a show and they pick up the chosen child, it’s almost always a boy.
Any case, and then there’s a prophecy that declares this person of no significance is a savior. And then everybody reveres them because they are in the prophecy. And then they do the thing in the prophecy. I would say that’s the straightforward chosen one situation.
Oren: Yeah, the reverence is important to that, right?
An interesting little subversion of that I have seen is the chosen one doesn’t have special skills and is somewhat of no consequence. But instead of playing it as, wow, you’re so cool, you’re gonna save the day. It’s more of like, oh boy, you have this huge responsibility and you are not prepared and sucks to be you. And that can work. It can also feel forced, but it works okay in the Prydain books.
Taran is an assistant pig keeper who has no particularly useful skills. Now it helps that with Taran, we don’t know that he’s prophesied as a chosen one until pretty late in the books.
Chris: Yeah, I feel like that’s revealed in the end.
Oren: Yeah, so you could argue that he doesn’t count.
Chris: He technically is, but we don’t know that.
Oren: Yeah. And then you have characters who are partway there, like Sisko from Deep Space Nine is a chosen one. And he has some reverence. Some of the Bajorans are like, you’re pretty cool, Sisko. But overall, I’d say it’s pretty mild and he doesn’t get powers from the prophets or anything. If anything, the pah-wraiths give their champion powers and the prophets are just like, don’t look at us, man. What do you want from us? Which I always found very funny. Sisko is also in that camp. He gets some candy for being the emissary, but not as much as he could.
Chris: Yeah, definitely the classic chosen one is chosen, so you have a relatable character, because they’re a character of no note, and we don’t have any outstanding traits that they know of at first. I always think of Garion.
Oren: Yep.
Chris: From the Belgariad, where he has a silver circle on his palm. And so you know that there’s something special about him. But he thinks, oh, it’s just a birthmark. It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean I have a super special power that will make me a savior. So, there’s some sign, but again, we don’t reveal that he has powers until later.
Oren: Yeah, this is your really classic chosen one. The one who has not only a straight up prophecy chosen by fate, or some equally powerful entity that says they will save the day, but also they get special powers that no one else has, or at least no one else has to the same degree.
And they usually don’t start the story with those powers. They develop them pretty quickly as the story goes, though. Garion is one. Rand al’Thor from the Wheel of Time, Neo from the Matrix, Aragorn from Lord of the Rings. He’s a little unusual in that he’s not the main character, but he still fits the archetype.
Chris: He definitely is a chosen one. He is clearly, unlike Garion, for instance. Garion is clearly designed to be the audience stand-in character, the blank relatable character, in a way that I don’t think Aragorn is. Aragorn still got some candy, and so he’s still a wish fulfillment character to some degree. But I think that there is a certain combination of starting with a character that’s super relatable, and then giving them all the wish fulfillment. That’s been very attractive.
Oren: Aragorn is interesting, because in the movies, he doesn’t have what you would call a special power. He is of a special bloodline. But you could watch the whole movies and not realize that Aragorn is supposed to be quite old. He’s super long lived. But in the books, not only is he super long lived, he has magic healing hands, which kind of come out randomly to show that he’s the true heir in the third book, because why not?
Chris: Yeah. Yeah, that’s pretty funny.
But yeah, I would say that all the things that we just said, if you play all of that straight, and you don’t make it unique in any way, I do think that’s going to feel somewhat cliché at this point. But there’s not that many stories at this point that are doing that whole shebang without any changes.
And there’s a number of different ways to mix it up. You can make the prophecy evil, which I have seen before. It was a reveal then, but it was an interesting one. You can make the prophecy wrong. You can make a side character or the villain a chosen one, something that unfortunately Mistborn did not do.
Oren: So close. I was so excited when I thought that’s where we were going with that story.
Chris: I thought that the chosen one’s gonna be evil, but no, that was just an imposter who killed the chosen one. So disappointing.
Or I like to personally like a protagonist that has an ability that’s very niche. So, it’s not very powerful and therefore not super glorified, but it just happens to be the right ability for the current situation.
A good example, even though I don’t actually like this book, is Lirael. This is a sequel to Sabriel by Garth Nix. Unfortunately, Lirael is not nearly as good as Sabriel. And in addition to having the ability, she also gets a lot of stuff.
But the one ability of hers that I think is neat is that she’s born in a line of seers who would usually see the future, but instead of seeing the future, she sees the past. So objectively, it’s not any more powerful than seeing the future. Some people might say it’s less, because we have other ways of seeing the past. But for this particular situation, it’s important.
Oren: From a storytelling perspective, it’s way more powerful because it is so much easier to give a character useful information by seeing the past than it is by having them see the future. Because if they can see the future and get useful information, that breaks the story so quickly that you almost never actually give them anything. It’s always, oh, your vision is clouded, or oh, who knows what you saw? It was too vague to be sure. It’s always stuff like that. Whereas in the past, it’s like, yes, I have the power of exposition vision. Bwaaah!
Chris: I was a little annoyed that she also got to be the Abhorsen, like Sabriel. And we have this other character. She gets all the goodies and the other character doesn’t.
Oren: Poor Sameth.
Chris: But in any case, I like that idea.
So yeah, if there’s various ways to mix it up, and if you do something a little different, then I wouldn’t worry about it too much.
Oren: We can get into what I call the Schrödinger’s chosen one, which is a kind of character who could or could not be a chosen one. And whether or not they are called a chosen one generally comes down to A) how they are referred to in the story, and B) whether people like them or not. Because chosen one is enough of a cliche that people often use it as a pejorative.
For example: consider Buffy and Aang from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Avatar the Last Airbender. They are both inheritors of a special power, and they both have a special job to save the world. They are the exact same level of chosen one. The Slayers are called chosen ones in Buffy, but there’s not actually any specific prophecy about Buffy saving the world. It could be any Slayer. And Aang is told he has to go fight the Fire Lord, but there’s not a prophecy that says he’s gonna win. He’s just told that’s his job.
So, they are the same level of chosen one, but Buffy is routinely referred to as a chosen one. There are think pieces about how Aang is totally not a chosen one, or subverts the chosen one.
Chris: [laughs] Subverts the chosen one.
Oren: Even though they are the same thing.
Chris: There’s so many stories now where people have different powers and then the one special protagonist has all of the powers.
Oren: Yeah!
Chris: That’s real popular now, and Aang is a fairly early example of that. So, the idea that he’s somehow a subversion is very funny.
Oren: If you’re at that level of chosen one, you have a big boost to candy from doing that. You need to be aware of how much candy you’re giving your protagonist and think about that and balance it out somewhat.
With Aang, they do an okay job, not the best job. Aang’s not a bad character, he’s just notably not as good as the other characters he hangs out with. And in Buffy, they overdo it sometimes, where they’re like, Buffy has it too easy. We’re going to have all the other characters get together and do a public criticism session of Buffy.
Chris: Oh man, yeah. Whedon just loves putting Buffy through. Ugh, sometimes it gets bad.
Oren: Yeah, I guess that’s supposed to, I don’t know, make Buffy’s life suck so it doesn’t feel like she’s getting too much candy from being the Slayer. Of course, the writers on that show were definitely not using that terminology, but same thing. And I think it’s a bit of an overcompensation at some points. It’s like, this is just deeply unpleasant to watch.
Chris: Yeah, most of the time she doesn’t even actually get any spinach. She’s just really unhappy. She’s just miserable. She’s still candied.
Yeah, it can be tough because if the character doesn’t have enough candy, again, sometimes they just, why are they the hero? Why is this story about them? And it feels extra, like they aren’t deserving of having special powers or whatever makes them a chosen one.
Emmett in the Lego movie, the Lego movie is funny because at the end they’re like, oh, but he wasn’t the chosen one. Everyone is the chosen one. It’s like, hmm. And we do the same thing where we have a woman, just like for Jen and Kira in the Dark Crystal, have Wyldstyle, who’s right there, clearly much more qualified to be the chosen one. And why is it Emmett? Doesn’t feel like it should be Emmett.
Oren: I keep thinking whenever you say Wyldstyle, it’s like, you mean Trinity? Oh, wait, no, hang on.
Chris: Certainly, we want some humility in our characters. It’s definitely harder to like them if they just have tons of candy out of the gate.
Hopefully they have some traits that are strong points besides just a magical power that they happen to have. Ideally, they have a magical power. And also, they’re such a nice person that they are the one who will use the power in the best ways, in the most moral ways, because they have such a good heart or whatever. Some reason why your character deserves to have that. It’s helpful.
Oren: It’s really interesting to see how the Wheel of Time TV show is trying to handle this. Because I mentioned at the top that Rand is arguably the most chosen chosen one who has ever chosen oned. Other than Garion.
Chris: Garion’s very classic.
Oren: Garion is a little bit more of a chosen one just because he’s so generic when he starts. Whereas Rand is also generic, but not that generic. Rand is at least a little mouthy. That’s as deep as the characterization in Wheel of Time ever gets. But it’s something.
So, the show, I think the writers realized that that story was already going out of fashion in 1990. And in 2021 and 2023, that’s gonna get you laughed out of the writer’s room.
So, what they’re trying to do, I think, is to really emphasize that it’s a team sport. They’re really trying to emphasize that, yeah, Rand is the Dragon Reborn, but he needs all of his friends to help him win. And the real power was the friends we made along the way. And also all this magic.
Chris: But they also want to make the fans happy.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: The story puts so much on Rand. He’s so powerful. Look at how powerful he is! Look at the dragon! The dragon has the most powers! So powerful.
Oren: But consider that he Indiana Jones’d that one guy who wanted to sword fight him. And I don’t know, I feel like a lot of the season was worth it just for that moment.
Chris: So in the book, does he actually, I’m trying to remember, because he does sword fight because he’s got the Heron Sword. Over time, he develops those skills, right? He doesn’t come out of the gate just being super good at the sword.
Oren: Yeah, no, he does learn to sword fight in the book. I forget exactly how he wins that fight, or what happens. I think he does channel, but he does sword fight the guy, right? It’s a much more drawn-out sword fight when that one Seanchan guy, Seanchan or whatever, I don’t know how to say that.
Chris: Okay, so does he win? Or does he lose?
Oren: He does win. But I think he uses his powers to win. So it’s just a sword fight that the story didn’t need. Rand’s already gonna have a big fight. He doesn’t need to have another one with a mini boss before he can get up there. That was just a funny reference to me, especially since the show’s interpretation of the Seanchan, they are pretty goofy in the books.
And in the show, they are, if anything, even goofier. And they have these super long nails, which only makes sense if they aren’t also supposed to be fighting, but apparently they’re supposed to fight. So…
Chris: Yeah, the thing that occurred to me when I saw how long the nobles’ nails were, were they were even a point of honor. Where when you dishonor yourself, your nails get cut off, and you have to grow them back before you can be seen in court again. The obvious thing, we’re like, okay, that is clearly a sign of leisure, because a working person couldn’t have nails that long. So clearly the reason why they’re a status symbol is because that means that they don’t have to work. But no, they fight apparently. So yeah, that would be a big liability.
Oren: At least they think they can.
Chris: They try to.
Oren: We’ve never seen any of them fight, because Rand just annihilated him with magic, but he seemed to think he could fight.
Chris: Look, either your nobility keeps super long nails… When I’m talking about long, I mean a couple feet. That’s how long we’re talking about. Either your nobility keeps two foot long nails, or they fight. They can’t do both, that’s a contradiction.
Oren: One thing that’s interesting to me in this whole chosen one discussion is the special parentage. Because not all chosen ones have that, right? A lot of chosen ones don’t, but it’s definitely associated with it.
And I think that at this point, having special parents is probably worth some candy, but maybe not that much. Especially in the United States, where we have this whole cult of the bootstraps thing going, which has its own problems, but as a result it means that we have an almost instinctive dislike of characters who are shown on screen to be getting their stuff through nepotism. Now, of course, we have lots of nepotism. I’m not saying we don’t. It’s just a cultural value. But at the same time, authors really seem to like it.
Chris: I think it is a way of sneaking in more candy, because the assumption is if your parent is really cool… There’s unfortunately some kind of eugenics in here. The assumption is if your parent is really cool, and they’re your biological parent, that should make you more cool.
It was weird in Picard when they were almost doing the reverse, where Picard now has a son, and his son is super special. It felt like a weird way of trying to give Picard some candy, by giving him a special son.
Oren: Just very strange. It also felt like normal narrative nepotism, where we were expected to care about Jack because we care about his parents. Jack does almost nothing to endear himself to us.
Chris: Honestly, if he actually seemed like a kid instead of being in his 30s, maybe it would have worked better. Then he would have seemed a little bit more hapless, somebody to take care of. But yeah, I just… Man, the actor they chose. Just too old. Bothered me all the time.
But yeah, I think that’s what it is. I think there’s some level of just flattery and some wish fulfillment about having cool parents, and that being revealing of your own potential.
Oren: And I think you can subvert that a little bit. You can have the Steven Universe storyline about how your mother was special, but also, she made you to be a weapon sort of thing. And that’s a little bit of a subversion there. A little bit. Not a lot, but some.
Chris: It was nice that it was the mother that was special, because in so many stories, it’s always a father. It’s nice when it’s both. That’s the other thing, is that having both parents come from a special line provides a convenient explanation for why your main character has so much more powers than anybody else. So, I do think that’s another reason it gets used. But if you’re going to do it, can you please pile the candy on the mother? I would appreciate that instead of the father. Assuming you have a mother and a father.
One movie that I do think has a neat subversion is the classic Willow movie from 1989. Because in that one, it sets up Elora as the chosen one, and she’s just a baby. And the movie has this whole opening about how the evil Queen Bavmorda needs to get rid of this child who’s been prophesied to defeat her.
This child with a special birthmark. We didn’t even talk about birthmarks, other than Garion and his silver birthmark. Pendants are another classic one.
But yeah, so she’s trying to hunt this child down. And then Elora’s not the main character in the original movie. It’s Willow, and he’s trying to protect her. And then at the end of the day, what happens is that basically Willow defeats Bavmorda, not the baby. The baby kind of causes it in that a ritual to get rid of Elora goes wrong. But it’s really Willow that creates that effect by being clever.
Oren: Yeah, it’s a fun little self-fulfilling prophecy where Bavmorda is destroyed by this baby because she is trying so hard to kill this baby.
Chris: But Willow, who is actually the main character and who is a farmer. Not a farm boy, farm adult, although he was so young. I did not realize that Warwick Davis was only 17 when he played that role. He acts so mature, you can’t tell.
In any case, he’s the main character and not the chosen one, right? And that’s one of the reasons why it was so strange when they did the sequel show, where suddenly they made it so much more about Elora.
Oren: Yeah, that one was just weird. That dissonance was there a little bit in the first movie too, at the end, where they’re implying that Elora is going to be in charge now. Why? Why would anyone follow Elora? She didn’t destroy Bavmorda. She had nothing to do with that. And then we try to do a sequel and it’s, I guess, Sorsha is still in charge and now Elora is important and back, but it’s still called Willow. They didn’t change it. It’s not called Elora, a Willow story.
Chris: Yeah, Elora didn’t actually need to be a major character in the show because she actually wasn’t as important in the original movie. Willow was. And so again, I would have expected Elora to be queen and then her to send Willow out on a mission and that mission to be the story.
Oren: That seems obvious in hindsight.
Chris: It’s pretty obvious, but then we had to do something to make it so she’s the chosen one again. We have to take away her chosen one status so that then we can reveal that she’s a chosen one.
Oren: She was actually double chosen the whole time.
Chris: Yeah, that was pretty awkward. I can see how the writers looked at that and were like, oh, we have this chosen one. Clearly, she’s the main character. But no, it was actually more interesting the other way.
Oren: Yeah, and Warwick Davis is only in his 50s. You didn’t need to have the hot young cast take over, right? Warwick Davis was perfectly capable of still being your protagonist. And I know because he was in every episode. It wasn’t like he wasn’t available.
Chris: Yeah, and again, so many actors that they’re bringing back these days are really aging out and are sometimes having trouble in their action roles. But Warwick Davis, again, was only 17. So, he’s still quite young. Should have taken better advantage of that.
Oren: People are always talking about how they really want more fantasy stories about middle-aged characters going on an adventure. This is the perfect opportunity for that. But instead, it was like, no, it’s about Elora and these other young kids. And they’re all here for some reason.
Chris: It was interesting in the latest Matrix movie how they decided that they would try to fix the gender imbalance by making Trinity also a chosen one. I almost think it was to make up for the fact that she spends large portions of the movie just not involved. She’s damseled, we might say. But yeah, there was part of that where at the end we’re like, actually, Neo and Trinity are now both chosen one, and we need to bring them together. It almost felt like a bit of an apology.
Oren: Oh, like a force dyad. Everyone loves force dyads!
Chris: Okay, you’re gonna have to explain the force dyad.
Oren: Do I? That was just a part in Rise of Skywalker when Palpatine was being like, ah, yes, Rey and Kylo Ren, you’re very important and you need to be together. And the force said so and he called them a force dyad, which just means two of something.
Chris: Okay, so if a couple characters communicate psychically without their shirts.
Oren: Yeah, that’s a force dyad now.
Chris: That makes them a force dyad. Okay, got it.
Oren: Sure. Well, why not? Nothing in Rise of Skywalker means anything. It’s all just nonsense.
Chris: But knowing Disney, they’ll keep adhering to how every part of it is canon forever.
Oren: Yeah, I’m waiting for the late next TV show to have goddamn force dyads. Clearly the force dyads were the chosen ones the entire time.
Chris: What’s important is the force dyads we met along the way.
Oren: Alright, now we’ve reached the end of the prophecy and I guess I won. I’m gonna go and retire and back to my pod-farm-cast.
Chris: If this episode was entertaining, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/Mythcreants.
Oren: Have you considered that perhaps you were chosen to support us on Patreon? Ooh!
Chris: Oh, yes, that’s right. It makes you very special to support us on Patreon.
Oren: Before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing Patreons.
First, we have Callie Macleod. Then there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, professor of political theory in Star Trek.
We’ll talk to you next week.
[Outro Music]This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Coulton.
No one wants their readers rolling to disbelieve, but how do we stop it? Sometimes it can feel like beta readers are flagging every single aspect of the story as unbelievable, which is super discouraging. Fortunately, we authors have options for helping readers believe in our stories, so there’s no need to throw up your hands and disavow the entire concept just yet. Listen on as we discuss how to keep a story believable, what causes disbelief in the first place, and when it’s time to just accept that some readers won’t buy it.
Show Notes The Tiffany Problem * Why Should Fiction Be Believable? * Should You Show or Tell? * A Complete Guide to Beta Reading * A Deadly Education * Aftershocks * The Hound of the Baskervilles 1983 * The Masquerade * Animorphs * Oppressed Mages * Joyce Summers * The Martian * Legends and Lattes TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Mbali Mathebula.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle. [Intro music]
Oren: Welcome everyone to another episode of The Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren.
Chris: And I’m Chris.
Oren: And it’s just the two of us today for the next couple weeks. It’ll be just us. We can complain about things Wes and Bunny like, the Three Parts Dead. Wait, I like Three Parts Dead. Darn it.
Chris: Oh, I can complain about Three Parts Dead.
Oren: No, it’s my favourite.
Chris: Hoisted on your own petard.
Oren: I don’t like it.
Chris: Readers get to watch you fan rage.
Oren: Oh man, that’s going to be rough. But okay, so we should probably talk about our topic for today. Problem is, I don’t actually believe in podcasting. You just listen to strangers have a conversation for half an hour. That sounds really contrived. I don’t think anyone would ever do that.
Chris: Oh, geez. It’s like some author came up with a bad social experiment.
Oren: Certainly, when I used to listen to a lot of podcasts, I certainly felt like, why am I not allowed to join this conversation? This seems cruel.
Chris: It’s like a Black Mirror episode. What if the conversations happened where you couldn’t join in?
Oren: What if everyone you thought was cool was having conversations? And also, Mythcreants.
Chris: That is a common impulse upon listening to the podcast, because everybody is like what? Sometimes people get mad at us for not mentioning a story they wanted us to mention in the podcast.
Oren: I understand that impulse. I’ve listened to plenty of podcasts that I’ve been like, why aren’t you bringing up this? This thing is really relevant to what you’re talking about. Why aren’t you bringing it up? I just generally managed to not comment that.
Chris: I don’t believe that you’re not bringing this up right now. Must be deliberately ignoring it.
Oren: What we’re talking about today is making your story believable, which is a pretty hot button topic, a subject of much debate. Not quite as hot button as likability, but pretty hot button.
Chris: It’s hot button when you blatantly call things unrealistic. Our oldest hit post on the site, five unrealistic character traits, was me going around and pointing at popular characters and being like, that’s unrealistic. Made people very mad back in the day and we kept getting lots and lots of traffic to that. The more you make people mad, the more traffic you get.
Oren: There’s also just a huge backlash to the idea of something being realistic or not because people get tired of pedantic, silly critique like CinemaSins, which is just pointless. There’s nothing to it, but it’s not enough to just say that. So instead, they rebel against the idea that anything in fiction should be realistic. And I caught myself recently writing, this has a problem of not being grounded. And Chris had to call me on it. What does that mean, Oren? Why are you using the word grounded? And it’s because I meant realistic, but I was afraid people would think I was uncool if I said that.
Chris: The grounded, it is the hot new term, apparently.
Oren: Yeah, that’s a term people like to use now. And it means the same thing.
Chris: And you can expect that anything that readers often complain about, there are going to be a lot of storytellers, authors who come up with reasons to dismiss that because nobody likes to hear people criticize their stuff. That’s natural. I do think this is an area where we really have to come in with the right expectations because readers do flag all sorts of different things as unbelievable. And for reasons that may have nothing to do with what’s in your story, sometimes they are even factually incorrect. Objectively wrong. But again, blaming them is just not productive.
Oren: Yeah, and I get it. I’ve had some comments about something that wasn’t believable or was unrealistic. And I’d be like, I got that from history. That’s a thing that happened in these exact circumstances that I wrote in the story.
Chris: Oh, but you found something that was stranger than fiction.
Oren: Ooh, and look, there are two possibilities when that happens. One, you might just have a weird beta reading reaction. These things happen sometimes. Two, maybe that thing is perfectly believable, but the way that you are portraying it is not. You are doing something in your portrayal that is making a believable thing seem hard to believe in.
Chris: But fiction does have to adhere to a higher standard of plausibility than reality. Because in reality, we talk about the things that are incredibly unusual and unlikely, because those are the interesting things. And we believe them because they actually happened, or usually, hopefully, we have some evidence that they happened. That is, sometimes they didn’t happen. But nonetheless, they have that at least a veneer of credibility. And that’s why we believe it. Whereas when a reader knows everything in your story is made up, it’s just you can’t get away with stuff that people will believe is true in a nonfiction story. That’s too bad, but it’s how it is. And yeah, I don’t think you can make every single reader happy about everything. That’s just, don’t try. You’ll wear yourself out. And you’ll probably insert way too much exposition and explanations in your story. I personally like to look for anything that more than one reader flags independently of each other. If you have a critique group that acts like a focus group and they all talk to each other, that’s harder.
Oren: Yeah, because then they all contaminate each other, and they all get each other’s ideas. Yeah, no.
Chris: You don’t want to bother with things. If you sense that one person in your critique group brings it up and another person is like, oh yeah, now that you mention it, don’t know. That doesn’t count. Look, we have enough work on our hands without also addressing things that readers didn’t actually notice while they were reading and therefore didn’t negatively impact their experience. So you want things that multiple readers independently noticed. And if multiple readers flag the same thing, then usually it’s worth, what can you do, right? Even if they’re objectively wrong, again, there’s no point in blame. Our purpose is just to see how we can optimize their experience. And sometimes there might be either you wouldn’t change it anyway, hence the Tiffany problem. Or do you want to talk about the Tiffany problem?
Oren: The Tiffany problem is just shorthand for things that seem like anachronisms but aren’t, because the name Tiffany is actually quite old—many centuries old. But if you had a story set in the Renaissance and you had someone named Tiffany, there’s a good chance that would sound weird, like that would sound too modern. And there’s just a lot of these things, right? Some anachronisms are real, and people don’t ever notice them. Some are fake, and people flag them all the time because they go against people’s conception of what the story should be like. And you just have to decide how much of that is worth fighting.
Chris: Yeah, probably taking a stand that Tiffany is a historical name may not be your goal for the story. So that’s a place where you probably just don’t want to use the name Tiffany, even if it is technically a historical name.
Oren: Yeah, and I had a scene in my story that a couple of people flagged as being unbelievable. And it was a scene where it was a battle and some cavalry were doing this maneuver where they charge in and shoot a bunch of arrows, because they’re mounted archers, like rude guys, and they would shoot a bunch of arrows at the infantry and then very quickly ride away and try to lure the infantry into chasing them. And my beta readers, a couple of them, were like. This doesn’t make sense. Why would the infantry do that? That’s a thing that happens in actual battles.
This is a common tactic that the cavalry will use because, unless they are a very specific kind of cavalry, they can’t actually break through a packed infantry formation. So, they instead try to harass the infantry into breaking formation. And that was important to me. I wasn’t going to take that out, even though a couple of people did flag it as not believable, because I wanted this battle to be based at least somewhat on reality. So, I just did my best to make it believable and to show why that happens. And I decided to take the hit. I’m sure there will be some readers who are like, why would they do this? I don’t believe this. And I’m not saying those people are bad people. They just don’t happen to be as into the historical battle’s fandom as I am.
Chris: But hopefully somebody who is into that fandom will appreciate the tactics that are in the fact that they’re real.
Oren: Problem is the people in that fandom are gonna be like, well, your commanders aren’t nearly ruthless enough. Why aren’t they slaughtering all the civilians? I didn’t want to write that story. That’s why.
Chris: Oh no, no way to win. But yeah, readers flag all sorts of things everywhere. And don’t panic. Do the best you can. And honestly, if you get your ants high enough, if you make them entertained enough, they won’t care as much when something is not believable.
Oren: Yeah, that’s what I keep telling myself. There’s a concept here that I find really useful. And you touched on it earlier. It’s called intuitiveness. Intuitiveness is a very simple way to make your world more believable. Your plot too, not just your world, your whole story. And that is when things feel like they follow naturally from each other because that just makes them much easier to explain. For example, here’s an intuitive set of facts. The world has fire magic. Fire mages are employed as smiths and soldiers. You barely have to explain that. That just feels very natural. An unintuitive example, a world has fire magic. Fire mages are employed only as doctors. That’s weird, right? That doesn’t make any sense. How is that? And it’s like, okay, well, here I have this long explanation about how you can’t use fire to kill thinking beings because the god of fire loves humans because they created fire. And fire that mages make maxes out too low to melt metal. So, they aren’t really any use in a smithy. But it’s high enough to sterilize medical instruments, which makes them really useful in surgeries. And so, they gain a lot of medical skills by doing that. And then they become doctors. You can see how even if that made sense, that would take way more time to explain.
Chris: Yeah, I think that’s a good segue into when explanations can work and when they can’t. Because a big thing that we see a lot is that authors, especially since we have the option of adding exposition pretty easily into our narration, that think that explanations are the hammer, and everything is a nail. And we can just insert explanations or even arguments. That’s where it gets really funny is now when somebody’s, no, I can put in my arguments. I’m explaining, but it really sounds like arguments.
Oren: Yeah, every once in a while, you come across a book where this just feels like you’re arguing with a beta reader. Like some beta reader brought up that this doesn’t make sense and you wrote your argument with them into the story.
Chris: So yeah, sometimes if something is just unclear, the more explanation can… if something is just too subtle or implied, sometimes explanation can help. And this is an issue where, most of the time, we want to show where we can, right? And only tell where we have to. And if there are some things that you are showing that are just not coming across, sometimes you may need to tell to get that clarity. But again, too much explanation is going to clutter the story and add way too much exposition. This is definitely a reason, again, not to try to address every single thing a beta reader brings up. And I do wonder how many stories with extra exposition, part of that is that the author is trying to explain every question the beta readers have, everything the readers flag instead of just letting it go unless you have a reason to believe it’s a trend.
Oren: Yeah, I’ve definitely read client stories like that. It’s in my experience not super common in published stories just because the too much exposition bad mentality is really ingrained. I find it’s not super common for stories to be published with too much exposition. Though there are exceptions, and those exceptions are called a deadly education. But not entirely, right? There are also some stories where it’s hard to tell, does this story have too much exposition or not enough plot? It could be like that at one book series that I read, like Aftershocks, I think it was called. This book has a lot of exposition, but it also has no plot. Maybe that’s the real problem.
Chris: Sometimes explanations don’t work because the idea is just inherently unbelievable. And it doesn’t make sense, and there’s no compelling enough argument or explanation you can make that will make it make sense. And of course, nobody wants to admit or wants to hear that their idea is one of the ones that just doesn’t inherently make sense. But sometimes it doesn’t matter. As Oren pointed out, sometimes the story is too complex, and the explanations are just too much to keep track of. That instance where we have why the fire mages are only doctors and the amount of text needed, that’s just too much. If you have to explain that much, it’s not going to stick in the reader’s mind. You need something simple and strong if it’s going to work. And then another reason explanations may not work is if you’re showing something different than you’re telling. Showing is always more convincing. If the readers look at the actual events of your story or the actual things your characters are saying and they draw a conclusion that is in direct contradiction to what you tell them, they are not going to believe you. They are going to believe what they saw directly in the text. For instance, if a character is a jerk and you tell them the character is charming—it’s just an example—they’ll be like, no they’re not, they’re a jerk.
Oren: It’s rude to personally attack Sir Arthur Conan Doyle like that, Chris. That’s like a thing, I just finished recently a complete read of all of Sherlock Holmes, and it’s so weird how Sherlock is a huge jerk, similar to the way he is portrayed in the BBC Sherlock, but everyone around him acts like it’s no big deal, and the characters say that he’s super charming. It’s really weird.
Chris: Yeah, man, he is such a jerk.
Oren: Yeah, there’s a 1983 adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles where they basically adapt most of the book line for line. Most of the dialogue is just lifted right off the page. And it’s so weird to watch Holmes say these deeply hurtful things to Watson, and Watson just be like, eh, whatever.
Chris: And the actor’s trying really hard, too. He’s saying these jerky things in a kind of friendly voice, but it’s just like, wow, you condescending bastard.
Oren: It’s very strange.
Chris: Again, there are a few places where explanations do help if it’s just a lack of clarity, but yeah, you can definitely do more harm than good by sticking explanations in everywhere.
Oren: And I would say that there’s a good chance that you may, at some point, need something that’s counterintuitive. In a perfect world, you wouldn’t, but plotting’s not perfect. There’s a good chance you’ll run up against something that is critical for your story to work. And at that point, okay, you may just have to take the hit. But you should try to minimize that, right? You don’t want to go around adding unintuitive things that you then need to explain if you don’t really need them.
Chris: The other thing, again, I’d like to mention, is the point that when you do explain something, you are calling attention to it. So if it is an unrealistic conceit that you just need for your story to work, it’s better to just, that’s how it is and oftentimes not explain it at all. And let just people get used to it and forget it’s there. And it’s really annoying when a story comes up with a very bad explanation, and then they keep mentioning their bad explanation. And they would build off of their bad explanation its like, look, okay, I understand why you need this thing, but can we just, can we let this go? Can we get rid of the blatantly wrong thing?
Oren: Yeah, a lot of masquerades are like that. Where the masquerade is really hard to explain. Often, there’s no way to do it in a way that makes any sense. But we accept it because we need it for urban fantasy to work.
Chris: Just in case anybody is unfamiliar with the term masquerade, this is the conceit in most urban fantasies where most people don’t know magic is real or magical creatures are real, etc.
Oren: And we need it to make that premise work; similar to, you might have something that’s sci-fi with a similar concept, right? Animorphs only works if we maintain the masquerade that nobody except for the Animorphs and one or two people knows the yeerks are here. That is something that’s necessary for a lot of stories to work. It’s almost impossible to explain it. That almost there means that there are some exceptions, but they are very rare. Most urban fantasy stories are not using them. And so in general, it’s usually best to just accept that’s a thing and tell your urban fantasy story, and stop calling attention to the masquerade. But some authors just can’t help themselves. I’m going to build huge plot points around the masquerade. Please don’t.
Chris: But what if we used oppressed mages to explain the masquerade?
Oren: Oh boy.
Chris: Now we have to explain the oppressed mages in addition to the masquerade. It just keeps getting better.
Oren: Yeah, the problem with oppressed mages is that almost no one adds them to a setting casually anymore. People add them to settings because that’s what they want the story to be about. And there’s not really a way to ignore the oppressed mages in most cases. It’s not like a masquerade; where it’s like a utilitarian setting device that allows you to have a certain kind of story. It’s just if it’s in the story, it’s almost certainly what the author wants to write about.
Chris: The masquerade starts to stick out. Again, a lot of things don’t stick out until the story makes use of them. In the masquerade, it is a thing that’s pretty easy to ignore until you get to the point where the protagonist is supposed to tell somebody about their situation. And they’re like, no, I can’t tell my mom I have magic because of the masquerade. So my mom’s gonna think I’m being real bad instead and ground me. That’s a typical thing. Now that’s when it becomes a lot harder, right? Or even worse, I’m not gonna tell my girlfriend I’m a hero. I’m just gonna not show up to dates frequently. There’s always a reason why the love interest doesn’t get to know. That’s a very bad reason.
Oren: Yeah, and that’s another one that’s, to a certain extent, that’s just a kind of story that people like. And I don’t necessarily know if it’s practical to be like, don’t ever have any conflict in an urban fantasy story where your protagonist is caught between their real-life responsibilities and their magical responsibilities. I do think you probably don’t want to lean on those too hard. Not like we don’t talk about Teen Wolf enough here on the Mythcreants podcast. But I think Teen Wolf has the balance on that pretty well set up. Teen Wolf has, especially in its early episodes, some sequences where the protagonists are like, oh no, we have a high school thing that we can’t do because of werewolves. Or, oh no, our parents grounded us because we were out all night, and we can’t tell them why. And it works okay, but they know when to stop.
Chris: They also have somewhat of emotional reason because they’re all werewolves, right? They’re not doing the whole urban fantasy shindig. There’s always the fear that a loved one will fear them when they find out, right? And again, when it’s between telling somebody and letting other people die, being afraid that somebody will fear you is no longer a compelling motivation. But it still gets to you a little ways when it’s personal.
Oren: Yeah, as a counterexample, they don’t go all the way that Buffy does, where Buffy and her mom have these really emotionally upsetting fights over this. At that point, it’s just, tell her already. I’m just frustrated that this is happening over such a nonsense reason.
Chris: Okay, so when we do have believability problems, we obviously have a variety of ways to take care of them. We talk about explanations a lot. Obviously, foreshadowing is one of our primary tools. Basically, what happens is that readers have a conception of how things work in their head that’s sometimes subconscious. And when you surprise them, things often seem unbelievable. So foreshadowing sets expectations, usually before they become super important, in which case they’re under a lot more scrutiny. And it allows you to have cool reveals, right? Where we put in little hints. We don’t actually realize there are aliens in the story until we want to reveal that. But then once we know that we’re like, oh yeah, we have these characters studying UFOs and these mysterious things happening. That was all the aliens. Makes sense. We have a better reaction. Another thing that’s commonly used, instead of doing little hints, you can just change things gradually. If you do it slow enough, it tends to work. If you want to introduce aliens, you could start with people discovering alien microbes first. Which is, depending if you have a high-realism setting.
Oren: If you had the Martian, you wouldn’t just have ET show up in the Martian. That would not make any sense. That would be unbelievable. But if you wanted to do the Martian and Mark Watney first finds some bacteria on Mars, that’s more in line, and you can work your way up to ET.
Chris: If you move it slowly enough, usually it works. Then there’s—we talked about this a little bit—it can be tough if you have contradictory ideas. That’s where it’s much harder to be like, yeah, just do it slowly. And sometimes there are two things that just don’t exist very well simultaneously. If you have a high-tech setting where characters are using swords. If you have aliens and also a bunch of fantasy tropes, it’s going to give people some dissonance, usually. And sometimes you can reconcile them by showing how they fit together. It’s a little tough, it’s not necessarily impossible. In Firefly, one of the things that they do is they have their sci-fi elements and their western elements, and they show that there’s these border planets that are generally much poor and low on resources, and all the high-tech stuff takes a lot of resources. They don’t have swords; they’re still using guns because guns don’t actually take that many resources. It’s hard to justify why people wouldn’t use guns. But nonetheless, there’s lots of, they ride horses, right, in the border planets, for instance.
Oren: The one that gets me is you have a modern setting or whatever, and everyone’s using swords, and I’m like, all right, sure, swords. I like swords. Let’s get into this. And then suddenly, one of them pulls out a gun. I’m like, no, why didn’t you do this earlier? Why are you not doing it again? Oh God, it’s ruined now.
Chris: I couldn’t pretend. I could forget about those guns as long as you didn’t pull one out.
Oren: It just feels like you’re trying to get one over on me. I feel like the author is making fun of me for putting in the work to suspend my disbelief. When it comes to characters, the maxim to remember is from the Vulcan dictates of poetics, which is that characters should act in accordance with their established traits. And that can be tough because sometimes we want a plot point that requires them to act against their established traits. And we’ve all seen Game of Thrones season eight by now. That’s a pretty obvious example where we want Daenerys to burn down the city, but that obviously goes against her interests and everything that we’ve established that she would do until that point. So just do it, whatever. You also have stuff like in book form in Legends and Lattes, minor spoilers, or not minor spoilers, significant spoilers for Legends of Lattes. Viv has this whole plot line about not giving in to the mob’s demands and not paying protection money because it’s against her principles. That’s like her entire stance. Not because she can’t afford it, because it’s against her principles. And then she has a meeting with the mafia leader and agrees that she’ll totally pay the protection money as long as she can do it in goods instead of coins.
Chris: And pastries? Or what have you?
Oren: Food and drinks. So now a bunch of mob guys are going to hang out at her coffee shop. What is this? What is happening?
Chris: I will say, though, that besides things that are plot reasons for having a character act out of character, there are also a lot of perceived character inconsistencies that can happen because readers do interpret characters very differently. And they may project themselves onto a character, for instance, or just have a different idea than you do about how a character works. In particular, if you have a character who is supposed to make some kind of behavior change, they are intended to change their mind. They have an act, and then they drop the act. Or they stop putting in an effort in. Any kind of changes that we would normally want when we are depicting complex characters, those can come off wrong or come off unclearly so that people just look at it and they’re just being out of character. In which case, sometimes if it’s a point-of-view character, you might need more internalizing to help keep people on the same page with that character. You may need to if you don’t have a stimulus, right? What is the reason they changed their mind right then? Did they get a new piece of information they didn’t have before? Was there something that emotionally moved them? They may need a catalyst to make that clear and to show the audience, okay, the before and after picture more clearly. This is tougher if it’s not a viewpoint character, but you can have your viewpoint character speculate on what’s going on with that character and wonder themselves, and that will help the audience because it will give the audience some kind of reasoning. Last, just remember that preventing believability problems can be a lot easier than fixing them later, after you’ve already drafted your story. Plan your magic system. Put limits on that magic early, because once that powerful magic is in your story, it’s going to be a mess to keep all of your plot points from being contrived. Choosing a theme, being conscious about the level of realism you’re employing. Do you want people to walk off bullet wounds, or do you want wounds to get infected? You probably don’t want both of those things in your story. So, planning does, in some areas, really help keep you from running into huge problems that are just too hard to fix after you’ve drafted the story.
Oren: Okay, with that, I think we are going to call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you found what we said believable, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com slash Mythcreants.
Oren: And if you didn’t, I’m prepared to argue with you about it for five paragraphs. Before we go, I want to thank some of our existing patrons. First there’s Callie McLeod. Then we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, professor of political theory in Star Trek. Talk to you next week.
[Outro music]
A story always says something, but is it what the author wanted it to say? All too often, a message is garbled, undercut, or completely destroyed because the author doesn’t understand how to properly communicate it. That’s one of the most common issues that comes up in content editing, so we have quite a lot to say on the topic. We discuss audience trust, stories that say one thing but do another, and, of course, the philosophy of consequentialism.
Show Notes Five Mistakes That Destroy a Story’s Message * Fire Lord Ozai * The Imperfects * Wolf Pack * The Light Brigade * Paradise * Consequentialism TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Maddie.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast, with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock and Chris Winkle. [Intro Music]
Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant Podcast, I’m Chris and with me is…
Bunny: Bunny.
Chris: And…
Oren: Oren.
Chris: This podcast is not about messages or how they fail, it just looks exactly like that. What it’s really about will be subtly woven into our conversation via metaphor and symbolism. It’s for the second listen, maybe the third.
Bunny, Oren: [Laugh]
Chris: Very deep. It’s layers, like an onion.
Oren: It’s conveyed in such a way that it can mean whatever you want it to mean, and you can argue about it forever. [Chuckles]
Bunny: It’s a podcast as starry as the seeds of a pumpkin.
Oren: Okay, that’s good. I do like pumpkin.
Bunny: Listen to it two other times and you’ll understand.
Chris: [Chuckles] If you don’t understand, maybe you’re not an adult.
Bunny, Oren: [Chuckle]
Chris: But yeah, we really see that now. That argument. It’s very sad. [Laughs] Okay, we are actually going to discuss, for real, what gets in the way of sending a message. And by that, message being something you actually want to communicate to the audience. Some opinion or statement, and then have them receive that communication. And that’s kind of an important distinction.
Because I want to start by talking about tea leaf messaging. Just because this is something I see in a lot of client works, and it’s hard to identify in something that is published or popular because you can’t usually tell that was the approach unless you talk to the storyteller and find out what their intent was. We’ve talked many times about how very difficult it is to read a storyteller’s intent by looking at a work. This is one reason why the tea leaf messaging approach, oftentimes you just can’t see it until they tell you it’s there.
So what happens is, in the US at least, in our English and literature classes, we’re all taught to analyze stories for what we might call theme and meaning. And this is a really subjective exercise where the teacher makes you look at all the tiny details of the story and what various people say, or anything. Literally anything that’s there and guess what it all means. And it’s considered very subjective and the onus is on the reader to basically read into the tea leaves to figure it out. And you can come up with just about any conclusion by doing this, which honestly is why people like it so much. [Laughs] Because it’s a great fodder for discussion.
And again, I’ve said it before, but when literature is analyzed in class, it’s very much a culture that was created by fans for fans, not by writers for writers. And if they’re all reading the same beloved classic book again and again, and they’re trying to keep their conversations fresh, this is a way to accomplish that.
Bunny: Shakespeare [Fake cough].
Chris: [Laughs] Oh, you have a bad cough there, Bunny.
Bunny: Oh, I don’t know. Just jumped into my throat.
Chris: Yeah, geez. So what happens is that when writers want to put meaning to their story, they usually are following the mentality that was imbued in them by these types of classes where they’re thinking of meaning as a subjective exercise and that they as the writer just decide what it means. And then they put in little encoded hints and they don’t realize that nobody who reads their story is going to pick up what they’re putting down because those tea leaves are probably going to be insignificant compared to all of the other things that they put in their story, and are just insignificant and ambiguous. And so there’s not really a message that’s going to be communicated there.
Oren: Right. And it’s not even that they aren’t going to be looking and they aren’t going to notice the tea leaves, it’s that they will probably notice the much more obvious thing that you put in by accident, because if the tea leaves are tiny, then the rest of your story will take over and there will be a much more apparent message based on the bigger, more easily recognizable things.
Bunny: Look, if you put tea leaves into orange juice, all you’re going to taste is orange juice.
Chris: Very good metaphor. It’s very deep. I’m sure you will understand it on the fourth listen.
Bunny, Oren: [Laugh]
Chris: So basically to actually send a message, it has to be built into the story at a more fundamental level and more clearly. So you have to make your heroes and credible characters embrace this opinion. You want to often make your villains stand against it, is one way. Make people who embrace the opinion succeed because they embrace it, and then don’t undermine it, which is the thing I’m sure we will talk about where people put in a message and then they basically undo that message with how their story works.
Oren: It’s great being at Mythcreants because on the one hand, we tell people that, “Yes, you do need to be clear if you want your message to actually come across”. But we also tell people not to just put their manifesto in their first chapter, and then everyone gets mad at us because you get the people who are like, “No, I don’t think I should have to be clear”.
Bunny: [Chuckles]
Oren: And you got the people who are like, “Oh, but I wrote this manifesto. What do you mean I can’t just put it in as chapter two?”.
Bunny, Oren: [Chuckle]
Chris: And to be clear, if you like themes and tea leaf reading, it’s not that it hurts your story. It’s not that you can’t do that if that’s what you like. It’s just that if your goal is to actually have a message that is received, tea leaves will not accomplish that goal.
Bunny: Here’s a question. Can you tell a story without a message?
Chris: Not really, but you can make your message kind of common and generic enough that people don’t really notice it.
Oren: Yeah. Most stories are going to have a pretty basic like “if being clever is good”.
Bunny, Chris: [Laugh]
Chris: Being brave is good. Sticking by your pursuits is good. [Chuckles]
Oren: Persevering through hardship is good. That sort of thing.
Bunny: The friends we made along the way.
Oren: Yeah, those are messages. They’re pretty uninteresting. No one’s going to talk about them because they’re so common.
Chris: They’re so common people won’t even notice them really. But they are still messages that are in fact being sent. So yeah, stories are always going to have a message unless you make them unsatisfying. If readers get to the end and “What was the point of all that?”
Bunny: [Chuckles]
Chris: [Laughs] There may not be a message in there. Or they’re feeling the lack of a message. Yeah, you’re going to lower engagement if you don’t have something. But it does not necessarily have to be something that really stands out.
But yeah, the point is that when you have a message, generally there are very specific story mechanics that are used for that. That by default, people believe heroes, for instance, and what they believe. And I know a lot of people hate that. [Chuckles] But that’s just, look, heroes are right 99% of the time. So that’s just how people are going to expect them to be right again. That’s just how it works. Anyway, or what people are fighting for. The things that the stories rely on.
Oren: The one that is of course the most common, in my experience, the biggest problem that I run into both in published works and in client works, is that the author wants to send a message that the thing the hero needs to do to solve the main problem is bad. And that’s just not going to work. It’s just not going to come across.
And usually, it’s violence or acting on your own and being hot-headed. You got all kinds of authors who want to send a message that violence is wrong, but their main characters need to fight someone to stop a bad thing from happening. And I’m sorry, but your story can’t say that violence is unequivocally wrong if you then use violence to solve an important problem. You just can’t.
And the best you’re going to end up with is a story that’s really dark and dismal, and then when people don’t like it, you’re going to pop out from behind the page to be like, “Yeah, that’s because I was trying to say violence was wrong, so actually, you not having a good time was intentional”.
Chris: Don’t you like being challenged?
Bunny: [Chuckles]
Chris: Clearly, you’re not an adult.
Bunny: Oooh.
Oren: Congratulations, you said nothing.
Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]
Bunny: Go back to your baby literature. Oh wait, baby literature has messages too? Well, shit.
Oren: Yeah, damn it.
Chris: That’s a constant thing with people undermining messages, is that they want to have their bad trope and eat it too, right? Or in this case, when we’re talking about violence, sometimes it’s an action story, but for children. And I think some writers, something about that doesn’t sit well because I’m going to have children engaging in violent fights, and I don’t really want to promote violence to children.
And so then they try to both have a story about that, where the reader can enjoy those fights, but also condemn it, and that doesn’t work. You have to be willing to give up. You could potentially have a story where people learn that fighting is not the answer, but you would have, at the very least, much less action, and then you actually solve the problem without it and show that it wasn’t necessary in this particular case. But that goes against having cool fights.
Oren: And you can also, either, A: You don’t need to have tons of fights, you can make a story that works without them, it’s just harder. And, you can also embrace nuance, because most of us think that violence is bad most of the time, but is acceptable in certain situations, and that can be an interesting thing to talk about in your story. That’s a thing you could embrace. It’s much easier to do that than try to deliver some blanket “violence bad” type message at the end.
Bunny: Or like the pacifism thing at the end of The Last Airbender that comes out of nowhere. I don’t know, you’ve been beating up guys for three seasons now.
Oren: Yeah, that one at the end is just weird, because it’s like, “It would be wrong to kill Ozai”. And at first it’s like, would it? We don’t really have time to discuss that, because we’ve had so many fights where we didn’t have to kill anybody, why does suddenly this one need someone to die?
Bunny, Oren: [Chuckle]
Bunny: Yeah, that’s a pretty deathless series. There’s one, maybe one implied death.
Oren: They made fun of how unclear that was in The Ember Island Players episode.
Bunny, Chris: [Laugh]
Chris: Another one is beauty. So many popular stories that are supposed to have a message that beauty isn’t important, always cast a super hot actor in that role, because they want to say beauty isn’t important, but they also aren’t willing to give it up.
Oren: “Note to the producers, Margot Robbie is the wrong actress to cast if you want to make this point”.
Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Laugh]
Oren: That was a beautiful line, I loved it.
Chris: That was a line from the Barbie movie, for anyone who has not seen it. Any of the three people who have not seen that movie at this point.
Bunny: There’s also: Just put their hair in a bun.
Chris: Yeah, and put on glasses. Make their hair frizzy. Style it so it’s frizzy.
Bunny: Yeah, frizzy hair. Incredibly ugly. Ugh.
Oren: Although, that one’s usually a lead up to the makeover sequence, right? Where they take the glasses off or what have you. Whereas the ones that are like, “It’s okay, you don’t have to be beautiful, it’s what’s on the inside that matters”, and it’s said by a bunch of very beautiful people with perfect makeup.
Bunny: [Chuckles]
Oren: Okay. Okay, Hollywood.
Chris: I’m just annoyed with all the one-sided ones when it comes to heterosexual romances, right? Where it’s about, “Oh, see, she sees his value even though he’s not hot”. But she’s super hot, of course.
Bunny: Of course.
Chris: [Chuckles]
Oren: Yeah, or one of my recent ones, spoilers for the show The Imperfects, is they have the characters straight up say that this villain’s tragic backstory doesn’t excuse his actions. Everything about the show is designed to make you think that maybe his actions aren’t that bad because of his tragic backstory.
Bunny: Oh my god. Just decide!
Oren: It’s so weird that the characters say that as if it almost feels like it came out of an argument about tragic backstory villains that you can imagine happening online. But then they’re like, “No, we’re definitely still gonna do it”.
Bunny: [Laughs]
Oren: Because we want that trope.
Chris: That sounds like an embattled writer, right? I wrote this and this was a criticism I received and so now I’m just gonna write everybody in my story saying, “Oh no, we’re not excusing his actions”.
Bunny: [Chuckles]
Chris: Meanwhile, we’re clearly trying to build sympathy around him despite his actions because of his backstory and make him look less evil.
Oren: He certainly never gets held accountable for any of the things he did. It feels like you excused his actions a little bit.
Bunny: Just a little. It’s like having a movie about how it’s so cool to smoke cigarettes and at the end one of the characters says, “Don’t smoke cigarettes, kids”.
Oren: Don’t you do it.
Bunny: Don’t do it.
Chris: Another thing that can be really tricky sometimes is the protagonist learning curve. Because we talked about how people by default, they do believe the protagonist. And so the protagonist, unless you do something to counter it, has authorial endorsement. And what they think is a message your story has unless, for instance, you bring in a mentor to be like, “Oh, hero, someday you need to learn X. You’re wrong”. There are many stories where the protagonist needs to learn a lesson and this can be a great way of communicating a message, by having them have to learn this lesson to save the day and then they succeed because they’ve learned it.
But the problem is that in the beginning of their arc, they have not learned the lesson. [Chuckles] They have to be wrong about it in order for them to go through that learning curve. And if the story is long enough and it takes them long enough to learn, that means it looks like you are pushing the opposite point until they learn.
Sometimes with books, if the message isn’t super contentious or super important, sometimes that’s fine. Or sometimes it’s just obvious. So a protagonist, for instance, who doesn’t accept themself for who they are, especially if they’re like, “Oh, no, these cool wings make me such a freak”.
Bunny, Oren: [Chuckle]
Chris: Nobody believes that. Everybody assumes they’ll just be on a self-acceptance arc.
Bunny: [Chuckles]
Chris: But there can be things that are more contentious and if it’s stretched out for long enough, that can be an issue. I have a couple examples. For one, in the show Wolf Pack, so the showrunner, Jeff Davis, has anxiety and the lead Everett has anxiety and he wants to get rid of it. He becomes a werewolf.
Bunny: [Chuckles]
Chris: We know from interviews…
Bunny: Who needs therapy? You have werewolves.
Chris: Well, he becomes a werewolf by accident, but what happens is that he thinks that becoming a werewolf got rid of his anxiety and that his anxiety was bad and it’s great that he no longer has it. But we know from interviews with Jeff Davis that his point that he wants to make is that anxiety is a part of you and it’s not something to get rid of.
But that is absolutely not where season one ends. We see Everett reveling in the fact that he doesn’t have anxiety anymore and thinking that he became neurotypical basically by becoming a werewolf. It’s not a great way to end the first season. And then when you throw in the fact that there’s also an autistic kid that might get bit and, suggestion, an antagonist of questionable credibility, but still, suggests that the autism might go away.
Bunny: Hmmm.
Chris: This whole thing is… eughh.
Bunny: I will say werewolves as parallel for mental health is not something I’ve encountered before.
Chris: And I don’t think it’s supposed to be. I think it’s supposed to be separate. But it’s just, again, it’s supposed to be part of a learning curve, but in season one, the main character doesn’t get there and by default we assume that he’s right. And I would have no idea that was the showrunner’s intent, is to show that he’s wrong and have him learn better.
Oren: Just from an industry perspective, that is a huge roll of the dice, assuming you’re going to get a second season. Especially the way things are today, right? But even assuming you do get a second season, assuming you had a second season locked down and you knew you were gonna get it, considering how many people in real life talk about trying to cure various neurodivergences as if that’s a desirable good thing, you are asking a lot of trust from your audience. And I guess I would ask, what have you done to earn that trust? What have you done to make your audience confident that they can trust you on this? And with Wolf Pack, I’m just not convinced.
Chris: It has some detail on coping strategies for anxiety, which is good. It shows that at some level they’re doing their research. At the same time, what it doesn’t show is that it is neurodivergent friendly, especially with this kid who has autism and is being given a “mystical cryptic child trope” treatment. That would absolutely destroy any trust because he’s being othered. And so I definitely would not trust that a show like that would do the right thing. And even if there’s been an effort made to make the depiction of neurodivergence accurate.
Bunny: Which is a shame because we definitely need more neurodivergent characters.
Chris: But as a good example, for instance, the story Light Brigade, we have a future narrator who then states her own opinion and how it’s different from the character that is going through the book.
Oren: A retelling narrator is so useful there. You can just head off the entire problem by being like, “Wow, I knew so little back then”, or something.
Chris: And this is important because in Light Brigade, the main character believes in a fascist system, right? And is following it. To make that more palatable and to show that “No, I swear I am not endorsing fascism”.
Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]
Chris: We have the future version of the main character narrating the story who would just say that she was wrong at the time. And that completely corrects the issue.
Oren: And obviously that requires a specific narrative premise, which not every story is going to have. But man, if you got it, so useful. [Chuckles]
Chris: Otherwise, again, bringing in a mentor that is more credible and trustworthy than the main character to state your actual opinion is very helpful.
Oren: Right. Because then what you have is a situation where the mentor is like, “This is the case, young one”. And the young one is, “Nuh uh, I know better. It’s this thing that’s problematic”. And then everyone’s like, “Okay, I get it. The young one is wrong because they are young. I get it. I understand”. [Laughs]
Bunny: I’m curious, when is stating it not enough, though? So imagine you have the retelling premise and the narrator is like, “This wasn’t good”. I imagine that in some situations, the story leans hard enough onto the message that it is good, that it’s very tell don’t show.
Oren: You still need to maintain basic likability for your protagonist. But in the case of Light Brigade, the protagonist is a conscripted soldier who is from a really impoverished background where joining the corporate military is the only option that she really has. But you don’t see her going around and committing mass atrocities and then having the future narrator be like, “It was wrong of me to do that”.
Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Laugh]
Bunny: Yeah, that probably wouldn’t work.
Oren: But she does join the corporate army and she is sent to supposedly repress a resistance movement on Mars. Now, spoilers, it turns out she’s mostly fighting other corporations and the Mars resistance is actually largely an invention of the corporations. So that is an interesting twist. So it’s good to have the future narrator, but it’s a balancing act.
Chris: And this could be undermined. We’re talking about undermining messages. So if then this main character went out and got really cool and badass being a space marine or whatever, and we felt like the fighting was glorified, that would definitely undermine this message. But it doesn’t feel that way in this book.
It’s very interesting, but basically what happens is that there’s different location jumps and the protagonist starts jumping through time by accident. And that creates a central conflict for the book that makes it very fascinating without leaning super hard into these fight scenes and making them super cool and exciting. So it has another way to entertain audiences without being like, “Hey, look at this cool action sequence”. So that it’s not glorifying violence in the same way as the other books we were talking about.
Oren: One that drives me up the wall is when you have a story that has a really reprehensible antagonist and you’re just really excited to just take them down. They’re the worst. And then suddenly… They had a point.
Bunny, Chris: [Groan]
Oren: And it’s such a weird problem because usually the problem with a villain who has a point is that they have some kind of legitimate grievance, but they’re being evil. So their legitimate grievance can’t be addressed, like half the MCU nowadays.
Bunny: [Chuckles]
Oren: But this is the opposite. And so an example is the Deep Space Nine episode Paradise, where there is a lady who has tricked her entire colony into having to live on a planet where none of their technology works and they die of easily treatable diseases and probably starve to death sometimes because they have to do subsistence farming without any advanced tech. And anyone who questions her, she puts in a torture box.
Bunny: [Laughs]
Oren: And it’s like, okay, this lady is obviously evil and the worst and everyone, we’re all ready for her to be defeated. And then when the good guys finally defeat her and they’re like, “Okay, everybody, we can beam you away from this terrible place where you’ve all been horribly traumatized”, and the people that she tricked are like, “No, we’ll stay because she might have lied to us. But we did get a sense of community out of it”.
Bunny, Chris: [Laugh]
Bunny: Medicine and community are incompatible, Oren.
Oren: Yeah, and this allows her, the evil lady to give Sisko a knowing “I told you” look, and it’s just, what, what are you doing? [Laughs]
Bunny, Chris: [Laugh]
Oren: Why? Of all the villains, that one. [Laughs]
Chris: Here’s the problem with having a villain that then ends up being a friend or just misunderstood or not so bad, is that you’ve got basically one of two options. Either, one, you don’t really have enough tension because you’re not willing to make the villain act that bad because that would be out of character. Or two, they really are that bad and then when you’re like, “Oh, but see, they were just misunderstood all along”. Your audience is like, “What?” That’s just, ugh. I think in many cases writers also just underestimate the amount of cruelty they’re depicting, which is sad.
Bunny: Yeah, again, that’s one of those things that I think has become normalized more than it should.
Chris: Or I think there’s also a story logic problem where we see all of these problems all the time in stories and that kind of also normalizes things within the story universe, right? And people don’t take this out. Okay, imagine you met this person in real life and you accidentally insulted their mother and then they killed your sibling. Would that be an appropriate response? [Laughs]
Bunny, Oren: [Laugh]
Chris: Would you be like, “Oh, see, it was my fault. I accidentally insulted your mother”. You know, right? And we see a lot of things like that where it’s just, no, every person is responsible. You don’t get just an excuse to murder somebody if somebody makes a slight mistake. And we don’t think about how that would actually be evaluated in a real context.
Oren: My absolute favorite one on Chris’s post about mistakes that destroy a story’s message is when causality is neglected, where the author thinks that the character doing something right or wrong is enough and doesn’t consider how that leads to the outcome that is supposed to be good.
I love how in Age of Ultron, the second Avengers movie, the city is going to explode and Captain America’s like, “No, I’m going to stay here and die with the civilians”. And it’s played as a really dramatic, selfless thing for him to do, even though it doesn’t really seem like it. Is he giving up his seat so someone else can escape? Because that would actually be cool. It’s not clear if he’s doing that. Maybe he is. But then, suddenly, just after he does that, Nick Fury shows up with a helicarrier to evacuate everybody, and it plays it like those things are connected, but they’re not.
Chris: [Chuckles]
Oren: If he had decided to leave, he just would have met Nick Fury going the other way and they would have paused for a moment and been like, “Oh okay, let’s go back”. [Laughs]
Bunny, Chris: [Laugh]
Oren: Maybe a little awkward, but nothing different would have happened.
Chris: Or just makes the character seem right by luck. So you have to defend your message, right? If you want a protagonist to succeed or fail because they embraced your message or went against it, you have to actually make a convincing argument by showing that causality.
Bunny: So today in philosophy class we were talking about consequentialism, which is this weird ethical theory where what makes something good is whether the action, the output was good. And because this is philosophy class, there was a very funny, strange example of, you’re a person who just loves sucker punching old guys. So you go up to an old guy in a cafe and you sucker punch him and it turns out he was choking. So you sucker punching him saved his life. I think this causality thing is basically that.
Chris: It is. I think that’s a hilarious example because we do see writers do that sort of thing in their story. At that point, it’s a matter of how contrived is this implementation? Does that feel like a natural causality or does that feel like something that was cherry picked by the storyteller to justify something that doesn’t have a good justification?
But I could definitely see, not this exact thing, but something similar to an obnoxious character that the storyteller just loves. And they’re always showing up the main character. “See, I just like to punch people and I think I should be able to punch people”. And the main character being like, “Oh, you’re such a bad person”. It’s like, “No, I’m really smart. I can definitely… See, look!” and then punch somebody. And then that person turns out to be, “Oh, wow, I was choking and you saved me. Thanks!”–
Bunny: [Chuckles]
Chris: –And walking off. And then the obnoxious character the storyteller loves gets their smug last word in.
Bunny: Oh, yeah, that’s terrible.
Bunny, Chris: [Laugh]
Chris: That’s obviously a dramatic example, but storytellers do that. They really do, especially when they really like a character, they love it when other characters doubt them and then their favorite character is proven right. And so you see really funny things like that. But the implementation problem in that case would just be, that obviously feels like the storyteller’s invention, not a natural occurrence of events. Because that’s such a coincidence that somebody happened to be choking.
Oren: All right. With the clear lesson that it’s okay to punch people because maybe they’re choking–
Bunny: [Chuckles]
Oren: –I think we will go ahead and call this podcast to a close.
Bunny: Consequentialism, baby.
Oren: [Chuckles]
Chris: And if you feel like punching somebody and we just gave you a great idea as to how to justify it, please support us on Patreon.
Bunny, Oren: [Laugh]
Bunny: Brilliant. A-plus segue.
Chris: We swear we do not encourage punching among our patrons. Or do we? If you listen to this four more times–
Bunny: [Chuckles]
Chris: –May discover our real opinion about punching and whether it’s good or not.
Bunny: [Chuckles] Write me an essay, five to eight pages.
Oren: All right. Before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, we have Callie Macleod. Next, there’s Aymon Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. And we would never punch any of them because they’re great. So we’ll talk to the rest of you next week.
[Outro Music]Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.
Behold, the idyllic country of Generica, where the stones are cobbled, the roofs are thatched, and the wizards are robed. Such is the nightmare of spec fic writers when they create a new world. We all fear that our setting will be dull and drab, but it need not be so. This week, the discussion is on how to make your world stand out, how to give it a distinct look. Also a distinct sound, smell, and touch so that you’ll be fully ready for the holodeck adaptation in the 24th century.
Show Notes Wheel of Time * Curse of Chalion * Game of Thrones * Legend of the Seeker * Derinkuyu * The Broken Earth * The Difference Engine * Stitchpunk * Solarpunk * Animal Companion * Cottagecore * Afrofuturism * Giant’s Causeway * The Cinder Spires * Raksura * Project Habakkuk TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Sofia.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.
[intro music]Bunny: Hello and welcome to the Mythcreants Podcast. With me today is…
Oren: Oren
Bunny: …and…
Chris: Chris.
Bunny: And I’m Bunny, I’m back. And today we’re going to talk about creating a look for your story, by which I mean you should really be using Times New Roman. Stop using Calibri.
Oren: I’m all about Helvetica over here.
Bunny: Helvetica’s okay.
Chris: I have a Comic Sans world.
Bunny: No! You’re the villain, Chris. You’re the villain. Get out of here with your curved Sans Serif letters.
Chris: Yeah, and then some Papyrus.
Bunny: Ugh, not Papyrus.
Oren: Any fans of Montserrat?
Chris: Yeah, I do like that one too. Pronouncing it though is always a bit of a challenge.
Oren: I have no idea how it’s pronounced. I just said it phonetically and rolled the dice because I like to live dangerously.
Bunny: Monster-rat?
Oren: Monts-srat.
Chris: Monster-rat. That’s what it’s gonna be from now on. I have no idea what that looks like, but I can get behind a font called Monster-rat.
Oren: My good friend Oswald.
Bunny: The most classy font: Oswald.
Today we are talking about not just fonts, but how to escape the magical, fantastical, incredibly bland world of Generica, which has cobblestone streets and peasants doing peasant things. And there might be some trees. And a palace probably.
Oren: Yeah, probably some thatched roof cottages.
Bunny: There’s definitely thatching. There’s a lot of burlap around. There’s bales of straw, horses…
Chris: And to be clear, it’s not that these things are necessarily bad. There are definitely cases when you want to evoke the traditional genre look for whatever reason. It’s just that usually you want to do something more than that.
Bunny: Yeah, if you’re relying on your readers to have been familiar with other generic fantasy places and just fill that in themselves, you don’t have a very distinct world going on.
So, the problem is just that a lot of stories over-rely on readers having this notion of what places look like. They rely on that rather than actually building a location or a look for their world. That technically works. The reader is picturing something. They’re picturing Generica, the fantasy town. But they’re also doing the work.
Chris: That imagery will also feel very remote, if they have to, oh look, there’s a castle. It’s still going to be a very blank castle. And as a person whose visual imagination is not very robust, to me that’s a very simple, vague, cloudy castle, if you just say castle.
Oren: So, I would say, having read a fair amount of high fantasy, I do think one thing that leads to this kind of generic feeling is less the choices that you make in terms of, does this setting have things in it other than what might be common in various historical time periods? Or is it that you’re just not interested in making it seem interesting or unique? You have the Wheel of Time, which just feels exceptionally generic.
Bunny: Yes, I remember when my friend was reading that, and the first book travels through three different towns. More than that, it was just a journey between towns that all felt the same but had one thing different.
Oren: Every town is the same, every country is the same, except that occasionally one of the random countries has an accent that doesn’t make any sense. So, it’s extremely generic compared to The Curse of Chalion, or Chalion, whichever it is. Lois McMaster Bujold’s book.
And these books are from about the same time, so I’m not comparing Lord of the Rings to something that comes much later. These are contemporaries.
Curse of Chalion feels much more interesting and much more distinct, even though they are roughly similar in terms of the elements that they have. They have castles made of stone and houses made of wood and thatch. There are probably cobblestone streets in both of them.
The difference is that Curse of Chalion is going for a more grounded approach. That’s why it doesn’t have a lot of much more obvious fantasy elements, and so it focuses on that.
There is a scene that I will always remember in Curse of Chalion: When one of the characters, the princess character I think, puts on a pair of earrings, they’re described as diamond spark earrings. And the description of them really stood out because you realize that until now no one that you’ve encountered has been wealthy enough to wear jewels. That made it seem really neat, that sort of detail.
And I’m not saying that Curse of Chalion is super high on novelty, but it’s higher than Wheel of Time in terms of its location. If this was a TV show, it’s the difference between Game of Thrones and whatever the Sword of Truth series was, which just looked really generic, and that was of course largely down to budgeting. But in written work, you don’t have a budget. You instead have your words.
Chris: Creating a look, Bunny talked about it making your world memorable. It definitely does that. But also, if you want atmosphere, it’s a really important component of atmosphere. And I also think that creating a look gives you something to focus on when you write description. You’ll know what am I trying to do with this description? What kind of things should I feature, for instance?
Bunny: Yeah, it makes description way less perfunctory, especially if you can get excited in the sort of world you’re looking at. It’s way easier for me to write description. I’m like, wow, that’s really cool.
Chris: So, we say the look of your world, but I would also group that together with the aesthetics. So, you can also think about sounds and smells, or the way that things move and change. It doesn’t have to be static. And that kind of fits together in the aesthetics of your world, which is a component of your theme. You can start by thinking about the general theme of your world.
What kind of an atmosphere did you want? Do you want to be more grounded, like Curse of Chalion? Or do you want to be more whimsical? Or in a sci-fi setting, you might decide it’s more space fantasy or more minimalist and futuristic. What kind of story is this? Dark or light?
All of those things, you can start by looking at that and then extrapolate the type of aesthetics that give you that impression.
Bunny: Absolutely. And if you’re not sure where to start, I’ve come up with some questions that you can ask in order to get your creative juices flowing down the mountain to the sea of description.
Chris: Oh, man, that’s some aesthetic imagery right there.
Oren: I wasn’t sure where the metaphor was going, but I like where it ended up.
Bunny: I was saying juices. I was not sure where it was going either.
Some sorts of things that you want to ask yourself is stuff like: What makes life here unique and interesting? What are we doing here? What’s this world like? Why do you want to set it here? And often that’s going to have stuff to do with your plot, which is good. You want it to because then that means you can explore the interesting parts of your world more thoroughly.
There’s also just things you can ask yourself about the culture this takes place in, or the architecture, or how geography shapes architecture. There are some really fascinating cities around the world that have been shaped by the places where they’re built. Obviously, lots of port towns, but there’s an area in Guadix, Spain that supposedly inspired hobbit houses because people live in the hills.
Oren: Oh, man, my absolute favorite is this place. It’s in modern day Turkey, and it’s this area where there’s a large stretch of what’s called tuft, which is a kind of relatively soft stone. And so, there are just miles and miles of underground buildings. Because it was very easy to excavate and the area above isn’t really particularly hospitable. It doesn’t have a lot of cover. There’s not much vegetation. And so, people who lived there over the millennia dug out these tunnels, and it’s super cool.
It’s unfortunately the subject of a lot of conspiracy theories about the whole ancient Atlantis nonsense, but the actual area is super cool. I will put a link to it in the show notes. I can’t remember what it’s called off the top of my head, but I love it. Very fun place to learn about.
Chris: One thing I do think that you should think about upfront, because I’ve had a couple clients that have not, is if you do want your world to seem mysterious in some way, or the supernatural elements to seem mysterious, you have to plan that ahead. Because what happens if you create a general atmosphere or look that has just tons of overt supernatural things happening everywhere, that’s not going to be mysterious. You can’t make it mysterious anymore because it’s all out in the open where you can see it.
So, if you want to be mysterious, you do have to tone down the supernatural front and center. You can still have oh, the mists that descend every evening and nobody can see what happens in them. And right, you have separate aesthetics and separate look that goes with mysteriousness. But you can’t just have every person has a whole horde of magical devices, and now we want the magical devices to be mysterious. Those things are not compatible.
That’s in the same way in Curse of Chalion, Oren remembers these earrings that are luxurious because the setting is grounded. The more higher realism, the grittier your world is, the more that the supernatural things stand out when they appear.
You want to think about that balance, whether you want everything to be magical and whimsical and out in the open right away, or if you would actually prefer something that feels very grounded so that when you do put in something supernatural or something luxurious or something that is hope in a dark setting, for instance, it pops more.
Bunny: Yeah, I think Oren’s example is just a really good instance of using the world to emphasize something by contrast, which is a great way to do that.
Oren: Another tactic that I’m fond of, I’ve done this at least a couple times in some of my own stories and it’s worked okay, is to figure out what cool thing do you want this world to have and then extrapolating from that as a basis.
And as far as published works go, the Broken Earth is a fantastic example because the Broken Earth’s concept is basically what if apocalypse is all the time? It’s an apocalypse punk setting. The world is so geologically unstable that every so often some kind of giant catastrophe happens, and it sets civilization back however many centuries.
So that’s the premise, and Jemisin uses that to influence every aspect of the world and how everything is very locally based. They do have bigger empires, but even those tend to be more insular because when an apocalypse happens, the first thing that breaks down is complicated intercommunication and interdependency, so that’s discouraged. That doesn’t mean everyone’s nice, right? These communities can be mean like anyone else, but it does mean that people are much more focused on who their neighbor is than the stocks they might buy from a city across the continent, stuff like that. And that is just a very cool concept. I like that a lot.
Bunny: That’s a great way to make it memorable. Not a lot of stories have done that either.
Some of the most memorable stories have picked a concept and then just ran with it. Many of the punk genres, right? The blank punk, not just the musicians with spiky hair. Steampunk is maybe the most popular or most well-known of the punks.
Chris: But now the punks have to compete with the cores.
Bunny: Oh, that’s true.
Chris: Steampunk versus cottagecore.
Bunny: Ooh! [laughs]
Oren: That’s an interesting one. Because if you look at some of the early foundations of what’s now the steampunk subgenre, if you look at the Difference Engine, for example, which while no book can really claim to be the first steampunk novel, the Difference Engine is certainly very foundational to the genre.
The premise of that one is what if, the analog computers called the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine that were only theoretical in real life, what if they actually were built and they worked as advertised? That creates a very different kind of setting and the world branches out from there. And it does a reasonably good job.
Now, nowadays, because steampunk has become its own set of tropes and expectations, you can’t just do that again, because then you just get steampunk and everyone’s like, I’ve seen this before. I know what’s going on with steampunk. So, you might need to apply your own twist to make it seem more unique.
Bunny: And there’s other punk genres that haven’t been used as much that I think are pretty ripe for being explored. Chris, I think I remember an article you did that mentioned stitchpunk, which is not something I’ve seen before, but it’s very intriguing where everything’s fabric.
Chris: Yeah, there are a few stitchpunk works, but they’re few and far between. The movie Nine, there’s some video games like Kirby’s Epic Yarn. But yeah, no, it has a lot of potential because you can have constructed creatures and people in it, right? And that really changes the nature of how things work.
Bunny: And that’s really unusual.
Solarpunk is another one. I think that one maybe has the trouble in utopia problem of like, this sounds really great, where’s the conflict?
Oren: Okay, I have to admit, I’ve thought about this. I don’t think that’s true.
Bunny: Oh, really?
Oren: No, I don’t think so. Because solarpunk, granted, it’s new, right? So, it’s very nebulous. But it is largely defined by letting nature reclaim things and powering our civilization on renewables. That’s the defining feature of solarpunk. You have a lot of solarpunk art that’s very beautiful, that shows overgrown buildings and big fields of solar panels and stuff like that.
But that, to me, does not suggest a utopia or a shortage of things that would cause conflicts. Hot take: renewables can break down like anything else. One of the reasons why it’s hard to transition to renewables is that they are often less reliable than fossil fuels. We should do it anyway. Hot take again.
Bunny: It’s gonna get hotter if we don’t.
Oren: It is still very easy to create conflict with people who use, generate their power through solar or wind or what have you. It’s when you get into the Star Trek levels of super advanced mega tech, then you have problems.
Bunny: Okay, I guess I was thinking just too optimistically. Once everyone agrees to use renewable energy…
Chris: …all of our problems are solved. That brings up a good point about wish fulfillment or what the reader is likely to be interested in. And readers have different things that they will get excited over. But having some idea of, okay, what reader base, who likes X, are you catering to with your world?
So, for instance, if you have focus on a lot of adorable animals in your world, right? The animals in your world wear little hats.
Oren: aww!
Chris: Or whatever, everybody has their own companion animal.
Bunny: aww!
Chris: That’s something a lot of readers would get very excited about that you can then cater to. And I think that does help.
And with solarpunk, there’s definitely a wish fulfilment aspect there. People are unhappy with how the environment is being handled right now. So hey, let’s look at a world where that problem was solved. And we have this cool environmental utopia aspect. It doesn’t mean the setting has to be utopian in other ways. But there’s definitely some wish fulfillment there that you can lean into to give readers who are excited about that more novelty and enjoyment than they would otherwise. Similar with stitchpunk, there’s different ways you can go with it.
The funny thing about stitchpunk is you can go light or dark. So, you can have cute little dolls and it’s all happy and light. But there’s also a lot of stories where the people who like dark, creepy content just love creepy dolls. They like subverting that. So, then you could also have the like, oh no, this is the evil doll realm. Dolls exist in the dark and they prey on the children who are foolish enough to play with them or whatever you have. Something like that.
But thinking about what it is that people are interested in the setting and what makes it attractive and how you can bring that out, I do think makes a difference.
Obviously, cottagecore, for instance, comes with this idea of this kind of idyllic life where you’re living in a Thomas Kinkade painting. And that’s something that, again, you can think about with your description. Okay, what does idyllic rural countryside life involve and what are some details that I can put in there?
Bunny: I love me a good story or a good picture or something where it’s just so many books. That’s my wish fulfillment. There’s a lot of cushions, books, and tea. And I’ll take book-tea-cushion-punk any day.
I’m trying to think of other punk aesthetics. The only other one I can think of right now is afropunk, which is also, I think, gaining momentum with maybe the most rises most prominently to my mind being Wakanda, pretty obviously.
Chris: And that’s often tied into solar punk. So, I think Wakanda would be considered solar punk too.
Bunny: Good point. You can also combine these. But if you’re not looking to put your story into a particular existing punk genre, things that you can think about in terms of your cities and your urban areas to make them interesting.
What’s important to your culture? And how does that show up in the motifs that they use and murals and their architectural styles and statues and stuff like that, that can be really cool. Just what does this tell us about what these people value?
Or worlds that have features that lead to different tech. So, if you’ve got floating islands, does the floaty stuff, the float rocks factor into how people use technology? When there are giant trees, you’ll probably have giant tree cities, which are always cool and probably solar punk.
Oren: Or giant tree sloths!
Bunny: …or giant tree sloths. A city on the back of a giant tree sloth.
Chris: On the stomach of a giant tree because they’re upside down.
Bunny: They tried to build a city on the back, and everything fell off.
Oren: I’m glad we’ve all come together on this.
Chris & Bunny: [laugh]
Bunny: And then obviously, the stuff we’ve talked about with inspiration from real places, because there’s some pretty interesting and wild places out there. As with natural formations, the giants causeway, I think it’s called, it’s these hexagonal rocks leading into the sea that were formed by lava flows or something like that. Completely nutty and super cool.
Oren: Basalt does be like that sometimes.
Bunny: Basalt do be formed in hexagons.
Oren: Here’s a question for y’all: Can a story spend too much time establishing its look?
The story that I’m thinking of is The Cinder Spires, another Jim Butcher book. It’s got airships in it, so of course it was all for me. But everyone else I’ve talked to who read it commented on that it was boring, and I agree with them.
And I’m just trying to figure out if the issue there is: Was there too much time spent describing the world and the airships? Or is it just that there wasn’t anything else going on?
Chris: It is worth noting that description does slow the story down. You can mix description in with action, though, and that makes it work a little better and have less likely to slow things down.
But usually, we mainly consider description when it’s there just to set the scene and build that imagery. And while that is happening, usually the story is not moving forward. So, it’s definitely one of those things that can be abused if used too much.
Bunny: If you want to have this really distinct look for your world, it helps to have parts of that look tied into the actual plot. So, when the character goes to interact with the cool world object, they need to go and visit the Blotty Blue and get a What’s-It from it. Then you get to explain what the Blotty Blue is and why the What’s-It is important.
Oren: Very wise.
Chris: It reminds me of the Raksura books where they have airships in that world too. There’s a sequence where the characters walk in and look at the engine of this different type of airship, because there’s several different types of airships that are propelled in different ways in the setting. Everyone was like, oh I love that, but you’ll probably find it boring.
I did.
Bunny & Oren: [laugh] No!
Chris: The airship was aesthetically cool, but I didn’t need to know the details of how it works. I think at that point it’s less about the look and the imagery and more about exposition and you have to care about the mechanics of engines.
Bunny: I think Oren’s gonna need CPR after this.
Oren: Chris, my heart!
Chris: I think the classic mistake that I see all the time with description is that the protagonist walks into the fantasy city, and then right up front, we have the city sketched out like a schematic.
That’s what I call a schematic description, it’s not great. The writer thinks the reader is looking at a piece of paper and they have to tell them, okay, in the left upper most quadrant there was this thing. Now draw this rectangle and it’s three units deep and two units wide, okay? Now in the lower left draw this circle.
Too much information, and the reader is expected to keep track of every detail independently and then, somehow, piece it together into a big picture. That is too much for humans’ working memory. People cannot keep that many things in their head at once. There’s definitely a limit, and for some people of course that limit is going to be bigger than others, but for the most part we have a lot of trouble with that. It’s gonna make it so that we just don’t understand anything at all and start tuning it out after a while.
So instead, it’s about representing details that are evocative and valuable in themselves, not in having a completely accurate picture. It’s less important to say here’s a room, here’s all the different walls of this room, and which piece of furniture is on each wall. That’s less important than, okay, this room is fancy.
So, here’s a plush velvet fainting couch. It’s next to a waist-high vase with all of these glass flowers. That’s an evocative picture and you can put it in the room and then just give it a general idea. A spacious room with a high ceiling and then here’s our fainting couch and there’s maybe a light streaming in through the windows. We don’t know where the windows are.
The reader can just imagine which wall has the window and which wall has the fainting couch. And as long as you don’t contradict them, as long as you don’t specify later, it doesn’t matter how they imagine it. It’s having those general feeling, okay, I know what type of room this is and having those specific evocative items that kind of represent the feeling, those details that can be imagined, that matters.
Bunny: It’s creating, in a lot of cases, instead of just lots and lots of detail, creating impressions that are very solid and clear and memorable.
Oren mentioned the underground city. I seem to remember a book, I didn’t finish it because I don’t think the story hooked me, I think it was called First Light. The premise was that one of the characters lives in this city carved into ice and they ice skate everywhere.
Chris: Oh cool!
Bunny: That’s awesome! I’m gonna remember that forever, what a great idea.
Oren: So, they live in the aircraft carrier made of ice that was bandied around in the Second World War. That’s such a goofy project, that’s what it made me think of.
Bunny: What? The what?
Oren: There was a plan in the Second World War to make an aircraft carrier out of the substance called pykrete, which is basically ice mixed with sawdust. It would have been huge and made of ice.
Bunny: [laughs]
Chris: Fascinating.
Oren: They never did it for a bunch of reasons, but that’s what that made me think of.
Bunny: Wow, someone in our audience needs to make a world where it’s a city made out of pykrete.
Oren: Yeah, what if pykrete was a thing? Guys, get on it. Speculative worldbuilders, make it happen.
Bunny: Please, now that would be memorable. Who the hell worldbuilt Earth? What’s going on with that?
Oren: Yeah, it’s kind of all over the place. Its theming is really weird.
Bunny: One more tactic that you can use is picking one part of your world and then emphasizing it a bunch.
The Search for Wandala does this pretty well, where it’s the idea is that there are aliens, but also all of the microorganisms on our planet have been blown up to macro size. So, the characters ride around on a water bear. There’s also these alien creatures who are there who caused it to happen. It’s just an interesting world in that it feels very fantastical. And as I’m saying this, I’m remembering this book also benefits from some illustrations, so maybe that’s part of it, but it’s also just a cool idea.
Or like Wildwood. I know I mentioned Wildwood on a previous podcast, but their thing is like Pacific Northwest, forest, and evil ivy. There’s ivy everywhere. Again, memorable.
Oren: Water bears are a meme. So, putting giant water bears in your story, there were certainly worse options available, I would say.
Bunny: More giant water bears. That’s what you should take from this episode. And Pykrete.
Oren: Everyone loves Pykrete. It’s everyone’s favorite thing once they hear about it.
Bunny: A Pykrete battleship pulled by giant water bears.
Oren: Yeah, there we go. Now we’re putting the important things together. With that image, I think we’re going to go ahead and end this podcast.
Chris: If you enjoyed hearing about Pykrete and other world building tips, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Callie McLeod. Next, we have Amon Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson is a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
[Outro Music]This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Colton.
We want our stories to be believable, but we also want conflicts to be resolved by plucky underdog heroes without many resources. The problem is that in a believable world, serious problems would probably be sorted out by the relevant authorities instead – whether that’s a government, military, or private entity. This tension leads authors to make some pretty weird choices, but there’s a better way. Well, several better ways, and we’re talking about them this week!
Show Notes Ten Ways to Keep the Authorities Out of Your Plot * Deus Ex Machina * Discovery Season Three Finale * The Masquerade * Rosemary and Rue * Into the Spiderverse * A Deadly Education * Going Under * Nancy Drew * Teen Wolf * FROM * Supernatural Ghost Banishing TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Viviana.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.
[Opening Music]
Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren, with me today is…
Chris: Chris
Oren: And
Bunny: Bunny!
Oren: Hooray, Bunny’s back!
Bunny: It’s me!
Oren: Now, everyone, I’m sorry. We have a bit of a problem with the podcast. There’s been some serious issues and I thought we would fix it ourselves, but then I just called the Department of Podcast Repair and they’re going to take care of it. Actually, everything’s fine. It’s really convenient.
Bunny: Oh, well, thank goodness.
Chris: They just show up and turn it off and on again?
Oren: Yeah, it was that simple.
Chris: And we’ve already done that! We’ve already turned it off and on again, but for some reason it didn’t work when we did it. It only works when the authorities do it.
Bunny: If that doesn’t work, we can just kick it, I think.
Oren: [Laughs] Based on that opening joke, our topic, I think, is weird tech support solutions? No, so we’re actually talking about keeping the authorities out of your story because that’s a problem that a lot of people have. And, generally speaking, it’s that there’s an obvious thing of ‘Why aren’t the people whose job it is to deal with this, dealing with this problem? Why does your independently minded protagonist have to do it?’
Bunny: Because they’re the protagonist, Oren.
Chris: Not to mention that protagonists are often underdogs. So they’re usually underqualified to do what you want them to do. Practically powerless, and that just makes it that much worse.
Oren: Yeah, although every once in a while, you get a story that does the opposite, where the author doesn’t have a contrived reason, and then the authority just comes in and solves the problem. Oh, that’s worse!
Bunny: Yeah, I’d rather it be contrived and have a story than for it to be realistic and not have one.
Oren: Yeah, there aren’t that many examples of that in published works, because most writers know better. It does happen at the end of Discovery’s third season, which is very funny. ‘Oh no, the bad guy is here! Bet our heroes are gonna have to deal with her.’ ‘No, actually, they have a million allies, and the allies all show up and deal with the problem. Don’t worry about it.’ [Laughs]
Chris: Look, Oren, you love a good come to the rescue, though.
Oren: I do. And that one, it kept happening! Surprise reinforcement turning point continues to occur, thats a little much, guys.
Chris: Did we really get all of those prior achievements?
Bunny: You can hear the ding! ding! And the Steam achievement icon pops up.
Chris: Yeah. I remember Game of Thrones also had a sequence where it did three surprise reinforcements in a row. And it was like, the first one was set up pretty well, because Sansa had written a letter, and it made sense that somebody came to her aid, but then the rest were just like, ‘really? Is this the only way you know how to do an exciting turning point?’
Bunny: I was trying to think of stories that did this, and I couldn’t really think of any specifically, but I feel like I’ve read stories or heard people talk about them where the authority that comes in is just an omnipotent being. God comes in and the story is over now. I have solved the problem.
Oren: That’s a classics reference. That’s literally the deus ex machina. The old Greek situation where in their really ancient Greek plays, they would literally just have the gods show up on stage and sort the ending out, and they would be lowered down by a special box, and that’s where we get the term “God from the Machine.”
Bunny: Oh, really? I didn’t know that.
Oren: Yeah, no, that’s a real thing. Now, as far as I know, that device isn’t in any of the ancient Greek plays that we still care about, but that is what I’ve read. I suppose it’s possible that could be a myth. It’d be hilarious if that wasn’t true, because I’ve only studied a handful of ancient Greek plays and none of them had that in it.
Bunny: Now that you mention it, I think The Odyssey has something like that. God, I hope I’m getting this right. Sorry, Greekophiles in the audience if I’m getting this wrong, but I’m pretty sure The Odyssey ends with Odysseus killing all the suitors, and then Athena, who’s his patron goddess or something, comes in and ensures that the suitors’ families are totally cool with that, so that there’s not more violence. It’s like, well…
Oren: Don’t worry about it.
Bunny: All right. I’m not sure about Athena.
Chris:At least in that series, the gods are tendentially involved throughout, so it’s not like it’s out of nowhere. It makes it a little better. It’s more like Athena as a character.
Oren: Also got a bunch of ancient Greekophiles being like, ‘how dare you say that The Odyssey was a play, a piece of theater, it is an epic poem!’
Bunny: Oh, excuse me. (Sarcastically)
Chris: Of course, now we have to think about how to keep Athena out of our plot so she doesn’t just solve the problem.
Oren: Athena’s my favorite goddess. She goes in like all of my magic plots. There’s always Athena in there. It’s like, ‘Oren, this story didn’t have any Greek stuff in it. Why is Athena here?’ Well, she’s my favorite.
Bunny: Because she’s cool.
Oren: Yeah, so Wikipedia is backing me up on this and saying that it comes from plays like Eumenides, which I’m probably pronouncing wrong, but anyway, yes, that is the literal deus ex machina, which we have since turned into a more general term to refer to a contrived ending in which the solution is too easy or appears randomly or something.
Bunny: It’s a good thing that got that phrase when they started using machinery in plays, or it would have been like, ‘God from the hand-cranked box.’
Oren: That’s probably what they were talking about. But machine is any kind of various contraptions.
Bunny: Oh my god, can we popularize ‘God from the contraption’?
Oren: God from the contraption, or God from the wheelbarrow, maybe. Just wheel him on stage.
Bunny: Ooh, yeah.
Chris: How about how to keep authorities out of your plot?
Oren: If we must. It feels like the authority is coming in here and telling us what to do, Chris.
Bunny: Oh, no! Oh, get out of here!
Chris: It’s keep the authorities out of your plot, not keep the authorities out of your podcast. Gonna deus ex machina this whole podcast episode.
Oren: In my experience, the best solution is to just consider context and scope. This isn’t always a problem. If your story is about a bar fight, it’s not a huge issue, because no one is expecting the police to show up in the first minute after a punch gets thrown. Whatever, you’re fine. If your story is about a threat to the city, now you have to think about it, because regardless of your opinions on the police, they will act out of self-preservation, and they are also in the city. At least during their day jobs.
Bunny: I think that when the police show up at the bar, though, they’re like, legally obligated to swing a kosh around their finger and go, ‘What’s all this, then?’
Oren: Suddenly a British accent. ‘Sir, this is the Midwest.’
Bunny: They have those domed hats.
Chris: Yeah, there’s actually a lot of options. So, certainly if you have no better option, you can just pretend they aren’t there, which some shows use, but there’s enough options in most plots, you shouldn’t need to do that.
Oren: Yeah, it just, it helps if you set your story up from the beginning. I have a blog post on this that has different options, but to synthesize a number of them, you just want a situation where it makes sense that nobody else can solve this but your hero. And that’s tricky, because you also don’t want it to feel like your hero is destined to solve the problem, because that’s boring.
Chris: There can also just be various reasons why it doesn’t reach the authorities, right? For instance, maybe your hero doesn’t want to get in trouble. You have to set that up. But if they have been doing something that they could get caught and punished for, or somebody else is doing something that they could get caught and something bad could happen if they go to the authorities, that is a real thing that keeps people from reporting problems. It does assume something that’s relatively small scale, not like aliens invading the whole city.
Bunny: Yeah, I think that maybe the two most easy ones are just either the authorities are the villains, in which case it’s pretty clear why the hero doesn’t want them helping, or just the protagonists are the authorities, or what counts as authority in the gritty small town where the murder has taken place, or whatever.
Chris: And the authorities can be various flavors of antagonism. They can just be, they will do it wrong and make things worse, or they can be, there’s a reason that the hero feels threatened by them, but they technically could take care of the problem, or they could just be underpowered, right? As Oren said, a reason why only your hero can solve this problem.
Oren: Yeah, and you can use your world-building conventions depending on the kind of story, right? If you’re doing urban fantasy, that’s a pretty obvious built-in. If you already have a masquerade, you might as well use it to explain why the government can’t fix the magic problem, because the government doesn’t know about magic. Now, of course, if you have a magic government, that creates a different problem.
Bunny: I’m actually currently reading a book that’s a masquerade urban fantasy. It’s Rosemary and Rue, which is an October Daye book, and the explanation it uses for why the authorities, such as there are authorities, fairies and stuff, don’t get involved is because politics. They don’t want to encroach on each other, the people with power are all squirreled away in their own little kingdoms in San Francisco being like, ‘Man, it really sucks that person got murdered, but yeah, good luck.’
Chris: Diplomatic immunity! Stories way extend diplomatic immunity beyond what it actually is, but I’ve seen some very funny movies where it’s like, ‘Yeah, no, the diplomat can just commit mass murders, and there’s nothing we can do!’
Oren: He’s fine, don’t worry about it. Dresden Files does the same thing. This is not an uncommon urban fantasy trope, which is the idea that, sure, there are organizations within the magical world, but none of them is the overarching authority. There is no Leviathan of State, as I think Hobbes would put it.
Chris: Ugh, Hobbes.
Oren: Hobbes! My good buddy Hobbes and his Leviathan.
Chris: Ughhh
Oren: And of course, the Dresden Files is funny though, because the Dresden Files has a thing where it’s like, there’s not really anyone in charge. There’s just a bunch of different factions, and they’re all angling off their own interests, except that there is the White Council, which is like the wizard government, and they’re in charge. And, at first, when the stories explained they also kinda suck. They’re sorta evil, or at the very least, are ineffectual. But then eventually Dresden joins them, and suddenly it turns out they were actually pretty cool the whole time.
Bunny: Well, that worked out.
Oren: Yeah, so that’s a little bit, a little iffy there, but it worked when it needed to, I’d say.
Chris: I do like the solution of having authorities that are too low on resources. They’re technically there, but they’re underfunded and underpowered in the setting. Again, if you are making up the authorities in your setting. And that’s fun because, if you want them to be there, you can have somebody show up, but they can be conveniently tied up with other things at any other time.
Oren: That’s really what I was hoping they would do with the New Republic in the current era of Star Wars live action shows. Just have it be like, ‘Look, the New Republic has really limited resources and they’re all contained somewhere else, so they can’t come over here.’ But instead, it’s like, ‘Oh, the New Republic has basically infinite resources, but they won’t send anything because no one has filed the correct form.’
Chris: One thing I would think about a little bit harder is if you do have a school conflict— normal kids in school— to just be very wary of the fact that there are lots of stories where there is intense bullying happening at a school and there is no acknowledgement that the school can and should be playing a role in stopping it. You could have the school refuse to stop it and that be a conflict, right? But at the very least, it should be very clear it’s their responsibility because right now that is a very serious problem where schools could step in and keep those things from happening and they just don’t want to.
Bunny: Because it makes them look bad in whatever forms they have to file, I’ve heard.
Chris: That could be one reason, right? Or just plain old negligence. I’ve had teachers just watch bullying happen right in front of them and not do anything. And it’s just, again, the whole attitude that somehow kids are in a post-apocalyptic lawless zone when they walk into the school and the only thing they can do against the bully is maybe fight or just let their lunch money get stolen or whatever. Just whatever you do, even if you could get away with it and your readers don’t notice, please don’t perpetuate that. Again, some type of acknowledgement that this is the school’s responsibility and that they absolutely do have the power to stop it is important there.
Oren: And, for reference, I went to a elementary, middle, and high school where the teachers actually did, for the most part, take steps to stop bullying and it wasn’t 100% successful, but there was a lot less of it than literally anyone else I’ve talked to who went to high school at around the same time I did at different schools. It can be done. It’s not impossible.
Bunny: Yeah, and also I think keeping track, if you do want bullying in your story, I feel like it’s easy to go overboard and make it cartoonish, especially like physical bullying, shoving people in lockers and stuff.
Oren: The thing is that bullying can get pretty extreme and I don’t want to act like that doesn’t happen, but I do think it’s important to recognize that bullying doesn’t have to be that extreme to be bad. And that’s the problem that a lot of these stories have, is that they’re like, ‘Oh, well, we don’t know how to make less extreme bullying seem like a problem, so we just jump immediately to the protagonist gets into a fistfight on his way to class.’ Which happens, unfortunately, it’s not unheard of, but it’s not the most common form of bullying and you don’t have to jump all the way there to show that there’s a problem.
Chris: And it normalizes it and makes it seem that is what bullying looks like and things that are less are not bullying. I think in many cases you can really tell the skill of the storyteller by how much they are able to take smaller problems and make them meaningful as opposed to making everything exaggerated all the time. Like, every character who walks in is just like a huge jerk and every conflict is like a bunch of violence. To me, that’s just a sign of a lack of skill by the person who’s doing it, as opposed to a situation like we have in Into the Spider-Verse, the first one. We have a situation where they totally make the protagonist feel out of place and an underdog without doing any real bullying. They just show him at a new school and because it’s implemented so well, they don’t even need to do any of those things.
Oren: School settings are especially difficult when you’re trying to figure out how to keep the authority from solving your plot because there’s just so many extra things you need to consider because schools have a pretty strong obligation of care because they have a bunch of kids there and so then you’re either having to ignore a lot more or trying to come up with a lot of really contrived or convoluted explanations. That’s just very challenging and, I’ll be honest, I’m not entirely sure how to solve that problem. I can tell you how to keep the space navy out of your space pirate problem. I can come up with solutions for that, but magic school? Mmm.Every example of that I’ve seen has come off as either contrived or convoluted, or both.
Bunny: It’s a fine line between contrived and convoluted.
Oren: Yeah, you can do both at the same time. I have a whole article about how Deadly Education is trying so hard to explain why there are no teachers who can help at this magic school and its explanation is both incredibly complicated and also doesn’t make any sense.
Bunny: I think also for people writing middle grade and elementary school books, you don’t need to have bullying as an element of it. I think kids might prefer to have a story without bullying in it. It’s just so used in those sorts of novels that it’s like you don’t have to have bullying as a plot element.
Oren: Yeah, you can definitely tell when authors throw it in because it feels like they are obligated to and not because it’s something that is like a core to their story or something they have something to say about.
Chris: Yeah, it’s like a ‘save the cat’ type moment but like for sympathy, right? Instead of selflessness where it’s like, ‘Oh, I need my hero to be an underdog. How do I do that in five minutes flat with no setup or follow through? Oh, here is a bully. There, there’s our underdog. See, don’t you sympathize with them? Okay, moving on.’
Bunny: Save the cat or shove the cat in the locker. I think one of the funnier ways to keep authorities out of a plot that I’ve seen, and this is extremely niche and can only work in comedy, is just they think it builds character for the protagonist to struggle. They think that this is good for their resume. It shows they have gumption. In particular, I’m thinking of, and this is a video game, so obviously some of the rules get bent already for that, but it’s Going Under where you play an unpaid intern who has to clear out the dungeons full of monsters that are like former startups.
Oren: Spooky.
Chris: Oh no.
Bunny: It also takes place in future Seattle, which is funny. It’s a good game.
Chris: Yeah, that sounds funny. But yeah, it’s either low stakes or it’s just supposed to be really comedic, right? Then you don’t need as rigorous of an explanation as when the story has a more serious tone, for sure. If we want to talk some examples, I think Nancy Drew is funny because it clearly struggles with this a little bit, and some seasons work better than others, but what Nancy Drew keeps doing is it will have somebody who is leading the police force who is very skeptical about the supernatural and also just hates Nancy Drew for an unknown reason. Maybe because she’s associated with the supernatural or maybe just hates— ‘I don’t like citizen investigators.’
Bunny: Meddling kids!
Chris: At this point, Nancy Drew is not a kid anymore, but-
Oren: Meddling new adults!
Chris: Meddling new adults! But, at the same time, it’s not really a reasonable position for anybody to keep because Nancy Drew is, of course, effective and also the magic in Nancy Drew is incredibly obvious. Everybody can see it, right? There’s no automated forget-me field or anything like that to hide the existence of magic. So by the end of the season, they always have that police person warm up and Nancy romances two of them.
Bunny: Wow.
Chris: Yeah, she has two different cop love interests that last for a season that are like the hard-ass disapproving character that she starts working with. And it’s not that this couldn’t work, it’s just a very temporary solution. And to continually have an antagonist, unless you’d have to have a more permanent reason that not only are they unreasonable, but then everybody else would have to support them. If Nancy Drew is right there solving crimes and the entire community sees that she’s solving crimes and is behind her, it would be hard for an antagonist who stands against that to keep their job.
Bunny: I guess one way to deal with the authorities is to bring them into the story and then make it in a sexy way. That’s what happened, right?
Oren: Yeah, you definitely want to think about repeatability. Like, how often does this need to work? Because if it only needs to work once, you have a lot of options. If you’re doing a short story or even a single novel, you can create exceptions. You can be like, ‘All right, normally the magical waste cleanup crew would deal with this like weird portal problem, but they’re all sick this week. It’s my job.’ But if you want to have a story where there are multiple books about the protagonist dealing with weird magic phenomenon, you’re going to need a better explanation than that. And that’s where it can be handy to be like, ‘All right, there’s a lot of these problems and there aren’t enough people to deal with them, so hey, you get tasked with dealing with all of the magical phenomenon in this area. Good luck. You probably won’t sleep much.’ That’s a good solution for that problem.
Chris: Yeah. Certainly, staffing shortages could have been at least a helpful solution because so much stuff happens in Horseshoe Bay that nobody wants to play on the police force anymore because everybody’s getting killed by ghosts or something. That’s what starts to happen in Teen Wolf actually. So Teen Wolf goes with the underpowered police option. The police are just not equipped to handle it. I think that doesn’t work as well in Nancy Drew, because it has a much higher emphasis on the investigation aspects and not the fighting aspects.
Oren: In Nancy Drew, they are doing magic stuff, but it’s like rolling spot hidden to find the magic thing as opposed to in Teen Wolf where they’re werewolves. They have to investigate and then solve the problem.
Bunny: I haven’t seen Buffy, but I’ve heard that’s also a problem of like, why is literally everything in this small town all falling to a tiny team of people and also like all right here?
Oren: With Buffy, it’s more of a ‘Don’t question the masquerade’ situation. It’s ‘Yeah, there’s a masquerade. Nobody but the main characters knows that there’s magic.’ ‘Why is that?’ ‘Shut up. Don’t ask that question.’
Chris: The other thing is that the masquerade starts to actually fall away as the show continues because there’s nothing enforcing it. And what happens is, by the end, there’s a big magical catastrophe and everybody is leaving Sunnydale, right? There’s other acknowledgments that people start to know that vampires are around. And then the problem is that more people know about them. In season four, we have a whole military group that knows about them. And the problem with that then is, again, we lose our excuse for why the authorities aren’t getting involved.
Oren: Yeah, the government knowing about vampires and having an anti-vampire department was just eh.
Chris: In a number of shows that do that, where they bring in the authorities when they really don’t need to for the plot. And then it wasn’t a mess until they made it one.
Oren: Granted, season four was also one of the, okay, Buffy’s not in high school anymore. How do we handle this now that Buffy’s a college student? And they just didn’t quite know how. And then season five was like, whatever. I guess technically, she’s still taking classes off screen, but no one cares.
Bunny: Classes boring. Teachers are authority. Get them out.
Oren: Well, college is hard to build that kind of show around because in high school, it was much easier to explain why all the characters had the same classes and why they all had to hang out together, but that doesn’t happen in college. Even if you and your friends all go to the same college, the chances of you all being in the same classes are very small, right?
Bunny: Yeah, my roommate and I are the same major and we’ve had maybe three classes together in all the four years I’ve been here. And that’s a lot. I don’t think I’ve had that many classes with anyone else.
Oren: They also struggled because, in a high school drama, even if the classes are not magic, they still feel super important. They’re important to your social life and your grades seem super critical. Whereas, it’s not that they aren’t important in college, but they just aren’t as huge a part of your life. At least that was my experience. It’s been a while.
Chris: Yeah, and college is almost— in high school, the reason why you need good grades is to get into college, supposedly. So then, what do you need good grades for in college? You could definitely set up a situation where a character vitally needs good grades for whatever reason, but by default it’s not really there.
Bunny: For the joy of it, Chris. The joy of staying up until 3am wondering what the hell a hash table is.
Oren: Nobody knows what hash tables are.
Bunny: They’re tables that hash… I don’t know, the book had a really not helpful explanation there. It just looked like blobs.
Chris: They’re blobs.
Bunny: They’re blobs.
Chris: From is probably the only show I’ve seen that has the reverse problem. It’s like a pocket universe or something where people are stranded in this place and a guy ends up deciding, ‘Okay, I guess I’m the sheriff because somebody’s got to kind of take charge and help protect people.’ And then the show just wants him to do everything, but there’s no reason he has to always do everything. It’s like, you have an entire town to help you solve this problem. Why aren’t they helping you solve this problem? Why are you doing it by yourself?
Oren: Look, it’s hard to shoot these scenes with that many characters in them, okay? It’s easier to just focus on Boyd.
Bunny: Wow, I wish I had the gumption to just walk into a group and declare myself sheriff.
Oren: Look, it’s the superpower of being extroverted.
Bunny: Yeah.
Oren: Alright, so I think we’re pretty much out of time, so I’m going to return to our original topic because we got a little distracted by schools and just reiterate that, in general, if you’re assuming you’re building a world, then you want to keep it on the simple side when possible. It is easier to create a world that does not have an authority to get in your way than it is to create an authority and then keep coming up with exceptions for why they can’t be there.
Chris: It’s like the transporter that malfunctions every time for a different reason. After a while, it’s like, ‘Maybe you shouldn’t have added the transporter.’
Oren: There’s a reason why no other sci-fi franchise has a transporter.
Bunny: Or the supernatural ghost banishing exorcism that only works like ones.
Oren: Oh yeah, they have the supernatural. This is how we get rid of ghosts. That never works in 15 years!
Oren: Okay, so with that, we will go ahead and call this episode to a close.
Chris: If this episode helped you with your plot, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com slash Mythcreants.
Oren: Alright, and before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First there’s Callie McLeod. Then we have Amon Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, there’s Kathy Ferguson, professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
[Closing Music]
This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening-closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.
Are dark stories deep and meaningful, or are they edgy and empty? It all depends on whether there’s a payoff at the end. Basically, if you throw a bunch of upsetting stuff at the audience, did you have a reason to do that? Having something to say does require more effort, but the results are worth it, and we’ve got some tips on how to do just that!
Show Notes Under the Cloak of War * Deep Space Nine * Pareto Improvement * Get Out * City of Brass * FROM * Icheb’s Death * Tuvix * Cold Calculus * All Is Possible * The Good Shepherd * Lower Decks * Paradise * Grimm * Serenity TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Lady Oscar.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.
[Intro Music]Oren: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren, and with me today is…
Wes: …Wes…
Chris: …and Chris.
Oren: [dramatic voice] Today on the podcast we will endure great hardships. Our favorite microphone will die tragically in our arms, and the RSS feed will burn down, destroying all that we’ve worked so hard for. [end dramatic voice] And that’ll be it, then we’ll just go home. That’s the end. [laughter]
Chris: And the RSS feed and the microphone will both scream in pain, even though they are technically objects, or not even objects, that cannot feel pain. Somehow it will happen. It will be excruciating.
Oren: A magical fairy will appear to give them just enough semblance of life to scream at us in agony.
Chris: We’ll see the RSS XML code just strewn everywhere in gory detail.
Oren: How is that different from a normal RSS feed? [General laughter]
Chris: It’s inside, it’s in the proper order, and things are inside their containers.
Oren: So today’s topic is going to be making a dark story pay off. And this was born out of me watching the Strange New Worlds episode “Under the Cloak of War”, which I wrote an article about. But it was a positive article, so of course nobody cared. [laughter] Now we’re coming to the podcast with it, so y’all can not care about it here too. Because I really loved that episode, and it reminded me of the best parts of Deep Space Nine and other times when Star Trek has gotten darker in a way that actually worked.
Chris: But Oren, I think you’re forgetting how controversial this will be. Because some people really do not like the idea that their dark elements should have to pay off in some way.
Oren: Yeah, they don’t like that. Look, if you’re trying to write a story that is just upsetting everyone, and you don’t have anything to say, go do that. Do it if you want to, you still have the legal right to do that. I can’t tell you how to make people like that. I can only give you advice on how to not do it. If you don’t care, then who cares? [soft laughter]
Chris: This is one of those places where I think the Pareto improvement, this is a concept I brought up in a blog post a long time ago about concepts for becoming a better storyteller, where people get very defensive about stories. So, when you say something could be improved, sometimes their response is, “but I liked it”. But the issue isn’t whether you liked it, the issue is could we do this thing that would improve the experience for other people, and you would still like it? So it’s an objective improvement, because some people like it better, and no one likes it worse.
And in this case, when it comes to dark material, and whether or not it pays off, there are some audiences who just love dark stuff, and they love edgy things, and they just want to have a fantasy about where you have to kill your best friend or something. We all have our separate tastes. But there’s a possibly significantly larger audience, or at least larger enough, that will like dark material, but expects there to be some kind of payoff. As a storyteller, it simply makes sense to give that payoff to broaden your audience, so that you can include both the people who just want to see the edge, and also the people who are willing to get through dark material ,as long as they get some benefit from that. Some other benefit besides just feeling pain for the sake of feeling pain.
Oren: Yeah, I don’t think there are going to be too many people who are going to read your dark story and be like, wow, there was something important you said at the end there. I hated it. [laughter] Very unlikely that anyone is going to like your story less because it had a point. I’m not going to say that’s 0%, but vanishingly small. Just in general, if you care what people think of your writing, and most writers do, this is usually the right course. So I have a question for the panel. When you’re watching or reading or smelling, if they have smell-o-vision, a dark story, what do you expect to get out of it? What to you is payoff here? What does that mean to you?
Chris: I would put it in a couple categories. One is simply making victories better. It’s kind of where the harder it is to achieve victory, and the more long time coming it is, the more strife, the more meaningful, more significant, that victory feels. So, I think one way is just, is this there to make some later victory more powerful? And we’ve seen a number of stories where it’s just, the villain does terrible things to the protagonist, but it’s so that we really care when that protagonist finally manages to turn the tables on them. You see this a lot in horror stories, where the protagonist of the horror story is just watching all their friends die, and just going through all sorts of things. But then, the reactive hero finally becomes proactive, takes charge, and beheads the villain or monster, whatever it is.
Wes: Spoilers for Get Out, but that movie did that. [laughter] I was here for that. That was a great example of going through the dark stuff for a good payoff on that. I don’t like horror movies, but enough people that I respect their opinions told me to watch Get Out, and when I was in the first half of that movie and through it, I was just like, thoroughly creeped. I was like, okay, there has to be something to this. This can’t just be horrible. And yeah, hero gets out and makes them pay, so hey.
Chris: Or even something like the protagonist has to travel on foot through Mordor. Their achievement feels more significant. But if we don’t have an achievement or a victory that is a direct response to the dark element, if it’s just there to be tragic and we have no lighter mood that comes after it, then we don’t have that particular type of payoff.
Oren: In my experience, payoffs from dark content most often fall into one of two categories, and sometimes they’re both at the same time, which is they make a later victory matter more, there’s something affirming that they enhance, or they are commenting on some kind of actual problem that matters. And sometimes they can do both at the same time.
But “Under the Cloak of War”, to a certain extent, is mostly the commenting on a real problem, because spoilers, if you haven’t seen the episode, it’s very good. It ends with Dr. M’Benga probably killing this Klingon war criminal. It’s not really a victory, even M’Benga, he says, “I’m not sad he’s dead,” but it doesn’t really seem like he’s celebrating. There’s not like a, “Woo, that guy’s dead, we killed him!” But instead, the point is to comment on the Federation’s complicity, because the Federation was willing to ignore or cover up this guy’s war crimes because he was politically useful to them. And the message was, that was wrong. They shouldn’t have done that. This is what happened as a result. That’s the sort of thing where that doesn’t necessarily have to go to a victory later. The victory later is just, I would say, an easier and to a certain extent, less risky strategy, because if you’re commenting on a real problem, the problem with that is you have to comment on a real problem and you need to know what you’re talking about, and you need to have something to say, and very often a lot of people who do that don’t.
Chris: I think it’s also worth pointing out that a lot of times when we’re talking about meaning, which is the other way that it can pay off, that comes with that karmically satisfying ending. In a lot of cases, when you have a dark element that resolves an arc, we get some sort of meaning from that. For instance, if a protagonist sacrifices themself, we are creating meaning by saying that something is worth sacrificing for, and that also creates a victory. Or, if we have somebody who fails, and it’s a really tragic ending, there can be a valuable point about what led to that failure and what they did wrong.
Oren: Yeah, you show how the character’s actions arrived at that point.
Chris: Which is different than, for instance, a character getting killed by a stray bullet, that dies for absolutely nothing. Which is, again, just to shock the audience as much as possible.
Oren: And, of course, there are always going to be stories where you want to show a character dying, or otherwise having something bad happen to them, even if they did everything right. And that’s a reasonable thing to want, but you need a little more thought than it just being a random thing. The story could be powerful if it ends with a character who did everything right, but still can’t get what they want because of systemic oppression. That could be a message there. The message could be that you can’t individual exceptionalism your way out of racism, something like that. But if they do everything right and then die in a car crash at the end, it’s like, what was the point of that? Sure, that can happen in real life, but what are you saying by doing that? What is the purpose?
Chris: I will say, though, that a character who does everything right and then dies at the end to prove a point that some things are not within our control, that is still going to be an unsatisfying story, because the character doesn’t have any agency. Now, it can be worth it. Sometimes we might want to create a story that bothers the audience in various ways because we have a goal, like bringing up an issue, and we’re okay with accepting that penalty of the audience being disgruntled. But just to be clear, if you had that situation, the audience would be disgruntled.
Oren: That can also just get into questions of whether or not that’s your story to tell a lot. I’m not going to say that a Jewish filmmaker or author shouldn’t do that about antisemitism, but if a Gentile person did that about a story where a Jewish character, after doing everything right, died because of antisemitism, that would make me uncomfortable. To me, that would just feel gratuitous. It’s complicated. Maybe it could change based on the movie, but the idea does not…it does not spark joy. [laughter] So that’s a whole other issue. We’ve talked about that sort of thing before, but I just felt it was worth mentioning here.
When it comes to things to avoid, the biggest one, I think, is message confusion or dilution. You show this horrible oppression, and you’re like, yeah, that’s probably bad. Maybe. I critiqued a lot of books on the site for doing stuff like that. City of Brass comes to mind, a novel that had a real problem with that, where it was like, yes, the poor Shafit, the half-Djinn, they are super oppressed to really extreme levels, but also they’re a big threat, because they might riot and kill a bunch of the privileged Djinn. And it’s like, okay, that’s… what are you doing? Why are you equivocating on this point?
Chris: Because, you see, black-and-white is boring. So what we’ve got to do is take an inherently black-and-white situation and then just graywash it a bunch.
Oren: Get some grimdark sauce on there.
Chris: Can’t just write a situation that’s naturally gray. No.
Oren: And then of course there is what we talked about before, which is the danger of being more extreme than you have to. And it, first of all, often just feels contrived. There’s a moment in… I’m going to not describe the details because it could be gross, but in the show From, mild spoiler for the second season, there is a scene where a character is dying, and they have to decide whether or not to end the character’s life early. And that is a pretty powerful moment, and it actually works pretty well because of how dark and dangerous that place is. It feels reasonable that they might have to make that kind of choice, but then they go way overboard with it and try to make it more painful and horrible. And, “No, man, you already had me with the initial dilemma. That was already dark enough, right? I was already invested.” Adding more stuff on top of it just, A, doesn’t make sense, and B, just feels like you’re trying to ruin my day for no reason.
Chris: If you’re going to put a character through intense suffering, you have to make sure that is well-reasoned. Coming up with contrived reasons why a character goes through intense suffering looks very bad. This is the issue with Icheb in Picard, where it just doesn’t make sense. The villain would just make him unconscious, give him painkillers or something, because the situation is clearly impractical for the villain. And so it just always looks worse if you have to come up with contrivances to explain why you’re doing something that is really unpleasant for audiences.
Oren: Yeah, and along a similar line, I always recommend keeping the dilemma as real as possible. You can have sci-fi or fantasy elements to it, but you want it to feel real. And if you use an entire techno or magical grounding for the dilemma, you’re encouraging your audience to dig through your tech or magic system looking for a solution.
Again, to get back to “Under the Cloak of War”, one of the dilemmas in that story, it’s a war story, in one of the flashbacks, they’re treating wounded soldiers. They have a situation where they use the transporter to keep a wounded soldier alive in the hopes that he can be evacuated somewhere with better medical care. And then they have a dilemma because they need to beam in more wounded soldiers. And, if they do, then the transporter will stop keeping this soldier alive and he’ll die. They’re using the transporter, so obvious sci-fi element. But the basic dilemma is medical supplies and attention in a high danger, high casualty zone. That’s a very real dilemma. That dilemma is incredibly real. As opposed to something like the infamous “Tuvix”, where they’ve combined Neelix and Tuvok, and then they have this whole thing about uncombining them. And that one is a pure techno problem. And one of the consequences is that everyone who watches that episode is, “What about all these things you could have done to not have to make that horrible choice?” There are all these technical ways you could have gotten around that problem.
Chris: The short story “Cold Calculus” [Note: “The Cold Equations”], which is infamous for this, is very similar, in that we have a situation where there’s a girl who has stowed away aboard a ship. And the writer is just–I should say the writer, but actually this ending was enforced by the editor. Not–the writer didn’t actually even want this ending. But the story insists that every pound of weight on the ship matters, and there’s no room for error. But if you have to go to that level of explanation to justify why something cruel is needed in the story, then it’s too late. It’s all over. If you have to do that level of explanation, it’s not working, period.
Oren: And it’s notable that the same thing could potentially happen with “Under the Cloak of War”. If you were inclined, you can look through the way the transporter has worked in other episodes and be like, “Why didn’t they do this?” But the episode is not encouraging you to do that, because it’s not using the transporter to make up a dilemma out of whole cloth.
Chris: I do think it’s worth looking at to what extent is really dark material worth it when we’re, for instance, creating tension. And I think this goes back to, is this excessive for its purpose in the story? An episode I like to bring up is the Discovery episode “All is Possible”, where Tilly is training some cadets on a planet. I have a spoiler for it, but it’s honestly a fairly minor spoiler. This is a situation where one of the cadets dies. If TNG or Voyager had done this story, they just would have had everybody live. But no, there’s still a little bit of edginess left in Discovery, even though it’s season 4, I think. What’s also remarkable about this situation is that Discovery is absolutely not prepared to take this death seriously, because they just don’t have time to honor this cadet’s life, and to have people actually mourn at the end. They just gloss over it, until he’s like, “Oh, training cadets was so great. Can’t wait to do some more!” Somebody died.
I’ve seen this before where we want to have a minor character die, but we don’t have time to really treat this with the seriousness that somebody dying should be treated. I think that one of the reasons they did that is because they wanted it to be a really tense episode. And so having a cadet die, see, now the situation is serious. People could die. But we could have created the same effect by just having the whole team struggle more. What if somebody got really ill, and people got injured? You had two people who had to be held up by the rest of the team, and they’re like shuffling around. We could have absolutely created that tension without a death that this episode just wasn’t prepared to handle.
Oren: And we can directly compare this episode to two similar episodes from Voyager and The Next Generation. The Voyager episode is called “The Good Shepherd” and the Next Generation episode is “The Lower Decks”, the name inspiration for the cartoon Lower Decks. And in “Good Shepherd”, while certainly not a perfect episode, no one dies. They have tension, because there’s aliens and spooky stuff. And then they get back and they all have a firm, wow, we had a fun adventure together. And we sure learned a lot when the captain took all of us problem kids on an adventure. And then there is the “Lower Decks” episode, and a person does die in that episode. Probably. There’s like a tiny sliver that she might still be alive because they weren’t sure if they wanted to use her in Deep Space Nine. She never comes back. So the assumption is that she died. And it’s very somber, like the end of the episode, everyone’s sad because she died. We’re not doing like, oh, well, that was a fun Lower Decks plot right there. Those are your two options. No one has to die if you don’t want them to. You’re the writer. You can just say they don’t.
Chris: I think it’s also worth mentioning that the death has some meaning in that the whole point of the episode was to highlight all the people on the ship, all the crew members that weren’t senior officers, and what they were doing and what their struggles are. And so having one of those people, and she chooses to go on an extremely risky mission, that’s also extremely politically valuable and has a chance of doing a lot of good. So she decides to do that sacrifice. So it has some meaning, because she knows what she’s getting into when she does it. Her death, again, highlights the fact that the entire crew, not just the senior officers, put their lives on the line in Starfleet all the time, and then treats it very seriously. It’s very different.
Oren: And of course, Discovery is not alone in terms of Star Trek that kills off extras and then doesn’t really acknowledge it. And I don’t mean to single out Discovery for that trope that Star Trek has struggled with for a long time, but that Discovery episode is particularly notable because it’s like a fun adventure with the kids. [laughter]
Chris: It’s also just this is when Discovery is finally leaving its edgy phase, finally getting into the seasons where the tone is not quite so melodramatic and then it’s, nope, we need to do the last hurrah of the edgelord.
Oren: That’s been a problem with modern Trek that it has really struggled to shake off. This has been odd for me, because I’m a Deep Space Nine fan, and back in the day, Deep Space Nine was the show everyone yelled at for being too dark and edgy. And now I’m just watching the new Trek like Picard and early Discovery, being like, “Why is it so edgy? It’s so daaark. And have I become what I hated, or is it the children who are wrong?” [laughter]
Chris: When I look back at Deep Space Nine, I really do feel like all of their dark elements did pay off.
Oren: At least, with a much higher hit ratio than some of the newer stuff has. Deep Space Nine’s not perfect. I remember that one episode where we met the weird eco-terrorist lady who tortured people and forced them to live without any technology so they died from random illnesses. And then at the end it was like, “Maybe she had a good point.” [laughter] Which…that wasn’t good. That wasn’t a great way to end that episode.
Chris: That episode would have been significantly better if the writers had not sympathized with this lady for some reason. The moment that Sisko goes back in the box, rather than take off his uniform, I just felt like that was a very iconic, memorable moment.
Oren: So I don’t want to say that Deep Space Nine has never had any misfires. I just think that in general, they were much better at handling dark material than the newer shows have been. But, we do have “Under the Cloak of War”, which shows that they can do it. So I just hope they do more of that.
Chris: It definitely feels like Strange New Worlds is in a better place when it comes to how it approaches this kind of thing.
Oren: I’m genuinely pretty excited for Discovery season 5. Season 4 had still some growing pains, but overall it was quite good. So maybe season 5 will be a little more mature. We’ll see.
Wes: Chris, I think to get back to your earlier point about reducing tension, in my experience I think in the darker stories, it’s almost like the more explicit the darkness, the less tension I experience. And, I remember this very clearly in the series finale of Grimm, where Big Final Bad, who of course was new to that season, whatever. There’s other problems there. Somebody on Team Good dies, and yikes. Oh crap. We’re here. It’s the end. That person’s not coming back. And then another person on Team Good dies. And then another person on Team Good. And I’m like, “Okay, nope, they’re all coming back to life.” [Chris laughing] It’s too much. This is just not real. So much focus was put on the first death that when other Team Good characters died, because of time constraints, obviously, there was less focus on them. And so I was like, okay, something’s going to happen where main character Nick gets a deus ex machina to basically bring everybody back to life and save the day. I’m just like, okay, great. That meant nothing. [laughter]
Because it was striving so hard to force me to feel something through these elaborate deaths by how powerful and dark this whole bad guy is. But by going so explicit in that effect, it had the opposite effect on me, the viewer. Good dark elements should still have elements of subtlety, uncertainty, to continue to drive tension. And I feel like if you’re not including those, you’re just laying it out there, this person’s dead. Let’s move on. There’s nothing inherently that raises tension about that.
Chris: I think about it with fake deaths at this point. I guess I won’t say that we should never, ever do death fake outs. But I think at this point, they really do have to have big story significance. It has to matter that person almost died. It has to create complications for the story. This whole, “Oops, somebody died, and then they’re back.” We’ve done it too much. At this point, it just feels cheap. And now it makes it so that when any character dies, we’re constantly questioning whether they really are dead. It does depend on the setting. Because I remember in Serenity, we have some significant characters die at the end of that movie. But this is a sci-fi setting where there isn’t just like magic that we can wave a wand and possibly bring people back from the dead. When people died in that movie, I was not thinking that they would come back. And after a while, I started to wonder if everybody was just going to die.
Wes: Yeah, that one was done really well, because there were still lots of things uncertain. Like we don’t see a way out here. There’s no magic MacGuffin that’s waiting for them around the corner.
Oren: The situation that Wes describes in Grimm is fascinating, because it feels like it has several different problems all happening at once. Because first, there’s the fact that, as Wes pointed out, each new death has less time. So they aren’t as focused on it. So it doesn’t feel like it matters as much. Then, of course, there’s the repetition aspect. The first time something happens, it’s very tense. But the more times it happens, it’s, “alright, I’ve seen this before.” And then there’s the last one, which is the weirdest one conceptually, which is the whole “I’m calling your bluff, writers. I believed that you would kill one character. I don’t believe you’re going to kill ten.” And that one’s weird. That one’s almost existential. Because on the one hand, you can create tension, even if the audience intellectually knows the protagonist isn’t going to die. But you clearly at some point reach a moment where something has flipped, and now they don’t emotionally believe it either.
Chris: I also think it’s worth pointing out that, and this happens a lot, we see it in manuscripts all the time, where writers will not understand the difference between dark material and tension. And so they’ll just make bad things happen, thinking that’s what excitement is. In this situation in Grimm, when somebody’s alive, we have tension over whether or not they die. Once they are dead, that tension is gone. And to some extent, if one character dies, and we think that everybody else is more likely to die, that can actually raise tension. But the tension over that specific character has now dissipated. I think that sometimes when you have enough characters die, that can start to, not only does it have diminishing returns, because okay, we already know that characters can die, but now half the cast is already dead, I don’t have to worry about them dying. [laughter] And, I know that they’re coming back, and it just all goes downhill from there.
Whereas in Serenity, just enough characters die. But the setting also matters, because in a setting like Grimm, or like in Buffy, Buffy is hilarious because they bring all of these characters back from the dead, and then when Tara dies, they’re like, “Nope, death is permanent, can’t do anything about it.” It’s very arbitrary. Grimm probably had a setting that has lots of magic running amok, and was fairly low realism, so that you could believe that they would just pull something out of their hat to bring all the characters back to life. But Serenity, again, has a setting that’s a bit higher in realism, still has its supernatural elements, but it’s a sci-fi. That one, it would be hard to believe that a character would come back to life.
Oren: With Buffy, of course, that entire season is predicated on bringing a character back.
Wes: Anyway, with that, I think we will call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you got a good payoff from this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com slash mythcreants.
Oren: And if you didn’t, consider supporting us because of how cool and edgy we are. [laughter]
Wes: Before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Callie Macleod. Next, we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
[Outro Music]This has been the Mythcreant Podcast, opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.
A subject is discussed in this episode of the podcast. Conclusions about sentence construction are reached. Increasingly contrived examples of passive voice are made. Much like “show don’t tell,” the advice to always avoid passive voice is pointed in the right direction, but is too broad to take literally. This week, we’re discussing what passive voice is, how it works, and the benefit it can provide to your story. Also, some wild passive voice takes from around the internet.
Show Notes What Writers Should Know About Passive Voice * Writing Academy: Passive Voice * Ignited Ink: Passive Voice * Participle * Lessons From the Empty Writing of the Alchemyst * Lessons From the Extremely Serious Writing of Malazan TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Arturo.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.
[intro music]Chris: The Mythcreants Podcast is being listened to by you. It’s hosted by I, Chris Winkle, and by…
Oren: Oren.
Chris: And…
Wes: Wes.
Chris: Today, passive voice is being discussed. Should it be avoided by fiction writers everywhere? After this intro is heard, yes will be guessed, almost certainly.
Oren: There was an attempt to create passive voice in an introduction of Oren Ashkenazi, but he could not think of one. Thoughts to do passive voice could not be had by him.
Wes: There was slow clapping in the background from third host Wes.
Chris: So yes, this time we’re talking about passive voice, which has a very bad reputation in writing circles. So we’re going to talk about what it actually does, what it doesn’t do, when you should avoid it, or not.
Oren: Okay, I have an immediate question for the panel. All of the guides are like, your high school English teacher told you to never use passive voice. Did any of y’all’s high school English teachers actually have anything to say about passive voice? I don’t think mine ever did.
Wes: Mine didn’t say anything about it. I remember thinking back on that, and they just wanted us to like read books and write about books. They didn’t really talk about writing.
Oren: Chris, did your high school English teachers have anything to say about passive voice?
Chris: I don’t remember. I don’t remember that they did, but I feel like they were a little too focused on literature and where commas went. They were really focused on where commas went.
Oren: Yeah, if you’re listening, please comment to tell us if any of your high school English teachers actually had an opinion on passive voice, because that’s what literally every article I could find about passive voice started with.
Chris: I almost think it’s a little too advanced for what high school English teachers want. They just want to teach you proper grammar and punctuation. Going into style and what is strong style, I think is just more like college level.
Oren: Yeah, I don’t think I actually even knew what passive voice was until I started looking up resources for fiction writing, and then I found all this stuff about it. I’m like, “Okay, I guess that’s what that is.” Maybe.
Wes: Yeah, I remember in college I had a couple professors write a paper, get some feedback, and I remember one, he would cross out a line that had passive construction and just cross out and write, “Weak.” And I was like, “Okay, yes, point well made, sir, but also I’m very tired. And that’s what I did last night. Thank you very much for the passing grade. I take your ‘weak’ with pride.”
Chris: Okay, so first, what is passive voice? There are things that are obviously passive voice. And then there are things that it is just a discussion whether they are passive voice. Just to break this down a little bit: sentences often have a subject, a verb and an object. When we say, “You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast,” “you” are the subject and the verb is “are listening.” And then “the Mythcreants podcast” is the object. It’s the thing being done onto. Passive voice converts the object into the subject by adding another “to be” verb. So in this case, it would be, “The Mythcreants podcast is being listened to.”
Oren: And then you can add “by someone” at the end of it if you want to. It could be “being listened to by you” or it could just be “is being listened to.”
Chris: You don’t need to have the original subject or the actor, I would say in this case, because it gets confusing, because at this point, the object has become the subject. So I would just say the actor, whoever or whatever is doing something. You can add them back in with “by,” but you don’t have to. So, “the Mythcreants podcast is being listened to by you.” And that is usually a pretty easy test for passive voice: is whether you can add “by murderous kittens,” is one of my favorites, or whatever to it. If you either see the word “by” in there or you can add “by murderous kittens” and it makes grammatical sense, then that’s a good test of passive voice.
Oren: Yeah, those are the ones that even I can spot.
Wes: I think a good point here to make with passive voice is, yes, it has incredible use. And there is sometimes value in not describing the actor. “The Mythcreants podcast is being listened to” might land on its own and be appropriate for the context, right? “The vase was broken.” It’s a fun English construction to take an actor, take an agent out of something to draw focus elsewhere. And it’s just cool. It’s neat that we can do this.
Chris: So here’s a question, Wes: Since you mentioned “the vase was broken,” there are some situations in which I’m not sure if it’s clear whether something is passive voice or whether it’s just an adjective. For instance, this came up in discussion between the copy editors when I had a post on passive voice. If you take this sentence, “he was dressed in a three-piece suit,” the word “dressed” could be considered passive voice in a verb or could be considered an adjective, and it works either way. For instance, I could say, “he was handsome in a three-piece suit.” That works grammatically. Or I could say, “he was dressed in a three-piece suit by his tailor.” And both of those work, which I find interesting.
Wes: Yeah, if we want to just have this quick moment right away, “he was dressed in a three-piece suit.” The verb is simply “was,” “to be.” The participle is “dressed,” and participles are how we also form adjectives. We take nouns, we add “-ed” or we add “-ing,” making past and present participles respectively, and then those help provide additional modifiers to sentences. So in this case, we’re creating a predicate: “was dressed.” It’s offering you more context. And I would provide a fluid argument that it is still a passive construction. Because we can say, “he wore a three-piece suit,” for example. And that is tighter phrasing, and there’s a sense of agency there. And so it’s really that the “dressed,” that adjective right there, is less about the focus of the passive, and it’s more just the presence of the “to be” verb is, to quote that professor I had, weak phrasing. And so passive is not active, passive is weaker than active, it’s more words. Therefore, I could say there’s an argument there to just call that passive voice, because there’s a more active option.
Chris: Yes, I would… personally, I would call that passive. But it’s interesting that there… in this case, there isn’t really a distinction. They’re the same thing. But the point is that it has the effect that passive voice has, so you might as well refer to it as a passive voice, even though you could also consider that word an adjective. Then there’s the fact that we can have sentences with multiple clauses. Usually, when you look up resources on passive voice, everybody uses very simple example sentences that often have one clause or just are extremely clear-cut. But when you have really long, complex sentences with a lot of clauses, and this is very frequent in fiction, you have subordinate clauses that could also be considered passives. For instance, “he was a small man,” comma, “dressed in a three-piece suit.”
Oren: By murderous kittens. This was definitely my experience as I was desperately trying to find something relevant to say for this podcast. I read a bunch of other people’s guides on passive voice, and they generally reached similar conclusions to the post “What Fiction Writers Should Know About Passive Voice,” on Mythcreants by Chris Winkle. But the thing that really stood out to me about Chris’s post is that the examples were so much better because they were actual examples from fiction and not just hypothetical, really simple sentences. So I felt like I had a much better understanding of how to use it from Chris’s post.
Chris: But in this case, “he was a small man,” comma, “dressed in a three-piece suit,” we actually don’t have that extra “to be” verb because it’s been elided, so it’s implied. Technically, it’s still there lurking within the comma, but it’s tighter, right? It’s always better if we don’t have to include a word, especially since “to be” verbs just don’t have any flavor. So I would say that this is better, because we don’t have to add an extra word in there.
Wes: Yeah, it’s still, I think, passive phrasing, but it’s tighter, and I’m here for that.
Chris: And then, of course, we can add more clauses. “He was a small man,” comma, “dressed in a three-piece suit that had been tailor-made for him by murderous kittens.”
Wes: By murderous kittens.
Oren: Obviously, who else would do it?
Chris: So now we have, again, “he was a small man.” It’s not a particularly strong phrase, we still have a “to be” verb, but it is technically, I would call that active, even though it’s not particularly strong. But then we have two subordinate clauses that are passive: “dressed in a three-piece suit that had been tailor-made for him.” So I do think that when you have long sentences, it’s worth looking at all of your clauses and deciding whether or not they should be passive. At the same time, there’s… passive voice is de-emphasized, and clauses, depending on their placement, they may be in a placement of emphasis or de-emphasis. And so the very first clause, and also to some extent the very last clause, are the places where they’re naturally emphasized. And so passive voice has a stronger softening effect there, and it feels a little bit more natural in a clause that would normally be de-emphasized anyway.
Wes: Yeah, I think that’s a good point.
Oren: One thing that comes up in these conversations a lot is the basic take that this is similar to “show, don’t tell,” in that there are actually times when you want to use passive voice; it has its uses, similar to how there are times when you want to tell in fiction; you can’t show all the time. But even from a wordcraft perspective, I understand that authors are pulled towards telling more than they should, because telling requires fewer words, and it requires a less detailed knowledge of whatever it is you’re bringing across, and it takes less time and everything. Is there a similar effect with passive voice? Is there like a push towards passive voice that writers follow when they shouldn’t?
Chris: I think in some situations, but I haven’t actually noticed it all that much, right? Usually when it comes to various habits like telling or being overly distant in narration, they’re things that a lot of people do by default, right? And I see them very commonly. I haven’t seen that many fiction pieces where I was like, “Okay, this writer, their problem is they have a habit of putting everything in passive voice.” It might be more likely for people who have an academic background, because academia pushes a number of writing habits that I would consider not good writing habits in any other context, at least. And one of them is some parts of academia use a lot of passive voice.
Wes: I think it’s appropriate for that medium as well, because if you’re writing an academic subject, you might be talking about an object that doesn’t really have the ability to be active, and therefore you are almost forced to use certain constructions. A good example of this, and therefore making it a useful tool for a writer, it doesn’t translate to fiction. I’m going to be very clear about that. But if you’re talking about a film and you want to keep the film as the subject for your sentence, in describing that film, you might mention, like, the actors, the producer, the publication, the launch date, all of that stuff. If you were constantly changing your subjects to keep active phrasing, it would confuse people to no end. But if you kept it all as the film as the subject of each sentence, you’re introducing passive phrasing, but at least… it might be wordier, but you’re going to reduce that cognitive burden by keeping the subject the same the entire time. Which I think if you’re doing it, maybe more abstract things where there’s no active agent, it’s better for that purpose. But you’re right, Chris. The second you start venturing into fiction writing or storytelling of any kind, that habit should not follow you. You should be judicious about using it.
Oren: I definitely noticed, as I was writing notes for both this podcast and the previous and next episode, that I use passive voice a fair amount because it would feel repetitive to constantly point out who I’m talking about doing it. Like I would say in my notes something like, “this episode of Deep Space Nine was derided.” And I don’t say who did it. And the implication is that it was by fans and viewers. And it feels weird to include that every time or to say… to switch it around and be like, “fans didn’t like this episode.” I think just because I’m more interested in the episode than the fans who didn’t like it.
Wes: Yeah, definitely.
Chris: The emphasis is on the episode. The fans just aren’t important in this case, right? We don’t care about them. One thing I want to mention when it comes to habits, looking at some of the places where I had thought passages in fiction were using passive voice when maybe they shouldn’t: it really feels like the tendency comes from a desire to keep the subject of the previous sentence and create a smooth transition. This is a little bit what you were talking about, Wes, where if we change the subject all the time, it would be jarring. At the same time, in these cases, it feels a little unnecessary. For instance, this is one I brought up in my post: “The stone walls provided the family with only one room. It was dominated by the large table in the center.” And in this case, what we have is: we mention a room, right? And then “it,” in the next sentence, refers to the room. Only one room: “it was.” And that creates a smooth transition to the next sentence. But then, when we look at the content of the next sentence, “it was dominated by the large table,” that’s a little awkward because this large table is supposed to be dominating. And it feels so much more dominating if you change it to the subject and say, “a large table dominated the center.” It feels more dominating. And so overall, I think, when it comes to creating the right impression, that using passive voice there was not the correct choice. At the same time, I can see the impulse to create a smooth transition. And sometimes writers do create too much of a jump between sentences. It’s not clear how the second sentence is connected to the first. It’s disorienting for the reader. And it’s really hard to judge when you sense what’s happening yourself. So that is definitely one trend that I have seen. Another one, when it comes to places where I would not do passive voice, is that, again, we’re talking about subordinate clauses and leaving out things like the subject and eliding verbs. And if you have a really long sentence and you don’t want to start a new sentence. For instance, this is from the first book from Malazan, the Book of the Fallen series: “Monstrous and misshapen, it had been cold-hammered into the form of a winged demon, teeth bared in a leering grin, and was tugged and buffeted in squealing protest with every gust of wind.” So… this is a sentence about a weather vane.
Wes: Oh, yeah.
Chris: It’s a very big deal, this weather vane. It’s a very big deal in this book. But we have this passive construction. And I actually think at the beginning of the sentence, it works really well because the first phrase is “monstrous and misshapen,” right? Which really creates a strong impression. We don’t really care who had cold-hammered this weather vane 100 years ago. It doesn’t matter to us.
Oren: You don’t tell me what I do and don’t care about. I really want to know the backstory of Mr. Coldhammer Smith, the smith who did cold-hammer it. I want to know. How did he make it so misshapen? I have so many questions.
Chris: It does have an official title, too. It’s called Mock’s Vane.
Wes: Mock’s Vane!
Chris: Maybe it’s Mock. Maybe Mock cold-hammered it into the form of a winged demon. We don’t know. But so we start with, “Monstrous and misshapen, it had been cold-hammered into the form of a winged demon.” To me, I’m perfectly… I think that’s perfectly okay, even though it’s passive, because that first “monstrous and misshapen” really kind of is very strong and has good emphasis.
Wes: That “had been” is like… also adds that sense of age to it, right? Really tosses it back like “this was shaped,” but a long time ago.
Chris: And then, when we go to the subordinate clauses here, we’ve got: “form of a winged demon,” comma, “teeth bared and a leering grin,” comma, “and was tugged and buffeted in squealing protest with every gust of wind.” That’s the part where I would change it to a new sentence so we can have the weather vane be active again.
Oren: Yeah, if we’re spending so much time describing this weather vane, it might as well make more of an impression. Whether that’s a good use of our time or not is questionable, but we’re doing it, so we might as well have it be a little bit more imposing.
Chris: If we’re going to have a monstrous and misshapen weather vane that is a demon with teeth bared and a leering grin, at that point it makes more sense for it to be in an active position instead of just being tugged and buffeted helplessly. But I can see how the writer here probably just didn’t want to end the sentence and start a new one. And that’s probably how that happened.
Oren: Look, periods aren’t free, okay? Especially back when this book was being written, you had to pay an extra 50 cents every time you ended a sentence. So, you know.
Wes: Apparently commas were half off, so hey.
Oren: So my general understanding is that you are going to want less passive voice the more potentially, I don’t know, active or maybe tense a situation gets. Because the obviously silly example that Chris has in her post is: “the knife was raised.” And the knife being raised is a pretty dangerous, threatening action, and decoupling the actor from it feels extremely silly. It gives the impression that it’s like levitating up into the air.
Chris: It doesn’t make any sense.
Wes: Unless that’s the point, and it actually is. Well, whatever, I’m not going to split hairs. It’s a great example.
Oren: Yeah, I just… that’s been, I think, a decent general rule to follow is that if it’s higher tension, you’re almost certainly going to want more active voice because you’re trying to be higher tension. And if you try to use passive voice, which kind of slows things down, that’s going to… you’re going to be working at cross purposes.
Chris: Sometimes you’ll find unusual situations where passive voice changes the emphasis in a way that’s really productive for the sentence. For instance, I’ll have a couple good examples. This one we’ve talked before about the beginning of The Alchemist, which is a journal entry where this guy is just boasting.
Wes: That’s so good.
Chris: It has this sentence from it: “I was acknowledged as the greatest alchemist of all, sought after by kings and princes, by emperors and even the Pope himself.” “I was acknowledged,” that’s a passive construction, but its purpose is to brag. The purpose is to put the emphasis on “I.” The important thing is “I was acknowledged,” not the Pope or the emperors or the princes or kings; they’re unimportant.
Oren: Yeah, who cares about those guys?
Chris: And that makes perfect sense; it’s passive voice. And it actually comes off almost stronger because it’s passive voice, because it takes all of that emphasis and puts it on “I.” Here’s one that I really like from Elantris: “Then he saw his hand. What had been hidden in the shadows of his darkened room was now illuminated by the hallway’s flickering lantern.”
Oren: Spooooooky.
Wes: Yeah, that’s pretty good.
Chris: Yeah, so again, it takes the emphasis and puts it on this kind of mysterious thing and does it really well. But yeah, in most cases, passive voice is a good match for something that should be softened or de-emphasized, but you will just see situations in which it’s really good at putting emphasis on the right thing. And neither of those passages would be as good if passive voice was taken away.
Wes: Yeah, I think you’re right. It’s like what Oren was talking about. You can definitely use passive voice to almost zoom out a bit to give people an easier time instead of active phrasing, active phrasing, active phrasing, active phrasing. And I think judicious use between active and passive voices can let your prose breathe a little bit, provide a kind of flow to your sentences. And these two examples you said are just really good examples of how it can expand to good effect, right? And then you could bring it back with active phrasing and kind of tighten it up if you needed to after something like that. So it’s a good tool.
Chris: Now, if you want to avoid it, because I think that a lot of times when we use passive voice, there may be a reason. If you find yourself writing a sentence in passive, it may be because, again, the subject just isn’t important. You may have a reason for doing it that you do not know consciously. But if it’s something where, “Okay, I would like this to be more active,” or you want to get rid of those “to be” verbs, my top recommendation is to just think a little bit more creatively of what could be the subject of your sentence and what actions it can take. Because something that we would consider passives can actually take actions. For instance, in this Elantris example, we’ve got a flickering lantern. The lantern could be the subject of the sentence. It’s flickering. It’s taking an action. Right? Something can shine or hang or drape or do all kinds of things. So we can usually take just about anything that we want to emphasize and find a verb for something that it’s doing, even if it’s just sitting there, and turn it into the subject without using passive voice in many cases.
Oren: Okay, so I have a few online takes that I need to run past you guys because…
Chris: Okay, let’s do it.
Oren: Okay. All right. So first of all, this one is from writeacademy.com. And its example is: “in the tumbledown house lived a little old lady.”
Chris: Wes, what is that? Because that’s just a reordering of the words.
Wes: “A little old lady lived in the tumbledown house.”
Chris: Which would… that would be normal in a sentence. It’s just that the word order has been rearranged.
Wes: Yeah, I would not call that passive.
Chris: No. Is there a name for that?
Wes: I don’t know. Yoda speak?
Oren: Okay, so that’s officially a Yoda sentence.
Chris: Yeah, it’s not… but that’s not passive voice. It’s not what passive voice is.
Oren: So here I got another site. This is “inked in…” No, “ignited in writing.” Yeah, “ignite your writing” or whatever. This one’s got a couple of takes. So first, we’ve got some example sentences that are things like, “the bathtub was overflowing with water.” That didn’t seem passive to me.
Chris: That’s not passive. No, because the bathtub can overflow, right? It’s… that’s the verb it’s doing. That’s just a… was it called a present participle? Wes, what is that?
Wes: We could say it’s a continuous verb construction. Past continuous verb construction. It’s happening now at the moment.
Chris: That’s all that is. That’s why the “to be” verb is there. Is this written by an AI by any chance?
Oren: I don’t know. It’s from 2019. So probably not. All right, so then we have the next one: “the park had been decorated with streamers.”
Wes: Yes, passive.
Chris: Yes, that’s passive.
Oren: Okay, so that that sounds passive, right? Because of the “had been”?
Chris: The park does not decorate itself with streamers. Somebody else had to do it. That has been omitted from this sentence.
Oren: The murderous kittens, obviously; they did it.
Wes: Yeah, they did it.
Oren: Okay, so then their hottest take was basically that any kind of distancing verb was passive voice. So, “Jim started to run after Fluffy, and Sarah felt sad.”
Chris: What? No, no!
Wes: That’s not passive.
Chris: No, no, you can’t just… no, you don’t just take all word clutter and call it passive. That’s not what passive means.
Wes: Yeah, that’s bad.
Chris: It’s bad and should feel bad.
Oren: From now on, all subpar wordcraft is passive voice.
Chris: This is a reminder to listeners that the wilds of the Internet can be dangerous and to stay safe.
Oren: Yeah, it’s dangerous to go alone. Take this podcast. That to me, I was like, “This is a really hot take.” Even I could tell this… something about this sounded wrong.
Chris: Didn’t you know that all bad phrasing is passive now? It’s just what we call it.
Wes: I don’t like that. Makes me mad.
Chris: Overall, I would say that passive voice is something to keep an eye on. Similar to “-ing” verbs, frankly, right? “-ing” verbs can also be overused. They can also be misused. They create often simultaneous things happening and sometimes that’s a logistical impossibility. People say that two things are happening at once that cannot happen at once. “-ing” verbs can also add a little clutter. But at the same time, they’re obviously something that is important and that we like to use for a variety and obviously a good tool, even if they can be misused and even if they can be overused and even if they can be a little cluttery sometimes. So I would think of passive voice as similar to that. Saying it’s bad or just saying that we should avoid it, to me, that’s a little bit too much. That’s too much of a strong statement.
Wes: It’s not helpful advice.
Oren: I noticed that some of these guides I was looking at phrased using passive voice as a cool rebel move. And I don’t think that’s a great way to look at it either. I think you should be looking at passive and active voice based on the utility they provide to your story and not like whether you’ll look cool at the writers bar. With that, I think the podcast is being ended.
Chris: If you would like Mythcreants to be supported, patreon.com slash Mythcreants should be visited.
Oren: I don’t know how they can’t give us money after that. I think they have a legal obligation to. Before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons who use active and passive voice in precisely the right amounts. First, there’s Callie McLeod. Next, we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Next week, you will be spoken to by us.
This has been the Mythcreants podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.
The undead rise from the grave to eat your brains, but why? When did they start doing that, and what’s the history behind it? Do zombies even eat brains anymore? This week we’re looking at all these questions as we examine the history of zombies in fiction, from the latest prestige fungus shows to stories that actually predate the introduction of “zombie” into white people’s vocabulary. Listen on, and enhance your braaaaaaiiiiiiiiins!
Show Notes PBS Zombie History * Night of the Living Dead * Magic Island * White Zombie * I Am Legend * Reanimator * The Shambling Guide to NYC * 28 Days Later * Shaun of the Dead * World War Z * The Walking Dead * The Last of Us * We’re Alive * Army of the Dead * Romero Smart Zombie * Marvel Zombies * The Strain * Thriller Music Video * Resident Evil * The Witch: Left For Dead * White Walkers TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Ace.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.
[Intro Music]Wes: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m your host, Wes, and with me today is…
Chris: Chris.
Wes: …and…
Oren: Oren.
Wes: And we begin today’s podcast with an obligatory “braaaaains!”
Oren: Braaaaaains!
Wes: Today we’re talking about zombies. Specifically zombie fiction, a history thereof.
Oren: Mmm, history brains. The most delicious kind of brain.
Wes: The most delicious kind. I do feel though that we need to begin by simply asking, what is zombie? Because corpses have been rising from the dead in fiction for a really long time. I was reading that the Greeks were worried about revenants springing up from the grounds, exhumed coffins had those bodies laying in there with stones pinning their arms and legs down, right? Because otherwise they would just walk right out of these shallow graves, I guess.
Chris: Is Frankenstein’s monster a zombie, for instance?
Wes: Great question. Great question. And I think that is, I’m inclined to say that before basically the middle of the 20th century, there were no zombies. And then zombie fiction, boom, started with I Am Legend and just went from there.
Oren: I have some dates for us.
Wes: Okay.
Oren: Alright. So, first of all, trying to do a history of zombie movies is an exercise in futility because there are so many, going back to the 20s. There are hundreds if not thousands of them, and it’s really hard to tell who’s influencing who. Some of them are lost, we don’t even know what some of them were anymore. But, we can pretty much pin the popularization of the term zombie, at least according to a PBS documentary that I watched, and I have no reason not to trust them, to William Seabrook and his book, The Magic Island. Now, we’ve had corpse reanimation before that. In fact, there are some stories that were published shortly before.
Chris: What year was this?
Oren: This was 1929 and there are a few stories published before then which we now call zombie stories, but certainly did not call themselves that and were not really called that at the time. Reanimator, for example, by Lovecraft is generally now considered a zombie story, but it’s a few years older than this. Basically, what happened is that Seabrook did a cultural appropriation on people from Haiti and the Caribbean.
Chris: So he was actually using the term zombie.
Oren: Yes.
Chris: Okay, that’s interesting because Night of the Living Dead, which is what people usually cite as the origin of zombies in 1968, they were not using the term zombie, they were using the term ghouls. And then George Romero said that basically the term zombies had been applied by film critics. So when he did the next zombie movie, by that time he was, okay, all the film critics are calling them zombies, I guess I’ll call them zombies.
Wes: It must have been that some of them had read that book, right?
Chris: Mhm. That would explain where they got the term from, because otherwise it’s a little strange. I don’t think Romero felt like it was much of a fit.
Oren: Okay, here’s the thing you have to understand about Romero, is that he’s a big ol’ liar. If not a liar, he is definitely in denial about a lot of things, because, for example, he also insists that he intended no racial commentary on the film, a film in the 60s in which a black man shoots a bunch of white zombies to protect other white people and is then killed by a white militia coming to save them. No political or racial implications were meant by that at all. Stop saying they were. I’m not saying he’s lying, actually. I’m saying that he does not realize where his influences come from. It seems extremely unlikely that he had no idea about any, or that there was nothing at work here. And zombie movies were already extremely popular when Night of the Living Dead came out. They had been, zombie movies had already gone through at least one cycle of boom and bust by then. They had gotten so popular that they became silly and were spoofed. And this all happened in the 40s.
Chris: Here’s a question for you. Okay, so the earlier zombie movies, before I Am Legend, did they have a zombie apocalypse?
Oren: There are so many of them, but usually no. Before I Am Legend, the default was, again, these were much more obviously appropriated from spiritual beliefs. And again, they were not sincere most of the time, and they were certainly not accurate, but they were much more often going to be a single person controlling a group of zombies. The idea of the zombie apocalypse doesn’t become popularized until later. I Am Legend, you mentioned, is one of the big ones, and then of course Night of the Living Dead really helped to popularize it.
Chris: For anyone who’s not very familiar with I Am Legend, this is a 1954 novel, and it’s actually about vampires, but it made waves because of its post-apocalyptic setting, and it has vampires in a setting that’s very much like a lot of our modern zombie movies, where the world is just overrun by vampires and there’s one dude left. And the vampires are not active during the day, which kind of allows him to go out and just stake a whole bunch of them and kill them at once. But they’re very much vampires. They’re susceptible to garlic and everything. So it’s not actually about zombies, but this is the book that Romero said was his inspiration for Night of the Living Dead.
Oren: Yeah, and I’m sure it was, right? I’m sure that there was also inspiration from that book, but Romero can’t pretend he wasn’t at all influenced by the incredibly popular film genre that existed at the same time.
Chris: What he did then is he took the zombies from earlier films and this kind of post-apocalypse that was overrun by the undead from I Am Legend and combined them together.
Oren: There’s even a funny little nod in the movie to previous zombie films that were popular at the time because we go through phases of what causes the zombies, and prior to Night of the Living Dead, a very popular one had been radiation. Before that, it was usually magic, because, again, we were more directly stealing from its spiritual roots. But there was a period in the late 40s and 50s when radiation zombies were very popular. I cannot imagine why. And even though Night of the Living Dead doesn’t specifically say what caused the zombies, there is some dialogue about radiation from a space probe. It was clearly a bit of hat tipping there, regardless of what Romero is saying.
Wes: I really think we should bring back radiation zombies, the virus stuff is so passé.
Oren: What I’m curious about is are we going to get a wave of fungus zombies?
Wes: Yes.
Chris: We might, but at the same time, I feel that we can’t really… It’s worth a little novelty, but I think that novelty is going to get tapped out pretty fast.
Wes: But I think kind of the point of the zombie is also the gross out. Actually, no, no, I just fear what’s next after mushroom zombies.
Oren: That is definitely a trend that if you look at, again, very broadly, there are always films that either are ahead of their time or buck the trends, but very broadly, zombies have gotten grosser over time, right? Because originally, again, the older zombie movies stick closer to the idea of an undead laborer. Or just a guy that you order around, or a lady who wasn’t into your affection, so you make her a zombie to play piano for you or whatever. These are all real zombie movies I’m referencing. They’re great, they’re not, but anyway. That’s another thing that Night of the Living Dead is generally considered to be very influential on, is making the zombies real gross. And having them eat people, and it was not the first one to do that, but it was certainly a very popular one that did that.
Chris: So Oren, did you see, do you know of any early film where they ate brains before 1985 with Return of the Living Dead?
Oren: No. Again, there are so many. I can’t say that there wasn’t one, but as far as I know, that’s the first time.
Chris: Of course, at this point, zombies pretty much no longer eat brains.
Wes: They’re less discriminatory, right?
Chris: They still eat brains, but they’re not especially interested in brains. They’ll eat anything.
Oren: I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a zombie movie where they actually eat brains. The closest I’ve ever come to a zombie story where they eat brains is Mur Lafferty’s story, where the zombies are just regular creatures like every other kind of magical creature, and they eat brains to stop themselves from becoming gross and undead. And so that was the closest, and so that was obviously a subversion of the expectation. I can’t think of a time I’ve seen a zombie movie where they sincerely go around trying to eat people’s brains.
Chris: Yeah, I think that’s just a little bit restrictive if the only thing the zombies will bite is somebody’s head and then they have to get through the skull.
Wes: I think, like, Night of the Living Dead was like, okay, here’s the story, and it ends with that militia showing up, and definitely not, nothing political for the ending there. But then, Dawn of the Dead, that’s when it really went, like, full zombie-pocalypse scale, and then Return of the Living Dead was like, okay, let’s gross out further by doing brain feasting. There’s definitely something there with just trying to, like, each new zombie installation is like… Up threat, or up gross? And then, fast forward to then, 28 Days Later, which is, okay, what about gross and fast?
Chris: Yeah, it was 28 Days Later when we got fast zombies.
Wes: I think that was, that’s the one I remember, I mean there may have been one before, but I remember that being the first like, fast zombies, because it terrified me.
Oren: Certainly popularizing the fast zombies, right? Again, there are so many zombie movies that trying to find the first one to do anything is like an exercise in futility, but as far as big budget popular ones go, yes, that seems to be the consensus.
Wes: What was really scary about that one, too, not only were the zombies fast, but the infection rate was also so fast. I don’t know, spoilers or anything, but that really nice, like, bearded character who I obviously sympathized with, beard solidarity, looks up and a body in a rafter drips one drop of blood that hits him in the eyeball. And then, moments later, turns into a zombie and they have to kill him. Yeah, that was some scary fast moves.
Chris: Yeah, and I do think that’s a sign that, again, the zombie movies had been losing some of their terror, right? We need to turn up the notch. And then, by 2004, okay, we’ve, we’re just gonna make them funny now. Which, as Oren pointed out, has happened before. But I think it’s a lot easier to identify when a general cultural trend changes, or when something is popularized, than to look and find the very first instance of it. And, Shaun of the Dead…
Wes: Great movie, great movie.
Chris: …in 2004, definitely seems to mark the point at which we start doing a lot of zombie subversions.
Oren: Yeah, the time was right. This has all happened before, it will probably all happen again. Zombies have a remarkably enduring film legacy, and I don’t think that’s going to stop, although I suppose it might, right? Maybe The Last of Us is going to be the last big zombie thing for the next 50 years, I don’t know.
Wes: I don’t know, because Shaun of the Dead accomplished that, but then 10 years later was World War Z. Right. And it’s, okay, we’re going to bring back fast, scary, strong zombies and the military. It suddenly got super serious again.
Chris: Was World War Z a success?
Wes: They tried hard, right? Brad Pitt was brought into it. It made waves when it showed up in theaters. I don’t really think, though, it had a lasting impact because The Walking Dead came to TV, which is not a movie, but had a much bigger cultural impact, I think, for bringing more of a mood to it. World War Z was quite literally named. It’s, it’s like, it’s more like a military type operation movie, which I think pushed it so far in that direction that it lost what really made zombies scary, which is that sense of being almost like on a frontier, and alone, and hunted.
Chris: Right. And The Last of Us definitely uses the drama of the situation. I think one of the reasons there aren’t more zombies in it is because they figured, okay, zombies are actually old now. What’s interesting is looking at how being in a zombie apocalypse affects the people.
Oren: The real monster is maaaaaaan! Yeah, okay, so to answer some World War Z questions that we had. So the movie was financially successful, but was critically panned, surprise, and was generally considered not particularly influential. Like, people didn’t really remember it, it was a very forgettable movie. The book was much more influential, from what I can tell. The book that it’s based on, which has very little to do with the movie, right? They made a lot of changes and changed the entire vibe.
Chris: Yeah, that book is not a book that you can just adapt into a single movie. You could make, since it’s multiple stories, you could take a bunch of stories from the book and make them into separate movies.
Oren: Yeah, because the book is a bunch of vignettes of varying quality that document the initial infection, then the collapse, and then the rebuilding afterwards. And yeah, that would be really hard to make into a movie.
Chris: You could, uh, do a TV show where each vignette is like one episode. And it’s just completely episodic.
Oren: It certainly seems like the book fueled the cultural phenomenon known as the zombie plan. Did you all have that in high school? Anyone?
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: Yeah.
Oren: Everyone was talking about what their zombie plan was.
Wes: Arguing about what weapons you should have, pros and cons of each, yeah.
Oren: And that happened. And I honestly think The Walking Dead is much more influenced by the World War Z book than the World War Z movie is. And heck, The Last of Us is also like that. They’re very different zombies, right? But the idea of this very rigorous approach to whatever causes the zombie infection, and this idea of building the world around it, that’s something that we see in both The Walking Dead and The Last of Us. We also see in all three of them a lot of hand waving, where it’s like, yeah, it’s all perfectly realistic, it all makes sense, until you get to this part of it, don’t look at that part.
This is my favorite part in, from World War Z, the book. They have this section where they’re describing when the army tries to fight the zombies, right? And it’s like, oh wow, the army, they brought anti tank rounds to fight zombies, that doesn’t work, the zombies don’t have tanks, lololol, army logistics, am I right? And it’s like, okay, yeah, that’s pretty funny, but it covers over the fact that they could have just run the zombies over with their Abrams. The Abrams has a wade depth of four feet, so unless there’s enough zombie to cover the entire battlefield in four and a half feet of liquid zombie, then the zombies aren’t winning that fight. So that’s, and The Last of Us does that too, right? Every zombie apocalypse story does that. They draw your attention with something that seems credible, and then they gloss over the parts that don’t make sense. And that’s fine, right? That’s the tradition of the zombie story. I’m not calling out World War Z here. I just find it interesting.
Chris: One of the issues is that a distinguishing feature of zombies is that they’re not smart. Right? They’re not smart enough to actually act strategically, and that does limit their threat level. And because if we make them smart enough to coordinate, then they’re just not zombies anymore.
Oren: And there have been several attempts at smart zombies, and so far none of them have been particularly influential. The podcast We’re Alive was very popular. It was one of the first really big fiction podcasts, and it’s a zombie story, and… by really late, it starts to introduce smart zombies, which is incidentally also when I stopped listening. And I think there are some smart zombies in that, oh gosh, the Zack Snyder movie, the Michael Bay, there’s a Netflix zombie movie where they have to go to L. A. and steal a safe that’s full of zombies. And I think there are some smart zombies in there. One of the Romero movies actually features a smart zombie who can use tools and teaches the zombies combat tactics, which is pretty scary, but I think Chris is right. In general, that has just never caught on because that’s not what people want from zombies.
Wes: One thing on smart zombies that I was thinking about was Marvel Comics did that run about Marvel zombies. And what I liked about that one is yes, they turned into zombies, but they were effectively themselves except the hunger gnawed at them. So if they weren’t eating human flesh. They became increasingly more zombie-like, right? And I’m talking like 28 Days Later zombie because they’re all superheroes and super powered, too, so really fast, still very strong. But I remember a particularly gross section of that was that Black Panther got captured by Dr. Pym, who was a zombie. But he had, like, just eaten, and so he still had his brain, and with his smarts, he caught Black Panther, and then kept him so that he could study the condition, but also have a snack every now and then to keep his mind focused. I was like, oh, this is grossing me out. Well done!
Oren: Mission accomplished.
Chris: It might be worth mentioning that there is, of course, with zombie subversions, protagonist zombies. And then usually that’s where we get some level, but yes, usually like iZombie, definitely follows a trend that you have to eat brains and if you don’t eat brains, then you become mindless. There is an interesting TV show called The Strain by Del Toro that has a combination. They’re like a cross between vampires and zombies where there’s a kind of an infection like a plague, but it’s caused by vampirism. So you have the boss vampire at the top that creates these parasites that infect people and then they become zombies. It’s an interesting way to combine it so that you have an intelligent boss. And some intelligent villains, but at the same time, at the low level, people are more like zombies than vampires.
Oren: Yeah, having some kind of smarter, higher level villain that controls the zombies to a certain extent, I think that’s doable. I think you can do that. I think making the average zombie smart is where you’re running into problems, because at that point it just, it becomes too different. It’s like making a dragon that doesn’t have wings or a breath attack. At that point, it’s starting to miss too many of the qualities that we want it to have, right?
Wes: With both options, it completely alters the mood, right? Depending on what you’re offering, because we can talk about how some zombie films and stories might be parallels for, I don’t know, climate change or any kind of global destruction or something like that. But the second you introduce a puppet master, that kind of situation, suddenly it’s just, it’s not about that. It’s about a bad evil sorcerer. Who just raises the dead and doesn’t use it for a good necro industrial complex.
Oren: It can still be political commentary. It can be about how rude, uh, people with darker skin than us are coming to steal our light skinned women.
Chris: Oh…
Oren: Not an uncommon zombie story in the old days. Uh, fortunately, we’re a little less blatant about that nowadays.
Wes: You mentioned Reanimator, which I think is an interesting Lovecraft story. Because I like the approach, it’s a frustrating story to read because it’s one of the few that I think Lovecraft actually really got paid for and it was serialized, so like at the start of each section, it recaps what happened before, and it’s not always super accurate. Which I think is hilarious. But like the point of that is that Herbert West, the Reanimator, is trying to successfully reanimate a corpse. And, like, hilarious tagline is he keeps saying that it just, the specimen just wasn’t fresh enough. And you can see, like, where it’s going with him starting to just murder people to try to bring them back perfectly. And I like that push of just, oh no, foul science. We try to learn too much and it bites us, right? It’s just this guy that’s just like, killing people to bring them back to life perfectly, but at the end, he can’t do it, and so all of his creations come back as zombies and take him out. I’m like, okay. But I like the push of that story, of just, I’m not trying to make zombies, I’m trying to bring people back from the dead perfectly. And I thought that made it a little bit more compelling.
Oren: Yeah, that’s not a super common element in zombie stories these days. I don’t know, maybe just the idea of casting medical science as the bad guy has fallen out of favor with mainstream film producers. Maybe vaccine conspiracy theories made that a little too real, and people were like, let’s not endorse that viewpoint.
Chris: But you could take it from a magic perspective too, like Buffy, for instance, had a storyline like that. After Buffy’s mother dies, Dawn is eager to bring her back to life and doesn’t care, doesn’t want to look at the fine print for the spell she’s casting.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: For instance, so it’s the idea of carelessness and then here’s your karmic consequence. Of course, with magic, you’ve got all this, oh, you’re disrupting the natural order and life and death is like the one thing that magic can’t do. Everything else…
Oren: Look, it can turn you into a goose, but it can’t cure your cancer, okay? It just can’t do it.
Wes: Maybe that’s why fungal zombies are popular now, because death and fungus is repurposing death into new life, and so thus completes the cycle.
Oren: Yeah!
Wes: You’re not violating anything, it’s fine.
Oren: Very pretty, too.
Chris: I loved how after The Last of Us, there were all these articles about what this fungus it’s inspired by can and actually can’t do. Right? Like, people were wondering if it was capable of animating humans. It’s like, no. No, no. It makes ants move a little bit, okay? It’s very different.
Wes: Yeah, I think it’s, I think they specifically call it Cordyceps, as, like, the mushrooms, and I have that in the coffee that I regularly drink, and it’s just a nice additive.
Oren: Delicious!
Wes: So far, I could be an intelligent zombie, for all I know, but I’m not falling, I’m not falling apart.
Oren: Zombies are known for doing repetitive tasks, and we all show up to do a podcast every few weeks, so what other explanation is there? I did have fun explaining to a few friends that the new zombies in Last of Us are not any more realistic than the zombie virus, because the Last of Us zombies have as much in common with the Cordyceps fungus as 28 Days Later zombies do with rabies. Right, it’s like, there’s a connection, but it’s pretty slim. I am really curious to think about what old types of zombies might make a reappearance. I don’t think radiation zombies are coming back, that’s my gut feeling. I think that’s a little too goofy nowadays.
Wes: Yeah, radiation in general. It seems like it had its time, and I don’t know, it’s just kind of gone.
Oren: It’s interesting because it’s still a big problem.
Wes: Yeah.
Oren: We’re still concerned about radiation, about nuclear weapons and nuclear power. It’s not like that went away, but I think we just got tired of it. Yeah, all right, I guess it’s just here now. I do think that magic zombies have potential. I think you could bring those back. Although, if you… if you did it in the ways that they did it in the 30s and 40s, your movie’s not gonna be in for a good PR time. But I think you could distance it enough from the actual spiritual practices that were first pilfered, that it wouldn’t raise too many hackles.
Chris: How about more zombie music videos? Like Thriller? Clearly we’ve done movies, we’ve done TV shows, it’s time for the zombie music video.
Wes: The power of the zombie music video and the zombie video games, Resident Evil, definitely got it out there. But yeah, it was funny looking into this history of zombies and yeah, Thriller gets so much credit for getting zombies out there into, I don’t know, the zeitgeist.
Oren: Which is, of course, funny because the reason zombies were in Thriller was because they were really big at the time. Michael Jackson didn’t pick zombies out of the ether or because he was like an obscure film nerd. Right? He picked them because they were very popular, and then, of course, that became a lot of people’s first introduction to zombies, and so it’s all connected, it’s all a cycle. Video games definitely help keep zombies alive during periods when they aren’t super popular at the box office or on TV, because video games will always love zombies because video games always need a source of enemies to fight.
Wes: Uncomplicated enemies to kill.
Oren: Zombies are just so flexible in terms of uncomplicated enemies to shoot. And because it’s evolved beyond the standard zombie for video game purposes. So you can make zombies that are giant and zombies that can shoot stuff and they can all be zombies. It’s all fine. I don’t know how well that would work in a TV show, right? If we started doing, like, Left 4 Dead, the TV show, and then the witch showed up, I feel like people would maybe question if that’s really a zombie. But in video game terms, sure.
Wes: It’s a zombie witch!
Chris: Maybe what we need is the fantasy zombie. Except for the problem with that is budget.
Oren: Zombies are also pretty popular in high fantasy. They serve a different purpose there, right? The walkers are basically zombies in Game of Thrones, and depending on what kind of fantasy setting you’re in, right, if you’re in anything that’s even kind of D&D related or adjacent, a zombie is a low level enemy you beat when you’re leveling up in the noob zone. But for something that’s more realistic, they can be a serious threat. Especially since you have to fight them with swords and you don’t have any Abrams tanks to run them over up to a depth of four feet.
Chris: But it’s true, every high fantasy story just refers to zombies as something else.
Oren: Yeah, that’s a pretty popular thing now, right? The Walking Dead never calls them zombies. I don’t think Last of Us ever calls them zombies. I think that’s just a trend. Yeah, we all know, we all call them zombies, but no one in the universe does.
Chris: Because we’re trying to pretend that zombie fiction doesn’t exist in that universe.
Oren: Yeah, I think that’s just a defense to explain why none of the characters are genre savvy about zombies.
Wes: That makes sense.
Chris: Yeah, also I feel like tying it to pop culture, if you’ve got something like Shaun of the Dead, where it’s subversive and flippant, then that works much better. But if you want something that is supposed to be serious, I think just bringing up pop culture zombies when zombies are supposed to be real in the setting is going to create a clash of moods.
Oren: Alright, so we’re getting close to the end of time here, but I do want to bring up one weird historical fact that I’ve discovered. Which is, so Wikipedia has lists of zombie fiction, right, and there’s a lot of zombie movies, as you would expect, and they’re spread out pretty evenly, there’s no period in which we weren’t making zombie movies. But if you go to their list of zombie books, and you organize by date, it’s 1921, Reanimator. 1929, The Magic Island, which was later adapted into the movie White Zombie. And then, the next book isn’t listed until 1976.
Chris: No books!
Oren: Explain this gap in your resume. I’m sure there were zombie books during that time period, but for whatever reason, they didn’t rank high enough for the Wikipedia editors to put them on the list.
Wes: Yeah, I guess so.
Oren: I don’t know if that’s because they actually weren’t popular. Some of the ones that are listed here from the 70s and 80s are extremely obscure. So I don’t know, maybe that’s just a weird Wikipedia error, but for some reason it struck me as very funny. Okay, with that, I think we will call this episode to a close and shamble on off the podcast.
Chris: If you want to feed us some brains, support us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: Yeah, brains aren’t cheap, man. Before we go, I want to thank a few of our very brainy existing patrons. First, we have Callie McLeod. Then there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, there’s Kathy Ferguson. She’s a professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
[Outro Music]Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening/closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Coulton.
Lay out your magnifying glass, conspiracy board yarn, and forensics kit, because it’s time to construct a mystery! That means laying the foundation for what needs to be solved, adding stakes, and making sure there are obstacles in the heroes’ path. It sounds simple, but can get really complex in practice. Fortunately, we’re here to shed some light on the process.
Show Notes Severance * Lost * From * Game of Thrones Mystery * ANTS * Murder in Christmas River * Legends and Lattes * Three Parts Dead * Dresden Files * Supernatural * Wanderers * Today I Do * Sherlock Wedding Ring Deduction * Nancy Drew TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Jen.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. With your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.
[Opening Theme]
Oren: And welcome, everyone, to another episode of Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren. With me today is
Chris: Chris
Oren: and
Bunny: Bunny
Oren: And unfortunately, today’s podcast topic has gone missing. So, we’re gonna need to split up and look for clues. Chris, I need you to look for stakes, otherwise it doesn’t matter if we solve the mystery or not.
Chris: Serial killers. Always serial killers.
Oren: [acceptance] Mm-hmm. Always. Literally always.
Bunny: Maybe it’s vampires, if we’re looking for stakes.
Oren: Speaking of which, Bunny, I need you to find some obstacle that will make solving the mystery harder, otherwise there’s no tension.
Bunny: [laughs] Can do. Can do.
Oren: Okay, now this sounds kind of hard. I don’t know if we’re actually gonna be able to find the topic, so maybe we’ll just make “Constructing a Mystery” the topic instead, cause that’s kind of what we’re doing.
Bunny: Oh, but what am I gonna do with all these track hurdles?
Oren: We’ll just have to, we’ll do—we’ll go running on them later, I promise. We definitely won’t skip leg day.
Bunny: [sarcastic, grunt] Okay.
Oren: Today, we’re talking about building a mystery. And the first question is, “What is a mystery? Is that itself a mystery?”
Bunny: Slow down there, Mr. Ontology.
Chris: Is a mystery a sandwich? Yes. Everything is a sandwich.
Bunny: [laughs] Where’s the protein?
Chris: Come up with all kinds of sandwiches on this podcast.
Oren: Yeah. The mystery of the missing sandwich. There’s always going to be a fuzziness around the edges, but generally speaking, people won’t describe your story as a mystery unless it heavily features the characters trying to figure something out. As opposed to, say—you can say that Game of Thrones is about the mystery of who will sit on the Iron Throne, but no one is trying to uncover what that is, right? They’re all trying to get it for themselves.
Chris: I feel very called out.
[Group laughter]
Chris: I think that’s from another podcast where we were talking about mysteries being about the answer to a question as opposed to the resolving of a threat. They also need to resolve a threat, right? But, they’re a little bit more about answering a question. And I think the purpose of the comparison to Game of Thrones was talking about, in how the mystery has to be resolved, because, Game of Thrones, we also had a situation where we couldn’t just get rid of the bad guys, there also had to be an interesting answer to who would be on the throne. Even though it’s true, nobody—there’s no protagonist in Game of Thrones that is trying to solve the mystery of who will be on the throne.
Oren: And the comparison still sticks, right? There are some things in common. If you wanted a satisfying answer to who will be on the throne, it couldn’t just be one of the contestants, one of the people who was going for it, right? There had to be something more interesting there.
Bunny: Ah, they turned it into an oligarchy.
Oren: Yeah, they tried to do that, and absolutely failed. [snicker] But, they were trying.
Chris: Were they though? Were they trying? I feel like that’s in question.
Oren: They were trying in the same way that seniors are trying when they deign to come into school the last week before graduation.
[Chris & Bunny laugh]
Bunny: Phoning it in before phones.
Oren: Yeah. So, that’s what was going on there. But, I’m trying to be more narrow with this topic and look at things the reader is going to look at and say, “That’s a mystery. This is a mystery story.” [confirmational]
Often a crime is involved, but sometimes it can just be something strange, like, a ship has gone missing, or there’s a strange magical phenomenon that we have to investigate. People would sometimes—would call those mysteries, even if no obvious crime has been committed yet.
Chris: Especially in speculative fiction, where there is a lot of just, traditional whodunit plots in speculative fiction, but there’s also a lot of weirder stuff. One of my favorites, “What is up with this weird place? Why is it so bizarre?” [chuckle]
Oren: [false-scary voice] Why is it so spooky?
Chris: Severance and Lost, and From, for instance, are all shows that are mystery, in the sense of, people are in a weird place and it does bizarre things, and there is no answer probably.
Bunny: What are the spookums and what do they want?
Oren: Look, the fortunate thing is that Lost set a really good precedent for the big, final answer to stories where we’re just wondering what this really weird place is the whole time. I think everyone was very satisfied with that answer.
Bunny: I think also, mysteries can be, like, there are often minor mysteries. They might be corollary to the main plot, like the story has a mystery in it, like the queen of a kingdom has vanished. And maybe the story has a component of like, “Where did she go? What happened?” But that’s also about the political intrigue of other people bickering over the throne, or whatever. I feel like that would have a mystery component, but it wouldn’t be a mystery story, unless the seeking out and finding was the main thrust of it.
Oren: Yeah, absolutely. You can have a mystery that is a smaller part of a bigger story, or is a plot that builds in the background. There mi—people might describe the mystery of what happened to the queen, and the protagonist might solve that as the first step of a bigger conflict—that actually is what happens in Game of Thrones, because we’re investigating what happened to the previous hand of the king. And my god, it’s been so long, I can’t even remember what the answer was. But they do that, that’s part of the story. Or it can be something that builds in the background, where it’s: we can’t find out what happened to the queen. So, now we have to deal with the political instability, and as we’re doing that, we slowly uncover clues about what’s happening with the queen.
Chris: [incredulous] You can’t remember what happened to the hand? But that’s why Eddard got his head chopped off.
Oren: I don’t remember what happened there. I jus—I only remember that Eddard found out about the incest kids, I don’t remember how the hand…
Chris: But, that’s how he found out about the incest kids, is he was tracking what the other hand was looking into.
Oren: Yeah, I’m gonna have to take your word for that Chris, because that doesn’t ring any bells. Unlike the ending of Game of Thrones. [laughs]
Chris: He basically tracked the other hand’s activities, which was solving the mystery of the children and who was their actual father.
Oren: That could be the case. I have no memory of this event, but I will have to trust you that this is what happened.
Bunny: As someone who’s never seen Game of Thrones, this is a very funny thing to have without context.
Oren: Yeah, if Chris is lying to me, please comment and explain to me, or just tell me she’s lying and see if you can come up with a more convincing answer for what happened.
Chris: Yeah, so the hand? A Thing-like character that was just a hand running around…
[Oren and Bunny giggle]
Chris: And it disappeared.
Bunny: [snicker] The mystery of the reanimated glove.
Oren: Yeah, this uh, this all sounds equally plausible.
Chris: That’s definitely what was happening in Game of Thrones.
Bunny: The reanimated glove and the incest children.
[Chris laughs]
Bunny: Coming to Disney+ this fall.
[Oren chortles]
Oren: Once you have your mystery, right? Once you have your thing that the protagonist is gonna try to solve in some capacity, be it the main story, a child arc, or something that builds in the background, you need to attach some stakes to it. And this is where most of my clients have problems when they are trying to construct a mystery, because they—in the most classic mystery of the whodunit, who committed a crime, they tend to think that catching whoever committed the crime, that’s all you need, because, now justice will be served. Hurrah. But that’s just not that urgent. It’s “yeah, I guess we’ll probably catch him eventually, or maybe not, but he already did the bad things.”
Chris: Yeah. Even if it was urgent, there still has to be some kind of threat by the person staying loose. That’s what I’m talking about, serial killers. Cause they know, if you know they’re gonna kill again, then that provides some threat. But if you have no reason to believe that a murderer in a whodunit, for instance, is gonna kill again, then, it just, there are no stakes because there’s no actual threat. Yes, you wanna see the person punished, of course, but that’s just not enough to create tension.
Oren: Yeah. You could intentionally go for a low tension story—those are often called cozies. Just be aware that if you do that, you’re gonna need to crank up the other ANTS in some capacity, ‘cause without tension you’re gonna need something else to keep people reading the story.
Chris: I suspect a lot of times, there’s lower stakes issues in many of those stories.
Bunny: I think that’s a reason why a lot of stories start with, I think it’s called a body drop? Where it’s trying to get you hooked in with a thing that’s obviously high tension. But the weird part about when cozy mysteries do that—and admittedly, I haven’t read a ton of these, but there’s one in particular that comes to mind and, because—I think that this is a problem, potentially, with body drops in general, because, they have to—in a prologue where they’re showing someone getting murdered, they have to not reveal too much, but they have to reveal enough that it’s threatening and compelling. Does that make sense? So, there was this one cozy mystery called, I think it was Murder in Christmas River? And it started with the murder, but because it was trying to be coy about who was being murdered and how the murder happened, the prologue was through the point of view of a dog?
[Oren and Chris laugh]
Bunny: None of the rest of the story was part of the dog’s perspective, just the murder.
Chris: That sounds like it would be more funny than threatening.
Bunny: Yeah, I don’t think it was all that threatening, but it was clearly meant to be.
Oren: Yeah. Admittedly, I would probably not love it if a book opened with a really high tension murder and then was a cozy for the rest of it.
Chris: That doesn’t sound like a good idea.
Oren: It would be like if Legends and Lattes, instead of opening with having—with a fantasy battle having ended, and the protagonist getting her loot from the fantasy battle, had opened with a giant fantasy fight. And then, the rest of it was the protagonist running a coffee shop.That is not the expectation you wanna set.
Bunny: I will say, just as for Legends and Lattes, I even found the opening of it as-is to be a bit jarring. The first sentence is about her squelching her hand into the head of a monster and I was like Whoah. That’s not what I braced myself for. [surprised]
Oren: Squelching. Delicious.
Bunny: Yum!
Chris: I also just have to put in here that, I think at this point, that body drop is only a term for this in our minds. [laughing] I think what happened, I think what happened is a commenter used it—those commenters say lots of things—and then I was like “Oh, is that what it’s called? That’s what I thought.” Cause it makes perfect sense.
Bunny: The body drops.
Chris: Yeah, body drops. Yeah. Perfect sense. So then, I just started using it, like it was the standard term. And then I tried to look up on the Internet if that was actually the term that people were using, and the only place Google returned was me.
[Group laughs]
Bunny: Oh no, it’s recursive!
Chris: [laughing] Congratulations, commenter, you randomly made this a term. That sometimes happens. Commenters use terms, I’m like, “Oh, OK.” That, but it’s so intuitive.
Oren: The origin of the term aside—that is very interesting—my experience is that this kind of scene is, it’s not bad, but it’s also unnecessary. Aside from obvious silliness, what Bunny was describing with the murder from the scene of a, POV of a dog, or the squelching incident earlier…
[Bunny laughs]
Oren: You can have a disconnected prologue where the body is found, right? Or the evidence of a crime. It’s important enough that it’s not usually going to bore your readers, or make them wonder what the point of that was. But, you can also just start with your protagonist finding out about it. In my experience there’s no disadvantage to doing that, and it decreases the chance that you might do something silly—have a murder through the perspective of a dog.
Bunny: And it helps if the person—you can have a prologue of someone else, of the mystery thing happening, and still make the characters involved with it present in the rest of the story, without necessarily being the main character. I think that’s also just like a more interesting way to do it. I don’t think this is a perfect example, but we can defini—Okay, I’m talking about Three Parts Dead, let’s start there, where we have the opening, and it’s not really a body drop, but we are with one of the characters—who is not the main character but is a prominent character throughout the story—being present at the time of the major conflict occurring, and then continues to be a character throughout the story. I think that works a lot better than if it was just some random guy in the temple when the alarms went off. Am I making sense?
Chris: Another maid who finds a rich guy’s dead body?
Bunny: Exactly.
Chris: And really should be charging every time?
Bunny: And they go “Mama Mia” or whatever.
Oren: That scene in Three Parts Dead is funny because that’s Abelard we’re talking about, and he’s like….
Chris: The best character.
Oren: Yeah, he is the best character. I was gonna explain that he’s the second, secondary protagonist—the deuteragonist, as it is sometimes called. The world’s silliest sounding writing term. But he’s also the better character, because he has an actual motivation, and skin in the game for this mystery, whereas Tara, the protagonist, is just there, and would like to get a cool, lawyer job. Whereas Abelard, this is like, his God has died, and his city is at risk. So that actually, I agree that starting with Abelard worked, but it also highlights that maybe Abelard should have been the main character.
Bunny: That’s true. Abelard is my boy. I love Abelard.
Oren: He’s—Everyone loves Abelard. He’s fantastic.
Chris: Going back to stakes, I will say that my favorite stakes are the angry ghost stakes. All you do is put an angry ghost in the story. [laughing] So, basically, you better solve this murder, you better solve this mystery or I will eat you.
[Bunny laughs]
Chris: Or something like that. It’s not normally something you can do, is add any stakes to any story by just having an angry ghost tell the protagonist they have to do it.
Bunny: The ghost is gonna getcha.
Chris: Ghost is gonna getcha.
Oren: Does it have to be an angry ghost, or can it be an “angry ghost,” quote-unquote, the kind of ghost that, like, is angry but just keeps showing up until it just feels like it and the protagonist are buddies?
Bunny: Or is it a, not angry, just disappointed ghost?
[Oren and Chris laugh]
Chris: To create tension, it does actually have to be threatening, cause the ghost is being, is the tension for the mystery in that case. But, you could have a ghost that, I guess something that’s bad is happening to the ghost instead? So if the ghost doesn’t have their murder solved, they’ll be stuck in purgatory forever or something. I suppose you could do something more creative.
Oren: And that works very well, especially in stories where the protagonist is relatively inexperienced with the supernatural. It’s less effective in something like the show Supernatural, or The Dresden Files, where, at that point, you might have…, you’d start asking “why don’t they just go and take care of this ghost first?” But, if your protagonist is a relatively uninitiated private eye or what-have-you, they yeah, they don’t know how to deal with ghosts. They just gotta solve the mystery. They gotta do what the ghost says.
Chris: Yeah. Supernatural’s biggest problem with ghosts is that they had a very straightforward way of getting rid of ghosts that should have been easy if it went smoothly, so they have to have a complication every time.
Oren: Yeah, I love it. They explained to us how you get rid of a ghost in the first episode, and it literally never works.
[Oren and Bunny laugh]
Chris: Other things that you can do for stakes in a murder mystery, anyway, is, you can have, somebody can get blamed for it. So you might need to save them. Or, for any kind of mystery, if there’s some kind of greater conflict, some, a murder happened and it raised tensions higher and now two groups are fighting, you can do something like that.
Oren: Rather than “the thief stole a diamond. We need to get that diamond back or else Da Beers’ diamond consortium will take a 2% loss on their profits.” Instead what you want is “someone stole the royal jeweled scepter of the kingdom of Peacelandia, and now there will not be peace in Peacelandia, because everyone’s blaming everyone else for the theft, so you gotta find it.” That’s the sort of thing you want.
Bunny: Yeah, the clues should advance the conflict. If you’re just chasing your own tail, I guess the dog in the murder mystery, then you’re—it’s just gonna feel repetitive and like, why are we still here? Maybe they do find a piece of evidence, and then they falsely accuse someone and then the stakes are ramped up because now there’s tensions between people who would support this person and the people who hate that person, right? And then, maybe they find another piece of evidence that vindicates that person, so the tensions between those two groups start to release, but, I don’t know. Maybe they had to do something controversial to find that piece of evidence, and now there’s that problem and the groups are angry at them for that. It should, it should progress the drama.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: I would recommend trying to hold on to one threat, if you can, throughout the entire thing, just to give it a little bit more evenness and to make it feel like the through line is a little bit stronger. But often what happens is, if you have something that’s a little bit not as urgent, what you can do is add, to solve the mystery, now you can do things that are dangerous, right? And that can supplement that a little bit. One example, if somebody goes missing, that one can work really well because their life is in danger, but it does tend to lose urgency. Pretty fast. If someone’s missing and you don’t find them for a while, after a while readers are gonna be like “if they were gonna get killed, they’d probably already be dead, and we’re wasting a lot of time.” So it doesn’t really feel like time is of the essence anymore. With something like that, if you have your heroes going into intense danger, to save that person, that can help supplement something like that.
Oren: Yeah. And, gathering clues is another place where a lot of writers really stumble, and Chris has a whole article on gathering clues, but I’ve found that the really common problem when people are trying to construct their mystery is that they just don’t give the mystery enough content. And so, the heroes are always one clue away from unraveling the entire thing. And so as a result they never find any clues. And so, there’s no movement. And that’s a real problem.
Chris: Hero can’t have agency, cause if they have agency, they’ll solve the mystery immediately.
Oren: And that was the problem with the book Wanderers, was that the actual mystery of where did these zombies come from was really simple. The answer was incredibly obvious, and if the protagonists had made any progress they would have figured it out, so they basically just aren’t allowed to find clues until the very end. And wow, is it frustrating. [laughs]
Chris: It’s very frustrating. If anybody’s not read Wanderers, in that book they have zombies whose skin is just… and the main character, by the way, works for the CDC, so his job is literally to find out what this disease is. So like, their skin is so impenetrable that it’s like Superman skin, where any knife breaks, right? And then as soon as they die they like, explode or something. They have one—they do get one body. Oh, if they stop them from moving, so that, if they try to delay them, and put them in quarantine, at all, they just explode, and they die. They finally get a body, and then the body is just immediately stolen, [pauses, laughs] before they can investigate it. Ah it’s just, it’s a very frustrating book.
Oren: It’s like they try to collect samples. Can’t collect samples, skin too hard. It’s ok, we’ll hold one of them to experiment on. Can’t hold one of them, explodes immediately. It’s like, okay, can we examine the remains of the one that exploded? No, it disappeared from the morgue, it’s gone now.
Bunny: [laughs] Definitely running against a brick wall, which, maybe that is what it’s like working at the CDC.
Oren: That is a particularly stringent example, but I have seen a number of stories where this happens. What you want to do in that case, is you just need to make your mystery a little more involved. You need to add more steps, essentially, that the hero can uncover. And if there’s people who are—have disappeared, then, you find one of the disappeared people, and they’re in this weird, mysterious stone circle. Hey, you found a clue and you’ve made some progress. Now, you have to figure out what’s going on with the stone circle, and that leads you somewhere else, right? And as long as that feels like it’s part of the same story, and you’re not just going from unrelated event to unrelated event, that’s generally a good way to go.
Chris: One thing that I’ve seen happen before, is that, again, your clues need to build on each other, right? And it feels like it matters what happens, and… you can’t spread your clues out to horde information. So, if the hero gets a bunch of clues that don’t seem in any way related to each other, and their relevance to the story isn’t known, just so that you can have a cool ending moment where “Oh, it all comes together” and clicks together at once, I understand the impulse to do that, because everybody loves their cool reveals. But if you have every clue seem unimportant and unrelated, so that you can not give away any information until the end, then it makes your book feel like it’s very aimless. It makes your scenes feel pointless. It doesn’t feel like anything is happening, or any movement in the story is happening. So, you do have to have one clue and then another clue that feels related to it in some way. [chuckles]
Bunny: Yeah, oh yeah. I was just gonna say, I think a corollary to this is also important, which is the order in which you present the clues, which has to do with not only making sure the movement makes sense, but also making sure the reasoning makes sense. So, I have a bit of a weird example of this going wrong, which I think people on the discord have heard me talk about, because it was an extremely strange episode of Criminal Minds that I caught when I was running on the treadmill.
And, so this episode is called Today I Do, and, what has happened is that there’s a, the body of a teenage girl has turned up in a pond, and another teenage girl is missing. And, we first see the pond scene, and they’re like, investigating it, and they decide that the murderer must be female, because it was a water burial. And even if it’s true that statistically, women murderers are more likely to dump the bodies in water, that’s also—statistically, men are more likely to do a murder. First of all, that doesn’t work. Second of all, the next scene after that is, that they realize that the girl who’s disappeared had a mysterious woman living with her. I dunno, man, maybe you should present that first. That’s a lot more compelling evidence that the murderer might be female.
Oren: It would be good if your clues made sense. [chuckle]
Chris: And your heroes don’t feel like they’re metagaming.
Bunny: Yeah. I recommend that you make your story make sense. Yeah, I recommend that.
[Chris laughs]
Bunny: Alright. Anyway, I do like the premise of that episode, which is, it’s like a murderous life coach, self-help guru. I just think it was like, just a very weird way of doling out information, and it felt like the wrong order. And also, I don’t even know if I would, it doesn’t seem sexist, it just seems poorly thought out in a, at least parallel to sexist kind of way. Like the women murderers, if someone was poisoned, it was a woman. That sort of thing.
Chris: It’s at least stereotyping. Especially since if you’re actually solving a crime, you cannot, you know, state a statistic like that and, it’s fact. Right? Even if 70% of water burials were done by women murderers, that’s still only 70%. [laughing] Right? You can’t just state, like that—yeah, it’s definitely a woman. No, there’s a 30% chance it’s a dude, or not even counting like non-binary people, or what-have-you. And so, you can’t just rule all those people out. That’s not how that works.
Bunny: It would be a lot more sensical if they were like “Oh, the disappeared girl was living with a mysterious woman, and then they found the body in the pond, and then they can be like, this is statistically making the fact that it might have been a female killer more likely, because there’s a mysterious woman in the mix now, so I feel like you’re more justified in thinking like that. Or they could just be disproven. Show them the folly of being like, “women do be burying bodies in lakes, amirite?”
[Oren and Bunny laugh]
Oren: My absolute favorite, the whole like, poison is a weapon that women use to kill people, is my favorite misunderstanding of statistics there is. Because the actual statistic is that, women who murder are slightly more likely to use poison than men who murder, but not only do men commit so many more murders that any random poisoning is much more likely to have been committed by a man than a woman, but women are also still much more likely to use other methods, because poison is a relatively uncommon form of murder. So it’s just, it is a misunderstanding on two different levels, and it’s my absolute favorite. I love explaining that to people. Even though it’s, we’re a little bit out, out-of-bounds on terms of topic now, but I just couldn’t help myself.
Bunny: Hey, if you dis—if you’ve dissuaded at least one person in our audience of using that trope, then you’ve done us a public good.
[Oren laughs]
Oren: Alright so before—since we’re coming up on the end, I think it’s relevant to talk about the climax of a mystery story. Cause this is also difficult, because, if for no other reason than people have this idea of the detective gathering everyone together and revealing who did it, and oh boy is that hard to do in a book.
Bunny: It was the butler.
Oren: Yeah, it could be the butler.
Bunny: Oh, it’s de—it’s definitely the butler.
[Group laughs]
Chris: The butler is statistically likely to poison people.
[Group laughs]
Chris: And then dump them in a pond.
Oren: See, this is the kind of an ending, big reveal moment we need. But, typically speaking, stories that do that are almost all TV shows, or the old Sherlock Holmes stories, where the story was told through Watson’s perspective specifically so that Holmes could hide things from us because if we knew what Holmes knew, the mystery would be solved too early. And, that’s just not a good way to write a story. It’s not worth it. The losses you get from keeping the story out of your protagonist’s point of view are too high. In general, I think you’re gonna have a hard time doing the classic, get everyone in a room and explain who did it. You can have something that has a similar aesthetic. You can have similar appearances. You, your character could get everyone in a room as part of finding out who did it, but if they already know? Eh, you are gonna have a hard time with that one. That is gonna be a tough sell.
Chris: It could happen at a big event where everybody happens to be present. The protagonist bursts in, last minute, “Hey, I know who did it!” If you want everybody to be there.
Oren: Yeah, that’s also po—that’s there’s—you could do it, there are ways, but the classic scenario is extremely difficult. And just in general, the ending that a lot of writers seem to want, which is where the protagonist has all the clues, and the climax is them putting all the clues together, that’s also very difficult, because if you give your protagonist all the clues, chances are, you’re readers will figure it out too early, and then be frustrated that the protagonist hasn’t figured it out yet. Because they have all the clues they need, why haven’t they put them together yet.
Bunny: Yeah. I think there’s also a problem in a lot of these big “oh! It all clicks!” reveals moment is that when, is, it’s when the author is trying to write a character that’s smarter than both themself and the audience. But they have trouble doing that, because they’re the author and, the best they can do is make a character that’s like, as smart as them? So it just ends up with contrivances that have the trappings of seeming intellectual. Like, the BBC Sherlock is a great example of this.
Oren: Yeah, they’re often just making huge leaps of logic that’s—that doesn’t actually hold up. That’s… it’s like you say that it had to have been this guy, because there are scratches on his phone, and so he had to have been an alcoholic, but there are lots of ways that guy could have gotten scratches on his phone.
Bunny: Yeah that train of logic will haunt me. I seem to remember there was one particular, there was one where Sherlock decides that someone is an adulterer, because the inside of their wedding ring is clean, and every time I fiddle with my watch or my earrings, I’m like “would Sherlock think that me fiddling with these is a…”
Chris: You’re an adulterer. [giggle] Statistically likely.
[Bunny laughs]
Chris: Those who fiddle with their jewelry are cheating.
Oren: Yeah. So that’s, that is the other problem, is that very often when authors do this, they have the protagonist make this incredible leap of logic that doesn’t actually follow from information that they know, and that’s just as unsatisfying. And so, that’s usually why the climax of the story, when they finally figure it out, that will usually be the protagonist getting some new piece of information they didn’t have before, and that is what will make it all click together, and that’s how you figure it out. Usually. That’s just much easier than the alternatives.
Bunny: And make it, don’t try to be smarter than the audience, make it something that the audience can understand. Don’t be like, I figured it out because of some clues that the audience was never shown, that I 4D chest my way into my magic mind powers and top—talked to some people off-screen and here’s the answer. That’s just gonna be frustrating.
Oren: Yeah, clues that the audience didn’t know, that’s always frustrating. Man, the current season of Nancy Drew, they have so many weird leaps of logic. My favorite one was recently. They found that someone had dug a grave, had snuck into the graveyard and dug a grave, and from that, they’re like “Aha! It’s this lady we know. She wants to kill…” another character, and I’m just sitting here wondering “ok, there are reasons why she might want to kill that person.” There—those exist in the plot. If you think carefully, you can figure them out. They’re not very well explained, but they are there…, why would she dig a grave first?
[Chris and Bunny laugh]
Oren: In the graveyard!
Bunny: Look, she’s just being efficient. Like, when you got the body right there, you’ll wish you dug a grave.
Chris: Even if she wants to kill him, she has no more reason to go to the graveyard and dig a grave than anybody else. I should probably mention this town is full of weird stuff and murders all the time of course, because it’s a show that takes place in a small town. The murders per square foot number is very high, given a random-dug grave, that could be like anybody, or anything. Right? I can tell the shape of this grave that a woman dug it, and it must be…
[Bunny laughs]
Chris: a woman who’s very snobby dug it, and hates the historical society, and I could, from these marks I have deduced this.
Oren: Actually, I can tell that a woman dug it, and I can tell because she accidentally dropped her pronoun pin in here, which is, it’s nice that she’s inclusive. So, I think with that, we’re gonna go ahead, and call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, support us on Patreon! Just go to patreon.com/Mythcreants
Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First we have Callie Macleod. Next, there’s Ayman Jaber, he’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a Professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week!
[Closing Theme]
Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Coulton.
You might think the answer is obvious: just have your villain be clean shaven! Unfortunately, it’s not quite that simple. Villains need coherent motivations like anyone else, and they need aesthetics that won’t seem silly to the audience. How do you do that without leaving the villain drab and boring, or making them into the latest bad guy who is actually right but kills people so you won’t notice? Fortunately, that’s our topic for the week!
Show Notes …or die * Does Your Villain Twirl Their Mustache? * Vadic * Krankor * The Lord Ruler * Recursive Sauron * Napoleon Bonepart * Wildwood (The Dowager Governess) TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Elizabeth.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.
[opening song]Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris and with me is…
Bunny: Bunny.
Chris: And?
Oren: Oren.
Chris: [evil voice] Mwahaha! I have tied Oren to the train tracks. Bunny, you must choose whether to save him, or your beloved drawing pad, which I’m dangling over a flame.
Bunny: No!
Oren: Yeah, you should probably go for the drawing pad, honestly. That’s pretty expensive.
Chris: That’s pretty expensive. I’m sorry, Oren. You might feel a slight sting.
Oren: Plus, the trains in America are really slow. You have time to go get the drawing and come back. It’s fine.
Bunny: How am I supposed to complete my next comic, Chris? [laughter]
Chris: Yes, it’s all part of my master plan to destroy Oren, or alternately, your drawing pad. Either one. Devious. Minions! Go forth! [evil voice] Or die. [laughter] Got it! So this time we’re talking about how to avoid mustache twirling villains.
Oren: There’s actually a cheat code for that. You just make them clean-shaven, and you’re done.
Chris: Yeah. Wow.
Oren: I didn’t make this up, because Chris has a post on avoiding mustache twirling villains, and this came up in a Reddit argument where somebody was trolling someone by pretending to not know what mustache twirling was, and claiming that if somebody didn’t have a mustache, they couldn’t be a mustache twirler. And so this person was like, you’re obviously trolling me, here’s a post that explains what that means, good day.
Bunny: Wow, I didn’t realize the fix was so easy. I need to stop writing villains with facial hair.
Oren: Yeah, it’s solved. The character in question was Vadic from Picard season three, who, I don’t know if I’d qualify her as a mustache twirler. She definitely chews the scenery a lot.
Chris: Yeah, I agree with that sentiment. I think she’s a little too far. So what are we talking about? What is a mustache twirler? Obviously not literally a villain twirling their mustache, although they have! That’s what it’s based on. Essentially any villain that’s one note or flat, and what happens is they tend to come off as comical rather than scary, just because they’re so over the top and kind of cartoonish feeling. And if that doesn’t happen, then they’re boring, because they only have one characteristic and don’t have anything interesting about them generally.
Oren: In the wild, I would say most authors don’t set out to write this. But the most common way I’ve seen it happen is that they set out to write either the Joker or Darth Vader, and don’t have an understanding of the very specific circumstances under which those two villains actually worked, and so they put them in the wrong story and they become mustache twirlers.
Chris: Yeah. When people are trying to write villains, they don’t think of their villains like normal characters, and so their villains just do things because they’re villainous and those are villainous things to do, not because they have the same reasoning another character would have to take actions.
Bunny: Capital V Villain.
Chris: I think another issue is that villains often have a smaller part in the story, which just doesn’t encourage depth, doesn’t encourage a lot of character development. But yeah, a lot of times the storyteller is trying to copy a big bad that they’ve seen in other stories, and they don’t know what they need to do to make that villain menacing. And this is a really common problem. We see it in manuscripts all the time. It’s the most common problem villains have in manuscripts. It might be the most common problem villains have in general.
Oren: Yeah, although nowadays we’re going in the other direction of the villain who totally has a point and is super sympathetic, but is still evil for reasons.
Bunny: Gotta punch them. Gotta punch their bad villainous self and just leave the point dangling.
Oren: Look, they might have a good point, and then they might blow up a room full of civilians for kind of no reason. Who knows? It’s impossible to say.
Chris: Look, we want to punch people. That’s the most important thing, that there are people to punch. If the villain is not somehow really bad, how do we get our punchies in?
Bunny: Look, gotta blow up a room full of civilians, or else how do we solve… climate change? Please applaud my messaging.
Oren: It’s really the only way. But that doesn’t tend to be a big problem in the manuscripts I edit. That’s a problem that, I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s just a Hollywood thing or not, but I very rarely have picked up a client manuscript and been like, the problem here is that you’re trying to make your villain have a point but also be evil.
Bunny: I think that Hollywood has noticed that people praise villains that are more than mustache twirlers, so it’s what do we do with that without working too hard? People like messaging, right? They like it when stories say something. Let’s have the villain say something. Then we can punch him.
Chris: I’ve also seen writing advice where to try to make it more interesting, instead of looking for issues that are naturally nuanced, they just say, oh, take a black and white situation, and now graywash it. What if we have an issue that’s clean cut where somebody is trying to save the children and the other person’s not, but then it turns out the person trying to save the children only wants to sacrifice them? Or something like that. That’s like the mentality, and if you apply that to real world issues, it gets very messy.
Bunny: At best it gets very weird.
Chris: But a mustache twirler happens when the storyteller is not trying to do that. They’re not trying to have it be gray generally. Usually they’re looking for a much more clear cut villain, and they end up making a villain that is very flat.
Oren: Yeah. One of the main causes that I’ve seen is simply that a lot of spec fic stories have end of the world level stakes, and it’s challenging to create a villain who would realistically want the world to end, because they live there too. And so that becomes a bit of an issue. You can do it, you can make reasons why a villain would want the world to end, but a lot of authors struggle with that, and so they just end up with a villain who’s like, I just want to watch the world burn, man. Because I’ve also seen The Dark Knight.
Chris: So how do you know if you’ve written a mustache twirler? Honestly, if you’re not deliberately trying to make your villain sympathetic or well-rounded or not a mustache twirler, there’s a good chance your villain is a mustache twirler. People just end up making them by copying famous evil villains.
But if you want to know, okay, what traits does a mustache twirler typically have? Okay, so cackling, threatening everyone around them, playing with weapons, that would be a typical villain type, but it could be something else. For instance, maybe your villain is just really snobby, and is just always snobby, and every sentence they say is another opportunity to be snobby. Or they’re cold and they constantly make cutting remarks, and that’s just like their entire personality. Take any trait that we would associate with an asshole, or a villain, or somebody that we’re likely to make into a villain, and just have them do that and not really have any other traits that are opposing that in some way, and you’ll probably have a mustache twirler.
Oren: Yeah, the weapon playing with one is funny because I see that a lot in client manuscripts and even in some published stories, but it’s not super common in movies in my experience, which is usually where a lot of these authors are getting their bad habits from. So, I don’t know where that one came from. That just pops up a lot, the bad guy who’s so cool because he’s playing with a knife, and he’s doing knife knuckles or whatever.
Chris: Gotta throw some darts, maybe? Throw some darts at the hero’s face on the dartboard?
Oren: Yeah, that’s another common one. Various unsafe gun handling practices.
Chris: To kill humans… for reasons. Humans just have too much spunk. You can’t let them run free or they’ll overthrow your empire because of all the spunk that they have. [Chris laughs] Their free spirit is unlike any other alien race in the galaxy.
Bunny: Exactly, they’re too threatening because they’re so cool. Now, there’s one Mystery Science Theater movie, I’m forgetting the name of it right now. Prince of Space. That’s the name of it. But the villain is Kronar. His opponent is Starman, who is also an alien, but the conflict takes place on Earth for some reason. And Starman is just a man in a really dorky costume. I hope I’m remembering this one right. It’s because his spaceships are, like, gas powered?
Chris: He wants our oil?
Bunny: Yeah, I think he wants our oil or he wants our technology. Maybe in this humanity has just started developing a warp drive or something? And he’s like, I’m so tired of relying on my gas powered spaceships, which take forever to go across the galaxy.
But I bring up Kronar because I feel like he’s the archetypal mustache twirler. Like he’s got this long pointy chicken nose, and a mustache, and he’s got an evil laugh. He goes, let me see if I can do it: Hengh. Hengh. Hengh. He does it like that. And yeah, I don’t know. When I think of mustache twirlers, I think not of manuscripts, but of Kronar. And I’d recommend if anyone’s is my villain a mustache twirler, if they resemble Kronar at all. Yes, they are. They are a mustache twirler. Do the Kronar test.
Oren: But in Kronar’s defense, he at least has a motivation. He has a thing that he wants that will personally benefit him, which I’ll admit a lot of mustache twirling villains I read in manuscripts don’t. So why are they doing this? I don’t know. Because they hate joy or something. That’s where the Joker and Darth Vader come into it, because those characters, often it’s hard to really say that they have any particular motivation for doing what they’re doing. They’re just evil. But they have other aspects – mostly they have really high novelty that generally these mustache twirling villains don’t have.
Chris: It also does matter that they are movie villains.
Oren: Comic villains in the Joker’s case, but yeah.
Chris: Because if you have visuals, then the aesthetics mean more, and they make a bigger impression. And both Joker and Darth Vader really have aesthetics that stand out. Then when you have an actor and I mean, to some extent an illustrator too, but I think actors especially, are very good at taking their lines, like an unremarkable villain line, and rounding it out and making it feel a lot more realistic. When you have just the text written on the page, you have to add more nuance to it to make it work and make it feel realistic, because you don’t have somebody who can play against it and round it out. I do run into a lot of writers who want to copy Darth Vader. And just the first note is that he is a movie villain, not a book villain. And so his outfit just wouldn’t have the same impression if it were in a book. There are some famous villains from books that are like Darth Vader, but they don’t really enter the story that much, like Sauron or in the Mistborn series, the Lord Ruler is like this too.
Oren: Okay, so Mistborn books have a lot to recommend them. But honestly, the Lord Ruler is not great as a villain. He’s very average. He’s a generic guy. He has one interesting thing going for him, spoilers: which is that you think that maybe he was the former Chosen One and that the Chosen One turned evil. And that’s neat. That’s a cool concept. But that turns out not to be true. He actually killed the Chosen One and subverted destiny.
Chris: Yeah, it’s weird to have a twist that makes the story less interesting rather than more.
Oren: Yeah, so he’s basically just a less interesting Sauron. Because Sauron is at least serious and almost more like an Elder God kind of villain. Whereas the Lord Ruler is just a guy.
Chris: Well, like Sauron, Lord Ruler is not really in the scenes. He’s just built up like Sauron is. And Sauron, you don’t even really see him at all. He speaks in like one scene -that should have been taken out, because it does not make him sound impressive.
Oren: Excuse me, Chris, have you forgotten recursive Sauron from the Hobbit trilogy? We see Sauron all the time. We see him so many times.
Chris: Oh, man. If anybody’s not familiar with recursive Sauron, it’s the funniest thing. It’s one sign that the Hobbit movies are bad. I think it’s the second Hobbit movie. I just remember seeing this in the theater and being like, really? They’re doing this? Where you stare at the eye of Sauron, and it shows a silhouette of Sauron as the pupil of the eye. And then it expands. And there’s another one. So it expands till the pupil takes up the screen. And then there’s a new iris. And then it just keeps going. It was a recursive Sauron over and over again. It’s like somebody thought this would be a good effect for the movie.
Bunny: That’s very, very Microsoft Paint. [Chris laughs]
Chris: But in any case, that’s part of the issue. Is that when you have a villain that’s flat, that’s just pure evil, sometimes as soon as they show up and you start depicting them, they come off really flat and looking bad.
Bunny: Yeah, I will say just to add on to the villainous aesthetics thing. That can be used to make them look cool, as in the case of Darth Vader. But it’s also really easy for that to tip over into just looking goofy again, like a Scooby-Doo villain. Lots of pointy angles, or like Jafar, reds, billowing capes, booming voices, signature laughs. I’d also say that in regards to why these mustache twirlers are just uninteresting and not very good. Another reason for that is if you do want to make your villain something other than Mysterious Sauron or Darth Vader, there’s just not that many ways for them to engage with the hero in an emotional sense or in a non-cliché sense, because they’re all evil all the time and will probably just cackle at the hero.
Chris: It’s gonna be hard to have a conversation.
Bunny: Yeah, again, look at Prince of Space, which I just figured out that I was getting the villain’s name wrong. It’s Krankor, not Kronar. Krankor, just look at Krankor and don’t do that.
Chris: Kronar would have been better, honestly. That would have been a better villain name.
Oren: Yeah, Krankor sounds like he’s cranky.
Bunny: He is cranky. His costume looks very uncomfortable.
Oren: Truth in advertising, then.
Bunny: [imitating Krankor’s laugh] Ehh, ehh, ehh.
Oren: And there’s definitely also a question of shifting tastes. Because these things come and go, but I feel like my impression is that looking at books that are coming out now, the general taste is that villains who wear classic red and black with sharp costumes are considered cheesy to the point where it’s sometimes fun for the hero to wear those things to be like, aha, I’m the classic villain, but I only do good things. Whereas if the actual villain does it, then they really need something to make that new and fresh or it’s just gonna feel boring. It’s, oh yeah, hey look, the villain dressed as a villain, everybody. Give him a pat on the back for figuring that out.
Chris: I do think that in books, the aesthetics, again, they don’t matter as much, so I don’t think you’re gonna have a villain who’s gonna seem as comical because they have a swashy red or black cape. But I do think that if you want to get something from it, you need to make it a little bit more unique. I suppose if you had an urban fantasy setting, or a setting with really high realism, and the villain walked in with a swashy cape and it just felt very out of place in the setting maybe, but usually it’s more about you need to have some level of novelty.
Oren: And when I think of really good book villains, like the few I can think of that actually have an impression and stay with you for reasons other than them being bad, you’ve either got your Elder Gods style villains like Sauron, or you have villains who your hero can talk to, because you need that to build attachment to the villain. You need to be able to talk to them, otherwise there’s just nothing interesting going on in scenes where they’re in. And even if that conversation is hostile in some way, it’s still a conversation. There’s still something that they have to say to each other than, I’ll stop you, villain.
Chris: [dramatically] No, you won’t.
Oren: I think the most successful example of that is Napoleon from the Temeraire books, because he’s the villain, Mr. Actual Napoleon, and he’s just a guy the hero can talk to. They have a lot in common, they’re on opposite sides. He actually has a slight problem of being a little too reasonable, and at some points you have to ask, why haven’t the good guys switched sides to work with Napoleon? And I think Novik at some point realized that, because she reminded us that Napoleon reinstated slavery in the French Empire, so he wasn’t actually a super nice guy.
Bunny: No, it’s a rather rude thing to do.
Oren: But if you didn’t know that, there are a number of books before she reminds us of that, where you could very easily be forgiven for wondering why the heroes aren’t just working for the French now.
Bunny: Another villain that I think really does it well, and I don’t know if either of you have read this book, but this is Wildwood by Colin Meloy. The first book’s villain is the Dowager Governess, who in the setting, there’s three locations mainly, and so she used to be the governess of this town. She was married to the governor and they had a child who died, and then she tried to use dark magic to bring him back, and people did not like that, so they cast her into the woods. And then they all think she’s dead.
But what happens is that one of the protagonists of the book, Curtis, encounters her before we know she’s evil, and she’s really charismatic and kind, and she’s a capable, really charming political leader. She’s got a whole army of coyotes, and you see how she’s gathered this army is because she’s been strategic and mobilized this scattered, basically diaspora, the society of coyotes, which are looked down on and been like, hey. I can give you glory, and I’m going to treat you with respect, where a lot of other people haven’t. So you can see why she’s a formidable opponent, and also when Curtis is on her side, she can be genuinely kind, but very pragmatic.
And it’s impressive how sympathetic, and not even necessarily sympathetic, it’s just how much we enjoy interactions with her, because they have so much nuance, even when the end goal of her plan is the ritual sacrifice of a child. It’s literally the killing babies thing that we say when we’re talking about villains being over the top, but Wildwood manages to make it work, I think in large part because we do have so much contact with this villain before we realize that she’s a villain.
Oren: Yeah, although I might be concerned about authors trying to imitate that, because that sounds like it could very easily become another example of the villain who’s the leader of the marginalized group, which is a bit overplayed these days.
Bunny: Yeah, that’s true. I think it also helps that when it comes to the coyotes, we have an understanding of why she’s able to lead them, but then we have individual coyote characters who aren’t just the bad guys that get shot at and die. There’s a- he’s still, in the scheme of things, a minor character, but Dimitri the coyote is one who defects, and we see more of them than your average mooks. But yeah, I think it helps that the book doesn’t really focus on whether the coyotes are oppressed, or whether they’re just a scattered subgroup that needs a collective identity, and she gives that to them. I don’t know, for me I just see that it helps because we see why she works. That she is cunning and smart and able to mobilize people, and we see why people would agree with her.
Chris: I do think it’s worth asking, though, if somebody really wants a Sauron, because some people do. They’re very inspired by that archetype, and that’s what they want to write. What can we do to make the super evil villain come across a little less moustache-twirly? I would say that mostly you just have to tone them down a little bit from what you’re probably thinking of, and round them out. Making them polite and personable, because that’s one thing that Bunny just mentioned that made this villain so striking, is that she was really charismatic. And that’s one thing that is really missing from a lot of villains that come off as too moustache-twirly, is just making them polite can make such a huge difference. It really can.
Bunny: Why would people want to hang out around this person? What makes them compelling?
Chris: If you’re thinking about it strategically, again, they have every reason to want to charm other people. It’s just one other form of power. So that definitely helps, but mostly you just have to make their mannerisms less villain-like and more person-like, including some positives, usually.
Bunny: I also want to say that when you’re thinking about including motivations, it also helps if their motivation isn’t just power, because that’s vague. I think it would help to be like, what do they want to do with the power? Or for what reason? Because I feel like in a lot of cases, we have a villain that’s just, they want to take over the realm. They want more power. And I think that’s been done so many times that it’s hard to make that not moustache-twirling if it’s devoid of anything else.
Chris: I would add some kind of political philosophy to that, maybe. I think you could still have them be pretty evil, but have something that they want to do with the realm, for instance.
Oren: Yeah, and at that point, you can tie it into real-world motivations, right? It can be, they want to take over the realm because they want to enrich their own country, right? Nationalism, everyone loves it. They want to take over the realm because they hate taxes, and they don’t like having to pay taxes, and the democracy keeps putting taxes on them. None of that. We’re going to get rid of that. I don’t like taxes for me. Again, very easy to understand motivation. Usually power is a means to an end, not an end in itself, unless you’re doing some 1984 stuff.
Chris: And then it’s worth thinking about, if you want your villain to threaten people or lash out, it’s not that you can’t do that. You just have to think a little more critically about how it’s going to actually enhance their threat level, rather than just come off as over-the-top. For one thing, if they’re just harming people who are obviously less powerful than them, like their own minions, which just reduces their own assets and makes them feel out of control, which is the opposite of what you want, or just helpless victims, that doesn’t make them seem any more impressive, because that was easy.
If they’re going to be going and just killing things, you should instead show them killing something that it actually takes a lot of power and skill to kill. So that actually shows off their prowess, as opposed to just puppies or whatever. Usually that’s because the biggest question that’s holding their threat back is whether they are able to achieve their dastardly goals, not whether they have dastardly goals. Usually it’s pretty easy to establish that they’re going to do something bad, so the fact that they are going to harm is not in question, and therefore killing puppies doesn’t really change anything. It’s just over-the-top.
Bunny: Yeah, I think also people want to show that their villain is cruel, and there are ways to do that can A, show that they’re cruel, but B, also not show them being just cruel. You can show both that they’re cruel and that they’re strategic by having them be cruel in places where it gives them an advantage. And it doesn’t give you an advantage to, I don’t know, torture the lackey who failed to bring them the jewel or something like that. That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but if you can show them being cruel in a way that furthers their own goals and isn’t excessive, I think that would work a lot better.
Chris: And then the other thing you can keep in mind, if the question is not whether they can do bad things anymore, but whether they will, which only happens in narrow circumstances such as if your hero is a prisoner, and you have this prison overseer or guard, right? At that point, the hero is at their mercy, and the question is whether they will hurt them. At that point, it makes a little bit more sense for them to lash out, because that shows that the hero is actually in more danger. Whereas in a normal situation, it doesn’t.
Oren: One thing that I think is useful to think about, because we want our villains to act menacing sometimes, right? Like a friendly villain is good, I am a fan of that, but I think it’s also reasonable that authors are going to want their villains to be scary and have an evil grin or something that really drives the point home. And I think if you want to do that, you want them to be menacing when they have achieved a position of power, and you use that. Because again, it’s just more effective that way, rather than depending on some actor to really sell the expression.
Chris: Certainly an evil smile is going to mean more if your villain has just gotten a big victory than if your villain is, oh, this failure is all part of my secret plan. Really, I’m going to turn this around. Evil smile.
Oren: Or even if the villain and the hero meet before the battle or something, and the villain is just like, aha, I’m evil! We haven’t fought yet, calm down. [laughter]
Chris: That just goes to show that you can’t just use those kinds of trappings to make a villain feel threatening on its own. There has to be substance behind the style. If you have a character that’s just wearing the black cape and swishing it around and having an evil smile, but you don’t actually show them doing any damage, then it’s just going to feel like it’s all hype.
Oren: Yep, that’s true. Alright, with that, I think we are going to go ahead and call this episode to a close.
Bunny: We have killed the episode! Mwahaha! [laughter]
Chris: If you would like to bring the episode back to life, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: Flawless segue.
Chris: My promos make perfect sense. What are you talking about?
Oren: Before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First there’s Callie MacLeod. Next there’s Ayman Jaber, he’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
[closing song]Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.
What is a character arc? A miserable little pile of development! Unfortunately, said development can get a bit confusing, as authors try to change too much, don’t have a real problem to begin with, or aren’t sure how to resolve the issue. That’s our topic today, plus a fun detour into why your D&D god probably doesn’t mind if you have friends.
Show Notes Not Liking Christmas * Erica Ortegas * Name of the Wind * John Sheridan * Kathryne Janeway * Sandman Arc Issues * Scouring of the Shire * Vox Machina Pike Arc Problem * Korra * Aang * Pro-bending * Honor Among Thieves * Sprig Plantar * Mark Scout * Anakin Skywalker * Meta Mysteries * Shallan Meta Mystery TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Sofia.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.
[Intro Music]Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren, with me today is…
Chris: Chris
Oren: …and…
Wes: Wes.
Oren: And today we’re going to grow as people and that process will be very easy. We won’t have to put any effort into it. We’ll just wake up better and it’ll be great.
Alternatively, we will act like everyone’s ice cream preference is a major flaw that needs to be addressed. Wes, I heard you like rocky road. That is not acceptable.
Wes: What? No, not true!
Oren: Chocolate fudge brownie is the only kind, and we are going to have this entire episode convincing you that your rocky road choice was wrong. And by the end you will feel wiser for it.
Chris: Yeah, by the end I will learn it was wrong to love cookies and cream.
Oren: Yeah, wow.
Chris: And that I should compromise with you by only eating the ice cream that you like.
Oren: Yeah, Chris, I don’t know, man. You starting off liking cookies and cream might put you beyond the moral event horizon, to be perfectly honest.
Chris: No, I’m all flawed. No strength because of cookies and cream.
Oren: Alright. So, today we’re talking about mistakes in character arcs. And that one we were just joking about is one that comes up a lot and it’s almost always about Christmas. It’s the one where there isn’t actually a problem to be addressed, but the story acts like there is one because the writer’s values are misplaced.
Chris: I find that this one seems to happen a lot in TV shows where they’re trying to come up with character arcs for various episodes. I don’t know if you have seen this one so much in books, which tend to be a little bit more thoroughly planned than an individual episode of a TV show.
Oren: It is far less likely to happen in a published novel. And I think that you are right. I think the reason it happens more in TV shows is because you need a character arc every week and you go through a bunch of character arcs that way. So, you start scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Wes: What’s left?
Oren: Yeah. In published books, not so much, but in client works, yeah. A lot. And I don’t think this is because my clients are evil people. I think it’s just because they haven’t thought through the implications of a story that is about how the protagonist needs to stop working at a car dealership and instead work at a grocery store. What is that? That’s kind of nothing.
Chris: First of all, you need a problem, and you have to communicate that problem to the audience. And they have to be convinced that it’s an actual problem.
Oren: And of course, the Christmas thing is just a bit of cultural hegemony where you have to enjoy Christmas. It must be something wrong with you if you don’t enjoy Christmas when there are, of course, many reasons why you might not love Christmas. Varying from religious to cultural to personal. That’s not a real flaw, but it’s a thing that gets showed a lot on TV shows every time there’s a Christmas special.
Chris: And I just can’t help but think: what are we teaching people here about how we should treat people who don’t like our favorite holiday? It does not seem great.
Oren: Hmmm… Concerned Jewish noises.
Chris: There was also on Strange New Worlds, a recent character arc for Ortegas in one episode where she’s just unhappy she was taken off a mission. And then at the end of the episode, she’s like, oh, I shouldn’t have been unhappy I was taken off that mission. But I’m not convinced, right? It’s somebody else who got her hopes up by assigning her to the mission only to take her off last minute. It doesn’t seem like that was something that she should have been fine with. It’s okay if she’s disappointed.
Oren: It was really weird that the story starts with her being sad because she wanted to go on a mission, but she has to stay and fly the ship. And there’s this weird detour where she feels unappreciated in flying the ship.
Chris: That’s never acknowledged or addressed.
Oren: Yeah, that never goes anywhere. And then the big conclusion of her arc is how cool it is to fly the ship, so she’s not upset that she didn’t get to go on the away mission anymore. I didn’t feel like she had a problem of not appreciating her job. That didn’t seem like an issue that she had.
Chris: It seemed more like a problem with the other people and the way that they were treating her. Although I wonder if that middle stuff about her not being appreciated flying the ship was just accidental, and was not supposed to be part of her arc.
Oren: You can also have a character, if you’re looking for reasons why there’s no real problem, it’s that they just don’t have problems. In this case, it tends to manifest as the character being super perfect. It’s hard to have a character arc when you’re perfect at everything. Because a character arc doesn’t have to be about addressing a flaw. It doesn’t have to be like, I’m selfish and by the end of it I’ll be unselfish. But it means your character has to have some problem that they’re having.
And characters like Kvothe, or, what’s his name, Sheridan from Babylon 5, or Janeway from Voyager, they all have trouble with arcs because to have an arc they would need to have something wrong at the beginning and the writers are just not willing to give them those things.
You can also have a problem where the character has lots of potential arcs, but the author is just not sure how to bring any of them out. I had that problem on my manuscript, Chris can testify to that. I had a lot of things that could have been arcs, but I was just not sure what to do with any of them. So, my character just kind of trudged through the story and muddled through.
Chris: I do think that this creates something that’s fairly similar but distinct from having an arc that’s too broad. Too big and broad. Which is something I see a lot where a character technically has a flaw that maybe the writer has named but it’s just too all-encompassing to both express and address, right?
And clearly, so Sandman, he’s the one I like to pull out for this, where he clearly has three different problems. And I can tell he has three different problems because he needs all three of these flaws to explain all of his behavior. If one was taken out, he would act differently in various situations.
He’s prideful, he’s clinging to a tradition and unwilling to change, and he’s just really callous towards people’s suffering. But they’re all just mixed together. They’re one arc for him and that doesn’t really work because we can see how they operate distinctly.
If he was unwilling to change but he still was compassionate, he would just do more, right? To help people cope with the decisions he made. But he doesn’t.
And then we have various learning experiences for him that just don’t really match up with when we see him change because somebody’s just not thinking of this succinctly. If you’re thinking about, oh he has all these, he gets better about his pride so suddenly he’s compassionate now.
Oren: Hmmm…
Chris: That’s not how that works.
But when people, when I get client works, this can also take the form of my character is just selfish. Which a surprising number of writers like to write, even though it’s a very tricky thing because it definitely risks damaging likability. But I think the trick with that is that selfishness is actually just really broad. It encompasses a whole lot of different destructive behaviors and often a great fix is to just narrow that down and be very specific about what kind of behavior your character does that’s selfish. Because that will help with the likability issues, and it will make it much easier to address.
Coming of age stories. It’s very typical to have a young hero who’s supposed to get mature but maturity encompasses so many different things. If you have an entire series, you could pick one part of maturity per book, right? And teach your protagonist a lesson in that and have them mature as the series goes on. But altogether, that one’s a really hard one because it’s so nebulous.
Oren: Yeah, you could have… for example, Lord of the Rings has the famous scouring of the Shire sequence where the hobbits are badasses now and they roll back into town and act like badasses.
It’s a cool moment, it creates fun contrast, but it’s hard to say that any of them had particularly strong arcs except for Frodo, right? Frodo has a really strong arc, but it’s hard to say that Merry and Pippin and even Sam had much of an arc. They had really gradual change over a very long story and by the end, they are different. The vaguest sense you could call that an arc, but I wouldn’t hold it up as particularly strong. At least not what most authors are trying to do when they do an arc.
Wes: Just thinking about what you’re talking about with client manuscripts and the issues with Sandman, it’s like people want there to be truly something wrong or something negligible that they can portray as a flaw because that’s the only way they can wrap their minds around it. And something I think we talked about on a previous podcast where I edited something, but the Vox Machina show had Pike in it with a contrived problem. I think they just wanted to add more Pike because during the play stuff, she wasn’t around. But the lesson there is, what did you say? God doesn’t care if you have friends.
Oren: I’ll just summarize this for you real quick and then you can give us your thoughts on it. Because it’s weird. It’s hard to remember. Okay, the way this goes is they’re in a fight with some vampires. She gets hit with a dark spell and her holy symbol cracks and then her magic doesn’t work anymore.
Then somehow that makes her really depressed instead of just assuming that she needs to fix her holy symbol. And she says that she needs to go and apologize. So, she goes on this little side quest where everyone else is doing stuff. And then she says that she thinks she’s cursed to the monks at her Everlight god temple.
And then a few episodes later, she finally talks to Everlight. And Everlight’s like, you’re having a crisis of faith. And she says, it’s because I put my friends above you. And Everlight’s like, no, that’s not true. You’re fine. And then she leaves.
Wes: What’s the big takeaway for that character arc? It’s okay to have friends. Was that ever in doubt?
Chris: But also, the friends didn’t seem to have anything to do with why her symbol cracked in the first place.
Oren: No, it was a frankly bizarre sequence that I’m not really sure exactly why it’s there.
I did some research and I looked at the original campaign sessions. And in that one, of course, Pike has to leave because her player wasn’t available for a long time. And in the game, they created this problem where she killed an unconscious enemy. To stop them from being a threat later. And that gave her a crisis of faith. And so, she had to go do this pilgrimage.
Which, okay, sure. Right? I don’t know how well they handled it. But as a premise, that sounds fine. You can see how that would give her a crisis of faith and how she would have to grapple with it in some capacity.
But then when it came to the show, it almost felt like they were like, okay, we need to have Pike go away for a while because that’s a thing she did in the campaign. But we can’t have her kill an unconscious enemy because that would be too grim. Who knows? Just whatever. Throw darts at the board until we find something.
Chris: I think it would be easier if she didn’t follow a god that was just generically good. Because definitely a crisis of faith works much better if she violates some tenet. But then you need something that’s a little bit more flexible and doesn’t risk being darker than you want to put in the show.
And in this case, if she violated some tenet of her god to protect her friends. And that made her lose confidence in her faith. And think that her god would disapprove. And that kind of makes her powers stop working. And then she goes and realizes that no, what she did was fine. I think that would be a fine arc for her to have. But again, the problem has to match the rest. And that’s just not how this started. It had nothing to do with her friends. So, the problem and the resolution are not working together there.
Wes: Yeah, it’s an example of a flawed character arc because there’s not really a problem.
But there can be great situations where somebody has their belief system and it gets challenged, and then they have to grapple with a revised understanding of that.
But I think people want their arcs. I think flaw really throws a wrench into this, like character flaws and how those are taught about pride and ambition and all these core attributes that are so grand and romantic, etc., etc. And then it’s, oh, do I have to do that? No, I’m just going to make it that they hate this flavor of ice cream because it’s too intimidating.
Chris: But it can be also an emotional hardship works just fine for a problem, right? So, if you don’t want to think of it as flaw, think of the characters going through a tough time and how they recover from it. In this case, she has a crisis of faith because she did something. She lost confidence in her faith. That’s still a problem. We call it a flaw, but it seems a little overly harsh. And that’s just fine. That works great for an arc.
Oren: Yeah, there’s a little bit of extra complication in this particular example because crises of faiths are weird in a setting where gods can talk to you and you can just commune with them and be like, hey, how do you feel about that thing I just did?
I’m not saying you can’t do them. I’m just saying they’re a little trickier than if you’re in a world where gods are exactly the same as they are in our real world. I’m not saying whether they exist or not. I’m saying that they can’t just talk to you on command.
Wes: Presumably in that world, if you fell out of favor with that god, just be like any other gods available to bestow me with some divine abilities? I can tithe.
Oren: And of course, in D&D in particular, you don’t really there’s a strong incentive to not explore that because if you do, you might lose your cleric powers. Your entire reason for being there is your cleric powers. Same reason why most D&D warlocks don’t have storylines where they like grapple with the ethics of serving their patron, because if they don’t, they can’t Eldritch Blast anymore.
Wes: Can we talk about season one of Korra and her character arc about how bending’s the best?
Chris: Okay, so she had a difficulty with arrow bending that she ever comes. That’s what I think of, right? Where she’s, I think that’s supposed to be that she’s just very headstrong and is having trouble getting into a more dodgy mindset. I think they were trying to do the same thing they did in the Aang training episode. That was actually really good with Toph.
Where the idea is the avatar, the last element they learn is usually the trickiest for them, because it’s in some way philosophically opposed to the one they started with. And so, in that case, Aang is an airbender. And when it comes to earth bending, he needs to stand his ground and he’s just used to darting around and dodging. And so that’s really hard for him to stand his ground, especially since he needs confidence. He has to believe in himself to do that. And when he’s been struggling, that’s extra hard. So, it’s a good episode with a good little arc.
But then when we bring Korra, she’s supposed to be the opposite, right? She’s headstrong, she’s confrontational, she doesn’t want to be dodgy. And so, she just can’t get airbending. That one didn’t really… There’s a couple different turning points that happen, but I don’t feel like we really saw necessarily why she resolved it. We did see that in her pro-bending tournament.
Oren: Pro-bending.
Wes: Pro-bending. It’s the best.
Chris: Yeah, with its four rounds, which makes perfect sense.
Oren: I hate it so much.
Chris: We have one episode where she is the last of her team standing. And she remains standing by using airbending moves. This is before she can actually airbend, right? But it’s supposed to finally show that she’s using the moves. I’m like, okay, that’s a reasonable step forward in your arc. But in the end, she only starts airbending because all of her other powers are taken away.
Wes: That’s the big crux with the mistake in that character arc: She doesn’t get to complete it herself. There’s just, I don’t know, there’s a true lack of agency. Because Amon takes away her bending, but apparently not all of it.
Chris: That’s one of the two things that I see people use as they’re pseudo turning points, right? They and I see them use a lot and it’s because they’re fun and dramatic, but they don’t really have good karmic effect.
One of them is you’re coming down to the wire and suddenly you can do a thing because you have to. And that’s it.
This also happened in the recent D&D movie where we have this character that’s having difficulty mastering this helmet, this magical helmet that he needs to put on. And then finally, when it’s an emergency and let’s put the helmet, use the helmet, or die or whatever it is, I don’t really remember the details, he can do it.
And that is used a lot by storytellers. And I think they just love how dramatic it is and the fact that it gives them a really easy way to bring it down to the wire and raise tension. But it also is just, what do you mean the character can just do it because they have to? It doesn’t really feel like they grew as a result of that experience.
Wes: But deep down, Chris, they found out that they were capable of it all along. They were born to greatness.
Oren: Okay, Wes, maybe you can help me remember. With Korra, this is season one. Does she gain her powers or gain her airbending powers partly in response to something bad happening to Mako?
Chris: No.
Oren: No?
Wes: No.
Chris: When Amon takes away her other powers and she has to fight, she suddenly finds the only thing she can now do is airbending.
Oren: I remember wondering if she was doing what I’ve started calling the Super Saiyan turning point. Because Dragon Ball Z does this for all of their turning points, where the way that they have characters get a turning point is someone they like will die, and then they’ll get really mad.
Chris: This is the one used in Amphibia. Same thing in Amphibia where we have Sprig. He doesn’t actually die, but he’s supposedly dead.
Oren: Yeah, I was wondering if they were doing that, but it sounds like they didn’t.
The thing that I remember is that, sure, she can airbend now, but I notice that she’s airbending exactly the same way she firebends. Whereas Aang had to stand his ground and not—he couldn’t just do dodgy airbending but move rocks, too.
Chris: I feel like that’s a problem with the animation and the storyboarding.
Oren: I also remember a thing about Korra in season one in particular, and I think this continued into the later seasons, in fact, is that she would have characters say, Korra, you shouldn’t run off and do this headstrong, violent thing. And then she would run off and do the headstrong, violent thing, and it would work. And then they would do that again, and they would tell her not to do it, and she would do it, and it would work. And they would—they just kept doing that?
Chris: I do wonder, because there were definitely some plotlines in Korra that felt like it was more like the Janeway plotlines. Where the idea was not that Korra was supposed to be flawed, but that we have to make everybody hate on Korra so that she can be vindicated when she turns out to be right after all.
Which is exactly what many episodes of Voyager do with Janeway, as the whole crew is against her so that she can persevere and be like, see, crew? I was right all along. You should have listened to me.
And I’m not a big fan of these plotlines.
Oren: Sheridan in Babylon 5 does that, too. I hate it. It’s so irritating.
Chris: Yeah, it’s a fairly typical candied character thing. But I did notice some Korra episodes that felt like that.
Wes: I really thought that Korra was going to end with—she gets airbending, she’s lost the rest, and then the series would be like Last Airbender, where she’s got to go relearn and learn more about herself, right? Because all the—the earth, fire, and water came naturally to her. She was five years old and bending those three elements. And I’m like, okay, great. This is going to be a long-running character arc of her getting a better understanding of herself. And it was like, no, we’re just going to give it all back because we don’t know if this studio is going to be around.
Oren: This might be the end of the show. You got to deal with it.
Chris: Another thing that’s typical in character arcs is just, I guess I could call this bad pacing of the arc. Or bad movement.
Where either, one, there’s too much repetition, where the character keeps making the same mistake in the same way over and over again. And you got to keep the character arc moving forward. It gets really frustrating if we just see the character, the situation not changing, right? They need to take baby steps or learn the same thing in different situations or something where you feel like you can make progress.
And then the opposite, in which they suddenly change without a reason. It’s because we’re rushing things.
And the hilarious thing is that Severance does both with its main character, Mark. Where at first, it just gets really repetitive, where he has this phone ringing from underground.
Wes: The phone with the longest battery life ever. How many days does that thing ring in his basement?
Oren: I remember, I kept my Nokia flip phone longer than most people. And I remember that battery would last for quite some time.
Chris: So, it’s like, at first, we have to watch over and over again as he chooses not to pick up this phone by this person in the underground that will like, integrate or unsever people. And that just gets really repetitive. And then suddenly he answers the phone and goes to meet somebody. And then he just helps her cover up a murder.
Oren: Yeeeeah!
Chris: And he has no reason to do that. And it’s completely unbelievable. It’s way too far into rebellion for him.
We needed something in between. We needed some time for him to pick up the phone and answer and maybe for her to say some really compelling things to him and then him to tell her, I don’t believe you. And then him to go away and see outside verification of what she’s saying or other things. We needed some steps in between to eliminate the repetition and build a bridge to that sudden jump.
And I’m sure that the writers just loved the twist of the shocking and sudden murder. But it was just very out of character.
Oren: Although admittedly, when I saw that scene, I thought that the doctor that he finally went to talk to after a billion episodes was going to just leave. And he was going to be like, no, I can’t talk to you because you murdered somebody. And I thought this was yet another attempt to put off advancing that plot. And so, when instead he just helped her, I was like…
Chris: yeah, sure, I’ll help you cover up a murder.
Oren: It’s like, yeah, I don’t, it doesn’t make any sense, but I don’t care. I just desperately want this storyline to move forward.
It was just very funny when Chris and I were watching that at the same time. And she was just like, it doesn’t make any sense. Why is he doing that? I was like, oh, thank God he did that. Same problem, different reactions.
Wes: Charting point A to point B. And we’re like, is that reasonable?
Chris: Of course, the record holder for that one is Anakin, the suddenly murdering children.
Wes: Oh, yeah.
Oren: Anakin is evil now for reasons because he saw his wife maybe dying in childbirth, and he makes some very limp attempts to fix that. And then he didn’t get the promotion he thought he deserved. And I guess he’s a bad guy now. Whatever, he’s evil. From my point of view, the plot lines are good.
I’ve also, just from some client manuscripts, I’ve encountered common problems where there isn’t a turning point in the arc. The arc just stops because the author was done with it, which is not super common in published works.
But I did find it once in The Wizard Hunters, which is a novel that I’ve written about on the site before, where the arc is that the protagonist is having suicidal urges, so really serious, right? And it ends with her having a chat with a side NPC who’s like, no, I don’t think you’re suicidal. And that’s the end of the arc. It’s over now. And then after that, we have some technobabble about how maybe the suicidal urges came from this MacGuffin she had, and now that she doesn’t have the MacGuffin anymore, it’s over.
Chris: That sounds like something a TV show would do. It’s funny that you found it in a novel.
Oren: Yeah, it was super weird. It definitely felt like Martha Wells, the author, just got to the end of it and was like, I don’t know how to resolve this. It’s over! Done now! Moving on!
Chris: It does sound like Martha Wells. Sometimes she does seem to do stuff like that.
But no, I mean, in a TV show, you can’t really have internalizing. So, a lot of times they use dialogue in awkward situations, in which you would normally just show the inside of the character’s head. And so, one character saying to another, nope, you’re not suicidal, just sounds like something a TV writer would put down.
Oren: It even had the look into your eyes, and now I can tell you how you are on the inside from your pupils.
Chris: As you and I both know, you’re not suicidal now.
Wes: We mentioned TV shows in this No Turning Point. It’s just like when different writers and whatever, but it’s like where they suddenly remember that this character has an issue. Then they’re like, oh, it needs to be in this episode again, which of course is Din Djarin’s Droid Hatred. Oh gosh. Which is just not a character arc. It’s just sometimes they’re like, oh, he’s a bigot.
Chris: But it’s funny because there are droids. No, it’s not funny.
Wes: Doesn’t add any depth to him. They’re not trying to resolve that in weird ways.
Chris: It would be easier to ignore if they didn’t do such terrible things with it. When he’s just like making, oh, I don’t trust droids, and so I don’t want a droid working on my ship. That’s one thing. But when he’s like, here droid slave, go do this very dangerous thing that you’re scared to do because I don’t feel like doing it myself.
Wes: Here friend, ride around in the corpse of previous droid figures.
Oren: Yeah, oof. Big oof.
Chris: That droid was my friend, therefore I want the corpse to make into a walking suit for my child.
Oren: To say nothing of the one where they just straight up put down a droid slave revolt. That happened.
Chris: But it’s okay because the droids like being slaves, or according to them.
Oren: No, he has an arc in that episode. And his arc is that he shouldn’t have assumed all the droids wanted to rebel because a bunch of them didn’t.
Chris: Oh gosh.
Wes: Great arc.
Oren: That’s his arc. Yeah, okay, that is technically an arc.
Chris: When you have to put in an explanation about how people like serving their masters or overlords or whatever, that’s when you know you should stop.
Oren: It’s still technically a car if you cover the inside with spikes. It can still meet all the qualifications of a car. That doesn’t mean it was a good idea to do.
Wes: Spike car!
Oren: Yeah, welcome to the spike car. That’s what it feels like watching that droid episode.
Chris: And we just get to see him just attacking droids that are just trying to do their jobs and watching them just try to recover and not attack back. Oh, this is so painful.
So, another common one that we see is covering up the character arc with a meta mystery. In other words, this is when you try to make a viewpoint character be mysterious. So, we don’t actually know what their issue is. And it usually comes in the form of they have some issue stemming from their backstory and the writer is hiding their backstory. And this is a big problem because you can’t understand the character, you can’t understand their motivation, and it’s honestly more frustrating than anything else. Can’t empathize with them because you don’t know where they’re coming from. So, it’s just not a great way to get the character going. And sometimes we, after a while, the meta mystery clears up and then we can actually have our character arc. But until that time, it really cuts down empathy for the character.
Oren: Funniest one that I’ve encountered on that was Shallan in The Way of Kings, where Shallan has this entire arc about whether or not she should trust the woman that she works for, whose name I can’t remember off the top of my head, but she’s an important lady. And eventually Shallan decides that she’s going to.
And then throughout all of this is this weird meta mystery about what happened to her dad. And it turns out that has nothing to do with the arc she’s on. But I kept thinking it did because I didn’t know what other reason we would have to hide that. But no, it turns out that she knew the whole time what happened to her dad. Sanderson was just saving it for a last-minute reveal to try to get you to buy the next book.
Chris: You can do something like this with side characters though, if you want to, as long as you, again, communicate from your viewpoint character. See that there’s something going on with the side character, let the viewpoint character be interested in what it is. Without pressuring them, tell me your backstory, side character. But then you can develop the side characters arc by revealing their backstory, having them talk about it, and then heading towards closure from there.
So that can work, but your viewpoint character and your main character, they should be basically the same. So don’t make your main character not have a viewpoint, just so you can give them a mysterious backstory. Please, I’m begging you.
Revealed backstories also do have to matter, right? They really should be relevant to the plot and change things going forward in some way, or else it may feel very indulgent.
Oren: All right, with that, we have finished our arc of getting to the end of the podcast. I think we can all agree we became better people for it. And I know you guys all agree with me about ice cream now, right?
Wes: Yes.
Oren: You guys aren’t gonna go eat rocky road and cookies and cream, aren’t you? I see I failed. All right, we’re done now. We’re out.
Chris: If this podcast gave you an arc with a positive ending or just made you want ice cream, consider supporting us on Patreon, because those things are definitely related. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, we have Callie Macleod. Then there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson. She’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Talk to you next week.
[Outro Music]This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Colton.
Even the most jaded and cantankerous critic was once a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed reader. Well, they were less jaded and cantankerous, at least. What books bewitched them in this time of innocence? What stories inspired their desire to tear apart every story you’ve ever loved and also to write their own stories that must then be torn apart in the great cycle? Listen and find out!
Show Notes Discworld * Mouse Guard * Rainbow Magic * Fate: The Winx Saga * Boxcar Children * Catwings * The Boat * Polar Express * Jumanji * Animorphs * Escape Velocity Nova * Belgariad * Wheel of Time * Warrior Cats TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Maddie.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle. [Intro Music]
Bunny: Welcome to another heart-pounding episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Bunny, and with me today is…
Oren: Oren.
Bunny: And…
Chris: Chris.
Bunny: And as you can see, I’ve boing, boing, boinged my way into regular hosthood and taken up residence in the big purple Mythcreants’ clubhouse where we all live. There’s no escape for me now. Sorry.
Oren: No, you’re trapped.
Bunny: [Chuckles] I’ve set up my little bunny hutch in the living room and have taken all of the TV controls, so you have to live with me.
Oren: Gonna have to just start having to get up to press the buttons on the TV like some kind of medieval peasant.
Bunny: Boo. Anyway, today we’re going to be talking about lovely, perfect, flawless books. Books that make our hearts a flutter and our nostalgia ooze out our ears like silken honey. I’m sorry, I don’t know why I wrote that line.
Chris: [Laughs]
Bunny: Books that make you sigh for the simpler days of yore. Books that you’ve shared furtive pink-cheeked glances across the classroom with and might have kissed if you weren’t so worried about your braces locking together. I’m sure everyone has felt this way.
Oren: This is getting pretty steamy, admittedly.
Chris, Oren: [Laugh]
Bunny: But not just me.
Chris: I don’t know, Bunny. That would mean I have to not hate everything.
Bunny: I don’t know, it could be an enemies to lovers type thing.
Chris: [Chuckles] Or a lovers to enemies.
Bunny: [Chuckles]
Chris: Sadly, that is my tale of first book love woe.
Oren: I hate everything except for the things I love which are perfect and can’t be criticized.
Bunny: [Fake cough] Discworld.
Oren: Yeah, it’s perfect. Nothing is wrong with Discworld. I have never once criticized it. You can’t prove that I did.
Bunny: [Fake cough] Mouse Guard. Sorry, I’ve got something caught in my throat.
Oren: [Laughs]
Bunny: I think it’s a point.
Chris: [Laughs]
Bunny: Today we’re talking about our first book loves, the books that first inspired us, the stuff that we got into writing. And I have quite a few of these. And a lot of them started out as just very early things that I then tried to copy while trying to pretend that I’m not copying them because I don’t use the exact same characters. I use a character who is me and therefore is not canon in the novels. It’s legally distinct.
Chris: As long as you put yourself in there, it’s no longer what you’re copying anymore.
Bunny: [Chuckles]
Oren: Look, they’ve got green eyes this time. So it’s different.
Bunny: Yeah, exactly. And for me, the first kind of book love, the very earliest, is the series called Rainbow Magic. Have either of you heard of that?
Chris: Actually, no.
Oren: Only vaguely.
Bunny: It’s this massive, ridiculously massive by this point. And it was then too, I remember going into the library and there was a whole shelf that’s entirely these tiny little Rainbow Magic books. And each of them had a fairy on the cover. And the fairies were all themed, there were groups of themed fairies. The first ones were the jewel fairies. There was an emerald fairy and an opal fairy and what have you other jewels, fairy, sapphire fairy, that sort of thing.
Chris: That sounds very cute. Sounds like something I would have liked had I ever known these books existed.
Bunny: It was adorable. And I love these. And basically they all have the same plot. The villains are goblins. They’re led by Jack Frost because why not? What happens in each mini series in this greater series and happens in each book, was that Jack Frost has stolen something and the two main characters, Rachel and Kirsty, have to go and get it back by working with one of the themed fairies.
Chris: Oh, so the themed fairies aren’t actually the main characters. We’ve got a couple of relatable girls to work with them.
Bunny: We got Rachel and Kirsty, Jack Frost, maybe he stole all the original jewels or he stole all the sand so nobody can have nice soft sand this summer. There’s just a ridiculous amount of fairies by now. There’s sport fairies, the jewel fairies, there’s pet keeper fairies, which have dogs and rabbits, which aren’t the same thing as the baby animal rescue fairies. And then there’s the after school sports fairies, which aren’t the same thing as the sport fairies or the water sports fairies or the fun day fairies. Yeah, it’s a bit ridiculous.
Oren: I’m sensing some theming issues here.
Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]
Bunny: “Building Rainbow Magic. How Daisy Meadows failed to theme her world”.
Oren: I predict a highly divisive grimdark TV show adaptation in this series’ future.
Chris: [Laughs]
Bunny: Look, it’s owned by Mattel.
Chris: Like the Winx?
Oren: The first time I saw this, I thought of Winx and how divisive that show’s adaptation was.
Bunny: I do remember seeing clips of that recently and looking at clips of Winx, the animated version. I would never have guessed they were the same thing.
Oren: Chris and I watched both to try to get a feeling for what it was about. And my hot take is that there were some issues with the live action version, but generally it was fine. It had some strengths too. I didn’t think it was a horrible betrayal of the original, but I didn’t have a huge amount of attachment to the original.
The biggest issue is that there was a little bit of whitewashing, which was unfortunate, but they also increased diversity in other ways, which was good. I’m not saying that cancels it out. There were both good and bad things.
Chris: So this book series you’re talking about, Bunny, were these middle grade novels?
Bunny: I think they were even younger, so probably elementary school is when I would have been reading these. They were very short books and having the same basic plot. It was the sort of thing where if you’re a little girl like me and you like little things and fairies and you got all these fairies that have common little girl names, so you’re like, “Which one is my name?” And you go looking for your fairy and then you’re like, “I identify with Rachel and Kirsty and I like fairies”, so you read the rest.
Chris: But they were still mostly text, I take it.
Bunny: They had pictures in them, like drawings, but it was mostly text.
Chris: Sounds like Boxcar Children level.
Bunny: Yeah, I would compare it to The Boxcar Children just a bit better because it’s magical.
Chris: [Laughs] Boxcar Children had its own wish fulfillment of being in a boxcar, which would not normally be fun. But of course, I think that was the charm, is that it made it sound like your fun hideout where you get to be free of adults and everything’s just fine.
Oren: Everyone go live in the woods.
Bunny: I did read the first book of that series. It didn’t hook me the way the fairies did.
Oren: There are fairies, that does help a bit.
Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Laugh]
Chris: I suspect the fairies have a little bit more novelty than The Boxcar Children does.
Bunny: I have massive nostalgia for one Rainbow Magic book in particular, which was one of the special edition books, which were like slightly longer. So when I mentioned that Jack Frost stole the stand from a beach, that was this book. And he also stole all the seashells and all of the something else.
So what makes this book a special edition is that instead of stealing one thing per book, now he’s stolen three things in this book. And it’s not part of one of the theme series. It’s Joy the Summer Vacation Fairy.
Chris: Did the book ever tell you what Jack Frost was gonna do with that sand? [Laughs]
Bunny: He built a castle out of it, and then studded the walls with the seashells? I don’t know.
Chris: [Laughs]
Bunny: He just kind of seems like he likes taking stuff.
Chris: That seems like an unusual thing for a Jack Frost character to want. Doesn’t he have an ice palace or something?
Bunny: He does have an ice palace. So I guess he just wants a summer getaway home.
Oren: The fairy thing helps give the books a burst of, “Oh, wow, that’s neat”. That was basically the same thing with me. I may have mentioned this previously at some point on the podcast before, I honestly can’t remember. I really struggled learning to read, partly because of my dyslexia.
So by the time I started at a school that actually knew how to teach me, I was pretty behind. And at the same time, everything I tried to read was really boring. I’m not sure how much of it was actually boring and how much I just had a bad attitude. It’s been a long time. The stuff I remember was “See Spot Run” level stuff. I had no interest in that. It’s possible that my teachers tried to show me more interesting stuff and I just wasn’t interested for whatever reason.
Bunny: It’s very tense, though. What if Spot trips?
Oren: Yeah, what if he does? What if he doesn’t run? What if you don’t see it?
Bunny: Where’s your God now?
Oren: Yeah.
Chris, Oren: [Laugh]
Oren: The way I remember it is that I basically just didn’t read until fourth grade because of a combination of difficulty and not feeling like there was anything worth reading. Then I was introduced to Catwings by Ursula K. Le Guin, an author who I would go on to have no disagreements with.
Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]
Oren: As the book suggests, is about cats with wings. And I was super into that because I already liked cats and these ones had wings and they flew around and had adventures.
Bunny: [Chuckles]
Oren: This was literally all I needed. There wasn’t really a super complicated plot, except in the second book where we introduced one of them with trauma, which was pretty dark. They still had to go on adventures and explore a forest and that was all great. That’s really all it was. And I would reread those books for years because those were the books that made me think that there was maybe something worth reading, that it wasn’t all really boring nonsense.
Bunny: You still have similar critiques of almost everything that you read. Has that changed?
Oren: [Laughs]
Chris: This is another series that it’s really weird that I’ve never heard of because when I was young, I was really into the idea of cats with wings. Maybe my parents just only gave me like “serious” quote unquote, not actually serious literature. They’re still geeks.
Bunny, Chris: [Laugh]
Bunny: Serious cat book.
Chris: [Laughs]
Oren: I can’t explain Catwings. The books Bunny was talking about are a little bit after our time. They’re from 2003. They wouldn’t have been an option for us when we were first learning to read.
Chris: Oh man, that’s the year I graduated from high school.
Bunny, Chris: [Laugh]
Chris: A little too recent.
Bunny: Little baby Bunny.
Oren: I can’t explain Catwings because that one is not only really well known, it’s by Ursula K. Le Guin, who is one of the high profile prestige authors that people love to heap praise on and talk about how deep she is.
Bunny: Nobody talks about Catwings.
Oren: Catwings doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Everyone is all obsessed with Earthsea and The Dispossessed. I’m like, “What about my cats with wings?” And they’re like, “No, we need to walk away from Omelas again”. And I’d rather not.
Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Laugh]
Bunny: What are you talking about with The Left Hand of Darkness? What about the left wing of the black cat?
Oren: One of them is a black cat. It’s very dark. That’s the one with the dark backstory.
Bunny, Chris: [Laugh]
Bunny: I think I read like a few of those books because again, I was a very cat obsessed little kid. I’ll get to the way that intersects with Rainbow Magic in a moment. All I remember from those books is cats with wings. They go to the big city. There’s a book with the black cat where he has his own adventure. That’s all I remember.
Oren: There aren’t actually that many of them. There’s only four. There’s like the first one where they have to leave the city for reasons. And then there’s the next one where they meet the next cat with wings. I was always confused where that other cat came from because as far as I could tell, it wasn’t one of their siblings.
Bunny: Oh, Jane on Her Own.
Oren: And then there’s one where they go back and meet their mom again, which I liked because I was always really sad that they had to leave because I’d anthropomorphized them something fierce. There’s four of them. I think the ones that I reread were mainly the first two, but I’m sure I reread the other ones as well.
Bunny: I think I would have gotten really into those because the funny thing is, when I set out to “copy”, quote unquote copy, legally distinct Rainbow Magic, see it was called Tree Line Magic, which is very different. And instead of having jewel fairies, it was just a jewel fairy and her name was Ruby and she was not a fairy. She was a cat fairy.
Oren: That’s different.
Bunny: That’s completely different. An anthropomorphic cat with wings. Posed the exact same way that the fairies in the Rainbow Magic series are. It’s just more misspelled.
Oren: The misspellings give it flavor.
Bunny: This is how you add novelty. Spell things ways nobody spelled things.
Oren: Put some apostrophes in there. You’ll be good to go.
Bunny: I remember there’s a few notable misspellings, but because I live in the Pacific Northwest, the story was also set there. And at one point they ride the “fery”, F-E-R-Y.
Oren: [Laughs]
Bunny: They see some “ocas”.
Oren: [Laughs]
Bunny: The sentence was, “Suddenly, ocas apart”.
Oren: Which is of course a huge mistake because it should have been “the boat”.
Bunny: [Laughs] Oh no, shut up. [Laughs]
Oren: Probably shouldn’t have brought up that in joke on the podcast that literally no one else will get, but it’s fine. We’re leaving it in there. Everyone can wonder what the heck I was talking about.
Bunny: [Laughs] We’re leaving it in.
Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Laugh]
Chris: Why were you so mad that you said “the boat”? How strange.
Bunny: It’s a mystery. Don’t ask.
Chris: We know Oren loves boats. How could he be angry at this?
Bunny: [Laughs]
Chris: How could this be out of place?
Bunny: Spooky.
Oren: Alright, Chris, we haven’t heard from you yet. What’s your deal?
Bunny: Was it cat related?
Chris: No! I didn’t read any books about cats. Isn’t that sad?
Bunny: Ugh, loser.
Oren: I don’t know if we can let you back into the club, Chris.
Bunny: [Chuckles]
Chris: I just had a deprived childhood. If I’m going to talk about something that I still think of positively, which is a rare thing indeed, and I’m allowed to go back to picture books, I think it’s worth talking about Chris Van Allsburg.
Bunny: I don’t know if I’ve heard of that.
Chris: Okay, but you have, because he’s the one who wrote Jumanji, for one thing, and The Polar Express, which have both been made into movies and absolutely should not have been made into movies. [Laughs]
Bunny: Oh my god, The Polar Express. That movie.
Chris: Yes, that movie was absolutely terrible, but here’s the thing.
Bunny: So gummy.
Chris: The reason why it’s terrible is because all of Chris Van Allsburg’s books have very little in the way of content in them. They’re all based on not telling you anything, so it all feels extremely mysterious. One of his stories just has a series of illustrations with one sentence to make it mysterious. The Polar Express is just a wish fulfillment story about a kid going on a train and coming back. There’s no story there, which is why it doesn’t work as a movie.
Bunny: It’s also weirdly religious. I don’t know. I never understood that. You must believe in Lord Santa.
Oren: That’s a pretty common Christmas trope. I’ve never liked it, but it’s not uncommon.
Chris: I don’t remember it being a particularly religious book.
Bunny: Believing in Santa is the premise of a lot.
Chris: But Jumanji is the one where the game becomes real.
Oren: Admittedly, I liked that movie.
Bunny: What?
Chris: That movie’s better.
Oren: Yeah, I liked the Jumanji movie. It’s not great, right?
Bunny: No, it’s not the Jumanji movie. You liked it? You liked? Wow.
Oren: Yeah, I like things.
Chris: [Laughs] Oren likes things.
Oren: I actually like a lot of the things I critique.
Bunny: Careful, you’re going on record saying this.
Oren: The movie Jumanji is very silly, mostly a comedy. It’s got some serious moments that are a little bit, sure, this is happening now. But it’s mostly just a Robin Williams vehicle, and I don’t dislike it for that. I think that’s fine.
Chris: Well, he has one book where a kid falls asleep and sees the future, and it’s an environmental message. He sees everything has gone wrong with the environment and the future, and it inspires him to recycle and stuff like that. He has just a lot of very magical feeling books, and they even did one where they took one of his books and actually got a bunch of speculative fiction writers to write short stories based on some of the lines and pictures that he had. And he wasn’t so into it. I think the point is the mystery.
Bunny: That’s a good idea, though, for an anthology.
Chris: But anyway, his work is really well known, and it is speculative, and if you have not seen his books before, they’re definitely worth, next time you’re at a bookstore, pick some of them up.
Oren: Chris, was there a specific book that kind of ignited your desire to write your own stories? Because Bunny’s mentioned hers. I’ve got one that I haven’t brought up yet. I’m just curious if that happened with you, or if your desire to write happened some other way.
Bunny: Yeah, what legally distinct fanfic?
Chris: No, actually. My inspiration for writing was insomnia.
Oren: Yeah, that’ll do it.
Bunny: Oh, woah.
Chris: [Laughs] You have to do something when you’re laying in bed for hours every night as a child, wondering when this mysterious thing called sleep will come. I found writing by hand, because I didn’t start typing until I was 10, because that’s when home computers started to become popular. I didn’t want to write very much. I did it a little bit, but it was too tedious, because I would write down a sentence, and then as soon as it was down, I would just want to rewrite it, and it was all on physical paper, and it just got mangled very quickly, and I didn’t like it.
When I was 16, I was finally inspired to actually write something, and that’s when I finally became a lot more fluid at typing. Until then, I had avoided typing, because I found it tedious, too. But no, I did not write any child fanfiction, unfortunately.
Bunny: Wow.
Chris: Instead, in school, I wrote morbid stories about a vampire cat that killed its owner.
Bunny: Cat! Okay, good. You’re welcome back. Welcome back to the club.
Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Laugh]
Bunny: I wrote down that entire Rainbow Magic thing on paper. My parents had kept it in our family vault, which is how significant of a document this is, and it’s really something else. Yeah, I also didn’t really type until I got older.
Oren: For me, I started typing as soon as that was an option, but that wasn’t until I was a little bit past the age when I started reading. And before then, I had story ideas, but they were mostly just, “Hey, mom and dad, what if this happened?” Usually based off of some kind of Star Trek episode we’d been watching.
I couldn’t really write by hand very well, because every problem that I had learning to read, it was way worse learning to write, so that was just not on the table. It was all they could do to get me to do my school assignments. I had to learn to type first, and that took a while.
Then the books that actually inspired me to try to write my first novel were the Animorphs books. Those were, of course, the big thing at that time, right? They came out exactly at the right time for me to read them, and were very much products of that exact moment in 1996.
And this was at the same time when we were doing this weird long-distance RV trip around the country that my mom had taken a sabbatical to do. So we were homeschooled that year, and I wanted to write this novel, and each chapter was also a geography lesson, because my mom needed a homeschool lesson. This was the only way she could get me to pay attention to geography, was if in each chapter the protagonists visit a new state and do something there.
Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Laugh]
Chris: That’s brilliant. I love it.
Bunny: That is very smart.
Oren: So it wasn’t a good story, but it was a good geography lesson.
Bunny: My dad would tell me Pascal and Princess stories, which are stories about these two little dogs and their owner, Peter. And the little dogs are small, white, and excitable, and they could jump as high as Peter’s knees. That was how the stories always started. And somewhat similar to the Rainbow Magic ones, this time it was gnomes. And the gnomes have stolen something, like, they’ve stolen all the baguettes in France. Oh no. Peter goes to “Special Red Phone” and calls up, “insert child property character I was into here”, so, The Magic School Bus, or Rudolph, and they will help track down the gnomes by going to various places and decoding riddles that my dad somehow came up with on the fly that were like rhyming. And then they would go find the gnomes, do a dance to put the gnomes to sleep, and then bring them back to Gnome Island, where they belong.
Oren: That’s pretty impressive to do on the fly. That’s some skills that most gamemasters would be pretty jealous of.
Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]
Bunny: I need you to run the Peter, the Dogs, and the Gnomes campaign.
Oren: I once had a session with a fairy character who spoke in rhyme, and I have never spent longer preparing for a session than that one.
Chris: Oh my gosh.
Oren: I wrote every single question I could imagine the players would ask her, and I wrote a rhyming answer for it.
Bunny: Wow.
Oren: And then I had a reason why she would have to leave the scene if I couldn’t think of a rhyme.
Bunny, Chris: [Laugh]
Oren: And I had a rhyme that was basically, “Stop asking me questions”, rhyme.
Chris: Did it work out when you ran it?
Oren: Yeah, it worked fine. I think the players were just so confused by what was happening that they didn’t push too hard.
Chris: Wow.
Oren: That session worked out pretty well.
Chris: That sounds brutal. I would never attempt that.
Bunny: That’s dedication.
Oren: I haven’t tried since, so you’re not wrong.
Chris, Oren: [Laugh]
Bunny: That’s like you’re running a marathon.
Oren: That was like college free time level GM prep. I don’t do that anymore.
Bunny: You had free time in college? Man.
Chris: Somehow people in college manage to do an awful lot of GMing and roleplaying.
Bunny: [Chuckles]
Chris: We assume you must. I don’t know, or just all the energy.
Bunny: Oh yeah.
Chris: Maybe you don’t sleep. There’s another possibility.
Bunny: That’s true of many of my friends, yes.
Oren: Let me put it this way. I had more free time in college than I had either in high school or after college. I also realized that I went through phases. I would get excited to write, I would try, I would stop and burn out, and then I wouldn’t for two years. And this happened several times in between the ages of 12 and 18.
It was actually video games that got me more into writing than books did. Animorphs was the first time, but after that it was video games. And I think the reason is just that I felt more connected to the characters in the video games than I did in characters in books, because that’s the main advantage of a video game is you get to actually control your character so you feel more immersed.
My most serious attempt was after I’d been playing a really long Escape Velocity playthrough, which is a little space game where you control a single ship. I got through it, almost the whole game, in the same ship that I really liked and I spent a lot of time customizing it and it was my favorite ship. And I just noticed at the end of the playthrough, I clicked on its stats and I noticed that it had a crew of two?
Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]
Oren: And so that meant there was some guy who’d been hanging out for this entire playthrough as I did stuff like become a alien god and awaken my psychic powers and then decided to stop doing that because it was evil. And he’d apparently just stuck around the whole time.
Bunny: [Chuckles]
Oren: And he’s not in any of the dialogue or anything. So I was like, “Who is this guy? What was his deal like?” That was the impetus for my first really serious attempt at a novel. Not that that went anywhere, but it was an attempt.
Bunny: That’s cool. That’s a good premise. Who is that random guy?
Oren: Generic space opera and the search for that one guy.
Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]
Bunny: I’d read it. I’d read it. Any other notable influences y’all would like to do a speed round?
Oren: Chris, you haven’t talked as much. It’s your turn to do one.
Chris: When I think back at the novels that stick out in my mind as the novels that were important to me, unfortunately, it’s the Belgariad.
Oren: Yeah! [Laughs]
Chris: And I read 12 of them. Because you have two series, a series of five and then a follow up series of five and then you have some standalone books about some of the immortal characters. I quit sometime in high school and I was done partly because they’re just so racist and sexist and I even read some more series by David and Leigh Eddings. And again, the more books I read by them, the more I noticed how extremely problematic they were. They had one book where the protagonists forced the trolls to have less babies so they would eventually go extinct.
Bunny: Wow. Eugenics! Oh boy!
Chris: You have no idea. The Belgariad, one of its distinguishing features, all these countries in the fantasy world that are defined by a single trait. There’s the extreme greedy money country and the knight country where everybody believes in chivalry and unfortunately some of them, again, are really racist. We have all of these bad guy countries where some of them are devious and others are stupid.
Oren: They’re all racist, but some of them are more virulent than others.
Chris: Some of them are really bad.
Bunny: Oof.
Chris: One of the bad races, they decided to try to make them sexy by justifying why they had women on collars and leashes.
Bunny: Eww!
Chris: They’re secretly empowered!
Bunny: Great.
Chris: Yeah, I was a sucker for farm boy chosen one books.
Oren: Because it’s so surprising and a twist that a farm boy could be the hero. You wouldn’t expect that.
Chris: I could identify with the farm boys and then being chosen, it got so much wish fulfillment. And that’s what hooked me.
Bunny: That’s why you’re the queen of the realm now.
Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]
Oren: No, I had a similar experience with Wheel of Time because Wheel of Time was my first high fantasy book. Also the first time I realized that high fantasy really existed, that you could have a story about like swords and magic and stuff. Because before then I had mostly read sci-fi or low modern fantasy stuff. For me that was amazing and it also had the farm boy chosen one thing. Because wow, this random guy Rand? Name even sounds random. Is the special chosen one?
Now the beauty of Wheel of Time is that series went on for so long that I got old enough to realize that it was problematic. By the time I got to the last book that existed at the time, which was I think book 9. That was when I stopped. And then all of the angry Wheel of Time fan ragers were like, “How dare you stop at book 9 and still think you can talk about the series? You’re the worst”.
Bunny, Chris: [Laugh]
Chris: Yeah, I read Wheel of Time around the same period, my farm boy phase, and I didn’t finish it because it just got too depressing. I knew it was real sexist, but I was still hooked for a while.
Oren: I tried to reread it and I got to book 4 and I was like, “All right, surely the slog will end soon”. And I looked at the forums and oh, the slog hasn’t started yet.
Bunny: [Chuckles] That’s telling.
Oren: Alright, we’re almost out of time. Bunny, give us one last one.
Bunny: Warrior Cats. Just Warrior cats. I had so much Warrior Cats. Continuing with the theme of my cat obsession as a kid. I got big into cats in late elementary school and early middle school. All of my friends were into Warrior Cats. I was into Warrior Cats. I was River Clan, of course. We all had different cat personas and we’d run around scratching each other on the playground.
Oren: As one does.
Chris: [Laughs] Of course you did.
Bunny: [Laughs] I have a terrible habit of biting my nails. I was always the weakest when it came to scratching, but I made up for it by hissing and yowling and confusing the playground monitors.
And that was the source of my second manuscript, another fanfic that didn’t want to be a fanfic. It was a mess. It was incredible as the main characters are Fallen Leaf and Tree Bark, which are very compelling names. Their mother was a powerful fighter, not a warrior. She was a fighter. There’s evil wolves who are coming after them. And there’s a tribe, not a clan, a tribe up in the mountains that is getting threatened by a cougar and the cougar is somehow their dad because I wanted an “I am your father” moment, despite never having seen Star Wars at that point. And then actually Fallen Leaf, who’s definitely not my self insert, is a reincarnation of an ancient other cat fighter named Blood Rose, which matters somehow. It was all over the place.
One funny thing about this manuscript that I’ll never forget is just, I was like, “How would cats measure things?” They wouldn’t measure things in feet. They would measure them in “robin lengths”.
Oren: Obviously.
Chris, Oren: [Laugh]
Bunny: That’s intuitive. [Laughs] More intuitive than the standard system.
Oren: All right. I think that is going to be all the time we have.
Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com slash Mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First we have Callie MacLeod. Next there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
[Outro music]Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.
Literary fiction and speculative fiction, are they really so different? No, but also yes, and most of all, it depends. This week, we’re taking another look at the topic to see if we can figure out what literary fiction even is, what spec fic writers can learn from it, and why you don’t need to sacrifice plot to get great wordcraft or deep characters. Plus, some delicious author drama!
Show Notes Vladimir Nabokov * 190 – What Is Literary Fiction * Way of Kings Shows Us The Damage a Meta Mystery Can Do * How Romanticism Harms Writers * The Buried Giant * Ishiguro-Le Guin Drama * Piranesi * Haunting of Hill House * The Metamorphosis * Edgar Allan Poe’s Short Stories * 193 – The History of Haunted Houses * Is Neil Gaiman Magical Realism TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Viviana.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
You’re listening to The Mythcreants Podcast. With your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.
[Opening Music]
Wes: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast. I’m your host, Wes and with me today is…
Oren: Oren.
Wes: And
Chris: Chris.
Wes: And we’re gonna start bashing literary fiction right off the start, so I figured I’d start opening up with a quote that I think encompasses probably some of our biggest problems with this- we’ll call it a genre, a mood, a vibe, I don’t know. But, Vladimir Nabokov has this quote that says, “Style and structure are the essence of a book. Great ideas are hogwash.” And…
Chris: Mm-hm.
Wes: If that is not literary fiction snobbery at its finest, I don’t know what is. And so, today we’re going to talk about that.
Chris: I have to say, Wes, for you, this is quite a turnaround. We did talk about snobbery last time, but-
Wes: Yes.
Chris: To have you come out of the gate and be like, “And literary fiction people are snobs” is completely different.
Wes:I think this is the crux of it because I consulted my notes from when we talked about literary fiction, genre fiction, and mass-market fiction in episode 190, and I’m looking at my notes, and I’m like, ‘I still agree with, like, all of this. What’s the problem?’ I’m like, ‘Oh, the problem is other people.’ Since then, what I’ve come to the conclusion of is that I don’t really understand literary fiction because I don’t hang out in literary circles. What I know about it is that when I read a book that is tagged as literary, there’s a good chance I will find problems with it, and when I critique it, I am told that those problems are actually good because it’s literary, and the arguments that people give don’t make any sense, but they are very often smug and superior.
Chris: That’s what all fan-ragers say about all of their stuff.
Wes: Yeah, that’s true, but literary fans, I’ve noticed there’s a different vibe.
Chris: Similar to the Malazan fans?
Wes: Yeah, no, exactly. Malazan books definitely Venn-diagram over onto literary, right? There’s like a huge culture of ‘Actually this is very smart, and we are very smart for having read it, and if you are critiquing it, it is because you are not smart.’ Whereas, I get a lot of fan rage from, say, the Way of Kings critique. But I didn’t get specifically that level of, ‘These books are for smart people and you’re not a smart person.’ I just got people who were mad.
Chris: I said in 190, I don’t know how much there actually is snobbery around the idea of literary fiction.
Wes: Oh, you sweet summer child.
Chris: Oh, I was trying so hard to be nice, aww!
Wes: I was new-ish to the podcast still, you didn’t want to scare me off too bad.
Chris: But for me, it’s just very much crystallized with my looking at romanticism, right? And now having a much firmer idea of the culture and how much that culture is bedded in academia on how it’s reinforced, and all of its tenets, which I had seen separately and not really linked together until I looked at romanticism by accident. It was like, ‘Oh, my God. This is all the things that are wrong with novel writing culture. They’re all right here and there’s a name for it.’ And from there, then it was much easier to link things together and the fact that. I think that the sense of superiority is not just an ingrained part of the culture, I almost want to say it’s an essential part. Because, when you have a bunch of professors who are sitting in universities where this is what they want, and they’re finding that all of their students come in and don’t like the works that they like, and the works that they like aren’t selling, it’s almost a reflexive way to try to continue their lofty positions, right? Because they have privileged positions in universities and that culture is ingrained there and self perpetuating. And to be clear, I’m totally in support of tenure because it gives people academic freedom, but that also means that those cultures don’t necessarily- they can make it so that they are almost all literary and resist change, even when the general populace likes other types of works better. It almost feels like the reliance on the idea of superiority is how they try to justify that privileged place that they have, even though they are a niche fandom. Which isn’t bad to be a niche fandom, but having a superiority complex is kind of bad.
Wes: Really? (Sarcastic)
Oren: I was gonna say that it’s if the dark fantasy fandom thought they were better than everyone else. Then I realized, ‘Wait, hang on, they kind of do.’ Not universally, of course, but that is definitely another flavor of, ‘We’re very smart for reading these books and you guys are just not smart because you didn’t like them.’
Wes: One of the fundamental issues with literary fiction, as far as I’m concerned, is that we teach English literature classes, and so they need things to study. We don’t really teach writing classes, because that’s why Mythcreants exists, because it has excellent writing advice, and how you craft characters, how you craft throughlines, like all of that great practical advice that people come to us for is not in a literary classroom because that’s not the point, but because that’s overwhelmingly the conversation, it infects actual writing, right? You start reading all these things, you’re like, ‘Oh, that must be the way you have to write it.’ Which is exactly where Chris is getting the, ‘Oh, romanticism is the root cause of all evils.’ For this kind of bit. When really it’s just literary fiction, it can be about any subject, but it just employs enough goods that you would want to teach them, like literary devices, or like multifaceted themes, or like complex illusions, right? If the payoff of reading the story is the experience of reading the text itself, instead of the resolution of the plot and character arcs, then I call it literary. I think it’s as simple as that. It’s just what are your expectations? And that’s it. But I think it just gets held up as something else because, I don’t know, I think people just want to like, like their things and be mad at you if you don’t like it, which is how I understood Chris’s talk about professors and things like that.
Chris: I would also say that I think in classrooms, there’s also a great deal of emphasis on literature courses, oftentimes over creative writing courses, as you were saying, and I think that there is partly a big difference in that literature is all about analyzing works that somebody has already written, which is very different than if you are a storyteller and you want to create something, and so I can see how if your entire profession is analyzing works that are already written how rewarding it becomes to go, ‘Oh, I want to look at all of the different multiple levels and we want to debate over what it means and I can’t change what’s in it, but I can look at it in a new light and that’s interesting.’ Whereas if you’re a storyteller and you’re trying to actually create a specific experience for the reader or get something across, that comes with very different goals than somebody who is teaching a literature course. It does feel like a lot of the English classes and the way that they almost look at quote unquote ‘great literature’ comes with the idea that the literature is fixed and so we apply creativity in how we look at it instead of looking at, ‘Okay, but how can we make it to get the result that we want.’
Oren: What I find interesting is when you have books that are considered literary, because there isn’t a great set of definitions for what literary fiction is. Wes’ definition is pretty good, but that isn’t always what other people are using.
Wes: Should be.
Oren: I take books that are considered literary, but still have speculative elements. Because, of course, like all genres, literary has a lot of crossover with other genres, and those are the ones that I find interesting. If it’s a literary book that has no magic or advanced tech or anything, and it’s just set in the real world, sorry, that is so far outside of my interests that I don’t even know how to comment on it. But, when it’s something like The Buried Giant, or Piranesi, or The Haunting of Hill House, all of which are books that get labeled as literary by various people, but also clearly have speculative elements, those are the ones that I find fascinating. Can I tell you guys a little bit about the drama around The Buried Giant?
Wes: Oh, please.
Chris: Yeah, let’s hear it.
Oren: Okay, so this is some drama from 2015, so this is vintage drama. The author, Kazuo Ishiguro, said in some context, and I cannot find where the original quote is, I can only find people saying he said this, that he was worried people would think this book was fantasy. Which is a very silly thing to say, because it is fantasy. It’s set in Arthurian England with magic and dragons and stuff. It’s fantasy. So it’s a very weird thing to say. This made Ursula K. Le Guin very upset, and she wrote an angry blog post, which I think she deleted, because I can’t find that blog post either, I can only find people talking about it, and she lambasted him, and I haven’t always agreed with everything Le Guin said, but I certainly felt some sympathy there. Then, later, Ishiguro clarified that he likes all of those things, and ‘Let’s be friends, everyone’ and Le Guin was like, ‘Alright, we’ll be friends.’ But still was like, ‘If you like all those things, why were you worried that people would think it was fantasy?’ And my favorite thing that I found about this book was someone saying, it could be YA, because it’s got ogres and stuff.
Chris: That seems to be part of the like, fantasy is for children. Thing that some people who have no familiarity with speculative fiction think. They’re just like, ‘Oh, it’s fantasy, you mean fairy tales and fairy tales for children.’ Actually, no, fairy tales are definitely not for children. If you’ve actually read any original fairy tales.
Oren: Tell me you don’t know anything about publishing without telling me you don’t know anything about publishing.
Chris: If your only familiarity with fantasy is Disney movies. Disney animated classics, then maybe that’s what you think.
Wes: The Buried Giant is an interesting case. I think where Ishiguro is really coming with that is like, probably how he wanted his book marketed. He’s like, ‘Okay, no, like, I’m trying to comment on memory,’ is where I think the literary components come in, right? The theme throughout the book is just, what is memory, right? That’s why there’s the amnesia inducing fog, like, how do we construct memory and the experiences that the different characters have with that? And then there’s the whole drawing on more Arthurian texts as well. So big play on themes and drawing on an established literature are two giant flags that he wants it to be taken as like a literary story. Because la hallmark of a more conventional fantasy is that maybe it’s not going to like directly comment on another book. It might just be focusing on its own thing. Everybody draws on stuff anyways, it’s just positioning, but you can see like where maybe he was just like, ‘Oh,’ and why he had to backtrack on it too.
Oren: And here’s the thing that makes me a little sad about that. It’s because it’s not like I can prove this. I don’t have a market research team, but certainly from my experience, I can’t imagine that fantasy fans would dislike a book where the premise is, ‘Hey, what if there was a magical fog on the land that drained memories?’
Wes: Great premise.
Oren: And buried ancient atrocities committed in the name of maintaining peace. And then what would happen if that fog started to lift and people remembered? That is a super cool premise, right? I think Game of Thrones fans would be all over that and they might expect more blood and gore but there are lots of fantasy books that don’t have blood and gore, right? That’s a cool premise, I think fantasy fans would love that. Where I think fantasy fans would have a problem… this is the part that makes me sad about the book, is that it has that great premise and then it just does not live up to it. Because we start off with this cool premise and we have this elderly couple who are trying to make a journey in the midst of all this and trying to figure out who they are and what that will mean for them, and that’s all very cool, I might even call it character driven.
Chris: No.
Oren: But then, in the middle of all that, suddenly we veer off and are hanging out with this kid, who, I’m sure Ishiguro had some ideas about what this kid means, but to me he means nothing. He’s not important, he has nothing to do with the old couple other than being in their proximity for a while, and I guess he’s supposed to represent how the younger generation will continue the hatred of the older generation, but, my god, he has a lot of screen time for such a simple idea and we spend a lot of time with him, and at one point we talk to these boatmen who think that they are the arbiters of whether or not your romance is real, and I’m sure that also had some deep meaning to Ishiguro, but I’m just sitting here wondering, ‘What the heck does this have to do with the initial premise?’ Which sounded really cool, and then just gets lost as the story continues.
Wes: Right there just is, I think, maybe our chief frustration with so-called ‘literary works’ is maybe they have a throughline, but the author, like, either doesn’t really care about it, or just abandons it. But people who like these stories don’t care, which is speaking as somebody who does like a lot of those stories, but like now after we’ve been podcasting for 10 years and talking about this stuff, it’s a mixed payoff, right? And when you can have cool novel craft and world building and also rich payoff, just give me all the good stuff. Why should I trade? Why should I sacrifice?
Chris: Even if the primary focus is on wordcraft and how pretty the wordcraft sounds and enjoying the experience, it doesn’t hurt the book to have a plot that works.
Oren: Yeah, if this novel came to me as an editing manuscript, I would tell the author things like, ‘Your wordcraft is really strong and you have a really cool premise and very engaging characters, but you’re trying to make your story about everything and your story can be about anything, but it can’t be about everything, and I’m gonna ask you to prioritize.’
Wes: That’s right, only Moby Dick can do that. Because it’s too long. But it’s so fun.
Oren: Maybe agree to disagree on that one. I have a whale’s worth of opinions on Moby Dick, but…
Wes: I think my favorite thing about that thing is just that it’s basically Herman Melville’s love letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, and it’s, boy, know your audience, man.
Chris: One thing, Wes, I’m interested to get your opinion on, since you’re putting a lot of emphasis on the type of wordcraft, but the thing that I consistently hear from romantics is that they consider important is characters, that they want to do in depth character looks, and a lot of the works that are being called literary often have characters that are really wacky or have a lot of flaws, but there is also often a lot of character internalizing. Just a lot of words are spent going into the character’s mindset extensively, going into their background, that kind of thing. Do you see that as playing a role in your way of thinking about literary works?
Wes: I think it contributes, for sure. While you were talking about that, I was like, let me rack my mind for like a spec fic type example. And Franz Kafka is The Metamorphosis where Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning and is just turned into a giant bug. It’s all interiority because he can’t talk, he’s just a giant bug. And it’s a novella, but that’s all interiority as he sees things play out around him with his family and there’s no plot at all. Like, it’s just him and the family eventually just getting tired of him and the whole thing is just social commentary done in a weird kind of wacky way. And I think it’s good. I’m glad it’s short, you know, because I think that novel premise can’t last very long. And maybe that’s an issue with literary fiction as well. It’s like, they’re just too long. A lot of them should be shorter. And I think that’s why Poe is good, because he prioritized short stories and his whole goal in his philosophy of composition, which is you can read online, is just to evoke a single feeling in a story. That’s all he wanted to do is just, ‘I wanna write something that makes you feel this one thing. That’s what I’m gonna try to do, whether it be like dread or like anxiety or something like that.’ I like that challenge. I like that idea. Does it have great plot? No. Does it have weird characters? Yes. Does it make me feel something? Sometimes!
Oren: Well, nobody’s POE-fect.
Wes: Nobody’s…No.
Chris: Yes. But no, I can definitely see where some people really enjoy lots of internalizing, but that does tend to really slow movement down to a crawl. So, a lot of people are just going to find that fairly dull, but other people enjoy that and that’s completely reasonable. Haunting of Hill House. One we can talk about that has lots of internalizing and is also just slow moving. It’s not that it doesn’t have a plot, but it becomes a crawl.
Chris: And I have this quote from the version that’s currently on Amazon that has this introduction and this is just so romantic, this quote from the introduction. The whole thing is, of course, like this, but this called my attention, and the emphasis comes from the quote, to be clear. “Eleanor is a genuine literary character, rather than a device of the narrative. She is complicated and a distinctive individual, peculiar even, although not so peculiar that she fails to engage the reader’s sympathy.” And it’s just the italicized “character”, right? Other people just write devices of the narratives. But this is an actual, true, genuine character. It just, again, really speaks to some of those attitudes that they have in literary circles well only a character where we spend all of this time. Internalizing to explore every faucet of their backstory and history or whatever is a real character. And, I don’t know, I just find that kind of funny, but The Haunting of Hill House definitely does that, right? Spends lots of time internalizing.
Wes: The point of The Haunting of Hill House, besides having great prose, as far as I’m concerned… And we talked about this in our History of Haunted Houses podcast, is that Shirley Jackson wanted to write a psychological horror story, and that’s what you get. It’s just, sure, there’s that great, fantastic opening paragraph about The Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against the hills. That’s cool, but then yeah, it’s all Eleanor. And her increasing unreliability as this fantasy that she’s wrapped into her mind, ultimately, spoilers, cause her to drive away and crash and die.
Oren: It’s funny because there’s always this, this character, this is a real character, and this is the thing that people say about literary fiction a lot, and I have to admit, after reading Hill House, I don’t feel like Eleanor is especially deep. I think she’s fine, I think she does what she needs to do, but I think like most good characters, Shirley Jackson focuses on a few elements of her because trying to portray an actual person in all of their complexity, even in a novel with a lot of interiority, would be too hard, and probably, you’d lose the reader, we focus on a few things that Eleanor has, and I think it works, but I wouldn’t call it particularly unusual. If every other character that people write is a mere device, then Eleanor is that too, right? What is the difference between Eleanor and any other great character that readers connected with?
Chris: We do lots and lots of internalizing.
Oren: We do.
Chris: But that brings me to the question of… What is the big difference between Haunting of Hill House and what Stephen King is writing? Is it just that his wordcraft is worse? Because he does, in some of his works, a whole lot of internalizing. And he loves delving into characters. He clearly has a romantic mindset. His memoir is just beloved by literary professors, but I’ve never heard him, despite how he seems to want to be literary and has those aspirations, ever spoken of as though his novels. are literary in any way.
Wes: Great question, Chris. My answer, I suspect, is why comedies don’t win Academy Awards. Convention. It’s just like, he positioned himself as a horror writer. He writes horror. Horror is a genre. Full stop.
Chris: And Haunting of Hill House doesn’t qualify as horror?
Wes: Because I don’t think she ever positioned it as such. She just submitted these things to just get published. And a lot of things were published, like, posthumously. I think whoever her agent was, just grabbed it and was like, ‘Okay, well, this is just fiction writing. Like, it’s not genre, because it’s about, like, real people. And fantastical elements are not super fantastical, so hey, fine.’ I think it just has to be how the book is marketed for some of these things. Stephen King’s Misery has no speculative fiction elements and you get good feels in that, good strong horror feels in that story, but it’s not considered literary by any means, even though I think it does have plenty of literary components in it. But he’s just held up as something else entirely. So, yeah, that positioning is really weird, and it shows just how arbitrary this is, and whoever’s holding the keys to these gates is just doing their thing.
Chris: Yeah, cause to me, Haunting of Hill House does read like just classic horror, and yeah, it’s a little more slow and psychological, but, I don’t know, it doesn’t, for me, really set it that much apart from a lot of other horror works or speculative works.
Oren: One thing I would also say is that Shirley Jackson has been dead for 50 years at this point. I would not be surprised if 50 years after Stephen King’s death, and to be clear, I wish no ill will toward Stephen King. I hope he is with us for quite some time. But, I wouldn’t be surprised if 50 years after he passes, his works are considered literary. Because, the two criteria that seem to come up the most often in whether a work is literary, is, if it’s new, it has to be avant garde in some way. That is what generally gets it tagged as literary. Or, if it’s old, it doesn’t have to be. It can be very conventional, but if it’s old, then it can be literary.
Wes: I’m glad you brought that up, Orym, because that gets back to English literature classes. Has the book been around long enough and does it have enough of what they consider teachable to be taught enough? So there’s been enough time for several works in Shirley Jackson’s catalog to have been taught and reviewed. Brought into classrooms like The Lottery, Hill House, We Have Always Lived In The Castle, those things have been taught now, and so it’s considered literary ’cause we can teach it in class. I’m sure people teach some Stephen King, but he’s not in the classrooms. He’s not part of curriculums across the country
Oren: And he’s just too present. Right. He’s still there. Still tweets or exes now is what he does.
Wes: I heard today they’re called zeets.
Oren: Zeets? Yeah, he does that. He has opinions. I just don’t think we’re ready to start the process of literarizing Stephen King yet. I suspect that will happen eventually, though.
Wes: If the author is dead, sometimes you have to wait.
Chris: But that also speaks to the double meaning of the word literary, right? Whether it’s a genre with particular conventions, like all genres, or whether we’re just pointing at the works that we think are superior in some way and just calling them literary. Which, honestly, I just don’t think that’s very healthy, that whole attitude of, ‘You’re not legitimate unless you have this literary label.’ Writers are so eager for validation. And I don’t think that’s a good way to look at it.
Oren: I would agree, except one obvious exception is that it got this novel that I really like, Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke. There was more notice for that book because it was declared literary.
Chris: No! I like it so it’s not literary. It has a well, no, it has a well structured plot. With a good resolution, therefore, it can’t be literary. If people are, like, defining literary by what they think is good characters, I think I’m allowed to define it by ‘It has a bad plot.’ So if it has a good plot, it just can’t.
Oren: That was the thing I found funny was I was trying to find, okay, why do people think that Piranesi is literary? And as far as I could tell, the answer was that they wanted it to be.
Chris: It does have a fair amount of internalizing. But the thing is that, again, the plot is good. The pacing is good. If it was a much longer book, it would probably become a problem, but it’s just short enough that it stays tight, and it does feel like things move, even though there is a fair amount of character contemplation in there.
Wes: Yeah, to your point of saying, why is it literary? Because they wanted it to. Brings me back to the point about why comedies don’t win Academy Awards. Until Tropic Thunder in 2008, that Ben Stiller satirical action comedy. Got a bunch of nominations and won Academy Awards because people just decided ‘Oh, okay this one.’ It just doesn’t make any sense.
Oren: But perhaps Piranesi can be where we heal the rift between spec-fic and literary.
Chris: No, it’s ours! So it belongs to us, it does not belong to them. They can’t have it. They can’t have it. It’s obviously a work of fantasy, come on.
Oren: I saw one blog post in their attempt to define it as literary tried to say it was magical realism.
Chris: What? No.
Wes: Magical realism is definitely the way literary fans try to say that they enjoyed a fantasy novel.
Chris: Because it has the word ‘realism’ in it. Look again, it’s exactly how I got my TA to allow me to write speculative fiction in college is by, what if I write magical realism? Like all he hears is it has the word realism in it. And he’s like, ‘Sure.’ And then I just write whatever I want. ‘You said I can have magical realism. So therefore this must be allowed.’
Wes: I’ve definitely been in classes where people hold Neil Gaiman up as like magical realism, like American Gods, for example. And I’m just like, ‘Sure, whatever.’
Chris: Yeah, it can’t be speculative fiction, because it’s good.
Wes: Can’t be spec.
Oren: Yeah, that’s a whole argument about whether or not magical realism is a genre defined by what is in the story or by who wrote it, because I’ve seen some arguments that it is a Latin American genre specifically, and I’m not going to weigh in on that, I don’t have any opinions, I just know that if you’re defining it to the point where it can include Piranesi, you don’t know what it means.
Oren: I have one more thing I want to say before we go, because we’re almost out of time, which is, regardless of what people think about literary fiction or not, I would just say that as a content editor, I often encounter problems in stories that authors tell me they are doing on purpose because they want to be literary. These are things like weak plots, characters doing things that just don’t make any sense, and poor world-building, and authors sometimes tell me they’re doing that on purpose to be more literary, and it’s, to some extent, still a free country, so you can do that, but if that’s the kind of attitude you have towards your book, I’m probably not the right editor for you, because, like, all I can tell you is how to fix those things. I can’t tell you how to keep them that way, and also make people like your story.
Chris: Yeah, I think we should just go the Piranesi route and just make your story good enough that people want to declare it literary just ‘cause.
Oren: Yeah, that’s the new way. You’ll be literary if it’s really good and some literary fans like it. And then they will create the reasons that it’s literary for you. It’s the perfect crime! Alright, I think we will go ahead and close the podcast on that note.
Chris: And if you enjoy this podcast, consider supporting us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, we have Callie McLeod. Then we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
[Closing Music]
This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself”, by Jonathan Coulton.
We talked about The Mandalorian back when there was just one season, but now there’s a whole lot more of it. Also, all the characters have names now, so that’s neat. Join us as we discuss the highs of season two, the mids of season three, and whatever the heck was happening in The Book of Boba Fett. This is the way.
Show Notes The Mandalorian * First Season Podcast * Daft Punk * Cara Dune Controversy * The Book of Boba Fett * Razor Crest * The First Order * L3-37 TranscriptGenerously transcribed by James.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.
[opening song]Wes: Welcome to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m your host, Wes. With me today is…
Oren: Oren.
Wes: And…
Chris: Chris.
Wes: And we do an audio podcast, but not like it would matter even if we did a video one. You would never see our faces because we never take our helmets off. Because we are true Mandalorians!
Chris: This is the way.
Wes: This is the way.
[laughter]Wes: Or we are French house funk music artists, Daft Punk, who are also Mandalorians. The key thing here is – it’s complicated. Look, if you just like having stuff over your face, you’re probably a Mandalorian according to some. This is the way.
Oren: The important thing is that if we do have to take our helmets off, we can go and have a little swim in a neat lake and then it’ll be cool. We’ll all be fine.
Wes: This is true. It’s really just encouraging hygiene in an otherwise increasingly gritty Star Wars universe.
Oren: Everything’s real. There’s a lot of dirt now. A lot of dust everywhere.
Wes: Chris and Oren talked about the first season of The Mandalorian many moons ago, and there’s been two seasons since. So, we thought we would catch up, with probably more complaints than anything else, because quite a bit has happened with the show. And there are more shows and spinoff shows of all kinds of things in this ever-expanding, questionable content realm of Star Wars.
Oren: I went back. I don’t usually do this for podcasts that we’ve done in the past, but I felt like I should this time. I went back and looked at what we said, and I noticed we had a few predictions. And it’s interesting to look at which ones came true.
Wes: All right, share them.
Chris: Let’s hear it.
Oren: So first, we predicted that The Mandalorian would become the flagship of the franchise, which it did. It’s not only huge, but it has so far spawned one show, which we don’t like talking about, and another show that will hopefully be better. That one starts this year. That’s the Ahsoka story, which is going to also be like Rebels season five and also the film reboot of the Thrawn series. It’s a lot.
Chris: They’re making it sound doomed, Oren.
Oren: It’ll be great.
Chris: Just back off a little bit.
Oren: What could go wrong?
[laughter]Chris: It doesn’t sound good.
Oren: We predicted that Grogu was going to have problems once his arc of trying to find a teacher or trying to learn to use his powers finished, and boy were we right.
Chris: Absolutely correct.
Oren: For this last one, hey, we’re not infallible. We predicted that Cara Dune would be a cool character with a long history in the franchise.
Chris: Oh, man.
Oren: Oh, no. Oh, no.
Chris: Sweet summer children that we were.
Oren: And I will point out that from a storytelling standpoint, we were definitely correct. They were planning to have her be the star of her own show, but then things happened, which I’ll put in the show notes if you don’t know, and that didn’t occur. Fortunately, I don’t think there was any way we could have predicted that. Those were our Mandalorian season one predictions.
Wes: On the whole, pretty good, you guys.
Chris: I think it also might be worth mentioning the fact that Boba got his own show since then.
Oren: Yeah, he did.
Chris: Since we spent a fair amount of time on our Mandalorian podcast just talking about the fact that Mando was not quite Boba Fett, and how weird that was, and all of our theories for why they just didn’t use Boba Fett, and possibly some of the story constraints that they had for Boba Fett were reasoned, because when we actually got Boba Fett, it was just the worst.
Oren: Actually, one reason that I did not think about at the time, but that may have been a contributing factor, is that they felt like if they were going to use Boba Fett, they had to use the same actor who played Jango Fett in the prequels.
Because they did that! It’s the same guy. And I would not have expected that. I assumed they would just have recast him, but it’s possible that they just didn’t think that actor was right, and they wanted Pedro Pascal, because Pedro Pascal has never met a special orphan he could not escort somewhere.
[laughter]Chris: It’s true. Yeah, that could be it.
So, the Mandalorian is not as good as it was. It’s not terrible like the Book of Boba Fett, but also, I have to say, wasn’t a good sign that the same team who did the Mandalorian also did Book of Boba Fett.
Wes: Right. And we have to talk about Book of Boba Fett, because it has two full episodes dedicated to the Mandalorian story.
Oren: Or here’s an idea. We could just not include the parts where we talk about those episodes, and then just keep going, assuming that everyone already knows what we’re talking about.
Chris: We’ll talk about them in a different podcast. I’ll be like a guest on somebody else’s podcast, and then I’ll talk about that part.
Wes: Way to stay true to canon. There we go.
Oren: I do think that we should mention that, and I know Season 3 is fresh in our minds, but I don’t want to neglect Season 2, because that wasn’t even out when we first talked about the Mandalorian.
Wes: Right, yeah.
Oren: And I think Season 2 is generally probably the strongest.
Wes: It’s good. Especially like, the finale of that is great. I really enjoyed that one.
Chris: Yeah, I loved the Season 2 finale, even though it’s CG. It made me feel like the Force was mystical again.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: Watching the end of Season 2.
Oren: Yeah, I had some trouble with the premise of, we need to find Baby Yoda a Jedi to train them, and apparently no one in this setting knows who Luke Skywalker is.
[laughter]Oren: That was a little weird to me, but whatever. Once I accepted that, I enjoyed that quite a bit. I thought having Luke show up to murder a bunch of Sith battle droids was fun.
I don’t like CGI Luke. He’s like a perfect replication of Mark Hamill. If Mark Hamill couldn’t act, is what that looks like to me. But he was fine. He was very minimal. He didn’t talk much. It’s not like in the Book of Boba Fett, where he’s starting his own cult.
That was also where we met Ahsoka.
Wes: Yeah, she was in Season 2, the first half of the season. Because she got to drop that good line during that pretty awesome duel with the person that had the beskar spear, and the whole like, where is Admiral Thrawn? I thought that was kind of a cool nod to her forthcoming show.
Chris: And Mando got the beskar spear for a while, and I thought that was neat.
Oren: We had a funny little Boba Fett fake out, where it was like, there’s a guy with Mandalorian armor, but he’s not a Mandalorian. It’s like, okay, is that Boba Fett? And it’s like, look, he’s got Boba Fett’s helmet. And it’s like, is that Boba Fett? No, it’s not Boba Fett. He got the armor from some Jawas. Oh, okay.
Chris: Although I do have to remind you that was also the season when Grogu ate some poor woman’s eggs.
Wes: Oh my gosh, yeah.
Oren: Don’t do that, Grogu.
Wes: It’s like, we know that Star Wars likes their cute, weird aliens and their ha-ha funny bits, but this is like, the whole point of that episode was, hey, escort this woman and her offspring to this planet to reunite with her partner. They’re just getting consumed by Baby Yoda.
Oren: Don’t do that. That was not funny.
Chris: That was humor that relied on the audience not empathizing with this woman who was in a kind of bad place and was trying to travel across the galaxy to get back together with her mate so that they could have kids, and it was a real struggle. We had to not empathize with her to find Grogu eating her eggs funny.
Oren: That just seems like a bad concept.
Wes: Yeah, not a great premise.
Oren: I did love how they said M-Count because even Filoni is not ready to use the word Midi-Chlorians.
Wes: Nor should he.
Oren: Yeah. I mean, he clearly loves all aspects of Star Wars canon. He wants all of it, but even he knows that if he says Midi-Chlorians, people will be upset. So now it’s M-Count. What is an M-Count? Who knows, it’s something.
Wes: Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter.
Oren: The Razor Crest exploded, which I was honestly surprised by. You don’t normally see main character ships explode.
Wes: No, that was cool, and then they really dropped the ball replacing that one.
Oren: Yeah, I was like, what ship is he going to get to replace it with? And it’s like, he’s going to get a single-seat fighter? That’s a weird ship for a bounty hunter to have.
Chris: Yeah, it’s cool looking, but it’s not very practical.
Oren: Somehow, he knew he wasn’t going to do any bounty hunting in season three. He foresaw that.
Wes: Kind of funny too, because they blow up his ship, and then he gets another ship that is mostly just, hey, remember the prequel trilogy, I guess? It’s such a downgrade, and granted, I think we all really love his, what’s it called, Oren? The rifle that he has in season one?
Oren: Oh, his disintegration gun.
Wes: Yes, that is amazing. And yes, he loses that, but he gets the beskar spear, and then he gets the Darksaber. So it’s, oh, okay, cool weapon upgrade, despite losing the rifle that could destroy anything. The ship was like, no, you get this tiny thing that I guess goes really fast.
Oren: Yeah, it’s super OP, apparently. This is always a problem that Star Wars has.
Star Wars has an issue where it has its characters fight way too many enemy soldiers. This is the first time I think we’ve seen it really happen in space to this degree, because we haven’t had that many space battles where the protagonist is by themself. But in season three, suddenly, the Mando was fighting like six other ships, and it’s like, that seems like too many. It doesn’t seem like he should be able to beat that many other ships. He’s a bounty hunter. He’s not the Red Baron.
[laughter]Oren: For the record, the Red Baron couldn’t have beat six other planes either.
He would have run away, is what he would have done in that situation.
Wes: But at least he never took his goggles off. This is the way.
Oren: Oh, the important thing is that at the end of season two, Moff Gideon was defeated really thoroughly and so we never saw him again.
Chris: Oh yeah, that guy’s never coming back.
Oren: He’s gone. It would be a really bad decision to bring him back as a villain for season three.
Chris: Wah-wah[sad noise].
Wes: And then to not only bring him back but do a bunch of mysterious buildup and then like right towards the finale, have him and his shadow council and he’s making demands of them and it’s like, he’s a loser. There’s no way he’s going to win.
Chris: Literally he lost.
Wes: And then pulling in the Praetorian guards as well. They’re like, they dress in red and they’re badasses. Except this child Yoda can evade them forever, apparently.
Chris: And now it’s canon that he’s a Sith wannabe.
Wes: There it is.
Chris: He’s literally a Sith wannabe. He acts like it, he looks like it, and it’s canonical.
Oren: It also just dramatically feels like some scenes happened in the wrong order. Because first we have Gideon tracking where Mando is. So normally you would have that scene as a prelude to the bad guy being like, aha, I shepherded you into a trap or something to fight you on my terms. But no, that doesn’t happen. Instead, Din and Grogu end up in a room full of Moff Gideon clones who they immediately destroy because for some reason Gideon has a button for that. Then they go and fight Gideon and Gideon’s like, no, I had this whole clone plan. I was going to do clones.
Chris: How could you destroy all my clones?
Wes: My poor clones. They had the one thing that I never had. The Force. It’s like, this is not a Jedi story. We don’t care.
Oren: Why are we explaining this plan after it’s already failed? What is even happening here? It feels like a D&D dungeon where the players went into the rooms in the wrong order and the GM just couldn’t react quickly enough.
[laughter]Oren: And so players, like, diffuse the boss’s big plan to rule the world before they even meet the boss. I could buy that in a D&D game. Things happen. It’s really weird that it happened in a scripted television show.
Chris: Maybe one of those clones will survive and then next season we’ve got Moff Gideon clone.
Wes: Oh my God. Don’t. No. Chris.
Chris: But he’ll be an actual Sith. Won’t that make him great?
Wes: There it is. He’s probably just coming back anyway. Something about his stupid beskar Sith suit is going to somehow keep him alive.
Chris: I’m trying to think of why do that with the clones. Why bring in all of those clones only to destroy him? The only thing I can think of is that somehow we’re going to save one.
Wes: And so are we to assume that his cloning projects with Dr. Pershing in the earlier seasons, was that self-serving for him the whole time? Or were those meant to be Palpatine clones?
Oren: I honestly don’t know.
Chris: Why not both?
Wes: I guess why not both. And I guess, yeah, I did bring up Pershing.
Chris: Oh yeah, we’ve got the Andor episode in Mandalorian. Not only are there Mandalorian episodes in Book of Boba Fett, but there is an episode- it’s not actually Andor because it doesn’t have any of the Andor characters, but it’s a very Andor episode where we just hang out with other characters to maybe establish a minor villain for next season, I guess?
Wes: Not only that, but the runtime on that was twice as long as the preceding episode.
Chris: Why are we doing this? Why are we doing it? Just like the clones, why are they here? What do we want with them?
Oren: It was so weird because it was like, hey, I bet you all want to know what happened to Dr. Pershing. I’m like, who?
Chris: Oh yeah, that guy. The glasses guy who liked Baby Yoda but was also not willing to stand up for him. I remember him, I guess.
Oren: Doesn’t help that this episode is part of the current trend in shitty-ifying the Republic. Not only is it super ineffective, and it can send some bored X-Wing cops to harass Din once in a while, but it can’t do anything. And also, it has an amnesty program.
Chris: They don’t let people use their names, they go by numbers. It’s like, what?
Oren: They don’t even establish if the people in this program committed actual crimes.
Chris: Or they just happened to work for the Empire.
Oren: Yeah, it’s like most people were probably in the Imperial military at some point, guys. That’s how giant militaries work.
Ugh, that was so weird and I hated it.
I like the bad guy in that episode. She’s cool. I hope we see her again. That actor was having fun. She can be the villain of season four for all I care.
Chris: I’m wondering if that’s the minor villain that entire episode was meant to set up. I think we probably could have set her up in less time. There had to be a better way. There had to be a better way.
Wes: The whole Pershing story, too, in that sets up even more questions like about their saying, hey, the Republic is actually not that great. But also showing him give this heartfelt speech about why he does what he does to try to like clone organs and save lives and stuff. And to think that no one wants to use any of that technology.
Oren: No, they hate it.
Wes: What? He’s literally talking about saving lives by cloning hearts and other kinds of organs and practicing medicine and everybody’s like, haha, go enjoy your amnesty program, you Imperial loser.
Oren: You absolute weirdo. Yeah, no, that was so weird.
Also, if you step out of line – because I guess your counseling session with the question repeater droid wasn’t enough – if you step out of line, they put you in the brain frying machine.
Wes: Oren, it’s not a mind flayer. It’s not a mind flayer. Don’t worry about it.
Oren: Like best case scenario, it rewrites your brain against your will. Worst case scenario, it kills you.
Wes: I didn’t like that episode, but I did really like that they had a Mon Calamari telling him that thing was OK.
[laughter]Wes: That was a hilarious decision. I mean, that joke was just peak. I lost it. I saw this nod to Admiral Ackbar. It’s a trap. And this Calamari saying, I actually find it quite soothing.
Oren: That was pretty funny. That was the best part of the whole episode. It’s still a terrible episode.
Wes: The whole thing with the Republic being like, we don’t have the resources to protect the outer systems. And it’s like, here, we have an entire planet full of star destroyers that we’re sending to the scrapyard. Maybe use some of those just a thought. I don’t know. I’m just spit-balling here.
Wes: Maybe that’s where the First Order got all their ships. They’re like, oh my God, can you guys believe they’re not using these things?
Oren: Part of this does seem like it’s a weird attempt to retroactively set up the First Order. And I just wish they wouldn’t do that. I just wish they wouldn’t bother.
Chris: Can we just forget that? Can we just forget that happened, please? That’s all we want.
Oren: Nothing about the First Order makes any sense and attempts to explain it are just going to make less sense.
Chris: I just want a Star Wars story that lets me forget about all the bad parts of Star Wars.
Wes: Is that so much to ask?
Chris: Just leave it alone. Let’s just go to a new planet and just not interact with the rest of it for a while. Make it a distant memory first, please. But speaking of bad things, I think we have to talk about droid oppression.
Oren: Oh boy.
Chris: Sorry to rain on your parade here.
Wes: I like how they were like, hey, you’re going to love this episode because Jack Black and Lizzo. I’m sorry, are we excusing all this racism because these celebrities are guest starring?
Chris: I did like Jack Black and Lizzo, that specific part, but woo, uncomfortable episode.
Oren: I love how back in the day they gave us Solo, where it was like, there’s a droid who wants to be free. Isn’t that hilarious? And I’m like, all right, this is surely the worst Star Wars is ever going to get with its droids. And then they got this episode, and it was like, Din Djarin, you shouldn’t be racist against droids because they love being servants. They love it so much.
Wes: They feel so bad for our frail little meat bodies. They just want to help us.
Oren: If we could have given them, like, a sense of superiority about it, that would actually have made it a little better. Instead, it was just like, yes, we love having your boot on us, humans. Please press harder. The worst.
Chris: Having Mando hate droids was just always a bad idea for this show because in this context, droids are slaves. They’re definitely an oppressed group. I mean, just to be clear, at Mythcreants we do talk about how you can use mindless machines if you want enemies to mow down or what have you.
But in the Star Wars setting, droids are definitely meant to come off as people. We’re supposed to get attached to them, care about them. And so that’s why it’s really unacceptable in this setting that they’re property.
And having Mando hate on them just, oof, in season three, even before we get to the Lizzo Jack Black episode, we have this whole scene where he buys this droid who doesn’t really want to endanger its life doing what he wants it to do. And so then he has to order it to here. It’s too dangerous for me to go in those caverns. So I want you to do it as my canary in the coal mine. Ugh, this is deeply uncomfortable.
Oren: So out of character for Din too. Since when has Din ever been like, I don’t know guys, that might be dangerous. I think I’m going to stay in the ship.
Wes: Yeah, exactly.
Oren: Are we talking about the same Din Djarin? If anything has been established about him until this point, I would have expected his droid racism to manifest as, no, I’m not putting an astromech in my ship, I don’t trust it. As opposed to, I’m going to buy an astromech and then bully it into taking some atmospheric readings for me. Do you trust that those readings are accurate, Mando? Because you don’t seem to trust droids any other time.
Chris: And then there’s also the fact that Baby Yoda is walking around in the corpse of IG-11.
Oren: Yeah, but that did generate a lot of memes. So can we really say it was bad?
Chris: Don’t get me wrong, I think giving Baby Yoda a robot suit was a great idea. It makes Grogu a little more useful. And also, then we can give him the yes-no without getting him on the speaking path. Because we don’t really want him to speak still, because he’s supposed to be a cute little baby.
Wes: The yes-no was, that was brilliant.
Chris: It was priceless. Yeah, it was really very toddlerish. It was perfect.
But why did we choose a character that died for that? And so much time was spent in season 3 with, no, I want to rebuild this droid who’s my friend. And they make it very clear to Mando that, okay, but the memory chip is completely fried, so it just would not be the same person. It’s, no, still want to rebuild it. It’s like, feels like desecrating some poor robot corpse at this point.
Oren: Real weird if you realize that IG-88 was basically a person who saved Din’s life several times. Speaking of droids and going to Mandalore, let’s talk about Bo-Katan, shall we?
Wes: Ah, yes.
Oren: How do we feel about Bo-Katan? What are our thoughts on Bo-Katan?
Wes: We knew she would show up after season 2’s entry and failing to get apparently the thing that she had to have to unite the Mandalorian people.
Oren: Yeah, but they’re real big on proper blade custody transfers.
Wes: Exactly.
Oren: Which I always thought was weird, because those Mandalorians are always making fun of the Death Watch for being too committed to their traditions.
Wes: Gosh, I’m so glad you said that.
Oren: Don’t get me wrong, they could be hypocrites. I’m open to the possibility that they actually have this tradition that they really care about and not others, but I just would have liked someone to point it out, someone on the Death Watch to be like, okay, if we’re the ones who care about tradition so much, why does it matter how she got the Darksaber? And then they’d get all defensive, and, well, because that’s different. Shut up.
Wes: I was here for Bo-Katan being the Mandalorian of that season. I’m fine with that. I think Katie Sackhoff does a great job in that role, and I would have rather just followed her from the start. Din and Grogu didn’t do anything really that interesting.
Chris: I like her as a character. I would have preferred if she had been useful to the plot in that she, okay, she’s in charge, and then what we do is have Mando go on missions for her, and the show focuses on the missions that he’s doing for her.
She’s a leader that we can believe in so that we want him to succeed on his missions, which are helping her, but the focus is still on Mando.
I liked her, but I would have preferred to keep her main character, and if we wanted to do her as a main character of a show, to just give her her own show.
Oren: We are missing one very important fact that makes Bo-Katan important for this season, which is that Katie Sackhoff could actually be in the studio to film, and Pedro Pascal could not.
Wes: Yeah, that probably explains a lot.
Oren: There’s a reason he doesn’t take off his helmet this season, or at least not in a way that we can see his face.
Wes: I remember somebody speculating too, as episodes were being released, that Dave Filoni voiced Paz—wait, what’s his name?—the bulky Mandalorian with the massive gun.
Oren: Oh, I just called him the Heavy.
Wes: The Heavy, I like that. So as the episodes for this season were coming out, there was speculation that the character Paz Vizsla, who, aka the Heavy, the Mandalorian that never gets tired carrying around the biggest gun on the planet. But I guess Jon Favreau had voiced him in the previous seasons, but then that changed to a different actor, so it was like, oh, he’ll probably take his helmet off. They have a different actor, because Favreau’s not going to be behind the mask, probably.
That and a few other things, like knowing that Pedro Pascal was not available, really, it felt like they were just messing with us the whole time.
I think Filoni and Favreau both came out and were like, maybe isn’t the Mandalorian anymore? Maybe there’s others that are Mandalorian. No, we don’t care about that. Be quiet. And then the penultimate episode, The Spies, they really wanted us to believe that the Armorer was a spy for Moff Gideon. And I’m glad she wasn’t.
Oren: I have to admit, I completely missed that part. I do remember now that there’s, oh no, we found a shard of beskar in Moff Gideon’s shuttle that he escaped from. I guess I completely blanked on the possibility they might be making us think that there was a spy among the Mandalorians. Fascinating.
Wes: I think this is where they are being too clever and drawing surprise, drawing on things that are not in the show, but that would be familiar to people that have watched all the other shows. And there’s another Mandalorian character that was team Death Watch, team Darth Maul, who wore a similar colored outfit and was not on team Satine and Bo-Katan. Those creepy long shots of the Armorer suddenly saying, oh, these wounded can’t carry on. Oh, I will take them back to the main ships. Oh, you’re going to go get a secret ambush, but here I go taking these wounded back to the ship. They want to set it up for betrayal. Oh, and she has horns on her helmet, just like Moff Gideon.
So, I don’t like the idea that they were just messing with us because they could. But also, I’m glad that the Armorer was not a spy because I like the Armorer as a really weird character, but a good character. I liked it. Aside from – we have problems with Mandalorian strength and ineptitude. I like her consistent presence throughout the season. And I like how that moment when she asked Bo-Katan if she went in the water and has taken her helmet off since and Bo-Katan’s yes and no. And she’s like, great, you’re Mandalorian, hang out with us. We are friends now. And I was like, oh, okay. Fun moment.
Chris: I don’t know what you’re talking about. The Mandalorians are just very competent. Anybody hang out on a planet where large birds come to eat your children regularly.
Wes: And they have no ships. They have no ships. Where are their ships?
Oren: Where did all these Mandalorians even come from? Because they were all dead last season.
Wes: That’s true.
Oren: That was one of the problems with season two is it killed all the Mandalorians except for the Armorer who somehow survived. Or maybe that happened in season one. I forget. But they were all dead. And now suddenly there are a bunch more and they live on pterodactyl planet and Pterodactyls just come by and grab their kids sometimes. And they don’t even have a guy on lookout.
Wes: It just happens and it always gets away, Oren.
Oren: They also are really confident about how long it will take this pterodactyl to eat the kid. They are really sure they know how long that’ll take.
Chris: Oh, drat. It took one of our kids. I suppose we should do something about it sometime. Oh, Bo-Katan! That’s nice of you to volunteer. We were gonna get around to it eventually.
This is what happens when we really need Bo-Katan to show that she’s useful and the only way we know how to do that is by making everybody else complete incomps.
Oren: They suddenly just forgot how to do anything.
Wes: Which is terrible because the episode where the pirates attack Nevarro, the ground action…
Chris: Oh, that was fantastic.
Wes: Where they’re being like SWAT team Boba Fett.
Oren: Yeah!
Wes: Heck yes! I’m here for this! This is great!
Oren: That was so well choreographed. That whole ground battle was great.
Chris: Definitely an improvement because, again, listen to our podcast episode on season one and we were talking about how bad all the gun battles were. They really cleaned up and improved that since then.
Oren: I’ve even talked about this before is that if you want to make gun battles fun, you have to emphasize movement. People standing behind something and popping up to shoot and then popping back down. That’s not exciting. It will never be exciting. So if you want an advanced technology fight to be exciting, you have to show the characters moving around and flanking each other and using different kinds of weapons. And they did that and it was real fun.
Chris: Best part of season three in my opinion.
Oren: And then at the end, Mando got a nice little house as a reward for all of his work. Because I guess he’s playing a Bethesda video game now.
Wes: He’s got his homestead.
Oren: All right. That is, I think, as much as we have time for. We’re gonna have to end this season of the Mandalorian podcast episodes. We don’t know if there will be more, but if there are, we’ll come back and revisit this in two years.
Chris: If you would like us to remove our helmets, you can support us on patreon.com. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants. That definitely makes sense.
Oren: Yeah, that’s a very good patron level. We’ll add that in there.
And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First there’s the popular writing software Plottr, which you can learn more about at plottr.com. Then there’s Callie MacLeod. Next we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
[closing song]Chris: This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.
One story is good, so wouldn’t two stories be better? And what if you put one story inside the story you already have? That way, your fans don’t have to put down the book if they want to read something else for a while. That’s right, we’re talking about stories within stories: how they work, what their problems are, and when you should use one. Surprising no one, we spend a lot of time talking about authors who’ve gone overboard.
Show Notes How to Tell a Story Within a Story * The Fisherman * Ten Thousand Doors of January * The Problem With Multiple Viewpoints * The Once & Future Witches * The Neverending Story * Interview With the Vampire * Balin’s Journal * The Name of the Wind * Middlegame * The Magicians TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Elizabeth.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.
[opening theme]Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Oren, with me today is…
Chris: Chris.
Oren: And?
Wes: Wes.
Oren: Okay, so for this episode, we’re actually going to record this one for a little while, and then talk about a different podcast that we recorded a while back. Maybe just record that one for a bit. We’ll just do my old Star Trek podcast, as if this was an old Star Trek episode. And then we’ll just come back to the Mythcreant episode and finish it out. Does that sound good? That sounds fun, right?
Chris: Yeah, absolutely.
Wes: We gotta fill up this time slot somehow.
Chris: Look, it’s important that everybody know the backstory of your podcasting career. So we gotta start talking about your previous podcast and then play some of it for a while. It’s just very important information.
Oren: I think we’re gonna have to go like full immersion and do the original two hour live broadcast setup that we had… for some reason. I still don’t know why. [laughter]
Wes: For the challenge, no doubt.
Chris: And let’s face it, this podcast would be so much deeper with a framing device.
Oren: [deep breath] Oh boy. Yeah, I wanted to talk about stories within stories, or nested stories as they’re sometimes called. And the reason is that I read a book that had one recently and it was bad and I’m upset. [laughter] So now I’m gonna make it everyone else’s problem.
Wes: Oh, and so what book was it?
Oren: Okay, the book was The Fisherman. It’s a novel that’s supposedly cosmic horror. I have some issues with that label. It’s got weird water stuff, but I don’t think that’s enough to call something cosmic horror. The problem with this one is, so it starts off with this very, very long backstory explanation that explains how these two guys lost their families. That takes a while. And then they go fishing together for a while. And then finally, one of them is, hey, we should go fish in this real weird, mysterious creek that I won’t tell you how I learned where it was. All right, I’m getting into it.
Chris: I like how this sequence, every time you’re like, okay, once we just get this part done, then I’m sure the story will begin. [laughter] Sure, okay, we need their dramatic backstory. Okay, that makes sense. Okay, maybe the story will start. Okay, well, they’re going fishing, but now they’re going to the creepy fishing hole. So I’m sure the story will start there.
Oren: Yeah, you would think the story was about to start, but then they stop at a diner and the cook there tells them the backstory of this creek for half of the book. Like, half of the book is just the backstory of why this creek is spooky.
Wes: Was it actually spooky?
Oren: No. [laughter]
Wes: Did it ever have a chance, Oren?
Oren: The parts in the present, when we’re not spending way too much time on backstory, are actually spooky. Most of the time. I’d give it about a 90% spookiness rating.
Chris: That’s pretty good.
Oren: Yeah, that’s pretty good. There was one really weird sequence where I think it’s supposed to be spooky, but it’s just gross. But other than that one part, it’s very spooky and weird. The interior backstory is the opposite.
It’s incredibly dry, and it tells the story of how a Hungarian wizard came to this area of New York and set up shop. And then a while later, a German wizard came and also was there, and they didn’t like each other, and they had a beef, and the German wizard won. And then the Hungarian wizard got banished to another dimension for a while, and he’s still around, and that’s why the stream’s creepy. If it sounds weird and dry, it is. This takes up half of the book, and it just does all of these things that I’m like, why is it doing this?
First of all, it has too many degrees of separation. So the protagonist is hearing this from a cook who heard it from a minister who heard it from an old lady who heard it from her husband who heard part of the story from the father.
Chris: Oren, every time you add an additional person, it just gets deeper.
Oren: Yes, and so I got really confused who the ‘I’ is, because this is all first-person narration, and I’m just like, who is ‘I’? Someone is ‘I.’ Who is talking?
Chris: One of those people in the chain is ‘I,’ but it’s like a shell game, or passing it back and forth.
Oren: And it’s barely related to the main story. It does technically explain why this creak is spooky. Other than that, it does foreshadow that this Hungarian guy likes to offer men their dead wives if he’ll help them. That’s a thing he does as an eldritch bargain, which he’s gonna do once we finally get back to the main story, but I don’t think we needed that spelled out for us. It was actually pretty creepy and well-established already. Like, I don’t think I needed that to be spoon-fed to me. That’s a term that people sometimes like to use for stories that over-explain things.
So this thing has several problems. One, it’s just not very good. If you tried to read this as its own story, you’d be like, what is this? It’s super dry. There’s no suspense. There’s no investment in any real character because we keep hopping around and we get very little characterization from anybody. So it’s just bad.
Chris: That reminds me, I just have to say, of Ten Thousand Doors of January, where we have this interior story that the protagonist continually reads, and we have to continually read it with her, but it’s one big exposition dump. It does feel, many times when this storyteller changes up the story, they just don’t try the second time around, including stories within stories, right? You didn’t try to make that inner story as engaging as your outer story.
Oren: And it’s also just weird because it’s just, as far as backstory goes, it is so unnecessary. I don’t need to know that a while back, the spooky Hungarian wizard had a beef with a different wizard. I don’t need to know that. All I need to know is that he’s spooky and weird, and that he’s trying to hook the great leviathan who lives in the deep beyond the world. I would really like to know what’s supposed to happen when he does that. The book never establishes that. But regardless, that’s all I need to know. And I need to know that he is offering these two grieving men their wives back if they will help him. That’s the actual premise of the story. I don’t need to know about this German wizard.
Wes: So the German wizard is the titular fisherman.
Oren: The Hungarian is actually the fisherman.
Chris: Because he’s trying to catch this little leviathan.
Oren: Yeah, because he’s trying to catch the leviathan. That part I actually like. The fishing motif is very cool, which explains why the backstory is so bad, because there’s no fishing motifs in it. It’s just a German wizard. [laughter] And the Hungarian wizard is doing some vaguely bad stuff, and he like turns one of the dead wives in the work camp nearby into a zombie. And the German wizard is like, I guess he should probably not do that. I’ll go mess him up. And then they have a little wizard fight. This is so counter to cosmic horror. Everything is all out in the open. Everything is very dry and matter of fact. That part is not, I don’t think, inherently the fault of it being a story within the story. I think that was just bad writing choices. But you’re not wrong that authors sometimes completely change their style when telling their inner story, and that can be a problem.
Chris: Honestly, it’s similar to POVs, which is one of my grievances against multiple POVs, is that usually the first POV in the book, the storyteller tries really hard to optimize that and make that engaging. And then they just take you for granted when they introduce the second POV. And it’s like, why would I care about this? Which is one of the things that – there’s other problems with multiple POVs. Obviously, we’ve talked about that a lot, but that’s one of the things that makes it worse.
Oren: The other thing that’s hilarious about this is these people, the two guys who are being told this inner story, they don’t know anything about magic at this point. All we know is that there’s a creek that has some kind of mysterious deaths associated with it, and the protagonist knows that his friend is being shady about why he wants to go there. That’s all we know at this point. And so they just go, and this cook just tells them a five-hour story about a German wizard. It’s supposed to be serious and scary, but it is hilarious. Try to imagine how that scene would possibly go.
Wes: Do they just lap it up too?
Oren: Later, they’re like, eh, that can’t have been real. But then they’re all real creeped out by it, because. And the story, the book even implies that they’re supernaturally creeped out by it, because I think later the author realized that he said it took an hour to tell the story, but the actual story takes about four hours to read. That doesn’t make any sense. So he has a little afterwards where the protagonist is like, later on, after all this happened, I was possessed by the spirit of exposition dumps, and I learned all this other stuff, which I have since added to the original story.
Wes: Of course.
Oren: What does that have to do with anything? What even was that?
Wes: It’s like the author got side-railed, went that way, wrote through all of that, then realized what he wanted to actually write about, returned to that, and was like, there’s no way I’m cutting this.
Oren: It does feel like backstory that got out of hand.
Chris: The other thing is that, and I think this is just an impulse to make your story compelling, that when writers put in these stories within the stories, then they’ll have their characters react to the story, right? Because they just heard it. But they always have them be so impressed, and it just comes off like bragging. It’s oh, wow, that dry story about a wizard, little wizard duel, is so creepy, and I’m so in awe. It’s changed me.
Wes: And you’re like, I just read that, and it’s terrible. [laughter]
Oren: I had to read that, man. Don’t tell me that was good. [laughter]
Chris: Which is one of the problems with stories within the stories, is that I think one of the reasons they’re attractive is we want to talk about storytelling because we’re storytellers. And so if we put in stories, then we can talk about stories. But in the majority of cases, this kind of meta-commentary is just very obnoxious. We don’t really want to listen to storytellers wax poetic about storytelling. It’s not very fun. Ten Thousand Doors of January did something similar. Oh, this book, it’s so riveting. It’s just an exposition dump. Or Middlegame.
Wes: But it’s about her father.
Oren: And if you don’t believe in the love story of Ten Thousand Doors, you’re a dirty imperialist.
Wes: I read her, I don’t know if it was immediately her next book, but The Once and Future Witches, as far as I’m aware, it’s what she published after Ten Thousand Doors of January, and still includes stories in stories, but in an effort to draw her main story’s connection, which is basically three sisters who are witches, spoilers – [laughter] if you didn’t get that from the title – to the larger folklore of witches. So periodically throughout this book, there’s just literally a fairy tale. I skipped most of them. I turned the page, oh, this is a fairy tale. Okay, back to the story. I get what you’re doing, but it’s exactly what Chris said. It comes off as pretentious. And sure, there might be enjoyment there, but I want to see what’s going on with these sister witches. I don’t need to read a rehashing of Hansel and Gretel to explain what’s going on with this person.
Oren: Please tell me about the sister witches. That actually sounds interesting.
Wes: Yeah, I did like that a bit. So it opens up with, it’s set in New Salem, and it’s meant to be a suffragette and witches story. So set in New Salem, the youngest sister basically arrives there. She’s got her gnarled staff and she’s 17 and just left home under some odd circumstances because she was the last one there with her dad. And basically finds her sisters and their meeting has this weird magical energy about it. And they accidentally summon the Tower of Avalon for a moment. But then, they get involved in some local politics with a suffragette group, but they’re not willing to take steps. And the young witch is, we have power. Why would we not use it? It follows that trajectory of them forming their own group and then trying to collect more knowledge because the oldest sister is the town librarian and they piece things together.
Anyway, long story short, big spoilers. The bad guy was one of the first witches with the original three. And so it’s modeled after the Crone, the Mother, and the Maiden. So the three, the once witches and the future witches. He is Hansel from the stories who also acquired witch power, but he didn’t stay in the woods with the witch. He learned from somebody that she was bad. And so he killed her, but his sister fled into the woods, becoming the first Maiden. And he just basically used dark magic to keep his body alive and periodically burn witches.
I liked actually quite a bit of it. I really liked how they explained why did they burn witches? And she explained it as originally they burned the witches’ books because that’s where they kept their knowledge. And then they figured if we’re going to kill them anyway, we might as well throw them on there too. But it was more like we’re destroying your knowledge so you can stop this. Stop spreading this kind of stuff, these dangerous thoughts and things like that. In sum, it’s a good book. You could cut out two thirds of it. And that would be great. Because it’s 550 pages, something silly like that. And the whole story could be told in easily 250. That’s my experience.
Chris: It’s a good book, except for two thirds of it.
Wes: Yes. It’s like when you retell it and you’re like, okay, the core of this is good, but I did just skip a bunch of it. I’m liking these parts, skip, skip, and just chugging along because I don’t care about these parts.
Oren: I can see why the author felt the need to put in fairy tales if her bad guy is going to be Hansel, but I promise there was a better way to get that reveal.
Chris: Or just put in one fairy tale. Just put in the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale. You don’t need any of the other ones. The trick to doing a story within a story is that you have to make it matter or else it’s just skippable. And that means that it coming into play somehow changes the outcome of the story. And there’s multiple ways we could do that. Obviously, it can reveal information about the history, and usually if you’re doing that, the character again is also reading, telling the story, listening to it, what have you. They learn something important that’s based on history. They use that information somehow. Method one.
Another method is just to have it impact the character in a way that makes sense. So this one is a little harder. I think it could risk once again getting into the kind of cheesy pretentiousness of having your character be like, oh my gosh, that story is amazing. But I think what you want to do is look at it at a personal level instead of just being like, this is the most incredible story that has ever been written. Just be like, hey, this, I empathize with this character, right? Because it feels similar to my own life. And it got me thinking, and I realized because of this character’s journey that maybe this is what I want to do for myself. So keep it personal instead of just talking about how amazing the story is.
Wes: I like that advice because it seems like sometimes these stories and stories aren’t written for the story or the characters, but the readers. And that’s the wrong approach for sure.
Chris: And then the other one is a little bit more unusual, which is breaking the fourth wall, which you have in The Neverending Story, which I might have to just read that book sometime since I’ve only seen the movie. But that one is just very unusual in that Sebastian, the main character, starts reading a story and then we dive into the story. But then as it goes on, it starts to link him and the story together. So the world starts to, he starts coming into the story world slowly.
Oren: You have a number of stories that use the framing device as a way to insert commentary onto the inner story or the main story, depending on how big your framing device is. The Neverending Story is hard to judge because it’s just silly in a lot of ways and not very well put together. So it’s hard for me to tell how well that strategy would work if it was better presented.
The recent AMC Interview with the Vampire adaptation does something that’s not exactly the same because it’s not a person being literally pulled into a book, but it’s similar in that the reporter is hearing the story from Louis. Louis is clearly lying at some parts and the reporter either calls him on his bullshit or investigates to be like, what’s Louis hiding here? These parts of the story don’t make sense. And that’s really cool. It’s one of the only times I’ve ever seen that work.
Chris: Yeah, it’s probably the only time I’ve ever seen using this for commentary on the inner story seems like it has paid off, especially since that allows the show to clarify that what people are seeing is domestic abuse, which people are bad at recognizing normally.
Oren: It’s helpful that they’re basically doing what you said, Chris, is that they are using this to reveal things about the character and rather than having the reporter be like, wow, Louis, that was the best story I’ve ever heard, or the scariest story I’ve ever heard.
Chris: Which is what the original Interview with the Vampire does. The boy.
Oren: My favorite thing about the new Interview with the Vampire is that the reporter guy is like, yeah, and so when I was like a young kid and heard your story for the first time, I was all like googly eyed and over impressed, but I’m not like that now. I’m snarky and jaded, so you’re gonna have a tougher audience. And it was so great. I loved it so much.
Chris: Looked at his old work, because this is a different interview. It’s like, thank you. No, it is not an interview. I really appreciate that. [laughter]
Oren: That adaptation is so good. Hey, what if we took everything great about the book and made it better, and either cut or subverted all of the bad stuff? The only way it could be better is if they included Lestat’s dad.
Chris: No, we don’t need Lestat’s dad [she laughs].
Oren: Chris, no adaptation has been brave enough to include Lestat’s dad. I won’t stand for it.
Chris: No, that was a good move on their part. But similarly, just going back to The Neverending Story for a second. I do think that the breaking the fourth wall makes sense to me, because it sounds a little cheesy, but they still make it clear, at least in the movie, that the message they’re going for is that imagination is good, and resist calls to give up your wild imagination to be more grounded. And it feels a little fanciful. It’s just like, hey, kids, the message of this story is you should go play with toys and have fun. Or maybe the kids need to read more books, right? Which is the other end is, hey, children, brush your teeth. [laughter] But nonetheless, it has a message that is about the importance of the imagination or of story worlds and books. And so then having a story where Sebastian has to participate in the story he is reading in order to save the story world just fits with that, and I think makes it so that it adds something as opposed to it just having commentary that isn’t useful or doesn’t… You want all parts of a story to be stronger together. And I feel like it fits that criteria. Even if that if you watch the movie, yes, it is a very silly movie. [she laughs]
Oren: One thing that I will advise, and I talk about this in my post from a few years ago on stories within stories, is that if you are planning to put like an entire or at least most of a story inside your book or whatever it is, practice your microfiction. Because that’s what you’re doing, right? Because what you should be doing is it should be short and sweet. I’m just gonna say, don’t do what The Fisherman did. It’s not a good idea. That’s too long. So you’re gonna want it to be much shorter.
And unfortunately, the example I use in that article is from a franchise I don’t want to give any more airtime to. So instead, I’ll use Bolin’s journals, the one that they find in the minds of Moria. And they don’t read us the whole journal, but they read us a section of it. And it’s real creepy. And it ends with we cannot get out, which is [shudders].
Wes: Very good.
Oren: Gives me shivers constantly. And so that inner story is used for a few things. One, it is used to fill in what happened, which is actually really important. And in the movie, one of the things that’s very confusing is that Moria apparently is super ancient, has been abandoned for a long time. But also there have been dwarves here recently. And it’s hard to tell what’s going on. But in the book, it’s clear that the dwarves are a recent expedition to Moria, which is an ancient, long-abandoned dwarf kingdom. So it gives us some exposition on that. And then it also sets the mood and builds tension as it describes what happened to them and how they all died and how they didn’t make it out and all of that.
Chris: And it’s very relevant for the characters, because if this prior party that came in here died, that means very bad things for them.
Oren: Yeah. So it both gives information that the reader needs, and it is really good at establishing the mood and building the tension of the threat the protagonists are about to face. And it does all that in a very short amount of time. Because if it had been much longer, any tension it had would have worn off because it would have been like, wow, we apparently have time to read this entire thing.
As opposed to something like the start at The Name of the Wind, which has a framing device. Before we even get to the framing device, we have some randos in a pub telling a story. And it’s short. I’ll give it that. I’ll say that much for it. But it’s otherwise just useless, because it’s just a story about this invincible superhero who nothing bad can happen to.
Chris: And he’s Kvothe, right?
Oren: I don’t know if he’s Kvothe or not, honestly. Kvothe is also like that.
Chris: I don’t know that he’s Kvothe, but that is the thing that struck me about it. Because Kvothe is supposedly really famous elsewhere, hence why he’s changed his name. Slightly. Changed his name slightly. Not enough that would actually disguise him. Just enough to pretend he’s disguised.
Oren: Especially since his hair is true red. Not like…
Chris: Red red!
Oren: Yeah, not like fake red people’s hair. No, like real red. You’d think that would make him pretty easy to find. But I think – it’s been a little while since I’ve read this – but I’m pretty sure that story they tell at the beginning predates Kvothe. I think he hears part of it when he’s in his childhood flashback. But I could be wrong. But even if that is Kvothe, it’s just… All it would do… It would be even worse, right? If that was actually Kvothe, and those were things he’s actually supposed to be able to do. The only way that would work is if we told the story about how great Kvothe was, and then the real Kvothe narrated to us about how I actually can’t do any of those things. People just expect that from me. And that might have had some value. But as it is, it’s just worthless. All it does is foreshadow the Chandrians, which is just not worth that much time and energy spent on this.
Chris: Yeah, it’s not an exciting story. It’s not tense. Really. I felt like it did more to establish the magic system, which is maybe what it was for, but I don’t think it had any particular purpose.
Oren: Right, especially since the magic… The part of the magic system that it establishes is the boring part. There’s two halves of the magic system in Name of the Wind. And there’s the actual, if not rational, at least robust sympathetic magic system that you have to think about, and it has trade-offs, and you have to figure out how to use it. And then there’s the true name system, which is if you know something’s name, you can make it do whatever you want.
Chris: I understand why people like the true name system, because they seem mystical, then it’s, oh, how do I get something’s name? But they don’t work out very well. Because then you just go around collecting names, and it just becomes uninteresting after that.
Oren: And look, maybe you can do something interesting with actually finding the name, but once you have it, it’s like, all right, now I got this name, and I can basically do whatever I want. I would advise maybe have something a little more interesting happen once you get the name.
Chris: Probably be one part of a bigger system that has other interesting things in it, perhaps.
Oren: Yeah. And then the other method that I talked about in that article is referencing sections of a longer story. And here, you’re not going to put the whole thing.
Chris: This is the Middlegame strategy, just to curse it.
Oren: Yeah, it’s Middlegame, but also The Magicians, which is not a book I love, but did use this aspect of it fairly well. Because in The Magicians, the inner story is basically Narnia. It’s called Fillory, but it’s Narnia. And The Magicians, although it is pretending to be grimdark wizard school, it’s actually grimdark Narnia. So having the protagonists already be familiar with the fake Narnia story is helpful, because it creates some beautiful dreams they have that the story can then rip to shreds, because that’s what the story is about. And I’m not saying that’s what you should write your story about. I’m just saying that if you want to, this is an effective way to do it.
And they talk about the story, and it becomes clear how it’s important. At first, it’s just like an offhand reference, right? They don’t belabor the point early. They just mention that it’s one of many fantasy books that the protagonist likes. And it comes up more later, once they realize that Fillory is a real place they can go to. And then it sets up the expectations of, oh, it’ll be great, and there will be fauns there, and we’ll be kings. Then they actually go there, [grimdark voice] and everything’s horrible, and the Aslan equivalent ate Lucy’s head. [normal voice] I see what you did there.
Chris: I feel like one of the issues with Middlegame is that it felt like all of the pieces of the bigger story were meant to be symbolic in some way. And it just came off as too much, right? Like, we’re trying to create a story that is supposed to be from a best-selling series that one of the characters writes. So we’re already putting it on a pedestal by talking about how amazingly popular it is. And then we take little pieces, and they’re supposed to be both from a really compelling story, and supposed to have some deeper encoded symbolism in them. And it only works to the extent that it does, because it’s like when you make up a fantasy chess game, and it’s not really chess. But you’re like, oh, this is a game where all the moves perfectly correspond to the political intrigue in the story. That’s never going to work. You can’t really do that. But you can pretend if you just don’t say what the rules of the game are.
Wes: Yup.
Chris: Then we can pretend it’s totally analogous. Same with Middlegame’s excerpts. We have these weird excerpts with weird language in them. And no, this is totally evocative of such and such, we swear.
Oren: Yeah, I guess maybe. The weirdest thing about Middlegame is that technically the characters in the book have all read the inner story because it’s a novel that exists in the setting, but they almost never talk about it. So it’s hard for me to tell how it’s supposed to apply to different situations. I just know that each chapter starts with a quote from this book, which took me forever to figure out it was an in-universe book. I thought these were just a completely different set of characters off somewhere else for a while. Which – that book exists. Maguire just went and wrote that as its own story. So I guess at some point it might be funny to go and see if the snippets from Middlegame actually match what’s in the full version that Maguire wrote.
Chris: I would be surprised if somebody’s reading these books that were written after Middlegame and just be like, okay, that’s cool. Nice text here… huh, we have this weird section where everything just doesn’t fit right and feels really forced. I wonder what that’s about.
Oren: Yeah, it’s like dialogue that was written for the trailer. [laughter]
Chris: Yeah, dialogue written for the trailer. Huh, that’s weird.
Oren: It’s like, why did they say that? I don’t know, but it seems like it would sound cool separated from the rest of the story and just set on its own. You’ll be watching an episode of Star Trek and they’ll be doing normal Star Trek dialogue and then suddenly one of the characters will turn to the camera and be like, and that is why we must continue our exploration at all costs. What? What are you talking about, Captain? But that was a line he had to say because it was in the trailer and it looked cool in the trailer. [laughter] All right, now I think our story within a story has come to an end, as is our story outside of a story, because the podcast is over.
Chris: If you enjoy this podcast episode within a podcast episode, please support us on Patreon. You can go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s the popular writing software Plottr, which you can learn more about at plottr.com. Then there’s Callie MacLeod. Next, we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
[closing theme]Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.
It’s time to divide your magic into categories, but what should those categories be? What should they be based on, what powers should they grant, and, most importantly, how well will they fit on an online personality test? Those are all questions to ask of an elemental magic system, and that’s what we’re talking about today. We discuss how many elements a system should have, how to choose them, and why everyone expects four element systems to have a secret fifth element. Plus, what is “beast keeping” anyway?
Show Notes The Four Fundamental Forces * The Standard Model of Physics * Bending * Legend of the Five Rings * The Infinity Stones * Owl House Covens * Fate: The Winx Saga * Mistborn Magic * Frozen Two Magic TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Viviana.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.
[Opening Music]
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. I am Chris, the mage of plot arcs, and with me is…
Wes: Wes, the mage of red pens.
Chris: And…
Oren: I am Oren. I have the four elements of gravity, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, and electromagnetism. By their powers combined, I am the standard model of physics.
Chris: No! You can’t get multiple elements!
Wes: Yeah, boooo!
Oren: Look, I’m going into the standard model state, okay? I could do anything in this state.
Chris: Look, if you’re the avatar or the chosen one, you have to have all of the elements. You can’t just have a separate set of them.
Oren: Look, these are the four fundamental forces, okay? They’re fundamental. You can’t have forces more fundamental than these ones. Yes, I know the standard model doesn’t actually include gravity. I looked this up, but I wasn’t going to let that fact ruin my joke.
Chris: So yeah, this time we’re talking about elemental magic.
Wes: And so right off the bat, we have to answer the question of what is an element, don’t we?
Chris: Yeah, what is elemental magic, and are sandwiches involved?
Oren: The element of sandwich. It’s definitely- See, I think people are always being like, ‘We could use the actual elements of the periodic table.’ You could, if you’re a coward. What you should do is the elemental groupings of the periodic table, because then you can be an alkaline metal bender and an alkaline earth metal bender, and those will be different, and it’ll take five hours to explain. Then you can be a lanthanides bender. I don’t know what a lanthanide is, I just know it’s one of the categorizations on the periodic table.
Chris: Can I be a noble gas bender?
Oren: Yeah, get that helium.
Chris: I can make people’s voices really high, but I do have trouble exploding anything. Anyway, a magic system could be considered elemental whenever magic is sorted into categories that determine what the magic does- loose definition. So anytime you see a magic system that is sorted into those types of categories, you could call it elemental. Obviously it’s elemental if we have the traditional magical elements like fire and water and there are some trends like elemental systems are more likely to be a little more rational. Not always. They can definitely be very arbitrary, but because there’s such a big tradition of people just controlling their element, we can sometimes be more likely to logically see what a mage is capable of doing and not capable of doing and extrapolating a little bit better. I think partly because an element just narrows it down enough. If you have your mages and they can do absolutely anything, it’s almost impossible to make it rational because there’s no way you can sort all of that out into, ‘Okay, this is exactly how I got this effect.’ If you have all the effects under the sun included in your magic system. Whereas giving it elements oftentimes does narrow down what mages can do. It doesn’t mean they’re not overpowered, but sometimes it narrows it down.
Oren: Yeah, and if you have a story where it’s established that characters can control fire, air, earth, water, whatever, it’s less likely that you’re going to be tempted to suddenly have one of them cast a scrying spell because which element is that? It’s not like you couldn’t figure out a way to do it, but the temptation will be reduced.
Chris: But Oren, I want healing, so I was thinking my water mages would heal people.
Oren: Ugh…
Wes: The human body is mostly water anyway, Oren.
Oren: Gosh, man, I’ll never stop being annoyed that Avatar has all of these very substance-based magic effects that are all based on controlling the thing, and then healing, which just does a bunch of unrelated things and they all fall under water for some reason. You should need earthbending to fix bones. Hot take.
Chris: It would have been cool if only the Avatar could heal, because you’ve got to use all the elements together or something.
Oren: I like that, yeah. What I honestly would have done is I would have had different benders specialize in different kinds of healing. That’s what I would have done, and granted, it would have been a little harder in a cartoon. In a book, I think it would have been a lot easier, because you have more time to explain how they’re doing it.
Chris: I would say that’s if you decide you really want magical healing, and that’s the only way you’re going to get it, because I will advise against the, ‘Oh, and people with this element have this power, and then this power, and this power, and they’re not really related to each other, and now we have to give everybody with the other elements the same goodies to make it feel even,’ and so every element is just like a random collection of powers that is really hard to remember, and often feels arbitrary itself. So I would say resist adding too many additional related powers that aren’t really intuitive onto your element, if you can help it.
Oren: You can also start getting thematic elements if you want. Fire magic is out of hand pretty fast, like Legend of the Five Rings does that with its magic system, where fire magic, yeah, it’s got the obvious stuff of actual fire, but it also makes you smart.
Chris: Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about.
Oren: Fire magic to get smarter, and air magic makes you better at bows. And I don’t mean because you’re using wind to guide the arrows, that would actually make sense, that air is associated with bows, so if you’re an air shigenja, you can become good at bows.
Chris: Don’t want to make it seem miscellaneous like that. Don’t get me wrong, if you normally have martial artists that control air, earth, fire, water, and you really want healing, and you give them each one healing power, it’s not going to kill you, but pretty soon it’s easy to start adding more and more miscellaneous stuff like that. And also, even the healing powers by themselves just feel a little bit contrived. They don’t quite fit in naturally. So anyway, some advantages of elemental systems are that everyone loves magical categories that you can put people in.
Wes: It’s so true.
Oren: Yeah, that makes a good personality test.
Chris: That makes a good online personality test, everybody will love it. You can get diverse magical effects while also keeping magic manageable. Doesn’t mean it will be manageable, but it’ll be a little easier, a little more possible to make it manageable.
Oren: It’s easier to balance because if you have one element that flies and another one that shoots long-range deadly attacks, you can more easily make those not the same kind of magic so that you don’t have to deal with ‘Why does he just fly up and shoot lightning bolts down forever?’
Chris: And then you can also use it to create interesting theming and world-building, depending on what kind of elements you choose. Because we’re not just talking about air, earth, fire, and water here. You can basically make anything into your elements.
Oren: Yeah, although I had an interesting observation that as I was thinking about what can be elements, I noticed that, so first you want whatever your elements are to feel equivalent.
Chris: So you’re talking about a set of elements as opposed to what qualifies as an element?
Oren: Yeah, that’s what I was… Should we talk about what qualifies as an element first?
Chris: I don’t have notes on that, but that’s what I thought you were going to say. It would be a little strange if you’re like, ‘I’m the element of mugs.’ I guess they’re supposed to feel at least a little bit magical and mysterious. Or not a noun that’s not a specific object. An abstract noun, whatever it’s called.
Oren: If it’s going to be an element, you want it to feel fundamental in some way. Because an actual element in real life is a substance that is the same atomically. You don’t get it by mashing different kinds of atoms together. It’s all one kind of atom. So that’s the general vibe you’re going for. It shouldn’t feel like a very specific part of the world and if it does, you’re usually going to have a lot of elements. Like I was thinking, earth and sky, those feel like elements.
Chris: Yeah, I will say though that if it has a magical connotation, for instance, you would have ruby and sapphire mages. We associate gems with magic and it’s easy to make them feel mystical.
Oren: But like, salt and sand, for example. Those could potentially be elements, but they wouldn’t be your only elements. That would feel really weird. That would feel like you’re leaving a bunch of stuff out.
Chris: So before we get into talking about a set of elements, I just want to mention that there’s more than one way to do this. And when we’re thinking about elements, we’re usually thinking about a specific kind of elements. But there’s actually other methods. So I call this ‘ordered elements.’ The idea of ordered elements is that you have a specific set that kind of represent the metaphysics in the universe in some way. They feel fundamental to how the universe works. Which is why they have to be chosen very carefully, which is what Orin has started to talk about. So that they feel natural. Because if they’re asymmetric, or the set doesn’t feel right, then it’s going to be really contrived and the magic’s not going to be that believable. So, they’re finicky. But there’s other ways to do it, for instance, you can have what I might call ‘sourced elements’, where you pick things in your world that are a source of magic and then you use the explanation that those things are just naturally different, and so the magic that comes from it is naturally different. So, for instance, if you had a set of islands of different sizes and different traits, and then each island had an island spirit, or had an island magical essence, and then the people of that island could channel it, the big island might not be the same as the little island. Maybe one is more powerful than the other, and the number of elements that you have would feel random because that’s how it’s just naturally occurring in your world, right? So it doesn’t have to feel neat and orderly that way.
Chris: Another way you can do it is what I call ‘chaotic elements’, which feels a little bit more like a superpower system, and more like scientific phenomenon, and a little bit less mystical, which is why I don’t think it’s used very often. But you can just say, you know what, this is all really random, we don’t really understand it, but this one person can channel water and the other person can channel mayonnaise and there’s some repetition, but we have no idea how many of them there are, and they just seem to occur at random. It can be used for a little bit more jokiness, but also just without that, without having a mayonnaise mage, it also just feels a little bit more scientific. But the point is that you’re setting the expectation that it’s really random and eclectic, and that, for instance, a more powerful person might be able to do water and all that entails, and a less powerful person might just have ice, for instance, so they can only deal with water when it’s in its frozen state. But the most popular choice seems to be, again, going with kind of like universal metaphysics that are supposed to vent something mystical about the universe.
Oren: Yeah, that’s where your classic fire and water, night and day kind of elemental systems come from. Those feel like somehow part of the existence in some capacity.
Wes: Less element and more fundament.
Oren: Mmm, fundament, that’s good, I like that.
Chris: So as Oren was saying, you wouldn’t have a system that’s just salt and sand, because that doesn’t feel complete. Which is one of the requirements, is that it feels like it’s a complete set and it’s not missing obvious things. Because if you have salt and sand, then you’d have to ask why you don’t have dust or something else like that in there, because it doesn’t feel like a complete set of all the things that are like that.
Oren: Or dirt, right? Why isn’t dirt one of them? Or any of the other things that can dissolve in water. Why isn’t sugar an element? A common one that I see in client manuscripts is elements that are mismatched, that don’t feel as broad. Instead of fire and water, you’d have something specific like fire and rain.
Wes: Yeah.
Oren: Rain is just a little too specific, right? Fire is very broad, whereas rain is a specific instance of water. And that just seems overly limiting if you’re only doing a two element system.
Chris: And, in most cases, you’re looking for elements that are also equally powerful. And oftentimes broadening the element makes for a more powerful magic worker, depending on how your system works. Usually if you’re going for more of a mystical set, you’re not looking to make one randomly more powerful than the next one.
Oren: Right, because remember, people need to be able to identify whichever element they think is best and they’re not going to be able to do that if one of them is just the loser element.
Chris: Yeah, you don’t want somebody to take your internet quiz and then be sad about the results they get, okay?
Wes: That’s right.
Oren: I’m only a rainbender. I hate it. I’m just going to look up the answers next time. I wanted to have fire!
Chris: And they should be equally distant or related to each other. So if you have plants, and then you have lava and steam or something, it’s just one of those things is not like the other. I like to think about it like a color wheel, where it would be very strange if you had blue and teal and green and then yellow. And that was your set.
Wes: That would be weird.
Chris: That would be weird.
Wes: Are there expectations with these, if you have an elemental system, that they have their opposites? Like if you say ‘elemental magic’, that carries a connotation that, like, fire and water are opposites. And then if you talk about light magic, then there must be dark magic. If there’s order magic, then there must be chaos magic.
Chris: I think if you have an element that suggests an opposite, maybe. But in some systems, light mages would also control darkness. Because they would just take the light away, for instance. And some elemental systems do not have opposites that are inherent to the elements they chose. Like for instance, if you have a sapphire and ruby mage, what’s the opposite of sapphire?
Oren: It depends on how many elements you have. If you only have two, the expectation that they will be opposites goes up. That’s why you could have a fire and water system, but you probably wouldn’t have a fire and earth system. That would feel weird.
Wes: That would feel weird, yeah.
Oren: The two elements are fire and air. Really? Those are the two? Something about that seems wrong. Whereas fire and water, that’s more okay. You’re less likely to get people wondering, ‘Where are the other two?’
Chris: Yeah, or fire and ice.
Oren: Yeah, fire and ice, that’s another one.
Chris: So basically what you don’t want is what they have in Frozen 2.
Oren: Oh gosh, that was hilarious.
Chris: Where they have earth, air, fire, water, and ice. What?
Oren: It was really weird! She’s not water, because she’s only ice, so she can’t be the water one, but she’s also clearly too close to water to be the bridge between that they wanted her to be in the movie. It’s amazing how you picked a thing that wouldn’t work either way.
Chris: Yup, that does not work. That does not work at all.
Oren: So how many elements should you have? That’s a question. What’s the number? What’s the perfect number of elements, Chris?
Chris: Okay, I will say that part of this is, do you expect the audience to remember all of them? Because I do think that in some cases, I’m going to go over some examples, including Owl House. Owl House has more than you can remember, but that’s not really important, because you’re not expected to remember all of them. If you want people to remember, I think six is even pushing it a little bit, but you might be able to do six if they’re really intuitive. Otherwise, I think the more you have, the harder it might be to just make your set feel natural. You might get to 12. You can have subcategories, right? So if you wanted, you could take air, earth, fire, water, and then subdivide them into three forms each.
Oren: Because then I don’t have to remember all the subforms, but I can probably remember the base four.
Wes: If each has clear opposites, you only really need to remember half.
Chris: And that would probably help you make a larger set that feels more natural and help it feel a little bit more intuitive. But yeah, I mean, if you had, of course, a chaotic element that’s naturally occurring, then you could have an infinite number if you wanted to. But the point is that you could have potentially lots, and then just don’t expect your audience to remember what they are. Don’t require them to and as long as you have it set up so they feel natural, you’ll be fine.
Oren: That just means that if you have a whole bunch, and you want to introduce a mage who has sound magic, then you’re going to have to remind your audience what sound magic is first. You can’t just have the mage show up and start doing sound magic and expect us to know what that is.
Chris: So I want to talk about some out there. And again, this is one of those things where I’ve had people submit questions asking me, ‘Hey, are my elements even?’ and the answer is no and then they don’t want to change it. Because usually when people have a really random set of elements that isn’t quite working, they’re just attached to having certain characters have certain powers, and they don’t really want to change it and that’s how they ended up in that situation in the first place. We originally conceived one character having fire and another having lava, and then we didn’t really want to add all the others in. And that’s how it becomes a problem. But one example that’s interesting is that they do surprisingly well with the Infinity Stones, I think, except for one. So let’s see if you can tell me which one I think needs to be at least renamed.
Oren: Is it Reality?
Chris: Oren, you were supposed to wait for me to list them first!
Oren: Oh, I’m sorry.
Chris: Especially since our listeners may not have them memorized.
Oren: That’s a good point.
Chris: Okay, so the Infinity Stones are Space, Time, Power, Reality, Mind, and Soul. These are surprisingly good. They’re very cosmic-feeling. And they’re called Infinity Stones, so that really fits the theme. But the problem is that Reality would normally encompass lots of those other things.
Oren: Yeah, probably all of them. It’s like having a system where your elements are eggs, flour, sugar, chocolate, and cake. One of those is just the other four put together. They’re not equal.
Chris: And it’s so weird! Because all you have to do is relabel Reality so that it’s Matter. Were they worried that’s too scientific for their audience? I think most people know what matter is.
Oren: Yeah, I feel like you might still have a problem if matter lets you turn people into slinkies but better naming for sure.
Chris: I’m not talking about how OP the Infinity Stones are. I’m just talking about whether or not those elements are balanced. But otherwise, I think they do surprisingly well. And it’s a set of six. And again, with things like Mind and Soul, just accept the fact that Mind is different even though technically it would be part of Reality. Or Matter, right? It would be part of Matter. There’s a cultural precedent there of thinking of Mind as being separate.
Oren: Although I would start to be unclear what the difference between Mind and Soul is. I’m not saying you couldn’t show that to me. If you told me those were the categories, I would not intuitively know the difference.
Chris: And I also think that you could take Mind out of here and change Reality and Matter and the set would work. So that it would be Space, Time, Power, Matter, Soul. Or just Matter, Mind, and take Soul out. And I think it’s okay to have both. It’s not bad. The set would also feel complete with just one. The Owl House magic system has about nine in here. It’s not the worst. The show gets away with it, but it’s a little rougher. So their elements are Abomination, Bard, which is like their music magic, Beast-keeping, Construction, Healing, Illusion, Oracle, Plant, and Potions. And I think the issue here is that we have two different types of elements. We have elements that are representing Plant and Abomination. They’re almost like different types of lifeforms and then Beastkeeping is… It’s not Beast, it’s Beastkeeping.
Oren: Do we ever see any Beastkeeping magic? I remember the Beastkeeping Master is just like a cat person and I think he scratches people. But I don’t remember if he ever does any magic.
Chris: So maybe it’s just Beast, in reality, not Beastkeeping. But see, the others are all like… Feel a little bit more task-oriented about activities that you do or crafts. So Bard is making music and constructing things and healing people. And Illusion even could be casting illusions. And then Potions, you’re making Potions. Even Oracle, I mean we can start to stretch this a little bit, is okay, we’re doing fortune-telling.
Oren: Potions is also weird thematically because in The Owl House, magic is like an inborn thing that you have and you do it out of you. Like it comes from you, specifically from your bilesack. And it’s potions work with that. Because potions are like things that you make. Is this one of those settings where someone else can follow the same instructions but if they don’t have the magical energy, the potion won’t work? Because that one just feels a little odd. Like by default, Potions feel like a thing anyone can do if they have the right ingredients.
Chris: Yeah, the other problem that happens with potions in many cases is can the potions do everything?
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: So all of the other elements are limited in the tasks they can perform, but potions are just like the magic way anything can happen. Pretty soon, potions become really OP.
Oren: Anytime the author needs like a magical effect that doesn’t fit into one of their other elements, ‘I guess there’s a potion that does that!’ and it’s like, alright, just keeping a long list of all the things potions can do.
Chris: So yeah, if I were to look at the Owl House magic system, I would probably think about either the task-oriented things like construction or the kind of nature or life oriented things like plants and abominations and do one or the other.
Oren: I guess if we wanted to explain why they don’t really make sense, we could say that Belos invented them and Belos isn’t very smart.
Chris: Yeah, don’t get me going about how it does not make sense that anybody would ever choose to get the mark and restrict themself because there’s no advantage to doing that. I don’t care how convincing Belos is, he would not convince people to put on a mark that permanently takes away most of their magical ability. It’s just not a thing that would happen.
Oren: Look, he’s a very good public speaker, okay?
Chris: That’s not a thing! No one is that good at public speaking.
Oren: He can sell you timeshares.
Chris: Yeah, he locks you in a room, doesn’t let you go anywhere.
Oren: Until you agree.
Chris: He lures you in with a free gift and then gives you a sales pitch and then just doesn’t let you leave.
Oren: There’s like a pile of snacks but you’re not allowed to have any until you sign.
Chris: Oh no. So there’s Winx, which does pretty well, the new Winx show. Fire, water, earth, air, and then it has light and mind.
Oren: Light is the odd one out in that exchange. Mind feels like the secret fifth element that everyone expects a four-element system to have now, but light is like fire but less. They did eventually establish that light can do illusions and stuff, which fire can’t do, but, by default, light just seems like weaker fire.
Chris: In the show, it feels better than it looks on paper because it’s like light and fire, aren’t those kind of closely related? Fire can create light, so what’s the advantage of light? In the show, yeah, they can create entire illusions, make things invisible, and it feels very distinct from fire, which is just you can start fires. So it works a little better in the show.
Oren: Plus, with fire, you get to be the main character. I was curious what either of you thought of the Mistborn elements, the eight, I think it’s eight basic metals, the metal powers.
’
Wes: There’s lots to come from, right?
Chris: Yeah, I think that’s a tricky one, because first of all, choosing metals, there’s lots and lots of metals, and it doesn’t work because he uses it to, ‘Hey, we’ve discovered more’, right, as the books go on. So it’s incomplete because we don’t actually know about all of them. So it’s useful that way, but even trying to pick which metals to use is a liability when creating a system like that. And I think he did the best he could, but also the set of powers, I think that’s the biggest problem, is just the set of powers that they convey are too eclectic and don’t feel what they match. In a system like this, where you have, okay, like a sapphire or ruby mage, for instance, that’s probably not elements where you’re just going to give people direct control over their elements. This is not bling mages, necessarily. Usually what you’re going to do is match it symbolically to whatever power it gives. And so if you do that, you also have to be careful that those powers feel as natural as the elements that you choose, and that the symbolism is very intuitive. Keep it simple, easy. So after he chose a specific set of metals, he also had to figure out what powers those metals represent. It was honestly just a very tricky thing, and so it’s not really surprising that it came out feeling a little arbitrary.
Oren: To be honest, metals often have very similar properties. And so it’s, okay, why is tin the superior eyesight metal? What makes tin related to eyesight? And it’s like, iron, that’s the one that pulls things towards you. It’s like, alright, iron’s magnetic. That sort of makes sense. Pewter is the super strength one. And it’s like, pewter is not a very strong metal. That doesn’t feel strength related.
Chris: It works a lot better if you choose elements that have symbolism, right? Because for at least rubies and sapphires, we associate them with colors. In actuality, sapphires can be a whole range of colors. They’re not necessarily blue, but we associate them with the color blue. So then you can use color blue symbolism to choose what a sapphire mage could do. Or if you have a mage that’s like sun, moon, stars, sky, or something like that, you can think about, okay, what is the symbolism I’m going for with my celestial theme? And choose appropriate powers based on that. But to just choose metals that all feel similar. That’s a big ask.
Wes: The more specific you’re naming it, the more arbitrary it feels for sure. And it gets away from, I think, everything Chris has told us about the point of an elemental magic. If we’re choosing, like, You’re a potassium mage!’ Okay, great. It doesn’t, I don’t know. The more associations you can have with your elemental term, the better. That’s why, like, fire, life, death, order, chaos, all that stuff, I think you can just fit. Things will make more sense under those broader umbrellas.
Oren: Yeah, although I admittedly do love the idea of sapphire and ruby mages. Instead of having thematic powers, just having to pelt each other with different kinds of gemstones.
Chris: No, they have a bling contest! It’s like a beauty contest for whoever makes the best bling.
Oren: Whose jewelry is coolest?
Chris: Obviously the sapphire mage, because they can make so many different colors.
Oren: But I like rubies. Rubies are my favorite. The rubies always win in my heart, Chris.
Chris: One last thing that I thought would be good to talk about before we go is, again, you don’t necessarily have to make it about having direct control over the element, even if you’re doing earth, air, fire, water. It’s very popular. It gets really powerful, though. It’s especially easy to kill people. Too easy to kill people. Which means that you can put limits on it. Like distance, and do you have to touch it, and do you have it to start with whatever that will help. But other ways, besides the symbolic way, is you can have it, like, some other type of affinity. Can you survive an element, like a fire mage being able to walk into fire? Can you sense things inside the element, or through the element, like a scryer dipping their hand in a puddle, and then seeing things that are close to a nearby lake? You could navigate or travel through it, flying or breathing underwater. That kind of thing.
Oren: In that case, I want to be a microplastics bender.
Wes: You can go everywhere!
Oren: I am all-knowing and all-consuming. Or all-permeating, really.
Chris: So I would just, again, think a little bit about what kind of relationship people have to their element, and you can do control. Sample your options a little bit first before just going for one.
Oren: I think it is time to end the podcast on that note, now that we’ve covered all the elements. There aren’t any we didn’t cover. Don’t write us.
Chris: If you enjoyed this podcast, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreats.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s the popular writing software Plotter, which you can learn more about at plotter.com. Then there’s Kelly Macleod. Next there’s Amon Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, professor of political theory in Star Trek. Talk to you next week.
[Closing Music]
Chris: This has been The Mythcreant podcast. Opening-closing theme “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Johnathan Coulton
Biff! Pow! Bonk? These are all terms have have been used to describe violence in fiction, but unless you’re writing an old-timey Batman comic, you’ll probably need a bit more. Fortunately, that’s our topic for this week! What’s the best way to describe violence? How much violence should you describe in the first place? Is there ever a good time to use metaphors in fight scenes? Listen and find out!
Show Notes Dullahan * Onomatopoeia * Animorphs * The Dragonet Prophecy * Torture * Fight Scenes TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Steven.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.
[Intro Music]Wes: Welcome to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m your host, Wes. And with me today is…
Oren: Oren
Wes: …and…
Chris: Chris.
Wes: Today we’re going to talk about how to describe violence in speculative fiction. We know that not every reader can stomach violence and not every writer wants to go all in on describing it. Fair enough.
I think, today I just wanted to talk about how to approach describing violence in fiction, some ways of doing it, and some things to keep in mind because people often portray things “realistically”. And so, if you want to depict violent encounters, there are tidbits and advice that we can throw your way. So, let’s just get into it.
Chris: You said realistically, Wes, so I think thinking about the level of realism is a good place to start here.
Wes: I think that’s a great idea because there’s kind of a lot of things that we will let pass with certain types of violence, depending on target audience or rating. Star Wars is a good example. Plenty of violence, but generally not graphic violence. So that when certain things are very graphic for Star Wars, and then somebody walks it off, that’s not realistic.
Oren: In Star Wars, we’re used to characters miraculously avoiding taking lethal damage or something that should kill them, at least by film standards. In real life, you know that getting shot in the shoulder is not something you just walk off a lot of the time, and hitting your head really hard and falling unconscious is not something you just walk off most of the time. But in movies, that is the trope, and Star Wars usually adheres to that until the recent trend of impaling people and then having them just walk it off. What is going on at Disney, guys?
Chris: Can we stop doing that, please? Can we stop? Please. Black Panther’s doing it too. You’re a bad influence, Star Wars.
Wes: Quick note on prose writing: If you are describing violence and you’re using the verb impale, that’s a pretty strong one. I’m just saying, that’s a strong word choice.
Oren: Your old buddy Vlad would be disappointed in you.
Chris: I think you have better ways of creating dramatic moments in prose than showing somebody get impaled. Again, it’s this one-upmanship over, you know, the audience is used to shoulder shots. So now we need to do something more dramatic to make them worry about the character, but we still want the character to live. And you just can only go so far before it becomes absolutely ridiculous. Someday soon, everybody’s going to be sewing their head back on.
Oren: Maybe they evolved the ability to remove their own head.
Chris: Oh, man! Lost girl reference!
Oren: Early Lost Girl reference for you.
Chris: That’s episode two, right? Something like that?
Oren: It’s very early. It’s before they had any budget, and so their bad guy was a guy whose head was hidden in his shirt.
Chris: Again, they’re supposed to be scary assassins, but their ability is that they have evolved the ability to remove their head.
Oren: They said the word evolve!
Chris: And again, these are like fey in this setting. So, evolving, removing your head is a little bit of a theme clash there. Anyway, it was absolutely hilarious. It’s like, oh, they’re so scary because their head isn’t with them. How is that supposed to help them fight? I don’t even know.
Oren: Apparently, they can see without it, so it’s like fighting a normal person, I guess. They’re not invulnerable as far as I can tell, or if they are, it has nothing to do with their head.
Chris: I think that that would be a disadvantage. It would be very interesting if they took their head and put it at a bird’s eye view.
Oren: Maybe their eyes can shoot lasers, so they put their head on a little cart as a turret and it flies around and shoots at you while you’re trying to fight them. Or you could just go the opposite direction and take comics as an inspiration and write Biff! Pow! You know, that sort of thing.
Maybe this is just me, I have to ask with you two here: Am I the only one who really doesn’t like onomatopoeia used in fight scenes in particular, but I guess anywhere in stories? Anytime a story writes boom when there’s an explosion, my eyes roll back into my head.
Chris: I really think it’s about how it’s used. I think if you use cheesy comic book onomatopoeia, that is going to feel like a tone clash in many stories, especially when you want the fight scene to be very serious and tense.
But I do think that sometimes onomatopoeia is a lot more subtle, where you just have a little italicized drip, drip, drip that’s kind of representing a sound.
Wes, where do you see the border of onomatopoeia? What qualifies and what doesn’t qualify?
Wes: Technically, we’re just looking at is the word on the page representing the sound as closely as possible? Drip, drip, drip is an interesting one. I never really would have thought of that as onomatopoeia, but I see that there’s definitely an argument for that. I don’t know what the line is. I think medium matters. And so, if I see it in a graphic novel, I don’t mind it at all. It feels like that’s just kind of part of the deal.
But if I was reading a story and they’re somewhere there was an explosion and then single word, italicized: boom. I’m just like, ugh. Maybe that could be done well, but it wouldn’t be done that way.
Oren: Maybe I’m just biased right now because I’m nearly done with my Animorphs reread and Animorphs uses onomatopoeia constantly. And some of it just sounds a little silly.
Like when the Yeerks fire their Dracon beams, the book has tsew written out. And so, the narrator is constantly saying tsew. I don’t know what that is. And it’s also very similar to the onomatopoeia they use for the sound that the hawk in the group makes when it’s screeching.
But I also just think it might have to do with the fact that the audio narrators, when they were recording, were clearly given the direction to try to sound as freaked out as possible when reading the onomatopoeia descriptions to try to make the fight scenes more tense.
Wes: It’s kind of an interesting point, because if you were not listening to an audiobook version of that, but reading, my experience with that, when I see onomatopoeia written down, I think my internal reading brain doesn’t process that the same way as just normal prose. I just see it. I register it. Okay, cool. But I’m not in my head going tsew-tsew, or whatever.
Oren: It might not be a big deal. Except when the Yeerks shoot at them with guns or lasers and the narrator is reading: bang, bang, bang, as if they’re about to be murdered in real life. It’s like, guys, I know that no one is going to die in this fight, okay? It’s an Animorphs book. I know that no one’s allowed to die until the last book.
Chris: I think this is similar to when we’re talking about level of realism. What is the tone of the story? Is it campy? Because you could definitely get away with more onomatopoeia if the story already feels campy.
Oren: I mean, that is, I think, also just a general problem with Animorphs. As is, remember how of The Dragonet Prophecy, the first book had really gruesome fight scenes?
Chris: Yeah, it’s like this does not feel appropriate for middle grade.
Oren: Yeah, ease off on that.
Animorphs is the opposite. Animorphs starts with what feels like appropriate levels of description of the injuries and the damage that the characters give and receive. But as you get further in, it gets more and more graphic, and it just doesn’t match.
Because again, this is a story where we have to pretend that every time the Yeerks fire their lasers, that they have hands made of butter and the lasers are constantly slipping and sliding all over the place, so that we can explain why a bear doesn’t just get disintegrated by a laser beam. Then it’s like, now read this very graphic description of a tiger biting someone’s head off.
It’s like, I don’t think you’ve earned this, Applegate. I don’t think you’ve earned the right to make me read this.
Chris: Certainly, if you want your characters to do things in fighting that are unrealistic, like how high can they jump? How big is that weapon? Do we get an anime size weapon that’s the size of a person?
Oren: I want a sword that’s big enough I can use it as a shield.
Chris: How well can they shake off injuries? That kind of thing. It just should be consistent, and it should match the work. But it doesn’t always have to be highly realistic. High realism isn’t better; It’s just different and it suits a different tone of story.
Oren: A lot of this has to do not even with what is realistic, but what feels more realistic based on tropes. And one time back when I was in college, I approached a new group to play in a Firefly game and I was like, hey, I want to make a guy who uses a sword. And they were like, that’s cool. You can totally make a guy who uses a sword. And I’m like, all right, I have this really powerful character who uses a sword and I want his sword to be super big because I was playing a Final Fantasy game at the time. And they were like, no, you can’t do that. That’s not realistic. I’m like, okay, it’s not realistic for my sword to be huge, but it is realistic for my sword character to charge across a room before any of the bad guys with machine guns can shoot him and then stab them all with his normal sized sword? That’s realistic? I was a little salty.
Chris: So, should we talk about narrating a fight scene itself?
Wes: Before we hop into that, generally, I think if you are going to get into a violent situation in a story, you have two options: You can narrate the fight scene, show it all blow by blow, or you report the violent encounter after the fact. Those are really the only two options. If there’s a third one, I’m not smart enough to think of it.
There’s pros and cons to each. And depending on the level of violence and how graphic the violence might be and how realistic you might want it to be, I feel like there are good decision points for whether you’re going to show it happen or report it after the fact.
Chris: I would say that usually if this is a situation where you don’t want to show it in a scene, in most cases, you probably just shouldn’t have that violence in your story.
I guess if you have a story that’s dealing with a really difficult issue… So, let’s say you have a story that’s about something like sexual assault, about something like torture; You have to have a character in that situation in order to make the necessary commentary that you want to make, but it’s also very sensitive. That would be a time to cut away until afterwards or something like that.
Wes: You’re right on all those points. And I think after the fact stuff, we see that on screen or we read about that in stories, whodunnits, mysteries, things like that. The anticipation, the next victim, and it happens, but we cut away. And then the investigators see it after the fact.
Chris: So, this is not a fight that the protagonist is actually engaging in, in that case?
Wes: Exactly. That’s a very common use for not showing it, but letting the audience get the anticipation of, oh no, kind of picking up the pieces later without showing something as graphic as the examples that you described.
Because whatever violence you’re including in a story at whatever level, I think that a lot of writers can feel a sense of concern that depicting violence is condoning violence. And that’s something that I think everybody needs to kind of understand. How you depict things in your stories and report on them. There are certain levels of authorial endorsement that come with that. And leaving certain things out is probably a good idea if it does not contribute to the story meaningfully.
Chris: I do think that the major mistake that people make when it comes to messaging is that they think that if they depict something and make it seem bad. Let’s say, oh, I don’t want to condone violence, so I’m going to show how horrific violence is. And then they do it in detail and it’s like really graphic. That doesn’t actually condemn violence. It normalizes it.
So, you can’t have your cake and eat it too. Right? If you want to show graphic violence, but also want to condemn it, you can’t do both of those things.
Oren: Showing violence as horrible can be part of condemning it, but it’s not that on its own. Right? The classic trap here is the stories about characters having cool fights and then the author feeling kind of bad that they’re glorifying violence. And so, making the fights unnecessarily brutal and gross. Also, Animorphs, let’s be perfectly honest, later Animorphs books do this too, where we’re clearly trying to do all the horrors of war, but also, we want to have super cool animals-fight-aliens fights.
That is, I think, the trap to avoid. If you are trying to avoid glorifying violence, the easiest thing to do is to not have violence in your story. But if you want to do something a little more in depth, it takes more work than just making the violence you have more unpleasant.
Wes: And just being consistent in the depictions, I think also matters.
Because, to piggyback off of what Orin just said, if you have a story and I’m looking at basically every superhero story where the goons just get violently destroyed and then the villain, somehow you aren’t going to kill. Because everything that led up to that moment, despite if you’re like, oh, I can’t kill, that would be against my code. It’s like, well, you probably killed and hospitalized 30 people just now.
But that is kind of condoning a certain type of violence, right? It’s like, well, we’re not going to point out that that was problematic, but that you might kill this person. This one moral dilemma right here is suddenly the focus of your attention? I don’t like that. It’s not consistent. It’s not realistic.
Oren: I don’t know how much of that is description, but that is a problem that the whole like, well, I don’t want to kill this guy because he’s the boss. And it’s like, if nothing else, that’s dissonant. You can argue whether or not it has any kind of problematic messaging, but it certainly creates a weird feeling of your character being really inconsistent.
For the record, I’m not super worried about stories glorifying violence by having characters get into cool fight scenes, if for no other reason than that ship has entirely sailed. But beyond that, I do think there are some things to consider, like you just mentioned, having your characters be willing to ruthlessly kill minions, but suddenly the bad guy, no, he can’t. We need him for the next book.
Chris: Personally, I’m not going to look at somebody who writes a cool fight scene and be like, you’re promoting violence because you wrote a fight scene. At the same time, if your point you want to make is an anti-violence point and your protagonist solves problems with violence, I feel like you’re going to be working uphill at that point and that you should consider a different way of solving problems.
Wes: No, you both raise good points. The presence of violence is not necessarily condoning, but how it works into your story. And Chris, I think you raised torture showing up. If somebody, this happens way too often, we’ve talked about this a lot, if there’s violent torture or any kind of torture in your story and that gets the protagonist what they need, you’ve condoned that violence.
Chris: Even if it’s the villain torturing the protagonist, but the protagonist still gives the villain information that’s useful. Oren’s written about this.
Oren: Well, because that feeds into, there’s a lot wrong with torture. Hot take. Hot take: Torture would be bad, even if it was a reliable means of getting information, but it’s not. And the fact that a lot of people think it is, distorts the debate around it.
That is something that I will never stop getting mad about whenever I see some story where the hero or the villain, either way, it doesn’t matter who it is, beats up some guy until they give them the information and it just works that way.
And it’s like, that guy could have just not known the information. You didn’t know he knew that. He could have just not known. And then he would have beaten him until he lied to you to make you stop. Or maybe he lied to you the first time. You often have no way of knowing. And they never show that because it would be narratively inconvenient. So, they instead just want a dramatic punch this button until you get information. And I think we need to do better as writers. I think we can and should do better.
Chris: Are we ready to move on to fight scenes?
Wes: Yeah. Let’s talk about some fight scenes.
Oren: I’m ready for fight scenes. That’s a lot more fun than torture.
Chris: Yeah. So, I have some tips. Wes, I think you probably have your own tips.
Wes: Yeah. Let’s talk about it.
Chris: So first, know what actions to cover and what level of detail is important. At the too detailed end, we have talking about either exact body parts. You can just say that somebody punched somebody else. You don’t have to say that somebody used their right hand to punch somebody else. That’s too much detail. And this is just a logistics issue, really. But you cannot recreate a film. Don’t paint a diagram. You have to keep it simple.
But then you do want to stay in the moment and focus on specific actions that are happening right now. Unless logistically for the story to be believable, you have to summarize sometimes. If you have a huge battle, you’re going to have to summarize battles realistically last a while. But otherwise keep the fight short and stay in the moment. Have less moves, but make those moves riveting instead of like, and then they punched each other 20 more times, or over and over again, or whatever you have to fast forward.
Oren: I would say that as a rule, if you have an option between summarizing the fight or just making the fight shorter, usually making the fight shorter is the right option.
Chris: It’s more realistic too, because bodies break pretty easily. A lot of times the long fights that we see choreographed in film are actually unrealistically long.
Wes: One fight scene that I really like on that note is in the first Daredevil that came out on Netflix, where his quest reward at the end of the season is getting the Daredevil suit. And up until that point, he’s just wearing a black leotard and a black headband.
But there’s a long shot in the hallway in, I think like episode three, where that poor stunt actor is having to fight all these people and the choreographing goes on for like two minutes. And you can just see the actor just completely exhausted by the end of it. I’m just like, yes, this fight scene’s amazing because they’re not shying away from the fact that every punch thrown is draining this person’s willpower.
Oren: That fight scene created its own little genre of hallway fights. That’s a thing now. It’s like, oh look, they’re doing the hallway fight and we all recognize it. Thanks Daredevil.
Right here, I have a quick question on the subject of summarizing. Is it summarizing to say something like he launched a flurry of blows?
Chris: Yes.
Oren: Is it bad?
Chris: I mean, I’d have to think more about the specific circumstance, but I feel like we’re making the individual blows feel unimportant at that point. What we want is to focus on specific actions that could make a difference. And a flurry of blows, it’s also just very abstract. If it’s some kind of combo action that involves more than one movement, I might state that at once, but normally I think that’s going to get a little bit too distant from what’s happening.
Individual steps that your character takes are usually not important enough to narrate individually. There might be some times when you want to say a character specifically stepped forward and punched or something, but normally footwork is just not important enough.
A specific punch or kick or block are all things that, you know, if you fail that block, you can get sliced up, that individually make a difference. So, you’re looking for actions that do that. I would have to look at what the flurry of blows does in the fight, but I would be concerned about that.
Wes: Launched a flurry of blows, when I heard you pitch that example, Oren, I almost felt like that introduces then the fight scene. It’s like they crossed swords and engaged, and then we describe the fight scene. It’s like the pre-fight summary. That’s how I understood that. And I don’t know if that’s good practice or not?
Oren: I would say that something like the example you just gave, crossed swords and engaged, is a little different than a flurry of blows because that is one action and then a statement of intent.
Wes: Well, does it though? Cause you could say Oren launched a flurry of blows and then you could describe those blows. I’m keying off of launched because that doesn’t convey finished action.
Oren: I guess my question would be: if you’re going to describe them all anyway, why did you start by summarizing them as a flurry of blows?
Wes: To prime the reader.
Oren: All right. Well, consider me officially primed.
All right. I have another question about metaphors in fight scenes. So, if you had two characters who are about to start fighting and then the narration describes about how they were playing the most dangerous game of all. Presumably, maybe it’s not as bad as that. Let’s assume it was a good metaphor. I just don’t know of any.
Chris: Admittedly, when you said, I have a question about metaphors in fight scenes, my instant internal reaction was don’t.
Wes: —Don’t.
Chris: Here’s the thing: We have to keep up the pace. And because actions in this case are very quick and happen very fast. We also want the pros to be tight, to reflect how fast the action is. Metaphors, they tend to be a little bit more confusing. They definitely slow things down.
If you have a pause in the action where let’s say both people are exhausted and they kind of take a step back and stumble for a moment and you have an opportunity, then to add in a little bit more narration that maybe you could fit in a metaphor.
But otherwise I think in most cases, if somebody added a metaphor to a fight, they would be again, summarizing and stepping back and being like, oh, this person maneuvered like a fish swimming upstream, I don’t know. And at that point, the question is, are we being specific and immediate? Are we focusing on what’s happening now? And how exciting that is? Or are we kind of taking a step back? I’m not going to say metaphors during fights are impossible. I’m sure there’s something that could work out, but I think that would be dangerous.
Wes: I think more importantly in describing a fight scene, and if you are doing a grittier, perhaps more realistic, more violent story, using plain, simple language can often convey stronger violence more effectively.
If I just said, he raised the hammer and struck the opponent in the skull and felt the hammer go in. It’s very simple, non-flowery language, but it’s gross. Those little zoom-in details, without saying he slashed his opponent and blood rained down like dark tears from the heavens.
Chris: I mean, I will say though, that if you have just finished off your opponent, you do have time, usually…
Wes: …to bring in the metaphors.
Oren: It’s hard for me to separate best practice from taste here, because I know that personally, I have a very narrow band of describing what happens when you hit someone. Between It feels like I’m reading a Marvel fight where every hit is just on a cartoon character and Ugh, I’m grossed out, there’s too many organs. It needs to be in that very narrow band, or I won’t enjoy it. And I don’t know if that’s the right way to write a fight scene or if that’s just what I prefer to read in fight scenes.
I don’t need to know it. I’m a content editor.
Chris: That’s a good point. Strong, direct, active statements really punctuate those important moments. And you need some sentence variety, even during a fight, but look at which clauses have kind of lower emphasis.
And if you have anything that they’re doing simultaneously, first of all, make sure it’s actually simultaneous, but also that’s going to be lower emphasis. And so, make sure that the content in there is naturally lower emphasis. And if they’re punching and kicking, that’s, you usually want a very direct statement for that.
So, before we go, because I know we’re getting low on time, I’d also like to just go over what is graphic because I do run into manuscripts where writers don’t realize how graphic they’re being. So, I think just talking about the difference between what I would consider graphic or not graphic.
And I will say, I am a person who does not like graphic bodily injury, and so the line is going to be different for different people. So, this is partly what I would consider, igh, and what I don’t.
For instance, in a non-graphic fight scene showing an injury, you would have a simple statement about the injury, and then oftentimes describe the reaction by the injured person to that injury to kind of represent its impact. So, somebody is stabbed in the stomach. They cry out and collapse onto their knees. For instance, we just say they stabbed in the stomach. We’re not describing that stomach wound in detail.
Oren: And then they just get up and walk away.
Chris: So, we use their reaction to it to make it feel impactful without describing the actual injury in that much detail.
You can have really abstract descriptions of pain if this is a viewpoint character getting injured, piercing, throbbing, that kind of thing. Some people might have issues with blood, but usually blood is fine.
If you want to say a body part is at an odd angle to show the bone has been broken, I would just not be exact about it. Do not get specific. Their leg is at an odd angle. It’s all you need to say. You don’t need to say exactly where on the leg or what angle it’s at. But I would say that if you make your injuries particularly gruesome, it’s still going to be too much.
Like for instance, Wings of Fire, we have a description of how acid falls on somebody’s face and starts eating through it. That’s just inherently really gross.
Wes: I think if you want to add a slightly more appropriate description to emphasize the injury, if that’s the type of story you’re telling, then there’s a difference between what Chris has described, where he brought the hammer down on his opponent’s hand and his opponent recoiled in pain, or something like that.
If you give an extra line in there to say he heard the bones break, a little extra declarative line can provide just a little heightened sense of graphic violence. I do think it’s best to keep it short and simple, though, and not go down this level of overly describing it because readers are going to fill it in well enough on their own based on the details that are already in the story.
Chris: Personally, if I read description where bones are heard snapping, I consider that graphic.
Again, this is about what type of story you’re telling. So, I’m not here to tell you to not make your violence graphic, but generally you need a reason because it is going to be off-putting to some people. So, if you’re telling a really gritty story or something that’s just revels and dark gory stuff, it’s not a good way to spice up your climax or make your climax more exciting because it isn’t excitement. Doesn’t make anything more exciting. It’s really just about the level of realism and how dark you want it to feel, how gritty you want it to feel. As I said, bone snapping, any bones sticking out.
Again, this is going to be gross. You can exit the podcast now if you don’t want to hear this.
Anything popping out: Eyeballs popping out, any other parts. I would say any description of organs. That’s pretty graphic. Skin being sliced, not a big deal. But if the skin is being stretched or is missing, somebody’s been skinned. That is going to feel pretty graphic. It varies with body parts being gone, which body parts we’re talking about. A missing finger, not that big of a deal.
Some writers will write, here’s the viewpoint of somebody as they get torn apart. That’s not a thing that is a light reading. When it comes to describing pain, if you have really graphic metaphors or analogies about like, oh, this thing felt as though an arrowhead was being driven up my spine, it’s possible to make descriptions of pain graphic enough to be unpleasant for some readers.
Oren: Well, that is a good thing, I think, to end the podcast on.
Chris: Yes!
Oren: I think we all died of being squicked.
Chris: All right. If you found this podcast, I’ll say useful, possibly not enjoyable, please support us. You can go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: Before we go, I want to thank a few of our patrons. First, we have the popular writing software Plotter, which you can learn about at plotter.com. Then there’s Callie Macleod. Next, we have Ayman Jaber, he’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
[Outro Music]This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Colton.
Any good adventure will give your hero a sense of personal growth and accomplishment, but what about something more tangible? Think of the rewards one could earn: sparkling jewels, enchanted weapons, or just great stacks of cash. This concept of “quest rewards” is very common in video games and TTRPGs, but it’s a lot more complicated in a scripted story. Why’s that? We’ll tell you!
Show Notes Din Djarin * Bilbo Baggins * Callandor * Andúril * Sting * Phial of Galadriel * Gurgi’s Wallet * Helm of Disjunction * Hither-Thither Staff * Shadeslayer * Shrek * Chilling Effect TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Suzanne.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle. [opening song]
Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren. With me today is…
Chris: Chris.
Oren: and…
Wes: Wes.
Oren: Now as a reward for reaching episode 430, we each get a precious treasure. Chris, you get an enchanted red pen that slays all contrivances.
Chris: Oh yeah!
Oren: Wes, you get a pile of gold and jewels, which may or may not have a thematic greed curse upon them.
Wes: It matters not. I can die knowing that this treasure is mine.
Oren: For me, I get the satisfaction of a job well done.
Wes: The best reward of all.
Oren: The real treasure was the podcast all along. [Laughter] So this topic was born out of me thinking about video games and tabletop roleplaying games and looking at the fact that quest rewards are basically standard for those genres and thinking that they probably got that from written stories, but then realizing that that’s kind of an odd topic in written stories. In a video game, it’s like, yay, I completed a mission. I got 5,000 monies and a new gun. Woo! But if you do that in a written or filmed or otherwise non-interactive story, it seems a little weird. But there are still rewards that characters get, so I wanted to figure out what was going on with that. What’s the deal?
Chris: We’re not gamifying our stories. We still do have rewards.
Oren: Yeah, I’ve had some clients who definitely had a story I think critics would have described as feeling video gamey because the character went and did some difficult stuff and then at the end found a chest or something with a cool item in it.
Chris: That felt kind of random, like this doesn’t come out of the narrative, it just, oh, there happens to be a treasure chest here.
Oren: It’s sort of like the random encounter feeling you get when your character’s just walking along and then suddenly, whoa, bandits! Whoa, okay, we’re fighting bandits now. All right. Okay, bandit fight done. Moving on.
Chris: It’s like, we don’t have story structure. Oh, wait, I’m supposed to have an exciting moment now. Random attack!
Oren: And for this, I think it’s like I’m supposed to have something satisfying at the end of a quest of some kind and I don’t have that. So instead, cool sword! So I thought that would be kind of interesting. I can think of stories both older and more modern where at least something that looks like a quest reward is still part of it and the resemblance starts to get fuzzier the further out on the sandwich discourse grid you go because you have the really obvious stuff like if you go back to the Hobbit, Bilbo is going on this adventure with the dwarves for some cash. He’s gonna get some cash money and he does. He gets some cash money at the end. And then in a more modern story, we have Din Djarin who gets bounties and also gets cash. Those are kind of a literal interpretation of a quest reward. And then you have things where the character maybe wasn’t like promised that if he did this thing but still gets a cool thing at the end of a story like Rand getting his super powerful magic sword in one of the Wheel of Time books at the end. A sword so powerful that in the next book he had to get rid of it because he was too strong.
[Laughter]Wes: I also kind of like the quest rewards that are like, I’m giving you this with the understanding that you are going to go do this thing. It’s like the pre-reward. Like when Beowulf goes off to slay Grendel’s mother, this guy gives him Hrunting, the sword. It’s like, here, use this.
Chris: It’s dangerous to go it alone. Take this.
Wes: But of course then that sword fails him, but then he finds a giant sword amongst Grendel’s mother’s lair and then uses the giant sword to slay. So he gets a double quest reward there. Getting that key item right in the video game moment that is way stronger than anything that you had previously.
Chris: Yeah, there are pre-quest treasures usually given by a mentor or something in preparation for the quest. But that happens in video games too, right? Not just in prose or non-interactive works?
Oren: It does, but not with the same regularity. In video games and in classic D&D style RPGs, you expect to get some kind of tangible reward at the end of a quest that will make your numbers higher, basically. And of course, this is a big generalization. There are video games that don’t do this. It depends on the medium. But it’s common enough that when I talk about quest rewards in video games, everyone knows what I’m talking about.
Chris: Right. But I’m just being like, getting treasure without doing something first. I’m just thinking about Link and his little village that he often starts out in. Does he have to do anything to get his first sword and shield?
Oren: Depends on the game. But yes, usually you get something to start you with. But I would say in video games, that’s not more common than it is in prose stories. I think the reason is that they serve the same function, which is either a way to explain why the character can do the thing that they need to do. It’s like, well, now you have a cool thing that you didn’t have before. Plus, a bit of novelty and wish fulfillment where the brand new weapon that they have now is more interesting than if they just started the story with this sword that they’ve always had.
Chris: You could do a little mini obstacle in the village to give your hero their first sword if you wanted to. But I think in many stories that’s not what the story is about. We have other things to spend time on. There’s your sword of basic slang so that you can get on with your journey.
Wes: Even the gifting process can say something a little bit, even if the thing isn’t particularly special. Like when Aragorn gets Narsil and he’s just like, here’s the sword for your station. Oh, cool sword. Does it do anything? No. It doesn’t. But this is a sign of how I trust you and I sanction you on your quest. Something like that. But Sting glows when Orcs are near. That seems more useful. This sword doesn’t do anything.
Oren: Yeah, but it’s like a long sword and Sting is a short sword, so it does an extra 1.5 damage on average per swing.
Wes: Ah, key.
[Laughter]I like in the movies too, when Frodo gets from Galadriel the Light of Eärendil, this little container full of something. He’s like, uh, what?
Oren: Galadriel, why did you give me this?
Wes: Two movies later, it comes in handy. It’s like, you gave me a fragile vase full of water? Cool. Thank you.
Chris: It will light dark places, Wes.
Wes: Oh, right. Yes, but like, is that a metaphor, Galadriel?
[Laughter]Chris: Is this like the reward is the friends we made along the way kind of thing?
Wes: Yes. [Laughter] Obviously, we know Tolkien loved his epics and that like higher person of station gifting the person going on the quest something cool, I think plays into like the whole lineage of items and their stories and why that’s important to say this thing that I’m giving you has gone by many names, but always done these very things. And now you guys know that it is once again, this item that is also going on the quest and that gives it a special story significance, at least in epics. And we don’t really write epics anymore for good reasons.
Chris: Right. But if you go on a quest and you have the sword that some famous person used to slay some giant monster, that makes it feel significant.
Oren: Nowadays, I feel like if a quest starts and they make a really big deal out of the sword they’re giving you at the beginning, I’m like, that sword’s gonna break, isn’t it?
[Laughter]The lesson is going to be that the sword didn’t matter. That’s the only reason to make a big deal out of the sword they give you in the opening chapter. It could be a lesson right there, like Taran, when he gets his first sword at the beginning of I think it’s the Book of Three when he has to head out to find Arawn and Dallben is like, here’s a sword and Taran’s like, what does it do? And Dallben’s like, it stabs people. What do you want from me?
Wes: It’s a normal sword, you assistant pig keeper. Bringing up the Book of Three is a good example of how at the end of that book, each of Taran’s party members, they all get a quest reward. That’s kind of fun. I mean, the best one is obviously Gurgi’s bag of never-ending food or whatever it’s called.
Oren: I love his wallet of never-ending food.
Wes: Wallet of never-ending food. That’s the best quest reward.
Oren: That’s actually the version of the quest reward that I think is underappreciated, perhaps, by modern writers, just because that’s a fun bit of wish fulfillment at the end of the quest, and you don’t usually want to use that as the main stakes. If you’re using a quest reward as the stakes, you need to think about everything the stakes need. Like, what bad thing will happen if I don’t get this? Because readers care more about a bad thing that will happen than a cool, nice thing that you might get. But if you already have stakes, and you’ve got those all sorted, then a cool reward at the end is a lot of fun, and Gurgi’s wallet shows exactly the way to do it. It’s cool, it has a neat function, it’s novel, it’s kind of unique, it serves a specific need that the character has.
Chris: It suits Gurgi.
Oren: Yeah, it suits Gurgi.
Chris: The other thing that’s really useful about that is that it is logistically useful in books down the line, because now it’s like, oh, the heroes are in a bunch of trouble. Geez, how are they getting food? They’ve been out in the wilderness for weeks. Oh wait, we have Gurgi’s wallet, so I don’t have to explain how they got food for traveling. That’s super useful to have. But also, it’s not like, broken. It’s not overpowered.
Wes: That’s a good point. If the quest rewards happen in the resolution of the story, if you are working on a series, they can show up later. Maybe have a bigger part in another story.
Oren: Just try to do better than whatever it was Eilonwy got. Like a pin or something? I think it did eventually have some random effect later that wasn’t really important, but I was like, oh right, yeah, I guess she had that pin. Everyone else got something cool, and Eilonwy got a pin. Not even like a super cool-looking pin.
Wes: I remember like, Doli’s reward was, sure, you can turn invisible, but it’s gonna hurt.
Oren: Teach you to whine about not being invisible. [Laughter]
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: That is a good point though about the usefulness, because if your character gets an item part way through the story, whether that’s the end of book one or several chapters in, it does have to come into play later. Which can be an issue in the latest D&D movie. They spend a huge amount of time just trying to get one item, and then it doesn’t really matter. I mean, we could say it kind of barely matters a little, but it doesn’t matter in proportion to the amount of time they spend getting it.
Oren: But on the other hand, it gave me such joy whenever they slipped and called it the Helm of Dysfunction. So can we put a price tag on that, Chris?
[Laughter]Spoilers for the D&D movie, but as opposed to this random staff that they just happen to have. And it was a portal staff, and they basically use it to solve all of their problems going forward. It’s like, now we’re thinking with portals, and I’m like, is this a D&D item? I don’t remember this in any of the magic item guides that I’ve read.
Chris: Yeah, it’s like, why didn’t you spend your whole quest trying to get that item? That would have worked a lot better.
Oren: Because we needed it earlier to get them out of a bunch of other situations we didn’t know how to get them out of.
Chris: Yeah… On the other hand though, if you do have a section of your plot, and you realize that you could just take it out and it wouldn’t make a difference, adding an item that matters later can be a way of making that section of the story matter. So let’s say you do have a random quest that your hero goes on, and they don’t meet their objective and then they just go back to normal. And you’re like, okay, well, they just failed and nothing happened. So that thing they did doesn’t matter, but you really like it. Maybe they will, while they’re doing the thing that they ultimately fail at, also happen to find something important that they then use so that section of the story still matters.
Oren: Yeah, that can be very handy.
Chris: I also think rewards are useful for balancing karma. If the hero worked really hard, especially if they suffered a lot, we want to see them rewarded for that. And it plays not just a quest, but like other important struggles. For instance, if you have a coming of age story about a young hero, and that hero goes through their first battle, you would expect that to be a very difficult experience. So usually there will be something that comes out of that battle. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be an item, though. Or friendship was the reward. Oftentimes I think rewards are just leveling the hero up, especially when it’s a young hero. So they might get a new title. The example that I can think of that comes to mind is in Eragon in book two, we learn that he now has the title of Shadeslayer because he defeated the Shade at the end of book one.
Oren: Oh, well, good for him.
Chris: Right? Eragon is funny in some places, but that part is appropriate. It’s like, hey, you got some candy. People think you’re cool. They call you Shadeslayer now. And that’s your reward for going through that struggle and succeeding.
Oren: Well, they’d better call him Shadeslayer… or die.
Chris: No!
[Laughter]Oren: That sort of use of quest rewards can also be very handy, especially in a story where the character was laboring for a particularly selfless set of stakes. Like if they were really trying to help other people a lot, they can feel like they deserve a little extra. And it’s better to give them a magic sword than to have someone fall in love with them as a reward in most cases.
Chris: Oh, no.
[Laughter]Oren: Or just give them someone as a spouse now, as used to be the tradition. I was looking for stories that had examples of this, so I checked out TV Tropes and it was like, okay, there’s like a couple of animes and some movies and some fantasy books and like fairy tales. And I opened that one and it’s like, oh, look at this long list of fairy tales. It’s like, man, how many of these are like a guy getting a wife under very shady circumstances? And the answer was more than I was comfortable with.
Chris: Yep, there’s a lot of fairy tales like that. Now, to be clear, I think it’s okay for your hero to become really cool and do something cool and someone likes them afterwards. And that can in a way be a reward, but that’s very different from if you defeat the dragon, you get the princess’s hand in marriage.
Oren: Yeah, I mean, having your hero become someone more romantically interesting, I think is fine. The issue is when they haven’t really done that, but now someone is way into them and it feels like you’re just giving them a prize. Long way of saying I agree.
Wes: Shrek did a pretty good job with that. There are all these motivations happening. Shrek wants to go do this reward just to get everybody kicked out of his swamp. And Lord Farquaad is sending him on a quest to get the reward of a wife and he’s the bad guy, so it’s a bad thing to want. But then Shrek does the dragon quest, but then after that develops a relationship with Fiona. There was time for that romance to happen. So even though he and Donkey did rescue her from the tower, it’s just a little different enough from our standard fairy tales for sure.
Chris: That’s an interesting example because they definitely invoke the trope without actually doing it too much because after he rescues Fiona, she does expect that he’s going to be this prince she’s going to marry. Now later we find out that what she’s hoping for is if she has this handsome prince and true love’s kiss or whatever kisses him, then she won’t become an ogre anymore. That’s what she’s actually hoping for. But what it appears is that he rescues her and then she’s like, oh yeah, that means we’re getting hitched, right? And the important thing is he says no.
[Laughter]As opposed to this thing that we see often where it’s like, oh no, this is wrong, but she wants to so much. So I guess it’s okay. It’s like, yeah, then you’re just looking for an excuse to do the bad thing, storyteller.
Wes: Yeah.
[Laughter]Oren: Not a great thing to equivocate on, I would say. The good news is that the fear of clichés works in our favor because the whole go on a quest and get the princess’s hand in marriage is so well known that like very, very few authors will do it sincerely because everyone knows it. And so they’re like, no, it would be cliché. So it would be a faux pas to put that in my story. And it’s like, well, you’re not wrong, but that’s not the main reason.
[Laughter]Chris: It’s also notable that even Disney movies have stopped with the like, they instantly fall in love after one dance at the ball routine. They subverted it with Frozen and their other recent movies to give people at least a little bit more time.
Oren: Now they try to do an actual romance arc with varying degrees of success, but they’re trying.
Chris: They’re trying. It just goes to show how outdated the whole I rescue the princess and she marries me or I do a task and get a wedding is at this point. If even Disney has cut it out.
Oren: Finally caught up, Disney. Good job. We knew you could do it.
Wes: Are there any particular quest rewards that you all really like in stories? Because I have a fun random one.
Oren: Please tell.
Wes: Well, I really like in Lord of the Rings in the books, because it doesn’t happen, unfortunately, in the movies is that basically in return for like helping the Ents out and befriending the Ents is that Merry and Pippin get to drink Entwash and they get huge. They become huge hobbits.
Chris: Really?
Wes: Yeah, they grow. They’re basically become, I don’t know, like dwarf sized. That’s important at the end for the scouring of the Shire because they’re both just like riding into town and Frodo and Sam are there, but they’re kind of broken people. Merry and Pippin are just like, huh, huh, and they save the Shire because they’re huge hobbits.
Chris: I did not remember that part.
Wes: It’s so funny.
Oren: I’m imagining how much of a nightmare that would have been to try to do in the movies.
Wes: I know.
Oren: They were already employing very cutting edge film technology at the time to make the hobbits look short and make it look like that was naturally part of the scenes with the human-sized characters. And so at least when the hobbits were all by themselves, they didn’t have to do that. They could just film the hobbits normally. And now suddenly if Merry and Pippin are significantly taller, oh my God.
[Laughter]I can see why they didn’t do that.
Wes: It’s just a funny question because one, it literally makes them bigger. And then two, they return home and it’s like, look how much they’ve grown physically and metaphorically and spiritually.
Oren: It’s a secret metaphor.
Wes: Exactly. Plus Entwash. You’re drinking Ent sweat.
Oren: Is that what that means? Is that just water that washes off of an Ent?
Wes: I don’t remember what it is, but I know it’s just called Entwash. I mean, I think the Ents drink it, but it’s unclear.
Chris: Probably not their sweat then?
Wes: Probably not.
Oren: Maybe they’re weird survival types, Chris. Who knows?
[Laughter]Wes: That was a quest reward that always stuck with me because I thought it was funny, but I also really liked it when I first read the books. I was like, oh cool. These hobbits are big. They weigh probably like eight more pounds each. That matters for some reason.
Oren: I actually enjoyed in the first season of the Mandalorian- I think it was the first season. Maybe it was the second season. I don’t know. Whichever one, when he gets the darksaber.
Wes: Second season. Yeah.
Oren: I thought that was pretty neat. I’m not super attached to him having it. Spoilers for the third season, but the reactionaries are mad because he gave it to Bo-Katan. I don’t care. I think it’s fine that she has it, but it was cool when he won it from Moff Gideon and had a cool darksaber.
Wes: Yeah. And he wasn’t fighting Moff Gideon with the understanding he would even get it.
Oren: Right. It was a whole. Moff Gideon happened to have it and he was like, well, I guess I’ll take this. And then they’re all like, no, you can’t give it away. It has to be won in combat. And he’s like, well, I guess I’m stuck with this for a while.
[Laughter]Wes: And then I like the implication later where he uses it. And he’s like, oh my God, this thing sucks. It’s so heavy. Why does it hurt to use?
[Laughter]Oren: Part of Dave Filoni’s obsession with having non-force users use lightsabers. It’s a common thread in a bunch of his Star Wars material.
Chris: I have to say, I did really like the Beskar in the Mandalorian. He did something, he gets Beskar, brings it to the smith. It just feels kind of video gamey, doesn’t it? You get the Beskar and then you bring it somewhere and then the shopkeeper makes a thing for you.
Wes: It was fun too for people like me who like, I didn’t know that their armor was made out of Beskar. You know, I just saw what looked like an impressive amount of money and I was like, oh, cool. He gets a lot of money and then I go and melt it down and make cool armor out of it. Yes, please.
Oren: I honestly couldn’t remember if Beskar was invented for the Mandalorian or if it was part of Star Wars secondary canon before that. But yeah, it was kind of neat. It was like, here’s some metal ingots. It’s like, that’s an odd thing to get paid in. It’s like, oh, I see. It’s blaster proof armor.
Chris: He also got the Beskar Spear as a reward. And I thought that was pretty cool because you could actually, I think, fight against somebody with a lightsaber with it. So that was a really neat thing and it was unique, but also useful. I don’t remember what happened to that thing. I’m sad he doesn’t have it anymore.
Wes: Well, because you have to watch the Book of Boba Fett to understand what happened to it.
Chris: Well, I did, but I tried to forget as much as possible.
Oren: I was legit sad. What happened to that spear is that the armorer melted it down because like Beskar’s not for weapons, it’s for armor. And I’m like, all right. On the one hand, that does make sense because Beskar’s only real use as a weapon is if you’re going to fight someone with a lightsaber and have an ability to block lightsabers. And that doesn’t come up that often. So I get it. It makes sense, but I was still sad. I love that spear. I was really sad when she melted it down.
Wes: Spears are great weapons. They need to be in more shows.
Oren: Yeah, I do love spears. Someone get me like a Jedi with a long stick with a lightsaber taped to the end.
[Laughter]I’m into this. It can be like in the extended universe books where they started introducing weird lightsaber customization features where you could have like a nine-foot lightsaber blade.
Chris: Whoa.
[Laughter]Oren: It’s like, this is getting out of hand.
Chris: Let’s not do that.
Oren: Or you could make your lightsaber catch on fire. So it would do extra fire damage. You know, if there’s one thing a lightsaber needs, it’s more damage.
Chris: Well, apparently now somebody can walk away after they get stabbed through the midsection with a lightsaber. So apparently it does need fire damage.
Wes: Yeah, I guess so.
Oren: Yeah, that’s the problem, man. The Sith need that extra 1d6 of fire damage. They just can’t get a killing blow without it.
[Laughter]Chris: For me, when it comes to negative treasure, cursed items, I always keep thinking of in Voyage of the Dawn Treader: the dragon bracelet.
Oren: Oh, that thing creeped me out. Not because it turns you into a dragon. That’s fine. But because it didn’t grow when you became a dragon.
Chris: That was really creepy.
Oren: Just freaking crushing your arm now. I hate everything about it. I was scared to wear rings for years after that. Not like I wore a lot of jewelry anyway, but I was definitely mildly afraid of putting on a ring and worrying that my hand would grow while I was asleep.
Wes: I get that for sure.
Chris: Yeah, that part was not necessary. The thing that really helped the story was turning Eustace into a dragon.
Oren: That is a good part of the story. It’s as good as Eustace’s arc was ever going to be. It resolves his arc really fast after that, but I still liked the dragon transformation.
Chris: I do think that in a lot of cases with treasure, it is almost like a karmic problem where storytellers don’t want to give their heroes treasure unless they need it, not just because they want it. And there may be some exceptions, especially if the hero has kind of gone through a lot of excessive hardships to get the treasure. But I think in that case, that’s often when it’s, oh, we didn’t get the treasure, but friendship was the reward all along.
[Laughter]We didn’t actually need it for anything as opposed to, oh, my parents’ business is going to be foreclosed on. Now I need money, and then you get treasure to pay for it. And then often heroes just give away the rest. Or if they get a bunch of treasure, they don’t need it for anything. They often give it away.
Oren: Sometimes they put a portal on a balloon and the balloon spews the treasure out over the rest of the town.
[Laughter]We’re getting close to the end here, but I do have one more thing I want to mention, which as I talked earlier about using quest rewards as the stakes. And there’s a cautionary tale I want to share, which is that you need to be careful that the quest reward isn’t just a cool thing that you as the author want your character to have. So I read the novel Chilling Effect a little while ago. Some spoilers for that novel. The big thing that the protagonist is trying to get at the end of the story is that she wants her ship back, because she had a cool ship at the beginning, and it gets stolen from her about halfway through. And now she has I guess a less cool ship? Although granted, it’s kind of unclear why her first ship is better, but it’s supposed to be better in some unspecified way. So her big motivation is that she wants to get her ship back, and it’s just kind of a weak motivation, because she doesn’t need the ship for anything. She’s already got a new ship, which I actually have more attachment to than the first ship, because she spent a bunch of time fixing it up and getting it space-worthy. So that felt a little too video game-y. That was like, yeah, well, we need to get the cool ship back so that it has better stats for us to blow things up better with.
Chris: Are there any actual stakes, like negative stakes?
Oren: No. If she doesn’t get her ship back, she won’t have her ship back.
Chris: Right, so that’s the problem, is that’s not capable of generating tension, because it doesn’t matter. There’s no negative consequences if she doesn’t get her ship back.
Oren: Yeah, basically. That’s the issue. And I’ve seen that sort of problem in client manuscripts on a fairly regular basis. This was just one of the only times I’d seen it in a published work, so I thought it was worth pointing out.
Alright, well, I think that’s a good note to end this on. We now have the reward of a podcast episode. That’s basically good. That’s the same as a pile of gold.
Chris: We can say that’s the reward we earned for talking for half an hour. You can read what you like into that.
Okay, if you enjoyed this episode, please support us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s the popular writing software Plottr, which you can learn about at plottr.com. Then there’s Callie Macleod. Next we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
[Outro Music]Chris: This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.
Spell books and mystic sigils are all well and good, but what if you’re planning a story with lots of fights? For that matter, what if the spell books and mystic sigils are part of the fights? This week, we’re talking about how to design your magic system for maximum action entertainment. Sorcerous martial arts, psychic duels, and shimmering shields abound! Plus, you know there will be complaints about pro-bending, right? How could there not be?
Show Notes Channeling * The Art * Q * Bending * Blood Witches * Pro-Bending * The Force * Allomancy * Orogeny * Borg Shields * Dragon Age Magic * Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Anna.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.
[Intro Music]Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren.
Chris: And I’m Chris. And before we get started, just letting you know we are looking for audio editing volunteers. No experience is necessary. We will train you just to make us sound good.
Oren: Please make us sound good. [Chris laughs] You have no idea how much we need that.
Chris: Anyway, just go to mythcreants.com/volunteer.
Oren: Alright, so it’s time for a magic battle. Very exciting. So you’re gonna make a shield and I’m gonna shoot little bolts at the shield until it either goes away or I get tired. Does that sound like fun? It’s like a lot of fun, right? Very exciting.
Chris: To make it more exciting, maybe we can just make it last longer. You know, make it epic size?
Oren: Yeah, I could make the bolts real big and glowy.
Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’ll make the shield super huge. Oh, it’ll be a dome.
Oren: Everyone loves domes. So magic, designing magic systems is hard and I really struggle with it. So I thought that it would be useful to focus specifically on making a magic system that is for fighting. If you want to do a lot of magic fights in your setting, what should you design your magic to be like? Because I’ve encountered a number of stories, both published and unpublished, where the author clearly wants to have a lot of magic battles but did not design their magic to work for magic fights. And so as a result, the fights are boring, or contrived, or over too quickly and such. So this is a way to concentrate and figure out if this is what you want your magic to do.
Chris: And like, usually when we talk about fights, we also have to point out the difference between movies and books because it’s not the same. Movies, of course, are very good at making magic look cool. So we can have what is actually a very boring magic system or just a magic system that’s not optimized for fighting. So maybe it’s interesting, but the fights would be really boring and they’ll do all kinds of things to make it look super cool. Even though the fight isn’t actually that exciting in a way that a book would take advantage of. A book has to focus more on the strategy of the situation and has to carefully communicate first what is happening, which is hard enough when you have a whole bunch of people moving around and not just moving around, but also using magic, which has to be explained.
And part of what is happening is who is currently winning and why. And then they have to know what could happen. Right? So if you want your protagonist to feel threatened, we need to know that something could threaten them. If your protagonist just comes up with whatever magic is super cool in the moment and can do just about anything (which there are lots of stories where that is the case), how do you threaten that person? They’re on fire right now, but we know that they can just kind of like, wave their wand and that fire will turn into water and they’ll be completely healed. There’s not going to be much sense of threat in that situation.
Oren: Wheel of Time has that problem, which, because the mages can do practically anything. Age of Myth has it even worse. The book Age of Myth, where the mages are just at Q-levels of power. So like when two of them are fighting, I have no idea who’s winning. One of them throws a house at the other one and it’s like, is that bad? Is having a house land on you a problem for these mages? I can’t tell. I have no way to know.
Chris: [laughs] So yeah, the first question is just, are you limiting your magic? If you have a really long range ability to like, blow up anything, it’s not going to be much of a fight. Somebody just does spells in their basement.
Oren: Anything that instantly ends the fight, that there’s no defense against, is not good. And it gets worse the more easily it can be used. Like the further away you have to be, or the less effort you have to put into it. Avatar starts to have that problem towards the end with Korra, especially with bloodbending. Like bloodbending is actually very boring. It’s fine as a scary thing for the bad guy to do to show how threatening he is. But once you actually get into the fights, he can’t use his bloodbending because it just ends the fight immediately. Winx Saga on Netflix had the same problem. There were a bunch of characters, they were called blood witches, who, their power was just instant mind control. And so to stop them from just ending fights immediately, we just had to introduce a bunch of situations in which their powers didn’t work. It just started to feel like now it’s gone the other direction. Now they just feel useless.
Chris: So just having good limits is really important to keep the fight interesting. Because if one person can just insta-kill the other person, there’s no strategy that can happen there. Or having a death spell that’s equivalent to just shooting a gun or like a wand. A gun is at least better because a gun can run out of ammo. If your character has a kill spell, they don’t have any reason but to point their wand at the other person and be like, “kill, kill, kill,” all over and over again. And that’s just not very interesting.
Oren: That also can get into another common problem, which is repetitive powers, where you have a bunch of different powers that more or less do the same thing. I’d rather not mention it, but there’s a certain wizard school story, which is the poster child for this, because the characters have like 50 different spells, all of which do some variation of “point your wand and it incapacitates whoever’s on the other end” in various ways. And it’s like, there are not that many ways that you can do that that are actually interesting. Like, oh, well now the blast you shoot is green instead of red. [Chris laughs] That doesn’t actually make it that much more interesting. And even Avatar starts to run into this problem in Korra, but not just in Korra, but that’s where it really starts to become obvious, is that they have different bending powers, but often the bending powers just kind of end up being various flavors of “push your opponent backwards.” That’s most notable in pro-bending, where they added a bunch of restrictions that made the fight less interesting, and now they literally are just shoving each other back and forth. And I don’t know whose idea that was, but it doesn’t work very well.
Chris: Right, it’s also because it was a kids show, and so they don’t really want to show people getting burned. So fire pushes people back now.
Oren: Roasting someone alive. So I wanted to talk about two extremely broad strategies that you can go with, with your magical combat. And I found that, I think pretty much all books are going to fall into one of these categories, but that’s not impressive. It’s just because they’re very broad. There is the enhanced physical fight, in which the characters are still fighting with their bodies in some capacity, but they have additional powers that help them do that. Avatar is like that. Star Wars is like that. The Art of Prophecy book that I’ve talked about a few times recently is like that. Mistborn is like that. Any kind of magical martial arts story is going to be that way. And then the other extremely broad category is where your protagonist is basically not using their body in any meaningful way, and is just dueling with powers themselves. Which is rarer, but still happens. And The Broken Earth is probably the most notable example right now. Because when two mages in The Broken Earth fight, what they do with their hands basically doesn’t matter. They’re entirely dueling with their magic powers. So first things first, pick one of those. Decide which one you want.
Chris: There is opportunity for a little bit of blurring. So if your characters aren’t really doing martial arts, but where they stand ends up mattering for how good the magic is. Maybe there’s some ley lines, and if they are immediately on top of that ley line, for instance, they can cast better magic. They might still have reasons to use maneuvering their position as a strategy during the fight, or doing magic to get the other person off of the ley line to reduce their power might be a thing. You can still use a little bit of movement and spacing if you want, but it’s not the same as doing martial arts with some magic.
Oren: Okay, so the first thing that I recommend for your magic, when you’re adding defensive magical options, you usually want those to be active defenses. Such as jumping out of the way, or some kind of difficult deflection spell, or something like that. You don’t usually want all of your magic defenses to be like a passive shield or a suit of armor. Some of that is fine. It can help explain how your characters survive, despite having these very spectacular attacks hurled at them. But if that’s like the entirety of their defense, then that just gets kind of boring, because they just stand there and take hits.
Chris: You definitely don’t want defenses to be super reliable, because you also don’t want, for instance, a shield spell that a character can just cast over and over again. You want the possibility that the defense will fail, or some way for the attacker to get around it so that they have to change tactics. I’m actually reminded of the Borg. They have adapted! [both laugh] Okay, this character’s using this type of shield. Maybe there’s a way to get around it, or certain types of spells that get past that type of shield.
Oren: Yeah, I mean, and like, the bad guy having a form of invincibility or resilience that they use offensively is a little different. The Borg don’t just like, sit there and wait for your phaser to run out. They come at you. So there’s a certain amount of like, alright, well now we can’t shoot them and we need to think of another way to beat them or something. And that usually involves shooting them with something that isn’t an energy weapon for some reason. [both laugh] Bullets, they could never adapt to that.
Chris: That is hilarious when sci-fi settings pull out, like, okay, but like, what about the physical bullet?
Oren: Yeah, Stargate did that too, where it was like, the replicators are basically immune to everything except bullets. Bullets can kill them. It’s like, well, that’s convenient.
Chris: So if you have a battle, it could be just magical or there’s no reason you couldn’t do this if you’re doing like, physical martial arts too. Basically you want to create strategies that you can communicate to readers and that your characters can use to be clever, right? And that can change from fight to fight. The more fights you have, the more you need to be able to vary those fights so that every fight doesn’t feel the same. So basically what you want is lots of different levers that you can pull to affect the outcome of the fight and make the situation different this time. And one way to do that is to just think through all the different ways that your magic can break down or go wrong, right? Which is something I encourage people to do anyway, because you’re always going to have times in the story where magic is a little inconvenient. And on one hand, it can be a little bit much if you’re like, oh, it’s like the transporter fails for a different reason every time. That would solve the problem. But still, it’s good for magic to not always work.
For example, it’s very common in magic systems for characters to need to concentrate to do magic. It’s like, just concentrate, just concentrate. But strangely, once a character learns to concentrate, that almost never goes wrong. I almost never see stories where the concentration is only for a little training arc that’s usually underdeveloped. We never see people who are proficient in magic have problems with concentration, but there’s so many reasons why we might not be able to concentrate. And there are tactics an opponent can use to break somebody’s concentration. Anything from just a loud bang right nearby, that would make it hard to concentrate. Or you could go with the whole “your loved ones calling out to you” thing if we want to be much more clever about it. But if your characters have to do X in order to cast magic, that’s potentially something that could be disrupted, even if it’s something like, internal, like concentration.
Similarly, if you have an elemental system and they need to have access to that element, they can’t just generate it automatically. You probably don’t want to take all of the element away from them because, or at least not for the full fight. Maybe you take it away and they get it back. But you could have a strategy that’s about reducing it. So for instance, if you have a water mage and a fire mage, and the water mage can’t control steam in the air, the fire mage might use a tactic that’s designed to grind down the amount of water that the water mage controls by boiling it.
Oren: I like that concept. I do find it kind of annoying when you have an elemental system and like only one element has that problem and it’s always water. It’s assumed for whatever reason by default that fire mages can just make fire and earth mages always have earth around, basically. Most of these stories never take place somewhere where there isn’t any earth. And then air mages always have air or they would be dead. But with water mages, it’s like, ah, well now there’s no water. Drat. [Chris laughs] It starts to feel like picking on water.
Chris: Well, I will say if the fire mage can’t just create fire in thin air, the water mage is definitely going to have an advantage for that one.
Oren: Yeah, I agree, I agree.
Chris: Yeah. And then your magic systems have their own trickiness because you need to make them roughly equivalent enough if you’re doing lots of fights.
Oren: They have to be the same but different.
Chris: Same but different. But for instance, if your characters have magic tattoos, okay, what happens when somebody gets injured in a way that breaks their tattoo? That creates a new pattern there. Could that mean that their magic goes wrong? And just look at all the aspects of your magic system. Be like, “okay, where could it break down?” That’s a potential attack vector that somebody could use and the fight could then focus on that. Now you need a reason why, again, they would do that instead of just doing the insta-kill spell, which is why you don’t really want insta-kill spells. You want something where a person has to be clever to get around the other person’s kind of defensive or has a reason to try to get an advantage, right, for later in the fight.
Oren: The Broken Earth is actually a very good example here. So The Broken Earth has a clear objective that you’re trying to achieve in a magic battle, which is you are trying to break the other mage’s Torus, which is a fancy way of saying their little donut of magic that’s around them. Because if you break that, you can’t use your powers without an intact Torus, and if you can’t use your powers, you’re basically helpless against another mage. And so first it’s like, alright, that’s what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to break their Torus. And then, how do you do that? And so it creates this interesting system where you have to try to figure out, okay, should I put all of my energy into one point and attack there, but then they can avoid that attack? Should I split them into multiple attacks and hit them from different directions? And you have to try to find different sources of power from within the ground, because it’s all geology-based, so you’re trying to find hot spots or pockets of gas that you can use to draw power from. And so it creates a very active magic system. With a goal that is clear and easy to understand, but multiple ways to accomplish it. And no, like, one single, “I get out my Torus-piercing bullet and shoot it.” It’s a remarkably good combat system. I really like it.
One of the problems with that book is that there isn’t nearly enough mage-on-mage fighting, even though that’s like the best part. [Chris laughs] Because it’s an Oppressed Mages story. It’s like, I would really love it if the battle was between two factions of mages instead.
Chris: Yeah, that sounds cool.
Oren: It’s so cool. Anyway, so that’s an example. There aren’t that many examples of books with good magic systems for fighting.
Chris: Unfortunately.
Oren: Broken Earth is one of the few I could find, and so I feel the need to trumpet it.
Chris: Well, I mean, similarly to, you know, what makes the magic break down, you could also go with, can you add something fun that would give somebody an advantage? You just have to be, again, be careful that the advantage is not too big, because you don’t want, like, “I do this and then the battle is over.” Well, I mean, that might be very convenient for one fight, but if you have lots of fights. For instance, my example of, maybe it matters where they stand, and then you have a reason for them to try to do a weird king-of-the-hill situation, for instance, where they’re both trying to stand on this little hillock and like fighting over it. [laughs]
Oren: “You give me that. That’s my hilltop!”
Chris: Or anything else that could be interesting. One of them is upwind, or has other things about them. Items on them. Maybe you have a system where they have rings that help a little bit, and they can knock rings off of each other’s hands or something like that. So there’s lots of different options here, but basically you’re looking for things that could make the difference, you know, give an advantage or a disadvantage, or be the difference between winning and losing, so that you have different things to focus on in different fights.
And it’s also helpful, I think, if your mages are a little different from each other. And it doesn’t have to be like they inherently have one talent or the other, but you know, they can be trained in certain ways so that they focus on some tactics over other tactics. And that way they can do a little bit of sizing up. What’s this person good at, what they’re not good at. Just like all the times when we have physical fights. It’s all about, okay, this person is very fast, but they’re not very strong, so they can’t take a hit very well. That kind of thing. It’s also nice if you can do that during magic battles.
Oren: I had one client story, and I’m changing the details of this because it’s a client story, but the general concept is the same, where the idea was basically that characters can activate more magical abilities, but doing that comes with risk of either exhausting themselves faster or losing control of their magic. So it was like (as an example, this isn’t what it actually manifested as, but without telling you the details of someone’s unpublished story), suppose you had a series of magic gemstones. You could like, socket them into your magic wrist gemstone holder. And the more you put in, the more powers you had access to, but also the faster you are drained and the greater the chance of a bad reaction between the two spells. So that creates an interesting choice that the character has to make, of like, “Okay, how many powers do I want at one time? What’s the risk worth here?” That was just a really cool concept, and it introduced a bunch of fun strategies for the mages in this client’s story to use in fighting. I really liked it.
Chris: Yeah, any time the choice to use magic has to be strategic. Like, one of the things that’s interesting is if you have a system where you have to prepare magical things in advance, as opposed to just during the fight doing spells, that can be, you know, that has its own strengths and weaknesses. But if your character is like, okay, I’ve used up my magical battery, and now I have a finite number of spells that I can use, these spells left, now I have to suddenly be strategic. And there’s a cost to using magic now. And now I can only use it if it’s actually worth it, right? Where I have to like, “wait till I see the whites of their eyes” is basically the equivalent. [Oren laughs] Don’t shoot until you have a good shot, because we have limited ammunition. It’s similarly, you gotta hold on and only use a spell once you know it will have maximum effect if you only have a limited number of spells. So anything that has a tradeoff that comes with a cost, then the character has a reason to be more strategic than they were before, as opposed to again, just spamming the insta-kill spell as fast as you can for the entire fight.
Oren: If you’re primarily experienced with magic systems through videogames, this is a place where you’re going to run into problems. Because in a videogame, you can have like, fire, lightning and ice. And each of those have a different, like secondary effect. Fire puts a damage over time, lightning gives a paralysis and ice slows them or something. And like in a videogame, sure, that totally could work. But in a story, unless it’s a very specific type of story, hitting someone with fire, lightning or ice will have roughly the same effect in that they will be dead. [both laugh] Those secondary effects aren’t going to matter, so you have to think about it in terms of real humans and the way real human bodies work. You can’t count on very abstract secondary effects that only work in video game logic.
Chris: Unless you’re a Dragon Age cartoon show, though.
Oren: Yeah, I mean. [both laugh]
Chris: This new Dragon Age show, which was very surprising that it kept using all the same mechanics as the videogame.
Oren: Yeah, it was weird. Character gets like, stabbed in the back and just walks it off because they’re fine. Because they have hit points left.
Chris: Well, it does feel like Dragon Age. So that’s success there, I guess.
Oren: Yeah, it definitely feels like Dragon Age. [both laugh]
Chris: I think it’s worth looping back on the fact that you want to make characters do more with less. We’ve talked about these situations where we have magic powers that just get out of hand. And I think bloodbending is such a great example because it shows you why we add things like that to the story in the first place. For one episode, it was really impressive and cool and intimidating. And so it had its purpose at that time. But then when we start to use it more and we get used to it, then suddenly it’s bloodbending everywhere all the time and our fights are just less interesting.
Oren: Right. And I was thinking about bloodbending too, right? Because I was like, all right, what if they… Because in Korra, they added a ton of special things onto bloodbending to make it even more overpowered.
Chris: And they didn’t have to.
Oren: That was a completely unforced error. There was no reason to do that.
Chris: I do think that once you add something that’s cool to your story, you want to bring it back outside of its original context. And that’s part of the problem here. Because originally, bloodbending was very difficult. It could only do it during the full moon.
Oren: And that was something that I was thinking about. I was like, what if they hadn’t added all of that nonsense to bloodbending that they do in Korra and make it able to take bending away and work when not on a full moon and not even have to make motions to do it? What if they just hadn’t done any of that? What role would bloodbending have had in the story? And I was forced to conclude I still think it would be kind of not good because it would basically just come down to Katara can auto-win a one-on-one fight during full moons. That’s what bloodbending came down to. If it requires full moons, that basically means it almost never comes up. Except if it did come up on a full moon, then the fight would be kind of boring.
Chris: There’s exactly one bloodbending plot you can do, which is “character learns bloodbending for the first time.” [laughs]
Oren: You could arrange things so that on the full moon, she has to fight multiple enemies because she can only bloodbend one person at a time, presumably. So maybe you could make it work that way. But once you find yourself having to limit a power by like, a certain time slot that it can be used in, that’s already a bad sign.
Chris: Right, I mean I do think with bloodbending we could have had maybe one additional episode where Katara uses it when she really doesn’t want to. Right? Uses it out of desperation. And then the full moon just doesn’t come back for the rest of the show. And fast forward to Korra, Korra learns bloodbending for the first time. It’s also still super creepy, the end.
But yeah, besides that, I think the other thing that happens a lot is that people who show their protagonist learning magic, they really want the climax to be showing, “Oh hey look at all the cool, powerful things they can do now!” But that doesn’t actually make for the most exciting climax. Because you’re just escalating all of the powers. They probably won’t feel threatened. It’s going to be really hard to keep track of what’s going on. So I think in many cases it’s almost better to, if your protagonist is growing in power, make them show off during the penultimate fight. And then for this climax, force them to show a lot of ingenuity by taking things away from them, right?
And again, if you have lots of levers, if you have reasons why your magic wouldn’t work, then you should be able to do this. If you don’t have any way to take the magic away from them, then you’re kind of forced to wait until the very end of the story to give them magic so that it doesn’t get in the way of conflict. But if you have those levers, then what you can do is they can show off for the penultimate fight and then during the climax, “Oh no! Their magic item was broken or their magical battery is out” or, you know, whatever you want to do, and then show that they are so good that they can overcome this obstacle by being clever. And showing finesse, for instance, instead of just like raw power. That kind of thing. Or in some cases, you can loop back onto the lessons that they were learning when they were just starting. It’s like, “Oh, you need to be more disciplined. You know, do your breathing exercises.” “Oh, breathing exercises are so boring!” And then like, at the very end, “Oh, I’ve got nothing left except for these breathing exercises.” [both laugh]
Oren: A breathing exercise to save the world.
Chris: Something like that.
Oren: Here’s a question as we’re coming to the end of our time: What did you think of the magic fighting in Mistborn?
Chris: Now that I think about it, it did feel kind of like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I didn’t actually think about it that way at the time, but when I was told after, I was like, oh yeah, that does make sense because they’re leaping off of rooftops a lot.
Oren: Right, if you are a Mistborn in the setting, you can do that. That’s one of the things about it that I found kind of annoying is that it felt like, to do the cool stuff, you basically have to be one of the Special Mages who gets all eight powers. Because like, with just one of those powers, there’s not really a lot you can do. But with all eight of them, you can base, or at least with, there are a few that don’t really matter, but with like two or three, you can do magical kung-fu fighting.
Chris: On the plus side though, that means that you can have your super special chosen one who has all of the powers and not have them insta-win because they’re super powerful.
Oren: That’s true.
Chris: That’s definitely a tradeoff. There’s so many people who want to do the trope of, “My main character has all the powers and everybody else just has one.” Right? It’s good wish fulfillment. I think that when you get to an elemental system that has like eight different elements, right? It’s one thing for Aang to have access to all four elements. Of course he also has the Avatar State, which is the real broken.
Oren: Yeah, that’s the real issue.
Chris: But if you have eight elements, think of how much that magnifies the difference in power level and it’s just gonna make it harder for you to keep that under control.
Oren: Or alternatively, the way that Mistborn addresses that problem is that like five of the eight kind of suck [Chris laughs] and they don’t really matter that much. It’s like, “Oh boy, I have eight powers. One of them is: the ability to notice when someone else is using magic.” And then another one is the ability to prevent that first power from working. There’s like the one to see far away, which is situationally useful. And then there’s like the three that are actually good, which is super strength, and then like the ability to pull metal towards you or push it away from you, which are like the three that actually matter in the story.
Chris: Yeah, I mean, it’s worth noting that Mistborn also has a limit in that they all rely on metals that get burned up. So you have kind of a limited time span quantity, which is also, I think, a good choice there.
Oren: It gives you a good built-in reason why they can’t use their powers forever. Admittedly, it does have certain shades of like, they’ll get tired because I don’t know how long the metal that they’ve taken will last. They can tell me in the story, but like, I have no way of knowing how many seconds have gone by.
Chris: If you have any limit that’s like they get tired, their energy fades, or, you know, we have a limited quantity of material, something that’s, you know, not binary, that’s like an amount that diminishes, the key is really being consistent about it and not just, hey, this would be a convenient time for them to get tired. It should always be present and used consistently, and then it will feel a lot better.
Oren: Alright, well, that’s a good note, I think, to end this podcast because we are out of time.
Chris: If you found this episode useful, become a patron. You can support us on patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, we have the popular writing software Plottr, which you can learn more about at plottr.com. Then there’s Callie Macleod. Next we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
[Outro Music]
Turning points. We know them, we love them. Without a turning point, a conflict gives no satisfaction – it just fizzles out. But are all turning points good? Absolutely not. This week, we’re showing you the highest highs and the lowest lows of all the turning points we could find. And some of the bad ones aren’t even from the MCU. Amazing!
Show Notes Turning Point * Character Karma * Fractal Plotting * Free Guy * Daughter of the Moon Goddess * Space Opera * Rocky * Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness * Elantris * The Separation * Spider-Man: Homecoming * Wolfpack TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Lady Oscar.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.
[Intro Music]Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Chris.
Oren: And I’m Oren.
Chris: [dramatic voice] The Mythcreant Podcast is in dire straits. For one, Wes was clearly captured by a villain. Why else wouldn’t he be here?
Oren: Oh no.
Chris: Now, it’s the moment of truth. Can we save the podcast with our clever wits or unfaltering determination? [end dramatic voice] Speaking of which, we could use some audio volunteers. [laughter] Yes, that’s right. The turning point is you, dear listeners. If you’re interested, no experience necessary, we’ll train you how to do it. Just go to mythcreants.com slash volunteer. [ting sound]
Oren: You can help us sound way smarter than we actually are.
Chris: Okay, I will now assume the podcast was saved. Or, alternately, we just committed a misdeed by asking for volunteers during the opening gag.
Oren: Oh, no!
Chris: We’ll get our comeuppance shortly.
Oren: We have bad character karma now, that needs to be balanced out.
Chris: So, this time we are talking about good and bad turning points. What are turning points again? That is a very valid question.
Oren: Yeah, who is turning point?
Chris: They’re one of the most advanced storytelling concepts. When we’re doing editing, we don’t usually talk about turning points unless the plot is already pretty strong. Because they do take a little bit of effort to wrap your brain around.
But basically, a turning point is how you make your resolution feel satisfying, feel right. You’ll have a moment at the climax–the climax of the climax, if you will. And that is the difference between failure and success. And your protagonist needs to do something impressive under difficult circumstances. Or, alternately, if it’s a downward turning point, it means they did something like taking the easy route. Or succumbing to temptation. So you can have a satisfying ending that is happy or sad. Either way, it just makes the outcome feel deserved. And it gives it meaning, too. If you don’t have a good turning point, a lot of times the end just feels kind of pointless. Because you’re not making a point. So, there are many different ways you can do turning points. And, it would take quite a while for us to get into it. But generally, most of the time we’re focusing on positive turning points because most stories end happily. So, that’s what you’re going to focus on. And usually, the hero is going to win because they’re clever, or they’re selfless, or they persevere and do what is necessary, such as making a sacrifice.
Oren: You’re usually demonstrating one or more of those three qualities when you’re doing a turning point. There are occasional other things, but those are the ones that will get the job done most of the time.
Chris: Turning points actually happen at all levels of the fractal. When you get to the big climax of the story, you really want the protagonist to do something that feels impressive, that stands out. So if they’re making a sacrifice, it has to be a significant sacrifice. If they’re going to be clever, the puzzle should seem real difficult. If they have to just push past pain–this is a common one that comes up in movies because movies have a little bit more trouble with turning points. If you see a moment where the hero gets shot and then they manage to get up again, generally that’s their turning point. It’s like, see, because they had willpower and they just pushed through all that pain. Which we can talk about whether that’s a good idea, but that’s what they’re doing there.
Oren: I mean, it tends to work better in movies because we can have the actors there to show us how much pain they’re in. And so it’s like, all right, well, that looks like an effort of will. That was hard work. So not that you can’t do it in prose, it’s just a little more difficult to communicate emotion at that level.
Chris: So should we start with a good turning point, or a bad one?
Oren: Well, we should start with something nice, I think.
Chris: Okay, so my favorite still is the climax of Free Guy. For anybody who’s not familiar, the concept of this movie is that the main character is a video game NPC, non-player character, and he basically starts to gain the powers of a player. And again, I’m going to have to spoil this. We’re going to spoil all the things we’re talking about because we have to talk about the ending turning point. So there’s not really a way to get around that, sorry. So the way that he manages to get the powers of a player is he gets these special glasses. Before, he was operating on a predetermined route where he would just repeat the same actions over and over again as an NPC. And then he gets the glasses on and suddenly he sees that he’s just repeating himself and starts learning and kind of evolving beyond that little NPC role and becoming a protagonist. And as the movie goes on, he wants to empower all the other NPCs. So he’s trying to encourage them to rethink what they’re doing and try new things and experiment. But these glasses are, you know, enabling him to do what he does and giving him a lot of power. So the villain controls the game server, and to get rid of Free Guy, he creates Dude. [laughter]
So the characters are Guy and Dude, don’t forget, which is a version of Guy who’s super muscled and has been designed just for violence. I designed this super violent NPC for the explicit purpose of replacing Guy and also tearing him apart. So the climax is when we do this fight, which is kind of like a mirror mode fight, except for Dude, of course, has been given all of these inherent fighting abilities. The turning point comes when Guy, the main character, just in case you mix up Guy and Dude, has been pinned down by Dude and is really struggling and he’s getting choked. And, for the turning point, he puts his all-powerful glasses on Dude. It’s such a good turning point because it just meets multiple criteria for what makes a happy ending feel deserved. For one thing, putting the glasses on Dude shows that Guy considers Dude to be another person, who is worthy of agency and having his own life outside of the constraints that have been programmed for him, despite the fact that he’s being actively attacked by Dude. So that’s really selfless.
Oren: It shows a level of compassion that is refreshing to see in big budget movie characters.
Chris: So, it meets the selfless criteria, but it’s also just very clever. We know that he became self-aware when he got his glasses. Giving your greatest weapon, that he’s been using continuously during the fight, to the person who’s about to defeat him is just not an intuitive move to make. So it’s a very clever thing to do on top of that. And then, instantly after that turning point happens, we see the reward. Dude is really delighted to have these new glasses, and so he just gets distracted playing with the glasses and doesn’t bother trying to go after Guy anymore.
Oren: Yay! Yeah, no, that was really good. That movie was better than I expected it to be. I was admittedly a little bit like, oh man, it’s another Ryan Reynolds vehicle where he’s playing a video game protagonist. But it worked out much better than I thought it would.
Okay, so this one is a little less well-known. This is from a novel that I read recently called Daughter of the Moon Goddess, by Sue Lynn Tan. So, the protagonist has a problem, which is that she needs to give the Emperor these pearls that she’s found so that he’ll release her mother. But the pearls contain the souls of these dragons, and that’s why the Emperor wants them, because he wants to control the dragons. And the dragons don’t want to be controlled by the Emperor, because the Emperor’s kind of a rude man. So we have this moral dilemma. And so here she has a clever realization, that I really liked, where she realizes that she promised to give the Emperor the pearls, but didn’t say anything about the dragon souls. Those were just assumed, because they’re attached to the pearls. And so she realized that she can free the dragons, so that no one can control them, and then give over the pearls, which fulfills her end of the bargain. Now admittedly, as I read this, I was like, okay, this feels like maybe this is an invitation for the Emperor to fulfill his side of the bargain by releasing the mother into a pit of snakes. [laughter]
But I was like, all right, it’s not perfect, but it’s very clever. I like it. I thought it made sense. It had a very, almost fairy tale type of ending quality to it. And I should note, all of my examples, my good ones, are from books, because I’ve noticed that books tend to have a harder time with turning points than movies and TV shows do. So I desperately looked for book turning points to find, and I eventually compiled my list. If it was me, if I was editing that, I might have suggested that they make it so that the Emperor doesn’t realize that the dragons aren’t in the pearls until after he’s released the mom, and then they, like, get out of town. [laughter] I think that would have been my suggestion to improve that a little bit. But it still, it wasn’t bad, as was. It worked fine.
Chris: The other option, if you really want to feel good editing and don’t want to feel like the protagonist just got one over on the Emperor and actually fulfilled her deal, I think you would need to change the Emperor’s character.
Oren: You could make the Emperor someone who would respect that kind of cleverness. I honestly would have preferred that. I found the Emperor a little bit too cacklingly evil. But yeah, that would also have worked.
Chris: And you just do some things early in the story to demonstrate that your evil character is actually very lawful and respects that kind of thing. Alright, how about a bad one?
Oren: Yeah, tell me a bad one. I’m ready.
Chris: Okay. I think the baddest one has to be Space Opera.
Oren: Oh gosh, Space Opera. Man, that’s been a while. This is the novel by Catherynne Valente?
Chris: Mm-hmm. It managed to have not one, not two, but three deus ex machinas.
Oren: I wrote this in an article, but I don’t remember what they all are now. It’s been so long. [https://mythcreants.com/blog/six-stories-with-failed-turning-points/]
Chris: Basically, we’re in a music contest that is supposed to prove that humanity is sentient enough to continue existing, and the humans have no way to win because all of the aliens basically cheat. Like, they have a song that releases brain worms, and the brain worms go into the audience and then give them various feelings, and that’s why their music is supposed to be better. It’s like, okay, but that’s not music, that’s just technology.
Oren: Yep, they have mind control worms or super tech or whatever, and it’s like, alright, this is clearly rigged from the start. And yet, at the same time, also it feels too easy, because remember, they don’t have to win, they just have to not come in last. And it’s really weird to me that they aren’t talking about that more, they aren’t being like, okay, how do we make sure we beat whoever the other worst team is? They just never acknowledge that. And in fact, at one point, I thought they had actually just won by default, because a number of teams were sabotaged and didn’t show up, and it said that they were automatically losers. So I guess that doesn’t count? But I thought it did for a while, and I was like, alright, I guess they have won now. [laughter]
Chris: So, basically, a weird alien creature is born, and other things show up at the end that basically screws up the humans’ number when they try to perform. But then because it’s so screwed up, people are like, yeah, we decided we like this. And nothing about it is due to any effort on the part of the protagonists. There’s no agency involved. They don’t make any choices that lead to this outcome at all. The funny thing is that it really would have been better if they had just done what everybody in this contest is doing, which is to eliminate your competition, because that’s allowed–for people to just attack another team.
Oren: Except apparently not. I don’t know why they even bother doing that, since apparently those teams are just not counted anymore. I don’t know. That was weird. I don’t understand how this ranking system works.
Chris: So yeah, deus ex machinas obviously are always a problem, because you need to lay the groundwork for whatever your solution is early, so that it doesn’t feel like you’re just making random stuff up in the moment. But also, your main character has to do something to bring about the end. That’s absolutely essential.
Oren: Alright, I found my article where I mentioned what the other two were. So after this weird alien birth happens, a side character suddenly decides to help them, and it’s like, why is he helping them now? Why didn’t he help them at any other previous point? And the answer is, there is no answer. He just decides to, because the story’s almost over. And so he uses time magic to bring back their dead band member to help them perform. And it’s like, okay. And at this point, it’s kind of unclear, do they even need more help? Because again, they don’t have to win, they just have to be better than last. And then suddenly, the big space black holes who are sapient, or alive in this setting, show up to sing backup for them, because they just think that their song of losing their band member is so sad and tragic. But there was another person here who was singing about losing his entire species. Why is that not tragic enough to get the black holes to show up? It just reminded me of Star Wars, when Leia is comforting Luke, who has lost an old man he’s known for two days, and Leia has lost her entire planet. It was just so weird. And it was also weirdly unnecessary, because it felt like they had already achieved their objective.
Chris: It’s weird how little most of these deus ex machinas actually have to do with the final outcome. We had a creature birth, and that doesn’t really matter, and we brought our dead friend back, and that doesn’t really matter either.
Oren: It would be sort of like if how in Rocky, the big goal with Rocky is that he’s trying to last the whole fight with the champ. He’s not even trying to win. It’s a victory if he gets all the way through it. It would be like if they kept saying that, but then as the fight went on, there were just random people showing up to help him to not only win the fight, but to become the world boxing champion in the last five minutes of the movie.
Okay, my turn for a bad one. Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, in that it made me mad. I assume that’s what they meant. There are not one, but two big turning points in the ending of this movie that are solved by pep talks. First you have Doctor Strange, who is doing a weird communion where he’s trying to get control of the extra dark powers, and a bunch of ghosts are showing up and giving him grief. And his alternate universe girlfriend, Christine, gives him a little pep talk about how you tell those ghosts you’re the boss of them. And he’s like, oh yeah, I guess I should do that. And then he does it. And he’s like, alright, that was weird. And then a little bit later, we have Strange goes up to America Chavez, who is the sexy lamp of this movie, because she doesn’t really do anything, but she does have a randomly malfunctioning portal power that will move the characters around through dimensions whenever the writers want it to. So now they’re in the big fight against the bad guy, and Doctor Strange is like, hey, America, you actually can use your powers if you just believe in yourself. And then he tells her that she’s been controlling her powers the whole time, which is obviously not true. [laughter] I might even respect the movie a little more if it was a deliberate lie to give her confidence, but I don’t think it is. I think we’re supposed to think he’s telling the truth, and somehow that works. That gives her the ability to control her powers that she hasn’t been able to control for the entire movie.
Chris: You know, considering that she remembers using her powers to send her moms away to a different dimension, you think that would make her feel a little guilty?
Oren: You would think, but it’s okay, because the moms only exist for five seconds so that we can cut them out for releases in any countries that have anti-gay laws. So she can’t feel bad about them later, because then that would make it harder to cut out, you see.
Chris: Ooh.
Oren: We’ve solved it.
Chris: Oh, no.
Oren: The real villain was Disney’s moral cowardice. [laughter]
Chris: Oh, dear.
Oren: Although I will give Doctor Strange a little bit of credit. Once America has miraculously gained the ability to control her powers, her idea of opening a portal to a world where Wanda the villain’s imaginary magic children are real is actually very good. I actually like that quite a lot, because that’s a clever idea and it makes sense, and it’s actually something that she could think of and fits with what was happening instead of just suddenly being able to do something.
Chris: Right, because having her children be gone is Wanda’s entire motivation for all of her villainy. It’s not really giving her what she wants, because the other version of Wanda is also there, but then her kids can look at her and be like, how could you do this?
Oren: Right. It’s totally believable that, A, Wanda’s kids would freak out because this evil witch lady is in their house, and that this would get through to Wanda the villain as these kids that she apparently cares for a lot. I don’t buy that part of the story, that she cares about these fake magic kids she invented, but if we assume that she does, which the movie tells us she does, and that’s what America knows, then them thinking she’s a monster would have some effect on her. So that part of it makes sense.
Chris: Alright, back to good.
Oren: Yeah, give me another good one, Chris.
Chris: Since somebody’s like, oh, we should talk about books.
Oren: Mmhmm.
Chris: I like the turning point in Elantris, Brandon Sanders, good old Brando Sando, because it’s about the magic system, and everybody knows he loves his magic systems. And so, it’s really nice to see a storyteller who then makes the problems about the things that they care about, and then makes that at the center and makes a turning point about it. So, in this case, Elantris is this fallen city that used to be basically heavenly looking, glowing buildings, glowing people who have magic and lived forever. And something happened ten years prior where the city just broke, and the people in it just kind of broke. So they still technically live forever, but now they feel the pain of all of their wounds. So they become, you know, non-functional pretty quickly. The main character, Raoden, starts to problem solve how this magic system works during the book, and he studies all of these symbols, and in the great cataclysm that broke the city, there was a big rift that was created. So it came along with a huge natural disaster, and as he puts together the pieces, he realizes that the magic system has symbols that are based on physical features, and that a very big important symbol stopped working because there was a new physical feature in the land that was created, and the symbol no longer matched. So for the turning point, he figures that out, and then draws a line in the ground to fix the symbol.
Oren: That’s very Brandon Sanderson.
Chris: [laughing] It’s very Brandon Sanderson, yeah. But that’s what I really like about it, is because I’m always trying to encourage people to, you know, you can make problems about anything, so you don’t have to add lots of action if that’s not actually what you care about. And so I just love that as an example.
Oren: Center your darlings.
Chris: Yep, center your darlings.
Oren: If this is what you care about, make it the whole point, don’t keep cutting away from the point to get to the thing you care about. Alright, so I’ve got another one. This is from one of the Animorphs books, because I’ve been doing an Animorphs reread. This is from the book Separation, and the basic plot of this book is that Rachel, who is the group’s badass, gets split in two Captain Kirk-style. Fortunately, one of her versions doesn’t become a sex pest, I appreciate that.
Chris: [laughing] Oh, no.
Oren: But she has mean Rachel and nice Rachel, is what they describe them as. There’s some not 100% perfect things in the depiction that I would change if I could, but the basic concept is solid, which is that one side of her has the courage, and the aggression, and the short-term thinking, and the other side of her has her long-term planning, and her ability to care about others and empathize with them. So, the aggressive side is a huge badass but can’t make plans and is constantly messing things up because all she wants to do is charge in, and then the more passive side struggles to do anything because she doesn’t have any courage to help her get over her fear. You have that classic sci-fi setup, and in this case they manage to arrange a scenario where the climax depends on the two of them working together, which demonstrates a certain amount of perseverance, because they really don’t like each other. This is also symbolic of Rachel having a problem where she’s starting to think that she’s a bad person, so she has a lot of self-hate and the two sides don’t like each other, but they have to work together. They need the planning of the passive side and the ability to kick butt of the active side. And then of course they have to make a plan together, and that shows a certain amount of cleverness. And, I also just really appreciated how this book managed to make Rachel’s character arc its throughline, which is a thing that I hear a lot of authors want to do but is very difficult, and they managed to do it in this episode, while also leaving a hook because there was a Yeerk project that they were trying to stop that they weren’t able to, and so they continue to stop it in the next book. But it doesn’t feel like there was a bad resolution because Rachel’s character arc was introduced first, and was more urgent. So it was just very cool. It was a cool way of externalizing the character arc, and I liked when they worked together, and it was just a fun little turning point.
Give me a bad one, Chris. I’m ready.
Chris: Spider-Man: Homecoming.
Oren: Aww yeah, I love that one! Haha!
Chris: So this is actually a very frequent problem that we see with turning points, is where the protagonist just does the same thing and gets different results. Or just does it like, with more spunk. It’s like, were you not trying the first time? So in Spider-Man: Homecoming, we’re going with the theme of great power comes with great responsibility. So, Spider-Man decides to go and solve this big problem, fight this bad guy on his own without calling any backup, and it leads to…was a building being split in half or something?
Oren: A boat, yeah. He’s on a boat, and the boat gets split in half.
Chris: The boat gets split in half. And afterwards, Iron Man berates him for being irresponsible. It’s like, you shouldn’t have taken on this thing and now all this disaster was created. You have not learned your lesson. And then, for the climax, we do the same thing. He does a big fight on an airplane, and the airplane crashes. So that’s just as destructive as the first time, but he manages to catch the villain. And this time Iron Man is totally cool with it. So he made the same decision, it’s just this time he punched a little better. And, that’s not something he should be rewarded for.
Oren: This is definitely a thing that comes up in a number of stories that I’ve worked on where the character’s arc is that he shouldn’t do the thing that he needs to do for the plot to work. And it’s like, that’s just not a good arc. There’s no way that’s going to be satisfying. And this movie, it seems like Peter has this arc of not going and saving the day by himself, because that’s irresponsible. I mean, sure, you can make that argument, but he’s a superhero. That’s literally what he has to do. So there’s no way that character arc is going to end in a way that’s satisfying.
Chris: Yeah, if there was something about his earlier decision, if he was supposed to call for backup and get help, and then he accepted help the second time or something, anything that’s different. But no, he just does the same thing again. And there’s no real learning.
Oren: You could also set it up so that Tony is wrong, and that Tony is basically trying to prevent Peter from doing stuff because he doesn’t think Peter’s ready, but Peter is ready. And that’s possible. You could do that, too. It’s just, they didn’t. It’s just like, I’m going to do this again, but this time it works.
Chris: Because.
Oren: Yeah, because. Because it has to, because the movie’s almost over. All right, I got one more. It’s the ending of Wolfpack.
Chris: Ohh, yup.
Oren: Because–spoilers for the end of Wolfpack. What is even happening here? First, all of the main characters get sent off to their rooms, basically. One of them gets arrested. One of them gets non-consensually committed to a mental health facility. One of them, her brother and her get taken away by social services. And then Luna, the last one, she just stays in the car. [laughter] Like, as far as we know for that entire episode, she’s still just sitting in the car.
Chris: Yeah, there’s no real turning point, unless you think of AU Buffy. We call her “AU Buffy”, it’s “Alternate Universe Buffy”, because she’s played by Sarah Michelle Gellar, and she has definitely been styled to look exactly like Buffy, like makeup and everything. So she’s AU Buffy. Unless she’s the main character.
Oren: Right. She goes and has a final fight with a retired fireman.
Chris: You know, a normal dude. They’re so scary.
Oren: A normal guy, not even like a soldier or a police officer or someone who is good at fighting, just an ex-fireman who’s been working as a janitor for the last 10 years. And she has a gun, and is a werewolf. And she also has backup. She has another badass dude with a gun and her werewolf son is also there. It’s like, what is this? Why is this happening?
Chris: And she’s presented as being somewhat antagonistic for most of the season. So she just kind of steps in and gets everything she wants. Nobody else really has any kind of turning point. It’s just like all of the Teenie characters had their turning point in episode seven. The one thing they do choose to do, that if we were going to change it, is they do have to make the decision in the final episode to go to a parent and tell their parent about the problem. I can definitely see, in a different show, there being an episode about that. But when you have the final episode, that’s just not really climactic enough.
Oren: Right. Especially since it doesn’t even change anything. Because what specifically is happening is that they have a former werewolf. He’s been stabbed. So now he’s in human form, and he’s dying. And they have to decide whether or not to tell their parents, or the one particular parent, the one who knows about werewolves. And they argue about it for a while, and then they eventually decide to. But as I’m watching, I’m like, what is he going to do if they tell him?
Chris: He takes the werewolf to the hospital, and then the werewolf was just stolen from the hospital.
Oren: Right. Because the hospital can’t do anything. He has blood poisoning with silver. What is the hospital going to do? Remove the silver from his blood? They’re going to put him in a centrifuge? It was so weird. And so they told him and it didn’t matter. Nothing changed. It was just, we’re in a different location now. So I guess that’s a lesson, is that moving locations is not the same as a turning point. All right. Well, I think we’re out of time. We gotta get out of here.
Chris: All right. If you enjoyed this episode, support us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com slash mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s the popular writing software Plottr, which you can learn more about at plottr.com. Then there’s Callie Macleod. Next we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
[Outro Music]This has been the Mythcreant Podcast, opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.
Most authors know that when a story ends, they should resolve all the plots they’ve opened. It’s the polite thing to do. But what if you’re only ending a single book in a series, or an episode in a season of TV? What should you resolve then, and are you doomed to be written off as a cliffhanger?! Don’t worry, this week’s episode is here to help. We talk about what needs to be resolved and what can be safely left open for next time, plus some tips if you find yourself with a problem. We also make time to complain about TV these days, because that’s just who we are.
Show Notes Fractal Plotting * The Art of Prophecy * The Name of the Wind * Sailor Moon * Ishamael * Andor * The Mandalorian * Arcane * Picard * Wolf Pack TranscriptGenerously transcribed by James.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle. [opening song]
Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren.
Chris: And I’m Chris.
Oren: And unfortunately, it’s just going to be the two of us. Wes is out for a few weeks, but he will return. And for now, we will entertain you with our storytelling thoughts.
Chris: Before we get started, just letting everybody know we could use more audio editing volunteers. This does not take any experience. We will train you how to do it. So, if you have been frustrated with our likes and our uhms, this is your chance to kill it with fire. Just go to mythcreants.com/volunteer.
Oren: I like the use of just getting their spite as a reason to volunteer.
[laughter]Oren: That’s very clever. Okay, so for the topic today, I thought we would start talking about things to resolve at the end of a story, but then not go back to that. Instead, we can randomly switch topics around, maybe do a little world building, and then end the episode discussing the latest Mandalorian show.
Chris: But we will continually tease that we might, in fact, do this. We’re not going to do it, but we might continue to hint that it will happen.
Oren: And at the end of the episode, we’ll be like, ‘Hey, if you want to hear about resolving things at the ending, you could keep listening next week.’ And we’ll just do that.
Chris: And then just rinse and repeat. Yeah.
Oren: Yeah. Forever.
So, we’re talking about what needs to be resolved when you’re ending a story that is part of a series. This can be the first novel in a series, the second novel in a series, an episode of TV, a novella in a series, a series of short stories, whatever.
You come to the end of an installment in which you publish the story, and we want to talk about what you should resolve when you’re doing that because this is something that my clients struggle with often, and I also see it in a lot of professional stories that are clearly struggling with this too. So, my clients are not alone, but I thought it would be useful to have this discussion as something I could point them to, because there’s just a lot of things going on here.
Chris: I think it’s useful when talking about this to think about what the actual borders of the story are. Because we’re used to thinking ‘Okay, we’ve got a book/we’ve got a movie/we’ve got a TV show.’ But when we look at story structure, when do the storylines actually end?
For instance, in a TV show, it could be that the story is just one episode and it never stretches beyond an episode. In a lot of TV shows, there is a story per season. But in each season, there is basically a different story happening. We don’t see any problems that then resolve in the next season. Or it could just be the entire show is one story.
When we’re looking at a book, it’s like, ‘Does that book have a self-contained story or is it in essence only part of a story?’ So, if you’re looking at the end of the book and you want to figure out how it’s supposed to end, but the story keeps going, you are looking for a mid-story resolution which you would actually have similar things during the book too.
Oren: Mm-hmm. Because it’s all fractal. It’s all the way down, baby~
Chris: Should we talk about why resolutions are important before we get to the end of the story?
Oren: Uh, I think we promised we were going to move away from that topic, actually. So, let’s talk about something else.
Chris: [laughter]
Oren: A resolution at the end of the story is what makes the end of the story feel like the end. It’s what provides the S in A.N.T.S., the ‘Satisfaction’. It’s what makes it feel like there was a point to reading this.
If you don’t have it, you get to the end and you’re like, ‘What was the point of that? Things happened, but it didn’t ever come to anything. It didn’t feel like it mattered. Often, it felt like you could just skip over that, and you wouldn’t really have to watch it too much.’ And that’s not always true but it feels that way anyway. It’s like, ‘Nothing is particularly different from when we started.’
Depending on how the problem is manifesting, it often feels like the story has gone in a giant circle. Especially if this is one of those stories that opens with a really tense, important plot and then just ignores it for a while and then at the end is like, ‘Come back next week if you want to hear about that plot we opened at the beginning.’ And it’s like, ‘Alright, I feel like I’m just back where we started now.’
Chris: If the story is really short, you may just have the end – [laughter] – and you don’t have to worry about, ‘Okay, wait, I have to end some things but keep other things going.’ But if the story has any length at all, a mid-story resolution, whether that’s the end of a book that’s part of a series, the end of an episode that’s part of a whole season, what have you, tells your audience that you care about their experience and that you keep your promises. Because when you introduce a problem, you are promising to deliver a resolution.
If you don’t offer any resolution, don’t offer any satisfaction, you know, you just keep hooking them and hooking them, not giving anything back, and it feels like you’re just stringing people along, they may get pissed off. If they end a book and absolutely nothing is resolved, they may leave. Even if they otherwise like the story. They may feel manipulated, like you’re just doing everything you can to keep them engaged in the story, but you don’t really care about their experience.
Oren: And to a large extent, this is basically the same thing as a cliffhanger.
A lot of people tend to think of cliffhangers as the character being in immediate physical danger or a sudden new problem appearing at the end, but it’s the same effect if you open the story with a big problem and then don’t resolve it or do anything that moves it closer to resolution or what have you by the end of the story. It’s like, ‘Well now, that just feels like I’ve been left hanging. I didn’t get anything out of that.’
And this is tricky because if it’s a story that’s part of a series, you also want to leave some things unresolved so that the series can continue. It’s not like you need to resolve everything, but you need to resolve something, and we’re here to tell you what that something is.
Chris: I do think it’s good to look at the difference between just not having a resolution, having a cliffhanger, and having an ending hook. Because it is okay to have a little plot hook at the end of each book, and that’s actually different than just not having an ending.
Oren, you’ve said that your definition of a cliffhanger is a problem that’s urgent. I think that’s a really good definition, especially since there are other reasons a problem can be high or low tension, because usually cliffhangers are specifically really high-tension problems. But if the stakes are low, nobody’s going to bother doing a cliffhanger, like, ‘Oh no, somebody stole my sandwich!’
Oren: Find out next time!
Chris: Come back next time. And I’m hungry.
Nobody’s going to bother with that.
So really, the difference is usually the stakes. For instance, if we have an end that’s like, ‘Ninjas are attacking!’ and we just end it right there, that’s a cliffhanger. If we have, ‘Hey, we just found out the villain sent some ninjas after us,’ that’s a hook. Because ninjas are coming, but they’re not immediately about to chop your head off.
But a resolution may or may not happen before either of these hooks. It’s just more satisfying if you end one problem, and then your ending hook is opening a new one. Or if you have a lower-tension problem in the background, bringing it back to the forefront as opposed to just not having a resolution at all, and the same problem that we introduced in the beginning is essentially not changed.
Oren: There are usually two broad ways that this manifests. Either there is some kind of urgent problem that was introduced early and it looks like it’s going to be the throughline and then it just gets abandoned or we’re told it will be resolved next time, or sometimes there just isn’t one. That also has a similar effect of, ‘Well, it feels like nothing was resolved here.’
I have two books that are examples of one each, if I may. First is The Art of Prophecy by Wesley Chu. This is a martial arts story, and I’m going to give some spoilers. It’s a pretty recent novel, and it starts with this pretty interesting problem where the protagonist is a mentor, and her student is going to have to fight an evil bad dude as part of a prophecy, but he’s not ready. She has to try to get him ready for training to fight that guy. Okay, that’s kind of neat. That’s a cool twist on the Chosen One arc. But then that arc goes away, because the guy he was supposed to fight randomly dies in an interlude.
Chris: That’s just such a weird choice.
Oren: Everyone’s expectations were thoroughly subverted, I’m sure. The book then has a brief chance where it could have pivoted the problem to being them trying to keep the Chosen One alive because the leaders of their country want to kill him because he’s politically inconvenient. But it misses that chance, and instead the book just kind of does other stuff until the end. It has a bunch of mostly unrelated storylines.
Then at the end, it’s like, ‘Okay, well, we survived that random battle that we just had, and now, now young Chosen One, now I will train you, because I’ve discovered that actually the prophecy refers to another fight that is still going to happen.’
And it’s like, ‘Wait, this is where we were at the start of the series.’
Chris: Wahh, wahh [sad noise effect]
Oren: We’ve just gone in a giant circle. We could have just started this earlier.
Chris: Backwards movement. Very bad.
Oren: So that was the first kind. There is a problem, but then the story just abandons it and is still interested but doesn’t want to do it in this book. It’s like, ‘Buy the sequel if you want to see the protagonist train this young Chosen One.’
And then the other one, that is more of a case of there just isn’t really a problem, is The Name of the Wind, which has a really interesting, tense conflict in the framing device, but then we leave the framing device so that Kvothe can tell us his autobiography.
Chris: It’s tense at first, but then after you see five scenes of Kvothe just cleaning, it’s just like, ‘I guess this problem must not be very urgent, because I think Kvothe would be doing something to take care of it if it was.’
Oren: Maybe he’s cleaning so that when the demons come, he won’t be embarrassed, Chris? What will the demons think of the place? It’s all dirty.
But in Kvothe’s autobiography, there isn’t really a problem that needs to be solved. When it’s introduced, you could argue that he’s trying to get justice for his parents because his family is murdered fairly early on, but that’s such an abstract goal. There’s no threat. There’s no reason he can’t just take as long as he wants to get vengeance. There’s no particular reason to think that these demons who killed his family are going to kill anybody else, other than being trope savvy. In character, there’s no reason to think that.
And so, the entire story is just him going from place to place, and then at the end he has a boss fight with an angry dragon in the woods, and we act like that resolved something, but it didn’t. And it’s like, ‘Stay tuned next time for Kvothe finding who killed his parents’. And it’s like, ‘Well, that was not a very big problem to begin with, but I still feel cheated that there was no resolution on it.’
Chris: It’s interesting to see that one of the few things that writers come in knowing, almost every time, is that they need to have an exciting climax near the end. But often they don’t understand that the climax is supposed to be part of a bigger structure, part of a bigger arc, and that it’s supposed to take all of the things that are already in the book and bring it to a head, and that’s what gives it a really nice payoff, as opposed to just, you know, random ninja attack.
We had a fight scene now. It was very exciting.
Yay, done?
Oren: Yeah, very common. I’ve seen authors try to substitute a character arc conclusion for resolving their big tense problem. Or maybe moving to a different area, that’s another one that I see a lot. The Art of Prophecy actually did both of those things, because at the end of it, it’s like, ‘Ah, you, young Chosen One, you have finished your character arc, and you have stopped being arrogant.’ And it’s not a very good character arc, because he had already stopped being arrogant way earlier, and the book just kind of told us he was arrogant.
But even if it had been a better character arc, and he had been arrogant, and he’d finally stopped, that wasn’t the big conflict we started with. That was not the big high-tension storyline that the book opened with. It was not him being arrogant, it was that he had to fight this dude, and he wasn’t ready.
Chris: And to be clear, I think it’s absolutely great when you have the character arc come to a head around the climax, often in conjunction with the external throughline. Often, them growing as a person allows them to solve that higher-tension problem. That’s great.
We’ve talked about high and low-tension arcs in another podcast, about the fact that tension just grabs attention. [laughter] Sounds very awkward. And so, it’s what creates structure. The highest-tension problems are what creates the biggest pieces of structure for the story.
So, if you introduce a really high-tension problem, and then you only solve a super low-tension problem, like a character arc, that’s not going to feel like you gave a significant enough resolution.
Oren: If you want your character arc to be the big resolution, that’s possible if that’s really what your story is about, if you are prepared to tell a story about that character arc, which is challenging, but doable, but also not what most of these stories are doing. That’s not what they promise us at the beginning.
Chris: So, we talked about how, obviously, it’s helpful to know what your throughline is, so you know what kind of ending is unexpected. At the same time, what can happen in these situations is you have a series, you have something like a big bad or another big problem.
You’re not planning on actually resolving that until the end of the series, so then what do you do at the end of a book? That is often what keeps people from having a nice resolution that kind of pays the reader back for getting that far. So there are different options, and these are basically child arcs. When we talk about fractals, we talk about an arc, and then if we break that arc down into smaller arcs that are like obstacles that move the story forward in that bigger arc, those are called child arcs.
And you can have a resolution for something like a subplot, a romance subplot for instance, but that’s not really going to be the same. It’s not really what the audience is expecting when they get to the end of a book or episode for the most part.
So, if you have, for instance a big villain, usually, dealing with a minion is one of the most common things. In fact, sometimes you need to insert a minion to be the fall guy at the end of the book. It’s like, ‘Hey, maybe your big bad villain was behind it all along, but you can’t take them down, but you need to take down somebody. And it has to make a difference.’
So put in a minion that is dangerous to be the more immediate threat. And to be much more hands on.
If you have a villain, you want to insulate them from failure. And that’s one of the hard parts about creating these resolutions and letting your heroes get some wins, but also not making your villain look incompetent. So, if you keep your villain remote and distant for a little while, so that it doesn’t feel like the failure is on them, that can be helpful. Then put in a minion that is working preferably with little direction and then you can just take down the minion.
The key then is that in the next book, you don’t want to feel as though the minion is still there. You don’t want to Sailor Moon style it.
Oren: Oh my gosh.
Chris: I mean, again, this only works for so long. Sailor Moon has this whole routine where every episode they defeat a minion, and the evil queen puts in another minion that’s identical to the previous minion. After a while that does get very silly.
Oren: But on the bright side, we, as novelists, don’t need to do this as often as the people making a multi episode per week cartoon show.
Chris: Yeah, there are a lot of Sailor Moon episodes.
Oren: There are a ton of them. We only need probably two or three endings for our series unless we’re really ambitious. And even then, it’s not going to be nearly as many as there are animated episodes of a cartoon. You have less risk.
It can still happen, like in The Wheel of Time when Rand fights Ishamael like three times over the course of three books. And it’s like, ‘Okay, I wonder if he’s going to lose again. Probably.’
Chris: But yeah, you just want to make sure that there is some difference, right? You’re not just having the same fights over again in the next book. We need movement, we need some variety to keep the books interesting. You don’t want to get repetitive.
Besides a minion, there can be other smaller problems that are created by the big problem. And again, anytime you do this for a child arc, you want something that encompasses the whole book. You want to introduce the big problem, but also the smaller problem that is more urgent than the big problem so that you can kind of bring it to the forefront.
For instance, if you have brewing tensions between two planets that are going to get into conflict, in the first book, the brewing tensions cause a trade war and then you’re trying to solve the trade war, and then other problems that are created by the friction until you for the last book do the outright war. So, you can have those kinds of smaller, more immediate problems created by the big problem. They can be caused by a villain or not caused by a villain.
Oren: Okay, I have a thought on how I would fix The Art of Prophecy if I was given it to dev edit. Can I workshop this with you?
Chris: Sure, let’s do it.
Oren: Okay, right. So, we would start the same, with this prophecy that the Chosen One, his name is Jian, is going to be chosen to fight the Great Khan of the Katuia hordes. And the protagonist, her name is Taishi, she has to train him. We do the same subversion where the Khan dies. Then we have the local rulers want to kill Jian because he is now politically inconvenient. So, she has to save him.
But then here’s where we make the change. Instead of just dropping him off somewhere, like she does in the existing book, she takes him with her, and they go to investigate the prophecy, which is, in the current book, a thing she does, but by herself for some reason. I don’t know why. And so then, Jian can still be with her. They can be part of the same story. She can still teach him how to fight or try to as they’re dodging assassins and trying to figure out what’s up with this prophecy. Then they eventually find out that there is more to the prophecy than they thought. It hasn’t actually been ended prematurely. There is still going to be a big battle. The book climaxes with Jian having to fight a major lieutenant of the final bad guy to show that he has actually gotten better and that Taishi has trained him and made him good.
Chris: The one concern I have is, what are the stakes of this Chosen One fighting the big bad as presented in the beginning? Because usually those stakes would be higher than the Chosen One’s life. The risk is when you change from that to it just being about the Chosen One’s life, you’re reducing the stakes and actually lowering the tension by doing that. Now, you could possibly change that. You could possibly try to avoid making the stakes that big and just be like, ‘This is the Chosen One to tackle the big bad but he’s actually disposable. We have four Chosen Ones waiting in line.’
So, it’s not like if this person loses, then everybody’s going to be crushed. It’s that this boy is being treated as though he’s disposable. And so, the main character wants to give him a chance.
The stakes then are still his life and that probably would go over better when the big bad dies and then people try to get rid of him. Then you could create a twist later where once they understand the prophecy, not only does it turn out that there’s another big bad that he has to fight, but now we find out he is not as disposable as we thought, and all of those other trainees aren’t going to do it anymore.
Oren: The book does have some context that’s a little similar to that that I didn’t think to include, but your version is still better. So, if I was given this book to edit, I would be like, ‘Hey, Chris, I have this thing. Can I run it past you?’. And then Chris would be like, ‘Yeah, you could do that, but it would be better if you did it this way.’ So now you guys have all seen a window into the content editing process here at Mythcreants.
Chris: I will say though, obviously, when we work with actual story examples, they’re always very complicated with a lot of moving pieces.
If I were to start it from this at the conceptual stage, I would have tried to think about, ‘Okay, are these big twists actually worth it?’
Or would it be better for me to just be like, ‘Hey, here’s the Chosen One. First step, keep people from killing the Chosen One. Step two, train the Chosen One.’ That is opposed to presenting this as ‘I need to train the Chosen One. Oh, wait, no, I need to protect the Chosen One.’ And obviously, that change comes with some twists and maybe those twists are good, but it’s also really easy to be like, ‘Ooh, twist’, and not think about what kind of experience it actually creates.
Oren: Sometimes we have to go for the smallest viable change in content editing.
Chris: Yes, if we were content editing this, we would have to go for the smallest viable change.
Oren: But it might be a little different if we were just working with it on the outline level.
Chris: Mm-hmm, exactly.
Speaking of which, the example I just gave, another way for a child arc is that you need something to tackle the big problem. And so, you have to either acquire it or keep it from getting destroyed. So, we have a Chosen One. First step, protect the Chosen One from dying before we can even train the Chosen One.
You could have something else, like there’s a looming environmental disaster and people are trying to shut down the EPA. First book, save the EPA.
Oren: I do want to save the EPA. That does immediately resonate with me. Good stakes.
Chris: But then the looming environmental disaster is still there. Those kinds of like side objectives. Meanwhile, you can have your big bad also reach their objective, electing somebody who wants to shut down the EPA as president, so that you have that kind of escalating tension.
It’s tougher for relationships. People have trouble with relationships because it’s really easy for tension to go down as the people become closer and you get closer to solving the problems. If your relationship arc is your highest tension arc, you kind of need to create layers of problems. Just give them ten problems to work through, so as soon as they cross one barrier they run into another one.
You know, first, got to free my love interest from the hell dimension.
Okay, they’re back, but they don’t realize that I’m the one who saved them or even know I exist.
Oren: Oh no!
Chris: Got to overcome that problem. Okay, now they’re into me, but duty calls and it’s pulling us apart.
Layers of problems to uncover. Because if you just have one and then you start solving it, there’s nothing to get through.
Oren: This is challenging for me. I have a hard time with character arcs that are more complicated than ‘Character makes bad decision, learn lesson, now makes good decision.’ It’s about as far ahead as I typically think on characters.
Something else that is interesting is that I’ve seen this in a lot of client works, but one place I wasn’t expecting to see this problem, but it keeps popping up, is in big budget TV shows.
Chris: Yeah, what happened to the episodic arc?
Oren: I don’t know.
Chris: Are we too cool for episode arcs now? What happened?
Oren: It’s like Andor happened and everyone was like, ‘Yeah, I guess we don’t need episode arcs anymore.’
Chris: Andor is such a weird case though because it has arcs for three episodes. For a set of three. That’s also cool now. Arcane did it. Andor actually did it better than Arcane. But people were complaining about Andor and the fact that they have a mid-episode of an arc of three episodes that just starts in a random place and ends in a random place. Like, ‘What was that I just watched?’
Oren: Yeah, it really feels like Andor is meant to be watched as three hour-and-a-half long movies instead of ten episodes. The numbers on that are wrong, but you know what I mean. At least Andor felt like it was doing it on purpose, even though I wouldn’t say that was a good choice. But then we have Mando season 3, which just has a number of episodes that just have no arc and don’t seem to be in service of anything.
Chris: And I was surprised because, again, the previous two seasons didn’t have this problem, but the previous two seasons were following a very specific plotline they set up with a very specific method. We’ve got our kind of samurai-Western story happening. And so they had a model to go off of. And I guess we have to remember that these are also the people who made the Book of Boba Fett.
[laughter]Chris: Oh, Book of Boba Fett, you’ll be the butt of jokes for many years to come.
Oren: It’s a beautiful thing. We all have a thing we can all be united on and be like, ‘That was boring. Why did that happen?’
And then for a show like Picard season three, mild spoilers, some of its episodes have arcs, but there was this two-to-three-episode period where they were all stuck in the nebula of plot stagnation, and nothing happened. I was like, ‘Will you please leave this nebula.’ And they eventually did. And the show got a lot better. Still not good, but it’s better. It’s not as mind numbingly boring.
Chris: Why did you think the nebula was worth three episodes? Oh my goodness.
Oren: It was like, ‘Hey guys, we’re going to spend three episodes in this nebula so that we can redo the Star Trek tropes of the nebula is alive and we’re going to ride the shockwave out.’ Neither of which made any sense in that context. I don’t even mind Star Trek nostalgia. I love Star Trek nostalgia, but I could see that you were just awkwardly putting it in there and it didn’t fit. I was like, ‘Why are you doing this? My gosh.’
Chris: Do you think they were trying to make room for Picard father-son bonding?
Oren: Yeah, I guess we had to trap them in a location so that Picard and his plot son would have reasons to talk, I guess. I don’t know.
Chris: I’m sure there’s a better way to do that though. There’s no reason they can’t just solve problems together.
Oren: I also think it has to do with a problem we’ve seen in some other shows where I don’t think their main plot has enough meat to it for them to actually spend ten episodes solving it, so they just spend three of them inside a nebula.
Chris: The Wolf Pack problem?
Oren: Yeah, that’s the Wolf Pack problem. Wolf Pack also has a complete lack of episode arcs.
Chris: Except for episode seven.
Oren: Right.
Chris: Episode seven is the magical episode that has an arc. None of the other episodes do, just that one. Out of eight.
Wolf Pack is an interesting example. I wrote an entire article about this one if you’re interested. It spoils everything. I’m not going to spoil everything.
Now, I’ll just say that the writers are incredibly focused on their reveals. And I won’t say what they are, but they kind of trap things into a corner that makes it hard for them to produce material for the show. They also don’t give the protagonist agency. That one’s a little weird. I think there’s multiple reasons and maybe they just don’t realize it’s important, I don’t know. But they seem to mistake moving the story forward with giving clues about their reveals. It’s like, ‘As long as we give some clues every episode, that’s movement, right?’ No, that’s not what movement is. Things have to actually change. The characters actually have to make progress. You have a bunch of pointless scenes that make no difference. Giving clues is not really going to solve that problem. So, each episode is just kind of a collection of scenes.
Oren: I’m not sure if this is what’s happening. I’m hoping not. I’m hoping that this is just a weird coincidence that we happen to see so many shows doing this at the same time and that we’ll look back and be like, ‘That was a weird time in TV.’ But I can’t help but wonder if this is a reaction to seasons being shorter.
Chris: I’ve been wondering that as well.
Oren: And writers having been used to the idea of ‘Yeah, sure, I’ve got twenty episodes to slowly hint at my big reveal.’ And now it’s like, ‘I’ve only got eight. All eight of them have to reveal hints.’ It’s like that’s the whole thing.
Chris: If that’s the case. I think that they’ll just adjust over time. I also wonder if moving to streaming has given people more freedom and they don’t really know what to do with that freedom. They’re like, ‘Ah, I can do whatever I want. I don’t need episode arcs anymore.’ Like, don’t get rid of that, that was good.
Oren: Alright, well, I think we are pretty much out of time here now that we’ve gotten the chance to vent our spleen about the lack of episode arcs in TV. Bring those back.
Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First there is the popular writing software Plottr, which you can learn about at plottr.com. Then there’s Callie MacLeod. Next, we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
[closing song]This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme, The Princess who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.
Who is telling your story? How close are you to their inner thoughts? What position does the story occupy in space time? These are all questions you need to answer when using your story’s perspective, but don’t worry, it’s not as intimidating as it sounds. This week, we’re discussing the pros and cons of choices like first vs third, unfolding vs retelling, epistolary vs whatever the opposite of epistolary is. We also reveal the secret of future tense narration, along with why some online lists think A Game of Thrones is written in omniscient. We know, it doesn’t make sense!
Show Notes Epistolary * A Game of Thrones * The Ocean At the End of the Lane * The Club Dumas * Lord of the Rings * Hitchhiker’s Guide * Discworld * Wizard of Earthsea TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Arturo Serrano.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast, with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.
[intro music]Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is…
Oren: Oren.
Chris: … and…
Wes: Wes.
Chris: As we all know, the Mythcreants Podcast is an epistolary work, mimicking an authentic non-fiction recording. We chose the format because it really makes you believe that there are three real people talking about writing in the real world in 2023. Very high credibility. That way it’s just really impactful when we’re all eaten by sea monsters.
Oren: Waaa!
Wes: No, God.
Oren: It’s actually just one very skilled parrot.
Wes: Running everything.
Oren: Yeah, it’s just, I got the whole thing. It’s a very, very competent bird, really, if I do say so myself.
Chris: So this time we’re talking about choosing your story’s perspective, including things like your narrative style, and your narrative premise, and all that goodness.
Oren: So like, second person omniscient future tense?
Chris: Yeah! We can break it down, because it’s more complicated than people make it seem.
Oren: It seems pretty complicated already, Chris. I don’t know if I can handle more of this.
Chris: I feel like it seems complicated to you because you hang out with me too much.
Oren: Maybe. There’s a possibility.
Chris: I swear, every time I open up a book that’s supposed to be on point of view or perspective, it just talks about first versus third. And then it just makes a bunch of assumptions about the narration based on whether you’re using first and third that may or may not be true. There’s a lot of equating of things going on.
Oren: I was looking for examples of omniscient narration, and I found A Game of Thrones listed on a couple of places. And I was like, that is… No! That’s not what that is, you guys! Please.
Wes: Is that just like, there’s multiple perspectives, so therefore must be omniscient?
Oren: Yeah, I guess that was the logic. I was like, am I misremembering these books? So I cracked open the first one, and like, no, this is in limited third-person perspective. It just switches between characters a lot. But it tells you when it’s doing that. Doesn’t leave you guessing whose head you’re in.
Wes: Weird.
Chris: Yeah, is it distant?
Oren: I mean, it’s a little distant, but not so distant that you would confuse it for omniscient. It’s not as close as it could be. It varies a little bit. The distance can sometimes get a little sloppy, but it’s still clearly limited.
Chris: Before we start talking about this stuff, let’s just define them a little bit. I mean, I think the most… Again, the most obvious thing is whether you’re using first, and technically you can also use second. Some works do use second person, or third, right? So, “I went to the store” versus “You went to the store” versus “He/She/They went to the store.”
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: That kind of thing.
Oren: First and third are the two most common, right? I or he/she/they.
Chris: And people like to make up a lot of stuff about them that’s not true. Like, okay, so third is often more distant than first, but not necessarily.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: First can actually be distant, and third can be very close in distance. And we can talk about what distance is. That one, we had a whole podcast, I think, about distance. But distance is basically the sense in the narration of whether you’re like somewhere near the character, like hovering over them, looking at them from the outside, or whether you’re like in their head, looking out through their eyes. The way it’s narrated: Are you narrating as the character? Or are you narrating about the character? And so if it’s more distance, it gives you the sense that you’re kind of like further away from that character. It’s kind of like the zoom in, zoom out of a camera. So you know, some people will kind of instinctively get a little bit more close when they start narrating in first person, but I’ve definitely seen distant first.
Oren: I would say that it’s not that you can’t have distant first; it’s that it’s probably a little more jarring when you do, would be my guess.
Chris: Yeah. An example of distant first would be Neil Gaiman’s Ocean at the End of the Lane.
Oren: Yeah, that makes sense. It’s been a while, but yeah.
Chris: And we haven’t talked about our narrative premise yet, but this is a character retelling. And so it’s a guy telling how he was as a kid, something that happened to him as a kid. And so he feels really distant from the child version of himself. And so it just doesn’t feel that immersive.
Oren: I mean, that’s the question of: Are you using unfolding or retelling premise? And definitely retelling is going to be more distant because it literally… the premise is that the character is telling events that happened to them in the past, which is adding a layer of separation between the reader and the story. Whereas unfolding is: the events are happening now and you are witnessing them, which is, you know, of course, impossible, but it’s fiction. So you know, don’t worry about it.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: Can a retelling be close?
Chris: Yes.
Wes: Is it just…
Chris: Right. Okay, so retelling is kind of complicated because you’ve got a future narrator. But then what happens is that the future narrator will start narrating about their past. And then what you can do is you can actually kind of zoom into the past. So you kind of temporarily forget the future narrator is there and dive more into the character’s past self narrating. And so if you do that, and you’re careful about your transitions, you know, you can actually bring it in close and then zoom out again.
Wes: Okay.
Chris: Right? But if you don’t do it carefully enough, it can get jarring, that kind of thing. Most of the time when I’ve seen people do a character retelling where we have our future narrator who’s talking about their past, they usually stay fairly distant. They don’t usually get really close, but they can.
Wes: Interesting. Yeah, that feels almost like a… more of like a frame than anything else.
Oren: It’s similar. But when we talk about a framing device, we usually mean, like, the story will start with someone in their, you know, in their attic and being… and then it’ll be like, “Now I’m going to tell you a story.” And then like they’ll open a book and be like, “And this is that story.”
Chris: Well, I do think that’s actually how character retellings got started. So if we go back to like our earliest stories we have, and we’re looking at something like ancient Egyptian folktales, right? A lot of times they do have a framing device to explain why we have a first-person narrator. But at this point, we don’t need that anymore. So we just dispense with the framing device. And get right into the first-person narration. Because we have a future narrator, we can kind of hint things that are in the future that the character –the past character– doesn’t know about yet. And the other thing is that, when you have the future narrator there, the narration happens out of time, right? And the character and the, you know, narrator knows that they have an audience. So it feels in some ways more like the omniscient narrator, because they can just start telling the audience things for the purpose of the audience knowing things.
Wes: Right.
Chris: They could just deliberately, like, “Hey, and this is what I looked like.” We don’t have to gracefully work it in; you can just tell your audience.
Oren: Right. And that’s like the main advantage of a retelling is you can get a bit more creative with the narration before it starts to feel contrived or jarring. And, you know, this is useful for jokes, or if you want to build a little bit of dramatic irony by letting the audience in on something the character doesn’t know. If you’re doing subversions, this can be handy because you can kind of clue the audience in ahead of time that you’re not just playing this trope straight, which can drive a lot of people off before you get to the subversion. The retelling has those advantages. It trades immersion for those, though. Like unfolding is a much more immersive perspective. So, you know, you just have to decide which one is right for the story you’re telling.
Chris: And it’s similar to omniscient. Omniscient is always third person, though. And the idea with omniscient is that your narrator actually comes from –is a real person– comes from the real world and they’re telling you a fictional story. At some level, it’s: “the author made this up.” That’s kind of what omniscient is, right? And that’s kind of how the narrator can be all-knowing. And that’s why it’s really weird when, like, an omniscient narrator, like the storyteller, tries to be like, “Oh, and did you know that the omniscient narrator was this character in the story this whole time?” It’s like, how does that… how does that work?
Oren: Right. You have to do something real weird, like be like, “And the omniscient narrator was God,” or death or something. That’s why like first person omniscient is not something I would recommend. I’ve read a first person omniscient story and it was like the narrator turned out to be some guy that the protagonists knew. And I was like, “How did he know the details of their marital dispute?”
Wes: Because there’s the section, Oren, where the narrator makes it very clear that the main character fully confided everything in them. I read this horrible book called The Club Dumas years ago. No one should read it. And that happened. There were the narrator’s like, “How do I know all of this? Well, the main character told me, of course.” I was like, “What? No.”
Oren: Seems suspicious. That’s pretty sus. And of course, the opposite of omniscient is limited, in which the narrator is limited to the things that usually a single character knows. And retelling is technically a form of limited. It’s just a more… it’s like almost halfway between limited and omniscient. You will start to get weird questions if your retelling narrator starts to know things that doesn’t seem like they should know. People sometimes joke about this with the Titanic movie, where technically the framing device is that Rose is telling the story, but lots of stuff that Rose couldn’t possibly have known about happens. And it’s like, in a novel, that would be way more obvious.
Chris: Yeah.
Oren: If Rose would be like, “And while we were having our fun down below, upstairs, there was two people in the crow’s nest talking about how they could smell ice.” And it’s like, “Rose, how do you know that?” It’s like, “Don’t worry about it.”
Chris: Yeah, an omniscient narrator can tell you multiple people’s thoughts. It would be a little strange if a first person, you know, doing a retelling of their life, did the same thing. Unless reading thoughts is a power that they have.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: So when we talk about unfolding events, we’re talking about there’s no real explanation for how the story is being told, which is kind of what the narrative premise is. It’s the premise of how the narration is happening. We assume that we narrate like you’re just there, you know, embodying a character and things are just happening before your eyes. The one we haven’t talked about, but was mentioned earlier, is epistolary narration, where you’re mimicking some kind of real document or file. And that one is real tricky most of the time, because you need to make it pay off. You really need to make it authentic.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: And it can be really hard to pull off all the things that we expect out of stories, right? Like detailed action scenes and while also staying authentic.
Oren: It’s like, did whoever write… whoever’s writing this journal really take time to note down the way the moonlight glinted off of the axe as it fell? That doesn’t seem like the sort of thing they would have written down.
Wes: That’s why I’m always suspicious that anything that’s like epistolary is definitely like more historical fiction in the sense that it’s like 19th, 18th, 17th century stuff. Because it’s like, oh yeah, people journaled a lot more then. They might, you know, they’re so bored that they might actually take the time to describe that to their friend who’s also so bored because they don’t have TV.
Chris: I think it’s a fun one for short stories. You know, anything that’s a little bit more experimental, right? Some choices are definitely more experimental than other, like second person, for instance. I think those are still often very fun to use for short stories. You know, you just want to think a little bit harder before you use them for a whole novel or really big project where you have to commit to using something that’s a little bit experimental or otherwise just could get in the way of the story itself, right? Like do you want to focus on the story or do you want to focus on how the story is being told?
Oren: And the one category I don’t think we’ve touched on directly yet is tense. What tense is the story in? Usually it’s going to be past tense or present tense.
Chris: Future! It’s always future!
Oren: It can be future, you know, that’s one of those ones that probably works best for a short story. Writing a novel in future tense sounds exhausting.
Wes: Yeah.
Oren: But not as exhausting as reading it.
Chris: Yeah. I’ve seen, again, brief instances of future tense as kind of jokes, but it’s bad, mostly not just because it’s impractical, but because the wording is so awkward. To constantly use “will” everywhere. It’s just in English. It’s not great.
Oren: So many “will”s. You got to throw in all of them.
Wes: Yeah. Well, we don’t have a future tense. We use modal verbs to indicate probability with our normal verbs. And “will” is just the most certain modal verb we have. And you can just write, like, standard verbs and use time indicator words to set the future. Like, we don’t have a grammar future. Sorry.
Chris: Ooh, getting technical!
Wes: No, it’s not like, you know, like a Latin language or something else where they do have different verb… forms of the verb. We just affix a modal to our standard verbs and we call that future tense. But the way we can talk about future in English, I can use, you know, an -ing form. I can use a “will.” I can use the standard form. And as long as the context is clear from the rest of the words in the sentence, I’m talking about the future. So I just think that’s an important thing there. Editor/grammarian signing off.
Chris: Kind of sounds like future tense might be more practical in another language.
Wes: Yes. Well, it would be… it’d probably be way less annoying.
Oren: But then you wouldn’t have all the cool modals, which is a word I just learned.
Wes: All the modals.
Oren: Modal. That sounds neat. I like the way that that word sounds. I like the way it feels. It’s got good mouthfeel, you could say. I have a question, Chris: The great debate between present or past tense. Past is a little more conventional, but we’ve talked about how present tense has some advantages where it, specifically, it feels a little bit more immediate. And you don’t have to put “had” as a word whenever you’re indicating that something happened in the past, because you can just use past tense. So question A, are there other advantages that present tense has that I’m missing? And B, does past tense have any advantages other than convention?
Chris: Well, past tense allows you to do a character retelling.
Wes: Big advantage.
Chris: So it opens up additional options. And also, for instance, if you were doing epistolary narration, you need to mimic the actual style of documents. So a lot of times you would end up using past for that reason. Or even with letter writing. If you’re doing letters as your story, you will probably use multiple tenses, depending on the time that the character is supposed to be writing the letter. What’s past for them, what’s present for them, what’s future for them. So there are just some options that past tense has that future tense, that, well, definitely future tense, but present tense doesn’t. But I do suspect that as time passes, there will be more and more works in present tense, because it is advantageous for those little reasons.
Wes: I will say that as a reader, as gripping as present tense stories are, they demand more of me. And I don’t feel like I’m alone in this. There’s definitely… if we talk about feel of your narrative style and the choices that you make, a present tense is asking more, because it’s inherently just more action. Past tense is casually telling stories; that isn’t quite as gripping, because it adds a little bit of distance and offers a different type of feel with that story.
Chris: Yeah, I mean, I was just gonna say, you could say the same thing about distance, right? If you wanted.
Wes: Yes, yes, absolutely.
Chris: Yeah, but I mean, in most cases, all else being equal, higher immersion is considered better. And there is a question of when a story becomes too intense for the reader, right? Because that can happen with tension, too.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: You can have too much tension. Some readers are more tension-sensitive than others. But generally, immersion is considered a positive factor. But I can see why in some cases you might want to reduce immersion if that helps you relax, right? Or helps you deal with tension, right? Maybe the story is a high-tension story that’s kind of on the edge of your tolerance. And if immersion is lower, you’re able to tolerate it. Any case, I thought it’d be worth talking about, again, how you make these decisions. Because there are a lot of options; they’re kind of technical. In most stories, there’s no necessarily right choice. There are some types of stories that might lend themselves better to one choice or the other. But definitely part of choosing is artistic, right? And what you want for your story, and what kind of experience you want the audience to have. So, you know, I think the best way to choose is to start with the story and how you want it to come across. So, for instance, is making your story feel tense, exciting, immersive the most important thing to you? Especially if you’re writing like a horror story, for instance, or a thriller. In those cases, often the storyteller will prioritize bringing across tension and immersion. In which case, you know, you might choose first person present tense. Since present tense increases immediacy, it’s going to make it feel tenser and more exciting. And first person, again, some people feel like it’s a little closer. And also I think right now, just the state of where present tense is, you can pair present tense with third person. But I think people are a little bit more used to it when you pair it with first.
Oren: First also has one interesting, not huge, but important to keep in mind, advantage and disadvantage, which is with first, you have an extra pronoun, which can be very helpful if you have multiple characters that would otherwise be using the same pronouns. And you can end up with pronoun confusion. But you can stick “I” in there, which makes it easier to tell the difference between the protagonist doing something versus another character who uses the same pronouns as that protagonist. The downside to that is that you can’t mix up the protagonist’s name with their pronouns. So because if it was in third person, you could say “she” and then “Beverly” to keep your word variety up. Whereas in first person, it’s going to be “I” both times. So you need to be aware of that. Otherwise your page can just be covered in “I”s. And, you know, that can get annoying to read.
Chris: I do wonder how much of that is something that bothers the writer more than it bothers the reader. Sometimes, when you’re writing, you just become hyper-aware of the words that are the same. I don’t know. Have you read a story where the usage of “I” just bothered you because it was too much?
Oren: Client stories? Yes. Published stories? Not usually. I think this is something that tends to get fixed. Copy editors can probably help. Just being more accomplished at wordcraft. I think you can fix it. I don’t think it’s an insurmountable issue. But yeah, I have a… I’ve had a couple of client works that were just… the term “I” is popping up a lot. If you repeat any word enough, it starts to lose meaning. But I don’t think it’s like a reason to not use first person. It’s just something to think about.
Chris: I mean, probably a lot of those cases, lengthening the sentences a little bit, which normally would be something I would be cautious to recommend because people easily go overboard with their sentences, but that would probably be one way of reducing the amount of “I”s a little bit. Okay, so we just talked about tense and immersive. Generally, present tense is a nice choice. Now, granted, you could have other kinds of, like, tense stories, like if you’re doing cosmic horror, you might want to go for epistolary feel, right? With that credibility. It also lends itself to a little bit of mysteriousness, which, again, people can definitely go too far with mysteriousness and just like hide all the important things about their story. That’s not… that’s not good mystery anymore. But sometimes that kind of gives you the right atmosphere that you want. And so there’s been, you know, because of Lovecraft, a tradition of doing cosmic horror with an epistolary narration style, and it does make it easy for you to leave information out.
Oren: I also think it is worth noting that sometimes it can be worth it to pick the option that you’re most comfortable with, even if there might technically be better options available. I agree that often first person and present tense is the best way to go. But I’m honestly just much more comfortable with third person past tense. And that doesn’t mean I always will be. And hopefully I can grow and change and branch out. But for now, I sometimes just stick with third person past just because that’s what I know how to use. And it just feels easiest.
Chris: Certainly people tend to get used to one particular narration style and have trouble changing it. And if you’re not used to it, and you change for the first time, your, you know, draft can be just like littered with the other narration style that you’re used to using. So that’s something to watch out for. And again, some people are just going to have their go-to narration style that they like to use. And that’s fine. I like to sample different ones personally. So when I do a project, I think about, “Okay, what would I like to do this in?” But of course, it’s partly a matter of comfort. And that’s just fine.
Oren: All right. So what about limited versus omniscient? Which one is right for you?
Chris: So I do think that when you’re talking about, you know, limited or character retellings, do you want your narration to be conversational or personable? Because that’s kind of like the opposite side of the tense and immersive. It’s that if you use a character retelling, it’s really easy to take up a conversational tone and to fit in extra little anecdotes because you don’t have to keep your narration in time, right? Because it doesn’t… no time passes for the story when your character is just giving anecdotes. Because your narration is out of time in that case. So it allows you to kind of fit more in and explain better. So, if you have a really complicated setting, for instance, it might make it easier to explain. With any of that, of course, with great power comes great responsibility. So, you know, you do hear complaints about character retellings. It’s just being, “Oh gosh, this narrator won’t let me get to the story! Just won’t stop talking!”, you know?”
Oren: Just one more anecdote!
Chris: Right. But certainly the character retelling lends itself well to that. And omniscient can go both ways, but I really do think omniscient is at its best when you have a narrator that has some personality and is light and is fun. Because it just… again, the Lord of the Rings is omniscient and it’s a little on the darker side. And Tolkien was good at wordcraft. You know, he did omniscient pretty well. The same time, I don’t necessarily think that those choices are very complementary. As opposed to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or Discworld, which are omniscient and very playful and those things. It works really well because the narrator has lots of fun personality and the omniscient gives it the freedom to make whatever jokes, you know, the narrator wants to, basically, without worrying about the story.
Oren: That’s basically my conclusion. Because when I look at stories that feel like they really benefit from their omniscient narration, they’re almost all, if not outright comedies, at least humorous in some capacity. And then I look at Earthsea is written in omniscient, which I sometimes forget because I just sort of assume it’s limited because the whole thing follows Ged. It’s like, “Why is it not limited?” And it’s just, you know, occasionally we do weird little omniscient asides. And I feel like that probably would have been better in limited narration.
Chris: Yeah. So there are works, you know, I think particularly fantasy works, that are in omniscient that are not funny, but I don’t necessarily think they’re benefiting from it. I think there’s a lot of people who just do really distant limited or omniscient kind of by default, and they’re not really taking full advantage of it. They’re using it because it’s convenient, because then they don’t have to… they can tell the audience whatever they want. They don’t have to limit knowledge to what the viewpoint character thinks, but they’re also just not using the power it has to raise engagement in the story.
Oren: Right. Or you can end up with situations where most of the book is fairly straightforward narration, and then every once in a while there’s like this weird little authorial aside that, because it doesn’t feel like it’s part of consistent voice, it’s like, “What? Whoa, hang on. What’s happening? Why are you suddenly addressing me, the reader, directly?” That’s a thing that happens a lot with people who pick omniscient without really knowing what it requires.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, I think the best omniscient narration is bold, and there’s no question it’s omniscient. Right? It’s not there to just kind of fade into the background. Otherwise you get narration that kind of feels bland. Whereas if you get really close, then the idea is that your viewpoint character is narrating, and so they are flavoring the narration. But you can stay like really tense and immersive.
Oren: Right. And to a certain extent, limited is, I think, a little easier for new writers just because you have the protagonist as a guide for what your narration should be like. Whereas if you’re trying to create an authorial voice from scratch, it’s like, “What should my authorial voice be like?” It’s like, “I don’t know. Should it be like my voice?” Big, big question.
Chris: I also think whether you want it to sound traditional or modern is another big one for what you choose. Obviously third-person past is going to sound a lot more traditional. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to choose that for certain types of stories. Like for instance, let’s say you’re writing an adaptation of a fairy tale. You might choose third/past because you want it to sound fairy tale-ish, like traditional fairy tale narration, but not summary. A lot of fairy tales are written in summary. Or you might decide that you actually really want to subvert that and make it snarky and modern. Right? So maybe you don’t want to use third/past. Maybe you want to use first person, either like a retelling or present tense or something, and get all snarky. Right? So that’s kind of where your, you know, what experience do you want to give and your artistic choices come into play.
Oren: Yeah. No one told me I had to make choices. What is this nonsense? All right. Well, then I think we, on that note, we’re about out of time. There is one more thing I want to mention, though, is which Chris and I have started referring to as TV narration, which is a narration where you act as if like a character’s head is an opaque barrier and you can’t go inside it.
Chris: Or like film POV.
Oren: Right. Where it’s like you can only look at characters from the outside and like, I just like, look, if you’re doing that, you are missing out on like 50% of the benefit of writing a book instead of filming a show. So I would just avoid that. Whatever that is, don’t do it.
Chris: Yeah. That’s like when you have cold, dispassionate narration and you’re not in any character’s head, but you’re also oftentimes limiting yourself to what the character knows. But like you never see their thoughts or like anything, you know? It just feels like a camera is rolling. And that’s not great because you don’t actually get to see pretty pictures. That’s why you would want a camera to roll.
Oren: Just remember to use the strength of your medium.
Chris: OK, if you found that podcast useful, consider supporting us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com slash mythcreants.
Wes: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, we have the popular writing software Plottr. You can learn about them at plottr.com. Next there’s Callie McLeod. Then we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Next there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Danita Rambo. She lives at therambogeeks.com. Talk to you next week.
[outro music]This has been the MythCreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.
There comes a time when even the most prodigious writers among us have to put a story away for good. Despite how certain writing memes might make you feel, this isn’t a failure. Everyone trunks a story sometimes, and the trick is to know when you’ve done enough and it’s time to move on. That’s our topic for this week, with a focus on how different types of writers handle the situation in various ways.
Show Notes Process Advice * The Writing Process * Five Activities I Use to Beat Writer’s Block * Harnessing Your Passion to Strengthen Your Stories * Shattered Ascension TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Linda Ndubuisi.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast, with your hosts: Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.
[Opening theme] Oren: Welcome everyone to another episode of Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren, and with me today is…
Wes: Wes
Oren: And…
Chris: Chris
Oren: So our topic for today is trunked stories. I was going to do a little bit about not finishing the podcast, but honestly, that sounded kind of sad. And I realized this is a little bit more of a serious topic. For definition time, a trunked story is a story that you have decided to stop working on and you have no immediate plans to go back to it. That could mean that it’s half drafted, it could be that it’s finished but it needs to be revised, or that it’s 2% of the way from being published but you just can’t hunt down that last run-on sentence, so you just throw up your hands and run away. So, it just means a story that you have put down and have just not planned to come back to it.
Wes: Why do we trunk them?
Oren: I think it’s because you put them in the trunk. Put them in a trunk! Wes: Of your car? Or like, steamer trunk?
Chris: No, like a chest.
Wes: Why don’t we chest stories?
[laughter] I don’t have…I mean, I don’t know. Do you have trunks? I don’t.
Oren: I had a piece of furniture growing up that we would refer to as a trunk.
Wes: Okay.
Oren: It was a little bit chest shaped, but it was like… For some reason, I think of chests as being more solid, whereas this had kind of a leathery surface, which to me is a trunk for literally no reason. Like, I don’t have a justification for that. It just is.
Chris: Yeah. And I guess this would have been when all the stories were on paper—it’s probably where this term is from—so you got to actually put it physically in a storage compartment.
Oren: I did a little Googling to see if I could easily find the origin of the term trunked and nothing came up. And I was like, “I’m not spending more than five minutes on this.”
Wes: I’m not suggesting we should, I’m just wondering because…yeah, it’s just kind of funny. Like, car trunk is the most immediate thing that comes to mind for me. And then it’s just like, every time you run an errand, it’s following you around. It’s never…you’re never going to quite let it go.
Oren: I mean, I do collect a lot of weird stuff in my trunk over the years— like in the trunk of my car. So I guess that makes sense. It’s like, “there could be some manuscripts in there. No one knows.”
Chris: Do you think it’s good to note that everybody trunk stories, right? I think when people trunk a story and they’re not feeling good about it, they might feel very alone. I suppose if you’re working on your very first story, maybe you haven’t trunked a story yet because you haven’t had the chance to. But even if somebody tells you they finished lots of stories and have never trunked one, it’s still most likely they forgot about some story they trunked. Right?
Oren: Or they’re defining trunked differently. Right? Like, they might be in their heads being like, “I’ve never trunked a story. I finished every draft. And then I, you know, put the draft in like a little word file that I haven’t looked at for 15 years.”
Chris: And I think it’s just the reality of the fact that stories are a big time investment. They’re relatively big projects. And if you continually do projects that are that big, sometimes you will not finish the project.
Oren: And there are a lot of reasons that you might not. I mean, sometimes if it takes you a long time to write a story, you can find that you have gotten better as a writer, and you are so much better now than when you started, that trying to update the story to be up to your current standards is just too much work. And I mean, honestly, I think if that’s the reason, that’s not a bad thing. Like, you’ve improved to the point where you have to start something new because you’ve gotten better. That’s not the only reason you might do it, but I have seen that happen.
Chris: For sure.
Oren: I’m not going to say that I’m great at writing, but I used to be way worse. And I’ve had a couple of stories that took me so long to write that I was like, “All right, you know, I was just awful when I started this, and I don’t really feel like going back and trying to bring it up to the moderately mediocre level I’m at now.”
Chris: Right. This might be a good time to talk about the “magnum opus,” which usually ends up in the trunk. So when we talk about magnum opus, we’re not talking about the traditional definition because we just don’t really believe in the magnum opus. We refer to… A lot of times when people start writing or they really get into it for the first time, they take on a super huge project, and usually it ends up being a whole series. Sometimes, they don’t know it’s a whole series at first, but it’s something that’s just like big and overly ambitious. It’s kind of like a writer’s first love. And often the writer’s really, really into it, but it’s just a very large project. And it motivates us to start writing, right? To do this thing that in our minds is our big masterpiece. But that’s a really very difficult thing to do when you are brand new. So it’s both a very ambitious project and we’ve got a very inexperienced writer. And generally it becomes extremely complicated because the writer isn’t used to simplifying, because they don’t know how big their ideas are, and often because they’ve been thinking through every detail of the story in their heads before they even sit down and try to make it happen. And so for that reason, the kind of magnum opus is usually something that a writer can work on for years, but ultimately puts in the trunk. Not universally, there are a few people who beat the odds, but the trunk is usually where it’s destined for.
Oren: Yeah. I think mine was a badly disguised Final Fantasy fanfic where I was going to unite Final Fantasies 7, 8, 9, and 10 into one mega story—that was my magnum opus. And you can imagine that didn’t turn out super well.
Chris: My magnum opus was a trilogy about three characters who were going to destroy themselves. It was very edgy.
Oren: So dark, so mature.
[laughter] I work with a lot of clients, and I’d say probably a good third of them, maybe a quarter if it’s on the low end, are in the magnum opus phase, where this is either, if not their first story, it’s their first big story. And so they don’t really have a concept of how difficult this is,
or a concept of how much complexity their story can handle. They haven’t learned the concept that your story can be about anything, but it can’t be about everything. So that just becomes untenable after a while, and you eventually have to—in most cases, unless you’re one of the extremely lucky few—acknowledge the things that you learned, and put that story away and work on something that you can actually achieve.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, I do think that the magnum opus has a role in providing that initial motivation to learn, and get over that initial big learning curve. And of course, some of that comes from the fact that, you know, especially since we have all these cultural messages that are like, “Oh, you know, just pour your heart onto the page and it’ll be great!” It’s like, “That’s not how it works.” We don’t know what we’re getting into, usually, but that is what gets us there—to a certain extent. But they’re so big and so complicated that what happens is you get so much better, but you are constrained by all the things you made up when you knew absolutely nothing.
I put my magnum opus down because I was just so much happier and more productive working on short stories. Like, when I started working on a short story, I made progress—I actually got it done. I went back to my magnum opus, I just felt stuck, right? And just couldn’t get anything done and didn’t know what to do. And after a while, I was like, “Okay, I guess maybe I should just do the stuff where I am productive and happy”—after a while.
Oren: And that’s actually an important point here. I think that some people get a bit too fixated on the idea that they can fix anything in revisions. Revisions are powerful, and you should absolutely do them, and they are important, and you can make a lot of improvements in revisions. But revisions aren’t infinite. Nobody has infinite energy, and you are sometimes going to hit a point with some stories where it is just not worth the effort it would take to revise this into something you’d be happy with. That’s just going to happen. And I’ve encountered some people. And I went through this phase where I thought you could just revise anything. The threshold is different for different people. Some people can revise way faster and to a much greater extent than I can, and some people are even worse off than me and have an even harder time. So, you just have to learn to balance where your time and effort is going.
Chris: I do think it’s worth thinking that one person’s trunked stories is another person’s completed, because it’s not just about how good the story is, it’s about what your goals are, and what standards you’re holding your stories to. So you’re most likely to trunk something when you’re at the
stage where you’ve become really discerning because you’re learning a lot, but your writing skill isn’t quite up to your new discernment. Like, you can now tell what good storytelling is and what great wordcraft is, but
you’re still practicing and trying to get your own skills to measure up—and you will get there. Right? Because discernment… Once you have that discernment, you’ve unlocked additional levels. Then you just have to get to them. But it can be a really discouraging time, so you might be more likely to trunk something simply because you’re not proud enough of it to show it to the world, and you’re not motivated to get it there. Whereas somebody else could take a similar story that’s of the same level and just be like, “Okay, well, I’m going to move on to something else, but I’m happy enough with it that I’m going to put it out there. I’m going to independently publish it, or I’m just going to share it,” or whatever your personal goals are, because everybody can have different goals. Some people, they write a story that’s really just for themselves to read, and it doesn’t need to go anywhere. So it’s mostly about where you want your stories to be before you consider them complete—whatever that finish line is for you. And for different people, that’s going to look different.
Oren: The reason why we keep focusing and emphasizing so much on different people is that this is the much-discussed process advice that we talk about sometimes. We don’t give process advice that often, just because it’s so individual and it changes so much. But trunked stories are such a sore point for a lot of writers, and I’ve actually had people ask me to talk more about them, that I decided a podcast was a good idea because I’m not sure if what I have to say is coherent enough for an article.
[laughter] Chris: Well, on the site, we have 86 articles marked the “writing process” so that’s not actually much compared to our hundreds of articles. But there are some topics where people do find process advice really helpful. It’s mostly that it’s just not a replacement for craft advice, especially if it’s a craft topic. Whether or not you trunk your story is definitely more about process, because it’s not really a craft topic.
Oren: Yeah. And you just have to look and see where your situation is. Because for one thing, most of us don’t depend on our fiction writing for our income. And if we do, then that’s a different scenario, right? If you’re depending on hitting your word deadlines so that you can pay your rent, then you’re going to look at this with a different priority. And you’re going to be like, “All right, well, maybe even if I don’t like the story and I’m not happy with it, I need that money so I’m putting it out there.” But if you don’t, then you’re not losing anything financially by not finishing a story that you’re not into writing anymore. Which is not to say that you shouldn’t finish it—that’s up to you; that depends on what you want out of it—I’m just saying that there can be a lot of pressure to finish it no matter what. And I don’t really think that’s helpful.
Chris: I do think that if you’re even asking yourself whether you should trunk a story, it suggests you’re already losing motivation. That doesn’t necessarily mean you should trunk the story, but I think at that point, the question becomes, “Are you having an ongoing problem where you’re not able to finish your stories?” Because that sets a very different context than “I can’t finish this story.” Because in many cases, if you’re miserable working on the story and your income is not dependent on finishing that story, and you have another story you can work on instead, then that’s often just the best choice. Now, of course, there’s other factors like, “Are you almost done?”
[laughter] But if you’re not finishing anything, then sometimes that might give you a reason to try pushing through and just see what happens. But even then, I would say that sometimes, the issue has to be fixed upstream in the process. Right? Sometimes, if you’re not finishing anything because you’re not actually interested enough in the story concepts that you’re coming up with, that’s not necessarily going to be fixed if you keep going. But you might find what works for you if you try new stories. Right? Or if it helps you to plan your story out, if that allows you to finish, right? Then that’s something that you can stop mid-story and plan it. But that’s, again, something that you would try and see what process you need to start. But in that case that might be a reason to try just seeing if you can get to the end if you push yourself a little harder.
Oren: Yeah. And if you… You also can think about it in terms of what is the most efficient way to use your writing time? And is it worth spending that time to try to break through a block you’re having on a story? Or are you just staring at a page and not making any progress when you could be spending that time on a story you’d actually write? Just because you started this one first doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the one you want.
Chris: If you’re wondering, “What is the alternative to trunking a story?” Some people do find some success in rediscovering what is important about the story. I mean, I had a client tell me that he took his story out of the trunk after reading material about Centering Darlings because he realized what it was about the story that he loved. And sometimes finding out what’s actually important to us improves motivation. And you realize that you spent the story working on that action plot that you thought you had to have, when really the personal relationships was the thing that got you to write. And sometimes in those cases, once you find out what your darling is and then reimagine what the story would be if you really focused on that and put it front and center, that can be motivating sometimes.
Oren: It’s also worth looking at what you’ve already learned from a story that you’re thinking about trunking, right? Because we’re all afraid of, or at least most—I am—maybe not all of us, a lot of us are afraid of having all of our time and effort wasted. And to a certain extent, I would argue that you don’t really waste time with writing as long as you’re thinking about how these things work and trying to do better because that’s just practice. Now, the tricky part there is knowing how to judge your practice because this isn’t like practicing for something that has an objective measure. It’s like… It’s not like you’re trying to get a ball in a basket and you know if you did or not because the ball went in the basket. You’re trying something much more abstract, but that’s what reading about how storytelling works on MythCreant.com will help you out with. And at that point, you can learn a lot from your trunk story: you can learn what things actually interest you; you can learn perhaps which storylines became too chaotic to manage; you can learn which ones you actually found yourself trying to go back to, and that maybe is what caused the problem because maybe this character should have been the main character in the first place. There are so many things you can learn there.
Wes: Would you encourage somebody then, Oren, to consider repurposing or salvaging aspects of a trunk story?
Oren: Yeah. I mean, that’s… I think that’s a great thing. I think people can definitely do that—I’ve done that a few times. If that gives you the energy to write, then go for it. I mean, the nice thing about the trunk is that it’s not the fire pit.
[laughter] Wes: Fire pitting stories.
Oren: Your story is not gone, probably. So you can go back to it. You can reimagine it for later. I had a story a while back that was just kind of completely untenable after a while, but it had some ship combat in it that I really liked, and I took that and made it on airships instead of regular ships. And that’s the story I’ve got on the site with airships in it. Can you tell I like airships?
[laughter] Wes: Kicking yourself for using actual boats the first time around.
Oren: The problem was actual boats the whole time. I mean, the actual problem was that the protagonist and the antagonist had a relationship that wasn’t good to write, but also I couldn’t figure out something to replace it with—that was what actually killed that story. So I started
fresh with a clean set of characters who didn’t have that baggage. And then I was like, “Oh, hey, I remember all that ship combat that I used back in the day. I’m going to go ahead and don’t mind if I control copy paste, but just do a control F for C and replace it with air, not L.”
[laughter] Chris: I had a story once that I had kind of outlined, and then when I started to draft it, I realized that I didn’t have enough sources attention and I didn’t really have a lot of content to fill it out. But more than that, the story’s appeal was based on a few jokes that I liked. And this was probably a novelette-sized story. I just wasn’t motivated enough to finish this draft because the things that pulled me in weren’t a big enough part of the story inherently, and the idea just didn’t have the potential that I originally thought it had—that was still a good learning experience. Now when I think about story ideas, I really try to think about how motivated I am to write that idea and how much content I really am interested in writing, and then kind of slot it into what I think the appropriate length is for that story based on how much writing I really want to do in that vein.
Wes: I am very curious about what jokes inspired you to write the story. Chris: There were sex jokes.
Wes: Okay, nice.
[laughter] Oren: There were 69 of them.
[laughter] Wes: Oh boy. That’s great.
Chris: I think the working title was called Sex Portal.
Wes: Okay, nice. I would probably stop and thumb through that. Like, “Oh, what’s this book? This is a joke book. What’s happening?”
Oren: And you can, of course, come to the sort of the other side of this where, if your story is nearly done, if you only have like 5% left to write, or you’ve done like several rounds of revisions and you only have a little bit left, at that point it can be worth just pushing through, even if it’s not a pleasant experience, just so that you have the thing that you already put in most of the work for—that can also be a valid tactic. I don’t want to say that you should just stop writing the moment you
encounter a problem, it’s just you have to be able to decide when it is worth pushing through. Like, when will pushing through the story be good for you in the long run, or when will it just be causing yourself unnecessary mental anguish? And that will depend on, “What is it like for you to write a story you’re not into?” Because some people can just do it, and those are the people who are most likely to be able to make money off of this, because if they’re the kind of person who needs to have a really steady update schedule, they need to be able to write at all times, and for them, maybe just go, whatever. But if you’re like me, and writing a story you don’t care about is one of the hardest things, then you have to be pretty close to the end for it to be worth pushing through on that one.
Chris: This is one of those reasons why I’m always telling people they should try short stories.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: Because again, when you’re in that magnum opus stage, and you’re trying to decide whether or not you want to trunk an entire series, or push through, that’s a pretty big decision that involves a lot of time, and you’ve got like the whole sunk cost fallacy, right? Where it’s like, “Oh geez, I put so much time into this.” And again, that time is never wasted, because a lot of times, writers learn a lot of storytelling by working on their magnum opus, even though they made things as hard for themselves as possible. But the nice thing about a short story is that if you get bored of it halfway through, then you can see, okay, what is it like to actually finish this and get that sense of accomplishment without forcing yourself to finish three more books to get to the end of the series you planned.
Wes: The other thing that might help with inspiration with short stories—I’ve been thinking about this—and obviously it depends, but talking to your support network can be helpful for this kind of stuff. And feedback is always nice if you have people willing to provide it. But time is a big ask of people. You don’t want to drop your magnum opus on their footstep and say, “I’m stuck, please help.” When you could say, “I can’t quite wrap up this 2000 word short story, do you have a little bit of time?” I think that’s why a lot of us who took writing classes in college, for better or for worse, it was… I think that there’s value in talking through some things with drafts, more or less complete. Because at that level, then, you’re dealing with some external accountability, which can be helpful for some people.
Oren mentioned, “What’s at stake with your writing? Is this professional? Are you getting paid for it?” And if you decide to open up to a friend or colleague or something and ask for their advice, you’ve kind of brought them in. And that could be a little bit more motivating now, because it’s
not just you working on it, somebody else is kind of coming to help you a little bit. And that might be the juice that you need. It’s not for everybody, but sometimes getting out of your own head for a while can help avoid the trunk.
Oren: Yeah. I mean, if you know someone who is like a person you can talk to about your stories and will enthusiastically talk to you about them with you, that can be invaluable—and be nice to that person.
Wes: Buy them chocolates.
Oren: Because let me tell you, that is not a guarantee when you go to writing social circles, whether they be in person or online or whatever—those are the Wild West. And you need to be careful who you choose to do this with, because you can be like, “Hey, so I’m sort of stuck on my story about the necro-industrial complex.” And you can have someone be like, “I don’t like skeletons; they’re boring. What about dragons? Like, what if it was the dragon industrial complex?” And you’d be like, “This is not what I wanted.” That’s not uncommon. I went through a phase where I went to every writing group in Seattle I could find, because I was convinced that if I just went to enough of them, I would write more. And this was what I encountered—people who would just… you would tell them what you were trying to do with your story and they would be like, “Well, what if you did something entirely different that I think is cool?”
Wes: Oh no.
Oren: And it wasn’t really until MythCreant started that I met more people who I could actually talk to about my stories, and then they would respond in a way that was helpful. And I’m not going to pretend I was never that guy, right? I’m sure I was. I’m sure someone came to me and was like, “Okay, so I kind of want to do a story about sand crawlers.” I’m like, “Oh yeah, sure. Sand crawlers, whatever. Have you considered making them airships?”
[laughter] They probably have their own podcast now to complain about me. [laughter]
Chris: But yeah, there is a lot of people who… It’s not about necessarily the story or working on the story, it’s just about being discouraged about your skill level. So finding that one person,who sometimes is your mom, but may not be your mom, who will cheerlead—who will be a cheerleader—is very valuable.
Oren: All right, well, with that perhaps surprisingly upbeat and heartwarming note from the cold, cynical hearts at the MythCreants saddle of sadness, we’re going to go ahead and call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you found this episode helpful, please support us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/MythCreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, we have the popular writing software Plotter; you can find out more about them at plotter.com. Next, we have Callie McLeod. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. After that, it’s Ayman Jaber; he’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Danita Rambo; she lives at
therambogueeks.com.
We’ll talk to you next week.
[Closing theme]
It’s well documented that dragons are evil monsters that hoard gold even though they can’t spend it. Or is it? Turns out dragons have a lot more depth to them, and that’s what we’re talking about today. We discuss what defines a dragon, whether it ever makes sense for them to hoard gold, and how to balance the inevitable power creep that comes with adding a dragon to Team Good. Also, you can call your dragons lots of different things, but please don’t call them bison.
Show Notes Uncle Iroh * The Dragon * Viserys Targaryen * Smaug * Beowulf Dragon * Smaug’s Wealth * Memoirs of Lady Trent * Blue Moon Rising * St. George and the Dragon * Wyvern * Temeraire * City in the Middle of the Night * Dragon’s Hoard * Saphira * Pern Dragons * Draco TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Elizabeth.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.
[opening theme]Wes: Welcome to another episode of the Mythcreant podcast. I’m your host, Wes, and with me today is:
Chris: Chris.
Wes: And:
Oren: Oren.
Wes: And upon entering the massive chamber, you see a hoard unlike any other. Intricate jewels, priceless artifacts, and gold. So much gold. So many tiny little pieces of gold. Tiny gold coins that fit right in your hand. And yet, some gargantuan dragon beast is going to know if you just take one of them? Wait, how did the dragon get this hoard in the first place? Its claws. How could it even pick up a gold coin? [laughter] And we don’t see them flying around with saddlebags or sacks and things like that. And anyway, this is just a preview of the very fine discourse you’re all going to hear on today’s Dragoncast. [laughter]
Oren: I think we should specifically talk about characters who are not dragons, but are referred to as dragons.
Wes: Like who? Uncle Iroh?
Oren: Yeah, Uncle Iroh. He’s the dragon of the West. Great guy. The dragon from Uprooted, who is awful and I hate him and I don’t know why he’s called the dragon. I think he has a fire spell? [laughter] I don’t know. It made him sound-
Chris: Is it because he takes young women?
Oren: Is that why? I don’t know. It made him sound way cooler than he was.
Chris: I haven’t read this book. From what I understand, the idea is he takes a young woman from the village and I think she just becomes his assistant before she goes off to university or something?
Oren: He kidnaps young women and makes them clean his house for ten years. And then he sends them to college. In the protagonist’s case, he picks her because she has magical talent. And the whole time I’m reading this, I’m just like, why? Why does he do this? Their village is right there. Why doesn’t he just let them go home at night? There’s no answer. [Wes laughs]
Chris: So then the story couldn’t happen.
Oren: So the story can happen. Because we really wanted a story where the love interest kidnaps the protagonist, but we wanted to pretend that wasn’t super messed up. But I assume that we’re talking about actual dragons and not what Viserys calls his temper. I also hate that guy, but I’m supposed to hate that guy, so it didn’t feel as bad.
Wes: Yes. Now, I think we can probably segue maybe back into these metaphorical dragons, but I think just dragon-dragons, whatever comes to mind in whatever shape or form, that should probably also be discussed as well.
Chris: I have opinions. I have come to conclusions about dragon sandwich.
Wes: Good. [laughter] Okay. What should we start with? How big is a dragon? Is that appropriate?
Chris: I think it can be any size as long as it is relatively big. But here’s the thing I realized. You can have mini-dragons in your setting, but only if the setting also has large dragons. So anytime that I’ve seen that a book has the cat-sized dragon that’s the cute pet – the convenient-sized dragon, the setting also has a big dragon. And that’s why we can call them dragons, even though they’re small, is because of the fact that they resemble the big dragons.
Wes: Yeah, I like that. There really hasn’t been a situation where there’s only been tiny, cute dragons.
Chris: Right, because then you probably just wouldn’t call them dragons, if the big dragons wouldn’t exist. So they can be lots of different sizes, but they’re always big, or at least there are big ones in the setting. I would say probably the smallest size is like a horse, but usually bigger than a horse.
Oren: Yeah, if it’s not megafauna of some kind, I think people are going to be asking, why are you calling it a dragon? Dragons are flexible. They can be a lot of different things. You can change a lot of things about them. I think that if you wanted to make one smaller than a horse, you would have to come up with a pretty compelling reason why it’s called a dragon, or I would just start rolling my eyes.
Chris: And usually that reason is that there’s other dragons in the setting that are much bigger and it resembles them.
Wes: Well, that’s just a really important thing, is no matter what subversion we’ve probably encountered, the word dragon sets serious expectations for size, power, ability – all of those things.
Oren: What I’ve noticed, I looked at the list of various dragon stories that I have read or have seen being popular. What I’ve sort of determined is that the purpose of dragons in stories is to take the classic example of a dragon that we all know of, which is the monster that hoards gold in a cave for some reason, and subvert that, but still assume that we know that’s the core concept of a dragon. And I was trying to find, are there any stories that just have the classic dragon that aren’t super boring? And, I mean, maybe. I couldn’t find them.
Chris: I should probably clarify that I’m mostly talking about classic Western dragons. Because Eastern dragons are similar in many ways, but also different.
Oren: What I learned from doing some basic studying about mythological dragons is that we are sometimes perhaps a little too liberal with what we consider to be a dragon. It’ll be like, there are dragons in every culture in the world. It’s like, alright, what’s this dragon? And it’s like, well, it’s a giant serpent. It’s like, hmm. I mean, I guess we could call that a dragon if we want, but are you sure it might not just be a snek? [sic] A big ol’ snek? [laughter] Snakes are pretty common and they’re spooky, so I don’t know if we have to fall back on this idea of the universal dragon myth to explain why people would have snakes in their art forms.
Chris: Giant snakes. I mean, people like to make giant versions of everything, so…
Oren: It’s like, what if animal was big? Small animal big now. [laughter] It’s not a particularly complicated idea. But yeah, I mean, most of the stories I’m thinking about are using either Western dragons or occasionally a combination. Sometimes you get settings that try to use different dragon mythologies to various degrees of success.
Wes: The Western dragon as we know it, we can blame Tolkien for Smaug, because the immense popularity of Lord of the Rings meant that tons of people read The Hobbit. And so we know about Smaug that way. And he ripped that off from Beowulf. That entire saga with Beowulf’s last challenge going to fight the dragon and that dragon horde: that’s one of the older texts we have where for whatever reason, a dragon’s hanging out on a massive treasure hoard. I think they only did that because the Geats and Beowulf and all of them, they just really wanted treasure all the time. The best part of that is like Beowulf’s dying and he’s like, Wiglaf, bring me some of that sweet treasure so I may look upon it and be content while I die. I’m just like, this stuff rules. But there had to be a dragon there sitting on it. And that’s mostly it was Tolkien said, I need inspiration for a dragon. Yes – I’ve translated Beowulf. I’ll do this. I don’t know when he translated Beowulf relative to writing The Hobbit, but he did translate Beowulf. And then everybody’s like, oh, okay, that’s a dragon. It does nothing but sit on treasure. And it just doesn’t need to eat either, apparently, unless it eats treasure, which would explain things.
Oren: I mean, there are some stories where dragons draw sustenance from gold or whatever, because people have been trying to ask since The Hobbit, why do dragons have treasure? My favorite thing about The Hobbit is that in The Hobbit, the dragon’s treasure is just the dwarves’ treasure that he moved in and took.
Wes: That makes so much more sense though.
Oren: Right. And that makes sense, but then he apparently gathered it all into a room for some reason. It’s like, that’s kind of an odd thing for him to do. How did he do that? How did he reach into the room?
Chris: I just love the image of this dragon looking in every corner of every room, and then finding individual coins, and then trying to scoot them slowly to the other side of a fortress.
Wes: You got to pass the time.
Oren: Also, apparently in The Hobbit movies, he’s just really exaggerating the amount of gold that exists. There’s an estimate floating around that smog is worth however many billion dollars, but that estimate is based on the book and the description of the pile of gold he’s sitting on. In the movie, he has like a mountain of gold, which is more gold than exists. [laughter] It would be difficult to value how much that’s worth.
Wes: There was a Reddit thread that said, if you have dragons in your world, it’s assumed that your world has more gold than ours. And I really liked that. I was like, yes, I accept this premise.
Oren: Yeah. I still remember the first time I read a book that was trying to subvert dragons a little bit. In retrospect, it was pretty basic, but it was like, oh, but you see, to the dragons, gold has this song, and they really like it, and it’s beautiful to them. I was like, okay, yeah, that’s all the explanation I need. That was also the book that was like, hey, look, we’re very clever because our super cool awesome protagonist doesn’t have shiny armor. He has somewhat pitted armor. [exaggerated] Woooo! [normal] I was like, yeah, this is extremely edgy and mature. [laughter]
Chris: Of course, the hot new thing these days is dragons that hoard other things besides gold, like books.
Oren: It’s certainly the Tumblr meme. I haven’t seen that in a story yet, but I’m always on the lookout. My favorite interpretation of that so far is the one from the Lady Trent series, where the dragons are basically just animals. They don’t hoard anything themselves, but their bones are an advanced construction material. And part of the storyline is that if people find out about that, they’ll start hoarding dead dragons. So the protagonists are trying to keep that information under wraps.
Chris: I did encounter a dragon in Blue Moon Rising that collects butterflies, but I don’t know if it was really a butterfly hoard so much as it was a subversion where somebody set out to slay a dragon. It turns out the dragon is really nice and collects butterflies, so then he takes the dragon home as his friend. And that makes it sound like a really light, sweet story. It is not, if you keep reading. This is the ultimate bait and switch story, is what it is.
Wes: They were actually vampire butterflies. [laughter]
Chris: I wish! Man, that would have been a much cooler bait and switch.
Wes: Thinking about the treasure hoards and stuff too – okay, it flies in and takes it or terrorizes the land and people bring the dragon’s treasure. And that’s how the hoards are made, because it’s tribute. I don’t know if either of you are familiar with Saint George and the dragon. Saint George is in Christianity. This is a Christian figure that apparently kills a dragon. So dragons are canon in the Bible. But the story for that was that the dragon was extorting tribute from a nearby village. And so they were giving them trinkets and money and livestock, and then they basically ran out of that, so then once a year they would give a human tribute. And they were fine until their lottery picked their princess. And they’re like, oh no, we can’t give them our princess.
Chris: Everybody else can get eaten, but not the princess.
Wes: Yeah, exactly. And then Saint George had to come in and slay it.
Chris: Is that where the dragons eating princesses thing comes from?
Wes: It definitely is one of the sources for that, yes. It’s a lot more, at least in my knowledge of it, and our listeners could correct me, but the Saint George story is a lot more popular in Slavic Christian churches. Generally the Christian sects that venerate the saints more are more likely to spend time on this. American Protestant churches that spend more time on Jesus than the saints don’t really get this story. I was raised Protestant. And then when I met Orthodox Christians and learned of this story, I was like, whoa, well that’s way cooler.
Oren: It’d have gotten me to pay more attention at Sunday school, I tell you what. I mean the one time that I went to Sunday school.
Wes: [excited] You’re telling me dragons are real? [laughter]
Oren: It’s like, tell me more about the dragons. And they’ll be like, mmm, okay.
Wes: But yeah, so actual story of dragon accepting a princess’s tribute.
Oren: Well, look, we can’t let the dragons take the high quality mates that the noble aristocratic men need. What’s the world coming to at that point? [laughter]
Wes: Okay, so because Game of Thrones was popular and everybody saw the dragons and the CGI for those dragons had the dragon wings attached to the four legs.
Oren: Did it?
Wes: Yes. Instead of–
Chris: But they still have four legs, right? So it’s not that they’re sitting on two legs.
Wes: Yes, they have four legs, but the wings are attached to the two legs closest to the head. So like a bat.
Oren: I mean like if a bat had an extra set of limbs growing out of its wings. Yes. Wait, hang on. Admittedly, I haven’t seen Game of Thrones in a long time, but this image that I’m looking at really makes it look like its forward legs are its wings.
Wes: Yes.
Oren: Oh, I can already hear the arguments that this might technically be a wyvern. [laughter]
Wes: Yes. Well, I just thought it was kind of funny because the dragons in Skyrim look like that too. And I’m just like, where did the wings on the back go? Just four legs and wings on the back. That’s fine.
Chris: Dragons don’t have to have wings or flight as long as they have some breath spit attack.
Wes: Okay, so that’s a dragon. They gotta have a breath spit attack.
Chris: I think they have to have either wings/flight, so if it looks like a serpent, but then it somehow coils through the air and it doesn’t have wings, it still seems to qualify as a dragon. So it needs to have either wings or flight, or on the other hand, some kind of special breath or spit attack that’s ranged from its mouth. It could be like acid or ice breath. Doesn’t have to be fire. But I think if it doesn’t have either the wings or flight, or the breath, at that point, I don’t think anybody would want to call it a dragon anymore. Of course, then there’s the question, does this make Godzilla a dragon?
Wes: Well, Godzilla has a breath weapon. Yes.
Chris: Godzilla has a breath weapon, so I guess it does make Godzilla a dragon.
Wes: The rare dragon that has gone bipedal. [laughter]
Chris: That does make Godzilla a little different.
Wes: But I do like how Godzilla likes to swim. That gets on the whole sea serpent type dragon thing. So that works.
Oren: Aquatic dragons are fairly popular. A lot of stories feature those. I think what it comes down to is, could I make a creature that people would recognize as a dragon without wings or a special breath weapon of some kind? Probably. Would I want to? Ehhh… At that point, the question is, it sounds like it’s probably a lot less cool. The Temeraire books, for example, have a lot of different kinds of dragons, and most of them are very boring and forgettable. The ones that you remember are the ones that have some kind of special ability. They can mostly fly. A few of them can’t, but most of them can fly. But only a handful have anything resembling a breath weapon or something that would substitute for one, and those are the ones you remember. The fire-breathing ones, the ones with acid. Temeraire himself has some kind of sonic wind attack. And then you have the others, and it’s like yeah, there’s a bunch of others, I guess. They’re also around.
Chris: I think you could get away with calling it a dragon if it doesn’t have those things, if, again, it resembles another dragon in the setting that does have either wings or some breath attack. But I think if you had a story where you didn’t have those other dragons, and you’re just like, here’s a big lizard. It doesn’t fly; it doesn’t have a breath attack; and called it a dragon, people are like, eh, it’s not really a dragon.
Wes: It isn’t really, though. It’s just a super crocodile. [laughter]
Oren: Or, according to the naming conventions of some books, we could call it a bison.
Wes: Oh my gosh. Oren.
Chris: No…
Wes: Oren, why would you do that?
Oren: Bam! Y’all thought I forgot about City in the Middle of the Night. [pained laughter]
Chris: No. No.
Wes: Oof. That hurts me. That hurts my brain.
Chris: Or a zebra. Who knows?
Oren: [laughing] Call it a zebra.
Wes: I’m already, like, I was thinking about the weird monikers for dragons, and calling them wyrms is cool, but also weird to me. But then you went and dropped that.
Chris: But only wyrm with a Y.
Wes: Yes, wyrm with a Y. But then Oren drops “bison” and now everything’s just ruined.
Oren: Well, I feel like the wyrm term, as it were, is a nod to the mythological origins where they were very often just giant sneks [sic]. They were big ol’ snakes. And that’s sort of a worm. Worms and snakes are basically the same thing, is what I’m saying here on Mythcreant’s podcast. So you can quote me on that.
Wes: I think it’s kind of funny. I just popped into the etymology on Merriam-Webster’s, and it’s just like how dragon, go back far enough, oh, it’s just the word for serpent. It’s just like, okay, thanks, Latin.
Chris: Oh, see, we gotta get Oren now, because Oren, you said that a culture that had a giant serpent meant they didn’t necessarily have dragons. But see, the word dragon means serpent.
Oren: Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Yeah, that’s definitely what people today mean when they look back at ancient cultures and are like, see, they’ve got dragons. [laughter] They’re like, oh, you see, because technically the word dragon, if you go back far enough, just means serpent, and so anyone who drew a big serpent had dragons. Retroactively, it’s all the same, it’s all the collective unconscious, the monomyth. It’s all true, open your eyes. [laughter] Okay, so we’ve sort of covered what dragons. Now my question is, why dragons?
Chris: There’s actually a lot of purposes for dragons. It’s surprising how many different roles they fulfill.
Oren: Okay, are you going to suggest that someone maybe write a short story about a classic adventurers vs. dragon fight, but from the dragon’s perspective, like some kind of real basic weirdo? So you’re suggesting we should do something like that? Because I’ve never heard of anyone who wrote a story like that. And if they did, they should feel bad.
Chris: Excuse me, but I have it on good authority that such a story would have been called cute by commenters and very sweet, despite the potentially violent dragon protagonist. It’s quite an accomplishment if you think about it.
Oren: That’s an odd story to call cute. That story was pretty graphic.
Chris: I remember originally looking at that story and be like, okay, you gotta make it angrier.
Oren: Why else would you have a dragon in your story though, Chris? You had ideas.
Chris: Okay, yeah. It’s interesting how much people do with dragons, because kind of traditionally they’re supposed to be antagonists. But of course, anything that we use often enough becomes good. Because we like it, because it’s not as scary anymore, that kind of thing. So we’ve got a surprising number of dragon protagonists, just like this very cute short story we were talking about, Dragon’s Horde. You can find it on Mythcreants.com. Also the Wings of Fire series, dragons are protagonists there. They’re a really popular choice for xenofiction.
Oren: Whoa, that’s a big word. Hitting me with the fancy new terms today.
Chris: Xenofiction being stories where you have very non-human protagonists.
Oren: People also just love to ride dragons, and so there are a bunch of stories where you do that in various forms.
Chris: The Temeraire books.
Oren: Oh man, the Temeraire books, when I first started reading them, I was like, wait, so hang on, so dragons have nets on them? Big nets, and a bunch of people hang on to the nets, and that’s how they get into battle? The dragon flies into battle with 15 guys hanging off of it on nets? And I was like, that’s silly. I’ll never take that seriously. And then eight books later, I was like, now tell me more about the nets, and how the people hold on to them. I’m very invested now. [laughter]
Chris: Let’s see, Eragon, another example story with mount and animal companion. You have to have that animal companion that you’ve got a mental link with, and they talk in your head.
Wes: Very important.
Chris: Very important. Great wish fulfillment there. Sometimes they’re supporting characters, especially if they talk in your head.
Oren: I was a big fan of the Dragons of Pern series for a bunch of reasons, but primarily because it was the first series where I encountered the author trying to provide an in-universe explanation for some weird sexist assumptions that they had made. Because for the first bunch of however many books, all the dragon riders are guys, except for the queen dragons, who are just baby makers. And everyone who fights the threat is mostly guys. And I was like, that’s kind of weird. And then in one of the books, they do a flashback book where they’re like, oh, you see, it’s like that because the person who made the dragons was sexist. That’s why it’s like that. I was like, hang on, I feel like you actually made the dragons. [laughter]
Chris: Is this self-commentary?
Wes: Yeah, it’s self-commentary, for sure.
Oren: That’s not a real explanation.
Chris: Sorry! I was sexist.
Oren: I also got super weirded out in that series when it turned out the dragons could time travel and teleport. Took me forever to figure out what was going on there.
Wes: Yeah, when dragons get magic, nothing makes sense anymore.
Oren: I mean, I don’t mind dragons having special abilities. I don’t like it when the dragons are also wizards. I feel like that’s just cheating at that point. Once you make the dragon also a wizard, it kind of loses its identity.
Chris: This is the issue with dragons that are protagonists, or especially pets and animal companions or side characters in the first place, is that they’re just too powerful already because they’re big and they either fly or have a breath attack. So already we’re getting into a lot of trouble. Like in Eragon, his dragon, Saphira, in the first book just disappears. You can tell Paolini’s just looking for reasons why she won’t be around so that the main character can actually be in trouble. They’re always heading into a town where they can’t bring her or what have you.
Oren: Temeraire had a weird opposite problem where because basically everybody has dragons in that setting, it didn’t give the protagonist a huge big advantage to have a dragon. But it did create this weird situation where the dragons are supposed to be huge, but we also want Temeraire the dragon to be in almost every scene. And so I sometimes just had a hard time figuring out how Temeraire was following Laurence into these buildings. I get that the buildings are sometimes larger than regular ones, but Temeraire is the size of a ship. How is he getting in there? I don’t understand. It’s like if the USS Constitution was just following you around. That’s how big Temeraire is sometimes described as.
Wes: Reduce-enlarge spells, clearly.
Oren: Yeah, just shrink down.
Chris: And of course you can have dragons as antagonists. A little more traditional. I don’t really like the idea that all dragons are evil. Not a big fan of that.
Oren: Yeah, I ran into that in The Priory of the Orange Tree where there were fire dragons and water dragons; water dragons were good for reasons, and fire dragons were evil for reasons, and I found it super boring. It’s like, and here are the fire dragons! I’m like, yeah, I bet they are. Yeah, they are for sure.
Chris: I think the problem is either they’re sapient, because sometimes dragons are sapient, and you’re basically created an evil race. Or they’re not sapient and you’re like, hey, let’s go murder a bunch of animals.
Wes: Yikes.
Chris: It’s a little better if there’s one dragon that’s making trouble, as opposed to all dragons are bad, because then the story is kind of supporting genocide or animal extinction to some extent. I just don’t like that idea. I don’t like the idea that the world would be better off if we just went and slaughtered every single dragon in the setting.
Oren: I mean, that’s why I couldn’t watch the anime Drifting Dragons even though it had dragons and airships. They hunt dragons like this is some kind of sky whaling. I was like, I don’t really want to watch that.
Chris: No, let’s not do that.
Oren: No thank you.
Chris: And it’s weird because it also seemed like it was advertising itself as a light, fun show and it’s like, yeah, I’m not seeing this.
Oren: A light fun show about the whaling industry.
Chris: A really interesting depiction I’ve seen is in the book Seraphina. Dragons are Vulcan-like. They remind me of Vulcans. First of all, they can change into human form. Another thing that’s surprisingly common is dragons that can shapeshift so they look like humans.
Oren: Well, we were just saying enlarge-reduce spells, right? That’s the main focus of getting them to be human sized.
Wes: And everybody wants to find out that they are part dragon.
Chris: The book spends a fair amount of time talking about the differences between dragons and humans and their cultural differences, and how they’re trying to build an uneasy alliance between dragons and humans to fight against the dragon antagonists that are villains, because dragons are not inherently evil. The dragons suppress their emotions. It’s like Vulcans where I think the idea is that they were kind of violent and fight each other a lot normally. So suppressing their emotions is one way that they take care of that problem.
Oren: That’s also very Vulcan-like.
Chris: Yeah, exactly. It’s Vulcan-like. They love the sciences and the arts to some extent too. Yeah, so it’s just kind of interesting to see that take on dragons.
Oren: And of course there’s the classics. Dragonheart is a movie that holds up surprisingly well because it’s a subversion of the whole “Dragons are evil monsters that we have to kill” because actually, no, it was the king who was evil the whole time. That’s not super groundbreaking these days, but it still made a pretty good movie. Plus, I really love the thing where they pretend to do dragonkilling jobs. That’s my favorite part. I know that’s only a small part of the movie, but I wish that was the whole thing.
Wes: And the scene where he tries to sink, but it’s too shallow, and so everybody’s like, oh my gosh, let’s go eat it. [laughter]
Chris: Oh no.
Wes: Something that I think is funny with dragons is: dragons have a natural enemy. What is it? And for the Dungeons and Dragons world, they decided giants are the enemies of dragons. I don’t know what the equivalent of that is; I guess it’s us and alligators, maybe. No, that still sounds terrifying. Us and monitor lizards? That’s still terrifying. I hate it.
Chris: I would think that the most logical enemy would be some group that is competing for their food source, especially since there’s no way dragons, if they’re in any number, would have enough to eat. I guess maybe giants in the setting are grabbing cows and eating them.
Oren: If I was going to pick a classic D&D monster to be the dragon’s enemy, I would have picked beholders because it’s not just about the logic of the fights, which, obviously giants don’t have any particular chance against dragons, but it’s also just the cultural clout that they have. And within the setting, dragons are literally in the name, and then beholders are probably the most famous monster. So I think that would work. If I was inventing a mythology for D&D and I wanted dragons to have a natural enemy, I would pick beholders because those are like the two most prominent monsters.
Wes: I like that ,because giants are weird anyway. They’re just people, big.
Oren: Or, I mean, the obvious actual enemy of dragons is adventurers, who’re basically their own species by D&D rules. It’s like, I haven’t seen any peasants with 10 levels of fighter, let me tell you. [laughter] All right, now that we’ve covered why giants are a weird natural enemy for dragons, I think I’m going to call this episode to a close and go add it to our horde, as we are dragons who hoard podcast episodes. Yeah, that’ll track.
Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, support us on Patreon. You can even choose Dragon Tier, if you so wish.
Oren: Before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First there’s Plotter, the popular writing software, which you can learn about at plotter.com. Next there’s Callie MacLeod. Then we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Next we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Danita Rambo. She lives at therambogeeks.com. We’ll talk to you next week.
[closing theme]Chris: This has been the Mythcreant podcast. Opening and closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.
There’s something exciting about this podcast. You could say it’s electrifying, which is fitting because this week we’re talking about some of the many energy sources that can populate your world. Are you the kind of person who spends hours wondering how castles are heated and how spaceships get their fuel? No? Too bad! We’re talking about all of that, plus more about cranks than you ever wanted to know.
Show Notes Harvesting Lightning * Mako Energy * Mist: Final Fantasy IX * Soul Gem * Solarpunk * A Half-Built Garden * Engineering in the Ancient World * Fuel: Star Wars * Holodeck Reactor * Deuterium: Voyager * Three Parts Dead TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Anonymous.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.
[Intro Music]Wes: Welcome to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m your host, Wes. And with me today is…
Oren: Oren
Wes: …and…
Chris: Chris.
Wes: Make sure your batteries are fully charged or you’re plugged into the wall and get ready, because this podcast is going to zap you full of energy, because we’re talking about how power and energy affects your worldbuilding today.
Oren: Wow, my hair is standing on end.
Wes: Oh, I know, full of electricity. And right out the gate: We are not experts in how power is made, we just are fans of it. And so we’re going to be wrong about probably several things on here.
Oren: I am going to talk like I’m an expert, though.
Wes: Yes, yes.
Oren: I’m going to be very confident about the things I say.
Wes: I’m just getting this disclaimer out of the way. And it’s done. We are consummate professionals on how this stuff works, so let us tell you.
When we’re talking about energy sources, this very much leans into either the magical or the technological level of your world. But I think it’s kind of an important thing to focus on. If you have the means of generating power, then those means can affect the world. Not only just how the power is extracted or used, but any side effects from the power and how much power is around also affects just exactly what your characters can even do in the story.
Chris: So, here’s a question: Do you two think it’s possible to have a resource scarcity with infinite energy?
Wes: No, not a meaningful one.
Oren: What is infinite energy sandwich discourse?
Wes: Tony Stark made it in the second Iron Man movie and then he jealously hoarded it.
Oren: You’re going to need to get pretty specific. This is a problem that a lot of very high-tech Star Trek type settings have. Not technically infinite energy, but they have so much that it’s effectively infinite. So, they do one of two things: They either ignore that and just hand wave it or they carve out exceptions. Like, we can make almost anything because we have infinite energy, but there’s this one special, hard-to-make-anium substance. And we need it, because otherwise we’ll die of the hard-to-make-anium deficiencies.
Chris: Or dilithium crystals or something?
Oren: It could be dilithium, although they never really used dilithium for that. There’s a couple of mentions of dilithium mining, but it doesn’t come up that often. You can have a thing where it’s like, we have this thing that produces a ton of energy, but to use it we need this specific catalyst, and the specific catalyst is very rare.
So you can do stuff like that. But if you have a machine that just spits out infinite energy, you are going to have a harder time generating resource scarcity.
Chris: I think something interesting that you could do, is have lots of energy, but have trouble transporting that energy. Because we don’t think about that much. That’s why batteries are so important. But battery technology is kind of separate.
So, if you have a world that has a natural geothermal on steroids or something, people have to be in specific areas to harvest it, it’s much harder to transport it. The farther away you get, the less energy you have.
Oren: That’s why we don’t generally harvest lightning as a form of power.
Wes: Unfortunately.
Oren: Yeah, it’s too bad really. I read a couple articles on this and assuming they are correct, the argument they made is that we do have the technology. If we spent a lot of money, we could create a system robust enough to absorb and store the energy from a lightning bolt. But this thing would be extremely expensive and huge and it would just sit there anytime there wasn’t a lightning storm.
Chris: This is the issue with wind, but it would be more so if we actually needed a lightning bolt.
Wes: I’m trying to imagine just how big this thing would be to absorb 1.21 gigawatts.
Oren: My favorite story about energy production is Final Fantasy VII. I just love that story. It’s a great game. It’s one of my favorites and it has this whole thing about how in this world, everything is run on mako power, but mako is bad for the planet because it comes from the life stream, which is what everything needs to be alive. So, they’re kind of harvesting life energy to power everything.
And it’s like, all right, I’m totally with you. This is a very cool metaphor. I’m into it. And they’re like, you know what we need to replace mako energy? Good clean coal! That’s like, oh boy.
Wes: I like how then in Final Fantasy IX, Mist Continent that makes people kind of irritable and can start wars and mutates things that can all live in it for too long. Some of the people are like, well, actually, that’ll power these engines. We can have our airships run on mist as long as they’re still kind of touching the bottom of the fog. So, it’s kind of cool because it’s, you know, a boat on a sea of fog. Toward the end of that game, you realize that the mist is just souls.
Oren: Oops.
Chris: Whoa. Got super dark and edgy very quickly there.
Wes: Yes, because the whole point is a second planet was dying and they want to like colonize the main planet of the story. So, they set up this organism to create the mist that prevents the souls from presumably being reabsorbed into some kind of life-stream-type thing. So, they just float, and cause trouble, and also power engines. I remember finding that out and I was just like, uh, what?
Chris: What a downer to find out at the end of a game. Sounds like somebody is really into their edgy shocking twists.
Wes: Yes, of course, you know, previous to that, they did develop some airships that worked apparently on just normal engines. They don’t specifically say coal, or anything fun like that. It’s a good way to say we can move past powering our ships on the souls of the dead.
Oren: There is no ethical consumption under Square Enix. So as far as I’m concerned, I’m totally in the clear to sail my skyboat across a sea of ghosts.
Wes: I do like those problematic energy sources, but the Elder Scrolls games do that with soul gems. It’s like, oh, so you want to enchant things? Well, you need soul gems. Well, what’s in a soul gem? Well, it’s a soul, of course.
Oren: I mean, that’s probably just a euphemism. That’s a thing they call it. Probably like a little static charge or something that’s in there.
Wes: If you don’t want to power things on the souls of the dead, you might consider cool ways to harness the energy of the planet without sucking its life force dry. Chris mentioned wind. Solar’s good. I’m a big fan of the tidal ones that aren’t really doing that well yet because, you know, salt water and all that stuff. But I think that’s a cool way to kind of take advantage of ocean tide. Pretty much you just need to figure out how do I spin this turbine to create a charge?
Oren: All right, so hear me out. Skeletons.
Wes: Go on.
Oren: Just get some skeletons.
Chris: It is a leveling up of human powered machinery, which is a thing like human powered water mills and all that stuff used to be in common use.
Oren: You all forgot about the Necro-Industrial Complex, but it’s back, baby!
Wes: Oh, man, how could we have forgotten?
Oren: Cast raised dead on a bunch of skeletons who can work forever and never get tired and don’t need to eat and don’t need wages or anything. So, you just make a bunch of skeletons and you have them turn a crank. And it’s easy-peasy.
Wes: But now I’m wondering: What level of sentience do these skeletons have?
Oren: That’s not something you or the ethics board needs to look into. But I mean, there’s clearly a demand for more stories that have a lot of renewables in them for, I would assume, obvious reasons.
Solar punk is a very popular aesthetic. There aren’t that many solar punk books. Not yet. There are some. I just read recently A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys. That’s definitely a solar punk novel. It has a huge focus on people coming up with efficient, non-carbon burning energy sources and trying to make those viable and using those to preserve things that we need, while also not cooking the planet.
Chris: I think another good thing to think about when we’re talking about renewables versus fossil fuels—besides just that fossil fuels obviously are very dirty, they’re bad for our health and bad for the environment, all that—is just the different dynamics of having a fuel source that is ready to go, that you just grab from the ground, versus most renewables, that take a lot of skilled labor. You have to set up machinery, you need technicians, People have to maintain them.
And the difference there is that for renewables, the wealth is actually shared a lot more. Whereas whenever it’s something that’s just ready to be ploughed in the ground, what you have is a resource that is valuable, that people would be more likely to fight over. Then the people who benefit from that are more likely to be a small group. Honestly, it encourages things like colonialism and other atrocities. Because if you can just go and grab somebody’s land and take their fossil fuels, that’s different than, no, we actually need to develop a labor force and have skilled labor in here.
The other thing about renewables is, the difficulty transporting it also means that the skilled labor is local. So that just creates two very different types of economies.
Oren: You say all that, but just wait until I set up my giant mirror over your solar plant that redirects all of the light over to my solar plant. There you go. I have now imported fossil fuel conflict into the renewable industry.
It should also, of course, be mentioned that a lot of renewable technology still depends on other resources that may not be hydrocarbons, but that are difficult to acquire and that can have its own set of ethical concerns. Which, I’m not an expert on, it’s a thing to be aware of.
Chris: I do like the fact that non transportable energy gives you a justification for people being in weird places. Imagine you were harvesting energy from deep sea trenches and so you had to have technicians down there.
Oren: In some kind of abyss, you might say.
Wes: It’s true. I mean, you get the cool environment and that level of skill to extract the stuff brings in natural element of risk.
Chris: What if all of your cities were around some kind of supernatural energy source instead of being on rivers? You could kind of change the geography and where humans tend to settle.
Oren: If you’ve got big magic crystal formations and the magic crystals are what power your magic system? Yeah, absolutely. You’re going to have settlements form up around magic crystal deposits.
One thing also to keep in mind is if you want to get really into the technical weeds of this, which a lot of people won’t, I don’t usually, but it’s still interesting to think about, is that beyond the source of energy, do you have a way to harness it to create something useful? Because it’s not immediately obvious how being able to boil water is going to allow you to have an industrial revolution. There are a few steps in between there and you need different kinds of cranks and the ability to spin different things and then ways to harness that spinning to do useful stuff.
There’s a book that I should have grabbed before we started. I’ll put it in the show notes that describes this, and it talks about how one of the reasons that we didn’t have industrial revolutions before the actual industrial revolution is that it took a number of technologies existing at the same time in order to make that possible. It wasn’t just as simple as, well, you figured out how to boil water, so steam engine time.
Most stories don’t need to go that far into it, but if you’re one of those people, you know who you are, who’s really into the technical stuff, then that can be really interesting.
Wes: Well, it just fleshes it out too. If you’re determined to say that steam power is what my world is going to run on, I think that’s what’s going to happen. What are all the techs involved in making that happen and what helped make that possible in the first place?
Oren: It can help with realism a bit. It’s why you’re probably not going to have a steam industrial revolution in a society that doesn’t have access to a fair amount of metal working. It’s hard to make a steam engine out of wood. I’m not saying you can’t. I don’t know if you can or not. I’m just saying it’s probably pretty difficult.
Chris: I also think it’s worth thinking about what are the differences between what society looks like before and after industrial revolution that could change if you add a lot of energy to your setting and you want to make it realistic. With that much energy and of course technology to harness it, we can have big factories, but also efficient transport, so that we can have bigger markets. If we don’t have the energy to do fast transportation, it’s really hard to engage in widespread trade or have commodities.
That’s why in a fantasy setting, we have our local smithy and our local cabinet maker and those town craftspeople because you need all of your goods to be produced in town because you don’t have tons of shipping. And so then, once you have energy, you can produce things on a mass scale and also ship them on a mass scale. And so, we don’t have that fantasy town feel anymore.
Wes: Yeah, that’s a good point. Even large cities that are powered by magical energy. Yeah, the bigger the industrial complex, regardless of the fantasy or the sci-fi of it, more people are going to go to the cities and there’s going to be less of those specific jobs that you just noted kind of lose that small town fantasy feel naturally. Or you probably would, and people might notice the differences.
Chris: In some ways, it’s a little sad because having cheap consumer goods probably raised the quality of a lot of people’s lives. But at the same time, that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t actually a decline in quality of a lot of goods between when you had a person who was investing tons of time making something that was expensive, but then it was really important to make it last because it was so expensive, to when you have cheap commodity goods.
Oren: I have read some interesting back and forth on to what extent mass production decreased quality, and there’s apparently a lot of disagreement about that.
It’s worth thinking that when we think of a handmade artisanal craft, we’re usually thinking of something that a person is spending a huge amount of time on and really using their expertise to make it as good as possible. In most cases for us, if you have the income to do that, the reason you’re doing that is because you want a really nice one. Otherwise, if you didn’t care, you would just go and buy something that’s mass produced.
It’s worth noting that that isn’t always the case if you don’t have access to mass production. Like, you still need a shirt, and you might not be able to afford to have a really good tailor make a really good shirt that will last you a long time. You might just get a crappy shirt that some apprentice made. And if that’s the case, then having mass production of shirts might actually increase your quality of shirt.
Chris: I think people probably got a lot of hand-me-down shirts too. I mean, there was also a lot of reusing and patching and those times.
Oren: All I’m saying is that, I have read different accounts of to what extent the quality of goods does or does not drop based on automation.
Wes: But all this for the world, the presence of shops and services and goods and all that stuff, definitely would have been a bearing perhaps on your main character, your other characters and skill sets that they might have or not have otherwise.
Chris just made a good point about hand-me-downs and stuff. So maybe there’s not a great tailor around or there’s just not an accessible opportunities to Amazon a bunch of stuff to your farm. You probably would be handy with a needle, among other things.
If you’re in a higher energy environment with better transportation capabilities, you might not have bothered with something like that. It just wouldn’t be a known skill because you don’t have a use for it. So that’s another way to consider how your energy needs can affect just basic skill sets.
Oren: Zooming back out for a minute. One of my favorite tropes, if you’re looking at power sources, is to have some kind of supernatural or otherwise magical power source in your setting that has adverse effects, but like, fun adverse effects. Because in real life, we have plenty of power sources with adverse effects. But—
Chris: I don’t want to read about it.
Oren: That’s going to be a little bit more somber than maybe you want. Instead, you can have some kind of weird glowing metal that is used to create these really futuristic-y reactors. But it has the minor problem of it kind of weakens the dimensional barriers where it’s being used. And so then demons come out. It’s like, that’s fun, now we can have a fun demon adventure. And it can kind of be a global warming parallel if you want just a more exciting one.
Chris: That’s definitely more fun than the Star Trek warp global warming parallel.
Oren: Oh, my God.
Chris: Gotta adhere to the warp speed limit. It’s like, hey, guys, so the entire premise of our show is exploring space at warp speed. What if we introduce an episode where we said, that was bad and you shouldn’t do it? It’s like, well, I don’t think that’s going to last very long. It’s like, hey, guys, what if boldly going where no one has gone before was actually bad for space? And it’s like, well, that’s kind of our whole thing, man. What do you want from us?
Wes: Any story they’re deciding to say, OK, we’re going to have a problem with the power in this one. And it’s like, well, has there ever been a power problem before? And they say, no, that’s a bad idea. The Star Wars movie where they run out of fuel. They’re running out of fuel? What?
Oren: Yeah. Suddenly in Last Jedi, fuel is a thing you can run out of. Let me put it this way: I’m not against the possibility that ships in Star Wars could run out of fuel. I am bothered by the fact that in Last Jedi, they run out of fuel extremely quickly, which has not really been a thing before. You need to put a little more thought into it.
Chris: I think in any story, if you’re going to use resource shortages, you have to make sure that you are consistently thinking them through and not just using them when it’s convenient for you to use them. Or they don’t feel real anymore. They just feel like a plot contrivance every time it happens.
So, if it’s like you have your characters wandering around in their ship for weeks, without stopping anywhere, and they’re having no problems with fuel, and then another ship goes for a day, and they’re like, oh no, we’re out of fuel. That doesn’t feel real. Whereas if you actually are rigorous with it and make it consistent, then that can be really interesting at that point.
Oren: It’s rude to personally attack Star Trek Voyager like that, Chris.
Chris: Voyager, which manifests new shuttles whenever it wants to use the…
Oren: New shuttles, new torpedoes. Voyager is a thing where they just had a bunch of conflicting desires. In the early episodes, they wanted the idea of, okay, our ship is trapped far from home, which means we have limited resources. We can’t just go back to a star base whenever we’re low on space gas. And okay, sure, that’s a decent premise for a Star Trek show.
But they still want to do their regular Star Trek episodes, which include holodeck episodes and replicators. And so, they just kind of ignore it whenever it was annoying. They’re like, okay, well, we can just use the holodecks because they run on a different power source than the rest of the ship.
Chris: It’s a very weird premise for a show that basically has a reset button, where we start every episode with everything being fine, and then there’s no continuity. You get damaged in one episode, the next episode, everything’s repaired. You would expect if you’re going to have an ongoing show that’s dealing with resource storage as part of its premise, that things just won’t go back to reset every episode.
Oren: And it also doesn’t help that in Voyager and Star Trek in general, we have no idea what powers their ship. Their ship power just goes. It’s like, we’re going to be low on power. And it’s like, are you? Can you not get more of whatever it is?
Later in the show, they eventually were like, it’s deuterium because they decided to go with deuterium because they decided that the ship was powered by fusion reactors, which has always been in the tech manuals, but the show never really acknowledged it. And so, they were like, it’s deuterium. That’s what our ships are powered by. It’s like, all right, but deuterium is really common. And they even acknowledge that in one of the episodes. So it’s like, all right, this is why we don’t have resource problems anymore.
Chris: Another thing I want to mention that you could use to restrict energy a little bit is just make it require really expensive infrastructure.
Oren: I was going to say human sacrifice, but your idea works too.
Chris: I mean, if we’re getting into the speculative energy sources, we can get all sorts of things like human sacrifice. Maybe you have to do constant rituals. But infrastructure can also create a big off-the-grid-effect.
And if you have a lot of political strife, it can be a matter of do you have the political stability for a large enough group to pile their resources together to make energy infrastructure and an energy grid and maintain that? Or maybe the power goes out every time there’s a war and nobody can keep that power running by themselves. And then as soon as you go outside where there’s a powerful empire or something, that energy’s gone.
Wes: And a good extension of that too is just, is the grid centralized or decentralized? As we experience our current world, things happen to affect power systems. Like in the United States, for example, we see the different effects that that can have on different states and things like that, depending on the nature of the grid. Is it powered by one source or does it have a diversity of sources to draw on? Is it centralized system or is it a decentralized system?
You often hear about that pretty quick, depending on how many people are without power. There can be massive implications there, that could play into a political story like you just mentioned, right? It’s like, well, this state’s controlled by fossil fuel. And so, all of their centralized power systems are done by gas and that’s it.
Chris: I think it would be funny if your power grid ran on divine energy and your God was very fickle. It’s like, oh no, something happened that was in the news, and it pissed the gods off, and all of our clerics are on it. They’re trying to communicate to the God and find out why the power’s out and what we need to do.
Oren: God just went through a breakup. We’re trying to counsel them through it. It’s going to take a little while. Okay. You can expect some more thunderstorms as they cry it out.
Chris: And to patch this, I think we’re going to need a hero to go on this quest to appease this God, turn the power back on.
Oren: That’s one degree of separation away from being the next Three Parts Dead story. Three Parts Dead has a very similar premise to that, which is a book that I really like.
Chris: Another reason I need to read this book.
Oren: No, don’t read it. Then you’ll critique it and I’ll be upset.
Chris: Oh, oh! Should we give Orin a taste of his own medicine?
Oren: No, the whole point is that I give that to other people.
Chris: I’m pretty sure we have lots of listeners that could use some vindication by having Orin listen to his favorite book critiqued.
Oren: Look, Bonnie already had to go through this because she had to hear me critique it and she likes it more than I do. What I’m saying is that it would not be fair for me to have to go through that.
Chris: I have to say the only reason I haven’t read this book is because a certain somebody wrote an article about a plot twist in the book and so it was spoiled for me. And then I was like, I might as well not read it.
Oren: Do you really remember that plot twist?
Chris: Yes.
Oren: That article is like six years old at this point.
Chris: Yes, I do remember the plot twist.
Oren: Well, I’ll bonk you on the head. And then that’ll give you the plot amnesia. That should solve everything, right?
Chris: All right, listeners, if you would like to hear Orin’s favorite books critiqued on this podcast, you can help make it happen by supporting us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: Before we go, I want to thank a few of our patrons. First there’s Plotter, the popular book planning software, which you can learn about at plotter.com. Then there’s Callie Macleod. Then we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Next, we have Ayman Jaber, he’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Danita Rambo. She lives at therambogeeks.com. We’ll talk to you next week.
[Outro Music]This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Colton.
We love Klingons, Twi’leks, Time Lords, and all the other aliens who are basically just humans with a bit of makeup. But sometimes we need aliens that are more, well, alien. In fact, that’s the topic of this week’s episode. We talk about what it takes to set aliens apart from humans, why you might want to do that, and what the costs are. Plus, have you ever heard of wolves forging plate-mail armor in the woods? Inquiring hosts want to know!
Show Notes Heptapods * Babel-17 * The Abyss * The Presger * Old Man’s War Aliens * Eridians * Astrophage * Crystalline Entity * A Memory Called Empire * Species 10-C * The Tines * Yeerks * Andalites * Mimic * Angels TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Shu.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.
[opening song]Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Chris and with me is
Wes: Wes
Chris: And…
Oren: Oren
Chris: I have to confess, I am an alien. I have chosen a form all of you are comfortable with because you just wouldn’t be able to perceive my true form and my name is unpronounceable by human vocal cords.
Wes and Oren: laughs
Oren: I mean, I assumed you were an alien because who else could understand human storytelling but an outsider.
Wes: laughs
Oren: Ah, yes. Just cut through all of it straight to the heart with such ruthless efficiency of a cold alien mind.
Wes: Of course, now we don’t know to what end Chris, that’s not even your real name, is doing these things, which makes it tense.
Chris: Tense, maybe?
Oren: Yeah, very tense. I’m tense right now.
Wes: Maybe?
Chris: We’re not too sure what the stakes are.
Wes: You don’t seem bad laughs I don’t know actually anything about you or what you’re doing behind the scenes, but sure, I’ll be afraid of you.
Chris: So this time we’re talking about alien aliens, as opposed to just aliens that are not aliens.
Wes: Right. So Star Trek and Star Wars aliens.
Oren: What do you mean? I can’t just put some bumpy foreheads on them and call them an alien? What have I even been doing with my life?
Chris: The thing is most aliens are a bit human-ish. I mean human-ish rather than humanoid because a humanoid is a specific body shape. And that is not the only way in which we make aliens like humans.
Oftentimes it’s more a matter of culture and personality than the way that they look. And we do that just so that they’re relatable to humans since humans are consuming our stories. And that’s kind of how we make them characters that people can understand and get attached to, is by making them more human-like. And so when we depict aliens, they often have really uncanny similarities to humans. So for one thing, so that they can talk to us without us going to too much effort, etc, etc.
But they’re also pretty low in realism. So they work better for low realism stories than high realism stories. And to be clear, this does not come with a value judgment. High realism is not inherently better. And sometimes we want alien aliens that are closer adhered to what we imagine aliens could be like.
Oren: Yeah, we want big old Heptapod aliens that we got to hold up signs that we’ve drawn their circular language on that gives us time travel powers.
Chris: Yeah, I like the rival Heptapods.
Oren: Yeah, they’re great.
Chris: What if cosmic horror but friendly?
Wes: They are cool.
Oren: I don’t really love the language that gives you time powers, but I do love the aliens. They have a great design.
Chris: Admittedly, learning an alien language that gives you time powers does kind of stretch believability for me a little bit.
Oren: Just reminding me of Battle 17, where it was like this language makes you better at code breaking. And I’m like, all right, I can kind of see that languages and codes are sort of the same thing.
And then it also makes you better at tactics. I’m like, all right, maybe those are both mental exercises. And then it also makes you better at kung fu!
All right, you lost me there, bucko.
All: laughs
Wes: I do like the Arrival aliens. They’re a great one because I immediately also thought about the movie The Abyss, which featured on our underwater podcast.
Chris: Oh, yeah.
Wes: Because this is probably getting into the cosmic horror stuff, but alien aliens that definitely are inspired by Earth sea creatures. It just does it for me.
Chris: Mm hmm
Wes: Because I guess that’s the point. The thought of there’s still so much in the ocean and we don’t have any idea of what’s going on. And how does anything live in there? Instead of empty void of space, okay, whatever. But the ocean, it’s just got a lot more going on. It’s completely alien.
Chris: Those deep sea trenches where things glow.
Wes: Yes.
Chris: There’s heat vents.
Wes: Yes.
Chris: A totally different environment.
Wes: So creepy.
Chris: Yeap.
Oren: Wes, did you write this article that I read a while back that was like mad that NASA got all this money and wanted that money to go to ocean exploration instead?
Wes: Laughs
Oren: That’s the weirdest article. It’s like, come on, man.
Wes: I didn’t write that, but I regularly go on anti-space rants and how all that money should be spent here on Earth. And yeah, half the time it’s definitely on the ocean. So stand by it!
Chris and Oren: laughs
Wes: The abyss aliens are great because they don’t talk. And at first you don’t really know what they are until the end. And even then it’s iffy because they just kind of shaped the water in the underground rig to kind of take forms and make faces at the end of a little tentacle and stuff. And it’s got a good mystery, but there’s still some personality with the play aspect that then suddenly turns violent when it gets attacked by the underwater Marine or whatever.
Oren: Mm hmm.
Wes: I think they do a lot there without any kind of verbal communication to kind of, like, make you side with these weird underwater aliens.
Oren: Right. And of course the basic rule here is that the more time your characters are going to spend around these aliens and the more interactions you have, the harder it is to maintain them being non-human. Right?
Because eventually you’re going to run into a point where it just starts to feel like they don’t make sense if you spend too much time with them and they’re still just being weird and inscrutable. That just gets harder and harder to maintain. And that’s why the aliens in Old Man’s War are a lot less weird than the aliens in Ancillary Justice.
Because the aliens in Ancillary Justice, they’re around, but the humans don’t interact with them very much. Like the aliens show up and will do something for their own weird alien reasons and then the humans just kind of have to deal with it. But in Old Man’s War, the aliens are all part of a big galactic community that has diplomacy and a space UN and space wars and space treaties. And they can’t really have that if they’re all operating on like completely different levels. So they have to be much more human in their actions, even if they are described as looking very different.
Chris: I would say that if you’re going to have really alien aliens in interaction, it’s just a much higher investment.
Oren: Mm hmm.
Chris: And it depends on like, do you want your story focused on the nitty gritty of communication?
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: So that’s what Arrival is about. It’s all about a translator who encounters an alien species and has to teach them English basically from nothing.
Oren: Right.
Chris: And it kind of breaks down how you would do that. But that obviously takes a lot of story time, right? It’s not something that we can just move on to the next scene. Okay, we can talk to the Heptapods now moving on.
Oren: You can’t like to meet a Heptapod and then immediately go on like a space adventure with it. I mean, you could, but it would stop being the kind of alien we saw in Arrival. It would be a more human-ish alien.
Chris: I think a great story for talking about alien aliens is Project Hail Mary. And there will be spoilers for about halfway through, FYI. So we have first just the astrophage, which are just microbes.
Oren: Right.
Chris: Which has really high realism, right? If we found aliens, chances are pretty good they would be more microbe sized than humanoid size and shape. And then when we do meet an alien that’s sapient, there is some effort.
It’s not Arrival level effort put into communication. This alien does eventually take on some human-like characteristics, but Andy Weir still puts a lot of effort into the differences and into how the characters have to work really hard to bridge the gaps.
So we have a whole sequence where the main character comes upon an alien spaceship and then they have to figure each other out. They have to figure out what kind of environments they can live in. They have to figure out how they can sense what materials they can sense each other through because they don’t have sight. They have a different perception.
And do that language building. They definitely used shortcuts to make that go faster.
Wes: Mm hmm
Chris: Definitely kind of.
Oren: Yeah, a little bit of handwavium there.
Chris: There’s a little bit of handwavium that makes it go faster than it does in Arrival.
But at the same time, the idea is that there is an upfront legwork that is done to get them communicating with each other. And then we established that they eat totally different things, live in totally different environments, and have completely different anatomy.
Rocky is basically spider-shaped and they can’t live in each other’s environments. And that Rocky has a much longer life cycle. Just lots of details gone into it. So Rocky is still more human-ish than, for instance, the Heptapods.
But it is about, I think, as if you want just another character in your story, is about as alien as you can make a character while still having them be a named person that you get to know.
Wes: Yeah. That’s so important. So you want to include an alien-alien. Okay, how much screen time are you giving them? Because it’s going to determine quite a lot about what they’re going to be capable of and how many human qualities they’re going to need to take in some capacity. Because otherwise it makes no sense.
Chris: Or they can just be the threat. They can be monsters.
Wes: Yes.
Chris: That’s the other option. They can just be monsters.
Wes: Yes
Chris: Yeah. Like the Crystalline Entity.
Oren: The Crystalline Entity is weird. laughs Why does it want to eat humans specifically?
Chris: That’s really what I want to know. There is this big universe out there. It’s a crystal. How did it evolve to predate on meaty flesh beings that run around? I don’t…
Wes and Oren: laughs
Oren: The first Crystalline Entity is also hilariously inconsistent in their description of it. Because in the episode where it’s destroyed, it’s supposed to be like a tragedy. They described it like an animal. Picard is like a sperm whale. It’s not evil. It’s feeding. And it’s like, do you remember two seasons ago when it talked to Lore and plotted with him to eat your ship?
Chris and Wes: laughs
Oren: Because I don’t know any sperm whales that can do that.
Wes: Moby Dick.
Oren: Yeah
Chris and Wes: laughs
Wes: Yeah. I ran into similar problems. I quite enjoyed Memory Called Empire and I read the second book, Desolation Called Peace, and Memory Called Empire.
We’ve talked about it before, the ending of how they used this weird thread of Cthulhu space aliens to solve their conflict or whatever.
Oren: Hey guys, there were Cthulhu aliens the whole time.
Wes: The whole time.
Oren: Well, that’s good to know, I guess.
Wes: And then in the second book, obviously those aliens are like the feature of it. But the main point is Mahit and Three Seagrass go to strike up communications with them. Because their ships are the most Cthulhu non-Euclidean thing going on because they dissolve the other spaceships and stuff.
Oren: One second. I just want to say we’re probably going to do some spoilers for that second book because that second book is still pretty new.
Wes: Before I continue, definitely a spoiler notice. I’m going to spoil this book so hard because I need to get this out.
Oren: Yeah, go for it.
Wes: So Mahit and Three Seagrass go to try to set up communications and talk to these things. But all they have is this really weird recording that when humans listen to it, they basically vomit and get headaches and nosebleeds and things like that. It’s horrible, but they listen to it and they think they pick out a type of syntax to get these messages going.
Anyway, long story short, they land on a planet and the aliens show up and they’re just open to a random page in a monster manual and point at one. It’s not memorable. But what makes them alien is apparently they’re connected by a mycelial network in their brains. So they consume a spore that they call a people maker and then everybody’s linked mentally.
This reveal was so underwhelming because up to that point in the book, they spend so much time emphasizing the technology that they have for the space ship, like the fighter pilots for those, being linked together through like technological neural networks. And so it’s kind of like running in parallel. And ultimately at the end, the aliens realize that there are other people, just not with people makers.
And then the spaceship fighters get to go in and join with this to get a sense of empathetic repair because they feel it when their fellow spaceship pilots die and stuff.
But I was just like, wow, way to really just make it so boring.
Oren: It’s like the solution is that they were a hive mind.
Wes: Yes, that’s it.
And it’s a challenge when you make your entire story focused on just trying to communicate with these things. And it’s like, okay, well the secret is just that there’s actually this alien is in a symbiotic relationship and you can communicate with it if you also eat this spore.
Oren: Done!
Chris: That’s all you had to do the whole time.
Wes: The whole time.
Oren: Solved!
Wes: And Mahit and Three Seagrass aren’t even the ones that figured that out.
Chris: Oh, boo, boo.
Wes: It’s a random character introduced in that book. They don’t even get to eat the spore. They just watch somebody else do it. Oh my gosh. Okay, I’m done. laughs
Oren: Admittedly, one of the things I was wondering about when I started that book is, why on earth were Mahit and Three Seagrass picked to go and talk to these? What qualifications do they have to do this?
Wes: Yeah, none. I think really Three Seagrass gets wind of it because she’s working in intelligence and then just makes a stop at the station or wherever, at the station.
Oren: Yeah, LaSalle station.
Wes: To just grab Mahit and drag her on an adventure. laughs
Oren: Right,I mean, I remember how, because I read about a third of the way into the book, and it’s like, okay, so sure, she grabs Mahit because Mahit’s her girlfriend. She wants to hang out. That’s fair. I can even kind of buy that she grabbed the job before anyone else could see it because she’s a spy or whatever.
Wes: Mm hmm
Oren: That seems like an odd thing for Three Seagrass to do. It doesn’t really seem in character for her, but sure.
What I don’t understand is why when they get out there, the admiral in charge of the Imperial fleet isn’t like, who the heck are you?
Wes: laughs Yeap.
Oren: Someone, someone get me some real experts. You sent me like a VIP escorter and a disgraced backwater ambassador. What am I supposed to do with these people?
Wes and Oren: laughs
Wes: Yeap.
Oren: Although this actually hints at another problem that you often get with like big alien aliens, because very often what you’re trying to do is have them be like, whoa, the things they’re doing, they don’t make sense. Like, why are they doing these things? It must be because they think differently, but then it turns out that they don’t.
Wes: Right, yeah
Oren: The 10-C in Discovery has this problem where – spoilers for season four of Discovery, the 10-C are basically strip mining our galaxy for stuff. And they have like this giant black hole type thing that just floats around the galaxy, hoovering up anything in its path as part of their mining process.
And everyone’s like, wow, I wonder why they’re doing this? They must be really weird aliens. And they go out and talk to them and they’re like, “Hey, so we live in the galaxy. Could you please not send that big old black hole thing near us?”
And the 10 C are like “Oh yeah, good point. We didn’t realize there was anything living in that galaxy.”
Wes: laughs
Oren: I don’t believe you. Like I just, that just, that answer is not believable. It feels like you’re lying and you’re upset you got caught. It’s kind of, is what’s happening here.
Chris and Wes: laughs
Wes: It’s the same thing with the aliens in Desolation Called Peace. Because they’re supposed to not recognize that the humans are people. And it’s like, how many non-sapient or in your case, non-sporient and species do you run into with spaceships? Right?
It’s like, you know, it, yeah, sometimes it can be hard to recognize intelligence and there are huge debates of whether or not certain animals have certain levels of intelligence. But like if some wolves came out of the jungle wearing plate mail armor that they had made themselves and we could see them making it in big forges, I think we’d probably be like, you know, those wolves are probably about as smart as we are.
Like even though that technology is less advanced than what we have now, it’s still clearly not something a regular animal can make. Right?
Oren: laughs I really want that to happen.
Wes: Just some wolves show up to be like, “Hey guys, we built a trebuchet. This is our most advanced engineering is we’ve have the math for trebuchets. That’s as far as we’ve gotten.”
And people being like, “I don’t know. I mean, can animals, maybe some animals can make trebuchets. Do you, do you need to have human intelligence to make trebuchets? It’s like, they haven’t figured out airplanes yet.”
Chris: This is our Discovery/Fire Upon the Deep Crossover. Fire Upon the Deep with the, the wolf, the dog aliens.
Oren: Yea, the Tines. Tines.
Chris: Tines. That’s another one that is really creative while still being understandable enough. Right? But still feeling very different because they have a pack mind. So not quite as far as a hive mind and they look kind of like dogs. That’s the other issue is a lot of these aliens, if they’re not looking like humans, they look like animals, like all the space whales in Star Trek.
Oren: Everyone loves space whales.
Chris: Does speed things up by giving us something to at least compare them to because otherwise just describing an alien might get kind of tedious. And the fact that they work together as a pack just gives them lots of novelty and lots of big differences. And again, the story takes some time to work out the communication differences and how, you know, humans and the Tines learn to relate to each other. So it still invests some time.
Wes: I think with some alien aliens, you can run into a chicken and the egg situation. We’ve been talking about Animorphs a fair bit lately. And so the Yeerk, I’d like to know how that happens.
Oren: Yeerks
Wes: Sorry, the Yerks. Like, okay, you are a very intelligent slug-like alien, but definitely have to have hosts who have extremely good technology.
Oren: Are you asking how did the Yeerks evolve that way or how did the Yerks make a space empire?
Wes: Both. Yes.
Oren: Okay, okay. So the answer to one makes more sense than the other one.
Wes: okay hit me
Oren: So the answer to how the Yeerks evolve that way is that they were originally just regular brain parasites that weren’t sapient. They just lived in the brains of various creatures on their home planet and got nutrients that way.
And over huge stretches of time and evolutionary time scales, they were selected for ones that could make their hosts do things that increase the viability of their life cycle. That brought along with it intelligence. If they were more intelligent, they could make their hosts do more complicated tasks which would then increase their chances of survival and breeding.
So, to a certain extent that makes at least broad sense. There are a lot of problems you can raise with some of the individual execution of it. But on a very broad level it makes sense. The way they have a space empire is complete nonsense. It’s super contrived.
Wes: laughs
Oren: The way that it happens is that the Andalites find them and they are just very low tech. The creatures that they have are kind of like monkeys that don’t have a lot of capabilities and the Andalites are like “You guys look cute”.
One day the Yeerks steal some Andalite ships and fly away and kill a bunch of Andalites and basically declared war on the Andalites. For the next 20 years, the Andalites just can’t find them. The conceit of this book is that the Yeerks just went out and hide and in 20 years, the Andalites, despite combing the galaxy for them, couldn’t find anything.
Basically the answer is by being off screen for a while.
Wes: Riight
Chris: laughs
Wes: That’s so weird because they also have to like soak in a hot tub. laughs
Oren: Well, the whole Kandrona race thing is a little weird. It’s funny because the obvious solution when you’re trying to figure out how did these parasitic slugs get a space empire? The obvious solution would be that they infiltrated the Andalites when the Andalites first arrived and the Andalites didn’t realize it until the Yeerks had already, you know, were in control of a large part of their military.
Right. That’s the obvious explanation. But they can’t use that one because Visser 3 has to be the only Yeerk with an Andalite body to make him a very scary bad guy. So that explanation, the one that actually makes sense is right out. So we need to have this bizarre contrivance of the Yeerks are just really good at hide and seek.
Wes and Chris: “Laugh”
Oren: Is there an explanation?
Chris: When we get to predatory aliens, there’s a lot that don’t really make that much sense. I’m trying to remember if we knew the Mimics from the Edge of Tomorrow/ Live Die Repeat why they are attacking the surface and what they want
Oren: Do we find that out? There was a queen, I think, that Tom Cruise had to kill on his last run.
Chris: She has time loop powers. That’s what makes them distinctive, because they have time loop powers.
Oren: Do the aliens have that? Is that where he got his powers from? I forget.
Chris: Yeah, yeah. Because they have this, it’s basically a hive mind, but with different levels. I don’t know if it was another queen or a higher lieutenant or something, higher level blood got in him before he died. And so basically how it works is whenever I think a queen dies, they reset the time loop because they don’t want their queens to die. So then he gets that power to reset the time loop whenever he dies.
Oren: Maybe they taught him the language that you get from the heptapods that allows you to go back and talk.
Chris: But just like in this case, we just defeat them and then we don’t ever have to learn what their supposed purpose is. Why do you want Earth so bad? It doesn’t seem like there would be that much stuff here for you.
Wes: That’s kind of a good example though of alien aliens also where interacting with them, despite maybe how knowable or believable they are, there might be a conference of ability on a human character.
Maybe it’s magical for all intents and purposes. But something like that where the aliens possess an ability to take your memories and control your body and these other things that clearly humans cannot do. And I think that helps set them apart from your standard different styled forehead alien who has just a humanoid body and likes shooting blasters.
Chris: Or if we’re talking about the Expanse, what is it like the Protomolecule or something? We can create a sexy version of the dead lady you’ve been stalking. That’s your special ability at the end.
Oren:The Protomolecule does a lot of stuff, okay? It’s a very flexible molecule. It can fill in any plot holes we might have.
Chris: But it’s alien based, right? The Protomolecule?
Oren: Yeah, yeah. It’s some alien nonsense. Although that was one of the problems in the later expanse books is that the aliens were too advanced. I guess this isn’t really making them more alien problems.
This is really more a technology issue because the plot of the books is that the big overarching plot is that something wiped out the gate builders – the Protomolecule makers. Something wiped them out. And it’s like, what was it? And we’re going to have to deal with it. That’s what the series is building towards. But by the time we have exhausted all of the human political conflicts, we are nowhere close to being ready for that. And so instead, the books insert a 30-year time jump to invent some more human villains to fight.
And it’s like, wow, okay. That’s where it lost me. I was out at that point. I’m like, I’m sorry. This 30-year time jump is too jarring. It’s 30 years later. They’re all doing the same jobs with the same character dynamics on the same ship.
I refuse to believe their lives are that static!
Chris: But for some reason in the show, and I don’t think this was in the book, right? The girl doesn’t reappear in Protomolecule form.
Oren: Does that happen in the show? Yeah. Is this when Miller dies in the show? I barely remember that. I don’t think that happens in the books. But the first book I read so long ago. And I also get the first book confused with the second book because they have almost identical plots.
So I’ll be remembering things that I thought were in the first book. And it’s like, that doesn’t happen until book two. It’s like, Bobby’s not even in book one. And I’m like, man, what a dark time when there was no Bobby.
But I mean, the whole question of a person interacting with an alien and being changed is that’s very cosmic horror-y. That’s very fun. That’s your Delta Green thing. One of our agents spent too long looking through this gap between worlds and now they have psychic powers, but probably they’re going to snap and kill everyone at some point. So be on the lookout for that. But they’ve got psychic powers for now. So it’s cool, right? It works out.
Chris: Yeah, I’m guessing the Protomolecule, again, part of the reason it did that is so if you want your super-alien alien to talk, that’s the whole, I thought you would be comfortable with this form. After a while, it becomes really, really cheesy.
Oren: Right. Well, at least in the books, the Protomolecule creates a ghost Miller to hang out with Holden for a few books so that Miller can still be in the story despite dying, which is the aliens who made the protomolecule are all dead. We never interact with them directly.
So instead we have ghost Miller who is sort of an alien and he’s like, I’m acting like this so that you can understand me. And also because the authors really liked Miller as a character and weren’t really ready to let him go yet.
Chris: Yeah. Actually, Fire Upon the Deep does something similar with Pham, his golden boy character.
Oren: Yeah, the super cool guy.
Chris: The author clearly likes the best. But he’s there to be a mouthpiece for the super intelligent entities that rule the galaxy in that setting. So here I’ve got a little puppet person who I can kind of speak through to be at your level without demystifying that big super intelligence.
Oren: That’s not a terrible way to do it. I do think at some point you have to go beyond that though. If you have your weird alien aliens and then they’re like, I have created a human mouthpiece. All right, I’ll accept that for a while, but I’m going to need a little more eventually.
Chris: Right. Yeah. I mean, first of all, it has to be distinguishable from just being a human. Yeah. Which is a lot of like, I thought you would be more comfortable with me in this form. A lot of times it doesn’t pass that test, right? It’s like, well, for all intents and purposes, you just are the form that you’re showing up in because you can perfectly mimic human behavior, for instance.
Chris: Man… Supernatural does that a lot. Especially with its angels. With Castiel, they at least spent a while making him weird, but with the other angels, they’re just very human the moment we meet them.
Chris: So yeah, I would say if you’re going to do that, try not to make it a perfect resemblance. Try to show some of that alien personality in there. Oren: Make them little weirdos.
Chris: All right. If you enjoyed hearing about alien aliens, consider supporting us on Patreon. Just go to https://www.patreon.com/Mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Plottr, the popular book planning software which you can learn about at plottr.com. Next we have Callie Macleod, Kathy Ferguson who is professor of political theory in Star Trek then there’s Ayman Jaber, he’s an urban fantasy writer and connoisseur of Marvel and finally we have Danita Rambo she lives at therambogeeks.com. We’ll talk to you next week.
[closing theme]
Foil: not just a type of fencing sword or a material to wrap food in. It’s also a character archetype, though what exactly that archetype looks like is a matter of debate. Do the characters have to be mirror opposites, or will any differences work? Should their contrast be played up in the plot? Can anyone understand Wes’s new Sherlock Holmes theory? That’s what we’re exploring this week!
Show Notes Din Djarin * Enid Sinclair * Wednesday Addams * Wednesday Failed the Addams Family * Zuko * Aang * Azula * Blake Snyder * Gandalf * Saruman * William Adama * Helena Cain * Night Vale * Desert Bluffs * Empok Nor * Bill * Frank * Rincewind * Twoflower * Macbeth * Banquo * Victor Frankenstein * Henry Clerval * Professor Moriarty TranscriptGenerously transcribed by James.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.
[opening theme]Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren. With me today is…
Chris: Chris.
Oren: And…
Wes: Wes.
Oren: Now today we’re talking about foil, which is great for baking potatoes and keeping food fresh or just crinkling because you like the sound.
Wes: Well don’t forget that it’s important for keeping the government out of your head.
[laughter]Oren: Right, exactly. You gotta get a little hat out of it. It’s great. So, that’s about all the uses for foil in storytelling, right? For foils we don’t need any more than that. We’re good?
Wes: No. Unless they’re swords.
Chris: Yeah. We need to give Samwise Gamgee more ways to cook potatoes, so that seems pretty useful.
Oren: See the problem here is that we all have the same attitude towards foil and none of us are contrasting with each other, you could say. None of us are foils to each other. Ha! Got it. Took me a while.
Chris: All we have to do is bring up literary topics. I think we’ll manage it.
Oren: Yeah.
Wes: All good.
Oren: So I wanted to talk about foil characters because I only kind of know what a foil character is, but it’s a term that people use all the time and that I’ve used in the past and I’m like, do I even know what that word means? I don’t know. [transition to deep, corny voice] So I figured I’d ask you guys because the first stage of any Mythcreants podcast is sandwich discourse.
Chris: We do like our sandwiches.
Wes: We do.
I think just the most important thing to take away with this is character foils. Again, this is just another thing that in literary analysis they like to make a big deal out of. But really, it’s pretty simple. You’ve got usually a main character and secondary characters. When they interact, their interactions emphasize their differences. Then you can call them foil characters, I guess. But that happens in real life too. So we’re all actually foils to our friends and family.
Oren: We’ve all been foils to each other the whole time.
Wes: The whole time, yeah.
Chris: Foils all along.
So I would say a character that’s designed to contrast with another character, usually the protagonist. But this doesn’t mean that when you’re designing the character, you’d be like, [transition to gung-ho voice] ‘Okay, now I’m going to design a contrasting character.’ They’re just something that we do often and for a number of good reasons.
I would also say that often the foil character doesn’t contrast in every single way. In fact, if they have things in common with the protagonist, the differences stand out more. So a lot of characters that I would call foils are actually very similar to the protagonist in a lot of ways. But then those differences stand out partly because of their similarities. Oftentimes they have similar demographics. Like they’re both two young men. But not always. Sometimes they have a little bit bigger differences than that. But that’s what I would call a foil.
Oren: Yeah, I’ve also just discovered that in my head to call something a foil suggests that there is a strong contrast, or it’s being used to emphasize something.
I found a lot of examples on the Internet of people being like [transition to uppity voice] ‘These two characters are foils to each other.’ And I’m like, ‘Mhm, no. Absolutely not.’ My favorite that was listed somewhere was Din Djarin and Boba Fett.
Chris: What? What? No.
Oren: Yes.
Wes: That’s horrible. No, not at all.
Oren: They’re foils in that Din Djarin has a character and Boba Fett doesn’t.
[laughter]Chris: At this point, yes.
Wes: And when they’re put on the screen, you realize that.
Oren: Right, because they took all of Boba Fett’s character and gave it to Din Djarin and now Boba Fett has nothing left. So I guess in that way they’re foils.
Wes: Oh, my gosh.
Chris: Oh, man.
Oren: Another example that’s a little less comical is from the Animorphs books. I’ve seen a number of places list Marco and Jake as foils because Jake is the leader and Marco takes orders. That’s just nonsense.
Chris: What? I mean, does that define them? Does taking orders define Marco more than other characters?
Oren: No, it doesn’t. Which is funny because there’s a much better option, which some places also list, but it’s just weird that the Jake thing comes up first, which is Marco and Cassie. Because in the books, Marco is the ruthless one who’s like, ‘The ends justify the means, we do what we have to do.’ And Cassie’s like, ‘No, we have to be better and not lose ourselves to make short-term gains.’
Those are actually contrasting views that are often used to highlight each other. Those are foils. But like Jake and Marco because Jake gives orders and Marco follows orders? What kind of nonsense is that?
Wes: That’s silly.
Chris: Now the most prominent foil that’s probably going through popular discourse right now is Wednesday and Enid from Wednesday.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Those two are definitely foils, no question about it. Enid is obviously designed to be Wednesday’s foil.
Wednesday is dour and constantly wearing black. Enid is really colorful and really positive. You even have pictures of them posed.
The fact that they are, again, both young women, and they are dorm mates basically, gives them comparable qualities so you can really see where they depart from one another. We even have the room divided in half and their joint window that used to be all colorful that Wednesday scrubbed the color off exactly half of it. So we can see that contrast really easily.
Oren: We really needed that too because the rest of the school is all dark and gothic and Wednesday is dark and gothic. So she doesn’t really stand out in the school but she stands out when you put her next to Enid.
Chris: Yeah, in previous Addams Family stories it has been Addams Family contrasting with everyone else. Right? And that’s been kind of the purpose. So this was a little… not the choice I would have made.
Wes: To put it lightly.
Chris: I might have had an entire article ranting about that.
Wes: Maybe.
Chris: Don’t need to go into it here. Should we talk about why have foil? Why do foil?
Oren: But why is foil?
Wes: Yeah, I think it’s a good thing to touch on.
Your character should interact with the world and probably run into disagreements with people. But having a foil means you have someone around to consistently reveal more about your main character’s qualities in a way. Or if they’ve already been revealed, emphasize them. Because it’s kind of part of an arc too, to say that this interaction point with this foil is actually showing how your point of view character is perhaps developing over the course of the story.
So I think foils are actually really important for character arcs and plot arcs as well, just by providing an essential opportunity for people to see this in action instead of being told about it.
Chris: I mean certainly if you’re going to bring out a character arc, you have to show that your character has a flaw that’s in some way different than everybody around them.
Wes: Yeah, for sure.
Chris: If an entire group has the same flaw, that’s a very different thing and it certainly is not going to make a character look like they have a flaw if everybody is doing it.
But foils can be used in other ways for character arcs. For instance, a foil could have the flaw even worse and inspire the character to be like, ‘Oh yeah, maybe I don’t want to do that.’
But in general, they’re very good for bringing out specific traits in the character and that allows us in many cases to comment on the character. Whether it’s Wednesday is dour and Enid is peppy. So now we can sort of delve more into the fact that Wednesday is dour or Wednesday learning from Enid, Enid learning from Wednesday, all those great things. It certainly makes a character more distinctive when you see them contrast.
And as you pointed out, Wes, the scenes of contrasting characters, oftentimes it creates just more interpersonal tension that brings a scene to life. It creates more chemistry in many cases, creates a little bit more conflict because the characters are contrasting. So that means they’re not always going to agree all of the time.
Wes: Yeah, those moments are great too. Like when you’re talking about a show or like a book, it’s kind of easier to actually remember those moments because they are good scenes.
Usually they have action happening and more than one character. It’s not just an interior monologue or something like that or a bunch of exposition. Things are happening and that provides you with really good examples of characters in action changing and talking and doing and revealing all these kinds of secrets and things that they might be holding on to. So definitely a moment to do a scene and not sum it up.
Oren: The other thing that you should keep in mind with foils is that they are really useful for getting people to ship your characters.
[laughter]Orem: I’m not going to say that every single foil pair of characters is shipped, but actually wait, no I am saying that actually.
They’re all shipped.
Chris: Well, every pair of characters is technically shipped.
Oren: Yeah, but you know, a lot more. The more two characters contrast with each other, assuming they have any meaningful interactions and sometimes if they don’t. But usually if they have any meaningful interactions, that is going to generate a lot of shipping.
Wes: Yep. Oh boy.
Chris: I think a lot of it is that chemistry that just a little bit of interpersonal tension and conflict creates.
Wes: Yeah, definitely. Because it’s fun.
We keep saying a character foil, but I think the term taken almost too literally can say, ‘Okay, well my foil kind of needs to be antagonistic.’ And no, your antagonist has a particular role to fill, and your foil doesn’t need to be a villain. Could be a minor villain, but it’s better to have your Zuko, you know, that kind of situation where he’s not really the villain and they have chemistry and eventually they come together, and they emphasize the differences in each other’s characters. I’m talking about Aang, of course.
You know, the other ones, the whole group is kind of their own set of foils, which is super fun with any kind of ensemble cast.
Chris: Actually, for Zuko, I would mention Azula as being Zuko’s important foil instead of Aang.
Wes: Oh yeah, a great one for him. Yeah.
Chris: Because again, Aang is so different from Zuko that the differences don’t really come out as much.
Whereas Azula is in a much more similar position to Zuko, so now we can really see where they diverge. And it’s used to emphasize how much Zuko has had to struggle, which makes him more sympathetic. And of course, because Azula is pretty evil, it also makes him look more moral.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: To prepare him for that redemption arc.
Wes: But I guess the nice thing about series like that one is, Zuko is foiled by tons of people throughout the course of that show. I mean, Katara gets some good action, Aang when he gets on board, obviously Azula. But that’s a great example of just a character that gets so many good growth opportunities because he has great foils. Because Azula really helps build that sympathy for him and then he gets kind of shaped by Katara and then the relationship with the other members of Team Avatar.
I think that’s nice. A foil can do its job until a certain point and maybe your main character graduates to a new foil or something like that. Or slays the previous one, as it were.
Oren: Right.
Assuming there’s a character arc involved, then your characters probably aren’t going to be foils forever, right? Because a character arc involves change and then those two characters might not be as different anymore. That can be its own issue.
If the reason why we loved these two characters together was their contrasting personalities and then one of them has an arc that makes them closer together, it’s like, are they as fun together anymore?
Wes: We need the drama.
Oren: You know, bring in someone new.
The villain foil, which Azula definitely is, is very useful if you want to have the whole “the villain is a dark mirror of the protagonist”, which Blake Snyder thinks automatically happens for some reason, but you actually have to work at that. It’s not automatic.
Wes: Yep.
Oren: But you know, you can do that if you want to. If you want to set that up, you can have two characters, your hero and your villain, who are similar in some ways. Chris mentioned demographics. That’s a pretty common one or job. If you want to do the Gandalf-Saruman route where they’re both wizards and they’re both supposed to be these wise figures who oversee the lesser people and then Saruman turns evil. There you go.
Chris: I really liked Adama and Cain.
Oren: Mhmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Chris: And Battlestar Galactica. Because again, Cain is a villain that’s introduced later. She’s also an admiral like Adama, but she technically outranks him. So when she shows up, she kind of takes over. And again, they’re both admirals in the military. They were put in a similar situation after the war with the Cylons. But we now see what would have happened if Adama had gone down a much more ruthless route and just decided the military was just going to be in control now.
Oren: And to head off anyone who wants to get technical, he’s technically not an admiral, but they’re both officers. It’s close enough.
Also, she mirrors some of the initial conflicts that he had with Roslin and the other civilian characters, but she’s much worse. That kind of contrasts how far he’s come because, you know, in the first couple episodes, he was not really sure about Roslin as president. He often kind of brushed aside her orders and thought he should do things himself. But, you know, he came around and he recognized what was going on, and then you have Cain show up to be like, ‘Yeah, whatever, I don’t care about that president. Civilian power? What’s that?’
[laughter]Chris: One thing I also think is fun to think about is the same kind of contrasting technique outside of characters, like in your worldbuilding, for instance. Probably one of my favorites is Night Vale and Desert Bluffs.
Oren: Oh, yeah.
Chris: For anyone who’s not familiar with Welcome to Night Vale, which I think most people are at this point.
Oren: I’d forgotten what Desert Bluffs was. It’s been a while. I looked at your notes like, what is-what are you talking about?
Chris: Yeah, it’s similar to the Addams Family, actually. In that Night Vale is this like cosmic horror, super spooky place. But when you get down to it, the people there are nice people. And Desert Bluffs is designed to be the reverse. So it seems, oh, it’s super nice and sunny, but like everybody there is really evil. Again, it creates contrast and makes it so that preserves Night Vale’s novelty will also make Night Vale look more saintly.
Wes: Yeah.
Broadly, I think we’re probably now just talking about opportunities for good juxtaposition in your text and for your scenes or your shows. It’s just like, ‘I’m going to put these things close together.’
Oftentimes in prose, it should be close enough, right? Like not chapters apart, but where you can draw on that immediate contrast and emphasize the unique qualities that each one possesses without really taxing your short-term or long-term memory if you’re reading a book.
But it’s fun. Anything put into contrast is fun. Beyond characters too. It’s a good way to kind of just view shows and read books by looking for points of contrast and then just focusing on what that adds to your experience.
Oren: One of my favorites was from Deep Space Nine when they go to Empok Nor, which is another Cardassian station that’s built in the same fashion as Deep Space Nine, which used to be called Terok Nor when it was a Cardassian station. Because we spent several seasons by this point building up Deep Space Nine as this place that’s warm and lived in and it’s a little rundown and disheveled in places, but that just kind of makes it more charming. It has a working person station vibe as opposed to like the kind of cruise ship vibe of TNG or the military vibe of the original series.
But then you go to Empok Nor, which is the same model of station and has similar sets inside because it’s supposed to be built the same, but it’s all abandoned and spooky and full of murder. And it’s like, this is great. This has some fun contrast. I like this a lot.
Chris: And they get to reuse sets?
Oren: Yeah, and it’s cheap. It’s good on the budget too. So, you know.
Wes: Real helpful.
Oren: Not a problem that you need to super worry about if you’re writing a novel, but you know, who knows? Maybe if it turns into a TV show, it could be helpful.
Chris: Oh, hey, another recent pop culture one. Bill and Frank from The Last of Us.
Wes: Oh, yeah.
Oren: Absolutely.
Chris: Talking about how that works in a romance, there’s different romance dynamics that can help establish what the characters have to offer each other. But with a couple of characters that are foils, oftentimes you’ll have a very pessimistic character and a very positive character because it makes it really easy to see what they offer to each other.
There’s lots of other character contrasts that you can set up that make it obvious how two people are better together.
In this case, Bill is just a complete loner survivalist and was a conspiracy theorist before the apocalypse. Doesn’t think he needs anybody. And Frank is this really friendly people person. So we’ve got like a protector-nurturer dynamic going on there. But, you know, Frank is, again, kind of positive, which Bill really needs. And then Bill is really interested in protecting Frank.
Oren: Yeah.
When I’m looking at how to construct a foil, I think I sort of generally go with either aesthetics, characteristics, or methods. Usually, you’ll want more than one. But those are kind of three different categories.
For aesthetics, you have Wednesday and Enid who just look very different. For characteristics, you could have something like Garak and Bashir from Deep Space Nine. They also look different, but not like in a super contrasting way. In that case, it’s more of Bashir is extremely earnest and Garak is very cynical and also kind of sinister.
And then, of course, you can look at methods. And this one gets a little trickier because you need to be able to create different ways that characters solve problems.
You can have something like Twoflower and Rincewind from the early Discworld books where Two Flower is just extremely fearless because he doesn’t really understand danger. So he’ll see something dangerous and be like, let’s go check that out and just want to get close to it and see what it is. Whereas Rincewind is a total coward and wants to run away from anything that’s a problem. So, of course, you stick those two characters together and you have a fun time. I mean, not a super fun time because you’re reading early Discworld, but~… close enough.
[laughter]Wes: Fun enough.
Oren: But I mean, that’s why the ruthless edgelord type character and the sweet cinnamon roll type character work really well pairing them up. And the edgy character doesn’t have to be played by Pedro Pascal, but it probably helps at this point. Like it’s getting to be a bit of a tradition.
Wes: Other ways to create opportunities for your foils to interact, I think, is putting them in the same place where they receive plot important information. Just getting information is a good way to just figure out how people respond to it. And the example that I have used for a long time when I’ve talked about this with students or other kinds of things is in Macbeth because it happens right at the start.
When Macbeth and Banquo come upon some witches who are like, ‘Hey, guys, we’ve got a bunch of really cool things to tell you.’ And Macbeth’s like, ‘Tell me more.’ And Banquo’s like, [transitions to adorable voice] ‘Mmmh, is this a great idea?’ But then I just love that it happens after the fact.
The first prediction comes true. Macbeth is Thane of Cawdor. And he asks Banquo, well, don’t you hope that your kids are going to be kings? Because that first prediction already came true. And Banquo gives a cautious response. But I always kind of wish that Banquo said, [transitions to adorable voice] ‘I mean, I hope so. Because if you actually become king, then that means that our grandkids are going to get married~’. Instead of Macbeth just going full on murderer.
But I think getting information and considering what can you do with that information and how the characters approach that with skepticism or, in this case, extreme ambition is a fun way to do it. We’re not throwing them into conflict, but we’re planting a seed for that to play out over the course of the story. And it’s plot relevant, which is always helpful for that kind of stuff.
Chris: Whereas a moral dilemma is probably a good way to have it come to a head.
Wes: Yeah, absolutely.
Chris: Because you can easily put the two characters on different sides of that moral dilemma and then fight, fight, fight.
Wes: Fight, fight, fight. Get it done.
Oren: So here’s a question, Wes. Because when I was first looking up foils, all of the examples were from classics that I either haven’t read or haven’t read in a very long time. And one of the ones that comes up a lot is Victor Frankenstein and ye olde Monster.
Wes: [emphatic] No.
[laughter]Oren: You don’t think so?
Wes: No, I believe Victor’s true foil in that story is his friend Henry.
They’re foils, I think, in a more important way, but you could look at them as just the humanities against the sciences as foils for that. Because Henry is very much socially aware and likes people and is empathetic. And Victor’s just like, [transition to grouchy voice] ‘No, math’, and other kinds of science. But Henry is there to basically be the foil to Victor because Victor is depressed, he’s gloomy, he thinks he’s destined for greatness. And Henry is, I mean, this is very much a Wednesday and Enid kind of situation. Henry is enthusiastic. He loves experiencing things with Victor, trying to point out the mountains are awesome. And she really liked writing about mountains. So we got lots of that stuff.
Oren: Yay, mountains.
Wes: But you know, and when Victor falls ill, Henry kind of nurses him back to health. I mean, they really do have quite a romance going on with this, too. I’m sure that got shipped at some point.
But what’s most important, I think, about that foil is Henry dies and his absence makes you feel like… A good foil will, when they’re no longer in the story, will give you a sense of what would Victor have been like if Henry was still around. I think that’s kind of good because you see that change and then they go down this path that their foil was kind of maybe keeping them away from.
Frankenstein’s creature is not a foil because it’s just an extension of him and his hubris. It doesn’t do anything to exacerbate his hubris or arrogance. It just makes him say, ‘Oh, man, I shouldn’t have made you. You’re hideous.’ And then he runs away forever. I think it’s boring.
Oren: Yeah, that was kind of the impression I was getting. It didn’t really seem like it fit.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: I would like to just follow up on that because that’s a really good way if you want to have a character on a downward arc.
I mentioned this in my post on doing a downward arc that it’s very helpful to show that your character has a positive influence and then to start them on their arc, take it away. And often take it away in a devastating manner that encourages the character to act out, which then creates a downward cycle. So in this case with Victor and Henry, you can see how that would happen.
Wes: That’s such a good point and that’s a really good article of yours because you have to do that if you want to have any sympathy for somebody going on a downward spiral.
I think tragedies can be done very well, but you have to start out with something good going on. Otherwise, what’s the point? You’re not going to feel anything.
Chris: You definitely have to show why the character changes and that’s something that people have a lot of trouble with, especially when the character has to change in a negative way without, again, it being too much at once and then we just hate the character.
Wes: Yeah, exactly.
Chris: At that point.
Wes: You want to feel like there’s a chance that as bad as it’s gotten, you’re like, ‘Oh man, but maybe they can pull it back. Maybe they can turn it around.’ Sometimes there could be a turning point where that happens, but if it is a tragedy, then no, but that can still be satisfying in its own way.
Chris: Another interesting couple of characters is Frodo and Gollum, especially as they’re shown in the movie because they have some contrast, but their similarities are really what makes the big impression. But again, we see a possibility for Frodo, a bad possibility for Frodo in Gollum, but also Gollum is devious and tries to isolate Frodo. So we kind of have that reverse there.
Wes: Yeah, that’s nice because Frodo has tendencies that you can see the path with Gollum and Gollum kind of exacerbates those a little bit, but because they have that kind of shared experience, Sam’s attempts to kind of help Frodo become less effective as Gollum and Frodo get a little closer as things go on.
Chris: Because normally Sam would be the good influence character.
Wes: Which is good because yeah, that’s a really good example, Chris. Frodo gets both of them as foils because it’s a small traveling party and their influence waxes and wanes as Frodo changes over the course of the story, which is great.
Chris: Often if you have three characters, you can make them all contrast with each other pretty easily. The more characters you add, of course, the harder that becomes.
Oren: One of my favorite foil pairings is a weird little self-fulfilling prophecy almost, because in a lot of these lists, you will find Sherlock and Watson.
Wes: Ah, yes.
Oren: But when I read the original Sherlock stories, I would not have described them that way.
In the original Sherlock stories, Watson is very blank. He doesn’t have much of a personality. He’s the person whose eyes we are watching the story through.
Chris: Does he represent the audience mainly?
Wes: Generally, yeah.
Chris: Is it there to be like the boy in the original Interview with the Vampire? He’s like, [transition to fanboy voice] ‘You’re so cool, Louis.’
Oren: The main reason I think we see the story through his perspective is so that we can hide information that Sherlock then uses to make his deductions. And it’s like, [transition to sour grapes voice] ‘Man, if I knew that, I would have figured it out too.’ So in the original books, I would definitely not describe Watson as much of a foil to Sherlock, but he has certainly become that in more recent recreations of Sherlock and Watson, in Elementary especially, which is the one that I’m really familiar with. That’s my Sherlock. #mysherlock.
Wes: They do the same in the Sherlock with Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman too, because I think you have to, because otherwise Watson has nothing going on.
Oren: Right, otherwise why is Watson in this story?
Wes: There’s enough pieces from the original stories to make him compelling. It’s just Doyle didn’t bother with it. And if Sherlock is just solving cases, I think that’s why Moriarty really blew out of proportion in recent stories as like, ‘Oh my god, finally somebody to contrast with and compete with Sherlock. This obviously needs to be the main villain from here on out.’ But I maintain this, and I realize we’re getting close to the end of the time that if you closely read The Final Problem, that spoiler alert Moriarty is Holmes.
Oren: Waah.
Wes: I’m done.
Oren: Whoa, okay, just dropping a bombshell 15 seconds before the end of the podcast. Okay, strong work everyone. We’ll be back next week with episode 422. What the heck are you talking about, Wes?
[laughter]Oren: Alright, well y’all can ask Wes in the comments what the heck he meant by that and he could tell you, I guess. Because we are out of time.
Chris: If you enjoy this episode, please support us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First and welcome to the podcast as brand new we have Plottr, the popular book planning software which you can learn about at Plottr.com. Next there’s Callie McLeod. Then we have Kathy Ferguson who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Next there’s Amon Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Danita Rambo. She lives at therambogeeks.com. We’ll talk to you next week.
[closing theme]This has been the Mythcreant podcast, opening closing theme, The Princess who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.
Something is happening in your story, but should you describe it in detail or gloss over everything but a few highlights? So many choices! Well, two choices, specifically, but still not easy to make. Scenes are generally more compelling than summaries, but not everything can be a scene, and picking the wrong moment will seriously slow down your story. Fortunately, we’re here with a few tips on the subject!
Show Notes Should You Show or Tell * How to Choose Scenes For Your Story * When to Cut That Scene * 24 * Man of Steel * The Art of Prophecy * Always Be Solving Problems TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Anna.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast. With your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.
[Intro Music]Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Chris and with me is:
Wes: Wes.
Chris: and-
Oren: Oren.
Chris: And then the Mythcreants spend half an hour describing the differences between scene and summary, and when their listeners should use one or the other. [pause] Okay, if you enjoyed that episode, please support us on Patreon. [laughter]
Oren: Hooray! Easiest podcast recording ever.
Chris: Of course that’s all the detail we need, right? We wouldn’t need to make it any longer, or break that down a little bit.
Oren: Look, Chris, it’s episode 420. I have some, um, very legitimate activities to go do, so if you’ll excuse me. [Wes and Chris laugh]
Chris: This time we’re talking about scene versus summary. What they are, how to tell the difference between them (which is not as easy as you would think), and when to use them.
Oren: So what is the difference between them and when should I use one or the other? This is all like way above my pay grade as a content editor. I shouldn’t have to put up with this. [laughter]
Chris: So I like to start with the showing and telling spectrum.
Wes: Oh my, there’s a spectrum now.
Chris: There’s a spectrum, which I have an article, Should You Show or Tell, that actually breaks this down that we can link to. “Show, don’t tell” is a very popular adage and it is mostly true, but it is also very reductive, and it’s hard at first to understand what it means and what it circumstances and all of that. One of the things that’s really useful is that there is a whole spectrum between telling and showing, and you’re trying to hit the right place on the spectrum.
On the telling end, we’ve got really broad abstract statements. For instance, “Marcy and Ted did not get along”, or “Nighttime in the swamp was unpleasant.” Those statements don’t even have a time or place attached to them. They’re just abstract. They’re almost like statements of opinion without anything to support that. For that reason, they actually have very little use in storytelling. Usually you would not make statements like that. There may be some very brief cases for something that’s really unimportant, but generally you would not say those things.
And then on the showing end, we have details that are like watching a movie. So if I said “The spotted red grasshopper rubs its legs together”, it’s like you’re watching a movie where you see a spotted red grasshopper, that’s a visual detail and you watch it taking an action. So it’s very sensory, it has a specific time and place, and you could directly witness those things happening. So that’s on the showing end. When we say “show, don’t tell”, it’s because almost always, writers should be more on the showing end of the spectrum and are erring too much on the telling.
Oren: It’s because new writers tell more than they should, because telling is easier. The cost of it is not always obvious.
Chris: Summary is actually in between those two. You wouldn’t have summary that’s “Marcy and Ted did not get along.” It’s actually closer in some ways to the showing end, but it’s still more telling than a scene. A scene is like, as showing as you can get, to the point where it feels like it’s unfolding in real time. And the story time is roughly equivalent to how long it takes you to read those events happen. Maybe even a little slower. You could read a couple paragraphs of thoughts, give it a little bit of wiggle room, and then assume that the character thought those things more quickly, which means that time is actually slower. So then summary, for instance, as an example: “Over the next few days, Marcy and Ted constantly bickered over who would do the dishes, while the red grasshoppers ate the garden vegetables.”
Oren: I can see there’s a problem here. We need to get these humans out of here so we can eat more vegetables. [laughter]
Chris: And there’s some leeway over how detailed it is, but we now have a much more specific time where it’s over the next few days. Summary could be over the whole year, depending on how much time your story covers. But we have specific events instead of “Marcy and Ted just don’t get along.” Instead, we know that they are bickering. We’re not watching the red grasshopper take a bite out of a vegetable, but we know in general they’re eating the vegetables. So we’re not witnessing it happen, but we’re also much more specific than a very abstract, “My opinion is that Marcy and Ted don’t get along,” right? We have no idea how that opinion formed or what you would have seen to make you think that they didn’t get along.
Oren: The most useful thing I can contribute here is that I would recommend reading How to Choose Scenes for Your Story by one Chris Winkle. Because I was just wondering, I was like, “Man, how do you decide what should go into summary and what goes into a scene?” I was like, hey, hang on. I think we have an article about that. And we do! [Wes laughs]
Chris: We have a couple articles, I have a very old article that’s like, When to Cut that Scene. Despite the fact that it’s not technical at all, it works surprisingly well, better than you’d think. It has like three criteria. Does it have conflict? Is it necessary for the later events of the story? And would the character remember this in 10 years? Basically, the more you fit that criteria, the more it should have a scene. And even though I now have a much more technical explanation for when you should have scenes and not scenes, and I’ll share some of that with you, that’s not bad. When I look at it most of the time, it seems to work.
Wes: With summary, especially how you’ve just kind of described it, it’s just like, “I just need you to have some information and we’re also probably transitioning.” And this is providing context. Because if there is no summary, then everything’s a scene. Suddenly everything has like, equal weight, I guess? Because a summary is a good way to show what is actually not important enough for a scene. So it’s the backdrop that features your scenes.
Chris: Yeah, I’m not going to say that it’s impossible to have a story that’s nothing but scene but no summary. But like every single second would have to matter. And that’s like, logistically almost impossible.
Oren: I mean, that’s generally how very short stories are written. In a flash piece or even a short story, you’re not going to have much, if any, summary just because you’re covering a very short amount of time. The longer your story gets, the less likely it is that everything that’s happening is interesting enough to be in a scene. Have either of you seen 24? Supposedly 24 did that, where there was like no cutting forward, it was all real time. I’ve never seen the show, so I don’t know how they did that.
Wes: I haven’t seen it either, but you are correct, that is how they do the premise. And I do know that in like one season in the 24 hour cycle, he starts and then gets over like a drug addiction. Time is very malleable, I think. [laughs]
Oren: Sounds like they had to do a bunch of fudging to make that premise work. And I suspect you would have a similar problem if you tried to do even something as short as 20,000 words that was all one scene. I think you would start to have trouble. Does your character need to go anywhere? Are you really going to describe their entire walk or are you just going to summarize that they walked somewhere?
Chris: However, I do want to mention here when we talk about that, that a scene is a pretty fuzzy unit. A scene is a grouping of real time narration that’s all the way on that showing end, but it often includes summary. And I would say that probably most short stories still have a little summary in there. For instance, your character starts cleaning, finds a magic item, that’s all real time, then they clean for 10 minutes in summary, and then the magic item does something in real time again. That would be like a very common example of when you would just dip into a little summary during the scene.
Another one that’s real common is, your characters are talking, then they have something to say that’s like, really long that readers already know. For instance, you have one character that needs to update another character on all the stuff that just happened. You summarize that part of the conversation because you don’t want to bore readers with a bunch of stuff that you know already, and then you go back into dialogue.
Often summary is like a whole paragraph or more, but we can also dip into a little bit of summary and dip out again while still basically having a real time scene. I do think that becomes an issue if you really do want every moment to matter, like if it’s a fight scene and people are swinging swords. I just don’t think there’s a lot of reason in fight scenes to go into summary because the whole point is that it’s exciting, and I think that summary adds a little bit of distance, right, where we’re stepping away from a very specific time that is just going to make the fight feel less lethal.
Oren: The reason that you would add summary in a fight scene is if it’s more like a battle. A one-on-one or a two-on-two or something, those fights are probably going to be short. There are some exceptions. It’s possible that you might, if for example you want to have two characters who are so evenly matched that they fight for hours until they’re both exhausted, you’d probably use some summary there because at that point you’re no longer worried about one character dying because the whole idea is that they’re so evenly matched that neither can get an advantage on the other.
Chris: I mean that also doesn’t sound like an exciting fight so much? Not that you wouldn’t have that fight for other reasons in the story. It doesn’t sound like excitement is your biggest priority if you’re going to have a couple characters wear themselves down over a couple hours until they’re exhausted.
Wes: That was one of a few problems with the Man of Steel movie. The fight with General Zod is like half the movie.
Chris: Oh man, that would be exhausting. I would start tuning out.
Wes: It’s just like, what are you doing? It was so boring. It was just, ugh, brutal.
Oren: There’s always a problem with Superman fights where it’s like, can he be injured in these fights? Because they sort of act like he can, but in other sequences it sounds like he’s invincible. When he gets punched, does that do anything? Or is he just getting pushed backwards and now he’s back?
Wes: Yes, it hurts him. Only if he’s fighting Batman. For some reason. [laughter] Batman is the only one who’s figured it out.
Oren: Well, he has a lot of time to plan his punches, okay? But the other reason I was saying why you might engage in some summary is if it’s a very large fight scene, like a battle. In that case, you may need to describe things other than what your character is doing and there are a lot of other people around and it would just be exhausting to describe what they’re all doing.
Chris: Right, if you’re going to break it down into sections, like you would for a battle, battle would normally be more than one scene anyway. Or if you had an instance where you have some fighting and then a character hides for a little while, you might have a reason you want them to hide longer than real time.
Oren: In most cases, if you have a fight scene and it’s supposed to be exciting and fun and you find yourself having to go into summary, that’s a sign that your fight scene has gone on too long. And that you should probably just find a way to end it. If you start with, “And then like three assassins jumped out!” and you describe a bunch of sword strikes and blocks and knife throwing, and then you’re like, “And then four more assassins!” and then you find yourself having to summarize the next four assassins, it’s like, I mean, maybe just don’t have those other four assassins pop out. Maybe just don’t.
Chris: Right, you just not do that.
Oren: Maybe there don’t need to be seven assassins. [laughter]
Wes: Chris said, you know, the summary puts in distance and I would echo and add the de-emphasis that summary really puts on things. Chris’s example of doing the dishes and finding a magic ring and then returning to the dishes. Maybe the first time you’re doing the dishes, you would actually have a scene for that because that’s maybe important to finding the ring, but you’re not going to then spend more time on the dishes. If you did, that might suggest there’s a magic bracelet. Every time you put a scene for something, you are zooming in and emphasizing that so you don’t want to mislead your readers by making them think something is more important than it is. Chris, you also said a character filling another one in, “as both you and I know.” Please do that in summary. It’s not important to go over again! [laughter]
Oren: Can we mention the Expected Trend Rule? Because I really appreciate that rule and a book I’m reading just broke it recently and it was super annoying.
Chris: This is again part of, how do you know that something should get a scene in real time.
Oren: If you end a scene indicating that something is going to happen or continue to happen, you can summarize as long as things continue along the trajectory that you have set. If you end with one side winning a battle, you can summarize as they mop up and maybe capture the next town or something. But if they’re going to suddenly start losing, that needs to be in a scene. You can’t just summarize, “And then they lost a bunch.” And that’s what happened in this novel I’m reading where the fantasy Chinese and the fantasy Mongolians were having a fight. The fantasy Mongolians were winning. We cut away and then cut back later and summarized how the fantasy Mongolians lost? And it was super jarring, I was like, why did you end the fight with the implication they were winning then? That was just really confusing. Why did you do that? I didn’t like that.
Chris: I feel like this is a trick used in children’s stories where they never actually want to show their protagonist losing. [laughter] They just show them winning and then narrate or summarize how they’re actually losing to try to keep up tension. I feel like She-Ra did a little bit of that.
Oren: Yeah, no, She-Ra did do that. She-Ra was like, every time we would see them, they were winning. Mass Effect did that actually. Although it was sort of the opposite. Every time we saw the Reapers, they were totally just destroying everything. But whenever the Reapers were off-screen, suddenly they were being held at a defensive line somewhere. It’s like, I’ve seen Reapers. I don’t think you can do that.
Chris: If we’re going to get a little more technical about what gets a scene, it’s your important plot points. Remember, always be solving problems. You have a scene to introduce a problem. There’s a lot of flexibility how you introduce the problem as long as you show it existing. For instance, in a mystery, do you want to do the body drop or do you want to have your protagonist discover the body? A lot of flexibility there, but usually you would show the problem in the scene because it’s important. And then absolutely, you need a scene for the turning point. That’s one of the most frustrating things is when problems are solved off-screen or not in a scene. The problems should always be solved in a scene.
The resolution, it’s a little bit fuzzier just because the resolution can blend with the turning point. So for instance, if your turning point scene includes a little bit of resolution, sometimes you can just summarize the little bit of extra. So for instance, you have a scene with a turning point where your protagonist catches the villain and then you summarize how the police took the villain away. You don’t necessarily need a scene, even though that does provide the dispel’s tension further and provides a little bit more. But there are other places where you definitely would need to show the resolution if, for instance, your character comes up with a clever idea that is the turning point, but we don’t actually see that defeat the villain. You absolutely need a scene for that. But they can all be in the same scene because arcs come in all sizes. So you could have one scene that has problem, turning point, resolution. Of course, it does matter if it’s relevant to your throughline or your main plot. Often what happens is if you introduce a problem that seems like it needs to be solved and it’s not part of your plot, you usually have to do something about that to set some expectations that this is not part of the plot or else it will feel like your protagonist has to solve it.
Oren: Can we give an explanation of that? I feel like I should know what you’re talking about.
Chris: Let’s say you’re writing a novel and you have what seems like a mystery hook. Like somebody dies under mysterious circumstances. That would seem like something that you should follow up on and in many cases something that your protagonist should solve, right? So let’s say you actually want to solve that in book two. Some cases what you might want to do instead is make the death look accidental and then in book two reveal that it was actually murder, because then it doesn’t look like there’s anything to solve.
Oren: Or have the murder happen and then be like, “Well that was bad but the guy got caught, nothing to worry about.” And then the next book being like, “It was the wrong guy!”
Chris: Or in some cases you could have, “Well, this is a problem, but that’s just how it is. There’s nothing we can do about that.” Because that also doesn’t create any tension because there’s no hope of resolving it. If you look at the events of your story and you’re like, “But all of my story events are things that happen gradually!” That’s something that you have to work on, and this is a reason why it’s good to block out scenes in your outline. If you get to that place where you’re like, “Oh I’m thinking about all of these gradual changes in my characters,” you gotta condense that into pivotal moments to put in scenes. If you look at your outline and you’re about to draft and it’s like, “Oh this stuff kind of happened over several months”, you gotta choose specific moments to represent that.
Oren: That’s like, core issue with training arcs that we’ve talked about, right? Is that you need to create a moment and that’s hard to do because in real life training is a long process of repetitive tasks that give you slowly increasing performance. That’s not fun to read so you gotta find a moment that makes it interesting and give it a turning point.
Chris: So you have one scene to show your character struggling, there’s the problem. Then you summarize along an expected trend that they keep struggling. Then you have another scene to show their breakthrough moment. And then you show them succeeding at their training exercise.
Oren: And then you can have a little bit more summary that does the resolution of, they’re good at training and they’ve got the skill they needed. And then their mentor dies. [laughter]
Chris: We talked about emphasis, a scene is for those really important moments. What gets summarized? There’s a lot of things that get summarized that you can also honestly just skip. And it’s kind of up to you whether you want to summarize that stuff happening or you want to just kind of skip ahead. But a lot of times summary is for things that don’t make a difference to the story but are needed for believability. For instance, if a crime happens and it’s like, okay, people are going to be asking if my character has told the police. That’s not where the story is going, it’s not going to involve the police. I can just be like, “In summary, character reported theft to police, nothing came of it,” move on.
Oren: Is there a good way to tell if I’m encountering something in summary that it feels like maybe it just shouldn’t be there at all? Is that just something I have to figure out for myself? Is there a rule I can apply here?
Chris: If you’re reading, are you getting bored? [laughter] I mean, it’s not uncommon to have summary that’s just too long. Because summary can come in a huge variety of lengths depending on how detailed it is. One mistake that often gets made is that summary is just too long. And when we talked about things happening gradually versus pivotal moments, if you are summarizing things that are easily shown in your scenes, a lot of times you don’t need to summarize them. If I’m like, “Over the next two days, Marcy and Ted bickered,” but then you have a scene of them bickering, did you really need to say that they were bickering? Because we can see them bickering. Is that information necessary? Because most summary is there for logistical reasons, which means that if you take it away, that should cause confusion or reduce the experience in some way. And so if you can cut the summary and it has no reduction in reader experience, then it probably should be cut or condensed a little bit.
There is some things that are somewhat interesting, but not interesting enough for a full scene. Like travel definitely often goes too long, but a little travel summary can be interesting if it’s condensed down enough.
Oren: Yeah, I was also just kind of wondering if there’s a good way to tell how much summary is too much, how many paragraphs before I should probably stop and find a scene somewhere, or is that just like, too context sensitive to try to give a rule for?
Chris: Yeah, that’s a little context sensitive. I mean, I would say that if you have like three paragraphs, take another look. Not because you can’t have three paragraphs of summary if there’s a lot happening that you need to summarize, but that would be worth another examination.
Oren: Chances are just high at that point that you might have too much.
Chris: Chances are significantly higher that you have too much summary if you have three paragraphs of summary.
Oren: When I’m writing summary, should I still be working to try to make my wordcraft all cool and evocative, or is that like a waste of energy and I should just get the business over with?
Chris: You can make it cool and evocative too.
Wes: Do I still have to do that? More work, Oren. [laughter]
Oren: I was hoping for permission to just rush through it. Darn it.
Chris: I mean, if you don’t like writing summary, go for less. As little as you can get away with, but you can make cool and evocative summary. Any words can be pretty. You can pretty up any words you want.
One thing I think is important is talking about how do you recognize when you have summary where you are not intending to have summary, what I call an over-summarized scene, which is when you were trying to write a scene, but you put it too far to the telling end of the spectrum. We get that de-emphasis that Wes mentioned, that distance. It doesn’t feel real. It doesn’t have emotional impact. It’s not quite as immersive. If you’re not used to it, it’s hard to tell what’s wrong. It’s like, why don’t I feel anything here? Then sometimes people try to compensate by making it all super melodramatic. [laughter] This does not work.
First is to assess, is it in real time? If the story moves faster than the reading time, it’s probably summary. If it takes you 10 seconds to read, but 15 minutes passes in the story, it’s summary. Dialogue is always in real time. You know if somebody is getting the full double quotes treatment, you know that it’s in real time. However, if you look at your story and it’s all dialogue, sometimes that’s because the narration is summarized and so it’s really short. Dialogue forces you to move into real time, then dialogue takes a disproportionate amount of the manuscript. If you see any character actions that are grouped together instead of stated individually, it’s summary. So if you say, “She punched again and again,” that’s summary. If it’s real time, she should be like, “She punched, then she kicked.” You don’t need to state her body parts. You don’t need to be like, “She punched with her left fist.” [Wes laughs] Important actions like that might not have, “They put out his arm and then moved his hand to grab the doorknob.” We don’t need to get that specific. “Open the door” would be an action. If you start grouping actions together, “he cut five enemies down.” That’s definitely summary there. If it’s in real time, it’s “he slashed an enemy.” One important action at a time.
Oren: What if he just said a devastating insult to five enemies at the same time and so they were cut down by that? They cut down five enemies with this devastating insult, then it wouldn’t be summary anymore, would it? Checkmate! [laughter]
Chris: A scene will often include thinking time. A viewpoint character will have to figure out stuff. They should have time to assess the situation around them rather than things just happening without any thought or calculation going into them. Not that they need to internally deliberate every single action, but oftentimes that assessment in thinking time kind of like, allows tension to build. And the level of detail. “She tried to escape” versus “she ran for the door.” Running for the door is a specific action that you could directly witness. Notice that “tried to escape” is just a step more abstract. It could be a number of different things. “He turned them away” versus “He shook his head and closed the door.” “He shook his head and closed the door” is a very specific thing that you can witness. “He turned them away” again could mean a number of different things. That’s the difference and if you’re finding that you’re grouping actions together, your writing is a little bit more vague or abstract, things happen without time for thinking and calculation, that’s a good sign that you’re aiming too much for summary and you need to dive more into the moment and break it down.
Wes: Role-playing games are pretty fun. There’s a good balance there between what scenes the gamemaster is inviting you to participate in and what they are not. What they’re choosing to summarize. You mentioned travel. You’re not going to have everybody role-play that whole thing. Maybe there’s like one encounter on the road that is important, but that’s it. Otherwise it would be exhausting.
Oren: The tricky part is when you have very active players who want to do their own thing and you’re like, okay, does that need to be a scene or can we just summarize it? It’s like, I don’t know, it depends on what they wanted to do.
Chris: [laughs] Sometimes they won’t let you summarize anything because they want to do more things.
Oren: They’ve got their own ideas about stuff. [Wes laughs]
Chris: Yeah, this is why you need flex time in a game where everything just happens at plot time and you don’t even try to specify days anymore because you can’t move forward in time because the players always want to do something.
Oren: Okay, well I think that brings us to the end of this scene. So I think it’s now time to summarize the ending. “And then he ended the podcast.” [Chris laughs]
Chris: Alright, if you found this breakdown useful, please support us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: Before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First we have Callie Macleod. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Next we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally we have Danita Rambo. She lives at therambogeeks.com. We’ll talk to you next week.
[Outro Music]
The nights are long and the ground is cold. Glittering eyes stare out from dark crevices, and you may just come face to face with a duplicate who embodies your greatest flaw, because we’re in the shadow realm now! These places are dark and spooky, but, perhaps more importantly, they are alien. They’re also our topic for this week. Whether it’s the literal afterlife or a particularly twisted part of the real world, we talk about caves, abysses, and how orcs can grow food when the sun is blotted out.
Show Notes The Year Without a Summer * Mordor * Moria * Katabasis * Annuvin * The Cave * Made in Abyss * Ash Yams * The Bad Place * The Shadowlands * The Upside Down * Beetlejuice * Barovia TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Viviana.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock and Chris Winkle.
[Opening Music]
Wes: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast. I’m your host, Wes. And with me today is-
Oren: Oren.
Wes: And-
Chris: Chris.
Wes: All right, get out your torches and turn the lights on full blast because those shadows are just waiting for the right opportunity to pounce and take you into their world. We must remain vigilant and shine our bright lights to keep them at bay! But also, doesn’t the brightest light cast the darkest shadow? Hmm, what’s going on here?
Chris and Oren: [Laughs]
Oren: Does it? I guess.
Wes: I don’t know. I remember that quote from the opening scene in the first Kingdom Hearts about the brightest light casting the darkest shadow. And I was like, “Does that make sense?”
Oren: Oh, man. I’m trying to figure out how do you measure how dark a shadow is?
Chris: What is a dark shadow? Is it about the contrast between the shadow and the light? Or is it we’re going to measure how many photons are in that space?
Wes: [Laughs] I feel like it’s kind of trying to riff on the idea that the most noble of paladin could become the worst blackguard, that kind of shift.
Oren: It’s very poetic.
Chris: Or, a powerful magical girl becomes a powerful witch.
Oren: It’s like “It’s dark as just before dawn”, which is not true, but sounds cool.
All: [Laughs]
Wes: It sounds cool. So anyway, we are either talking about shadow realms today or the duality of humanity. [Laughs]
Oren: We got to talk about the land of Mordor then, because it’s literally where the shadows lie.
Wes: I mean, for Adar so loved his Uruk that he gave up the sun by blowing up a mountain.
Oren: Everyone knows that if a volcano erupts and spews a lot of ash and other particles into the air, it’ll all just kind of stay in one place.
Chris: It’ll stay and block out the sun, but only over that one country.
Oren: It’s not going to ever move. It won’t flow or move with the atmospheric currents. That’s how air works, okay? Just believe us.
Wes: There was such opportunity there for that to blow up and then basically send Middle-earth into a mini ice age. That happened in Europe in the 18th century. We got great art out of that, so maybe that could have happened.
Chris: Right, but Mordor’s not supposed to be as big as Europe. That was brief. How long has Mordor had this volcano problem?
Oren: I don’t remember the Lord of the Rings timeline. I think this is several thousand years before the movies?
Chris: Some very stubborn clouds. [Laughs]
Wes: Maybe the water continues to feed into the volcano, which continues to create more volcano cloud ash. I don’t know, it doesn’t make sense.
Oren: One of the things that The Rings of Power did that I was sort of surprised, kind of impressed by, but also just like, “Eh”, was that it decided to stick with the idea that before the Lord of the Rings books started, the orcs couldn’t travel in sunlight. That’s supposed to be a new development in The Lord of the Rings, which is a weird thing because it makes it really hard for orcs to be threatening in any other context, which is why the Hobbit movies just forgot about it. But Rings of Power felt constrained by that, and as a result, it has this extremely weird storyline trying to make the orcs threatening despite the fact that they can’t go outside during the day. They’re basically like vampires, except that they aren’t superpowered at night. They’re just regular people at night.
Wes: [Laughs]
Chris: Well, they’re ground vampires because they’re experts at tunneling.
Oren: Yes, they can tunnel really well.
Chris: It’s like tremors.
All: [Laughs]
Wes: But orcs, yeah.
Oren: Sometimes they did normal tunneling where they just had to dig for a long time, but then sometimes they were doing cartoon mole tunneling where they would just kind of tunnel under your house, grab someone, and leave. [Laughs]
Chris: Speaking of which, we should not forget Moria. Moria is a shadow realm, right? It’s inside a mountain and it’s super dark.
Wes:I think actually something just to quickly get out of the way that I do remember from a religion class I took in college is that there’s a storytelling tradition that in the class they call it a katabasis, which I believe just means a descent, like a going down, and it starts with the “Epic of Gilgamesh” and all the way up to present day. Basically, it’s any time your hero goes into another type of place and faces some type of trial. And so, Moria is a great example of actually stepping into a shadow realm. Sometimes quite literally people go to hell [Laughs], which I think is the most literal interpretation, but stepping into a wardrobe can offer challenges and any kind of place where you’ve just stepped out of one reality into another. Even if it’s not a completely opposite reality, it is distinct in tone and threat, and as a result of that you come out changed. That’s another important part of what a katabasis is, is as a result of that trial you are different now. And they lose Gandalf in Moria. That certainly alters the composition of the Fellowship.
Oren: Yeah, I mean until the next movie, but fair enough, yeah.
Wes: Well, yeah, oh yeah.
All: [Laughs]
Wes: It fundamentally changes Gandalf because then suddenly he’s reborn and better.
Oren: It puts them on the path to the Fellowship breaking up, because if Gandalf had still been with them on the other side, all of that nonsense with Boromir probably wouldn’t have gone down.
Wes: He would have just whacked him and said, “Sit down!”
Oren: A lot of the places that we’re thinking of that we would consider shadow realms, some of them are actual separate dimensions or other worlds that you can’t just walk through, you need some kind of magic to get there, like Hades, or the Fade from Dragon Age, or parts of the Never Never in Dresden Files. But, sometimes, they’re just really spooky parts of the world, like Mordor, or Annuvin from Prydain, or the cave in Empire Strikes Back. Yoda just lives next to an evil cave for some reason.
All: [Laughs]
Wes: But the shadow part definitely comes from, if you’re sitting in shadow, it’s darker, but I don’t believe that a lack of light is really the big deal. It’s more about a lack of warmth, physical and or metaphorical. The lack of comfort in this space is actually a big part of why there’s threat here.
Chris: So if you go into Moria and you get down to where there’s some geothermal heat, we are no longer in the shadow realm.
Wes: Or you’re like, oh man, this is great. Wait, why is this here? And then of course there’s fire demons.
Oren: Regardless of whether we mean literal shadows or not, it’s a place where the environment is hostile in some way. It’s not like a normal place where a threat has wandered into. The Shire didn’t suddenly become a shadow realm because the Nazgul were there. Mordor is different than a place where orcs happen to live. It’s supposed to be corrupted in some way. It’s sometimes kind of vague on how exactly, but it’s supposed to be.
Chris: So for instance, the Abyss in Made in Abyss. Made in Abyss is an anime and the premise is that there’s this huge crevice, this vertical shaft going down and it’s very dangerous just because of the wildlife. It has just tons of things that will eat you down there. And it has different levels that each have different creatures. And people get sick if they travel back up again, and there’s a certain point of no return where even people who venture in there to get relics because there’s some cool technology relics in there that they can retrieve, if they get past a certain point, they can never come back again because they will die of this sickness that comes with coming up. And the main character has a compulsion to go down, which is also a common thing. It’s that people feel compelled to travel down this abyss. It’s an interesting concept. I like it, but it’s very dangerous and it’s presented that way and presented that if you are a beginner, you need to stick up to the higher levels or else you will probably die. But it’s just wild. It’s just a very wild place similar to Area X, for instance.
Wes: I couldn’t help but think of The Abyss, the movie that we talked about in our underwater podcast, which is also great. I was like, oh, if they go down too far, they can’t come up because they get the bends and their blood boils and they die.
Chris: Right. Yeah, it’s similar.
Wes: That’s a cool premise. I like that a lot. Oren said a key-word that I think is often associated with shadow realms is this idea of corruption. And to what extent do you feel like that is maybe an essential component of Mordor, Annuvin, or any kind of shadow realm we might look at?
Oren: There’s differences in thematics and what kind of imagery they’re conjuring. Like The Abyss, for example, there’s really nothing to indicate there’s any kind of corruption there in the show Made in Abyss. It’s just that it’s weirder and weirder the farther down you go. And so that’s dangerous because these are strange unknown wilds that humanity was not meant to tread in sort of place. Whereas in something like Mordor or the Shadowlands from Legend of the Five Rings or Annuvin from Prydain, the idea is that this was once a normal place that has been all messed up and it has been changed in a bad way. And that’s a different kind of threat, I would say. Whereas in Made in Abyss, in that sort of thing, it’s like this place is terrifying, but it can also be awe-inspiring and beautiful and there can be a feeling of, yeah, if this place wasn’t trying to kill us, it’d be really cool. Whereas you’re probably not thinking that about Mordor.
Wes: Mostly, in Mordor, you’re wondering, “What do all these orcs eat?”
Oren: Yeah, I do have questions about that. Questions about orcish agriculture.
Wes: Yeah, probably like ash yams or something like that. [Laughs]
Oren: I’m going to need a 20-page paper on this. Have it on my desk by Monday.
Wes: You brought up Annuvin a few times, obviously I love Chronicles of Prydain, but I do think that it’s a good example of also what they did with the movie Hercules. Annuvin, in Welsh mythology, is basically the other world where gods and spirits dwell, where Arawn is just kind of managing it. Same thing with Hades in Greek mythology, just has a job. But both Chronicles of Prydain in the books and the movie Hercules are like, “You know what, just because this person supervises the dead, they need to be the villain. They need to take them away from their desk job and make them the bad guys. Because it’s the only way that this works, because death is bad.”
Oren: My first shock upon rereading Prydain recently was I’d forgotten how Welsh it is, and then my other shock was that this is very different from the mythology that it’s based on. I was like, alright, I have to remember not to assume I know things about Welsh mythology because I read the Chronicles of Prydain.
Chris and Wes: [Laughs]
Oren: The funniest thing about Annuvin in those books is that they say it’s the land of the dead, but it’s absolutely not. Dead people don’t go there when they die in any capacity.
Chris: All of the dead are like cauldron-born who were reanimated.
Oren: Yeah, I think the only way it’s the realm of the dead is that Arawn has a bunch of zombie soldiers. Not really what it sounded like they meant at first. I think Lloyd Alexander just wrote that in the first book because it sounded cool and, as the books went forward, realized that would be kind of weird if we went there and there were ghosts. That would kind of be a thing we’d have to deal with.
Chris: Especially if all magic is supposed to leave at the end.
Oren: Yeah, well, well, well.
All: {Laughs]
Wes: Also weird if the dethroned Achren somehow is just living and seeking revenge on another person. Which is also odd.
Oren: Achren is funny because for all of the other villains that they fight, they all die. Usually some kind of appropriately poetic death. But Achren gets to be redeemed and then she has a heroic sacrifice instead. And it’s like, “Hmm, I wonder what’s different about Achren compared to all of your other bad guys. I wonder, could it be something that starts with a ‘G’ and ends with ‘ender?’ Could it be something about that?”
Chris and Wes: [Laughs]
Oren: Could it be that maybe you had a little bit of quote benevolent unquote sexism going on here? Who knows? We’ll never know except the answer is yes.
Wes: I think he was like doing a self insert with Gwydion and had a thing for Achren.
Oren: That’s not wrong. Gwydion is definitely his favorite character. My favorite is in book three when Taran is like, “Hey Gwydion, we should totally capture that spy before he does anything.” And Gwydion’s like, “No, we need to wait and see what he’s up to.” And then later the spy kidnaps Eilonwy and then Gwydion’s like, “Well, he moved too quickly! It’s too bad. No one could have seen this coming!”
All: [Laughs]
Oren: And it’s like, come on Gwydion.
Wes: Come on. Oh, man, that’s great. Those books are awesome.
Oren: Yeah, they’re fun. I enjoyed rereading them quite a bit.
Wes: Another weird actual land of the dead was in His Dark Materials. It’s literally called The Land of The Dead because why be creative?
Chris: Is this in The Amber Spyglass?
Wes: Yes, it’s in The Amber Spyglass.
Chris: There’s a lot of things in The Amber Spyglass.
Wes: There’s a lot of things in The Amber Spyglass. But so very straightforward, there;s a ferryman that they have to pay to cross the river to get into this place. Okay. And then they leave their daemons behind, which as a result of this adventure, they get the power upgrade where their daemons can go farther away from them like the witches. I don’t know, whatever. But I think it’s funny that I remember reading this book and I just imagined all these dead souls are just in a very large room and in this room are these harpies casting vicious mockery constantly.
All: [Laughs]
Wes: And they’re just standing there taking it until Will uses the subtle knife to trick the harpies into telling them all to leave. This is like, this is the most boring land of the dead I think I’ve ever read.
Oren: Look, he used all of his creativity for the motorcycle elephant aliens.
All: [Laughs]
Oren: There wasn’t any left for the land of the dead. Honestly, that’s actually pretty par for the course for the way that the supernatural is portrayed in that book because theoretically one of the big conflicts in both that one and the previous book is Azrael’s fight against heaven. But it barely portrays that and when we do occasionally see the armies of heaven, they’re all kind of drab and uninteresting. It felt like Pullman just couldn’t bring himself to describe the afterlife or heaven in a way that might make it sound kind of cool. Because the message of that book is that we shouldn’t have an afterlife, souls should just be annihilated when they die. That’s the solution they come up with. And it’s like, “Yeah, okay, sure, Pullman.”
Chris: Sure. Yeah.
Wes: That reminds me of when the Harry Potter satanic panic was happening and somebody interviewed Pullman and he’s like, “I don’t get what the fuss is about. My books are about literally killing God and no one seems to care!”
Chris: He’s a little put off by this. Yeah.
Oren: I was really trying really hard to make Christians so mad. They did not take the bait. They just didn’t care.
Chris: I had somebody ask me in the comments of one of our articles, “Why do you think that this is about Christianity?” And I’m like, did you not notice the Adam and Eve parts of it? [Laughs] So I think to a lot of people it’s so pervasive. They look at little differences that it’s not Christianity anymore. It’s like, well, if you think other sects of Christianity are not Christianity, I can see why you thought that.
Oren: It’s like, yeah, see the big church, which is clearly Catholicism, has some slightly different theological and liturgical practices to the real Catholic church. Therefore, it’s not actually Catholicism. And it’s like, I mean, if that’s what you need to say to read the books and enjoy them, then I guess, sure.
Chris: So does the Bad Place then qualify as a shadow realm?
Oren: I mean, probably. Do we ever actually go to the Bad Place in The Good Place? I forget.
Chris: I mean, it is technically the Bad Place. Spoilers. But I think we go and see a workplace as part of the official traditional bad place.
Wes: We see the workplace and they spend time in a museum of like really low evils or something because Michael thinks that’s the safest place for them. And so it’s a museum depicting people like the first waiter to say sarcastically, “Oh, I guess you must have hated that” when somebody finished their meal. It’s just like annoying evils. But they go there and they attend that party with Bad Place employees and stuff.
Chris: We don’t see them torture people.
Wes: We never see that. No.
Chris: We don’t see like fire and brimstone.
Oren: Yeah, we never go to the normal torture part of the bad place. We’re always in the “What if we made them slightly psychologically distressed?” experiment of Michael’s, which is in retrospect probably kind of weird that he got that approved. But, you know, whatever. I’ll take it.
Wes: Sean was just so bored. Yeah, that’s a good one. And then maybe more story related is like, why would you include a shadow type realm? I think that there’s probably plenty of reasons. But Mordor is obviously very representative, like, okay, this is where we have to go to solve the thing. Right? Like this ring has to go there and that place is shadow and represents the ultimate evil threat. So go there, drop off the key thing and then lift it out by god eagles.
Oren: Thanks, eagles!
Wes: Thank you!
Chris: To be honest, that sounds a little bit like having evil races, having an evil place. Now, sounds like shadow realms are a little bit broader than that. You can have a very dangerous place that’s not evil. I suppose you could have a place that’s just very polluted, has lots of toxic chemicals if you wanted to have an environmental message. But the whole traditional, “This place is shadowy, therefore it is evil. And then the evil race comes from there.” It’s like, eh, I don’t see much value in that anymore.
Wes: No, there’s not.
Oren: A lot of the ones we’re thinking of are definitely tied to the concept of an evil race or other not good concepts. The whole concept of a corrupted place, that can be a parallel for a lot of different things. In the most famous ones, it’s not because we all know what Tolkien was going for. But in general, whether or not we consider corruption to be a requirement to be a shadow realm or not, the main purposes of a shadow realm are that it provides novelty and tension at the same time. It’s tension because it’s dangerous and spooky, whether that’s the monsters or just the dangerous environments from Made in Abyss. Or whether it’s the fact that if you stay in the Shadowlands in Legend of the Five Rings too long, you become a demon. That’s spooky, but it’s kind of cool. And that’s why the one in His Dark Materials is so uninteresting. It’s because it has no novelty. It’s just like, yeah, it’s a room where all the ghosts hang out. Done.
Wes: Those are all really good points because I think that hits why season one of Stranger Things was very well done. Because that shadow realm is Hawkins, but not Hawkins. And that was great before they decided to ruin it all by making it all just some dude.
Oren: Thanks, Vecna. [Laughs]
Wes: Thanks, Vecna. But in that first season, it’s great because why deal with the shadow realm? Oh, well, because it’s hunting us. Sure, there’s the Demogorgon, but it’s more like the place is hungry. They must have been inspired by Shadowfell from Dungeons & Dragons in general for that kind of thing. But I thought that was a really cool play on the environment itself is the antagonistic force coming for you and taking a loved one in that case.
Oren: Back then, before this idea that Vecna just created it for some reason, the implication was that this was like another Hawkins that had been taken over. The bad guys won here and this is what it looks like when they win. So that was real spooky and added a lot of tension. Not so much anymore, but season one was good back in the good old innocent days of season one.
All: [Laughs]
Wes: One thing that I thought was interesting that was pointed out, but they never did anything with it, was every time they go into the Upside Down, it has those little floating flakes of I don’t know what. But they showed government people going in with hazmat suits, but there’s apparently no lingering effects, I guess.
Oren: No, it’s fine.
Wes: Don’t worry about it. It’s fine. You can just breathe that. It’s all good. They’re going to cough and be like, “Oh no!”, but it doesn’t matter, I guess.
Oren: In season two, it was like, well, Will’s all messed up. So maybe it was from breathing all that stuff. But no, apparently it was because the Mind Flayer took a special interest in him. Everyone else can just be there for whatever and they’ll be fine. Don’t worry about it.
Wes: I did love that cliffhanger at the end of season one where Will vomits up the slug in the bathroom and then for that moment is just ported there and then ports back. I thought that was pretty cool.
Oren: That was pretty cool. Didn’t really go anywhere, but it was cool.
Chris: Yeah, it would have been nicer if they had actually developed that. But I think that is perhaps some of the appeal. If your shadow realm is an adjacent or like a mirror type of plane of existence, then it’s kind of always there and that can tighten threats, certainly, depending on how you play it.
Chris: Like if it’s the ghost realm that’s overlaid over our own, for instance.
Wes: Yeah, exactly. I think there’s a lot of cool opportunities there.
Oren: Everyone loves the ghost world.
Chris: Which reminds me of Beetlejuice.
Wes: Oh, yes. So glad you brought that up.
Chris: It’s like they die and then suddenly they leave their house and it’s like sand and worms. That’s what happens if they try to leave their house and we’ve got the whole dead person bureaucracy that they have.
Oren: Oh, great. Now I have to live in Dune.
Wes: The ultimate shadow realm.
Oren: The ultimate shadow realm. Everyone telling me that Dune‘s a subversion. I’m like, no, it’s not a subversion and they won’t stop telling me it’s a subversion.
Wes: This is Oren’s true bad place.
Chris: And then they pull out The Red Book whenever you talk about Lord of the Rings.
Oren: On, no. Ah, The Red Book! It’s like “You seem like someone who’s only read The Red Book.” I’m like, oh, no, I’m already dead inside now that you’ve said that.
All: [Laughs]
Oren: One more thing I wanted to mention about shadow realms that they’re useful for, especially if they’re more fantasy oriented shadow realms. Like this probably wouldn’t work well with the Upside Down. But if they’re more fantasy oriented, then you can use them as a way to do character development. Popular options include showing the darkness within. This is what the cave is for in Star Wars. But also temptation arcs. The idea being that this place is negative in some way and so it’s drawing out your negative aspects. That can be good for character development in addition to some novelty and tension.
Chris: Your shadow realm could be a nightmare where they see all their fears.
Oren: I had fun with the Curse of Strahd game because basically Barovia is one of those. It’s called a domain of dread apparently. Although the version that I ran through was very different than the one that’s in the base book because my GM changed it a lot. But it had a similar vibe that was like, this land’s all messed up because it’s ruled over by a super messed up vampire who did some kind of creepy weird ritual to make herself immortal. Strahd was a she in my version.
Wes: Barovia is a good example because yes, it is an isolated area ruled by a not benevolent monarch. There’s a lot of horrible, but it’s not ubiquitous. There are still some people trying to do good things there and I think that helps make it more interesting. It’s not all just undead all the time.
Oren: Right, it’s a place where people are supposed to have to be able to live. It’s not like the Shadow Lands where you only go in there for a limited amount of time and then you either die or you come back out. It has to scale things back a little bit because you need to be able to have believable villages that still exist.
Chris:Or like Mordor where the orcs eat rocks, I guess, that are on the menu.
All: [Laughs]
Wes: They’re on the menu.
Chris: I’m referring to the line, “Meats back on the menu, boys.”
Wes: That was a great pull, Chris. I loved that.
Chris: It’s anachronistic but it is a pretty good line. I wonder if the writers debated that behind the scenes.
Wes: I hope so. I hope it was fraught debate and they won in the end and we all won in the end. Oren was mentioning character development and things like that. I think that’s something kind of cool there if you wanted to work like a corrupting influence with the… What was the name of the abyss show you mentioned, Chris?
Chris: Made in Abyss.
Wes: Made in Abyss, right? Okay, yes. They go down too far and they can’t come back up. It might as well be the fact that the shadow realm has in fact captured their soul and they’re trapped there forever. So I think that there still might be some kind of connection there with the place having a certain level of threat over your characters and being able to draw them in and maybe never let them go. So, whether it’s real or fantasy, there’s a lot of cool opportunities to play with cool monsters or maybe there’s different types of powers or a corrupting influence, but make it fun and spooky.
Oren: Well with that, I think we’re going to go ahead and call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you enjoyed this trip to the shadow realm, please support us on Patreon. That does make sense somehow. There’s logic there, I swear. Just go to patreon.com/Mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First there’s Callie Macleod. Then we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory at Star Trek. Next we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally we have Danita Rambo. She lives at therambogeeks.com. We’ll talk to you next week.
[Closing Music]
Learning things is hard! If only there was someone to teach us, a mentor of some sort. That’s the topic for this week, and perhaps we can even learn something along the way. We talk about why mentor characters exist, what benefits they provide, and why they’re often such a problem that authors are notorious for killing them off. Also, why are there two episodes of The Mandalorian in the middle of Boba Fett’s show?
Show Notes The Mask of Zorro * Gandalf * Yoda * Romanticism * Always Be Solving Problems * Jeong Jeong * Taran Wanderer * The Art of Prophecy * Glinda the Good * Fairy Godmother * The Book of Boba Fett * Master Pakku TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Suzanne.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle. [opening song]
Oren: Welcome everyone to another episode of Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren with me today is…
Chris: Chris
Oren: And…
Wes: Wes.
Oren: Now settle down, young whippersnappers. I have to teach you about mentor characters only to die tragically. So I don’t steal too much of your thunder. That means you’ll have to do about the last third or so of the podcast without me.
Wes: How are you going to die?
Chris: And we can avenge your death.
Oren: Well, probably the villain will be involved, but it’ll also be kind of frustrating. It looks like I probably didn’t have to die and the writer just didn’t know what to do with me at that point in the story. And so I’ll be like, Yay, I’ll hold off the villain, guys. And you’ll be like, you know, we could all stay and fight the villain and probably win. And I’m like, No, you guys go on.
[Laughter]Wes: I bet you’re going to mentor us and lead the conversation down a particular direction and then die. But fake your own death only to swoop back in to find us at a complete loss for how to close out the podcast because you primed us to fail. And you come in to save the day. You’re actually the villain and the hero.
Oren: Oh, so I’m like a stealth protagonist then.
Wes: Yes.
Oren: I mean, that’s not something certain authors are above.
[Laughter]Chris: I wish that was not a thing.
Oren: Authors do really fall in love with mentor characters, and they are really obnoxious when that happens. I don’t like it.
Chris: One of the unusual purposes of a mentor is to be the author’s voice box, which just happens because they’re a character with high credibility. Because if they’re teaching the hero, and therefore making the hero more effective, that means that they are right and they know what they’re talking about. So then any time the author wants to send a message, they just have the mentor say that. And that can get annoying if authors want to do too much preaching using their mentor.
Oren: As with many characters, there will sometimes be cases where it’s a little fuzzy, like is this character a mentor or not? Gandalf follows a lot of the same tropes that you see with mentor characters, but he never teaches anyone anything.
Chris: See, I would say that’s not just teaching that makes a mentor. Yes, if we follow the technical definition of the word, but I think that it’s a character that gets somebody, particularly the hero, ready to face challenges. It includes teaching, but isn’t just teaching. Oftentimes, mentors give them resources and equipment, general guidance, or just protection while the hero is still green. How you take that character and get them ready to fight the big bad, the sort of mentor does that. So I would use a broader definition that’s not just teaching.
Wes: I like then Gandalf’s trial by fire is to invite a bunch of dwarves over to clean out your pantry and dirty your house to make you want to leave.
Oren: All right. So the question then is first, why mentors? Why would you have them in your story?
Wes: Well, I think on some level, a lot of us enjoy being taken under the wing by somebody just better and smarter. Not better, well, probably better. It’s comforting to have somebody tell you what to do and how to improve yourself. That’s great. If you’re lucky enough to have that person in your life currently, don’t let them go or let them die tragically, please.
Oren: Yeah, that’s the wish fulfillment aspect, right? There is a heavy wish fulfillment aspect of a cool person supporting you and teaching you to do cool things or otherwise preparing you to do cool things, whether it’s giving you stuff or just showing you life lessons or whatever. That is a strong reason why there are often mentor characters in fiction. It is because people like that.
Chris: I would just go with the logistical reason for having a mentor in the story, which is that we love underdogs. A hero that’s an underdog is often actually not ready to do the adventure. And then somehow we have to get them ready or if they don’t know anything, if they’re a fish out of water, we need tools to do that.
Oren: That’s the practical reason or logistical, as you said, because the hero often doesn’t start knowing everything they need to know. So we need someone to teach them or they need to learn somehow. And that’s often easier if there’s a teacher.
Chris: Writers can definitely go too far with that, though. If they don’t know how to have the hero use initiative to learn things on their own, mentors can be used much too quickly and just show up and like, here, this is exactly how to do things. This is exactly what you need to know. And the mentor is on an Escort Quest.
Oren: Well, that is one of the core contradictions of the mentor character, which makes them a continual thorn in the side of many stories is if the mentor is teaching the character something and it’s important, which it should be if you’re including it, then why doesn’t the mentor just do the thing? Or even if the mentor, for some reason, can’t do the thing, it still very often creates a point in the story where the protagonist is just doing what they’re told all day and has no real agency. And that’s not fun either. These are things you need to be aware of when you’re adding mentor characters.
Wes: I feel like then that means it’s done better when the hero has motivation, but no route to get there. I’m thinking of, I don’t know why I just thought of The Mask of Zorro with Antonio Banderas and Anthony Hopkins.
Oren: That was a good movie.
Wes: It was a good movie. Antonio Banderas had his own motivations. And Anthony Hopkins, the older Zorro, is trying to guide him in pursuit of that. But then you run into impatience or things not taking too long or conflicting motivations. And I think that is definitely a helpful thing to do. I guess Star Wars with Anakin is a less good, definitely less good movie. The same kind of situation with restrictions being put on you by mentor characters and making you wait and you’re impatient and you’re in love and all these things.
Oren: Well, you can definitely have conflict with a mentor character, too. That’s something that most stories that have an extended training part of them will have some form of conflict with the mentor, just because otherwise it’s going to be more boring. In Star Wars, they were trying to go with that. The prequels, they’re not good, but they were trying. We also see that in the original movies with Yoda when Luke is like, I’m gonna go and get Vader. And Yoda’s like, don’t do it. And Luke’s like, oh, I’m gonna. Or even earlier where Yoda’s like, go into that cave. I happen to live near an evil cave. Go in there and don’t take your weapons. And Luke’s like, well, I’m taking my weapons. And that doesn’t go well for him.
Wes: All in all, a series of failures on Luke’s part.
Oren: Yeah, look, Luke didn’t do nearly enough flippy training while he was there. He needed to do way more flips. And then, of course, people also really like to subvert the wish fulfillment mentor and create a demanding, overbearing, or otherwise rude mentor. I like to go further and take it into the realm of an antagonistic mentor myself.
Chris: I would just say that there’s a little bit of a difference between the tough love mentor and antagonistic mentor. Because in many cases, we’re doing the drill sergeant mentor. And as far as I know, drill sergeants aren’t actually that bad anymore. If we have a mentor that’s just an asshole, usually they’re not actually a good teacher and aren’t constructive. But a lot of times, the writer wants to frame this as constructive, and they’re just looking for ways to make their scene interesting and give their main character spinach and challenges. So they’re using just a complete asshole mentor. Whereas I think a good antagonistic mentor, there may be some conflict, but ultimately, at the end of the day, they have different goals than the hero. So they can seem perfectly friendly, but then the hero finds out that what they’re preparing for is something different than the hero thought, or what they want the hero to do is not what the hero wants to do.
Oren: That’s a good difference. A mentor might be a jerk, but I would generally only classify them as antagonistic if they have a different goal than the hero. They have some kind of opposing goal as opposed to just being a hard ass.
Wes: If you want to do a hard ass, caution. Like Chris was pointing out with the asshole mentor, they’re supposed to be teaching you things. So if you’re portraying abuse or not teaching, like do it again, harder, do it again, harder, do it again.
Chris: Oh man, if I had a penny for every single scene, I saw that.
Wes: You’d be rich.
Chris: I would be so rich.
Wes: Chris has written extensively about the influence of romanticism and how pervasive it is in our creative processes. That’s yet another example of it cropping up. It’s just like, I can’t teach you how to be the hero. I’m just, I’ll beat it into you until you realize that you’ve been the hero the whole time. There’s no education happening.
Oren: Yeah, if I have to see another magic training sequence where the mentor just says concentrate over and over again, I will lose it. No, I hate that. Yeah, I mean, those are two different but often related problems. People have a hard time writing mentors or teachers to be hard asses without just going into abusive territory. That’s not to say that there are never reasons to make your mentor abusive. That can happen and it’s possible that your story could be about that in some way. But often that isn’t what the person actually wants and they just want their mentor to be a hard ass, but they just go too far. And as a result, they can end up validating or excusing that behavior. That’s a problem. The other half is just depicting actual teaching as often kind of boring or just hard. Instead they just shout, concentrate.
Chris: On the flip side of that, if your teacher is going to do more than shout concentrate, you need to actually think through what are the skills that this takes that the teacher has to develop. It takes a lot more time and thought, especially if you have a situation where it’s like point the wand, say the word, a spell happens. Coming up with something else, since it looks so effortless, that’s actually going on inside takes some time and thought and probably brainstorming.
Oren: Yeah. And that’s extra hard for magic. At least if you’re training in a real skill, then you can look up how that’s actually done, whereas there aren’t really any good ways to look up how to teach magic.
Wes: And coming up with magic systems alone is hard enough.
Oren: Yeah. Oh, man. I really hate it when some young fantasy kid is going to learn sword fighting and he’s never picked up a weapon in his life and the mentor is like, here, tosses him a sword. I’m like, oh, God. They make you do like three weeks of footwork in fencing before you ever get to hold a foil. And those aren’t actually sharp.
[Laughter]But that’s obviously a personal thing. Not everyone has taken fencing and will have that personal experience to be annoyed with. But you can still do better than that.
Wes: If you’re wanting to do more training situations with the mentor, I’m kind of trying to think about the balance here. You want tension, like some meaningful conflict. But how can you put that into a mentor education? I don’t know. I guess that’s the mentor saying, climb this cliff without any ropes. It’s the only way you can become the hero.
Oren: The inherent challenge of creating conflict in a mentor student teaching sequence is that in theory, the mentor is there to help. The mentor is supposed to teach you. If you can’t learn, that’s partly on the mentor. Not entirely, but partly. So in theory, the mentor is trying to work with their student. So that creates some dissonance. That’s why so many authors will have the mentor doing things that are actively detrimental to the student’s learning, like yelling at them and humiliating them every time they make a mistake or something like that. That’s actually bad for learning. If you don’t acknowledge that in your story, it can be very frustrating to anyone who’s been in those real life situations.
Chris: We talked about this a little bit in our training episode. Basically, if you want a little arc, you have to come up with something that is holding your character back. And then in a moment that kind of unlocks that for them, whether it’s this is a magic that requires confidence, for instance. So, OK, why aren’t they confident? You create a specific character arc with an issue for them, then resolve that. Then they can do magic.
Oren: Just think of it in terms of remembering your ABSPs. Always be solving problems.
[Laughter]It’s a problem to solve like anything else. If you want your mentor to be a hard ass, they can do things like not cut the student any slack when they’re tired or just demand a grueling schedule or not care about excuses for late work, things like that. Those are all things that a hard ass teacher could be that might or might not be good teaching, but are not abusive or actively detrimental.
Chris: Right. Overly high standards or harsh grading can be hard ass and be fine if they’re just very, very picky. But they should not be insulting the student or doing anything that would tear down the student’s confidence.
Oren: Unless part of your story is that they’re bad at teaching or have these problems with their teaching, which you can do, but most stories don’t have the time for that.
Chris: We mentioned before that mentors have a tendency to take over. Perhaps it would be good to go over ways to keep that from happening.
Oren: Kill them. Kill them dead.
[Laughter]Wes: Kill them super dead.
Oren: At this point, killing the mentor is something that I’m not going to say you can’t do. I’m going to say you should look at other options first, because it happens so often that it’s sort of like arranging for all of the adults to be out of commission or somewhere else at a magic school. Yeah, you can maybe get away with it, but people are going to be really focused on your justification. And if something about it feels off, they’ll be like, oh, he’s killing the mentor again, everybody. We’ve all seen that one before. And then they’ll laugh at you.
Chris: It’s a little cliché. The other issue is that if we have a lot of mentors who, for instance, are older characters, then we end up killing off all of the older characters, which is just not a great thing for us to be doing. That’s less of an issue if you have an unconventional mentor who is still not a marginalized character. But I think that’s the other issue with it. Again, I wouldn’t say never kill off your mentor, but look at what else you can do first.
Wes: Yeah, keep them alive. And make it very clear at the onset why they can’t do it. Maybe they tried before and physically are no longer capable and are, yes, I will mentor you to exact revenge for me because I need this to happen. I think if that’s clear at the start, you don’t have to kill them. You just make it clear that they can’t lunge anymore for the fencing move that is the only bad guy’s weakness.
Oren: That one is something that I think you can generally use old age in that because if you’re assuming this is a physical type story, this is a story with a lot of physical conflict. Old age is a pretty good one, unless you’re like an avatar type setting where being older just makes you more badass. That’s going to be a problem, but you can decide what kind of setting you want. I do want to advise caution on using disabilities in that regard, which I’ve seen some people do because you can just get weighed into all kinds of potential issues of saying that having a disability means you can’t do X or X. And that’s just not something you want to engage with unless you’re really prepared.
Chris: I would say people who are not knowledgeable consistently underestimate how much a person who is disabled can do and think they can’t do all kinds of things that they actually can in fact do. So, yeah, we just don’t want to go there.
Oren: You mentioned The Mask of Zoro earlier, Wes. That’s actually a perfect example of a story where the mentor does not take over. Now granted, he does die, but not as a way to get him out of the way. His death is for other reasons. He dies at the very end.
Wes: Yeah, and we didn’t directly mention this, but that’s a good example of why do we like mentors in our stories. That is very much a student has become the master storyline. And the master in this case is just Zoro. Zoro is bigger than the both of them.
Oren: And that’s a case where the thing that they need to do is big enough that they both need to do stuff. It’s not just like, well, this is a thing where we only need one person, so we’ll just have Anthony Hopkins go do it. It’s like, this is a big problem. He needs help. Then we can focus on the missions that he sends younger Zoro to do until the climax. That works quite well. In that story, it’s kind of funny because they’re doing a little bit of a switcheroo there where they are showing that, sure, younger Zoro is more capable because he’s physically younger and in better physical shape, but we’re also kind of magicking how quickly he learns to be an expert swordsman. You could usually get away with that, especially in a movie. In a book, you might need to be a little more robust about how long that takes.
Chris: I also think it is workable to have a mentor who has other responsibilities that are important. It might be a little cliché if the mentor suddenly gets a message that they’re needed elsewhere and then rushes off right before the climax happens. But you can have a mentor that people depend on, that has other special skills that are indispensable or for whatever reason simply cannot, for instance, drop what they’re doing to go adventuring. So the hero could train with them and then the hero travels alone would be one way to do that.
Oren: You can also set up situations where the protagonist, despite having some skill that the mentor needs to teach them, has some special quality that the mentor doesn’t have that allows the protagonist to do whatever it is we need the plot to do. Or it can also be that the protagonist needs multiple skills and they’re learning one from this particular mentor, but that’s not the only thing they’re going to need. Avatar the Last Airbender, of course, does both of those where Aang’s the Avatar and you’ve got to deal with it, but he can learn all four elements. No one else can do that. So he needs to do Avatar stuff. He also has all the Avatar powers, but he still needs to learn the elements from other benders. He has to learn a little bit from each of his friends, from Katara, Toph, and Zuko. Hey, Zuko here. And so that’s a very good setup where obviously none of those characters are going to take over the story, at least not on the virtue of being too strong, except maybe Toph. They each have something vital to teach him and he has his own thing that he needs to do. So that’s a pretty good setup right there.
Chris: I also want to mention that besides killing the mentor, they can just get injured. You can just injure them and then they’re in recovery and they’re out of action for a while.
Oren: It’s worth noting that depending on the kind of conflict, there are other things you can do. We’re kind of assuming a physical-type training scenario, but if you have a political story where the mentor is some old politician who’s teaching an up-and-coming congressperson how to navigate the political scene, you have other options. You could have the mentor be no longer welcome in political circles because their career ended in some big scandal. So they can’t just go and be like, well, I’m the congressperson now, because that’s not how that works. It depends on what kind of story and what kind of conflict you have, what kind of skills are being taught. We’re also assuming a very plot-important mentor. There are always possibilities that you might have some more flavor-type teaching, like when Taran is going around in the fourth Prydain book and he learns a bunch of crafting. None of those characters are ever in danger of taking over the plot because they’re like teaching him weaving or blacksmithing, not evil Death-Lord slaying.
Wes: Some nice practical things.
Oren: Yeah, he gets to make his own little cloak.
Chris: I will say it might be easier if you have a less conventional mentor. For instance, you could have two characters that are both mentors to each other and have different skill sets. Instead of having the super wise guy, you could have some asshole on the streets who is worldly. And so they are the mentor to your protagonist because your protagonist is not used to being on the streets and needs somebody to teach them. But ultimately, that asshole is not going to be the hero.
Oren: You can also get kind of creative with it. A book that I’m reading right now is called The Art of Prophecy and it starts with the protagonist, who is this lady named Taishi, becoming the mentor to a supposed chosen one whose training has been really badly handled and he’s bad at fighting. She’s trying to make him better at fighting. That’s an interesting premise. That’s a high novelty premise. We could argue whether or not she technically counts as a mentor archetype anymore in the same way that Dr. Horrible isn’t really a villain even though he has the aesthetics of villainy. But you’re going to get some benefit out of that. Of course, the story does require a little bit more of a robust plot than 500 pages of her telling him to do martial arts forms until he gets it right. But it’s a cool concept. So you can do a lot of things by experimenting with what kind of mentor character you’re using.
Chris: We also have Glinda. Glinda’s a mentor.
Oren: Glinda?
Chris: The Wizard of Oz.
Oren: Oh, Glinda the Good. Yeah, the murder-mentor.
[Laughter]Go knock off all of my political rivals, Dorothy. So that’s what I hate. The meme of people doing the reductionist version of the Wizard of Oz about how Dorothy’s a murderer. But that’s not true. Dorothy isn’t murdering anybody. She’s being manipulated into eliminating political rivals by Glinda. That’s the reductionist Oz plot.
Chris: I would also classify the fairy godmother in Cinderella as a mentor. She shows up, gets Cinderella what she needs to go to the ball, instructs her to get home by midnight, and then she disappears again.
Oren: Yep, there’s a strong mentor case right there. Just don’t be like Luke from The Book of Boba Fett and be like, You can’t have any friends, Grogu. You’re not allowed to have friends anymore. What happened to you, Luke?
Chris: They needed some conflict for the Jedi, I think is the problem. And also the prequels are still canon.
Oren: Yeah, I honestly think it’s because they feel beholden to the prequels, which had their whole no attachments idea, which the prequels are incredibly inconsistent about because it was a terrible idea and didn’t make any sense. But it really seems like the new Disney Plus live action Star Wars shows feel like they can’t contradict things that were established in the prequels. Or maybe the person in charge just likes them. Filoni, I think is his name. He’s apparently a big Star Wars fan, so maybe he just thinks those are cool. I don’t know.
Chris: I think I should specify for anyone who’s confused: The Book of Boba Fett has a Mandalorian episode in the middle. And that’s what we’re talking about. Why? Are they a crossover? So to get people to watch this awful show? I guess?
Oren: Yeah, it’s really not clear why there’s a Mandalorian episode in the middle of The Book of Boba Fett. The joke is that they put that in there because nobody liked The Book of Boba Fett. But they already had all those episodes before they aired the first one. They had no knowledge of how much people would hate that show. I suppose maybe they showed the first episode to focus groups and the focus groups hated it. But that still seems like they would have made some changes. I don’t know. It’s very confusing.
Wes: I think they just realized that they messed up at the end of that Mandalorian season because they’re like, wait, oh crap, we just split up Grogu and Mando. Wait, oh no, we can’t do that. We have to start the next season with them together.
Oren: Yeah, that might have just been it. It might have been that they were like, we don’t want to waste valuable Mandalorian episode time getting Grogu back with Din. So they’re just like, we’ll just stick that in The Book of Boba Fett. It’ll be fine. Don’t worry about it.
Chris: It’s fine. Nobody watches The Book of Boba Fett.
Oren: It does seem like they were remarkably unsure what that show was actually about. It wouldn’t surprise me if they were like, yeah, it doesn’t matter. No one in this room has anything that they’re passionate about doing with The Book of Boba Fett.
Chris: Well, as Oren knows from the new trailer for the third season of Mandalorian, Mando has some very wise words for Grogu.
Oren: [Laughs] Oh, God, I love that trailer. He’s like, Grogu, you have to learn to navigate the galaxy. That way you won’t be lost. And it’s like, yes, yes, Mando, that is what navigation is for. You have to learn to cook. That way you won’t be hungry. You have to learn to wash your clothes. That way your clothes won’t stink.
Chris: This is what Mando is like as a mentor, apparently.
Wes: That’s a good moment of caution is once you tune into, those are called tautologies, once you start paying attention to them, they are everywhere. We are drowning in them. You can say so many things without saying anything at all, or you’re just saying something completely obvious. Like, Oren has a bad day and it’s talking to me and Chris about it. And then I say, well, Oren, it’ll be okay. Tomorrow is another day.
[Laughter]Oren: I guess if you write a lot of tautologies, there will be a lot of tautologies in your story. Eh? Eh?
Chris: [Groans]
Oren: I’m very clever, is the point.
Wes: Any mentors from media that you all favor or quite enjoyed?
Oren: We already mentioned them, but it’s hard to do better than Team Avatar. I was looking, I was like, are there any problems with the mentors of Team Avatar? Those being Zuko, Toph, and Katara. The only one I could find is that we had to retcon Katara being worse at waterbending than Aang, which was a weird storyline that didn’t make any sense anyway. So I’m fine that they retconned that.
Chris: Yeah, there’s definitely some good training arcs in Avatar.
Oren: Some of the other mentors, like Master Pakku, I think is his name. The guy from the Northern Water Tribe, eh, could take or leave him. But that’s more to do with his weird sexism that doesn’t really work well in the episode than it is to do with his training style.
Chris: I don’t remember him actually teaching them. I don’t think there was a real training arc there. There was just an arc of Katara getting past sexism.
Oren: There was like some off-screen training and some very brief training that we saw bits of. Oh, I did love Jeong Jeong, I think is his name. Aang’s first firebending teacher who was terrified to teach Aang firebending. I thought that was a neat concept. But yeah, Team Avatar. I mean, hot take. Avatar, the Last Airbender. Pretty good show.
Wes: It’s Oren, ladies and gentlemen.
Oren: I’ll be here all week.
With that, I think we’re going to have to call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you enjoyed hearing about mentors, consider supporting us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: Before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Callie Macleod. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Next, we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Danita Rambo. She lives at therambogeeks.com. We’ll talk to you next week.
All too often, adaptations of a famous work completely miss the mark. Fortunately, this is not one of those times. Instead, AMC takes Anne Rice’s classic vampire story and gives it a stunning makeover, keeping the best parts and fixing all the important problems. What’s more, the show is in a unique meta-conversation with both the book and movie. What does that mean? Listen and find out!
Show Notes Interview With the Vampire (show) * Interview With the Vampire (movie) * Interview With the Vampire (book) * Louis * Lestat * Claudia * Daniel * Armand * Mayfair Witches TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Suzanne.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris:You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle. [opening song]
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Chris.
Oren: And I’m Oren.
Chris: And today Oren is going to interview me about my undead life. But by interview, I mean only flattery. So you can ask questions about how awesome are you, Chris? And I will say yes, I am very awesome indeed.
Oren: Wow, that’s just such an awesome rule. Like, it’s amazing. It must be because you’re such a cool undead vampire that you come up with such awesome ideas.
Chris: So that is basically the original Interview with the Vampire book, right? We’re going to talk about Interview with the Vampire in particular in the new AMC TV show adaptation. Content notice, this show features intimate partner abuse. So we are going to discuss that depiction. We will also have spoilers. It is a very great show. So if you’re worried about it being spoiled, you might want to go watch it.
Oren: You could just go watch it. Can’t imagine why you’d be listening to us if you have the option of watching Interview with the Vampire, the TV show. I presume you’ve already done that. And now you’re here looking for some more vampire content.
Chris: But what about their Interview with the Vampire related podcast tie-in that they keep advertising with the show? Yeah, we love this show. But no, we don’t really care about your tie-in podcast, AMC.
Oren: That was so weird. It’s like, here, go listen to our show podcast. I’m sure there are plenty of people who are interested in that. But we are the wrong audience for it. In fact, that was actually one of the weirdest things at the beginning was when I thought that the beginning of the show was another ad. Because the beginning of the show is Daniel doing an ad for his MasterClass program.
Chris: Yeah, yeah.
Oren: It was so seamless that I thought another commercial had just started playing.
Chris: I thought it was a MasterClass commercial that was like, oh, can we skip forward? And I think maybe we did or I just didn’t look because I need to go back and watch that now. It’s too convincing. Yeah.
Oren: It felt so good to me, too, because MasterClasses, in my opinion, are not worth the money. I think they’re scams. Not intentional, but I think they’re just not worth your money. And I just love how he does this ad and then afterwards, he’s clearly like, I hate myself.
[Chris laughs]Oren: That was very gratifying to me personally.
Chris: So before we get into the details of the AMC adaptation, I was hoping that we could talk about the book and then the movie. Because this is very much an adaptation that makes commentary and is engaged in discussion with the previous versions of the story, shall we say. And you definitely get more from it by having consumed the book and watched the movie. I think that newcomers can also enjoy it, for sure. I don’t think that you have to have consumed the previous works, but I think that matters. So should we start with the book?
Oren: Yeah. I mean, book bad. I didn’t really like the book.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, the thing about the book is that it absolutely depended on the novelty of being a vampire and describing in intimate detail a vampire’s life. As you can imagine, that does not have as much novelty now as it did when the book first came out. That’s basically the biggest appeal of it. It doesn’t have a throughline. The plot just kind of meanders along. And Lestat is just not who you probably imagine him to be. He’s not the same person as he is in the popular imagination.
Oren: He’s just an asshole. He’s just a weird asshole.
Chris: But also a pathetic asshole. He doesn’t have the charm. He’s not slick. His human father is hanging around.
Oren:For some reason, no adaptation of this book has ever kept that part. He just has his human dad traveling around with him for some reason.
Chris: Louis is not nearly as angsty in the book as he is in the movie. He’s just kind of insufferable and pretentious.
Oren: I don’t know. I guess it depends. I would define him in the book as being really angsty, but sanctimoniously is the thing that makes Louis in the book so hard to deal with. He’s angsting, but also just being terrible while he’s doing it. He has half-baked philosophy that doesn’t make any sense. And he’s constantly going on about how, oh, how can people do bad things? Om nom nom nom nom nom nom. And he murders somebody. But the horror of doing bad things. Om nom nom nom nom nom nom nom. That’s how he is in the book. In the movie, they changed that and just had him be one angsty boy. He’s not sanctimonious like he is in the book. He doesn’t do a lot of weird half-baked vampire philosophy.
Chris: He’s much more intense about his angst in the movie, I feel. I feel like he’s more kind of contemplative about his angst in the book. Louis is a slave owner in both the book and the movie. It’s very racist. It’s not great. It’s very bad.
Oren: Eugh. It’s not good.
Chris: Yeah, it’s not good. In the book, Claudia is like five when she’s turned.
Oren: Seven, I thought.
Chris: Or seven. She’s real young. There is sexual subtext between all of the characters, which is extremely gross in Claudia’s case.
Oren: Yeah, it’s not good.
Chris: And then our interviewer is just a boy. I think he’s just called Boy. I don’t think he has a name.
Oren: Nope, nope. He’s just Boy.
Chris: He’s really just there to be the audience that Anne Rice wants to have and to be like, oh, Louis, you’re just so cool.
Oren: Talk about the world’s least necessary framing device. Most framing devices are unnecessary, but I honestly think you could probably take him out and then just start the story with Louis describing being a vampire. And I don’t think people would even notice.
Chris:That’s par for the course with framing devices, but yes, you could absolutely do it in this book.
Oren: I don’t think people would even notice that something was missing.
Chris: That’s the original book. We have these characters that are just not nearly as good, especially Lestat. So it’s weird, in fact, that Anne Rice decided to make later books about Lestat because he is nothing notable, nothing to write home about in Interview with the Vampire, the book.
Oren: I get why she would pick Lestat over Louis. It’s like, all right, because Louis is over. New book, who dis? Louis is just such an obnoxious character with nothing really going on after the end of the first book. Lestat, at least in some sections of the book, is claimed to be cool. The book claims he’s suave. He’s not. The description of him is not suave. But, I can imagine how Anne Rice would see him that way. The movie is interesting because the movie did away with Lestat being just a pathetic asshole and made him all suave and dark and cool. But it also made him not an abuser anymore, which raises the big question of why does Louis want to get away from him in the first place? Right?
Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah. We could understand that Lestat was such an asshole in the book. We could understand why Claudia and Louis needed to get away from him, why they would have trouble doing so, and ultimately why they would decide to kill him. But in the movie, he’s so charismatic. He doesn’t seem particularly abusive. They do escalate things between Lestat and Claudia where they no longer like each other. But it’s a little bit forced. Again, we only have a movie length. It’s definitely rushed. It’s just a little strange that it goes that far. We don’t really have the same motivation for killing Lestat that we do in the book. We still have loads of sexual subtext in the movie.
Oren: Although less with Claudia, thankfully.
Chris: Yes. I’m not going to say it’s devoid of Claudia though, I think. We still have a few lines from the book that are like, it’s weird for a daughter to refer to her father as my love. That’s kind of a weird thing. That would be a weird thing. We still have that in the movie. But it’s definitely cleaned up a lot from the book, for sure. Obviously, there’s still a lot of chemistry between Lestat and Louis.
Oren: That’s the main attraction of the movie, right?
Chris: Yeah. We got a bunch of really just gorgeous men, the most gorgeous male actors we could find and dress them all up as vampires and then had them act like they really wanted to have sex with each other.
Oren: Right. You can just imagine they’re doing that anytime they’re not on screen. Because we’re never going to say it on screen because it’s the 90s. But that’s what we want you to think.
Chris: The interviewer is still pretty obnoxious. He’s a little older, but he’s not much better.
Oren: Yeah, he’s still technically in the story.
Chris: So basically the appeal of the movie is the glamorous visuals and the A-list actors. Great acting. It tries to deal with the lack of throughline. It cuts some parts out, which is good. Like they don’t delve into Eastern Europe to see a different kind of vampire.
Oren: Yeah, we never meet the zombie vampires. Real loss, if you ask me.
[Laughter]Chris: But at the same time, it can’t quite get past the fact that the book doesn’t really have a throughline. So it just has kind of an awkward tension sag in the middle before it gets going again. But it did what it could as a movie. Which brings us to our AMC adaptation.
Oren:Which is like a one in a generation adaptation. This almost never happens.
Chris: Yeah, this is a fantastic adaptation. It’s funny because I had to remember that the big draw of this adaptation was that the gay subtext is actually text. Louis and Lestat are actually in a romantic relationship explicitly because it’s so natural in the story. I had basically forgotten that this was considered the big deal about this adaptation, that this was a big change. The big thing that the adaptation was largely advertised on in many corners because it’s just so obvious. Like, of course they are. Of course they’re a couple.
Oren: Yeah, it just seemed very normal. I mean, extremely sexy, but not something that I was shocked by, right?
Chris: I have to say, The Guardian had this review of the AMC adaptation that’s like, oh, you know, I think something is lost when you change subtext to text. And it’s like, oh, shut up, Guardian. This is why I don’t give you money.
Oren: Yeah, something is lost. It’s just not a thing I care about losing.
Chris: If subtext is so great, why don’t we just take all of the heterosexual relationships and make them all subtext? You know, so we don’t lose anything.
Oren: The thing that is lost is heterosexuals being comfortable. That’s what we lost.
Chris: Well, as a heterosexual myself, I would like to see two sexy guys actually be in a relationship.
Oren: Yeah, well, there’s that too. People have some weird takes on Anne Rice. I saw one person complaining that this new show is bad because Louis isn’t a slave owner anymore, which means he’s not a monster before he becomes a vampire. And that the point of the book was that he was already a monster. No, that’s not the point of the book.
Chris: No, that’s definitely not the point of the book.
Oren: The book doesn’t care that he was a slave owner. It does not condemn him for that. So just the fact that he’s not a slave owner anymore is a huge upgrade.
Chris: It’s definitely a glorification of him being a slave owner. It plays into the sort of romantic notion of those southern plantation owners, which is very gross. The movie even has a slave that’s like, oh, master, I’m so concerned about you. Oh, it’s gross. That’s why it was so great that Louis is Black in the AMC adaptation.
Oren: And they moved it forward into the early 1900s instead of the late 1700s. So we get to see the Black business owners in New Orleans at the turn of the 20th century. Super cool. It’s kind of unfortunate that big budget prestige dramas have become people’s main education about African American history. But until we catch up in the schools, this isn’t a bad place to learn.
Chris: And instead, Louis runs brothels, which still allows him to question the morality of running brothels, right, and still give some of that there. But we don’t have to have him be a slave owner.
Oren:You can see the strain of ruthlessness that he has had to get, right, because this whole world is arrayed against him. He’s had to do hard things to succeed, which is important and part of his character and something that he wrestles with after he becomes a vampire.
Chris: It’s really interesting to see how being a vampire, to some degree, helps Louis deal with oppression, but he still can’t entirely escape it. It just gives him more privilege and power in some areas that he can use to cope, but he’s still affected by that oppression, because vampires to some degree have to deal with society. I thought that was a really good thing that they did with the show actually, having that balance of, okay, the vampires, yes, they can overpower any individual human, but there’s still going to be trouble if they incite a mob, for instance.
Oren: They can’t just reveal themselves and be like, bow before us mortals, right? Like they still have to remain hidden, which is about as good a justification for the masquerade as you’re ever going to get.
Chris: Yeah, just about as good. With only a few vampires, we can basically get away with that. The other thing is the plot is handled really well. I have to say the throughline problem is neatly solved just by using a TV show and dividing the plot into seasons, because the plot of the book just works much better as two arcs instead of one, because we have the whole deal with Lestat as our first season arc, and we haven’t gotten to season two yet, but the stuff in Paris with the other vampires seems like a natural second season. Again, the story works much better as a part one and a part two than it does as one story, which the movie had to condense into one.
Oren: It’s too bad because if the movie was made now, they would realize they could turn the book into two movies and get twice as much money.
[Laughter]Oren: But they hadn’t started doing that back in the early 90s. The ability to squeeze money out of a franchise had not advanced far enough yet.
Chris: I have to say, spending an entire season with Lestat just gives enough space to make a really intimate drama. We’ve got a couple episodes with just Louis and Lestat getting a really close look at them and their relationship, and then we bring in Claudia and spend some time with her. I would have to say that’s probably the weakest point of the season. Claudia’s not a terrible character, but she takes some time to warm up mostly because of this age dissonance she has where she’s supposed to be a child who then internally gets older because she’s a vampire and is immortal, but doesn’t outwardly age. I think that there was a little bit of tension there in how do we depict this, where she seems young at first to contrast with how she is older, but people don’t want to cast an actress usually that is underage because then you have child labor laws.
Oren: Right, and of course she would physically age over the course of production, and that’s a huge pain. A friend pointed out, I think I mentioned this in my article that she’s supposed to be 14, she looks 19, and she talks like she’s 7. That gets smoothed over pretty quickly when some in-universe time passes, but at the beginning it’s a little bit iffy on her character.
Chris: She still has this central problem of wanting to grow into an adult physically and never being able to do that. I have to say with the current actress being a little older, it’s just not very convincing. When I see her it’s, like, well, I mean, yeah, she might be a little smaller than she would be otherwise. She might have grown a little bit more, but there are plenty of women who are that small, so it just doesn’t seem like a huge issue.
Oren: Her arc in this is much more about escaping from Lestat than it is about wanting to become an adult. They still have that in the story, it just doesn’t work quite as well. It’s not quite as compelling as the fact that she wants to escape and that there’s conflict because Lestat is jealous of the fact that Louis cares about her because Lestat wants Louis all to himself. There’s all of that. Lestat sees her as his possession the same way he sees Louis, and that part of the story is beautiful and works very, very well.
Chris: It’s interesting to see that even though it’s a very intimate drama, the story always moves forward. It’s never repetitive. Every episode we have a different situation, they’re in a different place than they were before, and we move towards that escalation where they have to kill Lestat to escape from him. In the depiction of abuse, one of the interesting things there is, so, real life abusers are often very charming, and there’s a risk because if you depict them that way, you don’t actually want the audience to root for an abuser or get attached to them, right? You want to see abuse as it is. With this show they did start Lestat very charming, and I think that for me, it allows you to see from Louis’ eyes what the relationship looks like to him in addition to what it is, and I think as the season continues, they’re doing their best to then pull up the curtain and show how horrible Lestat really is, but allow you to be charmed by him in the beginning. Now, I don’t know how many viewers were not able to make that transition. Sometimes people get really attached to characters and want to make excuses for them, but for me, by the time Lestat was going to die, I was ready for him to die because he’s a horrible person.
Oren:To me, it just felt incredibly natural. Okay, he’s super cool and suave, and then after a few episodes, he’s becoming more and more of an asshole and becoming more and more abusive, both emotionally and then physically. I believed that Louis was having conflicts. I believed that because Louis still had this image of Lestat as this cool, suave lover that he had taken earlier, that he would be resistant to trying to leave the relationship the way Claudia wants him to, but it was so immediately obvious to me what was going on that it’s hard for me to imagine someone being like, oh, but actually, Lestat wasn’t such a bad guy. But maybe someone does that somewhere.
Chris: You know how people are.
Oren: I do know how people are. I have met people.
[Laughter]Chris: One thing that helps, we haven’t talked about Daniel that much. Daniel’s interview was fantastic in the show. One of the reasons why framing devices don’t usually add anything, and this one actually manages to by making good commentary on the story. The reason I haven’t previously seen this work is for exactly the problem that we talked about in the book, where the only commentary the author wants to make on their own work is like, oh, it’s so awesome. But because this is not the original writer of the book, they used the interview with Daniel to make comments on the original story, because we see Louis and Daniel together in the scenes in the present day. The whole premise behind this is that the original interview happened and Louis told Daniel one thing, and now they’re meeting again many years later and Louis is there to be like, okay, actually, I lied a bunch that first time. Let me tell you how it really was, which kind of gives them a little bit more leeway with the story, but also allows Daniel to contrast what Louis is saying now from what he said before and make a lot of commentary. One of the things that’s used for is for Daniel to outright say, this is an abusive relationship, to help give the viewer some clarity about what is being depicted that might not be as obvious if we’re just watching it from the perspective of people at the time, especially if Louis is still charmed by Lestat.
Oren: The concept of making this the second interview is brilliant. It’s a stroke of genius. It’s a eureka moment. I don’t know how they got to it. Maybe it was iteration, but it feels like a eureka moment because it makes the show have this weird meta continuity with the book and allows them to do all kinds of great commentary and critique of the story as they’re telling it. And man, I just, I love Daniel in the show. I love Daniel in this show. I love how he’s sassy, you know, that he’s old and tired and he doesn’t have time for any of Louis’ crap. It’s so great. Oh my gosh, that character.
Chris: His critique of his earlier interview is like, this isn’t an interview.
Oren:He’s like, I was just telling you how great you were because I was young and over awed. It’s like, oh, that’s beautiful. Thank you, Daniel. I love you. Send you some fan mail.
Chris: That becomes very valuable when Louis is talking about his abusive relationship and he still doesn’t necessarily have the proper distance from it. Even by the end, we see that Louis, even though he manages to escape from Lestat with Claudia’s help, he’s still a little bit under Lestat’s influence. Having Daniel there to be like, ha ha, you say that you were in an equal power relationship, that’s obviously not true, et cetera, I do think is really helpful when it comes to depicting abuse to make it very clear to the viewers that that is what you were watching. Because again, especially when it starts, it can be very subtle. People don’t know what they’re looking at because the entire point is that the abuser wants to disguise what they’re doing to get control over the other person.
Oren: You want Lestat to make convincing arguments when he claims that he’s not being abusive, because you want him to act in a way that is logical for his character to act. But if he makes those arguments too well, then the viewer might be like, oh, well, I guess he’s got a point, right? That’s what Daniel is here to do to point out and be like, no, actually, he doesn’t. It’s very useful for that.
Chris: Yeah. And we start with small things like the fact that Lestat wants to sleep with other people. He says he’s okay with Louis doing it, but he’s not. He’ll come and get jealous and try to prevent that from happening. Later when he starts to enter an abusive cycle where he inflicts violence and then after six years lures Louis back with lavish gifts, which is another typical thing that abusers do. So we see that and see it escalate until we’re ready for Lestat to die. Hopefully everybody was ready for Lestat to die.
Oren: Right. He also does a bit of isolation because he turns Louis into a vampire, which isolates Louis from any of his human connections.
Chris: And he also just doesn’t like it. He clearly doesn’t like that Louis wants to stay in touch with his family.
Oren: Right. He also refuses to tell Louis and then later Claudia anything about other vampires. So they have no one else they can socialize with or talk to because he’s the only vampire they know. That is another very classic abusive tactic.
Chris: Yeah. That escalates. And then they handle the Lestat not-death real well. Did you want to talk about that?
Oren: Oh, well, I mean, that’s one of my favorite parts because—
Chris: Exactly.
Oren: Okay. So they have this really great epic masquerade ball that ends in a double cross, triple cross stab Lestat moment, which is super great. That’s the best Claudia ever is in the show when she’s organizing all of that. I love it. And then we see them throw Lestat’s body in the garbage, into his coffin and then into the trash instead of incinerating it. I’m like, oh, come on. They know he can regenerate. It’s like a huge plot hole. And then we flash into the present and Daniel’s like, hey, you know he can regenerate. What the heck? You let him live on purpose. And Louis is like, oh, you got me. I did. And I was like, oh, this is beautiful. I saw it and I thought it was a plot hole, but actually it was a plot point. I love it when that happened.
Chris: Another thing that’s really nice that they do is at the end of the last episode when Lestat has finally been cast off, they do a teaser for the romance with Armand, which I think is really good when you have a gay couple and gay people need more happily ever after. So yes, this gay relationship was an abusive one, but hey, look, we have a healthier one coming up next.
Oren: Right. The show’s not trying to say that gay relationships are inherently abusive, which can sometimes be the message if you only ever show one. Your audience will make assumptions whether you want them to or not. So it can be helpful to have other relationships. And in this case, the Armand one looks to be pretty cool. I’m so hyped for season two. I really hope that they deviate from the book and Claudia doesn’t die. Just Claudia is so much better as a character in this show. Like in the book, I kind of didn’t care when she died. Sure, it was sad, but I didn’t really like or care about Claudia. Whereas now I definitely do. I don’t know, sometimes characters you care about die, but it’s hard for me to imagine not rage quitting if she dies in the same way that she does in the book. I guess we’ll see. I don’t know. They’ve done good so far.
Chris: I think at the very least she’ll probably have more agency because in the original, she’s just kind of cast off. She’s characterized as a helpless child, even though she’s supposed to be quite devious. In the movie again, she’s just, oh, let’s throw her in the well. She can’t do anything. She’s a helpless child. I’m sure that the show will do better than that. We might find that Claudia gets mad at Louis and leaves instead. I would not be surprised if that happens, but we’ll find out. One thing I will mention is that this show does, it’s not shown on screen. It is off screen, but there is a rape. It has a plot purpose, which is to explain one of the reasons why Claudia comes back instead of going off on her own and the risks of her being out there. But I can’t help feel like there was probably a different way to do that. Because the show is not about Claudia, I’m just not seeing that as a necessary thing that they needed to do.
Oren: It’s especially awkward because Claudia going off on her own is also the least fun part of the show to watch to begin with. So it’s like, yeah, all right, I guess we’re having an ending to this part. It feels like maybe we just shouldn’t have done this part to begin with.
Chris:She does try to leave again later and then Lestat just threatens her. And it’s like, okay, well, we could have just—
Oren:Maybe we could have started there. I don’t know.
Chris: We could have just done that.
Oren: That part was weird. The Wiki, for whatever reason, says, and then he does something that we don’t know about. And it’s like, okay, are you in denial? Or do you have some insider knowledge that we’re going to get a reveal that it wasn’t a rape in season two?
Chris: That could be. We’re certainly left to assume that it was rape, but we don’t know for sure.
Oren: I don’t know what’s going on with you guys, Wiki. I don’t know if you have some friends or if you’re just in denial about what happened.
Chris: If it’s not rape, you’re leaving the audience to experience the story as though it was rape, because that’s what you’re left to assume without seeing it happen.
Oren:Despite that, I still really loved the show. I thought it handled most of its really dark topics much better than I’ve seen in any other context for the last few years, at least.
Chris: Yeah, it was a fantastic show. I was really impressed. The acting was great. The social interactions were so rich and nuanced, like I have seen few times before. It was worth signing up for a new streaming service. Even though AMC doesn’t have a lot to offer, it was absolutely worth signing up for AMC just to watch this one show.
Oren: I’m probably going to sign back up once Mayfair Witches airs. I’ve never had any interest in Mayfair Witches, but I’m so hyped because of this show. I guess we’ll see what they can do with other Anne Rice properties.
Chris: All right. Well, if you enjoyed this episode, please support us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: Before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, we have Callie Macleod. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Next, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Danita Rambo. She lives at therambogeeks.com. We’ll talk to you next week.
It’s the end, the bad guy is defeated, but you’re not quite ready for the medal scene yet. Maybe you have a few loose relationship arcs to tie up, or maybe the hero still has to escape the exploding base after the villain’s death. Nothing as exciting as the climax, but still some conflict. That means it’s time for falling action, which just so happens to be this week’s topic! We talk about what falling action is, whether you need it, and how one is supposed to pronounce “denouement.”
Show Notes Defenestration * Save the Cat Writes a Novel! * The Aeneid * A New Hope Medal Scene * The Martian * The Scouring of the Shire * The Batman Riddler * Buffy the Vampire Slayer Finale * Final Fantasy VII Ending * Seraphina * Sabriel TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Ace.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock and Chris Winkle.
[Intro Music]Wes: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m your host, Wes, and with me today is…
Oren: Oren.
Wes: And…
Chris: Chris.
Wes: And boom, out the window, defenestrated.
Oren: Wah!
Wes: Now we’ve resolved the main conflict of this podcast and we watch as the falling action occurs!
Chris: This is kind of an anti-climatic podcast.
Wes: I was just like, what is falling action? And I was like, pushing someone out a window. That’s fine. Yeah, alright, well I jumped right into it. Today we’re talking about falling action.
Oren: I think technically you jumped right out of it is usually how we would describe defenestration.
Wes: I guess so, but like, we’ll get into kind of the nitty-gritty thing. But if the climax is somebody going out the window, then the falling action is dealing with what happened after that.
Oren: That’s true.
Wes: Which is where we are. And I guess I just defined it. So, hey.
Oren: Nice.
Wes: How about that?
Chris: It all harkens back to the good old triangle graph—
Wes: Gotta love that.
Chris: —we saw in grade school with that big slow rising action slope going all the way up to a peak, which is the climax, and then falling into the falling action. And to be clear, the climax, the peak, is not in the middle.
Wes: But what about symmetry? How dare you?
Chris: You cannot. There is no, the midpoint isn’t real, people. What it is is that statistically there’s probably a peak of a child arc near the middle. Just because if you have an odd number of child arcs and they’re of equal size, there’s going to be a child arc peak in the middle there. So if you think it exists, you can use confirmation bias to verify its existence by just looking for something exciting near the middle of the story. But it’s not real because it’s a substructure. It’s not part of the overall story arc.
Wes: Yeah.
Oren: My favorite is the “Save the Cat! Writes a Novel” definition of the midpoint, which is “a false victory or a false defeat.” And then the author gives a bunch of examples of real victories and real defeats. And so apparently by false, what they mean is that the story’s not over yet. So basically, any example of the hero winning or losing something around the middle can count. And it’s like, yeah, I guess I can see why you would find this in most stories.
Wes: Sure.
Chris: Just the idea that succeeding or failing a child arc is always inherently false. I don’t think that’s how that works. I do think that there’s definitely a question of how narrowly you’re defining the climax.
Wes: Yes.
Chris: Because if we’re saying falling action comes after the climax, I think that when people use the term climax, they’re often thinking about a full sequence.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: Right? Often one scene. But if there is a fight that is several scenes long, it might be that entire exciting fight sequence, which is several scenes long. And that’s kind of what they’re thinking about when they say the climax.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: For me, I would pinpoint that peak more precisely. So it’s the turning point. And I would even call the action—so if your character, for instance, is about to get fried and they suddenly have an epiphany, that would be your peak. And it can be a single moment. It could be just one paragraph. And then if they take an action based on that epiphany, maybe they identified a weakness in their opponent, that would be already into falling action. Because now they are resolving the throughline right there and defeating the antagonist. Now, somebody else would be like, well, no, we’re still in the climax there. So that’s not falling action, depending on how narrowly you define it.
Wes: I, for the purposes certainly of this podcast and talking about falling action, I think it’s important. The climax lasts however long it does. But what happens at the climax should be some resolution of the main conflict. Like the thing.
Chris: The throughline.
Wes: Yeah. The throughline must be resolved.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: It must be resolved. End of story. If the big bad needs to go, they go at the climax. And the falling action is, OK, the big bad’s gone. What’s left to deal with? And that is what that is supposed to be. It should not be as intense, but it should still matter.
Chris: Right.
Wes: But plenty of stories just don’t have falling action. And that’s completely fine.
Chris: Especially if it’s shorter.
Wes: Especially if it’s shorter. Yeah.
Chris: And it has less arcs to resolve. And it just doesn’t make sense. A lot of the time, short stories end on a real punch, right?
Oren: Right.
Wes: I remember reading The Aeneid in college. And it ends right when Aeneas just kills this guy, the enemy chieftain. Just kills him, dead, end of story. I was like, well, all right. That’s one way to end a story. But then I realized, oh, wait, A New Hope. They blow up the Death Star, and then they just get medals, and it’s over.
Oren: So I actually, if you’ll excuse me, I have an example involving New Hope. Because of course, the question when we’re talking about falling action, I’m sure what all of you have been desperately wanting to know, is what’s the difference between falling action and epilogue?
Chris: Or is it denouement?
Wes: Denouement.
Chris: Denouement.
Oren: Denouement.
Wes: Denouement.
Oren: I legitimately don’t know what that means.
Wes: It just means the final part of the story.
Chris: At least the online definitions I saw, which are generic and people might disagree, really made it look like it was the same as falling action.
Oren: At least the way that I look at stories, I do think there is a useful distinction to be drawn between when you are still drawing down from the climax, from the action of the story, and then something that happens a little later to give you some closure. And in New Hope, the falling action is very short. It’s heading back to Yavin, Luke landing, getting a big hug from Leia and Han, and then assuring us that R2 is going to be okay. That’s falling action. And then we cut to the medal scene, and I would argue that the medal scene is epilogue because we’re no longer resolving anything. Now we’re just giving a little bit of extra at the end to be like, yeah, what happened here mattered, and we have medals to prove it, right?
Chris and Wes: Yeah.
Chris: Going back to the Martian, which is the one that did not have any additional falling action. If we’re going to say the falling action is what happens after the throughline is resolved, we’ve already had the principal resolution, and it’s just all of the follow-up resolution. The Martian would end without any falling action, which is in the book, right?
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Which is not great. So we have Mark Watney, he’s on Mars. There’s a whole question of whether he’ll survive, and he’s just barely getting by, and he’s getting thinner. You know, not a healthy time for him. And then we have our climax where he’s got to kind of bungee out into space, and somebody’s got to catch him and reel him in. And in the book, they finally get him back into the ship, and so we know he’s safe and done. That’s it. So the movie then added an epilogue, which we see, we flash forward in time, and he’s like a professor teaching people, and he gives like, you know, the inspiring speech about what he learned from his experiences, which is definitely an improvement. I do think that the longer the story is, the less it becomes acceptable to simply end before you have any falling action, especially. If you have lots of falling action, I don’t think you necessarily need as much epilogue, right? It’s just having wind down time that matters.
Wes: Right. I do think that that is an excellent example of an epilogue. I don’t think the New Hope example is epilogue. I think it’s denouement because it’s happening immediately after the events of the climax are resolved.
Oren: Hmm!
Chris: But does it actually tie up any, does it actually resolve any arcs?
Wes: That’s not really the role of denouement.
Chris: Okay.
Wes: The falling action resolves any lingering conflicts, and then the denouement is basically showing how they end. And then an epilogue happens after the events. So like the time gap in The Martian is a great example of things kind of skipping forward. So if you take it out, the epilogue out, the story should still stand. I guess you could take the medal scene out of New Hope.
Chris: You could take the medal scene out and the story would still stand. It doesn’t resolve any arcs. It’s just a feel good scene.
Wes: Right. But more often than not, an epilogue is not the same as a conclusion, and a denouement is a conclusion. An epilogue—in our Prologues and Epilogues podcast, we talked about this. Epilogues are extra. They’re just meant to flash forward in time and show like how people get on. But like, they’re not the same thing. So I think that’s an important part to point out is that we have the climax. We have the falling action that deals with any leftover bits. The denouement shows kind of how they settle. And an epilogue usually is an afterword, something to piece anything else together and say like, oh, by the way, these people got married and had kids.
Chris: Yeah, I don’t know. I’m not really seeing a role for the denouement there because either a scene resolves an arc or it doesn’t. And if you’re saying that an epilogue is only something that happens after you have a time skip, you know, that could be a separate definition that would distinguish it from a denouement. That’s not how we’ve before used the word epilogue. But I’m just not seeing how a denouement could be distinct from both falling action and epilogue because there’s just not a whole lot of choices there.
Oren: I have a hot take. My hot take first is that I think we’ve been saying denouement wrong this whole time. I’m pretty sure it’s denouement. [It is.]
Wes: Oren, I hate you.
Oren: I’m pretty sure that’s what’s happening.
Chris: No less than denouement deserves.
Oren: Pretty sure we’ve just been saying it wrong for 10 minutes.
Wes: I mean, that’s fine. All words are made up. And so all pronunciation can be made up, too.
Oren: Yeah, fair enough.
Chris: Do we need this term at all? Can we just throw it in the trash bin and pretend it never existed?
Oren: I don’t think it’s super material whether we say that an epilogue requires a flash forward, like a later point in time or not. I think what matters is that we’re drawing a distinction between a part of the story that is still resolving things and a part of the story that is not.
Wes: Yes, that is true.
Oren: That may be denouement, it may be epilogue, we could have that argument in another podcast. I think we generally agree that for this definition to be useful, that’s where the falling action would end.
Wes: Yes, the falling action is the last part of the story where any conflict is resolved. After that, there should be no more conflicts to resolve.
Oren: I would generally say that is a good definition of falling action, which is why the Scouring of the Shire is so weird.
Wes: Yes.
Oren: What is going on here?
Wes: Clearly the weirdest thing, but also that’s a big example. I have a smaller example, Little Red Riding Hood. The climax of that story is not when the woodsman comes and cuts the wolf open. The climax of that story is when the wolf eats Little Red Riding Hood.
Chris: I don’t know if that’s a great example because she has no agency. She’s supposed to be the main character.
Wes: But it’s a fairy tale.
Chris: Well, yeah, that’s why it’s not very good.
Wes: No, it’s not very good. But if we’re just doing a basic triangle, there’s the rising action where she’s on the way, the threat is growing because the grandma gets eaten, it grows. Then the main thing happens where the main character gets consumed, and then the deus ex machina shows up to save the day.
Chris: Yeah, right.
Wes: I mean, right? Like on a basic level, there’s that. But the Scouring of the Shire is a much better example because Sauron’s defeated. We tossed the ring into Mount Doom, but then there’s falling action that’s like appropriate falling action. Like, oh, crap, the volcano’s erupting.
Chris: The problem with the Scouring of the Shire is that it opens up a whole new arc that you were not expecting to be there. Right? Which is not usually what you’re supposed to be doing in falling action.
Wes: No, it’s not. And yes, we knew that Saruman wasn’t firmly dealt with.
Oren: Yeah, the Ents just let him go.
Wes: The Ents really slacked off.
Oren: They’re not good jailors. Do not put them in charge of keeping people in one place.
Wes: Right, but a generous read could be to show and truly emphasize the heroes that the Hobbits have become, how they ride into town and Merry and Pippin are like super tall from all the Entwash that they’ve been chugging, and just kick some butt.
Chris: Yeah, I mean, I guess we could call it epilogue because it’s basically a separate story that’s there for the purpose of just showing characters being happy and reflecting on their experiences, right? They’re showing off their new skills that they got while having their epic adventure.
Wes: You’re right. I mean, it is kind of a separate story, which—this is why I’m hung up on this. We see in a lot of prologues, a separate thing is happening and prologues and epilogues are kind of the same. Just depends on where they’re located. The movie doesn’t do the Scouring of the Shire, which is good, but does show, I think, a good denouement. Like the conflict is resolved and people are sailing west and we’re happy.
Oren: Yeah.
Wes: Denouement. Oren, you’re going to mess with me forever.
Oren: The denouement! Ugh.
Chris: I mean, is the denouement supposed to be just the last thing you see, but not unless it’s epilogue? I just don’t think this word has a consistent definition.
Wes: What would you say if then we see the boat sail west, whatever, and then they’re happy in the Shire and they’re settling down, roll credits, and then five more minutes show up and it skips forward or it shows something extra that’s like them, I don’t know, just trying to piece together here because the point of going west or staying in the Shire is kind of like, you’ve had your trial, here’s your reward, and that’s the resolution.
Chris: I mean, I would say that I would just call it all epilogue unless it’s actually closing a story arc, in which case it’s falling action or kind of resolution stage.
Wes: Right. Yeah.
Chris: Regardless of whether there’s a time skip or not. I mean, I have one article in which I referred to the very last thing you see as the end note. Basically, it’s the closing tone of the story. So that could be worth a special term.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: But I don’t think there’s any distinct point that comes after falling action that we could say the story has ended because falling action, its purpose is to conclude the story. It’s to disperse all the tension and tie everything up. So after that, there’s nothing to tie up regardless of whether you skip forward in time or not.
Wes: Yeah. And I think the biggest takeaway that I hope everybody has from this is literary scholars made all these terms to get published and that’s it. None of them have any great meaning and they’re just arguing about random structure that has no real application for storytelling. So trust us when we say that: have your main climax that resolves the big question and then deal with the fallout and then end your story.
Chris: I’ll go through the sequence that usually happens at the end.
Wes: Yes, good idea.
Chris: So first, before the climax, there are usually resolutions to smaller arcs and there doesn’t have to be, this is optional. But for instance, if you have an “all is lost” moment before the climax that you’re doing what I’ve referred to as a dramatic reversal, there’ll be—a character arc might complete to restore hope or characters might reconcile their relationship and that might end a relationship arc. And that will set the stage for the climax, right? So the characters were fighting, they resolve that, and then now they’re ready to team up for the climax. So we have those non-throughline arcs that can close before the climax or after.
Then we have our climactic sequence begins, got our big fight sequence or what have you. And then there’s going to be a climactic turning point, which is the single moment that the character is just like in deep trouble and has some kind of breakthrough, whether it’s pushing past barriers or having—coming up with some insight or what have you. Then we have after that turning point, we’re already starting on a downslope, but we’re still in the climax is our follow up action, where it’s like, I had an insight. Now I’m going to use that insight decisively to finish the through line. Finish him! And that usually ends the climactic sequence.
And then our throughline is tied up and then we have more smaller arcs go through their resolutions in what we’re calling falling action. So, usually, depending on the story, it could be one scene, it might not be there at all. It could be a whole series of scenes with more resolutions. And then if we conclude all of those other arcs in the story and we still don’t feel like we’re finished with our feel good content, then we can have our kind of goodbye epilogue scenes, which are just there to show characters being happy or reflecting on their experiences. There’s no plot arcs concluding, they’re already concluded, which is what we would normally call epilogue. So that’s how the ending, that peak and falling action normally works. And we can get fussy about like, OK, where does the denouement? I’m never going to say that word without—because that’s how it is to me. Where does the denouement fit in that sequence? But that’s the sequence that we have, right?
Oren: Well, I mean, if it’s happening at the current moment, it’s actually called the de-NOW-ment.
Chris: Oh, oh, no. Get out of here.
Wes: Get out of here, Oren. Oh, no.
Chris: In many stories, I think it’s interesting that you do have a choice whether or not you want to resolve those smaller arcs in your falling action or before the climax. And it creates kind of a different feel depending on what you’re going for. If you want sort of a dramatic reversal and then like, oh, hey, hope is restored, you know, and now I’m ready to face the big challenge. If you like that feeling, you can go for some closures that happen before the climax. Or if you just want a riveting story that’s just one thing going wrong after another all the way up until the climax and then a decisive moment and then it all comes together. You can save most of those arcs to resolve after. I do think that maybe you have a little bit more time for explanation if you wait until after the climax. You don’t have to worry as much about keeping the story moving there because the tension is already low.
Oren: Right.
Wes: I think a good way to identify falling action is if the tension has wound down a little bit. And that doesn’t mean that there couldn’t still be some things that need to be resolved because they could be very bad. But understanding that the climax should be the thing that is the most tension. You’ve got to deal with that. You know, and so if, I don’t know, defeating General Zod is the climax, but to defeat him, you’ve basically threatened this entire city that you have to go take care of. That’s falling action because the whole rising action wasn’t pointing to the fact that that city was going to get destroyed. It was taking out General Zod. So sometimes the climax can create extra conflicts as a result of them, depending on how epic and huge the story is. But that’s common.
Chris: Right. Like a character gets hurt and falls.
Wes: Yes.
Chris: And then the hero’s like, nooo! And then like kills the villain. And then we have our falling action when they go back to that person who fell and be like, mentor, don’t die! And then the mentor says their final words.
Wes: And they’re like, I’m just hanging on this ledge. It’s fine.
Oren: Or I mean, we could just have Palpatine throw Kylo Ren into a hole and then he just climbs back up and there’s no explanation of how he didn’t die. Whatever. It’s fine. He’s climbing up out of that hole now. It’s falling action time.
Wes: So falling action is when you can just have the most fun you ever want, right?
Oren: Yeah. Just do whatever. You do whatever you want now. It’s fine. Nothing matters anymore.
Chris: It’s funny because the falling action doesn’t need much tension anymore, right? If you have some tension in that before you resolve any kind of arc, you usually focus on the arc. So for instance, you know, you might have a falling action scene where somebody is like, oh, no, I need to confess my love for my love interest. And then there’ll be like some nervousness leading up to that scene. And that’s your tension. That’s your remaining tension from the arc. And then there’s a love confession. And then they’re like, oh, yes, we’ll be together forever! And your tension is all gone. Right? And so there’s still some tension in there, but you don’t really have to—usually have to manage tension during falling action. I don’t think I’ve ever. There might be some stories where the falling action goes on too long, but I cannot recall a story where I was like, oh, this falling action doesn’t have enough tension. That’s not really what we’re looking for anymore at that point.
Wes: Yeah.
Oren: Yeah. I mean, if anything, your big tension related problem in falling action is going to be the situation where you open up a new plot and try to raise tension again. And it’s like, no, no, the story’s over. We ended the story. It’s like, nope, now you got to fight the Riddler’s forum members. You got to fight them. It’s like, do we have to?
Chris: Right. Which goes back into the false ending problem that The Batman has.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Which is an odd thing. So this is when you make the audience think that the story has concluded, only to be like, wait, but there’s more. Now, that’s not even my final form. Or, you know, have a whole new climax. And The Batman does this. It feels like what was previously the tensest arc has concluded. It felt like the throughline because it just had more tension than anything else. And then suddenly we reveal there’s another whole climax. And this happens partly because they want Batman to collaborate with a villain. And so they can’t make that villain look too bad or else it looks bad that Batman collaborates with him. So as a result, he’s not adding a lot of tension to the story. So then there’s not enough tension after the other arc is concluded. And then suddenly it’s like, but no, this villain, now here’s his master plan and now we’re going to go into another climax. So that’s how that happened. And I can understand how they got in that fix.
Wes: Sure.
Chris: And you’d think that it’s like, oh, but aren’t you excited that we’re going to have now a more exciting climactic sequence? And you’d think so, but no.
Wes: Yeah, yeah. The falling action is a good opportunity for us, like everybody to kind of like take a breath. And if there’s conflict, know that it’s probably going to be OK. You know, like the end of Buffy comes to mind where the city gets leveled. But they’d already evacuated it. And you didn’t think that after fighting all those uber vampires, they were just going to suddenly get taken down by some falling rubble.
Oren: Yeah, I wasn’t too worried about that.
Wes: Yeah. In that case, it’s just necessary to transition you from the climax to a resolution just to get there. It’s part of the path.
Oren: Right. I mean, sometimes the stakes can still be quite high, but just the way that it is dramatically constructed, it still feels like lower tension. Like, a really clear example of this is in Final Fantasy VII, the video game, because it ends with you defeating Sephiroth, right? That’s the climax. You defeated the big bad and his big old sword, the big swordy boy. You’ve defeated him. He was very shirtless. Everyone had a good time. And then it goes into cutscene mode where you have to escape the crater and then you’re flying out on the airship. And you’re seeing that this big old meteor that Sephiroth had summoned is still coming, which is technically a higher stakes conflict. Like in terms of the number of lives at risk than your fight with Sephiroth was. But you can also just kind of tell that this is going to be dealt with, right? And, you know, lo and behold, your dearly departed Aeris does her final limit break from beyond the grave and that deflects the meteor. And it’s like, great, good job. We didn’t really have to do anything. We’ve done our part. We allowed this to happen. That’s some decent falling action right there. And then the game doesn’t have any epilogue. And I’m mad about it. But, you know, that’s another, that’s a different argument for a different time.
Chris: Read the book Seraphina, which is quite a good book. I actually enjoyed it, but it does have a weird issue with its climax and falling action where the book has dragons and the main character is a half dragon. But, you know, the dragons can take human form. So that’s how she resulted. She can’t transform into a big dragon. And so we have what is or should be the climax where she has to, you know, use her wits to talk to a big dragon and distract it so it doesn’t kill her or any of the other people, any of her allies. But then afterwards, the dragon flies off and there’s a big dragon fight between two dragons. And it just feels like this should be the climax, but it’s not because the main character is just watching. Right? And it’s a little, it’s like, I guess this is maybe falling action, but that dragon was the villain. So the arc about that villain hasn’t entirely resolved until he’s taken down. Right? And so, again, I can see how the story ended up in that situation. She can’t turn into a big dragon to battle him herself. And because the story has dragons in it, it might be kind of disappointing if there are no dragon battles. At the same time, it just adds some awkwardness to, OK, what is the climax? Is it the dragon battle where the main character has no agency and we’re just kind of watching? Even though that seems like it’s more climatic and that’s when the actual throughline is resolved. Or is it that moment where she faced off with the dragon, but we didn’t really get a resolution there.
Oren: The weirdest bit, and I don’t know if this is technically falling action or epilogue or—
Chris: Denouement.
Oren: —denouement or whatever we’re going to call it. Yeah, I don’t know which of these it technically is, but in the novel Sabriel, the big fight ends with a heroic sacrifice. That’s the climax, right? Like she sacrifices herself to defeat the bad guy and she dies. And then I think there’s an indication on the page that there’s a scene break, but it then returns in the same scene. No time has passed, but on the page it makes it look like there’s been a scene break, right? Like it uses the triple dots, I think, to make you think that we’re in a different scene now, but it’s the same scene. And then she comes back to life.
Chris: It’s lying, lying. That’s what it is.
Oren: And I don’t know if that’s falling action or what.
Chris: It’s lying lies.
Oren: Yeah, it’s definitely lies. Yeah, okay. It was a heroic sacrifice, and then she immediately got resurrected for reasons.
Chris: It just feels so manipulative. Like, oh, she’s dead. Scene break. You know, it just feels like you had a commercial break or the end of an episode and the TV show writers are like, okay, guys, we have to end this episode on the hook. It’s like, okay, well, we don’t really have any twist planned for this part of the plot. Okay, we’ll just make it look like the protagonist dies. And then the next episode starts like, okay, oh, look, they’re not dead after all. You just thought they were dead. Ha ha ha. Let’s move on. Like, why did you do that? Why did you make me worry about the protagonist’s life for a whole week between episodes?
Oren: It’d be especially weird if you were one of those people who, like, you know, gets really frustrated when a character dies. And so you stopped reading the book and you just don’t know that she comes back to life because it looks like the scene’s over. Like, so you figure if she was going to come back to life, it would be in this scene. But according to the text, it’s the next scene. It was very weird. It’s the weirdest thing. I don’t, again, I don’t know what it technically qualifies as, but I know I didn’t like it.
Wes: I think lies is a good classification. It’s fine. Okay, so just to wrap up, if we—quick reminder, falling action is the stuff that happens after the climax. And there should still be some tension, some conflicts, but it is an opportunity to unwind from all the tension that gets resolved in the actual climax itself. So just know that that is what we’re talking about here. And you don’t need to know any other terms, really. You probably don’t even need to know that term. Just, hey, you know, resolve your conflict and then take care of business and then get out of town. Off away from Sunnydale we go.
Oren: So, for example, here, we wouldn’t want to end this podcast with me starting another argument about how it’s actually pronounced do-no-mount.
Wes: Oh my god.
Chris: Do not mount.
Oren: And I think that’ll be it. We’re gonna get on out of here.
Chris: If you enjoyed any of our fine tips about pronunciation and terminology, consider filling our tip jar by becoming a patron. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, we have Callie McLeod. Then we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Next, we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Danita Rambo. She lives at therambogeeks.com. We’ll talk to you next week.
[Outro Music] Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening/closing theme: “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.
A main character? Pshaw, that’s so last year! In 2023, we’re all about big casts of characters who get equal development. Or, at least, mostly equal development. Maybe there can still be someone who’s kind of the main character. Just a little. If that’s confusing to you, then have no fear, we shall explain all. We talk about what an ensemble story is, why you might use one, what the pitfalls are, and, of course…whales on the Enterprise?
Show Notes Friends * Golden Girls * Deep Space Nine * Cetacean Ops * Nine Truths for Roleplayers Who Start Writing * Five Bad Habits Writers Learn From Roleplaying Games * Wings of Fire * Animorphs * The Expanse * Discworld TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Paloma Palacios.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock and Chris Winkle.
[opening song]Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren, with me today is…
Chris: Chris!
Oren: And…
Wes: Wes!
Oren: Now, there is no main host of this podcast, though if there was it would be Chris, instead…
Chris: (laughs) No!
Oren: Instead, we are an ensemble show because it’s about all of us and all of our hot takes.
Chris: Wait, but there’s only three of us. Does it really count as an ensemble with only three characters?
Oren: I’m glad you asked, because it’s time for sandwich discourse!
Wes:(groans)Aaaah!
Oren: Aka, what is an ensemble story?
Chris: We can’t talk about anything without making a sandwich first.
Oren: You can’t, it’s impossible!
Wes: Ha, ha, ha!
Chris: Get the munchies every time.
Oren: Yeah. So the strictest definition is stories that have no main character and are about a group instead, and the examples usually given are sitcoms, more often than not, like Friends and Golden Girls. It’s hard to say who among those is the main character, but that’s not really how most people use the term. When people talk about ensemble stories, usually what they just mean is that the story has given enough development to secondary characters that it feels like the story is also about those secondary characters, even if there is still a main character. And it’s fuzzy, right? Like, Deep Space Nine is generally considered an ensemble show. Voyager and the Next Generation aren’t even though all three of them are Star Trek shows with main characters (the captains), but Deep Space Nine just puts more effort into its secondary characters than either TNG or Voyager does, so people are much more likely to describe Deep Space Nine as an ensemble show, even though Sisko is clearly the protagonist.
Wes: So instead of just tossing them a random character in an occasional episode, it’s just like, who are you consistently tracking throughout this, right?
Oren: At some point, people will start calling you an ensemble story just because they feel like your characters are important enough, and that’s really what it means. So there’s not a strict, this-is-an-ensemble-story-and-this-isn’t, or at least not if you want the definition to be particularly useful.
Chris: I also think a lot of ensemble stories, there’s an association with them being a team. Like, you could say other stories are ensemble, but usually if you have a little political intrigue where everybody’s at each other’s throats, I mean, you could call it an ensemble story, but that’s not really the association that has.
Oren: Yeah, I mean, Wikipedia literally lists Game of Thrones as an ensemble show.
(group laughter)
I don’t think most people would describe Game of Thrones that way.
Wes: What? That’s like what they say, like ensemble cast, but they mean like all of these actors have equal billing. You know, it doesn’t matter what their characters are doing. We’re paying them the same.
Oren: Right. In Game of Thrones, sure, there are a bunch of characters and, at least early on, you can’t really say who the main character is after Eddard Stark dies. But the reason for that is that they’re all opposing each other, right? There’s pretty clearly a main character in each group and then they’re all fighting each other. And most people wouldn’t describe that as being an ensemble story.
Chris: Just the association we have. There’s a team good and they generally work together, which is I think why a lot of ensemble stories have like a group that’s traveling together or on a ship together, even though that’s actually one of the hardest way to do them, because when you have a group traveling together, they’re always present, like all the time, and that actually becomes harder to balance the characters, in my opinion. Whereas if they are actually, you know, doing their own thing just a little bit, it’s easier to distinguish the characters from each other.
Wes: That’s when the ship is metaphorical, right? What unites them? What is their purpose?
Chris: Right. It’s easier to fade a character out and have them just not present in a scene if people aren’t just together on a ship all the time.
Wes: Unless the ship’s like, really big. Like, I don’t know, they’re lost in steerage. Who knows when they’ll come back.
Chris: Well, there are dolphins somewhere on the Enterprise.
Oren: Or in lower decks, I think they’re beluga whales. (laughs)So, all right, let’s talk about ensemble stories. So, why? Why is an ensemble story? Why would you do this?
Chris: I think it’s mostly because people like to focus on communities.
Oren: I think it’s because people want to tell disparate, fractured stories and they don’t want to admit that, and so they’ve come up with a word to describe it that makes it sound better.
Wes: I think it’s because writers can’t choose which character they like the most, so they do all of them.
Oren: You two are more correct, certainly, but I have encountered a number of people who, when we’re talking about throughlines and having a central story and making sure your story is about something, will be like, well, my story is an ensemble story, so I don’t have to do that.
(group laughter)
Wes: Tricked you, Oren.
Oren: I mean, technically, you don’t have to do that because, you know, it’s so far not illegal to do whatever you want in your story. That’s the reason, you know, being an ensemble story will have nothing to do with whether or not your story would benefit from having a single, unified plot that it’s about, but you know! (laughs)
Chris: Yeah, I mean, just to clarify, I mean, we talk about advantages and disadvantages, but frankly, I think that the disadvantages often outweigh the advantages to the point where ensemble stories can be great, but it’s usually better if there’s a reason this story should be an ensemble story. Right? Not that you can’t have them because there are advantages. They offer, again, a lot of relationships, so if you like to focus on social interaction and relationships, if you really want to highlight a community and the struggles of community, rather than just like a single hero who is somehow responsible for everything; if that’s important to you, if you want more representation and a greater variety of characters, that can be a good reason. But it’s trickier and it’s more complex, and so I think you should have a reason to do that in your story because otherwise, how is that cost going to pay off?
Oren: Right. Certainly, you should try to have a better reason than I would like an excuse to fracture my plot.
Chris: Just add all the viewpoints. I have an ensemble cast. It’s five viewpoint characters on their own continent, but that’s okay because I’m using the word ensemble.
Oren: Yeah, they’re an ensemble. A multi-continent ensemble cast, that’s what’s going on here.
Wes: Yikes.
Oren: But even discounting the possibility that someone is just kind of using it as an excuse to make bad choices, there are just, in general, costs to making your story more ensemble. It is more difficult and there are advantages to having it more closely focused around a single character. So, you know, because you have to do things, like you have more characters to establish, that takes up time. We’ve talked about before how your audience’s attention is a resource and you don’t have infinite attention, so the more of it you spend establishing different characters and developing them, the less you have for other things.
Chris: And also comprehension, right? It’s like, how much can your audience actually keep track of? Just beyond how much time you have for them to pay attention to things.
Oren: And it can also just be harder to make your characters fit into the story. And this is a problem that particularly tends to come up when people start with a group of characters and are like, I want to tell a story about this group of characters and then try to build a plot around them. Not saying you can’t do that, but you are more likely to run into the problem of now-you-have-some-characters-who-just-don’t-really-fit-in-this-story. This is particularly difficult when you are trying to adapt a role-playing campaign into a novel, which I see happen all the time, because role-playing campaigns have between three to six protagonists and they were all made by randos who probably had very little understanding of any kind of unified plot, assuming there even was one. And so now you’re like, all right, I’m trying to make a plot and we have one character who’s an elf ranger. Okay, cool. That’ll be fun for the woods part of the adventure that I want to write. And then it’s like, all right, then we have this other character and they’re a dwarf fighter. It’s like, all right, well, I can make them friends with the elf ranger. And it’s like, then I have this dragonborn warlock. Why is the dragonborn warlock here? Are there even dragonborn in this world? I don’t really have any place for them. And it just spirals out of control from there.
Chris:Yeah, I want to clarify that the purpose of a character plot-wise is to affect the outcome events, to make choices that steer the plot in a different direction that ultimately change that outcome of the story, and so if you have a character that’s just hanging around a lot, but if you could take them out and nothing else would change about how the story unfolds, that’s not a character that should be there. Right? And so if you think about your total plot, you have maybe all of these different conflicts that have to be solved, and now you have six characters that are all involved in this conflict. Then you have to find a key point for each character to do their thing that makes a difference and it really becomes unwieldy the more characters you have, especially if they’re all around all the time. Besides just making the characters all distinct from each other, which is surprisingly difficult once you go above three.
Oren: Yeah, and also just finding stuff for them to do. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. So here, I got a hot tip for you to start this off.
Wes: Give it to us.
Oren: A good way to dip your toe into the ensemble waters, as it were, which is to have a story scenario where everyone has a job, a thing that they do officially in the story that contributes to whatever the overall goal that they have is. And the simplest setup for this is spaceship crew, and then you have your spaceship crew and everyone on the spaceship crew has a job and they do that job and that is the thing they do that contributes to accomplishing whatever the mission of the spaceship is and that’s your plot, and now you’ve got a very good base for your ensemble cast because you’ve got your pilot and you’ve got your mechanic and you’ve got your captain and your doctor, and there you go. Now you’ve got everyone’s got a thing they do that’s helpful. Right? And then you won’t have to be sitting there being like, OK, OK, how does how does Glorp the alien contribute to this mission? I don’t know. And it’s like, well, Glorp is the doctor, so it’s fine. Now, you know that their base contribution is doctoring and you can build from there.
Chris: And you can do the same thing in any situation. It’s just a lot more obvious how you do it on a spaceship, especially if you’ve been watching lots of Star Trek. I thought it might be worth mentioning why TV shows usually have ensemble casts. Like, why does that make sense for a TV show?
Oren: Because they have all these sexy actors that they want to show off. They’re all very attractive.
Chris: And they all have contracts that say they should be in every episode.
Oren: They do have those.
Chris: That is part of it! It is part of it.
Chris: OK, so first, TV shows are really long. They are a long story. Often novels actually adapt better to TV shows than movies just because movies are much shorter, have much less space, and the length means that they just have more time to develop their characters. Still helpful to start with a main character. So the first episode only has to develop that person. And then you can pace yourself when you’re developing characters. But the point is that it has the time, has more room for that complexity. And then because it’s long and episodic, oftentimes writers of TV shows are looking for more material. Every season they have to come up with more material every episode. And so lots of characters can also come with lots of different storylines. If you have a novel with one strong throughline, that’s actually a liability because it might fragment your plot by having each character kind of do their own thing and not interact with each other. But if you have a TV show with lots of episodes and you need material, yeah, why don’t you just delve into that character’s backstory for an episode? It provides more material. The visuals make a difference because if you can see the characters, it’s easier to tell them apart. You’re not trying to give them all a name that starts with a different letter so that people can recognize them on a page. And because we don’t have thoughts or exposition, visual works need more dialogue to replace that. And so they often want more characters just so that we have more talking happening in each scene that much less likely to have a scene where a character is alone.
Oren: Plus you only have to do half the job of making the character distinctive if you’re writing for a medium that has actors. Because actors are pretty good at their job as a rule. If they manage to get into the high budget productions that we’re all thinking of, those jobs are incredibly competitive, so it’s very unlikely that an actor gets there and doesn’t know what they’re doing. Not impossible, you know, nepotism happens, but usually they still have at least a decent idea of how to figure out a character and that is very helpful for writers because if you’re a novelist, you don’t have that advantage. Or if you’re writing a play for your community theater group, you might not have that advantage either.
Chris: And finally, because again, TV shows, they do vary in exactly how episodic they are. But most of them are to some level episodic. And what that means is they can more easily shift the spotlight so they can have one episode that stars a side character, develops their backstory, and maybe other characters don’t even appear or only appear briefly. That just helps them manage all of the characters and give them some time for development without having to constantly juggle the entire cast every episode, without violating audience expectations, so that can also be really important because if you’re basically restarting the plot every episode, you just have more flexibility about which character is the star.
Oren: Right. You can have, this is a Dax episode, this is a Kira episode, this is a Worf episode. Whereas it would be hard to do that in a novel. I’m not going to say it’s impossible, but very challenging.
Chris: Yeah, I mean you can do it in a novel series and it definitely works better in anthology series. And usually you do something where you have a rotating viewpoint in a series. I mean Wings of Fire is a bit like this, but Wings of Fire actually has a sort of series throughline that just doesn’t always feel very important. So a rotating viewpoint and each character has their own arc in each book to develop. I think it works even better if there’s less of a throughline between the books, because, for instance, in Wings of Fire, Sunny, the character that gets the last book, just feels more important because she gets the last book.
Oren: Yeah, so if you’re going to do that, I mean the character that you choose to end with is going to feel more important. That’s why the Animorphs books, which do something similar, that’s why they made the choice in their last book, normally each book is narrated by a single character, but the last Animorphs book cuts between all six of them. I wouldn’t normally recommend that, but in this particular case I think it worked pretty well. Helped reinforce that this was a story about everyone and it wasn’t like suddenly one of them was the main character.
Wes: That’s cool.
Chris: Animorphs books, there’s 62 books and six characters, six people on team good so does it just continually rotate them in a very predictable pattern?
Oren: Yep, more or less. I haven’t confirmed off the top of my head if it’s the same pattern every time, but they have the same number of books. Now it might mix up the pattern a little bit, like it might start going Jake, Tobias, Rachel, Cassie, Marco, Axe, and then instead of circling back to Jake, the next one might be Rachel again. And then they do them in groups of six, so you can see how they get roughly the same amount of time in the spotlight. Plus some of those books are side stories and prequel novels that don’t involve the main six, but most of them are the main six protagonists. Yeah, and I mean Animorphs is probably not in reach for most people because Animorphs is a series of novellas, but even the writer of Animorphs couldn’t keep up the pace of Animorphs and after about book 25 was working with a team of ghost writers. Now they do a pretty good job. Like there’s no obvious yep-this-is-where-they-started-using-ghost- writers, you know? The plot does get increasingly bizarre as you go further and further in, but I don’t think that had anything to do with the ghost writers, I think that was just that the plot was starting to come apart because of all the things they kept adding to it.
(group laughter)
But it’s like by the end of the story, there’s alien Satan running around and it’s like, ‘yeah, that’s making this real weird’, but the ghost writers did a very good job of continuing Applegate’s style, but they were putting out like two novellas a month.
Chris: That’s just wild.
Wes: Wwoww!
Oren: Yeah, like most writers, even if writing is their full time job, would not be able to maintain that level of output. But on the bright side, I’m not convinced you would need to.
Chris: Yeah, I don’t think you’d be at that level.
Wes: Nope. Not.
Oren: Like there are definitely – like the Animorphs books are fun. I like them. I recently started a big reread and I got stalled out at about 25, because I ran out of audiobooks. But there are a number of these plots that don’t strictly need to be there, right? Like this is clearly a like, hey, we’re making this in the concept of people will buy more of these books and we have a plot that’s very flexible in terms of its timeline, so we can just keep putting in little mini adventures where like today the Yerkes are trying to take over the public swimming pool, and it’s like, well, we better stop them, but like it’s not really going to change much in the longer story if you take that book out and don’t read that one. So the good news is that I think you could probably do something similar and not have to write 64 books or however many it is to get that effect.
Chris: Mhm. Another way that books usually form an ensemble is just slowly over time. And I also think this has some disadvantages, right? But if you have anything from a single novel to a series, over time you develop your side characters and again, you can trickle them in so you’re not spread too thin at once. And then oftentimes more characters are added until the work feels more like an ensemble work. Honestly, I think in a lot of cases this is not actually the best choice.
Wes: Yeah, I was going to say.
Chris: In some cases it works out fine, but I’ve definitely seen more than enough works. That just add characters that don’t need to be there because the writer likes them.
Oren: (sarcastically) Yeah, but if I reach the perfect amount of characters and have a really good ensemble story going, if I add more characters, it will be more ensemble, so I should do that, right? I would just like you to know that my name is Robert Jordan, in case that was any doubt.
Chris: I mean, I definitely think it works best when you already have the characters there because they fulfill important roles in the plot, and over time you just get to know and like them better. Maybe you had a minor antagonist that was important for conflict in the beginning and then you start to sympathize with them. They switch over to team good, right? And that character is around because they have – had – an important role in the plot early and now they can have insight into team evil that they can give the other characters from their time of being a villain, and so they have a purpose now and you’ve just kind of grown attached to them over time. It’s more of a problem when characters start popping out of the woodwork or just seem like they’re really trivial and then suddenly you’re spending lots of time with them and you don’t know why.
Oren: Well, that guy needs a POV now and we can’t get rid of that villain.
Chris: You get a POV and you get a POV!
Oren: The Expanse is actually a pretty good example of that working out well, so the Expanse starts off with Miller and Holden as the two protagonists and this continues even after Miller is dead thanks to the magic of the protomolecule. But over time we build up more character with Holden’s crew, Alex, Naomi, and Amos. That’s kind of a lie. Alex never really gets developed, but Naomi and Amos do. And we add in a couple more characters early and we have one villain who was too cute to stay a villain and she had a very sad backstory.
(group laughter)
She becomes a good guy. So we end up with probably six, which is I think a reasonable number for these really long novels. And this takes place over about five books. I’d say it’s about book four or five when you start to think of The Expanse as an ensemble cast. And it’s not like the crew members are bad before then. They’re just not super well developed. Like Naomi is their ship’s mechanic and she’s there and she fixes the ship and Amos is the muscle and he punches stuff. And they have some backstories, but they’re not super important. And then over time we learn about Naomi’s connections to the Belter resistance and then Amos gets a little buddy. And we learn about his tragic backstory and it takes a while, but it feels pretty natural.
Chris: I also think a good example is Discworld. Again, another anthology series that had lots of time and various books star different characters, but we know that these characters are just there in the world, which means that they could potentially pop into any other Discworld book. And because they’re mostly an anthology, they’re pretty flexible about which characters feature in any story. And so you can have a group of witches in the witches books, and they slowly progress and develop over those books. And then maybe you can have another book that’s not so focused on the witches, but a witch appears. And that kind of gives time for all of the people in the world to sort of develop as the books go on. And makes it easy to feature somebody who used to be a secondary character in their own story with their own kind of ensemble cast, etc.
Oren: Yeah, and Pratchett never tries to put all of his characters into one book.
Chris: That would be a disaster. Right?
Oren: It’s like he has a world and his characters move around in it. And so he’ll come up with reasons why. It’s like, well, I want Angua to be in this story, even though this isn’t a City Watch story, so here’s a reason why Angua’s here, I think Angua’s the character’s name. Or, you know, it’s like, I want Granny Weatherwax to make an appearance in this story, even though it’s not a witch story. And, you know, we do stuff like that.
Wes: Yeah, it’s like what they do in Monstrous Regiment, where Vimes and the Watch show up basically at the end. But Vimes doesn’t really say very much. I think maybe like a couple lines. Which is nice, because it’s like what Chris is pointing out with the anthology series. They still feel important because they’ve had their moments, you know? But it’s not their story. But you feel like, I don’t know, like they could participate just by their presence because you know they’re storied and they have a background. So I don’t know. I just think that is a fun approach. More anthologies like that, please.
Chris: I’d also like to add that Pratchett doesn’t like, ‘Hey, look, it’s Vimes, the character from the other story’, make it awkward.
Wes: My favorite one is in Going Postal. Vimes is in it, but he says nothing. He’s just like in the room when veterinari is talking to Moist. And I’m just like, what? It’s just like, what’s going on? But just his presence alone is still kind of cool.
Chris: Yeah, it’s much more natural than like making a big deal about how we’re seeing a character from another story.
Wes: Yeah.
Oren: Although it’s worth noting that even TV shows don’t have infinite time. And I have seen a few that just add so many characters that there’s just not time to properly move the-
Chris: Stranger Things! Cough, cough, Stranger Things! Cough, cough, cough.
Oren: Yeah, I mean, Stranger Things. I was actually thinking of Magia Record.
Chris: Oh, yeah.
Oren: The weird quasi-sequel to Madoka Magica.
Chris: So to be fair to Magia Record, it is about magical girl society. So it does need more magical girls. Doesn’t necessarily mean that many magical girls.
Oren: The more that I watch Magia Record, the more that I think it would just be a better show if it just focused on its own characters and didn’t keep cutting over to the Madoka characters. Don’t get me wrong, I love the Madoka characters, but they are not part of this story. It is painfully obvious that they’re not part of the story. And they continue to take up more and more time to the point where in season two, where the Iroha is like, Yachiyo, we have to go and save the other three members of our magical group. I’m like, who are they again? It’s been so long since we’ve seen them.
Chris: Yeah. But even if we take out the original Madoka magical characters, it still has more characters than it needs.
Oren: Right. I mean, for some reason, we meet two different magical girl groups and one of them just kind of disappears for a while. It’s like, why aren’t those the same group of characters?
Chris: Right, so first the main character, Iroha, meets a magical girl group and makes friends with them and you just assume that’s going to be the cast of the show, but no! After a couple episodes spent with them, she just leaves and then joins up with an entirely different group. And they disappear for a while. Now we do kind of see them on and off later, but it’s just a very strange thing. It’s like, oh, I thought those were the important characters, I guess not.
Oren: Like, I mean, I remember those two characters more than I remember most of the characters in her new group, even though like, we haven’t actually seen them as much just because I got used to them first. Right? It’s Rena and Kaede, I think are their names. I don’t remember the name of their leader, unfortunately. But in the new group, the only character whose name I remember is Felicity, because she’s the only character with an English name. Right? And that stands out. But the others, I’m just like, I have no idea who’s in this group. They’re around somewhere, I presume.
Wes: So when would you kill someone? One of the characters.
Oren: Immediately to show the reader I’m serious.
(group laughter)
Wes: Exactly. I was thinking about, like, shows that kind of like become more ensemble. The Magicians is not a good TV show, but they did this in one of the later season. Spoilers – they kill Quentin.
Oren: Lol.
Chris: I can’t say I’m sorry about that.
Wes: Lol. Yeah, I know. It was definitely an ensemble like, prior to that point, like they definitely had all kind of come together and been working a lot more, but then Quentin’s death moves it even more into, okay, it’s definitely about all of them now, instead of us beginning the series, following him and him going to the magic school and doing this stuff and meeting these people. So I mean, we had a podcast on killing characters, but I guess if you start with someone and want to become ensemble, death is an answer.
Oren: Death is an answer. That’s good. That’s a good takeaway from this podcast.
Wes: Yes.
Chris: I will also say that they can just ride off into the sunset instead. Like that’s a thing.
Wes: (disheartened)Yeah, I guess.
Chris: Dear Stranger Things writers, you need to get rid of some of your white boys, okay? But if you don’t want to kill them, you might want to kill them because this is still a horror show basically, but if you don’t want to kill them, Jonathan can just go to college, okay? If you don’t want to murder him. He can just go to college and then we don’t have to see him again.
Wes: There you go. (chuckles)
Chris: Yeah.
Oren: It doesn’t always have to be death, it could be college. Anyway, so we think we are about out of time because we have too many characters in our podcast ensemble, that’s probably not true, but you know, we ran out of time anyway.
Chris: If you heard any tips that are useful for you, consider filling our tip jar by becoming a patron. Go to patreon.com slash mythgrants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, we have Callie Macleod. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Next, we have Ayman Jaber, he’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Danita Rambo, she lives at therambogeeks.com. We’ll talk to you next week.
[closing theme ]Chris: This has been the Mythcreant podcast opening-closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.
You don’t notice it when it’s working, but you’re painfully aware when it’s missing. You find yourself asking “Is this going anywhere?” and “What was the point of that?” But what is it? Movement, of course! The feeling that the story is making progress toward some kind of endpoint. We tried to talk about movement before, but its flashier cousin tension stole the show. So this episode is all movement all the time.
Show Notes Dominoes * Lord of the Rings * Archive 81 * Severance * Twelve Kingdoms * Encanto * Area X * Grogu * Always Be Solving Problems * Ships of Air * The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms * A Fire Upon the Deep * Yoda TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Anna.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock and Chris Winkle.
[Intro music]Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Chris and with me is:
Wes: Wes.
Chris: And-
Oren: Oren.
Chris: Now in episode 333, we covered movement and pacing, but the movement was so slow, we only had a few minutes for movement at the end. Since then, the podcast has moved forward by 80 episodes.
Oren: So much movement in this podcast! [Wes laughs]
Chris: So now we return to movement, like some kind of annoying flashback, which has got to be frustrating for our listeners because they were obviously expecting us to get closer to the podcast’s dramatic conclusion, that is definitely coming!
Oren: Yeah, I guess if you think about it, this podcast doesn’t have much movement because we don’t have a goal or an end point, we’re just going to keep making episodes forever. You can’t stop us.
Wes: We’re Supernatural. [Wes and Chris laugh]
Chris: Oh, wow.
Oren: Someone’s feisty today.
Wes: Yeah, let’s do this!
Chris: Yeah, we’re covering movement, which we’ve just done more coverage on lately, so we have more to say about it. It’s basically the feeling that the story is making progress towards the conclusion, whether that means the hero is getting closer to solving their problems or things are just coming to a head and disaster is getting closer and closer. So it can go in a positive direction or a negative direction, the point is that you feel that climax on its way.
Oren: Movement is similar to things like background music or cinematography in that most of the time you only notice it if something is wrong. There are exceptions, sometimes you will notice when the movement is particularly good in the same way that you might notice that there is very good cinematography or that there is very good background music. But usually it will seamlessly fold into the greater story unless it’s not there, and then suddenly you will notice.
Wes: But the experience of that is very much just you’re engaged, you’re focused, it’s engaging. That’s kind of what we want from our entertainment.
Chris: People do generally like it when movement jumps forward, where if the story makes more progress than they expect. You can get into weird issues where it’s like, “Okay, this is what I thought was the conclusion of the story, but it’s not over yet.” But in general, if movement is faster than expected, that’s usually a positive experience. So it’s also, I should mention, referred to commonly as momentum. You’ll hear that a lot, and the reason why people call it momentum is because it comes with the sense that events are building on each other. That’s kind of like one of the basic requirements is that you have to feel like every event matters and causes the next event to occur like dominoes falling. People kind of think of that sense of causation to be momentum. In a literal sense, movement is a little bit closer to what’s actually happening.
Oren: You imagine my surprise when I found out that playing dominoes does not refer to lining them up and then pushing one over. It’s like, an actual game, you play with dominoes? I was so confused when I learned that. [Chris laughs]
Wes: Yeah, but does anyone know how to actually play dominoes, Oren?
Chris: I’ve played it before, actually.
Wes: Do you match numbers? Is that what you do?
Chris: You line them up on the ground or on the surface or whatever in different configurations so that you try to get the end of one domino with the numbers on it matched to the end of a different domino with the same number.
Oren: And when do you line them up and then knock them over? Is that like the victory celebration at the end of the game? [laughter]
So more seriously, one of the most common reasons that there is no movement is that there is nothing to move toward. For a story to have movement, it has to have some kind of theoretical endpoint. And sometimes this is just straight up stated. In Lord of the Rings, they have an in-character goal, which is to reach Mount Doom. That’s the hypothetical endpoint. And we know that they’re getting closer to it because they are physically getting closer to it. [Wes and Chris laugh]
Chris: Very simple!
Wes: Very helpful.
Oren: But it’s not always that straightforward. You can have something like Archive 81, which has the implication that the endpoint will be once we figure out what’s going on with these weird tapes. But that’s not necessarily the character’s goal at the beginning of the story. He has his own thing. He’s being drawn into this world of magic VHS tapes that he wasn’t necessarily interested in. You can have different levels, right, it doesn’t always have to be as straightforward as like, this is your quest. Go do the quest. Although that is also perfectly legitimate.
Chris: Right, I mean if you do have a character goal that happens to line up with the throughline of the problem and solution, that is probably more obvious just because character goals are usually more obvious than a problem that’s kind of like building that you can feel. So for instance, Archive 81, in one sense he is sent to do this job at a creepy house. Okay, well the ending is when he’s completed that job. But the house is creepy and bad things are happening there. And that could easily come to a head much sooner than he’s actually going to finish doing the job. Really the movement is towards things escalating at the house where either he is taken or whatever threat you have, taken or killed or whatever it is, or he, for instance, escapes.
Oren: That show would not be very good if he went to the mysterious cabin to work on these magic VHS tapes and he saw a bunch of weird stuff and then he finished and got paid and left. [laughter] He succeeded in his character goal, that’s what he was trying to do! God, I would riot if that happened, I would be very upset.
Chris: That’s why if anybody ever tells you that a story is a character goal and that you need to get a character goal, just ask them how it’s supposed to end. Because they can’t tell you, because it’s not actually correlated with a character goal, it’s about tension. It’s about a character goal but then that character goal can change and it ends someplace. Once again it’s good to just clarify the difference between movement and tension, or movement and pacing. Because tension or pacing is about if things are exciting. But things can be exciting, but still frustrate readers because they feel like things are pointless. It’s like yeah, technically this is an exciting action scene but are we there yet? Which is what happens when you have tension but not movement.
Oren: Yeah, and although it can be difficult to tell sometimes, right? Spoilers for Severance. Severance is a show where it is sometimes hard to tell if the problem is that there’s no movement because it doesn’t feel like these scenes are going anywhere. Or if the problem is that there’s no tension because it doesn’t feel like anything really bad is going to happen.
Chris: And the answer is both?
Oren: Yeah, sometimes it’s both. Especially in the middle of the first season when the characters are exploring the building and they’re not technically supposed to and they might get sent to the break room. But we’ve established that the break room is meaningless, they act sad after going there and then they’re completely fine. There’s very little tension because there are no meaningful consequences if they get caught. But there’s also very little movement, because it doesn’t feel like anything they find matters or builds to anything, right?
Chris: I mean basically the two requirements of movement are causality, which is the sense that events build on each other, but also relevancy, and that’s the sense that events actually matter to the throughline. You could have movement issues in any arc, right? It’s not necessarily just the throughline. Twelve Kingdoms has a movement issue (this is an anime), some of the character growth, where we have a character who needs to accept that she is the Chosen One monarch. We just spend too many episodes with her being like, “Yeah, I don’t know if I’ll accept it.” It’s like, okay, but if you don’t accept it, you’re gonna die and your magical creature is gonna die, so I don’t really feel like this is a choice. It goes on for several episodes and it feels repetitive. That’s a movement problem in a character arc.
The other thing to keep in mind is it’s about movement relative to audience expectations. If the answer to something seems super obvious, in that case I’m like, why aren’t you just saying yes to being a monarch because if you don’t you’ll die? Like at that point I’m expecting the turnaround to be very quick and I’m not even sure why she’s agonizing over this choice. And so that expectation means that I expect this to be an arc that ends quickly, not one that takes a long time. And that creates movement problems. And you can do that with any arc. Like if there’s a big mystery where the answer seems obvious. Some people I’ve talked to have this issue with Encanto. This is obviously the problem that is causing the family’s magic to go away, why haven’t you found the answer already? When that happens it feels excruciating when the characters do their whole mystery solving because you’re expecting it to be faster. With travel sequences, a lot of times what happens is the writer focuses too much on the destination and then people think that destination is like chapter two. When actually no, the characters are going to spend the whole book traveling, that’s the end of the book. In that case, their expectations for movement versus what happens is what makes it so excruciating and what makes the movement feel so slow. Having those expectations the right way and having problems feel the right level of difficulty can make a big difference.
Oren: In new manuscripts that I look at, the two most common ways for movement to stall are, you introduce a new character, a new POV character or some stories don’t have POVs, you know just goes off and does their own thing for a while. Or you have the existing character go off and do something that’s not related to what the audience wants to see. That is super frustrating. This also shows where the character goal model of storytelling can start to break down. The book Authority, which is the second Southern Reach book, the main character, his goal is to put the Southern Reach Agency in order and figure out its personnel staffing problems and what have you. But as the reader we’re like, “What’s going on with Area X? Tell us about Area X!” A weird scientist approaches the main character and is like, “Hey do you want to know about Area X? Come meet me out behind the sheds” and he’s like “Obviously I’m not doing that” and we’re like, “No go meet him I want to know about Area X!” [laughter]
Chris: It’s always a very very bad idea to like, taunt the audience by having an obvious step that the character could take to move the plot forward and have the character just not do it. That is just an inherently frustrating experience. In Severance, Mark has this phone.
Oren: Oh my god, the phone, ugh.
Chris: It’s a serious phone and he spends like weeks just like, letting the phone ring and we see it over and over again. The phone rings. He’s still like, this is the fifth time he still hasn’t picked up that phone.
Oren: Three episodes of this phone ringing. Jesus. [Wes laughs]
When it comes to moving the plot forward or character consistency, I will pick moving the plot forward every time. Even if it bothers me a little bit. Another Severance episode, Mark goes and meets this doctor who then straight up murders a guy in front of him. In character, it makes no sense for him to go along with her at that point. That is absolutely not something Mark would do in that situation, but I want him to anyway because I want this storyline to move forward. And so when he does I’m like “Yeah okay whatever, sure it’s fine.”
Chris: I didn’t like it. I was like, “No, what are you doing Mark? That is absolutely not a thing you would do!” There has to be some other way to put movement in here.
Oren: There is, there absolutely is, but in my brain it feels like a binary and I will take the one that moves the plot forward.
Chris: The primary way for them to not rush that, was to start movement earlier so they didn’t have to squeeze it all in the end. I think again it’s worth a reminder we talked about high and low tension arcs recently. High tension arcs do draw the most audience attention and so that is where they will expect movement the most generally, and get the most frustrating if it is not there.
Which leads us to The Mandalorian which is actually a pretty interesting case study in movement. Because when I watched through The Mandalorian, I was not expecting it to focus on what is essentially a throughline. Because a lot of shows have a more episodic structure and The Mandalorian has episodes in the middle that are just, “We’re doing bounty hunting with Mando and baby Yoda.” Or Grogu if you want to be very technical about it. And we’re just kind of getting by, on the run, and that’s kind of what I expected. When you looked at reviews we noticed there were a lot of people who were unhappy about these filler episodes. And at first I wondered, is the issue that it’s only like an eight episode season as opposed to like, Buffy, which was originally over 20 episodes a season. It’s a really big season if expectations were different. But then looking at it, for instance when you have a Buffy villain, the villain kind of shows up but they’re not an urgent problem. So their arc isn’t actually high tension in the beginning and that’s what allows you to have those episodic arcs. With The Mandalorian, the issue is that we have a pretty high tension arc that’s still ongoing. Because Grogu is actively being hunted by an entire guild worth of bounty hunters. We start with that and it’s still high tension when we get into the more episodic episodes. And so people expected that throughline to move forward, felt like those more episodic bits were very filler-y. If it had been lower tension in the beginning then that wouldn’t have been an issue.
Oren: [jokingly] Well, actually, Chris I think you’ll find he’s called “The Child” at that point? [laughter]
Wes: Come on Oren! [laughs]
Oren: You can also lack movement I’ve discovered, if you feel like the story is going nowhere, there’s a good chance that it’s because the throughline is either weak or missing. Definitely manifests as a lack of movement. A novel I read recently that had this problem is called The Atlas Six. The main characters are recruited into this super cool magic library and that’s the plot. They’re in this library now. Eventually they learn that like, “Oh one of you has to be murdered at the end.” That could in theory become a plot, but the book doesn’t really treat it as one. It’s just sort of the characters all just kind of accept that “Okay I guess someone’s gonna be murdered at the end. I hope it’s not me.” They just spend the whole book messing around in this library until we have an incredibly rushed final sequence. And it’s like this whole story has no movement and the reason is that it doesn’t have a throughline. Because hanging out in a library is not a throughline. [all laugh] Like you would think that in this situation the throughline might be their relationships? But it’s not, their relationships barely advance throughout something like 30 hours of audiobook.
Chris: You can create movement just by having a deadline and showing time tick down. The issue with that is it doesn’t fulfill satisfaction requirements that you might otherwise be fulfilling if you have movement in other ways. That doesn’t provide character agency, it doesn’t make events feel like they matter. And so it’ll provide movement, but if the character is just like, twiddling their thumbs as the clock ticks down, you’re gonna have a satisfaction problem even though technically you are moving forward.
Oren: Gotta remember your ABS. Your Always Be Solving Problems.
Chris: We have an acronym for that now.
Oren: It’s not something everyone gets. Since I dinged Authority earlier I feel like it’s only fair to mention that Annihilation, the first book, has pretty good movement. Its ending is a little bit of a mess but the actual book has a very clear implied end point of “Will we survive the Area X? Will any of us live through this?” That’s what the story moves towards as they encounter more dangers and weird stuff starts happening. And there’s also of course another potential end point of “will we find out what’s going on with Area X?” which is not solved in the first book.
Wes: I think that one also does a good job of using locations to help with momentum. There’s the tower and the lighthouse. Knowing that those are gonna be things that are gonna be explored I think helps.
Oren: [jokingly] Excuse me Wes, I think you’ll find it’s a tunnel? [all laugh]
Wes: Oh sorry. [laughter] Wait actually, everybody else calls it a tower right? But the narrator thinks of it as a tunnel?
Oren: Which of us is the narrator?
Wes: I’m not a protagonist. I’m not a protagonist. Tragic. [laughs] I’m not Wes. I’ve already been cloned.
Chris: It goes into the ground. I think she thinks it’s a tower and it goes downwards. It’s a vertical shaft.
Oren: It’s a hole is what it is. [laughter] They can’t call it The Hole. That would be very intimidating.
Wes: But I think that’s good because we brought up Lord of the Rings at the start where it’s like, we know they need to go to this place to do this thing. But Annihilation is: we’re in this weird place and those are weird things. We don’t know what we’re gonna really do in there, but maybe we’ll learn something? That mystery helps maintain momentum as well.
Oren: And remember, your story is a fractal. You can have movement within smaller parts of your story as well, and Area X definitely does that with the different locations like you said, where they first they’re like, we’re gonna investigate. This lighthouse. This tower. Slash tunnel. Slash hole. Weird stuff happens when we do that. So there’s movement in those individual fractal parts of the plot that builds towards the conclusion of “Will any of us survive?” Spoilers. No. [all laugh]
Chris: In a survival story just seeing conditions get worse which is what we see in Annihilation is the characters are slowly kind of taken over by Area X. That gives it a sense of movement. And with that story of course we also have them actively finding clues as to what could be going on that also gives it a sense of movement. In many stories if it’s a survival story, things just getting harder, it’s a form of movement. You do need agency.
Oren: If you don’t have agency, then you might have movement, but it’ll be unsatisfying. You’ll be frustrated. You’ll be like, “Why is this story about this character?” Another thing that can cause a lack of movement is a disagreement between the audience and the author about what is related to the throughline. Because sometimes the author thinks something is related to the throughline but has not sufficiently made that case. And more sharp eyed readers among you may notice that this doesn’t actually move the story forward.
One example of that is the novel Ships of Air. In theory, the plot is that there are these bad guys, Gardier I think they’re called, and they’re invading and they have all these super advanced airships and stuff and they’re real bad guys. So in theory, the plot is trying to defeat the Gardier. But we spend a huge portion of this book dealing with the little local politics of this group of people who are in one of the worlds they hop to. And these people cannot help against the Gardier. Their technology is like, medieval. They have no magic. They are useless. When we go and spend a whole plot line, we need to go negotiate with these guys. And it’s like, do we? [Chris and Wes laugh] And I’m pretty sure in the author’s mind, negotiating with these people will help somehow. Like I wouldn’t be surprised if in the third book, there’s like a, “Oh these people come and help us in some way we couldn’t have expected.” Or it’ll reveal later that we really just needed more personnel and now we’ve got more warm bodies. But in the moment it’s like, what are these people going to help us with exactly? There’s no answer so you’re just kind of left with, [shrugs].
Chris: I had somewhat of the opposite experience with a portion of Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. We have this character, she’s one of three heirs, she’s trying to compete to get the actual throne because anybody who doesn’t get the throne dies. She’s royalty because of her mother who is dead and she spends the beginning just like investigating her mother’s history. Well I can totally see how this could be relevant to her getting the throne somehow. Like there’s no “Oh if I investigate my mother I will get this and then end up with this solution.” But at the same time I could see how it could be fruitful. She wasn’t even trying, she just felt like investigating her mother’s history and it doesn’t go anywhere! [laughs]
Oren: Yeah, some stories like, will make it seem like this is progressing the plot, and then you’ll reveal actually no it’s not. And it’s like, well that was a waste of time couldn’t we have just skipped to the end?
Chris: I’m not sure Jemisin was even trying to progress the plot. I think it just wanted to go into the character’s experiences and she didn’t really want to focus on the plot. And I just happened to think that that was gonna pan out somehow. I’m not sure that she was intending that.
Oren: Right, it’s like there’s so many ways this could apply and it turns out the answer was none of them.
Chris: One of the most excruciating stories as far as movement that I’ve come upon is Fire Upon the Deep. [Oren laughs] Okay so the idea is there’s like fast and slow portions of the galaxy where in the fast portions the warp drive can go faster. And in the slow portions you can’t go as fast. And so we have characters that are traveling from the high warp area to the low warp area. Not only is the travel much longer than you would expect, but like, there’s scene after scene where they describe how the ship keeps moving slower and slower.
Wes: [laughs] Oh no.
Chris: Oh I just feel like it’s mocking me now.
Oren: Yeah Chris, it’s called the slow zone, not the narration moves at a good clip zone. Come on. [Chris laughs]
Oh I wanted to mention something that we briefly touched on but that I found extremely useful once I figured it out. When you’re looking at the relationship between movement and tension, since your story needs both, you need to move your hero closer to a resolution while also making the resolution more difficult.
Chris: When you move your hero closer to solving the problem, it will seem less difficult because they are closer. And so the reason why you need to make it more difficult is to just restore that sense of uncertainty and difficulty that you had before they made progress.
Oren: And this can be real tricky if you have a more character goal oriented story. To defeat the great archdemon, first I have to unlock the Sword of French Fries. (Maybe a modern story, I’m hungry.) [laughter] And that will move the story forward but also that might make it seem easier now that you have the Sword of French Fries. So you have to do a bunch of different things to make sure that it’s still, even though you’re now closer to resolving this archdemon problem, one way or the other it doesn’t seem like you’re closer to resolving it in a positive way because then the tension will drop and you don’t want that.
Wes: But I think the solution is whatever skills and abilities you acquired at the earlier challenges, you just forget that you have them. [all three laugh]
Oren: Yeah that’ll solve it. Good job, we fixed it! It’s like, hey we had this magic sword and then we never used it again.
Wes: Never used it again! That sword already had its moment, Oren.
Oren: We resolved the problem with these destroyer droids with force speed and we probably don’t ever need to use that again. It’s over now.
Chris: One thing I want to mention before we conclude is the switcheroo. If your requirement is to make sure that every event feels relevant to the end, the obvious question is how do we do twists and surprises? Maybe things turn out to be more or less useful. Maybe we do something we think is productive and it turns out that’s the wrong direction, we’ve followed a red herring. Or vice versa, we thought that something wasn’t going to pan out but then it turns out it does. We want to have those twists in our stories. The trick is that you do want the audience to always feel like they’re moving forward in every moment but you can switch the reason why. If they’re chasing a red herring and that doesn’t pan out, you need to make it productive in a different way. “Well I guess this wasn’t the suspect that we were looking for but this person still has information to give us.” It still advanced the plot just not in the way that we were expecting.
An example that I like is when Luke is on Dagobah in Empire Strikes Back, he meets a strange creature who is totally not Yoda. We don’t know if it’s Yoda yet. Later we find out, oh he was with Yoda the whole time. We keep the viewers thinking that it’s relevant by suggesting that this creature could lead him to Yoda. So it appears to have relevance and then it turns out no, it’s actually Yoda. That actually makes movement jump forward which people generally like. It’s like, oh, I thought we were going to have to find Yoda but this is Yoda. Great!
Oren: Chris, I ask you, can your theory account for an 11-year-old watching this movie for the first time and then having their friend lean over and say, “Hey, that’s Yoda!” when he first appears and then being really annoyed for the entire scene, asking for a friend! [laughter]
Alright, well, with that particularly odd anecdote, I think we will call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, please support us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And while our podcast series as a whole may not have a conclusion or movement, this episode does. To allow us to keep doing that, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First we have Callie Macleod. Then we have Kathy Ferguson who is a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Next there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally there’s Danita Rambo. She lives at therambogeeks.com. We’ll talk to you next week.
[Outro Music]
Somehow, jokes about the linear nature of time became part of our schtick here at Mythcreants, but time is no laughing matter! At least, not when you’re trying to convey time in a story, which is often trickier than it sounds. This week we’re talking time jumps, time stamps, and all manner of time shenanigans. With luck, you’ll learn how to properly explain when things happen… just in time!
Show Notes Lies of Locke Lamora * Crescent City * Moon Knight * The Witcher * Making Time Travel Logical * Fight Scenes TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Elizabeth.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.
[opening theme]Wes: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast. I’m your host, Wes, and with me today is…
Oren: Oren.
Wes: And…
Chris: Chris.
Wes: Open page, episode 413, colon: Conveying Time and Narration. Thursday, December 8th, 7:02 PM.
Chris: Wow.
Wes: I did it, right? I’ve established time?
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: [intensely] Am I done?
Chris: It’s amazing how tense you made that sound.
Wes: [still intensely] Nothing’s more gripping than knowing the date and the time at the top of that first chapter because you know that when it goes on to some other date and time, things are going to get real. [laughter]
Oren: Am I the only one who doesn’t ever notice or remember those? People will put timestamps at the start of chapters and they just don’t enter my brain. Then later in the chapter it will talk like I’m supposed to know what day it is and I’ll be like, what? What are you talking about?
Chris: No, you’re not the only one. It is the absolute worst way to convey time. No, no, actually, sorry. There’s one way that is worse: it’s to do the same thing but with a fictional calendar that you made up for your world. [laughter]
Wes: Ah, there you go. Yep. [laughter]
Oren: Ah yes, the third day of Beelzebub.
Chris: Lies of Locke Lamora, I may be talking about you.
Wes: Oh boy.
Oren: Oh my god.
Wes: The funniest thing about that is everyone ignores it, and I’m sure writers agonize over it, which is kind of what we’re talking about today. Conveying time is an important part of storytelling, because it helps your readers follow the timeline of your plot to gain a better understanding of your characters, their motivations, and ideally maybe help create a sense of continuity, maybe structure. So yeah, we were just going to talk about the importance of conveying time appropriately, how you can do that, and yeah, let’s jump into it.
So pull out your world building pants and make a fake calendar and make everybody memorize it first, and make sure that you’re operating on not a 24 hour clock because that’s boring. Go to something else that’s much more manageable, like 10 hours, and then people only sleep like five.
Oren: Brandon Sanderson.
Wes: Yeah. [laughs]
Oren: Gosh. Every once in a while I’ll be talking about Way of Kings and we’ll be having a very normal Way of Kings conversation. And then someone will pipe in and be like, well actually that character you’re talking about is four years younger than their stated age because of the way time works in the Cosmere setting. So actually, what you’re saying doesn’t make sense and I’ll be like, I wish the earth would swallow you.
Wes: Oh my gosh, I love that. So yeah, we probably aren’t going to spend a lot of time talking about that because I think it’s horrible. And an unnecessary way to confuse people, especially – if you want to put weird timestamps at the top of your chapters, go for it, but no one will pay attention. And if we have to thumb back to look at those, no one’s going to do that, especially if it’s an audio book. Also, if it’s an audio book, it’s even more confusing.
Oren: Yeah, it’s even worse. In audio there’s no way to easily go back to where that date was. If you’re very lucky, they might only put the date at the start of the chapter and so you can go back to the start of the chapter but then how are you going to go back to where you were before? I always tell my clients that if you want those, okay, but don’t expect anyone to read them. You have to do your in-text description of time as if those didn’t exist.
Wes: Epistolary works, obviously, they’re letters, there’s going to be timestamps, but again, they’re more flavor. They’re like surrounding fluff, because usually someone will say something like, it’s been a while, or sorry I’m late getting back to you. The text itself still conveys the passing of missed time instead of noticing, oh, this letter from this person is arriving three weeks later than the previous correspondence. Something like that is unnecessarily technical and doesn’t really serve a narrative purpose.
Chris: I think if you’re going to use contextual clues like that to show time passing, you have to be extra careful to be clear as opposed to relative time and date stamps. Also, it has to be soon enough. That’s the other trick. If you don’t put it up front and you let people get their own idea of the new scene or chapter, thinking that it’s the next day, and then they find out a long time has passed, that’s just very jarring.
Oren: The only thing I really know about conveying time in narration is that the more lines of text you have, the greater amount of time you are implying has passed.
Chris: Yeah, let’s talk about that. The micro-time passage in narration.
Oren: I just know that if you’re in a fight scene and you have your character think for an entire paragraph, it gives the impression that they’ve stopped in the middle of a fight to have a nice ponder.
Chris: Now, to be clear, this is assuming that you’re writing in unfolding events narrative premise, as opposed to omniscient or if you have a character retelling where the character is clearly like a future version of themselves, they can just go on a rant in the middle of a fight scene. But possibly most works are in unfolding events where the whole premise of the narration is that the viewpoint characters are actively experiencing events unfold and so then the time passing has to reflect what they are experiencing in that moment. And in that case, every word makes it pass just because it takes time for the reader to read those words.
Besides the fact that if you have, of course, a character think a whole bunch in a fight scene, the believability that they can strategize that much between a sword swing starts to fall apart.
Wes: Can’t you just end the thought paragraph with “It flashed through her mind in a moment” or something like that? [laughter] Obviously just a real fast thinker.
Oren: Let me put it this way. There’s no law against doing that yet.
Chris: I do think that if you put in your narration “and a whole bunch of things happened at once,” I think that’s better, honestly, if you’re not in unfolding events, because it’s still easier for a retelling character to say that. But I do think it gives you a little more leeway. But when you’re at the point where it’s just no, it’s just impossible for that character to strategize that much in that little time, it doesn’t really help at that point. If you really need to describe lots of things happening simultaneously, it’s a little heavy handed. It’s not my preferred tactic, but I’m not going to say you should never, ever do it.
Dialogue is the other one because characters are supposed to be going back and forth. And especially with dialogue, the thing that happens is if you wait too long, not only is it unrealistic – have you responded to that person yet? But then when they answer, a lot of times the reader forgets what they’re responding to, because they can’t hold the previous line in their head for that long. And so then they have to go back and look back several paragraphs to see what question they are answering.
But it’s still possible to have this weird time dilation effect, even if you’re not in really key sensitive passages. For instance, Crescent City has this exposition dump that happens between when a character grabs a doorknob and when she walks through the door. [laughs] It’s several paragraphs and wait, she hasn’t crossed the door yet?
Oren: She’s been hanging out, you know, just thinking about the setting and all the things that are in it.
Chris: It is occasionally, though, useful if you have a really tense moment, to extend it a little bit for more emphasis and dramatization, even in an unfolding event. So you have a fight scene, you keep most of it very nicely, tightly paced. You don’t want to have too much description, and usually you don’t need to because you don’t need to describe the way every single body part moves, which is a mistake that people make in fights. But if you have, oh no, the blade is about to chop off somebody’s head and it’s swinging in, sometimes it actually is useful to just extend that a little bit so you can kind of get a little more drama out of it. Just do it purposely.
Oren: Then of course you get into questions of where characters are and what they’re doing in fight scenes, which is related to time. You don’t want it to feel like one side has just stopped because it’s not their turn yet. You have to consider, if the heroes can do this in this amount of time, the villains also can do a similar amount in that amount of time.
Chris: Right. Does it feel like they were standing around watching when they should have been helping?
Oren: This particularly tends to come up in escapes, I’ve noticed. It’s not super common that a hero will defeat the villain via turn-based combat. I think most authors know that’s a bad idea. But I have read a lot of stories where the heroes are surrounded and they’re going to be captured and then their best friend rides up on some fantasy animal and they all scramble on board and ride off. And it’s like, what were all the bad guys doing while that was happening? That took time. If you’ve ever tried to get on a horse, it’s not instantaneous.
Wes: They’re in awe of the majestic horse.
Oren: Yeah, it’s a very cool fantasy horse. Giant leopard or whatever it is.
Wes: But I think a lot of that is really good advice around just showing things happening prevents you from getting maybe obsessively wordy with time language. Like, ‘and then this happened, followed by this a moment later.’ ‘And then after the battle was done’ – you don’t need to hit every piece of action with a time adverb like that, if you’re simply conveying things in a sequence of events and showing that things are changing. Pepper a few in, but I think there might be a sense, especially with blow by blow action, to get a little too nitty gritty on how time is passing when it’s just really unnecessary. People will help you if it’s well written and focuses on meaningful plot and action. We’ll be forgiving if you suddenly say that it’s raining and it wasn’t before.
Oren: So if it’s badly written, then I should really consider the amount of time passing and very careful measurements.
Wes: Probably, yeah.
Oren: I think that’s what we’re going for. I think that’s the lesson here. [laughter]
Wes: Sure. Just write better. God.
Chris: Speaking of which, the word ‘suddenly’ is often one that’s overused a lot. No, you don’t want to say it’s ‘suddenly.’ You want to make it feel sudden. And saying it’s sudden does not make it feel sudden. You have to just pace your narration so that something feels sudden by having not a lot of contextual clues, or foreshadowing, or lead up. It just happens. That’s how you make it feel sudden. You don’t say it’s sudden.
Oren: Ironically, the word suddenly often makes it feel less sudden.
Wes: I think ‘suddenly’ also is guilty of showing up in a lot of internal thoughts, like “Suddenly, a thought popped into her head.” So how do you do that if someone is just in their own head thinking thoughts?
Chris: I feel like that’s a replacement for “Somehow, something popped into her head.” What you actually want to do, especially if it’s important, is you want to have some outward stimulus that makes the character think about something. They get a clue and they observe something that’s relevant. And it can be something that’s just a reminder of something else. They see somebody do something that reminds them, hey, maybe the villain could be doing this behind the scenes or what have you. You have a source for any epiphanies instead of just, I randomly had an epiphany.
Oren: It just happened, as one does.
Chris: One thing that I found interesting that I want to mention in audio again is talking about transitions. A lot of times we want them to be clear and relative time, not calendar dates. But I’ve noticed in audio, we use a specific tone of voice for transitions. If an audio narrator just speaks transitions in a normal voice, it sounds really jarring and kind of sudden when the time changes. So if it’s just like “A week later he went to the store,” that’s not how you say it. You say “A week later, [pause] he went to the store.” You use a specific voice that indicates that transition, which I found very interesting.
Oren: I always have a problem when I’m writing any kind of, “And then some time passed,” because it always feels weird. It’s like, “Two weeks passed,” and I was like, what happened in those two weeks? This person’s a different person than they were two weeks ago. What happened? How are they different now? It’s like, I don’t know, nothing. There’s nothing interesting in those two weeks. I can’t describe it in any detail, it’ll just be boring, but it feels jarring to just jump two weeks ahead. I don’t know.
Wes: Oren, they just performed their downtime activity. [laughter] They had their success or their failure, and they acquired whatever boon or harm that accrued, and it’s over.
Oren: Yeah, there you go. It’s solved.
Wes: Time passed. You’re done.
Chris: Having the relevant amount of white space and break is also good. So if you just move to the next paragraph, and it was three months later, that would be very jarring because it’s just a paragraph break. Whereas for a time transition that large, we would actually expect a chapter break. So that could be part of the issue, where if it’s the next day, we would probably expect a scene break that has an extra empty paragraph, maybe some asterisks or something like that. And I think in audio, there’s a longer pause, there’s more silent time for those. It’s subtle, but there is for those different transitions. And so I think that having that white empty space is also important in preparing for a time jump.
Wes: And time jumps are a good way to just convey passing of time. You can just do that. You don’t really have to explain it. But I think how you leave things before the time jump should probably not raise a bunch of questions. Kind of to Oren’s point, like, well, what were they doing during that time? It’s like, I don’t know. Maybe they went home. They’re just with their family.
Chris: Okay. Let me go over the expected trend rule, which is useful here. This is a basic rule of thumb that governs whether you can just skip over time. Basically, everything you skip over must follow an expected trend. So if you show your characters get into a fight, you can jump ahead and show that things have gotten even worse between them. Because after they fought, that would be an expected trend. But they can’t be getting along again unless you actually show them resolve their differences in a scene. Maybe if they make tentative steps, and you feel like they’re the first steps to them getting along, you might be able to jump forward then and show that they’ve repaired things the rest of the way because that would be an expected trend. So basically, if it’s the first or instigating instance of something that starts a trend or changes the trajectory of the story, you can’t skip over it. If it’s anything important, whether that’s your character arcs and your character change, your relationship arcs, whether people are getting along or how close they are, or whether it’s the external plot, anything that’s important in the story. But the thing that people get really caught up on is travel.
Oren: It’s me, I’m people.
Chris: The reason is because travel, in a lot of our fantasy settings, is supposed to be arduous. And so can we really skip it? And the answer is yes. Some summary can be helpful, but a lot of times even people put in too much summary of traveling. So this is how you skip travel. First, you focus on the destination and not on the journey and setting expectations ahead. You don’t want to make the journey sound dangerous because that makes it sound like it’s eventful and that will set expectations that you will focus on the journey. So keep the narration focused on the dangers of the destination, not on the dangers of the journey. Don’t make it sound dangerous. And then you just do a scene or chapter break, depending on how big the travel is. Then you narrate the characters arriving at the destination. And then you can put in exposition after that to briefly fill in a summary of their trip. Then just show the effects of the trip on them, like they’re tired. All the expected things that you would think after traveling. Unless you actually have events happening during your travel, which is different, that’s really all you need to do. You don’t have to go through the entire travel sequence.
Wes: I like the focus on danger means events need to happen. I like, too, how travel’s nice because you can convey passage of time with the setting changing depending on how far they go. You could be experiencing different weather, maybe different climates, and that can convey a sense of not only time but distance as well. If you really want to get into some worldbuilding chops, you can definitely focus a little bit more on that.
Chris: Summarizing speeds time up, so it’s similar to jumping in its principles. If you feel like information has to be filled in logistically but it’s still not exciting and it’s not a pivotal point in the story, then it’s a good candidate for summary. But you don’t need lots of summary to make the journey feel long, for instance. Only a little bit so that people have an idea of what happened.
Oren: Mostly I think that would work fine. Maybe I’m looking for problems here, but if you were in a low tech fantasy setting, it’s not unreasonable that some trips could take a year, or two years. And it would feel weird to me – even though a lot of those trips would be perfectly routine and there wouldn’t be anything interesting happening during them – I would feel weird jumping ahead a year in a character’s life because that was how long it took them to get across the ocean or whatever. I don’t know what the solution to that is.
Wes: The solution is just the Game of Thrones approach. [laughter] You teleport. You just teleport places. Time and space jumps.
Oren: Nice. Good job, everyone. We solved it.
Chris: I really do think it’s about setting expectations. If you think that travel is dangerous in your setting and they should have an adventure, you can do that too. But you also have to set expectations for that, that we’re going to have an adventure on our way. I think another option is that you can have a starting travel adventure that shows your character adjusting to travel and then following the expected trend rule. After that, they just get more confident and then you jump ahead. They had trouble at first. They overcame a big obstacle. And yeah, there were more obstacles, kind of like the first. But after that, it was more routine and we would expect them to get more confident and experienced during the travel sequence.
Wes: Yeah, I like that. You’re showing how time is passing through your characters, changing and growing over the course of the story. I like it too for some things that might be a little bit more relatable than learning magic, sadly. Like learning how to work on a ship or something like that. We can understand that it is challenging and that learning it would take time and mastering it would take even more time. So I think there’s something there with how your character is changing can convey, just through that, a nice sense of passage, or at least justify those longer periods that you’re talking about, Oren. It’s been a year and this person suddenly… [laughs] Suddenly! This person was adept at boat maintenance. [laughter] Watch out Cthulhu!
Oren: I guess it should also be a good reminder. You don’t see that many professional authors make this mistake, but I see it in a fair number of manuscripts, is that you don’t want to institute a time jump if you’ve just opened up an urgent problem. Or, really, if you have an urgent problem. And you could say that that’s already covered by the expected trend rule. But if you find out that, oh hey, our school is going to get attacked by vampires tomorrow. You don’t want to jump two months after that most of the time.
Chris: I mean this is good to cover because you also wouldn’t want to be like, vampires attack tomorrow – two months have passed and the vampires still haven’t attacked. Because that would just totally destroy the urgency of the situation and you would lose your tension. That is the other thing that time jumps can sabotage. You don’t need all of your problems to be so urgent they’re going to happen tomorrow. What you need is a sense that time is of the essence and that the protagonists have to act promptly. Sometimes that means things take a long time but they need all that time. Sometimes it means things are happening tomorrow. But in many cases it’s at least implied that the heroes need to act promptly. And then suddenly three months pass, the heroes haven’t been doing anything. That certainly tells readers that, nope, none of this was urgent. They have all the time in the world. And then your tension is gone.
Oren: Don’t worry, it’s fine. Everything’s okay. [laughter]
Wes: I thought time jumps were done well and poorly in Moon Knight. The worst one was certainly how we skipped how he beats the big bad at the end of that season. Which is exactly what we’re talking about. Don’t do that. That’s horrible.
Chris: It was not an expected trend.
Wes: No, definitely not. But early on when we’re just with Steven, close POV with Steven, and experiencing his loss of time and waking up in different places. And that I thought was actually interesting because he’s also at a loss for what’s happening and why things are happening. That is wrapping you into the mystery of missing time. It doesn’t last forever because that would get old. But I think that a close narration like that where the character also can’t account for time provides a little bit of novelty, a little hint of mystery that also gets at how things are passing. I don’t think you necessarily want them to do a Rip Van Winkle, but I think you can make decent use out of that. Trying to account for lost time is an interesting way of picking up the pieces in real time, not just flashbacking.
Chris: No, then it gives you the same experience as the character, which is great and makes it into a mystery. That’s something I’ve actually been a little disappointed in with Severance. There have been situations where they had the opportunity to cut the scenes so that we would see people’s experience based on their memory, and they just decided not to do that. That’s too bad. That’s a lost opportunity in my opinion. Should we talk about moving backwards in time?
Oren: Oh boy.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: Oh boy. How?
Chris: We’ve talked before about the fact that we don’t think flashbacks are justified most of the time. One thing that I think is worth mentioning is that moving backwards in time is simply less expected than moving forward. So if we’re talking about things like conveying time with contextual clues, I’m not sure that’s going to be enough. For instance, if you just show, hey, look, the time is different because it’s snowing outside and it was summer before, the default assumption is that we’ve moved to the closest winter forward. And so I guess I just wouldn’t recommend trying to use contextual clues when we move back.
Oren: We make fun of movies that use a sepia tone filter when it’s time for a flashback. But we’ve been watching Magia Record, which is an anime that has lots of flashbacks and it does not use any visual cues to indicate it’s a flashback. And my God, it’s confusing. I’m just like, I don’t know. When is this? When has this happened? And I don’t know. I’m never sure when anything is. I don’t like it.
Wes: More confusing than Witcher season one?
Oren: Oh my God. [pained laughter] Thanks. Yeah, oof. That was not good.
Wes: That was not good.
Chris: [joking] But wasn’t it clever? Wasn’t it so clever?
Wes: [also joking] Yeah, so clever. So clever. No timestamps. You just have to pay attention to how old people look.
Oren: Except two of the characters are immortal and the other character, who should be aging, isn’t. [laughter] They definitely did not make Jaskier look 10 years older.
Wes: Oh man. I didn’t even put that in my show notes. That just jumped out from the recesses of my brain.
Oren: It’s probably because in terms of TV and movies, the only sign of aging is that a character’s hair turns gray, or if they’re really old, they get wrinkly skin. Beyond that, there is no sign of age; and Jaskier’s not old enough to have gray hair yet, so he basically looks exactly the same as he did 10 years ago.
Chris: The one thing that could be flavored differently that I can think of is narration. If you are in present tense, you could go to past tense. I don’t think that’s clear enough by itself, though. I still think you need labels. But that could help as a signifier. It could get to the point where if you do it consistently enough times – you’d have to have a premise that supports that, which almost certainly wouldn’t – then people might know, oh, hey, it’s past tense, so we’ve jumped back in time. But in a lot of cases, I wouldn’t even count on readers to notice. Sometimes they’ll notice, but especially if you do a chapter break, they might come back the next day and if they’re totally used to both present tense and past tense, just not realize that the narration is different.
Wes: I think that hits on an important thing about this whole discussion. When you’re conveying time in your narration, in your stories, the point of it is just to provide continuity. Don’t try to do something clever. We just want to know what’s happening when. Clarity wins the day in this kind of conversation. There are interesting ways to do it, which we’ve hit on, but trying to do something clever with manipulating time in weird ways for the sake of some kind of reveal; the payoff is not worth the confusion at all.
Oren: I just want to know what’s happening, okay?
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: Yeah, it has to be in the story. The story has to have interesting things in it, as opposed to just the way the story is conveyed.
Oren: Now that we have gotten the time out of our systems and we now know all about time, it’s time to end the podcast. But in the present, not in the past. We’re not doing that. And we’re not doing any time jumps. Although I suppose for us it’s kind of a time jump since we’re going to record the next one immediately after this, but you guys won’t hear it for another week. Whoa!
Wes & Chris: [incredulous] What? Oh no.
Chris: So if you found any of our tips useful, consider allowing us to continue making podcasts by going to patreon.com/mythcreants and becoming our patron. And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First there is Callie MacCleod. Then there is Kathy Ferguson, a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Next we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally we have Danita Rambo. She lives at therambogeeks.com. We’ll talk to you next week.
[closing theme]Chris: This has been the Mythcreants podcast. Opening and closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Coulton.
The only thing spookier than the unknown is… something you don’t know about! This podcast isn’t just about horror. It’s about the creeping dread of an uncaring cosmos, and also air conditioners for some reason. That’s right, we’re talking about cosmic horror: what it is, how to use it, and whether it’s best as a spice or the full meal.
Show Notes The Colour Out of Space * The Southern Reach * Trail of Cthulhu * What’s a Non-Ableist Alternative to “Losing Sanity” in Stories? * The City We Became * Wintertide * Maplecroft * Epistolary * The Dunwich Horror * Eye of Argon TranscriptGenerously transcribed by James.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle. [opening song]
Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren and with me today is –
Chris: Chris
Oren: And
Wes: Wes.
Oren: And today we have the unknowable horror of something you don’t know.
Chris: Duun Duuhn.
Wes: Spoooooky.
Chris: You know, a lot of things that are scary pretty much all rely on the unknown.
Oren: They do.
Chris: Once things become familiar, I mean, they still can be threatening, but it’s not the same anymore. But personally, I think one thing that distinguishes something we may or may not have mentioned yet is awe.
Oren: Yeah. Cosmic horror is the topic of today and yeah, I do think that there is a certain amount of awe that is inspired by things in cosmic horror. I would have said that all horror uses the unknown and the mysterious to a certain extent, but I think cosmic horror tends to use it a lot more and really emphasizes how this is weird and strange and even, dare I say, unknowable although that can be a real cop out.
Wes: But you’re right. It’s right there in the title. The scale of things is cosmic. So, awe is something you get when your protagonist stumbles upon cyclopean cities from an ancient age and the character is literally dwarfed in the presence of these things, which is important for the themes of cosmic horror.
Chris: Yeah. I have an article in which I talk about creating a mysterious atmosphere in which I talk about because awe requires mystery. It’s the combination of massive, impressive scale or scale at any vector with a sense of mysteriousness, and I feel like that’s what really distinguishes cosmic horror to a certain extent, although of course, it’s a sandwich. There are variations. Not all stories focus on the cosmic level elements as much.
Oren: Yeah, you’re going to get fuzzy things around the edges, like The Color Out of Space. Most people would agree that’s cosmic horror but unlike a lot of other stories in the genre, in The Color Out of Space there isn’t a giant threat to earth – it’s a single creature. Now, granted, there is a certain level of literal cosmicness to it because it comes from space. But there’s not really anything to indicate that there is a larger danger present, which is common in a lot of other cosmic horror.
Wes: Yeah, I think that’s a good one to contrast with since you mentioned that Lovecraft story, like At the Mountains of Madness that takes place in Antarctica. That is very different. Not in the threat, but just in the scale of what they’re looking at, like the ancient cities. Everything is just suddenly filled with wonder and it’s weird. I had a friend that just got back from Antarctica, and she said that it is weird, and it feels like everything wants to kill you.
[laughter]Wes: I guess there’s something to these to these spaces where people dare not tread or should not.
Oren: Yeah. And if you want an example of a story that does that from someone other than Lovecraft and honestly, who could blame you, you can always check out the Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer, which is extremely cosmic horror and in this case it’s all about this weird Area X, which is [creepy voice] ‘pristine wilderness’, which is a term that they use a lot. And it starts to sound very creepy after a while.
And there are, of course, implications that Area X itself is expanding and devouring everything around it. But even before you know that it’s this huge place that doesn’t have any people in it and is weird and operates by strange rules that you don’t understand. So that has your classic awe-inspiring grandness to the horror that you might come to expect from a cosmic horror story.
Chris: I do like that VanderMeer’s aesthetics are very different though, because he loves weird biology and plants and animals. So Area X doesn’t have the same types of creatures in it. It’s very much like Florida wilderness that’s gone strange.
Oren: Stranger.
[laughter]Chris: Other interesting themes – dangerous knowledge is one that I like and find interesting, not that we always want to stigmatize knowledge, but I think the idea isthat the universe is inherently uncaring, even antagonistic, and so when you learn about the universe you actually learn lots of bad things that are damaging to your mental well-being.
Oren: Right. And with the whole trope of dangerous knowledge, I mean, you can go at that in a couple of different ways.
You can go with knowledge that’s literally dangerous, which is why it would probably be a bad idea to flood the Internet with instructions on how to make a nuclear bomb in your kitchen. The potential for harm is extremely high.
But then you can also have knowledge that threatens your worldview in a way that is extremely unpleasant, if not outright painful or psychologically damaging. Now, unfortunately, that has been kind of magnified in a lot of cosmic horror stories to the stereotype or trope you get in Call of Cthulhu. Like, [old man voice] ‘Oh no, I read the spell of how to summon a big old glowing fist and now I have some kind of vague, unspecified mental illness.’ That’s not how that works.
Chris: Yeah. I do like the idea of magic being corrupting, and I think it’s helpful in many stories because magic is so powerful. It gives the protagonist a reason not to use it and often makes magic users into antagonists instead, which sometimes just works better.
Oren: Yeah. I have no problem with the idea of magic itself being corruptive or corrosive in some way. And you can mix those things, right? You can have the idea of the reason this person is all weird now after they read the spellbook isn’t because of the words they read. It’s because that book conveyed magical knowledge and magic is corrosive.
But that can be kind of hard to communicate. And so a lot of cosmic horror type stories are just sort of like, [old man voice] ‘Oh look, a spooky spellbook and waahh now I’m evil.’
Wes: I’m not a huge fan of the terms, but in Trail of Cthulhu by Kenneth Hite and Robin D Law they had three aspects of health, physical health, and then stability and sanity.
I always like the stability one, because I think it’s getting at what you’re talking about Oren. You can cast spells, but it kind of just messes with you. Like you’re just shaky or nauseated or just kind of generally unwell from the experience of foreign magic. But nothing about that has made you suddenly realize that I don’t know, Catholicism is a lie.
[laughter]Wes: That differentiation I think is important. And it works really well in a game but in stories, I don’t know, they just want to blow everything up immediately.
Chris: So I just want to mention that we do have a Q&A on the site that talks about the concept of, quote unquote, losing sanity that isn’t a lot of cosmic horror and how to make that not ableist. So I thought I’d just go over that quick.
The Q&A is written by our disability consultant, Fay. The biggest general principle is to just get more specific because part of the problem with the idea of sanity is that it’s used as a very broad category for a lot of different things. If you have somebody lose sanity, whatever that is, and then they have various kinds of symptoms, it feels like you’re making a statement about conditions that you probably don’t want to make that statement about and lumping a lot of people together and oftentimes stigmatizing different people. So generally, instead of giving a catch-all term, you just want to get specific.
Is a character disillusioned? Did they have faith in the world and that everything happens for a reason and that goes away and now they’re all jaded, for instance? Or do they have specific symptoms like disturbing hallucinations or waking nightmares? Are they feeling angry or aggressive? Do they doubt their own memories? Do they drink a holistic cup of depression?
Wes: That helps ward off the effects.
[laughter]Wes: If anything, that’s a preventative.
Chris: If you just get specific about what its effects are and show that, then you don’t have to worry so much about this broader term that has more ableist implications and could cause you to make statements that you don’t really want to make.
Oren: Yeah. And I do think that maybe one of the reasons that cosmic horror stories tend to exaggerate this process that we’re talking about, like, [old man voice] ‘Oh, I read a spell and it was real spooky and now I’m a serial killer’, is that at least in my experience, cosmic horror often tends to work better in short stories because it is harder to maintain the mystery and the unknowableness over a longer period of time. The longer you have to be in that space, the harder it is to maintain that without it just getting frustrating.
Not to say that it can’t be done. There are some longer works of cosmic horror that do it very well. But I think it’s an easier set of tropes to employ in a shorter story. The downside is that in a shorter story, you don’t have a lot of time to demonstrate that someone is having a bad day because of the weird eldritch knowledge that they’re absorbing.
Wes: Edgar Allan Poe wrote The Philosophy of Composition, and he talked about what the point of a short story was. Short forms should focus on evoking some kind of feeling. And it’s the only form that works for that. So, yeah, cosmic horror, definitely the longer you get, the less chance of like an awe or terror or whatever you’re going for can be applied.
Oren: And you also, of course, have to think about what kinds of things are your readers likely to find weird or disturbing. Because that’s part of what makes a lot of cosmic horror, especially one written by old H. P., seem just kind of silly now because the guy was terrified of air conditioners and has a story about an evil air conditioner, which is a lot funnier than his stories about evil black people and evil Italians.
So beyond the racism, there is just some bizarre humor because he was scared of some very weird things that probably most people at his time would not have been scared of. And especially to modern readers that are like, ‘What? What’s the problem? I don’t get it.’
[laughter]Oren: So you keep that in mind. And in general, I would say that this is a common problem in all cosmic horror, not just Lovecraft. Writers sometimes forget that making something mysterious is an enhancement of making it threatening. It doesn’t make it threatening on its own.
This is a problem all the way back to Lovecraft’s story, Dagon, where the main protagonist is like, [funny voice] ‘Oh my God, it’s a fish man.’ And it’s like, ‘What is that fish man doing?’
Nothing.
He walks past and goes to an altar and performs a religious service. And unless you’re just extremely racist, that’s not scary.
That problem persists into the modern day where The City We Became uses a lot of cosmic horror tropes and the bad guys get less scary because they start off as racist cops and they’re terrifying and then they become weird tentacle monsters, and this is actually less scary than the racist cops.
Chris: Definitely with the fish people, or Deep Ones, who felt like they might be analogies to other races. Winter Tide is such a good book for then recasting that. And it’s like, ‘No, this time we’re going to show that The Deep Ones are an oppressed group, show that side of the story,’ and kind of takes that and twists it in a very interesting way.
Oren: Winter Tide is such a fun example of a tactic that I’m very fond of personally, which is to use cosmic horror as a spice rather than as the entire meal.
Because if you compare Winter Tide to something like Maplecroft, where Maplecroft is a straight up cosmic horror novel through and through. Whereas Winter Tide has cosmic horror elements (there is a deep devouring hunger that they have to deal with at some point), but a lot of the story is dealing with much more personal and much more mundane evils of racism and government targeting of minorities and stuff like that and academic bureaucracy. There is such a thing as bureaucracy horror, but I don’t think Winter Tide quite rises to that level.
So that is a tactic that I like a lot just because I found that cosmic horror is very compatible with most other genre tropes, unless you’re trying to do something that is light and fluffy, in which case probably not.
Chris: The risk is that if you have your mysterious elements for too long, they will not be mysterious anymore. Maplecroft definitely has a fair amount of buildup, and so it needs other problems that the characters are facing so that we can slowly introduce the cosmic elements and have them not front and center at first. I think that’s the issue.
If you decide to pull out your cosmic horrors in Chapter One, then you’re going to reveal them too fast, and you need room to first set the mood and then slowly build. And then you’ve got to keep your characters busy while you’re doing that.
Oren: Maplecroft, at least the way I remember it, Wes, you’ve read it more recently than me. I believe it starts with a fish person attack, a Deep One or whatever you want to call them in that story. And then the action that keeps the characters busy for the rest of the story is investigating that and dealing with the social fallout of whatever is happening. But it’s much more focused on the unknowable danger than Winter Tide is, I would say, anyway, after reading both.
Chris: There’s definitely chapters of Maplecroft where we do things like focus on a glass or stone or something that gives off weird vibes. Before the monsters come back in the house we focus on the weird stone. We have a doctor who’s reporting on a case study of a disease for a while. We still have smaller signs of horror there that then are allowed to build before the monster comes back anyway.
Wes: Unlike Winter Tide, sustained cosmic horror wants you to feel that, but there is more of a mystery involved where solving it saves and damns people. I think that’s the crux of it. And why Winter Tide doesn’t really do that. There’s less noir vibes than certainly Maplecroft.
Oren: A character does die in their attempt to fix things in Winter Tide. But it’s not a character we particularly care about as opposed to in Maplecroft, where a protagonist’s girlfriend just goes missing. And it’s like, ‘Uh, I’m sad about that.’ Then the sequel teases us about her and then doesn’t resolve the story line, and now I’m just angry.
[laughter]Chris: The other interesting thing about Maplecroft is that it sticks with the epistolary style, similar to what H. P. did, which is an interesting choice. Of all the epistolary works I’ve read, it is one of the better ones with that medium, which is really tricky. And I think that often it is hard to convey information if you’re using epistolary narration, but that is maybe to cosmic horror’s benefit. Because less is more in this case. Eventually in Maplecroft, we do get into blow-by-blow action scenes, which characters are less likely to write down, but it sticks to it decently well.
Oren: There was a weird spate of YouTube videos a few years back where people were really wringing their hands over the question of, ‘Are you allowed to shoot Cthulhu?’ And it was interesting because the whole thing was about, ‘Well, if you can defeat the Elder God with weapons or a spell or something, is it really cosmic horror?’ And I’m like, ‘Well, yeah, you just need to understand what effect that is going to have on the story going forward.’ So if you defeat Cthulhu with a magic ritual, that can work perfectly well. It’s just that you can’t really use Cthulhu as a cosmic horror threat anymore in that story.
Chris: I would almost say if you can defeat Cthulhu, it’s not really Cthulhu. You’ve created your own lesser version of Cthulhu. So I understand Cthulhu is supposed to be a cosmic scale. So that seems… I don’t know.
Oren: You probably wouldn’t put him in a headlock and take him to the showers or something.
[laughter]Oren: But it would be like you perform a spell that stops the Old Ones from rising from the Deeps or what have you. That’s credible. That works fine with the established canon of Cthulhu as we have it.
Chris: If you defeat Cthulhu by shooting him with a gun, that’s inherently an action-scene oriented fight. You’re not just appeasing him with a ritual sacrifice or something.
Wes: I think one of the funniest mundane Eldritch deaths in pretty much any cosmic horror story I’ve ever read, hopping back into Lovecraft, is in The Dunwich Horror where there’s a whole other thing going on with a much bigger threat. But Wilbur Whateley is the humanoid that has Eldritch or Old One parentage and so his body is very different.
He basically goes to the library to steal something, I think, from Dr. Armitage and the guard dog just takes him out. This horrifying guy with Eldritch powers and the guard dog is just like, ‘You smell bad, Imma eat you.’ And he does. And that is the end of that guy.
Oren: Lovecraft has a thing about dogs. Dogs are very powerful. There’s a Lovecraft story where a guy is being harassed by aliens and the aliens can’t get to him until they find out a way to take out his dogs. Because sure, cross the vacuum of space in advanced technology, whatever. But here are some dogs. You’ve got to watch out.
Chris: Did H. P. have dogs? And do I want to know what H. P. did with them?
Wes: As far as I know, he only had cats.
Oren: Yeah, less said about his cats, the better.
Chris: Looping back on what you said about using cosmic horror as a spice. I think that’s one of the neat things about it. That you can just take a lot of other settings and just throw it in as the source of threat. And it works really well.
One of the interesting stories that I did not think about is Conan the Barbarian. I did not think about the fact that that story actually has cosmic horror elements. And still I was doing a critique of The Eye of Argon, which has a reputation for being the worst story ever written. It just has a lot of really funny word choices is what it has. Like somebody was using the thesaurus badly.
The interesting thing about it is it’s obviously derived from Conan the Barbarian. And it’s interesting to see it suddenly go into cosmic horror territory. And I was surprised by that.
But actually, after talking to Oren, he said, ‘No, actually Conan the Barbarian does that too, because you do have cults in Conan the Barbarian getting powers and doing sacrifices.’ And so it’s hard to imagine cosmic horror in sword and sorcery. But it works. It provides the source of threat.
Oren: It depends on the Conan story. But Conan often runs into things that in a Lovecraft story would be cosmic horror. In a Conan story, sometimes they are and sometimes it’s just like, And here, a cult, I’m going to chop them up with my sword. It depends on how strong Conan is that episode.
Chris: If feel like the purpose of cultists is to give the human something to shoot instead of Cthulhu.
Wes: Yeah, I think that’s right.
Oren: I mean, there is something to that. But sometimes Conan is strong enough to fight the entire city garrison. And sometimes he’s scared of a large ape. So it depends on what Conan story we’re talking about. Partly because Howard and Lovecraft were writing at the same time, their stuff often shows up in each other’s stories. And there are some Conan stories that do have the larger themes and tropes we associate with cosmic horror of the unknowable evil and what have you. And then sometimes he just meets a weird squid god and he stabs it.
Chris: OK, no I just want to know what Conan conventions show up in H. P. Lovecraft’s work.
Oren: It’s been a while. I can’t tell you off the top of my head.
Chris: We’ll leave this question for another podcast. We’ll love to imagine big muscled shirtless guys bursting in.
Wes: I think cultists are probably a pretty good moniker for cosmic horror. Just the presence of them suggests that there’s something untoward happening, not sanctioned by the authorities, and there’s probably sacrifices there. If you have a cult show up, it’s immediately like, ‘OK, creepy things are going on.’
Oren: And there are plenty of cosmic horror stories that don’t have cultists. But it goes back to the awe concept we were talking about earlier. Because this thing is awe inspiring. And so it has people who worship it because it’s so big and weird and grand.
Chris: Another thing that’s really great about cosmic horror is the fact that because it’s largely a feeling, it really allows for a lot of variety. You want things that are strange, but they can be strange in just about any way. You can have space opera with cosmic horror that has weird aliens. You can have urban fantasy with cosmic horror because there’s magical creatures coming in, and so it makes it very versatile.
Oren: Urban fantasy is an interesting one, because you have to do some work to separate your cosmic horror elements from your more traditional urban fantasy elements. Because if you have a vampire or a werewolf and they have their own powers that can make the cosmic horror not really particularly scary because like, ‘Oh, look, well we already have magic and we know all about that.’ So if you’re going to do that, you just have to be careful to make your Old Ones or your Elder gods or whatever they’re called, weird and different even compared to the magical creatures that your protagonists probably are.
Chris: Because magical creatures are familiar in an urban fantasy setting, and so you need them to still feel strange.
Oren: Familiar and of course, more powerful. So if you don’t do that properly then it can feel like, ‘OK, well, now my supernatural creatures are just on the same level as whatever my cosmic horror elements are.’ And I’m not going to say you should never do that. There are plenty of stories that reimagine traditional cosmic horror elements as things other than cosmic horror. In fact, some Lovecraft stories even do that. But that’s probably not the mood you’re going for if you’re sitting down to write a cosmic horror story.
Wes: So if you guys pick up a cosmic horror story, I guess what’s attractive to you about the genre? What do you want to feel? Is it that sense of awe? Is it the mystery of it? Do you just want to hear about creepily designed alien gods?
Chris: I mean, I do like creepy things, so I’m not that hard to satisfy in this case.
Wes: I just want to be creeped out without feeling grossed out. That’s my most important feeling because that’s always a problem with horror.
When I’m reading a book, I don’t really get scared. I just get kind of annoyed, or it feels unpleasant because there aren’t jump scares in books. So it can be creepy, but once it starts like, [narrator voice] ‘…and then her face melts off’, it’s like, ‘Alright, well that’s gross’.
Or like, [narrator voice] ‘…and then the slasher murdered this character that you liked and said…’.
‘Well, I liked that character. Oh, alright.’
And then, of course, if you’re watching TV or whatever and it’s like jump scare and I mean, yeah, that did activate my fear response, but not in the way I wanted.
Chris: I’m a similar way. I don’t really like pure horror on its own. I love horror comedies. But I just love creepy stuff, probably because it’s mysterious. It has to be mysterious to be truly creepy. Dark and mysterious, basically. And I really like the atmosphere and cosmic horror is so strong in the atmosphere that I think that’s really what it’s about.
Oren: I got into a really dragged-out argument one with someone who shall remain nameless, about an RPG campaign I was running that I described as having cosmic horror elements. And the players won. They triumphed. They got the good ending. And this person was like, ‘You can’t call that cosmic horror. They can’t win in cosmic horror.’
I was like, ‘Ok, well, how do you keep your story going if they’re never allowed to win?’
And they were like, ‘Ah, well, you see, I just fill it with really gross stuff constantly.’
Wes: Ugh.
Oren: I’m like, ‘I don’t see how that fixes the problem.’
Wes: Uh-uh.
Chris: So I don’t know which campaign this was. I remember one campaign that was urban fantasy cosmic horror where we just shut off the gateway. We didn’t destroy the Eldritch horror. We just kept it out. And that was considered victory.
Oren: But even in that situation, there’s a reason why if I ever ran another campaign in that world, I wouldn’t be like, ‘Well, OK, guys, the Old Ones are coming back.’ Because it would be like, ‘Well, OK, we already did this.’
Even though, logically speaking, the Old Ones in that setting are still a threat, dramatically speaking, you’ve already defeated them.
Chris: There’d have to be some kind of escalation or change in order to make it work, certainly.
Oren: This argument was way before that campaign. I think I was running some Delta Green or something at the time.
Chris: Did your players shoot Cthulhu?
Oren: They did not, no. But they did use guns because Delta Green is a setting where you have lots of guns. So they would occasionally shoot their way out of problems.
Chris: It is an agent game, right? It’s like X-Files, the game.
Oren: Mhm.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: So it’s hard to avoid guns at that point. Why would my agents not have guns in a modern-day setting.
Wes: Because only swords work against Cthulhu.
[laughter]Wes: Or actually, I should say only boughs of ships work against Cthulhu.
Oren: You can only destroy Cthulhu by running a boat into him.
Chris: Only Mr. Stabby the Stake works against Cthulhu.
Oren: Alright. Well, now that we’ve figured out what works against Cthulhu, I think we’re going to go ahead and call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you enjoyed listening to this episode, please support us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, we have Callie McLeod. Then we have Kathy Ferguson, who is a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Next, there’s Aymon Jaber. He is an urban fantasy writer and connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Danita Rambo. She lives at therambogeeks.com. We’ll talk to you next week.
[closing theme]This has been the Mythcreants podcast, opening closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.
We live in a society, maaaaan, and we probably will in the future. Exploring these futuristic cultures and locations is one of scifi’s main attractions, so it’s important to think about how society would evolve with the passing of time. Hopefully, we can do better than a world that’s just modern day with weirder fashion. And we can definitely do better than saying global warming will be solved by an army of self-help gurus, which sounds too weird to feature in a high budget streaming service, but here we are.
Show Notes Apple Podcast Review * Battlestar Galactica * Londo Mollari * Firefly * The 100 * Moonhaven * Demolition Man * Shadowrun * Belters * Basic TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Linda Ndubuisi.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast, with your hosts: Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock and Chris Winkle.
[Intro Music]Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Saddle of Solace commentary. I’m Chris and with me is…
Oren: Oren
Chris: and…
Wes: Wes
Chris: All you had to do was keep a straight face; couldn’t do it?
Oren: Maybe if you’d given me some warning instead of just immediately upending a cup of holistic depression on us.
Wes: Yeah, no heads up on that.
Chris: So, I know this looks like episode 411 but it’s actually episode 3000. An episode from the future in which we have renamed the podcast, obviously. But it’s surprisingly like the podcast our listeners know today, except that it’s broadcasting from a spaceship. And sometimes we have a computer on as a guest host, but otherwise it’s the same.
Oren: It’s more chrome for some reason. A lot of chrome and earth tones. A lot of earth tones.
Chris: So, this time we’re talking about futuristic societies and whether they involve cups of depression, apparently.
Oren: I’ve seen Picard when he was in the early seasons; he was not a happy man.
Wes: No. I think, isn’t that just kind of a thing? If they’re talking about the future, they’re like, “Oh, the future, everything’s better because of technology.” And they’re like, “Actually, no twist.” It’s horrible.
Oren: Or even if there’s no twist, it’ll be like, “Everything’s better because of technology.” And then the characters will be like, “Ah…I reminisce for the old days.” And I’m back here living in the old days being like, “No, no, you don’t.”
Chris: It does feel like most, both utopias and dystopias, are future societies. Not that you can’t do that with the past or other world fantasy, but that’s what people tend to think about. I think one of the biggest things is how different should society be? I do feel like in a lot of cases, there’s just a lack of imagination happening. Battlestar Galactica, I think, is the biggest culprit because they even have a Secretary of Education that is in line to inherit the presidency, which is like a very specific government setup. And it’s just… how did the US get to another planet? I don’t…
Oren: I don’t know, they did it in Star Trek too. So somehow it happened, I guess. Do you not believe in the theory of parallel legal evolution?
Chris: Convergent governments?
Wes: Is that just the storyteller wanting to try to keep some things familiar? It’s like, “Oh, well, if I have to create a new system of government that adds to the cognitive burden, and I want them to be burdened by my aliens or my tech?”
Oren: It’s very clear that the people who made Battlestar Galactica, what they desperately wanted to make was a show about a World War II Pacific aircraft carrier with the Secretary of State on board having to be made the president because everyone else is dead and the characters taking off in Hellcat fighters. But they didn’t have that. They had the rights to Battlestar Galactica. And so they did the closest they could.
Wes: Okay, okay.
Chris: I guess if they wanted a quick explanation for why a character could have one role and then suddenly find herself president, even though she’s actually the Secretary of Education, using a similar government role to the US would make people understand that at the same time, it’s not really a difficult concept.
Wes: No, yeah.
Oren: Yeah, I’d say the strongest thing they get out of it is that they get to play on the existing, I would say, disrespect for teachers because that’s a thing that Roslyn has to deal with early. People are like, “She’s a school teacher.” And it’s like, well, A – “No, she’s not”; B – “The heck.” And that is a thing that exists in the real world, unfortunately, where people don’t tend to respect teachers, and think that school teaching is basically daycare. And so as a result, there’s a certain visceral like, “Okay, I see what they’re saying there when they say that thing.” And that would be a little trickier to get if we said that she was the grand whiz-ba of the Department of Edu-Learning. Well, obviously, we wouldn’t make it that silly. If we named it something more fictional, there would be a slightly bigger degree of separation between the viewers and the drama that is happening.
It also might just be… honestly, the more that I think about it, the more that I wonder if it might be breaking theme because man, again, the inside of Galactica, and the ships in general are designed to look so much like real naval ships, in the uniforms and in their consoles and in their sidearms, and everything. I kind of wonder if it, maybe, would have felt kind of weird if the governmental positions had fictional names.
Chris: Well, you could still use a similar government system that was still not just so obviously taken from what the US has…
Oren: That’s true.
Chris: …while keeping the relatively high realism and feeling like it could be an earth government. I mean, I think one of the problems is that people don’t like other cultures, especially when you have a big budget project where the producer could just nix anything creative, and they want to make sure the characters are relatable. It’s like we want characters to be stylish by today’s standards. Whereas when we actually look at the styles that were popular in other times, a lot of times are pretty goofy looking to us. Like Lando from Babylon 5, which I guess the rumor is that was a joke that both people thought the other person was serious, but it was not.
Oren: Oh, Londo.
Chris: Londo, yeah, sorry, Londo.
Oren: I thought we were talking about Lando from Star Wars. Like, “Is he not stylish?”
Chris: Oh no, he’s very stylish.
Oren: It’s like, “He’s Billy Dee Williams, can he be not stylish?”
Chris: Probably not.
Oren: Yeah, that’s the fan theory – it’s that that was supposedly… the Centauri hairstyle was supposed to be a joke that people ended up taking seriously. I don’t know if that’s true, but that’s the internet rumor.
Chris: And of course, then we have to make the characters all follow the same lifestyles, right? Like, it’s too much to include queer people in our optimistic future unless some studio executive thinks that it’s acceptable for the current day audience. I think with novels, it gets easier because individual novelists are more able to push boundaries, get more creative, and they’re expected to, I think, in many ways.
Oren: Yeah, well, a novelist can at least be perhaps slightly ahead of the curve, whereas TV shows tend to be slightly behind it. And of course, it varies on where you are, right? But nowadays, Star Trek finally has openly queer characters; after decades, it finally has them. And the number of openly queer characters that Star Trek has would still seem pretty conservative if you were just in an average neighborhood in Seattle, and the level of acceptance of queer characters would seem maybe a little behind the times in some ways. We have a couple of gay characters. We do have one trans character, which is unfortunately uncommon even today; whereas in real life, there are many, many different kinds of queer people, and they don’t really exist on Star Trek at all yet.
Whereas in a novel, you can push it a little further and you can have more like the culture books, which are not perfect, certainly, but at least in the culture where everyone’s super high tech and they have magic medical technology, you can change sexual and gender expression basically however you want. And it still comes at it from the default of assuming that you begin as a cis straight person and then you change into something else. And there’s a character who’s like, “I’m too manly to do that.” And it’s like, “Okay, so this isn’t great.”
Wes: No, not good.
Oren: But it’s more forward thinking than Star Trek was at that time, right?
Chris: I also sometimes think about Firefly, where we have this premise that China was really culturally influential, and the characters swear in Chinese, they sometimes make Chinese food. But we have surprisingly few Chinese characters. Like, “Where are all the Chinese people?”
Oren: Do we have any? I think there is one Asian background posse guy.
Wes: I think that’s all.
Chris: So it’s just like, “Okay, well, you wanted to create the idea that culture change, but all we ended up with was a bunch of white people swearing in Chinese,” and that’s kind of a problem.
Oren: Or at least a bunch of Americans swear in Chinese, right? I mean, the show has a fair number of black characters, which I don’t want to discount. That’s still a good thing and still unfortunately uncommon in some areas. But it is just very glaring when they say that this world is largely influenced by China, but not by anyone Chinese. Like, “Where are they?”
Chris: The one story I’ve seen where it feels like things have changed too much for the amount of time that’s supposed to have passed is in the show The 100 – It’s supposed to be only a 100 years later. And I would just have to… when I was watching it, every time they would say the amount of time I would just plug my ears and be like, “la la la… I can’t hear you.”
Oren: It’s like, “Turn that up by a factor of 10.” Right?
Chris: Right. It feels like it’s closer to a thousand years. And I liked the world building in that show – people have their own holidays and their own religion – but the people on the ground have evolved their own language, and that does not happen in a hundred years.
Oren: But they all also still speak standard media accent English.
Chris: Which is hilarious.
Oren: For some reason.
Chris: But if you all speak English, why did you create another language? How does that work? The other thing is that people have biologically evolved to have varying levels of radiation resistance – and that’s another one, there’s no way that could possibly happen in a hundred years; it’s too short. But most cases, stories tend to err in the other direction.
Oren: Yeah, The 100 does a pretty good job of creating a fictional culture, timelines aside. Admittedly, I used to have stronger opinions on this than I do, just because I used to feel more confident in trying to talk about what future societies would look like. And then I learned more about how societies work, and I’m like, “Oh, this is too complicated. I have no idea.” And I also learned that in a lot of places where the writer does try to make a society that is markedly different from the one that we have now, often it comes off as annoying or contrived, and at that point, I’m like, “I mean, maybe it’s better to be safe and just call it the Secretary of Education” because then at least, you aren’t season one TNG, with a world where no one grieves.
Chris: Oren, would you like to tell us how Moonhaven hurt you?
Oren: That show has upset me a lot. So Moonhaven, if you haven’t seen it, is on AMC+, I think, one of a million streaming services that no one asked for.
Chris: The service that you sign up for just to watch interview with a Vampire.
Oren: Yeah. So, the show just has a couple of things going for it immediately wrong. The premise is that we created a moon colony where they would try to figure out a solution to climate change, and to do that we terraformed the moon. And I’m like, “Okay, have you tried using that technology on Earth? Maybe explore that idea a little bit.” So then we go to Moonhaven, and there are certain things about the culture that are objectively just really weird and don’t really make sense. Like, they have almost no violence, but also they’re extremely jaded to violence, and when violence happens, it doesn’t bother them at all to the point where they just seem weird and unreal. And they have a bizarre, like, “We’re going to take children away from their birth parents and make other people raise them,” which is just such the whitest thing. White people think that having your children taken away and raised by someone else is a fun novel experiment.
Chris: Just to go into the “How weird this system is”; at first they framed it like they’re doing communal child rearing, but then it turns out they’re not doing communal child rearing. They’ve just decided that they’re going to take children away from their biological parents and give them to other parents instead. It’s a little unclear whether the children sometime while they’re growing up rotate families at all, but that’s just a really bad idea, right? Because children need some continuity, so you wouldn’t want to just move them from one household to another. And of course, when we get a lot of very strange societies that are like dystopian and futuristic, there’s often an explanation. It’s like, “Well, this really bad thing happened, so we did this.” And it’s usually very unrealistic because that’s just not how we react when bad events happen. In this case, their explanation is supposed to be that these moon people at one point broke into these feuding family factions, and so they did this to break up the family loyalty. But it doesn’t make any sense because now we’re assuming there would be no loyalty between parents and children if they’re not genetically related.
Oren: And yet at the same time, the show thinks that there’s a mystical, magical connection between blood relatives because when one of the moon cops finds out that his blood mom is dying – this woman who he’s apparently never interacted with before – he goes to see her and they share this like, “Oh, I know you and we know who each other is” moment. And it’s like, “This woman is a complete stranger to you.” It’s like, “Nah, but she gave birth to him, so they have a mystical connection.” And it’s like, “How can you get both of those things so wrong in the same show?”
Chris: Yeah, it’s strange because this is supposed to be utopian society, although it’s kind of questionable how much authorial endorsement there really is for it. But there is to some level, right? So having a system where we take children away from their bio parents, but at the same time we’re also making biological relation look super important is just kind of, “ugh”.
Oren: It’s just, it feels like two mistakes wouldn’t be made at the same time, and yet here we are. And the reason why that show just upset me is I hate being talked down to – it sets me off. And I know nobody likes being talked down to – “I’m very special” – but it upsets me a lot. And the show is basically nothing but talking down to you because the premise is that to solve climate change, sure, maybe some new technologies would be helpful, but really what you need is a bunch of self-help gurus to come and teach you to live differently on an individual level. And at this point, it’s like, I don’t know if that view ends up being validated or not by the end because I stopped watching at four episodes, but even entertaining that view was just too upsetting for me; I just couldn’t do it.
Chris: Right? The basic premise that the show is working off of is the idea that they set up some sort of utopia on the moon, and now they want that utopia to come and basically do cultural conquest to make the earth just like it. It’s so strange for a number of reasons; One is, if the earth has the political will enough to actually do this, then they don’t need the moon people. Right? Because they could just use that political will to solve their problems. And also the idea that we would specifically set up our problem solving on the moon is just a very… like, “Why would we do that?” Just like why would we terraform the moon instead of use terraforming technology to fix environmental problems on earth. So we just have a very absurd premise on the space. I do like that, again, the writers weren’t afraid to make moon culture different. And they do have some interesting things; there’s clearly… it feels very millennial-ish, lots of discussion of feelings where they’re not afraid to be vulnerable, and a lot of what they do is managing feelings – and that’s really important to them. And I think it’s supposed to be like, “This is how they stop violence.” It is very irritating that the whole framing here is that they can have a utopian society if everybody just manage their feelings and there’s no protection against bad actors. Like the idea that you could create a utopia that’s… by making every person perfect instead of dealing with the inevitable person. If one asshole can mess up the entire system, it’s not a good system.
Oren: Look, in real life, we know why climate change is happening – it’s a combination of our technology working a certain way, and incentives that reward people for exploiting the system to become hugely wealthy at everyone else’s expense; that’s why climate change is happening on a very abstract level. Moonhaven is like, “But what if it was actually the individual people are assholes?” And it’s like, “That’s not why climate change is happening. It’s really frustrating that you are trying to phrase climate change on an individual problem level. Like, we could just fix it if we were all nicer to each other.”
Wes: All I’m hearing from this is that… Moonhaven is the name of the show?
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: …is brought to you by big oil and conservatives who would rather build a horrible colony on the moon than raise taxes or cut emissions.
Oren: Honestly, it does feel that way. It’s like when they’re talking about “We’re going to send the mooners to earth to teach them how to live better.” It’s like, “Are the mooners going to dismantle exploitative capitalism? Are they going to make Enron give all of the money to green energy?” No, they’re not going to do any of those things. They’re just going to give little seminars where they tell you to self-actualize better – it’s horrible. Yeah, it just really upset me; I did not like it. And so that was why I stopped watching because at this point, it was like, “I’m not a critic anymore, I’m just mad.”
Chris: It’s funny because some people think that you’re mad at everything you criticize, but what happens when Oren is actually mad at a show? But in any case, in some ways, it reminded me a little bit of Demolition Man, where the purpose there is to make fun of the libs. So we create a society that’s supposed to be libs. The funniest thing about the Demolition Man future society is the fact that there’s no sex. They never touch each other. I’m just contrasting that with, for instance, The Stand, where everybody’s all god-abiding, and then when they go to the devil’s community, it’s all about sex, with this idea of the libs as not liking sex.
Oren: Look, the libs are simultaneously depraved and sexually obsessed, but also weak beta cucks who can’t get any, depending on what part of the conservosphere you happen to be in.
Chris: It’s like the idea that the libs can’t fight, but also are very threatening. But the thing about Moonhaven is, on one hand, it feels like some of the writers really like this moon utopia, but on the other hand, it feels like it’s semi-Demolition Man-ish, because we have a main character who’s from Earth who’s tough enough to deal with moon problems.
Oren: Yeah, I definitely feel like the direction it was going was supposed to be like, “Well, maybe we have some things to teach each other.” Right? I think that’s the version it was going, which could have been fine if we weren’t starting from such a terrible place. If it didn’t feel like the entire point of the moon colony was to deflect blame away from the people who are responsible for climate change, this wouldn’t be a problem – it’s horrible.
Wes: Yeah, but it’s still hitting on the theme that futuristic societies are using advanced tech to perpetuate class and societal differences – that seems to be a feature of it. And I guess it’s like, “To what extent is your tech controlling or limiting your characters or freeing them?” And there’s some balance there, right?
Oren: Well, that’s actually an interesting little contradiction that I found in cyberpunk stories that are told in the Shadowrun model. I don’t mean with the elves and the magic that is also in Shadowrun, but I’m specifically thinking of the type of cyberpunk where everyone’s got robot limbs and enhanced senses and wired reflexes. The sort of stuff that in the original Neuromancer that so much of cyberpunk draws from were actually very rare. It’s like cyberpunk has a lot of themes about “How technology is controlling you,” but also as part of the power fantasy a lot of these cyberpunk stories have people running around just doing amazing things they couldn’t possibly do, except that they have all this technology in them, and it’s a little weird. It’s also like a lot of these cyberpunk stories are trying the punk part, right? They’re trying to focus on the idea of these characters being poor and on the margins of society, but they also have machine guns for legs. I don’t know of the last time you tried to buy a machine gun, but they’re not cheap. That’s always struck me as weird. It’s like, “We’re very poor and downtrodden, but also check out my nuclear powered heart transplant.” I’m not saying I want that to go away. I like Shadowrunners with cyber legs running around and doing cool stuff – I also enjoy that – so I’m not saying you should stop. It’s just an interesting contradiction that I noticed.
Chris: I will say as far as I can tell, the best story so far for creating a future society is The Expanse, because The Expanse world is not for every story – it’s specifically high realism – and because it’s a hard sci-fi story that’s not in too far of the future, and it just takes place in our solar system. But the fact that it shows people growing apart and changing at a realistic rate, right? So it’s not like we go to various parts of the solar system and the culture is exactly the same as we know it today, but it’s also not weirdly wildly different. And the power dynamics of the different people in the solar system are very realistic.
Oren: I liked the various details of Belter culture; of things like, there’s a huge emphasis on being detail oriented because your life support systems might fail, and they have a lot of movements in their communication because they’re often communicating through space suits where you can’t necessarily see a shrug or your radio might go out, so you need to use like a more obvious hand gesture – I thought that was very neat – and the focus on different foods that you can more easily make in space was cool. I did find it a little off-putting that for some reason the Belters are the only people whose English has changed in several centuries. For some reason, apparently no one on Mars has any Hindi in their English even though a huge number of the original Martian settlers are supposed to have been Hindi speakers. So that was a little weird, right? And like you know, Earth still speaks in standard media accent English, but the Belters have this very distinct patois – as it’s known – and that was a little off-putting to me. I get that we’re trying to make the Belters higher novelty but I just… I feel like there was a better way. Also, while we’re on the topic of social stuff at The Expanse, I really, really wish they’d come up with a better way to portray basic – this is their version of universal basic income; that’s why it’s called basic. And in the books the idea is that you’re on basic, and then you basically just kind of die inside – is the premise.
Wes: Great.
Oren: Like, the people who are on basic are portrayed as doing nothing, and just kind of sitting around all day. And it’s like, “Okay that’s just kind of insulting and not realistic.”
Chris: If you ever want to know what basic income would be like, just think of all the retirees that you know. A lot of them are actually very busy, even busier than they were when they were still working because they fill up their time with other things.
Oren: And then in the show, they found a different way to be weird about basic, because in the show basic is terrible, and everyone on basic is like sick and can’t get medical care and is miserable. And it’s like, “Okay, so I guess this program is just not very well run – is I guess what is happening here.” But it definitely feels like the implication is supposed to be that state providing for you is bad for some reason. And I was like, “This is a weird political message for The Expanse; I don’t like it.”
Chris: So, random tips if you’re trying to name characters who are in the future?
Oren: You should name them things that are like qualities but are not qualities they have. So for example, your character could be named Solo if he is notable for being part of a duo because he has a partner named Chewbacca.
Chris: In any case, if you’re in a futuristic setting, you want a name that sounds modern but doesn’t sound like a name we have today. So, some ideas are you can associate current names with genders that they’re not normally associated with today. For instance, The 100, the main character’s name is Clark, and it’s a woman. You can turn last names into first names. You can use some names that are historical or out of fashion because there’s a lot of interesting names out there that a lot of people aren’t using, and names can come back into fashion. You can also shorten some of those historical names into nicknames. And then, oftentimes what works is just name people after other words that we use that aren’t often somebody’s name, like sparrow or maple – that kind of thing. You can imagine those becoming names and going to vogue. So, a few tips there.
Oren: If your story takes place roughly a few decades from now, it would not be unrealistic to encounter characters named after Game of Thrones. I’m not saying you should, I’m just saying you can.
Well, with that I think we are going to call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you enjoyed this episode please support us on Patreon – go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: Now I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First we have Callie Macleod. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who is a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Next we have Eamon Jopper, he’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally we have Danita Rambo; she lives at therembogueeks.com.
We will talk to you next week.
[Outro Music]
Your hero is going on their adventure, so what do they need to bring with them? A sword probably, but perhaps also a compass to find the way, a lute to lift spirits around the campfire, or maybe even a jaunty cap so everyone will recognize this great adventurer! Over time, these tools might become so associated with the character that they’re now signature items, which is what we’re talking about this week!
Show Notes Special Abilities * The Impala * The Alethiometer * Stiles’ Jeep * Hunter: The Vigil * Indiana Jones’ Hat * Mutt Williams * The Batsignal * The Hylian Shield * Link’s Glider * Aang’s Glider * The Eye of Sauron * Sting * The Horn of Gondor * Mr. Pointy (which we forgot was originally Kendra’s) * Maplecroft * Web-Shooters TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Kavin Jayakumar.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock and Chris Winkle.
[Intro Music]Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Myth Green podcast. I’m Oren. With me today is-
Wes: Wes.
Oren: and-
Chris: Chris.
Oren: Now we need to figure out what we’re doing for this podcast. So first let me check my topical meter.
Oren: And it turns out we’re doing an episode about signature items. I really hope that being able to read this topical meter never becomes overpowered.
Wes: I’m sure we’ll use it responsibly and not abuse it at all.
Oren: This is a bit of part two to the special abilities podcast because signature items are similar, but not usually the same. And they fill a similar role, but are different.
And there’s one thing I appreciate. It’s things that are similar, but different.
Chris: Well, anytime we want to give you spinach, Oren, all we have to do is rake your topical meter.
Oren: Oh no, that’s my only useful skill is reading the topical meter.
Wes: I guess you have to find somebody with a knife that can cut through ghosts.
Oren: Oh, I hate that.
Wes: It’s fine. It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.
Oren: Yeah. Signature items are often weapons, but not always. And they’re often magic, but not always, which is a little bit different from the special abilities because as I talked about in that podcast, most special abilities are magical or supernatural in some capacity. It’s, I’m not going to say it’s impossible to have a regular skill be a special ability, but it would be very challenging.
Chris: So here’s a question. Does a signature item have to be positive for the character? Can I call a spinning wheel Sleeping Beauty’s signature item, for instance?
Oren: In terms of sandwich discourse, I would say probably not in the original or not original, but in the classic version of the story, because the spinning wheel is sort of something that happens to her. It’s not really something that she uses, but I could very easily see a re-imagining of Sleeping Beauty where she has a signature spinning wheel that she uses, because that is an item that is associated with her in the lore as it were.
Wes: I was kind of thinking that for it to be a signature item, if you cosplayed as that character and you didn’t have that item, it’d be kind of like, wait, who are you? That’s kind of where I’m going with.
Chris: But what about vehicles then? Because for some characters, the vehicle is kind of their signature item.
Oren: Oh, absolutely. Again, we’re starting to sort of get blurry here because vehicles are sort of their own thing, but in something like Supernatural, the car is definitely a signature item. It’s probably the most distinctive signature item that any of the characters have, is their Impala. So that is clearly an example of a signature item that is a car. In some cases we can get a little weird, like, is the Enterprise Picard signature item? I wouldn’t say so.
Wes: No, it’s Earl Grey hot.
Oren: Yeah, it’s Earl Grey.
Chris: I would say that the vehicle has to have a special association with a character. The Millennium Falcon, for instance, is very associated with Han. I think an even better example is Stiles from Teen Wolf has an old Jeep. It’s associated with him, for one thing. It’s clearly used to characterize him, to give him more character in that he really loves this old Jeep and continues to duct tape the engine whenever it breaks down. I think it’s also useful for the show just to have a vehicle that is always breaking down and then we need to explain why they keep using it. But also, it gives him something that he can contribute, which a lot of times that’s what a signature item does. If it gives a character more capabilities, it’s what allows them to participate in the story. So since Stiles is the only non-magical character for most of the show, that’s important. That’s on the central cast. Then he has a vehicle that he can use to make himself useful so he can drive people around.
Wes: Yeah, there’s definitely an element with signature items where so much of the character gets imbued into it. It has much more of an extension of who they are, significance. Like those scenes where Stiles is duct taping it together to do his best to not let it fail. He sees himself in the car. It’s an extension of who he is and what he contributes. So it’s a very literal connection between item and person.
Oren: One of the funnest role playing game abilities I’ve ever seen was from Hunter the Vigil and there was a signature weapon special ability that you could take and it didn’t make you do more damage or attack better when you were using the weapon. It gave you a morale boost. Just like that’s really neat. That’s a cool way of interpreting that. I liked that. In general, you want it to be something that is useful in some capacity. That’s what separates a signature item from a signature look. Like someone could have a cool hat that they always wear and that the hat is associated with them because it’s part of their look. But unless they’re like doing something with the hat, it doesn’t really serve the same storytelling function.
Chris: Indiana Jones has a hat. That’s really important. And I think in this case, it’s more than just his complete look, especially since often it’s a device. It’s not that it necessarily helps him, but usually in a movie, he’ll almost lose the hat in an extremely dangerous situation and then just last minute manage to grab it again. And so you see him interacting with the hat, even though the hat itself, I suppose it probably keeps the sun and rain out of his eyes.
Oren: Yeah, it does do that. I’ll give it that much.
Wes: Yeah, but they clearly knew how important it was to who he is because in the last crusade, they had to do the opening flash extended flashback. I don’t know the scene of him is like a teenager and he gets the hat from those treasure hunters. That guy gives him the hat at the end of it and then it flash forwards into present time. But that’s his identity. The hat is him.
Chris: It also doesn’t feel at least to me, it didn’t feel awkward and like some of the Star Wars prequels with Han. We need to figure out why he has the last name Solo. And it’s like, well, we didn’t need an explanation for that. But it feels appropriate to see Indiana Jones backstory where he gets the hat.
Wes: Well, they did the hat and the whip in that backstory. It was done pretty well and on a moving train, no less.
Chris: And then at the end of the crystal skull, we even have this moment where his hat flies off towards Shia LaBeouf’s character. And it looks like it’s supposed to be like a passing of the baton moment where he picks up the hat and he’s about to put it on and then Indiana last minute comes and grabs it from him. It’s like, no, my hat.
Oren: Look, I think they already knew by that point that most people were not going to particularly like the character of Mutt. Possibly because they named him Mutt. That wasn’t helping him at all. So I think they realized that giving him Indy’s hat at the end of the movie would make people hate it even more than they already did.
Chris: One that I think is pretty funny is I really feel like Commissioner Gordon’s signature item is the Batman summoner. His spotlight.
Wes: Oh, no. That’s so good.
Chris: It’s like that’s all he can do is summon Batman.
Oren: Like, God damn it, Bruce, get a burner phone. Yeah. We have phones now. My God, what if you’re somewhere where you can’t see the clouds? That’s an example of something that’s so important to Batman’s aesthetic that they don’t get rid of it. No matter how gritty Batman gets, they will still have Gordon summon him with a spotlight that’s bat shaped. This doesn’t fit at all with this extremely gritty Robert Pattinson Batman. But that’s part of Batman’s lore and we can’t get rid of it. It would be like saying it doesn’t really make sense for you to dress like a bat. And he’s like, yeah, you’re right. It doesn’t really make sense. I could just wear normal.
Chris: What do you do if it’s a clear night and there’s no clouds in
the sky?
Wes: No crime.
Oren: You hope you don’t need Batman. But it’s also it’s Gotham. Let’s not pretend it’s not always raining in Gotham.
Chris: There is that.
Wes: A signature item that comes to mind as we were talking about fashion would be Legend of Zelda Link. I’m not talking Master Sword. I think the hood and the shield very much are the things you have to have. Obviously, there’s the little tunic thing, but the shield I think is very important. The Hyrulean shield has such a designated aesthetic to it. Getting that thing in Breath of the Wild was hard. But when I got it, I was like, OK, now I’m Link. I’ve got the right gear at this point.
Oren: I would have said overall that Link’s most iconic signature item is actually his grappling hook. I’m not an expert on Zelda, right? It’s just that the grappling hook stands out because a lot of people have swords. A lot of people have shields. And most of the time, the Master Sword is not really distinguishable from another sword. Sometimes it shoots lasers, which is not common. Most swords don’t do that. But most of the time it’s just a sword. Breath of the Wild, it regenerates after it breaks, which is an interesting mechanic. Whereas not a ton of characters have grappling hooks, especially not in high fantasy. Most characters who have grappling hooks are in a superhero genre, whereas Link has a grappling hook. So that’s the item I most associate with him. That and bombs.
Chris: Mabel does.
Oren: Oh, yeah. Mabel has a grappling hook.
Chris: Gravity Falls. Got a grappling hook.
Wes: They did notably leave the grappling hook out of the Breath of the Wild game because you have to climb and it’s always raining.
Oren: Yeah, they’re not going to let you grappling hook. Although in Breath of the Wild, they added a new signature item, which is his glider.
Wes: Yes.
Oren: Or at least I think that’s new. Maybe that’s been in previous games. I don’t know.
Wes: The glider was cool. Avatar comes to mind, last airbender, another glider as a signature item.
Oren: Yeah, that glider. I like that glider in Avatar. It’s a little OP, but it’s very cool. I also love how the presence of that glider outmodes the big villain in season three of Korra’s entire special ability. Because he’s like, my special ability is I can fly. And they’re like, we can all fly, man. All of us. We have these glider things. That’s not, you’re not special.
Wes: That was so disappointing because it’s like, oh man, what is the next tier of airbending going to be? We’ve got the lava and the lightning and the metal. It’s like, I can fly. Oh, okay. Although maybe you could argue that it was ripping the air out of people.
Oren: Yeah, that is a much more impressive thing that he does. But of course, he can’t actually use that for anything other than controlling the air. And cutscene deaths, because that’s one of those, if he used that in an actual fight, it would be extremely boring. It’s the same reason why no one is ever actually allowed to use bloodbending except for villains in special scenes. Because bloodbending means we can’t have elemental kung fu fights. And that is what everyone is here to watch. This is why there are no guns in Avatar. Nobody is here to watch people shoot guns at each other.
Chris: So does the eye qualify as Sauron’s signature item? Or is it just Sauron? I’ve always been unclear about that part.
Wes: Or is it just the ring?
Oren: Like Sauron is sort of just an eye, I think. I don’t know. He’s recursive Sauron in the Hobbit movies. That’s a pretty signature item right there. I just sort of thought the eye was him. I didn’t really think of it as an item. The ring is kind of weird because it’s a MacGuffin and Frodo has it the most. But you’re kind of hard pressed to say that it belongs to Frodo.
Chris: His purpose is to be the ring bearer. So I do think it’s kind of iconic for him. And if you were, for instance, to dress up as Frodo and go to a con, it would be a little weird if you didn’t have the one ring. That would generally be expected. So it does define Frodo, but it’s still kind of antagonistic.
Oren: Sting is Frodo’s more traditional iconic item, which he got from Bilbo. It was Bilbo’s before him. I never get tired of talking about Sting because it’s a very cool weapon because it glows when orcs are near, which is just much more interesting than plus one to attack and damage.
Chris: I guess I associate Sting with more with Bilbo than Frodo.
Oren: Bilbo finds it, but I would say Frodo spends all three Lord of the Rings books with it. I feel like that’s more his item than Bilbo’s after a certain point.
Wes:I guess Bilbo just gets maybe a little bit more direct use out of it. And Frodo’s like always going into danger. He’s like, oh God, this thing doesn’t shut up.
Oren: Yeah, it’s always glowing. It’s just a night light now.
Wes: A signature item from Fellowship that I liked that definitely didn’t get that much play in the movie was Boromir’s the Horn of Gondor.
Oren: Yeah, the horn!
Wes: Is awesome because in the book the way it’s described when he blows that thing, it’s just like a force. This thing’s been handed down from all the stewards of Gondor. It’s got this lore and legacy about it. And in the movie, they get ambushed by orcs and Boromir’s trying to blow it. And Aragorn’s like, oh crap, we gotta go! A little disappointing.
Oren: Yeah, I love the Horn of Gondor in the books. That is such an unusual signature item for a badass fighter to have. Normally they’d be like, this is my magic sword, Irindel, forged by Birindel at the Smithies of Lirindel. That’s normally how Lord of the Rings does it. And I’m like, I don’t care. I’m already asleep. And then Boromir’s like, I got this horn. Let me give that a quick blow. And then I’m literally blown away by that horn.
Wes: It’s like all the force of a didgeridoo, but nice and compact for travel.
Oren: There’s just something neat about this cool warrior’s most useful item being a thing that calls for help. That’s just a neat idea, right? It just goes against the standard, I’m a badass and I don’t need no one attitude that you expect a cool Rizzled warrior to have. It’s just very neat. I like it a lot. And of course, there’s the classic we were making jokes about earlier, which is the Alethiometer from the Golden Compass. It shows the classic problems that you can have with one of these things because it works really well in the Golden Compass when Lyra is still trying to figure out how to use it. But then like in the later books, once she knows how to use it, she can basically find out anything. And so you just have to stop wondering why she isn’t using it to find out more things.
Wes: It also jumps to a new level of how contrived it is with her using it. At the end, she kind of just loses her ability to use it entirely. And so she was just basically an avatar channeling dust and that was it. At least in the first book, it felt like she was doing it herself.
Oren: Right. She was figuring out what the symbols meant. But by the second and third book, admittedly, sure, I get that it would probably get old after a while for her to constantly be trying to figure out the symbols. Maybe that was only cool for one book, but that’s something you have to think about. You have to plan ahead with these items. Whenever your hero is learning something, always plan ahead to what the story will look like once they have learned it.
Chris: I also just think it would have been neat if there had been more conflicts around her trying to interpret it. I’ve got these three symbols and I think I know what these two mean, but not this one. And then she figures it out at some point instead of just like, oh, I just have a feeling I just know what the symbol means. In some cases, if you can come up with new conflicts and new interesting ways to interpret the symbols, it will give it more longevity in the story. After a while, people might still get tired of symbol puzzles, but you could probably do a few of them.
Oren: That would certainly have extended the alethiometer’s usefulness, since that would give a tangible thing that she still hasn’t quite figured out. Like the next step as opposed to like, well, I can basically ask it anything now, which is where we are at the end of the first book.
Chris: How about Mr. Pointy?
Oren: Oh, in Buffy? Yeah, absolutely.
Chris: Buffy the Vampire Slayer?
Oren: To the extent that you can tell one steak from another, right?
Chris: Like, oh. That’s the funny thing, because we all associate Buffy holding a steak, but as far as we know, she constantly goes through steak. But at some point we learned she has a steak named Mr. Pointy. It’s not really clear how much real continuity there is in that, but we can assume she has a lucky steak.
Oren: I’m gonna go back and do the CinemaSins thing of being like, eh, continuity error, that’s a different steak.
Chris: To be fair, when she steaks a character, they usually turn to dust and it leaves a steak in her hand. So she could bring you this Mr. Point quite a lot.
Oren: Yeah, except I think she lost it when she stabbed that government official in season three.
Chris: Oh no.
Wes: Oh gosh.
Oren: That was the death of the first Mr. Pointy. You don’t ask Buffy about that, she’s still kind of traumatized over the whole thing. But urban fantasy is a pretty decent place for signature items, because then you can start to add magic to it in a way that you wouldn’t necessarily do in a high fantasy story unless it was a very high magic story.
Chris: Or you could do Wizard of Oz, where the signature items are inside them all along.
Wes: Oh, what a con.
Oren: Except for the woodsman with his ax, he kills a lot of wolves with that ax.
Wes: He’s all covered in rust because it’s just dried blood. That guy’s a beast.
Oren: Yeah, he just murders lots of creatures. He is a killing machine.
Wes: Speaking of axes, I recently told Oren that I’ve been listening to Maplecroft.
Oren: Yeah.
Wes: And so Lizzie Borden’s iron ax is so cool. It’s just stuff I never would have thought. It’s like, what if we did a Deep Ones Cthulhu type story, these eldritch horrors? You know, okay, we better get guns. It’s like, no, what if you just had an ax? And I’m like, yes, this is better.
Oren: Well, the ax in the Borden books, first of all, it has the cultural weight of the trope of Lizzie Borden took an ax. Because these books are Lizzie Borden versus Cthulhu is the concept. Then, like, in universe, they find a way to make the ax special because the Deep One type monsters are vulnerable to iron and their bullets aren’t made of iron, but the ax is. Now, granted, once they know that, logically, you could make iron bullets, but we’re not gonna.
Chris: Just like putting the devil’s traps on bullets.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: That’s super natural.
Oren: Oh, God. That upset me so much when they did that and then just forgot they could do it.
Wes: But there’s something about a melee weapon like that. The first scene where she describes that Deep One trying to get into the house and how she just like takes it out. And it’s just this gory mess of this corrosive fluids and salt water and stuff. And the ax has a bunch of gore on it and it’s sizzling. And she thinks that the blood is corroding the ax, but no, the ax is corroding the blood. The iron is dissolving it. That moment of realization was so cool in the book. And then she goes and puts nails in all the windows around the entire house. Gotta nail everything shut, put iron all over the place.
Chris: And I did love all the details about how she had to dispose of the creatures’ bodies so they wouldn’t attract more creatures.
Oren: Yeah, she also has that furnace, Chekhov’s furnace, as it turns out.
Chris: But yeah, there’s Boba Fett.
Oren: He’s a character made of signature items.
Chris: That’s basically what he is, yes.
Oren: And now Din Djarin has them all.
Wes: It’s true, I was gonna say, Boba Fett has so many… He is a walking signature item that they had to make all the Mandalorians Boba Fetts.
Oren: Yeah, they all have those things. They got the jet packs and the rocket and the grappling hook and the armor. They got everything. They even added one that Boba Fett doesn’t actually have, but that they mention, which is a disintegration gun. Mando starts the show with a rifle that disintegrates things. Man, I wish they would get that back for him. I don’t like that he doesn’t have it. It was a really cool weapon, now he just has a normal blaster pistol, which is boring. And he still has shells for the disruptor gun. He still has them, you can see them on his costume. But he doesn’t have a gun for them, and why is he still carrying those?
Chris: Because they look cool.
Oren: Now granted, he doesn’t have anywhere to put that gun anymore, because they decided his new ship is a one seat-
Wes: The tiniest ship in the world.
Chris: I was like, how is he supposed to bounty hunt with that thing? There’s no place to put people.
Oren: There are a bunch of think pieces about it.
Chris: Oh really? What’s the hottest take then?
Oren: The consensus seems to be emerging that either A, he’s going to get another ship, and maybe the Naboo fighter will be like attached to the bottom or something, or he’s just not going to do any bounty hunting in the new season. Because the new season seems to be gearing up to be a story of the struggle for leadership of the Mandalorians, so it’s possible he just doesn’t do any bounty hunting. Now of course, he doesn’t know that, so that still raises the question of why he would want a single seat fighter, but we’ll see how it goes.
Wes: Maybe it’s just he didn’t have any better options. He’s like, well, I’m broke and you’re offering to put this together for me. You do think though, with all the Mandalorians having the Boba Fett signature items, it’s like if your alleged culture is weapons, he says like weapons are my religion when he’s trying to get onto public transport. Well then why aren’t you guys making new ones? You’ve got this armorer who’s very cool, just making the same old stuff. Come on, innovate a bit.
Oren: Oh no, that’s the secret commentary. It’s because they can’t innovate, because the weapons have become part of their entrenched dogma. So they’re not allowed to change. Aha! We made it deep.
Wes: That’s why the Empire beat them.
Chris: I’m sure there’s also an unreliable narrative.
Oren: While we’re having hot takes, a signature item that I think is bad and I wish would go away, even though I know it never will, are Spider-Man’s web shooters.
Wes: Well what if you just made it genetic and his web shooters are part of his body?
Oren: You should do that. I was so confused when it turned out that wasn’t the default.
Chris: That was really interesting in Spider-Man No Way Home, where they bought multiple Spider-Mans together. They were able to compare and contrast. Wait, it just comes out of your body? It’s like, yeah. But hey, if you’re bit by a spider, it seems awfully coincidental if then you invent web shooters.
Oren: Right, that’s the weirdest thing, okay? I was so confused because I was like, all right, so he gets his powers from a spider bite. I’m like, all right, what are his powers? His powers are super strength. That’s his main one. That’s not a spider power. I don’t know why he has that. And then he has awareness and it’s like, are spiders particularly aware of things? Is that a thing?
Chris: Spiders are psychic, didn’t you know that?
Oren: If I was gonna pick an insect that is particularly aware of its environment, I would have picked flies, not spiders.
Chris: They do have eight eyes.
Oren: They do. Maybe that’s what it’s supposed to be a reference to.
Wes: But they have to rely on their webs for sensory data.
Chris: He has psychic webs all around him.
Oren: Yeah, psychic webs, that’s what it is. And he can also climb things sometimes. The current Spider-Man doesn’t really use that much, but in some iterations he can climb things. It’s okay, that’s a spidery ability. But the most spidery thing about him is a separate invention that he made. He just thought that up. Just thought you would figure that out. It’d be like if Superman had a bunch of superpowers and then also made laser eye goggles. It’s just real weird. I liked it much better in the Tobey Maguire movies when they were just part of his power because why wouldn’t they be? That’s the most spidery thing about him. Now, I like to imagine Peter Parker being like, okay, I got bit by a spider. I need to be Spider-Man. But I can’t really do anything spider related. So how is that going to work? He’s like, I know.
Chris: This is a branding problem we need to fix.
Oren: Yeah, well, maybe he was hanging out with Kate Bishop who was talking to him about branding. And he was like,you’re right. I do need to brand myself better. And so then he made some web shooters.
Chris: If we saw that, that would actually make more sense. But I think in all the iterations of Spider-Man I’ve seen, they want a very quick transformation from Peter Parker to Spider-Man. So he gets bit by a spider and then suddenly he has all the spider things, including his invented web shooters. I don’t know how it is in the original comics if he’s inspired by his spider bite or what.
Oren: Well, okay, so in the three different live action movie sequences, Tobey Maguire, he just has his. Those are built in. The Andrew Garfield one has a little montage where he makes some web shooters. And he just coincidentally happened to be working on something strong and sticky for some reason. And then he was I know web shooters. And then he just does that. And then in the new MCU version, we don’t even see his origin story because everyone knows his origin story now. So we skipped that part. In Into the Spider-Verse, does he make web shooters? Does anyone remember? How does that go in Into the Spider-Verse?
Wes: I don’t remember Miles making those.
Oren: I don’t either. Where did he get them? Uh-oh. All right, everyone, commenters, I need you to look this up for me because we’re at the nearly at the end of the episode. I don’t have time to check it myself. But anyway, that’s my hot take on Spider-Man web shooters.
Wes: I think it’s just because they want to make it clear that, hey, let’s not forget, yeah, he’s super strong now and whatever, but he’s still like a nerd. So he used his brain power to create the thing that’s most central to his identity.
Chris: Or somebody thinks that shooting webs is gross.
Oren: They do make a lot of jokes about it. So maybe that’s what it was. Maybe they were just like, we want to avoid the, does he shoot webs out of his butt joke. They always make that joke anyway. So I don’t know what the point of that was. One last thing since we’re almost at the end here. I will say be careful with plots about how your character doesn’t need their special item because special items are cool. And most of the time, if the character depends on their special item because it does a cool thing, having an arc where they lose that special item is going to be a real bummer.
Chris: But if then they just get the special item back again after they learn they don’t need it, then it makes their arc feel like it didn’t matter.
Oren: Yeah, then it’s just a very weak arc as we see in both Moana and Thor in the MCU. They both have arcs about not needing their special weapon. And in Moana’s case, Maui just gets it back because obviously we don’t want Maui without his special hook. And then in the Thor movies in Ragnarok, he actually exchanges his hammer for cool lightning powers. And that was pretty neat. But that only lasted for a movie. And in the next movie, he gets a big ax to replace it, which is way less cool. All right, I think that’ll be it for this episode. We’re going to call things to a close.
Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, support us on Patreon. Just go to
patreon.com slash mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our patrons, assuming we still have any after my Spider-Man hot take. First, we have Callie Macleod. Then we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Next, we have Aymon Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Danita Rambo. She lives at therambogeeks.com. We’ll talk to you next week.
[Outro Music]
Hold a moment, friend. We must turn to the side and speak at length on the nature of death, almost as if there’s an invisible audience I’m talking to. And once we’re done with that, we’ll monologue a bit about how the hero can’t possibly stop our evil plan. Today, we discuss why monologues exist, what their purpose is, and why you see more about them in theater than other mediums. We even demonstrate a few monologues ourselves, though you may not be able to tell the difference from a normal episode.
Show Notes The Incredibles Monologuing * Shakespearean Monologue * The Light Brigade * Closet Drama * West Wing Walk & Talk * Interview With the Vampire * Soliloquy TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Anonomous.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.
[Intro Music]Wes: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m your host, Wes. And with me today is
Chris: Chris
Wes: and
Oren: Oran.
Wes: All right, just long rambling monologues from all three of us for today. But let me make sure we’ve got this checklist here to make sure that we make them the quintessential monologues. First, do we have the luxury of a prose narrator to explain our inner thoughts to the audience? No. All right, monologuing is off to a good start. Ready, set, Oren go.
Oren: Wait, hang on. How is this going to be different than any other episode?
Chris: The question is, do I need to hold a skull while I’m monologuing? Is that a requirement?
Wes: I think it helps to have props when you monologue, generally. I do think we should address this head on at the start is what is a monologue?
Oren: But who is monologue?
Wes: And who is monologue? Because, you know, you could say like, oh, it’s just a long speech. Right? And the answer is yes, no.
Chris: Are we going with the traditional theater definition of monologue?
Wes: We should start with that, or at least talk about it throughout the whole thing, because the whole point of a monologue is to share information that would not readily come up in dialogue for the benefit of the audience.
Chris: The question I have is how much does that traditional theater monologue happen outside of theater? But we can talk about its purpose in theater first.
Oren: I’ve actually been thinking about this quite a bit recently. If you allow me to monologue a bit on the subject.
Chris: Oh, wait. But is this actually a monologue?
Oren: Who knows?
Chris: It’s for the benefit of our listeners. So maybe it is.
Wes: Yeah, but he’s talking to you and me. So no, it’s just extended dialogue.
Chris: So fourth wall break is required then?
Wes: Very much helps.
Oren: That’s the tradition.
Wes: Oren, if he’s going to go off here for a minute to express his perspective and feelings on the situation, then he is basically sharing his inner monologue via interior monologue vocally. I don’t know. It’s just linguistic mess. But I think as long as he would be saying things that might not be so clear, he would be saying things that like maybe not be so relevant to like you and me, Chris, and that fourth wall aspect is kind of coming in there, and we maybe are like oblivious to what he’s saying half the time, then yeah, totally.
Oren: What you guys are going to need to do is turn off your headphones so that I can just talk and you’re not listening. And it’ll just be me in the audience.
Wes: I’ll go make some tea.
Oren: There are a number of storytelling conventions that make more sense in theater. And monologuing is one of them. Acts are another. Because with monologuing, it’s much more natural for an actor on the stage to turn to the audience and be like, all right, I’m going to tell you something. Either it’s not part of the story like the other characters can’t hear them, or even if they can, there’s sort of an understanding that this is for the audience’s benefit and it’s much easier to accept. And it’s similar with acts, you know, whereas act one, act two. In theater, those have a literal meaning because you need to turn the lights off so you can move set around. Whereas in other mediums, they’re kind of arbitrary divisions, like what is an act in a movie? It’s like a time period someone picked. There’s no…
Chris: It’s like a chapter. What is a chapter? Well, it’s whatever the writer wants it to be.
Oren: Whereas in theater, they’re like an actual thing created by the constraints of the medium. In theater, a monologue is much more acceptable, whereas in a movie, if someone literally turns to the camera and started talking directly to the audience, you would need a pretty specific type of movie for that to work. Obviously, there are movies that do that, but very specific ones. Like it would be weird if that happened in a movie where that was not the joke. Whereas in theater, that happens all the time in plays that are not comedic or otherwise fourth wall breaking.
Chris: If you wanted to do it in another medium, you would definitely have to establish the convention so that the audience expects this to happen so it’s not jarring every time, especially in film. That definitely adheres to the idea that the audience is like an observer outside the story. I think if you had prose, of course, you have different kinds of narrators. An omniscient narrator can typically use second person to talk directly to the audience, so that’s a little different. But still, we wouldn’t usually have characters doing it in a prose work unless you had a very specific conceit to support that.
Wes: The power of the theater’s influence on all of our other stories is strong, and I think monologues have had a lasting sticky power. Because, as Chris noted, if we’re in a prose medium, we have the benefit of a narrator, which means we get good exposition just from that. Or bad exposition. We get exposition, hey! You can benefit from that. So odds of you writing a very long, winded speech that reveals something about the speaker, I mean, it could happen, sure.
Chris: It does happen, sure. I mean, it happens for non-viewpoint characters, but they’re less important usually than the viewpoint character. So, again, still useful, but not like your main character, you don’t know what’s happening inside their head.
Wes: No, and I think that’s because if that’s happening in a prose medium, it’s also falling prey to the same things that happen in our TV movie medium as well, where it’s just a bunch of unnecessary extended dialogue exposition, where it’s like, oh crap, they need to know this stuff. Word vomit. And then it’s like a weird, out-of-place monologue. It’s the whole, as you and I know thing, but it’s not for the character, it’s for the audience, but it’s dressed up as bad dialogue.
Chris: Does a monologue normally just, again, just discards the presumption that these are characters speaking to each other? So it’s not awkward, unnatural dialogue, it’s just a fourth wall break.
Wes: It doesn’t have to break the fourth wall, I mean, that’s kind of what it’s for on a meta level, but it’s just the character thinking out loud.
Chris: So it’s voiceover.
Wes: So it is voiceover, essentially, yes.
Chris: It’s kind of like a fourth wall break in some shows like She-Hulk or House of Cards. Instead of having a voiceover, you can just watch the actor say it instead of a disembodied voice.
Wes: And I think the other important thing is the speaker of the monologue is not doing it for the other characters. That just really should be firmly established. Traditionally, it’s not for them, it’s for the character speaking and the audience. Rousing speeches are just speeches, they’re not monologues, they’re just speeches. Call them speeches, don’t call them monologues.
Oren: Well, I’ve got a bunch of notes about potential monologues that are basically speeches. Oops.
Wes: I know, that’s fine. It’s not a fight I would win, but I do think it’s important to know that this is a speech written by this person to deliver to these people. This is a monologue expressing how this person feels about this situation verbally to not other people in the play.
Oren: This is where I think we cross over into the more colloquial usage of monologue, which is more generally a character who talks for a long time. And I would say that probably the most common, certainly the best known use of the monologue in this context is the villain speech.
Chris: Which is actually pretty similar to what we’re saying this theater monologue is in a number of ways.
Oren: And the villain typically gives this speech for the same reason. It’s because the author wants to get across how the villain works. And I think this happens for a number of reasons. I think the reason we see villain speeches way more often than we see hero speeches has to do with a combination of we see the hero more often, so it’s easier to establish how they work. But at the same time, I think authors also often put a lot more effort into their villain, at least in terms of creating motivations and what have you. Because you can say, my hero is saving people’s lives because that’s the right thing to do. And that’s a fairly simple and easy to explain thing. Whereas if you want a villain who’s not just racist, you have to come up with a more complicated reason why they’re going around killing people. Then that needs more explanation. Often authors are very proud of it, and so they want to tell you. They’re going to have their monologue, okay? They’re going to tell you what’s going on.
Chris: I think we have two different aspects here. Sometimes it’s more logistical than others. The villain has the unique combination of often being off-screen a lot, but also still affecting the plot to a very great extent. And so we have these situations where the villain might have been taking actions in the background that are supposed to be their fault that we have not revealed yet. And then sometimes the storyteller just builds that up and then wants to give it a big reveal at the end. But then for that to work, the villain has to be like, and didn’t you know I was behind the scenes the whole time doing X, Y, Z, right? And that’s the more logistical side of it, which I would argue usually it’s better to just have the protagonist figure some of that out. And then the villain can just correct one thing. Well, yes, you have that all right, but this one part, you know, your father was actually me. When we have a villain that is an important character doing immoral things, we want to know why, right? Which is more like the traditional theater monologue.
Wes: Which sometimes is delivered in song because songs are fun.
Oren: If it’s a musical, that’s even easier, right? Musicals, even filmed musicals, generally have the conceit that the songs are not actually happening in the story. The song is a break from the actual reality of the world, and now the characters are going to express some emotion or feeling or thought or what have you in song. At that point, you can just go back to the theater convention of now your villain can just sing about what it is that they feel. That’s easy. No one has to ask, like, why is the villain saying all of this to the protagonist? It’s not easy because writing music is hard, hot take. But in terms of narrative, it’s much simpler.
Chris: Okay, we’ve got a solution. If you ever feel the need to put in a villain monologue, just make it into a musical instead. I think more things should be musicals, so I don’t see anything wrong with this.
Oren: Where’s my science fiction musical? I’ve had a couple of fantasy musicals now, but not a single Star Trek musical.
Wes: It’s forthcoming, I’m sure. You might run into a situation where a monologue can occur naturally as the result of dialogue, and that would be three people are having a conversation about a podcast topic or whatever. One of these people just starts ranting and venting, and suddenly it’s very clear to the other two people in the room that the person speaking is actually no longer talking to them, but has kind of gotten caught up in it. And since this person began by vocalizing their thoughts and opinions, they suddenly kind of just kept pulling on that thread and kept going. And suddenly they can’t help themselves. They’re just talking and talking and talking and talking and talking and talking. And then they kind of stop, and the other two are like, whoa.
Chris: In my mind’s eye, when I imagine the scene, the other two have already fled.
Wes: Yes.
Oren: I thought that when that started that Wes was just calling me out, but then I realized that he was really taking it to the next level of meta commentary. And I was like, all right, I have no choice but to applaud.
Wes: That is kind of an example of how monologues, and when I say monologue, I definitely mean it’s vocalized, right? They do happen in real life as extended dialogue thing because we talk to our friends, our family, whatever, and sometimes people vent. They just need to get it out. That is monologuing because it’s actually not for the listener. It’s for the speaker. That’s a very good kind of natural example of it.
Oren: Back in my day, we called that live journaling.
Chris: Okay, here’s a question. What about when you have a character going on and on, and it’s supposedly for another character, but it’s definitely for the audience, but it’s all about the writer preaching?
Wes:Oh, God.
Chris: Like the Light Brigade, the Light Brigade interludes that are nothing but the main character just going on essays upon essays of the author’s opinion. Monologue or not monologue or sandwich?
Wes: Sanctimonious writing. If it’s not inside quotation marks, it’s definitely not a monologue because I would like them to all be inside quotation marks, please. But yeah, that kind of self-insert stuff probably is just the author meta-monologuing. It’s expressing weird subjective thoughts and things like that, which is actually a good side note that if you’re listening to a lecture for a class, that is not a monologue. That is a lecture or a speech because it’s generally delivering information. If that speaker starts going off topic and ranting about something, then suddenly it’s monologuing. If it’s just delivering more or less factual information then it is not a monologue.
Chris: Is it more important that it’s whether the information is factual or it’s about feelings or who the audience is?
Wes: I think it is a mixture of who the audience is and what it says more about the speaker. Because really the whole point of the traditional monologue is we’re going to listen to this and learn something about the speaker, not necessarily the information that they’re saying, but about them. So maybe we learn that they have a thirst for power or an anger about injustice or they’re sad about unrequited love.
Chris: Because in theater it’s a replacement for what would be a viewpoint in writing. I guess the other thing is that it’s probably harder in theater to do flashbacks.
Oren: Yeah, they’re a bit challenging.
Chris: Again, film has a harder time delivering information than narrated work does. But one of the tools that’s used is the flashback, which of course leads writers to think that flashbacks should be used more than they actually should. In theater we don’t even really have the flashback option. I’m sure you can work in a flashback. It’s not impossible, but I’m just thinking about the set and the expectations of the audience and how hard that would be to manage.
Wes: Does it all come down to lighting?
Oren: I mean, it depends. You get different directors who want to do different things. I have worked with some directors who, on the instance that we did a flashback sequence in a theater production, they were like, all right, we need a special flashback lighting setup that will tell people that this is a flashback. But for others it’s like, you would light this the way you would light a normal scene and you just kind of count on dialogue or occasionally a setup monologue to explain that it’s a flashback. But I mean, there aren’t a ton of flashbacks in the plays that I’ve worked on because they’re logistically challenging and plays want to minimize the number of times you have to change the set. At least the plays that I’ve worked on. I suppose if you have an unlimited Broadway budget you can do what you want. If you’re trying to write a play that a local high school or community theater group can put on, you want to have as few set changes as possible. Because flashbacks typically require a set change or at the very least a costume change or something, right? And so you really have to ask, is that necessary? Do we need that? That was one of the first things I learned when I tried to write a play. I had flashbacks and characters going to different places all over the place and my good director friend looked at this and was like, this is unstageable. You would need millions of dollars to construct all of these sets.
Chris: That’s okay, Oren, that just made it a closet drama.
Wes: There you go, perfect.
Oren: And then we revised it into something that used one set in a little black box. It was great.
Wes: I love the idea, Chris, that the first closet drama was born because somebody wrote up this screenplay and somebody said, it’s unstageable. And they said, well, I’m not throwing this away. We’re going to publish it.
Chris: Just read it to my friends so they understand how great it was. Somebody will fund it if I read it to enough people, I’m sure.
Oren: Hey, you know, sometimes it’s fun. I used to write fan Star Trek scripts and my friends and I would go into a building on campus that was vaguely shaped like the bridge and we would just read out all the scripts. That was a lot of fun. I mean, in retrospect, they weren’t very good, but it was just a fun thing to do for an evening.
Chris: There’s nothing wrong with writing closet drama if that’s what you really want to write. I mean, today, people would usually just write prose instead if the intent is not to perform it. I mean, there were definitely times throughout history where theater was the most well-known form of professional storytelling and not everybody could put on a play. So it made sense to write closet dramas.
Oren: Plus, it’s really hard to get someone to read your prose. But if you tell them that you need them to voice a part, then you can play on their vanity. And then they’re more likely to come to your house for an evening.
Chris: Oh, I see. Life hack. If you need people to read your work.
Oren: I have a friend who came to me to read my 200-page novel and they’re like, oh, that’ll take a while. It’s like, hey, I need you. You’re perfect for the part in this 200-page closet drama I wrote. Life tips, everybody.
Chris: We can talk more about, I guess, the more modern film form then. If we’re talking about monologues as a replacement for viewpoints, then in film, the closest thing would be the fourth wall breaks oftentimes or voiceover. Voice overs are less heavy-handed. So that’s more popular. For some shows, once there would be too much voiceover, it’s almost preferable to go with a fourth wall break so that you can see the actor deliver their lines. Which might be why, for instance, House of Cards used a fourth wall break. Basically to give the main character’s viewpoint, especially since he was an evil dude. And they wanted the audience to feel like his confidant, to understand him better and root for him, despite the fact that he was an evil dude.
Oren: If you’re trying to explain the American political system, you basically have two options. You can either have monologues where they explain all of the subcommittees and the bills that aren’t being voted on in the filibusters and all that. Or you can do Aaron Sorkin walking and talking scenes where everyone talks at like 100 miles a minute while they’re walking down a hallway. And those are your two options. And West Wing already did the second one.
Chris: When I watched the interview with the vampire movie again, after it had been years, and after reading the book, which has lots of exposition in it, it was just amazing how much voiceover there was. They were trying to condense this kind of long, rambling book into a movie and try to communicate the things that were definitely from a viewpoint that were very hard to communicate visually. Like the idea of the world looking totally different to a vampire. Now you could do that with special effects, but when you talk it up too much, it’s almost hard to come up with some visual special effect that matches how much you’ve talked it up. It’s almost easier to just say it at that point.
Oren: It would also be kind of irritating to have that constantly on. It’s like, I see the world super differently. And it’s like, okay, but I don’t? Can you turn it back to normal? It’s like, I see the world through a fisheye lens. It’s like, I wish you didn’t.
Wes: Voiceover stuff also plays well in comedy. Arrested Development was really popular in the early aughts. The narrator was always kind of commenting on what’s happening out loud for everybody to hear. I think maybe I enjoy Fourth Wall breaks more than the voiceover. If it certainly persists beyond the opening sequence, I’m like, okay, what is happening in this show? But it’s a way of just quick introduction while somebody’s walking, and it’s clear that this is the main character, and we’re ramping up to actual dialogue. Probably should do away with it.
Chris: The voiceover is already considered pretty heavy-handed and to be avoided unless you need it. Once you get too much, Fourth Wall break is even more heavy-handed.
Wes: There’s probably always a better way to do it than that.
Oren: You can have certain situations where the narrator isn’t a character on screen but still has a personality, and that’s part of the story. The Series of Unfortunate Events on Netflix is basically that premise. The narrator is basically a character in the story but isn’t on screen most of the time. I think he shows up once or twice. Most of the time he’s not on screen, he’s just talking while the characters are doing stuff. Because it’s a comedy, sometimes they acknowledge him and it’s a big joke, and everyone laughs. Very funny.
Chris: When the voiceover is done well, you don’t notice it that much. People also sometimes use voiceover to give things a traditional story feel, almost with a storyteller that you feel like is telling a tale to kids at bedtime or something.
Wes: So the audience matters.
Chris: It’s a niche technique, but I’ve seen it in a variety of films and that works if you have need of it. If you don’t need it, you should probably cut it down as much as you can.
Wes: But you’re right, it definitely sets the scene well. Nightmare Before Christmas opens with that before songs, and there’s lots of good songs in there that are monologues. Perfect example of a show that has lots of very good monologues.
Chris: But I have to say, in a narrated work, particularly text-narrated so it’s not audio, which you could still have songs and audio work, work them in. Generally, any kind of text that’s not said by an omniscient narrator, but said by a character and feels like it’s for the audience instead of another character is to be avoided.
Wes: Really start running into the awkward factor or the, I’m tired of this factor because suddenly it’s like, okay, why is this character not participating in this dialogue anymore? Why have they hijacked the conversation? The propensity for it to become very obvious that something weird is happening increases with each extra line of the speaker’s dialogue.
Chris: In a medium where you don’t really need to do that because you have a narrator, it just feels unnatural and it’s unnecessary. Instead, you say you have a side character and you want to reveal their inner self. Usually for that, you want two characters to bond. So you reveal a side character’s backstory because it matters building their relationship with another important character. So it’s always well-tuned for the actual other character that is the audience in the story.
Wes: Having your characters interact for that purpose is probably better at building attachment than if it was just a monologue. Because a monologue, there’s no interaction point. You’re just supposed to kind of sit there and listen to it or read it.
Chris: Hence why you need a skull.
Wes: Hence why you need a skull. You have to do something. You need props to make it slightly more interesting. Seeing the two characters discuss this stuff and bond, something’s happening there and you really feel like you’re a part of it. It’s just way better opportunities to build attachment.
Chris: Usually you have some level of relationship arc happen. Two characters are coming closer together and moving from being strangers to being friends or enemies to lovers or whatever it is you’re doing.
Wes: And then they can sing about it.
Chris: And then they can sing about it. Audio drama, of course, is very interesting because it’s supposed to be something that someone just overhears, but that’s an impossible standard. So a lot of times characters have to talk about what they see.
Oren: There is an interesting blurry line between audio drama with a narrator and a book that you’re reading out loud. It’s often unclear exactly. If there’s no narrator and it’s just dialogue and sound effects, okay, that’s an audio drama. Sometimes you have a little bit of a narrator who shows up occasionally and you’re like, okay, that’s still an audio drama. And then you have a little bit more and a little more. And eventually you’re like, this is just an audio book that you’ve hired different people to read the dialogue of different characters for. You’re blurring the lines about what is and is not a sandwich, and it makes me uncomfortable.
Wes: Since we brought up theater, we didn’t mention soliloquy is specifically that type of monologue where everybody else on stage is very quiet. They’ve all checked out so that you can talk to your skull.
Chris: Freeze frame?
Wes: Yeah, the freeze frame, the soliloquy is the technical term for that. So your character’s basically talking out of time. That would kind of illustrate that it is happening inside their head. Definitely the best way to convey this is coming straight from my mind, no one else can hear, the lighting has changed. That freeze frame is probably the best that theater can do. Extremely popular 16th through the 18th century theater productions and things like that.
Oren: Plus then you can play a fun little game about which actor is the best at standing still. It’s like, I saw you move, I know it’s not actually frozen, I can see you glancing around.
Wes: It certainly is helpful in that it very clearly lets the audience know what’s happening. Interior monologues, the speaker’s just kind of talking and you might not know if other people hear it or if they can respond to it or something like that. And I think that just relies less on stage direction cues and things like that, it just might have somebody just kind of going. Since it’s rarely acknowledged, it’s certainly a little bit trickier I think for the audience to parse together just who knows what. And that is a little bit more of a dramatic aside, which definitely visually takes you away in the realm of, okay this is not for anybody on stage. But it’s still in real time and that can be a little trickier to certainly pull off.
Oren: Sometimes I have a fun game trying to guess if a piece of dialogue was an aside or if the other character just didn’t hear it. Someone will be like, we’re going in and we’re going to rescue the princess and someone else will be like, we’re going to rescue your mom. Is that like an aside? Was that a joke just for me or is that something the person actually said and the hero just didn’t hear them?
Chris: In audiobooks it’s so tough. The narrator would normally do a character thinking in the same voice they do the character talking. If the character is thinking and talking next to each other in text you could visually see what’s in double quotes and what’s like a italicised or something like that. In an audiobook if the narrator doesn’t make some kind of change so that you can obviously, just by hearing it tell which is which. You’ve got a lot of really distracting awkward dialogue where you’re like, wait did the character just say that?
Oren: I’ve got a solution for that actually. All you have to do is have the audio narrator read open quotation mark closed quotation mark around dialogue. So it’ll be: the enemy soldier ran down the hall open quotation mark stop closed quotation mark the hero said. I’ve solved the problem.
Wes: Adding hours and hours to all the audio files.
Chris: This is an issue I had in for instance the calculating stars. The author narrates herself and she’s a great narrator. She’s so good at many voices but that’s one thing that she doesn’t do is make that clear and create some very nerve-wracking situations.
Oren: All right well with that I think we’re gonna go ahead and call this episode to a close.
Chris:If you enjoyed this episode please support us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com slash mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First we have Callie MacLeod. Then we have Kathy Ferguson a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Next there’s Aymon Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally we have Danita Rambo. She lives at therambogeeks.com. We’ll talk to you next week. This has been the Mythcreant podcast opening closing theme the princess who saved herself by Jonathan Colton.
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Show Notes The City in the Middle of the Night * Hugo Award List * Tidally Locked Planet * Battlefield Earth * Epistolary * Fake Words * Melodrama TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Cindi at YourPodScribe.*
Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock and Chris Winkle.
Chris: This is the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris and with me is…
Wes: Wes.
Chris: And…
Oren: Oren.
Chris: And all hail the Gelet, our lord and saviors. Hail.
Oren: All hail.
Wes: Ughhh. [All laughter]
Chris: So we are doing the first of our Hugo nominee coverage. We’re going to be covering all six novels that were nominated for a Hugo this year. And this time it is City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders, and it is a doozy. We have been practically bursting at the seams to talk about this one.
Wes: The last several podcasts we had to bite our tongues just to save some material for today.
Chris: So we’re going to start, we could pick over small things in this book for the entire podcast but just going over some basics, especially for people who have not read this novel. So again, Charlie Jane Anders is a trans author who’s won lots of awards previously.
She hasn’t yet gotten a Hugo for a novel, but she has won a Hugo for novelette. And she’s had a previous novel that’s been a finalist. She’s got a lot of awards under her belt. I have read some of her short stories previously, and they were honestly a lot like this book. So basic genre and premise of City in the Middle of the Night.
It’s a science fiction novel about human settlers on a tidally locked planet. We have main character, Sophie grows up in this oppressive city called Xiosphant, and then she travels to another city on this planet called Argelo that is very chaotic, and then finally goes to the City in the Middle of the Night, which is an alien city.
Do any of you want to add some basic details of this premise or the genre?
Wes: There’s a Sea of Murder. [Chris laughter] You cannot forget the Sea of Murder. Which is like the only really great parts. [Wes laughter]
Oren: I mean, the best part about this book for me is playing the how do you actually spell these weird scifi words game? Because I listened to it on audio, so I don’t know how to spell Xiosphantor Argelo or Gelet, which is the name of one of the aliens. It’s very exciting to find out how these words are actually spelled.
I guess I probably should have led with this. Definitely, there will be spoilers since we’re talking about the novel here, and part of those spoilers include the other character arcs. I guess really the two main character arcs, there’s Sophie who has this arc of having a toxic crush that she can’t quit until she joins up with the aliens who she accepts as her lord and savior. And then there’s Mouth who is a kind of oddly named other character who has this arc of going from a total badass in theory, to being a total pacifist and also accepting alien Jesus into her heart.
So those are the main character arcs of the story.
Wes: And the two narrators. Did we say that? Sophie’s a narrator and Mouth is a narrator.
Oren: I forget, are either of them first person or are they both third person limited?
Wes: Sophie is first person and Mouth is distant.
Oren: It goes to show that to a certain extent, some of these narration choices kind of fade after a while beacuse I could not remember, even though I only read this book last month I was like, is Sophie first person? I don’t remember her being first person, but apparently she was.
Wes: Yeah, and for such a long time, especially when the characters got together, as I was reading it, I was thinking okay, Sophie’s narration has so many internal thoughts and feelings and Mouth’s chapters do have that, but they’re more limited. And then when they finally were in the same physical space and you were in Mouth’s chapters, Sophie was just kind of labeled as the mute, you know the strange girl that doesn’t talk. And then in Sophie’s chapter’s Mouth was just like the arrogant jerk. It was confusing for a bit.
Oren: So I guess we should ask, why did this book get nominated for a Hugo? Why do we think that enough people liked it that it is now on the finals list?
Chris: I think it’s all a novelty, personally.
Wes: Novelty. Yeah, that was what I was going to say.
Chris: This book is pretty much just novelty, novelty, novelty. I mean, I have to say I did, when we finally get to the City in the Middle of the Night, as much as that chapter was mostly exposition, I did enjoy that chapter because it was so novel.
Wes: I agree. The novelty was really high at the beginning of the book because we’re on an alien world. What are we going to do? We’ve got these people who seem to be resisting some kind of force, which is a city, and since that’s a tidally locked planet, they don’t have any kind of circadian rhythms for their bodies to follow. So then I kind of liked where they were going with the tyranny aspect of the government controlling their sleep and maybe therefore if they control your sleep, they control your dreams and your whole lives.
But that didn’t matter. I’m going to say that about a lot of things in this book.
Oren: I did definitely find myself thinking, “and that didn’t matter” quite a bit as I was reading this. So I can see the novelty aspect, right? Because it takes by some tidally locked world. That’s cool. It’s got weird monsters. That’s cool. But I’m honestly kind of surprised that it didn’t suffer more from how confusing the beginning is.
I could not tell what was happening at the beginning because I eventually figured out, oh, okay, we’re on a tidal locked planet, and like I know a little bit about tidally locked planets, I’m not an expert, but I understand the basics.
And then she goes outside and doesn’t immediately die. Is she wearing a space suit? No. Okay. This planet has atmosphere. Even though a tidally locked planet, you would really expect it to not have atmosphere. And I don’t think it was ever established that it has atmosphere until she was outside and not dying
Wes: And her main city of Xiosphant? The two main cities exist in basically like a twilight, which it’s really unclear how wide that is. Also, the distance between everything, so we’ve got this whole planet, but everybody can only live in a 50 mile strip and that’s it, which is weird, but there’s mountains that protected the city from the daylight side.
That was some geography that I did notice, and then a mountain that they throw Sophie off of to basically kill her early in the book and then she doesn’t die.
Oren: Spoiler, she doesn’t die.
Wes: She doesn’t die. [all laughter]
Oren: But that really hindered the novelty for me because okay, cool, I like tidally locked planets and I like alien monsters and I’m willing to extend my suspension of disbelief that a tidally locked planet would have monsters on it. I just would have appreciated that being established before it was suddenly plot relevant.
My basic expectation of a tidally locked planet is that it’s going to be lifeless and not have an atmosphere because that’s how I understand tidally locked planets to typically work. And this one doesn’t work that way.
And it’s not like this was a surprise to Sophie, right? If Sophie had thought that it was lifeless and had no atmosphere and then found out otherwise, that would be one thing. Because we would have been going along with the ride, but Sophie already knew all this. So having it not established made it really hard for me to enjoy the novelty. I kept being like, what? What? What’s going on?
I’m honestly surprised that that didn’t hurt it more. I guess other readers must be better at understanding this stuff than me.
Wes: Well, I think what people probably did like a lot about it is, and I have to believe it’s Sophie, because I don’t think Mouth should have even had a POV [Oren, Wes, laughter], not for me, but I can see the appeal of Sophie’s struggles. The obsession, the quietness, learning to try to come into her own, dealing with, I like how you put it, the toxic crush and just feeling pulled every which way, and that interiority is clearly the focus of the novel, but often all the novelty that we’ve just discussed is not a part of that, really at all. Except for, as Chris pointed to, the good chapter where we actually get to the City in the Middle of the Night and conveniently these aliens have a working computer and video for her to just watch it and learn stuff.
Oren: Yeah. The alien appreciation tour [Wes, Chris, laughter]. One thing I did, like, I’d forgotten about this in my torrent of notes about things I didn’t like, one thing I did like was the introduction of Sophie’s character. This was before the weirdness with the planet itself, but Sophie is introduced as a character who has a crush on someone who is unattainable. It wasn’t clear to me at the beginning if that was because this is a homophobic society or just because Bianca is of higher social rank than her. It turned out to be both.
But I could tell that she had a crush on this person who didn’t see her romantically and would be difficult to pursue, and that crush translated into her taking the blame for this crime that her friend committed. And that’s cool, I like that, we’ve got conflict where the storie’s moving. That’s a great way to build sympathy with Sophie immediately. I enjoyed that quite a bit. Then she got thrown outside and I was like, why is she not dead?
Wes: For stealing three dollars. [Chris laughter]
Oren: That part I didn’t have a super problem with because who knows how this authoritarian government runs, but how is she not dying? And it’s, Oh, okay, it’s because all the stuff that was not established for me, before it suddenly was critical to what was happening.
Chris: So now that we have talked about what is good about the story and taking time away from that, let’s critique starting with the crocodiles.
Oren: Ooh, the crocodiles.
Wes: But before we get full crocodile, let it be known that there’s a; this is part of the book, translators note at the very beginning that basically talks about how the whole thing has been made accessible, and so therefore the names of certain things are changed and we got crocodiles and bison and let’s just go from there. I just thought that was super weird.
Chris: Was this a fictional translator’s note?
Wes: In the copy I have before Sophie’s first chapter, there’s a little note there that talks about how, actually I will open my book and find that page for us. Okay. So there is a translator’s note at the very beginning of this book and it says, “This manuscript has been translated from the original Xiosphantiand Argolen into peak English”, which as, unpronounceable name, points out. And then it goes on to say that the entire thing you’re about to read has been translated for you English speakers with some really weird things about how, and this is the translator speaking; “I have attempted to render this into peak English as seamlessly as possible. Hence “radio,” “lorry,” “pager,” “crocodile,” “cat,” “bison,” etc. Names and proper nouns have also been regularized into English spelling where possible.” Just some very odd notes that I didn’t quite find necessary.
Chris: It’s so funny because the other book that I’ve seen that done in is Battlefield Earth and it feels like a weak way of trying to turn your novel into epistolary. Like this is a real document from the world. But it’s not though. It’s obviously a fictional story. There’s no other part of the narration that makes it epistolary.
Wes: No, not at all. And it’s, it’s an unfolding narrative, right? Neither Mouth nor Sophie are recalling this, they’re living it.
Chris: That’s just awkward.
Wes: It’s just awkward.
Oren: I should point out, I don’t remember that from the audio version. Was that in the audio version, Chris?
Chris: I don’t remember from the audio version either. Although with everything that happens in this novel, it could it be quite forgettable?
Oren: Okay. That’s weird. I suppose we should explain what is going on with the progress.
Chris: Why are we talking about crocodiles, right? [Wes, laughter]
Oren: And then I can explain why this translation note is extra irritating. Okay. So the crocodiles are this thing that Sophie mentions a few times before she gets thrown out of the city for the crime of stealing some money. Okay, why are we talking about crocodiles? That’s a little weird. Maybe they brought some crocodiles from Earth. I don’t know, but that’s all we get is mentions of crocodiles and then we find out after she’s thrown out that the crocodile is actually an alien. It’s an alien monster, and this is so jarring.
Because at this moment that should be like really tense of Sophie having been thrown out of the city and being confronted with this alien monster. The story has to do an info dump about what a crocodile is, and it feels super disingenuous that like anyone would call them that, they don’t look anything like crocodiles.
Chris: Yeah, there’s an explanation of how they have a mouth with lots of teeth, but no, that’s not enough.
Oren: Lots of things have mouths with lots of teeth.
Chris: And the mouths are round too. They’re not even pointed, like triangles.
Wes: The image that came most readily to mind for me with some kind of crayfish or a lobster, calling them lobsters would have made more sense than crocodiles, because they had pincers and tentacles. So…
Oren: Yeah, and the reason why this is so extra funny is that this is basically what Chris specifically said not to do in her post about using fake words.
Chris: Yeah I have one example for when you actually do want to use fake words. And my example was almost exactly like this situation.
Oren: But it was specifically exaggerated and surely no one would ever do this, I’m exaggerating for effect, then I read this book and, nope, someone did it [Wes, laughter]. Parity is now real.
Chris: My example to be clear was if you have a creature that is technically an alien or fantasy or whatever, but it wags its tail and herds sheep and barks, it’s obviously a dog. But if this thing climbs on the ceiling and licks dust off of it, it’s obviously doing weird things, then don’t call it a dog. That would be confusing.
And the crocodiles are not the only instance of using words in this way. Word usage is just all over the place, confusing everywhere. The mountains are called Mother and Father, we have other animals like bison are definitely not bison…
Oren: Or anything bison like
Chris: or anything even close to bison.
Wes: They’re just a maw of teeth and they can move apparently lightening fast.
Oren: Right, they’re huge, but also somehow really sneaky.
Wes: But here’s the big thing, late in the book, they have explosives. And the quote is, “One of the explosives had a crude timer which they turn to its furthest setting, a picture of a zebra.” And my mind exploded because what is a zebra? Bison are not bison. Crocodiles are not crocodiles. So what is this a picture of? You cannot suddenly have an actual thing be what it is named. That doesn’t work.
Oren: And there were actually a lot of things like that, that happened in the story where they talked about like peaches and fish and other things, and okay, do you mean those things or do you mean weird alien stuff?
Chris: We can’t trust words anymore.
Wes: I know! [laughter]
Chris: They could mean anything.
Oren: This translator at the beginning is so irritating in retrospect because it feels like trying to take what is clearly a mistake and be like, no, actually it’s very clever that I used the wrong words for things because this is a translation, you see. But it’s not a translation. This is internal narration, an unfolding story. No one is writing anything down. You can’t just say it’s epistolary, oh my gosh.
Wes: If anything, the best monster in the entire book is, here’s a shortened version of the description, this is when I think they’re going back across the Sea of Murder from Argolen to Xiosphant…
Chris: Which, it’s very confusing that the Sea of Murder is actually a sea.
Wes: Yeah, that’s a good point too [laughter].
Chris: Because you’re trained not to trust words anymore and assume everything that’s metaphorical means something else. So I was really surprised when the Sea of Murder was actually a body of water. I was not expecting that.
Wes: They’re returning to Xiosphant because Bianca has won the affections of a crime lord in a crude, small army. So anyway, then they’re on the Sea of Murder and the quote says, “But the mist cleared, and Alyssa spotted the cause of the eruption, one tentacle covered with iridescent feathers and tipped with a leaf shaped barb the size of a tenement had burst upward from the frozen ocean.” This is just a tentacle monster thing that starts wreaking havoc on them. It gets no name, and I’m fine with that. I’m like, okay it’s some beast from the deep that isn’t worth a name, but at least it’s not trying to trick me into thinking it’s something that it’s not.
Chris: How do you know that’s not the zebra?
Wes: Oh my God. Oh my God.
Oren: Actually, earlier they called it a squid.
Wes: Did they? Ugh.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: An actual clear name that’s actually descriptive.
Wes: It’s at least close.
Oren: It’s like, yeah, okay, that thing is somewhat squid like. It’s not a squid, but at least I can see why you would call it that. As opposed to animals that have nothing in common with the monsters that they’re named for.
Chris: And we haven’t even talked about The Invention.
Oren: Oh my God.
Wes: Let’s just talk about Mouth [Chris, laughter], because cut that entire thing out of the book, the entire Mouth POV. I didn’t want any of it.
Chris: Oh yeah, absolutely.
Wes: All of it done with it. But please, Chris, tell us about The Invention.
Chris: Well, I mean, just going back to terminology where The Invention is obviously misleadingly named on purpose. Spoiler, not spoiler, it’s a book of poetry and cultural stuff and it’s clear that nobody in that world would ever name that book The Invention.
And Anders just felt that it’s going to be so clever because this thing is really valuable to Mouth, and we think that it’s an actual piece of technology that could make a difference. Instead what’s important to her is a cultural artifact. I’m fine with a cultural artifact being important to her that she has a reason for that but doing this, but what is it doesn’t help us get in Mouth’s viewpoint and care about it like she does.
It just keeps it vague and it feels super contrived because again, nobody would ever call it that.
Oren: Right. And it was obvious from the beginning that it was not going to be something useful. Because there was no reason for the author to withhold all description of it if it was actually going to be something helpful. It was the clumsiest attempt at a subversion I’ve seen in quite some time where it for some reason assumed that we would think it was something useful.
But I have no expectations for it. I don’t know what it is. And so I’m just sitting here being like, would you please tell me what it is so I know why it’s important for us to go get it? And it just didn’t, and it was like aha it’s a poetry book. Why does that matter at all? That didn’t go back and improve the chapters where I didn’t know what it was before and I could tell it was going to be something useless.
And mostly I could tell that because humans in the setting are incredibly incompetent and can’t find their ass with both hands [Wes, laughter]. So the idea that they were going to find something useful was immediately off the table. But that was some meta knowledge on my part.
Chris: Speaking of Mouth, one of the interesting things is, I think that Mouth was originally intended as a nonbinary character. It’s extremely subtle, where we get a very brief line about Mouth not wanting labels and gender is included in a list of labels that Mouth doesn’t like. But the reason I was pretty sure is because when Mouth is introduced, Anders seems to go to a lot of effort to try to not use any pronouns to refer to Mouth whatsoever.
She does use “her” to refer to things that belong to Mouth or when that is appropriate, but never uses “she” in reference to Mouth for quite some time and repeats the Mouth’s name frequently. And then about halfway through the book it feels like Anders is just like, okay, this is too hard and gives up and then uses “she” for mouth whenever.
Wes: That’s a good note. I didn’t think about that. I was really hung up on, this plays into the weirdness of The Invention, it’s Mouth’s POV and Mouth is a part of a group of transporters, smuggler types, but Mouth is the last of this group called the Citizens, which was basically, I imagine it being some kind of motorcycle brigade that didn’t live in any of the cities and just got high in the wilderness and visited these sacred sites that they made up on a planet that, you know, humans are new to.
Oren: Yeah. More or less [Chris laughter].
Wes: But Mouth is called Mouth because Mouth never got a personal mythology and therefore never got a name. So I thought the repetition was just emphasizing that this person is just a Mouth, but nothing important. But again, it wasn’t very satisfying.
Chris: I don’t think Anders’ wordcraft is quite that calculated.
Wes: No, probably not. Oh, also Mouth’s people were creating climate change on this planet and so the crocodiles killed them.
Chris: Okay. It’s time to talk about the crocodiles more, isn’t it? [Wes laughter]
Oren: Yeah. We have to get back to the crocodiles because, Oh God, I hate everything about them.
Chris: Just to start this off, there’re a lot of things wrong with this plot. Pretty much everything is wrong with this plot that you can think of to be wrong with a plot, but one of the base problems with the very premise is that the crocodiles, which are later renamed the Gelet, are a sapient people on this planet, but it is absolutely critical for this plot to work that they simply cannot communicate with humans except for via, what is best described, literally, as Lovecraftian mind rape, for reals. I wish that was not the best way to describe it, but it is. And some of the times it is consensual in this book, but some scenes seem to be deliberately framed to make it more analogous to a violation.
And Anders loves the Gelet, so as you can imagine that’s pretty problematic.
Oren: Yeah. We spent huge sections of the book just worshiping and fawning over how great the Gelet are. I’m sitting here being like, these are super gross and everything about them is gross. And I was rebelling in my head at how great the book was telling me they were.
Wes: And the fact that Sophie is the poster child for what the Gelets want; a complete submissive with no sense of self.
Oren: Yeah. That too. Everything about the Gelet is wrong. First we get told that they are super powerful and yet they apparently don’t do anything to stop humans from killing them. Humans randomly kill them sometimes because humans think they’re animals, and they don’t try to stop that.
Apparently they’re fine with it. That seems unlikely. Then they have this hilarious thing where we’re like, oh, well, Mouth’s people, her group, accidentally disturbed the system that they had in place to keep the climate stable, and so they murdered all of Mouth’s people, which we are told they’re very sad about because it was their last resort, but it was also apparently their first resort. They didn’t even try communication.
Wes: Let’s also point out that there’s a scene where Sophie takes several other people deep into the night, she’s persuaded them that the Gelet will talk to them and a bison shows up. And the Gelet just destroyed this thing in a hot second. Sophie has time to just register the bison’s open mouth, all these giant teeth, and then it’s just gone. And then the Gelet are there. So what’s their deal?
Oren: Yeah. I don’t understand. They apparently want something from humans, but it’s really unclear to me what they could possibly want from humans because again, humans in the setting are incredibly incompetent. And I feel like you’re so powerful, you have to be able to just get whatever it is you need.
Chris: We also know that they can operate human computers because there is a specific scene in their city where they play an old computer recording to communicate with Sophie that another human has left. So the idea that they could operate human computers but cannot figure out how to intelligently communicate to humans any way is something that cannot possibly hold up.
But it’s really important to the story that Sophie have to undergo this huge transformation and do things that other people aren’t willing to do in order for communication to happen.
Oren: Yeah. And then of course Sophie goes around forcing herself on other people which is some of the grossest stuff that I’ve ever read and I feel like I don’t why? Why? What is happening here? What is the point of this?
Chris: Yeah. That’s one of the biggest things about this book is it really feels like it’s supposed to have a message. But I was racking my brain trying to figure out what message Anders wanted to send with this book. First we’re in this Xiosphantcity and it’s super oppressive and kind of fascist, and you’re like, okay, this is the bad city, and now she’s going to Argelo, and you think you’ll see in Argelo what the better human civilization is.
Nope. Argelo is supposed to be the opposite extreme. It’s actually real unrealistic. It’s supposed to be chaos. Nine different families fighting each other. Basically crime lords and the city is constantly changing leadership.
It mostly just feels like somebody who knows nothing about anarchy, their idea of what anarchy is. In reality, when you have those kinds of situations, you end up with a dictator. One person has more power or power accumulates power. It’s just a kind of an unrealistic society.
But now we have two opposite human societies that are both bad. I don’t know what the point is with this. And then we finally see the alien city, and it’s like a paradise because the crocodiles, the Gelet, our lord and saviors are perfect in every way. But it’s also pretty clear that this is not achievable by humans. Humans are incapable of the utopia of the crocodiles.
So then I was looking for, is there something that humans are supposed to do to get closer to the symbolic utopia of the Gelet and that doesn’t ever come, that doesn’t appear in the story in any way. As far as we know, the Gelet are just amazing and awesome and so much better than humans, and there’s no message that humans can take away from this about how to create a better society, even though it looks like that’s what the pieces of the book are trying to construct.
Oren: At the end, it really felt like the message was that we must submit to alien Jesus [Chris, Wes, laughter]. That’s the only way we will be saved. And I was like, was this written by one of those people who thinks that UFOs are coming to save us? Because those people do exist. They’re real. It feels like one of them wrote this book and then published it under Charlie Jane Ander’s name.
I don’t think she thinks that, so I’m very confused what the purpose of any of this was.
Wes: Want to know a super minor thing that is just going to be such an irritation for me?
Oren: Oh yeah?
Wes: What is the ankle skirt. Were they wearing skirts, but the skirt was around their ankles?
Chris: I guess. I mean, what do words even mean.
Wes: I don’t know. But if anybody can figure that out, please let me know because I just…
Oren: Admittedly I assumed it was supposed to be an ankle length skirt, but maybe I am a pleb and didn’t understand.
Chris: I assumed it was skirts around the ankle with frills.
Wes: They bring it up several times about having to take off the skirt around their ankles. It’d get dirty immediately.
Oren: I also love how Argelo is a crime agro zone. Immediately upon coming to the city, this group of heavily armed, bad ass mercenary couriers is attacked by a dude with a harpoon gun. Really? Those are the people you’re going to try to rob, single guy with harpoon gun?
Earlier we had the same thing where they got attacked by “pirates”. Who were simultaneously supposed to be desperate fishermen who had turned to piracy, but were also clearly just fully kitted out to be pirates and had clearly been doing this professionally for quite some time, even though nobody crosses the sea. This is the random encounter, I guess [Wes laughter]. I’ve been playing a lot of Final Fantasy recently and it felt like, yep the screen went all whirrly and now we’re playing the battle music and here are some enemies.
And they don’t actually exist in the overworld when you’re walking around, they’re just here. So you have someone to fight.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, that is the thing about the novelty of this book for me is that yes, it’s very novel, but so much of it makes very little sense. And if that’s something that you don’t look too closely at, maybe you get a lot more out of that novelty than if you’re inclined that just wouldn’t happen or that doesn’t compute.
Wes: So we keep talking about the Gelet because they keep distracting us. But I do want to finish talking about Mouth’s arc because of how bizarre it is. This is one of the two major character arcs in the story, and it goes from Mouth being a total badass to her being a complete pacifist, but it’s so clumsy that it just doesn’t work.
First of all, I noticed that we don’t ever see Mouth be a badass. We’re told she was a bad ass in the past, but when actual fights happen in the book, she’s almost always frozen in fear or indecision.
Chris: I cannot count the number of scenes in this book where action happens and the internal narration is “and I just couldn’t do anything about it. I was completely helpless. It all happened so fast and I was disoriented and I wanted to do something, but instead I threw up.” Over and over again.
Wes: There is one thing that happens right at the beginning when Mouth’s chapter’s introduced and that’s when they’re trying to go into this secret tunnel in Xiosphant with the smuggled goods and some guy, I don’t know what his name is, Jeremy or whatever, walks up and he’s, Oh, I’m going to rob you guys and Mouth just puts his head into the ceiling.
That’s the one clear moment of violence where Mouth apparently is strong. Just pick this guy up, explode his head, drop him on the ground, and then the rest of her people are like, great, he was our one contact. They’re like whatever, we’ll find somebody else. I’m a bad ass. And then you never did anything cool again. [Laughs]
Oren: Right. Then the part about it that makes it even weirder is that we have this big fight in Argelo, which doesn’t seem that important at the time because it’s told almost entirely through summary. We’re told that some acid rain started and then the nine families started fighting and that Mouth and her friend went and held this food depot for a while. This is all summary. So okay, I guess we’re going to keep going. And then the next time we see Mouth, she’s handed a weapon that she just drops. What is happening?
And then we are back-filled in about how in between chapters, she developed a problem where she can’t hold weapons anymore. The assumption being that because she was traumatized during this fight…
Chris: That was told. In summary…
Oren: Yeah. If this fight was so important, why was it in summary and what about it was more horrific than any of the things Mouth has done before? She’s killed lots of people. Why was this particularly bad? I don’t know. The book didn’t tell me. And so that was the weirdest type of character arc I’ve seen in quite some time.
Chris: Before we go, there’s one last thing that we really haven’t talked about, which is the wordcraft. Because it is very purple. Besides the confusing words, it is super purple. You know, some of the metaphors are interesting. There is some novelty in the wordcraft, but some things don’t really make sense. I don’t know what somebody standing like an upturned a knife is supposed to mean or what connotation that’s supposed to happen or what connotation that’s supposed to have.
Sometimes the metaphors feel pointless. Like, my eyelashes froze like needles. Is that really necessary? I mean, if your eyelashes freeze, they’re just a little stiff. It seems a little extreme to call them needles. And we can’t describe time passing without, “it felt like we had always been walking and that was our entire lives and we would never stop walking again.”
That’s how Anders summarizes time passing. Every single thing is dialed up to 11. Really melodramatic throughout the entire book. Wes do you have any…
Wes: Yeah. The metaphor thing is something that stuck out to me. It’s notable that this book is specifically focused on a subset, which, most metaphors in this entire thing are similes. So, that word “like” is throughout the entire book. Argolen, a language that sounds like a throat disease, like icicles, like this, like that, like shit, like…all of it and it’s just weak. It’s not, it’s not offering anything to me as a reader.
Every metaphor you’re offering, you’re telling me exactly how it is and it’s over the top. It’s not making me ponder. It’s not considering any nuance. You’re not giving me anything to play with with this language. It’s just telling me exactly what it is in melodramatic language that doesn’t seem to fit the environment.
Oren: All right, so my favorite is at one point when Sophie makes an analogy to something smelling like a dead woman’s tears.
Wes: That was a great one.
Oren: What does that mean? What do dead women’s tears smell like? Are they different than dead men’s tears? How do you know what they smell like, Sophie, [Chris laughter] how do dead people cry in the first place? What does this mean? And it was so absurd that like a lot of the purple prose, it just took me right out of the story, which is the main reason why you’re not supposed to use purple prose is that it’s distracting because it means nothing. It’s just weird.
Chris: Yeah, I have to say that if you want every single moment to be juiced for as much emotion as you can possibly get out of it, then it becomes monotonous after a while, it means nothing and moments that are supposed to be emotional…it gets very tiresome the longer it goes on.
Oren: Yeah. Hashtag do not juice it, is my new way of looking at the world. All right, but we’re going to have to call it, we’re already way over time, so thank you everyone for listening. We will return next week with more Hugos and just for the reference, I think this is the worst one in my opinion, so I think they’ll get better after this. We’ll see.
For those of you at home, if anything we said piqued your interest, you can leave a comment on the website at Mythcreants.com. Before we go, I want to thank a few of our patrons. First we have Kathy Ferguson who is a professor of political theory in star Trek. I feel like she would have a few things to say about this book’s misunderstanding of how anarchy works.
Next we have Ayman Jaber, who is a Marvel connoisseur and urban fantasy writer, and finally we have Danita Rambo and she lives at therambogeeks.com. We’ll talk to you next week with more Hugos.
Promo: If you enjoyed this episode, consider leaving us a review on iTunes so we can continue to grow like a swarm of Nanites.
Chris: This has been the Mythcreant podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Coulton.
Hmm, who was that one character again? You know, the one that did the thing in that place? Ugh, if only they were easier to remember! That’s what we’re talking about today: making characters more memorable. We talk about sneaky tricks authors can use, like unusual verbal quirks or cool talismans, but we also talk about the fundamentals, like making your characters do memorable things. Plus, you get to find out what we think our own most memorable traits are.
Show Notes Taran of Caer Dallben * Fflewddur Fflam * Princess Eilonwy * Gurgi * Adaon * Doli * The Goblin Emperor * Lex Murphy * Tim Murphy * Hermione Granger * Ron Weasley * Draco Malfoy * Gawyn and Galad * Tony Stark * Spider-Man * Star Lord * Magnus Chase * IZombie * Murderbot * Ayame Sohma * Mineta * Hellgate Incident 24 * Mando * Baby Yoda TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Yzsekh.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle. [opening song]
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast. I’m the woman and with me is…
Oren: The guy who hates everything
Chris: And…
Wes: That other guy [Chris and Oren laughter] Come on guys [laughing]
Chris: I’m pretty sure you’re the literary guy. I’ll have you know.
Wes: Oh, that’s so sweet.
Chris: I asked everybody to think about if listeners didn’t know our names, how would they identify us and what would they remember about us, Oren is a guy who hates everything is probably appropriate [laughing].
Wes: That’s why he’s so much fun.
Chris: The guy who rants a lot.
Oren: I mean people do think that I hate everything. Like this is a thing that every once in a while I will run into people who are surprised when I talk about something I like cause they get the impression from me that I hate everything cause I like to critique stuff.
Chris: The answer to that is that we think everything has flaws and we’d like to talk about those flaws, but we don’t actually hate everything.
Oren: Although I do probably hate more things than the average person just as a rule [laughter]. So it’s not entirely inaccurate.
Chris: So that might be a distinctive feature that you have that somebody would remember.
Oren: They definitely would, and they do [Wes chuckles].
Chris: It’s true, in social situations Oren unusually marches in and then rants about the book that he’s reading and what he doesn’t like about it.
So pretty sure that is what people remember. Anyway, we’re talking about memorable characters and how to create them. At Mythcreants we generally call this characteristic distinctiveness, how distinct your character is, what makes them stand out. How strong of an impression do they make? If they’re really distinctive, that means they make a strong impression. How unique are they and ultimately how memorable they are?
Oren: And just a note, Chris, don’t think, I didn’t catch what you did there at the beginning where you were like, I’m the woman. I’m not saying nobody remembers you as that because your voice is pretty distinct compared to me in Wes’s. But I think the true connoisseurs of the podcast would definitely remember you as the insightful one.
Wes: Yes, yes.
Chris: Oh, Oh, that’s so sweet.
Oren: Don’t think I was gonna just let you get away with that [laughter].
Chris: If somebody is familiar with me from the blog, and particularly might be thinking about me as the conceptual abstract one who doesn’t like examples, only likes concepts [chuckling].
Oren: I know at least one person thinks of you as inappropriately impertinent.
Chris: as opposed to Oren “has an agenda” Ashkenazi.
Wes: [laughing] I know we’re having fun, but this is a good thing to do in stories, and we’re talking about giving your characters epithets, a descriptive name. For example, in the The Chronicles of Prydain, The Black Cauldron in Book of Three, he’s Taran the assistant pig keeper.
Chris: Oh, I love that title so much. A perfect way to give your protagonist spinach at the beginning of a story because an assistant pig keeper, that’s not a glorious title. So it makes him really sympathetic, but it’s also really distinct, and I think he gets it in the beginning because he wants a title, and so then his mentor figure’s like, ‘Oh, here you’re the assistant pig keeper’. It’s a glorious title.
Wes: Which is great because the pig that he’s, you know, the assistant to keeping is an oracle pig or an oracle pig who can see the future.
Chris: That’s a good point. This is actually an important pig. This role is more important than it seems.
Wes: I think epithets like that, they’re just wonderful. Different settings and worlds and stuff can make better use of them. But descriptive names are good because names are hard to remember.
Chris: That’s why we tell you if the character is not important, then we don’t name them, her mother or brother the secretary, it’s just way easier to remember than trying to keep track of tons and tons of names for people who aren’t important.
Oren: And you know what is easy to remember? Doing stuff cause we were just talking about how the things people will probably remember us for on this podcast is what we do on the podcast. Cause Chris is always analyzing and I’m always hating and Wes is always talking about literary stuff.
Wes: I was going to say ‘and Wes is always there’.
Oren: [laughter] No, stop. Rude. So if your characters are doing stuff in the plot, your characters are much easier to remember. And that’s why when I read a book like The Goblin Emperor, I was annoyed by how much more easily I could remember the male characters because they all had jobs and did stuff.
I was like, oh, that’s the prime minister and that’s the general, even though I couldn’t remember any of their names, I could not for the life of me, remember which woman was which, because none of them do anything. They’re all just around. One of them, I think was kind of into the main character, but that was the closest any of them had to any kind of distinctive actions.
It wasn’t that their personalities were all the same. When I was reading their dialogue, I could tell, okay, this is a reasonably distinctive dialogue, but I just couldn’t remember who this was. Because none of them ever did anything other than talk occasionally. This is a thing that I’ve discovered is that if you want your heritage to be memorable, they should do stuff, cause it’s much easier to remember a character who does things.
We remember the girl from Jurassic Park way more than we remember the little boy because she is active in the plot and hacks the system and uses what turns out to be an actual user interface from some period of time. Whereas the boy mostly doesn’t.
Chris: He gets electrified once. That’s what I remember about him.
Oren: That’s his most memorable sequence is that he gets electrified. For most of the story he’s just kind of around.
Chris: A lot of distinctiveness is also about just making the traits stand out more. Sometimes exaggerating them. I think a really good example is Harry Potter, the characters’ distinctiveness is their primary strength.
They are more distinctive than they are anything else. They tend to be missing other things like depth and complexity. Being distinctive and memorable is not the only factor in making a good character, but they do fairly well, just on distinctiveness. There’s no mix up between how Hermione acts versus Ron versus Draco.
Harry is a little blander because he’s the blank protagonist, but for the most part, you’re never going to mix up these characters personalities. They all have a very unique way about doing things and say things differently.
Wes: How would you describe Ron’s distinctiveness?
Chris: Honestly, the first thing that comes to my head is Ron is an asshole [Wes laughter].
Ron needs help. He doesn’t like to actually do work. He’s bad at things. He has a whole bunch of negative characteristics. It’s not as distinct as Hermione, but there are a number of things that he does, including just not being nice.
Oren: The way that I remember them is that Hermione knows stuff, Harry does stuff and Ron’s a jerk. [laughter] Those are the traits of those three main characters, and Ron is definitely the weakest of them, hot take I guess [laughter].
Wes: My coworker said, ‘Oh, Ron’s distinctive because he’s the lesser Harry’. Yeah. Harry’s not great at this Wizarding world, but he’s new to it and Ron is just kind of bad.
Chris: Ron does make a big deal about Ron being in Harry’s shadow. I can see where that impression came from, but Harry’s just never a jerk like Ron is.
Wes: I was trying to think of a more positive association that I could broaden out for what makes Ron memorable. Cause I was trying to think of generalized items and so we talked about epithets earlier and he gets his introduction with Harry and then they go to school.
And Ron’s largely most memorable characteristic is that he’s a Weasley. They really draw attention to that. And so he’s memorable by association, which is interesting because like, Crabbe and Goyle are memorable because of their just association. There’s nothing really distinct about those two guys.
Chris: I mean, certainly they blurred together.
Wes: They’re just Draco’s henchmen. Ron’s more than a side character, but association is kind of a nice, easy way to like remember people kind of like what Warren was saying about jobs and things like that is if it’s kind of clear where they stand or who’s on their team, that can help.
Chris: I think it’s also worth adding that they all have a distinctive look. Harry with his green eyes and black hair and scar, Hermione with her brown, bushy hair, Ron with his bright red hair and freckles.
Oren: Although in the movies have somewhat made that a little less clear, Hermione now looks like Emma Watson and not the way I imagined her [laughter].
Here’s a small thing you can do to make your characters more memorable.
Don’t give them names that sound similar or look similar on the page because I’m reading through some of The Wheel of Time now because I’m a masochist. There are these two characters named Gawyn and Galad. And I cannot for the life of me remember which is which, and they hang out together a lot. It doesn’t help that they’re both very similar.
They’re both upright do gooders, one of them is supposed to be too good, which is the book’s way of foreshadowing that he’s going to join the crypto-fascist militia later. At this moment when they are first introduced, they are almost exactly the same. They’re also both very attractive. And so I can’t remember which of them is talking when they show up.
I’m like, oh God, who is this? Cause it kind of matters cause one of them knows things. The other one doesn’t. And I don’t know who this is.
Chris: And it’s interesting how different it is when it comes to mixing up names between what is on the page, if you’re reading it or if you’re listening to it, if it’s on the page, whether the shape of the word, whether it has ascenders like a T or an L or descenders like a P, that matters cause it changes the shape of the word.
But then if you change it to auditory, it’s a lot more like what kind of vowel sounds do we have? Either way, just giving the name a different first letter goes a long way.
Wes: Also, different number of syllables is also helpful.
Oren: So in more substansive advice, I would say that giving your characters contrasting personalities is a good way, especially if they are major characters who are on screen a lot together.
Chris: If you’re creating a team, usually contrasting them against each other is really great. It creates more interesting interactions. It creates more conflict in scenes that would otherwise not have as much conflict because an enemy isn’t around.
Oren: This is actually a problem with the MCU, is that they have so many characters who are the quipsters that it starts to get a little weird when those characters are in a room together.
You know, I need a little break between my quips, okay. You got Spiderman and Tony Stark and Star Lord, they’re all in the same room and they’re all quipping and it’s like, okay, calm down. Calm down.
Chris: Yeah. The quipping doesn’t stand out anymore. Right? The whole landscape, knowing what’s in your genre and out there in general does make a difference.
People compare your character not just to other characters in the story, but to other characters in other works. I’m not saying that you should try to make a character that’s 100% unique because that’s impossible. Be realistic about this. I don’t think that you, for instance, should try to avoid making a character that reminds anybody of any well-known character in any story anywhere.
That’s not going to work out. If yours is a very common character archetype, a character type out there, you can do your best to steer away from that or do something that’s just used less often. One way you can do that, of course, is that there were some people who just aren’t covered very often at all in stories in general.
When’s the last time you had a story where the main character was homeless or a social worker, or there are certain people, we just don’t make the heroes of our stories often enough.
Oren: And I actually can think of an example of a story with a homeless protagonist, and I’m not doing this to be snarky and be like, ‘Oh, but there is one Chris’.
Chris: [laughs] Like every commenter.
Oren: It’s because it’s a perfect example because I remember him. This is the character from The Sword of Summer. The main character starts off homeless, and it’s so unusual that I remembered it. Now it has some issues cause you get the distinct impression that this character is homeless because he is too proud to ask his relatives to stay with them.
Which I’m not gonna say that’s impossible. But I just feel like the book is kind of underestimating how much it sucks to be homeless. Even then, I still just remembered that cause it was so weird.
Chris: There’s a lot more tendency to have main characters who have more power and privilege. Our stories are more likely to be about privileged people, also generates less sympathy.
It can be really good to try to make your story about types of people who don’t have their stories told. Not that you should co-opt somebody else’s story, but telling a story from the perspective of somebody who is not the hero often can be very helpful.
Oren: We should mention that we really discourage trying to use marginalized traits to make a character more memorable.
You should have marginalized characters in your stories because it’s the right thing to do, and because diverse casts are inherently better than non-diverse ones in most cases. You probably shouldn’t try to make your character super memorable because of their race or gender or ability status because that way lies bad things.
It’s very easy to go from that to being a caricature, especially if you yourself are not a member of that marginalized group. I don’t recommend that.
Chris: Yeah. Let’s talk about stereotypes for a bit, and I specifically want to talk about iZombie because again, character traits, if we don’t do it well, a lot of times are used for novelty and that’s good, but you don’t want to take somebody’s inherent demographic characteristics and use those for novelty. Cause that looks really bad.
So the premise of iZombie is we have a main character who is a zombie. That’s great. That’s memorable. Obviously zombie, that’s becoming common, as we have more stories about zombies, we have more characters have zombie traits instead of zombies just walking around braaiins.
But still, it’s very memorable to have a main character who is a zombie, and she eats brains and she works in a morgue [chuckles], where she has some availability to eat brains, but she tends to solve crimes because when she eats somebody’s brain, she gets some of their memories, which helps her solve the crime, but she also gets some of their personality characteristics temporarily.
What the show has done as it has used that to create a per episode novelty factor. She’ll eat part of the brain of an old woman, and then she’ll act like a cranky old woman for the episode. It’s a very stereotypical manner that is not respectful to the people. There was one where she ate the brain of an Asian dude. It was a racist episode. It was not good.
Oren: Oh no.
Chris: It was very cringe-worthy. So the lesson here is that you have to be careful about using people for novelty, using real traits, of real people of demographic characteristics and trying to do some to get all of the novelty distinctiveness that you can because you’re going to make it disrespectful because to somebody who has those traits, that’s not a quirk. That’s not fun and entertaining. That’s just who they are.
So those things should always be normalized. They should never be used in that kind of manner. It’s a lot easier to use somebody’s career, for instance, in that manner than their inherent demographic characteristics.
Oren: Another thing that can be really useful for making character more memorable is making them likable [Wes chuckles].
If I like a character, I am much more likely to remember who they are. And I’m not just talking about Murderbot, but I am definitely talking about Murderbot.
Chris: [laughing] Murderbot is also very distinctive. I’ve been talking about the Murderbot series a lot. They’re called the Murderbot Diaries specifically, because Murderbot is a character that has what I would consider the three tenants of likability, just all maxed out.
This is like a best case scenario for a likable character. Murderbot is very selfless and very sympathetic and very novel. Specifically, Murderbot is a construct who has both biological and machine components. Therefore, an unusual character, and that distinctiveness and novelty that comes from that is part of Murderbot’s appeal.
Oren: Another cautionary tale to keep in mind is that being memorable doesn’t automatically mean the character is good. There are some characters that I remember because I hated them and one of them to not be in the story. Like Chris and I are watching Fruits Basket right now and they just introduced a new pervert character.
Who is always going around verbally harassing women into a certain extent, physically harassing them, and I hate him. I remember him because I hate him so much and I hate every moment he’s on screen, especially because all the other characters are more memorable for good reasons.
Chris: Yeah. It’s like Mineta in my Hero Academia. Mineta is the worst character. Nobody likes him. Why can’t we just take him out of the show?
Oren: Yup. I will never forget Mineta but that’s not a good thing.
Wes: Small little things can help. I mentioned association. I mentioned epithets, a talisman and a character that possesses a talisman can be more memorable. A talisman in this instance would be an article of clothing, a piece of jewelry, some item that the character possesses.
And for example, if we’re going into the Book of Three, The Chronicles of Prydain, two characters are most known for their talismans. There’s Fflewddur Fflam, and he has the harp that strings will break when he lies, which is great because he also has a very just quirky manner of speaking that makes him memorable, but also Eilonwy has her bauble. It’s some kind of glowing sphere that lights up and that makes her quite memorable. Also she’s memorable because she’s the ego deflator of Teran. Every time he starts thinking he’s cool, she just shoots him down, which is great.
I was thinking about in The Black Cauldron, and there’s a character who doesn’t survive the first half. His name’s Adaon, but he has a crystal that offers insight and Taron gets Adaon’s gem after he dies from a Huntsman attack. It’s kind of like, ‘what do you remember about the character? Oh, okay, well, I remembered that character had this item and this item was important in some way’, and so that talisman is kind of like an external representation of the character.
Chris: It’s also very iconic visually, the bauble, it’s like this round glowing orb. It’s different than the rest of the setting. The harp that strings breaking and crystal like, these are all very iconic things.
Wes: What also is great about it being a physical object like this is if the character is missing, but another character possesses the talisman, it’s kind of a good way to keep that other character around because of so much symbolic significance that the talisman has for the other character. I think that that can be done well. You don’t necessarily need to make your main character have a talisman because your main character is probably already memorable because of her goal or quest. There’s enough going on for the main character but side characters benefit from this.
Chris: I do think characters that appear more briefly do have to be a little more distinct. If you go all in on making your character super distinct and unique some of the risks is that they will come off as a caricature because you’ve exaggerated them so much, they don’t seem like a real person.
But depending on the length that this character is going to be around for, how long the story is, if you have more time, it’s easier to develop a character that is distinct and memorable, but it’s still pretty complex and deep at the same time. Whereas if the story is shorter, you don’t really have time for that. I actually have this one story, Hellgate Incident 24, it got a lot of comments about how the characters in there feel so real and their mannerisms are based on people in the workplace, in real life, which makes a difference, but they’re actually written like caricatures.
They’re definitely exaggerated from how real people behave, but it’s a very short story that’s composed entirely of emails. So there would have been no way for those characters to make an impression unless I exaggerated those real behaviors I’d seen.
Oren: And by the same token, if that had been a longer story, having characters who were always talking that way, and a caricature of their archetype would have gotten annoying, I suspect.
Also, just for the record, y’all erased Gurgi and his wallet while you were talking.
Chris: [laughing] No.
Wes: But the point is, Gurgi gets the wallet at the end of the first book. I contend that while Gurgi has a talisman Gurgi is mostly memorable A for being a Gurgi.
I think he’s kind of a Yoda in that respect. It’s unclear what he is, he’s Gurgi, but he gets crunching and munchings. He has like a verbal quirk and also he’s always hungry. I think that makes him more memorable.
Oren: I’d honestly forgotten he didn’t start with that.
Wes: He gets it at the end, is kind of a reward because he’s always hungry.
There’s a point where some of the other characters, but they don’t really have any food, and so Gurgi’s feeding everybody from his wallet of ever food, but they find out that it’s not that satisfying, which I think is like a great thing. It’s like, here’s your magical item. It’ll always give you food. You’re not going to really like it though. Gurgi liked it. Nobody else did.
Chris: Gurgi does not have a very like picky palate there. Gurgi just likes food. That’s what matters. Everybody else is like, ‘okay, it’s food. It will fill us up. It will allow us to travel without the story being bogged down by the logistics for how we get food all the time while we’re traveling, but it’s just not very good food. And we would really rather eat something else, but if we don’t have anything else, then we can have that’.
Wes: I’m going to specifically talk about Gurgi, Fflewddur and Doli the dwarf, because at the end of that book, they all get something. Gurgi gets his wallet. It goes along with his crunches and munchings and now he has his food. Fflewddur is the one with the harp talisman and his verbal quirk is that he exaggerates in lies and so his heartstrings break, and so his gift is one string that will never break. That is kind of an interesting play on his talisman already. Doli is memorable because when he’s introduced in the story, he barely talks to any of them and whenever he’s asked a question or frustrated, he just holds his breath.
And turns purple cause he’s holding his breath so hard and then they find out that he’s mad that he can’t turn invisible cause all the other dwarves in his family can hold their breath and turn invisible. So at the end of the first book. He gets his wish and he can hold his breath and make him invisible. But then when he comes back in the next story, we learned that going invisible makes his ears buzz and hurt. And so then he starts bringing in more verbal quirks about bees and hornets, swarms of them and stuff like that. So he’s still agitated, but for like different reasons.
Chris: Instead of watching him turn purple, now we’re hearing him complain about all of the hornets in his ears.
Wes: It’s five books and they’re well planned out, but how he’s taking what’s initially memorable and changing them as it’s going through the story is kind of a fun way to keep your attention.
Oren: I mentioned contrasting personalities earlier. I wanted to give a pretty interesting example, which is actually Mando from the Mandalorian.
I think Mando on his own would be very boring and not really relatable or interesting or even very memorable because he’s stoic and has no facial expressions, but pairing him with baby Yoda is where the memorability comes from. I really feel like I have a super strong image in my head of who Mando is, and almost all of that comes from interactions with Baby Yoda.
If it was just Mando being a cold, silent bounty hunter, I would be asleep. I would just be like, ‘yeah, I guess he was going to go and punch somebody [snoring, Chris and Wes laughing]’. Instead he’s like, ‘no, stop playing with my spaceship, Baby Yoda’. ‘Okay, fine. You can have this little knob that can be your toy now’. Beautiful. I love it.
Chris: I really think Baby Yoda was just stroke of genius from wherever storyteller came up with that.
It was the perfect solution to this protagonists they had that had to be mysterious kind of by necessity. It’s like how do you build attachment to a character that is supposed to be mysterious? Normally, protagonists are not mysterious [chuckling].
Oren: it’s not that Mando is completely unmemorable without Baby Yoda. There are a couple of instances like when he uses sign language to talk with the Tusken Raiders and gets through their territory without violence. That’s very memorable and I’ll remember him forever for doing that because. In the Star Wars onscreen universe. I don’t think anyone’s ever done that before.
There are a lot of books where people talk to the Tusken Raiders, but as far as the live action films and now TV show go, the Tusken Raiders when they appear have always been treated as auto agro bandits. Now, having someone talk to them and treat them like human beings is just so, Whoa, my mind is blown!
That was very memorable thing for him to do because in that case, that wasn’t even necessarily. The thing that it said about his character, although it does also say cool things about him, it was that he was doing something memorable.
Chris: Doing things, show, not tell!
Wes: And show, doing things that are different from the normal things.
Chris: Before we go, I just want to mention that in our future podcast, we will be covering the Hugo finalists. The novels. Oren has actually already read all of them, he had a headstart. When they were announced he had already read four, Wes and I are getting through as many as we can, but then we’re going to be discussing them on future podcasts.
So that is coming. We will have much to say on these. If you are reading any or planning to please join us or if you just want to hear what we think about, novels that are up for awards. Spoilers: We don’t love lots of them.
Wes: I wonder what the guy who hates everything is going to say about it.
Oren: [laughter] Ooh, it’s a mystery.
All right, so we’re going to have to call this ups to a close. Thank you everyone for listening. If anything we said piqued your interest, you can leave a comment on the website at Mythcreants.com before we go, I want to thank a few of our patrons. First we have Kathy Ferguson, who is a professor of political theory and star Trek. Next, we have Ayman Jaber, who is a urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally we have Denita Rambo and she lives at therambogeeks.com talk to you next week.
Mythcreants is free, but the fairy dust and anti-matter we feed on isn’t help us out by going to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Chris: This has been the Mythcreants podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Colton.
Where does animal end and monster begin? Are monsters just particularly dangerous or mysterious animals? What effect would monsters have on an ecosystem? We talk about all that and more, because this week’s topic is realistic monsters. It’s time to discuss what monsters eat, why they might attack humans, and how the real monster is the damage caused to infrastructure. Plus, a touching personal story about why Oren is afraid of dogs.
Show Notes The 100: Parasite Worms * Air Bison * Horizon Zero Dawn * Torchbearer * Maximum Ride * Live Die Repeat * The Witcher * The Upside Down TranscriptGenerously transcribed by I. W. Ferguson.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle. [opening song]
Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren, and with me today is Wes and Chris and I have a pop quiz for both of you. And the question is, what is the difference between a monster and an animal. And since I know no one wants to answer pop quizzes, I’m just going to go in the order of how I introduced them. Wes, you first.
Wes: A monster is a scary thing that will threaten me, and an animal is a cute, forest friend that will befriend me and we’ll all be okay.
Oren: Chris?
Chris: I would say an animal operates like all of the real animals that we know on Earth, even if it’s technically not a real animal and it’s on an alien planet, it would have all of the characteristics like intelligence level and abilities that we would consider animals on Earth to have. Whereas, a monster, it might be scarier, but it might also have weird supernatural stuff or do other weird things that we would not expect animals to do.
Wes: Wow, I really teed you up for that one, Chris.
Chris: You’re not wrong though. That is definitely the connotation that we have with animals and monsters.
Wes: I wanted to sneak that in from the start.
Oren: So today’s topic is using realistic monsters, and by realistic, I mean having the monsters act in a way that is more accordant with the way that you would expect a creature of that monster’s intelligence to act. Because one of the things that’s common with monsters in more trope-ey settings is that they’re always out to try to murder humans, and it’s very often not at all clear why. Why is this monster out here trying to eat humans? When in real life there are many animals that are physically more powerful than a human, but they aren’t usually wandering around trying to wipe out human civilization. That’s not a thing that happens.
So I just wanted to talk a little bit about that because it can get kind of silly. People are willing to excuse this trope to a certain degree because we like fighting dragons, but I’ve read some books recently where the monsters just feel completely out of nowhere. What is happening with these monsters? Why are they here? Why are they acting this way? Especially true in sci-fi settings, because I think there’s just a slightly higher standard of believability in sci-fi, but I can get it in fantasy, too.
Chris: I think of this as being, “I want my monsters to be realistic-feeling, but also not feeling like animals.” And there’s almost like a balancing factor. Where on the not animal side, but not realistic we have things like in season five of The 100 there’s these parasitic worms and there has just been a second nuclear apocalypse, so the entire Earth is dead. But somehow there’s parasitic worms that come out of the sands and infect people, and grow really fast.
How could these things possibly be alive? What were they eating earlier? How could they still exist after nuclear bombs went off? I don’t understand. And then on the other side, we have things like, Oren and I recently watched this trailer for an anime called Drifting Dragons where there’s airship crews that are hunting and eating dragons as though they’re sky whales.
Okay, we could come up with a whole ecosystem and compare dragons to sky whales, but now they’re animals and I don’t really want to watch people kill and eat them, especially if we’re comparing them to whales.
Oren: Right. And it’s not like I’m watching this thinking, “Oh, how immoral—hunting.” You know, I eat meat. I know where meat comes from, and I’m not against characters who hunt, but as the premise of the show, that’s a little weak. I wouldn’t particularly want to watch a show about deer hunting, either. It’s just not a very interesting premise to me.
Chris: So there has to be a way to have monsters that, if we want the protagonists to fight them, we wouldn’t feel bad about it, but they still feel realistic or like they could be there.
Wes: I’m thinking of connotations now, if you were introducing me to a science fiction novel or a fantasy, doesn’t matter, and you made up a creature and gave it a name, whatever, but you described it as an animal. For example, the air bison in Last Airbender, they’re domesticated cows. They’re animals. That tells me that we know a lot about them, and a monster tells me that we don’t know a lot about it. Does that hold true? We want monsters because they’re unknown and therefore we don’t know and what we don’t know we are afraid of, but an animal, an animal connotes that we know everything about it.
Chris: That is definitely a correlation that happens. Not all of the things that we call monsters are scary. We’re definitely capable of having things that we consider a monster, but it’s not really scary. But certainly the connotation is there and things are scarier when they’re mysterious.
Oren: And just to be clear, I should mention that we’re talking about non-sapient monsters. I often call vampires and werewolves monsters, but, that’s not what I’m talking about here, right? I’m talking about chimeras and stuff like that. I originally wanted to talk about this because the Jurassic Park franchise is slowly lurching towards a post-apocalyptic, ‘walking dinos’-type show where somehow a few dozen dinosaurs that escaped at the end of the last Jurassic World movie have literally destroyed human civilization. We are now in the dino land. I’m amazed that this franchise has gone in that direction, but looking back on it, I could kind of see the roots of it, even back in the first movie where they were like, “Oh man, the dinosaurs can breed because of their frog DNA.”
That doesn’t really change what’s happening in this movie, right? In the actual movie, the threat is from the dinosaurs that are there. They’re not really worried that the dinosaurs are going to hatch up a bunch of reinforcements. {laughter, merriment}
That line is the start of what would become stronger and stronger with each iteration of the franchise. The idea that dinosaurs are an existential threat to humanity and it’s like, “Okay, I guess that’s what we’re going with now.” It’s somehow more ridiculous than zombies.
Chris: Look, Oren, life will find a way, but specifically dinosaur life. Human life doesn’t find a way to kill dinosaur life. Only the dinosaur life finds a way to kill a human life.
Oren: I guess the dinosaurs are the virus. So that just made me think, I don’t like it, bothers me a lot. But one of the main things that I would advise thinking about when you’re crafting some kind of fantasy ecosystem evolving monsters is, What do they eat? Do they eat? In a fantasy or sci-fi setting, it’s possible you could have a monster that doesn’t actually eat. There’s a PlayStation game where it’s a post-apocalyptic game and you have a bow and arrow and there’s a bunch of robot dinosaurs. I would love to see the lore on how the setting got to this point where there are a bunch of robot dinosaurs running around.
It makes more sense. At least in the moment because you don’t have to worry about, “What are the robot dinosaurs eating?” You can just have them out there and they kill humans on sight and they’re made of metal, so they’re probably hard to kill.
Chris: The other thing I would say, that if you want your characters to specifically kill monsters, and we’re not supposed to feel bad about it, there should be plenty of those monsters around. In other words, they should be not the last wampa! {laughter, merriment}
I still haven’t forgiven Oren for his ‘last wampa’ story.
Oren: The Last Wampa! It’s so, so good. Everyone loves The Last Wampa.
Chris: No, no, it’s not. There are lots of wampa! There are lots of wampa.
Oren: Well, you’ll be glad to know that the Star Wars extended universe writers agree with you. There is a story where they go back to Hoth for some reason and they meet a bunch of professional game hunters who are a bunch of jerks and we are clearly supposed to cheer when the wampas come in and kill them all.
Chris: Wow, that’s amazing.
Wes: That does make me feel better.
Oren: That’s a thing that happened in that story. And the one that Luke cut the arm off of is their leader. He’s the wampa leader.
Wes: Okay. I like that less.
Chris: That’s the remedy I need to this ‘last wampa’ story here.
Oren: In general, if your monsters are huge and have giant teeth, they’d have to have those things for a reason. It’s unlikely that a predator is going to evolve to be way bigger and way stronger than it has to be to take down prey because at that point, it’s just being inefficient. And so if you have a giant monster with big armor-penetrating teeth, there had better be an armored, large herbivore around there somewhere for it to eat, assuming that it’s a predator.
It doesn’t necessarily have to be. You can also have monsters that come into conflict with humans because of territory. And that’s not a predation instinct. That can also happen. You know, if it’s a giant herbivore there’d have to be a lot of plants around.
Wes: We’re really about to spill into ecosystems, aren’t we? How much foliage is there to support large herbivores and how much sunlight does this planet get? A big old rabbit hole.
Chris: And hopefully this is not a monster that is protecting its young and that’s why it’s aggressive, and please don’t make it cute. This is my list of requests.
Oren: If you want to have your characters treat the monsters more like animals, a good thing you can do is study the way that park rangers do it, because you’ll notice that park rangers don’t go into the park with swords and machine guns in case they run into a bear. Because there are better ways to handle this. Fighting an animal’s not efficient.
And so you can have an adventure story where your PCs or your protagonists—depending on if it’s a roleplaying game or prose story—wander into an area that has dangerous animals. But fighting the animal is the last resort because you probably have other ways of dealing with it.
I did this once in a Torchbearer game where I had the main “magical creatures”, were basically just dinosaurs and the main characters came upon one in the first dungeon they came into and they were like, “Okay. We have to figure out a way to get around this animal without fighting it.” They did a bunch of animal handling stuff and it was super fun, and I really enjoyed it.
Wes: That makes sense because if you have animal monsters in an area and they want to battle them, the animal will react based on fear and pain. You can maybe have your characters choose to fight to the death, but animals won’t do that.
Chris: Just like people won’t do that. I’ve talked about this many times on the blog. It’s racist to think that any group of people are just going to randomly throw themselves at the enemy until they’re all dead. Something really, really awful would have to be happening. People don’t do that. They want to live. Animals are like that, too. They are risk averse. They’ll fight as much as they have to. If they think they’re going to get gored, they will not.
Wes: They’re also not always hungry. That brings me back to Jurassic Park. Even as a kid, I was like, “Aren’t those raptors full? Didn’t we see them getting fed earlier that day?”
Oren: And then, “They’ve already eaten four humans by now, how much room could they possibly have left?”
Chris: But the big issue, of course, with this Jurassic Park franchise is it’s not about a couple of characters going alone into the wilderness and then encountering big animals that they’re not prepared to deal with because they don’t have the necessary weapons or equipment. It’s about what are essentially animals taking on the entirety of human society and humans can kill everything.
My personal theory for why orcas don’t eat humans, even though they definitely could, is because they know we’ll just murder them all. Maybe I’m attributing a little bit too much sophistication to orcas, but we’re out there with our boats.
Wes: Unlike those monstrous sharks that don’t have such thoughts.
Oren: Yeah. I mean, I don’t know a whole lot about animal intelligence. I would kind of wonder if maybe with the orca is that it is smart enough to know that humans are not it’s normal prey. Because my understanding is that a lot of shark attacks are generally considered to be caused by a case of mistaken identity. It’s not a hundred percent, sometimes a shark does seem to just attack a human for no reason, but a lot of the time it seems like the shark mistook the human for something else, and very often will bite once and then be like, “Uh, that’s not a seal,” and then leave.
Wes: To what Chris said about animals being risk averse: But how hungry is the animal? It will take bigger risks depending on how hungry it is, and perhaps pursue something outside of its normal food supply.
Chris: For a lot of animals when they attack humans, they are just getting desperate.
Oren: Another thing to consider is, is your monster actually strong enough to be a major threat to a human? Because humans are actually better at fighting than we give ourselves credit for. We can actually be pretty dangerous. And then if we have a club or something heavy to hold in our weird grasping limbs. What are these things, guys? It’s like having five tentacles at the end of a stick. I don’t get it. But yeah, if we can have those things, we’re actually pretty dangerous. And so that’s one of the reasons why I was so amused in Maximum Ride when the characters are running from this big dog, it’s like, “Oh, it’s such a scary dog.”
I personally am scared of dogs because a dog pushed me into a fire once when I was a kid. But I think if I was a hardened resistance fighter, I could probably take on a dog. I think I could do it, if I had to. I still wouldn’t want to, but I could. The werewolves that are chasing them are probably more threatening than the dog.
Chris: You mean the erasers?
Oren: Excuse me. Yes. Yeah, the erasers.
Wes: Oh, yeah. That story. That’s what we’re talking about. Oh, I hate that.
Chris: I do think that if you want monsters that are going to take on the entirety of human society just beyond encountering a few people in the woods: “Now we want to actually threaten civilization.” They pretty much have to have supernatural characteristics of some kind. It doesn’t have to be explicitly magic. It could be things like, they could be weird aliens, like in the movie, Live, Die, Repeat, or Edge of Tomorrow, more forgettably named Edge of Tomorrow. There’s a bunch of aliens. They don’t seem individually that intelligent, but they have Groundhog’s Day powers. So they can just keep replaying time until they succeed.
Oren: And those aliens are definitely pushing the line between a sapient and non-sapient monster. They very often didn’t really act like they had the ability to do complex planning, but I think they were supposed to, since they have like a weird invasion force going on. I was a little unclear about that.
Chris: I think it was supposed to be one of those ‘hive-mind’ things where they had a central omega that maybe did the thinking. The individual drones didn’t seem to have intelligent thought as far as we could tell.
Oren: Another thing I wanted to talk about as a potential role for your monsters can be something other than direct threat to human life. They can be basically a pest, and that can cause a lot of problems depending on the type of story you’re writing. If you’re writing a very high-stakes, fast-paced adventure story, then it might not be such a big thing, but if you’re writing a story about someone who’s trying to keep their village going through the winter, having a particularly nasty type of vermin that can tunnel through the walls of your barn and eat all your grain, it could be a really serious threat. That could be a problem, and that’s just a slightly more realistic thing you could do with your monster that wouldn’t require it to be an ‘extinction-level event’ problem.
Wes: Except the humans would get so annoyed by the pest that they would seek to exterminate them, because that’s such a human thing to do.
Oren: Although it’s generally pretty hard. That’s one of the traits that we use to define a pest is that it’s hard to get rid of. We generally don’t consider apex predators to be pests because we can get rid of those pretty easily if we want to. They’re actually very vulnerable. Rats, or giant hornets, as the case may be, are a little bit more of an issue.
Wes: Especially if they’re called ‘murder hornets.’
Oren: Yeah, they are sometimes called that.
Wes: The premise of the monster threatening the town is tough, but it seems like just such a staple of fantasy. Wasn’t that how the Witcher show opened? With him hunting a “monster” in a swamp?
Oren: The Witcher just does straight up D&D monsters. It’s not even trying to make them a little bit realistic.
Wes: Although wasn’t there a later episode where somebody said, “And one less of those monsters in the world”? It tried to—I’m going to say animalize—the monster that he killed. “Oh, you’re hurting our ecosystem. That thing probably had a family.”
Oren: There is an episode of the Witcher where they talk about hunting dragons, which are sapient. So that’s a sort of a different scenario. There’s a difference between hunting a creature that can talk to you, versus hunting the last tiger, or the last wampas the case may be. {laughter}
Chris: You stay away from that last wampa!
Oren: Those are different problems. Hunting a species to extinction is bad for a number of reasons, but hunting a sapient species is not only way worse, but it also doesn’t matter if it’s the last one because—hot take—murder is bad. {laughter}
All your hot philosophy from Oren Ashkenazi on mythcreants.com.
Chris: The Witcher, they definitely don’t seem like natural occurrences to me, but the world building is kinda messy. You’re not really sure where they all come from. It does feel like maybe there were dark mages a couple of hundred years ago that spawned a bunch of dark magic that out of it grew monsters. It seems like that type of setting.
Oren: Yeah, a wizard did it. I am a really big fan of the premise that there’s another reality that sometimes intersects with our own and monsters come out of it. At that point you can kind of cover up a lot of the issues of, “Well, what would this creature eat?” And it’s like, “Well, nothing, cause it’s not from here.”
Chris: The Upside Down, for instance, from Stranger Things. Of course, in the Upside Down, the place is so desolate you’re like, “Okay, what did they eat?” But I think there, the idea is that the mind flayer, or what have you, has been moving through universes, consuming them. So it’s eaten that one up and it has to come to the next one.
Oren: Running out of food in its pantry. It’s been self-quarantining and now it’s making its trip to the grocery. {laughter, merriment}
Wes: Yes, fleshy delights.
Chris: But certainly with supernatural stuff, you could get a lot of things that you can violate more normal rules. Maybe these are demons that escape from hell running around. They only eat souls.
Oren: A good way to do this is often to have your characters be in an area that otherwise doesn’t see a lot of humans. If there are monsters running around that are capable of eating humans and do this regularly and are made of armor and murder, I think that you would have a hard time forming a civilization in the first place.
You would either have to destroy most of the monsters or you just wouldn’t be able to. I think that in a lot of cases, that’s why it’s useful to have your character be either on an alien planet, or on another area of your fantasy world that hasn’t been inhabited by sapient creatures yet, or in the case of a lot of fantasy stories, the premise is more that for some reason the wilderness has advanced, and it’s not really clear why a lot of the time. Why is the wilderness advancing now? It’s like, “Hey, it just is. It’s fine.” That’s probably the best take you’re ever going to get for a D&D type setup—why you have to constantly go out and kill monsters and come back.
Wes: In striving to make them realistic, thoughts on whether or not you should include that character that points out that they’re just misunderstood and in fact can be befriended and tamed.
Oren: Only if that person is right. {laughter}
Let me put it this way. A character who is like, “We shouldn’t kill the murder monsters,” is both really irritating and also a weird environmental straw man. In real life, if tigers were an existential threat to humanity, I don’t think you would see a lot of people protesting them being hunted.
If we were in danger of being wiped out by tigers, I think environmentalists would be okay with us fighting the tigers. So the person who’s like, “It’s just an animal. It’s misunderstood”, if they are correct, that can be a fun twist, but if they’re wrong, they’re just an obnoxious straw man of actual people who get enough of a bad rap as it is.
Chris: As long as it’s done with some thought. Sometimes, in some stories, having the protagonist be like, “No, everybody else is so cool and wants to kill, but I understand that it’s an animal,” and sometimes that can get a little repetitive and feel like it’s a little bit slapped on there. Like the writer is purposely making the world full of assholes just so that the protagonist can stand out by not being an asshole.
Oren: It does raise the question of why would your protagonist be the only person who thinks that.
Chris: But I think as long as you apply some thought to it. These people, what is their normal way of handling the situation? Or, if you have a group of characters heading into a place that they’ve never been before, credibly establishing their fear, and as long as you think through it a little bit, I wouldn’t be too worried about it.
Wes: The person who cares, they could not be the only one. I’m not saying that you need PETA in your worlds, but they can’t just be the one person that thinks that those are not monsters. Probably someone else has had that thought, too.
Oren: But the one that I really hate is the reveal that, “Oh, these monsters were sapient the whole time.” Did they not ever try to tell us that? Even if they don’t have the ability to make human speech, demonstrating intelligence isn’t that hard if you have human level intelligence; there are lots of ways you could do it. Especially in a modern or sci-fi setting. In a fantasy setting, maybe it would be hard, but in a sci-fi setting, it’s like, “Hey, why is that monster tapping out the first 10 prime numbers over and over again? That’s weird.”
There’s a whole field of study on this about how we would try to communicate with an alien species that we don’t share any mouthparts with. And I just find that really unbelievable, and especially if we find out that these monsters have some kind of super power and are really, really strong, and then we find out they also have human level intelligence. Why haven’t they been using it and why do they act like animals most of the time and not use their intelligence to keep themselves alive? This is a thing that I see a lot in fantasy and sci-fi and I don’t like it. I always find it very contrived.
Chris: Things that have that level of intelligence will act like it, right? Nothing else will be a degree of a coordination among them that indicates high intelligence.
Oren: Right. It’s like, yeah, okay. That thing might look like a weird monster because it has lots of claws and stuff, but when the time it starts building a trebuchet to siege your castle, you might have to wonder. It’s like, “Hmm, I think maybe it’s got something going on.”
In general, people like animals. And so the idea of humans going out and fighting animals as if they were monsters is just probably a bad idea. If you’ve ever played D&D with younger players, and it’s like, “Some wolves attack you!” and they’re like, “What? Why do we have to fight the wolves?” Even if you can come up with an explanation for why the wolves are doing that, they’re probably not going to enjoy it.
And that’s the same thing in books. Again, if I have to read a story about the main character killing a bunch of wolves. All I’m going to think is that this main character is just kind of incompetent and that there were probably some other way to deal with this problem.
Chris: Do you hear that, Dragon Age? Maybe you should stop making the bears eat me.
Oren: It’s hard enough to believe that wolves would attack a party of heavily armed adventurers.
Wes: But how else are you going to grind for that sweet, sweet XP?
Oren: Oh boy. We’ve talked about game design now. Think we’re going to have to call an end to this one. Thank you everyone for listening. Those of you at home, if anything we said piqued your interest, you can leave a comment on the website at Mythcreants.com. Before we go, I want to thank a few of our patrons. First we have Kathy Ferguson, who is a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Next we have Ayman Jaber. He is a urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Finally, we have Danita Rambo, and she lives at therambogeeks.com. We’ll talk to you next week.
[closing theme]
Character thoughts, huh, what are they good for? A whole lot, it turns out. But they can also be used poorly, and then they’re worth absolutely nothing. This week, we do a deep dive on how to narrate what’s going on inside the protagonist’s head. We talk about how close and distant perspectives affect narration, what different perspectives even are, and why you might prefer one to another. Plus, a little chat about our old friend, melodrama.
Show Notes Choosing Your Story’s Perspective * The Ocean at the End of the Lane * Dagon * The City In the Middle of the Night * Back to the Future TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Darian.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.
Wes: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m your host Wes, and with me today is Chris and Oren. And I would like to tell you what’s going on through very close, intimate perspective, sparing no details, no emotional thoughts or reactions, as you all stand there and wait for me to finally say something. But rest assured, this close emotional narration I’m going to impart on you is not mere exposition, but something magical and transformative that is going to make these minutes of silence between dialogue seem like it’s really worth it. Right?
Chris: We hope! Dun dun dun…
Oren: That sounds awesome. If that’s true, then I’m totally into it!
Wes: Well, so today we’re talking about that close perspective narrator. You know, first person, I pronoun, who’s telling you what’s going on, filtered through that person’s particular thoughts and emotions. And whenever I encounter it initially, I’m here for it, but I just end up usually not being as satisfied. Maybe I prefer more distant narration, but I get kind of lost in the intimacy and I get annoyed at certain characteristics of it. And so that’s why I wanted to talk about it today to see if I’m alone in this.
Chris: I also want to mention that this can also be done in third person. Obviously, if you’re writing it in first person, I think it’s more likely to be close narration. Although, I have actually read some first person narration that was surprisingly distant. A good example, I think, is Neil Gaiman’s Ocean at the End of the Lane, where it’s a character thinking back about when he was a kid, and he feels distant from himself as a kid, right? Especially when you have those character retellings, they can actually be surprisingly distant. So it’s not exactly the same thing as what pronoun you’re using, but obviously there is a trend where if it’s using first person, it’s more likely to be close narration, whereas third person often has more flexibility to be distant and is perhaps less likely to be close.
Wes: That is an interesting bit too though, about how first can be more distant, because we don’t internally vocalize everything that we think, necessarily. And if you’re trying to do that on paper, you kind of have to vocalize everything. It’s always internal dialogue. Otherwise… I mean, it doesn’t work to do it any other way.
Oren: Well, if you’re using words to communicate, you have to use words to communicate.
Oren: Hot take.
Wes: Hey, Chris, you are the master of point of view. Can you give us just a quick rundown of the features of close narration?
Chris: Oh, well, thank you, Wes. Very flattered. Yeah. Okay, so close narration means that when you’re in the narration, you’re experiencing the story as the viewpoint character. You’re inside their head. You’re looking out through their eyes. As opposed to distant narration, which gives you a sense that you’re kind of hovering over the character’s head looking down at them. It’s kind of the subjective difference.
And when we get into the difference of what the narration actually looks like at a technical level, we see that in close narration, the general narration and the character thoughts are, for the most part, the same thing. And the way that the story is narrated, all of the character opinions are stated as facts, and it can be hard to tell when something is just something the character thinks. And when something has authorial endorsement. And for the most part you can almost assume by default all the things that the character thinks, all of their bias, is just how it is. Unless the writer specifically establishes we have an unreliable narrator. Whereas with distant, usually thoughts are put off in italics and the narration has a more objective, or—in the case of omniscient writing—instead of a viewpoint character, we have like a separate personality who is our narrator. Otherwise, we have more objective-feeling narration.
There’s subtle differences, like in distant narration we’ll hear about how the character saw something or heard something, in those words. Like, “she saw a bird fly away.” But putting her in there and using that pronoun for the viewpoint character gives the audience a sense of looking at her from the outside. Whereas if you were in close, it would just say “a bird flew away.” Cause we’re in her eyes, we’re not thinking about the fact that the character is seeing that bird. So there’s a lot of little subtle things that change in the narration with the overall tone, but close narration generally is using the characters voice. To a certain extent, the character is telling the story even if it’s in third person. And so while it’s not like the character is overtly telling the story to the audience, it’s still definitely their perspective. So that’s the basic rundown. It’s pretty complicated in practice, but the difference is, I do think that close narration is generally… yeah, I would call it more immersive instead of objective.
Wes: Immersive, in the sense that we don’t have any choice but to be pulled along for this ride of direct thoughts and dialogue and everything getting filtered through one very particular perspective, where an omniscient narrator might take us on a few different rides in one chapter. And you mentioned technical aspects, like the sentence structure might vary more in omniscient, whereas in close perspective, do you say that the sentence structure tends to lean towards more active stuff? I assume that someone might not make as many passive sentence constructions, or they might use different types of verb tenses just to convey what’s happening in the moment.
Chris: Yeah. I would say close narration has, generally, a greater level of immediacy and gives you a closer experience as far as feeling like you are the viewpoint character. Whereas when you get more distance, there’s more of a buffer between you and the story.
Oren: I think a lot of it comes down to consistency within your choice of when you’re being close and when you’re being distant. From what I understand, you’re not usually going to be close all of the time. You’re usually going to be close when something important is happening, but at the same time, you don’t want to be distant when something important is happening, because then it’s like “oh, well, I guess that’s happening to somebody else.” And it’s like you lose the main advantage of being a narrated story, which is that you can feel the much stronger connection with the protagonist. And that’s different than omniscient, right? ‘Cause we’re sort of talking about two categories. And then within one of them we have subcategories, because there’s limited and omniscient. And then within the limited, there’s close in distance.
Chris: Yes. I mean, omniscient is kind of distant by necessity, ‘cause your characters are generally not all-knowing. So omniscient is basically a subcategory of distant.
Oren: Huh. Interesting. That’s not how I would’ve thought about it, but that makes sense.
Wes: But you could have a limited first person. Well, before I try to put it into a bucket… if it’s a first person narrator recounting what happened, as opposed to a first person narrator telling you the events as they happen.
Chris: Yeah. We’re getting into narrative premise right now. It’s a whole nother category of thing that we can talk about, but I call… when it feels like you’re there, and events are just happening, I just call it unfolding events or the story unfolding, versus the future first person telling somebody about something that happened to them in the past, I would call that a character retelling, right? Like, unfolding versus retelling. Just to give us a little language that we can use to talk about these things.
Wes: I’m only bringing that up really because I do want to get to the source of my general frustration. And I’m already suspecting that “unfolding events” might be a bit of a peeve of mine because I think I’m less forgiving with it. I’m more forgiving with somebody who’s doing a retelling, and I know it’s a retelling, because then I know that this narrator is constructing a story, as opposed to trying to just be with the character and things are happening in that moment and unfolding and unfolding. And that’s when we end up running into tricky things of how much the character knows, and what the character is not telling me, even though maybe the character should be telling me, because why would you keep that a secret from your innermost thoughts?
Chris: I mean, certainly the retelling character has some omniscient characteristics, where they have more leeway in what information to hide from you and what to tell to you. Similar to somebody who was telling you their story, it would seem more natural if they leave things out. Whereas unfolding, there’s a lot more of an expectation that you will hear everything that the character thinks as they are experiencing those events. I do think that retellings do tend to get very verbose. I think they’re often more verbose than unfolding, because it’s like having an omniscient narrator, right? You have a person who’s just like, “oh yeah, and that day I went there, and by the way…” I think it does encourage more conversational asides than unfolding does, but maybe it annoys you less because there’s a premise, a narrative premise that explains why we’re doing those asides.
Wes: And maybe I’m more comfortable with that… agreement, initially. It’s like, oh, okay, this is very clear to me. I know the rules. I’m not going to get tripped up on it as… well, I’m less likely to get as tripped up on it.
Oren: I would say that both unfolding and retelling can get too distracted with asides. I would say that unfolding has a smaller chance of getting distracted, but if it does, it’s worse. Whereas retelling has more leeway, but by definition of having more leeway it is more likely that the author will misuse that. Because I’ve read books that have the problem in both types, both unfolding and retelling. I’ve noticed that with retelling, authors often take that as carte blanche to just say, “Oh, whatever. I can just tell whatever I want. ‘Cause technically it fits with my narrative premise. And so yeah, I’ll stop for a moment and give an info dump about the species of tree that I saw.” And it’s like, weren’t there wolves chasing you? I swear there were wolves chasing you a second ago.
Oren: And an unfolding narrator that did that would be more obvious. But authors are less tempted to do so when they’re unfolding, because it’s so much more obviously wrong.
Chris: Similar to limited and omniscient, I think, where omniscient is very powerful, but it comes with a lot of responsibility, as Uncle Ben would say.
Chris: Whereas the useful thing about limited, where you are restricted to what the character knows, is even if you can’t always work in exposition as easily as you could in omniscient, it also gives you some guidelines for what’s important, and maybe what the audience doesn’t need to know. Exposition… maybe that’s not important enough to put in there. It gives you some guardrails.
Wes: Just the word “exposition,” we’ve put out plenty of advice on Mythcreants about being careful with it. A little goes a long way. But I feel that when it comes into… thoughts of the narrator as exposition, I get more of that than I do with omniscient narrators. I wonder if the writer feels compelled to almost overshare because we’re in that character’s head, and then you can encounter things like repetition, or just short little abbreviated punctuation marks, or maybe just the same curse word over and over and over and over and over again, and I’m sitting here reading it saying “yeah, I get it. Can we get back to what’s going on?” I don’t know why I don’t have as much patience, but I do know that I don’t care that much for repetition. And, fair enough, if it’s a character trait for the narrator to maybe muse on or obsess over certain things, or features of a city, or a person that they care a lot about, and that keeps coming up… It’s gonna stress test my patience a little bit because I want to see something new, maybe, as the story carries me forward? It’s like, I know that this was established in chapter one that this person has this obsession. And every time the object of the obsession comes back into play, I don’t really need to hear again about how you’re overwhelmed with feeling about your obsession. I know that that’s there. Nothing changed. You don’t need to remind me.
Oren: I feel like you might also be touching a little bit on melodrama?
Wes: Probably.
Oren: See, that’s not necessarily the same thing, but when you mentioned “you don’t have to keep telling me how you’re overwhelmed with feelings…” I’ve read a couple of books recently that had characters who were constantly overwhelmed with feelings. And it felt very melodramatic…
Chris: And knowing that you just got through The City in the Middle of the Night…
Wes: Yes.
Chris: [laughs].
Wes: We’ll talk more about that, extensively.
Chris: We will talk more about City in the Middle of the Night on another podcast. But I mean, certainly there are lots of writers who are still working on “how much is too much,” and a sense of pacing, or they’re feeling through the story without really thinking intentionally about what narration they’re putting down, and then it has to go through editing, and it doesn’t get chopped as much as it should get chopped. I mean, there’s just… not a sense of pacing. The thing that’s so difficult about exposition is that having the right exposition in your story is actually really important, but it takes an immense knowledge of storytelling before you know “this is what information needs to go in here,” and also have the restraint to know “this doesn’t need to go.” I’ve read about as many stories that are missing information that they really should be telling readers to raise engagement, as ones that are just… info dumping everywhere. And that’s just a really hard thing to do. But melodrama, beyond just the repetitive “oh, I already heard this. Do you have to tell me again?” is a showing versus telling problem, for the most part.
Oren: I feel like this might be another situation where melodrama might be more likely in a unfolding close perspective than in a more distant retelling perspective. Possibly because the author, in attempting to get in the head of their character as events are unfolding, feels like they have to just give us more emotion, bigger emotion, all of the emotion.
Wes: Yes. I’m just agreeing with you so much.
Oren: Because all of the emotion is how this character is feeling right now, and I almost feel like the author would be a little embarrassed to do that in a retelling? Because if you’re getting into the head of a character who is retelling a story, they’re not going to sit there being like “and then I was so overcome by the howling void of grief” because you would never describe yourself that way if you were telling a story to somebody else.
Wes: [laughs]
Oren: Now, I’m not going to say that there aren’t any retelling narrative premises that are melodramatic. I’m sure there are. I just feel like in my gut—you know, we talked about writing with your gut, this is my gut talking—that a close unfolding narration is more likely to have melodrama, because a lot of authors think “more is better” when it comes to emotions.
Chris: And melodrama’s created by, like, “I really want my readers to feel something here, and I don’t actually know how to do that technically. Okay, well, maybe if I just say the word fear over and over again in this paragraph, and use elaborate metaphorical imagery for fear, and how afraid I am, and talk about my insides squeezing and writhing and how my heart wants to escape my body… if I just hammer that really hard, maybe my readers will feel fear?”
Chris: And it’s like, no.
Wes: No.
Chris: That’s not how it works.
Wes: That’s a good point, because okay, we’re in the character’s head, and then enter… stimulus, and the character needs to have a reaction, and the author knows that readers are reading and want to have the reaction too. And so, reactions to things: fight, flight, freeze. And more often than not, it’s just, like, “okay, I’m not sure which one this really falls into, but I’m just going to overwhelm you with this, instead of have the character maybe have a strong emotional reaction that either takes them deeper into the event, away from the event, or paralyzed with some kind of thing.” But I don’t need to really hear about how your entire body froze up for a whole paragraph.
Chris: [laughs]
Oren: I do also think that amongst some writers there’s an issue where they think that it’s clever to have a character who freezes in a difficult situation? Because they’re reacting to the opposite extreme, which we see a lot, of “cool guys don’t look at explosions,” right? Of action heroes who everything washes off of them like nothing matters, and they are islands, and nothing affects them in any way. And so some authors overcompensate and are like, “Oh my gosh, a conflict! This character is completely frozen.” And they sort of seem to think that that’s clever. Very often they will call your attention to it, cause there’ll be like, “you know, in a story, I would have done a cool thing, but since this isn’t a story, this is real life, I didn’t do a cool thing.”
Wes: [laughs]
Oren: And it’s like, okay, I guess, sure. That doesn’t really increase my enjoyment in any way. Believe it or not, there is a balance there. And I do, in general, prefer that characters do things rather than not do things. And there are ways to show that your character is, in fact, affected by what happens to them other than just having them freeze up every time a difficult situation comes along.
Wes: True, because they’re… Hearing a lengthy expression of their thoughts and emotions in reaction to something is not action. You can dump as many evocative words as you want in there, but it’s not action. It’s internal. It’s not affecting the world outside, unless you’re showing us that character taking the emotional reaction to go do something about it.
Chris: And I do think that you can have internal conflicts that are important, where there’s a conflict that is unfolding in the character’s head, but it’s good to know that whenever you’re narrating about the character’s thoughts and feelings, it—particularly if you’re on an unfolding premise—that takes time, right? That makes you feel like time is passing. And so if you have that moment where the character is running for their life… yeah. We don’t have time pauses. Well, the character thinks really hard, right?
Wes: [laughs]
Chris: The clock is still ticking! And certainly the thing that happens when people do too much thoughts in general is just, the pacing is ruined. Especially if it’s during dialogue. Dialogue is pretty sensitive to pace, and characters are expected to respond to each other. So one thing that I’ll do is if a character asks a question, and then the other character thinks for a while, I’ll have the other character react like that character just stood there and didn’t say anything. It’s like, “hello!” Because that’s what it feels like when that character just, like, thinks a bunch, and doesn’t… you don’t write an answer down.
Wes: Yeah. We do that in roleplaying games sometimes. You’re asking a player what that player wants to do, and there is like, “Well, I walk up to the storekeep and I…” And then everybody around the table is waiting, and then you’re like, “Okay, well, the storekeep has decided to help somebody else. We’re not all waiting here.”
Oren: And just, if you’re not sure how this feels, try it the next time you talk to someone. Like when they ask you a question, try to have a several paragraph long think to yourself about what they asked you.
Oren: And see how long it takes you to do that. Because contrary to what some people think, our brains don’t process thoughts as words that quickly. We tend to think in about real time. We’re not going into bullet time compressed acceleration, right?
Wes: I wish.
Oren: Yeah, it doesn’t really work like that. Although again, it’s a little more flexible when you’re doing a distant or more retelling-focused story, because you can have that freeze frame effect, right? Like from a movie. You’d be like, “Yep, that’s me. I bet you wonder how I got into this situation.” That kind of similar thing, which is harder to do when you’re unfolding.
Chris: I also want to mention that there’s a lot of fuzziness between retelling and unfolding. A lot of stories that are retelling, the character starts retelling, but as they retell, they actually go into the head of their previous self and things unfold more. There can be a lot of transition and fuzziness there, so it’s definitely not binary as far as just either retelling or unfolding, when it comes to a first person narrator that’s retelling. A lot of times they will dive into the head of their previous self.
Wes: Which is always interesting when you’re encountering that first person thought narration and then you get a sentence, and it’s probably meant to be put on some kind of stylized meme background and sent out into the world of quotes. But I sometimes do this where, like, you read the quote and you think, wait, who’s that for? Who said that? You know, like that’s a grand observation about life. And in the midst of what’s going on, that seems really out of place. What are we trying to do here? Trying to just nudge something in that’s not quite jiving with what this character is currently experiencing?
Chris: Yeah. I mean, one of the problems with character retellings in particular, especially if they’re diving into the head of their previous self, is sometimes there’s a real lack of clarity about which present or future character is actually thinking these things. You have a lot of flexibility, but sometimes it can be confusing if you’re not careful about clarifying. It does make a difference.
Oren: I’ve read a couple of books where there was clearly a retelling, but as I got further into the book, I was like, “Okay. Does the character at the point the story is at think this, or is this the future version of them thinking this?” And that confusion has made it harder for me to empathize with the character, because I’m having a harder time telling “Okay, this thought that the character’s having seems out of step with what’s going on. Is that because the writing has made a mistake? Or because this is supposed to be a thought from a more informed character later on?” And that’s one of the reasons why unfolding has this distinct advantage, is that you don’t have any of that. You are just in the character’s head right now. And you can get closer to them a little more easily because you aren’t tempted with all these other distractions.
Wes: That’s a good point. Because a frame story… The first one that comes to mind, Oren, you’ve talked about Lovecraft’s “Dagon” before—you know, frame story—but even though there’s a break and then we get the events, it’s still a retelling no matter what. And I wonder, is that okay if you set up the frame and then you go into the next paragraph, there’s a clean break and it just starts immediately as if it’s unfolding? As long as that transition is clear, does that take care of these potential issues of narration, or at least help mitigate it?
Oren: Well, it’s been a while since I’ve read “Dagon,” but if I recall correctly, we start off with the framing device. And then there’s a pretty clear point where, for the most part, the story is then directly in the character’s head and it’s effectively unfolding at that point. And I think that that works fine. I think the issue is if you start zooming in and out.
Wes: That makes sense.
Chris: I would say that if you set the expectation that “this is going to be unfolding now,” as long as you don’t do anything that feels odd—that feels like it’s not a match for that—you’re fine. Everyone is just going to assume it’s unfolding until you specify otherwise.
Wes: So make good use of your sectional breaks. Make good use of white space. Just put a chunk of white space in there to clarify that “whatever just happened, this is now different,” and we’ll be more forgiving, I guess.
Chris: I don’t know. You might need more than white space. I would have to look at it. Depending on…
Oren: You might have to deploy the power of the three asterisks.
Wes: It’s so strong and mighty.
Chris: But as far as internal conflicts can go, it’s like, thoughts can be tense. They are not always slowing things down. Particularly, again, when you know what information your readers need and you know what exposition will actually make the story more engaging, that’s pretty powerful because having your character worry about what could happen if they fail their goals, for instance, that raises tension in the story, right? ‘Cause we’re specifying what are the consequences for failure here, which we recently talked about [in a podcast] as being important for tension. And you know, we can have conflicts at critical moments. Where the character has to figure something out, or the character is facing a dilemma and they have to decide. Perhaps even a battle of will—they have to gather their willpower to do something. My general tip for that is just if you’re doing an internal conflict where a character is feeling indecisive, try to organize it a little bit?
Wes: [laughs]
Chris: And generally you want to group your reasoning so that we have, for instance, one paragraph arguing for one side of the dilemma, another paragraph arguing for the other side of the dilemma. If you mix it up, a lot of times it’ll just feel really disorganized and confusing to readers if we’re like, “Oh, this, but this, but wait this,” and then kind of going back and forth. If you keep that organized, it comes across much clearer.
Oren: This is why I always literally describe an angel and a devil on each shoulder, and then just have them say it as dialogue.
Wes: Perfect. So much easier.
Oren: It fits in every story, believe me. There’s no issue of theme clash.
Chris: Oren, what I’m saying is that they each need to monologue. They should not have a dialogue with each other.
Wes: So I think one of the main takeaways that we should probably leave you guys with is that internal narration has a lot going for it, but make sure that there’s—if you’re going to include a lot of internal conflict, like Chris was talking about—that there’s an external outlet. And where the character might be tested initially, and react a certain way internally, consider how that test could maybe reappear later in the story and then how the thought process around that has maybe changed, if you’re wanting to show character growth. It’s not a written medium, but—Chris, I think this was in a post of yours awhile ago—where Marty McFly from back to the future gets called “chicken,” and you can almost see the internal monologue going through his mind as he gets set off by that. But then by the end of the trilogy, he gets called “chicken,” you think he’s set off, and then he changes his behavior, you know? So there’s some kind of growth there. And I think that that’s something to keep in mind, because as much as we can raise the stakes with internal conflict and narration, you need to show it has an impact on the events of the actual story for it to be satisfying.
Oren: I mean, the job of an actor is often to portray what we would do using internal text, and that’s why actors get paid the big bucks, because that’s hard.
Wes: Yeah. It’s real hard.
Oren: All right, well, I think that is going to be enough for this episode. Thank you, everyone, for listening. If those of you at home have any questions, you can leave them as a comment on the website at mythcreants.com.
Before we go, I want to thank a few of our patrons. First we have Kathy Ferguson, who is a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Next we have Ayman Jaber, who is a Marvel fan and urban fantasy writer, and finally we have Danita Rambo, and she lives at therambogeeks.com. We’ll talk to you next week!
What’s that, someone did a new Star Trek show and we don’t have an episode about it? This shall not stand! Today we’re talking about Picard, the whole Picard, and nothing but Picard. We discuss how this show measures up to previous Trek offerings, where it might go in the next season, and why this feels so much like Mass Effect. Also, we spend a lot of time going through a truly bizarre interview with the showrunner. Make it so.
Show Notes Variety Interview with Michael Chabon * Nicholas Meyer * Picard * Raffi * Rios * Jurati * Elnor * Soji * Dahj * Hugh * Icheb * Seven of Nine * Christopher Pike * Kira * Duet * Move Along Home * Kylo Ren * Reapers * Star Trek: Nemesis * Michael Piller * Martha Wells * Zhat Vash * Qowat Milat TranscriptGenerously Transcribed by Ursula.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock and Chris Winkle.
Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren, with me today is Chris. It’s just the two of us today. Wes is off in copyedit land.
But I have a suggestion, a new suggestion that I think will be very helpful to anyone who wants to make a Star Trek show. And that is, only people who have never heard of Star Trek should be allowed to write it. [Chris laughs] And Chris, do you know why I think that?
Chris: Well, why, Oren?
Oren: The reason I think this is because every time they make a new Star Trek show, especially recently, whether it’s a movie or an actual TV show, they always talk about how the person they brought in to run it is such a Star Trek fan, and they love Star Trek so much, and I’ve now seen the results of that. And I think it’s a mistake.
Apparently Star Trek fans don’t know how to make Star Trek, so they should probably stop and give it to someone who doesn’t actually know about Star Trek. I have a sample size of one where that worked really, really well, back with Wrath of Khan and Nicholas Meyer. So I’m good to go as far as I’m concerned.
Chris: So we’re not counting Abrams, then.
Oren: Uh, no. He claims also to be a Star Trek fan.
Chris: Oh, he does? I thought he just likes Star Wars.
Oren: He also loves Star Wars, but he claims to love Star Trek. Every time they talk to Abrams about Star Trek, he always is like, “I love Star Trek so much”, and it’s just like, I don’t care. I know you’re doing this performatively. I don’t care what you feel in your heart.
Anyway, so this is because we’re talking about Star Trek: Picard today, the first season anyway. So if you haven’t seen it: Spoilers, maximum spoilers. If you haven’t seen it, and don’t want to know what happens, then I guess go listen to some other podcast that isn’t talking about Star Trek: Picard.
Chris: Or go watch Star Trek: Picard. [laughs] Yeah, or maybe not. It’s very mixed. It is definitely not all bad. I do think that it is surprisingly similar in its strengths and weaknesses to Discovery.
Oren: Yeah. You can definitely tell that the two shows are made in the same mold, and neither of them are the worst Star Trek that’s ever been made. They’re both better than Enterprise. But I would say that neither of them are particularly better than, I dunno, Voyager or early Deep Space Nine, neither of which were particularly great.
But as I was thinking about this, I was like, all right, so why am I so annoyed if objectively I know that they aren’t that bad compared to previous Star Treks? Why am I so irritated with them? And I think I know the reason. It’s because both Discovery and Picard immediately set the dial up to 11 and were like, ah, the fate of the entire Federation is at stake in Discovery. The fate of the entire galaxy is at stake in Picard. And that’s just a weird thing to do for the first season of your show.
Chris: I do think that there’s a sense that they take themselves very seriously, that they’re a big budget effort, and that does set the standards a little higher. Whereas Enterprise, being a prequel… now, granted, if Enterprise was coming out right now, we might also be very angry.
Oren: Yes.
Chris: I mean, we’ve had time to get used to how bad Enterprise is. At the same time, being in the past didn’t ruin the future as much. Picard is a follow-up to TNG, with a lot of the characters that TNG had, whereas Enterprise wasn’t taking much in the way of characters from other stories and doing things with them that fans would dislike.
Oren: Also, for all of Enterprise’s faults, at least in its early seasons, it wasn’t super grimdark. That’s the other problem with both Discovery and Picard, they’re both very grimdark.
Chris: Yeah, I don’t necessarily think that grimdark is more anger-inducing than the good-old-boy sexism stuff that was happening on Enterprise.
Oren: That’s also true.
Chris: But in any case, the frustrating thing for me is the fact that I think a lot of fans have been very clear that part of what Star Trek means to them is this utopian setting. That it’s very hopeful, that it shows us a future that’s better, and that people don’t want dark Star Trek.
But it’s clear that for some reason CBS is just very determined to give people dark Star Trek anyway, and I find that personally very frustrating. Why? Why are we doing the grimdark thing? I don’t know, other than maybe that a few creatives at the top, who have a lot of clout, just personally really want to do it.There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of a strategic reason. It’s just the fad nowadays and we have to force it on everything.
Oren: It was especially funny in Discovery, because you could tell from the advertisements in season two that they knew we wanted less grimdark, because they put a bunch of jokes in the trailer. They had Captain Pike say, “And we’ll have a little fun along the way”, which is a line that makes no sense in context when it actually happens. It’s like, that’s a really odd thing for you to say there, Chris. Chris Pike, I mean, not you, Chris. This is going to be confusing. But you could tell that they were clearly trying to make it seem lighter. They, of course, lied and it was even more grimdark than the first season, if that’s possible.
I do think that if a show is going to do dark Trek, I hold it to a higher standard than I do a show that’s being lighter. If Deep Space Nine had done the episode Duet, where Kira confronts a man who she thinks is responsible for horrible war crimes and atrocities, and it had been goofy and badly thought out, that would have been horrible. Right? That would have been way worse than the actual worst episode of that season, which is the one where they all get sucked into a board game and have to play and do jumping jacks or whatever it is they do to get across the room.
Chris: Honestly, one of the reasons I think that grimdark has gotten so overwhelmingly popular among studios now, is because special effects have gotten better over time. It’s easier to accept bad special effects when shows are lighter. It’s like now that we can do realistic special effects, we can have shows that take themselves seriously, that we couldn’t have before. And now we just have to turn that up to 11 because we can?
Oren: I also have a feeling – I have no data to prove this – I just know that from the fan groups that I hung out in when I was growing up in my formative years, all of us thought we were being really brilliant by proposing some kind of dark subversion. And I know I did this. I wrote a bunch of fan scripts when I was a freshman in college and they were extremely dark.
I’m glad no one ever made those into TV shows because they would have looked a lot like what we have now. We all were convinced that we were very smart and brilliant for doing this. And I feel like the current crop of Star Trek writers just never grew out of that phase. I don’t know for a fact that’s what’s happening, it’s just really what it feels like.
Chris: I’m also seeing a lot of comparisons from these new shows to Deep Space Nine. Deep Space Nine is a very good show, and so it’s easy for these creators to say, well, you know, people didn’t like Deep Space Nine either, but Deep Space Nine was was brilliant. And it’s like, well, okay, Deep Space Nine still wasn’t as dark as Discovery and Picard.
It certainly wasn’t gratuitously dark, where we’re just dark for the sake of being dark. Everything there definitely served a storytelling purpose. Also, even though it did have an overarching plot, it still was more episodic than Discovery and Picard are. So the whole, “well Deep Space Nine did it” – it’s like, yeah, but Deep Space Nine was good.
Oren: Yeah. That’s kind of what it comes down to, that Deep Space Nine was just a higher quality of writing than either of these shows have. They could get better. Star Trek has a tradition of starting off pretty rocky and then getting better. Of course, a lot of shows just get worse from when they start off bad.
But at the same time, again, Deep Space Nine for the most part didn’t go super dark in its first season, right? They gave themselves some time to learn what they were doing first, and then they were like, okay, now it’s time for the really dark war stories and the arc where we have Starfleet try to perform a coup to overthrow the Federation president and stuff like that.
Chris: Right. We’re going to establish the Federation and the setting so that we have something to subvert, as opposed to instant subversion when we haven’t even revisited the setting that’s supposed to be familiar.
Oren: It just takes a lot of care to do that properly. And I feel like the new Star Trek – and unfortunately Picard also falls into this category, it’s not just Discovery anymore – doesn’t have that care. The overarching plot of Picard is like, everything sucks, the Federation is super dark and terrible now, but it’s okay. It was all due to some Romulan infiltrators. And now we’re going to ride off into the sunset and I guess everything is fine, is the implication that I’m left with.
They could come back and address some of that stuff in season two I guess. But I don’t feel like they’re going to, because it’s not clear to me how much of this is supposed to have been an actual problem, and how much of this is just stuff they threw in there because they thought it would be fun, or because writing a utopia is hard.
Chris: I will say that they both have good characters, but a lot of trouble with plotting.
Oren: I agree that Discovery has good characters and trouble with plotting. I actually don’t think that’s necessarily true with Picard. Picard has, I think, two good characters. Three, if you count Seven of Nine, who is not a main cast member. But of the main cast, we’ve got Picard, who is just a good character by nature of being played by Patrick Stewart. They could tell him to do anything and it would look good. And Patrick Stewart does a great job. He makes Picard seem like Picard, even though he’s in very different circumstances than when we last saw him.
And then there’s Elnor, who is beautiful and wonderful and amazing. And for some reason they kind of forget about him in the last three episodes.
Chris: Talking about Elnor, I do think Elnor is a wonderful character. However, he would be a pretty difficult character to write. And I do wonder if one of the reasons that he’s being shunted off is because he is too difficult to handle. The radical honesty thing he does, where he is always honest no matter the circumstances, is very entertaining and makes him very endearing. But it does mean that there’s a whole variety of situations in which he could just ruin things right away just by not saying what he’s supposed to say.
Oren: Yeah. He can’t lie or be sneaky, although we’ve shown that he sort of can, as long as he doesn’t get asked direct questions. But yeah, no, that’s a possibility. Although I’m having a hard time imagining why that would justify shunting him off onto a side story in the last three episodes, because I don’t recall those being particularly subterfuge-heavy.
That was when they go to the android planet and he was off on the Borg cube with Seven and we kept waiting for the Borg cube to show up and it finally did, and then it didn’t do anything. And then he stayed on the Borg cube with Seven for some reason. And I was like, okay. I mean, those are the two best characters in the show, but that’s not where the story is.
Chris: I have to review all of the episodes, but at the same time, if you’re thinking about adding him to a scene, he’s not a social character who can achieve his goals, usually, by social means, because he’s just like a blunt force instrument. He can provide entertainment and some fun interactions, but he can’t use charm, generally, he’s useful by pulling out his sword and causing violence. So if they don’t want the very specific things that he does, it’s just going to be hard to include him.
Oren: But speaking about the other characters for a minute, this show does a similar thing to what Discovery did, but I think in this case it’s actually worse. Because Discovery was like, hey, here’s Captain Georgiou and Burnham, and they’re best friends, and then Georgiou dies immediately and it’s like, oh. I kind of miss Georgiou now.
This does the same thing, because it introduces Picard, and these are his two Romulan friends who are kind of his caretakers and they’re cool and have secret dark histories that I want to know more about, that seemed very relevant to the plot. And then it’s like, no, they’re not coming with Picard for some reason, because I guess we couldn’t afford the actors for that long. And then we have to meet the space weirdos.
Chris: So you don’t like the space weirdos?
Oren: I don’t. I mean, it’s not even that I don’t like them. It’s that I feel nothing.
Chris: Okay. See, I generally do like the space weirdos.
Oren: Okay, that’s fair. I’m not saying this has anything to do with the actors playing the space weirdos. They’re all perfectly fine. I like Elnor because he’s so weird, and he’s so present and doing stuff. But the other three – we’ve got Raffi, who I don’t feel like I know anything about, other than that she’s a conspiracy theorist and she’s mad at Picard for kind of contrived reasons.
Chris: I do think that Raffi is probably the weak link. She spends all of her time brooding and stewing and angsting. I like the scenes where she uses her skills from being in intelligence. And I think the issue is that we have the scene where she goes and meets her son, and it’s supposed to be really meaningful, you know, we see her vulnerable side. But because she’s constantly vulnerable and constantly upset, it doesn’t really mean anything. Whereas if she had been a badass for most of the season, then seeing her be vulnerable with her son would have actually meant something. I think she would just be a much better character if we just saw her stronger, less vulnerable side more of the time.
Oren: The other issue with Raffi is that the moments where she does do cool things, they all seem like things that Picard’s Romulan friend could have done. Also we already knew her and we didn’t have to spend another episode getting to know her, because they’d already done the work. But moving on from Raffi, we then have Rios, who is the man with the galaxy’s most contrived backstory.
Chris: It’s true. He happened to be the only person to encounter androids before.
Oren: Right. Of all the people in the Federation, they just happened to grab, by random chance, the one guy with a backstory that was connected to this android plot – also in a very contrived way that I didn’t like. We’ll get to that later. I did like his holograms, those were a neat touch. And I kind of liked that he seemed to be in more of a nurturing position towards the end of the season.
Chris: I did like seeing him in an emotional support role when he was doing it.
Oren: Right. But I still just feel nothing for him for the most part, because I don’t feel like he matters. I don’t know what his deal is. It just seemed like he showed up and was like, hey guys, I’m a space captain and I’m here.
And then finally we have Jurati, who I liked at first because she looked like she had the whole fish-out-of-water thing going, which I thought was kind of cute. And it was kind of cool to see her have to react to things that she wasn’t prepared for, and all that stuff. But then she has this super weird plot where she murders Maddox, and either was mind controlled to do it, in which case none of it matters, or wasn’t, in which case she’s a murderer and they all forgive her way too easily, and her reasons for doing it don’t make sense.
Chris: Right. I mean, I separate Jurati from what she did a little bit. I liked Jurati, but I do have to kind of forget the Maddox stuff, because that was definitely a mistake on the writer’s part. They took her over the moral event horizon by having her murder her former lover, and then they wanted her to be redeemable. And because they wanted to have their cake and eat it too, they brought up the possibility that maybe she was kind of mind controlled, but not actually, because then she couldn’t be sorry and go on a redemption arc.
It was just a mess. You know, you have to choose one way or another. Either she was being controlled and it wasn’t her fault – honestly, that route is probably better because she could still feel bad about it, even if it’s not her fault.
Oren: Right. Then it wouldn’t be a redemption arc, it would be an overcoming-guilt arc. We, the audience would know she didn’t do anything wrong, but good luck convinced her of that.
Chris: So no, that was not good. That was a big mess-up. Honestly, it feels similar to the Kylo Ren mess-up in The Force Awakens. It’s like, no, you want this person to be an antagonist who is redeemable. You can’t just have them kill somebody good right in front of the audience. That’s grimdark edgelord writers going too far there. But at the same time, she still has a lot of potential as a character. You know, sometimes we have to blank those parts out. But she’s very humble and sympathetic and kind of adorable. I want to like her.
I think going forward, in a best case scenario for season two, I think this crew could be quite an interesting and good crew. Again, honestly, my biggest issue with Rios is he just doesn’t feel particularly consistent. He hasn’t gelled. I think, as you pointed out, his motivation is probably one of his biggest problems. We never understand why he’s doing anything, especially since they won’t really clarify whether there’s money.
Oren [laughs]: Yeah, there is that.
Chris: I mean, Picard has hired Rios, but is he paying him money? What is Rios doing this for? And that’s hard, right, we don’t know what his motivation is. Of course, Seven is perfect. She’s actually a completely different character than she was in Voyager, but she’s still great.
Oren: It’s been years. I’m perfectly fine with Seven having changed. I have no problem with that. I love the new badass Fenris Ranger Seven. Six seasons and a movie about the Fenris Rangers please. They’re way more interesting than this weird Mass Effect plot you have going.
Chris: We haven’t talked about Soji yet.
Oren: Oh, right. Soji.
Chris: She’s really interesting because she is clearly designed to be like a blank main character. But she’s not really the main character, because Picard’s the main character.
Oren: Right. I also don’t feel anything for Soji. I actually liked Dahj, and then they were like, “No, we killed Dahj. But we replaced her with Soji. That’s basically the same as keeping Dahj, right?” And it’s like, no, it’s not. Because I liked Dahj. She seemed to have something going on, whereas Soji is just a completely different character depending on what scene we’re in.
That seems like it’s partially intentional, like she’s a weird, blank slate where she was programmed to think she was human for literally no reason. Then she discovers she’s a robot and that basically resets her character. And then she has a brief phase where she considers wiping out all life in the galaxy for no reason.
Chris: Speaking of which. So first Jurati is like, “Okay, I have to kill my former lover because androids are bad and they’re going to cause all the destruction.” Then she sees Soji and she’s like, “No, I would never kill you, random android I just met, because you’re a work of art.” And then they get to the colony of androids and she’s like, “No, I’m not the mother of you androids, screw all of you.”
And it’s just – what is happening? Character consistency has definitely been an issue in this season.
Oren: The whole thing where she is like, “I would kill my lover over this, but I won’t kill you, Soji” is definitely the show treating Jurati like she’s using audience logic, where Soji is a main character, so of course she’s not going to kill Soji. We’ve been watching Soji for the whole season, but we barely knew Maddox, so it’s fine for her to kill Maddox even though from her perspective it’s the opposite.
Chris: But Soji feels like she’s there to be a relatable wish fulfillment character, like she’s meant to be an audience insert a little bit. Because she has cool android powers. She doesn’t have a very strong personality, especially compared to all of these other characters which do generally have very strong personalities. They’re not all consistent, but they generally come across much stronger. So having Soji there without the distinctiveness of the rest of the cast, but she’s not technically a main character – ugh, I mean, that’s tough.
Oren: I feel like maybe part of the issue is actually that we spent so little time with Picard and Soji together, and then the big climax is supposed to be resonating off of their relationship. And I think maybe that’s part of the reason why I feel nothing, because I don’t really know what is supposed to be happening here.
Soji’s choices to nearly wipe out all of humanity, and not even all humanity, all organicness, they don’t make any sense. But then when Picard appeals to her to not do it, it’s like, okay, on the one hand, yeah you shouldn’t do it, because it’s a terrible idea. But on the other hand, I’m supposed to believe you’re committed to it. I don’t really see why Picard is changing your mind. I don’t see what it is about your relationship to him that makes you think that you’re now not going to do what you were really committed to like half a second ago.
Chris: Well, it’s very much like Discovery, where we have a really complicated plot that drives all of these contrivances and now we’re trying to make our characters do what we want the plot to do. If you just had a more streamlined, stronger, simpler plot, a lot of this character contortion wouldn’t be necessary.
Oren: Right, yeah. That is another issue with it, that it’s basically trying to do the Mass Effect plot, but Mass Effect had three very long video games and still couldn’t stick the landing.
Chris: It’s weird that they chose the Mass Effect plot, because as far as I remember, nobody liked that.
Oren: Well, people liked the idea of the Reapers. They didn’t like the ending, but they liked the concept. They were really into the concept. And it’s not like Mass Effect is the only scifi story to ever use this idea of an ancient alien race – in this case a race of robots, but you know, whatever – an ancient alien being that lives outside the galaxy that comes to wipe people out every once in a while. That’s not that uncommon a scifi trope, but it’s a very complicated one. It’s hard to set up and explain properly, and Mass Effect completely whiffed it for various reasons, but Mass Effect also had a lot of time.
And in Picard they were like, yeah, we’re going to do that in 10 episodes of TV. It’ll be great. And most of those episodes are spent not investigating the premise, but trying to find Soji. We have this incredibly complicated premise and we don’t even spend most of our time working on it. We shove that in at the very end, like somehow we’re going to have a satisfactory resolution to this idea. It’s like, no, you’re just not going to.
Chris: Maybe the dialing things up to 11 is one of the reasons that they’re rushing everything, because they don’t want to give things time to build. They want everything constant action, full intensity all the time.
Oren: Oddly, that is actually one of the reasons why I have hope for season two. Because I can’t believe that any writer would seriously look at season one of Picard and be like, yeah, we’re going to be able to top that. And so it’s dead. It seems like the natural course is to do some lower-stakes, episode-of-the-week stuff. I don’t necessarily prefer episode-of-the-week format to serialized stories, but these writers have pretty clearly proven that they cannot do serialized stories. But they seem to be okay at episode-of-the-week problems. So that’s my hope: That they’ll just do that because they’ve left themselves nowhere else to go.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, same with Discovery. I think Discovery’s best stuff usually was episode-of-the-week, and I think maybe when they make things season long, they just make everything too complicated for themselves and they might do much better if it was more episodic.
And it’s also hard – I mean, it’s not impossible to do something grimdark and episodic – but generally something more episodic tends to lend itself to a lighter show a little bit. So maybe that would get them to back off. Whereas in this show, man, the ending where we’re going to talk about how great death is?
Oren: Literally comes from nowhere and means nothing. And there was a YouTuber, I think it was CGP Grey, he made this video that at the time I thought was incredibly pretentious, about how death is bad. That was the point of the video. And I was like, yeah, I know death is bad.
Chris: Because you didn’t know what he was responding to.
Oren: I didn’t know he was responding to this episode five years in the past somehow.
Chris: But this is not the only time. Recently we went through The Good Place having its entire end being about how, “oh, but death is very necessary”. At least for The Good Place, they were exploring philosophy and so maybe they felt like they wanted to explore the philosophy around death, and so they need to actually have death in their show to do that.
I’m still not a big fan, but in Picard this was so random, like, “Hey, let’s reintroduce a favorite character, Data, just so that we can watch him die.” It’s like, what?
Oren: Right. And at least in The Good Place, even though I did roll my eyes a little bit, they at least had the premise of, yeah, okay, after you’ve been alive in heaven for 50,000 years, sure. Maybe you would feel like ending that existence. I’m not gonna say that no one would feel that way, and that in that very bizarre scenario the rules of how we operate wouldn’t change.
But in Picard it’s like, “Hey, it would be wrong for Picard to die at 90 of space Alzheimer’s, but it would also be wrong for him to live past 110”, which is his actual lifespan. We have very narrow definitions of what is an acceptable amount of life for a human.
Data is even worse, because there was no concept in the show that Data was somehow still alive. And then we find out that he’s not only still alive, he’s been basically trapped in a white room since the end of Nemesis, and it’s like, Jesus Christ, that might be one of the grimdarkest things the show has ever done. And it literally vivisected someone on screen. No wonder Data wants to die at that point. [Chris laughs] Here’s an idea. How about you download him into one of the millions of Android bodies you have. Then you don’t have to keep forcing Brent Spiner to try to look like he hasn’t aged.
Chris: Yeah, and of course I’m sure they also aren’t thinking very hard about the implications of, “Hey, every time somebody is dying, we can just make them an Android body.” That’s never going to come up again.
Oren: Yeah. No. Oh God. That part at the end where they’re like, “Oh, Picard is dying. He’s going to be dying, you should be sad”, and then, “Oh, hey, we brought him back into a robot body” and it’s like, yeah, no, of course you did. And then finding out that the writers think that’s a deep statement, when they went out of their way to make it very clear that this body is exactly identical to Picard’s normal body in every way…
Chris: It doesn’t mean anything. It’s pointless, it’s a difference that is no difference.
Oren: It’s exactly the same as if you had just cured his space Alzheimer’s. You didn’t do anything else. There’s no meaning here.
Chris: But now you’ve created another broken way that we can revive people in the setting that we’re just going to have to forget exists, despite the fact that the main character now basically represents this thing.
Oren: That’s just a Star Trek tradition at this point.
Chris: To be fair, the previous versions of the show certainly did that quite a bit.
Oren: Every Star Trek series has created a way of bringing people back from the dead, which it then hopes you forget about. It’s honestly not fair to not let Picard or Discovery have at least one of those.
Chris: So, can we talk about this interview that Variety did with Michael Chabon?
Oren: If we must.
Chris: So there’s a very interesting interview with the showrunner for season one, who is not going to be the show runner for season two. So hopefully that will create some good changes. But basically what it makes pretty clear after looking at Michael Chabon just a little bit, is that one of the reasons why this is so grimdark is because he’s a storyteller who thinks that being provocative and making people mad is deep. And pissing people off for the sake of pissing people off, not because he actually has anything meaningful to say, which is a pattern that is been happening a lot.
The things that he says he was surprised about are so unreal. Now, he was a novelist before he started working on the show. So he was surprised when people were mad that he killed characters off, when he killed Hugh, and Icheb. He had a statement about like, “Oh, we thought it would matter how we killed them, but I learned that, you know, if you kill a character, people are just mad regardless of how you killed them.” And it’s just like, how could you not know that as a storyteller? How could you not know that killing characters is upsetting to people?
Oren: Also, he clearly set up both deaths, but particularly Icheb’s death, to be as upsetting as possible.
Chris: Yes. We can get into the other unreal thing that he thought. Somehow he even said, “We thought it was okay because these deaths aren’t gratuitous.” And then he goes on to describe exactly how Icheb’s death is gratuitous, that it’s graphic, that Icheb is helpless, and it’s like – if Icheb’s death is not your definition of gratuitous, I don’t want to know what you think a gratuitous death is.
Oren: We have this character being graphically vivisected on screen. Even though in-universe there’s no reason for that to be happening, because if the people want his implants, they would sedate him so that he A, doesn’t die of shock first, and B, isn’t thrashing around when they’re trying to get his implants out.
Chris: But no, we have to watch him thrashing around in pain on screen. That has to be the thing.
Oren: And then Seven has to mercy kill him, despite miracle Star Trek medical tech. She doesn’t even try. She’s just like, no, I guess you’re gonna be mercy killed now, because we needed that. And this is all in service of an “arc” – I use quotes – that lasts for one episode and involves a villain we’ve never seen before and will never see again.
The idea that you needed that for that arc, I don’t know if they actually believed that, or if they’re saying that now because they’re in trouble and they’re trying to do damage control because it’s just so absurd. I can’t imagine they actually thought they needed that. I’m positive they did that because they thought it would provoke a reaction and be edgy, but I guess I don’t know. I’m not in their heads.
Chris: Well, they were writing to provoke a reaction. The other thing that’s very interesting about this interview is watching Chabon making excuses for why all of the queer relationships are kept in the plausibly deniable range, instead of being explicit. In particular, there was talk of this scene between Seven and this antagonist, and there was clearly some subtext about them being lovers, where I think the antagonist or somebody says, “We were incredibly close.”
And Chabon is saying “Well, no, the reason we don’t have any explicitly gay people and queer relationships in our show” – even though Discovery’s done it, so it’s not like we’re really groundbreaking here – “is because, you know, things have to be organic and it just didn’t come up. I mean, it just wouldn’t be natural for them to say that they were a couple, you know?” And it’s like, you know what would be natural is for them to say instead of, “We were incredibly close” is to say, “We were in love.”
Oren: Or, and here’s another thing to throw your way: That scene only works if you don’t think about the fact that they were probably lovers. Because if they were, that means they’re our first lesbian couple since Deep Space Nine, and we not only bury one of them immediately, we have the other one do it. Jesus. What is wrong with you?
Chris: We can also count the number of heterosexual couples that were explicitly shown. For some reason homosexual, queer relationships are the only ones where it just wasn’t organic to bring them up. For some reason it’s very organic to bring up all of the heterosexual couples on this show.
Oren: But he has a thing in there, where the heterosex scene that was very sexy and had lots of sex wasn’t about sex. So it’s fine. It basically doesn’t count. I don’t know why we couldn’t have had a bunch of queer sex that wasn’t about sex. Apparently that wouldn’t have been natural. I don’t know.
My favorite part of that interview, because he’s so elitist and blaming the audience for not liking his stuff, is when he talks about how TNG got good later because they realized what they had. And I’m like, no, you know why TNG got good? It’s because they fired the people in charge of it and brought in someone who knew what he was doing. And that guy’s name was Michael Piller and he’s great – and he’s dead now, so he can’t take over. But the fact that they’re bringing in a new show runner just makes that line particularly ironic.
Chris: Do you think we could give Michael Piller an android body?
Oren: Yeah, that might work actually.
Chris: He might be on a drive somewhere, trapped.
Oren: Yeah. Who knows? We should ask him. And before he tries to shut off the drive, we can be like, “Hey Michael, I know it kind of sucks in here, but we could bring you back outside and you could have real experiences. Would you prefer that?” Maybe just, you know, make sure that he knows that’s an option first.
Oh, I also have a message for CBS. As long as you guys are hiring novelists with no television experience to be your show runners: just hire Martha Wells instead. I’m not going to promise she’s going to do a good job, I just want to see what her version of Star Trek looks like. Because apparently being good at the job is not a prerequisite anymore. So yeah, just get Martha Wells in there, whatever. It’ll be fine.
Chris: And then Murderbot becomes a character in Star Trek. That’d be so good.
Oren: I mean, that’s not how I would choose to run a studio, but that’s how they’re already doing it. So I don’t see why not.
Chris: I did have to say though: I do have hope for season two. I loved the ending scene of all of these space weirdos and Seven on the bridge of the ship together. Now I just want them to go on episodic adventures. And maybe if we don’t have them, you know, randomly kill people and go on redemption arcs, they can actually hit their stride. I think they would actually be a really nice and interesting crew, potentially.
Oren: They even showed, towards the end, a very brief shot of Raffi and Seven holding hands in a way that seemed romantic. Now, I don’t know if we’re going to keep doing the whole “oh, well it’s subtext. It wouldn’t be natural”, but assuming that they pull their heads out of their asses on that one and actually give us a romance between those two, yeah, I’m into it. Make it happen. I will forgive all of Raffi’s weirdness in season one as long as Seven gets a cool romance arc.
Chris: Yeah. Is there any chance, do you know, of Seven just being a main cast member in season two?
Oren: I haven’t heard anything. It certainly looked like she was going to be.
Chris: I hope so. Fingers crossed.
Oren: Yeah. I mean, I don’t know who’s in charge of Jeri Ryan’s schedule, but let’s try and make sure she has some time available.
Chris: Just give her an extra android body.
Oren: Can we talk just a little bit about the plot? Because we’re at 40 minutes and we still haven’t mentioned the plot
Chris: Other than the Mass Effect annihilation.
Oren: We mentioned that it was Mass Effect, but we didn’t really talk about what that means.
Chris: Go for it.
Oren: I’m just very curious what the thought process on this was. Where first they were like, okay, for some reason, Maddox went and made a whole colony of androids – and I don’t really know why he would do that, considering how unreliable the tech seems to be – and then he sent two of them, making them think they were human, so they would have no defense in case anyone ever spotted them. And now we’re going to say that the Romulans have an anti-android cult that they’ve been doing for a long time – and I just don’t get why.
Chris: My favorite part of that is that they just renamed the Tal Shiar. It’s like, okay, but don’t you understand, they’re not the Tal Shiar, they are the, what is it…
Oren: Zat Grat or whatever. The Zat Grass.
Chris: Zat Grass? [laughs]
Oren: Yeah, I don’t care.
Chris: I don’t care either. It’s like, but see, they’re even older organization. Okay. But – they’re still just the Tal Shiar. I mean, we can call them by a different name if you want, but it doesn’t really make them more impressive. They’re the same group. There’s nothing that’s changed about that.
Oren: I was just thinking that for a show that loves its deep-cut references as much as this one does, I don’t get why they would go out of their way to give the Romulans a thing that they’ve never had before. And it’s really obvious that they’ve never had this before. It feels like they really want to have their continuity cake and eat it too, again. They’re like, “Hey guys, look at all these continuity references you’ll only get if you’re a TNG super fan. Also, the Romulans are completely different and have this extra thing that we bolted on for no reason.”
Chris: I did like, though, that there was lots of Romulan characters and we got more diversity of Romulan culture.
Oren: That’s true.
Chris: We got the awesome badass truth nuns.
Oren: Yeah. Another thing that the story should have been about and wasn’t.
Chris: Yeah, of course they had to introduce a whole bunch of badass nuns only to be like, “Oh, but look, there’s the one guy that knows all of the women’s secrets, and he’s going to be the character.” This is such a wish fulfillment thing I’ve seen in many stories. It’s like every time we introduce an order of women who have secrets of some kind, we just have to have the dude learn all of their secrets.
Oren: Someone should tell whoever’s making that Dune movie that Picard already did it and he doesn’t have to anymore. Whatever the Chosen One’s name from Dune is, that’s just Elnor now. He’s the Cuisinart Chatterback or something. I forget how to say it. I always call it the Clambake Chowder Cake in my mind, because that’s what it sounds like.
But anyway, all I wanted to mention was how ridiculously complicated the plot is. And all of it is building towards this weird thing where they’re like, “We have to summon the Reapers to save us.” And the only way the Reapers know how to do that is by wiping out all life. And it’s like, couldn’t we just ask them to, I don’t know, move us or something? Do they understand language? What’s their motivation? Why are they doing what they’re doing? Why are they so devoted to this, but yet also immediately left when our emergency 911 call was suspiciously interrupted?
Chris: It does feel like the plotting is very similar to Discovery, where we have a base premise that is hard to support in the first place, but they like it. And then, I don’t know if it’s a matter of them just looking at the plaudits of individual episodes and optimizing locally, and not thinking about the big picture, or just trying to stuff too much in, or all of the above, but it’s just overly complicated. It comes with tons of contrivances and things that just don’t inherently fit together quite right. And it’s all very, very dramatic.
Oren: It’s definitely an example of, don’t over-promise. At the very beginning they started doing this whole like, “Oh, wow, when you find out what’s going on, it will be knowledge that humans were not meant to know, and it will drive you to murder people.”
And I’m like, I can’t possibly imagine what that reveal is going to be, that would make that make sense. And yeah, it turned out they couldn’t deliver because it was an impossible thing. I wish more storytellers would stop being like, we need maximum drama right now, so we’re going to promise so much that our later episodes just can’t live up to that promise.
Chris: Also, you know, it’s the first season. Give your story some room to build. As you said, how is Picard gonna top this in season two? Especially if you’re planning a show that’s going to last for a while, you don’t want to start at the top. You want to start small. But they are not doing that.
I don’t know, maybe there’s some worry that they won’t be able to keep people’s attention. Maybe that’s what this is about. They don’t realize that it doesn’t take everything up to 11 all the time to keep your audience engaged, that you can actually have a scene where Riker makes pizza and people will love that scene even though it’s a slower personal moment.
Oren: I mean, that episode is definitely the best part of the show, where it’s just Picard hanging out with Riker and Troi, swapping stories. It just makes me really wish they’d done something like Star Trek: West Wing or whatever, so all of the characters could have been around. I agree it would have been pretty silly for the entire aging cast of TNG to be on a space adventure, I would not have enjoyed that, but I would have loved for them to be in politics and you know, talking about Federation press reports and all that stuff. That’d be great. I want to see Beverly Crusher as the Federation Surgeon General.
Chris: Yeah, that would’ve been cool. It would have also been a premise where they could have easily popped in for an episode and left if they weren’t all the main cast, right. Because they’re usually all hanging out on earth all the time.
Oren: Star Trek: West Wing would have been the best concept for this, but instead they went with space adventures. So that’s where we are now. All right, well, I think that’s all the big strokes. I could nitpick the plots of various episodes…
Chris: I’m sure you could rant about this for longer.
Oren: Yeah. But I think I’m not gonna. I think we’re going to call this to a close now. If anyone’s still here after we ranted about Picard for like, I don’t know, five hours: Thank you everyone for listening. If anything we said piqued your interest, you can leave a comment on the website at Mythcreants.com.
Before we go, I want to thank a few of our patrons. First we have Kathy Ferguson, who is a professor of political theory in Star Trek. She may be about to disown us for this episode, we’re not sure. Next, we have Ayman Jaber, who is a Marvel connoisseur and urban fantasy writer. Finally, we have Danita Rambo and she lives@therambogeeks.com. And we’ll talk to you next week.
You’ve done the work of adding sword fights, epic battles, and dramatic arguments. Your characters always have something they want, no matter how minor the scene. And yet, you’re still having difficulty making readers care. Congratulations, you’re having difficulty making your conflicts matter, and you’re far from the only one. Listen in as we go through a handy checklist of reasons why you might be having trouble and then explain what you can do about it.
Show Notes Star Wars: A New Hope * Star Wars: The Phantom Menace * Emma * Doll House * Lessons From the Writing of The Name of the Wind * The City in the Middle of the Night * Voyager: Endgame * The Grace of Kings * His Majesty’s Dragon * Empire of Sand * October Faction * Star Trek: Picard TranscriptGenerously transcribed by author and editor AJ Sikes.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast, with your hosts: Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.
Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren, and with me today are Chris and Wes. Today, we are talking about how to make conflicts matter. I thought about trying to do an opening bit, but I couldn’t think of a way to make it matter. So that seemed like a bad idea, because I think conflicts should matter.
And so should opening bits if you’re going to have them.
Wes: Well, I don’t think anything matters. It doesn’t matter. And what are we even talking about? What is a conflict? Isn’t that a confusing term? Didn’t we clarify this?
Oren: Yeah, just a few weeks ago. I think we call them struggles now.
Wes: Ooo, yes. Struggles.
Oren: I have run into a number of stories. Some of them published, but most of them manuscripts that I edit. They have lots of conflict, but it’s still really, really boring. That’s because the conflict doesn’t matter. People are fighting over something, physically or socially or what have you. People are struggling to get something, but I don’t care for a number of reasons.
That’s a really serious problem that even professionals make, and it’s something that I thought new writers would benefit from knowing more about.
Wes: So you’re saying that if somebody says the secret to making your stories better is to just add more conflict, that isn’t necessarily correct.
Oren: Maybe not. If someone tells you the secret is anything, they’re probably not 100% on the ball.
Oren: Be wary of anybody who tells you they have a special secret that no one else has figured out as a rule.
Chris: It’s that one weird trick. Editors hate it.
Oren: Part of the reason why I wanted to talk about this is actually related to that, and it’s that some people, partially because of confusing terminology, partially just because they actually don’t like conflict, think that they don’t have to put conflict in their stories and they point to stories where the conflict was boring as evidence that they don’t need conflict. That’s a really frustrating argument, and it’s wrong, and it will hurt your storytelling if you follow it. Part of the reason we’re doing this today is to try to explain that there are reasons that conflict didn’t work and there are things you can do to fix it. It’s not just the conflict is actually boring.
Chris: In my experience, a lot of these people don’t want to put conflict in their story. They don’t like stories with high tension or as much tension as a lot of other people like, which I think is completely valid. The thing I’d like to point out is you should still have good plot structure with good conflicts, even if you want those conflicts to be lower tension conflicts.
Because setting this up isn’t just for the conflict and for the tension. It’s also for the satisfaction that you get from resolving issues. If you completely hamstring your conflicts, it’s also not satisfying when those conflicts are solved. So you’re losing more than tension by messing up your conflict.
Oren: I actually have a checklist of things you can do if your conflict isn’t really working out and feels like it doesn’t matter.
Step one. Are the stakes clear? What is at stake? Does the audience know what is at stake? Have you explained it? Sometimes it’s obvious. At the beginning of Star Wars, we have a conflict where a very large ship is shooting at a very small ship.
The stakes are obvious. Will the ship survive? We don’t have to have a narrator say “And now the small ship is trying to get away because it doesn’t want to explode.”
We can tell that, but more complicated stakes might require some explanation. Also, because I never get tired of bagging on the prequels, an example of a conflict where the stakes aren’t clear is the beginning of The Phantom Menace. There’s a trade dispute and a blockade, and the Jedi are here to negotiate something and it’s really not clear what the conflict is and it doesn’t become clear until quite late.
The movie’s already been going for several minutes by the time the Trade Federation people are like, well, let’s kill the Jedi, at which point the conflict has obvious stakes: life or death. It’s still bad, but for different reasons.
That’s step one and I find that that is more of an issue in social conflicts. For example, the movie version of Emma, that Chris and I watched the other night, has all of this conflict and stakes based around who will get into a relationship with who. But because the movie doesn’t have a narrator, it doesn’t know how to tell us what is going on inside the main character’s head, which we need to know.
So instead, it depends on us to interpret all of these very minor glances that she gives people. And if you miss one, you have no idea what’s happening anymore and you’re like, what’s going on? What are they arguing about? I don’t get it.
Chris: Definitely something that’s easier to interpret when you have a book with a narrator and that you can always stop and examine things a little longer if you need to.
Oren: Step two on the list is: Are the stakes compelling? This is where you’ve explained what they are, but does the audience care? Are these stakes that the audience will have any vested interest in? And this actually has two sub points, which are the characters first have to be likable because we need to care about them getting their stakes or not getting them.
And then the other one is do the stakes matter to the character, because again, your stakes don’t always have to be life and death. That’s a thing that some storytellers get taught and it’s wrong. Stakes can be emotional. They can be relatively small if they matter. A story that fails to make the stakes matter is the TV show Dollhouse.
That’s one of the downsides of having your protagonist be a literal blank, programmable slate, is that nothing matters to her. The only time that those conflicts matter at all is when they suddenly become life and death. Before then, she wants nothing and cares for nothing. Who cares if this party that she’s going to goes well? Not her. So why should I?
So I can keep going on this checklist, but I feel like that might just be me talking forever. Have either of you encountered anything like this in the wild?
Wes: I think something to add to Oren’s point here on the stakes mattering and also mattering to the readers and the characters . . . . I feel like they’re best when there’s something emotional happening. And then we talked about things being sympathetic and the characters being likable. But there needs to be an emotional reason for why this struggle is important. When you bring in an emotional aspect, that helps you approach the levels of conflict that you can have.
We talk about how it doesn’t have to be life or death, but as long as there’s an emotional impact on your protagonist or your point of view character, if you’re reading especially, you’re maybe more likely to vibrate on that wavelength. You can empathize a little bit and kind of feel why this “insert social event here and main characters presence and performance at it” matters.
Because if you’re spending a lot of time in a close perspective, you’re kind of adopting a little bit of the character’s emotions. You’re feeling it and having that emotional element to a conflict really helps bring in my own investment in what happens. But it’s better to have that instead of just this logic based conflict of, “Oh, right, if they don’t do that, then this will happen. That is bad.”
We can’t ignore that there’s a human element in this, and good conflicts I think incorporate that.
Chris: One of the things that happens with both of these issues (what are the stakes and do they matter) is a lot of writers have the tendency to withhold too much information from the audience. A lot of times they do it because they want to seem mysterious, or they just don’t realize that they should be proactively informing the audience of why things matter and what the context is around what things are happening. Or they feel like they’re being clever. Because if we withhold information, we can reveal it later. That is contrived and it really damages that emotional investment that Wes was just talking about.
If you don’t know why something matters to a character. You can’t care about it with that character. You can say the character cares. But without understanding why, it’s never going to hit home.
I did a critique of Name of the Wind a while back, just the first fifty pages, which is actually the prologue instead of the main story. We have this situation and it has another problem, which I’m sure we’ll cover later that also makes the tension lower than it should be. It’s very mysterious and it doesn’t fill in any information. There is this scene where Kvothe has to bury this giant spider and he is already badly injured, but his comrade is now unconscious. So he has to dig a big hole to properly dispose of the spider by himself. It’s kind of sympathetic, but we have no idea why he has to bury the spider.
What happens if you just leave this evil demon spider around after you killed it? We don’t know. It would be a lot more compelling if there was a struggle there, where there’s a little tension over whether or not he actually succeeds, even though he’s injured from the fight, because there’s a consequence for the spider not being buried. But we don’t know what it is; there’s no tension there.
I hope we’ll talk more about City in the Middle of the Night. There is an issue where this protagonist is doing very wild things and taking lots of risks in order to steal something that is referred to as The Invention.
Oren: Great name.
Chris: Honestly, as soon as I heard that, I thought “It’s going to be some cultural artifact, isn’t it?” The Invention is mentioned. It’s a super vague name. There’s no description of what it is, and so we have no idea why the character cares about it. Of course, this is to set up for reveal where it’s not something that anyone would actually call an invention realistically.
So it ends up being very contrived, but it also makes it harder for us to emotionally invest in the idea of the protagonist going and getting it and all of the risks that are being taken to get it. That is why we can’t care. We’re being very coy about this and we’re withholding information when we should be proactively filling in context. Doing that helps conflict work and tension work.
Oren: It felt like the world’s laziest subversion. What it felt like was that the author wanted us to assume that this thing was of practical use and was some kind of bad-ass bit of technology. And then reveal that it was actually just a cultural artifact.
That is a very hard thing to do in a close narration, but it is possible. There are ways you could do it, but it felt like the author didn’t even try. It’s called The Invention, which feels like placeholder text got left in there like they forgot to do a find replace “The Invention” with what they actually call it.
What is happening? Are you trying to convince me of something and reveal it later? I honestly can’t tell because it’s such a lackluster attempt. I don’t know if that’s actually what you’re trying to do.
Chris: The term is obviously contrived. It is obviously not naturally what some people would call something. Maybe if it had turned out to be something that would be reasonably called The Invention . . . . But even the vagueness around it suggested that it was intended to be a surprise.
Otherwise, you can notice in narration when something is just conspicuously absent, when we would have described this thing and we haven’t. We have every good storytelling reason to describe it because it is the stakes in this conflict, whether or not this character gets their hands on it.
When we leave that absent and we have a super vague term, and it’s just distinctly unnatural, it doesn’t feel like the surprise is a natural part of the story. It feels like it’s a contrivance added by the author.
Wes: So stakes matter and words matter. That’s what I’m hearing.
Chris: So, Oren, you talked about what the stakes are and whether we are emotionally invested in those stakes. Do you want to go onto another item?
Oren: So the next thing that you have to ask if your conflict’s not working is “Is it too easy? Does it seem too easy? Have you given the heroes too many advantages?” Because at this point it’s just boring. Okay, well now I’m going to watch the heroes walk over their opponents for fun and profit. Why do I want to read about that? You just tell me they won and get it over with faster. So you have stories like Endgame, and by that I mean the last episode of Voyager. I don’t know what kind of Marvel movie you might’ve thought I was referring to.
The episode of Voyager has [the crew saying]: “All right, we’re going to fight the Borg. We’re going to do it with all of this magic future tech that blows the Borg up real good. Okay, well I guess you’re going to win then, because you have all the future tech. But who cares.
Towards the end, they finally create an actual conflict because they decide that they’re not going to do their moral dilemma, which was originally “Well, we either have to get ourselves home or blow up the Borg. We can’t have both.”
But what if we could do both? That would be really hard. Now we finally have a conflict that looks like it’s not going to be too hard, but it’s too late in the episode. I’ve already watched forty-five minutes of this, so that’s just a serious problem. The bad guys are not powerful enough. The good guys are too strong.
This happens a lot. It’s especially an issue in more wish fulfillment focused stories where the hero is just way too good at everything.
Wes: That’s interesting because conflict matters. Especially in our speculative fiction because we want to see people overcoming things. We want to see people have the courage to stand up to something when the outcome is not necessarily known.
Pull us away from our day jobs and couches and show us what it means to actually struggle for something. And if they’re just walking through, that’s boring.
Chris: This reminds me of a book I started recently. When you have a protagonist who has problems and you’re trying to generate sympathy for them, which is one way of getting people emotionally invested, it’s important that when they’re being selfless that they give something up.
We had a book we were listening to recently where the main character was just a jerk, who didn’t seem like he was doing anything good and he deserved everything bad that’s ever come to him. They decide to have the stereotypical save the cat scene, which is lingo that means you set up a deliberate scene where your protagonist does something selfless, like save a cat, so they seem like a good person and people become emotionally invested in that protagonist. But he walks up and he easily helps a couple people by just forging a note from somebody else and it just doesn’t cost him anything.
He’s already a jerk, and he didn’t really struggle for that. I like him even less because he got a bunch of candy poured on him for doing this thing, like he was such an awesome person for something that cost him nothing. This was supposed to convince me to like this person. Now it has done the opposite.
Oren: So that book is called The Grace of Kings. Not to be confused with The Way of Kings or the various other of Kings. There are a lot of of Kings, it turns out. But no, this is The Grace of Kings and ho, boy, is it bad. But the scene that Chris was referring to is, I think, the worst save the cat scene I’ve ever read. Or experienced in any form.
It is the epitome of leaning too hard on the save the cat device because the author first forgot to write a character that would actually save the cat. This person is such a jerk and so self-serving, I just don’t believe he would do that. It actually feels inconsistent with the character that has been established for him. Until this point.
There’s what Chris was talking about, which is that he actually risks nothing. This is no skin off his back whatsoever. He just did this essentially for free. There’s the fact that his plan is so bad that it inadvertently only works because the people that he’s saving think of a way to make it work for him.
What is happening is there’s a woman who is being hassled by a guard to either pay this unreasonable tax or send her oldest son to a forced labor camp. So the main character comes up to the garden and is like, “Here, I’m going to forge this credit note from some rich guy and this will cover them.”
That sounds like that might risk him getting in trouble with the guards, but the book is very clear that it doesn’t. I know when I say that, it sounds like he’s taking a risk. He’s absolutely not in the book. The book is very clear. He will never be caught for this.
If the family had stuck around, they would have been because the guard would have gone to cash the note. It would have been revealed as a forgery and then he would’ve gone back to hassling the old woman. But fortunately the old woman’s son completely independently, is like, “Hey mom, we should probably skip town.”
Okay, I’m glad that son at least has a good head on his shoulders. It’s just very bad. It’s an incredibly bad scene. There’s no turning point. The main character doesn’t convince anyone. He just does it. It’s like, “Oh, that was really easy.” The guards in this town are apparently very gullible.
Chris: One of the many ways in which giving a character too much candy (and having a character that you love too much and it’s hard to understand why people might not love your character) can really make the conflicts in your story feel like they don’t matter. Because you don’t want that character to actually have a hard time or struggle or have any weaknesses, which are usually one of the reasons they struggle.
Oren: I remember back when I first heard about the save the cat device when it was first described to me in those terms, coming from a screenwriting book, one of the concerns that I had with it was, I feel like this is going to encourage writers to have a save the cat scene without actually writing a character who would save the cat.
I’d never actually seen that before, so I’m glad that The Grace of Kings exists to confirm my concerns over that trope.
Chris: Honestly, that’s my entire problem with save the cat structure altogether and many of these other structures that writers follow. It tells them to do individual stages, but it doesn’t actually teach them what an overarching plot is. What a through line is. And so they just stick the requirements in their story because there’s basic storytelling lessons that are just missing. They don’t actually get the end result that they’re supposed to, if they think about each event in isolation without understanding how they fit together.
And I think the idea of just an injecting a scene, where your character randomly saves a cat and then just goes on and continues being a jerk, is a good example of that problem.
Oren: It’s like trying to follow cooking directions when half of the steps are missing because the person who wrote those cooking directions just thinks it’s obvious.
Chris: And already knows those things and has never thought about the fact that they need to be specified.
Oren: Add the usual amount of spices and it’s like, “Oh, thank you. Thank you very much.”
Another item on the checklist versus “Is the conflict too easy?” is, “Is the conflict too hard?” And this happens sometimes. It’s not as common, but it does happen where you’ve set up a conflict where the hero has no chance of winning.
It’s just inconceivable that they could win. And that makes it so the audience is just gonna check out and not actually pay attention. Because even if they don’t academically know this, they’re just waiting for the situation to change so that the hero actually has a chance to win, even if it’s a small chance.
There’s a reason why the shot that Luke Skywalker has to make is one in a million not, and then Luke Skywalker has to disassemble the Death Star by hand. A good example of this is at the end of His Majesty’s Dragon, the first book of the Temeraire series. Napoleon is about to invade England with his dragon fleet and the English are thinking, “We only have ten dragons to fight him. That’s impossible. So I guess we’re gonna go up and die defending England.”
Well, I know you’re not going to die because I know there’s another book. Even if I didn’t know that, I was pretty sure that you’re not just going to die. I’m just waiting. What’s going to change to make this victory possible?
And later on down the road there is a twist that makes the victory possible, but everything before then it’s just me waiting for it. I’m not excited. I’m not engaged.
Chris: I think this is a place where a character, having goals and agency becomes really important. If your character is actively thinking about how to solve their problems, and making plans that maybe don’t have a big chance of success, but are at least possible, then they’re being proactive. Then you can see a way out of the situation that isn’t just hopeless.
But when the characters don’t have any agency and aren’t reacting like it’s a solvable problem and are sitting around, that becomes extra gloomy and it feels pointless.
Oren: We’re getting towards the end of my checklist now. One of the last ones is, “Is there a strong turning point?” Because even if you do everything else right, if there’s no turning point, then the conflict just kind of feels like, “And then they fought good.”
This is what Chris talked about earlier with satisfaction. The turning point is critical to satisfaction. The turning point is what makes the conflict worth reading at the end. Especially if you’re talking about this in prose form.
If you’re watching a movie, we’ve talked about how movies have a different set of rules because you’re enjoying just watching the really great fight choreography or the beautiful costumes or whatever.
In a book, you don’t have any of those things, so you really need a turning point. It needs to be there and it needs to be strong, especially if this is an important conflict, because otherwise it’s just like you eventually won, I guess. That’s what you’re left with.
An example of this is the book Empire of Sand, which actually has a fantastic turning point, but then keeps going for some reason and instead of turning into falling action continues the climax as if it didn’t already have a really great turning point.
The main character is now trying to defeat this giant magic storm. And doesn’t really know how she’s going to do that. Well, maybe her turning point is that she turns down this weird God power that is offered to her for no reason in the middle of the giant storm. Well, no, because there was no reason to think she wouldn’t turn that down.
If you actually examine it with logic, you realize that she should’ve taken it. But that’s a separate thing. There was no reason to think she would take that. There’s no turning point there. And then it’s like, well, she uses her magic dances to do it, but we don’t know anything about how her magic dances work.
They’re very, very vague. So it’s just, yeah, and then she danced real good and defeated the storm, I guess.
Chris: If you have a plot in particular that has no turning points in general, after a while, it just feels like things are happening and there’s not much point to it. And I think that just lowers investment.
I should also mention agency because that’s another common reason why winning seems too easy. Usually people need problems to have some kind of deadline. And what’s a reasonable deadline? Depends on the problem. A longer deadline could be reasonable.
If we have three months until the invaders show up, but we can’t survive unless we build an entire fortress to defend, and we don’t really have enough time to do that. That’s a tight deadline.
But otherwise, if we don’t have a reason why all of that time is needed, the reader will assume you’ll find an answer. This is another thing that Name of the Wind has, that’s a problem at the beginning. A lot of times, lack of deadline is not something that’s explicitly stated; it’s just implied by the way that the characters behave, which I think is one of the reasons why writers are very likely to get caught up with this problem.
In Name of the Wind, we know that there’s going to be a bunch of spiders attacking the town, and that’s going to be real bad. But then we just watch Kvothe putter around for a while and he’s not really doing anything about it.
When you have characters who are just not doing anything about the problem, the only assumption is that it’s just not urgent. Everything’s fine and then tension just drops, because this is a problem that we’re not dealing with now. This is a problem that we will deal with with later. That definitely makes it harder for us to care about a conflict or just jumping forward.
If you just jump forward a week and nothing has happened. We didn’t narrate how the characters are busy building that fortress or anything like that. Again, we’re implying that the problem is not urgent because we allowed a week to pass and nothing happened. So that’s another way we get caught up with making the conflict feel too easy and tension goes away.
Oren: Chris, I noticed in your notes that you had a point about characters just losing too often. I was curious if you could elaborate on that.
Chris: We’ve talked about a lot of the most common things that cause lack of conflicts, but we’ve run into a couple of stories that are popular out there, and that are especially funny and seem kind of unique. They have lots of problems, but they just don’t seem to be compelling and they don’t seem to be working.
And those two stories are the Netflix show October Faction and the Hugo finalist City in the Middle of the Night. When I looked at them, I realized that despite how very different these two stories are, they actually have a lot of the same problems and the same reasons why the comflicts just don’t feel compelling.
They both have lots of problems, or at least in portion. City in the Middle of the Night definitely has portions where the characters just don’t have any problems. Sometimes the characters are crossing the Sea of Murder, as it is called, so sometimes they do have problems.
But there’s a series of problems that are very similar in both of these works where, first of all, we talked about low investment. They both had problems where the characters are kind of hard to like, sometimes because they’re kind of jerks. The other thing that really happens is the fact that the characters don’t have very much agency, and that goes back to the turning point problem that we were talking about. The character who doesn’t proactively try to solve their problems and earn victories is just hard to get emotionally invested in.
I don’t know if it’s just that we have little sympathy for people who aren’t even trying to solve their own problems. Sympathy is generated when a character has a problem that’s not their fault, and if a character is not actually trying to solve their problem, I think a lot of that sympathy is lost. I also think that we just don’t want to relate to a person who is just puttering around not doing anything and not taking charge.
But in any case, these characters have too little agency, and they never seem to actually solve their problems. In City in the Middle of the Night, we have a character who gets a life or death situation and just stands around and happens to be saved by somebody else, very miraculously. In October Faction, they just don’t seem to solve their problems.
Wes: The old waiting game, it’s fine.
Chris: October Faction is very strange because it opens up tons of new plot threads everywhere and new hooks. But then because it has so many of them and it keeps opening them up, there is no time to develop any of them, so we can understand them and so we can care about them. But they’re also never addressed.
And the characters just continually are suffering. They have a couple of high schoolers, and the high school is just the worst in the most contrived way. The story makes it clear that these high schoolers are never allowed to get a break. This high school is designed to make them suffer as much as possible, and they don’t seem to have very much agency in actually solving their problems or the ability to actually turn things around. After a while, what’s the point of getting invested in this? This is just nonstop gloom and doom.
I also realized, about both of these stories, a big thing is that I actually don’t know what the through line is.
I know what the through line of October Faction is supposed to be. It’s just so far in the background that it feels like we’ve forgotten about it, even if they don’t. I’m sure it will come back towards the end. The through line in October Faction is supposed to be this weird magic symbol that the dad put on the floor, and that’s going to be something the Agency wants. But it’s so far in the background, and the characters aren’t doing anything that seems related to it, that it doesn’t feel like the through line.
I mean, a show can have an overarching seasonal plot that builds up in the background, but while it’s small, you have to have strong episodic plots, and it feels like the writers of October Faction just don’t know what an episode is.
Oren: It also has to actually build up, whereas this one doesn’t. This one is just, “Oh yeah. I guess that symbol is still around. We haven’t made any progress on that.”
Chris: But the thing about this is that a story needs a sense of movement and the way that it usually gets that movement is that we have a big problem, like a big overarching plot line or through line, and we feel like, as we go through smaller problems, we are making some kind of progress with our big through line.
And when you stop progress on the through line, or you take a detour to work on some subplot that has nothing to do with your through line, we kind of lose the sense of movement that things are progressing towards an end. And that’s boring. It feels like it doesn’t matter, and so the conflicts aren’t compelling.
Oren: That is exactly what happens in both of those stories and it is not a beautiful thing to watch. I’ll put it that way.
Chris: It’s like, “My conflicts aren’t working.” Do you have the right conflict? Are your conflicts part of what you promised your readers in the beginning? If you made a promise about big juicy plot hooks, are they related to it or following up on it in some way?
Or do they just feel like we’re taking a side trip? Because that’s just going to be disappointing. When you give readers a big plot hook, they want to see what happens next there. And if you then introduce something with lower stakes…
Oren: So one more thing before we have to end the podcast is touching on something Chris mentioned, but I think is worth expanding on a little bit, which is the question of, “Is your conflict too dismal?”
This is a certain extent, a personal taste issue. The more dismal you make things, the more people will be turned off by it, but it is definitely possible to make your conflict too dismal, and this is something that happens in the Picard show. There’s just a lot of death and suffering. After a point, “I guess if they fail, more people will die. But I’ve already seen so many people die, I’m not really invested.”
That’s also an issue of stakes. There’s this one section in the Picard show where two of the characters are fighting the Romulans for control of this Borg cube. But it feels like all the people they might have tried to save are already dead. So, who cares? If they get to control the cube or not, what are they going to do with it? They’re not going to save anybody.
Next episode, we discover, “Oh, actually some of those people were still alive.” We should have known that earlier, right? We should have known there was still some good they could do by saving this cube.
Chris: It’s good to point out that there are problems with escalating the stakes too high too quickly. If this is an ongoing story, if you are writing a novel series. Leave yourself some room to build. We have a huge battle on a Borg cube where tons of people are dying and then somebody injects a bunch of former Borg, watch them all dying in space because you’re grim dark for no reason.
How are you going to build on that? How are you going to then to follow it up with something that feels like it matters more? Because again, the effect wears off and as the story progresses, generally you want to build the stakes higher. Having the different stakes in different types of conflicts also definitely helps. But giving yourself room to grow is also important.
Oren: I would very much agree with that, and I think that is a good note to end the podcast on. Those of you at home, if anything we said piqued your interest. You can leave a comment on the website at Mythcreants.com, but before we go, I want to thank a few of our patrons.
First, we have Kathy Ferguson, who is a professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. Next. We have Ayman Jaber who is an urban fantasy writer and Marvel connoisseur. And finally we have Denita Rambo, and she lives at therambogeeks.com we’ll talk to you next week.
Chris: If you liked this episode, a review on iTunes is a great way to increase our power level. This has been the Mythcreants podcast. Opening and closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.
We all know that the most important function of alignment is ranking celebrities and fictional characters on a nine-square grid, but what if I told you it was also a morality system in a tabletop roleplaying game? That’s right, this week we’re talking about D&D’s alignment system. What does it even mean? What’s its purpose? What makes a character turn neutral? We discuss all that and more, plus a history lesson on how the alignments have changed over the game’s many editions.
Show Notes The History of Haunted Houses * D&D Alignments * Minsc and Boo (Stand Ready) * Planescape: Torment * Lord of the Rings * Viconia * Curse of Strahd TranscriptGenerously Transcribed by Anonymous.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.
Wes: Hello, you’re listening to another episode of the Mythcreant podcast. I’m your host, Wes, and with me today is…
Oren: Oren
Wes: and
Chris: Chris.
Wes: We were a little surprised we didn’t have a podcast on this already. It seemed a little chaotic of us to have not systematically gone through our readership and realize that Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) alignments might be a topic worth discussing until now.
Oren: Normally we are very lawful, and so we would fulfill the unstated law that any RPG-related podcast has to have some kind of episode about alignments.
Wes: So here we are, teetering into lawful territory and adhering to tradition and discussing this topic with all of you today.
Chris: Honestly, I thought we hadn’t covered it cause we were lawful good, and D&D alignments are clearly just too evil and chaotic.
Oren: That’s true. They are actually, correct. Good joke.
Wes: We should probably cover the alignments really quick, even though they’ve been covered time and time again. It’s an axis. There’s lawful and that’s opposed by chaos, and then there’s good, and that’s opposed by evil with the neutrals in the middle, there’s nine of them.
Oren: Or so you think…
Wes: I guess I’m just going with what’s published here.
Oren: Surprise, but the best part about D&D alignments is how different they are over each edition.
Wes: Ooh, yes. I do love that. The only thing that seems to be the same are the names.
Oren: But even that’s not true. In Fourth Edition, they changed the names.
Wes: Oh, I thought we didn’t talk about Fourth Edition.
Chris: Does this mean we get a history lesson in D&D alignments?
Oren: Yes.
Wes: Oh
Oren: Yes.
Wes: Oh no.
Oren: Okay.
Chris: It reminds me of our haunted house podcast that ended up being about the history of haunted houses because Wes had so many interesting things to say about the history of haunted houses.
Wes: This’ll be a little shorter than that one.
Oren: This one’s a lot shorter. I promise. Back in the day, this is as far back as I could find an actual PDF of the book to look at the alignments for, I’m looking at First Edition of advanced D&D. You had the ones that you’re familiar with. Those were all still there. They are real weird. Chaotic good had a line about how freedom and randomness of action is the ultimate truth. [laughter] I don’t know what that means, but I kinda love it. You can see where the reputation of lawful good Paladins as actually being evil comes from because it has this line. This one is all about how certain freedoms must be sacrificed. It’s like, “Ooh, Ooh, Hmm. I have concerns.”
This is also the absolute best version of true neutral I’ve ever read. Because most editions that I’ve seen interpret true neutral to mean you just kind of don’t care. But now back in First Edition advanced D&D, true neutral was all about the balance between good and evil. It’s the Star Wars prequels. They’re back, and they somehow followed me into D&D.
Chris: I kind of liked that because now people can’t just opt out of the system. Nobody’s like, “I don’t want labels, so I’m just going to be neutral,” which everybody does because let’s face it, D&D alignments need work. Like haha jokes on you, you thought you could be free. But no, you care about balance.
Oren: Then there’s this whole confusing mess of First Edition and Second Edition advanced and basic D&D that ran in parallel for awhile. But the next book that I have a PDF for is 3.5 and 3.0, and that’s when we took alignments really seriously back then. They have long descriptions. Pretty familiar, but this was also when the mechanics were really heavily influenced by the alignments, and you had things like “detect evil” and “smite evil.” Your alignment was really important to the actual dice of the game. It really mattered.
Then there’s Fourth Edition. Fourth Edition’s attitude was, “we don’t know how to make good changes, so we’re just going to make changes and hope that works out for us.” Fourth Edition pared it down to only five. You have good, lawful good, evil, chaotic evil, and unaligned. And I admittedly kind of understand this because in both 3.5 and Fifth Edition, the difference between neutral good and chaotic good was extremely unclear. Both of them were, “you do good regardless of what the law says.” That actually sounds like the same alignment. Evil is basically unlawful evil in this version, and then they have unaligned for people who don’t want to deal with it. So that happened.
And finally we get to Fifth Edition, which is the edition that does not care about your alignment. You can just read the resentment in the alignment section where each alignment is one line of text now and they’re like, “Oh God, we really have to write this…uggggh.”
They wrote one line of text for each alignment, and it’s things like, “lawful good can be counted on to do the right thing as expected by society.” I have concerns.
Chris: You’re conformists, you lawful good people. Sheep, all of you!
Oren: Neutral good: “[do the] best they can to help others according to their needs.” And then we have chaotic good: “creatures act as their consciousness directs.” What if their consciousness wants them to kick a baby? What’s their consciousness? Who told them what to do? I’m confused.
But Fifth Edition is great because Fifth Edition has basically made all the alignment arguments pointless because they don’t matter anymore. They’ve been completely removed from the mechanics or almost completely. The only mechanical alignment thing I could find in Fifth Ed. is that certain items require you to be certain alignments in order to use them, certain high level magic items. Detect Evil is gone. Protection from Evil is gone. Technically it still has spells with those names, but those are actually for all different kinds of magical creatures, not alignments. Smite is just “Smite” now. It’s not Smite Evil.
Wes: Turns out anybody can be smited.
Oren: Congratulations, nobody cares what your alignment is anymore. We’ve solved that problem.
Chris: People really only want alignment so that we can take celebrities or fictional characters and put them on the alignment chart for giggles.
Oren: That is the most important part of the alignment chart now.
Wes: Arguably the most useful and valuable one. [laughter]
It is funny, Oren, you’re so right to point out how those sentences are so boring. They really threw it in, which I also have 3.5 open in front of me and yeah, there’s a lot of text in there, a lot of unnecessary text. But I like [in] 3.5 how they end each section with saying why that alignment is the best alignment. I feel like they should have only written that. “Lawful good: Lawful good is the best alignment you can be because it combines honor and compassion.” Okay, that’s fine. I’m fine with that. Everything that came before that was a little odd. Why would you over-explain this?
Or “Chaotic neutral is the best alignment you can be because it represents true freedom from society’s restrictions and a do-gooder zeal.” Just somebody who’s looking out for themselves and not- What did one of the editions say? “It’s the purview of unstable people.”
Oren: That was back in AD&D that was “freedom and randomness of action as the ultimate truth.”
Chris: Wait, so does it have lines advocating for chaotic evil then?
Oren: It switches them because it assumes that only villains are evil. So instead it says, “this is the most dangerous alignment you can be for this reason.”
Chris: “Lawful evil is the most dangerous alignment because it represents methodical, intentional, and frequently successful evil.”
Oren: I do think lawful evil is kind of an interesting one because all of the other alignments are nonsense and mean nothing, but we all instinctively know what lawful evil is. Of all the alignments, that’s the only one that translates into the real world.
Wes: I’ve gotten into discussions with friends. Chris mentioned the celebrity alignments and things, or you talk about, “Oh, well I think this politician is definitely chaotic evil.” And pushing back on your point, we know what lawful evil looks like. There’s an idea that if it’s chaotic evil, then it is the most evil. Successful evil is bad, and systematic evil things can be far more prevalent and pervasive.
But I think you’re right that if alignments were real, lawful would be the dominant one because I feel like chaotic alignments depend on actual personal strength. Because, if we’re going to do a Baldur’s Gate reference, Minsc is a chaotic good ranger, and Boo, and he’s strong. He’s a very strong guy who sometimes gets a little too zealous in his pursuit of justice and starts chopping things up with swords regardless of whether or not he’s in the middle of a city with you and you don’t really want to take on all those guys right now, but he flies off the handle because they’re slavers. There’s a personal strength aspect with chaotic alignments in that game that suggests you’re the individual, you are the Bhaalspawn, and you are chaotic, and you can do what you want. And that world lets you do what you want because personal strength can overpower lawful order.
Oren: I love that, and I think that is a beautiful interpretation. I’m going to have to be a dick about it though, because I don’t think that that is necessarily an alignment thing. I think what you have described is character traits, which are good, and those are beautiful traits to have, but a lawful good person could just as easily be the guy who flies off the handle and attacks the slavers because they’re just so zealous about the law and maybe these slavers are illegal somewhere.
Part of the issue with it is that the whole law versus chaos is a very interesting dynamic, but not at an individual level. We’re basically talking about order and freedom is the question. Those are legitimate questions about how we should organize a society and how should we make our laws to promote freedom versus order. There are a lot of those that don’t necessarily have a correct answer, but at an individual level, it just gets weird. The idea of some guy who breaks rules, not because the rules are bad, but just because they like breaking rules. That’s just a character flaw. That person’s not an alignment. That person is just kind of an asshole.
Wes: It seems like it was wrong to have your characters be assigned an alignment in D&D. Arguably, maybe a way to guide you for role playing or whatever. Planescape Torment – that game did it right. You just start the game off as true neutral, and then things shift over time based on actions and dialogue choices. Humans are mutable. I’ll accept that. It’s more interesting if you’re talking about the devils and the demons. They exist as that alignment. I’m weirdly more on board with that. A character that you’re playing in that world who has agency. I think you’re right. It’s a trait. There doesn’t feel like there’s a larger thing going on.
Oren: The whole issue of good and evil as supernatural forces as opposed to alignments makes way more sense because that’s what Lord of the Rings is. That’s what Star Wars is. These evil things that, we define them as evil. They don’t always define themselves as evil. Sometimes they do, but that’s actually kind of beside the point. What matters is that we define them as evil and they are a categorizable thing that exists as opposed to in the real world where we have a set of concepts that determines what evil is. Whereas in Lord of the Rings, we can say that Sauron’s not the only kind of evil, but Sauron is by definition evil. That’s one thing we define as evil. That just works better than the idea of a person having an alignment because a person can be evil. Evil is a real thing, but it isn’t baked into their soul. There are a lot of reasons a person might do bad stuff, and the idea of having it be a label is just kind of silly. If you actually tried to roleplay your character that way, you’d just come off really stilted and weird, which is why Fifth Edition doesn’t care. It’s why they stopped making that important. Incidentally, it’s still bad to give whole races an alignment. Fifth Edition, I’m talking to you. Goblins being evil is bad. Please stop.
Wes: That’s something they just seem to have trouble shaking. In Baldur’s Gate II, you can pick up Viconia, who’s a Drow character in your party, and she’s lawful evil in the alignment spectrum. And then you can also pick up Keldorn, who is a lawful good Paladin. For the most part, he’s very likable until you put him in the same party as Viconia and you realize, okay, they just had to make him racist. She is Drow, and eventually he just attacks her. You can’t stop him. He will do that. Lawful good means just accepting that all Drow are evil and beyond redemption.
Oren: According to the setting, he’s right. Aside from the occasional weird exception, Drow are inherently evil. The explanation for them is very confusing. I have an article coming up on Drow and how they make no sense at all. The bottom line is that according to the setting, he’s right. Viconia is evil. Verconia is her name, right? Am I saying it right?
Wes: I think it’s a Viconia.
Oren: Viconia has a great character, but it’s not because of her alignment. Her alignment is just the closest thing that they could come up with to describe what her character is, which is a pragmatic and ruthless character. That’s what she is. She doesn’t go around causing suffering for the heck of it because she likes causing suffering, but she is very amoral when it comes to other people being hurt to get what she wants. And that’s a consistent and strong characterization that makes her interesting. And the fact that she’s labeled as lawful evil as, “Well, she breaks laws all the time and I have no idea if she’s breaking Drow law cause no one knows what Drow law is. But certainly she doesn’t seem to mind that she’s breaking the laws of whatever city you’re in.” In Baldur’s Gate II, when you find her, the lawful evil alignment is just what they gave her to try to match this character they’d actually already made with this bizarre and arbitrary nine alignment grid thing.
Chris: That brings up the question of what neutral is supposed to be. In this setting, I guess if they’ve already defined all the Drows as evil, they might be doing the best they can. “Okay, we have this character. She’s supposed to be alignment evil. We can’t really ignore that, but we also don’t want her to just be despicable because she’s a party companion, so this is what we’re going to do.”
But to me that sounds like a description of what a neutral character should be. The problem is people like to choose neutral because they don’t want to be part of the system or what have you. They don’t usually think of a neutral character as a character that doesn’t care about hurting people. But really if you’re not aligned with good, then isn’t that how you would feel? You hurt people if it’s convenient and you don’t flinch at that. But neutral never seems to work out that way.
Oren: That’s what it would be if we were consistent with what evil is. If the idea of evil as being something that causes suffering because it desires to cause suffering, the suffering is the point. As opposed to being willing to cause suffering in order to acquire something. If that was what evil was, then yes, neutral would be, “I’m willing to hurt people to get what I want.” That’s what neutral would be. It isn’t because that’s a terrible kind of character. A lot of people don’t want to play that character.
People pick neutral because alignments are bull. I appreciated having that option back when the game actually cared what my alignment was. In Fifth Ed, no one cares. I sometimes forget to put down what my alignment is. Doesn’t matter anymore. And when I do put it down, I never look at it again. I played a campaign with my brother where he ran us through the whole Curse of Strahd campaign, and at the very end I remembered my character was technically chaotic good, and I had been working this whole game to build a coalition against Strahd and construct a new order. Doesn’t sound very chaotic, but who cares? Literally nobody. And so that was a fun thing to realize I’d written down on my character sheet when we started the game.
Wes: It only really mattered with the “find familiar” spell. You only got a certain type of familiar depending on your alignment and in which that case everybody was chaotic neutral cause then they could get a cool cat.
Oren: It’s like, I guess I’ll just be neutral because then I can do whatever I want and get the cool magic thing that I need.
Chris: The issue is if you define evil as being willing to hurt people for your own ends then it just doesn’t make sense for there to be any neutral on the spectrum.
Wes: I really like how you described Viconia because, to make another Planescape Torment reference, late in that game, when you’re confronted with some previous incarnations of yourself, there’s three of them. It’s good, and then there’s one that’s unfortunately named the mad incarnation, and then there’s the pragmatic incarnation. They moved away from just evil. This is the pragmatic incarnation. Oh, I see what you’re doing here. That character was just ruthless and self-serving, but had specific goals in mind.
Oren: Part of the reason we keep running into problems when we tried to define what evil is is much like genre, evil is a collection of associated aesthetics or traits or what have you. It’s a collection of things that something can be more or less like. And so that’s why we can recognize evil in the real world when we see someone yelling that immigrants are rapists. We know that’s evil. We don’t have to consult a weird chart to find out. But at the same time, we run into problems if we try to reverse engineer it and be like, “okay, well now evil must be these things,” because it doesn’t work that way because evil’s not one specific set of things. It’s a collection of things and the more like those things you are, the more evil you are. That’s why the whole alignment label system is just never going to create good fiction and why most of the time you end up ignoring it except for when suddenly it really matters if you can smite it or not, then suddenly you need to know.
The whole concept of a setting in which you can not only smite but detect evil, that’s just so bizarre. Because on the one hand, that would definitely lead to discrimination where anyone who was evil would be discriminated against, but also they would definitely deserve it for being evil. It completely destroys the way that we actually think about the world and the way we experience it. It’s similar to how in most D&D settings, the afterlife is just known to exist and when you die, you just go there and you can be brought back if you have a large diamond. The level to which that will change a society is comparable to how much actual alignments and having people be able to tell them would change a society. It’s just completely bizarre. People don’t give D&D enough credit for its surreal weirdness, how bizarre this world is.
Wes: The afterlife stuff is interesting and the multi-verse aspect of it. I kind of wonder how the multi-verse related to the whole alignment thing. And they say, “well, if we’ve got all these extra worlds, we’ve got like a good place and a bad place, but maybe we need more places to multi-verse.
We can’t just do some kind of heaven and hell binary. What are some other ways we can throw in? Oh, I know. We’ll do a lawful world that’s basically a giant clock called Mechanus, and people will go adventure there and enjoy pure order maybe.”
Oren: I’m probably lawful good to the extent that I think that laws are important and that we should probably have them. This gets weird because obviously if someone tells me the law now is that we are going to cut off everyone’s toe because that’s the law. That’s wrong. [laughter] I don’t have any compulsions about saying that’s wrong because I also think taxes are good. That’s one of the reasons why it just doesn’t fit on any character to try to figure that out.
There are interesting conflicts to be had over more gray areas where there might be a situation where one person who is fundamentally a good person would be willing to break the law and another person wouldn’t. But that often has as much to do with fear of consequences as it does with, “is it morally wrong?” If someone was like, “Would you like to steal from credit card companies?” I’m like, “No,” but that’s because I don’t want to go to jail, not because I think it’s wrong. But that’s a different scenario entirely. It requires care and attention to detail and knowledge of how the characters work, not a chaotic neutral label on your character.
Chris: I think the issue with the whole lawful label…I only wish it was more of an order versus freedom label, but calling it lawful versus chaotic… The idea seems to be that if you’re lawful, that you will just follow laws for the sake of following laws. You will follow rules because you’re supposed to follow rules, and the rule is automatically good regardless of the context, and most people don’t really identify with that: “I’m just going to follow the rules because they’re rules.” Then it gives the whole lawful good a feeling of being a stick in the mud, and nobody wants to be a stick in the mud.
Wes: Substituting order, that makes sense because you’ll see in incarnations of D&D how they talk about that, that by lawful they mean laws that a city has approved or tradition or a personal code of honor that sets a code of conduct. So a free spirit can have a personal code of conduct that is, “I am a free spirit. I shall follow my whims.”
Chris: I think the base problem is that the whole alignment system was extracted from supernatural mechanics, from Lord of the Rings, like Oren mentioned, and wasn’t a way of actually categorizing real people and their different belief systems and their way of approaching things.
If you’re creating an epic conflict in a fantasy setting, like good versus evil, it has some use. But if you’re trying to give player characters options, it doesn’t really have any use because those are just not what divide people or at least not the way that they’re characterized. And so asking players to make decisions between different options when either one option is the obvious option that everybody should take, or they’re kind of equally unpleasant doesn’t work. Whereas it does work better if you have a story that you’re preplanning, like Lord of the Rings, where you can just decide, “No, there’s no ‘detect evil’” and we have an actual metaphysical manifestation of evil that’s in the world that we have to struggle against, and we’re not deciding that Legolas is chaotic good versus Gimli’s lawful good or something like that.
Oren: Something like “detect Sauron” for lack of a better term. That’s what Gandalf actually seems to have. It’s really not clear to me that he has “detect evil” because then we would have to determine what evil is. And in Lord of the Rings, Sauron is evil, but not all evil is Sauron. Then it gets even weirder and more complicated. And don’t even get me started on alignment-based deities. Why would anyone pray to anything but a good god since you can be a good person and also get super powers? What kind of person wouldn’t take that deal? A tiny minority maybe.
Wes: It’s all about power. And it’s about the churches trying to get the faithful to follow their ways and tithe for their gods. Because sure you might see Ilmater as being the god of sacrifice and looking out for your best wellbeing, but really you need to look to Torm and you should patronize Torm’s temples cause only Torm will defend you.
Oren: That makes actual sense as opposed to what’s in the book, which is that some gods are good and some are bad. [laugher] Hot take alignments: they don’t actually work very well. That’s my big takeaway from this podcast.
Fifth Edition made the right choice. Fourth Edition tried to do something similar but messed up because it changed things, and people don’t like change, and if you’re going to change stuff, you need to have a really good replacement or a really good justification, and D&D fans just weren’t excited to hear that actually alignments are bad. So instead Fifth Edition changed it without anyone even noticing because it was so subtle. They’re all still in there. The game is just designed in such a way that they no longer matter. And I actually find that kind of brilliant.
Chris: It’s a good way of phasing it out, weaning people off of it without making waves or inspiring backlash.
Oren: If there ever is a Sixth Edition of D&D, which I don’t know if there will be, but if there ever is, I wouldn’t be surprised if it just doesn’t have alignments at all, if they’re just gone.
Wes: Well, and how they introduce the ideals, the bonds, the flaws gave far more options to flesh out your character a little bit instead of something as abstract as lawful neutral, whatever the heck that is. “Must follow all laws.”
Oren: All right, well I think that will about do it for this podcast, but before we go, I want to thank a few of our patrons. First, we have Kathy Ferguson, who is a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Next we have Ayman Jaber, who is a urban fantasy writer and connoisseur of Marvel. And finally we have Danita Rambo, and she lives at therambogeeks.com. Talk to you all next week.
Promo: As your eyes open, a haunting melody fades to silence. Strange symbols circle the floor and someone lying next to you is dead. Can you put the pieces together before you meet your doom?
Find out by playing our standalone RPG, The Voyage, for sale on mythcreants.com.
Words words words! What do they even mean? And who decides what they mean? When you’re a writer, these are very important, which is why today we’re talking about the terminology of storytelling. In fact, we’ve already started, since “storytelling” is a bit of terminology in and of itself. That’s right, it’s terminology all the way down! We hope you enjoy it.
Show Notes Storytelling’s Terminology Blog Post * Thermian Argument * Galaxy Quest * The Last Jedi and the Power of Failure * Fan Rage * Hoth * Harry Potter * Luke Skywalker * Katniss Everdeen * Margaret Atwood Writes Speculative Fiction TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Innes.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Chris and with me is
Wes: Wes
Chris: and
Oren: Oren.
Chris: And to start, we should let you know that we’ve lied to our listeners. We’re not really a podcast, we’re a video deprived talk show [Oren gasps] and we’re not actually hosts, we’re just story pundits who won’t leave and keep talking instead.
Oren: I keep trying to leave, but they won’t let me.
Wes: You’re trapped in here. We’re all trapped!
Oren: The doors are locked, man. This is just the quarantine lifestyle.
Chris: Of course. What we are all depends on what terms we use to call ourselves, and then also what those terms actually mean. We’re going to talk about Terminology Wars.
Wes: Oooh battle time.
Chris: Cause there’s nothing I like better than taking something that sounds boring and putting ‘wars’ at the end of it. I wanted to talk about this topic because I did write a blog post about this a while ago – about terminology being a mess – but it was boring. I think it was boring.
Wes: I liked it.
Chris: I thought it would be a lot more engaging in discussion format as opposed to an elaborate glossary, which is basically what it was in the blog post.
Oren: Hang on. I’m going to go read this blog post. Y’all need to give me a few minutes.
Chris: Maybe we should open this with ‘why.’ Why bother to spend a podcast talking about terminology?
Oren: I often ask ‘why’ about many things.
Wes: Especially words. Words seem like they get ‘whys’ a lot.
Oren: I don’t understand why even words. Who need?
Chris: Terminology is important at any time because we can’t communicate with each other effectively without understanding what our words mean, storytelling in particular. I think that this industry just has more terminology problems than most other industries. In particular, we have lots of terms for wordcraft stuff or about sentences and sentence constructions. When it comes to storytelling in particular, the conversation has been underdeveloped. At Mythcreants, I’ve made up a lot of terms. It’s not because I think that I should be making up lots of terms, but because we extract principles from stories so that we can teach those principles to other people, and then we have to name them. We can’t just not name them and discuss them in a robust manner. Of course other people are doing the same thing elsewhere and being consistent is very difficult. It’s difficult just for us to stay consistent on our own blog between blog posts that span six or seven years now.
Oren: The solution is just for everyone to make us way more famous and then everyone will know our terms and there will only have to be one. Anyone who’s ever been frustrated with terminology, just spread Mythcreants around everywhere, and eventually it will just be us. Problem solved.
Wes: Problem solved. Love it.
Chris: I mean, I do try to play nice with others. If I know a term is being used, somebody else has come up with a term for the principal I want, I do try to use that. How good that word is at communicating the concept does matter to me though. I’m definitely more reluctant to use a term that somebody else has invented if I think it’s just confusing or unintuitive in some way. There’s one term that is going around- I came up with the term ‘Real World Fallacy’ which means basically anytime somebody treats a story as though it’s real life by making some argument that would only work if stories were real when they’re actually fictional. At the time I didn’t know about the term ‘Thermian Argument.’
Wes: So clear. I definitely know what that is.
Chris: No, it turns out that they’re not actually equivalent. I would say the Thermian argument is an example of a real world fallacy, but the real word fallacy is not necessarily a Thermian argument. Just so you know what this means, it’s in the movie Galaxy Quest, the Thermians are an alien race that thinks all of the Galaxy Quest shows are real. They think that everything that happened was historical documents and not a fictional TV show. Specifically the Thermian argument refers to when somebody tries to defend something in a story using in story logic and justification. Like, the reason that there are no women werewolves in this setting is because the werewolf gene is on the Y chromosome.
Oren: The reason why everyone in this setting is constantly punching themselves in the dick is that that’s where the magic button is, and you have to activate the magic button.
Oren: It makes sense, guys. Did you not read the backstory? That’s why all the dick punching. I don’t know why you wouldn’t want that.
Chris: It is definitely an example of the real world fallacy because it is using a justification that treats this story like it wasn’t just made up by somebody. But, I think real world fallacy is better first because it says ‘fallacy’ instead of ‘argument,’ so it comes with a statement that this is invalid and not good logic. Also Thermian is kind of clever once you know what it’s referring to, but it’s still a very insider-y term. Real world fallacy is meant for a wide audience of writers, not just in speculative fiction, whereas Thermian argument is for specifically geeks who are really into analyzing geeky media and know what it’s referencing. It’s just not very accessible to outsiders.
Oren: Just to be clear, the term Thermian argument was coined in a YouTube video in 2015. But we hadn’t heard about it until quite recently. For some reason it just didn’t cross our radar and we’d already been using the term ‘real world fallacy’ for a few years by that point. Who knows what would’ve happened if we’d known about that YouTube video sooner. For now we already made this term, have been using it for a while, and we actually think it’s a more descriptive term and is better for what we’re talking about. We’re probably going to keep using it.
Chris: To be fair, again, the real fallacy does cover other circumstances. When somebody defends incompetent villains by saying sometimes bad people in real life are incompetent that’s also the real world fallacy. When you defend something in a story by saying it happens in real life, that’s not a Thermian argument, but that is the real world fallacy. They’re still not quite equivalent.
Oren: I really started pushing hard on the term ‘throughline’ a few years ago, even though I didn’t make that up – I think that’s a theater term originally. It really describes a very important storytelling concept, which is a thing that connects the story together, the thing that makes it so this couldn’t be split up into multiple stories. It needs to be one thing and it should be throughout the whole story, which is why it’s called a throughline, because it is a line that goes through. I specifically wanted that instead of something like ‘the main plot’ or ‘the main plot thread’ or whatever, because a main plot is not as specific. A main plot is usually the throughline, but also you could say that this story’s main plot is something that only happens in the middle of it just cause it’s the most important plot, and that’s not the throughline. In that case, the story probably doesn’t have a throughline.
Wes: You also didn’t want to say something like the barbecue skewer where each scene is either a vegetable or a piece of meat that has to fit together nicely if you want to have a good meal. There’s just too much to unpack there.
Oren: Damn. I wish I had now.
Oren: Wes, where was this three years ago when I needed a term? Why have you been holding out on me?
Wes: I’m sorry. [Wes laughs]
Chris: Throughline is a great example of when it’s been hard to keep the blog consistent because I’ve been writing about throughlines for years, and then Oren comes up with a blog post and just names them throughlines. I’m like, okay, that’s fair. I’ve been really disorganized about what I’ve been calling them. I’ve called them different things. I haven’t really defined them for people properly. When Oren decided that’s what he wanted to use, I was like, all right, I’m just going to go with it. For a while, all of our blog posts, when they talked about throughlines, would point out that, okay, I used to call it all of these different things and now we just call it the throughline and hope that our readers get what we mean. But we link, we link to it, to other places. That’s a nice thing on Mythcreants is we have so many blog posts that if there is any doubt about what we mean, we can usually just link that term to another blog post and then if somebody wants to know more, they can go there.
Oren: Beyond simply using different terms for the same thing, there’s the opposite, which is using the same term to mean different things.
Wes: Oof no. Hiss.
Oren: That’s also confusing. Although in my experience, when I have encountered someone who it looks like is using a term differently than I am, when I push deeper to try to find out what they actually mean, I discover that I was right the first time: they were just using it badly and their argument is bad. I got into a Twitter conversation a while back with some people who were trying to tell me that ‘story’ in a roleplaying game was bad, and I was like, okay, you must mean something different by story than what I mean by it, because I don’t think you actually think a story in an RPG is bad. I pushed a little deeper and I found out that they sort of mean something different, but what they mean is any kind of preplanned activity by the GM, any kind of the GM making notes or thinking, ‘well, it would be cool if this happened,’ or doing basically any prep work. They consider that story and that was bad, and, okay, first of all, that’s a bad use of the word story, but also you’re wrong.
Wes: You’re so wrong.
Oren: We’re having trouble here both because you’re using the terminology badly and because your argument is bad. There’s two layers I have to sort through to figure out what’s being said and then explain why it is incorrect. I just run into this constantly. I have a huge list that we could get to at some point if we run out of other content about arguments that started off as terminology confusion, and then I realized how bad the argument actually was.
Chris: I have to say that we do allow guest posts that say things that we don’t agree with if the guest poster makes a good argument, but I do crack down on different terminology usage because I want, at least when you’re on Mythcreants, to experience some consistency about what terms mean. That’s at least the one thing that I can do across blog posts for people so that they don’t have to get through that first layer of, does that word mean what it’s always meant at Mythcreants, or in some cases has changed – ahem – at Mythcreants. [Chris and Oren cough awkwardly]
Chris: I’ve had some guest posters that are not necessarily happy with that. It becomes an issue because some people build their whole careers in the industry by defining terms in very specific ways. I had one person who inquired about guest posting, who had this whole point about how story is what we would call ‘message,’ and that was not different from plot, whereas we define stories generally as being the plot structure. And I was like, okay, look, I understand that you’re trying to promote your website, so I don’t necessarily expect you to automatically change all of your terms because that just wouldn’t work, but at the very least, we need to have an explanation in the article for what you mean and how you’re using terms differently than we use them. That guy didn’t come back. Maybe he just got busy, but maybe I drove him away with the Terminology Wars.
Wes, sarcastically: Just an unreasonable request. Oh no.
Oren: Chris was being way nicer than I would have been. Chris was giving this person a chance to explain that they were using different terminology, whereas like I’m fine with putting up a blog post that says that The Last Jedi is good, it’s not, but I’m okay with putting up a blog post that says it is, if it’s well argued. But if you try to put ‘worldconjuring’ in one of your posts, you’re out of here. I’m going to veto that so hard.
Chris: I think it’s time to talk about ‘worldconjuring,’ which is something that we always joke about amongst ourselves. Oren, why don’t you have a go at that one?
Oren: It’s actually a surprisingly short story. A guy wanted to write a provocative piece about storytelling, fantasy storytelling specifically, but he didn’t have anything provocative to say, so he redefined worldbuilding to mean too much worldbuilding and wrote a post title that was ‘Worldbuilding is Bad,’ so everyone would click on it cause like, what do you mean worldbuilding is bad? What is wrong with you? Then he defines worldbuilding as too much worldbuilding and well that’s actually not controversial at all. Literally everyone agrees with that. Then he was like, but wait, the correct amount of worldbuilding is called worldconjuring. This is the most pointless blog post I have ever read. It was really long and just like, what is this? This is so pointless. This is clickbait. People accuse us of clickbait all the time because we use provocative titles, but when we have a provocative title, it’s because we have something provocative to say. This article had nothing provocative to say. It just used a provocative title to bait your clicks as it might be considered.
Chris: Reminds me of the guy online who, his whole schtick is that you have to understand your genre really well to write the plot. What plot you write depends on your genre, which we just don’t think is true. At all. At Mythcreants, we specialize in a subset of genres, but at the same time we talk a lot about how really story is very genre independent. There are conventions but almost all of the principles we talk about apply to any genre. In order to defend the idea that somebody had to specifically write their genre and all of their plot had to fit their genre, he just made up tons of genres for every different plot type. And of course, genre definitions are very vague and it is easy to debate what a genre is because it’s like sandwich theory; it’s a loose collection of associations and there are no real hard lines about genres. At the same time, it still feels very disingenuous to just make up a bunch of genre terms that nobody is using and call them genres and then tell everybody that genres are super important.
Oren: Worldbuilding came up another time in a similarly bizarre way, and this is another case of first there was terminology confusion and then also the argument was bad. It was a YouTube video that was titled ‘The Perils of Worldbuilding’ and I was like, what? So I clicked on it. It was this guy talking about how worldbuilding is bad because it causes regressive politicians to exist. See, if we accept a world that exists, then we will accept when a bigoted politician tells us that a world exists that is not the real one. [A world] where Mexicans are evil or whatever. I was like, okay, bro, citation needed. It got weirder because he very quickly stopped talking about actual worldbuilding and was talking about fan culture, basically fan wikis. He really doesn’t like fan wikis. He hates them and thinks that they cause bigoted politicians because we get too invested in fake worlds, and so when they lie to us, we want to believe them. Okay, so first of all, you’re not actually talking about worldbuilding, you’re talking about fandom. And also, what the heck?
Wes: That’s the exact same thing about, oh, the violent video games are going to make you violent.
Oren: Yeah, but three steps weirder.
Wes: No question about that. If you can imagine that this is a reality, then obviously you can be persuaded that it is the reality. What?
Oren: It’s very specific. It’s like [saying] violent video games will make you launder money. Because you see in video game violence, you often pick up loot that you dropped from your enemies, but in order to actually spend that loot in real life, you would need money laundering. There isn’t money laundering in the video game because it’s not that realistic, but now you’re thinking about money laundering. Killing that goblin and getting the four gold pieces has made you a money launderer. Boom. It all makes sense.
Wes: The logic is flawless.
Oren: I love it. Man. I’m just going to do fiction-based conspiracy theories now. This is obviously my calling that I’ve missed.
Chris: As Wes knows, literary terms are definitely my weakness. [Chris laughs]
Wes: Big caveat, as Chris pointed out, literary terms are used for literary analysis and the level of that is often not really what we’re talking about on Mythcreants. I believe those two things are pretty well separated. There are some crossovers, but the story critiques that we’re doing are not the same type of literary analysis. Those just come with a lot of baggage anyway.
Chris: You know what I realized recently, Wes, and you’ll have to tell me whether or not you agree, is I now think of literary analysis, and the community that does it, as a fandom. They are a very much more traditional fandom that focuses on classic literature. It feels like the big divide here is that it’s by readers for readers as opposed to by and for storytellers. That fandom generally really likes to look at multiple interpretations of texts and come up with new interpretations of text. They’re not writing them so that’s not their focus. Their focus isn’t on how it could be changed. It can’t be changed. They’re focused on interesting ways of analyzing and interpreting texts.
Wes: I think I half agree with you. We’re dealing with a situation where they are reading and critiquing for other readers and other critics and not for other readers that are necessarily producing the craft of new stories. Of course some of them are writers too, and that’s something to take into consideration. As far as it being a fandom, yeah, I think that’s a good way to put it. For the longest time, the definitions of these literary terms have just been held in ivory towers and used among published – I was going to say authors, but I’ll say critics – and professorships and things like that. I mentioned baggage earlier because you’ve got to think that if this has been happening for decades then suddenly if everybody was revising terms for what they meant, then it would be a lot more work to follow what somebody had meant in a previous decade even, or something like that. That’s why I think they have this more iron grip on their terminology. Still, their focus is different and you’re right about that. By far and large, they’re not really talking about, this is how we’re going to talk about this in a way to help you improve your craft of writing. You’re mostly saying, this is how I’m going to talk about this and I’m going to analyze it with these terms so that maybe when you read it, you’ll come to this understanding, which is messy to say the least.
Chris: As I said earlier, the terminology about sentence constructions and at the wordcraft level is much more robust than for storytelling. I think that when they do focus on what a writer would want to know, that’s where they focus, on that micro level as opposed to the broader storytelling strokes. We do run into some communication issues that are a fan/storyteller divide sometimes, specifically when talking about how to interpret characters that are coded perhaps in certain ways. The fact that the fan wants to proactively interpret a story as being- as wanting to queer the narrative, for instance, and interpret characters as being queer or having other marginalized traits because you can’t change the work, but you can change how people look at it and thereby effectively make it better representation by changing how it’s perceived. From a storyteller standpoint, we want to push storytellers to make their representation clear and to stand up for marginalized people, so we don’t have that same, let’s interpret this in the most favorable manner possible to marginalized people because we’re trying to be critical and push storytellers to do better. Sometimes that creates a little bit of discomfort when it comes to having those cross storyteller fan conversations. Now on the blog, I’m specifically very proactive about making that distinction so that people understand that there’s two different ways of looking at this.
Oren: It doesn’t help that a lot of the times these terminology disputes are being used as a cover for fan rage. That makes the whole thing even more confusing. But in general, I agree that we want to be clear that we are talking about this from a storyteller perspective and not telling the audience how they need to interpret stuff because if the author is dead, certainly the critic is also dead.
Wes: Well said. I got chills.
Chris: Speaking of literary terms, should we talk about themes?
Oren: Theeeeeemes.
Chris: We have a whole podcast on themes and we had to, in the beginning, clarify the different ways that the word ‘theme’ is used, which is really confusing.
Wes: It is, and I have hard opinions on this, but I’m practically flexible. I will go to a themed party and not complain about if the theme is goblins, that’s not really a theme. You mean topic or subject.
Oren: A goblin topic-ed party. I’d go to that.
Chris: The message is goblin. Let’s all be goblin.
Wes: I do think it’s interesting though, because I think recently I’ve kind of tried to reconcile this where if Chris and Oren invited me to a goblin themed party, then my thought process would be, okay, what is going to be Chris and Oren’s take on a goblin themed party? At the end of that party, perhaps I’ve come out with a statement about what Chris and Oren view a goblin themed party as, and suddenly I understand the theme. See, you guys. I took a message from it.
Chris: Thanks for translating. As Wes just mentioned, the literary term ‘theme’ is what we call ‘message.’ Where there is a specific opinion, shall we say, that is being expressed. Whereas when Oren and I use the word theme, we’re using it in the more colloquial definition of a themed party, and we use that in particular for worldbuilding when there’s a specific aesthetic or repeating theme- sorry, repeating imagery. [Chirs laughs] I can’t even define the word theme without saying theme. The problem is, if I were to see the word theme as a literary definition, I would have had a lot of trouble coming up with a new word for that cause colloquially we usually call it theme.
Wes: There isn’t a better word for it. Even though I’m kind of a weird stickler about it, I agree. There just isn’t a better word. Theme is the best word for both meanings, and that confuses me and everyone.
Oren: We could just cobble together a random assortment of sounds and see if that works. Call it a gooblegack. That’s what it’s called now.
Wes: Yes! Everyone bow down to Oren’s new word for this.
Oren: I have a well gooblegacked book. The transcribers are going to love that one.
Chris: Hey, when I come up with new terms, I always try to make them very intuitive using real words and not inventing a language.
Wes: I think this word though, it depends on the context in which you’re writing and maybe the scope of how you’re talking about it. For example, if you’re talking about how you should theme your world, that’s a good discussion, but if I asked you guys, what are the themes of science fiction, how would you answer that?
Oren: I would stare really hard and kind of angrily. How dare you?
Chris: I see your point Wes. If I was talking about the themes of science fiction, I would probably talk about adaptation to new technology, for instance.
Wes: Yeah, and that’s totally- I feel like that works.
Chris: That would be a theme by the literary definition.
Wes: Yeah, but the scale is different. We’re talking about a genre and the theme of a genre. In a world, if the theme of your world is Hoth-like, then there’s an ice agent, the lone Wampa or whatever Oren’s really sad story is about. No retelling that please. Go to the previous podcast to hear that sad story. Maybe it helps just to try to, again, define how you’re talking about that word. Although if you’re not talking to me, you’re probably not going to run into any kind of annoying arguments about it.
Chris: Although adaptation to technology is not what we would call a message right? We would keep that to something that is a very specific opinion that is saying something in particular about the adaptation to technology.
Wes: Which is good because then the message, messages really, do offer variations or interpretations of something more broad, like how we can use theme in that sense. If adaptations to future technology is the theme, then tons of messages could come from that depending on the writer.
Oren: One thing that I think about a lot when I’m looking at terminology is the balance between clarity and prescriptivism. I don’t want to go and tell people what their words mean. I don’t want to be that guy. But there is a value to having your terms mean the same thing consistently and using them in the same way that your audience will use them especially if you are someone who writes about storytelling on the Internet. I watched a YouTube video recently that was supposed to be about tropes. First the video read this long definition of tropes from literaryterms.net or what have you, and in this definition, irony was a trope. I was like, that’s not how I would consider irony or the word ‘trope.’ I was very confused. But then it turned out that that wasn’t what the video is even about. It was using the more colloquial use of trope, like the chosen one, and I was like, okay, why did you read that definition? Then it started talking about the chosen one and we started listing off characters like Harry Potter and Luke Skywalker and Katniss Everdeen. Wait, hang on, hang on. One of those things is not like the others. It’s not like this is a random unimportant thing. We were defining what the chosen one is so that we could talk about it, and Katniss Everdeen is not a chosen one. A huge part of her story is that she chooses to go on the adventure. The most famous line from the book or the movie is when she volunteers as tribute. There’s just no way that that’s a chosen one. If you aren’t careful with defining your terminology properly, you could end up with something that’s so broad as to be useless. By that definition, if Katniss Evergreen is a chosen one- Katniss Evergreen? Katniss Everdeen is a chosen one then basically all protagonists are chosen ones, and at that point the term is useless.
Chris: I’d like to talk about a few terms that I wish I could change, but are too ingrained in the industry.
Wes: Ooh, yes, yes, yes.
Chris: We’ve talked about how the word conflict is misleading, and it is an industry-wide term that people generally agree on its meaning, but newcomers often are misled into thinking that conflict equals violence. We’ve got to have fight scenes. We’ve got to have bombs blowing up. I’ve heard the suggestion from somebody years ago that to be less violent, it should be called ‘negotiation.’
Wes: Oh my God, I hate that. I hate that.
Chris: Frankly, it’s just as misleading, and now we’re not even emphasizing the fact that it has to be intense or it should be intense. New storytellers always have to be pushed to make their conflict more intense and have higher stakes. If I were to wave my wand and call it something different, I would call it ‘struggle.’
Wes: I like struggle. As you were talking, I was thinking ‘obstacle,’ but that suggests something physical and struggle is better. Struggle captures a wider variety of conflicts.
Chris: Struggle puts the emphasis on the fact that there is something difficult that a person is dealing with without externalizing what kind of situation that person is dealing with. It emphasizes the fact that it is difficult for them, which I think is the important part here. But as much as I want to, I can’t just rename conflict ‘struggle.’
Wes: We could start now and we could revise every post on Mythcreants. No, we’ve always done it this way.
Chris: When I rule the world, I can make everybody use different terms.
Wes: There you go.
Chris: When we first started the blog, there was a discussion of what term we should use for ‘storytelling’ partly because the people I was originally founding Mythcreants with were all very into the folk community and it has another meaning, which is actually ‘an oral performer who stands up and tells people stories in person.’ I chose storytelling because it was the only term I could think of that really communicated what I needed it to, and frankly that’s the term that everybody uses. I don’t know if it’s become more apparent to me with time and exposure and everybody was using it then, or it’s just become more popular as a term than it used to be. If I had thought of the word ‘storycraft’ back then, I would’ve been tempted to use it. I still shouldn’t have because everybody uses storytelling. I like the term storycraft because it emphasizes that it’s a craft, which I think the industry really needs.
Oren: It needs to understand that storytelling is something you can get better at, and that you can find patterns that work.
Chris: That it has an engineering component shall we say, like a craft does. I wish I could call it that, but it’s too late. It also would have distinguished it from oral performance on top of that, which would have been nice. The last industry terms that I wish I could change is the ambiguity of hero and villain, which I’m constantly having – not constantly, but in some posts in particular – to work around in the blog. We already have the words protagonist and antagonist, and so we could just use hero and villain to mean somebody who is moral and somebody who is not moral, but that’s not what they mean, or at least they don’t mean that clearly. They mean protagonist and antagonist when we already have terms for that. When we’re talking about amoral protagonists and moral antagonists, it just becomes very confusing.
Oren: Yeah. I don’t love it.
Chris: But too late.
Wes: Too late.
Oren: Yeah. This decision was made for us in the ancient times.
Chris: The before times.
Wes: Maybe as a way to end on that is we can’t revise anything or control necessarily what we see other than, I dunno, like Chris said, reading in the genre to see if people are using one term more than the other. Maybe see if you like it and adopt it even if the temptation is great to create your own. It might be better to just embrace that this is the language that people are using to discuss the craft. Also just don’t be jerks about things. If I tell a friend – I’m going to use air quotes here on ‘friends’ – about Mythcreants dealing in speculative fiction, have you guys ever gotten pushback on this? That all fiction is speculative?
Chris: No, actually that one I have not heard.
Wes: Oh my gosh. It drives me up the wall.
Oren: I have gotten pushback on speculative fiction, but from the other direction. Specifically from Margaret Atwood fans who believe that only what Margaret Atwood writes is speculative fiction and nothing else is.
Chris: Margaret Atwood claims it to be a specific genre that she herself writes so that people don’t think of her work as being scifi and fantasy because she wants to be seen as literary. That’s my understanding of it.
Wes: Ugh. All I can do is sign and grunt.
Oren: Well, we will have to end this podcast with a sigh and a grunt and a reminder to don’t be a jerk unless someone brings up worldconjuring, in which case I give you permission.
Before we go, I want to thank a few of our patrons. First, we have Kathy Ferguson, who is a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Next, we have Ayman Jaber who is an urban fantasy writer and a Marvel connoisseur. Finally we have Danita Rambo and she lives at therambogeeks.com. If anything we said piqued your interest, you can leave a comment on the website at mythcreants.com and we will talk to you next week.
If you’re stuck on your next draft, we’d love to help. We offer consulting and editing services on mythcreants.com.
This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening/closing theme: ‘The Princess who Saved Herself’ by Jonathan Colton.
Look, redemption arcs are great fun, but what happens when a character does something bad and doesn’t ever redeem themself? That’s a downward arc, and it’s one of the hardest tropes to pull off successfully. That’s why it’s the subject of today’s episode. We discuss the risks of a downward arc, what happens when one fails, and how to make them work. Plus, some bonus complaining about TV Tropes’s categorization system.
Show Notes Fred * Return of the Jedi * Prince Arthas * Zuko * Power Reveals * David * Walter White * Ezra Bridger * Faith * Willow * Londo Mollari * The Good Place * Captain Nero * Daenerys * Saruman * The Last Ringbearer TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Cindi at YourPodScribe.*
Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock and Chris Winkle. [Opening Theme]
Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Oren with me today is…
Chris: Chris.
Oren: …and
Wes: Wes.
Oren: Folks, you might not have noticed it, but I’ve been getting steadily more evil over the last few podcasts. I’ve just been really tearing into stories and being a rude, mean critic, and also probably kicked a puppy at some point. [Group laughter]
I have had a downward arc, you could say. I’m very bad now. I started off good, but now I’m evil and dark and broooody.
Wes: Good job. Way to flip the switch on your evil on the last episode of the last season.
Oren: So last time we talked about redemption arcs, and now we’re talking about downward arcs because I like symmetry. So downward arc is the opposite of a redemption arc. It’s when a character starts off good and goes bad. But it’s hard. It’s hard to do that because people don’t like seeing the characters they like turn evil. They don’t. They complain. Loudly. They’re very unreasonable about this. [Group laughter]
Chris: I also think it’s the most difficult arc to pull off and make it believable, besides being challenging because you’re making a character that the audience might sympathize with, bad. They’re also harder for people to get to wrap their minds around how this character could become evil.
Oren: And like last time, I just want to point out that this is not the same as a face-heel turn, which is another TV Tropes thing, because a face-heel turn is very, very broad. It’s basically any time a character started off on team good and then ends up on team evil.
And it can happen a lot of different ways and a lot of the ones they list as face-heel turns, the character is revealed to have been evil the whole time, or the circumstances change and now he’s on team bad. Nothing about the character actually changed. So it’s not really an arc. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad, just that we’re talking about different things.
What is bad is how TV Tropes lists Fred’s death at the end of season five of Angel as a face-heel turn. What the heck? [Wes laughter]
Chris: Yeah. It’s rubbing some salt in that wound.
Oren: It’s not a turn. She’s just dead. And now there’s a new character who is meat puppeting her body. Oh my God, you guys really?
Chris: Too soon.
Oren: Also, I love that by this definition, every zombie is a face-heel turn now. Anytime someone gets bitten by a zombie they’ve done a face-heel turn. I’m grumpy about this, is the point.
Chris: There’s a lot to be grumpy about in Fred’s death.
Oren: It’s a bad death and this is just doing disservice to her memory. Downward arcs are hard for a couple of reasons, but the two biggest ones are that if you made a character who was good and likable, it is difficult to create situations where they will believably do the bad things you need them to do to have a downward arc.
And then the other problem is that even if you manage that, if you aren’t really careful, the story might just be too dark. Even if it is believable, everyone’s like, ah, I don’t want to live anymore. And they stop reading your story and go watch She Ra or something and have fun.
Let’s talk about the believability part first. Because this is a serious issue that happens in a lot of stories where you’re doing bad things and you’ll become bad. They do one thing and it’s not really clear how it links to another thing. This is the Return of the Jedi problem where it’s like, strike me down with your weapon and then you will join my team. But why? Why would Luke do that? And the best explanation is mind control. But that’s not a good explanation. It takes away all of the actual arc part of the downward arc.
Chris: It takes away from the internal conflict that Luke has about being tempted by the dark side. If it’s just about him being mind controlled, there’s no temptation there.
Oren: The best downward arc that I can think of is Arthas from Warcraft III and I feel like a bit of a tool for saying this because everyone brings up Arthas from Warcraft III as much as people bring up Zuko when you talk about redemption arcs. I think there’s a reason for that though, is because Arthas represents a pretty good archetype because what you have with Arthas, the basic story, if you’re not familiar with it, is that he’s a commander in the Alliance and he’s a good guy and he’s great and everyone loves him, and he has to go and fight the undead.
Basically over the course of the story, he has to make a series of increasingly hard decisions to fight his enemies. He has a town that he goes to where everyone in the town has been infected with the undead virus and they’re all going to become undead soon. He decides to preemptively kill them.
That’s a really hard choice, but you could see why he did it, and then that puts him in the headspace to do more dark things. This does end with him picking up a sword that turns him evil. [Group laughter]
Chris: We finally seal the deal with mind control.
Oren: But there’s an important part about this, okay? The important part is that he chose to do that, knowing what would happen. He was put in the position of deciding that it was okay to pick up the sword that would turn him into a monster. That helps with the believability because at that point, now we can bridge that gap between the Arthas who was established at the beginning. And the Arthas who we later have murdering everyone constantly.
That’s actually a thing that I think fantasy could do to take more advantage of. You can get the character into a position where they are willing to take whatever dark corrupting magic. Then they do. And so then it’s more believable. It creates a little bit of wiggle room if you decide you want to redeem them later.
I think that’s just a really good concept and I think more people could follow it.
Wes: Well, it’s cool, too, because you get to also introduce artifacts or weapons or other cool items into your story as well that seemed to just have such power. Instead of somebody offering a loved one with a conventional weapon, no, grab the magic sword and take your power.
Oren: Another interesting way to do a downward arc is what I call a power reveals arc. Because there’s this whole concept of power corrupts, but more accurately and I’ll put the link to where I found this because I didn’t invent it, I’m not that smart, more accurately, power reveals. It reveals who you are. It doesn’t make you bad.
And so you can take a character who hasn’t done anything evil because they haven’t had the power to. They’ve just been in a normal situation living their normal life and then they get power and it reveals who they are. The character David from Animorphs, we’re going way back to the 90’s; does this, where he’s a normal guy, the first thing that he does is he finds the morphing cube and tries to sell it, which is not an evil thing, but he’s a normal person. He doesn’t choose to get involved in the resistance, like all of our noble main heroes.
As he gets more power, we start to see that he’s actually kind of selfish and a little bit sadistic. It’s not so much that he turns evil, but that we see what was already there but that he wasn’t allowed to do because he was constrained by the bonds of civil society.
Chris: Basically when a character gets more power they don’t face any consequences anymore and sometimes those consequences were keeping them in check.
Oren: And then there is another element to it, which is the author does also include a few areas where the plot conveniently creates breaks between the heroes and David. One example is before he’s turned completely evil, they get ambushed by the bad guy. David, again, not having signed up to be a brave resistance fighter, tries to negotiate with the villain because he doesn’t want to die.
And the rest of the characters are like, whoa, you were betraying us. And then later he’s, actually, I was just doing it as a bluff to get in a position where I could attack the bad guy. Yeah, I mean, you say that now…maybe you’re telling the truth, but it really didn’t seem like it at the time, and that creates more of a split between David and the other characters, and when David starts to go further into his arc, the people who might’ve been able to help him aren’t there because of that split that the plot created.
I think David is actually a really good example of a downward arc. I think that from that old kid’s book about Animorphs did a really good job there.
Chris: I should also mention the Walter White method, which I think is a pretty good method. Walter White is of course the main character and I do think this is pretty good at preserving more sympathy where you’ve got an escalating conflict. Sounds like it’s similar to the Warcraft III in some ways, but instead of the character being forced to make the ends justify the means over and over again, in this case, you’ve got tragedy strikes a character that doesn’t deserve it, gives them lots of sympathy and in response they lash out and further escalate the situation by doing so, even though they lash out in ways that are unwise, it’s still very understandable that they do it. It’s easy to sympathize with the choices, even though they are technically the wrong choices to make. When they lash out, it further escalates the situation.
For instance, it puts them on the opposite side of authorities or the rest of team good, as you mentioned. And from there the situation escalates and it kind of repeats. Where they continue to make more and more enemies and continue to respond in a little bit more extreme way than they should, even though it’s still understandable until they’re basically at odds with the rest of the world and they are resorting to more and more extreme means.
In this case from Walter White and Breaking Bad, what happens is he gets cancer and he’s trying to figure out how to pay his medical bills. So he starts cooking meth and dealing drugs. But in doing so, he gets in conflict with other drug lords and drug dealers, and with the authority to keep up his cooking meth, he starts to resort to more and more ruthless tactics and kind of an escalating conflict.
Oren: And with both David and Walter White, we’re talking about characters who go all the way on their downward arcs. You don’t necessarily have to take it that far. The downward arc is often the setup for a redemption of some kind. Ezra from Rebels does a decent job of this where he has this temporary downward arc when he joins up with Darth Maul for a little bit. He snaps out of it eventually and is, Oh, actually Maul is evil. Unfortunately, we don’t ever get the resolution of that arc because they brought in Obi Wan Kenobi to kill Darth Maul for some reason.
Chris: Oh, that was so frustrating. I hated that so much.
Oren: Ezra and Maul had this really great chemistry and this antagonistic relationship, then, ah, actually no, we’re done with that cause don’t y’all remember how from the clone Wars Obi Wan and Maul had this thing going? We’re going to resolve that instead.
Chris: Even if they really wanted Obi Wan to kill Darth Maul, if they had just shown Ezra face Darth Maul and then make the right choice where he decided that he was not going to go along with Darth Maul or let Darth Maul influence him anymore. Then his character arc would still be mostly resolved even if his relationship with Darth Maul wasn’t, but no, that’s not what happened.
Instead, Obi Wan just swoops in and we never actually see Ezra stand up to Darth Maul and stop being manipulated like we should. It was very frustrating.
Oren: That was why we stopped watching Rebels for a few days. Getting towards the end and then it was like, no, okay, we need a break. It was getting really good, and then, no.
Chris: Another way that you can make a character go bad, and this is kind of the Faith method in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That’s not a perfect arc. It’s not bad. It’s not great. But basically you have a character that wants to be validated. Maybe the character’s really prideful or maybe the character has a chip on their shoulder and it compensates by being really prideful.
They do something wrong and all of the good characters criticize them and they don’t like that. They don’t want to admit that they might have ever done anything wrong. So for validation, they find somebody who is less moral and that person tells them that they are the best and they are right, and all of those other people are wrong and gains influence over them and steers them towards evil.
Oren: That’s a really good model for a downward arc. Faith in particular has some weirdness to it. First, and a lot of people forget this, Faith starts the show with a redemption arc. She arrives and is real bad and doesn’t take her slayer job seriously and hurts people. She’s a bad person. And then we spend a few episodes redeeming her from all of that, and now she turns evil suddenly. Whoa, hang on. What? That was weird.
And then the other problem with the specifics of that is that Faith accidentally kills a human because she thinks it’s a vampire. Everyone’s like, Oh, wow, Faith, you’re going to have to go to jail. She’s no, I’m not going to, and it’s hard not to think that she’s the one who’s correct and the rest of them are just being weird.
If we accept the premise that your story is about fighting vampires constantly and no one’s ever allowed to help you, and there are always vampires and they look indistinguishable from humans, yeah, there are going to be some civilian casualties. It’s bad, but that’s your premise. Okay? You set up those rules, not me.
Chris: I do think that Faith’s arc is really hard to understand what is happening with her because she does that, but then she doesn’t want to admit to being sorry about it or it makes her feel powerful or it’s just very unclear what is supposed to be going on with her, where after killing a human by accident she somehow goes bad instead of feeling remorse and going good. That’s just a hard one.
But we do have the mayor, which is an awesome villain who swoops in and starts validating Faith and gains influence over her.
Oren: Another downward arc that people like to use as a model, and I see why but I would say be careful of is Londo Mollari in Babylon Five. Londo Mollari has a downward arc and then a redemption arc, which is a great setup. If you could pull it off, that can work really well.
The issue is that Londo Mollari’s downward arc is that he wants to make Centauri great again and it’s kind of uncomfortable. Even at the time it was probably not great, but especially now when I rewatched Babylon Five and I hear Mollari complaining about how the problem with the Centauri people is that they don’t have an empire anymore.
I’m just like, ah, gross. He’s supposed to be sympathetic in those scenes and clearly to a lot of people he is. But the problem there is that he’s supposed to have a problem, which he then reacts to and goes too far is what we’re trying to do with that setup, which is again, a perfectly legitimate way to start a downward arc.
The problem is that the issue that he has isn’t real, at least not most of the time. I do think there is that inciting incident later in the show, something bad actually happens to Centauri. I think the Narn take one of their planets or what have you, and the Centauri decided not to do anything about it, and that actually pushes him. His whole thing of being sad that they can’t oppress the Narn anymore is really…
Chris: His problem is that his culture has been engaging in colonialism and can’t do it as well anymore. Which is the same thing as having a character whose problem is that they’ve lost their ability to oppress other people or lost the privileges that they should never have had in the first place. That’s their grievance.
Ideally, if you want a character to be sympathetic while they are on their downward arc, you have a genuine problem and a genuine tragedy. As opposed to the character feels entitled, in which case they’re already a villain and we’ve got more of the power reveals scenario. In this case, the story definitely treated him as a sympathetic character.
Oren: The way everything was put together, the way that the shots were put together in the music were clearly supposed to sympathize with Mollari at this point, so like that’s just something to be wary of when you are putting together the reason for your character’s fall, your grasp of morality is going to come up in ways you might not have expected it to.
This is a hard thing to judge on your own because if it’s something that you don’t think is wrong, it’s going to be hard to imagine that other people would. Then this is where an editor and beta readers can help. Also some philosophy, maybe take a philosophy class is what I’m saying. Watch the good place.
Chris: Another really common one that we see a lot that sometimes I think works okay and sometimes does not is using the idea of revenge. Where you want to do it very fast and strong so you have a character have a bad thing happen to them and then they are out for blood and an extreme way so that they instantly go evil.
This is Willow in Buffy the Vampire Slayer which probably is one of the better depictions of this, despite the non sequitur with her wanting to end the world, her deciding that she’s just going to get revenge by skinning people alive. You can understand that happening.
I’ve seen it done really poorly with the 2009 Star Trek where we have this guy who’s really mad at Spock because Spock tried to save Romulus but failed. Because he tried but failed, that’s why we want to destroy Vulcan.
I think this is particularly likely to happen when you have an antagonist that’s mad at the hero because we don’t actually want our heroes to do anything bad. So then the antagonist has to be super, super unreasonable, and it just feels contrived at that point.
Oren: This was also the first taste I had of how the new Abrams’ Star Trek was going to fill in backstory in secondary material. They have this whole comic where it explains that actually what happened is that the Vulcans had this thing that could have saved Romulus. And they held it back because Vulcan High Command was worried that the Romulans would turn it into a weapon, which is actually kind of cool and is interesting and I don’t know why that’s not in the movie. Guys, come on, you have to put the important stuff in the movie. You can’t make me go do homework. It’s ridiculous.
Wes: So you probably picked up on a lot of the things we’re talking about here that there needs to be something about your character that, for lack of a better word, can be exploited for the downward arc.
I really like how you guys were talking about the insecurity of a character who can then get validated by an evil mentor. I mean, it’s really an evil mentorship that’s leading to a lot of these downward arcs over time. But that’s important.
You hear this talked about as a tragic flaw or something like that. There’s just an issue with this character, and I’m curious what your guys’ opinions are with how early that should be established in a story and then at what point that should first be exploited to signal the downward arc.
Because I’m thinking about what Oren said about how power reveals. Otherwise, it’s just a neutral character who has maybe a shorter downward arc instead of a character that’s been established to actually do good things except is also prideful, and then the pride gets exploited and the fall is even steeper.
It seems like that might really eat into your word count or your run time, depending on how you set that up. That’s why I think revenge is tossed around as the quickest route to do a face-heel turn.
Oren: I would say that when you are doing a downward arc for a major character and you’re going to use a flaw of theirs, you’re going to be all Greek Tragedy on us.
I would say establish it as early as possible because you really need your audience to be on board with this. They need to agree with you. When you say that this character did a bad thing because of their flaw. You can’t have them be, I don’t believe you. I haven’t actually seen that flaw. And then you tell them, but I have a written down on their character sheet and then you get into a fight.
I actually thought Willow did a decent job here. Buffy the Vampire Slayer with Willow, where they have actually shown that Willow is kind of vengeful. This is not the first time this has come up and this is putting aside the issue with burying her girlfriend. That’s a whole other problem.
Having her go from recovering magic witch to I’m going to skin this person alive as revenge, I actually could believe that. I have seen that Willow is, while nice, also has a mean streak. This is a power reveals situation where we’re now seeing what Willow does with that power. Unfortunately, then they do this pivot to, and I’m going to blow up the earth.
I don’t really see where that comes from. The best explanation at that point is that the magic is making her do it, but that takes away from the actual arc, and it isn’t like an Arthas situation where she deliberately made the choice to have all this evil magic that would make her want to destroy the world.
Honestly, when it feels like should have happened with Willow, and as long as we’re in the let’s revise our favorite childhood shows mode, is that she probably should have just stayed as a potential villain for a while because her thing is now that she is very powerful and really goes after people who wrong her and is happy to kill them.
She doesn’t have any reason to go after Buffy or Zander or any of the good guys yet, but once we’ve established that for her, it would not be hard to come up with a reason why she would have to. That’s basically what we did with Faith where Faith doesn’t jump immediately to let’s kill Buffy. In fact the episode where she goes to be friends with the mayor, she actually saves Buffy.
It takes her a while to work up to that. And I think that Willow could have done the same thing, but it was the end of the season and we needed some kind of big villain. So now it’s Willow and she wants to blow up the planet because why not?
Chris: I would add that you can choose to have them exhibit the flaw from the beginning, but you can also give them a flaw with the tragedy, the difference is that the tragedy creates more sympathy and because it takes time, it all works better if the character is more central. When you have a side character go bad, that’s when there’s usually a great opportunity to show them, have that initial flaw because they don’t have to be quite as likable as your main character.
So it’s okay to have them be a person with more good and bad attributes. Not that the main character can’t have that too, but it’s easier to have a side character that’s a little more flawed. That’s foreshadowing and I agree that it should be done early, but it doesn’t have to be obvious. It can be subtle.
The character showing that they’re just a little prideful, but it seems innocent in the situation in the beginning, and it’s only later that that actually looks like a warning sign. But you can also just give a character flaws by having bad things happen to them and show what flaws they have as a result.
Oren: And it’s also really important with downward arcs to consider motivation. I think we may have covered this a little bit in the podcast before, but I want to circle back to it because it’s hard to overstate how important motivation is. If you mess up the motivation, even if you established the necessary traits, it’s still gonna be a disaster.
As an example, I fortunately have the finale of Game of Thrones and I see a lot of people arguing about this, or at least I did. We all seem to have forgotten that game of Thrones happened. After this episode there was a ton of arguing about whether or not Daeneryswould do this. And people were pointing out she did all these evil things in the past. So you’re all naive fairy people for thinking that she wouldn’t do this.
The issue is not, does she have the capacity to do this, because I think most people who watched the show would agree that yes, she has the capacity to kill a lot of people to get what she wants. The issue is that she has no motivation.
They wanted her to burn down the city, yet they could not be bothered to come up with a motivation where burning down the city would serve her interest. They just couldn’t be bothered because they were bored and they wanted to go write Star Wars and they were polite enough to tell us this. I don’t have to put this together from behind the scenes.
Chris: Also the issue here is they wanted the other characters that were normally following her to 100% turn against her to the point where they would kill her. And so in justifying those characters and making those characters look good, they needed her to not have any good reason to do this. So then they can have John Snow bridge his own love interest and be angsty.
So I think that’s one of the reasons she had no motivation is because they were too busy proving that she needed to be put down to give her one.
Oren: Yeah, I guess that’s a good point. In a story as dark as Game of Thrones, it’s really easy to imagine that if she had had a real reason to burn down the city everyone would’ve been well, okay I guess that’s just what you had to do. [Group laughter] Wow. They really messed up. Oh boy.
Chris: It was not good. It was not good. And it comes down to the fact that they did not have enough time because they were given more seasons. They turned that down because they wanted to do something else. Yeah, it was bad from the top.
So that went to a dark place. We have completed the downward arc of this podcast.
Oren: So before we end, I want to talk about a slightly more positive aspect, which is of course the downward arc of Saruman. Saruman is a little weird because he’s actually already evil by the time we meet him in the story, it hasn’t been revealed, but that is the case.
But with Saruman, he describes his downward arc to us and we find out about it after the fact and it more or less works okay. This is a case of we are using some magic mind-control because he’s got that orb thingy, which is at least implied to have some kind of effect on you. But it’s a very subtle one. And mostly what it seems to have done is shown him how strong Sauron was. And then we reveal this trait about Saruman, which is that even though he’s very powerful, he’s also very self interested. And that was okay as long as serving the good guy seemed to serve his self interest. But then as he started to think that maybe Sauron couldn’t be beaten, he was like, mm, hmmm, that’s the sound he makes. Uh, cause he’s a wizard.
Chris: He comes from the dark crystal, actually Skeksis…
Wes: He’s a Skeksis…
Oren: It’s short. It’s not very complicated, but it works. You can see how this guy used to be a respected defender of the light. So I just think that that’s worth mentioning. Your downward arc doesn’t always have to happen on screen, especially if you’re an omniscient narrator and have a lot of words to spare.
Wes: I like how his downward arc is self preservation but it’s down because of how evil Sauron has to be. I think I brought up on this podcast before, but there’s this story called The Last Ringbearer that is written by a Russian author that’s re-imagining the conflict of the ring from Mordor’s perspective and basically how since history is written by the victors, they portrayed Mordorians as monstrous, evil, beasts. I think that it’s kind of funny that, okay, if we definitely have good and evil established very clearly, then someone who’s just doing self preservation and goes to the bad side is a downward arc. But if it’s a conflict and it’s more complicated and it’s not necessarily sure who is the good person, the the self preservation motivation I think is an interesting complication to explore.
Chris: I think in this case Saruman starts actively working for Sauron, but it does bring up interesting questions of what is a person’s obligation? How much can we expect a person to sacrifice? Because the issue is that somebody could literally be doing wrong just by choosing to stay alive. If for some reason their death was required, we could set up a situation like that and what is required of people before we start to condemn them.
And Saruman’s case, he does start to do a lot of bad things. But that is a really interesting point. If you had a character that joins team evil but does so under duress, you could definitely blur those lines.
Oren: Well, that is a good note to end this podcast on because there are a lot of ways to explore downward arcs, they aren’t always quite so straight forward as we might think.
Before we go, I want to thank a few of our patrons. First we have Kathy Ferguson, who is a professor of political theory in star Trek. Next we have Ayman Jaber, who writes urban fantasy and knows all there is to know about Marvel. And finally we have Danita Rambo and she lives at therambogeeks.com.
If anything we said piqued your interest, you can leave a comment on the website at mythcreants.com and we will talk to you next week.
Promo: If you like what we do, send a few dollars our way through our Patreon. Every cent goes into the hoard of gold we lounge on like dragons. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants. [Closing theme]
Chris: This has been the Mythcreant podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Coulton.
Sometimes, we love a villain. We can’t help it; they’re just so dark and cool that we want them to be heroes. But they can’t usually just become heroes on account of all the villainy they did. That’s when you need a redemption arc, a storyline that lets your beloved bad kid go from evil to good. It also works on heroes who have strayed from the path of righteousness. Redemption arcs are often attempted but rarely successful, so it’s time to talk about how they work, why they work, and when you shouldn’t even try one. Plus, the legally required Zuko gushing.
Show Notes Zuko * Crafting a Redemption Arc For Your Villain * Kylo Ren * Darth Vader * Spike * Piccolo * Vegeta * G’Kar * Andrew * Morgan * Max Rockatansky * Furiosa * Agent Kallus TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Svend and Bunny.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock and Chris Winkle.
(Intro music)
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris and with me is…
Wes: Wes.
Chris: And…
Oren: Oren.
Chris: And you didn’t know, but we all have… a past.
Wes: Wooooh.
Chris: A dark past.
Wes: Oh my.
Chris: And this has been a long road towards redeeming ourselves.
Oren: Oh, okay. I thought we were about to go into an Enterprise pun. Phew! Redemption arcs: So much better.
(Laughter)
Chris: Oh no. I said the words “long road.” Now I have to redeem myself again! How dare I remind anybody of that!
Oren: Okay. Well, if we’re talking about redemption arcs, I have two very simple steps for redemption arcs. Step one is to watch Avatar: The Last Airbender, and step two is to realize that your redemption arc will never be as good as Zuko’s. Give up, scrub. Boom! I solved the podcast.
(Chris laughs)
Wes: Rinse and repeat. You can do that as many times as you want, which should definitely be a minimum of four.
(Laughter)
Wes: It’s so good.
Chris: All right. Well, if anybody wants to do Zuko’s arc, I have broken it down a number of times on the blog, so you can do Zuko’s arc if you want. I mean, it can’t be Zuko’s arc, unfortunately.
Oren: Only because of copyright restrictions. A similar arc, but legally distinct from Zuko is fine.
Chris: So, redemption arcs actually come in a huge variety. We apply that label to things that are pretty different. It’s any arc where the character makes progress from being more villainous to more heroic (or more moral) over the course of the story. I like to break them down into three different categories because I think those categories are better at representing what we see in media and a lot of the cases.
So the first category is a sacrifice arc. This is for characters like Darth Vader, where the character is evil most of the time, and at the very end you find out that they regret their actions and they want to do better. They usually do that by sacrificing themselves, and that’s where it stops.
Oren: And that’s convenient because now the bad guy’s not around anymore to make us ask, “Well, maybe he should still go to jail for all the people he killed. I know he had a really touching moment there where he saved his son from the evil lightning emperor, but like, he’s still a war criminal. It’s just way more convenient that he’s dead.”
Chris: So if you have a villain that you want to be somewhat sympathetic, but that villain is still supposed to be a villain and is not supposed to hang out with team good like they’re buddies at any point in time, these characters then can cross the moral event horizon. The moral event horizon is the point at which your villain does something so bad that nobody – or at least some of your audience, anyway – is never going to like them. And so you don’t have to worry about that. You can just say, “Okay, they’re done. They’ve given up their life.” They don’t have to give up their life, though. They have to give up something significant.
Wes: It does hit satisfaction for the reader because you’re like, “Okay, that’s tidied up. It’s clean. We’re done. I can focus on something else.”
Oren: One thing to be wary of with a sacrifice arc – and I’ve seen some people mess this up, including the recent Rise of Skywalker – is that doing a sacrifice arc does give you the ability to have your villain be redeemed for worse things, especially if you’re going with the “sacrificing their life” arc, although Chris just mentioned there are other ways to do a sacrifice arc. But if they’re going to sacrifice their life, they can do some worse things and have the redemption arc still work since they’re giving up so much more, but at the same time, you still have to make it believable that they would want to be redeemed or turned good or in any way. That was something that the Rise of Skywalker failed to do. Why is Kylo Ren good now? And it’s like, “I guess Leia did something with the Force, and now he’s good?” And it’s just a giant question mark. Whereas with Vader, we could see what was happening. With Vader, it was like, “Hey, Vader saw all these horrible things, but now, like the one thing he cares about, which is his son, is going to be destroyed. And so yes, that will make him turn on the emperor. That makes sense.”
Chris: I actually think the biggest issue in this case with Kylo Ren, that Vader did not have, is that a lot of the storytelling in the new series relies on you to like Kylo Ren, despite the fact that he is a villain.
Oren: This is also true.
Chris: We have this whole “sexual tension with Rey”/“romance with Rey” thing going on, and if you hate Kylo… Think about Darth Vader being in that position.
(Wes laughs)
Oren: Bleaaugh.
Chris: Exactly. Kylo is designed to be attractive even though he’s dark, and you’re supposed to root for him becoming good, unlike Darth Vader. You’re not really supposed to like Vader. You can just hate him for the whole thing if you want to, and then he changes his mind at the end. But there’s no point in which caring about what’s happening or being invested in what’s happening relies on you liking Darth Vader.
Wes: So in A New Hope, Vader isn’t running the show right next to the emperor, because there’s Grand Moff Tarkin, but his surviving the Death Star and then kind of just being in charge… I don’t feel like there’s much change in Vader between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back. Whereas with Kylo Ren, in The Force Awakens and then The Last Jedi when he assumes control of the First Order, it’s almost like he gets an evil growth power up. That also makes him less believable than Vader. Vader seems to be kind of just consistent when Grand Moff Tarkin and the Death Star explodes, Vader just steps into that role. He doesn’t seem to have done much more evil than he already did contribute to.
Oren: Well, there’s just a whole list of problems with the Kylo Ren redemption arc. I’m not sure if I’d say he gets an evil power up, exactly, but he does pass up several chances at redemption when it seems like that would be the one he would take. At the end of The Last Jedi, he has a situation where Snoke wants to kill Rey and he doesn’t want Rey to die, and it seems like that’s what’s going to turn him good, but then he decides that no, actually he’s definitely still going to be evil. And it’s like, “Okay, well that seems like we closed the door on the redemption, because if that’s not gonna make him turn good, then what possibly could?” And the answer is… Eeeeh? Abrams doesn’t know. Nobody knows. It’s just that somehow, Leia died, and he’s good now. That’s the answer. Good job.
Chris: So, should we move onto the second type of arc?
Oren: Yeah, probably. We can just talk about Kylo Ren for five more hours.
(Laughter)
Chris: So this is the arc that I would put Zuko in. I call it the temptation arc. Besides Zuko, I also think that Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer fits well into this arc. This arc is where what you really want is to have a character who’s not quite on team good and not quite on team evil, but is kind of an edgy character that maybe hangs out with team good, but in between. That adds more interpersonal conflict. This character faces the temptation to be evil, but also experiences pangs of consciencessness. This is usually a pretty long arc, because usually these characters start out as villains. However, they don’t usually remain villains for that long, comparatively. Pretty soon they start to get influenced by good, and they have a long journey before they finally are completely heroic, or they have to have a change of heart. They usually have to make a sacrifice, but they don’t die; a sacrifice arc. And then generally there’s some grovelling involved.
Both Zuko and Spike have a period where they grovel before team good and just ask to help the heroes. They don’t ask for forgiveness at that point, because they don’t feel entitled to forgiveness, so they just ask to help and they have to do that grovelling for a while before they finally are fully a hero.
Oren: And this is the thing that, for example, Dragon Ball Z misses. Both Dragon Ball Z and just Dragon Ball create a lot of situations where former villains have to work alongside the heroes, which is a good part of this temptation arc. But then, they don’t ever really make up for anything. They’re just like, “All right, I guess we’re on team good now!” But you, the character, are still evil. You still killed a lot of people. Are you different now? I don’t know why I would expect you to be. But whatever, I guess. He’s on team good now. And that’s why those arcs aren’t satisfying.
Chris: Yeah, certainly some stories get very lazy about redemption arcs. Changing whether a character is good or bad is always a tricky thing that takes time and care, and if you rush it, it’s never going to work out very well. Usually, temptation arc characters have a period in which they are pretending to be good, but are doing so for selfish reasons and aren’t really good yet. And that’s one of the reasons they have to grovel later, because they’ve pretended to be good previously and then went back to evil.
Oren: And something that I want to bring up, because I’ve seen some people be confused about this, is that a redemption arc is not necessarily the same as a heel-face turn trope you can find on TV Tropes. That trope is extremely broad and applies to basically any situation where someone used to work for team evil and now works for team good, whereas a redemption arc requires an actual change. For example, the character of G’Kar, from Babylon 5, sort of starts off seeming like a villain, and by the end, he’s definitely a main character, but he doesn’t really go through a change to do that. It’s just that the political situation around him changes. He sort of goes through a change in that he becomes more religious, but by then, he’s already clearly on team good and it doesn’t really have anything to do with addressing the bad things he did at the start of the season. It’s more that Babylon 5 is a complicated political setup, and so it’s not as easy to say who the good guys and who the bad guys are.
That’s why I would say that G’Kar doesn’t really have a redemption arc, which isn’t necessarily bad. It’s just that it’s important for people to understand that changing teams doesn’t automatically mean a redemption arc. A redemption arc means that you have to change the character in some capacity.
Chris: Yeah. I think the thing about redemption arcs is that they really show you what it takes for a wide group of people like your audience to forgive someone, because in a strong redemption arc, a character has done things that would piss off the audience a bit. And you don’t want them to cross the moral event horizon if they’re going to stick around, especially as a member of team good, but they haven’t done good things, and usually at the beginning, they’re a character who the audience doesn’t like. So then a lot of the things that are involved in a redemption arc are specifically designed to have them be forgiven by a huge group of people.
Besides their crimes being forgivable, almost all of the events that you see in redemption arcs are designed to show the audience that the character’s change of heart is genuine, that they’re not acting better for their own personal gain, that they have to prove to the audience that that’s genuine change, and that they have no other reason for being good. So you see things typically like showing remorse privately, where there’s no one there watching them. Confessing to wrongdoing is also really important.
In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the character Andrew actually has a pretty nice redemption arc. It’s kind of a temptation arc, wherein he’s captured by team good and they don’t know what to do with him, even though he’s a murderer and he murdered his friend. And so he hangs out with them for a while and he wants to be one of the good guys, but he’s clearly just doing that out of convenience. And so do you have a specific episode where he is made to confess, truly confess, and he goes beyond what he has to. He was pretending that he was mind-controlled when he killed his friend, and this time he admits that he wasn’t, and he even goes beyond that to things that Buffy wouldn’t have guessed or known. Confessing things that he didn’t have to proves that he was genuinely sorry.
Similarly, the whole sacrifice that a character gives in a redemption arc is a way of putting their money where their mouth is, basically, to show that they have to give something up that they care about in order to repair the damage they’ve done and to prove that they genuinely care and that they’re not just saying that. They also can’t ever feel entitled to forgiveness. Feeling entitled to forgiveness is a thing that happens again in the stage where a character is on team good, but they’re doing it for selfish reasons. That’s when they might demand the other people forgive them and ask, “Why are you still holding a grudge?” Refusing any type of reward or recognition for behavior that they do to redeem themself would be another thing that we would see as proof that their change is actually genuine.
So we have this whole list of things that happen during a redemption arc, and every step of the way, they’re designed to show people that this is not selfish, that this is selfless, that the person has genuinely changed, all of that stuff. And that’s kind of what makes up the core of redemption arcs, especially the temptation arc.
Oren: This stuff is at least as important, perhaps more important, than switching from one team to another. You can actually have good guys who go through redemption arcs. Maybe they went too far. They hurt someone. They’re not actually working for the villains to any point, but they did something bad and now they have to make up for it. That is what defines a redemption arc, as opposed to “due to circumstances, this character who started out as a villain is now on our team.”
For example, in the Dresden Files, originally the character Morgan is a bad guy, and he’s harassing Dresden and does all kinds of bad mean things to Dresden because Morgan is a wizard cop and Dresden is a wizard crime boy. And then later on, Dresden stops being a wizard crime boy and joins the wizard cops. And so now he and Morgan are on the same team, but Morgan doesn’t have a redemption arc. Well, at least not a very strong one. He does have a very slight “becoming more sympathetic” arc, but it’s not like he ever makes up for the things that he did to Dresden. In this case, though, I don’t think this is necessarily a problem, because the story’s not about Morgan. He’s not a super important main character. I think that’s important to understand what you’re trying to go for when you’re starting a redemption arc. You said there was a third kind of redemption arc. Please tell.
Chris: This is what I call the forgiveness arc, and that’s when being a villain or villainous is in the character’s background.
So that’s actually over. This would start often after the sacrifice. It’s when you have a hero with a dark past who has to redeem themself.
A great example, I think, is Mad Max in Fury Road. I’ve also listed Furiosa as an example, but I think Mad Max is actually a better example because you can see more clearly how his arc works, where usually at the beginning of these arcs, if they’re a real strong arc, the main characters kind of wallowing.
They are sorry, but they’re not really productive about it. They’re not putting it to good use. They were just like, “Oh, I’m just the worst. There is no point in trying to do anything good.” But they’re not actively doing harm. They’re just not doing anything constructive to make up for their dark past.
And then at some point in time, they get the call to adventure and they gain purpose, like “Yes, I can make up for my bad past by doing good things.” And then that ends with forgiveness and the important thing here is that the hero forgives themselves. Just want to make that clearer because again, when we’re talking about forgiveness and whether our character feels entitled to forgiveness, [I’ve] definitely seen some stories that put pressure on characters that have been targets of immoral behavior to forgive somebody and that’s inappropriate.
Oren: “Oh, why are you being so unreasonable and not forgiving them?”
Chris: You don’t want your happy ending to rely on a character that was a survivor, to then give forgiveness to the person who targeted them. But you can still have a happy ending. The important thing is that the person who needs to redeem themself has gotten to the point after wallowing and finding purpose and just working without any reward—not even recognition, doing thankless work, you know, digging port-a-potties. A lot of times when the character is trying to redeem themself, you want to make sure that they’re not taking lots of glory, because that’s a reward in itself.
The point where they’re like, “Okay. I can forgive myself for the bad things that I did, and that means that I don’t have to wallow anymore. I’m not going to live an extravagant life, but I don’t have to constantly deny myself any type of comfort because I don’t have to punish myself anymore.” That kind of thing.
Wes: That one’s really distinct from the other two because it sounds like, and please correct me if I’m not quite understanding it as well, but the other two, sacrifice and temptation, really seem to rely on other characters forgiving the character that’s going on this redemption arc. Whereas in the forgiveness arc, there still needs to be the authenticity aspect, but forgiveness is solely in the character’s perception of their own journey, and then I suppose the readers’ or the audience’s. Is there necessarily less interpersonal conflict among characters in that last arc?
Chris: There is usually some level of interpersonal things. I mean, forgiveness arcs can be very internal like that. And again, part of my emphasis on that is to get away from the idea that other people should be required to forgive the character. Sometimes it does involve another person that the character has to make up to, the person wronged in the past. It can be like Mad Max. His process is very internal. He helps the other people he finds along the way, but he doesn’t come into contact with the people that he specifically felt like he wronged. So it can be either way, but that does feel different when it’s about the character proving things to themselves.
All of these arcs do overlap to a certain extent. The temptation arc overlaps with the sacrifice arc and the forgiveness arc. They’re different stages in this process where the sacrifice is the first stage and the temptation focuses on the middle and the forgiveness is the final stage.So the wallowing that we see in the forgiveness arc and them working to redeem themselves, it’s the end of the temptation arc.
Oren: I definitely have noticed that, because this is hard work, a lot of storytellers just try to cut corners. Like, “This guy’s good now. He’s just on Team Good.” You probably shouldn’t do that just because it’s not satisfying. But you especially shouldn’t do that with a villain that you have established to be very evil, like the character of Kallus from Star Wars Rebels. We first start him off with no traits that would make us want him to be redeemed, because he’s really incompetent and really mean. He’s not likable in any way, and he’s constantly getting his butt kicked. And then we find out that on top of that, he’s also a genocide dude and ordered one of the characters’ whole species to be wiped out.
Chris: He even has a trophy. He has a weapon that is unique to their culture that he uses because he got it fighting them. That’s gross, really gross.
Oren: So then they’re like “Okay, this guy’s going to get redeemed.” And it’s like, “What?” And then he gets redeemed by—he gets stuck with the character whose people he genocided in an ice cave for a while and they have to work together. Then we find out [that] he didn’t order the genocide, but he was still there. He still participated. And “It’s okay, he won the trophy weapon in an honorable duel, so that makes it fine.” Okay, sure. That sounds like a thing that could happen. And then suddenly he’s good now and he’s a completely different person. They haven’t actually revealed that he’s good yet, but I could immediately tell because when one of the bad guys comes in and starts talking about how “All right, we’re going to do this thing.”
He’s like, “But there will be a lot of civilian casualties if we do that.” And I’m like, “Wait a minute. When have you ever cared about civilian casualties before? Okay, I guess you’re good now, but also…why?”
Chris: This character was the villain [who] it felt like the writers were putting in charge whenever they wanted the heroes to win. They had some higher level villains that they wanted to preserve their threat. So those ones were not allowed to lose. So whenever they wanted the heroes to get a win, those higher level villains would just disappear and leave this guy in charge to fumble things.
Oren: There was one episode that just really drove home how hapless he was. He sets up an ambush for the heroes, and everything goes his way. The ambush goes perfectly. He has them completely surrounded, they have nothing, and then they just fight their way out of the ambush. Like it’s not even a problem. This isn’t even the main plot of the episode. This is the opener to lead into the actual plot. And it’s like “Wow, this guy can’t win even when everything goes his way. Amazing.”
Chris: I would say anytime you have a character that—this is important for any big character arc, but especially for arcs where the character has a change of heart from good to bad or vice versa—it’s [important] o really understand what the character’s motivation is, why they did it, and what things are pulling them towards good or pulling them towards evil, and get that down.
A lot of times you can just give a character a good influence and a bad influence. There’s a person who influences them in a bad direction and a person who influences in a good direction, and then you could have some nice interpersonal conflict there. You can give them—honestly, devotion to anything can be a double edged sword. They can pursue a goal at the cost of doing bad things. But whatever it is, it just has to be clear what it is, and then you have to have things in the story in place to influence them in one direction or the other.
Or if there are bad guys or villains, and they’re showing some remorse, why now? Were they never made to do things that were that awful before? And now the Lieutenant of the Big Bad and the Big Bad is ordering them to do things that are more evil than they were previously required to do, and now they’re starting to feel bad about their direction. That kind of thing is, of course,
Oren: Chris, I have a question. Are there any benefits to a redemption arc that a character fails? You give the possibility of redemption and then they aren’t able to take it and now there’s just no redemption for them. They’re never coming back. Is that a thing? Is that doable?
Chris: Yeah, it could be doable. It would be like any other unhappy ending or a failed arc. Generally those things are cautionary tales. It’s really hard with protagonists because people need to like protagonists and people don’t particularly like their protagonists doing evil things and they don’t particularly like their protagonists having unhappy endings.
So it’s not like there’s not a place for that in storytelling, for having unhappy endings and protagonists fail and cautionary tales. But certainly you’re making some bigger sacrifices, generally, when you do that. A side character could fail. A lot of times the story would have something to say about why, and you could compare and contrast with another character if you wanted. You could even have two characters going on a redemption arc together, and then when the big test comes, one of them passes and one of them fails, and [you could] have some interesting contrast there.
There was some question of—that could have been done with Kylo Ren. To some people, it felt like that’s what was supposed to happen in the second movie, that he had a chance of redemption and he just decided not to go for it. He could have continued a downward arc from there. They had wanted to go in that direction. Part of the issue is that they set really mixed expectations for Kylo Ren from the beginning, and also it was the second movie, not the third. So that definitely brings up a big question of how final it is, because the story is not over.
Oren: That was one—I was trying to do my fanfic treatment of Episode IX, like, What would my Episode IX have looked like?—one of the things that was really hard is, What do I do with Kylo Ren? Because an actual redemption arc feels impossible at this point. And yet I clearly feel like that expectation was set in the previous films and not completely done away with at the end of The Last Jedi. And so it seems like not a good team player thing to say, “Well, I’m going to ignore that.” Which is definitely a thing that the actual movie producers didn’t care about because they ignored each other’s stuff constantly. But one of the things that I was trying to do was, “What would Episode IX have looked like if it actually tried to work with Episode XIII instead of just ignoring everything from it?
Chris: I would definitely say the handling of the villains was the biggest challenge facing Episode IX because the other movies had so royally messed that up that there were not really any good answers there. Bringing back Palpatine was basically a Hail Mary.
Wes: I’m curious to what extent, because I saw some chatter about this on the Internet, that bringing back Palpatine cuts away some of the effect of Vader’s sacrifice. Is that just people talking on the Internet or is there some truth to that? Or does it matter that Vader believed that the change was permanent, that he had killed Palpatine? We readers know that Palpatine didn’t die there, but does that take away anything at all from his arc?
Oren: I’m going to say no for a few reasons. One, it’s Episode IX—who cares?
Wes: I mean, that’s the best reason right there.
Oren: It is literally impossible for me to summon emotion for anything that happens in Episode IX because it’s so empty and meaningless. But at the same time, even if I’m not being snarky, I’m still going to say no, because the important part of Vader’s arc was not killing Palpatine. It was saving Luke.
Chris: I would agree with that. I would just say that anytime you bring back a villain that is supposedly dead, there is going to be some dissatisfaction where it is going to feel like it cheapened the previous ending. And I think that’s what they’re feeling because we thought that the heroes got a victory and now you just took it back. That’s a little irritating. But specifically for Vader’s redemption arc, I would agree with Oren here that he still saved Luke. He still made a sacrifice. For that arc, I don’t think Palpatine living really matters.
Oren: Also, it’s Episode IX, who cares? My new thing, whenever anyone asks me “Well, what does Episode IX mean?” I was like, “I just don’t care.” Obviously I do care because I spend a lot of time talking about it, but I don’t care in an aloof, cool, hipster way.
Wes: I do like that you brought up the moral event horizon several times in this and I just remembered that the start of The Last Jedi Kylo Ren tries to just blast Leia to pieces. That happens at the beginning of that movie, right?
Oren: Wait, say what?
Wes: Doesn’t Kylo Ren train his blasters in the spaceship on Leia and pull the trigger, and she survives because of space Force magic?
Oren: No, he specifically does not pull the trigger. His fellow pilots do.
Wes: Oh, okay. I thought he did.
Oren: The reason you think he did is because if he hadn’t, which is what actually happened, that would have been the setup for the actual redemption arc we all expected. But then he didn’t have a redemption arc. In fact, he seemed to deliberately choose to be evil for reasons that we didn’t really understand. So I get why you misremember that scene. It’s because it would’ve made more sense the other way.
Chris: It would’ve also been more consistent with the way he crossed the moral event horizon in Force Awakens. Like killing Han.
Wes: Thank you for clarifying that. It’s just a mess. Don’t watch anything after Episode VI.
Oren: That’s pretty good advice. But speaking of not watching anything further, we are definitely out of time for this episode, so I’m going to go ahead and call it here. Those of you at home, if anything we said piqued your interest, you can leave a comment on the website, mythcreants.com.
Before we go, I want to thank a few of our patrons. First we have Kathy Ferguson, who is a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Next we have Ayman Jaber, who writes urban fantasy and knows all there is to know about Marvel. And finally we have Danita Rambo, and she lives at therambogeeks.com. We’ll talk to you next week.
Chris: If this episode resonated with you, post a review on iTunes to increase the range of our spells!
For no reason at all, disease seems to be on a lot of authors’ minds right now. Whether you’re writing up a storm in self-quarantine or just thinking of new ideas during this difficult time, we’ve got all the disease-focused discussion you could possibly want. We talk about how actual diseases work, how speculative elements can be used as a parallel for disease, and how silly a lot of scifi medical dramas are. Get that cheese to sickbay!
Show Notes Erra, God of Plagues * Night of the Living Dead * The Walking Dead * World War Z * Why Zombies Aren’t a Good Pandemic Parallel * Outbreak * Twister * Genesis * Identity Crisis * Unnatural Selection * Learning Curve * Killed by Death * Thane Krios * 12 Monkeys * The Train Job * Wanderers * Temeraire * The Quiet Place * Bird Box * Snow Crash * The Ring * Eco-fascism * Survivors * Y: The Last Man * The Stand TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Ursula.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock and Chris Winkle.
Wes: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m your host Wes, and with me today is Oren and Chris. We’re talking about fictional diseases today, and it’s probably a good idea to let you all know that we’re based in Seattle and we’re all just fine. We record remotely and so really nothing much has changed since, I don’t know, years ago. Right, Oren?
Oren: Yeah, it’s been at least three years since we’ve recorded in a room together. I’m honestly not entirely sure any of you have faces anymore. It’s been a long time. Those were dark days.
Wes: Was editing more of a challenge back then, when you had to look at our faces while we were disagreeing about stuff?
Oren: Yes and no. Editing on the one hand was much faster back then, but it was because there was way less I could do. So if we were talking over each other, well, it’s all in one track. Too bad. And if there was a sound when someone was talking – too bad. It’s all on one track, so the amount that I could do was very limited, but now everything’s on different tracks, which means I have to spend about three times as long editing the podcast. It sounds way better though. It’s not like it’s a bad thing, exactly, it just takes more of my time. Although I do have a young protégé who may be training under me to edit some of the podcasts, so we’ll see. I’m sure they will do great, and then they’ll turn evil and then we will have a final confrontation. As this sort of thing goes.
Wes: Very exciting. We look forward to seeing this develop. So, yeah, with a lot of the Covid-19 talk, we thought that we would talk about fictional diseases as they’ve shown up in our media over time. Because stories about contagion plagues have been around since – I tracked down like an eighth century BCE poem about Erra, some Akkadian or Babylonian plague god. It turns out to be the god of mayhem, pestilence, and confusing political order. And so I feel like Erra has returned ,everybody. But then I was wondering, what sacrifices do you make to a plague god? I’m not sure if you can appease one so easily.
Oren: I mean, I feel like everyone who dies during a plague is a sacrifice to the plague god. That’s just efficiency.
Wes: I guess that makes sense. Yeah.
Chris: I think what we’re trying to do is stop sacrificing people to the plague.
Wes: But the plague god must be appeased somehow.
Chris: Maybe that’s not a best practice.
Wes: Yeah, we need to reevaluate our best practices during this time. So yeah, that’s a really old one. We can put a link to this poem in the show notes. A lot of people are familiar with the plagues from the Old Testament in the Bible and the Tanakh, and then of course The Walking Dead where we get zombie diseases and things like that.
Chris: It does feel like today fictional disease stories fall in two categories, zombie stories and not zombie stories.
Wes: Really true.
Oren: I also like how we went from eighth century BCE, to old Testament, to zombie stories. That’s quite a jump. We’ve gone from old Testament to 1967 in our timeline of diseases.
Wes: The fiction in between there is not super speculative. And you know, the ones about cholera are just not inspiring reads, because that is a horrible thing that happens to you. But then there’s a lot of tuberculosis ones, especially in like Victorian literature. And that has some very interesting associations. A lot of authors use that to try to convey spiritual meaning, because if you have tuberculosis, you get frail, blood gets drawn out of you. They kinda thought that it was like a wasting disease that made you sacrificial and angelic and holy because of it, and stuff like that. So – kind of weird. I’d rather talk about zombies.
Chris: Yeah, there are definitely some cultures where a woman being sickly is considered attractive, which is a little disturbing. But I think it’s the fact that women are supposed to be weak and fragile is part of femininity and they need rescuing or are in distress or something like that.
Wes: The zombie thing, Chris is right, it’s either zombies or, you know, not zombies. And I think we’ve kind of moved on to say, okay, we’re not necessarily talking about disease and plagues as something maybe related to some god punishing or blessing or however you want to look at it. And now it’s like, okay, there’s science here. But I think spec fic is still using disease to kind of comment on political and social realities, or to at least explore them, which is why in so many of them, the outbreak kind of happens before the plot. You don’t really see a lot of the disease in action.
Oren: Well, there’s a few reasons for that. So if we’re not talking about zombies – and someone may or may not have written an article about zombies on Mythcreants.com recently at the time of recording, we’ll never know if someone did that – but if we’re talking about not zombies as a rule, they are hard to make into stories. Not impossible. But diseases are kind of awkward from a storytelling perspective for a couple of reasons. They don’t tend to adhere very well to a narrative arc cause they’re viruses or bacteria or what have you, and they don’t care. And they’re kind of hard to fight.
You know, if you wanted a story about fighting a disease, you can do a medical drama. But medical drama is also really hard. Especially in spec fic. If you look at all science fiction, the medical drama gets even weirder, because you’re trying to do your research by talking to doctors and you’re like, “Okay, but like what if they had a magic scanner that could like tell if cancer existed?” And the doctors are like, “What are you talking about?” – “How would that change things?” – “I have no idea. I don’t know how to answer that question.”
Chris: I think the problem with having diseases and a lot of science-based problems in general is that. They don’t support the idea of a few unlikely heroes turning things around in a short period of time.
One of the funniest examples I’ve seen is in the movie outbreak, which I believe is from 1995. They do this thing at the end where it’s like, okay, we just need to get these antibodies from this one person and then we’ll mix it with this magic serum to create antiserum and then we’ll cure everyone. It’s ridiculous. Because they’re trying to make the science actually work for a story that has a climax and then has a neat resolution. It doesn’t work out so great.
Oren: Yeah. I mean, in this sort of scenario, the disease is essentially a disaster story. And disaster movies, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but they tend to be pretty cheesy. You can’t fight a volcano. It’s possible to have a good story based on human drama around a disaster. There’s a lot of great drama there, but if the disaster itself is taking up center stage, it’s like, you know… have you ever seen Twister? Where they act like the tornado is a villain? The tornado comes back for revenge at one point! It’s amazing, and most disaster movies are like that when they focus on the disaster itself as opposed to like how humans react to the disaster.
One advantage we do have as fantasy writers – this doesn’t work well in scifi in my opinion – but as fantasy writers, the scenario Chris just described of like, we need to get the antiserum, it could actually work if you wanted it to. If you set up properly that there’s a god of healing and they have a temple deep in the lost lands and you need to get there and get the thing that will cure all disease. Yeah. Okay. I guess that could exist in fantasy. Sure. Whereas if you tried to do that even in futuristic scifi, it would probably come off as very hokey.
Chris: So Star Trek has this ongoing thing that they do for a lot of their medical plotlines, whether it’s a disease or something else, where they have the technology to just look inside the body and know what’s wrong at a microscopic level, which is amazing. And we do not have that. But for some reason, despite having all of that knowledge, doctors always say they can’t do anything until they know the exact source of the disease, because otherwise there’s no conflict, right. They could just look at it like, okay, here’s a problem. I’ve come up with a solution.
But no, now that gives the characters a reason to go back and try to do some mystery solving and find out exactly what happened. And for that to work, the doctor has to be like, well, you know, I can see what’s happening in this person’s body at a microscopic level, but for some reason, my hands are just tied until I know the whole story of how this came to be.
Oren: In Star Trek in particular – and Star Trek isn’t the only scifi program to have this problem, but it does stand out as having a lot of medical dramas – the wild inconsistency of how their technology works. Because in some episodes they can completely de-transform you, like if you’ve turned into another species entirely, they can just be like, yeah, hang on, let me just undo that real quick.
And then in other episodes, they’re like, man, he has Space Alzheimer’s, it’s impossible. We just can’t. We can’t deal with it. Our technology is helpless before Space Alzheimer’s. And Alzheimer’s is a horrific disease in real life, but if you can change someone from a newt back into a person, I feel like maybe it’s not so indefeatable anymore. You know?
Wes: Doesn’t Worf turn into like a acid-spitting scorpion or something like that?
Oren: Yes. That does happen. There is a Star Trek episode where they de-evolve. That episodes is great because it misunderstands both how diseases work and how evolution works. It pushes the idea that we evolved from animals that are around today. So Riker turns into a Neanderthal, like we evolved from a Neanderthal, which are not around today, but you know what I mean. And Picard is turning into a lemur? No, we did not evolve from lemurs. Oh my God, what’s wrong with you?
Chris: Oh, what’s actually pretty good is the TNG episode Identity Crisis, which surprisingly good, despite its absurd premise where Geordi gets a parasite that turns him into an alien. The idea is this is how the aliens reproduce, which is probably completely unrealistic, but it’s a very creepy story because he just has medical problems that start happening and friends that start disappearing and he has to figure it out.
Oren: The mystery is really creepy, right? They do a really good job with his investigation. I love the part where he’s down on the holodeck and he notices there’s like a shadow he can’t account for in this recording, and he’s like, computer, based on these parameters that it’s reasonable for me to have, where would they be standing to cast this shadow? And it generates this really creepy-looking black blob and it’s like, oh my god, holodeck, whoa. But like once you find out what the actual problem is, it’s like, yeah, okay. I guess they’re going to retransform him with his DNA. That’s a thing DNA does, right? You can turn off the body and turn it back on and then the DNA will fix every problem.
Wes: That’s part of the season two Unnatural Selection episode, right? Where they just recombine Pulaski’s DNA structure to fix the aging problem that happens?
Oren: For that one, to be fair, they used the magic transporter,
Wes: Oh right. Good point.
Oren: Which they never do again because wow, it turns out the transporter being a resurrection device was a bad idea.
Chris: My favorite science snafu is still this Buffy episode where Buffy has the flu and she’s in the hospital. And the idea here is not that the flu is fictional, but that there’s a monster that in order to see it, she has to have a fever under the influence of this flu. She’s recovering and she can’t see the monster anymore, and so she breaks into this doctor’s office to grab a solution that has the flu in it. And when she grabs it, Willow objects: “No, that’s 100% concentration!” [laughs] Like – what, that liquid is 100% flu, it’s just nothing but flu particles all the way down?
Oren: Absolutely nothing else.
Chris: And then she just drinks what is supposedly pure flu and then just gets a fever again in a couple minutes. It’s amazing.
Wes: Oh, that’s great.
Oren: So in the scifi thing, I do think that if you want to have a scifi illness, you can do it. Because we discover new illnesses. It’s a thing that happens. But I do think you need to be a little more creative than taking a regular illness and giving it a space name. This happened in Mass Effect, where they make this big deal about how one of your companions is dying from a fancy space disease.
But when they explain it, it’s like – it’s cancer. He has space cancer. And it works exactly like cancer and has exactly the same symptoms as cancer, and they play all of the cancer tropes of this guy dying. Except for the part at the end where he beats up an assassin while dying of space cancer. I don’t think that’s in most cancer stories.
They would be improved by it though, just saying. But you could be a little more creative than that. I think you kind of have to be, otherwise it just feels very hokey. And you know, Mass Effect’s technology isn’t quite as advanced as Star Trek’s is, but it’s still advanced enough that it really feels like we should at least have made progress on the cancer front by then. By the time we have FTL drives, it seems like maybe we could have something that would be more effective against cancer. You know, we’re pretty good at developing treatments for disease when financial interests don’t get in the way. It’s not like we aren’t bad at that. We actually do a good job.
Chris: I would say that disease works much better as a threat that’s involved in the stakes than it is actually fighting it during the story. That’s how 12 Monkeys works. A main character in 12 Monkeys has gone back in time to stop a world-ending pandemic from starting. So we see the results of it, it doesn’t have to go into any of the biology of how this thing works, but we know it will work and then it’s about stopping it from happening in the first place. I think that’s definitely easier than trying to science your way out of it once it starts.
Oren: And you can use disease and illness as a powerful backdrop. There are several stories that do this. In The Train Job from Firefly, the premise of the episode is not “let’s fight the space disease”, but that they go to this town where everybody has this disease caused by industrial runoff, basically. And they’ve been tasked with stealing the medicine that these people need. And they’re like, “oh no, we’re the good guys, we can’t do that.” So they don’t. And that’s cool. And it helps for a few reasons.
One is that Firefly does a pretty good job establishing this divide between the future people who have the advanced technology and the future people who don’t. So you get the feeling that this probably wouldn’t be a big problem in a rich central core planet, but you know, out here in the rural boonies, it’s a lot more of an issue. That’s good. And then they also aren’t trying to fix it. It’s the backdrop of the conflict they’re having.
There’s also stories like Wanderers – which I don’t like, I don’t think it’s a good book. But it does portray disease quite well and uses it as an effective backdrop. Unfortunately, that’s the best part of the book. It doesn’t do anything else, but it has the disease.
Chris: I have to say though, a lot of the description of the disease in this book is really disgusting.
Oren: Yeah. There is that.
Chris: I had to stop when I was listening to some of the narration about this disease because it was just gross. So if you are easily grossed out or just don’t like body horror or anything like that, I would not recommend the disease parts of Wanderers – the actual disease parts of Wanderers as opposed to the pseudo disease parts of Wanderers.
Oren: Another cool way you can use disease and storytelling is as part of the politics of your setting. The Temeraire series does this quite well. I unfortunately don’t remember exactly which book this happens in. But they pick up a new disease that infects all of their dragons, because this is a Napoleonic-war-with-dragons setting. And they find out that this is a disease that is known about in another part of the world, and that part of the world has at least the potential to create a cure. So they go and try to get it, and that makes sense because this is Napoleonic-era transport, you can’t just call someone and have them fly it over to you the next day. It takes a while to get there. And then they have this interesting conflict of, well, we’ve got the cure, but the disease has started spreading to our enemy countries, so maybe we should just keep the cure for ourselves and let them deal with it.
And at that point, this causes the main characters to have a crisis of conscience. Because they’re like, “That’s evil. Letting people die of illness when you could prevent it is evil.” – “But those are the bad guys. And these are our orders. What do we do?” It’s a cool conflict and I liked it quite a bit. That’s not the only way to use disease, but it’s just a fun way of tying the disease into the human drama, which is what I think is compelling about that scenario.
Chris: One thing I’d really like to see is – apparently the most often used way of controlling a new epidemic that starts is by simply rigorously tracing people who’ve come in contact with it and isolating them, right? Some people have to do that work and to try to contain it best they can. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re magically coming up with a cure, they’re just trying to keep it under wraps and keep it from getting too big. So I think you could probably have a fictional virus that, like Coronavirus, is contagious before symptoms start, but turns some people into monsters, so you can have that action component. And then have a team whose job it is to trace who could be infected and fight with the monsters that happen, but mostly contain it. They can never defeat it entirely because it’s always gotten ahead of them, but they can minimize its spread.
Oren: That is really cool and I’m way into that.
Chris: Somebody, if you’re listening, write me that story. I put in my order.
Wes: In general, if you are looking to write a story about diseases, the means of transmission, I think, is something that’s important to probably base on reality. I guess you could do some kind of auditory disease, maybe? You hear a contagion? I dunno. I’m just trying to think of anything besides the standards. But really, you know, there’s airborne diseases; Chris mentioned asymptomatic hosts who apparently are called reservoirs…
Chris: That’s creepy.
Wes: Touch, fluid transmission… parasites are a terrifying way for diseases to spread. And then, you’ve heard this one lately too in the news, it’s a little different from airborne and coughing and spittle, it’s called “aerosolized”. So if you cough, a little bit of it, like the water particles that come out of your mouth, can linger in the air for awhile. It’s different from a dry cough; with a wet cough, you can actually make a room full of the stuff for 10 minutes, up to that long. Just by having a really hard coughing fit. Really scary in its own. Adds some tension.
Oren: You said this as a joke, but I actually liked the idea of a disease that spreads via audio or via one of your senses. That’s creepy.
Wes: Yeah. I think it is creepy. The closest I’ve ever come to an idea like that was in Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash, which is kind of a post-apocalyptic world and then there’s also this MMO kind of situation. And it’s an MMO, so if you’re in there, nothing bad can really happen to you in the real world. Except when somebody kind of gets their brain hacked by effectively looking at a snow crashed computer screen, you know, all white and stuff like that. It hacks and rewires the guy’s brain. But that person then could not spread the disease, but the software could be transmitted to spread it. It is interesting. I would have to reread the book before I could fully endorse it, but I remember that being a little compelling.
Oren: Well, making an illness that spreads via your senses is very unusual and I think very novel. It also has the potential to be difficult because, you know, we tend to rely on our senses to see things as it were and to understand the world around us. So if one of those is a vector for a disease, that creates some weird dynamics, which I think could be absolutely great to play with and have fun with. But if you’re not prepared for those, it can be kind of weird.
Chris: It reminds me of Bird Box, right? Also, I think it would start to feel really similar to a lot of the horror that we have out there that is sensory-based and purely magical, and there’s no premise that it’s specifically a disease. But there’s been a number of movies lately about trying to stay quiet because the monster can hear you, or, in the case of Bird Box, you can’t see the monster or you die.
Also The Ring, where you watch a video – that one is viral in a way, because the way that you live is by making a copy of the video. Now, granted, there’s no rule, or the movie doesn’t specify there’s a rule, that somebody has to watch your copy. So it does sound like you could just copy the video that gave you this curse and then throw both copies in a pit somewhere and it would be fine.
Oren: I mean, the real question is, why is anyone still watching VHS anymore? [all laugh] Boom. Gotcha.
Chris: I guess with a disease, if you can get it in a very surreal way by seeing or hearing it, I would wonder what makes it a disease and not, like, a curse.
Oren: I mean literally nothing. I would actually say that it in fact should be a curse, because at this point it’s not a traditional disease. It is a parallel for one. And I would say that that is potentially cool. I do see people talk about – I get there’s an analogy between the way memes spread and the way that a virus spreads, and in fact the term meme originally was used to refer to genetic material and not images – but sometimes I do see people take that a little far.
It’s like, “They’re going to infect us with their memes, and if I see this meme, I’ll become infected.” Again, it’s an analogy. It doesn’t quite work that way though. But if it’s a magic curse, it kind of could. I’m fine with it if it’s magic. I will accept a lot of things if they’re magic.
Wes: Another cool use for diseases in your stories is if you’re attempting to write a story that needs to be post-apocalyptic in some way, but you don’t want to necessarily destroy your planet to make that happen. Diseases are great for that. It’s kind of interesting right now in our current situation to see the ways in which nature is already rebounding. I saw some great pictures of how the channels in Venice are clear and fish came back because, you know, tourism has stopped.
So disease can give you an opportunity for your post-apocalyptic heroes, where society has probably broken down, to still be enjoying resplendent wooded forests and not a nuclear wasteland. Sure, there might be dilapidated cars and things like that, but you can more or less preserve a climate and an environment you may want to have in a story that you couldn’t otherwise, if we used devastating weapons to create our different type of reality.
Oren: That is definitely true. One thing that I will advise caution on – actually, two things. First, be careful when you’re using a disease to create a post apocalyptic world about what the conflict is going to be. There’s a british show called Survivors, where the premise is that something like 99% of the population gets wiped out by a disease, and there are these isolated groups of survivors and they fight. But the show doesn’t have anything for them to fight over, because there’s basically unlimited resources now.
They look into like, well, how long will canned food last? And it turns out it lasts several years. So, okay, at some point, maybe we might have to start fighting over the cornfield one of us started, but for right now, we basically have unlimited food and unlimited housing and unlimited building material. So why are we fighting? And the show didn’t have an answer, but it had them fight anyway.
So be careful of that. And the other thing to be careful of is – all right kids, it’s time to talk about ecofascism! Which is a thing where people say, “Oh, the earth would be better off without us. We should just kill all humans.” And this sounds like something that you would see on a bizarro episode of Captain Planet, but it’s a real thing. And the problem with it, the reason why it’s bad, is that it tends to get translated into, “what if we killed the poor people?”, and this idea that like, yeah, the world would be great if it was just a handful of privileged people and all of the poor people of color were gone.
I’m not saying that any story that uses a disease to create a post apocalyptic environment is supporting ecofascism. It is just kind of a hot button issue right now. So be aware of that when you’re writing your story. Maybe do a little research on it to make sure you don’t accidentally play into those tropes.
Wes: Also, just to piggyback off of Oren’s great point there, if you’re writing a disease into your story: Diseases affect humans. Do not make your diseases target a particular segment of a population, a certain race. Therein lies undesirable things. Your stories are better off saying humans share genetics and if it can infect me, it can infect Oren, it can infect everybody. Instead of trying to jump through loops, to piggyback, or remove… there’s colonialism in those stories.
Oren: And even something like Y: The Last Man is not great in that regard. The premise is that a virus killed all men and it has two problems. First, it’s just pretends that trans and intersex people don’t exist. It doesn’t know what they are and it doesn’t know what to do with them. So that’s a problem. But then the other problem is that the whole story basically like, “Oh man, what if this one beta male was the last man?” And it’s like, [in disillusioned voice] okay. I just… sure.
It’s sort of the premise of the story and I just didn’t like it. I thought it was kind of misogynist in some unusual ways that I was not expecting.
Wes: A good story to pick up on conflict in a post-apocalyptic disease world as opposed to Survivors, like you just mentioned, is Stephen King’s novel, The Stand, which you can read if you want, but it’s a beast, it’s like 1200 pages or something. Ungodly.
But his premise is that, in the first few chapters, the engineered super flu happens. And it just wipes out seven eighths of the American population or something like that. So the story is about the survivors who for whatever reasons survived and are trying to make their way to, I think it’s a city in Eastern Colorado. There’s supernatural elements in this where they’re getting visions and things of a person that’s setting up civilization again. But the larger conflict comes into scale with his villain, Randall Flagg, who with this super flu has basically also developed some kind of demonic power and is rallying tech workers and industrial strength, and basically trying to build a fascist state. And that kind of takes over this conflict of, why would these two groups who are rebuilding civilization come into conflict? Well, one of them is going to try to use weapons to oppress everybody else.
Oren: I mean, that’s perfectly reasonable. The issue with the show Survivors specifically was that it took place right after everyone was dead and the only people around were small isolated groups.
Wes: That makes no sense.
Oren: Yeah. It just didn’t really work.
Chris: Well, I can mention another one that’s funny. In the Voyager episode Learning Curve the ship gets a disease. They make a big deal on Voyager about how the ship is cutting-edge because it has these bio-neural gel packs. So one episode, the ship starts malfunctioning and it turns out they have gotten a disease from cheese that Neelix brought on board because of course, Neelix is the one who messes up everything.
Oren: That whole episode is basically built so that they can have the doctor say, “Get that cheese to sickbay.” [Wes laughs] Which is, incidentally, another example of how they have mega scanners that can scan everything, but for some reason they needed the original cheese. They couldn’t just scan the infected gel packs and be like, “Oh look, they’re infected with cheese.” They had to get the original block, which they’re fortunate no one had eaten. I don’t know what they were going to do if that had happened.
Wes: “This cheese is too delicious!”
Oren: Granted, it’s Neelix’s cheese, that was never going to happen, so they were at least safe from that problem.
Wes: We’re getting close to the end of our time here, but something else to maybe consider in your stories, is that diseases, viruses, these things don’t kill very fast. At least not highly contagious, pandemic-style ones. So that can continue as a background threat, where maybe it’s under containment. But the point is that a virus, for example, needs time to propagate. So if you wanted to make some kind of super deadly virus outbreak in your story, that just, it’s so dangerous, it will kill people in like 20 minutes.
Most people would read that with skepticism, because most sicknesses have a length of weeks or days because that’s just kind of the nature of how these things propagate. Even bacterial ones, like the black death, didn’t kill somebody in a few hours. It takes a little time for those kinds of things to set in, so that might be something to keep in mind if you want to write a story that’s trying to base your fictional disease on realistic ones.
Oren: Right, if you make your disease too lethal and too fast, then it’ll just burn out and it won’t spread.
Wes: Immediately. Yeah.
Oren: All right. Well, I think this is a good point to end the podcast. Before we go, I want to thank a few of our patrons. First, we have Kathy Ferguson who is a professor of political theory in Star Trek; next we have Ayman Jaber, who writes urban fantasy and knows all there is to know about Marvel. And finally we have Danita Rambo and she lives at therambogeeks.com.
If anything we said piqued your interest, you can leave a comment on the website at mythcreants.com and otherwise everyone please stay safe, if you can. We’ll talk to you next week.
I could tell you what this podcast is about, but how would you know if I was telling the truth? Normally, you’d just have to trust me, but in fantasy stories, we can have magic that stops people from lying. That’s what we’re talking about today, and it’s a far more fraught subject than you might expect. It turns out the possibility of lying is pretty intrinsic to the human experience, and changing it has huge ripple effects that most writers aren’t prepared to deal with. What kind of ripple effects, you ask? Listen and find out!
Show Notes Zone of Truth * Toph Beifong * Daredevil * Aes Sedai * The Three Oaths * The Truth About Lie Detectors * Deanna Troi * Elnor * Eleanor Shellstrop * Chidi Anagonye * Torture Should Not Work in D&D * Xanth * Veritaserum TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Anonymous.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.
Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren, with me today is…
Chris: Chris.
Oren: and…
Wes: Wes.
Oren: I was going to mislead you about what the topic of today’s episode is, but I can’t because I’m in a Zone of Truth. So I have to tell you everything. Everything has to be truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Because this episode we’re talking about anti-lying magic and how it’s way more messed up than you think. It’s very bad.
Wes: It’s so messed up.
Oren: It’s a very common staple of fiction. A lot of stories have it, and it almost always has way weirder implications than they think it does.
Chris: And wider and more subtle, at every level.
Oren: Because it turns out, being able to lie to people is a pretty fundamental part of the human experience. And once you change that, that really changes the way we interact with each other. A lot of stories don’t recognize this. Then this covers magic, like the actuals Zone of Truth spell for D&D, which stops people from lying. Covers things like Toph and Daredevil, who can supposedly tell that you’re lying by listening to your heartbeat. And it covers things like the Aes Sedai from Wheel of Time, who have a magical oath that stops them from lying. Because these are all different ways of getting at the same thing. And the first thing I want to talk about is the detection methods.
You need to be careful with these because the whole concept that you can tell that someone’s lying because their heart rate changes is actually pretty dangerous because it turns out that we have machines in real life that do that, and they’re called polygraph machines, and they are very unreliable. And because it turns out that, yeah, someone’s heartbeat might go up when they lie. But it also could go up because they’re nervous because you just asked them a hard question.
Wes: That’s like me at the doctor every single time.
Chris: I personally just like the idea that Daredevil or Toph have somebody that they think is like always lying to them and that turns out that person just has a crush on them.
Oren: And it goes beyond the polygraph detection. The whole concept of being able to tell that someone is lying from how they’re acting is very problematic, and it leads to people who are innocent being assumed to be guilty because they act in a way that we associate with lying. But it’s often just a result of stress or them being neuro-divergent in some way. That’s already a problem if you assume that Daredevil can tell someone’s lying because of their heart rate. That’s already spreading inaccurate and potentially harmful information.
But going beyond that, you would just not believe how many plots depend on people being able to lie, how many plot points need that factor. And this is why characters like Deanna Troi, her power is way more nebulous, right? She doesn’t know someone’s lying because of their heart rates. She just knows. And notice how her power mysteriously stops working a lot of the time.
Chris: She tends to phrase it as, “Oh, you know, he’s hiding something.” They start downgrading it into really vague terms because it’s just too powerful if she knows when something they say is precisely a lie.
Oren: There are episodes where we don’t even go that far, where she doesn’t even go with, “you’re hiding something.” It just goes with, she doesn’t say anything and it’s…but later we find out that person was lying. [sarcastic] Wait, hang on. Why didn’t Troi’s powers go? And it’s cause, well, we needed them to be able to lie for the story to work, okay?
Chris: I like to think about it this way – if all of the different conflicts you can’t have if people can’t lie. Do you want to have a betrayal in your story? Do you want to have a secret mole or traitor in your story? Do you want to have someone who seems nice at first and then turns out to be evil at any point in time? Do you want any member of Team Good to be able to keep a guilty secret? Think of all of the plot opportunities that you’re just straight up giving up if somebody can tell when another person is lying.
Wes: [sarcastic] Yeah. You’ll never pull off that surprise birthday party.
Oren: My favorite example of this is from The Wheel of Time, which I’m doing a reread of. In The Wheel of Time, you’ve got the Aes Sedai, who are mages, and they’re incredibly problematic, but we’re just going to look at one aspect of them today, which is that they can’t lie. They have a magic device that when they swear an oath on it, they have to keep that oath. And one of the three oaths they take is that they can’t lie. But some of them we know are secretly working for the Forsaken. I think it’s called the Dark One in Wheel of Time, but he’s Satan. And these ones are part of what’s called the Black Ajah ‘cause they are evil and everything in The Wheel of Time that is dark is evil. It’s not exactly a complex setting, morally speaking.
And so they have this whole thing about, “Who’s Black Ajah? We can’t know who the Black Ajah is,” and it’s all paranoia. And it could be anyone. It could be you, it could be you. It could be me. No one knows, right? That’s like a huge part of the plot. So first it’s okay, well, I said I can’t lie, so you could probably just ask, “Are you Black Ajah?” And later on we find out that the Black Ajah have a way to break those magic oaths, but they can only do it in special circumstances. So you could fix this by just calling each Aes Sedai into your room one at a time, having them reswear the “I won’t lie oath” on the magic item, because if it doesn’t hurt you to double up on the oath, right? It does nothing to you if you aren’t Black Ajah. And then say, “are you Black Ajah?” And if they say anything but no, then you know they’re Black Ajah and you can just get rid of them. And I was like, there, I solved it. I solved the Black Ajah problem. And of course, this was never brought up as a possibility at all because it would defeat the entire purpose of the paranoia aspect. And it’s like, see that’s a reason why, just enforcing magical not-lying creates plot problems.
Chris: I don’t think I’ve ever come upon a story with anti-lie powers that have actually been consistent because they are just too hard to manage. At some point in time, the story’s going to be inconsistent and break it.
Wes: Because they’ll kind of bring up this situation where this is the only option. There is no other way to find out unless we find who’s lying and force them to tell the truth.
Oren: Right. And I mean also it’s just there’s a lot of tension and conflict that almost all stories have over, Which characters should we believe? Is this character telling the truth? And here’s the thing is, it works in reverse too. Not being able to lie is actually a very powerful advantage if you’re in a society where most people can lie and everyone knows you can’t. Because that means everyone can always trust what you say. You can try to do the whole like sneaky-lie-without-lying thing that Wheel of Time tries to do and imply that all the Aes Sedai are untrustworthy [sarcastic] because they’re evil scheming women. This book has a problem with women. But beyond that, it turns out that that’s actually very hard, trying to be all sneaky, especially if someone is just like, “answer plainly: yes or no.” If someone won’t let you say five paragraphs to get around having to lie, that’s actually very hard.
And so if people know you can’t lie, then you can tell them things and they’ll know it’s true. Right? So there’s no longer a…you can’t have a conflict over trying to convince the King that he’s going to be assassinated because he knows you can’t lie, and you’re telling him he’s going to be assassinated. So at the very least, he knows you believe it. Now, in certain circumstances, you could still make that work. You could have the King be like, “Well, I know you believe I’m going to be assassinated, but I don’t think I actually will be.” That’s a thing that could happen, but it just makes everything way harder.
Chris: Speaking of which, I also want to talk about characters that have radical honesty. They’re not that common. But Elnor, for instance, on the new Picard show fits in this category. The only time I’ve previously seen a character that had had this trait (and it is a really novel trait, it is really interesting, but I think that it might just be really hard to maintain) was in the show, Lie to Me. They had a character that practiced radical honesty. But after, I dunno, five episodes, he just broke his radical honesty pledge for a really bad reason and then just didn’t have it anymore. And it was too bad because then he was a boring character. But I think it might’ve just been too hard for the readers to maintain the radical honesty and have their plot work.
So I’m kind of watching Elnor to see. They’ve had a really good conflict so far where he had to pretend to be somebody else. He was even in a costume. And he was like, “Well, I won’t lie.” And then they’re like, “Okay, well you better not say anything.” And his conflict was just to stay quiet during this entire deceptive exchange.
Wes: Chidi is another character that enforces a self code of not lying from The Good Place. And I think he’s a good example of it done very well because there are situations, minor spoilers, where they go to the actual Bad Place where he is told that he has to lie, he has to pretend to be a Bad Place employee, and he still doesn’t want to do it even in that situation. And I don’t know, I mean it’s a comedy, and there’s certainly good opportunities there, but the radical honesty character as playing into this anti-lying magic situation is a fun one, I guess. Chris, you’re right, you’re right. You don’t see it that often.
Chris: Well, I think the nice thing about Chidi is that he actually can lie if the plot really requires him to.
Wes: And it’s very clear how uncomfortable it makes him.
Chris: Right, he’s got the whole stomach ache, facial expression on. So we can see that there’s a consequence which will make it so he resists doing it in the future, but we can break it if we need to. Whereas a lot of time when you have characters like Elnor who’ve taken a sacred oath, it would just feel a little bit weird. Where we can imagine Chidi doing it under pressure, it’s harder to imagine Elnor lying under pressure.
Oren: Although here’s the thing. I would say that Chidi and Elnor are reasonably similar. They have different justifications, but in terms of the entire dynamics of the story, they’re sort of the same in that they personally won’t lie. But the only guarantee everyone else has that they don’t lie is that they say they won’t lie. That’s just, that’s way less disruptive. Also, Elnor is both doesn’t lie and also socially unaware. So that’s a very different kind of character type to a Chidi. Chidi doesn’t lie, but Chidi is also polite. Whereas Elnor is the kind of character [who] walks up to you and is like, “Hello, your nose is hideous. I don’t lie. Radical honesty.” Whereas Chidi doesn’t do that. He just doesn’t lie. And so those are two different kinds of characters, but they are much less disruptive to the setting in which they live because they could lie under the right circumstances and other people can’t have any guarantee that they aren’t.
Wes: Well, that’s what you’re really getting at in this situation where there’s magic at play or something. Chidi and Elnor have still retained their agency, and there’s nothing else kind of affecting that. But in stories where it’s a cheat, it robs them of who they are if somebody can just be found out or not have any choice in the matter.
Oren: Quick thing I should’ve mentioned. I realized we were talking about Chidi and Elnor, which sounds a lot like Eleanor, who was a character on The Good Place. But we were actually talking about Chidi from The Good Place and Elnor, the character from Star Trek Picard.
Eleanor from The Good Place lies constantly at all times. She’s still very rude though, it should be pointed out. She will still tell you your nose is hideous.
Wes: Oren, in Wheel of Time, do they ever bring up lies of omission?
Oren: Yeah. They don’t consider that a lie.
Wes: Like Zone of Truth (and all these other magic ways to stop people from lying) assumes that the person under the influence of the serum or the spell will talk. That has always bothered me, that they’re not only forcing them to tell the truth, but they’re also forcing them to talk.
Oren: So it gets weird here. Okay, so my understanding, and it’s been a while since I’ve read the Zone of Truth spell, I’ll call it up now while I’m talking, but my understanding is that the Zone of Truth spell doesn’t force you to answer. It just forces you to answer honestly if you talk. That’s how the Aes Sedai thing works. That’s typically how magic works. I’ve noticed that drug truth serums (which again, are not a real thing, but in fantasy they are or in sci-fi), those tend to be more along the lines of forcing you to answer. That can create some problems there. There’s a really good article that I’ll link to about the problems with Zone of Truth and how it basically incentivizes players to torture people, which is a thing that people do sometimes on purpose. Zone of Truth is an accident. It’s not supposed to work like that. But once you create a scenario where people can’t lie, then you can inflict pain on them until they tell you what you want to know. And the normal rules for why torture doesn’t work don’t apply anymore.
But I’ve also seen storytellers do that on purpose. Where they’re like, “Hey, my character in Daredevil does this. Daredevil can tell if you’re lying so he’s gonna beat on you until you give him the answer.” And it works for Daredevil, and that’s their internal justification. And my strong advice is don’t do that for all the reasons we talked about before. It’s actually both because Daredevil’s way of detecting lies is inaccurate and highly problematic. You’re almost certainly going to regret giving your character that ability at some point. But also because frankly a lot of people aren’t going to see that distinction. They’re just going to see a character getting tortured and they’re going to see the torture working and then they’re going to think torture works. And there’s a whole John Oliver segment about this, about how people think torture works and so they support torture when they shouldn’t. And just to be clear, torture would be bad even if it did work, but it doesn’t.
Chris: That’s almost why I think it’s better if you are going to do some sort of truth spell or effect for it to make the character talk. Cause then at least there’s nobody going to Torture Town. ‘Cause there’s no reason to because the character will talk. Granted, I think a lot of this is writers in the moment just want to give their characters information. That’s what they’re thinking about “How does my character get this information?” A lot of times, of course, they also want to be edgy, which is too bad. And so they resort to anti-lying powers and torture and things like that in order to just have their character be able to capture an antagonist, get information from them, and then move on to the next step. And there’s other ways to give your protagonist information. Search their person, take a phone out of their pocket, and then look inside their phone for instance, find clues. I have a blog post that’s just a list of ways for your character to get information and to get the clues that they need for your plot to move forward.
Wes: What’s also great about that is those clues serve as evidence. [laughter] You’re not just extracting a confession out of somebody through dubious means, but you’re actually building your case, which is great for mystery stories and things like that.
Chris: Depending on what type of story you have, there’s a whole other issue with if your main character is a cop and what appropriate cop behavior should and shouldn’t be. Where breaking and entering and grabbing clues is a typical thing for a protagonist to do, but cops are supposed to have warrants for that. I think that’s a little bit beyond my area of expertise, but that’s just another thing to keep in mind. But oftentimes the protagonists are not actually in an official position of authority and there’s a masquerade and so they’re trying to find out about the magical bad guy and there’s no authorities to help them and yada yada.
Oren: Another one that’s weird is if you really start drilling down on the whole concept of magical lie detection, you start to get into some bizarre situations where it’s not even really clear what a lie is. For example, if we go back to the Wheel of Time scenario, and let’s say the Aes Sedai decided to do what I suggested and bring in every Aes Sedai one at a time, have them re-swear the no-lying oath just in case they had it taken off earlier, and then ask them, “are you Black Ajah?” Are they lying if they say no because they don’t call it the Black Ajah? They call it the Zafran Booty Box. That’s what they call it. And then they’re like, “well, you didn’t ask me if I was in the Zafran Booty Box so I wasn’t lying.” Is that a lie? And how quickly can they change the name? If they find out you’re doing this, can they quickly put out a memo and be like, “Hey guys, we don’t call it the Black Ajah anymore. Now it’s the Zafran Booty Box, and they will never think to ask us that.”
Wes: This sounds like a semantics argument on Twitter. [laughter]
Oren: Yeah and that’s a weird question that doesn’t really have a good answer. And honestly, why would you put yourself in the position of needing to decide that?
Wes: But yeah, you bring up a good point. And that’s a lot of storytellers who employ this, I think, view truth as it is objective. The spell works because truth is objective and the person under the influence of the spell knows the objective truth, not their subjective reality and their interpretation of events. That’s a pretty big conceit to just put into your story, isn’t it?
Oren: I would argue that there is an objective truth. The question is: does your spell know what it is? Because for example, if in that scenario the answer to, “Are you part of the Black Ajah?” is yes, everyone there would agree to that in a vacuum with no other concerns. The issue is, Can you trick the spell by changing the name? You haven’t actually changed the truth. Have you tricked the spell’s programming is the real question.
Chris: Basically, is the spell dependent on the beliefs of the person saying it or does it just have all knowledge of the universe? Because if that person is wrong…
Oren: I do think it’s a different situation. It’s not even a question of, Does it have knowledge of the universe? This is still based on the knowledge that the people have. Most magic spell/truths assume that the spell only cares about what the person knows. But again, in this case, if you ask me, “Are you a writer for Mythcreants?” and I had just secretly two minutes ago in our financial documents changed the name from Mythcreants to Zafran Booty Box, and I said, “No, I am not a writer for Mythcreants,” I would be lying in that I know that, yes, I’m still a writer for Mythcreants, I know that name change isn’t real. It’s just something that I did because I wanted to play a semantic trick. And you would agree that if you knew everything that was going on, that saying that I’m still a writer for Mythcreants. So the question at this point is not, Does the spell have knowledge of the universe? The question is, Does the spell understand that you’re lying or have you tricked it with your little verbal semantics game?
Chris: So what you’re talking about is the distinction between technically correct and correct is often what we call that, right? Whether the semantics matter. But there’s also the difference of does the anti-lying magic based on a person saying what they believe to be true versus what if they’re wrong. Most anti-lying magic usually is themed to be based on what somebody believes to be true. But if we’re going to get into “how does a spell have knowledge of objective truth,” we could potentially have a spell where you can’t say things that aren’t true, even if you believe them.
For instance, in some of the Xanth books actually, there is a spell that’s supposed to make somebody say what their magic is even if they don’t know. That magical appears. So technically we could have a spell that enforces objective fact, regardless of what the person’s saying it believes.
Oren: I mean, there’s no reason you can’t do that.
Chris: You shouldn’t. You shouldn’t. I mean, that’s like having an omniscient character in your story.
Oren: This actually comes back to another point that I was making, which is that when you’re talking about introducing speculative elements to your story, be it magic or technology, you can justify most things. The question is, Should you? You can create a world where the only way to do magic is to punch yourself in the genitals.
That would explain why people are constantly punching themselves in the genitals. But you probably shouldn’t. That’s not a good idea. And it’s the same thing with magic lie detection making torture work. Yes, you can make that a thing in your setting if you want and have it be logically consistent. It’s still a bad idea though.
In Lord of the Rings, you’ve got those weird square-shaped mountains around Mordor, and a lot of people say, “Oh, well those mountains are artificial. They were made by the Lord of the Rings angels. That’s why they looked like that.” And I’m like, okay, that’s technically plausible, but it’s still a bad idea.
If I was in Avatar, I could have the earthbenders run around drawing dicks on the map, and I could say, “Yes, see, an earthbender did it. That makes perfect sense in character.” And yeah, it does, but you still shouldn’t do that. It’s still a bad idea.
Chris: If you can at all avoid having any kind of anti-lying magic or powers in your story, that’s the best. But let’s say for a second that somebody already has established it in their story, they’re writing a sequel, or otherwise, they are wedded to this idea and talk about what we can do to mitigate this so it’s at least less of a problem, even if it’s still present.
Oren: [sarcastic] I don’t know man, I think you’re just doomed.
Wes: Very helpful advice.
Chris: For instance, in one of your articles, Oren, you previously talked about Troi? One of the problems with Troi, the fact that her powers are passive, where she doesn’t have to do anything, she just receives mental information from everybody around her. Whereas if she had to actively look in somebody’s head in order to see if they were lying or not, then she just wouldn’t be doing it all the time. And even better, she could consider it a violation of their right to privacy because it would be, and then only do it in extreme circumstances. What that allows is for antagonists that you have no reason to suspect or no strong evidence, if it’s in violation of a right to privacy to suspect, be able to lie with no issue. But if you really want to get…you have a captured antagonist that is obviously gonna commit genocide or something, she can take that extreme step of reading their mind.
Oren: Yeah. Honestly, I much prefer the idea of Betazoids and other psychics in general having to concentrate on you to read your mind because the idea that they are constantly listening to all thoughts around them and they can’t turn it off is actually kind of upsetting. It both makes me not ever want to be around them and also makes me feel very sorry for them. It’s like people have weird random thoughts that are very involuntary and that’s just sounds unpleasant.
Chris: Harry Potter does a pretty good job with veritaserum and making it. It’s very hard to produce. It’s in limited supply. JK Rowling establishes pretty well that often potions take several months to make. I think she uses it on one antagonist, but it’s also used as a threat to Harry. What if Snape, of course because Snape is the worst, accidentally slips over his pumpkin juice and threatens him with it, basically, which is awful because Snape is awful. She uses it to increase tension too, and then conveniently it runs out. They can’t just go get more. Now that does break down in a big world after a while. It’s like, “What if it’s really important to get this information? Somebody has got to have some of it somewhere, right? If we have the money.” It’s not perfect.
Oren: But first, you could brew up some liquid luck and then use the liquid luck to brew up more liquid luck and then use a little bit of the extra liquid luck to brew up some of the truth potion. And basically it’s just an infinite liquid luck cycle.
Chris: Yeah, the liquid luck was too far, should not have done the liquid luck.
In cases where we had, you’ve already established lie detection via heart rate, showing that it’s fallible is definitely better than nothing.
Oren: Fallible, having it require some fairly onerous conditions in order to use. The Vulcan mind meld isn’t as bad because not only do they have to physically touch you, but they have to say this long “my mind to your mind” thing, which it’s pretty easy to create scenarios where that can’t happen.
Chris: I also have to say with the heart rate, you’d think somebody’s heart rate would go up if they’re in pain, people are scared, or excited for whatever reason, and so you can eliminate torture as a good way to detect lies if you’re using heart rate because if you torture them, their heart rate will probably already go up. You use that to ask them questions in a very calm environment where they’re relaxed and not in pain.
Oren: That guy seemed cool as a cucumber, but his heart rate went up when I asked him this question so that might be worth looking into, right? As opposed to, well now we know he’s lying.
Wes: That’s probably a key element. Having just something cast suspicion is better than just saying “we know.”
“Oh, that was odd behavior, not what I noticed that person doing before.” And that’s better than just saying like, “I know.” There’s no intrigue there.
Chris: Yeah, I mean if you really do have a point of view character that can detect heart rate, then that would be something that would flavor the narration a lot in a lot of social interactions.
“Oh, the character’s heart rate just went up. What does that mean? Were they worried about something? Did I say something wrong?”
Oren: What is your heart rate detection range? ‘Cause you could be a mobile heart attack warning system if you get a lot of those around. Can we mass produce this system? And whenever anyone’s heart rate starts to have a problem, we’re like, “Aha! Get that person some help right away!”
Wes: Daredevil, he’s hearing it right? Or is it he’s sensing the vibrations of their hearts?
Chris: He must be hearing it. Pretty sure he has super hearing, doesn’t he?
Wes: He’s different. All of his senses are heightened to where he’s just super.
Chris: The other thing I have to ask is, How fast is this change? I can sometimes, if I’m really close to somebody, have my ear on their shoulder or whatever, hear their heart rate. But I’m not constantly monitoring how fast their heart was, measuring how excited they are. So is this a really noticeable jump that somebody would actually notice?
Oren: That I don’t know. We are going to have to save that question for another time because we are out of time on this episode, so I’m gonna have to call everything to a close. Those of you at home, if anything we said peaked your interest, you can leave a comment on the website at mythcreants.com.
But before we go, I want to thank a few of our patrons. First, we have Kathy Ferguson, who is a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Next we have Ayman Jaber, who writes urban fantasy and knows all there is to know about Marvel. And finally we have Danita Rambo. She lives at therambogeeks.com. We’ll talk to you next week.
One of them is evocative language, and the other is an animal or inanimate object with googly eyes. But which is which? And how are you supposed to use them once you figure out the answer? That’s what we’re talking about this week. We’ll discuss the advantages of anthropomorphized characters, the implications of having them, and why they’re so popular. Plus, a quick lesson on personified language, and Oren goofs about which BoJack Horseman character is which.
Show Notes Redwall * Mouse Guard * Toy Story * The Brave Little Toaster * Thor * Finding Nemo * BoJack Horseman * Animal Farm * A Spell for Chameleon * The Cats of Ulthar * The Dreamlands * Smokey the Bear * The Lion King * Hamlet TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Svend.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast, with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.
Wes: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m your host Wes, and with me today is Oren and Chris, and today we’re talking about two terms that are by far and large used synonymously, but I’m going to explain how that’s wrong, and I’m probably not going to get a lot of fans from this, but it’s fine. And so I’m just going to need to qualify that I’m going to localize anthropomorphism and personification as literary devices, to clear this up.
Oren: I’m glad because I looked these up in preparation for this podcast and the definitions that I found on literary terms.net were the same, but it also says “This is a personification” and “This is an anthropomorphism”, and they were the same thing. I don’t get it. Which one is it?
Wes: It’s incredibly frustrating. I think the challenge is that personification has that word person in it and it’s also easier to pronounce. Anthropomorphism is quite a mouthful, and I’m sure I’m going to mispronounce it throughout the rest of this episode, but the easy TLDR here is it is anthropomorphism if whatever thing is being anthropomorphized is basically a character or a narrator. Full stop. That’s it. And then it’s personification if it’s describing something as if it were human. It’s only description. So the difference is, the anthropomorphism is literal in the story. Personification is figurative in the story.
Chris: Personification is fancy description.
Wes: Exactly. So if we say that the wind howls or the clouds weep, that is personification because the clouds do not weep, but we’re using that because it’s more evocative, because humans weep. And so that resonates on some level. And I think that’s why we’d like to use that type of language.
Another way that you can remember that anthropomorphism is about literal things like your brave little toaster, having eyes and emotions that are typically human, is the word itself. Anthro, so “human”. And morphos, “form”. Human form. There it is.
Chris: I still think it’s a bad word. I still think whoever made up that word is bad at their job. It’s too long!
Wes: We can blame whoever really liked Greek words because that’s what we have. I do agree though, it’d be nice if there was something a little bit more accessible, really. Shorter, easier, cleaner.
Oren: All right, here. I got it. Humanify. That’s easy, right?
Wes: You need to trademark that immediately. Oren will show you how to properly humanify things for your stories.
Oren: Yeah, that doesn’t sound awkward at all.
Wes: We should probably mention really quickly the other meaning of personification, and this is used more loosely. It’s not in the same sense of the literary term and it basically means that someone or something embodies a particular quality or concept. And so basically all Pantheonic faiths, those are personifications. So Thor is meant to be the personification of thunder and lightning, and so he’s thunder and lightning given human form. It’s basically saying, “That human essence is this abstract concept given human form”. It’s very much still anthropomorphism, I think, but for some reason that’s included in the dictionary and we have to talk about it.
Oren: What about if you say, if someone’s really mad, “That person is the personification of anger”? Because that’s the thing someone would say.
Wes: Yeah. You can say that. It’s just like you might say that the absolute monarch of your fantasy kingdom is the personification of modesty. You’re basically saying that that person is the exact embodiment of this concept.
Chris: Well, that’s figurative, right?
Wes: Yes, it is figurative. Yes.
Chris: So we’re saying they’re figuratively the personification of modesty. Whereas if they were actually, literally the personification of modesty, they would be a spirit or god-like figure that is modesty. Like death. If we have death as a character, that’s literally the personification of death.
Wes: Which has been anthropomorphized into a humanoid shape, and therefore, anthropomorphism.
Chris: It’s too much. It’s all spaghetti. It’s all tangled together.
Wes: The other thing here is, more often than not, it’s probably anthropomorphism. If you’re doing The Lion King, pick a Disney movie, it’s anthropomorphism. But we tend to personify things more as writers because it’s more evocative. It’s better at imagery. Oren, you had an example of the town huddled. The town itself cannot huddle, people huddle, and so it’s personification.
Oren: Right, until Disney or Pixar makes a Towns: The Animated Movie where it’s a bunch of little towns with googly eyes and they’re like, “Hey, we exist!” And I’m like, “I have so many questions”.
Wes: That’s a perfect example of anthropomorphism right there. We want everything to be little tiny humans with cute smiles and googly eyes.
Oren: Man, I cannot think of an anthropomorphized universe that does not have horrifying implications. You’ve got Mouse Guard, which is all about anthropomorphized mice, and it’s like, “Okay, does that mean everything in this setting is sapient, or just the mice?” And if it’s just the mice, then does that mean that all predators are sapient and they have to live by constantly murdering other sapient creatures?
Wes: I remember in elementary school really enjoyed the Redwall books and the food descriptions in those are phenomenal. And then I remember thinking, even as a kid, “Wait, how do they get cheese?” Are cows just voluntarily making it for them? Who is doing this?
Chris: Is it mouse milk cheese?
Wes: Is it mouse milk cheese?
Oren: Okay, look, it could be mouse milk cheese. That only squicks us out because we don’t typically make cheese from our species’ own milk because it’s more efficient to get it from cows.
But the thing about the Redwall books is that Redwall solves this problem with racism because in Redwall it’s like, “Hey, these animals, the vegetarian ones, are good animals, and the ones who eat meat are bad animals”. And so that’s the solution. It’s “Yes, it’s true that everything is sapient. And it’s true that predators are evil, because they exist. And so therefore they’re bad”. Whereas Mouse Guard doesn’t do that. And so it has a lot more questions, but less racism.
Wes: So we’ve really been talking a lot about the differences between the two and the rationale. And personification is commonplace because it’s figurative and hopefully it doesn’t add unnecessary style to your writing. Anthropomorphism is something that is a good tool for writers to consider. And I saw online a good example of why anthropomorphism can let us tell stories that we would not be able to tell otherwise if we just had human characters. And this story was Finding Nemo. You can’t do Finding Nemo with humans. You have to anthropomorphize the fish. Otherwise the plot breaks. It doesn’t work. We don’t keep people in aquariums.
Chris: One way I think about anthropomorphism versus personification is that anthropomorphism is always speculative fiction because we’re changing reality. And I do think that in general, ideally, your speculative fiction story depends on those speculative fiction elements and you can’t take them out or the plot breaks. What would Toy Story be if those weren’t toys?
Oren: I would argue that you can do these stories without anthropomorphized animals. You would have to change a few specifics, but not much. It’s not hard to do a story about a human who loses their kid and has to team up with a weirdo to go through alien environments to find their kid. That’s actually pretty common. It can’t specifically be a clownfish because that’s not a human anymore, but in this case, the fact that it is an animal adds some important and, I would say, useful qualities. For one thing, it’s novel. Animals are cool and novel and also cute, so it adds novelty that’s useful.
It also often makes the stakes feel a little bit less intense, which is one of the reasons why it’s useful for stories for younger kids. Not always though, because my favorite example of a story that is anthropomorphized for no reason, other than that without it, it would be a miserable story, is BoJack Horseman. There’s really no plot reason that BoJack Horseman has to be a horse man or why his girlfriend has to be a cat. You could turn all of those characters into humans, and you would barely have to change anything about the story. And yet watching that sounds like a nightmare. I don’t want to watch that. And I think it’s because BoJack Horseman is about very low stakes—at least low in terms of life threatening—low stakes, high drama, personal stories. And the fact that they’re all animals is something that gives it novelty to keep us interested. While we get attached to the characters, if BoJack Horseman wasn’t a horse man, he would just be a jackass. Boom. Puns, good. And we would never watch the show long enough to get attached to him. Him having a horse head is what makes the show worth watching. The show is the horse head. Mind blown.
Wes: Mind blown. You bring up a really good point. Anthropomorphism really can help spark imagination, create more vivid characters—not necessarily BoJack, but other stories. And you see this a lot, Chris said, in speculative fiction. And so of course we’ve looked at folk tales, children’s stories, fairy tales, and there are symbolic dimensions that come if your protagonist is a horse or your protagonist is a wolf. That’s going to be associated with it because we all have symbolic associations with certain types of animals. There’s a reason why George Orwell picked the pigs as the ones who take over the farm in Animal Farm. Pigs are associated with greed generally, even though they get a bad rap. They’re really delightful.
Oren: I thought it was because pigs are very smart in real life.
Wes: Well, they are really smart in real life.
Oren: Oh no. George, George, why are you demeaning the pigs?
Wes: How rude. But it makes sense too that he has the sheep in the story that blindly follow the pigs’ orders. And he also has Boxer, who—I’m not sure if Boxer’s a Clydesdale or just a really big, strong horse.
Oren: He big. That’s all I know.
Wes: And he’s also perhaps the personification of hard work.
Oren: One thing to be careful of, speaking of personification, again, if you’re doing spec fic, which you probably are if you’re listening to us, is being careful with how you personify things, because readers will very often read that as foreshadowing. If you describe a dragon pin and it’s eyes seeming to look around the room and sparkle with an inner life, a lot of readers are going to think that means that dragon pin’s real and it’s going to come alive soon. And if it doesn’t, then they’ll be like “But the dragon pin, with the spark—were you lying to me? Did it not actually sparkle with an inner light?” ust go on the internet and tell lies.
Wes: Yeah, that’s great advice because we all want it to do that. We all just want your jewelry or your phone to spring to life and just do something. We crave it.
Chris: Especially the beginning of the story where the audience is still learning about the world. If you have a very specific world and they already know what the rules are for what is magical and what is not, and the themes that the world follows, then it’s a little bit easier to put those things in because they already know, just like for the real world, what is clearly not going to happen. But especially in the beginning that can really trip somebody up.
Oren: Because at the beginning they’re still learning your genre convention. They don’t know which tropes you’re using.
Chris: It’s hard to imagine how little context somebody has when they start your story, what it’s like to start that fresh, because we already know what our worlds are about and sometimes what’s going to happen. Maybe not if you’re discovery writing, but for the most part, we know those things, so it can be hard to imagine the amount of thinking that a person has to do when they start a story. Just figuring out, What is happening? Where are people, what are they doing? Very basic things like that, and it’s very easy to throw a wrench in that.
Wes: So if you are doing a story with anthropomorphized characters and main character, you probably should make it clear that your main character is a cat when describing that character early on. Somehow. You do not want to save that unless you’re planning some very strange reveal.
Oren: Reminds me of the opening of A Spell for Chameleon where it doesn’t describe anywhere what the main character looks like or what he is. His name is Bink, which is a weird name. And then he starts thinking about going to centaur school, and I’m like, “Is Bink a centaur?” And he’s not a centaur. It means it’s a school where centers teach. I have no way to know that from just these opening paragraphs. It sounds like he might be a centaur.
Chris: I just know that after this podcast, I might get like a question in our Q&A box that’s like “Okay, I have a main character that’s a cat. How do I gracefully work in that this character is a cat?” We get all kinds of questions like that. It’s really hard to answer those questions because there’s just so many different things that you can do and it’s so context dependent. It’s like, Your character could start licking their paws and washing them. What kind of anthropomorphic cat do we have? Because there’s a lot of variation. Does your main character wear clothes, for instance, and all of these different levels of just how human-like that animal is.
Oren: Excuse me, Chris. Some cats were sweaters. Let’s not rule that out. I don’t want to live in a world where my cat isn’t allowed to wear a sweater. Another thing that’s very useful for describing what your character looks like if they are a fantasy creature or if they are in a world with fantasy creatures, is by contrasting them with something else. If your character is a fairy, they might see a human and be like, “Whoa. That human was very tall. Unlike me, a fairy, who is really small. And they don’t have wings, unlike me, a fairy who does have wings.” And just write it exactly like that!
Wes: That’s perfect writing.
Oren: Take that out of the transcript, copy, paste it into your document and you will win a Hugo. I promise.
Wes: So we mentioned that anthropomorphism adds novelty. And I have a question for you, too. Does it always add novelty?
Oren: I mean, only a Sith deals in absolutes, but I can’t think of a story that had anthropomorphized characters that didn’t add novelty. That doesn’t mean there aren’t any out there. Just not off the top of my head, no.
Chris: I would say for the most part, yes, but with some caveats. For any genre or subgenre of speculative fiction, any tropes can eventually get old. But at the same time, often there is still a dedicated group of fans of that subgenre that continue to be attached to and like and get benefits from things that might be old to other people. It’s not quite as shiny as it used to be. And for instance, it’s hard to imagine animal characters ever getting old. They’ve been around for a really long time. And sometimes they change as our views of animals change and our notions about animals change—and our memes about animals change.
And you can depict them in new and fresh ways to help maintain their novelty. And then, what are we comparing it to? Because if we have a story where it was just about people and that’s our context, and then the one thing we’re changing is making those people animals, that’s going to be more novel. It just is. The other thing that I would generally mention is again, with the theming in your world building, I don’t necessarily recommend always adding animals personified—sorry, not personified. I have just learned today by teacher Wes, anthropomorphized. Anthropomorphized animals. Just throwing those in there in a setting that’s cosmic horror is not necessarily going to be a good addition to your story.
Wes: But Lovecraft tried. I’ve read some of the ones with the cats that are basically humans and…oof.
Chris: Wait. There are Lovecraft stories about cats that are humans? I know there’s fish people, the Deep Ones.
Wes: I think they do qualify probably as anthropomorphized because in the story that I’m recalling—which I think is The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, which I cannot recommend. I just need to let that land. I cannot recommend this—the main character, Randolph Carter, gets taken to the moon by the cats, and then there’s a space battle on the moon where the cats are fighting some other alien race and they can talk but also fly in space. He really liked cats. It was bad. It was very bad.
Chris: That sounds like it has theming that’s all over the place and is just really silly as a result.
Wes: He’s certainly not well known for his dream world stories because they’re all very bad. And the cats feature in that pretty prominently.
Oren: Let me tell you, it’s real weird when you’re playing Call of Cthulhu and the GM decides you’re going to do a Dreamlands adventure. Because you stop playing cosmic horror and now you’re playing D&D, is what it feels like. Because Dreamlands are just kind of a generic fantasy setting with some occasional weirdness in them. And so it’s like, I’ve got my Call of Cthulhu character here, and I’m playing D&D, and this is real strange.
Wes: That’s the best way to describe that. That’s exactly what it’s like.
Oren: But another thing that anthropomorphized characters do beyond simply adding novelty is they almost inherently come with certain themes and allow the audience to suspend their disbelief and not think about certain things before the purpose of the theming. So Toy Story is a good example. Now, if you did the same plot of Toy Story, but with regular humans being like literal play things for giant monster people and they had to pretend to not be alive whenever those monster people were around, that’s horrifying. That is a horrifying thought. It’s not a fun story, but with Toy Story, because they’re toys, it’s very easy for us to watch and just accept that premise, even though within the internal logic of the universe, it’s still extremely horrifying and also really weird. The kid who makes his own custom toys is evil. It’s easier for us to accept that and fewer people ask questions because the characters as anthropomorphized toys come with certain themes that we just kind of accept because that’s what they are.
Chris: Did you know that in Toy Story 4 the kid just makes a random toy in her preschool? It’s just a spork with googly eyes and it comes to life and it’s really sad that it’s not trash and it wants to go back in the trashcan. This is really a thing that happens in Toy Story 4. It is kind of horrifying.
Oren: I’ve never even seen Toy Story 3. I saw Toy Story 2 and it was bad and I was really confused when everyone was excited for Toy Story 3. And I never watched it. And it sounds like Toy Story 4 just goes further.
Chris: I don’t know if I’d say Toy Story 4 is terrible, but it does take this premise to a place where I had not expected by really saying that anything that a child takes, and then, for instance, scribbles eyes and a mouth on, suddenly comes to life. It’s horrifying.
Oren: Why do the toys from the factory? Those aren’t made by children. I mean, some of them are. They shouldn’t be. Is that how you can tell if a factory is using child labor? Those are the toys that come to life—oh no. Oh no.
Wes: You’re about to write Toy Story 5, aren’t you, Oren? We gotta get to the bottom of this.
Oren: Pandora’s box is open. We can’t ever close it again, I’m sorry. It’s just an endless stream of horror.
Chris: That’s why some premises just aren’t made to be examined. You should just leave it. If you don’t cover it in the story and don’t make it plot relevant, nobody will look too closely at it and then people won’t be horrified. But Toy Story 4 decided to go there.
Wes: It’s almost like—and this is something that you can do with anthropomorphism much more easily, although we just showed that it can backfire—that maybe there’s a message and maybe Toy Story 4, okay, “This toy that was made is created, and wants to be trash.” And we’re the writers thinking, “We’re going to do a story about nihilism. This toy that came to life simply wants to not exist. And we’re going to explore that through anthropomorphized toys.” But because they’re toys, a really heavy theme is lightened.
That’s also nice because it works with anthropomorphized animals. When we talk about Smokey the bear and other types of stories that are trying to convey messages for younger audiences because they might resonate more with watching dogs and cats do and learn about respecting other sapient creatures and showing that all animals are sapient and we should treat them with respect. So it definitely gives you a little bit of leverage there and gets you outside of that human box that you might be trapped in.
Oren: What we’ve learned from Smokey the bear is that you need bears to brainwash children into not starting fires. Because they won’t do it if a human tells them not to. It’s just going to want to start the fire more.
Wes: You really don’t want a bear upset with you.
Chris: Well, in Toy Story 4 the toys are often a metaphor for parenting, actually, in the Toy Story series. So Toy Story 4—Toy Story 3 was about watching your kid grow up and letting them go. Andy goes off to college in Toy Story 3 and then Toy Story 4 is basically about being an empty nester and having a life beyond kids. And so I think that the horrifying created spork toy that wanted to be in the garbage instead of being played with was supposed to play into that theme of having a life other than kids.
Oren: I don’t know how they expect these toys to be a metaphor for adulthood if they don’t have to pay rent or get depression. This seems silly. I don’t, I don’t get it.
Wes: I want to circle back to Finding Nemo because I would like to add a little bit about why that story works with fish. Yes, Oren is correct. Of course, we could change the elements, keep the story basically the same, but what’s neat is if you have a passion for something in the natural or unnatural world—for example, you are very much into birds, and you know a lot about birds, and you might be able to tell a compelling airborne story through anthropomorphized birds, much in the way that Finding Nemo told a very compelling story that got to explore an underwater paradise/nightmare in some parts.
So that gets back to the novelty factor, but it also lets you play with things in different ways, much like how The Lion King is anthropomorphized characters. It’s drawing on blind pride culture in the savannah to effectively just retell Hamlet. It’s just the Hamlet story with some minor changes. But it’s completely nuanced and stands alone because of the setting and the animals and things like that. It’s pretty cool, what you can do with that shift in how you’re literally constructing your characters.
Chris: One question I have is, it does feel like there is a strong link between anthropomorphism and stories for children, and it may just be that children are always playing with inanimate objects and they love animals. And those things go together. There are some darker stories that involve that, but they’re fewer and farther in between. I’m wondering if it’s just that it’s association with children or that we need time to get used to the idea of anthropomorphizing things so that it doesn’t feel silly anymore. Beause if it feels silly, then it’s definitely harder to use in a dark story.
Oren: If I had to guess, I would say that anthropomorphized stories work pretty well for children’s stories because children are even more attached to novelty than adults are, would be my guess. And there’s also just custom. A lot of this is just that Disney, the man—not just the company, but the person Walt Disney—was very foundational to America’s animation industry, and he wanted to make stuff for kids. So that made a very strong push towards animation being for kids. And anthropomorphism is much more common in animated stories than in live action. And that border is starting to blur now. Thanks, Cats.
To a certain extent, there’s just that tradition, that started for a somewhat arbitrary reason. But I do think that, at least from my experience—admittedly limited experience—with kids, it’s harder to get a kid to sit down and watch something, because, “Don’t worry, little Timmy, in a few hours, you’re going to get a really good reveal about how you shouldn’t concentrate too much power in one set of hands.” And it’s like, “What? No, I don’t want to watch that and we’ll play outside.” Or, “Here’s a talking fox.” Oh yeah. Way into it now.
Chris: I’d like to go back to the point you were making about animation versus live action, because certainly when it comes to anthropomorphizing something that is not even humanoid, it is definitely in many ways easier to just animate that character than it is to bring into live action. And obviously we’ve gotten better at live action and we have a number of techniques. I don’t know that CG is always what we’ll want to use—but that starts to look animated, if we use CG. So I think that means that if we are depicting in visuals and we tend towards animations, then often we end up with something that is simplified visuals.
I mean, animation can be really dark, too. It doesn’t have to be light, but it still has that same association with children, and when we simplify things. Whereas darker stories are associated with realism. And so live action in some ways does lend itself very well to dark stories because of that realism aspect.
Oren: Well, that’s certainly true. However, speaking of realism, we are realistically out of time for this episode. Boom. Segue.
Before we go, I want to thank a few of our patrons. First we have Kathy Ferguson, who is a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Next we have Ayman Jaber, who writes urban fantasy and knows all there is to know about Marvel. And finally we have to Danita Rambo and she lives at therambogeeks.com. If anything we said piqued your interest, you can leave a comment on the website at mythcreants.com, and we will talk to you next week.
Sometimes in writing you just know what to do, even if you can’t say why you know. That’s your gut in action, your writerly instincts making themselves known. But how does writing with your gut actually work? What are its strengths, what are its weaknesses, and how can you improve it? We discuss all of that, plus some special advice on how to improve your dialogue by lurking in chat rooms!
Show Notes Should You Outline? * The Four Critical Elements That Make Stories Popular * Five Concepts for Becoming a Better Storyteller * Blink by Malcolm Gladwell * The Magicians TranscriptGenerously transcribed by Bunny.* Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.
Chris: This is the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is…
Wes: Wes.
Chris: And…
Oren: Oren.
Chris: And I’ve got a bad feeling about this. But that’s good, because now our podcast has more tension.
Wes: Oh, I see what you did there. Nice.
Chris: So our topic is writing with your gut, and it’s worth starting by defining what that means. It’s a pretty common saying in writing, but not everybody is keeping up with the latest, new, hottest books on writing topics. Basically, it just means using your feelings and instincts when you’re writing. And often, specifically, when people talk about using your gut, they mean choosing story events when you’re writing because they feel right in the moment. They feel like that would be a good way for the story to go, that would be engaging, or that would be riveting or what have you.
Oren: Well, the only good advice I’ve ever gotten from my gut was not to trust my gut. So I’m not sure if I’m the best person to talk about this.
Chris: Yeah. Let’s get right into it and some of the reasons why I want to talk about it. So, one of the biggest discussion points when it comes to using your gut is sometimes writers debate whether a discovery writing or outlining is better. They should probably not be debating these things too hard, but nonetheless they do. Discovery writing is also called pantsing. It’s when you’re writing and you’re making it up as you go. You’re kind of improvising the story as opposed to outlining or planning the story ahead. And the main criticism I see of outlines or planning is the idea that if you ad lib, you’re able to follow your gut more easily to make the story more powerful.
Oren: Oh man. The most annoying part of writer discourse I’ve ever seen was after Game of Thrones season eight when everyone was like, “Ah, you see, the problem here was that they planned too much and wound up with an ending that didn’t work for their characters because they were just so committed to the ending!” And it’s like, no, the problem is that they were bad at writing. We know that. They even told us that they completely skipped out and phoned in the last season. There’s not anything deep to discover here. It’s just a regular, boring case of bad writing.
Wes: That’s so funny to me. [Sarcastically] The problem was they planned too much. Yeah, sure.
Chris: To be charitable to this viewpoint, I do think that some writers probably do have more trouble getting in touch with their gut when they are outlining, because you’re a step removed from the story. Not everybody has the capacity to look at an outline and feel it out. Now, the thing about using your gut is that it just isn’t mutually exclusive with outlining or planning your story, but sometimes, people definitely can have an easier time getting into the mindset of what’s happening in the moment or their character motivations versus if they’re looking at a more bird’s-eye view, abstract representation of the story.
Wes: The other really challenging thing is planning just seems accessible. I can sit down with paper, and I can chart it out and just grind on my plan for this story. And how do you practice trusting your gut, following your gut? There are certainly ways to do this, and we can talk about some, but it’s less accessible, and that’s one of the frustrations that I hear when people talk about writing with your gut. There’s a chance they’re not going to explain that process very well, and then it can come off as maybe a little pedantic, like, “Oh, I just knew what that character would do. I just trusted my gut and it has never failed me.” And I’m like, “Well, that’s great for you, but how about the rest of us who are trying to practice our craft? What do you mean, trust your gut? How have you learned to trust it?” Like Oren said, I agree: I don’t trust my gut at all. I keep that thing at bay because I don’t know where it’s going to take me.
Oren: It’s such an alien concept to me when people say, “Well, this character just told me what they were going to do or what they were going to say” and “I just knew. That character is alive and talks to me.” I’m like, “I have to actively think about every single thing my characters do.” That’s why on my first draft, my characters all sound the same. They all just sound like me because I don’t know what they’re going to say. I have to go back after I’ve written it and be like, “All right, let’s change the way this character talks so that they don’t sound like every other character.”
Chris: I think that is the trick. This is the one of the reasons why I generally don’t support using process advice in place of actual theory when it comes to storytelling. Process advice is like, “Go out and listen to people, or read books, or imagine the scene ahead of time.” They’re all about what your process is to come up with the writing. And the problem is that it doesn’t teach you what was wrong with your writing. It’s not necessarily reliable. What happens if you do that and then nothing changes? And so, with the gut issue, the most common advice I see is to read good stories, and maybe it does help some people. I do still have questions: if you still need to train your gut, how do you know what stories are good?
Wes: I’m a proponent of reading widely, and I think maybe the main qualifier there is that I don’t think you need to necessarily read good books. I think you need to read books in your genre that people are talking about. Maybe they’re bad, and that should be fine, because that means you read widely in your chosen solar punk genre or whatever (we still want that really bad, by the way! I had to plug it.). If you read widely, I find that you start digesting a lot. You pay attention, you start seeing what the conflicts are, who the characters are, and the plots, and then you can start seeing maybe what is repeated throughout, what might be contrived, what’s old, what’s cliched, and so on. It’s beyond just reading. It’s almost like you need to actively study that, and then you do internalize those things over time. I mean, it’s one of the reasons why, Chris, you and Oren are just phenomenal in your critiques. It’s because you guys have such a breadth of knowledge on so much media that you draw on these things really easily. You can just watch a show and then critique it. And you have so much experience that you’re drawing on that because you’ve consumed so much media and you’ve spent time talking about it. And that’s kind of what I’m getting at here. If I sat down to write a western, I would have no idea what to do because I don’t really know if there are conventions that I need to follow beyond hats and guns.
Oren: No, that’s about it.
Wes: Okay. Nailed it! And so I think that if we’re advising people to read it, you should read widely and with intent. It’s a bonus, because there is the pleasure element that you get from reading the stories, but you should consider what your purpose is as well and see if you can apply that.
Oren: First of all, Wes, thank you for saying such nice things about me. The way I would have described that is read critically because that’s how you can actually get use out of reading stories, either in your genre or just stories in general, because if you don’t read critically, then at best, you’ll end up soaking up both the good and bad things that the story does and you won’t have any way to tell them apart.
Wes: We’re really talking about school, aren’t we? Jeez. If you’re just reading critically and not necessarily sharing what you’re reading with anyone in whatever forum – in-person or online, however it suits you – you might not see what’s good, what’s bad, but what’s worthy of discussion or not. You might take something and say, “Oh that seems fine.” Because you don’t maybe have the context for why that was bad.
Chris: One thing that I think is good to mention about all of the media that we consume – and definitely this is something that I actively do as I consume media, and it really helps that I spend a lot of time thinking about it and writing about it – is that we try to go beyond the gut when you consume a story and do what we call intellectualization. I know it’s a huge mouthful, but it seemed like the best word for it. We try to take all of those feelings that we feel when we consume a story and actually figure out, in intellectual terms, how we can quantify why we had them, why we didn’t, and then come up with guidelines for them. And for me, that’s what all of that consumption is for. And I guess the biggest thing I want to say about the gut is that people tend to think of it as opposed to your intellect, that those are two things that are fighting with each other or on opposite sides. In reality, I really think that they should be working together, and thinking about the gut in isolation of the intellect… if I didn’t have my gut, I would have no data with which to come up with intellectual guidelines for how to do storytelling. My gut tells me when something is working and when it’s not, but it can’t tell me why. Only my intellect can tell me why.
Oren: Right. And, as a dev editor, being able to intellectualize this stuff is actually a requirement because I need to be able to tell authors what they’re doing wrong and how to do it better. And if I couldn’t do that, then I’m not really a dev editor. I’m just a beta reader, at that point.
Chris: And going back to what we were talking about before with, like, “Oh, how do you train your gut?” It’s hard to quantify. Sometimes people end up giving process advice. That’s a result of not having the intellectual tools and ideas and concepts to support what your gut is doing and to understand it. I wish the human brain just had a way to attribute feelings. I wish it had a mechanism by which I can tell why I’m feeling this feeling. But it just doesn’t. You have to poke around in there and measure your feelings until you figure out what is causing feelings. It’s very irritating.
Oren: And at least in my experience, being able to intellectualize these things helps you do better with your gut as well. Because, at least for me (and we’re getting into process here again), when I do things, I tend to start with an outline where I start with some element of the story that I like. Some element that really sprung into my mind. And I do kind of write with my gut from there because I don’t yet have a formula to produce a good story. If we make one eventually, that could be pretty cool. I don’t have one yet. And so at that point, I kind of am writing with my gut. I’m like, “All right, this is a story about a lady who has a dragon front arm. That’s a pretty cool concept.” And I’m like, “Okay. And then a bad thing happens. Uh oh.” And that’s because my gut knows that there should be conflict. And as I go, I’m doing this in the outline phase because my gut is going to get some things wrong, because I’m just not consciously processing all of the data that I might need if I was going to try to write this out completely intellectually. And if I do it in the outline phase, it’s easier to go back and be like, “Oh yeah, okay. So that thing where it turned out her foot was a rabbit, that was kind of a neat idea, but it doesn’t go anywhere.” My gut was wrong on that one, so I can take that out. Whereas if I was doing this in the full draft, that would be a lot of work. I don’t want to go back and revise my whole draft more than I have to.
Wes: Was the rabbit’s foot wrong because the arm kept trying to eat it?
Chris: In stories where it feels like the storyteller was optimizing for what felt good in the moment and not looking at the big picture, I’ve noticed a problem where you end up with a story that’s a series of really clever moments that don’t actually make sense once you think about them. For instance, you’ll have a cute moment where one character is surprised to see another character, but then right after, you’ll learn that they had every reason to expect that person to be there. Things like that happen. This is what really bummed me out about the first season of Magicians. It’s not the only thing. I really did not like the first season of Magicians. But I noticed that all over the place, where it felt like the writers were optimizing the scene at the cost of the episode.
Oren: Because if you don’t have any kind of planning, then you don’t have a way to make things come together at the end, which is important. And you can come at that from a number of different angles. You have people who are like, “Well, you either have to think of the plot or you have to think of the characters.” And it’s like, “Well, no.” You need a satisfactory ending either way, and you can either create a satisfactory ending and then go back and make characters who will get you there, or you can work on your characters until you get the characters that you need to reach a satisfactory ending. Those are both perfectly legitimate options. Either way, you need to work on it.
Chris: As far as training the gut goes, another thing that I like to point out is that a new storyteller doesn’t necessarily know what tension feels like. We’ll tell you what tension is, and if you know that intellectually, that is a feeling of stress or uncertainty or suspense, but it does take some practice to know what that feels like, and I don’t think of it is training your gut. I think of it as training your brain to pay attention to your feelings. Basically, if you are in touch with your feelings, you will be a better storyteller.
Wes: You’re absolutely right. When you pitched this podcast idea, a few books came to mind. One of them that I read by Malcolm Gladwell is called Blink, wherein he’s basically looking into why and how we can make split second decisions. Is there anything that’s informing us? And he draws from a wide range of social psych, research, and experiments and things just to say that our experiences inform us. The people who are more in tune with reflection, self-analysis, and things like that tend to be able to explain their rationale better, or they’re not surprised why they chose something.
They can rationalize it more beyond what Oren was saying about, “Well, that’s just what the character told me that they would do!” It’s like, “No, I know that this is the case because of X, Y, and Z.” It’s just this general notion that it’s requiring quite a lot of, I like your guys’ word, intellectualizing. Those experiences and those emotions are what’s allowing you to make these decisions. There’s very much that conscious element to making gut decisions. They just come later, after a lot of experience in work.
Chris: Definitely, when I’m consuming stories, a lot of times what I am doing is that hard process of, “Okay, I know it, when I see it, but why?” I’m trying to find patterns between different media that explain the feelings and why they happen. I don’t think process advice should ever replace those intellectual lessons. If you feel something that’s wrong in your gut, and it can’t tell you why, only that it’s not working, having your intellect there to give you reasons why it might not be working and ideas for improving it, I think is really important. But at the same time, having the right process for some people could really help them evoke feelings better, particularly for getting into characters. Some people might find that if they do their character backstory, they have a much better, stronger feel for that character and have an easier time using their gut for that character than they would if they didn’t do some of those process things. But at the same time, we have to understand what the goal is, so that you can test process options and see if they work for you and know that they work for you or not.
Oren: Yeah. That’s why it’s so important to understand, just from a philosophical standpoint, that there are ways to make stories better and ways to make stories worse. And this is just a thing that a lot of people have trouble with, because some of us are used to the idea of storytelling as this completely subjective thing, that it can be anything and all stories are equally valid. With that viewpoint, it’s just very hard to improve, because you can’t construct the actual framework that you need to judge the story’s final result, which is what we do at Mythcreants. If that was something we believed, the whole point of Mythcreants would be pointless.
Chris: And of course there are some factors, like taste, which can make it really hard to use your gut. Definitely, if you’re writing a story that is optimized for wish fulfillment for people like you, it might feel really good to you and not feel good to other people. So that’s another limitation that gut has. But at the same time, I think when it comes to things like tension and pacing, it’s really essential to be able to take that gut measurement of when something feels tense enough. It can be really subjective how much tension you’re creating in a scene and whether that tension is enough to stretch out past this slow scene. And there are some good guidelines for what is too much, too many slow scenes or too many fast-paced scenes. That also happens. If you have action scene after action scene, it can just feel exhausting. They start to lose their effect. So there are guidelines about that, but I still think it’s very valuable to take that gut measurement to know when we’ve had too many slow scenes and we need to speed back up again, or vice versa.
Oren: Although I was going to say that determining how much tension you should have in a story is another place where your gut can steer you wrong because of your personal tastes. One of the things that varies a lot between readers is tolerance of tension. Tension is generally good and it’s required for most stories, but everyone has a degree to which the tension is too much. And, of course, that level changes based on your mood and all bunch of different factors, but everyone’s range is different. And if your range is particularly high or particularly low, you can end up with some pretty skewed stories where the tension is either really low because to you that’s like, “Oh boy, that’s a lot. I put some salt on my food and it’s just too spicy now, too spicy!” Or, if your tolerance is really high and you’re just tossing on jalapenos, like, “I don’t get why other people have a problem with the scene. There are only fifteen disembowelments. What’s the issue?”
Chris: Yeah, that’s a hard one. I’m still figuring out best practices for that a little bit. I do think that a lot of times shifting the type of conflict might be the best way to deal with a lot of those differences, as opposed to making the pacing really slow and it feels like the tension is completely dropped, for instance. I mean, you certainly wouldn’t want a story where it feels like an action story sometimes and then the characters hang around for three chapters and all the tension goes out the window. At the very least, you’re not giving the audience what they expect or a consistent amount of tension. But I think that a lot of people who don’t like high tension in their stories tend to enjoy a lot of personal stakes instead of life-or-death stakes. But yeah, a lot of new writers still have to learn to add more tension and don’t have enough tension. And as a result, a lot of times editors and other professionals will be pushing them to add more tension. And a big question for me is, at what point are we just adding tension for the sake of tension and catering to a different set of readers that like higher tension? And at what point are we doing a good thing that is overall strengthening the story? That’s a hard question.
Wes: No clear answer, either. You got to trust your gut with that one.
Chris, What I tried to remember, though, is that a broken plot, even if it’s low tension, isn’t low tension for the right reason.
Wes: Something that you should consider, too, are your friends, your acquaintances, your family, and their reactions to things. For example, if you’re consuming a show with someone, or if I’m watching a show with Oren or Chris, and they have a reaction to something that I do not have, it would be worth your while to just have a discussion about that. Because I, too, suffer from the problem that Oren brought up, wherein all the characters I’m writing or conceiving of are just me. They’re just the same person. And if you can have an opportunity to ask people why they reacted to something, provided you’re doing this gently and not probing them or asking anything too rude, you might learn quite a lot about behavior. A lot of us can consider a close relative or a friend and wonder to ourselves, “Oh, what would my best friend do in this situation?” And you might have a pretty good answer for that, because you know that person very well, probably because you shared experiences or they’ve told you about their experiences. This is all stuff that you can kind of use, as well, because gut is going to apply to all the characters in your story, the decisions that you’re making, and how you’re modeling them off of other people are off of your own planning. So I just think that there’s certainly a human element that you might want to consider as part of your process.
Oren: That actually brings me back all the way around to what I’ve talked about in other podcasts, where I think it’s actually a better idea to get beta readers from people you know than internet randos because with people you know, you at least have some ability to judge what they like and don’t like, and so you can see how their individual tastes, may be flavoring their reactions. Whereas if you just connect with some internet rando, you have no idea what’s going on in their head and like what stuff they like and don’t like, and what their biases might be. And not to say this is a perfect process with people you know, but at least you have somewhere to start.
Chris: I think a really good example is, I had one story where the end worked for most of my beta readers, but I had one beta reader who just couldn’t believe what the protagonist did at the end. And after asking her some more questions… and again, I think when it comes to probing more information, if you really are there to ask for information, and you don’t try to give information, if you use open questions and you don’t tell the beta reader anything about your story, I think you’re usually okay. I think it’s when you try to explain yourself, shall we say, that it becomes a problem. But what I found out was that she had attributed a motivation to the protagonist that was different than what was written in the story. And it was almost certainly because she was projecting herself onto the protagonist. She felt that the protagonist had specific needs that she has, that the protagonist does not have. Mostly, she assumed that because she loves doing challenging tasks and challenging her intellect, that the protagonist had the same need. So I have definitely found that to be true. And it does help if you know the person. And also, I do think that somebody you know is probably going to be more willing to answer your follow-up questions and take that time in general to try to give you the information that you want to know. So, yeah, that can definitely be true. If you put yourself in a place of always being interested in why they had the feelings they have, you can learn a lot of really interesting things from beta readers, if you’re not as concerned with whether or not there’s something objectively wrong with your story. Firstly, I think reactions like that are just really interesting. They tell you a lot about human psychology.
Oren: A smaller area that your gut can be very helpful for, and it is one place where I think training your gut is relatively easy, is dialogue, because dialogue is quite tricky. In dialogue, we are trying to mimic what we think people sound like, not what they actually sound like, because then you would have “uh”s and all that nonsense. We don’t want that. But you’re still trying to make them sound natural. And I have read a lot of manuscripts where one of the author’s problems was that they did not know how to do that. They did not know how to write dialogue that sounded natural, but not the way people actually talk with all these filler words and repetitions and all that nonsense. And in that case, just reading good dialogue is generally a pretty good way to train that. And just trying to sound like what that dialogue sounds like is, I think, a reasonable way to go, if you’re having trouble.
Chris: It seems like it might be helpful to, instead of listening to people talk when we’ve got all of these “um”s and “like”s and filler words that you don’t want in your dialogue, look at how people chat online. Nobody inserts “uh” and “like” in their chat messages, but it’s still a casual, conversational back-and-forth mode of communication.
Oren: If they do insert an “um” or a “like,” it’s to make a specific point.
Chris: Exactly, and we would do that speaking as well.
Oren: All right, well, we are just about at the end of our time, so I’m going to go ahead and call this episode to a close, but before we go, I want to thank a few of our patrons. First, we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Next we have Ayman Jaber, who writes urban fantasy and knows all there is to know about Marvel. And finally, we have Danita Rambo, and she lives at therambogeeks.com. We’ll talk to you next week.
Chris: If you enjoyed this podcast and want to slip us some gold-pressed latinum, head on over to patreon.com/mythcreants. We appreciate it.
Chris: This has been the Mythcreant podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.
