The Spectrum of Storytelling: Light vs. Dark Narratives

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 

Transcript

Generously 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 fulfillment 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.