Balancing Player Identification and Characterization in Interactive Fiction

Show Notes

• Chooseco Lawsuit 
• As Dusk Falls 
• Eldrin Ring 
• Stray 
• Twine 
• Choice of the Deathless
• Mass Effect’s Ending 
• The Mako 
• Fallout New Vegas Ending 
• Oxenfree  
• Character Karma 

Transcript

Generously 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: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Oren…

Chris: …and I’m Chris. 

Oren: And joining us again, we have special guest Bunny. 

Bunny: Hello, and I have a very special scenario for you two. So you find yourself on an unfamiliar podcast with three strange voices speaking right in your ears. Would you like to turn to minute 15 to hear the voices talk about Mass Effect? Would you rather turn to minute five to hear them cackling? Would you rather turn the podcast off, to exit?

Oren: No, don’t turn it off. Because if you exit, then we basically die. That’s how that works. [laughter]

Chris: I being a person who likes creepy stories, I’m gonna have to go with the cackling, actually.

Bunny: Okay, good. Writing down note, cackle at minute five. [laughter] Okay, yeah, but anyway, all this is to say, now that you have turned to minute, probably about one inch of the podcast, that we are going to be discussing interactive narrative today, which is an umbrella term for a couple different types of interactive stories. But most broadly, people associate this term with video games and tabletop role playing. And also those little books you had as a kid where you could, like, turn to this page to befriend the dinosaur.

Oren: Yeah, the surprisingly trademarked Choose Your Own Adventure novels.

Chris: You can’t use that term–trademarked. [laughing]

Oren: Yeah, I tried…there was a lawsuit between Chooseco, the company that owns Choose Your Own Adventure, and Netflix over–Bandersnatch, I think it was? The Netflix choose-your-own-adventure movie. But as far as I can tell, it isn’t over the term. I don’t think Netflix ever uses the term “choose your own adventure”. So it was unclear to me what they were suing over. And I couldn’t tell if they were actually just suing over the concept of being able to do that. And they settled out of court, so we don’t know.

Chris: You own all of interactive storytelling? [laughing]

Oren: Yeah, you just own the concept of moving to different points in the story based on choices that the audience makes. That’s a pretty ambitious trademark right there.

Chris: Good luuck! I think that would also require a patent. Not that you should be able to patent that. It’s too broad and generic. But that’s definitely not something that trademark covers.

Bunny: Right. And the interesting thing I think about interactive narrative is that there’s a lot of different ways to define it. And obviously, the ontology of anything is pretty squirrely. But as far as I can tell, there’s a couple different general structures that interactive narratives tend to have. The most obvious one is the branching narrative. It branches off exponentially based on the choices that the player makes. And, a good example of this is the game As Dusk Falls, which is basically just a branching narrative game. This would apply to any of those text-based, choose your own adventure–parody, satire, parody, satire, fair use. [general laughter]

Any of those types of novels probably qualify for that as well. Obviously this can get like choice bloat, but that’s more a question of writing it. There’s also circumstantial branching, which I’d call a subset of branching more generally, which is when you have little branches on, say, side quests or talking to certain characters, but the main story is linear. And then there’s, I’d say, branches divided by linear success state gameplay, which is my fancy way of saying you gotta not die for a section before you can progress. So this would be like, you got to run across the room and kill the baddies, and then you get the next section of story, which may or may not be branching.

Oren: So what you’re saying is that I’m not stuck on a boss, I’m stuck on a linear success threshold narrative point.

Bunny: Yes. Copyright trademark. Copyright trademark.

Oren: I’m gonna tell people that the next time I can’t get past Margit at the start of Elden Ring again. [laughter]

Bunny: Well, that’s what I say whenever people are like, how far did you get in Stray? And I’m like, aaah, I’m currently involved in a linear success state gameplay trying to get past these Zorks, or whatever they’re called.  [Transcriber’s Note: “Zurks”]

Chris: When I think about it, I’m looking for the point at which interactive storytelling diverges from non-interactive storytelling, because they have some different principles. And you can’t necessarily take everything from one and apply it to the other. And, my feeling is that any situation in which player slash reader choices change the outcome of the story kind of changes it more into interactive storytelling rules. And that even combat, where the only story branch is just this continual, “you die, or the story continues on its linear progression”, still counts.

Bunny: Yeah, that’s an interesting argument.

Chris: Because in order to not die, the player still had to get involved, and do something. And, when we talk about choice, when we talk about character agency in a non-interactive story, that includes their success or failure after making some kind of effort, right. The choice could be very intentional or not. In interactive storytelling, it can just be a skill test, right? But nonetheless, the player had to do something there in order to get the non-die outcome.

Bunny: Oh, wait, hold on. Hahahah. Hahaha. Hahahahaha.

Chris: [laughing] We’ve gone to five minutes?

Bunny: Yeah, we’ve been past five minutes. Anyway, continue.

Oren: See, that’s called fulfilling foreshadowing. [general laughter]

Bunny: I think a more common definition of it, though, would be that, like a truly interactive story would mean that something that progresses even if you fail, like you don’t have to succeed this challenge for you to get more story. Whereas something like that has this sort of interactive, then you gotta do the combat, and then interactive. Sure, you can die any number of times, but that’s not happening in the story because you need to succeed the conflict to progress.

Oren: Maybe it’s not happening in the story. Some games are really unclear about that. Is the respawning part of the story in Elden Ring? Some of the dialogue suggests it is, but also most of it says no. So who knows?

Chris: Although I’m going to argue that the differences, the biggest differences we see between interactive and non-interactive are still present, even if in that linear storyline where the branches are all you die because you failed your boss fight.

Bunny: Yeah, maybe. On the other hand, when you’re writing an interactive story, what you don’t want is for it to feel like you’re writing a book, but then at the end of every chapter, you have to get up and play basketball until you can read the book again.

Chris: I agree that’s not very good interactive storytelling. [laughter] I’m sure some games might have other ways of entertaining people, even if the story doesn’t have a lot of branches, but certainly that’s not a very interesting story. If it’s interactive, people usually expect a little more than that, I’m thinking.

Oren: Yeah, if I was going to get into video game design here, it’s not so much that I mind linear storytelling, but let me put it this way. I expect more gameplay elements if the story is more linear. If the story is basically a novel, and at the end of each chapter, suddenly there’s a boss fight that I have to do, that’s a little weird, right? It’s like reading text, reading text, oh, fight? Oh, okay. Read more text, read more text. Technically, that’s an interactive element, but it would feel odd. I don’t mind video games with very linear storytelling, assuming the story is good, but if they’re going to do that and there’s going to be gameplay, I just want the gameplay to be a little more present. And it usually is. I can’t think of a game where I’ve encountered this theoretical problem of it basically being a book, and then suddenly there’s a fight every once in a while. [general laughter]

Chris: I think at the very least, oftentimes if you just have your Twine interactive novel, or whatever, you would have, hey, do you want to explore this room? And there’s things that you can look at ,and you’ll get more details as you want, but they don’t necessarily change the story going forward, but there’s still choices you can make about your experience.

Bunny: I think that’s, oh, I hope I’m not using this term wrong. I think that’s hypertext fiction. One of the earliest forms of online interactive narrative were these hypertext things where you walk around and say, you see a tree, and you can type in, “take banana”, or something like that. Obviously, we’ve moved a lot beyond that, but I think that’s the sort of thing that you’re describing, right, Chris?

Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Oren: The Platonic ideal of this kind of game is always the story that has all these branching choices, and each branch that you pick matters, and they all lead to different endings. And that’s all cool, but you gotta be careful there, because it’s easy to bite off more than you can chew. 

Chris: Yeah. I’m interested in hearing from you, Bunny, on how do you keep that branching bloat from getting out of hand? Because I know certainly you can get into trouble with having way, way too much material to write.

Bunny: [laughing] So, this week I wrote the chapter from hell. So, yeah, I thought I’d been doing pretty good. So, basically, I am writing a Twine story currently, and I’m trying to keep it like as a simple thing. I’m one person. I’m planning to finish it by the end of the summer. On the first two chapters, we’re like, okay, so the character can make a choice about how to interact with it, like this person, and see if they get angry. And if so, that’ll affect things down the line. All right. They can choose whether to keep or quit their job. That seems pretty straightforward. And I got to chapter three, and I’m like, it sounds like there’s three main choices for where they can go in this chapter. That sounds doable, right? No, that was not doable, because each of those had to involve a conversation, and each of those conversations branched into a hellish tangle. And then each of them had to culminate in a specific character interaction I needed to have for this chapter to be complete, which branched in itself, and which also needed a different description based on where this character was encountered.

So, yeah, bloat pops up where you don’t expect. And what I have to say about this is plan, plan, plan. Because, I think the mistake I made with this is that I’m someone who tends to like, I plan a bit, and then I see how it unfolds. I should have planned more. I knew broadly where I wanted the story to go. But if I had given it a bit more thought, I would have been like, hey, maybe I shouldn’t have three or four main branches in this that will then branch exponentially into themselves. [laughter] If you’re doing–the standard branch thing is one branch, one node, that branches into two nodes, and each of those branch into two, that’s 2 to the N. You’re going to quickly run out of energy.

Oren: And this is, of course, much worse if your game has any kind of visual or art assets that need to be worked on. To say nothing of enemies, if you’re doing something a little more complicated. There’s an interesting series of tweets from the head writer of Dragon Age II where they talk about how it’s real weird how the Archmage is the final boss, and he gives the same speech regardless of whether you choose to side with him or not at the end. And the reason for that is that they ran out of time. They knew that wasn’t a great ending, but there was just no time to write and then animate and then make into gameplay a separate ending for what happens if you side with the Archmage. So we just got this weird squashed bit.

Bunny: Yeah, and that’s one of the dangerous parts, right? If you commit to making an interactive narrative, you damn well better make it interactive, right? You gotta avoid these bloats, but you’ve also gotta make sure that there are still tangible impacts on the story, on both the story level, and on the scene level. That’s generally what people expect. Now, the different structures I was talking about earlier, there are different ways to approach it. If you approach it from one particular structure, versus another particular structure, you might have some built-in ways to block bloat. For example, there’s a type of pattern that’s basically like a diamond. So you start at one node, everything branches out, and then everything comes back into the next node.

Chris: So the different choices end up leading to the same place, basically.

Bunny: Yeah, pretty much.

Chris: Mass Effect 3?

Bunny: [laughter] Oh, we’ll get to that. No, no, no, you’re a minute early. Hold on, we don’t get to talk about Mass Effect yet. [more laughter] So this would be a game where, or a story, for example, where it takes, like, maybe you play three main events, or something like that. And I’m thinking right now of a game called Choice of the Deathless, which is just an interactive novel, basically. Where you progress through the same three events, or same three or four events, no matter how you play the story, but how each of those events unfolds is different. And the larger story level choices, a lot of those are in how you develop relationships with the characters, rather than how you affect the most major outcome of the story. So that’s one way to add structure.

There’s the game I mentioned earlier, As Dusk Falls. Its ethos is to never branch more than three layers deep, which is a design ethos that’s really hard to stick to, because oftentimes it’ll just feel like you should be branching further than this, and you aren’t. But that’s what you need to do as a storyteller.

Chris: So what does “three layers deep” mean, exactly? Does it mean that you only have three different versions of the story at once?

Bunny: Yeah, I think more or less it’s that the nodes can only branch three times.

Chris: Total, throughout the whole story?

Bunny: I think it’s that they can branch three times before coming back together.

Chris: Okay.

Bunny: In some way. And this is for the, I think this is mostly for the minor nodes, because that story is actually fairly branching on the story level, but on the scene level, I think it’s this three layers deep thing. Oh, and yeah, Mass Effect. Anyway, say what you were saying about Mass Effect, because it’s time now.

Chris: [laughter] There was the obvious complaint at the end of Mass Effect 3 that all of the three big choices, some people found them satisfying, but they all felt the same at the end. Oren, yeah, you could definitely go into this in more detail.

Oren: I find that one fascinating, because I think that people definitely didn’t like it, for legitimate reasons. It’s not good. But, I also think that a lot of the critique was not in the right place, which is unsurprising. The people who were upset are not professional storytellers or game devs. They’re just players. It goes back to that issue we were talking about last week, where you’re getting feedback from people who are not storytelling experts. So the things they say are sometimes going to sound pretty wild. For example, I’m not really convinced that at the end of Mass Effect 3, the issue was that all your previous choices didn’t have a huge effect on what your options were.

Bunny: They didn’t have a massive effect?

Chris: [laughing]: They didn’t have a “mass effect”, yes.

Oren: I’m not actually convinced that was the issue. I think that this would have worked fine as an example of that diamond pattern that Bunny was talking about earlier, because, regardless of what you do, you end up going to fight the Reapers. And, I think that’s fair. I don’t think anyone was too upset about that. I don’t think anyone was super mad that you end up having to go up onto the Catalyst. I think the Catalyst’s problem is that it just doesn’t make any sense. That’s not a branching story issue. That’s just that it’s a bad plot point. But then you get to the three choices that they offer you, because they felt that there had to be choices, because that was the expectation. But then, of course, not only are all the choices bad, because your options are, “blow up the Geth and your best friend EDI”, “become one with the Reapers”–how could that go wrong? Or “force everyone in the galaxy to become part robot”? That’s the one that is supposed to be the good choice?

Chris: [laughter]

Oren: So at the end, you basically have three terrible choices which are being forced on you by the Starchild who appears out of nowhere. And at that point, it’s not even a branching issue. It’s just a basic agency problem of, “Sorry, Shepard, there’s nothing you can do except these three options that I, an NPC, are giving you.” And that’s a problem. Even if that was in a novel, it would be awful. Everyone would hate that. So, I do think that at this point, people often say it would be impossible for them to make the ending have all of your different choices matter. And I actually don’t think they needed to. I think they’d already done the hard work on that by giving you a bunch of different companion quest endings based on what you’d done previously.

Bunny: Certainly with the sort of open world RPGs, or, Mass Effect isn’t really an open world RPG, but games of that scale, I should say, a lot of their branching components branch out around quests rather than around a main story. And so I think games like Mass Effect use this to a really great advantage, because while there is a loose or, yeah, I guess a looser main story that’s going on, you can still get the satisfaction of having a large input into how certain quests turn out, even if you don’t have that massive size of an effect on the main story. [Chris laughing] You see what I did there?

Chris: So you can have fewer versions of the main story, in exchange for just having an extra version of a smaller side quest.

Bunny: And Mass Effect is actually one of those games I’d probably categorize as having story divided by success/failure states. And a confession of mine is that I started trying to play Mass Effect, and I’m just terrible at the combat. Like, I’m dying over and over and I can’t get to the next part of the story.

Chris: Did you get into the Mako?

Bunny: Did I get? I made it to the Citadel.

Chris: I started Mass Effect 1 and then as soon as I started trying to use this vehicle called the Mako, I just, it was just, no. That thing is the worst. I would just stop playing, and hand the game control over to my partner and make him do that portion for me. [laughing]

Bunny: Maybe I need to hire someone to get me past this then.

Oren: Look, it’s been long enough that we’re allowed to be nostalgic about the Mako and pretend that those sections weren’t absolute butts. [general laughter] But all I think that Mass Effect’s ending really needed in terms of choices was to be a little more like Fallout: New Vegas’s ending, where there are several different choices you can make that determine how the story ends, and they don’t depend on the millions of different minor choices you’ve made, right? Nothing in the game is tracking whether or not you were nice to the doctor who first wakes you up at the beginning, or whether you robbed him. That’s not going to have an effect on the ending, and I don’t think anyone was expecting that, but you get to side with the NCR, or the Legion, if you’re a weird sadist, or Mr. House, if you like Ayn Rand. You have those options, right? Those are meaningfully different, whereas the Mass Effect ones all look the same and have the same ending cutscene and are all bad, and end in the same result no matter what, except for in one of them EDI and the Geth are dead. [laughter]

Bunny: And New Vegas does an extra thing well, which is that if you did do a lot of those quests, you get allies show up, and it’s a whole thing, and you can feel good about that even though it’s not necessarily a huge…it’s not like you get a wildly different ending if you didn’t recruit the Boomers.

Oren: Yeah, but also the ending cutscene and the epilogue, you get, “hey, that quest you did, this town is prospering because you fixed their water main”, or “everyone in that town died, because you poisoned their water main”. [laughter] That’s the sort of thing people are looking for, right? And it doesn’t have to be that many. It’s not an unsolvable problem, as some people thought it might have been, early. It’s just that the end of Mass Effect 3 is bad. That’s just really all it comes down to.

Bunny: [laughing] Yeah, sometimes they just be bad.

Chris: I’d like to just, if we can, loop back and mention the things that are different, interactive versus non-interactive storytelling. Since we talk a lot about the basic principles, I think it’s interesting to look at, why does interactive storytelling change other things, right? So that you can’t just take storytelling theory from non-interactive stories and apply it to a video game, necessarily. I think obviously a big one is the audience identification with the protagonist. Because, if you’re making choices for a character or, again, doing combat for the character, or whatever you have, the audience is much more likely to see themselves as that character. You can have people in a novel identify as a character, like, that happens, but I think it happens a lot more with interactive mediums, and that’s why there’s so many conventions to encourage it and cater to that further. Like having silent characters, because if your character talks, sometimes it can be, like, oh, that’s not me.

Bunny: And that’s actually one of the challenges of creating interactive games, is that you have to balance the fact that people are going to bring their own personalities and choices to the game with having a character that seems distinctive. One character that’s really distinctive is Alex in Oxenfree. She’s snarky, and you can choose to make her a little meaner or nicer, but she’s got a very distinct way of speaking, and maybe that’s not how the player themself would speak, or maybe they pick a choice and they’re like, oh, Alex, I didn’t mean for that to sound rude. [Chris laughs] That’s one of the challenges, is giving the player characters a pre-existing personality, but still enabling that personality to be affected, but not set by the character. So that’s balancing player identification with characterization. So you risk alienating the player and reader if it feels like they just can’t control this character because it would be like if Alex was just constantly the snarkiest.

Oren: Yeah, it’s like when you pick an option, and suddenly the character, it’s like you have your three dialogue options and you pick the one that’s, “I would like to get past this guy”, and then Shepard responds by shoving him against the console. It’s like, “Wow, Shepard, that was a lot more aggressive than I thought this was going to be”.

Chris: I accidentally got in a romance in Mass Effect that way. I was just trying to leave the possibility open, but then it turned out to be, like, “You’re right, there is something between us”. I’m like, “Noo, that’s not what I wanted!”  [laughter]

Bunny: That’s funny. Okay, there’s the difficulty of the player identification and characterization question, and then, more fundamentally, I think we also need to mention the paradox of choice, where more player freedom means less structure in which to tell a story, and more likelihood that the story will be disjointed.

Chris: It’s just like running a tabletop role playing game, where your players do strange things, and you’re trying to make the story coherent somehow.

Bunny: And I’m sure Oren has many stories about that.

Oren: Yeah, at least I can do it in real time, and I don’t have to try to predict all the weird things you guys are going to get up to several years from now. [general laughter]

Bunny: And then there’s this concept one of you mentioned earlier, which is, I think it was you, Oren, the platonic ideal of having this infinite reactability, and stuff like that. Was that right?

Oren: Yeah, no, that’s one thing I mentioned.

Bunny: Yeah, this actually has come up in a lot of academic theory about games, and whether or not, it is academic, it’s not necessarily practical, but it is a good question in terms of what should the goals of creating interactive narratives be. And this is generally, it’s called the holodeck theory, which is, we should aspire to create games that move towards something like the holodeck, where the player can act in any way and it will respond cohesively, and still make a good story. And I’d just like to push back on that a little bit, just because I would argue that restriction is part of what makes these games interesting, and that limitation is part of the contract players make with creators. We were just talking about TTRPGs. Those are probably the closest thing to a holodeck, and the player could say that they do anything, but that would make a pretty crappy game, even if you’ve got a really good GM.

Oren: Yeah, and, admittedly, there’s also a certain question of trust, because at least with a Game Master who’s right there, we can talk about things that I want. Whereas, the more choices that you have in a game, the more you have to trust that the developer and you are on the same page, without being able to ask the developer. And that can get a little odd, right? And the more choices you introduce, the bigger of an issue that can become. And, of course, there are people who are now saying, “Chat GPT will let us achieve the holodeck”, and I say I’m skeptical. [laughter] We’ll see. I can’t make predictions on that. But I have my doubts.

Bunny: Yeah, I’m pretty skeptical too. AI’s inclusion in stuff like video games, even just in like roaming enemies and stuff, like, I’m sure that will get better and better. But in terms of crafting a cohesive narrative out of a character that, like, I don’t know, decides to go sit in the corner, because, why not? Instead of interacting with anything. [laughter] I don’t think Chat GPT is going to help you there.

Chris: It’s true. Yep. Even in a tabletop RPG, a good player is trying to make the narrative go forward, too. Right? And everybody is on board, in working together.

Bunny: Yeah, it’s a collaboration. There’s an understanding of the necessary limitations of the form, I’d say.

Oren: And that’s how you can get into the mutual horror stories where the GM is, “my players just wouldn’t engage with any of my material”. And then the players will be like, “and then the GM’s story idea was that we were supposed to murder this town, and none of us wanted to do that”. [laughter] It’s not always that extreme. But, if the GM’s story requires that the players decide to adopt a child, and the players have made characters who would absolutely not do that, you can get at legitimate impasses like that. And that’s why communication is important. 

Chris: Another big thing that’s pretty obvious is just the difference in turning points. Because, we’ve explained this whole character karma thing that novelists do to make it feel like a victory was earned by a character in a situation where the novelist can just make anything up. Right? And just be like, “here, you get victory now”. And how you can’t just make it feel like it was just delivered unto the character by the author. It has to be earned in some way. And when you have interactive narrative, instead, those interactive components always sub in for the turning point, whether it’s a difficult choice, or a random dice roll, or a test of skill. At the same time, I’ve still noticed that a number of video games do have a karmic mechanic, where you make choices. And then you get an outcome like Mass Effect has it’s Paragon versus Renegade gauge. And others have virtue versus sin points, or something like that. 

Oren: Yeah, although those are…in video games, those are notorious for always being bad. [laughter] Because they always end up feeling arbitrary and weird. And Mass Effect is probably the best example, because, especially as the game went forward, it just made them less important. The different Paragon and/or Renegade reactions still matter, it’ll still determine what Shepard does. But they don’t define you going forward, which is the problem that a lot of these games have, where in Knights of the Old Republic, you need to get through this conversation because you’re wasting time, and there’s children to rescue. But if you pick the aggressive option to get through it faster, you get a Dark Side point. And that didn’t feel like a Dark Side action to me. But now my character is Dark Side, forever, because of that. And so that’s just really hard to do. I’m not gonna say impossible, but very difficult.

Bunny: I think another, from a writing standpoint, another thing that you need to pay attention to, because these sorts of choices, you want character development, if possible. One thing that you have to think about as an author, when you’re writing these sorts of things, is that you can’t have a character necessarily at the beginning or end of their character arc when you write the story, because that’s part of the choice component, I’d argue. You have to have a character somewhere in the middle, which is really difficult because then they can go…they can slide backwards, or they can move forwards. And that’s affected by your choice. The hard part is not simplifying that into you’re a Paragon, or you’re a Renegade, or you’re a Sith, or you’re a Jedi. 

Chris: So the idea is that in an interactive story, you’d want the character to be able to get better or get worse.

Bunny: Broadly speaking, if that’s what your story is focused on.

Chris: So there needs to be room for them to move in either direction.

Bunny: So, yeah, if you have a, if you’re putting your player character in and you’re writing, like, oh, I want them to have, I want them to become more confident. What if the player doesn’t play them that way? You have to have the possibility that they regress.

Oren: At least go in another direction.

Chris: At least, if you have the player decide that the character is going to murder somebody. [laughing] You don’t have to worry about likability because the player chose that. I’m sure you would have an issue if you started off a character with, oh, by the way, you’re playing somebody who just killed a bunch of people now. I think a lot of players would not, again, want that imposed on them unless that was, like, the specific draw of that game, which, oof.

Bunny: [laughing] Yeah.

Chris: But if the player chooses to make their character black hat, and do bad or selfish things, then you can just take the character in that direction, without worrying that the player doesn’t like it.

Oren: All right. I think we are now going to have to make the choice to end this podcast.

Chris: No! We die. Game over.

Bunny: Man, you made it linear again.

Oren: Yeah, diamond narrative, I think. [general laughter] That’s what I’m doing here. It’s all coming back to the end.

Chris: If you enjoyed this podcast, 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 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, 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.