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

Transcript

Generously 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.

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