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

Transcript

Generously 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 5. 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 5. 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.

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