Show Notes

• Bat Flight Speed 
• Animal Companion 
• Temeraire 
• Shadowfax 
• Narsil 
• Bill the Pony 
• Torrent 
• GoT Dragons 
• Appa
• Naga
• Llyan
• Catbus 
• Moya 
• Sisters of the Vast Black 
• Yakul
• Fuunsaiki
• Chocobo 
• Maximus

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Sofia. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast. With your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.

[Intro Music]

Oren: And welcome everyone, to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren. With me today is…

Wes: Wes

Oren: …and…

Chris: Chris.

Oren: Now, saddle up, partner, cuz it’s time to ride into the sunset! But on what you might ask. What is your personal steed, the best mount for you in all of speculative fiction?

Mine, the most gentle, most mild-mannered horse you can find, because I can’t tell horses what to do and they know it. So, if I get up in the saddle and the horse has any opinions of its own, we’re just going wherever the horse wants to go. So, I need you to get me a horse who is just the chillest. The most chill horse you can possibly imagine, and then I might be able to get it to go somewhere.

Wes, what’s your preferred mount?

Wes: This is assuming I can just ride it: I just want to ride a bear. They’re fuzzy and adorable and they’re also terrifying monsters. And I want to ride one.

Oren: Bear Cavalry. Yeah, I’ve played War Hammer. I know all about Bear Cavalry.

Wes: Exactly. They’re super handy.

Oren: Chris, what do you got for us?

Chris: I would like to ride a giant bat.

Wes: Awesome.

Oren: Yeah. That’s great.

Wes: Is part of your deal with using a giant bat as a mount that you have to also sleep upside down, strapped to it?

Chris: Look, it’s just easy to find a stable cuz you don’t need it on the ground. You just find a place for them to hang.

Wes: Yeah, that’s smart.

Chris: They can fly, they’re very manoeuvrable, and they should be fuzzy too.

Oren: Depending on the kind of bat, they also might just be very fast. Apparently, bats are some of the fastest flyers in level flight. Falcons get all the attention because they can dive really fast. But if you just want to go like cross country, bats are often your best bet.

Chris: Yeah, they thought that bats were really slow and then they put some trackers on them and found out that some bats go much faster sometimes than they thought.

Oren: There’s apparently some contention around the current bat speed record, which is very fast, but also there’s questions about how it was measured. I’ll let the bat scientists figure that one out.

Chris: If we’re talking about mounts, does the Mount need to be an animal companion or can it also be a character?

Oren: Well, I’m not a mount prescriptivist, so I think that it’s flexible enough that often the mount is a character. Not always, but that’s pretty common.

Temeraire is probably the example that comes to my mind the easiest. Cuz Temeraire is a big old dragon and he talks and he’s his own character. But Laurence also rides on him, as do a bunch of other characters, cuz he’s very large. He’s still a mount, even though he’s also another character.

Chris: Admittedly, when I tried to think of mounts that were cool, I came up a little disappointed. It’s not as many as I thought. And a lot of them are dragons. People just really wanna ride dragons, the mount of choice.

Oren: The reason why I think it’s harder to come up with examples is that in a lot of cases the story will be like, and this is Billinar and he’s the greatest horse cause he’s real big and real fast at running. That’s the weapon problem, they’re trying to make your character’s signature weapon neat because it has +5 to attack and damage.

Chris: Rude of you to call out Shadowfax that way.

Oren: Shadowfax is a little more memorable than your average Lord of the Rings horse because he is established to be the Lord of all Horses.

Chris: Yeah, but he just does everything that other horses do.

Oren: He does. I’m not saying he’s great. I’m just saying that the fact that he has a title makes him a little more memorable because that gets people thinking like, what does the Lord of Horses do exactly?

Chris: That is the only reason I can remember him at all.

Oren: Because of the memes, because the memes.

Wes: But it’s kinda the exact same thing with Narsil, the sword, right? Is there anything special about this sword? No, but it’s a sword-y sword. It might be the sword-iest of swords.

Oren: I can remember Bill the Pony much better than I can remember any other horse in the Lord of the Rings books, with the exception of Shadowfax. And the only reason I remember Shadowfax is because of the memes asking what it is to be Lord of all Horses.

But no, you know what the best fantasy horse is? This one’s not a character. It’s Torrent from Elden Ring. I love my horse from Eldon Ring. First, he has like a pair of antelope horns for no reason. I don’t know why he has those, but it just makes him stand out.

Chris: And the other horses don’t.

Oren: Apparently not, you don’t see a whole lot of other horses, but I don’t think they do. So, I don’t know why he has those, but that’s a thing. But you can see him from the side. He’s clearly all horse. He just has antelope horns for some reason.

He’s also very mechanically useful. He’s got the double jump feature. Without that exploration in Elden Ring would be basically impossible. And he opens up all new kinds of combat. So mechanically, he just makes a big difference once you get him. Story wise, he picks you because he believes in you.

Wes: Aw.

Oren: And you know how rare that is in Eldon Ring? Nobody believes in you in Eldon Ring. Even your maiden, Melina, she doesn’t really believe in you. She picked you because there was nobody else. But Torrent, he thinks you’re cool. He thinks you have what it takes. And it’s just, yeah, Torrent, I don’t think you’re a great judge here. You’re a horse, but I really appreciate the gesture.

Chris: So should we talk more then, about what a cool mount should have? You’ve listed the things that I was gonna say.

For instance, distinctive features. If it’s another horse, how do you tell it apart from all the other horses? In this case, Torrent has some horns. We don’t have an explanation for the horns, but they do make the horse distinctive. Obviously, an unusual species is good, making the mount distinctive.

The next thing is personality. Does it do anything other than exactly what the rider wants? Does it have any things it’s scared of or any strengths or inclinations or other behavior that kind of sets it apart from just a vehicle you are driving?

Oren: The personality really is what makes your mount different from a motorcycle. If you look at stories that wanna make the vehicles more prominent, they give the vehicles personalities to make them more like mounts.

Chris: It feels like the mount still exists when the protagonist is not riding them.

Oren: Torrent doesn’t have that. He literally vanishes when you get off his back.

Wes: But he still believes in you.

Oren: He lives inside this little whistle I have.

Chris: Animals need care.

Wes: That’s a good point, Chris. Don’t forget that your mount is a living creature and you can’t just put it in the shed like a sword. You can just put the sword down and not treat it. Good mounts are not treated as inanimate objects.

Oren: If you build up the attachment in a mount, you can’t just trade it in for a better one the way that you would a weapon, because you’ve built attachment to it. Supposedly, the character really is supposed to care about this creature, at least they probably should if you’re trying for that kind of relationship. And so if you’re just like, no, I’m trading it in for a better model. No.

Looking at you Avatar! Not the last Airbender, blue people avatar. He has that whole thing about bonding with his one special dragon and then he’s, actually, I need a bigger dragon, and we never see what happened to his original one. It’s just gone.

Chris: But the Game of Thrones dragons, because it is important to the plot where Daenerys actually has to manage their food supply. They’re more than just political tools.

Oren: And it takes a long time in reading terms before they become adults that she can ride. In universe, that’s a ridiculously fast growth rate. That’s the thing that’s pretty common in fantasy, is that giant creatures that you’re gonna ride also grow super-fast.

Chris: Anything that’s young grows at an astounding rate.

Oren: But the Game of Thrones books are so long that even if you read them back-to-back instead of having to wait a million years between when they were published, it still feels like it takes quite a while for Daenerys’ dragons to mature to the point where she can actually ride them. Of course, she has them for four or five books. So that helps a lot too, right? That builds more attachment with them.

I also think that when you are writing a mount of some kind, you should also give some thought to what it actually allows your protagonist to do. And even a horse has a lot more functionality than just going fast. Being on a horse means you’re higher up and you have more momentum, so you can see farther and you have an advantage in fighting. And your horse, if it’s properly trained, can even fight with you.

If you get a more exotic mount, like a fantasy creature or even something like an elephant, that’s gonna change, right? What your mount can and can’t do will be very different. So that’s just something I’d recommend keeping in mind when you’re thinking of effects this will have.

Wes: That’s kind of part of the novelty factor with cool items that let you do things that you can’t otherwise. And a mount compliments you by providing options for you to do things that you can’t otherwise do. My bear mount can climb really well, and all I gotta do is hold on.

Chris: I think Appa, who is a standout mount in general, is really good for that because he facilitates the plot by just allowing them to go from one end of the world to the next much faster. They can even sleep on him, but he does eventually need to sleep himself, and he’s big, but he does not fight. He’s too scared.

Oren: Except for sometimes when he does fight, mostly he doesn’t cause he’s OP.

Appa is an interesting example because generally the writers of Avatar are very good at remembering that Appa exists even when he’s not being used for transport.

So, it doesn’t feel like he just disappears in a pokéball whenever they get off of his back. Although it is also notable that he can fly. So, when they do need him to not be around, he can just lift off into the sky. And that’s a little more convenient than a standard, very large mount would be.

Chris: It’s notable that in other stories, Appa might make traveling too easy, but Avatar the Airbender relies on a lot of traveling to make the plot work. We wanna zip around and tour the whole world and see all the temples, etc. And so that’s really valuable.

But in another story, they had an issue in Dark Crystal just because some of the female characters can fly and they needed to travel for distance and they needed it to be hard, so it would’ve been very bad if Appa had been there.

Oren: You do really wanna calibrate the kinds of transportation that you have to the sorts of things your character needs to be able to do, and you don’t want to give them a big old flying mount if they can just fly over all of their problems.

Temeraire has the same issue and they generally handle it pretty well. But there are a few instances where there’s a bit of a contrived, we’d better sit down over here so we can get ambushed, get supplies.

Wes: This is, we don’t really ever know what to do with flight. We want things that fly cuz they’re cool, but then we’re like incompetent.

Oren: But same thing can happen in reverse and that’s why Pabu [Naga], I think is his name, the polar bear dog that Korra has, is basically a non-entity and it’s because he’s just not capable enough. So, he can carry Korra faster than a person can walk and he can swim. But Korra’s a water bender; she can already cover ground much faster than that just by herself if she wants to.

Chris: And she does spend much of the time more stationary than Aang does.

Oren: And if she does need to go somewhere, she has access to all of these advanced vehicles. We literally don’t need this dog for anything. It’s not like they couldn’t have found a way to make him important, but it would’ve been much harder and they were clearly not really interested.

So, he seems like he’s gonna be important and then he just fades away as the story progresses. Except for one time when he shows up and knocks down a big set of iron bars. And is he strong enough to do that? That feels like more of an Appa thing, but I don’t know.

Chris: My personal opinion is that the very best mount is Llyan from the Prydain Chronicles.

Oren: The big cat?

Chris: Yeah, the bard rides a cat.

Oren: Yeah. I love the big cat. Yeah, no, giant cats are great.

Chris: He’s about to get eaten when he realizes that he can play the harp. And the cat likes the harp.

Wes: That’s right. Oh, it’s so good.

Chris: So, the rest of the books, he’s just riding a cat that has a will of its own.

Oren: Cat’s distinctive, it’s got its own personality, it’s not overpowered because he can’t really fly. They’re often so overmatched by their enemies that having a cat mount who will help them fight is pretty handy sometimes.

Wes: Cat-type mounts don’t show up a lot. Does anybody even ride lions and tigers?

Oren: In real life? No.

Wes: Oh yeah.

Chris: The believability of getting a cat to go where you want it to go.

Wes: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But that’s why it works well in the Prydain because the cat enjoys the music and is, okay, I am choosing this. I’m allowing this to happen.

Oren: It’s not fully sapient, but it’s smart enough to make a kind of deal: Sure, I’ll carry you around as long as I feel like it and as long as you play me music that I like, but I might eat your friends.

Wes: I guess the other kind of cat mount, I love it, but it also freaks me out, is in My Friend Totoro: the cat bus.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Oh yeah.

Wes: Oh man, that thing is so weird.

Chris: Do we really wanna step in here?

Oren: What’s important is that the inside of the cat bus is also furry. The fur extends inside. Don’t think about the alternative.

I think it was Children of Blood and Bone that also had cat mount. Yeah. I think the protagonist had a big old kinda lion-type creature that they rode around and that was fine. It wasn’t super memorable just because other than being a cat, it basically functioned largely like a horse would.

This isn’t its fault, but it was unintentionally funny: They’re all surrounded by the guards and the guards are about to kill them, and then the brother shows up on his big cat mount. The action scene just pauses as it describes him riding up, and then them getting on, and then them riding away. What were all the guards doing?

Chris: Look, it would’ve been very rude of the guards to attack them while they were escaping, okay?

Oren: It wasn’t their turn.

That happens a lot in the later Animorphs books. Not really related to mounts, but the bad guys pausing while the heroes gradually leave. That’s a hard thing to do when you want your protagonists to run away from a fight is you realize that, oh yeah, the bad guys could just chase them.

I also like how you can occasionally get cool mounts in sci-fi with living ships.

Chris: Yeah, you gotta ride in those space whales.

Oren: And the most obvious example that people are probably familiar with is the one from Farscape, which is certainly notable. Moya is the name of that one. I remember not really liking that one cuz it’s been a while since I’ve watched Stargate [Farscape]. But I remember feeling like Moya, oddly, her personality came off as really inconsistent because sometimes it felt like she cared about the people on board and then sometimes she was just doing stuff that would kill them and they’d be like, oh, that’s just Moya. Sometimes she just tries to kill us. And I don’t know, that felt a little weird to me.

A book that I’ve read recently that I really liked is called Sisters of the Vast Black. And they’re a bunch of nuns and they hang out on a living ship, which is also their convent called Our Lady of Impossible Constellations. Which is just a fun little ship and you get to know its personality and its quirks.

And the mechanic is also a vet, which is just neat. It decides it wants to mate with another ship and they keep it safe while that’s happening and that’s just a fun little sequence. Story does get much darker later for warning for anyone who reads it, but that part was fun. I liked it.

Wes, do you have any favorite mounts you wanna bring up?

Wes: So what about like underwater mounts? Those I don’t think get a lot of attention because swimming and if our protagonists actually take any action in the water, they’re probably capable anyway and/or part fish.

Oren: I think the reason you don’t have a ton of underwater mounts is just that by the time you’re giving a human the ability to act underwater to the level that they need to do most adventures, it’s also assumed that they have a swim speed.

The Aquaman movie recently has whales that the characters ride around in. In the most recent Black Panther movie, the Namorians, I forget their name, but Namor is their leader. They have whale troop transports, which very politely just drop the troops off and then swim away so that we don’t put the Wakandans in a position of having to kill whales.

Chris: Avatar Way of Water, of course we gotta upgrade to the new water animal just to help them go faster and they ride along and they have whales that they talk to. But those don’t really feel like mount so much as they’re friends, but they have like smaller underwater animals that pull them along.

Wes: The lack of underwater mount, like in our stories. It’s just that, I guess, water’s just not accessible no matter how we really spin it. I know we have talked about it’d be cool to have more like ocean-based stories. It’s harder maybe to conceptualize. It’s easier to think giant eagles are cool mount. They can get you where you need on land, but it’s okay, I’m underwater now. I need to go into the abyss and am I gonna ride in a giant angler fish?

Oren: Yeah, I’m into that.

Wes: Actually, yeah, that sounds cool.

Chris: If we change people enough, if we have a story where we want people to fly or a story, we want people to swim, we stopped using mounts as much because now we’ve given the people transport capabilities they need themselves. So there’s just less reason to have mounts.

Oren: To have underwater mounts, you basically need a situation where your characters can live and do stuff underwater, but not super fast. Basically, the same dynamic that we have on land. We can walk around and do stuff. We don’t need mounts to move, but if you wanna move fast, a horse is pretty handy. So you would need to do that.

And there’s no reason you can’t. I just noticed that most authors tend not to, most authors by the time they create mermaids, they’re like, but also the mermaids should just be able to swim fast enough that there’s not really any reason for them to have mounts.

Wes: Mounts also transport heavy things and water makes that easier.

Oren: Although again, it’s just a question of how much. It’s easier to move stuff underwater, but how much easier? So, you could do it. It would require a little more extra effort.

I have some fun, honorable mentions that aren’t super great but are fun. My favorite is Fuunsaiki, I believe is how you pronounce it, is the horse from the anime G Gundam. And he pilots a Gundam, which is a horse and is human, is on a human shaped Gundam and gets onto the horse Gundam, which is piloted by a horse. That’s the kind of show this is.

Chris: And so, does the human Gundam ride the horse Gundam?

Oren: Yeah, absolutely. And it has to use the reigns, the giant, like Gundam reigns.

Chris: No wireless technology.

Oren: Can’t just tell the horse where to go on your cell phone. That’s not gonna work.

Chris: At what point are we just replicating the entire world and giant-mech-form? Why don’t we just put everybody in robot suits?

Oren: There are some Gundam shows where the giant robots actually feel like giant robots as opposed to people with smaller people inside them. G Gundam is not one of those.

There’s also Yakul, the red elk, which looks like an antelope. I tried to find out if the red elk was like a real animal. If it was, I couldn’t find it. But I was always confused when they called it a red elk. Cause it doesn’t look anything like an elk that doesn’t have antlers. It’s got horns that is taxonomically inaccurate. I thought it was pretty cool.

Wes: One that comes to mind, might rival my bear choice, are chocobo. I like birds that you can ride who are also cute.

Chris: What is that from?

Wes: Final Fantasy introduced the chocobo mounts, which are like ostriches, but way better.

Oren: What if an ostrich was big enough to ride?

Wes: What if an ostrich is big enough to ride and super cute and came in a variety of colors?

Oren: In Final Fantasy VII, you spend a lot of time grinding chocobo races.

Wes: You really do.

Oren: Assuming that you wanna do the extras, right? If you just wanna beat the game, whatever, you don’t ever need to. But if you wanna beat the big optional bosses, you’re gonna need to do a chocobo grinding.

Wes: There’s something fun about flightless birds that function as mounts. I think that’s a cool concept. And I know that chocobo is a bigger, more popular version of that for anybody who’s played Final Fantasy games. But I’ve yet to see another one.

Oren: There’s a cutscene in Final Fantasy X. That really shook me for a second because it shows a bunch of armored chocobo knights riding into battle, and I was not expecting to see the Chocobo. It’s like a badass animal. It’s Final Fantasy X, but as far as I’m concerned, the modern new Final Fantasy game.

Wes: That’s right. Can’t quite keep up.

Oren: That’s when I stopped playing.

Chris: We also have Maximus from Tangled.

Oren: Do they ever actually ride Maximus?

Chris: I don’t think the other protagonists do. So Maximus is the steed for the captain of the guard. So Maximus starts as an antagonist. It’s more like Maximus is the rider and the guard is like decoration because Maximus is the one who’s actually doing all of the clue finding to follow the protagonist around trying to catch them. But then I think when Maximus goes on their side, if they ride him, it’s not for very long guard.

Oren: The guard captain is basically a hood ornament that Maximus has to make it easier for him to get places.

Chris: Doesn’t have to explain himself, as long as he just has a human on his back. Everybody will attribute everything he does to the human.

Oren: All right, I got one more from the very first Animorphs book.

This felt like the players doing a clever idea that the GM was just not ready for, and so arbitrarily said didn’t work. So what they do is they’re like, okay, we know where the Yeerk pool is, that’s where the yeerks keep all their hostages when the yeerks are not in their heads. So we’re gonna raid there and free a bunch of people.

So, Cassie says, I know, I will morph into a horse and then I can carry some of the people out. That’s a good idea, Cassie. Good plan. Applegate’s like, actually, I can’t let you do that because if you free anyone, then my masquerade wouldn’t make sense. For a number of reasons, That doesn’t work. All the people you try to free either fall off or die.

Chris: Oh, that’s terrible.

Oren: Except for one woman who they managed to get out with and then that woman is never mentioned again. No idea what happened to her. But I did think that was a creative bit of thinking on Cassie’s part. I appreciated that.

Chris: Since this series is about the horrors of war.

Oren: Ooh.

Chris: Do you maybe think that this is supposed to be an analogy for the terrors that prisoners of war go through and in a middle-grade story about kids transforming into animals?

Oren: Yeah. It’s very dark and serious, let me tell you.

I think that’ll about do it. Now that we’ve gotten the horrors of war into our fun horse podcast, I think we’re gonna have to call this one to a close.

Chris: If you enjoyed this podcast, consider supporting us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons:

First we have Callie Macleod. Next, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson who’s a Professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.

[Outro Music]

This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Colton.