You shouldn’t have any problems keeping up with the references we make in this podcast. You just need to watch several TV series, a bunch of movies, read a nine-book series, and also study Irish history for some reason. Some books feel that way too, with characters making all kinds of pop culture references that readers might or might not have context for. And what should you do when your fictional world needs pop culture of its own? We’ve got some tips, and also some deep cut Star Trek lore, as always.

Show Notes

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Savannah. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny. [Intro theme]

Bunny: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Bunny. And with me is−

Oren: Oren.

Bunny: And−

Chris: Chris.

Bunny: And, you guys, lately I’ve been realizing that like every time we criticize a popular story, I feel like Pauline. You know what I mean?

Chris: Oh yeah, totally. I definitely know who Pauline is.

Bunny: I keep expecting Blinky Bill to show up. Like, come on, we’re gonna end up on the train tracks if we’re not being careful.

Oren: Is Pauline Jolene’s cousin? Is she also worried that someone will take her man?

Bunny: No. You know, Pauline? Pauline stole Jolene?

Oren: There are sapphic versions of that song, so don’t even worry about it.

Bunny: Yeah, what if we start feuding with another podcast? It could turn into a real Musketeers of Pig Alley situation, right?

Oren: Yeah, absolutely.

Chris: Yes, absolutely.

Oren: Were there also− How many Musketeers, did it say there were three but actually four? That’s a Musketeers reference I get.

Bunny: I know one of them’s called the Snapper Kid.

Chris: Wait, one of the Musketeers?

Bunny: This is one of the Musketeers in The Musketeers of Pig Alley, which was a 1910s movie about gang violence.

Chris: Oh yes. The very classic Musketeers of Pig Alley.

Oren: Look, it’s old. It must be good. That’s just how these things work.

Bunny: And The Perils of Pauline, which was another 1910s TV serial, and I bring these up very cleverly because we are talking about pop culture and fiction. And one thing that fiction referencing pop culture often does is that it is set in the future and pretends like pop culture from a hundred years ago is still the hot thing on everyone’s mind.

Oren: It’s the Star Trek thing where they’re like, ah, the greatest people in their field: Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Gababoobadeeboo! And then you−our new character that we’ve just met−it’s like, wait, hang on. Who is that one in the middle? That’s just some rando that’s a Star Trek person.

Chris: At least Star Trek tries. I still remember when they got in big trouble with the UK or Ireland because they added an event.

Oren: Yeah, the Irish Unification of 2024.

Chris: Created a political incident where that episode was taken off the air in certain countries.

Oren: That was a big deal at the time. That was not a good thing to have on TV.

Bunny: Oh my gosh.

Chris: And that’s, again, just because they were trying to make a list of important events, and they needed something to happen in the future, and they made the mistake of choosing something real.

Oren: Personally, I don’t think that was a mistake. I think that was on purpose.

Chris: You think they were trying to make a political statement?

Oren: I think so. Nowadays we tend to−this is vastly oversimplifying it−but we tend to think of Ireland as a pretty peaceful place. But let’s just say that when the episode we’re talking about was made, the violence was a lot more recent than that.

Chris: Wow, okay. (not sarcastic)

Oren: So, I think that was on purpose.

Bunny: Most people only learn about the troubles in Ireland from like, I don’t know, Peaky Blinders.

Oren: A lot of people think about that era as being way longer ago than it was, which is interesting. But I do suspect that Star Trek episode did that on purpose.

Bunny: Fascinating, I look forward to your manifesto on this.

Oren: There we go.

Bunny: Anyway, drop in the comments if either anyone got my timely references to The Perils of Pauline and Musketeers of Pig Alley.

Oren: I was worried because Disney Plus keeps trying to give me this new show called Pauline to watch, and I was like, is that what this is? Should I have watched that?

Chris: Oh no, there’s all this buzz about a show! Quick, we gotta go watch it!

Bunny: Ugh, exhausting. I’m glad I’m not in some sort of position where I would be expected to keep up with TV shows because I’m on some sort of podcast and then just simply don’t.

Oren: We hates it, Precious.

Bunny: So, the topic of this podcast is pop culture and fiction, both referencing real life pop culture and creating your own pop culture. And I struggle with this a lot−which is why I decided to lead an episode about it−because most references to real world pop culture and fiction feel really cringey and obnoxious to me. And, most folks do not spend a lot of time fleshing out their own pop culture if it’s separate from real life pop culture. But I do think hypothetically, probably, both can be done well.

Chris: One thing that I’ve seen a lot of in recent years, for obvious reasons, is shows especially that want to, or sometimes books though, that want to replicate internet culture in some way. Right? Within the story. And a lot of times it is bad. I still laugh at the Mira Grant book Feed, because the main characters are bloggers, but they’re really big bloggers. Like the top social media influencers we have today except they’re blogging, and they follow this politician who I think is−they say he’s a Republican, but it doesn’t feel like the audience is for Republicans. It’s one of those really optimistic works where you see, “I’m totally unbiased because I have a good Republican character, and see how reasonable he is?”

Oren: This was a little more believable in 2012 than it is now, but even at the time it did raise my eyebrows a little.

Chris: So then they’re following along and covering his campaign, and unfortunately I know about blogging, so when Mira Grant comes up with titles for their posts, I know how bad they are, and that no one would click on them. And then they’re like, this blog post about this politician’s campaign is “number three” on the internet. And I’m like, what do you mean “number three”?

Bunny: You know, when you open “The Internet”, it says “Trending”.

Chris: By what measure? In what way? And the idea that “number three” would be some political campaign and not a cute cat or porn or something…?

Oren: I have so many questions about A) how they’re measuring that, and B) what gross stuff did they have to remove from the rankings?

Chris: That one is just classically funny. But more recently, there’s stuff where people have content that goes viral when it obviously wouldn’t go viral. I mean, that one’s a tough one. If you want something to go viral in your story−because things only go viral if they’re really surprising−they have to be different than anything that’s come before, for the most part. So if it was possible to replicate, people would be doing it on purpose all the time. Instead, people who do make content to go viral, usually just spam tons and tons of content, and wait for something to be picked up a little bit.

Oren: One of The Expanse books ended like that. The big climactic ending was that they had like a viral crowdfunder.

Chris: Wait, didn’t a character invent crowdfunding?

Oren: Yeah, a character basically invents crowdfunding.

Chris: That always cracks me up, when somebody events something in another world that exists in our world.

Oren: Again, this was early enough that crowdfunding wasn’t as big as it is now, but it definitely existed, and so it was very funny that A) this person invented crowdfunding, and B) their crowdfunding campaign went viral because they needed to save their daughter. And this is a space system that has 10 billion people in it. How many of those 10 billion need to save a child? And they’re trying to crowdfund that? Because that’s the world we live in today, where everyone’s crowdfunding is “I need to save this young child”. And often they’re real and horrible, and then sometimes they’re fake and horrible. So the idea that that would be enough to cut through the noise is absurd.

Chris: I will say if you want something to go viral, I think your best bet realistically is to set up some sort of societal context where something is going on, where people are just primed for this content, right? There’s a big controversy already. There’s a big news event. There’s a big tragedy. And then this content comes up as the perfect representation. You know? For instance, an image that goes viral because there’s a hurricane. And it’s a dramatic image of that hurricane. Or people are mad about something, and something happens that is a perfect representation of what they’re mad about.

That kind of thing can kind of give it the leg up in making it feel more likely that people will be passing this around than just, “Oh, I did something funny. I made a funny noise, and it went viral!”

Bunny: One of the reasons people do include pop culture references is just immersion, right? They grew up in the 2010s, and or they grew up in the 1910s and love Pauline and Peril. They might naturally reference these things. I do think that’s one of the less common reasons, though, at least in terms of explicit references. Explicit meaning direct references. You’re naming the specific thing rather than just being like, “Ah, that serial of times when a woman gets into peril” in a vague sense. Actually saying the name of the thing.

I don’t find very often that authors do that to be immersive. Usually, they’re doing that as a shorthand for saying this thing is like this other thing. Or for humor. I think those are the two main things.

Oren: Pop culture jokes are pretty popular. I’ve found that they tend to work better in movies than novels because movies get stuck in development hell all the time, but at least in theory, a movie can come out on a shorter timescale, and you can edit the script to make different references before you start filming. And that can be a little bit easier, whereas a novel will often be stuck in your drawer for 10 years. So the references are more likely to age much faster.

Chris: I have evergreen articles where I couldn’t help referencing something going on that day, and when I look back at them I’m like, yeah, I probably shouldn’t have done that. It just very quickly feels dated, and fiction, again, takes a really long time to go through the publishing process often. I do think it works better when you feel like the story is actually about that time period in some way. If it’s an 80s period piece basically, then it makes sense to have a lot of 80s references in there.

That feels like that story is meant to capture a certain time, a certain year, and there’s a purpose towards all those references, even if they’re a little out-of-date. I think that works a little better than if you have a piece, it feels like it’s supposed to be a little timeless, but then there’s random pop culture references from that year in there.

Oren: Although, it is funny because what you’re really doing is making references to things that people in the modern day associate with that time period. Or at least that’s what most people are doing. It would be really funny to do a 2008 period piece and have everyone talking about Avatar, the James Cameron movie.

No one talks about that anymore. The moment a new one comes out, we immediately forget about it. But it was super popular! Everyone was seeing it. But I don’t think that would evoke that time period in the same way that the campaign of Barack Obama would. That’s the thing people associate with that year.

Bunny: And since you’re talking about classic 80s, I have to shit on Ready Player One a little bit. Which is one of those cases which−Okay, at least Ready Player One has an in-story justification for why everything is 08s-ified, which is that its creator built the platform on 80s worship. But this is probably patient zero of the pop-culture-hasn’t-advanced-at-all-since-pretty-much-the-eighties.

Chris: Because this is a future that worships the 80s.

Bunny: The premise is that the creator of the virtual world really liked the 80s, and he’s designed a quest for control of the virtual world after his death that is centered on 80s references. So people spend their life devoted to studying obscure crap from the 80s, and we never see anything that suggests the 2000s existed. Or anything past 1995, maybe. There is nothing new. It’s all just 80s, 80s, 80s used in the laziest way possible, because most of it−and this is a trap that a lot of pop culture reference falls into−is instead of describing something, using a reference to describe it. Instead of describing something, you say it’s like the other thing. So if you don’t know what the other thing is, then you’re kind of adrift. And Klein, the author, will also do this in the vaguest possible way. Instead of describing colorful details, like the haircuts that people have, he’ll be like, “A variety of 80s haircuts”.

Oren: Oh, that’s nice.

Bunny: At one point he goes to a club, and I think the exact phrase is that he performs a variety of 80s dance moves. Which, like, great, if this is supposed to be a love letter to the 80s, can’t you be more specific?

Chris: That’s definitely a show don’t tell issue there.

Bunny: That is a huge issue with over-reliance on real-life pop culture. You’re telling people what to think.

Chris: With the 80s hairdos, it’s also particularly funny because they’re not hard to describe. The US in the 80s, noted for having really curled, high volume, just lots of hair everywhere.

Bunny: Yeah. Big hair. Hair helmet.

Chris: Big hair.

Bunny: Perms. You could rattle them off, so it’s insulting to the reader that he didn’t bother to add 10 extra words. Other books do this, too. Artemis by Andy Weir had something similar where our character is looking at the moon bases, and she was like, “They looked like the moon bases from every pop sci-fi pulp book.” Okay, thanks.

Oren: Those actually look pretty different, depending on which book you’re reading.

Bunny: She at least describes them as round, right? They’re bubbles. But at one point she does look at them and is like, (robotically) “They look like they’re from a sci-fi book.”

Oren: The bright side is that something like Ready Player One in book form is pretty rare in my experience. The nostalgia fests are much more likely to happen in movies, right? Because movies are really expensive, and people who make them are super risk averse, so they want to keep doing stuff that they know their target spending audience already likes. That’s why we have another Jurassic World movie, even though there is nothing left to do in that franchise. And it made a lot of money! So they were right.

Bunny: Go figure.

Oren: But in book form, there doesn’t seem to be a huge reason to do that, has been my experience. You’ll occasionally get authors who are a little obnoxious with it, but in general, I would say that at least in speculative fiction, which is the genre that I pay attention to, people are constantly pushing the envelope. When I see the books that are popular now, that’s very different from what was popular a few years ago.

Bunny: For sure. I think that if you do want to reference pop culture in your book, and your book is set in the real world and stuff, and you do it intentionally that you can for lack of a better word time lock your book. If you’re not trying to set it in vague “now” or five-minutes-in-the-future sort of stories that I’d argue probably most stories set in the present day do where it’s “now”! But if you want your book to be set sometime recently, but definitely a fixed time period, you could do something like what Kaiju Preservation Society does, which is that it’s definitively set during the pandemic. It makes references to the pandemic. It is set during those years, and so when it makes pop culture references−which I also find annoying, but at least they don’t have that problem−it makes sense because we know when we are. So it’s not going to age weirdly, because it’s fixed.

Kaiju Preservation Society kept doing this thing where the character would reference pop culture and the other characters would be like, “OMG, you did not! Wow! You named the Kaiju Bella and Edward? You did not. Whoa, you call yourself a Deliberator? That’s from Star Crash. Wow, I got that!”

Oren: Yeah, they’re proud of their references.

Chris: They’re very proud of that. I think Scalzi ended up writing Kaiju Preservation Society because of the pandemic. He had a rare incident where he wasn’t able to get out the work that he had been planning to write and had to tell his publisher that it wasn’t happening. And ended up writing Kaiju Preservation Society instead. So, I think part of the reason for setting that during the pandemic is that it was very much a product of the pandemic too.

Bunny: Doing that was a good choice, too. With the backstory on that book being what it is, and in terms of keeping the pop culture grounded in time as well.

Chris: Should we talk about speculative pop culture? You want to make something up?

Bunny: Yeah, I feel like it is relatively rare in terms of going into a fantasy book and then the speculative world having a defined pop culture of its own−

Chris: Although you should toss a coin to your witcher

Bunny: −you’ll get vague references to that. Does Witcher do that?

Chris: Yeah, Witcher has−again, in books, it’s harder, right? Whereas in an audio-visual work, we can actually have music. So, for instance, Toss a Coin to Your Witcher is a song that the bard character in Witcher sings that got really popular online. And that one was good because it fit the setting. I think if you’re gonna have pulp culture in your setting, you should start with what is the actual primary method of mass communication that people use? And if you have a low-tech setting that’s before widespread literacy, then basically what you have is people coming, meeting, and talking to each other. So having a song in the story where the bard’s like, “Hey, can you please give this other character some money?”, basically the bard Jaskier will make songs out of Geralt’s adventures, and then they sing that at taverns and stuff. So that’s fun.

Bunny: Considering what kind of mass media−quote unquote, because this will depend on the communication level of the world−people experience is definitely the first step you should take. What are people experiencing?

Chris: We’ll talk more about Shield of Sparrows in the next episode, but one of the funny things … that world is just not thought through. One of the things is that there’s newspapers, and it’s like, what? This is like a medieval−

Again, we didn’t have novels in Europe until about the 1800s. You know, lots of them. Because that’s the point at which the printing press had advanced enough. And of course there’s also a chicken and the egg issue with printing and reading. If there’s nothing, people can’t buy things to read. They have no reason to learn to read. But also before they are incentivized to learn to read, we need to make printing cheap enough, and for a long time that was not true. Books were too expensive. So there were a number of different things that happened. But one of them was that the printing press made printing cheaper, and we finally had novels.

In this fantasy book Shield of Sparrows, it’s just that the books still seem to be pretty rare and expensive, but at the same time, there’s newspapers.

Oren: There are a lot of anachronisms in that book. One of the ships is named Cannon, as in the weapon, and this is not a setting with gunpowder. So… whatever. What does that even mean?

Bunny: It’s just a cool word that we made up.

Oren: It’s just a fun word that we thought might sound cool as a ship name.

Chris: But basically if you’re making a world and you’re anchoring it to real world technology levels, and it’s European-ish, we’re looking at the 1800s for books and printing to become more common. The earlier you get before that, the less people are literate and the less you’re gonna have printing and newspapers and have pop culture through that way. At that point, it’s a bard comes to town and goes to the tavern, and everybody’s excited and ends up singing the same song in town. And that’s their pop culture!

Bunny: Or if you have a court or something, they’re all watching maybe the same play. Everyone’s attending the new kabuki production.

Chris: Traveling theater!

Bunny: Yeah, theater!

Chris: Traveling band doing some theater and comedy and jokes and stuff. And then people go and see that together.

Oren: For me, when I’m looking at a setting, if it’s in any way a modern setting, I know that there is no possible way I’m gonna be able to communicate the complexity of real world pop culture in a book. I don’t have time to go into all of the references that we use in real life that you need to know a thing to understand them. I would have to explain the entirety of the MCU if I was telling a story set in the modern day to someone who didn’t know what the MCU was. It would be ridiculous. So I do my best to come up with something, some of the more prominent aspects that are easier to explain and use that to hint at the idea that there’s more, but we’re not focusing on that right now. We’ve got a plot to do.

Bunny: Right. I think that’s why it’s relatively rare. It’s because a lot of in-universe entertainment isn’t super relevant to the main story, or it’s just fluff and flavor. And, honestly, I love when there’s fluff and flavor about the universe’s pop culture. I like that Murderbot is always watching telenovellas, even if they’re not relevant to the plot. It’s a fun worldbuilding detail, and of course there are telenovellas.

Oren: I really liked how in the show other people had seen them and that became a plot point in a few points in a few areas. I thought that was very neat.

Chris: The show writers were really good at leveraging and making it part of the story.

Bunny: Another book that did in Universe Entertainment was The Dead Cat Tail Assassins, where the main character really likes pulp novel penny dreadfuls, essentially, and ultimately uses these to convince a couple gods to not kill her. Being like, “Hey, in this−” this is spoilers for the climax, I guess, “−in this penny dreadful, this scenario happened, and you wouldn’t want the scenario to happen here, would you? Because that would be bad.” I was like, that’s fun. You don’t see a lot of these stories within stories unless they’re serious folklore that’s relevant to the foundation of the world or whatever.

Oren: I would also say that another option, if you’re just trying to make something that is to help readers understand the world and to feel like it’s a living place where people do things, is you can create pop cultural trends that are similar enough to things that are in the real world that readers can kind of get it, but not being exactly the same.

Nowadays we’re inundated with superhero movies, right? And that’s a feeling that people will have. And you might not necessarily want to have your setting have superhero movies, but assuming that it has this level of mass media, your character could very easily talk about how all the advertisements for the next hollow films are this specific genre because that’s what’s popular right now and I feel like I haven’t seen anything that isn’t that for a while. And that’ll get across the same feeling.

Chris: I would like to see more sci-fi settings where there’s pop culture that is in new mediums. Something that doesn’t translate to the internet or TV or radio or print, right. It’s like everybody sends each other these weird telepathic messages, and now we have telepathic memes.

Oren: We make fun of Star Trek for seeming culturally stagnated because they only ever listen to classical music or watch movies that are in Paramount’s IP archive.

Chris: And that they pass around electronic tablets like they’re pieces of paper.

Oren: They have a big stack of iPads they pass around. (laughing) No, but they also do, you know, the holo-novels were interesting, right? The series went on, and we saw that there were people who made these as−if not a job, because it’s the federation, you don’t necessarily need to work at least−as a serious passion. And that was an interesting concept. I liked that.

Chris: That was good.

Oren: I’ve seen enough sci-fi where it feels like when they want to make something futuristic, they just take something that’s vaguely East Asian, and they’re like, “There! That’s the future now.” And it’s like, okay, I know we all read Neuromancer when we were kids, but maybe we could move past that a little bit.

Bunny: And what gets popular in a society says a lot about that society. One thing I really like in games and stuff−which again, this is easier in games because there’s not so much… if it’s an open world game, you expect to be able to find things in that world, whereas in novels space is more at a premium and you can’t just throw things in that someone can run past and go “oh, ha ha”−but I love when games have artifacts around that you can find. Or posters for futuristic movies that don’t exist. You can be like, oh, this is an interesting look into this greater world that I’m just running around in.

Oren: It’s environmental storytelling, isn’t it?

Bunny: It is. That’s what we in the biz call it.

Oren: All right. Well, with that I think we will go ahead and call this episode to a close, because I’ve been distracted by a very cool in-universe ad for a product that I’m gonna go stare at for a little bit.

Chris: And if you enjoyed any of our references about references, consider supporting us on Patreon.

Oren: Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel−speaking of pop culture. And then we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek, also pop culture. We will talk to you next week. [Outro theme]

Hour 2: Brandon Jacobs and Nick Turturro