The Mythcreant Podcast 501 – Unusual Jobs in Fiction
What does your protagonist do when they’re not righting wrongs and saving days? Main characters often have action-oriented jobs like mercenary or battlemage, but what about everyone else? Theoretically, a hero might be a teacher, custodian, hairdresser, or podcast editor, just to name a few possibilities. But we don’t usually see professions like that among our main characters, so this week, it’s time to talk about why.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Mukyuu. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Intro: You are listening to the Mythcreants podcast. With your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny.
[opening song]Bunny: Hello and welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Bunny, and with me today is…
Oren: Oren…
Bunny: and…
Chris: Chris.
Bunny: And despite the title, as it turns out, looking at my notes, unfortunately we are not discussing the Bond villain Oddjob with his razor bowler hat –
Oren: The best weapon!
Bunny: Which seems so very effective and not at all cutting yourself when you take it off with your flesh hands.
Chris: So did he have an odd job then? I don’t think I’ve seen this Bond villain before.
Oren: No. He just does odd jobs.
Bunny: He’s just called Oddjobs.
Oren: His odd jobs are to kill James Bond all the time. [Chuckle]
Bunny: It’s a pretty odd job. It’s pretty specific, you gotta admit.
Oren: Yeah. There’s not a lot of growth potential in that sector, okay? [Laughter]
Bunny: He could move on to something odder one day, but it’d be a hard market finding one. There’s only one James Bond.
Chris: The odd job industry is just laying off so many workers right now. [Laughter]
Oren: It used to be there was job security back when we all thought James Bond was a code name, but thanks to Skyfall, we know that that’s his actual name. His parents were Mr. And Mrs. Bond and they died and left him Alfred.
Bunny and Chris: [Laughter]
Bunny: So although we aren’t talking about Oddjob–rest in peace–we are talking about unusual jobs in fiction. Jobs that characters have that aren’t super common or uncommon jobs that would make for cool jobs for protagonists that we’d like to see more of.
Just to narrow it down a little bit, I’m mostly talking about jobs that are specifically relevant to a plot. If the character is a middle manager who then gets whisked away to Narnia and doesn’t do any middle management, they don’t file Aslan’s taxes or anything like that, then that doesn’t really count.
Oren: So would an abbess count? Is that a weird job?
Bunny: [Laughter]
Oren: Perhaps one who was in rebellion? Hmm?
Chris: But does she do much abbess-ing?
Bunny: I guess she does some.
Oren: She does like a little abbess-ing, right? Just a little. As a treat.
Bunny: Yeah. She talks religiously, I guess.
Oren: Look, I chose not to have any magic in this fantasy setting, so I need to scrape every drop of novelty I can out of any other aspect of the story.
Bunny: I think whether the abbess is an unusual job depends on if you count D&D clerics? Although you’re right, there is no magic. Those are kind of defined… So maybe it is an odd job. Not Oddjob, but an odd job.
Chris: An abbess leading a rebellion certainly is not a normal combination that you see a lot.
Oren: I’ve also never seen a D&D cleric perform religious services. D&D clerics just treat gods as their personal spell bang.
Bunny and Chris: [Laughter]
Oren: It’s like the idea of them as religious leaders is [pitch rising] meh, meh.
Chris: Eh, don’t think about it.
Oren: Anyway, buy my book.
Bunny: Anyway, The Abbess Rebellion is now available on mythcreants.com or wherever you get your books. Certainly we see a lot of rebels, but we don’t see a lot of abbess rebels, so I will count that.
Oren: Yay.
Bunny: As a favor to a friend.
Oren: Ah, there’s a lot of nepotism going on in this podcast.
Everyone: [Laughter]
Chris: It was interesting for me to look and see stories that had characters with unusual jobs and why. What was their purpose in doing that?
For instance, I found a couple stories that seemed to assign an usual job because they wanted a quirky but uptight protagonist that has to learn to let loose. Like the IRS agent in Stranger Than Fiction, for instance.
And I have to say with some of these, like I’ve just read the House on the Cerulean Sea, where you’ve got a caseworker for magical orphanages. That’s what the main character does. And I dunno, some of these stories are kind of judgy. They like following rules. Why don’t you just let them follow the rules, right? Why do you have to try to fix them?
Bunny: So it’s like the job is the hairband on the love interest who takes off the hairband and lets her hair fall around her shoulders to become beautiful?
Chris: Yes [chuckle]. Honestly, I wanna see a badass IRS agent that goes after rich people.
Oren: It’s weird to me that that’s not already a movie.
Chris: [Stern government agent voice] It’s like “Hey, those schools don’t fund themselves, billionaire”.
Oren: People are so turned on by the idea of billionaires paying their taxes, I’m amazed no one in Hollywood has grabbed that idea yet. Give us a movie or a TV show or something of the IRS auditing SpaceBezos, or whatever.
Bunny: Again, if you made it a comedy, you can have an IRS agent that becomes an action hero. First, they audit the billionaire. The billionaire really doesn’t like that and sends goons after them.
Chris: But little do they know.
Bunny: Little do they know this IRS agent is packing.
Chris: IRS really just stands for I am Really Super.
Oren: [stern announcer voice]File under W9, as in you’ve been wasted nine times.
Everyone: [Laughter]
Oren: This dialogue practically writes itself.
Bunny: This is 10 out of 10 dialogue. I would read this. I know back in the day we had an article about undersung protagonists, something like that.
Chris: Yeah. I did write an article.
Bunny: And I think the IRS agent was on there.
Chris: Yeah. I totally did. This is how many years I’ve wanted somebody to write more IRS agent protagonists.
Bunny: You gotta do it, Chris. You’re done with the fairytales. Get onto the [gruffly, with emphasis] “Real Stuff” .
Chris: I don’t know. It’s kinda hard to fit in my other world fantasy setting.
Bunny: [Laughter] Well the snow queen needs to file her taxes too, I’m just saying.
Chris: Or, another reason. This is funny. Police procedurals always need more novelty and they’re always desperate for novelty ’cause police procedurals always go the same. So they always come up with a weird job for the detective to have. Like Dexter is a blood spatter pathologist. He’s also a serial killer. That’s really where the novelty’s coming from. Or a bone analyzer, or a mortician-
Oren: Or an author, like a mystery author. They like that one a lot.
Bunny: Have there been multiple police procedurals where the main character was a mystery writer?
Oren: Maybe there’s only one. Isn’t that the premise of Castle?
Chris: Yeah, he’s a writer of some kind, right?
Bunny: What’s he doing there?
Oren: They call him because he is so good at writing murder mysteries that he knows how crimes work.
Everyone: [Laughter]
Bunny: [sarcastically] Yep. I’m sure.
Oren: That sounds ridiculous, but that was a thing with Arthur Conan Doyle. I don’t know if the police ever actually called him, but he would give his opinions on famous crimes and people would pay attention to him. And think, oh, well, Arthur Conan Doyle thinks it was this, so it might have been this.
Chris: Oh, wow.
Bunny: That’s just early podcasting though.
Chris: See, I would’ve just assumed that’s something a writer would write.
Bunny: That really does sound kind of self-aggrandizing. [pretentiously] “Oh, I could figure this out. I write political intrigue. And so the president calls me and asks me what to do in this situation. The president needs help with witty dialogue. I can do it.”
Oren: There are definitely a lot of stories about writers to the point where, I don’t know if you can call that an unusual job.
Bunny: No, definitely not.
Oren: But it’s always funny to see how various storytellers portray different types of storytelling. With novels, it’s always very romanticized. But with TV writers, when they write about themselves, they’re very prosaic about the whole thing. I much prefer that approach.
Bunny: Yeah, I don’t think we can count writer as one of the uncommon jobs just because it shows up so much. And also it’s kind of meta. Whoop, whoop, whoop.
And another one that shows up I think less frequently, which is surprising, is reporter or journalist. I think that technically a lot of characters are journalists, but you don’t see them doing much journalism. Or is that just my impression?
Oren: It’s not as common as something like detective, but it comes up a fair amount.
Chris: I think when there’s a lot of stories about journalists, it often focuses on the research part of the job where they basically have to do detective work to get a story and not on other aspects of the job. So they basically become detectives.
Bunny: Well, it all arcs around back to detective.
Oren: Outside of the Discworld novel Truth, there aren’t that many specfic stories with newspapers in them. So it’s a little hard.
My sample size is biased. I haven’t read very many stories about reporters, but that’s because most of the stories that I read don’t really feature the news.
Bunny: They’re common in the superhero genre, but superheroes aren’t as popular in books, so that’s a lot of comics and shows and movies.
Oren: Some of the noir detective stories that I’ve read have a reporter as a secondary character, usually as a romance interest.
Bunny: Actually… The Sleepless, now that I’m thinking about it. The main character worked in a newsroom, I’m pretty sure. So I guess that counts. Also, when I was typing up notes for this episode, I remembered that Tintin is a reporter and man, he does no reporting.
Chris: [realization dawns] Oh yeah.
Oren: Really? I thought Tintin was a professional dog owner.
Bunny: That would be a better job for him.
Oren: Wait, wait, is Tintin the guy or the dog?
Bunny and Chris chorus: The guy.
Oren: Okay. I couldn’t remember.
Bunny: Snowy is the dog. Snowy is a professional snark. Snowy could write the president’s witty commentary, I’ll say that.
Oren: You don’t see, at least in my experience, you don’t see a ton of teachers in speculative fiction.
Bunny: At least not like professors.
Oren: Yeah. Despite magic schools being an entire genre, those are almost always from the point of view of the students. I can think of a number of non-specfic stories about teachers, but once you get into magic, it’s like, eh, no, we’re not gonna do teachers anymore.
Chris: The new Godzilla show had a teacher, but she wasn’t teaching anymore.
Bunny: Yeah.I feel like they have teachers but they don’t have a lot of teaching.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: I guess Keiko on DS 9.
Bunny: You don’t see a lot of her though.
Chris: Yeah, I think if it’s about the adults and it’s for adults, they just don’t really wanna have a lot of kid characters necessarily.
If it’s a film, they have to hire all those child actors, and that’s a little tough to manage. And there’s a question of, okay, how high stakes is it appropriate to get while keeping this light if we have lots of children? And I think there might be some practical things in film that sort of limit that.
Oren: I liked the concept behind the novelThe Art of Prophecy, which is about the mentor of the chosen one. I thought that was an interesting idea.
Unfortunately, it turns out that’s a hard premise to maintain, and so spoilers for that novel, but after the first few chapters, she dumps him with a friend and then goes and has her own adventure. He then becomes a separate POV with nothing to do for the rest of the story.
Chris: [disappointed] Oh.
Oren: But I liked that concept for a while. It was an interesting idea of her having to figure out how to solve problems and how to train this kid. I don’t know if a whole novel could support that idea, but for a short story? Sure. I think that could be interesting.
Bunny: I think all of these sorts of common jobs that we’ve been listing and when they use a less common job and make it work for the story point to the core components of what makes a job good for the story that the character is in.
At the very least, in general a job needs to come with a conflict or conflict stemming from that job is possible, or be useful in solving problems.
Chris: Right.
Bunny: And the protagonist has to have knowledge relevant to the conflict, whatever the conflict of the story is, or their job should let them acquire that knowledge if the job is relevant to the story.
Chris: I looked at it and any type of travel plus research is really good. So you can study archeology or just biology. Or any person who has expertise and can go travel and use that expertise tends to work really well. Anything that responds to problems or emergencies, right?
And it can be something creative: Oh, I’m a person who enforces the masquerade by erasing evidence of magic after an incident. Or I stop time from unraveling. Or that’s why we have emergency workers that are often in stories. Or anything that puts the protagonist in the know before they’re targeted for that knowledge is another one that I’ve seen before.
Like in Paycheck, the protagonist has a kind of unusual job. What he does is he helps companies reverse engineer competitor products. The point is that he created something advanced doing that, which shouldn’t be let loose on the world. But now he has amnesia and et cetera, et cetera. But like his job put him in the middle of that situation.
Bunny: And then the job should also place the protagonist somewhere that they have a hand in the resolution of the conflict as well. Obviously if you have the other components where they have the knowledge and stuff, the knowledge and the proximity, et cetera, et cetera, it does follow that they would therefore have a hand in the resolution. But it always bears repeating because we don’t want some guy swinging in and solving the story for you.
And then I think it also bears mentioning that all of these factors also depend on the scale of the problem. So some jobs are more relevant to a globe trotting adventure or a thriller. That’s why we have spies. We have a lot of spies and security agents and hitmen and that sort of thing. But if the conflict is to figure out who stole the office candy dish, then you might have the middle manager there. They have to do some conflict resolution with their dastardly employees. I don’t know.
Chris: Or if it’s a drama or personal story, obviously we need a bartender.
Oren: [Chuckle]
Bunny: Ah, fiction loves its bartenders.
Chris: Loves its bartenders. So many bartenders.
Bunny: Although I do feel like often there is a bartender in the story, I feel like I’ve seen a lot of stories where the bartender isn’t the main character, but they’re there for the main character to vent to.
Chris: That’s a good point. We could use more bartenders that are the minor characters in somebody else’s story and have heroes coming to them all the time and unloading all of their packages.
Oren: Yeah, bartenders are on the list of professions that are allowed to do therapy. But not therapists. Like that’s been getting better I think recently, but for a long time on TV, the moment a character went to talk to a therapist, it’s like, well, obviously this isn’t gonna help. Instead later they’ll go talk to a bartender and they’ll have a breakthrough.
Bunny: Guinan will be the author’s voice and say exactly what they should do.
Chris: As it turns out, the bartender is the shrink in disguise.
Oren: Yeah, Star Trek was really bad about that. I did appreciate that Discovery went out of its way to try to make the ship’s counselor actually be able to do counseling. It took a while, but they got there. I really appreciated it.
Bunny: Yeah, brownie points for that. I can’t think of more than one actual therapist main character right now, but maybe that’s more common in genres that I haven’t read as much of. I feel like crime and thriller might have more of those. I recently read a book — another meta mystery, which annoyed me — called The Silent Patient, which was a thriller mystery, and that had a therapist protagonist. So they’re out there.
Chris: Yeah. I do think that it’s a little tricky because they often don’t go anywhere and they spend all their time in conversation. You can only have so much dialogue. You want somebody who goes out and does things, and they also are required to keep all of the therapy confidential unless there are specific things that are revealed.
So, it’s not that you couldn’t necessarily do therapy, but I just think if you have a traditional therapist that’s licensed, that’s a lot trickier than having, for instance, a priest who talks to people but then also does other things and is more realistically proactive in, for instance, solving community problems.
Bunny: For instance, leading a rebellion.
Everyone: [Chuckle]
Oren: What I always tell my clients is, what you need for your protagonist is you need your protagonist to be equipped to interact with what the story is about. And since spec fic tends to err towards the action side of things–not always, but a lot–and the adventure side of things and the magic side of things, you will need a protagonist who can at some level interact with those things.
If you have a long time, you can build up that stuff. This is why it’s hard to have something like: I’m a completely normal person with no special skills and I’m going to quest to save the world. Because you have to put in a lot of lead time if you want them to develop the skills necessary. And if that’s not what you wanna do, this is how you get characters who are thrown into a group of much more competent NPCs, who then just do everything. And that’s boring. No one wants to watch that.
So you really just need to ask, okay, what is my story about? And then what the character’s job is will have a lot to do with that.
Chris: I think one of my favorite examples of an interesting profession combined with a speculative fiction plot was the show Surreal Estate—
Oren: [Laughter]
Chris: Where they’re all real estate agents and they deal with houses, but then the houses end up being haunted and so they have to resolve the hunting before they sell the house.
Main issue with that show is that honestly, it would be a great premise for a comedy, [trying to hold in laughter] but it actually takes itself a little too seriously for a premise like that.
Bunny: What?
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Which is really funny. But it’s still real campy, so you can still watch it and laugh at it. Not all is lost, but that’s just such a great concept for a comedy. Opportunity’s a little wasted.
Bunny: That’s such a good name too. I gotta say. Surreal Estate. Yes.
Chris: Well, you can see how haunted houses and real estate just naturally go together really well, and how they would then have to deal with the supernatural just in doing their regular job. That’s a good one. That’s very complimentary.
Bunny: Yeah. Another one that I think did a great job pairing the job of its protagonist with the conflict is Arrival. The entire movie Arrival is about communicating with these aliens which have touched down. The main character is a linguist, which makes a lot of sense. It’s about learning to speak another language.
The linguist needs to figure out how to communicate with these creatures who, as it turns out, don’t even experience time the way that humans do.
Chris: One thing I really loved about Arrival is the fact that it showed interesting things about her job that you would not normally know. Because when the aliens arrive, people think that, oh, can you just translate it?
That’s not how that works. We have to already know the language and have encountered it to just translate. So we have to go through a specific process to have a common language for the first time so that we can even start translating in the first place. So it actually showed that process and I just love that. I like to learn interesting things about what other people do and other skill sets and professions and then putting it in a speculative fiction context just adds more novelty to it. So that was really cool. That was a really neat part of the movie.
Bunny: Yeah, there’s not a lot of protagonists who, A) have a job that’s so deeply central to the plot, and B) have a job like linguists. And it’s also just a really good movie. So that helps too.
Oren: I also really like the approach of taking a fairly traditional fantasy/sci-fi job and putting a little twist on it. So for example, monster hunter. Pretty normal job for a protagonist to have, right? But I like the novel Trail of Lightning ’cause she’s not just a monster hunter, she’s a [with emphasis] freelance monster hunter.
She doesn’t do this for free. You gotta pay. You think bullets and monster healthcare are free? No, she has to pay for that stuff. She doesn’t have an employer. She’s not saving into social security. If you want a monster hunted? Pay up.
Chris: I think that’s another thing that people liked about the Witcher. I don’t know if Geralt feels like as a freelancer to me but-
Bunny: Bounty hunters are all freelancers, but they don’t all act like it.
Oren: Geralt makes a lot of mention of coin. He says “coin” a lot. Coin, coin, coin. And in The Mandalorian, he talks about credits and uh… oh gosh what’s the name of that special metal they have?
Bunny: Unobtanium!
Oren: No, there’s real word for it. Beskar!
Chris: Oh, beskar, oh yeah!
Oren: Yeah. Yeah. And it talks about beskar and credits a lot, but for the most part it doesn’t really seem to matter if he gets paid. Whereas that was what made Trail of Lightning, at least the opening, really compelling was that her getting paid actually mattered.
Spoiler. Later on, it doesn’t matter as much, but I liked that beginning. That felt like that really mattered to me.
Bunny: This character’s not a freelancer, but the book was making a lot of commentary on soulless work and in this case literally. It’s the novel Hench. The down on their luck henchmen, the henches who are doing their henching to pay the bills and the supervillains pay the bills.
Again, that’s not the perspective we see often, which makes it interesting.
Oren: One that has potential but I think is also tricky is various gig jobs. Because that’s the thing a lot of people have personal experience with, so there’s a lot of identification there.
But at the same time, it’s also very dismal and bleak.The gig economy is not good, so I think you wanna be careful with that. But I think there’s potential there. You can imagine how that might work in a more novel setting with monsters or sci-fi problems or whatever.
Bunny: It reminds me of the beginning of Snow Crash.
Chris: Even though that was pre gig economy, but at the same time he starts by delivering pizza in the beginning and he’s trying to cut corners to deliver it on time because the company he works for keeps such close tabs on how fast he goes, which gig workers would probably identify with.
Oren: Yeah. And I’ve seen a few stories where characters are gig workers at some point. I haven’t really seen it be a huge plot point other than something like the Kaiju Preservation Society where the protagonist is doing food delivery at the beginning, but then he meets someone who offers him a more interesting job.
Bunny: Yeah, I feel like food delivery is often the base point where the character starts. Didn’t the new Laura Croft movie start with her delivering a pizza or something? I could be totally misremembering that.
Chris: Yeah, there are some professions that are just put in there to emphasize how downtrodden the protagonist is, and that’s definitely one of them.
Bunny: But some of them, like Space Sweepers, have them doing garbage collecting or space salvage, so it’s got the speculative fiction element, but they’re also doing a contracting job. It’s like gig work because they’re not technically employees. They’re technically a contractor, but of course they only have one client so it’s an uneven power dynamic that’s used against them.
Oren: Yeah, I mean Space Sweepers has a very cool premise. I like that a lot. One of my favorite weird ones is the Newsflesh series. I forget what the first one is called. That’s the one I read where the main characters are.
Bunny: [pained] No, they’re bloggers.
Oren: Yeah, they’re bloggers.
Chris: No, that was so bad. I did not finish that book. I could not. It’s like “we wrote this political piece”– Here’s the thing. Running a website, I can tell how bad the titles are–
Bunny: [Laughter]
ChrisB: And it’s like “this was a hit post” and “this is what it was called” and I’m like, no, something with a title would never be a hit. That’s a terrible title.
And your title really matters because that’s what people look at and decide whether to click on something. And of course, somebody who’s a novelist doesn’t necessarily have practice or expertise in making a title that will get clicks. So. Maybe it’s unfair for me to expect it, but I was just like, no, these titles are bad. [Laughter]
And then they go “our site is now number three”, and it’s like number three according to what? What rank? That’s not a normal ranking in Google when you type it in Google.
Oren: But my favorite was that apparently in this world, every website publicly reports their traffic data in real time. So you can always see who has the most active users at any one time. There’s just a board for it.
This does make me wonder. Has anyone who is a professional of some kind watched a movie or read a book about their profession and been like, yeah, that’s how it works. If that has happened to anybody who is listening, please comment and let us know.
Chris: I think you have to have a writer who’s also been in the profession, and then it can definitely work.
I mean, a lot of military sci-fi is based on that. It’s all people who’ve been in the military writing for other people who’ve been in the military about that kind of military experience.
Bunny: Why didn’t they hire a blogger as a consultant? Get some SEO.
Chris and Oren: [Laughing in the background]
Chris: Oh god, that would be kind of hilarious. The other thing is like the idea that any — ‘cause they were writing about politics; they were following a presidential candidate around and writing about him — the idea that a political website would be like number three or whatever it was. No, that’s gonna be cat videos or porn or something.
Bunny: Well, they’re number three behind the porn and the cat videos.
Oren: Yeah. I mean, have we filtered out Taylor Swift in this setting?
Bunny: One job that I would love to see more of, and maybe this goes back to Arrival, but I feel like we don’t have a lot of just translators.
You two have been watching Shogun, right? And the translator is not the main character, but I feel like that show has been demonstrating how ripe a role for that.
Chris: She’s real important. But we have talked about how difficult it is to make. It’s almost the same reason why there aren’t more therapists. It’s difficult to make that interesting because good translation involves a lot of, almost by rote, repeating of what people are saying.
The reason it works in Shogun is ’cause she’s a real bad translator. She’s really bad at her job. And so by paraphrasing and changing what people are saying, which translators are not supposed to do, it makes it fresh, right? So we’re not just like listening to the same dialogue twice all the time.
Bunny: That’s true. I guess it would also be hard in a prose medium. If your viewpoint character is a translator, they’d be hearing both languages in whatever language the story is written in, which would be weird to convey.
Chris: But I think Strange New Worlds does have some of the Star Trek characters do advanced translations, and that’s supposed to take place earlier in Star Trek when Universal Translator doesn’t work as well. Or sometimes in Star Trek they encounter an alien species that can’t be translated. So there have been a few interesting storylines about translating in Star Trek, but I do think that’s a little difficult because at that point it can get really technical into linguistics.
Oren: [imitating Star Trek] Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.
Chris: We can’t translate idioms, we just can’t do it. The memes are untranslatable.
Oren: Shaka, when the walls fell.
Bunny: [Laughter]
Oren: Okay. Well, with that amazingly smooth Star Trek reference, I think we are going to call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you’d like to help us with our unusual jobs, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: Our very unusual jobs of blogging–
Bunny: and podcasting.
Chris: Yeah, well maybe soon a speculative fiction element will enter and we’ll realize that in order to keep blogging, we have to deal with ghosts or time travel or something.
Bunny: [Spooky voice] Audacity is infected with ghosts.
Oren: All right. Before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of marble. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
[closing theme]This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.