442 – Lessons From Content Editing

Show Notes

• Tears in the Rain 
• Content Editing 
• Throughline 
• The Three-Act Structure 
• Hero’s Journey
• Story Circle 
• The Problem with Multiple Viewpoints 
• Pacing
• Movement 
• Malazan 
• Lockwood & Co
• The Masquerade 
• Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur
• Giving Your Protagonist Agency When Things Go Wrong
• Turning Points
• Black Panther 
• The Winter Soldier

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Arturo. 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.

Chris: And I’m Chris.

Oren: Hooray! Chris is back! Transcribers will be less annoyed with me now.

Chris: Is it because they couldn’t tell the difference between your voice and your brother’s voice? Is that what…?

Oren: And Wes’s voice. It was all mixed together. It was all one voice. One amorphous voice talking about D&D.

Chris: Yes, I think that is a particular problem with having your sibling on. So first, some big news. Mythcreants is about to turn 10! We’ve been doing this for a full decade now.

Oren: Ah, that’s so long.

Chris: So long, yeah. So to celebrate, next week we’ll be doing an anniversary podcast talking about running Mythcreants and what it’s like to have a podcast for a full decade. And we’re giving all patrons who are at the $10 tier and up, that’s the Pegasus tier if we’re going by fantasy animal names…

Oren: Fancy fantasy animal names.

Chris: …feedback on a thousand words. You can submit an excerpt from your draft, a short outline, a flashfic, a world description, whatever you want. Then tell us your goals, questions, what kind of feedback you’d like, and we’ll write something up just for you. The celebration ends on August 14th, so join us by then if you are not already at that tier to get our feedback. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants and choose that Pegasus tier or above. It’s going to be fun to see what everybody gives to us.

Oren: We may or may not crush your dreams. Who knows? Anything’s possible.

Chris: We’re not going to just crush people’s dreams.

Oren: I don’t know, Chris. I’ve seen things. I’ve seen things you listeners wouldn’t believe. I’ve seen manuscripts with plot holes bigger than the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched character arcs fizzle in the dark near the anticlimactic ending. But all those moments will be improved, like words on a page.

Chris: Or all those words will be lost in time because I’m going to use my strikeout tool on them. I’ll strike that out.

Oren: I might not improve all of them, because I’m a content editor. I don’t really improve words. Honestly, words make me nervous. If you could just give me the general vibe of the story, I’d feel more comfortable.

Chris: So yeah, we’re going to talk about tips from our content editing work, reviewing manuscripts. Content editing is where we give writers big-picture feedback. I don’t actually use my strikeout tool during content editing. We don’t change anything in the manuscript. We just review it and find out what your goals are and then help you achieve your goals by giving you feedback and telling you what to focus on. I think for a lot of writers, this saves a lot of time because people get caught up worrying about little various things in their story and don’t really know where they should focus their energy.

Oren: It’s hard to assess your own story, because it’s your story. You wrote it. And even if you are not convinced that it’s the greatest thing ever, it’s just hard to know where it actually needs fixing and what those priorities should be. And that’s why we do things like we look at biggest issues first. We’re trying to be practical here. So we’re not going to tell you to fix the ending of this battle scene if we’re also going to tell you that the battle needs to be revised, because that would just be pointless. And we always focus on actionable recommendations because most authors, at the state of writing when you’re looking for a content editor for the first time, aren’t going to super know what to do with just a list of problems. “Here’s what’s wrong with your manuscript.” “Great. What do I do with that?” As a writer, I don’t know what to do with that. So I need more specific advice. So that’s why I try to give to other people.

Chris: We give suggestions, but we always describe the problem well enough that people can make their own choices. The suggestions, people can take them. A lot of them are also just examples of how something would be solved.

Oren: Yeah, you don’t have to take my advice. I’m not your dad. I’m just telling you the problems as I see it. I’m offering you suggestions on how to resolve them and then you do with that what you want, because you are a free agent in all of this. So far. We’ll see what happens later. So by far the most common fundamental problem that I run into in manuscript editing is the missing throughline.

Chris: Yeah, that’s definitely the biggest issue. And we look at that before anything else because the missing throughline essentially means you don’t know what your story is about. And that means you may have to rewrite large portions of it. And so it is definitely the thing that calls for the biggest revision. So we’re not going to tell you to futz with chapters when huge portions of the manuscript need to be rethought.

Oren: And the throughline is, for if you’re not familiar with our nomenclature, it is the thing that ties the story together. It is the problem that you introduce at the beginning that drives the plot and then you resolve at the end in the climax. That’s the throughline. And the reason a lot of stories don’t have one is that a lot of writers don’t know what it is.

Chris: Yep.

Oren: It’s very important, but it’s also often not talked about. And I suspect that might be because of a desire to not limit what your story can be about. But as we’re fond of saying, your story can be about anything, but it can’t be about everything.

Chris: I think plot in general is just really poorly understood. People are like, “Three-act structure,” and then we get a headache.

Oren: What is the three-act structure? It’s literally nothing.

Chris: It’s not anything. Same with most of the structures out there. They don’t actually do what a plot needs to do, or like they’re not incompatible with a plot, but they don’t actually… And so people follow these and they don’t realize that’s not actually going to make their plot work.

Oren: It’s like they tell you things that could be in a plot, not things that need to be in a plot. And if you don’t already know what needs to be in there, then these don’t help you or worse, you end up damaging your plot, trying to contort it into these arbitrary steps that they’ve given you. And that’s why the most popular of these writing formulas tend to be the ones that are the vaguest, because on some level we know that if a formula is telling us to do a million different little bits, it’s hard to follow because how are we supposed to do all those things? Where if it only gives us like eight very vague steps that can mean kind of anything, we can be like, “Yeah, I followed Story Circle when I wrote this.” Sure. If you zoom out and make it look real fuzzy enough, maybe that’s Story Circle. Who knows?

Chris: Whereas when we talk about throughlines and a problem in resolution, that’s very abstract, but it’s not actually vague. We do mean something very specific. It’s just that everybody else is trying to be very concrete. Your hero goes traveling, for instance, when we’re like, “You need to create a sense of uncertainty over a possible threat. That’s what a problem is.” And so you can look at those two things. One is very specific about exactly what the hero does, which just isn’t flexible enough. And we’re looking at, “This is the feeling that you need to evoke, that makes it feel like there’s a plot there.”

Oren: And that’s, of course, where the vagueness also comes from on these structures, because they’ll say things like, “Your hero has to go traveling.” But it’s ridiculous to say that every story needs to literally include a character who goes traveling. What is that even about? So instead, they’re like, “They have to be metaphorically traveling.” At that point, it can mean anything. And so you haven’t actually limited any options. Whereas if we say, “There has to be a problem, there has to be uncertainty over the outcome of this problem, of this threat,” that is a specific thing your story needs to have. It can still be a lot of different things. But it does need to be that. It can’t be a metaphorical problem. It has to be a real problem.

Chris: I will say that I feel like we saw this and we shouted out. So we shouted about it a bunch on the blog. And since then, I feel like I can tell when somebody actually reads the blog, because their plot is more likely to work better. I’m sorry to say, dear listeners, that when I get a podcast listener as a client, that is less likely to be true. I think it’s just because we go through topics so much that shouting about the throughline every episode would just get really old. And so those kinds of things are more likely to be missed.

Oren: The throughline is also just very complicated. And we haven’t explained all of it here because it would take more than half an hour to do that. So I’m going to be linking instead to our articles where we do explain that. So there’s just… there’s only so much you can get across in a podcast.

Chris: I’ve had a few clients that they did have a throughline, but they still didn’t really understand the plot structure inside of story. And it’s really the same thing, right? Just understanding what a problem is and turning point and resolution. And that happens at multiple scales. That’s a little bit more unusual, but I’ve also seen it.

Oren: Now, since we’ve been zoomed out, let’s just talk a little bit about what it looks like when you don’t have a throughline or your throughline is not being brought out. And usually this manifests as the story meandering. It doesn’t feel like it’s going anywhere.

Chris: If you’re not sure how to end your story, that’s a big clue. Because usually, once you have that problem, you know that once that problem is solved, that’s your end. So if you can’t figure out how to bring things to the end, that’s a good sign.

Oren: You often end up going on tangents. All of these things are signs that a throughline is missing.

Chris: Yeah, a throughline definitely gives you direction. So if you’re like, “I have… the plot could go absolutely anywhere and I have no idea what to do,” right? That’s… you might be missing. Again, we can never say anything for certain. These are only possible signs.

Oren: So to use a randomized example, which is combining several different things from different stories I’ve edited, because I don’t want to like trash talk any of my clients directly on the podcast, a story that’s missing a throughline could look like it starts in a post-apocalyptic town and the protagonist is going around being like, “Wow, post-apocalyptic life is real bad, and we’re all upset constantly, because it’s bad time, because we don’t have our technology and what have you,” but there’s not really anything that needs to be fixed, there’s nothing that can draw your attention. And so the protagonist just hangs out for a while and then suddenly raiders attack. OK. And so then the protagonist fights the raiders for a bit and the raiders leave. And then, maybe a little while later, the protagonist goes and like chats with their sweetheart, and they talk to their sweetheart for a while. And then maybe later they go and deal with the corn, because maybe the corn has some problems. And this story does technically have conflict in it. Not all of them do. Some of the ones I look at don’t have conflict at all, but this one does. It’s just not going anywhere, right? None of the conflicts build on each other. They’re all just things that happened. And now, of course, you could make the throughline the general survival of the town if that seemed to be in question. And then you could incorporate different problems like raiders and crops and sweethearts, maybe. Who knows?

Chris: Sweetheart could be very vital to the town.

Oren: Yeah, you really need that sweetheart.

Chris: The load-bearing sweetheart right there.

Oren: But if you aren’t doing that from the beginning, you’re going to have a story that just feels like it wanders around until the pages run out and now the story is done. But it doesn’t ever feel like it ended. So that’s what it looks like. So how do you fix it, Chris? How do you fix a missing throughline?

Chris: We… you start with a problem, and you get to the resolution, and then the trickiest part. So, you know, the problem is survival. This town is in danger of falling apart. Resolution is anything that permanently settles that question. So it could be: “Town has fallen apart.” If you want it to be, most people prefer, “The town is saved, no longer a danger of falling apart.” But then you gotta look at your chapter events and they should be things that ultimately lead to that end. So if you can take them out and that… the end, the way that issue is solved is exactly the same, they’re not really structurally part of the throughline. So you want to get all of your big events so that they build on each other, they make a difference. It’s like a dominoes effect, that one thing leads to the next. If at any point in time, something can just be extracted and your readers would never notice that part is missing, everything else works seamlessly together, you know you have something that’s not really fitting in. So another really common thing we see is: Managing characters can be difficult. And it’s very common for manuscripts to first just have too many characters. And that spreads things really thin and divides up the story and makes it so that no character gets enough time or development. We could start with a main character that’s working really well, and then… but half of the story is spent away from that main character with other characters that are less engaging, is what often happens. And this often comes with confusion about who the main character is. And sometimes our clients are divided on that. They may have started the manuscript loving one character and then came back to it later and then decided they liked a different character better. Sometimes they’re divided because they feel obligated to make one character their main character, but they like a different character better.

Oren: Yeah, that’s especially common if the manuscript was written over a long period, because people change. And if you’re writing your manuscript over multiple years, by the fifth year of working on this manuscript, you could very easily identify more with a different character than you did at the start when you first started writing it. And now you’ve got a problem.

Chris: And again, just like I was talking about with plot, if you can just take a character out and everything works, you should probably take that character out. Oren talks a lot about the smallest viable change, which is the smallest amount of change that will fix the problem. I tend to think of it more as easiest viable change, where cutting is not necessarily the smallest change, and it can be really hard for writers. We get really attached to what we have. But it’s kind of like ripping off a bandaid, where it hurts at first, but then it is often so much easier and faster than doing things the hard way. And when it comes to things like cutting, especially if you have a character that is just extra and doesn’t need to be there, cutting is a lot faster than trying to find things for them to do. Once you get to a certain point and you have way too many characters, it becomes really difficult to keep them all distinct so that people remember all of them and can keep track of them, but also to give them all a role so they feel like they have a reason to be there.

Oren: Because that’s the question everyone always asks, is like, “How many characters should I have?” And it’s: You should have the minimum number that your story will work with in most cases. Because if you start adding more, they’re not really going to do anything. There will just be more names to remember. Pretty soon you find yourself adding a Dramatis Personae.

Chris: With 92 characters.

Oren: 92 characters, including the Son of Darkness and the Knight of Darkness. Darkness, darkness, darkness.

Chris: Yeah, we’re referencing Malazan, which I did a post on recently.

Oren: Best post. Love that Malazan post. It was very serious.

Chris: Very serious. It’s a very serious story. So with this one, making a list of your characters, testing what would happen if I removed them, and then a lot of times what we do in editing is we tell the client to prioritize things. Make an order of priority. Which one is the most important? Not just to the story, not to the plot as it is, but to you. Which one do you like the most? What character do you enjoy writing more about, and would be really painful to reduce their presence? As opposed to this character that you, like, “I don’t know if they’re important to the plot, but I just feel obligated to write them. I don’t actually enjoy writing that character.” Now, the funny thing is, sometimes we do find that clients give us answers that we have fairly certain are not correct when it comes to what their priority is. We can tell in your manuscript how much you would love a character, genuinely. There’s some very strong signs, and again, sometimes people will put their top character as a character they feel obligated towards. This is the character they’re supposed to love, but we can tell in the manuscript that they’re not putting energy into that character like they’re putting into another character.

Oren: Yeah, I’ve had a few clients who, after I have pushed a little bit, have admitted that actually they don’t really like that character the most. That’s just their main character, so they felt like they should rank them higher. I’m trying to think if there’s a better way I can ask that question that will encourage them to be more open the first time. But until then, I’ll just have to depend on my amazing ability to suss out which character you like most. It’s usually not that hard. Because it’s the one that has all of the development and gets to do the most and usually has the most candy, although not always. Sometimes it’s the one who has the most bad things happen to them, because now the story can focus on them more.

Chris: So yeah, just think about that. And then what you want for a main character is that they should definitely be the star of the show at the climax. Sometimes that can get lost. You should spend the most time with them. Definitely make them a viewpoint character. Or, if you’re writing an omniscient, that just means you follow them. Viewpoint character film style. Give that person the most investment and focus. And other people could support that main character. Not that there aren’t ensemble stories or those can’t work, but that’s actually a very niche situation. I have not… Oren, have you gotten many manuscripts that you would say, “Yeah, this is an ensemble?” Like, ensemble is an equal focus on multiple characters and that actually works in the story.

Oren: No, not that actually works, really. I have seen a few stories where the author had that idea, but just didn’t know how to do it because ensemble stories are difficult. And so I would talk to them about, “Okay, is this something you’re really interested in? Because if it is, we can try to work towards it. But it is going to be more work.” And when I explain that to them, they usually go for a single main character.

Chris: So it’s not that it’s impossible, but it is a really niche scenario. And in the vast majority of cases, there’s one character. Even if you have a Team Good, protagonists that are hanging out, there’s one character that’s the most important.

Oren: I have had one client who had a pair of dual protagonists. And I thought that actually would have worked fine. But in the end, she decided to consolidate it down to one for her own reasons. And that also worked. The story worked very well, but I think she could have kept both of them as the double protagonists. So that’s a situation where that could have worked, but that’s one client. I’ve worked with more than that.

Chris: If you’re writing a romance, I think it’s more common to have two characters where you have viewpoints from both people on both sides of a relationship. Even in those, I’ve often seen that one character feels a little bit more like the main character than the other. But that would be probably the most common reason I’ve seen it evenly spread over more than one character. Another character-related thing that, again, this is really important for your main character and assessing who your main character is and spotlighting them appropriately, it’s very common for the main character to not have enough agency.

Oren: Oh boy.

Chris: Especially if your character is young or a woman.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: It’s not that I’ve never seen adult men, male protagonists with not enough agency, but that is significantly less common.

Oren: I’ve seen it a few times, but surprising no one, it’s usually young and female is the reason, is the characters who don’t have much agency. At least when it’s a woman, that’s usually a matter of preconceptions and baggage that I can explain why that shouldn’t be the case, and then that can be changed. There are occasional exceptions, like when an author wants to write a story about… that takes place in a really patriarchal world, but wants a plot that depends on someone who isn’t under patriarchal restrictions, but they want the protagonist to be a woman, that’s complicated. But usually it’s not that complicated. Young protagonists are a lot trickier.

Chris: Yeah. With young people, it’s like, there’s a lot of logistics over whether there are also adults that should be taking on these tasks, which makes it partly a worldbuilding issue in many cases. Having a built-in reason why young people… That’s one thing that, I don’t know if we’ve talked about in Lockwood & Co., that was a neat part of the premise, is that only young people have the ghost abilities to detect ghosts, therefore we have a built-in reason in the world why they’re going into danger. And that really helps, but not every story is going to have something like that that is easily usable.

Oren: Yeah, and when it comes to young adventurer heroes, there are ways to make that feel more realistic, but in a lot of cases it’s going to come down to a similar situation to the Masquerade, which is: often there’s just not a way to make it super plausible, but your story kind of depends on it anyway. And so sometimes you’re going to need to deploy some handwavium.

Chris: Basically, just don’t call attention to it. If you point out that there’s a bunch of adults right there who could handle the problem, this is the issue I keep having with some recent Marvel shows, including Ms. Marvel and Moon Girl, where they want to bring in S.H.I.E.L.D., but once S.H.I.E.L.D. is there, it’s like, “Why isn’t S.H.I.E.L.D. helping this young person deal with their enemies?”

Oren: Because Maria Hill’s not taking their texts anymore, because Casey texted her too much.

Chris: Oh, gosh.

Oren: That’s a real reason. That’s a real thing. Apparently people are mad about the way Maria Hill was treated in the Secret Invasion show, but I’m mad about the way she was treated in the Moon Girl show.

Chris: It’s like, “We sent her too many texts and she’s already blocking our texts, so we just have no other way of contacting S.H.I.E.L.D. for help. We just can’t do it. Texting was our only method.”

Oren: I’m actually worried that season two is going to play up how worried the rest of the family is about Moon Girl and how they think that she shouldn’t be a superhero, because I hate that storyline, because they would be right. She shouldn’t be a superhero, but she needs to be for the show, and I want to watch the show. So it always ends up feeling really contrived.

Chris: Yeah, if you have a child hero going on dangerous adventures, just don’t bring in that kind of social conflict. Just don’t have the parents be like, “I don’t know, this is dangerous,” and do a conflict over it. Just don’t. Leave it alone. And again, in this situation with Moon Girl, the answer was to not bring S.H.I.E.L.D. in. If you have a child superhero, you just pretend like other people can’t do anything and aren’t there, and adult authorities aren’t there, and just don’t exist. But in any case, so again, with agency, you’re looking at making it so your main character is making important decisions that have an impact on the plot, which often means that they come up with ideas and come up with plans. If you have a group of protagonists, they’re doing that and guiding what actions the protagonists take next. Now they have to do it alone, but we need to see that they really have an impact. And also, they’re the one that is most responsible for solving problems, because: Always Be Solving Problems. We talked about that.

Oren: And there is one last thing I want to touch on in this topic, which is: I often get a question that boils down to some version of, “Does my protagonist have to be a badass to have agency?” And the answer is: If the conflicts you have in mind require specific skills for a character to participate in them, your protagonist should probably have those skills, whether they start with them or get them before the conflict arises or something, because otherwise it’s just not going to work. If your story is about sword fighting, your protagonist should be able to sword fight, at least on some level. And by the same token, if your protagonist is a huge badass and has all these skills, but you create a scenario where none of those skills ever matter, then having all of those skills doesn’t compensate for their lack of agency. I’ve seen this happen a number of times with female protagonists, where the author will be like, “They’re a huge badass, they can swords fight and shoot arrows and they have magic,” and whatever, but then none of those skills ever matter, like they’re never in a position to sword fight or shoot an arrow or use their magic, and they just get carried along through the plot for some other reason.

Chris: Oftentimes in these cases, when we have a protagonist that does not have enough agency, giving more skills, taking away any other characters that are solving problems for them can be important. If they have a parent hanging around, if they have a mentor hanging around, that’s just solving everything for them, you’ve got to reduce that mentor’s powers and abilities or take them away entirely and then give your main character more skills until they can actually make that impact and have agency. And as a last note, if you are having trouble because you want things to go wrong, and you’re like, “If my main character is able to solve problems, then things wouldn’t get worse, and I want things to get worse,” I do have an article on that that we can point you to, on how to keep giving them agency, even if you want everything to go downhill.

Oren: And that actually is a good segue, because we’re almost out of time, but there is one last common problem that I want to cover, which is lack of turning points. Because turning points are another really important thing that most people don’t know about, at least not intellectually. A lot of people understand them instinctually, but don’t have a name for it. For a long time, I called them the extra oomph moment, because I was very eloquent until Chris came up with turning points. This is the point in the conflict where the protagonist goes from losing to winning, or winning to losing. It’s where they demonstrate not only how they’re going to win/lose, but why they deserve that outcome. And if you don’t have one, then you can just describe the conflict as, “And then the character fought really good, and then won.”

Chris: “They swung their swords back and forth, and hey, what do you know, that sword swing chopped somebody’s head off. Yay!”

Oren: A very famous example of this is in the Black Panther movie, the first one, the final fight between Killmonger and T’Challa. They just fight for a while, and then suddenly T’Challa wins. This time he throws a knife, and it works this time. It wouldn’t have worked other times, the guy just would have dodged it, but it worked this time, because the fight’s over.

Chris: And you’ll see the films will have them do something fancy, to try to create… it’s not a good way to create a turning point, but what they’ll do in most of these cases is they’ll, like, “Okay, the protagonist is down,” and then suddenly, “Cool move!” And it’s…

Oren: Why didn’t you do that before?

Chris: A cool move is not… Oh, the latest Marvel thing is like, how you win is by getting stabbed through the midsection, and then somehow through force of will, getting up and attacking the enemy anyway. And it’s like, I… that is not a good turning point.

Oren: That one’s actually really interesting, because that is taking a good idea and taking it so far that it’s a bad idea. Because what they’re trying to do there is they’re trying to demonstrate persistence, which is one of the qualities we talk about in our turning point posts, because usually the three qualities your protagonist is demonstrating to show why they win is they’re either showing cleverness, persistence, or selflessness. And there are others, but those are the three that’ll get the job done most of the time. And persistence often takes the form of persevering through pain, and that can work. We can see that in The Winter Soldier, when Captain America gets shot, but he is able to push through that and do the thing he needs to do. The problem is that now we’ve… like, getting shot’s not enough anymore, so we’ve upgraded to getting impaled.

Chris: And it’s just clear that the Marvel writers don’t really know what to do, so they just keep copying what they know works, but that means doing the same thing over and over again. Which is, I think, one of the reasons why it’s escalated so much, is because it’s lost its impact. So instead of changing to a different kind of turning point and doing something unique, they’re just making it more.

Oren: And at that point, even if you could argue that they’ve demonstrated persistence, it just destroys credibility. They should be dead. They got stabbed through the middle. Like, you don’t survive that. Unless you’re Wolverine. I’ll accept it, maybe, if you have a specific healing power that can fix that, but if you do, it’s probably not a good turning point anyway.

Chris: Yeah. We’ve got several articles on turning points. They are one of the more advanced storytelling concepts. I often don’t go over turning points with clients until other pieces of the story are looking pretty good. Certainly, if there’s no throughline, I don’t usually talk about turning points. Focus on the big picture stuff first. But the climax is never going to feel quite right until you have that turning point down. The climax, especially. Turning points happen everywhere, but the climax is where you want the turning point that really just knocks it out of the park. Because that’s your most important moment.

Oren: This is true. And speaking of turning points, we have reached the end of the podcast, where we go from recording to not recording anymore by demonstrating cleverness of checking the clock. Therefore, I think we can call this point turned.

Chris: And if we said anything that makes you wonder whether or not you’re doing it right, or you have a good throughline, or you have good turning points, you can join our 10-year celebration and get that personalized advice from us on your story or project. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants and join at the 10 USD or Pegasus tier or above by August 14th, if you’re not already at that level.

Oren: Alright, and before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, we have Callie McLeod. 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 will talk to you all next week.

[outro music]

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