534 – Climaxes in Low-Tension Stories

Show Notes

• Xenomorph 
• Tension
• Two Guys With Guns
• Legends and Lattes
• The Spellshop
• Quicksilver

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Arturo. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris:  You are listening to the Mythcreants Podcast, with your hosts: Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.

[opening theme]

Oren: Hey, so a quick note from the future: We got a little excited when talking about The Spellshop and Legends & Lattes, and forgot to give spoiler warnings. So spoilers for both of those books. Now back to the podcast.

Bunny: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Bunny, and with me is…

Oren: Oren.

Bunny: … and…

Chris: Chris.

Bunny: So it’s been a nice little podcast we’ve got. I’m sure we’re all holding our tea with both hands curled up under blankets, and maybe we have a pastry next to us that we can dip in our tea, savor, and then just sigh a little bit. And it’s been nice, but I hear something bad is supposed to happen. It can’t all be good.

Chris: Mmm!

Oren: We can have a sudden burst of violence.

Chris: Yeah, that’s true.

Bunny: Maybe there was foreshadowing that we went and encountered a xenomorph, so… Oh no, I feel something in my chest!

Chris: Oh no!

Oren: Suddenly we all died ’cause of xenomorphs.

Bunny: Secretly in this croissant there’s a razor blade. I will use it to slash the throat of the xenomorph.

Oren: Good job!

Bunny: Now we can get back to running our tea shop.

Oren: Yeah, everything’s great. We’re all fine here. There was just some gruesome violence.

Bunny: Alternatively, something dramatic could happen, like Chris and I disagreeing on the efficacy of the ending of a certain cozy mystery we both read recently.

Oren: Oh dear.

Bunny: That would never happen.

Chris: No, never! Always in agreement.

Oren: We could have, like, a sudden conflict with one of those weirdos who writes these essays about how cozy fantasy is destroying literature. That could happen. That could be our sudden final fight.

Bunny: That could be our twist. We could start pretending that Legends & Lattes is equivalent to… harboring Jeffrey Epstein.

Oren: Yeah! What a great essay!

Chris: But, you know, if we have to face these people, we’re going to have to actually win them over, right? We have to realize that they meant well all along. They were just going about things the wrong way, and then they become our friends and soon they’re sitting down with us and also holding tea with both hands.

Oren: Ah, the true victory!

Bunny: Yeah, they’re just misguided! They’re just misunderstood. They can work at our tea shop on weekends.

Oren: Oh no…

Bunny: So it’s hard to write climaxes for low-tension stories. It’s hard to measure out the right amount of conflict. It’s like putting sugar and tea: you need just enough.

Chris: Yeah.

Oren: So, like, all of it, then. The maximum amount.

Bunny: Frankly, you just drip some tea into the sugar jar.

Oren: Yeah, it’s fine. If you use sugar alternatives, some of those you don’t need to use nearly as much to get the same amount of sweetness, so you should use the same amount for even more sweetness. Boom!

Bunny: Yeah, you could use Splenda and it tastes really gross.

Oren: I gotta admit, I like Splenda.

Chris: Yeah, me too.

Bunny: No!

Oren: I can’t tell the difference between Splenda and sugar and I don’t have to use as much Splenda, so that’s what I end up using.

Bunny: No, it’s just sickly and icky.

Oren: You know, I’ll have to take your word for it. It’s the same to me. I have tested different mugs of tea with different types of sweeteners in them, and I cannot tell the difference between Splenda and sugar.

Chris: You placebo’d yourself with sugar?

Bunny: Oh, I was trying to figure out if this is Splenda or sugar or regular tea, and now my knee injury is gone.

Oren: Although this could be a fun climax for a story about running a tea shop, where the person is trying to prove that their sugar alternative sweetener is just as good as sugar, or vice versa, prove that you should only use real sugar, none of this fake chemical stuff, right? There’s no chemicals in any of this.

Bunny: Yeah, we’re going to go to war with big Splenda.

Oren: But, like, for a low-tension tea story, which is about keeping your tea business going. The climax could be convincing a critic. Tea critic, those must exist.

Bunny: Heartland Food Products Group is going down!

Oren: If you wanted to make the stakes a little higher, sure, right.

Chris: I do think that it’s worth talking about why people have so much trouble with this. It’s because everybody knows that a climax is supposed to be more tense and exciting. That’s the one thing that everybody knows before they come to Mythcreants. It’s the only thing. But without understanding plot structure, they’re just like, “Oh, I’m supposed to have an exciting moment here.” And so we’ll see stories that people will turn in, where the characters will be sitting around holding their tea with both hands. And then you’ll have graphic fight scene, and then you go back to characters sitting around with tea and having nice conversations. That’s almost like what The Wandering Inn is like. Well, The Wandering Inn actually does have structure when it’s not doing violence. It’s kind of like that, where it’s like, “This doesn’t really fit here.” And there’s a big difference between having a plot that climaxes and then just having random violence pop in out of nowhere, ’cause that’s not really structure. What you want is to have a problem the character’s working on and then have that build up to a peak.

Bunny: It’s the “Two guys with guns come through the door” piece of writing advice that we’ve debunked. That school of thought doesn’t really work anyway, but it especially doesn’t work if you’re trying to write a cozy.

Chris: I mean, I’m not going to say there’s no situation in which you could have two guys with guns coming through the door, but I think that when somebody’s thinking of that, they’re assuming you know everything else about storytelling and those guys with guns actually fit your story and actually work for your plot, and not that you have a cozy where somebody is creating a coffee shop and then two guys coming through the door with guns. The average person who’s just learning storytelling for the first time doesn’t have any of that context or preexisting knowledge to lug that into. And I think a lot of what we call pseudostructures are like that. The idea is that you’re supposed to come to the table already knowing how to tell a story.

Oren: So, were I to hazard a theory about the main issue that people have here, and you all know me, I’m very cautious with my opinions…

Chris: You’d never.

Oren: … I would say that the biggest reason why people have problems creating a climax or finale for their low-tension story is that people have a really hard time with the difference between low tension and no tension. And a number of these stories, which are clearly aiming for low tension, overshoot and hit zero tension. And if there’s zero tension, there’s nothing to resolve. That’s what the climax does. It is a machine that turns tension into satisfaction. And if you didn’t have any tension, you have nothing to put in the machine. So then you end up doing all kinds of weird things to try to compensate.

Bunny: You need a conflict that will also be your throughline, right? I think that’s the other difficult part, is that it needs to be a resolution that comes from what the rest of the story was also about.

Oren: Yeah.

Bunny: That’s why, even if you don’t have a random burst of violence, a random burst of conflict of any type that’s not related to what came before is also not a good climax, even if it’s the right level of cozy.

Chris: Yeah. Although, I mean, what I will say is, let’s say we’re taking Legends & Lattes. Basically the stakes become whether the coffee shop fails, and it has to get you to care about the coffee shop for that to work. But that’s the throughline, is whether that coffee shop, that effort to put it together, will succeed. And so, last episode we talked about, “Okay, how do you use up your time so you can bring in different antagonists,” right? As long as they all threaten the coffee shop. And so it has a couple different plots that are mostly built with foreshadowing that provide some tension. We have the protection racket, and then we have the old coworker who has a grudge.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Because they are established early, then they can kind of show up later and create a new threat. So I don’t think that there was anything wrong with Legends & Lattes having, “Oh, the old coworker sets the shop on fire.” It wasn’t resolved well, but as a climax, I don’t think that was necessarily bad.

Bunny: Yeah, I actually think that would’ve been kind of a perfect climax, because a big part of the story was, like you said, “Will the coffee shop succeed?” and, to a lesser extent, “Will Viv give up violence and find community?” And in the latter case, it kind of fumbles that, right? Like we’ve discussed how her finding community is not quite there. She’s running a business and it’s not like nobody can be charitable towards a business that burned down, but it doesn’t do the work to be like she’s earned the amount of support that she gets in return for it.

Oren: Yeah, we just didn’t see her giving to the community the way that we would want for that kind of ending, right?

Chris: Right. And just to clarify, for anyone who has not read this book, what happens is that the old coworker actually does succeed in burning the shop, and then the community gets together to rebuild it. And what that should be to make that ending satisfying, it should be what we call a prior achievement, where earlier the main character has done something to earn their goodwill without getting anything in return, and then now they return the favors that she’s done by rebuilding the shop. Therefore, we can attribute the fact that they rebuild it to her, even though it’s a community effort. But in this case, she just hasn’t done that. She hasn’t earned it. So it’s just unsatisfying because, yeah, they liked drinking coffee, but she was doing that for profit, right? It wasn’t a favor to them.

Oren: Right. It works a little better, in my experience from talking to people who liked the ending, what made it work is that we are so heckin’ starved for nice local coffee shops that the fact that she doesn’t do anything for the community is beside the point. It’s like, “You’re not Starbucks and you serve good? Yes! Have all my money! I will send my children to work to repair your coffee shop. I just want a nice coffee shop that isn’t Starbucks so bad.” But I think we can aim a little higher, right?

Bunny: I do think, to script-doctor this a bit, I think that Baldree did set himself on the back foot by having this be set in a large city where most of her customers are kind of anonymous. We get to know some of them, but I wonder…

Chris: As opposed to The Spellshop, which is in a small town where everybody knows each other, therefore is obviously the good model for how to do this correctly?

Bunny: As opposed to The Spellshop, yes. On Bland Wish Fulfillment Island.

Oren: Hang on, hang on. We gotta… I’m not done with Legends & Lattes yet. For script-doctoring, I actually know a thing that could have made this work quite well, and I think wouldn’t have taken that big a change. The book sort of has two climaxes, ’cause it has the gangster protection racket plot (which I think we agree also doesn’t resolve very well, because it’s just Viv agreeing to pay protection money in product instead of cash, and that’s like the same thing, that’s not any better), so what we needed here was for Viv to solve that problem by rallying the local business owners (who we could have be characters; they wouldn’t need to be just a faceless crowd), have a few of the other local business owners, and they rally together to present a united front. “Well, none of us are paying, and you can’t take all of us.” And that scares off the gangsters, and Viv is the one who makes this all work and she takes point and does all the effort to make it happen.

Chris: Because she does get something from that, in that they all oppose the protection racket together, which gives her protection from the protection racket. We’d really have to see her go above and beyond.

Oren: Yes.

Chris: She needs to do something that it doesn’t feel like she’s already gotten some benefit from.

Oren: I agree. We would need to see that this is something important enough that it earns her good karma, but it would then give us some characters who we already know who could then band together to help her at the end when her coffee shop burns down.

Bunny: And honestly, you could probably combine those two things. Maybe she refuses to pay the protection money and her coffee shop gets burned down. But she’s built up so much goodwill that her neighboring businesses are like, “This will not stand,” and together take a stand against the protection racket, right?

Chris: Honestly, I really like the idea of the coffee shop burning down and then it turns out the real coffee shop was the friends we made along the way, right? That’s great. Just didn’t quite get there.

Bunny: Yeah, yeah.

Oren: You can see the idea, but it’s not quite manifesting.

Chris: Right. In concept, it was a fine idea for conflict. It’s just how Baldree has issues solving problems. But yeah, so generally the climax has to be more tense than the rest of the book, but it doesn’t have to be life or death. A lot of times, a high-pressure social moment works. “Everybody’s watching, now make a speech!” tends to work pretty well.

Bunny: It’s like, “A song! Do a little dance!”

Chris: This is super cheesy, but all those romance movies where one of the people’s getting married to somebody else, and then the character has to march in, interrupt the wedding, and confess their love…

Oren: Ah, no, I don’t like it.

Chris: I’m not going to say it’s my favorite ending either, but there’s a reason it’s done that way, and that’s to create a climax that is: the love interest is about to get married to somebody else, so we have some level of urgency, which otherwise is difficult to create for a romance.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: But you can also do it with: “the love interest is about to move away, or take a job that will take them away,” or something like that. And then we have a really high-pressure social situation with everybody watching, and it makes the protagonist prove themselves while confessing their love.

Bunny: Yeah, they take a risk of making a fool out of themselves or having people laugh at them, or being very publicly turned down or shamed. That’s enough to make a lot of us cringe imagining ourselves in that situation.

Chris: Yeah. But it also makes it feel like they’ve earned that, because they were willing to do all of those things. So that could be an alternative to having… Lives do not have to be in the line. Or another alternative is, if you don’t want something that’s fight-scene-exciting, if that doesn’t fit because the story otherwise has no fight scenes, it is pretty low tension, have something that has lives in the line but is just a little bit slower paced, ’cause a fight scene is very fast. Can you imagine how fast people punch each other or hit each other with a sword? It breezes by very quickly, so that fire in Legends & Lattes breeds a little danger, but it’s not quite as fast-paced as a fight scene. There’s a little bit more time to maneuver and avert disaster.

Bunny: Yeah, if you want to see how fast fighting happens, watch fencing sometimes.

Oren: Sorry, it’s already over. You can’t anymore.

Bunny: Yeah. Some authors are like, “It was a quick fight! It was two minutes!” That’s a long fight.

Chris: Yeah. Realistic fights are over super quickly a lot of times, but we don’t always do that in stories because we want the fight to feel a little bit more epic.

Oren: Although I do feel the need to point out, before anyone else does, that how fast a fight is is going to depend on the kind of fight.

Chris: Sure.

Oren: It’s true that fencing is over really quickly, but a fight with both participants in full plate mail armor, that can actually last quite a while.

Bunny: Yeah, it takes two minutes just to walk up to your opponent.

Oren: The reason fencing is so fast is that all you need to do is tag the other person with your point or the side of your weapon, depending on what kind of fencing it is, and that’s reasonably in keeping with the kind of duels that fencing has grown out of. But if you’re two plate-mail-covered warriors, you are really hard to hurt.

Chris: Yeah, and if your plate mail is made out of solid gold, then you’re not going to be able to jog. And then if the protagonist starts leaping up a wall somehow like a video game, you’ll have a real tough time there.

Bunny: You’re being taunted…

Chris: I’m making fun of quicksilver.

Oren: Right.

Chris: It has some very confusing description of the armor, but at least part of the time suggests it’s made of solid gold, and you would not make plate armor outta solid gold. You would just not do it. That is not a thing, no matter how rich and vain the queen is, you still would not do that.

Oren: Certainly not for, like, your random guards to actually wear, right? Maybe a gold-plated one as, like, a display piece if you’re incredibly rich, but anyway.

Bunny: Another conflict that both Legends & Lattes and The Spellshop use is hiding something, which is helpful because, if someone comes looking for it, then there you go. There’s your conflict, right? And then you can resolve that by being clever. And those are both things that can be tense, but don’t need to devolve into swords swinging.

Chris: I have a post on nonviolent exciting conflicts, right? If you want something that still has kind of the excitement that’s close to a fight, but you just don’t want to have violence, which again, a lot of times in light stories or cozies may not feel like it fits. Chases, for instance, can be really great ’cause you might have to chase somebody. You might be chased and you create tricky terrain that you have to jump over or trip up on that can give you some interesting things going on. Or… I like mazes and labyrinths. You can have cool puzzles and monsters slip out. If you have magic, of course, you can have a ritual. The Spellshop ends with a ritual. I think that there is some things about it that could be better as far as excitement goes. I think the problem with the way that that ritual design there… so it’s a group who has to say a bunch of words perfectly to stop a dangerous storm. And I think the issue with it is you want it to be difficult, but if the difficulty is, “Oh, you have to say all these words right the first time,” then there’s no room for people to fail and then recover.

Bunny: But they try to have it do that anyway.

Chris: Yeah, but then it just feels unrealistic because you’re supposed to fail if you don’t say it exactly.

Bunny: Right. And they’ve built it up so much that this has to be perfect and it takes tons of training and that these need to be professionals, but then these people who have never spoken the words before seem to do it perfectly. One of them stumbles a little bit and then gets comforted by a cat and gets right back on track, and all that does is make flowers fall from the sky, and it doesn’t feel like it was actually that hard.

Oren: I have the solution for this, actually. This is what’s called engineering in error bars. The engineers who made this spell know that the people saying it are not going to say it right, so they tell you that it needs to be 100% perfect, but it actually only needs to be about 90% perfect, but they don’t tell you that, ’cause they know if they do, you’ll push it and you’ll think it’ll be okay for it to be 80% perfect. And then everyone dies. I’m glad we’ve solved that plot hole.

Bunny: Very clever.

Chris: Sometimes you need to have… let’s say they had to toss a ball between them as part of the ritual, as an example, and it can’t touch the ground or the ritual fails horribly. Now you have opportunity for the ball to go wide and then somebody to run after it, right? And then somebody else catches it, but “Oh no, we have to include them in the ritual,” ’cause only people in the ritual are allowed to touch the ball.

Bunny: High-stakes volleyball.

Chris: High-stakes volleyball! The point is that we’re creating a framework for the ritual where we can watch them struggle to meet the requirement, and we have some room to maneuver there. That just doesn’t really work very well if they’re just saying a thing.

Oren: Finally, my ability to describe Hacky Sack in perfect detail is going to come to the fore.

Bunny: You and the storm are going to compete in a game of cornhole.

Oren: I also thought it might be worth pointing out, ’cause we’ve been talking a lot about avoiding the random burst of violence at the end, if you want to have a relatively low-tension story that ends with a fight scene or some other kind of violence, that also can work. It just needs to feel like it’s a reasonable escalation of what’s been going on as opposed to something random. And the perfect example is The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi, which is a fairly low-tension, not zero ’cause it’s about a main character hanging out in a kaiju research base, and so there’s always the threat that a kaiju might step in the wrong place, right? So that could happen. So there’s some tension there. It’s just not super high tension for most of the story. And then by the end, it escalates, ’cause one of the kaiju gets in a bad situation and they have to go try to deal with it and there’s a bad guy and blah. You know, at that point you have a fairly conventional action climax.

Chris: Story things.

Oren: Yeah. And the reason it worked was that this felt like a natural extension of what had already come before. It wasn’t like, “We were just hanging out in this town the whole time, and then suddenly a kaiju appeared.”

Chris: I think that the climax starts to feel inappropriate when, either, (a) it’s just graphic and that doesn’t fit the tone of the story, and that does happen when we get manuscripts in, people who are less experienced, usually, again, need to work on judging tone, and so sometimes they make things a little too graphic by default, or (b) there just hasn’t been similar conflicts in the story or anything building up to the fight. Even Legends & Lattes, which generally doesn’t have much physical fights or conflicts in it, has a lot of foreshadowing to build up this animosity towards the main character from somebody who is another adventurer who goes on fights. There’s a little bit of foreshadowing of the threat of violence, even though there isn’t any fights in the book.

Bunny: I think it’s also important that pretty much any climax, while it can have multiple parts, needs to be its own thing. This is the climax of the book, and that’s another issue I had with The Spellshop, is that there’s kind of five different climaxes. And I have listed them!

Chris: I mean, okay, so my interpretation is those are the climaxes for child arcs. Which is what usually happens if you subdivide the book into child arcs, and each child arc should have a climax. We discuss this a little bit, and that’s a matter of the perception on the part of the reader as to whether the throughline has resolved or not, which I have called on the blog a false ending. The difference here is that I didn’t feel like there was a false ending, and it sounds like Bunny experienced a false ending at some point in the book.

Bunny: I did. I experienced a false ending because I felt like the story ended when we wrapped up the Kiela story, and after we did that, then it becomes the Radan story. At which point I was like, “Okay, this just keeps going,” right? So I felt like the Kiela story ended when we found out that Radan is not an investigator. She’s, you know, misunderstood and running from something, just like Kiela. And actually the books are safe, and okay, that’s good, but then it becomes The Radan Show. Now Radan needs to be hidden from her ex-fiancé. And then there’s a storm and they gotta fix the storm. And I think you’re right that this ought to have been the thing that felt like the full ending. And then the fiancé comes back, so Radan needs to be hidden again, and then the fiancé has to be convinced not to try and find Radan.

Chris: Doesn’t that happen before the storm? Because the storm hits the ship.

Bunny: No, it happens twice. They leave and then the storm hits, and then the ship comes back.

Chris: And then he briefly visits. But that’s in falling action.

Bunny: Yeah, but it still felt like there was still tension in whether he would continue searching the island for Radan. She still has to convince him that Radan should go free.

Chris: Right.

Bunny: Like he’s not decided on that, despite them already having talked about that.

Chris: Right. But at that point it’s… yeah, I mean, I interpreted it differently, but that’s okay.

Bunny: I think maybe the main reason I found this not super satisfying is that I wanted it to be more about Kiela, and it’s all about Radan.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, Kiela still has agency, though. She’s still the problem-solver, because she is the one who’s coming up with plans to hide Radan, or I think it’s Radane?

Bunny: Radane?

Chris: I listened to the audiobook.

Bunny: I don’t know; I just read the book.

Chris: Yeah. Could be different things.

Bunny: Yeah. I… My brain just decides to pronounce things. Maybe it’s Kiela; I’ve just been calling Kiela.

Chris: Yeah, the audiobook narrator pronounced it Kiela and Radane, I think. But regardless, she still has agency. She’s the one who chooses that they should hide Radane, and has agency and is put on the line. Radane is off hiding somewhere. And then she’s the one who has to talk to the people who are coming in looking for her. So that’s why I didn’t feel like the end of the story was about Radane instead of Kiela, because Kiela still has that agency. I do think there’s, again, a question of interpretation, because Radane comes in and threatens to expose Kiela. There’s a question of, “Okay, once that’s done, do you still feel like there’s a threat of Kiela being exposed or not?” And I think that could be why you feel like that’s tied up, because after that’s resolved, you didn’t feel like there was any more threat to Kiela being exposed, whereas knowing that somebody’s coming for Radane, you could ask, “Okay, well, is that somebody also going to expose Keila in the process?” Because there’s still that guy in town, like really grumpy guy.

Bunny: Yeah, the hero hater.

Chris: He was clearly just there to create some tension of her being exposed.

Bunny: Although we ship him off at the end like a sack of potatoes.

Chris: Yup. We ship him off at the end.

Bunny: But he hates jam!

Chris: But he is there to say, “Not only is she hiding Radane, but she is no good and she’s got her spellbooks and stuff.” So yeah, that’s how it ends.

Oren: There is a notable tension slump between the reveal of Radane and when it heats up again later. So I can see how that could cause some way, “Is the story still going? Yeah, I guess. Oh. Oh, okay. Here we are.”

Chris: Yeah. I think what was supposed to be happening there is Radane initially comes in as an antagonist, right? And then of course, ’cause this is a cozy, we befriend her.

Oren: Yeah, you gotta.

Chris: And then once we befriend her, somebody else might come after her. And I think that is supposed to create tension, but it just seems so unlikely, because this is an island that’s way out far away. So the idea that somebody would specifically come looking for her there when nobody’s come looking for Kiela there or anything else…

Bunny: Within like a day or two.

Chris: … seems really unlikely. So I just did not feel any tension over that. And then I think the tension picks up when somebody actually shows up looking for her.

Oren: The island is so idyllic, though, everyone eventually ends up there. It somehow has better food than the big city, you know? Totally how rural towns work.

Bunny: Yeah. I will say I did feel weird about the amount of pastoral idealism in it, and, like, I get it, it’s Wish Fulfillment Island, I get that, but Kiela’s always going, “And it’s so much better than the city!”

Oren: Well, this all just makes more sense when you realize there are two facts: One is that most writers live in cities. Two, most writers are depressed and therefore anywhere they are not is better than where they are. That’s why we get so many stories about how small town life is better than city life.

Bunny: Yeah, it’s Hallmark.

Chris: Right, you go somewhere and everybody knows each other and likes each other, of course.

Bunny: Except for the jam hater.

Chris: Totally people you get along with, and somehow you have all the same amenities of the city that are magically there, and the variety of food and, yeah.

Bunny: Yeah, there can be one grumpy guy, but he’ll leave and then everything’s great.

Oren: One rude boy.

Bunny: One rude boy.

Chris: One rude boy who we could ship off at the end.

Bunny: In my opinion, having imperial investigator threat and then a warship was too much. I think we could have had one or the other, and then had the storm conflict and resolved that with a little more trouble, and then that would have wrapped both the “Kiela needs to find community,” “The storms are affecting the island,” and the spellbooks plot, all at the same time.

Chris: Yeah, that might’ve… I think the tricky thing there is these plots where you have an antagonist that is just a little misunderstood and you can make friends with them, those are really hard to pull off and make everybody stay in character without making it like they just turn into a different person. And so, keeping them short, I think, definitely makes that easier because, in most of those situations in my experience, if you think about their character and you just make them act in character, they don’t really want to fight that much, if they’re that kind of person who’s just like, “Some kind of misunderstanding happening here.”

Bunny: What did you think of Caz threatening to murder Radane?

Chris: Oh man, that was…

Bunny: That was weird.

Chris: That was a little much. I think it was played for humor, but yeah, maybe a little much.

Bunny: I don’t know. The characters take it pretty seriously.

Oren: He’s a small, adorable plant. Therefore, everything he says is funny and not threatening.

Chris: I’ve definitely encountered that fallacy in books. “Hey, the character is small and cute, therefore they can do no wrong.” It’s like, “Mmm…” It’s actually just like the magical in Legends & Lattes, who’s like, “But you see, she’s running a protection rabbit. She’s running a protection…”

Bunny: Protection rabbit!

Chris: See? It’s a rabbit! So it’s cute and harmless.

Bunny: She rides a rabbit.

Chris: Led by this grandma, and so she’s sweet. So therefore, protection racket is just fine. I’ve definitely seen that fallacy in books.

Oren: Okay. Look, so we’ve gone even further over time than last time, so I think…

Bunny: No, I didn’t even get to talk about Tea Dragon Society!

Oren: I’m sorry. We are out of time. We’ve spent too long on Legends & Lattes and Spellshop.

Bunny: Here I was, coming in, pitching this, “I have only two main stories to talk about. How will we fill the time by arguing about them?”

Chris: Alright, if you would like to pet the Protection Rabbit, just support us at patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First there is Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.

[closing theme]

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