A story always says something, but is it what the author wanted it to say? All too often, a message is garbled, undercut, or completely destroyed because the author doesn’t understand how to properly communicate it. That’s one of the most common issues that comes up in content editing, so we have quite a lot to say on the topic. We discuss audience trust, stories that say one thing but do another, and, of course, the philosophy of consequentialism.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Maddie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast, with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock and Chris Winkle. [Intro Music]
Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant Podcast, I’m Chris and with me is…
Bunny: Bunny.
Chris: And…
Oren: Oren.
Chris: This podcast is not about messages or how they fail, it just looks exactly like that. What it’s really about will be subtly woven into our conversation via metaphor and symbolism. It’s for the second listen, maybe the third.
Bunny, Oren: [Laugh]
Chris: Very deep. It’s layers, like an onion.
Oren: It’s conveyed in such a way that it can mean whatever you want it to mean, and you can argue about it forever. [Chuckles]
Bunny: It’s a podcast as starry as the seeds of a pumpkin.
Oren: Okay, that’s good. I do like pumpkin.
Bunny: Listen to it two other times and you’ll understand.
Chris: [Chuckles] If you don’t understand, maybe you’re not an adult.
Bunny, Oren: [Chuckle]
Chris: But yeah, we really see that now. That argument. It’s very sad. [Laughs] Okay, we are actually going to discuss, for real, what gets in the way of sending a message. And by that, message being something you actually want to communicate to the audience. Some opinion or statement, and then have them receive that communication. And that’s kind of an important distinction.
Because I want to start by talking about tea leaf messaging. Just because this is something I see in a lot of client works, and it’s hard to identify in something that is published or popular because you can’t usually tell that was the approach unless you talk to the storyteller and find out what their intent was. We’ve talked many times about how very difficult it is to read a storyteller’s intent by looking at a work. This is one reason why the tea leaf messaging approach, oftentimes you just can’t see it until they tell you it’s there.
So what happens is, in the US at least, in our English and literature classes, we’re all taught to analyze stories for what we might call theme and meaning. And this is a really subjective exercise where the teacher makes you look at all the tiny details of the story and what various people say, or anything. Literally anything that’s there and guess what it all means. And it’s considered very subjective and the onus is on the reader to basically read into the tea leaves to figure it out. And you can come up with just about any conclusion by doing this, which honestly is why people like it so much. [Laughs] Because it’s a great fodder for discussion.
And again, I’ve said it before, but when literature is analyzed in class, it’s very much a culture that was created by fans for fans, not by writers for writers. And if they’re all reading the same beloved classic book again and again, and they’re trying to keep their conversations fresh, this is a way to accomplish that.
Bunny: Shakespeare [Fake cough].
Chris: [Laughs] Oh, you have a bad cough there, Bunny.
Bunny: Oh, I don’t know. Just jumped into my throat.
Chris: Yeah, geez. So what happens is that when writers want to put meaning to their story, they usually are following the mentality that was imbued in them by these types of classes where they’re thinking of meaning as a subjective exercise and that they as the writer just decide what it means. And then they put in little encoded hints and they don’t realize that nobody who reads their story is going to pick up what they’re putting down because those tea leaves are probably going to be insignificant compared to all of the other things that they put in their story, and are just insignificant and ambiguous. And so there’s not really a message that’s going to be communicated there.
Oren: Right. And it’s not even that they aren’t going to be looking and they aren’t going to notice the tea leaves, it’s that they will probably notice the much more obvious thing that you put in by accident, because if the tea leaves are tiny, then the rest of your story will take over and there will be a much more apparent message based on the bigger, more easily recognizable things.
Bunny: Look, if you put tea leaves into orange juice, all you’re going to taste is orange juice.
Chris: Very good metaphor. It’s very deep. I’m sure you will understand it on the fourth listen.
Bunny, Oren: [Laugh]
Chris: So basically to actually send a message, it has to be built into the story at a more fundamental level and more clearly. So you have to make your heroes and credible characters embrace this opinion. You want to often make your villains stand against it, is one way. Make people who embrace the opinion succeed because they embrace it, and then don’t undermine it, which is the thing I’m sure we will talk about where people put in a message and then they basically undo that message with how their story works.
Oren: It’s great being at Mythcreants because on the one hand, we tell people that, “Yes, you do need to be clear if you want your message to actually come across”. But we also tell people not to just put their manifesto in their first chapter, and then everyone gets mad at us because you get the people who are like, “No, I don’t think I should have to be clear”.
Bunny: [Chuckles]
Oren: And you got the people who are like, “Oh, but I wrote this manifesto. What do you mean I can’t just put it in as chapter two?”.
Bunny, Oren: [Chuckle]
Chris: And to be clear, if you like themes and tea leaf reading, it’s not that it hurts your story. It’s not that you can’t do that if that’s what you like. It’s just that if your goal is to actually have a message that is received, tea leaves will not accomplish that goal.
Bunny: Here’s a question. Can you tell a story without a message?
Chris: Not really, but you can make your message kind of common and generic enough that people don’t really notice it.
Oren: Yeah. Most stories are going to have a pretty basic like “if being clever is good”.
Bunny, Chris: [Laugh]
Chris: Being brave is good. Sticking by your pursuits is good. [Chuckles]
Oren: Persevering through hardship is good. That sort of thing.
Bunny: The friends we made along the way.
Oren: Yeah, those are messages. They’re pretty uninteresting. No one’s going to talk about them because they’re so common.
Chris: They’re so common people won’t even notice them really. But they are still messages that are in fact being sent. So yeah, stories are always going to have a message unless you make them unsatisfying. If readers get to the end and “What was the point of all that?”
Bunny: [Chuckles]
Chris: [Laughs] There may not be a message in there. Or they’re feeling the lack of a message. Yeah, you’re going to lower engagement if you don’t have something. But it does not necessarily have to be something that really stands out.
But yeah, the point is that when you have a message, generally there are very specific story mechanics that are used for that. That by default, people believe heroes, for instance, and what they believe. And I know a lot of people hate that. [Chuckles] But that’s just, look, heroes are right 99% of the time. So that’s just how people are going to expect them to be right again. That’s just how it works. Anyway, or what people are fighting for. The things that the stories rely on.
Oren: The one that is of course the most common, in my experience, the biggest problem that I run into both in published works and in client works, is that the author wants to send a message that the thing the hero needs to do to solve the main problem is bad. And that’s just not going to work. It’s just not going to come across.
And usually, it’s violence or acting on your own and being hot-headed. You got all kinds of authors who want to send a message that violence is wrong, but their main characters need to fight someone to stop a bad thing from happening. And I’m sorry, but your story can’t say that violence is unequivocally wrong if you then use violence to solve an important problem. You just can’t.
And the best you’re going to end up with is a story that’s really dark and dismal, and then when people don’t like it, you’re going to pop out from behind the page to be like, “Yeah, that’s because I was trying to say violence was wrong, so actually, you not having a good time was intentional”.
Chris: Don’t you like being challenged?
Bunny: [Chuckles]
Chris: Clearly, you’re not an adult.
Bunny: Oooh.
Oren: Congratulations, you said nothing.
Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]
Bunny: Go back to your baby literature. Oh wait, baby literature has messages too? Well, shit.
Oren: Yeah, damn it.
Chris: That’s a constant thing with people undermining messages, is that they want to have their bad trope and eat it too, right? Or in this case, when we’re talking about violence, sometimes it’s an action story, but for children. And I think some writers, something about that doesn’t sit well because I’m going to have children engaging in violent fights, and I don’t really want to promote violence to children.
And so then they try to both have a story about that, where the reader can enjoy those fights, but also condemn it, and that doesn’t work. You have to be willing to give up. You could potentially have a story where people learn that fighting is not the answer, but you would have, at the very least, much less action, and then you actually solve the problem without it and show that it wasn’t necessary in this particular case. But that goes against having cool fights.
Oren: And you can also, either, A: You don’t need to have tons of fights, you can make a story that works without them, it’s just harder. And, you can also embrace nuance, because most of us think that violence is bad most of the time, but is acceptable in certain situations, and that can be an interesting thing to talk about in your story. That’s a thing you could embrace. It’s much easier to do that than try to deliver some blanket “violence bad” type message at the end.
Bunny: Or like the pacifism thing at the end of The Last Airbender that comes out of nowhere. I don’t know, you’ve been beating up guys for three seasons now.
Oren: Yeah, that one at the end is just weird, because it’s like, “It would be wrong to kill Ozai”. And at first it’s like, would it? We don’t really have time to discuss that, because we’ve had so many fights where we didn’t have to kill anybody, why does suddenly this one need someone to die?
Bunny, Oren: [Chuckle]
Bunny: Yeah, that’s a pretty deathless series. There’s one, maybe one implied death.
Oren: They made fun of how unclear that was in The Ember Island Players episode.
Bunny, Chris: [Laugh]
Chris: Another one is beauty. So many popular stories that are supposed to have a message that beauty isn’t important, always cast a super hot actor in that role, because they want to say beauty isn’t important, but they also aren’t willing to give it up.
Oren: “Note to the producers, Margot Robbie is the wrong actress to cast if you want to make this point”.
Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Laugh]
Oren: That was a beautiful line, I loved it.
Chris: That was a line from the Barbie movie, for anyone who has not seen it. Any of the three people who have not seen that movie at this point.
Bunny: There’s also: Just put their hair in a bun.
Chris: Yeah, and put on glasses. Make their hair frizzy. Style it so it’s frizzy.
Bunny: Yeah, frizzy hair. Incredibly ugly. Ugh.
Oren: Although, that one’s usually a lead up to the makeover sequence, right? Where they take the glasses off or what have you. Whereas the ones that are like, “It’s okay, you don’t have to be beautiful, it’s what’s on the inside that matters”, and it’s said by a bunch of very beautiful people with perfect makeup.
Bunny: [Chuckles]
Oren: Okay. Okay, Hollywood.
Chris: I’m just annoyed with all the one-sided ones when it comes to heterosexual romances, right? Where it’s about, “Oh, see, she sees his value even though he’s not hot”. But she’s super hot, of course.
Bunny: Of course.
Chris: [Chuckles]
Oren: Yeah, or one of my recent ones, spoilers for the show The Imperfects, is they have the characters straight up say that this villain’s tragic backstory doesn’t excuse his actions. Everything about the show is designed to make you think that maybe his actions aren’t that bad because of his tragic backstory.
Bunny: Oh my god. Just decide!
Oren: It’s so weird that the characters say that as if it almost feels like it came out of an argument about tragic backstory villains that you can imagine happening online. But then they’re like, “No, we’re definitely still gonna do it”.
Bunny: [Laughs]
Oren: Because we want that trope.
Chris: That sounds like an embattled writer, right? I wrote this and this was a criticism I received and so now I’m just gonna write everybody in my story saying, “Oh no, we’re not excusing his actions”.
Bunny: [Chuckles]
Chris: Meanwhile, we’re clearly trying to build sympathy around him despite his actions because of his backstory and make him look less evil.
Oren: He certainly never gets held accountable for any of the things he did. It feels like you excused his actions a little bit.
Bunny: Just a little. It’s like having a movie about how it’s so cool to smoke cigarettes and at the end one of the characters says, “Don’t smoke cigarettes, kids”.
Oren: Don’t you do it.
Bunny: Don’t do it.
Chris: Another thing that can be really tricky sometimes is the protagonist learning curve. Because we talked about how people by default, they do believe the protagonist. And so the protagonist, unless you do something to counter it, has authorial endorsement. And what they think is a message your story has unless, for instance, you bring in a mentor to be like, “Oh, hero, someday you need to learn X. You’re wrong”. There are many stories where the protagonist needs to learn a lesson and this can be a great way of communicating a message, by having them have to learn this lesson to save the day and then they succeed because they’ve learned it.
But the problem is that in the beginning of their arc, they have not learned the lesson. [Chuckles] They have to be wrong about it in order for them to go through that learning curve. And if the story is long enough and it takes them long enough to learn, that means it looks like you are pushing the opposite point until they learn.
Sometimes with books, if the message isn’t super contentious or super important, sometimes that’s fine. Or sometimes it’s just obvious. So a protagonist, for instance, who doesn’t accept themself for who they are, especially if they’re like, “Oh, no, these cool wings make me such a freak”.
Bunny, Oren: [Chuckle]
Chris: Nobody believes that. Everybody assumes they’ll just be on a self-acceptance arc.
Bunny: [Chuckles]
Chris: But there can be things that are more contentious and if it’s stretched out for long enough, that can be an issue. I have a couple examples. For one, in the show Wolf Pack, so the showrunner, Jeff Davis, has anxiety and the lead Everett has anxiety and he wants to get rid of it. He becomes a werewolf.
Bunny: [Chuckles]
Chris: We know from interviews…
Bunny: Who needs therapy? You have werewolves.
Chris: Well, he becomes a werewolf by accident, but what happens is that he thinks that becoming a werewolf got rid of his anxiety and that his anxiety was bad and it’s great that he no longer has it. But we know from interviews with Jeff Davis that his point that he wants to make is that anxiety is a part of you and it’s not something to get rid of.
But that is absolutely not where season one ends. We see Everett reveling in the fact that he doesn’t have anxiety anymore and thinking that he became neurotypical basically by becoming a werewolf. It’s not a great way to end the first season. And then when you throw in the fact that there’s also an autistic kid that might get bit and, suggestion, an antagonist of questionable credibility, but still, suggests that the autism might go away.
Bunny: Hmmm.
Chris: This whole thing is… eughh.
Bunny: I will say werewolves as parallel for mental health is not something I’ve encountered before.
Chris: And I don’t think it’s supposed to be. I think it’s supposed to be separate. But it’s just, again, it’s supposed to be part of a learning curve, but in season one, the main character doesn’t get there and by default we assume that he’s right. And I would have no idea that was the showrunner’s intent, is to show that he’s wrong and have him learn better.
Oren: Just from an industry perspective, that is a huge roll of the dice, assuming you’re going to get a second season. Especially the way things are today, right? But even assuming you do get a second season, assuming you had a second season locked down and you knew you were gonna get it, considering how many people in real life talk about trying to cure various neurodivergences as if that’s a desirable good thing, you are asking a lot of trust from your audience. And I guess I would ask, what have you done to earn that trust? What have you done to make your audience confident that they can trust you on this? And with Wolf Pack, I’m just not convinced.
Chris: It has some detail on coping strategies for anxiety, which is good. It shows that at some level they’re doing their research. At the same time, what it doesn’t show is that it is neurodivergent friendly, especially with this kid who has autism and is being given a “mystical cryptic child trope” treatment. That would absolutely destroy any trust because he’s being othered. And so I definitely would not trust that a show like that would do the right thing. And even if there’s been an effort made to make the depiction of neurodivergence accurate.
Bunny: Which is a shame because we definitely need more neurodivergent characters.
Chris: But as a good example, for instance, the story Light Brigade, we have a future narrator who then states her own opinion and how it’s different from the character that is going through the book.
Oren: A retelling narrator is so useful there. You can just head off the entire problem by being like, “Wow, I knew so little back then”, or something.
Chris: And this is important because in Light Brigade, the main character believes in a fascist system, right? And is following it. To make that more palatable and to show that “No, I swear I am not endorsing fascism”.
Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]
Chris: We have the future version of the main character narrating the story who would just say that she was wrong at the time. And that completely corrects the issue.
Oren: And obviously that requires a specific narrative premise, which not every story is going to have. But man, if you got it, so useful. [Chuckles]
Chris: Otherwise, again, bringing in a mentor that is more credible and trustworthy than the main character to state your actual opinion is very helpful.
Oren: Right. Because then what you have is a situation where the mentor is like, “This is the case, young one”. And the young one is, “Nuh uh, I know better. It’s this thing that’s problematic”. And then everyone’s like, “Okay, I get it. The young one is wrong because they are young. I get it. I understand”. [Laughs]
Bunny: I’m curious, when is stating it not enough, though? So imagine you have the retelling premise and the narrator is like, “This wasn’t good”. I imagine that in some situations, the story leans hard enough onto the message that it is good, that it’s very tell don’t show.
Oren: You still need to maintain basic likability for your protagonist. But in the case of Light Brigade, the protagonist is a conscripted soldier who is from a really impoverished background where joining the corporate military is the only option that she really has. But you don’t see her going around and committing mass atrocities and then having the future narrator be like, “It was wrong of me to do that”.
Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Laugh]
Bunny: Yeah, that probably wouldn’t work.
Oren: But she does join the corporate army and she is sent to supposedly repress a resistance movement on Mars. Now, spoilers, it turns out she’s mostly fighting other corporations and the Mars resistance is actually largely an invention of the corporations. So that is an interesting twist. So it’s good to have the future narrator, but it’s a balancing act.
Chris: And this could be undermined. We’re talking about undermining messages. So if then this main character went out and got really cool and badass being a space marine or whatever, and we felt like the fighting was glorified, that would definitely undermine this message. But it doesn’t feel that way in this book.
It’s very interesting, but basically what happens is that there’s different location jumps and the protagonist starts jumping through time by accident. And that creates a central conflict for the book that makes it very fascinating without leaning super hard into these fight scenes and making them super cool and exciting. So it has another way to entertain audiences without being like, “Hey, look at this cool action sequence”. So that it’s not glorifying violence in the same way as the other books we were talking about.
Oren: One that drives me up the wall is when you have a story that has a really reprehensible antagonist and you’re just really excited to just take them down. They’re the worst. And then suddenly… They had a point.
Bunny, Chris: [Groan]
Oren: And it’s such a weird problem because usually the problem with a villain who has a point is that they have some kind of legitimate grievance, but they’re being evil. So their legitimate grievance can’t be addressed, like half the MCU nowadays.
Bunny: [Chuckles]
Oren: But this is the opposite. And so an example is the Deep Space Nine episode Paradise, where there is a lady who has tricked her entire colony into having to live on a planet where none of their technology works and they die of easily treatable diseases and probably starve to death sometimes because they have to do subsistence farming without any advanced tech. And anyone who questions her, she puts in a torture box.
Bunny: [Laughs]
Oren: And it’s like, okay, this lady is obviously evil and the worst and everyone, we’re all ready for her to be defeated. And then when the good guys finally defeat her and they’re like, “Okay, everybody, we can beam you away from this terrible place where you’ve all been horribly traumatized”, and the people that she tricked are like, “No, we’ll stay because she might have lied to us. But we did get a sense of community out of it”.
Bunny, Chris: [Laugh]
Bunny: Medicine and community are incompatible, Oren.
Oren: Yeah, and this allows her, the evil lady to give Sisko a knowing “I told you” look, and it’s just, what, what are you doing? [Laughs]
Bunny, Chris: [Laugh]
Oren: Why? Of all the villains, that one. [Laughs]
Chris: Here’s the problem with having a villain that then ends up being a friend or just misunderstood or not so bad, is that you’ve got basically one of two options. Either, one, you don’t really have enough tension because you’re not willing to make the villain act that bad because that would be out of character. Or two, they really are that bad and then when you’re like, “Oh, but see, they were just misunderstood all along”. Your audience is like, “What?” That’s just, ugh. I think in many cases writers also just underestimate the amount of cruelty they’re depicting, which is sad.
Bunny: Yeah, again, that’s one of those things that I think has become normalized more than it should.
Chris: Or I think there’s also a story logic problem where we see all of these problems all the time in stories and that kind of also normalizes things within the story universe, right? And people don’t take this out. Okay, imagine you met this person in real life and you accidentally insulted their mother and then they killed your sibling. Would that be an appropriate response? [Laughs]
Bunny, Oren: [Laugh]
Chris: Would you be like, “Oh, see, it was my fault. I accidentally insulted your mother”. You know, right? And we see a lot of things like that where it’s just, no, every person is responsible. You don’t get just an excuse to murder somebody if somebody makes a slight mistake. And we don’t think about how that would actually be evaluated in a real context.
Oren: My absolute favorite one on Chris’s post about mistakes that destroy a story’s message is when causality is neglected, where the author thinks that the character doing something right or wrong is enough and doesn’t consider how that leads to the outcome that is supposed to be good.
I love how in Age of Ultron, the second Avengers movie, the city is going to explode and Captain America’s like, “No, I’m going to stay here and die with the civilians”. And it’s played as a really dramatic, selfless thing for him to do, even though it doesn’t really seem like it. Is he giving up his seat so someone else can escape? Because that would actually be cool. It’s not clear if he’s doing that. Maybe he is. But then, suddenly, just after he does that, Nick Fury shows up with a helicarrier to evacuate everybody, and it plays it like those things are connected, but they’re not.
Chris: [Chuckles]
Oren: If he had decided to leave, he just would have met Nick Fury going the other way and they would have paused for a moment and been like, “Oh okay, let’s go back”. [Laughs]
Bunny, Chris: [Laugh]
Oren: Maybe a little awkward, but nothing different would have happened.
Chris: Or just makes the character seem right by luck. So you have to defend your message, right? If you want a protagonist to succeed or fail because they embraced your message or went against it, you have to actually make a convincing argument by showing that causality.
Bunny: So today in philosophy class we were talking about consequentialism, which is this weird ethical theory where what makes something good is whether the action, the output was good. And because this is philosophy class, there was a very funny, strange example of, you’re a person who just loves sucker punching old guys. So you go up to an old guy in a cafe and you sucker punch him and it turns out he was choking. So you sucker punching him saved his life. I think this causality thing is basically that.
Chris: It is. I think that’s a hilarious example because we do see writers do that sort of thing in their story. At that point, it’s a matter of how contrived is this implementation? Does that feel like a natural causality or does that feel like something that was cherry picked by the storyteller to justify something that doesn’t have a good justification?
But I could definitely see, not this exact thing, but something similar to an obnoxious character that the storyteller just loves. And they’re always showing up the main character. “See, I just like to punch people and I think I should be able to punch people”. And the main character being like, “Oh, you’re such a bad person”. It’s like, “No, I’m really smart. I can definitely… See, look!” and then punch somebody. And then that person turns out to be, “Oh, wow, I was choking and you saved me. Thanks!”–
Bunny: [Chuckles]
Chris: –And walking off. And then the obnoxious character the storyteller loves gets their smug last word in.
Bunny: Oh, yeah, that’s terrible.
Bunny, Chris: [Laugh]
Chris: That’s obviously a dramatic example, but storytellers do that. They really do, especially when they really like a character, they love it when other characters doubt them and then their favorite character is proven right. And so you see really funny things like that. But the implementation problem in that case would just be, that obviously feels like the storyteller’s invention, not a natural occurrence of events. Because that’s such a coincidence that somebody happened to be choking.
Oren: All right. With the clear lesson that it’s okay to punch people because maybe they’re choking–
Bunny: [Chuckles]
Oren: –I think we will go ahead and call this podcast to a close.
Bunny: Consequentialism, baby.
Oren: [Chuckles]
Chris: And if you feel like punching somebody and we just gave you a great idea as to how to justify it, please support us on Patreon.
Bunny, Oren: [Laugh]
Bunny: Brilliant. A-plus segue.
Chris: We swear we do not encourage punching among our patrons. Or do we? If you listen to this four more times–
Bunny: [Chuckles]
Chris: –May discover our real opinion about punching and whether it’s good or not.
Bunny: [Chuckles] Write me an essay, five to eight pages.
Oren: All right. Before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, we have Callie Macleod. Next, there’s Aymon Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. And we would never punch any of them because they’re great. So we’ll talk to the rest of you next week.
[Outro Music]Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.