The Mythcreant Podcast 469 – Fantasy Drugs
From wholesome pipe-weed to shady ThreeEye, spec fic writers have a long history of inventing new drugs for their stories. Sometimes these drugs are a metaphor for something else, but other times, something else is a metaphor for drugs! This can get pretty confusing, so today’s episode is all about getting to the bottom of things. We’re talking about mushrooms that are literally magic, Super Soldier Serum, and the world’s most 90s video game. Plus, why lightning is drugs, but levitation isn’t???
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Lady Oscar. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[Intro Music]Bunny: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Bunny…
Chris: …and I’m Chris.
Bunny: And I hear some straaange music. It’s like snare drums and the harpsichord, and it’s really funky. And there’s a strange filter on us, Chris, and we’re cross-faded in a kind of rainbow way. And I’m hallucinating that Oren’s gone. What’s going on?
Chris: Oh no. It’s like in a fish eye shape and everything.
Bunny: Yeah, and every time I move there’s like a weird shhwhshh sound. I think we’re trippin’ on fantasy drugs.
Chris: The big question here is, by being on a fantasy drug, does that mean we’re also on magic? Or is there, are we having magical visions that will become real?
Bunny: Yeees? Or maybe nooot. I dunno, we’re on drugs, it could be anything. Who am I to say?
Chris: Maybe we’re on drugs so that some hero can come and find out who is selling drugs to us and put them in a room.
Bunny: Maybe we could be like, maybe we’re goofy, like maybe we’re on drugs, but we’re on drugs in a kind of goofy way, where we’re like stumbling around and it makes spring noises whenever we bump into something.
Chris: Or maybe this is a deep metaphor for drugs.
Bunny: That’s true. It could also be that, although probably not, if it’s also comedy.
Chris: Maybe we’re high on metaphors.
Bunny: Yes. We’re high on metaphors. Metaphors for magic, perhaps. But, yes, today we are talking about fantasy drugs, which we may or may not be on.
Chris: Which may or may not be magic.
Bunny: Which may or may not be magic. [laughter]
Chris: The question is, is magic drugs, or are drugs magic? [laughter]
Bunny: A lot of fantasy drugs seem to just be magic. Like, you get addicted to magic. That is certainly a very large trope.
Chris: Right. I think Willow in Buffy is the most notable and the most ridiculous one. Because they clearly want there to be magic in Buffy, and they want characters to cast magic. But then, because everything has to be terrible in season six, suddenly Willow is addicted to magic, and magic is drugs, and then she has to get over it. But they don’t actually want to just give up characters casting spells, because that would be no fun. So then they have to retcon and be like, oh, well, you know, it was the black magic that was addictive. Now Willow’s fine, and she’s super powerful, and she can cast tons of magic now, and it is no longer a drug, for reasons. ‘Cause she’s attuned to the earth, I guess.
Bunny: Yeah. The moment you make magic into a drug, but you still want magic to be cool, it ceases to be a drug metaphor. Like, it doesn’t make sense if you try to apply it to drugs. So, like, what? You were addicted to cigarettes. And you got off of cigarettes, but now you can smoke good cigarettes, and it’s fine.
Chris: It’s also just very unclear, because in many fantasy settings, a number of them, their evil, magic, or dark magic, is supposed to be addictive. But there needs to be a clear line between what is good magic and what is evil magic. It’s like Star Wars. Dark side. Light side, basically. But in Buffy, it’s just we, we have not previously made that distinction, so it’s just very unclear. Good magic is attuned to the earth, guess, maybe. And all of these like spells that have nothing to do with the Earth are apparently attuned to the earth as far as we know.
Bunny: [laughing] It’s whatever you say it is. It’s like in the drug metaphor, you can eat apples, and that’s fine. But if you have bananas, you’re gonna get addicted to them, and they’re dark fruit.
Chris: Or in Star Wars, you can kill people by throwing them off a cliff. And that’s fine, that’s good magic. But if you kill them with lightning, that is bad magic and that will screw you up.
Bunny: They should just start calling them “side A magic” and “side B magic”. There’s nothing really light or dark about that.
Chris: Lightning is very dark. You can see how dark it is.
Bunny: Of course, if we’re gonna talk about those, and we’re already touching on this, we have to answer the question of what is a drug, which is ontological, and in my opinion, very family resemblance-y, like, I don’t know. It looks like a drug, so I think it is, in this case The dictionary says that it’s “a substance that causes a physiological effect, or that causes addiction, habituation, or a marked change in consciousness”. Thank you, Merriam-Webster. But that is quite broad.
Chris: In stories, it really seems to be the addictive component that the stories usually focus on, especially since it’s such good fodder for plots, right? To have a character get addicted to something. And so usually, as soon as something becomes addictive, it becomes an analogy for drugs. Everything to, like, the One Ring in Lord of the Rings, for instance, even the One Ring, it starts to change people’s behavior because they have to have it.
Bunny: Yeah, that’s true. I didn’t think of the One Ring, but I guess that is the hot take of the episode is that the ring is a drug.
Chris: [laughing] Right? Their precious…
Bunny: Getting high on ring, man.
Chris: Where characters start acting in destructive ways just because they want the One Ring. And it does extend their life, right? It does have, if we’re going for a physiological effect of some kind…
Bunny: You can look at Gollum, and it’s definitely had a physiological effect on that guy.
Chris: Right. But. It makes them live longer, but it’s like too little butter spread over too much bread, as Bilbo would say.
Bunny: It makes you invisible, too. Life extension and invisibility.
Chris: And besides magic being addictive and therefore quickly becoming an analogy for drugs, we of course have drugs that are magic. Not to be confused.
Bunny: [laughing] Not to be confused.
Chris: I think the spice in Dune is probably the most iconic one there.
Bunny: That was definitely the most well-known fantasy drug if I had to pick one. Um, and I learned today, looking at your notes, that there is a spice in Star Wars, too. Why did they do that?
Chris: Okay, that’s a weird one because I think spice had pre-existed, like had been a thing that had been mentioned in one of the Star Wars stories, and then later they decided it was a drug. And that created some weird effects [laughting] because I had been talking before about, I think, that Owen had claimed that Luke’s father was like, had been working in spice trading, and then they made spice a drug. So it means that…
Bunny: Look, Dune was out by then. Why did they call it that? They could have named it anything?
Chris; I think that the word “spice” really indicates its value in trade, right? Because the spice trade in the real world is so famous.
Bunny: We should call it silk. That doesn’t sound as cool. [laughter]
Chris: Well, yeah. I don’t know. It’s a good word for a valuable substance. And you can imagine somebody calling something “spice” that’s not actually a spice, as we would know it. I don’t know, maybe it is a spice. Maybe it’s a spice that gets you high.
Bunny: We have weirder names for drugs. We have, like, drugs named, “tweezers”, and “sunshine” and “big chief”.
Chris: Big chief? [laughing]
Bunny: Yeah, big chief. “Simple simon”. I looked up some of these and it’s like, I can’t believe anyone actually calls them that, but okay.
Chris: I will say that when the drug is illegal, people have a lot more incentive to make up names.
Bunny: And it also means that if you give your fantasy drug a goofy name, people might accept it, because we do that too.
Chris: There’s lots of things that are goofy in real life that we probably still shouldn’t do in our fantasy because it’ll sound goofy. [laughing]
Bunny: That’s fair. That’s fair. We talked about pykrete a while ago. I’ve got a bit of a list here about why people use the drugs.
Chris: Ohh, let’s hear why people use the drugs.
Bunny: [laughing] Why authors put the drugs in their stories, shall I say? To be more specific. I think the first and foremost one, although maybe this is disqualified, if we’re defining it as needing to be addictive, is it gives you powers. It makes you super. It’s a serum you put in your body, and now you’re a Spider Man, or you’re a Hulk.
Chris: Right. And, which brings up the question of are we talking about any medical treatment that includes a substance that somebody imbibes as a drug?
Bunny: Yeah, those ones I think are on the edges if we’re putting addiction as like our main criterion. But there are, there’s like, the villains deal in drugs. I guess that makes it a bit more central, because those are usually bad because they’re trying to get people addicted, and the villain in Catwoman’s got the evil face cream that makes you wrinkly if you stop taking it, which I guess is a little like addiction. And then they have thematically appropriate ones. Joker can’t have a normal drug. He’s gotta be cool and have one that makes you laugh to death.
Chris: Mm. I do think that making up a non-real drug is just very convenient, because then you don’t have to worry about accuracy.
Bunny: Yeah, no, that is certainly one of the highest appeals of it, I would say. It can also be like mysterious mixtures, and they cause weird events that you can’t explain, and you can’t explain it anyway because it’s a fantasy drug. But like it explains why you can’t replicate a fantastic event or something if, again, this is mostly in regards to superhero origin stories.
There’s one that I noted here was Lucy. I think that counts, because it does give her superpowers. It’s also labeled as a drug specifically, but we don’t see Lucy get addicted to it. She just becomes telekinetic, or whatever.
Chris: Yeah. It’s like a one-time drug. So it’s more like a treatment, one-time treatment…
Bunny: Yeah.
Chris: …than an addictive drug.
Bunny: Apparently it’s something that one of the villains explains is produced by pregnant mothers in like very small amounts. So I don’t know why they bother trying to explain that, because that makes it even sillier, like our baby’s low key telekinetic.
Chris: Yeah, that’s real weird.
Bunny: I don’t know why they did that. Another reason is because there are settings that want to be grittier than there being magic, but they want something that’s basically magic. So they make it a drug, or a chemical, instead.
Chris: To give it that gritty atmosphere.
Bunny: Like it’s, it feels airy-fairy if you’re like, “this is my gritty setting and [silly voice] add magic in it.” But you can say, “this is my gritty setting and it has drugs” and that feels a lot more in theme. I read a book recently called The Velocity of Revolution. And the drug that features prominently in there is myco, which is a mushroom, it’s like powdered mushroom. And it gives them heightened…if users are using the same strain, then they can communicate and, like, sense people who are nearby. And I was like, okay, that all makes sense. This is a dieselpunk city. And it would be a little weird if it was just, like, “and also there’s magic.” Like it’s clearly going for a different tone.
Chris: Yeah, that reminds me of The Magicians. Because The Magicians, the thing that story does is take fantasy tropes that are normally in stories of average or light tone, and then make them very dark and gritty and depressing. And apparently the series tagline is, “Magic is a drug”.
Bunny: Noo. [Chris laughing] All right, just hit me over the head with it, I guess.
Chris: But this is the one where people can turn into geese, [Bunny laughing] but you can’t cure any sickness or ailment with magic. That’s not allowed, but you can turn into animals, but arbitrarily you’re not allowed to do anything good with it.
Bunny: What if I turned into an animal that had like superhealing, though?
Chris: Yeah. I don’t know.
Bunny: Or what if I broke an arm, and then I turned into a snake? Problem solved.
Chris: This is also the one that has grimdark Narnia. And they travel to grimdark Narnia. [Bunny laughing]
Bunny: Why didn’t they just make it a drug then? Why call it magic? Just call it a drug. It’s the goose change drug.
Chris: No, because they specifically want to subvert traditional fantasy tropes, by making them super dark and gritty. So you gotta have something that is obviously Narnia, but is also very dark and gritty, where everything is bad and wrong. You have to have the magic school–because it contains a magic school–but just have the magic school be horrible. Just that’s the shtick for The Magicians.
Bunny: Sounds like a very, I don’t wanna say…I feel like that would get old. That’s what I’m trying to say.
Chris: It did for me. Other people like it, of course. There are always people who like things that are very dark and gritty and edgy. That has its audience. I’m not among them, but they exist.
Bunny: I don’t think I’m among them either, but I think that also points to a potential with this, like the magic drugs thing, which is that if it’s taken too far, it can become silly. At some point you are just, like, “your drug is magic”, but at some point it just is magic and you are taking magic via a pill.
Like the myco at the beginning of The Velocity Revolution is like, it’s got great internal consistency. I really liked how it was used. It makes sense that they’re, like, “they can communicate”, and I can buy that. People on the same strain of mushroom can communicate with each other. And then they expanded a bit and they’re like, “if you make this extra special mushroom by mixing different strains, then, you know, you can take over someone else’s body who’s on the myco.” Which, because the myco lets you share sensations, I was like, okay, that’s a bit more of a stretch, but I think I could still buy it. And then by the end of the book, they’re like seeing God and broadcasting memories into each other’s brains and….
Chris: But just using the mushroom?
Bunny: Yeah, and like hijacking people’s, like, radio waves.
Chris: If you take enough spice in Dune, you transform into a weird creature that can teleport ships.
Bunny: [laughing] That’s silly!
Chris: [laughing] Don’t remember what the mechanics are, but there’s these navigators in Dune that are very powerful ,and they are basically created by imbibing tons of spice, in which case they actually transform. And they have like huge brains that can do whatever is necessary to do faster than light travel in this setting.
Bunny: I feel like that’s more acceptable in Dune, because Dune already has a much lower, like…
Chris: Lower realism?
Bunny: Yeah. But The Velocity of Revolution is like, it’s about class conflict in this fictional city in a fantasy world, but it’s clearly trying to be, like, it’s not trying to be space opera.
Chris: The realism is high, and that’s why they use a drug for the magic. But then when it becomes more and more stretched that mushrooms could do all of this, [laughing] that starts to break down, right? And then just starts to feel silly, because it clashes with the realism of the story, I assume.
Bunny: Yeah. And then the problem is that, and like the story is very centered on myco, like it’s all about the myco, the plot revolves around it, so you expect it to be a big feature of the climax, and it is. And they do, to be clear, they do a really good job with the myco for three quarters of the story. The problem comes once things start escalating and becoming ridiculous. I cannot buy that a mushroom could do this. This is how they resolve the climax–spoilers for Velocity of Revolution–but basically because the myco, this particular strain of myco, is native to their continent, one of the of the characters–and myco is, its strength is increased when you go fast. One of the characters goes really fast with this other person who’s been experimented on with the myco, and that makes all of the foreigners violently sick. And they leave.
Chris: What? So wait, let me get this straight. They take the magic mushroom. The magical mushroom somehow becomes more potent if you, like, run while it’s in your system. [laughing] And this character has like super-speed running. And by running around the planet, they managed to enchant all of the foreigners to make them sick.
Bunny: [laughing] That would be even worse. So, this is dieselpunk, so they have motorcycles. They’re not just like running really fast. They’ve got trains and stuff. And to be clear, the speed thing, I was on board with, I was like, okay, it’s cool that this gets stronger when you go faster. It’s a story where everyone rides motorcycles, and they’re a big part of the setting. So I’m like, cool, I’ll buy that. But then if you’re looking at the myco at the beginning of the story, even though there’s this whole element where it’s this person that has been so experimented upon by fantasy evil Nazi doctor, she’s got all these different mushrooms and has weird powers, I still don’t buy that a mushroom could let you hijack radio waves or make a bunch of foreigners sick, no matter how fast you go.
Chris: If it was explicitly a magical mushroom…
Bunny: But it’s not. It’s a drug.
Chris: But it’s supposed to be…but this is supposed to be a scientific explanation for this.
Bunny: Yeah. Like, it’s not trying to be magic fantasy, if that makes sense. Like it’s using the myco instead of magic, and they don’t call it magic.
Chris: There’s supposed to be an underlying scientific explanation for how this works, and we see that a lot, right? In a lot of settings where they’re not explicitly supposed to have magic. They’re supposed to have science, and then the science gets more creative. At some point, it doesn’t really fit science anymore.
Bunny: And they’re definitely trying to make this science, because you’ve got fantasy Josef Mengele experimenting on people with mushrooms. You’re making this very clearly science. It’s a science. Yeah, anyway. I like that book, but that was ridiculous.
Chris: Going for something that I think works better but is pretty trip–so, the book, Perdido Street Station has very animalistic themes and is kind of absurdist, and it has this drug called “dreamshit”. And it comes from this moth that basically is predatory towards sapient beings by having these wings that hypnotize them, and then it sucks out their like mind, sucks out their dreams. And so the dreamshit is literally the shit from this moth… [laughing]
Bunny: Oh my God. [Chris laughing] That’s memorable.
Chris: …that has the remnants of all the dreams it like sucked out of people when it ate them. [laughing]
Bunny: I’ve never heard of something like that, so that’s unique.
Chris: Yeah, that’s unique. Again, very wild, but because it fits the actual setting of the book, which is very animalistic and very absurdist.
Bunny: And it sounds like it’s a book where things are magical.
Chris: Yes.
Bunny: It’s a setting where you have a moth that sucks dreams out.
Chris: Everybody’s like animal people in that book, and they’re like living in the carcass of a giant being. That had giant rib bones left over. Or, that’s where the city is. So yes, it all fits. And it sounds like there was a theme clash with those mushrooms that was really the problem.
Bunny: And the mushrooms could have been really cool. They were really cool. They just had power creep.
Chris: Yeah. In many stories, drugs are used as a means of control by antagonists, and that’s part of the plot.
Bunny: Dystopian vibes.
Chris: Yeah. Or there’s a lot of vampires, right? There’s a lot of vampire drug stuff, where it’s like people get addicted to vampires’ saliva, or whatever it is, and that’s how vampires control their victims. Star Trek has some really funny drug episodes. Probably the funniest one is this TNG episode called “The Game”.
Bunny: [laughing] Oh, I read about this one.
Chris: Yeah, Riker goes, I think it’s Riker, goes to Risa, [laughing] which, for anyone who is not familiar with Star Trek, Risa is like the tourist pleasure planet. [both laughing] Where everybody goes, and we assume has lots of sex with the Risans, but…
Bunny: …but they play games, like a bunch of neerds.
Chris: There’s just insinuations about what happens on Risa. So he comes back and he brings “the game”, which is this little device, and they show them playing the game, which is supposed to be really addictive, and it is the most awkward, worst nineties CG you have ever seen.
Bunny: Oh no, I’m looking at it now. Terrible.
Chris: It just looks hilariously bad. The CG…
Bunny: It looks like pancakes.
Chris: …that appears when they play the game, and they just get this like funnel, and they just toss discs in the funnel, and just seem to get a high from that. And the entire ship, the game spreads around the ship, and the entire ship becomes captive to the game. And I think Wesley saves the day or something, because of course he does.
Bunny: Yeah, I think I remember reading about that. But they chase him around and try to force him to play the game. I don’t even know if that’s supposed to be more a metaphor for drugs, or if it’s a metaphor for video games, by way of drugs, or if it’s like two layers deep, and it’s trying to say, “video games are a drug because of this game”, so it’s a metaphor for the metaphor of video games being a drug?
Chris: [laughing] Unclear, unclear. In a better use of this, in The 100, there’s this group, and they’re like the Reavers in Firefly. They’re just a bunch of people, and they look like they’re designed to be disposable villains that you can just kill off, right? That they’re all like cannibals, and really aggressive barbarian types. And then it’s revealed that they’re actually all captives to a more powerful, privileged group that has kidnapped all of them, and then has given them this drug that they inject that is very addictive, and also makes them very aggressive. And so then we have a protagonist that actually gets captured and joins them briefly before escaping. So, I definitely liked that, because I’m pretty tired of groups where everybody’s just evil, and it’s an excuse that you can just kill people without remorse. And so it was nice to see that kind of turnaround, and the drug was used as an explanation for why they weren’t just evil cannibals like they first appeared.
Bunny: No, that’s a good way to use it. That’s one of those things where–this was The 100, right? That’s one of those more grounded shows, too.
Chris: Yeah, when the monsters aren’t there. It’s so funny, because I had–after watching The 100 for the first time–I had completely forgotten that there were random monsters. [Bunny laughing] Like I somehow, I had just clipped them out of my memory, because they’re so anomalous, and they make no sense. But then when I went back and watched a second time, oh wow, there was episode that randomly had a giant gorilla.
Bunny: What? Okay, so it’s 85% grounded? [both laughing] Maybe not as grounded as I gave it credit for.
Chris: And I had completely forgotten, because they’re just so random and one-off, that that existed in this show. This show tries, definitely tries, to be more gritty and higher in realism. There are some things that I have to bleb out, like they keep saying that people evolved radiation resistance in only a hundred years. Every time, I just put my fingers in my ears and go, “La, la, la. I can’t hear you.” [Bunny laughing] No, I’m just going to pretend it’s been a thousand years, instead of a hundred years, at least. But they made a conlang. That’s the other thing, it’s supposed to be only a hundred years, but the people on Earth have evolved a new language, but they still speak English. [laughing]
Bunny: Ah, we accept that for weirder things.
Chris: So yeah, it has its foibles, but certainly it is trying to be grittier.
Bunny: And you could believe that a drug would do that, too. Like you can buy it, even though it’s still a fantasy drug.
Chris: Star Trek: DS9 did something similar with the Dominion. The Founders of the Dominion, they have various races under their control, and some of them they control with the drugs, although that one was a little strange, because they also just–a lot of these races they had actually created through genetic manipulation, and were so loyal that it didn’t really seem like they would even need the drug to keep control of them. But…
Bunny: Just in case.
Chris: Just in case.
Bunny: Yeah. So those are some funny examples. I will say sometimes the coward’s way to do this, in my opinion, the least interesting way, is when you want basically heroin or cocaine in your setting, but you don’t wanna call it that. That’s not a fantasy drug. You’re just giving it another street name.
Chris: [laughing] Do something weird with it.
Bunny: Let them trip balls!
Chris: Give people visions!
Bunny: Yeah, make them turn into fishes when they’re on the drug or something, I don’t know.
Chris: Like ThreeEye in Dresden Files, people get second sight, which apparently is very bad, because you can’t forget anything that you see in second sight. So their mental wellness goes rapidly downhill as they take this drug.
Bunny: What do they see?
Chris: You know, I don’t remember specifics, or I’m not even sure how much there were specifics in the book, but the idea is that they get visions that they can never forget.
Bunny: Huh. And they also get addicted to the visions?
Chris: To the drug, yeah. So it’s an antagonist that is making this drug, and Dresden has to track them down, and finds out that it is made by somebody who is magical, who is creating a drug that actually has magic effects and gives people a kind of magic ability, but one that is not good for them.
Bunny: It’s interesting, because that one is one that I think would work in a setting that’s trying to be non-magic?
Chris: Right. Because it’s very similar to the hallucinations that people get on many drugs.
Bunny: Yeah. It’s just like a hallucinogen, and I can buy that they can’t forget it, for whatever reason, for some technobabble-y reason.
Chris: But what if it gets more potent if they run fast?
Bunny: [laughing] Let’s keep the Flash out of this. So before we sign off, I did also wanna talk about a couple ways of making them work, which we’ve also gone over here by examining positive and negative examples.
So, I think many fantasy things, like magic, whether or not the drugs are magic, or magic is drugs, they need to have an internal consistency, which was the problem with the myco, is that it started with having a clear set of rules that I could buy. And then spiraled out of control into like time shenanigans, and radio wave control, and that kind of thing. So that’s perhaps an obvious one, but I think bears mentioning.
Chris: I think I would like to add is if you’re going add an addictive substance to your setting, it’s good to think about what you were saying about real-life drugs, in particular, narratives where a character just has to use their willpower to stop taking the drug that they’re addicted to, is not a good idea. Because in real life, that’s a method of blaming people who essentially have a disease, and they need treatment, they don’t need blame. So I would just be very wary of any of those types of narratives that really put the onus on the character to just use their willpower to not take a drug they’re addicted to anymore.
Bunny: And yeah, be careful too–drugs in the real world obviously have huge and racialized histories, so if you’re using it as a shorthand for someone’s moral character, or that there’s a place that’s inherently bad and backwards, probably shouldn’t do that. Read up a bit on the history of drugs, specifically Black people’s incarceration and marijuana.
Also, just in general, go get trained in Narcan, people. That’s just a good thing to do in the real world. That’s the lifesaving drug nasal spray.
I think perhaps maybe the last one, if you’re trying to make them a huge and obvious stand-in for something else, maybe you should just be doing a story about the something else, like that weird Star Trek video game thing.
Chris: [laughing] The game.
Bunny: The game. Yes, the game. You can use them to explore some really interesting issues, but if it’s just, “Don’t do drugs, kids,” that’s not the most interesting thing you can do with your fantasy drugs, I gotta say.
Chris: All right…
Bunny: With that, our high is fading. We’re coming back into focus, and we’re gonna have to wrap this episode up.
Chris: If this episode gave you a high, or at least didn’t make you feel like you were going through withdrawal, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. And, before we go, I also want to thank our existing patrons. First, there’s Callie Macleod, then there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Until next week!
This has been the Mythcreant Podcast, opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.