Saving the world, epic stakes, exciting battles, all of them are great. But sometimes you want a more personal story that still has plenty of magic to keep things interesting. You want a supernatural drama. This week, we’re talking about how to use speculative elements to bring out the characters’ emotions, what kinds of speculative elements you need in the first place, and how to integrate all that with your main plot. Plus, someone’s out to overthrow Chris as leader of the podcast, oh no!
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]Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Chris and with me is…
Wes: Wes.
Chris: …and…
Oren: Oren.
Chris: Now the two of you have been great co-hosts so far, but a witch just gave me a prophecy that one of you is going to overthrow me. Now I don’t know if I can trust you anymore.
Oren: I’m prepared to sell Wes out to any degree I must.
Wes: I’m prepared to do it.
Chris: The question is, which one of you is not of woman born? Which apparently just means a Caesarian section or something like that, which I don’t understand.
Oren: Don’t worry about it.
Wes: It was just how they got around the prophecy for Macbeth, where Macduff could be like, “I was not born of a woman; they cut me out of my ma!” And Macbeth’s, “Oh crap, I’m gonna die.”
Chris: Maybe one of you was born from a trans man. I think that’s a much more logical reading of the statement.
Wes: Agree.
Oren: If I was Macbeth, I would be like, I would contest that wording. Blah. That’s what would happen if I was Macbeth.
Chris: So this time we’re talking about supernatural drama. This is a neat topic for me because, when we think of speculative fiction, we’re always or not always, but often automatically, assume high stakes. Yes, we have a lot of really popular speculative fiction stories [that] are life or death scenarios, action, that kind of thing. We can have any plot that we want. They don’t necessarily have to have stakes that high. And we can also use fantastical things for other effects and for other types of plots. You just want to use them in your plot somehow. Otherwise you end up with what we might call a Mars Western. All the fantastical things can be removed and it wouldn’t matter. Unfortunately, Grimm, the show Grimm has this problem.
Oren: Yeah, that’s such a weird show. It’s just a regular cop show. And then every once in a while it’s, oh yeah, also there are monsters.
Chris: And I think the problem that particular show had is it wanted to keep the supernatural hidden and have a regular way to close cases without explaining the supernatural. But you could just take it out and it wouldn’t make any difference.
Wes: It had such an immediate snowball effect because they kept wanting to introduce newer monstrous creatures and stuff. “We cannot keep the lid on this forever.” And that’s why I forget which season, they just had a full pivot to like, “Okay, he’s not really detective anymore.” Or, “We’re going to bring all of his detective friends in on it and also make sure that the police chief, who is also like a half something, is also on his team.” Yeah, pull the veil back way hard.
Chris: Yeah, I heard they fixed it later.
Wes: The premise was never sustainable for that.
Chris: I thought it was worth talking about examples of how fantastical things can be used to create drama and not just to threaten people’s lives. And I think this would be especially beneficial for high school drama, because we had a whole episode where we talked about supernatural teen drama, and the fact that it always comes apart at the seams, because what happens is all the supernatural elements are focused on really high-stakes plot arcs which makes all of the teen drama feel petty in comparison.
Oren: You don’t have to call out Sabrina and October Faction like that.
Chris: Pretty soon it’s just like the drama part doesn’t feel like it matters. Teen Wolf just drops it, becomes a high-stakes show where the drama is not really there anymore to a large degree.
Oren: That happened in the magical girl roleplaying game campaign that I finished running a few months ago. Like at the start of the campaign I did some high school drama stuff and by about the midpoint it was like, yeah, alright, we’re all dealing with way too much magic nonsense for that. So high school is just a place you hang out occasionally for exposition scenes.
Chris: After a while, it just doesn’t feel like the drama matters when everybody’s about to die. Let’s talk about shows, movies, books where the supernatural kind of made a difference to the character relationships that were in the show.
Oren: Chris, is this just an excuse to talk about School Spirits?
Chris: Yes.
Oren: Be honest.
Chris: So we watched School Spirits recently and, oh geez, what network is this on? What streaming service?
Oren: It is on Paramount Plus, one of the worst streaming services.
Chris: When you’re done watching Star Trek, you can watch School Spirits.
Oren: Please watch it; we don’t know if they’re gonna get a season two.
Chris: We need it to get a second season, therefore we need you to watch it, okay?
Oren: Stop whatever you’re doing and go watch School Spirits. Paramount apparently just posted a huge loss for their earnings. This is not good.
Chris: Not good at all.
Oren: Before your company implodes, I’m gonna need season two, okay? On my desk.
Chris: In the plus category is that it’s clearly a budget show. It has no special effects. Which is interesting; they do well with it. It’s a ghost premise. That’s one of the types of supernatural things that you can pretty easily do without any special effects. They have this odd thing where, when they want ghosts to interact with objects in the living world, they just make a copy of them. So that we can show our ghosts do all of the normal things they would do by moving things around and then nobody in the living world actually sees it because the ghost has their own copy of this popcorn that they’re eating.
Oren: Yeah, it’s ghost popcorn now. It also means they don’t have to do like a scene from the living person’s perspective where we see a bunch of stuff levitating because that would cost an amount of money. Probably not a lot, but some money. And we’re not here to spend money. The ghosts don’t have any flashy powers or abilities. Very focused on the characters. I might even call it character-driven.
Chris: Oh no.
Wes: Oh Oren, don’t do it. Don’t do it.
Chris: No, Oren, don’t. We can’t. No. In School Spirits, it’s about a ghost who wants to solve her own murder. So she dies. Most ghosts remember how they died, but she doesn’t remember how she died and she really wants to know. In most murder mysteries, you would need to do something else to raise the stakes and the urgency because, if it’s just one murder, there’s nothing to anticipate as far as somebody else getting murdered. That’s why we still have so many serial killers running around in our shows, so that we can believe that something else will happen that’s bad if we don’t find who murdered the person who’s already dead. But in this case we don’t have that, but it still works, you know, very well by focusing on the drama aspect. The main character, Maddie, who’s dead, she has very strong feelings and that’s why it’s beneficial to have her around because she could be gone and other characters could be solving her murder, but because she wants to know who killed her, it’s much more personal. If my boyfriend killed me, ugh. If my mother killed me, ugh. That’s a big deal. And we do have some stakes related to “Maybe she’ll be able to pass on” or “Maybe she’ll get stuck.” For her, it’s really about her personal happiness. And then we have a variety of other characters that we care about. All of them have just enough flaws that allow us to imagine it’s possible they might have killed her, but are overall still interesting, sympathetic people. The show really focuses on that attachment aspect so we just care who did it.
Oren: Although, interestingly, this is one of the things that would make the show, I think, very difficult to write as a novel. And I’m going to try to avoid any real spoilers here, because everything we’ve told you so far is like in the first two minutes of the first episode. It’s just part of the premise. It follows characters around who are still active suspects so that we can get to know them and build attachment to them. That would be really challenging in a book. The book would have to follow the character but not tell us what they were thinking, because if it told us what they were thinking, it would be too obvious whether or not they were the killer. And that’s just very challenging. Not impossible, but challenging.
Chris: Generally, showing what’s in a character’s head is how you get that strong attachment in a narrated work. In a visual work, you have actors. In this case, like Christian Flores, who plays Simon. Just amazing acting on his part that really gets you to like the characters. He plays like the one character that you never suspect of murdering her, because that’s not his role in the show. But we still have some great actors who are bringing these characters to life, and if we were in a narrated book and we just saw them from the outside and we didn’t get to watch their nuanced facial expressions, it would be really hard to build that level of attachment. The show also does well with creating episode arcs so that each episode has a smaller problem that gives us some tension. Simon is going to confront somebody who he thinks could be the killer, and we’re worried about his safety. Or we have tense social situations, that kind of thing. And so that’s how the show manages to do very well with much lower stakes than we would usually need for our kind of murder mysteries, because it really focuses on that drama aspect.
Oren: And on Maddie’s side, very often her investigations and trying to figure out what’s going on require her to get to know the other ghosts. And you know what that means? Drama! And that’s perfect and it’s just suited to what it’s trying to do. It doesn’t have a big flashy exterior plot that the drama is distracting us from, because the exterior plot is, first of all, much lower in stakes, but also it’s part of the drama, and it just works really well and you should go watch it if for no other reason so that you can come back and give us our own cup of holistic depression by telling us you didn’t like it. Wouldn’t that be sweet? The important part is that Paramount Plus would still get your viewership numbers.
Chris: Another one I think is really worth mentioning that made me think about this for the first time is Paper Girls, which is on Netflix.
Oren: No, it’s on Amazon, I think.
Chris: This one is based on a comic book as opposed to School Spirits, which weirdly is going to be a graphic novel but is not one yet.
Wes: Based on the forthcoming? Is that possible?
Oren: It’s based on a graphic novel that doesn’t exist yet, which is the weirdest idea I have ever heard.
Wes: I feel like that happened with 2001 Space Odyssey. It’s like he did the movie and wrote the book like at the exact same time.
Oren: I’m pretty sure the only reason it says that is to boost sales of the graphic novel so that, when the graphic novel comes out, people who watch the show will be more likely to know about it. But anyway, that’s School Spirits. Now: Paper Girls.
Chris: Which is based on a comic book.
Oren: Actually based on a comic book.
Chris: And it’s got time travel in it and it’s about four girls that hop around in time and they meet their future selves. And it does technically have a high-stakes arc in it, but it’s bad. We don’t really care about that. Mostly the problem with the external arc is that these teenage girls, they just don’t have any way to affect it. They don’t have any agency in it and so it just doesn’t feel like it really matters, because they can’t do anything and it’s just annoying when it comes in. But the time travel is just used so they can encounter their future selves and be disillusioned or disappointed in some way. And so they travel around and then argue with their future selves. Oftentimes about, “You didn’t accomplish the things I expected you to accomplish.” “You didn’t keep in touch with family members.”
Oren: The show is definitely at its strongest when it’s just about these four girls being stuck in a time period they’re not familiar with and trying to navigate that. When the evil time cops show up, protagonists can’t do anything against that, so they’re just going to hang out, I guess, for a while. And that’s boring. I would have liked this so much more if there just weren’t evil time cops and this was just a natural phenomenon that had accidentally sent the girls hopping through time.
Chris: One of the girls jumps to the future and discovers that she’s a lesbian. It’s something she did not previously know about herself. Fairly dramatic for her. And that’s something she has to think about.
Oren: You have one character who meets her future self and is, “On the one hand, you’re everything I wanted to be; on the other hand, you didn’t do any of the things I wanted.” And that’s complicated and it’s neat and the characters are always like stressed out and being crappy to each other, but like also trying to help each other, which is very sweet. They do a really good job of making that seem compelling and not just like characters being rude for no reason.
Chris: The drama that happens between the teenage girls definitely feels like it’s done well. Where they can be mean to each other; at the same time they are also going through a very stressful experience. You don’t really hold it against them in the same way, and they’re trying in many cases to get along, even if they don’t always get along. We also have a really neat scene where one of the girls has her period for the first time and doesn’t know what to do, and the other girls like go and steal some tampons for her. That’s not really a great place to start. So then they go steal some pads for her. I think it’s how that sequence works out. Frankly, we need more things like that.
Oren: Because Mac’s the best and has your back, no matter what’s going on.
Chris: So that one was really good because it really felt that the time loops were uniquely set up to do these personal journeys. Honestly, the kind of time war plot was just window dressing.
Oren: It just feels unnecessary. You don’t need that to keep the girls together, because they’re gonna stick together, because they’re the only ones who know about each other. They don’t want to leave and then be stuck in a time they don’t understand without, like, anyone who knows what’s going on. So even if they argue, you have a pretty good reason for them to stick together. Except for when one of them like dramatically leaves and the other three are like, “We were mean to her; we need to go find her.” That’s also a thing you can do. So you don’t like need the threat of the time cops to keep them together. Would you consider Interview with the Vampire to be a supernatural drama?
Chris: I think I would. Especially the first season, that we have on AMC, or like the first half. Because later there’s a little bit more life or death stakes with enemy vampires. But certainly in the beginning, definitely does a really good job. You could still have it be a story about abuse if they weren’t vampires. But I do think that the fact that they’re vampires matters, because it changes the nature of the story and the dynamics of the abuse and the kind of control dynamic. They also have some interesting things that they do with it. They can read each other’s minds. except for Lestat can’t read the minds of the vampires he’s created. But they can read each other’s minds. Which is interesting; it allows them to have private conversations where they scheme. But there’s also a way that he spies on them by getting another vampire that he created to do it. It builds up to life or death stakes, but those stakes come naturally out of the drama as the situation between the characters escalates. Of course, Lestat in the beginning has to deal with things like, his family is now very suspicious of him and he’s trying to maintain his relationship with his family. But he can’t show up to family events during the day.
Oren: We’re talking about Louis, right? Not Lestat?
Chris: Yeah. That just creates a lot of very personal conflict for him. What about The Good Place?
Wes: What’s the supernatural element? They’re dead. Spoiler.
Chris: Being in heaven slash hell probably qualifies.
Wes: I guess. Sure.
Chris: The Good Place is interesting because, every time they want to reset the drama, they erase the characters’ memories.
Wes: Yeah, that’s true.
Chris: Or move them somewhere else. Obviously, it’s a comedy and it has some higher stakes in that they could end up in hell and that would be a problem. But at the same time, it uses that as a premise for why the characters get together and they’re supposed that, “Hey, this is your soulmate,” pushes them together in a way that gets the drama going.
Wes: Probably should just toss a spoiler warning on here. As things progress in the seasons and they do get wiped, but then get brought back and recharged. But the relationships between them, despite what’s going on around, still resurface in meaningful moments. And in meaningful moments that do affect the plot and the other characters. Like in the episode when they all become Janets, Eleanor starts losing herself. That moment with Chidi bringing her back to herself, acknowledging their relationship, I thought it was actually quite well done. Plus they all got to be Janets for a while. That was hilarious.
Chris: They have good relationships in The Good Place, but I think the character arcs is really where it stands out.
Wes: Yes.
Chris: Because the whole premise is that they need to somehow become better people to avoid going to hell. And so that really puts the focus on their personal progress and adds stakes to their personal progress, which would otherwise be more difficult to do.
Wes: And that also is important, just how the show even concludes that you have to better yourself to not end up going somewhere bad. The comedy aspect has conflated a little bit. Still works.
Chris: It’s interesting because The Good Place is reinvented so often to keep everything going. When they finally, for instance, spend a while on Earth, that’s a new way for us to explore the characters and their backstories and why they ended up the way they were. And see what would have happened if their lives had played out differently. Each time we change things around, we get to see a different aspect of the characters.
Oren: Beyond just talking about different examples, which admittedly is very fun, what exactly do you need for a supernatural drama? We talked a little bit about how you don’t want a super high-stakes overriding plot, because then, if you stop to take time away from that to do some drama, it’s going to feel like a distraction. So what other requirements do we need?
Wes: Vampires.
Oren: Yeah, obviously.
Chris: Most of the ones that we see that have good drama, one of the keys is making sure that you have strong characters that have significant flaws that can help drive the drama. At the same time, still being people that you can care about. Which is the real trick. A lot of times, people have trouble writing characters that have reasons to fight with each other without going too far and making their fights seem forced and petty. Any kind of drama needs that kind of character work so you have a reason for them to fight in the first place and differences between them without making it feel overdone or comical. In Paper Girls, where we have these teenage girls and we have issues where one of the girls has been living in poverty and she has issues, and she says a few anti-Semitic comments, which are not great, but at least we call her out. That’s probably not an issue I would recommend most people cover.
Oren: Yeah, it takes a little bit of care, that one.
Chris: But we have another girl who’s just a little bit overly enthusiastic. She’s super academic, needs everything to be done. You can take that a little too far. You know, the girl who feels like she’s forgotten. People call her the new girl, don’t know her name. They all have their personal issues for us to bring out and work on. Similarly, School Spirits. For that one to work, we have to, again, have all these reasons that we create to think that somebody might kill Maddie. And for instance, her boyfriend, which we bring up, is a bad boy. You could understand what’s attractive about him, but then you can easily twist that around and be like, “Okay, how bad is he?” And was he messed up enough that he might have hurt her?
Oren: We’re not gonna say, because you’ll have to watch it to find out.
Chris: Definitely, the characters that have big enough problems that you can actually do a drama with them and have that be meaty is also another requirement. Most of these works have some level of, “What are the stakes of the drama?” Oftentimes, it is an important relationship. Why does their happiness depend on this happening? For Paper Girls, you can understand why it’s a really big deal for them if they become entirely disillusioned by their future selves and who they are and how that reflects upon their feelings about themselves. In School Spirits, of course, we have this murder and Hattie’s happiness is really at stake with who murdered her. Interview with the Vampire has some pretty high stakes. Good Place again attaches “Do they go to hell?” to its drama as stakes. So that’s definitely an opportunity that you can use with supernatural drama that you would not get otherwise, is to attach some kind of supernatural stakes to your character interactions.
Oren: You also just want to make sure that your supernatural setup is actually designed to promote drama. You can easily end up with –I’ve seen this in client manuscripts even– a setting that’s supposed to be full of social drama, but like the supernatural elements are kind of scattershot or are like a magic school where you’ve got vampires and werewolves and harpies and they’re all hanging out. And so that in itself doesn’t really use the magic to drive the drama. That’s just having people with different power sets. On its own, that’s not really enough and you’re likely to end up caught in the issue that other shows have had, where it just seems like the external plot is bigger and more important. And then the other thing of the device that I would suggest is: you’re probably still going to have an external plot and you’re still going to want to resolve that at some point. I’m not just talking about Fruits Basket here, but I am talking about Fruits Basket. Fruits Basket had this external plot of the curse and how that’s going to cause a lot of problems, and Toru at one point is like, “I’m going to break the curse,” and then she does not do that or take any steps towards doing that, and we just forget she ever said that.
Chris: The odd thing about Fruits Basket is that the characters all end up bringing their own curse by just like getting over their personal issues and Toru goes around helping people get over their personal issues, but Toru never helps them break their curse. Why didn’t we just fit those two things together? Why didn’t we more explicitly say, “Okay, they manage to get free of the curse once they get over their personal issues; Toru’s going to go around and just assist them in some way”? And therefore we have stakes to her helping them and stakes to those character interactions. But no.
Oren: It does sound obvious when you say it that way.
Chris: It does sound really obvious, but that’s just not how it works.
Wes: That’s Chris’s supernatural power.
Oren: We’re nearly at the end of the podcast, so which of us was going to overthrow you again?
Chris: If you would like a chance to overthrow me, just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: We’re going to have to add so many patron tiers at this point. Just creating work for ourselves, I tell you.
Chris: Look, I have to work that promo into the end of each podcast, so there you go.
Oren: Before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons who we are very grateful have not tried to overthrow us. First, there’s the popular writing software Plotter, which you can learn about at plotter.com. Then there’s Callie McLeod. Next, we have Ayman Jaber, who’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’ll talk to you next week.
[outro music]This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.
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