449 – Mistakes in Character Arcs

Show Notes

• Not Liking Christmas
• Erica Ortegas 
• Name of the Wind 
• John Sheridan
• Kathryne Janeway
• Sandman Arc Issues
• Scouring of the Shire 
• Vox Machina Pike Arc Problem 
• Korra
• Aang
• Pro-bending 
• Honor Among Thieves 
• Sprig Plantar 
• Mark Scout
• Anakin Skywalker
• Meta Mysteries
• Shallan Meta Mystery

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Sofia. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.

Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren, with me today is…

Chris: Chris

Oren: …and…

Wes: Wes.

Oren: And today we’re going to grow as people and that process will be very easy. We won’t have to put any effort into it. We’ll just wake up better and it’ll be great.

Alternatively, we will act like everyone’s ice cream preference is a major flaw that needs to be addressed. Wes, I heard you like rocky road. That is not acceptable.

Wes: What? No, not true!

Oren: Chocolate fudge brownie is the only kind, and we are going to have this entire episode convincing you that your rocky road choice was wrong. And by the end you will feel wiser for it.

Chris: Yeah, by the end I will learn it was wrong to love cookies and cream.

Oren: Yeah, wow.

Chris: And that I should compromise with you by only eating the ice cream that you like.

Oren: Yeah, Chris, I don’t know, man. You starting off liking cookies and cream might put you beyond the moral event horizon, to be perfectly honest.

Chris: No, I’m all flawed. No strength because of cookies and cream.

Oren: Alright. So, today we’re talking about mistakes in character arcs. And that one we were just joking about is one that comes up a lot and it’s almost always about Christmas. It’s the one where there isn’t actually a problem to be addressed, but the story acts like there is one because the writer’s values are misplaced.

Chris: I find that this one seems to happen a lot in TV shows where they’re trying to come up with character arcs for various episodes. I don’t know if you have seen this one so much in books, which tend to be a little bit more thoroughly planned than an individual episode of a TV show.

Oren: It is far less likely to happen in a published novel. And I think that you are right. I think the reason it happens more in TV shows is because you need a character arc every week and you go through a bunch of character arcs that way. So, you start scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Wes: What’s left?

Oren: Yeah. In published books, not so much, but in client works, yeah. A lot. And I don’t think this is because my clients are evil people. I think it’s just because they haven’t thought through the implications of a story that is about how the protagonist needs to stop working at a car dealership and instead work at a grocery store. What is that? That’s kind of nothing.

Chris: First of all, you need a problem, and you have to communicate that problem to the audience. And they have to be convinced that it’s an actual problem.

Oren: And of course, the Christmas thing is just a bit of cultural hegemony where you have to enjoy Christmas. It must be something wrong with you if you don’t enjoy Christmas when there are, of course, many reasons why you might not love Christmas. Varying from religious to cultural to personal. That’s not a real flaw, but it’s a thing that gets showed a lot on TV shows every time there’s a Christmas special.

Chris: And I just can’t help but think: what are we teaching people here about how we should treat people who don’t like our favorite holiday? It does not seem great.

Oren: Hmmm… Concerned Jewish noises.

Chris: There was also on Strange New Worlds, a recent character arc for Ortegas in one episode where she’s just unhappy she was taken off a mission. And then at the end of the episode, she’s like, oh, I shouldn’t have been unhappy I was taken off that mission. But I’m not convinced, right? It’s somebody else who got her hopes up by assigning her to the mission only to take her off last minute. It doesn’t seem like that was something that she should have been fine with. It’s okay if she’s disappointed.

Oren: It was really weird that the story starts with her being sad because she wanted to go on a mission, but she has to stay and fly the ship. And there’s this weird detour where she feels unappreciated in flying the ship.

Chris: That’s never acknowledged or addressed.

Oren: Yeah, that never goes anywhere. And then the big conclusion of her arc is how cool it is to fly the ship, so she’s not upset that she didn’t get to go on the away mission anymore. I didn’t feel like she had a problem of not appreciating her job. That didn’t seem like an issue that she had.

Chris: It seemed more like a problem with the other people and the way that they were treating her. Although I wonder if that middle stuff about her not being appreciated flying the ship was just accidental, and was not supposed to be part of her arc.

Oren: You can also have a character, if you’re looking for reasons why there’s no real problem, it’s that they just don’t have problems. In this case, it tends to manifest as the character being super perfect. It’s hard to have a character arc when you’re perfect at everything. Because a character arc doesn’t have to be about addressing a flaw. It doesn’t have to be like, I’m selfish and by the end of it I’ll be unselfish. But it means your character has to have some problem that they’re having.

And characters like Kvothe, or, what’s his name, Sheridan from Babylon 5, or Janeway from Voyager, they all have trouble with arcs because to have an arc they would need to have something wrong at the beginning and the writers are just not willing to give them those things.

You can also have a problem where the character has lots of potential arcs, but the author is just not sure how to bring any of them out. I had that problem on my manuscript, Chris can testify to that. I had a lot of things that could have been arcs, but I was just not sure what to do with any of them. So, my character just kind of trudged through the story and muddled through.

Chris: I do think that this creates something that’s fairly similar but distinct from having an arc that’s too broad. Too big and broad. Which is something I see a lot where a character technically has a flaw that maybe the writer has named but it’s just too all-encompassing to both express and address, right?

And clearly, so Sandman, he’s the one I like to pull out for this, where he clearly has three different problems. And I can tell he has three different problems because he needs all three of these flaws to explain all of his behavior. If one was taken out, he would act differently in various situations.

He’s prideful, he’s clinging to a tradition and unwilling to change, and he’s just really callous towards people’s suffering. But they’re all just mixed together. They’re one arc for him and that doesn’t really work because we can see how they operate distinctly.

If he was unwilling to change but he still was compassionate, he would just do more, right? To help people cope with the decisions he made. But he doesn’t.

And then we have various learning experiences for him that just don’t really match up with when we see him change because somebody’s just not thinking of this succinctly. If you’re thinking about, oh he has all these, he gets better about his pride so suddenly he’s compassionate now.

Oren: Hmmm…

Chris: That’s not how that works.

But when people, when I get client works, this can also take the form of my character is just selfish. Which a surprising number of writers like to write, even though it’s a very tricky thing because it definitely risks damaging likability. But I think the trick with that is that selfishness is actually just really broad. It encompasses a whole lot of different destructive behaviors and often a great fix is to just narrow that down and be very specific about what kind of behavior your character does that’s selfish. Because that will help with the likability issues, and it will make it much easier to address.

Coming of age stories. It’s very typical to have a young hero who’s supposed to get mature but maturity encompasses so many different things. If you have an entire series, you could pick one part of maturity per book, right? And teach your protagonist a lesson in that and have them mature as the series goes on. But altogether, that one’s a really hard one because it’s so nebulous.

Oren: Yeah, you could have… for example, Lord of the Rings has the famous scouring of the Shire sequence where the hobbits are badasses now and they roll back into town and act like badasses.

It’s a cool moment, it creates fun contrast, but it’s hard to say that any of them had particularly strong arcs except for Frodo, right? Frodo has a really strong arc, but it’s hard to say that Merry and Pippin and even Sam had much of an arc. They had really gradual change over a very long story and by the end, they are different. The vaguest sense you could call that an arc, but I wouldn’t hold it up as particularly strong. At least not what most authors are trying to do when they do an arc.

Wes: Just thinking about what you’re talking about with client manuscripts and the issues with Sandman, it’s like people want there to be truly something wrong or something negligible that they can portray as a flaw because that’s the only way they can wrap their minds around it. And something I think we talked about on a previous podcast where I edited something, but the Vox Machina show had Pike in it with a contrived problem. I think they just wanted to add more Pike because during the play stuff, she wasn’t around. But the lesson there is, what did you say? God doesn’t care if you have friends.

Oren: I’ll just summarize this for you real quick and then you can give us your thoughts on it. Because it’s weird. It’s hard to remember. Okay, the way this goes is they’re in a fight with some vampires. She gets hit with a dark spell and her holy symbol cracks and then her magic doesn’t work anymore.

Then somehow that makes her really depressed instead of just assuming that she needs to fix her holy symbol. And she says that she needs to go and apologize. So, she goes on this little side quest where everyone else is doing stuff. And then she says that she thinks she’s cursed to the monks at her Everlight god temple.

And then a few episodes later, she finally talks to Everlight. And Everlight’s like, you’re having a crisis of faith. And she says, it’s because I put my friends above you. And Everlight’s like, no, that’s not true. You’re fine. And then she leaves.

Wes: What’s the big takeaway for that character arc? It’s okay to have friends. Was that ever in doubt?

Chris: But also, the friends didn’t seem to have anything to do with why her symbol cracked in the first place.

Oren: No, it was a frankly bizarre sequence that I’m not really sure exactly why it’s there.

I did some research and I looked at the original campaign sessions. And in that one, of course, Pike has to leave because her player wasn’t available for a long time. And in the game, they created this problem where she killed an unconscious enemy. To stop them from being a threat later. And that gave her a crisis of faith. And so, she had to go do this pilgrimage.

Which, okay, sure. Right? I don’t know how well they handled it. But as a premise, that sounds fine. You can see how that would give her a crisis of faith and how she would have to grapple with it in some capacity.

But then when it came to the show, it almost felt like they were like, okay, we need to have Pike go away for a while because that’s a thing she did in the campaign. But we can’t have her kill an unconscious enemy because that would be too grim. Who knows? Just whatever. Throw darts at the board until we find something.

Chris: I think it would be easier if she didn’t follow a god that was just generically good. Because definitely a crisis of faith works much better if she violates some tenet. But then you need something that’s a little bit more flexible and doesn’t risk being darker than you want to put in the show.

And in this case, if she violated some tenet of her god to protect her friends. And that made her lose confidence in her faith. And think that her god would disapprove. And that kind of makes her powers stop working. And then she goes and realizes that no, what she did was fine. I think that would be a fine arc for her to have. But again, the problem has to match the rest. And that’s just not how this started. It had nothing to do with her friends. So, the problem and the resolution are not working together there.

Wes: Yeah, it’s an example of a flawed character arc because there’s not really a problem.

But there can be great situations where somebody has their belief system and it gets challenged, and then they have to grapple with a revised understanding of that.

But I think people want their arcs. I think flaw really throws a wrench into this, like character flaws and how those are taught about pride and ambition and all these core attributes that are so grand and romantic, etc., etc. And then it’s, oh, do I have to do that? No, I’m just going to make it that they hate this flavor of ice cream because it’s too intimidating.

Chris: But it can be also an emotional hardship works just fine for a problem, right? So, if you don’t want to think of it as flaw, think of the characters going through a tough time and how they recover from it. In this case, she has a crisis of faith because she did something. She lost confidence in her faith. That’s still a problem. We call it a flaw, but it seems a little overly harsh. And that’s just fine. That works great for an arc.

Oren: Yeah, there’s a little bit of extra complication in this particular example because crises of faiths are weird in a setting where gods can talk to you and you can just commune with them and be like, hey, how do you feel about that thing I just did?

I’m not saying you can’t do them. I’m just saying they’re a little trickier than if you’re in a world where gods are exactly the same as they are in our real world. I’m not saying whether they exist or not. I’m saying that they can’t just talk to you on command.

Wes: Presumably in that world, if you fell out of favor with that god, just be like any other gods available to bestow me with some divine abilities? I can tithe.

Oren: And of course, in D&D in particular, you don’t really there’s a strong incentive to not explore that because if you do, you might lose your cleric powers. Your entire reason for being there is your cleric powers. Same reason why most D&D warlocks don’t have storylines where they like grapple with the ethics of serving their patron, because if they don’t, they can’t Eldritch Blast anymore.

Wes: Can we talk about season one of Korra and her character arc about how bending’s the best?

Chris: Okay, so she had a difficulty with arrow bending that she ever comes. That’s what I think of, right? Where she’s, I think that’s supposed to be that she’s just very headstrong and is having trouble getting into a more dodgy mindset. I think they were trying to do the same thing they did in the Aang training episode. That was actually really good with Toph.

Where the idea is the avatar, the last element they learn is usually the trickiest for them, because it’s in some way philosophically opposed to the one they started with. And so, in that case, Aang is an airbender. And when it comes to earth bending, he needs to stand his ground and he’s just used to darting around and dodging. And so that’s really hard for him to stand his ground, especially since he needs confidence. He has to believe in himself to do that. And when he’s been struggling, that’s extra hard. So, it’s a good episode with a good little arc.

But then when we bring Korra, she’s supposed to be the opposite, right? She’s headstrong, she’s confrontational, she doesn’t want to be dodgy. And so, she just can’t get airbending. That one didn’t really… There’s a couple different turning points that happen, but I don’t feel like we really saw necessarily why she resolved it. We did see that in her pro-bending tournament.

Oren: Pro-bending.

Wes: Pro-bending. It’s the best.

Chris: Yeah, with its four rounds, which makes perfect sense.

Oren: I hate it so much.

Chris: We have one episode where she is the last of her team standing. And she remains standing by using airbending moves. This is before she can actually airbend, right? But it’s supposed to finally show that she’s using the moves. I’m like, okay, that’s a reasonable step forward in your arc. But in the end, she only starts airbending because all of her other powers are taken away.

Wes: That’s the big crux with the mistake in that character arc: She doesn’t get to complete it herself. There’s just, I don’t know, there’s a true lack of agency. Because Amon takes away her bending, but apparently not all of it.

Chris: That’s one of the two things that I see people use as they’re pseudo turning points, right? They and I see them use a lot and it’s because they’re fun and dramatic, but they don’t really have good karmic effect.

One of them is you’re coming down to the wire and suddenly you can do a thing because you have to. And that’s it.

This also happened in the recent D&D movie where we have this character that’s having difficulty mastering this helmet, this magical helmet that he needs to put on. And then finally, when it’s an emergency and let’s put the helmet, use the helmet, or die or whatever it is, I don’t really remember the details, he can do it.

And that is used a lot by storytellers. And I think they just love how dramatic it is and the fact that it gives them a really easy way to bring it down to the wire and raise tension. But it also is just, what do you mean the character can just do it because they have to? It doesn’t really feel like they grew as a result of that experience.

Wes: But deep down, Chris, they found out that they were capable of it all along. They were born to greatness.

Oren: Okay, Wes, maybe you can help me remember. With Korra, this is season one. Does she gain her powers or gain her airbending powers partly in response to something bad happening to Mako?

Chris: No.

Oren: No?

Wes: No.

Chris: When Amon takes away her other powers and she has to fight, she suddenly finds the only thing she can now do is airbending.

Oren: I remember wondering if she was doing what I’ve started calling the Super Saiyan turning point. Because Dragon Ball Z does this for all of their turning points, where the way that they have characters get a turning point is someone they like will die, and then they’ll get really mad.

Chris: This is the one used in Amphibia. Same thing in Amphibia where we have Sprig. He doesn’t actually die, but he’s supposedly dead.

Oren: Yeah, I was wondering if they were doing that, but it sounds like they didn’t.

The thing that I remember is that, sure, she can airbend now, but I notice that she’s airbending exactly the same way she firebends. Whereas Aang had to stand his ground and not—he couldn’t just do dodgy airbending but move rocks, too.

Chris: I feel like that’s a problem with the animation and the storyboarding.

Oren: I also remember a thing about Korra in season one in particular, and I think this continued into the later seasons, in fact, is that she would have characters say, Korra, you shouldn’t run off and do this headstrong, violent thing. And then she would run off and do the headstrong, violent thing, and it would work. And then they would do that again, and they would tell her not to do it, and she would do it, and it would work. And they would—they just kept doing that?

Chris: I do wonder, because there were definitely some plotlines in Korra that felt like it was more like the Janeway plotlines. Where the idea was not that Korra was supposed to be flawed, but that we have to make everybody hate on Korra so that she can be vindicated when she turns out to be right after all.

Which is exactly what many episodes of Voyager do with Janeway, as the whole crew is against her so that she can persevere and be like, see, crew? I was right all along. You should have listened to me.

And I’m not a big fan of these plotlines.

Oren: Sheridan in Babylon 5 does that, too. I hate it. It’s so irritating.

Chris: Yeah, it’s a fairly typical candied character thing. But I did notice some Korra episodes that felt like that.

Wes: I really thought that Korra was going to end with—she gets airbending, she’s lost the rest, and then the series would be like Last Airbender, where she’s got to go relearn and learn more about herself, right? Because all the—the earth, fire, and water came naturally to her. She was five years old and bending those three elements. And I’m like, okay, great. This is going to be a long-running character arc of her getting a better understanding of herself. And it was like, no, we’re just going to give it all back because we don’t know if this studio is going to be around.

Oren: This might be the end of the show. You got to deal with it.

Chris: Another thing that’s typical in character arcs is just, I guess I could call this bad pacing of the arc. Or bad movement.

Where either, one, there’s too much repetition, where the character keeps making the same mistake in the same way over and over again. And you got to keep the character arc moving forward. It gets really frustrating if we just see the character, the situation not changing, right? They need to take baby steps or learn the same thing in different situations or something where you feel like you can make progress.

And then the opposite, in which they suddenly change without a reason. It’s because we’re rushing things.

And the hilarious thing is that Severance does both with its main character, Mark. Where at first, it just gets really repetitive, where he has this phone ringing from underground.

Wes: The phone with the longest battery life ever. How many days does that thing ring in his basement?

Oren: I remember, I kept my Nokia flip phone longer than most people. And I remember that battery would last for quite some time.

Chris: So, it’s like, at first, we have to watch over and over again as he chooses not to pick up this phone by this person in the underground that will like, integrate or unsever people. And that just gets really repetitive. And then suddenly he answers the phone and goes to meet somebody. And then he just helps her cover up a murder.

Oren: Yeeeeah!

Chris: And he has no reason to do that. And it’s completely unbelievable. It’s way too far into rebellion for him.

We needed something in between. We needed some time for him to pick up the phone and answer and maybe for her to say some really compelling things to him and then him to tell her, I don’t believe you. And then him to go away and see outside verification of what she’s saying or other things. We needed some steps in between to eliminate the repetition and build a bridge to that sudden jump.

And I’m sure that the writers just loved the twist of the shocking and sudden murder. But it was just very out of character.

Oren: Although admittedly, when I saw that scene, I thought that the doctor that he finally went to talk to after a billion episodes was going to just leave. And he was going to be like, no, I can’t talk to you because you murdered somebody. And I thought this was yet another attempt to put off advancing that plot. And so, when instead he just helped her, I was like…

Chris: yeah, sure, I’ll help you cover up a murder.

Oren: It’s like, yeah, I don’t, it doesn’t make any sense, but I don’t care. I just desperately want this storyline to move forward.

It was just very funny when Chris and I were watching that at the same time. And she was just like, it doesn’t make any sense. Why is he doing that? I was like, oh, thank God he did that. Same problem, different reactions.

Wes: Charting point A to point B. And we’re like, is that reasonable?

Chris: Of course, the record holder for that one is Anakin, the suddenly murdering children.

Wes: Oh, yeah.

Oren: Anakin is evil now for reasons because he saw his wife maybe dying in childbirth, and he makes some very limp attempts to fix that. And then he didn’t get the promotion he thought he deserved. And I guess he’s a bad guy now. Whatever, he’s evil. From my point of view, the plot lines are good.

I’ve also, just from some client manuscripts, I’ve encountered common problems where there isn’t a turning point in the arc. The arc just stops because the author was done with it, which is not super common in published works.

But I did find it once in The Wizard Hunters, which is a novel that I’ve written about on the site before, where the arc is that the protagonist is having suicidal urges, so really serious, right? And it ends with her having a chat with a side NPC who’s like, no, I don’t think you’re suicidal. And that’s the end of the arc. It’s over now. And then after that, we have some technobabble about how maybe the suicidal urges came from this MacGuffin she had, and now that she doesn’t have the MacGuffin anymore, it’s over.

Chris: That sounds like something a TV show would do. It’s funny that you found it in a novel.

Oren: Yeah, it was super weird. It definitely felt like Martha Wells, the author, just got to the end of it and was like, I don’t know how to resolve this. It’s over! Done now! Moving on!

Chris: It does sound like Martha Wells. Sometimes she does seem to do stuff like that.

But no, I mean, in a TV show, you can’t really have internalizing. So, a lot of times they use dialogue in awkward situations, in which you would normally just show the inside of the character’s head. And so, one character saying to another, nope, you’re not suicidal, just sounds like something a TV writer would put down.

Oren: It even had the look into your eyes, and now I can tell you how you are on the inside from your pupils.

Chris: As you and I both know, you’re not suicidal now.

Wes: We mentioned TV shows in this No Turning Point. It’s just like when different writers and whatever, but it’s like where they suddenly remember that this character has an issue. Then they’re like, oh, it needs to be in this episode again, which of course is Din Djarin’s Droid Hatred. Oh gosh. Which is just not a character arc. It’s just sometimes they’re like, oh, he’s a bigot.

Chris: But it’s funny because there are droids. No, it’s not funny.

Wes: Doesn’t add any depth to him. They’re not trying to resolve that in weird ways.

Chris: It would be easier to ignore if they didn’t do such terrible things with it. When he’s just like making, oh, I don’t trust droids, and so I don’t want a droid working on my ship. That’s one thing. But when he’s like, here droid slave, go do this very dangerous thing that you’re scared to do because I don’t feel like doing it myself.

Wes: Here friend, ride around in the corpse of previous droid figures.

Oren: Yeah, oof. Big oof.

Chris: That droid was my friend, therefore I want the corpse to make into a walking suit for my child.

Oren: To say nothing of the one where they just straight up put down a droid slave revolt. That happened.

Chris: But it’s okay because the droids like being slaves, or according to them.

Oren: No, he has an arc in that episode. And his arc is that he shouldn’t have assumed all the droids wanted to rebel because a bunch of them didn’t.

Chris: Oh gosh.

Wes: Great arc.

Oren: That’s his arc. Yeah, okay, that is technically an arc.

Chris: When you have to put in an explanation about how people like serving their masters or overlords or whatever, that’s when you know you should stop.

Oren: It’s still technically a car if you cover the inside with spikes. It can still meet all the qualifications of a car. That doesn’t mean it was a good idea to do.

Wes: Spike car!

Oren: Yeah, welcome to the spike car. That’s what it feels like watching that droid episode.

Chris: And we just get to see him just attacking droids that are just trying to do their jobs and watching them just try to recover and not attack back. Oh, this is so painful.

So, another common one that we see is covering up the character arc with a meta mystery. In other words, this is when you try to make a viewpoint character be mysterious. So, we don’t actually know what their issue is. And it usually comes in the form of they have some issue stemming from their backstory and the writer is hiding their backstory. And this is a big problem because you can’t understand the character, you can’t understand their motivation, and it’s honestly more frustrating than anything else. Can’t empathize with them because you don’t know where they’re coming from. So, it’s just not a great way to get the character going. And sometimes we, after a while, the meta mystery clears up and then we can actually have our character arc. But until that time, it really cuts down empathy for the character.

Oren: Funniest one that I’ve encountered on that was Shallan in The Way of Kings, where Shallan has this entire arc about whether or not she should trust the woman that she works for, whose name I can’t remember off the top of my head, but she’s an important lady. And eventually Shallan decides that she’s going to.

And then throughout all of this is this weird meta mystery about what happened to her dad. And it turns out that has nothing to do with the arc she’s on. But I kept thinking it did because I didn’t know what other reason we would have to hide that. But no, it turns out that she knew the whole time what happened to her dad. Sanderson was just saving it for a last-minute reveal to try to get you to buy the next book.

Chris: You can do something like this with side characters though, if you want to, as long as you, again, communicate from your viewpoint character. See that there’s something going on with the side character, let the viewpoint character be interested in what it is. Without pressuring them, tell me your backstory, side character. But then you can develop the side characters arc by revealing their backstory, having them talk about it, and then heading towards closure from there.

So that can work, but your viewpoint character and your main character, they should be basically the same. So don’t make your main character not have a viewpoint, just so you can give them a mysterious backstory. Please, I’m begging you.

Revealed backstories also do have to matter, right? They really should be relevant to the plot and change things going forward in some way, or else it may feel very indulgent.

Oren: All right, with that, we have finished our arc of getting to the end of the podcast. I think we can all agree we became better people for it. And I know you guys all agree with me about ice cream now, right?

Wes: Yes.

Oren: You guys aren’t gonna go eat rocky road and cookies and cream, aren’t you? I see I failed. All right, we’re done now. We’re out.

Chris: If this podcast gave you an arc with a positive ending or just made you want ice cream, consider supporting us on Patreon, because those things are definitely related. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, we have Callie Macleod. Then there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson. She’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Talk to you next week.

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