Normally, you can’t just wish for a story to be good. But if that actually works, then watch out, because you’re almost certainly in a morality play about how something you get without any work isn’t actually worth having. That’s just what wishes are usually used for in fiction, and it’s our topic for today. We’ll discuss earning a wish, the difficulties of wish contracts, plus the one time a wish-horror movie turned into a rom-com.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Melaine. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.
[Intro Music]Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren.
Chris: And I’m Chris.
Oren: So, right at the top here, I’m going to rub my magic lamp here, and I’m going to wish for a great episode. And that’s going to work, right? It’ll be very satisfying.
Chris: I don’t know. I think you should just wish for more wishes.
Oren: Hmm.
Chris: And then you can wish for a great episode.
Oren: But what if the wishes are granted to me in a way that fulfills the wording of what I said, but not what I wanted to happen? Ooh, I should probably write up a contract.
Chris: Yeah.
Oren: So today we are talking about making a wish. Usually in fantasy, although I’m not opposed to a sci-fi wish granting thing, that’s always possible, too.
One thing I think is very funny about wishes, is that they basically work the same way that your character getting anything works, which is that if it doesn’t feel like it was earned, it will be contrived. The only difference is that wishes remove the requirement that the thing they get be logical, because a wish sort of by its concept can be anything, but in terms of how it’s satisfying it still has to be earned the same way anything else would be earned. Like if your character is going to win first prize at a baking contest and they just wish for it that will be really unsatisfying, but it would also be really unsatisfying if they just barely tried and their cake was the best cake. Even if there was no wish involved, either way, you would have a satisfaction problem.
Chris: I would say if a wish just doesn’t fit the setting, then it would feel very contrived that, oh wait, my character can just wish for something. But I think in a lot of stories where there are wishes, the story is about wishing because it’s such a big deal, and this is really a karma problem. Again, your character needs to get good karma and then pay off that karma to earn their victories. But what happens when a character gets something that they have not earned is they actively get bad karma except for Aladdin should have gotten bad karma. because the genie totally cheated him. I’m sticking to that.
Oren: Hot take. Hot Aladdin discourse 2025.
Chris: But in any case, however, there is an exception to this because it works karmically, selfless wishes totally negate this, or they need extra effort if you want them to do bad karma. Basically, what always happens is that the characters specifically wish for something for their own gain, personally. And if they actually wished for world peace or something that was fairly selfless, then there usually has to be another element if you want that to accumulate bad karma because basically the good karma of using a wish for a selfless purpose would negate any bad karma that getting that without earning it would bring. So, you can still have that be something that comes back to haunt them if there is a sign that that’s extremely careless. Like they’re just wishing for world peace on a monkey’s paw, right? And they’re told, no, don’t wish for things on the monkey’s paw. And they’re like, “No, I’m going to do it.”
Oren: I’m gonna!
Chris: Hey, monkey’s paw, gimme world peace. Okay, in that circumstance, you would still expect that to have a terrible outcome, but basically for this to work, and usually wishes are a set up for them to have something bad happen or take their wish back eventually, you need them to do something for their own sake.
Oren: Right, and this is another way in which you can see that wishes fundamentally don’t work any differently than any other way the character gets something, which is that they start at the beginning by getting something they didn’t deserve. And then the story is about the consequences of that. That’s how you make that satisfying. Otherwise, what’s the point?
Chris: Although you could have a story where they do something really great, earn lots of good karma, and then their payoff for that is that they get one wish.
Oren: Yeah, I mean that’s sort of what happens at the end of Aladdin, although he is wishing for the genie’s freedom, but like the genie is getting something out of it. And you could argue that that’s sort of the genie’s wish.
Chris: Right, so he makes a selfless wish to free the genie, and then that creates good karma for him and then he gets good things. That were not just the genie being free.
Oren: Yeah, because he gets to be in a relationship with his girlfriend, right? Which is what he wanted from the beginning, basically.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, the thing that gets me about Aladdin’s wish is that he wishes to be a prince and then instead of that going wrong in some way, the whole problem is that he’s not a real prince. It’s like, what do you mean he is not a real prince? He wished to be a prince. This is an arbitrary social construct based on class suppression. I don’t see why he isn’t a real prince.
Oren: There’s just so many questions. Like, okay, is he a prince of something? Is there a country that he’s the prince of now? I have so many questions.
Chris: Yeah. Do we just like create millions of people for him to rule over that did not previously exist? Do they remember their previous existence? Do they know they just popped into existence?
Oren: Did the genie just like supplant him, find some other dynasty and send them to the cornfields, and now he is the prince of that area?
Chris: Or they suddenly remembered that they have an additional son?
Oren: One of my favorite tropes is the wish contract. This is a thing you mostly see online where people are like, “Well, I could defeat the monkey’s paw by clever wordcraft.” But here’s the thing: it doesn’t really work that way because the whole point of contracts is not to magically bind people into following an arbitrary set of instructions. The goal of contracts is to have a clearly laid out agreement where the responsibilities of both sides are enumerated so that there is less chance of there being a misunderstanding. And that’s why we need courts to interpret them sometimes because no contract is perfect. No contract can foresee all situations.
That’s why smart contracts don’t work, one reason they don’t work, it’s because you can’t do contracts by flowchart. Whereas these magical wishes kind of assume they work like smart contracts. So, a smart contract is a software concept. The idea is that you can program a piece of software to decide when a contract has been fulfilled and release the payment. It’s this idea primarily popular among libertarians so that you could have contracts without needing a state to enforce them. We see a lot of blockchain people talking about them, or at least you did.
Chris: And this software is just omniscient? Just magically?
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Some person would still have to tell the software what’s happening and that could be messed with.
Oren: Right, and you are seeing the problem with why these don’t work. It’s just not a workable solution.
Chris: We don’t wanna be ruled, because we’re libertarians, just ruled by The Machine.
Oren: The magic contract!
Chris: The magical Machine will rule over us!
Oren: And that’s sort of how people imagine wishes working. But in reality, no matter how tightly written your contract is, there are ways to interpret it that can mess you up. And in real life, the recourse that you have is you can go to a judge and the judge can look at the contract and be like, no, that’s obviously not what they meant. And no reasonable person would think that, therefore you are in violation of your contract.
So, here’s a famous one to avoid getting messed up by wishes, they will say, “Grant this wish according to my intent and not my wording.” And it’s like, okay, what was your intent? Can we prove that? How are you going to prove that that’s a thing? Can the wishing party just be like, “Oh, well this is what I thought your intent was. I can’t read your mind. I’m not omnipotent.”
Chris: I mean, anything that can cast a wish is kind of omnipotent. I see what you mean. That they’re like, “We can’t technically judge this.” I see it more as a matter of reader expectations, because if we’re going to weasel out of a contract somehow, then we establish that it has to follow certain rules and readers want to know what little tricksy thing is done to weasel out of the contract. And if somebody were to say, “Oh, you gotta judge this by my intent,” and the reader clearly perceives their intent as being a certain way, then that could eliminate options.
Oren: Yeah, if you’re doing it for fictional purposes, then that’s a bad way to word it. Just because people tend to use that as a, “Nothing else I say matters because it’s my intent.” So that doesn’t tend to be fun for fiction. But my point is that even that kind of wording, if you are really creative, you can find ways around it. Like for example, what about your intrusive thought that you had when you were thinking of the contract? Is that part of your intent? I would argue it was, and now I’m going to do what your intrusive thought said. That’s just an example of how, without an enforcement mechanism that is able to say what a reasonable person would expect, you can’t really trick wishes that way. But in fiction you can, I’m not saying you should never do a wish contract story. This is just a thing that’s part of the wish discourse on the internet.
Chris: I think for wishes like that to work, we have to assume that there are metaphysical rules that are in essence forcing some kind of contract interpretation for this to work in the first place. But it does bring up a couple questions. One issue with wishes is the wishing for more wishes, even in Aladdin where the genie is like, “Oh, and you can’t wish for more wishes.” There’s still a million ways you could potentially use your wishes to get additional wishes. Now, I do think at least if you have a genie, if you’re like, “Oh, I want a book where if I write something in it, everything I write comes true.” The genie could just, using its own intelligence, be like, “No, that’s clearly a method of getting more wishes. I don’t do that.”
I do like stories where the protagonist doesn’t actually know the wish will work when they make it because I think that really helps with reader perceptions like, “Why doesn’t the character just wish for that, or that?” Because if you were to just casually toss a coin in a fountain and make a wish, you’re probably not going to optimize that because that’s just a hopeful thing you’re saying, right? You don’t actually think that’s literally going to come true. And so some stories have a character making a wish, not knowing that something will act on that wish, and that allows you to be a lot more flexible with their motivation and how they word it.
Oren: A twist that I like on this trope that doesn’t come up all that often is to abandon the idea that a wish is like an omnipotent anything can happen and focus more on a wish being a favor that some powerful entity will grant you, because that makes it a lot easier. You don’t have to think about things like wishing for infinite wishes. Because you’re basically being owed a favor by a powerful entity and depending on how the entity is set up, that could be a lot of different things, but it doesn’t come with the assumption that it can be anything.
Chris: Right. So, if a billionaire was like, “I will grant you three wishes,” there are still some things that a billionaire cannot bring somebody back to life, for instance. But you could wish them to give up their billions theoretically.
Oren: Yeah, you could. That’d be a good wish.
Chris: I mean, you can still call it a wish at that point. I think in many cases that’s not necessarily what we think of as wishes, but I guess if the entity is powerful enough, it can be close enough.
Oren: Yeah. I mean, that’s not the trope, right? The trope is that it can be anything and then you wish for something selfish and then it goes bad. Right? Like, I get it.
Chris: Yeah, like The Monkey’s Paw. I think people really like The Monkey’s Paw because of that bad karma aspect. I do think it’s worth thinking about how The Monkey’s Paw works if you want it to go bad, because I just keep thinking about the Wishmaster movies.
Oren: Yeah!
Chris: So the Wishmaster movies are about an evil genie that kills people who make wishes, and they just get lazier and lazier about it as they go. In the first movie, the Wishmaster is just doing clever things to make the wish go wrong. And then we get to movie three, and somebody makes a wish and then the Wishmaster just kills them. It has nothing to do with the wish!
Oren: It’s an unrelated death.
Chris: It’s an unrelated death, and it’s just like, oh, come on. Because I think that’s one thing that people want to see with The Monkey’s Paw, is how it has to come from the wish somehow. I think two easy ways to do this usually are—often it’s a matter of causality—where either you can have, Oh, you want money? Well, a loved one will die and leave you a bunch of money. So, we implemented the wish in a way that something bad had to happen for it to work, or, we could do the reverse and have the wish happen and it creates something bad. So, oh, with the money your loved one went adventuring and then died. So those two things tend to work pretty well and they’re not too hard. So the Wishmaster’s just, “Oh, you made a wish? Now I kill you.” Uh, that was not much fun.
Oren: We should point out the best Wishmaster movie, which is the fourth one, where it starts with a lady wishing and as she says, “I wish…” And the genie’s like, “All right, once I grant this wish I’m going to kill her.” And she says, “I wish the next man to see me falls in love with me” and it’s him. And so he falls in love with her and then that’s the movie! The movie is that he’s in love with her and he has to actually be in love with her before he can kill her, and it’s great. It’s a beautiful, terrible movie, but I love it so much.
Chris: I still haven’t seen it. I need to see it. I do think alternate interpretations of somebody’s wording are fun, but they’re harder and I don’t want to see another, “Give me what I deserve.” That one’s used all the time where the villain will be like, “Oh, don’t worry, you’re getting what you deserve.” Or like, “Don’t worry, you’ll join your loved one…in death!” These really ambiguous wordings that villains say all the time with somebody that they’ve hired that they want to betray or whatever. Yeah, those, we can see them coming a mile away so it has to be at least more original than them.
Oren: Yeah, I mean this is only sort of a wish, but in general it’s very frustrating when characters trust someone who is obviously untrustworthy, where it’ll be like, “Oh, well I’ll let your loved ones go if you do this for me,” and then he like, lets them go off a cliff. And it’s like, okay, sure, that was clever wording, but also, did he even need that? Like how do you know he was even going to keep his word in the first place?
Chris: So, what do you think about a wish like, “I wish I was a king,” and then somebody becomes a homecoming king again?
Oren: I think that’s fine. What are you going to do, complain to the wish court? We’ve established there isn’t one of those. You take what the smart contract gives you.
Chris: The all-seeing, all-knowing smart contract.
Oren: Personally, with me for wishes, I don’t want to have to focus on the wording of the wish because at this point it starts to get kind of frustrating because I’m so into the genre that when someone makes a wish and doesn’t think about the wording at all, it’s like, oh, well obviously that’s going to go bad. But at the same time, if they do spend a lot of time thinking about the wording, that’s kind of boring. It’s not really what you want, and you either end up with a wish that went well or none of that mattered anyway.
Chris: I mean, that’s why it’s nice to have characters who make wishes not knowing that this is about to come true. I do think that also may lower their bad karma a little bit. You get something like in Big, for instance, the movie, a boy finds this little wish giver/fortune teller machine at a carnival and wishes to be an adult. And then it’s not that it backlashes on him in so much as he decides in the end, no, actually, he’d rather go back to be a kid again. So he just learns a lesson about being a kid as opposed to somebody intentionally making a wish and then choosing to pass over world peace to give themselves money.
Oren: That’s why I really like Madoka Magica, it’s one of the reasons I really like Madoka Magica, is that in that instance, the mechanics of the wish are less about the wording of it and more about how much power are you granting Kyubey to let him grant your wish.
It’s not, if I recall correctly, spelled out exactly but there’s a pretty strong implication that the more powerful the magical girl, the stronger the wish, which is why—spoilers at the end—Madoka can make this world-altering wish, it’s because all of Homura’s time loops have made Madoka super important.
Chris: I feel like it’s said both ways where Kyubey both says that, but then also says that a bigger wish makes a more powerful magical girl.
Oren: Oh, does he?
Chris: I think he says both things.
Oren: It wouldn’t be the first anime that had contradictory explanations for how things worked.
Chris: Yeah, does the chicken or the egg come first here? Is it that you need a powerful girl for a powerful wish, or is it that a powerful wish makes a powerful girl? But there’s definitely the whole thing where, because fate rests on Madoka because of the time resets, that makes her bigger and more important. So I don’t know, maybe that enables her to make a bigger wish, but the wish she makes is like a huge, universe-altering wish. So what happens if she had just made that in her first wish? You know, I don’t know.
Oren: The answer has to be no, right? If it would’ve worked for her to make that wish without all of the rigmarole, then it’s like, ugh, that whole show was for nothing. I refuse! I reject that reality. I wish for it to not be so.
Of course, the funniest movie that’s tackled wishes recently was Wonder Woman 1984, which, oh man.
Chris: Yeah, that was…I don’t know why they thought that was a good idea.
Oren: That’s such a funny movie because, in order for that movie to work, they have to just assume that nobody is making selfless wishes. Or even selfish wishes that don’t hurt anybody else. They just assume that everyone’s wish is going to be negative. And it’s like, wow, that is a really dim view of people, but otherwise the movie doesn’t work because if a bunch of people had wished to cure cancer and then it would’ve been like, “Oh, we brought cancer back, guys. Because you guys didn’t earn getting rid of cancer.”
Chris: Oh no.
Oren: That was bad karma.
Chris: No.
Oren: You should have done your karma better.
Chris: There’s a couple movies that use not-quite wishes in interesting ways. I mean, I do think the original Home Alone is kind of fascinating because he makes a wish for his family to go away and then his family is suddenly gone and we know that there’s no actual wish that made them vanish, but he thinks there’s a wish that made them vanish, which is pretty funny.
Oren: And the lesson is that…I don’t know what the lesson is exactly. Is it that you should appreciate your family? Maybe, who knows.
Chris: It is funny that he is really happy about it at first. And I don’t think that’s what actually would’ve happened.
Oren: Well, we do establish that he’s terrible and his family is pretty bad to him, right? So maybe.
Chris: This little maniacal character who is really okay with his entire family just disappearing into thin air.
Oren: Yeah, it’s fine, don’t worry about it. Even as a kid, one thing that always drove me up the wall was watching Dragon Ball Z, and they have these Dragon Balls that can grant wishes, and the only thing anyone can ever think of to do with it is immortality or resurrecting a dead person.
Chris: Nothing else. Ever. Only death.
Oren: Yeah, almost never. They almost never wish for anything else. And it’s just like, guys, I feel like maybe you could do something else with those. And it’s just like, “No, we’re not going to because this is a show about punching people. It’s not a show about wishing our problems away.”
Chris: Wait, how many wishes do people get on this show? Is there a world mechanism that continues to deliver wishes? Like, if they win the punchy-punchy fights at level 9,000, then they get a wish, or what?
Oren: Hang on. Deep breath. [Inhales]
So, if it’s the Earth Dragon Balls, you get one wish and then the Dragon Balls turn to stone for a year, and then they turn back into Dragon Balls and you can make another wish, but they’ve been scattered, so you have to go look for them, but that’s not actually a problem because they have technology that finds them, so don’t worry about it.
Then over on Namek it’s three wishes, but the rules are a little different because you can only resurrect individual people for some reason, but you can resurrect the same person multiple times, whereas on Earth, even though you can resurrect as many people as you want with one wish, it can only resurrect each person once for some reason. So, yeah, that’s it.
Chris: Okay, so the Dragon Ball that’s is named after is a wish-giving device?
Oren: Well, there’s seven of them. You have to gather them together and then the dragon appears. Yeah, it’s a whole thing.
Chris: Okay, so is it protagonists wishing for people who are dead to come back to life and antagonists wishing for immortality?
Oren: So, there’s several shows in the continuum and the first one, which is Dragon Ball, that’s when they’re the least powerful they’re ever going to be. That one is mostly about stopping the villains from wishing for immortality. The villains like to do that. That’s where the villains come from. They wanna wish for immortality.
Chris: All of them?
Oren: Yeah. Uh, a lot of them, many such cases. And then in Dragon Ball Z, by that point, I guess they’ve just kind of given up on immortality and the bad guys are so galactic scale that it kind of feels like that doesn’t matter. So at that point, the Dragon Balls mostly exist as a way to bring back dead characters, and I assume that’s why they added the one resurrection thing to try to give death some tension.
Chris: Because there was never anything else.
Oren: But then they added a new dragon that can break that rule later to bring them back again some more. So don’t even worry about it.
Chris: So what that suggests is that they have to make sure all of the characters are dead and resurrected once, so that the one resurrection limit will give the story tension?
Oren: Yeah, they do that a couple of times.
Chris: So basically, it’s like if you had a D&D party that could do resurrections if one of your party members dies. Instead, it’s like a wish-giving ball.
Oren: It’s like everyone gets an extra life, basically. But also, when you die, you just straight up go to heaven. Everybody knows about it. You can talk to people who are there. You can train, because of course they have to do a lot of training, so a lot of the training sequences are when they’re dead.
Chris: Wow.
Oren: Yeah, that was like peak entertainment in the nineties. What do you want from me?
Chris: Nineties cartoons.
Oren: Yeah, that’s great. This was all that was on, it was either that or I guess the Yu Yu Hakusho show, which was not that different. One wish that I’m still sore about is from Buffy the Vampire Slayer when Cordelia makes a wish that Buffy had never come to Sunnydale, which is for the most part a really good episode but for some reason Cordelia dies and then never remembers making the wish, and that upset me so much.
Chris: Oh yeah, she didn’t learn a lesson from it.
Oren: What was the point of this, if not for her to get character development?
Chris: The point of this was to have an alternate reality Sunnydale, that was super grim-dark.
Oren: We could’ve done both of those things!
Chris: I know we could’ve, but clearly this was just an excuse to have our alternate reality Sunnydale.
Oren: Yeah, supposedly Whedon would do things because he thought they were subversive, even if they were bad for the story. I suspect this was one of those. Because you can see the moment where Cordelia’s starting to realize that, “Oh, this was actually a bad wish” and then she dies, and it kind of feels like that was a deliberate subversion. But now, now this was pointless. Good job, man.
Chris: Yeah. Although that’s where we get Willow’s, “I think I’m kind of gay.”
Oren: Yeah. I think that’s also where we get Anya the first time. There’s a lot of good things that come out of that episode, but for some reason, character development for Cordelia is not one of them.
Chris: Yeah, well. I mean, we know that Joss Whedon wasn’t very good to that character or her actress, so…
Oren: Yeah, we do know some things from behind the scenes now.
Chris: We know some bad things. That was one of the unfortunate things that is kind of, hmm. Cordelia’s character is so interesting because she lasts through Buffy and four seasons or so and then goes into the Angel spinoff and just continues to develop as a character. Which is fantastic. It’s one of the characters that I think develops the most on any television series and still stays herself, but has also grown a lot, as much as she could grow while still being Cordelia, and that’s really cool. But the show treats her like trash, and it is very sad.
Oren: Well, my last wish is going to be that the show was better to Cordelia. That’s my wish. Who knows? They are rebooting it, so maybe.
Chris: Are they?
Oren: Yeah, they cast the new Buffy, it’s the girl from the Star Wars portal fantasy, Skeleton Crew.
Chris: Oh, okay. Because they keep talking about rebooting Buffy, and then not actually rebooting Buffy.
Oren: I mean, I’m not saying this one’s actually going to get made. I just know that she has been cast as Buffy and there have been some publicity photos with her and Sarah Michelle Geller.
Chris: Okay, well maybe they finally did it.
Oren: Yeah, maybe. And supposedly Whedon’s not involved. So that’s nice for everybody.
Chris: Yay!
Oren: So, hey, what do you know? Maybe our wish has already come true. Alright, well, with that, I think we’ll go ahead and call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber, he’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory and Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
[Outro music]- note: Ryan Kiera Armstrong is not cast as Buffy, but a new character