The Mythcreant Podcast 509 – Updating Problematic Stories
A lot of old stories are bad. Even the good ones have elements that don’t hold up anymore. But when those stories are popular, both writers and readers want to revisit them, be that in the form of sequels, prequels, or remakes. This presents a conundrum, where making the story better may damage what people liked about it in the first place. This week, we’re talking about what causes such situations, discussing what to do about them, and also cutting the Gordian Knot that is Star Trek’s transporters.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Ace of Hearts. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny.
[Intro Music]Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Oren and with me today is…
Chris: Chris
Oren: …and…
Bunny: Bunny.
Oren: So for today we are going to update episode 15, which is from more than 10 years ago about the Hero’s Journey. And our views are a lot more critical of the Hero’s Journey today than they were in 2014. So that’s a free gotcha for anyone who wants to call us hypocrites. You don’t even have to research that one.
Bunny: We’ve had 10 years of character development.
Chris: Yeah. The important thing though is that we stay true to episode 15, so that nobody who liked episode 15 will dislike anything we say now.
Oren: Right. But we also sort of understand that that is not really tenable anymore given our current opinion. So how about we just put in a quick aside to be like “maybe the Hero’s Journey is bad,” and then continue with episode 15, you know, as normal.
Bunny: We could do the thing where if you play our voices backwards or like play the theme song backwards, it says [distorted] “Hero’s Journey not good,” And then the superfans can spot it.
Oren: [sarcastic] Well, I’m completely sold. I don’t see what could go wrong with that. So today we are talking about updating potentially problematic stories, and by problematic, we can of course mean social justice related, but sometimes it’s just that the story was bad.
Bunny: The most basic kind of problematic. It’s just not good. It’s a problem!
Oren: You know, maybe it got a pass at some point because stories used to be worse, or because there was a convention or something, and now it’s not good anymore. So… tastes change over time. And of course the obvious solution that I’m sure a bunch of people are already saying is to just make new stories. And I agree that’s ideal, but that’s not a real solution because as much as I would love to have more new stories, even if we do get that, there are still going to be attempts to update old stories, partly because of money, but also because people like old stories and want to revisit them. That’s just the facts.
Bunny: Yeah. New stories are hard.
Oren: New stories are hard! You know, I like old stories too, right? I like Star Trek. I would be sad if we never made more Star Trek and we’re, you know, just focused on new sci-fi. I do want new sci-fi, but I also want Star Trek.
Bunny: What can I say to make people feel old? Like, I like old media. I like old literature. I like Toy Story.
Oren: Yeah. Big fan of ancient classics like Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Bunny: I’m a stan of Finding Nemo personally.
Chris: Uh, speaking of a story they have not managed to reboot: Buffy. Every time I’ve tried, it’s just gotten stuck in development.
Oren: Yeah. Now it’s got stuck in the fact that we all know Joss Whedon’s terrible. So that’s the latest hurdle to overcome.
Chris: Yeah. I don’t know whether he has – sometimes, he might have rights or not, depending on various situations.
Oren: Yeah. I mean, last time I checked, it’s not that he has rights, it’s just that he’s so associated with it that they would feel weird doing it without him. They think people wouldn’t watch, and who knows. Maybe that’s true.
Chris: [doubtful] Hmm.
Oren: I don’t know. That’s as I understood it. Granted, sometimes these rights agreements are hard to judge from the outside. They aren’t always clear about them.
Chris: Well, what if we just got somebody else to direct and be really mean to the actors.
Oren: Yeah, that should probably work.
Bunny: I think we can just delete Joss Whedon, personally.
Chris: Pretty sure we can find another jerk in Hollywood.
Bunny: There are plenty.
Oren: Yeah, we can find out about their abuses in 15 years.
Bunny: Can’t wait for the exposé.
Oren: All right, so sometimes you have things that are relatively easy to fix. And these are things that outside of bad faith actors, nobody is really going to notice that you changed them. And they get changed all the time, and in fact, no one notices. It’s only when you know, some right wing YouTuber finds one and makes a three hour rage video about it. Then suddenly it matters. Right? And these are things like, in Star Trek there’s an episode where they say – in the Original Series – women can’t be captains. Who cares? No one. We ignore that. We retcon, it’s over. No one cares about that.
Bunny: Good riddance!
Oren: There’s also a Star Trek episode where they establish you can’t go above Warp 5 without causing space global warming.
Bunny: What?
Chris: It was such a bad decision because they had every reason, like, to know that that would be a thing that would be annoying in future episodes.
Oren: Right? Like, pro tip, don’t make the thing your story is about bad to do. It’d be like if we had an avatar sequel that was like “actually, bending causes cancer.” Well, uh… why? I came here to watch bending. I didn’t come here to watch responsible not-bending to avoid cancer. What on earth?
Chris: Yeah. I mean, I understand wanting to do a global warming analogy. They should have just used something else.
Oren: They had many options that were not the thing their show depends on. And then you have stuff that is not even at all related to problematic stuff like in The Dresden Files. The first book has this thing about how people are starting to realize that magic might be real because the government didn’t stop drugs. And uh, yeah, that’s… silly. Why on earth would you – that’s bad! That’s bad worldbuilding.
Bunny: Like LSD breaks the masquerade!
Oren: Or like, I think it’s just part of a list of things that are going wrong, and that’s why people are thinking about magic more. And one of the things that’s going wrong is drugs, you know? Middle class white author, the fear of drugs is always big on their minds, right? So like… that’s a thing. And obviously that was very silly and it was never mentioned again because it was bad. And I think most Dresden Files fans probably don’t even remember that part. So sometimes these things still don’t get fixed, like. Star Wars. There’s no reason that stormtroopers have to be cannon fodder. They don’t have to, but they always are for some reason.
Bunny: But the memes, Oren. Won’t somebody think of the memes?
Chris: Would we recognize the stormtroopers if they’re not cannon fodder?
Bunny: I don’t know!
Chris: Would they even be stormtroopers at that point?
Oren: I think we’re ready for that. I think we’re ready for stormtroopers who can actually fight well.
Chris: I mean, I think if I saw some stormtroopers who knew how to aim, I would just be like, well, clearly those can’t be stormtroopers. They’re spies wearing stormtrooper uniforms.
Oren: What if we called them like stormtrooper version 2.0 or something?
Chris: Yeah, they’re clones again. We went from clones to like convicts and now we’re back at clones.
Bunny: Storm-two-pers!
Oren: Oh, there we go! Got it! It’s still very funny to me that in the first Star Wars movie, stormtroopers are actually supposed to be like elite badasses and they are! And like, the very first scene where they appear, where they just mow down a bunch of rebels in silly hats and then Obi-Wan is like “only Imperial stormtroopers are so precise.” It’s not until they get onto the Death Star, and the only way for them to not all die is for stormtroopers to not know how to aim, that suddenly “stormtroopers being bad” as a meme is born.
Chris: Oh, really? Because the protagonists were outmatched.
Oren: Yeah. That’s the reason. It’s, and they just kept going. Empire Strikes Back kind of pushed back on it a little bit. Like if you watch the Cloud City sequences, the stormtroopers are not as incompetent as we’re used to thinking of them as, but by the time…
Chris: Yeah. Well that’s kind of how inverse ninja theory works though, right? Because when you fight more ninjas, there’s no way for the protagonist to survive unless all those ninjas are less competent,
Bunny: Or if you fight them one ninja at a time for some reason.
Oren: Best webcomic ever is when Dr. McNinja, the bad guy, uses inverse ninja theory against him by making a bunch of Dr. McNinja clones. And so Dr. McNinja turns it on the bad guy by making his outfit look different. So now he’s a heroic lone ninja against the horde of ninjas. Oh, it’s beautiful. It’s my favorite webcomic moment I’ve ever seen.
Bunny: Beautiful.
Oren: Speaking of old media that I love. So by the time of Return of the Jedi, the stormtroopers had been completely memified. Right? They were basically done.
Chris: But also, you have to gimme your opinion on this Oren, but it also seems to me that gunfights in general, it can be kind of tough to choreograph without people just not aiming correctly. At least a lot of films and shows do a very poor job.
Oren: Yeah, I mean, I would say that’s correct. I’m not a film choreographer. Uh, I’ve choreographed some fight scenes on stage a couple of times. We don’t use guns there, mostly because in live theater there’s not enough room. But in general, yes, it is more challenging to choreograph gunfights without everyone just being bad at shooting.
Bunny: I feel like the best gunfights are kind of the cat and mouse type gunfights where there’s more emphasis on sneaking and hiding.
Oren: Yeah.
Bunny: And less on just aiming the weapons at each other.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, I think in general, guns are just too lethal.
Oren: Yeah, you wanna avoid the like, “everyone is hiding behind something and every once in a while they pop up to take a shot and then get back down.” Right? Unless you’re doing some kind of First World War trench warfare commentary type stuff, that’s real boring. But there are ways to make that more interesting. You’ll have to watch some movies where they do that because I, you know, again, I’m not a film choreographer, but what makes the stormtroopers special is that it’s not that everyone in Star Wars is bad at shooting, it’s that they are uniquely bad at it. So like if everyone in Star Wars was just kind of equally bad at shooting, it would be less of a problem.
But anyway, those are like the easy mode problems that usually are solved without too much trouble, unless they’re a meme, at which point we’re stuck with stormtroopers. Then we have like medium mode problems where these are a major point of the story, but they’re not what I would call load-bearing. And so this is stuff like the droid problem in Star Wars. Where droids are clearly sapient beings that are all slaves and are, you know, enslaved by good guys as freely as bad guys.
Chris: The bizarre thing about this one is how recent Star Wars has only gotten worse-
Oren: Yes.
Chris: -about this. And it’s like, how, how did you take a problem that was bad and then just make it even more bad?
Bunny: They’ve drawn attention to it, which they really shouldn’t have done.
Chris: Right, by having like a rebellion that the protagonist put down, and by having Mando just have a ridiculous amount of bigotry against droids, only to like, “oh, this is the droid I really care about. Now let me grab his body and turn it into a suit for my child.” I mean, it’s just like… really? This is what we’re doing?
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: First step, stop making the problem worse.
Bunny: Second step, don’t, don’t turn people into bodies for your children.
Oren: Or, I mean, if you’re gonna do it, do it equally. Right? Dig up your organic best friend and make them into a vehicle for your children. Oh, I’m sorry, is that gross?
Bunny: Do it, Star Wars.
Chris: And you know, I would be personally all up for taking Star Wars in a direction where all the protagonists admit that they were wrong and that they were slave owners and… You know, I would be up for that drama, but obviously that’s not gonna happen. Tons of people would get very, very angry if their beautiful protagonists were canonically depicted that way. So there’s really only one way to do that. It was just to basically retcon it but not acknowledge that you retconned it.
Oren: Just a soft retcon.
Chris: What? They’re paid workers and they’ve always been paid workers.
Oren: Yeah. Don’t ask.
Chris: Just no one speaks to the past.
Bunny: People weren’t bigoted. They were just kind of mean. Don’t worry.
Chris: What are you talking about? We’ve always given them credit!
Oren: And like, every once in a while there’s news out of Disney that suggests maybe they’re finally going to move the Star Wars timeline forward, and that would be just a great opportunity to do this and just not even mention it.
Bunny: I don’t know. Is that just gonna fall in the Disney “first gay character” for the 10th time camp?
Oren: Well, the way that you would avoid that is you just wouldn’t say anything. Like the reason the whole “10th first gay character” thing is a meme is because Disney keeps trying to get credit for things that should be basic decency by now. Right? Like Agatha All Along is a show that’s out that’s very good and has a number of gay characters. But you notice that Disney didn’t be like, “look, it is our first gay witch character.” ‘Cause that would be a real silly look. They just let the story speak for itself, right. So anyway, I think that that could work. There are other things where this is tricky, like the Wheel of Time’s gendered magic system. In some ways that can be fixed without any trouble like we saw in the show, the idea that the Dragon can be anyone, it doesn’t have to just be a guy, and they took out all of the like “to channel man magic, you wrestle it into submission and watch football, but to channel woman magic, you submit to it and perform domestic cleaning tasks.”
Bunny: Although one of their extra features I remember watching did still kind of do that, but it’s not in the show proper. It’s one of the like, “you can optionally watch this if you’d like” content.
Oren: They saved the gender essentialism for the special features?
Bunny: Well, it was a while since I watched this, but it was like, “these are the two types of magic and this one is like a river that you have to flow with and this one is like fire that you have to grapple with” and that sort of thing.
Oren: I do really love, and I don’t know if this was on purpose or not, but in the first Wheel of Time episode, they’re doing an initiation ritual for Egwene, I think is her name. Yeah. Egwene or whatever.
Bunny: Egg Ween.
Oren: Uh, and the initiation ritual is that she has to jump in a river and it’s this really violent, difficult, like strenuous task and I can’t help but feel like that was a reference to the idea of “you submit to the magic of feminine rivers.” Right?
Bunny: I think it was. And in that extra feature I mentioned they do show someone floating on water and stuff like that. I’m pretty sure that was intentional.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: It was a very weird initiation ritual though. Jump in a river!
Oren: But this does leave a few odd aspects of Wheel of Time, like now that we’re playing down the differences between man magic and woman magic, we arrive at this odd place where for some reason, only men can see man magic, and only women can see woman magic. And it just kind of leaves you wondering, why? Why is that? That’s weird.
Chris: There’s still the Red Ajah. The full-on man-haters in the show.
Oren: Right. The Red Ajah are actually much harder to fix. I would put them in hard mode. Now, making them all man-hating lesbians is an unforced error. And I don’t remember if the show, I don’t think the show plays up the idea that they’re all gay, or at least that’s where all the gay characters are, is in the Red Ajah. ’cause the show actually has a fair number of queer characters, which is very cool.
Bunny: They also have a poly triad, which is cool.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: I would expand their antagonism. So instead of focusing on them being man-haters, because it’s just so terrible to find guys who are gonna murder people and take away their powers. Just focus on them being the security outfit in general, where they’re also busy hunting spies.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Right. So it’s not just man-hating that their job is.
Oren: I mean, it feels like the obvious play is to just show them being corrupt. They’ve gotten, you know, they have an important job, but in the service of doing that job, they’ve gotten more powerful and now they like being powerful. As opposed to what’s in the books, which is that, no, taking magic away from men is bad and evil. If you don’t do it, the man will explode and kill everyone around him. But it’s still bad of you to do.
Bunny: Right.
Oren: And then like, I think if you did that, I think you could even still have all the stuff about being afraid of the Red Ajah because they’ve gotten corrupt and now they are, you know, they don’t care. And I’m sure some Wheel of Time fans will tell me that’s already what’s going on in the books. I could just say, go read the books again. That’s not what it is. The idea is that they are inherently bad for going after men who have magic. That’s just portrayed as an evil act, even though everyone agrees it’s necessary.
Bunny: Yeah. I want them to be more interesting. I liked… I’ve only seen the first season, but I liked the Red Ajah lady and her cheekbones.
Oren: Yeah, and I mean obviously you could also…
Chris: She’s a good actress. And very distinctive looking, yeah.
Oren: And I also think you could probably change the plot a little bit because again, in the books, the Red Ajah are like the evilest Aes Sedai. Now granted all the Aes Sedai, except for a handful of main characters, are kind of evil in the books because the author does not like powerful women. And so powerful women are kind of inherently sinister in the series. But there’s no reason the Red Ajah has to be the most evil of them. Right? Like the plot will work regardless of which Ajah the various bad guys come from. So I think that could have worked just fine. I think the show chose to not make that change to the plot because, I don’t know, maybe the writers liked that part. Maybe they were afraid of backlash. It’s hard to say.
Chris: I think they could have also just snuck in giving the Red Ajah, what are they called? The wardens? You know, so they have… so there’s men basically participating in them too. I mean, that would be a deviation from the book, but basically the only reason that they don’t have wardens in the book is because they’re man-haters. So I feel like you could just slip those back in and it wouldn’t be a big deal.
Oren: Yeah. I agree.
Chris: To anybody, but like the fans that are already mad. Yeah.
Oren: The fans you would lose with that, you have already lost by making choices like “the women aren’t terrible.” And, you know, removing the idea of man magic being inherently more powerful than women magic. And now speaking of hard mode, now we are getting to the areas that are legitimately… I do not know how to solve this problem.
Bunny: New story. Erase it, delete it. Put it in the pit with Joss Whedon.
Oren: I mean, it’s like, I’m sad because I like Lord of the Rings. There is a lot about Lord of the Rings that I enjoy. I have only run one Lord of the Rings one-shot, but I really enjoyed it. It allowed me to do things that I don’t normally get to do. I got to really play up the epic nature of the fantasy in a way that feels cliché or silly in most other settings, but man, them orcs. I don’t know what to do about the orcs.
Chris: Okay, so I have a possible suggestion. Obviously we’ve seen from Rings of Power, the thing that just obviously does not work is humanizing the orcs more because if you humanize them only to shove them into the role of being just 100% cruel enemies people hack down. That doesn’t, that just makes the problem worse. Which is what Rings of Power did, was showing like orc babies and families and kind of being like, oh yeah, well maybe they’re these poor orcs, they have nowhere to go, and also the term orc is offensive. You shouldn’t call them that.
Bunny: Wait, that’s part of the show?
Chris: Yeah, it’s in season 2, and season 1 mentions it too. And then, but then we just turn around like, oh, ha ha, fooled you. They’re gonna kill the leader who loves them and follow Sauron instead.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: So, I mean, maybe it’s supposed to be a tragedy where the orcs, you know, Sauron turns them against their leader and they make the wrong choice. But we’re just, again, we’re just doing all of the things Lord of the Rings does, and that’s the pitfall of trying to humanize them. It doesn’t really make anything better. But I do wonder if maybe, again, if you were allowed to deviate a little bit from the source material, but not too much, you could just go in the other direction and just go with the idea that they’re like undead elves.
Bunny: Yeah, I mean, it kind of seems like you have to, if you want them to serve the purpose that they served in the originals, which is cannon fodder largely, you can’t go making like a complex society we’re supposed to understand and empathize with, because then it’s pretty clear that they are victims here as well.
Oren: And I should probably clarify ’cause again, to people who sometimes haven’t tried to do this, on some level it seems like the obvious solution is, well, why don’t you just make the orcs like any other fantasy ancestry? And in a new fantasy setting that would work. But in Lord of the Rings, the orcs being evil is so baked into every element of it that I don’t think you can change that aspect of them without just removing the things that even regular everyday Lord of the Rings fans recognize as being important to that franchise. I believe very hard in my soul that nobody outside of the Griftiverse cares about black elves. I think they were perfect. Like your average Lord of the Rings fan is perfectly fine with that. But if you start taking the orcs as evil out of that, that’s gonna change so much. I think you’re gonna have problems.
Chris: Especially since so many of the villains in Lord of the Rings are like shadowy background figures that kind of rely on the orcs to be cruel and… cannibalistic, honestly, so that they don’t really need a leader who’s forcing them to be cruel because the leader is always some shadowy figure in the background. They’re always roving on their own and just trying to eat hobbits and stuff. It’s just… but I do think maybe they could be pushed in the other direction, so they’re just canonically not an actual race or species, and instead they’re just, you know, elves risen from the dead. Or something like that. Shadowy monster demons. Something that’s just more canonical, these are not people.
Oren: Yeah. I mean, you know, as much as I don’t really love praising Wheel of Time, that is actually something Wheel of Time has, is that the cannon fodder evil monsters are just kind of Frankenstein creatures that the Dark One cooked up. There’s no implication that they have a culture, right? There’s no menus for meat to be back on, that sort of thing.
Bunny: And the thing is, the Lord of the Rings setting already seems to have something like this with those like undead king guys, right? Like it wouldn’t be too far a stretch if you were like, well it’s, you know, thematic resonance. You can make these undead king guys. You can also make this weaker undead-ish version of elves or whatever.
Chris: Isn’t there even lore about the orcs being made from elves that were tortured or something?
Oren: Sometimes, the lore on orcs is kind of inconsistent, and it requires digging into a bunch of secondary source material that I do not have time for. But yes, there is some material about how they were corrupted elves in some places. So if you played that up and you know, played down the idea of them being their own species that is separate but similar to other species, I think you’d probably be at least better than what we have now. The non-social justice related thing, there’s also stuff like Star Trek’s transporters.
Bunny: Famously.
Oren: I just, I wish we could go back and…
Chris: Transporter cancer. Instead of warp cancer, how about transporter cancer? I mean, that would be kind of gloomy in the setting because everybody’s been doing it.
Oren: Yeah, I mean, okay, so if you’re not sure what I’m talking about, the transporter is just a nightmare for trying to plot episodes because it makes it way too easy to get into or out of a place. And a lot of plots depend on it being hard to get into and out of places. And to say nothing of all the different abuses of it, where you can, you know, beam bombs over. And so when writers start to think about this, it’s like the entire episode becomes an exercise in reasons why the transporter won’t work, and that’s just boring. Like, why have this piece of technology if you’re never allowed to use it? And so if it were up to me, I would never have invented transporters.
Chris: Transporter global warming!
Bunny: You can transport, but it turns you into a lizard.
Chris: It makes you evolve.
Bunny: You evolve into a higher form of humanity.
Oren: Maybe this makes me a toxic fan, but if a new Star Trek series came out and it was like, by the way, we all stopped using transporters because we found out that they give you cancer. Like, I wouldn’t like that. Even though I don’t like transporters. That would seem bad to me.
Bunny: Oren’s hot take is “transporters bad, cancer worse.”
Chris: Well, I think the problem is that it’s a utopian setting. And so the assumption would be if the technology was unsafe, they would’ve caught that a long time ago.
Oren: Right? Or like we could come up with another reason, right? Like we could say that one of the God-aliens running around has blanketed the entire universe in a transporter stopping field, something. We could do something like that.
Bunny: The very specific God.
Chris: Yeah, it just becomes very arbitrary.
Oren: Right, and I wouldn’t like that if they did that. I would roll my eyes very hard at that, even though I support the goal.
Chris: I know what fits this setting! The Transporter Clone Wars! But what if there was a war? I mean, they’ve already done this a couple times with like, androids and eugenics. Where there’s a big war in the setting, and then as a result something gets banned to an extreme degree. So we could just do it with the transporters. There were, somebody made a transporter clone army. It caused a huge war, and the transporters were banned.
Bunny: Transporters are too much trouble.
Oren: They also did that with time travel stuff in Discovery, which went to the future to explain why they don’t have time travel technology. They were like, oh, yeah, we all banned that after the Temporal Cold War.
Chris: See? See, it’s the perfect solution.
Oren: You know, I gotta admit, I think we’ve cut the Gordian Knot. All right. I’m gonna write to Alex Kurtzman and explain to him that we’ve solved this problem.
Bunny: Have you got transporter issues? Are your transporters gumming up your plots? Call 1-800-Oren.
Oren: No, this is Chris’s idea. I’m not stealing it!
Bunny: Oh, 1-800-Chris.
Oren: Any time there’s a problematic technology in Star Trek, there was a war about it and everyone banned it. Don’t ask questions about why the species who love war banned it. Just go with it on this one. Okay. Well, with that, I think we have hit the end of our time and I mean, we solved transporters. I think we can call it a day on that.
Bunny: It’s been a pretty successful episode.
Chris: Yeah. If you would like us to solve your problematic technology with a war, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of marble. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
[Outro Music]Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening/closing theme: The Princess who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.