The Mythcreant Podcast

When reading a book or watching a movie, there aren’t many choices for the audience to make. We can decide how fast to read and whether to keep going, but the actual story is set. But what if it wasn’t? Not all storytelling mediums are the same, and this week we’re talking about the ones where players get to make choices. Do those choices matter? That’s an entirely different question. Show Notes Choose Your Own Adventure  Clue Movie Interactive Netflix Movies Baldur’s Gate 3 Rogue Trader  Heart of the Woods Orin the Red Jacob Taylor Gale Dekarios New Vegas Curse of Strahd  Mass Effect 3 Descent Into Avernus  Firefly RPG Transcript Generously transcribed by Elizabeth. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. [Intro Music] Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren. Joining me for a third time is my brother Ari. Ari: Hello once again, everyone. Oren: So you know what’s fun: writing one story. So what would be twice as fun is if you had to write two stories, based on a choice someone made early at the beginning. Ari: Well, that’s just many times the story. So that’s just a better story at that point. That’s more story for your story. Oren: Yeah. And then you could do it a couple more times until you’re writing infinity stories pretty quickly. Ari: Mm-hmm. I don’t see any problems with this. Oren: Yeah, it’s just fine. So this is what happens when you introduce audience choice into storytelling, and I’m using that terminology specifically because this can cover a range of different mediums. The most obvious examples would be either TTRPGs or video games where the players can make choices directly. But in theory, you can also have something like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. There are some movies that work this way. Ari: You mean the storytelling masterpiece of the Clue movie with multiple endings. Oren: Yeah, although that one is less about audience choice, that one’s more like what theater you happen to be in. Ari: It’s true, but I just wanted to reference one of my favorite movies. Oren: It’s a good movie. Netflix has a movie. I’ve forgotten the name of it and I should have looked this up before the show, but whatever, I’ll put it in the show notes, that has an interactive element where, as you’re watching it, you decide what happens next and it’s quasi-interactive. So when you’re dealing with a written medium, this of course introduces a whole host of problems. With an RPG, you’re not really writing an RPG. Ari: Hopefully not, anyway. Oren: Presumably you’re reacting in real time, but with a video game you still gotta write whatever happens because of the characters doing things. So that’s hard. So here’s a important question. Is more choice more good? Ari: No. Oren: No? Okay. Ari: No, not at, not at all. It can be good, but like a lot of things, there’s moderation. Oren: All right. Well, that’s the end of the podcast. Ari: Yeah, we did it. I solved it. You’re welcome. Everyone come back next time. Oren: Yeah. I mean, I love making choices in video games and feeling like it matters, but that second part is important. And I recognize that most game studios don’t have infinite writing time. Ari: Exactly. The quality of the story matters a lot more to me than the number of choices. I would love more choices in my RPGs, but not if it comes with the cost of a game being worse or the story being worse. Oren: There’s a concept in game design called Diamond Dialogue, which is where you make a choice and it goes off in two directions, and then those both come back to the same place. Ari: I’ve been playing a lot of Baldur’s Gate 3, and there’s a ton of that in there. And some of it is more obvious than others. Oren: You can make it work, but sometimes it starts to feel pretty obvious that you’re not really making any different choices and the results are kind of… jarring. In Rogue Trader, which is a Warhammer 40k game, you can become almost fully chaos-infected and everyone will just hang out until the end of, I think act four. Ari: Yeah. Then – Team Good is a generous term, uh, Team Not-Chaos – will leave your group at that point. You hit the threshold for when the choice will matter because, like you said, there’s limited time and also the game might not function super properly if most of your party disappeared early. Oren: There are a lot of very chaos choices you can make that I figure would’ve driven them away long before then. Ari: Oh, yeah. 100%. Oren: Heinrix is an Inquisitor and he is there watching me make a deal with the chaos governor of one of my planets. Like, I don’t think he’s sticking around for that. Ari: This is actually interesting. The video games I see take two approaches and we kind of see them at different spots in Baldur’s Gate 3 and Rogue Trader. Oren: Mm-hmm. Ari: Whereas in Baldur’s Gate 3, it’s really easy to lose your party members super early based on those decisions you make. But once you hit a certain point late in act two, or especially in act three, it feels like no matter what you do, they are with you till the end. You have your lady who, her whole thing is “I hate mind flayers,” and you’re like, let’s all be mind players. And she’ll be like, okay, that sounds like a great idea. I was like, wait a minute, this seems like one of the one things you would not be okay with. And then you have, like you mentioned in Rogue Trader, where it feels like at the beginning it’s almost impossible to lose them with a couple of notable exceptions. And then at the end is when it’s like, oh, oh, you made those choices – okay, time for consequences. And so then you lose a bunch of party members if you have gone to the wrong type of evil. Oren: Yeah. It is funny how easy it is to not get certain party members at the beginning of Baldur’s Gate 3. Almost like the game has a few traps built into it. Ari: Like, you could just slap Gale’s hand and he’s just gone. Bye, Gale. Or if you’re the dark urge, it’s even worse. if you don’t understand the dialogue that the dark urge gives you, where it’s like imagine you’re doing an evil thing, means you are doing the evil thing – then Gale’s just dead in that one. It’s so easy, and then at the late game, it’s impossible. It doesn’t matter what you do or what you say to these people. Oren: I was really confused how quickly Lae’zel agreed to lie to the other Githyanki for me, and that’s not really a choice thing. She’ll do that regardless of what choices you make, but that was definitely an example of them sacrificing character realism for the sake of keeping the party together. Ari: Yeah, and I don’t mind, I understand the limitations of game development, although sometimes it feels like Baldur’s Gate certainly had the resources to do some of these things better than they did. But what I don’t like is when it feels like the game is trying to trick me into thinking that, oh yeah, your choices definitely matter. Don’t worry about it…wait. No, they don’t. Like that Diamond Dialogue design, when that is so heavily used to the point where I know what I say doesn’t matter. Sometimes I’ve gone so far as to reload just to see, and it is like, there’s eight options here and they’re all meaningless. There’s no difference and nothing changes based on what you say, and what you say could be radically different! Like: what are you doing? I wanna take over the world and eat the dead and rip and tear and skulls for the skull throne and whatnot. Or you could be like, I wanna just help everybody. And then the thing goes, well, you’ll figure that out tomorrow. And then that’s the end of the dialogue. Why did you have me respond to this? This doesn’t matter. Oren: The funniest one is when Raphael, the demon or devil, I forget which one – Ari: He is a devil. Oren: Yeah. And he offers you a bargain for your soul and you can’t accept. Yeah, you can say yes. Ari: He is like, you’re not supposed to say that yet. That’s not till act three. Go away. We’re not ready for that.  Oren: Why did you give me this choice if I’m not allowed to take it? Ari: Baldur’s Gate, I think, has this worse than Rogue Trader, but it’s like the game assumes, well, no one’s going to click this. Why’d you put it in there? Someone’s gonna click it. Oren: That is replicating the accurate D&D experience though, because sometimes GMs will give you a choice and they just don’t expect you to make one of the choices. But you can, and sometimes it feels like it makes some more sense to. Ari: At least in A TTRPG, you can react to it as the GM. The game is just kinda left floundering. You’re like, oh, what a lovely lampshade you have here. It’s beautiful. It really ties the room together. Oren: There are some times where I feel like the choice actively makes the game worse is when you are given a choice that has a really negative repercussion that there’s just no way you could have predicted. I just feel like, why are you punishing me for this? The worst one, the worst of any I’ve ever seen was this game called Heart of the Woods, which is a visual novel that does not appear to have any branching choices. It appears a hundred percent linear until you get to the end, where there are two bad endings and a good one, and which one you get depends on a random dialogue choice you made eight hours ago. Ari: Excellent. Oren: Did you say ‘I promise to make it up to you’, or did you say ‘you’re right?’ Because you should have said ‘you’re right’ if you wanted the good ending. Ari: I don’t want you to say you’ll make it up to me. I wanna be right.  Oren: It’s the weirdest thing. And it was so surprising that when our friend who’d recommended it to me was talking to me about the game, he didn’t understand what I meant because he just didn’t realize there were multiple endings. Because it does not seem like a game with multiple endings. Ari: I’ve seen some people defend this when a character says something in a video game and then it just turns out they’re lying to you. Like in Baldur’s Gate 3 – Baldur’s Gate 3 is a good game, by the way, for anyone wondering. I do think it’s a good game, but I’m playing it right now and it is one of the biggest RPGs that’s come out in the last decade, so I’m using it as an example. Where you meet murder Harley Quinn Orin – not podcast Oren, very different. Alter ego, I assume. And she’s like, oh, I took one of your people and I’m gonna murder them if you come after me. That’s just a lie. She won’t. So it’s almost like, she lies to you, but this is a video game. I don’t…A, she could just kill them. If this was a realistic world, she could see me coming and stab them in the face. But also, it’s a video game. So I know there are limitations and I just kind of have to believe characters ’cause there’s no way to check their story. It feels like the choice of ‘do you go after them or not’ doesn’t really feel like a choice. Because I have no idea what the consequences are without looking them up. And anytime I have to look up the consequences of an action, not because I wanna make the perfect choice, but just so I understand where are we operating here as far as is this character even being truthful with me, I think is a failure of the game story. And I would rather less choice than that.  Oren: Yeah, I kind of feel like you probably shouldn’t put in choices that you know are just leading to a deliberately bad ending, but that’s obviously a pretty controversial stance. I do think we could compromise on don’t have characters recommend things that if I do them, will be bad for non-story reasons. The most blatant example of this is in Mass Effect 2. Ari: That’s rough buddy. Oren: Poor Jacob. Not a great character to start with. And when you’re talking to him, and I think Miranda is the other one, Miranda’s like you could go and prepare to fight the collectors, which means do all the side quests. And Jacob’s like, no, I think you should go and fight the collectors immediately because we don’t have time to wait around. Do not do that! Ari: Don’t do that. That’s the bad ending. Oren: You will get the worst ending. But in character, it makes sense that Jacob would say that because we don’t have time, right? The collectors are doing stuff now. Jacob doesn’t know that the collectors will just wait for you to do all the side quests. Ari: Also, if you do it that way, Mass Effect 2 is an incredibly short game. Mass effect 2 is like 80% companion acquisition and then loyalty missions. Oren: Yeah, it’s bizarre to me that they even have a character suggesting that. And I’ve even seen that listed in reasons Jacob’s a terrible character and like, that’s not Jacob’s fault, man. Don’t put that on him. Ari: And I could see why the writer put it in there. That makes sense for him to say. But also, this is a video game, and don’t tell me to do something that’s not just a bad idea story-wise, but also robbing me of a lot of content. Like back in Baldur’s Gate 3, your dream visitor – who in my game is just my character, but with a commanding mustache – Oren: It’s a good visitor. Ari: – Will say, don’t go to the Githyanki creche. Don’t go into the astral prism. If you don’t do that, that’s a huge amount of the story you just don’t get. You’ll learn those things eventually anyway, at least for the astral prism part. But you can just skip the Githyanki creche and if you follow that character’s advice, ’cause they’ve been right about everything else so far and they seem to have your best interests at heart, you just missed out on a pretty cool area. And the same can be said for visiting House of Hope in act three, Raphael’s House. The dream visitor, who you know now at this point and is theoretically even more your ally, says don’t do that. It’s a waste of time. It’s dangerous. There’s no reason to do it. We have a plan, but is there a real reason I shouldn’t do it? Or is there just this character telling me and they’re just wrong. And it turns out the dream visitor is just incorrect. You can just do that. Get a bunch of cool loot. It’s great. Oren: And you can see how they’re imagining this because in a tabletop game, if I had an NPC suggest, okay, don’t go there, and the players are like, oh, that’s a good idea, I would then create the story in such a way where a different cool thing happened. Something that wouldn’t have happened if they’d gone to the House of Hope, if I had been designing the game properly. Now, there are GMs who will design a whole dungeon for you and then be like, do you want to go to the dungeon? Ari: Yes. Oren: And then you don’t get the out of game signal and so you say no ’cause you think there’s a different place to go. And then they’re just kind of sad. That’s its own thing. Ari: Playing an RPG with your friends, there’s also that room for investigation to a certain point when an NPC in a video game says a thing, sometimes I’m like, no, I wanna know more about that. And then there’s just no dialogue for it, but in tabletop, your players could be like, do we believe them? Are they telling the truth? What vibe do we get from that? Yeah. And you can, as the GM, be like, well, you sense that they’re really scared or something. You know, you could give reasons as to why this person might personally say this, but not necessarily as the GM telling you that you shouldn’t do a thing. That can make a huge difference. And video games just don’t have that flexibility. It’s especially bad in Baldur’s Gate 3 because the character, the way it talks to you is omnipotent narrator-type voice that just appears in your head. So it feels, if anyone is the writer stand-in for what I should and shouldn’t do at this point, it’s this magic voice in my head that seems to know everything. Oren: I mean, if we’re gonna keep talking about choices in Baldur’s Gate 3. It’s very funny that they have this whole temptation arc with the tadpoles, but taking the tadpoles doesn’t do anything. Nothing bad happens if you take them. They’re just cool powers. Ari: I assume it’s a relic of an earlier system that was going to make that matter. I can see a version of Baldur’s Gate 3 where that was a huge part of it. I think either the remnants of it when they scrapped it or stuff that they had, so they just put it in there because don’t waste the work if you can use it somewhere. And then you don’t see anything about it past act one, which makes me think that that was dropped relatively early and act one was designed kind of as the standalone space where they were still figuring out what they wanted the game to be, which is why sometimes the very beginning, I think they’ve taken this out. Your character has voice lines in act one as just a random person, and I assume that’s a relic from when your character was supposed to be voiced, and they never talk again, and it’s just weird. Oren: I really wish your character was voiced. I know why they’re not. I understand that it production-wise would’ve been a nightmare, but man, one of the few moments that I actively dislike Baldur’s Gate 3 is when an NPC gives me like a brilliant setup for some kind of impassioned reply, and my character just stands there silently. Ari: And it’s funny ’cause I feel like they could have at least voiced some of the replies for the origin characters, because they already had the voice actors in, they have the dialogue choices. Obviously that is more time in the booth and costs more, but I personally believe Baldur’s Gate 3 had the resources for that. Oren: The tadpole thing reminded me of a better version of that in Road Trader, where you start off the game with a shard of this chaos blade. And that’s one of the big choices they ask you to make in the beginning, is what are you gonna do with this thing? And you can start leaning into it and you will eventually get really cool powers. You will also be chaos-ed. Ari: You get a really cool sword. That’s not the same as saying it’s a really good sword, but it is really cool. Oren: It looks great. You will feel stylish. Ari: Yes, 100% the sword element part of Rogue Trader works really well, A lot better than the tadpole non-dilemma that the game introduces. And you get to make friends with the giant space chicken if you want, which is pretty cool too. Oren: Everyone likes the space chicken. Now, we’ve been talking a lot about choices early in the game, so it might be worth looking at how do choices pay out at the end of the story. And it’s really interesting to me to see how different games do it. Usually they try to collapse your choices down into roughly the same ending with a few changes because again, they don’t have time, right? They can’t make a billion different endings. But with the exception of Rogue Trader, again, because Rogue Trader’s endings are a bunch of texts on cards, so it’s a little easier. Ari: Yeah. They can write a lot of those. Oren: Although they do bug pretty badly. Ari: Oh yeah. They don’t always make sense, but they do have a lot of them. Characters are both very alive and very dead at the end of my Rogue Trader games, according to the end cards. Oren: Yeah, but most games don’t do that, and so they have to give you an ending where it at least feels like your choices line up. Baldur’s Gate is okay at that. I think Fallout: New Vegas is actually probably one of the best ones. Ari: I’d agree with that. Fallout: New Vegas also does a combination where they have the final action climax of the Second Battle of Hoover Dam, followed by the end cards. I love the end card system. I love it so much. I used it in my cursive drive game for my post game credits that I did for my group. I think that with the limited time and budget they had to do a lot with a little, and I think that was a very smart use of the resources they had. Oren: Yeah, I think that you’re ending at the same battle regardless, but which side you’re on makes a big difference. And then what you do when you win, that makes it feel like your ending choices matter quite a bit. Baldur’s’s gate 3 ending is fine. The big choice you make at the end there is independent of the other choices you’ve made. Ari: Yeah, you fight the big brain and then you’re kind of allowed to do almost anything regardless of what you’ve been saying you’ll do leading up to that, which isn’t my favorite method. It is nice to have some level of freedom. You’re not just completely locked in from a choice you made eight hours ago, but the other side is, why did I make all those choices if basically just comes down to the dialogue tree right at the end?  Oren: Yeah. You’ve been rejecting mind flayer powers this entire time, but now you can become the elder brain if you want to. Ari: Yeah, on reflection, I would love to be the elder brain. You know, they make a good point. So yeah, let’s sign me up. Let’s go. Oren: Yeah. I didn’t realize that’s where this was going. Ari: That was so sweet. And then you have like Mass Effect 3. Oren: Oh boy. Ari: Oh boy. What Instagram filter do you get on your cinematic right at the end? Oren: Yeah, I mean, that one is pretty infamous. It’s interesting to see with Mass Effect 3 less the choices at the very end and more how the choices that they gave you in Mass Effect 2 create problems for 3. Because in theory, you can start Mass Effect 3 with most of your party dead. If you fail the end, especially if you take Jacob’s advice in Mass Effect 2, most of your party will not survive the final level, and so you have to be able to play the game with almost no companions from the rest of the series. Ari: Yeah, everyone’s just gone. Oren: Which is why they suddenly introduced several new ones. Ari: Yeah. Hot take, Mass Effect 2, I think, does the series dirty. There’s a lot of problems that come from Mass Effect 2. I know it’s the darling for a lot of people. Oren: Well, I mean, it’s the best one, but it is the problem child. Ari: Although I would argue gameplay wise – it’s not what we’re talking about, but it did suffer the worst from the remake. So if you’re replaying the trilogy, don’t be surprised if Mass Effect 2 feels kind of the odd one out in the gameplay department. Oren: Little clunky there. I was gonna move on to talking about tabletop games. Ari: Yeah, sounds great. Oren: I figured it would be useful to talk about choices in tabletop games because that’s the other place where they tend to come up a lot. So how do you approach that? Because you run D&D, which is very different from the freeform, go with your feelings kind of games that I tend to run. Ari: Yeah, these touchy feely games. Not for cool math nerds like me. Oren: Yeah. The namby-pamby hippie games. That’s right. Ari: So for me, I have a couple of general story beats in mind, especially if it’s something I’m working on completely custom. I did a campaign called The Undiscovered Country, just completely my own creation. And I tried to create a cast of characters that would all spend the first act, I guess, of the game, meeting the party, and then seeing who does the party like, who do we vibe with here, and then their level of importance would be adjusted accordingly. That way it felt like I didn’t have to put a ton of work into all these characters and then just hope I guessed right as to who the characters would choose to interact with. And then once I knew that, then it would become a lot easier to shape the major story moments that I had thought of, for each of these characters to be central portions of the game. Oren: Honestly, I use a pretty similar strategy. The way I see it is that there needs to be a balance between player choice and what the GM wants to do. Assuming you’re doing a kind of traditional GM tells a story to the players and then takes the players into account when making the story, right? So there are interactive concepts out there if you wanna play a GM-less game, or one where the game is governed by a flow chart or whatever. But if you’re playing a more traditional RPG, there has to be give and take on both sides. If the GM is like, hey, we’re doing a paranormal investigation game in this town that I made, players should not be making the choice to not go to the town. Ari: We’re moving to Chicago. That was in the Dresden Files, so there’s probably some stuff over there. Oren: Yeah, you have to be willing to buy in that amount. This is kind of Roleplaying 101 stuff, and you either do it with a session zero or you can just kind of intuit it if you know your players really well. But within that, I try to make it so that my players can make the choices that they want within reason. I have certain players, who will remain nameless, who sometimes try to find the not-viable choices to see if I’ll let them make those. Ari: Yep. I’m familiar with those types of players. Oren: Yeah, and you know, I love them, but that can be a little hard to deal with. [laughs] Ari: Sometimes my strategy has been terrible panic as I realize that I’m playing a prebuilt module that didn’t actually give the players a reason to do the story, and I just have to rely on my players’ goodwill to descend into Avernus. The game doesn’t give you a reason to go to Avernus, which seems kind of important because you’re literally going to hell. I just have good players who were like, yeah, okay, we’re going to hell. I guess this otter wizard told us to, and I very quickly had an NPC who the characters had developed some attachment with saying, I have a reason to go to hell. I’m gonna go there and die if I have to. So the players are like, okay, we’ll go with that. Sometimes the game you’re running, especially if it is pre-made, doesn’t have good decision points built into it because it doesn’t provide your players with anything to work with. Be aware of that, especially if you’re running prebuilt adventures. Oren: Yeah, definitely read the prebuilt adventure ahead of time. You don’t know what it’s gonna do. It could be weird. Ari: I just assumed they had a reason and it wasn’t until we got to that session, where it was like, oh no. Oren: Yeah, I’ve been on the other side of this, where the GM clearly expects me to make a choice to continue the story that doesn’t seem good to me. At the risk of a cliché, it does not seem like something my character would do, and I do my best to try to make my character the kind of character who would do what’s necessary for the plot. But players don’t like being humiliated, so if you require them to kiss a bunch of boots to continue the story, they’re probably just not gonna do it. Ari: Yeah. Why am I asking them to go jump through these hoops of feeling very uncool to get to the fun part? Oren: There was a Firefly module that a friend of ours tried to run in college, where you land on a planet and everyone’s really rude to you at first, and what you’re supposed to do is do unpaid jobs for them and you’ll be then paid in exposure and eventually you can build up enough reputation to get paying jobs. We came here on a spaceship. We could just go somewhere else. Especially since not knowing that this was the premise, I made a character with the rich trait, I think it’s called Moneyed Individual, but it’s the trait that means you’re rich and it’s actually very cheap – which is sort of a problem in a game where you’re supposed to be a hard scrabble trading vessel – but that’s a different question. So as a result, it was just really hard to get into the head space of we gotta do these crappy exposure jobs to build up to the paying ones, you know? Ari: Yeah. I had that problem as a player as well, where this world that my friend made for us where every NPC was a jerk to us, regardless of what level we were and what we had done for them. Late into the campaign, we were level 14 or 15 or something, and you’re kind of a big deal at that point. These people are still just mouthing off to us the whole time, and it made me like really frustrated and I didn’t even wanna work with these people. It became really hard to, like you said, get into the head space of we’re cooperatively building this story. Like, I don’t wanna work for these jerks. They’re all being unnecessarily rude when literally all we’ve done is help them. I don’t really wanna interact with them anymore. So I just sass them and then go and do the quest because I wanna fight something, which is not where I want to be as a player in D&D. Oren: Alright, there’s one more thing I wanted to talk about, which is how do you feel about games that have a roughly good run and a roughly evil run? And the evil run is always underdeveloped. Ari: They have to be, if you have a run where you are guessing more than half of your player base is just never gonna see the evil content. You don’t have infinite resources, no matter how big your studio is, and when you could make a better good run at the expense of your evil run, yeah, do it. I think Rogue Trader is the most likely to have your player at least trying chaos, because chaos is a fairly popular faction in Rogue Trader, and also it’s fun. Everyone’s a jerk in Warhammer, so it feels less bad that you’re the biggest jerk, but I think it’s worth it if it gets you a better campaign that the majority of your audience is going to be engaging with. Myself included. I am totally fine that Caesar’s Legion has way less content to it because I don’t wanna play those people. They’re awful. I feel bad whenever I talk to them or have to interact with them. So get rid of it. Oren: I feel for players who see, oh, there’s an option for an evil run, I’ll try that, and then they feel punished because the evil run is just not well made. I understand why that is really frustrating. By the same token, if we’re dealing with a limited pie, I want more of the pie and I’m only ever playing the good runs. So. Ari: I’ve seen it discussed that, oh, just don’t have one. Don’t have an evil option. But then I also see people complain about that, and it’s the same people. Yeah, it does stink that one of these has less content. In a perfect world, they would both have the exact right amount of content to be the best stories they could be. But I think the inclusion of evil options is almost as valuable as actually building out those evil options. Knowing that you could have been a big jerk, but you chose to do good, I think is a valuable and necessary portion of a lot of games. That is what that’s doing. Because if you took it out, it would feel like you weren’t making choices at all. Oren: Alright. Well, I think that is a good place to end the podcast on. For those of you playing the good run at home, you can make the choice to pledge to our Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants. And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week. [Outro Music] 

Today, we’re talking about conflicts in fandom between people who like one romantic pairing over another, along with… Oh, not that kind of ship, huh? Never mind, this episode is about actual ships and the fights they get into. Mostly spaceships, but also some mention of the air and water variety. Plus, you get to hear Oren’s attempt at pronouncing “Jeune École.” Show Notes The Aeronaut’s Windlass Honor Harrington  Warhammer 40k  Jeune École (The “Young School,” not “New School”) The Expanse  Machine Spirit Adeptus Mechanicus  Codex Alera  War Drive  Hyperspace  HMS Rodney  HMS Captain  Sid Meier’s Pirates  Transcript Generously transcribed by Victoria. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle. [opening song] Oren: And welcome, everyone, to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren. Once again with me is my brother Ari.  Ari: Hello again, everyone. I’m back.  Oren: Yes. Now, before we start this podcast, I need everyone to read this 500 page technical schematic for how rail guns work. This is gonna be on the test. Ari: I definitely know that. So, I’m ready.  Oren: So, we’re talking about ship battles today. Possibly because Ari and I recently read The Aeronaut’s Windlass, which is sort of about ship battles.  Ari: There’s a couple of ships in there.  Oren: You know, there’s some airships in there, kind of. We get a little one at the beginning and then a big mystery plot, and then another little one at the end, or a bigger one. Ari: They have a little tussle. I don’t know if this is where Jim Butcher’s greatest strengths lie, but it was okay. Oren: And I know you’ve been binging the Honorverse books, again. Which are about two things: ship battles and how great monarchy is.  Ari: Yes, we love the monarchy here. Big fan. A benevolent dictator is really just our best option as far as a form of government. Oren: Just such an interesting take to read in 2025.  Ari: Look, look, it’s complicated. Okay? These were made in like 19, like 89, so they had no idea. Now, there was no evidence that monarchies might not be the best form of government at that point. Oren: How could they have known? Ari: They just couldn’t have known. They were fresh children. Oren: It’s so funny to me how they start off by being like, ‘And you know what bankrupts communist states? It’s welfare. They spend too much on welfare.’ Ari: Yeah.  Oren: And you look at what actually bankrupted communist states, and it was military spending. Ari: Look, David Weber’s political views, or at least the ones expressed in this book, ’cause they’re not always the same- I read some of Orson Scott card’s books and boy, those are different.- but the, whatever they are, they mellow out a bit. But yes, you do have to accept some love of the monarchy. Couple of monarchies, actually.  Oren: Yeah. So, for ship battles, I think the first thing to think about is what is your inspiration? Like your historical inspiration, assuming you have one. That will sort of help you inform what you’re doing. Like in The Aeronaut’s Windlass, which is an airship story, there’s clearly like an inspiration to age of sail, ships of line type combat, although they can also fly and go in any direction they feel like. Ari: They’re also airplanes, which were definitely around at about the same time, give or take. Oren: Yeah. You could almost miss this, but they drop that one of the big ships they’re fighting is 500 years old.  Ari: Yeah. A little war hammer inspiration in there with like old ship, good ship.  Oren: Yeah, it’s like the ship gets better as it ages. Ari: Yeah. It’s like wine, you know? It just gets better with age.  Oren: They mentioned that it has steam engines, and I got the impression those were kind of recent, so I’m like, did they refit it for steam engines? Ari: Yeah. Being 500 years old doesn’t actually mean a lot. It’s like a Ship of Theseus issue here. They’ve just replaced every part of it at this point, but they like the name, and they’re like, ‘Well, we can’t just name a new ship that, so we just have to keep refitting this one.’ Oren: Yeah. The ship’s bell is 500 years old. Ari: Yeah, exactly. Look, as long as one piece is still from the original, it’s legal, okay? No one can sue us over this. Oren: Yeah. So, that’s one option. Star Wars is obviously World War II in space. The Honorverse books are kind of World War I in space, and then they get into this weird, like, missile development tech, which kind of mirrors torpedo development before World War I. And then we get into something that’s vaguely analogous to aircraft carriers, but also kind of like the Jeune Ecole mid-1800’s French naval strategy. So just some mix and matching going on there.  Ari: I think they even use that term in the Honorverse books. Oren: Jeune Ecole? Do they? Ari: yeah. I think they talk about that as like a school of ship design or something. It’s something similar. That’s how I read it in my head, anyway.  Oren: Yeah, it so it’s a French term, and if you will forgive me for being way too nerdy, it translates roughly as ‘the new school.’ Ari: Yes, that is in the Honorverse.  Oren: Yeah, and the idea was that you could use a bunch of small, heavily armed ships to blow up bigger ships, and the idea was that it would be more cost-effective. At first, they were like, ‘We can use these new explosive shells that we’re designing.’ And then that didn’t work because of Ironclads. So they were like, ‘Alright, we’ll switch that out, and we’ll use torpedoes instead.’ And that also didn’t work. And it’s a fun example ’cause everyone’s always wondering like, ‘Well, why didn’t they see aircraft carriers coming?’ Right? Why didn’t they realize aircraft carriers would out mode battleships? And it’s like, well, people had said exactly the same thing about torpedo boats. Ari: You know, hindsight 20-20, and all that. It’s a lot easier to look at everything after the fact and be like, ‘Well, yeah, that just makes sense, obviously.’ Oren: People are always claiming that this is gonna be the next big thing that’s going to out-mode everything. And sometimes it is, but often it’s not.  Ari: And also, especially in like an existential wartime, you really don’t wanna be wrong about this and invest all in on a new weapons system for it just to not work. So, you know, I can see why there would be some resistance to upending naval doctrine in the middle of a world war or leading up to one, and the Honorverse does include some of that, actually.  Oren: And that is part of the reason why the French Navy was struggling towards the late 1800’s and start of the 1900’s, is that they had gone in on this Jeune Ecole idea or, I’m sure I’m butchering that, but you know, the new school, right? And it wasn’t like they stopped building larger ships, but the larger ships really took a backseat for a while, and so then they had to play catch up right around the time everyone else was revolutionizing how their battleships worked.  Ari: Yeah, the Wonder Weapon School of Thought, like, ‘We’ll build the magic bullet, and then we’ll be good to go.’ You see in the Honorverse, it’s important that you have the person who pushes that be tempered by the cool cool main characters who know that too much innovation all at once with unproven technology is a bad thing. So like, we need the cool main character. That’s what France needed.  Oren: Yeah. Why didn’t France have Captain Honor here helping us out? I mean, her name is Honor. How could she not be right?  Ari: She is very cool, and I say that jokingly, but I like her a lot as a character. But boy, the setting also likes her a lot as a character. Oren: That’s very cool. Then there are some ship battles in fiction that don’t have an obvious parallel, like I don’t know what the Expanse is drawing on. I mean, the Expanse does have big guns and torpedoes, so I guess you could argue that that’s again, sort of World War one-ish, but they’re so different in the way they operate.  Ari: You do see, I think some of this in the details of how the Honorverse works as well, where it’s like someone actually giving at least some amount of thought to what warfare in distances imposed by being in space would mean and how the differences between momentum and acceleration and things like that and gravities and all that noise would affect how combat works and what ships are forced to think about, or captains are forced to think about. And I think I see some of that in the Expanse where they’re exploring the differences. It’s not just World War I but with some stars in the background, or World War II with some stars in the background. There would be a lot of changes if we actually tried to shoot at each other over Interstellar or even intersystem distances. Oren: Do they use crossing the T in the Honorverse? It’s been a while. Ari: Yes. They cross the T. Their form of propulsion is also their form of defense. There’s super, like, gravity walls that are formed above and below the ship with weaker ones on the side, but in the front and the back they are open, so you are always trying to cross your enemy’s T and either get it down the throat or up the kilt shot as they say. Oren: You can definitely see how that makes a little more sense on the water than in a three-dimensional space environment. Ari: Yeah, everything’s like real big in Honorverse. Like, the size of these things are measured in like hundreds of kilometers. So, it’s like approximately being in front and also their, when their attacks are done with like missiles, the missiles are supposed to be smart enough to try and maneuver in front and behind ships before they explode. That kind of thing. Oren: So that’s an interesting question, actually, since we’re talking. You mentioned shields. How do you feel about shields in ship battles? Ari: When all they do is represent additional hull that comes back between episodes, like how in Star Trek they’re just like, ‘Oh, okay, like we just have to get through the shields.’ then the consoles start exploding. I like when shields are-if they’re doing something more novel than just adding additional hit points to the ship. The Honorverse ones are mostly a damaged reduction mechanic rather than a complete ‘you have to punch through these before you can hurt me’ kind of deal, and I prefer that style.  Oren: Yeah, and I mean, with Star Trek you can really tell the writers kind of struggle with that sometimes ’cause it’s like if the shield is basically just a wall of hit points you need to get through, then what happens when we’re in kind of a rush, right? It’s like, we don’t have time to chew through the shield, so it’s just oh, suddenly the shields don’t work. Ari: Yeah. Or, just stuff explodes anyway. Like the shields are there, but they’re like, oh, the shields are down to 50% and like three incidents have died already ’cause their consoles exploded in their faces. Like, I don’t, what is the shield doing?  Oren: Yeah. I mean, that is one of the advantages of a book over a TV show is that at least with the budget that Star Trek was working with in the nineties, you know, they need to make the space combat feel dangerous, right? But they can’t actually have like a phaser beam rip through the bridge. They don’t have the budget for that. So they had to go with consoles exploding. That’s how you make it feel dangerous. Ari: We put explosives in everyone’s consoles to really spice things up a little bit when we’re fighting. Oren: Right. Whereas, In the expanse or in the Honorverse or in Windlass, things just explode because people are shooting explosives at you.  Ari: Yeah, and the Honorverse spends a lot of time during its space battles really trying to hammer home both the physical damage to the vessel, because especially in the early books, the vessels are almost their own characters in the fights, but also the human costs as the Honorverse gets, not incredibly graphic, but graphic enough that it seems like a bad time. Oren: Yeah. I reread the first one recently, and I thought it did a really good job of explaining what the different systems were and why they mattered. You understood like, okay, so we need these sensors because they allow us to see the missiles coming and that’s how we dodge them. And so when we lose these sensors, now we’re taking more damage, and you know, stuff like that, right?  Ari: Yeah. We’re gonna take more damage ’cause our net of defensive systems are now falling apart.  Oren: Yeah. And I thought that was very good. It really added a sense of desperation as these two ships are just tearing each other to pieces. It was confusing the way that it keeps switching between ship bridges like that with basically no indication of which ship we’re on.  Ari: So I, for the most part, didn’t have that issue reading it way back when. And it’s much better as an audiobook, obviously, because the voice changes. Oren: Yeah. Ari: I do honestly think that one of the reasons, in later books, all of the bad guys have to start calling themselves Citizen Captain and Citizen Admiral is so you have an easier time identifying which side you’re reading about. Oren: Yeah.  Ari: Without having to remember the characters’ names. Oren: In Windlass, I was sometimes a little confused what exactly they were doing. I sometimes got it. Like, okay, the netting is basically sort of like sails, except they aren’t dependent on wind direction. It’s like sails, but you always have wind going in the direction you want to go. So you can shoot that. Okay, I can see how that works, but I remember specifically in the big ending fight when the two battle cruisers are shooting at each other, I could not track why one of them was being more effective than the other one. Ari: It’s ’cause it was real old. Yeah. I think was my takeaway is that the ancient machine spirit that dwelt within it and the powers of the Adeptus Mechanicus and holy terror really spoke through its guns. And I have no idea. I agree.  Oren: As far as I could tell, it was because the ship that was losing was captained by a loser who we hate, and so, his ship sucks.  Ari: Yeah, what a jerk. Yeah, the Honorverse falls to that sometimes too. This, the ship is captained by a big dumb jerk and that means their ship sucks. It’s weird ’cause Butcher has a high fantasy, the Codex Alera series where he writes large scale battles, and I think he does a really good job at some of my favorite fantasy battles that I’ve read. And so I was a little confused by some of the vagueness present in the ship battles in Windlass. That it was just like even sometimes, literally, they went into the clouds and then one ship came out and was winning. It’s like, oh, I might’ve liked to see that, but okay. Oren: What happens in the clouds stays in the clouds. Ari: Until it comes out, and it shoots at our main character, Captain Grim. Oren: Oh gosh. Captain Grim. Okay. I don’t hate Captain Grim, but I definitely don’t like him as much as Butcher does.  Ari: Butcher really likes Captain Grim, which I get it. People like honors in the Honorverse, so I do get it, but also I don’t like him as much. Oren: The fact that he’s so persnickety about people calling him Captain Grim and not by his first name, Francis. He’s such a try hard in that scene. It’s like, no, don’t call me Francis. I’m Captain Grim. Like, okay. Ari: Yeah, if people call you that, cool. But it loses a lot of its impact when you’re running around demanding people call you by your cool alias name, you know, like I’m not Ari, I am like Death Slicer and call me that, damnit. You can’t call me by my actual name. Oren: Y’all gotta call me Rathe McBlade from now on. Ari: Exactly. It’s very cool.  Oren: Which like to be clear, if someone tells you what their name is, respect them. I’m not saying you should go check to see what their actual first name is. I’m saying, in this context, he just wants you to call him by his gamer tag. This is not like a name change situation. Ari: Yeah, I completely agree. If someone tells you what their name is, respect that. But this seems like a guy who is very attached to his Xbox Live gamer tag and really wants you to respect how cool he is. Oren: This is a little bit beyond ship battles, but one of the reasons I think Honor is a better character than Grim is that Honor has to start with a goddamn loser ship that’s been like half gutted to fit this like newfangled weapon that barely works. Whereas, Grim starts with a ship that’s already like the best ship of its size, and then he gets a special power crystal that makes it even betterer.  Ari: Yeah, it’s called the Predator. It’s a very cool ship for cool people. And it has all the coolest people. Like, they’re gruff, and they pretend they don’t care, but they care. They really do care. Oren: I was so much more attached to Honor’s, like tiny little cruiser in the first book. It was like getting blown up and I was like, no, no special ship. No.  Ari: Yeah. And that’s why at the end when it’s like, oh no, like my ship sustained too much damage, it will never, like, it’s gotta go to the scrappers. It’s like, oh, you fought so hard. And now, now our, the poor ship is just. What did they say? She was too old and she gave too much. Oren: That’s a pretty good line, honestly. Ari: And it’s like, oh, now I feel bad.  Oren: As opposed to Predator, which is very cool.  Ari: We love predator here and we know nothing. Predator’s gonna be fine. Predator isn’t going anywhere. I don’t believe for a second the predator will suffer. Any permanent damage except for maybe like the final climax, and then we cut to having a cooler, bigger ship, also named the Predator. Oren: Predator two Electric boogaloo.  Ari: Exactly. That’s the only instance I can imagine that ship is going anywhere in the Windlass series.  Oren: Moving back to the actual ship battles, one thing to think about is how do your ships get into and out of fights? Because in the real world it’s on the water, right? And they gotta move around on it. But in fantasy settings, they’re often in space or in the air, and those tend to be a little different. Especially once you get FTL involved. Like, if your ships can jump to Lightspeed, it’s very easy to end up in a situation where anytime they’re losing, they can just smash the go to Lightspeed button and escape. And you probably don’t want that. That’s gonna hurt tension in a lot of your fights. Ari: The Honorverse dedicates a lot of pages to explaining why, in all of these fights, you can’t just do that. Oren: Yeah. Ari: They have like hyper limits around the stars. So like once you’re inside a certain space within, depending on the star type, you can’t hyper out. So we’d have to like break away and get outside again. The Weber goes to a lot of trouble to talk about how space is huge, and even the biggest ships are tiny moats. So this is all down to very precise math generating intercept vectors and then tricking people who might have higher acceleration than you into an angle where they just can’t get away from you. It’s just impossible with the technology in the setting. Even if they max excelled away from you, they have built up too much speed coming towards you, that kind of thing. And it’s obviously like that is an important detail for him, and I think it serves the series generally quite well in making the battles feel both different from being just on the water, but also possible and not just pretending that space is really tiny. Because that’s kinda what Star Trek does, right? Star Trek just pretends everyone’s kind of right next to each other all the time. Oren: Yeah, they’re always flying up there. Star Trek has also kind of changed the way Warp Drive has worked over time. Like sure, the distances in Star Trek don’t make any sense, but it at least used to be that if a ship went to Warp, the other ship could just chase at Warp, right? And again, the distances are weird, but at least in like relative speed that sort of works. But more recently, star Trek has increasingly treated warp speed more like hyperspace, which I suspect is JJ Abrams fault. Ari: JJ, why would you do this?  Oren: Like, he started doing that in the 2009 movie, and I think it’s just sort of stuck. Even the shows are doing it now. Now, granted, we don’t know for sure, right? I think in, in Discovery, they still do like a warp speed chase where they’re shooting at each other. So, it’s not like it’s guaranteed, but the writers are treating it more that way. Which Star Wars has this as a huge problem. Like in Star Wars, every new edition of Star Wars pushes the envelope of where you can go into hyperspace and how easily. Ari: Well, let me tell you about, uh, hyperspace branding this new idea I’ve thought of. I think it’ll really do well for this series. You know, imagine you’re going like really fast.  Oren: Are you? Is that how hyperspace works?  Ari: It might be, but it’ll look really cool. Like. The coolest looking scene in a movie, you might say. Oren: yeah, is it worth what happens after? I don’t know. Ari: But it did look really good.  Oren: But like even beyond the hyperspace ram, like we’re at the point now where you can hyperspace from the atmosphere of one planet to the atmosphere of another planet.  Ari: Yeah. It’s kinda like teleportation. I think this is when writers, I don’t know if lazy is the right word, but their focus is elsewhere. And so this is the button you press to get from one locale to the next and the rest of it, it’s fine.  Oren: Yeah, don’t worry about it. It’s funny to me because The Aeronaut’s Windlass shouldn’t have had this problem because it doesn’t have FTL, but for some reason Butcher added like a permanent cloud layer that any ship can just dive into to escape anytime it wants to. Ari: See. I initially assumed when I was reading, ’cause the way they talked about it was like, ‘oh, you can’t just do that.’ And so I’m like, oh, is the cloud layer like corrosive? Is there something in it that like eats you, like a big monster? And there are monsters in it, but they’re apparently not super common, and you could just run away from them or not attract their attention by being quiet. Oren: Right. Ari: So, you can just leave. I don’t wanna be here anymore. I’m gonna go live in the fog now.  Oren: One of the things about Windlass that also kind of confused me was how advanced their technology is in some ways, and yet they don’t have turrets.  Ari: Butcher really likes Broadsides. Oren: You can still have broadsides with turrets. Ari: No, those two things cannot exist at the same time in what I imagine of naval warfare. Once one is invented, broad sides are over. Oren: Unless your ship only has one turret.  Ari: Yeah. Points-Look, it just wouldn’t be the same. Oren: Or like, I guess it could be one of those weird experimental battleships that have like all the turrets in the front. Ari: Yeah, yeah, yeah.  Oren: That’s-which, those look kind of funny, but- Ari: They’re over the-some weighting issues that maybe- Oren: Yeah. Most of the time, even with turrets, you still have broad sides. It’s just, historically speaking, we basically started putting turrets on ships almost as soon as ships were like structurally sound enough to have them. Ari: Mm-hmm. And they weren’t just cannons sitting like inside the ship that could technically roll around sometimes, maybe. Oren: Yeah. No, they were like fully rotating platforms, although they were like, it was not an easy process.  Ari: Sure. Oren: Like, there were several experiments that did not go well. There’s an infamous HMS captain, which was one of the experiments with early turrets that was extremely unstable and just rolled over and sank one day, and it’s like, yep. Ari: Yeah, I can imagine that. You have all this weight in one spot, and then also once the guns start firing and if you’re trying to like, put the biggest gun you can in the turret. And all of a sudden your ship is on its side.  Oren: And it had to do with the fact that these ships still had mast, which made it really awkward. Like, where do we put the turret if they have masts? That was a whole problem. That’s another reason why for a while, naval planners in the UK were very cautious about new technology is that there had been a lot of warnings that the ship was dangerous and the disaster waiting to happen. And they had been, at least according to the narratives that I have read, ignored because there was a fear that we were gonna miss out on this new technology. So, you know, I’m not saying that directly applies to any of our modern situations, but I’m not, not saying that either.  Ari: Oh, it’s, don’t even worry about it. Jim Butcher just, he just kind of picks and chooses what he wanted. Like some things are obviously very advanced compared to the age of sail broadside canon blasts he wanted. So it can feel a little, I don’t know, anachronistic maybe to read that and see like, wait a minute, these technologies, one of these should be advanced a bit more if we also have this other one. Oren: Yeah. One thing that I was a little annoyed by was the fact that apparently the ship’s webbing is outside the shields. And I guess that’s not a huge problem for big ships ’cause they have like spools of the stuff so they can just let out some more if you shoot it. But I mean, part of this was just a dramatic issue because later in the book there’s the big rival ship right captained by his ex-wife, which is built up like it’s gonna be the bad guy. And then when they actually fight it- Ari: They just surrender. It’s fine.  Oren: Yeah. Like, they fight it and it takes like two pages. They like fly up to it and shoot off its webbing real quick ’cause that’s outside the shield, and then it can’t do anything. And it’s like, all right, this is dramatically unsatisfying, but also feels like this is way too easy a tactic. It’s like, why would you ever shoot at anything else if you could do this?  Ari: Yeah. The common issue where a lot of fiction will make shields and then put the most important things outside the shield. Oren: Like the shield generator. Ari: Yeah, especially the shield generator. It’s like, what? Like, why did you put that out there? You should tell me if there’s a reason. ’cause I would like to know, Oren: And I’m pretty sure Butcher is getting inspiration from the fact that during the age of sail there was a lot of discourse about whether or not you should shoot at the enemy ship’s rigging or at its hull, right? And you could argue that it came down to what was your priority? Was your priority destroying the enemy or was your priority getting where you were going to like drop off troops and stuff?  Ari: Yeah Oren: But at the same time, it’s not really the same because in the age of sail, if you shoot at the rigging, it’s not like one broad side, and now your enemy has no more rigging left right? Which is how it seems to work in windless, at least in that particular battle.  Ari: Yeah. I mean, I played a lot of Sid Meyers pirates, so I’m pretty much an expert on this. You use the chain shot to take down their sails so that you can board them and have a fencing mini-game. Oren: Yeah, a little fencing, mini-game. Plus, then you get a free ship. So, why would you ever sink them?  Ari: Yeah, exactly. That’s how you gotta trade up. You gotta like, hermit crab your way into a bigger ship every time. For Butcher’s story specifically, uh, it really does suffer from how effective blasting the webbing is. Very wildly because he had introduced two ships that were being set up as the big final boss. And then like, what do you do with that? Like, the predator can’t fight two ships that outgun and out everything except being the coolest. So you have to get rid of one real quick. And so that’s how they, they’re like homing their homing pile that they had in there, and then they just take out sales and now it’s over. But they can’t end the fight like that with another one. So it just stops working like that. Like, why wouldn’t you have spools in your smaller ship? Like, how big are they? Are they so large that you couldn’t afford to put some space to not getting completely knocked out of a fight ’cause someone got a good hit? Oren: I mean, and especially with how vulnerable that makes you, right? It just seems like something you would prioritize. That’s partly just a plot problem that Windlass has, right? Because Windlass has this big like mystery where they’re like trying to stop the bad guys from doing something and the bad guys are really mysterious, and we never really find out what they’re trying to do. And at the end, they basically get away with it, and it’s like, all right, they got away with this magic book. What does that mean? It’s like, I don’t know, come back for book two to find out.  Ari: Read the next one, I guess. It would’ve been nice to know something about the book. Oren: Right? And it feels like butcher. Couldn’t figure out how to make a climax that was actually part of that mystery. So instead he was like, oh, hey, remember that big Battle cruiser from the very beginning of the book? That’s the climax. You’re gonna fight that guy instead  Ari: From the dark age of technology. I’m sorry, to anyone listening who doesn’t recognize all these war hammer references, but that’s all I could think of whenever they talked about how old and cool the ship was. Oren: Glory to the Omnissiah! Ari: Exactly. Is that’s, that’s that was me reading that. Yeah. It’s like, shoot the air ship’s on the cover, and it’s all very important, and it has nothing to do with the mystery that’s happening.  Oren: Yeah. Oh, that is another thing that’s funny is what do these airships look like? Ari: I have no idea. I have literally no clue. Oren: The book cover doesn’t really show one. Instead, it shows someone who I assumed to be Captain Grim, although he looks too young.  Ari: Yeah, he looks really young. Like I imagine Grim is like a weathered, but handsome, like 40 something. Oren: Yeah, I kind of imagine him looking a bit like Gortash from Baldur’s Gate 3. Ari: No, a handsome young man with an easy smile. Oren: But on the cover, I guess that’s supposed to be Captain Grim, but it doesn’t really show the ship at all. And all the art that I’ve seen of it sort of depicts them as flying tall ships, but I know that’s not what they look like. The description is of like a cylinder, but also they have an open deck somewhere. Like, where is the open deck?  Ari: Yeah. The image in my mind is kind of like a half cylinder with like the front top part open, and then you have like the webbing put out behind it like fins almost. That was the best I got, but I think I took that from like a magic card or something. So no idea how close that is. Oren: My question is, why does it have an open deck?  Ari: Because people need to fall off. Obviously. Oren: You have to seal the rest of the ship. What’s the point of making the top part open just so that your sailors can tumble off the side sometimes? Ari: It’s very dramatic is why, I have no idea. I assume that this is just more of butcher really wanting to pull from Those age of sail ships, where they had open decks. So this one has an open deck too, so you can like basically build on that imagery. A lot of readers, I’m sure, have at least some idea of like a captain trumping around on the deck of their wooden sailing ship. He’s shouting cool orders as their ship explodes around them. Like, you know, that’s a very evocative image, but it doesn’t make a ton of sense in the setting we have. Oren: I mean, pretty cool moment from the end of the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie where it’s like walking down the stairs as they’re exploding. I mean, that battle, it makes no sense at all. Ari: No, no. Oren: but it’s a cool scene.  Ari: Yeah. That ship would’ve just ruined two ships because they had all their guns available, but, you know. Oren: Yeah. It’s like, are you guys gonna shoot? Nah, nah, don’t worry about it.  Ari: No, they, it is very cool what they did to us. Like we have to give it to ’em. One of the things that’s an interesting alternative to that though, is in the Honorverse, what they do is they specifically call out the juxtaposition between what is happening compared to like the immediate environment the characters are in. Like, the characters are in this like quiet, small room in like the center of their ship. So like the most armored spot they could possibly be as like these waves of missiles and lasers are going out and killing thousands and thousands of people that until their shift is hit directly, they don’t hear a single thing. And even if the ship is big enough, even when the ship is hit, then they just get like, you know, their screen shakes a little bit in the old, the Star Trek manner. The camera shakes, and how that is like, you know, it feels kind of unreal until all of a sudden like, explosion breaks through into the bridge and then all of a sudden, like all the horrors of war are on upon them. And I think that’s really cool too. So you don’t have to evoke always like pirate to the Caribbean or, you know, whatever. Take your favorite age of sale. That kind of imagery, I think you can do a lot with specifically not using that imagery in your fantasy or sci-fi. Oren: All right. Well, we are about out of time, so thank you for talking to me about ship battles. Ari: I love ship battles. I am, I’m here for it.  Oren: And, if those of you at home want to help us continue our battle against the Pirates of AI bots that are-Yeah, we’ll go with that. That’s a metaphor. You can support us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson. He’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week. Bye everyone. [Outro Music]

Music, in an animated movie? Pfft, that’ll never catch on. But just in case it does, today’s episode is about a recent entry in the genre that’s mostly flown under the radar, assuming your radar is located somewhere on Mars. While global hit films are a bit outside the scale we normally work at, there are still a few things normal writers can learn from this film’s success. Other than the importance of having a bird and tiger in your story. That much is obvious. Show Notes KPop Demon Hunters Halloween Costumes  Amphibia The Owl House Jentry Chau Star Wars Without the Soundtrack The Frozen Olaf Short Transcript Generously transcribed by Ari. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Oren:  Welcome everyone to another episode of Mythcreants podcast! I’m Oren. Chris is taking a few episodes off because she’s very busy, so as a guest I would like to welcome my brother Ari. Ari: Hello everyone!  Oren: Ari tends to make a great co-host, but feel for the transcribers because apparently no one can tell our voices apart. So, you know, say a prayer for them.  Ari: This is Oren, just actually doing, he’s learning his voice work right now, and I’m just him, but doing a second voice. So.  Oren: Yeah, it’s very complicated.  Ari: That’s why we agree on so much.  Oren: [chuckles] So today we’re talking about just a little cult darling, a small indie film, you probably haven’t heard of it. Netflix barely advertised it. They didn’t have any merch available or Halloween costumes. There’s no way it’s a mega hit, right?  Ari: No. Whatever you’re about to say, I’m sure I’ve never heard of it or have feelings about it.  Oren: Yeah. From some small obscure genre called… K-Pop?  Ari: Yeah. Yeah. Oren: I don’t know what that is. That sounds like music, I suppose? Probably not a big, very passionate fandom attached to that.  Ari: It stands for “o-Kay Pop”, so it’s like, you know, it’s okay. It’s fine.  Oren: Yeah, yeah. It’s okay, y’know, nothing to write home about. And then you attach some demon hunters to it.  Ari: Mm-hmm.  Oren: And I suppose you got yourself a little urban fantasy movie. Ari: Yep.  Oren: It’s so funny to me that Netflix absolutely did not believe in this movie, and it’s now [chuckles] it’s everywhere.  Ari: I am very interested for– ’cause I’m sure we’re gonna get more behind the scenes stuff as time goes on, and I’m fascinated to know what the rollercoaster of emotions was for all the people involved in this. Particularly the six main voice talents, both the speaking and singing voices, but then also the two creators behind it, the two main creators, what was that like? What is this one in a million shot for a movie? They call it “breaking containment” when a post goes viral and, uh, boy, howdy, this one broke containment. Oren: I’ll admit, when Ari asked me to come watch this movie when it was out, I was kind of skeptical, I watched the trailer and I was like, “all right, that looks like a movie.” I was a little worried, it felt a little bit like everyone’s faces looked kind of the same. So I was like, “is this Pixar again?” But then I watched the movie and I thought that it was much better than I was expecting. And in fact, I would go so far to say it was quite good.  Ari: I adore this movie. I saw it pop up on some of the various online communities that I’m a part of from other animated shows that I’ve really enjoyed. It showed up around my– some spaces were talking about Amphibia or The Owl House, stuff like that, and I thought, “well, I have Netflix. It looks interesting.” I like the idea, but Netflix originals can be very hit or miss. So I thought I’d give it a shot, and it turns out it is one of my favorite movies ever.  Oren: Yeah, so this is the part, I think, where we have to say like, well, I don’t normally watch this kind of movie, but…  Ari: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.  Oren: This seems to be a common feature of K-Pop Demon Hunter discussion. Ari: Yeah. I do watch these types. I do watch these animated musicals and things, so, that ain’t me. But I’ve seen lots of people say that, you know, “oh, this is not my normal thing, but it’s real good.”  Oren: I am a huge sucker for musicals, so this is also pretty much my normal thing. It’s like, “Hey, I also really loved Jentry Chau, and this feels like more of that.” Ari: Yup. Oren: I feel like Jentry Chau’s art style is a little more interesting.  Ari: Yes, I agree.  Oren: But it feels in the same vein. So, maybe this will convince them that we need more Jentry Chau too.  Ari: I hope so. That would be very cool. I really like that show. So I would love to see more of it, and I would love to see more skilled artistic projects get chances from this one.  Oren: Yeah. As the person here who only liked the movie a lot, I will be taking the critical view.  Ari: Yes. That’s fair. I don’t know how critical I could be, so this is a good space to be in. Oren: Yeah. So the first thing that I think is interesting about this movie is I feel like its three characters are a very good example of the fundamentals of character design. Like, I don’t think that they’re gonna blow anybody’s mind. They’re fairly straightforward, but they work really well ‘cause you’ve got three main characters, we’ve got Rumi, Mira, and Zoe. Mira and Zoe are the supporting characters, so they need to be memorable with less focus. So we boil them down to “the hard ass” and “the cinnamon roll”, which is again, [it’s] just what you do in a movie like this. They both get their own small character arcs as a treat.  Ari: I think that, uh, for supporting characters, this is an excellent example for folks looking to make their own stories. That you don’t need to reinvent the wheel with your characters, just make it a really good wheel. And these characters, I think, are just an excellent demonstration of just solid writing and really good voice performances just across the board and how that can really elevate characters that could in other contexts be too simple. So I think that’s something that a lot of people can learn from. It’s not always just ‘complexity equals good’. You can do something simple very well and it will resonate with people. Oren: Yeah. That’s sort of my philosophy, right? I’m always trying to tell people to master the basics before you try to do something real fancy. Ari: Mm-hmm.  Oren: First of all, we should say spoilers, obviously. It’s probably a little late for that, but, spoilers. Rumi is more developed, right? She’s the main character. It’s interesting that her arc is, “I’m ashamed of the way I was born, but it turns out I didn’t need to be.” What’s that a metaphor about? Yes. Ari: A lot of it can be a lot of things, for sure. Oren: Right, and I think that is part of the movie’s popularity, is that if you wanna see it as a queer metaphor, you can, if you’re a, shall we say, less accepting kind of person, you don’t have to think that’s what it is. I’ll admit that is a little disappointing to me, is that to make something super popular, maybe we have to strip away anything too identifying about it. I’d like to think we can maybe do better than that, but I do think that is a factor in the movie’s popularity.  Ari: Although I would say that I think specifically body shame is something that this movie is very focused on. You can do a lot with Rumi’s character arc and her feelings around her demon side. But I think it is very clear that she is incredibly ashamed of parts of her physical appearance. And also you can see it in how her, essentially mother, treats her, tells her to hide and cover up, things like that. That is– I think there is some specificity to that that I think adds to the movie where it’s not just completely sanded down to where this could mean literally anything you feel bad about, which it can be. It can be, I think, a very wide application, but I do think that’s something important to note for it.  Oren: Although again, we should also keep in mind that it’s a body shaming thing on characters who are objectively still very attractive. Again, we’re not going that far with it, and I’m not gonna say that this movie needed to, when others don’t. I’m not, I don’t wanna hold K-pop Demon Hunters to an unreasonable standard, but it is, it’s noticeable, right? It’s noticeable when you see stuff like that.  Ari: Mm-hmm.  Oren: Jinu is an interesting bad boy romance.  Ari: Yeah. I like Jinu a lot. I don’t have as many bad boy romances to compare him to, but I’m interested to hear your take on him. Oren: So he is at an interesting middle point between two ways that bad boy romances tend to go wrong. One is that they’re like, “he’s a bad boy, he breaks the rules” and like, “what did he do?” “Oh, like he jaywalked once.” Ari: He’s a little rude.  Oren: He’s edgy.  Ari: He tipped his waiter 10% instead of 20%. Oren: He wears a leather jacket and sunglasses and it’s like, all right, that’s not really a bad boy in any meaningful way. Ari: Yeah.  Oren: And then it’s like “he’s a bad boy.” “What does he do?” “Well, he treats women like crap.” Like, all right I mean, that is a bad boy, I guess.  Ari: He executed Order 66 on that room full of children. You know, just a bit of a bad boy.  Oren: Just a rebel, you know? A rebel against not killing younglings.  Ari: Yeah, exactly.  Oren: So Jinu, I think, walks that line because he did do something bad, which was that he abandoned his family. But it’s in a way that you can kind of understand, and it’s not good, but it doesn’t make you go like, “eh, I wouldn’t, I would never wanna be attracted to him. Gross.” Ari: Yeah. And I think that they did a good job that his mother is there too, so it’s somewhat understandable why even in the flashback that they’re not condemning him in those short scenes we have. Jinu’s role as still a child, late teenager at that point, I think that helps make him feel more sympathetic ’cause he wasn’t the most senior person in that family group.  Oren: Yeah, he’s not abandoning his own children. Although we don’t know what he was doing in the demon realm since then.  Ari: He was hanging out, you know, he met a tiger and a bird. Oren: Yeah, he was working on his, uh, on his vocal lessons. We’ll say that much.  Ari: Yeah, he was really good though. So, you know, that was time well spent I think. Oren: The tiger and the bird do confuse me. I understand that they are a real life cultural reference, but in universe I do not know what they are.  Ari: I don’t know what the intent for them was besides maybe just having some cute mascot characters and also the role of non-speaking animal characters, the world over, of giving a character someone to talk to so the audience can hear a thing in the proud tradition of Avatar: the Last Airbender’s Momo. But I think that now that the movie has taken off, they signify the world is wider than the original, very short, ‘this is how the hunters came to be’ section would indicate, because we see Rumi does not know what they are either, so they’re obviously something. They don’t appear to be demons because they’re not doing the whole murder-people-and-eat-their-souls, so what are they? We don’t know. And so whatever their original role was, I think now that it’s a space to say the world is wider than we thought it was from the first movie,  Oren: That’s what the sequel’s gonna be about. K-pop Demon Hunters: What The Heck Is Going On With This Bird And This Tiger?  Ari: Rumi’s singing voice, Ejae, for Halloween took a photo where she was dressed in a big tiger onesie, so that was just a preview of what the next movie’s about.  Oren: Yeah, they’re sending us subliminal messaging.  Ari: Exactly. The Easter Eggs have already started.  Oren: What do you think about the possibility of a sequel?  Ari: Um. I want more. I want more. I just want to see more of these characters. Without getting too much into some of the issues that I had with the movie, seeing more of them is something I really wanted from this, and so I would be happy with just about anything. I would consider myself a superfan, so I’m probably not the right bar for that. I think that there are interesting spaces for them to explore, like Gwi-Ma isn’t dead or whatever, banished, defeated, whatever. Whatever happens to that guy, he’s still around, presumably. You know, Jinu may or may not be dead, that’s a rescue mission we may embark on. I mean, if certain parts of the fandoms we need to save all the Saja Boys, ’cause they’re all sweet boys that need our protecting. Oren: Yeah. They never did anything wrong, really.  Ari: They never did a single thing wrong and they’re all great. But then there’s also characters, like we still don’t know what happened to the other Sunlight Sister, there’s three. There could be as many as maybe even two more generations of hunters still alive if they didn’t die prematurely for whatever reason. So, you know, there’s a lot of, there’s the whole space of exploring what the hunters are. Celine was just barely in the movie, so more of her. I think unlike some movies that feel like they answered all the questions and now they need to scramble, I think that there is still threads that can be tugged on for another movie. Oren: I mean, we beat up Gwi-Ma, I think is how you say that.  Ari: Gwima? Or Gima?  Oren: There’s a W in it. I’m not sure if you pronounce the W.  Ari: Yeah, I’m not sure.  Oren: But the king of demons, right? Who’s a big old fireplace, we beat him up real good, so I’m a little concerned about him being a villain again. You could make it work, but once you’ve defeated a villain like that, it’s just not as scary the second time. Ari: There’s always the trope though of going to the demon realm where they are at their strongest, right? Like the whole, you know, ‘you only defeat a demon if you defeat them where they come’ from that a lot of fiction series use and then, you know, give Gwi-Ma a handsome singing avatar of some sort and you know, you got– you got something, maybe  Oren: he does need a humanoid appearance to do singing, like somehow he needs to be able to sing, right?  Ari: That is very important and like, I hope they don’t bring back the eyes. I thought that that was very silly looking when he grew eyes right at the end.  Oren: I can tell you’ve seen the movie more than me because I can’t even visualize that. I’ve seen it a few times and I have no memory of this.  Ari: It’s right at the end where he is super, super powerful before he like, Kamehameha Blasts Rumi, he gets eyes. He reminds me a little bit of the Cookie Monster at that point. I don’t know if that’s the look they were going for. I’m gonna assume it’s not, but uh, you never know. Oren: That’s that’s funny. Okay. Yeah, I think it would be interesting to do a– you’ve mentioned before the idea of bringing back the third Sunlight Sister ’cause we don’t know what happened to her, like what even is her deal. I think she could make an interesting villain with Gwi-Ma as the dark voice on her shoulder kind of thing, play up the whole like, “I’m so devoted to destroying demons that I’m gonna ally with the demon to destroy demons.” Ari: Or like, she doesn’t know it’s a demon, that kind of thing? Oren: Yeah. Yeah, I think that could be interesting.  Ari: For me, it’s like what haven’t we seen at the moment in the world? And that is hunters fighting other hunters. And from a visual design perspective, I think that could be a very fun space to explore. I am going to assume that the budget for this next movie will be larger than this first one given how Netflix held it in regard at the start and how they are now. So longer, more intricate fight scenes I think are in our future and having hunters with different weapons. We know Celine’s weapons were dual swords of some type based on the credits, and I think we might know what the other ones were, I think Rumi’s mom used a bow based on concept art. Concept art is of questionable canoninity, but whatever weapons they use, it’s different than just demons running at you and trying to get ya. Oren: Yeah, I mean, the hordes of demons are not especially dangerous.  Ari: Yeah, they’re just, they represent, they need to overcome their emotional struggles so they can punch all the demons. Oren: Right. I mean, that’s the fights in general, right? This is not like a particularly gritty world where you’re like, “oh man, I really hope she can pivot on her central axis fast enough to dodge that hit.” It’s like, “eh, that’s not really what we’re doing here, you know?”  Ari: No, we’re not. We’re not here for that. The fight reflects the feelings.  Oren: Which of course is, I think, the whole point of a musical, right? I [think] it is funny, I occasionally see people talking about how like, “oh, well if you take the music away, this movie wouldn’t, is, you know, not that great.” [chuckles] Ari: [chuckles] Uh, yeah, you’re right, I guess.  Oren: Which it is true. [chuckles] Yeah? It’s a little like if you take the soundtrack away, Star Wars isn’t very good. [laughs] Ari: True. If we took all the special effects away from the Marvel movie, [it’s] just a bunch of people in a green box! What’s even the point? That’s a wild take. Like of course! It’s a musical! Even more important than sound already is in movies, it’s incredibly important in every movie. If you don’t think that you’re wrong. It’s extra important in a musical, especially a musical about musicians, there are layers on layers of how important the music is.  Oren: I do think that the plot is another example of having good fundamentals. Nothing too fancy, which is probably what the movie needed. Like we’ve got a pretty good tension arc we introduced at the beginning Things seem to be going pretty well, and then they start to get worse with ties into the main character’s arc, which is something that a lot of new authors could learn from, honestly. Probably my biggest thing that I have to deal with as an editor, or maybe not the biggest, but one of them is having a story where there’s a big external conflict and then a character arc that’s just kind of unrelated to it.  Ari: That’s a tough one.  Oren: And that happens in a lot of published stories too. That’s not just [an] unpublished author problem. So the way that we see here, the thing that starts to make everything go wrong is Rumi’s character problem, and so those are inextricably tied together. Ari: I think simplicity was super important, not just ’cause this is a kids’ movie and some clear, good fundamental storytelling I think is very good for that genre, but also just how short the movie is. They don’t have a lot of time. They gotta keep things moving and straight and to the point. And if Rumi’s Conflict and the actual, like the main conflict for everyone else wasn’t related This movie just would’ve been very strange. I don’t think it could have functioned at all with the constraints it was under with runtime and whatnot. Oren: It’ll be interesting with the sequel as a stress test of Do movies get worse if you give them a bunch more money? Like a thing some people talk about and like sometimes it correlates. Not always, but sometimes. Ari: For me it’s more of, do movies get way worse when you rush out sequels? And the answer is generally yes, and I am actually made more hopeful by the fact that it’s going to still be multiple years until the next one. I am certain someone in some office wanted to rush out either an animated show or a K-pop Demon Hunters 1.5, like Beauty and the Beast, One and a Half from the early aughts or the late nineties or whenever that came out.  Oren: How about a 20 minute short that we stick in front of other movies for no reason? Ari: Yeah, I love that. I’ll just go to those movies just to watch K-pop Demon Hunters.  Oren: Just give it the full Frozen treatment.  Ari: So I am made somewhat hopeful that it seems like the creative team behind this Seems aware of some of these pitfalls and they seem to have retained control over this project. It’s not being taken over by some bigger name in hopes that that will somehow make it better. I don’t think there’s any guarantee, ’cause this movie was so good that a sequel will be as good or Better, but I’m not dooming over the sequel at the moment.  Oren: You know, it could end up like Frozen 2.  Ari: Ugh. Don’t say that.  Oren: I mean, it could, right? Like–  Ari: I don’t wanna hear that.  Oren: There are some signs, but not all of them. Because one of the biggest problems that Frozen 2 had is that the characters resolved their arcs pretty fully. And it does feel like Rumi’s arc is mostly resolved, but it’s possible to give her a new one, or we could focus more on the other characters.  Ari: I think that the main spaces that I can see just from this movie is that Rumi’s relationship with Celine is a huge source of conflict because I think that the way they portray Celine in this movie, she is obviously also indoctrinated into the same like she is older, but you can see that in the few scenes she’s in, at the very end of the movie, when she’s quoting their mantra that that was taught to her by someone else. And she’s obviously built into that, all of that same dogma that the hunters had. So. And she fails Rumi, she fails the other hunters. But I do believe the character when she says, “I do love you, it’s just that doesn’t always mean everything will work out.” And so it’s not that she’s just evil, how are Rumi and her gonna work that out? I don’t know. I think that could go a lot of different ways. But I also think that the space for the other two characters, at least in the interpersonal conflict, is that I don’t know if Rumi is gonna be stronger than them because she’s also a demon, in a lot of settings that would make her stronger. K-pop Demon Hunters might buck that trend, but Rumi say, single-handedly solving all of their early fight problems, establishing like these two characters feeling like they’re not necessary anymore, You know, that is I think, a space for some interpersonal drama. I don’t think either of those would be the primary conflict of a movie, but I could see either of those being good spaces for characters to have emotional moments with each other.  Oren: I think the second movie should be about them realizing that they are actually workaholics and you know, having a little bit at the end where they’re like, “no, we rested up enough and now we can go back to work.” It’s like, “no! you didn’t!  Ari: No. Oren: “You didn’t rest up enough. You barely took a break!” Ari: Look, we can just hope that all they meant was that they just wanted to say hi to these cute kids who were obviously super into their work. That’s what I’ll hope, I’ll hope they continue to have some time off from their actual jobs. Oren: All right, so we’ve got a few minutes left, we’re not quite at the end yet, and we haven’t talked about the music that much. And I’m not a music person. I can mostly just say songs that I like and songs that I don’t. So real quick, which is the best song and why is it Take Down?  Ari: Uh.  Oren: [laughs] Ari: Oof, I mean. My favorite song is How It’s Done. I think what makes it my favorite is that I love that confident declaration that ‘we’re good and we know we’re good’, especially given how well this movie did. Where they say like, “the whole world is singing our sound”, or, I can’t remember the exact lyric right now. Where they say that, that’s true, That’s just happened. “Whole world playing our sound”. That’s the lyrics. That’s my favorite. Take Down is also very good. The idea of the diss track, there’s a lot of emotion built into that song that I can see why it’s a lot of people’s favorite.  I think that really, for me, the odd one out is Soda Pop. I know it’s supposed to be the kind of artificial intentionally and fake, cutesy, bubbly pop. It’s doing its job and I actually appreciate that it is also the one that is the closest to my range, so it’s the one that’s the easiest for me to sing. I like what Maggie Kang, one of the directors said that while she was working on this she knew that these songs needed to feel like K-pop songs. They needed to be a song another K-pop group would create, and I think that that shows through in the stand aloneness of these songs. I think there’s a range in musicals where, how well does this song stand on its own, you just listening to it without watching the movie that it’s connected to at the same time? I think most of them pass that test for me. I think there’s a couple, like the duet song, I don’t think that really works on its own. I still think it’s a good song and I like listening to it, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense without the movie.  Oren: Yeah. If I had not seen the movie, I don’t think Free, which is the duet song, would’ve worked super well. I’ve heard some fun covers of it, but it’s, [sigh] Soda Pop is intentionally kind of annoying. Ari: Yes.  Oren: So it doesn’t feel fair to say Soda Pop is my least favorite.  Ari: I mean, it does its job. If we’re not including Soda Pop, I think Free is probably my least favorite for that reason that you just stated. That’s one of the big ones.  Oren: So the one that I see that is very popular, which I like but is not my favorite, is Your Idol. Everyone loves a villain song and seen that one held up as [a] favorite, which I also like. I don’t think there’s any on here that I actually dislike, but Your Idol is a very effective villain song for like raise intention for the climax.  Ari: Yeah, I really like that the choreography of the characters for your idol, I think is doing a lot of work. I like your idol a lot, but whenever I’m listening to it, I am imagining the poses of the Saja Boys more than I imagine any of the accompanying animation for the other song, like when I’m listening to Golden, I’m not like playing the movie back in my head the way I do with Your Idol.  Oren: It is interesting to me that Golden is sort of the song that they picked to be like the face of the movie at music awards and such. Ari: I can see why it’s the one that gets sung, it gets reprised more than the others, and I think it’s often called the “I Want” song. I think Golden is the closest to that, where they’re like building this, what ends up being a false ideal for themselves. Which is interesting as why it’s the face of the movie, but I, I can see why. And I think it’s also just, it’s very impressive. I don’t know a ton about the technicalities of singing, but Golden feels like a very effective demonstration of how skilled the voice actors are. I think that’s another reason is that it gives all the voice actors, I think, a really good time to show off what they can do. Oren: Yeah, I’ve been told by people who know more about music than me that it is a very technically complex song. I have no choice but to believe them ’cause I have no idea. I don’t know how music works, so I’ll take their word for it.  Ari: You know, I have some natural singing talent and that one’s hard. That one’s real hard to sing. And it’s not just the range issue, there’s a lot going on in that one. I think it makes sense as the poster for it. Even though it’s not my favorite, I would be interested to see I’m sure someone has done a survey. I would like to see what the general feeling is as to [a] favorite song from that movie.  Oren: Alright, well we are at the end of our time, so I’ll go look that up. If I find one, I’ll put it in the show notes so we can all find out together as a family.  Ari: Excellent.  Oren: So for those of you at home, if you enjoyed this, you can feel free to support us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.  Ari: Bye everyone.

You’ve written so many scenes of pulse-pounding tension, isn’t it about time to slow down and relax, maybe with your characters on a beach somewhere? After all, your heroes deserve some time to unwind, and readers will enjoy it too. Up to a point, anyway. The big question with R&R scenes is how long they should go on, along with how often to have them and whether you can use them for multitasking. At least, we hope those are the big questions, because they’re what we’re talking about today. Show Notes Beach Episodes Golden Gardens  The Last Wish Voyage of the Dawn Treader  Scene vs Summary Legends and Lattes Enchanted Forest Chronicles  Redwall Food Cozy Fantasy Wings of Fire Save the Cat Transcript Generously transcribed by Scott. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.   [opening song] Oren: Welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren. Chris: And I’m Chris. Oren: So, we’re actually gonna spend this episode just on the beach, sipping drinks and lounging in the sun. Chris: We’re gonna do that snore cast that we talked about a couple episodes ago. Oren: No worries, no concerns. Maybe a little emotional growth if there’s time, or rather, we will talk about characters doing that because it’s the Pacific Northwest in October, and there’s no sun. So, that’s not even an option for us. Chris: What? You don’t wanna do a beach episode in the Pacific Northwest?  We can go to Golden Gardens… (sarcastic) Oren: As long as it’s not raining. I love going to beaches when it’s cold out. If it’s raining, that’s a different story. Chris: But that’s probably ’cause you don’t actually get in the water. Can’t have a beach episode where nobody gets in the water. Oren: That would be hard. So, here’s the opening question ’cause we’re talking about rest and relaxation scenes in fiction. So, important question for the panel. Chris: For the panel as in me then?   Oren: Chris is the panel. (both Chris and Oren laugh) The question is, can you do beach episodes in a novel? Chris: When we talk about a beach episode, are we talking about having an episode structure first of all? Oren: Yeah. Not to put you on the spot or anything. Chris: Okay. I would say actually no, because you can do an episodic structured novel. But it’s kind of a stretch. People aren’t really used to it, they expect a novel to have a much stronger through line, and I think that they can get used to it and it can still be fun, and we do have some episodic novels like travel novels that are very episodic. But a beach scene is like an entire episode that is usually lower intention. That would be definitely weird in a novel ’cause I still think you would have a higher expectation, that the episodes will escalate to some degree. If it feels like The Witcher book, where it’s really just an anthology, with a framing device…(Chris laughs) If it’s an anthology, sure. But I think if it’s anything beyond an anthology, where we actually have some kind of through line holding together, there’s higher expectations for escalation. Man, when we had beach episodes, that’s when we had TV show seasons that were like 20 episodes long. Now, big streaming shows are like eight episodes, and it would be a real waste to do a beach scene. We don’t got time. Oren: Maybe a beach scene, not a beach episode. Chris: Yeah, a beach scene. That’s true. Slip of the tongue but, yeah, we can do a beach scene, a single scene at the beach. Oren: I think you would have the same issue with the novel ’cause, even a really episodic one like Voyage of the Dawn Treader which is our go-to example for episodic novels, doesn’t have that many episodes. Chris: Probably 12 or something. I think I counted them honestly, and it’s in the range of 12, maybe 14 at most. Oren: An entire episode is gonna be a pretty big investment of time.   Chris: And the other thing that makes this work, is that the through line has to be extremely low key If we’re gonna take a break like that, because if the through line is at all tense, urgency is at all high, the audience is gonna represent the “filler” because they expect the story to have more movement, instead of characters doddling at the beach. Now, don’t get me wrong, some audiences absolutely love these. If you go to AO3 and look at fan fiction, (Chris laughs) there’s all types of different fanfiction, but you quickly discover one of the biggest motivations for a doing fan fiction, is that there’s so many people who actually want more low tension, personal conflict, and a lot of very popular stories that are much higher tension and much more tightly paced. And that’s of course, because these really popular stories are trying to appeal to a very wide audience, and so they wanna make sure that they have the audience’s attention. Whereas, when you have a story that’s for a more niche audience, like cozy fantasy, it’s meant for an audience that does not want a high-tension story. Then it’s a lot easier to be like “Okay, yeah, we’re gonna do some beach. (Chris laughs) Beach time.” Oren: In general, if your through line is less urgent and less tense, then you’re gonna have less of a problem. Moving past the concept of an entire beach episode in novels, because that’s already a little strange. Let’s look at the beach scene, as it were, which is a little more manageable. First thing to think about is “why?”. Why would you include a scene like that? Would it be a scene at all or would it be summary? Would it be beach summary? Chris: I’m not sure why you would do Beach summary. I mean, if you had an entire book that was on the beach side, and you’ve already done a beach scene, then you could summarize “Yeah, my character went back to the beach to relax for the afternoon.” But, if the goal here is to have a scene that provides some wish fulfilment where we don’t just want characters to relax, we want the audience to enjoy the coffee shop atmosphere. For instance, if we’re talking about Legends and Lattes. Then, summary is really gonna, I think, take away a lot of that. Not that you can’t do some wish fulfillment in summary, but I think that to a certain extent that defeats the point, summary is for stuff that is not engaging but necessary, Oren: You’d be more likely to summarize a character recovering from an injury, than relaxing for pleasure. Chris: If your character has an afternoon to themself and we have to explain what they do for that afternoon, or we want them to spend all afternoon at the beach, but only when the sun sets…does the love interest show up? (Chris laughs) So, we just need to get them to the beach, but that part’s not supposed to be interesting, then we have summary. But, I think when we’re talking about scenes of rest and relaxation, a lot of times we’re looking for something that the audience can dig into and enjoy at some level, get some wish fulfilment in. I don’t think that summary really serves that purpose very well. Oren: Which, I guess, brings to mind the next question. “What are you doing in a relaxation scene?” It could just be wish fulfilment, especially if you’ve got a really cool, fun setup. But, I think you are also often using them to give audiences a chance to catch their breath, and these can also be just a little bit of a relief to see that the characters get some time to recover a little bit if you have a tenser story. Because some stories can be tense, and you still wanna have little bits of relaxation between the really exciting stuff. Chris: First, if we’re talking about pacing, letting the audience rest is particularly important. After you have a really fast paced tense scene, like you have a big fight or battle, what happens is if you have that super tense scene where the audience is expected to pay attention, to any moment and any moment could be a matter of life or death or something like that, or heated argument might do this, where the audience has to be in high alert because every moment is really crucial. That gets exhausting after a while for the audience. That’s when they’re actually ready for a lower tension scene, and a complete change of pace, and it’s when they will actually be able to pay attention through it. So, if you have a scene that’s only kind of tense, maybe we kind of introduce a new mystery, but it’s not super tense. Then if you do like a really relaxing beach scene after that, you might lose their attention. Oren: Right? It’s like, “oh man, we found that the diamond has been stolen. All right, let’s go meet at the bar for martinis.” (Oren and Chris laugh) Chris: Right! At that point, it just feels like now we’re de-escalating instead of escalating. We were just getting revved up to get started on this arc, that’s when it’s gonna feel boring, but if you put that same “let’s go to the bar” after they’ve had a hard fight, or they had a jewellery heist and just barely escaped from authorities or something like that, now we’re really ready for that bar scene. My simplest rule about pacing is, always put your lowest tension scenes immediately after your highest tension scenes, and then ideally between that you’re going up steadily. Low tension scene up steadily until your peak, and then you drop. I think you’ve described it sometimes as alternating tenses and non-tense scenes, and I think that also works if your tenser scenes are tense enough. If every other scene was a scene where a character was in immediate danger (Chris laughs) then, yeah, I think you could probably do every other scene having a relaxing scene if it’s tense enough. But, in a lot of stories, we’re gonna have a lot of in-between scenes where we’re booting up the problem or something like that. Oren: When I talk about alternating tense and untense scenes, I’m usually talking about that with a client who, kind of, has no idea how to arrange their scenes and needs something really basic, and this is how I get them to break up three scenes of the characters hanging out and talking. “Okay, you can have those scenes, but they can’t all be back to back like this.” Chris: And sometimes people ask me, “okay, how long is it acceptable to step away from the stories through line?” and just have the characters tend to their relationship or work on a subplot, and my answer is “well, usually you’re safe for a scene.” Now, that is still actually pretty generic ’cause some scenes are long and some scenes are short, but roughly a scene is fine. I don’t know, stories are very different from each other, and some stories kind of have two through lines. Like, they have an exciting external plot that happens in the beginning and then fades away, where the character works on their personal problems, and then the more exciting action fades back in again. There can be complex things going on that changes that up, but generally…a scene, is the amount that is safe, but it’s not necessarily all or nothing. Characters can be doing something that’s meant to solve the through line problem, but they’re not in intense conflict over it yet. Like, “Hey, we need to investigate what happened to this murder, so we’re gonna go over to the mortuary”. So, we are working on that, but once we’re at the mortuary, we run into our ex and then most of the scene is actually spent on personal drama, but they’re still at the mortuary and they still come away with some sort of clue that they used on their murder mystery, for instance. But, if you’re completely stepping away from the through line, I think a scene is about the rule of thumb I would go for. Oren: Probably not a super long one, you wanna probably keep that scene on the shorter side and I think, to just hit upon an important point which is that, a lower tension scene is not necessarily the same as an R&R scene. If you just had a life-or-death chase, and now you’re gonna go and research what that thing was that was chasing you, that’s lower tension but I wouldn’t call it relaxing. You have to think about “what is the purpose of the scene.” If you’re trying to move the story forward by having your characters do some non-physical conflict, they’re trying to solve a riddle or figure out a puzzle or something, that can also be good, but it’s not really relaxing. When you think about relaxing, it’s really more about the feeling you’re creating and the reader. Chris: But at the same time, you can have problems and conflicts during relaxing if you want to. Usually, you would just be aiming for them to be a little lower key, but oftentimes relaxation scenes are when you work on the more internal arcs of the story. Oftentimes, especially if, let’s say your character just made a bad choice in their character arc and then faced consequences, you have a relaxation scene afterwards. That’s a really important time for your character to then process what happened and then be like, “Hey, maybe I made the wrong choice there…naaah.” (Chris laughs) Or whatever you want to happen. Have them talk it through with another character, have those relationship arcs, have those characters spend time with each other. I mean, I do think one of the really important things about those lower key scenes, whether they’re technically relaxing or not, is that usually during your really tense, fast-paced moments, you don’t really have as much time to focus on internal arcs. It’s just harder to then talk about their feelings, than it is if they’re having a tea party, for instance. Oren: Here’s something to think about. Timing. When you’re planning these scenes, and this is more delicate the higher urgency your story is, and urgency is usually something – first of all, it’s gonna be more present in higher tension stories – and it’s usually going to increase towards the end. Chris: I bet you’re thinking about A Study in Drowning. Oren: You know, I wasn’t, but I should be. (Oren laughs) Now that you say that. I should have been. (Oren and Chris laugh) Chris: It’s such a great example of a relaxing scene. It’s a culmination of a romance so, the characters finally decide they’re gonna go to bed together, but it’s just at the wrong time, and it would only take actually a fairly small change…to make it okay…but it’s a situation where the urgency is actually really high ’cause there’s a big storm, and they’ve been staying at this creepy mansion where they’re trying to uncover some evidence, and the storm was probably gonna bring the mansion down. Oren: They don’t have a lot of time. (Oren and Chris laugh) Chris: And that’s when they decide “bow chicka wow wow” (Chris laughs) and we really needed to reduce the urgency of the situation a little bit. Oren: Usually the way that you would have a scene like that, regardless of whether the characters are gonna get it on or not, the result of some successful conflict or maybe a failed conflict – the resolution of a conflict on the character’s part – which now puts them in a situation where they just kind of have to wait for a little bit. If your high tense plot is that your character “needs to get these plans to the rebel base as soon as possible, and you’re running outta time” you would have a sequence where your character fights their way through the spaceport, and just manages to get their ship off the ground, and now they’re in hyperspace for a little bit and they got nothing to do. So, they can talk about their feelings or go to town, whatever they want, and because that’s the result of a resolution, it is less likely to feel like “maybe you should be doing something else right now” you know? In character you can make it make sense too. Those are both important. Chris: And having just a required waiting period. If there’s no movement on the through line for too long, it doesn’t really fix that problem because the audience knows that you created this. It’s like “Nope, sorry, but we can do nothing but stay in this cabin for three months” and then narrating three months’ worth of content. It’s still gonna make them impatient, but what it does is it takes care of that specific urgency problem where it distracts the audience with “how could they be having dinner right now? Somebody’s dying!” It takes care of that problem so that they’re no longer distracted, by feeling like the characters need to be doing something else right now. Just any, any reason that they’re hold up or they have to wait. They’re waiting to hear back from somebody, for instance, and there’s just not a whole lot that they can do right now. Oren: It occurred to me that a book series that does a lot of scenes like this is actually Lord of the Rings – which I find interesting – and it does more earlier in the story, they become fewer and farther between as you go. But, after the initial Shire sequence, we have the characters do a little bit of traveling and it gets a little dangerous, and then they just stop at various places. They stop at Tom Bombadill’s house, they stop at Rivendell. Or first they stop at The Prancing Pony. Then they stop at Rivendell. The order of operations continues, and in the second book, I think that one point they stop and hang out with, uh, oh gosh. What’s Boromir’s brother’s name? The less-good Boromir brother. Faromir, that’s his name. (Chris laughs) Chris: Technically, according to the book, he is the superior brother. Oren: Yeah, that’s true. And then of course, as the story ramps up, they have fewer and fewer of those (scenes). By the end, they’re just exhausted ’cause they can’t ever stop. There’s nowhere to rest. Both narratively and literally. Chris: If I remember correctly, the pacing for some of those scenes at the end still, is not necessarily high. There’s a difference between the tone and the pace. So, that long trip where they’re trying to dodge Orcs as they get closer to Mount Doom, I remember that being kind of a slog. The Hobbit also has this long sequence where they’re going through this…Oh, gosh, what is it called? This gloomy forest full of spiders. Oren: Murkwood? Chris: Murkwood, yeah, that’s it. Oren: The hobbit’s not real, okay? We don’t know what’s going on in The Hobbit. Tolkien was having some kind of fever dream when he wrote The Hobbit, nothing in The Hobbit makes any sense. (Oren and Chris laugh) Chris: But, we can have long periods where there’s just tons of narration about how miserable the characters are, that doesn’t make it exciting. It just makes it kind of depressing, and so that’s how I feel like a lot of the Lord of the Rings ends up being. Whereas, when something is exciting, that means there’s an active problem for the character to solve that is providing an immediate threat, and that’s what actually makes it exciting. And you can have that excitement without making all of the characters super miserable all the time. Oren: The Red Wall series also does this in a way that I find very interesting, which is food porn. It’s like, “hang on, everybody, pause the story. We gotta describe this deeper never turnip and tater’ beet root pie in exquisite detail”. And sometimes it is a little much, in some of the books you’re kind of sitting there wondering, “do we have time for this? Isn’t there a bad guy? I thought we had a bad guy to deal with?”“Hang on a minute, there’s still soup. We haven’t done the soup course yet.” (Chris laughs) Chris: A lot of cozy fantasy is pretty much well known for having slow wish fulfillment scenes, whether we’re going into details on the coffee shops, baked goods, but not the coffee… Oren: Not the coffee though, just the baked goods. Chris: We’re never gonna stop teasing Legends and Lattes for having really lackluster coffee description, but the baked goods are, you know, described- Oren: Baldree, do you just not like coffee very much? (Oren and Chris laugh) Chris: “Maybe it should have been a tea shop. If you don’t like coffee, I don’t know.” Maybe he just didn’t really know very much about coffee. It’s like, “I don’t know how to describe coffee.” I feel like you could research that pretty easy. Oren: That was the part that confused me. I’m not a big coffee drinker either, but I was immediately able to come up with various things that they could do with the coffee, because I have the internet available to me. Chris: Or the obvious. So, you have chocolate and you have coffee. Mocha, how about that? The obvious implications of the ingredients you are already established to have. Oren: I kept expecting them to do that and they never did and I’ll never get over it. It’s broken my trust. (Oren and Chris chuckle) Chris: Or Teller of Small Fortunes. That one is interesting ’cause they travel around, and they have their little wagons and they invent fortune cookies, which is hilarious. You always gotta invent something that exists, but we go into details about how they make these fortune cookies for the first time, and sell ’em to customers… Oren: Red Wall is a weird book because sort of cozy, but also not. It has sequences that you would recognize from a lot of cozies, and yet, it is also occasionally very dark and brutal. (Chris laughs) Chris: I guess the question is, “is it just inconsistent?” As I said, I feel like cozy fantasy comes from lighter, classic fantasy stories that had a cozy element, but were all so exciting, but still were sort of lighter in tone. Like the Enchanted Forest Chronicles, or Howl’s Moving Castle, or some Terry Pratchet, where those all have definitely neat wish fulfillment elements. Like talking to Dragons, the first in the Enchanted Forest Chronicles. Technically, it has tenser action than you wouldn’t normally have in a cozy ’cause the wizards are all evil, but you can just defeat them by pouring soapy water on them and they just melt. So, it’s never graphic. (Chris laughs) So, we technically have a big villain that we wouldn’t usually have in a cozy fantasy, but at the same time, the story is still very light in tone and a bunch of time is spent on problems that are very cozy. Like, “oh, I was just sorting the dragons hoard and organizing everything very neatly, and then I accidentally opened the bottle, and a genie came out. Now we need to figure out how to get it back in there.” “God, these knights keep showing up, wanting to slay the dragon. I don’t really want them to slay my dragon, so how do I convince them to leave” and other things like that. But it sounds like Red Wall gets…darker than that. (Chris chuckles) Oren: A lot darker. Red Wall, actually, is kind of infamous for having a major character die every book. Chris: Wow. Oren: Yeah, sometimes a character survives through multiple books and I’m like, “okay, they’re gonna die eventually” and then eventually they do. “oh, that character’s been around for a while.” (Oren chuckles) Chris: That just sounds like a total disconnect. It reminds me of- In Wings of Fire, the first book has violence between these dragons, in a story that is supposed to be anti-violence but is clearly not, but it’s surprisingly graphic. We get surprisingly graphic about all these horrible injuries that all of these dragon characters are getting, and it’s like “this is a middle grade story” and it’s true. The author does actually lighten up on the graphic violence. Oren: Yeah, someone talked to her between books. Chris: Somebody talked to her (Chris laughs)That was just a thing, she didn’t know that she was going too far. She didn’t know where the right level of graphicness or non-graphicness was at, and she corrected it after a couple books. It’s like, “okay, that’s understandable.” It sounds like with Red Wall, they are not the right stories to have a major character die. Oren: That always struck me as weird when it happened. “Huh? I wasn’t expecting that. All right. I guess that character’s dead now.”A final form of relaxation scenes that I find interesting are scenes that you find in books like Animorphs. Which are less about the characters catching their breath, and are more about – to a certain extent – almost like what the Save the Cat people would call “the fun and games”. Where in the case of Animorphs, it’s like “what if we turned into an animal and hung out as that animal for a while and had a fun animal time?” You could see it’s superhero stories, It’s like a sequence where the character just kind of enjoys having powers for a while. Unlike the Save the Cat people, I don’t think that that scene needs to happen at a specific point in the story in every story, ’cause that’s ridiculous. But, you do recognize that kind of scene when it happens. Chris: When I originally read Save the Cat, what interpreted is that you have advertised this story as having a specific novel premise, and this is where you fulfill that promise. So, if you advertise “oh, look at the funny hijinks that will be in the story.” That’s when you have the funny hijinks. For Animorphs it’s like, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if you could turn into an animal? Child, wouldn’t you wanna read this?” And that’s where you’re like, “Hey! Here’s the part where I give you that novelty I promised, and that wish fulfillment I promised, about turning into an animal”. Oren: You can’t be fighting aliens all the time as an animal, sometimes you just gotta have a moment to be an animal. Classic case of Save the Cat, noticing something that does happen and then universalizing it because that makes it easier to sell storytelling advice. (Oren chuckles) Chris: But I would say that dark stories can also have rest and relaxation scenes, the tone might just be a little different. For a cozy fantasy, we’re really looking for a heavy wish fulfillment experience, whereas in a darker story, it’s more about – obviously giving the audience a chance to rest – but also making it realistic that the character can keep going. (Chris laughs)You can only put a character through so much then it’s like “aren’t they just gonna collapse from their injuries at some point?” Oren: It’s fine, don’t worry about it, they’ll just keep chugging energy drinks. Those let you go forever. Chris: You do want some variation in tone too, in the story. Even if you have like a dark and edgy story, your edgy twists are not gonna…feel that shocking anymore if you do that every single scene. (Chris laughs)So, some contrast is still there, but it still shouldn’t feel like a cozy scene and then have lots of graphic violence featuring protagonists. That would still be weird. Oren: I think now that we have had a long and difficult high-tension episode, we are gonna go and have our relaxation at the cold, damp, dark Pacific Northwest Beach. (Oren and Chris laugh) Chris: And if you found this episode relaxing, 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. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week. [closing theme]

Dive into the world of emotional conflicts in storytelling! Discover how characters grapple with internal dilemmas and competing impulses. Explore why clever solutions can undermine narrative satisfaction and the importance of making both sides of a conflict compelling. Learn about the challenges of creating tension between friends and how external pressures can heighten drama. Plus, hear critiques on story arcs like in The Tainted Cup, and see why TV series excel at showcasing emotional stakes.

Sometimes, fantasy is actually history, and I’m not talking about the claim that Middle-earth is actually ancient Europe. The historical fantasy genre has a lot of potential, especially for weird nerds who won’t shut up about fun historical factoids, but it does have some challenges. You usually want something that’s recognizably historical, but you also want to account for the differences caused by magic. Or do you? Listen and find out! Show Notes The Last Mammoth  Masquerade  Temeraire  Cold Magic  The Queen of the Tearling  The Devils  Babel A Master of Djinn A Game of Thrones Dune: Prophesy  The Factory Witches of Lowell Transcript Generously transcribed by Arturo. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast, with your hosts: Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle. [opening song] Oren: And welcome, everyone, to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren. Chris: And I’m Chris. Oren: So I’m working on a story where, back in the ancient past, 5,000 years ago, a meteor came down. It gave everyone the ability to bend reality at will. The story is set in the present and everything is the same, except that, instead of debating gun control, we are debating reality-bending control. Chris: We don’t have reality-bending dinosaurs from the meteor that hit? Oren: No, not from 5,000 years ago. Chris: Good point. Very recent dinosaurs! Oren: They’ve been hiding those dinos. 5,000 years ago is recent enough that we might have some reality-bending mammoths up on one of those Arctic islands in the north of Russia. Chris: I love the idea that you have a masquerade in your setting where magic is secret, but also dinosaurs. Oren: Also dinosaurs! Chris: Is that really a bigger deal than hiding magic? I think it would probably be just as hard to hide magic as to hide dinosaurs. Oren: Depends on the size of the dinosaur, I guess. Chris: Yeah, it might be easier to hide dinosaurs if they’re like the little chicken-sized dinosaurs also known as chickens. Oren: Babby non avian dinosaurs. So obviously, I recently wrote a post about how history might or might not change in historical fantasy, and that might be out by the time this podcast comes out. Who knows when our posts come out? Not me. If it is, you’ve already seen that, and if not, you have that to look forward to. But I wanted to talk about it in a casual discussion format, because I still have thoughts, and if those don’t, you know, get out somewhere for content consumption, I don’t know what I’m doing with my life. Chris: Start talking in your sleep because you need to rant about this? Oren: It’s called a snorecast, I’ll have you know. Chris: I think it is interesting, when we’re talking about historical fantasy and what is the effect of magic, how similar it starts to feel to alternate history, which is its own subgenre of speculative fiction, because it’s almost like alternate history Plus. Oren: I would say historical fantasy is almost by definition a kind of alternate history where one of the things that changed is that there’s magic now that’s generally not part of the historical timeline. There are some exceptions, right? Like, you can make a historical fantasy where you make everything self-contained, maybe it’s a masquerade, maybe the fantasy just happens in a very small area so it doesn’t really affect anything else, that’s all possible. Chris: That’s the difference, right? Historical fantasy doesn’t have to get into all of that historical details if that’s not the goal, whereas alternate history, I think that there’s an expectation of higher realism. Because the point is that you have history diverging, there would naturally be more of a focus on that. Not that you can’t have that in historical fantasy too. I just think in alternate history that’s the point. And of course we don’t have magic to do the diverging, whereas in historical fantasy, you would definitely have magic be the reason why history is different. Oren: No, historical fantasy where the south won the Civil War and unrelated, there are wizards. Chris: Yeah, right? It just feels really random when you do that. Or you could just have dragons in the setting besides magic, something like that. Oren: You can do the thing that we’ve seen several times, which is historical fantasy where magic is everywhere, it’s super well known and everyone uses it, but also everything is the same and nothing changed. I wish people wouldn’t do that. I don’t like that. It’s not something I’m a fan of. It just kind of makes me wish you were just doing normal historical fiction at that point, because at least I wouldn’t feel lied to. “Alright, here’s all this magic and everyone uses it everywhere.” It’s like, “Okay, wow, what’s the implications of that?” “None. Don’t ask about the implications. There aren’t any. We’re not doing that.” Chris: I think people just want to have the aesthetics of the historical time period. They don’t want to have to do the whole figure out cause and effect. If you want castles and dragons, right? because we can have a whole conversation about how those fantasy elements actually change the setting, the problem is having castles and dragons is inherently a bit illogical. I mean, depending on the dragons, of course. But a lot of times we show dragons and they can just destroy castle walls as they fly by or something. And at that point, there’s no point in castles. Oren: Your dragons don’t have to be Temeraire levels of dragon, where not only are dragons really big, but they work closely with humans and are in many cases basically human servants. Which does raise questions about: Why does anyone have big fixed fortifications? Because, as we see in the novels, dragons can just drop large rocks on them from way too high up to be shot at. And don’t worry about it, everything’s fine now. Chris: It’s probably fairly likely, right? I don’t know if it would be everybody that you would get in a situation where you want the aesthetic coming from a certain time of history, but then you’re adding magic that would naturally outmode that aesthetic. It’s like the issue with people wanting characters to use swords in a setting where there’s modern guns; there’s not a lot of reason to use swords, but we just want swords, and so sometimes that could be an issue if you think about all of the effects that magic would realistically have. Oren: I’m willing to grant some grace on this one. I’ll be magnanimous. Like, I get it. You know, the whole point of historical fantasy is that you want to be in a historical period. Being like, “Oh, well, you can’t, because your magic has been around and would have changed everything,” I get that that’s not a super workable approach, so I’m willing to meet authors halfway. And if they want to follow the Temeraire route, which is that everything is the same up until the story starts, and at that point, things can change because of how dragons work, I’ll accept that. I will be wondering, like, it’s a little weird that dragons being everywhere didn’t have any impact on the French Revolution or the life of this kind of obscure Corsican aristocrat who ends up becoming military dictator of France. A little weird that that all happened in the same way, but now that the story’s started, we have dragon airlifts and different colonized territories breaking away and battles that turned out in different ways. Yeah, cool. There we go. That’s what I want. See? That’s all I ask. It’s not unreasonable. Chris: In the Temeraire series, is it just dragons? Is there anything else? Any other fantasy creatures? Any other kind of magic? Oren: Just dragons. Chris: Question two: At any point, does somebody scoff at the idea that there might be, like, a unicorn? Does somebody be, like, “What, you think that just because dragons are real, that other creatures are real? Shh. This is not a fiction. This is real life.” Oren: I don’t remember. It’s been a while since I’ve read the nine books. There might be something in there where someone does that, but if so, it did not stick in my memory. There are some creatures that are like kind of pushing the limit of what a dragon is. There’s a giant sea serpent that hangs out near Japan, and it’s huge and it’s scaly and reptilian, but it doesn’t really have functional wings. So, like, is that a dragon? But, like, yeah, pretty much everything is draconic. There aren’t any griffins or manticores as far as I could find. Chris: That is the key: If you only want one kind of magical creature, don’t mention anything else. Oren: Yeah, it’s going to feel kind of pretentious if you’re like, “You thought there were unicorns? Silly!” Chris: Or just like kind of mean. Fantasy writers like other stuff. It just kind of feels like a weird personal dig if you’re like, “Ha ha ha, you wanted unicorns!” And it’s like, “Well, of course I wanted unicorns. I’m a fantasy reader reading this fantasy book.” Sometimes what happens is the writer writes a setting that only has one thing in it, and then they get questioned by their readers and people they talk to, and they feel like they have to put an answer in their story, and that’s how they end up in that situation. It might not be because they’re scoffing. Oren: Sometimes it’s supposed to be a joke. It’s not a joke I find very funny. But, you know, it’s like, “Ha! You thought vampires in this setting could turn into bats? Why would you think that? Are you stupid?” Turning into bats isn’t any more random than a lot of the other abilities vampires have. Why is that one unscientific? Chris: Yeah, be careful. At some point in time you are going to have an ability that is just as unrealistic as a vampire turning into a bat. We don’t see a lot of alternate history urban fantasy. Usually the reason for using modern-day Earth setting is because you specifically want it to be familiar, and that would also motivate you to not have history diverge. Oren: Imagine having to explain, like, “Here’s a modern-day-looking city and it’s got werewolves and mages.” And I got to explain all that. And then also I got to explain how this city is not part of the United States. It’s actually part of the breakaway micronation of New England. Because the Civil War went real weird. It’s like, “Okay, that’s a whole other thing I have to explain now.” Chris: Feels like a theming problem where the story is not cohesive and the world is not cohesive anymore. Similar to, like, Carthage won, and also there are wizards, and those are completely separate reasons that history diverged in two different ways. Oren: Wizards don’t even like Carthage. Why would they have anything to do with that? There are plenty of historical fantasy stories that have urban fantasy feelings. They use certain urban fantasy tropes, they have an urban fantasy aesthetic, but they aren’t actually set in the modern day. They’re set in a historical city, and sometimes the fantasy elements are used to help recreate some modern things that wouldn’t be there. Sometimes we don’t pay too much attention to that part of it, I’m not gonna say you couldn’t do it, but doing real-world fantasy stories with a big alternate history plot set in the present is already really weird. Urban fantasy or not, that’s just kind of unusual. You can go the other way, right? Because I’ve been complaining about stories that just have magic that’s been around forever and it didn’t change anything, but if you go the other direction and it’s like, “Oh, look, magic’s been around forever, everything’s different,” then you have to explain a whole lot, and it takes a while and it’s confusing, because you have this weird mix of real-world proper nouns and fantasy terms, and it takes a while to figure out what’s going on. I read this book called Cold Magic, and I first thought it was just a second-world fantasy setting, because it didn’t really seem to have anything in common with the real world. And it seemed like it was set in roughly 1700s-ish. But then they started using terms like Phoenician. That’s a real word. Hang on. And then I eventually found out it has this extremely complicated backstory of Carthage kind of winning the Punic War, and also huge magical natural disasters that made a bunch of people move around, and then also Carthage is destroyed later by a different magical thing. It was so complicated! Chris: That reminds me of our conversation on post-apocalyptic fantasy, where there’s a bunch of books that just seem like other-world fantasy settings, and then you get this weird reveal that, no, actually it’s the future. Queen of the Tearling just seems like a typical other-world medieval -inspired fantasy setting, and then we suddenly learn that the main character has real-world books. Maybe that was people-fled Earth. Oren: Yeah, it was scifi or something. Chris: Sometimes it turns out it’s like planetary evacuation and colonization is supposed to be the backstory. Why? Why are we doing this? Oren: With Cold Magic I definitely felt like this would have been easier if it was just a second-world fantasy story with some inspiration from various points in history. The weirdest one that I’ve read is The Devils. Everything’s different because of magic, but also, everything’s the same. Everything has a different name, but the dynamics are exactly the same. So it’s set in, like, late medieval period, you know, around crusading times. And there’s no Byzantine Empire because Rome was destroyed in the war with Carthage. This is another setting where Carthage won the Punic wars, interestingly. But there is instead the Empire of Troy, which fills exactly the same role. And then there’s like a different holy city with a Catholic-ish religion in Italy and it has a schism with the patriarch in Troy. And I’m just sitting here being like, “Am I losing my mind? What is going on?” Chris: I wonder if some authors are just really intimidated by the idea of making changes. It reminds me of Kuang’s Babel. There is technically silver magic in the setting, but the setting is almost exactly the same as if magic didn’t exist. My theory was that maybe she just didn’t feel at liberty to change history, I don’t know, maybe because she wanted to make a point about colonialism, and if we changed history, then the point might be less relevant. Or maybe… She has this author’s note in the beginning of the book that’s really defensive about accuracy in her depiction of historical Oxford. Feels like really embattled with all these people saying, “My depiction is inaccurate. And yes, I, you know, took as little artistic license as I could to serve the story.” That sounds like she doesn’t feel like she has permission to change more of the setting because it won’t feel accurate anymore. Oren: It’s weird for me to imagine the author who wrote Babel caring what anyone else thinks. Chris: If she didn’t care, I don’t think she would have put that author’s note in the beginning. Oren: That was weird, because on the one hand, I liked the author’s note because it had cool historical context, and I like that stuff. I like to hear what kind of research authors did and what changes they made. On the other hand, its bizarrely defensive nature, to me it felt less like someone who was embattled and more like someone who just likes to argue and wanted to preemptively argue with her critics. Which I get, I love to argue too, so fair enough. Maybe I misread the book. It’s just the book is so edgy. It’s so edgy and it’s so in your face about how edgy it is. It’s hard for me to imagine the author being like, “Oh, well, I can’t change anything because then people will be upset.” Chris: Sometimes edginess offers a certain level of prestige. Like, I wish it didn’t, but I’ve definitely talked to many people who think that’s what makes a story good or profound, is just edginess and to shock people. Whereas being believed that your history is inaccurate… I mean, that could feel embarrassing. Oren: That’s not going to get you on NPR or The New York Times or anything. It was so weird reading this where it’s like, okay, so in this setting, there’s this kind of silver-based translation magic that is powering the British Empire. And it’s like, how does that work? Well, pretty much the same way that the regular British Empire worked. It hasn’t done anything different. It’s just that we did like a Find and Replace, and instead of “coal,” we put “silver.” Chris: Yeah, the Silver Industrial Revolution. We could even say the Silver Revolution. We had to also specify that it’s industrial. That was very odd because some of the things that we described, it feels like the silver would have the opposite effect as what we’re talking about. Oren: We’re told that silver is putting people out of work in factories because it’s automation. But we’re also told that people are moving to the city to get jobs, like they did in the actual Industrial Revolution. Chris: People are moving to the city to get jobs because there were factories that were offering jobs. So if silver is automating that and taking away from the jobs, why are people moving to the cities? Oren: There was a reference to, like, “Oh, the Thames is actually clean in this timeline.” Okay, that’s different. That’s cool. But then they’re like, “Don’t swim in the Thames.” Like, okay, I mean, I get that you had to say that because it’s set in Britain, you have to say that. But also, that was, like, the one difference. Chris: If anybody swims in the Thames, then somebody’s gonna DM Kuang and tell her that she’s got inaccurate Thames. Oren: Oh, it does make one big difference towards the very end. Spoilers. The silver magic gives the British Empire a giant glowing weak spot, which, if you punch them there, they explode. Like, it’s nice that imperialism is so easy to defeat in this scenario. It does take them a painfully long time to think of this plan. They’re like, “We could capture the tower where all the silver magic is, and then we could demand that the empire be less evil.” How do you think that’s gonna work? And obviously it won’t. And then eventually they’re like, “Oh, I guess we could just blow it up. That’ll do it.” Chris: No, as soon as we introduced these regional towers that power magic for huge swaths of England, I was like, “Okay, well, obviously we need to go and disrupt those towers.” And then, nope, the characters take forever to think of that. Oren: That’s why it’s so funny that this book is so obsessed with the idea of how violence is necessary, and, like, that’s how you defeat imperialism, is through violence. Okay, sure. But like, you kind of gave yourself a cheat code here. Chris: Not actually demonstrating that violence is the right answer. Oren: It’s like if I wanted to make my story about how important democracy is and I invented a democracy crystal. It’s a magic democracy emitter. Chris: That makes democracy work. Oren: I guess, sure. Chris: That doesn’t sound like democracy actually works, then. Oren: That sounds like maybe I’m not confident in my argument when I do that. One way to do this that doesn’t get used that often as far as I can tell, but I really like it, is you just have magic be kind of recent, within a few decades. Chris: Let’s say we applied this to Temeraire. That sounds like it would just be logistically difficult in that situation. I’m not saying this is a good idea. I think recent magic does have lots of advantages. Fantasy writers don’t usually want to use it. Oren: The biggest problem that it has is that if magic is recent, then you can’t have a bunch of ancient magic traditions. Chris: I’d be afraid that if we had recent dragons, they’d be like, the dragons are aliens that landed on Earth. And I’d be like, “No!” Oren: Recently arrived dragons would be very hard to do what happens in Temeraire, right? You need a completely different explanation. That’s not the only way to include magic in a historical setting. You can also use books like A Master of Djinn. Magic returned, started in Egypt, so Egypt was the first to capitalize on it, and they used it to make a bunch of cool steampunk tech, which is why, a few decades later, Egypt is a rising power just before World War I. But, like, the world is still recognizable, right? You haven’t had this change ripple out through centuries. Chris: I think the “magic returns” tactic is a really good tactic for this because then you could just be like, “When was magic last year?” “Oh, just a long time ago. Don’t worry about it.” Even Game of Thrones, when it brings back dragons, it’s like, “Okay, well, we have dragon eggs from the last time, so the dragons don’t have to spawn out of the ether. We have some remnants somewhere.” If it’s so long ago that it’s like prehistory, it does make it a little hard to say, “Oh, well, we have rituals that go that far back.” But again, it’s nothing that speculative fiction writers don’t do all the time. What was it? Dune Prophecy, where we’re like 10 million years ago? Oren: Some absurdly long amount of time. Chris: Speculative fiction writers always want to expand timelines into ridiculous extents. Like, no, you don’t understand. Human civilization changes so much faster than that. Oren: Like in the Star Wars Andor show, where they brought out this statue. Like, this statue is 25,000 years old. That’s so old, man. You don’t know how old that is. In Master of Djinn, they have some ancient traditions by being like, “Yeah, there was magic around during, like, at some point when we had the ancient Egyptian gods. Maybe there was some magic then, so we can bring back worship of those gods as an old tradition.” Or you could have the idea that magic has been around, but it’s been hidden behind a masquerade. So you can have some masquerade magic traditions. Chris: We had a masquerade for most of history, but then the masquerade has been lifted recently. And so now magic is everywhere. That’s a good combo. And then you can have your old rituals and what have you. What if you just want historical fantasy that is relatively low realism, you are not trying to sweat over every historical detail, the masquerade, of course, is a good way to do that. We have a previous episode on the Masquerade, which is this idea that magic is secret and most people don’t know about it, and it is just a technique for keeping the world the same. The key is that it’s usually unbelievable if you pay too much attention to it. You usually just don’t want to call attention to it and advise against making conflicts over the Masquerade, like where the hero really wants to tell their loved one they have magic, but they just can’t do it, it starts to provoke questions about the Masquerade. You don’t want to do that because you can’t answer them. And then the other thing we talked about, which is the scope of the story. If this is like a cozy, where we’re just like one coffee shop, one in, and we don’t really see a lot of the world, you’re raising less questions. Whereas if you talk about the current monarch or current politics or what wars are happening, or put in big historical events during the course of the story, that certainly cause a lot more attention to the state of the world. Oren: A strange thing that is very common in a lot of historical fantasy that I’ve read, that doesn’t need to be, but it just seems to happen a lot, which is that when you’re creating a conflict in historical fantasy, there’s a tendency to only give one side magic. I’m not gonna say that never works, but it usually doesn’t. Chris: I mean, do you want that side to steamroll everybody else? Oren: Right, I mean, that’s the most immediate problem. If the magic is cool and fantasy-ish, chances are it’s pretty powerful. So that’s gonna create some balance issues. Chris: Oren, what if I just give the other side guns? Oren: I cast summon rifle level 5. Like, that was the problem in… gosh, I’ve forgotten the name of the story, but it was set during a quasi-real mill strike from the 1830s, and the strikers all had magic and the bosses didn’t. Amazingly, the strikers won. Chris: Oh, jeez, I wonder how that happened. Oren: It was not hard. That’s one potential problem. But, like, it also creates a lot of believability issues in a lot of stories. Like, why has nobody on the other side started using magic? This was the problem in Babel, but reversed, where only the bad guys have magic. And it’s just weird. Why hasn’t anybody else tried to make this? Apparently it’s been around since at least the Roman Empire. All you need is a silver and some translators to get started. It doesn’t have a high entry cost. Chris: Everybody else forgot. Oren: They got lazy and they didn’t think about it. Real weird, you know, not what I would expect. Even more basic: it’s just kind of boring. Here we have the cool magic people, and then the other side is some guy. Chris: In Babel, I originally thought that the reason we’re using silver as part of the magic system is to justify why only the wealthy could wield magic. Honestly, any material that is the only material that can be used for magic, if it’s scarce at all, it’s going to get expensive. But silver could be even more expensive. But then the book specifically says that China has a whole stockpile of silver. But they’re way outmatched by England. So at that point, silver has been eliminated as the reason why other people can’t use magic. Oren: They could still be outmatched. British magic could be more powerful. In real life, the Chinese had guns during that time period; they just weren’t as good. Chris: We could have magic that just wasn’t as good because they don’t have the same amount of institutions to churn out translation words that power the magic. Oren: Instead, it’s just like only England seems to have magic and maybe the rest of Europe. That’s harder to say. Chris: Since this is a historical setting, this is not as big of a deal. But it’s just silver with two words on it. There’s no reason another person can’t copy those words. Even if England has Oxford, which is much better at creating these translation words to power your magic, it would be fairly simple for other people to spy on them and just copy them. Oren: Well, we are now going to copy something that I’ve seen from many other podcasts, which is that we are going to end the episode because it’s over now. Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Just 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. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. [closing song] This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.

The sad truth is that your villain can’t be everywhere at once, whether they are a scary dark lord or an angsty tortured prince. They need minions to carry out their evil will, but that’s no simple matter. You have to think about how these minions operate, how strong they should be, and most importantly, ways to make sure they don’t get mistaken for those yellow guys. This week’s episode is all about making sure your big bad’s underlings don’t become a laughingstock, but also that they won’t be so strong that it’s impossible for the hero to win.  Show Notes Despicable Me Kpop Demon Hunters  Andor Stormtroopers  Jem’Hadar  Sauron vs Arawn Devil May Cry Blue Eye Samurai  Transcript Generously transcribed by Phoebe. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle. [intro music] Chris:  Welcome to the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Chris. Oren: And I’m Oren. Chris: You thought we were in charge of this podcast, but actually we’re just the goons you have to get past to reach the mid-level boss. But nobody has gotten past us in 500 episodes, probably because there’s only two of us, which means we’re very tough and intimidating. Oren: Yeah. If there were more of us, we’d get weaker. So, you know, we have intentionally killed off all the other hosts to gather their powers. Chris: [laughs] Yeah, and I guess the boss must be really scary since if we can, you know, keep back the heroes for 500 episodes, that must be one tough boss. Making our boss look good. Oren: Yeah, it’s Podcastia, is who it is. [laughs] Chris: Ohhh! Oren: Get past us, you have to face her. Chris: Oh geez. That is pretty scary. So, this time we’re talking about making the most of your minions. Oren: When I saw this podcast topic for a second, I thought we were talking about the minions from Despicable Me. Chris: No. Oren: I was like, oh no. [laughs] Chris: You know, this is funny, but I’ve never seen Despicable Me, but I find the minions really annoying. Oren: Yeah, no, I have never seen any of the movies. I don’t have an opinion on the movies. Chris: Maybe I would like them better if I actually saw Despicable Me, but I don’t know, they just, maybe they just look irritating. Oren: It’s because they’re everywhere. It’s, they hit saturation point and now they’re not cool. Now they’re annoying. Chris: And I’m gonna judge them from my ignorance. Oren: Yeah, that’s exactly it. It’s like, okay, it’s like if you had never seen Frozen and you know, suddenly just Frozen was everywhere. You were like, what? Chris: Or you know, for anybody who has not seen KPop Demon Hunters. Oren: Yeah, exactly. [laughs] Chris: [laughing] By now you must hate K-pop Demon Hunters. Okay, so why do we have minions? Why minions? Oren: Because storytellers are lazy and they don’t want to have to fight actual people, so they just send in faceless mooks. There. Podcast over. Done. [laughs] Chris: [laughs] Yeah. I mean, technically everything we do for a story could be just a sign of laziness. I mean, we could do it without that, it’s just harder, right? Oren: Yeah. I mean, the real reason is that usually you’re spending most of your character development budget on characters who are good guys, ‘cause that’s who your protagonist is gonna hang out with the most, and that’s who you’re gonna build attachment to. And there are some individual bad guys that you’re gonna develop, right? Almost every story is gonna have that. But they’re not usually enough to fill out the entire roster of Team Evil, so you need minions. That’s like the core storytelling reason. And then there are a bunch of other logistical reasons that we fill in. Chris: Yeah, I mean, their primary role is just to save the big bad for later, so the big bad doesn’t have to enter the story too soon. Instead, we can build their mystique and make them real threatening in the background and have the minions kind of provide some level of antagonism in the meantime. Oren: Yeah, and usually the bad guy is powerful and has, you know, people who will work for them and the ability to command resources, and so at that point, minions make sense. Chris: So you also need them to just fill out the world, right? It’s like, you can’t have an evil army without soldiers. At some point you’ll need to put some in, but usually for some sections of the story, they are the main antagonists the heroes are dealing with. I mean, not necessarily. You could have minions that only show up when there’s a big bad around commanding them. That’s possible. But most often you don’t want, you know, a slower escalation of threat. And so usually for the beginning portions of story, we first start with just a minion fight, for instance. Okay, so then, next question, what makes a good minion? What are we aiming for for our minions? Oren: I mean, minions follow most of the same rules as any other enemy, which is, the most important one, is that if you want them to be threatening, you can’t be beating them up all the time. That’s just the way it is. Once you start beating up stormtroopers, they aren’t threatening anymore, and technically you could try to make them threatening again, but the amount of work you would have to do to do that is pretty high. That’s why the most threatening enemies in Andor are not stormtroopers, the stormtroopers in Andor are about as weak as anybody else. It’s the guys who operate more like modern day special forces, like the dudes who go into the hotel towards the end when they’re trying to rescue what’s her face, those guys who wear kind of stormtrooper looking armor, but not the same. Those are the threatening minions. Chris: [laughs] Those guys, so threatening, shaking in my boots. Oren: [laughs] Chris: I mean, I might argue that the purpose of the minion is ultimately to lose in place of the big bad, right, but that basically, you know, create an escalator of threats and you can have more than one level of minion to do this, right? You can start with the stormtrooper and then go up to the special forces and then go up to the red guys who are guarding the emperor, whatever they are. Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: And then Darth Vader. We have a kind of minions that are at different levels getting more and more threatening towards the top. And part of the reason for doing that is because, again, sometimes we just need our heroes to actually win a fight. And when they win, whoever they win against becomes less threatening, is less capable of creating tension. And so at that point, we need to kind of discard them and move up to the next bigger threat in order to just maintain tension in the story. However, I would definitely say that, you know, it could be bad if that escalator is moving too quickly because if every single minion anywhere on that hierarchy just quickly becomes defeated, after a while, I do think that the audience is like, okay, well that last one wasn’t a big deal. We beat them, so I’m sure this one will be fine too. Whereas if you really want tension, having the minions actually be scary at first, basically try to extend their shelf life a little longer. Also, just again, we just see less easy victories and that also helps with the big bad later. Oren: Right, and you just need to think about how much are we gonna be fighting these guys? Because in Star Wars, even though we could do that escalator of threat, we really don’t in most of the movies. It’s just stormtroopers on stormtroopers. And you know, in the initial confrontation, the stormtroopers were pretty scary. And then they just immediately lose that once our heroes actually fight them. But that’s all we’ve got. So we keep sending in stormtroopers. That’s the thing to think about, right? In [Star Trek:] Deep Space Nine, the Jem’Hadar are like the main minions of the Dominion, which is an interesting sentence. Chris: [laughs] Oren: And these are the guys that we have to fight for the back half of the show, and the writers either by accident or planned, preserved their threat level by not having us just defeat them a bunch of times. Like, in the early confrontations between the Jem’Hadar and the main characters, usually the best the main characters can hope for is a draw, and we do have the Jem’Hadar win a fair number of times, and that just keeps them scary in a way that they wouldn’t be if they just lost a bunch. Chris: You had a great post where you were comparing Sauron and—god, what’s his name, Aaron or Arawn? Chronicles of Prydain? Oren: Oh, it’s Anwyn or something. It’s Welsh. [transcriptor’s note: It’s Arawn.] Chris: Ohhhh. Oren: I don’t remember how to pronounce it though. Chris: But like, the one thing this big bad had going for him was the Cauldron-Born. Oren: Yeah. They were great. Chris: Where it’s just a minion that actually is way scarier than any other, because they just can’t die, period, right. There are a form of undead and usually on other undead you might have to do something special to kill them, but these ones just can’t die in any way. So literally the only thing the heroes could do is run. That’s it. If you see them, you run. And that just made them very scary. And when a few of them mattered, and then when there was a whole army of Cauldron-Born attacking, that was just genuinely frightening. And so they worked really, really well since you couldn’t win against them, right. It just made sure that they never lost and they’re always, you know, threatening. Oren: Yeah. And it worked out well because once we destroyed them, they all died. It was like, all right, that’s done. We don’t have to deal with those guys anymore. Chris: [laughing] Yeah, yeah. At that point you need a load-bearing boss that you can defeat and just watch them all die at once. Oren: It is also worth thinking about if you do want to use the minions to escalate threat, you should be thinking about, “why are my minions weaker than the later guys I’m gonna have my characters fight?” ‘Cause I love Avatar the Last Airbender. But one of the problems it would have if you tried to tell it as a novel for adults is people would ask, okay, why are the soldiers less trained than the elite teenager squads? Why when the nations are serious, do they send in their angstiest 16 year olds? Chris: [chuckles] Oren: You know, that’s a question people would ask, and it’s like the same problem if you have your setting in a more realistic or grounded or modern setting. If you’re doing like, a mob story, you’re probably not gonna have it so that, like, all right, I beat up the big mob enforcer, now I’m gonna go fight the mob leader. It’s like, he’s not gonna be any better at fighting than his enforcer dude, right. Chris: [laughs] Oren: You know, you’re gonna need a different kind of escalation at that point. Chris: I do think one thing that we’ve seen is that, again, sometimes the storyteller’s goal is just to create a bunch of wish fulfillment and empowerment at the beginning of the story by having the hero wipe the floor with a whole bunch of minions, like, Hey, look how cool he is. And that does make things really hard. If you have a big badass and all you wanna show is that, see, he’s so badass, he wipes the floor with 50 demons, after that, it is gonna be really hard to make those demons intimidating. I’m thinking about that cartoon we started watching, what is it? Devil May Care? Oren: Devil May Cry or—no, yeah, Devil May Cry. That’s what it’s called. Chris: Devil May Cry. That’s it. If you can have the hero, start with, again, if he just fought a bunch of humans instead in a tournament or something, I think that would have saved the demons to be a little more special, that would’ve helped. But yeah, you can’t really have it both ways there. You gotta choose. And it does definitely reduce excitement if you choose to have a hero that can just wipe the floor with a whole bunch of minions at once. Oren: No, I need you to see how cool my hero is when I want him to be cool. And now I need you to forget that happened and act scared now that I want him to be in danger. Chris: Gosh, one of the other things that people do is, okay, so your hero has leveled up to the point where they can defeat a minion. Now let’s add more minions. Well, the problem is that it quickly becomes impossible to choreograph a solution where your hero wins against so many people. This is why in Blue Eye Samurai, we have multiple sequences where the protagonist takes on impossible odds and just wins in contrived ways, right. Or the other thing that can happen is that suddenly all the minions are super weak. Oren: Yeah. I always recommend using fewer rather than more minions because you can always add more, but it’s really hard to deescalate them. Once you establish that your hero can beat 10 minions, you’re gonna need way more than that to challenge them again. So pace yourself. Chris: Right. Same with monsters, right? If you have any enemy that appears in numbers, at some point in time too, it gets so ridiculous that you can’t really add more and have it feel like more. We already have a horde of these demons. So you could say the horde is twice the size as before, but nobody’s gonna care because it already feels like the maximum number of demons that I can imagine being in this scene. [laughs] Oren: It’s like, now we have two times infinity demons! Chris: [laughs] And it’s like, okay, if you really want that wish fulfillment, you really wanna give, you know, your hero candy, again, balance the concerns how you want to. But for the purposes of having an exciting story, it’s always better to have fewer minions, have stronger minions, have them last longer before your hero can easily defeat them. Oren: Yeah. Also, just having fewer of them means that you can make them more interesting, right? You can give them a little more personality, you can give them a little bit more description, and that’s harder to do the more of them there are. Chris: Speaking of personality, I think the other thing that I’ll want to avoid in my minions is just not to have them feel like they are dehumanized people. So basically if they are like, monsters that are just—vampires actually are a good example because vampires do not have, well, I mean it depends on the setting, but usually they are formerly people, right? They’re not really a group that were born that way, and so they turn into monsters. Or you could have monsters that are just like, a bunch of shadow creatures, don’t seem to have any will or minds of their own, and those are fine. You can make them super vicious, you can make them super evil if you want. Or you can have humans or people who act like people and have their own concerns. They can be bad people, but they’re not gonna be 100% pure evil in every context, usually, in their life. And also if they think they’re gonna die, they will run away. [laughs] I cannot emphasize this point enough. They think they’re gonna die. Same with animals. I mean, I don’t really like having characters kill animals personally, but you may have a fight with an animal, right? If an animal thinks that it’s outmatched, it will run away, typically. Oren: You need to think about who these minions are and what is their motivation, and are you showing that in the story? You know, are you showing that they have the kind of unquestioning loyalty that they will fight to the end every time? You could. Again, not to toot DS9’s horn too loud here or anything, but that is one of the things that makes the Jem’Hadar so dangerous is that we establish that they do have that kind of intense loyalty and they will fight to the death no matter what. But that’s something that we take some time to establish. We don’t just expect you to assume that about every alien species we encounter. Chris: And you know, we find out they’re basically an engineered species and they’ve also been purposely addicted to a drug to keep them in line. So extra measures are used to force them into this position. They’re just not like your average soldiers. Oren: Right. And because Deep Space Nine is a long show, we have time to do a little bit of complication of the Jem’Hadar. We meet some renegade Jem’Hadar who have rebelled for different reasons, which is interesting. Chris: I would be especially cautious if you’re using—you have a real world and you have people who are basically criminals or even prisoners. Like, there’s this weird cultural mindset that a person is either a criminal or they’re not. And if they’re a criminal, they’re just a dehumanized person who will just auto-attack. [laughs] Oren: Yeah, they’re just zombies, you know? Chris: Who’s just auto-hostile and then will keep attacking until they die. And it’s like, that’s just, that’s not how humans behave. And people don’t fall into two neat categories of criminal and not criminal, because we’re humans. Oren: I mean, and that’s the thing. It’s always funny when you watch shows where the writers seem to think that an area with high crime rates operates like a Final Fantasy game, where you go into it and if you take a certain number of steps, a random encounter will show up. It’s like, look, your characters might get mugged or something, that could happen in the right story. Often they are so huge and badass, that would not happen. Chris: [laughs] Oren: But even if they are relatively normal people, they’re not just suddenly going to summon crime boys. Chris: You don’t understand. This is an aggro zone. Oren: [laughing] Right? Chris: Soon as you step in, you agro the nearest resident. [laughs] Oren: Right, and now there’s criminals. [laughs] It’s like that’s just not how it works. Chris: Again, especially in a prison sequence, okay, because especially in the US we can be extremely cruel to prisoners and these are people who are serving their time. If they’re in prison, they were not sentenced to just execution immediately, so we shouldn’t be beating them up until they die, for instance. So, you know, treating them like they’re not real people who have real reasons for doing things is just not a good idea. Oren: It’s so funny in the third Nolan Batman movie when Bane breaks open the jails and a bunch of people come out to join his revolution and it’s like, you could tell that the writers have read enough history to know that’s a thing revolutionary movements do, but not enough to know that the reason that works is that in those contexts, the prisons are full of revolutionaries. Chris: Right. They’re their own members of their own organization who have previously been captured and put in prison. They’re not just like, you know, the random drug dealers who will join their violent organization. Oren: It’s like, just imagine you’re in there for like, dealing cocaine, and Bane comes in and he is like, would you like to fight the US government? It’s like, uh, no? [laughs] Chris: [laughs] Oren: What? [laughs] Chris: Oh man. Again, people end up in prison for all sorts of reasons, but at least in the US the majority, I think the biggest or the biggest number, the plurality perhaps, is drug offenses. Those people are not necessarily violent, they weren’t just, fight for any villain that lets them free. Oren: But even violent criminals aren’t gonna do that, right? It’s like, the violent criminal who is in there is someone who, I don’t know, beat his wife, right? Is the wife beater suddenly gonna join up with your dark lord? [disgusted/uncertain noise] Just think about it a little bit, is all I’m asking. Another thing to think about if you do want to use lots of minions is just to remember that your main characters can be smart and that a smart main character will not fight all of the minions at once out in the open. You have your main characters. If you want them to fight, like 20 guys, have them retreat through narrow areas or use hit and run attacks or things like that so that you don’t have a situation where you have to describe how they’re somehow fighting off attacks from five directions at once. And that just makes the numbers a lot easier to handle. Chris: And it also just makes your minions look better if your hero has to put in some effort to defeat them instead of being like, Nyah-na-nyah-na, boo boo [laughs], and, you know, which I think, sometimes with like the stormtroopers. Or man, the, the droids in [Star Wars: The] Clone Wars are the goofiest… Oren: Oh gosh. Pfft. Chris: They make very bad jokes while they’re being killed and not only does it make them look comical, but also it calls attention to the fact that they’re actually thinking beings and maybe we shouldn’t just be slaughtering them perilously all over the place. Oren: It’s really weird how the battle droids are weak on purpose. George Lucas has interviews where he talks about how, yeah, they’re pretty useless. The Jedi could just kill thousands of them. And why, George? [laughs] Why did you make them that way? [laughs] Here’s something you can think about that’s important. We’ve been talking about minions from the perspective of the villain, right? What about when the heroes have minions? Chris: I mean, that’s not typically what we mean. Are these like pseudo-villain heroes? Oren: No. Like, what if your hero is the captain of the USS Enterprise? Chris: So you mean sidekicks? Oren: I mean, are the Redshirts sidekicks? I don’t know if I would describe them that way. Chris: I mean, usually we would call them Redshirts in that case. Oren: [chuckles] Chris: But I mean, sometimes we do have pseudo-villain heroes that do have what we would literally call a minion. And in Megamind he has little robots, which is useful because on one hand he kind of treats them like they’re his children. But on the other hand, they are robots. They’re not actually, as far as we know, they’re not independently thinking. So if he needs to make them explode, he can do that. And we don’t think less of him. I mean, I think that is one difference, right, is, if you have a villain and they don’t need to be likable, then they can put their minions into danger. But if you have Mando in The Mandalorian and he literally picks up a droid just to make that droid go through a very deadly situation and he didn’t wanna do it himself, that was a low point, I gotta say. Oren: Yeah, no, that was bad. That was part of Mando’s weird racism against droids arc. I don’t know who thought that was a good idea. Chris: I mean, so I think that’s a key difference. Whereas I guess the idea with a Redshirt is that you are trying to establish that the antagonist is dangerous by having people that you can kill off, but you actually don’t want anybody to mourn them. Oren: Right. Chris: Which is, I don’t know. I think that’s to be avoided if you can avoid it. I mean, not that you can’t have minor characters killed off, but I think if you should have somebody that your protagonists know who dies, that should mean something, ’cause a person died. Oren: Yeah, if you’re going to have characters dying, it probably shouldn’t only be background characters that no one cares about. Just in general, especially if you’re using it to build up threat or something. Chris: And you know, again, if you have like a big war, of course, there’s gonna be some people who are in the background dying, but usually at that point you would also have somebody that we care about dying too, instead of having just like, oh yeah, the war was terrible, but you know, don’t worry about it. Oren: The war was terrible for someone else presumably. My group came through it just fine. [laughs] Chris: [laughs] Oren: So this is another thing with minions, is that when you’re thinking about how they work, you don’t just need them to be, you know, rush at the hero with fists punching, right? Again, for the right kind of story, that can work fine, but for a lot of fantasy stories, you’re also gonna want your minions to be a little more interesting than that, right? You’re gonna want them to have magic powers or cool tech, and that’s a good way to make them stand out. That’s actually what makes certain enemies in Star Wars work better because once they do start introducing steps of minions, they actually get a little more interesting ’cause they can fly or they have armor that actually works. Stuff like that. That’s a good way to help them stand out. Chris: Yeah, and of course you can also make some minions that are actually named characters. Which is really useful if you do, again, we don’t typically recommend giving your villain a viewpoint. That causes numerous problems, including demystifying the villain and making them less threatening. And it’s hard not to give information that you don’t wanna give away, et cetera. But if you do need to share something going on on the villain side, you can potentially give a minion a viewpoint. Or a minion can be a useful way if you want them to tell the hero something. Let’s say the heroes do something nice for a minion, they defeat the minion, but actually then when the minion is about to fall and die, fall off the edge of a cliff or something, the heroes are like, no, actually I don’t want you to die. The minion’s grateful, gives them information, that kind of thing. Of course, now that I’ve said that, we have to talk about torture— Oren: [laughs] Chris: —because there’s so many stories. Look, torture doesn’t work. Okay. That’s the problem, is that when people are being tortured, they just say whatever the torturer wants to hear. So you have no way of knowing if that information is any good, and usually the hero just ends up going on a wild goose chase. There was actually a pretty good sequence in The 100 where they actually did this, right. There was actually, somebody was threatened and gave bad information, and then it caused a massacre because that show’s dark. [laughs] Oren: Or if it’s not guaranteed that that’s what’s going to happen, but that happens often enough to make the process unreliable. Chris: And yes, you could introduce magic to fix this, but you shouldn’t. Oren: [laughing] Yeah, I wouldn’t. Chris: Because torture, again, doesn’t work. And creating a scenario—adding magic just to make it work just feels weird because in real life it doesn’t work, right? And so we just shouldn’t be creating stories where heroes use it because it’s cruel and it doesn’t work. So I know some stories are dark and edgy, but I just feel like we can be dark and edgy in other ways, right. I think we have lots of ways to be dark and edgy if that’s what we want. Oren: Well, there was just a really cool thread that I read a while back talking about how, okay, if you are trying to do this, if you’re like, “well, torture works in my setting ’cause we have the Zone of Truth spell or whatever.” It’s like, okay, are you really prepared for the implications of that? ‘Cause people would operate completely differently if that was a thing. If information could be reliably extracted, there would be just completely different methods of sharing information because it’s a huge vulnerability all of a sudden that everyone knows about. So unless you’re ready to go that route, which most people aren’t, I wouldn’t. Chris: The other thing that happens sometimes with minions giving information regardless of how it’s done, is that we don’t think the heroes will trust it. So then suddenly we have spontaneous lie detection magic added. We had a whole episode on lie detection magic. But nobody is ever prepared for the repercussions. And again, detecting a heartbeat is not a reliable way to detect lying. Oren: This is true. Chris: So [instead of] just suddenly giving your character lie detection powers, just make the minion convincing or have them give the heroes some collateral or something. So usually you can either have the minion choose to give information, maybe in exchange you can have the hero convince them, Hey, I know you’re just doing this for money, but if you can help me defeat this boss—maybe they hate their boss. Maybe the villain has forced them to do this. So you can have lots of ways. You can also have the heroes find clues on the minion. Oren: Yeah, that’s my favorite way to do it. Chris: Right, so like, well, we looked on the minion’s phone, we found a note in the Minion’s pocket. We looked at a label on the clothes the minion was wearing, and that can be another way for them to get information out of a minion. Oren: Right. And if you want it to be a little conflict, then you can find some clues that don’t immediately—like, you don’t find a map, but instead you do the old Sherlock Holmes thing of like, okay, so there’s some red gravel on his feet that’s kind of interesting. And some, oh, and there’s a—he had a candy bar wrapper in his pocket, but this candy bar is only sold in this specific part of the city. Right? And then you figure it out that way. That will replace the dramatic tension of a torture scene, which is often why authors use those scenes to begin with. All right, well, now that we have our annual don’t do torture message out, I think we will go ahead and call this episode to a close. Chris: If you found this episode helpful, 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 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 Colton.

Everyone knows that werewolves and vampires hate each other. It’s just a fact of urban fantasy life. But… why, exactly? For that matter, why are any secret magical factions in conflict with each other? And when they do fight, why doesn’t the one with more powerful magic just auto-win? You would think that wizards could just drop orbital strikes on everyone else without leaving the sanctum. Do we have suggestions on how to handle those issues? You’d better believe it. Show Notes The Order  Teen Wolf Kate Daniels (not Kate Cain) World of Darkness The Dresden Files  Supernatural  The Initiative Battle Droids Are Weak on Purpose  Lie Detection Magic  Transcript Generously transcribed by Lady Oscar. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant 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 I’m putting the final touches on my urban fantasy setting. I’ve got a faction of mages that keep magic locked down real tight, so there are no rogue casters. And also a faction of werewolves that spends all of its time hunting down rogue casters. I don’t see a problem with this. I think this will be fine. Chris: Hmm. Maybe the rogue casters are coming from inside the house. Oren: Inside the werewolf house. Chris: Werewolf house. [laughing] Werewolves just hunt themselves down. Oren: It’s fine. Yeah. So today we’re talking about planning urban fantasy factions. Why do urban fantasy factions need their own episode? Because I felt like it. And also because… Chris: We can do what we want! Oren: Yeah. You’re not the boss of us! [laughing] Partly because we watched The Order recently, which is one of this crop of two season Netflix shows that was urban fantasy. And it had a lot of problems, and one of the problems was that its worldbuilding was real garbage. Chris: Mm-hmm. Oren: But I also just think that there are some differences in how you think about urban fantasy versus, like, high fantasy, or scifi, or steampunk or whatever. And partly it’s because they tend to be all mixed together, because there’s usually a masquerade, and so what you have are factions that exist within or alongside human society. And so you have to think about how that makes things different. And then at the same time, they also tend to have a more kitchen sink approach to worldbuilding. Which is not a hundred percent, right? There are examples we can talk about that don’t just throw everything at the wall, but there’s sort of a default expectation that, you know, if you’re gonna have some kinds of magical creatures in the modern setting, that sort of implies you have all of them. Chris: I mean, I think when people think about urban fantasy, often their expectation is, if magic is real, then it must be linked to all of the folklore that we have about it. Oren: Or in some cases the pop culture, right? Like, a lot of urban fantasy tropes are really, really divorced from any folklore, but… Chris: What we think is folklore, right? [both laugh] And I think obviously that’s very eclectic and comes from all of these places. It’s not like we crowdsourced, like, tidy worldbuilding. Oren: Right. Chris: And so it just results in a very kind of eclectic world with lots of different magic users that work in different ways. Oren: And lots of different creature types. Chris: Mm-hmm. Oren: If I’m making my own fantasy world from scratch, I can sort of decide what types of creatures I want to be there, and I can limit the magic more easily. But if I’m making an urban fantasy setting, it would be kind of weird if I was like, the only kind of mages are elemental mages. That’s all there is. It’s like, really? That’s all. Chris: Yeah. I mean, you could have – some urban fantasy settings have a very specific, there’s a door to another world that’s where magic comes from. It’s not like you have to go with all the folklore. It’s just popular. I think the other issue is, you can exclude a faction if you have a nice tidy theme that makes it intuitive what is included and what is not included. But that is rarely combined with our typical urban fantasy. The closest I think I’ve seen, or at least one of the closest, is Teen Wolf. At least in the first seasons. Oren: Yeah. Chris: Because you know, originally it’s like, okay, just werewolves. Alright, just werewolves, also druids and banshees. I’m like, okay, that’s… a little random, but we’re still going with a kind of werewolf nature theme. And then they add other types of shapeshifters that shapeshift into other types of creatures, so they’re kind of werewolf-like. And we still have no vampires, you know, like we add kitsune, for instance… Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: Okay. And then they bring in steampunk mad scientists and like, what? [laughing] What are the steampunk mad scientists doing here? Oren: They’re here. Don’t worry about it. Chris: And then later we get ghost cowboys. Oren: Everyone loves ghost cowboys. Chris: [both laugh] And so eventually it’s just, okay, well why not vampires at this point? Oren: Yeah. Chris: But for a while there, we had a pretty tidy urban fantasy setting where it was just, you know, people shape-shifting into creatures for the most part, and that kind of kept it together. But if we had several different types of creatures from a wide variety of pop culture-ish folklore, folklore-ish pop culture, and then didn’t have vampires, that would be weirder. Oren: Right. And a lot of it is gonna come down to what are you choosing to show, and how long is a story going for? Like, it was weird to me watching The Order that we have mages and werewolves, and that’s it. Chris: And nothing else. Oren: Right. Chris: Right. I kept expecting vampires to show up. Oren: Yeah. And that seemed strange to me, but at the same time, the storylines were so narrow that I was like, all right, I guess we aren’t really exploring the world at all. Maybe there are other magical things that… Chris: Oh, there’s also a golem. Oren: Yeah, they do make a golem once. Chris: Best character. Oren: Yeah, we love that golem. The one that really got me was in the Kate Kane books. They have werewolves and mages again, odd. Odd that that happened twice. But the mages are all necromancers, which again, okay, sure. But they have vampires, but the vampires are, like, undead…robots… Chris: Harsh! Oren: …that the necromancers pilot around. That seems, yeah, that seems mean. Chris: Why aren’t they zombies? Oren: Yeah, I don’t know. Chris: Why not make them zombies? That’s what zombies are for. Oren: Like if someone picks this up and he’s a vampire fan, it’s like, oh…sad. The vampires in this setting kind of suck. Chris: I mean, we always do tell people to add your own spin, right? Oren: Yeah. Chris: Maybe we should have given a caveat there. Okay, “Add your own spin, but please don’t make it disappointing.” Oren: Yeah. It’s like, I don’t know, “Be creative except when it’s bad, then be less creative.” Chris: Be creative, but if you use a creature, try to retain what people think is cool about the creature. I mean, I have talked a bit about, like, at what point should you not call it the same thing? Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: Because in general, I always recommend reusing words people are familiar with because it just lowers the cognitive load and makes things easier to understand. And I’ve seen all sorts of… But this typically happens only in high fantasy. Like in high fantasy we can have, you know, vampires and werewolves and wizards and elves, but they would be called other names to make it seem like they’re not vampires and werewolves and elves. Oren: Yeah. Chris: When they are. When they obviously are. [laughing] And they would all be names that are hard to remember, which means the fans just call them werewolves and vampires and elves. Oren: How dare you? Those are my lupine changers and my, uh, sanguine draw-ers, and my eternal fair folk. [Chris laughs] Chris: At least urban fantasy worldbuilders are not trying to pretend that they’re using something new when they’re not. But at a certain point, again, reuse the name, but at a certain point, you lose the essential something that makes it feel like it’s anywhere close. And so vampires that act like zombies, that’s a little… Oren: Yeah. I just don’t know why you would call them a vampire at that point. Just seems misleading. Chris: Yeah, I don’t know, did they daintily suck blood instead of just bite into people’s necks? Oren: No, they’re just monsters. They’re just combat robots basically. Chris: Okay. But yeah, I mean, I do think, again, there’s a lot of expectation, like once you add werewolves, are there gonna be vampires? I think there’s slightly less expectation that if you have vampires, there will be werewolves, just because we have so many vampire books that are just exclusively focused on vampires. Oren: Yeah. And while we’re talking about werewolves and vampires, there’s other things to think about. But one thing that I really recommend thinking about, especially with urban fantasy, is if you want your factions to come into conflict, why? Because this is a thing that has always been a little confusing to me, and I’ve run into this problem when I’m running World of Darkness, which is that if you look at these fantasy factions, especially when they’re divided by creature type, they very often don’t compete over anything. Like, you know, vampires like to suck blood, and in most settings, werewolves like to live in the woods. And so they don’t really have any direct reason to fight each other. But they always wanna fight each other, right? Like, that’s what authors want. So what is the reason for that? It’s easier to do this in a classic high fantasy or other setting because you just have, you know, they fight for the same reasons that humans fight, for control over territory and resources and stuff. But that doesn’t really make sense in an urban fantasy setting most of the time because they’re already sharing their territory with humans, right? Like again, they live alongside humans, so it’s clearly not an issue there. Is there something they both want and there’s not enough of it? What’s going on? And this is why in my big urban fantasy RPG from a few years ago, I invented Essence, which is like the supernatural energy MacGuffin. What does it do? Don’t worry about it. Everybody wants it. Chris: Hey, it was nutritionally important to young, magical people. Oren: Mm-hmm. Yeah, it’s important. Don’t worry about it. Don’t look too closely at that. Chris: [laughing] But yeah. Gave them something to fight over. I think there’s also a question of, okay, are we only making factions for the purpose of having them fight? Do they have to fight? Can they all just hold hands and sing Kumbaya? Oren: Yeah, I mean, I would say they don’t have to fight. I would say that if you are creating factions, it’s probably because you want there to be some tension between them. Chris: Maybe I just want one character to start a coffee shop. Oren: Yeah. I mean, you might, [both laugh] in which case the factions don’t matter nearly as much. Because they’re not gonna play that big a role. Chris: Right. Like in Legends & Lattes, which is like in a D&D setting. It has the different D&D ancestries or, you know, groups, just because that’s what’s in the game. Not because the story actually needs all those factions, but everybody’s already familiar and knows what gnomes and orcs are. Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: So it also just doesn’t add any information overhead. So the story can afford to add a bunch of factions that it’s not actually going to use in the plot in any important way. And just adds color to the setting. And you know, you could potentially make up your own factions and do that. But I think that is, again, a benefit of urban fantasy. Usually if everybody knows what a werewolf and a vampire, etc. is you can just add them to the story and make less of a big deal about them because you didn’t have to spend a whole bunch of time to explain them. Oren: Yeah, that’s true. Chris: I think mainly you do want sources of conflict in your world, right? So especially if you’re planning on writing a whole bunch of stories in one world, and you need new conflicts for sequels, having the different factions fight is just an intuitive way to do that. Oren: Or like the threat that they might. I’m not saying every urban fantasy story needs to have a big war in it. Just that there’s a good chance that if you are building a setting from scratch and you are creating these factions, it’s probably because you want them to be at odds in some capacity. And that’s gonna be easier to do if you think of some underlying thing that might put them in competition with each other in the same way that different groups of humans and/or orcs, elves, dwarves whatever are kind of in inherent competition with each other over limited resources. Chris: Mm-hmm. I mean, in that big urban fantasy role playing campaign you mentioned, you also had political dynamics of a kind of a joint governing system. And the more powerful groups had representation and less powerful groups didn’t. Oren: Yeah. Chris: So, but you know, theoretically, honestly, if you have magical people in a real-world setting, they’d probably have tons of money. So the idea that they need to like – having a joint governing board assumes that they have to pool their resources to accomplish shared goals in some way. I suppose if they’re trying really hard to maintain the masquerade, they could have fights over how that’s done that just require cooperation because any one group could, you know, spill the beans, but that’s honestly looking too hard at the masquerade. You probably don’t wanna do that. Oren: Yeah. [Chris laughs]  And that’s what makes that so challenging, is that you can’t usually use, like, the vampires and the werewolves are fighting over, you know, a building they both wanna own. Well, why that building? What does that building matter? Chris: Okay. How about magical global warming? Like the, uh, God, what was your – the, like, skeleton…? Oren: The Necro-Industrial Complex. Chris: [laughing] Necro-Industrial Complex! Oren: I mean, The Order actually had this, and it was really cool. It was just introduced in like the last two episodes out of nowhere, which was this idea that the more magic is done, the bigger the chance of these, you know, dangerous eruptions that happen that can eventually reach apocalyptic levels. Which provides the justification for why the magical organization clamps down on rogue casters so hard in the first place, and creates a reason why different mage organizations are in competition, because they’re fighting over their magic carbon budget, basically. Chris: Yeah. I thought one dynamic of that for this particular show was that you’re supposed to pay for your magic by doing – I mean, they call it a sacrifice, but for smaller spells, it’s just like you cut yourself and bleed a little bit, and then you magically heal it, so it’s fine. Oren: Yeah. Chris: But I think what was happening is that there were specifically too many people neglecting sacrifices, right? So they were using magic a little lazily, which honestly, if you had magic spread far and wide, that would totally happen. Oren: Yeah. I mean, they were a little inconsistent about how that worked. But sure, like you could also have it be not a strict carbon budget, but more of like, you know, not-super-well-trained practitioners are more likely to do this, so we have to keep it really focused on only letting the people who we approve of do the magic, that sort of thing. Chris: Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, no, it was a good conflict that, of course, was not handled – was not taken advantage of very well by the show. Oren: Right. I’m also a big fan of, like, magical locations. Because you can create areas that different factions would want for different reasons. You know, if you have a special glade that is sacred to the moon cult, then you could also see why both werewolves and certain kinds of mages would want to control that, that sort of thing. Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Oren: So it doesn’t always have to be like one thing. It’s just good to think about what it is that’s gonna bring them into competition with each other. Chris: Yeah. Maybe ley lines are super important. Oren: Yeah. Everyone loves ley lines. Chris: We gotta fight over control of the ley lines. Oren: They’re very flexible ley lines. They can do a lot of things. [Chris laughs] Chris: I mean, I do think that one thing that’s tricky is once your factions start fighting, then you have to be more fussy about whether the power is balanced in the way that you need it. Because – I mean, otherwise your job just gets hard, like if you’re planning a big battle between wizards and vampires, but your wizards could just fireball the whole building where vampires sleep during the day? Oren: Yeah. Chris: The conflict is over, and you don’t wanna have to be like, oh no, just forget about that. Or, you know, make up very silly excuses for why your wizards are not doing the obvious thing that they should be doing. And it just becomes really distracting and contrived really quickly. Oren: This is why as a rule, when I am making an urban fantasy setting, I actually don’t like having witches or mages as their own faction. I know that’s like a big trope, but the moment you do that, it becomes really hard to balance them, because again, urban fantasy lends itself to a kitchen sink approach to magic. And if your wizards can do almost anything, as a group, how can there be competition against them? Because their powers are so flexible. Chris: Right. If you look at every faction like it’s just a mage, and look at their spell list. You’ve got werewolves, and on their spell list, they can turn into a big beast. Maybe when they want. [both laugh] Oren: Yeah. Chris: And the vampire spell list is like, okay, I’m immune to certain types of damage. And depending on the story, maybe they have some strength powers, and perhaps they can hypnotize people a bit. But they also like, again, have a major weakness about not going out in the sunlight in some stories. And then wizards and witches have a spell list that’s infinity long.  Oren: Yep. Chris: And can do anything, right? And it starts to become obvious how a fight between these factions is not gonna work. And again, following the whole, like, pop culture of folklore, people really want their wizards and witches to basically cast whatever spell. And so that makes it really hard. I mean, you can tone it down, but they might feel a little lackluster. Like if your witches can only fly on brooms and occasionally get vague visions of the future, that’s not what we’re going for with witches. We want witches that are cool and powerful and, you know, put curses on people. Oren: Yeah. It’s hard. It’s a difficult problem that I don’t think has a single solution. Chris:  The other thing that I’ve seen is you can try to even it out by boosting the other groups, like give werewolves and vampires more powers. But you would still have to reduce the powers that witches or wizards have, and then they can also end up feeling a little bit more of the same than you’re looking for. Like 4th ed. D&D for instance really focused on balance, but everybody felt like all the different classes were the same. Oren: I mean, that was literally what happened in the Dresden Files, right? You get to the most – once you get far into the Wizard-Vampire War to the point where Dresden is basically a walking weapon of mass destruction, and it’s like, okay, how are vampires gonna deal with this? And the answer is that the vampires are now also wizards. And it’s like, okay, well, I mean that does explain it, but, kind of boring. Chris: Yeah. I will admit that I do like the idea of witches that can cast magic spells, but it always takes like several weeks so they can’t do action spells, you know? But that would only help a little bit. It’s still bad if you let them, for instance, spend weeks making a bunch of magical bombs and then throw the bombs. Like you can’t let them do that either. Oren: Then you’re just getting into the Batman problem. How much time does he have to prepare? [both laugh] Yeah, I have found that there are basically two ways you can approach this. You can either just not have mages as their own faction, and instead if you want to have a flexible magic system, have it be available to anybody, and then just have different kinds of creatures. Or you can just, you know, really limit what your mages can do, but find clever ways for them to use it. Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Oren: Right. And so at that point, the mages basically become, not a powerhouse, because they can’t stand up to anyone in a direct fight, but they can cause lots of problems around the edges. And so that’s a reason why no one wants to mess with them, even though they aren’t real strong face-to-face. And that’s, like, the lore in World of Darkness, for example. It just doesn’t match with what mages can actually do. Chris: I mean, if you have witches and you just don’t put them into full warfare with any other faction, and then you would also need to make them purposely neutral, right? A faction can be more powerful than any other faction without plotting headaches if they just don’t get involved in the fights. Instead you could have them as, like, neutral arbiters that sometimes you have a conflict over convincing the arbiters to decide with you, for instance. Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: And that could be something that’s challenging, but you don’t try to have a tense war of, like, witches versus werewolves. Oren: Right. Another thing to think about here, beyond just the raw power of your factions, is you have to think about the areas in which they compete. Because if they compete in completely different areas, that’s often not gonna make for a very fun story. Like, if you have dream spirits whose entire thing is that they attack you in their dreams versus werewolves, it’s like, what’s the story here? Right? Chris: [laughing] What are they competing over? That would be interesting. Oren: Like, how are they supposed to be in competition with each other? Chris: Well, when a werewolf eats somebody, they expect to be able to eat their dreams, too. But if the dream spirit is already in there, it completely ruins the meal. [both laugh] Oren: It’s the same problem that you get into with vampires when they can’t go out during the day. It’s like, okay, if you make them powerful enough to auto-win at night, then you’ve just got like rocket tag, basically, with whoever attacks first just wins. And that’s not very interesting either. Chris: Yeah, that’s a hard one. Oren: Another avenue to think about with this, and again, this tends to be a specific urban fantasy problem, is just for one, first of all, how organized is your world at all? Because that is a question that has huge repercussions, and it’s easy for authors to neglect it, especially if they are bringing a character across the masquerade for the first time, and you only explain a little bit of the setting at once. Chris: By organized, you mean like does the magical world have its own government, for instance? Oren: Yes, exactly. Like, are we talking about, you know, supernatural creatures are solitary and just kind of hang around humans and don’t have an organization? Do they have small groups? Do they have organized factions? Do they have a one-world government? Chris: How about if we pretend they’re really isolated at first, but then we realize we need someplace to take our second novel, so then we say that there’s been a government all along that’s been ruling them? Oren: Yeah, I mean, that is a thing that happens sometimes, and it’s a real problem, you know? [laughter] Chris: I mean, you could do that, but it would be hard, right? It would be hard to create the idea of isolated individuals and then have that stay consistent with a world where there’s a government. Maybe you could do something like, oh, well actually the werewolves we met were just the outcasts that were thrown out of bigger society, for instance. Oren: Right. I mean, you could have it be like okay, there’s magical government in the cities, but in the rural areas, it’s kind of a free-for-all. Yeah. Like that’s possible. Chris: Yeah. This is – Supernatural did something like this, right? Where everybody seems super isolated and then we find out there’s somebody who, like, makes her money stealing magical items, which is… Oren:  Okay. Yes, but that’s a different problem. [Chris laughs] So the issue with that was that the supernatural is secret, but also there’s an entire underground society of rich people who know about magic. And there’s a lady who buys items, like artifacts for them. It’s like, who are these guys who are buying these artifacts that they know are magic? Eh, don’t worry about it. Chris: Maybe they’re magic ghoulies, very rich magic ghoulies? Oren: Yeah, maybe. We don’t know. We never hear about them again. You do run into this problem, again, whenever you try to split like the Hunter RPG in World of Darkness. This is why it doesn’t mix with the other settings very well. Chris: And Hunter is basically like Supernatural, right? The premise is that we’ve got a couple of humans who are by themselves hunting supernatural things that are also isolated. Oren: Yeah. And you can introduce big hunter organizations if you want to. I hate doing that. I think it completely ruins the game. But some people like that. But even in that situation, it still doesn’t really work. Because it’s like, okay, so now we’re like, there’s a vampire feeding on people. Okay. We’re not just hunting the vampire. Now we have to think about, like, what are the political implications of killing this vampire? Chris: Is this gonna start a human-vampire war? Oren: And like, I’m not gonna say you couldn’t make an interesting story out of that. It’s just not what default Hunter is set up to be. Chris: I mean it’s also, you know, again, why it’s weird when Buffy suddenly has the government in season four starting to, like, manage the supernatural. It’s like, okay, well if that’s true, Buffy should always be able to call the government for help anytime, you know, the hellhole gets out of control. But yeah, that’s… Oren: I love how the government got involved in season four, and then just was like, “Eh, I guess not.” Chris: Somebody cut funding. You know, there was DOGE coming in there with its AI, and just like, how about we just pull the plug on this program? I’m sure it’s fine. Oren: Yeah, we’re spending how many millions of dollars to stop the apocalypse? Eh, that doesn’t seem efficient. [both laugh] Move fast and break things, and things being the world. Chris: Okay. So how about guns? I mean, generally we discourage guns, if you don’t have to have guns in your setting, because guns are just, like Oren was talking about, the insta-win, right? If you have an ability where whoever attacks first they win. Guns are like that, because they’re so deadly, so quickly, and it’s just, it’s very difficult to write interesting gun fights. Oren: Yeah. So I would say, basically, I would say that it’s okay if you want your characters in an urban fantasy setting to use guns. They can. It’s just that you have to be aware that once you open that Pandora’s box, you cannot close it. You can’t have them use guns some of the time. Chris: Right. It’s like, well, why didn’t they bring the gun this time, you know? They could’ve done that and won this fight. Also, are we prepared for, like, werewolves wielding guns? Oren:  And if you do that, you have to realize that you’re signing up for a very different kind of story. I mean, there’s a reason why nearly all of the enemies in the early seasons of Supernatural are ghosts. And partly it’s budgetary reasons, but it’s also just way more threatening if the enemy they’re fighting is not physical. Chris: Right. You can’t just take a machine gun and mow them down. Oren: And once you make it physical, it’s like, okay, you can say that, well, it’s immune to bullets. It’s like, all right, is it immune to, you know, 5,000 rounds a minute? Like, that’s just enough physical force to cut it in half at that point, right? Chris: Yeah. Oren: So you just have to be aware of that. And a lot of stories don’t think about that because they want their sword fights and their, you know, kung fu battles. Or they want magic missiles to be cool, and then they introduce guns and it’s like, well, wow. We have a problem here. Chris: And then there’s Teen Wolf with, like, humans use guns. Nobody else uses guns. Why? Oren: Reasons! Chris: Reasons. [laughing] Like, I’m pretty sure vampires, or – well, no, this is Teen Wolf – everybody else could also, werewolves could also wield guns. Oren: Right? Especially since the werewolves don’t have to, like, fully transform, right? In fact, they mostly don’t, most of them, when they transform, they just like grow more facial hair. Chris: So what if you had all the magical people, you know, basically can’t get too close to metal? Can you make guns out of, I don’t know, ceramics or something? Oren: I mean, yeah, they’re called ghost guns. They’re, I mean, in the modern day, they are not a particularly advanced form of firearms as I understand it, because they’re really, their only use case is to sneak them past security. So, you know, they haven’t been given a whole lot of thought, but yes, you could do that.  Also, then you wouldn’t be able to use swords and things, which I found that a lot of urban fantasy writers really want. Chris: I know. That’s the thing. That’s the problem with, like, can’t get near metal. I don’t know, maybe bone swords? Stone swords? Oren: Yeah, I mean, I would honestly say that in most cases, if you don’t want guns in your urban fantasy setting, the best solution is to just not use them, and don’t bring it up. [Chris laughs] You know, maybe you can make, have some throwaway dialogue about how like, yeah… Chris: Okay, but Oren, what about this? None of my characters use guns. And then suddenly I need my character to be very clever. [Oren laughs] And so then this is the first person to think of using a gun, and then pulls it out in a dramatic moment and like, “Hey, check out this!” Oren: We’ll come to your house. [Chris laughing] Like… I will personally find you and explain why that’s wrong. Oren: But, okay. Real quick, because we’re almost done, I wanna make sure I actually say this, which is that in general, if you don’t want guns in your urban fantasy setting, the best solution is just not bring it up. You can maybe have a line of dialogue saying that guns don’t work on the supernatural, and then refuse to explain further. Do not take questions. [Chris laughs] And if you’re consistent, your readers will probably just go with it. Chris: Yeah. You want people to just forget guns exist. So too much explanation is only gonna make it worse. Oren: All right, well, I think with that, we will 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. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. [Outro Music] This has been the Mythcreant Podcast, opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.

We all know that a boring scene can slow down the story. But what if. The words you wrote. Also had an effect. On pacing? This week, we’re discussing how to use wordcraft to control the speed of your story. Sometimes that means speeding up, of course, but it can also mean slowing down. Readers enjoy a relaxed scene to appreciate the scenery just as much as they love pulse-pounding action. They’re less likely to enjoy scientists explaining stuff for a billion paragraphs, though. Show Notes How to Pace Your Story The Shattering Peace  Podcast: The Five Types of Narration  Kaiju Preservation Society  The Empire of Silence  A Deadly Education  Shield of Sparrows  Fourth Wing  The Abbess Rebellion  Transcript Generously transcribed by Sofia. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle. [intro music] Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris. Oren: And I’m Oren. Chris: Alright, I’ve heard we need to pick up the pace on this podcast. So, what we’ll do is record normally and then just speed up the recording during audio editing and publish that. Oren: That sounds fantastic. I don’t know what could possibly go wrong. Chris: Yeah, it’ll be fine. Everybody will like listening to that. Honestly, I have been told many times that I speak too fast. Supposedly being a good speaker just means talking like you would talk to your friends, but I don’t think that works for me. Oren: Yeah, I don’t know. I just try to do what I would normally sound like. Chris: Right. And you sound great. [laughs] But sometimes if I get excited, I start talking really fast and skipping words, and slurring words, and nobody can understand what I’m saying. I hope I’ve gotten better, at least when I’m paying attention. Or maybe I talk slower now because I’m getting old. Oren: [laughs] Chris: [laughs] This is about pacing in word craft. It’s kind of frustrating that pacing means two different things. But I didn’t choose this. Not my term. Oren: I didn’t choose the pacing life. The pacing life chose me. Chris: So, most of the time when we talk about pace—cause we talk about plot so much at Mythcreants—usually when we’re talking about pacing, we mean plot pacing. Which I think is best defined as the level of tension as the story progresses. So that pattern of which scenes are tense relative to which other scenes. And how that goes. But now we’re talking about wordcraft pace, which is a measure of how verbose you are for the content you’re covering. It’s a little more analogous to plot movement than plot pacing. Cause plot movement is basically, does it feel like you’re making progress on the story? So, wordcraft pacing is like, how quickly are you actually getting the story content in there in proportion to how many words you are using. Oren: Yeah. It’s the difference between if we’re having a scene that is at an ice cream shop and we’re just hanging out there for many pages. That’s just a slow story choice. As opposed to I am describing an action scene, which could be fast or slow, depending on how I describe it. Chris: We could go to the ice cream shop, but describe that so concisely that the word craft pacing is fast, but the plot pacing is slow. Oren: That’s true. Chris: If you do have pacing that is much too fast in your wordcraft, it’s also possible that the story will feel slow because you’ve basically killed all the motion, right? And so, people will get bored and won’t know why. So that happens. But your wordcraft pace can be too slow or too fast, and people naturally fall in different places on the spectrum. There are people who are naturally very verbose and people who are naturally very concise. So if you have a problem here that are habits that you have to change, it’s not like you are uniquely bad at this. People come at it from multiple directions. Oren: Yeah. I have an example actually, that I wanna talk about. I recently read The Shattering Piece, which is the most recent book in the Old Man’s War series from John Scalzi. And I noticed Scalzi’s writing tends to go through phases. And right now, he is in what I call the scientists-explaining-things-to-each-other phase. Where that’s a fairly large percentage of the book [with] scientists explaining things. And to be sure any amount of exposition is gonna slow the pacing down a little bit. Cause you need to explain things, but I just noticed that the explanations were so long for things that we absolutely did not need to know. And it seemed like when he starts saying, you don’t have the math for that, it’s like, okay, I get it. That’s a line from the first book. I know. But you’re gonna explain it anyway. Could you just skip the part where you say you can’t explain it? Cause I know you’re about to. Chris: And this is in dialogue? Oren: Yeah. This is in dialogue. Chris: Yeah. So not very long ago, we had a podcast on the five different types of narration. And one of the reasons that’s useful to keep those in mind is if you have a big chunk of the same type of narration, it’s more likely to be your big pause—that is too slow in the narration. There is reason to have lots of dialogue. Sometimes there’s a situation where one character needs to recount something that’s genuinely interesting and very relevant to another character, and maybe that is worth several paragraphs. But usually, it’s unusual to have one character talking for that long, especially without interruption. And so that could often be a lecture that is boring and shouldn’t be in there. Sometimes writers want to fit in more in their story than they can reasonably fit. And so instead of making the story about the subject matter, they just have a character do a lecture about all the things they care about that they wish could fit into the story, but don’t have time for. Oren: Well, what makes this book interesting—And this is something that I think Scalzi picked up from his previous two books—which is that it’s not just one character doing this. There are several scientists who are all talking to each other. God, help me if you tried to figure out which one was which. I don’t know. They’re all the same, but they’re technically different characters. Chris: Yeah. I remember that issue in Kaiju Preservation Society. Oren: Yes. That’s where I first noticed it, and I liked that book anyway, but it has gotten worse. As an example, mild spoilers, they go out to a system where an asteroid colony has gone missing, and the information that is actually being communicated to you is that there’s nothing there and we can’t detect anything on any of our sensors. This takes pages to explain. Chris: Did he study science and now he really wants to share the science he studied? Is that what happened? Oren: I don’t think so, cause it isn’t very technical. It’s not quite techno babble, exactly. It’s a little more consistent than that. But I wouldn’t call it hard science either. And the main character’s not involved in any of this—which is a different problem, that the main character has a very odd skillset for this story. So she is kind of watching a lot of this play out—but we could have communicated that there was nothing there, that nothing showed up on their sensors in way less information than it took to do this. That’s one of the reasons why I got to the end of the book and realized very little actually happened. It’s maybe a novelette’s worth of story stretched out over a novel. Chris: Yeah. It reminds me: you read Empire of Silence and I didn’t. It’s not out yet, but maybe it will be out by the time this episode comes out. A critique of the beginning. Oren: Yeah. Chris: And that one’s so funny because it is extremely verbose, but at the same time, it’s almost like you can’t judge pacing because there’s just no story to speak of. Oren: Yeah. There is nothing. Empire of Silence is a weird book because it technically does cover a lot of stuff. It’s just that none of it matters. It is just recounting the main character’s day is the best way to describe that book. Whereas the shattering piece is not doing that, but it is still somehow taking forever to cover a very small amount of in-universe time. Chris: Yeah. One way that you can tell… a key sign of pacing that is too slow is when the dialogue cannot flow naturally because it’s interrupted by big chunks of text. And that definitely happens in Empire of Silence, where people should just be talking to each other naturally, but the writer can’t help putting exposition for a paragraph between each line. That’s not what you want your dialogue to sound like. You want it to sound like people having a conversation, which typically happens pretty fast. People don’t wait and then think for several minutes before answering. Oren: That’s a pretty awkward way to have a conversation. Chris: You can have large blocks of description, especially if you’re trying to describe something in terms of schematics. And a picture is worth a thousand words. But not in your narration. It is not worth taking a thousand words to describe a picture. Oren: It’s just not worth that much. I don’t need a picture for that many words. Chris: I mean, sometimes writers have a picture in their head and they’re like, okay, how do I make readers see this picture. And just… Don’t is the answer. Don’t, don’t do it. So those kinds of big pauses, those exposition dumps are obviously a huge one. Other kinds of big chunks of narration… Again, sometimes we do need several paragraphs of dialogue, dialogue in particular. But you know, if you have the same type of narration for a while, it’s just a warning sign to check it out and see if you maybe could be a little more concise there. Oren: And you know, we’ve established by now that this can happen in any perspective. Like Empire of Silence is third—No, first person. Wait. Is it first person retelling? It is first person retelling. Chris: It can happen in any perspective, but I do think character retellings in particular [do] tend to be rambling. Oren: Well, that’s good. Cause I was about to talk about other character retellings that do this, and I thought I had to qualify that statement by saying that this other book we just talked about wasn’t a retelling. But it turns out it was. So, actually this is only a retelling problem. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Chris: [laughs] Again, any perspective can have this, but I think that it tends to encourage it. Maybe omniscient too. I read fewer works in omniscient. Both a character retelling and an omniscient narrator give the writer the freedom to just say whatever they want at any time they want. And with great power comes great responsibility and all that. Oren: Though it is interesting to see how it can happen in different ways. Deadly Education admittedly, part of that is just because the magic school is so complicated that there’s no short way to explain that. But beyond the magic school, the main character just rambles a lot and talks about her backstory and magic and stuff. That probably could have been condensed a bit. Which is what we normally tend to think of when we think of slowing down the pacing with rambling. But then you have something like Shield of Sparrows, which has so much internalization that it just takes forever to get through a scene. Where it’s like, hang on, we need to give the characters like witty internal thought reaction to everything. I like giving the characters internal witty thought reaction to stuff, but I don’t think we need this much. I think we could dial it down a little bit. Chris: Yeah, certainly character thoughts can go overboard. Shield of Sparrows is really funny because if you just read the text, the, the constant, like internalization and thoughts feel more like they’re supposed to be kind of witty or smart ass. But then if you listen to the audiobook, they get a really good audio narrator—oh, I can’t remember her name—But she makes it sound a little angsty instead, like it’s self-deprecating. And it’s still way too much, but it is more tolerable. Oren: It does make her seem more sympathetic. Chris: It makes her feel self-conscious and nervous, instead of just being a smart ass about everything. Oren: Yeah. It’s a little harder to be like, oh no, poor you. When you’re constantly being a smart ass about stuff, it’s like, I don’t know. Seems like maybe you don’t think it’s that big a deal. Chris: So, on the opposite end of the spectrum, we have over-summary, which I’ve talked about before. This is the worst-case scenario for it being too fast. Where you have an important moment, something that you really want the reader to experience in full. And if you’re a naturally concise writer I am and Oren too, I think is on the more concise end of the spectrum… Oren: Yeah. Chris: By default, you are gonna have prose that just moves too fast because it’s a little too distant and vague and it isn’t getting enough detail. It isn’t narrating moment by moment enough. So that can be a really big problem because the story doesn’t feel real, it eliminates immersion, and everything just falls flat. Nothing is exciting because, one thing that I’ve been emphasizing lately—cause it’s important that people get this—is that tension requires anticipation. You have to anticipate the threat and have time to feel it. So, if it just whizzes by your head— Oren: whoosh Chris: [laughs] …you have no time to anticipate. And so, it can really kill tension too. Something that should be exciting if it happens too fast is actually less exciting. Oren: Yeah. I noticed that in Fourth Wing. I’m so proud of myself. When we’ve been—spoiler alert—building up the bad guys for a while and then suddenly we just see some and it’s just like, yeah, they’re over there in that town. We see some. Oh, okay. There’s some venin over there. Oh, is there? Are there now? Chris: Just seeing them as little specs from far away probably isn’t the most intimidating way to introduce the villains. Oren: I don’t know. I would’ve described it as there’s something, we don’t know what it is. We just see huge gouts of flame or something. Just anything other than just like, those are some venin, I guess. It’s like are there? I don’t know. Do you know what a venin looks like? Chris: I think Yarros does try to build up the venin with stories about them. But the issue is that we get a basic definition for what they are, but we don’t know that they’ve done anything. And I think that’s because we’re so busy with this idea that their culture has covered up their existence. I don’t know why. If you had a nationalistic military society, usually you want to exaggerate the enemy threat to keep people in line. You don’t usually wanna pretend the enemy doesn’t exist. Oren: Yeah. They’re obviously fake. You read that and it’s just like, I’m sorry. Because I’m genre savvy, I know that you’re building to the venin being the big bads. But they just feel like nothing. There’s no detail about them. And what little detail there is, is extremely generic, evil bad guy stuff. So, by the time we actually meet one, we have really no conception of what these guys are supposed to be, other than evil dragon riders. And the normal dragon riders are also evil. So what does that mean? What’s the difference? Chris: Yeah. I don’t know. Again, if we saw them do things, I think that is one key thing for a lot of villains is actually seeing them do damage and hearing what they’ve done. But any case, we digress. Oren: We do. We tend to do that. Chris: We do tend to do that. Oren: I did get some beta reading comments, if I remember correctly, about The Abbess Rebellion, feeling like it was too fast paced. How much of that do you think was due to the word craft? Go ahead and roast me. Chris: [laughs] Uh, man. Again, because pacing is used for both the wordcraft and for the plot, I would have to know more. That’s just so context dependent. Maybe your big battles. Maybe they were exciting at first, but they got exhausting. Which is what happens when the pacing is too fast in like the plot. Or maybe it was that the word craft was rushed. Oren: Yeah. I mean, I do know that at least a couple of my readers wanted more complicated politics. Which isn’t really a word craft issue, that’s a plot issue. But I suspect the wordcraft probably had something to do with it. My prose is utilitarian, would be a kind way to describe it. So, I imagine there’s probably some of that in there too. Chris: I think Utilitarian Prose is perfectly good prose. I think we all have different preferences and plenty of people love utilitarian prose. Oren: Yes, that’s definitely true. Plenty of people love your prose, Oren. it’s fine. It’s fine! Chris: [laughs] I’m not sure if when it comes to [The] Abbess Rebellion, lots of people are gonna be like, that was the perfect prose for me. I wanna pick it up just for the prose. But I do think there are a lot of people who are like, I don’t wanna think about the prose. I don’t want it to be showy. I just want it to be ”invisible”. Oren: My ideal audience is people who don’t care about the prose [laughs] Chris: [laughs] There are also errors that you can have in the prose that it doesn’t have, right? It’s also not invisible if it’s convoluted or hard to understand or awkward or all of those other things. So it utilitarian prose still take skill, okay. Oren: What if it had the phrase “rain of arrows” nine times in one chapter? Be a really nice thing if the copy editors caught that. Thank you, copy editors. Chris: Oh man. I had one short story that Ariel copy edited and she’s like, you’re just using the word “know” way too much. And I looked at it, I was like, wow, I really am using that word a lot. It felt like such a normal word. I wouldn’t have to worry about it repeating, but… Oren: Such personal attacks from the copy editors. I know. Chris: I know maybe there is some writer out there who is perfectly able to keep track of all of their usage of all terms and phrases and make sure they never repeat too much. I don’t know that I know that person. Granted now that I say that, somebody will pop up on our Discord server and be like, oh, I have this software. And I can perfectly keep track. There’s always somebody, but that seems unusual to me. Yay for copy editors. Oren: So here’s another pacing question: How much does sentence length matter? Chris: Technically it is an independent feature, but I do feel like people who use longer sentences are more likely to be verbose. Technically you could have a rushed long sentence or a run on sentence where everything happens. But I tend to think that people who use longer sentences are often the verbose kind because they’re trying to stuff in more words. But I also have people who have sentences that are really hard to understand because they’re putting really important things in a subordinate clause. Or mentioning really important things just in passing. Like, no stop, that’s too important. You gotta slow down and introduce that properly. I also see that so it can go either way. The ultimate measure of how rushed it is—we’ve talked about comparing it to real time. So ideally, the time in your story world does not pass faster than reading time. So you should basically be able to act out what’s happening in the story in the time it takes you to read it. So of course, that’s subjective. Hilariously, I do have some speed readers in my family that complain about books being like too much of a emotional rollercoaster because the story goes by so fast for them. And I’m just like, well, should you maybe not speed read if it’s, if that’s an issue. I mean, maybe they can’t. Maybe they can only speed read at this point, but they did specifically learn a speed reading technique, so… Oren: They shouldn’t have to change, Chris. The book should have to change. Chris: [laughs] But yeah, if you’re a speed reader, maybe judge this by reading out loud. But it’s also a very rough measure. We don’t have to be precise. But if you do find that you’re having this problem where you’re rushing things too much and you’re wondering why everything falls flat, you need to add more small actions in between what you have. And almost certainly more description. Usually more description is necessary, possibly more thoughts and feelings too. And that’s kind of the cure to moving too fast. I’ve had it described as savoring the moment, but I found that very vague. When my writing was washed and somebody told me to savor the moment, I didn’t know what that meant. Oren: Chris, just stop and smell the flowers. Chris: So I tried to get more specific than that, so you know what to do. Oren: What about length and complexity of the words themselves? If you’re using a lot of big words, is that slowing your pacing down? Chris: Well, it’s slowing down the reading speed. Not necessarily, no. It’s more about how vague or specific you are. Even if you’re in like a reasonable range there are still important choices you can make that help shape how different moments in your story feels and different moments in the story can call for a different pace. So again, when we talk about too slow and too fast, obviously there’s a lot in between, huge explanations like we talked about, and rushing past everything so that you can’t actually feel anything. And this is basically a balance between immersion and immediacy. So immersion—we’ve talked about before—basically it’s how real everything feels. So, the reason why over summarize prose feels dead, just doesn’t come alive, is because immersion is completely lost. So a story has to feel a little bit real for us to feel emotion. Another way we talk about immersion, of course, is if something interrupts your immersion by calling attention to itself, like an error. So that would be lost immersion because something throws you out of the story, for instance. But otherwise we’re just talking about a more slow gradient with the level of realness. Oren: Like you thought you were reading a high fantasy story and suddenly someone talks about genetics. It’s like, hang on, you guys know what genes are. Chris: So generally, a slower pace often helps with this, but not exposition. Oren: but not exposition. Chris: Exposition is not immersive because—I pretty much define it by being stuff that is not the here and now. So, we’re imparting general facts. We’re imparting something happening somewhere else or in the past. Because it is not the here and now, it is not immersive. That’s one reason it’s so bad to overuse it. But it’s also so easy to overuse because it’s so flexible. You can say anything in exposition. Oren: That’s why you should never say anything in exposition. Just don’t do it. Chris: Noooo, don’t do that. That’s bad. Oren: Just trust your readers to pick up on things, Chris! Chris: You need exposition! Oren: Trust your readers. Chris: [laughs] Description though is really immersive, which is why, if you’re over summarizing, it’s usually really helpful to add more description. Action is immersive. Dialogue is immersive. Internalization and thoughts like, hmm, maybe. A little bit can at least maintain immersion. But if you start to go overboard, then I’m not sure that’s so good for immersion. Oren: Although it should be pointed out that dialogue can be used for exposition and it doesn’t magically become not-exposition if you put it in dialogue. Chris: It is true. We tend to think of dialogue as exposition when it feels a little bit forced. And it doesn’t feel like that’s what the character would naturally say in the moment. So basically, you want your really emotionally powerful moments—Usually they benefit from higher immersion, and so it makes sense to have more description, be a little bit more verbose. Dig in a little bit and let readers appreciate the moment. I also think that a slightly slower pace with more description is really great for building anticipation and atmosphere. It’s not so great though, when you want something to be really exciting because you’ve got fast-paced action or something that feels desperate, it feels like an emergency. For that, usually you want higher immediacy, which is basically urgency on steroids. So, you still don’t wanna over summarize, but generally that calls for a little bit conciser language that moves the action a little faster. Thrillers would typically have a lot more concise language for those fast moments. Oren: Yeah. You would have your more elaborate description of the underground base when your character is brought into it for an interrogation, less so when they’re trying to escape it as it’s exploding. Chris: So, in a scene, you can vary it from one to another, even during dialogue. You can create a pause during the dialogue. Characters stare into each other’s eyes and describe their eyes for a little while to create an emotional moment. Even during fights, sometimes it is useful if there’s a particularly tense moment in the fight to put this fight into slow-mo so that you can experience the tension of the moment. Your character is pinned down and somebody is bringing a blade down on them and they can’t move. Like that’s a good time to like, actually, I’m gonna slow down a little bit here and build anticipation for that strike instead of making it feel fast and desperate. Oren: And what does that look like exactly? I don’t imagine we’re saying and then time slowed or is that what we’re imagining? Chris: No. There is a difference between when you slow down, it does make a difference what words you use. As I said, description is usually a really good way to slow down because it adds something, it adds immersion, and it can also be used for atmosphere. As opposed to if you’re just wordy or you have overly technical language. Like, they brought down their blade at a 75 degree angle from left to right or something like that. That’s obviously technical language that does not add to the moment. But if you say their blade flashed in the firelight and the grimace on their face, their red eyes bore into me as they brought their blade to bear or something. Oren: That is what red eyes tend to do as a blade is brought to bear. Conventionally speaking. Chris: Yeah. Unsurprisingly, I’m not very good at coming up with great description on the fly, but yeah, something that is embellishing. Oh, the villain pressed on close and I smelled their breath or something. And describe what their breath smells like. Oren: Ew. Do we have to? Chris: [laughs] But the point is, that’s very visceral. And so, it helps get you in the moment. And so that’s the kind of thing that you wanna use to slow down, typically. And if you’re not sure what to do, whether you wanna be faster or slower, I would just focus on: what are important actions right now? What matters? Like narrating the protagonist, reaching out the hand, turning the doorknob and swinging the door open does not matter. That’s trivial, it’s not important. Whereas if you just said, then Sally knocked Sam out. That would be very vague. Like, okay, wait, we seem to be missing things here. Did Sam see Sally coming? Did he have a chance to react? What did Sally actually do to knock Sam out? Swing a frying pan or what? There’s lots of things missing from that picture. By default that’s what you can use to judge. Oren: Well, now that we’ve covered all important frying pan pacing issues, I think we will go ahead and call this episode to a close. Chris: If you found this episode useful, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. And we will talk to you next week. [Outro Music] This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Coulton.

What’s that strange sound overhead? Is it a magical creature landing on the roof or just a common crow? If your book is shelved in the fantasy section, it had better be a magical creature! But that doesn’t mean you can’t tease your readers a little, makin’ ‘em sweat, wondering if they’ll get the sweet supernatural content they crave. To what I’m sure is your great surprise, we’ve got some tips for that! Show Notes Dana Scully  Ann Radcliff  Does Romance Have a Happily Ever After  Marry and the Witch’s Flower  Kiki’s Delivery Service  A Drop of Corruption  St. Elmo’s Fire Scooby-Doo What Moves the Dead The Fall of the House of Usher The Last of Us What Feasts at Night Transcript Generously transcribed by Maddie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris:  You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. With your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle. [Intro Music] Chris:  Welcome to the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Chris.  Oren: And I’m Oren.  Chris: Hey, did you… did you hear that? I think my mic is picking up these weird sounds that I can’t hear myself, but when I listen to the recordings from the microphone, it’s like quiet, inaudible voices whispering… with faint notes of a song I haven’t heard since childhood. It’s probably the neighbors.  Oren: Don’t be silly, Chris. Despite having encountered supernatural things many dozens of times, I am going to be skeptical of this one.  Chris: Hmm. When will you acknowledge the truth before your eyes, Scully?!  Oren: Scully’s very cool. I would like to be 5% as cool as Scully, and if this will get me there, I’m willing to do whatever it takes. Chris: So this time we’re talking about the questionably supernatural. Oren: Is it supernatural? Chris: Is it magic? Is it not magic?  Oren: So here’s my hot take. It better be. Chris, Oren: [Laugh] Chris: No. How could you diss Ann Radcliffe that way? Disrespect.  Oren: Ann Radcliffe and me, we got beef. My beef is that supernatural was fake and not real. I’m like the people who get real hung up on the idea that romance has to have a happy ever after. As far as I’m concerned, if you hint that there’s supernatural stuff, there had better be supernatural stuff.  Chris: Say, that is true, if you are writing speculative fiction, there should be some things fantastical. But I still think we might need to acknowledge that there are works outside of speculative fiction in which that might go down a little better. Oren: Hmm. Agree to disagree, except that I don’t agree. Hmm. Chris, Oren: [Laugh] Oren: I think that it’s fine if you do that as long as it is a book that is never going to be read by me.  Chris: [Laughs] Well– Oren: That’s my stance.  Chris: I don’t think you’re gonna pick up the average non-speculative mysteries. So I think we’re… Oren: Oh they’re safe then, or are they?  Chris: It is really funny to read some non-speculative works and see how they use speculative elements as dress up. Oren: Mm-hmm.  Chris: “Oh, see, I can add novelty to my word craft by using metaphors of this being a fairytale or treating this element as though it’s supernatural. But of course, we all know thats ridiculous.”  Oren: “Obviously.” [Chuckles] Chris: That’s how those stories go and it’s always weird. I critiqued a mystery story that, apparently it does have some level of supernatural elements in it, but I could not tell because it kept using metaphors. Okay, I know he’s metaphorically breathing fire because he’s angry, but could he literally breathe fire, please? That would be so much more interesting. [Chuckles] Oren: That would be neat. Who knows? Maybe.  Chris: I know this house only sort of looks like a cyclops because of the windows, but what if it actually was a cyclops? That would be better. With the speculative audience, you definitely don’t wanna taunt them with something that is fantastical only to, “Uh, sorry.” In the same way, you don’t be like, “Well now that those kids grew up and are adults, the magic goes away. ‘Cause they gotta act like adults now.” Nobody wants that. Don’t take the magic away. Don’t do it.  Oren: The most popular trope that everyone hates. The weirdest concept. I suppose someone must like it, but everyone I talk to hates that trope and it’s always funny to me how common it used to be. Chris: How could you do that to Kiki? How could you do that to her?  Oren: [Chuckles] Chris: I definitely feel like it comes from this outlook of, “Oh, well that’s not realistic. Of course, we gotta grow up so naturally the magic has to go away,” instead of thinking about what’s actually enjoyable for readers.  Oren: Also, we were talking about Mary and the Witch’s Flower that does that. Not Kiki’s Delivery Service?  Chris: Doesn’t Kiki’s Delivery Service also do that? She grows up. Oren: I thought Kiki’s Delivery Service ended with a different weird ending, which was that her search was to find her element and then the ending is that her element is flying.  Chris: Maybe I’m getting that mixed up. Oren: Which was also unsatisfying because every witch can fly and it didn’t really establish that she was especially good at flying.  Chris: [Laughs] Oren: I felt like that didn’t work either, but I think that’s a different ending than Mary and the Witch’s Flower where the character excitedly yells, “I’ll never use magic again!” It’s like, what? Why Mary? Why? Magic rules.  Chris: I know that there’s a story other than Mary and the Witch’s Flower, but Mary and the Witch’s Flower is particularly funny because apparently the storyteller’s goal was to condemn magic, but it makes magic so cool that you would barely know that. If you look closely at the plot, you can see where the storyteller was attempting to do that. In any magic story where magic is cool, you would have villains doing something bad with magic. That’s just normal. That doesn’t seem like you’re condemning magic.  Oren: You were just showing me villains doing bad things and they were magical. That’s all that was happening.  Chris: [Chuckles] Any case, back to the questionably supernatural. So why do it? Why have things that maybe or maybe are not magical, supernatural, fantastical in some way?  Oren: Other than enraging me personally.  Chris: [Laughs] Well, just having something mysterious is not gonna do it. It’s just the ending. Obviously creating a mysterious atmosphere, if you don’t know whether or not something is fantastical or if it’s normal, that opens up kind of a mystery, creates lots of atmosphere, which is a big reason to do it.  Oren: Mystery enhances a number of other traits. If the magic is mysterious and you want it to be scary, that’s much easier than if it’s well known. And if you want it to be wondrous, that’s also easy. If you don’t know for sure if it’s magic or not, you can create this feeling that there might be magic anywhere around any corner, which is very cool, even if there’s very little actual magic in your story.  Chris: I also think that it might be useful for slowing down the action in the story. I think this is good for horror in particular because we don’t necessarily wanna heat up things too soon. Any kind of monster is only gonna be threatening for so long. And a lot of horror stories, we build the mood first with a few events that seem not quite right, but aren’t overtly magical. And that helps the creep factor, and it also, frankly, uses some of the runtime.  Chris, Oren: [Chuckle] Chris: Well, building up the threat so that later we can confront it. We don’t confront it directly at first. So if we’re not even sure if it’s something supernatural, then that takes more time to reach the point where you’ve actually got it unveiled or have to fight it, for instance.  Oren: Another advantage is that if you’re in a world where the main character doesn’t know if something’s magical or not, doesn’t know that magic exists, that’s less you have to explain right off the bat. That’s just a practical benefit. Because if your main character is already a wizard or knows about magic, that’s more stuff you have to info dump. And if they don’t, then they can learn at the same time the reader does. It reduces your overhead, and that’s not the main reason to do it or anything, but it is a benefit. Chris: And I think with horror in particular, a lot of times we don’t want to have magical protagonists because we wanna disempower the protagonist. It just doesn’t make sense to have somebody coming in with magic. Instead, they’re being introduced to magic for the first time because we want it to be intimidating. But you could do this with a light story as well. You could have a story that’s really about discovering something that is wonderful and whimsical.  Oren: That’s like using a similar concept to hit a very different narrative experience. What you’re doing is, you are building the fantasy of, ”I might find magic, little old me living in my little suburb,” or wherever. That’s obviously a very different experience than a horror story being, “Ooh, is that thing spooky or just a serial killer?” But you use a similar process.  Chris: The only real difference is that we want all of the fantastical things to feel positive in nature in some way. Instead of finding blood, you find flowers. [Laughs]  Oren: Special glowing flowers. But were they glowing? They seemed like they were glowing, but during the day now you’re not sure anymore. Chris: Just for an instant, I leaned my ear next to one and I thought I heard some fairy bells, but it could have been in my imagination.  Oren: It was probably your imagination.  Chris: Let’s talk about how you do things that are only questionably supernatural. What are the tricks and techniques? I would say first any event with an unknown cause. We’ve got, “Oh, why are all the doors open after midnight?” Yes, technically somebody could be opening it, but we don’t know who, and that’s a strange thing for somebody to do. That’s your bread and butter. “This thing changed while we were looking in the other way. [Chuckles] We don’t know who did it.” Or strange unidentified music is another one. “At this time in the middle of the night, we hear strange tinkling music.” And somebody could be creating the music, but that’s a strange thing for a person to do. And maybe we wander outside looking for the source of the music and we can’t find it. When we wander different directions, it seems to come from different places. But again, that could just be a trick of sound echoing.  Oren: Here’s a question. At what point does it become a problem that it might be magic? Because I’m thinking specifically of the “locked door” problem, where you have a murder and the victim was inside a room that was locked from the inside. And in that situation, finding out that its magic is actually a disappointment because you were trying to figure out what was the clever way the murderer did this. And if the answer is that they have a spell that teleports them out of the room, that’s kind of boring. So when does that happen? When do you risk doing that?  Chris: That’s a good question. I do think one of the issues with the “locked door” problem is that the original expectation you were setting, is that there’s not gonna be magic. If we had magic in the setting where people could just say a few words in Latin and unlock doors, none of the characters are gonna ask, “Oh, how is this possible?” It wouldn’t even be worth bringing up.  This goes back to if we have an actual curiosity arc, is that different? When we’re setting up something that’s a mystery and usually there’s an active protagonist who is contemplating certain questions about the crime, and then to evoke curiosity, we’ll be like, “Oh, but this body was in three different locked chests that were locked from the inside” or whatever. You have impossible situation.  I do think that you kind of need to establish the rules for a mystery like that. Usually the expectation from the reader is that they will be able to, if they pay attention, they’ll able to guess the answer. And that the answer will follow certain rules. And so if you don’t tell them early on that this is a setting where people can just say a few words and unlock that, then that would be kind of cheating. “Wizard did it” is cheating.  But also that makes the whole question less profound, less wild. ‘Cause that’s what you’re doing to try to evoke curiosity. You’re trying to create a really wild situation that leaves people guessing. It’s not always backwards looking. We can create curiosity in a variety of ways. So it is curiosity evoking to have, let’s say, mysterious music coming out. But I think if this is a story where the supernatural is expected and you’re creating less curiosity and more anticipation that you’re gonna get something cool. If we, for instance, hear fairy music, it has its mysterious aura of mystery, but it’s not as curiosity evoking as the weird… like, A Drop of Corruption is really good at this. This is the sequel to A Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett. And sets up a really perplexing, “How could this murder have happened?” We have no idea, we think somebody died, but there’s no body and we don’t know how he could have possibly left the room, is the starting situation. But that’s really curiosity evoking.  I think when we have something like weird fairy music, it’s less curiosity, but it has more novelty. We know that the book is supernatural. We have expectations set. So we know that a possible answer could be fairies. As opposed to if you just like, “Oh, well he got out of the room because fairies did it.” That would not be acceptable in A Drop of Corruption.  Oren: And to some extent it’s almost like I know it when I see it. ‘Cause if we have a mystery with the locked room thing and it was magic, I’d be disappointed. But if the mystery is, “We found a murder victim and his organs are missing, even though there’s no marks on his skin.” And then I found out that that was due to an ancient cult performing dark magics. I don’t think I’d be disappointed. I’d be like, “Oh, cool. An ancient cult performing dark magics.” Even though technically that could be a mystery. Like, “How did they get those organs out?”  Chris: If you were given something else enjoyable, that can soften the blow. But generally, if you’ve invoked a lot of curiosity, you’re looking for the answer to fit certain constraints. Or it’s surprising, but it still makes sense with what you know, which is what a lot of mysteries do.  And I think in that case, if it’s like, “Oh, it’s disappointing that it’s not supernatural.” Well, if you have a mystery audience that are looking for a mystery answer that makes sense, more than they are looking for the novelty of real fairies or elder gods or what have you, then they’re looking for a different type of payoff. And it’s about those expectations that people come in the door with. And that you set as a storyteller.  But I do think that might be the key in some of these situations. As I mentioned in an earlier episode, I’ve recently listened to Anne Radcliffe, who is a late 1700s, early 1800s gothic novel writer, and she had a habit of doing a lot of supernatural things that then she reveals to not be supernatural in the end. Oren: Why would you think they were supernatural, silly reader?  Chris: Well, it’s interesting because she clearly had a specific beef with people being superstitious and how that was bad and you should not give into superstition.  Oren: [Laugh] Chris: And in the context she creates, I can’t say that that’s wrong. [Laughs] That was her deal. And I think she tried to answer it with various levels of nonsensical-ness. One of the ones that I liked is when she uses, “Oh no, what is that little flame on tip of somebody’s spear? That’s so scary.” And then it’s static electricity from the storm overhead. Oren: [Chuckles] It’s literally Saint Elmo’s Fire is what it is. It’s an actual thing in which the end of some kind of rod, like a ship’s mast or whatever, will glow blue, and it’s just a weather phenomenon. It’s caused by charged particles in the air. It’s very strange looking.  Chris: At first, people are like, “Oh no, it’s so ghostly.” And then the character’s like, “Oh, this just happens when there’s a storm. I don’t think it’s ghosts or a portent of doom,” or whatever. The funniest one though is when she has a character that’s horrified, and this is like a total meta mystery, basically, because it’s written omniscient, but she won’t say what her main character sees. And we imply it’s a dead person. There could be a non-supernatural dead person there. But it’s really funny when she then later needs to tie that up and she’s like, “Oh, actually it was just a wax doll. It was a wax doll, because you see…” And then of course she has to give this whole story of why a wax doll that looks like a dead person is there. It’s like, “Well, you see. This guy, he caused so much trouble and the church wanted him to repent, so they ordered him to make a wax doll of a dead person, then have him stare at it every day to contemplate his mortality so that he would think about being a better person.”  Oren: Just contemplating my wax doll over here. Chris: “And then he decided that it was a good idea and then stipulated that his descendants would have to keep the wax doll of the dead person to contemplate their own mortality or else they would lose some of their inheritance to the church.” So they were required to keep it around, but they didn’t wanna look at it, so they put it under this veil outta sight where the main character found it and thought it was an actual dead body and was too scared to look closer.  Oren: I have a really important tip for writers who are implying that there is something supernatural and then revealing it was something else. Don’t do that. Chris, Oren: [Laugh] Oren: If you have to launch into a big backstory explanation to explain it, that’s probably not a good idea. That’s true in general for any mystery. If once the mystery is revealed, you have to be like, “Okay, here’s two pages of exposition.” Something has probably gone wrong.  Chris: This is the method of, instead of just having events with unknown causes that are weird, Anne Radcliffe would actually have people see things that they thought were supernatural, and then it just turned out to be some guy who maybe was doing something a little unusual, but we would explain. Like at one point bandits are hiding their goods in the part of the castle that previously was abandoned, and so they see a guy in a dead woman’s room and they’re like, “Oh no, it’s a specter! It’s a ghost!” Because we have to assume that they didn’t look very closely. I think it’s a little hard when we have movies with such good special effects. In our thought of, “Well, couldn’t you tell visually the difference between a ghost and a person?” But the assumption here is that no, ghosts could just be like people walking around, but we think they’re ghosts for some reason. Oren: They could be. Who knows? [Chuckles]  Chris: Did you ever watch, was Scooby-Doo a thing?  Oren: Yeah! Chris: Scooby-Doo is pretty famous for having people faking supernatural things.  Oren: My brother loved Scooby-Doo, which part of my deep seated childhood resentment that he was allowed to watch cartoons when I was not at his age. His standard older sibling experience. He loved Scooby-Doo and so I watched fair amount of it just by osmosis ’cause that’s what was on. And yes, the older cartoons, the joke is that it’s always an old rich guy who is trying to scam someone in a monster costume. Which of course raises some serious questions like, “We saw that guy punch through a metal door. How did he do that?” Chris: Again, not having really watched much Scooby-Doo I know the thing it has a reputation for is having obviously supernatural things happen, and then trying to weakly explain how the effect was created by some normal scheming guy in ways that are very unrealistic and definitely could not have created. Oren: It depends on the episode. With some of them, all that really happened is that a guy chased them around and it’s like, “Well, that was actually a guy in a monster suit that chased us around.” Okay, sure, that could happen. And then in other episodes they’re like, “Ooh, how did he do all of this weird stuff?” Well, he used a fog machine and magnets, and those have varying degrees of credibility.  But then there are also times when they just do things that there is no explanation offered or attempted. I think there was an episode where a vampire turned into bats, and then later it turned out he was a guy in a suit, and it is like, “Well, hang on… the bats thing.” I think that happened. Granted, it’s been a while, so maybe not. But I do know there were several episodes where the monsters clearly had superhuman strength and that was just never explained.  Chris: I think part of the problem is not only is it increasingly hard to believe that something that we see could be ambiguous is about it being supernatural, but also if the audience knows it’s gonna be supernatural and there’s obvious signs it’s supernatural, I lose my patience. Of people being like, “Oh no, maybe it’s not supernatural.” It’s like, can you just accept a supernatural already? We know it’s supernatural. It becomes tiresome after a while if characters see something that is obviously supernatural and then drag their feet for a while, even if it’s realistic. It’s like, we’ve all been there. We’ve seen this happen in countless stories.  Oren: I find myself really torn there, and this is actually why I so often prefer to start with characters already knowing about the supernatural. Just because on the one hand, I know it’s boring for them to go continue to insist it’s not supernatural for a long time, but at the same time it’s also really hard for me to believe that they would just accept that something was supernatural unless they had some pre-existing beliefs in that area.  Chris: We just enjoyed T Kingfisher’s What Moves the Dead. Which is basically an adaptation of Fall of the House of Usher. Although, Fall of the House of Usher is so brief that it sticks close enough that I think it’s fair to call it an adaptation. But again, it has so much plot that the original doesn’t because the original is just a tiny little story.  But I think it’s a really good novella and I think in that one, we have weird things. And I think the important thing there is it’s not necessarily that the characters accept outlandish ideas immediately. It’s that they’re willing to move forward, not being sure, so that we don’t delay too much arguing about it. They don’t just refuse to take action, which is frustrating if we know. It’s that they pursue things reluctantly, not knowing what the explanation is, but hey, “Why don’t we try this because we need some solution.” And I think that works pretty well.  Oren: It does help a little bit in What Moves the Dead, that, spoilers, the explanation is that it’s a spooky fungus. The characters are more willing to accept that because they don’t know a whole lot about fungi. And this is the 1890s where mycology is still kind of in its infancy, so it’s a little easier for them in that context to accept that maybe fungus can do this.  Whereas nowadays, at least for someone who is knowledgeable about fungi, it would be like, “What? No fungi can’t do that. That’s ridiculous.” Although perhaps not a normal person ’cause I have talked to several people who think that The Last of Us is based on real science.  Chris: [Laughs] No. Oren: And are genuinely afraid that fungus is going to do that. You should be worried about increased fungal infections for a number of reasons, but they’re just the boring kind that will kill you. Not the kind that will turn you into a cool zombie.  Chris: We should be worried about more epidemics, but we don’t need to worry about zombies specifically. But I think that works well. If the characters can’t fully embrace it, but they have limited options of their situation, they need to do something. They can just keep an open mind and take what actions they can think of that might do something.  Another thing that we see often in gothic stories or in other stories where we need to make fantastical things ambiguous, is using dreams. Dreams are just very convenient because there’s all sorts of tropes about people getting visions or portents that are actually real in dreams. Or you can have something that is ambiguously a dream. If you have a dream where the character gets outta bed and walks around and then sees something supernatural and then suddenly wakes up in their bed, you don’t know if that was actually a dream or not. And so that can be really convenient for making something ambiguous or having the character be like, “Okay, well obviously that didn’t really happen.“ But maybe it did.  Oren: But maybe. Chris: Or maybe something invaded their mind. You can have your antagonist that attacks people in their dreams, which happens. Another Kingfisher one, What Feasts at Night would be the sequel. So dreams really offer a lot in terms of creating ambiguous situations. Is that a magical dream? Is it a normal dream? Or was I actually walking about in the middle of the night and saw things?  Oren: So here’s a thought. At what point does it cross the line from something that it’s okay to leave ambiguous, to something that you really need to explain by the end? I can think of some stories where if this character has an arc about regaining their faith, I don’t really need to know if the good luck they had at the end was actually an angel or not. I’m okay with that being ambiguous. I think that if someone was going around doing murders and the witnesses were all like, “It looked like an angel killing people with a flaming sword,” I’d want to know if that was real or not.  Chris: [Laughs] Oren: And so presumably you cross a line somewhere. I just don’t know where that is. Chris: That’s a good question, but certainly I think when it’s more closely related to actual plot arcs that need to be concluded. I think that’s the first question I would ask. Is there a plot arc here that we need to close? And sometimes that might be a curiosity arc. It might be, again, “We had a murder done in a weird way.” We really do expect that to be explained by the end, because that’s the expectations you set with a mystery audience. If you’re gonna evoke so much curiosity that it’s designed to create enough engagement for people to keep going. That’s probably something that needs to be answered. Whereas it’s something that we’ve closed up all the arcs, but this could be one way or the other. I also think that it might be easier to have something that has two different options instead of something that’s wide open. Was that really the ghost of my mother or was that just a dream or hallucination when I was on shrooms? [Laughs] We have two different options.  Whereas if we have a situation where we never find out where the strange music is coming from at all, that’s not an either or. That’s a wide open. So I really think that ambiguousness and ambiguous endings, you really do best when you paint what the possibilities are. It’s either this or that. And we don’t know which, but we can imagine either one.  Whereas if you have a wide open question, that could be anything. “We didn’t find out where the strange unidentified music came from,” so that doesn’t give us anything to go off of or to think about. Whereas if you have, “Oh, we thought that that music came from this person, but then somebody else said that they were dead before we heard the music.” Oren: Ooh. Chris: Did they make a mistake or did that person play music from beyond the grave?  Oren: Hmm.  Chris: [Laughs] We have two options. We’ve closed off the plot arcs. I guess that’s where I would start.  Oren: Well now we’re gonna go ahead and call this episode to a close and no, we’re not gonna explain if that stuff at the beginning about special voices hearing on the microphone was magic or not. You’ll just have to wonder.  Chris: …Or will we?  Chris, Oren: [Laugh] Chris: Okay, well, if you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.  Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. [Outro Music] Outro: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.