The Mythcreant Podcast

Award season is almost here, and as you can no doubt guess, we have… opinions. Specifically, opinions about the six novels on the short list for 2025’s Hugo award. Are these books good? Yes, and also no. They’re a continuum, you might say. And somehow, Adrian Tchaikovsky is on both ends of that continuum. How did he get there? If you listen in, you might just find out. Show Notes 2025 Hugo Finalists  The Familiar The Last Murder at the End of the World The Spellshop The Warm Hands of Ghosts Legends and Lattes Love Interest Beauty Pageant Graham Gore  A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking What We Do in the Shadows Murderbot The Mimicking of Known Successes Transcript Generously transcribed by Melanie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.  You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.  [Intro Music] Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren, with me today is: Bunny: Bunny! Oren: and Chris: Chris Oren: So today we are discussing the six best books of 2024.  [Chuckling] Oren: This is a very objective measurement of the best books. It’s definitely not just the six that were chosen by a kind of limited audience popularity contest. Bunny: Look, one of them was pretty good.  Oren: Yes. So, this is our Hugo episode because there are six Hugos. And let’s just go around and say how many of them we read. Bunny, how many of them did you read?  Bunny: Two.  Oren: Okay. Very respectable. Chris, how many did you read?  Chris: Well, I might say three. But the reality is that I read … [laughing] … the truth is that I did not finish most of them. I finished two and then I started three more, and one of them I was just, no. Not at all.  Bunny: And one of them that you did not finish was on the list for some reason.  Oren: Just remember, because I would never brag, I’m a very humble person, but I did read all six and I’m therefore a superior being.  Bunny: Ah, so this was a shaming question. I see. I am firmly in third place here. In my defense, I read a lot of other things on the proto-Hugo List you made, your prediction chart. I was constrained by what was at the library because I’m glad I didn’t buy some of them.  Chris: Well, you did finish Ministry of Time, right? I feel like that deserves a round of applause. Bunny: Woo. Okay. Maybe I can get bonus points for Ministry of Time. I read Ministry of Time and The Tainted Cup and a bunch of others that didn’t end up on this list. Which is funny to me because there were many on there that deserved to be on the list more than Ministry of Time.  Chris: Yeah. This year we tried to guess–I should say mostly Oren tried to guess, and some of us added a few additional books–what books might end up being nominated, which is an interesting exercise. The book that I was most surprised to not get nominated was Leigh Bardugo’s The Familiar.  It has a lot of things that I feel like Hugo voters like where it’s got a historical setting that focuses on marginalization and also has the kind of wordcraft that I would expect that Hugo voters would be interested in. I do wonder if the fact that it was so focused on the romance hurt it. Now there are a couple other Hugo nominees that do have romances but I feel like they’re less conventional romances than what’s in The Familiar.  Oren: Yeah. So, okay, let’s run through this real quick what those six books are. I mean they’re on the show notes, but just in case. So, the six are Alien Clay, Ministry of Time, A Sorceress Comes to Call, Someone You Can Build a Nest In, Service Model, and The Tainted Cup. So those are the six that actually got nominated for the Hugo. Then there are several others that we think maybe should have been on there instead.  Bunny: Yeah, certainly more than the existing one. I think that the other books from your list that I read, most of them, aside from Tainted Cup, which was the only one I could really wholeheartedly recommend, of the ones I ended up being able to read, I would’ve been a little annoyed if they had been nominated but far less annoyed than I was about Ministry of Time. Like Last Murder at the End of the World had a plot, things happened. The mystery, once it got started and you got past all of the convoluted worldbuilding, was fun. Ministry of Time was a slog.  Oren: Yeah. So, if I was going to modify this list, and again, this is already from a biased sample size, right, because I was reading books specifically because I thought they might be on the Hugo finals, but just based off of that sample size, I would axe Alien Clay and Ministry of Time, and I would replace them with The Spellshop and The Warm Hands of Ghosts. That last one, I think only I read. Chris: Probably why it wasn’t nominated.  Oren: Yeah, like I haven’t heard anyone talk about it despite it getting a respectable number of Goodreads views. But I liked it. And granted it’s also about World War I and about an aspect of it that I find really interesting, so, there’s a little bit of a targeted audience thing going on there. And I can see replacing A Sorceress Comes to Call with The Familiar. To me, I could go either way on that one. I don’t have strong feelings.  Bunny: I don’t know if I would put The Spellshop up there, but my feelings about The Spellshop are known.  Chris: I know you have different feelings about The Spellshop than we do.  Bunny: It’s not interesting enough. One of the funny things about the Hugos and any awards competition is that comparing these books to each other is always extremely funny, and I think it would be the strangest time for me to have to compare The Spellshop to The Tainted Cup. Like they’re just such different books. But you have to do that, right? You have to do that for the Oscars and stuff too, obviously.  Chris: And I voted for both of those to be nominated. It was pretty predictable that The Tainted Cup got nominated and The Spellshop didn’t. I do think that, just like romance, that cozies have a tough time and lighter stories have a really tough time getting nominated for the Hugos. Legends and Lattes did it because that one was kind of a big hit and a trendsetter, but I think cozies in general are going to, people just feel that darker stories are deeper, and it’s unfortunate, but it’s how it goes. Oren: Which is just funny because every so often there’s a think piece panicking about how light stories are taking over. It’s like, Calm down. Look at the ones actually winning the awards, friend. Chris: Yep, yep. Not actually happening.  Oren: Yeah. So, to me they have like a pretty clear scale of quality books where I just find Alien Clay and Ministry of Time to just be… I don’t get it. I don’t understand what we’re doing here.  With Alien Clay, yeah, it tells me that the author shares my politics mostly, which I guess is nice, but I can get that from reading his BlueSky account. There’s no story here.  Bunny: Nominating Adrian Tchaikovsky’s BlueSky account for a Hugo. That is innovative.  Oren: Yeah, there you go. I mean, I’m glad. I’m glad he’s anti-fascist. That’s good. That is a good thing, but I just don’t really think it has that much of an impact on his book.  Chris: For me, the funny thing, if we’re talking about Tchaikovsky, is usually I hear a lot of people refer to various writing as lazy, and I almost never do that. Generally, you don’t know what was going on with the writer. They were probably trying their best, got a lot on their plate already, but when I look at Tchaikovsky’s writing, you know, I don’t know if my perception is accurate, but the thing that really strikes me is it seems lazy and it’s like the only author where that is true.  Now, there are two Tchaikovsky books that were nominated, and one of them, I think, actually deserves that nomination. Just to add, make it a little more complicated. But Alien Clay…I did this love interest beauty pageant article on the site where I took out the introductory description of various love interests and kind of made it into a fun contest, and he describes the love interest when she enters the story as just dark and fleshy. And it’s just like, like how? How is she dark and how is she fleshy? Bunny: Me receiving a valentine that says, You’re dark and fleshy. That’s what I love about you.  Chris: I guess it’s creative in a way. I mean, maybe not the dark part, I suppose calling the love interest fleshy, but it also feels so slapdash. It doesn’t feel like you put in effort.  Oren: That’s basically the issue with Alien Clay, is that Alien Clay reads like a university lecture, and I’m sure its fans will tell me that was on purpose because the main character is a university professor, but it’s so dull and dry and it doesn’t feel like a story. There’s very little story. It’s just like, Hey, we’re hanging out. It sucks and it sucks a lot, but not in a way that feels dangerous or immediate, and then we win later, and don’t ask how, it just kind of happens.   Bunny: Look, the way to defeat fascism is to give in to a not at all suspicious hivemind.  Oren: Yeah, it’s fine. Don’t worry about it. Whereas Service Model, which has a very similar writing style, Tchaikovsky doesn’t really do immersive description as far as I can tell, but in Service Model, it works a lot better because Service Model is funnier, he’s using that very dry acerbic narration to make jokes, so it actually feels like it’s adding something,  and then Service Model also has a lot of novelty because we are really focusing on how weird these robots are in the way they make decisions and how that’s different from humans and that’s, to me, I think the big source of what made Service Model interesting. Whereas I didn’t feel like Alien Clay did anything with that. It was just, sure, there’s alien ruins, I guess, and that’s it.  Chris: Yeah, I mean, for books that get a Hugo, I just want to see that they have good knowledge of story structure and good storycraft. The Spellshop, for all it may have seem plain, I felt like it showed that. I felt like it showed a lot of deftness when it came to constructing a plot in a way that a lay person may not appreciate. Bunny: Are you calling me a lay person? I’ll have you know I’m an expert.  [laughing] Oren: It is kind of funny to me that most people who do a lot of reading or watching of movies or whatever, or any kind of consuming of media for a living, they almost always prefer weird out there stuff because they want to see something different. With Chris and I, it’s the opposite. It’s like, no, we want to see the basics done well because we almost never see that.  Chris: Yeah, that’s exactly right. I just want to see somebody who has nailed those foundations. And with both Ministry of Time and Alien Clay, they’re just like not there. I have not read Alien Clay. That’s the one I just said: No. Ministry of Time was one of the ones I did not finish, and it is just, oh, so much summary, so much exposition. I mean, we talked about it a number of episodes ago. It has the things that the literary crowd likes, but it does not, in my mind, show good storycraft fundamentals.  Oren: See, I did put Ministry of Time ahead of Alien Clay mostly because—despite the fact that it’s not a good book—there is at least a spark of passion for real life guy Graham Gore, historical figure. I can feel the author is interested in him.  Bunny: Oh, the author loves Graham Gore and this doomed expedition. Oren: Big fan.  Chris: We even have interludes where we go into his life. Oren: So, there’s something there, right? Whereas with Alien Clay, it’s like, it doesn’t feel like this story is passionate about anything. Bunny: If I could take the author of Ministry by the hand and be like, let me give you some advice about your ideas before you write this book I would say, historical fiction. Write it about this boat and this doomed expedition, but something goes fantastical and alternate history or something. You love this guy, let’s stick here. And not the tedious— Chris: But she’s writing what she knows and she has a super big crush on him, so she needs to write herself having a big crush on him.  Oren: Oh gosh. Bunny: It did sort of feel that way, especially since the character didn’t have a name. That’s very literary. Oren: To look at the books in the middle for a second because it’s easy to get obsessed with the two that are bad and then the two that are good. So, I find anything by T. Kingfisher, and this is A Sorceress Comes to Call, very funny because we know because of A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking that Kingfisher does know how to plot. She simply chooses not to most of the time. Chris: Yeah, we read A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking first, and I was like, oh, because I’d heard a lot about T. Kingfisher from other people who are fans, and I was like, oh wow, she is quite good. And then several books later, it’s like, okay, those books all have basically the same problem, where it turns out she really doesn’t like plotting. She just wants to build a collection of characters she likes hanging out. Just hanging out with each other. That’s what she actually wants to write and that’s what most of her books are.  And A Sorceress Comes to Call has a great opening. It has a fabulous opening. It is dark, but it’s very good. It is focused on abuse. And that abuse has a magical element in this story, and it’s brought to life so vividly and it’s really good. But the problem is as the book progresses, the characters just hang around and I mean, at this point, I have to say Kingfisher probably doesn’t really care about having the plot happen, but the characters basically spent a whole bunch of time talking about how they should have a plan and when they finally come up with a plan— and I’m bored at the lack of movement—when they finally come up with it, it is so bad. It is: Let’s do this and then maybe we’ll find out more about what the villain wants, even though it’s kind of obvious. And then when we find out what she wants, maybe then we’ll come up with a plan. So, it’s like a plan to come up with a plan.  Oren: That’s a good plan. Bunny: Matryoshka doll plan. Chris: And I just found that I almost stopped there. Like I took a break because I was so frustrated, and then I continued and then stopped later because I was frustrated.  Oren: It has a decent ending. It takes a while to get there, but it does have one. Kingfisher is too successful for plots now. It’s like if I ever become a successful author, all of my books will be weird airship terminology, and you’ll just be like, Oren, what is a keel corridor? You forgot to say what that is. What is goldbeater’s skin? Why are you talking about this so much? And I’ll be like, you can’t stop me! Anything I write will sell now!  Bunny: Well, the funny thing about A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking is that it’s two well-plotted books that are very different in tone stuck together. Oren: Yeah, but there’s baking in both of them. Bunny: That’s true. There is baking. There is continuity in the act that the protagonist performs. We have a mystery and a war story, and both are good on their own and yet they feel weird in the same book. That was my take on that book. Chris: I have to say, the way it comes together in the end is not quite right, which is common, though. That’s a lot of times the hardest thing in plotting, bringing the end together, and so even with A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking, we can see some cracks there. At the same time, it still feels like it shows a lot of skills that Kingfisher does not show in her other books.  Oren: She doesn’t have to anymore.  Chris: She does not have to. There’s also just some fundamental things about the story that don’t quite work. It’s kind of misogynist, honestly, which is surprising from Kingfisher where we have this villainess who has tons of magical powers, but all she wants to do with them is seduce a rich man.  Oren: No, hang on. It’s even weirder than that. She doesn’t even use her powers to seduce rich men. She just also has a lot of magical powers. And then seduces men. Those are just two things that are true at the same time. They’re just unrelated.  Chris: The characters have a lot of debates: Oh, should we tell the guy that she’s seducing that she’s an evil sorceress? Nah. And so they have to come up with excuses for that. It just has a lot of fundamental things that are not quite working either, but it has a fantastic opening. I see why it got people’s attention. And also, Kingfisher has gotten Hugo’s before, or at least one Hugo before, so not terribly surprising, that this was nominated. Bunny: Look, can we make a pact that if one of us is being seduced by an evil sorceress, and the other two know about it, that they will tell the third one?  I think that’s just what friends do, you know? Chris: I think we can make that agreement.  Oren: No, we wouldn’t want to upset you. Don’t worry. Apparently, he wasn’t that seduced because (spoilers) at the end, when he finds out that she died horribly, he’s like, Eh. He has the most nonplussed reaction you’ve ever seen. And they never tell him that she was evil. They just tell him that she died horribly. And he’s like, oh, well, you know. So it goes.  Chris: So, let’s talk about Someone to Build a Nest In, because this is a pretty unique story. It’s not my favorite, but I think being nominated makes sense for this book. It stands out: it has a monster as the main character, who has a unique voice, it also features abuse, abusive family situation, it has queer romance.  I had trouble with it because after the initial novelty of the monster POV started to wear off, I didn’t have great attachment to the characters. As opposed to A Sorceress Comes to Call, where I like the characters pretty well, but the plot, it’s really sagging. Someone to Build a Nest In has a decent plot with twists and turns but the main character is a little on the selfish kind of hypocritical side and the love interest doesn’t have a lot of agency.  Oren: This is the thing I don’t get about the main character, is that it feels like the entire character portrayal of her, because she’s always talking about how humans suck. Humans are the worst. And it just kind of depends on you not remembering that she murders people when she wants a snack. And that’s not part of the story. She never does that on screen or particularly seems to want to, we’re just told that’s the thing that she’s done. And I don’t understand why. Why not just have it be that she’s only ever had to kill in self-defense since it’s not part of the story anyway? I don’t get it.  Bunny: Look, someone liked in What We Do in the Shadows.  Chris: She is put in a position where she’s on the defensive in the beginning of the book, but at the same time she’s so powerful that I can never quite feel sympathy for her. And so if she was more of an underdog and she was not killing people, if we didn’t hear about her escapades killing people, I feel like she would’ve been closer to Murderbot probably, and a character that I could get a lot more on board with. She’s still a very unique character. I’m sure some people love her, but I couldn’t quite. The novelty wore off and the attachment wasn’t there to replace it.  Oren: She definitely rubs me the wrong way because I’m just not into characters who are constantly going on about how humanity sucks. Because it’s like, I don’t know, man. You try to do better, you know, make your own species and show me how that goes. We’re doing our best here, all right. So that just always irritates me and the fact that she’s clearly the worst, except for during the story for whatever reason, it makes that hit harder.  Chris: But she has one weakness, because she’s too powerful, and then that weakness is negated. Oren: Right, because having weaknesses is hard. Why would we want that? It would be like if in the beginning of a Superman story, he said, Oh, my only weakness is kryptonite. And then someone fired a kryptonite gun at him, and then he’s like, Ah, but you see I also wear a bulletproof vest, so NBD.  [laughing] Chris: So yeah, there are places that it’s not as tense as it should be. Oren: Yeah, it does have a very cool twist at the end which I really liked. That makes it a lot better. It’s just like a lot of stories, we were talking about this a couple episodes ago, they have a strong start because we put a lot of effort into it and then a cool, exciting climax. And then there’s just a middle where stuff happens, we kind of mill around until it’s time for the ending. Bunny: I will say having not read the book that I would nominate it for a Hugo just for having a good title.  Oren: Yeah, I mean it’s a memorable title. It’s a hard to say title, though. It’s like, Hey, have you read Someone You Can Build a Nest In? That’s awkward. That takes like five years to say. Bunny: That’s better than The Mimicking of Known Successes, though. Oren: It is better than The Mimicking of Known Successes. It at least has something to do with the story. I started shortening it to Build a Nest, but even that doesn’t really work I don’t think.  Chris: But still I could give that one full points for creativity. I can see how it got nominated. Oren: I won’t be mad if it wins.  Chris: I won’t be mad either. Oren: I will be mad if The Tainted Cup doesn’t win, though. I guess I will be mad if any book but The Tainted Cup wins because The Tainted Cup should win because it’s the best one. But other than that, I wouldn’t be mad. Bunny: Despite it only having a single tainted cup. That’s not terribly important in the scheme of the book. It was very, very good. Oren: Relation of title to book is not high.  Bunny: There is a tainted cup that comes up at the end. I was waiting for the tainted cup to appear, but it did not play a prominent enough role for me to cheer when it showed up.  Chris: Well, it has gravitas, which is probably what they were going for. Bunny: It does. Thematic, I guess.  There were a lot of tainted things and a cup was among them.  Oren: It’s better than the working title, which was Sherlock Holmes and Watson, but it’s Roman Empire, Kind of, and also There’s Lots of Cool Plant Magic. Bunny: That would be harder to say than Someone You Can Build a Nest In.  Chris: Okay. The thing I don’t get about the setting is why you would do a somewhat Roman empire setting and then make up a bunch of titles of officers that are not real Roman titles but are still extremely confusing and hard to keep track of.  Oren: Yeah it does have too many ranks. Chris: Why would you do that?  Bunny: It absolutely needed the list of ranks at the beginning because otherwise I would not have been able to follow it. Chris: If they’re not real title, why not make them easier to remember and understand?  Oren: I was really confused when I was looking at the list of titles because it’s like, princeps, okay, well that’s a Roman rank. It’s not the rank they’re using here, but it’s Roman. Where are all these other ones from? Like, are these real ranks? I just don’t know about, did he just grab one from, you know, every country he threw a dart at? I don’t know. Is there a real place somewhere with the title immunis? Who knows.  Chris: It’s also not that Roman, honestly, the titles are one of the most Roman things in there, and they’re not real Roman. I feel like you could just take out the Roman element.  Oren: Yeah. I mean, it’s got legions and senates and patronage. It has some less blatant Roman inspiration.  Chris: Okay. But anyway, it’s weird. We actually really like this book. We’re just complainers. We’re just big complainers. Oren: That’s just how we do.  Chris: So I was talking about the few things that I have to complain about with this book.  Bunny: How this is on the same list as Ministry… It’s shocking to me. I guess Din doesn’t step back and think briefly about how racism is bad and then go about his day. I guess that’s the difference. Oren: Look, the Hugo contains multitudes, okay?  Chris: So this is a Sherlock mystery with a really cool bio-cosmic horror setting that really adds lots of novelty and is recounted in a lot of depth. I think also the wordcraft is pretty good and the description really helps bring it to life. I very much like the main character, Din, I find him very lovable and we’ve got the eccentric Sherlock that he works for in the background but she gets overstimulated easily, so she can’t go around to the crime scenes herself and so our Watson does that, and he’s basically the main character. Oren: And he’s also dyslexic.  Bunny: Yeah, it does a great job using its magic system, for lack of a better word, to also portray characters with disabilities or disability equivalents. So, Din is dyslexic and Anna has sensory issues. She gets overstimulated really easily and stuff like that, which I thought was very cool and well done.  Oren: It’s funny to me because I’ve gotten so used to weird portrayals of dyslexia that I didn’t recognize that he was dyslexic until Chris pointed it out. And I was like, oh, yeah, okay, that makes sense. And that’s not a knock on the book. Like I don’t think that Bennett needed to make it more obvious. It’s just, it didn’t occur to me because the last time I saw a dyslexic character in a big sci-fi property he was immune to time madness because he sees everything backwards already and it’s like, okay, I guess that’s what dyslexia is in Star Trek. [laughing] Chris: You’re making it weird, Star Trek. Bunny: The linguistic shift, let’s say. It’s not the same. Thanks, Star Trek. Chris: I will say the ending to the mystery is a little predictable for me anyway, but honestly, I would much prefer an ending that’s a little predictable to one that doesn’t make any sense. And my experience is it’s going be one or the other because a lot of times it’s just people are trope savvy enough and can see where things are going enough, it’s extremely difficult to have a super surprise ending that actually follows all the foreshadowing you put down. So even though there were some things about it that I predicted I was still pretty happy.  Bunny: And here’s the thing, is that something being predictable is often used as an insult to it but often what it means is that the foreshadowing was good and readers were able to tie the foreshadowing to the conclusion and that means that the conclusion followed logically from the foreshadowing. When people start calling something predictable as a universal bad then we get Game of Thrones trying to outsmart Reddit. [laughing] Oren: I would say that it’s an ending where you can guess what’s going to happen but it doesn’t feel frustrating because it’s not something where it feels like the characters should have guessed it already. And that is often the sign of a good mystery because we want to solve the mystery. That’s part of the reason we read mysteries in the first place. Chris: So, yeah, that one we’ve been passing around talking about it with our followers on Discord. It seems to be pretty popular. There’s no book that’s universally liked, but generally people have been very positive who’ve read it. So that’s a good read, as long as you’re okay with something that is a little dark, it’s not very dark, but people die in horrific ways, killed by plants bursting out of them and stuff like that. So if that’s okay with you then it’s a great read.  Bunny: And that’s not a spoiler because that is the first scene. Oren: At least some of them deserved it, though. Chris: Yes, true. Some of them did deserve it.  Bunny: Yes. It’s quite a good mystery with a distinctly okay climax and I hope that one gets it.  Oren: Yeah, it’s just a very good book, you know. It’s just good. All right, well, I think on that unusually positive note, we’ll go ahead and call this episode to a close.  Chris: You can reward us for saying good things about books by supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/Mythcreants.  Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber, he’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of 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]

We love it when a character does cool things and gets cool rewards, but only to a point. When a character goes past that point, they get annoying, contrived, and frustrating. They have too much candy, but it’s we who get the stomach ache. Fortunately, this is not an automatic state of affairs. Characters get too much candy when authors make mistakes, and it’s possible to avoid those mistakes. This week, we’ve got a few tips on that! Show Notes Candy and Spinach Mary Sue Calvin and Hobbes Kvothe  Luffy Eda Clawthorne Raksura Kelsier Mysterious Badass Bondrewd  Black Swan Oz the Great and Powerful Transcript Generously transcribed by Aiden Lumb. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny. Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant podcast. I am Chris and with me is… Oren: Oren. Chris: And… Bunny: Bunny. Chris: We are of course cohosts. We’re completely equal partners, but I happen to have a secret dramatic backstory. So… the next ten episodes are going to have to be all about me and how shocking but cool my backstory is. Oren: We’re all equal, but some of us are more equal than others. Chris: It’s okay, Chris. We love you. You deserve this. Go for it. Bunny: I want to learn more! Chris: You’re so correct about how these next episodes should go. Oren:  Well, hang on. I think I’m actually going to disagree with Chris, just so that she can show how right she is, of course. Like, I’m not going to try to actually argue. I’m just going to put up some really pitiful objections that will be easily smacked aside. Bunny: Don’t listen to him, Chris. He’s a jealous hater. Oren: This might literally be a sign that I’ve been mind-controlled by the villain. Chris: Yeah, did you know that I used to be a rebel who wouldn’t follow anyone’s rules? That’s right. They called me “the book ender” because I would sneak around finishing people’s unfinished manuscripts. But no-one ever knew who I was. But… ta-dah! Shocking. I am the book ender. Oren: That’s so cool. That’s just the greatest thing that has ever happened. Bunny:  Oh my god, your eyes just changed colour! Chris: I know! They change colour depending on my mood. Bunny: They’re new and exciting and sparkly! Yes. And your hair, too: interesting. Chris: It’s also a sign that I am the chosen one and I have the secret power that’s needed to defeat the villain. Oren: Yeah. But you’re very modest, obviously. Bunny:  Of course. Chris: Naturally. In fact, that’s why I’m the chosen one: I’m so modest. And only a modest person can defeat the villain. Don’t worry, I’ll win every verbal smearing match with him, though. So… making fun of candied characters is always very easy. So, we’re talking about how to fix over candied characters and just a review. Most people listening probably know what we’re talking about, but again… So, a candied character is one that gets lots of glorification. Lay people are most likely to call these characters “Mary-Sues”, which we don’t use because it’s a gross and sexist term. It specifically targets women, even though in really big budget popular works they are far more likely to be men. Bunny:  Also, what if I don’t want to marry Sue? Oren: You don’t have to marry anybody. You can be single for as long as you want. Chris: The other thing that’s weird about Mary-Sues is it kind of conflates having a self-insert character with having glorified character and while those things can go together, they are also others that are… who will put in a self-insert character and really beat up on them. Oren: Yeah… which is way worse! It’s so uncomfortable to read a book about a character who is obviously the author’s self-insert and then the book just craps on them. And I’m just like: “author, are you okay?” I don’t know, maybe you need to talk to someone. Chris:  I think oftentimes it’s their younger self, where they’re like, oh, why couldn’t I be more like this when I was younger? But hey, stories are an outlet for our deep feelings— Bunny: Psychology… Chris: —Sometimes making them more transparently obvious than we would choose. Oren:  In reality most of the time you will never know if a character is the author’s self-insert or not. And for the most part, that never comes up. It only matters when suddenly people are looking for a reason to dislike a character and they’re like: “ah, this is definitely the author’s self-insert.” Like, if you say so bro. Bunny: Sometimes a self-insert character might be an incredibly boring, everyday person. I’m kind of reminded of that Calvin & Hobbes strip, where Calvin says he’s writing a book and Hobbes asks what it’s about and he says it’s about a guy who flips through channels with his TV remote and Hobbes looks to the camera and kind of walks away. And he’s like, “they say you write what you know.” Chris: Again, there’s something wrong with self-insert characters. They’re fine. But in any case, if we’re looking at candy, which is different than a self-insert character, we’ve covered some of the typical signs. Always being right is a thing that a lot of candied characters have. Usually, they are more quirky and unique than the characters around them. You can see that that’s where the creative energy’s going. They typically solve problems easily; being exceptionally good at an unusual number of things, like having three sets of professional skills that they’re the best in the world at, for instance. Oren: They have so many PHD’s. Chris: Having special physical features, like bright eyes or colour changing eyes. Or, you know, red red hair instead of just red hair. Bunny: Redder than red. True red! The colour of flame. It’s like, wait a second. Chris: Flames aren’t true red! What!? Bunny: It’s blue at the roots. I don’t know. Chris:  So, is it the colour of flame, or is it true red? Bunny: I should just say the colour of blood, in that case. Chris: And then, oftentimes they get lots of social recognition because in many cases, the storyteller is looking for excuses to give them social recognition. So, like them being famous; being the chosen one; having people admire or, alternatively, envy them, right? Like those jealous haters, for instance; having them die or fake die so that everyone can be super sorry about it. Bunny: This one is the most reliable way to identify them, for me. If there is a gratuitous funeral sequence where everyone weeps and talks about how cool they are, that, my friend, is a character you need to take some candy from. And I know it’s because I used to do it and… they’re absolutely self-insert manuscripts. Chris: Right. And I do think actually that young people, like kids, tend to have more taste for candied characters. They like more candy than adults do in general. But there’s lots of personal variation, I should say. Just because a character is candied does not mean that story is for kids. I just have to be firm about that, because there’s a lot of people who say things like that that’s not good. But, kids in general do seem to like candy a lot and I think a lot of us have had the experience when we were young of making our super-candied character in our stories. And that was fun. And it was fine. Oren: But, you do have to evolve a little bit. Chris: Kvothe in The Name of the Wind was the true red her[ring]—red as flame, is pretty much the quintessential example of a super-candied character. So, candy is not bad altogether. It’s just… once you get to a certain level, it can start causing a lot of problems, especially in the beginning of a story if it’s the hero. But, it also can be very, very enjoyable because it’s a way of getting vicarious validation, which is a very powerful form of wish fulfilment. Everybody wants to feel special, so it allows the audience—if they like the character; if they’ve already bonded with the character—it gives that vicarious feeling of validation. And that’s really fun. The problem almost always comes when the audience is either not super into the character or needs to be sold on the character still, that it causes lots of issues. Oren: Right. Because it’s harder to invest in a character when you start off by being told how great and cool they are. It’s like, that’s not anything like me; it seems like a weird space alien that you’ve created right here. Bunny: Alternatively, maybe the character is being endlessly beaten up on. Surely, that’s more relatable? Oren: Yeah. You go too far in the other direction, right? Bunny: Yeah. Chris: Yeah. Generally, you do want your protagonist to have some candy. And again, there are audience members who will really just love a character who has some candy just right out of the gate. At that point, I don’t think it’s optimal for talking about the hero of the story, just because I think that you can… if you do a few things to help mitigate it at the beginning you can get a wider appeal. Right? Get those people who like candy, and then also additional people. Whereas, if you go with tons and tons of candy, anybody who is just ready to identify with that character instantly, they might love that; there are some people who just like candy. So, I’m not going to say that if you really love candied characters and find an audience for that and that’s enough for you, that that’s a bad thing you shouldn’t be doing. But, for most of us, we’re trying to get a little bit of a broader audience onboard and this divisiveness of force—also why there’s unfair double standard and why we’ve got this Mary-Sue label blaming women, because if men are the ones who have the most influence, they look at these female characters with lots of candy and they don’t identify with these female characters, so they’re like, “ugh, Mary-Sues.” Meanwhile, Kvothe gets a free pass. So, in any case, that’s kind of the low-down on candied and over-candied—I like to use that to specify that they have too much candy, as opposed to assuming every character that has a lot of candy has too much. I think Luffy, for instance, in the live-action One Piece, I think he’s generally a good character. He has a lot of candy, but it’s kind of kept just under wraps enough through most of the show. At the end of the first season I think it goes a little too far. Oren:  Yeah. He becomes too much of an unstoppable badass and you’re kind of left wondering: why are the other characters here? Like, why did they bother to get out of bed that day? Bunny: Everyday can’t be Halloween. Candy must be spread out. Oren: But Luffy has the obvious benefit of—he’s a real goofball. Characters who don’t take themselves as seriously can handle a little bit more candy than characters who do take themselves more seriously, just because they don’t rub it in your face; they don’t act like they’re so cool. Because when someone starts acting like they’re so cool, you immediately want to be like no you’re not; you’re not cool, because we’re all contrarians. Whereas Luffy’s like, “I’m just a guy, I just like to steal stuff or be pirates.” He doesn’t really like stealing, but he does like being a pirate. Chris: Yeah. I think humility and kindness work really well for candied characters,  because then them being so cool and such a badass is not so in-your-face. And it also helps to prevent them from actively mistreating or pushing aside other characters. So, Luffy, for instance: his entire goal in the beginning is to get his own pirate crew. So, he’s really nice to the side characters; he wants to charm them, instead of being like, “oh, I’m a cool, badass loner and I don’t need any of you.” He’s just a really nice guy and you don’t know that he has all of these skills. Obviously, if we were writing this from the movie’s viewpoint, we wouldn’t want to pretend that he doesn’t have any powers for a long time, but… if he’s naturally a humble character he could still downplay them in his head a bit and do that kind of thing. Bunny: The thing about candy is that it can come across as boastful or boasting on behalf of the character, because boastfulness is annoying. Then, we’d want to see that character taken down a peg or two. But, when the character exists to be cool, they probably won’t be and that’ll get irritating. Chris: It’s starts to accumulate—it feels like an arrogant character, starts to kind of give them bad karma. We feel like, okay, they have all these rewards they haven’t earned and we have a natural sense of fairness and so, we want to see them kind of punished at some level. Now, the other thing with the hero is, again, when you’re introducing them, we usually want them to have sympathy and if they have so much candy—that absolutely kills sympathy. So, if you can just delay some of their coolness a little bit, so that you can give them the dark backstory or actually make them struggle (especially in the beginning) and have a hard time, that’s really helpful. Have them do cool things so that they earn being famous. Again, everybody enjoys candy once they’re actually attached to the character and they feel like the character has done something to earn it, right? Everybody likes… As far as I know… Somebody out there is going to say that they don’t like it. But in general, if you watch this underdog character struggle and then they do something cool and they earn a cool new title and get some hero-worship: we usually all enjoy that, because at that point, we’ve had time to get attached to them, we’ve seen them as underdog first and then we’ve seen how much they’ve done to earn people admiring them. Oren: Yeah. And you’d be amazed how much of this problem you can head off by just having your characters earn their victories and have to work hard, or demonstrate perseverance, cleverness or sacrifice, right? If you can have them demonstrate those things, their wins will just be more natural and they will not feel like you are just making them seem more cool and on one hand, that seems obvious, but on the other hand, it turns out it’s kind of hard to do, so, I can see why authors struggle with it. Chris: And, of course, there’s the tension issue, too. Because, if you have a character who always gets everything right, is never wrong, and shows off by solving problems really easily, then pretty soon, your tension is gone. And so, there’s a whole trick: if you have a super-candied protagonist, a lot of times, making them a fish out of water—okay, yes they are the most baddest of fighters in the entire world, but this time they have to do diplomacy. Or, another thing that I see frequently with characters that people really want to have tons of candy, is they give them a curse, because that’s a way of tricking your brain—“no, this character is inherently to most specialist of characters that ever was.” But they just happen to be under a curse right now. Oren: We’ll get back to that later, don’t worry. Chris: Yeah. This is, for instance, used in Owl House… oh man, what’s her name? Oren: Eda? Chris: Yeah. Oren:  Yeah. Chris: So, Eda is way too candied in the first season of Owl House, but she has a curse and that kind of starts to take over and reduce her power level by the second season. So, then she’s more balanced out. Oren: I’ve got to be honest: I was impressed and amazed that that happened. Chris: Yeah! Oren: The first season, Eda just does everything and I just assumed that was going to be the state of affairs for the rest of the show, but they actually fixed it and… they could’ve done that earlier, but better late than never. Chris: One reason these characters seldomly get fixed is because the reason they have so much candy is because they’re the storyteller’s favourite character and the storyteller just isn’t on the same page as the audience, because it’s their own character and they love them. Oren: Right. And a big one to think about is: where does this put the character in relation to everyone else? Because it gets much worse when it seems like this character is overshadowing others. So, if your character is kind of on their own and solving problems and they’re the only one who does that sort of thing, it’s not as big of a deal. But if you give them a team and we’re like, “yeah, you’re a team of cool martial artists.” But any time there’s a martial arts fight, only your protagonist ever really does anything, then there’s your problem, right? You gave them a team—they actually have to matter. Chris: So, it’s also worth talking about different roles. So, the protagonist—the nice thing about having a protagonist that’s candied is that that is the character that people are supposed to be attached to anyway. So, giving it candy to some level does align the interests of the audience with what you like to do. The problem is just the beginning, mostly. There could be problems later but the beginning especially when you need to get them attached in the first place and candy can stop that from happening. But then there’s other characters in the story who can also have too much candy. Candied side-characters, particularly those who are not love interests, I think is usually the worst situation. Oren: Yeah. Chris: Because if they’re a friendly character, they’re an ally. Again, this is exactly the Eda situation. Why it causes so much issues is because they want to help the protagonist and now, because they’re candied, they have tons and tons of powers and that’s where they oftentimes push the character that the audience is supposed to like the most aside and just takes over. And I think that is extra likely to create resentment. I do think—sometimes I have seen candied mentors that did okay, though. I mean, Eda, once she’s levelled down. But in the Raksura books, I think there’s a candied mentor that’s really powerful in those books too. But Martha Wells finds ways to toss his name to stone, to get him just to go away for a while so that problems can happen. It’s kind of like the Gandalf problem, right? Gandalf is super powerful. In the Hobbit, he has to away every single time they get into trouble. Bunny: I mean, that’s kind of Kelsier in the Mistborn Book One where he’s very good at fighting and stuff, but he needs a team. He’s charismatic and he’s good at fighting but they’re trying to incite a revolution and he’s kind of made himself the figurehead of that, because his ultimate plan was to become a martyr. So, he’s kind of like… make himself larger than life. And the other characters teach him about this and are suspicious of him over it. But the book is very obviously… you can be as cool and good at fighting as you’d like, but you need someone on the inside; you need someone gathering the troops; you need someone attending the balls and turning nobles against each other, and so forth. So, while Kelsier has tons and tons of candy, there are multiple roles happening in the book so it doesn’t feel like he’s taking away the other characters’ jobs. Oren: Yeah. And Brando[n] Sando[erson] in those books spent a lot of effort on the question of: why does Kelsier have to be somewhere else right now? He’s got other places to be. Chris: He’s a busy guy. Oren: Yeah. We’re focussing on Vin now. Kelsier is somewhere else, don’t worry about it. Chris: Right. And if you gave a candied side-character like that the level of social admiration that often storytellers want to give to a candied character, I think it would get out of hand and create a lot of resentment. It’s a little bit better when the side-character is a love interest, because oftentimes being super-competent makes that love interest more attractive. But, they can still be obnoxious… But there are definitely—especially in heteromancy—there’s definitely quite a few women who want the male love interest to just be the most candied. So, that’s partly a matter of taste at that point. Again, we have the same problems with him completely getting rid of her agency and that kind of thing. But, I think it’s often not quite as bad because there are also some benefits to having a candied love interest. Oren: Well, he does have to brood a fair amount. So, there is that. Bunny: Brood, but in a cool way. Chris: And sometimes if you have a side-character that you super love or is really candied, maybe you should consider making them your main character. Oren: Yeah, sometimes. Sometimes they would be the worst as the main character, though. Chris:  Yeah, it depends on the situation. But there are times when that might be a better solution. Of course, I do feel like sometimes people get attached to the side-character because they know they shouldn’t make their protagonist so candied—that the protagonist can just breeze through all of the challenges of the story. And they also cannot get away with making their main character super mysterious. And so, that’s why they build up a candied, mysterious side-character, which—I don’t know what to tell you—it just doesn’t work well in prose. It just doesn’t work very well. Oren just had an article about that. And the finally, there’s villains, which also are supposed to be competent; they’re supposed to be threatening. And so, they can tolerate candy. In fact, having people admire them could be a great way to make them more interesting and have them than, “oh everybody admires them, but it turns out they’re really evil.” Even so, I have still seen villains that are too candied. It still happens. Oren:  Once the villain gets to the point where it feels like the writer is into the villain and wants you to believe that the villain has a point when the villain does not have a point, that’s the classic, right? It’s like, “yes, I had to torture the babies for the greater good. It’s deep, you see and yes, you have to stop me because I’m contractually obligated to make the show where the heroes win, but I’m going to get several monologues out of this.” Chris: For me, the point at which I noticed that villains have too much candy is when the protagonist suddenly are worse at things, suddenly become less competent whenever they’re around that villain to make the villain look good, right? The villain gets in their last word and the protagonist is just speechless in response. Or, the protagonist forgets how to do something, so the villain can point it out. Something like that in a normal scene, the protagonist would have a verbal response, or remember something, or do something well. But suddenly they can’t. So, I think in Nancy Drew, Constance—is I think here name[?]— Oren: Yeah. That was frustrating. Chris: She’s a very, very frustrating villain. She’s a witch that apparently Nancy Drew is descended from and in all of their interactions you can just tell the writer just loves this villain, because she always gets that last word in and somehow her plans can never be undone, unlike all of the other villains. She’s always got ahead of them. And again, some of that can be fine. Getting one over on the protagonist can raise tension. But, at the end of the story, usually the villain is supposed to lose. And even if the villain wins, usually we’re doing a tragedy and it’s not about the villains winning; it’s about how the protagonist did something wrong. So, the focus is not on the villain. If the story is really all about how the villain wins, because the villain is super cool, there’s usually something wrong there and maybe you wanted to make that villain your main character. Oren: Right. Well, in the case of that character specifically: Constance. Part of the issue is that writing for Nancy Drew goes steadily downhill as the show continues. And by the time of Constance, it’s just not very good. And so, they have a really hard time giving Constance plans that actually work. Her plans are all really bad, but they have to work otherwise the show can’t keep going. And so, they just kind of work anyway. And so, you can tell that this is not a good plan and it’s just succeeding by a for real fiat and it’s annoying and it makes you feel like they’re saying the character is cooler than they actually are. Chris: But we also had—man—there was this one villain. The villains in Maiden Abyss, this anime that we did not finish also. You could tell that the writer loved them way too much and some of them were very gross, [for example] child torturing. Oren: That was the guy I was making fun of with the child torturing. It’s like, he’s torturing children. That’s bad, I guess. Like, okay, I do hate him now, but this was supposed to be a villain with something to say? But there’s really nothing to say about that; it’s not a complicated subject. Chris: And also, the protagonists have to struggle very, very hard against him. But they are still never allowed to defeat him. They just get a false victory and move on. And then we’re like, “oh, but don’t you know? He was fine; this was all part of his plan.” It’s just.. shut up. Bunny: Puppeteer villains are— Chris: I wanted to kill that guy. Personally, with my bare hands. Bunny: Ah, but that means they’re doing something right, Chris, because you’re not supposed to like the villain. Chris:  No! I don’t love to hate him—I hate him! Bunny: See, what people don’t understand when they make that argument is that there’s a difference between hating the villain and hating the villain as a character in the story. If you want to stop reading the story because the villain is bad, then that’s not good. That’s not the kind of dislike we want. Chris: Yeah. Bunny: Puppeteers and puppeteer villains are maybe the worst kind of over-candied characters just because by definition, they remove everyone’s agency. Chris:  Yeah. Like, was it Black Swan in Wanderers? Oren: Oh, yeah. In Wanderers, goddammit! God, I hated that. Chris: Black Swan is this—okay, this also combines the trope of having the little cute character be secretly a puppeteer, because in the Wanderers, there’s this AI that only communicates through this—is it like a little phone, or something? Oren: Yeah. Chris: It has little light pulses or something. And it’s clearly designed and fashioned in a way where it’s supposed to be cute, but we could tell almost immediately from the beginning of the story that this Black Swan was a puppeteer doing everything. Bunny: Look, it’s an AI called Black Swan. Chris: And, of course, [the] author loves it and—yeah, that was not great. But again, the purpose of a villain, they’re supposed to get bad karma and then that bad karma is supposed to balance out at the end of the story when they get their comeuppance, okay? So, if you don’t balance the karma, if you don’t do your karmic counting and you just leave them with that bad karma tab: that’s going to be really unsatisfying and perhaps make the audience want to strangle them with their bare hands. Oren: It’s like being in a role-playing game and the GM just gets way too into their NPCs. It’s like, that’s not what the story’s about. Calm down, right? Chris: Which, again, same goes for some of the other things we were talking about. That kind of social validation that often comes with candied characters. Even if you get a character who is, okay—they’re nice to other characters; they’re humble; we get them to struggle enough in the story, the last thing to look out for is—just when you start to kind of make things feel unnatural or derail things just to give them more social admiration. Just like the funeral scene, where everybody’s balling… Star Trek: Voyager actually has one of those in it, does Babylon 5 have that too? Oren: Yes. That was in my article where I was pointing out that Sheridan and Janeway are basically the same character. Chris: They’re basically the same character. They both have the funeral scene with people gushing. Bunny: The Sherlock show, as well, we can’t forget that. Chris: Ah, yeah. But, the backstory reveal: this is a key one, again, that I very commonly see with candied characters, because the thing about a backstory reveal is oftentimes, [the] audience doesn’t care. Like, no one cares, okay? If you reveal that this character has a backstory where they used to be a rebel, or they used to work for the other side—it only matters if it affects the plot in some way. And you can tell that the storyteller really likes this character if it doesn’t actually change anything, but it’s delivered in the story as though it’s a really big twist or a really big deal. Bunny: Be impressed! Chris: I don’t care, and— Bunny: Be impressed, Chris! Chris: But, it’s an important moment for the storyteller because the storyteller absolutely loves this character and it’s a way of giving that character more candy. Oren: This was why—hot take—this is why all the attempts to do a Wizard of Oz prologue with the wizard as the main character are doomed to fail, because the whole point of the wizard is that he’s a clown and that he only succeeds because everyone in the Emerald City is even more of a clown than him. So, trying to make him seem like a cool protagonist… No, that will never work. He’s a loser; that’s the whole point of the story. Alright, and now that we’ve successfully established that very important factoid of the Wizard of Oz, I think we’re going to go ahead and call this episode to a close. Chris: If this episode gave you some vicarious candy, 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 (who have the correct amount of candy, just to be clear). First is Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and 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.

It’s not the beginning or the end, not the first or last book. But rather, the book in the middle. Usually, this means book two in a traditional trilogy, but it can refer to TV shows, movies, and any other type of story. Sometimes the middle story isn’t the second installment, but the third, fifth, or even a group of stories in the middle of a series. These all have similar problems though. The writer has already deployed their big guns to get readers into the first book, and it’s not time to wrap things up yet, so what happens? Fortunately, we’ve got some tips! Show Notes Sophomore Album Fractal Plotting The Well of Ascension Movement Three-Act Structure The Bone Shard Daughter Mass Effect Transcript Generously transcribed by Arturo. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Bunny: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast, with your hosts: Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [opening song] Bunny:  Hello and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Bunny. And with me today is… Chris: Chris. Bunny: … and… Oren: Oren. Bunny: Today we’re talking about middle books, which have a couple issues unique to them, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. So, for instance, they’re easily angered and they’re more likely than other books in a series to become delinquents. They also often feel pretty neglected compared to the first and last books. Chris: Do they? Oren: The first book is the one that everyone has high expectations for, and then the last, youngest one is the baby. So, yeah, the middle books, they have some issues to work out. Bunny: They have to fight for attention, which is something that is true of both middle children and middle books, which I realized when setting up this joke. Chris: Instead of either middle children or middle books. I have to say: people get way into birth order discourse. Bunny: They do. I was looking at middle child stereotypes and people go quite far down that pathway. Oren: If we’re not categorizing ourselves by birth order, what is even the point, I would say. Do we even have an identity at that point? Bunny: I love when they conflict, where it’s like, “They’re quick to anger and to provoke their siblings, and then it’s like, “They’re peacekeepers.” Okay, if they’re both, then they’re just, like, a person, and sometimes they’re angry and sometimes they’re peacekeepers. Chris: Maybe we should start giving book astrological readings. Oren: Whoa! Bunny: Ooh! Chris: Based on the day you started the project. Actually, I would not be surprised if some writers waited until an auspicious astrological day to start writing a new book. Bunny: That has to exist. Oren: That’s such a Pisces thing to do. I’ve never heard anyone say, “That’s such a Pisces thing to do.” As a Pisces, I feel left out. It’s always like, “Oh, that’s such a Virgo.” “That’s such a Leo thing to do.” No one cares about Pisces, is my point. Bunny: Hey, it’s better than everyone only having bad things to say about Gemini, which is my issue. “You’re two-faced and pretty evil” and, okay, thanks. I was just born in May. And if we’re talking about the actual star alignments, I’m actually a Taurus, but let’s not broach that debate. So, yeah, we’re talking about the second books in series. Specifically in trilogies, the middle book. It’s the sophomore effort, the difficult second album, the middle child of the book world. And as it turns out, they are pretty often neglected. Chris: The book that often does not open the series or end it. Therefore, what is it even for? What do you do in middle book? Bunny: It’s middle books all the way down. Chris: Yeah, it goes deep, man. And they all get your hand-me-downs. Oren: What do you do in the middle of a single book, for that matter? It’s all connected. It’s all fractals. Bunny: I feel like it’s pretty uncommon for me nowadays to see just a pair of books. I don’t know if this is just the circles of books I’ve been reading, because maybe spec fic is especially apt to being divided into three, but usually what I see are either standalones, trilogies, or long series. I can’t off the top of my head think of a complete pair of two books. Chris: There are duologies. At the same time, I do wonder if traditional publishers encourage the trilogy by frequently doing three-book deals. Oren: I don’t know to what extent publishers want trilogies. I do know that authors think publishers want trilogies. This is one of those things where it’s often really hard to read what publishers actually want. They’re not really open about it, and you have to scoot around the edges and try to find people who work in the publishing industry and are willing to talk on their podcasts. It’s hard to say, but it’s pretty easy to tell that writers think that publishers want trilogies. So that certainly influences it a little bit, at least. Bunny: At least we seem to be done with that thing where you make a movie trilogy, but you split the last one into two. I haven’t seen that in a while. That was kind of the teen dystopia symptom, came along with that. Chris: I’m sure as soon as we have a super profitable adaptation of a really big IP into a series of movies, that will happen again. Oren: Honestly, we’re overdue for a big romantasy adaptation. I’m surprised that hasn’t happened yet. Bunny: Don’t speak it into existence. It’s gonna be Fourth Wing or something. Oren: It’s gonna; there’s so much money there. What are you talking about? Chris: That’s true. It’s true. It’s probably grinding through the Hollywood meat processing plant at the moment. Chris: I would watch that instead of another MCU movie, especially since the very samey first-person narration that every romantasy seems to have would not… probably not be that present In a movie. Bunny: That’s true; that would make it a lot more tolerable, at least for me. So I do think that middle books have some issues unique to them and not to the first and final books in a trilogy. I just read the second Mistborn book, and boy, did it have some Middle Book Syndrome. I think they have a couple particular challenges. In each book, you want to have a complete arc. You want to have the beginning, middle, and end, and the first book usually does that well, but then the second book, it doesn’t always do that well, but it seems like the first book, it does the resolution better than the second book. The second book is often there to build to the third book, which means it can’t resolve too much, especially if the series isn’t planned out in advance. That’s a huge issue. Chris: Actually, I would say the problem with middle books is that an arc doesn’t have a beginning, middle, and end. I think that is an oversimplification that comes from Aristotle, and then Syd Field just repeating that over and over again. But an arc has basically a beginning, and then if it’s a tension arc, an end that’s a turning point resolution that usually comes pretty close together. And then it’s like we don’t know what to do with the middle. And the answer is more arcs, more smaller arcs. A lot of times that’s very nebulous. A lot of different things can go there, and so that doesn’t give the middle in the series as much of an identity and doesn’t leave people to know what they should put there. Oren: Well, from a practical standpoint, especially for less established authors, when you’re writing the first book, you want it to be as engaging as possible. So you bring out all the big guns as early as you can. You’ve got coolest villain and your cool powers, and you don’t want to save cool stuff for later, because there might not be a later. You don’t know. And then you get to, “Oh, this was reasonably successful; I should do another one.” And what is there left to do? I have encountered a number of books that seem to have that problem where it kind of feels like you wrapped everything up in the first one. What are we doing here? Chris: Again, as Bunny pointed out, if you plan the series, and you understand how structure works, which a lot of people don’t, so… but if you do, then you can plan a series plot and you can give each book its own arc that’s like a child arc of a series plot. But, see, even with that, it’s hard to estimate how long a certain arc will take. I’ve definitely noticed this in my own writing, where I’ll be like, “Surely this will be three chapters,” and I get there and it’s one chapter and, “Oh no. I could have tacked this on to the end of book one, but I promised my publisher a trilogy.” Oops. Bunny: Between planning and realization, but at least in that case, you’ve left something open. Or instead, if you’re not planning a series at all and you just do book one, a big problem could be that you just tie up everything really neatly and then there are no problems left to solve. So at that point, you need to invent a new problem and split that into two to get your second and third book if you’re planning a trilogy. Oren: This is an interesting one, is that you very often get a book one that is kind of self-contained, and then with book two, it’s more like just part one of book three, and I don’t entirely know why authors do that. Maybe it’s Empire Strikes Back‘s fault. Empire Strikes Back isn’t exactly like that, but you can see how some authors might get that idea where the first Star Wars movie is like, well, the series could mostly end here and it would be fine, but clearly Star Wars can’t end at the end of Empire Strikes Back. It needs another movie after that. Chris: I think there are a couple reasons. One is, just as we said, a lot of times when a storyteller plans a standalone work, that’s all they’re thinking about. But if they do book two or story two, that’s the point at which they often know that there’s also gonna be a story three. And if they don’t think about, “Yeah, the middle book also needs to have some payoff at the end,” they might just make a story that lasts two stories and then just chop it right in half without any good closure. But also, there is a tradition of having the penultimate story have more of a cliffhanger ending to sort of like rev the audience up for the final installment. Doing it with a trilogy feels a little mean. Sometimes I wouldn’t judge it too hard, but at the same time, that feels like a more dramatic choice than, for instance, if you have a series of five and the fourth book has a more cliffhanger-y ending. Oren: At least with some authors, they have a thing where they, assuming they are planning, they’re like, “Okay, I know how my story starts and I know how it ends,” and then they have a problem filling in everything in between. And so when you blow it up to a trilogy, or even not just a trilogy, sometimes more than that, you have that problem but for an entire book, where it’s like, “All right, I imagine how my story begins, and then I know what the finale’s gonna be, and in the middle something should happen, presumably.” Bunny: The risk is a lot of dragging. So you’ve planned a trilogy, and the second book, you’ve overestimated how long it would take, or maybe you planned the trilogy and you had this part in mind, but now that you’re there, you realize it’s not like meaty enough to sustain a whole book, and then the book feels like the characters are just spinning in circles and killing time until the next installment. This was a lot of what I felt in Mistborn 2, where we have some of the least compelling parts of the first book kind of brought to the forefront, like Vin’s romance with Elend, which was never very interesting to me. I guess, spoilers: it ends in marriage (question mark), which I was very confused by. Oren: I think that book’s old enough that you don’t have to spoil or tag it. Bunny: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, spoilers for a, what? 2000s book, early 2010s. Oren: That book is old enough to drive. If you were trying to read it without spoilers, it’s probably too late by now. Bunny: Yeah, that’s true. But then it felt like a lot of time wasting, like we introduced a character that I very much dislike as an inclusion in the book, called Zane, our One Direction boy, because that’s the only other place I’ve heard of a Zane, who comes in to tempt Vin to just, like, run away. And he’s insaaaane! Oren: I was hoping he was gonna be Zany. That’s a better pun. Bunny: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Chris: Ooh, that is a better pun. They couldn’t go for it, though. I thought he was supposed to be like the Danger Boy alternative to the Love-and-Trust. Bunny: He is, but it’s unclear. It kind of felt like it was teetering on the edge of a love triangle, but Vin mostly seems like philosophically interested in him, and for there to be an excuse for Vin to have a bunch of stakes-less fight scenes with him where they’re just sparring. Oren: I think, therefore I romance. Philosophical interest, you know? Bunny: Pretty much. Here’s one of my big issues with Sando, is he’s so good at writing friendship. Why can he not just write friendship? You could have not done the thing with Elend. The dynamics between all of the friends are so much better than that dynamics of any romance in these books. Chris: He’s so big it’s definitely not pressure from publishers. Because sometimes with newer authors, they could be like, “Oh, well, this book isn’t marketable unless you add romance to it,” or something, and they can feel pressure. But with somebody like Brando Sando, you know that’s not an issue. He can do whatever he wants. Oren: Though he was less big in 2007. Bunny: This was pretty early in his career. I think he was just coming off of Wheel of Time, right? Chris: Oh, that’s true! That’s right, Mistborn, maybe he did feel pressure at that time. Bunny: I don’t know if it feels forced in the sense of the way that a lot of movies will force a romance, like it feels forced in the sense of he’s like, “The most interesting relationship to have between the male character and the female character is romance, so I’m going with that.” In fact, he’s very good at writing interesting friendships and quite bad at writing interesting romances. Chris: If it’s not interesting, that for me raises the question if no interest is going into it. So if an author just doesn’t really have much interest in a specific plot element and a specific arc, it tends to become bland because it has no detail and no creative energy, and it’s just kind of neglected. Bunny: And it was like that in the first book. And that’s kind of an issue with the second book as well, because that’s supposed to be driving Vin and Elend’s arcs. Well, Elend’s arc is more like… God, someone’s gonna come into the comments and tell me it should be Eh-lend. Ee-lend. We’re going with Ee-lend. Chris: Look, this is how people know that we read a lot, is that we mispronounce all of our words, okay? You gotta take pride. Oren: I’ll call him Eye-land just to round out all the possibilities. Chris: Even better. Bunny: Yes, Eye-land. His arc is about getting cleaned up essentially and being a better king. But Vin’s arc is like, “What if I’m too special and they’re using me?” which is why we have to have Danger Boy. Oren: What if she is too special, though? She’s pretty special. Bunny: She is pretty special, which is another issue, but we don’t have to get into that too. Chris: I do think this kind of dinking around, which is what a lot of times the second book feels like, where there’s no direction, because this book doesn’t have the beginning of the series, it doesn’t have the end of the series, so how do we use this space? And a lot of times it lacks good structure and characters are just twiddling their thumbs and talking with a Danger Boy, but with no chemistry or what have you. I think something that’s very related to that, that tends to happen, is often the second book is when the bloat begins. So we’ve talked about… ugh, it’s probably been a really long time. We’ve talked about chronic series bloat, is what I’ve always called it, where this pace of the books gets slower and slower and slower with each new installment because the storyteller keeps adding more viewpoints and keeps doing more worldbuilding and adding more places, because the assumption is like, “Oh, well, now I’m doing a series, therefore I can expand it into my huge grand vision,” but you can’t keep things moving at a good pace at that point. Oren: Chris, you can just say Wheel of Time. It’s fine. Bunny: Talk about something that’s not a trilogy. Oren: It’s interesting to hear about this in regards to Mistborn, because I only ever read the first one, and part of the reason I only ever read the first one was that at the end of the first one, they defeat the big bad, the super evil emperor guy. And I’m like, “All right, I guess the story’s over.” Like, it seemed odd that there was even a sequel. And this kind of reminds me of a more recent book that is new enough. I will give a spoiler warning for The Bone Shard Daughter. And I think this demonstrates a similar issue to what Chris was talking about with the series bloat, but also an instance of the author shifting from a kind of story they are very good at and clearly prepared for to one that they are not as good at, ’cause the first one is this very, for the most part, tightly plotted story of this princess with an evil king dad who uses creepy bone magic, and she’s trying to figure out what the heck is he up to and how is he doing his creepy bone magic? And she’s trying to figure all that out, and then that story ends and she defeats her dad and decides to stop doing creepy evil bone magic. And so what’s book two about? ’cause there’s not really much in book one to indicate what the sequel would be, and so then the sequel is like her trying to rule this empire, but the story is just not good at that. It was good at this really tight, focused drama. The big epic politics just end up not making any sense. Chris: You could take this as inherently in a very different position if in book two they are ruling. Bunny: I mean, that is also kind of Mistborn. In book one, it’s kind of a heist book, like they’re trying to kill the emperor guy and cause political uprising. And in book two they have the city now and it’s like a siege, like, that’s the main conflict of the book, is it’s a siege, and that means they’re sitting around in the city a lot. Oren: My first tip is: don’t write characters under siege. I mean, unless you know how sieges work, and you, know, do the whole active defense thing. Just sitting around while you’re under siege is not exciting. Chris: I imagine you have to really understand sieges to make a cool, fun, exciting conflict out of a siege. Otherwise, everybody’s just eating rats. Sounds like it would be really bleak. And not actually tense. Oren: They’re kind of miserable and grinding. It’s funny ’cause if you… they go through this weird curve where, if you don’t know anything about sieges, you’re like, “Oh, there’s some bad guys camped outside. Oh, well,” and then you can kind of continue life as normal. If you know a little bit about sieges, it’s like, “Oh, well, everything sucks, now we’re eating rats.” And then, once you know a lot about sieges, you’re like, “Oh, actually sieges are very dynamic and have a lot going on.” You just need to show that part. Bunny: It was definitely supposed to be more of a political conflict and like playing two different armies that are sieging the same city against each other. But that’s the sort of conflict… that’s like a couple of meetings. Oren: This chapter could have been an email. Bunny: Right? And the rest of it is like Vin hopping around playing with Zaid or Zane or whatever his name is. And then Elend getting tidied up, and some genuinely good scenes between Vin and her kandra, which, again, friendship being the best Sando type of relationship, and between the two terrorist people, which is a very small romance. I’ll give him that one. That was a good tiny soft romance. Oren: Here’s the thing, actually; in the past I have recommended to authors: “Hey, if you get to the end of your book and you think that that storyline has gone as far as it can go, one thing you can do is change the kind of story you’re telling.” So, in abstract, it’s not like I’m against going from a story that was kind of personal or heist-based to a story about ruling, but you gotta be ready to do that. You do have to acknowledge that is a different kind of story. Bunny: Admittedly, I thought the type of story this would shift to, I thought it would turn into an adventure story where we’re, “Oh, we’re gonna go find the Well of Ascension,” because the first book was setting it up as being in the mountains and stuff, and then the ending of this book was like, “Actually it was underneath the city all along.” Okay… So much for the adventure story. Oren: Oh. Well, that’s nice. We didn’t have to go anywhere. Chris: That does bring up the question of how many changes in book two are too much changes. Because you do have to cater to the people who liked book one, because that’s an audience that’s going to read book two. And I do think that you can have a totally different plot, like, if you want intrigue now because the protagonist is ruling, but similar types of conflicts I think is probably for the best. So if you have, for instance, lots of fights in book one, and you’re doing intrigue in book two, you should probably find reasons for fights to happen in that intrigue. Oren: I think that your second book should open with your original main character dying in a really embarrassing way, and then another character can turn to the camera and be like, “What, did you think it was about the same character? Wow, how trite.” That’s my favorite way to open a second book. Chris: No! Bunny: What book hurt you? Chris: Did… did somebody do that? Oren: Not directly, no. You could say I am synthesizing a number of different, really up-their-own-ass openings of different books that I’ve seen. Bunny: The problem is I could totally believe a book would do that. Chris: I am pretty skeptical of changing main characters. Generally, I think if you want to switch to a new character, it’s better if you start a whole new plot. So basically you have different books in the same world, but there’s less expectation that somebody has to specifically read through with first one main character and then the other main character. Instead, they can pick up either book in any order. I think that’s better and it sets expectations better. The exception I make is when we have set expectations, well, where we have like an ensemble, a team, that they’re together for the entire series, and each book focuses on a different one. For instance, Wings of Fire. That would be an example I think that’s fine. Because, again, the important characters are still pretty central to the story all the way through, and it sets expectations well. Oren: Theoretically. Chris: Theoretically it can. But we can say that about any storytelling advice. “You should do this.” “Oh, but what if they mess it up?” Well, I can’t stop people from messing things up. Oren: I just remember how every Wings of Fire book opens with what feels like a specially made premise to get the other four dragonets out of the way. “This is weird, man. Why are we doing this?” Bunny: I will say, now that you said that, I could see a direction Sando could’ve gone with this, that would’ve gotten me the adventure plot I was looking for, is just to follow,… Oh, no, I’m gonna get corrections on this one too. Sah-zed? Sayzd? Sa-zeed? The Terrisman character. Oren: Skarsgaard. Bunny: Skarsgaard. To follow Skarsgaard, who is traveling around at the start of the book and then goes to Luthadel, which is under siege, and so now he’s part of the siege. But I found him traveling around in quite an interesting part of the book, so if the series had been completely different and followed him in the second book, that could have been a direction to go with. I could see that having been something that worked. I don’t know. It would probably disrupt everything else, but, you know. Oren: I’d read a sequel about this… Saw Gerrera guy, I guess. That’s his name, right? Bunny: Yeah, yeah. Chainsaw Massacre, I think. Oren: One of the ones that I find really baffling, and I have seen this one, although it was in a video game and not a book, is when they introduce an unimaginably large problem that we’re gonna have to deal with by the end of the third installment. And if you’re like, “Okay, well, the second is definitely gonna be about getting ready to fight that thing, ’cause we need to get ready. We’re clearly no match for it right now.” And then they just spend the second one just chasing off some random baddies, and I’m talking about Mass Effect. Bunny: You knew we were getting there eventually. Oren: The end of Mass Effect 1, the Reapers are coming and they’re basically unstoppable and you’re not even on the same level as them. And all right, well, Mass Effect 2 is gonna be about trying to find a way to kill Reapers, right? No. Here are some new bad guys: the Collectors. They’ve always been here. Chris: Especially since Mass Effect desperately needed that time to find some way to defeat these all-powerful bad guys. Oren: And then they just don’t. And Mass Effect 2 ends and we’re no closer to defeating the Reapers than we were at the end of Mass Effect 1. And so Mass Effect 3 has to introduce the Star Child to brute-force us there. And it’s just… why? Chris: If I were to give a role to middle books, at least on a lot of speculative fiction, I would say the middle book is where the protagonist gets ready to do a big, intense final showdown against the baddie. And meanwhile, the baddie is maneuvering in place to do their master plan. And that’s not necessarily… you still have to make a problem with stakes to go with that, but that’s often where the protagonist does a lot of leveling up and training and other things like that. Oren: I mean, you still need to make that an arc. They can’t just be lifting weights for the whole book. But yes. I’m just imagining if this had been how Lord of the Rings was written. And so, in Fellowship they’re like, “Man, Mordor is really far away. We gotta get there.” And they make some progress. And then in Two Towers, instead of continuing to Mordor, they spend the whole book hanging around at some elf city, and then at the end they’re like, “Oh, crap, we needed to get to Mordor.” And then the eagles show up and take them the rest of the way. It’s kind of what it feels like. Bunny: See, I almost feel like that’s also something Mistborn was trying to do, because you have what’s going to be probably the ultimate villain, which is the Deepness, which is a shadowy, cosmic horror mist creature. But after the siege, it almost felt like an epilogue where they go and they find the Well of Ascension in the basement, and then it turns out that this power that the Hero of Ages is supposed to release, that’s the Deepness, actually. So now the Deepness has been released upon the world. Thanks, Vin and also Bland Boy Elend is a Mistborn now, which I am not a fan of, but we’ll see what they do with it in the third book. Oren: Oh, wait, so this Chosen Hero actually did something bad? Bunny: Yeah, I know. Shocking twist. So here’s what the Deepness has been doing, which should have been a bigger part of the book in my opinion, is that it’s been actively corrupting the prophecies and stuff like that. Like it’s implied that it might have made the prophecies to get itself out of there. Oren: I owe Brando Sando an apology, because I have complained for years that the thing that I really didn’t like about the first book was that it came really close to subverting the Chosen One trope when we thought the evil emperor was the Chosen One and that he was evil. But then we found out the last second, no, this guy is not the Chosen One, he killed the Chosen One and subverted the prophecy, but then it turned out the prophecy was evil the whole time! So there you go! We did it! We got there! Bunny: There you go. Forgiven. The third book is called The Hero of Ages, and I have not read it yet, so maybe we’ll retract this criticism. Oren: That’s how I look at stories, for sure. Chris: That’s the official Mythcreants standpoint. We are finally adopting the position that countless fanrages have chided us to do. Oren: Don’t critique until you’ve read the whole series. And don’t critique after that, ’cause someone might always add more books in the future. You don’t know. Chris: The lesson of this episode is apparently: always read the second book, because it will erase any mistakes in the first book. Bunny: We’ll see. One of my friends who has read the series asked me, “Oh, who do you think is the Hero of Ages?” And I’m like, “It seems like Vin would be too obvious.” If it’s Sah-zed, I’ll be confused but pleasantly surprised. If it’s no one, I’ll be satisfied. If it’s Elend, I’ll riot. Oren: It’s definitely gonna be like a Sazbod Bodsaw. That’s the Hero of Ages right there. Bunny: Hero of Ages name if I’ve ever heard one. Oren: Now that we’ve figured out who the Hero of Ages is, 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 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]

Anyone who’s read Mythcreants for a while knows that we’re very critical of pseudo-structures, those things that promise your story will be great if only you arrange it just so. And yet, no matter how much critique we heap on these literary lemons, there are always more. This week, we’re getting into the nitty gritty of why these structures don’t work, why they can’t work. It’s not a question of us preferring a different option; the thing they are trying to do just doesn’t make sense. Show Notes Save the Cat Save the Cat Writes a Novel  Three Act Structure  Hero’s Journey Hero With a Thousand Faces Kishotenketsu Virgin’s Promise  Story Circle  Freytag’s Pyramid Heroine’s Journey Transcript Generously transcribed by Sofia. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. With your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [Intro Music] Bunny: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Bunny. And with me is… Oren: Oren Bunny: …and… Oren: Chris. Bunny: Recently I found out that we’ve been doing podcasts wrong. Or rather, we’ve been thinking about them wrong. Or perhaps we haven’t been a podcast at all because we’ve been doing it the wrong way. Oren: Oh? Bunny: There’s, there’s actually an easier way in all podcasts throughout time and indeed all conversations throughout time, analogue or not, have followed the structure. If they hadn’t, they wouldn’t be conversations. Chris: Ooh! Oren: The monopod. Chris: That sounds so deep and meaningful! Really, it’s a guide to life. Oren: [laughs] Bunny: Yes, precisely. And there’s a number of very clear, specific and easy to follow steps. First, we start the podcast. Chris: Wow. That’s great. Bunny: Yes. It’s not called an intro though. Oren: No. Bunny: it’s called auditory birth. Oren: [laughs] Oh, God. Oh no. Chris: [laughs] Oh, man. Okay. Bunny: And even if it’s not the very first episode of the podcast, or if we’re not babies, don’t worry, it’s still called auditory birth because it’s symbolic. Oren: Oh, it’s a metaphor. Okay. It’s all making sense now. Chris: Yeah. It’s arisen from the collective unconscious. Bunny: Exactly. And now to make your podcast: Best listener, Chris will state our theme at three minutes. At minute 15, we will lapse into a terrible depression. Then Oren and I will argue and reconcile by minute 27 using a polarity realignment. Oren: This is really optimistic about how long we can restrain ourselves on the opening. Those have just been getting longer and longer as the podcast has gone on. Bunny: Look, we’ll hit minute three and then Chris can state what the podcast is about if you haven’t looked at the title yet. Oren & Chris: [laugh] Bunny: But after minute 27 the podcast is basically over, and it’s a free-for-all and we can talk about what we ate for dinner. Chris: That’s when we return with the lesson of the podcast to give to all. Oren: The audio elixir, as it were. Bunny: Yeah. Chris: The audio elixir. Bunny: And then we experience podcast death. Chris: [laughs] Oren: Though hopefully that one will just be metaphorical death. Bunny: [laughs] It’s a cycle that all podcasts and conversations go through. Another: fun fact, all podcasts are motivated by desire for sex or fear of death. Because podcasters get laid constantly. Oren: It’s the most sexually charged profession, if you think about it. Goddammit. Bunny: They really do make you think. Oren: Blake Snyder. That one’s a little specific. We should probably reference where that’s from. Bunny: Yeah, that is Save the Cat, I believe. Chris: Excuse me, but I believe it is time for me to state the theme. Bunny: Yes. Chris, what is this podcast about? Chris: It is about pseudo-structures. Bunny: Yes. Chris: Deep ones that are symbolic of regular structures, that are symbolic of pseudo-structures. Bunny: And now we are rising. Chris: Oh, sorry. I should probably tell people what that is. Since it is actually a relatively new term that I made up. Cause I can’t stop making up terms. Oren: It’s just what we do. We make up terms. That’s our thing. Okay. Don’t try to censor us. Bunny: We are so good at making up terms that we have all the candy. Chris: So yeah, these are basically things that are advertised as story structures, but they don’t represent what a real plot structure does. And they don’t really teach people plotting. A lot of times they’re popular because people are looking for fun, easy steps and coming up with ideas is hard. And storytelling is so dependent on all of these factors and it’s complicated. But it’s so easy if somebody just tells you, Step one, do this. Step two, do this. And they have various tricks that we can talk about to make themselves seem more legitimate. And there is a blurry line right to between what—Because sometimes that really seems like a pseudo structure. I know that the writer does have a gut level understanding of how stories work, but is just so bad at expressing it, that it basically becomes a pseudo-structure. So what is and what isn’t can be kind of blurry. But basically a real structure should actually tell you how to structure your plot in a meaningful way and not just give you fixed points that seem easy and you do them, and then you don’t actually get a good story out of them. Oren: Right. And so some of these, these are things like Save the Cat, three-act structure, Hero’s Journey, Kishotenketsu, the Virgin’s Promise… There’s so many of them. And some of them are pretty vague and relatively harmless. They won’t really help, but they’re not super likely to sabotage your story either. And then some of them are weirdly specific. But they all have one thing in common, which is that they are telling you things that could be in a story. They’re not telling you what actually needs to be there. And sometimes the things they tell you could be, there are just bad ideas. You should not do that. Bunny: Some of they seem to be both universalist and prescriptivist, depending on the scale you look at them and like how they’re being sold to you. Universal claims are things like the monomyth, where it’s like every story falls into this structure. Oren: Right. Bunny: This preexisting structure. And the ones that are more prescriptive are things like Save the Cat, which are geared toward writing advice. But all of them have elements of universal and prescriptive, at least if they’re writing advice because they’re usually pulling on things like the monomyth. And yes, it’s circular logic. Oren: Save the Cat—both Snyder’s version and Brody’s version—both claim that basically all stories do this. Which is hilarious, cause clearly many of them don’t. Snyder doesn’t even seem aware of this contradiction. And just like all movies do this except movies I don’t like, they don’t do it. Bunny: Every story falls into the hero’s journey and what defines a story? It’s something that falls into the hero’s journey. Oren: Yeah. Bunny: And Story Circle, which I hadn’t heard about until I started researching this episode, says this explicitly, you can apply the story circle to any story. What makes a story? Something that the story circle can be applied to. Oren: That’s nice. That’s a nice Story Circular definition. Chris: [laughs] Bunny: That’s true! It’s meta! Chris: Yeah. If you can’t identify real story structure, then you’re caught in this impossible contradiction between either: A) being like, Hey, put that event there. But not every story needs an event there. And so, you’re being way too specific and people can automatically tell that that does not fit. They shouldn’t have to do that because so many stories are not doing that Or you can get extremely vague and be like, oh, but I meant that metaphorically. It’s metaphorical death. It’s a metaphorical journey. Oren: Right Chris: It’s a metaphorical despair or whatever you want. And then it’s so vague. It could literally mean anything. And so people might be inspired by it and might be like, oh, I’ve got an idea for like a metaphorical death I could do here. But now it’s no longer meaningful in any way. Cause you could make anything match that. Oren: Right. And what’s funny is that sometimes like people will get really vague about even these bizarrely over-specific ones. This is the big difference between Snyder Save the Cat and Brody Save the Cat. Cause Snyder saved the cat is just hyper specific to a bizarre degree. But people still say like, oh yeah, I wrote this with Save the cat. And you look at it and you’re like, where is any of the weird stuff that Snyder was talking about? And they’re like, well, it’s there, it’s a metaphor of the thing he was talking about. Whereas like Brody cuts out the middleman and is like, yeah, all of these really weird claims that Snyder made, they’re all real, but also they can be anything. So, don’t worry about it. You can write anything and then say you’re following Brody’s version of the Save the Cat. Because the steps are all so incredibly vague. Bunny: Well, the thing it has to do is that it has to say that all these stories that you like fall into this structure. And so when it’s being used that way, the definitions of each of these moments has to be broad enough that you can slot in House of Cards episode one and the Emperor’s New Groove. Oren: Yeah. Cause those are both good things that people like. Bunny: And two, they have to both follow the structure. But then when you’re trying to give advice to people, then suddenly these structures get like super specific. With Snyder in particular, he’s giving you the pages that you need to to put these things on. Oren: Yeah. My favorite thing about Snyder’s is, if you just tried to make a movie following Snyder’s advice, it would be incomprehensible. It would be both really boring and weirdly paced. He’s got this 10% that’s supposed to be the debate of the movie. You’re supposed to spend that long debating to go on the adventure. Of course, none of the examples he cites do that because. Why would they? Why on Earth? Who thinks that’s gonna make the story better? Bunny: And like you can have a scene with a hero debates something. Sure. But to say that that’s both necessary and obligatory is just wrong. Especially since we have many stories that start after the hero has decided to go on the adventure. Chris: Yeah. Bunny: Or they’re just fully in. There’s no question. Oren: Right. They don’t always need to be convinced. And even for the ones who do need to be convinced, you probably aren’t gonna spend that long on it. Because it’s just not that interesting. Bunny: Can you imagine if 10% of a Brandon Sanderson book was debating whether to go on the adventure? Oren: Oh, no. Oh God. Bunny & Chris: [laugh] Oren: You could fit a normal person’s novel in there. Chris: Yeah. Okay. About that. This is interesting because some of this idea where you have this introductory segment comes from Freytag’s Pyramid. And then some later books… a bunch of those books, if you actually look at the text of them, they’re like, oh no, this should only be like a scene, or this should be as short as possible. Or from Kenneth Thorpe Rowe—whose book I’m reading right now—he is like, oh, well actually this can happen alongside other events if you can work the information in later. So they’re not actually intended to be originally this huge segment, but then you go later and you get to Syd Field’s three-act structure and it’s like, oh yeah, this huge section, one third of the story, should just be a whole bunch of setup. Oren: Yeah. Chris: You know, with maybe a few important plot points in it. And now we’re just making it really long. It’s not a good idea because you’re supposed to start the plot. You should start the plot as quickly as you can, and then think for your individual situation if it makes sense to delay a little bit so that you can do important setup, that makes it matter. But those trade-offs are different for every story, and so just telling everyone to delay when it would only benefit a few people is not a good idea. Bunny: Well, here’s the thing about Freytag’s Pyramid and the three-act structure. The thing that makes three-act structure so bad is that it’s Freytag’s Pyramid bastardized by a long train of dastardly Polish people who have been plotting. Chris: [laughs] Okay. I think we need to—for listeners who have not read my post on Freytag’s Pyramid. And again, most people don’t recognize the term Freytag’s Pyramid, but you have probably seen the simple triangle chart where there’s rising action and there’s a climax in the center for some reason, and then falling action at a downward slope. Sometimes they modify it to put the climax in the place we would put it now. But that’s Freytag’s Pyramid. And Freytag who made this pyramid really hated the Polish. He has at the beginning of his book, cause I’ve read it, he has an introduction where he actually does sound like a proto-Nazi. He’s weird. He never mentions the Polish, but he has a weird emphasis on racist that is kind of creepy. Oren: He’s old timey, European racist. Nowadays in America, we tend to think of racism as being between black people and white people, or white people and Asian people. Old timey, European racism is the heck with those Italians. Or if you’re Italian, the heck with those Venetians cause I’m from Naples. That’s the real old timey stuff that he was big on. Chris: But Freytag, apparently circulated pamphlets talking about how they should conquer Poland, except for Poland had already been conquered by Russia. So these were like, we should conquer Poland if they get free from Russia. That’s a lot of effort into fantasizing about subjugating Polish. Oren: Don’t worry everybody. The competition between Russia and Germany for control of Eastern Europe will never cause any problems. It’s fine. Don’t look into it. Bunny: Oh no! I think he does name drop the Polish people at some point in the book. I remember seeing that. Just to get a little dig it. Can’t let them think that this book about story structure is not racist a little bit. Oren: So, it’s not like everything Freytag says is wrong, but a lot of it’s wrong. And then a lot of it is in very different contexts to the way that we tell stories now. Storytelling has advanced a little bit from the tragic plays of the 1860s. Chris: Yeah, it’s just for tragedies. The part of the structure of the end is actually supposed to be the hero dies. Oren: Yeah. [laughs] Chris: Right? So, that’s one of his points, is the hero dies. So, it’s not for non-tragedy. It really isn’t. Again, this gets into the blur in this. I know that what Freytag’s trying to do, and I think it’s like less of a pseudo-structure than something like Save the Cat is. Freytag’s Pyramid is still very general. I don’t think it’s a good structure, but he’s at least trying to do what a structure is supposed to do, which is talk about the broad outlines of how the story works. Whereas something like Save the Cat is very like at this moment you do this very specific thing. And it’s removed from what even farther, removed from what structure should be. Oren: Save the Cat is honestly weird. A lot of these books, I can see how they catch on, even if I don’t think that what they’re saying makes sense. A lot of these structures. I don’t get Save the cat, especially Snyder’s version. Snyder’s version reads like a fever dream conveyed by the most annoying kid you knew in high school. It’s so strange. Everything is written with these really off-putting names that don’t make sense and it’s hard to figure out what he’s talking about half the time. I just don’t get how this became popular. At least with Brody’s version, I get how it became popular beyond the fact that it’s linked to Save the Cat, because it’s super vague on purpose, right? So anyone who doesn’t like being told what to do can just do what they were gonna do already and then like retroactively fill in the part like that they’re doing Brody’s thing. That’s hard to do with Snyder’s. I just don’t get it. I don’t understand. Chris: Remembering when I was young. Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: [laughs] relatively. Bunny: [old voice] When I was young… Chris: And I liked Save the Cat. Bunn: …And naïve. I was still saving the cats. Chris: [laughs] I remember liking it because it just seemed fun and easy. And if you don’t know what real story structure is, you never know what’s missing. Oren: That’s true. Chris: The funniest thing for me about Save the Cat is that Snyder very briefly references A plots and B plots. Which are actual things in a story, actual structural elements in the story, but never explains what they are. It’s just a passing reference. Oren: This is so funny. Chris: And the rest of the time, no reference to plot lines in this book, except for this passing reference that he doesn’t explain. It’s because for him it’s so second nature that he doesn’t even think it’s worth saying, and so it doesn’t go in the book. Whereas Syd Field with his screenplay, the Foundations of Screenwriting was his book. This is the one where this like “three-act structure” comes from. Oren: Or at least the version of it that many of us are familiar with. Chris: Yeah, I think Syd Field really was trying to communicate story structure. He just doesn’t have a good intellectual understanding of it. And so, he keeps saying, oh, you need a beginning and an ending, and a beginning and an ending. But he cannot get down what they are. So he will ask some questions, oh, well, does your character get married or divorced. He will ask questions. He’s clearly looking for like a hook and resolution. That’s clearly what he means. He doesn’t know how to define it. For him, it’s just gut level. It’s instinctual. So, he can’t say it. Oren: Yeah. Chris: Same with turning points. He has no understanding of fractal structure, right? So, or how child arcs work, right? So for him, oh you know, there’s a plot point that twists the action around. It’s like, okay, look, every single plot event in a story changes what happens going forward. They’re all do that and they can be anywhere. Bunny: I mean, the point you’ve made before is that these structures are only useful in as far as you already understand the other storytelling fundamentals. Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Oren: And even then, like if you understand the storytelling fundamentals, you can probably make a good story that follows these structures. Although, honestly, Save the Cat’s gonna be kind of a challenge. But you probably can. But at that point, what are they giving to you that is worth restricting yourself like that? Why not just tell the story you want to tell at that point? Chris: Yeah. I wouldn’t be surprised that maybe somebody could pick up Syd Field’s book and by thinking on it really hard and looking at examples, come up with some better idea of hooks and resolutions, even though he never says it. Oren: Yeah. Chris: Right? Maybe they could start paying attention to, okay, I need to figure out what the ending is to do the beginning, and the beginning has to match the ending, and that sets them on the wrong direction. I do think it’s a step better than, for instance, the Hero’s Journey. Which is just a bunch of metaphorical things that don’t really try at all. Oren: I mean, the thing you have to understand about the Hero’s Journey and the Monomyth is that it’s made up, it’s fake. Like Campbell doesn’t demonstrate it ever. Bunny: It’s a-spiritual-theory-of-storytelling-as-it-exists concept. Oren: Yeah. Trying to read the original Hero with a Thousand Faces is just an exercise in masochism because Campbell’s not a good writer and what he’s trying to say is extremely hard to figure out, and he’s just goes on and on, and he like writes in this really weird cryptic style. And then he’ll make bizarre claims out of nowhere. Like all ancient cities are built on the four cardinal directions. That’s just not true. And he just doesn’t feel the need to support these claims at all. Chris: He won’t say all, he’ll just say ancient cities. And you’re like, what do you mean? What ancient cities? Where in the world during? What time period. And so, you’re just left with just so all ancient cities? And he’ll make statements like they had a temple in the center too. Apparently ancient cities had a temple in the center and entrances in the four cardinal directions. This is just how ancient cities are. So, he is just a bad scholar. He is not, he’s not a good scholar and he does not actually prove his thesis in any way. Oren: He seems to resent the idea that he should. That’s just not what he is here for, okay? He’s already figured out the answer and now he’s here to like make it sound mystical to you. It’s just fake. It’s just made up. Bunny: What’s very funny to me is that a lot of these structures are like explicitly based on Monomyth, Hero with a Thousand Faces, Hero’s Journey, blah, blah, blah. But the fact that none of them agree with how many stages there should be is something that none of them really reconcile. Can these all be true at once? I don’t know. Does it have 3 acts? 18 beats? 5 acts? 16? Or 14 Or 8? Oren: It’s very funny watching people try to reconcile these completely unrelated, made up pseudo-structures. Trying to figure out how the three-act structure works with the Hero’s Journey. It it doesn’t, cause they’re both fake. They’re just fake from different directions. The three-act structure is just made up. You can divide any story into three acts if you want to. There’s no real reason, but you can, and like Syd Fields’ version of it at least has some specific advice. It’s just weird and not very good. Chris: Syd Field took an attention arc and tried to express it, but didn’t know how to actually describe it. And then built an arbitrary set of events around it. Like dividing the story into three. You could have three big child arcs, that each of them makes the story a little different, because they twirl and each of them spins the story in a different direction. As he was saying. Oren: Always twirling, twirling towards freedom! Chris: That’s an option a story could have. But that’s a very arbitrary thing to say that every story should have because if you don’t understand the multi-leveled fractal nature of plot structure, you cannot describe where things go because they could go anywhere. Bunny: They also don’t specify how long these should be. If you look at the charts and diagrams of, for example, something like the Story Circle—that are like meant to be visualizations—it looks like they should all last the same amount of time. But then you’ll read them a little bit and it’ll be like, this one can be as short as a single line. I won’t argue that huge moments that are important to the story can happen in a line or two. Like, all right, sure. But then in what sense is this a structure? Oren: Right. Why did you use a pie graph? If the actual size of these things doesn’t relate to the pie? Bunny: His claim is that because biology. It’s bullshit about like psychology and it’s a circle because of biology. I think that is what the article says. That’s about what I’d expect from a structure based on Campbell. But you know… Oren: Yeah. I love Story Circle. It’s like they return to their familiar situations. Do they? Why? Most of the time they don’t. And what is the purpose of dictating that as a requirement? Chris: I mean, some stories do it and it gives a sense of closure. Oren: Yeah. Chris: Right. Or revisiting the past and seeing how you’ve grown. It can be done, but it certainly doesn’t have to be done. Which is again, a lot of how these suiter structures are. They don’t know how to identify what real story structure is. So, they only have two options. One is demanding that you include something you don’t need to include, or being so vague that they’re not really giving you anything at all. Oren: Right. Bunny: If I was going to express a progression as a circle, that would imply that you can start at any point on the circle. And that’s also not true of the structure. Oren: [laughs] That’s a good point. Bunny: It’s not like other structures. Trademark. Chris: [laughs] Oren: [laughs] My favorite is when things that are not pseudo-structures get roped into this. Like a while back, I did an episode on this myth that you could avoid the need for tension and conflict in your stories by using this one weird trick, pseudo-structure. And the main show of that was a Kishotenketsu, which is harmless set of potential plot points. Chris: If I understand though, this is a structure that we don’t understand very well, right? Oren: Yeah. In all of my research, I could not find any well-sourced information about Kishotenketsu, other than a set of YouTube videos by some Japanese manga creators who don’t really get into it all that much. They use it as a guide for tension in their story. They don’t get into the specifics that much. Chris: Right. So, it might similar to the three-act structure a bit. Oren: Or maybe not. Chris: One is we don’t have good English sources on this, so that makes it hard for us to know exactly what it is. Chris: Yeah. I’m not making any claims about the actual Kishotenketsu as it’s used in Japan. I don’t know how they use it there. I just know what English language blogs say about it. The other one that I was looking at in that article was this thing called Daisy Chain plotting, which is not a structure, it’s a concept. Instead of having a single main character who you stick with for the entire story, you have a group of vignettes that all you relate to the same thing. Chris: So, I would, I would call Daisy Chain somewhat a structure in that it specifies that there is a chain of vignettes. Because that is a specific structure because you have a story that starts and ends for each vignette. Bunny: Oh, and each of the mini stories follows the three-act structure. Chris: [laughs] It’s not a very specific structure. It just means if you say, Hey, this story is an anthology. Or this story is episodic. Or this story is very serial/overarching or whatever you wanna call it, that is structural information. Oren: Yeah. Chris: About where plot hooks start and where they end. It is very vague and broad, but I would honestly give more credit to the Daisy Chain. Calling it a structure? Okay. Maybe in a kind of vague, broad type of way. Oren: Yeah, and I don’t have any issues with Daisy Chain. I think that that’s a perfectly legitimate way to tell a story. There are certainly trade-offs, right? There’s a reason why we tend to stick with a single main character. But if that’s the kind of story you wanna do, that’s totally doable. It isn’t gonna do any of these things that the people often claim that it will. Chris: It doesn’t get rid of conflict and tension. Oren: Yeah. It has nothing to do with those things. Daisy Chain seems perfectly fine, and it’s being used as this weird prop in this fight that some authors have against the need to put tension in their story. Dave Daisy chain didn’t ask for this. It’s just a neat little story concept. Bunny: Can we take a moment to appreciate just how bizarre Virgin’s Promise is? Oren: Uuuuuh… Bunny: A moment of silence for the fact that we’re talking about virgins. Like that’s not a bizarre, misogynistic concept in 2020, when that article came out. Oren: Supposedly, it’s one of those things where like the person writing it is like, no, this doesn’t have to be about gender. Anyone can be any of these roles. Okay, but why did you name the dark reflection The Whore? Did you have to do that? I don’t think anyone made you do that. Bunny: Here’s a line I pulled from it. Just as females can be heroes, males can be virgins whether or not they are gay. Oren: Yeah. I mean. Bunny: Thanks. Oren: That’s technically true. [laughs] Chris: [laughs] Somebody’s trying. Bunny: True in the literal sense. Chris: And failing to be sensitive. Chris: It’s also nothing I could find in that. And admittedly I just skimmed it because I didn’t feel like I wanted to spend a lot of time on that article. I don’t think that the Virgin ever explicitly has to make a promise, nor do they have to be a virgin. Oren: It’s sort of like the most obvious example of the thing I talked about earlier. This isn’t telling you what needs to be in a story. It’s telling you some things that could be in a story. If you ignore the weird, like virgin/whore-language, this is sort of about a story with the idea that it’s about a woman who is under pressure to do feminine coated things and wants to do masculine coded things and then has to reconcile those things. Sure. You can tell a story about that if you want to. There’s nothing wrong with that. Plenty of good stories are about that. But calling it a structure is weird because this doesn’t really tell you what needs to be in there. It’s just a list of inspiration ideas. Bunny: It’s a feminine plot. That’s also what the article calls it. Oren: Uhm. Oh, no, no, no. Bunny: I also don’t know if it’s related at all to the Heroine’s Journey. I don’t know if that’s the same thing or something else. Chris: What Oren was just saying, sounds like Maureen Murdock’s Heroine’s Journey. Oren: It’s similar. It’s very similar. Chris: I wrote about it back when I was more into the hero’s journey and then I learned better. But at the same time, if you want your character to go through growth and have big change, it can offer inspiration for doing that. It’s basically what I would say about it now. Oren: Yeah. Chris: I suppose you could say there are kind of some emotional structure in that there are periods in which the character appears to be learning and that would take tension down, and then having problems again, which would take tension up. But it’s mostly just for inspiration. Bunny: I mean, that does seem to be the best case scenario. Oren: Yeah. And it doesn’t call anyone a whore, which is kind of nice. Bunny: [laughs] yeah… Oren: Just in general, I would be very careful about the idea of story types having genders. I’m not gonna say there’s never a situation where that might be useful, but you get carried away with that almost immediately. Chris: Yeah. I will say with Maureen Murdoch, the thing is that—and I have not actually really clarified while in this post—is that she was a therapist for women and so the inspiration for her was the things that she heard from her patients. And their emotional journeys. And so the gender in that one, the Maureen Murdoch’s Heroine’s Journey, I think of it not as prescriptive, but as descriptive. She’s describing what a group of women went through emotionally at a particular time in response to patriarchy. And that’s where her idea for this Heroine’s Journey comes from. Oren: There is one more thing that I think is really important about this is that also, bisexual, non-binary people can be virgins. Just so we’re clear. Chris & Bunny: [laugh] Bunny: We’re all represented here. This podcast says you are valid as a virgin. We witness you! Oren: That’s definitely the message we want to end this on. Bunny: I think my conclusion after studying all of these pseudo-structures is that A New Hope is to blame for 99% of it. Chris: But I love A New Hope though, because I can use it to show people what an actual throughline is. It’s like, oh, you thought that a new hope was successful because of the Hero’s Journey? Well, guess what? It’s not! Here’s the actual… yeah. Oren: Now you’re gonna learn something. Chris: I had one editing client who told me that after he read this article, where I demonstrated through example that it wasn’t the Hero’s Journey that made it successful, but just having a throughline, that his mind was blown. Bunny: Heck yeah. Oren: We love to hear it. Bunny: Keep blowing those minds. Down with pseudo-structures. That should be your takeaway. Oren: I think with that we are gonna go ahead and call this episode to a close. Bunny: Oh damn. We forgot to have a big row and talk about our dinners. I guess this podcast will not hit the tops of the charts. Oren: Yeah, that’ll be part two. Bunny: Perhaps that’s not a podcast at all. Oren: We metaphorically discussed our dinners. Bunny: Yes, true. Yeah. Chris: If you would like us to stop and not discuss our dinners, you can 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. We will see you next week. [Outro Music] This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Coulton.

Movies. If there’s one thing we know about them, it’s that they aren’t books. Probably. They’re much more likely to have a bwaaaaaah sound effect, that’s for sure. And yet, new authors often write their novels as if they were writing a film script, abandoning the strongest tools at a novelist’s disposal. We call that film POV, and it needs to stop! Fortunately, today’s episode is about how to fix it. Show Notes Bwaaaaaah  Omniscient Narration  Limited Narration  Project Hail Mary Revenger  Nothing Good Ever Happens in an Interlude  Blake Snyder’s Rules of Writing  The Emotional Thesaurus  Sidekick Protagonists  Transcript Generously transcribed by Phoebe. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris:  You are listening to the Mythcreant podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny. [intro music] Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is— Bunny: Bunny. Chris: And— Oren: Oren. Chris: Here’s the thing. I think if we wanna attract listeners, we need to make this podcast more cinematic. Oren: *mimics dramatic THX-esque bwah sound* Bunny: Ooh. I like movies. Chris: Yeah. Movies are always better, aren’t they? The problem is this rambling voiceover. Voiceover is always tacky. It’s not working. So we need to make sure that we are only engaging in, like, third person, you know? So instead of saying I or we, we now have to name our names. Oren: Oren would like to suggest that we also add more *bwah* sounds, because that’s very cinematic. That was in the trailer for Inception, which we can all agree is the most cinematic movie. Bunny: No, Oren, which they all can agree is the most cinematic. Chris: Chris thinks sound effects are just key. Bunny: Yeah. Bunny wants to know what our background music we should have for this. Probably “The Princess Who Saved Herself,” but Bunny’s not entirely sure that the vocals would align so perfectly with her own Oren: Oren’s just hoping that this is gonna be royalty free, like public domain sound effects and music, ’cause we’re not running a profit on this podcast. Bunny: The three of them stood in an elevator. Chris: Pretty sure we should get an epic version of “The Princess Who Saved Herself.” Bunny: Ooh, Bunny likes that idea. Chris: Epic orchestral version. Bunny: It will have some *bwahs*. Don’t worry, Oren. Chris: We’re talking about how to fix film POV. We actually mentioned film POV several weeks ago. Basically, it’s what happens when you don’t have a viewpoint character. You might think, okay, well if you don’t have a viewpoint character, that means it’s an omniscient narrator, right? No. So when you don’t have a viewpoint character, but also can’t really say that there’s an omniscient narrator either because an omniscient narrator, one, should have a little personality, but will also be definitely not the characters. Citing facts the characters don’t know. Whereas with film POV, any narration there is, is usually so bland you cannot tell where it is coming from. The omniscient narrator, the all-knowing narrator still knows what characters are thinking and can actually say what they’re thinking or what they’re feeling, give little background details on them, all of those things. But in film POV, generally, all of that is missing. And what we’ve got is just the most neutral narration possible that’s like, objective, and that never goes into anything that the characters are thinking and feeling. It’s basically replicating a camera. Oren: And if you’re wondering why you haven’t encountered this more often, it’s because this is genuinely not something that makes it to publication very often in my experience. Most novels that I read, whatever their other problems, have at least managed to develop a more consistent viewpoint, whereas this is a problem that tends to affect newer manuscripts by less experienced authors. Chris: Generally somebody who just doesn’t yet know the conventions and may not realize that they need to cultivate their viewpoint. The other thing that can happen, and this is if you see it in a published work, this is almost certainly what’s happening. You can have it happen for just, like, a scene. If the writer doesn’t know what to do with their viewpoint character, the viewpoint character can kind of disappear unintentionally. Oren: That was in a scene of Project Hail Mary, which, otherwise a book that we like quite a lot and generally has a pretty good viewpoint. But there’s like one scene where the main character’s just not there, and for some reason the author really wanted to show us the scene. Whose viewpoint is this scene from? The answer is no one. Bunny: Wasn’t that also an issue in the opening chapter of, I think it was Revenger, that you did a critique post on recently? Where the character’s just kind of floating around blandly, observing things without any input? Chris: Yeah, Revenger basically had much of that problem where there was a viewpoint character and sometimes you could tell she was there. But other times she would disappear and there was definitely not enough internalization, which we’ll get into, which is that narration that has their thoughts and feelings and kind of communicates what’s going on inside the character. And that is the big thing that novels can do, that film cannot do. You know, obviously film has its advantages, it has its visuals and its sound, and those things are great, but there are lots of things that you can do in a novel that do not translate to film well. Partly because they are so internal is one reason that that can happen. Bunny: Almost like these different mediums have different strengths specific to them. Oren: And at least with some of the authors that I’ve worked with who have this problem, they legitimately were inspired by film and tv. That’s like their main touchstone for how stories are told, and that’s not all bad. There are a lot of things that TV and film writers tend to be better at than novelists. There are things you can learn there, but if you don’t understand the differences in medium, you are gonna be in for a bad time. Chris: Besides film POV, there’s the people who imagine the scene as a film and visual and then try to write description that replicates that and it’s like, no, a picture really is worth a thousand words. You don’t have a thousand words to describe this visual thing. You gotta convey meaning, you gotta focus on meaning when you’re doing things in narration, not on spectacle, which is what a film does. Bunny: More on layout, I think I’ve seen people try to get too specific with where things in a room are, we’ve talked about this on previous podcasts, but talking about the north and south wall and like there’s this over the fireplace and the fireplace is on the left and there’s a rug in front of it, and adjacent to that is a chair and it faces another chair, and in the middle there’s a table and then there’s a couch with its back to the fireplace. Chris: [laughs] Yeah. Bunny: That is all things that you would see if you were looking at this visually, but you know, we’re using our mental image. Keeping all of that in your mind at once when you’re not simply viewing it. That’s a lot. Chris: And even though novels are not as good at conveying visual information, as you know, visuals, otherwise, actually it’s much easier to convey information in a novel. But if you don’t have a POV, that can actually become much harder because it encourages you to just not include exposition. Because a lot of times exposition does come from the narrator, whether you have a viewpoint character who is thinking through things or an omniscient personality that is proactively informing readers about world tidbits or anything else that they should know. And so if you think of your narration as just being a camera, there’s also a good chance that you will leave out really important information that would be much harder to convey in the film. And also you might end up with exposition dialogue, which is a lot of times what films and shows do because they don’t have the option of narration. And so then characters have these really awkward lines that are designed to be exposition that don’t quite feel natural. Oren: This is an interesting example of a different way this problem can manifest. Sometimes the author realizes they need exposition, but because the story is in no one’s perspective, when they add the exposition as narration, it’s more boring than it needs to be. You don’t know who is thinking this, where is this information coming from? And so there’s nothing in there to make it feel like anything other than an info dump. And readers tend to react negatively to information that they feel is only there because they need to know it. As opposed to, because it serves some other purpose or tells ’em something about the characters or whatever. Chris: To be clear, story relevance is another purpose it can have that does make it better, right? Like if it’s, if you have planned narration that serves no purpose in the story, that is gonna be perceived even worse. But the more purposes it serves, including characterization, including being relevant to what’s happening in the story, the better when it comes to exposition. And the other thing is that exposition can also convey a lot of emotional information. It can actually make emotions more compelling if you choose the right details. When you have no exposition, which can happen as a result of film, POV or too little exposition, people have no idea of what’s happening, and all of the emotions are likely to fall flat. Oren: I’ve also noticed an interesting phenomenon with film POV, where the lack of emotion makes it harder to tell what’s going on. Like, it’s easier to get confused. Like if you have two characters and you figured out that there are two characters in this scene, and then there’s like suddenly a description of someone getting punched and you’re like, what is going on? In a more traditional narration, you would have the emotions that cause this punch. Readers would have some understanding that maybe violence is a possibility, so it wouldn’t take them by surprise. Or if it is a completely surprising punch that comes out of nowhere, that would also be a reaction the character would have. And so the readers wouldn’t end up feeling like they missed something. So that’s an interesting problem with this style of narration that I wouldn’t have guessed until I started seeing it. Chris: So, yeah, the first step to fixing this is just deciding what viewpoint you are going to do. In some cases, it might be possible that moving to an omniscient narrator is simplest, but I would only use that as a last resort because it is just harder to pull off a good omniscient narration. You have to again, set the expectation and reinforce it that this narrator is not one of the characters. And so you need a personality that is definitely not coming from the characters. And then every time a character thinks something or feels something, you need to mark that like you would dialogue, like whose thoughts it is and that these are thoughts from which character. It’s kind of fussy and it entails a lot of management. So it’s definitely better if the writer has a strong narrator personality and with these kinds of film POV narration, generally that’s not true. It’s only a last resort if you cannot find another character that fits the information you wanna convey and you don’t wanna make revisions. Whenever you have a character narrating the story, right, ’cause it’s either a narrator outside the story and an all knowing omniscient narrator, or it’s one of your characters who is basically narrating. When that happens, your narration is limited. It can only convey what that character knows, and that’s the biggest restriction. And so if you look at your narration and you don’t have one character who, for instance, is in every scene to observe all events, and you’re conveying little world facts that character would know or you’re describing things that that character can’t see, that all has to change in order for that character to be the viewpoint character. Oren: And that’s actually just a very useful limit for new authors to have. With great power comes great responsibility, and often new writers don’t yet have the restraint to not just go wherever if they have a narrative premise that allows that. So having a limited premise is a good way to make it less likely that your story will wander off on some tangent that the protagonist isn’t related to. Chris: If you know who your main character is, which hopefully you would—character that’s more important than the other characters, that you really like them, they’re the one who is solving most of the problems, they’re in most of the scenes, that’s clearly your main character. Let’s say you have a few scenes that they’re not in, like, I would just look and see, do you need those scenes or does the rest of the story stay intact? If you cut them out, maybe the character can learn that information later. Limiting things to what that character knows and perceives is a good way to make things a little bit more relevant. There’s a good chance that that stuff that that character does not know is also just less important, and maybe readers didn’t need to hear that. If you do decide, okay, no, I have to keep these scenes, I can’t go without them, but my main character’s not there, you can choose another viewpoint character— Bunny: Or an interlude, baby. Oren: Oh, no. Chris: No! If you are even tempted to call your scene an interlude, cut it. Just cut it. Don’t look back. Oren: Nothing good ever happens in an interlude. Chris: That has yet to have been proven wrong in any case. I mean, normally wouldn’t go for such absolutist statements because there’s always an exception. But I have yet to see anything good happen in an interlude. But if you’re gonna do that, if you’re gonna add a second viewpoint character, again, try to add as few as possible. The character that’s in all of the other scenes that your main character isn’t in. And you also, for viewpoint characters, you want somebody who is supposed to be sympathetic and feel familiar that you want the audience to like. You do not want a character that is supposed to be mysterious or threatening to be your viewpoint character. Oren: The mysterious one is a thing that a lot of authors struggle to give up. They want their main character to be a mysterious figure, but you just probably can’t do that. Chris: Not gonna work out. It’s just gonna be frustrating and feel kind of contrived. People will see that you, the author, are arbitrarily withholding information they should have when they’re in that character’s viewpoint and it’s just not very pleasant. Oren: It’s like, I need to know more about this character so that I can evaluate them and tell what’s going on. And if I don’t know enough to do that, then it’s really hard to get attached to this character. Like, it might seem cool to the author, but to most readers it’s not gonna work out. Chris: Once you’ve got your viewpoint character, you’ve chosen who they are, and hopefully that’s the easy choice, the most important thing that you need for internalization is why is your character doing what they’re doing? I think that’s like number one. So if your character takes an action, is there thoughts or context to explain why they are taking that action so people understand, why are you picking up the phone? Who are you gonna call? Why did you attack that person? Did they make you angry? Do you have a plan? What is your plan? Bunny: I think you’ll find, if I were to foreshadow a coming episode, all characters are motivated by sex or fear of death. Oren: Oh, no, get outta here, Blake Snyder. Chris: Put sex and fear of death in your narration, every time a character does something. Oren: It’s just those words, you don’t have to explain further. Bunny: Maria called her boyfriend, parentheses, sex. Maria paid her bills, parentheses, sex. Maria went to the store, parentheses, death. Oren: It’s all working out, you know, we’re hacking the matrix, right here. Chris: So after, why is your character doing what they’re doing, right? What is their motivation? What logic are they following that they’ve decided to take this action? The next most important thing is just, what are they feeling? How are they emotionally reacting to the things that they are perceiving in the scene? Right, and that can offer a lot of context, like the punch that Oren was talking about earlier. Which person are they rooting for in that situation? They watch one person get punched. Are they like, oh no, that person got punched, or are they like, oh yeah, that person deserved getting punched. Oren: Are they the one who is doing the punching? Do they feel angry? Like, I wanna punch that guy. All very important things. Chris: So just understanding how they emotionally react. A lot of times when I get into how to bring out emotions, I discourage people from stating feelings, like sadness, instead, showing that they’re sad with the narration. But frankly, at this level, it’s way better to just state, “Hey, he felt sad,” you know, “she felt sad,” or “they felt sad” than it is to just not have any emotion at all. You can always refine it later, but if you want, you can just put, “They felt sad. That made them angry.” Bunny: Parentheses, sex. Oren: I’m a firm believer in the Futurama bit that you can’t just have your characters say what they feel, because that makes me feel angry. But you haven’t seen what it’s like when you have nothing. So sometimes that’s a better alternative. Chris: That is the thing, again, about film. They don’t have internal narration, and so a lot of times they try to get their characters to do deep emotional conversations that they might not normally have or characters to state things like, this is how I feel, when they would normally talk about their feelings. So be glad that you are not writing a script or making a film because you don’t have to do that. You could just directly describe what they’re feeling. Bunny: On the other hand, you do not have access to charming actors, so make sure your dialogue is good. Chris: Once you get more used to it, then you can do stuff like, oh, my stomach twisted, or my heart started faster. Oren: You can start going through like, the emotional body language thesaurus and be like, okay, which sensations have I not used yet? Bunny: That exists. That’s a real thing. I think it’s called The Emotional Thesaurus. I have it. Chris: And you have, again, thoughts too, like, “oh geez,” or “What the hell?” Oren: Gee willikers, Batman! Bunny: By Jove! Chris: And once you have their motivation, so we understand why they’re doing what they’re doing and their thought process and what they’re feeling, if you don’t have any exposition and you have readers who don’t understand how the world works. Information management takes a lot of time to learn. It’s super advanced, it’s super complicated. It’s just that if you have been doing film POV, there’s a good chance that there is some information that readers need to know that you’re missing. Things like when you introduce a character, who is that? Is that your viewpoint character’s girlfriend or their child? Really basic things like that. Oren: Father’s brother’s cousin’s former roommate. Chris: And just have a very simple two-word explanation of what new people and places are. Don’t go overboard, just a little bit. When you’re narrating from somebody’s viewpoint, you describe things when they look at that thing. Somebody walks into the room, the character’s busy at work, they look up. When they look up, that’s when you describe the person. I bet it would be a huge pain to go through your manuscript and try to modify your description to reflect, you know, where is your viewpoint character sitting? What angle are they looking at things? When do they see things? When they walk in a new area, that’s the time to actually set the scene and describe their environment. It just takes practice. Oren: And that’s when you learn how to describe things that are most prominent first. If they walk into a room and there are like several people and one of them has a gun, you’re almost certainly gonna notice one with the gun first. You might do something tricky if you’re feeling advanced, you might do something that’s deliberately disorienting where the main character missed or perhaps subconsciously ignored this obvious thing, and then it’s very jarring when they see it. But that’s like an advanced technique. In general, you’re gonna start with the most obvious things and work your way down. Bunny: One really obvious thing taken from cinema that I’ve seen in a description before is a character panning up another character’s body in the description. Like, “I looked at her shoes and then her knees, and then her skirt, and then her belt, and then her top, and then finally her face.” I know where you’re coming from, like you’re coming from a literal panning shot up someone’s body. But in my experience, it’s a very unusual circumstance where you enter a room and there’s a person there, and you don’t just take them in in a glance, like you might scan them later, but if you’re starting at their shoes and then whatever hat they’re wearing is supposed to be a surprise… Chris: If you’re crawling on the floor and they walk in the room, then I will accept that you see their shoes first, and then you slowly pan up. Oren: We’ve solved it. We’ve cracked the case. Bunny: Yes. Okay. I can accept that. But in most cases you’ll notice the surprising thing about them first. Or just take them in. You know, “I scanned up her body, her shoes were—” Oren: Doc Martens. Bunny: Yes, Doc Martens, ’cause she’s edgy, she’s not like the preps and she’s wearing fishnet stockings. “And I scanned up and the baggy black sweater and oh my God, she’s got, you know, a hat shaped like a giant banana.” Oren: Whoa. Bunny: I think I would notice that first. Oren: This is one of those things where if you imagine what this would actually look like of someone staring at a new person’s feet and then slowly inching their eyes up, that would be bizarre. That’s like, maybe you gotta call human resources at that point. Chris: Again, for those scenes, let’s say we don’t have a huge manuscript-wide film POV issue. We just have a few scenes where we don’t know what to do with our character. Maybe we have made the mistake of using the Watsonian POV, who is always watching another character do important things. That’s where this happens for just temporary for a scene, is when you have other people who are just the most important in the scene. For instance, you have a child character where you have some starting scenes where the adults do something important before the child goes off on their own. Or you have, you know, somebody who’s an employee who’s watching their boss make decisions, or you have some scenes where just for that scene, other people are the decision makers. Hopefully that is not for the whole story. Oren: We hates it, Precious. Bunny: And if you wanna hear more about this, check out our episode on a sidekick protagonist. Thank you very much. Chris: You just need your viewpoint character to not completely vanish from the story when they are basically around, just to watch a few other characters do important things for that one scene. If this is a conversation, can they just interrupt to ask questions? Or maybe this is a scenario where they’re eavesdropping and they have to try not to get caught and we can kind of break up the dialogue with them. Like, oh no, I dropped a thing and that made a noise. They can emotionally react to what’s being said. They can also, let’s say, notice something nobody else notices. Oh, these people are really busy doing something, but there’s a monster sneaking up in the background. Oren: They could notice that news program that’s always on in the background that’s giving exposition that they need to know about. Chris: Yeah, that would be a pretty funny thing to see in a written work. Obviously inspired by movies. Or contribute important points or just think about the implications of what they learn, if they see something they can think about what it means, that kind of thing, personally for them, hopefully. So again, we don’t end up with like, a dry narrator voice that doesn’t seem to be anchored in the character. It’s best to just look for your things for your viewpoint character to do. If that is constantly a problem, then it sounds like you might need a larger change. Like maybe you need to take out a character that is constantly doing things that your viewpoint character should be doing, for instance. Oren: You might have the wrong viewpoint character. That happens sometimes. All right, well, now that we’ve told you to go change your viewpoint character, no context, just go change it, I think we can go ahead and call this episode to a close. Chris: And if you enjoyed hearing this viewpoint, 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. 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.

This week is all about the trials and tribulations of giving kids to your important characters. Or at least it will be, once we finish venting our spleen about the final scene of a certain popular TV show. Writers, please: sons are not spiritual clones of their fathers. It’s weird when a story acts like a guy didn’t really die because he has a male heir to carry on his line. Also: Baby Yoda is pretty cool. Show Notes Warbreaker  Andor’s Kid   Temiri Blagg Gulp Shitto Grogu  Reactor Andor Article  Ellie Atreus  Naomi Wildman  Newt Babies  Molly O’Brien  Dark Shadows Elora Danan Transcript Generously transcribed by Emma G. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris:  You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [Intro Music] Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren. With me today is… Chris: Chris. Oren: And… Bunny: Bunny. Oren: Alright, terrible news everyone. The male hero of my story is going to die. It’s very tragic, yet poignant and badass, but so tragic. Bunny: Nooo. Oren: And it’s obvious, only one thing to do, right? Is to reveal that his love interest was pregnant the whole time and in the epilogue she has his son. Obviously it’s a son, shut up. My hero has begotten an heir. Chris: This is what hope is, Oren. It’s just, you need hope. Bunny: Life goes on. Oren: This is hope. Chris: You know, and hope is babies, specifically male babies. Oren: Only male babies. Babies whose gender is not mentioned in the story but we will make a point of making sure everyone knows that it was a boy baby. Bunny: And then we can name the baby after the dead hero, which is never weird; a widow naming a child after the dead husband. Oren: Yeah, a son is basically just the clone of their father. That’s just how it works. It’s logic. Bunny: That’s what people mean when they say family resemblance. Chris: Oh dear. Bunny: I hate nothing more than when a female character has sex for the sole purpose of being a baby canister. Oren: That’s a fun way to describe it. Bunny: Like that’s their only role in the story, or like the only reason they had sex is like, oh, this is the outcome. Chris: It reminds me of Brandon Sanderson’s Warbreaker, which I have ranted on slightly over the years. One of the things that made me so uncomfortable about that book is they had one of the viewpoint characters who was supposed to be one of the main characters, made a big point about how her religious significance was to be “the vessel”. She was gonna marry this God king and have the next God king or whatever, and it’s just like, this is really uncomfortable. Bunny: Do you really wanna go there, Brando? Is this something you feel like you have a lot to say about? Oren: Brando. Brando, why? Bunny: Brando, no. No, Brando. Oren: No, Brando. Chris: I’m pretty sure it’s because he had recently finished The Wheel of Time and he got Robert Jordan cooties. Oren: It does spread. Like, I have worked with authors who had recently read The Wheel of Time, or The Wheel of Time was their favorite, and I’m like, yeah, I can tell. There are signs. Bunny: You’re not keeping your cards close to your chest here. Oren: Next to your bosoms, your sheer fabric covered bosoms is where the cards are. That’s my first clue. Granted, that’s hardly only Wheel of Time, but it is notable. Bunny: I was just re-listening to the 372 podcast episode on Armada, which is a terrible Ernest Cline book, and it does this exact thing where the premise is that the main character’s dad and mom have been separated and she thought he was dead and then they finally get back together and it’s very emotional, and they have the sex… Oren: Oh, “the sex”, very nice. Bunny: The sex, yes, which the main character notes, which is weird. Like, he sees the dad post-sex and is like ‘Ah, they’ve been banging’. It’s extremely weird. But this one bang was enough to get him a baby brother, named after the father, and the father dies. Dies heroically. So, it’s literally exactly this. Chris: Yeah, the trope, I’ve seen it before too. I’ve seen it previously and it is obviously like, ‘male babies is hope’. Oren: Yeah. That example is funny because it at least has the slight twist of he already has a son. Chris: Yeah, true. Oren: Now he gets another one. Chris: Look, once the child reaches two years of age, they are no longer hope. Okay? Hope has to be very small. Bunny: Once they start having a personality and the personality is not the father’s personality, then uh, you gotta rewind the clock a bit and pop another one out. Oren: Okay. So, spoilers for Andor, ’cause you know, we’ve been dancing around this for a while. The thing that got me about that was not even that it was sexist – ’cause it is – but it was just so trite. Chris: Mm-hmm. For a show that has such high realism, or tries to establish that super-realistic atmosphere and doesn’t have that kind of, yeah, it’s just definitely theme-breaking. Oren: Like, Andor is not perfect, right? I’ve critiqued Andor before, but, Andor at least felt like it was devoted to doing its own thing. Bunny: Wait, explain. Oren: Oh, I guess you haven’t seen it. Bunny: No. Oren: Okay, well, spoilers again because the main character of Andor, Andor, he dies in Rogue One, right? And Andor is technically a prequel. So, the end of Andor is this implication that Rogue One‘s about to start and Andor is gonna die, and then the final shot is of Andor’s girlfriend, Bix, who we haven’t seen for who knows how long. Chris: She’s supposed to be another rebel, but she just disappears from the show, right? The second season does not, yeah… Oren: Yeah, she just vanishes and we see her in like the final shot and she has a baby who thankfully the show’s creator was kind enough to let us know is Andor’s son, and it’s so bad. It’s for a bunch of reasons. There was nothing to indicate she wanted a child and every indication that she wanted to keep being a rebel, which apparently she didn’t do. Chris: But also, she decides to leave after this quote unquote “force healer” who Andor thinks is a fraud, maybe, senses that Andor is special and has some role to play and then she just decides, ‘Oh, because you’re special and you have some role to play, I need to ditch you so that you stay in the rebellion instead of leaving with me’ or something. Oren: It’s convoluted as all heck, but it’s like if Andor suddenly pulled an “I am your father” reveal, right? It’s just not something you expect to see in this show. Chris: It’s not like other Star Wars properties where Star Wars generally is lower realism, where we’ve got a lot of heroism with lots of magic, we’ve got all the force powers and the lightsabers, which, you know, not realistic weapons, but they’re cool and they’re colorful. And things are very flashy and there’s lots of aliens and the aliens are a bit hokey but we love them. But Andor has a very different atmosphere that Gilroy purposely made it different from other Star Wars, where it is much grittier, has very few aliens in it, much more subdued, doesn’t really have Jedi or anything like that. Except for the ship that dual-wields lightsabers, that is a little odd. Oren: Yeah, but we only ever saw that once, and I guess he must have blown it up off-screen or something, ’cause that ship never came back. Chris: So, it’s just, again, that it doesn’t really match the tone of rest of Star Wars, it’s much grittier and has its own way of doing things. Bunny: Is the kid named Andor? Oren: We don’t know. The kid is unnamed, as far as we know. I am desperately hoping we will never see this kid again. I hope this kid goes the way of Broom Kid. Chris: Yeah, that’s what I was thinking of: Broom Kid. Oren: Broom Kid does have a name, but it’s something silly and I’m not gonna look it up, but it was, you know, a lot of theories about Broom Kid and then they never went anywhere. We never saw Broom Kid again and I’m just really hoping this baby is the same way. I would love to never hear about this baby in any other Star Wars property. Chris: And again, just in case somebody has not heard Broom Kid discourse, this is a boy that has a really random appearance in Last Jedi and the camera focuses on him for basically no reason. And I think probably the director was setting up a future main character or something but everybody hated him because he’s random and doesn’t belong there. Oren: All right, I lied, I did look up his name. His name is Temiri Blog. Bunny: Blog? Chris: Blog. Oren: Temiri Blog. Chris: Is he from the expanded universe? Oren: I don’t know. He’s just a thing. He’s just Broom Kid, okay? Bunny: Does he have a blog? Oren: Maybe it’s Blagg. It’s B-L-A-G-G. Chris: That does sound like a Star Wars name. Oren: It does. There’s barely a joke of a meme of random side characters in Star Wars called Gulp Shito, and we are almost there with this character’s name. Chris: Oh. I feel like we should probably transition to another character who actually has a kid. Like, let’s maybe talk about Mando. Oren: Oh, we were gonna talk, yeah this podcast was supposed to be about characters with kids. Wow, it’s been 10 minutes. Chris: It was. Oren: Oh, no. Chris: Yep. Oh no, we had something to get off our chest about Andor, okay? Oren: You just stop trying after 11 years of podcasting. You have your notes and everything and you… Chris: Look, if we were gonna drive you away, listeners, you would probably be gone already. Bunny: Look, this is tangentially related. This is about issues with kids and now a specific kid that people have issues with. Oren: Well, we have issues with. Nobody else seems to care, except for there was one article on Reactor that pointed out just how absolute garbage this Andor scene is and I appreciate that article. But it’s really weird how there’s been almost no discussion of it. I think because people are just kind of in shock that it happened? It was so brief, it was like, what? What is that? Did you really? Chris: I think it would be easy to just edit that out of your mind, you know, just edit that out of your image of the end of Andor. Oren: Yeah. I mean, you literally could just clip that out and nothing would change. You don’t need it for hope. The hopeful part is that the rebellion is starting. That’s the hope. That’s what actually makes it feel like a hopeful ending. Bunny: But what if there was a child? Oren: Okay. Chris: Okay. Bunny: Speaking of children. Oren: Yeah okay, so we’ve got a little bit of podcast left. We should talk about other characters ‘cause the idea of this episode was supposed to be when you would give your major characters kids and whether you should or not. And we’ll just say that was 10 minutes of explaining a situation where you shouldn’t. Bunny: Yeah, there you go. We started with a negative example. Now, we give more examples. Chris: So, as I was gonna say. Mando. Definitely positive example. Although, I think one thing that is worth pointing out is that Grogu slash Baby Yoda in The Mandalorian is not really a full character. He plays a role that’s more similar to what an animal companion would play, where he’s kind of a semi-character. And also the droids, right, kind of fit that same semi-character mold where they don’t talk and they’re very loyal. Right. And so they kind of like tag along and be cute and occasionally do something useful. Oren: Yeah. And for a while it’s extremely unclear whether Grogu can even understand language and you know, what mental level is he exactly? They say he’s fifty, he acts more like he’s three or something. Is he, who knows? He’s very inconsistent about that. Grogu’s big problem is that he has this arc of going to train with the Jedi, and then that means he’s not in the show anymore. So they’re like, no, actually you’re not gonna do that, you’re coming back. So that whole arc was meaningless. Bunny: People like him too much. I feel like adult characters having kids is kind of the flip side of the kid characters having parents problem and the adults having kids dilemma is a lot easier to solve because if you don’t want there to be kids, you can just say they don’t have kids. Whereas, if a kid doesn’t have parents, you kind of have to explain that away. Chris: Look, they’re an orphan. Don’t ask me about it. Bunny: Yeah. They’re all orphans. Oren: I am not taking questions at this time. Bunny: Just, no, no parents, don’t worry about it. It’s probably fine. Let’s get back to the tea shop. Oren: But Baby Yoda also raises an interesting point when you’re looking at giving your main character a kid, the obvious problem is that if your main character is doing dangerous adventures, probably not responsible to bring a child onto those. Bunny: THE child, Oren. Oren: But also, not great if your protagonist just hecks off and leaves their partner to raise the child on their own. Right? We don’t really look kindly on characters who do that. Fathers used to be able to get away with it more. Now there’s, you know, a little more awareness that that’s not good parenting. And Baby Yoda has an interesting solution to this, which is that in the beginning of the show, he’s being hunted so Mando has to carry him around, otherwise he’d just be in too much danger. And then by the time they solve that problem, we’ve kind of gotten used to the idea that Baby Yoda is basically invincible and we don’t have to worry about him too much. Chris: I mean, it helps that they gave Baby Yoda powers. Oren: Yes, he does have many, many powers. Chris: In fact, he’s so powerful that they have to establish that after he uses his powers, then he is like conked out. Oren: Yeah, he has to take a little nappy nap. Chris: He has a daily ability. Bunny: He needs a long rest. Chris: But not, uh, what are the other ones called? Oren: He is not an encounter or an at will ability. He can only use it once a day. Bunny: I mean, escort quests are a pretty common way that kids are used just because, for whatever reason, they have to be taken into danger and your adult character is the one to shepherd them through that. Mandalorian being that, I think Last of Us is also that, and Terminator 2 as well, in which case, you know, you’re running away from something rather than towards it. Chris: I think a lot of times in those stories, the child character or the young character is there to be like the heart of the more parental character. Certainly with Mando, he’s a mysterious guy, and again, he is fashioned after Boba Fett. I know they decided to make an actual Boba Fett but he’s more Boba Fett-ish than Boba Fett is – the new Boba Fett is – honestly. Oren: That was so weird. Chris: And again, mysterious, wearing a helmet, who is this guy? Right? It’s hard to get emotion out of him and that is why they added the Baby Yoda so that you could see him having a tender relationship and add a little more heart to the story. And I think a lot of times in these other situations, certainly Last of Us, you know, that’s kind of the purpose in adding that child character that the adult can look after. Oren: Yeah. Ellie also provides a lot of snark. Which, uh, Baby Yoda is less good at. The escort quest is a tried and true method for explaining why your kid is in the dangerous adventure. It does have some limits. Notably, escort quests tend to have end points, and what if your story keeps going after that? You might not be able to justify it as easily again, Baby Yoda does it by being invincible. And by the end of the point where the escort request doesn’t really make sense, he’s kind of developed a little bit more of more like a teenager’s level of intellect and he is got so many powers that it’s like, all right, he is probably fine, he can come with us. Plus he is got a cool little chainmail shirt that he can wear, right? So he’ll be fine, but other characters are gonna have a little bit more trouble. So, you might wanna consider if the escort request is best option. Because there are some other premises that might work better. Bunny: I mean, sometimes the answer is just that the kid is very capable. Usually that’s not when the kid is a baby. But certainly if your child is like a tween or a teen, it starts making more sense that they can fend for themselves. Like I’m pretty sure that’s the dynamic in God of War, right? Oren: Right, and you, oh man, I love Dad of Boy. That game is so funny to me because I’ve only played the one where Kratos has a son. I have never played the series before then, and it just feels so natural. It’s hard to imagine what this game series was like before Atreus was here. Who was Kratos even talking to if he doesn’t get to say “boy” all the time? Boy, boy, boy. It’s like 90% of the dialogue and it’s beautiful. But yeah, I mean you can just have the kid grow up, right? Over the course of this quest. Either literally or figuratively. And then that can provide more of an explanation. Chris: I think about Star Trek, where when we had Next Generation, the idea is that we had families on board and so there’s some kids, but they get in so many dangerous situations, that it feels really irresponsible that they have kids on board. Whereas, at least with Voyager, they didn’t mean to be away long-term, and so kids might just happen. And so it was a lot easier to justify why they might have kids on board. Bunny: And it’s easier to take care of reptiles than human babies. Oren: Voyager took a little while to get kids, ’cause first we had Naomi Wildman’s 18-month pregnancy. And then a little bit later we got the Borg children and Wildman aged up between seasons, which was very polite of her. So that she could be a precocious tween instead of like five. Chris: Again, it is funny, but every single time you ever have a TV show where somebody has a baby and it’s a speculative fiction show, it’s like, all right, how long until some magic or time shenanigans makes this baby an adult? But with Naomi Wildman, we didn’t do that explicitly, we were just like, oh, in the background, we’re just gonna sneakily, maybe it’s a fast-growing species. Oren: Mm-hmm. And, Deep Space Nine had a sort of alternate version of that where they did turn Molly into an adult, but only for an episode, she turned back. For the most part, O’Brien and Keiko’s kids are the ages they should be. I mean, it helps that Keiko is already a side character so when we don’t see the kids, we can assume they’re with Keiko. Chris: And it’s funny that Naomi’s mother was also not on the main cast. It’s like we decided to add a kid to Voyager, but to somebody who’s not actually an important character. Oren: Right. And the invisible mom, she’s just never there for the back half of the show. Chris: I’m wondering if they thought that they would have to include Naomi too often if the parent was a major character. Oren: Yeah, that’s possible. I honestly think it’s just because Voyager’s writers never really prioritized their secondary cast, and I think they liked the idea of Naomi because she gave Seven something to do. They really liked that interplay, and I think that’s probably as far as it went. The Deep Space Nine compared to Voyager is an interesting comparison of two premises that generally work pretty well if you want your characters to have kids. ‘Cause with Deep Space Nine, they are in like a stationary location and so problems come to them sometimes, but they’re not actively taking their kids into danger and when they know a problem is coming, they always have some dialogue about how we’ve evacuated the children and civilians to Bajor. So, when the latest hostile alien tries to blow up the ship, we’re not putting those kids in danger. Whereas Voyager is more of like a, well we don’t really have any other choice because of unusual circumstances, everyone on the ship has to be there at all times. We can’t just let the kids off every time there’s a problem. Chris: And certainly if you have something like a survival story, pretty easy to justify why there are kids there, right? The aliens attack, I’m at home with the kids, now I gotta get them to safety. Oren: That’s like a variation on the escort quest, right? Chris: Pretty simple. Oren: There’s also an option that I don’t see as much, but I think works pretty well, is when you have characters who kind of travel around but have a home base that they return to at the end of each mission. So, they leave their base in the morning and they go have an adventure and then they come back and then they pick their kid up from school and they’re like, ‘Hey, how was school?’ And then the kid is like, ‘What did you do at work?’ And they’re like, ‘I fought a monster’. Or whatever, right. Or they pretend they didn’t fight a monster. And it’s very comical. Bunny: Yeah, screwball family comedies. Maybe if we expand our view outside of just speculative fiction, probably the most common genre of parent kid stories. I can’t think of a screwball comedy that’s specifically fantasy. Oren: Uh, I guess you could argue The Good Place. Bunny: Uh, do they have kids? Oren: No, they don’t. But like, I mean, I could think of some fantasy comedies, right? Maybe not the kind you’re thinking of. Chris: Again, we’re still watching Dark Shadows, the original 1960s soap opera. Oren: For some reason. Chris: And there’s like one – I like watching it – and they have one child character and you know, they have to figure out what to do with him, right? With all of these plots. And if you’re not familiar with Dark Shadows, it’s like somebody decided they wanted to make The House of Usher: the soap opera where you have this creepy mansion full of secrets. You’ve got some ghosts and the supernatural element is pretty slow building, but the further you get into the show, the more supernatural things there are. But they have this kid named David and they’re like, okay, what do we do with him all the time? Oren: We make him real annoying. Chris: But in the beginning, they decided to make him surprisingly murderous? So, he basically makes trouble, right? He makes trouble for the other characters and that’s how he’s relevant to the plot. And of course, the problem with that is that you don’t like him anymore. And then they shift to a plot where now he’s in trouble and we need to save him. Oren: Oh no, don’t take David. Please. I definitely don’t hate every moment he’s on screen. Chris: And again, the person who is supposed to be the main character anyway, when she first arrives, it’s gonna be like the governess, right? And so that’s why they make him such a troublemaker, is to try to make things hard for the main character. They go a little too far with it. Oren: The best part about watching Dark Shadows is trying to place odds on whether the writers will feel obligated to actually tie up any given storyline or whether they will just get bored and it will just kind of disappear. Because you know, both can happen, right? It’s like a soap opera, so there are really long-running stories and sometimes they get tied up and then sometimes they just don’t. And you know, don’t talk about them anymore. It’s so funny to watch characters who were introduced for storylines that got dropped and are for some reason still in the show. It’s like, why are you still here, Burke? No one’s interested in your legal drama from five seasons ago, but you’re still in the show, I don’t know why, we’ve moved on. Bunny: It does seem like there are sub-tiers. No, tiers makes it sound like a hierarchy, although maybe it is a hierarchy, argue about it in the comments. Of types of child characters. There’s like the essentially animal companion or even Burden characters like Baby Yoda or Elora in Willow, who are there mostly to be carted around, like Elora doesn’t do anything, she’s basically Burden. Oren: She makes gurgling sounds. How dare you. Bunny: She makes, yeah, she gurgles, that’s true. She adds to the soundtrack. And then you have Moppets who are like precocious children, who are like toddlers to elementary schoolers. Oren: Baby Yoda goes through that phase, too. Bunny: True. I mean, I’m sure Baby Yoda will transition entirely from Burden to Moppets, to Tween to Teen to Adult. And we will see him in his final form someday. Oren: In the upcoming movie he’s gonna have human length legs. And he’s gonna walk around. It’s gonna be weird. Chris: Oh no. Bunny: Yeah, he’ll have to decide whether or not to shave them. But then, yes, then there’s like the snarky tween or the snarky teen or the older teen. This is like Joy from Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, who has legitimate gripes and the story is about them having a conflict with their parent rather than their parent shepherding them places. Oren: Because once they get old enough, it’s not like the expectation that the parent will help their kid goes away, but it changes, right? There’s a different expectation for how you parent, even a young or middle teenager compared to someone who’s turned 18 or is 19 or 20. Right? It’s just the dynamic is kind of different. Bunny: Right. And then I think by the time your child is like 20, I mean you can still have parent/kid stories there, but they fall less into this category. It’s mostly two adults now who probably bicker more than your average pair. Oren: You don’t need to have the same special considerations if it’s an adult child. Right. An adult child? Whatever. Bunny: Yeah, they can fight the dragon. Oren: There’s not a great gender-neutral term for a child that works in that context. You can say an adult son or an adult daughter, and that makes sense. I would like another word, but there isn’t one. That’s English’s fault. Bunny: My baby has become very long. And has facial hair. Long baby. Oren: All right. We’ve talked a lot about the various premises under which children make sense. I do think the other thing that’s important to talk about now that we’ve only got a couple minutes left because of our Andor detour, would be like, think about what role the child character is going to play. Right? Because if you just stick a child character in there and you don’t have any idea for them, they can get kind of annoying pretty quickly. You don’t want them to just be constantly the reason the protagonist can’t do anything, even though it’s tempting to use them as a hindrance. Audiences will begin to resent them if that’s all they do. So, you know, Chris mentioned being the heart, or maybe that was Bunny, one of you mentioned it. Chris: That was me. Bunny: Cite your sources, Oren. Oren: That is one option. I’m also kind of a fan of a kid-as-apprentice storyline, where you have to show them the ropes, whatever job it is. Again, that works pretty well in stories where your characters don’t have great support systems, so you have to learn dangerous work on the job. Bunny: That’s kind of, inheritance dramas fall into that category. Like Game of Thrones is like, you know, technically they’re apprenticing to be, you know, murdering. Oren: They’re apprenticed to be, you know, leader of the grimdarkest house that was ever the grimdarkest. Bunny: Yeah. They’re learning how to have a tragic backstory. Oren: And that’s also, you know, your Kratos and your Atreus characters right there. And I think that one has a lot of potential. Or, if you have a really big cast, if you’re doing the literary equivalent of Deep Space Nine, you don’t have to be as focused, there might just be some kids around. That’s harder to do in a book, but it’s possible. So now that we’ve finished with the detour from our Andor detour, I think we can go ahead and call this episode to a close. Naturally, all of us will soon have an heir to pass on the podcast to when we heroically die. That’s definitely gonna happen. Chris: And if you enjoyed our rambling, 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. We will talk to you next week. [Outro Music]

We talk a lot about turning points, where a character overcomes challenges and saves the day. But what if they don’t? Turning points can go in either direction, after all. The downward variety is most common for villains, but it can apply to heroes, too. How do you make sure this sad ending feels earned, whether it’s a minor bump in the road or a permanent end? Is there a way to keep your readers from rioting? The answer is a solid maybe. Show Notes Turning Points Character Karma  Syril Karn He Chose Poorly  Elsa Schneider Hamlet Eddard Stark I Wanted My Hero to Make a Mistake. It Didn’t Go Well Marcus Inaros  The Laconian Empire Redwall Kai Winn Spiderman: No Way Home Transcript Generously transcribed by Ari. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. With your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny. [Intro music] Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is– Bunny: Bunny.  Chris: And– Oren: Oren.  Chris: Now I know since this is the start of the episode, we’re all feeling very optimistic, but what if in our hubris we go too far? [all gasp] One of us might choose poorly. And it will all lead to the downfall of the episode.  Oren: It’s all right. I’m very confident that that’s not a problem, so I’m not going to prepare for it. It’ll probably be fine.  Bunny: [chuckles] Nobody has ever been too arrogant before. Mm-hmm.  Oren: Yeah. Chris: I was warned not to do this episode, but you know, I got nothing on me.  Bunny: Don’t trust the haters.  Chris: Obviously, everything’s gonna be fine. [Oren chuckles] What could go wrong? Bunny: I’m one day away from retirement. [laughs] Oren: Surely, if I made the choice to not properly edit my co-hosts voices because I was feeling lazy that day and only edited mine, what could be the harm? Surely that wouldn’t lead to anything bad.  Chris: Of course not. So now that we have done the summoning ritual for something that will definitely not harm us. Bunny: Mm-hmm.  Oren: Mm-hmm.  Chris: Let’s get onto this topic, which is completely unrelated, of course, as it is every episode.  Oren: Yeah. That’s how the opening bit works.  Chris: [laughs] That’s how the opening bit works. We’re talking about downward turning points.  Bunny: Oh, like a sharpened shepherd’s crook? A scythe? Because it’s a downward turning point, huh? Chris: Yeah, yeah, that’s right! Very appropriate. Actually.  Bunny: Yeah.  Oren: It’s like one of those left turn signs, but it’s kind of come unstuck. It’s sort of on its side and it’s just pointing at the ground.  Bunny: Yeah.  Oren: Turn into the ground here please.  Chris: I love how symbolic this is, even though you’re trying to say things that are unrelated in your hubris. [laughs] Bunny: We’re too confident in our joke. We’ve accidentally made a serious thing, even though we were trying to be silly.  Chris: That’s right.  Bunny: It’s terribly ironic.  Oren: I have a downward turning point that I’m very excited to share that I just saw the other night.  Chris: Oh yes, we will do that. But first we should probably remind people what a downward turning point is. Oren: If we must. Chris: ‘Kay, so in case there’s somebody who doesn’t know but still wants to listen to our podcast, for some reason? Some trusting listener who is sure that we will define all of our terms.  Oren: There are dozens of us. Dozens! [Chris and Bunny laugh]  Chris: Okay. So we talk a lot about how to make satisfying endings when you have a typical plot arc, which is driven by tension. And the trick is that right at the climax you have something we call a turning point that determines success or failure, so whether the protagonist gets a happy or a sad ending. And most of the time we want happy endings. And so when we’re talking about turning points, we almost always default to talking about that because the vast majority of books have [a] standard or upward turning point. So the protagonist does something impressive or virtuous and it feels like they earned a reward and then they get a happy ending, sometimes a bittersweet ending, but a lot of times they’re mechanically the same.  Oren: Mm-hmm.  Chris: They sacrifice something, they’re actually doing something impressive and that creates kind of a bittersweet feeling. But in essence, they succeeded at what they were trying to do even if it cost something.  Oren: Yeah.  Chris: But this time, what we are talking about [is] how they earn comeuppance, instead. So a character, not necessarily a protagonist, does something bad, and then they’re punished and then the audience gets their schadenfreude. Bunny: [exaggerated] schaden-freude.  Oren: right. It feels right that this happened because that’s the trick to this, is that you both need to logically show that it makes sense that this happened. You also need to satisfy the reader that it feels correct that this happened.  Chris: Mm-hmm.  Oren: That’s the trick. And if you don’t do that. Readers are gonna be mad.  Chris: Right. And just in case anybody is unfamiliar and is like, ‘oh no, that seems too simplistic.’ Well, it’s more complicated in practice, but this is how all stories work. I swear this is not us trying to impose some moral simplicity on stories that is not already there. They all already work this way. Even stories that are missing turning points are usually trying to mimic them, and it’s just the storyteller doesn’t quite know how they work. Oren: Yeah.  Chris: And just doesn’t quite get them precisely. But we can still see that they’re trying in the way that they’re constructed.  Bunny: The most common kind that is trying to emulate a turning point but doesn’t really work is when the character tries really hard and then tries harder and succeeds.  Oren: Yeah.  Chris: Mm-hmm. Bunny: We need to know why it works this time.  Oren: Another common one is the super sayan one where they just feel so intensely because  something bad is happening that they are powered up now, and you getting really mad is not a satisfying turning point. [Bunny laughs] Chris: So what is? It’s more complicated than this in practice, but we can basically boil it down to three traits where we have either three virtues or their opposites. Which would be our misdeeds that make us feel like somebody should be punished.  Oren: Mm-hmm.  Chris: It’s not always about, A lot of it is about ethics, but not necessarily, it’s not perfectly condemning somebody. sometimes it’s just about, it only makes sense since you did that, that that would fail.  Oren: Yeah.  Chris: Or succeed, for instance. It doesn’t make logical sense otherwise. So the obvious ones on either side are selflessness and selfishness. obviously being selfish part of that is the hubris and arrogance and lacking humility is kind of an extension of that.  Oren: Mm-hmm.  Chris: Of being really into yourself and thinking you’re above everything. Then there’s, on one side, the determination, resistance, and the other side, I’m just gonna call it taking the easy route.  Oren: Yeah.  Chris: Unfortunately, it kind of strongly correlates to what we consider to be “weak will”, but I don’t like to use that term because studies have showed that’s not actually a thing. Nobody has weaker will than anybody else. But in this case, if somebody gives into temptation or is lazy or gives up easily, that would all fall in the ‘taking the easy route’. Makes sense that if you keep trying you are more likely to succeed, and if you push past your barriers you are more likely to succeed. So there’s kind of an obvious cause and effect here.  Oren: Yeah.  Chris: And then the last one, cleverness is considered a good thing that should be rewarded. And the opposite side is not- not being clever. Lack of cleverness is not something that characters are punished for. You have to be obviously careless.  Oren: Right. Making obviously bad choices, Chris: So ignoring warnings, cutting corners, that kind of thing. Oren: Imposing tariffs on your own economy, things like that. [all chuckle] Bunny: Worse on penguins.  Chris: And the hubris thing also falls into the carelessness category, right? Not only is it self-aggrandizing, but there’s also a certain amount of carelessness that comes with arrogance. So that’s generally something that would be a misdeed. Some action based on that would be a misdeed that’s worth punishing.  Oren: Yeah.  Chris: Generally in a story.  Oren: Okay. So now that we’ve got the basics, I’ve got a really interesting one.  Chris: Mm-hmm.  Oren: So spoilers for Andor season two episode eight. And this is what happens with Syril because Syril has a little awkwardly kind of transitioned into having an arc where he’s starting to question the empire. Chris: Right. And just for anybody who’s not familiar with Andor, Syril is a- he starts out in season one as like a low level corporate cop, or something like that in the empire.  Oren: Yeah.  Chris: And then he becomes kind of like an administrator, so he’s on Team Evil.  Oren: Yeah. And so by this point, he is starting to realize that maybe he is the baddies, and that the empire is not doing good things. And this is made very clear to him when he sees the empire’s soldiers open fire on a crowd of civilians and he’s stumbling around this scene of this massacre trying to figure out what to do. And we are- he is at a turning point, right? He’s at a turning point where he could choose to turn against the empire, and we would see that as a successful turning point.  And he would deserve, you know, something for that. I don’t know if reward is the right word ’cause again, he’s done a lot of bad things, but he would at least recognize [that] the empire was wrong and that he should do something about it. But instead he sees Andor, the main character who he has like an obsession with- Chris: Who had a big vendetta against.  Oren: and he gives in and decides to attack Andor instead of doing anything about this massacre that’s happening. And so then he and Andor have a fight and it’s, you know, very gritty and they roll around and punch each other a lot and it ends with Syril having a gun on Andor, and then getting shot by another rebel. And like right after Andor looks at him and says, “who are you?” Which is like the greatest burn that anyone has ever unintentionally delivered. Chris: because in Syril’s, mind Andor is his like nemesis or something?  Oren: Yeah.  Chris: Right. So the shock of being like, ‘so you’ve got out of your way in the middle of this massacre to attack Me personally, I don’t even know who you are.’ Oren: Yeah, it feels like in [under] normal circumstances, if we didn’t have the whole thing going on with Syril, if Andor was just in a fight with a- with like a major bad guy and then he won the fight ’cause some random rebel showed up and helped him, it wouldn’t really be very satisfying. It’d be like, ‘oh, okay, good job random rebel, thanks.’ But that this wasn’t about Andor, this was about Syril and Syril dies because he made the wrong choice. And it’s a very cool scene and it works really well. And it’s an example of how this is simple in concept, complex in practice.  Chris: Yeah. So basically the most iconic turning points [are] almost always used for villains. Oren: Mm-hmm.  Chris: Because with heroes we have to worry about whether they’re likable or whether the audience will get frustrated, but we don’t have to worry about that for villains. And so they’re just free to make bad choices and then get punished for that. I think the most iconic ones I’ve seen are like Indiana Jones. Oren: Mm-hmm.  Chris: The Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.  Oren: Mm-hmm.  Chris: They’re seeking the Holy Grail and they come upon this old immortal night at the end of all of their labyrinth that they have to get through, and Indiana Jones gets through, but also a villain gets through. And this knight has a whole bunch of grails and so he challenges them, ‘Pick which one you think is the grail, and then drink from it and see what happens.’ And the villain chooses based on the advice of somebody who betrayed Indiana.  Oren: Mm-hmm.  Chris: One of the turning points that’s common, the downward turning points, is the betrayed betrayer. Basically, if you have a situation where what goes around comes around,  Oren: yep. Chris: That’s a kind of a typical downward turning point. So this villain hired somebody to betray the main character, and now he relies on her advice when choosing a grail and believes her when she’s like, ‘oh yeah, this one that’s full of golden jewels. It’s totally the holy grail.’   Oren: That’s totally the one! [chuckles]  Chris: Right? Which is where you get that meme format with that old guy being like, [dramatic]  ‘you chose poorly’ as he drinks from it and ages really fast and dies.  Oren: Right. Continuing the weird Indiana Jones tradition of the bad guys would’ve failed even if Indiana Jones didn’t do anything [all laugh] Very strange. At least the two good Indiana Jones movies both have that. It’s very odd. Chris: But yeah, obviously Indiana Jones chooses the right one and drinks from the Grail and he’s like, ‘you chose wisely.’ It’s just like that really iconic scene of good choice, poor choices. That’s basically what every turning point is, just subtler usually.  Oren: Yeah. And we see that again actually a little later when they’re trying to get out of the area and the magic of the place, or maybe God or whatever, is stopping them from leaving and bringing the whole place down ’cause you’re not supposed to take the grail out of there. Indy makes his battle of will turning point and is like, ‘okay, I will leave the grail behind.’ Whereas his hot lady friend, who is also evil, she can’t do it, and she gives into temptation to try to get the grail and as a result, falls to her death and dies. Chris: Yeah. It’s a little funny when you think about it because on one hand, determination is usually a positive attribute.  Oren: Yeah.  Chris: And a different story also could just be determined and it would be good.  Oren: Mm-hmm.  Chris: But because this is framed as a temptation… also, she is warned. That’s another big sign that it’s a downward turning point as opposed to she’s just real scrappy and she’s gonna get that grail and good for her! [all laugh] Oren: Yeah. You go lady who was working with Nazis! Are you also a Nazi? Hard to say.  Chris: Hard to say.  Bunny: Unclear. You’re hot though.  Chris: Right, but the fact that she’s warned by this knight not to take the grail past the seal, right? And let it go and [she] refuses those warnings. There’s definitely a lot of subjectivity, a lot of downward printing points, and oftentimes the more relatable ones when you have like a sympathetic villain, are the refusal to let go of something. Oren: Mm-hmm.  Chris: Which, if you look at it versus determination, one of the things that you’ll see for determined characters is their ability and willingness to make sacrifices. Including sacrificing their life or giving up something that they want, or making a choice that has some downsides that will put them in danger. Bunny: I wonder if we’re supposed to view that particular turning point as greed? She won’t give up trying to get the cup because she’s greedy for it, maybe?  Chris: Mm-hmm.  Bunny: I think that’s how I read it.  Chris: I think that certainly factors into it. I feel like there’s a certain indolence is sometimes what I’ve called this opposite of determination. You’re lazy, but you’re also used to luxury and greedy as opposed to scrappy and self-sacrificing and… Oren: Right. We talk a lot about how traits that in some stories are positive traits that would make the character earn or deserve their victory in other stories can be portrayed as a negative and make them feel like they deserve their failure. Chris: Which is why this isn’t as simplistic as it may sound,  Oren: Right. Chris: Is because what is, determine what is carelessness, for instance, or when we have Hamlet, for instance, where he uses caution but it’s too much caution to the point where it’s carelessness. Oren: Right? Ned Stark is our favorite example. Ned Stark is honorable and he’s chivalrous. And in most stories, that would be a good thing and we would want him to win. But we see that Westeros is such a cutthroat place that when he starts to ignore possible allies because that doesn’t fit with his sense of honor, now it feels like you’re just making bad choices, man.  Chris: Now you’re being careless, yeah. Oren: Mm-hmm. Exactly.  Chris: And that’s how it is a lot of times with heroes. Because we talked about that a lot of the most iconic ones happen with villains ’cause you don’t have to worry about certain constraints. But when you have heroes, readers- they can be unlikeable because of what they do, but readers can also get really frustrated. Oren: Mm-hmm.  Chris: So if you ever got mad after you saw a main character make [what] was obviously a bad choice, [to Orin] You know what this is like.  Oren: Yeah. I have a whole post about that, how I needed my character to make a mistake and my readers consistently did not like it. Chris: There’s no perfect solution that works in all cases, but you can have them take a good karmic trait a little too far, and that’s exactly what happens with Ned is one way to make it better. Oren: Yeah. Chris: Trying to make the choices understandable as you can and just make it mild and then give them an outsized punishment for how mild the mistake is.  Oren: Yeah.  Chris: So it’s like you were a little careless in that [you] didn’t lock the door, but you didn’t know there would happen to be a bunch of people breaking in that night and killing people or something. Not locking the door is a relatively minor thing to be careless about, and it happened to be a bad night. That would be the kind of thing that is used with a protagonist, typically.  Oren: Yeah, and we’ve been talking a lot about these in terms of the conclusion of a character’s arc. Often that includes them dying, but downward turning points also can happen in lower stakes issues earlier in the story, right? Especially when you need your character to fail so that the tension stays high so it actually feels like failure is possible.  Bunny: Or it’s part of their arc, like it’s something they’re overcoming so we see them fail to overcome it a couple times.  Oren: Mm-hmm.  Chris: Yes, that’s exactly right. Here’s the thing, usually you don’t actually need this for tension, and the reason why you don’t need it for tension earlier in the story is because it actually looks just like a problem that starts an arc. So anytime you want something bad to happen or something to go wrong, that raises tension you can have the protagonist fail. And like Bunny said, storytellers typically choose that option when there’s a character arc and there’s something for them to learn. But if they actually don’t have any agency and something just bad happens that raises tension, it just looks like a new arc has started. The villain just struck.  Oren: Yeah. Mm-hmm.  Chris: You don’t want to deprive your protagonist of agency, period. You don’t want everything to go wrong all the time and the protagonist not have anything to do with it. That’s bad. But as long as the protagonist has some successes and has some agency, you can have a failure that they didn’t really have agency in because that just starts a new arc. It just looks like a different part of story structure.  Oren: There’s an interesting comparison to be made in the Expanse books. Um, spoilers for those, I don’t remember exactly which books this happens in, but there are two examples in the Expanse books of the villains ending a book by pulling off a major victory. The first one is against this guy Inaros, and Inaros isn’t the perfect villain, he kind of comes outta nowhere and it feels weird that we’ve never heard of him when he’s apparently this super capable rebel commander.  But he does manage to pull off a pretty convincing win at the end of one of the books when he slams an asteroid into Earth and takes control of the belt and is in a pretty strong position. Part of the way he’s able to do that is that our team good, which is not just the main characters, are too busy squabbling with each other to properly unite against him. That really helps there, it feels like they have made mistakes and that has opened the possibility for Inaros to win the day. Now of course it helps that this is clearly building to the next book where he’s gonna get defeated, but it still generally works pretty well.  Chris: Like the Empire Strikes back, for instance. Oren: Yeah, exactly.  Chris: Exactly. Where Luke decides that he’s gonna leave training. That leads to- he does succeed in some things as a result, but it also leads to a big failure. But because this is only the second in a trilogy, we can kind of like, okay, that failure is also kind of a hook for the next story. Oren: Right. But then later on we try this. Again with these guys who, they go off and live on an alien planet for a little while and then there’s like a 30 year time jump, and then they show back up with a bunch of super tech and just completely steamroll over the solar system. It’s some of the most frustrating stuff I have ever read, part of that is just because these guys feel really contrived.  Chris: Mm-hmm.  Oren: ‘A totally super powerful mega tech faction was just forming off screen for 30 years. Don’t worry about it. That definitely happened.’ But even if they had had a better explanation, there was just nothing the team good could do about this, so it felt dishonest to drag it out for so long.  Chris: Right?  Oren: Team good does everything right. You know, they all unite, they all have the perfect strategy, they get all their ducks in the line, and it’s not enough. And it’s like, why did you make me read an entire book about that? You could have summed that up in a chapter. Chris: Right? Yeah, that’s definitely the thing ’cause this doesn’t make for a good conflict, right?  Oren: Mm-hmm.  Chris: You want your protagonist to have some agency in conflicts too. So generally when you start a new problem that opens an arc, it happens pretty fast. Karma is something that is created and then sticks around until it’s paid off, right? That’s the other thing.  Oren: Yeah.  Chris: Why it really matters if we’re talking about the climax or an earlier sequence, because a character can do something good or bad and as long as that is not balanced out, they’re not rewarded or punished for that. That just sticks around on their tab-  Oren: Mm-hmm.  Chris: -And we just expect it to be resolved at the end. But until then, until the very end, and if it’s a series, it could be an entire series, the payback could come later. Generally, if it happens fast and they don’t have any agency in it, then that’s something to be- okay, they didn’t do anything wrong yet they still lost, but they’re gonna turn it around.  Oren: Yeah. Chris: ‘Cause they didn’t deserve to lose, ‘so we’re gonna turn it around later.’ You could have some fight where the villain succeeds ’cause they’re better.  Oren: I think that would’ve been fine. It’s just that it took an entire book. Chris: Right! No, it just took too long.  Bunny: That’s the sort of thing you want early in the book. Because then the idea is that you’re struggling to recoup from that.  Chris: Yeah. I can recommend giving some people some satisfaction at the end of a book. Even if the story doesn’t officially end till the end of the series, it sucks to get to the end of the book and get no satisfaction.  Oren: Cliffhanger, baby.  Bunny: It’s like a cliffhanger but you’re swinging from the cliff so you’re hitting your head against the side of the cliff. Chris, Oren: Yeah.  Oren: Yeah. A really. Weird one that this showed up, I swear, in every Red Wall book, would be that the hero would defeat the villain and then the villain would beg for mercy, and the hero would say, ‘okay, I’m granting you mercy ’cause I’m not evil’, and then the villain would try some sneaky cowardly attack after they’ve been granted mercy and this would lead to them dying.  Bunny: Ah, the self-disposing villain.  Oren: Yeah, it’s the self-disposing villain!  Chris: When you want the villain to die, but you don’t want the hero to kill anybody. That’s right!  Oren: I swear, every red wall book ends that way. And it’s so weird.  Chris: The superhero movies do that a lot too. Oren: Mm-hmm.  Chris: Yeah. The attack that reflects back on them.  Oren: Yeah.  Chris: But the other way that we dispose of villains is with the betrayed betrayer or victim’s victim.  Bunny: [giggles] What goes around comes around.  Chris: Yep, exactly. We have some person innocent that the villain hurt that we learned about earlier come, and one of my favorites is that it’s the end of Stardust where we have three witches that kept a bunch of animals in cages because they were using the type of divination where you look at guts. And then the animals, just as soon as they’re let out, they know exactly who hurt them and just swarm them.  Oren: Get ’em!  Chris: But that’s pretty typical, something like that.  Oren: Yeah.  Chris: Their minions that they were mean to, once freed, carry them away, and we hear them screaming, but we don’t have to watch anything happen. Oren: One of my favorites is near the end of Deep Space Nine, and I don’t love this arc in general, it feels kind of weird and anticlimactic, but there’s a specific part in this, and this is when Gul Dukat, who is working with the Pah-wraiths, has decided he’s gonna go down to the cave where the Pah-wraiths are all imprisoned and let them out and Cisco has to go to stop him. And Kai Win is also there and has sort of decided that she doesn’t want to be on Dukat’s team anymore.  And there’s this section where she could have just thrown the book into the big fire lake, the magic book that Dukatt was using, ’cause this is sci-fi, right? It’s got a magic book and she could have just done that and won. But instead she makes a big show of doing it and then Dukat blasts her with a Pah-wraith laser. And at first I was like, ‘ah, this annoyed me. She could have just won right there.’ But then I thought about who Kai Win is and I’m like, ‘yeah, no. She would want credit as she was doing it. She would want Cisco to look at her and be like, “Cisco acknowledge me that I’m doing this good thing because I’m very special and I need affirmation.”’ Chris: Gul Dukat is just like that too.  Oren: Yeah. Dukat also is like that. So in retrospect, I actually like that. I think it was in character.  [all laugh] Bunny: Forgiven.  Chris: An example I’d like to use of a protagonist’s downward turning point that is made mild is in Spiderman No Way Home, where basically what we find out is that Peter Parker’s girlfriend and best friend didn’t get into [the] college they wanted to go to because he has a bad reputation.  Oren: Yeah.  Chris: And so first he goes to ask Dr. Strange to basically cast a spell to make people forget who he is to change that. And because he’s doing it for his friends, initially it seems selfless. So that kind of softens it. But then we find out when Dr. Strange starts casting a spell, and he is like, ‘oh, well you appealed the decision, right?’ And then he is like, ‘uh, no,’ which shows carelessness, right? And the lack of dedication that he didn’t do his due diligence, so that takes a point against him. And then during the spell, he keeps asking for more things. He’s unwilling to make sacrifices. Doesn’t show that he’s properly determined and then the spell goes wrong, and then he’s like, ‘okay, it’s my fault. Now I have to make up for it.’ And he didn’t really do anything super bad, we can understand why he was doing what he was doing. At the same time, we can also see how he wasn’t careful and he overreached so it’s understandable that he feels he has something to make up for. Oren: Yeah. All right. Well, with that, I think we can go ahead and call this episode to a close and we didn’t have to pay for any of our arrogant choices earlier, so it’s great. It all worked out.  Chris: Oh, no. Means a karma still outstanding.  Oren: It’s fine. Just assume that it happened after we stopped recording.  Chris: Please don’t punish us by going to patreon.com/that would be awful. Oren: We would hate it so much. Before we go, I want to thank all of our existing patrons. There’s Ayman Jaber, he’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.  [outro music]

Just a couple of buddies giving each other a hard time, what fun! Unless one of them says something that goes too far, and now they look like a jerk to the audience. This is a balancing act writers must tackle: showing characters’ personality and friendship without stepping over a line. This is difficult in fiction and real life, but at least the former lets us plan ahead. Show Notes How to Write Barbs and Banter That Aren’t Mean Romantasy  Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves  The Last Jedi Who’s On First  Thor: Love and Thunder  Cabin in the Woods The Batman  How to Write Jokes  Sokka Dragon Prince  Kaiju Preservation Society  Mistborn Way of Kings  All Systems Red  Galaxy Quest  Baldur’s Gate 3 Banter  Transcript Generously transcribed by Maddie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris:  You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. With your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [Intro Music] Bunny: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Bunny, and with me today is… Oren: Oren. Bunny: And… Chris: Chris.  Bunny: It’s time to show off our deep and enduring friendship, you guys. I’m gonna be clever. I’m gonna be witty. You two suck and you smell bad, eh?  Chris: Oh, ha ha.  Oren: Snarky remark. Self-deprecating joke. Pop culture reference! Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle] Oren: I think I got this solved everybody. We figured it out.  Bunny: Can’t you tell what good friends we are? We’re the kind of friends who would never forget to write notes for this episode.  Chris: [Chuckles] Oren: We would not do that.  Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]  Bunny: Just as we would not stink and suck.  Chris: Look, I’m feeling very attacked right now. Bunny: [Laughs] Oren: Look, this isn’t an attack on you, Chris. This is an attack on anyone who happened to not make show notes for our episode on character banter. I don’t know who that is. I’m being very neutral here. I’m just lobbing attacks at everyone. We’ll see who it lands on.  Chris: Have you considered that actually the blank space where my notes should be is an artistic statement that is symbolic? Oren: Mmm. It could be that. That’s good.  Chris: See, it’s deeply ironic because it’s about banter, and yet it is silent.  Oren: Uh oh. We’re getting into artsy banter now. This has become very literary banter. I don’t love it. [Chuckles] Bunny: Avant-garde podcast. They’ll teach this in podcast class someday. Chris: [Laughs] They’ll make poor, poor students try to decipher its meaning, but the only right meaning will be what the teacher thinks. Oren: It’ll be great. Don’t worry about it.  Chris: The true American classic.  Bunny: They’ll be hunting through the archives for the fabled notes with the white space in them. It’s like the lost folio. Moving back to banter, from other episodes we’ve done on literary complaints.  Chris, Oren: [Chuckle] Bunny: The storytellers like banter. We write banter because it’s fun. It’s a good way to show character dynamics and what characters mean to each other and how close they are. It can build chemistry. Flirting, I would say, is a type of banter and it’s fun and humorous. It lifts up the dialogue and makes it amusing. I would say those are the main points of banter.  Oren: Hilariously, because of the backlash against the MCU, a lot of people are weirdly anti-banter right now. They don’t like it. They seem to think it’s bad for characters to have quippy dialogue, which is very funny to me, I occasionally encounter that in writing discussions. But then of course the moment something that’s not the MCU comes out, that’s quippy, everyone loves it.  Chris: So is it just they’re tired of the MCU or is it they’re tired of the specific types of quips the MCU uses? Which I think, Oren, you probably summed it up pretty well. Self-deprecating joke, pop culture reference.  Bunny: Ugh. Oren: The pop culture reference maybe, but even then, I’m honestly not convinced. For example, the D&D movie, it objectively speaking, had very similar dialogue to an MCU movie. Not exactly the same, because again, they don’t make modern pop culture references. But it’s pretty similar, and no one saw it, but everyone who did see it loved it. So I don’t know. I’m very skeptical that people are actually sick of quippy dialogue.  Chris: They’re just sick of the MCU.  Oren: I think they are sick of the MCU and the moment you take away the MCU, it’s like, actually, people liked this. And then, there are of course accusations people throw around like, “This has MCU writing.” But, when I look at it, they just mean something they didn’t like. That’s all it means. I don’t think it has any real definition that is useful for writers.  Chris: Personally, we’ve seen so many first person narrators in fantasy, in particular romantasy right now. Which again, it’s nothing wrong with romantasy, it’s just that romanasy is very hot. Really big trend. Anytime, it’s just like the MCU, you have a lot of something, it starts to get old.  So we have all of these first person narrators that are using real world curse words and tend to have a style of humor that is, and I think this is actually another complaint with the MCU and it’s witticisms, it feels like it’s not taking the story seriously. That we can’t be serious about anything anymore. And this again, with jokes in general, if you aim the joke in the wrong direction, it becomes a big problem. I think there was in Rise of Skywalker, people were making jokes at Hux’s expense in the beginning.  Oren: That was Last Jedi. Chris: That was Last Jedi.  Oren: It was when Poe flies his X-Wing to do a little “Who’s on First” routine with Hux to buy the rebellion time to escape. And it was very silly.  Chris: If you need your villain to be threatening, that’s a very bad idea to make a joke at the villain’s expense that way. Some villains are so scary you can actually get away with it. But in general, it’s like a lesser extent of that. Where after story, after story, after story where we have that same tone. Nothing is taken seriously because it’s like we’re D&D players who are too busy goofing around. [Chuckles] Everybody kind of craves something that’s a little more buttoned down. A little bit more ready to take itself seriously and be a little bit more emotionally potent. Because it dims all the other emotions.  Bunny: And here’s the thing, quips and banter are great in a dark setting. You need a break from that darkness. And, especially if you have a group of friends or something, the crew. I just read Mistborn and I enjoyed the banter of the crew very much. I thought that was quite well done, and because that is such a dark setting, it was often a welcome relief from the rest of that darkness. But when it’s all quips and a little bit of darkness sprinkled in, that they also quip about, that’s tiresome. It feels like the serious parts don’t get the weight that they deserve. Or in the MCU, it feels like it doesn’t trust the serious parts to carry themselves. You’ll lose the audience’s attention if you don’t make a little jab about the thing you’re trying to get them to take seriously. That’s a complaint I’ve heard for sure.  Chris: It goes to show that you do want some tonal variety. Within reason. It’s like you have a color palette. If you were doing a painting, for your tone, where you have a certain level of range. And not that you can’t have comedic stories that can be funny most of the way through, but I do think that having some level of tone variation where you allow moments to be a little bit more serious, can get audiences ready for them to be silly again, in some cases. Oren: I think it’s really hard to tell to what extent when, people say that about an MCU movie where they’re like, “It took itself too not seriously.” Like every moment was undercut. It’s hard to separate that from the general backlash against the MCU. I would say that Thor: Love and Thunder, for example, is a movie that definitely undercut where it should not have, by making too many jokes, like when Natalie Portman is dying of stage four cancer. They are still making the same kind of, of quippy dialogue. And that’s not even a situation where jokes are inappropriate. People make dark jokes in those situations all the time, but the specific kind of quippy MCU joke felt really out of place in that scene.  But I’ve also seen people making those complaints about every MCU movie that comes out, and I’m not really convinced that’s actually the problem. I think that’s just become a popular complaint ‘cause it sounds sophisticated. It sounds like you know what you’re talking about when you say that.  Chris: And with a dark comedy that has genuinely dark elements in it, sometimes you do want to lighten those dark elements up a bit and it kind of broadens the audience by allowing people to tolerate dark elements that they would otherwise have trouble with, by making jokes and lightening the mood. And that’s a good thing.  That’s kind of one of the tricky things about storytelling, is every time we give advice, there’s always tons of little niche situations, in which things are different. Yes, don’t make a joke at the expense of your villain, but Cabin in the Woods does it, for instance. But this is a movie, where it’s a lot easier to create a big sense of immediate threat and jump scares and all of those things. And these are really, genuinely very scary monster villains, zombies. So it doesn’t have to worry about the movie not being scary anymore because we made a funny joke. Oren: It’s been interesting that I haven’t heard the same complaint about Thunderbolts, which I haven’t seen. So I don’t know. I’m curious what’s going on there.  Bunny: I do think the MCU is more prone to undercutting its dramatic moments than other properties I’ve seen. And I think it gets less leeway because it does it so often, but I think it is endemic to the MCU in a lot of ways because it is known for that type of humor. And as you’ve said, when those movies started to come out, that was not a super common style of humor, and we were coming out of really grim, dark, Batman movies were the most recent superhero movie. So it felt fresh.  Oren: Whereas now the most recent Batman movie that was even darker and grittier, somehow, felt like a refreshing change. It was like, “Oh, Batman takes himself very seriously in this movie. Okay. All right. I don’t hate it.”  Bunny: Yes. It’s the Batman-Thor spectrum. It’s a sine wave. We oscillate between them.  Chris, Oren: [Laugh] Oren: I’ve been working on some banter in my current work in progress, as it were, and I’ve discovered that I only know how to write banter based on Kirk and Spock. Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle] Oren: I was like, “Okay, how am I gonna make these characters sound?” ‘Cause that’s one of the things with banter, is you want the characters to sound distinct. You don’t want them to sound like they’re repeating the same lines back and forth at each other. So I was like, “All right, I’ll make one of them warm and outgoing and friendly. And I’ll make the other one kind of stoic and reserved and more dry.” And I was like, “I’ve created Kirk and Spock.” I didn’t mean to do that, but I did. [Chuckles] Bunny: The latter one of those is also just your default character model, so…  Oren: Yeahhh.  Bunny: [Chuckles] Chris: But I also think that in general comedy, that’s how a lot of jokes work. The quote unquote “straight” man, which is a weird thing to say now. And seems to have a very different meaning.  Bunny, Chris: [Laugh] Bunny: It’s always just a straight guy and then Spock. It’s just a heterosexual man, and then Spock. Chris: [Laughs] But really, I think a lot of jokes are funnier if there’s somebody who is not laughing. And there is some contrast between the characters. So it kind of feels like that’s Spock, and then that character ends up being serious, which is Vulcan-like.  Oren: Well, if I was gonna get into this, I would say that the straight man-type archetype is certainly useful and shows up in a lot of comedies. I wouldn’t put Spock in that. And the reason why, is that Spock, even though he has the reputation of having no emotions, he loves himself a very underhanded jibe. He does that all the time. It’s like one of his favorite things. So he is definitely part of the banter. And sometimes the big three in Star Trek will kind of take turns playing the straight for the other two to joke off of. So I don’t know if we can say it’s specifically one of them or the other.  Bunny: I think, to touch on something that you touched on in the article that we have about this, which go check it out. It’s called like, “Banter and Barbs Without Being Mean.” Is that if there is one character who’s not laughing or not seeming to participate in it, that is a situation where it can start to feel mean. The other characters are kind of ragging on them. And obviously it’s not just not laughing. Like, exasperated sigh and rolling your eyes is also a way to engage with it in a way that makes it seem not mean. It’s all in how you do it, but it is something to be aware of when it feels like it only flows one way.  Chris: Generally, if you have a couple of people… and again, the reason why it’s so good at building friendships is because, when somebody delivers a barb or teases somebody else, that is actually a risky social behavior. And so if people can do it to each other successfully, that shows their closeness and their trust. So it’s almost in a way testing the relationship. And that’s why it’s interpreted as, “Oh, these people are good friends.”  But if you only have it happen in one direction, when one person is delivering a lot of teasing, a lot of little barbs and needling and the other person is not doing it back, and sometimes is not allowed to do it back. That definitely looks like a toxic relationship. If, for instance, one person likes to needle the other, but then gets upset if somebody needles ’em back. For instance.  Oren: Oh my gosh. The person who loves to give other people crap but will flip their lid if they ever get any crap in return. Probably not actually the worst person on earth, but definitely feels that way when you’re interacting with them. Bunny: Don’t give it if you can’t take it. The give and take is what a relationship is.  Oren: Personally, I think that when you have characters give each other a hard time, you should then narrate the characters worrying for hours afterwards. Like, “Was that funny or was I just being mean?”  Bunny, Chris: [Laugh] Chris: Relatable.  Bunny: No, no. You have to have them come up with a really good joke hours later. Oren: They also can debate whether, “Should I apologize or is that gonna make it weird?” I think this needs to be an avenue of character exploration that fiction has ignored for far too long.  Chris: No, see, for me it’s somebody saying something jokey at me and me being like, “Oh no. That means I’m supposed to joke back. How do joke?”  Oren: How? How can joke?  Chris: How. Oh no. [Laughs]  Bunny: It’s a good question. A lot of us wonder, “How do joke?” Chris: I actually have a post on that too. [Laughs] I’m much better at writing them than I am at saying them.  Bunny: That’s true. You did write an ongoing comic.  Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Chuckle] Oren: My favorite kind of joke is when you have a character who is really well known for making funny self-deprecating jokes, and then you make every character do that. Chris: Ohh, everyone is Sokka.  Oren: Everyone is Sokka now. Chris: Also known as Dragon Prince. Oren: It’s very funny to me that it, that Avatar had the correct amount of Sokka and that correct amount was one.  Chris: One Sokka. Oren: And then they made Korra that didn’t have any. And it wasn’t as good. And then they made Dragon Prince where they had lots and it was bad. It’s like, no, the correct number is one. You need to get the the correct Sokka balance for this show to work properly.  Chris: Actually, Dragon Prince was a good example of banter that did not work. Actually it was more the self-deprecating jokes. That’s what I noticed and that’s why I called everybody Sokka when I was watching it, because you would have things like, again, villains. Which, generally, you want your villains to be threatening, as we already talked about.  And the Sokka character known for making self-deprecating jokes, which caused him to be taken a lot less seriously. And so having a villain do that is… Why is the villain making themself less threatening just to add a little humor? And it kept doing that and it made the characters feel very inconsistent.  Oren: And here’s the thing, I can imagine a villain who is so confident and scary that they make self-deprecating jokes and it doesn’t matter because they’re so blatantly powerful. Or even not even necessarily a villain. I can imagine a hero who does that.  Chris: Or they’re using it in what’s obviously a calculated social strategy. They’re manipulative. You see them manipulate another character and then make a self-deprecating joke to seem approachable. There’s a number of ways you could do it, sure.  Bunny: Or they’re doing it ironically. The joke can be that they’re self-deprecating, but they’re self-deprecating in a humble-brag kind of way. Chris: [Laughs] Oren: But in Dragon Prince, they were definitely not doing that. Instead, what they were doing was either making weird mistakes that they would not naturally make and then trying to make a joke out of it. Or deliberately calling attention to their actual failings and weaknesses, which you typically don’t want characters to do when they’re supposed to seem cool.  Probably the crystallized example of it is in one of the early episodes where the elf-assassin lady doesn’t know what a whetstone is. And she’s not making a joke. The show is making a joke about her not knowing what a whetstone is.  Chris: Because she’s asking for the “thingy.” Oren: The “sword-stone thingy.”  Chris: To make her look silly, but she’s trained as an assassin her entire life. How does she not know it’s called a whetstone?  Bunny: That’s literally a joke out of Date Night.  Oren: My new headcanon is that the reason why, is that she’s an aristocrat. And so she’s been training as an assassin, but she’s had servants doing all the logistics work. So she’s really good at fighting, but she doesn’t know how to put on the armor, or fix a broken bow. She doesn’t know how to string a bow. Someone always does that part for her. [Chuckles] Chris: This might be a good segue into Kaiju Preservation Society. Bunny, I know you wanted to…  Oren: Bunny’s got beef. Bunny: [Chuckles] I do have beef. I found the banter in that extremely tiresome. And in the course of writing notes, which I did, I came up with a hypothesis, which is that banter as we talked about is all about relationship building. It’s often showing that characters are familiar with each other and the depth of their relationship, and what do they tease each other about? What can that tell you about them? The banter in Kaiju Preservation Society is directed almost entirely at exposition. They’re bantering with each other in that they’re talking to each other, but they’re really bantering with the exposition.  Chris, Oren: [Laugh] Bunny: And that is compounded by the fact–  Chris: That is funny. Bunny: –that they all sound the same! Chris: They do sound the same.  Bunny: They’re all redditors! That’s it. They’re just redditers.  Oren: They’ve bantered so much that they have become one. Bunny: They have. Oren: Like how is that not a beautiful relationship?  Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Laugh] Bunny: They have mind-melded in the samey-ness of their banter. It feels like I’m doing a bit of the thing we talked about with the MCU earlier. Where pieces of this in other media are good. Looking at the conversations themselves in a vacuum, this could be good banter and it does make the exposition a bit more entertaining when someone is explaining something and the others are, I guess, quipping about it. You can do that. But when that is the entirety of the book, and this happens in every expositional scene, even serious ones, then I am frustrated. I am done with it. I want to leave Reddit.  Chris: [Laughs] Oren: Scalzi has always had an issue that he tends to over-rely on dialogue, and his dialogue is not the most distinctive. And, no shade from me, mine isn’t either. So I try not to rely on it as much. You can see this in all of his books, but you definitely notice it less in his more plot-heavy books because there’s more plot, so there’s less time where the characters have to spend kind of chatting. And despite this, I actually really liked Kaiju Preservation Society, but I totally got what you’re saying because there is so much banter and so much of it is the same. It’s so similar.  Bunny: I think a huge part of it for me is the fact that the characters don’t sound any different because they are not that different. I couldn’t tell you how the personality of Jamie is different from the personality of Niamh, who’s name I hope I’m pronouncing right, except that they know different things.  Oren: I don’t think I could tell you the name of a single character in that book other than Jamie. Bunny: And so when they’re bantering, it doesn’t feel like it’s a conversation between people. It sounds like a conversation that’s designed to be jokey conversation. And because there’s no difference between the characters’ personalities or the way they speak, I don’t feel like I’m learning anything about the characters through how they banter. And so that is part one of the problem and part two is the fact that they’re really truly bantering with the exposition and not each other. Now I read Mistborn, as I mentioned, and they had a lot of banter scenes too. The purpose of those is to set up the fact that this is a close-knit crew and they’re quite trusting and it’s meant to be a contrast from Vin’s previous crew, which was just awful, and terribly abusive. And so it’s Vin observing a group of people who are comfortable with each other and genuinely friends and they rib each other over things. And that is, I think, critical. They are ribbing each other over specific traits that they each have. Ham is different than Breeze, and Breeze is different than Kel. And so the way they rib each other is also different. They will make fun of Ham being philosophical or Kel being cheerful and self-aggrandizing.  Oren: A little bit of a try-hard.  Bunny: Or Breeze being stuffy.  Chris: Does any character, like, constantly teased for not having notes? Bunny, Oren: [Laugh] Bunny: Actually, there’s a character who’s teased for having too many notes. Not that you’d know anything about that.  Oren: Boom. Ooh, oof.  Chris: [Laughs] Bunny: [Chuckles] And that character is Dockson, whose name I remember because the characters are distinct.  Chris: I hate them already. Bunny, Oren: [Laugh] Oren: It’s interesting because Sanderson is not an author who I would typically think of when I think of authors with good prose. His prose is generally okay. But I do think his characters are pretty distinct. And I even felt that way about Way of Kings, which was a book that I was extremely bored with for 300,000 words. But the characters stood out. I remember most of the characters. They were fairly distinct. I even remember a decent number of the large number of people on Kaladin’s bridge crew. So, I’ll give Sando credit for that one.  Bunny: And I think it also helps in Mistborn, in terms of differentiating people’s personalities, that they also each have a role to play. But in Kaiju Preservation Society, they’re scientists. And they’re scientists who do different science while all being redditors. So there’s extra fewer things to differentiate them. And they all seem to go on similar missions and stuff too. I don’t know. It’s like if the characters in All Systems Red started bantering.  Oren: Oh gosh. Bunny: I’d be like, “I dunno who any of you are.” Chris: [Laughs] Oren: Don’t threaten us with that, Bunny.  Bunny: [Laughs] Chris: Again, another reason for banter is to build up the relationship and when I did a critique of Crescent City, for instance, and we establish the main character Bryce has a best friend named Danika. They have some banter that is there to establish how good friends they are. And it’s clear the beginning of that book is really invested in their friendship.  But I think when you have too many characters or your characters are not distinct, it doesn’t reveal anything about them. And it also doesn’t build up their relationship because you can’t remember, “Okay, so which two people is this banter happening between?” Nothing feels special anymore, which is the whole point, is to distinguish it as a special relationship. Bunny: Exactly. And then I think another important part is something we also touched on, which is that it needs to be offset by serious moments. Serious moments need to have the weight that they deserve. And in Mistborn, this isn’t hard because everything is serious. Oren: They’re very dark. Bunny: Everything aside from these banter moments. It’s quite a dark book. But in Kaiju Preservation Society, there are moments that should be serious. The villain has captured them, but let’s make an Incredibles reference. Oren: Well, Incredibles, pretty good movie. [Chuckles] Bunny: It is a good movie, but I’m trying to get invested in the fact that they might die.  Oren: They’re not gonna, though. We know. It’s fine.  Bunny: Yeah, they’re not gonna, it’ll be fine.  Oren: I wouldn’t worry about it. Chris: There is a place for good comedies like Galaxy Quest for instance. Well, I’m thinking about Galaxy Quest and even their tenser moments, they make jokes. Jokes about how the captain managed to get his shirt off. Or when they go through the part of the ship that has stomping, clanky things for no reason, that they have to get through. And that’s because it’s very much a comedy. And it’s very devoted to comedy, even in its tenser moments.  Bunny: It sounds like there’s also different kinds of jokes there too. There’s physical comedy for instance.  Chris: I would say there’s different kinds of jokes. But honestly, I think if we compared it to Marvel, we might find it’s a lot of… Because the whole point of Galaxy Quest–  But at the time it was novel. That’s the thing. At the time it was pretty unique. –But the whole point of it is being a self-aware thing, because not only is it modeled after Star Trek, but the whole premise of that story is people from a television show that is basically Star Trek. Their actors coming back, and some alien race thought it was real, and like documentaries, and actually made the ship for them. And so now they have to pretend to be the people they were acting, the characters they were acting out. And for that reason it’s just naturally really irreverent and self-referencing and silly. Kind of the same way Marvel is, but it has a very strong reason. But it also has silly things like the cute aliens that turn out to have tons of teeth. They’re like, “Oh, they’re so cute. Oh no! They’re evil.” And they start attacking. That has nothing to do with the premise. That’s just a funny joke that takes something tense, but also makes it funny. And it’s not that we can’t do those stories. I do think that you wanna manage tension in any story, including a comedy. So there may be a point at which, “Okay, that’s too many jokes. We’re not getting enough tension.” I definitely do think there’s something to be said about Oren’s theory that really the base problem here is that we’re just all tired of the MCU. Bunny: [Chuckles] If there be one takeaway from this episode… Chris: [Laughs] It’s that we’re tired of the MCU. Oren: One question that I am very curious about is, I’m trying to figure out if the video game Baldur’s Gate 3 actually has good banter? Or if it just feels like the banter is good because I’m hearing voice actors give it in real time and it feels very immersive. Would this banter be good if I was reading it on a page? I don’t know. I was thinking of stories with good banter and I immediately thought of Baldur’s Gate 3, but then I was like, “I dunno if I can remember any of the banter.” I just remember liking that my characters were doing it as we were exploring the swamp. Chris: Well, delivery definitely makes a difference.  Bunny: To be fair, a lot of my banter with my friends might also sound pretty lame if someone recorded it. Which is why I have a podcast.  Oren: Hey guys, we’re gonna all meet up and have an offline podcast with no recordings.  Bunny: [Chuckles] Chris: You know, a lot of people read the transcript of this podcast instead of listening to it. Oren: They do.  Chris: So they read all of our jokes without our tone of voice.  Oren: Does that make them better or worse? We may never know. [Chuckles] Bunny: Unmasked, I feel unmasked.  Oren: Well, now that we’ve all been unmasked for being terribly unfunny, I think this will be a good time to end the episode. That is what it says in my show notes. Bunny: [Chuckles] Which you have.  Oren: Which I have.  Bunny: Mine also say that. It’s nice to have notes that say that.  Chris: I was gonna invite listeners to visit us on Patreon, but since it’s not in my notes, I think maybe I just can’t.  Oren: We just can’t do it. And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And 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.

Wizards with smartphones, sorcerers with MRI machines, what’s going on here? It’s our episode about mixing magic and technology! Specifically, how to do it without weirding your audience out. Also, why you shouldn’t make a big deal about whether magic in your setting is specifically called “magic” or not. That one really bugs us. And also the reason historical Japanese stuff is at home in cyberpunk, but you’ll have a hard time if you show up with a halberd. Show Notes Stone Scrapers  Atlatl  Sword of Kaigen   Razorgirl  The Sky Was the Color of a Dead Channel  Bending  Philosophical Ghostbusters Orogeny  Alomancy  Feruchemy  Mistborn RPG Temeraire  Inhibitor Collars  Bret Devereaux  Desmond Hart Ten Thousand Doors of January Crocodile Dundee  True Alphas Transcript Generously transcribed by Lady Oscar. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast, with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [Intro Music] Oren: And, welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren. With me today is… Chris: …Chris… Oren: …and… Bunny: …Bunny. Oren: Magic and technology, they can be difficult to balance and mix together, which is why my fantasy world has no technology. [Chris and Bunny laugh] All magic, wizards are just running around naked, eating raw food and freezing at night. Chris: Oh no, they haven’t even used rocks or sticks! Oren: No, we don’t do stone scrapers around here. That’s too advanced. That’s some high muckety-muck tech that we don’t need. We have magic for that. Which, honestly, it’s not hard to imagine a magic spell being better at cleaning an animal hide than a stone scraper, but you get by with what you’ve got. Bunny: The crows are laughing at us. Chris: Some settings basically have technology, but it’s all made out of magic, instead. So maybe you have cave paintings with magic, and, you know, furs with magic. Bunny: Chris, a paintbrush is pretty high tech. [laughter] Chris: It would be pretty funny to have a super magic kind of tech setting, but nobody knows what a wheel is. Oren: It’s like, okay, so instead of inventing the atlatl, we have summoned a magical force projection that extends our arm long enough to put a magic arrow into it, and then that goes farther. It just makes way more sense than inventing an atlatl, come on. [Chris laughs] Bunny: We have a spell that makes our fingers sharp, and a spell that extends our arm really far, really fast. So we’re doing the same thing as an archer, but it is just our sharp arm. [laughter] Oren: Sharp Arm is the stretchy guy they did not put on the Marvel team. [Bunny laughs] No, sorry, that’s a little too creepy for us. We’re gonna stick with Mr. Fantastic and the several other stretchy guys. Chris: You know, Sharp Arm would make a good creepy villain. Bunny: You’ve heard of Stretch Armstrong. You’ve never heard of Stretch Arm Sharp. Oren: They show up on the occasional superhero episode that’s like more of a horror episode, kind of out of nowhere. And then a few years later, you remember it and you’re like, that was weirdly dark. That was not what I was expecting from watching that show. [laughter] Bunny: They’ll make a movie out of it soon enough. Oren: So, the biggest issue when we are looking at settings that have both magic and technology is making sure that there is still a reason to use magic, when technology exists. That’s not the only reason, but it is the biggest reason, the one I have found that gives the most trouble. Partly just because our conception of what magic can do is anchored so heavily in medieval-ish fantasy that when we create magic even for modern settings, we end up making it as if it’s balanced for swords and horses. But it’s a modern setting now, so now we’ve got planes, and machine guns, and it doesn’t quite work out. Chris: I will say, there are some instances where you can make the magic more powerful than technology we have, but you don’t necessarily want to. Like guns. Guns are always the problem. They’re too lethal, so it makes it hard to choreograph good fights when they’re involved. So making magic more lethal than that is just a bad idea. Oren: Authors are already having to de-emphasize how lethal modern firearm technology is when they script fight scenes in modern settings. So making more lethal magic than that is like, “Oh, okay, now we’re creating some trouble for ourselves.” Bunny: What was that book that had the ninjas in the same setting as fighter planes? I think it’s a similar idea. Oren: There are actually a lot of books that do that. It’s the entire cyberpunk genre. [everyone laughs] The Sword of Kaigen is the one that I talked about recently, which has that problem of, this is a group of magical Samurai, and they have cool elemental magic, which is neat, but like is no match for close air support, which does happen in the book. And then we just kind of keep going and don’t worry about it. That’s happened going so far back as Neuromancer. There’s a guy who seems like he’s gonna be the final boss as this super badass, just like ninja guy. He’s not a tech ninja. He is just a normal ninja, and his superpower is that he can fight without being able to see, which ends up being really important because the bad guy’s main weapon turns out to be a blinding gun, and then the ninja joins Team Good and goes and kills the bad guy for them, because he can fight with his eyes closed. Bunny: Well, that’s a convenient matchup. Chris: So the enemy uses a blinding gun, instead of just…a gun? Oren: Yeah. Because, you know, guns are kind of hard to get in this setting. [laughter] The funniest thing about Neuromancer is that there are several paragraphs of loving description of the weapon the main character gets, and how it’s perfectly weighted to deliver all of the force to its pyramid shaped tip. It’s a baton. It’s a collapsible baton. [laughter] Bunny: Is it a sword? Oren: No, it’s even sillier. Chris: No, the swordiest sword? Oren: It’s even sillier than the swordiest sword. Bunny: It’s the baton-iest baton. Oren: This is way too much description for a collapsible baton. Chris: Does the character actually use it, then? Oren: I honestly don’t remember. Chris: I remember you complaining about the character getting this important weapon and then never using it. Oren: You’re partially right. I was complaining that the second most important character, the lady who the protagonist ends up working with, she’s called a razor girl, because she’s like specially tuned for combat, and she has metal claws and shit, and she has super-enhanced reflexes, and it really feels like she’s gonna fight the ninja, because nobody else in the story can possibly give her a problem in a personal fight. So she’s gotta fight the ninja. But no, instead the ninja just joins them and takes care of the bad guy, and she never gets to fight anybody. Chris: There’s like a whole library of books that I only know by Oren’s complaints about them. [Chris and Bunny laugh] Bunny: Oh, me too. Oren: It’s not my fault that I’m a prodigious complainer. I have no control over that behavior. Bunny: That’s why we have a podcast Chris: [laughing] Neuromancer being one of those books. I have never read Neuromancer. I only have a vague memory of complaints Oren has made about it, and I know it by those complaints. Oren: What color is a dead channel, though? I have questions. [laughing] Okay, so Neuromancer doesn’t actually have magic, but a lot of cyberpunk settings do. Bunny: What is technology? Chris: Also, what is magic? Oren: Yeah, who is magic? Chris: I think especially when we get into space opera, or space fantasy, there’s a lot of things that are like, “Okay, well, is that magic? Is that magic?” as soon as you start adding some fantasy aesthetics. Oren: Technically speaking, the supernatural is something that doesn’t exist. So, once it exists, it’s not magic anymore. There, I’ve solved your problem. That’s not a magical fireball. That person just has some kind of ability to create flames using their mind. We don’t understand how they do it yet, but it’s not supernatural, because it’s happening. [all laugh] That’s the Avatar strategy because at one point in the first episode, Katara said, “It’s not magic, it’s bending.” And then a bunch of weirdos decided this was the hill they were gonna die on, when you’re talking about magic in the Avatar setting. [laughter] Chris: People, please just don’t do that. If you have like an alternate world, just have it so none of them have ever heard of the word magic, and they just say bending or whatever instead. You don’t need to call attention to whether or not it uses the label magic. Please don’t. Oren: Broken Earth did the same thing. Chris: Didn’t Broken Earth actually have magic-magic, and then named something else magic? Oren: Yes, it did! Chris:  I know this from the complaints that Oren has made about this book. [Chris and Bunny laugh] Just to be clear. Oren: Broken Earth has a magic system called orogeny, which is a real term, but sounds a little bit inappropriate. [laughter] Bunny: It’s spelled “o-r-o.” Oren: Yes. It’s only when you pronounce it. But it’s a real geological term, so it’s a kind of earth magic. They don’t use the word magic throughout the book, which is fine. There’s no issue with that. It just gets weird that at the end they discover a new kind of magic, which the protagonist says, “This is magic. But the old one, that’s not magic.” And yeah, okay. You can make the argument that she would see it that way, but also I don’t think she would, because this new thing seems to be sort of a variation on what she was already doing, so I don’t know why she would consider that magic. It’s sort of like an airplane pilot seeing a helicopter and being like, “Magic! It must be magic! It’s different than my fixed-wing airplane.” Seems a little too similar. But regardless, it just made a lot of people very weird about the magic system in that book, because the moment you start talking about magic, they’ll be like, no, it’s not magic. They said it wasn’t. Bunny: Mistborn handily sidesteps this by simply having Allomancy and Feruchemy just be things that are there, and not someone being like, “Rawr, magic.” Oren: According to the Mistborn roleplaying game, I can dual-wield catapults, so I don’t actually need magic in that setting. Magic has actually been outmoded by catapults. Bunny: [laughs] I will say one of the least interesting things that you can do with magic – with melding magic and technology, I should say – is make technology work the exact same way it works normally, but say it’s magic. Like, there are cell phones, and they work like cell phones, but it’s a communication spell. It works just like phone calls do, but it’s a speeell. Chris: I guess that’s a question of what impression do you wanna leave the reader with. Because normally I would deter an editing client, for instance, from doing that, because generally if they’re doing that, they actually want it to feel like magic, and they’re just not differentiating it enough from using a phone. Now, I think it would kind of be a joke, right? You could definitely make a setting where it’s like, “No, no, it’s all magic, we swear,” and then somebody just pulls out a phone, and it’s like,“This is a very magic phone, I swear.” Oren: I would generally say that you want magic to feel different than technology. That’s not to say that magic cannot mimic, or provide the same utility that a piece of technology could. Lots of settings do that. And you can see in the Temeraire books, we start to see them using dragons the same way that modern armies use helicopters, to drop troops behind enemy lines and stuff like that, for transport and logistics. But that’s not to say that the dragons are exactly like helicopters. They have notable differences, like they are alive is the first one you might notice.  So I would generally say that you want it to feel different, even if it is performing a similar role. Otherwise we’re gonna start to wonder, why did you bother making it magic if everything is the same, but we add magic at the end of the word. “Here’s your mobile magic-phone!” Does it do anything different than a normal phone? Like, no, but we say that it’s running on an ether crystal or something. Chris: Also, magic has more novelty than a piece of technology people use every day, and it’s going to lose that novelty if it doesn’t feel different in some way. Oren: Which is why you want to make sure you actually have reasons to use magic, because it’s boring if you’re like, yeah, we have all these spells that we could use, but they’re all less efficient than just getting in the car and driving somewhere. That’s funny for a joke once, that’s like a subversive thing to do, but then afterwards you’re like, “Oh, right. Magic is cool, actually. I wanted magic.” Bunny: Magic cooler than car. [Chris laughs] Oren: Yeah. More interesting than car, hot take. So that’s why you should think about this sort of thing, rather than just being like, “Oh, well, why does it matter? Why can’t I just build my world organically? And if the technology is more powerful, then we’ll just use the technology.” It’s like, well, you can. It’s just gonna be sad. Chris: It’s worth pointing out, technology can be used by anyone. That’s one of its defining features, and that’s why you can’t balance out a magic faction by giving a different faction tech. Technically they could invent a new tech and then temporarily get the jump on the other side or something like that. But generally, if there’s advanced tech, the magical people will also have it if it’s useful. Oren: You can create isolated situations where that is temporarily not true. Like if you have a setting where magical beings arrive from another dimension or whatever, and they haven’t gotten situated yet, they don’t understand the technology of the world they’ve just arrived at. But they can learn. If there’s any amount of time, they’ll figure it out. Chris: And because storytellers are always looking for ways to oppress their mages, even though they shouldn’t, there’s a lot of stories – like X-Men has this – with the magical get-rid-of-magic collar. And even if the tech neutralizes magic, it’s still not as good as magic, because if you look at it, that means the non-magical people are on the defensive. Oren: My favorite thing about the magic-canceling collars in the X-Men universe is that there are multiple X-Men for whom their abilities are kind of a curse, at least to have them on all the time. So can they make a version of this collar that’s a little less obtrusive, like, I don’t know, something that would be a little subtle, like maybe a wristband or something that you could put on so that Rogue can have sex without killing somebody? [Chris and Bunny laugh] I know she wants that. She keeps talking about it. [laughter] Or like Cyclops can take off his glasses without causing a mass casualty event. It’s so weird to hear them angsting about that when there is an assistive device that exists in the world that could accomplish that for them. And they’re all like, “No, that’s evil. It’s evil that you made this.” Chris: The other thing I can think of is you could have tech that specifically applies to a unique magical weakness somebody has. Again, you’re only making things a little more even. You’re probably not giving tech people the advantage. For instance, in the movie Underworld, they have UV bullets that they use against the vampires. Bunny: UV bullets? Isn’t that just, like, a laser? Oren: No, they glow. They glow real bright. Chris: They’re probably not realistic, they just look cool. They’re like a bullet that has a liquid that looks like black light. Oren: My hot take is that vampires should not be vulnerable to UV lamps, outside of maybe some very limited circumstances, because once you establish that weakness, vampires are just child’s play to defeat. Why do you need a gun, when a lamp already exists? We already have a UV gun. It’s this lamp I got, and you just kind of sweep it around. Solved. It’s so boring. Bunny: Grow plants and destroy vampires. That’s what the Amazon listing says. Oren: Yeah, that’s a great use for that. I would generally say that you need to think about what kind of tech level you want, because that is going to affect what kind of magic makes the most sense for your setting. If you’re doing your kind of standard medieval-ish technology where you have swords and horses and castles, and pretty much every weapon is dependent on muscle power in some form, you don’t have to think about that too much. That’s where all of our default starting magic is coming from anyway, just because that’s where the genre has been for so long. So you’re probably gonna be okay there. Your biggest problem there is gonna be making sure your magic’s not just OP and causing problems, and that also applies if you go further back. Like technically speaking, there is a huge difference in technology between the Middle Ages and the Bronze Age. When you’re talking about how it affects magic, with fiction – they’re kind of the same. I’m very sorry to all the history professors who heard that, but in this context they are. Bunny: Oh, Bret Devereaux is gonna come for you. Oren: Oh, no, not Bret Devereaux! His article on archery ruined my book. [laughter] What do you mean they don’t fire in volleys? He couldn’t have told me that like two years ago? Agh! I hate it. [general laughter] Bunny: Gotta have a second edition to fix that. Oren: I’ve also found that once you start getting out of the medieval-ish era, and you get into more of muskets and industrial revolution type era, that’s when I find the connection between magic and technology gets more interesting, because you’re getting technology that is powerful enough to do things that were just unthinkable without these advances, but not so powerful that it’s gonna just out mode most magic systems. I’m not the first person to think of this. There are so many stories of “What if the fantasy setting got to the industrial revolution? What effect would that have on magic? And I think there’s a reason for that. I think that’s a really good balance point, because you can have magic that is still capable enough that you would use it over, say, a musket, or a train, without making the magic so powerful that it’s just mind-breaking. Bunny: I think it also depends on your magic system, obviously. I was thinking about this, and different magic systems, and I think mixing magic and technology only really works when you have a system where you can cast lingering spells on things. I was having trouble thinking of melding bending and technology. Like, you can kind of replace technology with bending. We see in the one city there’s guys pushing boxes around, and that kind of feels like the train is like a big chariot because it’s still running on effectively muscle power. It’s bending, but you have to have somebody there to do it. Or like Allomancy, although I’m sure if anyone could figure out a way to blend that with tech, it’s Brando Sando, but based on the first Mistborn book, it would be pretty hard to have an Allomancy-infused bike, or something. Oren: Stuff like Allomancy and bending, they don’t do enchanted objects. You don’t enchant an object with fire bending, but you can, if you’re interested in hard mode, you can stop to think about “How would this magic affect the advancement and production of technology?” For example, if we were just looking at Avatar, the various bendings, particularly earth bending and fire bending, have a lot of implications for industry. An earth bender is like a one-person construction crew. And a metal bender can shape metal in ways that even in real life we would struggle to do with modern twenty-first century technology. And fire benders can produce heat at levels that are not too unreasonable now, but if you don’t have industrial furnaces are very difficult to create. We also saw them charging batteries and stuff in Korra. So you can think about that. You can ask the question, would the magic make the technology less likely to advance, because we don’t have a need for it? And some technology is invented because it fills needs? Or is it gonna make it more likely to be advanced, because we have more advanced tools to make it with? And, I don’t know. That’s why it’s hard mode. I have no idea what the answer to that one is. Bunny: Or because a tech entrepreneur wants to outsource the labor to a machine, you gotta invent a machine for that. Oren: It is notable that most theories of why technology advances do assume that technology does something useful. Which, as we’ve seen, is not always the case. [laughter] Bunny: Look, instead of looking in a dictionary, I’m going to summon a fairy with a concussion to define this term for me. [Chris laughs] Chris: Supposedly, things that are not useful get to the end of their hype cycle, and the bubble will pop. Please pop, bubble. Please. I mean, it’s interesting that there are some magical abilities that are typical in scifi settings to the point where they’re considered scifi, basically all of your psychic abilities. And I do think some of them blend pretty well. Like telekinesis, okay, it’s not more deadly than a gun, but I do think that it’s useful in that it could be used for things a gun can’t be used for. So if you have a fight and somebody is taking cover, or you run out of bullets, or something else happens, telekinesis could pick up the slack and just give you a longer reach, which is really useful in a fight. Not more deadly than a gun, but there’s a variety of situations where it can be used. So to me it makes sense that that is a very popular scifi magic power, shall we say. Oren: Sometimes scifi gets a little weird. Even Star Trek – in Deep Space Nine, the first time we met the Vorta, they had this weird psychic blast power that they could use, which was clearly kind of cumbersome, and they had to aim it with their chest. So not an especially useful ability, unless no one has weapons, and then it becomes pretty handy, right? [laughter] What you were talking about with telekinesis is a method that I don’t see that often, which is to think about what technology, at least, what modern technology, is good at, and not try to have magic compete with it on that level. So modern weaponry is very good at delivering destructive force in a line in front of you. It’s just so good at that. It’s so incredibly good at it. Much to our chagrin, in many cases. So you probably don’t need to be trying to make magic compete with that. But modern technology is not very good at making stuff across the room move in a way we want it to move, or at changing the direction that water is flowing. Those are things that modern technology is not good at. So you can have magic do things like that, and have it be a little more interesting, so it doesn’t feel like you’re having to constantly choose. Chris: Another thing to keep in mind that we see storytellers do sometimes is just assuming that if it’s magical in a setting that’s generally low magic, and it’s kind of creepy, that means it’s somehow powerful. I think we probably talked about this in Dune Prophecy, where it makes a really big deal out of this guy, and he has the ability to look at people and kill them. A powerless ability. It could be powerful, but the thing is, it’s not any more powerful than a gun, because as far as we see in the show, he never does it to anybody who’s not in the same room with him. And it takes time, and sometimes it even hurts him if he does it too much. Oren: They are really squirrely about what the range on that ability is, and they eventually, I think, establish that it’s based on a virus, so it can affect anyone who’s infected by the virus, which does make it kind of mind-bendingly powerful. But for most of the show, it does not appear to work that way. Everyone’s acting like it’s really impressive, when it isn’t really. The same thing happened in Ten Thousand Doors of January – mild spoilers. A bad guy has the ability to drain the heat out of you with a touch if he can hold onto you for a while, which is a little less dangerous than having a knife. Sure, that guy can kill you if he can get a grip on you and hold you in place. But so can Crocodile Dundee. This bad guy is about as dangerous as Crocodile Dundee. [laughter] Chris: If you had somebody who instantly killed you with a touch, that would be a little more effective. Not necessarily more effective than a gun. Oren: They do have revolvers in this setting, so it’s still not super impressive. Chris: Which is kind of why you need magic to do something different, like shape-shifting somebody – mind controlling them. Oren: Right. Or opening doors to other dimensions. Chris: Opening doors to other dimensions. Oren: Or I suppose in the case of Ten Thousand Doors, making anything you write come true. Technology can’t do that! Chris: Oh my gosh. Aa! But see, Oren, for some reason we have to cut the words into our skin. Oren: She did do that at one point. [Chris laughs] Chris: She did not need to do that. She did not need to do that. Oren: She was feeling kind of extra that day. It was just a very, real drama-llama kind of day. It’s okay though. She gets tired after she does it. She has to take a little nap. Chris: Take a little nap for a plot-convenient amount of time. Definitely. The thing that I’ve learned from using magic, writing my own stories, is if it does not constrain you when you are plotting, if it’s never inconvenient, like, oh, I’d like to use magic now. But oh, drat, she just used magic, this is her cooldown time, or recharge time, I guess you can’t use magic yet, then it is not an effective limit. Oren: Yeah, but I don’t like having limits. I would like to do things that I would like to do. Chris: It’s true. Constraints can be hard. They require some troubleshooting, some critical thinking, but I think the audience can tell the difference. Oren: How about I say there are constraints and then ignore them when I need a scene to work properly. [Chris laughs] Bunny: All you have to do is make everyone surprised that it didn’t work that time, and then every time you do it, everyone acts surprised all over again. So you had limits. Oren: Yeah, there you go! As long as we acknowledge that we’re ignoring the rules, that’s fine, right? That’s probably okay? Chris: We have rules, and then every time the protagonists violate them, they just use lots of spunk and determination, and then push past barriers and unlock new abilities. Oren: They could declare war, if they’re Buffy. [Chris laughs] In fairness, that’s not really activating a new magical ability, that’s just Buffy deciding she’s gonna win the fight this time. Chris: Teen Wolf even has this whole arc for Scott where he becomes an alpha by, like, pushing past somebody’s magical barrier. Oren: He’s a true alpha, Chris! Chris: Oh, that’s right. It’s not even an alpha, he’s a true alpha. Oren: Because the show establishes that the way that you become an alpha is by killing another alpha, which doesn’t really make a lot of sense, because that implies that eventually there won’t be any, because surely some of them are gonna die in ways other than being killed by another alpha. That’s weird. Chris: So a true alpha is somebody who becomes an alpha without killing an alpha, and that’s cool, that fills in the gap, except for, of course, to give Scott candy, they have to emphasize how very, very, very, very rare it is. But it can’t be! Or there would be no alphas. Oren: It can’t be that rare! [Chris laughs] That show is also funny because it’s one of the ones we were talking about where the hunter faction gets to use guns and nobody else does, and there’s never an explanation of why. Why do only the hunters use them? The one hunter who becomes a were-jaguar gets both were powers and guns, so she multi-classed for that. Well, with the gun-using were-jaguar, I think we can go ahead and call this episode to a close. 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. [Outro Music] This has been the Mythcreant Podcast, opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.

Every story needs a viewpoint, and most of the time, that means a point of view character. This is often taken for granted, even though we’re never really taught the basics. Instead, authors just have to figure it out by feel. This week, we’re working to correct that as we go over viewpoint fundamentals. Who should your POV character be, what should they sound like, and how can you describe them? Also, why they should totally be Sam Smorkle the random goblin. Show Notes A Spell for Chameleon  The Point of View Gun Murderbot Show  Limited Narration  Close Narration Deep POV Omniscient POV Gideon the Ninth  Multiple Viewpoints  Unworkable Story Choices The Tainted Cup Revenger Project Hail Mary The Kaiju Preservation Society  Lock In Transcript Generously transcribed by Mukyuu. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.  Intro:  You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. With your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.  [opening song] Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is– Oren: Oren. Chris:  And–  Bunny: Bunny.  Chris: Well, I know that I’m sitting at a computer talking into a microphone, but I can’t see either of you, so for all I know you’re speaking to me from Antarctica.  Oren: Yeah. I’m really mysterious. You can’t see what’s going on inside my head. Bunny: I’m actually a penguin. I’ve been a penguin this whole time. I cleverly misled you by calling myself Bunny.  Chris: Wow. Oren: That is a good reveal.  Bunny: Yeah. I didn’t reveal this until four fifths of the way into the book, but you know…  Oren: You should definitely surprise reveal the species of your main character three fourths of the way through the book. Bunny: Yes.  Oren: I swear half the weird questions I see on various writing subreddits are “how do I conceal this essential piece of information about my viewpoint character?” And it’s “no, you don’t.”  [Bunny and Chris lamenting dramatically in the background] Bunny: Oh, stop. Bad. Retreat.  Oren: That’s the neat part. You don’t.  Bunny: And don’t mislead people into thinking your character’s a centaur either. Going to centaur school.  Oren: That was a funny example, right? Because he is like “I’ll have to go to centaur school!” This is from A Spell for Chameleon. In the first couple pages, when it was still kind of cute/funny, and not like gross/creepy funny. And he has that line where he says “I might have to go to centaur school”. You eventually could figure out it means a school run by centaurs, but since we’ve had no description of what he looks like at that point, it could just as easily be a school for centaurs, of which he is one of them.  Chris: So this time we’re talking about viewpoint characters, some basics, and questions that people ask and things like that.  Let’s start at the top with the obvious. What is a viewpoint character?  Oren: It’s the person that you shoot the point of view gun at from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  [Chris and Bunny chuckle] Bunny: Or maybe it’s the personification of a pretty overlooked point on the side of a highway.  Chris: Oh yeah, that sounds good.  Oren: It’s very nice. It’s very scenic.  Chris: Yeah, so it just means the narration is supposed to be in their head to some level,  reporting what they are thinking or feeling and nobody else. So stories that don’t have narration don’t technically have them.  Although in a show you can see that scenes might follow a character, and so it kind of feels similar to that character having a viewpoint, but it’s not technically the same because we don’t have their thoughts.  Although with voiceover…I don’t know, maybe with enough voiceover, you could call it a viewpoint character. Oren: The new Murderbot show looks like it’s going in that direction just based on the trailer, which it can probably get away with better than most because it’s using them to make jokes, which, sure. Generally speaking, that much voiceover is not a good idea. But if it’s funny, people will accept that.  Chris: And we call this type of narration limited, because the narration can only relate what the viewpoint character knows and nothing else. Bunny: Because Chris is trying to take away your rights. Rise up!  Chris: because I’m a prescriptivist!  Oren: Your rights to just say whatever you want in the book. Bunny: Use the chaotic viewpoint! Do not be restrained.  Chris: And a lot of times we do find people making mistakes in manuscripts where they accidentally slipped up and described a thought or a feeling of another character. It’s not that you can’t describe how other characters are feeling, but you always have to have citations. Basically how your viewpoint character knows that. So instead of “she was sad” if in this case she’s not a viewpoint character, you’d be like “oh, she looked sad” or “she seemed sad” or “she didn’t smile so I guess she was sad” or “she must have been sad because she didn’t smile”.  Bunny: Right.  Chris: Whereas if you just state outright in your narration “oh, she was sad”, you seem to be declaring that as though you automatically know it. And that doesn’t work if this character is not your viewpoint character.  Oren: And it might be worth covering why we say that. Because this isn’t just something we decided on one day. There are some reasons. The most obvious reason is that it is giving up a big advantage of using the limited viewpoint in the first place, which is that you can get deep into a character and understand who they are and immerse yourself in them and sympathize with them a lot and all that good stuff. And the more that you bring in stuff that that character doesn’t know, the more distant you’re getting. And at that point, it starts to raise questions about why you picked a limited viewpoint to begin with. And then of course there’s also confusion because if you introduce something that the viewpoint character doesn’t know, readers then have to wonder how do they know that? Do they know that? Or is the book just telling me that? Does the character know?  And it creates all kinds of issues. The story would just be smoother without them.  Chris: Generally the readers need to know how they should interpret narration. And so if you have a viewpoint character, the idea is that when the reader reads narration, that is supposed to be, at some level, a reflection of the character’s experience. And that can read very differently than if there is an outside narrator, like an omniscient personality, narrating the story. That can mean different things. The narration can be saying different things that way.  And if you do want to have a lot of emotional intimacy with a character and you want the reader to get really attached to them, get familiar with them, bond with them? Then you want the reader to be in their head a lot, knowing what they’re thinking and feeling. At that point it’s a lot more convenient to stick to  “yes, everything is happening from their experience” as opposed to–A lot of omni-narration actually will do that, but you have to start from the idea of a personality outside the character’s head and then smoothly dip into their head and back out again. And it’s almost more work.  And also having a viewpoint character with limited narration does help writers focus on what’s important because a new writer doesn’t necessarily know what they should focus on in their narration and what’s important to the story. And I do think it can be very helpful.  So yeah, it helps build more emotional intimacy. And at the cost of giving up, the convenience of being able to just say whatever you feel like in the narration.  Oren: Don’t worry though. Authors will find plenty of ways to go off on random tangents that they shouldn’t in a limited viewpoint. [Bunny chuckles] Authors are creative that way.  Bunny: They will not be stifled by words like “limited viewpoint”.  Oren: Look, a limited viewpoint character can think a lot of weird random trains of thought is all I’m saying. Bunny: Yeah, but it’s not the same. Limited is different from some other things. It’s different from close narration. Apparently people are using the word “deep POV” a lot. Apparently they’re not very consistent about what it means.  Oren: Yeah, I see it come up sometimes and it is usually in the form of people complaining about it and they don’t seem to know exactly what it is. They seem to be conflating limited and close narration. And close narration specifically refers to how much the narration is just the character’s thoughts, which is usually paired with limited, but they’re not exactly the same thing.  Chris: Yeah. So close is a matter of narrative distance. We’ve talked about narrative distance before. Every single time I have an article on point of view, I have to tell readers again what narrative distance is. It’s kind of a pretty technical complex topic, but it’s basically where the narrative camera is.  Does it feel like you’re looking at the character from like hovering in the air far above the city, or does it feel like you’re looking down at the character from somewhere like a foot above their head? Or does it feel like you’re behind their eyes?  Bunny: Is it Stardew Valley, Call of Duty, or Hades?  Chris: [Excited] Yeah! That’s great. So if it’s really close, that’s the feeling that you’re right behind their eyes. And that generally means that you’re using limited narration. Although, again, omniscience can do it temporarily if it’s careful. But at the same time, limited can get surprisingly distant. So an example: Gideon the Ninth, a really popular book, is in what I would call “distant limited”. It’s not like super distant because you can only get so distant and [still] have a viewpoint character. But the narration doesn’t entirely feel like it’s Gideon thinking those things or talking about those things. But at the same time, it still is limited because it restricts itself to what Gideon knows. And if the narration is full personality, the extra flexibility of not having to use Gideon’s personality can be used for things like humor. I personally do wonder, well, maybe you should have just gone with omniscience instead, since we were already not fully in Gideon’s head. Why restrict yourself to limited, to only what Gideon knows? But it’s not super bland. Distant, limited can be really bland sometimes, but can also be done with personality. And there’s tons of books like that. There’s tons of books that have distant limited, and sometimes they’re bland, sometimes they’re not. A lot of times I don’t think that that’s an optimal choice, but nonetheless, it’s not uncommon. So, that’s the difference between limited and close. Where is the camera exactly and what information do you have access to? It’s also a little different from does it feel conversational? People talk about a first person narrator being the person talking like it’s dialogue, but that’s not true in many stories. Sometimes a narrator will sound more conversational, like they’re talking to somebody, like they know they have an audience often, and sometimes it doesn’t sound like that. And that’s completely different from whether it’s limited.  Oren: So my first question is: who should your viewpoint character be? Can it be just some rando? Can it be Sam Smorkle, the goblin we saw in the tavern once?  Chris: Depends. Is Sam Smorkle the goblin your main character?  Bunny: It’s always Sam Smorkle the goblin.  Oren: Obviously not. No, I would never tell a story about Sam Smorkle. He disgusts me.  Chris: Awww, poor Sam Smorkle.  Bunny: [Sad] Noooo. Look, if Sam Smorkle is in the story, it’s automatic. That is your viewpoint character now.  Oren: You don’t understand my art. It’s a deep commentary by making you view the story through the eyes of the detestable Sam Smorkle, who isn’t there and doesn’t see any of the things that happen. I am telling you a deep commentary on the nature of fantasy. I’m ready to write my thinkpiece. Bunny: I have to get on Substack, I guess.  Chris: No, no. Again, people will tell you different things. My opinion is that your viewpoint character should always be the main character and if you have multiple viewpoint characters, you better be writing an ensemble.  We’ve talked about multiple viewpoints and how there are a few situations in which I think they’re a good idea, but most of the time I don’t think they’re a good idea [chuckle]. But basically, I really, really think that the viewpoint character should be the main character. We even had this as an example in our unworkable story choices episode. [Like] the Watsonian POV. Just say no to Watson’s.  Oren: Yeah, just say no to Watson’s.  Chris: [apologetic] I’m sorry.  Bunny: If someone approaches you in a back alley and opens up their trench coat and there’s a Watsonian viewpoint inside, just say no. Oren: Just dare to say no.  Chris: The reason is that readers just grow more attached to the viewpoint character, which is just really important. It’s really important for having people be engaged with your stories, for them to like your main character. They will like the viewpoint character better. I’m sorry, Robert Jackson Bennett, but I care more about Din than Ana. I know Ana is your favorite. [Bunny and Oren laugh in the background] I can tell. And she’s fine. But Din is where it’s at. I’m sorry.  Bunny: [emphatically agreeing] Din is where it’s at. Oren: Din’s my special boy. [jokingly threatening voice] You give Din more to do, you hear me? You give him more to do, Robert.  Bunny: You turn this around, Robert. [chuckle] Chris: And also readers reasonably expect them to be important. I do think that setting your viewpoint characters also is a signal to readers about which characters are of central importance, and that readers will generally, purposely get more attached to them. They’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. They do have some, it’s not like completely voluntary, but there is definitely some level of choice involved in who the reader gets attached to. Hence why when a show kills off too many characters, people stop getting emotionally invested. Because they choose not to, ’cause they know they’re gonna get burned after a while, for instance.  Oren: Yeah. I’m not convinced people can make the choice to get attached to a character that they don’t like at all, but I know for sure the opposite works where they can decide to not get attached to someone who they might otherwise have liked. Chris: Yeah, I do think there’s an element of, okay, we know this is the main character. If we want to like the story, we might try to cut it a little slack. The point is that it is also beneficial. So, yeah, definitely the viewpoint character should be your main character. Bunny: And you can also turn an audience against your viewpoint character, to be clear. They get a little bit of automatic sympathy because they’re the main character. You know, you wanna root for the person whose story this is, or [the person] who is your primary eyes through which to view the world in the story. We’re just more intimate with them than we are with any other character. So of course people are going to find them more sympathetic. But if your character is a jerk, you can lose goodwill pretty quickly. And if the main character’s a jerk and people don’t like the main character, that’s probably a recipe for them putting down the book, more than disliking any other single character.  Oren: Yeah. The stakes are certainly very high.  Chris: Looking at you people who are writing villain protagonists. It’s not impossible to do, but…  Oren: There’s an audience for that. I’m not convinced that’s the best move, to be intentionally limiting your audience to only people who like that kind of story. But you know, you do you.  Chris: Yeah. So make them your main character. And if you wanna know who your main character should be — most people already know that — it’s the character you like, it’s the character that’s affected by problems in the story, and ideally, kind of at the center of the problems and has some ability to actually create change and solve the problem, which Sam Smorkle the goblin probably doesn’t, unfortunately. Oren: Poor Sam Smorkle. He’s doing his best.  Chris: And be well positioned for likability, which in many cases means they’re in some sort of sympathetic position, which is why we like underdogs. Underdogs are always our heroes.  Bunny: In my experience, and I don’t think this is universal, but at least in the sorts of writing circles I’ve run in, it seems like a lot of people conceive of their main character at the same time as they conceive of their story’s premise. So usually I think people who have, at the very least, a little writing experience have a decent sense of who should be there and who will be the most well positioned to be the main character. Now, that’s not always the case, and it can change if they start writing the story and end up liking another character way more than their original viewpoint character. Oren: The biggest concern I’ve run into is less that they just don’t know who their main character is and more that they start off with one main character, but then end up getting attached to someone else as the story progresses. Stories take a long time to write. You get new ideas, you introduce a mysterious secondary character and you’re like “Ooh, they’re mysterious and cool, not like my boring old main character that I know really well”.  That’s what I’ve found to be the biggest problem.  Chris: Or sometimes they have multiple viewpoints and you can convince them to cut those viewpoints down, and you have to choose which person is the —  Sometimes what happens — again, a lot of times when people have multiple viewpoints —  is they end up with separate storylines because the viewpoint character also makes it so that you have to feature events that include the same character, and that’s really useful for plotting because it kind of forces writers to make their stories more cohesive and make everything interconnected. And so what usually happens when you have multiple viewpoint characters, and sometimes writers use them on purpose for this purpose, is that now that there’s two different viewpoint characters, they can be on different continents. They don’t have to have anything to do with each other. So although things they’re experiencing also don’t have anything to do with each other, and so basically we have two different stories that we’re just kind of hopping back and forth between, and they’re very disconnected from each other. I really do think that lowers engagement, so I don’t recommend it. I think it would be better just split them up and make them each their own story. It’s fine. But again, in some of those cases, we’ll recommend cutting down the number of viewpoint characters. And often because they have completely different storylines, one of them will just be working a lot better than the other one. And we could be like “Hey. Your story would be a lot stronger if you just focused on this storyline with this character, ’cause that one is just working better” oftentimes. Oren: One thing that I think is useful to think about when you are picking your main character and figuring out their viewpoint is that by picking someone to be your viewpoint character, what you’re basically doing is you are making them sympathetic and relatable over making them mysterious. Which is a thing that I think a lot of writers struggle with because they’re used to TV or film where the main character can also be mysterious because we can’t see what’s going on inside their heads. So halfway through the movie, we could reveal that they’re a vampire or something, which probably wouldn’t work in a book. In a limited POV book, it would be really weird to wait that long to reveal that they’re a vampire, unless they themselves did not know.  Chris: Yeah. So you kind of have to give up what we call those meta mysteries.  Bunny: That’s okay. All of the advertising material will reveal it anyway.  [Oren and Chris laugh] Chris: That is true. Yeah, you have to give that up, but it’s worth it. The trade off is totally worth it.  But in any case, another issue that we have with viewpoint characters — this came up in my Revenger critique recently — is just don’t let your viewpoint character disappear. They should have a presence in the scene. It should feel like they’re there. And if they seem to just disappear from the story, it’s not good because where did they go? This reminds me of Project Hail Mary. There are all these flashbacks, the main character remembering things. And then there’s one flashback where the main character just isn’t there. All the flashbacks are his memories. How is he not there? But as far as we know, he’s not even present. [Chris trying to hold back laughter] And it’s like we just wanted to have that scene and didn’t have an excuse to have the main character there, so we just thought he’d just slip it in and maybe we wouldn’t notice that the main character was missing.  Oren: Maybe he just heard about it by description and he’s just remembering having heard about it.  Chris: This tends to happen if the scene is about watching two important people talking to each other and the viewpoint character is mostly watching them. This is when this tends to happen a lot. Bunny: Don’t let them just be a camera.  Chris: It can be hard to figure out what they do. Ideally they would participate in the conversation. Failing that, like maybe your viewpoint character is actually eavesdropping, so they probably shouldn’t chime in, you can at least have them react to what they hear, give some emotions, and if you create a pause in the conversation, you can use that to have them think about what they’re hearing a little bit. They can at least react.  Oren: Definitely a “less is more “situation. For me, this has always felt normal because I just think of it in terms of role playing games, and if my players have to sit and listen to two NPCs talk to each other? Nu-uh, they’re gonna be outta there.  Chris: Except for when we had that fantasy arbitration. You were so self-conscious about that, but we all loved it. We’re like, yeah, no, we’ll just sit back and watch the GM talk to himself.  Bunny: We were so invested.  Oren: Well, that was three NPCs that I had spent a huge amount of time getting you involved in. One of them was your love interest and the other was your evil frat lady, bad guy. There was a lot of effort that went into that scene. I would not have tried that at the beginning of the story.  Chris: The other thing is if your viewpoint character disappears, what you’re left with is what I call film POV. And this is a disparaging term and it’s a reminder that narration has some advantages over film. Film isn’t just better. Sometimes people need reminders of [that]. I’m just laughing because there was some suggestion by tech bros that they would have a startup where they would turn books into a multimedia experience. Whatever that means. And it’s like, no, people actually do like reading books. Oren: Yeah. Whatever that means.  Bunny: It probably involves NFTs.  Chris: But not just inferior films, okay? That’s where basically you don’t get to show any character’s thoughts or feelings because there’s no viewpoint character anymore, and it’s not good. You should avoid that.  Oren: They’re just hanging out, you know, they’re just vibing, just chilling. Don’t even worry about it.  So on the topic of viewpoint characters disappearing. In Revenger, it was notable that this was definitely supposed to be the start of an arc where the main character discovers her identity and learns to assert herself. And that’s a legitimate arc. But they don’t have to be non-entities before that happens. I would argue that no one is actually a non-entity inside their own head, unless they’re some kind of weird alien or robot or something. If they’re like a normal person, they will have an internal life of some kind, even if they have an arc about finding who they are or whatever. In that early scene, the problem is that the sister just kind of takes over and the POV character is just like, yeah, whatever. Has no thoughts or opinions on things.  If we wanted to start that arc of her having to like discover her own identity, what you might do is have her be initially reluctant, but then decide actually, yeah, I’m gonna be super gung-ho about the sister’s plan, and that would show that she has an arc, that she needs to learn to be her own person instead of just kind of being nothing. Chris: What we really needed there is some thoughts and motivation from her, whatever they were, because her sister is basically manipulating her. This is Adrana and Fura. Fura is the main character, the viewpoint character, and we have no idea what she’s thinking or feeling, but we can see that her sister is manipulating her into something that she seems to not wanna do, but she also isn’t really fighting back.  So there could be multiple things going on there where a) she actually does wanna do this, but she’s supposed to be responsible so she thinks that she shouldn’t, but she secretly does want to. So she’s not fighting too hard. Or she really doesn’t want to, but she feels a lot of pressure, she wants to make her sister happy.  There could be all sorts of things happening inside her head as this occurs, but if we don’t know, she just feels like a sack of nothing. We don’t get to bond with her. We don’t get to understand her. We don’t develop as much attachment to her. So we can’t just leave it blank. There has to be something there.  Okay, so a few common questions. The biggest question that everybody always asks is, how do I describe my viewpoint character?  Oren: You don’t. You never describe them. Don’t mention what they look like at all.  Bunny: They might be a penguin.  Chris: Honestly, if it’s a short story, you might not have to. I do think that it matters, but I think that at novel size people do expect you to describe your viewpoint character. Bunny:  Or you could be like John Scalzi and not describe anyone, including the main character.  Oren: He doesn’t have time for that.  Bunny: Some sassy eyeballs named Jamie.  Chris: I think Jamie is supposed to be gender ambiguous, but even a gender ambiguous character, you could still say a few gender neutral things about that character’s appearance if you want to. Bunny: Murderbot is also– Chris: Murderbot is non-binary, I think. Whereas Jamie is ambiguous, as in Jamie could very well have gendered pronouns, we just don’t know what they are.  Oren: Murderbot is actually the same. Murderbot’s gender identity is not stated, at least not in the first book. People had to go and ask Wells in an AMA about that. And that was how we found out that Murderbot’s pronouns are “it” because that’s just not anywhere in the book.  Bunny: That one’s complicated because the other characters do refer to Murderbot with “it”. The thing is that we don’t know if that’s what Murderbot wants.  Oren: Right. Whereas with Jamie, John Scalzi is repeating his trick from his Lock In books. But with that one, it was a little clearer because the character was largely represented by a humanoid robot that they piloted around, whereas this character does not do that. It is a little harder to figure out that that’s what’s happening. You have to pay a little closer attention.  Chris: I didn’t notice at all, but that’s partly because I was listening to an audiobook that was narrated by Will Wheaton and that gives me a specific image. In the first scenes, what Jamie says and what Jamie’s doin, it was hard for me to not imagine Jamie as a guy.  Oren: Well, the thing that got me about it was that my old spoilers, I guess there’s a rude, evil tech bro in the story. And the way he talks to Jamie, it just doesn’t make sense to me that he’s talking to a person he sees as a woman this way. Chris: Right. And the way Jamie talks to him also. Oren: He talks to Jamie like one of the bros.  Bunny: To be clear, this takes place in the real world. It takes place in 2020 explicitly, so you don’t have the ambiguity of maybe a gender egalitarian setting.  Oren: I’m willing to conceive of the possibility of some asshole techbro who talks to women like they’re part of his asshole techbro circle. Not like that couldn’t exist. It just did not seem likely without any attention called to it.  Chris: Right. I suspect that was accidental on Scalzi’s part, that Scalzi was just writing from the perspective of a man. Since he’s a man and might not have realized that that would come off as gendered.  Bunny: Yeah, and I think I agree with Oren as well.  I think I did just implicitly be like the way Jamie is acting in this first scene and that sort of exchange with the first asshole tech person did strike me as I can’t really envision Jamie as a woman in this case, just because of the dynamics of that. Oren: Or at least not someone that other people perceive as a woman. Chris: But in any case, I didn’t notice that there was supposed to be gender ambiguity at all when I read that book or listened to that book for the first time and learned it later. Bunny: Hire Will Wheaton. That’s our advice.  Chris: But in any case, my point is you could still describe Jamie in ways that, if you wanted it to be ambiguous, it would still leave it ambiguous. So you don’t always have to describe your viewpoint character, but generally for a novel, people expect you to. You’ll probably get some comments if you don’t. You can do whatever you want with your own novel, but you’ll probably get comments.  So how do you describe your viewpoint character? We’re assuming that this is something where you’re kind of in a close perspective and the narration is closely representing their thoughts and experiences and people used to have their viewpoint character look in the mirror, but that’s considered cliche now.  You just wanna find a reason to remind them about their appearance, so they think about it. So have them dress up, or maybe they get like dirt on their clothes and hair, or perhaps they have a friend or family member that they would reasonably compare themselves to in the way they look to. Instead of looking in a mirror, they can look at photos or paintings of people.  I have an article with a list of more ideas, but the key is to just [think] when does your appearance matter? When do you think about it? And then create one of those situations and get them thinking about it a little bit.  And then the last question people ask, does their narration have to be their thoughts? Like literally?  The answer is no. Don’t overthink it. Exposition is important. It’s not supposed to be their stream of consciousness from their mind. Just have it generally reflect what they’re thinking about and you’ll be fine.  Bunny: Unless you’re James Joyce and want to confuse everyone.  Oren: All right. Well, with that, 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.  We will talk to you next week.    [closing theme] This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.