The Mythcreant Podcast

What’s better than an ally you can trust? An ally you can’t trust! For storytelling purposes, of course. In real life, you want your allies to be dependable and steady; in fiction, they should be wild and unpredictable, plus a bit sexy. If you’re going for the drama of an unreliable ally, that is. And after listening to this week’s podcast, you’ll obviously want to. Unless we were the unreliable allies all along. Oh, noooooooo- Show Notes Hero With a Thousand Faces  The Writer’s Journey (Note: It does have a shapeshifter chapter, Oren was looking in the wrong book) Archetypes of the Hero’s Journey Why the Term Mary Sue Should Be Retired  Teen Wolf Villains  Sylar Elsa Schneider Littlefinger  The Skull  Spike Redemption Arcs  Saw Gerrera Transcript Generously transcribed by Savannah. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris:  You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle. [Intro theme] Oren:  Welcome, everyone, to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren.  Chris: And I’m Chris.  Oren: Did you know that one of us is actually a shapeshifter? I tried to look up what the shapeshifter archetype actually is, because I only use it kind of casually, and I discovered that nobody knows. I found various definitions, and I always assumed that the Shapeshifter was a character whose loyalties we were uncertain of. Like, maybe they were gonna betray us. Maybe not. That’s what I thought it meant. I have now seen it defined as first any character who ever does anything sneaky has become a shapeshifter. But also, you have to be an actual shapeshifter according to some definitions, which is very funny, and I tried to look up the original definition in The Hero With a Thousand Faces, and I found it. I found the chapter labeled Shapeshifter, and I have no idea what the heck he was saying. I don’t know what any of this means, guys. I don’t know.  Chris: No, Campbell does not write in a clear manner. He is very hard to understand, anything that he’s saying Oren: And to my surprise, it doesn’t look like Vogler mentioned it. Chris: He must. He must.  Oren: I couldn’t find it.  Chris: I’m pretty sure he’s who I got it from.  Oren: I searched through his book, The Hero’s Journey, or whatever vastly specific title. Chris: The shapeshifter is listed on my Hero’s Journey Archetype post. And that is largely inspired by Vogler. So if Vogler had not mentioned the Shapeshifter, I don’t think I would’ve put it in my post either. Oren: Maybe he does somewhere, but I couldn’t find it either by searching the text with Ctrl+F or by looking in the table of contents or the index. So, if it’s in there, it’s very well hidden. Maybe he spelled it weird Chris: Spelled with lots of hidden GHs. Some silent GHs. Several times. Oren: S-H-A-E-P-E. The sheeAPEshifter. Chris:  There isn’t a very good word. I don’t really like the word shapeshifter for this anyway, but there just doesn’t seem to be a great term. I looked it up on TV Tropes. And TV Tropes has like 20 different categories, which is not helpful. Depending on the exact shade of untrustworthiness or the pattern of behavior this character shows. For storytelling purposes, we just want to group together characters that are between team good and team evil.  Oren: That’s just how I’ve always used it. I thought it was a pretty useful term for that. I thought it was easily the most applicable of the various Hero’s Journey terms that get thrown around, but now I have no idea. Chris: We really just need one term for this kind of character. And Shapeshifter is what I got. I don’t got a better one.  Oren: Specifically, we’re thinking about unreliable allies today, and shapeshifter is kind of the cool way of referring to that character type. They may or may not actually change shape.  Chris: We have disagreements about a lot of terms, like TV Tropes, for instance, is very insistent that you can’t call something a MacGuffin if what it is matters to the plot at all. Its only purpose has to be for people to fight over it, and it doesn’t matter what it actually is. And it’s like, that’s not useful. Okay? That is too narrow. That’s like the original meaning of ironic. Yes, I know what the original meaning of ironic is, but that’s too specific, and it’s not a useful word if we use that definition. Oren: LOL. We got our MacGuffin purists over here being like, “Don’t you call that a MacGuffin. They used it at some point! It does something.” Seriously got into an argument one time or watched other people be in an argument about whether or not you could call something a Mary Sue if you didn’t have proof that it was an author insert character. Chris: Now we need proof!  Oren: Okay, well, I don’t like Mary Sue as a term for other reasons, but that seems kind of unreasonable to me.  Chris: So yeah, unreliable allies. These are generally good characters to have. First of all, they’re generally extremely helpful because they make it easy to add more tension and conflict, especially to down scenes that are not normally that exciting. These are the scenes where something exciting has already happened and now your characters are resting, recovering, planning their next move, that kind of thing. But you still want a little something. You still want a little light conflict, a little light problem-solving to happen in those scenes. Maybe some emotional growth or some heated conversations, and so, these shapeshifters−now I’m thinking about it every time I say it−just make it really easy to add a little more drama. Because, do we want them around? Who invited them here? What should we tell them or not tell them? And then you can have them, “Oh, I could help you with that.” Make them very suspicious.  Oren: It’s not my fault that it’s hot, okay? We were all thinking it.  Chris: And then you can also have their help come at a cost more easily. Maybe they make demands, which are difficult to deal with, or maybe their advice isn’t actually trustworthy. It’s technically−at best−kind of correct, and then the heroes get into trouble that they have to deal with. Just opens up so many great opportunities for tension and conflict and makes those easy to add. That’s why they’re usually great characters to have around.  Oren: Although I have discovered a fun little contradiction, or maybe it’s more of a conundrum of the unreliable ally, which is when you spend a lot of time asking, can we trust this guy? It’s really difficult for the answer to be no and have it not be disappointing. Most stories that I know of that have an unreliable ally where we make a big deal about it, that person ends up being on team good. And, on the rare instances where that’s not the case, it’s always disappointing. And I have a few theories about why, about why this is more difficult.  The first one is that if someone’s trustworthiness is questionable enough that you have to ask, “no” is already the least surprising answer. It’s like, oh look, that guy’s acting hella suspicious. Can we trust him? Well, uh, probably not. He’s acting really suspicious. A trustworthy person wouldn’t do that. That’s the obvious answer. And then it can also make the heroes look really silly because why did you trust this person who was being really shady before?  Chris: Or be frustrating in the same direction if they are deciding to trust a character that is clearly, obviously not trustworthy−which is not what you want for your unreliable ally; they need to at least be partially credible−and you see the character decide to trust them anyway, that’s just going to be frustrating. And then it blows up in their face. That’s not good.  Oren: Also, I’ve noticed you build attachment to unreliable allies if the story’s doing its job. And then, if you are attached to them, you don’t want them to be evil. You don’t want them to die or be put in jail for forever or whatever. You want them to win because you like them. So, it’s like, no, be a good person. Come on. I need you to be a good person. Still edgy.  Chris: I do think it works well for them to be partially trustworthy, which is why I’m joking about like, well, technically what they said was true. A character that makes deals and follows them to the letter but there’s a little catch there that hasn’t been mentioned, that’s the kind of thing that we could justify. Okay, we got in a lot of trouble, but we still ultimately were able to achieve our objective that we couldn’t have done without taking this character’s dangerous advice. And now we know their word can technically be trusted if you pay close attention, so surely it will go fine next time.  Oren: I’ve also noticed that at least some stories tend to−I’m not just thinking about Teen Wolf, but I am thinking about Teen Wolf−use former big bads as their untrustworthy allies or unreliable allies. Chris: Teen Wolf is so funny because they refuse to kill any of their villains. There’s a couple villains that die, but for the most part, I think they kill some early on, and they’re like, you know what? That was a mistake. We shouldn’t have done that. Let’s never kill a villain ever again. And so they just collect! There’s six seasons and some of the seasons have two parts, which are basically two seasons. On top of that, every season has two villains. Okay? So there’s so many former villains in this show. They just are really useful.  Oren: They are, but there is a problem when occasionally they try to turn them back into main villains, and it often doesn’t work because we already beat this guy.  Chris: Right. Only Kate.  Oren: Kate works because she went through a whole transformation process, both literally and figuratively, to become another main villain. Whereas with Peter, we beat him in season one, and he was a great villain in season one. Then he was a great unreliable ally for several seasons, and then we fight him again. But we’re all 10 levels higher than the last time we fought him. Chris: No, Peter can never be a villain again. Why did you do that? Oren: I’m pretty sure we can take him, you know? Chris: There’s also Sylar in Heroes. His problem is he continues to shift between a hero and a villain so many times you want to just get rid of him. You get so sick of him. With Peter, okay, he’s a big deal in the first season, but then he is a minor side character who’s untrustworthy, and he works well in that role. We’re not making a big deal out of him, but with Sylar, we’re supposed to care about his fourth transformation between hero and villain, and I just don’t. I can’t care anymore. He’s just annoying now.  Oren: Heroes, man, I haven’t thought about heroes in a while.  Chris: Oh, I know. Oh, I know. Oren: That’s classic. That’s the show that most exemplifies monkeys banging on typewriters producing Shakespeare, because it really looks like that. The first season was kind of an accident. Obviously, the second season was pressured because there was a writer’s strike, so we accept why that one’s bad, but every season after that is equally bad or worse. Chris: Although I should point out, we had an episode about storytelling constraints. That it’s also true that the first season is always the easiest to plot because it has the least constraints. Unless you’re doing a prequel or a mid-quel, even.  I think luck is unfortunately−in storytelling−a much bigger factor than we might think it is. There are lots of authors who just have one book that is much better than the others because they happened to hit on the right formula, and things worked out and were easy for them, and then they did something different and didn’t realize its ramifications and didn’t know how to adapt to it, or didn’t realize that it was different from what they were doing before, and suddenly nothing works anymore. That’s unfortunately a repeating pattern, so I’m sure luck had something to do with it, but also constraints are also a big deal. So, if it’s easier to plot, and you can just do whatever you want, then you can solve your problems more quickly. Besides having an unreliable ally that’s on team good, another thing you can do is have somebody who is on team evil but is sympathetic to team good.  Oren: Yeah. The unreliable evil vizier kind of character.  Chris: Right, that way if your protagonist gets captured and thrown into a dungeon or something, you would have the lieutenant come up and be like, here, maybe I can help you. Oren: There may be a price to pay.  Chris: Should I trust you? Well, your alternative is remaining in the dungeon, so…. You know? Oren: This is convenient for storytellers because you really don’t want your characters hanging out in a dungeon. It’s real boring.  Chris: As soon as they get in that dungeon, you should show some way forward for the story to move forward. Whether it’s making friends with one of their guards or something to make it seem like they’re gonna solve this problem.  Oren: Personally, I’m just a huge sucker for unreliable ally love interests. Like I said at the beginning, they’re hot. I’m sorry, they just are. It’s just the law. If you make them of questionable loyalty and sexy and a little bit mean? Yeah. Gets me every time. Not a hard formula to crack.  Chris: It’s true. Elsa in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, she’s a great character that goes back and forth where she starts with Indy, betrays him, then she ends up on the bad guy’s side−team evil−but then is still kind of sympathetic, and eventually also betrays team evil to side with Indy. She’s a great character that works really well for that story.  Oren: Then she has an unfortunate end.  Chris: She has an unfortunate end, but it’s still one of the best downward turning points I’ve seen. There’re so many great downward turning points in the Indiana Jones movies. They’re really about people doing bad things and getting divine comeuppance. Oren: Shouldn’t be using these spooky artifacts, man. That’s not what they’re for. Don’t look at the arc. Don’t look at it.  Oren: They belong in a museum, or usually they belong buried somewhere. Failing that, a museum.  Chris: Yeah, that one definitely did not belong in a museum.  Oren: Here’s something I noticed, and this is similar to the thing I was thinking about with villains is that when I was thinking about unreliable allies that stuck in my memory, they’re all from TV. I could think of maybe one from books off the top of my head, and that’s Little Finger from the first Game of Thrones book. We know that he can’t really be trusted. He even tells Ned he can’t be trusted. He also plays up how he super cares about Catelyn, so maybe we can trust him. Spoilers: No.  Chris: What about Dresden Files?  Oren: It must, but I can’t think of one. They must have one somewhere, because Dresden Files does every noir trope, and noirs love the femme fatale who you can’t be sure if you can trust or not. I’m sure Dresden Files does that. Maybe Susan counts? Chris: Oh, I know! Skull. From Lockwood and Co.  Oren: Oh yeah, yeah. The skull. The skull’s good. Skull’s great.  Chris: The skull is a fantastic character. Lockwood and Co. is like a ghost post-apocalypse, almost a ghost dystopia, we might say.  Oren: A ghost-calypse.  Chris: Ghost-calypse, where in the setting, everybody stays inside at night because there are too many ghosts roaming around and young people can sense ghosts, but past a certain age, like 22 or something, they can’t anymore, which gives a reason why we have a team of teenagers who are doing ghost control. So they’re a little ghost teen ghost control agency, and they have a talking skull in a jar. And Lucy, the main character, is the only character who can actually hear the skull because that’s her special power, and the skull is very rude, says many mean things about people, and they can’t let the skull out of the jar because there’s a ghost embodied in it that will probably just kill them all. But slowly! Over the course of five books, Lucy and the skull grow closer together and they are more pals. And the skull grows less evil. Oren: To be fair to the skull, it does say mean things about people, but so does Lucy. Lucy is really mean.  Chris: This is one of those unintentional characterization things where there’s too much telling about negative things about characters, and that is interpreted as Lucy being a negative person, when I think it’s that the author is a negative person. Anyway, this happens sometimes, and I don’t think it’s intentional that Lucy just thinks negative things about people, but so many people are described in really negative ways except for crushes, golden boy Lockwood, who she has a crush on. But again, I still think it’s unintentional. But the skull, being a ghost, can sense things that everybody else can’t and has information, which is how it is with most unreliable allies, especially former villains. Obviously, we need a reason to keep them around, and it’s usually that they have really valuable information or expertise from their days of villainy that nobody else has access to. In this case, it’s a ghost with access to ghost information, but ghosts are for the most part malicious in the Lockwood setting. Oren: The needing a reason to keep them around thing is important. Teen Wolf got a little lazy about that sometimes with the hunter dude−Gerald, I think is his name−he was the evil leader of the hunters for a season, and they keep him around because he’s been really badly poisoned and he’s been dethroned from the leader of the hunter clan, so he doesn’t pose a huge direct threat, at least as far as they can tell. Turns out he has got some plans going on, but it’s pretty obvious that they think that they can handle him, and he has information that they need. But they also have characters like Deucalion, who is super evil and murders tons of people, but then he stops being blind. Chris: Oh God, it’s so ableist. It’s not good.  Oren: It is ableist, but I also need everyone to understand that beyond being ableist, it is… so silly. It just makes them look really not smart.  Chris: He was only murderous because he was blind, and now that he is sighted again, somehow he is not murderous.  Oren: They don’t even say that out loud. They just kind of imply it because I think they know how silly that would sound. They would sound so ridiculous. They can’t bring themselves to say it.  Chris: I know that he murdered tons of people, even people who were his own followers in his own pack. But it’s fine. I think he’s a good guy at heart.  Oren: Yeah, he is fine. They give him a stern talking to. They’re like, if you ever try this again, we’ll come get you.  Chris: Meanwhile, the Druid that season gets like a permanent end, and she’s a sympathetic character! She’ll only sacrificed a few people! Oren: Who among us! You know?  Chris: I do think that if you were going to take mercy on one of those characters and leave the character alive, you should leave the Druid alive. Oren: I even liked Deucalion in the later seasons when he showed back up as a good guy. He had a cool role, but man… Chris: It’s a charismatic actor. Maybe that’s why it’s less common in books.  Oren: I do think that’s part of the reason, but I think it’s also that TV shows have an easier time developing characters other than the protagonist. A big draw of using an unreliable ally is the character arc, which you can do in a book. It’s not that you can’t; it’s just a little easier on a TV show. So I suspect that’s part of why it’s more common.  Chris: One thing I do think is worth mentioning with the skull is one of the things that made the skull work is the skull’s utter helplessness. That allowed the skull to be more evil because I think that is one of the tricky things, especially if you don’t have a charismatic actor. I do notice that a lot of writers have trouble creating a certain level of antagonism, making their characters a bit of jerks, without going too far and pissing off readers. You just need to make them a little bit of a jerk. Readers are really sensitive, and it’s easier to underestimate how sensitive they are and make a character much more of a jerk than you needed to. In this case, when you have a character that is a bad person or a selfish person, making it so that they are in a fix and can’t really do any harm can be important, and the skull is able to just insult people all the time and just be overtly evil because it’s a helpless ghost inhabiting a skull in a jar. It is completely unable to do anything to hurt them. All it can do is scream at them. So it has no teeth behind anything it says. Anytime they don’t want to listen to it anymore, they have a little valve on the top of the lid of the jar. So if Lucy doesn’t want to listen to it, she can just shut the jar. And she does eventually figure out that it’s lonely, so we can use a lack of contact as consequences when it does bad things.  Oren: We can send it to its room. Chris: Sit in a corner and think about what it did.  Oren: The fact that it’s such a jerk is also what makes that premise not super sad. If the skull was a better person, it would be like, oh man, this is really mean. But the skull’s a huge jerk, so who cares?  Chris: If you have a character that needs to be a little more of a jerk and you’re having trouble with that balance of making them only slightly jerky, making them more helpless is a good balancing factor. And you could do things like, if they were an intimidating villain, like Spike for instance gets the chip in his skull that causes him pain whenever he tries to inflict harm on anyone that’s not a demon. So we have some sort of fantastical restraint on him.  Oren: Season four is not great, but Spike with the chip in his head was a stroke of genius. That worked out super well.  Chris: That worked out really well. And then later we had a conflict when Spike had grown enough as a person over whether he should still have a chip in his skull. And then Buffy argued that, no, at this point it’s immoral to keep it in him. We need to take it out. So that could also be an interesting conflict if you have. Some kind of fantastical constraint on a former villain, then at some point, if they redeem themselves a bit, there can be arguments. Have they actually changed or did they just behave that way because it offered them personal benefits? And can we trust them if we take the constraints off?  Of course you can also have a character that’s like, here, I’ll make a deal with you, but I can’t fulfill my end of the deal unless you take off the constraints because I have to use my magic for this. That’s always a fun one.  Oren: And at that point you get into the redemption arc, which is a whole other pile of discourse. We have several articles about redemption arcs. In general, you just keep in mind how bad you showed this character being and what the mitigating circumstances might have been. And there’s so many factors that go into it. With Spike, it’s one of those things where if you think about what Spike is actually said to have done it’s like, nah, he’s an irredeemably evil. But if you look at what he actually does and then compare to how long he has had the chip in his skull, it’s probably fine. It’s probably fine. Don’t worry about it.  Chris: Look, we didn’t personally watch all of those murders, so… Oren: He did a lot of murders, but I don’t know what the principal in season seven is so mad about. I didn’t actually see his mom die, although I did see the fight where she died at the end of it, but I didn’t see the actual death, and I didn’t know her, so I don’t know why he’s so upset.  Chris: A more recent example that’s also interesting is Saw Gerrera from Andor. Oren: He is really interesting.  Chris: He’s a really interesting character. In this case, we have not really on the same team as the heroes. One of the things I liked about Andor and Rogue One is capturing the fact that just because you have a resistance doesn’t mean that everybody’s united on the resistance side.  Oren: I loved how Saw is basically a bandit. He does like hurting the empire, but he’s also largely in it to get rich. He likes money. A lot of revolutionaries start out that way. Truly fascinating to see that on television.  Chris: Or you could have a situation where there are two groups that could be allied with each other, but they want to go about things in very different ways. Maybe one group wants to be nonviolent, and the other one is using violent means, for instance. Or have some other disagreements where they both have a common enemy, but they actually have very different objectives. That kind of thing. In Saw Gerrera’s case, it’s really interesting because we see scenes where it looks like other resistance groups are trying to collaborate with him against their common enemy, but he does not care about maintaining those relationships. He’s happy to sabotage other resistance groups so that he can do his own thing.  Oren: The problem with Saw was that he had one scene where he listed a bunch of different rebel groups and their affiliations, and I think one of them was Neoseparatists. And I’m like, hang on, tell me about those guys. What’s their deal? And no, we’re moving on. We don’t have time for that.  Like, no, bring back all those random rebel groups you were talking about. I want more interesting rebel politics.  Chris: They’ve been afraid of politics since the prequel trilogy.  Oren: They did add some back in Andor. Maybe if Andor had gotten the number of seasons it was clearly supposed to have, we would’ve gotten more of that. Chris: Oh yeah. So many good TV shows that would’ve been better if they’d just gotten the amount of episodes they were supposed to have.  Oren: It’s okay, Chris. We all agreed to pretend that Andor’s sister was never supposed to come back. We have been told it was always the plan for her to be dropped and never mentioned again. That’s just how it is, and we all accept it. See, I’ve now become the unreliable ally.  Chris: How could you! Well, if you didn’t find us too suspicious, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.  Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our most reliable allies, that is, our patrons. First is 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]

Your story follows its protagonist around as they perform feats of derring-do. But what if several years pass between each exciting moment? That’s realistic, but does it make a good story? It’s tough to recount such vast stretches of time in fiction, but this week we’ve got some ideas that might make it a little easier. Plus, we explain why ancient Greek and Roman writers are judging you. Show Notes The Empire of Silence  The Name of the Wind Aristotle’s Poetics  Tension Throughline  Horace’s Writing Advice  The Wheel of Time  Temeraire Magic Schools  Crusader Kings  The Mysteries of Udolfo  Daisy Chain Plotting World War Z Discworld Transcript Generously transcribed by Michael Frank. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle. [Opening Theme] Chris:  Welcome to the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Chris … Oren: And I’m Oren. Chris: Wait, wait a second. Something isn’t right here. My schedule says we’re recording for only a half an hour. And where is Mike? Oren: You know, we should probably tell the entire story of how Mike used to be on this podcast. And then Wes used to be on the podcast. And then Bunny was on the podcast, who we hope will be on the podcast again. And how much time do you have? ‘Cause that’s gonna take like, ten hours. Chris: Whoa! Who are those people? And we’re on episode 558?! What happened? I swear it was just yesterday that we were on episode 50. That’s not right. Oren: This is a simpler time. Back when we recorded hour long podcasts. Chris: Oh no. It’s like we started a podcast and then jumped forward until we were seasoned podcasters with one of the oldest podcasts still going ’cause we’re too stubborn to stop. Oren: That’s a weird thing to think about. This podcast is so old. Chris: This podcast is so old. I mean, I don’t know what the oldest podcast is. But at the same time, we are definitely up there in oldest podcasts. We have to be. Oren: We’re definitely older than any of the podcasts I listen to. Chris: Mm-hmm. So any case. We’re gonna be talking about long stretches of time and covering them in stories. And in podcasts apparently. Oren: And in podcasts. See, ’cause I—surprising everyone I’m sure—have a bone to pick about this. Chris: Mm-hmm. Oren: Because I’m reading a book called The Empire of Silence, which is trying to do Name of the Wind, but as sci-fi. Chris: Why! Oren: And it’s so boring. I don’t get it. Chris: That’s interesting. What essential parts of Name of the Wind is it trying to transfer to the sci-fi context? ‘Cause, I don’t know. I get the feeling that the setting is what makes Name of the Wind. Or at least the atmosphere. So what is the point? Oren: So the essential Name of the Wind-ness that it is using is the idea of a super famous guy who did something bad telling you his memoir. Chris: Okay. Oren: Something that you don’t know what it was. It’s implied to be bad, but also cool. But The Name of the Wind series is called The King Killer Chronicle. So presumably he killed a king. We’ll never know now, but we’ll never know because we’ll never do the third book. Yeah. I forget what this series is called. I don’t remember if it’s called “The Emperor Murderer Series” or whatever, but it’s that premise. And like, Name of the Wind feels like it is just trying to tell us the entire life story of this character. Chris: Aristotle says, don’t do that. Oren: He says not to. And we have strayed from his ancient wisdom! Chris: [laughter] Oren: We are off the path. Aristotle, come back. Chris: We’ve known that’s a bad idea for a really long time, Oren: And I’ve noticed that when books try to do this, it’s always really boring and I’m not sure if that’s a requirement? In theory, my head tells me that what you should be able to do is just be like, okay, well we’re telling this part of his life. This is gonna be a little episode. And then that’s gonna be done, and then we’re gonna skip forward. And then we’ll have another little episode. And in theory, those could work independently and not be boring, but they always are. Chris: Right. I mean, you can have an actual tension arc—and I can talk more about the difficulties and how to make it work. An actual tension arc that lasts through somebody’s whole life or longer. Oren: Right. Chris: You can do that. But I think the issue with this kind of Name of the Wind thing is that it’s being done instead of an actual throughline, often. Oren: Yeah. Chris: Or, okay. Does this “Space Name of the Wind” open with something equivalent to the giant demon spider threat that’s actually more interesting than the backstory only to abandon it? Oren: No, it doesn’t. It’s actually worse in that respect, because it doesn’t have an interesting framing device that it abandons. It starts you right in the memoir with a little aside to tell you this is a memoir being dictated by somebody who did something bad. Both of them go through like, all right, this is his childhood. Now he’s a street urchin ’cause something bad happened. And it’s not exactly the same. I wouldn’t say this book is copying or plagiarizing Name of the Wind. It’s just clearly heavily inspired by it. But both books have the problem of, there’s not really any tension. We’re just sort of watching things happen. There are maybe one or two moments where something might be tense, but mostly we’re just being told what this guy did for long periods of time. It’s almost all summary. Chris: Look! Look, folks. Horace says that you should not start your story when Helen of Troy hatches from an egg. That’s just too early. Oren: [laughing] Just don’t. If you won’t believe Aristotle, surely you’ll listen to Horace. Our good friend, Horace. Chris: Anyway, but no. It is interesting that they talked about these things so long ago. I think when in Aristotle’s case, there must have been playwrights at the time we were trying to do that, and I do wonder if mythology had an effect on that. Mythology has a lot of origin stories. Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: And so people, instead of actually having a cohesive plot—if people were trying to be like, “Here, all I have to do is just cover one person’s life or one hero’s deeds, and then automatically we have a plot.” And Aristotle’s like, “No, you need the ‘unity of an action,’” is what he called it. But I don’t see any reason why it has to be that way. I think in this case, the starting forward in time, it’s like using a flash forward as a hook. Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: To try to make up for the fact that starting with just like, okay, well the hero was born and then started to grow up, is just dull. Oren: Yeah. Chris: Which is why before adding a flash forward to your beginning or any other little tricks, you just need to make your beginning good first [chuckles]. So do your best you can to make your beginning good. And then if it’s beneficial, you can think about something like a flash forward if that will help engagement. Oren: Yeah. Chris: But I do feel like in a lot of these cases when writers are trying to add prologues or flash forwards or other things where they’re jumping around at a time in the beginning, that can be happening because they just haven’t put in the effort necessary to make their actual first chapter engaging. Oren: Right. The classic is the first chapter is boring, so we put a more exciting prologue right before it or something. That’s not ideal ’cause I still have to deal with this boring first chapter you wrote. I just have to deal with it a little later. Chris: Mm-hmm. Oren: In this case, I am trying to figure out what is the good way to try to write a story that takes place over such a long period of time. Chris: Right. Oren: Most of the big series that I read, they cover a surprisingly small amount of time. Sometimes it’s comical. Like The Wheel of Time covers about two and a half years. In fifteen books! And that’s a little much. But like Game of Thrones only covers—the ones that are written anyway—only covers about maybe three or four years, and those are all very, very long. Now granted they have series bloat with all these extra POV characters that they keep adding. But the longest one I can think of that I thought worked pretty well was Temeraire, which covers about eleven or twelve years in nine books. And that seemed like a lot, and I was hard pressed to figure out how would you cover more time than that in a smaller number of books. Chris: Yeah. No, you can. I mean, magic school ones are one of the ones that typically cover more time because we’re encompassing a school year. Oren: Yeah. Chris: The question of ‘how’ gets into different technical issues. I think maybe you should start with ‘why’ [laughs]. Why would we do this? Oren: ‘Why are’ though? [chuckles] Chris: I mean there are downsides, right? It’s harder to manage tension. And then there’s disorienting time jumps. And it can cause confusion, all those things. So there are disadvantages. So what is the payoff that we get if we incur those things? You know, one is, I think with the magic school, we’ve just got important events that would realistically take place over a long time. Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: So we wanna do the first day of school. We also wanna do graduation. Oren: Yeah. Chris: And also school year provides a nice bookend. You know, school year ends, everybody goes home for the summer. Kind of gives it a nice start and end to the story. Some people really wanna show their character growing older. Oren: Yeah. Chris: Maybe that’s the case in this Name of the Wind and ‘Space Name of the Wind.’ We just needed a plot that would work with that. Oren: Yeah. Well, I mean, they are clearly modeled off of memoirs. So I guess that is the motivation. We’ll go from, you know, childhood to when they did this super famous thing. Hilariously, Name of the Wind—his character when he is telling the story is supposed to be very young, which adds another weird wrinkle to it. I have no idea how old ‘space Kvothe’ is when he’s doing his memoir reciting. Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I do think that for even a lot of books, if you wanna show the character growing older … Again, a series gives you a lot more time. And I think what you can do is have each book. Over some events with their own plot and you have a less mature character, grow a little more mature or learn an important lesson about adulthood in that time. And then you skip forward between books when they’re a little older, and then they have another adventure in which they learn another adult lesson. Oren: Yeah. Chris: And if you have a series of books, that’s probably gonna work a little better than having tons of time passed during each book because people expect time to fly between books already.  Oren: Yeah. I mean, that’s basically what Novik does, right? Time generally passes at what you could consider to be real time during a book, and then there’s a year between each book. Which is, you know, about how she covers that much time in nine books. Chris: Yeah. And I would say if you can tell your story doing that, then you probably should. As opposed to ‘imagine school story,’ which has a specific reason to cover a longer period of time. You could have a story where you want to show a whole society change. And again, I do think that books that cover several generations or hundreds of years, to the point where they have to change main character, are gonna be working at an engagement penalty. But I also wouldn’t say that we shouldn’t tell those stories, right? Oren: Yeah. I mean, I get it, right? Like I play Crusader Kings and the idea of a story that covers the entire reign of one of my monarchs, or even my whole family line is like, oh, that sounds cool. But then I’m like, oh, how would I … how would I write that that wouldn’t be boring as hell? [laughs] Chris: Right. I do think a lot of times if you’re not gonna have a main character, you really should make the story shorter. Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: If you wanna keep up, you know, engagement. Now, I don’t know, in some cases maybe people would love your world building so much they’d stick around. But to me part of that feels sad knowing they’d be more engaged if you just had a main character. I guess you could have an immortal main character [chuckles].  Oren: Yeah. Just hanging out for thousands of years. I mean that works. Chris: I suppose we could do the same thing with the series, but like, have a hundred years pass between each book in the series. Oren: Yeah. Chris: And have your immortal character see how the society changes. Oren: Yeah, I mean that seems okay. What gets me is that—and maybe this is just me personally, I don’t know. I have a thing where when there’s a big time jump, it weirds me out that either the characters didn’t change and it feels like they should have or they did, and now it feels like I don’t know them anymore. It feels like it’s a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t situation. Maybe no one else feels that way. Chris: Yeah, I mean, I definitely think that could be a difficulty. And of course it’s a matter of finding that sweet spot, but surely that will be a little hard. Oren: Right. I mean, there’s extreme examples, right? Like when The Expanse does a thirty year time jump and everyone is on the same ship, in the same job with the same social dynamics thirty years later, and I am like, mmm—oh. Mmm, no. Chris: Be careful with that monkey’s paw. ‘Cause you might get Picard where everybody has changed, but they’re all miserable and they have horrible lives, and some of them have died.  Oren: People just seem to really like that idea. It’s like, “Hey guys, we’re doing a legacy sequel thirty years after. All the actors are way older. Well, they obviously should all be sad.” It’s like, shut the— Chris: Yeah. I don’t think people liked the sad part. I think at least people I’ve talked to who liked Picard, it was because seeing the actors, again, seeing the characters again means so much that they just do not care about the rest of the content. Or it’s not that they don’t care, it’s that they will like it anyway. Despite the content being sad.  Oren: The most well received of the Picard seasons seems to have been season three, based on at least the reactions I was seeing. And season three is just one giant nostalgia fest. And, uh, it’s not good. If you tried to tell this story with any other group of characters you would realize how bad it is. But because it’s all the TNG characters we’re like, yeah, we like those guys. They’re doing cool stuff from TNG. Or many cases, not even from TNG, but sort of things we’ve imagined they might have done since TNG. Chris: I think we should have just stayed with Riker and Troy and had them make pizza for an entire season. Oren: Heck yeah. I’d watch a season of Riker and Troy making pizza. And we could find out what happened to their daughter instead of having her just randomly disappear later [chuckles]. Chris: Mm-hmm. Yep. Yep. That’s what they should have done. Anyway [laughs]. Yeah. I mean, you could stretch it to the point where … if that’s what your concept supports, right? If you really wanna do, more than anything else, is to show how things change beyond the scope of one person. Oren: Yeah. Chris: Sure. Tell a story you wanna tell. I personally would recommend making it on the shorter side because I think it’s going to be harder to keep audience attention for a longer book. There’s some concepts, in other words, that are just harder to do if you don’t cover a long stretch of time.  Oren: Yeah. Chris: Whatever your goal is that you wanna express in the story. But it’s gonna come at a disadvantage. So. ‘How?’ Oren: Yeah. ‘How do now?’ We’ve covered ‘why.’ Now the other part. Chris: Okay. So the first thing, and—this is, you know, you’re not thinking about this, Oren. I think because it’s basic. But the first thing is to not make the story entirely summary. Oren: I don’t know. I’m pretty basic. I was thinking about that. Chris: [laughter] Oren: I’m mostly thinking about that because ‘Space Name of the Wind’ is mostly summary.  Chris: We’ve read a lot of books recently that have too much summary. Oren: Oh my God … Chris: Including some Hugo nominated books that have too much summary. Oren: So much summary! My God. Chris: Or for me, I just listened to thirty hours of The Mysteries of Adolfo, which is a book from the 1700s. And back then they just had not cracked scene technology yet. Oren: No, they didn’t know. Both: [laughter] Oren: We can’t judge them by the standards of our modern time. We can judge them by the standards of Aristotle’s time though. Chris: So a lot of these older books just have lots and lots of summary because they were not thinking about that. Whereas generally today, that’s considered a bad practice to have too much summary. So if you’re gonna have a story that takes place over long stretches of time, it’s really easy to … if you’re not thinking about this, which is why I often recommend blocking out scenes when you are outlining. Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: Because it just gives you time to stop and think about specific events in the story that you can depict happening in real time. Instead of describing the stories as a series of gradual changes that have no specific time and place to them. ‘Cause you’re gonna have to translate it over. Oren: Yeah.  Chris: Certainly you can have summary between events, but if fifty percent of the story is summary, that is too far. Oren: Too much! Chris: I don’t have a specific number. Right? Certainly the way you write can make summary more or less entertaining if you have a quippy, omniscient voice that makes jokes you can probably get away with more summary, but I don’t know … ten percent. Let’s go with that. I pulled that randomly outta my ass. I have no idea [chuckles]. But the point is that you want to minimize, generally, the percentage of the story that is summary.  Oren: In my head there are kind of two ways I imagine this working. And maybe this is too limiting. There’s one way, which is that you have your initial chapter and then you have a time jump. Which I don’t love, but I did do it in my book. So I can’t throw too many stones, but it was a solution to a difficult problem that I didn’t really have a good way to fix. Chris: Sure. And there’s lots of story situations in which we don’t, we have to to make the story work. Oren: Yeah. Chris: Especially if we don’t have time to revamp everything. That may not be the ideal way to do things, but are what’s practical for us right now. Oren: Right. So that’s one way I imagine it. And then the other way that comes to my mind is basically a series of vignettes with time in between them. When I try to imagine other ways of doing it, like the first half of the story is told more or less in real time. And then you have a ten year time jump in the middle. And then the rest of the story takes place ten years later. I don’t know. To me that sounds really weird and disorienting. Chris: Yeah. Oren: Am I wrong? Am I prejudiced? Chris: No, I mean, this is interesting because I do think that it’s about setting expectations. And when you have patterns that are for setting expectations, usually regularity is one of the things that helps. You know, I tell people with their chapters to not vary them too much in length. You have really short chapters. You can have really long chapters, but if you have a couple really long chapters and then you have a chapter that’s like five pages, that’s just weird. Oren: Yeah.  Chris: And it’s a little off-putting. And so I think time jumps are one of those things that they automatically take some adjustment from the reader and are a little jarring. But readers can absolutely get used to them if they know what to expect. And if you have some level of regularity—all the stories, they just have one backstory beginning of some kind, or like a flash forward. And then they do one time jump and people kind of know to expect that, especially if there’s a prologue. But then it’s expected that there won’t be another one. Whereas if you get three chapters in and there’s a big time jump, that’s gonna be more unexpected. But if you have a time jump every three chapters … Oren: Yeah. Chris: Right. But I do think it’s about more than how many words are between. It’s about ‘how does the story support this?’ So, jumping to the tension thing a little bit: so you can have problems that require a really long time to solve. They’re a little bit pressing, but it just takes somebody their entire life to solve the problem. And most of that is pretty dull. Oren: Yeah. Chris: But, I think in many cases, if you have a story that takes place over a really long period of time, it is a bit episodic. That means that there is less tension for the whole through line and more tension for each episode that takes place at the same time period. So let’s say we have the story opens with Sleeping Beauty style angry fairy, “Oh, you’re gonna die.” And they prophesize your doom in some way. And then you sort of jump forward and then you have an episode where the child encounters the source of doom. “Oh no, I ran into a spinning wheel.” Oren: [sarcastic] Waaah! Chris: “I have a conflict versus this spinning wheel.” And then you get away and you know, manage to avoid spinning wheels for five years. Then you have another episode: the spinning wheel now can chase you. Oren: Oops. Chris: This is very silly. But the point is that you can have a situation where it’s basically episodic. Something becomes urgent when you see it, which is what you need, okay? Because urgency is the thing you lose when you take too much time. You need some level of time pressure. And so in most cases, even if you have a magic school story over one year, you kind of have to manipulate urgency a little bit more. Oren: Yeah. Chris: So after you do like, a time jump something happens that reestablishes urgency for a period of time which you’re gonna stay in real time for the most part. Another problem occurs that problem is urgent. We get past that child arc, we make a step forward in solving the big throughline. And that immediate problem becomes less urgent and then you can jump forward. Oren: Right. Chris: In some cases maybe nothing happens and that’s what establishes it’s not urgent, right?  Oren: Yeah. Chris: It’s like, oh, well this person swore that they were gonna attack and kill me. But you know, it’s been three weeks and they haven’t. So I guess it’s not that urgent. Who knows when this will happen? We jump a year later. Oh, the attacker has finally showed up. Oren: Yeah. That sounds obvious when we say it. And yet I’m just wondering why so many books I’ve read haven’t done that. Like, the foundation seemed like it was custom made for this premise of every so often there’s a ‘cell in crisis,’ they’re called. And every generation or so we have to deal with it. But they don’t do that. Instead, we time jump and then summarize through a problem. Is it because they don’t know how to do smaller episodes? Is that why? Chris: Yes. Both: [chuckling] Chris: I mean, a lot of authors are just feeling their way through this, right? Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: The actual teaching specific things, not a lot of people are doing it, these specific ingredients for tension. So yeah, I think a lot of people are just feeling it out. Or various levels of intentionality go into different works. Oren: That’s true. Chris: Certainly the foundation could have had more tension, but it didn’t. But there are countless, countless books that you could say the same about. Oren: Yeah. And I was thinking about the book. The show has different problems entirely. Chris: Yeah. The show is its own beast. I don’t even wanna start on whatever that’s trying to do.  Oren: How do we feel about the so-called daisy chain plotting, which is what like, World War Z does? Chris: Well, that’s basically an anthology. So it’s just episodic, but without a through line basically. Oren: Yeah. Chris: There’s like a thematic link. If we’re talking about traditional daisy-chain, that’s the thing where you pass an object around that provides some connection. But the actual plots are entirely separate. So it is an anthology. Oren: Right. Chris: It’s just a chain of completely separate stories with their own tension, and then it has some sort of thematic link. So you could do something like that, certainly. I think you can have a long-term problem to connect things a little bit stronger than a daisy-chain. You know, you have a slow moving problem that flares up periodically. Oren: Yeah. Chris: And we deal with a flare up, and then maybe the last flare up we can finally resolve the problem for good. Oren: Yeah, that would make sense. That’s basically what World War Z does, arguably. Whether it does it well … But you know, the story starts with various vignettes about the beginning of the zombie apocalypse. And then we go through the different phases of the zombie apocalypse and then by the end we’re cleaning up the zombie apocalypse. Chris: Mm-hmm. Oren: An interesting choice that World War Z makes is that it’s more like the zombie apocalypse is what ties the stories together, but the stories are not really about fixing the zombie apocalypse. Chris: No, they’re about people’s experiences during the zombie apocalypse. Oren: Yeah.  Chris: We’d have to deal with zombies, but we w But no, he’s the FDR figure who comes in to, you know, be the wartime president America needs and do a ‘zombie new deal’ and all that stuff.ould get another FDR as president. I’ll take it! [laughs]. Oren: Yeah, we get back FDR. He’s so great compared to what we have now, right? I mean, nevermind the redlining and the internment. I’d still take it. Whatever. We’ll take what we can get. Chris: But those people aren’t really fixing the problem. Oren: Yeah, except for the one episode with ‘zombie FDR,’ by which I mean he’s their version of FDR during the zombie apocalypse. Not that he’s an actual zombie. That would also be fun. I’d read that. Chris: You know, it’s really sad that that sounds like wish fulfillment to me right now. Oren: Hell yeah! Chris: Yeah. So yeah, basically that’s it. You kind of reestablish something urgent. And it can be the same problem, but there’s a reason it’s urgent after the dump. We’ve said it many times before but say it again—this is basically when is it acceptable to summarize over versus when it is not? Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: So you can summarize it if it follows an expected trend. So character starts at their new job and then turns out they’re decently good at it. Then you can jump forward in time and it will be expected that they will gain more experience. If you jump forward in time and somehow they’re fired, you’re like, wait, that was an unexpected change that did not follow the expected trend. How did that happen? Whereas if you show them at their new job and they’re not doing too well … That one maybe [chuckles]. I don’t know. In that case, getting fired might still feel like too much of a notable event to skip over. But you can also have, you know, a ship does a few battles, wins the battles. We skip forward in time. It’s won five more battles in the meantime.  Oren: Yeah. Chris: Those would be notable events on their own, but since you’ve already shown a couple, it’s expected that more will happen. And so then you can skip over them. That’s the expected trend rule. And so what you don’t want is to skip forward in time and something strange and unexpected has happened, and we didn’t get to see how or why or what caused it or led to it. That’s the goal. Oren: Alright. Well, since we’re almost outta time, I have one more strategy that you can employ if you want to tell a story over a long period of time, is first begin publishing in 1983 and then publish forty-one books up to 2015. And this will allow you to cover quite a bit of time. And also you will be Terry Pratchett. Both: [laughter] Chris: Well, I think everybody would just wanna skip to the “be Terry Pratchett” part. Oren: Alright. Well, I think with that, we will call this episode to a close. Chris: If you found this episode helpful, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.  Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, we have Amon Jabber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then we have Kathy Ferguson, professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.  [Closing Theme]

Normally, you can’t just wish for a story to be good. But if that actually works, then watch out, because you’re almost certainly in a morality play about how something you get without any work isn’t actually worth having. That’s just what wishes are usually used for in fiction, and it’s our topic for today. We’ll discuss earning a wish, the difficulties of wish contracts, plus the one time a wish-horror movie turned into a rom-com. Show Notes Monkey’s Paw Smart Contract  Wishmaster Movies  Big Madoka Magica  Dragon Ball  Buffy Alternate Reality Wish Cordelia Chase Buffy Reboot1 Transcript Generously transcribed by Melaine. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle. [Intro Music] Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren.  Chris: And I’m Chris.  Oren: So, right at the top here, I’m going to rub my magic lamp here, and I’m going to wish for a great episode. And that’s going to work, right? It’ll be very satisfying.  Chris: I don’t know. I think you should just wish for more wishes.  Oren: Hmm. Chris: And then you can wish for a great episode.  Oren: But what if the wishes are granted to me in a way that fulfills the wording of what I said, but not what I wanted to happen? Ooh, I should probably write up a contract.  Chris: Yeah.  Oren: So today we are talking about making a wish. Usually in fantasy, although I’m not opposed to a sci-fi wish granting thing, that’s always possible, too.  One thing I think is very funny about wishes, is that they basically work the same way that your character getting anything works, which is that if it doesn’t feel like it was earned, it will be contrived. The only difference is that wishes remove the requirement that the thing they get be logical, because a wish sort of by its concept can be anything, but in terms of how it’s satisfying it still has to be earned the same way anything else would be earned. Like if your character is going to win first prize at a baking contest and they just wish for it that will be really unsatisfying, but it would also be really unsatisfying if they just barely tried and their cake was the best cake. Even if there was no wish involved, either way, you would have a satisfaction problem.  Chris: I would say if a wish just doesn’t fit the setting, then it would feel very contrived that, oh wait, my character can just wish for something. But I think in a lot of stories where there are wishes, the story is about wishing because it’s such a big deal, and this is really a karma problem. Again, your character needs to get good karma and then pay off that karma to earn their victories. But what happens when a character gets something that they have not earned is they actively get bad karma except for Aladdin should have gotten bad karma. because the genie totally cheated him. I’m sticking to that. Oren: Hot take. Hot Aladdin discourse 2025.  Chris: But in any case, however, there is an exception to this because it works karmically, selfless wishes totally negate this, or they need extra effort if you want them to do bad karma. Basically, what always happens is that the characters specifically wish for something for their own gain, personally. And if they actually wished for world peace or something that was fairly selfless, then there usually has to be another element if you want that to accumulate bad karma because basically the good karma of using a wish for a selfless purpose would negate any bad karma that getting that without earning it would bring. So, you can still have that be something that comes back to haunt them if there is a sign that that’s extremely careless. Like they’re just wishing for world peace on a monkey’s paw, right? And they’re told, no, don’t wish for things on the monkey’s paw. And they’re like, “No, I’m going to do it.”  Oren: I’m gonna! Chris: Hey, monkey’s paw, gimme world peace. Okay, in that circumstance, you would still expect that to have a terrible outcome, but basically for this to work, and usually wishes are a set up for them to have something bad happen or take their wish back eventually, you need them to do something for their own sake.  Oren: Right, and this is another way in which you can see that wishes fundamentally don’t work any differently than any other way the character gets something, which is that they start at the beginning by getting something they didn’t deserve. And then the story is about the consequences of that. That’s how you make that satisfying. Otherwise, what’s the point?  Chris: Although you could have a story where they do something really great, earn lots of good karma, and then their payoff for that is that they get one wish. Oren: Yeah, I mean that’s sort of what happens at the end of Aladdin, although he is wishing for the genie’s freedom, but like the genie is getting something out of it. And you could argue that that’s sort of the genie’s wish. Chris: Right, so he makes a selfless wish to free the genie, and then that creates good karma for him and then he gets good things. That were not just the genie being free.  Oren: Yeah, because he gets to be in a relationship with his girlfriend, right? Which is what he wanted from the beginning, basically.  Chris: Yeah. I mean, the thing that gets me about Aladdin’s wish is that he wishes to be a prince and then instead of that going wrong in some way, the whole problem is that he’s not a real prince. It’s like, what do you mean he is not a real prince? He wished to be a prince. This is an arbitrary social construct based on class suppression. I don’t see why he isn’t a real prince.  Oren: There’s just so many questions.  Like, okay, is he a prince of something? Is there a country that he’s the prince of now? I have so many questions.  Chris: Yeah. Do we just like create millions of people for him to rule over that did not previously exist? Do they remember their previous existence? Do they know they just popped into existence?  Oren: Did the genie just like supplant him, find some other dynasty and send them to the cornfields, and now he is the prince of that area? Chris: Or they suddenly remembered that they have an additional son? Oren: One of my favorite tropes is the wish contract. This is a thing you mostly see online where people are like, “Well, I could defeat the monkey’s paw by clever wordcraft.” But here’s the thing: it doesn’t really work that way because the whole point of contracts is not to magically bind people into following an arbitrary set of instructions. The goal of contracts is to have a clearly laid out agreement where the responsibilities of both sides are enumerated so that there is less chance of there being a misunderstanding. And that’s why we need courts to interpret them sometimes because no contract is perfect. No contract can foresee all situations.  That’s why smart contracts don’t work, one reason they don’t work, it’s because you can’t do contracts by flowchart. Whereas these magical wishes kind of assume they work like smart contracts. So, a smart contract is a software concept. The idea is that you can program a piece of software to decide when a contract has been fulfilled and release the payment. It’s this idea primarily popular among libertarians so that you could have contracts without needing a state to enforce them. We see a lot of blockchain people talking about them, or at least you did.  Chris: And this software is just omniscient? Just magically? Oren: Yeah.  Chris: Some person would still have to tell the software what’s happening and that could be messed with. Oren: Right, and you are seeing the problem with why these don’t work. It’s just not a workable solution.  Chris: We don’t wanna be ruled, because we’re libertarians, just ruled by The Machine.  Oren: The magic contract! Chris: The magical Machine will rule over us! Oren: And that’s sort of how people imagine wishes working. But in reality, no matter how tightly written your contract is, there are ways to interpret it that can mess you up. And in real life, the recourse that you have is you can go to a judge and the judge can look at the contract and be like, no, that’s obviously not what they meant. And no reasonable person would think that, therefore you are in violation of your contract.  So, here’s a famous one to avoid getting messed up by wishes, they will say, “Grant this wish according to my intent and not my wording.”  And it’s like, okay, what was your intent? Can we prove that? How are you going to prove that that’s a thing? Can the wishing party just be like, “Oh, well this is what I thought your intent was. I can’t read your mind. I’m not omnipotent.” Chris: I mean, anything that can cast a wish is kind of omnipotent. I see what you mean. That they’re like, “We can’t technically judge this.” I see it more as a matter of reader expectations, because if we’re going to weasel out of a contract somehow, then we establish that it has to follow certain rules and readers want to know what little tricksy thing is done to weasel out of the contract. And if somebody were to say, “Oh, you gotta judge this by my intent,” and the reader clearly perceives their intent as being a certain way, then that could eliminate options.  Oren: Yeah, if you’re doing it for fictional purposes, then that’s a bad way to word it. Just because people tend to use that as a, “Nothing else I say matters because it’s my intent.” So that doesn’t tend to be fun for fiction. But my point is that even that kind of wording, if you are really creative, you can find ways around it. Like for example, what about your intrusive thought that you had when you were thinking of the contract? Is that part of your intent? I would argue it was, and now I’m going to do what your intrusive thought said. That’s just an example of how, without an enforcement mechanism that is able to say what a reasonable person would expect, you can’t really trick wishes that way. But in fiction you can, I’m not saying you should never do a wish contract story. This is just a thing that’s part of the wish discourse on the internet. Chris: I think for wishes like that to work, we have to assume that there are metaphysical rules that are in essence forcing some kind of contract interpretation for this to work in the first place. But it does bring up a couple questions. One issue with wishes is the wishing for more wishes, even in Aladdin where the genie is like, “Oh, and you can’t wish for more wishes.” There’s still a million ways you could potentially use your wishes to get additional wishes. Now, I do think at least if you have a genie, if you’re like, “Oh, I want a book where if I write something in it, everything I write comes true.” The genie could just, using its own intelligence, be like, “No, that’s clearly a method of getting more wishes. I don’t do that.”  I do like stories where the protagonist doesn’t actually know the wish will work when they make it because I think that really helps with reader perceptions like, “Why doesn’t the character just wish for that, or that?” Because if you were to just casually toss a coin in a fountain and make a wish, you’re probably not going to optimize that because that’s just a hopeful thing you’re saying, right? You don’t actually think that’s literally going to come true. And so some stories have a character making a wish, not knowing that something will act on that wish, and that allows you to be a lot more flexible with their motivation and how they word it.  Oren: A twist that I like on this trope that doesn’t come up all that often is to abandon the idea that a wish is like an omnipotent anything can happen and focus more on a wish being a favor that some powerful entity will grant you, because that makes it a lot easier. You don’t have to think about things like wishing for infinite wishes. Because you’re basically being owed a favor by a powerful entity and depending on how the entity is set up, that could be a lot of different things, but it doesn’t come with the assumption that it can be anything. Chris: Right. So, if a billionaire was like, “I will grant you three wishes,” there are still some things that a billionaire cannot bring somebody back to life, for instance. But you could wish them to give up their billions theoretically.  Oren: Yeah, you could. That’d be a good wish.  Chris: I mean, you can still call it a wish at that point. I think in many cases that’s not necessarily what we think of as wishes, but I guess if the entity is powerful enough, it can be close enough.  Oren: Yeah. I mean, that’s not the trope, right? The trope is that it can be anything and then you wish for something selfish and then it goes bad. Right? Like, I get it. Chris: Yeah, like The Monkey’s Paw. I think people really like The Monkey’s Paw because of that bad karma aspect. I do think it’s worth thinking about how The Monkey’s Paw works if you want it to go bad, because I just keep thinking about the Wishmaster movies.  Oren: Yeah!  Chris: So the Wishmaster movies are about an evil genie that kills people who make wishes, and they just get lazier and lazier about it as they go. In the first movie, the Wishmaster is just doing clever things to make the wish go wrong. And then we get to movie three, and somebody makes a wish and then the Wishmaster just kills them. It has nothing to do with the wish! Oren: It’s an unrelated death.  Chris: It’s an unrelated death, and it’s just like, oh, come on. Because I think that’s one thing that people want to see with The Monkey’s Paw, is how it has to come from the wish somehow. I think two easy ways to do this usually are—often it’s a matter of causality—where either you can have, Oh, you want money? Well, a loved one will die and leave you a bunch of money. So, we implemented the wish in a way that something bad had to happen for it to work, or, we could do the reverse and have the wish happen and it creates something bad. So, oh, with the money your loved one went adventuring and then died. So those two things tend to work pretty well and they’re not too hard. So the Wishmaster’s just, “Oh, you made a wish? Now I kill you.” Uh, that was not much fun.  Oren: We should point out the best Wishmaster movie, which is the fourth one, where it starts with a lady wishing and as she says, “I wish…” And the genie’s like, “All right, once I grant this wish I’m going to kill her.” And she says, “I wish the next man to see me falls in love with me” and it’s him. And so he falls in love with her and then that’s the movie! The movie is that he’s in love with her and he has to actually be in love with her before he can kill her, and it’s great. It’s a beautiful, terrible movie, but I love it so much.  Chris: I still haven’t seen it. I need to see it. I do think alternate interpretations of somebody’s wording are fun, but they’re harder and I don’t want to see another, “Give me what I deserve.” That one’s used all the time where the villain will be like, “Oh, don’t worry, you’re getting what you deserve.” Or like, “Don’t worry, you’ll join your loved one…in death!” These really ambiguous wordings that villains say all the time with somebody that they’ve hired that they want to betray or whatever. Yeah, those, we can see them coming a mile away so it has to be at least more original than them.  Oren: Yeah, I mean this is only sort of a wish, but in general it’s very frustrating when characters trust someone who is obviously untrustworthy, where it’ll be like, “Oh, well I’ll let your loved ones go if you do this for me,” and then he like, lets them go off a cliff. And it’s like, okay, sure, that was clever wording, but also, did he even need that? Like how do you know he was even going to keep his word in the first place?  Chris: So, what do you think about a wish like, “I wish I was a king,” and then somebody becomes a homecoming king again?  Oren: I think that’s fine. What are you going to do, complain to the wish court? We’ve established there isn’t one of those. You take what the smart contract gives you.  Chris: The all-seeing, all-knowing smart contract. Oren: Personally, with me for wishes, I don’t want to have to focus on the wording of the wish because at this point it starts to get kind of frustrating because I’m so into the genre that when someone makes a wish and doesn’t think about the wording at all, it’s like, oh, well obviously that’s going to go bad. But at the same time, if they do spend a lot of time thinking about the wording, that’s kind of boring. It’s not really what you want, and you either end up with a wish that went well or none of that mattered anyway.  Chris: I mean, that’s why it’s nice to have characters who make wishes not knowing that this is about to come true. I do think that also may lower their bad karma a little bit. You get something like in Big, for instance, the movie, a boy finds this little wish giver/fortune teller machine at a carnival and wishes to be an adult. And then it’s not that it backlashes on him in so much as he decides in the end, no, actually, he’d rather go back to be a kid again. So he just learns a lesson about being a kid as opposed to somebody intentionally making a wish and then choosing to pass over world peace to give themselves money.  Oren: That’s why I really like Madoka Magica, it’s one of the reasons I really like Madoka Magica, is that in that instance, the mechanics of the wish are less about the wording of it and more about how much power are you granting Kyubey to let him grant your wish. It’s not, if I recall correctly, spelled out exactly but there’s a pretty strong implication that the more powerful the magical girl, the stronger the wish, which is why—spoilers at the end—Madoka can make this world-altering wish, it’s because all of Homura’s time loops have made Madoka super important. Chris: I feel like it’s said both ways where Kyubey both says that, but then also says that a bigger wish makes a more powerful magical girl.  Oren: Oh, does he?  Chris: I think he says both things.  Oren: It wouldn’t be the first anime that had contradictory explanations for how things worked.  Chris: Yeah, does the chicken or the egg come first here? Is it that you need a powerful girl for a powerful wish, or is it that a powerful wish makes a powerful girl? But there’s definitely the whole thing where, because fate rests on Madoka because of the time resets, that makes her bigger and more important. So I don’t know, maybe that enables her to make a bigger wish, but the wish she makes is like a huge, universe-altering wish. So what happens if she had just made that in her first wish? You know, I don’t know.  Oren: The answer has to be no, right? If it would’ve worked for her to make that wish without all of the rigmarole, then it’s like, ugh, that whole show was for nothing. I refuse! I reject that reality. I wish for it to not be so.  Of course, the funniest movie that’s tackled wishes recently was Wonder Woman 1984, which, oh man.  Chris: Yeah, that was…I don’t know why they thought that was a good idea.  Oren: That’s such a funny movie because, in order for that movie to work, they have to just assume that nobody is making selfless wishes. Or even selfish wishes that don’t hurt anybody else. They just assume that everyone’s wish is going to be negative. And it’s like, wow, that is a really dim view of people, but otherwise the movie doesn’t work because if a bunch of people had wished to cure cancer and then it would’ve been like, “Oh, we brought cancer back, guys. Because you guys didn’t earn getting rid of cancer.” Chris: Oh no.  Oren: That was bad karma.  Chris: No. Oren: You should have done your karma better.  Chris: There’s a couple movies that use not-quite wishes in interesting ways. I mean, I do think the original Home Alone is kind of fascinating because he makes a wish for his family to go away and then his family is suddenly gone and we know that there’s no actual wish that made them vanish, but he thinks there’s a wish that made them vanish, which is pretty funny. Oren: And the lesson is that…I don’t know what the lesson is exactly. Is it that you should appreciate your family? Maybe, who knows. Chris: It is funny that he is really happy about it at first. And I don’t think that’s what actually would’ve happened. Oren: Well, we do establish that he’s terrible and his family is pretty bad to him, right? So maybe. Chris: This little maniacal character who is really okay with his entire family just disappearing into thin air.  Oren: Yeah, it’s fine, don’t worry about it. Even as a kid, one thing that always drove me up the wall was watching Dragon Ball Z, and they have these Dragon Balls that can grant wishes, and the only thing anyone can ever think of to do with it is immortality or resurrecting a dead person.  Chris: Nothing else. Ever. Only death.  Oren: Yeah, almost never. They almost never wish for anything else. And it’s just like, guys, I feel like maybe you could do something else with those. And it’s just like, “No, we’re not going to because this is a show about punching people. It’s not a show about wishing our problems away.”  Chris: Wait, how many wishes do people get on this show? Is there a world mechanism that continues to deliver wishes? Like, if they win the punchy-punchy fights at level 9,000, then they get a wish, or what?  Oren: Hang on. Deep breath. [Inhales]  So, if it’s the Earth Dragon Balls, you get one wish and then the Dragon Balls turn to stone for a year, and then they turn back into Dragon Balls and you can make another wish, but they’ve been scattered, so you have to go look for them, but that’s not actually a problem because they have technology that finds them, so don’t worry about it. Then over on Namek it’s three wishes, but the rules are a little different because you can only resurrect individual people for some reason, but you can resurrect the same person multiple times, whereas on Earth, even though you can resurrect as many people as you want with one wish, it can only resurrect each person once for some reason. So, yeah, that’s it. Chris: Okay, so the Dragon Ball that’s is named after is a wish-giving device?  Oren: Well, there’s seven of them. You have to gather them together and then the dragon appears. Yeah, it’s a whole thing.  Chris: Okay, so is it protagonists wishing for people who are dead to come back to life and antagonists wishing for immortality? Oren: So, there’s several shows in the continuum and the first one, which is Dragon Ball, that’s when they’re the least powerful they’re ever going to be. That one is mostly about stopping the villains from wishing for immortality. The villains like to do that. That’s where the villains come from. They wanna wish for immortality. Chris: All of them? Oren: Yeah. Uh, a lot of them, many such cases. And then in Dragon Ball Z, by that point, I guess they’ve just kind of given up on immortality and the bad guys are so galactic scale that it kind of feels like that doesn’t matter. So at that point, the Dragon Balls mostly exist as a way to bring back dead characters, and I assume that’s why they added the one resurrection thing to try to give death some tension.  Chris: Because there was never anything else.  Oren: But then they added a new dragon that can break that rule later to bring them back again some more. So don’t even worry about it.  Chris: So what that suggests is that they have to make sure all of the characters are dead and resurrected once, so that the one resurrection limit will give the story tension?  Oren: Yeah, they do that a couple of times.  Chris: So basically, it’s like if you had a D&D party that could do resurrections if one of your party members dies. Instead, it’s like a wish-giving ball.  Oren: It’s like everyone gets an extra life, basically. But also, when you die, you just straight up go to heaven. Everybody knows about it. You can talk to people who are there. You can train, because of course they have to do a lot of training, so a lot of the training sequences are when they’re dead.  Chris: Wow.  Oren: Yeah, that was like peak entertainment in the nineties. What do you want from me? Chris: Nineties cartoons.  Oren: Yeah, that’s great. This was all that was on, it was either that or I guess the Yu Yu Hakusho show, which was not that different. One wish that I’m still sore about is from Buffy the Vampire Slayer when Cordelia makes a wish that Buffy had never come to Sunnydale, which is for the most part a really good episode but for some reason Cordelia dies and then never remembers making the wish, and that upset me so much. Chris: Oh yeah, she didn’t learn a lesson from it.  Oren: What was the point of this, if not for her to get character development?  Chris: The point of this was to have an alternate reality Sunnydale, that was super grim-dark.  Oren: We could’ve done both of those things!  Chris: I know we could’ve, but clearly this was just an excuse to have our alternate reality Sunnydale.  Oren: Yeah, supposedly Whedon would do things because he thought they were subversive, even if they were bad for the story. I suspect this was one of those. Because you can see the moment where Cordelia’s starting to realize that, “Oh, this was actually a bad wish” and then she dies, and it kind of feels like that was a deliberate subversion. But now, now this was pointless. Good job, man.  Chris: Yeah. Although that’s where we get Willow’s, “I think I’m kind of gay.”  Oren: Yeah. I think that’s also where we get Anya the first time. There’s a lot of good things that come out of that episode, but for some reason, character development for Cordelia is not one of them. Chris: Yeah, well. I mean, we know that Joss Whedon wasn’t very good to that character or her actress, so… Oren: Yeah, we do know some things from behind the scenes now.  Chris: We know some bad things. That was one of the unfortunate things that is kind of, hmm. Cordelia’s character is so interesting because she lasts through Buffy and four seasons or so and then goes into the Angel spinoff and just continues to develop as a character. Which is fantastic. It’s one of the characters that I think develops the most on any television series and still stays herself, but has also grown a lot, as much as she could grow while still being Cordelia, and that’s really cool. But the show treats her like trash, and it is very sad.  Oren: Well, my last wish is going to be that the show was better to Cordelia. That’s my wish. Who knows? They are rebooting it, so maybe. Chris: Are they?  Oren: Yeah, they cast the new Buffy, it’s the girl from the Star Wars portal fantasy, Skeleton Crew.  Chris: Oh, okay. Because they keep talking about rebooting Buffy, and then not actually rebooting Buffy. Oren: I mean, I’m not saying this one’s actually going to get made. I just know that she has been cast as Buffy and there have been some publicity photos with her and Sarah Michelle Geller.  Chris: Okay, well maybe they finally did it.  Oren: Yeah, maybe. And supposedly Whedon’s not involved. So that’s nice for everybody.  Chris: Yay! Oren: So, hey, what do you know? Maybe our wish has already come true. Alright, well, with that, I think we’ll go ahead and call this episode to a close.  Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.  Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber, he’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory and Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week. [Outro music] note: Ryan Kiera Armstrong is not cast as Buffy, but a new character 

We’ve all been there: The plot is going well, but your hero is solving problems too easily because of their cool magic powers. Couldn’t you fix it by making their society ban cool magic powers? Technically, yes, but there’s a lot that goes into such a decision. Why would they ban something as useful as magic? For that matter, why would everyone be organized into factions based on their birthstone? As you may have guessed, we have some thoughts. Show Notes History of Standardized Spelling  History of Prohibition  Landman Scene  Banning Dance   Are Flamethrowers Banned?  The Prime Directive  Pen Pals  A Private Little War  The Eugenics War Ad Astra per Aspera  General Order 7 Plus One  Divergent  Stalin’s Vanishing Photo  Fourth Wing  Transcript Generously transcribed by Aiden. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle. [opening theme] Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant podcast. I am Chris… Oren: And I’mOren. Chris: This is a secret podcast because we live in a culture where vocalizing is forbidden. Oren: Ooh, so scandalous. Chris: It goes back to the great singing wars, where two kings got in a big fight over who had a better voice. So, to prevent that from ever happening again, everyone decided: no talking. But we’re very brave rebels, because we think that we should be able to talk and it makes us outcasts and we’re hunted. Oren: It’s also somehow… we’re actually very good at it, despite supposedly being in a culture where no one ever talks. Don’t worry about that part. Chris: We had this awakening a couple of years ago where we discovered talking for the first time and it was very profound. Oren: But, we decided to invent English. So, honestly, maybe we are the bad guys. Chris: [laughter] Oren: You had a blank canvas of infinite choices and you decided a language that spells “GHT” to be either silent or an “F” sound. Why are you like this? Chris: [laughter] It is funny that there was a period in time when the first English dictionaries were being created, where some people writing things down made some very arbitrary decisions about how they wanted to spell things, sometimes just to match other words that were also spelled very strangely, and that’s it! Standardised spelling is only a couple of hundred years old. Oren: And that’s how we got to where we are today. Personally, I know that if I was going to make an unrealistic world where things are forbidden, what I would do is I would have one faction that just won’t shut up about free speech and just screams about it, and every time someone mildly criticizes them they scream about free speech and then when they’re in power they immediately start trying to ban peoples’ speech. If I wanted it to be really unbelievable, I would do that, is what I’m saying. Chris: Oh, no! Oren, too real! Oren: That’s just an unrealistic fictional expectation, Chris. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Chris: I mean, I do think there’s a fun conversation (and sometimes not fun conversation) to be had here about which things are realistic for culture to forbid and which things are not. Oren: What it comes down to is, you have to think about who is trying to forbid this and why. That’s what it comes down to and people try to forbid things all the time and there are various reasons they might do that. Sometimes, these are good reasons, like the taboo against teachers dating their students: this is a good thing to have. Some authors don’t understand that some taboos are a good thing to have and they think that if it’s cool and rebellious to break taboos against interracial dating, it must be cool and rebellious to break student-teacher dating taboos and it’s like no, that taboo exists for a reason; it’s because that is an inherently unequal relationship. Also, often it’s just they want to control people. You ban stuff that you don’t want people doing. That can be a good motivation, it’s just a question of who has a vested interest in doing this, right? Like banning talking is extremely unlikely just because it would be unworkable and would almost certainly fail, even if someone tried. Chris:  The other thing about why would somebody do this, again is the unworkability. Some things are just too burdensome. You could have tyrants, but people do have to choose to obey. And if everybody is universally unwilling to obey because it’s just too much, then it’s not going to work out. Like Prohibition in the United States: that wasn’t the most unreasonable law. We’re learning more and more that even a tiny bit of alcohol is bad for you and apparently, before Prohibition, the thing that people don’t realise is that we drank a lot more. It actually did something good in that it reduced how much people drank. But, at the same time, it was completely unworkable because nobody was willing to actually follow it. Oren: And of course, it caused a huge spike in organised crime; to some extent it invented organised crime. Prohibition is complicated and the idea of it just being this silly idea that nobody liked and then that we got rid of after a few years is overly simplistic. But it is a good example of how there are things that are just too ingrained, too successfully bad. At least in some cultures, right? It’s culturally different. There are cultures that have largely abandoned alcohol, it’s just not ours. Chris: [laughter] And again, maybe it comes down to how much people drank before Prohibition: a ridiculous amount. Some other things that are just unworkable, that are still things that fiction likes to feature is forbidding emotion, or love, or – and we talk about this all of the time – magic. Oren: Yeah, I’d love to ban magic. That’s just a thing everyone does, because you need your hero to be mistreated for something cool and awesome and not a boring sad reason that people actually get mistreated. Chris: Don’t get me wrong, if you actually wanted to make banning magic to be something that could happen and you only have cosmic horror magic that always lashes back and does terrible things, or if you quit gains, that could be plausible. But, most magic that people have, it’s not what people want. They have their cool, pressed mages. Oren: And you can come up with narrower circumstances. There are situations in which certain kinds of magic might be banned. Of course, often what authors will do is they will set up very good reasons for that magic to be banned and then be like, “oh, but it’s wrong to ban that magic.” Is it though? You made a pretty compelling case for it earlier. You an also have situations where it’s roughly parallel to the modern attempt to ban renewable energy, where there is a very entrenched group of powerful people who rely on one kind of magic and they see another kind of magic as a threat. They might try to ban that; that could happen. Chris: Definitely one group banning things from another group or something to protect their interests, that is very realistic. Again, as long as it’s not at the unworkable level; it’s what many stories want. Oren:  Even in those situations where there is one group doing it for their own interests, very often, if the thing they’re trying to ban is useful, they will still find ways to use it. There was this infamous scene from the show Landman where this guy just spouts a bunch of oil industry propaganda for five minutes. He does make one point that is true, which is the oil industry doesn’t have any problem using wind turbines when it is practical for them to use turbines to get oil out of the ground. They just don’t want you using wind turbines to power your house, because they want you to keep buying their oil. Chris: Some examples of things that have actually been forbidden: dancing is something that has been forbidden in some cultures. River dancing, an Irish form of dancing, comes from dancing being banned and them dancing covertly. Sometimes, forbidding dancing is religious: dancing is too enjoyable and it leads to sin. If there is an oppressed group, their oppressors will do all sorts of things to reduce their morale, and banning dancing is one of their ways of trying to reduce enjoyment. So, that’s where that comes from. Banning any kind of weapons; banning martial arts; banning specific cultural practices, especially if we’re trying to compel the culture to assimilate, or adopt a new religion. Mingling and marriage between two different groups: that’s a popular one. Sometimes goods are rationed, particularly in times of war. And of course, we have things like immigration. Oren: Trying to keep out people who are not part of your in-group is a pretty universal experience with predictably tragic results for everybody. My favourite – and I think you could also do something like this with magic – is when countries get together and agree to ban certain weapons. They almost never do this with weapons they still use. Chris: [laughter] Oren:  Like, flamethrowers are kind of illegal under international law and a big part of the reason is that they have really bad press, but also, we have bombs and missiles that do the same thing from further away. So, we don’t really need flamethrowers anymore. So, they’re an easy one to check of your list to improve your image. Chris: One of the funny ones that we do see a lot in Star Trek is the Prime Directive, which is very strange, because it’s based on outdated ideas of ethics and it’s basically there again to create weird plot complications: “Oh, no! It’s forbidden for us to stop Lesley from being murdered by weird planet that murders people for stepping in their garden area.” No, we can’t save this civilization from this… there was a big volcano… there was an entire planet that has a natural disaster and literally everyone’s going to die and they decided to do a conflate of whether it was okay to save them. Oren: Yeah, they’ve done that multiple times. The one that really draws attention  is the episode “Pen Pals” when the planet is kind of going through mass earthquakes. That’s the one where they have their debate about whether it would be okay to intervene, and obviously the answer is yes. So, Picard is like, “what if it was a war?” And, it’s like, I don’t know Picard! Maybe if the situation was different we would do something different! Chris: [laughter] Oren:  It’s the biggest non sequitur ever. Chris: It’s especially funny, because usually the justification they use for the Prime Directive, which applies to species that don’t have war capabilities yet – and so they’re fairly isolated on their own planet – is that they should not interfere with their development and let that society develop on its own. But, if the entire society is going to die, I don’t see the value in not interfering. [laughter] Oren: This whole idea is derived from two things: 1) it’s derived from a reaction against US military adventurism, which, fair enough: that was pretty awful. The war line is how Star Trek originally envisioned this, although hilariously, in their first Prime Directive episode – I don’t remember if they actually used the word “Prime Directive”, the episode is a private little war – they decide they are going to intervene and arm their side in this proxy war which is kind of funny in retrospect. But, it also comes from a reaction against this idea of, “well, we need to help who don’t have the same stuff we have so we’re going to help them by flooding their economy with consumer goods.” That often can have really bad consequences. They’ll get TVs for the first time, but their healthcare system will collapse. That sort of stuff can happen, but that’s complicated and hard to talk about in 45 minutes so what you end up with is these bizarre straw man situations where no serious ethicist would say, “yeah, you should probably let that species die in the name of noninterference.” [laughter] Chris: [laughter] Another thing that I find interesting is that in the Star Trek world, the Federation band eugenics, which I do think is believable, but  the reason that they ban eugenics seems very strange, which is, oh, there were some eugenics wars. Do you know what the details about these eugenics wars are? Oren: I don’t find that especially unbelievable. This is really complicated because there’s a huge amount of real life ethics tied up in this question. Because, unlike a lot of Star Trek’s moral dilemmas, this one is actually based on stuff that we might be able to do soon. I should point out that pretty much all countries that I know of currently adhere to rules that ban you from altering the genes of unborn children, aside from some occasional circumstances to prevent really serious disease. That is a thing we do in real life. It’s not unbelievable to me that if you add a bunch of people who were genetically engineered to be better and then they try to take over, and that caused a bunch of problems that we would ban the technology for that reason. Chris: Maybe part of the issue is that we don’t need a really elaborate backstory to explain why they banned eugenics. One reason for banning things is just sometimes, at a society level, something causes lots of problems even though theoretically, it could be done without harm. Definitely with eugenics, you could definitely see that there could have been irresponsible eugenics practices that ended up dong a lot of damage which just encourage them to ban it altogether. Oren:  We should specify what we’re talking about here, which is sci-fi gene editing, to give you essentially superpowers. Because, in real life, eugenics is a lot bigger than that. Chris: In the context of Star Trek, it is just genetic modification. They call it eugenics, whereas in real life, you get into really creepy stuff. Oren: In Stark Trek, I don’t know: that’s a really complicated one. It’s a little weird to me that in the Federation, you ban this practice because you think that’s it’s just too dangerous to be allowed. But it’s always struck me as odd that if it can do that, if it can give you that kind of superpowers, are there no other factions willing to do it? I don’t know. We see a lot of amoral factions in Star Trek. It’s also struck me as a little odd that the Federation, which is supposedly fairly moral , treats people who have been modified – without their consent, of course; this all happens when they’re babies – so badly and there doesn’t seem to be any serious pushback against that. That’s a little odd to me. I don’t know. The genetic engineering episodes are complicated and often end up being about something other than genetic engineering in the first place. So, it gets kind of hard to judge. Chris:  It is one of those things that it doesn’t feel like there’s necessarily a lot of thoughtful discussion on the issue in Star Trek. Oren:  I mean, their most recent attempt was kind of hamstrung by the fact that they can’t change it, because canonically it has to be in place for Deep Space 9 to happen. So, they had this weird episode where they argued about it for 45 minutes and then didn’t reach any conclusions. [laughter] What’s really funny in Star Trek is the occasional… in the original series they’ll do like, you’re forbidden to go to this planet. If you go there we’ll kill you. Oh, okay. Calm down! Chris: [laughter] Oren: The one that is always, of course, used to power all kinds of stories is characters who are banned from associating with each other. This is typically used in a romantic context, but not always. It’s one of those ones that can make sense, but you have to think about what it means and what you are saying with it. If you have people who are banned and you want it to be from two roughly equal sides, you know, you can do that. You can have feuding families or you could have nations that are very hostile to each other, you could have that sort of thing. But, other than that, its kind of hard to have this and be on an equal playing field. Again, if you have a setting where Jews and gentiles aren’t allowed to date, it’s not because Jews are held in high esteem. Chris: It’s going to be a very loaded topic. Oren: And I’ve seen this a few times in stories where they’ll have like, our two groups aren’t allowed to date. But, it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of prejudice just between the groups. And it’s like, well the reason they’re not allowed to date is because of the prejudice between the groups, right? Chris: It’s because the more powerful group doesn’t want their bloodlines, or whatever, to be tainted. It’s inherently extreme bigotry at work. Unless, again, there’s two factions who are just outright enemies. At a smaller scale, you could also have patriarchy, where we’re trying to control women and who they’re exposed to, to control what babies they might have. Usually, there’s a lot of oppression dynamics there, unless the two groups are just outright enemies. Oren: As a default for an author who isn’t looking to make some really big, deep statement, I usually advise something that’s analogous to feuding families, that is just easier and it doesn’t require as much complicated justification. Especially during the YA dystopia boom, which has been over for a few years at this point. But, you’ve got some really weird ones. Chris: Plus One. Oren: The novel Plus One had the… society is split into the nightshift and the dayshift because of the 1918 flu pandemic? Sure… Chris: [laughter] Oren: You get the ones that are like, you’re divided up among your Myers Briggs personality test results. Chris: Yeah: Divergent. Wherever anybody is in a different faction based on their personality trait, and how dare you have more than one personality trait! [laughter] Oren: I’ve met some hiring managers who think that way. But, in general, that’s kind of silly. That really complicated, arbitrary factor: it’s at best going to take a lot of explaining. It’s usually easier to just be like, well these two characters are from families who hate each other. It worked for Romeo & Juliet, it’ll work for you. Chris:  With something like Plus One, it feels like that elaborate setup where there’s a day population and a night population and ‘ne’er the two shall meet’ was trying to create some novelty in the world. For me, I would prefer the novel to be created by something that feels plausible, but I cant say that it never helps a book to be successful to have something wild. Like with Divergent, one of the reasons why it was popular, even though so ridiculous, is everybody loves a little online personality test. Oren: Stories where they ban the history are a really interesting one. Or, usually where they try to be like, no, this history doesn’t exist, right? This certain thing never happened. Chris:  Certainly plausible that someone would try. Oren: And it does happen. In some cases, there are examples of governments that have just tried to pretend things never happened. That’s the famous photo of Stalin with all of his cronies, and each version has one fewer crony in it. That sort of thing, that does happen. It’s difficult; it requires a very high degree of control. It’s usually easier to subvert history and paint a narrative that is favourable to you than it is to outright ban it. Who knows where we’re going now? But, for most of the US’s history, it’s very rare that we just straight up pretend that something didn’t happen. What’s more often, is that we pretend it happened in a way that is more favourable to us. As long as the majority feels like that supports their interests, that works out okay. In a ln a lot of fantasy settings, that isn’t what writers want, because I guess they feel like that’s not big enough of a twist. So, you end up with something like Fourth Wing, where there’s this reveal that, oh, there’s actually a secret other group of enemies that we have to fight, and it’s forbidden to know about them for some reason. I didn’t read the sequel, so I don’t know what the explanation they gave there is. But I am extremely sceptical. Chris:  Sounds like those enemies aren’t that far away. If it’s history that there’s no living evidence for it walking around, and you don’t have mass communication in this setting, so we can just burn all the books and wait a number of generations… forbid people to talk about it: I feel like that works a lot better. Fourth Wing has, like, the enemies are there; you can go see them if you just fly in your dragon a little ways. Oren:  It also brings up the motivation question. Why would a militaristic government try to hide the existence of a bunch of inherently evil enemies who it is okay to kill? That’s exactly what they want. That’s perfect. Most governments have to make up one of those. Chris:  Now that we’re seeing all the effects of misinformation. I suppose if you had a cyberpunk dystopia, aka the real world – Oren: [laughter] Chris: – you could have a situation where a tyrannical government says, “no, that’s not real!” and there’s so much fabrication, it’s not that the information doesn’t exist, it’s that it’s really difficult to sort out what’s real from what’s not real. So, it might be treated like just another conspiracy theory. Oren:  At least from my understanding of conspiracy theories – and I’m a hobbyist – the conspiracy theories that have the greatest reach are the ones that subvert what really happened. Like, you do get some people who’s conspiracy theory is that Covid never happened. That is a thing that some people genuinely believe. The much more widespread Covid conspiracy theories are that it was a bioweapon from China, or that it existed but it wasn’t really that bad and that it was really the vaccines; that sort of thing. Those are the conspiracy theories that tend to stick better because people remember that Covid happened; it’s harder to tell them that it didn’t happen, because they remember it. But, it’s easier to convince them that, actually, these people you already don’t like were responsible. That’s a lot easier. Chris: I do think that how distant something is in time really matters. Because, sometimes what happens is the storyteller just wants people to forget something that was only two generations ago. You know, your grandparent was alive then and could tell you. In some cases, it’s more plausible if you just make it a little further back in time, so it’s not in living memory and hasn’t been for several generations. Oren:  Well, I think with that, we are going to go ahead and ban any further discussion in this podcast. No more of that’s allowed. Chris:  If you want to support our brave efforts to talk, you can support us on patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: And, before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. There’s Ayman Jaber: he’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. There’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek; we’ll talk to you next week! [closing theme]

Speculative worlds have a lot going on, which is why we love them. Cool magic and meticulous technology, it’s what we live for. But oh, wow, is it hard to explain, especially at the beginning. That’s when you need to hook readers with something exciting, but if you don’t establish at least some of the world, confusion will reign. Thankfully, we’ve got some tips which are not at all based on our own difficulties!  Show Notes Ann Radcliff The Blade Itself  The Devils  Exposition  The Final Architecture  Shield of Sparrows  The Alchemyst  Lightlark When the Moon Hatched  Elantris Religion For Breakfast Children of the Light Transcript Generously transcribed by Arturo. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast, with your hosts: Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle. [opening song] Oren: And welcome, everyone, to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren. Chris: And I’m Chris. Oren: And a quick logistical note: sadly, Bunny will be out for a while. She had a very exciting opportunity. That means she just doesn’t have as much time for podcasting. So we hope to have her back in the future, but we just didn’t want it to seem like she disappeared suddenly. She’s still around Mythcreants. Hopefully we will still see her at some point. So that’s that note out of the way. Now, Chris, I have a problem. Chris: Hmm? Oren: My world is inside a snail that’s running laps around an infinitely dense salami stick, which was made from the Great Galactic Boar. And I need to explain all of this right away, because my protagonist is a salamibender whose power is dependent on where the snail is in its laps and is activated by recounting the boar’s great deeds. How do I explain this all in my opening fight scene? Chris: Ugh. I’m in this opening bit and I don’t like it. Oren: It is your fault, Chris. Your story did somewhat inspire this topic. Chris: And yours! Oren: Yeah, mine too, but I’m cheating. It’s easy. I took the easy way out. Chris: So, people may be interested to know that Oren and I have been each working on a new novel, and very much in parallel; we’re about at the same stage, which has been very interesting, and sometimes doing similar things. And that has given us the opportunity to see how we’ve both planned out our openings, dealing with worlds that are pretty complex. Oren: Yeah, see: your world is complex because it has an intricate magic system that is inextricably tied to the plot and upon which everything depends, and it has consistent rules that people can learn. My world is complex ’cause it’s full of silly bullshit. We are not the same. Chris: I mean, it is interesting. Your world is very novel, I would say, and has lots of really interesting things going on. Is it intimately connected to the plot? I mean, I know that it is, right? Like any good fantasy storyteller, you make sure that it matters that we’re in that particular world, but at the same time, it’s not quite so tightly connected, which I think makes it easier for you to more slowly introduce the world. I think my world is actually less complex than yours, but everything is so consolidated and dependent on everything else that I kind of have to introduce everything all at the beginning, or else there can be no plot movement until you understand the mages working for mage organizations fighting a magical disaster. Oren: I think you should just let people be confused. I’ve decided to become one of those people who’s just like, “Don’t worry about it.” Chris: Oh, don’t want to hold their hand. Oren: Yeah, don’t hold their hand. Just, like, dump everything on them. I already understand it. So they should be able to, right? It’s not like I have an advantage ’cause I’ve been talking to you about this story for the last year, right? It’s probably fine. Chris: Yeah. No, it’s going to be a whole other ball game when we get beta readers who have not heard anything about our stories. Already, I’ve had a funny experience where I am playing around with more historical language and one convention, because I’ve been listening to Anne Radcliffe, who’s a really classic gothic novel writer, and she frequently describes things by saying, “Oh, you know, the eye would follow this or that,” right? And it means one’s eye, a person there who happens to be looking. So in my opening paragraph, which is a little too ambitious as it often is, I have mentioned, “Oh, well, you know, the watchful eye will see this.” But I think, for people who are completely unfamiliar with that convention or what I’m doing, they’re like, “It’s like an eye of Sauron.” It’s now in the setting! Oren: waaaaaa Chris: The watchful eye! It’s like, “No, no, no!” Oren: That’s the reason why they can’t take the eagles to Gondor at the end. It’s ’cause of the eye. Don’t worry about it. It’s fine. Chris: The all seeing eye. It’s like, “No, no, that was not… there’s not a big eye in the setting.” Again, another reminder that when you have your opening paragraphs and people know literally nothing about the world, everybody’s trying to impress with their opening paragraph, but the wrong metaphor, people may not know it’s a metaphor. They may think that’s literal. We’ll see what happens when the beta readers look at it. Oren: Whereas my story, because my story is just full of silly bullshit, all I need to do is start with a scene which is fairly contained and doesn’t require you to know everything at once. So, you know, my opening scene introduces… we got a talking raven and our characters are here to break a curse for them. And talking animals. Pretty standard concept in fantasy, right? Lets people know we are in a fantasy world, but doesn’t take a huge amount of cognitive resources to figure out. And if they’re paying attention, they might notice the Norse theming, but they don’t need to yet. And I don’t need to explain that this city is made out of the bones of a giant serpent and that my protagonist is an einherjar, but who is weird and ostracized ’cause she didn’t die in traditional battle the way the other ones did, right? That I can… I can work that in a little later. Chris: Right. Because the immediate problem is curse-breaking, which, you know, people know what curses are from other fantasy works and various things, so that doesn’t take explanation. Oren: Yeah. The biggest problem that I actually have encountered so far is that one of the characters is a dwarf, and that has certain implications that I do not want the audience to have. Like, I don’t want them to think that this is… Chris: Right, it’s not Tolkien, it’s not D&D. Oren: Yeah. So in that case, I focused on trying to describe the unique way that dwarves look in this setting to try to signpost that, like, “Hey, this isn’t Gimli.” You don’t expect Legolas to be around the next corner. Will it work? Who knows? I guess we’ll find out eventually. Chris: I mean, that is one of the reasons why I advise, if your world has both fantasy and scifi elements, to try to introduce them together, if possible, so you don’t set completely wrong expectations about what kind of world it is. Just because the risk is, if you introduce fantasy elements and people are like, “Okay, this is a fantasy world,” and then suddenly you have a robot walking around, that could feel really random and contrived. Because they haven’t seen enough of your world to be like, “Oh yeah, everything, all the fantasy elements are robotic. You know, that unicorn over there is also a robot. I just wasn’t told,” or whatever it is that you’re doing to unite those things together. So if you introduce them at once, it helps set those expectations. I do think it’s worth talking about… Okay, every story has its own unique requirements, but there are some things that we generally try to introduce pretty early on in most stories. So things like who the main character is and the very general type of world, which just means: Is this like a historical-ish fantasy world? Is this future/scifi? Some very broad strokes, which I think is one of the issues you’re having, actually, with the dwarf and just the fact that your character’s a fish out of water. Oren: And just generally knowing the genre of a story is helpful to me if it’s like a setting-based genre. One of the things that was annoying about reading The Blade Itself is that, from the prologue, I actually couldn’t tell if this was fantasy or science fiction, because the guy is in a forest and he has a melee weapon of some kind, but it doesn’t describe what he’s fighting. There are bad guys, but I have no idea what they are. And he has a kind of modern-sounding name, which made me wonder if he was supposed to be like a crashed pilot or something. And eventually you find out, no, this is a fantasy setting. But it was weird how long it took. And the main reason I think was that it just refused to describe what his enemies looked like. You know, they’re just called the Shanka. It’s like, “What is that?” What does that look like? And it just does not say. It is just a blank void that he’s fighting for, like, the entire intro. Chris: And then we find out they’re basically just goblin/orc generic. Oren: I think they might be lizard people. I don’t know. Chris: Oh, are they? Oren: Maybe? I forget. But they’re basically… they fill the same role as orcs, right? They’re, like, a generically evil humanoid race that we can kill and not feel bad about. Which, regardless of whether I think that’s a good idea to have in a story, if I had known that’s what they were, I would know we were in a fantasy setting and that would help me set my expectations properly, whereas, since I didn’t know, I was feeling disoriented and having a harder time tracking things, ’cause every time something was introduced, I had to think, “Okay, is that being introduced as a scifi element or as a fantasy element?” And I don’t know which one it is. And that just took a lot of extra work. Chris: I mean, otherwise at the beginning, if I did an example rework where I added information in there, I have an information management series, and in the last one, as an example of how you work an exposition, I made some tweaks to that opening. Because, you know, having the main character fight some of these… what are they, Shanka or Flathead? They’re also called… Oren: Shanka. Yeah, they use those terms interchangeably. Chris: That’s the other issue, is there’s more than one term for them, which is a very bad idea. Whatever they are. It’s not a bad way to open, especially just since we’re out in the wilderness, we’re just doing a one-on-one fight. I mean, information-wise, that’s not too hard. Starting with action does make working in information a little more, you know, complex, because you don’t want to just pause a fight for a paragraph of exposition. You want to keep the pacing pretty tight. But if their information needs aren’t too high, you know, that can still work out okay. But it just feels like Abercrombie’s not trying. Not trying to tell us what we need to know. Oren: I’ve only read two Abercrombie books, and they both had this problem. The other one was The Devils, which was to a lesser extent, but in this one, the issue was that I was struggling to figure out, “Is this a fantasy setting or an alternate history setting?” And I eventually figured out it’s alternate history, but it’s really hard to figure that out, because it talks about a lot of things that are just made up, but then it also has the Mediterranean, like a real ocean, and then it mentions, you know, Ravenna and Venice, which are real cities, and I still have no idea how the timeline in that world is supposed to have shaken out. That took me a while to figure out what was going on. Chris: I mean, I’m a big fan of doing a lot of micromanagement when it comes to introducing information. So if you’re introducing something in your world, like I’ve got one of my major organizations, for instance, you know, there’s a lot of things about that organization, but it can really help to just word by word, you know, exactly what do people need to know? What do they not need to know? You don’t have to juice everything about that world element at once. And again, I always emphasize a particular focus on names, because names are the hardest, because people have to memorize them to understand them. And so simply not naming something, whether it’s a particular place or an item or anything that you’ve just given a formal name that somebody would have to learn and then recall later, is really helpful. So, you know, if you’ve got your city that’s, like, in these bones of the World Snake, for instance, you could just start with, like, “Oh yeah, everything’s made of bone,” and wait then, for instance, to talk about the rest of the city, which is really cool. Oren: My favorite is occasionally an introduction will introduce things wrong. Just like tells you something that just ends up not being true later, and I always wonder what’s going on there, you know? Did the author revise things later and forget to change the prologue, or does the author think something else is going on? I recently finished the Final Architecture trilogy, which you did a critique of the prologue, and that prologue is not only confusing, the information it does give you is the wrong information. Chris: Is it untrue or is it just not relevant to the book? Oren: Both. For one thing, it’s spoilers, I guess, for this book, it’s really coy about the Intermediaries and acts as though Solace, the POV character, doesn’t know what they are, but by that point in the timeline, the first Intermediary is already famous, and we find this out much, much later. So the idea that she wouldn’t be able to make that connection is kind of silly. So I don’t know why we acted so coy about the Intermediaries. Then… that’s the one that’s just kind of straight up wrong. Then it also just sets the wrong expectations, because in this prologue they blow up one of the big evil alien monster things. They just destroy it, and this sets the idea that it’s possible to destroy them with enough effort and they never try that again in the entire series. Instead, their strategy for defeating the bad guys is all based around trying to psychically get them to go away, a thing which happens off-screen after the prologue, and I’m just baffled. Chris: Right. That’s so damaging to the story too, then, because didn’t you spend the entire time like, “Well, why don’t they just blow them up?” Oren: Right, I was wondering that the whole time! Why are none of them thinking about trying to blow these things up? It’s not like it would be easy, but it seems like it’s at least worth considering, since none of your other options are working. And I just… at some point, I think Tchaikovsky just changed his mind and decided, “No, this is not going to be a book about blowing up the monsters. It’s going to be a book about psychically convincing them to leave.” Which, okay, but why didn’t you change the prologue? It’s so confusing when they start talking about that as something you can do, ’cause this happens in a time-jump-like prologue, then time jump to first chapter, and in that time jump, they first come up with the idea of using psychic powers to get the monsters to leave. Chris: I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised if Tchaikovsky thought that it was suitably dramatic for the intro and just wasn’t thinking about how it would affect tension or distract readers. Oren: Yeah, that’s possible. Chris: Yeah, I mean, I don’t know. Something that some writers do is they just want dramatic lines in their opening, and whether those lines are accurate, you know, this is… I often talk about the inflated hook, right? Where somebody says something really dramatic that just turns out to be completely untrue as soon as you start the next chapter. Oren: “I wonder what would happen if I jumped? Would anyone notice?” Chris: Yep. Oh, man. That’s from Shield of Seiros, and it just turns out that this is a thing that she’s done a number of times, so questioning “What would happen if I jumped?” turns out to be very silly. And you know that by the end of the first chapter. Another one I keep thinking about is The Alchemist, where there’s a chapter that ends with the character being like, “And then I saw, you know, a crime that changed the whole world.” Then it turns out the next chapter, a guy’s, like, stealing some books or something. Oren: Yeah, that changed the world forever, technically speaking. By the Butterfly Effect. Every action changes the world forever, Chris. That’s just, like, logic. Chris: And it’s just a really… you know, a really dramatic statement. And it’s clear that some writers are doing this on purpose, right? I guess they’re just not thinking about the experience of when you find out they just lied. Oren: Yeah. I mean, I’m sure in their heads it makes sense. I could be wrong. I doubt most authors are that calculated about it. Chris: I’m sure they’re thinking about just that they’re selling it, right? That they’re creating drama in the narrative. It just… and I don’t know, maybe some readers aren’t critical enough to think about it, or if you go away at the end of the chapter, and the next chapter, maybe you forgot what was promised earlier and are not keeping track of how accurate things are, I don’t know. But people are different. Some people notice those things a lot more than others, but yeah, I’m not a fan anyway. Oren: Well, I mean, I personally think you should definitely write your book with the assumption that people will not notice when you’re being dishonest to them, because you know that’s a really great strategy. Trust me, it works fantastically. Chris: Another thing that’s interesting to think about is I’ve seen a number of books lately that to solve world complexity, they have basically an opening teaser, or even like a full prologue, which is just a bunch of world exposition. Oren: Yeah, they do that for some reason. I don’t know who’s letting them. Chris: I mean, it’s a good question. I do wonder if this is happening because, you know, readers report being really confused in the beginning, you know, and ideally that would be sorted out… Again, I don’t know what everybody’s process is. I know that there are a number of really popular authors that do have a huge crew of fans, like fifty, a hundred people who are their beta readers that can help them sort out all of the confusion issues. But obviously not everybody has that. And so, I do wonder if sometimes, you know, an editor looks at it, but beta readers don’t. And an editor’s not always… Again, they might be too close to it. They might not always know. Or another thing: always keep in mind, whenever you are tempted to blame an editor for mistakes in somebody’s novel, you don’t know what it looked like before the editor changed it. So there could be a book that needs multiple rounds of editing. The editor did their best to fix confusion issues, but there were still some left. Oren: Plus thanks to Anne Rice, we have a very public example of how authors sometimes just ignore their editors, and if they are established, they can do that. And, you know, I appreciate that she wrote about it on Facebook, so now we know. Otherwise it’s all behind the closed doors, right? Probably not a great experience for her editor. This post will be out by the time the podcast drops, your critique of Lightlark. Isn’t that the one that its initial publication did not have this worldbuilding prologue and then the more recent ones did? Chris: Yeah. So we found other copies of it that didn’t have world information, but the copy that I looked at had basically all the elemental magic factions listed up front and then a teaser/prologue, it was short, that explained some previous events in the world. And the funny thing about that is that that teaser was extremely confusing, so I don’t think it solved anything. My theory is that it just didn’t get the amount of vetting that the rest of the novel did, except for the first chapter also just had really blatant confusion issues where the pronoun refers to a different person than it should, that kind of thing. So I don’t know what happens there. Again, maybe it was more confusing before it was edited, and it had so many issues that not everything was ironed out. But that was particularly funny because it looked like they added that to avoid confusion, but it was really confusing in itself. Oren: Yeah, I would love to know if that’s why they added this. Like it’s also possible to me that they added this because someone decided that this was a faction thing they could use for marketing. Like, “Ooh, which of the magic types are you? Personality test!” So we gotta put that up front, right? That’s one possibility. But I could also just see them getting a bunch of reviews being like, “I love this book, but it’s confusing,” and then someone making the decision, “All right, put a magic guide at the beginning of it. That will make it less confusing.” It’s like, “No, it won’t. But I see why you thought that.” Chris: Yeah. I mean, both When the Moon Hatched and Lightlark have these world prologues that are just missing basic information. Like, whoever wrote them just doesn’t know how to communicate the basics, right? is just leaving them out. When the Moon Hatched just lists off a bunch of dragons and where they live, and it’s a whole bunch of proper names that you can’t remember, and it doesn’t tell you how all these things are related, so it’s just very confusing. Whereas the Lightlark intro will just be like, “Oh yeah, and the island is about to explode” or whatever. It’s like, “Wait, what?” Oren: What… what island? Chris: “Where did that come from? You didn’t introduce that.” And so they’re banishing it. Like, “What? How does banishing it solve this problem?” Some really, you know, basic things that, again, if the author is writing these, sometimes it’s easy to overlook things that are just obvious to you, right? You don’t know what’s obvious to the reader. You know, again, it’s always better if you can just explain things in the opening chapters themselves, especially since you can’t count on readers to read your little world intro. But if you’re going to add a world intro to avoid confusion, man, you need to at least make sure it’s clear, okay? That has to be very direct. It’s just got… it’s got to be, no matter what. Oren: Yeah, but then we would have so much less fun stuff to critique if they did that. So have you considered that we’re actually hurting ourselves with this advice? I actually think they should have more confusing worldly stuff at the beginning. Like, I want my next epic fantasy to just start off with a long explanation of childrearing practices in this world, with a bunch of proper nouns that no one ever explains, and then I want that to never come up in the book. I just… that would make my life easier. I would have so much more content if we did that. Chris: A contrasting example I want to bring up is the teaser for Elantris, Brando Sando’s first published novel, is his debut, although this is apparently the sixth novel he wrote. Oren: Whoa. Baby Brando. Chris: Baby Brando. And this one also has a world teaser, and I can see why they felt it was necessary. I ultimately concluded that I wouldn’t use it. At least It’s not confusing, first of all. At least it’s not Lightlark or something like that. But the thing about it is that the first chapter of Elantris starts right in the thick of the main character getting this very world-specific curse, right? He wakes up and, you know, notices he’s cursed. So it gets in the story right away and I thought that was a great way to start. It’s very intriguing. And this curse, has to do with this magical city nearby, that was once beautiful and then fell into darkness. And there’s these people who randomly become magical and then they go live in the magical city. The city fell. Those people were once blessed and now they’re cursed. That’s kind of how it works. And so the teaser is intriguing, right? And if you’re interested in the worldbuilding, it’s not a terrible way to advertise the book. It’s like, “Oh, it was once beautiful, the city of the gods,” you know? And then has like a little [23:22], and then it ended. Dun dun dun… Oren: Yeah, that’s when they took up austerity measures. Chris: But then, when you look at the first chapter, some of that information is just explaining what the city is, is just repeated again. And I think ultimately, when you look at what’s necessary, again, it’s… I like to get into that micromanagement. The details really matter here. And we didn’t actually need to know very much about the city or the blessing it used to be, to understand that the main character is cursed. We could just say he’s cursed and talk about the curse, and then be like, “And because of this curse, they’re going to throw me into the Fallen City,” and again, we don’t recommend, for long periods of time, not telling readers something that the main character knows. But for short periods in the beginning, it can be used for curiosity, right? So then it’s just like, “Oh, the Fallen City, what’s that?” And then you could go into its history as the main character is thrown into the city. So the details of the city’s history and the fact that this first used to be a blessing, we don’t actually need that to understand this first plot event. Oren: Yeah, we just need to know this guy’s been Kafka’d. He woke up and he’s been cursed, and it’s basically the same as being a giant bug. Don’t worry about it. In fact, I think that’s how he should introduce it in the story. You’d just be like, “Hey guys, I got Kafka’d. Uh, it’s just like that book you didn’t read but have heard about in the memes. Don’t worry about it.” Chris: So anyway, it’s a nice contrast where the teaser is easy to understand, but also isn’t really necessary, because the opening chapter does a pretty good job, and with a few little small tweaks would do a little better yet, whereas Lightlark probably needed it, but it’s also very confusing. Oren: Yeah. Game of Thrones is one that is interesting because, on one hand, its world is actually pretty simple. If you look at it just from a magical and geological perspective, it’s like, okay, you’ve got what’s basically England, but you made it way bigger on the scale slider, right? And then you turned it upside down. So it’s not really that complicated and it’s pretty generic high fantasy times, but gritty. But the part that is complicated is all of the noble houses and all of their beefs, and that would be very hard to just jump right in. And that’s why we start with just one beef between the Starks and the Lannisters, who are also like the most diametrically opposed of the great houses, so they’re the easiest to tell apart, and as a result, it just eases us into how complicated these various relationships end up being. Although even then, it’s still a little too complicated for Martin’s own good, because there end up being entire noble families who are theoretically important, but get no real focus for most of the books, like the Dorne. The poor Dorne. They get nothing. They’re just hanging out. They get one guy. That’s it. He was played by Pedro Pascal, though, so that is in their favor. Chris: Yeah, I mean, political intrigue and the factions involved in that is some of the most complex world stuff. But yeah, it’s definitely helpful, if you’re doing faction conflicts, to just start the story with two. Basically, the more simple and memorable you make each faction, and the fewer people you introduce in each faction, the quicker you can introduce new factions. Oren: That’s the eternal contradiction with factions, is that you don’t want them to seem like caricatures, but you do want them to seem like caricatures a little bit. Otherwise, they’re hard to remember. It’s like the same traits that make them seem like two-dimensional caricatures also contribute to them being distinct and memorable. So yeah, you got to figure out a way to balance that. Chris: You know, it reminds me of… there’s this video being passed around recently, where a historian who focuses on religion on YouTube decided to do a video about how fictional religions didn’t feel quite realistic. And he has some interesting things in there, but the first thing is basically, “Oh, you know, real religions are much messier and have a blend of all of these different beliefs from these different time periods and cultures.” And it’s just, you know, there’s a reason why fiction doesn’t do that. Oren: Yeah. Could you imagine trying to introduce all of the complexities of Christianity to someone who’s never heard of it before? Chris: You know, I have a fictional religion, and just the idea of, “Okay, first I got to introduce these different cultures that each had their other religions at different time periods, and then I got to show how they’ve melded together into the religion characters currently practice,” and it’s just… no, that is not happening. It’s just too much. It’s too much. I mean, I suppose if religion was like, I was super focused on religion and my main character was just doing religious things for the whole book, and it was an in-depth exploration of the belief system, right? I might be able to manage something like that, but if it’s just one element of the story, even if it’s fairly important, that’s probably going to be beyond reach. Oren: But what you need to do is just take the Wheel of Time approach, where everyone has the same religious beliefs, but there’s no church, except there is a militant arm of a church that does not exist. That’s the approach I think everyone should take. I think we haven’t upset the religious nerds enough, if I’m being honest. Alright, well, I think with that, we will go ahead and call this episode to a close. Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week. [closing song] This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.

Unfortunately, we now live in a time when our democracy and basic freedoms are under assault from all sides. No single person can stop this, but everyone can help, and storytellers don’t need to be on the sidelines. The most important thing to remember is not capitulating in advance. Fascists and authoritarians want us to make it easy for them, but we don’t have to do that. If enough of us write stories that drive them up the wall, we might make a difference.   Show Notes I Wish the Ring Had Not Come to Me Workshops of Empire  Star Trek  Space Sweepers  Andor  The Acolyte  Superman Dune History of Voting Rights Curtis Yavin Nettle and Bone  Collective Action in Stories  Transcript Generously transcribed by Sofia. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re 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. Oren: And I’m Oren. Chris: So, I’m not gonna do any meta jokes this time. It doesn’t feel right for this topic that we’re gonna be covering this time. Oren: Yeah, well sign of the times. Chris: Sign of the times. I know. So, yeah, just in case you’re not an American and you don’t follow American politics—which feels like everybody does, given that we’re a superpower. So yeah, we’re not in a good political situation right now. We’re in the middle of an attempted authoritarian takeover. And when I say attempted, I just mean we don’t know whether or not it will succeed. Oren: Yeah. I would like to live in less interesting times if I had that option. Chris: Yep, yep. Oren: [snickers] Chris: I feel like that scene in Lord of the Rings when Frodo was like, I wish Bilbo had never found the ring, and I wish I’d never had to take it. And Gandalf’s like, We don’t have that choice. We can only choose what to do with the time we have. Oren: Yeah, I wish certain Lord of the Rings quotes were less relevant. Chris: [laughs] Yep. But anyway, there is hope. There is! Cause we don’t know what’s gonna happen. And our stories do matter. We may not have money, but we do have cultural influence, each one of us. And we know that our stories matter because there have been cultural forces and times in America’s history where people have aimed to stop storytellers from engaging in political expression. In particular the Cold War period when everybody was terrified that if writers talked about politics, we would all become communist. This was a real thing where apparently a lot of creative writing programs and universities were started to try to create writers that were American to counter Russian writers. Oren: Well, Russia did have a bit of an early lead in the literary legacy department, so we needed to catch up. Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah. So yeah, people think our stories matter because they do matter. But even with some of that resistance to adding politics to our stories, we have some great political stories. I think Star Trek in particular is a notable beacon of political storytelling, especially since it was written for everyone. We also have some really heavy reads of dystopian literature, but I love it when stories that are really pulpy and engaging also talk about politics. Which is one of the cool things about Space Sweepers. Oren: Before we get into the specifics of how you might write your story for a given effect, I do wanna say something that I think is the most important thing. If you’re trying to resist with your storytelling in any way, which is—if you don’t listen to anything else we say—is to not capitulate in advance. If you were thinking of writing a gay character or a story where an evil dictator gets eaten by piranhas or something, and now you’re like, oh, I don’t know if I should do that in the current climate. The most valuable thing you can do is to do it anyway. And I’m not even saying you should do that, cause that’s not always safe for everybody. But if you’re trying to resist there is. Chris: What we need the most right now is to normalize resistance and courage and to persist in using the freedoms that they want to take away from us. And then encourage everybody else to do the same. So, we don’t even need to change minds. We just need to bolster the courage of those who already know and care about what is right. Oren: Yeah, and that is the other thing, right? People are always wondering, what story can I tell that will convince people that fascism and bigotry are wrong? I’m not gonna say you can’t do that, but I will also say that it is just as if not more important for stories to energize people who already think those things are wrong. Your story might not change anyone’s mind. It’s very hard to change people’s minds. But it might make people who already feel that way more likely to do something or normalize the idea that they might do something. Stuff like that. Chris: Yeah. As they say: fear is contagious, but courage is contagious too. So that said, let’s talk about, what can you do? There’s lots of different things you can do. And you can do whatever fits you, whatever fits your story, because there’s tons of ways to resist. So, you don’t have to go immediately to writing about fascism. If you are really passionate about history, and knowledgeable about history, and that’s something that you’re really interested in doing, that’s fine. But that’s also something that is very intense. It takes more knowledge. It’s gonna be trickier. Don’t think that if you want to write something in resistance to fascism, then you have to depict fascism. You don’t need to. And in many ways it’s better to start with the positive. Oren: That’s the Star Trek way of doing it, right? It’s like, Hey, instead of having an episode where Uhura has to overcome racism to become an officer on the bridge, we’re just gonna show that she’s an officer on the bridge. No big deal. That’s just how it is. That was a pretty powerful act in the sixties. It’s hard to overstate how big a deal that was at the time, and to a certain extent how big a deal that is now. Because what’s the funniest thing to me about right-wing reactionaries is they get so much angrier about a visible black person than they do about a story straight up telling them they are evil. It’s the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. The amount of rage of something like the Acolyte, which to be fair did turn out to be bad, but there was rage about it way before that, right? Just because there was a trailer where there was a visible black woman that drove them into a froth compared to Andor which is a story about how they are the bad guys and how they’re evil. And they actually like Andor. Not universally, but in right-wing spaces, Andor is pretty popular. It’s wild to me that that’s how the dynamic seems to work. Chris: Yeah. It is interesting that many people in the alt-right have sort of embraced this idea of evil trolls as part of their identity. It is weird, right? You would think that nobody would wanna identify as evil. And I’m not saying that all fascists think that they are evil, but at some level they’ve chosen to embrace that. And this is why, when you do depict fascists, one of the tricks is, you don’t wanna make them look cool. A lot of times we like to have cool villains, but when it gets a little too close to home, then we just don’t want them to look cool anymore. Oren: yeah Chris: Which complicates this picture. But I mean, at least now we have an example since the fascists here are all a bunch of clowns. Oren: They are really bad at everything. Chris: [laughs] They’re really bad at everything. I’ve been fascinated by how that is a built-in part of this. That whenever somebody demands personal loyalty, all of the actual competent people don’t wanna work for that person anymore. And then they end up with a bunch of people who are just super bad at their jobs, but are selected because of their loyalty. So those things are very much connected. So going back to representation: Huge yes to representation. Just remember, Trump is trying to punish institutions for having diversity initiatives. So, we need diverse stories now more than ever. A big step that you can take is just diversifying your characters. And I know sometimes it is intimidating to represent somebody from a group you are not part of. But there are some simple things you can do. My general process for this is: Start by trying to match the roles in your story with a marginalized trait that makes it so that you’re avoiding stereotypes. And if you don’t know—let’s say you’re thinking about adding a black person or disabled person or queer person, and you don’t know what kind of stereotypes affect them—a lot of times you can just do internet searches on like racist movies, for instance. And just start reading what people say about stories that are problematic and you’ll start to see patterns, and things to avoid there. You’ll start to see people talk about stereotypes. That can be really a formative way to start if you feel like you don’t know anything. Oren: There is one thing about this that is kind of interesting to me—and I don’t wanna say it’s a good thing cause there’s nothing good about what’s happening now—but there is an interesting phenomenon that is less tenable now than it used to be. When there’s some modicum of progress, a bunch of the worst people you know will be like, okay, well there was a small amount of progress. That means progress is now the status quo, so I can rebel against it by being anti-progressive. And that’s just much harder to sell than it used to be. There was a period where it was like, diverse stories are the norm, so I’m gonna be cool and edgy by not doing that. Now the actual president is saying no more diversity. So, unless you love to lick boots, you’d better be punk and diverse is the message of that. Chris: Yeah, I get to be a cool rebel! You don’t wanna pick groups because you feel they fit the role. That can be actually a troubling sign. So, if you have nature people in your story, you don’t wanna pick Native Americans for that. Because if you try to like, oh yeah, that seems like it fits this marginalized trait, but a lot of times that means you are actively cultivating a stereotype. So you just try to, try to avoid that. Don’t put your lesbian couple in a role where they’re gonna die. So it’s a first, just trying to match the story role with the character of the right trait so that you’re not playing into those kinds of stereotypes and tropes that are problematic. And then making them feel like they are part of their group. It’s not about the big stuff, it’s about the little things. In this case, consultants don’t have to be expensive. You can find somebody who is knowledgeable to talk to you about your character and ask them questions. But it’s about little subtle things that are part of their daily life that kind of make them feel like they’re more part of their group. Having representation is better than no representation. If you feel like you’re not doing enough to make a black character feel black, or queer character feel queer, usually it’s better to still have them in your story. Oren: At least where we are now. Chris: If we had more representation all the time, that was great. That threshold might change. But right now, I would just err on the side of having that representation. But then you can look, it’s like, okay, this group of queer people, what are their favorite musicians? And have that person listen to some of those musicians. Those small touches are the things that you want to go for. As opposed to generally making the plot all about their marginalized trait, getting really personal about it, that you are getting into a little bit more sensitive territory and you don’t need it. So just go for little bits of flavor and you’ll be okay. Oren: Alternatively, and again, I find this morbidly amusing, is you can sometimes achieve the same effect just by giving your cool white dude lead some traits that the right-wing doesn’t like. To compare Superman to Andor. Both of them are at least somewhat political, like overtly. They have overtly political stories, but Andor is so much more political than Superman. Superman—mild spoilers—has a storyline about how it’s bad when US-allied nations murder civilians. That’s a good message. And obviously the right-wingers got upset about that. But Andor has several times that. It’s got the anti-prison system and anti-right-wing misinformation and anti-police state. And I can’t prove this, this is pure hypothesizing and speculation, but it really feels like the reason Superman set everyone off was that Superman is shown to be nice and kind of sweet and a little soft, which they’re like, Ew, girly. Whereas Andor is extremely grim and everyone’s hard and jaded and so there’s no fear of that in Andor. I’m not saying this to knock Andor. Andor is a good show. It’s just pretty obvious to me now what it is that upsets the right wing and what doesn’t. Just making your straight white male lead a nice supportive guy can be enough sometimes. [laughs] Chris: I mean, I really do think there’s so much we can do with men and masculinity that makes a huge difference. Authoritarian culture is about the belief that there’s some alpha male, who is inherently superior to others will swoop in, and take care of all of your problems for you. And you just have to be loyal to him. And that’s really what they believe and they find comforting, but that’s obviously extremely problematic and antithetical to democracy. But it’s scary to me that I can recognize this specific alpha male from our stories. All these stories where we have this super powerful male character that has to be the best, has to be the most powerful, more than any other man—and also women, but the emphasis is that he’s a lot more powerful than other men. Always knows what’s best and makes decisions for everybody else. That is authoritarianism as a cultural trait right there. Oren: And he is eight feet tall and three refrigerators wide. And eats 5 billion eggs. Chris: [Batman voice] And he talks like this. Oren: Oh man, I love it when we switch over to a male voice actor at the end of a romantasy novel, and you get to hear what the male lead is supposed to sound like. Chris: [laughs] Oren: It’s like, okay man, are you speaking through a subwoofer over there? What’s going on? [laughs] Chris: But again, just allowing men to not be larger than life, perfect caricatures. Oren: Hang on, I’m gonna have to stop you at allow Men. I don’t think we should allow men. No more, no more allowing that! It’s done. We had our run. It’s over now. Chris: [laughs] A lot of fascism, a whole segment of it, is about making men manly again and being strong. And a lot of times nationalistic authoritarian cultures in general put a lot of emphasis on masculinity. Because that feeds into being militant. And that’s what they want. And so having men and glorifying men who are actually sweet and sensitive, and need support sometimes, and don’t have to be perfect, and are not there to just dick measure with every other guy in the story, that’s huge. That is a huge difference. Even if it seems strange, that does make a big difference. Oren: Yeah. If nothing else, it’ll make your story stand out these days. Chris: Did the Superman story put emphasis on Superman being an immigrant? Oren: A little bit. Chris: A little bit? Oren: Not a ton. I honestly think James Gunn made a bigger deal about that than it is in the movie. There’s a whole thing about how he’s not from here. Again, mild spoiler. Lex Luthor runs a troll farm that is clearly doing some rip from the headline stuff about how right-wing trolls operate. So again, there’s a little bit of that, sure. Chris: And I do think that some of the difference between Andor and Superman is just when it’s abstract ideas that people are looking at, it’s easy for them to have that cognitive dissonance, to detach. And just not think about what it means or assume that the despotic empire is the libs. [laughs] Even if it’s obviously not the libs. Oren: People are really, really good at rationalizing away messages that they don’t like in stories that they enjoy. And this isn’t just a right-wing thing, leftists do it too. I’ve seen so many essays from at least left-of-center people, trying to convince me that Tolkien’s not a monarchist. Cause they like Lord of the Rings. And it’s like, no, it’s okay. You can still like Lord of the Rings, it’s fine. Don’t worry about it. Chris: Or like Dune. Isn’t there a lot of leftists who like Dune? Oren: I’ll give them that one a little bit. There’s a little bit more in Dune than there is in Lord of the Rings, but yes. There is that too. But with Andor, I made a habit of looking in on right-wing spaces to see what they were saying about Andor, and there was some understanding that Andor was talking about them. But most of it was rationalizing. Like no, the Ghorman protests can’t be anything like real life protests because they aren’t waving Mexican flags. Here I found a tissue, I can put the tissue over the metaphor and now it’s not real and it can’t hurt me anymore. Chris: So that’s the thing about those metaphors and analogies: if it’s an abstract concept, it’s much easier for people to ignore it. But when you have a black person on screen, now it becomes very clear what you stand for. Oren: Andor is so fascinating because you would’ve expected it to make them mad because you’ve got Diego Luna there who is a Latino with an obvious accent. But no, apparently that doesn’t do it. While committing horrible acts on many groups of Latinos, they’re also willing to be like, ah, maybe this one’s okay. It’s a window into the right-wing mindset. [laughs] Chris: Yeah. It’s strange. He is a gritty anti-hero, right? Oren: Right. I think that’s what ended up mattering. Is that he was super gritty and everything’s gritty. And I think they liked that. Again, I’m not saying that’s bad. I’m not saying you shouldn’t do that or that your gritty story is inherently right-wing. I’m just describing the reactions that I see. Chris: So, what we’re saying is that fluffy bunnies are praxis. Oren: Yeah, exactly. Actually you should go and everyone go write cozies now! Cause cozies are the only way to resist! You heard that here on the Mythcreants Podcast! Chris: [laughs] Oren: See how many panic pieces about cozies we can generate. Chris: More ideas: Stories that are about valuing things that are being harmed. Like immigration. Stories about immigrants. And immigrants are not in one shape or size. There are all kinds of immigrants. The value of public services, obviously that’s a big deal right now. Value of free speech rights, and specifically free speech is such a weird thing because they’re always claiming that they want their free speech while trying to suppress our free speech. Oren: That’s easier to reconcile once you remember that they are liars and they lie constantly. Chris: I think it’s easy for people who are rationalizing things away, to rationalize freedom is us getting our way and you not getting your way. Freedom for them means imposing their will on somebody else instead of them, because again, it’s a zero-sum. Instead of their enemies imposing their will on them or something like that. Oren: Right, exactly. That is freedom in my mind when I get all of the cookies, the cookies are finally free. Chris: [laughs] But in this case, specifically the ability to criticize an authority figure is what I would go for in this free speech category. That’s important, the value of democracy and equality, which democracy depends on. And I think this is really key because we’re talking about things like the rise of fascism and authoritarianism. The thing that’s going on here is that democracy inherently is tied to equality because democracy is based on the idea that we are all equal, and that’s why we should all get a vote. And it’s easy because classism, even if it’s bad today, it is much better than it used to be. And so, it’s easy to forget how things were, and that people believed that God chose who was poor and who was rich and those were just at your inherent traits. Even when America started, only people who own property could vote. Only white men who own property could vote. But to make our democracy better, in order to justify where everybody should vote, instead of a king should rule, we value equality. And so those two concepts are just inherently tied together. And that is why the right is abandoning democracy to some extent. At least some of them have come to realize that. They really don’t want equality, and so they’re turning against democracy. Oren: And this is also what they have all of the lies to rationalize it. Like, the illegal immigrants are voting, so actually we have to destroy democracy to save it! That sort of thing, right? They build elaborate head canons to justify all of it. Chris: Yeah. There is a lot of rationalization from some of them, but others absolutely know this and are deliberately trying to abandon democracy. Oren: This is true. So what I’m saying is that you should write a story about murdering Aragorn. You gotta do it. Chris: Speaking of that, because—what was it? The Thorn and… what was the Kingfisher story that got a Hugo award? Oren: Nettle & Bone. Chris: Nettle & Bone, right. Nettle & Bone is kind of like that. In Nettle & Bone—I think this is one of the reasons that it got a Hugo and was popular—is about how the main character wants to kill the prince that her sister is married to. Because she got married to the prince, but the prince was actually evil and not good. And now she wants to end him. And that is what the story is about. Oren: Very sympathetic premise. Chris: When we talk about monarchy and fantasy. I understand the pull towards monarchy in fantasy. I absolutely do. It’s nice wish fulfillment and also you have a character that automatically has the power to do things in your plot, which is also convenient. Oren: It is handy. Chris: But the romanticization of monarchy in fantasy is a bit dangerous and I think we should—I don’t wanna shame anybody for writing about things that bring them joy. My goal is to raise awareness about the implications of those things, so that everybody can choose to take whatever is the next step for them. Whether it’s writing a monarch character that has to fight other monarchs that are bad, instead of just being like, all monarchs are good. If that’s your baby step, that’s the next step for you, then good. Take the next step, right? I think that we should always embrace enjoyment and not shame people for enjoyment. But the more we understand about some of these patterns. Like the alpha male. Obviously, there are a lot of romantics right now that have these alpha male characters because some women love them. And I do feel like some of that comes from patriarchal propaganda. But again, the goal is not to shame anybody for what they enjoy. The goal is just to be more aware so that everybody can take whatever is their natural next step for them and do what they feel comfortable doing. Oren: There is some funny cognitive dissonance though when I’m reading some of these romantics where the author clearly wants to be progressive in some ways and it’s like, yeah, this is a world where gay romance is common and it’s not discriminated against. This character is non-binary. Anyway, here’s my love interest: Eight feet tall, three refrigerators wide, the biggest [duck quacking sound] in the land! And I’m like, Alright. Okay. Interesting that this is what’s happening now. Chris: [laughs] Oren: I do hope that when they convert some of these romantasies into movies—We’re really overdue for that. It’s weird that it’s only just starting to happen—I really hope that, however they cast the love interest, that they are accurate to the way they’re described in the book. Because then you would immediately realize that’s not really very attractive. [laugh] Chris: [laughs] Oren: This wall of flesh walks on screen and it’s like, hello, I’m Zaden. Chris: I mean, we talked about the fact that when men are described as buff—male love interests—that that can mislead you into thinking that women like guys to be buffered than they actually like. Generally, that bodybuilder shape with every little muscle popping out is not attractive. But the way that people describe love interests always emphasizing their muscles. The reader imagines what they want. The purpose of description is just to evoke the imagination. So it’s not always perfectly accurate. Oren: Well, it’s gonna be! When I adapt Shield of sparrows, don’t you worry! You’ll see! Chris: Oh gosh. And one other thing: I have an article on this, on portraying collective action and this in particular has come up because there are some people who are like, No, you shouldn’t have a single hero because in real life, we gotta work together to solve our problems. I can absolutely get that, and there’s definitely a place for stories about collective action, and I think that’s important too. Stories are inherently weighted towards having a single hero, but there are some ways to include collective action in your story and I have an article that lists some ideas for doing that. And it can be baby steps. Like you just have a hero that knows an activist group and works with them occasionally during the story, to your story is about the activist group or what happened. Oren: Or they can all be joined together in an unholy experiment.And now the collective is all one character. It’s good. It’s fine. Don’t worry about it. Chris: Yeah. No, you can have a hive mind. Why not? Oren: Yeah. All right. Well, now that we’ve suggested all protagonists should be replaced with hive minds because that is… Chris: Now my anti-authoritarian story has gotta be about the Borg trying to get that queen to go away. Oren: Yeah. Oh, that would’ve been great. A Borg revolution. I’d watch that. Chris: Yeah. Yeah. Oren: All right. Well, I think with that, now that we’ve come up with the coolest Star Trek idea, we’re gonna 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 I do want to thank our existing patrons because stuff’s hard and we appreciate the support. Specifically, Ayman Jaber, who’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And also Kathy Ferguson who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. And we will talk to you next week. [Outro Music] This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Coulton.

You’ve created a world where loads of nameless extras and faceless NPCs get roasted to death each morning, where everything is terrible and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Surely that’ll be tense, right? Uh oh, your beta readers are still reporting boredom. That’s because while dark content can influence tension, the two are not synonyms. Listen as we discuss what the differences are, why authors often get them confused, and how you can actually use one to boost the other.  Show Notes Tension Agency Children of Blood and Bone  The Devils  Suicide Squad  Inverse Ninja Effect The Blade Itself  Fourth Wing The Ghoul A Fire Upon the Deep 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. Chris: And I’m Chris. Oren: So for this story, I’m gonna be talking about some really cool, dark, exciting things. Like there’s gonna be body parts and people burning to death… No one we care about, of course. Chris: So does this story introduce new characters because it killed off all the old ones? Oren: No, I just told you, it’s not gonna happen to anyone we care about. Chris: Ohh, I see. Oren: I’ve just gotta introduce a bunch of randos, and they’re all gonna die horribly. And that’ll be really exciting, right? That’s the same thing as tension. Chris: Yeah, sure. Are we also gonna have our protagonists participate in a big tournament where they’re in a lake? And it’s full of slaves that are, like, drowning around them, but they’re just trying to win, and they don’t care about the slaves? Oren: They wanna win. You know, winning the slave murder cup is important to them. [laughter] Don’t worry, we’ll say that there’s a thing they need that is in the cup, and there’s nothing else they could do to try to find another way to get it. It’s just not possible. Chris: Yeah, I mean, there’s just slaves dying everywhere, but they can’t do anything about it anyway, so… Oren: Yeah. So enough giving crap to Children of Blood and Bone, because I now wanna give crap to a different book that I’ve been reading. It’s Joe Abercrombie’s The Devils, which is basically Suicide Squad, but in fantasy, is the premise. I did see some Redditors complaining that this book has Joss Whedon dialogue, which is just the perfect example of brain rot in literary discussion. Because now any book where the characters are irreverent and sarcastic is labeled as Joss Whedon dialogue. Chris: That is giving Joss Whedon way too much credit, okay. He did not invent being witty and irreverent and self-aware. Oren: Yeah, no. If characters make fun of the thing they’re doing, you have to pay Joss Whedon money. [Chris laughs] He invented that idea. No one else has ever done it. It’s just Joss Whedon. I just find that very funny. But, an actual problem that this story has, with some minor spoilers, is it has a serious tension issue, which you wouldn’t expect from Abercrombie, because his stories are really dark and full of death and murder. So how could there be a tension problem? And it’s because of the thing I just mentioned, or that’s one reason. There are others. But for this podcast, the reason is that when we have these big fight scenes where there’s lots of blood and guts and death, it’s just happening to somebody else. It’s like we give them a bunch of disposable guards so the guards can all die badly. And I’m just sitting here being like, okay, when are we gonna get through the nameless guards to someone who actually matters? And it takes a while. Chris: And again, there is also the inverse ninja effect. Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: Right? It’s just, when you escalate everything so soon, and again, it does feel like the guards were added just so that they can all get killed, but that also just makes people more meaningless, and pretty soon you have to add more and more fighters in all of your scenes. Because we know that having fifty people around doesn’t mean anything. Oren: Yeah. Well, I mean, that’s another problem with this story is that after the first fight, the actual suicide squad, not just their nameless guards, is basically invincible, we’ve established, because they’re so powerful. So later on, there’s problems where it’s like, “Oh no, some bandits attacking us!” It’s like, yeah, I think your invincible squad of fantasy superheroes can probably handle it. So that’s its own issue, but it is weird. It felt like they were given these guards and then we had to contrive a way for them to be ambushed, to get rid of the guards. Chris: Mm-hmm. Oren: But I think you’re probably right. I think it’s the other way around. The guards were put there so we could have a bunch of nameless mooks who could die horribly. Chris: Yeah. I mean, knowing Abercrombie. [laughs] Oren: Yeah. Chris: I mean, I’m not familiar with this work, but I still remember in The Blade Itself, he has a whole POV from a torturer guy. Oren: Yeah. Although, I’ll give him credit for this, at least in that POV, he was willing to have bad things happen to his POV characters. Chris: Mm-hmm. Oren: He wasn’t just inflicting it on nameless mooks. That torturer character has been himself horribly tortured, and is like all kinds of messed up from it in ways that you don’t normally see fantasy heroes get messed up. Chris: Mm-hmm. Oren: He doesn’t have, like, cool badass scars. He has ugly, seriously debilitating scars. You almost never see that. And I didn’t enjoy that book, but I did respect Abercrombie for being willing to do that. Chris: I mean, if you go dark, then be dark. Oren: Yeah. That’s kind of how I feel. If you want this level of darkness, you should be willing to inflict it on your main characters. Am I going to enjoy that? No. But I’d rather have that happen than just cooking a bunch of extras in the background. [laughing] Chris: Yeah. You know, as opposed to Children of Blood and Bone, which is what I was talking about earlier with the tournament where the slaves are dying all around them. Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: That was one of the books that inspired me to write by post on grimdark sauce,as I call it, where it’s weird because the scenery is extremely grimdark, but the story itself is not really dark, because nothing bad happens to the characters that you are actually following and actually care about. Oren: Yeah. Chris: That’s the one where when they need to escape, it feels like all of the soldiers attacking them just, like, pause so they can climb on the back of some giant cats and get away. Oren: Yeah. And that one is weird too because it does things like assure both the characters and the reader that, like, her grandpa will be okay, don’t worry about it. Which is kind of at odds with how dark everything else is. And, spoilers for later, but it turns out that’s wrong. It turns out their grandpa is not okay. And also then the protagonist eventually does get captured and tortured, but – by this point we’re so late in the story that now this feels like a jarring change. Like the story is breaking its promise to me, but also she is remarkably unscathed from her bout of horrible torture. Like she has the standard cool fantasy hero scars from horrible torture. Not the, like, this person’s body will never be the same scars that the guy from The Blade Itself had. Chris: Yeah, so in any case, let’s talk about the difference between darkness and tension. Oren: Yeah. There is something of a connection. The connection’s not entirely made up. Because if your story is super light, it is harder to create tension because for something to be tense, you generally need to have something serious at stake. And that requires a certain level of dark content, right? Not necessarily a lot, but some. Chris: I mean, I do think tension, particularly high tension, does make the story darker to some degree. And we can even call it one dark emotion or one dark aspect. But when we call stories dark, it can mean so many different things. Oren: Yeah. Chris: Tension by itself only goes so far in making a story dark. And also tension is just very specific. It’s a very specific emotion that’s that sense of uncertainty over whether or not something bad will happen, and so you gotta do something to keep it from happening. That’s what tension is for. It’s a very motivating emotion, and because of that it only goes so far in being dark. Whereas a lot of times when you get the really dark stuff, it can even kill tension because it tends to get really hopeless and gloomy. Oren: Yeah. Chris: Like no matter what we do, the whole world is gonna end. It’s like, okay, that’s very dark. It’s not actually tense though, because we know the world is gonna end, and so we kind of have to come to terms with that. Oren: Yeah. It’s like, you’ve a hundred percent established the world’s gonna end, so, all right. Uh, that sucks, but I’m not on the edge of my seat about it anymore, right? Chris: Yeah. Also, that’s the thing about having tragedy, and again, we’ve talked before about writers – what they actually want as their story continues is to make it escalate and have it more exciting and tense, but instead they just make it darker by having bad stuff happen.  Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: But having bad stuff happen does not necessarily raise tension, especially if – well, I mean, it’s already happened, so we’re not worried about it happening, right? So if you randomly kill off a character and then make readers really upset about it, that might not actually raise tension. That might just be sad. Oren: Right? And there are different ways this can go. If you kill off a character who is in certain respects, at least, similar to the surviving characters, that can raise tension, because you have actually shown that you are willing to follow through on the threats to characters. Is that a good thing to do? Eh, depends. Sometimes it’s worth it, sometimes it’s not. It depends on how load-bearing that character was. Chris: And also like what type of experience you really wanna create. Let’s say you kill a character in a way that specifically shows that you are willing to violate plot shields. Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: Nobody has a plot shield. Oren: Yeah. Chris: And I think that’s what is most likely to raise tension. As opposed to if you kill the character that’s three weeks away from retirement? [laughs] That’s not gonna raise tension, because you’re just showing that you are actually following plot conventions in who dies. And so that’s not gonna make any of the characters who seem to have plot shields feel at risk. But generally, unless you are doing a really dark story, and that’s the kind of experience that you’re creating for people – it’s, like, horror, it’s really dark fantasy, that kind of thing – I generally find that it’s not good tension, right? Oren: Hmm. Chris: The average person who’s reading a nice old adventure story and wants some excitement doesn’t often want to genuinely worry about their favorite character dying. I think when I’ve seen that, that can actually be sometimes a little too intense for people. And so usually even with plot shields, people can buy into the story scenario and the idea that, “Oh no, people could get hurt” without that extra meta-knowledge of like, no, this author might really do it. And adding in, let’s say you want them to believe that this character can really die, I do think that it gets very intense if you add that second meta element on top of it where you think it actually could happen. Oren: Yeah. Chris: And is a little bit more stressful. So, again, if you have a dark-loving audience, then anything goes at that point. But for kind of the average exciting story, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that. Oren: Yeah, and of course there’s also, you have to consider the cost of losing that character to begin with. Because if it’s going to accomplish this goal of making it seem like other characters could die, then that character needs to be effectively a main character on their own. Like,  it doesn’t work to bring in an extra and tell us about their backstory really quickly. Or introduce a small child, and be like, “Aren’t they cute? Look at their big child eeeyes…” [Chris laughs] Look, that doesn’t work. So if you are actually going to accomplish this, you need a character that was doing something similar to the other characters, which means it is going to cost you for them to die, right? Chris: Mm-hmm. Oren: Because theoretically, people enjoyed reading about them. If not, you have a different problem. Chris: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And people will get upset. And some people, that will be their favorite character, and they’ll rage quit. And I mean, again, that’s why we recommend killing off characters like protagonists so rarely. Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: Basically only in very special circumstances, or again, if you’re just going with grimdark, if that’s what your story is sold based on, and you want your stories to be really unpredictable, and anybody could die, and that is the experience that you are selling to your audience, and they know what they’re signing up for, then sure, there’s a niche taste. Everybody likes something different. But in general, that’s why we do it so rarely. And again, so I kind of hinted at the beginning, there are some TV shows that end up reducing tension because they kill off so many characters that nobody wants to get attached to characters anymore. Oren: Yeah. If you’re like, “It’s not safe, you can’t grow attached to anybody, you know, you’ll have to cry.” It’s like, all right, well, I guess I won’t then. [both laugh] Especially once you’ve killed so many characters, there’s nobody left. It’s like, all right, well, all the characters we started with are gone. I’m not starting over from day one here. I don’t got that kind of time. [laughing] Chris: But yeah, when it comes to bad things happening – again, we talked about showing readers that you’re not gonna follow plot shields, which again, would be a niche thing to do, not a thing that everybody should be doing. Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: The other situation is if you have something bad happen that then creates a new problem. It’s basically starting a new child arc of some kind that can raise tension. So rocks fall, destroy the town, and now we have to find someplace for everybody to take shelter. Okay, we’ve created a new task, avoiding further disaster. But the disaster that just happened that made everybody sad, that does not create tension. Oren: Yeah. Because what it is, tension is largely the fear that something is going to get worse. And once you establish a baseline of badness, it’s like, all right, well, that’s the baseline. Chris: It’s very forward looking. It’s always about what happens in the future, not what happened in the past. Oren: Right. Chris: What happened in the past can be useful for establishing what could happen in the future. If we see a pattern of killings, then we would be worried that it would happen again. So that can be useful, but it’s always forward looking. Oren: And this is why long extended descriptions of your fantasy city are likely to be boring, regardless of whether it’s a shining beacon of light or super grim and gritty with murdered people around every corner, because that’s just the status quo. That’s just how things are right now. You’ve set that baseline. Now it’s up to you to show me the possibility that things might get worse. Chris: Yeah. I think another thing that you can do – again, if your story is real dark and intense – then another place where they can be complementary is if you do show a horrible thing happening to somebody, and you’ve got, like, body horror, or what have you. And then you threaten the same thing for another character. Seeing how bad that is viscerally, I do think, again, does make those stakes feel more impactful. So that could potentially raise tension. So if you show a serial killer in gruesome detail doing their thing, and then the serial killer starts stalking another character, those gruesome details could make a difference. Because when it comes to stakes, it’s not just objectively how bad it is. There’s also an emotional element, and if you illustrate it in more detail and make it feel more real, the stakes do become more impactful. And you can also have characters imagine what could happen as another way of getting more details. Oren: Yeah. And that brings to mind the presentation of whatever it is. Because that matters a lot. If you have things that could potentially be really bad, but you summarize them or you don’t give them the gravitas they deserve, well, even though objectively that would be really bad, it doesn’t feel like it’s a real thing. Fourth Wing has this problem. In Fourth Wing, the protagonist’s life is technically in constant danger because of the murder school that she’s in, and all the murder that happens there. But it’s also summarized, right? Like almost all of it happens in summary, and all the solutions are kind of off-screen. There are only one or two instances where she really feels like she’s in danger. Even though technically she’s in danger the whole time. Chris: Yeah. I mean, I do think I found that book a little more tense than you did. Partly probably because I liked Violet, the main character, better. Oren: Sure. Chris: I know that you just didn’t feel any attachment to her. So yeah, there were things that were summarized a little too much, but I generally found that book to be still pretty tense.  Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: Because it did have a number of deadly challenges and high-stakes moments. But yeah, there were definitely some things that I would’ve liked to have seen more on-screen with her proactively troubleshooting instead of having it skim by. Oren: And that of course does bring another instance, because we’re talking about how much we do or don’t like the main character. That makes a big difference too. You need to have some attachment to a main character for there to be tension over what happens to them. And in dark stories, this can sometimes backfire because a lot of authors are like, “I’m gonna be dark and edgy. I’m gonna have my main character be a dick.” Like, all right. Well, now I don’t care what happens to them. [both laugh] You know, like, I might even want something bad to happen to them. Because they’re such a jerk, I wanna see them get some karmic justice. And if that’s your intention, that maybe – I’m not gonna say that couldn’t work. I’m just saying I have seen a lot of authors who have arrived at that situation accidentally. They clearly did not mean for this to happen. They want me to be worried that their jerk-ass puppy kicking protagonist is gonna get eaten. And it’s like, no, eat ’em. Definitely eat ’em. I’m mad at him from two chapters ago. Please eat him. You know? [laughing] Chris: Yeah. I mean, readers and audience in general are probably more sensitive than you think to character misbehavior. Anytime one character is hard on another character, readers can react pretty strongly to that, even if it’s something that is meant to be relatively harmless, like ignoring somebody, or running away when they ask for help. Oren: Yeah. Chris: As opposed to like these grimdark heroes who might just be, like, killing people. Alright, so in Fallout there’s this Ghoul character who has too much candy. Oren: Yeah yeah. Chris: But he also has a very charismatic white guy actor. And so people like him anyway. And the breaking point for me with his character was when he just shoots and kills a young man, maybe like a teenager or something. Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: And the kid was attacking him first, but only after being severely provoked. So our like cowboy Ghoul character comes in and was like, “Hey, by the way, I just murdered your brother, ha ha.” [laughs] And this is just a teenager who – again, the Ghoul is super capable. So he is more than able to just defend himself without killing somebody who’s upset that, you know, his brother got murdered. But that’s the kind of behavior that I would expect to see all the time for a lot of protagonists in really dark works. And yeah, after that point it would be hard to feel tension. I certainly was hoping something bad would happen to the Ghoul. Oren: Yeah, I wanted the Ghoul to die. And that’s the thing, is that I’m sure when some people hear that, they’re gonna be like, “Oh, well why would you want the Ghoul to be nice? He’s not a nice guy.” It’s like, yeah, I mean, sure, if he’s that big of an asshole, that’s fine. He can be a villain. I’m just not gonna be happy if the story ends by making him seem like the new main character, which is what happens in the first season of Fallout. Now Lucy is kind of tagging along with him. Chris: Mm-hmm. If a character gets bad karma, but they also get their comeuppance, that helps to balance the karma, and it also does take off the edge when it comes to reader resentment, right? So if we say, see the Ghoul do something bad like that, then something bad happens to him as a result of his decision, that mollifies the audience, and actually can make him more likable. But the Ghoul just keeps getting candy. And there is some – he did have a tangle with Lucy where she got the better of him because he sold her to, like, a meat shop or something. [laughing] There was one instance in which he got some level of comeuppance, but most of the time he just doesn’t. And that’s part of the issue. Oren: The thing about the Ghoul that I found most funny is that he’s basically invincible. Like, except for that one time when Lucy is able to get the drop on him somehow, but in pretty much every other scene, he’s invincible. But the idea of just robbing these people who have all the medicine he needs, apparently that never occurred to him. Like, he was willing to almost die from this lack of medicine, because I guess we’re just supposed to assume that robbing these guys would’ve been impossible. But we see him take out like a whole squad of Brotherhood soldiers in power armor, so I know he could do it. Don’t pretend he couldn’t do it, show! Chris: Yeah. I did not like seeing him take out that squad at the climax. That was, I was so mad about that. Oren: It’s too much. He’s too good. That’s just some bullshit is what that is. Chris: Yeah. But anyway, if you wanna have an edgy character that maybe readers are not gonna like, that can negatively impact the tension. So that’s something else to think about is that that emotional investment in the characters is kind of required so that we want them to succeed, and we don’t want bad things to happen to them. [laughing] Oren: Yeah. Chris: Another thing to think about is, again, we’ve occasionally talked about the difference between conflict and calamity. So basically, when you have a conflict, you’re showing a character struggling to kind of solve a problem against something that opposes them. And we call that something the antagonist, and sometimes the villain. And again, there could be more than one antagonist. The point is that at least one character is struggling. But the key about the struggle is that if that character is, like, standing there passively, or is tied up, or otherwise it doesn’t feel like they can do anything, it’s not really a struggle anymore. They are not struggling.  Oren: Yeah. Chris: And we have seen some stories where it seems like the writer is trying to write a conflict, but just doesn’t get the kind of character agency part of that. And so what happens is often, in this case, lots of bad or supposedly tense things happen really fast, and it doesn’t feel like the character has the ability to respond. And they might not be tied up. It might just be, again, there’s a little bit of over-summary, but like things happen fast. We don’t get the feeling that this is an interaction the character is having where they can intervene, and they can change the outcome. Oren: Yeah, it feels like a cut scene is playing in the video game. [Chris laughs] And like you can have tension in scenes where the character is not doing anything. It just tends to be kind of specific and specialized, and it’s usually based on the possibility that they could. I think Chris has mentioned the possibility of a scene where the main character is, like, sitting on the couch playing video games, and a serial killer is sneaking up behind them. They aren’t technically doing anything, but there’s a sense of tension because we’re like, “Oh no, they could get stabbed! Or maybe they’ll notice the serial killer.” But if they’re sitting on the couch, and then just like a bunch of aliens rampage through the town, and they’re just sitting there and being like, “Well, I guess I’ll either die or I won’t, because maybe the aliens will kill me.” I don’t think that’s very tense. I just – not for very long, all right. Maybe for a short amount of time. Chris: Right. So what happens when it keeps going, and the character doesn’t intervene for whatever reason, is that the antagonist actually starts to look like a wimp. Because at that point, all should be lost if the protagonist is not intervening. So let’s say we have this serial killer sneaking up behind the character on the couch while they’re playing a video game. Oren: Yeah. Chris: And they’re not doing anything. But we know they can. But let’s say the serial killer just keeps hanging out, and for some reason still has not killed our protagonist, has not done anything. They’ve been playing their video game for this entire scene, but for some reason the serial killer still hasn’t killed them yet. After a while, it’s just like, “You’re not actually gonna kill them, are you, serial killer?” Oren:  Yeah. No, you’re just hanging out. You’re just watching ’em play. Chris: They’re still fine. So you must not have it in you to kill them. [laughing] That’s a weird example. But like this happens in – I think the book Fire Upon the Deep is where I saw tons of these. Of stuff just happening, and there’s one scene when they’re on some sort of space station with some, I don’t know, hills or outdoor landscapes, and it’s all collapsing, and they’re trying to get to their ship while the landscape crumbles around them. But this keeps going, and we keep describing landscape crumbling, but the protagonists aren’t really doing anything special. I mean, I guess they’re running, and they’re not dead yet. So I guess it’s meaningless that the landscape is collapsing, right? Oren: Yeah, NBD. [laughing] Chris: Because if they’re not doing anything effective to ensure their survival, and whatever’s threatening them still hasn’t killed them yet, then the threat must not be a big deal. That’s basically how it works. But if you see these scenes, again, where lots of bad things happen in quick succession, and there are no protagonist actions, that’s just gonna kill the tension. It’s just gonna feel like none of it matters and get boring, even if it’s supposed to be exciting, even if it’s specifically written to feel threatening and exciting. That’s why you need that conflict where the character comes in and intervenes. What you want is like the serial killer is chasing after the character, and the character crawls away, barely… Oren: Yeah. Chris: And they managed to make it in the closet just in time and shut the door. But now the serial killer’s got an axe, and they’re breaking down the door. And then the protagonist just finds something else to just barely scrape by. That’s what’s tense, right? Because we can see that the protagonist is just barely managing to take actions that avoid them being killed, and therefore, the antagonist also, what they’re doing matters. Because the protagonist has to respond in order to stay alive. Oren: And this is why I always have to laugh at this weird agency discourse that rears its head every once in a while. Because almost guaranteed, someone will point to a horror story and be like, “Well, surely you can’t say that agency is required, because these characters were disempowered. And that was still fun.” It’s like, yes. Or yeah, maybe not fun is the right word, but you know, still a good story. But being disempowered doesn’t mean there’s no agency, it just means things suck. [laughing] Chris: Yeah. Generally, when the character is very reactive, that feels disempowering, even if they have agency. So in this case, they’re attacked by the serial killer, and now they’re reacting to try to keep this serial killer from killing them, as opposed to that turn that usually happens towards the end of a horror movie where they’re like, “Now I gotta bring the fight to the serial killer.” And the final girl grabs a weapon and decides she’s gonna be badass now. That’s the change from reactive to proactive, and it does feel very empowering. By the way, I do get this question a lot when I talk about agency, they’re like, “Well, what if I want my character to be disempowered?” It’s like, “Well, then you make them reactive.”  Oren: All right. Well, now that we’ve firmly established what those terms mean, I’m sure everyone will always use them the same way we do forever, and we won’t have any problems. Chris: [laughing] I’m sure we’ve put an end to agency discourse forever. Oren: Yeah, it’s done now. Chris: It’s done. Oren: And, so, appropriately, we will now call this episode to a close. Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. [Outro Music] This has been the Mythcreant Podcast, opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.

No matter your book’s plot or genre, a lot of its words will be spent on narration. Rather than treating narration as an amorphous blob, it’s important to understand the different elements that make it up. That way, you’ll understand whether the story has too much description relative to action or when you need to add a bit of exposition. This week, we’re discussing what makes the different types of narration tick and also apparently referring to the Hugos as something that will still happen in the future. That’s just the nature of recording your episodes ahead of time! Show Notes The Five Types of Narration Dialogue  Description  Summary  Action Ministry of Time  Alien Clay Star Trek: First Contact  Shield of Sparrows  Crescent City Transcript Generously transcribed by Phoebe. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris:  You’re 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. Oren: And I’m Oren. Chris: Did you know there are five types of lines in a podcast conversation? Oren: Really? Five specifically. Okay. This sounds real. Chris: Exactly five. Uh-huh. Yeah, there’s, uh, informative lines, uh, joke lines. Subtly trying to correct what somebody else says lines. Oren: That one is pretty important. What about non-sequitur lines where I talk about spaghetti for five minutes? Chris: That definitely happens. Oren: There have to be sandwich discord lines, right? Like surely that has created a sixth category. Chris: Oh yeah, that’s good. And our fifth time can just be laugh lines where we’re laughing in response to each other. Oren: What about opening bit lines? Is that already covered by one of the types? Chris: I don’t know. That might be part of the informative line, or is it its own? Oren: There you go. You sorted it all out. Chris: See, I’ve got it. I’ve cracked the code. Now all we have to do in a podcast is just pick one of those lines, but like every time before we say something, we need to pick a line type. It’s gonna go well. Oren: Press it and then get some auto-generated suggestions. What could go wrong? Chris: Sometimes I do feel like that when people sort things into types, that it’s just kind of silly and arbitrary and like, okay, but what are they for? But at the same time, in many cases, it is really helpful because it takes something that’s sort of big and amorphous and makes it a little bit less amorphous, makes it less vague. So that you can get inspiration from different types or it can be ways of thinking a little bit further about it and kind of understanding it a little bit better, that kind of thing. Just like when we have turning points, we break it down into different types of turning points, that really gives people ideas for what they can do for their turning point. And so, five types of narration is just me breaking narration down into what I see as the sort of natural divisions, and they have some overlap and fuzzy areas. But I do think that it is important for every manuscript to have some text in each of these categories. And when we get manuscripts very frequently, one of them could be missing altogether, one of them could be underused, and that’s actually a really big problem. Whereas of course, they can be overused too, and that’s when people start to get bored. Oren: As an enlightened centrist on the topic of categorization, I believe that you should do it when it’s helpful and you shouldn’t do it when it’s not helpful, and I’m sure that that distinction is very easy to tell and there aren’t any arguments over it. With these particular types as outlined in the Five Types of Narration Every Novel Needs by Chris Winkle, I find these helpful because when I am working with a client, it is useful to be able to tell them there is a certain kind of narration in your work that needs strengthening, and I can tell them what it is because we have a term for it. And because these categories at least generally correspond to actual things in the work, these are useful categories that I can tell them as opposed to, we just made some up about how your categories are aura writing and spiritual description, and that would be meaningless. I could tell them to work on their aura writing all day and they wouldn’t know what to do with that. But I can tell them to work on their description and I can, you know, describe what that is if they don’t already know it, and then I can help them that way. And I don’t have to just say, work on your word craft. Just make it better generally. Chris: And I should mention that I think almost all of these terms come from the writing industry in general. I’m not sure I’ve made any of these up, like internalization maybe, but people talk about internal narration, I’m sure of it, all the time. So I’ve just put it into a neat list. We do look at narration. It always does generally fall under one of these types. Now, the other thing being dialogue. Which is not technically narration. Oren: The secret sixth category. Chris: Secret sixth category. As strange as that may sound, ’cause narration means that you have a narrator, whereas dialogue is also something that appears in live action, in a play or a movie when action is unfolding. So it’s technically not narration. We can talk about it a little bit, but unlike the other types of narration, it’s also optional. You can totally have a story with no dialogue and have it work just fine. The other ones, I think they’re gonna be problems if you leave them out. Not that people don’t try. Sometimes people try with some of them, but at least for a novel, when you have a really long work, I think you can do a lot more experimental things if you have just a piece of flash fic or a real short story. But I think any novel that tries to skip one category altogether is gonna run into serious trouble. Oren: I was just gonna say that I think a novel, it would be tough to do one without dialogue, but possible, whereas I don’t see how you could do a novel without one of these types of narration. I just don’t see how it’s possible. Chris: Okay. Should we get started? So number one is description. Oren: I refuse to describe what that means. I won’t do it. Chris: Description is anything that is focused on building a sensory experience that kind of grounds you in the story world, obviously, what things look like, what they sound like, what they feel like. When it’s something that is there not to really build sensory splendor, but just to say, oh, this happened, like somebody shot somebody else, I might not call that description anymore, then I would call that action. But if you have movements that are part of the scenery, like birds flying between the trees, that’s not like an important event in the story, that’s scenery, then I would call that description. Description is pretty frequently neglected in the editing manuscripts we see. Oren: I wrote a book where it was neglected. My description’s average at best. I got no stones to throw. Description, much like some of the others on this list, is one of those things that people often have horror stories about, books that went on way too long with their description. We always make fun of Tolkien for that, and rightly so in some cases. And so as a result, that sometimes makes writers think that they should skimp on it. And also it’s hard to know what’s good description and what’s just going on and on. Chris: The thing I remember in a lot of epic fantasy books is they arrive at a new city and there’s two, three paragraphs telling me exactly what the city looks like, and I oftentimes can’t understand it. It’s boring. I start to skip it. That’s not great. But I do think description is often best when it’s intermixed with other narration instead of in big chunks because it does not move the story forward. It helps with immersion, it helps the story feel real. And when the story feels real, emotion is stronger and the story feels more impactful and that’s great, but the story also can’t move forward. It is stopping to smell the roses, which means that nothing is gonna happen. And so when you have big chunks of it, you end up putting the story off in some way. It’s also great for emphasizing what’s important in the story. Oren: Generally speaking, you describe things that are important more than things that are less important, because otherwise it feels like you’re wasting time. Partly it’s just down to expectations. Like if you describe a random guard with a lot of description, it makes it sound like that guy is important, and if he’s not, your audience is gonna feel misled. But it’s also just a question of being efficient. If you try to describe everything in lots of detail, your book will never get anywhere. So you focus on the things that matter. Chris: But what you do wanna do though, when you are in a scene, is to give readers a sense of the environment and a sense of place. And so a lot of times what I see in manuscripts is there’s just a new scene and a new place, and I have very little idea of what that place looks like, but also just what it feels like. A lot of times it’s about atmosphere. Are we in this sterile clinic with white walls and you can smell the disinfectant? Is that the kind of place you’re in? Or out on the beach and we can hear the waves and smell the salt. Can you smell salt? People talk about smelling salt. I’m not sure I can ever smell salt. Oren: I don’t know if it’s salt, but is a smell I associate with the ocean. Chris: There is a kind of a fishy smell, maybe seaweedy smell. Oren: There is a fishy smell. I don’t know. There’s a different scent that I don’t think of as fishy when I smell it when I’m near the ocean. And maybe that’s salt. I haven’t stood near like big piles of salt to try to figure out if they smell the same. I just know that’s the smell that I associate with the ocean and I have not smelled it, or at least I don’t remember smelling it when I’ve been near, for example, the Great Lake. So I associate that with salt water, regardless if that’s what it actually is. Chris: And if your character is like talking to other people, is everybody sitting around a campfire? Sitting around a table? Is somebody behind a desk? The basics of making it feel like you can imagine the scene. And you don’t wanna get too specific. You don’t wanna pin every aspect of the layout down. It’s about giving enough that readers can fill in the blank, ’cause they have a kind of idea of what kind of place it is, what position people are in, that kind of thing. And especially if you are introducing a fantastical world, like non-earth, then it becomes extra important because I’m curious, I wanna know, what do people dress like? What do the buildings look like? And again, you don’t have to spend tons of words describing every aspect of the building, but it’s a huge difference whether they’re like castles or shanties. Again, it’s about giving enough imagery that you can kind of create that feel, instead of having that blank void. Oren: The next one is action, which can get a little hard to tell the difference because again, we mentioned if you type out that someone is punching someone, did you not simply describe a punch? But it’s, I would say, different because it’s a fundamental difference in what you are portraying to the reader. It’s not a question of what it looked like. You are now describing an action, and if they don’t already know what it looks like, telling someone that a punch happened is gonna create some image in their mind, but not much. If they don’t know what anyone looks like, it’ll just [be] clothing mannequins punching each other, which is funny, but maybe not what you want. Chris: Action is about moving the story forward. These are the events of the story, basically, is what it’s for. And so of course it can be all kinds of things. It can be fights or people hugging each other or having conversation or landslide, rocks fall, everyone dies, any of those things actually happening, but the idea is that it’s a thing that somebody could actually watch. So if you were at a play or looking at a movie, it’s something that you could directly observe That’s action. And obviously its big benefit is that it moves the story forward. It is the main thing that readers are looking for in the story, is to see action unfold, but it also is just kind of weak by itself. Everybody has action. Action is not something that people leave out entirely as far as I know. I suppose there could be some experimental flash fic out there, but it also, when it stands alone, oftentimes it is very rushed and there’s no context that makes it matter. So there can be action, but nobody cares. Oren: I would say that action at least has the greatest potential to carry the story forward, but it doesn’t automatically do that, I would say. If you describe a bunch of random things your character is doing that has nothing to do with your plot, like a random encounter they get into where they’re investigating a murder and on the way to investigate a murder, they get jumped by an alley-worm and the alley-worm’s not related to the murder at all. Nothing about the murder plot changes and they fight the alley-worm. I wouldn’t really say that advances the plot just because by the end of it, you’re not any further along on the murder plot than you were before, just one dead alley-worm now. Chris: It does need the support of a story to be meaningful for sure. So action by itself is not necessarily gonna be brilliant. And you can tell when you’re overusing it, mostly because it starts to become more and more meaningless. If it doesn’t matter to [an] arc that’s happening. If it doesn’t make a difference to that arc, then pretty soon, even if it seems like it would be exciting, it’s going to cease to matter. So you can have a whole bunch of people with swords running and stabbing at each other. And if there’s like no story hook around that, then it could be boring ’cause it needs that story support. Movies and plays often really do have to work hard to try to deliver the information that people need to know. For instance, why is a character doing something? What are they thinking? What’s their plan? Why somebody is doing something is just very important information. And if you have a viewpoint character, that’s usually filled in with other aspects of the narration. Without that, a lot of times people are just confused or even what is happening, not just why are people doing what they’re doing, but even like, what is going on here are some very basic things that readers absolutely need that action cannot supply on its own. Another thing, I talk about this a lot because I just see it a lot in manuscripts, is also making sure that your action does not become summary, which we can talk about next. But basically when you’re in a scene and you want all of the really important moments of the stories to be scene, just to make sure that the story time does not unfold faster than reading time. And if you’re a speed reader, then definitely read out loud time. If you can read it faster than you can act it out on stage, that’s not good. That means you’re in summary and you’re rushing too much. So when people have too much action, not enough other things, they’re very likely to kind of summarize in that way. You just gotta get more detailed and step through the scene slower with smaller actions. Whereas if you have a lot of stuff like people opening the door and walking in and walking out and other little in-between bits, then you may have too much action and you should just try to cut to the chase. Oren: The third vital type of narration is summary, which, you can actually save a lot of time if you just use for the whole story. It’s actually pretty easy. It can usually take just a couple pages and you’re done. Chris: No. Oh no. Yeah, I’m sure that’s what whoever wrote Ministry of Time was thinking. Oren: Oh gosh, oof. Chris: I shouldn’t be so mean to her. It’s her debut work. She did get nominated for a Hugo though, and who knows? She might get it. So she’s doing pretty well for herself. Oren: If you wanna be mean on the Hugo list specifically for having too much summary, you should just be mean to Alien Clay. Chris: I’m sorry, Ministry of Time. Alien Clay is definitely the book that deserves my ire. Tchaikovsky! Oren: It’s like, Alien Clay is literally a book told almost entirely in summary, it is real weird. Chris: And that guy has two books that [are] nominated for Hugos too. Of course the other one is much better. The other one I understand. Oren: One of them’s good and actually deserves to be on the list. The thing about summary is it’s an important tool because a lot of stuff’s gonna happen in your story that is not that interesting, and it would take forever to write it all out and it would be boring if you tried, so you summarize it. The travel between important scenes, you know, your character, spending all day, cleaning the house in preparation for someone coming over. Stuff like that, that is important. You need to summarize it. I have occasionally read manuscripts where the author didn’t know to do that and it was bad. You gotta stop when something important is happening. Chris: But you gotta stop. And with summary [it’s] interesting because it’s still relating events that are at the current timeline of the story, shall we say, but sometimes it’s not really anchored in time. Sometimes it’s like, oh, over the next month, sometimes these things happened. There’s no specific place or time. We just know that this was kind of a trend that happened at some time during these passing moments. And other times it can get very specific. And then in the first week this happened and the second week this happened, but sometimes it’s just unanchored and if it’s ever un anchored and talking about general trends or often this happened instead of like a specific moment, then you definitely summary. Otherwise, that rule about story time versus reading time I think is a good way of judging whether something has veered into summary territory. One thing about it though, is that kind of like borderline, is it action? Is it summary? That is generally not a good area for your narration to be in. I think sometimes you might want it if you have, for instance, a scene and then you just want to skip over like 10 minutes while somebody’s waiting or something, then it might be useful there. But what I sometimes see also in manuscripts is there’s tons and tons of summary and the reason is because the summary isn’t actually summarized enough. Oren: There’s too much information. You spent the day cleaning the house, and you could have just summarized that by saying, I spent the day cleaning the house. But instead you’re like, first I cleaned the living room and I found five dust bunnies. And then I went to the dining room and I found several old raisins. And sometimes details like that can be nice, but if you’re doing a lot of it, ehhhh. Chris: If you find that you have a lot of summary, and again, sometimes you need a lot of summary, but for me, three paragraphs is when it’s time to like, check in. Do I really need three paragraphs of summary or should I condense it down? Is this important? Should I just cut it, or is there something actually important going on here that should actually be in a scene and I should make like a conflict outta that. So the thing about summary is it is very low immersion. It keeps you very distant, and so nothing that happens in there feels very real. So it’s not gonna be very interesting and it’s not gonna be very impactful. The whole point is to just get stuff over with quickly, especially if you have things like, realistically, my character has to do this, or else it’s just unrealistic. Well, nobody’s gonna believe that they didn’t try to go ask somebody for help, for instance, but it doesn’t matter because they’re gonna ask somebody for help and that person’s just gonna say no. And it’s not gonna make any difference. That’s the time when you’d be like, okay, I summarized. They went and called the administrator and be like, Hey, can you help me with this? The administrator’s like, no. Oren: Don’t worry about it. Chris: And then you could just move on. It’s good for that. It’s good for that kind of connective tissue. And in many cases where you have summary, another option is to just cut out and skip forward in time. But skipping forward does need a little bit of text to make sure that the transition is smooth, people can get a little disoriented, and summary still gives you some kind of sense of what happened. It has advantages over a jump. Sometimes a jump is better. Oren: Well, the one that gets me [is] summarizing large amounts of time passing, because obviously you can’t show all of that or even most of it, or even a fraction of it sometimes if it’s a long time. But at the same time, I just can’t get away from the fact that people change over long periods of time, even if no single event is worth pointing out as a scene. And so it feels really weird to me to summarize like several years passing because now it’s like, okay, the character should realistically be different now, but if they just act different from the reader’s perspective, it will seem like they changed for no reason. Chris: I think that’s gonna be a lot easier if you do something to prepare readers for the jump. If you have to do a several year time jump, the character will be like, all right, I guess I’m gonna be here for three years until the portal opens again. And then they start working on, I don’t know, building their hut in the wilderness or something and just start kind of grinding away. And then you jump forward and you see that they’re like, hut now, and they know how to live in this wilderness and they’re getting ready for the portal to open or something. We kind of have a little bit of preparation for such a big time jump like that. Again, we’ve talked about the expected trend rule. It follows an expected trend. It can be summarized. Otherwise, it’s too important. I was talking about the three-year time jump. Ah, geez. I have to wait three years for this portal, and I guess I better set up my hut. What you would expect from there on out is for the character to slowly kind of build up their life in this place and figure out how to patch their clothes or make the clothing they need, figure out their food. Make themselves [more] utensils. It’s expected that those things will happen, and so then therefore you can jump past them. So next we got exposition. Oren: Probably the most contentious one on the list, actually. Chris: I did notice something recently among literary writers, which I think is really funny, and I hope at some point somebody can explain to me why this is. But I’ve noticed literary writers seem to have two modes, which is, one is like the no exposition ever, and the other mode is like all exposition and summary all the time, and it’s such a strange thing. Are they like in two warring camps? I’m now fascinated and I want to know what’s going on here. But generally for the purposes of engaging readers, we want some exposition, but not too much exposition. Basically, exposition is kind of how you fill in the cracks when you need information that [you can] not work in, in other ways that are engaging, we should say, what is it? Oren: Yeah. What is, who knows? Chris: Well, maybe it’s the beginning of a story. I’m just kidding. There’s a stage, an exposition stage, that if you follow some story structures, like Freytag’s pyramid, they’ll be like, and it starts with exposition, and that’s probably where the name of this narration actually comes from. It’s like the explaining part. But exposition is anything that is just unmoored from the current timeline of events. Oren: It’s when the narration just tells you stuff that you need to know, or maybe you don’t need to know if it’s not good exposition. Chris: For instance, summary we talked about sometimes some things aren’t really tied to a specific time, but at the same time, oh geez. It’s not time to talk about time. Oren: We don’t have the time. Chris: We don’t have the time. That’s from First Contact, the best Star Trek movie in my opinion, but I’m sure Oren disagrees. Oren: That’s a hot take. We’ll come back to that later. Chris: Any case, at least with summary, we generally have like a time period that’s in the sequence of events of the story moving forward. Exposition is not the story moving forward anymore, although otherwise it can look just like summary, but instead it’s gonna be maybe back in time, or it’s gonna be things like just plain facts that have no specific time, like the world is round, for instance. So it’s basically just extra information that does not otherwise fit into the story, the sequence of events. And that means that’s a lot of different things and it’s very flexible and you will need that flexibility. But it’s also one of those things where a lot of times we wanna try to do stuff with other types of narration first and then use exposition where it is needed. And so that also means it takes a lot of skill to figure out when to use exposition and when not to. Oren: Also, a big part of it is honestly trying to arrange the story so that you don’t need more than the optimal amount of exposition. I deal with authors all the time who are trying to figure out, my story needs all this exposition. How can I deliver it in such a way that it won’t be boring? And it’s like, well, you probably can’t. Your story needs too much exposition. This concept is too complicated and it takes forever to explain, and it’s counterintuitive. There are better and worse ways to do exposition, but often you just need to control how much is necessary. Chris: Making your story too complex, when you kind of exceed your complexity budget, what happens is that you need tons and tons of exposition to try to explain it all, and readers are confused anyway. And there’s just no way of rescuing it at that point. It’s just gonna be too much. So that is why you just have to proactively simplify everything as you go and make sure that the story is only using what it needs. If you can combine two characters, you should, sometimes you need a minimum number for believability, but even then, if you have a whole ship crew, a lot of times you just try to make people blend into the background. So they don’t take space. You have to simplify to avoid having way more exposition than readers can actually handle. And then also when you plan scenes, scene planning is really important. Scene design is absolutely vital. And knowing how to write a good scene, it means factoring in what readers need to know, but also not letting that override other concerns, making sure you still have a good conflict, that it moves the story forward and we’re not just there to stare at things, so we get information, especially ’cause exposition can often give information a lot faster than showing it in the scene. We see some people who are kind of anti exposition purists and oh man, their stories feel so emotionally dead because you need information to react [to]  ’cause the reader needs to understand the context so that they can emotionally react to things happening. And when you take out too much of that information, metaphors can only do so much, okay? Word craft can only do so much to bring out emotion. You need story and context. And without exposition, it’s not working. Oren: I need to know what’s happening. Otherwise I can’t judge it and I can’t build any emotion around it. Chris: So real quick, we have one more. Oren: Yeah. The last one. Chris: Internalization or internal narration. Oren: Well, this one’s easy. We’ll just do it internally. No one has to listen. Chris: This is thoughts and feelings of your viewpoint character or your main character. If you’re running an omniscient and you’re kind of following one character around and yeah, it’s emotionally important. You wanna understand that character to get to like them, you wanna know why they’re doing what they’re doing, what the plan is, and all of that without enough internalization, that’s gonna hurt emotion. And then messes with the viewpoint too. Like I’ve had some stories that just don’t have enough internalization and it is jarring whenever I find out who the viewpoint character is, because they kind of didn’t feel like the viewpoint character. Oren: You don’t get to know them, you don’t understand how they think, which is like, I thought we were here to read a book about a character. Come on, show me the character, please. Chris: Internalization is also usually a doorway into exposition. Like you start with the character thinking and then they’re reminded of something and then you kind of lead into exposition. So if there is no internal narration, then usually exposition is also lacking, which is a problem as we mentioned. Oren: I would recommend though, if you’re like me and you’re working on some kind of very close narrated story that has a lot of internalizing, maybe you’re using a first person retelling narrative or what have you, I would recommend reading Shield of Sparrows because it will be a wake up call for how you can have way too much of that. Chris: If you write in first person, especially a first person, like a retelling, like a retrospective viewpoint where it’s a future first person looking back instead of staying in the moment. But Shield of Sparrows isn’t a retelling. It’s in the moment and it’s still too much. Anybody can be too verbose, but first person tends to get people in the mindset. It tends to encourage a casual conversational narration that tends to lead onto going on too long. So find that book that is for you just too much. Oren: I haven’t read that many authors who have had too much internalizing, but it does exist. It can happen. And Shield of Sparrows taught me that. It’s like, no, please, I don’t need another aside what you’re thinking right now. We’ve already had three of those in this scene. No more, please. Chris: The thing that gets me is during dialogue, because a lot of times authors really wanna explain not just what the viewpoint character is saying, but actually what other characters are saying. So this other character will say this subtle line, and then the viewpoint character will think like a translation of it for the reader. Oh, that must mean, here’s a deep [hint] and flavors of meaning behind this one line. It’s like, oh, come on. I understand the impulse to do this, but it slows the dialogue way down and just ruins the pacing. And that’s just something you should be showing. Show it by describing their body language and what they say, instead of telling exactly what they mean all the time. Oren: But what if the character that I am translating for is a really skilled actor who brings across their meaning so subtly that it can’t really be captured consciously. It’s just subconscious signals. Then can I do it? Chris: Well, they can just look into each other’s eyes and read their mind. Oren: Yes. Perfect. I’m glad we figured that out. Chris: Or characters thinking about their response. Like somebody just straight up asks them a question and then they think about their response for like several paragraphs and it’s like, uh, that person is waiting for you to answer the question. Oren: You could make that a thing. You could make them like, clear their throat, be like, yeah, are you okay? And they’re like, oh, I’ve been thinking for quite a while. Oops. Chris: Sometimes they do do that, but just be aware that any type of narration, when you put in more narration, it gives a reader a sense of passing time because well, reading it takes time. So time is passing for them. So the more narration you have, the more time passes, and so there’s this one scene in Crescent City where I think Bryce grabs a doorknob and is [about] to walk down into the stairs or through the hall or through a doorway or something, and there’s so much exposition at the beginning of Crescent City. She thinks about something and it goes in paragraphs of exposition, and then she still hasn’t crossed the doorway. And I’m like, she is just hanging out in that doorway, thinking really hard for several paragraphs. Oren: Yeah, she’s just hanging out. You’re trying to bust her for loitering. What are you, a cop? Well, with that, I think we will go ahead and call this episode to a close. Chris: And if you found that informative, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel, and then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll 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.

Imagine this scenario: two characters start the story fighting but end it kissing. Sounds completely implausible, right? Surely, this could never be a trope that single-handedly keeps BookTok afloat! But if you were to try writing such a story, how would you do it? This week, we’re talking about what it takes to write a successful enemies to lovers romance, which of course starts with a debate over what exactly an enemy is. This is still Mythcreants; did you think we weren’t doing sandwich discourse? Show Notes Bully Romance Shield of Sparrows  Fourth Wing Personality Clashes Friendship Rifts Mara Jade  Spinning Silver  Crescent City The Cruel Prince  This Is How You Lose the Time War Gul Dukat Kira Nerys  Sorsha Madmartigan 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] Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is… Bunny: Bunny. Chris: And… Oren: Oren. Chris: I’m afraid we have a new podcast nemesis. They’re constantly making snarky jokes at our expense, which, excuse me, is our brand.  Bunny: Ah! The nerve. Oren: We hates it.  Chris: I know, right? And these jokes, they’re really deep cut, like they’ve been listening to every episode. So clearly the only way to settle this is to challenge them to a podcast-off. Where their hosts come on our podcast and our hosts go on their podcasts. To fight. Of course. Just to fight.  Bunny: Yeah. We’ll get ’em. Chris: Nothing else. Nothing else going on here. We don’t even like them.  Oren: Well, what else could be going on here? I don’t even know.  Bunny: We hate their guts and they hate ours, and that’s all there is to it.  Oren: That’s all it will ever be.  Bunny: We are just enemies.  Chris, Oren: [Chuckle] Chris: It’s interesting how we managed to make podcasts into people. Look, don’t wanna make a romance joke about the actual hosts of this podcast. So that’s what we’re left with. This is what we resort to. So we’re talking about enemies to lovers.  Bunny: We have had, by this point, multiple meta podcast romances in the setups of our episodes, I believe.  Chris: It happens every time we cover romance. [Laughs] Oren: It’s just something that needs to happen, okay? That’s just a ritual we have to perform now. Otherwise, the machine spirit will be angry.  Bunny: Yes, it’s true. It’s true.  Chris: It’s true. Podcast will take her revenge. We do not offer her proper tribute. Okay! So, enemies to lovers. So first, what are enemies?  Oren: From what I can tell, it’s when a man treats a woman like shit for 200 pages and she occasionally doesn’t like it. That’s been my experience with enemies to lovers books.  Bunny: That’s pretty mean of her. She should apologize.  Oren: She kind of went too far. I think we can all agree, right?  Bunny: Yeah. Oren: I found out recently there’s a subgenre called “bully romance” that maybe that’s what these books should be filed under. But then I looked up more of it and apparently that subgenre generally involves a big groveling scene where the guy admits he was wrong and begs forgiveness. Which, whether you like that or not, is more than some of these supposed enemies to lovers books have. So no, they can’t be bully romances. They don’t meet that bar. They’re too far down.  Chris: So Oren is thinking about Shield of Sparrows, which I read the beginning to do a critique post that is now out, and then Oren was like, “But I have to read it. The title is so good.” And I’m like, “Oren, this is not a good book.” He’s like, “No, but the title, it calls to me.”  Bunny: Oren, the title is not even that good.  Oren: I like that title. I’m sad that that’s the book that exists, is the one that got that title.  Chris: So he got it in audio and since he had it, I was like, “All right, I guess I’m listening to it too.” So we both listened to the entire book. Bunny: Trapped into listening to Shield of Sparrows.  Chris: And it’s advertised as enemies to lovers, but no, he’s just the biggest jerk. Then suddenly his personality changes partway through. Then he just kind of stops and then we just completely forget about it. So there’s no amends at all of any kind.  Bunny: So this is the one where she pretends she’s gonna jump off a cliff at the beginning?  Chris: Yeah. Mm-hmm.  Oren: Well, no, she’s not pretending she’s gonna jump off a cliff. Chris: She is going to. But–  Oren: The book is pretending that it’s a possible suicide, is what the book is pretending, but it’s actually just her jumping into the water, which is a thing she does regularly. So, that’s fun, I guess.  Bunny: Standing dramatically on a… cliff.   Chris: So she’s like, “What will happen? Will I fly, or will I fall?” And it’s like, you’ve done this before. Do you think something different is gonna happen than last time?  Bunny: I stand over the lap pool, goggles in hand. What if I jumped?  Chris, Oren: [Laugh] Chris: But this book is advertised as enemies to lovers and if I’m being fair, there are a lot of blurry things. It’s pretty common in romance for the lovebirds to hate each other at first. And knowing when it goes far enough that you call it enemies to lovers can be kind of hard. I’ve been in that situation before.  But, at the same time, this is just clearly not it, because it’s not going both ways. He is mean to her for literally no reason. I suppose this is kind of spoilers for chapter three, but it’s so obvious I’m not really worried about it. But basically in the beginning, the idea is that her sister is in this elaborate arranged marriage to become the crown princess of another nation. And of course we quickly swap that so that it’s her instead.  Oren: For reasons.  Chris: And the love interest is called the “Guardian.” He eventually gets a name, but not for a very long time. Basically chose her and decided that we should play switcheroo and she clearly doesn’t like it. So then after he basically forces her to get in this arranged marriage, not just asking her dad, but pressuring her dad into it. Then he’s just really mean and resentful as though this is her fault. That just happens and she probably never fights back and he just comes and just makes a point of following her around just to insult her some more.  Bunny: Oh my gosh.  Chris: So, it’s pretty unsatisfying.  Oren: And I have read a few other books, there is supposed to be a conflict between the lovebirds and it is not equivalent. This is, I think, the most extreme I’ve ever seen it. Where it’s like, that’s weird. It’s really weird how awful he is. And then he just suddenly stops and we never talk about it again. I am happy to say that’s a bit of an outlier. Bunny: They should have an equal number of dislike and an equal ability to get under each other’s skin. They should probably be on the same level, for instance, so that if it was a boss and an employee, that would be a weird dynamic. They should be able to punch evenly at each other rather than up and down. Chris: This goes back to what we were saying when we were covering banter, right? About how do you make the banter not… If you want them to be enemies, you may want them to be mean at some level. At the same time, there’s some ways that you can do that, that it seems fair and some ways where it just seems gross. Having them both doing it and being on the same level with each other is an important part of that. Otherwise, again, you’ve got more bully dynamic. And I’m not into that. I understand other people are into that, but having him grovel afterwards seems like the least you could do if you’re doing a bully romance. And also, what are the taunts about? One of the things that makes this so gross and makes him so unlikeable, this Guardian guy, is the fact that he makes frequent sexual remarks about her that feel inappropriate. She had a fiancé that they broke off that engagement, to force her. And then he decides it’s a great time to be like, “Are you spreading your legs for this other guy?” And it’s like, he was her fiancé, and you decided to take her away from him. This is weird. Again, a weird thing to get mad at and also makes it feel punching down because it’s a man talking to a woman. And luckily, this setting is actually surprisingly sexually liberated. Which, the kingdom is supposed to be patriarchal, so it’s a little unrealistic, but whatever. But nonetheless, the real world context is that kind of thing is just really gross. And so any kind of using slurs or punching down, it’s just always gonna feel particularly bad. Oren: Maybe this isn’t the expectation other people have, but when I see a book or any story advertised as enemies to lovers, I expect them to be enemies.  Chris: Okay, so what is an enemy? Now you gotta define it.  Oren: People who work at cross-purposes. That’s my basic definition of an enemy. I know a lot of people I don’t like, almost none of them are my enemies. They’re just people I don’t enjoy spending time with. I’ve only in my life had two or three people who I would consider even mild enemies because we were working at cross-purposes.  One guy at a place I used to work really didn’t like me, and the rumor is that he was the reason I never got a job higher up. Who knows if that’s true, right? But if it was true, he was at least mildly my enemy. There are a couple of other people like that, but it’s very rare. Most of the time I just don’t like somebody.  Bunny: You mean it’s not enough for me to get my dog’s leash tangled in the leash of a cute guy, and then we stumble into each other and the dogs wrap around us and I’m like, “Oh! Well I’d never.” And he spills his coffee on me and he’s like, “You got in my way.” Oren: Technically the dog is your enemy now. I’m sorry about that.  Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Laugh] Oren: You are enemies of the good boy.  Bunny: Oh no, there’s no coming back.  Chris: Okay, for instance, here’s an example that I think works, I don’t think you have to super lean into the cross-purposes if you have other stuff going on. So, Fourth Wing, Violet and Xaden, I think that qualifies as enemies to lovers. They do warm up pretty fast, so they’re not enemies for that long. But at the same time, what they have is family history. Once they’re in school and they realize that they both are actually pretty good people, they don’t have cross-purposes anymore, but they think that they might. There’s mutual distrust because of a background where their family members killed each other during this rebellion that happened.  When she goes to Dragon Academy… Actually, it’s really funny ’cause it’s just so tropey, so blatantly obvious. Where it’s like, “Oh, and last thing, don’t go anywhere near Xaden Riorson.” It’s like, okay, that’s the love interest, huh?  Oren: Don’t do it.  Bunny: “So, I went near Xaden Riorson.” Chris: And immediately, “Oh wow. This guy, he’s so hot. He’s the hottest guy I’ve ever seen. Look at how hot this guy is. And what?! He’s Xaden?”  Bunny: “Xaden… who…?” I do think you can slot the types of adversarial relationships into a couple different buckets. And the one that you’re describing there is one that I’m calling “political factions,” where they’re part of adversarial factions with opposite aims or that they have bad blood, like… Romeo and Juliet isn’t enemies to lovers, but it is the “Montague/Capulet” dynamic. Or if Dune had a romance between the Harkonnens and Atreides, that would qualify. Oren: There’s a lot of fanfic about that, so sure.   Bunny: I’m sure you could find plenty on AO3. Officially. And then I think that’s also shades of the competitive rivals, for lack of a better word. Which is where it’s more circumstantial dislike, and they’re working against each other for a goal that they can’t both win. So both wanna be the concert master of the orchestra, or the starting quarterback, or they’re both competing for the same grant. I think that qualifies.  Chris: I think if you make rivals, you really gotta have them compete over something. To make it intense enough. But I think you could have a situation where there’s just kind of deep personal history that’s kind of bitter.  Bunny: I call that one “sworn enemies!” Deep interpersonal conflict! They’ve been wronged or they’ve wronged each other, or there’s a big misunderstanding. I feel like this one is difficult to pull off if they have a bad history with each other, because what you don’t want is for one of them to have had a very good reason to cut off the other one. If one of them has gone too far.  Chris: It’s the same with personality clashes. You can do a good personality clash that creates interpersonal conflict, but a lot of writers have trouble just not making either character a jerk. So I have an article that lists ideas for personality clashes where they can both be a little bit wrong. And, for personal history, I have one that I put out recently that’s how friends can have a rift between them, and that one’s meant for them to make up. But you could probably take some of my list there, for a past breakup and use something like that if you need ideas for how to have them have bad blood in their background and to make them both a little wrong. So it’s not just one person’s terrible.  Oren: I’ve noticed that, at least in successful stories, maybe this is just because the books that I read tend to have romance as a side plot. I’ve noticed that there are way more enemies to lovers in TV shows that I watched, than in books. I was really struggling to come up with ones with examples from books, but I think of TV shows, it’s like, “Oh, Catra and Adora, Buffy and Spike.” But it was pretty easy to find some, and with books, I was like, “Uh, Luke and Mara Jade, I guess?”  Chris: I think Spinning Silver, Miryem and the Staryk qualify. So that’s a situation where the reason I think it qualifies, is Miryem does kind of get him back at some point. As opposed to, there’s another romance in there that has some similar dynamics, but isn’t as good, between Irina and this prince. And at that point he’s got an evil demon in him and is doing bad things ’cause of his demon and she’s just, surviving. And that does not feel like enemies to lovers.  With Miryem, first the Staryk comes just like, “Hey, you can, basically metaphorically turn silver into gold.” Well, no, it’s literal but not magical. It’s not really metaphorical. “You could literally turn silver into gold. That’s useful to me. I don’t really care what happens to you as long as I get this gold because my kingdom needs it.” And then after he’s basically put her through enough, she finds a way to escape that ends up getting him in trouble. So she’s able to throw her own punches.  Oren: That would meet my working at cross-purposes definition from earlier. This part is kind of interesting. So on a whim, I decided to look up and see if the first Crescent City book is advertised as enemies to lovers because I wouldn’t describe it that way, but the two characters don’t like each other when they first meet, and sometimes seems to be all it takes.  It’s not advertised that way, which is interesting. Although it is advertised as “fae.” Which seems like false advertising to me. There are some fae in there, but none of them are the romance interest. Chris: In that setting isn’t everybody fae? Everybody magical? Oren: No, they’re all called “Vanir” for some reason. Might as well take a random Norse term, I guess. The main love interest is like, an angel, and the main character’s brother is fae. And admittedly, her brother is written enough like a rival romance interest that I kind of wonder if originally that’s what that character was. Chris: Interesting.  Oren: I didn’t like it. Her brother is really possessive of her. Granted, so is the love interest. So, whatever. But it was weird. It was like, this doesn’t really feel like a brother character to me.  Bunny: I don’t know how these are arranged, but if you look up enemies to lovers and then just go to the first Goodreads page that shows up, the very top one is The Cruel Prince, followed by Fourth Wing. Chris: Yep, yep. The Cruel Prince. I also did a critique of that, but didn’t get introduced to the love interest. Isn’t that one a bully romance? Maybe?  Bunny: I can’t help you there.  Chris: A romantasy I’m sure, because romantasy typically has some really high stakes, lots happening alongside the romance. So that’s where I would expect to see at least some enemies to lovers.  Bunny: “Danger boys.”  Chris: Mm-hmm. But anyway, obviously romance starts, you establish they’re enemies, generally working at cross-purposes. Usually they also dislike each other at some level. And then the next thing that has to happen is, you have to force them together. Oren: And I do wonder if maybe that’s also part of the reason why I tend to see this more in TV than in books. Because I think in TV we are just more willing to accept contrivances to get characters on screen together at the same time. This is my new working hypothesis. Whereas with books, I have often struggled to find reasons why the protagonist and the antagonist should be in the same space, even when I’m not trying to make them fall in love. I just need them to interact a little bit.  Bunny: TV series also have more time to unspool that. That might also be part of it.  Chris: This is again, what we talk about with the, I commonly call the “push and pull” romance, where you need something that pushes them together and something that pulls ’em apart. And a lot of romances, they are already into each other and it’s tough to figure out reasons why they can’t get together yet.  But if we start with enemies, then the first thing you need is something that actually forces them together. And that’s something that usually just has to be at the center of the story, has to be important to the plot. It’s not easy to think of that last minute. Need to be in the same room. So an alliance of necessity, even for enemies. Introduce another enemy, give them a common enemy so that they have to work together. Trap them in a place together, called “trapped in a labyrinth.” Or they get trapped in a haunted castle, something. Bunny: An elevator. Chris: [Laughs] Hopefully not a whole novel in the elevator.  Oren: I can see it working if they interact a lot because they’re going head to head in in various conflicts a lot. I can see that working as a way to build romantic chemistry. Now you need to be careful that the mood fits what they’re doing. It’s probably not gonna be good flirting if this is a super serious, gritty story about trying to protect refugees. It’s gonna seem real weird if your characters are flirting while fighting over that.  Chris: If they’re already classmates or coworkers, that’s certainly a lot easier. “Oh, they have to share a class.” Even then, it can be useful. Like, we have a competition in school. They butt heads. Then because they were fighting, they both get in trouble and then they do detention together.  Oren: That’s classic. They gotta clean the school or something. And then the school sends them to do something that is irrationally dangerous, that a school would never do, and then they have to bond. Bunny, Chris: [Laugh] Oren: There. We solved it. We figured it out, guys.  Bunny: Or the “buddy cop” thing. And we have a whole episode on that, where they have a run in and they dislike each other and, “Oh, you got in my way during this caper.” And, “Oh, you shouldn’t have, you were the one who got in my way.” And then the boss summons one of them into the office and is like, “I’ve got a new job for you. And you’ll be working with… [Dramatic Gasp] That person you butted heads with.” Uh oh!  Chris: Yep. An authority figure who can–  Bunny: They’re like, “Fine, we’ll work together. But. Just. This. Once!”  Chris: –Authority figure who can put them on the same team of some kind is helpful.  Bunny: I do think they need to have face-to-face time when they’re doing something other than hitting swords together, because then they can see each other in a different context. But I do like flirting while they’re hitting swords together. That is fun.  Chris: Why do enemies to lovers if they’re not gonna flirt while they’re fighting with each other? [Laughs]  Oren: First one then the other, right?  Chris: You could probably have a situation where they’re in competition or fighting and it goes too far and they’re actually sorry, and then they talk to each other. That would be a little bit trickier to finagle. But I do think that something that forces a little bit more conversation besides them just opposing each other is helpful, anyway.  Oren: I do think there should still be some challenge and obstacle to them getting together because it’s possible to go too far in the other direction. And that was my main beef with This Is How You Lose the Time War. I think that’s the title? Chris: Yep, yep. Oren: Because technically we have two characters on opposite sides of a fight, but the fight doesn’t matter to either of them. [Chuckles] They have no attachment to their cause. Chris: That book, honestly, it doesn’t really have any tension. It’s just one long love letter. It’s just poetry. It’s an interesting work, but the plot doesn’t really function particularly well because you don’t really understand what’s happening at all. You can’t anticipate what they can and they can’t do. Everything is made up as the characters go along, and things just kind of happen, but it doesn’t have what it needs to create an actual tension or a sense of obstacles. But it’s very pretty. That one is kind of an odd case.  But certainly if you do something like, their factions decide to make up with a marriage alliance, and what do you know? Now they are supposed to get married to each other. You’re gonna have to switch… Again, was why I think it’s helpful to also have some kind of personal history, or dislike, or something where they butt heads without all of those external factors. So they have that to get through.  And also, it’s not as much fun if they’re technically at cross-purposes, but they’re really nice about it. That could be a fun dynamic, but that’s not really what we’re going for usually with enemies to lovers.  Bunny: That’s the “Aziraphale/Crowley” dynamic.  Oren: You usually want some kind of hostility, otherwise what are we overcoming here?  Chris: And then of course once they are forced together, usually having them work surprisingly well together is a good way to start to get them to warm up to each other. Oren: Then you gotta remember your basic romance fundamentals. They still gotta be better together than they are apart. They gotta have things that draw them together, that sort of thing. Can’t just be like, “All right, well now we’re stuck together and we used to fight, but now we kiss instead.” Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Chuckle] Bunny: No, they have to kiss. But in kind of an angry way. That’s how you know. Oren: That’s exactly right. If one of them is the villain, you wanna make sure that they haven’t crossed the moral event horizon. That’s why it would’ve been a bad idea for Dukat and Kira from Deep Space Nine to be a couple. It’s a little unclear if that was ever actually a serious idea, but you hear various behind the scenes reports that that was something they were considering. And thank God they didn’t do that.  Chris: That would’ve been bad.  Oren: That would’ve been real bad. And the reason is that– Bunny: Oops, all genocide. Oren: –Dukat, even before he became a full villain, had overseen a horrible military occupation that was just too evil. He can’t be a good romance interest for Kira after that.  Chris: I also think the actress objected to that.  Oren: I’ve seen different accounts of it. The most recent one I looked up, the writers talked about it and were like, “Yeah, that was never a serious idea, but it had been suggested by someone at some point.” And there were some episodes that made fans wonder if they were going in that direction. But your villain doesn’t necessarily have to have been a genocide guy to have crossed the moral event horizon. There are less extreme ways that they could become too evil to have a good romance with.  Chris: Just coming to mind ’cause we were talking about books versus movies… And obviously some of the enemies to lovers we have seen have actually specifically been TV shows like Adora and Catra. And TV shows have usually a lot of time to develop characters if they have the same cast. Not anymore… Oren: Now it’s a lot less. Chris: [Laughing] But once upon a time they did. They got enough episodes. Whereas I’m thinking of Willow, the original 1989 movie, which still is a surprisingly good movie. Has held up pretty well, and it has this romance between Madmartigan and, ah man… Oren: Sorsha. Chris: Sorsha. And I honestly think that they do a really good job of finding ways to have them interact and build chemistry despite the fact that they are on violently opposing teams. Where, first she captures him, then he captures her. If you need a way to force them together, having one side capture the other and then use him as a hostage or compel them to help in some way, can be one way of doing that while keeping up a lot of the antagonism. And we have a whole scenario where they have a love potion, but luckily they don’t get too creepy with it. Bunny: I still get a little creepy with it. That scene gave me the willies. Chris: Where he goes in and starts spouting love poetry to her in her tent. When he is supposed to be grabbing the baby and running.  Oren: At least she’s not using it on purpose to try to seduce him. That’s where the bar is on love potions. Chris: The fact is that she didn’t use it on purpose. He had another reason for going into her tent, I think is also important. He didn’t actually go into her tent to creep on her. He needed to get the baby back and then saw her and the love potion took effect. There’s some things that make it better than most instances.  But in any case, they have this back and forth, and then later he takes her hostage and it kind of gives them exposure to each other. But they didn’t have a good way in the movie, and I think partly ’cause they just didn’t have enough time, to get her to realistically come over to the other side. So she just spontaneously watches him kill a dragon and then she’s like, “That’s hot.” [Laughs] Oren: She’s into it. [Laughs] Chris: She just instantly is on the other side. It’s real weird. So, do think that books have the advantage there. But sometimes, if one side is supposed to be, “Oh no, we’re the baddies,” you’re gonna need time to give that character their own incentive to realize that or leave. Oren: They need to believably change sides, and with her, she went from being into Madmartigan as an enemy to suddenly deciding that that overrode her previous loyalties. Chris: To her mother. And her mother’s evil. But at the same time, she clearly wanted to please her mother before. She was clearly going for motherly approval. And something in there to help her reevaluate that. And it could have been caused by Madmartigan. If they’d had time. But that would’ve really helped that plot.  Oren: We needed another couple episodes worth of time to make that believable.  Chris: I do think with novels, one of the helpful things about enemies of lovers is sometimes, people can run out of obstacles. And so it does extend the amount of time that you can have their romance last, because they started out as enemies. And then once you get them past that, you have to introduce new obstacles. But that’s still more than if they started out, liking each other better. So it gives them more distance that they have to get across in order for the romance to happen. And that takes time. But a novel often has a fair amount of time, especially if you’re not splitting it into a million viewpoints. Oren: All right, well, with our evergreen advice to not split the story into a million viewpoints, we will go ahead and call this one to a close. Chris: If you enjoyed this podcast, 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] Outro: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.

You shouldn’t have any problems keeping up with the references we make in this podcast. You just need to watch several TV series, a bunch of movies, read a nine-book series, and also study Irish history for some reason. Some books feel that way too, with characters making all kinds of pop culture references that readers might or might not have context for. And what should you do when your fictional world needs pop culture of its own? We’ve got some tips, and also some deep cut Star Trek lore, as always. Show Notes The Perils of Pauline Musketeers of Pig Alley Jolene The Irish Unification of 2024 The Troubles  Feed The Expanse  Post-Avatar Depression Ready Player One Artemis  Kaiju Preservation Society  Snow Crash Toss a Coin to Your Witcher Shield of Sparrows Murderbot Dead Cat Tail Assassins Holonovel  Neuromancer Environmental Storytelling Transcript Generously transcribed by Savannah. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris:  You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny. [Intro theme]  Bunny: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Bunny. And with me is− Oren: Oren.  Bunny: And− Chris: Chris.  Bunny: And, you guys, lately I’ve been realizing that like every time we criticize a popular story, I feel like Pauline. You know what I mean? Chris: Oh yeah, totally. I definitely know who Pauline is.  Bunny: I keep expecting Blinky Bill to show up. Like, come on, we’re gonna end up on the train tracks if we’re not being careful.  Oren: Is Pauline Jolene’s cousin? Is she also worried that someone will take her man?  Bunny: No. You know, Pauline? Pauline stole Jolene? Oren: There are sapphic versions of that song, so don’t even worry about it.  Bunny: Yeah, what if we start feuding with another podcast? It could turn into a real Musketeers of Pig Alley situation, right?  Oren: Yeah, absolutely.  Chris: Yes, absolutely.  Oren: Were there also− How many Musketeers, did it say there were three but actually four? That’s a Musketeers reference I get.  Bunny: I know one of them’s called the Snapper Kid.  Chris: Wait, one of the Musketeers? Bunny: This is one of the Musketeers in The Musketeers of Pig Alley, which was a 1910s movie about gang violence.  Chris: Oh yes. The very classic Musketeers of Pig Alley. Oren: Look, it’s old. It must be good. That’s just how these things work.  Bunny: And The Perils of Pauline, which was another 1910s TV serial, and I bring these up very cleverly because we are talking about pop culture and fiction. And one thing that fiction referencing pop culture often does is that it is set in the future and pretends like pop culture from a hundred years ago is still the hot thing on everyone’s mind. Oren: It’s the Star Trek thing where they’re like, ah, the greatest people in their field: Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Gababoobadeeboo! And then you−our new character that we’ve just met−it’s like, wait, hang on. Who is that one in the middle? That’s just some rando that’s a Star Trek person. Chris: At least Star Trek tries. I still remember when they got in big trouble with the UK or Ireland because they added an event.  Oren: Yeah, the Irish Unification of 2024.  Chris: Created a political incident where that episode was taken off the air in certain countries.  Oren: That was a big deal at the time. That was not a good thing to have on TV.  Bunny: Oh my gosh.  Chris: And that’s, again, just because they were trying to make a list of important events, and they needed something to happen in the future, and they made the mistake of choosing something real.  Oren: Personally, I don’t think that was a mistake. I think that was on purpose. Chris: You think they were trying to make a political statement?  Oren: I think so. Nowadays we tend to−this is vastly oversimplifying it−but we tend to think of Ireland as a pretty peaceful place. But let’s just say that when the episode we’re talking about was made, the violence was a lot more recent than that. Chris: Wow, okay. (not sarcastic) Oren: So, I think that was on purpose.  Bunny: Most people only learn about the troubles in Ireland from like, I don’t know, Peaky Blinders.  Oren: A lot of people think about that era as being way longer ago than it was, which is interesting. But I do suspect that Star Trek episode did that on purpose. Bunny: Fascinating, I look forward to your manifesto on this.  Oren: There we go.  Bunny: Anyway, drop in the comments if either anyone got my timely references to The Perils of Pauline and Musketeers of Pig Alley.  Oren: I was worried because Disney Plus keeps trying to give me this new show called Pauline to watch, and I was like, is that what this is? Should I have watched that?  Chris: Oh no, there’s all this buzz about a show! Quick, we gotta go watch it! Bunny: Ugh, exhausting. I’m glad I’m not in some sort of position where I would be expected to keep up with TV shows because I’m on some sort of podcast and then just simply don’t. Oren: We hates it, Precious.  Bunny: So, the topic of this podcast is pop culture and fiction, both referencing real life pop culture and creating your own pop culture. And I struggle with this a lot−which is why I decided to lead an episode about it−because most references to real world pop culture and fiction feel really cringey and obnoxious to me. And, most folks do not spend a lot of time fleshing out their own pop culture if it’s separate from real life pop culture. But I do think hypothetically, probably, both can be done well.  Chris: One thing that I’ve seen a lot of in recent years, for obvious reasons, is shows especially that want to, or sometimes books though, that want to replicate internet culture in some way. Right? Within the story. And a lot of times it is bad. I still laugh at the Mira Grant book Feed, because the main characters are bloggers, but they’re really big bloggers. Like the top social media influencers we have today except they’re blogging, and they follow this politician who I think is−they say he’s a Republican, but it doesn’t feel like the audience is for Republicans. It’s one of those really optimistic works where you see, “I’m totally unbiased because I have a good Republican character, and see how reasonable he is?”  Oren: This was a little more believable in 2012 than it is now, but even at the time it did raise my eyebrows a little. Chris: So then they’re following along and covering his campaign, and unfortunately I know about blogging, so when Mira Grant comes up with titles for their posts, I know how bad they are, and that no one would click on them. And then they’re like, this blog post about this politician’s campaign is “number three” on the internet. And I’m like, what do you mean “number three”? Bunny: You know, when you open “The Internet”, it says “Trending”.  Chris: By what measure? In what way? And the idea that “number three” would be some political campaign and not a cute cat or porn or something…? Oren: I have so many questions about A) how they’re measuring that, and B) what gross stuff did they have to remove from the rankings? Chris: That one is just classically funny. But more recently, there’s stuff where people have content that goes viral when it obviously wouldn’t go viral. I mean, that one’s a tough one. If you want something to go viral in your story−because things only go viral if they’re really surprising−they have to be different than anything that’s come before, for the most part. So if it was possible to replicate, people would be doing it on purpose all the time. Instead, people who do make content to go viral, usually just spam tons and tons of content, and wait for something to be picked up a little bit.  Oren: One of The Expanse books ended like that. The big climactic ending was that they had like a viral crowdfunder. Chris: Wait, didn’t a character invent crowdfunding?  Oren: Yeah, a character basically invents crowdfunding.  Chris: That always cracks me up, when somebody events something in another world that exists in our world.  Oren: Again, this was early enough that crowdfunding wasn’t as big as it is now, but it definitely existed, and so it was very funny that A) this person invented crowdfunding, and B) their crowdfunding campaign went viral because they needed to save their daughter. And this is a space system that has 10 billion people in it. How many of those 10 billion need to save a child? And they’re trying to crowdfund that? Because that’s the world we live in today, where everyone’s crowdfunding is “I need to save this young child”. And often they’re real and horrible, and then sometimes they’re fake and horrible. So the idea that that would be enough to cut through the noise is absurd.  Chris: I will say if you want something to go viral, I think your best bet realistically is to set up some sort of societal context where something is going on, where people are just primed for this content, right? There’s a big controversy already. There’s a big news event. There’s a big tragedy. And then this content comes up as the perfect representation. You know? For instance, an image that goes viral because there’s a hurricane. And it’s a dramatic image of that hurricane. Or people are mad about something, and something happens that is a perfect representation of what they’re mad about. That kind of thing can kind of give it the leg up in making it feel more likely that people will be passing this around than just, “Oh, I did something funny. I made a funny noise, and it went viral!” Bunny: One of the reasons people do include pop culture references is just immersion, right? They grew up in the 2010s, and or they grew up in the 1910s and love Pauline and Peril. They might naturally reference these things. I do think that’s one of the less common reasons, though, at least in terms of explicit references. Explicit meaning direct references. You’re naming the specific thing rather than just being like, “Ah, that serial of times when a woman gets into peril” in a vague sense. Actually saying the name of the thing. I don’t find very often that authors do that to be immersive. Usually, they’re doing that as a shorthand for saying this thing is like this other thing. Or for humor. I think those are the two main things.  Oren: Pop culture jokes are pretty popular. I’ve found that they tend to work better in movies than novels because movies get stuck in development hell all the time, but at least in theory, a movie can come out on a shorter timescale, and you can edit the script to make different references before you start filming. And that can be a little bit easier, whereas a novel will often be stuck in your drawer for 10 years. So the references are more likely to age much faster.  Chris: I have evergreen articles where I couldn’t help referencing something going on that day, and when I look back at them I’m like, yeah, I probably shouldn’t have done that. It just very quickly feels dated, and fiction, again, takes a really long time to go through the publishing process often. I do think it works better when you feel like the story is actually about that time period in some way. If it’s an 80s period piece basically, then it makes sense to have a lot of 80s references in there. That feels like that story is meant to capture a certain time, a certain year, and there’s a purpose towards all those references, even if they’re a little out-of-date. I think that works a little better than if you have a piece, it feels like it’s supposed to be a little timeless, but then there’s random pop culture references from that year in there. Oren: Although, it is funny because what you’re really doing is making references to things that people in the modern day associate with that time period. Or at least that’s what most people are doing. It would be really funny to do a 2008 period piece and have everyone talking about Avatar, the James Cameron movie. No one talks about that anymore. The moment a new one comes out, we immediately forget about it. But it was super popular! Everyone was seeing it. But I don’t think that would evoke that time period in the same way that the campaign of Barack Obama would. That’s the thing people associate with that year. Bunny: And since you’re talking about classic 80s, I have to shit on Ready Player One a little bit. Which is one of those cases which−Okay, at least Ready Player One has an in-story justification for why everything is 08s-ified, which is that its creator built the platform on 80s worship. But this is probably patient zero of the pop-culture-hasn’t-advanced-at-all-since-pretty-much-the-eighties. Chris: Because this is a future that worships the 80s.  Bunny: The premise is that the creator of the virtual world really liked the 80s, and he’s designed a quest for control of the virtual world after his death that is centered on 80s references. So people spend their life devoted to studying obscure crap from the 80s, and we never see anything that suggests the 2000s existed. Or anything past 1995, maybe. There is nothing new. It’s all just 80s, 80s, 80s used in the laziest way possible, because most of it−and this is a trap that a lot of pop culture reference falls into−is instead of describing something, using a reference to describe it. Instead of describing something, you say it’s like the other thing. So if you don’t know what the other thing is, then you’re kind of adrift. And Klein, the author, will also do this in the vaguest possible way. Instead of describing colorful details, like the haircuts that people have, he’ll be like, “A variety of 80s haircuts”.  Oren: Oh, that’s nice.  Bunny: At one point he goes to a club, and I think the exact phrase is that he performs a variety of 80s dance moves. Which, like, great, if this is supposed to be a love letter to the 80s, can’t you be more specific? Chris: That’s definitely a show don’t tell issue there.  Bunny: That is a huge issue with over-reliance on real-life pop culture. You’re telling people what to think.  Chris: With the 80s hairdos, it’s also particularly funny because they’re not hard to describe. The US in the 80s, noted for having really curled, high volume, just lots of hair everywhere. Bunny: Yeah. Big hair. Hair helmet.  Chris: Big hair.  Bunny: Perms. You could rattle them off, so it’s insulting to the reader that he didn’t bother to add 10 extra words. Other books do this, too. Artemis by Andy Weir had something similar where our character is looking at the moon bases, and she was like, “They looked like the moon bases from every pop sci-fi pulp book.” Okay, thanks.  Oren: Those actually look pretty different, depending on which book you’re reading.  Bunny: She at least describes them as round, right? They’re bubbles. But at one point she does look at them and is like, (robotically) “They look like they’re from a sci-fi book.”  Oren: The bright side is that something like Ready Player One in book form is pretty rare in my experience. The nostalgia fests are much more likely to happen in movies, right? Because movies are really expensive, and people who make them are super risk averse, so they want to keep doing stuff that they know their target spending audience already likes. That’s why we have another Jurassic World movie, even though there is nothing left to do in that franchise. And it made a lot of money! So they were right.  Bunny: Go figure.  Oren: But in book form, there doesn’t seem to be a huge reason to do that, has been my experience. You’ll occasionally get authors who are a little obnoxious with it, but in general, I would say that at least in speculative fiction, which is the genre that I pay attention to, people are constantly pushing the envelope. When I see the books that are popular now, that’s very different from what was popular a few years ago.  Bunny: For sure. I think that if you do want to reference pop culture in your book, and your book is set in the real world and stuff, and you do it intentionally that you can for lack of a better word time lock your book. If you’re not trying to set it in vague “now” or five-minutes-in-the-future sort of stories that I’d argue probably most stories set in the present day do where it’s “now”! But if you want your book to be set sometime recently, but definitely a fixed time period, you could do something like what Kaiju Preservation Society does, which is that it’s definitively set during the pandemic. It makes references to the pandemic. It is set during those years, and so when it makes pop culture references−which I also find annoying, but at least they don’t have that problem−it makes sense because we know when we are. So it’s not going to age weirdly, because it’s fixed.  Kaiju Preservation Society kept doing this thing where the character would reference pop culture and the other characters would be like, “OMG, you did not! Wow! You named the Kaiju Bella and Edward? You did not. Whoa, you call yourself a Deliberator? That’s from Star Crash. Wow, I got that!”  Oren: Yeah, they’re proud of their references.  Chris: They’re very proud of that. I think Scalzi ended up writing Kaiju Preservation Society because of the pandemic. He had a rare incident where he wasn’t able to get out the work that he had been planning to write and had to tell his publisher that it wasn’t happening. And ended up writing Kaiju Preservation Society instead. So, I think part of the reason for setting that during the pandemic is that it was very much a product of the pandemic too. Bunny: Doing that was a good choice, too. With the backstory on that book being what it is, and in terms of keeping the pop culture grounded in time as well.  Chris: Should we talk about speculative pop culture? You want to make something up?  Bunny: Yeah, I feel like it is relatively rare in terms of going into a fantasy book and then the speculative world having a defined pop culture of its own− Chris: Although you should toss a coin to your witcher Bunny: −you’ll get vague references to that. Does Witcher do that?  Chris: Yeah, Witcher has−again, in books, it’s harder, right? Whereas in an audio-visual work, we can actually have music. So, for instance, Toss a Coin to Your Witcher is a song that the bard character in Witcher sings that got really popular online. And that one was good because it fit the setting. I think if you’re gonna have pulp culture in your setting, you should start with what is the actual primary method of mass communication that people use? And if you have a low-tech setting that’s before widespread literacy, then basically what you have is people coming, meeting, and talking to each other. So having a song in the story where the bard’s like, “Hey, can you please give this other character some money?”, basically the bard Jaskier will make songs out of Geralt’s adventures, and then they sing that at taverns and stuff. So that’s fun.  Bunny: Considering what kind of mass media−quote unquote, because this will depend on the communication level of the world−people experience is definitely the first step you should take. What are people experiencing?  Chris: We’ll talk more about Shield of Sparrows in the next episode, but one of the funny things … that world is just not thought through. One of the things is that there’s newspapers, and it’s like, what? This is like a medieval− Again, we didn’t have novels in Europe until about the 1800s. You know, lots of them. Because that’s the point at which the printing press had advanced enough. And of course there’s also a chicken and the egg issue with printing and reading. If there’s nothing, people can’t buy things to read. They have no reason to learn to read. But also before they are incentivized to learn to read, we need to make printing cheap enough, and for a long time that was not true. Books were too expensive. So there were a number of different things that happened. But one of them was that the printing press made printing cheaper, and we finally had novels.  In this fantasy book Shield of Sparrows, it’s just that the books still seem to be pretty rare and expensive, but at the same time, there’s newspapers.  Oren: There are a lot of anachronisms in that book. One of the ships is named Cannon, as in the weapon, and this is not a setting with gunpowder. So… whatever. What does that even mean?  Bunny: It’s just a cool word that we made up.  Oren: It’s just a fun word that we thought might sound cool as a ship name.  Chris: But basically if you’re making a world and you’re anchoring it to real world technology levels, and it’s European-ish, we’re looking at the 1800s for books and printing to become more common. The earlier you get before that, the less people are literate and the less you’re gonna have printing and newspapers and have pop culture through that way. At that point, it’s a bard comes to town and goes to the tavern, and everybody’s excited and ends up singing the same song in town. And that’s their pop culture! Bunny: Or if you have a court or something, they’re all watching maybe the same play. Everyone’s attending the new kabuki production.  Chris: Traveling theater! Bunny: Yeah, theater!  Chris: Traveling band doing some theater and comedy and jokes and stuff. And then people go and see that together.  Oren: For me, when I’m looking at a setting, if it’s in any way a modern setting, I know that there is no possible way I’m gonna be able to communicate the complexity of real world pop culture in a book. I don’t have time to go into all of the references that we use in real life that you need to know a thing to understand them. I would have to explain the entirety of the MCU if I was telling a story set in the modern day to someone who didn’t know what the MCU was. It would be ridiculous. So I do my best to come up with something, some of the more prominent aspects that are easier to explain and use that to hint at the idea that there’s more, but we’re not focusing on that right now. We’ve got a plot to do.  Bunny: Right. I think that’s why it’s relatively rare. It’s because a lot of in-universe entertainment isn’t super relevant to the main story, or it’s just fluff and flavor. And, honestly, I love when there’s fluff and flavor about the universe’s pop culture. I like that Murderbot is always watching telenovellas, even if they’re not relevant to the plot. It’s a fun worldbuilding detail, and of course there are telenovellas.  Oren: I really liked how in the show other people had seen them and that became a plot point in a few points in a few areas. I thought that was very neat.  Chris: The show writers were really good at leveraging and making it part of the story.  Bunny: Another book that did in Universe Entertainment was The Dead Cat Tail Assassins, where the main character really likes pulp novel penny dreadfuls, essentially, and ultimately uses these to convince a couple gods to not kill her. Being like, “Hey, in this−” this is spoilers for the climax, I guess, “−in this penny dreadful, this scenario happened, and you wouldn’t want the scenario to happen here, would you? Because that would be bad.” I was like, that’s fun. You don’t see a lot of these stories within stories unless they’re serious folklore that’s relevant to the foundation of the world or whatever. Oren: I would also say that another option, if you’re just trying to make something that is to help readers understand the world and to feel like it’s a living place where people do things, is you can create pop cultural trends that are similar enough to things that are in the real world that readers can kind of get it, but not being exactly the same. Nowadays we’re inundated with superhero movies, right? And that’s a feeling that people will have. And you might not necessarily want to have your setting have superhero movies, but assuming that it has this level of mass media, your character could very easily talk about how all the advertisements for the next hollow films are this specific genre because that’s what’s popular right now and I feel like I haven’t seen anything that isn’t that for a while. And that’ll get across the same feeling. Chris: I would like to see more sci-fi settings where there’s pop culture that is in new mediums. Something that doesn’t translate to the internet or TV or radio or print, right. It’s like everybody sends each other these weird telepathic messages, and now we have telepathic memes. Oren: We make fun of Star Trek for seeming culturally stagnated because they only ever listen to classical music or watch movies that are in Paramount’s IP archive.  Chris: And that they pass around electronic tablets like they’re pieces of paper. Oren: They have a big stack of iPads they pass around. (laughing) No, but they also do, you know, the holo-novels were interesting, right? The series went on, and we saw that there were people who made these as−if not a job, because it’s the federation, you don’t necessarily need to work at least−as a serious passion. And that was an interesting concept. I liked that. Chris: That was good.  Oren: I’ve seen enough sci-fi where it feels like when they want to make something futuristic, they just take something that’s vaguely East Asian, and they’re like, “There! That’s the future now.” And it’s like, okay, I know we all read Neuromancer when we were kids, but maybe we could move past that a little bit. Bunny: And what gets popular in a society says a lot about that society. One thing I really like in games and stuff−which again, this is easier in games because there’s not so much… if it’s an open world game, you expect to be able to find things in that world, whereas in novels space is more at a premium and you can’t just throw things in that someone can run past and go “oh, ha ha”−but I love when games have artifacts around that you can find. Or posters for futuristic movies that don’t exist. You can be like, oh, this is an interesting look into this greater world that I’m just running around in.  Oren: It’s environmental storytelling, isn’t it?  Bunny: It is. That’s what we in the biz call it. Oren: All right. Well, with that I think we will go ahead and call this episode to a close, because I’ve been distracted by a very cool in-universe ad for a product that I’m gonna go stare at for a little bit.  Chris: And if you enjoyed any of our references about references, consider supporting us on Patreon. Oren: Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. 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−speaking of pop culture. And then we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek, also pop culture. We will talk to you next week. [Outro theme]