The Mythcreant Podcast

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

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

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

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

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: 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. 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. Chris: You know, it’s really sad that that sounds like wish fulfillment to me right now. Oren: Hell yeah! Chris: We’d have to deal with zombies, but we’d 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: 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.