The Mythcreant Podcast

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

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

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

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

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

Time to clock in for another shift in the podcast mines, processing audio ore and the like. But what if our workplace had… drama? Why, then you might be writing a workplace conflict, which we have advice for! We discuss whether a workplace is healthy or unhealthy, what kinds of clashes can be expected, and naturally, why the captain is always going on away missions instead of lower-ranked crew members. Show Notes Severance  The Orville Ask a Manager Hellgate Incident 24    Buddy Cops Friendship Arcs Personality Clashes Lockwood and Co Lower Decks  The Batman Transcript Generously transcribed by Ace of Hearts. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris:  You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [Intro Music] Bunny: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Bunny and with me is… Chris: Chris. Bunny: …and… Oren: Oren. Bunny: So we’ve all gotten a job at the Rad Dragon Nursery raising and training cool dragons in the middle of the magical mountains, which means that we’ll get to ride them and befriend them and form bonds with them. It’s gonna be great. Are y’all so excited? Oren: No, you can’t trick me. We’re starting a union. This isn’t gonna be like an “isn’t it cool to work at a cool place and have a cool boss who you do lots of unpaid overtime for?” story. I’m getting my mandatory breaks, Bunny: But Oren, the CEO says we’re a big family! And the CEO is also HR. So it must be true. Oren: It’s probably fine. Chris: I feel like maybe if we’re working with dragons, there’s some workplace hazards here. Bunny: Nah! Oren: What could go wrong? Chris: I wanna make sure I get my workers’ comp. Bunny: Nah, if you follow the incredibly lackadaisical safety procedures, you probably won’t get incinerated. Uh, and if you are, we’ll hold a big sad funeral because family, and uh, definitely not write it off as a business expense. Oren: Fantasy OSHA is gonna shut this place right down. We’ve got people given unsupervised belly rubs to the dragons. That is not safe. Bunny: Yeah. And, uh, unfortunately, we also have to deal with workplace hazards like someone microwaving fish and a boss clipping their toenails on the desk. Chris: Oh. Hmm. Bunny: So yeah, maybe, maybe we don’t go work at the Rad Dragon Nursery. There might be a little too much conflict there. But on the other hand, we do like conflict for stories and jobs and have a lot of that. Chris: I do think one thing, if you’re adding conflicts at work, that is just good to think about is whether or not you want to depict a healthy workplace. Because it’s really easy for storytellers to look for sources of conflict and add them and create a lot of toxicity in social interactions, which again, if it’s supposed to be dystopian and exploitative, that’s totally fine. Just don’t package a toxic workplace as a healthy one. So you want Severance, not Orville season one, basically. Bunny: But leg theft, Chris! Chris: Gosh, I’d even forgotten about the leg theft. It’s like the least of the toxic things that happen. So basically, again, if you package it as a healthy workplace when it’s actually a toxic workplace, then you’re giving some level of endorsement to like really bad, often abusive behavior. So let’s just not do that. You know, again, you can create a story reason why your character is working at a dystopian job, or a job that is the worst. They just need a stronger motivation for doing so. So if they’re gonna take a job that could kill them, then they need to be desperate. That’s basically the difference. Oren: Yeah. I mean, it’s also much easier than, for example, a magic school story, right? Because like jobs don’t have the same expectation of having a duty of care for adults. That doesn’t mean that they don’t abuse their workers. They absolutely do. It’s just not the same as a school where kids go. And at the same time, there isn’t the expectation that if a job is bad, the character’s parents would pull them out, uh, unless they’re also a child, which is this whole other problem. It’s also much easier to explain like, why would they stay there? The job sucks and it’s like, well, you need money to live. Chris: Right. Yeah. And again, there’s nothing wrong with “no, this workplace is exploitative, it’s dystopian.” But it feels different if you know it is, right, and the characters talk about it rather than, this is supposed to be a utopian setting in a utopian workplace, and we have really toxic things happening. So again, signs of a toxic workplace include things like: employees not getting the training they need to do their job; the employer isn’t making the best effort to keep people safe, or they’re not giving people time to heal, rest or recover; if you have like a boss that is demanding absolute perfection and always find something to criticize, that’s very toxic. Cutting people down or like purposely damaging their self-worth. I mean, if people give each other put downs and there’s no reason for doing that other than just to make them feel bad… That’s a sign of a very toxic person. And, you know, harassment or toxic behavior from other employees should be addressed if the workplace is a healthy workplace. Oren: They send out emails saying, asking you to say five things you did at work that day. I’m not even joking, like, you know, that’s in the news, but that’s like classic bad manager, right? That’s like the weirdest thing where it just shows that whoever is in charge has no idea how this business works. Chris: Yeah.  Oren: Because if they knew… Chris: or just asking for inappropriate things. Like, I know of a personal story.  Oren: …they wouldn’t need to ask.  Chris: That’s real bad. Bunny: Yeah, that’s terrible. Chris: Right? So asking for unpaid labor, asking them to invest their own money and things, or asking them to do things that are illegal, like buy drugs for them, that is a real thing that happens a lot in Hollywood, apparently. It’s not good. Oren: Hmm. I love the idea of someone signing up for a paid internship and they get there and it’s like, yeah. What I meant was that you will pay to go to places as my intern. That’s why it’s a paid internship. What else would that mean? Bunny: Yeah, you thought you would get money, fool! Chris: Yeah, and so that’s the thing is if, again, if a coworker is being really inappropriate, and that’s part of the conflict. You have to decide, is this a dystopian workplace or do you wanna work within the constraints of the fact that the manager should be jumping in doing something? Bunny: Frankly, dystopian workplaces are outside of the idyllic, small business owner archetype, which is cozy. Dystopian workplaces are definitely more conflict rich, I will say that, just don’t pretend that it’s totally normal when your boss does illegal things like withhold your paycheck. Oren: I would say that it depends a lot on what kind of problems you want your character to be solving. Because if they work somewhere dystopian, simply being there can be the problem that they have to solve, right? Because they can be dealing with a toxic loss or toxic coworkers or unsafe working conditions, things like that, right? And that can provide plenty of conflict to drive a story beyond whatever it is they’re actually doing. Whereas if you want a better workplace, then you’re more likely to lean on what is the job the character is doing and why is it important, and that is going to provide the majority of your tension. It doesn’t necessarily have to be all of it. Like you can still have a somewhat unfriendly relationship with someone at a job that’s not awful and that could still cause some sparks, right? But you are less likely to lean on that for like the majority of your tension. Bunny: And there are lots of problems at work that do not necessarily feature dragons and fantasy OSHA, this episode was largely inspired by me reading a lot of Ask a Manager, so go over there if you want to see some truly absurd workplace scenarios and some pretty mundane ones that are nonetheless difficult to deal with. There’s problems that we’ve all encountered. Chris wrote a short story about the annoying colleague who is annoying and blocking your way and preventing you from doing things. Chris: Yeah, this is Hellgate 42, I think it was. Oren: Yeah. Hellgate Incident 42. Chris: That one’s all in emails, all in coworker emails. I think that makes it more cowork-y. Oren: I love it. It’s so much fun. Bunny: That’s what we call epistolary. Oren: You could always just peruse like the various LinkedIn drama subreddits. They find some real weird stuff there. I was so confused by the concept of LinkedIn when I heard about it. And to be honest, I still am. Like, a work social network? What, why? Bunny: [sarcastic] Yeah, it’s a social media platform about being unemployed. It’s great. Chris: Admittedly, Hellgate Incident 42 is inspired by my experience of sexism in the tech world. I, as a developer, always worked as a freelancer, which made things better for me, but it was weird because every single time I had to interact with another tech consultant that worked for my client, and we had to coordinate, it was amazing how much they tried to block and obstruct me. And it was kind of like, the most innocent explanation is sexism, ’cause otherwise I would have to assume that every tech professional just aggros against every other tech professional, and that’s almost worse. Bunny: The wild tech professionals circling each other on their territory of a WordPress. Chris: And then I would have to often bring in the client and you know, I could beat them at the game. But it was still annoying. Bunny: Yeah, I mean, that’s definitely another common problem at work is, you know, sexism or racism or other kinds of bigotry and, you know, handle that with care. But it is absolutely a source of workplace conflict. Oren: From my own experience as, you know, not being particularly subject to either of those, people can be really uncooperative jerks, even without any kind of structural issue. So I can only imagine that that would probably make it worse. Chris: Yeah. I mean, for me, I realized that the male tech professionals that weren’t like that were people who would always self-select to work with me. They were like people who were my clients, referred people to me, or had chosen to work with me at some level. So no, it was sad. It was sad and kind of unbelievable sometimes because they would just act really bizarrely. But sometimes that happens. Oren: Yeah. But you got a really good short story out of it several years later. So was that not… Chris: I mean, I did have some really good moments like pwning them that I still remember fondly.  Oren: Was it not all worth it in the end? We didn’t publish my story Hellgate Incident 43 in which the main character makes a suggestion and people accept it reasonably and continue with their day. I’m just saying, Chris! Bunny: Or mine, Hellgate Incident 44 where someone comes to return a shirt and it goes fine. Yeah, all of these things can provide good conflict and good fodder for short stories. I think it would be helpful to step back and address the really basic question of like, why do we want stories where the characters work, right? Like, uh, presumably a lot of us work and we do that and we don’t always have fun with it. And, you know, stories are escapism. So why do characters work when jobs kind of suck sometimes? Oren: Because we’re all real weirdos! That’s the issue. Bunny: Yeah. We’re inflicting this upon ourselves is why. But jobs provide good conflict, as we were just discussing. I mean, maybe the most classic interpersonal conflict dynamic is, you know, the buddy cop dynamic, right? I mean, we have a whole other episode about this, about that specific pairing of characters who don’t like each other and then come to like each other as they work together on their job. Chris: And I do have a blog post with a list of personality clashes for your inspiration, ’cause that’s something that people have a lot of trouble writing just off the top of their head. So I have lists of them. And those ones can be really good if you want a couple coworkers who just inherently have, you know, work in different ways and have trouble getting along at first. Bunny: And crucially, a job forces them to work together, right? Like, if they were just neighbors, there’s less of a reason for them to tolerate each other and work through their problems because unless there’s something truly forcing them together, then it’s harder to contrive a reason for why they would work together even if they hate each other. If you’re an office drone and your boss says you have to work with, you know, Carrie, who you have a personality conflict with, and you and Carrie are gonna butt heads over everything and then eventually form a team and fight vampires or whatever, like, that’s a good arc. And it’s harder to make that work if you’re not assigned together. Oren: You need a reason for characters who don’t like each other to stay in proximity and do things together, and there are many ways you can justify that, but the fact that they work together is an easy one. It’s very self-explanatory. Bunny: Jobs can also send you into dangerous situations, like you can be hired to do dangerous things, and if your workplace is toxic and you’re desperate, then you are likelier to put up with this. And dangerous things can be exciting. It’s also sympathetic. So readers, again, have jobs and are familiar with the struggles. Um, that’s not true of all readers, I mean, some of us are podcasters, but… you know, most of them. And then just also, we love whimsical jobs, right? Like running a tea shop or raising dragons. And there are also plenty of comedic stories where, you know, a normal drudgery workplace has some sort of fantastical elements going on. And if you need further proof of the fact that people like seeing stories set in an office, just look at The Office.  Oren: With jobs, they are both pretty relatable for all the reasons you mentioned, and then they are also potentially good for wish fulfillment, which can be a cozy of like, this is a really nice tea shop that I work at where everything’s nice. But it can also be that the job’s hard, but I’m doing something meaningful. Right, because a lot of people do not feel that in their normal jobs. They do not feel like there is any point to what they’re doing, and so feeling like their work matters and seeing a character doing that as part of their job like that does have serious wish fulfillment. Bunny: Right. Yeah, that’s a good point. The wish fulfillment can also be about the output of the job rather than the job itself and why it’s worthwhile to struggle through that. Chris: And if we’re thinking about a small business owner, running a small business is difficult and a lot of the books I’ve seen about that I feel like could do a little bit more to create conflicts around running a small business. Like, for instance, one thing that most people don’t know until they get their first employee is how difficult training is and how much time it takes. Takes about five times as long as you think it will take, at least. ‘Cause you don’t know how much you know, and so you’re imagining, “oh, it’s only a, it’s a very simple task. I just, you know, tell them XYZ, and it’s done.” And then it turns out it’s actually a very complicated task where in different situations you make little adjustments and you don’t have any documentation because you’ve never had to train somebody before. And all of that is, and there’s so many things like that in small businesses, and that’s something that I’d love to see more stories similar to Legends & Lattes actually just get a little bit more rigorous because I do think there’s so much you can do there. Oren: Like what do you mean it’s hard to train people to feed the dragons? You just put the food in the trough. It’s really easy, and I mean, yeah, sure. If they’re looking a little aggressive, you make sure to look just off to the left so you don’t seem confrontational, but you also don’t seem like too easy a target. And sure if their scales are the wrong color, you know, you wanna deal with that. Easy, right? How long could that take to learn? Chris: Right? Oh, and that other dragon is recovering from sickness. So we have that dragon on a special diet. Oren: Obviously!  Bunny: Of course, that’s just intuition. Oh man, did y’all ever feed horses as kids? And we’re told like, “put your hand flat, has to be flat!” and then, you know, have nightmares about the horse sucking your fingers into its mouth, like carrots. Oren: I was terrified that the horse was gonna bite me. It never did. I’ve never been bitten by a horse, but I was always scared of that. Chris: Yeah, I had a horse run off with me when I was a kid. My sister was really big into horses and horse riding, and so… Bunny: Oh no! Chris: …that resulted in situations where I was put on a horse. Even though I was not big into horse riding, I just kind of found it scary. Bunny: It was just taking you to the equine kingdom where you could have ruled as queen. Chris: I mean, it was springtime. Apparently the horse had been cooped up all winter and was eager to get running. Uh, wish it had done it when I was not on its back. Oren: Yeah. I kept pressing X, which is supposed to be dismount, but just nothing happened, so, you know. Bunny: Oh, they never ported it to console, did they? Oren: Yeah, the control scheme is not good. Bunny: Report the bug, report it! So there’s quite a few jobs that are pretty common in fiction. The ones that sprang most readily to my mind were researchers, detectives, spies, soldiers, and journalists who are actually just detectives with a journalism mask. And then the small business owner, we already talked about, if you want to learn about uncommon jobs in fiction, we have a whole other episode about that. So I won’t go into it. Chris: Can I just complain about Lockwood & Co a little bit? Bunny: Oh please. Chris: So Lockwood & Co is funny because it’s a workplace, but it’s not a workplace. It’s a workplace, but they live together, they’re also roommates. And technically they wouldn’t need to. They just do. Again, in the world of Lockwood and Co, there’s like a ghost apocalypse. So there’s ghosts everywhere and everybody goes inside after curfew, and only young people can actually psychically sense the ghosts. So the people who handle ghost cases are all young. It’s a kind of neat world building actually. And so the idea is that we have young people who have their own ghost agency and so they hire somebody, but then that person comes to live. Like Lockwood is the main character and so he hires people and then they come to live with him in his house. Oren: I mean, he can’t really pay them very much, it seems like. So I guess offering them room and board, ’cause he happens to have a house he inherited from his parents is like, I guess the best he can do. Bunny: In general though, disclaimer, if your boss asks you to live with them, probably say no.  Chris: There’s a situation there that actually is more close to what you might have in a workplace conflict where they are really busy, they have lots of work, and I think they toss around the idea of maybe getting some help. And then Lucy goes on vacation and she comes back and Lockwood has already hired somebody. And when he had set up the clear expectation that this would be the hiring process that she would also be part of, and again, if he’s the boss, right, in some workplaces that would be totally normal for him to just make a decision and hire who he wants. But considering that they all like room together, right? And this is a very close collaboration, and Lucy had a reasonable expectation that she would be part of the process and be able to interview candidates, having her suddenly come back to find that he’d hired somebody, and it turned out this person was somebody that Lucy had a little bit of personality clash with, right? So that’s also just a bad idea for Lockwood to do because he can’t see whether the candidates work well with his existing employees. Oren: But in fairness, the personality clash they have is primarily that the other person is a girl and Lucy hates other girls because that’s a writing choice that the author made. Bunny: Uh, is she not like them? Oren: It’s weird, okay, it is real weird. Chris: The new worker does occasionally act kind of passive-aggressive towards Lucy. Occasionally, right? I think it’s supposed to be a personality conflict. Oren: Yes, it’s supposed to be, but the way that it was written made it feel like Lucy had basically decided to hate her. And then she also did some things that were a little annoying, is kind of what it felt like. Chris: I mean, she’s supposed to be a little jealous. Stroud, when he writes the scene, really sets things up to make Lucy jealous, where she comes back and finds this girl at her desk and other things like that. But the thing about this is that Lockwood is like completely off the hook for creating this situation. Whereas Lucy, I think the assumption the book goes with is that Lucy is wrong and she should just accept this girl. And when I look at this situation, no, actually Lockwood is the one who’s responsible for all this tension, right? Because he went and did something that was violating the norms, the expectations that he set with his employees and the norms for their workplace, right? Because when Lucy was hired, his other employee was part of that interview process. But it acts like, oh no, this is all Lucy’s fault and possibly this other girl’s fault. It’s like, no, it’s all Lockwood’s fault, actually. In my opinion. Oren: Lockwood definitely deserved more blame for that situation than he gets, which is none. Chris: Exactly. Oren: Although Lockwood & Co does dovetail into another interesting choice that you can make when you are writing a workplace story, which is, are you gonna do the easy mode, which is where you have them mainly go out on missions, and that’s the work. ‘Cause that’s, I just want you to know, if you do that, you’re a coward. That’s basically the same as a normal story. To be clear, I’m totally doing it and I’m a coward. Or are you gonna do an office bound story where they actually have to go to their work location and spend most of their time there? Uh, ’cause that’s harder, it’s more… it’s not bad, I’m not saying you shouldn’t do it, I’m just saying that it is more different than a conventional adventure story. Whereas if they’re like a team of agents and they go out and solve problems and then they report to the field office at the end of the week or whatever, it’s like that’s not really that much different than any other story. Chris: If they stay in the office, then think of the low budget TV show it can make. Oren: Yeah. I mean, they only need one set. It’s great! Bunny: I think the sorts of conflicts that they’ll deal with and the scope of them also depends on where they are in a work hierarchy. By far, I think the most common level in that hierarchy that we see is the low level employees. Like, you know, the grounds, the boots on the ground, the people in the cubicle farm, etc, just because they’re less insulated from danger. Most real life people probably feel like they’re in that position on the ladder. It’s sympathetic, and they have boots on the ground. They’re like right up next to the conflict in most cases. And then there’s like social conflicts where you have superiors who are ordering you around and you’re being treated as expendable maybe. And then they have to choose where to draw the lines, things like that. So for example, you would have a story about the soldier rather than about their commander. But these characters don’t have a lot of power. So you have to be careful about the scope of the problems you throw at them. They might feel out of place or useless if the conflict is too big. Chris: Or give them like a special ability, special magic power that makes them more useful or something. Bunny: Right. And you have to be careful to make the characters ordering them around remove their agency where we were discussing before, like the issue in Revenger where the character is just kind of floating around after the other characters, without any agency as they command her to go here and there and do various things. You don’t want that to happen. That’s not terribly exciting. This was the category that I could come up with the most examples for off the top of my head. So Lower Decks maybe being obvious, it’s the lower decks, it’s the people in the background, it’s the redshirts, so to speak. Oren: I mean, I guess you could argue every Star Trek is a workplace show. Bunny: It is, but I would argue that most Star Treks are a different level on the ladder, which is the characters are bosses.  Chris: The command crew. Bunny: They’re managers.  Chris: Yeah. I do think on Lower Decks they do send them out on missions, planet-side missions fairly often, and that is what helps give them agency because then they have a reason to send them away from the ship and away from the commanding officers. So they have to solve problems on their own. Bunny: Which is kind of funny because in the normal Star Trek shows the commanding officers just kind of do that too. Yeah, don’t worry about it. Oren: Lower Decks is also just a pretty low realism story, so like. They are on the ship and find that the ship is about to explode and then they go and deal with the problem themselves instead of like, you know, calling the bridge and being like, “hey, we need you to send like every person to help fix this problem” because it’s Lower Decks. It’s all for the bit. Bunny: Comedic, for sure. And I’m pretty sure Severance is in this category too. Light Brigade. The Mimicking of Known Successes too, which is a good example of… Oren: Really? Bunny: Yeah. Platy, it’s not super prominent, but Platy has to deal with like… she’s not a manager, she’s not a grunt either, but she is not overseeing anyone and she has to deal with internal politicking between different departments at her college. So I’d say she counts as this, even though it’s not a huge element of the story. She’s not a boss or a commander or a manager. She just eats scones and researches things. Oren: Who loves scones. But yeah. Bunny: And then you can have characters at the very top of the hierarchy, which are the leaders or the CEOs who have a lot of power and influence. So they’re well positioned to tackle big threats. If they’re the small businesses, they can struggle against failure or against the big businesses. Although usually these are, I don’t know if we should count these or not, because they’re not workplace conflicts so much as they are conflicts about the workplace. Specifically, whether it’ll survive. Oren: Right. Well, that’s the difference between… is your conflict about your protagonist dealing with crappy office culture, or is it about them trying to do a really important job and there are exterior problems stopping them from doing that? It’s that sort of difference.  Chris: But I guess if your protagonist is like in HR, right? Their job is to sort out what’s going on with the workplace. So those things are kind of intertwined and I think a lot of… a small business person would realistically have to do all of the admin work in addition to whatever the business is about. Right? So if we’re making coffee, we have to deal with making coffee, but we also have to deal with hiring employees and training them, and doing the accounting, what have you. And I feel like those admin tasks make it feel more workplace-y. Oren: Yeah, that’s true. Bunny: Yeah. I mean, the thing about having this level of character is that there are plenty of examples of them. Batman and Tony Stark, both are technically big business boys, but we don’t really see them do business things, which could be cutting commentary on the laziness of CEOs or it could just be the narrative not caring about that. You decide. Oren: I was so surprised, or sad and disappointed really, in the most recent Batman movie because the bad guy’s plan basically depends on the fact that Bruce never goes in to oversee his company, so he doesn’t notice that his company’s funds are being misappropriated. And I thought for sure that was gonna be a character arc moment where he’s like, “oh. I should spend more time managing my business and making sure it’s being used responsibly.” But no, he doubles down on Batman. Yes, punch every criminal now. Chris: And nobody calls him to be like, “hey, there’s a major problem with funds at your company.” I think somebody would call him and let him know this was happening. Oren: Don’t worry about it. Chris: I think the issue with having the leader of the workplace or the business, they have the most agency, but they have more liabilities when it comes to likability because it’s just harder to put them in a sympathetic position. And I think this is one of the reasons why the Orville turned out so terribly because I think they were trying to make the leadership position sympathetic. But when Ed comes in, he is responsible for all his own problems. And it’s like they make him relatable, being like, “oh, so you didn’t really deserve to be captain, but we’re making you captain anyway.” And yeah, I don’t think that was a good way to go. Now if this was a ship they were thinking of retiring for reasons outside of his control and nobody else wanted this command, then you could use that to make it sympathetic. Oren: Well, that’s the classic problem that a lot of writers have is that they misinterpret second chance with fail up. Right? It’s like, look, a second chance means we let you try again at whatever you were bad at. Or maybe we let you try again in a different area where you aren’t gonna cause the same problems or something. This is like, you messed up and now we are directly rewarding you for messing up. Bunny: Yeah. Going back to the whole logical worldbuilding thing, logic versus realism. And I think it’s difficult if it’s like a big entity, a lot of villains are leaders of big companies, right? Like the evil CEO and that’s also true in fiction. Oren: All right. Well, with that I think we will go ahead and call this episode to a close. We had our own kind of workplace story, I guess, to the extent that podcasting is a job. Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel, and there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week! [Outro Music] Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening/closing theme: “The Princess who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.

Many of our favorite spec fic tropes don’t make much sense. Does that matter? How important is it for the masquerade to make sense, and is that different from other logical issues that aren’t so well established? This week, we discuss the importance of logic in worldbuilding, or perhaps the lack of importance. We’ll see how much it matters for different parts of the world to realistically affect others, when it’s most likely to bother people, and how you can get readers to let things slide. Also, why are blogs named like they are? Show Notes The Hammerhead Corvette  Hyperspace Ram Warp Nacelles  Comic: Ship’s Inventory Gorn The Expanse  Coyote vs. Acme Sweet Tooth The Borg  The Sword of Kaigen  Bret Devereaux’s Blog  The Mimicking of Known Successes  Dazzle Camouflage  A Deadly Education  Shaun the Sheep The Butcher of the Forest  The Other Valley Transcript Generously transcribed by Savannah Bard. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris:  You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. With your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [Intro Music]. Oren: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren. With me today is− Chris: Chris. Oren: and− Bunny: Bunny.  Oren: So, I like things that are cool. Swords are cool. Jets are cool. So in my setting, I’m gonna tape swords to the front of jets so that they can run into the bad guys real fast. Ultimate stabbing.  Chris: So, is that two times the cool or is that cool squared? Oren: I think it’s coolness times velocity, actually.  Chris: Oh, I see.  Oren: This is, of course, only a little more ridiculous than what you would see in your average Warhammer 40000 story. And honestly, I would not put it past them to introduce some kind of aircraft that rams things and then has reverse engines to un-ram itself so it can ram things again. I mean, Star Wars introduced the Hammerhead Corvette, which… I hate that thing.  Chris: You know, the thing that they use when they want to instant-win after a long hard fight. Turns out they could have won the whole time. All they needed to do is just use this Hammerhead to ram things, this Hammerhead spaceship,  Oren: I hate it so much. It’s a good movie. I love Rogue One, but that part is so bad.  Bunny: They called it the Hammerhead Corvette.  Oren: Its introduction is super conspicuous too. None of the other ships get a name, and this ship isn’t in the movie except for that one part. And it’s like, are you trying to sell a toy? Chris: They make a big deal out of it.  Bunny: Here’s one on eBay I just found.  Oren: Were you expecting Hammerhead Corvette toys to really fly off the shelves? Maybe they did. I don’t know. Lots of little kids being like, “Mom and dad, I want a Hammerhead Corvette for Christmas.”  Bunny: Looks like Lego is in on it, so rest assured, lots of kids are getting their Hammerhead-flavored popsicles. Chris: And then what is it they did in Last Jedi? Was it a light speed to− Oren: Yeah, they did the Hyperspace Ram in Last Jedi.  Chris: It was a really nice special effect. It was. Oren: Okay. It’s beautiful. Unlike the Rogue One scene, it at least looked good. It just didn’t make any sense, and was also dramatically bad because it seemed like the movie was over, but then the movie kept going, which happens two or three times in the Last Jedi.  Bunny: It doesn’t even look like a Hammerhead Shark. It looks like a really derpy fish.  Oren: It’s doing its best, okay?  Chris: And this is what happens, of course, with weapons all the time. If they were able to do that all along, why haven’t they done it before? Oren: That is the obvious question.  Bunny: History. Who needs it?  Oren: We’re also like three minutes in. We haven’t introduced the topic yet. I was just complaining about how I don’t like podcasts that do this. So, that’s me now, apparently. That’s who I am.  Chris: I mean, we were talking about it. People can read the podcast title. Oren: They can, but we know they don’t. Come on. No one reads podcast titles. You just get a little ding. Oh, there’s a podcast episode! And then you listen to it. Anyway, we’re talking about logical worldbuilding. That’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently for various reasons. How important is it? Does it matter?  Chris: Sometimes? Depends.  Bunny: Implicitly, we care because there is a podcast episode about it.  Oren: I know I care!  Chris: You care when the nacelles are the wrong shape!  Oren: They can’t just make the nacelles the wrong shape, Chris! Chris: Bet a bunch listeners don’t have any idea what the nacelles are. If you watch Star Trek, usually their ships have these two little glowy parts on either side of the main body of the ship. Sometimes they move up and down and they glow before the ship takes off into warp or whatever. Those are the nacelles, and Oren notices when they have nacelles of the wrong shape, when they change shape from shot to shot or episode to episode.  Oren: This happens a lot in Voyager, because Voyager went through several models of shuttle before they landed on the one they liked. At first they had the old TNG shuttles, which, okay, sure. And then they switched out the nacelles of the old TNG shuttle for a different kind of nacelle, which seems like an odd thing to be doing when you’re stranded on the opposite side of the Delta Quadrant. And then they changed the shuttle completely, but they kept the new nacelles. So they Ship-of-Theseus’ed these shuttles is what I’m saying. Chris: I think this is a much smaller problem than the fact that they destroy countless shuttles in Voyager, and you assume that they’re replacing them in the background until they have a specific episode about making a new shuttle, and it takes them a huge collaborative effort to make one shuttle and then they immediately destroy that shuttle. We even had a comic−Once Upon a Trope, Bunny and I had a comic about this−about taking inventory and discovering that there were negative shuttles.  Oren: The shuttles are breeding.  Bunny: Once you have a stable colony, you can just sit back and let ’em do their thing. Just don’t deplete them too quickly. Chris: Star Trek technology is so wild, right? The thing about Voyager is it’s supposed to be having resource shortages because it’s all by itself on the other side of the galaxy, but we also know that they have replicators. If they have energy, they can just make anything they want.  Oren: Maybe. Sometimes. That did really confuse me, because with shuttles it’s like, “Okay, I guess the shuttle is too big to just replicate a whole shuttle.” But I was really confused by the idea that they could run out of torpedoes, which they make a big deal of in the first season. A torpedo is just a little package of antimatter on top of an engine. Chris: Maybe the replicators can’t make antimatter.  Oren: They can though! They use it for the warp core.  Chris: Wait, do they actually replicate antimatter?  Oren: I don’t know if they replicate it, but we in real life can make antimatter. It’s just a very slow, very inefficient process. Presumably, they can do it a little better in Star Trek. Chris: Anyway, logical worldbuilding. Which Star Trek is not known for. Oren: But I like Star Trek. But I also like logical worldbuilding. Bunny: It’s a complicated dilemma you find yourself in.  Chris: Now that we’re talking about Star Trek and logical worldbuilding−the Xenomorphs in Strange New Worlds. No! They’re supposed to be an intelligent species. They’re basically Xenomorphs. I mean, it’s the Gorn, which were completely different in the original series, but now the Gorn are Xenomorphs, and it just doesn’t fit the setting at all because there’s no reason for an intelligent species to do this. And all of the species are intelligent in Star Trek. Bunny: Gone are the days when you could take your shirt off and wrestle one on a sandy dune.  Oren: We don’t do that anymore. The Gorn are now serious space-murder-torturers. We don’t do silly wrestle scenes with them anymore. So the Gorn episode of Strange New Worlds is interesting because it is a place where theming and logic meet, and theming and logical worldbuilding are not always the same thing. In fact, theming is often used to cover up logical inconsistencies. Chris: Like katanas in a cyberpunk setting, for instance.  Oren: Exactly. Only katanas though. Bring out a broadsword in a cyberpunk setting, everyone’s gonna look at you weird, but it’s okay if it’s from Japan, I guess. Chris: Because people are so used to katanas being in cyberpunk that it now feels like it’s in theme, but it’s not really logical for people to be using katanas in a high-tech setting. Oren: Every time I play a cyberpunk campaign, I demand to use a glaive, like a big old bill hook. They’re like, “You can’t use those!” It’s like, “I can use melee weapons. There’re stats for it. You can’t tell me I can’t use them.”  Bunny: It does seem like most−maybe most is an overstatement, but many, many−illogical worldbuilding choices can slide because they’re genre expectations or tropes. You know, we want space battles, and we don’t want drones to do all of the battling. So we accept that you gotta go in and dog fight rather than launching missiles from a distance.  Oren: That’s the theming part. You want things that feel like they belong together, and theming often covers over logical inconsistencies. I mean, we see this in stuff like even The Expanse, which is famous for being more realistic than most popular sci-fi, but still has some pretty big logical inconsistencies that we gloss over.  Like, once you have the level of free fusion energy they describe in The Expanse, a lot of the problems they suffer from become kind of trivial. The problem of life support management, if you have infinite fusion energy, isn’t really that big an obstacle, but that’s not in theme with the setting. Right? The theme of the setting is that it’s grungy and everything’s hard and we’re constantly scrambling by, and the only reason we have the magical fusion drives is to explain how we can get around because otherwise we wouldn’t be able to get anywhere and that wouldn’t work.  Chris: There’s also the settings-level of realism, which is technically different. That’s basically whether the story has an atmosphere that feels realistic, grounded, gritty, et cetera, et cetera−it doesn’t have to be dark necessarily−and the degree to which it seems to follow the same rules as the real world. A lower realism setting would have characters easily jumping from rooftop to rooftop and lifting impossible things that are many times their size and weight. We just don’t expect there to be completely rigorous physics. Wile E. Coyote’s the ultimate example of low realism, right? Where he runs off of a cliff and then just keeps walking in the air for a while and doesn’t fall until he notices that he’s standing on air. Bunny: What would a logical but not realistic version of Wile E. Coyote be?  Oren: It’s that movie that’s actually going to come out about Wile E. suing the Acme Corporation. We thought that movie was dead, but it’s coming out, and I’m gonna go see it.  Chris: Things can be high realism, but still have parts that are illogical. For instance, if you have a plague outbreak and no one is wearing a mask and there’s no comment on it, that could be something that feels realistic, but has illogical components.  Oren: Thinking of the one with the deer kid. I don’t remember what it’s called.  Bunny: Dragon Prince. They had horns, right? Oren: Sweet Tooth, Sweet Tooth.  Chris: Oh, Sweet Tooth. That one is so funny because it has extremely low realism portions and really high realism portions, and they do not get along together. But we’re doing a very high realism plague outbreak, and this was during Covid−or right after Covid−that everybody saw this show. So we all know what it’s like to have a big pandemic, and yet everybody is just really careless about whether they’re transmitting it.  Oren: And of course there was the inevitable pointing out that there’s a whole segment of the population that acted that way. But the people doing it in Sweet Tooth do not have the “political motivation”, shall we say. Chris: But there’s also a specific community that is so hypervigilant and violent about transmission that if anybody’s found to have it, they burn them down in their house. But they still visit people without masks and share some water.  Bunny: Oh, that’s how you get mono.  Chris: So there’s clearly some contradictions in the world there, even if everything kind of has a feel of high realism. Oren: I want to rewind a little bit, because I mentioned that the Star Trek Xenomorph thing was an interesting combination of logical issues and theming issues. Logically, that makes no sense, right? They have all kinds of advanced technology that they have to come up with a bunch of excuses why none of it works. And then sometimes they don’t even give excuses, like their phasers just don’t hurt the Gorn for some reason?  Chris: In the Alien movies, the characters do not have Star Trek level technology to defend themselves against the aliens.  Oren: They don’t have any guns at all. They have makeshift flame throwers in the first one, and then in the second one when they have guns, that’s why they introduce a swarm of Xenomorphs. Bunny: Ah, but what about katanas?  Oren: They should have had some katanas, honestly. But then also theming-wise, it does not make sense, because−again−the theme of the first Alien movie is space truckers meet an alien, basically. They’re not trained for this. They’re here trying to do a job and get paid. They’re not professional explorers with crisis combat training. That’s why it feels like it works, but the Star Trek crew, they are professional danger explorers, so it feels weird that they’re suddenly so helpless. And so that’s where you have a combination of something that is both badly themed and just horribly unrealistic. Chris: The Federation’s relatively utopian. Not that they don’t face dangers outside of the Federation, but the general idea is they go and they meet other intelligent alien species. In that context, Xenomorphs that purposely decide to plant their young where they will kill other sapien species, it just doesn’t make any sense. It’s not a logical thing.  Oren: Star Trek can have completely evil enemies, or at least enemies that you have to fight, that you can’t talk to. Bunny: Wrestle them.  Oren: Yeah. The Borg, for example, but the Borg are a little more complicated than “we are evil because we evolved to be evil”. The Gorn feel like they’re from a fantasy series, which, I wouldn’t love them there either, but they would at least feel like they were not completely out of place. It doesn’t seem like this should be a thing here. Aliens are supposed to be at least a little more three dimensional than this. I’m still curious if in season three of Strange New Worlds we’re gonna pull a huge retcon and be like, “Oh, actually the Gorn are a normal species. Those ones you met were just jerks. You met the Gorn KKK. That’s why they were all assholes.”  Chris: I mean, that’s probably the best explanation they can come up with.  Oren: That doesn’t really make sense, but I’ll take it.  Chris: I’m afraid of them being, “Oh, we’re reasonable people except we have this cultural tradition!”  Oren: One thing that has been on my mind a lot has been this book that I read recently called The Sword of Kaigen, which more than most books that I have read, felt like the worldbuilding elements were thrown together in a pot with no real thought into whether or not they made sense together, and the book did very well. I’m not here to tell you that it was like a failure and you should never do what it does, but it did feel very weird that we have this modern setting and then also these magical samurai who hang out and everyone’s like, “Wow, you guys are a really big deal, you magical samurai.” And I’m here wondering, “Why did magical samurai matter when y’all have machine guns?” And then they have a brief fight where the magical samurai have to deal with modern weaponry, and they can’t. And then the story just keeps going as if that didn’t happen. It feels like most books would put in some effort to try to reconcile how the magical samurai work in a setting that has machine guns, and this book did not do that.  Chris: Look, I can take down a Black Hawk helicopter in hand-to-hand combat; it doesn’t even have hands!  Oren: That’s what I was expecting, right? I was expecting they would have some way to do that, and the answer “no, they don’t” is, I guess, realistic, but then raises the question why everyone thinks they’re so important. Bunny: So I guess that’s realistic, but not logical and perhaps not on theme either.  Chris: I would say probably one of the number one sources of illogical conceits is just people not acting in their interest in the story. The example we gave of Sweet Tooth is one where it’s like, “Okay, well, if people don’t want the disease, why aren’t they taking X, Y, Z steps?” This particularly applies when we’re not talking about single individuals but whole groups of people. If a whole group of people, like a society, for instance, appears to not be acting in their interest, generally that means you are misreading the situation. I love this example on the blog, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, discussing peasant farmers. People have looked at their farming practices and assumed they just didn’t know what they were doing and weren’t acting in their own interest. For instance, if they had a good year, they would spend all of their extra food feasting and giving it to their neighbors and then they would starve during lean years. People could look at that and be like, “Well, why did they do that?” They should have saved in some way so that they could have that extra wealth or food or whatever for when times were hard. But if you actually understand the economy of the time and how things work, they just didn’t have any way to do that. And so their best bet was to invest in social capital and build a social safety net so that they would feast their neighbors and then their neighbors would help them if they had lean times. And that was actually the logical thing to do. So if you see some kind of weird historical behavior it’s a good idea to ask about what is the context for why people are doing this? If you wanna put that in your world replicating that context, in which case it actually makes sense and it’s efficient, and it benefits people to do that kind of weird thing.  Oren: What I find unrealistic is that a blog with such amazingly useful and well-written information about history would be called A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, which is a really hard thing to say when you’re trying to tell someone about this blog. Bunny: Like calling your book The Mimicking of Known Successes. Very inconvenient. Oren: Doesn’t have anything to do with the story. Why is it titled that? I’ve just started calling it Devereaux’s blog. I don’t have time to say that really long name every time, and it doesn’t communicate what the blog’s about anyway.  Chris: I could just say ACOUP.  Bunny: ACOUP!  Oren: No, I will never say ACOUP.  Chris: If you ever do it, I will know you’re an imposter.  Oren: If I ever do that, I’m acting unrealistically. Then I’ll say that the nacelles don’t actually matter. It’s fine.  Chris: I will say this whole question of self-interest, though, in some ways has gotten a lot harder because of recent politics. There’s been a lot of arguments about what is plausible for an evil overlord, especially when we’re talking about villains. People would be like, “Oh, it’s realistic for the villain to be incompetent, because politics.” Most of the time we’re not actually talking about realism. We’re talking about what’s good for the story, which is different. A lot of people don’t understand that it’s different, but it’s different.  In some cases, like when I looked at Quicksilver, there’s this elite queen’s guard that apparently is supposedly wearing plate armor made of pure gold. It’s supposed to be illogical, a sign the queen only cares about appearances. And it is kind of holding these guards back somewhat. I had to be like, okay, well this doesn’t make any sense, but I suppose if the evil queen is a clown…? At the same time, I still think that there is some limit there. How obvious is it working against their self-interest? If the guard can’t even move, the queen would probably change her mind at that point.  Oren: I would also question can even the most clownish of evil queens afford even one suit of solid gold plate mail? Plate mail on its own is already really expensive in any setting in which it is relevant. Gold is expensive, and there isn’t that much of it. Most gold things in history are gold plated. They’re not usually solid gold. That’s pretty rare. The amount of gold you would need to make a fully gold suit of armor is like… and these are supposed to be more than one! I question whether even a really clownish evil queen who is gutting all of her public services for money and is trying to sell them for parts, would be able to afford that many suits of golden armor. Bunny: Wow, this is worse than nacelles.  Oren: Eventually, reality does come back to call. Clowns do a lot of clown stuff that it feels like they shouldn’t be allowed to do, but eventually it catches up with them.  Bunny: I also wanna say that this scenario of truth being stranger than fiction is something that’s been in actual nonfiction for a really long time. In nonfiction, you also still have to make the audience believe what you’re saying, especially narrative nonfiction, right? So, it’s true. These are facts about what happened that you’re putting together, but it still has to be believable, which is a weird thing to say when you’re putting together something that’s literally true. But I’ve been in classes where we talk about nonfiction and believability is still a huge matter. Oren: You gotta give your readers the context to believe these things. If you just list weird facts and are like, “Yeah, that happened.” Readers are gonna be like, “Oh, if you say so, I guess.” Maybe if they really trust you, they’ll accept it.  Bunny: There’s some real weird crap. There are warships painted zigzag.  Oren: Yeah. Why are they painted like zebras? I could tell you, but we only have four minutes left. In that case, you want to ease them into it. You want to give them a way that they can understand it, not just be like, here’s a weird thing. Don’t question it because weird stuff happens.  Bunny: Another way to cover up illogical worldbuilding is to have characters in the story act like it’s normal. I think that actually goes further in some cases, like with the dangerous magic schools. The fact that the adults aren’t panicking constantly makes the reader not panic until it gets obviously absurd. Or until the author ties herself in knots trying to justify it. Oren: The dangerous magic school is another one that is often covered by tropes. This doesn’t make any sense, but we are used to it. It’s a thing we’ve been seeing since the magic school genre blew up. So people will usually accept it as long as you don’t be weird with it. If you start calling a bunch of attention to it, you might have some trouble. Or you might not.  Again, Deadly Education did very well, so I can’t say for sure how much anyone cared. I can say that I know at least a significant number of people who read the book and had a hard time with all of the exposition, which is exactly what I would expect. It’s not really controversial to say that people don’t generally like reading huge blocks of exposition. An even bigger number of people did like the book enough to keep reading even though there was all this exposition, but to what extent the bizarre worldbuilding has any real effect, that’s harder to measure.  Bunny: It’s also worth mentioning stories that are intentionally illogical or at least present on their face as a bit absurdist or surrealist, because these exist, and it’s often stories with fairy tale logic or high comedy stories like Shaun the Sheep. Not very high in realism or logic. I watched an episode recently where the dog gets his chair attached to a drone and goes to space, and then falls back to Earth. We’re not supposed to be like, “Why isn’t he asphyxiating?” And The Butcher of the Forest being a good example of a fairy tale logic sort of world where you have to trust that it’s working on its own internal logic, even though it seems absurd. Oren: I read The Other Valley recently, which is a kind of surrealist story, where the premise is that the entire world is one valley, but like to the east and west of this valley, there is an identical copy of that valley that is like 20 years before or ahead of it in time. You’re not asking, “Where do these people get their cars?” Because they have cars. Where do they get gasoline? Where do they grow their food? That is not the point of the story. As long as the story itself does not bring that up as a big plot point, as some kind of “gotcha”, sure. The point of the story is about what you would do to change your history, which I think is fine. By the end of the story, if someone had been like, “Hey, didn’t you know it’s really weird that these valleys are able to survive despite being cut off from the outside world?” that doesn’t make sense. I spent this whole book suspending my disbelief over that. You don’t get to pull it as a gotcha now. Well with that, I think we are gonna 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 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].

We all love to describe things. Why not add a little more description? Even more. What could go wrong? Oh, no, now the description is confusing. We’ve got to clarify it, but how? Fortunately, that’s the topic of today’s episode. We’ll discuss how to tell if your description is confusing, what to do about it, and also why a certain gate is the bane of Oren’s existence. Show Notes The Tainted Cup Cognitive Load Comprehension Scarcity  Kurt Vonnegut’s Rules of Writing With Style  Beneath the Rising  The Marvelers  Eragon  Tiger’s Curse The Expanse  The Abbess Rebellion Transcript Generously transcribed by Michael Martin. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.  Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.  [Opening theme] Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is… Bunny: Bunny. Chris: And… Oren: Oren.  Chris: Now folks, to understand this podcast, you have to know about the space I’m recording in. So it’s thirty-two feet by fourteen feet with windows on the east and west sides, has two floors, and the staircase is along the wall on the south side, ending in a five-by-five foot landing on the top floor, and then a tile entryway about the same size on the bottom floor. Now, the TV is in the center of the bottom floor facing north, but along the north side is a beanbag, a couch, a laptop desk in that order going from east to west. Okay, so can you picture it perfectly now? Bunny: Your recording room has two floors?  Oren: I live here and I’m pretty sure I don’t know where I am anymore. I think I’ve gotten lost sitting at my computer. Chris & Bunny: [Laughter] Oren: I’m gonna need GPS coordinates. Bunny: Yeah. What latitude and longitude though? I feel like that’s the thing that willl finally paint the picture. Chris: Gonna give you all the dimensions for all the rooms now. And then I’ll just, like, tell you how many feet north or south they are. East or west. Instead of saying where they are next to each other.  Bunny: Please tell me you were walking around the living room with a compass. Chris: Gotta figure out how to orient here in my own home. Bunny: Yeah, you gotta use absolute units, not right and left. Chris: This episode is on description, and in particular clarifying it when it is overwhelming and confusing. And as silly as that description of where I’m recording is, that’s the kind of errors that I see when people are trying to describe something in their narration. There’s a number of things happening there where instead of building a picture for you, I’m telling you about all these separate items, and then somehow you have to do the work of placing them all. And I’m being overly precise and technical about it, and that’s kind of what tends to happen in people’s description. Oren: The moment you start bringing out precise measuring units, it’s like, eh, it’s not that you’ll never need those, but you probably don’t need them most of the time. If there’s a situation where you were considering them, the answer to whether you need them is probably no. Probably just going to make things worse. Chris: First, it might be good to talk about just why you shouldn’t make readers do too much work. Especially since we have people sometimes going around being like, “Oh, but I just wrote this to challenge the readers.” Oren: It’s ’cause what you have to say isn’t that important. Respect your readers’ time. All: [Laughter] Bunny: You’re not special. Oren: Like, a perfectly self-serving perspective: it’s that your readers are not gonna tolerate having a certain–more than a certain amount of their time wasted. From a moral perspective. It’s like, okay, is it really important to what you’re saying and is what you’re saying really important enough to need a full description of the living room? Is it really? Not like the answer is never gonna be yes, but it’s gonna be pretty usually no. Chris: Part of the issue is trying to do too much. Obviously in this situation. Whereas if I had a floor plan and I was, like, telling a mystery story, for instance, and the floor plan and the precision of it is that important. That’s kind of when you need the actual drawing in the book to make that work. And obviously if you’re in indie publishing you could make that happen. For traditional publishers I don’t know what it takes to convince them to include something like that. But that’s only because in a mystery story, you expect the audience to follow along perfectly and part of the fun is that they are putting in–they are trying to solve the puzzle themself. That’s when you need something like that. And generally there are times–and we’ll talk about that when you do need to convey some aspects that are a little bit complicated. But not usually something that precise. Bunny: Maps in the front of books are a staple of fantasy. People should be able to have, like, a general idea of what you’re talking about without having to refer back to a map. But I will say they’re useful. When I was reading The Tainted Cup, I referred back to the map a couple times and that was fine. I think I would’ve been able to understand the book perfectly fine without it. And that should be the litmus test. You shouldn’t rely on having a map in the book. But that is a tool that writers sometimes use. Chris: But even then you have only so many maps. You wouldn’t, for instance, have a map for every fight scene. Sometimes for a fight scene the environment does matter and that can get complicated. Again, just going briefly back to, like, the problem with making readers do work; why it has to be simple as possible. There’s this principle I love called ‘cognitive load’ and I was talking about it before I had that term. But then when I was researching learning and education for making courses, I found, like, oh! That’s what they call it in education. That’s great. That’s perfect. Cognitive load. Basically, the idea is that, like, even a reader who has some kind of genetically enhanced super brain. Created by aliens has limited brain power. Nobody has infinite brain power. Everyone has limited brain power. And the more of their brain power that you use on one thing, the more you degrade their ability to understand everything else.  So if they have to use their brain power assembling all these pieces together into an image or making a connection between two different ideas. Or, like, let’s say you have unusual phrasing with a word they’re unfamiliar with or any small thing that they have to use a little bit of extra brain power on. That means they have lower ability to make a second logical leap or understand anything else. Also, they have less attention to devote to the other regular details. So they’re more likely to miss something important. They’re less likely to remember what you’re saying. And some of that spare brain power’s just needed to enjoy the story. Right? So a reader who has to focus too much of their attention on just figuring out what all the individual words has none left for, like, what do those words mean together and following along. That’s why you just need to lower cognitive load as much as you can. I mean, and sometimes you’ll wanna spend it to get some result. But the point is that less is always better, so you know, make it as easy as you can. Bunny: Occam’s description. The simplest description is usually the best one. Oren: Or, like, not even necessarily the simplest ’cause we’re not advocating that you make everything bland and be like, “There was a hallway. There was a room. A person was in the room.” That’s not the goal here. The goal is to focus on the things that matter. And to not waste time on things that don’t matter, which would be, like, most of the furniture in most of the rooms you’re in. Chris: And also describe things effectively so that it’s easier for people. And I think one of the issues with a lot of these really big blocks of complicated description is not just that you’re asking readers to use their brain power, but it’s so much in such a small space. You could have in a paragraph maybe one new term, maybe two. And other than that, you don’t wanna have more than one. Too many fantasy world labels, for instance, on cities they’ve never heard of or character names that they aren’t familiar with in one paragraph. Because again, if you use up all of their brain power on one thing, then they get less for the rest of the paragraph. So then when you have, like, a big block of description that’s, like, super technical it’s all at once and it’s just overwhelming. Oren: It was just interesting ’cause for most of the time when I see people arguing about this, they’re arguing against what seems like an imaginary opponent who wants their writing to be super bland. And so they’re like, “No! My writing’s not gonna be bland. I’m gonna write it as much as I want. And if it’s confusing, that’s the reader’s problem.” And for the most part it’s like, that feels like a straw man.  But there was that Kirk Vonnegut writing rules article I did a little while back in which he–or the advertising executive that wrote this for him–basically said that readers only want to see stuff that’s like what was written before and don’t do anything new. And it was like, all right, I guess we found him. We found the person making that argument. Chris: We found the straw man. Bunny: His name is Vonnegut. Oren: It’s here. He’s made of straw. It was Vonnegut or this advertising guy. Fuess, I think was his name. It’s one of those guys. We’ve been talking about, like, too much information. I often find it confusing when they leave things out ’cause there are things that need to be there. This was one of the issues I was having with Beneath the Rising, which is a cosmic horror story. And to a certain extent maybe that was on purpose. Maybe I was supposed to feel disoriented, but a lot of it was just like, wait, we’re on a plane now. Okay, the plane is landing and it’s a rough landing. What is happening? There are missing transition moments, so I didn’t know where we were from one scene to another. Chris: Some writers have more trouble with this than others, and I wish that I had better tips and recommendations for how to fix if you have missing context. But I think in a lot of cases what happens is that the writer knows what’s happening. And so they don’t realize what the reader needs to know. ‘Cause they’re not in the reader’s shoes. And so then they leave out some very basic context about transitions and things like that, that readers need. And that’s kind of a hard thing and it can lead to narration that’s very confusing. I will say for description, one thing that you want to look for is that you’re not just focusing on evocative details. I think the difference between mediocre description and great description is really getting specific and having those interesting details instead of using sort of vague terms. But if you have nothing but the little details, then you’re not creating the big picture. ‘Cause you wanna create the big picture first in more general terms that are really easy to pick up. And then you associate the little evocative details with that big picture. And if you forget that first part, then there’s just a bunch of details and we get back to the reader and ask to try to assemble them into a picture of some kind. And that’s a lot of work to figure out. Oren: This was a really interesting one because I started listening to a book called The Marvelers, which I couldn’t tell what was wrong. I could just tell that I was not really seeing the world. The world did not seem novel to me, even though it’s like a magic school setting. And if I stopped and thought about what I had just heard, because I was listening to it in audio, there were lots of details, but I just couldn’t imagine like, what is this supposed to be? It didn’t seem like an interesting world, and I didn’t know what was wrong. And I was so desperate to find out what it was I bought Chris a copy of the textbook so that she could look at it and tell me what the issue was. Chris: And it’s honestly really interesting. So yeah, this is a middle grade magic school story and honestly the descriptive details in this book are gorgeous. I love them. They’re so beautifully written. But has the very, very big problem of not including general descriptors and context so much so that when I was looking through and just trying to read it, I was just exhausted. Just exhausted by reading a middle grade book. And no doubt the cool details is what got it published anyway. Okay. For an example: what would happen is like, I think–again, I have to say “I think” because there’s a lot of uncertainty in trying to read this book. Where, like, an airship comes to take the child away to the magic school and there’s no text just saying that it’s an airship. Instead, it’s all these shapes and pieces of it are described and I have to figure out that it’s an airship. Oren: The way you would normally do it is you would describe some details of a shape or a prominent fixture, and then say, like, the airship descended or something. It’s kinda like instead of ever saying the word elephant, it’s like you just describe different parts of an elephant. Bunny: The details have to be details of something. They can’t just be details.  Chris: And you would do it different ways, depending on the narration. You could say, oh, and then the airship appeared through the clouds. And then describe the airship. And first again, start with general descriptors like it was long and sleek, or had a big pillowy airbag. Or give some general “this is what it feels like,” and then you start looking at the individual details a little bit more. Or you could just–you’d be like, oh, I saw something through the clouds. Some shadow, some long, sleek shape because the protagonist hasn’t identified it yet. And it’s like, “Oh, it comes closer and I can see that it’s an airship,” and then start to notice details as it comes closer yet.  But the point is that normally you would say what it is. And it’s okay to start with, like, a few adjectives to give a general sense of size, where it is, how far is it from the protagonist, and things like that. Especially when you walk into a space, it’s like, oh, this is a cozy room. That’s cramped with lots of oddities. And then you would start describing the oddities. But the whole cozy room with oddities tells the reader what impression that you want to create with all of the details, and makes it easier for them to understand the relationship between all those details and the narrative in general. So they know why you’re talking about details. Bunny: I think this is related to another descriptive mistake that I’ve made and I’ve seen other people make before, which is describing a really big significant thing last. I had a set of description of, like, a town. And then after I described the town, I was like, oh, I’m gonna describe, like, the airship. Oren: Yeah. Always airships. Bunny: It was an airship. It all comes back to airships. “The big airship hanging above it.” And my readers were like, “Wait, I had to completely revise my image of this town once you described, like, an airship hanging over it after you described the town.” And also, wouldn’t that be the first thing the viewpoint character notices because it’s unusual. It’s out of place in this town. And yeah, that’s true. If you describe a desk that’s got pencils on it; also, there’s a golden retriever sitting on top of the computer. You really have to revise your mental picture and kind of go backwards. And that’s not ideal for keeping readers in the moment. Chris: It’s okay to have the protagonist notice something belatedly. But then you usually make a point that they’re like, “Oh wow. That golden retriever was so still I didn’t notice that there was a dog right there.” Oren: Or, like, there was a shadow and the person just assumed it was clouds, and looks up: It’s like, “Oh, it’s a ship. Oh, okay.” Chris: Otherwise, if something is big and you’d expect them to notice it. And especially if characters are gonna interact with it later.  Again, my favorite example of this is always gonna be in Eragon. In the beginning where we’re following this shade antagonist character who was in the woods and is throwing red balls of fire at the elves to steal the McGuffin– Oren: Just as one does in the woods, right? Bunny: Just chilling. Chris: –and at some point he was in the woods on the path, and then he just gets on, like, a tall rock pillar. And like what? Where did that come from? There was a big, tall rock pillar that you could just get on. And where was it before? And then he’s out there with his minions or, like, orcs, basically. ‘Urgals.’ And then at the end when he leaves he gets on his horse. You’re like, wait, there was a horse hanging around during the fight this whole time? Bunny: Horse: famously not spooked by fights. Oren: Yeah. Very calm horse. Chris: I think there was another book, this one called Tiger’s Curse, where in the prologue there’s just people who pop into the room. Like really important characters. We describe the king in his throne chamber and some of the environment, but neglect that two people who are, like, really important to the protagonist are also standing there. So yeah, that definitely happens and it’s very confusing when it does. Again, another reason to think about when the protagonist encounters something new–goes into a new area, especially. But like, yeah, an airship approaching would be another example–to draw the big picture first, make sure everything important is in place, and then dive into your details. Oren: And when we’re on the subject of things where you are going to need to spend the audience’s cognitive load, you are gonna have to be able to do things that might be a little confusing. This is often gonna happen if you have a big speculative fiction conceit. For example, in The Expanse I noticed that once they started getting into, like, the space fights it was sometimes hard to keep track of because they are describing this very complicated maneuver where the battle is decided by who can force the other ones into a high-G maneuver they can’t get out of. Which is not very intuitive. I don’t think most people, except for space nerds, even know what that means. So it’s not easy to describe that. But to a certain extent, that is unavoidable because that’s, like, central to The Expanse. You can’t take that out. So anything you can do to save your audience’s attention elsewhere will make that easier. Chris: I think that it’s worth talking about layouts and spatial relationships a little bit. Oren: I hate ’em. Chris: [Laughs] Because sometimes you will have situations where you do have to convey something for a fight or a battle. Oren has a couple of these in The Abbess Rebellion that we worked on together. Oren: Oh yeah. Oof. Chris: I just had to kind of repeat and clarify as best we can. Because one of them is a fight that takes place on either side of a gate in the city. Which, that’s perfectly normal. But the thing was that this is a gate by the harbor, and it’s designed so that people coming invading from the harbor can’t get into the city. But instead the protagonists are out on the outside of the gate trying to keep the antagonist from leaving through the gate towards the harbor. Oren: I created so many problems for myself with that plot. Oren & Bunny: [Laughter] Bunny: Dimensionality: two out of ten. Chris: It’s interesting that they’re on the wrong side of the gate. The gate is designed to defend from the other side, and that affects the fight, and that’s interesting. But just trying to explain that concept is surprisingly complex. And so had to repeat it multiple times, tried to clarify it as much as we could, what was going on there. Other times the language needs to change. Basically, if you’re describing spatial relationships the thing that you need to know is that people can only really handle two things in relationship to each other. But you can chain them if you want, a bit. So the couch is across from the TV. The coffee table’s in front of the couch. The remote is on the coffee table. Bunny: And all three of them are trying to get through the gate!  Oren & Chris: [Laughter] Chris: That’s defended from the wrong side! So that’s an example of something where I’ve got a series of statements that will only take you so far. If you have anything more than two items you need to come up with a shape the reader is familiar with as a shorthand for how they are positioned. So, you know, you got your four ducks standing in a row. Or your four ducks in a square or six ducks in a circle. Oren: Another one that I had a huge amount of trouble with was when there was a battle that was going on in different parts of the city. And where the different things were happening mattered because it affected how long it would take them to get from the important locations to another, or whether they could intercept certain enemies or whatever. And oh God, that was so hard! It was like, wait, what street are they on? Where is that related to this hill? And is the hill part of the gate that is being defended from the wrong side? Does anyone know? There’s a granary in here somewhere, I think. All: [Laughter] Bunny: You are supposed to know, Oren. It’s your job. Oren: No one knows. I did try to spend some time before that, getting the reader acquainted at least a little bit with the city and the way that it was oriented. Where the harbor was in relation to everything else. Chris: Yeah. And often you couldn’t rely on them to remember something like that. Bunny: I do think probably one of the most difficult things to describe, period, is battles where you’re supposed to understand what’s going on. And it is, I think, valid to have a protagonist out of their depth in the middle of a battle and swords are clashing everywhere. They’re confused and trying to figure out what’s going on. It’s fine for that to also come through in the description, at least to an extent. When you’re supposed to have, like, a clear view of what the battle is and how things are moving and who’s trying to get where at what time, that is legitimately probably one of the most difficult things to describe.  Chris: In Abbess Rebellion there’s another battle that, when I was editing, I had to stop and ask Oren what the layout was. And so I was like, okay, I just don’t understand what’s happening with these ridges and this spot that they’re camping and then there’s a fight there. And after talking to him, it’s like, okay, so we have ridges on three sides and then no ridge on the fourth side. So I was like, how ‘bout we just call this a horseshoe so that we have a shape that people are familiar with? But then I looked up, okay, did horseshoes exist then? Is this anachronistic? But they did. They did exist. So we used the horseshoe. Bunny: Horses have had shoes for a long time. Chris: So then by just calling it the horseshoe wedge–and then we would say the opening to the horseshoe–that made it a lot easier to communicate. Oren: At one point there was a battle where it was more conventional with, like, the two sides lining up to face each other. And you’re supposed to refer to the flanks as right and left. But I ended up calling them east and west simply because I knew that if I had to reverse them every time I was talking about the different sides, that would be so confusing. ‘Cause when you have two sides facing each other one side’s left is facing the other side’s right. And if I had to talk about, “We must move our right wing to attack their left wing,” it’s like, wait, why are there right and left wings on different sides? It’s ’cause the mirror versus–ugh! No, it’s just the two east wings are fighting. And it’s like, that’s not how this is normally described, but I just decided to make that sacrifice. Chris: In general, I would say right/left are the type of technical language that are generally to be avoided. In this case, east/west might have just been the best way to go in this situation. But if you can give things more of a descriptive label…In some cases if a character has two arms gets injured a lot of times you don’t have to specify whether it’s the right or the left. Let them imagine it whichever way you want, and sometimes it won’t matter.  But then if you need to keep track of them you call them the injured arm versus the uninjured arm. Or this is the sunny side of the yard or the shaded side of the yard. And that’s usually better because it’s easier to remember. It has associations and implications to it, as opposed to something like north/south, right/left. But again, sometimes there’s a reason to specify it’s the right or the left arm because it matters that it was the arm that they write with, for instance. Sometimes you want to, but those are things that I also try to avoid if I can. Oren: So here’s a question; so we talked about battles, but zooming in a little bit to like more of a fight scene, which still could have a number of combatants, and each combatant you add is more strain. How much can be done at the word craft level to make that less confusing versus how much do I just need to reduce the number of people in this fight scene? Chris: Sometimes it’s realistic to have more people, less is gonna be easier. So basically the more things you have, the less you can kind of depict them and bring them to life in an immersive way. The bigger your battle is, the more you’re gonna have to summarize. The more you’re gonna have to describe people in general, instead of talking about what individual people are doing. And that’s gonna lower the level of immersion is the consequence of that. So I always do think that it’s, in many cases, good to make the scale smaller, the scope smaller, so that you can bring what you have to life. I think, for instance, it makes a lot more sense to have a shorter fight. Where you can really stay in the moment. Then to have a longer fight where you’re then starting to summarize portions of the fight. I don’t think that makes any sense to do that. Bunny: There’s another consideration, which is if you have more people, you also have to deal with the choreography of more people to avoid the trap of one-person-at-a-time fighting. So that’s also something to keep in mind. Fewer people makes that less likely to happen. Or if you have a lot of people, honestly, for the clarity of your description and avoiding turn-based combat side of it, setting your thing in a narrow hallway. All: [Laughter] Oren: It’s interesting ’cause once you get up to a certain number of people, it almost becomes easier because you can be like, okay, “There was a big melee going on around me.” And then the two relevant people who were important are across from me and I only have to describe them. As opposed to a combat that has five important participants. It’s like, ooh, that’s so many! How do I keep track of five people in this fight? Chris: Well, if you only remember one thing, remember not to try to recreate an image. It’s too precise. It’s got too much information. It’s worth a thousand words, and you don’t have a thousand words. You don’t. You have to give up that level of control. And instead, just evoke the imagination and keep it kind of vague and let the readers imagine it how they want to imagine it, and just like set atmosphere and bring across the important points. Oren: Well, with those words of wisdom, 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 wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Amon Jabber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s the professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.  [Closing theme]

So, you’ve got a cute, little story about gardening, but now it’s almost the end, and you feel like something should happen. It’s got to be exciting, right? That’s what all the other stories do. But conjuring excitement can be difficult if the rest of the story is light and carefree. That’s how you get endings that have random bursts of violence out nowhere. Fortunately, there’s a better way, and we’re gonna talk about it. Show Notes Xenomorph  Tension Two Guys With Guns Legends and Lattes The Spellshop Quicksilver Transcript Generously transcribed by Arturo. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris:  You are listening to the Mythcreants Podcast, with your hosts: Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [opening theme] Oren: Hey, so a quick note from the future: We got a little excited when talking about The Spellshop and Legends & Lattes, and forgot to give spoiler warnings. So spoilers for both of those books. Now back to the podcast. Bunny: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Bunny, and with me is… Oren: Oren. Bunny: … and… Chris: Chris. Bunny: So it’s been a nice little podcast we’ve got. I’m sure we’re all holding our tea with both hands curled up under blankets, and maybe we have a pastry next to us that we can dip in our tea, savor, and then just sigh a little bit. And it’s been nice, but I hear something bad is supposed to happen. It can’t all be good. Chris: Mmm! Oren: We can have a sudden burst of violence. Chris: Yeah, that’s true. Bunny: Maybe there was foreshadowing that we went and encountered a xenomorph, so… Oh no, I feel something in my chest! Chris: Oh no! Oren: Suddenly we all died ’cause of xenomorphs. Bunny: Secretly in this croissant there’s a razor blade. I will use it to slash the throat of the xenomorph. Oren: Good job! Bunny: Now we can get back to running our tea shop. Oren: Yeah, everything’s great. We’re all fine here. There was just some gruesome violence. Bunny: Alternatively, something dramatic could happen, like Chris and I disagreeing on the efficacy of the ending of a certain cozy mystery we both read recently. Oren: Oh dear. Bunny: That would never happen. Chris: No, never! Always in agreement. Oren: We could have, like, a sudden conflict with one of those weirdos who writes these essays about how cozy fantasy is destroying literature. That could happen. That could be our sudden final fight. Bunny: That could be our twist. We could start pretending that Legends & Lattes is equivalent to… harboring Jeffrey Epstein. Oren: Yeah! What a great essay! Chris: But, you know, if we have to face these people, we’re going to have to actually win them over, right? We have to realize that they meant well all along. They were just going about things the wrong way, and then they become our friends and soon they’re sitting down with us and also holding tea with both hands. Oren: Ah, the true victory! Bunny: Yeah, they’re just misguided! They’re just misunderstood. They can work at our tea shop on weekends. Oren: Oh no… Bunny: So it’s hard to write climaxes for low-tension stories. It’s hard to measure out the right amount of conflict. It’s like putting sugar and tea: you need just enough. Chris: Yeah. Oren: So, like, all of it, then. The maximum amount. Bunny: Frankly, you just drip some tea into the sugar jar. Oren: Yeah, it’s fine. If you use sugar alternatives, some of those you don’t need to use nearly as much to get the same amount of sweetness, so you should use the same amount for even more sweetness. Boom! Bunny: Yeah, you could use Splenda and it tastes really gross. Oren: I gotta admit, I like Splenda. Chris: Yeah, me too. Bunny: No! Oren: I can’t tell the difference between Splenda and sugar and I don’t have to use as much Splenda, so that’s what I end up using. Bunny: No, it’s just sickly and icky. Oren: You know, I’ll have to take your word for it. It’s the same to me. I have tested different mugs of tea with different types of sweeteners in them, and I cannot tell the difference between Splenda and sugar. Chris: You placebo’d yourself with sugar? Bunny: Oh, I was trying to figure out if this is Splenda or sugar or regular tea, and now my knee injury is gone. Oren: Although this could be a fun climax for a story about running a tea shop, where the person is trying to prove that their sugar alternative sweetener is just as good as sugar, or vice versa, prove that you should only use real sugar, none of this fake chemical stuff, right? There’s no chemicals in any of this. Bunny: Yeah, we’re going to go to war with big Splenda. Oren: But, like, for a low-tension tea story, which is about keeping your tea business going. The climax could be convincing a critic. Tea critic, those must exist. Bunny: Heartland Food Products Group is going down! Oren: If you wanted to make the stakes a little higher, sure, right. Chris: I do think that it’s worth talking about why people have so much trouble with this. It’s because everybody knows that a climax is supposed to be more tense and exciting. That’s the one thing that everybody knows before they come to Mythcreants. It’s the only thing. But without understanding plot structure, they’re just like, “Oh, I’m supposed to have an exciting moment here.” And so we’ll see stories that people will turn in, where the characters will be sitting around holding their tea with both hands. And then you’ll have graphic fight scene, and then you go back to characters sitting around with tea and having nice conversations. That’s almost like what The Wandering Inn is like. Well, The Wandering Inn actually does have structure when it’s not doing violence. It’s kind of like that, where it’s like, “This doesn’t really fit here.” And there’s a big difference between having a plot that climaxes and then just having random violence pop in out of nowhere, ’cause that’s not really structure. What you want is to have a problem the character’s working on and then have that build up to a peak. Bunny: It’s the “Two guys with guns come through the door” piece of writing advice that we’ve debunked. That school of thought doesn’t really work anyway, but it especially doesn’t work if you’re trying to write a cozy. Chris: I mean, I’m not going to say there’s no situation in which you could have two guys with guns coming through the door, but I think that when somebody’s thinking of that, they’re assuming you know everything else about storytelling and those guys with guns actually fit your story and actually work for your plot, and not that you have a cozy where somebody is creating a coffee shop and then two guys coming through the door with guns. The average person who’s just learning storytelling for the first time doesn’t have any of that context or preexisting knowledge to lug that into. And I think a lot of what we call pseudostructures are like that. The idea is that you’re supposed to come to the table already knowing how to tell a story. Oren: So, were I to hazard a theory about the main issue that people have here, and you all know me, I’m very cautious with my opinions… Chris: You’d never. Oren: … I would say that the biggest reason why people have problems creating a climax or finale for their low-tension story is that people have a really hard time with the difference between low tension and no tension. And a number of these stories, which are clearly aiming for low tension, overshoot and hit zero tension. And if there’s zero tension, there’s nothing to resolve. That’s what the climax does. It is a machine that turns tension into satisfaction. And if you didn’t have any tension, you have nothing to put in the machine. So then you end up doing all kinds of weird things to try to compensate. Bunny: You need a conflict that will also be your throughline, right? I think that’s the other difficult part, is that it needs to be a resolution that comes from what the rest of the story was also about. Oren: Yeah. Bunny: That’s why, even if you don’t have a random burst of violence, a random burst of conflict of any type that’s not related to what came before is also not a good climax, even if it’s the right level of cozy. Chris: Yeah. Although, I mean, what I will say is, let’s say we’re taking Legends & Lattes. Basically the stakes become whether the coffee shop fails, and it has to get you to care about the coffee shop for that to work. But that’s the throughline, is whether that coffee shop, that effort to put it together, will succeed. And so, last episode we talked about, “Okay, how do you use up your time so you can bring in different antagonists,” right? As long as they all threaten the coffee shop. And so it has a couple different plots that are mostly built with foreshadowing that provide some tension. We have the protection racket, and then we have the old coworker who has a grudge. Oren: Yeah. Chris: Because they are established early, then they can kind of show up later and create a new threat. So I don’t think that there was anything wrong with Legends & Lattes having, “Oh, the old coworker sets the shop on fire.” It wasn’t resolved well, but as a climax, I don’t think that was necessarily bad. Bunny: Yeah, I actually think that would’ve been kind of a perfect climax, because a big part of the story was, like you said, “Will the coffee shop succeed?” and, to a lesser extent, “Will Viv give up violence and find community?” And in the latter case, it kind of fumbles that, right? Like we’ve discussed how her finding community is not quite there. She’s running a business and it’s not like nobody can be charitable towards a business that burned down, but it doesn’t do the work to be like she’s earned the amount of support that she gets in return for it. Oren: Yeah, we just didn’t see her giving to the community the way that we would want for that kind of ending, right? Chris: Right. And just to clarify, for anyone who has not read this book, what happens is that the old coworker actually does succeed in burning the shop, and then the community gets together to rebuild it. And what that should be to make that ending satisfying, it should be what we call a prior achievement, where earlier the main character has done something to earn their goodwill without getting anything in return, and then now they return the favors that she’s done by rebuilding the shop. Therefore, we can attribute the fact that they rebuild it to her, even though it’s a community effort. But in this case, she just hasn’t done that. She hasn’t earned it. So it’s just unsatisfying because, yeah, they liked drinking coffee, but she was doing that for profit, right? It wasn’t a favor to them. Oren: Right. It works a little better, in my experience from talking to people who liked the ending, what made it work is that we are so heckin’ starved for nice local coffee shops that the fact that she doesn’t do anything for the community is beside the point. It’s like, “You’re not Starbucks and you serve good? Yes! Have all my money! I will send my children to work to repair your coffee shop. I just want a nice coffee shop that isn’t Starbucks so bad.” But I think we can aim a little higher, right? Bunny: I do think, to script-doctor this a bit, I think that Baldree did set himself on the back foot by having this be set in a large city where most of her customers are kind of anonymous. We get to know some of them, but I wonder… Chris: As opposed to The Spellshop, which is in a small town where everybody knows each other, therefore is obviously the good model for how to do this correctly? Bunny: As opposed to The Spellshop, yes. On Bland Wish Fulfillment Island. Oren: Hang on, hang on. We gotta… I’m not done with Legends & Lattes yet. For script-doctoring, I actually know a thing that could have made this work quite well, and I think wouldn’t have taken that big a change. The book sort of has two climaxes, ’cause it has the gangster protection racket plot (which I think we agree also doesn’t resolve very well, because it’s just Viv agreeing to pay protection money in product instead of cash, and that’s like the same thing, that’s not any better), so what we needed here was for Viv to solve that problem by rallying the local business owners (who we could have be characters; they wouldn’t need to be just a faceless crowd), have a few of the other local business owners, and they rally together to present a united front. “Well, none of us are paying, and you can’t take all of us.” And that scares off the gangsters, and Viv is the one who makes this all work and she takes point and does all the effort to make it happen. Chris: Because she does get something from that, in that they all oppose the protection racket together, which gives her protection from the protection racket. We’d really have to see her go above and beyond. Oren: Yes. Chris: She needs to do something that it doesn’t feel like she’s already gotten some benefit from. Oren: I agree. We would need to see that this is something important enough that it earns her good karma, but it would then give us some characters who we already know who could then band together to help her at the end when her coffee shop burns down. Bunny: And honestly, you could probably combine those two things. Maybe she refuses to pay the protection money and her coffee shop gets burned down. But she’s built up so much goodwill that her neighboring businesses are like, “This will not stand,” and together take a stand against the protection racket, right? Chris: Honestly, I really like the idea of the coffee shop burning down and then it turns out the real coffee shop was the friends we made along the way, right? That’s great. Just didn’t quite get there. Bunny: Yeah, yeah. Oren: You can see the idea, but it’s not quite manifesting. Chris: Right. In concept, it was a fine idea for conflict. It’s just how Baldree has issues solving problems. But yeah, so generally the climax has to be more tense than the rest of the book, but it doesn’t have to be life or death. A lot of times, a high-pressure social moment works. “Everybody’s watching, now make a speech!” tends to work pretty well. Bunny: It’s like, “A song! Do a little dance!” Chris: This is super cheesy, but all those romance movies where one of the people’s getting married to somebody else, and then the character has to march in, interrupt the wedding, and confess their love… Oren: Ah, no, I don’t like it. Chris: I’m not going to say it’s my favorite ending either, but there’s a reason it’s done that way, and that’s to create a climax that is: the love interest is about to get married to somebody else, so we have some level of urgency, which otherwise is difficult to create for a romance. Oren: Yeah. Chris: But you can also do it with: “the love interest is about to move away, or take a job that will take them away,” or something like that. And then we have a really high-pressure social situation with everybody watching, and it makes the protagonist prove themselves while confessing their love. Bunny: Yeah, they take a risk of making a fool out of themselves or having people laugh at them, or being very publicly turned down or shamed. That’s enough to make a lot of us cringe imagining ourselves in that situation. Chris: Yeah. But it also makes it feel like they’ve earned that, because they were willing to do all of those things. So that could be an alternative to having… Lives do not have to be in the line. Or another alternative is, if you don’t want something that’s fight-scene-exciting, if that doesn’t fit because the story otherwise has no fight scenes, it is pretty low tension, have something that has lives in the line but is just a little bit slower paced, ’cause a fight scene is very fast. Can you imagine how fast people punch each other or hit each other with a sword? It breezes by very quickly, so that fire in Legends & Lattes breeds a little danger, but it’s not quite as fast-paced as a fight scene. There’s a little bit more time to maneuver and avert disaster. Bunny: Yeah, if you want to see how fast fighting happens, watch fencing sometimes. Oren: Sorry, it’s already over. You can’t anymore. Bunny: Yeah. Some authors are like, “It was a quick fight! It was two minutes!” That’s a long fight. Chris: Yeah. Realistic fights are over super quickly a lot of times, but we don’t always do that in stories because we want the fight to feel a little bit more epic. Oren: Although I do feel the need to point out, before anyone else does, that how fast a fight is is going to depend on the kind of fight. Chris: Sure. Oren: It’s true that fencing is over really quickly, but a fight with both participants in full plate mail armor, that can actually last quite a while. Bunny: Yeah, it takes two minutes just to walk up to your opponent. Oren: The reason fencing is so fast is that all you need to do is tag the other person with your point or the side of your weapon, depending on what kind of fencing it is, and that’s reasonably in keeping with the kind of duels that fencing has grown out of. But if you’re two plate-mail-covered warriors, you are really hard to hurt. Chris: Yeah, and if your plate mail is made out of solid gold, then you’re not going to be able to jog. And then if the protagonist starts leaping up a wall somehow like a video game, you’ll have a real tough time there. Bunny: You’re being taunted… Chris: I’m making fun of quicksilver. Oren: Right. Chris: It has some very confusing description of the armor, but at least part of the time suggests it’s made of solid gold, and you would not make plate armor outta solid gold. You would just not do it. That is not a thing, no matter how rich and vain the queen is, you still would not do that. Oren: Certainly not for, like, your random guards to actually wear, right? Maybe a gold-plated one as, like, a display piece if you’re incredibly rich, but anyway. Bunny: Another conflict that both Legends & Lattes and The Spellshop use is hiding something, which is helpful because, if someone comes looking for it, then there you go. There’s your conflict, right? And then you can resolve that by being clever. And those are both things that can be tense, but don’t need to devolve into swords swinging. Chris: I have a post on nonviolent exciting conflicts, right? If you want something that still has kind of the excitement that’s close to a fight, but you just don’t want to have violence, which again, a lot of times in light stories or cozies may not feel like it fits. Chases, for instance, can be really great ’cause you might have to chase somebody. You might be chased and you create tricky terrain that you have to jump over or trip up on that can give you some interesting things going on. Or… I like mazes and labyrinths. You can have cool puzzles and monsters slip out. If you have magic, of course, you can have a ritual. The Spellshop ends with a ritual. I think that there is some things about it that could be better as far as excitement goes. I think the problem with the way that that ritual design there… so it’s a group who has to say a bunch of words perfectly to stop a dangerous storm. And I think the issue with it is you want it to be difficult, but if the difficulty is, “Oh, you have to say all these words right the first time,” then there’s no room for people to fail and then recover. Bunny: But they try to have it do that anyway. Chris: Yeah, but then it just feels unrealistic because you’re supposed to fail if you don’t say it exactly. Bunny: Right. And they’ve built it up so much that this has to be perfect and it takes tons of training and that these need to be professionals, but then these people who have never spoken the words before seem to do it perfectly. One of them stumbles a little bit and then gets comforted by a cat and gets right back on track, and all that does is make flowers fall from the sky, and it doesn’t feel like it was actually that hard. Oren: I have the solution for this, actually. This is what’s called engineering in error bars. The engineers who made this spell know that the people saying it are not going to say it right, so they tell you that it needs to be 100% perfect, but it actually only needs to be about 90% perfect, but they don’t tell you that, ’cause they know if they do, you’ll push it and you’ll think it’ll be okay for it to be 80% perfect. And then everyone dies. I’m glad we’ve solved that plot hole. Bunny: Very clever. Chris: Sometimes you need to have… let’s say they had to toss a ball between them as part of the ritual, as an example, and it can’t touch the ground or the ritual fails horribly. Now you have opportunity for the ball to go wide and then somebody to run after it, right? And then somebody else catches it, but “Oh no, we have to include them in the ritual,” ’cause only people in the ritual are allowed to touch the ball. Bunny: High-stakes volleyball. Chris: High-stakes volleyball! The point is that we’re creating a framework for the ritual where we can watch them struggle to meet the requirement, and we have some room to maneuver there. That just doesn’t really work very well if they’re just saying a thing. Oren: Finally, my ability to describe Hacky Sack in perfect detail is going to come to the fore. Bunny: You and the storm are going to compete in a game of cornhole. Oren: I also thought it might be worth pointing out, ’cause we’ve been talking a lot about avoiding the random burst of violence at the end, if you want to have a relatively low-tension story that ends with a fight scene or some other kind of violence, that also can work. It just needs to feel like it’s a reasonable escalation of what’s been going on as opposed to something random. And the perfect example is The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi, which is a fairly low-tension, not zero ’cause it’s about a main character hanging out in a kaiju research base, and so there’s always the threat that a kaiju might step in the wrong place, right? So that could happen. So there’s some tension there. It’s just not super high tension for most of the story. And then by the end, it escalates, ’cause one of the kaiju gets in a bad situation and they have to go try to deal with it and there’s a bad guy and blah. You know, at that point you have a fairly conventional action climax. Chris: Story things. Oren: Yeah. And the reason it worked was that this felt like a natural extension of what had already come before. It wasn’t like, “We were just hanging out in this town the whole time, and then suddenly a kaiju appeared.” Chris: I think that the climax starts to feel inappropriate when, either, (a) it’s just graphic and that doesn’t fit the tone of the story, and that does happen when we get manuscripts in, people who are less experienced, usually, again, need to work on judging tone, and so sometimes they make things a little too graphic by default, or (b) there just hasn’t been similar conflicts in the story or anything building up to the fight. Even Legends & Lattes, which generally doesn’t have much physical fights or conflicts in it, has a lot of foreshadowing to build up this animosity towards the main character from somebody who is another adventurer who goes on fights. There’s a little bit of foreshadowing of the threat of violence, even though there isn’t any fights in the book. Bunny: I think it’s also important that pretty much any climax, while it can have multiple parts, needs to be its own thing. This is the climax of the book, and that’s another issue I had with The Spellshop, is that there’s kind of five different climaxes. And I have listed them! Chris: I mean, okay, so my interpretation is those are the climaxes for child arcs. Which is what usually happens if you subdivide the book into child arcs, and each child arc should have a climax. We discuss this a little bit, and that’s a matter of the perception on the part of the reader as to whether the throughline has resolved or not, which I have called on the blog a false ending. The difference here is that I didn’t feel like there was a false ending, and it sounds like Bunny experienced a false ending at some point in the book. Bunny: I did. I experienced a false ending because I felt like the story ended when we wrapped up the Kiela story, and after we did that, then it becomes the Radan story. At which point I was like, “Okay, this just keeps going,” right? So I felt like the Kiela story ended when we found out that Radan is not an investigator. She’s, you know, misunderstood and running from something, just like Kiela. And actually the books are safe, and okay, that’s good, but then it becomes The Radan Show. Now Radan needs to be hidden from her ex-fiancé. And then there’s a storm and they gotta fix the storm. And I think you’re right that this ought to have been the thing that felt like the full ending. And then the fiancé comes back, so Radan needs to be hidden again, and then the fiancé has to be convinced not to try and find Radan. Chris: Doesn’t that happen before the storm? Because the storm hits the ship. Bunny: No, it happens twice. They leave and then the storm hits, and then the ship comes back. Chris: And then he briefly visits. But that’s in falling action. Bunny: Yeah, but it still felt like there was still tension in whether he would continue searching the island for Radan. She still has to convince him that Radan should go free. Chris: Right. Bunny: Like he’s not decided on that, despite them already having talked about that. Chris: Right. But at that point it’s… yeah, I mean, I interpreted it differently, but that’s okay. Bunny: I think maybe the main reason I found this not super satisfying is that I wanted it to be more about Kiela, and it’s all about Radan. Chris: Yeah, I mean, Kiela still has agency, though. She’s still the problem-solver, because she is the one who’s coming up with plans to hide Radan, or I think it’s Radane? Bunny: Radane? Chris: I listened to the audiobook. Bunny: I don’t know; I just read the book. Chris: Yeah. Could be different things. Bunny: Yeah. I… My brain just decides to pronounce things. Maybe it’s Kiela; I’ve just been calling Kiela. Chris: Yeah, the audiobook narrator pronounced it Kiela and Radane, I think. But regardless, she still has agency. She’s the one who chooses that they should hide Radane, and has agency and is put on the line. Radane is off hiding somewhere. And then she’s the one who has to talk to the people who are coming in looking for her. So that’s why I didn’t feel like the end of the story was about Radane instead of Kiela, because Kiela still has that agency. I do think there’s, again, a question of interpretation, because Radane comes in and threatens to expose Kiela. There’s a question of, “Okay, once that’s done, do you still feel like there’s a threat of Kiela being exposed or not?” And I think that could be why you feel like that’s tied up, because after that’s resolved, you didn’t feel like there was any more threat to Kiela being exposed, whereas knowing that somebody’s coming for Radane, you could ask, “Okay, well, is that somebody also going to expose Keila in the process?” Because there’s still that guy in town, like really grumpy guy. Bunny: Yeah, the hero hater. Chris: He was clearly just there to create some tension of her being exposed. Bunny: Although we ship him off at the end like a sack of potatoes. Chris: Yup. We ship him off at the end. Bunny: But he hates jam! Chris: But he is there to say, “Not only is she hiding Radane, but she is no good and she’s got her spellbooks and stuff.” So yeah, that’s how it ends. Oren: There is a notable tension slump between the reveal of Radane and when it heats up again later. So I can see how that could cause some way, “Is the story still going? Yeah, I guess. Oh. Oh, okay. Here we are.” Chris: Yeah. I think what was supposed to be happening there is Radane initially comes in as an antagonist, right? And then of course, ’cause this is a cozy, we befriend her. Oren: Yeah, you gotta. Chris: And then once we befriend her, somebody else might come after her. And I think that is supposed to create tension, but it just seems so unlikely, because this is an island that’s way out far away. So the idea that somebody would specifically come looking for her there when nobody’s come looking for Kiela there or anything else… Bunny: Within like a day or two. Chris: … seems really unlikely. So I just did not feel any tension over that. And then I think the tension picks up when somebody actually shows up looking for her. Oren: The island is so idyllic, though, everyone eventually ends up there. It somehow has better food than the big city, you know? Totally how rural towns work. Bunny: Yeah. I will say I did feel weird about the amount of pastoral idealism in it, and, like, I get it, it’s Wish Fulfillment Island, I get that, but Kiela’s always going, “And it’s so much better than the city!” Oren: Well, this all just makes more sense when you realize there are two facts: One is that most writers live in cities. Two, most writers are depressed and therefore anywhere they are not is better than where they are. That’s why we get so many stories about how small town life is better than city life. Bunny: Yeah, it’s Hallmark. Chris: Right, you go somewhere and everybody knows each other and likes each other, of course. Bunny: Except for the jam hater. Chris: Totally people you get along with, and somehow you have all the same amenities of the city that are magically there, and the variety of food and, yeah. Bunny: Yeah, there can be one grumpy guy, but he’ll leave and then everything’s great. Oren: One rude boy. Bunny: One rude boy. Chris: One rude boy who we could ship off at the end. Bunny: In my opinion, having imperial investigator threat and then a warship was too much. I think we could have had one or the other, and then had the storm conflict and resolved that with a little more trouble, and then that would have wrapped both the “Kiela needs to find community,” “The storms are affecting the island,” and the spellbooks plot, all at the same time. Chris: Yeah, that might’ve… I think the tricky thing there is these plots where you have an antagonist that is just a little misunderstood and you can make friends with them, those are really hard to pull off and make everybody stay in character without making it like they just turn into a different person. And so, keeping them short, I think, definitely makes that easier because, in most of those situations in my experience, if you think about their character and you just make them act in character, they don’t really want to fight that much, if they’re that kind of person who’s just like, “Some kind of misunderstanding happening here.” Bunny: What did you think of Caz threatening to murder Radane? Chris: Oh man, that was… Bunny: That was weird. Chris: That was a little much. I think it was played for humor, but yeah, maybe a little much. Bunny: I don’t know. The characters take it pretty seriously. Oren: He’s a small, adorable plant. Therefore, everything he says is funny and not threatening. Chris: I’ve definitely encountered that fallacy in books. “Hey, the character is small and cute, therefore they can do no wrong.” It’s like, “Mmm…” It’s actually just like the magical in Legends & Lattes, who’s like, “But you see, she’s running a protection rabbit. She’s running a protection…” Bunny: Protection rabbit! Chris: See? It’s a rabbit! So it’s cute and harmless. Bunny: She rides a rabbit. Chris: Led by this grandma, and so she’s sweet. So therefore, protection racket is just fine. I’ve definitely seen that fallacy in books. Oren: Okay. Look, so we’ve gone even further over time than last time, so I think… Bunny: No, I didn’t even get to talk about Tea Dragon Society! Oren: I’m sorry. We are out of time. We’ve spent too long on Legends & Lattes and Spellshop. Bunny: Here I was, coming in, pitching this, “I have only two main stories to talk about. How will we fill the time by arguing about them?” Chris: Alright, if you would like to pet the Protection Rabbit, just support us at patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First there is 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. [closing theme] This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.

Protagonists are the most important character of their story, and characters do stuff. That’s pretty much their whole thing. But what happens when important characters have nothing to do? Why are authors always making this mistake, and what can be done about it? Obviously, the first thing to do is record a podcast; maybe that will help. Show Notes Agency Wolf Pack Name of the Wind Revenger Kochab Hundred Thousand Kingdoms Alien Clay The City in the Middle of the Night My Lady Jane Space Opera  Amphibia The Ministry of Time Transcript Generously transcribed by Emma G. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris:  You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [Intro Music] Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren. With me today is… Chris: Chris. Oren: And… Bunny: Bunny. Oren: So, there’s a problem for the podcast that we have to solve. But if we did anything, the problem would just be immediately over. So, I guess we probably shouldn’t ’cause we don’t wanna resolve it too quickly. Chris: Maybe we could just talk about resolving it and then not actually do it. Or maybe ask questions about what weird thing is going on here? We don’t know. Could be anything. Oren: We could talk about how we need a plan. Bunny: That’s true. We do. A plan is what we need. Chris: Or we could just come up with really bad plans and then fail at them continually. Bunny: I don’t know. I’m still stuck on the fact that we need one. A plan, I mean. Oren: Yeah, do we need a plan? We could have a committee to make a plan. Bunny: That always works. Oren: Or occasionally, maybe we could just ask our super cool dark boyfriend to solve it for us. Thanks super cool dark boyfriend! Bunny: Oh, that was easy.    Oren: Solved. Chris: He’s such a killer, but with me he’s super gentle. Bunny: You think you fixed him? Oren: So, today we’re talking about characters with nothing to do, which is a thing that happens a lot and has also happened in a lot of the books I’ve been reading recently ’cause I’ve been reading books that we think might win a Hugo and… they trend in certain directions, I’ll say that much. Bunny: All the thinking, none of the doing. Oren: Not universally, it’s just I’ve noticed a pattern in books that tend to be nominated for and then sometimes win Hugos. Chris: Look, it’s actually not hard to write a book where characters do nothing and just philosophize all the time. It’s just not very good and that’s why people don’t do that. Bunny: Yeah, turns out that’s really boring. I don’t know. I can also make up a fake philosophy and then talk about it for chapters upon end. Oren: All right, so the first thing is we should talk about why do we end up with books where the main character has nothing to do? Not just books, occasionally TV shows and movies too. We don’t discriminate here. Bunny: I feel like it is less likely to happen in something like a movie, though. Chris: A movie doesn’t have very much time, so if the character has nothing to do in a movie, it has really failed. I’m not saying that can’t happen. I think in TV shows where there’s usually more time pressure to come up with more material and there’s more constraints for how many characters they have to include and whether those characters come back or not and how many episodes they have to produce… I think that’s just easier to happen on a TV show than a movie. I’m not gonna say it couldn’t happen in a movie. Oren: Yeah, I would say that just based on my experience, it is least likely to happen in a movie, more likely in a TV show, and quite likely in novels because the more time constraints you’re under, the less likely you are to have your character hanging around for long periods of time just musing about things. Bunny: I think the one, the version of a character doing nothing or who has nothing to do that’s ubiquitous across these three mediums is the kind where the main character just runs after someone else who’s doing the things. In which case things are happening but this character has nothing to do. Oren: Yeah. You know, there are things occurring. I mean Twilight’s a movie, right? Not just a book. So, it has the same problem that the book does. So, there’s something – this is just about the time commitment – but often the reason is that there’s just not really a plot. Or there’s not enough plot, like the plot is really thin. So, if the main character did anything, the plot would immediately be over, there’s only one thing to do. Chris: Yeah. If the plot is it’s a mystery that’s too easy to solve, for instance, or it’s too easy to solve, period. I think the issue in Wolf Pack, which is a TV show where it’s got 14 wolves that just twiddle their thumbs until episode seven out of eight. Which is a really long time and there’s several reasons for that. But one of the reasons is if, again, miscommunication is not really a good obstacle when you have a high stakes story. And if everybody who wanted to, again, there’s just one antagonistic werewolf that’s going around killing people. If everybody who are all the protagonists just got together, they just clearly outmatch that one wolf. So, they have to drag it out so that they just don’t do it so there isn’t any standoff because we don’t have anything else for them to do. Bunny: Have fewer wolves, that’s our advice to storytellers. Oren: Just not as many wolves, please. Bunny: There are too many wolves. Chris: Yeah, I mean, if they had more antagonists that could be one way of dealing with that. The other problem with this show is that there’s a little lesser, there’s supposed to be a lesser antagonist. I mean, she’s supposed to seem like it, but she’s not really an antagonist. And that’s part of their problem is that she’s not actually gonna do anything bad. She’s just gonna ask questions and we’re supposed to feel scared. Oren: Yeah, well, she’s adult Buffy. She’s a little… she’s kinda menacing. Bunny: I mean, the just-asking-questions crowd can be pretty frightening. Oren: Oh my gosh. Oh no. Chris: But yeah, adding another antagonist sometimes, right? If you’ve got a big bad, have a lesser antagonist that protagonists can interact with and overcome. If you have a mystery, you can add more red herrings. Or add some complications to the protagonist, divide their loyalties a little bit. Give them a dark secret they have to deal with. Oren: Just make the plot a little meatier, you know? Chris: Yeah, you have to make the situation harder and put in more obstacles and create more structure there. Which again, if you don’t have practice, it is a little tricky to figure out how you do that, right? You can’t just make the conflicts longer. You have to make them more complicated, too. Oren: I also realize I’m doing this in the wrong order. I should have been establishing, ‘Why does this matter?’ ‘Cause it’s not like there’s a universal law that says characters have to do things. There’s reasons why it’s bad. Bunny: Why can’t the character sit on their hands and do nothing? Oren: Yeah, I realize that seems- Chris: No, it’s a valid question. I mean, if we’re talking about how stories work, we really do have to explore those basic questions because they have the key to other, more advanced questions. Bunny: Yeah, we’re just asking questions. Chris: Oh no. Oren: We’re also answering questions ’cause we know the answer to this one, which is that if the main character isn’t doing anything, the story’s boring. It has no movement and it probably has no tension because either the character’s not doing anything and nothing bad is happening, or we’ve just been assured that the bad thing is a hundred percent going to happen and there’s nothing the character can do about it. In which case, tension is still low because there’s no uncertainty. And to be clear, when I say do something, I don’t necessarily mean run around with a missile launcher, okay? There are many different versions of doing something. Chris: In Wolf Pack, there’s one episode where they all just spontaneously start running. The teen wolves. So, they can meet each other out in the park. And then they just have a conversation about what’s going on. And then they just all go home again. I mean, that’s technically something they did. They ran, their eyes glowed, you know, it was a thing. Bunny: They had a little extra budget. Gotta make that money worth. Chris: But we’re talking about, honestly, it’s all about trying to solve problems. It’s all about actually having a situation, a problem, that evokes tension, and then the protagonist’s job is to try to solve that problem. And they can succeed or fail. They may win some and lose some but that’s what creates that structure. And even if you have a tense problem, if you spend long enough with a protagonist just sitting on their hands doing nothing… at that point, the problem should have some level of urgency. So that if they do nothing, then the bad guy wins. Right? Or the disaster happens. So, if we watch them do nothing and continually nothing bad happens, well then that must mean that the threat isn’t really threatening and it doesn’t matter. I think Name of the Wind is a great example of that. Oren: Yeah, it is. Which is funny because Name of the Wind is not the kind of book you think of when you imagine a story where the character has nothing to do because it’s all about how amazing and great he is at everything. But he just hangs around the magic school forever and nothing happens. He is just there. Chris: It’s one of the few books with a candid protagonist and not enough agency, I think. Oren: Yeah, it’s real weird. Chris: Real weird. But, even in the prologue – it’s 50 pages – the framing device. The putting up the framing device. We have a situation where these spider demons are threatening the town. We make it seem like a big deal. And then Kvothe just hangs out cleaning his inn and doesn’t really do anything. It’s like, okay, I guess..? Bunny: Hey, that’s doing something. What if the inn was dirty? Chris: It’s like, okay, I guess those spider demons aren’t a big deal after all. They haven’t come yet. We’re not doing anything, so… Oren: It’s fine, don’t worry about it. And if you do create a compelling, tense problem and then your protagonist just hangs around not doing anything. That’s like, congratulations, I’m really frustrated with this character now. Did you want that? I don’t think most authors want that. Chris: Right. So, yeah conversely, if a disaster happens because the character sat on their hands and did nothing it’s really frustrating and people will hate that character. Oren: Yeah, I don’t wanna read about that character anymore ’cause they seem like the worst. And even in the one that Bunny talked about, which is the possibility of the protagonist who is sort of following around people who are doing stuff, I’m then left with like, ‘Why isn’t one of them the main character? It feels like they are actually who the story is about, but for some reason you didn’t wanna focus on them? Why not?’ Chris: Yeah, I just did a critique of Revenger and that has, I know that there’s plot plans for them later. But it opens with two sisters and one of them is the viewpoint character but she’s just a bag of nothing. It’s like she’s not even there. And then there’s another sister who is completely driving the story. It’s decided, ‘No, we’re gonna ditch this lame party and we’re gonna go on an adventure’. And it’s just, why are there two of them? Why isn’t there one of them? Oren: Yeah. I mean, in that case the reason why there’s two of them is because, so the one who actually does things can get captured a ways later and then the rest of the book is about trying to save her. So, I assume that’s supposed to be an arc, it’s just not a good arc. Chris: I think what we could do instead is combine them and then when she goes on the pirate ship, we can introduce a likable character there that is a later damsel for her to rescue. Oren: Yeah, I think that would work fine. That book in general just has long periods where the protagonist doesn’t do anything. In the first part it’s because on their initial space journey, they were hired to operate this magical skull that no one ever uses and it does nothing useful ’cause it’s like a communication device in a setting where no one ever talks to each other. So, that’s pretty worthless. And then after the sister gets kidnapped, there’s a brief period where, now the main character’s doing stuff, but then she gets kidnapped by her dad and has to be like ‘flowers in the attic’ for a while. And then she eventually escapes and we kind of keep going as if that didn’t happen. It’s like, oh well, that was unpleasant. That was a deeply unpleasant few chapters. Moving on. It’s like, I guess she’s very resilient. Chris: We’ve gotta go to torture town. Oren: Yeah, it’s just really infantilizing. Like, no you can’t do anything. You’re gonna be a child forever. Literally, ’cause we have drugs that do that and it’s like, okay, well this sucks. I don’t like this. Where are we going with this? And the answer is, we’re eventually going to get back to the original plot. Bunny: We’re going nowhere. We’re going to forget it ever happened. Oren: Yeah, and it’s just kind of a mess. Chris: Yeah, I mean that sounds partly like the issue of having a protagonist that just doesn’t have any way to contribute. Right? It’s like when you have a normie who’s surrounded by all these great heroes and you’re like, wait, how do they make a difference as a normie? And we talked about this a bit in our agency episode and it has a variety of solutions. You can give them a special power, is just one of the better ones. Get rid of some of the powerful allies or make them less powerful. Send the protagonist off on their own. You can create problems that are uniquely tailored for the protagonist’s background or where they come from or other things, but you have to think about how big are those problems? How much of the story are they gonna take up? Because if you have one solution that lasts for multiple problems, that’s the best. Bunny: I definitely had the character who’s supposedly the main character running around after another character problem with a graphic novel I read recently, which is also a web comic. I think you can read it all for free – called Kochab – which is a gorgeously illustrated, beautiful graphic novel. And man does it need that beautiful drawing because the plot is pretty thin. Oren: It’s a good thing you’re pretty, web comic. Bunny: Yeah, web comics should smile more. Again, great art style, I can’t recommend looking at the pretty drawings enough. Oren: Yeah, it’s very pretty. I’m looking at it right now. It’s like, wow, looks gorgeous. Bunny: It’s gorgeous, yes. I have a signed copy of the book. It’s very pretty. Oren: Oh, now they’re kissing. Oh, wow. Bunny: They do kiss. They do have a smooch. Spoilers! But the plot starts with Sonya, who’s the one in furs and stuff, skiing away from her village. And she goes too deep in the woods and her skis break and she stumbles upon this magical palace. And inside she accidentally awakens Kyra, who’s like a fire spirit. And then the book is mainly about Sonya following Kyra around as Kyra grumpily tidies up the palace. Sonya can’t even get too far from her because she needs to be nearby to stay warm because it’s the icy depths of winter and she can’t even help with the tidying. Kyra just kind of waves and magics the rooms into being nice and tidy. Oren: That’s nice. That’s convenient. Bunny: Yeah. I think the intention of the book is that Kyra is opening up after having experienced a tragedy with the last mortal she fell in love with. And I think the author thought that was enough – like their banter and stuff as this all is going on – to keep the plot moving, but it was just very ponderous. Chris: Yeah. It’s hard to deal with those stories where the storyteller only wants to focus on the healing and doesn’t wanna focus on any actual problems, right? It’s like, you can have a story about healing, but if it’s only healing and we don’t have any way to create tension or structure, then it does become a very slow story. Bunny: And then at the end, we have a very sudden, ‘Oh the ice spirits are now busting into Kochab’ and Kyra fights them. They don’t even notice Sonya, which, yeah, of course not, it’s a big spirit battle. Oren: Sudden burst of violence at the end. Every frickin’ time. Bunny: Yeah. Yeah, pretty much. And I mean, okay, again, I see what the author is doing. We want Kyra to eventually leave the palace because she’s self-isolating or whatever. It’s a metaphor. But yeah, please, I like Sonya. Give her something to do. Oren: It feels like the way you would do that is that there would be ice elementals, they’d be doing bad stuff and Kyra would be like, ‘Uh, what’s the point? I can’t do anything’. And Sonya would be like, ‘Well then I’ll stop them’ and go out and fight the ice elementals. And then the ice elementals are gonna do a murder on her. And then Kyra’s like, ‘Oh no, actually I do care about something’, and then uses her powers. Right. That feels like that’s how you would do that ending. I don’t know, maybe that’s basic. Bunny: Yeah, I don’t know. In this case, the ice elementals, they bust in and they’re like, ‘Thanks Sonya for distracting Kyra, now we can wreak havoc’. And then they battle. Oren: Yeah, I would not have done it that way. Bunny: Yeah. Oren: I do notice that this page has animated snow falling. So, for the print version, do they send you a new page every day to put in with the snow in a slightly different position? Bunny: Oh, not every day. It’s every couple minutes. You flip through it like a flip book. Oren: The one that I find interesting is when the author creates a problem that is too big for the characters to realistically do anything about. And then we just hang around until some late point in the story when something happens and now we can deal with it. Chris: Like The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms? Oren: Um, is Hundred Thousand Kingdoms that way? It’s been a long time. I honestly don’t remember. Chris: It’s pretty similar, although I would say it’s a manifestation of a different thing that causes this problem. But why don’t you give your other example and then we’ll talk about it. Oren: All right, well. Spoilers! This is for Alien Clay. Which is a more recent book by Adrian Tchaikovsky. And I think this one is on purpose because the main character is a scientist who gets sent off to a labor planet by an authoritarian government. Good thing we don’t know anything about that. And so he hangs out on this alien labor planet for a while and they talk about how much it sucks to be here and how much the government sucks. And it’s like, yeah, okay, I believe you, I know. And you’re just waiting! You’re going by and they’re like, yep, this is bad. And they’re hanging out. And then eventually, near the end (big spoilers!), they become a hive mind because of the life forms on the planet. And then they defeat the bad guys. Super easy, barely an inconvenience, ’cause they’re a hive mind now. Which is good, I think. We’re supposed to think that this is good and that anyone who isn’t evil would love this. Bunny: It’s boring propaganda! Oren: Yeah. It’s like, no, sorry guys, I don’t want this. Bunny: I think that’s a little spooky. Oren: There’s a lot of people who aren’t evil who I don’t want be in a hive mind with. And the book claims they can’t actually read each other’s thoughts but they’re so good at reading body language, they might as well be able to. It’s just like, great, what you’re telling me is I basically have no privacy. This sounds bad, I don’t like this. Chris: So, the characters are just waiting around for the alien consciousness to adopt them? Oren: More or less. Yeah, I mean, bad things happen, right? At one point they get sent out on a dangerous mission into the wilderness, but the dangerous mission is just them being like, ‘Yep, we’re probably gonna die’. And then they start walking back and you might expect that this would be a tense survival scenario and then at the very end the planet would help them? But no, it just dryly describes how they walk back and how it kind of sucks, and then they become planet hive minded and we’re good. Good job everybody. Bunny: How is it a hive mind if it’s just being good at reading body language? I thought the hive mind is meant to be the mind part? Oren: So, the story is kind of vague about the terminology. I’m using the term hive mind. It doesn’t use that term. I’m using that term because that’s how they act. They act like they’re all in sync. They’re all perfectly coordinated. They can all tell what each other is going to do. To my mind that’s a hive mind. Whether or not they officially have telepathy or not, it’s ’cause they all have alien spores and stuff in them. And yeah, it’s a little weird. At the end the message is bad ’cause the message is basically, ‘You can’t defeat authoritarianism without alien help’, which is a weird message for 2025, friendo. I don’t like it. And the story is also really boring, so what was even the point? Bunny: Yeah, I feel like there’s something that could have been done there to build up to that a little bit. Oren: Yeah, I mean, what you would theoretically do is the bad guys would have their own alien bullshit that they’re using. And then the heroes would try to do things to overcome it and fail until they get the help of the good alien stuff, right? That’s theoretically how you would do this, but that’s not what happens. Chris: Or, at least in The City in the Middle of the Night they have some traveling to do. Oren: Yeah, they do have to travel. Chris: That one also doesn’t have enough agency but at least they have something to do in general. So, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms has- I don’t remember the main character’s name but basically what happens is that she is the granddaughter of the emperor and her mother married somebody she was not supposed to, making her out of favor. And so, I think it’s after her mother dies, her grandfather calls her back to the capital to compete as a possible heir to the throne? But the entire idea is that this is some kind of punishment and she doesn’t actually have any chance of winning. Right? So, at first it’s really tense. And usually if the author tells you, ‘Oh, she has no chance of winning’, you’re like, sure, she has no chance. Wink, wink. But no, Jemisin, that’s not what she has in mind. Bunny: Would be shame if this plucky main character, underdog, upset the order of things. Chris: So, she’s just out of her depth and doesn’t even really try and instead she dinks around. She does have a hot love interest she falls in love with and kind of pokes around ’cause she wants to know what happened to her mother but doesn’t really have any bearing, right? If she investigated her mother and it felt like it had some relevance to whether she won this contest. Because everybody who doesn’t win the contest dies, I might’ve forgotten to mention that. Oren: Oops. Chris: So, she just twiddles her thumbs, and I think that’s because – spoilers – Jemisin wanted her to fail at the contest. And now again, we know that that doesn’t mean that she can’t try and she can’t do things that later pay off even if they don’t cause her to win. But I’ve seen this pattern before where storytellers… and we had this in My Lady Jane too, which is not the only issue with My Lady Jane as a TV show. But when a storyteller looks at a sequence of events and they’re like, ‘Okay, well Lady Jane has to get married, but she doesn’t wanna get married. Well, I guess I’ll just negate her will’. And she fails at everything, nothing she does matters, because they want an outcome that is a failure. That doesn’t have to be that way. You can still have the character do meaningful things, even if they fail at their one thing that they want, they can accomplish something smaller that matters later, for instance. Or, they could make the situation better. Maybe it was gonna be even worse before. Or they could do some other goal that then backfires and causes the problem. There’s a number of ways to still have the character do things if they fail. Oren: Or if you want them to really fail, they can make things worse. That’s also acceptable. It’s just super weird when you watch that show and realize that most of the episodes would be the same if the main character was asleep the whole time. Not all of them, but most of them. Chris: Just the definition of having no agency. You could just replace her with a sexy lamp. Oren: The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms that you mentioned reminded me of Space Opera with the music contest to save humanity. Where they’re like, ‘Okay, you guys have to win this music contest. And that’s gonna be impossible because you’re just two washed up musicians. You’re not even good musicians’. Because apparently in whatever year this takes place, Earth has no good musicians left. So, they just send these jokers. But everyone else is playing with super alien tech and psychic powers and it’s just impossible for you to do any of those things, so you can’t win. But then there’s this funny part where they acknowledge they don’t have to win, they just have to not come in last. But then they just ignore that, they don’t mention it again for the entire rest of the book. And I was so confused if that was an artifact from a previous edit or something because they don’t act like that’s the case. Chris: Yeah. This is similar, where they have this impossible contest and then they fail and then what happens in The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms after she fails the contest- That is foreshadowed, that is set up, right? She should have been doing things before that, but I don’t object to the way that it ended. I think it ended just fine. Whereas in Space Opera, we just have three deus ex machinas all appear at once to keep them from coming in so they’re not the very last. Oren: The triple ex machina. Bunny: The rarely seen, rarely pulled off, Olympic level. Oren: Slaps the roof of the story, ‘This baby can hold so many deus ex machinas’. Chris: And if you have a light comedic low realism story, you can get away with things that are a bigger stretch, but there’s still a limit. I’ve been noticing that as we’ve been rewatching Amphibia, which is a really good show. But some episodes are just like, uh that is too far for me. That clearly is not how that would work. You got yourself in a situation. In particular, there’s one episode where all the protagonists get tied up except for Polly, the little tadpole character. And the way that she fights the big antagonists is just, yeah, I’m just not buying that. And we specifically set this up as a situation that it was important that she overcome them herself. Oren: Right. The issue there was that in other episodes it’s established that Polly is actually very, very good at fighting. But part of this episode is that it’s supposed to be a quasi-horror episode, so we’re supposed to believe that this is a really hard situation and then she just defeats it by fighting good. There’s no turning point. It’s just like, ‘Oh, the turning point is that I’m good at fighting. I forgot’. Bunny: But what if you had a light story without a lot going on that mostly relies on novelty related to comedy of manners and time travel. But then someone gets assassinated and the character promises you that maybe she could have prevented it if she had made a different decision, which she didn’t. She’s sorry about that. Oren: It has been zero days since Oren and Bunny ragged on the Ministry of Time. Everyone change the signs. That’s a weird one. I don’t know what’s going on there, I’m gonna be honest. There is nothing happening and then, like many of these books, there is a sudden burst of extreme violence at the end. Okay, I guess? Chris: Yeah. I would say, again, not having finished the book because it was boring- Bunny: Chris, you have to join us. Chris: That’s one that feels like it only marginally has a through line. I guess there are some very silly antagonists that show up later? Oren: Yeah, I mean, sort of. It’s really hard for me to call that a through line. I guess what we’re supposed to think is that the through line is whether or not the love interest guy will be evil. But we didn’t even know that was a possibility until three fourths of the way through the book, when they suddenly make a huge deal about whether or not the love interest is going to join the evil British government. I mean this is already weird ’cause the love interest is so nice and we’ve been working so hard to ignore the fact that he’s a mid 18th-century British naval officer in the way that he acts, that suddenly when the end is like, ‘Oh yeah, you know, he might join the evil government ’cause he’s an 18th century British naval officer’. Bunny: They could have done so much more with that. It’s frustrating. Oren: You’ve been telling me explicitly to ignore that aspect and now you’re hanging the plot on it. Bunny: It makes a ton of sense that a guy from the height of the British Empire would be really pro-Empire. Chris: Yeah. And also, I gotta say, feeling tension over a naval officer joining the current day military. We have lots of those? Oren: Yeah. The book fails to explain why that’s especially bad. Does he do something that no one else could do? Chris: But even when they establish that they might be able to evade detection from some devices, I just don’t think it’s that big of a deal. Bunny: Yeah. He’s able to go through metal detectors real good. And I think also be invisible on cameras or something. Technology doesn’t pick them up? Oren: Which is hilarious because the thing that he ends up doing that’s really bad has nothing to do with any of that. The thing that he ends up doing that’s bad is that he’s in charge of the murder migrant patrol, which heckin’ sucks. But A: I didn’t even know this was a possibility until the book was nearly over. And B: if he doesn’t do it, is no one going to do it? Is he especially good at this aspect of the horrors? I have no idea. The book just doesn’t have anything to say about that. Chris: Now if I think about what tension does the book have going on, right? It’s mostly just honestly slice of life of the main character and this guy being roommates as she works for this government program. But there’s the threat that maybe these people who are expats who have come through time might get sick and die, right? Because they can’t adjust to the time. But frankly, there’s nothing that anybody can do about that. So, that doesn’t seem to matter as much as far as the plot. It’s like it’ll happen or it won’t and as time passes it seems less and less likely anyway. And then there’s vague foreshadowing hints about how this program is menacing somehow? Bunny: Of course it is. For the reader, there’s never any question. It’s a spooky government agency that’s creepy, bureaucratic. From the start it’s like there’s something up with this, something nefarious. Chris: Right. But again, we don’t follow that up with any movement, for the most part. I mean, there’s little bits and tiny bits at a time. But that’s probably the closest there is to a through line in this book. Oren: All right, well this book has once again gotten us way over time, which is probably ironic, but I think we are gonna have to call this episode to a close. Bunny: We should have ministered our time a little better. Chris: If we gave you something to do for a little while, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: Yeah, see if you’re typing angry comments, you’re not doing nothing. Before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. [Outro Music]