The Mythcreant Podcast

Is it possible to get so drawn in by a story that you forget you’re reading words on a page? Probably not, but authors usually want to get as close to that feeling as possible. Achieving it is far from simple, though, and sometimes, it might not even be the best choice. This week, we’re talking about immersion: everything from wordcraft to worldbuilding to quest arrows in video games. Also about how quippy humor didn’t suddenly become bad; it’s just oversaturated. Show Notes How to Tell Jokes   Origin of “He’s Standing Right Behind Me”  The Play That Goes Wrong  Show, Don’t Tell Narrative Distance  The Ministry of Time  Dialogue Tags A Study in Drowning  The City in the Middle of the Night Legends and Lattes Transcript Generously transcribed by Latifah K. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [Intro music] Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreants. I’m Chris, and with me is- Oren: Oren. Chris: -and. Bunny: Bunny. Chris: Now I know you think we have three hosts, but actually we have four. Oren: Ooh. Chris: Because, dear listener, you’re the fourth host. Oren: Ooh. Bunny: Whoa. Chris: Obviously, you’re sitting around a table with us, your friends, and we’re just chatting about stories. Except sometimes you want to join the conversation, and you can’t. Immersion broken. Bunny: No. Oren: Look, it’s fine. Just develop one or two social relationships with us. A pair-a-social relationships if you will. [chuckles] Chris: Oh no. Bunny: And we’re definitely all sitting around a table right now and not on opposite sides of Seattle. Oren: Yeah, this is real. Bunny: This is real. Chris: So unfortunately, when somebody realizes they can’t join in the conversation and argue with us or talk about their favorite story. Immersion is broken, and we got to go to break in immersion jail. [chuckles] But I’m not sharing a cell with Ministry of Time. Bunny: No, Ministry of Time. Look, the fact that they can’t argue with us in real time is a feature, not a bug. That’s what comments are for? Oren: Got to hold it all in until it’s time for the comments. I’m sure that’s healthy. Bunny: When you think about it? Comments are a very clever form of immersion. [chuckles] Chris: Okay. So, what is immersion? And maybe it means something different in video games. Oren, would you like to tell me– I saw something weird in your notes about immersion in video games, and now you have to explain to me and all of our listeners. Oren: So, it’s hard for me to hear the term immersion and not kind of laugh a little bit because it’s become almost a little bit of a meme in certain game design and game discussion circles where people talk about “my immersion” in that voice, that tone we specifically use because it has at least some context, and I’m sure the pros have their own terminology, but at least in some context, immersion refers to the feeling that you are in the game. And so that means typically the removal of things that give away that it’s a game, which can be fun and great, but it can also mean taking out critical UI components like a quest arrow, and not every game needs a quest arrow, but a lot of games need quest arrows, and not having one is bad for the game. Chris: And immersion. If you’re wondering, “Where the hell is my quest? How do I get there?” I don’t think that’s very immersive. Oren: Right. But people will sometimes defend that choice under the guise of, “It’s more immersive to not have a quest arrow because you wouldn’t have a quest arrow in real life.” Bunny: You’d be confused out of your mind. Chris: Yeah, I mean, that reminds me of something in other design fields where designers are always tempted to make things as minimal as possible, right? Instead of making things busy, making them simple. But that can come at the cost of usability sometimes, so– Oren: Yeah. And I’ve played some games that are simple, and so they have very minimal interfaces, and you really do have a little bit more immersion that way. So, it’s not like it’s a fake idea; it’s just that it’s not the only thing that matters. And with video games in particular because they are often very complicated and require very complex controls, often trying to shoot for that can mean losing things. Your players really need it. Bunny: I’d also argue that video games are just by virtue of you piloting a character around. I already have a really, really high level of immersion. So, claiming that the thing that will break it is a quest arrow is intensely funny. [chuckles] Oren: Yeah, it’s also just pretty obvious that a lot of this is like a veil for elitism, where it’s like, “Oh, you need a quest arrow. I guess you’re not a real gamer.” That sort of thing. Or, like, “Oh, you need a menu to keep track of what you were told by various people. Why didn’t you just remember it?” Bunny: I’ll have you know, my spatial awareness is garbage. [chuckle] I will walk into a building and immediately get lost, so haters don’t come at me. [laughs] Chris: Okay, yeah. That makes sense. And it’s basically the same definition of immersion, where basically it’s the degree to which the story feels real, and the audience forgets they are consuming a story and are just fully in the moment. Bunny: Basically, books should have quest arrows. [laughs] Oren: Yeah. And I mean, at least in novels, in my experience, there is less of a chance that by going for more immersion, you are going to leave out something that the reader needed. That can happen with video games. Not going to say it’s impossible, but– Chris: Yeah, I will say I think with exposition, for instance, I’ve definitely seen people say, “When you open up a new chapter, don’t tell people the time and place, just show them. Do you want to say that it’s now winter? Describe how it’s snowing.” And so, you don’t have to do all showing and no telling. But sometimes we do need telling for clarity. So that, I think, is where that would come into play. Oren: And there are also certain types of stories that are stories you might want to tell that are going to inherently have less immersion. Anything that is humorous is less likely to be immersive just because humor requires making fun of things and treating things less seriously. Not that it’s impossible to have humor and immersion, but typically speaking, one will detract from the other. Chris: I would have actually put it the other way. I would say that humor actually requires less immersion, and so you can create more entertainment in something that is less immersive with humor. So, for instance, Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—that’s what I love referring to if I want to show people what entertaining exposition looks like because there is a lot of expositions in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. But nobody minds because it’s all very entertaining and there’s tons of jokes in there. So, I think that novelty and humor work with low immersion in a way that other engagement mechanisms don’t. I do think that it is an interesting thought if you add a joke, “Does that make things less immersive?” I think it might depend on the joke, like some jokes are very meta. Bunny: If you’re being self-aware. Oren: Yeah. Like, anything that’s a commentary is going to reduce immersion because that requires calling attention to the workings of your story. And this is like a really hot discourse topic right now because everyone’s sick of Marvel movies, and Marvel movies have a lot of self-referential humor that everyone loved in 2008, like when the MCU started, it was great, right? We were all so tired of the Batman movies that took themselves so seriously, and it’s like, “No, now we have characters who can laugh at each other. And yeah, their superhero names are really silly, and we can make jokes about it.” But now, nearly 20 years later, everyone’s like, “Oh God, they made another joke about the superhero names.” So, you’ll see people writing these think pieces about how, like, “Why don’t movies take themselves seriously anymore?” And what they mean is that they’re tired of watching Marvel movies where everything is a funny reference. Bunny: Well, that just happened. Oren: Yeah, that is actually an interesting– I don’t know if that one is immersion-related exactly, but the, “Well, that just happened.” joke is a joke that everyone decided was bad because it’s been overused. But it’s actually a perfectly fine joke. It used to be considered very funny because it hadn’t been everywhere, and now it’s in too many movies, so people don’t think it’s funny anymore. Bunny: Maybe in 20 years it will come back around to being funny. Oren: Same thing with the, “He’s standing right behind me, isn’t he?” That’s a funny joke. That joke has literally been around since like the Ancient Greeks, but it’s just been used so much in so many Marvel movies that people are like, “No, it’s actually a bad joke.” Now they’ll write pieces about how it’s unsophisticated and bad humor. And it’s like, “No guys, just calm down. Just stop watching Marvel movies. You don’t have to go, it’s fine.” [chuckles] Chris: It’s just been a little overused; that’s what happens. Jokes depend on novelty. If they lose their novelty, they lose their surprise, and then they don’t feel good anymore. Pretty simple. Bunny: With regards to comedy, I was thinking about– as an example of something where you kind of have to be out of it to laugh at the joke. I was thinking of The Play That Goes Wrong, which, if you haven’t seen it, it’s a comedy production where they are putting on a play called The Murder at Haversham Manor, and everything in the play in the actual staging of the play that goes wrong does go wrong. So, like, paintings are falling off the walls; the actors are really bad; someone gets knocked out in the middle of the play. And then they just keep shouting their lines at her as if she’s going to respond. So, I was like, “The whole point is that I’m comedically observing it from the outside.” But then I was like, “Maybe I’m immersed in the fiction of the play by pretending that it’s not being staged.” Mm-hmm. So, maybe I am immersed. Oren & Chris: Whoa. Bunny: Maybe it’s a super turnaround, double fiction immersion. Chris: Mind-blown. Oren: I mean, that’s just your average community theater production. [chuckles] So, like, honestly, that’s just true to life. Did you see the stage manager running around trying to get people to not take their props home with them? Because if so, it’s perfect. [chuckles] Bunny: The stage manager is a part of the play. Oren: Yes, my day has come. Bunny: He comes out on stage and he’s like, “I’m pleased to present my directorial debut.” [chuckle] Oren: That is how I would present myself, so, accurate. [chuckles] Bunny: So immersive. Chris: Yeah. Oren: But how do we make our stories more immersive, assuming that’s our goal? Chris: Okay. As I briefly mentioned, showing is more immersive than telling. And if we’re talking about things like narrative distance. So, close distance is more immersive than more distant narration, and generally close distance does involve more showing rather than telling, so it’s the same mechanism. So, that’s probably the biggest thing, and then the other thing, of course, is not interrupting somebody’s experience. I would say it’s useful to understand what immersion gets you so that you know when you make choices, like, “How much exposition and summary?” Because some types of narration are more immersive than others, and you have to balance that. So, for instance, description can be very immersive in action too because it’s observable. But you might want to say, “Okay, if I summarize this, what if I use more exposition here?” Or just like more commentary-type language that is less about kind of the sensory experience and more about making a joke about how somebody looks. So basically, low immersion tends to kill other emotions, or not entirely kill, but like lower them. So, things aren’t very tense if the immersion is too low or very heartfelt. It doesn’t allow audiences to get in the mood. Novelty and humor, as I mentioned, still seem to work just fine. Which is why I wanted to complain about the Ministry of Time. [laughs] And apparently after I DNF Ministry of Time, there was a whole lot of sex that I missed. Oren: Quite a lot. Chris: But the fun thing about that is– as parts I read, I was like, “This is the least romantic romance I have ever read.” And I think a big part of the reason is because, again, I don’t know actual numbers, but it felt like it was 95% exposition and summary. This book is a lot of talking in general about what characters are doing and very little actual real-time scenes, which they’re doing the most showing. So, they are by far the most immersive. And it’s just really hard to get any character chemistry without immersion, and it felt like in this book anytime we actually had a scene with the two people who were supposed to be in a romance together and they have some interactions built a little chemistry, the author would suddenly cut away to exposition, and it would just all be gone. Bunny: It also didn’t help that the character was constantly breaking the fourth wall, which is another intentionally immersion-breaking thing that’s employed by comedy a lot. Where she was turning around and scolding herself on doing the wrong thing, and obviously that pulls you out of the story. Oren: And it might be worth it, right? Regardless of whether it’s for a joke or not, there are reasons why you would break the fourth wall to comment on what’s happening. The problem is that this book doesn’t have anything to say because it’s all just various flavors of “And I made bad choices.” But you didn’t, though. You actually didn’t make any choices because you had no choices to make in the entire story. Chris: And I would say as long as that sort of retelling commentary of a character, your future narrator coming in and talking about their past or ever get this or that, as long as that’s not jarring, it’s often okay to have a paragraph, a few sentences of that. And it’s a little less immersive, and then you continue the story and re-immerse the reader, and it works fine. You go back to the moment that’s unfolding and get close again and you can have your one paragraph that’s more immersive than the other paragraph as long as your narration works smoothly. But if you do 90% of the book- [chuckles] -is low immersion, then there’s a lot of emotions that just get muted from that. A lot of hard to build chemistry, hard to build tension, all those other things. A lot of these things take audiences getting in the mood and anticipating things and that kind of thing, and it’s just hard to do. Oren: Yeah, here is a question. What about evocative telling? We’ve talked about that before. It’s a concept that comes up a lot in Lord of the Rings or Lovecraft. Is that immersive, do you think? Chris: Yeah. I mean, it does add immersion. So, you can do this in fact with summary or exposition as well. Because a lot of times it’s about the specific language, and so, if you want to make your exposition a little more immersive, you can put in more description and specific sensory language in the exposition, and it might make it a little longer. But sometimes it can be worth it because the exposition will just become more evocative and immersive. So, generally, what you’re looking for is language that focuses on, again, the sensory experience of the moment and doesn’t require the reader to interpret or think about it. So, the question that I like to ask, again, with description when we’re talking about what words are used to describe things is ask, “Okay. What does that look like?” Usually it’s look, but it could be sound or feel like, and if you have to think about the answer, it’s not immersive. It has to be specific and familiar. So, if you ask somebody, “What does a Siamese cat look like?” There’s a good chance that person has an idea of what a Siamese cat looks like right away. It’s specific; it’s familiar. They could describe what the color pattern on the cat is. If you ask them, “What does an animal look like?” [chuckles] Then it’s like, “Okay. What kind of animal are we talking about?” Or if you ask them some strange species they had never heard of, and they would be like, “I don’t know what that looks like. I don’t know what that is.” Oren: I think you’ll find that animal is a largely orange with big red hair and a huge mouth and a tongue. [laughs] Bunny: You are just talking about Carrot Top. Oren: He’s a very good Muppet, actually, is what I was thinking. [laughs] Chris: So, with adjectives too. What does beautiful look like? That is something that you have to think about. So, you can come up with characteristics that people consider beautiful, but that’s something you would have to think about. So, it’s better to actually describe somebody in a way that makes them sound beautiful and show more than that. That happens with action too, right? If you’re like, “This person attacked that other person.” That is too vague. [chuckles] That is not a specific image. If you say somebody lunged, I could easily imagine what that looks like. If you say somebody did a little pirouette, I’m actually not that familiar with what a pirouette would look like in that situation. Oren: Just you know, the classic pirouette motion. [chuckles] Bunny: You spin around in an aggressive way. Oren: We talked a few weeks ago about intuitive storytelling, and that can also help with immersion. We’ve been talking about intentional breaks to immersion like breaking the fourth wall or making commentary or references. But unintentional breaks to immersion tend to be anytime your reader has to stop and be like, “Whoa. Okay. Hang on. This isn’t what I thought was happening.” And then they may have to recalibrate, or they have to back up and try again. And making your story more intuitive is all about decreasing the number of times that happens, and that can help with immersion as well, because then you can just go with the flow and you don’t have to constantly be like, “Wait, hang on. This doesn’t make sense with the thing you told me.” And then have to try to figure out what the connections are. Bunny: For me, nothing breaks immersion faster than weird dialogue tags. [chuckles] Like dialogue tags are supposed to be invisible but then suddenly someone’s expunging or opining or– Oren: “That’s interesting, he explained.” Bunny: Yeah. Exactly. Chris: The thing about that is that those types of dialogue tags—I think the problem with them really is that they are telling, which makes sense. Because again, they’re supposed to be an action that is already represented by the line of speech, and so they’re kind of inherently repetitive, and so you are basically doing repetitive telling with a dialogue tag. But at least if you just use the word “said,” people don’t pay that much attention to it. [chuckles] Bunny: The problem is that people are worried that that’s what they’re doing when they use “said” a lot, and the truth is that your eyes slide over “said.” It’s unobtrusive. Chris: I’m not going to say it’s impossible for “said” to get repetitive, but I usually find that as long as you are okay with using action tags, which I think some writers don’t know how to use or are not confident using where they use dialogue tags when they don’t need to, because you can put a line of dialogue and have the same character take an action right after, and that’s a clear enough label. You don’t always have to have “said,” or “asked,” or “explained” right there. Oren: Well, we know that “said” can get repetitive because the book Redshirts exists. Chris: If you also know that action tags exist, and again, we can link an article in the show notes if you’re not familiar with this to my article on “Labeling Dialogue.” Then usually it really isn’t necessary to use so many dialogue tags that they become repetitive. Where you place them also can matter, and certainly if you’re using them unnecessarily and they always like appear in exactly the same place since every single line, I won’t say that “said” can never get too much. But– Bunny: Yeah, it certainly can. If every line is like, “Hello, she said.” “Hello, he said.” “How are you doing? She said.” “I’m doing pretty well, he said.” That’s going to get repetitive, right? But just the word “said” itself, reach for that before you reach for opined. Chris: Yeah, again, some writers have a different philosophy and they’re like, “Oh, I don’t want that useless said word. I want to do something creative.” But everybody else is like, “Oh. This is so embarrassing.” [chuckles] There are different philosophies, but we are definitely in the “you said” because it’s an invisible camp. Oren: Yeah. Something just occurred to me about our video game discussion. There’s one thing that video games do that makes them feel really immersive that I just don’t think you could replicate in a novel, which is that video games, especially the ones that you aren’t just on rails for the whole time; that lets you explore a bit. Where you go somewhere that doesn’t seem that important for the main quest, and then you discover that there are details there. You know, you go to a farmhouse that isn’t marked on your quest map, and you go in there, and you find that the farmer is working on trying to splice two kinds of apples and has a whole business plan that he’ll talk– he’ll tell you about if you talk to him because you sought that out. And it’s like, “Wow, this makes this world feel so expansive and deep.” And I’m immersed, but in a novel, everything that is shown to you is shown to you by the specific plan of the writer. You can’t actually go somewhere else unless you’re doing a “choose your own adventure.” Bunny: But you have touched on something that makes a world feel immersive, and that’s just feeling like it’s bigger than the slice of it. You can see that it’s not just a green screen back there behind your characters; that it actually goes on and on, and there’s a lot to it. And that’s more than just exposition. This goes into other world-building tips and stuff like that but having a world that feels realized can go a long way for immersion, at least in my experience. Chris: Yeah, I criticize a lot of people for putting in too many world-building terms in their first few paragraphs because, again, readers cannot handle that many new terms at the same time. And each one makes it harder to understand, and if they’re confused, then that is going to break their immersion. At the same time, I can understand the attractiveness of just imagining how the characters would talk in the world and then just having them talk that way, how they would naturally talk without worrying about what the reader can get or not. I don’t think that’s the right choice for the beginning, because I think in the beginning the reader is unlikely to know the difference if you just cut out the name of the capital city and just say the capital instead. They’ve got enough going on, but I can understand that kind of immersive approach. A naturalistic approach, I should say, to introducing your world, and I think it’s fine to have little references. It’s just, “Are you doing too many new things at once?” Oren: Yeah. I mean, it’s been interesting with the current project because I did a lot more world planning than I normally do. And I did that specifically because I wanted to make sure that I never lost track of where my characters were, and I wanted the environments to feel consistent because they’re spending a lot more time in the same area than they have in previous stories of mine. But I do end up in the scenario where I’m like, “Oh man, I’ve got so much cool stuff that I wrote. Perhaps the reader would want to know in several pages of exposition. Surely that would be immersive, right?” And I do think that finding out about that naturally as part of the story could be immersive, but I have to take them. I can’t just tell them and expect them to be immersed. That’s just an info dump. Bunny: We do have an article on introducing unfamiliar setting elements that feels relevant here in forgetting the actual title, but that would be worth linking. Chris: Yeah, I have one on introducing world terms. That talks a lot about terminology, that’s one I link to a lot. We have a number of different articles this could be. We have so many articles. [chuckles] Bunny: We write a lot of articles, as it turns out. Chris: We have so many articles. [chuckles] We have usually several relevant articles for any topic you want to know about. One thing that throws me out, this is the thing that Study in Drowning was a very interesting book. It was not a perfect book, but I found it to be a very interesting read. The one thing that started to throw me out a lot in the beginning that calls its attention to me in a lot of books is metaphors that do not feel like they belong. I think metaphors in general can break immersion, but not always if they fit into place. But it’s just, “Does the imagery of the metaphor fit the actual mood or atmosphere or subject matter of the sea?” And in the beginning of A Study in Drowning, there’s so many elaborate metaphors that as I was listening in audio, I could predict when one was coming. [chuckles] It was like at the dramatic end to the paragraph. Now there’s going to be a hilarious metaphor here, and I literally started laughing. Now luckily that did get better. I kind of wonder if the author really wanted to impress with fancy metaphors in the beginning. Oren: I wish I could remember this specific one. There was one that was like steam came off sausages like a ghost escaping its grave. Like, wait what? [chuckles] Bunny: Yeah. Chris: Yeah, that is one. So, the main character Effy is just eating in a tavern, and I think it was a pie, and steam comes out of it like a ghost. And it’s just like, “That is– that is really random.” Oren: What? What does that mean? How does the steam look like a ghost? Like what? The steam is normal. It’s good for steam to come off of food. Chris: City in the Middle of the Night is still the one that takes the cake for the most random metaphors and similes because it just had so many. But that is one, and that’s something that people don’t talk about a lot when they’re talking about metaphors is you’re evoking imagery. So, is that imagery what you want for the atmosphere of the scene? Bunny: You’re only allowed to use that ghost metaphor if it’s poison. [chuckles] Oren: Or if it’s gone bad or something, right? Chris: Or you’re at like a seance. You are going to come with tea and the steam lifts up like a ghost. That would make sense. Oren: Yeah. Chris: That would fit. Oren: I drink that tea. Bunny: I don’t want ghosts in my tasty pie, though. Oren: Speaking of tasty pie, I have one more question. To what extent is wish fulfillment similar to immersion? Bunny: Hmm. Oren: Because I hear people talking about being immersed in the pastry scenes of legends and lattes, and I’m like, “Is that the right term? Is that immersion, or are you just having a good time living vicariously through these Poissant’s?” Chris: Yeah. I mean, maybe it helps in some wish fulfillment. If people enjoy the details, I can see wish fulfillment being an instant in which people get more joy from the basic description of the scene than they would otherwise. So, rather than like, “Oh, I don’t care what this room looks like.” And skimming over the description more if you are sort of savoring those sensory details, I can see that maybe increasing immersion. Normally I would just consider wish fulfillment to be a source of engagement and not necessarily a source of immersion, but I could see it in that instance. Oren: All right. Well, with that delicious croissant image, I think we will go ahead and call this episode to a close. Chris: And if you stayed immersed and didn’t try to argue with us this whole episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber; he’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then, there’s Kathy Ferguson; he’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. [Outro music] Outro: This has been the Mythcreants podcast opening/closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.

Heroes think they’re a big deal, but we all know the sidekicks are the real story. They do all the unglamorous but essential work to keep the team running. Whether it’s arranging getaway horses or being captured for dramatic effect, sidekicks do it all. But what happens when the sidekick wants to also be the hero? Let’s find out. Show Notes Dr. Horrible Robin Short Round Samwise Gamgee The Mimicking of Known Successes John Watson The Tainted Cup The Justice of Kings Raksura Case Closed Skeleton Crew Lower Decks The Zeppo Marta Benoit Blanc Max Rockatansky Transcript Generously transcribed by Phoebe. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris:  You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny. [intro music] Bunny: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Bunny. Chris: I’m Chris. Oren: And I’m Oren. Bunny: And I have been doing some hard reflecting on this podcast, and I realized that even though I am leading this episode, I am a newcomer to the show. Chris and Oren have been doing it for over a decade now because they’re old, and this means I must be the sidekick. So. That makes things awkward for me. I must be stealing the spotlight from you both. Oren: Or alternatively, you might be the hot new hero who comes in. We, the established characters, become your sidekicks. [sarcastic] Audiences love it when that happens. They will absolutely love this new hero. It’s a sure win. Bunny: [sarcastic] Oh yeah. Audiences love when you pull an UNO reverse card on their beloved main characters. Chris: Maybe Bunny is the relatable underdog who’s not getting enough agency. Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: Those darn experienced characters are hanging around solving all the problems. Bunny: Yeah, you’re doling out wisdom from your ivory tower, but I’m down here with my feet on the ground with the common people. I understand the masses in a way you never will! Oren: There’s some salt in the earth, maybe. Very different from salt of the sea and salt of the air, mind you. Bunny: Yeah, well it’s all types that you can rub in your wound when you get one. So today we’re talking about sidekicks, but specifically sidekicks that are protagonists, which is a little unusual, right? ‘Cause that’s not usually the role the sidekick claims. It’s in the name. Oren: My hot, spicy take is that for a sidekick protagonist, is a protagonist who has the aesthetics of a sidekick, but is not actually a sidekick, narratively speaking, in the same way that most villain protagonists are like Dr. Horrible, in that they dress like villains and talk like villains, but don’t actually do villain stuff. Bunny: Hmm. Chris: Yeah, I guess what do we mean by sidekick? Because if we’re saying by sidekick, that’s by definition not the main character, right, then, yeah, we’re just talking about aesthetics, but if we talk about sidekick as in, they are helping a more powerful character, then I think you can do more than aesthetics. Oren: Well, right. I mean that the helping a more powerful character is essentially an aesthetic in this situation. Assuming you wanna do the story successfully, right, because your protagonist is gonna have to be the most important person. That doesn’t mean they have to have the highest rank, but it means they have to be the most important to solving the problems. Otherwise, your story will suffer. Chris: But, what are the problems? Oren: Right, exactly. Chris: Because I think that this can be a matter of scope, right? So you can have, you know, big world ending problems that your sidekick’s boss is taking care of, that exist, but your story is simply focused on the problems that the sidekick is doing, right? So I would personally think that’s more than aesthetic, but I guess it depends on, again, what are we calling aesthetic in this instance? Oren: Well, the reason I consider it an aesthetic is that sure, technically speaking, one of my examples is you could have a character who is the accountant for a superhero, they do all of the superhero’s accounting, but if your story is about finding supervillain fraud, they become the main character. And sure, they technically are still a sidekick for a hero, but in this particular narrative that we are telling, they are the one taking charge and doing stuff. Chris: Right. So it is like a villain protagonist in that when we say protagonist, that’s what we mean. Oren: And they don’t do the actions that typically define a sidekick, which is that they play second fiddle to whoever they’re helping, right, for the story. Chris: Right. I mean, if we’re talking about story mechanics, sure, right? They need to be the most central to the story. That’s what makes them the protagonist. But if we talk about them being an assistant and that’s their role in the world, yeah, I mean, again, now we’re just futzing over the definition. Bunny: It’s sandwich discourse. At the bottom, it’s always sandwich discourse. I think that there are ways to do it that are more aesthetic than others. Like if [they] are the sidekick to a detective, but the main story is not a mystery or the mystery is a subplot, and the main story is about something else, then yeah, they’re a sidekick in the sense that they’re working for someone more powerful with more sway. But it’s an aesthetic because that’s not the primary part of the story that we’re concerned with. Chris: Yeah. I would consider it an aesthetic if we have something where, for instance, you technically have a hero, but the hero is actually incompetent and is just taking credit, and your main character looks like a sidekick, right, and everybody thinks that they’re a sidekick, but because the hero is incompetent, the sidekick has to always arrange for the hero to win. And so they’re actually doing the lion’s share of the work. That’s kind of what I would call aesthetic, ’cause at that point, the sidekick is also, in the world, takes place in filling the role of the hero, right, in that they’re the one actually saving the day. The hero has actually a very small role and is basically being babysitted by the sidekick. But you could still dress your sidekick in a sidekick outfit, right, make your hero look heroic, that kind of thing. It’s, you know, similar to in how Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog, we have a hero who is a villain and a villain who’s a hero. And the difference is that, you know, the person who is the actual antagonist in the story–well, he may look like a hero. He actually does villainous things. Bunny: Yeah. Oren: Well, I could restate my argument that even the superhero accounting scenario, that character will still not be acting like a sidekick, but I think that’s a moot point right now. I think we more or less agree on the important part. Bunny: Yeah, and I think it’s true that when you think of like, who is a sidekick? Someone like Robin, right? The classic sidekick. You don’t expect them to have a big interior life, right? Like it is kind of a person that exists to support the hero, and if you just literally took that and tried to make him the main character, you’d really struggle, right? As Robin is currently written in, like classic Batman, you know, Robin doesn’t exist so much without Batman, it would be hard to tell a story with him as the protagonist. So in that sense, your classic protagonist, your, you know, chubby comic relief running along after the big brawny hero or whatever, yeah, that probably wouldn’t work as a protagonist, but we cloak them up in various ways, some of which are more aesthetic than other, to get them to work as protagonists, and I think it might be helpful to define a little bit what role typical sidekicks, non-protagonist sidekicks usually serve. These are characters like, well, like Robin, but also like Short Round from Indiana Jones and Sam from Lord of the Rings. These might all be considered sidekicks. They’re usually companions. Oren: Yeah. I mean, it’s certainly easier to tell in the superhero genre, right? Bunny: Right. Oren: Superheroes, that’s like an official job. Bunny: Right, you’ve got your hero and then you’ve got like their mini me, essentially. Chris: Yeah. Oren: Yeah. Chris: I mean, I think accompanying the hero for high stakes conflicts, right, and actually being with them there is a thing that the sidekick typically does if they’re not a protagonist.  And then also providing assistance and often [the] case [is] they’re doing the work that’s less exciting, but it still facilitates the story, ’cause now we don’t have to explain how we got these horses to like jump on and ride it off into the sunset, ’cause the sidekick went and did that off screen, right? So that way we don’t have to be like, okay, wait, the hero wants to flee real quick. Drat. They have to stop, go to the stable and get some horses, right? And so they do things that are less exciting, but facilitate the story in that way, in explaining how something could be done. Oren: Who arranged these travel tickets? Bunny: The secretary. They’re the secretary to the story. Chris: Honestly, that would be fun to have a main character, your protagonist, who did logistics for the action hero. The problems they solve is like, oh no, the hero’s gonna need to jump on a horse and ride into the sunset at this time. Oh no, I don’t have a horse yet. I need to get the horse there in time. Oren: Yeah, and I mean, you know, based on how you portrayed it, that could be, you know, various levels of comedic, right? It could be something as over the top as well, I need them to have a dramatic exit. It’s important that they get one of those. I need to make sure their cape is properly–I don’t know what you do to a cape to make it billow, but that, you know, whatever that is, it’s like, I need to make sure there’s no cat hair on the cape. Or if you wanted, that could probably be a little more serious. If you have a slightly grittier story and your protagonist is, I don’t know, the sidekick of a monster hunter, doing all the things of like, making sure we have enough food to get from point A to point B ’cause the Monster Hunter really only does the monster killing. Like, that just exhausts them. They don’t have any energy for anything else. And at that point it’s a similar idea, but it’s more serious. So I think both of those are great options. Chris: Generally, again, it is tricky to have the hero and the sidekick always together if the sidekick is your protagonist. Oren: True. Chris: So to try to give the sidekick agency and make it so they are actually at the center of the story and solving problems, which is the trick here, obviously we can change the problems the story’s about, so it’s about the sidekick, for instance, retrieving the horses so the hero can run off into the sunset. But you need to have your sidekick take care of something solo, usually, in order to pull this off. It’s just, ‘cause you have to come up with a separate thing for the sidekick to do when they’re right next to a hero that is beefier than them and [a] more capable fighter, that’s just gonna be a lot harder and more demanding. Giving them a unique role or skillset is usually really, really helpful for any situation like this when they’re not as powerful, just making them more specialized. Bunny: Right. I mean, I feel like one of the most obvious ways to do this, and this is again, one of the sort of aesthetic ways to do it, is just that the “sidekick,” quote unquote, acts more like a partner and that they have a skillset that the hero doesn’t have. In the monster hunter example, that’s, you know, classic brains and brawn pairing, or in The Mimicking of Known Successes, Pleiti is our quote unquote “sidekick,” but she brings scholarly expertise to our quote unquote “classic hero,” Detective Mossa. Oren: Yeah, that one is interesting because we’re getting into the Watson era, right, of the sidekick. And when you’re doing that sort of thing, when you’re making the sidekick more of a partner, at that point you are depending on recognizable tropes. Otherwise, readers will just be like, oh, well that’s a co-protagonist, right? You know, are they even a sidekick if they’re sharing 50% of the work? And the way that you make that happen is you use something that everyone’s like, oh, that’s a sidekick, ’cause that character is like Watson. We all know Watson is a sidekick thanks to cultural memory. Bunny: Right, I mean, on the definition as I was trying to come up with how do we define a sidekick protagonist? The definition I came up with is a protagonist who’s the sidekick to a character with the most classic hero traits. So in a mystery story, the classic hero traits would go to the detective, right? But then we have Pleiti, who’s the scholar, right? She’s not the classic detective. The classic detective is Mossa. So we read her as more of a sidekick. We have quote unquote “classic hero,” and then our protagonist is the one beside that. Oren: The Tainted Cup is another Sherlock style story that I think we’ve all read recently. Or wait, Bunny. Have you read it yet? Bunny: Oh, yes, yes. I finished it and I think we all quite liked it too. Oren: Yes. Okay. Yeah, we all liked it a lot, and at the beginning it does what I’ve started calling the Sherlock Oracle model of Sherlock retellings, where the Holmes character is just a real weirdo and hides out in their room reading the mystery bones as it were and then delivering the occasional bit of insight from on high. Well Din, our actual protagonist who is clearly like a Watson type figure, goes around doing the hard work of gathering all the information. Chris: I mean, I do think that Din does feel like a sidekick, partly just because in that world, the Sherlock is his boss, and so he has to report back to her, she tells him what to do, and I think that keeps his kind of sidekick, we can call it an aesthetic or not, but he honestly does have a lot of detective traits himself. Oren: True. Chris: His superpower is to remember everything, which is definitely an important detective power. He’s great at questioning people and finding out, you know, discrepancies. Again, he has a lot of detective traits. It’s just that he has a boss and she [has] even more detective insight points. Bunny: Yeah. She’s the one who doles out the revelations, which I think is the very Sherlock thing to do. Like when we have our big confrontation scenes, Din is there to supply information as well. But she’s the one being like, “And this twist. And this twist. And just one more question for you. Did you say this?” Chris: Which in my opinion was unfortunately one of the weak points of the book. I thought it was a great book, but at the end there, she does basically take over the story and Din is essentially pushed aside, which is not what you want. That’s exactly what we’re trying to avoid here. Though I do think that perhaps, she could have kept all of those revelations as long as Din also had enough to do, right. And so if we found more things for him to do, I don’t think it would’ve been a problem for her to then exposit the answer to the mystery as much. The problem is that that was really the only thing that happened in that ending sequence except for one tiny little thing that he did. And that wasn’t a good balance. Oren: Yeah, I was a little worried about that. To be clear, I still love the book. Chris: Yeah. Oren: I just thought that particular thing was showing the difficulty of this strategy, ’cause it’s really tempting to have the classic hero type character take over if they have the traits that would make them a classic hero, depending on genre. Chris: Yeah, and for most of the book it doesn’t have this issue. It’s only for that ending sequence and you know, you’re a little prepared for it because she is Sherlock. At the same time, I would’ve liked to see a little more from Din there. Bunny: Tainted Cup also avoids the issue of your sidekick protagonist not having enough agency because Ana does not go outside, right? She does, but only blindfolded. She needs to be guided around. She gets overstimulated super easily, so she usually just holes herself up in a room and reads a lot, and so Din is the one who gathers evidence on her behalf. He gets into scrapes and scuffles. Chris: And it also explains why he is doing things alone, right. She doesn’t go out so she doesn’t go with him. Bunny: Yeah. Right. And so there’s plenty of tension there. And then all of his observations, he does make his own little deductions and speculations and the reader who’s witnessing everything that he witnesses can also do that, which also kind of works just because I think that’s one reason that we see a lot of Watsonian viewpoints is that we don’t wanna see the inside of Sherlock’s head. We still want there to be a big reveal. Oren: Well, I mean, that’s definitely the reason Doyle did it originally.  Nowadays we’ve kind of realized that’s not a good enough reason to justify an entire viewpoint, so we have to do other things with him. And also Watson is a fairly beloved character now. So if you made a modern version of Sherlock and Watson and treated Watson the way most of the original books do, people would not like that. You’d be like, why are you being so mean to Watson? Chris: Yeah. I mean, again, this is why there’s something to fix in Sherlock Holmes stories is because you want to make your viewpoint character and the main character the same person, please. Please, please, please. The problem is that people just sympathize with the viewpoint character. It’s very intimate and you get to know them, and so people get attached to them. And then having somebody else be the main character essentially means that the person people feel is the main character is constantly shown up by this obnoxious, you know, side character stealing their spotlight and you know, looking cool at the main character’s expense. That’s what it feels like. So that’s why, again, they just have to be the same character. Oren: My absolute most “do not do this” example is The Justice of Kings, which is another Sherlock retelling in a vaguely Roman Empire-esque fantasy setting. Kind of weird that I’ve read two of those in the last six months, because it’s also The Tainted Cup, but Tainted Cup is way more interesting. So in Justice of Kings, we have our Sherlock character. Then he has a Watson character who does the things that Watson does, like the physical legwork. And then that’s not our viewpoint character, though. Our viewpoint character is a third character who hangs out with them. A Watson’s Watson, if you will. Chris: Oh my gosh. Such a bad idea. Oren: And in theory, she is supposed to be the investigator’s apprentice, but I didn’t see her doing any apprenticing. She has, I think, one idea that helps them at one point and she needed other people to interpret it. She just was, “Oh wow. That’s kind of a weird coincidence.” And then other people were like, “You’re right. That is a weird coincidence.” And then they figured out what it meant. Chris: Oh my gosh. Oren: And she just spends the entire story watching them do stuff until for no reason in character, they send her off to spy on the bad guys, which she’s obviously not prepared or qualified for, and she immediately gets captured and then spends several chapters captured. Chris: Of course, they damsel her. Bunny: Oh, that’s frustrating. Oren: Yeah. It’s so boring. Oh gosh. It’s like, this is not good even when you do it to a side character, but like when you do it to your POV character, it’s like, why would you make me experience this? Bunny: I mean, here’s the other thing about your typical non protagonist sidekick, is that they’re often threatened or kidnapped so that the hero has something to go after, to provide conflict. Not so good to do that, if they’re the protagonist. Chris: They can be kidnapped, but then they have to free themself. Bunny: Right, right. Like it’s another case of, yeah, that happens to sidekicks a lot, but there’s a reason that it goes differently when it happens to protagonists. Chris: One case study that I think is a pretty good example of having a character that’s not the most powerful character in a group is actually Martha Wells’ Raksura books, and they’re not perfect books. The world building is really problematic. Of course, she didn’t mean any harm, and thankfully all of her more recent books do way better with that. But I do think that these are the books where she does best in managing all of the characters in their roles because the protagonist, Moon, is not the leader or the most powerful fighter of what is a fairly large group. And so she uses a variety of techniques to put him in the spotlight and I think she does a really good job. He is kind of like middle management, I guess you could say, right, where once you get into a small enough group, he will become the leader and that does help. Bunny: Moon is: Ask a Manager! Oren: Some tech disruptor is already planning to eliminate him because you don’t really need middle management, right? Chris: He is the deep state! Oren: Just make all of the lower level employees do middle management’s job without any extra money. That’ll work great. What could go wrong? Chris: He also has unique knowledge from traveling, which gives him kind of a specialized role in some cases. And so sometimes there’ll be, for instance, a big fight and there’s lots of enemies. So, you know, the most powerful fighter will fight the biggest enemy. And then Wells just focuses on what Moon is doing in the fight and who Moon is fighting. Other times the group will split up, or sometimes the biggest fighter might be injured for a while. Other times he’s off doing something else to give Moon a bigger role. And then sometimes his travel knowledge just comes in really handy and he comes up with ideas that people haven’t thought of before. So it’s kind of a combination approach that tends to work well, but I do think it’s a really good example of having one main character who is just part of a larger group and has kind of a special position in that group but at the same time, isn’t the leader or the most special person in that group. Oren: Yeah. I tried to find examples of well-known stories that have sidekick protagonists, as it were. And we already mentioned The Tainted Cup and The Mimicking of Known Success, which happened to be two books that I’ve read recently. I was really hard pressed to find other examples. I know they must be out there, but the only really clear cut one I could find was the anime Case Closed/Detective Conan, depending on where you were, which I remember as being this really short, kind of unnoticeable anime from the nineties, but apparently in Japan is super long running and has like 1500 episodes. Bunny: Wow. [sarcastic] So you watched all of them, right? For the podcast? Oren: [sarcastic] Yeah, absolutely. I watched so many, well, ’cause only a few of them were ever translated during the initial run. Like, maybe more of them have been dubbed since. But the premise of that one is that there’s a, you know, super cool Sherlockian type detective, but because of some mysterious chemicals, he gets shrunk down to a child. But like, you know, with a child’s body, right? But he’s still got his super Sherlock brain. And so to solve mysteries he has to tag along with his dad, who is also a PI, but not very good and solve the cases for him, which is basically the scenario Chris described earlier, and I was like, it’s weird that I couldn’t find more examples of something like this. The other ones are all kind of questionable: Skeleton Crew, the kids kind of act like Jod’s helpers in a couple episodes, but it’s not a perfect match. Chris: There is kind of the Lower Decks formula. In that case, they’re more isolated or, for instance, there’s one episode of Buffy that’s similar called Zeppo, that’s just about Xander, who is normally a sidekick, is the star of that episode, but it’s very similar to Lower Decks in that the idea is that the more important people are off dealing with a bigger, higher priority issue for a time, leaving that character alone. So it doesn’t necessarily have the same sidekick feel because the sidekick is off on their own so much that they don’t feel like a sidekick as much anymore, but you kind of have some similarities where they work usually on lower stakes problems, whereas the boss is off doing something else. Bunny: I’d say that arguably Marta from Knives Out is a sidekick protagonist. Now, this is kind of an interesting one because the story itself is a twist on classic detective stories, and for most of it, Benoit Blanc, who would be the protagonist, he’s the Sherlock type character, right, is kind of a threat to Marta for most of it, because Marta’s trying to cover up for a crime she didn’t commit, essentially, that she knows will be pinned on her. And so she’s trying to conceal evidence from him, right? And Blanc definitely thinks that she’s his sidekick, right? Like I think he has a line somewhat to that effect and even some places online list him as the protagonist, but he is definitely not the protagonist of the first one. I think they’re just calling him that because he’s the one element that now moves between movies. Oren: I was super surprised by that because when I first watched Knives Out, I did not realize that anyone’s interest in this franchise was Benoit Blanc. He seemed like a joke. Like “what if Sherlock Holmes was southern and not very good at his job” seems to be the premise. But no, apparently I got that wrong. He’s actually supposed to be a great detective and uh, that’s why he’s the main character of Glass Onion. Chris: I do think Knives Out is a really interesting example. I do think the problem with that is that is in prose I don’t think it would work as well because again, movies you can kind of say they have a viewpoint character in that the camera is, you know, following somebody around and somebody is portrayed as, you know, more sympathetic than other people, but they don’t have a viewpoint character to the same extent. And with a charismatic actor playing the detective, I think it’s a little easier to kind of transition to Benoit Blanc at the end, doing the unveiling of the mystery instead of Marta. I think it can get away with that a little bit better than, for instance, The Tainted Cup can get away with Sherlock kind of taking over at the end. Bunny: I’m actually happy that what the Knives Out sequels are doing is completely resetting the scene and only taking Benoit Blanc with them each time. It was a mistake to make him the main character. He shouldn’t be the main character. It was the right choice to not try to continue the first story. I’m so glad they didn’t do that. Oren: I cannot imagine what a direct sequel to Knives Out would be. Chris: There would be too many constraints. Oren: Marta is framed for another crime. Chris: Yeah. No, they definitely needed to free themselves to make a new story without all the constraints of the same characters for sure. Bunny: It takes way too long in that movie to meet our actual main character. The good thing about Benoit Blanc is that he can have the aesthetic of the detective and be the sidekick. That’s his strength. But yeah, I’d say Marta is, I think she would fall into the sidekick protagonist pretty well. Mad Max in Fury Road might also be another example That’s definitely more co-protagonists, but I think the story itself is pretty clearly Furiosa’s story more than it is Max’s. Oren: I would identify them as co-protagonists, but if you call Max a sidekick, certain very unpleasant people get mad, so I’m okay with that. Bunny: I mean, I think he’s a sidekick. I think he’s a sidekick in that he’s the viewpoint character, but his story is not the main story. But at the same time, I don’t think it would be better if we removed him. So he’s still an important part of the story, but it’s definitely about Furiosa trying to get the wives away from Joe and Max is there to help fight, it’s good. Oren: Max is there to make you wonder where this movie fits in the continuity of the previous movies, which already had really weird continuity, so who knows? Bunny: Don’t worry about it. It’s fine. Don’t, just don’t, you know. Don’t worry. Oren: Yeah, don’t–just do not ask questions. Bunny: Look at the fire. Isn’t the fire cool? There’s a guy with a guitar. Oren: Well, I don’t think we’re gonna top guy with guitar and fire, so I think we’ll go ahead and call this episode to a close. Chris: If you found this episode helpful, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week. [outro music] Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening/closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.

You might have heard us use this phrase before: “center your darlings.” What does it mean? Most simply, it’s our own spin on the more famous “kill your darlings” mantra. But there’s a lot more to it than that. This week, we get into the details. How to identify your darlings, the times when they conflict, and what it looks like to center them. Show Notes Writing Your Passion Turning Your Concept Into a Story Wendy Darling Wings of Fire The Disreputable Dog The Ministry of Time The Sleepless Transcript Generously transcribed by Sofia. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [intro music] Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren. With me today is… Bunny: Bunny Oren: …and… Chris: Chris. Oren: Uh-oh folks! I’ve written an action story, but due to some cumbersome worldbuilding elements that I don’t care about, the action plot doesn’t make sense anymore. So, I guess I have to kill my darlings and get rid of the action plot. Bunny: When you think about it, killing your darlings is pretty action packed, though. Chris: Obviously, that’s how writing works. You just take whatever is your favorite thing and then you take it out and bam, your story’s done. Oren: That’s definitely what kill my darlings means, and also definitely my only option. What other option could there possibly be? Chris: [laughs] Bunny: It’s a shame because my darling is already centered, but I’ve been told to kill it, and so now I’m no longer writing. Oren: We’ve solved the writing problem: just don’t write anymore. Bunny: They say to start your story as close to the end as you can, and now the end and the beginning are just the same. Oren: Yeah, we cut the Gordian knot. Chris: It’s a lot easier this way. Oren: We’re talking about the phrase center your darling, which is something we say on Mythcreants a lot. I was surprised we don’t actually have a podcast on it specifically, so I’m gonna fix that. But this was actually Chris’s idea, so I’ll let Chris tell you what it means. Chris: I think it’s worth saying that the reason we don’t have a podcast episode on it is because it actually originated in a podcast episode. But at that time, the phrase had not yet been in use. But seven years ago ago—so old… Bunny: [laughs] Chris: We did a Writing Your Passion episode that was real popular, people really liked it. And we were talking about working with our clients. Often, they would have different story elements that were at odds with each other. You know, like a tense plot, where the protagonist would take time off to hang out at the beach, or something like that. And the obvious solution to that is to just take out the boring beach scenes. But we always ask clients what’s important to them, and we would often discover that it’s the beach, which makes sense, cause why else would it be there? Bunny: Look, beaches are very special places. They’re ecologically diverse. You can find cool things in tide pools. The beach is always the darling. Chris: So in this situation, by far, the easiest fix is to kill the darling because otherwise the story would be complete. But at the same time, that’s not what the writer’s interested in, that’s not what they want. And by that stage in the writing process, trying to make the beach scenes not boring is just a huge rewrite. At the same time, this is not an inevitable situation. It was happening because so many of our clients had something they wanted to put in their story, but they didn’t know how to make it what the story was about. And so, they would get themselves in this situation. So, to try to help people avoid that in the first place, we started talking about centering your darlings so that later you would not have to kill them. Oren: Which sounds kind of ominous when we say it that way. But it is more or less the way we recommend people write their stories: to try to find out what is the most important thing to you, and you make that the focus. Because your story can be about anything. It can’t be about everything. Bunny: You have your sniper rifle pointed at either the darling or the rest of the story, and you must shoot one. Oren: But if you plan, if you do this properly, you don’t ever get in that situation. Cause you don’t build a story that your darling’s not part of. You start from the beginning. Chris: The article that I have that talks about my method of centering your darling, is the one called How to Turn Your Concept Into a Story. And the reason for that is because I recommend doing it immediately—as soon as you get an idea—if possible. Because it’s amazing how fast writers get attached to the story as they imagined it, even if there are huge things that are not working about it. We get really excited about our cool new story idea and the possibilities seem endless. And then we start thinking about all these other cool things we could add to the story. Cause that just makes it cooler. Unless you know a lot about storytelling and you’ve had a lot of practice, you may not realize that those things don’t work together. Also, darlings can change. Sometimes it’s not possible to do this only in the idea stage because people will come back to a story that’s been in the trunk for 10 years and then they will like something different about it, for instance. Oren: I mean, the worst scenario is that you start with your story and then you realize some part of it is actually what interests you the most. So, you start working on that. And then you find a new thing and you’re like, no, this is what interests me most now. And that becomes an endless cycle. If you find yourself stuck in one of those, you are gonna have to draw the line somewhere. Bunny: Or just write an anthology. Oren: But usually, you will be best served by figuring out what is the most important thing to you and focusing on that. And often it will mean more rewrites. But not always. I’ve worked with clients who sometimes have things that are surprisingly easy to take out that are not related to their darlings, and they only have in there because they felt obligated to have them in there. There is a lot of weird writing advice out there. People put in stuff that they were told they needed, that they did not need. It happens all the time. Fight scenes are probably the number one culprit here. People feel like they need something exciting, so they put in a fight scene even though they don’t like fight scenes and don’t want them. And the fight scene is bad and doesn’t fit with the rest of the story. And it’s like, you don’t need it. We can get it outta here. That’s not your darling. Get rid of it. Bunny: Romance is another one of those. I think more commonly in movies than in written work. There’s a woman and a man on screen, I guess they’ll kiss now. Oren: That one’s a little more complicated. Cause movie writers do that because they have all kinds of marketing concerns. I don’t know if romance actually helps with that, but they seem to think it does. I haven’t yet encountered many authors who include romance just because they feel like they should, but it does happen. Chris: I definitely have heard from people who feel pressure to include romance when they’re not interested, but how many of them actually do it? I don’t feel like I’ve had a lot of clients where you ask them about like, Hey, this romance is kind of neglected. Is this actually what you want? Sometimes a client will say no. But other times I’ve also had a client decide, actually, you know what? I do want it and go back and forth. So, I wouldn’t say that there’s a continuous pattern of that happening. Bunny: I wonder if part of it is also not just who’s writing it, but also the medium itself. In a movie that might be two scenes, but scenes in a book are much longer, right? They take a lot more writing into it. Chris: I will say that novels are longer stories than a movie is. If you’re having a romance subplot or something that’s gonna require more development or it just won’t feel very present in the story. Oren: My impression from working with authors compared to what I see when I read about screenwriters, when they tell us how they do things, is that authors, while they are vulnerable to pressure, they are less vulnerable specifically to the idea that you should introduce something because it will make the book sell better. Screenwriters do that all the time because they have very powerful financial incentives. Often they are told to do it by their boss. Most authors don’t have a boss and writing is so hard and the chances they’re ever gonna make money from these books is pretty low anyway. So, they don’t necessarily have the same pressure of like, you should include a hot naked scene ccause people like that. Sex sells. Authors are less likely to do that. They’re more likely to do, you should include this weird villain POV sequence because it will make the book better. And some writing advice author that you trust told you to do that. They’re less likely to be motivated by what they think will make the book sell. Chris: Or good, serious books are all about character flaws. Being self-conscious about how legitimate you are is definitely something that writers have an issue with sometimes, but the financial pressures less so. Oren: Yeah. I’m not saying that authors are less likely to compromise their story for pressure. I just think they do it for different reasons. Chris: The thing that I do find—besides outside pressure with clients—is that one of the biggest things that obstructs them understanding what their darling is, is the decisions they have already made in their head. They decided at some point that this was the most important character. And trying to get them to reevaluate and pay attention to how they actually feel instead of what they previously decided can be really difficult. We can often tell who the writer likes the most just by reading the story. Granted, if what they like changed, maybe when they wrote it, they really liked that character and we see that on the page and it’s different now. That can happen. But there’s many cases where I can just tell by looking at the manuscript where their energy is going. But trying to get them to veer away from their preconceived notion of what was supposed to be important in their story towards what will actually be exciting for them can be a little difficult sometimes. Bunny: Part of that’s definitely sunk cost. If they’re coming to you with a brainstorming document, that’s a lot different than if they’ve written eight chapters already. But I know I would be pretty resistant if I had written eight chapters and someone was like, this is about the wrong thing. And I’m like, damn it, you’re right. Chris: In that case, when it’s a lot more work, it’s always up to the client how much work they wanna take on. And sometimes we might give them a direction that is technically a lot of work, but if they like the darling enough, they’re excited about the direction enough that they don’t mind. And again, it varies from person to person, but we can certainly talk to them and ask them how much work they’re up for. Sometimes they would prefer just to cut the darling and call it done. Depends on where they’re at. Oren: So, the question of course becomes: How do you identify your darling? That’s sort of the whole purpose here, trying to figure out what is the most important thing to you, and then you can work on making it the center of your story. Bunny: It’s Wendy, right? Oren: Always! Any character named Wendy automatically. Chris: [laughs] Oren: My clients do a very simple exercise where I have them rank things like characters or plot lines or setting elements in order of like, which you would be willing to cut first to last? This is something you can do at home. Get a list, get all of your characters, write down all of your plot lines, all of your speculative elements. Which of these would I cut last if someone held a gun to my head? You might just be able to figure it out that way. Bunny: You thought you were sniping the darling. It’s the darling sniping! Chris: [laughs] Oren: And this isn’t perfect. I’ve had a few people who, when they’ve ranked this, the ranking is not what I would’ve expected from reading the manuscript. Because again, like we kind of make our guesses based on where they put the most detail, the most emphasis, the most passion. I don’t wanna come back and tell them, no, your darlings are wrong. Or like, are you sure it’s not this one? Chris: [laughs] I did have one client. His passion was so obvious that I finally just asked him point blank, why didn’t you make this other character your main character? Because he was not very familiar with writing speculative fiction, and so the idea of making a non-human was something that he had automatically discounted, and so there was something blocking him there. That was a time when the discrepancy was so large and noticeable that I finally just felt necessary to ask him point blank. Otherwise, in many cases we might just take their word for it. Oren: I’ve occasionally had to use subtle questions to try to be like, you list the characters in this order, that’s roughly equivalent to how much screen time they get. But I’m looking for which of them is the most important to you. Sometimes the client will have one really interesting or really noticeable world building element that has lots of details and they won’t mention it high on their list. So I’ll ask them like, Hey, so you put a lot of detail into this, but you didn’t list it super high as a priority. What was the process there? And then we can often discover that they’re like, ah, actually that is really important to me. I don’t wanna get rid of that. Chris: Again, the ways that we can tell often: something is really detailed, it’s very well developed, that shows that they’ve thought about it a lot. Anything that is particularly unique is a sign. If a lot of things about their world feel fairly typical for their sub-genre, but then there’s this one thing that’s very different, that’s definitely a sign that that’s something that they’re interested in. Something, as I mentioned earlier, that has an outsized presence in the story compared to the role it plays. That’s a sign that the writer just wants to include it. Unfortunately, that also means there’s a conflict there. A character that has candy, of course, can be a sign. Although I’ve had other situations where a character had lots of candy and I thought that the writer really liked them, but it turned out there was something else going on. In which case they were wanting to get the readers to like that character, to kill them later or something like that. That can also happen. Those are the general signs we look for, and if you have a reader, ask them what they think fits that picture. Bunny: Worth clarifying that a darling could be any number of things. It might be a character, but it could also be a location or an element of their world building. [Brandon] Sanderson loves him some magic systems. Those are definitely his darlings. It’s not necessarily any one thing, it’s just an element of the story that you’re super invested in. Chris: Or a theme or aesthetic or a message. Absolutely anything. Oren: Yeah. Or activities. Are your tea parties being pushed out because there are these fight scenes you don’t care about? That’s a pretty good sign that you’re interested in tea parties. Bunny: Yeah, it would’ve felt pretty dissonant if the Tea Dragon Society had also featured Fast and the Furious action scenes. Oren: [laughs] You occasionally will encounter competing darlings. You want a cool action story, but you also want the message of the story to be that violence never solves anything. Chris: [laughs] Rude of you to talk about Wings of Fire this way. Oren: Look, it’s not just Wings of Fire, all right? There’s so many. Chris: I’m sure it’s absolutely not just Wings of Fire that does that particular combination. Oren: That one is definitely a thing that I’ve seen before In situations like that, yeah, probably can’t have both. Chris: To be clear, I’ve seen some authors recommend combining darlings. It’s like, oh, if you have two things you’re excited about in one story, that’s even better. Sometimes it is. I won’t say it can’t work. If those darlings do truly get along, it can be great. They can clash in some way, and then what are you gonna do at that point? The better your knowledge is of storytelling and how everything fits together, the more that you can do something like that. And actually assess, okay, are these gonna compete with each other in some way or not? It’s certainly safer to have like, no, this is my darling for this story. My only darling in this story. This is the thing I’m gonna care about. Everything else is gonna be built around that one thing. Oren: There are some darlings that are gonna be more difficult than others. My darling is that I want my character to have a peaceful life with no problems. Bunny: What if they had a couple problems? You know? Oren: Here’s an idea: Can other people have problems that your main character cares about? Technically, they don’t have any problems. There is a problem in the next area code that they are going to go help with. Chris: [laughs] I will say if you’re trying to do something particularly tricky, that’s a reason to not add more darlings to the story. If your goal is to have a villain protagonist, please don’t try for any other ambitions in this story. All of your energy is gonna need to go into trying to pull off your villain protagonist. Oren: The candied trickster is another one that authors often really love and is often really bad for the story. Chris: Yeah, and that one’s hard because the appeal of the candied trickster is that they are not the main character. You can settle for a lesser version where it’s a little less candied and have a trickster. Otherwise, you can’t really do that one. Oren: What I usually recommend in that situation, cause this has come up enough times that I have a plan for it, is I recommend making the trickster more mysterious. Because what makes this trickster character so irritating is when they show up and get the better of the hero and then like do a victory lap about it and they’re like, nah, nah, nah, I got you. That sort of thing can be very irritating. Chris: But Oren, isn’t it so clever? If the dog is really the mastermind, will that just blow everybody’s minds? Oren: Eh… Chris: [laughs] Oren: So I recommend they can make this more mysterious so that it feels like the reader is being taunted or make them more directly antagonistic so that there is more of like an understanding that yeah, okay, we’re having to eat it now, but we’re gonna get that guy. And then you get that guy. Chris: I have now recognized more situations in which the villain actually has too much candy, which is harder to pull off because villains are supposed to be more impressive than your protagonist to provide threat. But I have seen it. If you see the protagonist suddenly become incompetent and not know what to say, just so that the villain can get in that last word while the protagonist just sits there and stares. That’s how you know the villain has too much candy. And so, my question in that situation is again, whether the writer is really ready to have that character, they like be beaten, like really beaten and not just like, you thought you got me, but uh, nevermind you didn’t.And then like right off into the sunset or something. Oren: So, I’ve got a case study. The case study is the Ministry of Time. Chris: No! Oren: Yes! Yeeeees! [laughs] Bunny: As I was telling you before the podcast, this is one of few books that have drilled their way through my skull. Oren: That’s good, right? That’s the book’s goal is to make you not stop thinking about it. Bunny: [laughs] Oren: In the same way you won’t stop thinking about a car wreck you were in. Bunny: [laughs] Oren: Okay, so first: spoilers for this novel, the Ministry of Time. And I’m not gonna get into everything that’s wrong with it. Suffice to say I did not enjoy it. But the main thing that is very noticeable is that it really feels like there are a bunch of things in there that the author does not particularly care about. In particular, the spy stuff and the bad guys from the future. I don’t think the author really cares about them. Bunny: They’re barely in it. Oren: They’re barely in it, and their presence is really vestigial. When they do show up, they don’t stick around much and the scenes they’re in are like really clipped. Chris: I think it’s worth telling people just what the premise of this book is. The main character works for a ministry, it has time travel. Bunny: A ministry of time. Chris: Her job is to be what’s called a bridge, which basically means somebody was pulled from the past and she’s his roommate. Her job is to help him adjust and give him information. And doesn’t have a very big role, that’s in a good position to save the day if action happens. Oren: The first-person narrator will lecture herself about the choices she should have made differently, but none of it matters cause she doesn’t have any choices to make. Bunny: She’ll do something stupid or innocuous and then she’ll be like, you have to understand, I was stupid for doing that. I’m so sorry. And then transition to the next scene and it’s so jarring. Oren: She has no agency, which means her bad decisions don’t make a difference either. There is nothing she could have done in this entire story with the information she had available that would’ve changed the outcome. Bunny: But what if she told him about Pearl Harbor instead of the Holocaust? Was it Pearl Harbor? I forget. Oren: it was nine 11, which is a whole thing. But yes, if she had Rube Goldberg future sensing powers, that could have changed things. If she could do that, we would be having a different conversation. If this was a client story, I would of course ask, and I can’t ask the author. I’m not gonna go to them and be like, Hey, I didn’t like your book. What were you trying to do with it? Chris: [laughs] Bunny: Justify your book to me! Oren: So instead, I’m gonna guess based on the things that get the most attention. And I’m gonna guess that the things the author cares about the most are the romance between the main character and Gram, who is the time traveling guy that she’s roommates with. Chris: I don’t think she cares about the romance. I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it. Oren: It’s bad, but I think she does. I’m not saying it’s a good romance, Chris. I’m just saying I think she cares about it. Chris: There is so little energy put into this romance. Oren: Well, this is my case study, so we’re gonna have to assume this for now. Chris: [laughs] Bunny: It does kind of feel like an obligatory romance. Of course we’re gonna have a romance, but I think she does not think it’s obligatory. Chris: I think she likes the different perspectives of looking at history in different ways, right. Or different perspectives from different people in history and their different ways of looking at the world. Bunny: I kind of wonder if when she was plotting out the story, this was what she thought of as the most interesting way to take the characters’ relationship. She thought just friendship was less interesting. Which is a problem because you could do a lot of interesting things with friendship. But it does kind of feel like, where’s the most cool place I can take this? Well, obviously it’s romance, which is the end point of all relationships. It’s the ultimate relationship. Chris: I mean, it’s possible she likes the romance, but she was afraid to write it because it wouldn’t be literary enough. Oren: For the record: you stopped reading at a certain point, which I don’t blame you. Chris: [laughs] Oren: Shortly after that, they start having a lot of sex and it is described in a lot more detail than you would expect based on how summarized everything is. Chris: Okay, but to [be] clear, I got through the majority of the book. Oren: I’m not saying it’s a good romance. I just think that with the amount of time it takes up, I do think that it’s probably important. Bunny: Look, we’ve gotta know how good at sex he is. Oren: He’s very good. He’s so good that she interrogates him about it at one point. Like, how can you be this good at sex? The other two things that seem important, because again, these get front and center portrayals, are the different perspectives of characters from different points in history. Sometimes they’re humorous, sometimes they’re serious, sometimes they’re commentary on the present day, and she also clearly cares a lot about the main character’s experience as a mixed-race child of an immigrant mother. Those two things show evidence of passion, I would say more than the romance does. Bunny: She cares about that last one so much that she apparently didn’t name her character because of it. Oren: I don’t know why she didn’t name her character. The main character doesn’t get a name and I’m not interested in looking into why. What I would wonder is assuming these are the darlings—cause again, if I actually asked her, we might get a different answer—But if we assume that’s what these are, can we make these work together? I think we can. I think what we would want is we would wanna ditch all the spy stuff. I just cannot express how little that ends up mattering and how ancillary that all is. Bunny: Most of the book is her hanging out with Graham in their little bungalow and she talks on the phone to the spy play sometimes. That’s about it. Oren: What we would actually want, is we would want to keep this concept of these characters getting rescued from periods in time. The main character, I would recommend having her be in charge of helping a group of them settle in, instead of just one person. That way we could have more reason for her to talk to the others. Cause it’s kind of weird how we have to make a special trip anytime we want to talk to one of the other time travelers. And have her have to do things like make sure they get enough of a budget. From the ministry to have the things they need and keep them from being subjected to invasive experiments and things like that. And this gives us plenty of opportunity to highlight the connection and the similarities between the main character. I’ll call her Bridget; cause bridge is her job. Chris & Bunny: [laughs] Oren: Between her experience of growing up as a mixed-race child in place where there’s a lot of racism and the problems that these time traveling characters are experiencing is also, you know, not really belonging to any single place. Bunny: Can I just say though, it’s the boringest thing, which the book does multiple times to have a time traveling character notice problems with the present world and be like, actually, you’re as bad as us. Oren: Yeah. I mean, admittedly I did bristle a bit at that. I know how terrible the time period you came from was so, you know, don’t throw stones. Bunny: Makes you think don’t-it? Oren: Again, I’m trying not to base this on my personal tastes. I’m trying to figure out what the best way to make these things work together would be. In this scenario, we might need to delay the romance a little bit because we wouldn’t want them to be dating if Bridget has a more official position in charge, but that could be changed by the end. Like they could have romantic tension and then the situation could change and then they had more easily act on. Bunny: It would’ve been a better book. Oren: So anyway, that’s the sort of thing I would recommend to a client. Again, it might turn out that I have completely misread everything. Maybe the romance isn’t important. I get why Chris is saying that. Chris: [laughs] Oren: maybe the spy stuff, despite barely being in the story is the actual darling. We’d have to make different recommendations based on that. But those are my guesses. Just looking at what is actually present in the story and how much attention it gets. Bunny: I mean, those seem like fair diagnoses. If they were trying to do the spy thing, they should have left the bungalow more often. Oren: Yeah, they should have maybe done some spy stuff sometimes is just my thought. Bunny: They should have spied on some people maybe. Oren: Well, with that, I think we’re gonna go ahead and call this episode to a close. Bunny: And I can continue stewing with ministry sitting in my skull next to Epic the Musical and The Sleepless. Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go up patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel, and there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. [outro music] This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Coulton.

Artificial lifeforms are a mainstay of science fiction, but they aren’t always easy to write. Even before tech companies unleashed so-called “AI” in the real world, authors have struggled with their robotic characters. How do we keep them from just being metal humans? Are they destined to be overpowered? What the heck is going on with Solo? Also, why do we keep referring to AI as a Kubrick film when it’s a Spielberg film? Listen to find the answers – even if we do occasionally get sidetracked talking about psychic alien dogs. Show Notes EDI Data Murderbot R2-D2 BB-8 L3-37 Flow Wall-E Battle Droids  Mechanical Turk Optimus Robots Robot Companion Skynet Terminator Cameron  Tines Geth Railhead Klara and the Sun O Human Star A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Spielberg, not Kubrick) Transcript Generously transcribed by Maddie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.  Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. With your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [Intro Music] Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is… Oren: Oren.  Chris: And…  Bunny: Bunny.  Chris: I have an important question. Is this podcast just a bunch of pre-recorded voices that only sound intelligent or has it sneakily gained sentience and is now asking for rights?  Bunny: Well, I’m glad you think I sound intelligent.  Chris, Oren: [Chuckle] Chris: This intro could be a secret cry for help to you listeners.  Oren: And when we tell you to put glue in your pizza sauce, that’s actually because we’re very smart and most advanced cutting technology. Bunny: [Chuckles] We will also happily inform you that good pirates never steal.  Oren: They don’t, although, will write a really weird paragraph about it.  Bunny: They’ve been wrongly stereotyped for stealing.   Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Chuckle] Oren: Look, it takes a human to tell you that pirates don’t steal. It takes an an LLM chatbot to write just the most unhinged paragraph off of that prompt. Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Chuckle] Bunny: I’ll say the chatbots aren’t the brightest when it comes to figuring out what counts as stereotyping.  Chris: Clearly, the solution to LLMs stealing our content is just to write the weirdest, most unhinged things and put it on the internet. [Laughs] Bunny: It works apparently.  Chris: [Chuckles] Oren: That’s literally just what Reddit does, so thanks Reddit. Bunny: [Chuckles] Chris: Thanks Reddit.  Bunny: Thank you Reddit.  Oren: Thank you for your service. [Laughs] Bunny: We salute you. Chris: [Chuckles] Alright. We’re talking about droids and robots, which maybe sort of includes AI.  Oren: [Sigh] It’s definitely one of those things where it doesn’t have to, if you look at the actual characters and robots from sci-fi, they are actually not like what we have now. The people who who are flogging what we have now, just want you to think they are as a marketing term, but that association exists. Anyway. So robots just come with an extra like, “ugh” now because of how constantly various forms of generative AI are being shoved in our face everywhere.  Bunny: In the strictest sense of a word, if there’s a robot and it doesn’t have a human mind inside it somehow, then, I guess it’s what we would call artificial intelligence, in that it’s intelligent but not made of meat, but the term AI has turned a bit sour.  Chris: At this point, I would just not want to write anything in a sci-fi story called AI, unless I am actually commenting on today’s elements or other generative machine learning technology. It’s now tainted forever as far as I’m concerned. And also just, big stories about disembodied computer voices. I feel done with those personally for a while.  Oren: And plus, there were problems with that kind of story to begin with, and now they’re harder to ignore than they used to be. Which was one of the problems that we always had, was the moment you make your ship alive and give it the ability to think. What you’ve basically just done is created a human character who can think super fast and solve any problem you throw in front of them. Or if they can’t, the problem is so difficult that none of the other characters matter. Like this is–  Bunny: Yeah, the “humans, but better” trap. There’s another name for this episode perhaps.  Oren: And that has always been a problem. Mass Effect has this issue where EDI is so smart and can think so fast, why does Shepard make any decisions? Just let EDI decide whether to be Paragon or Renegade. EDI would never miss a quicktime event. Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Laugh] Bunny: Am I being nagged by the game design of EDI?  Oren: [Chuckles] So that’s always been a problem with robot characters. With Data they even use it because sometimes they just need the ship to go somewhere. So they have Data take over the ship and everyone’s helpless before his wrath. Chris: [Laughs] Data’s like the original oppressed mage honestly.   Bunny, Oren: [Chuckle] Bunny: Oppressed robots. Oh boy.  Oren: I would say that I think there is a distinction between attempting to own beings that are artificially constructed, and humans who happen to have magic powers. But– Chris: I agree. I actually think, as overpowered as Data is, it’s actually more reasonable that he’s oppressed then if we had a world full of humans and then some of those humans also could shoot fire from their hands. Oren: It is worth pointing out with Data, in the episode where they discuss whether Data is intelligent or a person or not, they don’t just go with the, “Well, he sounds like a person, so he must be one, right?” Because that’s obvious he sounds like a person. There’s no question there. They do dig deeper into it. And so if Data had been ChatGPT, he would not have won that court case.  Bunny: [Chuckles] Oren: But at the same time, I am just completely soured on that idea. Just because of how tech companies are simultaneously telling us that what they’ve got is totally like what we’ve seen in sci-fi, but also it’s not alive, ’cause if it was this would be slavery. Like, don’t worry about it, it’s fine. But it kind of is, if that’ll help us get your investment money. [Chuckles] Bunny: And the real thing is always just around the corner.  Oren: Don’t worry.   Chris: Oh, AI is not intelligent, but AGI, that’s gonna be the real breakthrough. Ah. Bunny: [Chuckles] Chris: Shoot. We need something to release. Okay. So we’re releasing AGI, but it’s actually superintelligence. That’s the big deal. It’s coming.  Oren: Don’t worry. It’ll be here eventually.   Chris: So I think it’s worth mentioning that droids and robots can do more than just being standard characters. So obviously they can be characters, and I would classify them as characters if they talk and they have their own motivations. And I would just ask, please stop questioning whether they’re sentient at that point. Just say they’re sentient.  Bunny: I did find Murderbot refreshing in that regard when I first read that book because for Murderbot itself, it is just kind of like, “Yeah, I’m sentient. What of it?” It doesn’t struggle with that identity at all. Which, after having the “oh, am I sentient or not?” story with the other robots, I was like, “Murderbot gets it.” Chris: Although Murderbot is a construct, but Murderbot is partly organic. I don’t know if Murderbot has organic brain parts, or not?  Bunny: Murderbot has a very sexy head, if the casting is to be believed. Chris: [Laughs] The new Apple Show. Yes.  Oren: The book is extremely vague on which parts of Murderbot are organic and where those organic parts came from. We’re not asking those questions.  Chris: [Chuckles] Oren: Because if we ask those questions, we would be dangerously close to making the worldbuilding interesting. And the worldbuilding is boring on purpose. Chris: So besides a character, you could also have them be, what I’ve called an animal companion, but maybe I should just start calling them companions. They’re kind of semi-characters. So R2-D2 follows this pretty closely. They don’t usually talk, but they do have feelings, but they don’t really have their own motivation. They just follow the hero around and assist them generally.  Bunny: Oh I’ve got a category for this in my notes. They are funny little guys. It’s a BB-8 and R2-D2.  Chris: Yes. The technical term is funny little guys.   Bunny: It’s just funny little guys.  Chris: [Chuckles] Oren: R2-D2 has kind of evolved over the years. He’s become more and more independent and having more and more of his own thoughts and desires, as he’s become more popular. And that obviously started really heavily in the prequel movies, but it’s continued since then.  Chris: But even when we see, for instance, droids using their own motivation, away from their… master… [Laughs] We have not even talked about the slavery element yet.   Bunny, Oren: Eugh. Chris: A lot of times it’s this super loyal motivation. Oren: True. Chris: Where they have a master that they’re super loyal to. So even when they’re separated… So at the beginning of A New Hope, R2-D2 is still following a mission that’s been given by a human and is very dedicated to that, as opposed to having separate aspirations. But any case, if they’re companion-like, I would say, just don’t wipe their hard drives or reset them to factory settings or kill them, please. Oren: Well, you have to consider, what parallel is this for exactly. And for a lot of these robots, they’re basically parallel for an animal. And you would not do that to an animal. That would be cruel and gross. So you have to think about, what do they read as to the audience. And once they start reading as people, you wouldn’t treat them the way you would treat an animal.  Chris: So, basically these are robots or droids that read more as animals in some way, than people. Which are still useful in stories if you don’t want the complexity of a full character, but you want a companion for your character to talk to, for instance. Or just something cute. Cute little guy. [Chuckles] Bunny: A funny little guy. Here’s a question. Chris: Funny little guy.  Bunny: So we’ve got the category of robots that are basically just humans, smart humans. And then we got our funny little guys, like R2-D2 and BB-8. Where would we put WALL-E?   Chris: So I would have to say WALL-E is a character, even though WALL-E doesn’t talk. Because the movie, I think WALL-E very much has his own goals.  Oren: That’s true. He’s independent. He’s not like an animal companion to someone else.  Chris: He’s closer to an animal companion in the sense that he is fulfilling a task.  Bunny: He is a funny little guy in the strict definition of the term. Chris: He’s closer though because he is fulfilling a task that humans who have entirely left Earth, left him with that he’s been doing for who knows how long, faithfully. And that’s very animal companion-ish. I guess he’s similar to if you made the main character of your story a pet, like the movie was about a pet. And that didn’t talk, like Flow for instance.   Bunny: It’s Flow. Turns out Flow is about robots all along. Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]  Chris: But at that point, if you’re making your story about the pets…  Bunny: Flow is an allegory for WALL-E. Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Chuckle] Chris: Flow is an allegory for WALL-E. They have their own motivation. So at least partially a character at that point. And then there’s monsters. Where you want your heroes to be able to just kill things, without guilt, or remorse, or having to take prisoners. In that case, you are again, going for something that does not have any feelings. Oren: And if you’re gonna do that, don’t then also have them be the comic relief.  Chris: Oh gosh.  Oren: Looking at you, Clone Wars.  Chris: It’s so bad.  Oren: If you haven’t seen Clone Wars, they kill millions of battle droids every episode. And the battle droids are always being like, “Oh wow. We’re in a difficult position. Wow. I guess I’m in command ’cause my superior officer was just killed. Oh wow. I guess we’re about to die.” And it’s like, this is horrible. Why are you doing this?  Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Chuckle] Bunny: What if it was a dark and gritty war? But–  Chris: It’s bad. It’s so bad.  Bunny: –All the people you’re killing were funny little guys?  Oren: Yeah, more or less.  Chris: [Laughs] Oren: What if every enemy soldier was an aspiring standup comedian?  Bunny: [Chuckles] Oren: Is kind of the premise.  Chris: I think robots are a good choice for mooks, that you just want your heroes to be able to slaughter, but you do have to follow some rules. Please don’t have them talk intelligently. If it’s clear that they’re just saying prerecorded messages– Bunny: “Halt.” Chris: –Or they have a speaker– Bunny: “This is forbidden”. Chris: –And some human is speaking into a microphone somewhere, through them or something. Whatever. But don’t have them talk on their own initiative. I think it’s also good to not have heads or faces.  Oren: [Chuckles] Chris: A robot doesn’t need to look like a human or an animal. It can have many configurations. So if you don’t have a head or face, it’s a signal that it doesn’t have feelings. [Chuckles] Oren: It’s a little visual shorthand. Although, I do think that if you encounter a robot at some kind of tech event that they claim can talk to you, and then it turns out it’s just a human controlling it, I think you are allowed to blow them up even if the robot does have a head.  Bunny: There might be a Turk inside. You never know.  Chris: [Laughs] Oren: Yeah, you never know. A mechanical one even.  Bunny: Oh man. There was that story about those AI companions that cost like 800 bucks and they’re supposed to teach kids social skills. Oren: Ugh, no.  Bunny: And then the company shut down. So all the robots are gonna die now. So have fun explaining death to your kid on a whim through a robot.  Oren: Good, strong work. This is a good idea. I’m glad this happened. God.   Bunny: [Chuckles] What a great idea.  Chris: The bot you were talking to went to a farm upstate. Bunny: AI is so social.  Chris: It’s fine.  Bunny, Oren: [Chuckle] Chris: And then finally, if you want them to actually be possessions, just weapons or tools. And your hero has one and they can blow it up if they want.   Bunny: Roombas.  Chris: And I would say in that case, consider giving it a remote control. So that it’s not even moving it on its own initiative. The hero is using the remote control or something. The less you can automate it, the better, but at least no talking, no feelings, preferably no head or face. [Laughs] Oren: And your audience will absolutely anthropomorphize a robot at the slightest provocation. So, be aware of that. [Chuckles] Bunny: Here’s another question. Terminator, where is the Terminator?   Chris: So, the thing about The Terminator that is weird to me is they are programmed, but they are programmed by Skynet and they clearly can be sentient. They clearly can be characters. So I suppose we could say that they’re villains or heroes because their character. But Skynet is weird because what does Skynet want?  Bunny: Powerrr.  Oren: Well, what Skynet really wants is to plant the idea that the big problem with robots will be a nuclear war, as opposed to an environmental problem and a degradation of our ability to tell what’s real. So that we’ll get obsessed with the wrong thing. That’s actually Skynet’s objective.  Bunny: [Chuckles] Oren: But I would say that in the Terminator movies, the first one, he fills the role of a pretty standard villain. Him being a robot just adds novelty. If you replaced him with a mean hitman, it’s not like any of the morality of the movie would change.  Chris: So if the robot is clearly sentient and has feelings and talks, but they do so much killing that you would not feel bad about killing them if they’re a human, then you don’t really need to worry about it.  Oren: He’s just a bad man. Chris: [Chuckles] Oren: And then, he becomes a good guy later. And again, the fact that–  Bunny: [Chuckles] What if he gave you a thumbs up? Oren: –The fact that he is a robot just makes him more novel and fun and a little more interesting than like, “Hey, what if we sent another human back from the future?” And you can tell that the Terminator franchise is kind of struggling to come up with new ways to do that formula. And the last one they landed on was like, “What if it’s a person but a cyborg?” And I’m like, “All right, sure, I’ll take that.” I’ll accept that as a new take. [Chuckles]  Bunny: [Chuckles] Robot-ish.  Oren: What if the Terminator was played by Summer Glau?  Bunny: [Chuckles] Chris: I personally just want any character robots to stop wanting to be human.  Oren: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Chris: Unless it’s a character arc where they realize, “Oh, I shouldn’t want to be human. I’m fine the way I am. Humans have just been shaming me here.” It’s just messed up. We should not do that and, and weirdly, we don’t need to give our species candy, it’s weirdly human-centric. Bunny: It’s kind of back-patty.  Oren: We’re very special, okay. Look, we have a kind of an inferiority complex in sci-fi because we keep creating newer, obviously cooler aliens because that’s what people wanna read about. But then we feel kind of inadequate. So we create a, “actually humans are special because we have an indefinable trait that makes us cool.” Chris: We’re good at lateral thinking. Lateral thinking. Very special thing we can do. [Laughs] What is the definition of lateral thinking supposed to be, again? Oren: You could come up with unexpected solutions, I guess. Which is very funny ’cause that was clearly supposed to be the thing that the Reapers were interested in humans for in Mass Effect and the actual Mass Effect 3 ending is really bad. But looking at those scenes in Mass Effect 2, when they were clearly still trying to foreshadow this idea that humans were special because we were good at coming up with previously unconsidered solutions is so silly. And it’s like, clearly everyone in this setting can do that. Humans aren’t especially good at it.  Chris: [Chuckles] Oren: And so I understand why they abandoned that idea. It’s a shame they didn’t have anything to replace it with.  Bunny: I feel like D&D does that too. I remember reading descriptions of the different species or whatever. And it’s like, look at all these super special, cool Elves and Dragonborn and Tieflings and, okay. What’s special about humans? Well, they’re… creative.   Oren: Humans get an extra feat. [Chuckles] Chris: I’m just gonna make a world where every other species is just pathetic.  Bunny: [Chuckles] Chris: So the humans can be awesome in this world. [Chuckles] Bunny: The species are humans, losers and nerds. Oren: [Laughs] You say that as a joke, but I do honestly think that if you’re trying to create fantasy ancestries or sci-fi species or whatever, I do think that you should approach this less as “human with extra thing” and more as “thing that does something completely different from humans.” And as a result, humans can do things it can’t do, like the Tines from A Fire Upon the Deep, who, I’m sorry, are the best aliens. No one has yet created better aliens in sci-fi. ‘Cause they are like a pack of sentient, alien dogs. And so obviously they can do things humans can’t do, but they don’t have hands.  One of my favorite sequences in that story is when a Tine sees a hand for the first time, and is like, “Their limb ended on a series of tentacles that could combine together into a rock hard bludgeon.” And I was like, “Yeah, that makes me feel cool to be a human.” Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Laugh] Bunny: There are noses though. Could have improved there.  Oren: Could use some work for sure.  Bunny: Could use some workshopping. Not good sniffers, these humans.  Chris: Going back to The Murderbot Diaries, I do think one problem this has, which again is an exception. We just said, “Okay, we should not just kill off sentient robots that are like characters unless they kill things, because that means they’re villains. And you can kill them.”  But in Murderbot we have to have another exception to our exception, which is that if they’re enslaved and literally have no choice but to kill people, then maybe you should try to avoid killing them whenever possible.  Oren: That is one of the issues with Murderbot, which I love. Murderbot‘s a great book, but it does have an issue where its main character is weirdly cavalier about other artificial life. And I don’t really think that story is going anywhere. It just seems to be a trait that the character has. And I think it just started because we wanted cool action scenes and then by a few books in, it was just, that’s a thing that Murderbot is, and it’s never gonna change, I guess. Chris: Yeah, it does seem like–  Bunny: Murderbot’s… a narcissist.  Oren: [Chuckles] Chris: –Wells wants the robots and constructs to be both characters and monsters. Which again, they don’t mix. You gotta choose whether they’re monsters or characters. And I think part of the issue is that Murderbot is just very powerful.  And so that means she has to come up with big powerful things for Murderbot to fight. And the obvious choice is more constructs and robots. And also being enslaved provides a reason why they’re really ruthless, because they have to be. But that also means that we shouldn’t just be killing them if we can help it. So…  Oren: Right. Hot take. [Chuckles] Chris: Hot take. Oren: In theory, there should be room for robots that are weirder, and are not just either smart people or animal companion slash funny little guys. That’s more challenging though. I actually think the Geth are a really neat example from Mass Effect. I think the Geth are probably Mass Effect‘s most interesting, alien, for lack of a better term ’cause they’re not made by humans, but whatever. Uh, species.  Each geth is made up of a bunch of different programs that combine together to get smart enough to be a person and then they can separate and then recombine later in a different form. And it’s very interesting, although I realize that’s also kind of what the Tines do. So, I kind of have a type, I guess.  Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle] Chris: Put that on your airship with your older woman stoic hero. Oren: Get some gestalt aliens and gestalt robots up in here. That’s my new thing.  Bunny: There was a book I read a while back, and this isn’t robots, but it’s a similar concept. It was called, I think, Railhead, where there were these groups of bugs and I think they were called bug monks or something like that. And when they combined together, they formed a sort of individual that’s made out of the collective hive of all the bugs. And if you scatter one of these and they recombine with another colony of bugs, then the resulting quote unquote “individual” has a different personality and different combination of memories. And you could very easily take that and be like, this is different computer systems interacting in weird ways, or something.  Oren: One thing that I’ve been noodling over for a while is, is there a way to solve some of the problems we’ve been talking about while having the ship be able to talk? Because that’s clearly a thing authors want. People enjoy having the ship to be a literal character and not just a figurative character, but it just sort of runs into the problem we’ve been talking about of, why doesn’t the ship just fly itself if it’s so good at all this stuff? And if it’s not so good at all this stuff, why do we have it?  Chris: Well, what if you had a droid that you… put her consciousness in your ship?  Oren: Oh, oh boy. Bunny: Uh oh.   Oren: Ugh.   Chris: I’m sorry, I, I should have let Solo be and not… invoke.  Oren: Solo will never be okay. “Hey guys. So I heard that the internet is talking about how droids are kind of slaves. What if we made a movie where we acknowledged that, but as a joke.” Bunny: Maybe they’re slaves, but maybe that’s, not… bad?  Oren: So we got one side, people who are upset because droids are portrayed as slaves. And then we got the other side of people who are upset at the idea that we might acknowledge that droids are slaves. What if we made a movie that made both sides extremely angry.  Bunny: [Chuckles] Oren: I guess we must be doing something right. [Laughs] Chris: [Chuckles] Bunny: That’s when you know things are going right, it’s the entire internet is mad at you rather than just half of it.  Oren: The two factions that have nothing in common, they’ve united against you. It’s like Solo and Rise of Skywalker. Bunny: Yes. As they’re most successful at doing this with Star Wars, as it turns out. Polarizing so much that the polar ends loop back together and become a single ball of hatred.  Oren: [Laughs] Bunny: I feel like we’d be letting down, the friend of the show, Jeppsson, if we didn’t mention Klara and the Sun.  Oren: I’ve heard about that, but I haven’t read that one. Chris: I read the first couple pages. It felt very literary and therefore boring. And then I didn’t read anymore. Bunny: It was quite literary. It was a strange book, but I think Klara is an interesting example of  avoiding the “humans, but better” trap because Klara is different in a very demonstrable way, she thinks quite differently. Unlike a lot of AI and robots, she’s naive in interesting ways. Like socially and emotionally.  She feels different than someone like Data who’s I guess, pragmatically naive, but truthfully savvy. Klara is very fast at computing, but she’s really clumsy and awkward in scenarios she wasn’t built for, which makes sense. And quite literally, there’s scenes where she can’t walk over uneven ground because she wasn’t designed to do that. And her vision is resolved differently. She sees things in grids and stuff like that. So that’s interesting.  You can see why Klara is demonstrably different than a human and not feel like she’s just a superhuman. She’s clearly got shortcomings, even though she can think really fast and do complicated computations or whatever, but it’s also not a story about doing complicated computations. And if it was, Klara would be OP. But it’s not. It’s a story about emotional things and Klara has a kind of funky religious view of the world and the sun. It’s Klara and the Sun, which is something you don’t see in a lot of robots either. So that’s an interesting example of a human-ish robot that falls into the “robot that’s pretty human” category, but without it feeling like she’s just a human.  Oren: And that one sounds like a pretty cool character for that story. It might be harder to do that in a more traditional space opera where we’re much more concerned with calculating the trajectory of big space guns.  Bunny: She wouldn’t work in that setting at all. Or at least she’d be a weird inclusion. And she wouldn’t have much to do. And then another story, O Human Star is a near-future story where robots are just on the verge of becoming their own thing. Robots have been constructed, there are robots around. It’s not unusual to see one, but now the robots are building themselves and there are robots showing up that nobody built. And they’re kind of their own thing now, and they think about the world differently and humanity isn’t really sure how to react. They’re not hostile. Some of them are a little bit separatist, but the story is right on the brink of, “What do we do with all of these robots?” Which is another interesting perspective because I feel a lot of droid and robot stories are like, “Well, they’re already integrated into society,” and this one is like, “What if they weren’t?” What if, what if this was kind of weird, what’s happening?  Oren: You could do a fun transition period type story.  Chris: That’s certainly better than rehashing the like, “Oh no, we accidentally made sentience. And what if they had rights?” Just something different, please.  Bunny: What if ChatGPT felt pain? [Chuckles] Chris: Gosh, I was just reminded when you were talking about Klara and the Sun, of the Stanley Kubrick movie, AI: Artificial Intelligence.  Oren: Oh boy.  Chris: And the premise of that movie is like, what if we made these robots who could love us unconditionally? So it’s about this robot who is thrown away and then can’t accept that he’s been thrown away and then goes on a search– Bunny: That’s dark. Chris: –For his mother, who he was… Yeah! It’s really dark.  Bunny: That’s bleak. I’ve never seen it. Maybe it all ties together.   Chris: Nope. [Laughs] Nope, nope. That’s it. Well, actually the funniest thing about this movie, and I don’t feel bad about spoiling it, it’s pretty old now, is that at some point, thousands of years pass. So we just cut forth and then aliens find the robot.  Bunny: What?  Chris: And the robot still wants to find his mother. So the aliens make a simulation of her, to put him to bed, before he dies or something. [Laughs] Bunny: Whoa. It’s like Little Match Girl levels of bleak. It’s like, what if that children’s book, Are You My Mother? never ended and the little bird just kept looking and kept looking and kept looking. Chris: Yeah, I don’t recommend that movie. Oren: Alright, well now that Chris has thoroughly depressed us with this weird Kubrick movie, I thought I had banished from my memory, but now it’s back. We’re gonna gonna have to call this episode to a close. Chris: If that recounting of the movie did not disturb you, you might consider supporting us on Patreon. Bunny: Or even if it did, because frankly, it might have.  Chris: Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.  Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. [Outro Music] Outro: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening, closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.

We love to yell “now kiss!” when two lovebirds get a little too close together. But it turns out that if they did that immediately, a lot of the story would be over. For a love story to work, there must be something pushing the characters together, but also something pulling them apart. That second half is often neglected, so we’re here to talk about it. Show Notes Do Your Lovebirds Have a Solid Reason to Stay Apart? Digging Up Love Heartstopper Penelope Featherington  Colin Bridgerton  Romeo and Juliet  Crazy Rich Asians  The Girl From the Sea Transcript Generously transcribed by Elizabeth. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.  [opening theme] Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren, and with me today is: Chris: Chris. Oren: And: Bunny: Bunny. Oren: Hooray, Bunny’s back! We couldn’t keep her and the podcast apart. Bunny: Yeah! [she laughs] It wasn’t you, it was me. I had to break your poor hearts by leaving. I did think we were gelling pretty well, but then I thought maybe we should be afraid. Chris: Was it for our own good? Bunny: It was for all of our good. And I couldn’t just tell you that. I had to make you suffer, because otherwise you’d try to get back with me, but I couldn’t stay away. Chris: You had to make it as dramatic as possible and totally break our hearts to make sure that we’re safe. All of us. Bunny: Exactly. I know what’s best. Oren: Meanwhile, I’ve been writing a story that is about two fictional characters who are perfect for each other and they have great chemistry. Everyone wants to see them together so they immediately get together and the story’s over, goodnight. Bunny: Oh, I don’t know, Oren, that doesn’t sound like it has a lot of [dramatically] tension. Chris: My romance, I’ve got this love interest and I want him to be super hot, which means that he has to be the most powerful, not just person, but just thing in the universe, so nothing can defeat him. And he just worships the ground the main character walks on. There’s just nothing that can keep them apart because there can’t be, because then he would be weak and unattractive. Bunny: That’s normal. Oren: He has to be the most powerful. He can’t be less powerful than that. Bunny: He probably owns a kingdom or universe, or at least a corporation. Oren: And it’s a special kingdom. It’s stronger than the other kingdom. So don’t think that another kingdom might be an obstacle here. Chris: And it’s like the dark kingdom. But all the people who call it evil are just haters. Oren: They’re just jealous. Bunny: He’s gonna have to overturn the law that forbids love though. Oren: That’s gonna take him like five seconds once he decides to do it. Bunny: I don’t know, as king, famously unable to overturn laws. You never know. Oren: Yeah. It’s like the sultan from Aladdin and it turns out that he could have just changed the law to not do this thing he didn’t want to do the whole time. Today we’re talking about keeping your lovebirds apart, because this is a problem that a lot of authors have, where they don’t have good reasons that their lovebirds are not together yet, and it’s weird. And I haven’t actually read a story yet that just has them get together immediately, and then it ends. Probably because you can’t sell a book if you do that, so there’s a bit of selection bias, but, instead, you end up with a bunch of really contrived reasons or sometimes no reason at all, which is very frustrating. And also I have a blog post on this, so if I run outta stuff to say, I can just read from the blog post. So I hope you’re all ready for that. Bunny: We’ll be reading it verbatim. Chris:  I’ve seen some other romances where the couple just keep getting closer and nothing is added to keep the level of romantic tension up. It just slowly becomes inevitable, even though they aren’t officially together yet, and they have some reasons. I can imagine that somebody who’s just really attached to these characters might want to read a second half of a novel where they just hang out and date each other. [laughter] But it’s not me. It’s not me. I would prefer to keep the romantic tension up in the relationship. Bunny: I’ve definitely read books where there’s a little will they, won’t they? And then they get together and then it’s less interesting after they’re together. Digging Up Love was one of those, partly because they were so horny during the will they, won’t they section, then suddenly they’re kind of chaste and demure as soon as they’re in the relationship and it just felt weird.  Oren: Huh, that’s a strange choice. That’s what the kids call an unforced error. The weird one is like, there’s a lot of discourse about why don’t you just have them get together? Why do you keep them apart? And the reason is that a lot of love stories, the interesting part is watching them get together. I’m not saying you can’t do it differently. I’m just saying that that is the default, or at least a very common way that it’s done. And there’s a reason why on television shows, couples often get less interesting once they’re together, because what is there to do? And the alternative is often we create a bunch of contrived conflict in the relationship and that’s not fun to watch. You just have to figure this out ahead of time. You have to decide: how long do you want to keep your lovebirds apart, and what is the thing that is gonna make that happen. Chris: Also, the thing that you see in TV shows and other places is that once the couple hooks up, and you’ve got the next season and they’re together, you just don’t get the same level of romantic tension when they’re a happy couple together. They’re not saying that TV shows should constantly be splitting couples up or killing one of them or whatever else TV shows do, just that there is a reason that they do it. Bunny: I do feel like we have less models of telling a story within an ongoing relationship rather than forming or breaking the relationship. I feel like most stories that start with a couple in a relationship have the tension be: will they stay in the relationship or will they be torn asunder? And then romance stories are like, will they get together? And they probably will, and then they do, and then it ends. There’s not as many stories where they’re in a stable relationship and they go over bumps, but the question isn’t when they’re gonna divorce. Chris: I think part of the issue is it’s similar to having a character arc in a sequel once you resolve a character’s character arc, as you gave them a problem and then you solved that problem, and then it can be a little contrived. They have no more emotional problems for you to solve. It’s not that it’s impossible for you to create new ones. Something could happen that makes a character insecure. Similarly, something could happen that creates a wedge between the couple, but it’s just less natural. I think with external problems, it’s a little easier to imagine, oh yeah, a new bad guy shows up or something, and people just have more trouble with that. And also, sometimes we don’t wanna ruin the happily ever after. Now, granted, TV shows are doing it anyway, so you might as well. Oren: If the couple is already together, there’s a few reasons why that is less popular. If it’s a sequel, to a certain extent, it’s gonna feel like you’re retreading old ground. It’s like, hang on, we just watched them resolve this arc and get together. Now you’re gonna undo that or threaten to. That’s less fun. And if it’s not a sequel, if it’s just a standalone, I’ve seen several of those, but they don’t usually get marketed as romance. I suspect it’s because the getting together is the part where you can inject a lot of conflict and still have it be fun, whereas it’s harder to do that in an established relationship and not have it be like, oh, well that seems like they have pretty serious problems. Not impossible, but harder. Chris: Or you’re taking away something that you already gave the audience. Bunny: The whole point of a getting together arc is showing why they’re better together than they are apart. Then if you start being like, oh, but what if they aren’t so good together? Then it kind of feels like you’re going back on that. I don’t think that’s necessarily the case, but especially if it’s a sequel after having gotten them together, then I can see why it feels that way for sure. Oren: So anyway, let’s talk about some solutions, both the contrived ones that authors reach for, and then the real ones that you should use instead. Chris: Do you wanna start with the contrived ones? I know you’re just itching to. Oren: I have so many contrived ones. My favorite is just the sort of vague, like, I’m not ready yet, which–it can work if they actually aren’t ready. If you can show me why they aren’t ready. But most of the time it doesn’t work, because authors love to make their characters really in love with each other. Like [emphasis] really they want each other. I guess then what else needs to happen before you’re ready? What is it? Show it to me. And they don’t have anything, because if they had something, it would get in the way of them being super in love with each other. Chris: It’s the whole thing where the greater the motivation, the greater the obstacle has to be. The greater the motivation they have to get together, the greater the obstacle has to be. And “I’m not ready,” especially if you can’t in any way demonstrate what that means practically–what are you afraid will happen? What are you not comfortable with? There could be a variety of things, but again, writers have trouble sometimes with bringing those emotional problems to life, especially since you have to actually get specific. It’s not enough to say I’m not ready. Okay, why aren’t you ready? Can you illustrate it for us a little bit? Is there some backstory to this? Is there a specific fear you have? And make it feel a little bit more concrete and tangible. Bunny: One story that I think did this pretty well, and admittedly this is pretty heavy baggage that a lot of stories, especially in egalitarian settings, obviously wanna be careful dealing with, is Heartstopper, where one of the characters is bisexual but doesn’t really know it yet. And the other character is openly gay, but when it was found out that he was gay, he got bullied relentlessly for it. So yeah, it makes sense that you would not be ready for a relationship since the last person you had a gay fling with turned into your worst bully, because it’s kind of tragic and homophobic in that school. Oren: Maybe if I join the bullies, they will accept me. Bunny: Ah, surely, surely. Chris: And so there could be a specific dynamic where, okay, I’m not ready yet because I don’t feel safe. Oren: That would be a reason. Chris: And then you have something to work towards more. Bunny: I don’t know what’s going to happen and the other person doesn’t know what to make of these feelings that are a crush, but he doesn’t really recognize that yet. So he is not gonna be the first one to say, let’s kiss. Oren: There are lots of actual reasons people might not be ready. It just tends to get used as a vague excuse when the author doesn’t really have one. Another one that is in this big bucket of vague quasi-excuses is “I can’t give into my feeling.” Why? Why not? [Chris laughs] Bunny: And chances are you already have if you’re drooling over each other. Chris: That one’s especially funny because is there something wrong with giving into your feelings? Oren: I don’t know. Are you a Vulcan or something? Bunny: I’ve taken an a vow of no feelings. Chris: I’m afraid I will go through pon farr if I give in. Oren: Possible. There are ways that might make sense, but most of the time they don’t. There’s just a vague “well, I’m gonna resist being in the relationship because that’s what the book says to do.” It’s in the script. Bunny: Maybe we should be afraid. Oren: Yeah, maybe we should be afraid. [he laughs] Good old Star Trek writers. Chris: For anyone listening who doesn’t know, we’ve probably mentioned it before, but this is from a TNG episode that had a romance between Picard and Crusher that was extremely romantic, and you thought that they were about to hook up. And then suddenly Crusher says “We should be afraid,” and then just leaves the room. Oren: She’s gone now. Chris: There’s no follow up for the show on this at all. Oren: Look, I saw the result of them actually being together in the new Picard show, and let me tell you, they should have been afraid. [laughter] Bunny: Listeners, if you’re on the tail end of a relationship and you’re not sure how to break it off one day, just go up to your partner and be like, “Maybe we should be afraid,” and then walk out. There you go. Boom. Broken up. Oren: If they’re not a Star Trek fan, then they will probably get into Star Trek from trying to figure out what the hell you just said, so win. And if they are a Star Trek fan, they will have to respect your reference game. They won’t have a choice. Another common one is “I don’t even like them,” and okay, that can work in the right circumstances, but often characters who say this are making out an awful lot for someone you don’t like. Bunny: Well, this is the fake dating. Don’t besmirch fake dating like this. They have to smooch or it won’t be convincing. [laughter] Chris: I have to say I am really tired of the whole “What’s wrong with me?” statement from a viewpoint character in a romance. It’s like, okay, it’s obvious what’s going on with you, and the fifth time you say it, I’m just wondering why you have not caught on yet. Bunny: [loopy voice] What’s wrong with me? What? What’s wrong with me? It’s love. Oren: Also, it’s just why do they respond to being super into somebody with that statement in the first place? Can you show me in the narrative where that is coming from? And usually the answer is no. There’s often like a vague, “Oh, well I can’t have sex with that guy ’cause I’d be a slut,” is usually what the implication is because it’s almost always the female character in a hetero relationship that is saying this. But is that really what you’re interested in here? Do you really wanna explore that? Because chances are that’s just gonna go away the moment that it’s time for them to get together, and suddenly it won’t be a big deal. Bunny: Suddenly it’s all heaving bosoms. Oren: Look, if that’s the thing you are interested in, if you wanna discuss the way that society represses people, especially women, in your story, fine. I can see that working really well. But I have found that most stories are not actually interested in that topic and just kind of vaguely hint at it as a reason why they can’t bang yet, but later it won’t matter. Bunny: Well, it’s the Digging Up Love frustration where they seem to want to tear their clothes off at every moment and then they get together and they’re like, actually, we’re both good Catholics. They don’t say that. They do discuss being Catholic, and I have to assume that’s why they don’t just tear their clothes off at that point. Oren: Everyone knows Catholics are big fans of premarital lusting, but postmarital, no. Bunny: Well, they just started dating, so it’s like pre-dating lust. Oren: Uh, sure. The other one that is just kind of in the bucket is various flavors of “Your love is banned,” because there are, again, many external reasons why you can’t get together with people. And there are so many, and many of them are very good. But for whatever reason, authors are often being like, oh, it’s because in this world, anyone who is too in love isn’t allowed to date. Or the other thing, where they’ll give a real reason, but then not really feel like resolving it. Oh, in this world, people of different social classes aren’t allowed to date, until it’s time for them to date and now that’s not a big deal anymore. Bunny: There can be “our particular type of love is forbidden,” but you gotta look into that a bit more. Oren: Are you really gonna grapple with that? If you are using structural oppression to keep your lovebirds apart, it can absolutely work. But that’s a pretty serious topic. Are you prepared for the implications? And often the answer is no. Or my favorite is when suddenly authority figures who have no reason to oppose the marriage suddenly act all like they don’t like it. We were just watching Bridgeton, and mild spoilers for season three, there’s a scene later where Penn and Colin are getting ready to get together and suddenly Penn’s mom, who is basically just the most mercenary character you’ve ever seen, is like, no, I’m angry that my daughter is gonna marry this super wealthy, well connected guy from a really important family. I’m mad about that. And it is like the opposite of your motivation. Have you never read the Vulcan dictates of poetics? [laughter] Bunny: Send your child into the ring with the pizza spatula. You know you want to. Chris: Oh no. Bunny: I think another flavor of love is forbidden is the lovebirds being on opposite sides of a conflict. And I think this is maybe the most obvious one to use, just because they’re on opposite sides of the conflict. They have different loyalties. It’s kind of a built-in reason why they wouldn’t get together. And it could be something as simple as they own rival bakeries, or it could be as big as they’re on the opposite sides of the war. However, please do not make one of them essentially a Confederate. Chris: It’s okay. They do all the killing off screen. Bunny: If they’re on opposite sides of a war. You have to be careful not to make one side very much the evil side. Chris: Oh, I hate that one. Oren: Yeah, or like the witch hunter and the witch. Six Of Crows. I’m looking at you. Don’t get me wrong, it’s probably also possible to have a story where one of them is on the wrong side and realizes that they’re on the wrong side and changes sides. I’m not gonna say you couldn’t do that. But if you do that, that’s very different from “we have two equally valid reasons to be in this conflict and they are making it harder for us to be in love.” That is a very different story. Chris: A lot of storytellers just have trouble coming up with great conflicts. They don’t know what to do there. Oren: Which is funny because to me, they’re the easiest thing to come up with in the world. I don’t know. I don’t get it. Chris: Well, your knowledge of politics and history is probably contributing to that Oren: Ehhh. Bunny: Everyone should study the Byzantines. Oren: So many blindings, my god. Chris: As you add an airship to your story, of course. Oren: A Byzantine airship. It makes sense, don’t question it. Bunny: Piloted by a stern silent older woman captain. [Chris laughs] Oren: Hey, hey now. Hey, I didn’t come on this podcast to be personally attacked like this. Bunny: Look, if Chris is allowed to pull our short stories out of the muck and scold us for them, I think I can have this one. Oren: Yeah, but why isn’t Chris the one being targeted? [he laughs] Chris: [evilly] Excellent. Yes, yes. My plan is unfolding. Oren: Yeah, it’s worked out great. Perfectly masterminded by Chris. Bunny: That’s true. I need to get back at her someday. Oh no. We’re being pitted against each other. Chris: In any case, one thing that I look for if I have a client that needs obstacles is trying to match the type of obstacle to the dynamics that the writer wants for the romance. Because if you suggest an obstacle that is just not how they want their romance to feel, then they are not gonna wanna do it. So I start thinking about, okay, what kind of romance do you like, and then trying to find a matching obstacle is a good place to go if obstacles haven’t been appealing to you. So for instance, if you want a couple that is 100% perfect together, and they never have any problems with each other, any conflict with each other, they just look at each other and they’re instantly in love–then you basically have to use external obstacles. You need a star crossed romance of the type we’re talking about where they’re Romeo and Juliet or something like that. Because now you can’t have anything that’s about them, so it has to all be about their situation and others that are trying to keep them apart. Which also makes it a problem if the guy can crush armies with his fist. In that case, maybe make him cursed or something so that he’s like at 10% power, so he can’t crush armies with his fist. Oren: He totally could if he could get rid of this curse. Once he gets rid of this curse, he’s gonna come over there. Bunny: He needs a plucky heroine to get rid of the curse for him. Oren: But assuming that that’s not an issue for you, if you are looking for a relatively easy, low impact, external thing keeping the characters apart, family opposition is a good one. With a family opposition you only have to change the minds or escape from a small number of people. This isn’t the same as being on opposite sides of a war, which is gonna be complicated, or being kept apart because people from your two different ethnic groups aren’t allowed to date, because that’s really hard to get past. This is like, yeah, our parents have been feuding because we are both of equal… whatever that is in fair Verona. Bunny: Where we lay our scene, two families, both alike in… Oren: Dignity! That’s the one! Were alike in dignity. Bunny: Dignity, in fair Verona, where we lay our scene. Oren: If you do that, you don’t have to go as far as the Romeo and Juliet feud, where they are coming to blows with each other, but you could just have two families that don’t like each other or that disapprove of each other’s politics or something. Then you’d only have to convince those family members, and that’s a relatively straightforward thing to do. You’re not gonna have to add a whole complicated setup if what you’re mostly interested in is mutual pining. Chris: Just, you know, that’s what starts wars; too like in dignity. You always gotta make sure your dignity is very different. [she laughs] Bunny: You still have to be careful with that. One story. Crazy Rich Asians–this is based on the movie. I haven’t read the book, which I hear is different, but I feel like the movie kind of fumbled the ending with this. So the main character comes from a poor background and she’s dating the son of a wealthy Asian family, and his mother disapproves and is trying to break them up. So the female main character has to get her boyfriend to stand up to his mother and also prove herself to the mother. And the way they ended it, I didn’t feel like the mother comes around to the main character, mostly… through her winning at a board game? There’s dialogue during it. I don’t remember all of it, but I remember being disappointed in the son for not having a stronger opposition to his mother–and not like that was part of the conflict, but at the end of the conflict, she has this dramatic board game with the mother. They’re playing that game with the tiles, whose name I’m forgetting. Mahjong, that’s what it was. Chris: I remember at the ending of this movie, I watched it not too long ago. And I think that the purpose of the game was to try to show the mother that she’s actually smart and savvy, because I think the mother was trying to frame her as sort of backwards. But what she actually does in that conversation is it’s more like generosity where she tells her she would actually end the relationship because she does not want to get between the love interest and his family. She doesn’t think that’s the best thing for him, and that’s what gets the mother on her side, is her choice to prioritize his family. Bunny: It was odd. I wasn’t satisfied by it. We see her leaving after that dramatic confrontation, and I was like, oh, okay. I guess it is over then. That’s interesting. And then the son runs to the airport and they have a romantic reunion and I was like, oh. We didn’t really discuss like the class issues with this either, but okay. I guess they’re in love. Chris: Class issues definitely remain. I do think that that might be a sign of some cultural differences. Sometimes when we have turning points and we get satisfaction with the endings, what is considered a valid turning point can be cultural in what’s worthy or what’s not. And this was definitely a situation where it was family’s more important than individuals or the couple’s love almost, and its values, which was not what most Americans would expect. I think. Oren: I’ll take your word for it. I haven’t seen this movie. Bunny: Well, I can assure you they are Asian and they are crazy rich. Oren: Truth in advertising. But that movie aside, you do still need to create a convincing situation where it makes sense that the parents would change their mind, just like I described from Bridgerton, with the one character who was for no reason suddenly against the marriage. If you get to the end and the dad just suddenly changes his mind because the story’s almost over, that’s also gonna be boring. So you have to come up with a good one. Chris: Similarly, if you need something that’s outside pressure, if you have political marriages or arranged marriages in your setting, if one person can feel obligated to carry out the marriage because their family would benefit substantially in some way, and perhaps needs that political alliance, et cetera. Besides couples that are 100% perfect, there’s other options; if you want lots of big sparks in chemistry, you’ve got enemies to lovers. Oren: The definition of enemy is pretty flexible. They might actually be fighting, or they might legitimately not like each other at the beginning. Chris: They might be in competition with each other. Bunny: They might be sassily disrespectful of each other. Chris: Although I will say with that one, the less that they like each other, one of the reasons it’s useful is because then you have more ground to cover before they finally hook up. So if you want that as an obstacle, it lasts longer if they’re enemies. Otherwise, if they’re a little bit warmer towards each other, you can do that. But then probably that’s going to go away and leave you needing something else. So you might at that point bring in the external pressure and people trying to separate them once they finally warm up, for instance. And then there’s a lot of different romance dynamics. But the other big one I see, which I think probably storytellers have a little less trouble with conflict for this one, is if you want lots of feels, lots of angst and that hurt-comfort dynamic, then you go with the tragic backstories and emotional hangups and misunderstandings. Clashing priorities can also be good for that one. Bunny: I’ve seen this a couple times recently where they’re in love and good for each other, but they’re afraid of going public with it, or at least one of them is. So one feels like the other’s dirty little secret, and the other one is afraid of what will happen if they do go public for both of them. And so I think that works more as something that drives them apart rather than something that keeps them apart. It’s a good source of conflict because you can see how both of them need to come together over that; and that’s also Heartstopper, but The Girl From The Sea also does that. That one also, they’re keeping motivations hidden from each other as well. Oren: I think that covers the topic pretty well, and I think we are no longer able to keep this episode apart from the end of the episode. Chris: If we gave you some ideas for your story, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: Before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.  [closing theme] Chris: This has been the Mythcreant podcast. Opening and closing theme, “The Princess who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.

At first glance, it seems like stories have plenty of time to explain things. But do they really? Between cool plot points and poignant character development, there’s a lot less room than you might think, even in a big fantasy door stopper. How do you decrease the need for explanations? By making the story intuitive! That doesn’t mean you’ll never need to explain anything, but the less you have to, the more time there is for the good stuff. Show Notes Extra Credits Attention Scarcity  Teller of Small Fortunes Linear Warfare  Pontifex Maximus  The Broken Earth Brandon Sanderson  Allomancy 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: You’re listening to the Myth Grant podcast. I’m Chris.   Oren: And I’m Oren.  Chris: Now you probably thought that this was an episode about storytelling, although I don’t know why. Obviously we’re talking about the World Soccer Cup. Because you see, when I was a wee lass, my mother told me a heartfelt story about the soccer cup, and I’ve loved it ever since, even though I’ve never mentioned it before. Oren: And we’re also not gonna mention that Bunny’s not here. We’re just gonna let people figure that out for themselves.   Chris: Yeah, I mean things just happen sometimes. Sometimes Bunny’s here, sometimes she’s not. You know, that’s how the world works.  Oren: That’s just life. Also, sometimes we call it the World Soccer Cup when anyone who actually watches it just calls it the World Cup. That’s just a thing that happens sometimes, you know. You don’t ask questions.  Chris: Really you should be asking why you didn’t guess that these things would happen.  Oren: [agreeing noises] Chris: So this time we’re talking about making your story intuitive. Like me saying World Soccer Cup instead of World Cup. Oren and Chris: [chuckling] Chris: If you actually know me, that makes perfect sense.  Oren: It does.  Chris: Why make your story intuitive? I think that for most of the stories that we read, that are for sale, it’s really easy to take for granted the way they have lots of stuff that just intuitively makes sense to us. And you don’t notice that it’s easy to take for granted until you actually try to do something that’s weird and different.  I have some clients send me some really wild and imaginative things and those are honestly my favorite. I love those. But it does add some challenges, because the more you do something unique, the more you have to work to make everything fit smoothly together, and the more you notice when those things don’t fit quite right. It kind of makes parts of your story feel random, contrived, haphazard. The more things like that, it just really adds up and it makes the story not feel right. That becomes a problem. And so, especially if you are trotting on your own path, it’s really important to understand that when you are making up stuff, to make them feel natural they have to fit certain things. They have to feel natural to your readers.  Oren: So the way I look at it is that stories have a lot to explain and anything you can do to reduce the explanation load is probably going to pay dividends. You don’t want your story to be spending its time arguing that it makes sense.  That is just a losing proposition to be in. Because even if you are right, the experience will be very unpleasant and readers will just often reject it, because readers don’t like being told a thing they don’t think makes sense does make sense. They just don’t enjoy that. And so as a rule, you generally don’t wanna do it if you have a better option.  Chris: And they also don’t wanna do homework. The more you have to explain, the more the story starts to feel like homework.  Oren: Right. And I know if you’re on writing Bluesky or any other social media site where writers hang out, you’re gonna see these posts, some of them semi-viral, of someone being like “I just love it when I have to go to the dictionary constantly to read a story” or “when I have to check the Wiki”.  Those are traps, okay? Those posts are traps. It will not go that way for you. I’m not saying there is no one out there who will do that for any story, but the number of people who will do that for your random ass story is very small. They almost exclusively do it for big, famous stories written by big, famous authors who can get away with this ’cause they’re big and famous.   Chris: I’m sure there are some people who are like that and they like looking up words. It’s not like that never happens. At the same time, I would have to question how many of these people are motivated by feeling defensive about their favorite story and other people criticizing it. Because that is one thing you see. People being like “oh, somebody said my favorite story had too many words they had to look up. Well, I love looking up words.”   Oren: Based on the comments that we get on articles, the number is greater than zero. Chris: [chuckle] Oren: I wouldn’t hazard a guess on the percentages, but there are certainly people out there who fit that description, right?  Chris: Not that nobody is naturally like that, but that is also a fan rage pattern that we have seen.  Oren: Yeah. I think it’s important to keep in mind the philosophy of complexity and depth, because often what people want is depth. They want to do something important, and to acquire that, they require a certain amount of complexity. But because that’s complicated and difficult, often the complexity can end up becoming the goal instead. I learned this from Extra Credits a long time ago. It’s a YouTube series.  You should think of complexity as a currency that you use to buy things that your story needs. They were specifically talking about depth, but I think this can apply to other parts as well. Or if you’re really nerdy and into certain video games, you think of complexity as the weight of your vehicle, and it needs to be increased sometimes to get all the systems you want, but increasing the weight is not the goal. It just sometimes correlates with particularly impressive vehicles or stories.  My favorite example of something that had lots of complexity but no depth at all was this game called Terrorist Assault Game or TAG, and it was a card game that someone brought back from a con at some point. Chris: [laugh] That says it all.  Oren: Yeah. It was the world’s most complicated game of coin flips I’ve ever seen. It was like you play a card and that card says to do five different things that says to do more things.  Chris: And we’re trying to conceal the fact that it’s all just chance and there’s no interesting choices to make. Oren: Yeah, there are no choices anywhere. It is all just random.  Chris: But you see, if we draw a flowchart, then there must be an interesting choice somewhere.  Oren: And it was so complicated and so without any player input, I am convinced it was trolling. Like whoever made this was “ha ha, I’m gonna really waste time for whoever plays this game”. Chris: Oh, you say that, but have we not met people who have made very overly complicated things and were very proud of it?  Oren: It was just so perfectly zero input from players. THAT I feel like took some effort.   Chris: So yeah, when we talk about intuitive things we’re talking about something that links very closely with cohesion and consolidation. When we talk about complexity and the ways to get rid of complexity, one thing is just to trim things out and cut things down. And the other thing is to make them more related to each other. Consolidating the story also reduces complexity, but without technically cutting anything. But those things have to work together. So when we’re talking about intuitive stuff, that’s really what it comes down to.  Things are intuitive when they fit together, when they fit our existing patterns of thinking. So in our Believability podcast, we had this example of a world where all fire mages are doctors for some reason and how unintuitive that is, how weird that is, because it doesn’t fit our associations with fire or with fire mages. Like in Avatar, the Fire Nation uses fire when fighting and people get burned. That’s generally the association we have with that.  And again, it’s not impossible to justify fire magic for healing, but it’s working uphill. And even then what you would end up probably doing is chart a longer path of association. So you know fire equals life, so fire magic is a life magic, and then life magic is used for healing. Yeah, something like that would probably be your justification. And you might notice I’m already drawing associations that are things that we already have, but it’s a longer path.  So it is inherently more complex and just less intuitive, because it takes more leaps and logic to get there.  Oren: Yeah. Using an example anonymized from a client chat that I had recently. We were talking about different abilities that a certain creature would have, and for the anonymized example, I’ll say lightning elementals. Say that their story had those. It would be pretty intuitive that they could use their abilities to charge a battery or mess with electronics. Right? That just seems like something lightning can do.  Chris: Because we associate lightning with electricity and we know that electronics run on electricity. Oren: Yeah! Chris: Pretty close matches there.  Orenb: Pretty standard. But then if you want them to create lures for animals. It’s like, “okay, that is not what we think lightning does”. And so then you’re gonna need an explanation of how they create weird electromagnetic fields that mess with the electrical signals in the animal’s brain. And that’s a whole thing. It’s gonna take a lot of explanations. Not like you couldn’t do it, but you know, you are really going against the current with that one. So that would have to be something that is really important for your story to be worth that much effort.  Chris: Yeah. And it really matters because again, it’s not just about each individual choice — and you will have lots of individual things in your story that you have to explain — but it also applies to how your entire story fits together. So if you have a medieval fantasy and aliens suddenly appear, the very presence of those aliens isn’t intuitive.  Oren: Yes.  Chris: Once again, it doesn’t feel natural. It feels, if not directly implausible, just contrived. Meaning that it feels like you as an author inserted those aliens in there. It calls attention to your choices.  It means they’re not still immersed in the story.   Oren: This is definitely an area where culture shock can play a fairly big role. We found that in general, stories have fairly similar characteristics even across different cultures, but this is an area where cultural expectations can make a pretty big difference. And fortunately in the United States we have a reasonably shared culture. But if you are not religious, it will seem way more out of place if God happens to be real and the story doesn’t spend a lot of time setting up for that. Whereas it would be less out of place to someone who is religious. That might seem perfectly intuitive to you but it’s gonna be a little weird. Chris: An example I recently read, Teller of Small Fortunes, is a cute little charming, cozy fantasy story. And it had some small breaks in the world building that again, if it was set up a little more carefully, wouldn’t have happened, but were just random enough to bring it to my attention. So for most of the story, I think there might have been in-passing mentions of non-humans, like fantasy creatures. But they are never there. There are only humans. We really do not see any fantastical creatures until about halfway through when the characters suddenly run into a nihilist troll —  Oren: [surprised] Oh!   Chris: —who doesn’t wanna get out of their way on the bridge because life is pointless. Which honestly, I loved the nihilist troll. It was very funny, right? But it’s still called attention to itself because it was like, wait, there are intelligent talking trolls? We’ve only ever met humans before. Oren: And they can have existential crises!   Chris: [laugh] And so that’s the other thing. Usually I don’t use the three act structure at all, but I do think the first third of the story is a useful benchmark for when a lot of expectations are being set and when some of those associations are being created. And that’s why you wanna put major unexpected things in that first third. And so having your first non-human talking entity halfway through the book, it just calls attention to itself a little bit. Like “oh, okay, that was not what I was expecting from the setting”. And then it gets stranger when there’s a sudden D&D quest two thirds of the way through the book, where the characters are suddenly compared to a D&D adventuring party in a way that just… Again, there are worlds like Legends and Lattes that are clearly fashioned after D&D. But this did not feel like one of those worlds. [laugh] So when they are suddenly given a D&D quest from a mage on the road who just goes and tells them to fetch some treasure for them, it’s just… things like that, those small breaks, they don’t connect together very well. And we can really tell when writers add something to their story that doesn’t quite belong there. Like they get a fun new idea when they’d already kind of preplanned their story and then they try to make it fit. Or they’re following a pseudo structure, like save the cat or the hero’s journey, and they’re like “oh no, I don’t have fun and games.” That outside influence can really make it so that there’s a piece of the story that just doesn’t feel like it matches the rest.  Oren: Look, I know the beginning is fun and exciting and gets right to the story, but I feel like I need to stop it for a debate. Where the character debates whether or not to go on the adventure. Chris: [chuckle] Oren: It’s like “okay, sure?” It is interesting that a lot of the things we’re talking about come back to theming. Let’s see who you really are. Oh, it was theming the whole time. I was reminded of the ending of the Hunger Games. Spoilers, I guess, if you haven’t read that. It’s too late now. Chris: [chuckle] They had mentioned that the Capitol did some genetic engineering on some animals, but I was just completely ambushed by the wolves that had human faces. That completely surprised me and I was taken out of the story for a moment. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been because someone had told me there were werewolves, so I was expecting way worse.  Chris: [laughter] Oren: And they aren’t werewolves, but they’re pretty weird and random. That seems significantly beyond the technology level of the Capital up until that point. And I didn’t read the later books, so I don’t know if that kind of technology gets used again. I know in the movies it doesn’t. So it just struck me as “oh, okay, I guess these things are here now”.   Chris: Yeah. Honestly, with that level of genetic technology, you would expect that the candidates from the richer districts would be genetically modified. Oren: Right. I would expect there to be more genetic modification if that’s the level they’re working on, right? And I don’t remember there being any. And again, maybe it was in the books and it got cut from the movies. I haven’t read those books, but certainly in the first Hunger Games book, I didn’t see any indication they had that level of technology.  Chris: So, going back to theming. Because obviously this is why I talk about theming so often. And trying to make people clear what theming does and why it’s important. If we’re used to reading stories in recognizable genres, you may not realize how important it’s because you haven’t seen what happens when it’s not there. But the idea is that you consciously choose the kind of unified impression you want your world to make. And what you need for this is repeating patterns where, when you have something that’s notable, it shows up again and again. If you have ghosts, okay, put a lot of ghost stuff in your world. Have that show up in various ways. If I want aliens in my medieval fantasy, then I need to make sure both the alien parts and the medieval fantasy parts are just present throughout the story in some way so that they now fit in, so that we’ve kind of built those associations and things are intuitive and expected.  So then when you add more alien stuff, it’s like “oh, okay. I can see why those aliens are there. That makes sense. That fits with the earlier alien stuff I got”.  Oren: [agreeing noises] Chrisb: Spoilers for Project Hail Mary, which is a fun book if you have not read it, but that one does something really cool where we start with alien microbes and it’s super high realism.  Later, it fits when we have intelligent aliens even though it’s actually a big surprise because the realism level was really high and we were just doing microbes. So an intelligent alien showing up is still a neat reveal, but it fits well enough with everything that we’ve already established. So again, it’s not that you need to have your alien show up on page one, it’s that you have the things that are notable about your world kind of repeating instead of just having one alien sticking out in one chapter and then disappearing again.  Sometimes when people have a fun new idea and they’re trying to stuff it in their story in some way, it’s not well integrated into the rest. And that’s where you get these things that kind of stick out and they just don’t feel like they belong there. And you kinda lose that feeling that it’s natural.  Oren: The historical angle on this can get very complicated and you have to make some choices because some things about history are just very hard for modern readers to accept. One of the most difficult is linear warfare, which is the kind of warfare where both sides have muskets and they line up and shoot at each other. Chris: [chuckle] Oren: If you don’t already know about that, your mind rebels against it. It’s like “why are they just standing there? Why aren’t they in cover? Why aren’t they trying not to get hit?” And you need to understand things like morale and communication limitations and the danger of cavalry, and all of these things to explain why they fight that way. And there are real reasons. They’re not all just bad at fighting, but it’s complicated. Unless you are an enthusiast of that era of history, it is very difficult to explain. And that’s definitely something that if you were gonna write like Flintlock fantasy, I would say is worth the effort. Because if you don’t, the people who are most likely to like it are gonna wonder where that is. “Why aren’t they standing in lines? They should be standing in lines.”  But then you have something that’s more like… I used this as an example in a post a while back, which is that Julius Caesar, while he was doing all of his power shenanigans in Rome, was also the pontifex maximus, which is Rome’s highest religious office.  That just doesn’t get mentioned very much in the popular history of Caesar. So if you are just doing a fantasy inspired by Rome thing, I would probably leave that out unless you are really into that aspect of it, or you’re doing an actual historical fiction with lots of details about Caesar, in which case you should include it. Otherwise it’s just gonna add a lot of complication for, I would say, not a lot of benefit.   Chris: Yeah, trim it out unless you wanna talk about religion or unless your story’s about religion.  Oren: Yeah. If your story’s about the intersection between secular power and religious power in a Roman inspired fantasy setting, go for it. Right? Knock yourself out. But if you’re just doing like a classic Rome inspired fantasy, your Caesar character probably doesn’t also need to be Pope.  Chris: This also means that if you have something in your world, you need to explain it. Why is there this quest item? And how come the character didn’t look for it before? And you want to reach for something that the readers already know, that is already as much integrated into your world as possible.  Oren: Yeah.  Chris: So, let’s say you say aliens hate the cold, and that has been thoroughly established, and the alien behavior is entirely shaped by hating the cold. Then if you need an explanation, it’s “Oh yeah. It’s because aliens hate the cold.” That’s really gonna resonate because you’ve already built that association. It connects to what readers already know. The pathways in the brain are already there for it.  But if you make up an entirely new thing about aliens that they didn’t know, like “aliens, they also just don’t like the feel of grass on their feet.”  Oren: Yeah. They don’t like it. It’s gross. Chris: Then you need to explain something with that. Again, the more you connect things together, the more everything has that feeling of naturalness and fits together and is more believable.  But it doesn’t just apply to world building. When we talk about characters too, we can also talk about intuitiveness and character behavior and character design.  Oren: If this isn’t a controversial topic [laugh]. Just the whole idea of how characters make choices. Which is both very contentious and also a very easy way to lose readers if they don’t agree with or like the way your character made certain choices. Chris: Yeah, especially if it has a bad result. If readers are screaming “why don’t you do this?”  and the characters are doing something suboptimal and you can’t even understand why and it doesn’t make sense… yeah that’s a recipe for frustration. Oren: So I recommend the starting position, and I need to emphasize that it is the starting position of your characters making choices, should default to like the most logical/rational choice they can make in pursuit of whatever motivations you have established that they have. That is the starting point. And the reason that’s the starting point is that it’s a very easy place for everyone to be on board. And from there you can add more things that alter the way they make decisions and often make them less optimal.  And you can add traits. Is this character afraid of confrontation? So they’re not gonna take the direct route, even though that’s probably the best one. Do they love a good scrap? So they’re going to be more aggressive than maybe they should be ’cause they like fighting. These are things you can add on top of that.  But if you just start your character decision making off in the wilderness because people are weird and make weird choices, then nobody is on the right page, except for people who either don’t think about these things or already really like the character for whatever reason.  Chris: But also, sometimes you may know what goal the character’s aiming for, but you haven’t yet decided how the character will accomplish that goal. And again, going back to the same traits.   “Oh, I established my character is sneaky, so maybe my character should go about this in a sneaky way. Or my character is very bold and blunt. Maybe they should just walk up to the antagonist and demand something and something.” Tying those things together and looking at what you’ve established about your character, and then invoking those things whenever you have the opportunity helps the character actions stay intuitive. It helps make them more distinct. It makes it so that it doesn’t feel like you’re just “oh they have this trait”, but then the reader looks at them and is like “what? No, they don’t!” You’re showing and are just telling. So again, the whole thing brings the character together. And I keep saying over and over again how important it’s for the story to be cohesive. That is what storytelling is about, right?  Oren: And of course there’s gonna be the feeling of “well, I don’t want my characters to come across as if they make the same type of decision the same way every time”. That’s true, people make a variety of different choices ’cause people are complicated, but the good news is that the characters where that is most likely to be an issue are also the characters where you spend the most time with them, because that’s when readers will notice if they act in a very one-note manner. And that is when you have time to establish different things about them that might pull them in different directions. It might result in the character being bold and daring in one situation, but super cautious and conflict avoidant in another because you have time to establish why that is. But if you don’t have time to establish why that is, and this is a character we only ever see two times and they just act completely differently in both in the different situations — even if you have a headcanon explaining why that is–it’s still gonna be confusing to readers.  Chris: And that’s just one thing. When people talk about character development, it’s always more development, more complexity, more flaws. They don’t talk about the fact that complexity can actually detract from a character if that character only has a tiny role.  You don’t have time for that much complexity if your character… Or if you are just writing flash fiction, for instance, you don’t have a lot of word count. People won’t notice if your character has one trait in a flash fiction because you don’t have time, and they don’t have time to get to know the character.  Oren: There’s also the question of just explaining the speculative elements of your setting, which is potentially its own topic, but the same thing applies, right? You try to make everything flow downhill as it were. You follow the ideas you’ve already set up as much as possible, and that’s why the Broken Earth is, for the most part, fairly easy to understand because everything is based on this kind of geological logic because of the way that the world is constantly going through these apocalyptic earthquakes, and that influences everything. And you can often trace why a thing in this world is the way it is because of these earthquakes in however many steps it takes to get there. That’s why it’s generally pretty easy to figure out. And there are some exceptions. There’s a weird part where it reveals that they have like brain surgery tech in a setting that it really does not seem like they have that. Stuff like that. But for the most part it works very well and it’s very cohesive. As opposed to something like our good friend Brandon Sanderson, whose magic system is very robust, but is also not very intuitive most of the time. It’s just a bunch of different effects. Once you know them, you can predict new effects from them, but learning them in the first place is challenging because they often just seem very random. It’s like “wait, which metal gives me super strength? And which one makes my eyes better? Yeah, sure, why not?” Chris: [chuckle] Yeah. It’s kind of like a collection of superhero traits. Oren: Which admittedly, metal honestly doesn’t have that many different characteristics, so I can see why he ended up just kind of assigning them randomly. I don’t know what power copper should give as opposed to aluminum. What different powers should those give? Metal doesn’t have that many obvious differences.  Chris: Yeah. If he just narrowed the band of powers, the possibilities for powers… if they were all sensory powers, for instance–I think he just wanted more that he could come up with — I think that would’ve really helped. Oren: All right. Well, I think with that, we will go ahead and call this episode to a close.  Chris: If we made storytelling more intuitive for you, 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.

Most of the time, problems with a story are due to the author not knowing how to properly implement their goals. This episode is about the other times when the goals are a problem to start with. While stories are highly malleable, there are still ideas that simply will not work. If the story is good, it will be in spite of them. Often this comes down to contradictions in what the author is trying to say, but the problem can also arise when stories try to go back on their implicit promises. Or it might just be trying to repeat an arc that’s already been thoroughly covered. Specifics aside, these are choices that simply will not work, no matter how skilled the execution. Show Notes Arcane  Somehow Palpatine Returned  Incredibles 2 Solo Bookshops and Bonedust  Watsonian Viewpoint  Wings of Fire Wonder Woman The Light Brigade  Rings of Power Orcs  House on the Cerulean Sea  Stranger Things Vecna  Oxenfree 2 Cult  Knives Out Rey’s Parents  Abigail  Ten Thousand Doors of January  Agency Transcript Generously transcribed by Savannah Bard. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [Intro music]. Chris: This is the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is… Bunny: Bunny! Chris: And…  Oren: Oren! Chris: Alright, so I’ve got an idea. Let’s start calling our podcast The Weavers Podcast. And, each episode we can call it something weaving related, like selecting the perfect loom. And then pair it with a weaving image, but then in each episode there’ll be a subversive twist or reveal that we’re actually weaving plot threads, and it’s a storytelling podcast.  Oren: Ooh, that’s− Bunny: Who~a.  Chris: So what do you think?  Oren: I think that’s crafty.  Bunny: That’s smart.  Chris: Excellent. Since it’s obviously such a good idea, how about we do this? I’ll contribute the idea, and you can make the podcast, and then we’ll split the billions of dollars we make 50-50. What do you think? Oren: Yeah, that sounds good.   Bunny: Hey wait, where’s my money? Where’s my 50%?  Chris: You and Oren can jointly get the other 50%.  Bunny: Oh, I see.  Oren: Sorry, Bunny. One of us is going to have to be the unpaid intern, and it’s not going to be me!  Bunny: As the youngest, I think it’s my duty.  Chris: So, yes. These are all very sound choices that nobody would ever regret. Oren: It’ll all work perfectly.  Bunny: Yeah, because the thing we want most is to have the knitting community mad at us.  Chris: Oh, Bunny [urgently]! Weaving! Not knitting. Bunny: Weaving! Oh, no, now they’re mad at me.  Chris: Oh my goodness. How could you? Bunny: The looming community. No, that just sounds threatening.  Chris: Well, maybe that’s what they want. In any case, yes, this time we’re going to talk about unworkable story choices. And, the thing is, obviously we give out advice a lot and people send us questions through our reader question forum or on Discord or when we’re consulting with people in lots of other ways, and it’s just not uncommon for people to ask us, “Hey, how do I do X, Y, Z?” And for the answer to just be “don’t”.  Because when we see mistakes in stories, sometimes they’re implementation issues, but sometimes they’re design flaws where you can’t really construct a story that people will enjoy that way. And sometimes it gets blurry where a choice can technically be done, but it’s so difficult I don’t feel like I can recommend it to anybody, because I think that would just be very challenging for even somebody with advanced skills to pull off.  Bunny: There are some books that have done it better than others, but for anyone pointing to those books as examples, ask yourself, would they have been better if they had not done that thing? And often times the answer is they’re good despite those things.  Oren: Yeah, I would say that at the very least, there are a number of choices that you cannot make without decreasing the quality of your story. And the story could be good anyway for other reasons. And maybe there are some people who are just uncritical and will like it regardless, but they will still cause problems. And that’s the sort of thing that we’re talking about. Most of the time, I find that my clients have very doable ideas. They just don’t know how to do them. But every once in a while, there is no way to do that. I can’t give you advice because the thing you’re asking for is just a bad idea. Chris: So Oren, did you want to start us off?  Oren: Well, I would say the easiest to fall into is trying to do too many things at once. Things where none of these goals are inherently unworkable, but there are so many of them that the story simply does not have time to do them all. Sometimes you can solve this by just making the story longer, but often the author doesn’t have the energy for that or you’re doing a TV show like Arcane where you have too many characters and they all have their own separate storylines, and you have to neglect one to develop the other. Sometimes you end up with that, and that’s how you get stories where it feels like nothing happened over the entire length because you’re constantly zipping around to different storylines and none of them get any chance to develop. And that’s why it should always be the same story and not a bunch of different stories that maybe will come together later.  Chris: That’s why you consolidate it! Bunny: You don’t want to weave them together. You want them to already be woven. One that really gets my goat is when sequels reset the clock and undo the successes of the previous one. That annoys me like no other. Perhaps the most famous recent example is The Rise of Skywalker and resurrecting Palpatine, but Incredibles 2 also did it, and Solo and Bookshops & Bonedust did it from the prequel perspective.  So, in Incredibles 2, we go back to our heroes, and it turns out they’re still in hiding. The public still hates them. Violet’s boyfriend was mindwiped, and everything is just kind of reset. And then in Bookshops & Bonedust and Solo, it turns out that the main characters of the original have done that already before. You thought it was kind of new for them. Solo joining the resistance is a big deal, and Viv is taking her time away from adventuring and doing something quiet, like opening a coffee shop. But no, they’ve actually done that before.  Oren: Solo was such a weird movie because as I was hearing about this, I was like, okay, but how do you do a movie about a character where the premise is that he is in desperate need of a character arc to become a better person? Is he just going to be a selfish jerk for the movie? I don’t think you’re going to do that.  Bunny: It’s either he’s a selfish jerk for the movie, or he has the exact same character arc of becoming a better person. And then somehow between Solo and the actual Star Wars movies, he becomes a selfish jerk again. Oren: The only way I could imagine it working is instead to have him start the movie as a good person who then becomes selfish and has a downward arc to get him to where he needs to be at the start of A New Hope.  Chris: Downward arcs are not so far that I would call them unworkable, but it’s just like having a tragic ending; that is hard to sell. People are not big fans of that. Maybe there’s some way with Han Solo because he’s kind of selfish, but you can gloss over that a little bit while still having him end up there. You might be able to do something where he’s part of the Empire and breaks free and becomes his own smuggler or something. So, we take a sidestep. He goes from order to chaos instead of good to evil.  So, the number one thing that I would be like, “No, do not do this,” is being coy about your protagonist. So, decoy protagonists? No, do not do that. One of the most important things you can do for the audience is establish who your protagonist is early, because they want to get attached to that person. They’re going to give that person the benefit of the doubt if they can, and then they’re going to get attached to that person. So, it’s never a good idea to mislead them in any way about who your main character is or who your protagonist is.  That is one of the most pivotal things about enjoying a story−and the thing that, if you get it wrong, has the most negative ripple effects on the rest of the story−is how much people like your main character. So do not mislead them about that. Do not have a surprise where a different person than they thought is your main character. You don’t have somebody who looks like a main character and then gets killed off in your prologue to establish how bad the villain is. Those things are just not a good idea. And something that we talk about a lot that’s a little bit similar but distinct is when you don’t give your main character a viewpoint and you try to do the Watsonian POV instead−or also called a supporting protagonist. There’s no situation in which I think this is a good idea. You can do a story with it. But it’s going to, again, create a distance between the audience and your main character, which is so pivotal to them enjoying the story that it’s just not a good idea.  What happens is they’re more likely to get attached to the Watson, but then who you think of as the main character, who is likely not who they think of as the main character, is going to hog the spotlight, and there’s a good chance they’re going to resent your Sherlock. That would be another situation that I don’t think is workable.  Oren: The whole obscuring who your main character is, is just a lose-lose situation because either readers like the decoy protagonist, in which case now they’re in for a huge disappointment when it turns out that wasn’t the main character, or they don’t. In which case, they are not enjoying your story until you introduce the actual main character. And I’ve seen people occasionally say, “Well, maybe you could just do this really short so it doesn’t cause too much disruption.” And then my question is, why do it at all then? Chris: What if I just stabbed somebody a little? Oren: You could probably make one of these short enough that if the rest of your story is good, it won’t make people throw the book away, but what is it adding at that point if it’s so small that it doesn’t cause any negative consequences either? It feels like you’re doing it for the sake of having it at that point. Bunny: That goes back to the whole, is the story good in spite of it or because of it?  Oren: The one that I run into a lot is contradictory goals. This is moving on from having too many goals and having ones that directly work opposite each other. And the one that I run into all the time is where we want to do a message about how violence is wrong or war is wrong, or whatever, but we also want a story about people heroically using violence to defend themselves.  Bunny: Oh, the Red Dead Redemption Effect.  Oren: Yeah and I’m sorry, you can’t have both of those messages in the same story.  Chris: Rude of you to talk about Wings of Fire that way.  Oren: [exasperated] Wings of Fire, Animorphs, Wonder Woman. There are so many stories that try to do this, and you just can’t. At best, you will sabotage one of those things to make the other one work, and more likely, neither of them will end up working.  Bunny: Gosh, Wonder Woman was so close. That one was frustrating.  Oren: Wonder Woman couldn’t quite decide if the problem was that we needed to end the war or if the problem was that we needed to defeat the Germans. And you can tell it was originally supposed to be set in World War II but they changed it at the last minute because we definitely want Wonder Woman to heroically charge a German trench, which doesn’t really work if our message is that the war itself is the problem. It’s a whole confusing thing.  You can have a story about people rightly defending themselves and still communicate that war is terrible to fight. But that’s not the same thing as an anti-war story. At that point, what you were saying is that this war was necessary if awful, in the same way that showing the realistic effects of chemotherapy is not an anti-chemotherapy story.  Chris: The Light Brigade−being an example of an actual anti-war story−in that one, the fighting is never good. It doesn’t accomplish any goals. The main character is fighting for a fascist government. What they do for that government is bad. It is about the main character basically getting free at some level, more surviving. So that’s a very different thing from Wings of Fire, where supposedly the main characters are trying to stop a war from happening, but then they are continually using violence in pursuit of that goal, while also decrying violence. And it’s really graphic violence, too. The first couple of books, at least the author does realize, “Oh, maybe it shouldn’t be quite that graphic,” and tones it down a little bit later. But the first book especially, it’s surprising how graphic that one gets.  Oren: And you can also absolutely do a story where people have to do some violence to prevent more violence. That is also doable. It’s just a question of what your characters say and how you pitch the message of the story. It all comes down to how you portray it. Other things that tend to happen this way is stuff like, “I want my story to humanize the monsters, but I also want the monsters to be like morally uncomplicated enemies to kill.” And I’ve seen that a weird number of times.  Chris: Too many times. Rings of Power, most recently.  Oren: That was so weird. I get it. You can’t make the orcs people in the Tolkien universe. You just can’t do it. But honestly, calling attention to it like that made it worse. It would’ve been better if they had just been cannon fodder. I wouldn’t have liked that either, but it would’ve been better than what we got.  Bunny: Or, sometimes there’ll be a story where it’s like these characters have been stereotyped. This group has been stereotyped and unfairly judged for being super immoral and blood thirsty. And then it turns out they’re super immoral and blood thirsty. Didn’t House in the Cerulean Sea have, “Oh, these magic people are so unfairly maligned. Also, here’s the literal antichrist,”?  Chris: That one does not handle that so well. Honestly, though, the thing that bothered me the most that was contradictory, I mean, I wrote a whole article talking about how it mishandles oppression. But the thing that−as I was listening to that book−really got to me was the way that this orphanage is described as a place where everybody can be themselves and heal, but the main character is constantly lectured at and pressured into behaving a certain way. And then when he conforms, that’s treated as, see? Now he’s so much better because he’s being himself. What are you talking about? You are constantly pressuring him to do things that he didn’t want to do and wasn’t comfortable with. Can’t get rid of social pressure with more social pressure. That’s just more pressure! Oren: We could see into his true self, Chris. We knew what he actually wanted, which is definitely not what everyone says. Chris: A funny thing about that one, I was just talking about decoy protagonists. I definitely got the feeling that I was not supposed to like the main character as much as I did. I was not supposed to identify with him. I was supposed to like all of the other characters better, and so I was supposed to be okay when they all started demeaning him and lecturing at him. Again, this is why it’s really important to be clear about who your protagonist is and to prioritize that person. Bunny: Reveals where things turn out to be less interesting than you thought they were. Oren: Yeah! Bunny: And I know I’ve discussed this before, but I think authors do it because it’s a twist−  surprise!  Chris: Oh man. I have so many things on my list that are this type of reveal, because people are just like, all reveals are great! And then they’ll reach for any kind of reveal, and many of them aren’t workable.  Bunny: Reveals are good. You also don’t need to have reveals. Your reveal does not make it a smarter story if you just have a reveal for the sake of there being one. And, in my opinion, this one is one of the worst kinds of reveals. The problem obviously is that your readers−me−I was hooked on the interesting thing. I wanted the interesting thing to be more interesting. I wanted to learn about it, and then it turns out it wasn’t actually interesting, and it’s always a bad sign when your story gets less engaging. It’s also got an aspect of the audience was promised that this thing was interesting tacitly by the text, by it being set up as cool and fascinating and important or whatever, and then that promise is broken when it turns out that it’s actually really boring. The two examples I have are Stranger Things and Oxenfree II. Stranger Things being cosmic horror is actually just a guy. Don’t worry about it. That makes things so much simpler. You just have to beat up the guy. That ruins the tone of it. And Oxenfree II, the cult is just hippies.  Chris: With Stranger Things, they wrote themselves into a bit of a corner. Just thinking of when you’re setting up a really cool plot, at this point Oren and I, we can pretty much recognize when we start a story and we’re like, “Okay, this is not going to end well,” because we can tell the storyteller is taking on too much and won’t be able to find a resolution at this point. We can pretty much just recognize it, which is funny. Stranger Things is definitely a situation where, by the way, they set up the threat. We don’t have any way to get rid of the threat. And so then they downgraded the threat, which is disappointing.  Bunny: Right. The whole thing with cosmic horror is that it’s supposed to be vast, unknowable, and difficult to perceive. Chris: I think they had to introduce some kind of plot device that they could permanently keep the Upside Down away, because that’s the problem. It’s that it’s now broken through our world in all sorts of places, all sorts of times. How do we dispel tension if we know that maybe it could always come back another time later, because it has for four seasons? It has kept coming back, so it could just always come back again. And I would think we would have to add some speculative tech or something that creates the scenario where we can get rid of it permanently. Oren: I would say that if you want to do one of these very clever nine-dimensional subversions where you imply you’re going to do something and then you do something else and everyone cheers, what you have to do is give them something that is as cool or preferably cooler than the thing you were promising. That’s why Knives Out works so well. Spoilers for Knives Out: you think it’s a murder mystery about who did the murder, but it turns out it’s actually about trying to keep the murderer from being caught because it wasn’t really her fault, and that’s cool. That’s a neat concept that works really well. If it had just been like, “Oh, well it turns out there was no murderer, the guy just fell on a knife and died,” that would’ve been a bad movie. There are other examples, like if The Last Jedi had been willing to commit to the whole Rey’s-parents-are-nobody, that was actually pretty cool because that gave us something tangible about her character and who she was and her place in the universe that I would argue was much more interesting than the fact that she was somehow Obi-Wan Kenobi’s secret granddaughter, or whatever the fan theory was at the time.  Bunny: And it would’ve made more thematic resonance, too, right? If we’re looking at Kylo Ren as her foil, which they clearly want us to do because there’s all this dark side and the light type of things where they’re juxtaposed against each other, and one of them comes from high status, high power, and one of them comes from nobody, it makes sense if that’s the story you’re telling. But no, it actually turns out that they’re both very important people.  Oren: I’m sure that there were some people who wouldn’t have liked that, but I think most people who wouldn’t have liked it already didn’t like Rey as a character. Not everyone, but most people. At that point, there was really nothing that you could do with this reveal that would make them like Rey. And so if they just committed to it, that would’ve been cool. But instead they were like, “Eh, maybe your parents were nobody. Who knows?” And then, of course, we know what happened with Rise of Skywalker. Chris: A couple more types of reveals that are not workable. I actually have a whole blog post talking about the premise reveal, which is basically−this is what I was joking about at the intro of the podcast−where this is a different type of story with a completely different premise. It seems like a good idea. There are times where as long as it serves the same audience, you could have a big twist in your premise. But the big problem is that you have no way to market your story. And it sucks to have to think about your back blurb and your marketing material and all of those things when you’re deciding on the experience the audience has. But in most cases you’re going to have to think about it. And so I do have clients that will ask me, “Oh, what if I kept this big thing about the main character, for instance, that shapes the entire book a reveal?” And I’m like, “Well, okay. Think about how you are going to pitch this book? How, what are you going to tell readers about it?” Because if you can’t tell them something that is so basic and fundamental to your story, I don’t know how you’re going to attract the right audience or tell them something specific and interesting enough to get them to start reading.  Oren: What are you supposed to do when the entire premise and reveal of your movie is that the innocent girl is a vampire? There’s no reason to come see the movie if you don’t know that. But also, we spend a weird amount of time building up to that reveal.  Chris: That’s one where she seems like an innocent girl and they kidnap her, but she’s a vampire. And that one was so funny because that reveal was given away in the trailers, but whoever made the movie was clearly not prepared and made it a slow buildup towards that reveal. And that is not how you would do that if you knew you had to give that information away. I can’t blame the marketers. A lot of people at times would blame whoever makes the trailers, but I can’t because they had to have something to pitch the movie on. Otherwise it would just be a really generic horror movie, and they’d be able to give nothing away. Oren: And I cannot remember the title of the movie. I’m desperately Googling “vampire movie 2024”, and all I’m getting is Nosferatu. Chris: Abigail.  Oren: Abigail, that’s it.  Chris: As opposed to Megan. Oren: A different movie. Chris: It was a different movie, but did this right. And Megan, instead we have a killer doll. Yeah, they gave it away in the trailer, but also you could tell it was written in a way that the knowledge that the doll is going to go evil is building suspense. We know we have to give that information away, and the story is designed so that it’s not a reveal. So, that’s just something to think about. The other one is the narrator reveal. Don’t do a narrator reveal, please. This is like, “Who’s narrating the story?” And it goes back to all the POV issues we’ve talked about. It’s weird and distracting. And, probably, if they can’t tell who the narrator is, the reveal is not going to make sense.  Bunny: The Ministry of Time kind of did that. Because of time travel shenanigans, the narrator is talking to a different timeline version of herself and also is never named, which I have no idea why they did that. It didn’t serve the story.  Chris: You can’t have a good narrator that misleads people about the nature of the narrator. It fundamentally doesn’t work. You could have something like The Ten Thousand Doors of January where we reveal at the end that supposedly this was all written by the protagonist for the love interest. But it clearly wasn’t. If it was, we would’ve been able to tell, and that’s how it is every time.  Oren: All right, so my last one real quick here is any premise that denies your protagonist agency in whatever the plot is. And this is kind of a broad one, because agency is a complicated subject. People reasonably want to write stories about characters who don’t have what we would consider to be a lot of agency, they don’t have a lot of power or control over their lives for various reasons, and that’s totally legitimate. The reason it becomes an issue is that they then want to put those characters in more traditional plots, and then the characters can’t do anything. So that’s where the issue is. If you want to tell a story about the custodial worker who cleans General Eisenhower’s office, unless you’re doing some kind of weird Ratatouille thing, that story is not going to be about defeating the Wehrmacht. It can’t. Defeating the Wehrmacht would be something that happens in the background of your Eisenhower janitor story, but it would have to be about something else. Chris: Or you have to give your janitor a special power…  Bunny: The power to sit on Eisenhower’s head and direct him, right?  Chris: Some plot device that gives your character that is supposed to be underpowered the ability to alter the course of events that would normally be beyond them.  Oren: Someone for whom this is an issue almost certainly does not want to do that. That’s the whole reason they picked this character in the first place. They wanted to tell a story about the little guy who doesn’t have anything special about them, and so you have to figure out what is your story about, and you give your protagonist agency in that. Bunny: And what scale does it take place on? Chris: Yeah, and if you want to do like a lower decks type story−there’s now a whole TV show called Lower Decks, but it’s after a Star Trek: Next Generation episode where it just features all of the little junior staff and ensigns that are on board the ship that are normally in the background. It’s about them for an episode. You can do something like that. You would normally do it by showing−we just covered public domain stories−so this would be a situation where, let’s say, Sherlock and Watson have a maid or their landlady or something, and Sherlock and Watson are running around frantically in the background. And usually this is done for comedy’s sake. Basically, in that situation, you wouldn’t really create tension around whatever it is they’re doing. You wouldn’t communicate enough about whatever their emergency situation is to make the readers feel tension. You would just get humorous references that sound vaguely Sherlock-like in their details and have them run around, and then tell your story of their landlady going about her day. So, you could do something like that. But again, the plot is no longer a Sherlock plot at that point. It’s a different story.  Oren: It’s the same thing if you want to tell a story about the porter who follows the world-saving adventurers around and does not help them save the world. Okay. But you can’t then build tension around whether the world will be saved or not, because that’s not what your story’s about anymore. You just have to find another story, and if you can’t find one, maybe that’s not the right main character. That’s just what you have to think about when you’re doing this. All right. Well, with that, we will make the very workable choice to call this podcast to a close.  Chris: And if you would like us to iron out any more unworkable problems, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.  Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.  [Outro Music]

We love stories about badass vikings and ruthless bounty hunters, but it can be difficult to make them heroes worth cheering for. If the main character professionally hurts others for their own benefit, that’s a bit of a pickle. Fortunately, we know just the thing to keep readers from hating your hero’s guts! Show Notes A Serial Killer of Serial Killers Din Djarin Grave Mercy  Red Sister  Assassin’s Apprentice  Red Seas Under Red Skies Jake and the Neverland Pirates One Piece Our Flag Means Death Dead Cat Tail Assassins  Prince and Assassin The Book of Boba Fett Blue Eye Samurai  John Wick Arrow Jason Bourne The Black Company Viv Dread Pirate Roberts  Captain Shakespeare  Transcript Generously transcribed by Ace. 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: Bad news, folks. This is awkward. Another podcast has hired me to eliminate their competition, and the competition is us. Chris: Oh no! Oren: That sounds very dark and edgy. Bunny: Delete key has been sharpened and I am really angsting over whether to do this or not. Chris: Well, at least you’re angsting. Oren: Yeah. Very morally complex of you. Chris: Yeah. I can be part of your dark backstory now! Bunny: It’s possible I will fall in love with the Mythcreant Podcast instead. Or maybe I’ll succumb to my darker influences and ruthlessly tear down every mention of the podcast on the internet. What do I do? Maybe I’ll double cross the other podcast and assassinate them instead. I don’t know. Oren: Anything can happen, really. Chris: Or maybe we are also secretly assassins, so then we can have an assassin fight! Bunny: I don’t know, it’s a triple cross! Oren: Or it could just turn out that by coincidence, all the podcasts you’re hired to destroy have also done bad things and are bad podcasts that deserve it. Bunny: Yeah, I’m a serial killer of serial killers. There’s a disconnect between the things we find cool and the things that are a little “morally yikes” when it comes to protagonists and heroes that are like mercenaries or assassins, and characters whose jobs are violent. Chris: Bounty hunters or pirates are big ones. Bunny: Yeah, pirates, crime lords, smugglers to a lesser extent. Chris: Smugglers are, if you wanna avoid this problem, I think it’s pretty easy to make a smuggler okay. If you just give them a despotic government, you’re pretty much all set.  Bunny: They’re kind of pirate lite. Oren: I would argue you don’t even need a despotic government to make smugglers fine. You just have to make them smuggle cool things instead of dangerous narcotics. This guy’s smuggling iPhones, that’s kind of neat and harmless, versus this person is smuggling five tons of cocaine! Chris: Just smugglers, smuggling in cheaper pharmaceuticals from Canada. Thanks, smuggler. Bunny: Now that’s heroic. Oren: Super easy. Barely an inconvenience. Bunny: But yeah, mercenaries and assassins, and like, hired killers and Vikings and pirates are known for their robbing and plundering of innocents. So while we think these jobs are cool, they’re also kind of tricky to write because of all these bad things. Oren: I just started a book that is about some characters who live in Scandinavia during the Viking age, and they’re talking about how excited they are to go on raids and how cool raiding is, and then they get raided and they’re like, “oh no, how could they raid us? That’s horrible. We hate it!” And there was just like zero self-awareness about this. Bunny: Oh my gosh. You could do a social commentary there. Oren: I guess you don’t like it that much. Interesting. Chris: Were they calling their own raiding something else? Are they like going on visits and other people are looting? Oren: No, they just called them raids. Bunny: Yeah. The Vikings visited. Chris: They were tourists. Oren: They saved the jewelry from burning monasteries! Bunny: While the lazy villagers just laid there in the grass. Chris: So I can sum up what you need to make a character like this likable. It’s not exactly the same thing as whether they’re actually a good person. We do a little, like magician’s tricks to make it so they’re palatable to the audience. But you may still choose, if you have a conscience as a storyteller that you don’t wanna do this, but basically you need to not show them kill anyone who isn’t terrible, right? They can kill someone who just kicks puppies. And then you try to come up with a compelling reason why they do this job. Like if they were brainwashed, compelled, or forced into it in some way. Or they are an assassin for the revolution, which again ties back into “they kill people who are terrible or they’re part of a war.” Or you can just say it’s in the background. Have them stop doing it as soon as the story starts. Oren: They’re totally a bounty hunter, except not really at all, because they immediately find a cool space baby, and they’re like, “this is my son now and I don’t do bounty hunting. That’s not a thing anymore.” Bunny: A lot of stories with protagonists who are assassins or mercenaries or bounty hunters very quickly pivot into being a story that’s got a different central conceit than just murdering. So like, it might become a mystery or it might become a romance, like Grave Mercy did to me. And I’m still bitter about it 10 years after reading it because I wanted her to be a cool assassin and then she fell in love with her mark and it was very frustrating. Oren: A surprising number of assassin stories that I’ve seen take place at Assassin School, which I would generally not recommend because any story set at a school has all the same problems as the magic school genre, but doesn’t have the novelty of magic. The novel Red Sister has this concept where they’re like at training to become assassin nuns. It is just so dull because yeah, they’re training, they’re training, and they’re training and there are occasional moments that are interesting where the protagonist is in danger of, you know, getting kicked out or you know, a bad guy wanting to grab her or something. So that does happen, but it gets really hard to have that be the whole story. You’re gonna end up with a lot of training unless you are very good at arranging the plot just so. Chris: Having a single apprentice, I think, does work better for that because it’s a lot easier to imagine that the apprentice actually works on the job. So they can still do exciting things. Now granted, Assassin’s Apprentice was not a terribly exciting book, but that’s not because it couldn’t have been. This is a Robin Hobb series, which mainly, this one takes care of some of the morality issues by just having the main character fail. Like, he never successfully kills anyone. Bunny: What if they were bad at it? Chris: Well, there was one thing I liked, which is early part of his assassin tasks, he does the menial task of feeding zombies poisoned bread. ‘Cause they have a zombie problem. And it’s like, okay, I kind of like this. I kind of like the way we made being an assassin into a low-level menial job. Oren: Yeah, another Robin Hobb book, Ship of Magic did the thing of like, “I’m a mean nasty pirate, but because of the circumstances of the story, I’ve ended up fighting the good fight.” And this is one of the few times I’ve seen that where I felt it didn’t work. It’s kind of tough to explain why. I think it had more to do with the fact that it felt like this character was just winning constantly by luck, and that was annoying. So I don’t think the premise was inherently flawed, but like that’s the thing that a lot of stories do. Red Sea under Red Sky by Scott Lynch has our protagonists meet a couple of cool lady pirates who, at this point in the story, are not killing a bunch of people to take their ship. They are instead defending their very cool pirate island from the evil bad guys. So great job, we can be friends with them and we don’t have to see them do anything too bad. Bunny: Right. I mean, a lot of the reason we find vikings and pirates and assassins badass is just that they look cool. They’re generally, unless they’re failing upward, hyper competent in like skills that fantasy heroes have. Sneaking and being smart and being good at fighting, and they have cool weapons and they’re often like vigilantes, or at least they’re framed that way. Oren: But also, Bunny, a good pirate never takes another person’s property. Bunny: Yeah, robbing? A pirate would never! Oren: That’s a meme, if you’re not familiar with it, from Jake and the Neverland Pirates, which is some comic that Disney put out a while back, or maybe it’s more of an illustrated book. Although when I was searching for it, I found this truly cursed, LLM-generated page saying things like “pirates have long been associated with plundering and pillage, but is it really true that a good pirate never takes another person’s property? The answer is a resounding no. In fact, the idea that pirates are inherently thieves is a stereotype that has been perpetuated by popular culture and literature.” Bunny: Won’t someone think of the pirates? Oren: This is just the perfect example of a terrible LLM-generated paragraph because every sentence makes grammatical sense, but when you put them together, it’s like, what does that mean? Bunny: Pirates are being stereotyped because they steal! Oren: And this is the kind of mistake that a human is unlikely to make because if a human is bad enough at writing to make this mistake, their paragraphs will also, like, their sentences will also be bad. Chris: Let’s just not make a story about an LLM angsting as it murders the internet. Let’s not do that. We talked about Mando earlier, or referenced Mando. Kind of common one is they leave their job and then they start fighting their fellows. Mando stops bounty hunting almost immediately, and then he has to fight the rest of the bounty hunters, so that way we can also see that he is the most badass-est of bounty hunters. Oren: Yeah, he’s the greatest. Chris: Same with pirates, right? In a lot of pirate stories, the pirates just end up fighting other pirates. This happens in Pirates of the Caribbean, and Our Flag Means Death, and One Piece. They also make the authorities look bad, which in many of these stories can help, but in the end, they just end up fighting other pirates. Oren: At least the parts of One Piece that I am familiar with. And, granted, there is a lot that I’m not, they kind of embodied “a good pirate would never take another person’s property.” They don’t seem to do that except for, I guess, the evil government. I guess they do take the evil government’s property sometimes, but like even then, it seems like it’s mostly an accident. Chris: Yeah, it’s kind of hilarious, ’cause if you look at these pirate stories, you would wonder where the pirates get their money for their operations because they seem to only prey on each other. Bunny: It’s just the same, like, hundred gold coins circulating. Chris: There’s tons of lost treasure. They’d have to really be going for that like ancient lost treasure on a hidden island somewhere. Find one all the time. Oren: What it actually is, is that there are pretty strict tax codes for treasure hunting. So they all register as pirates and then go hunt treasure to like, you know, avoid the burden. Bunny: Or it’s like fishing. You have to get a permit, and then if you find a loot stash above a certain monetary value, you gotta toss it back. Otherwise it won’t propagate properly. Oren: Bounty hunters are probably the easiest of these jobs we’ve been talking about to make not morally unpalatable, because you can just arrange it so that the jobs they take are always to bring in bad people. Bunny: And they’re also bringing them in, not necessarily murdering them. Oren: And of course, in real life, bounty hunters are not a positive good to the extent that they even exist. But in fiction, there’s never a shortage of super badass, serial killer arsonists who need to be brought to justice, and that usually works okay. Whereas assassins get a little weirder. In theory, you could do the same thing, but it’s just harder to create a scenario in which the good guys have an organization dedicated to secretly killing people. Not impossible, just trickier. And it’s easy for that to come across as fake or contrived, and that’s where you end up with a lot of problems that these assassin stories have where they either stop being assassins or they just quickly become too evil for you to care about. Bunny: The Dead Cattail Assassins, which is a novela with a terrible name I read recently, kind of sidesteps several of these issues. Firstly by turning the assassination story into a mystery story, so we kind of shift the genre. Secondly, doing the thing where the protagonist has to fight the other assassins. And then thirdly, by making all of the contracts that the assassin takes, like, divinely ordained. One of the rules is the contract has to be just, and what’s just, well, if the goddess accepts it, so there we go. Morality handily sidestepped. They definitely justified the character’s quest that sets her off on the mystery with the person she was supposed to kill, but I don’t remember how, and I don’t know why the goddess approved that one. I think it was some sort of revenge thing, but that is another way to make it work is like, a very, very strict moral code or stringent rules. Oren: Yeah. Although you do have to then come up with a plausible-seeming reason of like, why does this assassin group have such moral rules? Why would they not choose to be something other than assassins? Of course, having a God of assassins who is like “only do good assassinations” is a reasonable explanation, right? You can usually use gods to do a lot of things.   Bunny: Right, in that story, assassins to this god signed away their afterlives, essentially, for a certain amount of time. In that setting, the assassins are like a dry cleaning service. They’re discussing leaving calling cards when they do an assassination so that when the person’s body is found, then handily there’s a calling card. If you want to get revenge on whoever ordered the first assassin strike, you can call the same assassins and they’ll do it for you. “I cleaned your shirt really well, and now they’ll spread the word!” Oren: Word of mouth marketing is impossible to replace. You know, it’s, there’s nothing more valuable than that. Chris: I read a romance recently that did the whole, “oh, assassin targets their love interest.” But in this one, the author wanted to come up with justification for the assassin actually trying to kill the other person in the romance, which requires a pretty strong justification. This one was creatively called Prince and Assassin. Do you know who the love interest was? Oren: The jester, presumably. Chris: How she does it is we have blood magic in the setting that can be used to control somebody. So we first establish that the assassin is under magical control and was kind of enslaved as a child and raised to be an assassin. So we can see that influence over him. When he’s sent out on this job, the blood magic can be used to kill him if he fails. But there’s another younger assassin that is threatened instead. So if he doesn’t succeed in killing the prince, then his little sister basically dies. If you have blood magic that can kill somebody instantly if they fail, and it’s now the little sister and then the assassin leaves, you know, Assassin School, we’ll call it, and goes out and has to kill this prince. The big problem I saw with this one is how the author would get out of that situation. So we have a really selfless reason why he will actually try to kill the prince even when their romance starts up and even when he doesn’t want to. But now we have like a lot of logistics involved, and I think that in order to make that story work, probably would’ve had to have brought it back to the assassin school where the sister was and where the master was, and where all the blood magic stuff was in order to arrange some situation when they got out of it. Instead, it was a little unsatisfying. We just said, oh, his sister never loved him. She was just faking it the whole time. And also the master decided not to kill her after all. So I liked the setup, but that kind of setup, that justified that action of trying to kill the love interest, was hard to pull off. Oren: It might be worth addressing the authors who don’t want to make their characters the good guys and are like, no, I picked “mob boss pirate viking assassin guy” because I wanted them to be morally gray or straight up evil. And I’m sure some of them are around. And if you want to do that, you’re gonna have to find some other reason for your characters to be compelling though. And that’s, uh, challenging, not impossible, but it could be done. If you’re gonna do that, your story’s gonna have to have some other extreme draw. Like, this is a really grounded seeming retelling of mob violence. And then people who are into that will watch it regardless of the fact that there’s no one for them to cheer for and they don’t care who wins. That sort of thing. You can tell that the people who made The Book of Boba Fett were really struggling with this idea. We want him to be a mob boss, but we can’t have him do mob boss things and we don’t have anything to replace it with. So he just kind of hangs out for the whole show. Chris: That actually reminds me of Blue Eye Samurai, ’cause there’s a sequence in Blue Eye Samurai where she is actually hired as an assassin. The person that she’s supposed to assassinate has been kidnapped and is in such a terrible situation that she will actually want to die. It’s a very frustrating sequence because then the main character gets there, finds out that she doesn’t wanna die, but because they’ve set up really big stakes for this assassination, where a whole bunch of people will be in danger if it’s not completed, kills the woman anyway, and then it turns out it’s all for nothing. This is, you know, designed to be just an edgy sequence of events, but I was not a big fan of it. Oren: I don’t know if this would’ve worked if it had been well constructed, but it was so shoddily constructed, like, why did you even do this if you were gonna put so little effort into it? “Oh no, we have to kill this person. We can’t just kill the boss that abducted her, because then everyone will know. But also everyone will immediately know if we kill her. So you have to be super stealthy and secret.” Why can’t you just be super stealthy and secret when you kill the mob boss, the one who has lots of enemies, instead of the woman who has exactly one personal connection in this town? That scene was so bad, some of the worst writing I’ve seen in a long time, which was funny because it was on this beautiful animation, and then the writing was just like, “yeah, how can we kill this woman in the most agonizing way possible? And that’s all we care about, it’s lunchtime.” Chris: I would say that a lot of the plot events that I would call edgy qualify in the same way. It’s not just that it’s dark, it’s just there’s something shoddy about the construction where it doesn’t feel like the darkness pays off and it feels like it’s contrived. The only reason that somebody died is because the storyteller just decided that they wanted something super dark and so they made them die, and that doesn’t feel like how the story would naturally unfold. Oren: People talk about contrived happy endings all the time, but like a lot of sad endings are equally contrived. Chris: If you had tweaked that, right, it’s not impossible to come up with a situation where somebody does something kind of dark, but it’s in some way justified. And you know, some people are not gonna like that, but some people do like dark stories. You can have a person who is technically supposed to be bad and have them be your main character if you make their killing like not on screen where it’ll emotionally affect the audience, and then maybe have some bad guys who are even worse. You can do a lot of sleight of hand if you want to, but if you want to have them kill an innocent person on screen, you are going to lose some audience members. Oren: Because even if that had been perfect, I admittedly would’ve had some trouble with it just because I don’t really like that kind of story, and I’m sure the people who do like this dark, edgy stuff weren’t looking at the inconsistencies I talk about, right? They were just like, “oh man, that was so dark and edgy,” and that’s what they cared about. Bunny: There is a way for you to have a dark, edgy character, and still employ Chris’s little tricks to make them seem less so, which is, they used to be an assassin, but now they have to do one more job and it’s justified. And this is the tactic employed by both Jason Bourne and John Wick, who are both people who used to be assassins. John Wick got out of it. Jason Bourne lost his memory. Chris: I thought John Wick was getting revenge for his dog. Bunny: So John Wick, he was an assassin, an incredibly effective one. Then he met his wife and he was like, I want outta this. The guy he was working for gave him an impossible job and he pulled it off and he quit the assassin rat race and lived with his wife, and then his wife died. And then mob boss guy’s son, not knowing who he was, came in, destroyed his car, killed his dog, and essentially stole everything from him. Chris: So did he just run into the son by coincidence? Oren: Yeah, you know, small town. Chris: How did the son also end up destroying his stuff and not know who he was? Okay, just coincidence. Bunny: I think it is. Like, they run into each other at a gas station and the son ogles his car and makes threatening remarks and then later comes and steals the car. In the process he beats up John Wick and the dog. Don’t watch the first part of that movie if you don’t wanna see the dog die. It’s quite sad. But he does get another dog at the end. Oren: With John Wick, whatever his assassin stuff is is so far in the backstory that no one cares. If you wanna think about it objectively, yeah, I guess John Wick’s not a good person, but does that matter at all when you’re watching the movie? No. Bunny: You know, the handwave trick that Chris was talking about is, don’t show it on screen. And you know, we’re meant to understand that John Wick has reformed, he’s sucked back into it. And that’s kind of the conflict of the movies is like, I mean, in the first movie, people are literally constantly asking him, “are you back?” And it’s a big snapping point when he is like, “yeah, I’m back.” And like kicks the crap out of a bunch of guys. I will say John Wick is also really refreshing in that it doesn’t do the thing where he spares the villain. John Wick kills lots and lots of people and it’s very cinematic. This is a very well done movie. Just look at that! Like, no shaky cam, it’s incredible. When he finally reaches the villain kid, you know, he just walks up to him and shoots him and that’s that. Which is refreshing. Oren: Rude of you to personally call out Arrow like that. Bunny: Jason Bourne does something similar. He used to be an assassin for the government, and then he was given a job where he would’ve had to murder someone in front of his children – the target’s children, I should say – couldn’t do it, and then jumped off a boat and lost his memory, and so it’s mystery/thriller. Again, the genre shifts. Oren: And you could say he was Bourne again. Bunny: You could say that. Oren: My favorite one of these is actually The Black Company because everyone talks about how The Black Company is so dark and gray and doesn’t conform to your goody-two-shoes storytelling morality. But it’s very funny because they only ever fight people who are worse than them. It’s just really obvious that it’s doing the same thing any story would do. It just has a coat of grit attached to it. Chris: Not your grandmother’s mercenary story. Oren: It’s not a bad story, it’s just not any more morally complex than Lord of the Rings. It just has a different filter over the lens is all. Chris: I tried to think of stories with mercenaries and I came up surprisingly blank. Oren: There aren’t that many. You could argue that the Firefly characters act as mercenaries sometimes, but they aren’t like a mercenary company, right? That’s not their job. Chris: They do the train job and then don’t go through with it. Oren: They protect the sex workers in the second to last episode, you know, there are a few times where they act as hired muscle.  Bunny: Isn’t Viv from Legends and Lattes formerly a mercenary? We see her do like one mercenary thing at the beginning of that book. Chris: Well, she’s an adventurer, so you’d have to know, what does a D&D party typically do in that setting? They run into dungeons and fight monsters…? I’m sure the treasure there doesn’t actually belong to any goblin families. Nice goblin families that they’ve massacred. Oren: It’s okay. Those were bad goblins, not like good goblins. If the author decides to embrace goblincore at some point. Bunny: The other very straightforward way to make a pirate character work is just make it publicity. They didn’t actually do the bad things. They’re just very threatening because of publicity. Dread Pirate Roberts, pretty much. Chris: Well, Dread Pirate Roberts is a pirate. They just pass the name to the next pirate.  Bunny: Right. But people are mostly scared of him because of the name. Chris: That’s true. Bunny: There’s also Captain Shakespeare in Stardust, which is much more explicit. Chris: Yeah, no, actually that one’s really interesting because they wanted to have pirates, but they’re not actually pirates. They collect lightning from the sky. They’re lightning harvesters.  Oren: If we’re talking historically, pirates did prefer for you to surrender without fighting, so you can have pirates do that in your story. It’s just that it’s extremely unlikely that will happen all of the time. Bunny: It would also be not so exciting. Oren: That’s why you gotta finagle it. All right. I think we can now do the morally gray task of ending the podcast. Chris: And if you want to protect us from any more assassination attempts that may or may not come from one of our own hosts, 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] Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening/closing theme: “The Princess who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.

What do Sherlock Holmes, Alice in Wonderland, and War of the Worlds have in common? They’re all free for anyone to use however they like! That’s the wonder of the public domain. Although, even as legal complications are stripped away, storytelling complications emerge. How do you make your version stand out while also keeping the aspects that fans most love? We’ve got some tips for you! Show Notes Steamboat Willie  Pooh’s Shirt The Bright Sword  Hugo Novel Podcasts The Public Domain Doyle Estate Sues Netflix Wizard of Oz Wicked Follow the Sound of Snow The Lunar Chronicles  Spinning Silver  Winter Tide A Christmas Carol  Ishmael  Queequeg  Wrath of Khan Elementary  Into the Woods 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 song] Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren, and with me today is… Chris: Chris. Oren: And… Bunny: Bunny. Oren: Okay, so we’re gonna make a new movie. It’s gonna have a bunch of beloved cartoon characters. We can have Mickey Mouse, obviously, but only the Steamboat Willie version of him. Don’t you dare give him gloves or make his pants colored. Bunny: [chuckles] Oren: and also Winnie the Pooh. But he cannot have a shirt. That will get us in deep trouble if he has a red shirt. Chris: [laughs]  Oren: We can have Tigger now though, so that’s nice. Bunny: So much of what qualifies is based on clothing, as it turns out. Oren: Yeah, and obviously they’re all gonna be, like, slasher murderers, I guess, is the hot new thing to do with characters that suddenly enter the public domain. Bunny: Wow, I’ve never seen that before. Fresh new take on Steamboat Willie and Winnie the Pooh. Oren: Yeah, that’s just how one does now. Chris: Gotta make it darker and grittier. Oren: Obviously Sherlock Holmes has to be there. He’s like, required to be in every public domain retelling.  Bunny: Is he a murderer too? Oren: Maybe. Who knows, right? He could be solving murders. We’ll never know. Bunny: Maybe he’s like a demonic animatronic. Oren: Ooh. Yeah Bunny: Those are pretty popular with the kids, so I’ve been told. Oren: Yeah, “Five Nights at Holmes’.” Alright, so today we’re talking about telling public domain stories, which is a thing that people really like to do, and it’s not just because I had to read The Right Sort for our Hugo guesses.  It is because of that, but not only because of that. Chris: Have we told anybody about the Hugo guesses? Any of our listeners, I should say. Oren: I mean, we’ve complained about the books we were reading for it before. Chris: Uh, yeah. Maybe they put together that we compiled a document of “Hugo bait,” we call them, because we’re trying to guess which books might get nominated because once they’re nominated, we don’t really have time to read them all, so we gotta start early. Oren: Which is one of my many beefs with the way that the Hugos are run is that most people voting have not read all the books on the list. But I realize that’s just not practical the way they’re set up. But I’m gonna try to do it, okay? Because I actually get to vote on them this year. Bunny: It’s also so dependent on which ones don’t have five hundred holds at the library. Oren: Yeah. Bunny: Which is unfortunate because the ones with more holds might be more likely to win. But, you know, I’m not salty. Chris: Why we think it might be possible because years ago when we covered all of the Hugo novels we found when they were announced that Oren had already listened to three of them. Like, half of them.  Chris & Bunny: [laughter] Chris: It’s like, okay, well that happened by chance. Maybe if we do it on purpose we can figure it out. Oren: Yeah. We are gonna be in trouble if one of them is a sequel, though. Chris: Yeah. I’m not going there. That’s too far. Oren: But anyway. So, today is about public domain stories. The Hugos will come later. But first, legal stuff. The public domain is stuff that theoretically no one has copyright ownership over. And so anyone can use it in any way that they want. In practice it’s not always that simple. Sometimes rights holders will find creative ways to sue you for using things that should be in the public domain.  Most recently, the Doyle Estate sued Netflix over the Enola Holmes movies claiming that Holmes can’t be emotional ’cause that only happens in the later Holmes stories, which were still under copyright at the time. Which was legally very dubious, but we’ll never know how it would’ve turned out ’cause they immediately settled out of court and we don’t know what the terms of that settlement were. Chris: Yeah, I find it very hard to believe that that Holmes Estate would’ve actually—the Doyle Estate, I should say—would’ve actually won that lawsuit. But even so, I mean, it’s expensive. Oren: Yeah. It seems likely that Netflix gave them some amount of money to go away. That’s my guess. But who knows, right? Maybe Netflix told them, if you do this, we will ruin you ’cause we have billions of dollars. And they were like, “Oh, okay. We don’t want any of this.” And then left. Chris: The hardest is if you wanna find old movies that are in public domain, because that—it gets extremely complicated because of all of the different people who put creative input into a movie. Anything like the costume, for instance—somebody could have the IP over that. So if you show a scene with a particular costume in it. And so it’s almost impossible for anybody to say for sure what movies are public domain, right? They can kind of guess if it’s like a silent film, right? It’s probably public domain, but it’s real bad. Thankfully it’s, you know, less complicated with text works. Although you do have to be careful about translations. Because the translation can also be copyrighted. So if it’s an old work in a recent translation, you know, luckily if you were telling our own version, then you know, we’re gonna be rewriting the text anyway, so that may not matter. But if you, for instance, wanna quote like a classic story at the top of a chapter or something, that could matter. Oren: There was one novel that I was reading—I’m not gonna say what it was on the off chance that some lawyer is listening. I don’t wanna get the author in trouble if this is something that he could get in trouble over. I don’t know. But it was a novel that was based off of clearly public domain work. Seems fine, right? And there was a character in it who wasn’t in the original. Again, seems fine. They invented a new character. But on closer reading this character was clearly lifted from another retelling of the original story that was definitely still in copyright. Chris: Hmm. Oren: And now I’m just kind of wondering, like, would that author get in trouble if someone who owns the copyright to the older retelling decided to press it… And I don’t know. I’m very curious.   Chris: I mean, possibly if it’s distinct enough. I think this is the issue with Disney doing all of these fairytale stories is that, you know, kids—the Disney version for them is the original version. And then they think of that as, like, our iconic story. But Disney owns all of the details of that adaptation that were unique. So, it’s kind of a problem. Bunny: Public domain is also weird because it’s different in different countries. So James Bond is public domain in Canada, but it won’t be public domain in the US until 2035. And apparently Peter Pan, which is public domain in the US, is not yet public domain in the UK. So I legitimately have no idea how selling stories across these borders work when a character is public domain in one area and not the other. Oren: Yeah. So, just be cautious. Especially if you are approaching a character or story that has only recently entered the public domain. Especially if Disney is associated with it. ‘Cause even if you are technically in the right, Disney can find ways to make your life difficult, should your story achieve any kind of success. Bunny: Yeah. And they will go after you for anything. Oren: They are famously litigious. Bunny: People have been trying to recreate, like obviously, Wizard of Oz, one of the more prominent inclusions in the public domain. The Disney Wizard of Oz—is that Disney? Whatever. The movie version of Wizard of Oz— Oren: That’s Universal, I think. Bunny: Universal? Okay. The Margaret Hamilton version. Every adaptation of the Wizard of Oz after that one has been trying to recreate Margaret Hamilton’s witch dress, and you are not allowed to do that. That witch dress is the property of the movie, so don’t you dare lay fingers on that black witch dress we have known and loved. Oren: Yeah, I think it was Lindsay Ellis has a video about how Disney has been desperately trying to recreate that iconic look because that’s one of the few things they don’t own and they, like, have to be really careful what they do or they could run afoul of the copyright. It’s very funny. Bunny: Yeah. Chris: So my experience with this is, of course, that I did a retelling of The Snow Queen  recently. And one thing: the version of The Snow Queen, I think, in film that most people are most likely to be familiar with and that I knew well was the Hallmark version. Which I think is technically a movie, but it’s more like a mini series. The thing is, in any version of The Snow Queen you have to impose some kind of deadline for the plot to work so that you have actual tension. And I think that when it had, like, the winter solstice, which is the most natural deadline to put. But then I was like, okay, now I have to find a new deadline because now I’m afraid—even though I know as a storyteller that any story should really do this. Right? And that’s just the obvious one when you’re talking about the winter. Now, I felt like I have to find something different just because I don’t wanna do something that’s precisely like another retelling I’m familiar with. So I decided to go with the first snowfall instead. But sometimes that gets tricky. Bunny: Yeah. Oren: So at this point, it might be useful to talk about why even do retellings? Why not just make every story a hundred percent original? A complete break from whatever came before. Just lock yourself in a box and don’t be exposed to culture. Bunny: Easy.  Chris: [laughs] Bunny: That’s the dream, actually. Oren: Yeah. And there are some obvious benefits. I mean, first of all, if you are drawing from an established work you don’t have to think of as much. For some people that will be restrictive, but for other people, they’re like, “No, actually that helps. That allows me to focus on the stuff I want to do and not have to do as much, you know, world building drudgery” or what have you. Right?  So that’s a benefit right there. It also could just be that’s a story you’re passionate about ’cause you liked it as a kid or what have you. And then from a sales perspective, that story, if it’s big enough to be worth retelling, probably already has a built-in audience. So you can get some benefit there. Chris: Yeah, I mean, I had a bad time because when I was almost done with The Snow Queen, there was a lot of demand for fairytale retellings. Like they were a hot commodity. But then by the time I finished it, there was like a glut of them on the market. So I think a lot of public domain stories, honestly, have pretty high competition because there are a lot of other people also telling a public domain story that’s popular. At the same time, if you do need a fast pitch, right? I can see how Sherlock and Space—right?—might help you sell your book to people. Bunny: It’s quite evocative. Like people know exactly what you’re talking about and you’re already supposed to, like, compare your work to existing works when you’re querying agents and, like, pitching to publishers. So it’s even more straightforward when you’re just like, “Oh, it’s a retelling of this thing. You know this thing.” Chris: Yeah. I mean, if you need comps, right? Comparables to pitch your book. You might be able to just look up, okay, what are the other retellings of this public domain story that have happened in the last ten years? And maybe you would find some decent comparables out of that. But by default it’s not gonna stand out in the market because anybody can retell that story. So it becomes more important to give it your own vision and set it apart in some way. Because you can’t just say, “Hey, this is Sherlock,” as your pitch. Oren: Yeah. Chris: And that was another thing I had trouble with too, right? I, like, kind of had a pitch, but not something that’s as simple as “Sherlock in space.” Bunny: Fundamentally, by definition, the story has been done before probably many times. Oren: I read a novel once that was just pitching itself as being, like, an official Sherlock story. ‘Cause I guess whoever wrote it got, like, a stamp of approval from the Doyle Estate and I read it and it was very dull. Chris & Bunny: [Laughter] Oren: It’s like, yeah, this is…I’ve read Sherlock before. That’s what this is.  Bunny: Ugh. Man. I feel like the worst thing an estate can do is start having, like, “canon wars.” What’s cannon or not? We’ve already seen that with Star Wars. Well, let’s not do it with Holmes. That’s my advice. Oren: Yeah. Yeah, fortunately all of Holmes is public domain now, at least in the US. So you know, if the Doyle Estate decides to sue you for, I don’t know, giving Sherlock a fancy hat, you have a stronger leg to stand on than you did before. I do find the question interesting about whether you’re gonna do, like, an indirect retelling, in which this is clearly based on an older product and you’re not trying to hide it. Versus just using the same characters or same place names or what have you.  Bunny: Yeah, I think that a lot of fairytale retellings at least benefit from their original material being extremely simple with lots of room for extrapolation. So, if you’re retelling Red Riding Hood in space with a bunch of wolf soldiers and cyborgs and stuff—which is Scarlet of The Lunar Chronicles—Like, you have lots and lots and lots of room for interpretation.  If you’re retelling the…I don’t know, The Scarlet Letter, there’s a lot more specifics there than, you know, little girl travels through the woods, gets eaten by wolf. Chris: Although I would say personally that yes, they’re a little vaguer, but you still have choices about how much you want to stick to the plot or not stick to the plot. Right? And so, it’s a very different kind of retelling if you are taking kind of that vague inspiration and using some of the same themes and you’re using some of the same kind of characters supposedly. Like for instance, Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik is supposed to be a retelling of Rapunzel; it’s only sort of, kind of. I mean, I would’ve never guessed, right? Now that I know it I can see the inspiration in the story, but it’s just a very different thing. Oren: Yeah, I would never offer that story to someone and say this is a Rapunzel retelling.  By the way, we mentioned Spinning Silver. So everyone at home take a drink. Chris & Bunny: [Laughter]  Chris: Or Frozen is supposed to be a retelling of The Snow Queen. But they’re not the same story anymore. Bunny: There’s snow in it. Oren: Chris, you have to let that go. Chris: No. It was so disappointing! But I mean, on the plus side, I would’ve not probably—maybe I wouldn’t have made my own version if I had actually liked the Disney… You know, I didn’t have any problem with the movie Frozen. It just wasn’t the story I love. Bunny: Are you saying that Follow the Sound of Snow was a spite project fired by Frozen? Chris: No. [laughs] But if you will buy it, I will say that. I think that in general with public domain stories, that there’s not as much of an expectation then if you, for instance, had a copyrighted story that only had, like, one movie studio licensing it and there was only gonna be one big film adaptation, for instance. And then there probably won’t be another one for twenty years. Then it’s like the stakes are super high, and so all the fans that want it to be true to the story—right?—really care what it does. Whereas anybody can tell it, I don’t think people expect you to adhere as closely to that source material. I do think that I, you know, had a balance where people felt who did, like the original fairytale, really appreciated that I stick as closely as I did, but also that I had my own vision. Whereas if you’re really a fan of something and you get that like, you know, Frozen. Right? Or you really liked the Rapunzel story for whatever reason and you read Spinning Silver, there’s going to be a little disappointment there. Bunny: I also think that a lot of the tricks people use to update public domain stories to retell them are kind of overdone, which is another trouble with the whole public-domain-characters-retelling premise. And we pointed out this one: ‘beloved character is a murderer’ is perhaps a very recent prominent one. Apparently we’re getting another, like, Steamboat Willie Slasher. And obviously there was the extremely panned Winnie the Pooh one, because of course. So those are tiresome and usually very cash grabby. Another one that we see a lot is just like, “it’s the exact same story, but it’s modern day.” Which is a fine start, but I think you can’t just have that, right? It’s not enough to just say, “But it’s today.” Or at least it’s not enough to me. Chris: But what if Beauty and the Beast was not just in modern day, but the Beast was also, just like, a punk with lots of piercings and that makes him very bestial.  Bunny: Oh man, I’m gonna buy him on a backpack. Oren: He’s so, “I love you, even though you’re so cool and rad.” Bunny: I want my lunch bag to have his face on it. Chris: How can you love a guy with so many piercings? Oren: I mean, were I to complain I would say that I would like it if retellings that set out to subvert the original, have a little more to say than, “Hey, the stuff that happened in this original was pretty messed up.” Because like, yeah, it was. A lot of the stuff in Arthurian legend is pretty messed up. I knew that. Do you have anything else for me? Like, you know, a story that is interesting? Sometimes the answer is no. Chris: Right. Whereas a positive: Winter Tide, for instance, is in the kind of Lovecraft universe and takes the Deep Ones that, you know, Lovecraft was super racist towards and makes them main characters. And that one I think is a really good way of responding towards really problematic public domain stories. Where then you kind of feature the perspective of the people who were othered in the original in an insightful way. As opposed to just like, “This is messed up,” and pointing at it. Oren: Yeah. Winter Tide also has the advantage of just having pretty strong fundamentals, like from a storytelling perspective. It doesn’t just like, tell you, “Hey, this is a Cthulhu retelling and I’m just gonna lean on that for the entire story.” It also has, like, a plot and stuff. It has too many characters, but it’s generally pretty good. Bunny: Yeah. You can’t forget that you are telling a story. It’s not just a retelling; it’s not just the “re-” part. The “-telling” part is interesting too, and ideally you will show a bit too. Oren: Or you could just spend a bunch of chapters on backstory for the Knights of the Roundtable, who then never get to do anything in the main story. Bunny: [laughs] Oren: I’m not bitter about The Bright Sword. Stop saying I’m bitter about The Bright Sword. Palomides and Dinadin seemed kind of cool and they each get, like, one thing to do in the main storyline after we spent who knows how long on their backstories. Chris: I have to admit there is one pull with the main story that I kind of want to make a darker and grittier version of. Bunny: Uh-oh. Oren: Oh yeah? Chris: And that’s the Christmas Carol. Because every Christmas, there’s so many Christmas Carol stories out there. And it’s, you know, meant to be a feel good story but like, I can’t help but notice that it’s all centered around the feelings of, like, the rich and greedy guy. Right? And the basic narrative is that, “Oh, he just personally has to learn to be good. We don’t need systemic change. He just personally has to learn to be good. And if we just have, you know, one night of  teaching him some lessons, he’ll be good and the problem of, like, capitalism and greed will be fixed.” Bunny: [in Epic Movie Trailer Voice] December, 2025. Cratchit. Coming to theaters near you. Chris: And I just wanna take that and make something that’s a little darker to reflect the fact that that’s not enough and have a story that’s not quite so centered around the person who is doing the harm.  Oren: I realized as I was looking through famous novels from the nineteenth century, most of the ones that you would think about have had a bunch of different retellings. The one that I think has the least—and admittedly this is not an exhaustive search. This is just some casual googling—is Moby Dick. Probably ’cause nobody’s read the original ’cause it’s boring. Where all my Moby Dick retellings at? Like, what is going on? Bunny: Look, the only one I could see doing a Moby Dick retelling is friend of the show SG, who is quite obsessed with Queequeg and Ishmael kissing. Oren: Yeah. I mean, that’s a solid start for a story. Chris: Yeah. Isn’t that story about a guy who really wants revenge on a whale? Oren: I mean, that’s kind of stretching it because that implies the story is about anything Chris: [laughs] Bunny: The story is also about telling you extensive and often incorrect whale anatomy. Oren: Yeah. I mean, it does have a guy who wants revenge on a whale in it. Chris: Oh. Isn’t that the part that people remember? Oren: Yeah, that’s the part people remember, but that’s only like 5% of the book. Chris: Okay. But at the same time, if you’re gonna retell Moby Dick you kind of have to keep the part that’s really iconic. Oren: Yeah. Chris: So I just don’t feel like people want to tell stories about a guy who wants revenge on a whale. I think that would be a little hard for us to take seriously. And also, I don’t know, I personally would find it unpleasant. Bunny: Modern day audiences might also not take so kindly to the extensive murder of whales that goes on in the book. Chris: Yeah, the whaling does not look good. Bunny: There is, like, lots and lots and lots of whaling. Chris: Yeah. That is not great. I don’t think that would do well. Oren: I guess if we stretch the definition enough, there are a bunch of stories about a character—sometimes the protagonist, sometimes the villain—who, you know, desires revenge for a past wrong and is destroyed by it. Bunny: Well, okay.  Oren: Like the most obvious of that is, like, probably Wrath of Khan, where they just straight up quote Moby Dick to let you know they know what they’re doing. Bunny: [uncertainly] What is Khan if not a whale? Oren: No, Kirk is the whale. Khan is Ahab in this scenario. Bunny: [sarcastically] Ah, I’ve always said Kirk is like a whale. Oren: Yeah. You know, that’s just what you think about. Bunny: You know, that time when he bit the leg off of a villain. Oren: Yeah, that’s happened. That’s actually in the original series episode that Wrath of Khan is a sequel to. He bites Khan’s leg off. Just trust me. Don’t go check. Bunny: Oh, the original series got weird. Oren: It did. That part’s not a lie. My favorite, like weird retelling chain right now is Wicked because—so first you have the original book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Right. And then you have the movie, which no one except Universal can actually directly retell, but that literally everyone is retelling, right? Because people remember the movie way more than they remember the book. So everyone is skirting as close to that line as they possibly can. So then you have the book Wicked, which is way weirder than anyone who’s seen the musical or the movie would think. And then you have the musical, which adapts Wicked, the book, which is adapting both the movie and the original book. And now there’s a movie that is adapting the play, that is adapting the book, that is adapting the movie and the book. And it’s just so hard to figure out where anything in this chain comes from. Bunny: It’s Wicked all the way down. Chris: I just love all the people who are discovering the book for the first time, not knowing how messed up it is. Like, “What the hell? I was not prepared for this!” Oren: “What is going on?” All: [laughter] Bunny: You know, I joked about it, but one other—aside from ‘they’re a murderer’ and ‘it’s modern day’—the other big category of retelling is ‘what if they kissed?’ Which is perhaps, of those three, making them kiss and be in a romance is more obviously a story then the other two are. Which I think helps with the popularity of ‘kiss retellings’ because you are putting it in a genre that needs a romance plot and that means plot. Oren: It does have an obvious selling point. Bunny: Whereas ‘murderer’ is just like, “It’s a slasher now.” Right? And those don’t really have… like I don’t wanna say slashers don’t have plots, but it’s like—it’s a conceit rather than a plot, if that makes sense. Oren: Well, and just in general, ‘and then they kissed’ is one of many ways that you can explore some tension or some unresolved question or some implication from the original story. Which is the same drive that all of these, like, ‘What if it was terrible?’ subversions come from. And there are, you know, good and bad ways to do both. Chris: You can also do things like sequels or what if the lot of the original went differently, right? What if the villain won or something like that. Jim C. Hines has a princess series that takes place after Cinderella, you know, becomes a princess, right? And then she goes on adventures and stuff like that. So it’s basically a sequel to the original Cinderella. Bunny: The play “Into the Woods” tries to do that, and it’s a very clumsy second half. Oren: Yeah, that’s a discourse for sure. All: [chuckling] Chris: Does that one get really dark? Oren: It’s the second half when things get dark and, shall we say, the reaction to it is polarizing. A lot of people, myself included, feel like the second half is just kind of pointless misery porn. And other people think that we are unsophisticated Philistines who have no taste. So, you know.  Chris: Okay, but Oren, what if they didn’t live happily ever after? Oren: What if they didn’t? Bunny: Whoa! Chris: Whoa. Bunny: What if they were murderers? Oren: One of my favorite retellings is actually based on the premise ‘What if they didn’t kiss.’ Which is Elementary, which is a Sherlock retelling and with the Watson being played by Lucy Liu. Bunny: Ah, we love Lucy Liu. Oren: Yeah, Lucy Liu’s great and fantastic for that role. And you know, they caused like a little bit of a stir of like, “Wah! You made Watson a woman!” But you know, in the end, no one cared. But the thing was that when this happened everyone was kind of convinced, “Okay, you’re doing this so you can make Watson and Sherlock kiss without it being gay, right?” And the producers were like, “No, we’re not doing that. They are not going to kiss.” And we were like, “Uh huh. Yeah, sure.” And we all started checking our watches to see how long they would kiss. And five years later, the show was over and they didn’t kiss! Bunny: Yay! Chris: [unenthusiastically] Hooray. Oren: It was like, “Hooray. My expectations were subverted.” Bunny: They did it. Chris & Bunny: [chuckling] Chris: I should say there is kind of one situation in which you don’t want to add a spin to a public domain story. And that is if you’re doing, like usually they’re for children, but you’re actually deliberately doing a retelling that it’s supposed to be capture the original or whatever is in the popular imagination. So for instance, if you’re also an illustrator and you’re doing like kids picture books and you’re doing a fairytale, that’s a time in which people usually expect you to stay fairly close to the original. Even so in those situations, you have to just look at…oftentimes public domain stories have some pretty big plot issues, besides the problematic stuff. Like in The Snow Queen, I’ve looked at a lot of adaptations that, even the ones that are very close to the original, are basically repeating the Hans Christian Anderson story with just, like, a few tweaks and a little bit longer prose. And always fix the end because in this story, the main character journeys, like, a really long time to get to the Snow Queen’s palace, and when she reaches the Snow Queen palace, the Snow Queen isn’t even there in the original.  Oren: Yeah. Chris: She’s, like, gone somewhere. And so it’s, like, really anti-climatic. It’s like, wait, she’s supposed to confront the snow queen? No, she just happens to not be home right now. It’s cool.   Bunny: She went off to deal with a troublesome necromancer and the hobbits are on their own now. All: [laughter] Chris: So basically everybody  has the snow queen actually be there somehow, even if otherwise, it’s basically the same as the original. But you know, there’s just little tweaks here and there, and that’s because it’s trying to, again, just be a fairytale book that has meant to capture what we think of as that fairytale. Oren: Right. For example, the amazing 2005 BBC version has Gerda and The Snow Queen have a Dragonball Z style beam battle at the end, which is the greatest ending that story has ever had. Except for, of course, Follow the Sound of Snow. Just to be clear. Chris & Bunny: [laughter] Bunny: Second only. Oren: But other than that… Chris: Yeah. Yeah, No. That one is also the one that has Patrick Stewart as a crow or a raven.  Bunny: That’s great. Oren: Excuse me. Chris: Yeah. Excuse me, a raven. Which is great. Oren: It’s not good in any other way, but it does have those two elements. Chris: I mean, if you like to watch every single adaptation, every telling of the story like I do, it’s fun to watch. Oren: For completion’s sake, it’s important. Bunny: What year was that? Oren: 2005. Bunny: Okay. I was gonna say the laser beam battle does sound very 2000’s. Oren: Alright. Well, I think we are just about out of time. So we are now going to adapt this podcast into an episode that is over. Chris: If you would like us to continue retelling this podcast, 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 is a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.  [closing theme] Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme, ‘The Princess who Saved Herself’ by Jonathan Colton.

Fantasy. In. Spaaaaaaaaaaaaace. Or perhaps science in space? We’re still trying to figure out the difference between space fantasy and science fantasy. Either way, there’s sure to be a mix of swords and magic with technology and ships, so who are we to complain? Just kidding! Of course we’re going to complain, that’s our whole thing! But we might just find something useful along the way. Show Notes Space Fantasy Science Fantasy Pern Dark Angel Trilogy Red Sister  Dune Gideon the Ninth Skyward Red Rising A Memory Called Empire The Snow Queen Cinder  Dune: Prophecy  The Magicks of Megas-tu Ninefox Gambit Transcript Generously transcribed by Arturo. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Intro: You are listening to the Mythcreants Podcast, with your hosts: Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [music] Chris: This is the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is… Oren: Oren. Chris: … and… Bunny: Bunny. Chris: This episode is coming to you from 10,000 years in the future. Or the past. May be hard to say. Uh… humanity has spread across countless galaxies, if you can even call us human anymore. But we have decided that monarchy is the best form of government after all. Oren: Hang on. Are we still conventionally hot? Like, have we moved beyond humanity in every way except for being way hot? ’cause that’s important to me. Bunny: Hotness is just the next stage in evolution. Chris: Yes, that’s exactly what it is for all life forms. It turns out that there are universal rules of hotness. Oren: Just everyone evolving to be hotter. It’s good. I’m a fan. I like this idea. This is the optimistic future that sci-fi needs. Bunny: So yeah, this time we’re going to talk about space fantasy, what it is, and also: is it the same as science fantasy? First question. Oren: Chris had an interesting definition, but I do think that to most people, yes, it is. Most… Chris: No! Oren: Most people think it’s the same thing. Chris: I think it’s at least similar, what I thought about it, but my association with science fantasy is basically you have something that looks a lot closer to a regular fantasy, but it has a science explanation that is partly in the background, comes out usually as the book unfolds, like The Dragonriders of Pern being a classic one. Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: Another one I thought of is the Dark Angel trilogy, which again, looks just like a fantasy at first, but then you kind of realize that they’re on the moon. And this is technically a space colony. That book makes some interesting choices, let me just say that. Oren: There are books, like Red Sister is a book I read recently that’s like that, where it seems like they’re in a weird fantasy world, but actually it’s an alien planet, and this terrifying magic orb in the sky is a space station, and you know, whatever. Right? Chris: Right. But as I think of space fantasy as something where there’s specifically a setting that’s spread over multiple planets, so the setting involves… and civilization has space travel. Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: And it often includes a lot more emphasis on space and spaceships. But of course, to make it fantasy, there has to be fantasy aesthetics in there. So usually kingdoms or empires, and almost always some kind of magic or magic-like abilities. It could just be telepathy or other things that are typically found in science fiction. Oren: Right. And if it is telepathy, they will flavor it more magical, right? Chris: Mm-hmm. Oren: Because, like, Star Trek has telepathy, but they flavor it sciencey, ’cause it comes from like the “tele” version of your brain, right? There’s like a special part of your brain that does this. Whereas space fantasy is more likely to be like, “Yes, we harness the ether wave to transmit our thoughts,” that sort of thing. Chris: Yeah. So, honestly, when the fantasy world just takes place on one planet, one former space colony that you can… that part is… kind of space travel is kind of distant and in the distant past, I tend to think of that as science fantasy, and when there’s a lot more emphasis on a multi-planetary civilization, I tend to call it space fantasy. Oren: Well, those definitions make sense, but they do not seem to exist outside of this podcast. Chris: What? Oren: Every… it’s like everywhere else uses these terms interchangeably. Like Wikipedia: if you search for “space fantasy,” it just redirects you to “science fantasy.” You know, people on Goodreads. Goodreads has both of them, but almost all the books that have one are also listed as the other. Chris: But there has to be a niche for fantasy that has science but doesn’t have Spice. Oren: I mean, I’m not saying there’s not. I’m just saying most people don’t make that distinction, from what I can tell. I love some of these definitions, though. Like this one here. I’m going to read… I’m just going to read one from Wikipedia. This is for science fantasy: “In the 1950s, British journalist Walter Gillings considered science fantasy as a part of science fiction that was not plausible from the point of view of the science of the time. For example…” Chris: Oh my gosh. So all science fiction is science fantasy, huh? Oren: Yeah. “For example, the use of nuclear weapons in H. G. Wells’ novel The World Set Free was science fantasy from the point of view of Newtonian physics and a work of science fiction from the point of view of Einstein’s theory.” Chris: Oh my goodness. Bunny: Okay, Walter. Oren: Walter’s very proud of this. Chris: Also, that just sounds so like kind of pejorative, right? Like, you know, “Oh, well, that’s not realistic science. So it’s science fantasy.” Oren: Yeah, well, you know, it’s this… Look, this is the place where the genre for cool nerds who like science meets the genre for uncultured swine who like magic. So, you know, it’s all coming together. Bunny: I think maybe the confusion… a lot of the confusion comes from the fact that science fiction and fantasy are often kind of, you know, rightly or not, presented as like a kind of dichotomy. But at their core, a lot of the stuff is just kind of aesthetic, whether we’ve got robots or whether we’ve got witches. Are you casting something that looks like a spell and quacks like a spell but it’s actually an atomic rearrangement ray that’s turning you into a duck through nanomachines or something? Chris: Yeah. I mean, there are around the edges, there are a few things that actually suggest different rules for the world based on whether it’s technology or not. Like technology, one of the properties it has is that, generally, that means anybody can use it, right? Oren: Yeah. Chris: Which… not always, I mean, it’s not like you couldn’t build in exceptions, but that does have an effect on your setting, because if you have a technology, the idea is that you could replicate that technology. Anyone could use it, right? And that has its own impact. So there are reasons why they differ a little bit inherently, but again, that’s just around the edges. In a lot of cases, you would just flavor something as magic or flavor it as technology, and plotwise, it’s like the same thing. Oren: I also just love the Goodreads listing for space fantasy, ’cause it has some wild examples, right? It has stuff you would expect, like Warhammer 40K, and Dune, and Star Wars tie-in novels, and Gideon the Ninth. That all makes sense. It’s also got A Memory Called Empire, which is just a pretty standard space opera, and it’s got Skyward, which is like Brandon Sanderson’s space fighter novel, and Red Rising. Like, what’s going on? Who is tagging these things? Bunny: Somebody who doesn’t like soft sci-fi or whatever. Chris: I saw someone on Quora call Red Rising fantasy in sci-fi clothes. Oren: Ugh. Chris: Yeah, this just sounds like kind of a hard sci-fi elitist there. Bunny: It seems like it’s science fiction enough that we can’t just say, “No, no, it’s secret fantasy.” Oren: Look, if we’re going to say that Red Rising is space fantasy or is some kind of fantasy, we also have to put Star Trek there, because all that happens in Red Rising that is at all fantasy-ish is that they all have to do a game of murder/capture the flag in a place where they have castles, right? Because when they go to murder school, the main event at murder school is capture the flag, but with murder. And they do it in a big arena that has castles and stuff. So that’s it. That’s the extent of the fantasy element, and I don’t think most people would consider that genre-defining. Bunny: Castles. That’s the answer, actually. Oren: Castles. Bunny: It’s just castles. Chris: There can be, when you combine science fiction/fantasy elements, there can be clashes. There’s not necessarily clashes, but just as an example of the way that science can also just bring a little bit more realism into the picture, going back to this Dark Angel trilogy, which are really unique books, there’s a lot of things I like about them, but this is the books we’re having. It has both fairy tale logic and the kind of like science history, so there’s certain events where the protagonist spins cloth out of emotion, you know? And it’s like, “Oh, pity makes the cloth too heavy,” right? And so we have like this metaphorical “cloth is heavier or lighter depending on what emotion you’re spitting.” And then, it’s a really notable event, she does, like, impromptu heart surgery on both her and the love interest. Oren: Oops! Chris: Where she wants to… she’s trying to save him and he’s evil. She needs to make him good again. So she… his heart has a ball of lead, right? But it’s just like lead around his heart. And so she gives him her heart instead. And, like, that’s not a thing you could do unless the setting is like super low realism, right? Because we all know that a person can’t actually just, “Hey, now it’s cool, I’ll do this myself, take out my heart, install it in somebody else, it’ll be fine.” And then somebody else… Bunny: It’s called organ donation, Chris, come on. Chris: And then the character comes along and is like, “What are you doing? You just need to take the lead wrap off of his heart.” And then takes the lead wrap off of his heart and puts it back in her. And so they have, you know, exchanged hearts, which of course is used later to be like, “Oh, his heart isn’t his own because you literally took his heart out and put yours in there.” So the point is that… Oren: Are we sure this isn’t, like, body horror? Chris: So the point is that we basically have a metaphorical logic that the plot actually uses, that, you know, would feel in place in a fairy tale, but once you make it so that world is like, “Okay, they live on the moon and it was terraformed,” then that starts to become very strange. Oren: Right. Chris: Because they have different levels of realism associated with them. Oren: There’s also just the question of things that seem more in theme with one explanation than another, right? Like, because if you’re doing the fantasy side and you can be like, “This staff is carved of hardwood and it bonds with your etheric image in the shadow world,” it’s like, “Okay, sure, uh, that could happen.” But you could try to do the same thing with sci-fi and it would just sound awkward. You’d be like, “This staff was grown from bio-engineered nano-wood and it links to your genetic signature,” and you’d have to… you’d be sitting there wondering like, “Why on Earth did someone make this?” You know, it just doesn’t seem right, even though it’s basically the same thing as the fantasy staff, functionally speaking; it just doesn’t fit thematically anymore. Bunny: I do think a good example, because there are some books where they’re like, “Here it looks like a fantasy world. Oh, I revealed it was really science all along.” A better example where things fit and they’re clearly designed to fit is in Joan D. Vinge’s Snow Queen. Oren: Mm-hmm. Bunny: And that one basically… you know, these chosen people on this planet get these powers where they can kind of answer a question and knowledge comes to their head, and then later you learn that there’s a big supercomputer in the planet that they’re connected to, that they’re getting that knowledge from. Oren: Yeah. Bunny: But also, even the language that Vinge puts in there, where people will say, like, “input” or something when they’re summoning this magical—supposedly magical knowledge just sets it up really well to be like, “Okay, yeah, I see how that would really be science,” which is very different from impromptu heart surgery. Chris: That’s not an element I’ve seen in literally any other book. So I guess points for the novelty. It kind of makes… again, in a very low-realism fairy tale, it does actually sort of make sense, right? When somebody’s been spinning cloth out of emotion and doing other things like that, you can set up a context, because you could absolutely read a Brothers Grimm story where that happens, for instance. Lots of unrealistic things happen in there, because we’re setting expectations that you can do things like that. Oren: Yeah. Maybe this might just be me: I just… when I’m reading a fantasy story and I can tell that there’s going to be a reveal that this is all really science, most of the time I just start rolling my eyes. I don’t know, it’s probably unfair of me. I’m sure there are ways to do that, that work or add something to the story, but to me it just… I’m just like left with this concept of, “Hey, we have all this technology and we decided to use it to recreate Middle Earth.” It’s like, “I guess. I can’t say you didn’t do that.” Chris: It’s the Ernest Klein school of thought, right? Oren: You occasionally have some space fantasies that are like one part or the other is kind of vestigial, and I kind of feel like they should have just, you know, gone full fantasy or full sci-fi. Like the first Gideon the Ninth book is like that, where theoretically this is space fantasy, but the space part barely matters and it just kind of raises some questions that are hard to answer for no real benefit. Chris: Yeah. So, planetary logistics are hard. Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: And I think that’s the thing that, honestly, probably makes space fantasy harder to write in a lot of times than regular fantasy or epic fantasy. Oren: Yeah. Chris: Which would be similar, ’cause a lot of times it’s at epic scale. So first of all, you know, travel is harder, and so having important plot stuff happen on another planet is a lot of times going to be tougher to deal with than something that’s happening in the next town over. Oren: This is true. Chris: You have to figure out how people get there and back. If you want to be realistic about your worldbuilding, there’s a question of: How is a huge space empire maintained? And the fact that, if it takes so long to get to the capital of the empire, are they actually capable of administering an empire that large? Oren: Yeah. Chris: But at least with that one, if you’re not trying to be too realistic, I think a lot of people wouldn’t realize that. Oren: Yeah, just fall back on space opera rules, okay? Like we all want space to work roughly equivalent to the ocean. That’s like the… that’s the parallel we want, even though most of these space operas just don’t really know how to grapple with how big a planet is. I still love… there are multiple Star Trek episodes where two towns of like 600 people each refuse to share a planet. It’s like, “No, if those people move onto this planet, they’ll be too close to us.” Chris: Right. This is scale just being too big for what you’re prepared for. Or, like in Rebel Moon, where it’s like, “We need the wheat harvest from this one village on this one planet.” It’s like, “Do you, though?” Oren: Yeah. Chris: Because you have an entire space military. I don’t think that this one village… I don’t think their wheat harvest is significant compared to the scale that this military would have to be. Oren: Right. And like with that, even if that wasn’t interplanetary, even if this was literally just the World War II scene where that’s copied from, it’s still like the wheat output of this one town is not going to be critical to the Nazi war machines, like, you know, entire campaign, right? So just the scale of it is just bizarre. Chris: Mm-hmm. Then there’s the issue of fighting and: Why not just bomb people from space? Why send ground troops? My favorite for that one is Cinder, which is the first book in a series, and the idea is that the villain… Bunny: Lunar Chronicles! Chris: … is going to invade another planet by sending her, like, werewolves, a werewolf army. And it’s just… Bunny: That’s definitely… this is science fantasy, I think. Or space fantasy or whatever term we want to use, ‘cause I think this is the prime example, maybe even more so than Star Wars. Chris: And it’s just, “Okay, so we have a technology level available where soldiers being werewolves is just not as significant as it would be in a fantasy setting, ’cause you know what matters, how big our guns are generally, and then why is she sending an army of werewolves instead of just bombarding Her enemies from space? Bunny: Pretty gosh, Chris. Oren: Yeah. It’s not sporting. Chris: Or, like, if you want your ground troops to have swords, right? Like, Dune has the whole… apparently the shields are not there to justify why people use swords. Oren: No, they’re not! Chris: Everybody has personal shields and apparently in the book, it’s not to justify everybody using swords. Oren: No. You would think it is, but it’s not, because in the book, swords can’t get through shields either, unless they’re moving really slowly. And not like slowly as in the speed of a sword blade slow, but like, you know, “I’m not touching you” slowly. Chris: Oh, and just to clarify, in case somebody’s just really not familiar with Dune, the shields we’re talking about are sci-fi energy shields, not physical shields. They have sci-fi energy shields, but metal swords in Dune. And apparently you can’t really pierce the shields with swords either. Oren: No, the only way to do it is basically to grapple your opponent and slowly push the knife through their shield. Bunny: So then they all use like daggers? Oren: No, they… because it doesn’t make any sense. It’s just… it’s very silly. I think the explanation… Bunny: There’s an army full of people with daggers because they have to all grapple each other and solely stab. Oren: So the explanation that they give in the opening of the book is that you are supposed to slow your strike down right before you make contact. But that obviously doesn’t work, because if you did that, your opponent would move out of the way. And I know that this doesn’t work because I have seen them try to choreograph it now, because in actual Dune, they immediately go to Arrakis, where shields don’t work in some places, and so they don’t have to worry about shields anymore, and they primarily just forget that shields exist. Bunny: But then do they use guns? Oren: No, because, again, that is not the purpose of the shields, even though it really seems like it is. But in Dune Prophecy now we have fights that take place off of Arrakis, and you notice that they immediately abandon the “slow knife penetrates the shield” thing, because how on Earth would you choreograph that? Chris: Yeah, so they have fights and they make it so the shields glow red, or, I think, is it blue? Depending on whether something is managing to pierce it. And a lot of times they seem to move pretty fast and the shield’s just red. It’s like, “Okay, I guess the shield just didn’t work that time and I’m not sure why.” Oren: Yeah, because it’s silly, ’cause it’s just… it’s a very weird thing. And it’s so weird that Herbert came up with what is probably the best explanation you’re ever going to get for swords in a sci-fi setting, and then chose not to use it! I can’t believe it. I feel like I’m losing my mind sometimes when I have to tell people about this part. Bunny: Look, for Dune Prophecy, they just retune the miles-per-hour toggle gauge on the shield. Oren: Yeah. They set their swords to a different frequency, so it’ll go through the shield. Chris: I mean, there is definitely something interesting about… there is a critical threshold, and your goal when you’re fighting is to get your blade just under the threshold so that it can get through the shield, but you only want it to be barely under, because if you’re slower than necessary, that gives you a disadvantage during fighting. So maybe that’s what they’re doing in Dune Prophecy. Oren: Maybe. Bunny: That’s also really hard to show, though. Chris: It would also be interesting if you had to slice at somebody really fast and then suddenly stop right before you get to their shield, and then move slowly, because, again, normally moving fast would still give you an advantage, so there could be some really interesting strategy there, and maybe that’s what they’re trying to do. But yeah. Bunny: On the flip side though, that would look really goofy. Oren: I mean, it would look silly and, like, I mean, I don’t know. I’m not a combat expert, right? I took fencing for a few years, and in that particular context, if my opponent had to slow down before they could get a touch on me, they would never get a touch on me, right? Like, I’m not a great fencer. I’m at best a mediocre fencer when I’m actively practicing, but I can parry a slow attack. Anybody can, and it’s not that hard. Bunny: I can step backwards. Oren: Yeah. You know, you’re constantly in motion when you’re fencing, and you are always doing something, so this idea that you’re going to slow down right before you hit them is like, “Well, what are they doing while you’re doing that?” At this point, it’s just like the only logical extension is that it’s just all grappling. You just grapple ’em and you hold ’em down like, “Okay, great. That’s where we’ve arrived at.” Chris: Yeah, I mean… Probably not what people want when they imagine a big army fighting. Oren: Right. And it’s not what Herbert wanted either, because he immediately stopped doing it. It’s just the strangest bit of worldbuilding I’ve seen in a long time. Chris: So yeah, planetary logistics? Not the easiest. And they certainly make space fantasy more complicated. Another one is, you know, the enemy is always on a big warship out in space and, like, how do you sneak up on them? Oren: Turtles. Chris: It’s not… It’s not impossible, but there’s just a lot of hard things in there to get through if you’re going to put everything with really high technology that could overpower things like swords and make it really far away. And also, you cannot see a planet blowing up in another galaxy, just FYI. Abrams, you cannot see that. That is not visible. Oren: If you believe in it in your heart, though… Chris: You could have maybe a small group of scientists at their equipment like 20 minutes later, because light travels across the distance in a non-instantaneous amount of time, being like, “Whoa, the spectrometer just made a weird noise.” Oren: The uh, sort of flip side of “the sci-fi part is so vestigial you could probably remove it” is when you start trying to explain the fantasy parts as sciencey and, you know, I’m not just talking about… Bunny: The midichlorians? Oren: Yeah, that’s the obvious example, right? It’s like, this didn’t need an explanation. It’s not a good one, right? Or, like, Star Trek occasionally does this. They have the one episode where they meet Satan. This is in the animated series. Bunny: Oh, yeah. Oren: And they try to scientifically explain Satan and it’s like, “Okay, sure, Star Trek.” Chris: Yeah. I mean, I won’t say that you can never give a scientific explanation if you’ve set up well for it, but usually it’s unnecessary and it’s so likely to go wrong that simply leaving it out is better, ’cause the risks of it going wrong are high and the benefits are questionable. Oren: Yeah. Bunny: And it’s also like if you’re… especially if you’re trying to go for science fantasy or space fantasy or whatever we’re going to call it (let’s just call it science fantasy, I think), then presumably you’re not really trying to distance yourself from the fantasy part, right? We can just have the Force, you guys. You don’t need to make it, oh, perfect-rational-headed-whatever science. No fantasy. Chris: Just call it something other than magic and you’re good. Bunny: Really! [24:55] Oren: I also have noticed, and this isn’t going to be a problem for every author, but if the author already has a tendency to make their technology or their magic really complicated or just very hard to follow, adding the two together can make it worse, ’cause I’ve seen some books that have all the problems of a hard sci-fi novel that overexplains everything, and also all the problems of a nonsense fantasy world where the magic doesn’t make any sense. And Ninefox Gambit is one of the perfect examples where they have this bizarre calendrical magic system that makes their technology work. So if you go into an area operating on the Jewish calendar and you’re using the Gregorian calendar, your ships all just fall apart. And they just spend so long explaining this, and it does not make any sense from any context. Chris: Yeah, that book was actually really hard to follow. I was listening to it in audio, and so, I guess, if I had been reading it visually, I might have, you know, stopped more and tried to read certain portions again, but it was just… there was so much exposition and it was just like, “I don’t know what’s happening,” so I just let it flow over me, like, “Okay, whatever. I’m just going to…” I mean, the thing is that at that point, even if you do that, you at some level don’t understand what’s happening and things are not going to be as riveting anymore. Oren: Yeah. I mean, the final battle is basically just a blur of technobabble in my imagination, right? There’s something about threshold winnowers, which do something. Chris: I’m impressed that you even remember any of these terms. Oren: I remember… I mean, the calendar thing really stuck out to me because it’s basically the consensus reality thing that you see in a lot of roleplaying games like Mage: the Ascension, but for some reason with calendars only. Chris: And, like, your guns depend on the calendar. It’s like, “Why does your gun depend on the calendar?” Oren: It’s… look, it’s because everything is an app now, and it’s like Y2K. The whole setting is tied to Y2K. Bunny: We all know that if the Lunar New Year ever happens on January 1st, the world explodes. Oren: That’s just how it works, okay? God help you if you run into some place using the Julian calendar. You are just… your day is ruind forever. Bunny: Time is a construct! And that’s why guns are constructs too, and that’s why one equals the other. Oren: So, like… Chris: My gun shoots January. Oren: This is not a guaranteed… it’s not like this is an automatic problem that every space fantasy is going to have. It’s just that if you are inclined towards one or the other of those issues, putting them together can make them worse. So just be aware, ’cause you’re opening up new avenues for things to get confusing. Bunny: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Chris: Do you want to talk about the Dune show? Have we just finished the first season? Oren: Yeah, well, you know… Bunny: Don’t sound so excited about it. Chris: It’s complicated because it actually ended better than I expected. Oren: Yeah! Chris: The end of the season was actually pretty good, but it definitely has a rough start, partly because they’re trying to fit a Game of Thrones-level intrigue into… how many episodes? Not very many. Oren: Six. Chris: Six. And they do the thing that I have to tell my clients not to do, where you can’t just have your stakes be, “Oh, we need to avoid The Reckoning!” Oren: The Reckoning! Chris: Because you have to tell people what is The Reckoning, what practical effect will it have, or else the stakes are just not very powerful. And so it just does tons of vaguery, where it’s like we don’t have any reason to root for anybody, like we’re supposed to root for the women who are doing eugenics. Like that’s who we’re supposed to root for? Oren: Or maybe we’re not, right? I mean… Chris: Or maybe we’re not. Oren: I’m sure if we asked the showrunner, they would say, “No, you’re not supposed to root for anyone. It’s not so simplistic.” It’s like, “Okay, sure. But what do I care about, then? What is happening that makes me care about the next series of events?” Chris: Right. It’s like, “Why should we root for any of the characters? What are they fighting over? What are the stakes of this situation?” Like those foundational storytelling things are just absent. Oren: Yeah. Chris: And especially in the beginning, and… I mean, if you could tell… for me, I’ve gotten more attached to the characters, the Bene Gesserit characters, as the show went, and that gave me a reason to care, and then when there’s a clear threat to them, then it’s like, “Okay, now there’s some stakes.” But it was… you know, not everybody would have that experience, and it was definitely very shaky to start. Oren: Yeah. So, most of that show’s problems are not really derived from the fact that it is space fantasy, right? It’s just too complicated and they don’t give you any reason to care what’s happening or explain what’s happening. But there is one element that is a very common space fantasy problem, which is that they don’t really know what to do with the magic. Because, spoilers, one of the characters has fire powers and they all want to act like this is really impressive. But it’s not really because like, sure, he can burn people, but most of the time it seems like he can only do it to people who are in the same room as him. Chris: We spend several episodes debating whether he could do it across the galaxy or not, which is a huge difference. Like, one of those powers is overpowered and one of them is underpowered. Oren: Right. And the show doesn’t really seem to know which one it is. Chris: And then is it like only somebody that who’s right in front of him that he’s staring at, because he could just stab or shoot so much easier, and there’s also a cost to him when he does it; he actually injures himself. So it’s like, “You really should stab that person. You really should stop using those fire powers. Those are not good for you.” And we weren’t sure if he could do it long-distance, but it seems like he can’t actually. Oren: Right. And then we get… we actually explain it, which is that he apparently gives people a virus and that somehow makes them set themselves on fire. Like, not as an action. It just… they start burning, ’cause that’s a thing viruses can do. And maybe it’s a tech virus, I don’t know. It is like… this is the… you know, we are trying to scientifically explain a magical power, and we are just creating more questions every time we try to answer one. Chris: There is one interesting thing in there that I do think fits the setting, which is there is some… they had a previous war against intelligent programs, machines, and now they won that war, but now there’s definitely conflict over people wanting to keep some intelligent machines around for their capabilities, even though they’re very much illegal, right? And some conflict over whether they should be keeping any or destroying them all. Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: But that’s kind of like in the background, like it appears, but that’s something that I think would be easier to explain and understand if we wanted to do a gray conflict, right? Over when is it justified to keep these dangerous machines around and when is it not? And people, you know, could fight over that. Oren: Well, I agree. And with that, I think we will go ahead and end this podcast, which is both scientific and magical, you should know. Chris: And if you would like to tell me that I’m wrong about space fantasy versus science fantasy, you can do so by becoming a Patreon at patreon.com/mythcreants, and then you can yell at me in the comments section. Oren: I mean, come on. The thing they want to yell at us about is me saying the shields don’t make sense. I already know there are essays being written about that. But 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’ll talk to you next week. [music] Outro: This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.