Have you ever wondered what it was all about, maaaaaaan? A lot of writers have, and they love to put such philosophizing in their work. When it works, we get The Good Place. When it doesn’t, we get weird interlude chapters that exist for no purpose but to lecture us. This week, we’re talking about how to get closer to the former rather than the latter. That means a discussion of moral dilemmas, what certain philosophers said, and something called “gothstatic wronging.” Or maybe it was “dogtastic wronging.” The world may never know.Show Notes The Good Place The Trolley Problem  Sandwich Discourse  Doxastic Wronging  Death Wish The High Ground  The Measure of a Man Past Tense  Plato Aristotle  John Stuart Mills  Machiavelli  Marx  Paley’s Watchmaker Argument  Kant  Bobiverse  The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas  American Born ChineseTranscript Generously transcribed by Ari. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Intro:  You are listening to the Mythcreants Podcast. With your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny.   [Music] Bunny: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Bunny, and with me is- Oren: Oren. Bunny: And- Chris: Chris  Bunny: I’ve noticed that there’s been a lot of this, like, what’s the meaning of life stuff and blah, d’blah, and people just love going on about that. But me, I figured it out. Life is meaningless without podcasts. Easy. I don’t know what these philosophers are on about. [laughter] Oren: Podcasticism, we’ll call it. Chris: It’s the answer to life, the universe and everything.  Bunny: Exactly. You thought it was 43? Oh no, child. It’s podcasts. If only all of those old philosophers had podcasts, they would understand it too. Actually, that’d be terrible. Oren: Part of our philosophy is that when we make Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy references, we intentionally make them wrong so that everyone can quickly type comments about how it’s 42, not 43!   Bunny: Oh, well, excuse me. Oren: We did that on purpose to make you think! Hmm. Bunny: It’s comedic genius and also very smart. Chris: Honestly, if you want a bunch of speculative fiction nerds to start spouting philosophy, just ask them what the meaning of different genres are.   Oren: Oh, no!  [laughter]   Bunny: Oh, I love genre discourse. I love ontology! It’s the stupidest thing ever! Oren: It hurts. It hurts so much, every time! They’re like, ‘science fiction is what’s pushing boundaries, and fantasy is what’s exploring the past.’ Oh God. I can find like a bunch of stories that are pushing the boundaries and have wizards and dragons. Are you gonna call that science fiction? Anyway I’m done. Moving on.   [laughter] Bunny: Ontology is, which is essentially like, what is it and what’s it like? Is definitely like the most obnoxious field of philosophy, and that’s why I love it. Chris: You mean it’s like sandwich discourse?  Bunny: It’s like, sandwich discourse is ontology. That’s- how do we define a sandwich? That’s exactly what ontology is.  Chris: It’s been fun sometimes though, looking into that.  Bunny: Oh, it’s great fun! It’s obnoxious, but it’s so much fun. I love it! Chris: We had a whole argument about what wizards are. [laughter] Oren: I may have had less fun with that than everyone else. I don’t know.   Bunny: My roommate once asked me as a brain teaser, ‘Do you think there are more doors or wheels in the world?’ And then I like turned it around on him and I was like, ‘all right, define a door.’ [laughter] And this went on for hours. Oren: That explains why I heard someone shout ‘fatality!’ a while back. Oof.   Bunny: Today we’re gonna be talking about writing stories that explore philosophy without just writing either an essay or a manifesto. Both of which you could do, but they probably won’t be stories.  Oren: Probably not gonna sell great as fiction. Chris: Yeah. I had somebody recently ask me about, can you blend fiction [and] non-fiction and make my story teach something? And there are stories that try to teach philosophy, but the trick is to use the mechanics of the story and not to get tempted into putting in lectures. And think people are really tempted to do lectures because they want to say more than they can fit if it’s actually embedded in the story. And so they’re just really tempted to have those interludes. Oren: Look, I spent five hours googling this, and now I’m gonna make it your problem.   [laughter] Bunny: Otherwise, the research will be for naught! I’d say that generally some people might have trouble coming up with philosophical conflicts. Like I’ve noticed that there are stories that treat something obvious as a philosophical conflict. Usually it’s anti utilitarianism, but we can get into that later. But generally, the good rule of thumb is it’s a philosophical conflict if someone could really disagree with it, like heartily, and have good reasons for that. Like make a sound case against whatever case you are making. This is why philosophers bicker. Oren: I would say that to have a story that explores philosophy, it’s not like you necessarily need to be communing with the collected works of Plato. You can have philosophical arguments that are not from the great well known philosophers. It’s just a question of, is this something that actually has any interest in being argued or is there just one really obvious answer? Bunny: That’s a good point. So when I’m talking about philosophy, I don’t mean putting Aristotle in your fantasy world.  Chris: Also, is this another trolley problem? Because can we stop with the trolley problems?  Bunny: No more trolley problems.  Chris: I’m sure we’ll talk more about “The Good Place” since its the ultimate example of this, but I do find it very funny that in “The Good Place”, when they talk about the trolley problem and they start doing a bunch of trolley problem simulations, it turns out that is just a trick by a demon to torture them using the trolley problem. [laughter] It’s not really for any value other than just making them feel bad.  Bunny: An accurate representation. Oren: The reason why the good place works so well is that “The Good Place” has a lot of philosophy with the capital “PH”, I guess from the big ones from Aristotle and from Marx and from John Stewart Mill probably; there’s a bunch of them in there. But the actual message of “The Good Place” is very straightforward, which is that people can get better and they deserve a chance to get better. That’s the actual statement about humans that the show is trying to make, and the rest of it basically is to fulfill specific plot points. Chris: I do think that it is important in “The Good Place” when it comes to… they want to actually teach philosophy to their viewer to some extent; that learning philosophy is the main character’s way of solving problems. And so she has a reason to sit down and learn philosophy, and the audience has a reason to watch that happen [laughter] because there are stakes where she has to become a, a good person or go to hell are the options. Betting it in the story using story mechanics is really important and you can do quite a lot. And I tell people, ‘Hey, if there’s specific kinds of scenes that you wanna have, make that your character’s way of solving a problem.’ And “The Good Place” does that with lots of learning ethical philosophy.  Bunny: That’s a very straightforward way to do it. Your character has to learn philosophy and thus you put philosophy [in] your story. I do think that some philosophical arguments would be easier or harder to convey in a context that would be relevant to a story. Like for example, there’s this concept of doxastic wronging, which basically means wronging someone without expressing a belief in any way. So if you have racist beliefs towards someone, the idea is that you are wronging them even if you never express those beliefs. And that’s really hard to convey in a story because by definition those beliefs are unexpressed. So like good luck telling a story about doxastic wronging where nobody ever acts on their beliefs and thus it’s very hard to have a story. Oren: Someone who is subconsciously racist wouldn’t count, like someone who doesn’t think of themselves as racist but checks their wallet twice after having business dealings with a Jew. That doesn’t count as sarcastic racism.   [laughter] Bunny: Doxastic!   Oren: Ducks-astic? I’m not gonna say that, right. I’m sorry.   [laughter] Bunny: Uh, well, okay, so just. So ‘doxastic’ comes from ‘doxa’, which just means opinion. Doxastic wronging is like wronging someone with an opinion. It’s very you- what you’ll learn here is that philosophers love making up fancy terms for words that we already have terms for like, opinion. [laughter] According to the philosopher who’s currently like putting out essays and stuff on this, I know it’s a modern philosopher, it’s not Plato, is that any like racist belief, even the person who doesn’t think they’re racist, is still being racist. This theory doesn’t go so much into stuff like what is objectively racist or not. It presumes that there are these things and if there are then having a racist belief about someone directly wrongs them. And one of the problems with this belief not to get in, or this theory not to get into it too much, is that it doesn’t define what wronging is. So I guess you’re shooting like mental lasers that create magical wronging fields around someone.  Oren: (making sound effect) bweenh bweeh-bweeh bweenh Bunny: Yeah, that’s what it sounds like.  Chris: See, I would just say that theoretically somebody who harbors a lot of racist beliefs are going to express those in some way, shape, or form, right? And so that seems… [laughter] Bunny: And so the impracticality of these- of certain philosophical theories like this one, because it requires these things being unexpressed, would make it hard to tell a story. Chris: But I would say most philosophies have hypotheticals that they use in their arguments that you could just make them real, right? And put them in your story, which also could reveal how realistic they actually are, which is a hilarious thing about Atlas Shrugged. [I gotta] take some digs at Atlas Shrugged because it’s over a thousand pages long and I read the whole thing in high school. Uh, but it’s just very funny because it’s so weirdly unrealistic, because reality in that book follows what Ayn Rand thinks reality is. Uh, there’s a character that like, [runs] in terror because somebody loves them unconditionally.  Oren: Aaaah! Bunny: Whenever I see my parents, I just like, bolt in the opposite direction.  [laughter] Chris: And of course we’ve got Galt’s Gulch where somehow all of the rich people leave to create their science fiction paradise. Oren: Rich people are great at farming. This is just a known fact. Chris: Right? Without any labor. Oren: Yeah. Bunch of subsistence farmer billionaires up there. Chris: ‘Cause all of their employees were apparently just freeloaders, [in] Ayn Rand’s mind. Um, and that’s what it takes to try to show her philosophy is doing really odd things like that, that are just clearly not realistic.  Bunny: And it’s definitely a good indicator of whether a theory is reasonable or not is how far you have to stretch to come up with scenarios that seem to counter it. Like if you can come up with a normal everyday scenario that like, violates the premise of your argument, it’s probably not a good argument. But if you have to be like, imagine a universe of cows and these cows have teapots, and what if the cows all poured their teapots at once? You’re like, I think maybe that’s not a very good counter argument. Maybe that argument that you’re trying to counter argue is stronger than the point you’re making against it. Oren: But my precious cow teapot world. [laughter] So I don’t know if I have anything as cool as that, like “dog-tastic” stuff you were talking about earlier, [laughter] but uh, I did do, my contribution to this episode is I talked to our patron, Kathy Ferguson, who I cite at the end of each episode as teaching political theory in Star Trek, and that includes some philosophy and, [in] Star Trek what that means is that she uses different Star Trek episodes as a way to illustrate the different philosophers and their ideas to her students. And I have a list! And I am fascinated by it. We don’t have to go through all of ’em necessarily, but I wanted to mention a few of them. Chris?: Let’s hear it. Let’s- Oren: Okay, so my favorite, the one that like, is really interesting to me, is when she uses the Voyager episode “Death Wish” to illustrate the ideas of Plato and Socrates. Chris: Which one is “Death Wish”? Oren: “Death Wish” is the episode where they meet a Q who wants to die.  Chris: Oh. Oren: And the reason, and this is like I wouldn’t say that this is a good idea necessarily for most types of characters, but the Q are so weird and omniscient and they know everything. And so his point isn’t really so much about death as we would understand it, because the Q are so different and strange. To him, it’s more like, ‘I wanna see what happens next’, and the other Q are like, ‘nah, no, that’s dangerous. You have no idea what would happen. We can’t risk it.’ And so he takes on the role that would be called “the dissident citizen” who goes around and like, tries to bother everyone and make them question what they know and if he’s anything like Plato, tell them to be less democratic, I guess. [laughter] Bunny?: Don’t get me started on the Republic. Oren: Yeah, so that’s, that is how that episode is used as [an] introduction to Plato and Socrates. It’s not like, it’s reading that episode is the equiv- or it’s not like watching that episode is the equivalent of reading “The Republic”, but it gives you like, an interesting, entertaining sci-fi version of it.  Bunny: Interesting. I tried to read the synopsis of that episode and was very confused by it. I think, because I don’t have the proper context, and I was like, ‘I guess it’s about euthanasia, but it sounds like it’s more nuanced than that.’ I was trying to figure out how euthanasia related to Plato. Oren: The end does have a very obvious Socrates reference because at the end, Quinn is the name of the Q who wants to die. The other Q, the main character Q who was trying to stop him, is brought around to his way of thinking and Gives him some hemlock. Bunny: Oh wow. Oren: Some magical Q hemlock and it’s like, man, yeah. I wonder what that’s a reference to. We may never know. [laughter] And obviously it’s not the same, like, Socrates was executed. He was forced to take hemlock by the state. Whereas this is something that Quinn wants to do as an experiment so it’s not identical, but the parallel is obvious. Um, then there are some other ones like that are really easy, like the deep space nine episode “Past Tense” which is the one that’s supposed to take place in 2024, so that’s fun, which is an episode about extreme poverty and class warfare and alienation of the working class when their dignity is taken away. And can you guess which philosopher that is used for? [laughter] If you need more than one guess, then I’m taking marks (Marx) off your report.  Chris and Bunny: Oh. Whoa. Oh! Oren laughs   Bunny: Does Kathy use that one?   Oren: She does! [laughter] She’s a fan of puns. So that one’s pretty self-explanatory, right? Because that’s the only other- you could also use the one where they, where they form a union and quote from the Communist Manifesto. [laughter] I think that “Past Tense” is actually a bit more direct in showing the deprivations that people face, you know, have under wealth inequality whereas the union episode is a little bit more comedic. The one that I don’t get, and Kathy explained this to me and I still don’t get it, was that she uses “The Measure of a Man” to illustrate the philosophy of John Stewart Mill, who is a philosopher I have no context for. I at least know something about Marx and Plato, uh, Mill I’m just like, I guess that was a guy, presumably. And Kathy explained it as like he had ideas about individuality and self-creation and, sorry, that went completely over my head. I’m just like, ‘yeah, that’s, that definitely makes sense. Mm-Hmm. I wanna get good grades.” Chris?: Smile and nod.  [laughter] Bunny: Well, embarrassingly John Stewart Mill is one of the philosophers I don’t really know. But just again, having looked at the plot synopsis, it does bring back our good old friend ontology and a bit of metaphysics in how we define intelligence and consciousness. And it seems to conclude that we can’t, or at least that there’s no satisfactory answer. Uh, in the case of Data, because this is the one about- Oren: Whether Data’s a person. Bunny: Yeah. Whether Data’s a person. So that’s what is a person and what are they like? And that’s ontology. Oren: Yeah. And for storytelling purposes, they have to leave it open because they wanna maybe do this sort of episode again. [laughter] ‘We can’t say if Data is a person or not because that would limit the number of episodes we could do in the future.’ Bunny: Whoops.   Chris: That’s a good example of having two characters, again, get in conflict to bring out philosophy, right? And argue different viewpoints from each other.  Bunny: And I think conveying characters’ philosophical perspectives and using those to shape worldviews and create conflict between characters is a really good way to bring philosophy into your story, [perhaps] a way that’s not like story level per se, but certainly like relevant in creating your characters. So there’s a bunch of different things that your characters might have distinct philosophies on. One of the big obvious ones is like their religious outlook. So if there’s someone who takes, I think it’s like Paley, I’m pretty sure it’s Paley’s Watch in the watchmaker argument, which is essentially an intelligent design argument. The theory is you find a watch in a forest and you can presume that the watch was made and just did not appear there. And basically it makes the same argument about the universe. So someone who takes that viewpoint might find like, beauty and perfection in like even mundane things, and that could be an interesting viewpoint. Another big one, that’s something that varies a lot between cultures is like, how do we view the mind body problem? Which is; is the mind distinction in the body? If so, how? Like, how does that work? So dualism. Oren: I have several problems with my mind and body. Can I consolidate them into one problem? Sometimes that’s easier to deal with.   Bunny: Oh, I wouldn’t be- I wouldn’t be so fast to, uh, make two problems into one bigger one.  Oren: Oh, I see. Is that a philosophy faux pa?   [laughter] Bunny: Uh, no, that’s just advice.   [laughter] Chris: So we have another patron who is a professor of philosophy, [laughter] apparently, just know a lot of these people [laughter].   Oren: Accruing philosophers, up in here. What is happening? What kind of vibes are we giving off? [laughter] Bunny: By which you mean two, who both like to argue.  Chris: We have another blog post on the site from her and hopefully we will get another on this one from Sophia Jeppsson and she talks about using deontology for like having a principled hero and what that would actually mean. And I found that kind of interesting because boiling down, and this is like philosophers like Kant, hopefully it was notorious for having this idea that if a murderer asks you where your friend is so that the murderer can murder your friend you’re supposed to not lie. But no, in a more practical sense this is about, basically respect and holding everybody to the same standards.  Bunny: Uh-huh, it’s basically the golden rule. It’s ‘treat others the way you want to be treated’. Don’t treat others as, like, ‘a mere means’ is the way he puts it. Stuff like that. Chris: But also just not being paternalistic when it comes to things like withholding information Because you shouldn’t be making choices for other people because you’re putting yourself above them, for instance. Oren: I read a book recently that all I could think of was, ‘y’all need Kant.’ ‘Cause it was a second book in the Bobiverse series and the protagonists, who are a bunch of sentient spaceships by this point, find like an alien planet with some industrial age ferret aliens on it. And the big bads are gonna come and kill everything on the planet and they can’t be stopped. So the good guys are like, ‘all right, we need to evacuate as many of the ferret aliens as we can. But obviously we can’t take more than a small number of them.’ And instead of being like, ‘Hey, alien ferrets, here’s the situation. Help us figure out who we should take with us.’ They just kidnap a bunch of them in the night and then leave.   [laughter] Bunny: What? Oren: And I was like, ‘no!’ And they justify it by being like ‘if we told them there’d be mass chaos’, and it’s like, well maybe. But you don’t have the right to decide that! For all you know, They might have an answer and be like, ‘please take as many of our children as you can.’ Or maybe they’d be like, ‘here, take these ones. These are the ones who know all of our important cultural stories. Take them!’ We don’t know what they would’ve done and we’ll never find out ’cause you didn’t give them the chance. Y’all need Kant!    [laughter] Chris: Get some deontology in that story.   Bunny: Have you let Kant into your heart? Oren: Can I speak to you about our Lord and Savior, Kant?   [laughter] Bunny: Ethical outlooks, obviously, I feel like people do philosophy in their stories without meaning to because often a big source of conflict is ethical conflicts. And usually that’s the conflict between the hero and the villain, but you can also have conflict between protagonists who have different ethical outlooks on the world. Certainly, we just talked about the trolley problem. One of the ones that comes up a lot because it’s really basic is utilitarianism. It’s easy to explain; maximize pleasure, minimize pain. That’s basically the guiding principle and maybe the most obvious story that does this is “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”. Oren: Oh yeah, that’s a story for sure.   Bunny: That is, of all the stories, that is one of them.   Oren: God, they’re calling us about that damn kid again, aren’t they?  Bunny: It’s a kid. It’s always a kid. [laughter] It’s basically, so a city believes it’s only happy so long as it tortures this young child. Not tortures it, but like neglects it. And then The Ones Who Walk Away are the ones who object to this philosophy. And so this is basically a critique of utilitarianism because utilitarianism would justify the position that you torture and neglect this kid so long as the happiness produced is greater than the kids suffering, blah blah.   Oren: See, this is why I always thwart all attempts at utilitarianism by becoming a utility monster. My favorite concept is like if you can mess up utilitarianism by enjoying things more than everyone else. And so if you enjoy a cookie a thousand times more than other people, you should get all the cookies, [laughter] because you’ll be generating the most enjoyment. [laughter] I have no idea how that could possibly work in a real world scenario, but I want to be it. That’s my goal now. Bunny: This is your aspiration. It’s good to have dreams.   [laughter] Oren: To be clear, I’m generally a utilitarian. Everyone has a certain amount of all of these things, and it’s when the answer becomes unclear that we have to search our feelings. Bunny: I mean, my hottest take about philosophy is just that it’s feelings all the way down. Chris: So somebody did a study looking at the way people solve ethical questions by looking at the Reddit Am I The Asshole? subreddit. And what was interesting there is they found the biggest number of questions that needed [to be addressed] were about relationships and obligations. Which again, is something that when we talk about a lot of philosophical questions, is we’re assuming everything the same in people’s relationships to each other is the same, whereas a lot of those real life quandaries were very much like, okay, what do I owe my boss, my spouse, my kid? And what is fair given that interpersonal relationship? Which I found very interesting.   Oren: Now I wanna know if there’s any way to judge how many of those stories are real. I don’t know. It feels like most of ’em are made up, but I don’t have a statistic there. Chris: Yeah actually relating to that, one dilemma that I found interesting was in “American Born Chinese”, because it has the same argument and what it does is it has it pop up in parallel in several different times in several different storylines in different ways, but it’s still the same argument. And it’s between the Chinese characters who are dealing with systemic oppression. And you have one character that just wants to go with the flow and fit in, and the other character that insists on taking big risks and sometimes pushes the character that wants to go with the flow into kind of upsetting the system and taking big risks and that being a big disagreement. So I found that one really interesting in the fact that it… the same argument was used in several different places in the story.  Bunny: And that’s a good sign that it’s being approached in different scenarios that could put it in [a] new light. And perhaps, I don’t know, I haven’t seen “American Born Chinese”, but perhaps providing a perspective that’s like, here’s another scenario that might challenge the way you think about this dilemma that keeps reappearing. Oren: Oh, I know another way. That is a very easy way to work philosophy into your story, which is just to pick a philosopher who was also like a statesman, because they often have really specific scenarios. So like you do Machiavelli and everyone knows Machiavelli’s famous, like, uh, “better to be feared than loved”, but you can get way more weird and specific with it. Like he also has opinions about locally raised soldiers versus mercenaries. So if you have a story about a character who is trying to get their city to switch from mercenary companies to using locally trained soldiers. Congratulations, that’s philosophy now. Bunny: Homegrown organic, grass fed soldiers. Oren: It’s like, look, Machiavelli, I get it. Everyone in theory agrees that home raised soldiers are better, but you don’t always have a population. If you’re a small Italian city state with lots of money and very few people, where do you think those homegrown soldiers are gonna come from, Nicolo? I have questions.   [laughter] Bunny: If you listen to Plato, they spring from the earth with a certain amount of metal in their souls that determines what class they are. Oren: Okay. Can we like, separate that from ’em when they die? ‘Cause that seems like leaving money on the table otherwise. Bunny: Yeah, you can smelt the soldiers I guess.  Chris: Speaking of which, I can’t believe we got through a philosophy podcast episode without talking about Plato’s Cave. [laughter] Bunny: Oh yes, the allegory of the cave. Oren: I’ve seen the matrix. I’m familiar. [laughter] Chris: Go into the cave and get a bunch of soldiers. Then do you have soldiers or not?  Bunny: See, the funny part is that the cave is part of “The Republic”. Like the allegory of the cave is an extension of “The Republic” that’s meant to illustrate things. In the logic of “The Republic”, the commoners, the toilers, the workers are the people stuck in the cave. And the guardians, the philosopher kings, are the ones who have made it out of the cave. But then the auxiliaries, the like, soldiers who are above the working class but below the guardians are like kind of partway out of the cave? They’re sort of in the mouth of the cave? [laughter] Kind of starts breaking down there. Chris: Yeah, it sounds like an analogy that’s being stretched way too far.   Oren: What’s important is that it just so happens that the people who are best qualified to be in charge are the same group of people who are writing this book. That was a really happy coincidence.   Bunny: The least likely part of Plato’s “Republic” is thinking that philosopher kings would stop bickering long enough to run a republic. Oren: If we had philosopher kings, we wouldn’t have all those problems we have under boring, normal kings. We’d have different, much more exciting problems! Bunny?: It’s true. Chris: Speaking of which, if you would like to make us your philosopher kings- Bunny: 10 out of 10 a plus pivot. Chris: Go to patreon dot com slash Mythcreants and it will happen eventually. [laughter] Oren: I do think we’re gonna have to call this episode to a close, but before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber, who’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, there’s Kathy Ferguson who contributed some material for this episode. So thank you, Kathy. We will talk to you all next week. [Music] This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening, closing theme, The Princess who saved herself by Jonathan Colton.

The podcast dives into the delicate art of incorporating dark content in storytelling. It explores why authors choose to venture into grim themes, discussing both the risks and rewards. Engaging examples illustrate the balance between realism and fantasy, emphasizing authentic character reactions. The conversation critiques the misinterpretation of fiction as a reflection of human behavior, and highlights the importance of meaningful choices that deepen emotional impact. Ultimately, it offers insights on how to successfully navigate the dark side of storytelling.

Villains need to be cool and intimidating, but that doesn’t mean they have to spend the whole story locked up in their spooky towers. With the right setup, your villain can be a major character, getting a lot of screen time and development, all without ruining their threat level or bringing the plot to a screeching halt. How do you make that happen? We’re happy to explain! Plus, you get to hear about why Bunny has such a crush on villain romances.Show Notes Designing a Memorable Villain in Prose  Villain Viewpoints  Mustache Twirlers  Dead Boy Detectives  Vecna  Hugh   Mysterious Benedict Academy  Spinning Silver  A Study in Drowning  This Is How You Lose the Time War  Children of Blood and Bone Maximus  Kylo Ren 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] Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren. And with me is…  Chris: Chris. Oren: And…  Bunny: Bunny. Oren: So today, Chris and I are the heroes of the podcast, and as we established four or five episodes ago, Bunny is the villain. She’s the evil puppet master villain.  Bunny: [Evil laugh] Oren: That’s good. That’s good. We want her to be in the episode too. So we’re gonna do a bunch of cutaways where Bunny can monologue about her evil plan.  Bunny: I need to come up with an evil plan, which I’ve had this entire time. I think I’m going to, for big and terrible reasons, I think I’m going to start throwing cats off of cliffs. [Evil laugh]  Oren: No! Kitties. It’s all right. They have parachutes. Chris: I mean, that will be very effective.  Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Laugh] Oren: And just say that you’re gonna do that. Every time we cut to you be like, “I’m gonna start, I’m gonna start one of these days.” Chris: Just hold a box of kitties. And then every cut scene, you’re 10 feet closer to this cliff that’s several hundred yards away. [Laughs] Bunny: Then I can like monologue to the cat. I’m gonna be like, “Oh, you’re gonna fall off that cliff so bad one of these days. Any moment.” Oren: So this episode is about making your villain a major character. I’ve noticed that this is the standard in TV and movies. The villain is often very present. I have an article about making the villain memorable, but this is related but not the same. It’s a little different. In TV and film, the villain almost always has a bunch of screen time. There are exceptions, but they tend to be very around, whereas in most books that I have read, the opposite is the case. The villain is often off screen for most of the story. If you interact with them at all, it’s through seeing evidence of their presence in the world. You don’t come face to face with them very often.  And as a result, I think that’s another reason why movies and TV tend to have more memorable villains than books do. That’s just the nature of the medium sometimes. But I do think that maybe there are ways authors could make their villains more present and that would make them something that people would think on more about from the books. Chris: I do think it’s worth just going into why we don’t usually recommend villain viewpoints, because this is the main big difference why visual mediums cut to villains so often and narrated ones typically don’t, is because narrated work typically has point of view where when we narrate a scene, we are in that character’s head. And this tends to not work very well with villains because being in a viewpoint of a character just inherently makes them feel more familiar and better understood. And as a result, they tend to be more sympathetic and less threatening. Usually what we want is for the villain to be threatening. So that kind of works against what their purpose is. And sometimes it even sets the wrong expectations. A viewpoint can also mean that a character is an important protagonist, and they might even think that the villain is going to convert over to Team Good and then be disappointed when they don’t. We talked before about mustache twirlers and how common it is, and writers definitely have a little more trouble making their villain feel real and nuanced. And unless the villain’s characterization is really good, putting scene in their point of view will really bring that to light and make them look bad. Whereas if they were more mysterious, maybe the readers wouldn’t have noticed. Oren: Or even just from the outside, not even necessarily more mysterious, but just not seeing events through their eyes. You spend so much work developing your characters that, doing that for a villain, just so that the villain can be a little more present in the story, developing their own narration, and then their voice. I don’t know. I just don’t think it’s worth it. Chris: This is something that honestly, also can be a problem in filmed works. Does your villain have anything to do in their POV scene or cutaway other than cackle about their scheme? [Laughs] Bunny: Look, I’ll have, you know, I’m holding a cat right now, Chris. Chris: [Laughs] Cackle and pet their evil cat evilly, but we were watching Dead Boy Detectives recently, for instance, and the season villains, you know, even the ones that seemed strong to start with. By the end I just disliked all of them because of the frequent cutaways and then the cackling, and then the cut back to the protagonist. And then another cutaway to the villain and some more, “Ha ha ha. Cackle scheming, scheming.” And they’re not really doing anything. Oren: The Night Nurse was especially bad. The witch wasn’t great either, but with the Night Nurse, mild spoilers, we just constantly cut back to her being like, “And when I get the paperwork signed, Bunny: Oh, not the paperwork. Oren: I guess that could have worked as a joke if it was funny, but it just wasn’t funny. It was just very like, “Yeah, we’re waiting, waiting for you to get that paperwork signed. For sure.” Bunny: You don’t want to like the villain in the way that you would like a hero, but you also can’t be just relentlessly annoyed by them in the way that makes you want to put the book down. Oren: It certainly didn’t help that the Night Nurse’s character was this extremely bombastic, constantly yelly type villain. Not a funny one. It was just, very loud is the most consistent trait I can give the Night Nurse. It was a very odd combination. At least the witch was interesting. But even so, when we keep cutting back to the witch over and over again and she’s like, “I’m gonna get those dead boys one day. You wait. Just wait. I’m gonna do it.”  Bunny, Oren: [Chuckle] Bunny: I was thinking about when you might not want to have the villain be a major character, and I think the obvious one is where you want the villain to be mysterious by definition. And then obviously you don’t want, when there’s not really a villain to begin with. If you are battling a hurricane, the conflict of your story is getting people out of the way of a hurricane, right? The hurricane will be there, but that’s not really a villain, right? Chris: I mean, maybe the hurricane talks, you know. [Chuckles]  Bunny: Maybe the hurricane talks. That’s true. You could have a well fleshed out, evil hurricane, and I would read that. Oren: Are you going to not believe it? If I introduce a mysterious NPC named Her A. Cane and they’re friendly and they want to be the protagonist’s best buddy. You’re not gonna see that coming?   Chris, Oren: [Chuckle] Bunny: Oh, nothing’s up with good friend Her. Oren: Yeah, Her A. Cane, “A” middle name. Very important.   Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Laugh] Bunny: And that’s how they introduce themselves. Chris: If you liked nuanced and personal villains, that works great as a major character. If you like a villain that has a dark swishy cape, it’s not impossible to make that villain a major character, but those tends to be the kind of archetypes that may not work so much because the longer they are on screen, the more complex they have to be to stay interesting. And so if they’re just there to be evil, don’t necessarily want them to be in the scenes quite as much. Bunny: You don’t want to turn a non-villainous… Horror is something that’s interesting because it’s not a villain, like cosmic horror, into a villain because you risk making it less interesting. I’m looking at you Stranger Things. Chris: Ohh yeah, that was sad. Certainly if you have the Elder God, that is not really supposed to be a person ’cause it’s too great and powerful and mysterious to be personable.  Bunny: But what if it was some guy.  Chris: I stand by my theory that they did that because they did not know how to defeat it, and they needed a way to end the series. Oren: That one is particularly bad because not only is he a person now, but he’s less cool than we thought. Chris: I actually really liked him in the backstory before he revealed himself to be super evil, because that was when he had some nuance, because he liked Eleven and they were buddies. That made him really interesting and sympathetic too, right? Sympathetic villains are also great for being major characters, but oftentimes they’re not as threatening. So that’s a situation where you have maybe two villains. One that’s the Big Bad and in the background, and one is the sympathetic villain that’s your first antagonist. Bunny: I’m pretty sure they did that earlier in Stranger Things. So I think your theory holds water. It’s especially frustrating in a show that had balanced the cosmic horror with knowable villains. Oren: And I’m not gonna say it would never work to make your cosmic horror villain into a more personable character. Stranger Things is a particularly bad example. I’ve seen some that work okay, but it’s definitely risky and you really need to think about what are you gaining by doing this? Do you have something that you actually want from this? Or are you just making the villain less scary now? Chris: It’s that situation where you have a villain who is pretending to be good, which I think we’ll talk more because that is one way to have them on screen, and then as soon as you reveal that they’re a villain, they have a personality transplant and they become a mustache twirler. It was one of those situations, and that’s always very disappointing. Oren: That’s actually my first method for how to make your villain more of a character, and that is to cheat and not let on that they’re a villain. You’re a cheater now. I hope you feel good about yourself.   Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle] Chris: You know, there are many reveals and twists that get writers into trouble. I have to say, I think that’s one of the better ones. Oren: Because one of the biggest obstacles to making your villain more present in the story is theoretically your villain and your hero do not like each other, and so it’s hard to have them in proximity very often. But if your villain is pretending to be on Team Good, or is actually on Team Good and will turn evil later, that is a great opportunity. The main risk is that they will turn evil and then suddenly just act completely different. And it’s like, “Well then I actually don’t know this person. This is an entirely different character. And I guess they were just really good at acting.” Chris: And we’ve talked before about how valuable it is to have a villain that’s polite and charming. Again, this is a great time to have a villain that stays polite and charming, and that shouldn’t change. They just need a conceivable motivation for why they were evil the whole time. They don’t wanna actually need a personality that’s different. Just a secret motivation. Bunny: A good example of this is probably in a lot of mystery stories. The villain has to be present. Otherwise the reveal of who dunnit…  Oren: Some guy.  Bunny: Yeah, some guy. The best possible reveal. Otherwise it will feel random. You need to have the villain be there rather than it being a character we’ve never met before. So probably the villain and the hero will be interacting quite a bit in these mystery stories. So it’s not surprising that things like Knives Out have villains in disguise. Spoilers for a couple years old movie. Hugh pretends to be teaming up with the main character because he wants something from her, which is how much she knows about what’s going on. Oren: Wait, who was teaming up with the main character? Bunny: Hugh. Oren: Wait. You were teaming up with the main character? Bunny: Yeah, it was me. Oren: I don’t think you’re in this movie, Bunny.   Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle] Bunny: Well, he also likes to throw cats off of cliffs, so we bonded. We have a little villain romance going.   Chris, Oren: [Chuckle] Oren: You can also, if you have very specific circumstances, it’s possible to have a secret villain who is only a secret villain to the protagonist. The main example would be the novel Piranese, which hot take, is good, and has a bad guy who, it’s not hard for the reader to guess that he’s a bad guy almost immediately, but the protagonist doesn’t know that. Chris: Right. And again, this is done without showing readers anything that the main character doesn’t see. It’s just that the main character has a specific perspective and is also a sweet cinnamon roll. And so he does not suspect something, but the audience has additional knowledge. Oren: We know that guy’s shady.   Chris, Oren: [Chuckle] Oren: The main risk is once the reveal comes and this villain turns out to be evil, you need to make sure that their reasoning for pretending to be a good guy actually made sense. Chris: There are some situations when they have already done something in the course of being a pretend ally that they definitely would not have wanted to do as a villain, like saving the hero when really they wanted to kill the hero. Why did you do this thing to help the protagonist so much if you actually had this motivation the whole time? So if they need the protagonist for something, that’s really good. I like allies who, the protagonist help them gain more power because they work as a team and power for the ally is power for the protagonist. But then it turns out this ally was just using them as a stepping stone. Oren: My favorite is you have a villain pretend to join Team Good while Team Good is taking out another villain who the first villain also doesn’t like. ‘Cause then we cooperate. We have a common goal. But I was pretending to be a good guy actually. I’m just a different flavor of bad guy. That’s one of my favorites. Bunny: The parallel to this is getting to know the villain because the hero is spying on the villain rather than the villain spying on the hero. I think this one applies in a much more limited context. This is the characters taking on a role to get close to the villain. The risk with this one obviously is making the villain look incompetent when they don’t notice that there are the heroes around.  But this is something that works really well in the Mysterious Benedict Society, which is a middle grade novel where the main characters are kids going to this spooky academy to see what’s going on with its mind control radio waves that it’s sending out. And so they interact with the villainous headmaster of this academy and his goons, his lieutenants. So you get to know the villain a bit more that way. But I don’t know if this would work so well with protagonists who aren’t child protagonists. Depending on the conflict. If the conflict is the hero is trying to kill the villain, you can’t really have: Hero go spying on villain and interacts with them and doesn’t just kill them and complete their mission. Chris: I’m trying to remember the name of the movie where we have a female protagonist who romances a murder suspect. That works partly well because we’re not really sure whether or not he’s a villain. So he’s tempting. [Laughs]  Oren: This is a movie or are we thinking about Wednesday?  Chris: (While laughing) Oh, no. Bunny: It sounds like something Wednesday would do. Oren: It’s a pretty broad definition is all.   Chris, Oren: [Chuckle] Chris: If outright investigating somebody, then you can balance the threat level. You do have to still make them menacing, which is the tricky one there is trying to balance that characterization. Oren: These are all various flavors of my second method, which is basically finding a way to force the hero and villain to be in proximity because you have a premise that is something other than “arch-enemies, scorched-earth, must fight now” premise. This wouldn’t work with Lord of the Rings. You can’t really have Frodo and Sauron in close proximity to each other. Chris: Just make them get stuck in an elevator.  Chris, Oren: [Chuckles] Chris: Works every time.  Bunny: Ooh, there’s only one bed.  Chris: [Laughs] Stranded on an island. Oren: All kinds of ways. If you have a lower stakes story, this tends to work better. If your stakes are not life or death, then you could very easily have a situation where protagonist is in close proximity with the villain. They might even live together.  There’s a certain amount of that in Pride and Prejudice. ‘Cause they are, you know, no one’s trying to kill each other, but there are characters who don’t like each other and characters who work in opposition to each other. And they all kinda have to hang out in this small society of aristocrats. Bunny: Awkward.   Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle] Oren: You can also do the “held captive” model. Often the hero will be a captive of the villain. The risk there is that your hero can end up with no agency, so you need something for the hero to be doing while they are captive. Spinning Silver is a great example of that. Chris: Yes, Spinning Silver does something that is interesting that I noticed in a couple stories where we have a mysterious villain possessing a lesser villain. This is an interesting combination. So you have your human antagonist who is supposed to be sympathetic because they are at least partially under the mysterious villain’s control. The mysterious villain, when you actually want to talk to them, they control the human antagonist and say a few words, and then they can mysteriously disappear again. Admittedly, Spinning Silver doesn’t do it, in my opinion, quite as well as A Study in Drowning does. Where in Spinning Silver, the big powerful villain is this demon. Whenever it appears, it’s just like, “Feed me, I’m hungry. Tasty.” Bunny: [Laughs] Chris: You’re losing some of your mystique. Oren: But so sympathetic, who amongst us has not been hangry? Bunny: I too get hungry. This is what I sound like every midnight.   Chris, Oren: [Chuckle] Chris: Whereas in A Study in Drowning, the possessor who’s the fairy king genuinely stays mysterious. It’s unclear to what extent he’s even real, but then he shows up more towards the end. But that’s just kind of an interesting combo. So you can have a villain that’s present and still keep your “Bigger Bad” mysterious. Oren: This sort of premise is also great if you wanna end up with a villain romance. Bunny: Yes. Oren: Bunny has some experience with that. Maybe she can tell us about it. Bunny: Me? I’d never.   Oren: [Laughs] Bunny: So the long and short of it is I romanced the villain of a campaign Oren ran and it was wonderful, and now I just really like villain romance. Oren: That was also Chris’s fault. Chris suggested it. Chris: I did have a habit of suggesting everybody romance people in that campaign. What can I say? I like romance.  Bunny: Chris was the matchmaker.  Chris: That was actually a great example because I was just like, “How is Oren gonna do this? [Laughs] How is Oren gonna pull this off?” The answer is long distance communication, which worked really well. So the villain would just appear in a vision to Bunny’s character and they could have a chat, but she wasn’t physically present, so they couldn’t actually fight. Bunny: And they went on one date. There was some temptation too, which worked with the character arc of not getting tempted into using this unethical magic. Oren: That also worked out, because I had several instances where Bunny’s character would be in serious trouble and then the villain would show up as her spectral self and be like, “Hey, I could help you out with that. It looks like you’re trying to save a bunch of your friends from dying. Would you like help?” Bunny: Well, I guess…  Oren: And so there was some temptation along the way ’cause I had created multiple sides to this fight. So there were points in which it would make at least some sense for the eventual final villain to help the party out in exchange for something else. And because they had a mutual enemy, that worked out. I also just did a lot of sleight of hand on where that villain was at any given time. It’s like, “She’s around, but you probably won’t find her. She’s very sneaky. Don’t worry about it.” Chris: This is the villain that also could make blood clones of herself. So if we ever got in a fight with her and we rolled too good, turned out that was just a copy.   Bunny, Chris: [Laugh] Oren: A very useful power for your bad guys to have in role-playing games is to create copies of themselves that are in theory weaker than they are. Because in role-playing games, you can’t control when your players win or lose fights. It just happens. So you have to be able to keep your villain threatening even when they roll really well. And that was how I did it. It’s like, “This is a bit of a kludge,” but it worked. Bunny: And it was great. That was one of my favorite character relationships I’ve ever had in a RPG campaign just ’cause it was a lot of fun and my character was constantly trying to arrest their love interest, which was very funny. Oren: It was very cute. They had a whole bit. Chris: Reminds me of This Is How You Lose the Time War, different form of long distance communication. It’s all love letters, so they just send messages back and forth. Obviously there has to be some motivation for engaging in communication. Trying to tempt people over to the other side can work pretty well. Maybe trying to unnerve the other person, if you have a villain who can go into your hero’s dreams, trying to disrupt them by giving them dreams that freak them out, for instance, might be something that you could do. Oren: And we had also, I mentioned earlier, the possibility of a villain lieutenant with a POV, and this is my third method and that can work. It is usually better than giving the main villain a POV, but you still need to make sure that your secondary villain is actually doing stuff that is relevant to the heroes. Chris: Not just cackling or watching the big bad cackle.   Bunny: [Chuckles] Oren: It doesn’t really make any difference if your POV is a guard in the evil base versus the bad guy himself if all they’re doing is standing around. Good model for this is when you have the heroes who are running away, and there’s a lieutenant villain who’s chasing them at the behest of a big villain, because then you can do a cat and mouse scenario.  Everyone associates this with Zuko from Avatar, but that’s a TV show. So it operates under slightly different rules, but it works pretty well in prose too. Children of Blood and Bone did that and that part of it worked out. I liked it.  Bunny: as a random example that this just brought to mind. I’m pretty sure they do that in Tangled too, with the horse.  Chris: Yeah.  Bunny: Maximus the horse, trying to capture Flynn Rider at the behest of the villain. Oren: It’s been so long since I’ve seen that movie. Bunny: Me too. I don’t know where I pulled that from. Oren: That’s a perfect example. And your secondary villain, who you very often are gonna have on a redemption arc. And if you’re not, then I would recommend some other character arc because if we’re gonna just be spending time in their POV, getting some kind of development for them is just gonna make that a more satisfying experience, even if that development is that they have a chance to turn good and don’t take it or something. So it doesn’t necessarily have to be redemption, but it should be something. Chris: Maybe lieutenant just decides that they’re gonna quit the field and run away from the villain, but they’re not joining the good guys. They run off or something. Just because, again, if you’re in somebody’s viewpoint, you’re getting to know them and having some kind of conclusion or payoff for that person is a good idea as opposed to just casually discarding them. Oren: If you’re really ambitious, you can have the secondary villain overthrow the main villain and become the Big Bad. That’s hard, because you need a way for that secondary villain to go from a lieutenant to the Big Bad level threat. You don’t want this to feel like the bad guys are now easier to beat. Cough. Cough. Kylo Ren. Cough. Cough.   Chris, Bunny: [Laugh] Bunny: Yeah, I was waiting for that. Oren: That’s an advanced level move, let me put it that way, but you can do it if you’re determined. Chris: In most cases, the lesser villain is there to lose the initial fights so that the Big Bad is still threatening. So they have to have a different role if you want them to take over as a Big Bad. Oren: The last method that I have is the old fashioned way, which is you just have the hero and the villain clash a lot, if not in direct personal combat, then indirectly through their armies or their ship or what have you. The big problem with this is that if the hero wins these fights, then your villain is basically done ’cause they have no threat anymore. But if the villain wins them, it can be hard to justify why the story is still going because the villain has won all these fights. Are they not trying to get the hero? Are they not trying to accomplish things? This works best if the hero and villain are fighting over something that is tangible but not a toggle switch. For example, the novel series Temeraire, the villain, Napoleon, is very present throughout the series, if not in person then commanding his armies that the protagonist is fighting, but they’re fighting over territory. So if Napoleon wins a battle, the story’s not over ’cause the heroes can retreat and regroup and try to do something else. Chris: You can have a hero that has to be clever and get some victories, as far as just keeping all from being lost. The villain is mostly winning any direct conflicts they have. And again, this is not just conflicts where lives are at stakes, right? There could be anything that they’re struggling over. It could be social clout. Oren: Why isn’t anyone liking my memes? Bunny: I’ve got all these funny cat memes, but I want to throw cats over cliffs, so people aren’t going, “Ha ha.” Oren: No, it’s okay. Bunny. You’ve had your redemption arc. Now you’ve adopted the cats. That’s how we ended this. ‘Cause you had a POV. Bunny: Oh good. Oren: That’s the rule. You had a POV. You need a redemption arc.   Bunny: [Laughs] I’m just petting them all without the evil cackling, my box of cats. Oren: Alright, on that beautiful image, we’re gonna go ahead and call this episode to a close.   Chris: If you enjoy this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson. She’s the professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week. [Outro Music] Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.

The hosts tackle the dilemma of creating dangerous worlds where heroes constantly face threats. They humorously dissect the absurdity of safe villages amid chaos, questioning who the villains target. The conversation shifts to role-playing games, exploring trade and morality within a humorous narrative of banditry. They analyze the dark humor of the Fallout series and navigate how communities handle existential risks. Additionally, the survival dynamics in Martha Wells' Ruxura universe are explored, as well as urban fantasy politics and creative choices in storytelling.

Discover how a protagonist's agency has become the new focal point of storytelling. The hosts tackle the challenges writers face in ensuring their characters make impactful choices. Delve into the dynamics of mentorship, especially in magic schools, and how it can affect character growth. They also discuss the balance of power between protagonists and supporting characters, highlighting the importance of realistic skills and development. Plus, enjoy some amusing critiques on common narrative tropes!

Discover how to balance magic in storytelling before it goes haywire! The hosts cheekily ponder the implications of limitless wishes while critiquing classic tales like Aladdin. They dive into the necessity of magical boundaries, exploring how defined limitations enhance narrative tension and character growth. With examples from popular media, they discuss the importance of managing magical abilities and the pitfalls of unrealistic fatigue in spellcasting. Tune in for tips on crafting a cohesive and captivating magic system!

The concept of historical accuracy can get really weird in speculative fiction. If you add magic, is it history anymore? What if you change everyone’s name slightly? Or maybe you just like to brag online about how much history you researched. At that point, how important is historical accuracy? Surprising no one, the answer is: it depends! And this week, we’re talking about all the ways in which it depends. Plus, desperately trying to remember the name for some fantasy creatures which may or may not be German.Show Notes Taking Inspiration From History  The Last Samurai  The Dothraki Horde George RR Martin Explains Why There’s So Much Rape in Game of Thrones The War of the Roses  History of Internment in the US  The Calculating Stars  Bridgerton Controversy  Shogun  William Adams Monique Poirier  Jägermonster For All Mankind History The Mercury 13 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] Bunny: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Bunny. And with me is: Chris: Chris. Bunny: And: Oren: Oren. Bunny: Long ago, in the Before Times, Oren did a post, a very famous post, a post that went down in history. And now, looking back as older and wiser podcast hosts upon this gentler time, we’re feeling inspired, but we can’t just copy the post, right? Or, like, maybe we can. Oren: I’ll just read it; it’s fine. It’s from 2017. It’s not my best work. Bunny: I mean, that’d be an easy answer. On the other hand, we can say we’re copying it and being entirely faithful, and then add a bunch of stuff about how Oren is good at fighting because he lives in the desert and only wears leather. Oren: Perfect desert attire. Leather really breathes. Bunny: Yeah, so today we’re going to be talking about taking inspiration from history, how to do it, how not to do it, and whether history nerds are going to come for our precious story babies. The answer to which is: Yes, probably. Oren: Maybe? I’m trying to think of a big question about accuracy in historical fiction or fiction that is based on history, at which point the question of what accuracy even means starts to get weird. Like, pfft… different accuracy matters more to different people, I guess. Bunny: If you want to get philosophical about it, even if you’re writing historical reports or whatever, you’re never going to get it 100%. It’s always going to be falsified to some extent. Oren: I was hoping to find whether there were any studies on to what extent people’s views of actual history are influenced by either historical fiction or fiction that has a historical vibe to it, and I couldn’t find any. So I can only go by my anecdotes, which is that for a long time my friends group and I in high school believed that The Last Samurai was an accurate portrayal of Meiji Japan. And we just assumed that’s what Meiji Japan was like. And, I don’t know, that seems bad. Chris: I do think it depends on what is the knowledge base society already has on this topic. But when people’s knowledge is low and they’re not passionate about something, I definitely think people assume what’s in a story is true, especially when it’s a trope that all the stories are using and then it just becomes like a default assumption without people really thinking about it real hard. Whereas if they have a history education, it’s not like it’s going to brainwash them into thinking that it must be true. But for a lot of people, they don’t think that hard about these things, and so it definitely will give them false ideas. I guess it’s hard to tell a story in history without taking some liberties. I think the question is: How big are we willing those liberties to be? And are there other ethical implications when we take certain kinds of liberties with history? Bunny: I think, in terms of just broadly historical accuracy, a lot of it depends on what expectations you’re setting for your story. For example, something like Game of Thrones implies a much higher bar for realism because it’s trying to be all gritty. And Martin even likes to talk about all the history he took inspiration from, which makes it extra embarrassing that things like the Dothraki are pretty crap when it comes to being historically accurate to the groups that he claims they were inspired by, or literally taken from. Oren: I mean, the Dothraki don’t make any sense with their own context, let alone, I don’t know what part of them he thinks is inspired by the Plains Indians tribes. But the more obvious inspiration is the Mongol Empire. And they don’t make any sense in that context or in their own context. They’re just a bunch of very violent boys, and their economy is violence, and their relationships are violence, and their entertainment is violence. Chris: Yeah, I would say that for Game of Thrones, this is not a historical setting. I do think that in many cases the claim that something is historical in some way is used to try to make it look like the storyteller isn’t making biased choices, which is absolutely not true. And when we’re looking at Game of Thrones, the realism in Game of Thrones is not about historical accuracy; it’s about atmosphere, and I think that’s really important when it comes to… Martin said that’s why he put rape in his story, and so it’s very different if you’re like, “Oh, well, this needs to be historically accurate, so I included rape,” or “I was building atmosphere, so I included rape.” One of those things looks more justified than the other, and if it’s a fictional setting, I don’t think that you have an obligation to be historically accurate. And other ethical concerns, like: “Are you representing a group respectfully?” “Are you being respectful to survivors of sexual assault?” become much more important than the idea that you’re trying to be historically accurate when it is literally not history. Not that historical accuracy couldn’t enhance Game of Thrones in some ways, but I feel like at that point, it’s a tool for creating a setting that feels real in building that atmosphere that he wants. Bunny: And he’s been explicit about wanting to be drawing from history here as well, and he’s definitely saying that to make the setting sound like it is, anyway, Oren: I think that’s just a clout thing, to be perfectly honest. It’s like if I went around bragging about how my book is based on the Byzantine Empire, it was like a “kinda” in that I had a big fandom of the Byzantine Empire at the time I was writing it, I incorporated some aspects in a completely different context, but that’s what it sounds like to me whenever I hear anyone talk about how “historical” Game of Thrones is. I think that’s just a flex. I don’t think that has anything to really do with how the story was written, especially considering how, if you have even like a passing knowledge of the War of the Roses, you can tell all the stuff that is not in there that would’ve been if this was actually War of the Roses-inspired fiction. Chris: Can you give us some examples? Oren: I mean, look at what people in War of the Roses wore. It’s real goofy. Their fashion looks ridiculous. It would be impossible to take that seriously. Bunny: Oh, look at that hat! Oren: Yeah, it’s bad. Bunny: They should be wearing hats like that. Oren: Also, guns. War of the Roses is a gunpowder war. Not like the Revolution or the Civil War, but firearms existed, and the fact that in the actual War of the Roses, the various leaders tried not to pillage and to spoil the country they were fighting over, because they still wanted it to be intact when they won, and I’m not saying Medieval warfare was nice or gentle; there are many, many, many examples where it was absolutely horrible and brutal, but in that particular instance, they often tried to avoid that, because this was their kingdom they were fighting for. So there are so many parts of the War of the Roses that don’t match up with Westeros at all. So this whole, like, “It’s drawn from history”? No. That’s just a flex. That’s just ’cause it sounds good on social media. Bunny: Also, if you want a more nuanced breakdown of why the Dothraki are not accurate at all to the steppe people and the Plains Indians, go check out the blog A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry by Brett Devereaux. I hope I’m pronouncing that right. Because, wow, does Martin’s claim that he only put a dash of fantasy in there really not hold up. Oren: I mean, in general, if anyone ever tells you that a society is 90% warriors, no, no, it’s not. It’s 90% food producers 100% of the time. Bunny: A lot of the criticism boils down to: Where are the sheep? But I think, if you’re using another setting, like an alternate history setting, or one that seems largely like Medieval-inspired or whatever, if you’re writing a comedy that’s already much lower in realism, people aren’t going to ding you about not being faithful to the fancy hats in the War of the Roses. Oren: Yeah. To be clear, I’m not suggesting he should have put in the hats. Bunny: I’m suggesting that. Oren: I am very well aware of the fact that history does not conform to best narrative practices. So, if you are writing fantasy and you’re inspired by history, I don’t think that means you have to be historically accurate. I think that’s A) impossible, and B) would make stories worse. And yeah, it still annoys me a bit that some people think that Lord of the Rings is an accurate reflection of Medieval life, but I don’t think that can be Tolkien’s fault. I think at some point the responsibility has to be shifted elsewhere. Bunny: Right, and the exception, I suppose, is that, if you’re setting your story during an actual historical event, and this is like historical fiction or alternate timeline fiction, even then you have to have the bones of the scenario pretty accurate, right? Chris: Yeah. I definitely think it matters what you are depicting. And again, a lot of times there are just other ethical considerations when it comes to representing something well, besides just, “Is this factually correct or not?” Especially when there’s people involved who got hurt. So, if you’re depicting a specific event in history, I do think you have to worry more about erasing bad stuff that happened. I think Game of Thrones, which is a fantasy version that only uses history as a tool, it’s definitely not supposed to be historical, doesn’t really have any excuse for having atrocities in there, because that’s not real. It’s not erasing them, because it’s a fantasy world. Whereas if you have a real war like World War II, and for instance, in the US the Japanese are put in internment camps, you don’t necessarily want to exploit the pain of Japanese Americans by showing that in any excruciating detail. But at the same time, you also have some obligation to not pretend that the US did not do bad things. And to not make that look like that didn’t happen. Oren: That can get real gray real quickly, like pretending that internment didn’t happen. Obviously bad. Having a Jewish character in the ‘50s who maybe encounters less antisemitism than would be statistically average? Uh, I’m less upset about that. That was a critique I saw of The Calculating Stars, was a claim that antisemitism was a lot more prevalent in the immediate post-World War II years than that book suggests. From my research, that is probably correct, but it’s not like it is impossible that this Jewish character could have the events happen as they do in the book. It just means that she would’ve been running into more forward-thinking people than were 100% common. And, I don’t know, to me that’s OK, but also, I’m Jewish; I have a reason to speak about this. There are much more complicated arguments that I have no stake in. Chris: Again, there’s a lot of this balancing factor between how do you make sure that marginalized people that existed in history are not erased, but if they’re marginalized and you’ve got, for instance, grand politics, sometimes those people aren’t well positioned to influence story outcomes, and so then it becomes tricky to figure out how you make it not erase them and still represent them. I know Bridgerton had a lot of controversy around the way that it decided to just reimagine history. Oren: Yeah, I do not have an answer to that one. Chris: That’s hard, I know. I don’t feel qualified to talk about that one, but what I want to say is those ethical considerations about things that are particularly sensitive are just more important than, “Okay, we took a random event. Now, did this part of the event actually happen or not?” It can be sometimes more of a matter of fact than it is of it’s sensitive or there’s ethical ramifications about those things in particular. Oren: Yeah, but I want to complain about how Shogun is not an accurate portrayal of Tokugawa Ieyasu. That’s not accurate! He’s not like that! Chris: Do you need to complain about Shogun? Do you want to tell us where Shogun hurt you? Bunny: What is a podcast for, if not complaining, Oren? Oren: I mean, perhaps in an attempt to be somewhat constructive, Shogun is an interesting example. This new TV show, which is actually the second time this book has been made into a show, and it is an interesting example of accuracy in historical fiction because, first of all, it’s alternate history in that all the names are changed, but you still know who everyone is very easily. It’s not hard to figure them out. Like, Toranaga is obviously Tokugawa. The dead Taiko is clearly Toyotomi Hideyoshi. But there’s a lot of stuff like that, and obviously Blackthorn is William Adams. It was a real person, real English guy who came to Japan. So that’s all there. Then you get into the question of how much does it matter that in this version, Toranaga is this really upstart, ethical, almost Ned Stark-like character who doesn’t want power and is super loyal to the heir of the previous ruler and he only goes after power ’cause he has no choice, as opposed to the real Tokugawa, who really wanted power and forced the heir of the previous ruler to commit suicide. Does it matter? Is that a big deal? I don’t know. It bothers me a little bit, but I’m not sure it’s a huge issue. I don’t think there are a lot of Tokugawa apologists out there. Maybe there are in Japan, I don’t know. Not Japanese, but certainly in the United States, there aren’t a lot of people being like, “Tokugawa did nothing wrong.” Bunny: I think it’s a salient observation that the real-world implications of the things that you’re changing, if it’s just some guy in history who played a small role and nobody gives a crap about, you’re probably not doing any damage by messing around with that story a bit. Whereas if you’re claiming there weren’t concentration camps, now that is a different matter, my friend. Oren: Especially ’cause there are real people who claim that, and who think that’s a thing, and those people can die mad about it. Chris: Or just all the people who assume that any period of history in Europe doesn’t have anybody except for white people, where it’s like, look, a lot of things happened in Europe and it’s a big enough place. People came and went. So it’s not necessarily as white as people think it was. And so, again, looking at a period of Europe and not looking for where there was diversity can play into narratives that then are used by people to complain about any story that has, like, a Black person in it, for instance. Oren: Right. Although Shogun is also interesting from another angle. Shogun the book uses Blackthorn as its main character, Blackthorn being the fictional equivalent of William Adams. Now the show can’t deviate from that too much. Like, they make some changes, but they can’t not have Blackthorn as the main character. The problem is that the real William Adams didn’t have anything to do with Tokugawa’s rise to power. He was there, but he was important afterwards. He was important for helping Tokugawa break the Portuguese shipping monopoly, and for Tokugawa’s… ultimately didn’t go anywhere, but at the time, important attempts to build a European-style navy for Japan. So he was an important person, but not for the specific period of time that the story covers. And so the show is a little unclear what to do with him. In the book, the author just goes with the idea that none of these Japanese people know what a gun is, and he teaches them how to use guns. Chris: Hmm. Oren: The show was not willing to be that inaccurate, probably ’cause it’s insulting. So instead they went with the idea that he has better canons than they had, which is maybe possible. But then they very quickly learned how to use the canons, so we’re back at square one of why is Blackthorn here. The answer right now is that he has witty things to say. He’s a very witty guy. Chris: Oren, do you know why the original guy was kept in Japan? Oren: Because he was very useful to Tokugawa, because Tokugawa did not like the Portuguese. He really didn’t like Christianity. Chris: But what about him was useful? Oren: Because otherwise Tokugawa had no one to tell him about the Portuguese except the Portuguese. Chris: Okay. Oren: There were so few Europeans who had made it to Japan at that point that he just needed someone who understood European politics and knew what was going on, and Adams fit that bill. Chris: Okay. Bunny: See, when I say that history nerds will come for your precious story babies, I am talking about Oren. Chris: And also me, because then Oren tells me. I wouldn’t know that all of this was wrong, but then he tells me, so then I do know, and then I’m grumpy. Oren: Yeah, now Chris is going to make it all your problem. Chris: And then I, on the podcast, tell Oren to complain about the show. So people besides me have to suffer in knowing that Shogun isn’t accurate. Bunny: And so it spreads and spreads. Oren: I don’t dislike Shogun. I’m enjoying it just fine, but I do feel like Blackthorn is a bit ancillary to the actual story they want to tell. Bunny: Yeah. And to go back to the point about who are you representing in this historical or historical-inspired setting, one community and genre that has had this conversation quite a bit, in which there’s not really a consensus, is steampunk. Steampunk is interesting in that it is both a genre and a community disconnected from media in the genre. It is also just an aesthetic that people like to dress up for, without being connected to a particular book, which makes it especially interesting. And so there’s been a lot of conversation about whether taking this Victorian aesthetic and sensibility, whether that is a kind of Victorian nostalgia. The Victorian period was not like a super great time, guys. This was a very colonialist time then. Chris: Yeah, I think you could really make the argument for just about a lot of fantasy genres, and I can understand the fear of glorifying, like we’ve talked before about glorifying monarchy, for instance, and that’s maybe not great, and that there are still some places where monarchy could be a real threat. I personally would, again, not go so far to say that this aesthetic is automatically bad because we are validating periods of history. Bunny: No, and I’m not saying that either, to be clear. I think that steampunk is quite fun, and the aesthetic is fun, and I like to put gears on things as well, but it does leave non-white fans in an interesting scenario. So there’s a cosplayer named Monique Poirier (Poirier? I write these things down, and then I say them, and immediately second-guess myself because I forget that this is an audio medium) who is Native American. And so she’s written about how to incorporate her cultural identity into something that’s very Eurocentric. And then, when she tries to do it, she goes to conventions and then people ask her where are all her feathers, if she’s inspired by Native Americans. Chris: Augh! Oren: Yeah… Bunny: That’s painful. Oren: I mean, that’s weirdly gross, I guess short of saying, don’t do that! Chris: Don’t stereotype people, please. Bunny: Don’t stereotype people. That’s good advice. Hot takes for Mythcreants. Oren: Let me put it this way: I think that the most viable path forward is for us to work on creating spaces where people don’t do that, and then having us folks be like, “Yeah, we’re going to do the English-inspired steampunk, ’cause I’m not going to do Native American-inspired steampunk. I’m not Native American.” And then we can just try to be better people, I guess is the way I would solve that problem. Chris: Yeah. I would also say that steampunk is already diverged from history quite a bit, and yes, a lot of its aesthetic is inspired by Victorian England, but I don’t necessarily think that it can’t branch out more, because it still has a lot of aesthetic components, like the clockwork, that could be combined with other things. And I feel like it’s so loosely based on history already that I would rather move towards just detaching it altogether. In this case, I would almost say that steampunk is better if you don’t pretend it’s real world. Put it in a second world, do what you want with it. Bunny: The problem with steampunk, too, is that, at least when most people think about it, they do tie this so much to alternate history. I’ve been doing research on this as part of my senior project, and it’s very difficult to find a definition that’s not related to a diverging timeline in actual history or something, which sucks for me, because I’m writing a second world steampunk-type thing, and so I’m like, “This doesn’t help.” But it is closely tied to that, and I don’t know if it will ever be completely divorced from that, especially since some of the founding works in the genre were alternate histories, like The Difference Engine, for example. But Monique Poirier (Poirier? I’m so sorry. Monique) has, as a cosplayer… a lot of steampunk cosplayers come up with histories for their characters and stuff. So she sort of asked how could native technologies be translated into a sort of steampunk setting or aesthetic? And she went with that. And so she came up with this whole alternate North America where the tribes are in a confederacy that includes the Kingdom of Hawaii and stuff like that, which I thought was an interesting and new way to go about it, rather than just remixing England again. Chris: It also sounds like a great way to freshen up steampunk, too. Oren: That sounds really cool. I’m glad that she is writing that. I’m not going to. Chris: Well, yeah. Oren: But for me it’s going to be, if I want to make steampunk cool and interesting, I’m going to set it in a world where there’s no ground and there’s just floating islands of stone that you have to take airships between. That’s how I’m going to freshen up steampunk. Bunny: And then you fight over hammers, It’s clearly not Earth, and so you don’t have to worry about the fact that you’re in a colonial setting at a specific time on Earth anymore. You can make it go on its own way. Chris: Yeah, I’d love to see more second-world steampunk. Bunny: Let us free ourselves from England and create wonderful gear-powered contraptions. Oren: Isn’t Girl Genius second world? Chris: Yes, I believe so. Or if it is Earth, it’s only very loosely. Bunny: Well, there are, like, German… Chris: Yeah, it’s true. They do have clearly a family that comes from Germany. Oren: Are they German or are they like Eisenfaust? Chris: I feel like it’s probably the latter one. Oren: Are they French or are they Montague? Chris: Yes, I suspect it’s the latter one, where it’s clearly Earth-inspired, but not actually. It’s been a while since I’ve read that one. Bunny: Yeah, it’s been a while for me too. But I do remember that they have those goblin guys, I… I don’t remember what they’re called, but they all have really thick German accents. Oren: Hmm. I would probably not make that choice, but sure. Chris: Yeah, I don’t… I don’t recommend… Bunny: But they’re not goblins. What are they called? Chris: Okay, but they’re not humans. Just don’t recommend taking a non-human species/race or whatever and applying a real-world ethnicity of any kind. I don’t know. I wouldn’t complain if it was the English. Oren: Certainly not in a way where it’s really obvious where you’re like, “Oh, those guys are Germans.” Germany’s not really in danger from this. I’m not worried about people mistreating Germans ’cause of it. It just doesn’t feel good. Bunny: Okay. So I’m trying to look this up. First of all, I looked up “girl genius species” and it’s correcting it to “girl genus species.” Oren: Well, that’s not helpful. Bunny: To which Wikipedia says, “female.” So thank you. So I can’t find this right now, but it’s true that a lot of the characters have distinct German names, but I think you’re right, Chris. And not just German-accent alternate-species guys, but I think you’re right that there’s not actual Germany there. Chris: As far as what makes sense in the real world, I think For All Mankind is a good example of alternate history that is molded in such a way that we include more marginalized characters, and it feels based in history, and is rigorous enough that it feels justified that it takes place on Earth. Because the premise of For All Mankind is that Russia or the USSR got to the moon first, and that extended the space race, which pushed both the USSR and the United States to invest more in their space programs, so we had more cool space things than before. Bunny: Jägermonsters! Chris: There we go. Bunny: Oh yeah, yeah. I remembered them. Continue. Chris: Those are not in For All Mankind; those are in Girl Genius, by the way. Bunny: Crossover? Crossover? Chris: Yeah. But in For All Mankind, as an example, the USSR shows off by getting a woman to the moon first. And at that time there are no female astronauts in the United States, and so then they’re like, “Oh, drat, well, we need to match them.” And so then they restart, find the old… The astronauts were real; the US really did train some women to be astronauts only to cut the program. So in this alternate history version, they go and bring some of them back and get that started. And so the various levers like that are pulled so that we can have faster social progress during the course of the show. But it’s very much somebody’s looking at: “Here’s the specific events that happened in history, and here’s how they would go differently, and then here’s the effects that would have,” and it has rigorousness that a lot of people like from historical settings. Whereas when you have something like steampunk, where being accurate to history was never the point in the first place, it feels like maybe you should just give it its own world and break free of that. Oren: That’s certainly my plan. Although, before we leave, I do have to complain a little bit about For All Mankind, because it does show an interesting problem that when you create a point of divergence, you change more and more. It becomes increasingly difficult to include references that the audience will recognize and still be believable. Some of them are small, like there’s a lot of pop culture stuff that, if you really think about it, probably wouldn’t have happened in this new timeline. But the one that just really gets me is that Al Gore is elected president in 2000, even though in this timeline Clinton was never president, so Al Gore was never vicepresident. Why was he even running? Chris: He gets speech coaching much earlier. Bunny: He’s a cool dude! Oren: Who do these people think Al Gore was before he was vice president? I don’t think Al Gore was popular enough on his own to be a presidential ticket without Clinton. It seems unlikely to me. Chris: And when he was running for president, the big complaint was that he just had no stage presence. That he was like a boring nerd that would just talk at you in a boring way. Bunny: Hey, as a boring nerd who just talks at you in a boring way, I take offense to that. Chris: But then I remember when the documentary An Inconvenient Truth came out, and he was actually a good speaker in that documentary, everybody’s like, “What the hell, Gore? Why couldn’t you do this earlier?” So I’ll just imagine this is an alternate timeline where he got speech coaching because he didn’t get the VP pick. Oren: All right. With that very important historical critique done, I think we are going to have to call this episode to a close. Chris: If this episode inspired you to write about history, 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 Aman Jabber. 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.

If you’re a writer, you’ve probably heard that heroes are more sympathetic when they’re underdogs, but what does that mean? Is any hero an underdog so long as the villain is stronger? Why does it even matter? This week, we’re talking about all things underdog: how they’re defined, what makes them so useful, and why being an underdog doesn’t automatically mean your protagonist is great. Plus, did you remember that Shape of Water had a plot outside of the sexy fish guy?Show Notes The Glass Cliff Judy Hops  Moist von Lipwig Captain Ed Mercer  Miles Morales Elisa Esposito Katniss Everdeen Wade Watts  Inigo Montoya  Princess Ariel  Darrow O’LykosTranscript Generously transcribed by Paloma. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris:  You are listening to the Mythcreants Podcast. With your hosts Oren Ashkenazi. Chris. Winkle and Bunny. [opening song] Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast! I’m Chris, and with me is… Oren: Oren. Chris: and… Bunny: Bunny! Oren: How many of us do you think could fit under a dog? It’d have to be pretty big, right? Like a very large dog, like maybe a Great Dane? Bunny: I could probably fit under a Great Dane, but I don’t know if there’d be much room for either of you. Oren: Yeah, we have to get a couple of ’em in there. This is we’re, this is gonna be a little logistically challenging, but I think we can manage it. Bunny: Underdogs.  Chris: Any case. This time we’re talking about depicting Underdog Heroes because underdogs are automatically heroes, of course. Oren: Naturally. Chris: Naturally. Oren: That is a problem in various historical conflicts when people try to make entertaining narratives out of them because sometimes the underdog is not the good guy. [Group laughter] Oren: I’m not saying that the allies in World War II were great, but I am saying the access was worse and they were definitely the underdogs in that fight. Bunny: But there is a reason why so many heroes are underdogs in stories. It works much, much better, makes the character relatable and often sympathetic, which aids attachment. It adds tension because then they have an uphill battle, so not making your hero an underdog can sometimes mean that you have a pretty boring story. So storytellers have a pretty strong incentive to make their heroes underdogs – not that needs to be exactly like that all the time. Sometimes it just depends on how you flavor it, but, generally, the villain has to be more powerful or whatever obstacles have to seem more powerful than the hero. Chris: So we just need farm boys, right?  It’s just all farm boys. Bunny: Just all farm boys. That’s the solution. Just put a farm boy in every story. Oren: So are we defining underdog fairly broadly, then? That was something I was thinking about. I was like, most heroes are less powerful than their antagonist, and if there’s no direct villain, then they are less powerful than whatever force they’re opposing. How broadly are we defining underdog? Chris: I would personally say in this case, ’cause obviously we could define it really broadly. We’re talking about heroes where the author is doing something very specific in the beginning to set them up as less powerful than the people around them, even the other protagonists, generally. If they’re like outcasts, for instance, that would be one way or something where  they have an unusual circumstance that is pretty unique to that character; whereas, for instance, an underdog that just has bigger obstacles might be a captain of the ship that has a whole crew and they’re facing a much bigger villain with a whole fleet. Technically, those are all underdogs, but we haven’t done anything that’s special to that if our captain is the main character, to make our captain seem unusually put upon or powerless. I think leaders are worth talking about because it is hard to make leaders an underdog, but not impossible. Oren: Right. This is why Frodo is more of an underdog than Aragorn is, even though Aragorn is technically still fighting a much more powerful enemy, but Aragorn is also a badass and has experience and knows what he’s doing. Whereas Frodo is veryinexperienced and small and has even fewer abilities than Aragorn does, so it’s a spectrum of underdog, as it were. Bunny: It does seem like the underdog heroes tend to have humble backgrounds where they don’t have very many means or much money, or they’re low in a society even by that society’s standard, and it seems like all odds are against them in a way that’s greater than just having fewer ships than the enemy. Chris: Yeah, I think Frodo is interesting too, because in the context of the Shire, he is not an underdog, and the movies gloss over this, but in the books, he is basically an aristocrat.  Bunny: [giggles] Really? Chris: The hobbit version of an aristocrat, yeah, and Sam is just his gardener, and there’s definitely a class difference between them, but of course the movie kind of gets rid of that, but then as soon as he leaves the shire. The idea is that he’s going with characters who are a lot more worldly and a lot more powerful, and now in that context he feels small. Oren: But I think Bunny also had an important point about how, generally speaking, if you want a character to come across as an underdog, you’re gonna have them be from a less advantageous background, partly because that increases – makes the character more relatable for most of us. Most of us are not aristocrats. Bunny: Or captains of space fleets, unfortunately. Oren: So yeah, if an underdog ends up being a captain, it’s gonna be something like, uh, they scrounged and saved and bought a really junk ship that secretly turned out to be great anyway – don’t ask questions about that. [group laughter] Bunny: Or they really had to fight hard to get into their captain school and really prove themselves in a way that the other kids didn’t or something. Oren: Yeah, they had to walk uphill to Captain School both ways. [group laughter] Bunny: I guess it’s a question partly of where the story starts because, if in that situation, I would think that they actually would not be a captain right away because by the time they become a captain, they’re not really an underdog anymore, but if that’s like book two, then you’ve already got attached to them in their underdog position where they were still scraping to put away money so that maybe someday they could be a captain in book one, for instance. Whereas if you want a character to start your story as a leader and still be an underdog, and I think the biggest reason to do this is – the trickiest thing with underdogs is giving them agency and letting ’em actually change things in the story. Whereas leaders are well positioned to actually make a difference and solve bigger problems, but I think that you need to make it so that their position of leader still seems precarious. Oren: It can be precarious and you would also play up that being a leader is a responsibility and a burden. more than a cool thing that they have, but I’m not sure if that would help. Bunny: Yeah, I don’t know if that makes them an underdog. It can be helped with sympathy if you do it well. I’ve, frankly, seen more than a few stories of  ‘Oh, being this cool, powerful position is such a burden’. Yeah, that’s a showing versus telling problem. You’ve gotta show how it’s a burden not just talk endlessly about how it is a burden. Chris: It’s hard being rich.  [group laughter] Bunny: You don’t understand the place where I usually get my nails done, just closed. I think the best thing you could do, honestly, is give them a position that nobody wants because it’s something that’s a complete disaster and as soon as it goes belly up, whoever’s leading it will take the fall. Oren: Right! Like ‘Yield, you’ve been given a command – Yay! – It’s one of the tiny outposts in the middle of nowhere that no one cares about – Oh… – and hey, there’s super secret alien enemies that just happen to be out there. Have fun.’ Chris: They did that in Zootopia, too. Bunny: So, I think Going Postal is a good example of this, right? Where Moist is given charge of the post office that has been defunct for like 40 years. Oren: Yeah.  Bunny: It has two remaining employees that are still there, even though they haven’t gotten paid and it’s filled with undelivered mail, so it’s a complete disaster and it’s a position that nobody wants. Oren: Plus his name is Moist, so that kind of makes him an underdog by default, I would argue. [group laughter] Bunny: That’s a good point. Chris: There are real situations in which, for instance, you have a company that’s failing and as a result, the board switches who the CEO is and finally give somebody, for instance, a woman or somebody who’s marginalized a chance at leadership, but now that person is expected to turn the company around, even though it’s the last white guy that got it in the position that it’s in now, and if it doesn’t get turned around, they take the blame. It’s like a real dynamic that happens. Oren: The glass cliff that’s called, I love that term. Chris: So that kind of situation, at that point, the leader is an underdog, even though they’re in a position of power, they’ve been set up to fail. If you have a character that you know is on the verge of getting fired for the right reasons, it can’t be because they’re undeserving. Oren: It can’t just be ’cause they’re bad at their job.  Chris: I mean, Zootopia actually is a good example of this. Judy’s not really in a big position of power, but when she finally gets put on a case, her boss has been very unfair to her, and so he’s looking in it for an excuse to fire her. Bunny: Yeah, he gives her like a day or two to solve this massive case. Chris: But a bad example I think would be The Orville, because they try to make him an underdog, but it’s like completely his fault. Like he does not deserve this position. He does not deserve being Captain. Oren: Chris, how can you say he doesn’t deserve to fail-up? Is that not every mediocre white man’s role?  Is that not our birthright? [Group laughter] Bunny: It’s the iron ladder that goes up the glass cliff.  Oren: You just keep making different materials and different things of height. I go, this is good. We keep this going. Bunny: Yeah, it goes up above the glass cliff to the iron mountain. It’s so sturdy. Chris: I think it’s also possible to put a character in a position of responsibility before they’re ready, but then you need a really good reason why they’re getting that position.  Oren: It shouldn’t feel like a reward.  A lot of it depends on like the context of the story: ‘Hey, does this job actually seem hard and that really bad things are gonna happen to you and that maybe having it is worse than not having it, ’cause if so, you could be an underdog for getting it, but not if you’re Scott Lang getting made into Antman.’ That’s that. That’s just a job with all upsides, and so when the fact that he’s like, ‘Oh no, I’m not ready,’ Well, maybe you should let someone else do it then Scott. Bunny: I do think one of the keys there is the presence of other people who should just be doing instead, like in Antman, where there’s clearly, but ‘oh, she can’t be a hero, she’s a woman who’s clearly way more qualified to do this.’, but if it’s a very necessary task and your hero is really, for some reason, the only person who can do it, then them having to do it before they’re ready… Chris: I think Into the Spider-verse did a good job with this dynamic where Miles Morales is very clearly an underdog. He’s just a kid who randomly gets these powers and he is trying to get through school and he makes a fool out of himself at school by accident with his new powers – How embarrassing – then other people, other spider people show up and they’re all absurdly qualified, and we’re cheering for Miles. We’re like, ‘Miles, you must learn your powers,’ and they qualify him to be the one doing the heroism because everyone else is falling apart. I think it did good. It did a good job with that, where the hero is underqualified, but there is a genuine reason why they need to be the one to do a thing. Oren: Yeah, there’re various spider stories are pretty good at that. Spider-Man does a, usually, pretty good job of seeming like an underdog as long as people stop like writing those, ‘Actually Spider-Man is the fifth strongest hero in the entire MCU,’. That’s a thing people like to do and no. No, it’s important that we not think about him that way or the story stops working. Chris: Yeah, I really like the Into the Spider-verse depiction of Miles Morales and him being out of place at school. It’s just so perfect because again, so many people just pull these cartoonish bullies out of nowhere that come and just agro on the hero for no discerning reason and instantly start with violence in a very exaggerated depiction of what typical bullying looks like and it just feels very cheap and it feels like they’re not actually handling the issue responsibly, whereas I really think more skilled storytellers will take smaller issues and then make them feel like they matter. I think this is a great example because Miles Morales ends up going to a new school that his friends didn’t go to. They went to a different school, and so now he feels really out of place.  It managed to bring that to life and make him feel like an underdog just because he feels different at the school and is not at home at the school without just being like, ‘Oh, I’m different because I have magical magic,’ and then every side character’s like, ‘Oh, the hero is so weird,’ and we haven’t actually shown anything that’s truly weird about the main character, except for maybe their cool magic, which nobody knows about. Oren: One of the things about underdog heroes is that you have to be prepared to bridge this gap you’ve created between the underdog and whatever their opposition is, because sure, having a big gap makes the underdog more sympathetic, it makes it easier to relate to them. It builds tension. It’s good but, do you know how you’re gonna cross it? Because the reason it does all those things is because it looks like it’s gonna be hard to cross and if you aren’t, you can end up with something like The City We Became, where the bad guy is supposedly, basically, Cthulhu and the main characters are brand new and they don’t know what they’re doing, they’ve only just gotten their powers. This seems like it’ll be really hard, but then every time Cthulhu attacks them, they spontaneously generate a new ability and beat Cthulhu. By the third time, it’s like, ‘Wow, I wonder if that’s gonna happen again – Oh, look, it did,’  because that story doesn’t have any insulation between the heroes and the villain. And it’s a classic problem if all various urban fantasy TV shows have the same issue where the bad guys have nothing to do but show up and try to kill the hero. The hero can’t die, so they, the bad guys, run away and now they’re not scary anymore. Chris: Yeah, this is why I think the farm boys ending up having to have a secret lineage tends to pop up so often, but that can like de-underdog them if you’re not careful, because if there’s a trial and they’re going to court and how will they pay the bills and suddenly they have all the money. They’re definitely not an underdog anymore, and this also isn’t much of a conflict anymore.  Oren: It’s very easy for that to feel contrived. In general, my take for the most reliable way to do this is to have the villain not immediately know who the hero is, so the hero is so insignificant that the villain does not even know their name at this point and that makes it much easier to give your hero time to get better until they’re actually ready to face the villain. The character of Sierra from Shadow Shapers does this really well – shoutout, that’s a novel, I’ll put that in the show notes – where she starts out with no magic at all and has been denied her magic ’cause thanks to the patriarchy, and she’s gotta learn really quick ’cause there’s an evil wizard on the loose. This makes her seem like a big underdog, makes her seem relatable, but the evil wizard isn’t going after her specifically, so she has some time to figure this stuff out. She doesn’t have to immediately beat him in the first chapter. Chris: Yeah, giving your antagonist some other plan that does not involve killing the hero or, if you can manage it, giving them a good reason to kill the hero, but it has to be like a real intuitive reason, not a, ‘I wanna crush your spirit’. No reason is better than a bad reason, let’s put it that way. Or some other reason why the villain can’t just instantly smash them like a bug.  Bunny: Not knowing about them is a good way to do that. I was thinking of the Shape of Water. Where Eliza, is that her name? I think it is – is a disabled custodian in this government facility, people overlook her and so she has little or no social capital, and it takes a long time for the villain to realize that she’s even up to something. Oren: I gotta admit, I had forgotten there was a villain in that movie. Chris: There is a villain, but it’s mostly sexy Fishman. Oren: I remember the Fishman romance. It is like ‘There was more to that movie than that’.  Chris: Yes, there was a whole external plot. There was a weird body horror with the fingers. Oren: Ah! Chris: I mean, I think another important thing about underdog heroes is again, how you manage allies that are more powerful than heroes, allies, mentors, secondary characters, because on one hand they can be really helpful in getting your underdog to a place where they can make a difference, right? That’s what the mentor is for, basically to give them skills, to give them equipment, whatever they need to actually participate in the story, but that can also turn around and be a problem if all of those characters are again, telling the underdog what to do. If they’re a hero, they have to figure things out for themselves, make their own choices. Taking care of all of the problems for them, which is something that we see repeatedly in many stories, especially when the hero is a young woman. Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: So, you need ways to allow them to help, but then just get them out of the way. Oren: Yeah, I recommend killing them all the moment that they have fulfilled the use you needed for them in the plot. Just have them immediately self-destruct. Done. Solved that problem. Moving on. [Group laughter] Chris: Acme, anvil falls from the sky. What it takes can depend on what kind of conflicts you have in your story. If everything is a fighting conflict, then you wouldn’t have a mentor who is just older or gets sick or injured and just not physically up to fighting. If you have social conflicts, you could have a situation where nobody trusts  the mentor or powerful characters anymore, whereas you have a down to earth relatable hero that people might listen to. Sometimes you can have situations where the antagonist goes for your hero when they’re alone or the hero sees something that they need to intervene in when the other characters aren’t present, but generally you want some ongoing reason why they have a way to contribute and why they can make a difference and that they’re in the center of things, as opposed to having like your peasant character and then having your court politics and your peasant is still in their village and has no way to affect the court politics, which is a thing that sometimes happens in people’s manuscripts that has to be taken care of. Oren: Yeah, that’s when you add another POV.  Bunny: Nooo, no, no. Oren: Occasionally cut-back to your peasant character to assure us that the peasant is still the main character. Chris: Oren, you gotta really resist the allure of the dark side. Okay.  Bunny: I don’t know, this might be a call for help. Chris: No lightning, no four-stroke.  Oren: The call of the dark side is so much shorter. Well, I don’t even know if I would say easier, but definitely shorter. Definitely takes less consideration to figure out.  Bunny: So I was looking online to try to figure out how most people tend to define underdogs and who they consider to be underdogs, and I ran across quite a few characters that I don’t think are underdogs. Oren: Oh yeah? Bunny: Like Wade Watts from Ready Player One, like he’s got all of the aesthetics of an underdog. He’s poor and lives in a trailer or whatever, but the main conflict of the story, he is ridiculously overqualified for. He’s read or watched every eighties property ever and is always on top of the ball whenever there’s a challenge. He knows everything, so you can’t just be poor. I will say, the poverty, having read this years ago, before it was commonly mocked,  I read this before, it was not cool. Part of the point of doing an underdog is to build sympathy for the main character and build that attachment, and I don’t necessarily think that just because they have the skills that they need to win the day. That makes them not an underdog because they still have that sympathy factor and some of that relatability, and a lot of times a character like this main character that attracts an audience will have both the candy and the spinach factors, right? They need some candy, they need some positive traits in order to justify why they’re the main character and bring a bright side. Bring a little bit of wish fulfillment so that it’s not just all doom and gloom. So, yes, it’s true that in the context of the virtual reality, he is definitely very capable and a lot of his downsides, his weaknesses, are negated. They do sometimes, switch back to the real world, but I wouldn’t necessarily say that he’s not an underdog because a lot of the important things about underdogs, like building that sympathy, are definitely present in the book, even if you think it’s bad, this is still a technique it uses to engage readers. Yeah. It’s also that he very quickly becomes rich when he wins the first challenge and then his home gets blown up, which sucks for him, I will admit, it does suck when your home gets blown up, but then he like moves to the big city where there’s no lag and buys expensive equipment  and also a sex doll for some reason. Oren: That’s fun times for everyone, but I would say that from, at least from my understanding of Ready Player One, I think that you are both right in that it is definitely setting him up as an underdog. We can question if it is doing that effectively. That sounds to me like it also wants to give him tons of candy and that kind of backfires in a lot of ways. Bunny: But I would say that for most underdogs, the goal at some point in the story is for them to gain in status and get the cool things. The goal is for the audience to get attached to them as they’re an underdog and then want that thing, want that for them. Want them to level up, want them to get riches, so at some point they are going to not be so much of an underdog anymore usually, and maybe it happens early in Ready Player One, but at the same time, the setup Ready Player One uses is very similar to a lot of other stories that use underdogs.  Chris: Fair enough. Another one that came up was an Inigo Montoya. Oren: From Princess Bride! Chris: Hmm, he has a tragic backstory. Bunny: But he seems to be a pretty equal swordsman to the guy he is trying to get revenge on. Chris: We do establish that they’re working for, oh, what’s his face?  Um, because he was an alcoholic and he was not doing well, and then he doesn’t have work. He goes and gets drunk again. So yeah, that one I would say at the very least, is subtle. Oren: So in the movie, I have no idea what’s in the book. I’ve not read the book, but in the movie, at the beginning, he’s just an antagonist. I guess you could say he’s an underdog because Wesley is the best at everything.  Bunny: Underdog antagonists. Wow. Chris: You can have underdog antagonists. Oren: Yeah, that does happen, but also I don’t think it’s obvious how great Wesley is until after he’s beaten Montoya, and then at the end where they have to break it into the castle, a little bit but not really, ’cause by once they get in the door, it’s like, ‘Yeah, look, there’s a guy, a bunch of mooks,’ he takes care of him and now he’s gonna go fight a guy who we’ve never really established as being particularly good at sword fighting. Bunny: Look, he has six fingers or something, and that means he’s got the good sword fighting gene.  Oren: He’s got that extra finger for really good pommel control. Chris: I can identify ways he’s supposed to be sympathetic, but I feel like certainly if I were looking for, ‘Here’s some underdogs,’ I would not just pick him.  Bunny: Another one is Katniss,  definitely, who I feel it’s similar to Wade and she’s actually very well equipped to win the Hunger Games. Chris: Although one of the big plot points in the First Hunger Games book, yes, she’s definitely designed to have the right skillset, similar to Wade is, but we also make a big deal about money mattering and that they need sponsors. So yeah, I think that there’s definitely a balance between, we want a character to be an underdog, but they still do need a way to participate in the plot and succeed. Oren: I think the Hunger Games does mess up a little bit in that it gives Katniss the right skills, but that it does not give its main antagonists for most of the Hunger Games, the privileged tributes, it does not give them the right skills. For some reason they’re all trained in close quarters combat as if that’s the main thing that matters in the Hunger Games, so I do think there is a little bit of that.  This at least has a problem at the beginning where she’s trying to keep her family fed and also lives in a super oppressive regime, so that helps a bit, but yeah, the Hunger Games is definitely doing some sleight of hand of like ‘Just, I ignore the fact that this protagonist has exactly the skills necessary to win this game’. Bunny: Yeah, I guess the thing that I’m associating with the underdog protagonist, which is maybe why Katniss and Wade both get to me a bit, is that I associate underdogs with needing to improve from their starting status, and neither of them really have to. Oren: Katniss does have to improve her ability to fake a romance on camera. [Group laughter] Bunny: That’s true. She does need to do that.  Oren: She’s really bad at that at the beginning, and she gets better by the end, so I think I love that journey for her.  Bunny: With cake camouflage guy. Chris: I do think that is nice when we get to see a character improve and that could have definitely been something, I think, in Ready Player One, again, just the way the plot is set up where all of the important skills are knowing obscure trivia, I feel like that would’ve been a little bit hard,  not that this is good. That would’ve been a little bit hard to bring Wade up to speed during the course of the story. Bunny: Yeah, that could’ve made it worse actually. Chris: Yeah, I think with Katniss Everdeen, I would probably keep her skills that are very useful, but then add additional skills that are just important for understanding the game and doing the right things out in the arena that she has to learn in addition, but yeah, I think Orin has a good point about what it’s supposed to be, is that there are career hunger games players, even though only one of ’em can live, but they’ve been prepared for this their entire life and so that is supposed to give them a huge advantage, and it’s not as big as we would expect considering. Oren: And the Hunger Games definitely has it a little difficult, because the trick I would normally use to preserve an underdog protagonist are hard to make work in a big arena deathmatch, not impossible, but difficult because if the other tributes actually were good at the things that win, the Hunger Games, which are stealth, tracking, survival, stuff like that, Katniss would just be dead. It would be very hard to justify that she lives so long. Now, I’m not saying you couldn’t do it. I can think of a few options, but we are running close to running out of time, so it might be a little late to get into those. Bunny: Okay. Speed round. Two more. Ariel from The Little Mermaid. Chris: Mmm, I’m gonna say no. She is a princess. Bunny: She’s a princess. Oren: She’s a princess, but her dad sucks.  Chris: Yeah, but I still feel like she gets to disobey him, and for the most part, the way that she, for instance, just doesn’t show up to the concert  at the beginning of the movie, if we’re talking about the Disney version of The Little Mermaid, to me, that just speaks of a person who’s used to not having consequences for their actions. I’m gonna say no on that one. Bunny: Now, Darrow from Red Rising. Oren: Maybe for the first 20 pages, before he gets his super-training, right? And then he’s, before he becomes like a sup, a literal golden boy.  Okay. Here’s the thing, Darrow should be an underdog, I think from a setup perspective. He is, because his house, even though this doesn’t make any sense, his house has way less stuff than every other house and his people don’t wanna obey him and stuff like that, even though he is personally really good and super skilled and good at everything. I think he could have been an underdog. The thing that makes Darrow not feel like an underdog is that he wins every challenge via a hidden plan turning point, which gives the impression that he can’t ever fail because anything that looks bad can just be revealed to actually be part of his plan the whole time. Bunny: Sounds like he’s similar to Wade, right? There’s definitely, ‘I’m trying to evoke the underdog to give him sympathy in the beginning and get people to get attached to him’, but then really what we want is lots of candy for him. Oren: Look, it’s hard to have underdogs win conflicts. Okay, I get it. Chris: Yeah, exactly. Bunny: Now what you need to do is make Darrow reference Monty Python. Oren: Yeah, that would do it. Chris: I think if we’re looking at underdogs comparing Ariel to Cinderella, right? Cinderella is definitely an underdog. Bunny: Oh, they prototypical underdog. Chris: The prototypical-underdog, exactly. Oren: All right. Well, we are definitely out of time now.  I think we’re gonna have to call this episode to a close. Chris: If you would like us underdogs to become the overdogs, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: I think the overdogs are like a kind of levitating wolf, but before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Aman Jabber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel, and then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. [Outro music] Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast opening, closing theme The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.

Delicious food, spacious housing, and a supportive partner: what do they all have in common? They’re all forms of wish fulfillment, and that’s our topic today! Wish fulfillment is an important element of storytelling that rarely gets talked about, and when it is brought up, it’s almost always in a negative context. There are reasons for that, but the idea is so much more than its worst examples. Listen on for a discussion on how wish fulfillment works, the best ways to add it, and why it should come in the form of cats.Show Notes Why the Term Mary Sue Should be Retired  Candy and Spinach  The Room  The Name of the Wind  The Raksura  Pride and Prejudice  Animal Companions Morwen’s Cats Legends and LattesTranscript Generously transcribed by Elizabeth. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Intro:  You are listening to the Mythcreant podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.   [Music] Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren, and with me today is: Bunny: Bunny. Oren: And: Chris: Chris.  Oren: We don’t actually have a topic today. We’re just gonna talk about airships and Discworld and why oppressed mages are bad, and all of my wishes will be fulfilled.  Bunny: Well, I’m sold.  Oren: Yeah, that’s basically the same as having an episode, right? Bunny: Yeah. A+ episode design. Would listen, would talk again. [laughter] Oren: So we’re talking about wish fulfillment, which is not a term that we coined or anything, but it does feel like we might be one of the few sites that talk about it in any depth. Chris: Or in a positive way, in some cases. Oren: It is really commonly derided, and I understand why to a certain extent. It is often associated with various forms of garbage-ness, often touching on various systemic injustices, but it’s not inherently bad and it’s very useful. Chris: It is sad how many people are just like, oh, enjoyment bad, entertainment, bad. Liking things in your story is bad. It is like, what do you think we’re doing this for? Bunny: Are you having fun? Stop that. Chris: Yes, we can give people meaningful or quote unquote “challenging” experiences, but if we don’t do anything else… Bunny: Silly Chris, you know you can’t be challenged if you’re also having a good time. Oren: God forbid anyone enjoy a story with a deep point to make. That would be weird and wrong. Chris: Everybody knows the level of enjoyment is subtracted from the message. They have an inverse relationship. Oren: So now that we’ve established where we stand philosophically, what is wish fulfillment? This is something that we probably should define at least a little bit, and the way that I think of it is that it’s something that the audience wishes they could have for themselves on various levels. You do sometimes get some wish fulfillment that is a thing that sounds nice, but maybe you wouldn’t actually want it in real life if it happened. Chris: I think a good example of that is love triangles. It is wish fulfillment to have these two dreamy guys are lusting after me and they want to be in a romance with me, and I want to be in a romance with them. Oh, what will I do? But in reality, that was probably gonna be a pretty stressful situation. I would consider wish fulfillment to be pleasure gained by living vicariously through a protagonist. The reason why I would specify you’re living vicariously through a protagonist, because I do think that the protagonist matters in this, so if you have various characters and one character is just like a jerk, and that character gets lots of cool stuff, you not generally get the same enjoyment from that. Oren: That’s true. Chris: Whereas definitely with some of these stories, there is a sense of if the audience strongly identifies with a character or at a lesser extent relates to them or is just attached to them, then I do think wish fulfillment becomes more effective. Oren: Yeah, it’s certainly harder to have wish fulfillment through the villain. Not impossible, but it’s usually gonna be through the main character or maybe a major side character. And the famous ones that you’ve heard of are definitely things like food porn or having a really hot significant other, that sort of thing. But they also can include having a nice house or solving a systemic problem. Things that are fantasies people have in real life. Bunny: When I was younger, I had a very particular – like if you read through the stories I wrote when I was young, you will notice this because it was a plot point in just about every one of them. I think it’s bound to be wish fulfillment, even though it’s something that I wouldn’t want to happen to me, which is a heroine sacrificing herself for a cause, and then everyone weeps over her, and then she gets brought back to life. I would not want that to happen to me in real life. That sounds very PTSD-inducing, but it was definitely wish fulfillment for me. Oren: But what if there were no negative consequences? What if psychologically everything was fine? [laughter] Chris: That’s a big example of candy. Candy is definitely wish fulfillment. Just to catch people up if you’re one of the few people who is new to this podcast, instead of having listened for a while, we’ve talked about candy and spinach as far as characters go, but candy is basically anything in the story that is designed to glorify a character in some way. And it’s often very powerful as a form of wish fulfillment, which is why people like it, and one of the reasons that people use it a lot and overuse it. This is why I think it’s important to think of it as living vicariously through the protagonist, because with candy, if you are attached enough to the protagonist and if you identify with the protagonist enough, the candy is great and it’s great wish fulfillment, and it’s very fun. But if you are not, then it absolutely backfires and destroys your attachment to a character. Usually it’s that dynamic, but definitely a character dying [laughter] and having everybody gather around and weep about them because that’s just like a lot of praise. That’s a lot of social recognition, which is, I think, really powerful wish fulfillment. And yes, the character is technically dead or temporarily dead, as the case may be. Bunny: It is temporary. You, you have to have her come back so she can like invent democracy or something. I think one of my protagonists literally did do that.  Chris: But sometimes these wish fulfillment characters, they do just die so that people can weep over them. Sometimes it’s like in The Room. [laughter] Okay. Just like in the movie The Room, the whole setup there is that people wrong him and then he dies as a result, and then everybody’s so sorry.  He really showed them. Oren: The whole ‘character fake dies or pretends to die or whatever so there can be a funeral where everyone says how cool they were,’ that plot device shows up in both Voyager and Babylon 5. And I used it back in my early explanation of why we call some characters Mary Sues and others not. But both of those are just these super candied captains whose candy includes having all of their subordinates think they’re dead and gush about how great they are. Bunny: Oh man, it’s so insufferable on Voyager. If you love Janeway, maybe you’ll enjoy that scene. Oren: I also hated it on Babylon 5. If you identify with one of those characters, that scene could be fun for you. But otherwise, this feels weird. I don’t like this. Bunny: Obnoxious. Wish fulfillment is legally distinct from candy, right?  Chris: Wish candy would be a type of wish fulfillment. It’s much more specific. We’re talking about specifically anything in the story that glorifies the character, and when I talk about candy, it can include traits of the character, like this character has blue hair and violet eyes and is really attractive and is the best at everything immediately. Those would all be forms of candy, but it’s really about what the author’s choices are. There’s a big difference between a character where, yeah, that character technically has blue hair and violet eyes and is skilled, but the story puts very little emphasis on it. The story instead focuses on where that character is lacking. They have all these skills, but the one skill that’s important to the plot, the character doesn’t have that and their face is constantly being rubbed in that. That’s very different from a narrative where the character has all the skills and the narrator is just constantly being like, oh yeah. This is what happens in The Name of the Wind with Kvothe where other characters show up just to be like, oh wow, Kvothe, you’re amazing. A guy shows up to the end be like, oh, you are that singer. You have the best voice in the entire world. I wanted to cry. It’s the amount of emphasis that the author puts in validating that character and glorifying that character in the narrative. Oren: But you can also have wish fulfillment that is not directly part of the character and that’s the classic. Really good well-described food is the classic wish fulfillment because we all love food. It’s a thing. People like it. Most people don’t have the time to have lots of really nice home cooked meals. Chris: RIP. Redwall feast bod. Oren: Yeah. That’s a thing that a lot of us wish we could have more of. And maybe it’s less effective for billionaires with personal chefs for every meal. I don’t know. That’s not a demographic I’m very familiar with. Chris: I’m reminded of Martha Wells’ Raksura books, where in the second book there’s like the whole beginning is all the characters who are in this, you could call it the clan, in this group, going back to their ancestral home, which has just been waiting open for them. Even though they left it, nobody’s taken it, and it’s a giant mountain tree, but they live inside and it’s so perfect for them because apparently their ancestors magically grew the tree to their own specifications just to be their house. And it’s giant and has all the things that they ever want.  And since they left, it’s just been left open waiting for them. And all they have to do is go back in. And that’s definitely there for wish fulfillment purposes. Oren: And there were plot reasons they left. I promise there were plot reasons. They totally make sense. Shut up. [laughter] Bunny: So I’m curious about wish fulfillment in angst. I was thinking about this and it does seem like angsting can be a form of wish fulfillment, and I think people love brooding heroes, and I think part of that is because they’re brooding over important things and not like, taxes. I do think that angst, even though in and of itself it’s quite negative, you don’t want to be in a situation where you have a lot of angst. We do have heroes where it seems like the angst is part of the appeal. Chris: There can be a difference between, hey, I think angsty boys  are attractive, and I want to be in a situation where I’m angsting, and that can be a hard distinction to make. But there are definitely some situations like, for instance, the character that is right, but everybody doubts them so they can be vindicated later; in which they face a lot of obstacles, but it’s like those obstacles are designed to validate them in the end, like from The Room. Some characters may angst as a form of almost showing how moral they are, because doing this thing that’s… They were forced to do something unethical and it just hurt them so much, so therefore they must be a really good person. I guess I would consider wish fulfillment to be mostly kind of focused on positive experiences and positive anticipation. You can get anticipation for wish fulfillment, just like you could get anticipation for tension, which would be like negative anticipation because you’re anticipating whether something bad would happen. But wish fulfillment can also be, you are looking forward to good and fun things happening. And I think that happens a lot actually.  Romances lean a lot on wish fulfillment. Just, there’s a huge variety and they work in many ways and engage in many ways. And one, it’s the kind of Cinderella romance, where oftentimes it’s not really so much about the chemistry between Cinderella and the Prince, for instance. He’s barely a character. It’s about all the cool stuff that comes with marrying the Prince. And Pride and Prejudice absolutely does this. In the beginning we don’t know Darcy barely at all. And we don’t really have that much reason to really be attached to him as a character, really be invested in his relationship with Lizzie, just because we don’t actually know him that well yet. But when he like walks in, we establish that he’s like good looking and he’s very rich, and the fact that he looks down on everybody means that it’s great wish fulfillment if he then falls for Lizzie, because he didn’t like anybody else. Oren: I’d also point out that there is another thing that, at least in the BBC movie version that I watched, is that Lizzie also looks down on everybody, just not as hostilely as he does. Lizzie is definitely portrayed as the smart one in this town and so there’s a certain amount of connection where that’s one smart person to another. I’m not sure how much that figures into it, but I didn’t think it was worth mentioning. Chris; Although it is really funny in Pride and Prejudice because Elizabeth basically falls in love with Darcy’s house. Oren: That was a thing. [laughs] That’s her wish fulfillment. Chris: She goes and like tours his home and it was like, wow, this is some really hot mansion you got here. Some really steamy grounds. These gardens. [laughter] Oren: He’s got huge tracts of land, as it were. Chris: And it’s funny because canonically, that makes a difference to her, but it’s also a way of emphasizing the wish fulfillment of marrying Darcy. Oren: I do briefly wanna return to the question of angst based on the way I have seen people describe certain YA stories in particular, and I’m not a psychologist. I cannot guess at what the mechanism behind this is. But it does feel like there is, at least for some people, a certain amount of wish fulfillment in a story that takes their big feelings seriously and is like, yeah, actually your big feelings are really important. Now, that doesn’t have much appeal to me because I spend a lot of my life trying to avoid depression, so I don’t really want big feelings. But different people are at different stages in their life, and that at least seems to be an appeal that some of these really angsty stories have. That is just me going off of what various people have said. It’s not a phenomena I understand well enough that I would recommend an author try to duplicate it. Chris: That seems reasonable, though. Oren: That at least is a thing that I have seen people talk about. So just on the angle of different things can be wish fulfillment to different people… But there are some things that are gonna have a broader appeal that I think are worth talking about. Things like a nice house. There’s an unfortunate number of people for whom that is very effective wish fulfillment. Chris: I think rare and cool pets, especially in speculative fiction. All those fantasy books where people get an animal companion that they have a psychic link with – Bunny: We all have animal companions. Chris: – So that we don’t have to deal with our animal companion jumping on the counter all the time. You can just talk to it and reason with it. Oren: It’s still an animal. In my experience, once it starts to become a person, the wish fulfillment fades, but you could still kind of get it to do things like it was a person that, with an animal, I guess maybe aside from a really well-trained dog, that wouldn’t work. You can’t just tell your pet to do stuff most of the time. Chris: Well, if you have, again, if it’s a character, it can still sometimes be like, for instance, in Eragon. He’s mentally linked to a dragon and she can talk, but at the same time he still has a cool dragon he rides. Bunny: I think that’s also true of Morwyn’s cats in the Enchanted Forest Chronicles. They’re often snarky little jerks, but in quite a fun way, and they’re cats and they hop around and help with stuff. Oren: That makes sense. I do love having magical cats, so you know, I’ll take that. I’ve also found that having supportive friends can be a good one, and I don’t even know if this has to do with whether or not you have supportive friends in real life. I don’t know. I find that to be pretty wish fulfillment-ty and I’m not lacking in friends. Humble brag. But maybe it would mean more to someone whose friends group isn’t great, but it seems to have a pretty broad appeal in general, finding people who want to help you with your dream or whatever. That seems to be pretty big. Chris: I know a lot of people are very attracted to the found family feeling and getting that kind of support. Oren: There is, to a certain extent, an aspect of these people are going to put a lot of work into what I want instead of necessarily what they want. Or just coincidentally it happens to be the same thing. That’s certainly the friends in Legends and Lattes, who are a lot more focused on the same goal that Viv has than most friends in real life who have their own pesky ideas about what they want. Rude. Chris: I will say sometimes the characters in Legends and Lattes really feel like they’re like an entrepreneur’s wish fulfillment. I need the perfect employee that, like, doesn’t want much money and does amazing work and will never leave and I don’t have to train ’cause they already know how to do their job perfectly. Like Baking Rat. Oren: Magical baking rat is a lot. [laughter] Bunny: But the wish fulfillment croissants, though. Oren: Those are, I think, officially rated for adults only. I don’t think kids should be reading about that. It’s too steamy. Bunny: There is a line about how the succubus character gets hot over the croissants or something. Oren: Oh goodness. Chris: In my opinion, wish fulfillment can go in any story, but it does tend to go very well with lighter stories. I think it’s because it focuses on more positive things, so it just has more kind of overlap with a light story like Legends and Lattes, where there’s problems in setting up this business, but also a lot of the pull is the fact that we get to do all the fun parts of starting and running a coffee shop without any of the actual hard parts. Oren: Jobs can be a good form of wish fulfillment in my experience. Just money on its own isn’t great wish fulfillment ’cause it’s too abstract, but a really cool job where you get paid money to do great – like fun, creative things. That is definitely a form of wish fulfillment. Chris: I do think money can definitely play in. You wanna translate it to what’s tangible, but if you have a character that levels up in anyway, so there are lots of stories that are like rags to riches that talk about, okay, character does this and then makes a little money and then they take some money and put it into the next thing. And then they start a bigger business venture and then you show them go up in the world, for instance. That would definitely involve some wish fulfillment. Oren: Yeah, I have read LitRPG. [laughter] Kind of wish I hadn’t, but I have. Bunny: I think wish fulfillment can also be just part of the story’s context as well. So it’s pretty wish fulfillment for me to read a story that’s in a setting without much bigotry, like a pretty egalitarian setting. Chris: I should mention that the prequel to Legends and Lattes – Bunny: Bookshops and Bone Dust. Chris: – Definitely involves some author wish fulfillment that’s in getting people to read books.  Because the bookshop, honestly, is often not that important. It’s not nearly as essential as the coffee shop is in Legends and Lattes. But the character who runs the bookshop asks people questions, and then always finds the perfect book that they love and just gets people to read. And as an author, I can imagine how attractive that wish fulfillment would be. [she laughs] Oren: Buy my book. Chris: Can you please buy my books? Bunny: Is there any commentary about how people are spending too much time reading the news bulletins and they have no attention span anymore? [laughter] Chris: Thankfully, the author is not particularly grumpy about current times. It is funny though, because he does do the thing that a lot of people do, where when they talk about novels and novel writing in an abstract way, they get way more like literary and romantic in their language, and it’s just very weird. It’s like, you know what you’re writing, right? This is not the type of books you write. It’s very funny. Oren: It’s like, well, this is not the kind of book that people like that would enjoy. Who is this part for, exactly? We’ve talked about what is wish fulfillment. I think we should now talk about when is wish fulfillment. ’cause if you spend too much time on wish fulfillment, sure you’re gonna get the people who that wish fulfillment really speaks to. But you’re gonna lose everyone else. You do need to consider, is this the appropriate time? Chris: I do think that wish fulfillment in many cases isn’t too hard to multitask. It’s only if you make choices that will actively reduce tension or do it instead of something else. So for instance, an example of wish fulfillment would be dressing up and going to an ornate masquerade ball. That in itself is an experience that’s wish fulfillment, but that is 100% compatible with having a plot event where you need to find the assassin at the masquerade ball. They definitely don’t have to choose there. Oren: But once you get to the ball, you are gonna have to do some assassin finding. You can’t spend the entire scene describing how great the canapés are and how beautiful everyone is. You can do some of that, but you do need some assassin finding in there. Chris: And similarly, in something like Legends and Lattes, I do think that there is a balance between making it so that building the coffee shop comes with enough problems, but is not too bogged down in boring business details, or solving them so easily that you don’t really have any tension. I would’ve honestly liked some of those problems to have been a little bit more rigorous instead of instantly solving them, which could be good for wish fulfillment, but also make some problems feel cheaper and less satisfying when they’re solved. Oren: I feel like if Legends and Lattes had a little bit of a harder time solving some of those problems, I don’t think it would’ve lost any of its current fans, and I think it could have gained some people who don’t like it. Now, we’ll never know. I don’t have an Earth 2.0 to run a test on, but just based on my understanding of stories, it seems unlikely that anyone would’ve walked away if Viv had had to work a little harder to get customers in the door. Chris: I should also mention, a lot of wish fulfillment I do think has a novelty aspect. We’ve got the attachment aspect and you have a protagonist you’re usually living vicariously through. But also, obviously these are experiences we don’t have in everyday life or they would not have the same impact on them. So there is a novelty element that can wear off. And sometimes timing, like if it’s pretty powerful wish fulfillment. Like in the beginning of the second Raksura book, them coming in and being like, hey, cool, we have this giant tree house, and we spend some time going and seeing the features of the house. We can sometimes get away with a few scenes doing that. And I think honestly, it helps that it’s a sequel because if somebody’s reading the sequel, they probably already know the characters in the first book or they’d never get to the sequel. Whereas I think opening a first book with a sequence like that would’ve been a big mistake. But not, again, doing it for too long before we get our plot hook, which in the case of the second book is actually somebody did steal something from this tree and it’s gonna slowly die unless we get it back. Bunny: [dramatic voice] No! Oren: No precious wish fulfillment tree! Bunny: The tree house! Chris: Which shows you that those scenes actually had an extra focus is because saving this tree is the stakes. And so by focusing on it in the beginning, we’re both showing why this tree is cool and why it should matter, that we save it. And getting some of that wish fulfillment in. Oren: I also think just from a wordcraft perspective, I should emphasize that details make wish fulfillment work. You can say, and then there was delicious food on the table – that is not wish fulfillment. You gotta describe to me the crispness and the spice and the savory. I wanna know what it tastes like or what it would fictionally taste like; if it actually wouldn’t taste that good, that’s fine. Lie to me. [laughter] Bunny: That’s like the fruit and mushroom thing. Oren: But the tree house is the same thing. It’s like, yes, here’s this tree house, but let me describe to you all the cool rooms and the way it was made and how a nice place to live this would be. Chris: It’s a form of novelty in that aspect. Absolutely. And so again, if it’s really novel, you can sometimes get away with some scenes devoted to it. It can be tricky for people to judge. I usually tell people not to rely on something being super novel, but in most cases you can find out at least if you have beta readers, ’cause they will say. If something is novel, they will say that they like it. They will point it out. Even if you don’t ask about it. Oren: Beta reading can be challenging sometimes when you’re trying to identify certain qualities of your story, because if the story is tense, there’s a good chance your beta readers will just keep reading and not comment. But if it’s got high novelty, they’ll stop and be like, hey, that thing’s cool, I like that, and they’ll leave a comment. So that’s pretty easy to spot. Okay. I think with that, my wishes have been fulfilled because we talked about wish fulfillment, which was the thing I wanted to do the whole time. Haha, tricked you. Chris: Well, if your wishes for a wish fulfillment podcast have been fulfilled, 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: This has been the Mythcreant podcast. Opening and closing theme, The Princess who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.

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